Odds & Ends About Musicals

 

[These short, random articles from various sources have been such fun to gather and post that I’m doing it again.  This time, the selection is again all about theater, but the pieces are all devoted to some aspect of musical theater. One of the articles is relatively old, from the member’s magazine of the union representing Broadway musicians nine years ago.  The other two are less than a year old.  I found them most interesting—I hope you will, too.] 

“A VIEW FROM THE PODIUM”

by Joseph Church 

[The article below was published in volume 115, number 6 (June 2015) of Allegro, the member magazine of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), the union that represents members of the pit orchestras for all Broadway and many Off-Broadway shows (among other gigs around town).  Its author, a member of the union, is the author of a book about music directing, a specialty I certainly know little about, and it seems it’s not well understood by most non-musicians.  It is, however, a vital profession in the world of musical theater, and in the spirit of my occasional series on theater jobs most theatergoers know little about, I’m presenting an insider’s own view of his work.]

Broadway music director gives an inside story in new book

As well as being a great honor, it is especially fitting to introduce my new book, “Music Direction for the Stage: A View from the Podium” [Oxford University Press, 2015], here in Allegro, as my involvement with the musicians’ union was one of my first incentives for my undertaking the book’s writing.

In the book I recount how in 1994, a group of music directors instituted a committee within local 802 to address a concern that their work was encroaching into areas for which they were not properly compensated or recognized, in particular extensive transcription and arranging, composing additional music, and doing music preparation. Several of us were helping composers realize their work as elaborate Broadway scores. Among our campaigns was an appeal to the Tony Awards committee to reinstate the Tony for music direction, discontinued after 1964. We presented our case in person and with a meticulously detailed and well-produced demonstration video about music direction, showing the transformation of a raw piece of music to its final form. The Tony committee were unmoved by the impassioned plea. They still expressed bafflement at a music director’s work, and were unable to remember the criteria by which they had judged the award until 1964, even though some of them had been on the awards committee then. Ironically, and very gratifyingly, one outcome of our failed attempts to explain our occupation and lay a groundwork for acknowledgement thereof was the American Theatre Wing’s establishing a Tony award for orchestration, beginning in the 1996-97 season. [ATW, along with the Broadway League, presents the Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Broadway Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Award.]

Our quest revealed how misunderstood, or more accurately “un-understood,” the job of music direction was then, and it continues to be. Its impenetrability is not difficult to accept, for a variety of reasons, two foremost among them: first, because the job varies so greatly from situation to situation, and second, because when a music director does his or her job well, the music is woven almost invisibly into the fabric of a larger entertainment, and the music director disappears.

The definition of music direction that I propose in the book sheds even more light on the confusion, so to speak. A music director is responsible for all aspects of preparing and performing the music for a musical production: a varying, fluid combination of creative, technical, and administrative functions. He or she is the nominal head of any music department that might exist within a production organization. Among the duties: accompanying (usually, but not always, at the piano), conducting, rehearsing, giving notes, coordinating with technicians and designers, explaining or demonstrating music to others, teaching singing, instruction in harmony and counterpoint, composing, arranging, orchestrating, determining music cues, contracting and managing music staff and instrumentalists, overseeing the physical and technical aspects of the music, maintaining and revising performances over time, acting as a supporter, mediator, counselor, psychotherapist, and executive decision-maker when musical indecisions and disputes arise. To prepare for each job, music directors acquire a comprehensive understanding of every aspect of the musical score, and of the on-stage content – the story, the style, and so on. They must execute their work in an effective union with many other creative and production personnel.

Local 802 and the AFM make many appearances in “Music Direction for the Stage,” partly because I use Broadway production as a model of stage production, regardless of whether the discussion is of Broadway theatre, a stock theatre, a community theatre, a nightclub or a university. The standards and practices that the union upholds on Broadway are applicable in all work situations, with regard both to reliability and excellence of the product – the musicians and music – and to the working conditions. Though the union makes no reference to music directors in the Broadway agreement, many of the tasks that fall under the heading of music direction are under the union’s protection, including, of course, conducting, playing, and arranging. (The managerial duties of music directors prohibit their coverage under a collective bargaining agreement.) Music directors are both management and rank-and-file, and during the contentious negotiations between employers and the union, music directors often find themselves with one foot on each side of the border.

There is little doubt in the writing of my pro-union bias, and my strong preference for live music performed without undue orchestra reductions. An audience member deserves to hear the energy of a living horn player blowing into a metal mouthpiece or bamboo reed, deserves to hear the sound of the player’s spit, and even deserves the musician’s mistakes, which confirm the sound’s reality, its personality, and its immediacy. Surely the few dollars that might be saved with reduced and synthesized orchestras cannot be worth the loss in humanity.

[Support of live music over the use of recorded or synthesized music in the production of stage musicals has been a policy of AFM for well over a decade, as has the campaign against reducing the size of the orchestra from that for which the score was originally composed. On Rick On Theater, I’ve published several posts on the subject beginning with my editorial post, “The Sound of Muzak” (16 June 2011). Other posts include “‘Big Sound’” by Mary Donovan with Marisa Friedman (27 September 2011), “Making Broadway Babies” (25 November 2013), and “Music Theater Programs for Kids” (18 May 2018).]

In my book, I give strong cautions against nonunion work. These are the least excusable production situations, and least advantageous for a music director. The presenters of these shows egregiously decimate orchestras and casts and employ low-fidelity electronic emulation, yet they bill their productions as “Broadway” shows. Musicians on these productions can be worked at will, going weeks without days off and traveling nightly by bus to the next stop, all at subpar wages. On the road, when not under a union contract, with many or all of their belongings in tow, including perhaps their instruments, exploited musicians have little remedy should their situation become dire. In my opinion, music directors (and all musicians) should avoid these productions entirely, even when looking to build a resumé. Nonetheless, my book addresses music direction situations of all kinds, even those at the amateur or semiprofessional level.

Finding the balance between instruction and information, between depth and comprehensiveness, and between theory and practice were among my many challenges in organizing the wealth of knowledge related to the subject matter. While it’s certainly meant as a textbook for aspiring and curious music directors, my hope is that my book will be read by all those who work with and experience the work of music directors, including orchestra musicians, singers and dancers, directors, producers, and of course the interested, enthusiastic audience member – a typical profile of a Broadway attendee in the 21st century. The material covered within is relevant not just to conductors and pianists but to all musicians and instrumentalists who might someday find themselves in the position of music director, for a singer or club act, for a revue or a benefit concert, for a local gala or an awards ceremony, or even for a Broadway musical.

Many of my colleagues, professional and academic both, encouraged me to write the book, and were supportive throughout the process. I have done my best to include their insightful and inspiring voices in the chorus of approaches, methods, and opinions I present. As I state in the introduction, it is mostly the lack of understanding of music direction that creates space for a study of the subject. A music director is not just an interchangeable part, nor just someone who plays the piano really well, nor just someone who happened to be available when a music director was needed, but rather an individual who can provide a unique and significant creative contribution to a production, as well as absolute musical and accompanimental proficiency. If I have a loftier goal, it is the desire to improve upon the discipline and its execution in both professional and amateur situations. . . What qualifies this author as a resource or an expert? In no way whatsoever do I profess to be the sole or utmost authority. It is not boldness, but rather inquisitiveness that motivates this work.

[Joseph Church (b. 1957), a member of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians since 1983, is best known for his work as music director and supervisor of two groundbreaking Broadway musicals, The Who’s Tommy (music and lyrics by Pete Townshend, book by Pete Townshend and Des McAnuff; St. James Theatre, 22 April 1993-17 June 1995) and The Lion King (music by Elton John, lyrics by Tim Rice, book by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi; New Amsterdam Theatre, 13 November 1997-Present).  

[He’s worked on countless other productions as music director, conductor, keyboardist, and/or arranger, on and Off-Broadway, nationwide, and worldwide, among them, In The Heights (music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, book by Quiara Alegría Hudes; Richard Rodgers Theatre, 9 March 2008-9 January 2011; associate conductor, keyboardist), Sister Act (music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Glenn Slater, book by Cheri Steinkellner and Bill Steinkellner; Broadway Theatre, 20 April 2011-26 August 2012; associate conductor), Les Miserables (music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, English book by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil; Broadway Theatre/Imperial Theatre, 12 March 1987-18 May 2003), Little Shop Of Horrors (music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman, book by Howard Ashman; Virginia Theatre, 2 October 2003-22 August 2004), Randy Newman’s Faust (music, lyrics, and book by Newman; La Jolla Playhouse, 24 September-29 October 1995, music director), and Radio City’s Christmas Spectacular (1988).  Also an active composer, he has written for film, television, the concert stage, and over 30 plays and musicals.] 

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“WHY WAS THIS TREASURE OF MUSICAL THEATER

ALL BUT LOST TO THE AGES?”

by John McWhorter 

[The piece below is the 9 May 2024 John McWhorter newsletter, published for New York Times subscribers only.  It’s not only about musical theater, but also about Black theater—in this instance, a vintage play.  A version of this article appeared in print on 12 May 2024 in the “Sunday Opinion” section of the New York edition, with the headline: “A Lost Treasure of Black Theater.”]

A Columbia University linguist explores how race and language shape our politics and culture.

Three Black book musicals were Broadway hits in the 1970s: “Purlie” in 1970, “The Wiz” in 1975 and “Raisin” in 1973, based on Lorraine Hansberry’s [1930-65] “A Raisin in the Sun.” That was Blacker than Broadway had been since 50 years earlier, when the 1921 hit “Shuffle Along” inaugurated a string of jolly all-Black shows that petered out during the Depression.

“Purlie” and “The Wiz” — along with “Dreamgirls,” which landed just past the decade divider in 1981 — have been well attended since the 1970s. “Purlie” was filmed for a video that got around a lot in the 1980s [it aired on 18 June 1981 on Showtime], and City Center’s Encores series revived it in 2005. “The Wiz” was made into a film that many Black people regard as iconic [released by Universal Pictures and Motown Productions on 24 October 1978], and a revival is playing on Broadway now [Marquis Theatre, 17 April-18 August 2024]. “Dreamgirls” was also successfully filmed, in 2006 [by DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures], was revived on Broadway in 1987 and has had various touring versions; its original cast recording won two Grammys.

“Raisin” was a hit in its day. It is a faithful rendition of the play, the script written by Hansberry’s ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff (with Charlotte Zaltzberg), with music by Judd Woldin and lyrics by Robert Brittan. It ran for over two years [at the 46th Street and Lunt-Fontanne Theatres, 18 October 1973-7 December 1975], won the Tony for best musical and best actress (Virginia Capers) and Theatre World awards for three other leads [Ernestine Jackson, Joe Morton, and Ralph Carter]. Its cast album, too, got a Grammy.

And yet you may never have heard of it. Even if you are old enough to have seen it back in the day, you probably have not thought about it in a very long time and might be hard pressed to hum even a few bars of any of the songs. Musical theater historians tend to blow by it with a couple of respectful sentences. That’s because “Raisin” basically dropped from sight after it closed. It’s had a regional revival or three, but compared with “Purlie,” “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls,” it is a dead property.

I first encountered “Raisin” in 1986, by way of its cast album. I found it weak and wondered how the show had run so long. This was when I was first becoming interested in musicals (a bug that didn’t bite me until the end of my senior year in college). Compared with the Sondheim and Porter and Kander and Ebb stuff I was drinking in, the music of “Raisin” sounded to me like just the R&B on the radio from 10 or 15 years before, except with fewer hooks and stretched beyond what it could support.

Recently, however, a friend asked me what I thought of it, so I pulled out my LP and gave the score a listen. Now I am better equipped to hear what in 1986 sounded too recent in style for me to assess. Now I can see that the “Raisin” score was golden work, and it deserves more attention. (Encores, are you listening?) [Encores! is a concert series presented by New York City Center since 1994, dedicated to reviving neglected musicals.]

Even the overture music is so infectiously gritty — roughly, the “Shaft” soundtrack meets Duke Ellington’s “Far East Suite” — that I suspect the most determined hater of musicals would hearken to it. In “Man Say,” Walter and Ruth’s early disagreement over his ambitions, each time Walter sarcastically imitates Ruth, the arrangement jabs in a high, dissonant sting of a chord from muted brass, perfectly conveying the mocking irony in Walter’s words. The score is full of unexpected touches like that, such as Ruth’s affectionate tribute to her son. An ordinary orchestration would have started it with violins purring long notes and some comments by a solo flute. But in the beginning of “Whose Little Angry Men,” Ruth is accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, which sounds more intimate, vernacular, down to earth — that is, like a mother talking to her son. I might still rate the “Dreamgirls” score higher, but “Raisin” is a close second.

I knew the composer, Judd Woldin, for a bit when I played a role in an early pre-professional tryout of “The Prince and the Pauper” that he scored. He borrowed a musical theater history book of mine and for some reason left a piece of duct tape on the spine. I still have it on my shelves. He was a sterling mensch. I think it was only chance that kept him from making a bigger mark. Had “The Prince and the Pauper” ever made it to Broadway, two of the ballads, “Mother Is Here” and “Kiss Away,” could have become audition staples. His musical adaptation of Langston Hughes’s play “Little Ham,” which did make it to Off Broadway for a bit in 2002 [at the John Houseman Theatre on Theatre Row], had a smart, plangent R&B lament, “Big Ideas,” that has never left my hippocampus.

So why are “Dreamgirls,” “Purlie” and “The Wiz” remembered and revived, while “Raisin” is all but forgotten?

Lack of authenticity is not the reason. Its score was written by white men but so were the scores of “Purlie” and “Dreamgirls.” A lack of flash may have been a factor: “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls” are spectacles, as much about costumes and dancing as how they sound. But “Purlie” is about a few people in a couple of rooms talking about problems, just like “Raisin.”

A likely reason “Raisin” isn’t much revived is a sense that a play as important as Lorraine Hansberry’s should be preserved as it was, that setting it to music is intrusive or at least unnecessary. Ethan Mordden, a historian of musical theater whom I hold in the very highest esteem, wrote: “The songs are finely judged. But they add nothing to what Hansberry wrote. They are what Hansberry wrote; that’s the trouble.”

People said the same about turning “Pygmalion” into “My Fair Lady.” I myself view Hansberry’s play as something close to scripture, but the musical pulls off some things that the play cannot. In the play, the little boy, Travis, can usually make only so much of an impression because the acting ability of kids that age is often limited (although the first person to play that role was Glynn Thurman [sic; Turman, b. 1947], the now celebrated veteran actor, and he was probably excellent). In the musical, however, Travis gets a captivating little song called “Sidewalk Tree” and comes across to us vividly. “He Come Down This Morning” gives us the Younger family singing in church, a central aspect of their weekly existence that the play, without music, can’t deliver. And while “A Raisin in the Sun” unwittingly initiated a genre that George C. Wolfe affectionately dissed, in “The Colored Museum” [1986], as the “[The Last] Mama-on-the-couch play,” “Raisin”’s music for the mother, Lena, — especially the unjustly neglected ballad “Measure the Valleys” — transcends any cliché.

“Raisin” is also special in being about Black people just having conversations. Clearing the table, standing around, answering the doorbell. Most Black musicals are about performers, flash, funk, scarecrows, witches, the Supremes or something like them, silvery gleaming, yellow brick, bluesy numbers that raise the roof. All great. But in the warm duet “Sweet Time,” “Raisin” has what may be the first Broadway song in which a Black couple simply converse with each other rather than proclaim and prance for the audience.

“A Raisin in the Sun” is certainly one of the best plays ever written in the English language. There is a reason it has been revived on Broadway not once but twice in the 21st century alone, as well as once Off Broadway, and is often done by regional and community theater groups. (I think I have seen it seven times.) However, it is increasingly distant from us in time. It was valued in 1959 as giving white theatergoers their first sustained look into Black life, but they have had many more such looks since. Housing segregation still exists, but not in the overt form of the covenants that the play so searingly depicts. Ambivalence about assimilation to white ways persists among many Black people, but the color line is not what it was. Today if Black people assimilate, it’s to a whiteness that is no longer as pure as it was in the 1950s, having been transformed by the “browning” of the culture.

This all means that “A Raisin in the Sun,” mythic though it is, is a look at history. Space opens up for new approaches, including Bruce Norris’s hit 2012 play, “Clybourne Park,” which revisited the mise-en-scène both before the play’s events and 50 years after them. Meanwhile, music has a universalizing essence, leavening characters who might otherwise seem like people of another time and making them more archetypal. “Raisin” complements “Clybourne Park” as an expansion upon the original material, keeping it alive as part of an ongoing artistic conversation.

“Raisin” is a property that audiences of all races can relate to just as they did 51 years ago. Its obscurity is accidental and undeserved, and a theater company that gives it a chance is likely to find itself with a smart, happy hit that sheds new light on a classic work of art.

[John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University.  He is the author of Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever (Avery, 2021) and, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio/Penguin, 2021).

