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.