To See the Face of God

Director Trevor Nunn said that Les Misérables is a show about God. And it is.

It's also a show about the nobility of the human spirit, faith, redemption, and other spiritual concepts. Religion and spirituality -- as well as the distortion of it and the lack of it -- informs most of the action of the show.

Jean Valjean sings in Act II, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” Valjean and Inspector Javert both believe fervently in God, but they believe in very different Gods. Javert believes in an angry, vengeful, Old Testament God, in the absolutes of right and wrong, good and evil. He believes that Valjean broke the law (which he did) and must be punished according to the law.

In “Stars” Javert sings:

And those who follow the path of the righteous
Shall have their reward.
And if they fall as Lucifer fell,
The flame, the sword!

And later in the song:

And so it has been,
And so it is written on the doorway to Paradise,
That those who falter and those who fall
Must pay the price.

Though he is a man obsessed, he believes in the law, both man's and God's. How many people today would accept that some criminals shouldn't have to be punished according to the law? We can look back now and say that the law of the time was too severe, but Javert has sworn to uphold the law, and how can we condemn him for that? Yes, Valjean was poor and starving; but is that justification for breaking into someone else's home and stealing their food, and then later, breaking parole (remember that Javert is pursuing Valjean not for the theft but for breaking his parole)?

Javert is trapped by the strictness of his own beliefs, so that when Valjean turns those beliefs upside-down by releasing him in Act II, Javert believes he has no alternative but to kill himself. He sings:

And must I now begin to doubt,
Who never doubted all these years?
My heart is stone and still it trembles.
The world I have known is lost in shadow.
Is he from heaven or from hell?
And does he know
That granting me my life today
This man has killed me even so.
. . .
There is nowhere I can turn.
There is no way to go on!

Javert's world, his convictions, the rules by which he's lived his entire life, are called into question, and because of the single-mindedness of his existence, he now has nothing left to live for. It's hard to say he was a bad man; after all, he was upholding not only the laws of man, but the laws of God as well.

For the most part, Javert is the villain of Les Misérables, but it's not that simple. His sin lies in his extremism.

He sees the world in black and white. He sees the divinity in the world and believes it is his duty to preserve it. In his song, “Stars,” he sees the night sky as a symbol of the immutability of the universe. The stars represent God and the natural order of things, “filling the darkness with order and light.” Valjean has violated Javert's view of what the world should be. There is no question that Valjean is guilty of the crime with which he was charged. Like his descendant, Detective Gerard in The Fugitive, Javert doesn't care whether or not the law is fair; it's the law.

In contrast to Javert, Jean Valjean believes in a benevolent, forgiving, New Testament God. He believes in redemption. When the bishop in the prologue not only lies to the police on his behalf, but also gives him the silver candlesticks, Valjean sees that he's being given a second chance, a chance to live life according to God's dictates (“My soul belongs to God, I know,” he sings later). He has broken the law, has repented, and has been forgiven (by God, anyway).

He has received redemption.

Valjean aspires to goodness and he achieves it; the audience identifies with his desire to be a good man and lead a good life -- and also with his past transgressions. He risks his life to find and protect Cosette. He actually offers up his own life to God in exchange for Marius, so that Marius and Cosette can be together.

English lyricist Herbert Kretzmer sees “Bring Him Home” as Valjean's final transformation from selfishness to genuine altruism. The song is literally a prayer, and perhaps more than any other moment in the show, invokes the spirituality that lies beneath the entire musical.

When Colm Wilkinson, the original Valjean, first sang the song in rehearsal, a hush fell over the company. Trevor Nunn said, “See? I told you this show was all about God.” And one of the company members said, “Yes, but you didn't tell us you'd engaged Him to sing it.”

In contrast to all that, Thénardier doesn't believe in God at all. He is completely amoral, living only by the rules of survival. He believes that it's every man for himself, and looking at his life it's no surprise that he feels that way. Again, it's hard to say he's a bad person; he lives outside the realm of right and wrong. Thénardier and My Fair Lady's Alfred P. Dolittle are cut from the same cloth, not immoral so much as amoral. In My Fair Lady, when Col. Pickering asks, “Have you no morals, man?”, Dolittle replies, “No, I can't afford 'em, Governor.”

