My Week in NY

You know your going to have a great day when you are in NY for a Theatre Conference and the first person you speak to in the morning is Marvin Hamlisch. I was blocking his way to the coffee and he walked up behind me and introduced himself. I just gushed and told him how I’d written papers on him in grad school. He was speaking at the conference (they are reviving A Chorus Line). He actually played the overture to the show. The show doesn’t have an overture but they had written one that they didn’t use so we got to hear that and from the composer’s own hand. I saw him again later that night at Sardi’s – we had an after show private reception there. Yup, I was hanging at Sardi’s after shows with Marvin Hamlish.

I already told you about my high from 110 in the Shade. I still haven’t come down. I’m still humming the songs from that show in my head wherever I go. Let me tell you about the next show I saw called Spring Awakening. It’s quite the phenomenon in NY because its such a unique property. There hasn’t been anything quite like it on Broadway before, perhaps as a project at a university but not in the legit theatre. It’s a rock musical with very contemporary music but the show is set in Germany in the late 1800’s. Overall the show is pretty good. Well how can you go wrong with simulated sex acts on stage, you’re bound to draw attention. It’s about adolescents becoming sexually aware. Funnily enough it’s become a family show – a very specific kind of family show. Many parents with adolescent kids are taking them to the show in order to open conversations with them about sex. Because the 13-25 year old crowd universally LOVE this show, and it has the legitimacy of the Broadway stage, it’s become a catalyst for opening a frank discussion with your kids about sex. The show has a ragged and raw, somewhat punkish feel and look. It’s full of the requisite adult suppression of the children’s learning about the world and particularly about sex.


Some people are saying that this is the next big thing in Musical Theatre. That worries me, not because of the subject matter, or the style of music. Those things were rather appealing. But because of this—the scenes in the show would play out until a character needed to sing. At that point the character would pull a handheld mic from a pocket or from a hidden place on the stage, the action would stop, and they would sing their song and then go back to the scene. The actors had body mics on already, they didn’t need a handheld so the mic was obviously used as a convention to push the show into its Punk mode from its Story mode. And the song that was sung was always a comment on the thoughts or feelings of the character in that particular situation. Now the songs were good, very good pop, punk, rock stuff. Not the best crafted lyrically nor with the artistry normally required of the stage but still very good for radio music and fun to listen to and watch performed. But here’s the part that bothered me—there was never a time when a character had to make a transition from an actor to a singer in the story, and that is at the heart of the art of Musical Theatre. You can have a bunch of great songs and weave them in and out of a so so story line and never deal with what we call a Guzinta, where the scene guz inta the song. If you don’t have that you don’t truly have Musical Theatre, you have a play with music. Prime examples of this are the Movie of Chicago where every single song is something that is performed on a stage. A character never breaks into a song as part of their scene. A better example is the movie that Bjork did a few years back called Dancer in the Dark. A lot of people were calling that a musical but all the songs were only allowed to exist out of the reality of the show. The music has to be a part of the reality of the show to truly be a musical. That’s what’s hard about this art form. That’s where the true writing and directing, and the full collaboration of the talents creating a show, lies. Without that you have a play with music and that is a whole lot easier to create and to be successful with.

Don’t get me wrong. I still liked the show a lot. We need lots of different kinds of shows on Broadway all trying different things and pushing boundaries. To show you what strange effect this show had on its audience here’s a story. We went out to drinks after the show and were discussing what we thought. Some hated some loved and someone asked us to score it one to ten. One guy who was lambasting it from the theatre to the bar saying how much he didn’t like it gave it a 7. I, who enjoyed it and found it interesting gave it a 6. The show just hits you the way it hits you. It is a unique experience.

Another wonderful thing, as I was outside of the theatre waiting for my colleagues to come out, who should pop out of the theatre but a guy from San Diego that I’d worked with on lots of projects at The Stage Co. Big hugs and what the hell are you doing heres and he introduced me to his dad as the guy who got him started in theatre. That was a very pleasant experience.

So that was Sunday and Monday. Tuesday was A Chorus Line. I had lots of hopes for this show because it’s among the best musicals ever written. And the show was good, it was good. But it should have been kick ass. This is the quintessential Broadway show about putting up a Broadway show and carries the baggage of all the theatre insiders with it. The creatives had all of the best of the amazing gypsies to choose from to cast the show, and there were some brilliant performances but overall they were spotty. I shouldn’t ever have heard a weak voice, or watched a poor acting job, or a less than brilliant dance from that show. It must be seamless, especially on the New York stage. The show was fine, it was good but I bet an amateur stock company in Des Moines could do as good a job.

Wednesday Mat is a theatre slot in NY but I had to stay in the room and do some work. I’ve got a pretty good set up here with a second screen and an inet connection with remote access to my desktop at work so I was in pretty good shape to get some stuff done. Wednesday Night was Mary Poppins. Disney’s done it again. The first act left me a little fizzled. One terrific scene in the park but not much else. The second act is full of great geek tricks and fun production numbers. The story gets more compelling as Dad’s job is in jeopardy and Mary comes to the rescue. Lots of nice familiar songs and lots of fun on stage. We walked out having had a truly magical Disney experience.

Thursday night was The Pirate Queen. The buzz on this show has been flop, very expensive flop. I can see why the NY audiences say that. It looks and feels like Riverdance meets Les Miz and indeed the creators are from those shows. But it’s got great sets including projections that move enough to put you into the world of the piece while not looking like a movie set. Great costumes, very nice music and a story line that is compelling enough if not brilliant. The show is almost through sung, like Les Miz but I think the authors did the show a disservice by that. There were many scenes that shouldn’t have been sung. The action of some scenes would have been better as dramatic scenes. That and the second act was almost all ballads. The sad part is that it didn’t need to be. The story went through the outfitting of a ship and a triumphant entry of the Queen into the harbor of her enemy, lots of fodder for good uptempo music, but alas all ballads. I’m really surprised that a music director didn’t look at his music selection in the second act and notice a problem just from that standpoint.Anyway, I’m really hoping it tours because I think Riverdance meets Les Miz is a great selling point. I thought it was terrific stuff for the road. Perhaps not the best Broadway show for Broadway show people but likely to be a crowd pleaser.

I still have 4 shows to go before I get back on a plane to San Diego. I’ll write more then.