the craptacular

There don’t seem to be enough hyphens in the English language to keep up with multi-hyphenate U.K. artist Kate Tempest.  Her work runs the gamut from hip hop, to poetry, to storytelling and theater. Oh, and she’s also writing a novel and releasing a companion album.  She comes to New York January 10-19 to perform Brand New Ancients at St. Ann’s Warehouse as part of the Under the Radar Festival. Tempest spoke with us about the piece, gave us a peek into her childhood bookshelf, told us about her tattoos, and much more…

MB: The opening of Brand New Ancients seems to come from epic poetry.  I was reminded of studying The Odyssey when I was in high school. What attracted you to the mythological form?

K: That’s just how it came out.  I never really studied poetry. I’d just written it all my life and that was my study of it. I didn’t know where it was going to go or what it was going to be. And I think that it’s quite important for artists to acknowledge that sometimes in finished pieces of work, it’s easy to think that it was always finished. But actually you don’t know where it’s going to go or what it’s going to be. And you find your way through it. At the end of it, you say, “All right, now I get it.  Now I get what it was trying to do.” But I didn’t begin by being like, ‘I’m going to write an epic poem and its going to draw on mythology.’ I wish I’d been that smart. It was more like, ‘We’re going to visit some characters in South London.’

MB: Brand New Ancients has these distinct movements between the music and the poetry. It’s interesting to see you hand off the microphone to the musicians.

K: It’s so wonderful to watch the drummer just going for it. And also, you’ve just heard all this poetry about struggle and human life and trying to live and love better, and then you watch a person playing a cello. It was the perfect physicalization of what we are talking about – watching somebody kind of struggling with this sublime thing.

MB: The piece made me want to shout and cheer while I was watching it.  But since it’s in a theater, we’re all politely sitting on our hands waiting until the end and then clapping. How does that feel for you up there?  

K: It’s strange.  Last night we did it in this massive church in London, you know, with stained glass windows and candles – the lot.  And I think because the audience is sitting on pews, and the congregation is supposed to feel like a part of what’s happening, people were much more vocal.  They were clapping after every musical moment.  I suppose it’s more about permission in a theatrical space. With a theater audience, as much as I say ‘Guys, I know that you’re here.  You know that we’re here.   Let’s all be in a room together and make this happen.’ I think it feels sometimes like you sit back and watch what happens in this kind of framed thing above you.  And at the end you say you’ve enjoyed it.

MB: You’ve been touring Brand New Ancients throughout the U.K., and I saw show the show in London at the Royal Court Theatre. How was it for you performing in the Royal Court, which has so much theatrical history?

K: It’s been an incredible journey.  The whole thing.  The Royal Court is a home to writers who’ve created such important work.  The legacy of that building, that stage. And I felt the weight of it, definitely. And the idea of  coming to New York. It’s such a huge dream of mine, you’ve no idea. I feel like the story is so London, and so much about where I am from, that it will hopefully resonate with New Yorkers.  Because I feel like New Yorkers are similarly linked to their city in the way that Londoners are linked to theirs. It was exciting being at the Royal Court but being in New York — that’s the thing!

MB: Is there anything you want to do in New York while you’re not on stage?

K: I’d love to see some rappers.  I’d love to see some live music.  But I’d quite like to go and see a basketball game because I’ve never seen one.  And just hang around and walk about and just be in New York. Talking to people. That’s what I’d quite like.

MB: When you were a teenager, you started doing rap battles. Was there a particular hip hop group or song that really drew you in initially to that world?

K:  I was going to say Wu Tang.  But before Wu Tang, I was a 10 year-old girl.  There was this cheesy hip hop boy band called Ultimate Kaos and Kris Kross, and shit like that.

The stuff that seriously got me was Gang Starr and Mos Def , Black Star and Talib Kweli, A Tribe Called Quest, The Fugees, obviously, and Eminem.  All the lyrical lyricists. All the different sounds from all over the states. Just fascinating, how the rappers coming out from New York sounded different from the rappers coming out of L.A. Absolutely blew my mind.

MB: You’ve been working for a very long time. Who is the voice in your head which keeps pushing you forward?

K: I don’t know who it is. I know that from early childhood I’ve had a compulsion to be creative. I know that when I don’t work, when I don’t make work, I don’t feel good. It’s become such a huge part of my character, my identity, how I think about the world. How I think about my days — it’s everything, really. It’s like my relationships, my lovers, my friends, my family, and my work and that’s it. That’s life.

I feel very lucky to be in a position where I can truly dedicate myself to the relationship that I have with my own creativity. There are many, many people who are excellent and absolutely amazing, but they can’t dedicate their time to their art because they are working. So I feel like my compulsion is kind of informed by an obligation to everybody else who I know, who I came up with, and what’s inspired me. I must carry on and get better. I must improve, for everybody else who’s inspired me or who’s working and hasn’t quite been able to break through.

MB: What was your favorite toy as a kid?

K: I had this amazing teddy bear. Just absolutely amazing. My mom helped me make him these dungarees out of this green felt. I called him Duncan after my best friend at the time. And I wrote a poem for him that I put in the pocket of his dungarees and it was poem saying who he was, and what to do if he was found. Because he’d be lost if someone had found him and he would be unhappy. I think my Mom’s still got him. I carried him around everywhere.

MB: What do your tattoos mean?  

K: Oh wow. (laughing) How weird that you know I have tattoos? Well, I find that the minute you start explaining the meaning you sound like an idiot but I have tattoo on my arm which is waves and cherry blossoms falling. My dad told me when I was a kid that when cherry blossoms fall, it’s time to write poetry. So I got them falling down my right arm, which is my writing arm. When I started to take my poetry seriously, [getting the tattoo] was like marking of the fact that it was always time to write. And the waves are about ebb and flow and creativity and childhood. My Dad loved the sea, and I loved the sea, so it was part of me and my family. It’s about stillness and depth and charging on. I got a tattoo on my leg which is kind of about the same thing. It’s got the moon in it. It’s about cycles and being true to things. I’ve got my partner’s name tattooed on my arm.

MB: Is there a thing you can’t stop talking about? Something you want to tell all your friends about.

K: There’s this band, this new hip hop group called Young Fathers that come out of Scotland and they‘re fucking unbelievable. I saw them at a gig the other night and I can’t stop thinking about it. Their performance was just wild. I’m telling everybody to check them out. I don’t know if their album has dropped yet. I don’t know anything about them other than I saw them the other night and they blew me away.

MB: Who do you fangirl over?

K: People in loads of different areas. So in theater, Jez Butterworth, I’m a huge fan of him. I saw Jerusalem. It changed my life.

MB: Name a Greek god or goddess you’d totally make out with.

K: I don’t know. I think I’d prefer humans. Every time the Greek gods and goddesses make out with humans it all seems to go wrong for someone. I think I’ll stick with humans, thanks.

On December 29, 2013, my mom, Lois Levy, passed away at age 67. (Read my eulogy for her.) In her memory, I’d like to offer a different kind of Broadway history: a short history of the Broadway lessons my mother left me.

Nothing Says I Love You Like A Showtune
Like most mothers, my mom loved to sing to me when I was little. Her favorite? “I love you / a bushel and a peck…” It wasn’t until years later that I realized the song that she sang over and over again to tell me she loved me was originally written as a strip tease number for Guys and Dolls. (If you think the “hot box girls” are supposed to be anything else, you’re deluding yourself.) Luckily, I seem to have avoided any long-term psychological baggage from making this connection.

Anything Worth Seeing Is Worth Seeing At A Discount
For as long as I can remember, my parents took me to see lots of theater: community theater, regional theater, tours, and Broadway alike. But they way they made it possible was through smart shopping: half-priced tickets from BosTix or ArtsMail at home in Massachusetts, “two-fers” and the TKTS line in New York. The balcony was good enough for us, thank you very much, and waiting in line at TKTS was part of the fun and adventure of visiting New York. Of course, my mom being who she was, the line at TKTS was also social hour, as she chatted up everyone around us about what shows they were hoping to see, what they’ve already seen, and what we all thought about each other’s choices and chances at getting decent seats. (If you’ve ever seen the musical number “Hello Hello There” from Bells Are Ringing, in which Judy Holliday gets an entire New York subway car to make friends with each other, you might have an inkling as to what the TKTS line was like with my mom.)

Choose Your Souvenirs Well
If we were going to see a show for half price, it should have gone without saying that we would therefore not be wasting money on frivolities like souvenir program booklets. At some point early on, possibly at my first touring show (Big River at the Colonial Theater in Boston), my mom told me that we would do just fine with the free Playbill provided, but if we saw a show with a really big star we could get the souvenir program book. Clearly those words stuck for me, because years later we saw Tommy Tune on tour in Bye Bye Birdie at the Providence Performing Arts Center, and I insisted we buy the program. (I was the kind of kid for whom Tommy Tune was a “really big star.”) My mother had no recollection of the original conversation, but she must have been grateful for several years of theatergoing without my begging for programs, so she bought it for me. After all that anticipation, it turned out that souvenir programs are actually pretty stupid, so I believe I’ve only bought one other in my entire life. (It was The Lion King. I was so blown away by the visuals, I wanted something I could keep to study those stage pictures forever.)

Souvenirs weren’t entirely off-limits. After seeing Big River, I was so obsessed with the show that my mom bought me both a script and a piano-vocal book. (We already owned the cast recording on cassette.) And after Anything Goes, I got a sweatshirt (likely bought at a discount at Theatre Circle rather than full-priced at Lincoln Center), and I wore that ugly, ugly piece of clothing until it was a rag. T-shirts from Falsettos, Tommy, Hair, Beauty and the Beast, Titanic, Cabaret, and probably some others I’m forgetting would follow, as would scripts and vocal selections from countless more. But unlike that Bye Bye Birdie program gathering dust in some box, those shirts got worn and those scripts got read, and those vocal selections are still being played. These days I’m more of a mug buyer, but when I drink my morning coffee from my Encores season mug each morning, I will think about how my mom taught me that souvenirs could also be useful.

Even the Biggest Stars Are Approachable
My parents took me on my first trip to Broadway in 1989 when I was 11 years old. When we got to New York, our first stop was (naturally) the TKTS booth — obviously, the one at the World Trade Center, so we could get tickets for both that night and the following day’s matinee and save ourselves one line wait. We ended up with tickets to Anything Goes at Lincoln Center (starring Leslie Uggams, who had followed Patti LuPone) and Into the Woods in its final month at the Martin Beck. We also had tickets to see the original production of A Chorus Line at the Shubert, which I believe were purchased with the aforementioned two-fers. We had orchestra seats to all three shows, a rare treat for me. I believe Anything Goes was our first show. We sat three or four rows away from the stage, house right at the Vivian Beaumont, so unusual to me with its thrust configuration and so much smaller than the Boston theaters I was used to. I don’t remember a lot about the show (other than loving it), but I will never forget at the curtain call, during an honest to goodness New York standing ovation, when Leslie Uggams came out to take her bow, my mom waved to her and Leslie caught her eye and waved back. I couldn’t believe it! I turned to my mom and asked if they knew each other. Were they friends? I was totally in awe.

A few years later, we saw Mandy Patinkin’s Dress Casual tour in Boston. Mandy is a friend of one of my dad’s cousins, so my mom took me to the stage door and dropped their name. The next thing I knew we were backstage waiting by Mandy’s dressing room door. We spotted Paul Ford, Mandy’s music director and accompanist, so my mom said hi and suddenly Paul was showing us around the stage before bringing us right to Mandy’s dressing room to say hi. I was totally star struck, but my mother modeled for me how to have a polite, non-crazy conversation between a fan and a star.

I don’t hang around stage-doors often these days, but when I do chat with a performer after a show without making a total ass of myself, I have my mom to thank.

Theater Is The Gateway To Acceptance
On my second trip to Broadway, my parents too me to see Falsettos, which to this day remains the most important musical I’ve ever seen. Falsettos, the fusion of two earlier, one-act off-Broadway musicals by William Finn, tells the story of a middle-class Jewish family not entirely unlike my own, in the aftermath of the father’s coming out of the closet. In the first act, we see Marvin (the father) attempt to create a “tight-knit family” consisting of his ex-wife, his current lover, his pre-pubescent son, and his therapist who is now dating his ex-wife. Act two complicates the story as Marvin’s son, Jason, approaches his bar mitzvah while Marvin’s lover, Whizzer, succumbs to AIDS. While this wasn’t the first time I had seen gay characters on stage—we had seen A Chorus Line on our previous trip, after all—it was the first time I made the connection between those characters and myself. I don’t remember any big discussion about the show, before or after we saw it, or any attempt by my parents to contextualize it as anything other than a good musical. They trusted me to do the rest.

A few years later, when we were in New York looking at colleges, we saw Love! Valour! Compassion!, a play by Terrance McNally that not only featured exclusively gay characters, it featured many of them entirely nude. Now, I’m pretty sure I chose that one (one of the only times in my young life I opted for a play rather than a musical, but it was a Sunday night and our options were limited), but again my parents enjoyed the play, and if they had a comment on the content, it was about the nudity, not the particular sexuality on display. Whether this was intention, subconscious, or simply another example of what good people brought me up, memories of seeing these shows and others with my parents definitely made it easier for me when I came out of the closet to them before I started college.

The bests…

Alex Timbers Is God
This was a great year for us. Want to know why? Because Alex Timbers was everywhere. Uptown, downtown, across the country, seriously, the man was putting up shows everywhere we looked. Between directing our favorite musical of the year, Here Lies Love, at the Public Theater, and adapting and directing the gloriously fun Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Delacorte all summer, Timbers somehow found time to present a concept for a new Muppets musical. Then, in the fall, he jetted off to San Diego to mount a production of the Jeff Buckley/Romeo & Juliet musical The Last Goodbye — which we loved — before hurrying back to NYC to get himself ready to direct Rocky: Das Musical on Broadway in 2014. Basically the only place we didn’t see Alex Timbers this year was in our bed. Probably because Timbers hasn’t stopped to sleep at least twelve months. Which is probably fine. Because Gods don’t need sleep like we mere mortals do. Still. We’re keeping a spot open in our beds. Just in case he’s looking for a new place to perform. Or something.

OK, the Tonys Rocked
Remember like three years ago when everyone used to bitch about the Tonys going down the tubes, and poor ratings, and the Death of Theater because IGNORANT AMERICA DOES NOT CARE WAH WAH WAH. Fuck that noise, because Broadway’s biggest night was bloody great this year. Neil Patrick Harris owned. The production numbers were brilliant. (“You can bounce a quarter off he ass of Billy Porter.” Still not over it, Lin.) The winners were diverse and deserving and best of all, the proceedings felt genuinely celebratory. The secret? Broadway stopped trying to put on a show aimed at converting the masses and started having its own fun, in-joke-y, beautiful party. The result? The ratings were up. And the people who love theater got it, and the people who didn’t wanted to. Mission accomplished.

Norbert Leo Butz at 54 Below
The best thing that happened on the Great White Way this year didn’t actually happen on the Great White Way. It happened in a night club in a basement below Broadway and it was Norbert Leo Butz’s cabaret “Girls, Girls, Girls.” In an evening exploring female archetypes — mythological, Jungian — through popular music as an attempt to better understand the women in his life, Norbert Leo Butz also managed to blow the fucking roof off 54 Below. Which is a hell of a feat, dude, because that shit is like… 20 floors up. That’s how big, how badass, how truly amazing this show was. One song in and we were losing our minds with joy. By the end of the night we’d basically become a puddle that needed to be scraped up off the floor. We would quite literally commit several heinous crimes for the opportunity to see Norbert perform “Girls, Girls, Girls,” again. We just hope we won’t have to.

Fun Home
There are no intelligent, sensitive new musicals for grownups, the world lamented! No probs, said Jeanine Tesori, who composed one of the best shows we’ve seen in years with Fun Home, the story of one woman’s attempt at sussing out her family history. Brimming with incredible performances and sweet/sensitive/sad songs, this show gave us hope that complex, thoughtful musicals can have a healthy life in New York. Are we mildly concerned that a Broadway transfer seems far away for this show, despite glowing reviews and multiple extensions? We are. Oh, we are. But for the moment, we’re happy to have this show on its feet, regardless of the neighborhood.

Laura Benanti Triumphant
Say what you want about The Sound of Music and Ms. Underwood, without her, we’d never have gotten to see Baroness Benanti Von Schrader — a performance so fucking good it basically erased all the badness around it. And good for Benanti. After several cancelled TV shows, and a rough patch in her personal life, ending 2013 on such a high note must have felt really fucking good. The fact that she stole the Tony Awards with her number about cancelled television shows probably didn’t hurt either. So let’s drink to the end of 2013 being the beginning of Laura Benanti’s epic rise to stardom. Or at least get her beautiful, amazing, hilarious ass back in a musical, stat.

Derek Klena Ascendant
With the assumption of Jeremy Jordan and Aaron Tveit into Hollywood heaven and Gavin Creel busy conquering a new continent, the need for a new Broadway hottie was dire, friends. Not only did Derek Klena show up just in time, he did upon arrival what all marquee hotties must: a tenure in Wicked as Fiyero, King of the Hotties and stylish sporter of suspenders and high-waisted pants. With that out of the way, he’s headed onward to The Bridges of Madison County and the miraculous universe of Tony eligibility — clearly where he belongs. Coincidentally, we’re gunning for several new categories this year — Cutest Dimples, and Best Intense-Yet-Knowingly Sparkly Eyes.

RSO Fest at 54 Below
In the past four years We’ve seen about a jillion new musical theater concerts. And much though we love having our fingers on the pulse of what’s about to happen on Broadway, these concerts can be a real slog. Composers are forced to present their songs completely devoid of context, and it’s all too easy for the music to suffer for the format. Which is exactly why RSO Fest at 54 Below was so great. Instead of forcing composer Ryan Scott Oliver to select a handful of songs from each of his different projects and smoosh them into one night, the venue presented three his musicals, top to bottom, each as their own individual concert. The material actually made sense, you guys! But at the end of the day, the best part of it all was that we got a real taste of RSO’s skill, not just with a few isolated minutes of music here or there, but with a whole story. With a whole musical. And guess what? He’s pretty good at writing those things! Maybe more composers should get a shot at showing us what they’ve got in a real show. In the meantime, we’re buying tickets to see Jasper in Deadland — one of the shows in RSO Fest — at the Prospect Theater this spring. Can’t wait.

Mark Rylance in Shakespeare
We’re not even going to pretend we didn’t know Mark Rylance was a genius before this year. His performance in Jerusalem is basically the best thing we’ve ever seen. Well. That is, until we saw him interpret Shakespeare. Rylance breathed a whole  new life into The Bard’s text, finding colloquial rhythms and space for breathing, and stuttering, and laughing, and being human in a way that we’ve never had the privilege to experience before. We’re obsessed. Not in the least because his Olivia in Twelfth Night was one of the most amazing female performances we’ve witnessed, and, well, Rylance is a man. This is the kind of shit we’re going to tell our grandchildren about over and over until we die and they’re going to hate us but we don’t even give two fucks because holy shit, how lucky were we to have witnessed this master at work?

Julie Taymor Returns Like a Mofo
Did you honestly think that Julie Taymor was going to sulk away from Spider-Man in defeat, never to return to the New York stage again? LOL, no. That’s what Julie said as she created the most memorable Shakespeare production of the season at Theater for a New Audience. Her Midsummer Night’s Dream was a wonder of flowing fabric, neon projections, and glittering costumes — old-fashioned theater magic that seems wildly removed from the computerized spectacle of Spider-Man. And who could resist her best innovation in this production: A chorus of children tasked with playing faeries, animals, party guests, woodland creatures, and even the woods itself. All this in a season that was so Shakespeare-crammed that it took a small miracle to stand out amidst the throng. But standing out and making a splash? We wouldn’t have expected less from our girl Julie.

The Jammer
Proving that simpler is sometimes a whole lot better, this little production at Atlantic Theater had us swooning this year. A tale of love and roller derby in 1950s New York, we fell hard for this show’s reliance on cardboard cutouts, Kay Starr songs, and a hilariously weird, expletive-laden performance by Jeanine Serralles. When it comes to a good night of theater, there’s not much more that a girl needs.

The worsts…

Smash
You know what’s awesome? That some people had the courage, smarts, funding, and wherewithal to make a TV show about the inner-workings of Broadway. Because that is some interesting shit, and we have known this since we were old enough to drop the cassette tape edition of the Sunday in the Park With George cast recording into a Walkman and hit play. You know what’s not? That the show totally, utterly sucked. Plagued by impossible writing, a meandering plot, and the most empty-eyed leading lady this side of Kate Levering, Smash was a bitter disappointment to those of us who no only love Broadway, but know in our heart of hearts that this is an intelligent medium filled with intelligent people who do intelligent work. The hell if we could find any of that on Smash outside of Angelica Huston, and anything worth caring about beyond the color of Ivy Lynn’s wrap dress of the week.

The Endless Vilification of Critics and Criticism Blah Blah Blah
Anyone who says anything bad about Broadway is bad! This is the refrain we here over and over again from fans, and industry insiders alike. Ben Brantley is evil. Journalists who expose important stories are out to take down Broadway. Our thought? That’s bullshit. Everyone’s work, whether you are an artist or a janitor, is open to subjective external assessment, and we all risk losing our jobs if we screw up, or if our bosses do. That’s life, baby. The rules aren’t different for a Broadway show. We hate this notion that critics are somehow ruining Broadway, that it should exist in this perfect bubble of positive sentiment, partly because that’s just creepy George Orwell talk. But also, this panders to this very dangerous idea that American theater, and Broadway, is some kind of rarefied endangered species. That we all need to whisper in hushed tones, lest it shatter to bits. Uh, no. Broadway is alive and well, and it produces enough great work each year that it can withstand people calling out its flaws. Our final opinion about opinions? Shout ’em out, good or bad. Because the thing that will help Broadway most is people talking about Broadway.

The Random, Left-Field Musical
Soul Doctor? The Janis Joplin live show? What the hell is this? When did Broadway become invaded by a) things we’ve never heard of, and b) things that have no obvious shot at commercial or critical viability? Have all of the Broadway producers in the world had their bodies taken over by Oompa Loompas? Because seriously, we are no experts at the business of Broadway — we adore things that fail all the time — but it seems like you would be smarter to light a huge pile of money on fire in the middle of 45th street than to invest real cash in something like Soul Doctor. But the thing that disturbs us most isn’t that these shows exist on Broadway. It’s that other shows don’t. Here Lies Love? Fun Home? We can’t find the cash to make either of these musicals happen in a Broadway house, but the Janis Joplin impersonation show can come right on in? Makes perfect sense… if you are certifiable crazy person. We hope 2014 is better than the last half of 2013, and that Broadway can eventually put its money where its brain is.  Speaking of which…

Entrance Applause for Dead People 
Rampant standing ovations at shows of even shitty quality are par for the course these days. And that’s bad enough. But this year, we reached a new low. Broadway forced me to experience something even worse — a show being stopped because the audience was giving entrance applause to a dead person. Okay. In fairness, they were giving an unknown actress entrance applause for her ability to look somewhat like a person who is already dead. But really, we all know that applause wasn’t for the actress (she hadn’t done anything yet!). It was for Bessie Smith. Or Odetta. Or Nina Simone. Really, people? Seriously? You’re so excited to be here that the mere appearance of someone dressed up like a dead person you admire is enough to send you into paroxysms of joy and applause and hooting and hollering? THIS IS NOT REAL. AND THEY HAVEN’T EARNED YOUR APPLAUSE YET. AND ALSO, THIS ISN’T REAL. OMG, hate. If Broadway ever does this to me again, I quit. At least Bernadette Peters earned her entrance applause. And speaking of dead people on Broadway…

The Sugarcoating of Shlomo Carlebach
You know what would be an awesome idea? Let’s write a musical about a famous man who is both long dead and the subject of a very long list of accusations of molestation and pedophilia and sexual abuse of many stripes dating all the way back to the 1960s. Except, let’s totally ignore the fact that hundreds of women have publicly accused him of heinous things and just make him seem like a really nice dude. And when the media asks questions, instead of acknowledging that we chose to wholesale ignore a huge portion of this man’s legacy, let’s just say that all those women were wrong. He’s not a playa he just liked to hug a lot. Doesn’t that sound marvelous? The creatives and producers behind Soul Doctor thought so. They brought that revisionist shit straight to Broadway and four months later, we’re still grossed out. And not even because the show was bad. But because it told Rabbi Schlomo Carlebach’s story in bad faith, and disrespected all the women he hurt. So notch another win on the patriarchy’s bedpost, I guess. But we’re out.

Matilda is Late for Class 
We spent basically the entirety of 2012 — and even a small portion of 2011 — hearing about Matilda‘s brilliance from across the pond. We even flew all the way over to the West End to see (and love) it for ourselves that winter. Then, everyone on this side of the ocean spent the second half of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 talking about how everyone was just fighting to be an also-ran beside the genius of Matilda in the race for Tony Awards. And then Matilda opened, and… nothing. Sure, it got great reviews. But by and large, no one seemed to give a fuck. Not the press, not our readers, not even us (we didn’t even bother to go see it again in NYC). By the time the Tonys jizzed all over Kinky Boots, our suspicions were confirmed — people just didn’t care about Matilda anymore. You could say that was due to the show’s Britishness and dark sense of humor. But really, we just think everyone had Matilda fatigue. In the year and a half between when the show’s West End and Broadway openings, everyone just got sick and tired of waiting. New York is a fast-paced, fickle place — Broadway, even more so — and that last six months of waiting seemed to do us all in. Which sucks, because the show is great. Here’s to hoping the next time producers move a West End smash across the pond they’ll leave less time for hype and give us more time to see, and love, the show for ourselves.

Jekyll and Hyde
There are two flavors of Frank Wildhorn: boring and craptacular. That’s it. There’s no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the Frank Wildhorn universe, because the man is just measured on a different scale. And as you may have guessed from the name of this website, we’re fond of craptacularity. Which is why we have a soft spot for Frank Wildhorn. And nothing of Wildhorn’s is more craptacular than Jekyll and Hyde. Well. Nothing has more POTENTIAL to be craptacular than Jekyll and Hyde. Which is why the deathly boringness –seriously, I spent a calculable percentage of the second act engrossed in… the ceiling — of this year’s revival was such a letdown. Don’t waste my time, Broadway. If you’re going to have Constantine Maroulis toss his hair around and screlt his face off, make it the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Turn that shit up to eleven. Or a thousand. And stop taking Frank Wildhorn so seriously. Camp is way more fun.

Alex Timbers
The thing about putting Alex Timbers on this list — on any list, really — is that it doesn’t make much sense, given Alex’s acute duel tendencies toward beauty and genius, to put any one else on the list. “Alex Timbers and Go Home” is often, for us, the bleating, chase-light-fringed headline of our lives and our hearts. But let’s try to break this down. First, the genius. Because, you know, this is a man who made a piece of experiential theater about Imelda Marcos, matched the wallpaper in a Broadway show to one he saw in Trainspotting, included a Mr. Big song in Shakespeare, directed Pee-Wee Herman, workshopped the Muppets, and wrote the line, “So is the Spaniards.” And if your head hasn’t exploded yet from all that, let’s also remind you that he is tall and willowy as a birch in the breeze, and has the hair of a classical god only not in stone, because HE IS REAL. Go kill yourself already, because Alex Timbers lives and he cannot let you forget it and neither can we.

Billy Porter
He won a Tony for his portrayal of Lola — drag queen, inspiration and all around-badass –in Kinky Boots, so clearly Mr. Porter’s sheer brilliance has not gone unrecognized this year. But jesu. Can we all please just take one more second here, as the year draws to a close, to appreciate how damn handsome this man is? With those dimples, and those perfectly drawn lips, and the badass nerd glasses, AND THAT SMILE, we are just constantly wishing we had a Billy Porter of our own to light up the rooms we enter every day. What. A. Stud.

Stark Sands
You’ve seen him in his underwear, but that wasn’t even the clincher. The thing that made you — and us — love Stark Sands forever wasn’t his aw-shucks way with basically everything, or his cute British wife who he clearly adores, or his wonky faux Kinky Boots accent, or his surprising quickness in stilettos, or the fact that he sometimes looks like he’s 14-years-old. The thing about Tony Nominee Stark Sands is that it’s all in the eyes, baby. If they are the windows to the soul, Stark’s soul looks like kittens and butterflies floating on a cloud of dreamy blue unicorns. Find the vein, girls. We are addicted. Which is too bad because our next fix, and many more after that, might just have to come in a movie theater and not on Broadway…

Tom Sturridge
Here’s how we know that we love, and I mean really love, Tom Sturridge: He’s done a lot of extremely dumb shit and we don’t even care. Telling Pat Healy how to do and not do his job? No worries, Tomster! Thanks for the helpful hints! Wearing the worst hat in all human history in the most pretentious, most airbrushed Burberry ads we’ve ever seen? Get it, Tom. Hope you got lots of free cologne samples. Because here’s the clincher: Tom Fucking Sturridge, Tony Nominee, is beautiful and talented. And just like no one cares that Giselle Buncheon is basically a really tall moron, The Craptacular does not care that Tom Sturridge makes occasional bad decisions about his life. Don’t we all, Tom. Don’t we all.

Billy Magnussen
Mr. Magnussen has had a hell of a year. Not only was the the hottest body on Broadway outside of the cast of Pippin, but Magnussen scored him a Tony Nomination for his performance as Spike in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and then rolled right on into the role of Rapunzel’s Prince in the much-anticipated, Meryl-Streep-led film adaptation of Into the Woods. But out favorite thing about Billy? The fact that he’s genuinely a pretty cool, pretty kind dude. Okay. That’s not entirely true. We love his abs and kind of want to lick honey off them like… several times, but really, his niceness is important, too! We swear! Really! We do!

Orion Griffiths
He looks like Ben Walker — if you bonked him on the head real hard so he shrank a bit in height but increased many inches in muscle-bound girth — which you know we love. Plus, this Pippin stud can bend his body into all kinds of interesting positions, which you know we’d love in bed. So really, what is there not to adore about this beautiful specimen of a man? We’d wager nothing.

Colin Donnell
Maybe it’s the beautiful baby blues Colin calls eyes, or the tattoos that peeked out of his wife beater, or the fact that no one outside of David Beckham has ever looked that good in a pair of wet Adidas Track pants and Sambas, but before the midway point of Love’s Labour’s Lost, we were eating out of Colin–err, Berowne’s hands. Then the boyband number — WITH THE KEYCHANGE JOKE — happened and it was all we could do to stay in our seats at the Delacourte Theater. Needless to say we have some positive feels about Mr. Donnell. Especially in our lady parts. And if he’s not on Broadway again soon, we’re going to start lighting important things on fire. Like the Empire State Building, so….

Zachary Levi
Broadway has no shortage of star castings, sure. But few of them had our friends and readers as twitter-pated as Zachary Levi’s move to Broadway in First Date and we get it. Oh, do we get it. Tall and unreasonably handsome, but still somehow like… the neighbor you daydreamed about back in your junior high school days, Levi really is like… the vintage Cadillac of swoony Broadway stars. Just a fucking classic. We’ll be honest, though, our favorite sightings of Levi were always at concerts, where it was fun to watch him shake off his First Date character and just hang with fellow Broadway performers and lovers alike. That’s when he seemed the cutest and realest and bestest of all.

Jose Llana
Mr. Smoldering Handsomeness 2013, Jose Llana, is a completely obvious choice here, we know. But it must be said, and said clearly: If you can play a dictator and still make us want to bone you, you are doing everything right with a cherry on top. You’re also doing everything right if you’re hotter at 35 than you were at 25 (check), if you can survive Wonderland basically unscathed (check), and if you are a bestselling recording artist in your native country (check).

Bobby Steggert
You know what’s not to love about Bobby Steggert? NOTHING. He is cute as a button, vaguely pocket-sized, has a smile like sunshine, and has been on the verge of happening for like five years. Join us in celebrating his actual happening, which allows us to include him on this list, and the fact that he’s playing Norbert Leo Butz’s son. Which is like… a kind of virtual lineage of hotness that we can really get behind.

Bryce Pinkham
It’s not just anyone who can make a murderous potential psychopath hot, and Bryce Pinkham has done this not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES on the Broadway, in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson , Ghost, and now, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Needless to say, we’re smitten, not in the least because Pinkham also brings a great sense of humor to his work. His role in Gentleman’s Guide is his biggest yet on Broadway, and his absolutely huge performance of “I’ve Decided to Marry You” basically stopped the show the  night we were at the Kerr. We were howling and applauding right along with the best of them. So, if Bryce is ever looking for a new partner in crime… well, we’re always available.

Samuel Barnett
As if his darling British accent weren’t enough to reel us in, Sam Barnett had to go and give one of the most sensitive, nuanced, thoroughly realized performances on Broadway as Viola/Cesario in Twelfth Night. Sitting, rapt, in the dim Belasco Theatre, we were pretty sure Viola’s quiet, longing, hopeful, passionate gazes at Duke Orsino were actually reaching into our chest and tearing our hearts out.  We’ve never felt more understood, or well represented on stage. The fact that the actor giving that performance was a man made those moments all the more mindblowing. The fact that that man is also ridiculously cute and British and funny off-stage, well, we’re clearly smitten for life.

Steven Pasquale
Confession: Lucky has been in love with Steven Pasquale since she was a bespectacled 16-year-old sitting in the balcony of Boston’s Wang Theater and she witnessed that moment when Sargent Christopher Scott took his shirt off for .5 seconds before the blackout. He sang “Why God, Why?” She sort of remembers. He screamed, “Hhhhnnnnnnnnooooooooo!” — just like Melchior — as the curtain fell. Yeah, she vaguely recalls. But it was that instant of shirtlessness that sent her into the next decade watching every episode of that fireman show and skipping every damn track on A Man of No Importance except “On the Streets of Dublin.” Because the power of Pasquale and his pectoral muscles were basically unstoppable and reverberated across the generations, right up to the moment when he starred in Far From Heaven and shattered her heart to bits. It’s been a long, sweet affair. And if The Bridges of Madison County works out, it’s going to last a while longer.

Photos, from top: Boston Globe; Jason Szenes; Gettty; Unknown Headshot; Unknown; Matthew Murphy; Joan Marcus; Unknown; Unknown Headshot; Unknown Headshot; Unknown Headshot; NYTimes Video Still; NBC.

Patina Miller
Never mind the accolades. Never mind that she was Tony-nominated two years in a row, won once, and showed up to both ceremonies in easily the best dress of the night. Let’s cut to the chase here: Patina Miller, with her bionic biceps and statuesque curvitude, is crazy beautiful. But what we love most about Patina is the sense of mystery in her pretty eyes — like she could spend her free time crashed on the couch watching Toddlers and Tiaras in yoga pants, or possibly flying between New York and Tangier on clandestine spy missions. Either image seems to work, and either way, we’d love to tag along.

Rachael Bay Jones
You know you’re about to have a good year when they re-write some lines in a 30+-year-old musical to accommodate your casting. Things only get better when that joke — riffing on the age difference between you and your young, male co-star — becomes one of the most meaningful, and, frankly, perfect, jokes in the show. But seriously, Rachel Bay Jones hardly comes close to looking her age up there on stage while she’s belting her face off and changing the direction of Pippin’s life, and we love her for having a sense of humor about it all, just as much as we love her for being beautiful and talented.

Stephanie J Block
Look, at the end of the day, we’re just plain jealous of Stephanie J Block’s whole thing. She looked beautiful in a very 20s get-up at the Tony Nominees cocktail party, and she can sing her face off, and she’s smart, and her husband is handsome as all get-out. Plus, with her kick-ass (Tony Nominated) performance in Drood, and her role in Little Miss Sunshine, it’s looking like New York City really got on board this year. We ain’t mad about it, either.

Shalita Grant
Obviously, she used to be a personal trainer. For anyone who saw her Tony-nominated turn as Cassandra in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, it will come as no surprise that Shalita Grant is well acquainted with the art of ass kicking. Whether telling David Hyde Pierce what’s what, or rocking a white satin floor-length halter dress, this girl can do it, and look fabulous — and fabulously well-toned — all the while. And that doesn’t even take into account her sparkletastic wit and outsized sense of humor. To play funny is one thing. To actually be funny is quite another.

Ruthie Ann Miles
Imelda Marcos — wife of disgraced former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos — is known more for her partying and vast collection of shoes than for her stunning good looks (though she was a beauty queen in her youth). But Here Lies Love star Ruthie Ann Miles gives not a fuck about that, because it’s her dance party and she’ll be beautiful if she wants to. And damn is she beautiful. Of course, Clint Ramos’ costumes certainly helped the star look her va-va-voomiest on stage, but we totes have a crush on Ms. Miles now, and we don’t care who knows it!

Patti Murin
Where does one even begin with this woman? She’s GORG. She has hair that is basically perfect. She’s truly hilarious, on stage, and off (seriously, check out her Twitter).  She was cast as a princess in this summer’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and when we heard the news all we thought was “duh” because she basically is a princess in real life. Also, she’s one half of our favorite Broadway couple this year, because all her awesomeness snagged Colin Donnell, which basically means everyone just needs to bow down.

Krysta Rodridguez
God, we have tried so hard to hate this girl, and we can’t even do it. Usually any presumption of “edginess,” aesthetic or otherwise, sends our eyes rolling waaaaaay the hell up in our heads. This is Broadway, after all. But Krysta makes it work, and for one pretty basic reason: She’s really talented and really hot. And here is a girl who could be an alto Laura Osnes if she wanted. But she kind of gives the hypothetical finger to all that noise in favor of a tougher, darker image. And Broadway needs some of that in the same way that it needs a future and some cheaper tickets. We approve.

Kate Baldwin
You can hear it every night when you walk through Hell’s Kitchen: The sobbing of young Broadway hopefuls, wailing away in their beds because they aren’t, and will never be Kate Baldwin. Because here’s the thing: Kate’s basically perfect. She’s gorgeous. She’s tall. She’s a redhead. She sings like a dream. And she possesses that kind of rare theatrical magic: When she is standing on a stage, you do not much want to look away — even with Norbert Leo Butz nearby. No small feat, that.

Alexandra Socha
Oh. My. God. Okay. So, obviously Socha wins all kinds of points for being totally gorgeous off-stage, but perhaps one of our favorite things about this beauty is her ability to totally change her physical presence for a role. In Fun Home Socha was almost entirely unrecognizable when she hit the stage playing a twitchy, nervous, young lesbian only just beginning to find her sexuality and come into her own. It takes real smarts to give a performance that sensitive and nuanced — so fully realized the actress herself almost entirely disappears — and we think that’s just as beautiful as the girl underneath the role.

Anne-Marie Duff
For the vertically challenged among us, there’s something about watching a tall actress onstage — like the weather, the air quality, and the view of the universe must simply be different, and better, up there. Such is the sensation we got watching the lovely Anne-Marie Duff in Macbeth this season. She seemed to float above the whole production — figuratively and almost literally dwarfing the entire proceedings. The kicker? She’s 5’7″ — hardly a giant. But she seems like one up there, floating about in yards and yards of fabric, courtesy of Catherine Zuber’s designs, which were sort of like Lord of the Rings meets underwear. And look, we got almost all the way through this without mentioning Anne-Marie’s handsome husband, who loans plenty of hottie cred all on his own…

Jessie Mueller
We are pretty damn sure it’s no accident that Jesse Mueller is starring in a show called Beautiful. We have always been suckers for Jesse’s girl-next-door charm, killer pipes, and throwback-y aesthetic. But what continues to flip our lids is her ability to shapeshift from role to role. The cues can be simple — a wig, a radically different costume — and it’s like seeing a whole new actress on stage every time.

Amber Iman
If we had to choose one Broadway debut that caught our eye above all others this year, it was Amber Iman’s performance as Nina Simone in Soul Doctor. Sadly, Amber’s knock-out good looks — she looked SO statuesque and glam! — and strong performance couldn’t rescue Soul Doctor from its own atrociousness. But we’re hoping we get to see more of this seriously, seriously stunning lady again soon.

Rachel Weisz
Ok, so we admit that we had to include this lady for one reason. Ok, for two — the first one being that she’s obviously really beautiful and Hollywood agrees. The second one is that we have literally never gotten over the dress she wore to the 2007 Oscars. Really. We are still not over it. Like, to the extent that we have waited for her to be in a Broadway show so we could feature her on this list and talk about it. The brooch! The necklace! The little diamond-y embellishments. Sorry, we can’t write anymore because we’re dead. You’re welcome.

Photos, from top: Charles Sykes; Unknown; Bennett Raglin; Marco Sagliocco; David Gordon; Michael Loccisano; Bruce Glikas; Jemal Countess; Broadway.com Video Still; Monica Simoes; Eugene Gologursky; David Gordon; Unknown

I’m not sure when gift cards became a controversial gift (are they lazy? are they thoughtless?)  because frankly, I think they’re the actual best. Seriously. The only thing better than money, is money that comes with the explicit designation that it can only be used for a particular kind of frivolity. When I was younger, gift cards meant one thing: cast album binge! But as I’ve matured (and acquired a Spotify Premium account), I find myself more and more drawn to filling my bookshelves (and my Kindle library) with books about our collective favorite obsession: Broadway musicals.

Actually, there is a particular sub-genre of books about Broadway that I love most, and that’s the Making-Of Chronicle. (This should come to no surprise, given that you are currently reading a column I write about the history of Broadway musicals.) Like a good Behind the Music episode, the best of these manage to break through the necessary conventions of the form to bring to life the dramas behind the drama and the personalities that gave birth to the shows we love – or occasionally, the shows we love to hate.

Right now, the Making-Of Chronicle spotted most frequently on the subway is Glen Berger’s Song of Spider-Man. Certainly, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has all the elements of a great making-of story: huge personalities, high stakes, and a disastrous journey from idea to opening night. I haven’t seen any version of the Spider-Man musical, but I will admit that reading the book makes me want to try to catch it before it closes on January 4th. Berger, the show’s book writer, acknowledges from the start that he can’t really create any sort of distance from the events he documents, and you may find his editorializing and finger-pointing exciting or exasperating, depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing.

But if you’re like me (or aspire to be), you’re probably more interested in Chronicles of shows long gone than documents of disasters still running (however fleetingly) on Broadway. So here’s five suggestions to add to your Amazon Wish List today, so you can order them with your gift cards on Christmas morning. I can’t claim to have read every “Making-Of” book. Hell, I can’t even claim to have read every “Making-Of” book currently sitting on my bookshelves… or even on this list. But these are the five (plus one honorable mention) that spring to mind first when the subject comes up, and you won’t go wrong starting with any one of them.

But He Doesn’t Know the Territory: The Making of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man
by Meredith Willson

The Music Man is one of those shows that we tend to remember as silly and cheesy, but then we see a production (or the glorious original movie) and remember that, no, it’s actually just about perfect. (Just avoid the abortion of a television version with Matthew Broderick and Kristin Chenoweth.) Meredith Willson, who wrote the show, was also a radio personality, bandleader, and memoirist. This story of how he came to write his biggest Broadway hit is told with the same down-home (but never sappy) charm that seeps out of every note of The Music Man itself.

Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies
by Ted Chapin

Before he was the man responsible for protecting and extending Rodgers & Hammerstein’s legacy in the 21st century, Ted Chapin was a gopher on the original Broadway production of Follies. He took notes, and 30 years later turned those notes into one of the best books about the making of a musical you’ll ever read. Filled with fascinating personalities from Hal Prince to Stephen Sondheim to Michael Bennett, not to mention a stage full of stars who were past their prime but not entirely aware of that fact, Follies was a crucible in danger of overheating at any moment. Chapin captures details like who hated her costume and where rehearsals broke down on any given day, with the result being a finely textured document that transports the reader directly to the rooms where this show developed into the flawed but beloved masterpiece it’s become.

The Making of No, No, Nanette: The Incredible Story of The Blunders, Intrigues and Miracles That Transformed a Dusty Musical of the 1920’s into the Top Broadway Success of the 1970’s
By Don Dunn

Well, that subtitle just about tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it? This one’s out of print but widely available, and makes a great companion to Everything Was Possible, since both books deal with attempts to create musicals in the early 1970s in the height of the nostalgia craze, but each happens in a very different way. Of course, the show that was constructed by amateurs looking to make a buck (Nanette) became a huge hit, while the show put together by verifiable geniuses (Follies) lost money and has never been performed with the same script twice since. But that’s show biz.

The Whorehouse Papers: A Candid, Hilarious, and Sometimes Hysterical Out-of-School Account of the Joys, Sorrows, Confusions, and Small Murders Attendant to the Making of a Smash Broadway Musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
by Larry L. King

I guess the 70’s were all about long subtitles, and everything’s bigger in Texas. King (not the guy from CNN) wrote the original article in Playboy that spawned the creation of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and co-authored the book of the musical. Like Chapin, he took extensive notes during the process, and like Berger, he was at the center of the maelstrom that occurred in creation the show. Unlike either of them, though, King ended up with a hit that made him “two-thirds rich.” I will admit that I’ve had this book on my shelf for years but haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it’s always recommended when conversations about these kinds of books arise, and I plan on tackling it in early 2014. If you get there first, let me know what you think.

Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical
by Barbara Isenberg

I’ve talked before in this column about how many Broadway fans have that one flop that they love beyond reason. In many ways, Big is that show for me. When it was being put together, it was seen as a sure-fire hit: based on a beloved film, with a writing team that had been responsible for hits like Anything Goes, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Miss Saigon and more, directed and choreographed by the team behind the smash hit Crazy For You. It was this presumption of success that led journalist Barbara Isenberg to embed herself in the show… that went on to be the biggest Broadway flop since Carrie. (I saw the show on Broadway and to this day don’t understand that hatred it  provoked among critics and certain audience members.) The growing realization of everyone involved that their pre-ordained hit is becoming a disaster makes the book engrossing (if heartbreaking). And if you aren’t already familiar with Maltby & Shire’s score, cue it up on Spotify right this second, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I want to give a big honorable mention to The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof by Richard Altman and Mervyn Kaufman, which is out of print and hard to find, and unlikely to come back anytime soon due to the recent publication of a newer book about the making of Fiddler which is by all accounts delightful in its own right. (That one, called Wonder of Wonders, is on my “to read” list for 2014.)

If Christmas is your thing, I hope you have a Merry one. If you’re into Gregorian Calendar, then have a Happy New Year. And since it’s before my next column hits, let’s all remember to have a moment of silence the first weekend of January when all the shows that have been limping through the fall are finally put out to pasture.

Stressed because you have deadlines at that thing you call a job and you still haven’t finished Christmas shopping and your whole damn family is fucking everything up by celebrating Christmas like four whole entire days early and you have a crush on a dude who is either really mysterious or really taken or really not into you and you can’t even really tell the difference?

No? Just me?

Whatever. Life is hard sometimes. Even at the holidays. I bet there are some hard things in your life, too! I bet some of you have started to believe you’re going to be forever alone, spending every holiday until your Great Aunt Eunice and all of her offspring finally die fending off questions about when you’re going to find someone nice and settle down AS IF THAT’S THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IN LIFE AND WHAT ABOUT YOUR ART AND MAYBE YOU JUST HAVE BAD LUCK ANYWAY OKAY?!

Still just me?

Well. Whatever (again). Here’s the thing. I have found a cure for this shitty week of stress.  And I’m going to share it with you. Because Merry Fucking Christmas, okay?! … Just kidding. It’s because I love you.

Anyway. Check out this lovely Christmas tune that Colin Donnell and Patti Murin recorded together.

(Aren’t they just the best? I mean. They have essentially restored my faith in the existence of love in this dark universe and if they ever break up I’m probably going to be suicidal, but no big deal guys, just don’t fuck this up, okay?! And shit… I digressed a lot, there…)

Because it’s lovely. And because they’re a-fucking-dorable, and they’re always doing adorable things together clearly. And because it’s basically perfect because how could anything those two do be any less than perfect anyway, right? I MEAN LOOK AT THEM.

So here you go. All I Want for Christmas (is Broadway’s Cutest Couple to Sing to Me). Just try not to feel spirited after this. I dare you.

On Friday night, I read Tony Kushner’s speech about being a writer, given at the Whiting Writers Awards, and I cry. This is not wildly out of character for me. I was raised by a woman who cries easily, and even my father has been known to tear up at particularly emotional events — you know, like the end of Sweet Home Alabama — so I’m basically genetically predisposed to tears when something moves me. And man, did Kushner’s speech move me.

In fact, one passage hit so hard that I immediately had to find pen and paper to retrace the words in my own hand and pin them up on my bedroom wall:

We write to negotiate our own relationships with momentariness and permanence, to speak with the dead, to bring them back, or try to, and of course we always fail to bring them back and we call that failure art.

On Saturday afternoon, those words still humming in my chest, I cry again. This time at a matinee of the new Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori musical Fun Home at the Public Theater.

This crying, however, was kind of remarkable. Not in that it was happening so much as in the way that it was happening. In the shoulder-heaving, body-wracking way it kept me from being able to get out of my seat for a standing ovation at the end of the show. This was a kind of crying only a few degrees south of the ugly sobbing I did the first time I saw Next to Normal. A kind of crying reserved for only the most moving pieces of art I’ve ever experienced in my life. Next to Normal. The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide To Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures. Fun Home.

So. You can tell that Fun Home hit home for me. To say I liked it is an understatement. To find the words to describe exactly how it moved me is fruitless. I will fail.

But I will say this — Reading Kushner’s speech when I did changed my experience of Fun Home in ways I will probably never be able to measure. And I am eternally grateful to the universe for putting them in my path together, one in front of the other.

Because the memory of Kushner’s speech seemed to illuminate the fact that, on some very basic level, Fun Home is about writing. About cartoonist Alison Bechdel grappling with the weight of her memories of, and relationship to, her father and how best to trace them onto paper. As audience members we see Adult Alison in every moment. She is there, not just to remember or retrace, but to hunt for the images and words she needs to contextualize the experience of growing up beside this man. Drafting, and redrafting, and drafting again. Perhaps failing, too. Even in the moments where she comes closest to finding the right words and pictures to freeze the frame in her heart and mind, to put it to paper.

Because, like Kusher said, as writers and artists we are always failing. Especially by our own measure. Michael Cunningham described the same sensation in The Hours, with the final conversation between characters Clarissa Vaughn, an editor, and Richard Brown, a writer:

“Stop saying that. You haven’t failed.”

“I have. I’m not looking for sympathy. Not really. I just feel so sad. What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”

It is inherently impossible, our endeavor to capture these things as vibrantly as they were, to make them real again for us and for our readers.

But we try.

Just as Bechdel did in Fun Home. As Tesori and Kron did in trying to bring another layer of color and light to Fun Home with their musical. And whatever their standards were, however they feel about the story they finally shared on that stage, from the audience, the work felt like a success. Perhaps most importantly because it found the language — musical and verbal and visual — to tell a very small story in a very big way. In a way that transcended its inherent boundaries to become all of our stories, as well.

That Saturday at the Public, Fun Home became the story of the father and grandfather I will likely spend my life writing about and around. And the fathers and grandfathers they spent their lives living around and through and away from. And the ways in which the people who love us make us and break us, sometimes in the same breath, and how things can be so, so messed up in the ways that real life always is — the scale is different for everyone — and yet, there is still hope that we can find context and meaning and love and forgiveness and a way to  move on into our own adulthood with the past so far away and right beside us all at the same time.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Every so often, a show that flops hard on Broadway leaves in its aftermath a corps of fans devoted to keeping its memory alive. With shows like Candide, Merrily We Roll Along, Carrie, and countless others, these vocal proponents ensure that while the show may have closed quickly, they will not be forgotten. In the case of the most beloved of these shows, including the three I just named, their fans go so far as to spend countless hours “fixing” them, figuring out how to solve the problems that caused the shows to flop in the first place. When this works, the shows can go on to great acclaim: Hal Prince’s revision of Candide ran for years in the mid-70s, Michael Grandage’s London production of Merrily We Roll Along won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, and Carrie‘s recent off-Broadway return spawned a series of regional productions which will surely give way to high school, college, and community theater productions for years to come.

The latest cult musical to get this fan-fueled revisal treatment? Why, Side Show, of course. Originally hitting Broadway in 1997 for a scant 91 performances, the show immediately developed a vocal following thanks to beltastic, star-making performances by Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner (who were jointly nominated for a Best Actress Tony Award) and a story emphasizing sisterhood and the value of outsiders (as Wicked would do far more successfully a few years later). When the original production flopped, its fans blamed the failure on the unconventionality of a show about conjoined twins; detractors blamed the failure on a muddy script and a score that asked audiences to accept conjoined twins earnestly belting the words “I Will Never Leave You” to each other.

Side Show 2.0 is currently on stage at the La Jolla Playhouse, just outside San Diego, in a co-production that will move on to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in June, 2014, with Broadway clearly the ultimate goal. The muscle behind this version of the show is writer-director Bill Condon, whom you may know from his work on the films Chicago, Dreamgirls, or the last two Twilight films. (No judgment, Bill. Okay, a little judgment, but I didn’t see any of the Twilight movies and I will admit that the trailers for the last two far outshone the trailers for the previous three.) Look, dude has an Oscar for writing Gods and Monsters, which he also directed, and which starred Ian McKellan as James Whale (director of Frankenstein and Show Boat) and featured Brendan Frasier as the kid Whale was boning and long story short it’s a film worth seeing. My point is that Condon has chops, and he’s a HUGE Side Show fan, and so when he said he wanted to direct a revised version of the show as his first stage musical, you can bet that producers lined up to make it happen.

This revisal is more revised than most. In an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Condon estimated that 60% of the script and score has been rewritten for this production, which makes one wonder if he didn’t have a show he liked more than 40% of to direct instead.

(The intensive remaking of the show feels particularly ironic given that Side Show‘s first act finale is called “Who Will Love Me As I Am?” Apparently the answer is not “Bill Condon.”)

I didn’t see the original production on Broadway (although I have read the script and seen a college production), so I can’t speak specifically to whether this iteration works better than the ’97 did. But taken on its own merits, it’s clear that Side Show still has a bit of transforming to do if it’s going to attempt Broadway again. It’s also clear that the matinee audience I was a part of didn’t care; they ate this sucker up.

At this point in its development, a lot of work has been done to the show to justify some of the beloved-but-giggle-inducing elements of the score. For example, how do you make “I Will Never Leave You” less eye-roll-able? Add a subplot about the potential for twin-splitting surgery, including a pre-prise (that’s like a reprise that comes before the song) set in the doctor’s office–DUH. In addition, there’s a lengthy flashback (20 minutes that felt like 45) added to the middle of the first act explaining how the twins made it from birth to now, which is vaguely interesting but does the exact opposite of moving the show forward. Most of the work so far seems to focus on providing stronger back stories and motivations for the characters, and all that work pays off. The next phase of revisions needs to focus on picking up the pace of the show and upping the entertainment value, particularly in the vaudeville numbers which often fail to reach escape velocity. (In a year when Cabaret is headed back to Broadway, we should be particularly thoughtful that numbers such as these can be both showstopping and meaningful; at the moment, few of Sideshow’s diegetic numbers are either.)

At the end of the day, the team behind Sideshow—and audiences being asked to shell out top ticket prices—need to decide if it’s all worth it. The great songs from the show have already entered the repertoire. In fact, New Yorkers can hear them in concert at 54 Below later this season. There’s already been a much more successful show to tackle the the central themes of outsiders, sisterhood, and belting, and Wicked isn’t going anywhere soon. And wouldn’t we rather have Henry Krieger and Bill Russell working on new material instead of rehashing a show that already took five years of their creative lives on its first trip to Broadway?

After all, if there’s one thing those of us who follow Broadway history know about these cult revisals, it’s that no matter how much “better” or more successful subsequent versions might be, those vocal, protective fans who got us all to take a second look will always prefer the fabulously flawed originals with which they first fell in love.