We impose our middle class morality on Thénardier without a practical consideration of the difficulty of his day-to-day survival. He sums up his life in “Dog Eats Dog.” When Thénardier sees the chaos, the injustice that runs rampant through the streets he can come to only one conclusion:

And God in his heaven,
He don't interfere,
'Cos he's dead as the stiffs at my feet.

If there was a God, Thénardier reasons, He would not allow a world as black and unforgiving as this one. The Thénardiers steal not only from the rich, but from the poor as well. It is truly a dog-eat-dog world.

So many morally ambiguous situations are scattered throughout the show -- Fantine turning to prostitution in order to make enough money to support Cosette, the Thénardiers taking more of Fantine's money than they need to keep Cosette, the Thénardiers' looting of the dead bodies after the insurrection, even arguably the insurrection itself. So many of these situations have no clear right or wrong, and perhaps the message of Les Misérables is that people are basically good, that they do what they have to do to survive, that ultimately good always triumphs, and that we are judged not by each other, but by God.

Though Sweeney Todd might disagree...

And really, is that what Les Miz tells us...? Considering the fates of the lead characters, maybe the Big Takeaway here is that the Thénardiers' way is best, not to be constrained to the morality of other people half a world and two thousand years away, not to be tied to ancient mythologies that often have very little relevance to the everyday struggles of real people.

The Thénardiers share a lot with Captain Macheath in Threepenny, when he sings:

What keeps a man alive? He lives on others;
He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole, if he can;
Forgets that they’re supposed to be his brothers,
That he himself was ever called a man...

That's some dark shit, but that's what Les Miz is really about -- the darkness of human existence and how we as humans respond to it. Both Valjean and Javert respond with dogma, while the poor respond by accepting (embracing?) that darkness. Maybe what we're supposed to take away from this story is that all human paths and choices are difficult, but the best we can do is shine some light on the darkness. And that's what Valjean does -- he responds to acts of darkness with acts of light.

A lesson we need today in 2018 more than ever before. There is great darkness in the land, and the only way to kill it is with light.

I'll leave you with a quote from Next to Normal:

We need some light.
First of all, we need some light.
You can't sit here in the dark.
And all alone, it's a sorry sight.
It's just you and me.
We'll live, you'll see.

Night after night,
We'd sit and wait for the morning light.
But we've waited far too long,
For all that's wrong to be made right.
...

And when the night has finally gone.
And when we see the new day dawn.
We'll wonder how we wandered for so long, so blind.
The wasted world we thought we knew,
The light will make it look brand new.
So let it shine.

Day after day,
We'll find the will to find our way,
Knowing that the darkest skies
Will someday see the sun.
When our long night is done,
There will be light.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

No, No, Nanette!

There's a lot more going on in No, No, Nanette! than most people realize.

This first of the genuine classics of musical comedy appeared on Broadway in 1925, with a book by Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel (based on Mandel’s play His Lady Friends), music by Vincent Youmans (then only twenty-six), and lyrics by Irving Caesar (then only twenty-nine) and Harbach. Youmans was hired as the composer only because his mother made a sizeable investment in the show and demanded producer Harry Frazee hire her son, but he proved himself an outstanding composer. Youmans enjoyed the kind of harmonic sophistication and experimentation that only George Gershwin equaled at the time, along with a genuine gift for melody.

Built on an old-fashioned, three-act, one-set-per-act structure, the story focused on three couples Jimmy and Sue Smith, Billy and Lucille Early, and the young lovers Tom and Nanette. Because Sue is so tight with the millions Jimmy has made selling Bibles, Jimmy “adopts” three pretty young women and finances their various enterprises. Jimmy, his lawyer Billy, and his niece Nanette all go to Atlantic City to meet the three girls who are now threatening to blackmail Jimmy. Lucille catches Billy with the girls, Tom and the rebellious, looking-to-raise-some-hell Nanette fight, everyone gets confused, and it looks like no one will get a happy ending. But sure enough, everything gets explained and after some hits songs like “Tea for Two” and “I Want to Be Happy,” all is forgiven. (In fact, the majority of Nanette’s score become pop hits.)

This was the music of the jazz age, not of Europe, not of ten years before, but of that very moment in America, music audiences could sing or dance to after the show. This story was about American now. The Act I finale was the kind of extended musical scene that would become commonplace later in the century in shows like Carousel, Into the Woods, and others, but here it was in 1925. Every moment and every song supported the plot and relationships and unlike many shows that had come before it, Nanette had something to say.

The show was about money and American greed.

Nearly every character in the show had some interesting and/or fucked-up relationship to money. Jimmy was a near-millionaire who loved giving people money just to make them happy, and the three gold-diggers girls were there just to con him into giving them generous handouts. Jimmy’s wife Sue was thrifty and hated the idea of spending money foolishly. Sue’s best friend Lucille was a compulsive shopper, buying things just for the sake of buying them, and to keep her husband on a leash by making him work like crazy to pay her bills. Nanette feels imprisoned because she has no money of her own and thus, no independence. The maid Pauline even had a song early in the show to set up this theme, “Pay Day Pauline” (cut from the revival).

Money, Nanette was telling us, is a weapon, a source of power, a prison, and a sure road to victimization. Most interestingly, Jimmy has made his fortune as a Bible publisher, a subtle reminder of the Bible’s admonition that the love of money is the root of all evil. America in 1925 and its rampant consumerism was right there on stage to be laughed at, sure, but also to be slyly and accurately commented upon.

But interestingly, this hit show didn’t start on Broadway.

It first opened in Detroit in April 1924, then went on to Chicago in May 1924 for a six month run, where it underwent repeated emergency surgery. (Only after its run in Detroit did its songwriting team write the show’s two biggest hits, “Tea for Two” and “I Want to Be Happy.”) Each time the show was changed, the critics were invited back, and each time they liked it a bit more. Still, by the end of the Chicago run, producer H. H. Frazee had lost about $75,000.

A second Nanette company was sent to Philadelphia and the eastern seaboard. Another company was sent west. The rights to a London production were sold while it toured and so it opened in London in March 1925, a full six months before its Broadway debut. In fact, it ran longer in London than on Broadway – 665 performances in London, and only 321 performances on Broadway. In April 1926, the show opened in France, with much more spectacle and much more dance. Then the London production toured to Berlin (1926), Vienna (1927), and Budapest (1928). Also in 1927, a few of the same folks put together a completely unrelated sequel called Yes, Yes, Yvette, which ran forty performances (apparently forty more than it deserved).

Obviously something in Nanette's subtle but scathing satire connected with audiences, not just in New York, but across the country and around the world.

Nanette was assaulted... oops, I mean revived in 1971, the script ransacked, songs cut, the score fiddled with and clumsily over-orchestrated, the whole thing overproduced and gaudy, but it still ran 861 performances, eclipsing the original production. Sadly, the very funny opening number “Flappers Are We” was cut, along with both songs sung by the wise-cracking maid, Pauline, and much of the satire about Americans’ obsession with money.

Nanette had been neutered and it became harmlessly cute nostalgia rather than hilariously sly social commentary. They took what had been an intelligent, well-crafted musical comedy and dumbed it down into what people in the 1970s only thought musicals of the 1920s were like, in the process losing all that was special about the original.

The revival's producer Cyma Rubin (nicknamed "the Black Witch" by the Nanette company) had hired the retired Busby Berkeley to both direct and choreograph the show (figuring she could save a salary that way) but he just wasn’t up to it. So he became a "consultant" and Burt Shevelove took over as director. Before long, Shevelove was also writing an entirely new script. Everyone had agreed that the original script just would not do, but Charlie Gaynor, who had been first hired to write the new script, loved the original too much. He barely changed it, infuriating Rubin. So Shevelove now found himself writing a new script at night while he rehearsed the cast during the day, sometimes canceling rehearsals because there literally was no script to rehearse. He began by paring down the original script to its essentials – but that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. And there were more problems. Donald Saddler was called in to choreograph this tap dancing show, but he couldn’t tap dance. Raoul Pene du Bois was designing costumes but didn’t have a script yet. Buster Davis was creating new orchestrations but wasn’t sure which songs would be in the new script.

Shevelove explained his intentions to the cast this way: “The world today is not a pretty place. It is filled with terrible news every day of Vietnam, campus riots, pollution, crime, inflation. The audiences that will come to see our show will have heard enough – much too much – about all those things. We must take their minds off these problems and make them concerned only with this: Will Nanette, this innocent little child get her wish and spend a weekend in Atlantic City? Nothing else, nothing else at all, is important. This warm, sunny, lovely little show must be our valentine to the audience.”

But he didn't understand the show he was rewriting. The original Nanette had dealt with more; Nanette and Tom had only been a frame upon which to hang some very insightful satire and social commentary. And Shevelove had also bought into the terrible myth that audiences want escape. They don't. They want connection. That's very different.

Also, Nanette was not "this innocent little child," but a young woman who wanted some independence for herself, at a time when many women were craving that -- both in 1925 and in 1971!

The revival finally opened, after a very bumpy ride, in January 1971. (Don Dunn’s tell-all book The Making of No, No, Nanette, now out of print, told the whole sordid tale.) Critic Martin Gottfried wrote in Women’s Wear Daily, “Somewhere along the way, Burt Shevelove decided to make this show ‘nice’ and instead of the potentially brilliant, he settled for the vacantly agreeable.” John Simon called the show “mendacious and stupid beyond the rights of any show, however escapist, to be in this day and age.”

Musical theatre had changed; ironically, the real Nanette probably would have been better received in 1971. As other shoddily revised revivals – soon to be called "revisals" – like Irene and Good News, followed in Nanette’s percussive footsteps, the critics revolted. With mutilated scripts and composite scores taken from multiple sources, these revivals barely resembled the originals. Brendan Gill of The New Yorker called this new genre, “show-biz body snatching” and “a sort of brightly painted mummy case in which bits and pieces of other once celebrated cadavers have been made to mingle with a portion of the authentic remains.”

It's the same problem we have in the New York commercial theatre today, producers and directors who don't understand the material they're working on, especially when that material is something genuinely fresh and unique. Just look at the terribly misguided original Broadway productions of High Fidelity, Cry-Baby, and Heathers, just to name a few recent examples.

Most directors of plays try to make sure they understand the play before they start directing it. Directors of musicals, especially many working in New York, don't always do that. They try to make it what they want it to be, instead of discovering what it is. And now in this new Golden Age for our art form, so many new shows are unlike any others, with their own very unique set of rules. If a director doesn't bother to figure out what those rules are, they'll do damage to the show. Just as Shevelove and friends did to No, No, Nanette.

Not all comedy works the same, and not all musicals work the same.

And sometimes, the shows that seem lightweight on the surface have a great deal going on underneath. Just look at Hair, Grease, and Rocky Horror, all three shows usually dismissed as shallow, kitschy, messy, unstructured, and/or empty-headed. But all three are smart, carefully constructed, insightful commentaries on incredibly pivotal moments in our cultural history.

People seem to assume that if a show is fun, it can't also be substantial, but New Line disproves that over and over, with Jerry Springer the Opera, American Idiot, Bat Boy, Cry-Baby, Heathers, and so many other shows -- most recently and perhaps most notably, Anything Goes.

And we're about to disprove it again in March, when we open La Cage aux Folles.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Power of Love Can Make a Zombie Too!

It's hard to believe it's over. It was five years ago that I set out to write The Zombies of Penzance. It seemed so perfect, so deliciously fucked up, and the process of "translating" the story , the changing of Gilbert's pirates into zombies, hardly disturbed the plot at all (though I later made some larger plot changes).

I know you want to ask, so yes, I was seriously stoned when I thought of the idea.

I immediately loved everything about it. I already deeply loved The Pirates of Penzance. I love zombie movies. I love mashups. Plus, I quickly decided that my approach would include an elaborate, though entirely false, backstory about the creation of The Zombies of Penzance. In fact, that meta-layer became an important part of the humor. We tell the audience Gilbert wrote these zombie lyrics, but then throughout the evening, we keep smacking them with anachronisms, four-letter words, and other morsels that Gilbert would/could never have written -- including all the references to zombies, which hadn't entered the awareness of Western culture yet in 1879.

I loved all of that. The inherent wrongness of its very conception, the fundamental idea of telling a horror story in the language of English light opera, possibly the most "wrong" storytelling form imaginable for this content. That was the appeal for me, more than anything else. I love things, particularly art, that are obviously wrong or fucked-up. That's so interesting, and often, so funny -- and it often reveals very cool, unexpected things.

I also loved the idea that this would be New Line's second zombie musical, since we did the very serious Night of the Living Dead in 2013. And its our seventh horror musical, following our productions of Rocky Horror, Sweeney Todd, Bat Boy, In the Blood, and Lizzie. Should we also count Urinetown...?

Throughout the time I've been working on this, I was always mindful of the fact that no matter how funny or meta-ironic my text was, it had no real value on the page. It's only a zombie operetta when it's live (dead?) onstage. I needed lots of people to make it into live theatre. That's true of all our shows, but since this was an awfully odd experiment, it was constantly in my awareness. When I talked to friends about it, at some point I'd always throw in, "...if I ever finish it, and if we produce it..."

We held a public reading in January. To my amazement, 150 people showed up, and to my greater amazement they followed the plot easily and fully embraced my multiple layers of meta, my blatant anachronisms, and the four-letter words sprinkled throughout. The audience loved both the ways in which I had stayed true to Gilbert & Sullivan and their traditions, and also the ways in which I violated that.

It's actually a fairly complex piece I wrote, and I was delighted that many of the reviewers noticed and appreciated that. Paul Friswold wrote in his Riverfront Times review:

Scott Miller and John Gerdes are the responsible parties, tinkering with Gilbert's lyrics and Sullivan's music to create something more than the sum of the parts. The two St. Louisans have added modern references, profanity and a careful adherence to the spirit of the original operetta. Portraits of George A. Romero and Queen Victoria hang above the old-fashioned stage and its working footlights, hinting at the twin forces at work here. Romero is the godfather of zombies in popular entertainment, and Victoria led the society that simultaneously embraced Gilbert & Sullivan's jaunty work and harbored a morbid fascination with life after death. All of these elements come together on stage, to strange and often comic effect.
. . .
But it's not all fun and pop-culture riffs. Despite his lethal nature, the Major-General has a most troubled conscience. The second-act song "When the World Went Bad" cracks open the show's candy coating to reveal the darkness within. Stanley sings of his fears about the forces bringing the dead to life, and worries about the coarsening of his soul. Is he less moral than the Zombie King, who spares some people (albeit under false pretenses)? The Major-General kills them all, and then shakes with terror and remorse late at night. Is he worse than what he hunts?

It's a question that harkens back to Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, which was Romero's own inspiration. The book also informs the finale, which is preceded by a delightfully ridiculous brawl between the Stanley daughters, who are in their bloomers and bearing cricket bats and nunchucks, and the zombie horde. Things become very dark indeed. But you know what they say: It's always darkest before the dawn of the dead.

Some people reflexively dismissed the show -- without seeing it of course -- as a stunt, a bastardization, a one-joke show. I'll admit that my new Major-General lyric is a stunt, but so is Gilbert's original. That's what patter songs are. Beyond that, The Zombies of Penzance is also an experiment in form and content, it's a weirdly complex, over-arching meta-joke about lost and discarded works (and also gender norms in 1879), and it's also very much a "translation" of Gilbert's original text, in terms of cultural context and also in terms of themes.

As I wrote in another blog post, The Pirates of Penzance is about how absurd and arbitrary class distinctions are. But though I changed the basic story very little, the substitution of monsters (zombies) for "monsters" (pirates) changes more than you'd expect. The Zombies of Penzance is about the Other-ing of those who are different from us, particularly by those who claim the moral high ground.

And also, because I cut the policemen from the story, and gave their songs to the Stanley daughters, who are now trained zombie hunters, it's also a story about women standing up for themselves, fighting back, solving their own problems. I was honestly shocked at how empowering it apparently felt for women in our audience when the daughters marched on in their zombie hunter clothes in mid-Act II, particularly I think for women who know Pirates.

The journey's been five years for me, but it's also been two years for John Gerdes, who adapted the music and orchestrated it. He adapted and orchestrated all the music before our reading last January, then he orchestrated Yeast Nation for us, then he came back to Zombies, finished his work and incorporated my rewrites from the reading. And then John and his wife Lea played in the band for the show. So I suspect John will have some zombie withdrawal as well.

This amazing cast has been working on this show since last November, when we started rehearsals for the reading. They have worked so hard on this score, both musically and conceptually. I realized early on that we had to apply the lessons of Little Shop, Bat Boy, and Urinetown to The Zombies of Penzance. The more seriously we take it, the funnier it gets; and in parallel to that, the better we sing the music, the more seriously we take that, the funnier the show gets. This isn't Evil Dead. To maintain the crazy meta-story, our audience had to believe this was intended to be performed at the Savoy Theatre in the 1880s. The more legit the music, the funnier the show.

And likewise, the better the craft -- rhymes, scansion, etc. -- the funnier the show. The Major-General's big patter song, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Era Zombie Killer," is funny partly because the craft is good. Really, I guess all this is a lesson Gilbert and Sullivan learned long before Little Shop of Horrors. Almost all their shows are inherently ridiculous stories (about inherently ridiculous aspects of Western culture) which they present utterly straight-faced. No matter how wacky Gilbert's text gets, Sullivan's music is always straight-faced.

This has been such a wonderful experience for me, bringing two of my greatest loves together, G&S and zombies. To quote my own lyric:

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!

I was very lucky to find a cast full of really strong, funny, talented, fearless actors to bring my show to life, and almost all of them have stayed with the show since last November. I am very grateful. And then to get such warm, overwhelming responses to it! Look at some of these press quotes:

"Another triumph for New Line. . . a hilariously inspired joke." -- Calvin Wilson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"The funniest show that New Line Theatre has ever mounted." -- Judy Newmark, All The World's a Stage

"Both a nightmare and a delight — let's call it a delightmare." -- Paul Friswold, The Riverfront Times

"Uproarious." -- Jeff Ritter, Critical Blast

"It's amazing. . . so much fun." -- Kevin Brackett, ReviewSTL

"A wonderful whirlwind of apocalyptic delight." -- Tanya Seale, BroadwayWorld

"Reverently irreverent and witty. . . a delightfully fun, pointedly funny musical." -- Tina Farmer KDHX

"Let the wackiness ensue." -- Lynn Venhaus, STL Limelight

"In terms of humor and sheer musicality, it’s remarkable." -- Michelle Kenyon, Snoop's Theatre Thoughts

But our show has closed and my zombie journey ends, for now. We've already gotten a couple requests for rights to perform the show, so the Zombie King may live (die?) on. But for all practical purposes, the ride is over. I will miss these characters and this beautiful music, and this extraordinary cast. It was so thrilling every night when they sang the a cappella chorale late in Act I, "Hail Zombies!" -- such a massive, gorgeous sound (due in large part to music director Nic Valdez)!

John and I will be cleaning up / correcting the script and score, and then we'll publish them on Amazon, so they'll be available soon. And I won't swear to it, but we also may be releasing a live cast album. And yes, we will license other theatres to produce the show.

And don't tell anybody... but I'm already working on another "new" G&S show. No promises, but I may end up writing a G&S horror trilogy before I'm done. I can hear the heads of G&S fans exploding as I type this...

Suggestions are welcome for source material for the third in the trilogy.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite bits from Zombies. Thank you, St. Louis, for once again, taking a chance on us and totally embracing the insanity we've wrought. We owe you so much!

My zombie hunting habits, though a potent, little metaphor,
Are really more subversive than the critics give me credit for.
In nineteenth cent’ry operetta, comedy or thriller,
I am still the very model of a modern-era zombie killer!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott