Choreographing "Paper and Pen" during a rehearsal at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

I’m getting to work on something wonderful and strange: a piece of theater about the father of behaviorism, entitled “The Behavior of Broadus.” Back in March I lucked into seeing an invite-only, hastily-rehearsed and gleefully thrown-together performance of this play with songs by the Burglars of Hamm. Center Theatre Group was commissioning this piece–and my friend Matt Almos was reluctantly banging out chords on the piano for this piece that had slowly but inexorably turned into a musical. The actors were making up their own harmonies, and the melodies were simple and memorable. I laughed and cried and it was better than Cats.

I approached Matt afterward and told him that it was wonderful–and they simply needed a little help from somebody who does this sort of thing and can help finish the songs the way they intended them. You know, like me.

And I said I’d love to do it.

Fast forward a few months, and Matt takes me out to lunch. Were you serious? he asks. Yes, I was, I reply.

And now here we are: there’s a commission, I am now a co-author of the piece, and 8 actors, a director, a musical director and a choreographer are making stuff REALLY HAPPEN here during a luxuriously-long two-week workshop at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, the same place we did Sleeping Beauty Wakes back in 2007.

The way the Burglars write together–and their painfully funny script–directly affected how Val and Gene and I wrote the script for Wheelhouse in the middle of August. I had already begun my work on the score of this piece before I left for the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, and the way these Burglars challenge each other and go with whatever is best/funniest/most right for the piece, no matter who wrote it–this is what we in GrooveLily were striving for as we revisited our painfully funny past to write the Wheelhouse script.

It’s odd to be back here in the same rehearsal room, four years later, and be working on something so…utterly different. The Burglars have written a musical (yes, it’s actually a musical now) that is so damned funny and wrong and wonderful, and I’m just grateful to be a part of something that is so WAY beyond my ken. And yet I’m here at the table contributing, being a part of it, and writing and arranging music to support the weirdest, sickest, funniest, and unexpectedly moving piece I’ve ever been associated with.

There are two performances that are open to the public. Tickets are ten bucks. Here’s the link. If you are anywhere near Los Angeles on September 17 or 18, come and see this. It’s great.

I’m officially a very happy camper.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/aug/23/groovelily-wakes-sleeping-beauty/

It’s a pretty nice story of how we got where we are, and what we hope for the future.

We’re in the darkened theatre–the big proscenium stage of the Weiss Theatre at La Jolla Playhouse. We stay in this dark room for 10-12 hours a day now, with brief 10-minute breaks every hour or so when they turn on the house lights on and we go outside to get a moment of beautiful Southern California sunshine.

The rehearsal process was very abbreviated–a mere three days–which isn’t out of the ordinary when you’re taking a full production from one theatre (McCarter) and essentially importing it whole to another theatre (LJP). Now we’re in the midst of six days of technical rehearsals on stage before the curtain rises on Sleeping Beauty Wakes with a paying audience again.

Our mood is upbeat–we did a week of rewrites in Princeton during the final week of the McCarter run, and then even more rewrites after we turned in that draft and met with exhortations for “even bigger, bolder steps forward” from director (Rebecca Taichman), choreographer (Doug Varone), McCarter producer Mara Isaacs and LJP artistic director Chris Ashley. Rebecca promised us that no matter how vast the scope of our rewrites, she’d get them on the stage despite the short rehearsal period.

And so she has. Despite the typical slowdown of tech rehearsals–when everything must move only as fast as sound, lights, projections, stage crew can work through the show for the first time–the show feels tighter and the storytelling more followable than before. Doug Varone choreographed up a storm during the first two days of rehearsal, essentially restaging everything from the moment the patients fall asleep in Act 1 until they wake up again, 17 continuous singing, moving, dancing, dreaming minutes later.

I continue to make tweaks to the underscoring of the in-between bits. Val’s rewriting lyrics here and there. Rachel is down in the front row next to Rebecca, making on-the-spot rewrites of little moments to increase clarity.

Carrie Manolakos. Photo stolen with gratitude, directly from her site, carriemanolakos.com.

My favorite new thing about the show is Carrie Manolakos, who is our MVP for the week. Carrie was actually called back for the role of Beauty when we went through the exhilarating, exhausting, filled-with-peaks-of-joy-and-depths-of-despair process of casting the McCarter production. It was a very tough call, but we ultimately decided to cast Aspen Vincent in the role of Beauty…but we all harbored a very soft spot for Carrie Manolakos and her gorgeous, agile, Valerie-esque voice.

During the run at McCarter, our Cheryl/Night Terrors Patient, Donna Vivino, discovered that she wouldn’t be able to participate in the La Jolla run…so we knew early on that we’d need to find a replacement for her. What we didn’t expect was that Carrie would be big-hearted enough, and open-minded enough, to come on board to replace Donna.

In our process of doing rewrites for the show, it was wildly helpful to know that Carrie was going to be stepping in, and Val actually wrote new harmonies and melismas for Carrie’s voice in the opening song. Carrie fits in like she has always been there–and the four-part writing for the patients sounds simply sublime with her as a part of it. I’m so grateful she took this gig.

I’m so glad we got another chance to make little fixes–they make such a difference. The show is already so much better, in this stop-start version of tech rehearsals.

7 days ’til opening!

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/152312-Rhinebeck-Writers-Retreat-to-Nurture-New-Musicals-by-Alex-Timbers-Michael-Friedman-GrooveLily

We’re in pretty august company, and it’s nice to read that Gaby Alter and Itamar Moses’ terrific piece “Nobody Loves You” is getting more work time at the Rhinebeck retreat AND is getting a production at the Old Globe. Val and I will be there with bells on–this show kicks butt.

I’ve often wanted to get a time machine and at the very least, send a message to my former self. If I could, it would go something like this:

Dear 16-year-old Brendan,

Congratulations. You’ve written your first song for a musical. You’ve recognized that pop songs in and of themselves are too limiting for you, and you feel you’ve exhausted the subject matter of teenage unrequited love. (You haven’t yet–you just think you have–but that’s another story.)

You are about to embark on an extremely difficult journey. Most people who write musicals do not make a living at it. Very few new musicals are produced, and with each passing year the cost of mounting one becomes more prohibitive. You’re going to study writing musical theater, and you’re going to learn a lot–but you’re also going to go into debt to do so. You’ll be freaked out by how long it takes to get a musical on stage–how many years and how much faith and trust from how many people–it will feel like an impossible task.

You will tuck your tail between your legs and try several times to do something else to make your way through the world.

Each time, you will find that you’re really not suited to anything else, and you don’t have a choice in the matter.

You will learn countless very painful lessons along the way.

Finally, when you’re 39 years old (and nearing 40), you will have figured a few crucial things out:

• Having people respect you is more important than having people like you.
• Respect is the most important ingredient in a good collaboration.
• You need other people to collaborate with. If you try to do everything yourself, your work will suffer.
• You must not ever work with people you don’t respect, or who have no respect for you.
• Nothing worth doing comes easy.
• The very, very, very best feeling in the world is the feeling of a group of people all working together towards the same end: making something great. And the way that you’re going to find this is writing songs for characters in dramatic situations, and helping to bring them to life on stage.

And this is the feeling that your almost-40-year-old self is feeling today, as an 8-person musical with a 5-piece band is opening at a respected regional theater. You are feeling the best feeling in the world.

Remember to enjoy that feeling when it comes.

xo,

your future self

Jimmy Ray Bennett in "Say You Do"

Interestingly, the 10-minute movie musical that Val and I wrote music and lyrics to, and that Val and Gene and I played on the soundtrack of (along with Chris Tarrow and Sean Flahaven), and that Jimmy Ray Bennett starred in–well, it’s getting screened on Sunday, May 15th in NYC. Admission is free, and if you’re in town (which we unfortunately won’t be) you oughta go.

Jimmy won’t be able to make it either, because he’s busy starring in this little musical that’s happening in Princeton. If you can go, see below for details.

In 2002, I was at a recording studio in Englewood, New Jersey, overseeing the digital transfer of some multitrack tapes for “just the three of us,” and Phoebe Snow was in the next studio, recording. I actually got to shake her hand, profess my love for her voice, and got to hear some music she was working on. I was on cloud nine.

In my miniscule spare time these past weeks, I’ve been staying up late, poking through iTunes, flitting about on youtube, listening to songs. I’m surprised at how much I have been influenced by certain recordings, and how the recordings have seeped into me until I can’t even remember the source of the music that comes out of me–but then I happen upon one of these records and the floodgates open and I realize–I have made these songs a part of me and now I’m reworking them into something new. You could call it borrowing or theft, but I prefer to think of it as unconscious homage, which I think is the best kind. (As long as it doesn’t get me into copyright infringement. See George Harrison and “My Sweet Lord” for a cautionary tale.)

Yesterday afternoon, before a meeting with writers and producer and director, Mara’s husband had put on XTC’s Oranges and Lemons, and the song “Across This Antheap” was playing–and the gorgeous, mournful end of the song has EXACTLY the same family tree as the chorus of “Can You Cure Me, ” our opening number for Sleeping Beauty Wakes. (not the one on the GrooveLily record—the new one that you can hear in the show.) But it didn’t occur to me, because I haven’t heard this song since 1989 or 1990 when it came out and I wore out my double-disc vinyl album.

And this morning I discovered that Phoebe Snow had died, and I was slammed in the head with a memory of the entire recording of Paul Simon’s “Gone at Last,” my favorite track from “Still Crazy After All These Years.” When I was four years old my mom and I had just moved to San Francisco and we were a single parent/single kid family for the first time. This album came out in October of 1975, a couple of months after we moved, and my mom picked up a copy soon after it came out. I would put this record on the record player and drop the needle on “Gone at Last” and dance around and around, and then CAREFULLY lift the needle and start the song over.

The night was black, the roads were icy
Snow was fallin’, drifts were high
And I was weary, from my driving
And I stopped to rest for a while
I sat down at a truck stop
I was thinking about my past
I’ve had a long streak of bad luck
But I’m praying it’s gone at last

In retrospect, I think my mom didn’t mind my dogged determination to hear this song over and over because in some sense it applied to her, to us, to anyone who has been in difficult circumstances and is hoping that things are going to get better. And dancing in circles with me around the living room of our little apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, I think she too was wondering if we were about to see our streak of bad luck end. Dancing around the room helped, anyway.

Paul Simon’s song is wonderful, subtle, and tasty gospel pop. Richard Tee’s piano playing is subLIME, and I think was an early indicator to me that I needed to become a piano player. But Phoebe Snow’s vocal on the 2nd verse and onward, when she takes on the CHARACTER of the WAITRESS in the TRUCK STOP is AWESOME. This may have been my first indication that a pop song could be used to tell a story. Either way, I love the song, I miss Richard Tee’s piano playing, and I will always miss Phoebe Snow’s voice.

That's what they'll say.
Image stolen, with love and respect, from Phil Foglio, http://www.thugdome.com/slagblah_gallimaufry_8.html

The night before last was a dress rehearsal where everything seemed to be so far from good that we’d never fix it and we were doomed. “People will laugh at us,” we said. “Critics will excoriate us. Audiences will say to each other ‘Bwa-ha-ha-ha-haa. What a stinker that was.’”

And then last night, an invited dress rehearsal with a small but appreciative audience, had SO MUCH that was SO GOOD that I breathed a HUGE sigh of relief. Act 1 is kicking ass. The storytelling through scene and song and movement and mise-en-scene is WORKING, PEOPLE.

And Act 2 has large swaths that we haven’t tech’ed quite as much as we’d like–and some underrehearsed transitions showed us how much we have left to do. The bones of the show that was working so beautifully in our last rehearsal room run are all there–but somewhere in all that we have done to put it on stage, we have lost some ground…and now that it’s all up in front of us with technical elements, we can see more things we need to fix.

Seven days and six previews remain until we open.

Tonight is our first preview, the first time a paying audience will see this madness that we have wrought.