[I saw Raisin in October 1974, one of the first plays I went to after I arrived in New York City that summer after five years in the army, the last 2½ of which I’d spent in West Berlin.  I remember the play quite vividly because of one thing: Virginia Capers’s performance as Lena Younger, the mother

[At that time, I was keeping a mental list of the most outstanding individual performances I’d seen.  I never committed the list to paper, and I stopped keeping it maybe a decade later, but Capers was high on it.  (A few others on the list were James Earl Jones’s Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope, Alec McCowen’s Frederick William Rolfe in Hadrian VII, and Pat Carroll’s Gertrude Stein in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein.)  Like the others’, her performance is indelible.

[I also saw a touring performance of Dreamgirls in 1990, and as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t come close to Raisin in quality.  (I saw The Wiz, too, in its Broadway première.)  While Raisin has stuck with me for 50 years now—I, too, have the cast album—I barely recall Dreamgirls as anything more than a wan facsimile of the Supremes (who were a strong musical presence in my college years).

[One additional personal note: George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum premièred in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at the Crossroads Theatre in 1986, directed by L, Kenneth Richardson, one of the theater’s founders.  (The Crossroads production went on to its New York début at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater (where Wolfe was then artistic director) for 198 performances from November 1986 to July 1987.)

[The Crossroads was founded in 1978 by Ricardo Khan and Lee Richardson, two of my MFA classmates at what is now Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.  It was a small program in those beginning years, 1975-77, so we all knew each other pretty well, but Lee became a friend—Ric was a directing student while Lee and I were actors.

[Crossroads was a big success.  Aside from premièring Wolfe’s play, it was New Jersey’s first professional African-American repertory company, and in 1999, it won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.]

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“EQUAL ACCESSIBILITY FOR DEAF

AND HEARING AUDIENCES? IT’S POSSIBLE!”

by Brian Andrew Cheslik 

[From the American Theatre website of 26 July 2024—it didn’t appear in the print edition of the magazine—comes this article on a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella with a cast of hearing, deaf, and hard-of-hearing actors and a similarly mixed staff and crew.  The author of the piece, Brian Andrew Cheslik, himself deaf, was the director of the production.]

How a new staging of ‘Cinderella’ is bringing Deaf/hearing theatre out of the ‘shadows.’

The beautiful thing about theatre is that there is never just one way to do it. Directors are able to take a piece and stage it in new and creative ways, while holding true to the story and the text. As a director who specializes in Deaf theatre, I look at each script to find ways to increase the accessibility. My goal is always to ensure that the show is accessible to both Deaf and hearing audiences, while finding ways to challenge the traditional theatre norms.

Traditionally, Deaf theatre has been staged with “shadow” actors or interpreters—i.e., every role is double cast with a Deaf actor and a hearing actor. This method has been used for many years. But in my opinion, it is quite oppressive to the Deaf actors. It requires that the Deaf actor share the spotlight with a hearing actor who is only providing the voice, while the Deaf actor is performing the embodied role. This method has often troubled me, because it sends the message that the Deaf actor’s language, American Sign Language (ASL), is not enough. Many companies will say that this bilingual approach is designed to make the show accessible to everyone. While the logic is sound, the result is that Deaf audiences have to focus harder on the signing actor, while having the visual distraction of the hearing actor. While hearing audiences’ attention may be split as well, there is never a danger that they will miss anything.

Take Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, for example. First, some qualifiers: I highly respect Deaf West [Los Angeles] and everyone involved on the show, as many of the Deaf artists involved are close personal friends. I am grateful for the show, as it really helped to put Deaf performers on the map in the industry and brought about an awareness that was needed, and I applaud the theatrical and Broadway community for welcoming this version of the show. I was lucky enough to see it on its closing night on Broadway. [The production ran on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre from 27 September 2015 to 24 January 2016 (23 previews and 135 regular performances).]

All that said, while I was thrilled to see Broadway audiences falling in love with my friends and this production, as a Deaf audience member, I have to say it was not fully accessible to me, as it was designed for a hearing audience. I will admit that I do have the privilege of having some residual hearing left, and my hearing aids to help me experience the music. I saw the original Broadway cast years before and fell in love with the story and the music, so I knew the show by heart. This allowed me to note what was lacking in terms of accessibility.

During intermission, I spotted another audience member I knew from my time as a student at Gallaudet University [prestigious university in Washington, D.C., for the deaf and hard of hearing]. I knew he was profoundly Deaf, with no residual hearing. I asked him if he was enjoying the show so far. His face dropped, as he told me he could not follow the story; it was often hard to see the signing due to the lighting design, and the periodic projection of text on the set was often illegible due to placement and font choice, while the constant dual shadowing of hearing/Deaf casting was distracting.

I have met numerous Deaf people who felt the same way. When I have been contacted by theatre companies that want to do inclusive shows in the mode of Spring Awakening, I have to explain the problems with this model, which is entertaining for hearing audiences but inaccessible to many Deaf audiences. It was time for a change. I had been wanting to push those boundaries of accessibility and try something new. Enter ZACH Theatre in Austin, with an offer to collaborate with my company, Deaf Austin Theatre, on an ASL/English production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, with a new book by Douglas Carter Beane [see my post Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957) (25 April 2013); the Beane script was written for the Broadway production which ran at the Broadway Theatre, 3 March 2013-3 January 2015 (41 previews and 769 regular performances)]. We brought on Michael Baron, artistic director of Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, to co-direct the show with me because of his experiences co-directing with Sandra Mae Frank on a Deaf/hearing version staging of The Music Man at Olney Theatre Center [Olney, Maryland] in 2022.

As a Deaf director myself, I understand how important representation is, and Michael 100 percent agreed. So the first thing that we did was to carefully select a production team that was mixed with both Deaf and hearing professionals. The production team included music director Allen Robertson (hearing), lighting designer Annie Wiegand (Deaf), choreographer Cassie Abate (hearing), assistant choreographer Mervin Primeaux O’Bryant (Deaf), costume designer Jeffrey Meek (hearing), set/projection designer Stephanie Busing (hearing), and a director of ASL, Kailyn Aaron-Lozano (Deaf).

When discussing the storyline and the integration of Deaf culture, I had to decide which characters were Deaf, which were hearing, and which were hard of hearing. We already knew that Ella was going to be Deaf and Prince Topher was hearing. Jean-Michel, Ella’s friend, would be Deaf, while the Prince’s buddies, Sebastian and Lord Pinkleton, would be hearing and Deaf, respectively. Madame, Ella’s stepmother, would be hearing, while stepsister Charlotte would be hearing and stepsister Gabrielle hard of hearing. These distinctions also served the story: Madame, the stepmother, valued speech over any other communication, sharpening her dislike of Ella, who could not hear or speak, in contrast to her hearing and hard-of-hearing daughter.

In casting the show, we put together a group of 15 actors, seven Deaf and eight hearing. Sandra Mae Frank, best known for her work on NBC’s New Amsterdam [2018-22] and Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, stepped into the glass slippers as our Ella. To star opposite Sandra Mae as Prince Topher, we found Trey Harrington, a hearing actor who had been studying ASL for years; we decided to make the Prince a CODA (child of deaf adults).

In our staging of Cinderella—which ran at ZACH in early 2023 and is about to reopen at Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma [30 July-4 August 2024] in Oklahoma City—Michael and I threw out both what is traditional in musical theatre and what is traditional in Deaf theatre. We created a production where accessibility was an even platform for everyone, regardless if you were Deaf, hard of hearing, hearing, fluent in ASL, or completely ASL illiterate. Unlike the “shadowing” practice noted above, the Deaf characters Ella and Marie had no vocal counterpart for most of the show, including during songs like “My Own Little Corner” and “There Is Music in You.” The same was true in reverse for hearing/speaking characters like Madame and Sebastian, who had no ASL counterparts. Prince Topher would shift from speaking to signing to SimCom (simultaneous communication: signing and speaking at the same time), depending on who he was with.

How did these various audiences follow everything that was happening? The key: The entire production would have the English text and lyrics projected as supertitles onto the set throughout the show, so that at any point the text would be readily available when needed.

Throughout, I strove to use Deafness and hearing as part of the story. I wanted to bring in the dynamics of a typical Deaf/hearing relationship, along with all the hurdles and opportunities that presents. During the Prologue, we set the story in a modern library, with an ensemble pantomime that shows a modern-day Deaf girl bumping into a hearing boy. He tries to communicate with her but learns from the librarian that she is Deaf, so he finds an ASL dictionary and learns how to sign, “My name is . . .” But when he tries to communicate with her, he loses his nerve and runs off. Dejected, our modern-day Deaf girl dives into her favorite fable: Cinderella. As she opens the book, the story comes to life and the stage transforms.

Bookending this opening, at the finale we bring back our modern-day couple and see that he’s finally built up the nerve to talk to the beautiful Deaf girl and introduce himself, as the final notes of the music sound out, leading to a conclusion of hope and love for the young couple.

Signing, Not Singing

To spotlight the Deaf actors portraying characters we identified as Deaf, we wanted to honor their authentic language, which meant not adding voicing for their characters. So during Ella’s solo of “My Own Little Corner,” Sandra Mae Frank signs the song along with the music, but no vocals are heard. As a Deaf person, the first time I saw Sandra Mae signing the song along with the music, it gave me goosebumps because it was so empowering to see.

This inspired us to add more ASL songs without voicing, including songs between Ella and Topher, because it makes sense that he would want to communicate with her in her own language. Songs like “Ten Minutes Ago” and “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful” are performed in ASL, English voicing, and SimCom at moments that align with the progression of Ella and Topher’s relationship.

During ensemble songs like “The Prince Is Giving a Ball/Now Is the Time” and group songs like “When You’re Driving Through the Moonlight/A Lovely Night,” vocals of the lyrics are heard, but the singers are hidden among the ensemble or offstage so as not to distract from what was happening. Gabrielle, the hard-of-hearing stepsister, SimComs whenever Madame was around, but when it is just Ella and Gabrielle, they use ASL only, solidifying their relationship. This growing sisterhood is even more prominent in the reprise of “A Lovely Night.”

This device works the other way too: When Prince Topher is speaking with his right-hand man, Sebastian, with no other Deaf characters onstage, they speak only. But if Lord Pinkleton is around, the Prince uses SimCom so that Pinkleton is included in the conversation. For Pinkleton’s song, “The Prince Is Giving a Ball,” Sebastian voices the song while Pinkleton signs it. The Prince, meanwhile, progresses in his relationship with Ella, from SimCom to full signing with no voice. This corresponds with the natural development of a hearing person’s relationship with a Deaf person.

As Madame is one of the more oppressive characters, we wanted to make it clear that she does not like sign language and only values spoken language. This is a form of audism: i.e., the belief that the ability to hear makes you better than someone who cannot. So Madame crudely gestures with Ella and treats her as ignorant. Madame disapproves of Gabrielle’s relationship with Jean-Michel because he is Deaf and cannot speak.

Supertitles to the Rescue

Co-director Michael Baron was on board with the goal of full accessibility with the production, and also wanted to build on what learned from his experience with The Music Man, based on audience feedback regarding the placement of the supertitles.

Supertitles are captioning projected onto the set and ingrained within the set design. Captions, by contrast, are not fully accessible, because they are often placed in obscure locations, forcing Deaf audience members to look away from the stage/show in order to read the text. We wanted to ensure that the supertitles had a central home onstage, while also being free to move if the scenic action is happening stage right or stage left. Stephanie Busing, our set designer, was completely on board and integrated these surfaces into her design, while also taking on the role of projection/supertitle designer. This allowed for a streamlined vision of cohesion between the physical set and the projections.

The supertitles are projected onto a large framed canvas descended from the fly system in the stage center position. But if Cinderella’s house happens to move far stage left or right, the supertitles are projected on the archway representing her house. The goal is to ensure that the text and the actors are all within the audience’s field of vision at all times throughout the show.

Some people have asked me why we have songs and dialogue without voicing, and my response to that is . . . why not? Why does everything have to be voiced? If Deaf audiences are always having to determine which mode of accessibility they will take advantage of during a show (ASL interpreters or captions), then why can’t hearing audiences also adapt? With this staging, everyone has to do a bit of work, turning to the supertitles when the text onstage is not accessible to them. No person has an advantage over the other—unless you are a hearing person who is fluent in ASL. Then you have the best of both worlds.

Honestly, while I’m very proud of what we’ve done with Cinderella, this should not be a rare or special occasion. Deaf actors should be considered, and supertitles included, in every production. That way Deaf audiences would not be limited to booking tickets on specific nights, but have the equitable option of choosing any night to attend the show.

This new wave of accessible theatre can be implemented in any venue across the U.S. and beyond. Want to see how it is done? Cinderella is playing at Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma City, July 30-Aug. 4 [2024].

[Dr. Brian Andrew Cheslik is the managing artistic director of Deaf Austin Theatre and the program director for the American Sign Language & Interpretation program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley [multiple campuses], as well as a Certified Deaf Interpreter.

[I referred to a post on R&H’s Cinderella above, with an embedded link.  That post is founded on my recollection of watching the original, live broadcast of the television version of the musical in 1957.  It starred a young British actress named Julie Andrews, who’d been making a splash on Broadway in My Fair Lady, from which she’d taken a break to do the only musical Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote for TV.  

[I was 10 and was already an incipient theater buff, especially musicals—I’d seen several shows in Washington, D.C., my hometown, and in New York City, I’d been to Fiorello! and MFL already.  There were many more to come—as I relate in my post “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010).  Needless to add, I loved that Cinderella, and a day or so later, my dad came home with the cast album, a monaural vinyl LP—which I still have.]

"'Wicked' costume designer Paul Tazewell on the vision behind his Oscar-nominated work

by Jeffrey Brown and Simon Epstein 

[The PBS News Hour segment on Oscar-nominated Wicked costume designer Paul Tazewell aired on 3 February 2025, part of News Hour’s regular arts feature “CANVAS.”  (PBS warns readers, “Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy.  They may contain errors.”  I do my best to correct these as I identify them, based on reviewing the audio recording of the segment.)]

“Wicked” is the latest version of an enduring American fairy tale. Among its 10 Oscar nominations, one is for costume designer Paul Tazewell. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown starts our coverage of Oscar nominees this year with this report for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Geoff Bennett, Co-Anchor of PBS News Hour: The movie version of the hit [stage] musical “Wicked” soared at the box office this winter, and among its 10 nominations, one is for costume designer Paul Tazewell [b. 1964; pronounced TAZZ-well]. [This year’s Academy Awards ceremony will be televised on 2 March.]

[The stage musical Wicked, a loose adaptation of the 1995 Gregory Maguire (b. 1954) novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which in turn is based on L. Frank Baum’s (1856-1919) 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaptation, was produced by Universal Stage Productions. 

[After an extensive workshop development in New York City and Los Angeles between 2000 and 2003, the show, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (b. 1948) and a book by Winnie Holzman (b. 1954), began previews for try-outs at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre on 28 May 2003, directed by Joe Mantello and choreographed by Wayne Cilento, with the production’s set and visual style by Eugene Lee (1939-2023; see “Making a Scene, Onstage and Off” by Sandy Keenan, in “Two (Back) Stage Pros,” 30 June 2014). The try-out opened on 10 June and closed on 29 June.

[After extensive revising, Wicked began previews at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre on 8 October 2003, making its official première on 30 October. It’s still running at the same theater after 25 previews and 8,249 performances (as of 2 February 2025; the show suspended performances due to the COVID-19 pandemic from 12 March 2020 to 14 September 2021), currently the fourth longest-running Broadway production.

[At the 2004 Tony Awards, Wicked won three awards and was nominated for seven others, including Best Musical. The production also won six 2004 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding New Musical, and four additional nominations.]

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown starts our coverage of Oscar nominees this year with this report. It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s a visually spectacular world, intended to feel both familiar and fresh.

Ariana Grande, Actress (as “Galinda/Glinda” in a movie clip): The Wicked Witch of the West is dead.

(Cheering)

[The 2024 film adaptation of Wicked (titled on screen as Wicked: Part I) was produced by Universal Pictures and Marc Platt Productions (both producers of the stage musical) and released on 22 November 2024 in the United States, after premièring in Sydney, Australia, on 3 November. The current film covers only act 1 of the stage musical; the second part, Wicked: For Good, is scheduled for release on 21 November 2025.

[Directed by Jon M. Chu and written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, the film received 10 nominations for the 97th Academy Awards, including, in addition to Tazewell’s Best Costume Design recognition, Best Picture, Best Actress for Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana Grande as Galinda/Glinda. The film has received numerous other awards and nominations.

[As of 4 February 2025, Wicked has grossed $471.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $251.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $722.2 million. That makes it the third highest-grossing film of 2024 in the United States, and the sixth highest-grossing film of 2024 worldwide. It’s also the all-time highest-grossing movie based on a Broadway play.]

Jeffrey Brown: For costume designer Paul Tazewell, “Wicked” is an enormous canvas of characters and colors, materials in motion, and it’s the biggest thing he’s ever been involved in.

Paul Tazewell, Costume Designer: It’s a blast, one, and it is my life. It is the way that I communicate, I mean, as a painter would. It is my language, and it is my means of being creative.

Jeffrey Brown: We met recently at Steiner Studios, a film production complex in Brooklyn, New York. And he told us that, for all the huge scale, the key is still through his designs and working with director Jon Chu [b. 1979] and actors, most of all Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, to help create characters, not only their outer clothing, but their inner emotional life.

Paul Tazewell: My focus is who these characters are and how they dress themselves and how to create a world that makes sense within itself and provides a magical environment for this story to exist within.

I mean, so I’m stepping into their shoes. If I’m working adjacent to . . .

Jeffrey Brown: Actually, they’re stepping into your shoes.

Paul Tazewell: Well, there is that. Both.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: When it comes to American cultural history, these are very big shoes to fill, beginning with the books, the first in 1900 by L. Frank Baum. [Baum went on to write thirteen more novels based on the places and people of the Land of Oz between 1910 and 1920, as well as a spin-off series of six short stories written for young children (1913/1914.]

Judy Garland, Actress (as “Dorothy” in a clip): But, if you please, what are Munchkins?

Jeffrey Brown: The classic 1939 film that’s taken generations over the rainbow.

[The Wizard of Oz (1939) was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and directed by Victor Fleming (1889-1949); Noel Langley (1911-80), Florence Ryerson (1892-1965), and Edgar Allan Woolf (1881-1943) are credited with the screenplay, though other, uncredited writers contributed to the script. The music was composed by Harold Arlen (1905-86) and adapted by Herbert Stothart (1885-1946), with lyrics by Edgar “Yip” Harburg (1896-1981).

[The classic movie fantasy famously starred Judy Garland (Dorothy), Frank Morgan (the Wizard), Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow), Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), Jack Haley (the Tin Man), Billie Burke (Glinda), and Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West [Elphaba in Wicked]).

[The Wizard of Oz was nominated for five Academy Awards in 1940, including Best Picture, winning Best Original Song for “Over the Rainbow” by Arlen and Harburg and Best Original Score for Herbert Stothart; an honorary Academy Juvenile Award was presented to Judy Garland (who was just 16 when she made The Wizard of Oz). The Library of Congress deems The Wizard of Oz the most-watched movie of all time.]

Michael Jackson, Actor (as “Scarecrow” in a clip): Okay, Dorothy and Toto, seems like we’re gonna have to find our own yellow brick road.

Jeffrey Brown: And “The Wiz,” a 1970s retelling on stage and film through the contemporary Black experience.

[The film version of The Wiz was adapted from the all-African American Broadway musical that ran at the Majestic Theatre from 5 January 1975 to 25 May 1977 and the at the Broadway Theatre from 25 May 1977 to 28 January 1979, for 15 previews and 1,672 regular performances.  (The play had tried out in 1974 in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.)

[After recasting and bringing in a new director, the première was staged by Geoffrey Holder (who also designed the costumes) and choreographed by George Faison. The music was composed by Charlie Smalls, who also wrote the lyrics; the book was by William F. Brown.

[The first stage production received eight 1975 Tony nominations and won seven, including Best Musical, Best Original Score (Smalls), Best Choreography, and Best Direction of a Musical. (The musical was revived on Broadway twice, in 1974 and 2024. On 3 December 2015, The Wiz Live!, which combined aspects of the Broadway play and its 1978 film adaptation [see below], was aired on NBC as a live television special.)

[The film adaptation was produced by Universal Pictures and Motown Productions and directed by Sidney Lumet from a screenplay by Joel Schumacher, who reworked the story from William F. Brown’s Broadway book. Quincy Jones supervised the adaptation of songs by Charlie Smalls and Luther Vandross, and wrote new ones with the songwriting team Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson.

[The star-studded cast included Diana Ross (Dorothy), Michael Jackson (Scarecrow; his feature film début), Nipsey Russell (Tinman), Ted Ross (Cowardly Lion), Mabel King (Evillene, The Wicked Witch of the West), Lena Horne (Glinda, The Good Witch of the South), and Richard Pryor (The Wiz).

[The film was released on 24 October 1978 in New York to critical and commercial failure. The Wiz received largely negative reviews, with many reviewers comparing the film unfavorably to the Broadway version. In recent years, criticism has become more favorable, and the movie’s become a cult classic among fans of Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and the Oz books.]

Starting in 1995, a new series of books by Gregory Maguire conjured a kind of backstory and revisionist history. It turns out we didn’t really know the Wicked Witch, or Elphaba, after all.

That spawned the amazingly successful Broadway musical running 21 years and counting and now the new film.

Paul Tazewell: I acknowledge all of those as I’m designing it, but with the intent of creating new images, new icons, new ways of seeing who these characters are, and a new way of telling the story. And I delight in it.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, “The Wiz” was the first show Tazewell designed. He also acted in it as a high school student in Akron, Ohio, where his mother taught him to sew. [Tazewell is a 1982 Buchtel High School graduate; he designed the costumes and played The Wiz in the production during his junior year, when he was 16.]

He went on to a hugely successful career in theater design, notably including “Hamilton,” for which he won a Tony and, most recently, “Suffs,” which brought another Tony nomination. He won a television Emmy for NBC’s 2015 “The Wiz Live” and the first Oscar nomination for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film version of “West Side Story.”

[Hamilton, with book, music, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, opened at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre on 6 August 2015 and is still running after 26 previews and 3,317 regular performances (as of 2 February 2025). Shaina Taub’s (book, music, and lyrics) Suffs ran at the Music Box Theatre from 18 April 2024 to 5 January 2025 (24 previews and 301 regular performances).

[Spielberg’s film remake of West Side Story (Tony Kushner, screenplay; Arthur Laurents, original stage book), produced by 20th Century Studios, Amblin Entertainment, and TSG Entertainment, was released in the United States on 29 November 2021. (The film is an adaptation of the 1957 stage musical [conceived by Jerome Robbins, book by Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; directed by Robbins; choreographed by Robbins and Peter Gennaro], itself inspired by William Shakespeare’s 1597 play Romeo and Juliet.)]

So, you’re grabbing images just on the Internet, whatever?

Paul Tazewell: That’s right, that viscerally speak to me. They could be abstract. They could be random. But, collectively, they start to create a world.

Jeffrey Brown: For “Wicked,” Tazewell has taken past icons, the witch’s hat, for example, and made them his own. He created a mash-up of old and new fashions, looked to the art of one of history’s greatest graphic artists, M. C. Escher [Dutch graphic artist whose work features, among other phenomena, impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, and tessellations; 1898-1972], and incorporated patterns in nature, including the swirl of the tornado or twister so indelible in the 1939 film.

He showed me an early plastic 3-D model of a crystal slipper made for one of the characters, the swirl pattern appearing throughout. It’s a detail that required weeks for Tazewell and his team to experiment with, design, and make.

I, as the viewer, seeing the film, I wouldn’t know all that, right?

Paul Tazewell: Right. And my hope is that — and that was for all of the details of Oz and what we were creating for “Wicked,” was that it becomes immersive, that you believe it so much that you’re drawn into this world. And there’s a suspension of disbelief.

Jeffrey Brown: Tazewell says he’s always bringing his own personal connections to the story and characters he’s working on.

He brought up the example of Elphaba, an outsider in Munchkinland, a different color from the rest, uncertain of her own place, and shunned by others.

Paul Tazewell: What I bring to the event is my own life experience and how I walk through life as well.

I have a direct emotional relationship to that, being a Black man walking through life in America. So, decisions . . .

Jeffrey Brown: So, you connect in that sense.

Paul Tazewell: Absolutely. So, decisions around how she emotionally presents herself, what her intention is, I have to build some kind of connection in order to have an honest take on what a character might wear.

Jeffrey Brown: There’s also another kind of history at stake in Tazewell’s Oscar nomination. In 2019, Ruth Carter became the first Black costume designer to win an Oscar for her work in “Black Panther.” Tazewell would be the first Black man to win.

Paul Tazewell: The number of people of color that I experienced coming up in this business, there were just . . .

Jeffrey Brown: Was minimal.

Paul Tazewell: There were just very few, and which is why it’s so important for me to be a face that is visible and out there for other people to see me doing it.

Jeffrey Brown: Tazewell is also seeking to make a case for the role of the costume designer more broadly, something he says is often not well understood and has implications for such things as pay equity within his industry.

Paul Tazewell: What has become more of a priority is to be expansive in a way that is not only identified as a costume designer, but is identified as a creative artist.

And I have tried to turn up the volume on indeed what it is that we do, and the power that we have as costume designers to create character. Our contribution is huge towards that.

Jeffrey Brown: Paul Tazewell vies for an Oscar, one of 10 nominations overall for “Wicked,” on March 2.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Brooklyn, New York.

Geoff Bennett: And Paul Tazewell is paying it forward. He established a scholarship at his alma mater for design students, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. [Tazewell got a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in costume design from NCSA in 1986. He went on to get a Master of Fine Arts in design for stage and film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1989.]

Amna Nawaz, Co-Anchor of PBS News Hour: It’s amazing, amazing work, and we wish him well at the Oscars.

(Laughter)

Geoff Bennett: That’s right.

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  

[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Simon Epstein is a multiple Emmy Award-winning producer.  Simon’s long-form productions include three historical retrospectives on the District of Columbia for public television, and the public affairs specials American War Generals, and “The Last Days of Osama bin Laden” for the National Geographic Channel.  Simon’s work also appears nationally on Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, A&E, and the History Channel, as well as a number of international broadcast outlets.]

Theater Odds & Ends (continued)

 

[Continuing with the theme of “Odds & Ends,” this time returning to short articles on theater, I have collected four pieces from American Theatre.  Some of the articles were published in the print edition of AT, but others appeared only on the magazine’s website.] 

“MAKING A MUSICAL ‘PRELUDE TO A KISS’”

by Ashley Lee 

[Some readers will remember the 1988 musical Prelude to a Kiss and its successful 1990-91 Broadway run.  Now playwright Craig Lucas has musicalized it and it’s had it world première in Orange County, California, in the theater which 37 years ago commissioned the play and débuted it.

[American Theatre of 1 May 2024, in a feature called “On the Scene,” looks at how Lucas turned the straight play into a musical—and how he felt about doing so.]

Craig Lucas’s fanciful, freighted romance returns to the theatre that commissioned it, South Coast Repertory, this time with songs attached.

In 1988, South Coast Repertory [Costa Mesa, California] debuted a play they’d commissioned, Craig Lucas’s [b. 1951] Prelude to a Kiss, in which a newlywed couple’s love is tested when the young bride suddenly swaps bodies with a mysterious old man. The play went on to become an Off-Broadway and Broadway hit, a Tony nominee for Best Play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a popular regional theatre staple, and the source of a film adaptation with Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan [Twentieth Century Fox, 1992; directed by Norman René].

[The play Prelude to a Kiss premièred on 15 January-18 February 1988 at SCR directed by Norman René with Lisa Zane as Rita Boyle and Mark Arnott as Peter Hoskins. The script and staging were revised and the play reopened Off-Broadway at New York City’s Circle Repertory Company on 14 March 1990, with René directing Alec Baldwin and Mary-Louise Parker in the lead roles. 

[The Off-Broadway production ran until 19 April 1990 for 57 performances (including previews), winning three 1990 Obie Awards (Best New American Play, Direction, and Performance – Alec Baldwin), and a 1990 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play.

[Prelude transferred to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre, opening on 1 May 1990 and running until 19 May 1991 (440 regular performances), garnering nominations for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, two 1990 Tony Awards (Best Play and Best Actress in a Play – Mary-Louise Parker), and three 1990 Drama Desk Awards (Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Actress in a Play – Parker, and Outstanding Director of a Play). René again directed, but Timothy Hutton replaced Baldwin as Peter.

[The play was revived on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2007 (8 March-29 April) at the American Airlines Theatre for 23 previews and 61 regular performances.]

Now, more than 35 years later, this 70-minute adult fairy tale is back at its original Orange County theatre—this time as a two-hour musical.

While plenty of playwrights have transformed their own plays into musicals (Kimberly Akimbo [Booth Theatre; 10 November 2022-28 April 2024], Purlie! [Broadway Theatre; 15 March 1970-6 November 1971]), and while Lucas has written his share of books for musicals (including the recent Days of Wine and Roses [Studio 54; 28 January-31 March 2024]), he admitted in a recent interview that this Prelude musical wasn’t his idea. Given that the seemingly whimsical fairy tale plot of the play, written at the height of the AIDS crisis [1981-95], was in fact inspired by Lucas’s grief as he watched a loved one become physically unrecognizable in what seemed like the span of an instant, he was hardly eager to go there again.

“I just wasn’t sure I wanted to revisit those years—they were extraordinarily horrible, most of my world was decimated, and the majority of my closest allies, friends, and loved ones were killed,” Lucas recalled. “The idea of going back and trying to retell a story that looked at mortality and catastrophic loss, even in terms of a romance, is hard. There had to be something actually worth diving back into, and the music had to bring out aspects of the material that the play didn’t dig into.”

Lucas was approached by lyricist Sean Hartley about the possibility of a musical adaptation 10 years ago, and was won over when he heard the first song, written by Hartley and composer-lyricist Daniel Messé.

For his part, Messé thinks that the story’s combination of realism and fantasy makes it “a perfect choice for a musical. The play is grounded in reality, but there’s this element of magic that anyone who’s been in love would recognize, where the entire world feels full of possibility. That’s exactly what you want in a musical—a suspension of disbelief, because people are singing, and a heightened sense of emotion that’s grounded in characters that feel very real.”

Now in its world premiere through May 4 [opened 5 April 2024] as part of South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival [3-5 May 2024], this Prelude resets the story in the present, where the character Peter, who initially worked in publishing, now works in data analytics. [The original non-musical was set in the 1980s, the period in which Lucas wrote it. The 2007 Broadway revival was set in that “present.”]

“I asked Craig about the new time period, and he said that true love in a technological world is worth fighting for, even more than before,” said Chris McCarrell, who plays the cautious, solitary Peter. “It’s interesting to think about how social media and cell phones affect this love story, and what it means to really know the person you believe is meant for you.

As in the original, Rita is still a bartender and graphic designer—and a romantic fatalist. Said Hannah Corneau, who plays, her, “Rita is very fearful and riddled with anxiety about the present world, so it’s hard for her to see life as an opportunity to seize.”

When Mary-Louise Parker played Rita in the 1990 Broadway production, Lucas recalled, “People thought Rita was a charming kook because she was so afraid of the world being destroyed. Flash forward to 2024, Rita doesn’t seem crazy at all. She seems correctly alarmed by the state of the world—she is the most sane person in the play!”

The musical also expands on the events leading up to that fateful kiss, because, as Lucas admitted, in the play Peter and Rita “fall in love very quickly, and they actually get married much too quickly.” Peter and Rita’s meet-cute conversations and wedding-day encouragements are now set to a whimsical, piano-driven score, though Peter’s first meeting with Rita’s parents gets a particularly comical banjo number.

Their scenes also feature an ensemble that sweeps across the stage like a chorus of fates, pushing them together and even pulling them apart at times. “Anyone who has been in a relationship knows it isn’t just built,” said Lucas. “Even without an illness or the kind of terror Rita has, relationships are really hard and take work. The ensemble says: We’re gonna test these people, we’re gonna put them through the wringer to learn what love really costs. What are you willing to do for your love, even if you don’t know what it’ll cost you yet?”

After an anonymous old man ascends from the audience to the stage and shares a kiss with the bride, their switched souls are represented musically: Rita, who had been crooning moody contemporary ballads, suddenly breaks out into a toe-tapping tune packed with jokes and optimistic truisms. The songs of the aged stranger—whose name, we learn, is Julius, and is played by Jonathan Gillard Daly—“have a much more classic feel,” said Messé. “His musical vocabulary is much more old-fashioned.”

One number, “The Man He Used to Be,” called for particular care, as Julius’s daughter mourns the father she knew before the onset of various health problems, and the relationship they shared that no longer exists. “That wasn’t really explored in the play to the degree that you can do with a song,” said Lucas. “It’s a look at mortality in a way that young people don’t like to and don’t want to do. It’s wonderful that [Hartley and Messé] were able to dramatize that, especially since it’s something audiences might be able to relate to on a personal level.”

While much has been added to Prelude to a Kiss for this musical adaptation, some things have been trimmed—like a bit in which the male characters attempt to secure Rita in order to reverse the body swap. As Lucas put it, “In 2024, nobody wants to see two guys with rope getting ready to tie up a woman—it’s sort of obnoxious, and I think that the humor back then was slightly too easy.”

The playwright continued: “I’m generally not someone who likes to revisit what I’ve done before, and it’s very hard for me to pull apart something I made before and rethink it,” he continued. “But it’s fun to be in a room with artists of a new generation, talking about expectations and awareness. And what I’ve learned over the years is, you’d be an idiot not to listen.”

Echoing some of the themes that the show brings to light, Lucas admitted, “That’s why people get annoyed with people of a certain age. They dig their heels in, they refuse to listen, and they refuse to grow.”

[Ashley Lee (she/her) is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television, and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen.] 

*  *  *  *

“5 THINGS THEATRE CRITICISM TAUGHT ME ABOUT PLAYWRITING”

by Kelundra Smith 

[In American Theatre of 31 July 2024, in a “First Person” feature, managing editor Kelundra Smith, who’s done a gig or two as a freelance theater reviewer, looks at what she learned about playwriting from writing reviews.  Her new play, The Wash, is in the midst of its “rolling première as you read this, so if there’s anything to gain as a dramatist from writing reviews, she’s someone who can find it.]

Our managing editor reflects on how the skills she picked up doing arts journalism inform her approach to storytelling in another medium.

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic,” said Oscar Wilde.

For the better part of the last decade, I was a freelance theatre critic in Atlanta. I spent many nights and weekends in the aisle seat watching stories unfold onstage and then participating in musings about what I’d seen with strangers.

That decade also highlighted for me the stories I wasn’t seeing: about poor people, people of color, people living with disabilities, or transgender or nonbinary folks.

That is part of what motivated me to write The Wash, about the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881. During this important but often overlooked event in American history, Black laundresses in Atlanta refused to wash clothes until they were granted the power to set their own rates and control their wages. They faced resistance from their customers, the government, and within their own ranks. But they ultimately prevailed, growing from a few dozen women on strike to more than 3,000 in less than three weeks.

My other motivation to write The Wash, which took me six years on and off (with a lot of time off) to finish, is that I have often rolled my eyes at the tendency of theatres to depict Black life as past life. But for me this story resonates so much with the present, speaking to the labor movements currently gathering strength in the auto, service, and theatre industries. (The Wash is currently in the midst of an eight-week run in Atlanta, co-produced by Synchronicity Theatre [7-30 June 2024] and Impact Theatre [11-18 July 2024]. In 2025, the play will be at the Black Rep in St. Louis, March 12-30, 2025, and co-produced by Perceptions Theatre [Chicago; Winter 2025] and Prop Thtr, October 2025.)

[The Wash is part of the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere program. Along with the performance dates listed above, there’s also been a RWP at the Impact Theatre at the Academy in Hapeville, Georgia, 10-28 July 2024.]

Stepping from critic to playwright has been an exhilarating and terrifying experience. I was only half-joking with a mentor when I said that if the play was bad I’d have to move to a different state and live in anonymity. In all seriousness, the process of developing this world premiere play has shown me that playwrights and critics have more in common than they think. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from about playwriting from theatre criticism (and vice versa):

1. You have to have a strong pitch. In journalism, whenever a writer pitches an editor, the editor usually asks, what’s the angle—what’s the hook? Why this story now? I’ve heard that Tarell Alvin McCraney [see posts on Rick On Theater: “Choir Boy (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)” (24 January 2015) and “‘Connoisseur of Grief’” by Carvell Wallace (4 February 2019)] often asked students at Yale Drama School, why is this a play? When it came to The Wash, I knew that I could never get an assignment from a daily paper to write an article connecting a largely forgotten labor strike to labor movements of today while also putting the world of 1881 in its proper context. The story needed more space; it needed the intimacy and immediacy of theatre. I can summarize the play in an elevator, but I’m hoping the experience of the play stays with people far longer. 

2. People have to care about who the characters are before they care about what they do. As someone whose journalism education was primarily in magazines, I developed the habit of writing longform pieces early. But as the speed of information has increased rapidly in the last decade, many news outlets have stopped publishing long pieces. These days, reviews are 400-600 words if you’re lucky. Still, I’ve learned that people will read long if the characters are compelling. The same is true for theatre and other media. TV creator Shonda Rhimes [member of Television Hall of Fame; showrunner of Grey’s Anatomy (2005-present), its spin-off Private Practice (2007-13), and Scandal (2012-18)] often talks about starting with characters who make strong choices. If you can make people fall in love with a person, they’ll read (or watch) till the end.

3. The story you start out telling and the one you end up telling may not be the same. The best storytellers are the curious ones. I can’t tell you how many times I went into an interview or a review expecting one thing and leaving with something altogether different. New discoveries are a part of the joy of connecting through stories. When I started writing The Wash, I resisted it being an ensemble piece, but it is one. I think playwrights especially are best served when they focus on the writing and let the story be what it’s going to be.

4. Everything is better with editors. Dramaturgs never get the credit they deserve, so let me shout out the teams at Essential Theatre and Hush Harbor Lab [both in Atlanta] as well as my dramaturg for The Wash, Antonia McCain, for helping me make the 110-page article I started out with into 94-page script. The director Brenda Porter and producers at Synchronicity Theatre challenged me repeatedly to answer the question, what are you trying to convey here? I’ve noticed that playwrights like Lucas Hnath give you all the mitigating circumstances in the first 10 pages, then we spend the remaining time untangling them. The same is true for journalists: Your first two paragraphs have to tell people the whole point. You can’t meander or be too precious about the words. Editors (and dramaturgs) are there to help you see that.

5. The community you build will be the audience you have. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve heard theatre leaders make is to think they’re competing with Netflix. In my opinion, the real competition for live theatre audiences is third places: coffee shops, bars, local hangs, parks, houses of worship, and other spaces where people feel a sense of home and community. Earlier in my career, I did marketing and community engagement for nonprofit theatres, and I figured out quickly that the show has to be more than a show to really engage a community, and that engagement has to be constant. I carried that knowledge into my journalism career, where I didn’t just go see shows I was reviewing; I saw as much as I could.

For The Wash, it was important for me to collaborate with theatres that understand the importance of community engagement. Synchronicity Theatre does pay-what-you-can performances every Wednesday. Impact Theatre offers a senior matinee as well as a free event in their neighborhood that people can attend whether they’re seeing the show or not. In addition, for The Wash, our sound designer Kacie Willis Lauders tapped into her network to host entrepreneur nights for folks to meetup before the show.

During one pay-what-you-can performance, we donated a portion of ticket sales to the Tiny Blessings Foundation, a local nonprofit that provides care packages to new mothers who are unhoused. We also hosted an event called Indigo Night, where we invited local, up-and-coming chefs to sell food in the lobby an hour before the show. They didn’t have to pay a tabling fee or share profit with the theatre, and audience members didn’t have to think about dinner.

All of these events were successful because we had already built the relationships to make them so. When you show people that you’re invested in their thriving, they’ll reciprocate and become invested in yours. That’s a lesson I take with me into all my work, on the page or the stage.

[Kelundra Smith is a playwright, theater reviewer, and journalist who’s worked in marketing and community engagement for theaters.  She’s written for the New York Times, Broadway World, the Bitter Southerner, Atlanta magazine, and is a writer at Emory University.  She’s the Theatre Communication’s Group’s publications director, guiding strategy for TCG Books, ARTSEARCH, and American Theatre magazine.  Smith comes from the Atlanta metro area.] 

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“PERFECT PROP PIE”

By Kelundra Smith 

[It seems the 18-year-old Broadway hit Waitress is having a revival across the country—and if there’s a Waitress, there’s gotta be pies!  It hasn’t escaped notice that the musical depends a lot of the sight and smell of a whole lotta different pies.  (If you don’t know that already, have a look back at Michael Paulson’s 2016 New York Times report “Sounds Like a Musical, Smells Like Pie” (27 April)—or, as it’s headlined on the website: “Fresh-Baked Pie Has Aromatic Role in ‘Waitress’ Musical.”

[All those performances of life in Joe's Pie Diner, though, require the prop folks at the theaters to make a lot of pies—some the actors have to eat and some are just for show.  Kelundra Smith's back, then, with a report from the Fall 2024 issue of American Theatre (posted online on 11 September 2024) from the “Previews” feature.  I say she’s pulled out a plumb!]

What theatres are cooking up for ‘Waitress,’ the Sara Bareilles/Jessie Nelson musical that’s popping up at several theatres in the coming season.

The musical Waitress charmed Broadway audiences in its 2016-21 run (following its 2015 premiere at American Repertory Theater). Now regional theatres are dipping their spoons for a taste. The story of Jenna, a young woman stuck in a bad marriage and a dead-end job at a small-town diner who finds solace in baking, started as an independent film starring Keri Russell and eventually made its way to the stage with catchy tunes by Grammy winner Sara Bareilles. As the 2024-25 season unfolds, 10 theatres are producing the endearing musical, which comes with the creative challenge and opportunity of depicting more than two dozen prop pies onstage, plus some edible ones.

[Waitress is a musical with music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles and a book by Jessie Nelson, based on the 2007 film (produced by Night & Day Pictures; distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures). The musical tried out at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August 2015 and then premiered at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway 24 April 2016 and running till 5 January 2020 (33 previews and 1,544 regular performances).  Diane Paulus directed, and the production was nominated for four 2016 Tony Award (Best Musical, Best Original Score Written for the Theatre – music and lyrics by Bareilles, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical – Jessie Mueller, Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical – Christopher Fitzgerald).

[The show returned to the Broadway boards from 2 September-20 December 2021 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for an additional 122 performances.]

At Nashville Repertory Theatre in Tennessee, where Waitress runs Sept. 13-22 [2024], prop designer Marlee Shelton and technical director/scenic designer Gary Hoff have been experimenting with insulation, air-dried clay, and foam to capture the texture of the stage pies. Shelton said she’s also been playing with shredded cork for savory pie filling and sawdust for coconut shavings. Added Hoff, “The really fun thing about making fake food is that you get to look at your world in a different way.”

Foam is also on the menu at Northern Stage in White River Junction, Vt., where properties manager Ellen Houlden is using joint compound to depict whipped cream spirals and gluing plastic fruit onto the surface. (The musical will hit the stage there March 12-April 13, 2025.) Though making fake food is one of Houlden’s favorite things to do, sometimes real food is the most economical option. “For Sweat [2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner by Lynn Nottage] I had to make a full cake for every single performance because of the scene where one of the characters takes a fistful of cake,” she recalled. “It made me feel like I connected with the cast in a different way.”

At Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville, Ga., where Waitress will be onstage May 22-June 22, 2025, production manager Katie Chambers and props designer Kristin Talley are also turning to insulating foam for the prop pies. But many of their conversations have been about consumables. For other shows, Chambers said she used whipped cream without filling so actors could eat quickly, then belt out a song. Another time she used instant mashed potatoes for cupcake frosting because the actors didn’t want to eat sweets.

No matter the ingredients, all the designers agree that the most important thing is to make audiences feel like they’re in the diner with Jenna and on the journey with her.

“You can always get yourself out and make a different decision,” Houlden said of the show’s takeaway.

“Sometimes we forget that and we get stuck in our routine. People should feel encouraged to follow their dreams and make big moves.” 

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“ANN RONELL: COUNT HER IN”

by Jennifer Ashley Tepper 

[If theater history interests you, this excerpt from a new book by Jennifer Ashley Tepper may be the most interesting of my short selections.  The piece in the American Theatre of 12 November 2024 is about the first female composer to write all the music and the lyrics for a Broadway show—back in 1944.]

In an excerpt from the new book ‘Women Writing Musicals,’ we learn about the songwriter who became the first woman to write music and lyrics for a full Broadway score, in 1942.

Tepper’s new book is Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy that the History Books Left Out, (Rowan & Littlefield, 2024).

Like Kay Swift [1897-1993], Ann Ronell [1906-93] benefited from the friendship and mentorship of George Gershwin [1898-1937]. She met him while she was a student at Radcliffe when she had the opportunity to interview him for a project. Gershwin encouraged Ann Rosenblatt to change her name to Ann Ronell. After all, he himself had been born Jacob Gershowitz. He also suggested she get training by acting as rehearsal pianist for a show, then hired her for his own musical Rosalie in 1928. She was 21 years old.

In 1931, she made her Broadway debut as a writer when she collaborated with Muriel Pollock [1895-1971] on a song for Shoot the Works! This show was an effort by Heywood Broun [1888-1939] to get actors and writers working, just after the Great Depression hit and people were in a panic. Shoot the Works! featured the contributions of many well-established writers alongside brand-new folks. Ronell got to be one of them after she heard about the project and just showed up at the theatre, trying to get her songs heard and considered. The one that ended up being picked, “Let’s Go Out in the Open Air,” was performed by rising star Imogene Coca [1908-2001].

Ronell hit Tin Pan Alley and began to sell her songs there. In the early 1930s she became successful with “Baby’s Birthday Party,” “Rain on the Roof,” “Give Me Back My Heart,” and “Willow Weep for Me.” Then she began writing songs for films and achieved her most enduring song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” co-written with Frank Churchill [1901-42], which was featured in 1933’s Three Little Pigs. This became the first hit song from a Disney film. She started composing for projects overseas as well.

[Tin Pan Alley was the section of New York City along 28th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues where thousands of commercial popular songs were written during the late 19th to the early 20th century. The name became synonymous with the songwriting and publishing business which was built around the songs produced there. The name is purported to be a reference to the constant sound of pianos as songwriters hammered out their tunes.]

A 1933 article in the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune captured Ronell’s rise to success: “Tin Pan Alley still is man’s domain. But sunny, smiling, determined little 23-year-old Ann Ronell, from Omaha, Nebraska, has crashed it! She has made good in a big way with four popular song hits and a score of others. Even the most anti-feminist old member of Tin Pan Alley had to relent and with one accord she has been acclaimed as one of its own.”

Ronell was quoted in the article by Julia Blanshard [ca. 1892-1934] about first meeting Gershwin when she interviewed him as a student. She shared that it was their conversation that made her resolved to make it as a songwriter herself. She also spoke about getting her start in the business.

“I found that it is impossible to even have your songs heard by the right people, unless you have a pull. Let a girl try to crash into the songwriting game and men will say, ‘Isn’t she cute,’ ‘When can I have a date,’ or ‘This is too tough a game for a nice girl like you!’” The article went on to describe Ronell’s indefatigable perseverance in show business and her entry to the professional world which was assured once Gershwin, Vincent Youmans [1898-1946], and Irving Berlin [1888-1989] heard her work and helped her get a start. The article concluded with a paragraph about her physical appearance and manner of dress.

Ronell spent much of the 1930s in Hollywood, not only writing songs but also music directing—one of the first women to do so for major Hollywood movie musicals.

Ronell’s second Broadway venture, a decade after her first, was even more distinguished. She was the sole writer of both music and lyrics for Count Me In in 1942 at the Barrymore. In this, she became the first woman to write the full score of a full-length Broadway musical by herself. Kay Swift had broken ground as the first woman to write all the music of a full-length Broadway musical by herself [Fine and Dandy, 1930], and now Ronell added lyrics to that distinction as well.

Count Me In started as a college musical. Future theatre critic Walter Kerr [1913-96] had met Leo Brady [1917-84], a professor at Catholic University [Washington, D.C.; Catholic University had a distinguished drama program], when Kerr took classes there, and the two wanted college students to have a theatre experience as close to professional as possible, so they decided to write a show for them to perform. They enlisted Ronell to write the songs. Musicals involving patriotic wartime themes were increasingly popular, so they decided to do another of those. Count Me In’s plot involves a shy businessman who wants to help the war effort at home, and who tries to enlist his family and community to join him.

Before long, the Shuberts were interested in bringing the show to a professional stage, and the college students were replaced by Broadway actors. George Abbott [1887-1995] was enlisted to direct the show in its next steps. He immediately clashed with Ronell and eventually left the show, stating that the score was inferior and that he doubted Ronell’s abilities to better it. [The book was ultimately staged by Robert Ross (1902-54)]

[Brothers Lee (1871-1953), Sam (1878-1905), and Jacob (1879-1963) Shubert founded the Shubert Organization, which dominated the theatrical business and owns 17 Broadway theaters, the most of the three largest theater-owners in New York City, plus two Off-Broadway houses and two in other cities.]

The show tried out in Boston, where Ronell’s score received excellent reviews, the show overall less so. Many thought the book was overly busy. Count Me In’s cast included Gower Champio[n] [1919-80] as one of the children of the lead character. Another future Broadway choreographer, Danny Daniels [1924-2017], was also in the cast. The rest of the illustrious company included Luella Gear [1897-1980], Charles Butterworth [1899-1946], and Jean Arthur [1900-91].

Count Me In received mediocre reviews on Broadway and ran 61 performances. In an interview years later, Ronell commented, “It was a terrific experience writing a show at last, and I understand now why there have been so few women who ever got a hearing on Broadway.”

In 1944, Ronell adapted the 1847 Friedrich Wilhelm Riese [German playwright and librettist; 1805?-79] operetta Martha [1844] for Broadway, with Vicki Baum [Austrian-born writer; 1888-1960]. It played several performances at City Center [22 February-13 May 1944]. Her last Broadway gig was composing a lullaby for the original Broadway production of [Arthur Miller’s (1915-2005)] The Crucible in 1953.

Separate from Broadway, Ronell continued to work busily as a songwriter in the following decades. Her song for the 1945 movie Story of G.I. Joe [United Artists, 1945], which was Academy Award-nominated, was the first theme song to ever play over film credits. She scored a Marx Brothers movie (Love Happy [United Artists, 1949]). She worked on a project with Judy Garland [1922-69] to musically adapt beloved songs into Garland’s style.

In a 1950 interview with Ohio’s Circleville Herald, Ronell said, “Some day I intend to compose the first American opera for film production.” The final line of the piece read, “Ten to one she does.” She never did, but her accomplishments are nevertheless impressive.

[Jennifer Ashley Tepper is an acclaimed theater historian, author, and producer.  She has been the creative and programming director at 54 Below since 2012, and has published four volumes of The Untold Stories of Broadway book series (Dress Circle Publishing).]