Our Beat Is Divine

After a night full of wacky, goofy, deeply human misadventures, all upending our usual notions of gender, love, sex, attraction, connection, Head Over Heels leaves us with something quite sublime.

Go round and round,
Like light and light,
Descending day,
And breaking night.
Our roads shall shortly separate;
What may endure we now create;
Remember now this present sweet;
We are alive.
We got the beat.

It's such a lovely goodbye to the audience. Life is about circles and patterns and cycles (which is a poet's term. So.), and the trick is to learn from these circles so that each time they roll around again we handle it or understand it a little better, and maybe grow a little too. That's essentially the plot of Head Over Heels, and not incidentally, almost every story based on the Hero Myth (Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, etc.).

Our actors mock me because I use circles so often in my staging, but that's because I learned from Hair that the circle is very, very powerful. It represents pretty much everything in life. Including Life.

Just as the Arcadians in Head Over Heels go in search of themselves and end up back where they started, so too did the New Liners over the last two years. This story of a weird and circuitous journey back to the beginning, was itself a weird and circuitous journey that led us back to where we started, so that we could finish.

Way back in March 2020, we opened one of the wildest and most meaningful pieces of theatre we've ever produced, the improbable Head Over Heels, one of those shows that shouldn't work, if you really think about it, and yet it's brilliant. And our audiences fully embraced our powerhouse cast and these powerhouse Go-Go's songs in this universal -- and wonderfully subversive -- tale of the road to self-discovery.

And then the world shut down in the middle of our run. But I was determined to return to Arcadia someday. It seemed important to me in a way I didn't fully understand. And now we have.

Head Over Heels is a show like Hair -- working on it changes you, how you think about the world, about life, about others, about difference. About storytelling. And also like Hair, we didn't fully understand the magic and power of this show, until we had it up in front of an audience.

(And even cooler, we staged it in what we call "a bowling alley" setup, with the playing space down the middle, and audiences on both sides facing each other. That intense intimacy made this show in particular so much funnier and more emotional in all the right ways. I gotta give props to our set designer Rob Lippert for suggesting this configuration. It was so right.)

Many in our audience were shocked by how this crazy, silly comedy could affect them in such a powerfully emotional way. But despite the chaotic insanity of the story and its events, this is a deeply human, deeply honest story about the most complex part of human existence -- love and sex. Head Over Heels subtly teaches us, the audience, the same lesson about stories that Pamela has to learn about herself, that surface is not all. This story goes surprisingly deep. Stories like this remind us that we all stumble, we all say the wrong thing, we all get tongue-tied and awkward, we all have lost love. We learn many things from stories, but the most important is that we are not alone. We are never the only one suffering or confused or hurt.

And yet also, everyone is Different. Head Over Heels celebrates that glorious difference, and suggests that it's more universal than we admit.

As a musician all my life, the metaphor of The Beat as a life force is so potent for me. And that phrase, "We got the Beat," will never be the same for me again. Now, it's a companion piece to "I Got Life" in Hair. It's a defiant refusal to be beat down by the world. No matter what comes at us, we got The Beat.

And in a larger, less intended way, The Beat is also a powerful metaphor for what New Line Theatre does. We tell stories through music. The Beat is literally New Line's life force. After a nearly two-year enforced hiatus during the Pandemic, that simple little phrase means more to me than ever. For the Go-Go's it was a defiant insistence in the 1980s that "girls" can rock too. For us, it means we have that magic amulet from the Hero Myth -- not ruby slippers, or a light saber, or a magic ring -- no, our magic amulet is Music. It's The Beat.

And as long as I can keep New Line afloat, as long as St. Louis embraces the kind of stories we tell, then we got The Beat. And as long as we're faithful to The Beat, it will serve us and protect us, and take us into the future. And yet we know that each time we embark on another artistic adventure, we must "craft a beat anew."

I can't imagine a better show with which to emerge from a terrible pandemic. We needed a story about Life Force and acceptance right now. I am so grateful I got to make that happen, with the help of a couple dozen wildly talented artsies. Thank you once again, St. Louis!

As we sang in the show, "Our Beat is divine!" 

Yes. Yes it is. And the theatre is my church.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Here are my Head Over Heels posts from 2020...
Head Over Heels
We Are Alive. We Got the Beat.
We Can Make It Our World

Miscast / Misstep

After two looooong years, New Line Theatre is back in business, and Head Over Heels is also back, to finish the run that the Great Pandemic cut short in 2020. When we first started work on it two years ago, we knew it was cool. We just didn't know how cool. Once we opened, we found that our crazy, wacky, musical comedy was deeply, seriously meaningful for people.

After two years with this show in my head, I now have a much better grasp of why audiences embrace Head Over Heels so utterly. It's about dignity. There's such a powerful sense of dignity around these characters' feelings and relationships. The only foolishness is in those who haven't yet found self-awareness, who haven't found their own innate dignity.

Beneath all the wacky hijinks, there's something very serious going on, dealing with the most powerful human drives: love and lust. It's a smart, sneaky, brilliant piece of theatre, which uses its "spoonful of sugar" (in this case, the Go-Go's) like a laser-guided missile. The show disassembles nearly all our preconceptions about love, sex, gender, identity, body type, you name it. It presents The Other as Not Other, but does it in such a charming and funny way, we don't consciously notice this incredibly subversive act.

In Head Over Heels, gender is essentially irrelevant, and our preconceptions are repeatedly burst. One character, Pythio, the new Oracle at Delphi, is explicitly "non-binary," and again, our preconceptions about them set us up for the most delightful surprise right before the finale. It's fun for both actors and audience to deflate, mock, and dismiss concepts we all take for granted (until we see how silly they really are).

Parallel to that, lots of theatre companies and choruses around the country often put on concerts of show tunes, in which the singers sing theatre songs that were written for characters that these singers ordinarily wouldn't be considered for. In other words, men sing Velma and Roxie's anthems from Chicago, adults sing "Tomorrow" from Annie, gay performers sing songs written about heterosexual love and sex, like "We Kiss in a Shadow" from The King and I.

The new context -- or the ignoring of the original context -- can be revealing in wonderful ways, exploring the lyrics' wider resonances and even unintentional relevance. We can see that at work in New Line's Head Over Heels, taking the songs of The Go-Go's and recontextualizing them for these times.

There's nothing particularly new or unconventional about exploring new context. That's the whole point of taking a song from the dramatic stage and reinterpreting it for the concert stage, right? After all, Frank Sinatra recorded "Send in the Clowns," which was written for Desiree Armfeldt. New Line's three revues, the Out on Broadway series, took show tunes about straight people and put them in the mouths and lives of gay people. Like I said, it really is interesting how the songs change, expand, even without changing the words.

There seems to be a renewed (or newly discovered) focus right now on reassigning songs in this way for musical revues; but for some reason the folks putting these revues together give their shows inherently insulting names. There is no dignity here. Almost all the titles include the words backwards or miscast. This has always bothered me, but any challenge to these awful titles is met inevitably with high dudgeon. And too often, these folks vehemently defend the performances within the show, pretending my objections aren't about only the title.

Why do these folks want the idea of wrongness defining their show? Is it wrong for a woman to sing a song written for a man? Is it wrong for an older woman to sing a song written for a young man? Is it wrong for a gay man to sing a song written for a straight man?

No. None of those things are wrong. And they are not backward! They are merely different.

Every time I see one of those revue titles, all I can think of is the gay, effeminate, high school drama nerd, who sees or hears these titles and gets the unmistakable message, loud and clear: this kind of casting, even in a concert, is WRONG or BACKWARDS. He can not play Harold Hill or Clyde Barrow. The heavy girl who wants to play Marian the Librarian also sees that casting against type is WRONG, even comically WRONG.

When I challenge these titles (as I have several times over the years), and explain why they may send a destructive message, the people who conceive and title these shows shut down tight. They won't even consider that their title might be hurtful, that other titles may be just as good without being hurtful. As just one example, why not change the title Magnificently Miscast to Magnificently Recast? Why not change Broadway Backwards to Broadway Reimagined? In other words, get rid of the idea of Bad. Is it just about the alliteration? 

One person explained that they were "taking the word miscast back." But what does that mean? Was that word taken from them somehow? Sometimes, marginalized groups will "take back" a slur used against them, as the gay community took back the word "queer" and redefined it. But miscast isn't a slur; it's a word they use to describe themselves. They choose to label their own shows as wrongly cast.

Some of them will argue they're using the words miscast and backwards in a funny way, to make fun of conventional casting practices. Some of these shows even have opening numbers explaining that. But still, the show's title, its public identity, literally tells us this idea is Bad. Casting against type is wrong. Casting against type is backwards. 

Spoiler Alert: No it isn't.

Perhaps the most baffling part of all this is that none of these folks producing these shows will even think about the negative effect these ill-considered (or maybe un-considered) titles may have. I think of a black teenager who wants to play Mama Rose in the spring production of Gypsy. What message does she get from these revue titles that explicitly label unconventional casting as wrong and backwards?

And don't tell me it's just semantics. It's so much more. It's a mindset, a subliminal, usually unacknowledged, potentially toxic worldview. Haven't we learned anything from the #BLM and #MeToo movements? Haven't we learned to question our own assumptions and preconceptions? If not, we're in trouble.

Our world is changing fast. We'll all make mistakes. We'll all say the wrong thing. We'll all need time to adjust to all these changes. But we have to be willing to think about things like this, rather than just defend the status quo or defend our missteps. Everything Americans once thought about age, gender, sexuality, race, body type, family, etc., all of it is up for grabs. That's why Head Over Heels is selling like wildfire. People need stories to make sense of their lives and the chaotic world around them. We have to be willing to embrace this change, not cower from it. 

And we must remember the words of Uncle Steve: "Careful the things you say -- children will listen."

It's a new world. And that's a good thing. And words matter.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott