I'm Sorry-Grateful, Regretful-Happy...

Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, who looks both backward and forward. In a way, New Line is like that, almost always looking backward to our roots and forward to the thrilling evolution of our art form and all the new wonders American musical theatre writers keep bringing us.

Likewise, I sit here on New Year's Eve, thinking back and looking ahead. If you wanna get all Sondheimy about it, you might say I'm sorry to see 2013 go, but grateful for what's ahead in 2014.

2013 was a really wonderful year. We started in January with the first "adult cabaret" presented by New Line's new bastard child, New Line Theatre Off Line. Some Songs 'n' Shit starred Zak, Dowdy, and Taylor, with Justin on piano and Dowdy directing. It turned out really great and played to a sold-out house. It was cool to see how well the New Line aesthetic transfers to cabaret.

In March we opened Next to Normal, and I gotta say, it really scared me in a lot of ways. But I could not have been prouder of it. It turned out very different from the original, much more a ghost story. We assembled a cast of four of my favorite veteran New Liners, plus two new young actors, and I can't imagine a more perfect cast. It was also the first time Dowdy officially directed with me, and that worked out really well. Dowdy is such a fountain of ideas, and anytime we hit a problem, he had six ways to get around it. We'll be teamed up again for Rent.

Kimi and Jeff, as Diana and Dan in N2N, were simply extraordinary. Both of them can really conjure up powerful, raw emotion, both of them have wonderful pop-rock voices, and both of them were utterly fearless, emotionally and artistically.

Next to Normal was a hell of a fucking mountain to scale, but we did it. We got eleven rave reviews and several critics said our production was better than the national tour. They used words and phrases like, "nothing less than extraordinary," "superior," "brilliant," "affecting and thought-provoking," "inspired," "surprising and exceptional," "emotionally packed, captivating," and our favorite, "scorching intensity."

In June, we took one of those massive, crazy risks that only New Line would take, with the regional premiere of the R-rated Bukowsical. We knew it would offend some people and we knew it might not sell all that great. But New Line isn't here to make money; we're here to bring interesting, exciting, smart, musical theatre to our region. And it was such a fun adventure! The writers were really helpful and supportive, and totally open to a few changes I asked for. They came to see the show and were really pleased with it. I hope other companies will tackle it now. It's so smart and so insightful into the relationship between an artist's life and his work, but it's also incredibly R-rated, so it'd have to be a pretty brave company who'd tackle it...

I'll never forget hearing that score the first time – "What's that feeling you get when you're down on your luck and you're too drunk to fuck? Bukowsical!"

I knew we had to do this show.

If ever a role was written for Zak Farmer, The World's Most Versatile Actor, it was the role of Charles Bukowski, the alcoholic, sexaholic genius at the center of the insanity called Bukowsical. Zak found the exact right balance of funny and serious. His Bukowski was not just a cultural outsider; he was also an outsider in his own show, so decidedly not musical comedy, inside this frantic, wacky musical comedy.

Not everybody loved Bukowsical, but a lot of people really did. My favorite quote came from Steve Callahan, who reviewed our show for KDHX – “For twenty-two years Scott Miller and New Line have been zapping the St. Louis musical theatre scene with bolts of energy. Off-beat, eccentric, sometimes dark, often hilarious, occasionally outrageous and always fresh, New Line productions are for folks who have accepted the fact that Rogers and Hammerstein are actually dead. . . Folks will either see it as one of the most outrageously funny things ever staged, or it will offend every sense. (Or possibly both.)”

Exactly.

And then in October, we took another massive crazy risk, with a musical version – a serious musical version – of Night of the Living Dead. It had only ever been done once at a community theatre in Maryland, so in a lot of ways, it was untested. And it was one of those shows that we had to discover as we worked. There's really no other show at all like it, so we were forging new territory. How does a serious musical horror-thriller work onstage? This isn't operetta like Sweeney Todd. What are the rules here? Can it really be scary? Can it stand up to its source material?

But as we've done so many times over the past twenty-three years, we knew enough to just trust this material and follow where it led us. And the reviews were amazing.

Kevin Brackett wrote in ReviewSTL, "Writers Matt Conner and Stephen Gregory Smith have found a way to translate the classic horror story into music and lyrics that are just as terrifying and suspenseful as the original film. . . For fans of Romero’s work, you’ve never seen it like this – and it’s a must see. Expect to feel the tension and hopelessness fly off of the stage and into the seats, and hold on until morning.” Paul Friswold wrote in The Riverfront Times, "Director Scott Miller steadily ratcheted the tension, and then broke it all open with the single most harrowing moment to happen onstage in St. Louis this year.”

Richard Green wrote for TalkinBroadway.com,  “If you can really stand pure psychological terror, you can proceed west for the stunning power of Night of the Living Dead.” Steve Allen of Stagedoor St. Louis called it “one of the most frightening evenings ever at a musical.” Lynn Venhaus wrote in the Belleville News-Democrat, “A sense of dread permeates New Line Theatre's Night of the Living Dead from the very beginning, a chilling and haunting work in both expected and unexpected ways. This is the stuff nightmares are made of – a serious musical adaptation of a landmark horror film that still resonates today. I've seen the original movie countless times and yet I jumped and screamed, such is the intensity of this live theatrical production.”

Yes, it really was scary. Though the baseball playoffs and World Series hurt ticket sales a bit, it was absolutely an artistic success. I was so proud of this show – I think all of us were. Judy Newmark named Night of the Living Dead the best small-scale musical of the year, in her year-end Judy Awards in the Post-Dispatch.

Looking ahead to 2014, I can't wait to work on all three shows that are coming up. But first, on January 25, Off Line presents its second adult cabaret, What the Hell Are We Doing Here?, starring Marcy Wiegert and Ryan Foizey, both of whom will be in Rent and Hands on a Hardbody. Like last year, Justin will music direct, and Dowdy will direct.

This Sunday we start work on Rent, and I've been playing through the score a lot. What a beautiful, brilliant show. I saw it on Broadway just after it moved uptown in 1996, and I saw the completely reimagined off Broadway revival in 2011. Both were thrilling.

I know exactly how I want to approach this show. Larson always said he wanted Rent to be a Hair for the 90s, and I've realized that's my way in, through the style of Hair (which I've directed three times over the years, and I've also written a book about it), rowdy, loose, spontaneous, wild, joyful, exuberant, insanely high energy. I dunno, maybe that doesn't sound all that different from the way everybody approaches the show, but I really think ours will have a fairly different vibe. I think Rent has acquired too much polish and convention over the years. I think the inherent rawness in its unpolished lyrics and music is part of what makes the show so visceral, so powerfully accessible, exactly like Hair.

When people who've never seen Hair ask me about it, I describe it this way: it's not really a show; it's an experience. Or as the hippies would have called it, a happening. That's really true. It's fundamentally different from every other musical in the way you experience it. And I think that's what Larson intended with Rent. But I think it's become too codified, too "set" today. Aside from the really wonderful off Broadway revival in 2011, it seems to me that most productions of Rent no longer feel sufficiently wild, dangerous, subversive, free. Larson wrote that Rent is about a community celebrating life even in the face of death. That's what I'm going for – a celebration of life.

And a celebration is wild.

In June, we'll open what may be my favorite new show of the last few years, Hands on a Hardbody. We've already cast it, and we have a killer cast, including a ton of New Line veterans. I love this music so much. And yes, we will actually have a truck onstage. To find out how, you'll have to read our set designer Rob's blog...

And then in October, to open our 24th season, we've already announced that we'll be doing Bonnie & Clyde, another show that I really love and can't wait to work on. And to answer the next question some of you will ask, auditions for Bonnie & Clyde will be in June.

I'm so fucking lucky. I get to work on the best, coolest, most interesting work coming out of the musical theatre today, with a bunch of exceptional, fearless theatre artists. Most incredibly, despite our often challenging, adult work, the people and institutions of this city have supported New Line so unwaveringly for the last twenty-three years. I am so grateful. I so love my job.

Thank you for reading this blog, for coming to see our shows, for interacting with us on Facebook and Twitter, for your contributions, and for trusting us. We will keep doing our very best for you. I promise.

It's been a great time off, but it will be really wonderful to be back in rehearsal...

Happy New Year!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

'Twas a Year Full of New Line 2013

with apologies to Clement Moore

'Twas a year full of New Line, and all 'cross our stage,
Flowed joyfulness, misery, triumph and rage;
A year full of rave reviews, praise, and premieres,
All greeted with laughter, with tears, and with cheers.
Our actors were fearless, our audience too
(They never knew just what those actors might do);
Each show an adventure, each song a surprise,
Emotion so honest, and yet super-size.

A suburban mom rode the bipolar express,
While rocking and belting out all her distress;
Her husband, her daughter, and son (a tad rude)
All took the same ride, with a sweet stoner dude.
They battled and bandied, in song after song,
On her road to recovery, winding and long;
And just when we thought they'd be swallowed by night,
They left us with hope and a faint ray of light.

And then came that drunkard, Bukowski by name,
To fuck expectations and wash clean our shame.
Like Christ on the cross (but today, in L.A.),
Reassuring us all that our sins are okay.
On the wildest of rides, the players confide
That we are all Bukowsical, deep down inside,
The truth of that hitting us square in the eyes,
Like a wonderful, wacky, and truthful surprise.

Then hopelessly, helplessly out of my head,
We took on the musicalized living dead.
No dancing, no silly self-referencing dreck,
Just horror-suspense that might leave you a wreck:
Shootings, explosions, fist fights, power plays,
And songs that would haunt your subconscious for days,
Screaming and fighting and zombies outside,
And one hell of a climax – one hell of a ride!

Before we move on, turn our minds now to Rent,
It's good to remind us how much those shows meant
To the thousands of people who laid down their bucks
To see a great story (and hear several fucks),
Who want that connection we all need to thrive,
That only can come from performance that's live.
Emotion gets bigger the second you sing,
So we'll move on to Rent, and see you in the spring...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Scott

Blogito ergo sum.

Blogito ergo sum. (I blog, therefore I am.)

So why do I blog?

I started this blog in spring 2007, as we started work on returning Grease to its original form, and I think my only conscious motivation was to document the process of making a musical, and maybe also to point out that the Grease we see on tour or in New York the last twenty-five years has very little resemblance to the original production that ran for 3,388 performances and was the longest running Broadway musical until A Chorus Line beat it out.

I knew all this was stuff I would have loved to read about when I was in high school. Yes, before the internet. Starting a blog was also partly about keeping up with social media, to make sure New Line is connecting to our audience beyond the physical theatre building and the two hours' traffic of our stage, about making our audience's interface with New Line a more continual experience.

The first two months my blog got zero visitors. Zip. Luckily, I didn't know how to check my traffic yet, or I might not have continued.

The third month, somehow my blog caught on and I began getting about 2,500 visits a month, and now every once in a while, it spikes and sets a new normal. In November of 2009, suddenly the traffic increased to about 5,000 visits a month and then stayed there. In the last few months, it's spiked to about 10,000, and it looks like it'll stay there for a while.

And with all those people reading what I write, I have become more conscious of what and why I'm writing. I think what has happened over time is that my blog is now an accumulation of evidence that backs up my ideas about musical theatre. It's kinda like I'm a scientist and this blog is my lab notebook, documenting all these successful experiments.

I hope that it serves both to convince people of the value and complexity of these shows and of this art form, and also to encourage others to do challenging musical theatre like we do. If nothing else, I hope this blog as a whole serves as a compelling argument that, as I've been saying for quite a while, the American musical theatre has never been more vigorous or more adventurous.

Since the mid-1990s, I've been writing books on musical theatre, four of them collections of background and analysis essays about individual shows. With almost every show New Line produces, I write a chapter about that show. In the last couple years, this blog has been where I record all my insights, revelations, research, and analysis, and after we close, I form all those blog posts into a single essay for my next book.

I hope my blog (and my books) also show young theatre artists how important – and how fun – dramaturgy is. From time to time, people will ask me why I don't have a dramaturg, and the answer is I love doing research.

I also hope my blog shows young theatre artists that there are no right answers, and that sometimes we all go down wrong roads. It's always been very important to me to blog about those moments when I'm confused, when I don't know the answer, when I can't solve a problem or understand the writer's intentions. I've read several books by the brilliant director Anne Bogart, and it's always so comforting for me to read about her failures, insecurities, blocks. It happens to the best of us. More than that, it's part of the process. Sometimes, a valuable part. Sometimes it helps to get stuck because it forces you to step back and rethink things, return to the fundamentals.

Though it wasn't necessarily true in the beginning, these days a big thing I want to accomplish with this blog is to prove the worth of shows that flopped in New York, and in the process, to give them new life in regional theatre. By sharing all my research and the experience of staging and polishing High Fidelity and Cry-Baby, I hope to convince people that they're both really brilliant works that were hopelessly misunderstood by lazy artistic teams.

In 2014, we'll produce two shows that flopped in New York, Hands on a Hardbody and Bonnie & Clyde, but not because of incompetent artistic teams. Neither of these shows was calibrated to the tourist audience and that's the only way a show survives in New York commercial theatre today. Hardbody is too interior, too emotionally complex. Bonnie & Clyde is too morally ambiguous and too honest about its brutality. I hope here in this blog to demonstrate how amazing these two shows really are, so that more people will produce them.

Directly because of New Line, there are now further productions of High Fidelity and Cry-Baby around the country, and we hope the same will be true of Hardbody and Bonnie & Clyde.

I've also realized in the last few years that my blog is a place to work through my ideas about this new Golden Age of musical theatre that I think we're in the middle of. It's in these posts that I first started writing about the neo musical comedy and the neo rock musical. As you can see from my blog index, I've written about that stuff here a lot.

I'm very conscious of the fine line I often walk here. I want to put forth interesting ideas. I want to get people thinking seriously about our art form. And yes, I want to be provocative now and then. But I also don't want to sound arrogant or like I think only my own opinions are legitimate. But I do think about this stuff a lot. It's a tough tightrope sometimes, to state an idea strongly, to argue against other ideas, and especially, to put forth a new idea, and yet not come across like a dick. I'm sure I've slipped off that tightrope more than once, but I hope that the force of my arguments balances that out.

Scott Susong, the head of Music Theatre at Illinois Wesleyan University, interviewed me for a Q&A last year for a conference of the Musical Theatre Educators Alliance, and he said something very cool about New Line and me. He said that he loved that we were doing this kind of challenging, alternative work onstage while also constructing an intellectual framework around that work. I had never thought about it in those terms, but he's exactly right. We're doing the work and also making an argument for that work at the same time.

Now that 10,000 people a month are reading what I write, and as my blog approaches 200,000 lifetime visits (I'll probably hit that mark sometime in January), I do feel a responsibility – to the people who read this blog, to the art form itself, to theatre students and other musical theatre artists.

I wouldn't want to put Descartes before the horse, but blogging is part of who I am as an artist and a teacher. The process of making art at New Line now includes as a fundamental element a public discussion of that process. And a big part of my role as a musical theatre artist is to do whatever I can to push the art form forward, primarily by spotlighting those artists and works that are at the artistic forefront of the musical theatre.

And let's be honest, it's also fun. I love writing, and I always have. I think I may have mild hypergraphia. In college, I chose courses that had no final exam but did require lots of papers. (Some Miller Trivia: In four years of college, every paper I wrote for every course was about musical theatre in one way or another. I was mildly famous for it.) And I love getting feedback from folks about what I write, agreeing or disagreeing, or my favorite, folks who are just thrilled to find a serious discussion of this amazing, revolutionary, ever-evolving art form of the American musical theatre.

We've never had more exciting new work to choose from when we plan our seasons. Our art form is currently kicking ass and taking names. It's almost overwhelming to think about the variety and brilliance of our recent shows – Night of the Living Dead, Bukowsical, Next to Normal, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, High Fidelity, Cry-Baby, Passing Strange, bare, The Wild Party, Love Kills... No offense to the traditionalists, but I think all these shows are a hell of a lot more exciting and original and artful than most of what was happening during the 1940s and 50s, a period the older critics and historians call The Golden Age.

This is the Golden Age. I have a ringside seat, and I'm doing my best to chronicle these amazing times, so you can have a ringside seat too. What an incredible, thrilling time it is to be making musical theatre.

In a couple weeks, we start rehearsals for a modern classic, arguably one of the shows that ignited this new Golden Age, the Pulitzer-Prize winning masterpiece of rock theatre, Rent. And members of the cast and staff will be blogging about our process. Stay tuned.

I love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Went Where the Music Took Me

Every once in a while (particularly when I'm particularly baked), I think about why it is that so many people love musical theatre so much. I dunno, maybe I'm over-thinking it. Maybe it's no more complicated than why people love jazz or country music. But it sure does feel more complex than just taste.

I know why people love theatre. I'd argue that pretty much anyone who sees great theatre will always love theatre. (Thank god the Rep was here when I was a teenager.) There really isn't any other experience like it, both its liveness and its demand for our imagination and participation. It's hard-wired into all of us to love storytelling, because we need it. Storytelling is how we understand ourselves and the world around us, or to use Sondheim's words, how we make order out of the chaos of the world, so that we can look at it and try to make sense of it. And theatre is the most immediate, most palpably human storytelling.

I also know why audiences respond to musical theatre so powerfully. As I've written about a lot, music is an abstract language and so it conveys emotion (the most difficult human experience to put into words) much more strongly and clearly than any dialogue or stage picture ever could. So when you take an already powerful experience like storytelling and add this abstract language to it, the audience receives it on both the conscious and subconscious levels at the same time. It becomes an even more potent, more total, more fully human experience.

And let's not forget – theatre started with music. Once upon a time, all theatre had music. The idea to divorce music from the theatre is a relatively modern one. Musical theatre is complete theatre, Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk.

But none of that answers my question. I know a lot of people who have no desire to ever see a non-musical play (or as I put it in one of my books, "a play that lacks music"); they only want to see musicals. That's not me – I love seeing a great play, and I see a lot of them. But I think a lot of people only want musicals.

Is that just about habit? Is it a (conscious or unconscious) statement? Is it because high school drama clubs are often very welcoming Islands of Misfit Toys? And while we're at it, why do gay men disproportionately flock to musicals?

My working theory is that because musical theatre uses the language of music, it is by definition a storytelling form of much bigger emotions, and that many people are drawn to that because it heals and feeds them emotionally. Some of these people are shut off emotionally, for whatever reasons (like being gay and in the closet). And in my experience, some people just feel more than others do. Their emotions are more easily triggered and those emotions are both more intense and deeper. I think I'm in this group. I've always felt like musical theatre just "fits" me. I feel comfortable in the gigantic emotion of "Wheels of a Dream" or "Bring Him Home" or "You Don't Know/I Am the One."

But even though most people don't usually feel their emotions that extremely, everybody does sometimes. Musicals traffic in big emotion, but sometimes life does too. Sometimes, the stakes in real life are as high as they are in a musical. People have screaming fights. People sob. people mourn. People rejoice.

Maybe it's that musicals hold a magnifying glass up to our emotions. They enlarge them, so they're easier to get a look at. Take bare as an example. It's so melodramatic, so perilously close to being over-the-top, but it works because the emotions are all so honest and so universal. Every one of the lead characters' "arias" hits someone in the audience right in the solar plexus. This is a story about what is arguably the most emotional period in any person's life, and we all remember it. So we accept the enormity of emotion onstage because we recognize it as genuine. Though it is bigger than "real," it feels real.

That's also why many people who think they hate musicals will fall in love with New Line's work. I think musicals make many people (especially men) uncomfortable for all the reasons I've laid out here. Some folks don't want to deal with giant emotions, particularly their own. But they love New Line musicals because the emotions are always really honest, and I think that on a subconscious level, people recognize that; and also because many of our shows are very self-aware and blissfully free of that awkward, Fourth-Wall, faux-naturalism from the Rodgers & Hammerstein era. New Line doesn't ask our audience to "suspend their disbelief" in the way that South Pacific does. We reject that "lie" at the heart of most mid-20th-century theatre.

Generally speaking, most musicals are much more presentational, more obviously artificial, more Brechtian, than most plays – which arguably also makes them more honest. Other than the shows in the R&H model, almost all musicals admit their artifice. Ever since the 1950s and 60s and the birth of rock and roll, authenticity has become important in our culture. Not coincidentally, that's also when we started abandoning the R&H model for the rock musical and the concept musical. Though it seems counter-intuitive, the very artificial art form of musical theatre is actually the most honest.

We don't try to convince our audience to believe they're watching Andrew Jackson onstage; we just need them to follow the story with us, and discover its surprising resonances with today's politics. By comparison, we are supposed to "believe" we're eavesdropping on Laurey and Curley in 1906, when the (hidden) orchestra fires up and he breaks into "Surrey with the Fringe on Top." It's fundamentally dishonest. We know it's not real. Why not admit it?

There's one other reason I think people love musicals, especially young people – energy. Musicals are just more exciting. Our bodies and brains react differently to music. Again because of the music, musicals (when done well) have an energy that most plays lack. One of the writers of Bat Boy coined the phrase "the depth of sincerity, the height of expression," and we live by that. Honest, but BIG. The music demands it.

You can always tell when someone has directed a musical for the first time – the energy is wrong, even if the cast are all musical theatre veterans. You can also tell when a musical theatre director directs a play – it feels musical. It wasn't until I directed a straight play for the first time in 1998 that I truly understood how fundamentally different musicals and plays are.

So where has all this gotten me? What about my initial question?

I guess it always comes back to music, one way or another. So my conclusion is that what's different between musicals and plays is the music. Yeah. Duh. Well, I guess that explains why I relate so powerfully to Rob Gordon in High Fidelity – it's all about the music, about living your life to music. It's about my favorite quote from Sondheim: "To live in music is a gift from God."

Maybe the truth is that musical theatre freaks are kindred spirits with hardcore rock and roll fans. Maybe that's why so many rock songwriters are writing for the musical theatre now. Maybe that's why theatre music and rock music are coming together at long last. After all, theatre songs were the hit pop songs of the 1920s and 30s. Maybe it was just the detour of the R&H Revolution (and let's be fair, the Sondheim-Prince era, too) that unnaturally separated theatre music and pop music, and they're finding their way back home.

And that also means that more young people are finding their way to the musical theatre than ever before, which is great news for the future of our art form. As much as I don't like The Sound of Music, it was so heartening to hear, especially after the disappointments of Smash, that The Sound of Music got over 18 million viewers and was the top-rated show for its entire broadcast! That's close to twice the audience the Breaking Bad finale got. And NBC has already agreed to broadcast another musical live next year.

People love musicals. Even the mediocre ones.

I"m not sure if I've settled anything here. I don't know if I answered my question or not. But really, what can you expect from this humble philosopher-stoner on this dreary Saturday afternoon?

Why do you think musical theatre is such a powerful force in so many of our lives?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Bard of Directors

I've already written a post about great musical theatre books, but this is a list of books that aren't specifically about musical theatre but are really inspiring and eye-opening for any theatre artist. As musical theatre artists, we have to be careful that we don't study only musical theatre, because if we do, we will miss a lot that's important. Here are some books and videos that I've found really helpful in my own work.

Training of the American Actor – This is a wonderful book, a survey of all the various American acting methods, each chapter taking on a different teacher and method, and written by disciples of these teachers, covering the work of Stanislavsky, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Michael Chekhov, and Uta Hagen. There's even a chapter on Viewpoints. It's a terrific artistic battery re-charger, and a good reminder that everyone takes a different path to get to our destination.

The Empty Space – This is a book every theatre artist should read. It's a powerful, clear statement about what theatre is, can be, and should be. Director Peter Brook lays out for us four kinds of theatre: the Deadly or Conventional commercial theatre; the Holy Theatre based on sacred ritual; the Rough Theatre, of the people in the street; and the Immediate Theatre, the kind of powerful, transformative theatre Brook himself was working toward. For anyone who sees theatre as just a commercial enterprise rooted in New York's commercial theatre district, reading this book will be an eye-opening, revelatory, probably mind-blowing experience.

Connecting Flights – This may be the coolest, most inspiring book I've ever read about the theatre, written by Canadian playwright, actor, film director, and stage director Robert Lepage. I guess if I had to label this book, I'd call it a philosophical treatise, but it's so much more and it's so much fun to read. Whatever it is, it will leave you energized, inspired, and thrilled once again by the endless possibilities of the stage.

A Sense of Direction – William Ball has written the best book on directing theatre I've ever read (and I've read a lot), both philosophical and practical. He talks about nuts-and-bolts issues, but also talks about the director's role in freeing and inspiring his actors. This book is a perfect mix of real-world advice and high-minded philosophy, and it reminds us that good theatre must be both.

Tips for Directors / Tips for Actors – Director Jon Jory has written these wonderful books that are really useful and really fun to read. In both these books, each page is a separate topic, some only a few sentences, some a full page, ranging from things you learned in Drama 101 but may forget from time to time, to ideas that may never have occurred to you before. The truly fun part of these books is to just open them at random and see what you find. We interviewed Jory on our radio show a while back, and he said these books are meant to be browsed through during a rehearsal break, or while waiting for a bus, or when you're decompressing at the end of the night. You never know what you'll find, and it'll always be useful...

A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre – This is my favorite book by the amazing director Anne Bogart. Like these other books, this one has some things that we all need to be reminded of, and also things most of us have never even considered. Plus, Bogart talks a lot about her actual process of directing, and it's so reassuring to know she gets lost and insecure, too! But reading about how she handles that is really inspiring and has helped me a lot in my own work.

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales – This is not a book about theatre, but every theatre artist should read it. This is the great child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's magnum opus, and the book that inspired Stephen Sondheim and Jim Lapine to write Into the Woods. First of all, this book will blow your mind, and you'll see fairy tales (and all other stories) like you've never seen them before. And though this book is specifically about fairy tales, it's really about all human storytelling. I've read this book twice (the first time when New Line did Woods) and I learn so much from it each time. I can't recommend this enough.

Get The Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, And The Audience – One of my favorite books, Walter A. Davis' psychoanalysis of The Iceman Cometh, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's one of the most interesting books I've read, and it gave me some valuable tools in understanding characters and their motivations.

I'll also throw in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, which isn't really about theatre, but it's a must-read for anyone in the storytelling business.

And here are some videos that I think every musical theatre artists should see...

The Power of Myth – This is one of my favorite things ever. The legendary Joseph Campbell and PBS' Bill Moyers sit down at Skywalker Ranch to talk for six hours about human myths and religion, and it's the most inspiring thing I've ever seen. It will change the way you see religion, myths, storytelling, and pretty much everything else. Once you're tuned in to the Hero Myth, you'll realize it's everywhere. This six-part series will make you a better theatre artist, whether you're an actor, director, designer, or writer. I think every acting student and every directing student should have to watch at least the first episode. It's almost like Campbell gives us the secret code that unlocks every story ever told...

In Search of Shakespeare – This is another of my favorite things, partly because I really love Shakespeare, but also because it's an extended look at how a theatre artist's life intersects with his work. Historian Michael Wood takes us on a four-part journey through Will's life, literally from birth to death, and actually visiting all the locations that figured in his life, looking at court records, family bibles, etc. With the help of the Royal Shakespeare Company's touring company, Wood takes us to places Shakespeare actually played and gives us glimpses of these plays in their original cultural and physical contexts. He even does a pretty great job of piecing together Shakespeare's "lost years," with a mix of historical evidence and informed conjecture. I've watched this whole four-part series four times, and I never get sick of it. It's another artistic battery re-charger.

Another great series that serves as a terrific companion piece is the 3-episode Shakespeare: The King's Man, exploring in great depth the politics and culture that informed and reacted to Shakespeare's work.

Looking for Richard – This is one of my favorite films ever. It's really just Al Pacino working at dissecting and understanding Richard III, with the help of artists like Vanessa Redgrave, Kevin Kline, John Gielgud, etc. And he assembles a group of his friends, including Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, Winona Ryder, and others to work through some of the scenes, even performing some of them in an actual castle, to talk about how Americans approach Shakespeare, to think about how to reach an audience... so many topics. This film inspired me more than any other single thing.

Shakespeare Uncovered and Playing Shakespeare – Both these series are really smart, really interesting explorations of the creative process. Shakespeare Uncovered is a series in which each episode is hosted by a famous actor (Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn, Joely Richardson, David Tennant) exploring one Shakespeare play in depth. And every episode is outstanding. In Playing Shakespeare, director John Barton essentially holds master classes with young (in 1982) actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company, including Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and others. I really love this series.

I remember, about ten years ago, when I realized that there wasn't much left for me to learn about the old musicals and writers – I'd been at it since I was a kid, after all. And also that there was almost no one writing about the new musicals and writers except me. It might have been just out of boredom that I decided I should re-read some of the (non-musical-) theatre books I'd read in college. I started with The Empty Space and it was so creatively energizing that I kept going, re-reading some of the classic texts but also new books, including the ones I list above.

And it made me a better director. After thirty-two years of directing musicals (can I really be that old?), I know about staging, pacing, tone, style, all that stuff; and though that's where a lot of musical theatre directors end their work, that's just the beginning for us. My work stands on the shoulders of George Abbott, Bob Fosse, Tommy Tune, and Hal Prince, but also Peter Brook, Joan Littlewood, Tom O'Horgan, Anne Bogart, and Bertolt Brecht.

As I remind us all from time to time – theatre is the noun; musical is just an adjective. The act is storytelling. Music is just the language of that storytelling.

Give these books and videos a try. I really think you'll love them.

Long Live the Musical Theatre!
Scott

Reviewing the Situation

We have more theatre reviewers in St. Louis today than ever before. When New Line was born, our shows got two reviews. Today, our shows get ten or eleven. Back then, the only two reviews were in print. Today, our reviews are in print, online, on the radio, and on local cable television. And I love that. I believe that reviewers are (or at least should be) a part of the theatre community, a part of the conversation. The more voices the better.

Some print reviewers (particularly in New York) worry that their "authority"is on the wane, that arts reviewing is becoming too democratic. I've read a lot lately about "the end of the professional theatre critic," and what a terrible shame it is that anybody with a blog can call themselves a theatre critic. I don't think this is a crisis; I think it's just another way our culture is changing in this still fairly new Information Age. And it's as it should be. It was never right that The New York Times could kill a new Broadway show.

The more voices the better!

For small companies like New Line, great reviews really can replace paid advertising (which we can never afford), especially now in the internet age. But for quite a few companies in town doing challenging, alternative work, that means we need intelligent, thoughtful, open-minded reviewers who write well, real theatre lovers who genuinely hope to be thrilled when they sit down in our theatre. And we're very lucky because there are quite a few local reviewers like that.

One of then is Judy Newmark, theatre critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I was presumptuous enough to ask her recently if she'd share her opinions about New Line and the local theatre scene for this blog post; and she was gracious enough to say yes. Here are her answers, unedited. You can tell from her answers how deeply she loves the theatre and the St. Louis theatre scene.

Tell us about a really amazing St. Louis production that you'll never forget.

Judy: Just one? There are so many! But okay . . . This was years ago, the old Theatre Project Company production of Bent, with Bobby Miller and John Grassilli. Not an upbeat play, no – it deals with the persecution of gay men in Nazi Germany, and most of it takes place at Dachau. But “up” is where it went, and I mean, straight to heaven. It was as beautiful as a prayer, as intimate as a dream. The play was transcendent, the highest achievement of theater and the one I hope for every time I take a seat in the house. You never know.

