Toxic Masculinity

Have you seen the Gillette ad that inexplicably has conservative America's panties in a twist?

It's amazing that this ad charges into our already toxic public discourse just as we New Liners are in rehearsal for La Cage aux Folles, containing a song called "Masculinity." Imagine what the right-wingers would think of Albin! Oh, right, we don't have to imagine. That's our story.

Yes, it seems M. and Mme. Dindon are alive and well and living in America. After all, we've all seen in recent years the many and various indignities imposed on trans Americans and others by panicky Christians. As I wrote in my last post, this show may be thirty-five years old, and based on a film even older, but it's about right here and right now.

It's fascinating to me how much the controversy over this Gillette ad parallels the song "Masculinity" in La Cage. We find the song funny as we watch it, because not only is Albin terrible at performing Maleness; so is Geroges. Albin's the one being "schooled" here, but Albin arguably has more self-awareness than Georges does.

This one dialogue exchange over the song's intro is so perfect.

GEORGES. I want you to pick up that toast as if you were John Wayne.

(ALBIN prepares, does his best gunslinger swagger, then sits back down and lifts the toast, fanning himself with it.)

GEORGES: I thought I said John Wayne.

ALBIN. It is John Wayne. John Wayne as a little girl!

It's a punchline but it tells the truth. Albin is a man in his way; he's John Wayne (tough, strong) as a little girl (who loves to play dress-up and house). Makes me think of The Bad Seed. Tellingly in this world, it's Madame Renaud who does the best "masculine" walk for Albin to imitate. And when Georges points that out to him, Albin replies, "It's easy for her. She's wearing flats." His world isn't made for this kind of performance. He doesn't even have the right shoes for it!

It's only in retrospect that we realize that Act II cafe scene and the song "Masculinity" are as cruel as Jean-Michel's abuses and betrayals. Jean-Michael wants Albin gone; but Georges wants him to deny who he is -- including his real role as Jean-Michel's mother. Albin is to become "Uncle Al," not even a member of the immediate family! Which is worse? Georges sees Jean-Michel's betrayal, but not his own.

Look at the examples of manliness they offer up for poor Albin in "Masculinity." They start with movie stars John Wayne and Jean-Paul Belmondo, both of whom performed their masculinity as much as Albin performs Zaza. And really, they're not telling Albin to think of the actors, but the parts they play on the screen -- fictional masculinity.

Georges invokes the French Foreign Legion. According to Wikipedia, "Beyond its reputation as an elite unit often engaged in serious fighting, the recruitment practices of the French Foreign Legion have also led to a somewhat romanticized view of it being a place for disgraced or 'wronged' men looking to leave behind their old lives and start new ones. This view of the legion is common in literature, and has been used for dramatic effect in many films, not the least of which are the several versions of Beau Geste."

To leave behind their old lives and start new ones. That's a pretty potent reference. He invokes "Charlemagne's Men," i.e. the Christian Crusaders. That's also really chilling, considering who Georges and Albin are. And a "stevedore" is a dock worker, a manual laborer. (Makes us wonder if Georges has spent time down at the docks...)

Then the Renauds up the ante a bit, referencing Charles De Gaulle (France's World War II resistance hero), Rasputin (the notorious holy man to Russian Tsar Nicholas II), and the Biblical Daniel. No pressure, though.

Finally in the last verse, the stakes get raised to a ridiculous extreme, suggesting as manly role models the brutal and genocidal Ghengis Khan, the fictional Russian war hero Taras Bulba, the ruthless invader and plunderer Attila the Hun, and weirdly then, the gentler and largely fictional "Robin Hood's Men"...

No wonder Albin can't get it right. With competing role models like that...

In retrospect, we realize how wrong this whole scene is, how wrong it is to force Albin to masquerade as something he's not, to wear a mask not of his own choosing. In the club, Albin's mask and performance as Zaza reveal his truest self. But the mask and performance of "Uncle Al" will deny Albin's truest self. It's only when Albin rebels, discards the agreed-upon scheme, and appears in full drag as "Mother" that he's once again showing his truest self.

He is Jean-Michel's mother.

But it goes deeper than that, to a lesson we're taught in the brilliant musical, Passing Strange, that we are each on our own quest to find The Real -- our truth, our path, our journey -- but we all have to learn that our Real is different from everybody else's, so nobody else can ever tell you how to find your Real. As Stew tells us at the end of the show:

'Cuz The Real is a construct...
It's the raw nerve's private zone...
It's a personal sunset
You drive off into alone.

Here in La Cage, Albin has to find his Real, his definition of being a man, not Georges' definition, or the Renauds' or the Dindons'.

I am what I am.

Only Albin can find his path, and by the end of the show, we know that path is where Albin always knew it was. With family.

He -- and the others -- have to learn that really being a man means taking responsibility, stepping up. It's not about our culturally constructed models of masculine and feminine; it's about being strong and dependable. Being a man is about being proud of yourself and not apologizing for or hiding who you are. That's what Albin knows and what Jean-Michel has to learn.

When Albin shows up in drag as "Mother," that's when he is most being a man, showing up for his family, even though he's in drag head to toe. I told Zak (who's playing Albin) and Robert (who's playing Georges) that my biggest revelation when I started working on this show was that it's not a gay comedy. It's not a showbiz comedy. It's really not a even comedy, though it's awfully funny.

