I’ll show them

It’s been a hell of a month, hasn’t it?

This blog has a strict No Politics Rule. I try to keep things light, and relate everything to musical theatre writing. So, I’ll start with this embarrassing story. There was a rare opportunity for my wife and I to watch something on television together, and she said she wanted to see 13. And I thought, great, there’s a presentation of a Jason Robert Brown musical I’ve never seen. Well, I thought Parade was depressing, but this took the cake: It was Ava DuVernay’s documentary about how the criminal justice system disproportionately incarcerates black people. We learned a disturbing history of justice injudiciously applied.

So, that’s a bit of a mea culpa, and June has become a month full of confessionals. I’ve read many people of color talk about horrific experiences in the theatre, and some white people have called themselves out on their own past behavior. The hope is that the theatre biz evolves into something with far less bigotry, but, as one white dude noted, “I’m a casting director; it’s my job to discriminate.”

My wife Joy, as you may know, has led by example, casting people of color and opening minds. Me, I’m a writer, and the very least we writers can do is to stop insisting that our characters must be caucasian when there’s no legitimate need. “Whiteness” – a word I pointed included in a translation of a musical theatre lyric once – is rarely essential. Leo Frank, in that depressing JRB show, is one of the few characters I can think of whom the audience needs to believe is pale. And Hamilton succeeds marvelously in casting people of color as America’s white Founding Fathers. But now I feel myself delaying launching into my mea culpa.

One of Lehman Engel’s assignments, in the first year of his BMI workshop, was to create a comedy song based on something in a newspaper. In the late 1980s, the Olympics were held in Seoul, South Korea. Now, every Olympics faces a delicate problem: some of the foods commonly eaten in the host country are occasionally considered, well, gross, by visitors from other places. I read an article about one such delicacy. In Korea, the newspaper said, people eat dogs. Something clicked. My New York neighborhood, at the time, was filled with restaurants serving cuisine of all the major Asian nations, but not Korea. Why was that? And might there be a possible subject for a comedy song? That’s often my main question.

Gleefully, I ran to my encyclopedia (for this was still the 80s) for a list of dog breeds. And then I poured on the puns and trick rhymes, with an eye towards coming up with sort of a comic jingle for a Korean restaurant.

We’ll serve ’em Seoul food…
If the food’s a bit too spicy, don’t start to pout
Dalmatian will put the fire out
Should a Boxer hit you and you feel hung over
Take the hair of the dog that bit you and swallow some of Rover

We’ll serve ’em Seoul food and sell it with beer
That delicately peppered German shepherd pie
Or some Beagle on a bagel, I mean, it is to die
Served with a cream cheese schmeer

Collie tamale and poodle-filled strudel
Dachshund au gratin and shi-tsu with noodle

When I played Seoul Food for friends and relatives, they howled with laughter. Which leads a writer to believe he’s done something right. My father (who died a year ago today) was a huge fan of the song, and so was a friend who practically doubled over with enthusiasm. A couple of years later, she and I were in a room with a piano, for the developmental sessions for The Company of Women. The assembled improvisers were all female, but an effort had been made to work with a diverse group: they were young and old, rich and struggling, black, white and hispanic. The show, and its unusual first step towards creation, had been my idea, and my old friend wanted me to share an original song to introduce my songwriting abilities to the company. And she had a specific song in mind: Seoul Food.

Gales of laughter rocked the rehearsal room, but Julie, our black actress, didn’t crack a smile. “Thank God I’m not Korean,” she said, “but then, if I was, you probably wouldn’t have played it.” There ensued some discussion in which people disagreed as to whether the song is offensive, but Julie’s words made me see my silly tune in a whole new way. There was no getting around it: Seoul Food was poking fun at an entire ethnic group for a specific cultural practice. Before long, I’d rewritten the song so there were no references to Korea. The revised Dog Food was a context-free advertisement for a restaurant of no particular ethnicity where, if you couldn’t finish all your Toto tofu, they send you home with a doggie bag.

My father was disappointed, thinking I’d caved to political correctness. He often told me how much he liked the song, in its earlier draft. Our actress from Puerto Rico included the revised number in her next show, a revue of my songs.

In a way, today, I’m bowing to the industry-wide pressure to confess my sins. One part of me thinks there’s little value to this admission of something I did more than three decades ago. I’m wary of virtue signaling, or for it to seem like I’m some wonderful person who got woke and you should follow my example.

I was trying to be funny, and maturing involves an awareness of how certain jokes might hit certain ears. Back in college, I had a tone-deaf moment, alone with my black roommate. He was a couple of years younger, and our dorm room was the first time he’d lived away from home. So, he asked me how to do laundry and I said I didn’t know much. “First, I separate; then, I add a half-cup of bleach when I’m doing my whites. But I’m never certain how to handle the coloreds.” He glared at me, hard.

That’s the price I have to pay

click above for tickets

My latest musical, The Influencer, will have what passes for a premiere these days on Thursday, June 25 @ 5PDT/8EDT & Sunday, June 28 @ 4PDT/7 EDT. I’ll be present for a Zoom talkback both dates. What you’ll see is a video abbreviation of the show that was supposed to play live in the Wallis-Annenberg in Beverly Hills.

So there’s a lot to unpack here.

You’ll hear about two thirds of the score, but, of course, not as intended. You see, everything I write is designed to have a great amount of give-and-take between accompanying musicians and actors. Vamps, fermatas, things where the band follows the voice and things that are supposed to be sung as quickly or slowly as the performer is feeling it, in the moment. But for this taped presentation, I had to create accompaniment tracks with NO give-and-take. Vocals added later. I’m the one choosing exactly how fast every line/note goes – removing the initial impulse behind writing all the songs.

It’s a thing I’ve often written about on this blog, liveness. In live theatre, a variety of factors have an impact on the speed in which things are performed. One famous example of this is called Holding for the Laugh. Songwriter writes a joke. Actor figures out how best to deliver it. Audience laughs for a length of time. As the laughter begins to subside, the conductor and performer look at each other and decide it’s time they continue the song. This moment of hilarity lasts for different counts every time it’s done. A small matinee crowd doesn’t guffaw for the duration of a packed house of nighttime theatre-goers, naturally. We adjust accordingly.

Turning a stage musical into a filmed property is deeply problematic. Taped thespians aren’t taking in the input of reactive listeners. Timing is set in stone. For The Influencer, I was tasked with coming up with tempos for everything. And it’s all a wild guess. For instance, I wrote a joke about an executive’s sudden urge to run to a vending machine during a business meeting. During a normal rehearsal process, we’d fine-tune that business. And then the singer and I would launch into the next note when the audience is prepared to listen. Now we have actors self-taping in their homes, not around a boardroom table, and I don’t know, and will never know, how long a viewer will laugh, if at all. We choose when to go on, regardless.

When one watches a movie, eyes take in the entire screen. Filmmakers talk about shots being “composed” and I’ll point out the obvious and say it’s very different in the theatre. That boardroom table might be a flat piece of cardboard. Actors might have blackness behind them, not an office interior, and the audience would use its imagination in a way no one’s used to doing while watching a screen. Of course the players would be sitting on just one side of the table, so they don’t block each other. And here in spring of 2020, we don’t have thespians in the same space. Everyone’s self-taping in their own homes. This poses a huge challenge – creating a visual out of utterly different videos.

Step back and consider the wide variety of things one can see on the internet. The greatest Hollywood musicals – say, Gigi, or The Wizard of Oz – are just one click away. Those glorious shots were composed by famous directors over far longer periods of time than we’ve spent on The Influencer. The viewer who isn’t thoroughly enraptured can “turn the channel” to a Hollywood classic at any point, and it’s daunting to think of the ever-present competition of entertainments.

So, instead, step back and think about the creative process here. Eight months ago, about thirty people got together in a room at the Wallis and all we had was a title. Many of the people in the room were teenagers, and roughly half of them were somewhere on the autism spectrum. Everybody addressed the question of what is meant by the word, Influencer, and how such leaders affect society at large. Over months, our weekly talks led to discussions of certain themes: how teenagers today are often swayed, how corporations get us to spend, how the fabric of a family can be torn asunder by a move from a rural area to the big city. One wild idea emerged, about a shopping mall where a sort of aromatherapy wackily induces people to buy more. It was pointed out to me that this relates to the sort of hyper-sensitivity to certain stimuli that some autistic people experience. So now there was something to write about that had some relevance, but was also, potentially, very funny.

From these suggestions, I came up with a complete score, and, with input from collaborators, a first draft of a script. The best part of this stage in the process was working with a 15-year-old who has a particular genius for storytelling. His uncommon knack for plotting influenced The Influencer in ways I’ve not experienced in my previous shows.

The folks who filled our development room then filled the roles in our cast of characters. And when you’re working with actors before the final text is set, there’s another sort of influence: players helped shape their characters. Three songwriters in our group contributed in three different ways: a lyricist handed me a lyric to set, a composer-lyricist came up with a whole song by himself, and a composer’s tune got a new lyric from me. Then, I wrote two countermelodies to it so we could have a massive counterpoint number. (This, alas, didn’t get into our video preview.)

When we do this show live, somewhere in our uncertain future, it ought to be something to see. What’s on display June 25 and 28 is an amazing transformation to an utterly different medium, and I think you’ll be very surprised and a bit captivated by what we’ve done.

One of you believers

June 11 has loomed large on my calendar for around nine months as the day my new musical, The Influencer, opens at the Wallis-Annenberg in Beverly Hills. The show will soon resurface in a completely different form. But the delay got me thinking about my shows that never got to be seen. And I’m embarrassed to confess I’ve been very, very lucky. Everything I’ve written as an adult has gone before an audience; the applause gave me life. So much life, I’m able to sustain myself through the disappointment of missing out on the applause I expected on this day.

Roughly ten years ago, though, a musical I was working on was cancelled because I no longer wanted to work on it. I no longer thought the show was a viable idea. And, in some ways, I never did.

One summer week, I got an unusual out-of-town gig. I’d be teaching musical theatre, and maybe musical improv, at a religious retreat upstate. Immediately, the mere mention of religion put me in an anxious state of extreme alienation. At the time, I had what amounted to a phobia. I have no spiritual beliefs. None. But, more important to this story, I had a deep distrust of anyone who did. And that’s a lot of people. And that would be everybody at the retreat.

To my great surprise, my time at the retreat was delightful and disarming. These people weren’t nuts. They may have shared a faith, but everyone had a different background, a different reason for being there – a swath of humanity that turned my head around. My prejudice – against religious people – evaporated.

When I came back from the retreat, I wanted to write about my experiences there. My normal format for such a thing, would be a long letter. But music seemed so integral to any account that I invented a new form. It was an autobiographical essay illustrated with show tunes. One could do this, we now know, far easier on a blog. All I had was a handful of pages with footnote numbers that corresponded to tracks on a CD. When you hit that moment in your reading, you were supposed to push play on a CD player. Sounds crazy, in retrospect. But, at the time, it seemed the best way to tell the story.

Readers/listeners reacted favorably. My little account entertained them, and they all had the same reaction: You really ought to turn this into a musical. I resisted, feeling that this memoir with soundtrack was the ultimate form. Yet, people kept insisting. And a little known fact about Sondheim was in the back of my mind: For most of his projects, he had to be dragged in to the collaboration. If he could get over his resistance and create a Tony-winning show, well, who was I to ignore the chorus of encouragement?

Autobiographical stories are fraught with many perils. I’d been talking to friends about something that happened to me. In the theatre, we’re talking to strangers, strangers who don’t already have an emotional connection to the storyteller. So, I set about fictionalizing until the thing became an original musical set at a Catskills religious retreat. The protagonist was still a faith-averse music teacher, but other than that, most everything was made up.

Many an etiquette book, back in the good old days when such things were published, warned against discussions of religion. It’s a problematic topic because most people have a pre-existing opinion, and usually that opinion boils down to “My sect is better that yours.” And there’s something offensive about that.
As I said earlier, I’m a man of no faith whatsoever, and yet 95% of my characters were believers. I came to feel that I was the wrong person to be writing this show.

And I was particularly hung up on defining the spiritual philosophy the show should be expressing. I wanted it both ways, or, I should say, all ways. I tried to have different characters articulate a panoply of concepts of God. This would be so difficult for my friend who majored in Comparative Religions. But I was way over my head.

Writing a musical can occupy five years of your life or more. You need to have a passion for telling that story that will sustain over time. My struggles to come up with a first draft of Haven were so great, the curmudgeon in me once again reared its ugly head. At that point, the problem wasn’t just that I didn’t understand the philosophy of those who pray. I no longer wanted to celebrate the diversity of opinions I’d witnessed at the retreat. Yes, there was something wonderful there in the woods, but I couldn’t find a way of communicating this with an audience of strangers. And so, Haven bit the dust, unheard and unseen.

Great adventure

Today’s the day I met my wife Joy, and I usually mark the occasion by saying a bunch of wonderful things about her, but this year I thought I’d broaden the topic a bit to talk about a career in the arts, using Joy as an example.

Joy was very young when we met, a year or two out of college. She possessed an extraordinary voice – at one point her screen name was Belter2000 – and there was a widely-shared view that its beauty and power could translate into a successful career in performing.

And so it began. The big move to New York. The getting up at 5 a.m. to get ready for an audition. The standing outside a midtown office building in the snow at dawn, waiting for the doors to open. I’m sure this story is familiar to many of you.

Most outsiders are unaware of what being a performer is like. It’s hard work, and yet, a lot of people don’t see it as Real Work at all. They think you open up your mouth, beautiful sounds come out, an audience is thrilled, and you’re well-compensated. Real Work is thought to be more difficult, no matter what it is. You know the phrase, “It’s not brain surgery?” It’s fair: brain surgery requires a lot of concentration, and standing, and wearing a mask, which, I keep hearing, is the hardest thing a lot of privileged people have ever had to do.

A magazine annually publishes the salaries for various professions. The average theatre artist earns less than any worker I can think of. It’s not brain surgery, certainly, but it pays about 1% of what the scalpel wielders get.

So, Joy got herself a Day Job. That paid her enough to make rent on a crappy apartment. When she took a national tour, that meant she’d have to sublet the apartment and earn less money than she would have had she kept her Day Job. Success equals financial failure. I’m reminded of the time I coached a stage veteran on a Broadway audition. He confided in me, sheepishly, that his Day Job paid him more than a Broadway salary would, and, therefore, he couldn’t really afford to take the job should he be lucky enough to get it.

Publications like Entertainment Weekly sometimes report what movie and music superstars are earning, and readers misinterpret this. Stage actors generally don’t make a decent wage. As the years went by, Joy reassessed. Was her love of performing enough to continue this unsustainable poverty? No, she decided, about 15 years ago. But there was a different aspect of the theatre biz that truly intrigued her: casting.

To get into casting, she took an unpaid internship in a boutique casting office. Read that sentence again. She left the performing profession that was condemning her to penury in order to work for free. Learn as you earn…nothing. But there’s no denying she was absorbing the casting business. One of the young casting directors there, Rachel Hoffman, went on to become one of Broadway’s top casters. She left for greener pastures, and so did many others that Joy loved being with, learning from. The boss recognized that she deserved a salary. Raises followed. Promotions, titles: Joy was soon doing all the work.

That’s not hyperbole. As the boss was off to rehab, Joy minded the store, did all the casting, calmed the clients – the sole paid employee. When the boss returned, Joy was rewarded by getting her name on the shingle. And then, eight years ago, the boss moved away to the fields of academe. Joy cared too much about their clients to let them go to strangers. And so, Joy Dewing Casting was born.

We bought a house in the suburbs, a more spacious place to raise our child. But here’s the unglamorous truth: Joy’s company and my career didn’t pay us enough to keep up this idyllic existence. So, three years ago, Joy won a job casting at Disneyland. This meant selling our house and becoming renters. Does that sound like a cost-saving move? It is not. In order to live reasonably near Disneyland, we pay more than we ever did as homeowners. And, as you may already know, an April furlough meant a suspension of salary.

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We scratch, we claw, we pick up pennies on the street. And by “we” I don’t mean the Katz family, I mean all of us who toil in performing arts. We take gigs that take so much of our time and energy, the compensation works out to be less than burger-flippers get. And now I’m going to use myself as an example, because today’s I-Met-Joy day, and I… am in there somewhere.

In the waning days of last summer, I negotiated a contract to write a musical. That’s the sort of thing one uses an agent for, but I can’t afford an agent. Still, I’ve been around arts contracts all my life – negotiating them was a big part of my father’s career. The contract laid out specifically what I’d do – there were aspects beyond the writing – and, for simplicity’s sake, I sold my services for one lump sum.

The band accompanying the show would have three or four players. I’d be musical director, manning the keyboard, and would tell others what to play. Which, I guess, could be called orchestration. When the Wallis-Annenberg Theatre in Beverly Hills took the responsible step of shutting down, it was decided we’d rehearse via Zoom and create a Sneak Preview video, showing our cast singing half the songs, conveying a bit of the plot. I think I’ll leave a description of what it’s like to rehearse 30 performers over Zoom for a different essay. But consider accompaniment. I’m not getting three or four players; I’m not getting any live player. It is now my duty to provide tracks that people sing to. These shouldn’t sound like the teeny tiny band we anticipated having in the theatre. Now that music was being created digitally, there’s no limitation to the number of players in a virtual orchestra.

Send in the flugelhorn! For months now I’ve been orchestrating for whatever instruments I please. In the theatre, orchestrators are concerned with utilizing players efficiently. You don’t hire a harpist to play exactly a half of a measure. But that’s what I’ve done here, with the synthesized harp.

My point – and I do have one – is that each song has required ten times the labor. I’ve been working like a dog for months. And the lump sum I negotiated hasn’t magically increased. I’ve been very busy, not getting rich.

And that, broadly speaking, is the life of a theatre artist in these United States. We grasp at straws; we beg for crumbs. No, it’s not brain surgery. It’s something that takes a lot more time for a hundredth of the compensation.