Atomic

I'm a deadbeat blogger.

We've already been rehearsing for two weeks and I have yet to post a blog about this show, the new rock musical Atomic.

New Line's production will be the show's fourth, after its premiere in Australia (where both writers are from), a short off Broadway run, big rewrites, and a production in Michigan.

I'm so glad we get to share this show with our audiences!

We finished learning the songs last night and we all love this score. The show received mixed to hostile reviews off Broadway, though I think the writers fundamentally reconceived the show after that. I read the off Broadway version and liked it very much, but the rewrites are excellent, and it's a much stronger show now, having lost some comic relief that really doesn't belong.

I realize as we work on this that it's a rare non-ironic show for New Line. There are moments of pretty dark irony, but overall, it's a very sincere, very earnest script, because these physicists take their work and the questions around it very seriously.

The reviews off Broadway often said this was a musical about the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, but that's not really true. The show is about the morality and moral questions swimming around the making of the bomb and its eventual use. This is a morality tale, not a history lesson.

This is a show about Dangerous Ideas. Pandora's Box. Which is why it has to be a rock musical. This is a story about big emotions, big rebellion (in various forms), big questions, and big moral complexity. Rock is the language of rebellion, of danger and wildness. What other musical language could adequately portray these people, their emotions, their rage, and their fear?

President Truman thought he could keep the details of the work secret so no one else could make the bomb. But you can never control ideas...

In thinking about the show, big picture, I realize that it's not really a Hero Myth, as so many of our shows are. This is a Frankenstein story. Leo and his fellow physicists create a monster, which they lose control of, and it rampages through the world killing people. In 2016, that's a rock story. The energy and intensity of this story demand rock and roll.

Atomic is a concept musical and the show uses its songs in two different ways. Some of the songs arise naturally out of dialogue, as in any good musical comedy or Rodgers & Hammerstein show. These songs should be staged fairly naturalistically, as an extension of dialogue. These songs amplify emotion in this very high-stakes story. The other numbers are commentary songs standing outside the narrative. These can be staged more expressionistically, and I think, more like a rock concert.

I have not yet blocked anything (we start blocking rehearsals Monday), but I've figured out the "language" and "vocabulary" of the staging. For instance, a big table and chairs will always be centerstage, and for the more conceptual, commentary songs, we can use that table and chairs any way we want. We can turn the table into a stage, or a memory, or pretty much anything.

And I want to find as many places as possible in the script to use both naturalistic and conceptual staging at the same time, to allow a dialogue scene to play out while a commentary song is being performed by the rest of the cast. The show's writers have created a dual personality for this show, part Brecht, part contemporary drama. That duality is present in the story itself, in the battle between science and government, in the emotions of these characters, in our moral assessment of the atom bomb, as we watch this story. I want to make sure our staging underlines all that.

One of the challenges of this production will be Rob's set, which extends across the middle of our blackbox theatre, with audience on both sides. So each section of audience will watch this gripping, morally complex drama, with the other half of the audience and their reactions as backdrop.

Americans will be our backdrop. And right in the middle of a Presidential election.

Like 1776 does, Atomic takes these historical figures out of the history book and gives them full, rich, complicated humanity. I can't even imagine having to grapple with questions like this...

This isn't the kind of smartass, ironic story we usually tell, and I have to be careful not to fall back on habits that better suit a different kind of show.

As with every show, my job is to understand what Danny Ginges and Philip Foxman wrote, and then figure out how to make it as clear as possible to the audience. Not to impose a "vision" or anything on it, just to follow the script and score wherever they take us. This is good storytelling and we just need to trust it.

As we always do.

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott