So much can go wrong in a musical, but why is it usually the book where things go the most wrong? And why, when beloved musicals are revived, is the book the place where the most surgery or salvage seems to be required? In the case of programs like New York City’s Encores!, San Francisco’s 42nd Street Moon, or Los Angeles’s late, lamented Reprise Theatre, all of which have the mission (more or less) to preserve and perform super-annuated Broadway musicals in concert or semi-staged renditions, the book is the element that typically gets the least attention or affection, with the understanding that the score is the main attraction; and the books are usually pegged as the reason old shows are unrevivable.
There are a few reasons this shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, how many mid-20th-century non-musical plays, apart from a small canon of a dozen or so warhorses, regularly get revived? Old scripts of any provenance often have dated gender or racial politics; it would be odd if they didn’t, honestly. And so each generation has its take on Carousel or West Side Story or Kiss Me, Kate—works I’d argue are strong enough in quality to keep reexamining (and tweaking) despite their problems.
But book writing is also a craft, an under-appreciated and often thankless one, that remarkably few writers have done surpassingly well, or at least as brilliantly as the songwriters they’ve collaborated with have crafted memorable scores. I think of book writing as analogous to screenwriting: It’s a craft more about structure than dialogue, about setting the scene for the central activity, which in the case of a film is usually some kind of action or visual element, and in the case of a musical is singing and dancing. Is it any wonder, then, that a lot of musical books are relatively flimsy and fungible? That they age about as well as an old structure might be expected to, and can demand some renovation to stay fresh? That might explain, for instance, the repeated attempts to revive Pal Joey, the Rodgers & Hart musical from 1940 that gave the world so many deathless standards, and arguably broke ground by centering an antihero, but whose book by John O’Hara has been worked over by no less than Richard Greenberg and, more recently, Richard LaGravenese and Savion Glover, for Arena’s Chez Joey.
What to do with old musicals that have delicious scores, as so many do, but whose books have a bit of both of the above issues—what could roughly be called cultural and structural deficits? I’d say that Aaron Sorkin’s Camelot at Lincoln Center Theater in 2023 was a noble stab at rehabbing that show, whose Lerner & Loewe score I rank among my favorites but whose book, by Lerner, is a regrettable hash; Sorkin’s version made it watchable, in my opinion, if not quite lovable.
In the case of two revivals now onstage in L.A., the impulse of the revisers is less about repair than respect. For David Henry Hwang, the new Flower Drum Song that East West Players is presenting at the Aratani Theatre in Little Tokyo through May 31, is a kind of double revision: It’s an update of the script he created in 2001, when the Rodgers & Hammerstein estates gave him carte blanche to take the songs from the duo’s 1958 musical and craft, essentially, a new play, like Hammerstein’s set among immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown, but, more in line with the C.Y. Lee novel that was their inspiration, honoring the nuances of the immigrant experience more fully and sympathetically.
The original Flower Drum Song, Hwang pointed out, “happens to be the only musical in Broadway history prior to 2015 which centers Asian characters as Americans.” (In 2015 the musical Allegiance, about the WWII-era internment of Japanese Americans, played on Broadway, with George Takei in the lead.) “Every other musical with Asians is set overseas and we’re playing foreigners. I think that’s one of the reasons that I really respect and value what R&H set out to do in the 1950s: to create a show that said that Chinese Americans are just as American as anyone else. Now we’re at a moment when immigration and the definition of what it means to be American is once again being called into question. So to do a musical like this, which centers an undocumented immigrant as the main character, and which celebrates immigration and centers a Chinese American story—it goes back to the original impulse that R&H had in the late ’50s in their cultural and political context.”
Hwang’s version dropped some characters and added others, reshaped plotlines, and reassigned or resituated many songs. Crucially, he also moved the action to the mid-1960s, so that the impetus for immigrants to flee China could be pegged to the first stirrings of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, while the Hart-Celler Act, which lifted restrictions on U.S. immigration from many non-European countries, was not yet in effect. (Lloyd Suh has a play about that.)
In revisiting the property for the current East West Players revival (which, in being helmed by EWP artistic director Lily Tung Crystal, is likely the first major production of Flower Drum Song to be directed by a Chinese American), Hwang had the realization that his earlier version hadn’t aged particularly well, and since he’s also written a number of musicals, including the subversive Soft Power, in the interim, he has a better sense of the form.
“There was stuff that, when I looked at my 2002 script, felt dated and a little creaky—not unlike when, in the late ’90s, I looked at the 1958 version,” Hwang said. “And there are things that I can do better now.” In a 2001 story for this magazine when his adaptation was new, he told Misha Berson that “creating a new book for an old musical can feel very much like a craftsman’s job, a gig. But for me it’s always been something incredibly personal. I consider this very much my new play.”
In the case of a new revision of Brigadoon, running May 13-June 14 at the Pasadena Playhouse, the impulse of adapter Alexandra Silber was, like Hwang’s, to honor the 1947 show’s original spirit but to make it land deeper and ring truer.
“So often people want to ‘fix’ these old shows, and there’s an implication that something about them is broken that requires a sort of carpenter or therapist or somebody in a fixing profession to heal something,” said Silber, a seasoned Broadway performer whose credits include Fiddler on the Roof and Master Class. “I wasn’t interested in necessarily rehabilitating the show.” Instead, she said, she was interested in addressing “the two things I think people have always declared as problematic: the role of women and authentic Scottishness.” In her pitch to the Lerner and Loewe estates, she made the case that “inside my body and brain, I was uniquely suited to speak to those things.”
So Silber has fleshed out the main female characters, Fiona and Meg, beyond the madonna-whore polarity suggested by Lerner’s original script, and has flipped the gender of the town’s wise elder, Mr. Lundie, now Widow Lundie, played by Tyne Daly. She’s also drawn on her own history—she studied at a Scottish conservatory when she was still a teen—to add more Scots to the dialogue, some of it explained and translated, much of it clear in context, all of it delicious (I was chuffed to be introduced to “crabbit,” “skoosh,” “numpty,” and especially “dreich,” an indispensable word for bleak, cold weather).
If Brigadoon’s cultural baggage may not seem as cumbersome as that of some older musicals, it arguably has a separate issue: A musical fantasy in which two men vacationing in Scotland stumble upon a magical town that’s frozen in time, it’s sufficiently old-fashioned-seeming that its very premise is the template for Cinco Paul’s send-up of Golden Age musicals, Schmigadoon!.
“Operetta and very early musical theatre are kind of the American version of commedia dell’arte, where you have these stock characters: the soubrette, the leading man, the comic relief,” Silber conceded. “I think our appetite has aesthetically shifted a little bit.”
Accordingly, her adaptation has sought to flesh out these archetypes with novelistic stage directions, and in particular with the kinds of questions about backstory she was trained as an actor to uncover. She envisioned the story’s two male travelers, Tommy and Jeff, for instance, as doing a version of what her colleague, the great Broadway actor Danny Burstein, did after his wife, another great Broadway star, Rebecca Luker, died from ALS in 2020: He joined a friend for “the Great Grief Tour of 2021,” Silber said, “and cataloged it beautifully on Instagram. It was things like, ‘We are in Estonia at the International Pig Festival.’ It was ridiculous and joyous and they laughed and cried.”
Another trope of musical theatre is romance; there’s typically an “A” and a “B” couple, they both end up together at the end, and there’s a strong suggestion, sung and spoken, that they’ve found their “one true love.” Silber said she’s taken pains to avoid that kind of language in her adaptation.
“I don’t personally believe in that or subscribe to it,” she said. “I’m not trying to write a story that’s like, no one could do this for Tommy except Fiona. The point I’m trying to make is, nobody can do this for Tommy but Tommy. Fiona and the world she inhabits make that leap worth it for him.” She paused and added, “I think that in our lifetimes we meet people, and the love they inspire within us deeply motivates us to change. I’ll even say in my own life, I’ve had people I’m so grateful I met them exactly when I did, and it did feel fated. But the journey that we were supposed to have was to share the boat for a while, and get from point A to point B.”
That journey could also describe her own charmed relationship with Brigadoon, or Hwang’s with Flower Drum Song. As he has Mei Li say at one point his adaptation, “To create something new, we must first love what is old.”
Seen Around Town
For some theatre journalists and Tony voters, April is the cruelest month. But I choose to see the surfeit of openings, mainly but not only on Broadway, as a sign of abundance in a time of precarity. Easy for me to say, I guess, since I’m not duty-bound to see everything. What I did see in the past month, I was mostly glad to see…
The Fear of 13, for instance, is a solid piece of advocacy theatre with an impressive stage debut by Adrien Brody. While I recognize a lot of the clichés that Zachary Stewart calls out in his hilariously mean review, I think what Brody is doing, holding the stage for show’s entire running time, is much harder than it looks. I’m hoping his Tony nomination snub won’t steer him away from the stage; I think he could crush in the right role…
I can’t be objective about Schmigadoon!, as its composer-book writer, Cinco Paul, is a lifelong friend. For what it’s worth, I would put this one in the category of “relieved that a friend’s show is actually good” (much more than good, I think, but as I say—I don’t pretend to objectivity here)…
I found David Lindsay-Abaire’s social comedy The Balusters at Manhattan Theatre Club exceedingly clever and funny, though I confess that its jolly, seemingly equal-opportunity liberal baiting all feels a bit too calculated, if not openly pandering (as my colleague David Cote thinks). I felt roughly the same way I felt about the beautifully produced George Clooney play Good Night, and Good Luck: That show was red meat for Trump-hating liberals, but at least it was filet mignon, and if The Balusters is shooting fish in a barrel, at least they’re Bluefin Tuna…
I’m trying to think of ways that Kaija Saariaho’s harrowing, unaccountably beautiful opera Innocence, which ran at the Metropolitan Opera under the direction of Simon Stone and the baton of Susanna Mälkki, could have been better. I can’t: On Chloe Lamford’s slowly rotating, subtly transformative set, the performers enacted the aftermath of a school shooting with such emotional bravery and range of expression, I will not soon forget it, nor how it made me feel. While I take seriously Justin Davidson’s principled objection—that such a subject should simply not be staged—I think its very stick-in-the-craw discomfort is what gave it both its immediate frisson and its remarkable staying power. If opera can’t dramatize a subject this raw and heavy, what is opera for?…
On an infinitely lighter note, Scott Ellis’s Roundabout staging of Fallen Angels is a deceptively offhanded-seeming delight, with not only Rose Byrne but in particular Kelli O’Hara pulling off impressive levels of comic stamina. Jason Zinoman put it best when he wrote that show’s “real feat is to put on a tight entertainment that somehow has the looseness of a hangout comedy”…
Chloe Lamford’s set and Laurie Metcalf’s Linda are the stars of Joe Mantello’s new Death of a Salesman, which has a coldly funereal aspect that somehow doesn’t sink the play, though it doesn’t exactly send it soaring either. Like Rebecca Frecknall’s super-dark take on Cabaret, I feel like Miller’s play is so industrial-strength solid that it can not only withstand this kind of stress test—it can show some startling new angles in such a harsh light, and this one definitely does…
I was almost completely disarmed by the lavish new musical The Lost Boys. I have no attachment to the film, which I barely remember seeing, but for most of its running time this new musical manages to generate suspense, menace, and wonder the likes of which you hardly ever see on Broadway, or anywhere. It’s a bit like if Stranger Things had a better script and a surfeit of rocking power ballads. I’m in the camp that finds the second act overly goofy and a bit anticlimactic (I’ve talked to folks who feel exactly the reverse about the two acts), but overall I’d say: If Broadway is indeed turning into a bit of a theme park, this is one of the better rides you can climb on…
I have long considered Joe Turner’s Come and Gone my favorite August Wilson play, so I was disappointed that I did not connect with the new Broadway staging by Debbie Allen. The acting is strong across the board, particularly by Cedric the Entertainer and Ruben Santiago-Hudson, but it all felt a bit sound-stagey to me and the flow felt off. I have read that this rendition may be turned into a film, so I’ll be interested to see if it works better in that medium…
I first saw the formidable Chris Wells onstage at the Actors’ Gang in Hollywood in the 1990s. He was the original Dr. Parker in Bat Boy, for one, but his signature roles were in such self-created works as A Fairy Tale and Liberty! For years after moving to New York City, Wells led a kind of secular “artist’s church” called the Secret City, which I was privileged to attend several times. But it has been years since he performed in New York; I wrote about his last show here in 2017. So what a joy it was to see him resurface last week at Pangea, accompanied by guitarist Jeremy Bass, for a program of original songs that were alternately saucy and sage. I didn’t know how much I needed to see and hear Chris again…
Finally, I caught the new Second Stage revival of Adam Bock’s The Receptionist, whose 2007 premiere with Jane Houdyshell I missed, though I recall the strong reviews it got. There’s no question it’s a stellar showcase for a lead actor, in this case the exquisitely harried Katie Finneran, but beyond that? I may have to send it to voicemail.
What Else Is New
To close, as usual, here’s my survey of May world premieres nationwide. (If you’ve got one coming up, please alert me at rwkendt@tcg.org)
Northeast
Michael Oluokun’s Have You Ever Thought About, though May 16 at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, is a sort of absurdist variety show involving audience members in real-time thought experiments. It’s directed by Andrew Scoville.
Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is the subject of James Clement’s Beauty Freak, directed by Danilo Gambini, running through May 17 in a staging by What Will the Neighbors Say? Productions at the cell theatre in Manhattan.
I know him as the voice of Tom Servo on the MST3K reboot, but in Baron Vaughn: Cycle Breaker at Rochester, N.Y.’s Geva Theatre through June 7, Vaughn is offering an autobiographical solo show about his own childhood and parenthood. Evren Odcikin is the director.
Nora Sørena Casey’s The Censorship of Dreams, as its title suggests, is a dystopian drama about a future in which even subconscious thoughts are monitored and considered threatening. Directed by Arthur Makaryan, it runs at NYC’s La MaMa May 1-17.
Inspired by Linda Ronstadt’s iconic album Canciones de mi Padre, the immersive, intergenerational musical experience Canciones, a co-production of Radical Evolution, Latinx Playwrights Circle, the Sol Project, and Boundless Theatre Company, will be offered at a private home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, May 2-24. The creative team includes Julián Mesri, Rebecca Martínez, Beto O’Byrne, Sara Ornelas, and Meropi Peponides.
Needle & Bone and This Is Not a Death Cult are running in repertory at NYC’s Flea Theatre, May 3-16. Directed, respectively, by Felicia Lobo and Pete Boisvert, both shows are written by Maggie Cino, Scott C. Sickles, and Montserrat Méndez’s, with Needle & Bone telling the story of a haunted tattoo parlor and Death Cult unspooling a journalistic thriller.
Anthony P. Pennino’s American, Italian follows two cousins with disparate experiences as the grandchildren of Italian immigrants. This production of SOOP Theatre Company, directed by Mike Keller, runs May 4-16 at the Chain Theatre in New York City.
In Dad Don’t Read This, playwright Eliya Smith depicts four Ohio girls whose sleepovers involve playing the interactive game the Sims. Directed by Chloe Claudel, this co-production of Try For Baby Productions and the Goat Exchange runs May 4-24 at St. Luke’s Theater in Manhattan.
Suli Holum’s The Woman Question uncovers stories of Keystone State medical pioneers in the fight for women’s reproductive freedom. Directed by Melissa Crespo, it runs May 6-24 at People’s Light in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
Class C, written by Chaz T. Martin and directed by Rebecca Wright, envisions a near future in which U.S. citizens face and fight back against government-assigned classification. It runs May 7-24 at the Azuka Theatre in Philadelphia.
