Brown, Guettel, and LaChiusa Discuss Musical Theater at Drama Book Shop

Last evening at the Drama Book Shop (250 West 40th Street), three of the musical theater’s most highly respected talents — Jason Robert Brown, Adam Guettel, and Michael John LaChiusa — took part in a discussion hosted by Wiley Hausam, editor of The New American Musical. The anthology includes the libretti of Floyd Collins, Parade, and The Wild Party, shows that respectively have music and lyrics by Guettel, Brown, and LaChiusa. Also contained in the volume is the libretto of the late Jonathan Larson’s Rent.

Hausam began by hailing the work of the three composers present as “valuable, beautiful,” adding that this “does not necessarily have any correlation to commercial success.” The discussion was moderated by David Finkle, chief theater critic for TheaterMania. Finkle asked Brown, Guettel, and LaChiusa to address certain points and then a brief question and answer period followed. Here are some edited excerpts from the composer-lyricists’ comments.

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On their musical influences and development:
GUETTEL: I listened to a lot of pop music — Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, CSNY, The Who, Aerosmith — and also opera because I sang opera as a kid. I have come to identify a certain factor in my work, a tension between a kind of inevitable groove in the accompaniment, and a kind of smearing of measure lines, an eliding of different… melismatic elements on top. So we have this tension between a kind of wire-frame sub-structure that gives the audience a roadmap and something that is much more malleable on top. They kind of rub against each other and, at times, create dramatic moments. I never wanted to be a writer for the theater until I became one. The intertwining of personal development with a professional life is what writing for the theater feels like to me. I have a very famous grandfather in my field [Richard Rodgers], and what if I don’t do anything even half as good, or a third as good, or an eighth as good?

BROWN: I grew up mainly listening to disco; I was a Donna Summer freak. Then I wanted to be like Elton John or Billy Joel, so I tried to write those songs, but my pop songs never had any life to them without some sort of context. I then listened to Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Bernstein. At the end of the day, I listen to everything and I never know what’s gonna get me going. It turns out that I’ve stolen more from Paul Simon than I’ve stolen from anyone else; there’s something in his writing that always seems to push me forward.”

LaCHIUSA: My main influences were my mother and my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hammer. When I was in fourth grade, I wrote sort of a Patty Hearst opera; it was more like The Wizard of Oz but with machine guns and stuff. Mrs. Hammer said, “When you grow up, you should write musicals.” And you never disagreed with that lady! Years later, she came to see The Wild Party and she said, “I didn’t mean that kind of musical!”

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On the realities of presenting a show on Broadway:

BROWN: “When I sit in the audience at a Broadway musical, I’m generally surrounded by certain recognizable types of people — this is gonna get pretty ugly in a minute! There’s the crowd that can afford it and there’s the crowd that can stand on line to go for free. So you’re dealing with a very sort of upper-middle-class and upper-class audience that generally tends to be older because they’ve accumulated enough money that they can go to the theater But then you have a lot of kids. It’s amazing to me, ’cause they have no money but they’re lined up for miles. I went to see Wicked and I was sitting in house seats that cost me 100 bucks; the people next to me had already seen the show nine times, and it had only been open a month and a half! They were mouthing along with all the words. I know that they sat and waited for the lottery every single night so that they could get those tickets. So you’ve got these rabid fans, these thrilled-about-new-musicals fans, and then you’ve got these older people who are there because it’s a nice night out and this is the thing they’re supposed to go see so they can tell Sylvia next door about it.

GUETTEL: For me, Broadway feels like a tradition. It’s either going to reflect the times or become less and less resonant with the times — like what happened to musical theater in Paris. You have five shows that have been running there for 50 years. Broadway could become that, so I have to always be careful to recognize that lump in my throat as kind of an emotional, visceral attachment that is not particularly realistic or necessarily productive for me personally. I think that we all have to do what we’re doing. If you don’t do that, as Jason said, you can end up with a dissonance between how a show is marketed by the nervous, necks-on-the-block producers and what the creators feel about the work. If you do insist on doing everything you can to be a commercial success, you can really fuck up your show and lose whatever makes it special. With Floyd Collins , we had a lovely little run at Playwrights Horizons [in New York] and then it got done all over the place. That feels so legitimate and so comforting; it’s okay with me. As for Piazza, Broadway seems less and less likely. All of these producers sat me down for free dinners and said, “Oh my God, you shouldn’t do it anywhere but Broadway,” but when the chips are down…well, I don’t know if the show is going to materialize on Broadway. It’s important that a show be seen in the right space and not be distorted through marketing or through giving up your core sense of the piece. If it is done in New York, it needs to be done right.

LaCHIUSA: We had to make a series of concessions when we did The Wild Party on Broadway, but I thought they were all for the good. Because, first and foremost, The Wild Party was a show: There were a lot of pastiche numbers that were vaudevillian and were about show business. As far as the money is concerned, I really stay as far away from it as I possibly can — and I was very lucky because I had producers on that show, from George Wolfe to Scott Rudin, who kept me far away from all that. They really honored my place as a writer, so I didn’t have to deal with a lot of the backstage drama that was going on with producing and money and stuff like that. And the stars didn’t dictate what I could write; I had battles with every single one of them but, in the end, I would just say no. Now, Marie Christine was done at Lincoln Center, which is Broadway but it’s under a non-profit umbrella; so it was a very healthy environment in which to work on that show and develop it while remaining true to my original conception.

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On whether or not Broadway needs to change in order to accept challenging work:

GUETTEL: I would say that my career trajectory is to get better and better at what I do so that there is a nexus between what I consider to be legitimate and what is commercially legitimate. That may or may not happen, but the more I connect with people, the more they’ll buy tickets and Broadway will have somehow miraculously changed. It’s up to the writers to do it, to a large extent. We have to figure out what that nexus is.

BROWN: You can’t expect to have kids come and see a show for $100 a ticket; you can’t expect to develop an audience with ticket prices that high. But there’s no solution to the problem. I know how much it costs to run a Broadway show; I’ve been in the middle of two of them now. When we did The Last 5 Years, once we got out of previews, the producers said, “Look, we’ve gotta get the ticket prices up to $65.” And I said, “Well, you can do that, but all those people who’ve been coming on the $20 tickets will stop coming” — which they did, the very day they raised the prices. What were they supposed to do? They were college kids! How were they supposed to pay $65 a ticket? Unless the prices come down, I have no illusions that the work I most value — the most progressive work that I want to do — can gain a home on Broadway. I will have to adjust the work that I do to a much broader palate because the broader palate is paying the bills.

LaCHIUSA: I think you’ll see more of the same thing you’ve been seeing on Broadway unless we all start dealing with some truths about our culture, which is in decline right now. I wish there was some way for that to be reversed, but I don’t know how. I know that my colleagues speak to me in their songs; I feel like they’ve got a voice that says, “This is a thing of beauty.” But it’s a larger, more powerful thing that has to go on here. We need a mayor, we need a President, we need religious people to reverse the trend of where we’re going culturally. Broadway’s a small part of the culture and it’s getting increasingly smaller, unfortunately.