Chaucer, Rabelais, BALZAC: A Music Man Glossary

Meredith Willson’s The Music Man contains dozens of words and phrases that most of us have never used or even heard, many of them things that Willson himself must have heard growing up in turn of the century Iowa. I so often get emails asking about one or more of these, so I figured, let's get them all together in one list.

The movie version changed some of these references, fearing the audience wouldn't know them. But as the show proves, it's not important for the audience to know every reference -- it's just important for this world we create onstage feels honest and authentic to the audience. As long as the actors know and understand all the references, it will contribute to the "reality" of this fictional version of 1912 Iowa.

Below is a list of those oddities and what they mean, along with some other references you may not know... Enjoy!

kibitzing -- talking, joking, chitchatting

notion salesman -- a guy who sells small personal items

button-hook -- a small metal hook for pulling buttons through buttonholes.

hard goods & soft goods -- Hard goods are durable merchandise, like cars, machinery, furniture, appliances, etc. Soft goods are merchandise that isn’t as durable, like clothing, rugs, and other textiles.

noggin -- a small cup or mug of wine, usually a quarter-pint.

piggin -- a small bowl with a ladle for serving cream.

firkin -- a small wooden tub for butter or lard.

hogshead -- a large container holding sixty-three gallons of wine.

cask -- a bottle of any size, but usually one holding liquor.

demijohn -- a large wine bottle with a narrow neck and usually a wicker enclosure around the bottom.

Model T Ford -- a very popular car. In 1912, U.S. auto makers were manufacturing 115,000 new cars a month, about a quarter of them Ford Model Ts. Ten years later, 50% of the cars in America were Model Ts.

Uneeda Biscuit -- soda crackers introduced in 1889 by National Biscuit Company (now better known as Nabisco), the first crackers to be sold packaged with a brand name instead of just out of a cracker barrel. This marketing experiment paid off and by 1900, Uneeda Biscuits were selling more than ten million packages a month, while all other brands of packaged crackers combined totaled only 40,000 packages a month.

Mail Pouch – a brand of chewing tobacco

teirce -- a wine cask holding forty-two gallons.

mandolin -- a stringed instrument (like a very small guitar) shaped like a pear

Jews-harp – a small metal musical instrument you hold between your teeth and pluck (sometimes de-racialized as a "juice harp")

tarred and feathered -- covered with tar and feathers (which is often deadly) as punishment

rode out on a rail -- banished from a community, as punishment (often after being tarred and feathered), often literally carried out on a fence rail

two-bit -- cheap (literally twenty-five cents)

thimble-rigger -- con man or thief

Hawkeyes -- residents of Iowa

livery Stable -- stable where horses are kept and hired out

billiards -- a table game like pool, without pockets

Horse sense -- practical common sense

three-rail billiard shot -- a shot that banks off three sides of the billiards table

balkline game -- billiards

pinch-back suit -- a suit with a coat that is gathered in the back, the sign of a city slicker

Jasper -- slang word for a (usually) a white guy who is simple or naive

Dan Patch -- a champion harness racing horse at the turn of the century. Thoroughbred saddled horse racing came to America from the British aristocracy, so it was considered elitist. Harness racing, in which the jockey rode behind the horses in a cart, was considered more the sport of the working class.

frittern -- frittering – wasting time

beefsteak -- a slice of beef for frying

cistern -- a tank for storing water that had to be kept full (by pouring water into it manually) for the family to use, before people had indoor plumbing

knickerbockers -- knee pants that gather at the knee, worn by young boys at the turn of the century.

Bevo -- a brand of non-alcoholic near-beer, from Anheuser-Busch, but it wasn't introduced till four years after our story is set...

Cubebs and Tailor-mades -- various kinds of hand-rolled cigarettes. Cigarettes were illegal (and considered highly immoral) in Iowa at that time.

Sen-Sen -- a popular breath freshener, very small but very strong.

arm'ry -- armory -- headquarters for a National Guard unit

libertine -- morally or sexually unrestrained

scarlet -- adulterous. It refers to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter.

ragtime -- syncopated jazz music, popular at the turn of the century, so called because of "ragged" (off-the-beat) style

dime Novel -- cheap, paperback adventure novels, in vogue from the 1850s through the 1920s.

Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang -- a racy monthly humor magazine first published in 1919, which reached a circulation of 425,000 in 1923. (Technically, this reference is anachronistic, since the show is set in 1912.)

Balzac -- Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), a French novelist

Paul Bunyan -- a giant from American folklore

Saint Pat -- St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, a missionary who brought Christianity to Ireland

Noah Webster -- (1758-1843) American essayist and lexicographer, who created one of the earliest American dictionaries

cross-hand -- a piano piece that requires one hand crossing over the other to play a note or chord

"This Ruby Hat of Omar Kay-ay-ay"- -- The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, erotic 12th century Persian poetry

stereopticon -- a slide projector with two light sources, so the pictures appear to fade from one to the next. Also, a hand-held device that lets the user look at two identical pictures at the same time, giving it a three-dimensional effect.

tablow -- tableau -- a grouping of people in costumes to create a still "picture"

Springfield Rifle -- a kind of rifle developed after the Civil War

ruffian -- a bully or lawless person

crick -- dialect for “creek”

pest house -- a hospital or house for people infected with pestilential diseases (bubonic plague, for example)

Pompy-eye -- Pompeii, an ancient city buried in the ash of an erupting volcano

Gilmore -- Patrick S. Gilmore (1829-1892), a famous Irish-American bandleader who wrote “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” (under a pseudonym).

Liberati -- Alessandro Liberati (1847-1927), an Italian born cornet player, bandleader, and composer, who came to the U.S. in 1872 and played with many bands, including Gilmore's. He had his own touring band from 1889 to 1909, and was active in music (opera, other bands, teaching) until his death

Pat Conway -- (1867-1929) a conductor, bandleader, and teacher, who directed several bands from the 1890s until his death and was the founder of the Air Force Band in World War I. Conway and Sousa were friends, and their bands often performed together.

The Great Creatore -- Giuseppe Creatore (1871-1952), an Italian conductor and composer who brought a band to the U.S. in 1902 to tour. He was active as a conductor through the 1930s.

W.C. Handy -- (1873-1958) a famous American blues composer and bandleader, who wrote “St. Louis Blues.”

John Philip Sousa -- (1854-1932) a world-famous bandleader and composer, who was known as “the March King” for writing many of the famous marches that marching bands play today.

(Harold's comment in the intro to “76 Trombones” about all these famous musicians coming to town on the same day, appears to be a joke, although an obscure one. The joke is that it would have been essentially impossible for all these extremely famous men of widely varying ages to actually come to one small town, especially all on one day. Hill is just throwing out names that sound impressive, names that the River City townspeople might know from their piano sheet music.)

cornet -- a different version of a trumpet, shorter in length (the same amount of tubing, just wrapped around more), with a longer bell and a somewhat darker sound.

tympani -- big bass drums

horse platoons -- military units of horses (in this case, used for a parade)

euphonium -- like a baritone, which is itself like a small version of the tuba, but the euphonium has a larger opening in the bell and produces a mellower sound and better low notes than the baritone.

Harch -- variant of “march”

Frank Gotch and Strangular Lewis -- two early 20th-century American wrestlers

Jeely Kly -- exclamation, variant of “Jesus Christ”

Perpetual Motion -- the theoretical ability of a mechanism to continue to move forever by itself without any loss of energy or speed. The joke here is that Tommy thinks he “nearly had” perpetual motion a couple times, which is impossible.

class of aught-five -- class of 1905

canoodlin' -- slang for romantic activity. According to Wesbter's (I love this), "The origins of canoodle are obscure. Our best guess is that it may come from an English dialect noun of the same spelling meaning "donkey," "fool," or "foolish lover," which itself may be an alteration of the word noodle, meaning "a foolish person." That noodle, in turn, may come from noddle, a word for the head. The guess seems reasonable given that, since its appearance in the language around the mid-19th century, canoodle has been most often used jocularly for playful public displays of affection by couples who are head over heels in love."

"For no Diana do I play faun" -- Diana is the Roman goddess of the hunt and the moon, and the faun is a mythological creature that is a man with ears, horns, tail and hind legs of a goat. This is probably a reference to the famous painting Diana and Her Nymphs Surprised by the Fauns (1638-40) by Peter Paul Rubens. Harold's line apparently means he's not chasing after any women.

Hester -- Hester Prynne, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, who had to wear a red “A” in punishment for her adultery.

agog -- highly excited

on the que veev -- on alert, watchful, a corruption of qui vive, French for “who goes there?”

Pianola -- a brand of player pianos

Delsarte -- François Delsarte (1811-1871), a French musician and dance teacher who taught a dance and acting method based on the mastery of certain bodily attitudes and gestures. Look at the drawings, and see how the Ladies Auxiliary for the Classic Dance is trying to imitate these moves with their "Grecian Urn" performance.