Three monologues about how small choices can make seismic life changes comprise Ella Hickson’s New Born, an Audible production at Off-Broadway’s Minetta Lane Theatre, running May 8-June 8 under Ian Rickson’s direction. The noteworthy cast: Hugh Jackman, Marianna Gailus, and Sepideh Moafi.
The ensemble of Blessed Unrest, in collaboration with playwrights Damen Scranton and Laura Wickens and director Jessica Burr, has created a dance-theatre piece called Body Unredacted, about “the art, science, and lived experience of the human body.” It runs May 9-17 at the Makers’ Space in Brooklyn.
I think it’s fair to call this one of the more anticipated shows of the year: A new musical of the popular film and novel Girl, Interrupted has songs by Aimee Mann, a book by Martyna Majok, and direction by Jo Bonney. It runs May 13-June 21 at NYC’s Public Theater.
Dana Leslie Goldstein’s Go Down, Moses dramatizes a free speech battle on a 1980s-era college campus. With direction by Brandon M. Weber, the Unlimited Stages production runs May 13-31 at A.R.T./New York Theatres in Manhattan.
Her play Eat Me was in last month’s premiere roundup, and last year’s Meet the Cartozians was just a Pulitzer finalist (and will appear in our Summer print issue), but you can now find the busy scribe Talene Monahan at White River Junction, Vermont’s Northern Stage for the debut of Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret, directed by Aileen Wen McGroddy (and starring Will Brill). Loosely adapted from a 1714 farce by Susanna Centlivre, it follows a chaotic cruise from Paris to Portugal. Runs dates are May 13-31.
NYC’s Playwrights Horizons debuts John J. Caswell Jr.’s latest play, Jerome, about an aging gay couple who live in a secluded Arizona town during the height of the AIDS crisis (one of the leads is Stephen Spinella). Directed by Dustin Wills, it runs May 14-June 21.
Eliana Theologides Rodriguez’s Indian Princesses follows five young girls of color and their white fathers at a summer camp in the 2000s. Directed by Miranda Cornell, it runs May 19-June 7 at NYC’s Atlantic Theater Company.
Okay, here’s another very-much-anticipated musical adaptation: Black Swan, adapted by Jen Silverman from the iconic Darren Aronofsky film, with songs by Dave Malloy and direction by Sonya Tayeh, runs May 25-June 28 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.
Midwest
The beloved comedy duo Burns and Allen are brought back to life by Tami Workentin and Jim Pickering in George & Gracie: A Love Story, in a show written by Workentin and directed by Laura Braza at Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stackner Cabaret, May 1-June 14.
Massachusetts teens on the bumpy road to adulthood during the summer of 1992 are the subject of Melissa Ross’s Do Something Pretty, directed by Jessica Fisch and stage at Chicago’s Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, May 2-June 7.
From May 2 to 17, St. Paul, Minnesota’s Six Points Theater is offering Promise of America—A New Celebration of Jewish American Song, a revue by Barbara Brooks and Raymond Berg, directed by Shelli Place, that encompasses Jewish influence on everything from Tin Pan Alley to hip-hop.
In Douglas Lyons’s trippy comedy Don’t Touch My Hair, two Black women have a weed-triggered hallucination that helps them confront their past. Directed by Teisha Bankston, it bows at Kansas City, Missouri’s Unicorn Theatre May 6-24.
Torie Wiggins’s Who All Over There?, loosely inspired by Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, follows a young couple trying in vain to downplay the implications of their interracial relationship. Directed by Steven J. Scott, it runs May 8-31 at the Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati.
A character who didn’t quite make it into Sondheim and Weidman’s Assassins—Oliver Sipple, the disabled U.S. Marine who thwarted Sara Jane Moore’s plan to kill President Gerald Ford—is the subject of Andrew Kramer’s Arlington, or Your Forgotten American Hero, running May 21-June 7 in an American Lives Theatre production at Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis, under Chris Saunders’s direction.
The musical Freak the Mighty, based on the popular YA novel by Rodman Philbrick, follows two friends who transform into superheroes. Written by Anthony Drewe and Ryan Fielding Garrett, and directed by Michael Barakiva, it runs May 24-June 21 at the Cleveland Play House.
Keerah, Netta Walker’s dramedy about two Chicago writers—one Black American, the other a white immigrant from Ireland—reuniting after an ill-advised romance, runs May 29-June 28 at Chi-Town’s Definition Theatre. Direction is by McKenzie Chinn.
A meta-theatrical satire about performative righteousness and good intentions gone wrong, Paul Heller and Alberto Lomnitz’s Spit in Your Face runs May 29-June 28 at the Detroit Repertory Theatre. The director is Leah Smith.
South
In the dark satire WitchDuck, Eva DeVirgilis uncovers and riffs on a bit of Crucible-esque Virginia history. Directed by Rebecca Wahls, the show runs May 6-24 in Richmond, Virginia co-production of Cadence and Firehouse Theatre.
Dear Alien is Liz Duffy Adams’s existential comedy about an advice columnist racing to make one last deadline. Directed by Shelley Butler, it runs May 8-31 at Houston’s Alley Theatre.
Gotta admire the commitment to the bit: Playwright matthew paul olmos also titles his plays in all lower-case. In that drive thru monterey, a Mexican American woman on a road trip in 1971 navigates romance and machismo. Directed by Brenda Palestina, it May 8-June 7 at Stages in Houston.
The centerpiece of Nashville Rep’s Ingram New Works Festival is Amy Tofte’s BloodSuckingLeech, about a young woman trying to protect her aging mother from online scammers and other modern-day predators. Directed by Beki Baker, it runs May 14-17.
Vineland Place is a new thriller by Steven Dietz about a young writer hired by a beloved author’s widow to complete an unfinished work. Directed by J. Barry Lewis, it runs May 15-31 at Florida’s Palm Beach Dramaworks.
Maryum Ali, the eldest daughter of the late boxing legend Muhammad Ali, tells her story in Float, May 28-June 14 at Bishop Arts Theatre Center in Dallas. Jemal Mcneil is the director.
Baltimore’s Strand Theater Company presents Somnia Mari Feral’s Bounce, about a young woman swept into a whirlwind marriage with a widowed pastor. Directed by Alma Davenport, it runs May 29-June 14.
Much-anticipated musicals are a running theme now, and that definitely applies to Basura, in which Gloria Estefan, Emilia Estefan, and Karen Zacarías tell the story of Paraguay’s Recycled Orchestra, for which young people turned scrap material into musical instruments. Adapted from the film Landfill Harmonic and directed by Michael Greif, it runs May 30-July 12 at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.
West
In Brown Face, written by Carissa Atallah and directed by Mia Torres, an undocumented poet asks a white, U.S.-born poet to perform her work at poetry slams, with complicated results. The show runs May 8-24 at Milagro in Portland.
Ascent tells the true story of Qian Xuesen, a brilliant aerospace engineer from China who helped launch America’s space program before he was stymied by Cold War paranoia. A posthumous debut for playwright Henry Ong, who died in 2018, the play runs May 9-June 14 at L.A.’s Skylight Theatre under Diana Wyenn’s direction.
Seattle Public Theater is the venue for Aviatrix, a new musical by Angela Poe Russell (book & lyrics) and Dionne McClain-Freeney (music & lyrics), about a Black Native girl from Texas who goes to extraordinary lengths to realize her dream of flying. Directed by Amy Poisson, it runs May 15-June 7.
Ritesh Batra has helped adapt his romcom film The Lunchbox into a new stage musical of the same name, running May 17-June 28 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Directed by Rachel Chavkin, with music by the Lazours, it follows a love that blooms from a mistaken food delivery.
It had a short workshop run at New York Theatre Workshop in March, but from what I can tell, its May 26-June 7 run at Oregon’s Portland Center Stage is the proper premiere of Kristina Wong, #FoodBankInfluencer, a twisted musical comedy in which the author-performer of Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord grapples with the vagaries of our nation’s janky emergency food system.
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