It's a drama about a middle-aged marriage and whether or not it can survive this crisis. That's the central action of the story. And I would submit, the real crisis isn't the hugely problematic engagement; it's a crisis of dignity and identity. Jean-Michel asks Georges to give up his (and Albin's) dignity and identity, and out of love, Georges agrees; but Albin saves both marriages because he refuses to give up his dignity, and he teaches both Jean-Michel and Anne an important lesson about being who you are.

And in the process, Albin becomes the role model for everybody else.

Literally.

Just as La Cage shows us there isn't just one kind of family (and sometimes, the "Other" kind might just be healthier), it also shows us there isn't only one way to be a man, that "being a man" isn't always about being a man. Notice that throughout the show, the Cagelles are tough as fuckin' nails, even intimidating, even though they're always in women's clothes.

When we produced Anything Goes last season, everybody was astonished at what we revealed in the material, but all we did was take the text, the characters, the story, the themes, seriously; yes, even though it's a funny show. We're doing the same with La Cage, and though it's not my goal, I bet we get a lot of the same reactions for this one.

It's so much richer and realer and more complex than most people think. And so truthful and so funny. And unfortunately, also reeeeeally timely.

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

To order tickets to La Cage aux Folles, click here.

La Cage aux Folles

"We are what we are,
And what we are
Is an illusion."

That's the first lyric in La Cage aux Folles, and though on the surface, it's talking about drag, it's saying way more than that. Just like the show it introduces. Those few lines encapsulate the entire story and all its themes.

Nobody realizes that the first time they hear it, but it's all there.

It introduces us to two ideas that will permeate every moment of the show. First, "we are what we are" -- in other words, we accept and embrace ourselves for who we are, without judgment or regret, without wanting to be someone or something else, and we're not changing. It's such a declarative statement. Particularly as sung by performers in drag, it's a statement of defiance and dignity. And that dignity will be greatly challenged throughout this story.

But the second phrase tells something just as important -- "what we are is an illusion." That's literally true of the men singing (St. Louis male actors playing French male performers playing female characters), but it's universally true for all of us. We all wear masks of various kinds in our lives; we all "perform" various roles, just like the characters in our story. This whole show is a deceptively serious story about identity and masks, reality and illusion.

Albin is living as a man, performing onstage as a woman, husband to Georges, "mother" to Jean-Michel, tragic diva to Jacob. When Albin shows up at the dinner party in drag, it's funny to us because we know he's about to cause all kinds of chaos, but we also register (maybe subconsciously) that this mask is "true." Albin is "disguised" as Jean-Michael's mother, but Albin is Jean-Michel's mother, in a very real way. So is it a deception?

Yes and no, both.

Like the whole show.

Like all of our lives.

When Albin takes his wig off at the end of "The Best of Times" in Act II, it's a plot device, but it's also such a compelling moment because the act of removing the wig after a drag performance is how Albin "tells the truth." He loves, even needs the mask, the safety of performance, but he never loses touch with reality. He can live successfully in both worlds.

As crazy as it is, Geroges and Albin's world has an equilibrium as our story begins. Yes, we witness Albin in full breakdown in the first dialogue scene, but we can tell from Georges' reactions that this is standard fare, part of their daily ritual. They both know the parts they play in this ritual, their lines, etc., and they both know by the end of the ritual, Zaza will go on.

This is a world of craziness and chaos, but it's also a world of family and ritual and commitment and a weird kind of stability.

People translate the title of La Cage aux Folles in various ways, but the one that seems most right to me is "The Mad Cage." The word folles is French for crazy or wild, and if you speak French, you'll notice that it's the feminine form of the word. So a literal translation might be "The Cage of Madwomen." But on top of that, folles is also French slang for effeminate gay men! When you know all that, the name of the show -- which is the name of the club above which the whole story takes place -- is a slyly subversive, multi-layered joke.

And what most people don't notice is that in the climax of the show, when all our characters are trapped in Georges and Albin's apartment, it becomes literally a "cage" of crazy people, une cage aux folles. The title tells us how our story will end.

But let's pause for a second, to note again that the slang word for effeminate gay men is a word that means crazy. That's pretty chilling. But also note that, just as gay Americans took back the word queer as a word of defiance and empowerment, so too Georges has taken back that word folles in an act of subtle, even comic, defiance.

Maybe they're crazy, but you'll pay to see them... so who's really crazy?

I first saw La Cage aux Folles in 1983 with my mom, on Broadway. It was wonderful, a big-scale, old-fashioned musical comedy that seemed gentle, but as timely as today's headlines. And even though I hadn't yet told my mom I was gay, and she didn't know any openly gay people, still at the end of the show she was deeply moved, and she said to me, "They really were in love, weren't they?"

The power of theatre.

But as much as I loved the show, it wasn't something I wanted to work on. Too big, too old-fashioned. Then I saw the 2010 revival on Broadway and all my preconceptions about this show were turned upside-down.

Ben Brantley's New York Times review of the revival cracked me up. He spent much of his review talking about how great the show is, except how bad the material is. It seems he couldn't imagine that maybe he didn't like the show in the past because other productions hadn't found everything that's there, and this latest production did. In Brantley's mind, it had to be that this production was good in spite of the material, not because of it. That was so funny to me.

I wrote a blog post about the revival the night I saw it, and I think I really got at what made it so different from the original...

I had been told that it was way darker (which we all know I love) and that in this version, the club in the show was much seedier. But that's not entirely true. What was so different may just be a product of changing expectations from the musical theatre audience. The biggest difference was the acting. So real, so honest, so truthful. They didn't play it as musical comedy; they approached the characters, relationships, etc. the way they would in a serious play. So though it's a funny story, there was no layer of irony distancing us from the emotions of these characters and events.

As much as I loved George Hearn as Albin, his was a musical-comedy Albin. But in 2010, Douglas Hodge gave us a powerful real, honest Albin, just a weary middle-aged man in a middle-aged marriage, who was also a very talented (though aging) nightclub performer. It was so much more emotional this way.

But the real highlight of the show was Douglas Hodge as Albin. His performance was nothing short of pure genius. Funny, honest, painful, subtle, joyful, and most of all, incredibly real. The kind of guy you'd love to have for a friend. Again, this was no musical comedy performance; this is an actor at the height of his power. Sometimes a naughty little boy, sometimes a weary middle-aged man, sometimes just a charismatic, lifelong entertainer who knows how to connect with an audience. His songs, "A Little More Mascara" and "I Am What I Am," both start out very quiet, very small, and that little detail made it so real, so emotional. He wasn't entertaining us with these songs; they were soliloquies from a man who isn't as sure or as strong as Albin usually is.

As I've said to a lot of people lately, the revival taught me that this show isn't really a musical comedy at heart -- the emotions and the stakes are too serious for that. There is genuine cruelty at the center of the story. No, this is a family drama, which happens to be populated by lots of colorful, larger-than-life, real people. After seeing the revival, I knew La Cage was a New Line show after all.

It's one of those productions that makes me see the material from an entirely different angle, much like the 1990s revivals of Carousel and The King and I. What I always thought of as a very sweet, fun musical comedy is now something much, much more. And what a joy it is to witness real artists of the theatre find that greater depth and subtlety in a show that isn't known for those things. It must've been there all along, hiding, waiting for actors and a director like this.

This is what I wrote about the revival's impact on me.

By the end of the cheering standing ovation, I was so overwhelmed with emotion, I could barely speak. I was supposed to meet a friend after the show, and I thought I wasn't going to be able to talk without bursting into tears. It was that powerful for me.

I can only hope that we bring that kind of honesty and resonance and power to this wonderful piece of theatre. I recently saw some footage of the original French (non-musical) play. It was very funny, but it could turn on a dime and break your fucking heart.

What could be more fun, or more satisfying to work on than that? Another wild and wonderful adventure begins! You have to see this one.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

To order tickets to La Cage aux Folles, click here.

Fascinatin' Rhythm

When I wrote my history book, Strike Up the Band, I had two primary agendas. One was to reject the premise of all other musical theatre history books, that the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical was the pinnacle of the art form. It wasn't. The other agenda was to include in the story of our art form all the people of color, the women, the people with disabilities who helped shape the American musical theatre but get left out of almost all history books. I hope I did a decent job of re-balancing our story a little.

But the first draft of my book was about double the length they'd accept. I had to cut so much out of it, including a lot of early, little-known black shows. But I saved all that text. What really fascinated me was the musicals before the turn of the century. George M. Cohan essentially invented what we know as musical comedy in the first decade of the 20th century, with shows like Little Johnny Jones (1904); but there were shows before that, shows I guess I'd call proto-musicals, not exactly the form we know today, but something close.

And there were a lot of black shows!

As the 19th century ended, the first generation of African Americans born free in America finally was coming of age. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court had invalidated the 1875 Civil Rights Act in 1883, and then had upheld the controversial idea of “separate but equal” for African Americans in 1896, still for a short while, anything was possible for black men in America, especially in the North. Many became doctors and lawyers, studied classical music with the best composers, and became great poets and novelists. The good times only lasted a while, but while they did, great things were accomplished. There wouldn’t be another time like it until the Harlem Renaissance.

And so in 1898, black performers finally joined the fun on Broadway with two all-Black musical comedies, A Trip to Coontown and Clorindy, The Origin of the Cakewalk. Of Clorindy, Bernard L. Peterson Jr. writes in A Century of Musicals in Black and White, “It was probably the first to fully exploit the possibilities of syncopated ragtime music in the theatre; the first to introduce the cakewalk (a staple of the minstrel stage) to sophisticated New York audiences; the first all-black show to play at a major Broadway theatre; and the first to have a white theatre orchestra led by a black conductor.”

In fact, more than thirty all-black shows were staged in Harlem and on Broadway between 1890 and 1915, and for a while some twenty blocks along Seventh Avenue in Manhattan was commonly known as “the African Broadway” because of the number of theatres housing all-black shows. In the first decade of the twentieth century, black men were buying theatres in various parts of the country, eventually forming a black touring circuit of their own.

The big break for Will Marion Cook and Laurence Dunbar’s Clorindy in 1898 is described by composer Will Marion Cook in his autobiography, and quoted by Thomas L. Riis in Just Before Jazz:

I went to see [producer] Ed Rice, and I saw him every day for a month. Regularly, after interviewing a room full of people he would say to me (I was always the last): “Who are you and what do you want?” On the thirty-first day – and by now I am so discouraged this is my last trip – I heard him tell a knockabout act: “Come up next Monday to rehearsal, do a show, and if you make good, I’ll have you on all week.”

I was desperate. On leaving Rice’s office, I went at once to the Greasy Front, a Negro club run by Charlie Moore, with a restaurant in the basement managed by Mrs. Moore. There I was sure to find a few members of my ensemble. I told them a most wonderful and welcome story: we were booked at the Casino Roof! That was probably the most beautiful lie I ever told.

On Monday morning, every man and woman, boy and girl that I had taught to sing my music was at the Casino Roof. Luckily for us, Ed Rice did not appear at rehearsal until very late that morning. By this time, my singers were grouped on the stage and I started the opening chorus. When I entered the orchestra pit, there only about fifty people on the Roof. When we finished the opening chorus, the house was packed to suffocation.

The show was booked.

Cook was born to college educated parents and studied music at Oberlin College in Berlin, and under the great composer Anton Dvořák at the National Conservatory of Music in New York. When his mother heard him working on the score for Clorindy, she came into the room with tears in her eyes. She said, “Oh Will, I’ve sent you all over the world to study and become a great musician, and you return such a nigger!” Like many other African Americans, she didn’t like the kind of “coon songs” Cook was writing, believing they denigrated the race and contributed to dangerous stereotypes that plagued African Americans. Despite the winning of the Civil War, lynchings continued in the South, the Civil Rights legislation passed after the Civil War was virtually ignored, and there was a major race riot in New York City in August 1900.

But Cook justified his work by noting that it got black men on Broadway for the first time. It was a debate that would go on for a century.

Blacks were finally on Broadway and, most important, not as minstrels and not in black face. Clorindy was the first show created and performed entirely by blacks in a mainstream theatre for an exclusively white audience. After Clorindy’s opening, Will Marion Cook exclaimed, “Negroes are at last on Broadway, and here to stay!”

Cook had not just put blacks on Broadway, he had also put syncopation into Broadway’s musical vocabulary for the first time, something that would distinguish musical comedy music from opera or operetta, forever separating the two, marking perhaps the most important musical moment in the history of Broadway. Cook would go on to write scores for many more all-black musicals over the next fifteen years, including In Dahomey (1903), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandanna Land (1908), which the Dramatic Mirror called “one of the rare plays that one feels like witnessing a second time.” Cook became widely regarded as the leader in black musical in America. his show The Southerners in 1904 was the first musical on Broadway with an integrated cast.

Bob Cole and Billy Johnson’s A Trip to Coontown not only boasted an all-black cast, but also Broadway’s first black producer, Bob Cole. The title a conscious reference to the very popular A Trip to Chinatown, the show told the story of a black con man who tries to con an older black man out of his $5,000 pension. The show was written in August 1897 and opened in New Jersey for a trial run, before going on tour and then moving to New York.

But the tour was no picnic. Because Cole and Johnson had defected from Black Patti’s Troubadours, that group’s white manager put Cole and Johnson through hell. He convinced black theatre owners around the country to boycott Coontown and convinced black performers that if they performed in Coontown they would be finished. So the show spent a year playing the worst, smallest theatres in the country, while the creators worked on the show. Still, when it came to New York in 1899, it had become such a hit, it suddenly was playing only the best theatres.

The story of Coontown was only barely important, and the show only marginally figures in the development of the American musical, except for the fact that it was the first musical produced, directed, written, and performed by blacks. And producer Cole, after only modest success with Coontown, was determined to push black musical comedy into new, unusual, and exciting places. The show’s program described it as “the Roaring, Racing, Rollicking Musical Comedy.” One Boston review called it, “far and away, the most satisfying extravaganza, white, black, or flushing pink, seen in Boston this season.”

Most people have never heard of these truly important artists, and that's a shame.

The more I researched our art form while writing my history book, the more I discovered people of color all throughout its history -- people and shows who are left out of almost every history book. My Strike Up the Band went pretty far in correcting that problem, but like I said, there was so much more I wanted to write about.

The first time my eyes got opened to the huge role in our history of artists of color, was when I first read Allen Woll's great 1989 book Black Musical Theatre, which I've now read three times over the years. Here are some other excellent books on this topic...

Black Broadway: African Americans on the Great White Way by Stewart F. Lane

The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera by Ellen Noonan

Who Should Sing 'Ol' Man River'?: The Lives of an American Song by Todd Decker

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical by Todd Decker

Reminiscing with Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake by Robert Kimball

Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater by Paula Marie Seniors

They say of politics, if we forget history, we're doomed to repeat it. With theatre, it's more like, if we don't know -- and learn from -- our history, our artistic toolkit is only half full. And I can help.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Editor's Note: Here's another post about black musicals from 2020.

A Hot Cup of Murder

One time, the Archbishop of St. Louis tried to shut down a New Line show called Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll. I'm not kidding. He failed. Well, he successfully shut down our preview, but we were open again for opening night. You can read about that here.

Our show was just a revue of theatre songs on those topics, three of the most powerful forces on humans, including songs from Rent, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Avenue Q, Songs for a New World, Hair, The Rocky Horror Show, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Naked Boys Singing, Company, Nine, I Love My Wife, Oklahoma!, The Last Five Years, Reefer Madness, No, No, Nanette, The Wild Party, and The Nervous Set. Sounds morally terrifying, doesn't it? Yet the Archdiocese was determined to shut us down. So bizarre.

More recently, a Christiany website tried to organize a form-letter campaign against our production of Jerry Springer the Opera (apparently they protest all productions of the show), but we only got 3 or 4 emails, and they were all identical. Some of the actors were afraid we'd have protesters at the theatre, but I knew these were the type who protested only if they could do it with one click.

Crazy shit, huh? But I can top both those stories, in terms of sheer weirdness.

One of our longtime New Liners, Colin DeVaughan, was working at Harrah's Casino in the early 2000s, and they were looking for events to bring in, that would attract busloads of seniors, who would then gamble the rest of the night. Colin told me about it and asked if we wanted to create something.

At first, I wasn't interested, but the more I thought about it, the more the idea of writing a murder-mystery-comedy intrigued me. So over the course of a few weeks, I wrote a (non-musical) comedy called "A Hot Cup of Murder." The script was recently published and you can get it on Amazon here.

Since we'd be performing the show in a banquet hall while people were eating, I set my show at a political fundraising dinner, where a rich guy named Preston Seaborn is launching a Senate campaign. But about ten minutes into the dinner, Preston drops dead in his entree, leaving his wife and bratty, 20-something kids to handle the awkward situation and unintentionally reveal all their worst impulses and secrets to the guests. And then a cop named Coffee shows up, with a mysterious past...

The cast included Colin, Mo Monahan, Robin Kelso, Troy Turnipseed, and Troy Schnider. We had a lot of fun with it.

We did the first performance at Harrah's and, despite the incredibly crazy, twisting story, the full house of seniors laughed at all the jokes, gasped at revelations, and had a really great time. We even got a standing ovation. We felt great about it.

Now here's the crazy part...

All the other planned performances were then cancelled. After all the work we'd done. No explanation. And we didn't get paid nearly what we had been promised.

Then a few months ago, I stumbled onto a website for "Parents of Murdered Children Inc.," which sends out "Murder Is Not Entertainment (MINE) Alerts" (not kidding), and on one page of the site, it had a list of their protests, and one item said:

January, 2001
Harrah's Casino
POMC was successful in protesting Hot Cup of Murder, a murder mystery hosted by Harrah's Casino.

I could barely believe it. Our little comedy was shut down by protesters!

And it made me wonder, do these folks protest every play or movie with murder in it? Or even every comic play or movie with murder in it? When would they sleep...? The truth is: murder is entertainment. Sophocles and Shakespeare and Arthur Conan Doyle and the writers of Murder, She Wrote all knew that. Oh yeah, and the Bible.

Their website says, "POMC makes the difference through on-going emotional support, education, prevention, advocacy, and awareness. POMC Vision Statement: To provide support and assistance to all survivors of homicide victims while working to create a world free of murder."

"Support and assistance" by telling everybody else what stories we're allowed to tell? While I have sympathy for parents of murdered children -- who wouldn't? -- how does this make sense? How does shutting down our play make any of those parents feel better or replace the terrible hole left in their lives?

That's easy -- it doesn't.

Just another example of people trying desperately to control strangers. It's so baffling to me. It's rare we've had issues like this, but it still happens and it will happen again. America is not past that kind of silliness quite yet.

To be clear, there were no children in our play and certainly no children murdered. And also, there are a shit-ton of movies, plays, TV shows and novels about murder, many of them dark comedies. I have a weird feeling that the operators of POMC are taking advantage of grief-stricken parents for their own agenda of trying to control the expression of others. That's pretty fucked up.

Though not entirely surprising in the Trump Era, sadly. That's okay. Imagine how all those folks' heads would explode if they'd ever see Bukowsical, Wild Party, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson... We'll always get the last laugh, because we're the ones who make the art, and it's the art that gets remembered.

Long Live Uncensored Uncontrolled Theatre!
Scott

Broadway Hot Damn!

I am in love with the BroadwayHD channel on Amazon Prime Video. I'm convinced that HD stands for Hot Damn!

When we were working on Yeast Nation, last summer, Greg Kotis told me that he and Mark Hollmann had based their story loosely on both Macbeth and Antigone. So I watched both plays on video, and it helped me a lot with Yeast Nation.

And then I wanted to see the rest of the Oedipus trilogy, which includes Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. One way to see them was to subscribe to the BroadwayHD channel. So I did, and I felt like Dorothy walking out of her sepia-toned house into the Technicolor of Oz. Suddenly, I had tons of theatre available to me, from the earliest plays that exist, up to the latest Broadway offerings.

If you've never seen it, I can't recommend these three plays enough. I set out to watch them more out of historical curiosity, but I fell in love with all three plays. Anybody who loves great theatre should watch all three, but make sure it's the 1986 BBC versions, translated and directed by Don Taylor, starring Michael Pennington as Oedipus, Claire Bloom as Jocasta, John Gielgud as Tiresias, and Juliet Stevenson as Antigone. Talk about powerful, compelling theatre!

Then, after watching the trilogy, watch The Gospel at Colonus, which is also on BroadwayHD, with Morgan Freeman. The Gospel at Colonus takes the story of Oedipus at Colonus and tells it in the form of a Baptist church service. It's brilliant.

I planned to subscribe only temporarily, but I'm hooked. I've already watched a bunch of my bucket list plays, like Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, School for Scandal, "Tis Pity She's a Whore, Buried Child, Present Laughter, and others. And I have dozens still to go. There's a ton of Shakespeare (I can finally see King John!), but there's also so much more... Here's just a partial list...

Paula Vogel's Indecent
Noel Coward's Present Laughter
Copenhagen
Rhinoceros (with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel!)
Ah, Wilderness!
Long Day's Journey into Night
Man Who Came to Dinner
Buried Child
Salome
A Touch of the Poet
Three Sisters
Hedda Gabler
"Tis Pity She's a Whore
School for Scandal
The Misanthrope
The Iceman Cometh
The Norman Conquests

And there are a lot of musicals, as well...

American in Paris
Holiday Inn
Billy Eilliot
She Loves Me
From Here to Eternity
Barnum
Sweeney Todd
Company
Gypsy (Bette Midler AND Imelda Staunton)
Toxic Avenger
Jerry Springer the Opera
Falsettos
Cats
Candide
Kiss Me, Kate
Tintypes
JC Superstar
Jekyll & Hyde
Memphis
Oklahoma!
Wind in the Willows
Sophisticated Ladies

I used to laugh at myself, because I have Charter on Demand, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and a huge DVD collection, and yet sometimes I just cannot find something I want to watch.  But that never happens anymore because now there are always a few dozen plays and musicals waiting for me...

And really, what could be better than that?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Into the Words

When young musical theatre artists ask me how to get where they're going, I always give the same advice, to consume as much musical theatre as humanly possible, to see every musical (live and on screen) that they can, read scripts and biographies and history books and analysis books, listen to cast albums -- and not just the new ones.

In other words, drink all of it in. And part of that is creating a good library for yourself.

I was browsing my own considerable musical theatre script library, and though there are lots of photocopied scripts and "lost" rental scripts (shhh, don't tell anybody), it's surprising how many musical theatre scripts get published. Of course, with some exceptions (like Sondheim), it's only the most famous, most commercial shows that get published. But it's happening more now than it has since the 60s and 70s.

I noticed I have several really nice published collections of musical theatre scripts in my library, so I thought it would be worth blogging about them. So many young musical theatre fans can start a decent script library without spending too much time or money (if you get these used on Amazon!).

Great Musicals of the American Theatre, in two volumes 
Volume One includes Of Thee I Sing, Porgy and Bess, One Touch of Venus, Brigadoon, Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, 1776, and Company.
Volume Two includes Leave It to Me, Lady in the Dark, Lost in the Stars, Wonderful Town, Fiorello!, Camelot, Man of La Mancha, Cabaret, Applause, and A Little Night Music.
Both volumes are out of print, but you can get used copies pretty cheap on Amazon.

American Musicals, in two volumes or boxed set 
1927-1949 includes Show Boat, As Thousands Cheer, Pal Joey, Oklahoma!, On the Town, Finian's Rainbow, Kiss Me Kate, and South Pacific.
1950-1969 includes Guys and Dolls, The Pajama Game, My Fair Lady, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, and 1776.

6 Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein
Includes Oklahoma!, Carousel, Allegro, South Pacific, The King and I, and Me and Juliet.

The New York Musicals of Comden and Green
Includes On the Town, Wonderful Town, and Bells Are Ringing

The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, vol. 1
Includes Promises, Promises (as well as several plays)
The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, vol. 2

Includes Little Me (as well as several plays)

The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, vol. 3
Includes They're Playing Our Song and Sweet Charity (as well as several plays)

Four by Sondheim
Includes A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George

Great Rock Musicals
Includes The Wiz, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Grease, Jesus Christ Superstar, Your Own Thing, Hair, Tommy, and Promenade.

The New American Musical
Includes Floyd Collins, Rent, Parade, and Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe's version of The Wild Party.

Collect all these collections, most or all of which you can get really cheap and in good condition, buying them used on Amazon. (I get most of my books that way.) And then you'll have a great variety of works through which to study and get to know our art form. Believe me, read all these scripts and you will understand the history and evolution of the American musical theatre.

And then you can buy all my analysis books and dig even deeper into these fascinating shows and our fascinating history.

Pretty cool that it's that easy, no? So get reading!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Broadway Pop!

I have fallen in love with Funko Pops figures -- they're so odd but so wonderful. In recent months, Funko has released several Little Shop of Horrors figures, as well as two versions of both Danny and Sandy in Grease, and big collections of figures from Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.

But wait, there's more! I was fortunate enough to happen upon Amanda Tang's Broadway Pop store on Etsy, and it was like I had died and gone to musical theatre memorabilia heaven. She has custom Funko Pops for Hamilton, Newsies, Wicked, Book of Mormon, Phantom of the Opera...

But it gets even better. You can commission special orders from her! Would anyone really think I could have that information and not act on it? I couldn't help myself. So I asked Amanda to create a trio of figures for me, Billy Crocker, Reno Sweeney, and Moonface Martin, in the original 1934 Anything Goes. See the photo above to see how cool they turned out! Amanda is totally open to suggestions...

About the same time, I discovered the very cool work of Brian Reedy, brother to New Line's resident graphic artists, Matt Reedy, who's been designing all the New Line posters since 2006. That family clearly has good artsy genes. Brian's already made a Hamilton woodcut, and an Audrey II linocut, both incredibly cool and both for sale in Brian's Etsy store.

(Brian says he'd be open to doing more musical theatre designs...)

Having found both these artists, I've been thinking about all the ways my artist friends could make money creating musical theatre related merchandise. There's already a ton of it on Etsy, though most of that is uninspired. And there's a large, easy-to-target fan base eager for cool stuff like that. That fan base probably skews younger (which is good for the art form!), but it also includes people my age.

I started thinking of all the musical theatre characters that would make excellent Funko Pops or linocuts. To work, the character needs a pretty distinctive, iconic look, that translates clearly into these different, necessarily simpler forms. And that made me think about what characters in musical theatre have a look that transcends the original actor who played the role -- or in some cases, characters whose look was set forever by the original actor.

For instance, even with the simple, almost expressionless faces of the Pops, a red sequined dress and red feathered headdress are unmistakably Dolly Levi, at that one specific moment, coming down the stairs of the Harmonia Gardens during the intro to the title song. The same is true of Cassie's red rehearsal clothes, Mame's gold jumpsuit and short haircut, Mrs. Lovett's bizarre side curls...

Once I started thinking about this, I couldn't stop. Imagine Pops and/or linocuts, and/or whatever other things we can dream up, depicting...

Dolly Levi (in the red dress!)
     In a set of three! Carol Channing, Pearl Bailey, and Streisand (in gold)! Maybe also Bette?

Lola from Kinky Boots

Evan Hanson from Dear Evan Hansen

Zaza (and Albin?) from La Cage aux Folles

Ti Moune from Once on This Island

Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof

Don Quixote from Man of La Mancha

Stew from Passing Strange

Mame Dennis from Mame (in the gold jumpsuit!)

Cassie from A Chorus Line

Princess Winifred from Once Upon a Mattress

Charity Hope Valentine from Sweet Charity

Pres. Jackson from Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Ethel Merman, as a career-spanning set
     Including Reno in Anything Goes, Annie in Annie Get Your Gun, and Rose in Gypsy

Chita Rivera, as a career-spanning set
     Including Anita in West Side Story, Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie, Velma in Chicago, and the Spider Women in Kiss of the Spider Woman

Porgy and Bess from Porgy and Bess

Jeremy, Michael, and the Squip from Be More Chill

Tracy and Edna Turnblad from Hairsprayy

Mother and Coalhouse Walker Jr. from Ragtime

Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady

Prof. Harold Hill and Marian the Librarian from The Music Man

Rev. Purlie and Lutiebelle from Purlie

Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd

Elphaba and Glinda from Wicked

Hedwig and Yitzhak from Hedwig and the Angry Inch

J. Pierpont Finch and JB Biggley (and Rosemary?) from How To Succeed in Business...

Sally Bowles and the Emcee (and Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz?) from Cabaret
     Do two sets -- the original 1966 look AND the 1990s revival look

Berger, Claude, and Hud from Hair

Laurie, Curly, and Jud from Oklahoma!

Anna and the King from The King and I

Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart from Chicago

Capt. Macheath, and Mr. & Mrs. Peachum from Threepenny
     Not sure which version... the original 1928 Berlin production? The famous 1950s off Broadway production? The sexy 1970s Public Theatre production...?

The whole cast of the original Fantasticks

The three (four?) Dreamgirls

The whole cast of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

All the leads from Spring Awakening

All the leads from In the Heights

All seven leads from Rent

All the leads from Avenue Q

All the leads from Into the Woods

I could keep going. For a long time. But I won't. I'm sure by now you have a dozen in your head that you can't believe I left off my list. I feel your pain.

But also, I'm thinking, how much would I (and you) LOVE Pops and linocuts of Jason Robert Brown, Stephen Sondheim, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bill Finn, Pasek and Paul, Joe Iconis, Kander and Ebb, and sure, why not, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Although personally, I'd love to have a Rodgers and Hart set! And while I'm on a roll, also Hal Prince, Tommy Tune, Bob Fosse, George C. Wolfe, Michael Bennett, Susan Stroman, Michael Mayer, Michael Greif, George Abbott, George M. Cohan...

Just think of the thousands of dollars I could blow if all of these were available. Maybe this post isn't such a good idea after all...

I'll just leave it there for now... But stop by and see Amanda and Brian and their cool work...!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Thank You, St. Louis!

I know 2018 was a rough one in many ways, but in my position as artsy-cynic-optimist, I can't help but see a lot of awesomeness in 2018.

What a year of New Line shows! One of my most loved shows, the classic Anything Goes; the wild, new(-ish) rock musical Yeast Nation (from the Urinetown team); and my own Zombies of Penzance. Wow, talk about variety!

So many people came up to me after Anything Goes performances, saying some version of, "This has always been one of my favorite shows, but I didn't know it was so funny!" That always made me laugh. But I think it revealed something important about New Line -- we took the show seriously, its characters and plot, its themes, its satire; and what we revealed to our audiences was only what had always been there. The other secret that many directors miss -- a comedy like this is meant to keep the audience off balance, so you can't ever give them a moment to catch their breath or process the insanity before them. It was overwhelming, in all the best ways. And it was hilarious.

And Yeast Nation... well, doesn't the title say it all? I was so happy that audiences and critics embraced this crazy show, its political intrigue and social satire. We had so much fun working on this, and then Greg Kotis, one of the show's writers came to see us -- and he paid us the most amazing compliment. He said to me, "This production has really renewed my faith in the material."

Could we get a nicer compliment from a show's writer...?

And then, my beloved zombies. You have to understand, I love zombie movies, and also, I love Gilbert and Sullivan. So when the idea occurred to me in 2013, through a stoner's haze, to mashup the two forms, I knew that was something I wanted to work on.

I worked for five years, off and on, writing The Zombies of Penzance. Contrary to what some assumed, it's not just a sophomoric joke; as wacky as it is, it's a serious piece of writing. Just as The Pirates of Penzance is a sharp satire of the British class system, in a parallel way, The Zombies of Penzance is a satire of the Othering -- the cultural and political excluding -- of many, many Americans today, often practiced through a morally hazy film of faux Christian values. When I replaced pirates with zombies, replacing metaphorical monsters with actual monsters, it had far-reaching narrative ramifications, even though the larger arc of the story remained pretty much intact.

Part of the appeal of the project to me was the experiment, the fundamental mismatch of content and form that is the central joke of the show. It's a zombie apocalypse story told in the form of wacky, English light opera. And there was also the basic massive challenge of rewriting a Gilbert and Sullivan show, which I love deeply, and to make sure I was retaining Gilbert's voice. The response from audience and critics tells me I did that pretty well.

After five years, it all blossomed in 2018. We did a public reading of The Zombies of Penzance in January, and to my great surprise, we had a packed house. The amazing Sarah Nelson music directed the reading for us, the cast did a really great job with it, and the audience LOVED it. They were fully engaged with the story and characters, even though it was just a reading, with the actors holding their scores. It was so encouraging!

We had a talk-back with the audience after the reading, and I learned a lot. I was happy to find that they could easily follow the revised plot, and they understood the silly logic of the story's resolution. But I also discovered that not everybody sees zombie movies. I had assumed the audience would know the basic rules of zombism, just like everybody knows the basic rules of vampirism. But that assumption was wrong. So I addressed that in my rewrites.

Also, a few women said to me afterward, half-joking, half-not, "Couldn't the women win?" And I thought, "Yeah, why couldn't they?" So I rewrote the end, so it's the daughters who outsmart the zombies. I did a ton of rewrites, mostly small things, but also a few big things, like adding one song and greatly expanding another.

One of the biggest lessons the reading taught me -- every time I had inserted a Joke, it was less funny than the dialogue and lyrics around it. I realized I shouldn't be inserting jokes, just telling the story, because that's already funny enough. Almost all the jokes I had stuck in got removed. The only ones that stayed were jokes that came from character.

My friend and partner in crime John Gerdes meanwhile had been orchestrating the show, and had created a piano-vocal score for us to use for the reading. So after all my rewrites were done, I passed it all back to John, so he could incorporate my changes, and finish it all, write an overture, etc.

We produced the show fully in October, and again, the response was so wonderful. Sarah Nelson had moved to New York, so Nic Valdez took over as music director, and all but two of the actors returned. The reviews were raves, the laughs were huge, and everybody walked out smiling or laughing. The actors and band had a great time, all our designers did really cool work, and everything turned out exactly as I had hoped.

AND THEN... we ended up publishing the script and full piano-vocal score on Amazon! And our sound designer Ryan Day asked if he could try making a live, high-quality audio recording of the show. He did, and now we've released a really great live cast album on CD (also on Amazon). It will be on the streaming services soon.

AND THEN... we started getting inquiries about production rights. There's nothing settled yet in that area, but it looks likely that there will be further productions of our show!

And if all that isn't cool enough, while we were running Zombies, I started writing my next fake Gilbert and Sullivan show, and I finished a first draft, much to my own astonishment, before the end of the year. It's really fucked up. I'll let it sit for a while now before digging back in. If all goes as planned, we'll be doing a public reading of this one in January 2021, and then producing it in our 2021-2022 season. Stay tuned...

This was also the year I published my latest collection of analysis essays, Literally Anything Goes: 14 Great Oddball Musicals And What Makes Them Tick, and a novelty book I had been working on for several years, It's a Musical!: 400 Questions to Ponder, Discuss, and Fight About. I also published several scripts and scores I've written. (You can see them all on my Amazon Author Page.)

All in all, 2018 was a really scary year for our country, but a pretty great year for me artistically. And 2019 looks like it will be just as cool...

Thank you to everybody I worked with last year, and everybody who supports New Line. I am truly living the dream. Though it would also be nice to be able to pay my bills...

Oh well, you can't have everything.

Long Live the Musical! And Happy New Year!
Scott