What is the local theatre scene missing?

Judy: Room to fail. I don't know that that's a uniquely St. Louis problem, though. I think theaters everyplace – even nonprofit theaters, even theaters in academic settings – put way too high a premium on “success,” which means. . .look, I have no idea what it means. Money? Extended runs? Awards? Artists need the room to fail spectacularly, to learn from that without derision, and to come back, cocky as ever and willing to risk it all the next time out. We talk a lot in the theater about risks but insistence on “success” cuts the other way; it can't admit the possibility of disaster. You want security, buy a toaster. Theater needs to be a gamble, every time.

What does New Line do really well?

Judy: Small, ripped-stocking shows with brains and glands (not purses). A few of my favorites prove the point: Return to the Forbidden Planet didn't need a functioning robot, it needed exactly what it had, a guy wrapped in aluminum foil! I hated Into the Woods until I saw it at New Line, which cut the heavy-handed opus I had endured down to nursery proportions – and revealed a sad, soaring, sensitive show about the vulnerability of children. Or Cry-Baby and High Fidelity, two shows that didn't do well on Broadway but thrived in the intimate New Line environment. I could go on.

What does New Line need to do better?

Judy: I'd love to see longer runs, and more than three shows a season. True, New Line often sells out, which is great, and I don't want to see it move to a big venue, because small scale is integral to its aesthetic. But if more people came, shows could run longer and there could be more of them. New Line needs to reach that potential audience.

What can New Line learn from other local companies?

Judy: How to make a theater experience special from the moment a member of the audience enters – especially a newcomer. Not every lobby is gorgeous. But the lobby starts the theater, and needs some atmosphere. It's not good to feel as if the assistant principal might be patrolling the halls.

What can other local companies learn from New Line?

Judy: That imagination is priceless.

Give us 2-3 rules that a good theatre reviewer should follow.

Judy: Just one: Be an optimist. The people onstage, and their offstage colleagues, are trying to make art. Maybe they will succeed. If they don't, it's not a catastrophe. But if they do – who knows? It might even be transcendent.


Interesting answers, no? She's right about room to fail, but we do often get cool new companies popping up who give us that room, like current new kid, Tesseract Theatre Company, and standbys like Slightly Askew.

I love Judy's answers to my questions. She's so right about all of it. That's not a surprise, because she always writes really thoughtful reviews of our shows, often talking about them in the context of our past work, or in the context of our art form's history and/or trajectory. As an example, in her review of New Line's I Love My Wife, she wrote:

New Line, the little cutting-edge theater that could, is opening its 20th season with I Love My Wife. . . New Line has done well with Hair, which it has mounted several times. It’s also staged strong productions of Grease and Chicago, the beat musical The Nervous Set, the slacker musical High Fidelity, and Return to the Forbidden Planet, set either in the 1950s or the future, maybe both. Put them all together, and it's an era-by-era look at changing American mores. Miller’s anthropological twist on musical theater gives New Line a distinctive point of view, brainy and bold. I Love My Wife is an apt addition to that repertoire.

We take our work really seriously and it's very cool that she does too. The artists of New Line, and those of other local companies, deserve no less. And in fact, most of the local reviewers do take our work seriously. That was a real challenge in our early days, but only rarely today.

St. Louis is a hell of a great place to make theatre, not just because of a thriving, ever-expanding theatre scene and a growing audience hungry for exciting theatre, but also because of great support systems, like the incredibly supportive Regional Arts Commission and the other local funders, like the local press who frequently do really great arts preview pieces, like KDHX, whose reviewers and interview shows cover almost every piece of theatre in town, including community theatre and educational theatre.

I think local theatre artists would do well to engage as fully as possible with our reviewers. They are a part of what we do, and many of them are smart, insightful people with valuable things to say about our work in their reviews. As a producer, I'm usually just looking for great pull-quotes to put on our website and to post to Facebook. As a director, I like to say I don't care about reviews, and though sometimes I get a bit pissed off at a clueless or lazy review, I often learn a lot from the many smart, well-written reviews we get.

Years ago, I reviewed theatre for KDHX for a year or so, and I'm really glad I got a taste of that. It's not easy, particularly if it's not a great show you're writing about. Just as I'm glad I was a performer when I was younger, so I can understand the process our actors go through, it's also nice to be able to see the other side of reviewing.

We're very lucky to have a theatre scene as healthy and adventurous as ours, and we're lucky to have someone like Judy at our city's only daily paper, who's so completely and passionately on our side. Thanks, Judy!

Long Live St. Louis Theatre!
Scott