What Makes You Think...

The reviews for New Line Theatre's Next to Normal have been extraordinary.

But one of our reviews really bothered me because it revealed the big plot surprise that happens about halfway through Act I, right after "It's Gonna Be Good."

Don't worry. No spoilers here.

If you've seen the show, you know what I'm talking about; if you haven't, I don't want to spoil it for you, because it's a huge surprise. It completely changes everything you've already seen happen. What you thought you were witnessing turns out to be really different from what you actually were witnessing, and as a result, the story you thought you were watching is actually a fairly different story after the big reveal. The stakes are now much higher, the story becomes more complicated, and the emotion gets dialed up to eleven.

It's really carefully set up and the big reveal is pretty powerful, often eliciting gasps from the audience.

When I emailed this reviewer about his spoiler, he pretended at first not to know what I meant. He wrote back to me, "The only thing I mentioned that occurs after the first 20-30 minutes of the first act..." Notice that "after the first 20-30 minutes" -- that's his dodge. Obviously nothing in the first 20-30 minutes could matter, right? Why do we even bother performing that first part...? So I wrote back and clarified which surprise I meant, and he then responded that it was actually okay for him to reveal that plot twist because it doesn't come at the end of the show. And that apparently means it's not important.

But at the same time, he also argued that it's impossible to write about the show without revealing that surprise, because everything else is built on that moment. He's right that the surprise in question is the show's "obligatory moment," toward which everything before it leads, and from which everything after it results. It's the one moment the story can't do without. But doesn't that negate his other argument, that it can't be all that important since it happens midway through Act I...? And after making the argument that this surprise is so central to the story, he then wrote in another email that when he first saw Next to Normal, he didn't really think this surprise was a big deal.

So let's review... it's not important because it happens early, it's vitally important because everything else comes out of it, and it's also not a big deal at all.

Okay...  Pardon me while my head explodes.

Of course, our other reviews talked about the show without ruining the big surprise, as did the New York reviews, so it's clearly not that hard to do. I asked this guy why it matters where in the show the surprise falls. Whether it occurs early or late in the story, why take that surprise away from audiences...? Why not let them experience the first part of the show the way the authors obviously wanted...? As our other reviews prove, it's not necessary to rob the audience of that. Doesn't it matter that the authors want to surprise the audience with that moment? Why does this reviewer get to decide which surprises matter and which don't...?

We know from talking to people after performances, that most of the folks coming to see us have not seen the show before. They don't know the plot twists ahead of time. Unless they see his review, of course.

As if all this isn't enough, he also said in his review that the story is not very dramatic because Diana's struggle is entirely internal, and "that's hard to dramatize on a stage." I asked him if he'd ever seen Hamlet. And I reminded him that Next to Normal won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Just sayin'.

Hero Myth stories can be internal, external, or both. In High Fidelity, Company, Sunday in the Park with George, Nine, Love Kills, Grease, The Wild Party, Cabaret, and thousands of other stories, the hero's journey is entirely psychological. After all, the Hero Myth story is just a human life in miniature; most of us take internal hero's journeys over and over throughout our lives.

When a story tells of a physical journey, the Hero Myth acts more as a metaphor for a human life; Dorothy Gale and Luke Skywalker's journeys aren't actually like anything most of us go through, but they do reveal our real human journeys through their symbols and metaphors. And because storytelling is such an integral part of human existence, we're all really good at reading those symbols and translating them, even  if only subconsciously. On the other hand, when the Hero Myth is presented as a psychological or emotional journey, as in Next to Normal, it actually becomes a more concrete representation of the journeys we all take.

I suggested this reviewer check out Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth and Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment.

I guess what's so frustrating about all this is the reviewer's refusal to think much about this show he's reviewing. There are many more reviewers in St. Louis now than there were even a few years ago. It's really terrific that as our theatre community grows and evolves, a robust critical community is evolving around it, to have an ever larger and more interesting conversation. We now get 8-10 reviews for every show, occasionally more, and it's very cool to get so many perspectives, to get so many responses from people of differing tastes and backgrounds. And this expanded pool of reviewers means the actual reviewing keeps getting richer and more thoughtful and more sophisticated. This larger conversation is enriching everybody, including our audiences -- some of whom write their own reviews of our shows on their personal blogs.

As a result, theatre in St. Louis is being afforded more respect today than ever before.

Which is part of why the Spoiler Reviewer bugged me so much. His dogged insistence that there's no harm in ruining a big plot twist speaks volumes. He shows a lack of respect for this show and its authors, for our audiences, and for us. We produce very complex, challenging work, and many of the other reviewers in town write really thoughtful, intelligent reviews of our shows; but this guy rarely takes our work seriously or looks beneath the surface. He dismisses much of what we do, often by bemoaning  the superficiality or blandness of shows when he himself has failed to look under the surface and see what's really there.

After all, they're only musicals...

Usually I don't worry much over what reviewers write (which is admittedly easy for me to say since 90% of our reviews are pretty much raves), but in this case, anyone who saw this guy's review before they saw the show had a lesser experience in the theatre, and that's a shame.

All I ask is that reviewers give us and our audience the same respect we give the work. After twenty-two years of doing serious, challenging, adult theatre, surely we're owed at least that, aren't we...?

You bet your ass we are.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

There Will Be Light

Brian Yorkey's dialogue and lyrics for Next to Normal use several textual themes. References to light, death, and madness appear throughout the show, but light is at its heart. The word light appears throughout the text, along with related ideas, like daytime and electricity. Just as the word rent in Rent takes on multiple meanings, all very resonant within the narrative, so the word light takes on multiple meanings in Next to Normal. Sometimes it means literal light, sometimes it means enlightenment or revelation, sometimes it means easy or lighthearted.

But actual physical light is also a theme in the show. The show begins with Diana turning on a light, and the show’s finale, “Light,” begins with Natalie turning on a light. Midway through Act I, Diana even brings on a birthday cake covered with lighted candles. This is story – a Hero Myth – about the quest for light.

When Dr. Madden tries to hypnotize Diana to unlock her past, he asks her to imagine going down a dark staircase, and in her passive-aggressive resistance, she quips, “Should we turn on a light? You know, with the stairs?” It's funny, but in the context of this action, light takes on a double meaning. Perhaps Yorkey is hinting that Madden might just lead Diana toward real enlightenment at last.

The next time we hear the word is in “I Dreamed a Dream,” as Diana slips into fantasy. She begins the song, “I saw you light the ballroom with your sparkling eyes of blue.” Here, light is beautiful, romantic, joyous.

This next time is a conversation late in Act I, in which Madden tells Dan that he recommends Electroconvulsive Therapy – shock treatment.

Madden: ECT is indicated.
Dan: Wow. I mean – they still do that?
Madden: We do, yes. It's the standard in cases like this. She's got a long history of drug therapy and resistance, she's acutely suicidal – it's really our best option.
Dan: That's kind of terrifying.
Madden: It's not. The electricity involved is barely enough to light a hundred-watt bulb.
Dan: (wry) Oh, if it's just a hundred-watt bulb...

Here light is connected to electricity, danger, risk, and it also takes us back to Diana’s reference to turning on a light in the hypnosis scene, and that opening moment of the show.

The Act I finale, Dan’s plea to Diana to agree to the ECT, is called “A Light in the Dark,” and once again the word light takes on all these different flavors of meaning – illumination, enlightenment, happiness, peace, but also life. Dan sings:

One light shines in the drive –
One single sign that our house is alive.
Our house, our own –
So why do I live there alone?
Tell me why I wait through the night,
And why do I leave on the light?

Though the first images are concrete ones, this song operates in metaphor. They are living in a world of darkness, and Dan desperately wants to find the light. Later in the song, he sings:

Take my hand,
And let me take your heart.
Keep it far
From what keeps us apart –
Let us start
With a light in the dark.

And at the end of the song:

I swear that somewhere in the night
There's a light...
A light in the dark.

He’s right, but it may not be the light he’s looking for. Dan is desperate to find the light, but Diana fears light, and he doesn't understand that. Like many of the songs in the show, this one operates on both concrete and metaphorical levels at the same time.

As we begin Act II, we go inside Diana’s head as she undergoes the ECT, in the song “Wish I Were Here,” and her first line is:

In an instant, lightning flashes
And the burst might leave me blind –
When the bolt of lightning crashes
And it burns right through my mind.

Again, light is dangerous, destructive, painful. To Dan, light is salvation; to Diana, it’s the enemy. Later in the song, both Diana and Natalie sing, “I’m the light and heat of every sun…” Light illuminates but it also burns and consumes.

When Diana comes home, Madden suggests to Dan how to jog her memories – “Keep it light at first, that's best. Careful that she's not distressed.” Here, light is about lightheartedness.

In “How Could I Ever Forget?” one of Diana’s recovering memories is “The lights of the city flew past.” Whether Yorkey intended it consciously or not, the phrase works on two levels, both as a concrete memory, and also as a description of her returning memories – her enlightenment – rushing past her grasping mind.

In “Promise,” Dan’s desperate recommitment to Diana later in the same scene, he sings:

To the girl who was burning so brightly
Like the light from Orion above,
And still I will search for her nightly –
If you see her, please send her my love.

Again, light is about burning. Is Dan the moth drawn to the flame, only to be consumed by it?

When Diana returns to Madden in the “Make Up Your Mind” reprise, he asks her to “Make up your mind there are moments of light.” Light as enlightenment, hope.

In the final scene, Natalie enters in the dark and says “Dad? What the hell? Why are the lights off?” Why is Dan choosing darkness? Now light takes on a final meaning, of facing up to truth, to life, a first step toward enlightenment. The finale, “Light,” is a summing up, tying together the themes of the show, and giving each character a moment to reflect on where they’ve been and where they are headed. Each character uses images of light and dark in different ways. Natalie sings:

We need some light.
First of all, we need some light.
You can't sit here in the dark,
And all alone –
It's a sorry sight.
It's just you and me.
We'll live. You'll see.

This is the first time Natalie uses light as metaphor, and she also physically turns on the light. She’s growing up and gaining enlightenment of her own. In the next verse, Dan sings:

Night after night,
We'd sit and wait for the morning light.
But we've waited far too long
For all that's wrong
To be made right.

Dan has not found the light yet. Later in the song, Gabe sings:

And when the night has fin'ly gone,
And when we see the new day dawn,
We'll wonder how we wandered for so long, so blind.
The wasted world we thought we knew –
The light will make it look brand new.

And then they all sing, “So let it shine,” repeating the word shine. Like the finale of Hair, this song recognizes the dark and implores us – all of us – to let the sun shine, to let the light in to vanquish the dark. The "we" they sing about is not just the Goodmans, but all of us. The song and the show end with this incantation, this celebration of the human spirit:

Day after day...
We'll find the will to find our way,
Knowing that the darkest skies
Will someday see the sun.
When our long night is done...
There will be light.
There will be light...
When we open up our lives,
Sons and daughters, husbands, wives
And fight that fight...
There will be light.
There will be light.
There will be light.
There will be light!

Despite the darkness of the story, this finale offers some hope, limited and narrow though it might be. The light is out there, the characters are telling us, but we must be open to it and we must fight against the dark. While Hair asked us, begged us, to let the sun shine in, Next to Normal ends on a declarative statement – there will be light. (Notice Yorkey's exclamation point on the last one!) Diana and Natalie have both found self-awareness and some kind of enlightenment – or at least, they're on their way. Dan has even taken a first tentative step toward his own enlightenment. Will these people be okay? Who knows? That's not the point. The point is the journey, the ongoing quest for light.

Very much like the search for The Real in Passing Strange.

Textual themes like this don’t always register consciously on an audience, but they do work on us. They create connections and associations. They underline important moments and ideas. And this particular theme of light registers with all of us on such a primal level. We humans are always in search of light.

It's part of why Next to Normal connects so powerfully with audiences. We need light too.

What a run it's been. Just three performances left...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. Look back over the lyrics I've quoted in this post, and notice the amazing alliteration all over the place. Yorkey does this throughout the show and it's so incredible once you start noticing it...

The Hope, The Heat, The Fear

There are so many things I love about Next to Normal, and it's such fun watching the show now, night after night, as it gets subtly richer and deeper at each performance.

The absolute best is sitting in the back of the house and listening to the audience, hearing the gasps when certain things happen in the story, hearing the crying and sniffling throughout the last twenty minutes (and, to be honest, also in several other places throughout the show), the big tension-releasing laughs, and the dark, low chuckles that spread through the house.

Three examples...

First, at the end of "My Psychopharmacologist and I." After weeks of mixing and matching medications, Diana says to Dr. Fine, "I don't feel like myself. I mean, I don't feel anything." Dr. Fine grunts and writes down in his notes, "Patient stable." The audience laughs, but it's a muted, ironic laugh. We see the dark humor from the outside, but we also see the horror from the inside. And that recognition from us sets up "I Miss the Mountains," making it even more resonant.

Also, late in Act I, Dan asks Natalie, "Is this Henry a good influence?" Natalie replies, "Like, compared to what?" Dan says, "Okay, that's fair." And we get a big laugh from the audience, sometimes even a double laugh on both Natalie's and Dan's lines. The audience sees the difficult truth in the humor, and they also desperately need the release of laughter at this point in the story.

Okay, one more (which you won't understand if you haven't seen the show, but I don't want to give away any surprises here). In Act II, Diana is trying to jog her memories after her shock treatment, and Henry shows up. Diana stares at him and says, "You remind me of someone. How old are you?" And Henry says, "Seventeen. Why?" And everyone in the audience tenses up. You can just feel it. At one performance, one guy actually said out loud, "Oh, shit."

And there's also a different kind of "listening" moment that really delights me every night. Before "I Dreamed a Dance," Diana sits down to go through a box of Gabe's baby stuff. She takes out a stuffed dog and sets it down. Then she takes out a baby blanket, carefully folds it, then holds it up to her face and smells it. It's such a personal, emotionally naked moment. Everyone in the audience both understands the impulse and recognizes the trap Diana's emotions have built for her. What's amazing about this moment is the complete silence in the audience -- no one moves, no one coughs, so one looks at their program. With Kimi's subtle, shaded performance, this moment is utterly mesmerizing and heartbreaking. I always smile when I hear that silence, because I know that means our audiences is 100% engaged in our story and characters.

Maybe my favorite thing, above all, about Next to Normal is the fights. On opening night, one of our Tweeters, created the hashtag #songfight. There's nothing so riveting onstage as a good, knock-down-drag-out fight. For some reason, a lot of actors are afraid to have a full-out fight, but conflict is the heart of drama, and a great fight is the height of conflict. Luckily, New Line actors are generally pretty fearless, so when I ask for a big-ass fight, they always bring it, in bare, High Fidelity, Evita, JC Superstar, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and other shows. With scenes in Next to Normal like "You Don't Know" and "I Am the One," and later, the "Gonna Be Good" reprise and "Why Stay?", either there are fireworks onstage or you're not doing it right...

Another thing I love is the roller coaster of Act II. Though the whole show is mostly music, with only small bits of dialogue here and there, Act II is even more wall-to-wall music. And composer Tom Kitt keeps the tension up by not really finishing most of the songs in Act II, robbing us of a button (the final boomp at the end of a song which cues applause), and often overlapping the beginning of one song over the end of another. And more than once, he creates that overlap in two different keys, to evoke in the music the tension and conflicts of the action. He's created the musical equivalent of a roller coaster, and it's part of the reason Act II is so emotionally draining -- there's no release, no pause, no moment to reflect. Like Diana, we have to just hang on and go for this wild ride. Sondheim used music this way in Sweeney Todd but I think Kitt is pushing it even further here, to extraordinary effect.

At New Line we rarely have strings in the band (other than bass), so it's especially cool that we have a violin and cello in the band this time. Sometimes when the whole band is playing, it actually sounds like we have a whole string section, rather than just three string players. And for those quiet, more emotional moments, there are these beautiful phrases by the strings between the vocal phrases, that lend such beauty and such fragile emotion to the action. The violin and cello play in harmony a lot, which is gorgeous, but they sometimes play in very dissonant harmony, telling us musically that there is something "wrong" happening in the scene, even if only subtextually. The band arrangements are incredible, and like Kitt's score for High Fidelity, the music does a lot of the storytelling in Next to Normal.

I'll end with the thing that makes all our work worthwhile. Every night at the final blackout after "Light," this roar of cheering goes up and as the lights come back for curtain call, the entire audience leaps to their feet for a standing ovation. Not just clapping, but cheering. And this show and this cast and this band deserve every bit of it. There's nothing better than an audience who's just had an amazing ride.

Ticket sales are soaring, the reviews are all raves, and I could not be prouder of what we've created. And I could not be more grateful that we get to do work like this, and that there's an audience here in St. Louis who wants to share it with us. What could be better than that?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Sing a Song of Forgetting

We opened Next to Normal last week and it has been a wild ride -- the biggest pre-sale in our 22-year history, huge houses opening weekend, and as of right now, seven rave reviews, calling our production "nothing less than extraordinary," "superior," "brilliant," "affecting and thought-provoking," "inspired," "surprising and exceptional," "emotionally packed, captivating," and my favorite, "with scorching intensity."

When we work on a show this difficult and complex -- and this challenging for the audience -- it's always so wonderful when our audiences fully embrace our production. And I gotta say, that happens almost every time -- we have such smart, fearless, adventurous audiences in St. Louis, and they never shy away from even our darkest, most intense work.

But even beyond this amazing reception, the biggest joy for me is getting to just sit back and watch this amazing piece of theatre every night, as it evolves in subtle ways, getting richer and deeper every night. It's such fun to hear the audience gasp when the various plot twists are revealed.

But more than that, it's fun to discover the endless treasure inside this script and score. Brian Yorkey's incredible musical rhyming dialogue is so naturalistic, yet so well-crafted, chock full of so many little jokes and hints and foreshadowing. I'm not exaggerating when I say almost every line of lyric contains thematic material and/or subtle foreshadowing.

One of my favorite numbers is "Song of Forgetting" in Act II. The more I listen to it, the more I find there. It's an interesting song structurally, because the verses are dialogue; but the choruses are commentary, a kind of  Fourth Wall-busting that acts as a cool meta-moment because they're singing about singing. In the original production, Dan sang the chorus to Natalie, presumably enlisting her into his warped agenda, but that staging changes Natalie into a more active player in the family psycho-drama, which doesn't mesh well with the rest of her character arc. Natalie stands outside the central storyline for most of the show, and that's important for the resolution of her story. The script doesn't say that Dan's singing this to anyone in particular. If he sings the chorus to the audience, it makes us accomplices, and it leaves Dan's dark agenda "unspoken" inside the reality of the story, which makes his motivations richer and more complex, only to be gradually revealed to Natalie in "Better Than Before."

The phrase "Sing a song of..." has Biblical roots, but it's intentionally ambiguous here. Throughout human history, why do we sing songs? To celebrate and to remember. Is Dan celebrating Diana's memory loss? Notice specifically what he's celebrating:

Sing a song of forgetting...
A song of the way things were not.
Sing of what's lost to you,
Of times that you never knew....
Sing of not remembering when,
Of mem’ries that go unremembered, and then
Sing a song of forgetting again.

He's celebrating the way things were not, times that they never knew. And then he sings of not remembering, and of unremembered memories. Also, notice that the first two lines don't rhyme -- they stick out, in order to underline the most important idea -- "the way things were not." This is a poetic way of articulating Dan's agenda, which is to reshape Diana's -- and the family's -- past to his liking. This is a dangerous road he's going down, but we only gets hints of that here. The rich music gives it a romantic feeling, but when you listen to what he's saying, we realize the song itself mirrors Dan's duplicity, operating on two levels at once.

The song starts with the discovery of the breadth of Diana's memory loss after her treatment. Notice how natural the dialogue sounds, but also notice that Yorkey never violates the structure and rhyming.

Dan

This house and all these rooms?

Last Christmas or last year?
Out back the dogwood blooms?

Diana

Do I really live here?

Dan

The paint, the walls...

All this glass and wood...

You don't recall?

Diana

How I wish I could.

Dan

Our house on Walton Way

The house with the red door?

Our trip to St. Tropez,

The whole week a downpour?

Natalie

My first few steps...

And my first lost tooth...

What, nothing yet?

Diana

To tell the truth...

Natalie

Jesus.

Dan

Sing a song of forgetting...

A song of the way things were not.

Sing of what's lost to you,

Of times that you never knew....

Sing of not remembering when,

Of mem’ries that go unremembered, and then

Sing a song of forgetting again.

That day our child was born,

Our baby girl's first cry?

That grey and drizzly morn,

I've never felt so high.

Diana

The day we met...

And we shared two beers...

Dan

Then?

Diana

I forget.

Dan

But that's nineteen years.

Diana

That doctor Mitchell said there might be some memory loss.

Dan

Doctor Madden.

Diana

Well, see, there you go.

Natalie

What a lovely cure...

It's a medical miracle.

With a mind so pure

That she doesn't know anything.

Dan

It's there I'm sure

‘Cause memories don't die.

Natalie

Why?

Dan

They don’t die.

Natalie

They die...

Diana

I'll try...

And then all three of them sing the chorus, but the words mean something different to each of them. Dan's idealized past is phony. Natalie's past is all pain. And Diana's past is gone. From these three conflicting perspectives, these words take on layers of meaning that slam up against each other and foreshadow the emotional collisions to come.

Dan, Natalie & Diana

Sing a song of forgetting...
A song of the way things were not.
Sing of what's lost to you,
Of times that you never knew.
Sing of not remembering when...
Of memories that go unremembered, and then
Sing a song of forgetting again.

It's remarkable writing. It functions both as a Brechtian commentary song, but also as as a conventional book scene, in that it moves the story forward, and it foreshadows Dan's desperate decision to try and rewrite their family history.

The song "Better Than Before" uses the same kind of musical dialogue, but minus the commentary.

I noticed when we were working on bare a couple years ago that we've reached a new level of lyrical sophistication in the musical theatre. Oscar Hammerstein invented the musical scene almost a century ago, with "Make Believe" in Show Boat, and later with "If I Loved You" in Carousel. Stephen Sondheim developed it further in Sweeney Todd, Passion, and other shows. But in bare and Next to Normal, it's been developed even further. Hammerstein's musical dialogue was always a bit stilted, sometimes having to rely on inverted sentences, odd word choices, etc. to make the trick work. Sondheim's musical dialogue was almost too skillful (look at the amazing "Weekend in the Country"), often calling attention to its own artistry. But Jon Hartmere's work in bare (just look at the remarkable "Wonderland" number) and Brian Yorkey's work in Next to Normal have taken us to a whole new level. And that's very exciting.

We truly are in a new Golden Age of musical theatre, and Next to Normal is a shining example of that. It's pretty fucking thrilling to be in the middle of all this...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Let It Shine

Next to Normal is one of the great modern American dramas, fully equal to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Death of a Salesman, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This isn't just a great musical (though it is that) and it's not just a great score (though it is that) -- it's a great work of art.

I'm ridiculously fortunate -- far more so than I probably deserve -- in that I routinely get to work on great art with really talented people. Pieces of theatre so transcendent, so beyond the rest of the art form, that they leave you forever changed. Shows like Sweeney Todd, Company, Assassins, Hair, Floyd Collins, Passing Strange, Jacques Brel, A New Brain, bare, and others. With all due gratitude to the theatre gods who watch over our weird, improbable little company, Next to Normal now takes its place on my list. I am such a lucky fucker.

Almost all the shows New Line produces are extraordinary works of theatre. If they weren't, we wouldn't produce them. And the few not in that category are intensely interesting but flawed works, that are still worth producing because they're just that interesting -- shows like Anyone Can Whistle, I Love My Wife, The Nervous Set, and Reefer Madness.

So what does a director do with a great work of art? Get out of its way. Or as doctors, put it, first do no harm. Don't add schtick, don't subvert, don't impose a "vision," just get out of the way.

Sometimes actors ask me at the first rehearsal, "What's your vision for the show?" I hate that question. There's only one right answer. To tell this story as clearly as possible. Anything beyond that is masturbation.

Looking back, I realize I've never had to direct a mediocre show in my life. Ever. I've never had to make up for the deficiencies in a so-so script or score. A lot of directors have to do that from time to time, but I never have. I'm very lucky. And it makes my job different from someone directing The Pajama Game or Annie Get Your Gun, both shows with a few decent elements but not nearly enough of them. I never have to shape or mold a show. My job is to reveal it. I remember reading that Michelangelo believed he just had to look inside the stone to find the figure he was seeking, then chip away everything else. He even created a series of sculptures, known as the Captives, that are in the process of being released by the artist from the stone that is imprisoning them.

With the expressionistic Next to Normal, the sculpture metaphor is really potent for me. We started with just Form -- script and score. And we've spent the last few weeks chipping away at this rock, revealing the emotion and subtext, excavating these rich, complex characters. And I've seen over the last week that we have now fully revealed this beautiful piece of art. And it's a stunner. Knowing what the set or the staging will look like ahead of time -- the show's physical incarnation -- doesn't tell you what the show's heart looks like. That you have to discover.

It must sound weird, maybe even pretentious, to people outside the theatre to hear me talk in such abstract, metaphorical terms about the work we do. But it's the only way to really get at the essence of what is essentially very abstract, instinctive work. We are storytellers, which means we are the makers of experiences. Subjective, individual, non-repeatable experiences. Because everyone's past colors each new experience, we artists have no control over the experience each audience member has in the theatre, watching our show. All we can do is tell the clearest, most resonant, most truthful story we can, and the audience provides the other half of it. Audiences don't want to be passive; they want to be engaged. It's so much more exciting and more fun.

All we have to do is ask it of them.

It's pretty heady stuff, being in the presence of such great art, living inside these lyrics and music, and these rich, soulful characters. I used to feel this crushing responsibility when we were working on pieces this good. Now I just feel lucky and grateful and I do my work. I know why I'm this lucky, why I get all the chances I get -- because I put the work first, because I am devoted heart and soul to making art, not making a lot of money, not getting famous, not making connections, just doing really good work. An artist always gets rewarded for that. Not always in money, but there are other kinds of reward -- like getting to resurrect and redeem High Fidelity and Cry-Baby, and getting to bring shows like Love Kills into the world.

And getting to work on bare, Passing Strange, Cry-Baby, High Fidelity, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and now Next to Normal, all in a row, without a single King and I or Nunsense anywhere to be found. That's the reward.

And it's plenty.

We got to sing through the entire Next to Normal score with the band for the first time today. It was thriling. That's the reward.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

It's Time for Me to Fly

Having worked on Next to Normal for several weeks, and now being able to watch the whole show at every rehearsal, it's almost overwhelming to fully appreciate the incredible complexity and craft in the writing. Every rehearsal reveals even more evidence for why this show won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Tom Kitt's music is extraordinary. Not just great pop music -- driving pop anthems, muscular guitar rock, gorgeous ballads -- but structurally very much an opera score, with arias, duets, quartets, sextets, recitative. The vocal arrangements are spectacular. But beyond that, this is a bipolar score, following the Sondheim Rule, that Content Dictates Form. Music primarily brings emotion to a story, and this story requires a special kind of emotion. So Kitt has expressed Diana's bipolar mood swings through his music. But not just Diana's. As much as they talk about Diana's mood, notice how erratic Dan is, from his weirdly manic "It's Gonna Be Good," to the conflicting emotions -- and musical styles -- of Dan's big solo, "I've Been." And notice the several musical fights in the show; the darker the emotions get, the more rock and roll the music becomes. As he did with High Fidelity, Kitt does as much storytelling here with his music as his collaborators do with words.

Kitt and Brian Yorkey have written musical dialogue scenes that both sound entirely naturalistic and also boast really economical, well-crafted lyrics with wonderful, original, surprising rhymes, including tons of interior rhymes, some almost hidden. Yorkey's lyrics are among the best I've ever had the pleasure of working on, and I've worked on almost all the modern masterpieces. Several times in each song, Yorkey reimagines a cliche, turns a phrase, or left-turns a sentence in an unexpected way that keeps us engaged and provides important foreshadowing or the development of textual themes. And sometimes a dark laugh too.

'Cause what doesn't kill me doesn't kill me,
So fill me
Up for just another day...

Or get a load of this amazing alliteration in the same song:

In the hustle and the hurry,
You want to wipe your worry
Clean away.
For just another day,
I will keep the plates all spinning
With a smile so white and winning
All the way.

And notice that in those last three lines, his sets of alteration overlap each other. We get the Ps of keep, plates,, and spinning; then the Ss of spinning, smile, and so; then the Ws of with, white, winning, and way. And those Ws link back to the Ws of the previous three lines, and want, wipe,, worry, and away. The audience doesn't consciously recognize all this, but it works on them, creating energy, momentum, in this context, maybe even a kind of frantic desperation. This kind of writing has to come from instinct -- who could plan all that and still make a coherent sentence that reveals character?

This is really skillful, powerful writing. And beyond the remarkable craft here, these few lines tell us almost everything we need to know about this family, even if we don't consciously realize we've taken in all this information. Later on, we may think back to Dan's desire to "wipe your worry...away" and realize how ironically it foreshadowed the dark choices he makes.

Dramatically, the show is just as extraordinary. It uses interior monologues for all the main characters, a device most people today think of as a Rodgers and Hammerstein staple, but it really goes back to Shakespeare. Diana's "I Miss the Mountains" is a close cousin to Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Both are deeply felt, desperately complicated, wrapped around metaphors, and focused on a choice to be made. Diana's song has companion pieces in Dan's soulful wail "I've Been," Gabe's defiant "I'm Alive," and Natalie's existential "Superboy and the Invisible Girl." In old-school musicals, they called these the "I Want" songs, though like I said, the device goes back a lot further than Rodgers and Hammerstein or Cole Porter..

But Kitt and Yorkey are at their dramatic best in the fight scenes -- real, visceral, knock-down-drag-out fights. The double number, "You Don't Know" and "I Am the One" is just one example among many of a powerful book scene quite artfully set to music and rhymed lyrics.

The show is also very cinematic. (I wonder how much that may be the influence of the original director Michael Greif.) Almost every scene dissolves into the next, sometimes even interrupting each other. Throughout the show there are moments when an actor in one scene simply turns around and now he's in another scene, in another time and place. There are often two scenes going on onstage at once, juxtaposing the action in really interesting, revealing ways. As just one example of many, Natalie fucks up her piano recital on one side of the stage, while at the same time, Diana's telling her doctor about not being able to hold Natalie as a baby. The two scenes slam up against each other in a powerful, emotional way, but only implying the connection that we in the audience then complete, delivering more character and relationship information than a much longer dialogue scene could. And this happens throughout the show, often in a cinematic split-screen effect.

This is an evolution of the form. All these things are also true of Rent, bare, Passing Strange, American Idiot, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. These new rock shows demand a very minimalist physical approach -- there's no time or place for traditional set changes -- and a less naturalistic, more fluid, more expressionistic, more cinematic kind of staging. Michael Bennett taught us, in Dreamgirls, how to use film devices on stage, close-ups, pans, focus pulls, dissolves, split-screens; and today's audience accept those devices on stage as easily as they accept them on the screen. No one today goes to a musical expecting the old Rodgers and Hammerstein faux naturalism.

Next to Normal lives in a metaphorical world as much as in the physical world. Many of the devices Yorkey and Kitt use are designed to keep the audience off kilter, to disorient them, to hold them in suspense, to not allow them time to think about and judge the things they're witnessing, to force them to experience these events rather than thinking about them. The audience is on this roller coaster ride with Diana, strapped in right beside her.

And that ties into the central point of the story, that a person's illness affects not just them, but everyone in their orbit. And because of the way Kitt and Yorkey have told this story, we the audience are among those in Diana's orbit. We have to live with her in her illness, her delusions, her twisted world, for two hours. When she sees the doctor as a metal rocker, we see that too. When she finds herself inside a delusion, we're there with her. That both binds the audience to Diana and gives them a more profound empathy than lesser writers could have allowed.

It's always interesting for me to work on a show when I love the original production, which was the case with Next to Normal. It used to worry me, not wanting to copy but wanting to be faithful. But over the last several years, I've come to think about my work very differently. I used to decide on the final product, then work toward it. Now, I figure out the road we need to follow, and then we all take the journey together, my job being to keep us all on the road and moving forward. After all these years, I'm really good at figuring out the right road to take; though sometimes I even doubt myself during the process. But it always turns out to be the right road in the end.

Because of all this, sometimes I know what the end product will be and sometimes the end product surprises me. This time, it's surprising me. I can see now that our production will be more surrealistic, more expressionistic, more Brechtian, more fluid, more cinematic, more of a perpetual motion machine, and a bit more presentational than the Broadway production.

This show reminds me a lot of Lippa's Wild Party. Minus the sexual debauchery. It's highly stylistic, very original storytelling. Following the Sondheim Commandment, that Content Dictates Form, Kitt and Yorkey have written Next to Normal in a storytelling style that mirrors Diana's world. The music itself, even without the lyrics, could not be set to any other story. Kitt uses the 7/8 time signature (essentially dropping half a beat out of each measure of music) frequently throughout the score. He sometimes plays two key signatures against each other. He almost always refuses to give numbers clear "buttons" at the end, which holds back the audience from the release of applause, and amps up the show's ever increasing tension. In many ways Kitt's music works like a horror film score, and like Sweeney Todd, which was consciously built on the horror movie music of Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Vertigo).

It's been so wonderful and so soul-nourishing to live inside this score for a few months. It's so cool to sit in the audience and watch our run-throughs, amazed time after time at some new subtle reference I catch that advances character or foreshadows things the audience never even imagines that are coming. We New Liners have been so lucky for the past twenty-two years to work on some genuine masterpieces of our art form. None of us get paid all that well, but we get to do something almost nobody else does. We get to make amazing, beautiful, meaningful art and we get to share it with an enthusiastic, intelligent, adventurous audience.

I don't care how much they pay me -- where could I ever find a better job than this?

We open next week and the show is in such great shape, with really just tiny little things to fix now. I am so grateful that we found these six actors. I can't wait to share this.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

You Can't Tame Me

The 1937 agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock is one of my all-time favorite shows. We were very lucky to get to produce it back in 2001. One of the things I love about it is the characters' clever label-names -- Reverend Salvation, Dr. Specialist, Editor Daily, Larry Foreman, and the rich capitalist Mr. Mister, along with his family Mrs. Mister, Junior Mister, and Sister Mister.

I think what I love about it is its honesty. It's a fable and its characters are types, so instead of trying to disguise that fact, Marc Blitzstein openly admits it in the way he names them. I did the same thing with a few characters in my 2006 musical Johnny Appleweed, naming the White House characters President John J. Birch (invoking both Dubya and the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society) and his chief of staff Carla Roe (invoking both Karl Rove and Roe v. Wade). The main character was a closeted gay man named Mark Dodger. And then there was Johnny Appleweed himself. Use your imagination.

There are several plays and musicals that do this, but not many. And of those that do, some make it very subtle and others outright announce it. There's the Christ figure Jason and his companion Peter in bare, but there's also Orphan, Angel, and Edgar Allen Rich in Celebration. I think my favorite is Gitlow in Purlie.

Next to Normal does it more subtly.

Now before I proceed, I don't know that the writers did any of this on purpose. But I believe that writers often use very sophisticated storytelling devices even without being conscious of their use, just because it feels right, because it feels like good storytelling to them. That said, in this case, I think it's intentional.

In Next to Normal, the bipolar woman at the center of the story is Diana Goodman. Right away, her last name sounds like a label-name to me, as if to suggest that these are decent, normal people -- and by extension, that mental illness plays no favorites. Bad things happen to good people. Her first name references the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon and birthing, who was also associated with wild animals and the woods (often the dark place of self-discovery in storytelling). Diana was widely known as "the virgin goddess of childbirth and women." But her first name takes on more serious resonance once we start hearing Dan refer to her as "Di," which he does throughout the script. It's pretty potent for this damaged woman on the edge of sanity to be called a name that sounds like die. And that nickname takes on even deeper resonance once we get to "There's a World."

And then there's Gabe, named for one of the most famous angels in Christian culture, the archangel who serves as a messenger to humans from heaven, who announced the birth of Christ to the Virgin Mary. With that in mind, Gabe's first lyric takes on even more meaning:

For just another day,
For another stolen hour,
When the world will feel my power
And obey.
It's just another day,
Feeling like I'll live forever...

Gabriel appears to various people throughout the Bible, and in the Old Testament, he appears to the prophet Daniel, delivering explanations of Daniel's visions; though, according to Wikipedia, "Daniel does not explicitly identify Gabriel as an angel: he is a visionary figure whom Daniel calls 'the man Gabriel'." Daniel is a Hebrew name, literally meaning "God is my judge."

Is that a hint about Dan's feelings of guilt? And does that reshape our response to that last conversation between Dan and Gabe before the finale? And really, Goodman is Dan's name -- Diana just married into it -- so maybe this label name is more about him. She refers to him in the song "Why Stay?" as "steadfast and stolid and stoic and solid." And not in a good way. Maybe the point here is that being a good man isn't enough in this situation. Maybe nothing's enough.

Earlier in Act II, Gabe says, "Until you name me, you can't tame me," and it's not until then that we realize no one has mentioned Gabe's name yet. The moment when someone finally does is all the more potent because of that. All this seems to argue that these carefully chosen names are supposed to have meaning within the story.

But wait, there's more... Where does the name Natalie come from? It's the English form of Natalia, which is derived from the Italian natale, meaning birthday. It specifically refers to the birth of Christ -- the Italian phrase for Merry Christmas! is buon natale! (literally "good birthday!").

Then there are the two doctors. The less empathetic, more drug-enthusiastic Dr. Fine has only one goal -- stability. He wants Diana to just be fine, nothing more. Dr. Madden seems to care about Diana more, but his treatment arguably maddens Diana even further.

Henry is a name shared by British, French, and German kings, and one Catholic saint. It comes from a Germanic name which combines the words for home and ruler or power. I'm not sure why, but this one seems less intentional and/or meaningful to me. Henry as "master of the house"? Or maybe it's more about Henry representing home to Natalie, a safe place. In terms of Natalie's Hero Myth story, she finds her magic amulet in Henry's love. She finds real human connection after a lifetime of being denied it. Maybe the reference to all those kings means nothing more than that Henry will be a strong man -- different from Dan.

And maybe all of this is accidental.

But that seems hard to believe, when the names' meanings fit so perfectly to their characters. Then again, maybe it was just a gut feeling that led the writers to each name. Whatever the impetus, it's cool. (If you haven't seen the show yet, some of this may seem a bit puzzling. The show's story has a couple really big plot surprises, and I don't want to ruin those for anyone who hasn't seen it, so I'm consciously leaving out some pieces of information. Sorry about that.)

Since Next to Normal won a Pulitzer Prize, I guess I don't have to argue (as I often do) for the show's bona fides. But thinking about stuff like this is my second favorite pastime. My first favorite is actually putting stuff like this onstage and sharing it with an audience. Lucky me, I get to do both most of the time...

Tickets are already selling even better than usual, so it looks like we'll have packed houses for this one. This astonishingly hard-working and artful cast of actors deserves no less. You'll be amazed at the rich, textured, layered characters they're creating. We're really going to do this beautiful piece of theatre proud.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Wandering Through the Wilderness

We are emotional adventurers.

The thing that makes a good story a good musical is emotion. As playwright Tony Kushner wrote, "Musicals can do what Auden praised Yeats for having done: they can 'sing of human unsuccess / in a rapture of distress.' We're immortal birds not born for death, each and every one of us; our souls, the deepest truest human impulses, ideas and actions, truly and fully expressed, must pour forth abroad in ecstasy. Or words to that effect. Know what I mean? And that's why there are musicals."

The thing that makes a production of a musical really wonderful and powerful is the honesty and authenticity of its emotions. That's one of New Line's top priorities -- second only perhaps to clear storytelling -- but unfortunately, it's not a universal priority. There are way too many shallow, phony productions of musicals, which sometimes give audiences the mistaken impression that the shows themselves are empty, when it's really just lazy directors and actors who are more emotional tourists than adventurers.

As I've argued before, people come to see a musical specifically because it's a more emotional kind of storytelling, so if a production delivers phony emotions, they're committing fraud as surely as someone selling glass diamonds.

When young writers ask me how they can know if a story is worth adapting for the musical stage, I tell them it's about whether or not the story is primarily an emotional one. Because its language is music, emotion is the lingua franca of musical theatre. If a story is primarily about action, songs might well get in the way -- which is why there are very few successful musical farces or musical mysteries, because those forms are about intricate plotting, not emotion.

A lot of older musicals follow a similar arc -- we watch as the Hero tries to assimilate into a community, and a "happy ending" is one in which the Hero succeeds in that assimilation, like in The Music Man, Annie Get Your Gun, Oklahoma!, or Brigadoon. In more serious musicals, the Hero often is unable to assimilate, so he has to be removed, sometimes by death, like in Sweeney Todd or Carousel. In South Pacific there are two Heroes (Cable and Nellie), so we get both outcomes. You might argue the same thing about The King and I and Man of La Mancha.

But in order to have a community to assimilate into, a musical needs a big chorus. And starting in the mid-1960s, choruses starting shrinking on Broadway, mostly for economic reasons. By the 70s, the leads became the chorus, as in Company and A Chorus Line. And if you don't really have a "community" onstage, that assimilation story loses its power. (Bat Boy sort of mocked that problem by creating a community of a couple dozen characters, but all played by five actors.)

For that reason -- and also because of the philosophical underpinnings of the 1960s counter-culture -- musicals began to turn to a different kind of story, the classic Hero Myth, in which our Hero starts out on a journey (sometimes concrete, sometimes psychological), meets a "wise wizard," finds his "magic amulet" (ruby slippers, light saber), picks up companions, navigates various obstacles (sometimes including a trip into "the underworld"), does battle with an "evil wizard," and finally gains new wisdom, often returning home to share it with his community. It's an incredibly powerful form because the Hero Myth is just a stand-in for a human life. We each have our own journey, wise and evil wizards, companions, and magic amulets, so we connect to that story form in a really powerful, personal way.

And the Hero Myth has become progressively more relevant in American culture because more people are living alone today than at any other time in human history -- mostly just because we can, thanks to various technological and economic developments. I'm in the middle of a great book about this trend, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

Just think about how many contemporary musicals follow the Hero Myth model -- Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, American Idiot (times three!), Shrek, Billy Elliot, Passing Strange, Cry-Baby, High Fidelity, Spring Awakening, Taboo, and lots of others. This trend started in the 70s, with Company, Pippin, Follies, Jesus Christ Superstar, then later Nine and Sunday in the Park with George, among others. But it really exploded in the 1990s, when musical theatre started to decouple itself artistically from New York commercial theatre on and off Broadway.

Because these new American musicals were being written with less thought to commercial potential, they were much more personal works, which generally steered them toward the form of the Hero Myth. In Next to Normal, Diana's arc follows a classic Hero Myth structure, even as far as a journey to the "underworld," in the form of the ECT and her memory loss. As Bruno Bettelheim writes in The Uses of Enchantment (the book that inspired Into the Woods), "Since ancient times the near-impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious. If we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now find our own way to become ourselves, and have entered the wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity." Yorkey and Kitt have used this ancient device but removed its metaphoric cloak. Here, Diana literally journeys into her own unconscious.

Even more relevant to Next to Normal, Bettelheim also writes, "From the earliest versions, fairy tales [and Hero Myths] stress that both desires reside in each of us, and that we cannot survive deprived of either: the wish to stay tied to the past, and the urge to reach out to a new future. Through the unfolding of events, the story most often teaches that entirely cutting oneself off from one's past leads to disaster, but that to exist only beholden to the past is stunting; while it is safe, it provides no life of one's own. Only the thorough integration of these contrary tendencies permits a successful existence."

But Next to Normal is actually a double Hero Myth. Diana follows her Hero Myth and Natalie follows a secondary Hero Myth; and key to Natalie's character, the two journeys are very similar. Natalie's awareness of that is what creates her fear that she will live a life as fucked up and damaged as Diana's, that her relationship with Henry will be as scarred and empty as her parents'.

Diana is also aware of these parallels, and of Natalie's fear of these parallels. At the beginning of "I Miss the Mountains," Diana sings:

There was a time when I flew higher,
Was a time the wild girl running free
Would be me.
Now I see her feel the fire,
Now I know she needs me there
To share.
I'm nowhere.
All these blank and tranquil years,
Seems they've dried up all my tears.
And while she runs free and fast,
Seems my wild days are past.

That's quite a jam-packed lyric. It's about missing her manic past, worrying that Natalie will suffer the same fate, her shame for failing as a mother, her inability to feel anything because of her meds, and even a tinge of jealousy of Natalie's youth and freedom. Despite the abundance of rhyme here, the language and sentence structure are completely natural, and the self-awareness Diana expresses moves her character forward and propels her to action. But beneath that, there's such extraordinary lyric-writing craft here. There are wonderful, almost hidden interior rhymes, like blank and the first part of tranquil, a trick Yorkey uses that throughout the score. And there's also a ton of alliteration -- the w's in the first three lines and the last two lines, the f's in the fourth and tenth lines, and the n sounds in lines 4-7, particularly in the fifth line.

This intro works as important self-awareness for Diana, but it also makes sure the audience recognizes these two parallel journeys. Just as Oklahoma! sets up a secondary love triangle to mirror the primary love triangle, here bookwriter and lyricist Brian Yorkey and composer Tom Kitt do the same thing with the Hero Myth. But Next to Normal is an incredibly complex piece of writing, so I'm still struggling with identifying all the various Hero Myth elements.

For instance, could Gabe be both magic amulet and evil wizard... and companion...? Could Dr. Madden be both wise wizard and evil wizard?

The one advantage Natalie has in her Hero Myth is self-awareness. While Diana is desperately trying to understand herself and her journey, Natalie is very clear-eyed, though maybe a touch too pessimistic. To Natalie, each disaster for Diana is a future disaster for Natalie. While the end of Diana's story is totally ambiguous -- especially as we see at the end that her journey has been mirrored by a hidden journey Dan has also taken -- the end of Natalie's story is more hopeful. It's still ambiguous, because let's face it, life is ambiguous, but less so...

The one significant difference between Diana's and Natalie's stories is in their partners. In Hero Myth terms, Dan fails as Diana's faithful companion, while Henry succeeds as Natalie's. It seems that Dan may not have known about Diana's problems when he married her, and to some extent he was "forced" into the marriage, if only by his own sense of duty and decency and whatnot. After all, Dan sees himself as the martyred Good Guy (which may be his great tragic flaw). On the other hand, Henry does seem to know exactly how fucked up Natalie is, and he chooses to be with her, without any external pressures, with his eyes fully open. Natalie and Henry have a much more honest relationship than Diana and Dan do, and so the younger couple will probably have a healthier relationship.

It's not important that an audience consciously recognize all this stuff. The Hero Myth works because we instinctively recognize the elements of the story, even if only subconsciously, as elements of our own lives. But it helps the actors and me to recognize these elements so we can tell this story as clearly as possible. Some directors and actors believe all you have to do is say/sing the words and the rest will take care of itself. I think that's really wrong, and it leads to a lot of very shallow, unsatisfying theatre. The more we understand the storytelling, the better we'll tell the story. Just by "underlining" a word, just by adding a pause to let something sink in for a second, we can make the important stuff clearer and help the audience get the most out of the story.

But we have to know what the important stuff is.

I've seen so many productions of Spelling Bee that are nothing more than sketch comedy, because the director and actors have no idea they're working on six Hero Myths. So they speed by all the important moments, they ignore all the character arcs, and they look for any way to get a laugh. They don't try for real honesty or authenticity, because it doesn't even occur to them that what they're doing is great art, that it feeds the audience's souls, that it connects us all on a fundamentally human level, that it explores the complexity of our human emotions.

As Ben Kingsley once said in an interview, "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."

We're very lucky at New Line because we've always worked in small spaces. Though our current space is a little larger, at 210 seats, it's very intimate because there are only seven rows. And that gives us the luxury of more subtle acting, not as minimalist as film acting, but (depending on the show) still pretty subtle. As I often tell our actors, you don't have to "show" the audience how your character feels; you just have to feel it. We humans are amazingly skilled at reading human faces. It's what we do all day. So even the tiniest, most subtle changes in a face are easy to read, because we all get so much practice at it.

And that will change Next to Normal. After all, despite its three-story set on Broadway, this is a chamber musical, a small, personal, intimate story of five people, and it belongs in a chamber setting. I think this powerful story is going to be even more powerful when you're sitting only eight or ten feet away from Kimi Short singing "I Miss the Mountains."

We are emotional adventurers. In a few weeks, you can join us on our adventure.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

What Are You Doing in My Electricity?

As I've written here before, I'm taking a somewhat different approach to staging Next to Normal. Not radically different, but different. I'm aiming for a more dreamlike atmosphere rather than fairly naturalistic scenes alternating with rock concert style numbers.

We've already staged all of Act I, but I was really stuck on Act II. I kept putting off working on it, and I know that's always a sign that I'm lost. In the off Broadway production, in a song (later cut) that's called "Feeling Electric," they did a trick with a hospital gurney up on its end and Alice Ripley standing up against it, so it seemed like we're were looking down on her from above. That's a cool effect that I've also seen in Into the Woods, The Capeman, and Hairspray, but it works, it's clear, and it's always a fun bit of stage trickery.

On Broadway -- using the new song "Wish I Were Here" in that spot -- they brought out a Diana double on a gurney while the real Diana sang from another part of the stage. And that worked too, but it didn't feel exactly right to me, at least, not in the context of the production we're putting together.

Then it finally hit me why I was stuck.

The gurney was getting in my way. That's how they had showed the audience that Diana is in the hospital. Except the opening of Act II doesn't really take place in the hospital; it takes place inside Diana's anesthetized mind, in a hallucinatory dreamscape. Though Diana is on the table and Natalie is at a club, the two meet here in Diana's dreamscape, and Diana says to her daughter, "Sweetheart! What are you doing in my electricity?" Even Diana has the self-awareness to know that she's inside her own head as it's being zapped.

So if we're inside Diana's head, do we really need a gurney? I don't think so. And that realization totally freed me.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, the Next to Normal team realized during the development process that they had been writing a musical about an idea (ECT) and a musical should be about people. The original Act II opener "Feeling Electric" was a song about ECT, and as they developed the show they realized the Act II opener had to be about Diana, not her treatment. So they wrote "Wish I Were Here" to replace the earlier song, and this new song isn't about the hospital, it's about the chaos in Diana's mind, as it's under assault by the shock treatment, as her memories are being annihilated, as the electricity blasts away at her past and her very identity. After all, our sense of self comes from the accumulated experiences and understanding we've picked up along the Road of Life, so destroying memories -- whether temporarily or permanently -- means the destruction of self as well.

From that perspective, the whole show becomes about Diana's struggle to save her own life.

This is a song about an existential threat to Diana's very existence. It's about Diana's consciousness and the violence done to it, represented by the throbbing rock beat in the music -- Diana's heartbeat, her lifeforce, in the voice of electric guitar. It's a powerful and subtle use of music as storytelling, something of which Tom Kitt is a master -- just listen to High Fidelity.

So the gurney is gone in our production.  But then the question becomes, how do we make it really clear to the audience how this dreamscape works? Or do we need to...?

When I staged this number with the actors earlier this week, I saw on some of their faces that same mix of bewilderment and skepticism that I often see on actors' faces when we're doing weirder shows. And I did something that some actors love and other actors hate. It goes like this, more or less -- "So we're in Diana's dreamscape, but we're also at the hospital where she's getting the ECT, but it's also a little bit musical comedy since you're singing backup, but not too musical comedy -- it shouldn't look choreographed or tightly staged -- it should feel fluid and dreamlike and abstract, just moving around the stage, like Diana's life and memories and sense of self are all swirling around her, her family and the hospital staff melding together, but it's also sort of Brechtian and presentational... So just fuck around and see what happens organically... Just let yourselves play and see where that takes us..."

I've tried this approach before in a number of shows, and it always works. In a show like this, some moments need precise staging, and other moments would be sucked dry by that. Some things need to be carefully worked out in detail, while other things will be far cooler and more interesting if we allow them to develop organically. We have the luxury of a somewhat leisurely rehearsal process.

We don't open for a month yet, and playing and exploring can yield really wonderful results, if you have the time. Some actors love time to play, but some actors don't like not having The Answer. I subscribe to the Jim Lapine school of directing -- get a "first draft" up on stage pretty quickly, and then tweak and shape it over time, as the actors create their performances. I compare it to creating comic books -- first you do the pencil drawings, then you ink it, then you color it.

My job is to give the actors a pencil drawing and then let them ink and color it.

Twenty years ago, that would have terrified me to be so casual and free with staging, but I've learned over time, working on shows like The Wild Party, Hair, Cry-Baby, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and Passing Strange, that sometimes a musical should not look too stagey or too controlled, that it should look more organic, more loose, more like an indie rock concert. After we ran "Wish I Were Here" a couple times, I suggested a few, slightly more specific ideas to the actors, but I was still careful to keep my comments largely abstract and nebulous...

I know our designers are happiest when I talk about our shows in abstract terms, in terms of emotion, feel, impact, themes, etc., and then allow them to translate those abstract ideas into concrete sets, costumes, sound, and lighting. But that same process works with actors too -- if you're working with really great actors, which I am.

The whole show is dreamlike to some degree, but a few moments in the show are very dreamlike, disorienting, disturbing, and revealing in ways that more naturalistic writing or staging would not be. I realize as we work on the show that one of the reasons the show has such resonance for audiences is that Diana sort of stands in for America at this moment in our history -- confused by competing versions of reality, unable to rely on authority figures or long-established institutions (government, education, religion, capitalism, etc.).

We like Hero Myth stories like Diana's because the Hero's Journey is just a metaphor for a human life. But it's also a metaphor for collective journeys, like the evolution of a society. "Wish I Were Here" represents the part of the Hero Myth in which the Hero must journey to the Underworld and do battle with the Evil Wizard. Here the underworld is the fractured personal reality of Diana's electrified mind, and the ECT is the Evil Wizard's magic spell. I'm still trying to figure out if Gabe is her magic amulet (i.e., light saber, ruby slippers) or if he's the antagonist. Or both.

But Diana's Underworld easily stands in for America's current darkness, in which competing parties can't even agree on what is factually true anymore, in which opponents compare each other to Hitler, in which one side rewrites school textbooks to comport with their belief system (and, let's be honest, in order to indoctrinate the next generation), in which so many of the rules of "polite society" have been tossed aside. How do we navigate this new, altered, dangerous landscape?

As we watch Diana navigate her own Underworld, perhaps we gain a little understanding of our own personal and collective Underworlds. And that brings me back to our staging. Instead of making the opening of Act II about this damaged woman undergoing a scary medical procedure, this scene in our production will be about Finding Your Way in the Dark.

Which is kind of the point of the whole show. How do we find our way when we have no map to guide us?

We use art.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

You Find Some Way to Survive

I was watching a documentary about Woody Allen and the term "agent of chaos" came up in one of the interviews. That really stuck with me, and it's been swimming around in my head for a few days. Now I'm working through how this relates to Next to Normal. And I keep seeing Heath Ledger...

And I realize how often an agent of chaos has shown up in the musicals I've directed, sometimes as a side character, sometimes as the protagonist. Think of Barry (or even Rob!) in High Fidelity, both Cry-Baby Walker and Lenora in Cry-Baby, Jackson himself in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, pretty much every character in Assassins, Matt and Jason both in bare, Queenie in The Wild Party, Dr. Prospero in Return to the Forbidden Planet, Edgar in Bat Boy, Mr. Bungee in A New Brain. Even Harold Hill in The Music Man, Joey Evans in Pal Joey, Billy Bigelow in Carousel, Anna in The King and I, and Maria in The Sound of Music.

And of course, Diana in Next to Normal.

Now that I'm more aware of this, I see it everywhere. Think of Richard in Richard III or Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Or Jack on Will & Grace.

The agent of chaos is often a misfit. In Next to Normal, Diana is a misfit, but only psychologically. On the outside, she's an average suburban wife and mother, and yet on the inside she is broken. And that brokenness makes it very hard -- impossible? -- for her to fit in the world. In Act II, as the family surveys old photos, we catch references to multiple embarrassing incidents in Diana's past. This has been going on a long time. But in Diana's case, she's not an agent of chaos because she is Id run wild, as with many agents of chaos, but because Ego and Superego are largely dysfunctional. She is an unwilling, "accidental" agent of chaos.

I saw a cool interview recently with the Next to Normal creative team, composer Tom Kitt, lyricist and bookwriter Brian Yorkey, director Michael Greif, and producer David Stone. They talked about how the show was originally called Feeling Electric, partly because the original impetus for writing the show was the issue of ETC (shock therapy), and partly because the show originally had a snarkier, more smartass tone. But one of the lessons the writing team learned as they developed the show over several years, was that they had to write about a person, not an idea (a mistake I made to some extent with my own show Johnny Appleweed). Musicals are the most emotional form of storytelling, so the reason to tell a story as a stage musical is because that story is primarily about emotion -- often love, but not always.

As they rewrote the show, it became more personal and more sincere. In its earlier versions, it was about ETC. Now it's about a woman and her family grappling with mental illness. Big difference. And the new title, apparently chosen more by gut instinct than by reason, reflected this new tone. Interestingly, they chose this title before the title song had been written, so they built that song around their new title.

"Next to Normal" is an unusual phrase that grabs your attention, and though we're all so used to it now, if you think about it even for a second, you see that it packs a lot of meaning. In most shows, the misfit doesn't end up fitting comfortably into the community. Once a misfit, always a misfit. (Two exceptions are Harold Hill and Maria Von Trapp, although you might argue that Meredith Willson's River City is a whole town full of misfits.) So in Next to Normal, instead of taking Diana on a journey from misfit to normal, the writers gave her a more modest, more honest, more nuanced goal, of finding a place next to normal. In the show's finale, Diana sings:

You find some way to survive,
And you find out you don't have to be happy at all
To be happy you're alive.

This is not a Rodgers and Hammerstein bromide like "You'll never walk alone." This is real life. Here, Diana chooses to walk alone. And notice that Diana's lyric is in the second person -- you find some way to survive -- as a reminder that this is not just her journey, but all our journeys. This song is sort of a companion piece to the equally ambiguous finale of Sondheim's Company. There is no happy ending here because there are no happy endings in real life; there's always a next chapter (so we all learned from Into the Woods). What's fucked up today may be fixed tomorrow, but it's equally true that what's fine today may be fucked up tomorrow. We know at the end of Next to Normal that Diana has made a decision, but we have no idea how it will turn out. As the song says, they will go on...

The show's secondary story (and parallel Hero Myth journey) between Natalie and Henry, both mirrors and intersects with the primary story. Like Diana, Natalie is also a misfit, but lucky for her, so is Henry. Structurally, Natalie and Henry are more serious, more integrated versions of Ado Annie and Will Parker. Throughout Next to Normal, there is an underlying tension as we slowly realize the friction between Natalie and Diana comes from Natalie's fear that she will grow up to be über-misfit Diana, that she is as broken as her mother. This fear permeates and shapes Natalie's relationship with Henry. Yorkey underlines this by setting these two couples together at one moment in Act I, when they actually say lines together in unison.

And while Diana takes her own Hero Myth journey, Natalie takes one too. Natalie's goal throughout the show is to find normality. But by the end, she has learned that she has the wrong goal. Instead of trying to be normal -- in other words, like everybody else -- Natalie finally understands that her real goal should be to figure out who she is and what her road is, just like the Youth in Passing Strange. We know Natalie has grown up -- or is growing up -- near the end of the show when she sings to Diana:

I don't need a life that's normal.
That's way too far away.
But something next to normal
Would be okay.
Yeah, something next to normal,
That's the thing I'd like to try,
Close enough to normal
To get by...

She's freeing Diana of guilt and expectations, and in the process, she's letting go of her own neuroses as well. Maybe Natalie has finally realized, with the help of Stoner Zen Master Henry, that normal is artificial, that it is a construct. They're not like other families because everyone's road is different. There is no such thing as normal in the real world, just as there is no such thing as average. Those labels are are about statistics, but our story is about complicated, ever-changing individuals. Normal has no meaning here.

And if there is no such thing as normal, can someone really be a misfit? Or are all of us misfits? Also, isn't life itself fundamentally chaotic? And if it is, doesn't that make all of us agents of chaos?

Probably depends on the shit you're smokin'. As the kids in Spelling Bee remind us, "Life is random and unfair." Neither good or bad, wrong or right. Just chaos. You can be scared by that or you can embrace the adventure. Diana and Natalie have been scared by that and must both learn to embrace the adventure.

The show's title even seems to invoke (though probably unintentionally) the new American musical, in which love stories and Hero Myths are as complicated as real life, in which there are no easy answers or endings, in which we can see ourselves and our own lives much more clearly than we can see them in simplistic shows like The Sound of Music or Brigadoon. This isn't a "normal" musical (if there is such a thing anymore), but it does use devices from both the R&H model and classic musical comedy (as in "It's Gonna Be Good"), so it's fair to say that Next to Normal is "next to normal"...

This story is not neat, tidy or easily wrapped up in a nice little narrative package, the way many musicals did in the old days. I think that's part of what some people hate about the New Golden Age of Musical Theatre that we're in now, but it's what I love most about it. And it's what I love most about Next to Normal.

Normal is boring.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott