Hail, Zombies!

Hail, zombies, thou heav’n-made dead,

Forsaken by the God we dread;

Great metaphor for all we fear!

All hail the end of all that we hold dear!

It was back in 2013, after watching the movie Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (coincidentally starring BBAJ's Benjamin Walker). It was just a few hours after watching the movie that I started thinking about what kind of similar mashup I might concoct in the realm of musical theatre. I've always been fascinated by the idea of art made from other art. Maybe that's because so many musicals are based on stories in other forms, plays, novels, movies. Also, I had been wanting to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but hadn't gotten around to it yet.

But if I wanted to adapt an existing piece, I realized I needed to find a work in the public domain. I couldn't fuck around with Carousel or Damn Yankees. And then it hit me -- one of my favorite shows ever, the very first show I ever saw on Broadway, The Pirates of Penzance. It first debuted in 1879 and it is in the public domain.

So I would write The ZOMBIES of Penzance. And yes, I was mega-stoned at the time.

I already knew the show by heart, backwards and forwards. And the plot wouldn't have to change much at all. Major-General Stanley still wouldn't want the title characters to marry his daughters, though for slightly different reasons. I went through the plot in my head, figuring how each plot point would translate. It seemed pretty straight-forward.

In fact, that was the key for me. I realized it would be more an act of translation than a rewrite. How do we tell this same story, but in the language of zombie movies? As I've said in other posts, the real appeal for me was the delicious mismatch of form and content, an aggressive, comic rejection of Sondheim's Law, that Content Dictates Form (much like another New Line show, Bukowsical).

I started with a test for myself. I decided I would first work on the new zombie lyric for "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General." If I could do that well, I knew I could do the whole show. I started that same night. It took me three days to finish it. I've changed only a handful of words since then.

So I set to work. I don't think I could have done it with a show I knew less well. It took me four years, though there were periods when I had to put it aside for a while. I finished it in summer 2017, and passed it off to my buddy John Gerdes, who had agreed to arrange the score and orchestrate it. He finished our piano score in November, we went into rehearsal, and we presented a public reading in January.

And the response was wonderful. Even with no set, costumes, makeup, or band, our overflow crowd totally loved it. They caught all the jokes, they followed the plot, and it was confirmed that you didn't need to know The Pirates of Penzance in order to enjoy The Zombies of Penzance, but knowing the original does offer extra laughs here and there.

The response from the talkback after the reading was so helpful. I took a few months, did some rewrites, added a song and a half, and reconstructed the last part of the plot. Then I gave it back to John, who had already finished most of the orchestrations. In August, we went back into rehearsal for this first full production of The Zombies of Penzance, or At Night Come the Flesh Eaters, Gilbert & Sullivan's long-lost treasure.

As I mentioned in my last post, in translating the central conflict to one about Monsters instead of Bad Guys, it also shifted the show's thematic content. The Pirates of Penzance is about the absurdity of social class, but The Zombies of Penzance is about the "Othering" and demonizing of those who aren't like us, usually by those who claim the highest morality. Of course, as befits Gilbert & Sullivan, the conflict is raised to ridiculous proportions in this case, since the Others are actually zombies.

Zombies that sing really well.

And partly because I cut the Policemen, this rewrite has also empowered the Stanley Daughters, much more than most (any?) of Gilbert's other women characters.

I know some hardcore Gilbert & Sullivan fans will be terribly offended at what I've wrought. But that's part of the point, part of the central meta joke, that I've chosen the single most inappropriate storytelling form to tell a zombie apocalypse story -- polite English light opera -- and the larger meta joke, that Zombies actually is Gilbert's first draft, rejected by his producer Richard D'Oyly-Carte.

There is a long and interesting tradition of art made from other art, including, but not limited to, half or more of the great American musicals, most of Shakespeare's plays, and one of the greatest short films I've ever seen, Todd Haynes' brilliant Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Of the nine other musicals I've written, two were based on true stories, but the rest were all original stories. So this has been a fascinating experiment for me, and it has been really wonderful living in the language of Gilbert all this time, writing in his peculiar voice, both in the hilariously overwritten dialogue and the heavily rhymed lyrics. I kept every rhyme scheme!

The best part of all this is seeing it onstage and getting to share it with our audience. People seem to be really excited about it. There will be some hardcore G&S fans who will be horrified by this, but that's really kind of the point of it all...

I'm so grateful to this superb cast, who not only sing Sullivan's glorious music like they're a cast of forty, but they also nail the wacky, silly, ridiculous, but always straight-faced Gilbertian humor. I often say that I can't make musicals without lots of other talented people, but this time I needed lots of very talented people. And we got them. And my co-director Mike Dowdy-Windsor added so much, as he always does, including the most obvious, most perfect final moment -- which hadn't even occurred to me till he said it...

I cannot wait to share this with our audience now. I'm really happy with how it has all turned out, and I'll dare to say that I think Gilbert would enjoy my adaptation, after getting over his outrage that I've rewritten his show, of course...

Come join the crazy fun. When will you ever again get the chance to see a zombie operetta...?

We preview tonight and open tomorrow!  Get your tickets now!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

We'll Hunt the Dead and Mount Their Head

Now that we're running all of The Zombies of Penzance at each rehearsal, it's easier to assess my writing, and I'm pretty happy with it. The public reading we did in January was enormously helpful, and I did tons of small rewrites, and several big rewrites, after that, including 1 1/2 new songs. Watching it now, I think those changes were all good ones.

It's still weird for me because Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance has been a part of me since I saw it on Broadway in 1981, and I've known the show, and the Kevin Kline cast album, by heart ever since. So even though I wrote all these new lyrics, I still hear the originals in my head.

It's fascinating to see the results of my transforming (translating?) of these Penzantian Pirates into Zombies. On the one hand, the essential plot outline changed very little, and the core motivations of the characters changed very little.

But changing mediocre criminals into actual monsters did change some things. As comically high as the stakes are in Pirates, they're considerably higher in Zombies. Sure it's terrible to be kidnapped and married against your will (what is it with musicals and forcible marriage?), but it's much worse to walk the earth as the living dead for the rest of eternity. The horror elements of our story have changed, even super-charged, Gilbert's satire. But also, the Gilbert & Sullivan storytelling form has changed the horror elements.

Unlike a horror movie, our show is populated by funny, clumsy, vaguely charming, and seriously gullible zombies, who are hard to find terrifying when they're singing intricate, Victorian-era, operetta lyrics. And so we get to like these goofy zombies, even root for them (and pity them) a little.

And then Act II opens, and we discover that the proper young Victorian ladies we met in Act I have all been trained as zombie hunters! They sing a creepy lullaby to their troubled father:

Oh, taste the glistening blood,
The giver of life and breath;
Your loving children ache
To hasten the undead death.
You trained us from the cradle,
We must kill again the dead.
We’ll hunt the dead and mount their head,
As Father has said.

The next time we see them, they're all decked out as hunters. We realize we formed opinions about them in Act I -- because of the G&S form, the period costumes, etc. -- and we accepted the convention that women are weak, that they are to be victimized and then rescued. But now they have weapons and they're singing about "a headless zombie running 'round the garden." We realize these women are more complicated than most G&S women; partly because they live in two competing story forms, but also because they live in two competing worlds, 1879 polite society vs. the dangerous, physical, visceral world of zombie hunting. These women have found a way to synthesize those two parts of themselves. Both personas are part of them.

Although, does any of that actually matter in a zombie apocalypse? You'll have to see the show to find out.

Gilbert loved plot twists. He loved subverting his audience's expectations. He also loved toying with his audience's allegiances over the course of the story. In The Zombies of Penzance, this transformation of the Stanley Daughters into zombie hunters, after we've come to like these zombies (we spend a fair amount of time with the zombies before we even meet the daughters), leaves us torn when the conflict comes to a head. Do we really want the zombies to be killed (again)...?

In The Pirates of Penzance, when the story reaches its climax, Frederic's nursemaid Ruth shows up with some important information, which resolves everything quite tidily. I hope Zombies will be lots of fun for people who know Pirates really well, because we will subvert their expectations around every turn as well. There is no Ruth in our version. So when that big moment comes in our version, the hardcore Pirates lovers will have no idea what happens next! I love that.

When I first thought about writing The Zombies of Penzance, I knew I had to make several important decisions. The center of the plot would remain unchanged -- Major-General Stanley doesn't want the title characters to marry his large family. I tested myself by writing the Major-General's big patter song first. The title ended up being, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern-Era Zombie Hunter," which forced me to make the character a retired zombie hunter. But he needed to be older and retired because that character is really passive throughout the whole story; and that also let the daughters become the heroes. I figured out how to resolve the central conflict ultimately, in a parallel but different way from the original. The new resolution is only barely logical and supremely silly, and I think Gilbert would approve.

All these decisions made me realize I no longer needed Ruth. Revealed information can no longer save the day at the end of our story. This is a zombie apocalypse. I spent a long time wondering if I needed the Policemen and I realized it would be much cooler to turn the Stanley Daughters into zombie hunters, and give them all the Policemen's songs. I was worried it would throw the show out of balance, but it doesn't.

In its original form, as The Pirates of Penzance, the story is a satire about the absurdity of class. The big deus ex machine at the end of the show is Ruth revealing that the pirates are all actually "noblemen who have gone wrong." Since they're of the correct class after all, they can marry the daughters.

But The Zombies of Penzance is a satire about Othering, the practice of dehumanizing those not like us, so that it's easier to hate and/or oppress them. (Some might call that America's Pastime.) It's why soldiers usually have derogatory nicknames for the enemy -- it makes them less human and easier to kill without remorse. Today in America, we see on the political right the Othering of Mexicans, Muslims, Gays, the press, and more. As long as people are "illegals" (they're not even worth a noun), it's easier not to be humane to them, not to think of them as families, not to see them the same as the Italian and Irish immigrants a century before. And frequently that Othering is done by those who profess most loudly their Christianity.

In The Zombies of Penzance, the Major-General and his daughters profess loudly and often their Christian beliefs. But in the song "We're Christian Girls on a Christian Outing," they also give us a few hints that their Bible-based morality might be flimsier than they would admit. In fact, several of the things they predict (or warn about) in this song will come to pass by the Act II finale. The contrast among their devotion to the Bible, their burgeoning though still sublimated sex drives, and their ferocious hatred for zombies makes a fun parallel to today's fundamentalist Christians, and their demonizing of gays, atheists, feminists, etc.

It's been cool working on this, taking this piece I love deeply, and making a new piece of art out of it. I often thought of the process as "translating" the story from one form into another. I often thought of a professor friend in college, Norman Shapiro, who translates Feydeau farces (among other things), and the conversations we had about the process -- and art -- of translation. I'm seriously thinking about trying another "new" Gilbert & Sullivan show, but next time, not just a variation on the original plot, but a completely different story. That will be harder to write, but should also be fun.

We open next week! Get your tickets now!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The New Regional Arts Commission

To our great surprise and horror, after 27 years of funding New Line Theatre, the Regional Arts Commission (RAC) decided not to fund us this season. We were truly baffled by the decision -- we get rave reviews for every show we produce, we have a national profile for both excellence and risk-taking, and Broadway writers periodically come see our productions of their shows, particularly when those shows were destroyed on Broadway, but brought back to life by New Line.

One article about RAC's new direction said, "Among the plan’s recommendations is that arts groups work with local organizations to help solve community problems. Arts groups can play a role with efforts to build affordable housing, improve public safety and other civic initiatives, RAC executive director Felicia Shaw said."

I think this is seriously misguided. You don't drive a nail with a pair of scissors. Same principle here.

Theatre and other art forms often address social and political issues (at New Line, almost always), but it is not the job of an arts organization to build housing or make neighborhoods safe. We are storytellers, not the police and not construction workers. We make our communities better places already by telling important, relevant stories that make people think. Does she not understand that?

Felicia is essentially telling us, though she may not realize it, that if we want to be funded by RAC again, we have to change the nature of what we do, change our mission statement (which does not currently mention affordable housing or neighborhood safety), etc.

In another interview, she said, "The focus of the report is how can the arts play a larger role in making St. Louis a better place to live."

The arts already do that in spades. In every city that creates an arts district, neighborhoods around that district thrive, because the arts automatically make an area a better place to live.

One person commented about all this in a St. Louis Theatre group on Facebook, "I believe though that sometimes we have to go beyond our comfort zone for what the community needs. I think that’s what RAC is trying to accomplish."

But it's not about comfort zones; it's about mission statement. People don't donate money to New Line to build affordable housing; they donate to us to tell them interesting, thought-provoking stories that intersect/interact with the issues surrounding us in the real world.

There's also something much more, much bigger going on here. Felicia's comments reveal something far more concerning, an underlying assumption that the arts are not "enough," that creating art and sharing it with the community, the entire point of a nonprofit arts organization, isn't sufficiently valuable in her eyes; that feeding the soul and the brain and the heart are less worthy endeavors than feeding the stomach.

All this despite the fact that storytelling is one of the most basic, most necessary of human functions. It's how we learn, how we connect, how we cooperate, how we govern, how we record our history and our culture, how we work through problems, how we grow collectively and individually. Storytelling is one of the most basic of human needs, going back to the first pictographs on cave walls.

To disrespect that long, proud, noble history, by telling us we only have value when that storytelling is augmented with "real world" service, is truly disappointing. Felicia obviously doesn't understand that, as important as building houses will always be, just as important is building empathy and understanding and connection, through the very real magic of storytelling. We shouldn't have to help build housing to prove our worth.

Let's look at the IRS and nonprofit status...

1894 – The Tariff Act of 1894 provided the first statutory Federal income tax exemption for charitable organizations: “nothing herein contained shall apply to … corporations, companies, or associations organized and conducted solely for charitable, religious, or educational purposes.”

1909 – The Payne Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 exempted from a general corporate excise tax “any corporation or association organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, or educational purposes, no part of the net income of which inures to the benefit of any private stockholder or individual.”

But what counts as educational...?

1973 – Revised Ruling 73-45, 1973-1 C.B. 220, holds that an organization formed to develop a community appreciation for drama and musical arts by sponsoring professional presentations such as plays, musicals and concerts qualified for exemption under IRC 501(c)(3).

In other words, the arts are inherently educational. They teach us about life, about our world, about each other, and about ourselves. Even without the express "educational programs" that funders love, the arts are inherently educational. They don't need to add activities in order to serve their communities.

One of Felicia's other focuses is talking about how the arts generate economic activity. That's great, but it also buys into the notion that what we do is not sufficiently worthwhile. We also have to prove that we generate money. Again, how terribly misguided. By accepting that premise, she normalizes the idea that we should measure the arts in dollars.

We shouldn't.

The title of her new plan is chilling:

Arts &

A Creative Vision for St. Louis

The title tells us all we need to know -- that the arts by themselves aren't enough. We have to create "art and..." Also, I love that the "creative vision" is that the creative arts aren't worthy unless they're combined with something else. I love irony.

On the first page of the Plan, it says, "That’s why we are pursuing a cultural vision to benefit and elevate not only the arts and culture in St. Louis but also to benefit and elevate St. Louis." So the art will be elevated by having to take on non-arts projects...?

The Plan summary also says, "But if all people in St. Louis have access to create and engage in the arts, and if the arts are understood and assumed to be for all, not just for some, then the arts can be not only an equalizer but also a ladder to opportunity, a job creator, a bridge between communities, an educational asset, a source of civic pride, an attractor of visitors, a draw for transplants, and a true economic engine."

The arts are already all those things in St. Louis, and have been for quite some time. 

One "Community Leader" is quoted in the report, saying "What is new [in St. Louis] is that if you want to be the creator -- a program, an event -- people aren’t asking for permission as much, they are just making it happen."

That's not new. That's been happening in St. Louis for decades. Anybody remember Theatre Project Company at New City School, the very "alternative" work at the St. Marcus Theatre and the ArtLoft Theatre, City Players at the shut-down Coronado Hotel, the Black Rep at the 23rd Street Theatre...?

Nobody asked permission to start New Line 28 years ago.

At one point, the report says, "Many artists said that they see and experience the same disparities of race, gender, and ability that are pervasive in society in both the nonprofit and commercial arts sectors. Barriers raised by racism and segregation add to the challenges they already face as working artists, further hindering their careers."

That is a real problem. But it's worth noting that New Line regularly has some of the most diverse casts on St. Louis stages, and that's been true for a decade or more. It's extremely rare for a New Line show to have an all-white cast.

But New Line got zero-funded by RAC.

Felicia wants arts organizations to tackle important issues. New Line has been doing that for 28 years. Felicia wants young people and people of color to have the chance to shine. New Line has been doing that for decades. In our last show the actors playing our "royal family" were white, black, and Asian. Felicia wants local ogrniazations to hire local artists. New Line has hired only local artists for 28 years.

But New Line got zero-funded by RAC.

The report says, "The arts are already working at the intersection of health, community and economic development, transportation, tourism, faith, education, and other sectors. But what we heard from participants is that they want to see even more connections between the arts and other nonprofit and social sectors, because they see this as a key way that the arts can help advance positive social change."

You know how the arts can best help advance positive social change, RAC? Changing the way people think, through the most powerful persuader known to humans -- storytelling.

Take for example, the very silly Zombies of Penzance, which we're about to open. I'm sure Felicia would not find our production particularly worthwhile in terms of social service. But if you look closely, Zombies is not just a silly romp; like all of Gilbert & Sullivan's shows, it's a satire. In its original form, as The Pirates of Penzance, it was about the absurdity of class distinctions. Now as The Zombies of Penzance, it's about the "Othering" of people not like us, the way we become "Us" and "Them," the way we see the Scary Other (Mexicans, Muslims, Gays, Transgender Americans, etc.) as less than human, so we can hate and even oppress them without any guilt.

We are in a particularly dangerous time of "Othering" right now, and this story will be particularly potent right now. But it won't help with affordable housing.

In the conclusion of the report, it says, "This process made clear that the time is right for RAC to expand its capacities beyond its role as grantmaker and consider ways to fulfill a bolder mission." RAC has always been much more than just a grantmaker. Under Jill McGuire's decades of leadership, RAC supported the arts community in so many ways, some of which Felicia has already ended.

Why do new people always feel the need to trash those who've gone before? Why did this report need to imply falsely -- and classlessly -- that in the past RAC has done nothing more than disburse grants?

It seems likely that New Line will never again get RAC grants, but we will apply again next year. In the meantime, please support small arts organizations in our area, particularly those several dozen that got cut off by RAC this year.

We will keep soldiering on, and somehow we will make up for the $12,000 per year RAC took away from us. If you think New Line's work is already worthwhile, help us make up for the indignity of this loss by making a contribution to New Line whenever you can.

New Line will continue to tackle the issues of our world, through provocative, intense, and yes, sometimes silly, adult musical theatre. The incredible praise for our work over the years, the rave reviews, the contributions that increase every year, are all the proof we need that we're on the right track.

We open Zombies of Penzance next week! Ticket sales are great! Get your tickets now!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

We Triumph Now, God Only Knows How

We've blocked our zombies and zombie hunters, and we've run the two acts separately. Next week we move into the theatre, and start running the whole show. The vocal music is sounding amazing, in part because we're spending a lot more time than usual reviewing music in blocking rehearsals, which makes the actors so much more comfortable. We're now at that point now where they have to put down their scores, and that moment terrifies some of them.

The score is learned, the show has been staged, and now we put meat on the bones. I realized a number of years ago, that comic book art is a really good metaphor for our creation process. I think that's because comic book art and musical theatre are both (usually) very collaborative work, which ultimately needs to look like it came from one artist.

We block a show relatively fast, and we don't run scenes a lot until all the pieces are in place. I think about that part of our process as my pencil drawing. I define the work ahead and lay down the ground rules. Then together, the actors and I "ink in" my pencil drawing, we add clarity and depth and focus, and we make a lot of choices. Then I sort of stand back and let the actors "color" their performance.

I'm a director who doesn't want to give an actor too much direction up front. I once saw an interview with Hal Prince, where he said that the job of a director is to put everybody on the same road, make sure they all stay on that road and don't stray onto some other road, let them do the work, and then edit and polish that work to create a coherent whole. I love that idea. I firmly believe that our show will be better and richer if the actors actively collaborate with me, actively create our show as much (or more) than I do. It won't be nearly as cool if all the ideas come from me.

That's unnerving for some actors, who'd rather I ink and color their performances. But most actors love the freedom. Then again, freedom isn't free. With great power comes great responsibility. But The Zombies of Penzance is a crazy, meta, artistic tightrope, so that freedom is a little scarier than usual.

I've asked the actors, now that they're comfortable with the music, to really focus on the text, to read it out loud (a good idea with any lyric), to make sure they totally understand everything they're singing (that's not always easy with G&S, or G&S parodies), to think about all the lyrics like they're dialogue, to think about why they repeat things...

But also, we all have to keep in mind that Gilbert & Sullivan operettas are almost entirely about showing how ridiculous we all are (yes, even zombies), and part of that ridiculousness is how Very Seriously the characters take themselves and each other. It's always Very High Stakes, literally life or death -- or undeath -- in our story.

But also...

We always have to keep one eye on the central meta joke of the show -- that this is the most wrong-headed storytelling form possible for telling this particular story. To be honest, that was the biggest appeal of the project for me initially. So we have to underline and revel in that wrongness, in this wild mismatch between our story and our storytelling.

Remember, The Pirates of Penzance was already making fun of the conventions of opera, like almost all the G&S shows do. But with The Zombies of Penzance, we add another meta-layer to it. Here, we're telling a horror story in the language of English light opera. So inside the story, everything is terrifying and insane and literally life or death; but when the actors step outside of the story to directly tell the audience things (which happens a ton!), they're in a quirky, ever so polite English light opera. And yet they're still in character and period the whole time. The actors have to find that dual reality and realize that if they're comfortable with it, the audience will accept it.

I guess our meta-meta musical is closer to The Mystery of Edwin Drood than any other musical I can think of. It's interesting that both Zombies and Drood are American shows based on British sources and British theatre forms.

What makes Gilbert & Sullivan shows work is getting the audience to accept the barely logical reality of the story, to accept the story's usually ridiculous rules and conventions, to care about the characters, no matter how crazy they are. In fact, it's often the most ridiculous G&S characters that we bond with most. The way all that happens onstage is for the actors to live completely and honestly within that crazy reality, no matter how crazy it gets, no matter how tenuous its logic gets. It's just like doing Little Shop of Horrors or Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson -- the actors have to make peace with the odd, unconventional rules these shows invent for themselves, and then audiences will do the same.

Actors who don't do musicals often think musical theatre acting is somehow "lesser" -- less serious, less skillful, less honest -- than acting in non-musical plays. The opposite is true. The kind of acting most musicals require (particularly post-1964) is much more difficult, much more complex, and requires more and different training. That's why so many famous actors have sucked in musicals. Our actors in The Zombies of Penzance have a much harder job to do than people realize.

It is a truism of theatre (and I assume other forms) that audiences will follow strong, confident storytelling wherever it takes them. We New Liners have seen that proven over and over again throughout our history, with shows like The Wild Party, Love Kills, Forbidden Planet, Floyd Collins, Passing Strange, American Idiot, Bat Boy, Urinetown, Sweet Smell of Success. But audiences will not follow tentative or clueless storytelling; they will disconnect.

We now have two and half weeks to just run our show at every rehearsal, tweak it, polish it, but most of all, to let the actors collectively find that dual reality, the style and tone, and construct the magic "clockwork" that pulls everything together into a unified whole.

Our intrepid music director Nicolas Valdez and our truly brilliant cast have shaped such a gorgeous musical sound for our show. Now the actors have to put down their scores, so they can explore and invest in these wacky characters and this wild, barely logical story. The sooner they put down the music and the more time they give themselves to play in this world, the richer our show will be.

This is the part where I sit back and let the actors explore. It's the most exciting part.

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

A Zombie Hunter's Life's a Bloody Drag

In adapting The Pirates of Penzance into The Zombies of Penzance, part of the process was reverse engineering my crazy meta origin story. Our origin story says that Gilbert & Sullivan wrote The Zombies of Penzance first, but their producer Richard D'Oyly-Carte refused to produce it, so they rewrote it as the now famous Pirates of Penzance.

Just to be clear, that didn't actually happen.

So as I was figuring out how to translate the original story into a zombie story, I was also imagining Glibert's fictional rewrite process. In The Zombies of Penzance, General Stanley's daughters have been raised to be zombie hunters. But when Gilbert rewrote the show as The Pirates of Penzance (are you confused yet?), he couldn't find an equivalent for the daughters as zombie hunters, so he invented the bumbling police. In Zombies, the story begins with Frederic as a freshly made zombie. But since being a pirate isn't a blood disease, Gilbert had to find some other reason for Frederic to be trapped in his pirate family. So he created Ruth, the leap year device, etc. Gilbert even moved a song from Act II to Act I to introduce Ruth.

If you're keeping up... none of the above is really true.

But some of the changes I made as I rewrote the show had a cool, but unintended consequence. By cutting Ruth and the policeman, I made the roles of the Stanley Daughters much bigger and more important. And because of the way it all worked out, we ended up with a cool double-cross on the audience. It was an accident, but I think it will be very effective.

In Act I, the daughters are pretty much the same as they are in Pirates, very girly, very Damsels in Distress. As Act II opens, they seem the same outwardly, but they mention during "Dry the Glistening Tear" that they've been raised to be zombie hunters. And then the next time we meet them, mid-Act II, they're dressed as hunters; and ultimately, the daughters save the day. Almost.

Our audience will start will preconceptions about the daughters, based on knowledge of the period (1879) and/or knowledge of Pirates of Penzance, and Gilbert and Sullivan generally. We won't mess with those assumptions in Act I, but we will comically shatter the audience's preconceptions in Act II, by turning the Good Girls into ruthless zombie hunters who find the slaughter of zombies rather funny. At the same time, the daughters will transform, over intermission, from Gilbert and Sullivan characters into horror movie characters, in a long tradition of kickass female heroes who kill the monsters in horror movies.

And then there are even two more surprise reversals after that, which get our story to its eventual resolution...

I didn't set out to do all that. I just wanted to write a zombie version of my favorite operetta. The idea itself seemed funny, interesting, and wrong in all the right ways. It's the worst possible storytelling form with which to tell a horror story. But however it happened, this is where it took me, and it delights me. I imagine the surprises will be particularly fun for fans of Pirates, who'll be expecting the police to show up in Act II.

But all of that also presents challenges for the women in the show, to find an internal logic that includes both their period-appropriate behavior in Act I and their horror-movie-appropriate behavior in Act II. I think the answer is that these women are both these things. They've been raised by their father, and trained to be killers; and yet they also know there are rules about Polite Society and women's "role" in their culture.

But we get a hint that these are not the blushing flowers of Pirates of Penzance, in Act I when the women almost discuss some sex acts, before Frederic reveals himself and prevents their detour into improper topics. Though they strive to live proper outward lives (as detailed in "We're Christian Girls on a Christian Outing"), there are adventurers and cynics among these women. At the end of "Christian Girls," they sing:

All our lives our Bible has protected us;
For this moment Jesus has selected us
To be paragons of pure,
All of this week, to be sure!
To be paragons of pure,
But predictions would be premature!
Ev’ry moment brings temptation,
And despite our inclination,
Satan could just win and we could
Waltz with sin!

They'll do their best, they're telling us, but they're not promising anything. These aren't the women from Pirates, but we only get hints of that this early in the story. At the top of that same song, we realize how sexual they are, even though most of them don't realize it themselves. Their sexuality is still sublimated, metaphorical:

We’re Christian girls on a Christian outing,
No bad words and please, no shouting,
Far away from male temptation carnal;
Where our nethers never quiver,
By the ever-throbbing river,
Swollen where the summer rain
Comes gushing forth;
Gushing forth in spurts and sputters
Sloshing through the roads and gutters,
Pounding through the virgin hills below us.
Scaling rough and rugged passes,
Working out our shapely asses,
There are greater joys, we know, in purity!

In Act II, we'll find they're not only brave and battle-ready, but also smart and quick-thinking. In this version of the story, without the character of Ruth, it's the daughters who deliver the G&S deus ex machina at the end, to resolve our plot. Although, in true-G&S fashion, there's a second, horror movie deus ex machina right after that...

For people who know Pirates, there are lots of funny moments where the text is almost the same as the original, but just different enough to be funny in this new context. But more fun than that, even if you know Pirates well, you will not know where our story is headed until the very end...

We're still blocking the show, but I cannot wait to share this delicious lunacy with our audiences. We move into the theatre next week! The adventure continues!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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