October 7, 2008

Artistry in a New Century

Creating and Producing the New American Musical Theater

Moderated by Sue Frost with Duncan Sheik, Steven Sater, Jessica Hagedorn, Mark Bennett, Steve Cosson and Michael Friedman.

[video and song: “The Bitch of Living” from Spring Awakening]

[Applause]

Philip Himberg: Good afternoon, I’m Philip Himberg. I am the producing artistic director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program and a board member of TCG. Welcome to the plenary session on developing new musical theatre, very happy to have you here. Ummm hello guys. Patti Lupone who is one of our great musical singing actors once said to me that – she told me a joke actually its not a joke it’s more of a quip and it went something like this: if Adolph Hitler were alive today, his punishment his only punishment would be to be sent out on the road with a new musical in development. [Laughter] Umm sounds kind of dire. And I just heard a story that’s actually true - in a pre-Broadway try out in Philadelphia one of our famous lyricists and I’m not sure who it is - there might be a person who there who’s a bigger musical theatre queen than myself who would know who this is - but, it may have been Dorothy Fields. It was in the 60s, it was in Philadelphia and apparently the true story is that she went outside of the theatre during a tech or dress rehearsal, dragged a policeman in from the street and insisted that he arrest her composer/collaborator. [Laughter] And when the policeman asked, “why?” he said, the composer had cut one of her lyrics without permission. [Laughter] At which point the officer actually called his lieutenant, informed her that he couldn’t in fact arrest anyone for that reason and then asked her for two tickets to opening night. So luckily at Sundance we haven’t had those experiences with new musicals. We were lucky enough to work with amazing teams on The Light in the Piazza, on Grey Gardens, on Stew’s Passing Strange which is now at the Public. We didn’t develop those shows only; other places of course were part of that development process and in addition we were lucky enough to work with these wonderful people here who you’ll just meet. I’m going to introduce to you the only person I thought could really moderate this panel, Sue Frost, who for twenty years was associate producer of Goodspeed where she oversaw 50 new musicals in production, she’s the past president of the National Alliance of Music Theatre and she currently is the founding producing director of Junkyard Dog Productions which is dedicated to the development and identification of new musicals. There you go, enjoy.

[Applause]

Sue Frost: Thank you Philip. I am so thrilled to be here. When Phillip and Gigi called me and said, would you do this panel, I thought, a panel on new musicals at TCG, hmm ok. I thought maybe I’d be in one of those breakout sessions and then I found out it was a plenary session and I thought, the world is changing in wonderful ways and I’m thrilled to be here. We are so fortunate to have this panel with us. We have award winning writers, Drama Desk Awards, Obie Awards, Tony Nominees, McDowell fellows. It’s an amazing group of talent here we’re not going to spend any time on bios because you’ve got them in your playbills and we have a lot of ground we want to cover. And we wanted to – the intent of this panel is to explore just how diverse this form is, how diverse this form continues to be and hopefully demystify the process a little bit and encourage every single one of you out there to take on the exciting task of developing new musical work. Umm, so we got a cabaret about epistemology, we’ve got musicals about serial murders, suicide, abortion… This is not your traditional musical theatre fare but we don’t know necessarily what traditional musical fare is anymore, so that’s what we’re going to explore a little bit. I would like to introduce the panel and then we’ll have them each talk a little bit about the impetus and the beginning of how they came up with their shows. First of all on the screen we have Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater—welcome—coming to us from New York.

[Applause]

DS/SS: Hello.

Sue Frost: Thank you and they can see us. We’re looking at them and they can see us. Thank you. This is all new to us too. Thank you for taking time out of your busy pre-Tony madness to join us. We’re thrilled to have you here.

DS/SS: Thank you.

SF: To my left we have Michael Friedman and Steven Cosson from The Civilians, we’ll talk a little bit about (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch and then to my right we have Mark Bennett and Jessica Hagedorn to talk a little bit about Most Wanted. So let’s start with the boys on the screen. Can you tell us a little bit about where Spring Awakening came from?

SS: Spring Awakening. I guess I had met Duncan, this is eight and half years ago and we had begun – altogether to the surprise of both of us – we had begun writing songs together and he proposed that we work on a record together of these songs we were writing and I said we should create a piece of musical theatre. And Duncan’s first concern was that the music feel contemporary and be relevant to a younger audience. And I guess my first thought about that was Wedekin’s play Spring Awakening, which umm, it just seemed to me so full of the unheard sort of longing and cries of young people. You know, though set in 1891 Germany. It struck me that the place that young people have found release from and expression of those cries for the past generation has been rock music and pop music. So it seemed a great fit. And it was 1999. We didn’t know it would take eight and half years, you know, and it seemed a way to create a kind of millennial story. That we could comment on the century we’d been through and look forward to the century ahead.

DS: I just thought it was this kind of strange, beautiful cool play. So you know I was game. I was up for anything. [laughs]

SF: Great, thank you. Can we talk a little bit about (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch?

SC: Umm sure so umm I guess our project’s unique because we have a theatre company, which is The Civilians. So our play just started really from “it’s time to do our next show” and we start our projects, they’re investigative in that we start with a question and we pursue a subject matter through interviews with real people. And this particular play really just started from an impulse to do something about the political landscape of the past several years. And we decided to look at the question of how people understand what is actually going on in the world. What are they doing with all this information and this was around the time of like: “there are weapons of mass destruction,” “there are no weapons of mass destruction,” “Jessica Lynch is a victim,” “she’s a hero,” “she’s a celebrity.” And we got together with our actors it’s very much a company process we started actually with an open-ended residency at the Public Theater, courtesy of Bonnie Metzger and Rebecca Rugg, who were working there at the time and just gave us a theatre for a few weeks in the summer. And we interviewed people for like six weeks and then digested what came in. Michael started writing songs, we came up with a whole script, we threw the whole thing out, we started over again. Then we came up with a version of it that we did at PS 122 and that was kind of interesting, but then it wasn’t done yet, so then we went to Sundance and sort of really went into the intensive support system and came up with a final version. And that’s what premiered and ran a few times after that.

SF: Great, great. Anything you want to add to that Michael?

MF: I wrote songs from the interviews and they were in the show too. So…

[Laughter]

SF: OK, Mark and Jessica… We’re gonna get back to that. [Laughter] Tell us a little bit about the genesis of Most Wanted.

MB: I was in tech for another show at the La Jolla Playhouse and I was fishing around for possible ideas for a music theatre piece and while I was sitting in there in tech I remembered the story about the hometown kid from that neck of the woods who had gone and killed a number of people and then went to Miami and shot Gianni Versace, and then killed himself. And I thought, ‘Oh well, there’s a great topic for a musical.” [Laughter] And so I just started riffing off it and just thinking well maybe there’s something here. I decided, it’s definitely going to be weird and it’s definitely something that speaks to me in some way. And I just began to float around with what that was and I talked about it one night with Jessica and as I described this young man and his background and all Jessica said—

JH: I got more and more excited. Because when I first came from the Philippines, you know when we immigrated we went straight to San Diego and so the story of this young man that inspired our script, ‘cause we’ve fictionalized it since, but the story of Andrew Cunanan had real profound resonance for me and I said, I gotta do this cause it’s got everything I love: class, race, sex, you know, what more do you want? Power, notoriety and looking for something - that dream that you sort of can’t get at. Plus it’s a tragic story, and it has its moments of beauty. So that challenge I think appeals to Mark and myself, ‘cause we’re perverse.

[Laughter]

SF: Reason enough to write a musical

[Laughter]

JH: Exactly.

SF: Let’s do a little bit more about the process, Steven, you mentioned eight and half years…

SS: Yeah

SF: I got a quick recap that I’m going to give all of you of the trajectory of Spring Awakening and then I would love for you to elaborate a little bit for the audience in terms of the real sort of critical moments that you feel really made a difference in the life of your show. I think that um, I think you win in terms of the amount of time, eight and a half years I think we have a little bit less here. So we’re gonna start with that. New Years’ 1999 you met, you start to collaborate, you brought in Michael Mayer, which is a very important part of your collaboration: your director. In fall of ‘99 you have a five day workshop at La Jolla, then you had a three day workshop at Sundance in 2000. You’re given a two week workshop in uhh at the Roundabout Theatre Company in NY in winter of 2000. Spring Awakening had a second workshop at the Roundabout which is when I believe Tom Hulce came on board officially, which is. No, I got that wrong, you’ll come back and tell me. Then it was scheduled for production and then in the wake of 9/11 and budget cuts the production that was anticipated at the Roundabout did not happen and for a couple years the show sat there, right? There were two years where the show kind of languished

SS: [quietly]Yeah, it was four. [laughter]

SF: What? Sort of.

DS: Four years.

SF: And then you know I was going to do this fast, cause I thought we could then get to you guys and you could tell me all about it but it’s taking me a long time. And it was at Lincoln Center’s Great American Song Book and then the Atlantic Theatre Company and then, Broadway. So that’s a quick recap of your eight and a half years. Now tell us a little more from your point of view where the magic happened and where it got frustrating.

SS: Well you know what happened, we actually were on a great fast track and it was thrilling. You know, Duncan and I had been talking about it. It was in the wake of the shootings at Columbine, everything began to feel more urgent. I called Michael and Michael had a lunch, in fact, with Anne Hamburger that was a few days later and she had just been named Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse and she said, ‘This sounds great,’ and she bought Duncan’s records and she read a couple of my plays and she just immediately gave us money to come out and do a workshop. It was her first project and we had to start work. I mean, you know, do a version of the script and write songs and we went out and it was really surprisingly successful for the board and after that, we had the great good fortune—which really was the turning point—that Philip Himberg invited us to Sundance and we spent three weeks there, living together, you know the three of us and we got, we found our show. And um, at that point someone from the Roundabout was interested in it, we did a first workshop in New York and at the intermission of that workshop Todd Haimes, the artistic director, turned to me and said, ‘I love this, what do you want?’ I said, ‘I want another workshop and a full production.” And he said, ‘You have it.’ And it was great. We did another workshop six months later and we were announced on the season and we had to postpone because of our director’s schedule. So we rescheduled a season later and we had to postpone again because of our director’s schedule and we were assured we had a production no matter what and that changed, with the umm, I guess with the financial cuts that hit in the wake of 9/11. Both at the Long Wharf and with the Roundabout, and the truth is we were dead for three and a half years. And um in the midst of that Tom Hulce who had seen both workshops and been really enthusiastic came on board and there were a few producers who had—commercial producers—who had seen the workshops they had all approached Todd about partnering with him they wanted to be a part of it, he hadn’t wanted them. We went back to the same people that told us times had changed, people weren’t looking for serious musicals, they wanted light hearted entertainment. Anywhere we turned with this script with German names and a rock CD, they couldn’t make anything of it. And so the other really big turning point for us was the concert at Lincoln Center. And Tom Hulce raised money and turned that into a full-fledged workshop and then mobilized the community and invited people and that’s how the Atlantic came on board and our commercial producer came on board who then enhanced a final workshop at Baruch College and the production at the Atlantic.

DS: I think, you know, the big turning point for me in this whole process, you know, coming from another part of the music business, I—when I was in the workshops, with the various casts and the various creative teams, you know, I would see moments that were really promising and cool. But there was so much of the time where I felt like, ‘what am I doing here and this is going to be a complete disaster.’ But, um, you know, eventually I don’t know why, it was very perverse but we stuck with it and I remember finally when the show was, when we saw it at the Atlantic Theatre Company, the day we saw “The Bitch of Living” – they weren’t even in costume yet, we had the band and we had the set, and we finally saw, we finally saw what the thing was and I kind of elbowed Steven and I said, ‘Oh ok, we’re going to be fine. This is gonna be cool.’ And uh, you know, it was the thing of just having to kind of believe against all the odds that maybe this crazy idea could work.

SF: So there’s an underlying theme: one of perversity, that we’ll get to later [laughter] and then also in terms of the development process and the workshop process and those moments when you have to step back and take a breath and figure out what your play really is and really find your play, can you elaborate a little bit about that? The two of you?

MB: Sure, umm, one of the things that struck me, listening to your story is as I sat there at times thinking, ‘Ooh wow another workshop, another workshop.’ That they really are these amazing moments of open heart surgery and you get to go back in and you get to really discover something new. I mean every time Most Wanted has had a moment like that, and there’ve been a number of them, we’ve learned life changing things about the piece and the life of the piece changes because of it. We were given, Philip Himberg again, gave us a residency at U Cross and then La Jolla has done about three workshops for us and then Philip gave us a space at Sundance in Utah. And every time it’s been a major, major leap forward. But it really has taken each of those steps I think, in trying to tell new stories in different ways it takes time to figure out how you’re storytelling and how music and drama are going to work together in a way that’s both unexpected and refreshing and comes from you…

SF: Well and it’s three different sources. These show comes from different sources: you worked off of a play and adapted a play, you’re working off of an idea really and interviews and you came up with an idea and you’re going after an event that actually happened without the source material to really adapt, I think the process is a lengthy one and involves a lot of time with actors and a lot of time with directors

JH: Musicians

SF: And your director. I think in every situation the director had a pivotal role in the development of the work as well.

JH: I really want to mention Michael Greif ‘cause he had you know a big hand in this whole project as well and I just don’t want to forget, you know he can’t be here but he’s a part the team, an important one.

SF: Great, and you also mentioned that you got this show to a place at PS 122 and you realized that it was what it was but it wasn’t what you wanted it to be and then you ended up at Sundance too, is that correct?

MF: Yeah I was at—that was actually kind of amazing cause we did the show at PS 122 and it had been produced and then I think we were both and the whole company felt like it had been produced and we were really excited about the show but we also knew there were some things we wanted to change and Steve met Philip and they were talking and Philip gave us this opportunity to go to White Oak at Sundance—

SC: Really by just going to the right bar at a TCG conference—which is how that all happened. [Laughter]

SF: Well I want to mention to that’s how La Jolla heard about Most Wanted, is that true? At a TCG conference, is that true? I don’t know if it was a bar…?

SC: Which bar were you at?

SF: It was in Portland, right?

[Laughter]

JH: It was in Portland, Portland, OR. I believe so I was really trying to recall when I told Shirley about Mark’s idea and how excited we were to collaborate and she just immediately said: “Ooh we gotta do this.” You know and she’s worked really hard, Shirley Fishman, to make sure this happens. And we also, you know I love hearing all the stories about the process and the long journey and the same names keep coming up of people who support you and you know, who try, when there’s no money, to continue with a workshop, you know even if it’s two days instead of two weeks. You get it and, yeah, so I’m grateful for that.

SF: Are you two behaving?!

[Laughter]

JH: Are you like making fun -

SF: You know we can see you.

JH: You’re on a big screen. [laughter]

SF: I want to switch gears a little bit—oh you didn’t answer did you?

DS: This is our first video conference ever so—

SF: You’re doing beautifully.

SS: We’re just learning the protocol. [laughter]

SF: You’re doing beautifully! You’re not supposed to make faces about the people at the table. [laughter] Let’s talk a little bit about why make it a musical? What makes it sing? You wrote songs— why?

MF: I did write songs, umm it’s funny the first way that we developed in the way the Civilians develop work was a show about abandoned geese and uh it was sort of Steve came to me and I hadn’t really written songs for theatre before really and so Steve was like, ‘Why don’t you write some songs for it,’ and it turned into a book musical about abandoned geese based on interviews. [laughter]

SC: It was very important work. [laughter]

SF: Groundbreaking.

MF: I think since then we found that the songs tend to lend for documentary theatre, which can be, I don’t want to say, can be a little dry? The songs tend to add a little moisture? I don’t know what I’m talking about [laughter].

SF: We’re talkin’ geese here.

MF: But the songs, the songs help lend sometimes an emotional journey to the work that [laughter] that can be really helpful and so in our next few shows we kept working with how text and songs can interact in different ways and by the time we got to (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch, I think we figured out a kind of way that I kind of go and write songs and there’s these interviews and then they start combining and interacting with each other in cool ways. I guess I can’t say that, you know, we knew we wanted to have songs in the piece and that’s why there are songs in it, but I think the songs really lend an important… flavor.

SC: Yeah and I would also say with a play like (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch which, you know is like about the politics of epistemology, which you know, it’s sexy, [laughter] and uh, something I try to do with my company, is to tackle ideas, work with contemporary subject matter, be fairly ambitious in what we’re trying to like make work about, but ultimately make it in a way that’s very accessible and is gonna really connect to whatever audience shows up and engage them. And I think you know, especially the kind of music that Michael writes, is very, it’s very accessible and it’s a way of actually taking, taking something, you know in a play like this one, which has no plot, no narrative, no characters that really track through it, and actually make it a work of theatre that speaks a popular language.

SF: And this is a perfect segue into a number from (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch. Yeah let’s do that let’s segue.

MF/SC: Ooh ok, yeah.

SF: Yeah let’s do it, ok. [laughter/applause] Do you want to set it up? Is Caitlin here?

SC: Yeah so umm emerging from the darkness soon will be Caitlin Miller who’s one of the performers of the show and one of the originators of, you know, the piece and she’ll be performing a song by Michael called “Song of Progressive Disenchantment” which really started, I think when we first had the idea Michael had said, ‘I want to write Caitlin a Brecht-Weill Song and then we figured out, you know what it was going to be.

MF: And as Caitlin appears, if I can just say one thing that’s really lucky about having a company is to be able to write songs ‘on’ people and Caitlin, you know, I wrote the song for her and she’s been through the whole process with us you know so it’s always kind of amazing to get that kind of opportunity and actually write around a performer.

SC: Is there a stage manager in the house?

SF: We’re gonna riff about that for a minute. Actually, while we’re waiting for Caitlin do you want to talk a little bit about umm you’ve had some of your performers together for Spring Awakening for quite a while and I think your leading lady first came to you when she was fourteen? Is that correct, is that true? Am I making that up?

SS: Yeah. Yeah we found her when she was fourteen which is of course the age of the character.

SF: She still is not—how old is she now?

SS: She’s 20.

SF: Yeah?

SS: Yeah. She didn’t have to undress you know until we did it on Broadway or off Broadway. [laughter] We were just doing workshops.

SF: You waited, that’s why you waited eight and a half years! You wanted her to be legal. [laughter]

SS: We did.

SF: That’s what it was.

SS: There you go.

DS: It was Michael’s idea. [laughter]

SS: Actually you wanna know something?

SF: Go find her—but anyway talk a little bit more about that I mean you did, actually several workshops with a lot of your performers and I think that whole idea of people having people to work ‘on.’

SS: Going with Leah, it was really Leah that we had over the years she was the only one. The other kids, we had people who repeated but they grew out of the show. You know what I mean? Cause they started, cause they’re supposed to be young teenagers. The other one is John Gallagher who plays Moritz who joined us at Lincoln Center and was so brilliant but the point of that was that we finally had Moritz. We finally had someone who could sing those—the challenge of casting our show is that kids had to, you know look fourteen or fifteen, you had to be able to play classical text and sing pop rock. So the talent pool was strange in this and the casting search was complex.

DS: Difficult, yeah. And I was looking for people you know who weren’t necessarily trained in you know musical theatre. I was looking, personally for kids who were in their rock band in high school, hopefully, you know. And in fact, we did find, a couple people from MySpace you know, who didn’t have agents and didn’t really come from the theatre world necessarily and um, you know, that I think really helps the show have a much broader sound. You know, we have these great trained people but we have these people that were kind of diamonds in the ruff. So, um it was important to me, you know, that we have a wide range of stylistic abilities.

SF: Great—we found Caitlin. So now a number from (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch. Thank you.

[“The Song of Progressive Disenchantment” from (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch]

[Long applause]

MF: We realize that doing a panel on the future of American musical theatre with a song called “The Song of Progressive Disenchantment” seemed a complicated thing but we only realized that about five minutes before the panel began.

[laughter]

SF: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about structure. Let’s talk about how you all approach your projects. I think many of you are not from the musical theatre world initially, so how you - what you bring to it, what you’ve learned from it what you’ve discarded from it. Duncan you’ve actually spoken rather famously about this so maybe you’d like to lead off on this.

DS: Sure. Well you know there’s a lot I can say on this subject. The first thing is that you know, I was definitely, kind of, not so well behaved in the initial moments of working on this piece because I was used to being in the studio as a recording artist and at the end of the day how I want the song to sound is how it sounds. Now, all of the sudden I’m in a room with, you know, a lot of very talented creative people, but who have their own agenda about what this piece is supposed to be, and, in fact I realize now, know a lot more about theatre than I do and so I’m having to understand that this is a collaboration and it’s a negotiation and the music needs to serve the piece, the music that happens at that moment needs to serve the story. So that was a difficult adjustment for me. But it’s a process like any other and I’m really glad to have gone through it cause I think in fact by learning to shut up and listen to other smarter people your work can improve.

SS: Can I say something? I wanted to say to say something that I think Mark said. I think that from the beginning we wanted to write really different— obviously it was a different kind of show and we wanted to write different kind of song, different musically and different lyrically and have the songs function in our piece in a different way and I think that what was so great was not only learning—you know ‘cause Mark was saying when you want to tell a story in an unusual way you have to figure out what that way is. But I think also for us, it was learning how—what was the form—what were the conventions of the form? The traditions of the form that we needed to learn from and use to have songs that didn’t tell story actually tell our story for example, you know what I mean? So that we could create this storytelling mode of our show we actually ended up creating hero’s journeys out of German expressionist source material. You know what I mean? The show really transformed and I think we both learned so much about kind of the art of musical theatre storytelling, I have to say.

DS: Yeah and I mean I had to learn the conventions so I could figure out which ones to let go of. And to know which ones we didn’t want to follow. The important thing for me is that the song can stand on its own; it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the musical at that moment. I always want the song to be its own entity. But of course it still has to serve the story so that just means, trial and error over and over again. And that’s why I think, I think it’s really a good thing that our show didn’t happen in 2002 or 2003 because we needed those three more iterations for it to actually work.

SS: And we ARE a bunch of people from

DS: Go ahead –

SS: It’s ok

SF: Wow, wow,

SS: I was just going to join in saying we were still helped by our director. We are, you know, Duncan and I don’t come from musical theatre backgrounds, though I come from a theatre background. And Bill T. Jones for example, comes from a completely different background. Michael Mayer, our director, had so much expertise in musical theatre it made for great head clashing and collisions and difficult times but in the end it really served us really well.

SF: You know there’s actually a quote, a little plug – in American Theatre magazine this summer there’s an article about Spring Awakening and also an article about you guys [the Civilians] and um you quote Michael, Steven you say ‘we didn’t set out to revolutionize the musical theatre nor the express intention of doing something different. Rather we had a story we wanted to tell and a way we all felt we wanted to tell it.’ And I think that’s sort of important when you talk about, it’s not necessarily rule breaking, its being allowed to let content dictate form and I think that’s really kinda key. Jessica, this is a new process to you—

JH: Yes, absolutely. I think Duncan and Steven said it very well. We had a lot of similar discoveries: we wanted to do all this rule breaking and of course I was the one who really didn’t know these rules even though I’d grown up seeing a lot of MGM musicals in the Philippines and thought I knew everything. It was interesting and humbling I think for me, to know that actually some of those interesting conventions could really serve a wacky, dark, dark story about people you normally do not see on stage. You know it was about knowing when to let go, and knowing when to use it, and listening and having someone like Mark Bennett and Michael Greif there to sort of have those big—you know we had a lot of head clashing, butting moments and I too was not so well behaved. And it’s great because when you’re in a situation when you trust each other it’s ok. I love all that back and forth, you know, with why you can’t do this… well why not? My thing is like, the other stuff’s so boring you know, so can’t we do something like this? And sometimes they’d listen, I mean you know, it’s a real give and take. [laughter]

MB: Sometimes

SF: Did you listen?

MB: Now and then.

JH: Now and then, just as I would now and then. And I think it’s all about that and it’s been really wonderful. [laughter]

SS: She’s great

JF: I mean really gratifying and enriching, in the deepest corniest ways. Umm how to tell a story in this way it’s really—cause when it works, it’s really wonderful.

SF: Do you want to add anything to that, Mark?

MB: Before I knew Jessica as a playwright, because I worked as a sound designer on Dogeaters, and knew her as a novelist from the book she wrote before she adapted it into a play, I knew Jessica as a downtown poet. And that is one of the things that first excited me about working with her on this – not in a sense my recent collaborations up until that point with her—but that fact that she looked at how words worked in a different way that was very much her own. And there was something about that, that I thought could kind of really of work within the crazy kaleidoscope that we were gonna try to create for our thing. Definitely the fact that she was from another landscape was really, really helpful to us.

SF: You talked a little bit about where songs are placed and structure.. a little bit—

MF: Yeah I find one thing that’s—talking about conventions and are you breaking them or doing them your own way—is how often you discover yourself recreating a convention. Where you do something and you’re like, ‘Oh right! That’s the Act I finale or that’s the 11 o’clock number that I’ve heard so much about. [laughter] I just realized it had to go there. Caitlin’s song in Nobody’s Lunch basically plays the part of the 11 o’clock number—which happened by mis—the song existed, it was in the wrong part of the show for a long time and only actually at White Oak did we discover, we were like, ‘Oh, if this goes here, the show makes a lot of sense.’ And it is about where you place things, especially in a musical and often until you see it performed it’s hard to know why placement works.

JH: Yeah

MF: Why things go where they go because often it’s not even for storytelling purposes, its sometimes just this really amazing cool number has to go here or you have to hide this number because no one wants it but it needs to be in the show so hide it here. But I think that’s one thing we’ve discovered with our work is just the structuring of where you put songs and how much text can go with a song and all those things it’s kind of fun to discover and realize why all those conventions are there for opening numbers and act closers and 11 o’clock numbers and things like that, so.

SF: So what are those classic musicals that have influenced you?

SS: Me?

SF: Yeah

SS: Musicals we look to, Duncan and I, you know when we began work, like two days after we first talked about doing this we went to see Porgy and Bess and then I think from that point for me it was West Side Story. You know there is no tragic Romeo and Juliet love story really in the original play, that’s our kind of creation. We look to West Side Story as well and Romeo and Juliet—they’re—Carousel had a big impact on me. Sweeny Todd when we saw it, was great.

DS: Yeah I mean, I had other things like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, that was eye opening for me—[agreement]—just to see kind of modern, you know, music could be used in this kind of traditional way. And also the idea that songs could function as interior monologues and you know it’s Bjork’s fantasy world that happens at that moment, that was kind of a revelation to me. Another thing I saw was Laurie Anderson’s Moby Dick at BAM which was just this incredibly cool piece where, you know, it just deconstructed everything about the original tale and the way it used music so theatrically was also really inspiring. So, and then actually last night I saw Xanadu. [laughter]

SS: We were there together.

DS: And that actually, blew my mind, [laughing] so I think I’ve really changed a lot in my [laughter]

JH: Oh no!

SC: Is there going to be rollerskating in Spring Awakening on the tour?

SS: Well, you know and in The Nightingale! In our next show.

SF: That’s it in The Nightingale.

DS: Well we’re—Segways, I think, we’re gonna use. [laughter] For when they get older.

SF: Alright, this is the fun stuff, what are those shows and musicals that really influenced you? We talked about variety shows and vaudeville—

SC: Yeah I mean, I love classic Broadway musicals and you know my entry into the theatre as a, like, you know, suburban kid was, you know you do musicals and that’s what theatre is. You know I did The Music Man, you know I think like seven times and Bye Bye Birdie and that’s what I know from back then. But I think the work of The Civilians one thing that inspired me from the beginning was really more of an idea—something I don’t know anything about, really, except through research, which was the early 20th century cabaret, you know mostly in Europe, that sort of coming together of artist and poets and wild performance artists and singers and that kind of culture where Brecht Weill musicals came out of and the idea of that there could be this mix of like entertainment and a bit of radical politics and that sort of mish mash of stuff was really—the idea of that was really exciting to me. And actually just sitting here now I was thinking back to my early 20s, I lived in San Francisco and there was a really cool, underground sort of queer performance scene going on there. And I actually you know, I think for most of my 20s just couldn’t go to theatre, you know even though that’s what I’m supposed to do with my life because I just found it really boring. But you’d go out to clubs on the weekend, like Justin Bond who now is—

JH: Yeah and Kinky and Herb—

SC: Kinky and Herb yeah would be performing something different oh and whole bunch of other people like that. And there was a place called Clubstitute.

JH: I love how he looks at me…[laughter]

SC: I feel like you were there! [laughter]

JH: I was there. [laughter]

SC: In a big dirty wig, right?

JH: Yes

SC: That was you.

JH: The Cockettes, don’t forget

SC: Ooh and The Cockettes, yes. Were fabulous [laughter] What were they called?

JH: Angels of Light

SC: Angels of Light no but—who were the ones, there was a trio of them and now I’m totally blanking… We’ll talk about it after.

SF: We’ll come back to that [laughter]

SC: But I just remember, being like sort-of in that scene. You’d go out for fun and in the theatre world you know how do we make our performance more vibrant, how do we bring young people in, how does it feel alive? It was like, you know, this is alive. And I think, with The Civilians it was part of my impulse, was like, can you bring that cabaret live club dynamic into a play? And a lot of our shows, you know we’ll develop them in a nightclub before we take them into a theatre cause you know I told my actors the first time we workshopped our show Gone Missing, it was at the Public theatre in Joes’s Pub where people are eating dinner and having drinks and you know you gotta be on it because as soon as you get boring they’re going to think about their Penne alla Vodka.

JH: That’s right.

SF: Dinner theatre, back to dinner theatre.

SC: Dinner theatre, really.

MF: That’s a lot of influences. Steve also isn’t admitting the Carol Burnett Show and The Muppet Show and the influences of everything mostly The Muppet Show really, that would be the influence.

DS: And The Muppet Movie

MF: And The Muppet Movie…[laughter] Basically I grew up watching basically my father forced my sister and me—to watch Astaire/Rogers movies over and over and over again. So basically I’d say Swing Time, a little bit of Meet me in St. Louis and there’s other stuff, but that would be the prime.

MB: Uhh sort of the basic fare all the way—your Bernstein and your Sondheim and your
Richard Rogers and all that. But then I kind of had this amazing collision when I hit college and just after college, of operas by Virgil Thomson I got to know more Brecht-Weill then I got to work for Stanley Silverman and Richard Foreman. And somehow what they were doing with it and working with Lynn Austin and the Music Theatre Group and what she had really took a front seat in terms of how—watching them deconstruct and put back together music theatre and the way in which music and theatre can function so all of that kind of was a part of that melting pot—

JH: Well I have to also agree with the Dancing in the Dark which was a revelation to me that film, oh my god, it blew my mind. The Singing Detective, Dennis Potter’s stuff, umm certainly West Side Story, which I only saw on film I’ve never seen it live cause in the Philippines it was just the movies and Hair which I saw live in San Francisco and even though some of it I thought was a little bit corny—‘cause we were living it when that musical came out—it kind of felt dated to me, yet the fact that they were there and they used kids, you know not necessarily, they had a lot of kids in the show that they’d found, I think sort of a little bit like Spring Awakening they tried to find some authentic types. That was very exciting to me, so I don’t dismiss it at all. And I like seeing all those naked bodies at the end, you know. They looked like real people and they smelled and they were all body shapes and colors and sizes—that was exciting. And umm, Singin’ in the Rain I loved that one, and Wizard of Oz I mean woah. [laughter]

SF: All across the spectrum.

JH: Yes! Absolutely.

SF: Let’s talk a little bit about audiences and accessibility, because I think it’s really important it seems to be an undercurrent through out the conference we keep talking about new audiences, we keep talking about what are the audiences of the future and I think it’s key. Music is an access point, music brings people in and I think that you’ve had an extraordinary—I’m pointing to this—you’ve had an extraordinary response to your show on Broadway which is you know, traditionally not a place for new audiences. So can you guys talk about that a little bit?

SS: Well it’s been completely extraordinary - we’ve brought this new demographic to Broadway. Duncan gave a concert the other night, and I was there and these kids came up to me, when I say kids I mean between the ages of 16 and 20, 21, there were five or six of them and this one young man said—first of all he confessed that he’d seen the show 20 times. [laughter] and he said to me, ‘You have no idea what an impact this has had on our emotional lives. And there’s a network of us across the country who are bonded by our experience of this show.’ This is what he said, he said, ‘To try and describe to you the effect it’s had,’ he said, ‘well, it’s ineffable.’ [laughter] This whole set of people in there, you know it was remarkable. I was at the theatre last night I walked by—after Xanadu--[laughter]

SF: You skated by—

SS: Yeah, we were there we enjoyed it. And Doug Wright was there, by the way, from Grey Gardens, so we weren’t all bad. But anyway, there were easily 250 kids standing outside the stage door waiting for autographs, coming up to me, wanting to be photographed with me, saying how much the show had meant to them. And I think the thing to me that is so moving about this is that they’re really affected by the show. It’s not just hero worship outside the door for the actors. I mean, yeah, of course that’s part of it, but they’re really affected by what the show’s about and that it speaks to them and what they’re living in a way.

DS: Look, we definitely from the very beginning set out to kind of bring a broader audience to Spring Awakening. We had no idea it would end up on Broadway, but we wanted to bring the larger culture into an experience of musical theatre and one of the ways we thought to do that was to use whatever you want to call it: indie rock music, post-rock music, you know, it’s what the wider culture listens to. And so, yeah, that has had this really positive effect where you have every age group in the theater – you know, there’s 17 year olds but there’s also 70 year olds in there and I think as long as they have a progressive spirit they’re going to really enjoy the show. Let’s face it: masturbation is funny…[laughter] and having it happen in the context [laughter] having it happen in the context of the song in that way, you know, it is really entertaining and even though the subject matter is dark I think it is important that the show is also really funny at points and joyful so I think accessibility is important.

SF: I apologize we were talking dirty in the green room which is why I just had that reference—Steve—you know once of the things I heard Tom Hulce talk about which I thought was fascinating was that kids are seeing the show and then they’re going home and they’re bringing their parents back—

SS: Without a doubt.

SF: Because it, it opens up an opportunity for dialogue and you’re seeing that happen quite a bit, aren’t you?

SS: Quite a bit and grandparents. And also I’m being approached by grandparents and parents in the theatre who say what it’s meant to them to be able to bond with their child at the show and what an effect it’s had on them and what dialogue it’s opened up later. I was there the other night and a woman seated on the aisle and her daughter came up to me and they were from Houston. And it was the third time they had come to town. She had asked to see the show for her 17th birthday and they’d come and she’d gone back and then told her mother about it and her mother had come with her and now she and her mother were there again with her mother’s friend and another daughter. And she said it’s this whole dialogue they have—yeah I suppose—about their lives about whatever—adolescence and sexual problems and problems of young people—that’s what it’s all about. The other thing that’s really interesting about our show for me, to learn back from the audience is that everybody of whatever age seems to experience their adolescence again watching it. People don’t seem to be responding, oh as a parent I feel this toward my child—they seem to be experiencing again what it feels to be 17. It’s interesting.

SF: Anyone want to add anything to that? In terms of audience?

JH: Well I’d like to just add the sort of downer part of this. And it’s true I’ve seen those audiences at your show and it’s great. You know, we can talk about new audiences ‘til we’re blue in the face but until the economics of the situation are addressed, in some way for example in Spring Awakening I think you have those really inexpensive seats on stage which go quickly but, you know, the kids can sort of afford that. Plus—

SS: We also have them in the back. We have them in the back of the theatre too, yeah.

JH: There are ways of kind of seeing the show and not spending hundreds of dollars for seats. Because until that’s addressed, you’re only going to have a certain privileged audience coming [Applause] and you can talk and talk and talk about new audiences but, you know [Applause] it ain’t just age and there you go again with the demographics and the class business and how people who’d really love to see your show cannot possibly think of going and bringing their mother and grandmother. I mean it’s tough, that’s the tough part, but let’s not dwell on that. It’s such a nice day and this is such a nice conversation. [laughter]

MB: And also this might springboard off of that in a way which is not as much of a downer place, but it’s also about how you program this stuff. Oftentimes I think theatres use musicals, as a way to buttress attendance. There are guaranteed things about a musical if you put it, certain musicals, in your seasons. And the idea of saying, yes it does that, but what if we begin to educate our audiences with newer forms of musicals or with alternative forms of musicals or with the larger spectrum of musicals so that an audience then can support a theatre developing new musicals and new musical artists and suddenly it’s not this crazy animal that can only exist in the second space of the theatre or the black box of the theatre but an entire community becomes more educated as to what’s out there besides an annual musical given by a theatre that’s meant to help buttress its economics.

SF: Very well put. We were also talking about your doing Most Wanted at what used to be Page to Stage it is now called The Edge at La Jolla this fall and in terms of how you prepare the audience for what they’re going to see…

JH: [laughs]

SF: Is another thing that is I think is kind of critical. We only have a little bit more time before the Q and A so I would like to round off this part of the panel with a selection from Most Wanted,

JH: Which Mark will set up.

SF: Mark will set up.

MB: Alright, first of all I should introduce the people who are going to be up here performing this and our soprano is Jennifer Baldwin Peden, and Brian West is playing the new boyfriend Chris, and Dominic Malfi is gonna be playing our incarnation of our serial killer Danny Reyes and our pianist is David Lohman. Jessica is going to do an introduction of all of this—this is a sort of a split scene that goes on, where Apollonia Serra the mother of the most famous fashion designer in the world, Apollo Serra is discussing a new line of perfume that the House of Serra is launching. And in this scene it’s a night at the opera and our main character Danny Reyes is at the top of his game and its one of those rare happy moments in his young life. He’s fallen madly in love with Chris Bailey and they’re at the opening night performance of La Magdalena at the LA Opera and everything is perfect.

[performance excerpt from Most Wanted]

[long applause]

SF: Terrific, thank you so much that was gorgeous. Now we’re going to open it up to Q&A and we have a little bit of a challenge here in that in order for Duncan and Steven to see you, you need to come to a mic rather than what has been happening throughout this conference where people have been bringing mics to you. So we’re ready to open up the floor for questions…Any questions?

Q1: For Duncan and Steven, I first have to say as the mother of a 16-year-old daughter in Portland, Oregon and a 21-year-old daughter in Philadelphia they are part of that network across the country that you referred to. My 16-year-old in Portland has seen the show three times. I made sure she saw it at the Atlantic Theatre without me and she called me begging me to take me to see it with her when it moves to Broadway. Economically the producers did something wonderful by, when it was at the Atlantic, by allowing kids to usher. So my 21-yr-old got to see it again a second time by ushering. She brought her boyfriend and they’ve seen it again so that was a great thing that they did I had to speak to that. My daughter, who has a love hate relationship to the theatre because her mother is an artistic director of a theater, [laughter] now couldn’t wait to get her hands on the book. She checks in with the website everyday. She got to the play because Duncan Sheik, for whom she was already a fan, was associated with this play. So I’m waiting for Snow Patrol to find a play and write music to. But my question, as a director is, one of the exciting components for me, seeing this play, was the juxtaposition of a 19th century German text with 21st century music and making that work and costuming it in the traditional turn-of-the-century or 19th century Germany, so, was there ever a temptation to update it in your development of it or did you always—had you decided from the beginning to keep it set in that time and just impose the 21st century sensibility of that music on the play? That’s question one.

DS: We had a brief flirtation with talking about maybe resetting it in McCarthy-era America where there was a somewhat similar kind of repressive thing going on in the culture, but I think we all realized, Steven, Michael and I realized, if you didn’t have the 1891 Germany you lost this incredible kind of richness and intrigue of that particular environment and the way the clergy and the way the professors were and the parents were and the way they communicated was so, so kind of unique to that world and so powerful and it was such a great thing to push against, it allowed the music to really explode out of this straight jacketed kind of environment. And so we realized early on it was important to keep the scenes in 1891 and then the music could really be such a great juxtaposition against that world. And Steven…

SS: And I also think that what it allowed us to do was—it allowed us to create—by leaving the play in period it allowed us to sharpen it as a lens about the present. Whereas in a way by making it a more contemporary story—to me—I’m actually not a fan of updating stories because I think that, stories to me, stories are particular to a time and place and they happen in that time and place and that there’s something vital about the story itself you loose, but I will say that I think there’s kind of a critical misperception about our show which is that we sort of honed and distilled Wedekin’s play and brought songs to it. And truly we took a lot of story elements and the characters of Wedekin’s play and really created what we felt was a much more contemporary story within a 19th century guise. You know what I mean? And then we burst that lens open with the songs. So, that’s what I would say.

Q1: So I have another question and that is, after seeing it, my first thought was how great it would be for high schools across the country to do this show as their high school musical. [laughter] And, given that you have enlightened enough high school school boards to allow the material in there. But has any thought been given to that or is it going to have to wait to go the rounds the more traditional, Broadway, then regional etc, etc.

SS: Yeah it’s gonna have to wait.

[laughter and applause]

Q1: Too bad!

SS: I’ve actually had conversations with the guy, you know they license stuff to colleges and high schools it’s the stock and amateur and they’re actually very frightened that this won’t play in high schools and that’s such a big part of their business. And what he said to me was that it took ten years before they could come up with a version of Rent and that the culture had changed enough that now Rent is being released to high schools. And he said, maybe over time that can happen with this show. I do think that one of the reasons your daughter… 17-year-old young women, you know today, respond to our show in the way they do or that it could be done by high schools has to do with what we’re talking about. In other words, instead of leaving Wendla—while we left her in a 19th century setting—we created a journey for her that could feel contemporary to a young woman today. Accepting and embracing her sexuality rather than being defeated by the fact that she had been date raped by a guy. And so to me, having done all this work, it would be quite amazing if some day high schools could do this play and kids could actually go through the experience of performing these roles. So.

Q1: Yeah, I’d love to see that. Thank you.

SF: Great. Mic #2 …we have a question.

BO: Bill O’Brien from the NEA. You all have talked about some of the more traditional musical theatre influences that you’ve had, or that you could kind of reach back and say were things that made an impression on you. But I’m curious, all of you seem to come at musicals from a much less traditional path, it seems. It doesn’t seem like you were groomed to naturally be looking towards creating musicals. So I’m really curious to hear from each of you, just quickly what was it about the musical form that you felt your kind of communication, the kinds of things you’re trying to express could leverage in that form. What was it that attracted you to the musical theatre form? … And break a leg tomorrow you guys.

SS: Thank you.

MF: It’s funny I guess I’ll do the dummy version for me which is I write music? And I find myself working in theatre? And I mean it sounds odd but when you put those things together you sort of end up with musical theatre? [laughter] By which I mean I’ve spent a lot of time doing music for plays or plays with music or songs or something that aren’t necessarily musicals and only recently find myself writing I guess what one would call a Musical with a capital M? Though I am terrified of that word. So I guess for me it’s that I came from music and ended up in theatre and it’s about combining those two things and figuring out what that means when you put them together. Tonight I go back and get tech notes from Michael Greif about Romeo and Juliet. So that would be music for a Shakespeare play so that’s a different part of the spectrum.

SC: I came into it as a new play director. And then as a new play director moved into creating original work. And then when I had my own company and had the ability to create whatever kind of work I wanted to do, then I think all the stuff I talked about before came into it, you know, wanting to have something that was very dynamic, something, something very alive, something very engaging and I think it was also meeting Michael. We ended up at Williamstown at the same time and I did a play and ended up getting a little music in it and then a lot of music and then we kind of went wild and I was like, ‘oh I like this, this is fun, let’s do more.’

MB: Growing up, nothing in real life quite thrilled me or made me cry as much as what I experienced when I would go see musicals.

JH: I want to add to that, that music is probably one of the most powerful art forms in the world it can communicate across all sorts of language barriers and boundaries and it’s emotional, and it’s thrilling. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to try to do that, if you’re doing theatre? As a poet, with my background in poetry you have to make words into a kind of music. Music is very deep for me so I sort of couldn’t wait to try it. And what a great hard challenge. The discipline required is also very intriguing to me.

SF: Duncan and Steven, would you like to add to that?

DS: The reason… you know, I toured for a couple years as a recording artist before I started working on Spring Awakening and I kind of got disillusioned with the fact, that, I just felt like, ok it’s four guys or girls up on stage playing song after song and just doing nothing and how boring is that, really. I was really excited about the idea that you could have these amazing sets and amazing costumes and amazing lights and this incredible narrative that would happen along with the songs you’re writing. And it’s so much more of a satisfying multimedia experience you know that was really exciting to me. And at the end of the day I could just sit in the audience and just watch it—which is even better!

[laughter]

SS: Me? Hi Bill! You know, this is a weird answer but the theatre that’s always meant most to me is ancient Greek theatre and ancient Greek literature and I’ve always thought about it and wondered about it and sort of, choral utterance and what that means, and I think when I met Duncan and we started writing songs it was so thrilling to me and it was like my life had taken such an unanticipated turn and I thought—it really came about because of this play. ‘Cause I thought this play you could open up the hearts and souls—this play felt like it had the soul of song already within it and you could bring songs to it and really hear what was in the hearts of those characters and it felt like an opera in waiting. So it really happened like that.

MF: I think what Steven just said is really important, which is I think we separate the elements a lot, in ways that Shakespeare, or the Greeks, or Brecht, or Chekhov didn’t and I think we end up with this idea that there’s musical theatre over here and there’s theatre theatre over here. And for those of us who write music that gets very sad. So I think that remembering there’s a whole continuum from capital M Musical to an Albee play that is literally not allowed to have any music in it [laughter] There’s a big spectrum in between and so to not find yourself trapped in between these polar opposites is really important.

SF: I couldn’t have wrapped it up any better. Thank you very much. Thank you to this wonderful panel.

[Applause]

Good luck guys tomorrow! Thank you.

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