A new Sioux-ciety

One year ago today was the final performance of my most recent musical, Identity. This show was extraordinary in so many ways, posed so many unique challenges, I barely no where to begin. When you first hear about this endeavor, you’ll leap to conclusions as to what those challenges were, and you’ll be wrong.

For instance, when I say this took place in a fancy performing arts complex in the heart of Beverly Hills, you might instantly imagine pampered and fancy people on both sides of the footlights. Then, if I tell you 90% of these people are part of families dealing with “special needs” kids, a different image emerges. Or what if I told you Identity is set in a near-future dystopia? Your mind might go to The Handmaid’s Tale or The Hunger Games and the reality is, it’s a funny musical comedy.

Throw out all your expectations.

The Miracle Project is an organization that uses performing arts to assist autistic people in their transition to adulthood. You’ve heard the term, “autism spectrum” and this carries an implication: There’s a wide range of abilities. Bill Gates, it’s been said, is on the Spectrum, and who’s more accomplished than him? Suppose his talent wasn’t software entrepreneurship, but singing-dancing-acting. Is your head turned around yet?

Like every essay in this blog, I’m going to talk about musical theatre writing. For that is my job. The summer before last, The Miracle Project hired me because, every year, they create and perform an original musical based on input from an elite set of talented folks. The show must entertain, of course, and it also has to be performable by autistic thespians and others. An experienced show-writer like myself could obviously come in handy. I have no experience working with the differently-abled.

So I asked about that. Would I have to know anything about autism to contribute, to musical direct, to run classes? To my bemused surprise, I was told not to worry about it. In the room, at all times, would be a set of people called the Co-Actors. They have the tools necessary to deal with any issue that comes up, so I was told I could do all the things I did with the students at the Broadway conservatory that was for twenty years my home. This seemed unlikely. So, I asked how will I know the co-actors from the autistic. Again, I was told not to worry about that. I wouldn’t know which was which. I was to treat everyone the same. And the Co-Actors would take up roughly half the roles in the show.

This was not what I was expecting. As time went by, I learned a few things about the neuro-diverse community. Being loud can cause problems for some. So, I could never call for fortissimo singing, and, instead of applauding, we wave our hands, using the sign language equivalent of clapping. Identity wasn’t greeted by thunderous noise of approval. The audience was wildly enthusiastic but knew to express it without a din.

For months, the weekly developmental sessions were group discussions that would frequently go off into tangents. I head a lot about anime characters, and one balding fellow obsessively spoke about Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The thing that seemed so unlikely when it was told to me, that I wouldn’t be able to tell the Co-Actors from the autistic, was true for me for months, and definitely for our audience. I learned that it’s a waste of time to think about the who-is/who-isn’t question.

What mattered was the fodder. Ideas about what should go into a show called Identity eventually emerged. But, for the longest time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a wildly improbable endeavor, doomed to failure. Sure, every artistic enterprise involves a leap of faith, but the stuff I was hearing couldn’t possibly be transmogrified into a coherent musical comedy.

Until it could. Near Thanksgiving (2018), I played around with a storyboard and I assembled ideas into elements of plot. IF the group wants to do this, THEN we’re going to need a song that does this. Then I’d write the song. There was also a desire to utilize particular talents people had. So, an operatic soprano needed a reason to sing a bit of Puccini. And the Sioux City fan was an accomplished rap artist. I think you can see how the input I received was challengingly wild. What original story could embrace an aria and a rap about a random Great Plains town?

My collaborators and I figured all that out. The cast was heavily involved in creating their own characters and rehearsal time was often spent improvising scenes. So, more input to embrace. Honestly, the biggest jolt to the process was when the director announced that our rap star would create a number that wasn’t about Sioux Falls. So the show had to be retooled to omit mention of what was once central.

I rolled with those punches. The script went through countless drafts. Many songs were cut. Cast members added songs, in wildly different styles. Another unusual aspect is that the auditions were held before the script was completed. So each new draft (and there were many) dealt with the strong suits and limitations of individual performers. An actor’s discomfort with romantic embraces meant finding a way to convey feelings between characters without a traditional physical manifestation, such as a kiss.

We seek freedom. But, often, it’s the parameters we’re given to deal with that focus our creative thinking and bring out our best work. The stunning success of Identity, it seems to me, is a little like one of those cooking game shows in which chefs are given a bunch of disparate elements and told to make a gourmet meal. Here’s a turnip, pickled herring, lemongrass and boysenberries. Go! I got a Sioux City-loving rapper, an opera diva and a newlywed who doesn’t like to be touched. Go! 

Whatever

This may have happened on March 17, not May 17, a very round number of years ago. And it’s a key moment in my musical-writing career. In some ways, a success, but, mostly, a catastrophe. And I think of it as a turning point. Before that day, my life was full of new musicals – every year or two. Afterwards, it was a slog to get anything done. But, I’m not sure there’s causality. It was half my lifetime ago. You’re only young once, and, before this, I could be viewed as something of a prodigy.

Careers are built on a chain of connections. In the cast of my first musical to play New York, Pulley of the Yard, or, Murder at the Savoy, was a lass who became a long-term live-in girlfriend. She had two friends from high school, Margit and Adam.With Adam, I wrote The New U. and On the Brink. Margit didn’t attend either, but soon invited me to join her in a new theatre company devoted to developing new works. We wrote The Christmas Bride together. And then, I got a wild idea.

I wanted to create a musical about the way women support each other through friendships with other women. But, as a man, I’d be seen as an illegitimate vessel for telling that story. So, I thought of a novel idea. What if we gathered a bunch of actresses to improvise scenes from their lives? This could generate material on which I could base a show with a certain amount of verisimilitude – a word I use here so often, it gets its own tag.

There were a couple of antecedents. One was A Chorus Line, which began as a series of “rap sessions” in which Broadway ensemble performers talked about things that had happened in their lives. A script and score was fashioned by Nicholas Dante, James Kirkwood, Marvin Hamlisch and Ed Kleban. Most of them weren’t dancers, just like I’m not a woman, but the basis on actual choristers’ lives meant nobody questioned their bona fides. In my career, I’d worked on two shows with Adam that were based on improvisations, and another that was supposed to be, but we couldn’t find actors willing to spend that much time on such a process. Later, I worked on seven other shows that used improv in their development, most of them with Second City.

Margit’s theatre company would provide us with space, which, in New York, is likely to be the most expensive part of a production. We were given a free playground, and so had the luxury of time. The workshop went on for many weeks, and the performers enjoyed improvising, discussing, being part of something new. The company insisted a team up with an established playwright. I’m calling her Pookie to protect her identity. At first, she and I seemed to be on the same page, wanting to create a piece that was true to the lives of our participants. Funny urban women, grounded in reality.

Those improvisations inspired some exciting songs. And, over at Pookie’s loft, a set of book scenes came into being. These, unfortunately, had very little to do with my songs. You see, Pookie was a very imaginative downtown artiste, and she literally wanted to send our characters to outer space. So, our initial shared vision of a realistic contemporary musical splinted into two visions. Pookie’s involved going to another planet. Mine didn’t.

And so came the 17th of some month that begins with M, and all sorts of people connected to the theatre company showed up to listen to what we had wrought. Our developing actresses read the characters loosely based on them. Of course, none of them were astronauts, so I can’t claim the book scenes had anything to do with them. And that’s why the reading revealed we had a huge mess on our hands, a book and score at cross-purposes.

Pookie and I wisely decided to split up. I continued to develop the show for years, for a while in collaboration with a very smart female playwright. She then moved to Florida and somehow ran afoul of a theatre union. I wish I knew more of that story. Also, the developmental director moved to California. Orange-producing states have drawn too many talented ladies from me and the project.

The chain of connections, in my career, started reaching their ends. One of our improvising actresses put together a close-harmony quartet. This was seen by an impresario he commissioned me to write an opera. But that was the end. Subsequent shows were not built upon the network I’d built before. Of course, everyone grows out of being perceived as a prodigy. And maybe it’s wrong of me to make that disastrous reading a point of demarcation. But I do.

Three heads are better than one

My fourth impromptu Facebook Live concert is devoted to Jule Styne, so I’ve been thinking about him and this piece can serve two purposes. I can share some Styne thoughts as I get ready to sing. The first three concerts were devoted to far-more-famous writers of an earlier era: Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter, and the brothers Gershwin. But when we think of the sound of Broadway, the fortissimo brass excitement, it’s probably a Styne score that comes to mind.

A pun I can’t resist

In one way, they all belong to a distant era, when songwriters wrote with one eye on the prize of getting a hit song to emerge from the score. Late in his life, Jule Styne met the grad students at NYU’s then-new program for musical theatre writing. And he was shocked to find the young people seemed unaware which moments in their stories needed to be put into song. Over the years, I’ve overanalyzed this exchange between the generations. Styne would have focused on bits of story that could have become extractable hits; the students, having grown up in a world where show tunes never made it to the Top 40, wouldn’t have bothered.

There was a memorable (to me, at least) essay years ago in Dramatics Magazine by Jeffrey Sweet. Ostensibly reporting on my musical comedy wedding, he discussed the idea that one of the things musicals tend to do is celebrate. They take little moments of happiness and magnify them into the delirious, and the audience catches the joy. In Bells Are Ringing, our heroine wonders what it would be like if strangers said hello to each other on a subway. This quickly explodes into a massive carnival of conviviality. It’s typical Styne.

A more famous moment occurs at the end of the first act of Gypsy, which I think we can all agree is his masterpiece. Rose’s talented daughter has run away to Hollywood and it’s devastating. All her work, for years and years, has been to make June a star and now she’s got no one except her completely untalented and klutzy other daughter who can’t sing, who mainly sews sequins on costumes. We all wonder how Rose will deal with the annihilation of her dream. Other songwriters – foolish ones, perhaps like that NYU class – would provide Rose with a lament, so she can express her pain in mournful melody. Styne turns the tables on that expectation with the peppiest bit of extreme brightness the theatre has ever produced, Everything’s Coming Up Roses.

In reality, Styne had written the tune years before for a forgotten project. But he played it at the piano for his young collaborator, Stephen Sondheim, and never informed him he’d be setting lyrics to a recycled tune. This wasn’t the only Gypsy tune that was repurposed. So, long before the cast album came out, someone surprised the twenty-something lyricist by saying “Hey, the cast album’s ready” and put on an overture that included You’ll Never Get Away From Me and Everything’s Coming Up Roses and only then did Sondheim understand the subterfuge.

Jule Styne was the last member added to Gypsy’s collaborative team. And that’s because he had the sort of experience a star can trust. After the success of West Side Story, master producer David Merrick swooped in with a brilliant notion. He’d purchased the rights to Gypsy Rose Lee’s show-busy memoir and wanted to hire as much of the West Side team as he could. The composer, Leonard Bernstein, was too busy, as America’s pre-eminent orchestra conductor, to sign on for his fourth show of the 1950s. But wait, the lyricist Stephen Sondheim was a trained composer, and, once again, the masterful Jerome Robbins would direct and choreograph, with the redoubtable Arthur Laurents taking care of the book. And, to play Gypsy’s mother, Merrick got the biggest star of them all, Ethel Merman. But there was a problem. Merman’s last show was an embarrassing flop and she naturally blamed the inexperience of its songwriters. At this point, Sondheim had one show on Broadway, as lyricist alone, and the queen from Queens wasn’t going to risk singing a score by a first-time composer. She demanded a music-writer with a proven capacity for creating hit songs, and, naturally, Styne’s name emerged. But Sondheim was unhappy to be robbed of the compositional role. He went to his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, to ask advice. The older sage pointed out that one learns a lot from dealing with a major star – West Side Story had none; Gypsy would be worth doing just for the experience.

I shudder to think how the project would have turned out with Sondheim’s jagged harmonies. The Broadway fable needed an evocative and entertaining sound, and Styne came through in spades. It’s impossible to listen to Gypsy’s overture without getting your spirits lifted.

It’s hard to believe this, but Styne didn’t consider Gypsy his masterpiece. He preferred Funny Girl, and I think on that one, he’s the true hero of the creative team. Much of the book had to be tossed out; many of Bob Merrill’s lyrics are incoherent – does anyone brag they have ten American beauty toes? – and genius director Jerome Robbins abandoned the project. But everyone knew that Barbra Streisand was a once-in-a-lifetime star. Give her a good tune to warble, and you’re golden. Styne did just that.

My favorite Styne score, though, is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which he wrote with the not-so-famous Leo Robin, a lyricist greatly admired by other lyricists. Robin would get the tune in his head and start walking the perimeter of Central Park. Styne would hail a cab, tell it to go down Fifth, across Central Park South, up Central Park West and complete the circle around Central Park North. Eventually, he’d find Robin who’d say “A kiss on the hand may be quite continental but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” Styne was no hack, but he sure could take a ride in one and find gems.