Gilt-edge -- of the highest quality, literally edged with gold

Chaucer -- Geoffery Chaucer (1340-1400), English author and poet who wrote the very racy Canterbury Tales

Raballaise -- François Rabelais (1490-1553), a French satirist and humorist, who wrote the very racy Gargantua and Pantagruel, which many thought was obscene and blasphemous

Balzac -- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), the notorious French novelist who wrote Droll Stories, a racy collection of thirty short stories

malfeasance -- wrongdoing. The joke here is that implication that Harold could get a permit for malfeasance.

flugelhorn -- like a cornet, but with a larger opening in the bell.

"Minute Waltz" -- famous waltz by Chopin which everyone assumes is meant to be played in a minute, but its title actually refers to it being small or miniature. Chopin's original title for the piece is "Waltz of the Little Dog."

Quaker -- a member of The Society of Friends, a religion that rejects luxuries, modern technology, and anything that isn’t mentioned in the Bible.

St. Bridget -- an Irish saint, who founded the first nunnery in Ireland

O'Clark, O'Mendez, O'Klein -- comic reference to three famous musicians who were not Irish, the famous cornet player Herbert L. Clarke, the famous Mexican trumpet player Rafael Mendez (another anachronism, since he was born only six years before our story), and apparently the famous Jewish trumpet player Manny Klein (but again, he was born only four years before our story).

St. Michael -- an Irish saint, who first brought formal education to Ireland in the fifth century

hod -- a portable trough

mavorneen -- mavourneen -- Irish word for “sweetheart,” derived from the Irish Gaelic mo mhuirnín, meaning "my beloved"

Tara’s Hall -- a music hall in Dublin

Hodado -- dialect for “how do you do”

Epworth League -- a Methodist youth organization, founded in 1889

Black Hole of Calcutta -- a small prison in India in which the more than a hundred Europeans were killed in 1756.

Wells Fargo Wagon -- a stagecoach delivery service started in 1851, which allowed mail order sales to flourish

mackinaw -- a thick, blanket-like coat, usually plaid, named for a kind of blanket that northern and western native Americans made.

double-boiler -- a small pot that fits into a bigger pot. Water is boiled in the bigger pot to cook things in the smaller pot.

D.A.R. -- The Daughters of the American Revolution, a patriotic women’s organization

"Minuet in G" -- very famous classical piece by Ludwig von Beethoven

Tempus fugits -- hurry up. It’s a Latin phrase meaning “time flies”

frazolagy -- phraseology, or choice of words

"Rustle of Spring" -- turn-of-the-century piano piece written by the Norwegian composer Christian Sinding, that was very popular in the US

Grecian Urn -- the ladies are doing interpretive dance, based on the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.

Shipoopi -- this is just a nonsense word

Capulets -- one of the warring families in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Mississippi sturgeon -- a fish

Galileo -- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Italian physicist and astronomer, who figured out that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around.

Columbus -- Christopher Columbus (1446-1506), Italian navigator who is credited with discovering America.

Bach -- Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), famous classical composer whose work is the basis for modern music theory.

Well-Tempered Clavichord -- refers to a famous piece of music by Bach, "The Well-Tempered Clavier." Both a clavichord and a clavier are early versions of a piano.

Redpath Circuit -- one of several vaudeville circuits in the U.S., a group of theatres to which performers would travel

Criminee -- a slang expression of dismay, a corruption of  "Christ"

Tintype -- an old-fashioned photograph

Hector Berlioz -- (1803-1869), French classical composer. (Harold couldn’t be getting a cable from him, since he had been dead for almost forty years.)

Cat-boat -- a small boat with one mast and one large sail.

Buster Brown -- a comic strip character

Privy -- outhouse

Shropshyre sheep -- English sheep known for very white wool and good meat


From time to time, I'm contacted by a dramaturg who wants to work with us, but I love doing this kind of research. As I write this, we recently closed the amazing Sweet Smell of Success, which was just loaded with 1950s New York references. It was so much fun discovering what they all meant and sharing that with the actors. Like I said above, understanding all that stuff is so key for the actors.

Right now, I'm reading everything I can about the culture and pop culture of the 1930s, as I start thinking about our upcoming production of Anything Goes later this season.

One of the great joys of this blog is being able to share cool stuff like this with so many people. Hope this list is entertaining and/or helpful...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

Fuck the Fourth Wall

I've always found the idea of the Fourth Wall to be silly at best, and dishonest at worst. We all know there's no wall there; isn't it dishonest for the actors to pretend that a wall is there... and that the audience isn't...?

There were a lot of ways in which I wanted to explore, new ideas, new directions, new focus, when I founded New Line Theatre in 1991. One of the most obvious ways was our content, with shows like Assassins, In the Blood, Sweeney, Passion, The Ballad of Little Mikey, Floyd Collins, Jacques Brel, et al.

But we also explored, from the very beginning, the idea of space and the artificial divide between actors and audience. A lot of New Line's history has been spent playing with those ideas or shattering them altogether. And I thought it would be fun to look back over some of the fourth-wall-fucking we've done over the last twenty-six years.

I couldn't put it into words until more recently, but a big part of the impetus for starting New Line was about embracing work outside the frame of 50s musical comedy and Rodgers & Hammerstein drama. I don't think I knew exactly what I didn't like about R&H when I started New Line, but I do now. It was the deeply flawed idea that musical theatre could work as mid-century naturalistic drama, that the performance of a musical could ever be naturalistic. They created (or at least regularized) the idea of a musical internal monologue, to excuse characters singing full front to the audience; but it's a ruse. The writers and actor really are telling the audience what the character is thinking.

It's Fourth Wall breaking without the guilt.

My work with New Line has almost always been about rebelling against all of that. It's dishonest. The actors are telling us this stuff. It's called storytelling. There's nothing shameful about a soliloquy. If it was good enough for Shakespeare...

Imagine the emotional heft of Billy Bigelow directly sharing "Soliloquy" with the audience, talking with them, not just at them. Like Tevye does in Fiddler.

After hearing way too many times that the staging for The Great Comet was "ground-breaking" (it was really great, but American directors have been using staging like that since the sixties), I've been thinking about the various ways we've played with space over New Line's history, rebelling against naturalism and the proscenium. It's interesting to see how our experiments got bolder over time. It started with invading the audience's space personally, and then over time, more generally moving the show off the stage...

The very first show New Line produced was A Tribute to the Rock Musicals, which I created. It was essentially a concert tracing the history of rock musicals, with some minor staging here and there. But in looking for a new way to frame the evening, I created a Professor (played by John Gerdes, who's currently working on the music for The Zombies of Penzance for New Line), who actually gave a "lecture" on the history of the rock musical.

The actors all started in the house, quickly overcome by the opening number, dancing and singing in the aisles, then moving up onto the stage to become the "examples" of the Professor's lecture. Looking back, I can't believe I made audiences listen to a lecture, but people loved the show. We only got a couple reviews back then, but they were both very nice. At the time I was just experimenting, but I realized that the actors coming out of the audience made them the audience's surrogates, and we all "learned" together, while rocking out to some killer show tunes.

New Line's second show was a neo musical comedy I wrote called Attempting the Absurd, about an unusually self-aware twenty-something who has figured out that he's only a character in a musical. In 1992, long before [title of show]. My senior year in college, I got this idea, and my roommate and I discussed the details and the logical implications of my premise for the entire school year -- if the other characters think they're real, then they don't know they're singing. If they don't know they're singing, what is going on in their reality? When I got home, I had honed my central premise and I wrote the show.

But since the "entire world" -- everybody and everything in Jason's life -- is a musical, then the audience is part of the story too, as the musical's audience. So once again, we started the show out in the house, this time with Jason and his girlfriend arguing across the center section of the audience, and then both of them slowly moving into one row, pushing past audience members, ending up dead center between two rows (a comic device I used again fifteen years later in Urinetown). It was impossible for the audience to be passive after that. They were part of this. Throughout the show, Jason talked to the audience, although his mother sometimes asked him why he was talking to the wall. My favorite bit was right after the first big scene. Jason sits on the front of the stage and talks to the audience:

It was three things that led to my discovery that I'm only a character in a musical comedy: I have the overwhelming feeling that everything I do is controlled by someone somewhere behind a typewriter, I have only a sketchy memory of my past, and I never go to the bathroom.

(He senses disbelief in the audience.)

You laugh, but haven't you ever felt like the things that happen around you aren't real? Just couldn't be real? Kind-of set out too perfectly? Like when you pick up the phone to call somebody and they're already on the line. Hasn't that ever happened to you?

It's been two years, no – longer, three years since I started really thinking about who I am, why am I here... And then not long ago, I suddenly realized that I'm only a character in a musical. I realized that I only exist within this musical. Of course, since everyone else thinks they're real, they think I'm nuts.

(Slowly and with great import:)

See, I'm a fictional character in the Real World, while all the people around me are real people in a fictional world.

(A long pause while he lets it sink in. He smiles. He knows how confusing he sounds.)

I bet you'd give anything to see Hello Dolly! right about now, wouldn't you..? Musicals used to be so neat and tidy... Ever since Sondheim, it's been all… downhill...

Eventually, Jason is arrested, for generally being crazy, and the charges are dismissed when Jason presents the Judge with the script for Attempting the Absurd.

I was meta before meta was cool. In case you're wondering, the title came from a line in the show, "Only by attempting the absurd can you achieve the ridiculous." The perfect title for this show.

Our fourth season, we did Pippin, with a woman as Leading Player, back in 1995 before that was trendy. We were in the St. Marcus, a theatre in a church basement. We built a runway off the front of the stage, out through the house to the back, and we used it a lot. The St. Marcus was a perfect place for this show, seating about 150, with the front row about three feet from the stage. It was really intense, really freaky.

I was particularly proud of some of the moments I created in that show. My favorite was the opening. The house went to black, and a pinspot came up slowly on Pippin, out on the runway, in the middle of the house. He takes a breath and raises his hand -- which is holding a gun -- up to his temple. He closes his eyes... and that note fades in... and he looks around... and "Magic to Do" starts. He slowly turns around and sees the Players emerging from the darkness...

What I loved about that moment was that it was incredibly intense, which gave the whole evening some serious balls, but it also set up the show's climax, when Leading Player tells the audience, "Why, we're right inside your head." This whole story has happened in Pippin's mind, so the Grand Finale is, by definition, suicide. I'm not sure audiences always get that, and I think this helped.

We produced Sweeney Todd in 1996, and for the first time, we did something I had been wanting to do for years. We used the entire theatre, including the audience, as the environment for our story. I had read an interview with Sondheim, in which he said he had wanted Sweeney to be a small, chamber musical, with the actors popping up behind the audience, scaring the crap out of them. I loved that idea!

So for our production, the aisles became the streets of London. Because we were in a basement theatre, there were support poles in the audience, and we dressed them all up as streetlamps. In addition to the small permanent stage at the St. Marcus, we built two satellite stages; and two of these three stages had revolves. Each time the chorus would sing "City on Fire," they would literally be inches behind the back row of the audience.

It was so much fun, and people really loved the intensity of it. The show became a real horror show again, instead of ironic social commentary.

In 1999, we did Into the Woods in much the same way, but going even further, this time setting a cross-aisle halfway through the audience, and again using all the aisles as paths in the woods, and now dressing up those poles as trees. Every time the cast would do the aphorisms, they'd all be walking briskly up and down the aisles, through the cross-aisle, behind the back row. It was completely stereophonic, and there was so much to look at.

As we did with Sweeney, we played big hunks of the show out in the house. One of my favorite moments evolved out of a problem. Our cast was slightly smaller than the original, and after Jack's Mother is conked on the head -- in the middle of our cross-aisle -- I needed the Steward to help carry her out of the way. But the Steward was holding the royal staff. So we decided he had to get rid of the staff somehow. Our solution was that he would slide it under the chairs in the front row, then whisper to whoever was on the end, "Say nothing or you're next!" The reactions were wonderful.

We don't usually do what you'd call "immersive" theatre, but every once in a while, there's a moment that comes close.

Another "close moment" was right before the finale of Assassins. This was our second production of the show, and we staged it in the round, each section of audience only four rows deep. It was So Intense. Byck threw his hamburger out "the window" over the heads of the audience. This was before the show had "Something Just Broke" added. So we finished the book depository scene, that amazing vocal counterpoint segues into the Copland-esque instrumental, and all the assassins went into the house, each addressing just a handful of people, each assassin privately telling that handful of people why he or she had to do it. The last to finish was always Guiteau, so as this weird, soft cacophony ended, we'd hear Guiteau hissing, "I did it for you! I did it for you!" And they all left the space as the music transitioned to "Everybody's Got the Right." It was one of the creepiest things we had ever done, and it really unnerved people.

With Floyd Collins, also in 1999, we kept the show onstage almost the whole time, with one exception when Floyd's down in the cave and he sings his cave calls. We placed the other actors all around the audience to sing Floyd's multiple echos. It was a really wonderful effect.

It's not really fair to say we rejected the Fourth Wall when we did Hair, since it never had a Fourth Wall to begin with. As I said to many people about Hair, it's not a show, not a performance, as much as just a happening, an experience. Every night before the show even started, our tribe was out in the house, greeting the audience and passing out daisies (as the original production had done). They spent a lot of time in the audience during the show, and at the end (again, like the original), they invited the audience onto the stage to dance. You'd be amazed how many people did. There was never a divide between actors and audience. The whole space was open to us. It was so freeing.

Then we moved into the ArtLoft Theatre in 2001. It was our first time in a blackbox, and it was like someone had just taught me to fly...

One of my favorite experiments was our 2001 production of the 1937 labor musical The Cradle Will Rock. Our production recreated the show's real opening night -- when the government had shut it down, the producers had found another theatre, and then the whole audience walked twenty-one blocks uptown to the other theatre. But the actors' union forbade them from appearing onstage, so much of the cast performed the show anyway, but from the audience. You can hear original producer John Houseman tell that amazing opening night story here.

My director's notes in our program for Cradle gave the audience its backstory, that they had just walked twenty-one blocks uptown, etc. Then Orson Welles greeted the audience and introduced me as composer Marc Blitzstein, to play his/my show from the stage. As it happened in 1937, just a few notes in, an actor stood up in the house and started singing, and soon the entire show was playing out in the audience. It was really thrilling theatre.

For both Bat Boy in 2003 and 2006, and Urinetown in 2007, we returned to the idea of playing lots of the show out in the house, in the aisles, between rows. You can watch our Urinetown Act I finale here, to see how much fun we had. I remember during that run, I watched most of the show from the booth upstairs, because it was a great view, but I always came downstairs into the back of the house for the Act I finale, because it was so wild, it just left you breathless.

Another interesting experiment was our Sunday in the Park with George in 2003. I had this idea to create something close to the two-dimensional world of the painting. So we built a stage eight feet wide by thirty-two feet long, down the middle of the theatre, with audience on both sides, facing each other. I almost gave up on the idea in blocking rehearsals -- it's incredibly hard to block on a stage like that -- but we figured it out. And the final effect was very cool.

In case you're wondering, the "painting" reversed between the Act I finale and the Act II opening, so both sides got a good look at the painting.

When we did Man of La Mancha in 2004 we built a small 16' x 16' stage in the middle of the space, and made it look as old and gross possible, and we made the entire theatre space (an old warehouse, which was perfect) into our dungeon, with the audience on all four sides. During the show, the entire cast sat around the stage watching when they weren't in the story. And because the front row of audience was only a couple feet behind the "prisoners," it pulled the audience into the action really powerfully, bringing them into the dungeon with us. It also made the rape scene very hard to watch. The one time the ensemble disappeared (gradually slipping underneath the stage) was for "The Quest," so Quixote could really be alone in the courtyard.

Our Robber Bridegroom and The Fantasticks, both in 2005, followed in our experiments with Bat Boy and Urinetown, playing all over the theatre throughout the whole show. It was fun thinking about the implications of playing out in the audience so much. Different people sitting in different places see different shows. We decided to embrace that and added lots of little details that only a handful of people could see or hear, depending on where they're sitting -- and that prompted a lot of repeat customers.

We left the ArtLoft in 2007, after Urinetown. For seven years we were at the Washington University South Campus Theatre, which was very nice, but after seven years in a blackbox, it felt a bit constraining sometimes. Now we're back in a blackbox at the Marcelle, and we've having lots of fun with it.

It's been so much fun and so educational having this wonderful laboratory -- our company -- in which to experiment with our art form, particularly now in this new Golden Age, when the material is so often extraordinary. So far, we've tried four different configurations in our first two seasons at the Marcelle.  My favorite so far was Atomic, with the playing space down the middle, and audience on both sides, watching this show about America's creation of the Bomb, with other Americans as a backdrop. Pretty cool.

Our next show, Lizzie, is another piece that fucks with the Fourth Wall. The actors won't leave the stage, but the show is a kind of hybrid of rock concert and rock opera, and much of it works best full front, directly singing to the audience. But there are also dramatic scenes, in which there's a vague sense of a fragile Fourth Wall. The toggle between the two is really interesting, and it makes for some intense storytelling!

New Line is not an "experimental" company. We're not "avant garde." The label I use is "alternative musical theatre," in other words, not mainstream, but not way outside, just different, alternative. But we have experimented a lot over our past twenty-six seasons, and I'm sure there will be plenty more cool experiments to come.

Stay tuned. And don't miss Lizzie!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott