the craptacular

When I moved to New York in February, I was thrilled to learn that one of the most notorious flops in Broadway history, Moose Murders, would be receiving its first New York revival off-off-Broadway. I excitedly bought my ticket and headed down to Alphabet City (OMG just like in Rent!) to the theater, which looked a little like the rec hall at the Sharon Community Center where I made my community theater debut as the Munchkin Coroner in a suburban Massachusetts production of The Wizard of Oz when I was seven years old. Before I left the theater, I tweeted:

Revelation of the night: "Off-off Broadway" is NY for "community theater."

— David Levy (@itsdlevy) February 6, 2013

All of this serves as a preamble to today’s column, which is about my trip last week to see another notorious ’80s-era flop, Smile, which just concluded a run off-off-Broadway in a concert staging by the Musicals Tonight company. There are, at most, five reasons why anyone cares about Smile nearly thirty years after it played Broadway for just over a month:

1. The book, lyrics, and direction were all by Howard Ashman, making his Broadway debut after the tremendous success of Little Shop of Horrors, which happened to be hitting movie theaters just as Smile hit Broadway.
2. The music was by hitmaker Marvin Hamlisch, returning to Broadway for the first time after the one-two punch of A Chorus Line and They’re Playing Our Song. At the time, A Chorus Line was the longest-running Broadway show in history.
3. It was based on a well-regarded movie, also called Smile, directed by Michael Ritchie. The film shows up on Netflix (and, I imagine, cable television, if you still have that) every so often. It plays like a not-quite-as-outrageous first draft of Drop Dead Gorgeous, and the cast features Bruce Dern, Melanie Griffith, Annette O’Toole, and choreographer Mike Todd. It was well-reviewed but not all that popular when it debuted. It has achieved something of a cult status.
4. The song “Disneyland,” from this score, rivals “Meadowlark” as one of the most overused audition and cabaret songs among ingenues. And although “Disneyland” is the only number from the score that seems to have taken root outside of the show, most of the score is very good.
5. That song was introduced by Jodi Benson, who starred in Smile on Broadway, and would go on to make her name in Ashman’s next hit as the voice of Ariel in The Little Mermaid.

Here’s why it failed:

1. The book is terrible.
2. Me and My Girl opened the same season.
3. Les Miserables opened the same season.

You may not remember Me and My Girl, a forgotten British musical of the 1930s that came to Broadway for the first time in the 80s and caused a sensation — largely due to Robert Lindsay’s star turn. It was a runaway smash. (Trust me.) And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about Les Mis. 

Now, plenty of shows with great scores have been rescued from terrible books with some time and revision: Candide and Merrily We Roll Along are probably the most famous examples. But the problems Smile faces seem particularly unfixable given that the writers are no longer with us (despite the example set by No, No, Nanette).

First, there’s the problem of too many characters. Like last season’s Hands on a Hardbody, Smile attempts to give us a handful of beauty pageant competitors to care about, plus another handful of folks backstage. It’s hard to know who’s story is being told, whom to root for, or occasionally even where to look. Are the adults heroes, villains, or supporting characters? We’re not even sure by the end of the show. How many of the girls are we supposed to care about? Well, two of them have actual personalities; one is a racist caricature, and another is a caricature of a racist… and there’s still a dozen more who have moments, but not real stories. Robin, one of the two girls we’re meant to root for, doesn’t want to be in the pageant, isn’t sure why she’s at the pageant, and earns our affection mostly by being less horrible than the rest of the girls. You sort of wish Bobby’s friends from Company would appear and beg her to want something – want something!

All of this is to say that the experience of seeing the notch-above-community-theater production of the show on stage at The Lion last week wasn’t exactly thrilling.

Thankfully, as with most shows that have ended their time on the Great White Way, Smile does live on through its songs. The challenge with this group of songs is that the writers (and from what I understand, Hamlisch in particular) were so stung by its failure that wouldn’t allow the songs to be recorded for a long time. Sure, “Disneyland” became a cabaret standard, but the rest of the score quickly faded into obscurity, except for some bootlegs passed around among collectors.

Following the show’s closing on Broadway, the writers revised it one more time, creating a slightly less dark version for licensing purposes; this is what’s playing off-off-Broadway right now. A recording of this version of the score, featuring many members of the Broadway cast, was made specifically so interested theater companies could hear the score, but it was not released commercially. In 2008, PS Classics put out an album called Howard Sings Ashman, a collection of song demos recorded throughout the writer’s career. The album was a two-disc set, with the second CD containing the entire score of Smile performed by its authors. While it may not be as fun to listen to as a full cast recording, it’s the closest we’re likely to get. If you’re a fan of Ashman’s work — and between Little Shop, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, who isn’t? — it’s worth purchasing.

(Four songs from the score had been previously recorded on Bruce Kimmel’s Unsung Musicals series, featuring a full orchestra and appropriate casting, although the arrangements and orchestrations were not those from the show. Those albums are unfortunately out of print today, but easy to find wherever fine used showtunes albums are sold. Additionally, two songs from a previous attempt by Hamlisch to musicalize Smile, with lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, can be heard on Sara Zahn’s exceptional album Witchcraft: The Songs of Carolyn Leigh. I’m not sure why Leigh left the project. It’s likely that her songs were considered too dark for Broadway. But today, they sound spot-on, making me wish someone could create a new version of the show using material from both lyricists.)

One small bit of trivia to close off our rather rambling exploration of Smile that will also tie us into the next installment of Remedial Queens. In 1985, Hamlisch and Ashman approached Bob Fosse about directing and choreographing Smile. Fosse demurred, but Ashman recorded the meeting, and PS Classics posted a transcript to their website when they were promoting the Howard Sings Ashman album. It’s fascinating. Then again, there’s little about Fosse that wasn’t fascinating, as Sam Wasson discovered when he set out to write a new Fosse biography. That book is about to arrive on shelves — all 700 pages of it. Tune in next time for a review!

Right this minute, Trudie Styler is busy making her off-Broadway debut downtown at The Culture project, where she’s starring in The Seagull. (Quick, go see this weekend before it closes!) But the other night the star took a few minutes after the show to chat with little old me. Inviting us to sit with her up on stage, Styler was ridiculously kind — even taking a few moments mid-interview to warmly greet a costar’s parents before they left the theater — and game to talk about what brought her to the stage stateside, and what she’s up to next.

The Mick: You’ve done everything — acting, philanthropy, raised a family, published a book, run a production company — what brought you back? And what brought you to this play?

Trudie: Well, I never entirely stopped acting– I’ve done quite a bit of film work through the years — but I’ve become known more as a producer than as an actor. I certainly haven’t done a role of this size on the stage for probably about twenty-eight years, which is a long time. And that was a deliberate choice. Because the theater is extremely consuming, and Sting and I have six children between us. My seventeen-year-old is just now in his twelfth grade and going to college next year, and I think there’s something significant about that. That I’ve got more time to think — okay, my nest is empty, and what do I want?

When Max [Stafford-Clark] invited me to do this role, of course I was terribly flattered. I played a cameo role in a classic piece that he directed in England eighteen months ago called A Dish of Tea with Doctor Johnson, which is about Samuel Johnson, our lexicographer. That was a really marvelous little flashy cameo role playing Hester Thrale who was a very clever, beautiful woman of the day and Johnson was completely in love with her. It was a twenty minute appearance at the end of the play, and it was very fun and lively. And we had a massive success with that and went into the West End and after that Max said ‘Okay, now I think you’re ready for The Seagull.’ I said ‘Really? Tell me more!’ And he sent me this Irish adaptation, which I fell in love with.

It’s taken us a bit of time to get it up and to come here — I had to be here in New York because my son’s in the most important year of his schooling — but Allan Buchman said that he could produce it at this newly christened Lynn Redgrave Theater and we’ve been having a ball.

M: So you’ve acted on both sides of the pond, is it very different working in New York?

T: Audiences are audiences the world round. I think in New York the audiences are quite warm. You know, they come with an expectation to enjoy themselves. British audiences come with an expectation to say… ‘Okay, entertain me.’ [laughs] They’re a little more, maybe, rigorous. And maybe I’m speaking of the off-Broadway audiences, perhaps Broadway audiences are a little bit tougher. I don’t know, I haven’t played on Broadway. Yet.

M: What role would you like to play next?

T: Sean Mathias and I are looking at a play that we might do next year. It’s written by the late Pam Gems, who I met in the eighties and whose son Jonathan I worked with at the Royal Shakespeare Theater. Do you know Pam Gems? She wrote Piaf.

Anyway, this piece is called Savage Love and it’s about an aging Arthur and Guinevere. Guinevere is on trial for her life for her adulterous, long-term affair with Lancelot and meanwhile, Arthur is living at court with all his bastard children, and she ain’t gonna take it lying down. So it’s a bit of a face-off and a portrait of their marriage, really. And it’s a very brilliantly written piece about women’s rights and relationships.

M: Speaking of marriages. Your husband Sting was working just down the block at The Public while The Seagull was in previews. What was it like to be working on different projects so close to each other?

T: We had a ball. It was fantastic. He did ten nights benefiting the Public and they made a million dollars, so everyone was very happy. Then the Public donated a lot of costumes to us because they wanted to be nice and say thank you, so it was a win-win. And we had lots of fun going to each other’s shows. It was really great.

So from what I understand, there are these things called sports which are like musicals in that the performers rehearse for a long time and then perform in front of an audience but unlike musicals they don’t have production numbers and you never know the end until you get there, which I guess is like The Mystery of Edwin Drood but with less sparkly costumes. And apparently one of those sports is called baseball, which you may be familiar with from its supporting role in Damn Yankees.

Okay, okay, I’m kidding, I was totally forced to play a year of Little League before I was old enough to self-advocate for theater camp, and also I live in the world, so I know all about baseball and could even debate the wisdom of the designated hitter rule if it would keep a cute boy talking to me a bit longer.

“Why is this relevant?” I hear you cry.

Because my (mother’s) beloved Red Sox are headed to the World Series!!!

(Actually, I think they’re already there by the time you read this, but I was busy at the screening of Merrily We Roll Along and wasn’t it just fabulous?)

I grew up in Boston, so it is my birthright to root for the Red Sox and curse the Yankees no matter how little I actually give a shit. This also means that I grew up steeped in the mythology of The Curse of the Bambino.

Since the curse was lifted almost a decade ago, I’m going to assume that at least some of our readers aren’t familiar with it, so let me lay a little Wikipedia on you:

“The Bambino” was the nickname of Babe Ruth, who was a famous baseball player before he was a disappointing candy bar. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman almost wrote a musical about him, but they were working on Little Shop of Horrors at the same time, and they started getting into fights with the fellow writing the book for Babe, so they cut their losses, put all their energies into Little Shop, and abandoned that project. (You can hear a couple of numbers on Debbie Gravitte’s excellent Alan Menken Album, though.)

Anyway, Babe Ruth played for the Red Sox in their World Series winning 1918 season. Just like Broadway gets really boring after the Tony Awards, baseball apparently has an off-season after the World Series ends that lasts until spring training. For the laypeople among us, we’ll call that season winter. Anyway, that winter, Harry Frazee, the owner of the Sox, sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees because apparently baseball works just like slavery, I don’t know.

Why, you might ask, would Frazee sell one of his best and most famous players? Fucked if I know. From what I understand, Ruth’s brilliance really emerged in that final season he played with the Red Sox, and he set a team record for hitting the most grand slams in one season (four) that has yet to be broken. But here’s what I do know — Frazee, like all rightly-thinking wealthy people, liked to invest in Broadway theater. That takes money. And with a full producing slate on the docket, Frazee needed to liquefy some of his assets, so he sold Ruth to the Yankees. I’m told that sale was the most profitable baseball had yet seen, so that’s probably all you need to know.

Broadway lore tells us that the show Frazee financed with the Babe Ruth money was No, No, Nanette. So in a way, the charming Vincent Youmans show that gave us such standards as “Tea for Two” and “I Want To Be Happy” is directly responsible for the suffering of generations of Red Sox fans. How, you ask? Well, following the departure of Babe Ruth from the team, the Sox didn’t win another World Series again until 2004, a story you might know from Fever Pitch, which will probably end up on Broadway with a score by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones by the 2020 season. Anyway. That multi-generation losing streak became known — somewhat tongue-in-cheek — as The Curse of the Bambino.  (BTW. In case it wasn’t clear where Frazee’s true heart was, by the time Nanette was on its feet, he had entirely divested himself of the Red Sox.)

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that Broadway lore in this case is wrong. Frazee financed a number of shows between the sale of Ruth and the advent of No, No, Nanette. That said, one of those shows was a non-musical play called My Lady Friends that served as the basis for No, No, Nanette, so that’s basically the same. And besides, why let a silly thing like truth get in the way of a good story?

But I digress. Because none of this is the “real” Curse of the Bambino anyway. Oh, no. You’ve got to wait another 50 odd years to get to that, my theater-loving friends. For you see, the story of No, No, Nanette did not end in the ’20s.

In 1970 the piece was dusted off by a whole new team and given a new book by the hilarious Burt Shevelove (who had previously written A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and who also directed this Nanette), new orchestrations by Ralph Burns (with vocal arrangements by Buster Davis and dance arrangements by Luther Henderson), and fabulous dancing by Donald Saddler, under the “supervision” of legendary film choreographer Busby Berkeley. In the aftermath of the tumultuous 60s, nostalgia was in (remember, this was the same year, though not the same Broadway season, as Follies), and Broadway had never seen a revival quite like this.

The new No, No, Nanette was an enormous hit, and it signaled to producers that old shows + new talent fiddling with the script and score = big bucks. It’s not that revivals hadn’t existed before, but prior to Nanette, they either more or less replicated original productions (and often at City Center or Lincoln Center), or they were small, off-Broadway affairs. There were notable exceptions: no two productions of Show Boat were ever the same, and the Lincoln Center revival of Annie Get Your Gun famously dropped two characters and their songs to make room for a new showstopper, “Old Fashioned Wedding.” But the wholesale overhaul of Nanette without the participation of its original creators, and the enormous success of that endeavor, really gave birth to the era of the Broadway “revisal” in which we are still living.

So in some way, if you hated seeing “I Say A Little Prayer For You” shoehorned into Promises, Promises, or if you cringed when Bart Sher decided that South Pacific needed an extra song and more graphic racism, you can blame Babe Ruth or Harry Frazee (or both) and chalk it up to the lingering aftermath of the Real Curse of the Bambino.

There is this moment in Big Fish: The Musical that’s really helpful for people who can’t think and who don’t like musicals, theater, or humanity. It’s the moment about half-way through the first act, when young Will Bloom and his fiancé Josephine find some family files pertaining to the elder Mr. Bloom, Will’s father Edward.

The pair, played gamely by Bobby Steggert and Krystal Joy Brown, stand there, and they look at each other, and they recap the entire first act. The dialogue goes something like this:

Will: So, my Dad loves to tell these crazy stories!

Josephine: I know, but they all have so much symbolic meaning!

Will: I know, they’re so convenient that way.

Josephine: For example, the story he tells about making friends with a giant. That’s about overcoming adversity!

The rest of Big Fish continues accordingly, wherein the characters tell you exactly how they feel about things, and in fact, exactly how you are supposed to feel about these things too. If you can get through the above scene and think, “Wow, that’s so useful and illuminating! I’m so glad these characters explained everything to me!” then you will probably love Big Fish. Love. Go buy yourself 15 sets of tickets, pick up a t-shirt in the lobby, and hang out at the stage door so you can tell Norbert Leo Butz to keep being in awesome Broadway shows because his track record is killing it right now.

If the above kind of made you want to flog yourself with chains, and made you miss Jerusalem, gritty British playwriting, your soul, and Mark Rylance even though he’s already here, then you might want to skip this one.

You also might want to skip every musical that Susan Stroman has ever made besides The Scottsboro Boys, because that was clearly a fluke of brilliant, gritty madness amidst an ocean of mugging, spangles, and really literal, hand-hold-y storytelling. Because here’s the thing: I love a classic, dance-y musical. But I’m pretty sure that Susan Stroman has never found a moment of quiet onstage subtlety that she couldn’t trounce with a herd of bespangled, high-kicking showgirls singing a patriotic song.

Such is the case with Big Fish, a musical about a guy who tells crazy stories his whole life, to the extent that even his family isn’t sure what’s true. Played by Norbert Leo Butz, who is again working his ass off to rescue subpar material, Edward tells his life story in flashback – his version of the story, that is. Thus we are treated (?) to witches, a mermaid, and yes – God help him – a giant. We are also bombarded with projections, dancing, swoopy costumes, an onstage lake, rave-style lighting circa 1994, and (I think) some fire. It’s all gorgeous. And empty. In a show that’s utterly free of subtext, it all reads as a goopy soap opera. An endless goopy soap opera. With approximately 4000 songs by Andrew Lippa — all of them competing with 4000 similarly themed Frank Wildhorn Songs in the 2014 Dizzyingly Bland Musical Songwriter Olympics — the show’s ending alone takes about 45 minutes unto itself. And just when you thought that the onstage developments (hint: they’re pretty dire) could not possibly lend themselves to another song… there’s another song. And also, another one. And then a singing curtain call.

It’s not the cast’s fault. Norbert is as charming and forceful as ever – even though his southern accent feels more like South Jersey at times. And Kate Baldwin in particular manages to wrench a genuine sense of longing and loss out of her role as Edward’s long-suffering wife. They’re both great at telling stories. If only they had a more nuanced one to tell.

Photo: Paul Kolnik

A couple of weeks ago, you may have felt a disturbance in The (Broadway) Force — the sound of a thousand queens suddenly squealing with a mixture of delight and disbelief. The momentous occasion? The long-delayed complete recording of One Touch of Venus was finally released on iTunes, a mere fourteen years after it was first announced.

Did you feel that? This time I’m pretty sure the disturbance is the sound of several thousand Craptacular readers asking “What the fuck is One Touch of Venus?”

One Touch of Venus is a musical comedy from 1943 by composer Kurt “Threepenny Opera” Weill, lyricist Ogden “Candy Is Dandy” Nash, and playwright S. J. Perelman, who was best known for his work in The New Yorker and co-writing the scripts of several Marx Brothers films. Sorry that I couldn’t figure out how to condense that into a middle name. You’ll live.

The original production starred Mary Martin, who was Peter Pan before Cathy Rigby and Maria Von Trapp before Julie Andrews and… well, we’ll talk more about Mary in another column. Broadway lore has it that Martin’s role — a statue of the goddess Venus come to life — originally belonged to Marlene Dietrich, but she found the show too obscene and backed out, enabling Martin to become a star.

Now, Mary Martin had already broken through in Cole Porter’s Leave it to Me, singing another famously dirty song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” (The “daddy” in question is not her father, and she performed it wearing a fur coat and… not much else.) But Venus was her first starring role, sort of like how Kristin Chenoweth won raves for her small part in You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown, but Wicked cemented her spot as one of Broadway’s top leading ladies. (Or, for older/gayer readers: substitute Barbra Streisand/I Can Get It For You Wholesale/Funny Girl, but if you can do that, you probably already knew everything I’ve written in this paragraph so get off my back, okay?! This column isn’t for you!)

Anyway, the show was a hit, running 567 performances (which was a lot back then) and spawning a few standards, most notably “Speak Low” (which you may know from La Streisand’s rendition on her Back to Broadway album) and “I’m A Stranger Here Myself” (which Cheno recorded on her first solo album). Full circle, y’all!

But here’s the thing: in the early days of Broadway, before Oklahoma! demonstrated the money to be made from an original cast album, shows weren’t really recorded in anything even resembling their entirety. A number of Venus songs were recorded by Martin and her costar Kenny Baker, but they were just highlights, in arrangements tailored for radio broadcast. So if you didn’t see the show on Broadway, you had no way of hearing the majority of the music. To add insult to injury, the 1948 film version with Ava Gardner cut most of the songs, and not like the way Hair cut songs you never missed. The score was eviscerated, and the few songs that remained got new lyrics, and, really, I’d rather just pretend it didn’t happen.

And then? Well, the show sort of disappeared. I mean, it gets done every once in a while, but it’s never been revived on Broadway. It was one of the early Encores! shows, hitting the City Center stage in 1996 with Melissa Errico as Venus. (That production also featured pre-30 Rock Jane Krakowski in a small comic role.) Errico’s performance in that concert made her a star (according to the New York Times) and inspired British music producer John Yap to record the complete score — dances, selected cut songs and all. Back in the 1990s, these “studio cast recordings” of complete scores were all the rage. There was an excellent series of Gershwin scores from producer Tommy Krasker. Conductor John McGlinn made a splash with an elaborate three-disc Show Boat, followed by several other scores. And John Yap created an entire “Complete Broadway Masterworks” line of dozens of such recordings for his label, known as TER in the UK and JAY in the US.

The thing about elaborate, complete recordings of Broadway scores? They’re expensive to produce. And, as you might imagine, they don’t sell particularly well. Sure, every once in a while something like Show Boat breaks  through as a cross-over hit. Or philanthropists and/or songwriters’ estates might sponsor a recordings. But the ambitious schedule Yap had set up got the better of him, and by the mid-2000s, the number of announced, unfinished recordings with his name attached became something of a running joke among the kind of people who have running jokes about obscure cast recordings. (Some others we’ve only heard snippets from, including a complete Anyone Can Whistle starring John Barrowman, Maria Friedman, and Julia McKenzie. Yap tells me this one’s next in line. Maybe next year?)

As you might imagine, after the ten-year mark came and went, all six of us who even remembered that this recording had been started despaired of it ever being completed. And then, suddenly, John Yap started talking about it again, a few roles were recast, and a preview was released on the web. And now, here we are.

Friends, I am here to tell you this recording was worth the wait.

If you aren’t already in love with Melissa Errico from her performances in shows like Amour or the recent Passion revival (if you were lucky enough to catch it before illness forced her out of the show), you know that she’s a soprano whose voice is like pornography for your ears. (And if you follow her on Twitter, you might know that she’s just crazy enough to be believable as a goddess trying to figure out 1940s America.) The rest of the cast is right up there with her: dreamy Brent Barrett as her love interest, Ron Raines at his Ron Rainesiest as the wealthy art collector who sets the story in motion, Victoria Clark as zingy secretary, Judy Kaye as a patrician mother-in-law to be… These may not be the Broadway types you tape to the inside of your locker (but seriously, Brent Barrett? if he’s not in your proverbial locker, he should be!), but they are the best at what they do, and what they do here is deliver some of the finest showtunes you probably haven’t heard before.

Now, you may have noticed that I’ve written over a thousand words without really telling you much about the plot of the show. Let’s just say it’s not going to play any feminist conventions any time soon. Ron Raines is an art collector who purchases a statue of Venus. Brent Barrett is his barber, Rodney Hatch, who’s engaged to marry a horrendous woman from New Jersey. Rodney slips the engagement ring he’s holding for the proposal onto the finger of the statue, and Venus comes to life and wants to bone him. He wants to bone her too, but he’s a faithful little nerd. Ron Raines gives Venus some bad advice about making the competition disappear, so she zaps Rodney’s fiancee into oblivion. This leads to a murder investigation, and… honestly, who cares? At the end of the story, somehow Rodney realizes that the shrew from Jersey isn’t right for him, but Venus also realizes that she doesn’t want to end up a suburban housewife, so she disappears and Rodney miraculously meets someone who looks JUST LIKE HER only this new lady wants nothing more than to be a suburban housewife so hooray for them.

Like I said, Wicked it ain’t. (Did I just use Wicked as an example of feminism? Kill me.)

But the songs! I defy you to get “I’m A Stranger Here Myself” out of your head, particularly if you’re in love with someone who doesn’t love you back. (Seriously. But let’s not talk about that sad stretch of 2010 in my life.) And the ballads! “Speak Low,” “That’s Him,” and “West Wind” could each be the soundtrack to a different montage of dating pictures in your wedding video. If the comedy numbers aren’t quite as funny today as you might hope, well, rest assured that in seventy years, Book of Mormon won’t be either. And that hardly matters, anyway.

The album is currently available on iTunes. A physical CD is due before the end of the year with a giant, deluxe booklet that is apparently holding up its release (but what’s another few weeks when it’s already been over a decade?). Besides, who buys their music on plastic platters any more anyway?

Last Friday night I saw the opening of Broadway Idiot, a new documentary about the making of the American Idiot musical. As a documentary Idiot was mediocre at best. But come Saturday afternoon, sitting on a park bench and staring down the gullet of a new theater season, American Idiot — a show long closed — was still on my mind.

So what gives?

It’s not just that I loved American Idiot, though I did. No. It’s that Idiot, which closed in 2011, is the last original musical on Broadway that I really loved. Some days, looking back,  American Idiot feels like it was the last bastion of hope in the bleak modern landscape of American musical theater on Broadway. The most recent truly great original American Broadway musical.  And it opened in 2010.

That is, of course, not entirely true. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Scottsboro Boys both opened the following season, in the same calendar year. And like Idiot, both musicals — regardless of how long they ran — said incredibly profound, and profoundly difficult things. They asked audiences to be intelligent, to consider nuanced points, to learn something new, to feel something deeply (even if it was an uncomfortable emotion to internalize) and to grow as people over the hours spent in those cool, dark theaters. All while pushing at the edges of musical theater and growing the form in the process, much the same way Next to Normal did in 2009, or West Side Story did in 1957.

But today, in the fall of 2013, all I can think is dear god, please. Please, bring back 2010. Or no. Not even 2010, but it’s spirit — whatever was percolating then that brought all these great big musicals together on Broadway all at once. Make me give a fuck about American musical theater again. Because the desolate terrain of the last three years — occasionally studded with some glitter-encrusted drag queen or caterwauling child — is crushing my musical theater loving soul.

Maybe that means I’m becoming one of those insufferable Golden Age of Theater People against my own will. Or I’m just being unbearably millennial and overly romanticizing a time period that has barely passed me by, but…

HAHA. Just kidding. I’m not.

This is reality. The original American musical, as measured by what’s been presented on Broadway, its biggest stage, has been a giant black hole of suckitude for the last few years. Even if we expand the definition of ‘original’ to include shows like Kinky Boots and Catch Me If You Can, Broadway STILL fails to make me give a flying fuck. Because honestly, how am I supposed to care about a place this full of paper-thin plot, pastiche, schmaltz, and emotional manipulation designed to cover for the lack of subtext necessary to support genuine complexity of feeling? What do I have to dig into there? To think about and talk about and obsessively analyze the underpinnings and inner-workings of?

Now, this is the part where I digress and acknowledge, lest the whole internet crash down upon me with totally tangential hatred, that The Book of Mormon happened in 2011. And as American musicals go, it was both original, and awesome. It also made me think a lot — about faith and community and the modern way. But The Book of Mormon is so slick, so polished, so note-for-note and line-for-line perfect, that it’s kind of uninteresting to think about and discuss. It’s also so popular and spendy that  it is nigh-unto-impossible for most people to experience this show once, let alone repeatedly. So it’s been knocked out of the running in this discussion.

Which brings me back to this:

With the exception of the nostalgic (and unoriginal) gem of Newsies, I’ve hated the world of new American musical theater on Broadway since American Idiot closed. Nothing has challenged me. Or exposed a single vulnerable nerve to the big bad outside world. Or asked me to think about the planet, or humanity, or even just musical theater, in a new way. Nothing has made me want to go back, over and over again, to experience the rush — or the emotional assault — once more.

Not the way Idiot did as it encapsulated the challenges and horrors — both thrust upon them and self-imposed — faced by an entire generation of young American men. The very generation of men I grew up amongst and will someday lead this country beside (hopefully). Or the way Bloody Bloody did by presenting our country’s political past in a contemporary context, throwing both history and modern life into sharp relief and making me reconsider my participation in the American political machine. Or the way The Scottsboro Boys did by forcing me to face down the horror of that kind of injustice, and wonder what exactly could be done about the ways our society continues to reenact those injustices to this day, in thousands of new and old ways.

And without that. Without shows that are more than just a very shiny, tuneful escape from my boring work day, well… Broadway becomes a place I struggle to even care about.

I’m all for balance. Newsies was a wonderful night at the theater, and what’s more, it plays a role in building a Great White Way that is accessible to different kinds of audiences. But what does it contribute to the history of theater as a lens through which we document, and interpret, and evaluate and reevaluate our American history? And why should I give a fuck about Broadway — why should I spend hours of my short life, and thousands of my hard earned dollars — if at some point, it’s not going to ask me some tough questions and make me feel something so strong and so real that I spend days and weeks and months trying to sort all the pieces of my feelings into words.

So come on, Broadway. Shut me up, show me down, prove me wrong. Ask me a question it will take me months of writing to answer. I’m begging you. But please, just do it soon. Because cute boys tap dancing can only entertain me for so long.

Have you ever seen Twitter blow up with excitement about some older star appearing at 54 Below only to find yourself asking, “Who?” Does the annual announcement of the Encores! season send you running to Google to figure out WTF is even going on? Did you get really excited about theater by way of Wicked or Next to Normal or Phantom and then stare down the gauntlet of theater’s 100 (+++++) year history and wonder what on earth you should check out? Friends, you are in the right place.

Think of REMEDIAL QUEENS as The Craptacular’s community service project, helping Broadway fans climb higher up the mountain of Broadway wonderfulness. Think of me as your sherpa on this journey. You may know me from my guest appearance on The Craptacular talking about Pipe Dream, or perhaps you’ve encountered some of my other projects, like Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim or Sondheim LOLCats. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m a super-big Broadway nerd. Like, in high school I co-wrote the internet’s first (!) Stephen Sondheim FAQ. And just this past August I was part of the winning team at 54 Below’s inaugural Broadway Trivia Night. In between I’ve amassed a collection of thousands of cast albums (including a couple dozen I helped birth as part of the late, lamented Fynsworth Alley), seen hundreds of shows, read the scripts of hundreds more, and, well, you get the idea. So I’m really excited/ beyond tickled to share this all with you.

What can you expect in this column? Some weeks I’ll focus on the work of a particular person or team, sharing my love for the likes of Mary Martin, Wright & Forrest, and Goddard Lieberson (duh). Other weeks might feature primers on older shows currently on the boards (or in the works) as revivals. Sometimes we’ll go thematic, with playlists (“15 Favorite Codependent Love Songs from the 50s!”) or other kinds of silliness (Ethel Merman Power Hour anyone?). And I take requests, so if there’s something you’re dying to know more about, leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter (@itsdlevy, natch).

Don’t worry. I’m not the kind of guy who thinks that nothing new will live up to the past, and you won’t find me crapping on things you love to make the things I love seem better. Frankly, they don’t need my help, and either way, that sucks. If there’s one thing The Craptacular believes, it’s that things don’t have to be “good” to be amazing. REMEDIAL QUEENS is all about sharing things I love — whether earnestly, ironically, or more often than not, with a foot on either side of that line — and hoping you love them too.

And now, as Irving Berlin once wrote, let’s go on with the show!

The Last Goodbye — a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet featuring the songs of Jeff Buckley — opened at the Old Globe in San Diego this past weekend. Even if you’re all the way over here on the right coast, you need to care about this because it’s starring Craptacu-fave Jay Armstrong Johnson as the forlorn/possibly douchey/totally doomed lover, Romeo.

Clearly we couldn’t just let this all go down without getting the scoop from the man himself and luckily for us, Jay was able to make some time in his busy rehearsal and performance schedule to have a quick chat. Topics covered include all the important things. You know, like Romeo. And Alex Timbers. And of course, a quick game of M.A.S.H., which you probably remember from indoor recess in elementary school.

M: You’ve done two shows in San Diego recently–what do you love about it out here?

J: I always thought that I would hate California– this idea of the WestCoast LA Plastic Thing — but I’ve actually grown to love it. It’s the weather. The weather is absolutely stunning and now I want to be bi-coastal in my career, because I’ve tasted it almost six months out of the last two years of my life.

M: What do you miss about New York?

J: [Sighs] I miss the fast pace. I miss people being aware of pedestrians. [laughs] And actually, I do miss a little bit of the weather. I really do love seasons, so everyone is freezing their ass off in New York right now and sometimes I wish that I was, because I like to feel different things and different weather. It’s an actor thing.

M: I feel you, though. Fall is my favorite.

J: Fall’s my favorite! Absolute favorite. And I’m not really feeling it right now. I kind of feel it at night, like when the show comes down, but…

M: It feels like summertime during the day here.

J: Totally. It does.

M: What drew you to The Last Goodbye? What made you want to be a part of this?

J: I saw it at Williamstown Theater Festival, and Romeo and Juliet has always been a weird thing for me. It’s the very first play I ever did, as a fifth grader in Mr. Ingram’s English class. I actually wrote Mr. Ingram a note saying that I would like to play Romeo, very much like I wrote Mr. Timbers an email saying that I would like to audition for this piece when I found out he was helming the production, and both worked out very well for me! [laugh] But Romeo has been a role I’ve been wanting to reprise in my professional career. And Jeff Buckley is everything. He’s everything.

M: How do you see your Romeo?

J: I feel like Romeo has this thing about him that people either love him, or they hate him, do you know what I mean? Because he can come off as this overly emotional fucktard. He’s so upset at Rosaline and all of a sudden he’s in love with Juliet, so he’s so mercurial in a sense. I’m still finding my Romeo. It gets more clear every day. I thought he was a lot younger, but we’ve been growing him up a little bit so he can contrast Juliet being so young and naive.

M: How has he changed in the last five or six weeks that you guys have been working on the show?

J: It’s changed a lot tonally. I was playing it a lot younger at the beginning of this process, and a lot more jokey, which is very much my nature, like, I’m the class clown. And [Director Alex] Timbers has helped me strip that away, because this is a rock musical and I am playing the sexual lead. So in order to get the women of the audience to fall in love with me, we’ve grown me up a little bit, we’ve given me a little more edge. We’ve given me more of an arc between young, emotional, poetic lover and the man ready to kill himself for his woman.

M: How did you prepare for the role?

J: A lot of the prep was in music land,  because Jeff’s music is so hard, I was scared shitless about it. He truly was a ridiculous vocalist, so the entire summer I was essentially giving myself Jeff Buckley voice lessons to be able to hit a high D every single night. Now I’m able to get back to the text. I’m not a Shakespearean trained actor, I was a dancer in high school and a voice major in college. So a lot of the work has been on text throughout this process, finding true Shakespeare on top of hard rock musical theater guy.

M: What is your favorite scene in the show?

J: Probably the song “Grace,” mainly because it’s the scariest one. Physically, vocally, emotionally — all of it. All of it is so hard and I get off on things that are challenging and it will continue to be a challenge to me throughout the rest of this run and if it goes to Broadway [knocks wood] it will continue to be a challenge throughout Broadway. So it’s my favorite because I get to it and I piss myself every night. But it’s also releases so much… I can’t even think of the word…

M: Endorphins?

J: Yeah!

M: It gets you high?

J: Yeah. It really does. It does. Sometimes I chug a cup of coffee before I go on, just to give myself an extra crazy thing. [laughs]

M: What scene has been the most difficult?

J: My very, very first scene has actually been the hardest one to figure out, because it’s the first time that the audience is seeing Romeo and he comes out and just starts whining. So in order for you to fall in love with your leading character, you have to turn that into something that is less of a whine and more of a need for something. We’re trying to get the point across that I’m a love-sick puppy, but not in a way that makes people annoyed with Romeo.

M: Have you had any spectacular on-stage mishaps in the show?

J: I don’t really think so. Nothing that sticks out in my mind as really, really bad. I think I’ve like, cut off one of Juliet’s lines and then had so much music to fill before a vocal entrance that I just had to sloooowwww dowwwwn my liiiiiine to filllllll the underrrrrscoooooring [Ed: this took Jay a full 10 seconds to say]… I think that might be the craziest thing that’s happened so far. Other than that it’s been pretty smooth sailing even though it’s such a nutty, physical production.

M: What’s your biggest on stage mishap of all time?

J: Probably when I was 13 years old and I was playing Peter Pan. When the three Darling children and I were exiting the nursery, the [set] moved and we didn’t. It was supposed to be going stage right but it got stuck center stage while we’re halfway out the window. My line is the only line that goes left and right — the three Darling children just dangle — so the fly guys were pulling me stage left. But I’m holding the weight of three human beings on my right arm and we all started to slip. I flipped around and grabbed Wendy with my other hand but Wendy lost John and he and Michael swung stage right leaving these two pairs of people just dangling, midair. It was truly one of the funniest and stupidest mishaps of my life, and it happened at the very beginning of my life as an actor.

M: Okay, so… Tell me what you love about Alex Timbers.

J: He’s the number one most collaborative director that I’ve ever worked with in my life. I think he knows who to hire and he fully puts trust in everyone’s work. He knows how to bring people together in a beautiful, beautiful way. He creates gorgeous stage pictures and allows everyone to do their work and it’s a beautiful thing. There’s no ego, and with someone who’s been so lauded for his work throughout the last few years, it’s unreal how much ego is not there.

M: Okay, now we’re going to play M.A.S.H.

J: I’m so excited!

M: Actually, we’re going to play Super Theater M.A.S.H. Do you want your results right away? Or do you want to find them out after?

J: Let’s find out the results after.

M: Okay, so we’re going to go through this — you’ll give me all the items for each category and we’ll pick a number, but you won’t see this until it goes live. [Jay applauds] Okay, you’re in. This is happening. First up, potential partner…

Photo: Matthew Murphy

Tomorrow is Friday the 13th, y’all. Otherwise known as the day when Patrick Wilson’s new movie, Insidious 2, hits theaters. (Because one shitty horror film is never enough, gotta have that franchise!)

While Patrick is cashing his assuredly low-to-mid-millions paycheck, throwing it on the heap with the one from The Alamo and The Switch, we’re here in NYC, weeping. And compiling a list of things we’d totally light on fire and walk away from forever just to have his golden voice and stellar bod and beautiful soul back on the Broadway in a musical.

13. That other revival of Romeo and Juliet.

12. Sympathy for the Devil.

11. Pinterest.

10. Soup.

9. Josh Gad — Hollywood can keep him forever.

8. Soul Doctor and First Date AND Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.

7. Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Unless he’s writing a musical for Patrick Wilson, in which case you can have Frank Wildhorn, which we understand is a paltry substitute. But we’re not giving you Boublil and Schönberg.)

6. Schmackary’s.

5. 50% of our weekly intake of alcohol. (Sorry, 54 Below, you’re gonna need a new revenue stream.)

4. Little Children. Even though he was shirtless in it.

3. Food.

2. Bleeding enormous sums of money. Like, seriously. Our whole entire life savingses and then some.

1. Safe words. Because offering run of the mill sexual favors alone clearly isn’t enough.

Addendum to the list– Things We’ve Already Sacrificed as an Act of Good Faith:

1. Splash Musical Mondays.

2. This year’s Broadway on Broadway.

3. The integrity of the Into the Woods movie.

Photo: Da Man Magazine