And You May Lose Your Heart

Why do we all know the names Bonnie and Clyde?

Hype.

Bonnie and Clyde weren't particularly good criminals. They made a lot of mistakes. They left a lot of robberies with nothing to show for it. They only rarely robbed banks; mostly, it was little mom-and-pop grocery stores (they sound less like Robin Hood now, don't they?), leaving jobs with as little as five or ten dollars.

So how did these half-assed kid-criminals get to be as famous as Al Capone or John Dillinger, maybe even more famous? The media. There were two ways to be famous in America in the 1930s. You had to get in the papers or on the screen. In the opening number of Bonnie & Clyde, Bonnie chooses the screen, and Clyde chooses the papers. As it turned out, what really did the trick was Bonnie's poems – the newspapers published anything she gave them, and that's what made them stars.

At first, the public was on their side, seeing them as rebelling against the establishment power structure that was oppressing everyone, but that pretty myth kept getting punctured, as they repeatedly robbed the working poor. In real life, the public largely turned against them eventually.

Personally, I think the main reason they became more famous than the other gangsters is that they were Just Two Wild Kids in Love. None of the other outlaws of the period had a story like that. You can just see Mary Sunshine from Chicago writing about them.

I've read in several sources that most of the lawmen were referring to them as Clyde and Bonnie, but once the poems were published, everyone began calling them Bonnie and Clyde. The order of their names is a recurring joke in the show, Clyde objecting for obvious reasons, and Bonnie always holding the trump card that nothing rhymes with Bonnie.

Imagine Bonnie and Clyde in today's uber-saturated media environment. They'd both be in hog heaven. They'd be uploading videos to YouTube twice a day and live-tweeting their robberies. And the FBI would be tracking the GPS on their car because Clyde hadn't thought about that...

I've discovered as we work on this show that everybody knows their names, but nobody knows anything about them, except if they've seen the 1967 film, most of which is fictionalized.

I recently found a Bonnie & Clyde History group on Facebook, and the things they share there have been really helpful. I posted in the group about our show, but as I was typing, I realized I had to explain this show – it doesn't adhere to so many of the details of these events, and leaves out a lot of things and people. And then I understood – this isn't historical biography; this is fable.

And the moral of the fable is: A broken country creates broken people with broken values.

Just as Bonnie's poems and a willing press turned their real story into a romantic adventure, the 1960s film turned their story into a counter-culture thriller about the individual fighting back against America's failing establishment; and the stage musical turns the story into a fable about how a broken country can break its people and its values.

This is a show like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that is its own animal. We can't try to force it into some other form. Sort of like Assassins, this is a show not about historical accuracy, but about emotional authenticity instead. And after all, as Voltaire famously said, "History is a pack of lies we play on the dead." Documentaries can focus on details; this show is about the emotional state of our country during these dark times. Clyde and Bonnie stand in for America in our show.

The musical's opening number gives us the story's emotional circumstances (of both our heroes and America), and "How 'Bout a Dance?" is the show's subtle (subliminal?) statement of theme. Look at the lyric as metaphor and it all jumps out at you. It's Bonnie's agreement to commit to Clyde's adventure, and though the characters aren't aware of it, the song essentially describes the arc of the entire show. By the end of the song, these two are now a couple and they are taking this journey together. With the confidence of only the very young, they carve their own path.

And almost everyone in the audience knows the adventure ends with their deaths in eighteen months.

With all that in mind, here's the lyric. Translate this lyric of images into the thoughts and emotions of these characters at this moment. Think of "dance" as adventure; "music" as the magic of Clyde and Bonnie's attraction (she twice mentions his looks), and/or maybe the allure of celebrity; "the blues" as the despair and shame of the Depression, particularly there in the Dust Bowl; and read "lose your heart" any number of ways...

How ‘bout a dance?
It’s always fun –
Come over here,
Let me get to know ya.
Can’t beat a band
To lift your spirits, hon.
You look so handsome…

How ‘bout a dance?
Let’s make a start.
Music like this
Can really throw ya.
You’ll lose the blues,
And you may lose your heart.

Tonight is the night
I’ve been waiting for;
Even the moon looks just right.
I’m sure the crowd will
Make room on the floor,
When they see you
Look like you do.

So, how ‘bout a dance?
Let’s make a start.
Music like this
Can really throw ya.
You’ll lose the blues,
And you may lose your heart.

When Bonnie sings, "Tonight is the night I've been waiting for," the surface meaning is that she's fallen in love and maybe also, depending on the performance, she wants to have sex tonight. But the next lines are about being in public. This isn't about sex; this is about a man showing up to take her away from her awful life. She's been waiting for the night she could drive away from West Dallas.

And now, when I hear the line, "I'm sure the crowd will make room on the floor, when they see you look like you do," I see the scenes in Act II in which Clyde is robbing a store and then a bank, with the customers all cowering together, hands up, Clyde center-stage.

This song almost seems like a throwaway: Bonnie Sings a Song for Clyde. But it's not a love song, it's more than that. Inside the innocuous dialogue and lyric, Bonnie and Clyde are sizing each other up, and deciding to make a real commitment. They're beginning their joint adventure, with their broken values and broken dreams, and this innocent-sounding song tells them and us what their end will be, before they even get started. They're just not listening because they're falling in love.

They sing this song again, later in the show, in the hideout right before the big shootout with the lawmen. It's this moment of false security, when they think everything is calm and safe, but we know it's not – which creates very cool tension. Bonnie hears this song on the radio and says, "Baby, it's our song!" Yes, it is their song, but in a way they don't understand.

When Bonnie repeats the last two lines of the lyric in the last few seconds of the show, the metaphor hits us: when you turn to crime and murder, you may lose the crippling despair of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, but you'll also lose your soul – and likely, your life – in the process. I know Bonnie understood that; I don't know if Clyde did.

I kinda think he didn't. At least, not in our story.

This isn't a show about them falling in forever-love; that's pretty much a given in the script. This show in its final form is a socio-political fable about the unintended creation of criminals. Which is why we're taking a very different approach to Bonnie and Clyde's relationship from what the original production did on Broadway. The script and the Broadway production were full of passionate kisses, with our heroes in various states of undress. It still looked like the La Jolla production, a tragic love story of two toxic but passionate kids.

But that version of the show is on the cutting room floor, along with half a dozen homeless songs. My whole understanding of the story in its current form is that these damaged kids can see only one path to any kind of happiness or security in this dystopian America, and they're ill-equipped either to legitimately make their own way, or really, even to be all that good at crime. Because they're essentially children. Emotionally, socially, psychologically, morally, everything but physically, they're children. Continually fed a religion that no longer seems relevant, Bonnie and Clyde have no moral compass left, just the hell-for-leather all-American pursuit of happiness.

At the expense of everyone else. The part Jefferson left out.

Clyde brushes up against morality a couple times, but it baffles him. That part of him is broken. Or was never formed.

The story here is not boy meets girl; it's a horror fable, as scary as anything the Grimms Brothers gave us. Which is why we've taken almost all the overt sex out of it. That's not this story. That was the story in La Jolla; not anymore. This version is about how America produced these two monsters and how they would be abandoned by their maker. A socio-economic Frankenstein story. In my opinion, this story is not about underwear or Clyde's abs (as lovely as Jeremy Jordan's were), or about passionate kisses. That kind of adult physical affection works against the show's central conceit, that these are kids, emotionally stunted sociopaths who have been made and broken by the world around them.

Don't get me wrong, New Line loves sex, and we've had a lot of it on our stage, but I don't think this show is about sex, so our production won't be either.

There's so much wrapped up in this story and there are so many choices available to us. Our job is to make the choices that tell the clearest story we can tell. And I think we're doing pretty well in that department. Only the audience can tell me if I'm right.

We open in two weeks, and I couldn't be happier with our progress.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

These Are Things You Take a Chance For

I had a really cool phone conversation yesterday.

Most of my theatre friends' heroes are actors. Most of mine are writers and directors. And there's nothing cooler for me than to talk with the writer(s) of a show we're working on. There are always insights and subtleties that I can get from the writers, which may not be immediately obvious to me otherwise.

I've had very cool email correspondence and/or phone conversations with the writers of High Fidelity, Hands on a Hardbody, Next to Normal, Passing Strange, The Wild Party, Hair, Songs for a New World, Bat Boy, Urinetown, Floyd Collins, The Nervous Set, The Robber Bridegroom, Night of the Living Dead, Love Kills, Cry-Baby, Bukowsical, and other shows. And we've gotten visits from Amanda Green (for both High Fidelity and Hands on a Hardbody), Mark Savage (The Ballad of Little Mikey), Adam Schlessinger (Cry-Baby), Annie Kessler (Woman with Pocketbook), and Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green (Bukowsical).

And yesterday afternoon, I got to talk with Bonnie & Clyde bookwriter Ivan Menchell (in the picture at the top), who was nice enough to give me an hour of his time. After I gushed a bit about how much I love this show, he told some really interesting things, and I got to ask some questions about my core assumptions. It turns out he's been reading this blog and really loves what I've been writing, so that's a good sign!

(I always worry a little what the writers will think when I'm blogging all about how we're gonna go in a different direction. Apparently, that hasn't freaked Ivan out.)

I was glad to find out that he really loves Matt Reedy's poster design for the show. He said it's the only poster he's seen for this show that emphasized fame over violence, and he liked that.

I didn't know until today that Bonnie & Clyde started out as a song cycle about the greatest couples in history, including Samson and Delilah, and Laurel & Hardy. Sounds kinda cool, doesn't it? Then director Jeff Calhoun suggested to composer Frank Wildhorn that he turn the project into a book musical about just Bonnie and Clyde; and Calhoun also brought Menchell into the process. Meanwhile, separately, director Michael Greif (Rent, Next to Normal, If/Then) and one of the screenwriters of the 1967 film were trying to crack the same nut but couldn't figure it out.

Here are some other tidbits Ivan shared with me...

He really thinks the scene in which Bonnie breaks Clyde out of jail is the show's "obligatory moment," the moment toward which everything before it leads, and from which everything after it results. Without that moment, there is no story. Once he said that, I realized how right he is. That moment is when Bonnie becomes a criminal, her point of no return, when she makes the decision that locks in her tragic destiny, hitching her wagon to Clyde's decidedly fucked-up star.

Bonnie and Clyde were as notorious, maybe more so, for living and sleeping together "out of wedlock" than for their crimes. People just didn't cohabitate openly like that. And technically, she was still married to someone else.

Being in jail or having a prison record was not the stigma then that it is today. So many people, who we'd probably consider innocent, were jailed for debt, for stealing food, for petty robbery – those crimes the result of the crippling poverty and despair of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

Bonnie really was a good girl, a straight-A student, before she met Clyde. When Ivan made a point of mentioning that, it hit me that that Bonnie is the one Ted loves, which makes that subplot even sadder. It's almost like there are two Bonnies – one pre-Clyde, and one post-Clyde. Ted loves a Bonnie that is no more; she's been changed and now she's the Bonnie Clyde loves. These men's big duet, "You Could Do Better Than Him," is really a battle for Bonnie's soul. Will she stay with Clyde and be the wild, dangerous Bonnie, or will she go with Ted and be the Good Bonnie again?

Is it even possible for her to return to her former self and life?

Ivan noted the horrors Clyde suffered in jail, not just back-breaking work on a labor farm, but savage beatings and rapes. As often happens today with non-violent drug offenders, it seems quite likely that though Clyde may have had the predilection, it was prison that made him into the killer he became. Ivan also wondered out loud if Bonnie and Clyde would have become these people if they hadn't met. Did they bring out the "worst" in each other? Would Bonnie have stayed a good girl if not for Clyde? Would Clyde have been the flamboyant show-off without Bonnie as audience? Would Clyde have become famous without Bonnie's poems published in the newspaper?

Ivan also told me that Emma Parker's book about Bonnie and Clyde, Fugitives; The Story of Clyde Barrow & Bonnie Parker, includes a lot of letters and diary entries.

Ivan also told me about some interesting staging ideas they tried. In the show's out-of-town tryout at the La Jolla Playhouse, Act I ended with Clyde's first kill and a dead cop laying onstage. Then they left the "body" onstage throughout the entire intermission, bleeding all over the stage. Then Act II started, the other cops arrived, moved the body, someone cleaned up the blood, etc. But then the writers realized they needed to hold off Clyde's first kill till Act II. Now the show ends Act I with our heroes on top of the world. Everything's awesome. And then it slowly falls apart in Act II.

A local critic once said to me the reason he doesn't like Sondheim shows is that Sondheim gives us everything we want in Act I (love, happiness, family, whatever), and then tears it all apart in Act II. I thought about it and that is true of most of his shows. But it's also true of Camelot, The Fantasticks, Fiddler on the Roof, even Anything Goes and No, No, Nanette, among other shows. And Bonnie & Clyde. And a lot of Shakespeare's plays. It's a common convention of dramatic storytelling. But it's not about giving and taking away; it's about establishing characters and situation, and then throwing it all out of balance, because that's how drama works. By the end, either balance is restored, or the characters adjust to a new normal (which is also a kind of balance).

Maybe that all feels more pronounced in musicals because too many of us still reflexively think of musicals as happy and innocuous. Well, that was true in the 1920s, but not today.

Ivan told me that in the Korean production, we actually saw (sort of) Clyde raped in the shower by Ed Crowder (which is only referred to obliquely in our script), and in the Act II opening, Clyde actually ran out into the house and robbed members of the audience, took their wallets, etc. I gotta say, that's kinda cool. Though we do fuck with our audiences sometimes, I don't think we'd wanna go that far...

So many new things to think about now. I've already thought of some small moments I want to change in the staging...

This is such rich material, book, music, and lyrics, and it's such a blast to work on. Now that we're running the whole show at every rehearsal, I have no doubt there are many new revelations in store for me, probably all the way through closing night, if past shows are any indication.

And eventually, I'll massage all my blog posts about the show into a coherent chapter for my next book. But in the meantime, I can't wait to get back to rehearsal. This is my favorite part of the process!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I Got Some Moves That I'd Love to Show Ya

We've finished blocking Bonnie & Clyde.

Woo-hooooo!

This was a hard show to figure out, particularly since we're going in a somewhat different direction from the original Broadway production.

I've developed a really nice system for myself over the years, when it comes to blocking. I'm not someone who likes working under pressure or deadlines. I remember freshman year in college, doing an all-nighter to finish a paper the night before I came home for Christmas break. And I hated how it made me feel! I decided then and there that I would never do an all-nighter again, and in order to keep that promise, ever since then, I plan to finish everything ahead of schedule. Everything. Grant applications, program notes, blocking, press releases, all the things I have to do in my job.

So first, as soon as we've decided that we're definitely doing a show, I photocopy the script (so it's one-sided) and get it coiled-bound at Kinko's. Then the script sits on my piano for a long time. My first job is to figure out the style and tone of the show – how does it look, how does it move, will we acknowledge the audience, will we place any action out in the audience, is this a full-front, presentational show or an intimate, ignore-the-audience show, will we have full-out choreography or less dance-oriented "Millerography" musical staging, will our set and props be very realistic or more cartoony or a mix of the two, is the acting naturalistic or heightened realism or full-out cartoony, is this a high-energy, fast-paced show or a more moderately paced, moodier show for which we'll really use pauses and silence...?

So many questions to answer before I can do anything else.

Also, I have to make sure I know the central theme of the show, the one sentence that summarizes the point of the story. Not the plot; the point. For example, Cabaret tells us that not doing nothing is also a political choice. Fiddler tells us that we must balance tradition with the ever-changing world around us. Company tells us that being in a relationship is really hard and frustrating, but it's better than being alone. So what does Bonnie & Clyde tell us?

I think this is a harder question with this show than with many others, because this show fundamentally changed what it was about between its out-of-town tryout at the La Jolla Playhouse and its opening in New York. At La Jolla, the show was about these two kids falling in love during difficult times. But on Broadway the show was completely transformed. They cut seven songs (including some great songs that just didn't belong in the revised show) and wrote six new songs, including many of the songs that define the show now – "Picture Show," "When I Drive," "Raise a Little Hell," "Made in America," "Too Late to Turn Back Now," and "That's What You Call a Dream." If you look at the two song lists, you'll see that they took the songs away from the lawmen and Bonnie's mother – these are not characters (at least in the revised show) that need exploration. Instead we get songs that lay out the socio-political themes for us (something almost completely missing in the earlier version), and go deeper into the central characters.

So what is the central point of Bonnie & Clyde? To be honest, I'm still wrestling with that. I'm close to it, but I don't think I've nailed it yet. It's certainly related to that socio-political context, and most directly related to "Made in America." It's something along the lines of A broken country creates broken people with broken values. I'm in the right neighborhood here, but I don't know if I'm knocking on the right door yet. The answer is in this lyric:

We may be in debt,
Wake up in a sweat,
But let's not forget
We were made in America.

Yes, let's not forget that. America is a big part of this story.

I think it's easy to imagine that without the Depression and the Dust Bowl, Clyde and Bonnie might have had less awful childhoods, more loving, attentive families, more stable upbringing, and maybe they wouldn't have ended up this way. If the Barrows and Parkers weren't suffering so profoundly, would Clyde and Bonnie have fantasized about being Clara Bow and Billy the Kid? Probably, but it would've stopped there. Clyde's "Bang! Bang!' probably would have stayed make-believe.

And thinking about all that led to my biggest decision as director of this show, and that is to bring the ensemble – the community – onstage periodically as backdrop to and comment on Clyde and Bonnie. I'm putting "America" onstage, in the show's opening and closing (which were both just Bonnie and Clyde on Broadway), and also for a few other scenes.

I try to make sure I work through all this stuff before I start blocking, but sometimes the answers only come as we're working. I create "rules" for each show, guidelines about how we will physically use the theatre space, what will and won't be part of this world we're creating, including many of the questions I ask above.

So for a long time, the script and score just sit on my piano, and the show percolates in the back of my mind.

Every once in a while, over the next weeks or months,  I'll have a revelation about how to stage a moment in the show, or about character, style, etc. When that happens, I grab the script, write my new idea(s) in, and put it back on the piano. Over time, I get a lot of big and/or complicated moments figured out.

Then as we being music rehearsals, the ideas start coming faster and more frequently, and I keep adding them to my script.

Finally, when it's time to block the actors, I work my way through the script and fill in between the ideas I've worked out. Sometimes that's easy; sometimes it's really hard. It was harder with Bonnie & Clyde because it's very cinematic in its writing, which calls for much cleaner, tighter, more economical blocking. And it means using cinematic techniques, like pans, zooms, split-screens, focus pulls, over-the-shoulder shots, etc.

My big secret (which really isn't very secret) is that I mostly block my shows stoned. I discovered years ago that marijuana mostly disables my internal critic, so that crazy and/or impossible ideas don't get dismissed automatically. And some of those crazier ideas are great!  And some of those impossible ideas seem less impossible if I just think through them and picture them in my head. Which means I come up with much more interesting, more adventurous, more unexpected, and often a lot more insightful staging if I've smoked a little of God's Goofy Green Goodness first.

Am I stoned now? What an impertinent question.

Usually, I try to get all of Act I blocked before our first blocking rehearsal, but I don't try to block the whole show that early. I want to see if my ideas for Act I work first, if it all feels cohesive, if our storytelling is clear, if the rules I've set up ar good ones, etc. If I'm feeling good about all that, I go ahead and work on Act II. If I'm feeling iffy about Act I, I try to figure out why before I go on to Act II.

I used to worry a lot as I worked if it was good, if it was funny, if it was powerful in all the right places. It drove me nuts because you just can't tell that stuff without an audience. But during our first production of Hair (we've done it three times) in 2000, I learned a really valuable lesson. When I focus on whether my work is good or not, I'm thinking about me; when I focus on whether we're telling the story clearly and well, I'm thinking about the story. I'm not trying to be impressive or funny or shocking or brilliant; I'm trying only to unlock each scene so that I fully understand it, and the actors understand it, and therefore the audience will understand it.

I read an interview with Sondheim, in which he said that he doesn't really care if an audience likes his show – since that's a matter of individual taste and every person will react differently – as long as they understand what he's saying, as long as the show is clear.  As long as you're working on really good material, and we always are, all you have to do is tell the story. Clarity is everything. Without it, a show may be diverting, but it won't be good.

Of course, even now that I've finished blocking the show and staging the actors, things will still change a lot. As I've mentioned on this blog many times, I see making comic book art as a good metaphor for my idea of directing – I do the pencil sketch, together and the actors and I ink in the lines, and then the actors fill in all the colors, with me on the sidelines as editor to make sure we're all drawing the same story in the same style.

We've run both acts separately. That's when we start to shape the show. I guess this would be the part of my comic book art metaphor where the actors and I, together, ink in the lines. We do a lot of stopping and starting, trying different ideas, different staging, different emotions behind lines. This is almost always the stage where we put some good fights into the show. Confrontation is one of the pillars of drama, so writers love to write fights (and the great writers write amazing fights), but most actors are afraid (or at least, hesitant) to really fight onstage, to get furious, to scream (or its musical equivalent), to Fucking Lose It. Luckily, all I have to do is ask, and they run with it. It's fun for an actor to have a fight onstage, so once I give them permission, they really find it.

We've got some humdingers in Bonnie & Clyde.

Now we'll just run the whole show at every rehearsal, and over time, things will settle, evolve, and find their final form. Everything will make more sense to our actors and they'll have time to fashion their characters' interior lives. Now is when our actors do their hardest and most important work. I've given them their exterior life; now they have to access the deepest corners of these characters' interior lives. They have to live fully and honestly in this non-naturalistic world I've given them. They have to add the color.

Sometimes I think many non-actors think that acting is, after all, just pretending, right? Well, yes and no. It's a very specific, meaningful, and complicated kind of pretending that communicates something of value to an audience. Pretending doesn't need an audience, but acting without an audience is just rehearsal.

I have such powerful respect for actors. They are magnificent beasts. (And I don't use that noun carelessly.) I really, really love watching each actor work, create, evolve, explore, take risks, succeed and fail, incorporate ideas and discard ideas, blend into the other performances being created, and slowly, skillfully create this amazing, detailed, complex character. One of the hardest parts of my job is that every actor needs something different from me, but I'm getting better and better at delivering it. Sometimes they frustrate me (and I know I frustrate them), but they dazzle me just as often. I still remember being an actor and I don't know that I could jump back into it at this point. There's so much more to it than pretending.

So now we run.

For the first few run-throughs, I try not to give them too many notes. I want them to have the freedom to explore, to fail and try again, to take risks. Then Dowdy and I will start shaping the show, cleaning things up, making sure it all works together to make a unified piece of art.

This is the fun part for me.

I can't wait to see this creature take shape. There's so much awesome on the way.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott