Bloody King Oedipus!

We live in an age of mashup.

The most recent example is a horror movie based on the 70s kids TV show The Banana Splits. But that's only the latest. There's the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the movie Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and a million Facebook memes. My favorite lately is a picture of Micky Mouse as a Borg.

One of the most audacious mashups ever is Todd Haynes' brilliant 1987 short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (which you can watch here), using Barbie dolls instead of actors, to create one of the most compelling dramas I've ever seen, I shit you not.

New Line has produced wild some mashup musicals, like Bukowsical and Jerry Springer the Opera. And then there's my own mashup of zombie movies and Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, The Zombies of Penzance.

Mashups fall under the broader category of Art Made From Other Art -- something I really love. Maybe that's because most of the great musicals (maybe even most of the good ones) are adapted from other sources, movies, novels, plays, TV shows, poems, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction books, etc.

Think of all the great musicals that came from other storytelling forms. Rent was based on the famous opera La Vie Boheme, even more on the original novel, Scenes de la vie de boheme (which is hilarious, by the way), and also on Jonathan Larson's own life and friends. The great musical theatre masterpiece Follies was based on a famous photograph of Gloria Swanson standing in the rubble of the razed Roxy Theatre, and also on a murder mystery musical Sondheim and Goldman were trying to write, called The Girls Upstairs. The classic Fiddler on the Roof was based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, and also on a famous painting by Marc Chagall.

But the mashup is a particularly potent subgenre of art made from other art. In most cases, part of the point of a mashup is to combine two forms which seem to be incompatible. Like telling the story of Alexander Hamilton in the language of 21st century hip-hop. But the best mashups reveal something new and meaningful and surprising, like Hamilton does. Like Little Shop of Horrors and Jerry Springer the Opera both do.

In 2013, I was fascinated with mashups and decided to try combining zombie movies (which I love) with Gilbert & Sullivan operettas (which I love). The result was The Zombies of Penzance, which turned out to be a big success. We published the script and score, and released a cast album.

While we were running Zombies last fall, I started thinking about all the other things that would mashup up well with Gilbert & Sullivan -- I soon had a list of 10 or 12 further possible projects, the more ill-suited to light opera they were, the better. I also decided that I would eventually create a Gilbert & Sullivan horror trilogy. And before I could stop myself, I had started work on a second operetta, based on a play that should never, never be a light opera.

By the time we had closed Zombies, I had already written Act One of Gilbert & Sullivan's Bloody King Oedipus!, imagining how Gilbert would have adapted the ancient Greek tragedy of incest, murder, suicide, and disfigurement into English light opera. By February, I had finished the libretto and had passed it off to John Gerdes, to adapt and arrange the music. And we scheduled a public reading of the show on Monday, Jan. 6, 2020.

Working on Bloody King Oedipus! has been very different than working on The Zombies of Penzance. For Zombies, I thought of my job more as translation than rewriting, keeping the same core plot and characters, but in translating the central conflict to one about actual monsters instead of metaphorical monsters (i.e., pirates), 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.

But Bloody King Oedipus! has no relation to Gilbert & Sullivan's Patience, the score I've plundered this time. Instead of re-fashioning Gilbert's story, I chucked out Gilbert's text entirely and started fresh. This time, my model was the ancient Greek play Oedipus the King -- I worked from four different translations of the script. I took Sullivan's music and wrote an entirely new libretto. I did move a few pieces of music around, and I cut one small section of music.

I realized early on that the humor of Bloody King Oedipus! comes entirely from the mashup, even more so than it did with Zombies. The seemingly impossible marriage of Sophocles' Oedipus the King with Sullivan's light opera score is a rich source of comedy.

After all, like they say, comedy is just tragedy plus time.

I realized the closer I kept to Sophocles' original plot and characters, the funnier it got. The demands of rhyme and rhythm and the catchy melodies give us an ironic distance from the horrors of the story. I learned quickly, as I did with Zombies, that anytime I wrote a "joke," it just wasn't as funny as playing it all straight. The comedy takes care of itself. The conception of the show itself is an evening-long joke.

It's the same lesson I learn over and over again (and keep forgetting) with each new project. Just tell the story.

The real challenge with both Zombies and Oedipus was figuring out the Gilbertian Twist, the ridiculous revelation right before the finale, which magically resolves the central conflict. With Oedipus, the operetta follows the play quite faithfully, until right before the finale, as the plot of the play wraps up, a new character arrives and upends everything we think we know, totally short-circuiting any emotional engagement we may have had. I think I've done a pretty good job of imagining the final twist Gilbert would have invented.

Once I had figured out how I was going to approach this, I sat down with the Patience score and four translations of Oedipus. I painstakingly matched pieces of music with blocks of text in the play, so I eventually had a very detailed outline of what each song had to accomplish. I only strayed from the plan once.

Then, one by one, with each song, I'd sit down, play through the music, read through the four translations for that section, figure out what's most important to get across, and then I'd start writing the new lyric. Sometimes it was fairly easy, and sometimes it was incredibly difficult and went through many rewrites.

Meanwhile, I was also reading books about Sophocles, about Greek theatre, and about the Oedipus trilogy. My favorite of those, if you're interested, was Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self Conviction by Frederick Ahl. It really helped me understand the original play. My favorite of the translations was the one by Don Taylor.

As I did with Zombies, I created an elaborate comic backstory, claiming that Bloody King Oedipus! is a real Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. You can read that on our Oedipus webpage.

This week, we go into rehearsal to learn the Oedipus! score for the reading January 6. I can't wait to hear these lyrics out loud and see if everybody else thinks it's as funny as I do.

If you can, join us for our reading and help me shape and fix this insane creation of mine. The reading we did for Zombies helped me so much. There's nothing like an audience to tell you what does and doesn't work about a piece of theatre.

A new adventure begins!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott