I'm Andrew Fucking Jackson!

Sometimes our heroes are assholes.

One of the strangest elements of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (among many!) is its hilarious and revealing central metaphor -- our seventh President as a moody, self-involved, fourteen-year-old emo kid with anger management issues. And he's a cutter. He lives in a ridiculous comic world but he Takes Everything So Seriously. Jackson sings, "Life sucks! And my life sucks in particular!" Not exactly Presidential.

About halfway through the show, after losing his first election, Jackson as Emo Kid confides to the audience...

I'd like to tell you what I'm feeling right now. Because I'm feeling like this whole thing is really fucked and that it's really unfair and frankly it's starting to get on my nerves and it's also starting to hurt my feelings. And, you can say, whatever, that I've killed a lot of people, that I'm a cowboy or a murderer or even that I represent the national character of this country. Because I kind of do. But I'm also a person, a really sensitive person. And, I worked so, so hard for this shit. You saw me. You saw me out there. Campaigning and stuff. And, then to take it away, to take it away so egregiously -- well, it's just unfair and I don't know what else I need to tell you other than that. And I know you probably think I'm an asshole for saying it...

The same story is told in the show's text -- Jackson really was a self-aggrandizing prick in many ways for most of his life -- and also in the show's political subtext -- America passing from the growing pains of national "childhood" into the complexity and internal chaos of national puberty. Here in BBAJ, John Quincy Adams stands in for ineffectual father in Rebel Without a Cause, with Jackson as Jim Stark, the volatile proto-emo kid.

Or maybe he's the daughter in Beetlejuice...

But this is not some silly cartoon. We have several figures in American politics today who are likewise emotionally retarded adults, people like Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, John Edwards, Allen West, and George W. Bush, among others. It's a serious point BBAJ is making, and some of the show's regional productions haven't understood the ironic layer of uber-seriousness laid on top that both makes the show work and makes it so funny.

The first dialogue scene in the show, a quick romp through Jackson's childhood, seems silly and absurdist, but it does a lot of narrative heavy lifting. It sets up Jackson's origin story, so different from any other President so far and from the rest of America's politicians. It sets up Jackson's attitude about taking land, his hatred of Indians, and his anger management problems, here all inheritances from his father; as well as his emotional retardation, trapping him emotionally in early puberty (coincidentally, his age when his mother died, though his childhood is compressed in the show). This scene gets at a very serious point about those times and these, that while most children grow up in a world of discipline, obedience, and dependence, Jackson grew up in a world with none of those. His world was one of violence, chaos, and moral anarchy -- just as it is for many urban kids today. Jackson never got the guidance or the emotional support children need to develop properly. So he remains an emotional teenager, which is the central point of the show.

To further underline all this, we find Jackson quoting TLC's pop song, "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls" along with the YouTube meme "Boom goes the dynamite!" He's not just a perpetual teenager; he's also a social media user...!

Jackson admitted his shortcomings later in life, “offering examples of his explosive temperament, which in those days were often accompanied by a stream of obscenities and threats of violence,” according to Lynn Hudson Parsons’ excellent book The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828. Parsons describes Jackson as a young man: “According to one source, relocating outhouses was one of their major nocturnal occupations. Andrew Jackson was the most roaring, rollicking, game-cocking, horse-racing, card-playing, mischievous fellow that ever lived in Salisbury.” But he was also the American hero who beat back the British in The Battle of New Orleans -- owing in large part to those same personality traits. Parsons writes, “It was not a mere military triumph. The victory came to be symbolic of a young, vibrant America defeating an old, effete Europe.” Young, vibrant, yes, but also reckless and insubordinate.

In some ways, Jackson is another in a long line of musical theatre anti-heroes, like Billy Bigelow, Harold Hill, Joey Evans, Henry Higgins, Rob Gordon, and Macheath. Why are we drawn to anti-heroes? Because we are all anti-heroes at times. Because that's real. And because the anti-hero is a particularly potent symbol of our current zeitgeist. In these complicated, morally ambiguous times, we require complicated, fucked-up heroes, like Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan, Nancy Botwin, Walter White, and of course the return to the big screen of Bruce Wayne.

But this Jackson is also an anti-hero in that he won't follow the usual rules of narrative. The protagonist has to learn something over the course of his story, but Jackson gets only a glimpse at the kind of self-awareness most heroes achieve by the end of the story -- look at "Being Alive" in Company or "Till There Was You" in The Music Man or "Love Like That" in Passing Strange; and then look at the end of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. True, there is profound insight in the last song "Second Nature," but that's not Jackson's voice -- as we see from his commencement address at the end, he possesses very little self-knowledge and still fancies himself a creator of "equality" for all, despite his mass murder of Indians and ownership of black slaves. In some ways, Jackson's lack of growth in the story is as much a Fuck You to the rules of narrative as Jackson's actions themselves were a Fuck You to the Washington establishment. As Mr. Sondheim says, content dictates form.

But the character Andrew Jackson in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is not really the seventh President of the United States Andrew Jackson. Like Shakespeare did in all his Histories, Alex Timbers has created a fictional character that uses the real Jackson only as a starting place. The character in the show is more a theatrical metaphor, a view of the real Jackson in the form of an emo kid, because (Timbers and Friedman posit) Jackson and emo kids share certain personality traits and making this implicit connection reveals truths about Jackson. This show is less historical narrative than emotional narrative, once again of both Jackson and our nation.

Throughout the show, Jackson pouts, throws tantrums, yells obscenities, and breaks every promise he makes. Jackson is emotionally and morally retarded and he himself must go through the growing pains of American evolution as the nation figures out what it is, what its values are, what its responsibilities are. The country was still working through a lot of this (and perhaps we still are now). Jackson's hero myth becomes the nation's hero myth. Like an American Jesus, Jackson represents us and suffers alongside us, rejected by the Pharisees, but favored by God. As the literal embodiment of American populism, Jackson represents the American experiment and the American people, both literally and literarily. He is shut out of the power structure just as the majority of Americans were shut out. In the election of 1824, Jackson won the electoral vote -- the voice of the people -- but lost the election because the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams instead. (They had this power in this case because no candidate had gotten over 50% of the electoral college.) The common man -- in the person of Jackson -- was robbed of this voice.

Adams wrote on the issue of expanding voting rights, “Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state.” The horror! Poor people voting!!

But there's also a strong narrative reason writer Alex Timbers created his Jackson in this form. In addition to being a fucked-up history lesson and a sly commentary on today's political scene, the forward action of the show is Jackson's classic hero myth journey, going further and further up the ladder of power, ultimately to a point beyond his talents. Sure, he had a talent for leading people, he had a talent for ruthless violence, he had a talent for fearlessness, and he had charisma in spades; but none of those talents are enough to govern a nation. George W. Bush had all those same talents (yes, I'd argue, including the propensity toward horrific violence, just not in person), but many would argue Bush was ill-equipped for the office of President.

Like Luke Skywalker, Jackson must start his hero myth journey as an impetuous, willful kid, who must learn to grow up; but unlike Luke, Jackson doesn't have a wise wizard to guide him. Or a magic amulet. Or really, even any companions on his journey. He has none of the tools the hero needs to fulfill the hero myth. His life does suck in particular...

Jackson's great, tragic Shakespearen flaw is a lack of self-awareness. He blunders through his life like a bull in a china shop -- exaggerated in the show for effect, but rooted in truth. (When Jackson left the White House, he actually said to a reporter, “After eight years as President, I have only two regrets, that I have not shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun.”) Jackson's gut instincts serve him well both in battle and in early American politics, but not in governing. It's only at the end of the show that Jackson gains some self-knowledge, gets just a glimpse of the immense moral gray area his life has been, and he looks back, conflicted...

STORYTELLER: His historical legacy is a complicated one. Some believe he was the greatest President of the 19th century while others believe his tenure was forever tarnished by his forced relocation of countless tribes...
JACKSON: This is not helping right now.
STORYTELLER: ...and the subsequent "Trail of Tears" which resulted in the deaths of many thousands of Native Americans.
JACKSON: (quickly, sarcastic) Great. Great. Good to hear. (lashing out) You know, you're not supposed to know your legacy before you die!
STORYTELLER: Even today, there is still no historical consensus. In the past few years, numerous books and documentaries have raised the question of whether Jackson was"a great President" or whether he was in fact “a genocidal murderer,” “an American Hitler”...
JACKSON: Wow.

Notice the "lashing out" -- not an adult response, even here at the end of his life. Just before that scene, the band soloist sings "Second Nature," a very complex song about how America was born and what it would become, its mixture of greatness and darkness that directly parallels Jackson's own journey. The soloist sings:

And what was it for?
The swimming pools?
The highways?
The ballgames in the dusk, on the battle fields?
A time we were so foolish and so young
No no no no no no…
No no no…
The grass grows.
We take it.
We want it.
It's second nature to us.

That's pretty potent stuff -- We take it. We want it. It's second nature to us. That describes much of America's early history as well as much of Jackson's life. But it's a childish impulse to take whatever you want. It shows narcissism and a disturbing lack of empathy. There was considerable greatness in Jackson, just as there is considerable greatness in America, but the journey has not always been a pretty one.

Maybe the show's point is that our heroes don't come in capes and tights. Sometimes our heroes are assholes. But that doesn't negate the good -- even great -- things they do. Only children believe in fairy tales and people who are All Good or All Bad. A continent is not taken by good intentions, kind words, and good-faith negotiations. It's taken by force. It's taken by murder. It's taken by a religious fervor called Manifest Destiny. We Americans want to eat the steak but we don't want to see the cow being slaughtered. Like the Florida couple in the show, we may condemn the genocide of the Native Americans and Spanish in Florida and Jackson's infamous Trail of Tears, but none of us are lining up to give the land back. We may condemn slavery and those who advocated for it, but will we tear down all the buildings in the South built by slaves and all the family fortunes built on slave labor? We may protest war, but would we rather America had not fought the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War? We want our heroes simple and they never are. We want to like them and emulate them, but they're not always likable.

Sometimes it takes an asshole to get the job done.

The brilliant musical 1776 has a similar agenda, but BBAJ goes much further. Timbers and Michael Friedman chose as their hero a man who accomplished great things and moved our country forward in a meaningful way -- essentially giving birth to modern democracy -- and who was also an arguably unstable, grudge-holding, murderous hothead. Now that's something an actor can sink his teeth into.

The adventure continues. And I still cannot get "Corrupt Bargain" out of my head!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I'm Not That Guy

I saw the original production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson from the front row, right after it moved to Broadway – which was lucky for me because it closed pretty fast...

Literally from the first few seconds of the show – when the black-jeaned Jackson snarled to the audience, "I"m gonna stick it in you!" and then at one women in the front row, "Especially you!" –  I knew that this was without a doubt a New Line Show and that I really wanted to direct it. There have only been a few shows that hit me that hard, that fast. Bat Boy, Urinetown, A New Brain, but not too many others.

The material is brilliant, bookwriter Alex Timbers' direction was smart and original, and many in the cast were pitch-perfect. But I didn't love everything about the approach, and I knew our production would be different. I blogged about the show that night after I saw it on Broadway, and the only serious complaint I had was that some of the cast were performing a very self-aware, late-nite sketch comedy style, indulging in those anything-for-a-laugh antics that they think are a kind of hipster Brechtian alienation device. And I think that can kill a smart, well-crafted show like this. The legendary director George Abbott said, “If you play it for comedy, it won’t work. If you play it for real, it will.” A piece of theatre this original and this serious-minded (despite the surface wackiness) only gets richer with emotional engagement. Consciously subverting that, either for cheap laughs or artistic pretensions, just doesn't make sense.

William Ball writes in his brilliant book A Sense of Direction, "The director who approaches the script with the intention of making it funny will be seen by the audience in the very way we see a spoiled child who leaps about, flops on the floor, stretches his eyes, pulls his lips, waves peculiar objects -- one may feel impelled to slap him silly as an arrogant, insensitive, nonparticipating, egotistical boor, whose interest lies merely in capturing our attention with no intent to fulfill our needs. We must never get caught trying to be funny!"

And because some in the original BBAJ cast were really great actors, they couldn't help but deliver richer performances. Benjamin Walker in the lead was damaged, sexy-as-shit, fucked-up perfection. His performance put me in mind of a couple other brilliant seriocomic performances that likewise seemed just perfect – Deven May in Bat Boy and Hunter Foster in Urinetown. All three shows are acting tightropes and all three men fully inhabited the characters and universes and weird styles of their respective shows.

BBAJ is a show so smart and so well-crafted that directors and actors just need to trust the material and follow the path the creators laid out for us. More than that ruptures the quirky alternative universe Timbers and composer Michael Friedman have created. I love sketch comedy but sketch comedy is about getting laughs; theatre is about telling a story. They're really different forms. Each one can inform the other, but they have opposing agendas. There is far more to storytelling – even funny storytelling – than laughs.

So we'll follow what I think of as the Bat Boy Rules – the philosophy articulated by one of the Bat Boy creators at the Actors' Gang in Los Angeles, where Bat Boy first premiered. Director and co-author Keythe Farley developed what his co-author Brian Flemming likes to call the “take-it-so-seriously-it's-funny-but-it-also-hurts” style of comedy. Farley’s mantra throughout the development process was “the height of expression, the depth of sincerity,” and that has become my my favorite style of comedy, easily applicable to shows as diverse as The Rocky Horror Show, Anyone Can Whistle, Urinetown, Return to the Forbidden Planet, and Cry-Baby. The canvas is bigger, the colors richer, the brushstrokes more expansive, but the image is no less true, the details no less real, the textures no less subtle. It's a style of truthful acting that marks all the work at the Actors’ Gang – and much of the work at New Line.

It's a style tailor-made for the neo musical comedy. But the key is truthful acting. It's not just about laughs or exaggeration or vulgarity. It's about telling the truth in an extreme style. From the first rehearsal of BBAJ, I told the actors they couldn't use any funny voices or physical humor unless it comes from character. The first priority here is telling a good story and getting the audience emotionally involved in Jackson's wild life adventure; getting laughs is secondary. And particularly with BBAJ, the laughs really will take care of themselves.

I think we can always learn a lot from a show's original production, especially in this case because bookwriter Alex Timbers was also the original director, but we also have to be aware of two important caveats. First, there's never only one best way to stage any show (okay, there might be a handful of exceptions, but not many). I learned long ago that it's silly searching for the "right" answer to every piece of staging because there is no right answer. There's only your answer and somebody else's answer, and maybe both are valid and both are brilliant, and they're nothing like each other. That's not scary; that's cool. We theatre artists tend to forget that and give ourselves less credit and power than we deserve.

Second, almost any show produced in a commercial venue will be scarred with artistic compromises. I've heard so many stories from musical theatre writers in New York about certain choices imposed on them by producers and in some cases, explicit demands to Dumb It Down. I can think of at least three shows for which I believe New Line's production was closer to the writers' intent than the original New York production was. I won't say which ones because I'm not supposed to repeat those stories...

As much as I fell in love with BBAJ when I saw it, I think my answers may be a little different. Here's an example, a mini-scene early in the show in which Jackson's parents die...

ELIZABETH: (claps her hands, cheery) So, I've got an idea! Why don't we go down to the crick and gather some – (she stops midsentence, eyes roll back, blood oozes from her mouth.)
      (THWING! Suddenly an arrow whisks through the window and hits Andrew's mother in the back.)
COBBLER: Holy Christ!
JACKSON: Mother!
ANDREW SENIOR: Elizabeth! (She falls forward dead. Andrew Senior rushes to her side.) The cholera finally got to her, son. It's too much. (bursts into tears) It's TOO MUCH!
      (THWING! The Cobbler falls forward.)
COBBLER: Son of a –
ANDREW SENIOR: Mother and Mary!
JACKSON: Cholera, daddy?
ANDREW SENIOR: No, no, son. That's the work of injuns!
JACKSON: Injuns?
ANDREW SENIOR: (suddenly with great urgency, grabbing a musket, kneeling next to his son, hand on his shoulder) Why we're gonna beat 'em back like the British, we're gonna drive 'em out like the Spaniards. 'Cuz don't you ever forget, young Andrew Jackson: this is our land. And even the land that isn't our land is the land that shall be our land, so pick up a GOD-damn rifle and make those land-grabbin' Injuns bleed! All of'em! BLEED! (Suddenly, THWING! and he falls flat forward. Arrow in the back, head into the stew. Young Jackson looks at him quietly.)
JACKSON: Mommy? Daddy?

Now, first let's stipulate that's pretty hilarious. But the storytelling is iffy. When I saw the show, knowing almost nothing about Jackson, I thought the Indians had killed his family and that's why Jackson had this lifelong hatred for Indians. I wasn't exactly sure if the running cholera joke (now there's a phrase!) was to make the characters look ignorant or just silly or...?

As I read about Jackson and watched documentaries, I discovered that, no, Jackson's mother did die of cholera and his father died in an accident before he was born. So now I really didn't get the running arrow-in-the-back joke. And I realized I had been totally confused as an audience member when I saw the show on Broadway. So I've been thinking about this scene a lot. I don't want to keep the arrow joke if it's just a cheap gag and it gets in the way of clear storytelling. Storytelling outranks laughs. Or is there something here I'm missing...? I have a feeling this may be one of those things that the original cast came up with in rehearsal, everybody laughed, and so it stayed in the show. I know there are a lot of moments in Bat Boy like that. But if that's the only thing behind it, I don't like it and I don't feel compelled to use it...

After all, I think it's also darkly funny if everybody around Jackson is dying of cholera and then his father says, "That's the work of injuns!" Then Jackson's lifelong hatred of Indians is born entirely of irrational racism – which is how it really was. I think that's also more interesting dramatically because it says something about contemporary racism in a subtle, almost subliminal way, very much the way the rest of the show does.

So I can have truthful, interesting, and funny, or I can have funny. Hmmmmm.

If the arrow gags are there just to function as a funny, slightly shocking way of showing us the frontier was dangerous, the same gag is repeated later, so that concept won't get lost. I haven't decided absolutely positively, but I think we're gonna go without the arrow gags in the family scene. We'll see how it goes. I think the scene will still both be funny and move the plot forward. If it doesn't work my way, we'll try something else. I think it's healthy that I always wrestle with any deviation from what I know about the writers' original intent – they know the show best – but they aren't the only artists working here. A show isn't theatre on the page. Still, the wrestling keeps me from going off in another direction unless I'm pretty damn sure I know what I'm doing.

I loved the original production and laughed my ass off, but I still prefer New Line's darker, more "serious" style of comedy – more straight-faced, more deceptively subtle – and I know our style fits BBAJ like a leather glove. With studs. Even if it's not how Alex Timbers directed it.

Of course, all of this would go without saying if we were talking about King Lear, The Cherry Orchard, or any other play without music. But a lot of people feel differently about musicals. For some reason, so many directors imitate as slavishly as possible the original productions of shows they direct – in high schools and colleges (which I can understand to some extent), in community theatres, in small professional theatre, in major union theatres, and on Broadway. Part of that is about laziness and/or lack of talent. Part of it is that videos of many famous musicals are readily available and that's just too tempting to pass up (I guess that goes along with the laziness). But part of it is Fear – fear of the adventure, fear of the near miss, fear of Being Found Out. (Bob Fosse, a genuine genius of the theatre, once said that he had a lifelong fear that people were going to find out he wasn't as good as they thought he was. Wow.)

I fought and beat that fear a long while ago. I just do the best work I can, and people like it or they don't. The stakes really aren't that high. Sure, if people hated everything I did, New Line would go out of business, and that would suck. But I stick to what Sondheim says – he doesn't worry if someone likes his show or not, only if he's been clear or not in what he has said. Clarity of storytelling is job one. And also jobs two and three. If the writing is good, the laughs will take care of themselves.

I love Alex Timbers' work, both as writer and director – I also saw Pee-Wee Herman on Broadway, which Timbers directed brilliantly – but the fact is I'm Not That Guy. And our cast is not that cast. Our show will be different from the original. I can't wait to see it take shape. It will be a truly collaborative creation. And it's gonna be a wild, funny ride!

And if anybody can explain to me the narrative value in the arrow gags, I'll happily put them back.

I love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

An after-thought... It's always very hard for me to switch gears from one show to the next. I really live inside a show while I'm working on it and I'm never eager to leave (unless it's really depressing). I realized tonight while writing this blog that I'm finally done with High Fidelity, truly one of my favorite shows ever, but I'm done. I've never actually "caught" that gear change before...

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

When I first saw Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson in New York, one of the things that struck me about it was how perfect that moment in history was for drama -- so many powerful, quirky, multi-agenda'd egotists (Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, JQ Adams, and others) at the center of this really high-stakes story, and such a volatile, chaotic context, as America found itself in the midst of massive, fundamental change.

Almost exactly like the political and social zeitgeist of 2012.

It's all true and it's also all so Shakespearean. Such gigantic stakes, such dangerous times, such powerful forces, such profound tragic character flaws, so many shadows. It's not hard to see the movers and shakers of the Jacksonian Era mirroring the political figures in Macbeth or Coriolanus or Richard III. I bet if Shakespeare were still alive, he'd have written a Jackson play.

It was a wild time in America. If 1776 was the birth of our country, then the election of 1828 must've been when we hit puberty, complete with all the chaos and growing pains that go with that period. As a country we were becoming a moody, needy, crazy, difficult, id-driven teenager writ large. What language could tell that story better than rock and roll? But Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson also tells the parallel story of the emotional and moral maturing of Jackson himself. His story follows the classic hero myth, alongside Luke Skywalker, Dorothy Gale, Rob Gordon, and Janet Weiss.

But even beyond the tumult of the times, Andrew Jackson is the Rorschach Test of Americans Presidents, so complicated and contradictory that almost everyone can find something in him that resonates. And despite the distance of a couple hundred years, his story is fundamentally in tune with the special character of the American rock musical in the 21st century – muscle, passion, emotion, irony, aggression, politics, roughness, rawness, ambiguity, authenticity, and a dash of anarchy.

Jackson was equal parts Barack Obama (charismatic populist, anti-corporatist, and intrinsically American success story), John McCain (crusty war hero Libertarian), Sarah Palin (loud, clumsy outsider), and George W. Bush (cocky, loyal, charming, and anti-intellectualist). Jackson's first biographer James Parton wrote, “Andrew Jackson, I am given to understand, was a patriot and a traitor. He was one of the greatest of generals, and wholly ignorant of the art of war. A writer brilliant, elegant, eloquent, without being able to compose a correct sentence, or spell words of four syllables. The first of statesmen, he never devised, he never framed a measure. He was the most candid of men, and was capable of the profoundest dissimulation. A most law-defying, law-obeying citizen. A stickler for discipline, he never hesitated to disobey his superior. A democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint.”

A PBS documentary about Jackson contains the following list of chapters: The Wild Young Man, The War Hero, The Slave Master, The Candidate, The First Imperial President, The Defender of the Union, The Great White Father, and The Prophet. (The Great White Father became an ironic nickname when he expelled all the Native Americans from their lands, i.e., The Trail of Tears.) Jackson was all of those things. And his life spanned an amazing time in the American Experiment. He fought in the Revolution, he won the deciding battle of the War of 1812, and he presided over the birth of modern democracy, modern capitalism, and the early dawn of the Second Industrial Age, altogether one of the most tumultuous times in our history.

His election in 1828 was the first Presidential campaign decided by popular vote, the first grassroots Get Out the Vote effort, the first overtly public campaign for President, the birth of the Democratic Party, and according to Presidential historians, the dirtiest campaign in U.S. history. (The urban Northerners depicted Jackson and the Democrats in cartoons as a donkey, a stupid beast of burden; but to voters in rural areas and on the frontier, a donkey was dependable, strong, necessary for survival. So the Democrats adopted it as their party symbol.)

And Jackson's presidency brought to the forefront for the first time many of the issues we still fight over today, including states’ rights and nullification, secession, separation of powers, the expansion of executive power, fiercely divided politics, new mass media (lithography and the steam-powered printing press), and lots more. The Jacksonian Era grappled with one of the Great Debates in our history: Who is sovereign – the federal government, the states, or the People? That’s a question being asked in our courts today, over the Affordable Care Act, gay marriage, voter ID laws, abortion restrictions, and so much more.

Even gay marriage and gay rights are subliminally invoked here because Martin Van Buren is written as an openly gay man in the show. The real Van Buren was widowed at age thirty-five and never remarried -- one of our very few "bachelor" Presidents -- so some historians have speculated that he might well have been gay. By bringing that to the fore, the show again connects those times to these and gets some laughs in the process. The laughs come both from the anachronism -- Van Buren could never have been openly gay at the time -- and the homophobic attitudes of the other politicians toward him, which unfortunately is only partly anachronistic...

Because Jackson was the first President elected by popular vote – and in a landslide – the Jacksonian Era (the only era in American history named for a person) was a difficult time for our country. Just as our extreme political hostility today in this new century is born of a genuinely divided culture, so too was Jackson’s world. And to dramatize all this tumult and complexity for a modern audience – and perhaps to teach us some lessons for our times – Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman have created a rock musical in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that thoroughly captures those people and those times in contemporary terms, and the show’s angry, cocky, ironic, rock and roll aesthetic captures even more so that era’s emotional zeitgeist, freakishly like our own today.

Why didn't the show last longer than fifteen weeks on Broadway? Too aggressive? Maybe. Too political? Could be. Too self-indulgent? Possibly. Too morally complex? Probably. Too downtown rock and roll? Most likely. Too dark? Almost certainly. Too obscene? Yes. Too honest about America? Absolutely.

Helpful hint: People paying $140 a ticket don't like to be told they're shallow and fickle.

I think the show would have lasted longer had it stayed off Broadway. After all, the score is incredibly sophisticated and complex and the script is smart, dark, and emotional. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is a sterling example of what I call the neo musical comedy -- sort of like Mame crossed with The Colbert Report. But like The Colbert Report, the neo musical comedy is not comforting -- it's confrontational. We already know New Line audiences enjoy that kind of ride, but I don't think most tourists at a Broadway show probably do. I can just imagine a young family seeing Wicked and then Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. They'd all end up with PTSD.

A new adventure -- and a new Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson -- begins!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Intersection Between Star Trek and Musical Theatre

I've been thinking a lot the past few years about my early artistic influences. I guess I'm at that point in my life where I feel I'm pretty good at what I do and I think I've developed my own personal aesthetic (maybe that's not the right word) or style (not exactly right either).

And that makes me think sometimes (like when I'm baked) about how I got here from there. Artistically speaking.

Kinda Like Frank Shepard in Merrily We Roll Along:

How did you get there from here, Mr Shepard?
What did you have to go through?
How did you get there from here, Mr. Shepard?
How did you get to be you?

I've already blogged about some of my early influences – working at The Muny, a live encyclopedia of musical theatre for me to study for eight years; seeing Grease and Rocky Horror as a teenager, the two films that changed everything I thought I knew about musicals; seeing The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway, discovering Cop Rock...

But I realize now that one of the biggest influences on who I am now was the original Star Trek. I was too young to watch it when it was first broadcast, but I watched it in syndication for years, seeing every episode many times. One of my strongest memories of childhood is in the summertime when my mother would be getting home from the grocery store just as Star Trek came on; so when they were in season, I ate about a pound of green grapes every Saturday afternoon watching Star Trek.

Only musicals can make me happier than that.

One of the things that I think connected me so powerfully was the very essence of Star Trek, even though I was too young to consciously register it – that Star Trek was a show about politics and sociology and that it traded in unabashed optimism about the human race. Like many of the greatest works of science fiction, the science/future stuff allowed a distance and a mask that gave Star Trek virtually unlimited freedom to talk about the issues of the day. Gene Roddenberry, the true genius behind Star Trek, addressed racism, the industrial-war complex, the hippie movement, nuclear weapons, government overreach, unjust wars, terrorism, environmentalism, and so many other issues, and he got away with it, even in the explosive 1960s, because the stories were set hundreds of years in the future.

I find much the same is true with musicals. The presence of the inherently joyful act of singing, and the ridiculously artificial act of actually breaking into song, give an audience a little intellectual distance – exactly the effect Bertolt Brecht advocated – that allows them to spend some time with people or issues they might otherwise avoid. I mean, who would ever want to really be in the same room with Sweeney Todd or the teen murderers of Love Kills? But the unreality of musical theatre makes it okay.

I can see now that New Line has a philosophy almost identical to the philosophy of Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek (which is not really a surprise to me, now that I think about it) both cynical and idealistic, serious and funny (and often both at once), intellectual and very big-hearted, and profoundly aware of the power and importance of storytelling.

And Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is both one of the most entertaining shows we've ever worked on and one of the most political. After all, it's a story specifically about politics. And just as Roddenberry addressed current issues by setting them a few hundred years into the future, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson addresses our current political and policy challenges by setting them a couple hundred years in the past. But there's no mistaking what the show's creators Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman are talking about. They're talking about Us. Here. Now.

Timbers and Friedman have held up a fun house mirror to our current political climate and it just happens to look a whole lot like the politics of 1828. As Mark Twain said, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Yeah, no shit.

At New Line, we believe in the theory that all great entertainment, all great art should contain three important elements – poetry, popcorn, and politics. In other words, it must be good art, it must be entertaining, and it must be about something of import. Otherwise, why bother? BBAJ (as we theatre folk call the show) gets an A+ in all three categories

Acting guru Stella Adler once said, "Unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger – better – do not act." Actor Ben Kingsley has said about actors, "The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you." And not just recognizing themselves individually, but also collectively, as a society.

In 2010, President Obama hosted an evening of Broadway music at the White House (and how fucking awesome is that!), and he said, "In many ways, the story of Broadway is intertwined with the story if America. Some of the greatest singers and songwriters Broadway has ever known came to this country on a boat with nothing more than an idea in their head and a song in their heart. And they succeeded the same way that so many immigrants have succeeded – through talent and hard work and sheer determination. Over the years, musicals have been at the forefront of our social consciousness, challenging stereotypes, shaping our opinions about race and religion, death and disease, power and politics."

Exactly.

The real final frontier is the dangerous but fascinating terrain of the human heart and mind. That's where the adventure lies. Just ask Luke Skywalker or Rob Gordon.

Working on Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is going to be such a gift. I can't wait to see what this cast of incredibly talented character actors and comedians are going to bring to this brilliant, ballsy, thrilling piece of political theatre.

The adventure begins. Again.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Cop Rock

Never was a television show more unfairly maligned than Cop Rock, the 1990 musical cop drama. It's now on nearly every list you'll ever find of Bad TV Shows. And it doesn't belong there. Sure, sometimes its songs didn't totally work, but series creator Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, LA Law, NYPD Blue) was making something truly new, a weekly musical drama series. It had never been done before. Or since. Until Smash.

I started thinking about Cop Rock again when I was creating New Line's very cool (if I do say so myself) YouTube History of Musical Theatre (in two parts, 1904-2000 and 2001-present), using about 250 YouTube videos to chronicle the history of the art form, so now students (and people like me) can actually see these classic performances that we could only read about before. And I thought I ought to include a couple clips from Cop Rock. I had taped most of the episodes and had transferred them to DVD, but I was missing a few. So I went online and found someone who was selling the whole series on DVD (recorded off of TV). When I watched it again, I remembered why I loved it so much.

When Cop Rock debuted, people laughed at the very premise of the show, but it really wasn't a bad idea. After all, in 1990 we had already seen Sweeney Todd, Little Shop of Horrors, and Assassins. We already knew that musicals could handle any subject matter.

So what was the big deal?

Young writers often ask me how to know if a story would make a good musical. I tell them the measure is whether or not the story is primarily about emotion (usually love, but also other emotions). If it is, it can be a musical; if not, it shouldn't be. Because music is an abstract language, it conveys emotions better than words can. But I don't agree with the old Rodgers & Hammerstein rule that when emotions become "too big for words," then the character breaks into song. That negates much of modern musical theatre. They don't have to be big emotions -- just emotions. Like confusion and fear of rejection in "Barcelona" in Company, or unease in "A Weekend in the Country" in A Little Night Music, or scapegoating (and fear of the Other) in "Another Dead Cow" in Bat Boy, or steely resolve in "The Gun Song" in Assassins.  Even when our lives get lonely or boring, we still have emotion -- after all, "It's Hot Up Here" in Sunday in the Park with George is about boredom, and "The Last Real Record Store on Earth" in High Fidelity is about stagnation...

Why is prime time TV always bursting with cop shows and medical shows? Because the emotional stakes are so high -- literally life and death. And that's the same reason why a cop show should be a musical. Here's the first song in the first episode of Cop Rock. Not only are these intense emotions, they're also emotions we never see represented in musicals...



I remember being thrilled by this as a 26-year-old musical theatre lover. And then just a few months later, I couldn't believe the show was being canceled after only eleven episodes. The story goes that ABC went to Bochco and said they didn't like the show and if he would turn it into a normal cop drama, he could keep it on the air, but if it stayed a musical, they would cancel it. Apparently, he told them to fuck off and he finished the series his way.

What went wrong? Well, on top of the fact that it was a musical TV police drama (which probably would have been enough), it was obvious, even at the time, that the grind of essentially cranking out a new one-act rock musical every week made it tough to keep the quality consistent. Randy Newman couldn't write all those songs -- but imagine if he had. So over those eleven episodes, a few of the songs fell flat, some were more amateurish lyrically than they should have been, a little heavy on cliche, but so many of the songs were really outstanding and original, and remarkably true to character. And they were all in the musical language of that moment in America.

With 20/20 hindsight, I wonder if it would have helped to use more underscoring, under dialogue and leading into and out of songs the way film musicals do. After all, cop movies use underscoring, even if Bochco's naturalistic cop shows didn't. And I think that would have helped the songs flow more naturally in and out of dialogue, and it would have made the songs seem less sore-thumby for viewers who don't see many musicals. Bochco made the mistake (like Rodgers & Hammerstein did before him) of thinking musicals can be naturalistic. They can't.

This next clip is maybe the best song of the series, the "finale," so to speak, of the first episode. The set up is that this heroin addict is arrested in the opening drug bust and a female cop helps get her released and helps her get her baby back. In the final moments of the episode, when we think all the threads are tried up, we get this...



Notice how Rodgers & Hammerstein this is. Hundreds of American theatre songs have an instrumental section in the middle which underscores either dialogue or action, and then the character sings one more verse. And scene. In the best theatre songs, that dialogue in the middle alters the circumstances, which alters the meaning of the lyric when it's repeated in the last verse, bringing ambiguity or irony to the ideas in the first part of the song. Here, the first verses are darkly ironic to begin with, but the last verse adds even more irony on top of that. Randy Newman's writing here is every bit as good, as artful, as complicated as the best stage musicals. This song later found its way into a similar situation in Newman's stage musical Faust (which also was unfairly maligned), only this time the action in the middle was the singer drowning her baby. Nice, huh?

Unfortunately, Cop Rock has never been released on DVD or even on VHS. I have to wonder, in this age of the New American Musical, in this age of American Idiot, Next to Normal, and Love Kills, if Cop Rock might be better received. And I admit it, I'd love to turn the first few episodes into a stage musical...!

People dismissed Cop Rock the same way they dismissed High Fidelity and bare -- without any rational thought, often without even seeing it. There was a hostility to the show that baffled me. What were people so upset about? Why did it bother them so deeply? Why did people feel compelled to reassure their friends that they thought Cop Rock was shitty? It wasn't. Even with its admitted flaws, it was better than much of what is put on television. And it foreshadowed an increasing use of musical numbers in other TV shows, like Allie McBeal, The Drew Carey Show, The Simpsons, South Park, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and others. Today, with both Glee and Smash on the air, might Cop Rock do better...? It's hard to know.

I know a big part of the reluctance to accept Cop Rock was a general bias against musicals in general (which may be getting better now, thanks to Glee and Smash), a mindset that New Line Theatre was founded (just a year after Cop Rock) to combat. Maybe subconsciously Cop Rock gave me the vision to create New Line, to focus exclusively on issue-driven musical theatre. Watching that show was certainly one of those seminal moments in my life (like seeing Grease, Rocky Horror, Hair, and The Fantasticks for the first time) when everything I thought I knew about my art form was challenged. These are the moments that shaped me as an artist and also that shaped New Line Theatre. And Cop Rock was a part of that.

I'll leave you with one more...


As in many of the series' musical numbers, here Cop Rock becomes a meta-musical. From the moment the court clerk's desk opens to reveal a rock organ, this number is commenting on itself, on Cop Rock, and on the conventions of musicals. While "Sandman" works like a Rodgers & Hammerstein song, "He's Guilty" works more like a musical comedy song. Reality is suspended (usually without explanation, other than that this is a musical). A contemporary audience accepts this in an ironic way -- they recognize both the absurdity of it and the fact that the show is operating in the audience's reality as much as in its own reality. It's incredibly Brechtian. That's something Rodgers & Hammerstein shows (or the "well-made play" model that R&H fetishized) never did. (Okay, purists, yes, R&H's show Allegro was more experimental, but it was also bad, it was a flop, and it's the exception that proves the rule. So there.)

But "He's Guilty" also makes another commentary, this one outward rather than inward, literally turning our justice system into show business. A trial is theatre, after all. Just as the two attorneys have put on "performances" for the jury, just as the defendant has "performed" his innocence, now too his sentence -- his fate (talk about high stakes!) -- will be a performance too. It's about surface versus reality. It's about the manipulation of the system, about the lie of impartiality. And it too is very Brechtian.

I've been writing a lot lately about the Neo Rock Musical (Next to Normal, American Idiot, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, bare, Love Kills) and the Neo Musical Comedy (Bat Boy, Urinetown, Lysistrata Jones, Bukowsical), and these Cop Rock clips are three great early examples. Now that rock is the primary language of the American musical, hip-hop is also finally becoming a legitimate language in musical theatre (Bomb-itty of Errors, Lysistrata Jones) -- but Cop Rock and "We Got the Power" were already there twenty-two years ago. The Neo Rock Musical usually follows (generally speaking) the R&H rules, but with a great deal more irony, and (obviously) using the vocabulary of pop and rock -- exactly like "Sandman" does. And any Neo Musical Comedy character would be at home in "He's Guilty" -- the height of expression, the depth of sincerity, as the Bat Boy writers would put it. In other words, stylistically outrageous, but utterly honest emotionally.

Cop Rock wasn't just ahead of network TV; it was ahead of the musical theatre. You gotta love this shit!

Long Live the Musical! Even on TV!
Scott

P.S. In the process of writing this blog, I was looking for Cop Rock clips on YouTube and found quite a few. So I've collected them into a Cop Rock Playlist on New Line's YouTube channel.

I Went Where the Music Took Me

We've closed High Fidelity and said goodbye to Rob and his friends at Championship Vinyl. I will miss this show so much. It's a remarkable piece of writing, so honest, so funny, so powerfully emotional. One of the reasons the show is so personally powerful to me is that I see Championship Vinyl as an only thinly veiled stand-in for New Line Theatre. I know that's not what David, Amanda, and Tom were thinking when they wrote the show, but they still got it exactly right.

But that's not the only reason I think the show is brilliant and will someday be recognized as one of the greatest works of the American musical theatre in this new millennium. The other reason -- maybe the main reason -- is that the High Fidelity writing team understood that storytelling comes before everything else. You want to connect with me? Tell me a great story. I think there is no more profound human development than storytelling -- it's how we try to understand ourselves and our world, how we record our history, how we grapple with the toughest issues of our times, how we examine what's good and not so good about our culture, how we impart important lessons about life and about living together in a civilized society.

As I have said in this forum before, we storytellers are the tribe shamans, the intermediaries between the natural and spiritual worlds. That's a powerful responsibility.

I was watching Meet the Press last week and realized something really interesting. For those of you who don't know me well, I'm a total political junkie. I watch at least a couple hours a day of cable news political shows (more when I have the time). Strangely enough, I'm an odd mix of cynic and dreamer, so the more I watch C-Span (and I watch it a lot), the more I love our country and our form of government. People think our government can't work anymore, but the truth is we have a really complex and really big and really varied country, so it's always going to be difficult to run it. Right now our country is irreconcilably split, so it follows logically that our representative Congress is too.

And still, I'm continually impressed at how seriously (most of) our elected officials take their jobs and how seriously they try to make our country a better place, even if I may disagree with them on how to do that. (Sure, some in Congress are opportunists and con artists -- I'm lookin' at you, Darrell Issa -- but really very few.) I think the biggest part of why I love politics is that I love people. I love watching the continuous creation and recreation of our civilization and culture, especially from inside this greatest of all human experiments, American democracy. We are an astonishing species.

But I digress.

So I'm watching Meet the Press and the host David Gregory asks the pundits what President Obama has to do to win the Presidential race. And several of them said, Tell the story. In terms of the economy, for example, make it clear what happened, what we're doing about it, and what we need to do going forward. In other words, give us a beginning, middle, and end, such that we will understand something we didn't before. Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said that people need a story to understand complicated issues.

And that hit me like a lightning bolt -- that's why theatre has always been fundamental to human culture, why all storytelling is. It's how we humans best take in information because we use multiple parts of our brain in processing the story -- especially if it involves music, because music is an abstract language which conveys emotion far more powerfully than words can, and that emotional power can make quite an unforgettable imprint on an audience. Also, because of the different functions of the left and right brain, most people find it easier to remember things if they're set to music. It's why Schoolhouse Rock works and commercial jingles. It's why we remember so many song lyrics. Historically, most storytelling included music. Only in the last couple hundred years was theatre ever divorced from music. Musical theatre is the theatre's natural state; theatre that lacks music is the anomaly.

But I digress again. Shit. Sorry.

So this need for storytelling, for context, is why we pass down important information in the form of fables and fairy tales and Bible stories, novels and films, plays and musicals. It's why Jesus taught his disciples through the use of parables.

Just tell the story.

There's a great scene in Tim Robbins' film Cradle Will Rock (if you haven't seen it, put it in your Netflix queue now!), in which the staff of the Federal Theatre Project debates the power and perceived danger of art, and they point out that most of what we know of English history, we know from Shakespeare. Except a lot of that is wrong. Shakespeare wasn't trying to get at historical authenticity; he was working toward emotional and psychological authenticity. Facts and truth aren't always the same thing. But today, most of us only know Shakespeare's versions of these events. No wonder the people in power are always afraid of the artists. Especially the fearless artists. We have Power. New Line Theatre has the dubious honor of having had opening night of our 2007 show Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll shut down by a court injunction requested by the Archbishop of St. Louis! They feared us and our art! Pretty fucking cool, no...?

And all this is why audience responded so powerfully to High Fidelity. This is a story that delves into some of the darker corners of human emotion and relationships, a corner where most people try never to go. But everyone who saw Hi-Fi recognized quickly the profound truthfulness in Rob's story. People hurt each other. And most of us never really understand why. High Fidelity tries to get at that why. Late in Act I, before Rob tells us the story of why Laura left him, he makes a request of the audience...

I bet you’re wondering why I’m an asshole. Well, you wouldn’t be the first. I suspect that Laura finally broke down and told Liz what happened. It was inevitable, I guess.
      (sighs – this is hard)
Okay, before we do this, I need you to do me a favor. Just take a minute and think about the top five worst things that you have done to your partner.
      (he waits)
Don't dress things up or try to explain them, just live with them for a moment.
      (beat)
Especially if your partner doesn't know about them.
      (beat)
Got ‘em? Good. Now remember that, and try not to judge me too harshly.

It's a brilliant moment for two reasons. First, it pulls the audience so directly, actively into the moment, in a way that theatre only rarely does. But second, everyone in the audience realizes in this moment that as much as we think Rob is a big dick, we're all Rob now and then. All of us have had to learn how to see beyond ourselves, to be aware of the consequences of our actions (the point of Stephen Sondheim's "No One is Alone"), to think about other people's feelings, not just our own. Some of us learn that as teenagers, most as young adults, some much later, a few never... Late in Act II, Rob tells us, "I've started to make a tape in my head for Laura. Full of stuff she’d like. Full of stuff that’d make her happy. For the first time, I can sorta see how that’s done." In the dialogue I quoted above from Act I, Rob forces self-awareness onto the audience, as he stumbles and struggles to find his way to his own self-awareness. And that act pulls the audience much more powerfully into his journey of self-discovery, because now the audience sees that it's everybody's journey of self-discovery, including their own.

Sure, the songs in High Fidelity are amazing and the dialogue is brilliant, but it's the storytelling that raises it above most other musicals. The original novelist Nick Hornby gets some of that credit, but the show's writing team created a new animal when they adapted this story. I don't know how much was calculation and how much was instinct, but the end product is a real masterpiece of the new rock musical.

It was an incredible honor for us to be the people who brought the show back to life in 2008, but it has been one of the greatest thrills of my life to return to it this season. Honest to god. I think Hi-Fi has replaced both Hair and Bat Boy as my all-time favorite show. It's really that good.

I want to thank everyone who came to see us and share this beautiful story with us over the last four weeks, this cast full of amazing actors with killer voices, our outstanding band, and our smart, insightful designers. What a trip it's been. There are some awesome projects ahead for us -- Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Next to Normal, Bukowsical, and others even farther out in the future -- but I'm going to miss Hi-Fi for a long time. A very long time.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Gonna Take Control and Rock Your Soul

It's been so amazing working on High Fidelity again, and seeing again up-clsoe the depth of artistry and seriousness of craft beneath what the original Broadway production team thought was just a standard musical comedy. And it's got me thinking again about the rock musical and the way our art form is changing.

I think about this stuff a lot. Page back through my blog and you'll see what I mean...

Nine years ago, when we were working on Bat Boy the first time, composer Larry O'Keefe (Bat Boy, Legally Blonde, Bring It On) told me that he sees all rock musicals fitting into two categories. With some of them, the rock and roll is the point. With others, the rock and roll just happens to be the language of the storytelling. I had never thought about it that way before, but I found that distinction really interesting and really meaningful. I realized that most early rock musicals were the former, and most recent rock musicals are the latter. Although it's not really that simple. Some are both. And as the rock musical becomes the dominant form in the musical theatre (at last!), the rock musical will expand and evolve and will no doubt inspire surprising and wonderful offspring that will take our art form even further.

We're already on a dual path – the Rodgers & Hammerstein model has evolved into the serious rock musical (often rock opera), like Next to Normal and Rent. The George M. Cohan/George Abbott/Jerry Herman model of classic musical comedy has evolved into the neo-musical comedy (which is not always a rock musical but it usually is), shows like Bat Boy, Cry-Baby, and Lysistrata Jones. And then there are hybrids, that borrow from both models, like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and High Fidelity.

So really, rock musicals can be divided up into two categories, in two different directions. For instance, Bat Boy is a neo-musical comedy that uses rock as its musical language, but it's not the point of the story; while Cry-Baby is a neo-musical comedy in which rock is the central point of the story, both a plot device and the central metaphor for the clash of cultures and moralities at the center of the story.

Likewise, Next to Normal and Rent are both serious rock musicals, using many of the Rodgers & Hammerstein narrative devices, and both shows use rock as the language of storytelling because that's the music of these characters' lives. The rock doesn't mean anything; it's just an authentic voice for these people. On the other hand, Jesus Christ Superstar also follows the basic rules of the Rodgers & Hammerstein model, but Superstar uses rock as its essential point, to bring the events of 2,000 years ago into the political and social consciousness of modern America. The show tells a political story, not a religious one, so it uses the music of rebellion to give voice to the subversive political rebel Jesus of Nazareth.

With Superstar, the fact that the story is being told in contemporary musical language, in conscious rejection of the archaic language of the Bible, is the whole reason the show exists. Although, let's be clear – we're talking about both the music and lyrics as rock and roll. Just retelling this story in a conventional, straight-forward manner would have never garnered the superstardom – or the outrage, and therefore, the press coverage – that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice found themselves in the center of. Rock and roll is the sound of rebellion, and it absolutely defined the energy and attitude of the show, implicitly making Jesus and his crew political rebels merely because they sounded like the political rebels of late 60s and early 70s. The very idea of setting this most revered Bible story to rock and roll was itself an act of rebellion, perhaps in a way we don't really understand today...

Evita was a similar case, in which the score had to be rock because Tim Rice reimagined Eva Peron as a rock star. The rock music and his subversive, smartass lyrics constructed his metaphor for him.

There's actually one more category of rock musicals, but it hardly exists anymore. It's the rock concept musical – shows like Hair and The Rocky Horror Show and Grease, in which narrative is less important than the ideas at the center of the show. (You might argue that American Idiot belongs in this group.) With Rocky Horror, the rock and roll gives the subliminally sexual 1950s horror movie style an overt sexuality and an irony that defines the show's oddball sensibility, and it underlines the story's implicit satire of America's Sexual Revolution. Like Hedwig, the genre of rock in Rocky Horror – early punk and glam – defines the story, conjuring the only time in popular music when gender was fluid...

Where Jesus Christ Superstar was primarily a political story, Grease was only subtextually political. But here, rather than rebellion being the point, in Grease rock and roll itself is the central character. It both defines period and tapped into the still new conversation in 1972 about the effects of rock and roll on America, on American sexuality, on American teenagers and their culture, etc. Grease is a show about how rock and roll changed sex in America. More songs in the show were about rock and roll (both literally and as a metaphor for sex) than were about Danny and Sandy, who only seem to be the central characters. In the clumsy movie version of Grease, the love story might have been the point, but on stage that romance is just a device for making a larger, more interesting point. And significantly, only five of the twenty songs in the show are about Danny and Sandy. No other musical would ignore the "central couple" that much. But how many of Grease's songs are explicitly about rock and roll? The "Alma Mater Parody", "Those Magic Changes," "Shakin' at the High School Hop," "Born to Hand Jive," "Rock and Roll Party Queen," and arguably "All Choked Up" (see my analysis essay for more on this). And the rest are about sex.

Return to the Forbidden Planet almost deserves its own category, as a Shakespearean, science fiction, rock and roll musical. Certainly rock is a fundamental part of the concept of the show, the wacky mashup of classic rock songs, with 1950s style science fiction and one of Shakespeare's greatest works; but at the same time you could argue that these people sing rock and roll because though they may live in the future, it's a future from the point of view of the 1950s. The period rock and roll makes clear the subtle joke of this being the scientifically naive, fantasy future that 1950s culture so fetishized. The show's rock score adds a very funny layer of irony on top of the stone cold seriousness of the actual 1950s movie Forbidden Planet (which is actually pretty great).

And really, High Fidelity gets its own category too. What makes this show special was the one thing its Broadway production team seemed to miss entirely. This is a genuinely alternative show, one that avoids “show tunes,” linear storytelling, and the fourth wall, one peppered liberally with the word fuck, and one that offers up only the most tentative of happy endings. (You have to wonder why they didn't open it off Broadway first – it might have fared better.)

High Fidelity follows Stephen Sondheim’s prime directive that Content Dictates Form, a lesson the show’s Broadway director and design team apparently have not learned. These characters are people who live outside the confines of mainstream American life, outside (mostly) the mainstream economic system, outside the mainstream culture. And so the creators of High Fidelity wrote a show that lives outside the conventions of mainstream musical theatre, a show that uses rock music as more than accompaniment, a show that plays around with structure in the way many recent American indie films have, a show that grapples head-on with real human pain. Everyone in this story is damaged. And though Rob is our hero, he’s also a real jackass. Many musicals today can claim that they reject the Rodgers & Hammerstein model, but only a few can claim that they use music and lyrics in genuinely new ways.

High Fidelity can.

Composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Amanda Green haven’t just imitated Aretha Franklin in the song “She Goes;” instead they’ve actually written a new Aretha Franklin song, a song Franklin might actually sing. It’s not a Broadway version of Franklin’s style or a parody; it is that style. Likewise, they don’t just imitate Al Green and Percy Sledge with the finale, “Turn the World Off;” they’ve actually written a new R&B anthem worthy of Green or Sledge. In a review of the first regional production of the show at New Line in 2008, Paul Friswold wrote in The Riverfront Times, “The music’s homage to real-world rock songs achieves perfect pitch when Bruce Springsteen arrives to provide Rob guidance in the greatest Springsteen song Springsteen never wrote.”

Instead of just writing a score that references lots of pop/rock songs and artists for comic effect – or worse yet, as a commercial gimmick upon which the whole show has to stand or fall – we just hear Rob's world through Rob’s ears. We get inside Rob’s brain and think about how this rock music snob hears the world around him. The musical choices Kitt makes are dramatic choices, not entertainment choices. Just as Rob does in his conscious life, in his subconscious life (i.e., the show we're watching) he uses rock music to try to figure out the people and events around him. Music is how he makes sense of his world, although he eventually learns that his music can fail him, that it doesn’t hold all the answers. For that, he has to dig down into his own heart.

Ultimately, High Fidelity is about a relationship, but not between Rob and Laura (as it would be if it were a musical comedy) -- it's about the relationship between Rob and his music, an intimate but immature relationship that has to change and mature before Rob can live his life as an adult. Maybe more than any other rock musical (with the possible exception of bio-musicals like Jersey Boys), this is a rock musical about rock music.

To make this point as clearly as we can in New Line's production, Mike Dowdy (who plays Dick in our show), had the idea to create a "Now Playing" rack on our store counter so that the audience could see the musical influences on Rob's story -- what we New Liners call "the source rock." So when Liz is singing "She Goes," an Aretha Franklin album is in the "Now Playing" rack. When Laura sings "Number 5 with a Bullet," there's a Pat Benatar album in the rack. You get the idea. When Judy Newmark reviewed our show for the Post-Dispatch this time, she ended her review with this – "If you go, be sure to notice the record jackets displayed on the shop’s check-out counter. Without any fanfare, they keep changing, a subtle graph of Rob’s state of mind. New Line specializes in those thoughtful little touches, perfect for a thoughtful little show like High Fidelity.” What I love about Mike's idea is that it so reinforces everything I've been talking about here.

It's all about the rock.

Long Live the (Rock) Musical!
Scott

Infinity and Happiness

We have opened High Fidelity and we've gotten six out of six total fucking rave reviews! There's not a single negative comment in any one of them. Mark Bretz at the Ladue News, said that our 2008 production of High Fidelity was "a glorious triumph" and "the best production of the year," and that this production is even better! Judy Newmark at the Post-Dispatch called our show "inspired."

Holy shit. We always get really enthusiastic reviews because we always do really strong work, but these reviews are even more enthusiastic than usual...

First off, though, here's a cool preview piece about our show, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, including an interview with lyricist Amanda Green. And she throws a big compliment at Jeff Wright (in the picture above), having seen him in the show in 2008...

And here's what the critics think of our show...

“The Number One reason to see this revival production of High Fidelity: IT ABSOLUTELY ROCKS!” – Chris Gibson, BroadwayWorld
Read the whole review here.

“Earlier this season, New Line Theatre staged two regional premieres: the wry, insightful Passing Strange and the raucous, insightful Cry-Baby. High Fidelity – by turns wry and raucous, and maybe the most insightful of all – makes an inspired conclusion. . . When New Line artistic director Scott Miller first staged High Fidelity on the heels of its Broadway failure, he rescued it from obscurity; it’s gone on to a number of successful productions at colleges and small theaters around the country. This production, also directed by Miller, is a kind of victory lap: a showcase for the musical’s clever songs, endearing characters and above all for the New Line gang. A talented bunch both onstage and behind the scenes, with High Fidelity they once again welcome theater-goers into their smart inner circle.” – Judith Newmark, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Read the whole review here.

“New Line Theatre artistic director Scott Miller saw the beauty and buoyancy behind the weak Broadway effort that introduced High Fidelity as a rock musical in a disappointing effort that folded after just 14 performances on Broadway in late 2006. Miller’s New Line Theatre mounted the first regional presentation in 2008, a glorious triumph that Ladue News cited as the best production of the year. . . Now, New Line has brought High Fidelity back to its greatest success in a presentation that, if anything, is stronger and more engaging than its 2008 predecessor. . . If you love rock music and feel-good stories, High Fidelity should top your charts.” – Mark Bretz, Ladue News
Read the whole review here.

“After four years, and rave reviews from critics, High Fidelity has returned to St. Louis. . . What stands out most about this production of High Fidelity is the passion that went into it. You can tell that these actors are singing and dancing their hearts out; you can feel the raw energy and emotion that they radiate with their performances. I listened to the original cast recording of the show, and I can honestly say that some of the recorded numbers couldn’t hold a candle to the New Line versions. . . High Fidelity is a fantastic show, filled with pure rock energy and a myriad of memorable songs. It would truly have been a tragedy if it wasn’t revived after being left for dead on Broadway. Instead of just taking the movie and slapping some songs into it, the cast and creatives really make it their own. With great performances and powerful rock music that is fondly familiar, it is a must see show that you don’t want to miss.” – Kevin Brackett, ReviewSTL
Read the whole review here.

“As always, Scott Miller’s direction is right on the money. He has found the secret of making this Broadway disappointment into a vehicle for fun and frenzy that you just wish wouldn’t end. . . If you’re ready for flat-out fun, don’t miss this terrific show. It bubbles with personality and just makes you feel good all over. Outstanding performances lead the way and the almost lost score with music by Tom Kitt and lyrics by Amanda Green along with the book by David Lindsay Abaire show that there’s life in any musical as long as it has heart, desire and a little help from Scott Miller.” – Steve Allen, Stage Door St. Louis.
Read the whole review here.

“In true New Line fashion, director Scott Miller pared the show down to what was necessary: the tale of a commitment-shy Gen-Xer struggling, buoyed by his love of music, to grow up and become a human – and by focusing on that, he made the show a hit of the 2008 season. Not resting on his laurels, though, in this production Miller opens up the space a little, allowing musical numbers to joyously jump out at you. . . The newly revived show has lost none of its original verve – in fact you could say this show is ‘re-mastered’ – in its new space, it takes the already clean master material and polishes it further, opening up the stage to let the ‘confessional booth’ tone of this charged rock musical spill out into the laps of the audience and make us question our own behaviors in our relationships, and explore how to forgive and be forgiven. . . So if rockin’ music with a good story is your idea of great entertainment, plan on seeing New Line’s High Fidelity.” – Robert Mitchell, KDHX-FM
Read the whole review here.

And though ticket sales were decent last week, they've really picked up this week, so I think we're gonna have great houses for the rest of the run. I don't know if I've ever been this happy about returning to a show.  I watch the show and am overwhelmed at the talent and power onstage, at the incredible vocals, the comic brilliance, the genuinely powerful, complicated emotions. Jeff Wright gets a big piece of the credit for our success, but I think this is truly the best ensemble we've ever had in a show -- and we're well-known for the quality of our ensembles... But this time, everyone in the ensemble usually plays leads for us, so there is a ton of fire power there...

Come see us and prepare to have your mind blown...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott