PROMENADE!

I'm a bit giddy.

Despite all the problems and troubles and obstacles of everyday life right now, I'm getting to fulfill a lifelong dream. I'm getting to work on a show that is a genuine legend of musical theatre, known by most musical theatre people only through its tragically incomplete cast album, because nobody ever produces it.

Flashback. When I arrived at college in 1982, I found out within a few days that the Harvard bookstore was called The Coop (short for The Harvard Cooperative Society), and it was a massive, multi-floor, two-building department store -- including the largest record department in New England!

When they told me that, I almost wet myself. My inner drama nerd swooned.

It was thanks to the Coop that I discovered March of the Falsettos, Little Shop of Horrors, The Baker's Wife, They're Playing Our Song, The Robber Bridegroom, Fiorello!, Celebration, The Threepenny Opera, Leonard Bernstein's Mass, Anyone Can Whistle and all the other Sondheim shows -- and Promenade.

Every time I bought a new cast recording, I listened to it obsessively for weeks. And then I discovered Boston had a bunch of excellent used record stores, and none of them knew how valuable their cast albums were. I was helpless to resist. When I graduated, I realized I had acquired an average of one hundred cast recordings per year while I was at college. When I graduated high school, I had one hundred cast albums; four years later I had five hundred. All on LP.

Promenade thrilled me when I first put it on the stereo. It was so playful and silly and really funny, and yet the lyrics had a weirdly dark, cynical edge to them. Who were these characters? I fell in love with the score, even though the recording is only about two-thirds of the show, even though I knew nothing about the show itself.

(One funny aside, in order to fit more songs on the LP, they sped all the songs up just a little, which made all the voices a little higher. I never even noticed until I listened to the CD and heard how it's supposed to sound.)

Years later, I found the Promenade script reprinted in a collection called Great Rock Musicals. (No offense to the collection's editor -- Promenade is many things, but it's not a rock musical.)

So I read the script. Twice. And I still had no fucking idea what was going on. But it was awfully funny! Plus, I reminded myself, I felt the same way about Hair the first time I read that script.

It wasn't until years later when I was writing theatre books, that I did further research into Promenade; and as a result, into the Cuban-American book and lyric writer María Irene Fornés, who was a major figure in Sixties theatre; into Theatre of the Absurd; into composer Al Carmines and the off off Broadway theatre he created, Judson Poets Theatre; and into the off off Broadway scene where Promenade was born.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to work on this show.

Year after year, as we talked about programming New Line's next season, Promenade was forever my personal Questing Beast. I knew we could never produce it because it was just too risky "commercially," but I really wanted to work on it. More than that, it was so outrageously, relentlessly special that I wanted to share it with people.

Then, about a year ago, as we planned this season, I called Chris Moore, our associate artistic director and told him it was time for Promenade. This show was initially about 1965 America when it debuted at the Judson Poets Theatre, and then it was expanded and became about a pretty different 1969 America when it opened off Broadway. But as it often is with great works of art, suddenly it felt, last year and still now, like Promenade is about America today.

Chris made the totally legit point that New Line is awfully wobbly financially right now, and that maybe we should be producing shows that we know will "sell" really well, instead of a lesser known 1969 experimental musical comedy with a strange title. He was absolutely right, of course. But if New Line can't do what it was meant to do, why bother? Every show in this season, Bat Boy, Broadway Noir Deux, Promenade, and We Will Rock You all speak to this moment -- regardless of when they were created. That's what New Line does.

A few months ago, our audiences were stunned at how much the twenty-five-year-old show Bat Boy seems like it's about America in 2025. A few months earlier, they were stunned by how the fifty-year-old Rocky Horror felt like it was written yesterday. You'll be even more stunned by Promenade for all the same reasons. But that's what New Line was created to do.

No, that's what theatre was created to do.

And surely the best way to look at the darkest aspects of our current zeitgeist is through humor. A spoonful of sugar, as they say. We have to face the darkness in order to understand it. But in the hands of Fornés and Carmines, that task is a little easier and a little less scary. And a lot funnier.

But trust me, though you'll laugh throughout the show, you'll be thinking about it afterward for a loooooong time. It's sneaky that way.

For most people, this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this brilliant, crazy, rule-changing, absurdist masterpiece of musical theatre. I know we say this a lot, but more than ever, there is nothing else remotely like this show. It scares the shit out of me as director! But we can't wait to share it with you!

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Promenade, click here.

P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here.

BROADWAY NOIR DEUX!

It won't surprise many people when I say that I often drive my collaborators crazy in various ways. For instance, when someone brings an idea to me, especially if it's not something I've thought about before, I need to take it in, then let it percolate. It swims around in the back of my head and at some point, I realize that it's either a great idea or a terrible idea. Sometimes the percolating takes minutes, sometimes weeks or even longer.

Por ejemplo...

It was two years ago, during the run of my seriously fucked-up Christmas musical, Jesus and Johnny Appleweed's Holy Rollin' Family Christmas, and I was spending a lot of time sitting in the lobby with Chris Moore, New Line's associate artistic director. And one night, Chris said, "We should do a show that's all black people singing the songs they never get to sing in shows."

Chris and I talk a lot about issues around race and representation in musical theatre. New Line has been assembling diverse casts for its entire history -- it's incredibly rare that a New Line show has an all-white cast. But as a middle-aged white dude on the cusp between the Boomers and Generation X, it's important to me that New Line never becomes middle-aged and that our cast and staff always look like our community.

That night, Chris' comment didn't get an immediate response from me, but it surely did start percolating...

After the show, Chris was standing in the aisle talking to some of our friends. I walked up to him and said, "You know, we've been doing these concerts at the Sheldon every few years. We should do your idea at the Sheldon!" We explained the idea to the others, and everybody thought it sounded great.

We toyed around with various titles, many of which were very funny but totally inappropriate. I can't remember for sure, but I think it was Chris who suggested we call it Broadway Noir. It was the perfect title. For me, using a French word evoked Josephine Baker, the black American singer and dancer who in the 1920s could only become a star in Paris. It also just sounded cool.

I decided that night that we would produce Broadway Noir at the Sheldon Concert Hall in January 2025. And totally out of character for me (still a recovering control freak), I told Chris that I would probably suggest things, songs, etc., but this was his concert. He curated the song list, and he directed the show. 

And people loved it. Despite an awful snow storm, the two performances drew nice big crowds. We saw a lot of our regular audience there, but also a lot of new people. And the reaction from everybody was so positive, that we decided to do a sequel and make this second one a part of our regular season, not just a special event.

Of course -- also at Chris' suggestion -- we called the sequel Broadway Noir Deux! (To be fair, I added the exclamation point. To me, it's both fierce and funny.) And once again, Chris has assembled the cast, directed the show, and curated the song list with the concert's music director Jermaine Manor.

The fun for me is threefold. First, I don't have to do any work on this! Second, I get to see actors who've done shows with us take on something really different. For instance, this time, DeAnté Bryant, who played Will in New Line's American Idiot, is taking on the  classic 1945 song, "If I Loved You," Rodgers and Hammerstein's soaring ballad of barely hidden emotion from Carousel. It couldn't be further from American Idiot. That's what's so cool about these concerts of ours.

Corrinna Redford played Mimi in Rent with New Line last season. I loved working with her. I loved watching her navigate the enormous range of intense emotions that Mimi suffers through. I also loved that sometimes she would come up to me and ask to change my blocking or direction, and she'd explain her reasoning behind the change -- and almost every time, her change made the moment or the scene better. She has killer instincts. In Broadway Noir Deux!, she jumps into something completely different, Jeanine Tesori's playful "Morning Person" from Shrek.

The incorrigible Kimmie Kidd played the outrageous, glamorous, hilarious French movie producer Liliane LeFleur in New Line's production of Nine. One of my favorite moments in the show was when Kimmie got to invoke LeFleur's Folies Bergeres performances. She was funny, naughty, sexy, and it was great fun working with her. In a stroke of genius, Chris has given Kimmie "Climb Every Mountain," from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music. It's oceans away from the playful carnality of Liliane LeFleur, and it will be such a treat to see it.

During our run of Rent, Chris and I had several conversations about how terrific Aaron Tucker was in the role of Benny. It was the first Rent I've seen in which Benny isn't a dick. He's just an adult. And let's be honest, Roger and Mark really are just slackers, right? This was the first time I liked Benny, and I understood more deeply his position, caught between his child-like friends and his desire to lead an adult life. After the scene with the homophobic pastor at the church, Benny and Tom exited with their arms around each other. I loved that. I am thrilled that in our concert, Aaron is going to sing "Johanna" from Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Aaron's got a beautiful voice!

Victoria Pines first worked with us way back in 2001 on the amazing 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock. She most recently worked with us in Sweet Potato Queens. She's an incredibly versatile, honest performer and her voice can pretty much do anything. In Sweet Potato Queens, she broke our hearts every night with "Cherries in the Snow." But in New Line's Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Victoria played Jewel and she brought the fucking house down every night with the joyous, raunchy "Twenty Four Hours of Lovin'." When Chris told me Victoria was going to sing Kander and Ebb's torchy "Maybe This Time" in the concert, I was thrilled. She will nail it.

I just met Ronmal Mottley a few months ago, as we started rehearsals for Bat Boy. He's new to our company, but he easily proved himself as both the loudmouth Mrs. Taylor and the nurturing Reverend Hightower. I remember calling him to cast him in Bat Boy, and I made sure he knew one of his roles would be in drag. Without a pause he said, "That's cool. I'm up for anything." Keep this guy around. He's also in both our upcoming shows, the weird but wonderful Promenade in March, and We Will Rock You in June. For Broadway Noir Deux!, Ronmal is singing Jason Robert Brown's gorgeous ballad, "Wondering," from The Bridges of Madison County. After the insanity of Bat Boy and the coming insanity of Promenade, it's so cool to give Ronmal a song like this.

Though I haven't worked with De-Rance Blaylock yet, I know she's a really great performer, and I LOVE that Chris has given her Sondheim's "The Ladies Who Lunch," from Company, one of the all-time great musical theatre character songs.

I haven't worked with the others in the cast, but I can't wait to hear them all. Chris and Jermaine did such a wonderful job last year, I know this year will be awesome too.

One of the reasons I love doing concerts of theatre songs at the Sheldon is that normally, people hear these songs in context, and they're thinking about story, sets, jokes, music. Concerts like this allow the songs to shine by themselves, to let us really listen to the lyrics. Most of us humans are primarily visually oriented, and if you give our brains a choice between visuals and some other sense, like hearing, the visuals will win the attention war. So for these concerts, we take everything else away. It's just the performers, the songs, and you.

Besides, the Sheldon is world-renowned for its acoustics. Singing there is a huge joy all its own. And when we can share wonderful theatre songs at the same time, it's doubly awesome.

And let's not forget the original reason for these Noir concerts. Though diversity in musical theatre casting is getting better and better over time, there are still lots of directors and others who can't imagine a black woman playing Sally Bowles, and can't imagine a black man playing Billy Bigelow or Anthony Hope. It's stupid. And these extraordinary local performers are the proof.

Join us this weekend at the Sheldon for Broadway Noir Deux! What could be better than sitting in an historic concert hall, listening to wonderful actors singing wonderful theatre songs? To me, that's pretty much heaven. And a great way to start the new year.

2026 just has to be better than 2025... right?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for Broadway Noir Deux!, click here.

P.P.S. To get tickets for the other shows in the season, click here.

P.P.P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here