[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 62 regular performances as of 31 April). Here is the second installment (the first
part was posted on ROT on 28 April) of
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!]
“KEEPING A FAMILY TOGETHER”
by
Michael Paulson
[On 24 February 2019, in the
Sunday Times’ “Arts & Leisure” section, Joe Iconis, Be
More Chill’s lyricist and composer,
talked with Michael Paulson about creating the play with his collaborators.]
Joe Iconis exploded
out of N.Y.U. on a wave of hope. A songwriter with a knack for story and a
taste for strange, he won the Jonathan Larson grant for early career composers.
He scooped up the Kleban prize for most promising lyricist. He was hailed by
Newsday as “ginormously talented.”
The descriptors
piled up until they made no sense any more. Emerging. Rising. Up-and-coming.
But something wasn’t
clicking. Year after year he wrote song after song, show after show.
Small-scale productions came and went; big-time producers did not.
He sustained himself
on determination. And side jobs. And borrowed money.
But mostly, he
sustained himself with an unusual artistic collective — the Family, an evolving
cohort of multitalented misfits (their word) — that, for more than a decade,
has plied basements and barns, singing Mr. Iconis’s rock- and pop-influenced
songs to a growing audience of fans.
It is fandom that is
finally propelling Mr. Iconis to Broadway.
The sci-fi high
school musical “Be More Chill,” for which he wrote music and lyrics, was left
for dead in New Jersey after a tepid review from The New York Times.
Resurrection has come thanks to young enthusiasts, who created YouTube videos
using the show’s music, shared fan art on Tumblr, and have streamed the cast
album more than 200 million times.
The show, adapted
from a young adult novel by Ned Vizzini about a nerdy teenager who swallows a
pill-sized supercomputer that promises to improve his life, is now in previews
at the Lyceum Theater; about half the cast are performers who are part of Mr. Iconis’s
crew.
Now he is spending
his nights where he has long wanted to be, in the row of creators cradling
laptops and binders at the back of a Broadway theater, polishing the show
before it opens March 10. On his right forearm he sports a tattoo of a mule.
“Hairy and stubborn,” he explains. “Just like me.”
Mr. Iconis, 37, says
his life changed forever when, as a 6-year-old growing up on Long Island, he
saw his first Off Broadway musical: the original production of “Little Shop of
Horrors,” a zany rock romp about a blood-craving, flesh-eating houseplant. “I
was a little kid who was really scared — I would always cry in movies, and I
never wanted to be away from my parents,” he said. “But ‘Little Shop’ didn’t
scare me. It made me feel alive.”
Each year for his
birthday, and sometimes on holidays, he would see another show. He tracked
theater seasons by reading newspaper ads; he tried to estimate box office
grosses by calling ticket sellers to ask about seat availability.
He loved theater.
But he hated performing. “I was always terrible,” he said. “I knew I was
terrible. And it terrified me.”
So he took to the
piano, writing songs, directing shows, doing anything that allowed him to make
theater without being center stage. “I both gravitate toward and identify with
people who feel like they don’t quite fit in,” he said. In college and grad
school, both at New York University, he zeroed in on writing, and for his
thesis in 2005, he crafted a musical about a garage band, “The Black Suits,”
that seemed to have promise.
“I thought, ‘This
show will be produced Off Broadway, it will be well received, it will go to
Broadway, and this is how I will enter into the musical theater world,’” he
said.
The universe had
other ideas. And Mr. Iconis, a prolific writer, was impatient to get his songs
heard.
So in 2006 he staged
a concert at Ars Nova, a small but prestigious theater that seeks to develop
early-career artists. He thought of “Things to Ruin,” as he called it, as a
theatrical version of a rock album that never existed. He was the de facto
frontman, playing the piano and occasionally singing, and he found that he now
relished that. But his shows were also a showcase for his friends.
The cabaret scene in
New York was dominated by solo acts and celebrities, but Mr. Iconis wanted
something different — a sort of troupe of troubadours, most of them unknown. He
had inspirations in mind — the filmmaker Robert Altman, for one, but also the
Muppets, because, in Mr. Iconis’s fervid imagination, they are the model of an ensemble
that successfully integrates friendship and theatermaking.
There were maybe 10
participants to start — among them Jason Tam and Jason SweetTooth Williams,
both of whom are in the cast of “Be More Chill,” Mr. Tam as the Squip (that’s
the supercomputer) and Mr. Williams in three roles, including a high school
drama teacher.
By last Christmas,
when Joe Iconis and Friends performed what are now their annual Christmas shows
at Feinstein’s/54 Below, directed by his longtime collaborator John Simpkins, there
were 65 performers — onstage, interspersed among the audience, even caroling in
the bathrooms.
“We were a bunch of
rambunctious punk kids that loved musical theater but maybe didn’t quite fit
into the quintessential musical theater mold,” Mr. Tam said. “But we found each
other and we found Joe Iconis.”
Many of his songs
are clever and raw, like “Everybody’s at the Bar Without Me,” a furious ballad
about feeling left out, and “The Goodbye Song,” the raucous singalong which
closes most shows, inspired by a dying father bidding farewell to his child,
but also weaving in affectionate allusions to E.T.’s return home in the great
1982 Spielberg movie.
In the early years,
the concerts were mostly at the Laurie Beechman Theater, a basement space
underneath a Times Square restaurant, and at Joe’s Pub, part of the Public
Theater. In recent years, the main performances have been over Labor Day
weekend at Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires, and in December with a
series of Christmas-themed shows at 54 Below, but there have been lots of
others — even a private party attended by James Earl Jones.
“It feels like this
crazy circus that has followed him and helped put the music out there and
spread the word about what he does,” said Lauren Marcus, who met Mr. Iconis
when she was at N.Y.U., sang in one of his earliest concerts, and then married
him at a ceremony followed by a jamboree.
The performances are
silly and celebratory and self-referential. The recent Christmas show included
jokes about “making people go viral” (an allusion to “Be More Chill”), and
managed to be at once ever-so-winkingly politically incorrect and super-woke.
(“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” featured an interpolated exchange between the two
performers about the gender politics of the song.)
Over the years,
artists have come, and gone, and come again. “The more I met people, the more
it started to become this idea — like I’m driving a bus, and I would tell
people to hop on, and they could stay as long as they want to,” Mr. Iconis
said. “The whole Family idea is loose enough to accommodate the lives of
working artists — it needed to allow people to come and go as their life
allowed.”
Some are on Broadway
— Eric William Morris, a longtime member of the Family who portrays an addled
bartender in the Christmas shows, is now starring in a musical adaptation of
“King Kong” — but many, like Mr. Iconis, have long been waiting for a big
break.
“We shared that
feeling — when is this going to happen, and should we just go be investment
bankers?” Mr. Williams said. “What got him and all of us through these
struggling times were these concerts that we did together.”
There’s been some
blowback. “I definitely have a reputation of being very loyal, and that’s
important to me — I love creating art with artists I have a history and a
relationship with,” Mr. Iconis said. “But there was this notion of me as a frat
boy working with his college friends. People got so insane about this idea of
me just working with my buds.”
He is unapologetic
about wanting to advance his collaborators, and not simply allow them to be
replaced by “someone who was on a TV show in 2003,” which is how he often sees
theater casting. “Many people have performed my stuff brilliantly for years,
and I feel like it’s my responsibility to do whatever I can to help,” he said.
George Salazar, an
actor who was featured in a Broadway revival of “Godspell” when he met Mr.
Iconis, started singing in his concerts, and is now starring in “Be More Chill”
as the protagonist’s best friend; his emotional rendition of the show’s big
number, “Michael in the Bathroom,” has made him an internet sensation.
“The Family is a
group of misfits,” Mr. Salazar said, “but the things that make us strange and
different are the very things Joe enjoys.”
Mr. Iconis likes to
write in public spaces — coffee shops and bars — away from the piano, focusing
on lyric and drama, and letting that drive melody. He has been prolific,
helping to create 10 full-length musicals, but has also been increasingly
disappointed that none found commercial success, and at times has even wondered
whether he should try to convert one of his side jobs, graphic design, into a
full-time career.
“He’s had a tough
time getting shows on, because people don’t know where to place his shows —
they have a childlike exuberance for adults,” said Julianne Boyd, the artistic
director of Barrington Stage.
He is culturally
omnivorous, and often turns to musicals or films to explain his own feelings.
Asked about his frustration, he cites a scene in “Boogie Nights” when the porn
star protagonist realizes he is not going to get where he wanted, and a moment
in “Synecdoche, New York” when a character buys a house on fire, knowing it
might kill her.
But one doesn’t have
to look far to see how taxing his long journey has been: His breakout song,
“Broadway, Here I Come!,” an oft-covered number featured on the NBC television
series “Smash,” is, at its most literal, about someone hoping to get to
Broadway who contemplates suicide.
“I never stopped
working, and I never stopped doing concerts, but it started to feel like there
was a bit of doom hanging over everything, and then I started to see other
people now coming up, and they were the next big things, and I was passed
over,” he said. “After a while it started to feel exhausting.”
He was introduced to
“Be More Chill” by his agent, who suggested that he and the book writer, Joe
Tracz, take a look at the novel.
From the beginning,
members of the Family have been part of the development process. The Broadway
cast includes not only Mr. Tam, Mr. Williams, Ms. Marcus and Mr. Salazar, but
also stars Will Roland, who as an N.Y.U. student in 2008 had a cameo in the Christmas
show.
And one of the
show’s producers, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, was a college student interning at
the York Theater Company when she stumbled across an Iconis demo tape; she was
wowed, and has been helping produce his concerts and shows for the last decade.
“The path has been hard,” she said. “There was one night when I was so upset
about a bad review a show of Joe’s got that I threw a glass out a window.”
“Be More Chill,”
directed by Stephen Brackett, had its initial production at Two River Theater in
New Jersey; Mr. Iconis and his collaborators thought it was going well, but
after The New York Times disagreed, that was the end of that. “We spent nearly
two years trying to get producers and regional theaters interested, and it was
very clear no one was,” Mr. Iconis said. So he agreed to license the show for
community productions, and many signed up; since June of 2017, R&H
Theatricals has issued 145 licenses for the show.
Among those who
licensed the show was Jerry Goehring, the director of the theater arts program
at a Connecticut college, Sacred Heart University. He was startled at how
quickly the school’s production, which he directed, sold out, and how many
people traveled from afar to see it, so he optioned the rights.
Last summer, Mr.
Goehring and Ms. Tepper rented space Off Broadway to stage a commercial run of
the show. That, too, sold out, with throngs of young people defying the critics
and flocking to the show. So Broadway, here they come.
And now that Mr.
Iconis is a Broadway composer, the theater world is opening to him further.
Emboldened by “Be
More Chill,” which is selling well in early previews, Ms. Tepper is planning
this week to announce a commercial Off Broadway production of another Iconis
show, “Broadway Bounty Hunter,” about an out-of-work actor who finds a job
hunting criminals. It stars Annie Golden, who, although more than a generation
older than Mr. Iconis and his college friends, is one of his most loyal
collaborators.
He has two more
high-profile works in process: “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson
Musical,” commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse, with a Tony-winning director,
Christopher Ashley, attached; and “Punk Rock Girl,” a jukebox musical featuring
songs popularized by female musicians.
“The dream is that
it’s a show done by school groups, and that it would be impossible not to cast
the strangest kids — the kids who would normally do tech,” Mr. Iconis said.
“That was my guiding principle — to write roles for the weird kids."
As he watches “Be
More Chill” through the preview process, he is obviously nervous, aware that
critics still may not embrace his work. But he is determined to use the energy
surrounding this show to fuel his other projects.
“You can use your
theater cred to do film or TV or music, but I’m just not interested,” he said.
“The thing I want to do is have musicals running in theaters, hopefully close
to, or on, Broadway.”
*
* * *
“YOUNG ANGST, WRIT LOUD”
by Ben
Brantley
[Be More Chill opened at the Lyceum Theater on West 43rd
Street, east of Broadway, on 10 March 2019 after beginning previews on 13
February. Brantley re-reviewed the
musical for the Times on 11 March and
this time, Show-Score gave his notice a 45, well in the negative range. The site gave Be More Chill an average rating of 70 based on 48
published notices, with the highest score of a pair of 95’s going to TheaterMania and the Wall Street Journal, and the lowest rating of 35
for the Washington Post. Sixty percent of the Broadway reviews were
positive, 23% were mixed, and 17% were negative.]
It seems you can’t
set foot in a Broadway theater these days without running into a noisy passel
of high school students. Not in the lobby, though that might be refreshing
given the general grayness of theatergoing audiences. The kids I’m talking
about have commandeered the stage, to let the world know — preferably in song —
that it’s not easy being teen.
Usually embodied by
performers at least a decade older than the characters they’re portraying,
Broadway’s swelling throng of anguished adolescents may all share a common
grudge against life (and more often than not a basic plotline). But they
mercifully have different ways of expressing their grievances, in shows as
different as the sophisticated, brooding “Dear Evan Hansen,” the smart-mouthed
“Mean Girls” and the big-hearted “The Prom.”
Now, after selling
out its limited run Off Broadway last summer, the rabidly eager “Be More
Chill,” which opened on Sunday at the Lyceum Theater, has joined the crowded
field of shows about hormonally-overcharged outsiders longing for acceptance.
While its characters, inevitably, learn that being popular isn’t everything,
the show’s investors would no doubt beg to differ.
Adapted by Joe
Iconis (songs) and Joe Tracz (book) from Ned Vizzini’s appealing young adult
novel, “Be More Chill” has already broken the Lyceum house record for a single
week of ticket sales. If it sustains that momentum, it will be partly because
this latest entry in the puberty musical sweepstakes has traits that undeniably
set it apart from its competition.
For one thing, it is
— by cold critical standards — the worst of the lot, with a repetitive score,
painfully forced rhymes, cartoonish acting and a general approach that mistakes
decibel level (literally and metaphorically) for emotional intensity. But this
ostensible amateurishness may be exactly what sells “Be More Chill” to its
young target audience.
Alone among Broadway
musicals, “Be More Chill” feels as if it could have been created by the
teenagers it portrays, or perhaps by even younger people imagining what high
school will be like. Though its production values have been souped up since I
saw it in August, the show’s current incarnation — which features the same cast
and is again directed by Stephen Brackett — remains a festival of klutziness
that you could imagine being put together in the bedrooms and basements of
young YouTubers.
In fact, it was
through social media that “Be More Chill” acquired its ever-expanding fan base
after an initial, critically dismissed run at Two River Theater in Red Bank,
N.J., in 2015. The cast recording inspired a staggering number of storyboard
art presentations and lip-synced video performances on YouTube and when it
opened Off Broadway, its score had been streamed more than 150 million times.
The plot, presented
in a droller and less hysterical vein in the novel that inspired it, is a
sci-fi variation on the theme of social paranoia that has long ruled teenage
entertainment. A nerdy, terminally unhip hero, Jeremy Heere (a self-effacing,
sweetly adenoidal Will Roland), is offered a computerized pill, called a Squip,
that rewires him to run with the cool crowd. Played by Jason Tam, in the show’s
slickest performance, the Squip materializes to Jeremy looking like Keanu
Reeves in “The Matrix” and proceeds to dictate his life.
That basic premise
recalls the Eisenhower-era horror classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,”
which gratifyingly suggested that those who rule the status quo are really
mindless pod people. At first Jeremy — the anxious son of a morose single Dad
(Jason SweetTooth Williams) who mopes around the house in his underwear — is
ecstatic just to fit in.
But like the leading
characters of “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Mean Girls,” Jeremy learns that
popularity comes at a dehumanizing price. His hour of reckoning takes place
during a performance of a school play about a zombie apocalypse, during which
he wrestles with his bad cyber angel.
He is assisted by
his bestie, the forever gauche Michael Mell (the highly emotive George
Salazar), whom Jeremy had abandoned on the road to social success. He is also
inspired by selfless love — for the madcap Christine Canigula (a hyperkinetic
Stephanie Hsu).
This all sounds like
more fun than it is — at least for anyone over the age of 21. (That’s a
generous cutoff point.) The acting, singing and dancing (choreographed by Chase
Brock) are all, to put it kindly, frenetic. The set (by Beowulf Boritt),
lighting (Tyler Micoleau) costumes (Bobby Frederick Tilley II) and projections
(Alex Basco Koch) bring to mind bright fan fiction comic books drawn in
fluorescent crayon.
Despite a lively
production number that brings the classic “Telephone Hour” scene from “Bye Bye
Birdie” into the present (as “The Smartphone Hour,” led by the powerhouse
Tiffany Mann), the show’s cultural and technological frames of reference aren’t
truly of the moment. Much of “Be More Chill” could have been staged in the late
20th century, when the first “Matrix” movie came out, without seeming out of
place or even prescient.
But it may be its
very lack of chillness that has allowed “Be More Chill” to capture so many
young hearts. None of the characters on stage really look like enviably
glamorous popular people, but friendly nebbishes imitating the social elite
with slapdash satirical broad strokes.
The rhymes in Mr.
Iconis’s lyrics feel like they might have been improvised on the spot by
class-cutting stoners behind the gym. (An example from the showstopping
“Michael in the Bathroom”: “I’d rather fake pee/Than stand awkwardly.”)
Doubtless much care
and calculation has gone into remounting “Be More Chill.” But it still has the
goofy karaoke quality of kids performing boisterously for other kids. It
doesn’t try to dazzle its audience with glossy professionalism. For better or
worse, this may be the only show on Broadway that a tween could see and think
happily, “Hey, I could do that at home.”
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
*
* * *
“‘BE MORE CHILL’ GETS A
BITTERSWEET AFTERLIFE”
by
Alexandra Alter
[On Sunday, 17 March 2019, in
its “Arts & Leisure” section, the New York Times published a
profile of Ned Vizzini, the author of the 2004 novel Be More Chill on which the musical is based. Vizzini, who suffered from depression,
committed suicide on 19 December 2013 at the age of 32.]
The
musical, based on a novel by Ned Vizzini, opens after a fraught journey.
One morning this
January, the artist Sabra Embury got an alarming private message from a
stranger on social media.
The young man told
her that he was struggling with mental illness and hearing voices, and that he
had recently read “Be More Chill,” a novel by Ned Vizzini, Ms. Embury’s
husband, who died in 2013. He wondered if Mr. Vizzini ever heard voices, and if
that was how he got the idea for the novel, which features a teenage boy who
swallows a pill-size supercomputer that manifests as a disembodied presence in
his head.
Ms. Embury
immediately wrote back, assuring the stranger that he wasn’t alone, and that he
was brave to reach out to her.
Over the past five
years, Ms. Embury has gotten similar notes on a near daily basis, ever since
Mr. Vizzini, who suffered from anxiety and depression, took his own life, at
the age of 32. During his short but prolific career, Mr. Vizzini often
corresponded with fans who told him that his books helped them cope with their
own mental anguish. Now those messages come to her.
A strange thing
happened after Mr. Vizzini’s death. Rather than fading, interest in his work
has grown, as a new generation of young fans discovers his books. His young
adult novels, including “Be More Chill” and “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” which
chronicles the five days he spent in a Brooklyn psychiatric ward, continue to
sell tens of thousands of copies a year, and collectively have more than a
million copies in print.
Other artists are
now adapting his stories into new forms — including, improbably, a raucous
pop-rock, sci-fi musical comedy based on “Be More Chill.” The show — which had
a sold-out Off Broadway run last year after a cast album went viral online,
gathering more than 200 million streams — opened March 10 at the Lyceum Theater
on Broadway, and has been optioned for a forthcoming feature film.
The enduring success
of Mr. Vizzini’s work has been a source of consolation for his family and
friends. But it’s also a constant reminder of his absence.
“I’m glad that he’s
reaching so many people on a positive level and helping them feel less alone in
the world,” Ms. Embury said. “It’s bittersweet, because he’s not here.”
‘Still kind of a kid’
He was born Edison
Price Vizzini — his parents named him after his grandfather, Edison Price, who
founded the family’s business, Edison Price Lighting, a high-end lighting
fixture manufacturing company — but he went by his nickname, Ned.
Growing up in the
1980s and ’90s in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Mr. Vizzini was a creative, precocious
boy who excelled in school and loved Dungeons & Dragons.
Writing came
naturally to him. While he was still a student at Stuyvesant High School, he
began writing for The New York Press. He wrote for The New York Times Magazine,
and published his first book, an essay anthology titled “Teen Angst? Naaah,”
when he was 19.
“He lived under
unbelievable stress, but his truest self was really goofy, and saw the pure
humor and the ludicrousness of it all,” said his sister, Nora Vizzini.
He studied computer
science at Hunter College, and published his first novel when he was in his
early 20s. When it came out in 2004, “Be More Chill” was celebrated as an
innovative, genre-bending story that inverted classic coming-of-age and high
school comedy tropes.
The novel’s teenage
protagonist, Jeremy, feels invisible and irrelevant, until he swallows the tiny
device that teaches him how to be cool, coaches him on how to impress girls,
drive a car and deflect bullies. While on the surface it reads like a raunchy
teen comedy, the novel also raises prescient questions about the corrosive side
effects of technology.
Mr. Vizzini — who
wrote bluntly but with humor about taboo subjects like online pornography,
masturbation and drugs — was hailed as an authentic and idiosyncratic new voice
who could channel universal adolescent anxieties into a sci-fi comedy.
“He could master
kids’ voices because he was still kind of a kid,” Jay Mandel, Mr. Vizzini’s
literary agent, said.
The accolades also
triggered a cascade of stress. After “Be More Chill” was published, Mr.
Vizzini, who had signed a two-book contract, tried to work on a second novel,
but felt incapable of writing. He was so overwhelmed by his fear of failure
that he started to panic.
One night in late
November, 2004, he felt so desperate that he thought about killing himself. He
called a suicide prevention hotline, which directed him to a nearby hospital.
He spent five days there, and when he got out, he wrote “It’s Kind of a Funny
Story,” which centers on a teenager named Craig who feels crushed by the
pressures of his prestigious high school and calls a suicide hotline after he
contemplates jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.
He wrote the novel
in a few feverish weeks, in what he described as a “mad monthlong dash to
exorcise some demons.” It was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the
American Library Association and adapted into a 2010 movie starring Zach
Galifianakis, Emma Roberts and Viola Davis.
Nick Antosca, a
novelist and TV writer who was a close friend and collaborator of Mr.
Vizzini’s, said he didn’t know how severe Mr. Vizzini’s depression had been
until he read an early manuscript of “It’s Kind of a Funny Story.” When he
asked about the origin of the idea, Mr. Vizzini said he’d been hospitalized
after a near-suicide.
“He never tried to
hide stuff like that,” Mr. Antosca said. “He drew very heavily from his own
life, whether he was writing fantasy or nonfiction.”
Mr. Vizzini made a
point of talking to his young readers openly about his brush with suicide, in a
way that didn’t stigmatize mental illness, or romanticize it. In a
question-and-answer session with readers, he described the morass of depression
as something he struggled with even after having undergone treatment in the
hospital.
“Even though I
didn’t want to kill myself, I didn’t really want to live, either,” he wrote.
On his website, he
compared himself to his novel’s protagonist, Craig, who wasn’t “cured” of his
depression at the end of the novel, but had learned to cope with it.
“He got better as in
‘he’s not going to consider suicide again.’ He sorted out some (and only some)
things in his life … like I did,” he wrote.
Stressed by Hollywood
Over the next few
years, Mr. Vizzini seemed to flourish. He got to know Ms. Embury, and one
Friday the 13th in 2009, at a party at Mr. Vizzini’s apartment, they ended up
talking for 12 hours, and decided they were meant to be together. They moved to
Los Angeles, where Mr. Vizzini pursued screenwriting and continued writing
fiction.
In 2010 they got
married in Las Vegas on Friday the 13th, which they claimed as their lucky day,
with an Elvis impersonator officiating. The next year, their son, Felix, was
born.
Mr. Vizzini was also
thriving professionally. In 2012, he published a middle-grade novel, “The Other
Normals,” and the following year, he released a nearly 500-page young adult
fantasy novel, “House of Secrets,” that he wrote with the movie director Chris
Columbus. He landed a string of TV writing jobs, and wrote for shows like “Teen
Wolf,” “Last Resort” and “Believe.
“He had a tremendous
amount of energy,” said the actor and writer Ken Baumann, a close friend. “He
realized he needed to take all that anxiety and self-criticism and subsume it
into work.”
But as his Hollywood
writing career was taking off, things began to unravel. He would wake up at
four in the morning to work on his fiction before commuting to his TV writing
job, and fell into what Ms. Embury described as “a constant state of burnout.”
“Everything was
clicking, he’s getting everything he wanted, then at some point, things
shifted,” she said. “Everyone has highs and lows, and he went into a low and
didn’t come out of it.”
In late December of
2013, when he was in Brooklyn visiting his family, Mr. Vizzini jumped from the
roof of a building.
A few months after
Mr. Vizzini’s death, Ms. Embury and Felix, who is now 7, moved back to Brooklyn
to be close to his family. They live in a cozy, art-filled walk-up apartment in
Park Slope, with Barnabas, a tubby black and white cat.
Felix, who was 2
when Mr. Vizzini died, has no memory of his father, but has started asking more
questions about him. “He’s getting to that age where he’s more curious,” Ms.
Embury said.
A show he never got to see
In the close-knit
world of young adult literature, Mr. Vizzini’s death came as a crushing loss.
Even those who knew he had previously contemplated suicide were stunned.
“It was just
something we did not see coming,” said the novelist David Levithan, a vice
president and publisher of Scholastic, who became friends with Mr. Vizzini in
2004. “We were always in awe, because he started writing in his teens, and we
thought he was going to be writing into his 80s.”
The musical based on
“Be More Chill” was still nascent at the time.
The composer-writers
Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz read the novel at the recommendation of their agents
in 2011, and were immediately intrigued by its theatrical potential. “It felt
like a voice I hadn’t seen in a musical before,” Mr. Tracz said.
After they signed on
to adapt the story, they spoke by phone with Mr. Vizzini. “It was something
that he never envisioned being turned into a musical, and he was excited and
intrigued by the idea,” Mr. Tracz said.
They were nearly
finished with the first draft — everything but the final song — when they
learned that Mr. Vizzini had died.
“He never heard
anything from the show, which is the weirdest, saddest thing,” Mr. Iconis said.
They wanted the last
song to somehow reflect Mr. Vizzini’s struggle, and to stand apart from the
rest of the musical, which consists of synthesizer-heavy, maximalist pop. The
final song, “Voices in My Head,” is acoustic, and “feels reflective and a
little bit more human,” Mr. Iconis said.
For the Broadway
production, they also added a subtle tribute to Ms. Embury. In a pivotal scene,
when the hero buys the tiny supercomputer from a dealer at a Payless shoe
store, the box holding the device says “SABRAS by Pinkerton.” (“Pinkerton” is
the name of a Weezer album that the couple liked.)
Ms. Embury cried
when she spotted the reference on opening night.
She still struggles
at times to process the contradictory emotions that come with being the
guardian of her husband’s growing legacy.
At one point, when
describing her surprise and excitement over the novel’s rebirth as a Broadway
musical, she slipped into the first person plural.
“There’s no way that
we expected this to happen,” she said, then paused to reflect on her pronoun
choice. “I’m speaking like I’m speaking for him too.”
[On 20 October 2018, it was
announced that Shawn Levy and Greg Berlanti will team up to produce a film
adaptation of both the novel and the musical of Be More Chill. It’s
still to be determined which film studio will acquire the rights to make the
film with Levy and Berlanti, even though they currently have first look deals
with 20th Century Fox. Other film
producers who contended for the film rights included Nina Jacobson, Ron Howard,
Michael De Luca, Marty Bowen, Scooter Braun, Jennifer Todd, and Robert Zemeckis.]
