Listening is Waiting redux

I've continued to grapple with the phrase "Listening is waiting" in the show. It's so easy to see so many different possibilities in those words -- it's very Rorschach-y...

So I decided to go straight to the source -- Stew. I'm pretty good at figuring out dense, complex texts, but sometimes there are too many choices, and the simplest answer is (when possible) to ask the writer. They never seem to mind when I ask questions like this; in fact, writers are often highly complimented that we're taking their work that seriously. So I asked Stew about "Listening is waiting," and I'm just going to reprint here what he emailed back to me... He is such a cool guy!

FROM STEW:

well, at bottom, the line is pretty straightforward:
"Listening is Waiting"
means just that: yer in an expectant state that is ready to receive, conscious, alert, sensitive to what's happening around you and to what MIGHT happen or what is ABOUT to happen, like any good musician in the middle of a jam session.

listening, for me, is active.
waiting, it would seem, is passive.
but my listening is active waiting.
and it's the same for any good musician.

now if memory serves "listening is waiting" always comes before a revelation.

The essence of rock and roll, among so many other things, is revealed to him after "listening is waiting" is sung the first time.

and i think the other time it comes is before he realizes that he's going to fill the void with music for the rest of his life.

this boy, and all musicians, but especially those his age, listens to music as if it were an oracle speaking via vinyl. he listens to hendrix and the beatles not merely to nod his head and get high to it, he is waiting to receive wisdom. He is waiting for nothing less than a revelation from this music, for something real to go down, for a sound that will change his life.*

The members of the congregation do the same thing with church and with the music of the church: they come every sunday listening for...waiting for... a revelation.

The whole congregation was listening and waiting
To be released from its collective frown.

So both parties are desperate for some kind of salvation.
his of course is quite different from theirs.
they want the burden of mortgages and the racism at their new "good" jobs to be lifted...and he wants to feel like he's living life to the fullest.

Even the bad kids in the back pew were wondering...
Is something real gonna go down?

Now some said: “Lord, please read us,
Collect us, then lead us to higher ground.”
And then all asked the very same question…
Is somethin' real goin' down?

At the end of the day, I'm not a playwright (as you've no doubt noted by now!!! :) but really just a rock and roll songwriter. And so I'm sorry if some stuff kinda just comes and goes without much explanation or foundation.

let me know if you need anything else.
Happy to oblige.

/s

*we used to have a scene somewhere late in act one where Youth was listening to music on headphones and describing his journey into the music and what he got and expected from it.

You Need to Blacken Up

I knew it was gonna come up sooner or later.

I'm a white guy (one of the whitest, if you go by pigment -- you shoulda seen me as a kid), directing a black musical about a black guy struggling with the black experience, and written by a black guy about his own life. That this might occasionally be an issue was definitely a consideration when I decided to produce Passing Strange. But I figured I've directed shows about Argentine political prisoners, women murderers, Texas prostitutes, teenage spree killers, French painters, and a German transsexual, so I'm pretty good at getting inside characters and worlds that are nothing like my own life. Still, that said, this arguable liability of mine popped up at rehearsal last night. First a little backstory.

I love the original production of Passing Strange. But as I started work on the show, I realized I didn't want to approach it in exactly the same way. The original show was equal parts rock concert and theatre piece, largely because the writers and their band were a part of the original production. But as I did with Return to the Forbidden Planet, which had a similar original production, I wanted to approach this show more as a full-throated theatre piece. I knew that the incredible quality of the script and score would stand up dramatically. And though a few moments in our production will be pretty much like the original, other parts will be really different. As much as I loved the style of the original, there were a few parts that really didn't work for me, moments that yanked me out of the world of the story for an easy laugh.

One of those moments was when we meet Edwin Williams, "teenage goddess." The way they played her in the original production was very cartoony. And it was funny, no question. But that moment -- which is key to beginning the Youth's journey -- lost the weight it should have had as an instigating incident. There are three incidents early on in which the Youth is at odds with his world in a fundamental way. The first is in church when he has a meaningful epiphany and is slapped by his mother for it. The second is when he meets Edwina and she demands a conforming, middle-class future from him. The third is when his garage band breaks up. These three experiences send him off on his journey.

Two of those three moments were treated seriously in the original production. Edwina wasn't. She was an outrageous cartoon. Like I said, it was funny, but the scene became a joke instead of a turning point for our hero. So when we started blocking that scene, I asked Andrea, who's playing Edwina, to not play her as a cartoon. I know that's always hard for an actor, when I ask them to go in a completely different direction than they expected, but god bless her, she was totally open to it. I think she wasn't sure exactly how to accomplish that but she was willing to try.

Tonight we ran Act I, and afterward, I was giving some general notes, explaining some things, stuff like that. And Andrea asked me about Edwina. She had played her much more subtle and real tonight. I told her I liked the direction she was going but I needed more aggressiveness and more control-freak from her. And she told me she was having problems bringing the character down from cartoon into something that felt right to her. And that started a long and really interesting conversation...

The black women in the room were telling me that there really are women like the more exaggerated Edwina, and that bringing her down was making her less real. I admitted, not being part of the black community, that they knew this world far better than I do. In fact, that's part of why I felt I could take this show on -- I could contribute what I know about theatre and our all-black cast would contribute what they know about living the black experience in America. I told Andrea she could go in any of a dozen directions with Edwina, whatever she thought made sense, as long as she wasn't a caricature.

At one point, I don't think we were making sense to each other. The women in the room were essentially trying to tell me that some black women like Edwina really are caricatures. And that's when I realized it was as much a language problem as a conceptual problem. When I use the word caricature I mean something that exaggerates or distorts something to emphasize one feature or trait and diminish the others. Caricatures don't really work in the theatre because the distortion keeps the audience from identifying with them and believing in them (which is why I think shows like Silence! fail as theatre). Caricature is by definition not truthful, since it distorts in order to choose one element over another. But I think what the women meant by caricature is just someone who's much bigger and more expressive than normal. And that take on Edwina makes sense to me.

So I made the admittedly subtle distinction -- but one that I think is at the core of the show's story -- between, on the one hand, a person who "performs" their life, who wears a mask of sorts in front of others, who doesn't show the world their true self (many celebrities and politicians are like that, which is why people are surprised when they meet celebrities or politicians who don't do that and they "seem so real"); versus, on the other hand, an actor giving a cartoony, untruthful performance on stage. If part of a character's personality is that they "perform" their life (as many characters in this show do, including everyone at the Nowhaus and arguably also Edwina), then the actor has to portray truthfully that real person who "performs" for the world, but they also have to portray that act of performing, as well as what's underneath that this character needs to hide behind their performance, when that character might drop the performance, whether that performance is obvious or invisible to the rest of the world, etc. That's a tall order for Edwina, since she lives on stage for only about one page. Still I think it's a goal worth pursuing.

As I write this, I realize that we see actors walk this artistic tightrope really effectively in the movie Pleasantville. The tension in town is between those who continue the facade, who continue to perform their lives (in black and white), versus those who have dropped the performance, the pretense, to become more fully authentic people (in color). In a way, it's almost like the residents of Pleasantville morph from characters into people as the story progresses. The story offers up commentary on the way America changed from the 1950s, when a facade was normal, even expected, to the 1960s, when a facade was considered phony. I think this goes to why conservatives and liberals react so differently to Sarah Palin -- she's all performance, all mask, all facade. But conservatives see that as normal -- "real" -- while liberals see it as phony.

Anyway, I finally told Andrea that she knows who Edwina is better than I ever will, and that I won't impose on her any details about what Edwina should sound or act like. But what I ask for is truthfulness. Whatever the truth is about who she is, that's what I want on stage. I felt like the actor in the original production was commenting on the character with her performance, like the actor felt superior to Edwina. I'd rather we get out of the way of this wonderful, rich, truthful character who only lasts a page in the script but helps set everything in motion.

Andrea's been awesome to work with -- and her Marianna is already very cool, very interesting -- so I know what she arrives at with Edwina will be wonderful. But it did remind me that this is different from other shows for me, in that I can't really research this world, but my actors know it well. And we've got really great actors in this show. They're going to find so many wonderful little truthful moments.

Hopefully, I've been clearer now and Andrea will have an easier road ahead. We block Act II next week, then put the pieces together and start sculpting it...

I so love this show.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Real is a Construct

This is one of the densest shows I've ever worked on, so packed with meaning and metaphor, and so often in the form of gorgeous, rich -- but very dense -- poetry. I don't think I've worked so hard on a text since we did Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris back in 1997. I think there's something to be said for the idea that audiences will take from this show what they need, maybe something different for each person, depending on where they are in their own life's journey, their own personal, life-long Hero Myth.

But as a company, we have to agree on what these passages mean. We all have to be on the same page, telling the same story, to create a compelling piece of art.

The Real is a construct.

That phrase is the latest puzzle for me. And I guess it starts with asking what is The Real? I think The Real represents some essential truth that the Youth is searching for. It's what Eastern philosophies would call Enlightenment, a fundamental understanding of the nature and purpose of Life. This is the central journey of our story. In The Wizard of Oz (one of the most famous Hero Myths), Dorothy Gale's essential truth is that "there's no place like home;" in other words, the search for enlightenment doesn't require physically leaving home, but it does require leaving behind the assumptions of home. The Hero's journey is really an interior one in today's world. We've conquered the Wild West, we've explored all the physical space there is to explore. As our lives continually become physically easier and easier, we have more time and consciousness to focus on our interior lives.

From an African American perspective, that interior journey was largely a luxury when most Black folks were slaves. Though there were some early exceptions, the exploration of the African American interior journey began in earnest with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, led by (among others) James Baldwin, a figure referenced several times in Passing Strange, along with his novel Giovanni's Room, about a Black man living in Paris, (which is one of the ways Mr. Franklin knows about Europe in Act I).

Stew tells us in the show that the Youth's journey is primarily about finding The Real, but he does not explicitly define it for us. He does tell us that "The Real is a construct," but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. After all, construct means a product of ideology, history, or social circumstances. Civilization is a construct and so is time, but they both exist. And our lives are a construct. We create them. We build them over time, moment by moment. We fashion them as we live, as a product of ideology, personal history, and social circumstances. And when we realize that The Real is a construct, that necessarily means that your Real will always be different from my Real, because each of us has a different ideology, history, and social circumstance. Before he learns this, our hero keeps getting trapped in other people's version of The Real -- the Buppies in L.A., the hippies in Amsterdam, the Nowhausers in Berlin. They've all found The Real for themselves, but when they try to impose their Real on the Youth, it doesn't fit.

In L.A., they find The Real in religion; in Amsterdam, they find The Real in free love and hedonism; and in Berlin, they find The Real in politics. But the Youth has to find his own Real.

'Cuz The Real is a construct...
It's the raw nerve's private zone...
It's a personal sunset
You drive off into alone.

Is that related to this passage in Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George?

Anything you do,
Let it come from you,
Then it will be new.
Give us more to see.

Strangely enough, the Youth discovers The Real isn't literally real. It's more abstract, more ethereal. The Real is a state of being. It's a way of living, a path, it's the Tao. According to Wikipedia, "In all its uses, Tao is considered to have ineffable qualities that prevent it from being defined or expressed in words. It can, however, be known or experienced, and its principles (which can be discerned by observing Nature) can be followed or practiced." In other words, The Real isn't real. Except that it sort of is...

For the Youth, The Real is artistic expression. Like Stew says "Some people feel like art is more real than life... And that really gives you something to think about." The song "Work the Wound" is about his acceptance that creating art is his path. The Narrator sings, "Every day I build a mask up to the task, another song, you see. I live behind the rhyme and verse. I lift my voice till I lift the curse; it's all rehearsed you see. This music always rescues me; there's a melody for every malady, prescription song, you see..."

Every character in the show lives behind a mask. They all "perform" their lives in some way. That's what the song "Baptist Fashion Show" is all about. That's what the character of Mr. Franklin and the jokes about the Mother's "Negro dialect" are about. But while the others aren't conscious of their mask wearing, the Youth/Narrator is. He chooses to be the storyteller. His masks have a purpose beyond hiding. This is his road. One of the most powerful moments in the show for me is when the Mother tells the Narrator (her son), "Don't be sad about your chosen path, and where it's taken you so thus far. 'Cuz this is what you did, and that is who you are. And it's alright." In other words, yes, he has made mistakes; yes, he has hurt and lost people; but this is his path. It accomplishes nothing to regret the past or to question the road he's on. It's his road.

In Berlin, Desi sings to him, "So come down now, remove your mask..." -- she's telling him to come down off the metaphorical stage he lives on, to stop performing his life (even though she does the same thing). But performing is his road. She's asking him to give up what is most essential in him, just as Edwina and Marianna did. And he can't do that.

But while finding The Real is the primary action of our story, Stew wants us to learn that though the search for meaning is important to life, it's not life itself. They say the unexamined life is not worth living. And while I believe that's true, Stew is telling us something deeper -- that the un-lived life is not worth examining. The pursuit of The Real shouldn't prevent us from living a full life engaged with the world. After all, as the Narrator sings, "Love is more than real."

Ultimately, Stew has offered up a fable for us with Passing Strange, sharing with us what he has learned in his life, as all great artists must, and this beautiful work of art takes it place beside similar works, including Federico Fellini's 8 1/2; Woody Allen's Stardust Memories; Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, and Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. Notably, every one of these autobiographical statements of philosophy toys with the idea of reality...

Stew's message to us in the end is that life is not a Hero Myth. Our lives are much more complicated than that. While storytelling can teach us important truths, it's just a story. There are things we can learn from art, but we can't live in art; we must live in the world to live fully.

With every show, I work to find the one sentence that sums up the central point of the story. Finding this sentence is the foundation for all the other work. In other words, what story are we telling here? We all have to know this if we're gonna do our job well. As examples... The point of Fiddler on the Roof is that traditions are important but they must adapt to a changing world. The point of Cabaret is that doing nothing is also a political act. The point of Rent is that there is always life to be found and celebrated, even in the midst of death. The point of Next to Normal is that some journeys must be taken alone.

I'm still thinking about all this, but I believe the point of Passing Strange is that life is a journey and we each have to find our own path and our own personal truth, but we can't let that search for enlightenment keep us from living life. It doesn't help us to understand life if we're not fully living it. In the song "Come Down Now," a female voice sings, "Now you are knee deep in your head's footnotes." Is this the inner voice of Desi or is it the voice of Stew the writer of Passing Strange, which would mean it's also the voice of the Youth, since he and the Narrator are the same person? The message here is that you can't live life inside your head.

If I'm right, if that is Stew's central statement, then we have to make sure every single moment in the show is working toward that idea. That's what gives a show unity and it's what gives a story power. As we work, I'll test my hypothesis, and if I find things in the show that don't point toward that, I'll adjust my hypothesis.

The work continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Listening is Waiting

Listening is waiting.

We hear these words early in Passing Strange in the church scene. As a female voice sings the hypnotic melody, the narrator speaks over it, "The whole congregation was listening and waiting to be released from its collective frowns. Even the bad kids in the back pew were wondering, Is something real gonna go down?"

As we ran this scene tonight at rehearsal, I stopped the scene and asked what that means -- Listening is waiting. Active (listening, as opposed to hearing) is passive (waiting). Which led to a really fun conversation about all the various things it could mean. But I quickly came to understand that we couldn't just assign our favorite interpretation to the phrase. It seems central to the core of the show. Stew used those words intentionally. It means something. This musical moment leads directly to the first big incident of the show, as our hero, the Youth, has his first religious experience -- only to be slapped and scolded by his mother for his inappropriate revelation. This struggle with organized religion is the first step on the Youth's hero myth journey.

"Listening is waiting" returns again late in the show, just before the Youth leaves his girlfriend Desi in Berlin. This time, as the female voice sings the phrase, Desi says to the Youth, "You came here to be real . . . but you're not. How can I love you if I don't even know you? Let me see your pain. Let me know the geography of your Hell." (She's German.) As the song segues into a new section, she makes him a commitment as she sings, "So come down now. Remove your mask. See, all you gotta do is ask me; I'll give you all the love life allows. All you gotta do is ask me, all you gotta do is ask me..." And then he leaves her. This is the last step on the Youth's hero journey before he finds that which he is in search of.

So what does the phrase mean? Listening is waiting. Both scenes seem to me to present a moment where the Youth has a choice. He can either be the person others tell him to be and live the life others tell him to live, or he can take his own journey and find his own answers. He can live safely and uneventfully in his "big, two-story, black, middle-class" house in L.A., or in the hippie family in Amsterdam, or the artists' commune in Berlin, his choices made for him either by others or by convention. Or he can find his own way, his own path. He will take missteps but they will teach him. He will lose people but gain wisdom.

He can listen to his culture and community, but that means not going on -- or at least postponing -- his hero's adventure. Likewise, Luke Skywalker can listen to his aunt and uncle and stay to work the farm on Tatooine, but then he can't leave with Ben Kenobi and discover his true nature. Listening is waiting. And waiting is passive. It is Not Doing.

The point of the Hero's Adventure is to gain true enlightenment, or as the Youth calls it, The Real. He thinks he finds The Real in all three cities, but in all three cases, he finds that it's someone else's truth, not his own. What he finds ultimately is that he is an artist, the tribe shaman, and only through artistic expression can he discover his true Jedi nature. Passing Strange is Stew's autobiography and he is both the narrator and the Youth, here to guide his younger self and to tell his story. The narrator is the Obi Wan to the Youth's Luke, the wise wizard figure, Glinda, Merlin, Tony's psychiatrist on The Sopranos... Within this piece of art, Stew has become his own wise wizard figure.

For Stew, The Real is found ultimately in the creation and sharing of Passing Strange, his true artistic expression of his self and the only way for him to truly know himself. As a friend told him after seeing the show, "The Real is a construct. The real is a creation. The Real is artificial. The kid in your play is looking for something in life that can only be found in art." Yeah, exactly.

It makes me think about Sunday in the Park with George, and the brilliant song, "Move On," when Dot sings to the artist George, "Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new. Give us more to see." Likewise, at the end of Passing Strange, the narrator sings, "The universe is a toy in the mind of a boy, and life is a movie, too, starring you. Your whole family's the cast and crew. That's a little secret between God and you."

In many stories, love conquers all. Here it's art that does it. Listening is waiting. Making art is acting.

Still thinking about this...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Suddenly There is Meaning

I have of late been looking back at the artistic influences on me throughout my life (in this blog post, among others). As I work on the extremely challenging, complicated shows we've been producing lately, I can see how those past influences have prepared me for my current work. Particularly with Passing Strange. This is a show that uses so many styles and devices to tell its story, from old-school musical comedy (albeit with a postmodern edge) to musical drama, to concept musical, to rock opera, from moments of high hilarity to moments of deep, subtle, complicated emotion, from totally naturalistic scenes to scenes of highly stylized theatrics.

Luckily, I've developed as a director over time to the point that I now have an incredibly versatile tool belt at my disposal. I really know musical theatre in all its forms. And part of that is due to my years at the Muny. I was browsing the Muny's website the other day, and it occurred to me visit some "old friends." I was an usher at the Muny the summers of 1980 through 1987. And I noticed a while back that the Muny finally put up on their site a list of all their shows going back to 1919. So I took a stroll back through the shows I saw as an usher, and I can trace a direct line from seeing and learning those shows straight through to the work I'm doing today, in The Wild Party, Forbidden Planet, Two Gents, bare, Passing Strange, and other shows.

The best thing about that Muny job was that the extremely cool usher captains realized quickly how desperately I loved musical theatre, so most nights they stationed me down in front, on one side or the other of the stage, where there are steps leading up onto the stage. My angle was a bit weird, but I was only a few yards from the actors. And the captains made sure I saw every show from both sides. It was amazing.

Although I knew a lot of the most famous musicals before that point, it was at the Muny that I really learned the literature of my art form. Not every production was perfect -- Joe Namath and Misty Rowe were literally tone deaf in the leading roles in Li'l Abner -- but most of the shows were really enjoyable. I got to see classic shows I might have never otherwise been able to see, gems like High Button Shoes, Pal Joey, They're Playing Our Song, Little Me, Funny Girl, Where's Charley?, Annie Get Your Gun, Carnival, I Do! I Do!, Shenandoah, Can-Can, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Apple Tree, the list goes on and on... and they all taught me something valuable about making musicals.

So here is that list of shows I saw during my ushering years... Envy me, my friends.

1980
Al Jolson, Tonight!
Bye Bye Birdie
Carnival!
Cinderella
The Debbie Reynolds Show
Li’l Abner
Little Me
The Merry Widow
Richard Rodgers in Concert
South Pacific
Sugar Babies

1981
Annie Get Your Gun
Camelot
A Chorus Line
Flower Drum Song
George M!
A Grand Night for Singing
Hans Christian Andersen
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
Kiss Me, Kate
The Mitzi Gaynor Show
Show Boat

1982
Anything Goes
A Chorus Line
Fiddler on the Roof
Gigi
Grease
The Sound of Music
They’re Playing Our Song
Unsinkable Molly Brown
West Side Story
Where’s Charley?
The Wiz

1983
Annie
Mikhail Baryshnikov
Camelot
Can-Can
High Button Shoes
I Do! I Do!
The King and I
Man of La Mancha
Pal Joey
The Pirates of Penzance
Promises, Promises

1984
Dream Street
Funny Girl
The Music Man
Oklahoma!
The Red Skelton Show
Sleeping Beauty
Sugar Babies

1985
42nd Street
A Chorus Line
Bob Fosse's Dancin’
Evita
Festival on Ice
Jesus Christ Superstar
My Fair Lady

1986
42nd Street
The Apple Tree
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
La Cage aux Folles
Pippin
Shenandoah
Show Boat
Singin’ in the Rain
Swan Lake: The Musical

1987
Around the World in 80 Days
Big River
Cats
Fiddler on the Roof
My One and Only
Peter Pan
The Sound of Music

I learned how to tell a really dark story in an entertaining way from Carnival, Big River, Shenandoah, Pal Joey, Evita, and others. I learned how to make a concept musical work, from Pippin, Cats, and Al Jolson Tonight. I learned how to deal with really big, outsized style from Li'l Abner, How to Succeed, Where's Charley?, 42nd Street, and High Button Shoes. I learned the rules of old-school musical comedy from Bye Bye Birdie, Annie Get Your Gun, My One and Only, La Cage, and The Music Man. I even learned how operetta works from The Merry Widow and The Pirates of Penzance. In fact, I probably learned more about my art form during those eight years than at any other time in my life.

Aren't I a lucky bastard?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. If you're interested, here are other posts about my artistic life and journey...
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals
Portrait of a Boy
And as for Fortune and as for Pain
Only by Attempting the Absurd Can You Achieve the Ridiculous
Funny Girl, Whistle, and Fiddler, Oh My!

Passing Strange

We finished our first week of rehearsals for Passing Strange tonight. I knew this was going to be really tricky, challenging, unorthodox music, but I think the actors may be a bit overwhelmed by it. We've got a really strong cast, so I know they'll conquer it, but it's gonna scare them in the meanwhile. I've been working on the score for a few weeks, so I already knew the mountain we're climbing.

Charles Glenn, who plays our narrator, is one of the most talented musicians I've ever worked with. He's done only one show with us before -- he was a blistering, terrifying Herod in our JC Superstar -- but he's also been sitting on our board for a few years. He's a professional singer, but I don't think he's ever tackled anything like this before. And I see him going through the same thing many New Line leads before him have gone through -- they struggle initially with this complex music and they feel embarrassed or worse when they can't nail everything the first time through. It happened with The Wild Party, Sunday in the Park with George, A New Brain, and other shows. I reminded Charles tonight after rehearsal that we have lots of time. Not only do we have lots of calendar time, but we also have a rehearsal just to review and clean up the music, and then after the blocking is done, we'll have a "Fix-It Night" before we start running the full show, when we can work on anything that's still a problem. And then we get ten full run-throughs before we put it in front of an audience.

I learned long ago that if we're going to do these crazy, difficult shows, we need a nice, leisurely rehearsal period. We love the luxury of all that time. The other luxury I get is Nikki Glenn, Charles' wife and an actor-singer-musician who's worked with us on several shows as an actor. She's my assistant director for Passing Strange and because she's a musician (you should hear her play jazz violin -- amazing!), she's there to help me figure out some of the more bizarre rhythms and such. Thank god she's here!

The other thing that's tough about the score is that many of the songs aren't just songs -- they're more like complicated, extended musical scenes. (Oscar Hammerstein would be so proud!) And because the show is so rooted in rock and roll, a fair amount of the music just won't really sound right until we have the band. I'm going to ask the musicians if they can join us earlier than usual. I think it would be really helpful. We have the most kick-ass band in St. Louis theatre -- Justin on piano (and conducting), Clancy on drums, Mike on lead guitar, Aaron on rhythm guitar, and Dave on bass. There's nothing like live music and there's really nothing like live rock and roll.

(The debate over live vs. recorded music in the theatre has resurfaced lately, and I just can't imagine doing musicals without a live band. They bring so much to it that can't really be quantified. I said to someone today that doing a musical with recorded music is like showing a theatre audience a videotape of a play. Maybe that's not a perfect analogy, but it's close...)

One of the things that's tough for me is the physical score itself. Every other show I've ever worked on had a piano-vocal score, but not Passing Strange. There's a piano book for the band, but with no vocals, so I can't use that for rehearsals. And then there's a full conductor score, with all the vocals and all six instrument parts all on the same page (11" x 14" paper, landscape-wise), so I have to read both keyboard parts plus the bass line as I play, all while keeping an eye on the vocals so I can help the actors. And I have to turn the large cumbersome page every 10-12 measures. Ack! I'm learning to deal with it, but it's not easy.

But even at this early stage, we're finding so much gold in this wonderful show, so many subtle things in the music and lyrics, some really funny, some really emotional. This is going to be one of those shows for which I write my analysis chapter and then keep adding to it throughout the run as I discover new things.

And probably more than any other show I've worked on (with the possible exception of Hair), the Passing Strange score is chock full of "earworms," those little musical phrases and pieces of melody that get stuck in your brain. We're only about halfway through learning the score, but we've encountered quite a few of them -- "a colored paradise where the palm trees sway," "Only love is real," "It's alright," "why you wanna leave," "slips through your fingers just like angel dust," and so many more. Like any serious composer, Stew and Heidi (the creators, in the photo above) have built a fully integrated score, using musical themes and leitmotifs, using carefully placed reprises, using vocal melodies later as accompaniment, etc. It's not just great rock and roll, it's also a great theatre score.

Once again, I feel so ridiculously lucky to get to work on this beautiful show with this talented cast, these brilliant musicians, and our gifted designers. Yes, I'm the ringleader and benevolent dictator, but none of my ideas are worth shit without the smart, fearless artists who bring my ideas to life and fuse their own wonderful ideas to mine. This is going to be hard work but it's also going to be crazy fun!

I continue to love my job.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Finishing the Fucking Hat

When I was in seventh grade, we had to write a paper describing a process. It could be about anything, building a birdhouse, washing a car, making dinner. I was a smartass at the time (but only at the time!) so I wrote a paper about writing a paper describing a process. I was pretty proud of myself and my teacher thought it was funny enough to accept my stunt. It probably wasn't as funny or clever as I thought at the time (I'm sure thousands of other kids have done the same), but I was only twelve.

Unfortunately, that's become one of the new models for writing musicals, and I hate it.

When I go to the theatre, I want to laugh because a show has gotten at some unexpected truth or because a character has revealed an unexpected side, not because the writers keep repeating the word cunt in a song or because of random self-reference. We laugh at the crazy people in Bat Boy because they are so desperately, freakishly human. We see real-world behavior in them, and we recognize our own darker selves in their absurdity. People laugh at the new musical Silence! (from whence comes the cunt song) because someone's saying dirty words in a musical.

Big fuckin' deal. Maybe that was "edgy" in the 1960s, but now that four-letter words are relatively commonplace in contemporary musical theatre, a potty mouth is hardly worth the price of a Broadway or off Broadway ticket.

The people laughing at Silence! should've seen Johnny Appleweed. Fifty-two occasions of the word fuck and its various forms. (Suck on that, Silence!) But in Appleweed I was consciously trying to make the word fuck mundane, to use it so much that the audience would stop noticing, to take away its power and its scariness. And it actually worked. It wasn't just about shock or cheap laughs; it was about exploring our hang-ups surrounding language.

And then there's self-reference. I love Urinetown and I like very much The Producers, but those shows were both far more than just self-reference. Urinetown satirizes the simplistic, Rodgers-and-Hammerstein, black-and-white morality of old-fashioned musicals to demonstrate how inadequate it is in a complex real world. It mocks the way too many old-fashioned musicals ignore the complexities of the real world (because it's a lot easier to write that way), and it also mocks political theatre like The Threepenny Opera, with a strong political point of view that, in this case, gets totally subverted in the last few minutes of the show. The Producers is a story about subverting the creative process for selfish gains, and it's told by subverting the devices of the genre which is both the form and content of the story. Bialystock and Bloom violated the theatre and so did their story. In both cases, the self-reference grew out of the story rather than out of an inability to write good comedy.

Content dictates form, as Sondheim says.

I've dabbled in self-reference myself as a writer. During my freshman year in college, I wrote a musical called Musical, in which the central character (and narrator) confesses midway through Act II that he's writing this show as we're watching it and he doesn't know how it ends because it hasn't happened yet. It brought up all kinds of questions about reality, authorship, etc., though the ideas behind it were only half-formed.

Then in 1992, I finished writing a show called Attempting the Absurd about a guy named Jason who has figured out that he doesn't actually exist and is only a character in a musical. (He knows this partly because he has only a sketchy memory of his past and he never goes to the bathroom.) The action of the show follows Jason's mother and the girl who's dumped him, trying to have him declared insane for believing he only exists inside a musical. At the end, he's arrested and taken to court where he produces the script for Attempting the Absurd, proving that he's right, that none of them actually exist, and his case is dismissed. The show was an exploration of perception, sanity, and belief, none of which were what they seemed to be in this world. The characters who knew they were sane were ultimately proved wrong -- they all only existed in this musical. Just because they believed something didn't make it true, and for those looking for it, that was a subtle message about religion.

My point is that self-reference can be funny, it can be interesting, and it can be a great device for exploring other ideas. But that's just it -- it's a device, a tool. Unfortunately, self-reference has become an end unto itself. There are so many shows now that are nothing but evenings of self-reference, for no discernible reason other than it makes the writers laugh. But animals on YouTube make us laugh. Is that the best these writers can aim for? That's not a very high bar and hardly the foundation for a piece of theatre. Seeing someone slip on a banana peel can be funny, but that doesn't make it good storytelling and it doesn't make it a two-hour musical. At least, not a good one.

But self-reference is all the rage right now. So we get musicals like [title of show] which would have made a great 10-minute piece of sketch comedy but was unfortunately a full-length musical. And then there was Gutenberg the Musical which was far worse, and the godawful, cynically shallow Broadway musicals Spamalot and Young Frankenstein. There was The Musical of Musicals, which was smarter but still unsatisfying and a bit too masturbatory for my taste. Even the uneven Book of Moromon has several pointless moments of self-reference, alongside a running gag about scrotum maggots.

And now we have Silence!, complete with an ironic exclamation point that might have been funny twenty years ago. (Yes, it's true that some musicals used to try to inject energy into their shows merely by adding an exclamation point to the title, but that doesn't happen anymore, it never happened much, and now it's nothing but an old joke.) Like the equally dimwitted Evil Dead the Musical, Silence! gets the majority of its laughs from self-reference, from its self-consciously low-budget production, and from more pointless vulgarity than even The Book of Mormom. Which is saying a lot.

It could have been so much more. Imagine the guys who wrote Bat Boy tackling The Silence of the Lambs.

Bat Boy referenced itself and its own limited budget from time to time, but it did so in the service of questioning whether big sets and lavish costumes are necessary to good storytelling. Bat Boy's cast changed costumes onstage to switch characters, and it exposed every "trick" of its stagecraft, admitting its own artifice but also fully engaging us emotionally in the story, so that by the end of the evening, we're stunned at how much we care about these characters and how deeply we're moved by the show's ending. Bat Boy and Urinetown didn't use self-reference because it was the trendy (and easy) way to write a show; they did it as a statement of belief in the power of the actor, and in protest against the mega-musicals of the 1990s, to return to Grotwoski's "poor theatre," where the power comes from the actors, rather than from stuff.

What are these new writers protesting? Intelligence? Structure? Character development?

It all comes down to telling the truth. Humans tell stories to understand ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Shows like Silence! and [title of show] bother me because they don't respect the incredible power of storytelling and the incredible responsibility we storytellers have to our fellow humans. I think they also bother me because I know how outrageously funny -- and truthful -- shows like Urinetown, Bat Boy, Spelling Bee, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson can be, all of which are waaaaay funnier than their shallower cousins.

William Ball writes in his brilliant book A Sense of Direction, "The director" -- or writer or actor -- "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!"

I know sometimes I will be in the minority on this but I will keep up the fight for smart, truthful musical theatre. There's so much of it being written now -- American Idiot, The Scottsboro Boys, Next to Normal, Love Kills, bare, Spring Awakening, Taboo, In the Heights, Passing Strange -- and there's no excuse for giving us crap instead.

Just my opinion, of course.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

But That Was Once Upon a Time...

I've shocked a lot of people lately, the last couple years or so, by arguing that the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is outdated, no longer relevant, that its style and content is old-fashioned, that its mid-century rural morality has very little to offer us in a world of terrorism and drug wars. People who love classic musical theatre deeply can't believe I'm saying all this. But to be fair, I'm not saying the old shows suck. I'm not saying we should never see them again. But I am saying they are no longer relevant to our culture the way they once were; and also, that the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is not the pinnacle of the art form, just one period and one style.

There are a lot of reason the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is best left to history. Its insistence on perfect rhyming and scansion seems silly in the age of rock and roll. Old-school theatre music, including the music of Stephen Sondheim, is about order and control. Rock and roll is about freedom and anarchy. If every rhyme in Rent was perfect, it wouldn't quite feel right. If every line scanned perfectly, it would seem considerably less authentic. That's just not what Rent sounds like. Same with American Idiot.

But the central problem with the Rodgers and Hammerstein model is that it's based on a deeply flawed fundamental premise, the idea that a musical can ever be naturalistic. George M. Cohan, at the turn of the last century, knew it couldn't. Kander and Ebb knew it couldn't. And the newest generation of musical theatre writers certainly know it.

Now before we go any further, let's distinguish between the word realistic, which means dealing with the world as it actually is, dark side and all; and the word naturalistic, which means imitating nature. Realistic is about content; naturalistic is about style. Robert Altman movies are naturalistic; Company and Next to Normal are realistic. Hair is both.

Rodgers and Hammerstein figured out, even before they started working together, that musicals can be realistic. Hammerstein's Show Boat dealt with alcoholism, inter-racial marriage, gambling addiction, domestic abuse, and more. Rodgers' Pal Joey was about a two-bit night club singer who uses women until they figure out he's using them. But both R&H seemed to think that musical theatre could be naturalistic too.

They were wrong.

All their shows (except Allegro) employed the Fourth Wall, and this created a dilemma when it came to solos, musical soliloquies. If a character is going to just stand there and tell us what he or she is feeling, how do you justify that in a naturalistic world with a Fourth Wall? You can call it an "interior monologue" but it still feels unnatural.

Singing in a musical is almost never naturalistic with the exception of a few shows in which singing is part of the story, like Hedwig, Cabaret, Hair, and a few others. But breaking into song when you're fighting or falling in love is entirely unnatural. Instead of struggling against that, musicals should accept it and make peace with it. George M. Cohan broke the Fourth Wall all the time. He never made any pretense at reality in his shows. Bob Fosse and Tommy Tune were the same. I think musical theatre is at its purest and most honest when it admits its obvious artifice. Thank god we have returned to that in recent years, with neo musical comedies like Bat Boy, Urinetown, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Cry-Baby, Lysistrata Jones, and second wave concept musicals like Rent, Hedwig, American Idiot, The Scottsboro Boys, Passing Strange, Spring Awakening, and so many others.

It's fascinating that musical theatre today is essentially rejecting the entire Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution in this new millennium and returning to its roots in classical musical comedy. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is not all that different in its style and its relationship to its audience from Cohan's Little Johnny Jones in 1904 or Cole Porter's Anything Goes in 1934. We're embracing our roots and having a blast doing it. Even serious musicals like American Idiot, The Scottsboro Boys, Next to Normal, and Passing Strange have all rejected the R&H model. We're a much more cynical culture today than we were in the 1940s -- you might say we have a better cultural bullshit detector -- and so we require of our musicals a fundamental honesty that R&H shows always lacked, as they tried to convince us that what was happening onstage was real when we all knew it wasn't.

Today, we prefer the honesty of shows that admit their artifice. Today, musical theatre artists follow in the footsteps of George M. Cohan, Bob Fosse, Hal Prince, Kander and Ebb, and Bertolt Brecht. Not Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I'm just sayin'.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

Portrait of a Boy

Sometimes young actors ask me what path they should take to build a career in the musical theatre. But I'm not the best guy to ask because I never cared about the money; I just wanted to spend my life making musicals, wherever and however I could. And also because I never consciously charted a course for myself. I just followed my bliss, as the legendary Joseph Campbell always advised. (I highly recommend the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell PBS series The Power of Myth -- Campbell's ideas have proven really valuable in my theatre work.)

You could argue that I had a huge advantage early on that most people don't have -- an unnatural and profound obsession with musicals. Literally, from further back than I can remember, I have been crazily, passionately in love with musicals. There has never been anything I'd rather do than listen to, watch, read, write, write about, or make musicals. And I can only assume that freakish obsession is why my life has -- often accidentally -- become an amazing lifelong course of study in my chosen art form.

Here's an overview of how I got to be me right here right now...

First, my parents started me on piano lessons when I was four. And even from that early age, they knew they could only keep me interested if one of the pieces the teacher gave me to work on each week was a show tune. I can remember (around age 5 or 6?) pounding out "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof for weeks on end. Drove my mother batshit. They tried to get me to take up trumpet as well in fourth grade, and I stayed with it for three years, but I hated it because I couldn't sing along and it didn't sound anything at all like the cast albums. At least the piano could approximate the sound (most of the notes at least) of the full orchestra. And I could sing along!

When I was a kid, I hated practicing piano. But I'm so glad now that they started me that early. I learned to read music as I learned to read words. Which is why today I'm a pretty outstanding sight-reader. Which is, in turn, why I have no discipline and can never really get myself to practice, because I can get away with sight-reading (except for The Wild Party -- that one I practiced). Which is also why I can direct from the piano for most of the rehearsal process. I really can watch and play the show at the same time.

When I was fourteen, I switched to a new piano teacher, St. Louis jazz pianist Carolbeth True, who taught me how to use the skills I'd learned all those years. Suddenly, I was practicing two or three hours a day, just because I loved it. Best piano teacher I ever had.

Then in high school and college I got my dream job -- ushering at The Muny, the world's largest outdoor theatre. From 1980 through 1987, I wore that godawful polyester red coat in the sweltering St. Louis summer heat so that I could watch musicals every night. It was like the perfect college survey course, planned out just for me. I saw shows I would have never otherwise seen, like Carnival, High Button Shoes, Li'l Abner, George M, Hans Christian Andersen, Shenandoah, They're Playing Our Song, Where's Charley?, The Apple Tree, Funny Girl, Oliver!, and others. And the usher captains were always so cool about stationing me down close to the stage so I could see everything.

In high school, I got to perform in an outstanding survey of the art form, including a classic Cole Porter musical comedy (Anything Goes, 1934), two Rodgers and Hammerstein classics, their first (Oklahoma!, 1943) and their last (The Sound of Music, 1959), a Lerner and Loewe classic (Camelot, 1960), a rock musical (Grease, 1972), and a brand new show, the first one I ever wrote, called Adam's Apple. It was also in high school that I saw Grease and The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time, both of which blew my musical theatre mind.

Later on, I would also get to perform in Godspell and to play the role I had always wanted, Cornelius Hackl, in Hello, Dolly!, across from my best friend Chris Penick as Barnaby. But that was the end of my acting career. Directing and writing were a lot more interesting to me.

I went to college at Harvard and discovered only after I arrived that there was no theatre department. So I was a music major instead and it was the best accident so far. I learned music theory and history and they have both been very valuable in the years since. And my sophomore and junior year theory professor was the amazing Peter Lieberson, a composer himself, but also son of Goddard Lieberson, onetime producer of the cast albums of Camelot, My Fair Lady, Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, West Side Story, and other classics. Peter's mother was Vera Zorina, onetime ballerina and Broadway musical star. Peter really encouraged me as a composer and he taught me an important lesson -- that an artist needs to learn the rules and history of his art form, even though he might periodically reject them, or only call upon them in a pinch.

And another teacher at Harvard, Ann Dhu McLucas (then Shapiro), also took me under her wing and together we created an independent study program for me over several years, analyzing in real depth the scores of quite a few Broadway musicals, laying the groundwork for the books and essays I write today.

Because there was no theatre department at Harvard, the theatre scene was an artistic Wild West. You got whatever space you could and mounted a show however you could. Because of this anarchy, there were 30-40 productions opening each semester, everything from Antigone to Dames at Sea. It was heaven. I produced my shows in common rooms, dining halls, a former library, but never in an actual theatre. Some friends and I started the Harvard Off-Key Musical Theatre Company, though we only produced a few shows. I learned there how to do the kind of low-budget, (almost) guerrilla theatre that would later mark the early years of New Line.

While I was in college, my high school drama teacher Judy Rethwisch and I stared a community theatre group back in St. Louis called CenterStage, active only during the summers until I graduated and we could produce full seasons. Again, though it wasn't intentional at the time, I see now that the shows we were producing were a personal little master class just for me. We did Hello, Dolly!, No, No, Nanette, Carousel, How to Succeed, and other classics, along with some more contemporary shows, like Godspell, Little Shop of Horrors, and Best Little Whorehouse. I had seen these classics at the Muny, but now I could actually work on them and figure out what makes them tick.

And once we were doing full seasons, I started creating these "Tribute" concerts, whole evenings of songs by one writer or team. Sometimes, there'd be historical narration between songs, sometimes just song after song, sometimes with a little staging, often none at all. I created Tributes to Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lerner and Loewe, Stephen Sondheim, and later on, a "Tribute to the Rock Musicals" and a "Tribute to the Dark Side." In almost every case, one of my priorities was to recreate exactly as possible each song's original performance, context, staging, etc. I realize now I was working my way through the masters of the art form, learning from them by working on them. Just as music theory students imitate Bach to learn composition rules, I was imitating the masters of my art form for the same reason. Just as I had to take three years of music theory as a foundation, these concerts did the same for me in terms of musical theatre. I continued this series into the early years of New Line.

While I was running CenterStage, I got a job at Dance St. Louis, first as a telemarketer, then as the assistant to the operations manager, and finally as the development director. It was there that an amazing man named Adam Pinsker, DSL's executive director, taught me the finer points of arts administration. He had worked in the field for decades and once again I had my own independent study. And on top of everything else, he let me stay after hours to work on CenterStage stuff.

In 1991 I was ready for adventure. So I left CenterStage and started New Line Theatre, right at the beginning of the new wave of nonprofit "art" musical theatre that swept the country in the early 1990s. By the time I left Dance St. Louis in 1994, New Line was off and running. Within a few years I also began writing articles about musical theatre and in 1996 my first book was published.

It's funny now, looking back, to see how freakishly direct the path has been. And it was almost never because I planned it that way. I believe, like Joseph Campbell, that it's not about charting a course or planning a timetable; it's about following your bliss. If you do what you love most and you do it your very best, good things will result. That being said, I'm aware how lucky I've been all my life to get all the opportunities I've gotten. I was repeatedly in the right place at the right time because I was always following my bliss, never straying from the path for a second.

I remember, right after college, Maritz offered me a job writing industrial musicals, i.e., short musicals for trade shows and conventions about how much GM loves its employees or about how cool the new line of Ford trucks is gonna be. I read some of their previous shows to learn the house style and they horrified me. I couldn't do that. I couldn't write musicals to increase sales or introduce the new line-up. Musical theatre is sacred to me. It's not about selling trucks. So I passed on the job. Best decision I ever made. Worst for my finances.

And so now here I am, waist deep in the most amazing art form humans have ever developed, thinking and talking and writing about musical theatre most of my waking hours. And I get to work with a shitload of incredibly talented, like-minded artists who want to make the same intensely cool, aggressive kind of theatre I do. And we get to work on and share with our audiences brilliant, emotional, original work like Love Kills, Passing Strange, The Wild Party, and bare. And as we work, I get to talk to not only the true geniuses of the art form (Bill Finn, Stephen Schwartz, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, John Kander, Ahrens and Flaherty, etc.), but also its newest voices (Larry O'Keefe, Kyle Jarrow, Andrew Lippa, Tom Kitt, Amanda Green, Adam Gwon,  Neil Bartram and Brian Hill, and others).

It's kinda like someone with a sweet tooth living in a candy store.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. If you're interested, here are other posts about my artistic life and journey...
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals
Suddenly There is Meaning
And as for Fortune and as for Pain
Only by Attempting the Absurd Can You Achieve the Ridiculous
Funny Girl, Whistle, and Fiddler, Oh My!

Leaving Me Breathless

The run of bare has been amazing. We've gotten lots of repeat customers, as well as people coming from Nebraska, New Jersey, Indiana, Minnesota, and elsewhere. This really is a show like no other. Knowing how much this show means to our younger audiences really makes me feel an extra responsibility with this show that's new for me.

It's been a hectic last couple weeks, running bare while preparing for and auditioning Passing Strange (and we've got an amazing cast, announcement soon). But I wanted to share with you the wonderful, effusive reviews we've gotten for bare. I'll admit I'm used to pretty glowing reviews lately -- we get a lot of them -- but it's still really wonderful, especially with a less mainstream kind of show like this one.

Here's what the critics think...

“New Line Theatre's current production of bare is a devastatingly powerful presentation that features a strong and talented cast performing at an exceptional level under director Scott Miller's sure hand. . . New Line Theatre's powerful and provocative production of bare: a pop opera is must-see theatre, providing the kind of experience that absolutely defines modern musical theatre, mixing catchy, open-ended compositions with an undeniably important subject matter. Make an effort to see it soon!” – BroadwayWorld.com

“This month, the truth serum seems to come to us in live theater, in the form of the very entertaining teen-angst musical Bare. . . director Scott Miller draws both actors, and the entire cast, to performances that are strikingly real and compelling, in spite of all the possible pitfalls of the high school drama at hand. It’s another remarkably solid cast for a New Line show. . . Bare is full of great story telling and fun music, rich characters and very fine performances.” – Richard Green, TalkinBroadway.com

“A 4.5 on a scale of 1-to-5. It’s smart, humorous and sophisticated, all elements readily observable in the regional premiere mounted by artistic director Scott Miller in New Line Theatre’s engaging and accessible presentation. . . Miller keeps the production moving briskly while also consistently bringing out the work’s sophistication, including guiding his players successfully through its complicated score. Really, there’s little bare about this rendition past its title. Quite the opposite, it’s an engaging evening of entertainment.” – Mark Bretz, Ladue News

“A Must-See. The 20-foot cross looming over the stage at New Line Theater was ominous, both in the minutes before the show began, and during the production. And it was hard to tell if it was intended to stretch wide, hugging the cast in an embrace, or to stand distant, arms akimbo in rebuke. Such thematic dualism reoccurs throughout Scott Miller’s production of bare.” – Darren Orf, St. Louis Magazine

“Go to New Line and plunge into this sad, dense, haunting pop opera. Yet for all its complexity, it’s emotionally bare. Created by composer Damon Intrabartolo and lyricist Jon Hartmere Jr., bare enjoys a cult following but not the kind of fame associated with, for example, Spring Awakening. But its similar story is equally powerful, conveyed not only by the director Scott Miller and the actors but through Intrabartolo’s romantic pop score, performed with passion by conductor Justin Smolik and the New Line Band. . . bare addresses a wealth of teen problems – substance abuse, pregnancy, questions of sexual identity, teen suicide – but it's no after-school special. It offers no answers, beyond an assertion that honesty is healthy and secrecy can be lethal.” – Judith Newmark, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“The cast of New Line Theatre's production of bare is strong in terms of both acting and vocals. . . bare is an original show with complicated musical structure. The fine cast is able to produce some unique harmonies and chords that at first sound discordant. It is to their credit and director Scott Miller’s casting that they are able to pull it off. . . bare is a show that explores a myriad of problems facing young people and their struggle to learn from and overcome the obstacles they face. It's definitely a show worth seeing.” – Christopher Reilly, The Patch

“It’s a strong, intelligent, interesting show that has played here and there around the country for more than a decade. This is its St. Louis premiere. . . Given the story and the setting, a number of younger actors (many students at Webster University) got the chance, and there are some splendid performances.” – Joe Pollack, St. Louis Eats and Drinks

“The cast of New Line’s bare brings more power than is probably needed in the small space but the show’s powerful message comes through loud and clear. The cast is a good one and this cult musical makes an impressive local debut. . . It’s all tied together with the great touch of New Line’s artistic director Scott Miller. And the flawless work by the band led by Justin Smolik adds to the lovely evening. . . It’s an adult production with some very provocative scenes and music that may not be to everyone’s taste, but bare really makes for a delightful evening of musical theater.” – Steve Allen, Java Journal

We close this week and we will all miss this show desperately. It's been a wonderful experience.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

I've Never Been This Bare

Well, we got bare opened. It was a tough Hell Week (though we've had far worse), not because of problems really, just the complexity and enormity of what we've taken on. bare is a hell of an ambitious show to undertake, and I now I understand why there are so many bad productions of it on YouTube. It's a show that requires much hard work, lots of figuring out, and incredible talent and intelligence from its cast.

But the show has come together so beautifully. Every single performance is so interesting, so authentic, so honest, so skillful, so artful. And now the reviews are coming in (which I'll post when they're all in, but meanwhile, you can see them on our Reviews webpage) and they're all pretty much raves. Two reviewers called our show "a must-see" and one called it "the kind of experience that absolutely defines modern musical theatre." Not too shabby, huh?

I wasn't sure what audiences would think of this deeply emotional, funny, sad, vulgar, rowdy piece of rock theatre. But I think all those elements create a weird kind of balance that makes this brilliant show work so well for such a wide audience. The funny balances the sad, the vulgar balances the sentimental, the personal balances the political. And then there's the gorgeous, fresh, surprising music, truly like nothing I've heard before in a musical.

We've realized that everyone in the audience can find a character in the show to relate to, whether it's the closeted gay boy, the anxious mother, the defensive "fat girl," the despised "slutty girl," the boy who loves too much but is never loved in returned... Haven't we all been one or more of those? And not just in high school...

I think the show's power also comes from its unblinkingly honest look at religion and other contemporary institutions (education, family, etc.) and how those institutions are failing us. As we gear up for another Presidential election and the Religious Right returns to the spotlight, could it finally be time to reassess the destructive role of religion in our culture? Sure, bare was first produced in 2000, but it's more relevant now than at any other time since it was created. With battles over textbooks and creationism, gay marriage, abortion, and so much more, religious extremists are doing great damage to our great nation, and bare shows us that destruction on a very personal level.

Of course, more than anything else, the power of bare comes from the incredibly talented and intelligent cast we've assembled, all of whom are getting accolades in the various reviews. I've never been a fan of the soap opera acting on the otherwise great 2007 recording of bare, and I've seen some amazingly awful productions on YouTube, so it was doubly important to me that honest, truthful acting take precedence over everything else, including the music.

And boy, has this cast delivered, from the brilliant, subtly shaded, emotional performances of our leads Mike Dowdy and Jake Golliher, who break our hearts every night, to their supporting players: Terrie Carolan who goes through so many intense emotions every night as Ivy; Charlotte Byrd, who paints a subtle, brilliant portrait of both Nadia's cynical shell and her deeply vulnerable inside; and Jonathan Foster, as the intense, ever-ignored, hopeless romantic Matt who lashes out at his closest friends. When Jonathan and Dowdy harmonize every night on "Are You There?" the sound is so glorious you just want them to sing the damn song again...! Same with Jonathan and Terrie on "Portrait of a Girl" and also Dowdy and Jake on "bare"...

And then there's our fascinating, endlessly inventive ensemble, all of whom have totally honest, fully-drawn, utterly individual characters as well as killer voices (which you can hear on many short solos throughout the show) and who blend on the choral stuff like they've been singing together all their lives. The choral work in the finale is literally breathtaking. And on top of that, their acting is impeccable, never a false note, never a pulled focus, never anything but full-out honesty onstage.

And let's not forget the "adults" -- Alison Helmer in yet another sad, soulful role as Peter's mother, who generates a lot of tears every night with "See Me" and "Warning;" and Zak Farmer who is a model of minimalist intensity as the Priest; and Nikki Glenn who stops the show every night -- twice -- with both "911 Emergency" (in full Virgin Mary drag) and "God Don't Make No Trash."

Oh yeah, and our kick-ass band who has conquered this very challenging score, all the while trying desperately to keep the volume down just enough to let the voices take prominence (and that's not easy for a six-piece rock band!). A big shout-out to Justin Smolik (our pianist and conductor), Mike Bauer, Dave Hall, Clancy Newell, Aaron Doerr, and Sue Goldford. I always love at curtain call when the cast gestures to the band and the whole audience goes crazy for them!

(By the way, Aaron Doerr, our rhythm guitar player, and Sarah Wilson, our sound designer, have both started blogs about the show as well. You can access theirs along with the rest of ours, on New Line's Blog Page.)

What an experience this has been -- incredibly meaningful and powerful, like very few other shows -- and how awesome that audiences and reviewers are all responding to this beautiful piece so powerfully and so positively.

To all those theatre people who periodically proclaim that musicals aren't "real theatre," I offer a hearty fuck you and offer up bare as exhibit A. This is what theatre is supposed to be, folks.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

The Worst and Most Perverse

I finally saw The Book of Mormon, the new Broadway musical from the South Park guys.

It feels sorta like if Andrew Dice Clay had written The Music Man. Tons of vulgarity but all in the form of an old-school 1950s musical comedy. But with shows like Next to Normal, American Idiot, The Scottsboro Boys, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and other incredibly exciting new shows in our recent memory, it's hard to get excited about a 1950s musical comedy, even if you're a fan of over-the-top vulgarity, which I usually am (everyone remember Johnny Appleweed and The Wild Party?)...

There are some outstanding performances at the center of it, but it's still disappointing. About two-thirds of it is very funny and occasionally as satirically insightful as the brilliant South Park. But the other third (which is a pretty big chunk) is lame. Jokes that misfire. Sincerity that doesn't mesh with the running joke about maggots on one character's scrotum (I'm not kidding). And fairly bland music even when the lyrics are excellent...

And too many references to other musicals! That stopped being funny quite a while ago. Haven't we moved beyond that yet? It's a truism that to be funny something must be a surprise. If you see the punchline coming, you don't laugh. Even a running joke can be funny if the audience can be repeatedly surprised that it keeps coming back. But musicals referencing other musicals is no longer a surprise. The most obvious examples are [title of show], Spamalot, and The Musical of Musicals, but there have been dozens more recently.

Urinetown was different because it didn't just reference other shows; it referenced its own structure and narrative devices. It literally deconstructed itself before our very eyes. Urinetown was entirely about the subversion of musical theatre conventions -- plus it opened ten years ago when everybody wasn't doing it yet. The Book of Mormon is not nearly as smart or original as Urinetown. It repeatedly substitutes references for cleverness. In other words, though I don't think it's a "bad show," it's surprisingly old-fashioned and not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. (Full disclosure: I'm also one of those who thought [title of show] was wholly unoriginal and only marginally funny.)

Also, The Book of Mormon is set in Uganda, and some of the jokes at the expense of the African characters feel clumsy and even unintentionally racist. Sort of a re-hash of that indie film The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981), which I also didn't find terribly funny for the same reason. Satire has to get at truth to be truly funny. The show's creators need to cut a shitload, but they're getting pretty great reviews, so I doubt they will.

I have to wonder who their audience will be and if they can tour this show, with jokes about clitoral circumcision, scrotum maggots, and Jesus... While watching the show, I kept thinking about how the Fox audience would react, as I remembered the suburbanites sitting around me for the tour of Avenue Q at the Fox, all of them totally not amused because it was too dirty for them. Ack!

So I posted something on Facebook about my thoughts on Book of Mormon, and I immediately got attacked from someone working on the show, who told me I just wasn't getting the "nuances" in the show. Yeah, right, like the nuance of the running joke about scrotum maggots...? He rambled on and on about how there are so many references that "most of the audience doesn't get." So I asked him -- doesn't that mean the show and/or the production is doing a bad job of storytelling, if "most of the audience" doesn't get a lot of the show...?

He proceeded to tell me I'm just not "an informed New York theatregoer." Really? How about you make that argument again after you've written nine musicals, six books on musical theatre, and run a nationally respected musical theatre company for twenty years, fuckface? Whatever, dude.

I can't help but compare Book of Mormon to bare, which I'm currently working on and which is so entirely original. Yes, bare has been compared to Rent, and it does owe an artistic debt to Rent, but bare really is something new and utterly sui generis. And living inside the music of bare these last couple months makes Book of Mormon seem to me even clunkier and clumsier than it might have otherwise.

bare is difficult to pin down. In its form, it’s closer to an opera than a musical, but it’s not exactly either. Its musical vocabulary is closer to alternative pop than pure rock, but there’s plenty of both in this score. It’s a story about the breakdown of our institutions – religion, education, the family – and the moral hypocrisy that traps many of us behind masks of conformity. And it's a far more intelligent and insightful look at religion in America than Book of Mormon is.

Acting guru Stella Adler once said, "Unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger – better – do not act." (I love that quote!) 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."

That's what's missing from Book of Mormon and what bare has in abundance. Truth. Insight. Balls. As much as I love most of Trey Parker's work, The Book of Mormon has no balls -- it just talks about them a lot.

I've realized that over the years I've been so fortunate to get to work on the absolute best musicals ever created for the stage. And I'll include bare in that list. But I think it's made me less patient with and tolerant of mediocre work. I can't sit through crap like Spamalot or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels anymore. All I can see is what shows like that haven't achieved, the opportunities they've missed.

I guess it's like a master chef who eats only the best, most interesting food -- he probably won't be found at McDonald's very often...

bare opens a week from tomorrow. I cannot wait to share this beautiful, amazing show with our audiences!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott