'Be More Chill': The Journey, Part 1

[On 18 April, I posted a collection of articles on Alien: The Play, a high school stage adaptation of the 1979 sci-fi movie, which caught the nation’s attention on social media.  The attention ended up garnering a $5,000 donation from the film’s director, Ridley Scott, to allow the student cast to give an additional performance beyond the two shows the original schedule allowed.  That performance was on 26 April, and was attended by no other than Sigourney Weaver, the actress who starred in the film (which celebrated the 40th anniversary of its release on that Friday). 

[Now I’m going to chronicle the unlikely rise of the Broadway musical Be More Chill, which reached the pinnacle of theater success also through social media.  I’ve collected the New York Times coverage of the three productions—the world première in Red Bank, New Jersey, which should have been the end of its road except that the cast recording of the score went viral on the ’Net; the short Off-Broadway run on New York City’s Theatre Row; and its transfer to Broadway where it opened on 10 March for a commercial run (which currently stands at 30 previews and 56 regular performances as of 27 April).  In two installments, here are the three reviews plus a couple of additional features on the phenomenon of Be More Chill, the little play that could (and did). 

[The Street of Broken Dreams, indeed!]

“A NERD TURNS COOL WITH A LITTLE SCI-FI HELP”

by Christopher Isherwood

[Charles Isherwood’s review of the début of Be More Chill appeared on 9 June 2015 in “The Arts” section of the Times.  Isherwood clearly dismissed the play, and in another world, that would have been the end of the production’s dreams.  The New Jersey production ran at the Two River Theater in Red Bank on the Jersey Shore from 30 May to 28 June 2015 (including a five-performance extension).]

RED BANK, N.J. — Teenage angst: the grief that just keeps on giving, to popular culture, at least. The woes of the misfit and the wallflower, the snooty brutishness of the jocks and the mean girls have been a bottomless well of material for television, movies and books for decades, and the well shows no signs of running dry.

Finding novelty in such a well-worn genre becomes the challenge. “Be More Chill,” an energetic if still familiar-feeling new musical based on the young-adult novel by Ned Vizzini, updates the classic nerd-who-yearns-for-popularity story by adding a sci-fi twist. Jeremy (Will Connolly), the skinny geek protagonist, becomes transformed into the cynosure of his high school’s popular crowd when his persona is tweaked, or upgraded, as one of the songs announces, after he ingests a mysterious Japanese pill.

The show, making its premiere at the Two River Theater here, features music and lyrics by Joe Iconis, who supplied songs for the second season of NBC’s “Smash,” and a book by Joe Tracz. It introduces Jeremy in a song announcing his mild ambitions: “I don’t want to be a hero/ Just wanna stay in the line/ I’ll never be a Rob De Niro/ For me, Joe Pesci is fine.” But his desire to shine is supercharged by a wicked crush on a perky girl named Christine (Stephanie Hsu); so desperate is he for her attention that he finds the courage to sign up for the school play — ever the mark of a loser in most high schools. (Although, thanks to “Glee,” this has begun to feel so 20th century.)

“Gay!” exults his nemesis, a nasty fireplug of a kid named Rich (Gerard Canonico). Perhaps because the musical features a cast of just 10, however, the supposedly “gay” school play troupe is instantly invaded by most of the cool kids, a development that goes unexplained. (Maybe they’re all “Glee” fans?) Anyway, when harassing Jeremy in the bathroom one day, Rich reveals that he was once a “loser just like you,” until he swallowed a gray pill from Japan that includes a “quantum computer,” which implanted itself in his brain and proceeded to direct his every move. What depressed terminal nerd could resist?

And so, after acquiring a magic pellet from a pusher who, amusingly, covers his tracks by working at a Payless shoe store, Jeremy downs his pill — which must be consumed with Mountain Dew — and acquires his very own Squip, or Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor. Portrayed by Eric William Morris as the commanding-voiced epitome of chillness, the Squip begins directing Jeremy’s every action, making like a cyberstylist to give his wardrobe a makeover, and making Jeremy’s former best and only friend, Michael, invisible so that Jeremy won’t be tempted to slide back into his pathetic, constant video-game-playing ways.

As those who watched the second season of “Smash” may recall (all 26 of you), Mr. Iconis composes music in the vein of post-“Rent” pop-rock. The songs for “Be More Chill” lean toward hyper up-tempo numbers, with singsong choruses (and the occasional random singing of “na-na-na”). The more idiosyncratic songs are the fresher ones: Christine’s paean to the joys of play rehearsals, or a funny number sung by Michael (an endearing George Salazar), who locks himself in the bathroom after sneaking into a cool-kid party, and laments the loss of his best friend.

There’s also a charming 21st-century update of “The Telephone Hour,” from “Bye Bye Birdie,” called “Rich Set a Fire (The Smartphone Hour),” although it is nowhere near as infectious as the original.

Mr. Tracz’s book is along the same lines: predictable in its contours, occasionally quirky in its details. And despite performances that are bright and Red Bull-energetic, the characters tend to be well-worn types newly decked out in high tops and H & M gear. There’s the stud-jock, Jake (Jake Boyd), who somewhat implausibly proves a rival for Christine’s affections, and the bitchy popular girls, the queen bee Brooke (Lauren Marcus) and her sidekick, Chloe (Katlyn Carlson), who sets her sights on the newly cool Jeremy.

Mr. Connolly’s Jeremy doesn’t exactly transform before our eyes from neurotic milquetoast to gleaming king of the cafeteria. But he’s a genial performer with a singing voice that has a tang of Billie Joe Armstrong about it. When, inevitably, Jeremy begins having second thoughts about being controlled by the Squip and abandoning his best friend, Mr. Connolly proves affecting in his ambivalence.

And Paul Whitty, who plays all the adult roles — the hyper-enthusiastic drama teacher, the pill pusher and Jeremy’s sad-sack dad, who refuses to put on a pair of pants — differentiates each with admirable expertise.

Despite its unusual cybertwist, “Be More Chill,” which is directed at a brisk pace by Stephen Brackett (“Buyer & Cellar”), hews so closely to formulaic stories of adolescent insecurities and the brutal ecology of high school that the quirky bits register as just that, little fillips of novelty adorning a boilerplate tale, like weird squiggles scrawled across a generic plastic binder.

Even the show’s efforts at more zany comedy sometimes have a whiff of the stale about them, as when the drama teacher announces that because the club’s funding has been threatened (didn’t this happen on “Glee”?), its production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” will have to be set in a postapocalyptic future.

“Instead of frolicking with fairies,” he sadly intones, “there will be fleeing. From zombies.” At which point I expected one of the cool kids to roll his or her eyes and snark: “Zombies? They’re, like, so over.”

Be More Chill

Music and lyrics by Joe Iconis; book by Joe Tracz, based on the novel by Ned Vizzini; directed by Stephen Brackett; choreography by Chase Brock; sets by Dane Laffrey; costumes by Bobby Frederick Tilley II; lighting by Tyler Micoleau; sound by Zachary Williamson; fight director, Unkledave’s Fight-House; production stage manager, Amanda Michaels; music direction by Nathan Dame; orchestrations and musical supervision by Charlie Rosen. Presented by Two River Theater, John Dias, artistic director; Robert M. Rechnitz, executive producer; Joan H. Rechnitz, associate producer; Michael Hurst, managing director. At the Two River Theater, 21 Bridge Avenue, Red Bank, N.J.; 732-345-1400, tworivertheater.org. Through June 21. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Jake Boyd (Jake Dillinger), Gerard Canonico (Rich), Katlyn Carlson (Chloe), Will Connolly (Jeremy Heere), Stephanie Hsu (Christine Canigula), Katie Ladner (Jenna Rolan), Lauren Marcus (Brooke), Eric William Morris (the Squip), George Salazar (Michael Mell) and Paul Whitty (Jeremy’s Dad/Mr. Reyes/Scary Stockboy).

[The play-rating site Show-Score doesn’t generally score regional productions, but sometimes, when an out-of-town show comes into New York City, the site posts a few local reviews and scores them.  For the New Jersey première of Be More Chill, Show-Score included four notices: NJArts.net, which got an 80; Talkin' Broadway, 70; the New York Times, 65; and Scene on Stage, 65.]

*  *  *  *

“EVER LOVE A SHOW YOU HAVEN’T SEEN?”

by Elisabeth Vincentelli

[The next article to appear in the New York Times was on 14 April 2018.  The little show from the Jersey Shore was about to open at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row and was already a hit with some theatergoers because the New Jersey cast recording had gone viral on the ’Net.  Elisabeth Vincentelli’s article was originally published in the “Arts” section of the paper.]

Before “Be More Chill” even starts previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center on July 26, it will already be one of the most popular new musicals in America, with a passionate fan base that dwarfs the number of people who have ever seen the show.

All this after a barely noticed monthlong run in New Jersey three years ago. And a little cast album that could.

When the show’s songwriter, Joe Iconis, and co-star, George Salazar, did a joint cabaret evening at Feinstein’s/54 Below this month, audience members flew in from Paris, Berlin and London. A dad got behind the wheel to ferry his daughter from Michigan. A pair of friends drove from Florida.

Annalise Heffron, 13, and her mom, Amy Cobb, spent 17 hours on a bus from their home in Cincinnati. “She picked that over the school trip to Chicago,” Ms. Cobb said by telephone later.

Still, even musical-theater aficionados may be asking: What exactly is “Be More Chill”?

Based on a 2004 novel by Ned Vizzini, the pop-rock musical, with a book by Joe Tracz, tells the story of a high school junior, Jeremy Heere, who ingests a pill-size supercomputer that makes him cooler.

Its only professional production came in June 2015 at New Jersey’s Two River Theater, which commissioned the show. The New York Times review was tepid, and despite Mr. Iconis’s spirited score and growing track record — he contributed the cult classic “Broadway, Here I Come!” to the TV show “Smash” — no commercial producer came knocking. The chill looked like rigor mortis.

And yet less than three years later, the cast album has passed 100 million streams in the United States. This, of course, is nowhere near the 2.3 billion clocked by “Hamilton,” but just under half of the streams for the vastly more established “Dear Evan Hansen” (211 million), and a lot more than another teen-oriented show, “Heathers: The Musical” (23.4 million), which ran Off Broadway and has had numerous regional productions.

So it’s not a total surprise that on Friday, a producer announced a commercial Off Broadway run, only the second professional production so far. “Knowing that people in such large numbers are connecting to it felt like a perfect opportunity,” said Gerald Goehring, whose credits include “A Christmas Story: The Musical.”

Most of the original cast will be back, and in a neat connection, Will Roland, who originated the role of the acerbic Jared in “Dear Evan Hansen,” will take on Jeremy in “Be More Chill” during the summer run, slated for nine weeks.

It’s hard to tell what ignited the frenzy, but about a year and a half after “Be More Chill” closed, the sci-fi-tinged story of the teenage dork and his friends somehow started getting traction.

Newbies would discover videos in the “recommended” column on YouTube, usually after they’d clicked on “Hamilton” or “Dear Evan Hansen” videos, and the internet helped link fans all over the world.

“I was getting tagged in fan art, then I started noticing people were writing fan fiction about my character and Jeremy,” Mr. Salazar said by telephone. “I was dumbfounded by all of it.”

Nowadays, even a show with a short run outside New York can get a cast album that may go viral. “For shows that don’t have productions, it’s a very easy way to get to a wide audience,” said the producer Ken Davenport, whose “Once on This Island” is now on Broadway. “And then the licensing companies respond.”

Indeed, Rodgers and Hammerstein picked up “Be More Chill” in July 2017 and made it available as a licensed show to schools and amateur companies.

The fan phenomenon was picking up velocity. The recording entered the Billboard Cast Album chart’s Top 10 a whopping 97 weeks after its release, by Ghostlight.

Illustrations and stories connected to the show spread on Tumblr, where “Be More Chill” inspired the second biggest musical-theater fandom of 2017, just behind the following for “Hamilton.”

Animated storyboards known as animatics popped up on YouTube; the most frequently rendered is the tour-de-force song in which Mr. Salazar’s character has an anxiety attack.

“Right after I discovered ‘Michael in the Bathroom,’ I decided to try drawing an animatic for it, even though I still didn’t know what the musical was about,” Claudia Cacace, a 22-year-old who lives near Naples, Italy, said by email. “I just related to the character so much that I felt the need to draw the scene.”

In turn, Dove Calderwood, 27, discovered Ms. Cacace’s art and commissioned her to animate the entire musical.

“It was something I wanted, and it was something I knew the fans wanted, because we didn’t have any visuals for the show,” Ms. Calderwood said by telephone from her home in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Another popular take on “Michael in the Bathroom” is an inspired cosplay performance (that is, lip-synced in character and in costume) by a 20-year-old who goes by “Jack or Aless, depending on the situation” and hails from Toronto.

“Everyone I’ve ever talked to about this musical has told me that they’ve been in the situation Michael was in,” Jack said in an email. “Being in such a vulnerable moment in your life, and then listening to a song that has a character that knows what it’s like to go through it, it really does make you feel that you’re not alone in this.”

Ms. Heffron, the Cincinnati teenager, prefers the score’s “The Pitiful Children” and “The Squip Song” to “Michael in the Bathroom,” which, she said, “is really good but a little overrated.”

Still, she made sure to seek out Mr. Salazar during a meet-and- greet after the 54 Below concert that went on longer than the show itself. She had brought him a Pac-Man toy because his “Be More Chill” character has a Pac-Man tattoo. (The show, “Two-Player Game,” has a few more performances through the end of May.)

There is no denying that fans are committed. They turned up in droves for an amateur production of “Be More Chill” in November at New Jersey’s Exit 82 Theater.

“It was the most insane attention any of my shows has ever received,” said Mr. Iconis, still sounding slightly stunned. “We needed security for a talkback at a community theater. Security!”

[The on-line version of Vincentelli’s article was entitled “How an Anxious-Adolescent Musical (No, Not That One) Found Its Fans.”  I found that amusing!]

*  *  *  *

“DON’T CRY. IT’S ONLY A TEENAGE MELTDOWN”

by Ben Brantley

[On 10 August 2018, the Times ran Ben Brantley’s review of the Off-Broadway (and New York) première of Be More Chill (“Arts” section, as usual).  The production ran on the Irene Diamond Stage of the Pershing Square Signature Center on West 42nd Street from 9 August to 30 September 2018.  The production was nominated for four 2019 Lucille Lortel Awards, including Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical (George Salazar), Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical (Stephanie Hsu), and Outstanding Projection Design (Alex Basco Koch), and one 2018 Clive Barnes Award (Will Roland, actor).

Brantley’s review was middling and Show-Score only rated it at 55, a moderate score in the “mixed” range.  The show got an over-all average score, based on 35 published notices, of 71 with 54% of the reviews positive, 37% mixed, and 9% negative.  TheaterScene,net got the site’s highest score with a 93 and The Wrap got a 30 as Show-Score’s lowest-rated review.  (The viewers gave Be More Chill an average rating of 84 on the site.)]

Two teenage girls seated near me for a recent matinee at the Pershing Square Signature Center agreed that they were so over “Hamilton.” Ditto “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Spring Awakening.” They had loved each of these youth-oriented musicals in turn, but now they had discovered the real thing.

The object of their passion is “Be More Chill,” the high-energy, high-anxiety musical that officially opened on Thursday night but is already all but sold out for its limited run (through Sept. 23). Few of the audience members, I might add, heed the injunction of the title.

On the contrary, the decibel level of their responsive shrieks matches, and sometimes overwhelms, that of the heavily amplified music. Eat your hearts out, Harry Styles and Katy Perry and all you other kiddie pop idols. This is the stuff of teen dreams with a vengeance.

Unfortunately, anyone for whom adolescence is a distant and unpleasant memory is unlikely to feel like screaming, not in ecstasy, anyway. Unlike the more nuanced “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Spring Awakening” — never mind “Hamilton” — “Be More Chill” seems like a members-only club for those caught in the hellish here-and-now of the middle teens.

Written by Joe Iconis (songs) and Joe Tracz (book), with direction by Stephen Brackett, this production not only addresses but also embodies the exhaustingly excitable metabolism of its target audience. As a consequence, what’s happening onstage feels like a closed-circuit communion between young adults and performers portraying young adults. It’s a show that might have been assembled in the bedroom of one of its unhappy characters and then streamed to the world via YouTube.

Which, by the way, is one of the principal media that turned “Be More Chill” into the sui generis sensation it already is. First staged to lackluster critical response at New Jersey’s Two River Theater three years ago, “Be More Chill” went on to become a disembodied hit with an audience that discovered the show online (via videos and a cast recording that has been streamed more 150 million times worldwide) with little or no prompting from its creators.

This is a grass-roots success story that could have happened only in the age of social media. And audiences for this show’s current New York incarnation, which is only its second professional production, arrive with a fierce sense of proprietary pride. “Be More Chill” really is all about them.

Its plot and tone exist between the brooding “Dear Evan Hansen” and another, perkier Broadway hit, “Mean Girls.” Like both those shows, “Be More Chill” — which is adapted from Ned Vizzini’s droll and eminently readable 2004 novel — deals with the anguish of feeling like an outsider in that treacherously stratified purgatory called high school.

The schlubby hero, in this instance, is Jeremy Heere (Will Roland, the nerdy Jared in the original cast of “Dear Evan Hansen”). Living in a rudderless household since his mom walked out (his dad, played by Jason SweetTooth Williams, can’t even be bothered to put on pants), Jeremy is equally low on confidence and friends.

As for school, he just wants to get through each day there unnoticed (which means not pranked, hit or generally bullied). The high points of his life are masturbating to computer porn and playing video games with his only pal, Michael Mell (the crowd favorite George Salazar). Jeremy does have a crush on the lovely Christine Canigula (Stephanie Hsu), the star of the drama program, but is more or less resigned to hopelessness.

As in “Mean Girls,” our leading nerd is given the chance to become Cool, an opportunity he will accept and live to regret. The key novelty here is that he is made over into popularity not by groovy mentors and stylists but a tiny, pill-sized computer that, once swallowed, teaches him all the right moves. The soulless soul of this machine, known as a Squip, is embodied by a dark angel who resembles Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix,” and is played with welcome wit by Jason Tam.

Beowulf Boritt’s set, accented by fluorescent frames, ingeniously suggests lives held in thrall by technology. But even once the Squip takes effect on Jeremy and (spoiler) others, the activity onstage is frantically human. From beginning to end, the score has an “OMG” urgency that never lets up, whether what’s being sung about is hooking up with a hottie (full of lyrics groaning with double entendres) or betraying your best friend.

Such breathlessness is most enjoyably deployed in a gossip-girls number inspired by “The Telephone Hour” from “Bye Bye Birdie.” This one is called “The Smart Phone Hour (Rich Set a Fire),” and it is led with vigor by Tiffany Mann as the chatty Jenna Rolan. A similar frenzy pulses through the breakout agony anthem “Michael in the Bathroom,” in which Mr. Salazar’s character barricades himself into teary solitude at a party.

The musical sequences, featuring slapdash choreography by Chase Brock, tend to blend into one another. And at times, I had the feeling that many of the uniformly intense cast members could change parts (and Bobby Frederick Tilley II’s costumes), and no one would notice.

The amplification level means that many of the lyrics are undecipherable to the previously uninitiated. Admittedly, this is sometimes a blessing (“Add some swagger to your gait or/You’ll look like a masturbator.”)

Personally, I was happiest when the plot careened off the rails into sci-fi apocalypse territory, which happens during the school’s politically corrected version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That was a hoot.

The rest of the show is more of a sustained holler, and being receptive to its charms surely requires a much younger set of ears than mine. It may be helpful to think of this bounding, exhaustingly enthusiastic puppy of a show as the theatrical equivalent of one of those high-pitched dog whistles that only those under 25 can hear.

Be More Chill

Credits Music and lyrics by Joe Iconis; Book by Joe Tracz; Choreography by Chase Brock; Directed by Stephen Brackett

Cast Cameron Bond, Gerard Canonico, Katlyn Carlson, Stephanie Hsu, Troy Iwata, Tiffany Mann, Lauren Marcus, Will Roland, George Salazar, Britton Smith, Talia Suskauer, Jason Tam and Jason SweetTooth Williams

*  *  *  *

“IT’S GONE VIRAL. NOW IT’S GOING TO BROADWAY”

by Michael Paulson

[On 6 September 2018, shortly before the Off-Broadway production closed, Michael Paulson reported in the Times that, due to its popularity in social media,  the show was going to Broadway.  Paulson recounted the astonishing rise of Be More Chill that resulted from its status on the Internet.]

“Be More Chill,” an energetic sci-fi musical set in the anxious halls of a high school, is coming to Broadway, propelled not by a presold megabrand or raves from critics, but a surge of social media.

Producers are betting that Broadway, increasingly dominated by movie adaptations, jukebox musicals and plays starring celebrities, has room for a no-name show whose early evangelists have been adolescents converted to fandom by streaming the cast album online.

Encouraged by the success of a current Off Broadway production, which sold out its run before the first performance, the producers announced Wednesday that they would open on Broadway in March at the 900-seat Lyceum Theater. The show, directed by Stephen Brackett, features a pop-rock score by Joe Iconis and a book by Joe Tracz.

“I’ve never ridden a horse like this,” said the lead producer, Jerry Goehring, a college theater administrator whose only previous Broadway outing was the six-week run of “A Christmas Story: The Musical” in 2012.

Broadway is a risky business — about three-quarters of all productions fail, and many a show with a strong tailwind has crashed. But angsty adolescents are hot these days, as evidenced by “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Mean Girls” and even “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Mr. Goehring said he had raised the “Be More Chill” capitalization costs — up to $9.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — in just a few days.

“Be More Chill,” adapted from a young-adult novel by Ned Vizzini, is about a high school student who seeks to boost his popularity by swallowing a Japanese pill that turns out to be a computer chip that functions as a de facto life coach.

The central characters, as in much popular culture about high school, are teenagers who feel socially ill-at-ease, and the universality of that experience appears to account for much of the show’s popularity. Its breakout song, “Michael in the Bathroom,” is about a boy who feels so marginalized that he shuts himself away during a Halloween party.

“Even though the story is pretty nuts and there is this crazy sci-fi element, it really is a celebration of misfits and geeks and people who feel like they don’t quite belong, and actual young people relate to the characters,” said Mr. Iconis, who wrote the show’s music and lyrics.

Mr. Iconis, a favorite on the city’s cabaret scene, enjoyed a flash of success writing songs for the television series “Smash,” but has yet to have a commercially successful musical, and “Be More Chill” will be his Broadway debut. (His most popular song, by the way, is titled “Broadway, Here I Come!” but it’s darker than that title might suggest.)

“Be More Chill” had a production in 2015 at New Jersey’s Two River Theater, which commissioned the show, but after an unenthusiastic New York Times review, Mr. Iconis thought its journey was over.

“It just kind of fizzled there — the audiences were loving it so much, but we didn’t get the review that a show like that needs to have a life, and we didn’t have a commercial producer or a famous person attached, so I felt like that was the end, and it was a huge bummer,” he said.

But then Two River and Ghostlight Records agreed to make a cast album. The release, in the fall of 2015, was unremarkable. Yet in 2017, the creative team and stars began getting an unusual number of Twitter notifications and Instagram tags for no apparent reason.

Mr. Tracz, the book writer, said people even started emailing him to ask questions about the characters.

“We started to see these fanimatic, homegrown videos of ‘Michael in the Bathroom,’ and these Tumblr and Reddit pages were getting a lot of traction, and the streaming numbers were going up substantially,” said Kurt Deutsch, the founder and president of Ghostlight Records, using the word “fanimatic” to describe animated storyboards created by fans. “It was completely organic — we don’t have tons of marketing dollars to make this happen. It just grew to become a viral sensation.”

The cast album, discovered and shared online, has now been streamed more than 170 million times worldwide, making it among the most streamed theatrical cast albums.

Mr. Goehring, the director of the theater arts program at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, had not seen the Two River production and was unaware of the show’s growing online fan base, but he was an admirer of Mr. Iconis’s work and decided to direct a college version of the show. When fans started to fly in to see it, he snapped up the commercial rights.

That, in turn, led to this summer’s Off Broadway production, in a rented theater at the Pershing Square Signature Center, which runs until Sept. 30. Again, the Times review was unenthusiastic, but the crowds have been raucous. Most days, 1,500 people enter a digital lottery for two to four last-minute seats, and a one-week extension sold out in six hours.

Among those who saw the show this summer: Robert Wankel, the president of the Shubert Organization, which then offered the producers the Lyceum on Broadway. Mr. Wankel said he had been struck by the youthfulness of the show’s fan base, a sharp difference from the usual Broadway audience.

“This has truly been created by social media, which is fantastic,” he said. “Social media these days, I don’t have to tell you, can make or break something, and in this particular case, they’re loving it.”

So now the show’s creative team is discussing tweaks as they prepare for what they are thinking of as “Be More Chill: 3.0” — Broadway.

“The fact that we’ve gotten here because actual human beings love the show is truly remarkable,“ Mr. Iconis said. “It gives me faith.”

[Please come back to Rick On Theater on 1 May for the continuation of this series of New York Times articles on the musical phenom called Be More Chill.] 

Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney

[On Sunday afternoon, 21 April 2019, my friend Diana and I went over to the Whitney Museum of American Art in the West Village just to see whatever was on show there.  We walked through a small exhibit of colorist paintings in Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s, an ongoing show that opened on 29 March 2019 and will close sometime in August.  Consisting of only two rooms in the Hurst Family Galleries on the eighth floor, it took so little time to cover that Diana and I decided to go down to the Robert W. Wilson Galleries and the Zelda Bloomberg Outdoor Gallery on the seventh floor to revisit Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960. 

[We’d seen this large show last year (see my write-up for Rick On Theater on 12 June 2018), so I won’t be writing another report, but there were over half a dozen Edward Hopper paintings on exhibit so I decided to post an old report from my archive from a 2007 visit to Edward Hopper at the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  On that trip to the Nation’s Capital, I also saw J. M. W. Turner at the NGA’s West Building, so I’m including that part of the 11-year-old report as well.

[I’ll also say a few words about Spilling Over at the Whitney at the end of the archival report on Hopper and Turner.]

EDWARD HOPPER & J. M. W. TURNER (National Gallery of Art, 2007/2008)

I was in Washington, D.C., several times since the fall of 2007.  I went down for Thanksgiving and then I returned for the year-end holidays and stayed for two weeks.  I did my now-usual Kosher Bus ride down on Friday, 21 December 2007, for a stay that would last until 4 January ’08.  While I was in D.C. the previous month, my mother and I had decided to try to see two art shows that sounded interesting and would still be running through the new year: Edward Hopper and J. M. W. Turner.

Now, I’m not really a fan of either Hopper or Turner, but I’ll give a very brief (well, superficial anyway) run-down of the two exhibits nonetheless.  Both fairly large shows were at the National Gallery of Art on the Mall.  We went down to see the Hopper on Boxing Day, 26 December, and encountered a very long line snaking around the second floor of the East Building.  The line kept growing even as we stood debating whether we should switch over to the West Building and give the Turner show a try; but fortunately, it moved quickly and we spent a pleasant-enough afternoon walking through the several galleries housing the 94 works of the show. 

Hopper (1882-1967) doesn’t move me; I find his work cold and emotionless.  His lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and vacant.  Even in the works with people, they are distant and alone—unengaged.  I know that this is what Hopper’s fans find intriguing in his work, and it’s surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art, but it makes his paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic experience.  He was captivated by architecture and the way light and shadow played on buildings and houses and he could paint the same one from different angles and at different times of the day over and over to try to capture the various ways the light fell, but this is a study to me, not an aesthetic evocation.  (Oddly, Turner had a similar obsession with light and also repainted the same scene—his were landscapes—multiple times.) 

Hopper painted at the same time that many other American artists were turning away from figuration and experimenting with abstraction and expressionism (and, er, Abstract Expressionism), but he fiercely resisted the shift and became an icon among younger and later artists of figurative painting.  (Not surprisingly, I guess, I am a fan of abstract art; I know some commentators—not necessarily art critics, however—see that movement as a fraud on gullible viewers, but I’ve always found the works exciting and moving, emotional and expressive.) 

So I found the show, called simply Edward Hopper (16 September 2007-21 January 2008), pretty much just a curiosity; there was nothing I wanted to come back for on a Midnight Shopping Trip.  This doesn’t mean that I didn’t learn anything, however.  The earliest works in the exhibit were etchings; I never knew Hopper did any kind of print work, and the 12 small etchings on show here, though they all displayed the same focus on empty cityscapes and lonely figures, were somehow more interesting to me than the later large oils.  (Hopper also painted watercolors in his early days.) 

I will also add that there’s a strange kind of theatricality in Hopper’s paintings—not action or drama, but his interiors especially look like stage sets, a kind of set designer’s rendering.  There’s an implied plot in some of them.  People sitting, essentially isolated even in a group, in a diner, viewed from the street through a long expanse of window (Nighthawks, 1942), make you wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark, empty street. 

The woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a near-empty movie theater (New York Movie, 1939)—what’s she thinking about while the movie’s unreeling on the screen just out of her vision?  (In my report on Where We Are at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I relate the “stories” of some other Hopper works that are in that show.) 

But these are intellectual curiosities, not emotionally-engaging ones.  A Hopper play would likely be one in which people sit around speaking in low tones—but only occasionally, leaving most of the play to silence.

In the Washington Post, remarking that NGA “understands what an odd duck it has on its hands,” Glenn Dixon labeled Hopper the “taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light” and a “voyeuristic stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary.”  Dixon observed, “It can’t have helped that his discomfort with the human form is palpable.  He would prove far less awkward handling architecture”; however, the WaPo writer found, “He was able to employ compositional stretches, subtle manipulations of reality, as psychological tricks.”  Commenting on those lonely scenes, Dixon called them “implication without incident, a kind of single-frame cinema that rebuffs drama but revels in mood.”  He asked, “What could be happening?”  Dixon’s interpretation?  “Nothing.  Isn’t that enough?”

“You must see it,” proclaimed Robert F. Bruner in the Post.  “His human figures remain imperfect,” cautioned Bruner.  “But what his brush strokes lack in detail, his paintings make up in mood.  Hopper’s special gift was to portray certain emotions of life in a big city, such as loneliness, detachment and introspection.”  He found that “the special impact of the exhibition came from a comment by a guide, halfway through the show: ‘If Hopper had been a better painter, he wouldn’t have been as good an artist.’  Think about that.”  The then-dean of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia asserted a remarkable analogy:

Business life is filled with lots of painters and fewer artists. The “painters” are the technicians, such as actuaries, time-and-motion efficiency experts, accountants who get the books to balance down to the last penny, logistics honchos who slim down your inventory, and derivatives analysts. . . .

However, the technical mind-set is too often focused on reporting data rather than creating knowledge (or, better yet, wisdom). . . .  Artists in business are visionaries, inventors, entrepreneurs and general managers, people who create something larger out of the assembly of resources.

 

On Artblog, art historian Andrea Kirsh agreed that Hopper had the “ability to people his works so as to suggest a narrative and create an emotional tension.”  Of what she called “Hopper’s narrative skill,” Kirsh said, “We sense that we are seeing a slice of a larger story and we project the rest of it onto the paintings, filling in past events or anticipating future ones.”  The Artblogger lamented, however, “I can’t say I gained an appreciation of Hopper’s paintwork, because for the most part it’s uninteresting, something that always disappointed me.”  Debating whether the artist was a Realist—my friend Diana says he’s an Abstract painter—Kirsh asserted, “Hopper gave us paintings that show things as we imagine them, or remember them.  Perhaps that counts as realism.”

David Yezzi of the New Criterion observed, “Edward Hopper’s paintings suffer from the same popular misconception that plagues the poems of Robert Frost: we feel that we know them.”  The New Criterion poetry editor went on: “The National Gallery’s Hopper retrospective . . . shows the painter as something more than a genial realist.  His attractive surfaces and inviting use of color notwithstanding, something darker and considerably lonelier, in a word, something more modern, haunts the shadows.” 

Hopper’s work has a self-assured continuity, from his lamp-lit nudes in stark bedrooms, to the sun-streaked lighthouses of Maine, to New York interiors glimpsed from an elevated train, to couples caught mid-scene in offices and restaurants.  All are situated in the (for Hopper) endlessly rewarding dynamic between vestigial and enigmatic narrative and the formal pleasures of form, color, and light as they inch toward abstraction. 

Yezzi cited Surrealist writer and poet André Breton as saying Hopper was “one of only a few American artists who could approach the dreamlike quality of Surrealism.” 

On DCist, Kate Mereand wrote, “The scenes are always striking: women at night, mostly alone, and then buildings, mostly in daylight.  Such is Edward Hopper’s art, finding voyeuristic fancy in two main types of subjects: ladies and places.”  Mereand found that “many of the . . . works . . . on display at the National Gallery of Art . . . portray the intense intimacy with which Hopper approached both flesh and brick alike.”  She characterized the painter’s work:

The somewhat photo-realistic quality of Hopper’s work blends more traditional and modern styles of art. The subjects are recognizable, bold, and at times intimate.  Whether it is thus milk-toast or middle-ground, art-lovers and haters of all kinds should be able to appreciate something that he offers.

She summed up by recommending that “you should see if for yourself.”

The next week, Mother and I traveled down to the Mall again to see J. M. W. Turner (1 October 2007-6 January 2008), a much easier show to get into, in the West Building.  Like Hopper, who was born 30 years after Turner died, the older painter was “fascinated with light,” noted Victoria Skelly of the Broad Street Review.  “Exploring the effects of light or the lack of it was a fruitful, lifelong focus for both men.” 

The problem I have with Turner (1775-1851) is that he’s essentially a 19th-century Romantic, a style for which I don’t have much feeling.  (I’m partial to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists of the decades following, at the turn of that century.) 

In addition, Turner’s a landscapist, so his canvases are all wild nature, sea storms, crumbling ruins, and craggy precipices—all with no inhabitants.  So, from my perspective, he’s invoking a vision of the world which doesn’t really exist and in which no humans live.  This doesn’t grab me, despite the academic fact that he does it with a focused attention on the way the light—the sun, fire, lightning, moonlight, whatever—illuminates the scene. 

To me, this makes Turner a technical master, perhaps, but not an artist that speaks to me.  (His series on The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835, which he painted after actually viewing the event on 16 October the previous year, are a remarkable record of the loss—but they are illustrations of the historical destruction.) 

What did interest me, though, were the works at the end of the show (whose 146 canvases were arranged chronologically).  I never knew that Turner was apparently a transitional figure at the end of his career between the Romantics and the Impressionists: his late works, some of which were actually unfinished, are more intuitive interpretations of the subjects, less faithfully depicted.  It seemed to me, though none of the curatorial material bore me out on this (Jacqueline Trescott, however, did mentioned in a preview article in the Washington Post that Turner was “an important influence” on the Impressionists), that these late works were proto-Impressionism. 

The Washington Post’s Blake Gopnik declared, “Turner's greatness lies in his resisting, more than almost any artist you could name, any single notion of what great art might be.”  He added that the works in J. M. W. Turner “could almost be by half a dozen different artists—each busy breaking an entirely different set of rules.”  Gopnik then offered this conundrum: “If most great artists' surveys give something for everyone to like, the strong feeling in the Turner show is that there's something there for everyone, even his greatest admirers, to dislike.  There are radically incompatible ways of doing things scattered throughout the show.”  The Post art reviewer concluded, “Looking at Turner's pictures may have rather the same effect that visiting him had:  You never know quite where you stand, what oddness he'll throw at you next or whether to be impressed, appalled or flattered when he lets you watch him breaking rules.”

[Edward Hopper was organized by the NGA in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago.  The curators are Carol Troyen, John Moore Cabot Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Franklin Kelly, senior curator, American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art; and Judith Barter, the Field-McCormick Chair of American Art at The Art Institute of Chicago.  The exhibit previously appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 6 May-19 August 2007, and will move on to the Art Institute of Chicago from 16 February–11 May 2008.

[J. M. W. Turner comprises 148 works organized by the NGA; the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with Tate Britain, London.  The curators are Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Dorothy Kosinski, senior curator of painting and sculpture and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with Ian Warrell, curator of 18th- and 19th-century British art, Tate Britain.  After Washington, the exhibit will go to the Dallas Museum of Art, from 10 February–18 May 2008, and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 24 June–21 September 2008.]

*  *  *  *

SPILLING OVER: PAINTING COLOR IN THE 1960s (Whitney Museum of American Art)

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the West Village (for a brief discussion of the Whitney’s new building, see my report on the “Whitney Biennial 2017,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 June 2017) is an exhibition of paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s “that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception,” according to the museum’s website.  Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s collection, Spilling Over includes works by Josef Albers (1888-1976), Emma Amos (b. 1938), Richard Anuszkiewicz (b. 1930), Frank Bowling (b. 1934), Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Sam  Gilliam (b. 1933), Marcia Hafif (1929-2018), Carmen Herrera (b. 1915), Alex Katz (b. 1927), Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Morris Louis (1912-62), Alvin Loving (1935-2005), Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), Robert Reed (1938–2014), Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), Frank Stella (b. 1936), Bob Thompson (1937-66), and Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935), among others. 

The exhibit’s title comes from a statement artist Bob Thompson made in 1966, shortly before his death at 28: “I paint many paintings that tell me slowly that I have something inside of me that is just bursting, twisting, sticking, spilling over to get out.  Out into souls and mouths and eyes that have never seen before.”  Organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Margaret Kross, curatorial assistant, the show opened in the Hurst Family Galleries on the museum’s eighth floor on 29 March and will run until August (no specific closing date is given).  On exhibit are 18 paintings, created between 1959 and 1972 that span Color Field works—including several Washington Color School pieces—to Op Art. 

As I’ve confessed before, I find the mid-century period the most interesting in American art, when our painting and sculpture really emerged from under the shadow of its European forbears and established itself as a force of its own.  (This was also the period when I was first introduced to modern art because it was when my parents became involved with the Gres Gallery in Washington; see my three-part account of this experience, posted on ROT on 7, 10, and 13 July 2018.)  Both this show and Where We Are, also at the Whitney, center on this era (though Where We Are does go back some decades further), which delighted me.

After Abstract Expressionism, a movement launched in the ’40s in which color was especially significant (the work of Mark Rothko, one of whose pieces, Four Darks in Red, 1958, is downstairs in Where We Are, is a good example of this), broke the ground for non-figurative and non-representational painting, artists invented Pop Art, Psychedelia, Op Art, and many other styles that used bold, bright colors, often in large swaths and washes of pigment.  For the Washington Color School, color was all painting was about—there was no point to their work except to create a joyful experience of color. 

Among the artists exhibited in Spilling Over are several on whom I’ve blogged before, including Sam Gilliam (“Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011), Morris Louis (15 February 2010), Kenneth Noland (passing mention in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin”); all three are or were members of the Washington School of Color (about which I blogged on 21 September 2014).  Gilliam is the only artist from this show whose work I own; my parents’ art collection (see “A Passion for Art,” 21 November 2017) contains three of his pieces.  Larry Rivers (1923-2002) is the only artist in the show who exhibited at Gres (1960, his first solo show outside New York City). 

During the period covered by Spilling Over, artists were experimenting with many aspects of art, finding new ways to communicate through painted canvases and new styles and materials to employ.  Paint, usually unmixed and otherwise unmuted, was dripped (famously by Jackson Pollock, who’s not represented in this exhibit), poured (Morris Louis’s Gamma Delta, 1959-60), and spattered.  It was applied with a palette knife instead of a brush (Norman Carton, another mid-century artist not in Spilling Over).  The canvases were unprimed so the pigments soaked in and stained the fabric (Louis, Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction, 1968) rather than coating the surface, giving the painting a translucent quality. 

Acrylic paint arrived on the art scene during the ’60s. bringing a vast new array of colors and hues, and many artists began experimenting with this new pigment and looking for other media with different properties to work with.  Art slipped its bonds and literally and figuratively spilled off the canvas and outside the frames.  The old, established forms and norms no longer applied.  It was no longer your grandfather’s art.

Of course, the whole society was experimenting, not just in painting and sculpture, but the other arts like film, design, literature and drama, music.  All the rules were being challenged and changed: gender, race, sexuality, language, dress, and politics.  Painting was only a visual manifestation of what was happening all over the culture.  The small selection of paintings in Spilling Over are a representation of that shift, but only a small corner of it. 

Among the most significant pieces in the show is Helen Frankenthaler’s Orange Mood (1966), an acrylic on canvas with large expanses of blue, yellow, mustard, and orange.  Frankenthaler had given an important boost to color painting when she introduced Louis and Noland, who’d come up to New York to visit her studio, to her work.  This so impressed the two men that they went back to Washington and immediately began applying what they’d learned.  Louis destroyed all his work up to that point and began working in this new way, essentially starting, with Noland and a few others who joined them, the Washington Color School, a branch of Color Filed painting based in the Nation’s Capital.  (Sam Gilliam, who came to D.C. from Mississippi in 1962, is a second generation of Washington Color artists.)

Orange Mood is entirely non-figurative, an example of what became the mantra of the WCS—making art that  communicates nothing but a delight in the experience of color—but in the same gallery is Thompson’s Triumph of Bacchus (1964).  A depiction of the Roman god of wine, it was inspired by Renaissance paintings of similar subjects—except that Thompson used bolder colors for his palette.  His choices of colors are also bold—yellow people. blue horses, a yellow ram—and the artist’s friend, saxophonist Steve Lacy, called Thompson “jazz himself,” pointing out that “the way he painted was like jazz—taking liberties with colors.” 

Getting off the elevator on the eighth floor, visitors to Spilling Over are greeted with three very revealing pieces, considering the curatorial point of the show.  One is Kenneth Noland’s New Day (1967), a canvas of acrylic stripes of many vibrant colors.  (Stripes were Noland’s signature form.)  As an introduction to an exhibit about paintings in color, New Day couldn’t be more appropriate.  And as the first WSC canvas a visitor encounters, it’s a perfect example of color as pure visual stimulus.

A second painting on the wall across from the elevator is Carmen Herrera’s Blanco y Verde (1959), an almost blank canvas in white and green, as its title bluntly tells you.  Most of the painting is white, with only a small triangle of green in the center, as if demonstrating how “color” can be reduced to a minimum and still stand out.  In a display of brightly hued paintings all in brilliant colors, an almost all-white canvas is noticed. 

Not unlike Robert Reed’s Plum Nellie, Sea Stone (1972), a purple-and-white painting that Reed considered a landscape.  Across the center of the canvas is a wide wash of deep purple, swirling and eddying like an abstract rushing stream.  But right in the middle of the purple field is a white rectangle, a geometrical blank space that draws the eye even though the dominant color is churning and spinning. 

What are possibly the most seemingly conventional and least conventional entries in the exhibit are near one another in the gallery.  Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction is a huge canvas that’s been stained with blue, green, blush, and maroon acrylic paint, diluted to the degree that it’s virtually transparent.  The canvas isn’t really hung, however—it’s frameless and formless, a practice Gilliam has used in many of his frequently-changing styles—but draped like some multi-colored bunting.  (Stained and draped or suspended fabric is also something this artist has done often over his career.  See my discussion of Close to Trees in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin.”)  Thomas Micchelli of Hyperallergic called Bow Form Construction a “fusion of painting and sculpture.”

Nearby is Alex Katz’s Edwin, Blue Series (1965), a portrait of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby (1903-83).  The portrait is painted on a bright blue background and both the background and the figure of Denby are flat and simplified.  Katz has cropped the side of the subject’s body on the viewer’s left as if some kind of door is blocking it and Denby is just exiting it.  If it weren’t for the flat, bright color of the background, Edwin, Blue Series could be a conventional—albeit Modernist, perhaps Expressionist—portrait.

I’d love to describe each of the paintings in Spilling Over, but even as small as this show is, that’s too much.  I’ve merely mentioned Louis’s Gamma Delta and I haven’t even done that with Emma Amos’s Baby (1966) and Kay WalkingStick’s April Contemplating May (1972), two artists who were new to me, and I regret that.  For a small show, Spilling Over was most interesting, but there’s just too much to cover here.

'Alien: The Play' (North Bergen High School, N. J.)

[I had planned to post a selection of published articles on two plays that attracted an unusual kind of attention that redounded to their benefit in terms of positive word of mouth.  One is the now-Broadway musical Be More Chill by Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz, which came out of obscurity in Red Bank, New Jersey, to delight audiences Off-Broadway in New York City and move to Broadway.  The other is a high school play—that’s right, a teenage student production—adapted from the 1979 science-fiction movie thriller Alien. 

[Both productions got viral play on social media and I was going to try to cover this 21st-century phenomenon that may be the harbinger of things to come in terms of publicizing a stage production, professional or amateur.  Word of mouth has always been an important way a play gets attention from prospective theatergoers, but social media has made that spectator-to-spectator communication much more potent.

[When I started to prepare my selection for the combined post, however, I heard an announcement that Alien: The Play, the New Jersey high school production, which had only had two performances in its original run (Tuesday, 19 March, and Friday, 22 March 2019), would get an encore because of the social media coverage.  I decided to save Be More Chill for another slot on Rick On Theater and devote this post entirely to the wonderful phenomenon of North Bergen High School’s Alien: The Play.  Kudos to one and all in North Bergen, New Jersey!  You all done real good—and I’m a former middle and high school theater teacher and director.  ~Rick]

“School’s ‘Alien’ Slays Internet”

by Dave Itzkoff

[Itzkoff’s  article was the first report I read on the reception North Bergen High’s Alien: The Play got in its brief appearance on the stage.  It was published in the New York Times of 27 March 2019 in the “Arts” section.]

There are those perennial stage works that are perfectly suited to be performed in high schools across the country every year: say, “Our Town,” “The Crucible,” “Annie” or “The Wizard of Oz.”

And now, to this canon, you might add “Alien.”

A New Jersey high school has found itself the unexpected recipient of online acclaim and viral attention for its recent stage production of “Alien,” the 1979 science-fiction thriller.

“Alien: The Play,” presented last weekend by the drama club of North Bergen High School, starred a cast of eight students in the film roles originally played by Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt and Ian Holm.

Whereas the movie had a budget in the range of about $10 million, “Alien: The Play” had costumes, props and set designs made mostly from donated and recycled materials.

Both the film and the stage adaptation feature a nightmarish extraterrestrial designed by the artist H.R. Giger — played, in this production, by a high school student.

“Alien: The Play” is the brainchild of Perfecto Cuervo, an English teacher at the school and the moderator of its drama club, and Steven Defendini, an art teacher there.

Last year, the two teachers worked together on a student staging of “Night of the Living Dead,” the George Romero zombie movie [1968]. This past summer, they started to plan a follow-up.

As Mr. Cuervo recalled their conversation, he said, “Do you think we can do ‘Alien’ as a play?” It seemed to require few sets, he said: “We have a spaceship. We have a planet. It could be handled.”

Mr. Defendini said he answered, “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know if we can do that. But we’re going to do that.”

The original “Alien” was directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O’Bannon. Released by 20th Century Fox, it is a claustrophobic horror film about the crew of a small outer-space vessel that encounters an unwelcome, nonhuman stowaway that has come to be known as the xenomorph. (Spoiler alert: The story doesn’t end well for most of them.)

The film was a substantial hit, critically and commercially, that burrowed itself deep in the cultural consciousness and started a decades-long film franchise.

Mr. Cuervo, who directed the students’ version, said he spent about a month and a half adapting it from the film. Casting took place in November; the crucial role of Ripley (the Sigourney Weaver character) went to Gabriella Delacruz, a senior at the school.

Ms. Delacruz, who had been in the school’s “Night of the Living Dead,” said that she was proud to carry on the feminist tradition that Ripley represents.

“She’s a female character who’s really portrayed as the hero at the end,” she said. “She isn’t the damsel in distress. She got to be a badass, if I’m allowed to say that.”

Xavier Perez, a sophomore, was chosen to play the xenomorph. “When we did the casting,” Mr. Cuervo said, “there was one person that showed up — a tall, skinny kid. I told him, ‘Well, I guess you’re it. You’ve got the part.’”

Rehearsals began in December, while Mr. Defendini, the play’s art director, oversaw the creation of exotic terrains and spaceship interiors, trying as best as possible to reproduce the aesthetic of the film.

“Some of the walls are covered in egg crates, not because it was the cheapest solution but because it was the most authentic,” Mr. Defendini said.

Using a variety of materials, some of which were donated by Tom Carroll Scenery, a stage production and design shop in Jersey City, the teachers estimated the total cost of the play was under $3,500.

The performances relied on an additional six student crew members, plus another five to ten who helped operate sound boards and lights and supply other special effects.

“We had four kids on laptops, doing sound effects, ambient noises and alien noises,” Mr. Cuervo said. “We used a lot of the band kids, because they know how to play instruments and they were really good with the cues.”

Though the original “Alien” movie is about to turn 40 years old, Mr. Defendini said its characters still resonated with his teenage students, who know its monsters from video games, pop-cultural lore and recent sequels like “Alien: Covenant.”

“We had kids in the crew who knew the specific genesis and species of the xenomorph,” he said. “What gender it is, what planet it’s from. Everything you could know.”

Asked if the drama club had sought official permission to present the play, Mr. Cuervo said, “Our main goal was really just to put on a great play for the kids, just get them out, stage front.”

(The Fox film studio was acquired earlier this month by the Walt Disney Company. A press representative for Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Alien: The Play” has drawn widespread praise on social media; an official promotional Twitter account for the “Alien” franchise said, “We are impressed! 40 years and still going strong …” and “Bravo!”

The comedian Patton Oswalt wrote, “This is fantastic. Blows my high school’s adaptation of PINK FLAMINGOS out of the water.”

An online trailer has received more than 130,000 views on YouTube, and the production was covered on news sites like The Verge and The AV Club.

Mr. Defendini pointed out that a tweet about “Alien: The Play,” posted by Leslye Headland, a co-creator of the Netflix series “Russian Doll,” had been liked by Joss Whedon, the writer and director of “The Avengers.”

That, he said, was sufficient validation for the students.

“For them, that’s enough, to be acknowledged by their favorite movie director,” Mr. Defendini said. “For a bunch of high school kids, I can’t imagine what it’s like to see how much recognition they’re getting for seven months of hard work.”

*  *  *  *

“Sigourney Weaver Thinks High School Production of ‘Alien’ is Out of This World!”

by Josh Wells

[A TV news story I saw reported that actress Sigourney Weaver, the star of the original film, had praised the North Bergen cast and company for their work to create the stage adaptation of the movie on Instagram.  The video and Josh Wells’s  article on Weaver’s congratulations was posted on The Blast on 28 March at https://theblast.com/sigourney-weaver-alien-high-school-play/.]

                                                                                                                                

It wasn’t long after a New Jersey high school put on their production of ‘Alien’ (yes, the 1979 Ridley Scott classic), that the internet erupted in praise faster than a chest burster. And now, Ripley herself is showering the kids with praise.

Sigourney Weaver, who played badass-Lieutenant Ellen Ripley, took to social media and applauded the students at North Bergen High School.

“It looked incredible. You put so much heart and soul into it,” Sigourney said in a video posted to the Alien Anthology Instagram page. She added, “The alien, I must say, looked very real to me.”

“Alien: The Play”, was presented by North Bergen High School, and it cast eight students to play the film roles originally by Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Tom Skerritt.

Sigourney goes on to say she is delivering her blessing on behalf of the film’s screenwriter Walter Hill, and the director of ‘Aliens’, James Cameron.

She ends her digital blessing with a tongue-in-cheek warning that the alien might still be alive, and “when opening your locker, do it very slowly”.

Hopefully she’s right, and next year we get to see a cat, a cyborg named Bishop, and flame throwers!

*  *  *  *

“New Jersey high school’s celebrated ‘Alien’ play gets encore”

The Associated Press

                                                                                      

[ABC News aired a report on the revival of the two-performance run of Alien: The Play on 16 April, the text of which is available at https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/jersey-high-schools-celebrated-alien-play-encore-62434909.]

A New Jersey high schools stage production of Alien is coming back with help from the 1979 films director, Ridley Scott.

Alien: The Play was performed last month at North Bergen High School, which sits about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the Lincoln Tunnel into New York City.

Images of the productions elaborate sets and special effects drew a huge response online, and Scott wrote a letter to the school praising the students creativity.

Sigourney Weaver played the character Ellen Ripley in the movie that spawned a franchise. She taped a YouTube video in which she called the production “incredible.”

The plays director, teacher Perfecto Cuervo, said in an email that Scotts production company provided $5,000 so the school could put on an encore performance April 26.

“Date announced for North Bergen High School’s ‘Alien’ encore performance”

by Jim Beckerman

[Jim Beckerman reported on the encore performance in the North Bergen Record on 15 April (https://www.northjersey.com/story/entertainment/2019/04/15/north-bergen-high-school-alien-play-dates-announced/3473715002/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=amp&utm_campaign=speakable), providing a few additional details.]

It’s official. “Alien” has a sequel.

There will be an encore performance of the stage version of the classic 1979 sci-fi movie, which became a viral sensation when some enterprising North Bergen High School students produced it with eye-popping sets and effects.

On April 26 at 8 p.m., North Bergen will reprise the show, which was staged for only two performances in March. Those performances caused a tsunami of interest when a video posted the weekend of March 23 got some 3 million hits.

“We’re excited to be able to do it again,” said Brian Bonacci, a staff music teacher who did the lighting for the show.

People were bowled over by the technical sophistication and the ambitious look of this production, which was done for a modest $3,500 and made generous use of recycled materials. Ridley Scott, the director of the original film, and Sigourney Weaver, the original star, sent congratulations.

“It’s just been crazy,” said director-writer Perfecto Cuervo. “I don’t know if you ever get used to the attention, to be honest. But the kids are taking it in stride.”

Luckily, Cuervo and his drama club team saved their amazing set and costumes, which included a 15-foot “space jockey” and a hideous toothy “xenormorph” that exactly correspond to the ones in the film.

“Alien” will be staged at the North Bergen High School Auditorium, 7417 J.F.K. Boulevard, North Bergen. How many tickets will be on sale, and where people can get them, are details still to be worked out.

“We definitely have some tickets earmarked for any celebrities who might come,” Cuervo said.

“High School Production of Alien Will Get Encore Performance”

by Adam Hetrick

[In Playbill on 15 April (http://www.playbill.com/article/high-school-production-of-alien-will-get-encore-performance), Adam Hedrick added other interesting points coincidental to the re-mounting of North Bergen High’s Alien: The Play.]

North Bergen High School’s production of Alien: The Play, which drew praise from original film director Ridley Scott, will receive an encore performance on “Alien Day.”

North Bergan High School’s elaborate stage production of the 1979 sci-fi horror classic Alien, which made headlines last month after video footage went viral, will get an encore performance on April 26.

The date is known to Alien fans as “Alien Day,” and coincides with the film’s 40th anniversary. The news was announced on the franchise’s official Twitter account.

Twentieth Century Fox, which produced the lucrative film franchise, is also set to release a slate of Alien-related media that day, including new books on the making of the film, a series of Alien 40th Anniversary Shorts, comics, action figures, and 40th Anniversary 4K Ultra HD re-release of the film.

Fox is also slated to make some surprise announcements on that date, including a new project with Audible.

*  *  *  *

“Sigourney Weaver makes appearance at North Bergen H.S. production of 'Alien' on Friday”

by Jim Beckerman

[ADDENDUM (27 July 2019): The encore performance of Alien: The Play at North Bergen High School took place as planned on Friday, 26 April, the 40th anniversary of the release of the 1979 film.  In attendance was Sigourney Weaver, the actress who played the lead in the sci-fi classic.  Here's the coverage from the North Bergen Record, the local newspaper, of that performance and the cast's response to the surprise audience member.]

The biggest sensation of "Alien," the much-talked-about North Bergen High School play that got an encore performance Friday night, was not the flashing, rumbling special effects, the incredible sets made of flotsam and jetsam, the monsters popping out of chests, or even the alien itself, stalking people in the aisle seats.

The biggest sensation was Sigourney Weaver, in person — the star of the original 1979 movie "Alien," who made a special trip to North Bergen to give her blessing.

"How exciting is it to be here tonight?" Weaver said, before the curtain rose, as the overflow crowd of 800 in the school auditorium went wild.

As you probably know, this "Alien"  became a viral sensation when someone posted video of the original performance in late March. The video got some 3 million hits — and the geek-o-sphere has been going crazy ever since.

"This is the night I've been waiting for!" Weaver told the crowd. "I've only been here a couple of hours, but I can tell this is a very special place in a very special town, and in a school like this you have extraordinary teachers…I met the students and I want to say they are so great."

Also, how excited people have been since director-writer Perfecto Cuervo, who conceived what was supposed to be a one-off performance, announced earlier this month the encore staging Friday night.

There are other signs that this "Alien" is extraordinary. The fact, for starters, that Ridley Scott, the director of the 1979 film, donated $5,000 to the school after hearing about the show. 

The fact that the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts has announced it is awarding $1,000 scholarships to all the cast and crew (a few will get $10,000 scholarships). 

Marc Zicree, a writer who has worked on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," flew all the way from Los Angeles to see the production and cheer on the students. And Sam Mercer, of Vienna, Virginia, drove five hours to North Bergen to see it, not even knowing whether he could get a ticket (he snagged one at the last minute). "I didn't think I was going to get in until one minute before the play," he said.

The amazing thing about the show is not just the sophistication, the imagination, the technical brilliance of the show, but the fact that Cuervo, his team, and his actors made it out of almost nothing.

It was staged for a modest $3,500 (most big high school shows cost in the neighborhood of $20,000). The incredible-looking sets were made mostly from odds and ends.  The fact that North Bergen High School doesn't even have a theater department speaks to the determination, resourcefulness, and sheer will of the students and faculty who were going to do this show, no matter what. 

That's why the New York Conservatory is all in when it comes to these students. "We're trying to fund schools where the students really want to do this for a living, who are serious," said Bryce Russell, director of admissions for the New York Conservatory. 

These students are serious, all right. The audience may have come just to wish a bunch of ambitious kids well. But as each expertly timed shock landed on cue, the audience laughed, cheered, and screamed, exactly as if they were at a professional Broadway play.

So is even this the end? What, after all, would "Alien" be without sequels?

There are no plans, Cuervo said, for more performances. But then again, with this play, there never are. "Formally, this is the last show," Cuervo said Friday night. "But we're definitely open to more."