All Over the Map

“If I can speak quite frankly, there’s been a lot written about this show,” says Stephen Flaherty. He’s referring to the 2000 Broadway production of Seussical: The Musical, with music by Flaherty, lyrics by his longtime writing partner Lynn Ahrens, and a book by both. Plagued by scorching reviews and underwhelming box office returns, the show closed six months into its run with an estimated $11 million worth of red ink on the books. Now, three years later, the cable channel TRIO is featuring the ill-fated musical on a series called Flops and the creators have gathered at the Coterie Theatre in Kansas City to work on a new version for young audiences.

Flaherty still feels that the original material has a lot of promise and that the spirit of the piece was betrayed during its commercial development. He recalls an early workshop production in Toronto: “We did it really minimally and something about the simplicity of that workshop floored everybody. There was basically a ladder and a couple of scarves. For the birds, we would tie a feather to the back of the actors’ frocks.” The feedback from that performance led to heightened expectations for the Broadway run and a gaggle of investors willing to furnish additional plumes for the bird suits.

Recent productions of Seussical have favored more modest approaches. For example, a student presentation at New York University took place in an intimate black box theater. During the performance, the players invited the audience to draw clovers on the floor, cultivating the sort of childlike mischief that Dr. Seuss portrayed so well. “There was a sense of play,” says Flaherty. “The audience was asked to respond with the fun we all had as children. This was using the original material.”

Still, Coterie Theatre artistic director Jeff Church pointed out that companies that perform for young audiences couldn’t take on Seussical‘s two-and-a-half-hour script due to TYA contract standards, so he convinced Flaherty and company to trim the running time for the Kansas City run. The condensed version focuses on the Horton story, cuts subplots like the Butter Battle, reduces the total number of actors, and clocks in at about half of the original running time. “At first, it was daunting,” Flaherty admits, “but Lynn and I were so impressed by Jeff and his ideas that we thought it might be worth taking another look at the show.”

If successful, the new Seussical might have a long commercial life as theater for young audiences; there’s already another production of the TYA version lined up for Seattle after the Missouri run finishes. In taking a more minimal approach to the material, it’s almost as if Flaherty and company have taken the advice of the TRIO mavens who blamed Seussical‘s problems on “excessive ambition.” At the end of our talk, I asked Flaherty how he felt about that TV program. “I don’t get cable,” he replied, “so I have no comment about that.”

–A.K.

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When he was a young playwriting student at Yale University, C.Y. Lee was told by a New York literary agent that he should “Never write stage plays.” Asian-American stories simply weren’t being told on the American stage and so the agent suggested short stories or novels instead. Of course, Lee’s 1957 novel The Flower Drum Song became a best seller that was quickly adapted as a Broadway musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein (and was recently re-adapted with a new book by David Henry Hwang). In the years since Lee took that agent’s advice, Asian-American drama has flourished; now at the age of 86, Lee returns to playwriting with Mama From China, produced by the Secret Rose Theater in Los Angeles.

The comedy revolves around Moo Lan, who arrives from China to visit her college-aged daughter, a boarder in the home of a struggling film producer and his wife. “The American couple is having a lot of financial problems,” says Lee, “and in the process of solving their problems, Moo Lan teaches them how to promote, how to publicize, how to make the right relationship.” The play was partly inspired by the author’s observation that, in many American stores, “you pick up anything and it’s made in China. I discovered that a lot of smart Chinese ladies in this country are really doing well.”

Mama From China isn’t Lee’s only current theatrical endeavor: the Pan Asian Repertory in New York City has bought the rights to a musical that he’s writing with his brother-in-law, and Lee also has another musical and two plays in the works. “After Flower Drum Song, I published 12 novels,” he says. “And, after so many years of novel writing, I got itching fingers and started writing plays again.”

–D.B.

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“Do you think that the comedy of the actual Democratic National Convention might compete with the comedy of your festival?” I asked political comic Jimmy Tingle regarding his Un-Conventional Comedy Convention. “Oh, sure,” he replied with a laugh, but he’ll press on anyway. Tingle has got some high profile company in the convention, including Mort Sahl, Jeanine Garafalo, and Lewis Black. They’re all planning a preemptive strike on the town of Somerville, Massachusetts, located just outside of Boston — home of this year’s DNC.

Well, think of it more as “friendly fire,” since most of the performers involved are famously liberal. Sahl came up with the line, “I’m not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government.” Garafalo hosts her own program on Air America radio with such guests as Noam Chomsky, and Black shouts his criticisms of the Bush administration at his trademark fever pitch. Tingle himself produced the Emmy Award-winning documentary Damned in the USA, taking on the subject of arts censorship.

“I was going to be working anyway that week [of the DNC],” said Tingle, “so I thought, ‘Why not try to make a series, and get other political humorists from around the country?'” He assembled most of the lineup with comics that he met while performing on the New York and Los Angeles comedy circuits. The festival kicks off July 7 with An Evening with Mort Sahl and runs through the end of the month. (The DNC will be in Boston from July 26 to 29.)

The festival with conclude with a week-long event called All Comedy is Loco!, dedicated to the memory of late Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill; a portion of the proceeds will benefit the Catholic Charities organization in O’Neill’s honor. It’s a fitting tribute in that the Speaker received a Roman Catholic education before beginning an illustrious political career notable for his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and his blistering critiques of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. A fervent populist, O’Neill is often quoted for having said, “All politics is local.” He grew up just one block away from the site of Jimmy Tingle’s Off-Broadway Theater in Somerville.

–A.K.

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An American photographer, working in an unnamed foreign country, captures on film an image that is terrifyingly brutal but also daring and provocative. In Crystal Skillman’s 4 Edges, receiving its world premiere in Fort Worth courtesy of Amphibian Productions, the image launches the photographer’s career precisely because it is so disturbing. That word describes the play, as well.

“I’ve had people not be able to finish reading it because they were frightened,” says Skillman. “Some people have been lulled into the sense that they want to be disturbed, but only to a certain level. This is a new world that’s being presented.” In order to create that new world, the playwright went so far as to fashion a new language that’s spoken by the inhabitants of her fictional foreign country. “I tried to come at it emotionally,” she states. “I put myself in the perspective of Palmer, the lead character, and what I thought she would hear. I wrote the first 10 pages not actually knowing what the person was saying to her, but I knew her responses and what she was trying to pick up. I defined the language through the characters.”

The title has several connotations but, for Skillman, it has its roots in photography, which she studied before becoming a playwright. “When you look through the perspective of a camera, there are four edges of a defined window,” she says. “It’s almost putting you behind glass; in a sense, it distances you emotionally from what you’re seeing.” The play explores what happens when one steps beyond that frame and has to deal with the emotions engendered by a photograph. According to Skillman, “Palmer becomes addicted to printing the image. She keeps trying to understand what it means because she has no idea what happened.”

The play poses several challenges from both a thematic and technical standpoint, but one of the things Skillman most admires about Amphibian is its willingness to meet such potential difficulties head on. “You’ve got to create a world that is familiar enough to seem real while also being new and different,” she says. “Anything can happen in a theatrical space. That’s what theater is about.”

–D.B.