I lied. It's not a new musical. It's the now "classic" musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors. When it debuted off-Broadway (I saw that original production!), it was really Fringe-y, and yet today most people would consider it a mainstream musical. It's because the art form has changed so profoundly since 1982. In fact, Little Shop is not a musical comedy; it's a neo musical comedy, a 21st-century evolution of the old-school musical comedy (yes, admittedly, a tad early to the 21st-century party, but still).
The story of Little Shop isn't just serious, it's fucking intense! All the wacky comedy comes from the show's ridiculous "given circumstances" -- a universe in which there's a man-eating, talking, blues-singing, bass-voiced, diabolical, alien plant bent on world domination -- or more precisely, because of the juxtaposition of the wacky circumstances against the characters' incredibly serious emotions and actions.
I'll do another one. A family moves to a small rural town that's failing because the mines have closed. Despite retraining programs, the former miners are facing bankruptcy and foreclosure. When the family adopts a troubled young man, terrible secrets and wounds from the past are brought back, the town turns against them, and the family shatters.
I almost forgot, the troubled young man is half-bat. Yep, that's the plot of the hilariously brilliant Bat Boy.
At this point, you know the game. What have I left out? They're all yeasts.
We've blocked about two-thirds of Act I of Yeast Nation, and at each step of my work on this show, I understand it a little differently. Having lived with the show for a while, listened while the actors learned the score, and now staging the show, I realize how deadly serious the actual plot of our story is. All that is crazy and ridiculous and hilarious comes from the given circumstances, in this case, that all our characters are single-celled yeasts living on the ocean floor three billion years ago, give or take.
We got to the word yeasticide in the script last night. That always makes me giggle.
Again, the plot isn't just serious; its Fucking Serious. And if there's any doubt, in the second scene of the show, the king has the father of the prince's girlfriend put to death for breaking one of the "strictures." Of course, his death scene, in which his "jellies spill out," is totally silly, but also kind of disturbing. That's the point.
But also, the given circumstances here aren't just funny, they're INSANE. Did I mention that our actors are playing yeasts? When Kotis and Hollmann wrote Urinetown, their characters were ridiculously clueless and ridiculously oppressed, but here they're yeasts!
Their tale turns it up to eleven on both the Sophoclean weightiness of the story and the wacky insanity of the given circumstances. And throughout the show, they often straddle both worlds in the soaring yeast power ballads, expressing really big, really profound emotions -- in yeasts.
Most American musicals assume a common cultural language with their audiences, and historical musicals often assume audiences have some knowledge coming into the show. But Yeast Nation comically explodes that idea too, because here that common cultural language the show assumes is that we all know that we evolved beyond single-celled creatures.
And that's really funny to me. And weirdly subtle. That kind of writing is a joy to work on. It's also hard to get right. But we New Liners, more than most, I think, really understand that narrative and stylistic tightrope.
Thinking back over our history, so many of our shows have been similar -- very serious on the surface, very honest in the emotions, but with sky-high stakes and a greatly heightened, even ridiculous style (which is not the same thing as over-acting). Here's what I wrote about this tightrope in my chapter about Bat Boy in my last book, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals:
Director and co-author Keythe Farley developed what co-author Brian Flemming likes to call the “take-it-so-seriously-it's-funny-but-it-also-hurts” style of Bat Boy. Both Deven May (as Edgar) and Kaitlin Hopkins (as Meredith) were in this first production and, together with Farley, they found the extremely sincere approach that this outrageous musical demands. Farley’s mantra throughout the development process was “the height of expression, the depth of sincerity,” a style of truthful acting that marked all the work at the Actors’ Gang – something the cast took to heart and something which guided them throughout the L.A. and New York productions. Flemming says of his partner, “Keythe's major contribution to Bat Boy has gone largely unmentioned, but it was great and permanent.” Unlike musicals in which the goal is to be as silly as possible (The Producers, Spamalot, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), with Bat Boy, the goal is to be as serious as possible within the context of an utterly silly universe.
“The height of expression, the depth of sincerity.” That's our mantra.
Shows we've produced that operate in this way (despite other differences among them) include The Rocky Horror Show, Bat Boy, Reefer Madness, Urinetown, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Spelling Bee, Cry-Baby, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bukowsical, and Yeast Nation. Interestingly, since I've been working on The Zombies of Penzance, I've realized that the Gilbert & Sullivan shows operated in very much the same way, though much more "controlled" than the awesome craziness of our 21st-century musicals.
I was happy to see how quickly our Yeast Nation actors got comfortable with the style and the tone of the show. We have quite a few new folks in this production, but everybody seems to get it. I think it's because the writing tells us everything we need to know. With Urinetown, the style and tone aren't as obvious on the page, and I'm glad I saw the original production before I directed it. But with Yeast Nation, they tell us what we need to know.
The dialogue is a heady mix of formalized, out-of-time, vaguely Greek-tragedy language, constantly alternating with utterly ordinary, contemporary slang, all of it peppered with invented language for this universe that sounds an awful lot like Dr. Seuss if Dr. Seuss smoked weed. It gives the whole story a weird but real dramatic weight (which the music helps a lot with as well), along with a funny but genuine humanity. And that reminds us, over and over, that this story isn't really about yeasts (since, as far as we know, they do not have religion or royal succession), but really about us.
Kotis' initial question that sparked this whole wacky enterprise -- How far back can stories go? What would be the very first story? -- also serves as a subliminal theme of our story: that all stories are about us. That's the point of human storytelling, after all. We tell stories to understand ourselves and the world around us. And maybe Kotis was also asking, mischievously, maybe subconsciously, how far away from humanity can a narrative get and still connect to an audience on a human level?
Fuck Cats! We're playing Yeasts!
Yet another New Line show that is sui generis. The more I think about the musicals we produce, the more I love that Latin phrase. "Constituting a class alone." Yep.
The adventure continues.
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
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