The Saddest Song

When I saw Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson on Broadway, I thought it was essentially a very clever period biography that pointed up interesting parallels to our own times. But now working on the show, I think it's something slightly different from that. Something bigger and more ambitious. I think it's a story about politics in America, not just then, but now. Always.

It's a show about us.

It's about the election of 1828, but it's also about the election of 2008. And 1932. And 1980 and 1992 and 2012. It's not just about Andrew Jackson; it's about you and me. The show actually plays fast and loose with Jackson's biographical details -- for instance, his father died in an accident before Jackson was born. And so far, I have not found one reference anywhere to Jackson and Rachel being cutters. I see now that this show is a companion piece to Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins, not just in its political content but in its agenda. This is not a show about historical authenticity; it's about emotional authenticity, about our collective emotional state.

Jackson says to Chief Black Fox late in the show, "I'm the will of the people." He doesn't say he represents or understands the will of the people; he is the will of the people. He sees himself as the literal embodiment of America. Midway through the show, Jackson says to us, "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." Bookwriter Alex Timbers is giving us a sly little meta-moment there, as Jackson reveals a world-class ego but also admits directly to the audience that he functions as a metaphor in this show. Like all great art, but more explicitly than most, this show is a cultural mirror, and we may be surprised at what we see there.

As a nation, we can be selfish, greedy, paranoid, stubborn, impatient, violent, jingoistic, self-righteous, and only sometimes self-aware. Democracy is messy. Democracy means that stupid people get the same vote as smart people. A crazy person's vote counts the same as a normal person's vote. Democracy is a collective act -- that is its miracle and its greatest weakness. A country truly run by the people who live there was a radical idea that even the Founders didn't totally believe in -- they didn't want women, people of color, or men who didn't own land to have a say in our democracy, only those elite white men who were morally and intellectually superior, in their own estimation of course. Jacksonian Democracy terrified John Quincy Adams and his circle of elites. The reason we see so many parallels between the elections of 1828 and 2008 (and 1992, 1980, etc.) is that the central character is the same -- the American people, the worst of us right alongside the best of us. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is about that complex mix of good and bad in each of us and in our collective national character.

And even beyond the parallels to modern-day politics, BBAJ also implies the politics of just a few decades later, when secession and Civil War became a reality. In the final Oval Office scene between Jackson and Black Fox, Jackson says, "And what I also promise you? Is you sign this treaty here tonight and in thirty years, you and I are gonna look like fucking heroes. For uniting this country." The moment is thick with irony as the audience realizes that thirty years from that moment, America will not be anything close to "united," but will instead be shattered by Civil War. We know what's to come but Jackson does not. He thinks he put to rest the question of secession when he stonewalls Calhoun, but we in the audience knows he has not. Like Cabaret, BBAJ implies as much as it shows.

My writing teacher in college, Victor Burg, taught me a valuable trick for understanding other people's writing and for writing clearly myself. Look at the beginning and end of any well-written piece of storytelling and that will tell you the writer's central agenda. In Sondheim's Company, the first and last songs totally encapsulate Bobby's long arc from an inward world view to an outward one; the first song is entirely about Bobby, but the last song is about "someone" else. Similarly, in High Fidelity, the first and last songs shows us Rob's arc from emotional selfishness to emotional self-less-ness.

And here in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the first and last songs define Jackson's (our?) journey from the superficiality of mindless American populism inward to its dark underbelly and unintended consequences, from the shallow "Populism, Yea, Yea!" to the sobering "Second Nature." Instead of going from one place or time to another, as most narratives do, this show goes from the outer shell inward. The audience accepts the show's dual time period (always both then and now at the same time) because this journey is the same in every period. As the show plays out, we spin deeper and deeper into the complexity of America, of politics, of race, of Jackson himself, and of us as a people. It's a classic hero myth, but it's us on that journey, the American people as protagonist -- and it's a journey we're still on in 2012.

Timbers' writing here is deceptively complex. Like Hair, this is a show that feels unpolished, chaotic, spontaneous, out of control. But also like Hair, it is very skillfully and artfully constructed. Though the character of Jackson often seems ridiculous and childish, though he may seem like a cartoon sometimes, he's actually a very real, complicated man. There's a wonderful moment late in the show when Jackson crashes into reality, as he first starts to comprehend how different the world actually is from how he has always perceived it.

It's the second-to-last number in the show, "The Saddest Song." In yet another meltdown, Jackson screaming and cursing at some tourists in the Oval Office, he yells after them, "The people aren't going to stop Andrew Jackson from doing what it is that Andrew Jackson knows that the people want!" Once, he saw himself representing the People; now he sees them as an obstacle. We can see here that he takes too seriously his own symbolism in this complicated, new populist world. All through the story, he has bullied and battled to get what he wants, playing by his own rules, rarely suffering any consequences. But once he's elected, everything changes -- and he rages against this new world:

When it stops being fun
And your patience is done
And you see being president's hard,
With this country before you
That cannot be governed
You find yourself powerless, bloody, and scarred.

Whoever said running the country would be fun? It's like Jackson is stomping his feet and yelling, "It's not fair!" Where's the swaggering hero of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend? Jackson is the President of the United States and yet he feels powerless. He feels alone, he feels both handcuffed and responsible -- probably like every President in American history. He's no longer the cocky but charming bully-hero. He has lost his mojo. He rages on:

And what is it for, the love of the people?
Who is it for, this nation we made?
That guy who did everything his way,
Where has he gone?

So tonight I'll sing the saddest songs
To everyone that I've done wrong,
And if you don't know how to sing along
Well I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
But the band plays on.

This is a song about self-pity. It reminds me of a line from Chicago -- "And now, Miss Roxie Hart and Miss Velma Kelly sing a song of unrelenting determination and unmitigated ego."

Jackson proceeds to position himself as the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, and the comparison is a fascinating one. According to Wikipedia, "God’s personal message to Jeremiah, 'Attack you they will, overcome you they can’t,' was fulfilled many times in the Biblical narrative. Jeremiah was attacked by his own brothers, beaten and put into the stocks by a priest and false prophet, imprisoned by the king, threatened with death, thrown into a cistern by Judah’s officials, and opposed by a false prophet." The comparison reveals Jackson's lifelong persecution complex. He sings:

Jeremiah looked down
On the people of Judah
And told them their future was bloody and cursed.
When I think of the conflict
And the change that awaits us,
It's gonna be hard
But this country comes first.

On the other hand, Jackson's right, isn't he? We know that America's future will be bloody and cursed, from the Civil War and lynchings in the South during Reconstruction (and up through the 1960s), World Wars I and II, the bloody Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq...

Jackson's warnings echo President Obama's reminders during the 2008 election that change never comes quickly or easily, that those who oppose change (in the show, JQ Adams, Calhoun, Clay) will fight hard to preserve the status quo. Jackson is gearing up for battle...

Revolutions will come to you,
Swift if you let them.
The nation united cannot be undone.
Adams, Jefferson, Washington,
Monroe, and Madison
Started a war but it's hardly begun.

We didn't just fight for independence from the King of England, the lyric suggests; we fought for our freedom from a powerful few dictating to the rest -- something Jackson and his followers saw happening again in the first years of our nation. (Jackson refers to "King George Washington" in once scene.) The country had been born decades earlier, but Jackson had begun a new battle, one to wrest power from the rich and privileged and put it truly into the hands of the people. This is a song  -- a soliloquy -- about creative destruction. The stage direction says, "The song has become a raging anthem of aggression and venom," as Jackson continues:

So we'll ruin the bank
And we'll cripple the courts
And we'll take on the world for
America's sake.
We'll take all the land,
And we'll take back the country,
We'll take and we'll take,
And we'll take and we'll take ...

It's a scorched earth campaign he proposes here, to ruin, to cripple, to take. He's at war with the Second Bank of the United States, with the Supreme Court, with the Indian nations, with Congress, and with the South, now threatening to secede. His promise to "take back the country" certainly conjures today's Tea Party. But Jackson is not done fighting yet (is he ever?), even if the polls are turning against him. But notice that it's no longer "the people" making this country, now it's Jackson alone that will save us.

And this country I'm making
Cannot be divided.
The will of the people
Won't stand in my way.
How can I tell you
How deeply I'll make them all bleed?

And so I'll sing the saddest songs,
Of enemies who did me wrong,
And the war will go on
And on and on
And on and on
And on as long as we need...

Even on into 2012...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Some Serious, Serious Shit

Within the first few lines of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Jackson says, "I'm wearing some tight, tight jeans and tonight we're delving into some serious, serious shit." It sounds like a joke when he says it, but this line tells us more than we realize about the show we're about to see. And as we rehearse, we're starting to understand just how serious it really is.

We finished blocking last night. The next part of the process is my favorite. The playing and the tinkering.

Every once in a while (I try not to do it too often), I cast a show by invitation, no public auditions. Usually it's the more unusual shows -- Bat Boy, Assassins, High Fidelity, BBAJ. We have such an amazing pool of truly brilliant character actors (several with improv backgrounds), some who work with us all the time, some who work with us only occasionally, when they just can't resist a role. But sometimes I just know who will be perfect. These particular New Liners bring so much to a show. John Sparger (in the title role this time) has become the Ann Reinking to my Bob Fosse. Not sure what he'll think about that...

My rehearsal process has evolved over time, borrowing from lots of famous directors over the years. I learned a lot from a wonderful book called The Show Makers, and all of Anne Bogart's books, and lots of others. When we work on a New Line show, I first build the skeleton -- basic staging, basic mood, style, etc. -- and we work pretty quickly. Then we spend a lot of time just running the show (first in pieces, then altogether) and experimenting. Playing. I don't like committing to too many small choices too early. I'm constantly telling the actors, "We've got time!" Over several weeks, we shape the show, slowly tuning in to each other, blending the performances together, finding little truthful moments, sharpening the style, trying to bring as much clarity as we possibly can to the story we're telling. A show like BBAJ is tough because it's very wacky and it's also very serious, so it requires actors who are funny and imaginative and fearless, but also very skillful.

Case in point. Nick Kelly has been working with New Line since 2002. He plays mostly funny characters for us (notably, William Barfée in Spelling Bee), and he never seems to run out of funny ideas, but he's also a strong serious actor (he also played Valentin in Kiss of the Spider Woman for us). Nick's Barfée was a master class in restraint, less sketch comedy than the original, more heartfelt -- and it really paid off for the audience. This time Nick is playing quite a few characters, but most importantly Henry Clay and Chief Black Fox. Near the end of BBAJ, there's a conversation between Jackson and the (fictional) Native American chief. And it's intense. And it's complicated. Check out this monologue that President Jackson delvers to Black Fox about Indian relocation --

Because I'm the will of the People and I know what's right! (horrible silence) And that's what populism is, bro. And I'm sorry about that. But we both know in our hearts that we can't have Indian ghettos scattered throughout the East Coast! And I wish you'd built symphonies in cities, man, and put on plays and showed yourselves to be a little more essential. You know, to the culture? And yeah, you totally were here first, absolutely, but we don't give a shit, and we never will. Because the day we arrived, we saw it, we wanted it, and frankly it was easier to believe it was ours. And so we're stuck. And what I promise you is that this is the least bad solution... And what I also promise you? Is you sign this treaty here tonight and, in thirty years, you and I are gonna look like fucking heroes. For uniting this country.

That is some fierce fucking writing! There's so much going on there for a really intelligent actor like Sparger to mine -- betrayal, the end of a friendship, racism, power, manifest destiny.

And Black Fox spends the whole monologue just listening, processing the pompous bullshit and the barely hidden threat being thrown at him, realizing what his "friend" is telling him -- if the Indians had acted more White they wouldn't have been slaughtered. Jackson hints at the subject of the song that follows (which I've blogged about), "Second Nature," about the questionable morality at the heart of Manifest Destiny and American expansionism.

But Black Fox also carries the weight of knowing he has betrayed -- and also murdered -- his own people. In this same scene, Nick has a line that is heartbreaking. Black Fox says, "Andrew, I have handed you the lands of at least eleven tribes. I did this with you, together as friends, behind their backs, because you promised -- I have killed my own people for you!" Black Fox has made this deal with the devil, choosing to betray his people and his land, to live in the White world. But he only had a place there as long as he was needed. Now he's become a problem, so he's being discarded.

This is some serious, serious shit.

And Nick and Sparger are already nailing it. They are both so on the right road.

It's only now as we put all the pieces together that we see just how serious this show is. When you see it as an audience member, you tend to remember the laughs, because there are a lot of them, and the songs, which are both amazing and freakishly catchy. But this is a show about a very complicated man, in the world's most complicated job, in really complicated times. This is a story about life and death, power and corruption, compromise and betrayal, and lots of moral ambiguity. The brilliant Alex Timbers has written a script that employs the Spoonful of Sugar trick -- he makes you laugh all night and then leaves your brain full of very difficult questions to grapple with on the way home.

Like Brecht, Timbers and Friedman do everything in their power to remind you of the artificiality of theatre, to distance you emotionally, to engage you only intellectually. But like Brecht, they essentially "fail" because they do connect to their audience very powerfully on an emotional level. Our audiences are going to feel conflicted about Jackson. That's the point. He's both hero and villain. And I guess so is Black Fox.

Last night, even though it was the first time they've ever done it, Nick and Sparger were thrilling in that final scene between Black Fox and Jackson. Sure, they'll find even more there over time, but the writing is so incredible and their instincts are so solid, that the scene already works. It's really powerful.

We know, watching this show in 2012, that America wouldn't be here today if we hadn't taken all this land from the Native Americans, slaughtering many of them in the process. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson makes us face that.

Like I said, this is some serious, serious shit. And I love it.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

It's Second Nature to Us

My favorite kind of theatre makes me laugh like an idiot and also makes important, serious, insightful commentary about our world and our lives -- shows like Bat Boy, Urinetown, High Fidelity, Cry-Baby, Spelling Bee, and of course, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

This show is wacky, it's rude and vulgar, it's irreverent, and it's also a serious piece of theatre about American politics and American culture, about our collective shallowness and childishness. I saw a poll today that says a majority of Republicans want to cut spending and lower the deficit and they also don't want any changes to social security and medicare. Yeah. Real life doesn't work that way, folks. But that's the mindset BBAJ is satirizing, and it's not just Republicans. Jackson gets his share of satirical punches in this show, but so do the American people.

When I see wacky-serious shows like this, I often notice a point in the evening when the show "earns" our respect and rises above mere laughs or outrageousness, when the show leads us down a path of comedy to a suddenly powerful, sobering moment. Both Bat Boy and Urinetown "earn it" at the end. High Fidelity earns it in Rob and Liz's fight late in Act II right before the funeral scene. Spelling Bee earns it with "The I Love You Song."

And Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson earns it at the end with Michael Friedman's powerful, poetic, emo ballad "Second Nature." None of the characters have this kind of self-knowledge or this outside-of-time perspective on our history, so this moment belongs to the band soloist, someone who stands outside the story all night, a kind of rock and roll Greek chorus.

"Second Nature" addresses head-on one of the central themes of the story -- a child-like blindness to consequences. The band soloist sings:

The grass grows,
A prairie,
A wilderness,
Across a continent.
And we take it,
We clear it out,
And make it in our image.
The backyards,
The driveways,
The covered wagons rushing through the high plains,
And motels on the canyon...
They make a second nature.

We re-make nature "in our image," bend it to our will, clear it out, pour concrete and blacktop, destroy and create, and we make it into something other than it was. We make it a "second" nature, one that looks like the real thing but is controlled and restricted in a way that real nature never is. We make it a "human nature," to re-coin a phrase, and it can never again be truly natural.

The nature that the Native Americans loved, cared for, lived off of, and prayed to, had to be destroyed to create a new "unnatural" nature. This idea is a more subtle, more political version of the same point in the song "The Colors of the Wind" in Disney's Pocahontas.

"Second Nature" goes on...

What was it for,
This country?
The farms and the blood across the prairie?
The nation we become
As we build a second nature.
No no no,
No no no...

Jackson "tamed" the frontier and tripled the size of our country, but "What was it for?" That's a powerful question. Did our conquering civilization improve the virgin wilderness of our continent or did we make it worse? Was the slaughter of tens of thousands of people (Indians, Spaniards, and others) a necessary component of our national evolution or just the White Man's clumsy greed? And what exactly is the nature of "the nation we become as build a second nature"? How does our destruction and re-creation change who we are as a people? When Jackson secured Florida for us by slaughtering innocent thousands, did that change the American identity?

As we worry today about genetically engineered foods, hormone-injected animal meat, oil spills, carbon emissions and climate change -- this second nature we have created -- BBAJ forces us to recognize that even though some Americans need to believe that America is the unquestionably good (even divinely blessed) Greatest Nation on Earth, the real world is full of gray area. And so is our story. There is much complexity in America's history, just as there is in Jackson's personal biography, and BBAJ chronicles one of our messiest, most morally ambiguous periods. The more I work on this show, the more I realize that America is the central character every bit as much as -- more than? -- Andrew Jackson.

I said in my last post that the central theme of BBAJ is that sometimes our heroes are assholes. In other words, nothing in the real world can be all good or all bad. Gray area is an inescapable part of life. It's what makes life interesting and complicated, and it's also why humans require art to make sense of it all.

The repeated No's throughout the song -- words of resistance, denial, regret, delusion? -- are just as complicated as the rest of the lyric. In a sense, they are speaking for Jackson and for Americans today as we look back on our history. We want to resist or deny the death and slaughter that grew our nation. We want to deny that we gave the Native Americans "smallpox blankets" to help kill them off. We want to look away from our collective act of paving over much of America's natural beauty. We celebrate Eisenhower's achievement of creating the intestate highway system, but in this context, his great achievement sinks into gray area too, a gray area we try to ignore as we speed from place to place.

But the No's also form a kind of bookend with the show's opening, "Populism, Yea! Yea!" Jackson's story begins in rowdy optimism and the love of his countrymen, as the whole cast sings, "Yea! Yea!" over and over. And the show ends at the sunset of Jackson's life, with a single soloist and a moody emo ballad, repeating, "No, no, no... No, no, no..." And the music beneath the No's switches back and forth from major to minor and back again, providing a parallel musical/emotional gray area. Is the soloist telling Jackson he was wrong, that he took the wrong path in life...? Telling him that he had the wrong values and the wrong priorities? Or maybe the soloist is just making the point that nothing is only good or only bad, that the good that came from Jackson's actions carried lots of bad with it too.

Maybe the soloist becomes History in the same way the Storyteller has been throughout the show, and he's telling Jackson that America's founding impulses weren't just to kill and take and destroy, that Jackson misunderstood -- and forever changed -- America's national character. From the soloist's and Storyteller's point of view, outside of time, Jackson failed morally and his kill-and-take strategy would continue to grow America after he was gone, but at what moral, spiritual price?

The band soloist continues...

The rivers run,
And parking lots,
The endless, endless fields and cities.
We make them,
Replace them with
All our dreams of the future.
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.

And the song ends with an insightful and disturbing conclusion about America as Despoiler, and a return to the more conventional meaning of "second nature" -- an acquired behavior or trait that is so long practiced as to seem innate. But it only seems innate. It's artificially created but we perceive it as natural. It's a second nature.

The grass grows.
We take it.
We want it.
It's second nature to us.

And that's where the show earns it -- "We take it. We want it. It's second nature." It has always been our (seemingly) innate impulse to just take what we want, the show is telling us, and we try our best to ignore the moral implications as much as we can -- just as Jackson does throughout the show. But there is always a price to pay. This is serious, subtle storytelling about America as a nation, slyly camouflaged through most of the show behind rowdy, wacky, high-energy comedy. But it's truthful comedy. It's real in all the ways great theatre always is. And like all great storytelling it leads us to a deeper, fuller understanding of ourselves and our world.

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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.