All Musicals, All the Time

Most of the time, life isn’t a musical comedy. But, once a year, there’s a weekend when life is exactly that for at least one gung-ho crowd. That would be the weekend when the Festival of New Musicals is thrown by the National Alliance for Musical Theatre — or NAMT, as it’s known to familiars. For two days at the end of the third week in September, representatives of the 133 NAMT member theaters — all of which perform musicals some or all of the time — gather to gab with other like-minded industry folks about the state of their chosen art. They are also treated to a program of songs from 11 production hopefuls and two days of 45-minute chunks from eight hot-off-the-presses or nearly finished tuners.

This year was the 15th annual go-round. Attendees were especially wired because a few of the composers, lyricists, and librettists were bigger names than have typically been associated with an endeavor that, since its inception, has been intended to introduce brand new writers to people with whom they might make art and commerce. Alan Menken and David Zippel, who have never had musicals unveiled for the NAMT dues payers, were represented. So was Tom Jones, a second timer. Laurence O’Keefe, whose Bat Boy was an Off-Broadway item last season, was also on the elite roster.

“Getting hotshot writers is not the goal,” festival director Daniella Topol told me when I was able to lure her and executive director Kathy Evans away from the madding crowd for a brief interview. Visibly happy about their smoothly running operation, both women insisted that the festival selection procedure is what it’s always been: Submissions — 170 this year — are passed around with no names attached to them. Topol reported that, when the staff saw the list of those earmarked for this year’s just-ended fete, the reaction was, “Wow, we’ve got a festival!” However, Topol did allow that word often travels quickly around the relatively small musical comedy world as to what projects prominent writers are working on.

 It sure seems to; one disgruntled spectator leaving Ballad of Little Pinks, for which Menken supplied the music, said to me, “No way that show would have been chosen if someone didn’t know Alan Menken wrote it.” Hmmm. Did they or didn’t they?

Perhaps a more pressing question is why Alan Menken with his collaborators, Marion Adler and Connie Grappo, would even enter a property into such a competition. Topol’s answer goes to the heart of the core problem besetting musicals nowadays: getting them on. Even people with track records need to do whatever they can to attract attention. The festival, which costs about $95,000 to pull off and which is partially underwritten by a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, is apparently becoming an increasingly important path.

Rarely, though, does it lead directly to full-scale productions; as Topol put it, festival exposure does not necessarily spell “insta-show.” Rather, it’s a matter of getting names and properties out there and then seeing what develops in a year or three or eight. John Forster, whose Eleanor was offered in 1992, agrees with Topol’s view. “They file it away,” he says of attendees’ responses to what they see. Forster mentions that his work, written with Jonathan Bolt and Thomas Tierney, has had something like eight productions since its NAMT Festival unwrapping but none in New York, where he maintains it’s still crucial for a musical to be given a commercial run in order to truly become established. Kirsten Childs, whose Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin was a 1998 entry, says, “It was a thrill to see all those people lined up to talk to me about my show right after it ended.” The reception line paid off: Childs’s autobiographical opus was produced at Playwrights Horizons less than two years later and is now one of the two dozen or so festival alumni selections that could be said to have gathered anything like widespread recognition. Thoroughly Modern Millie is perhaps the most successful graduate of all.

Because Topol and Evans agree that the festival is not enough to secure a musical’s future, they expressed great satisfaction that, this year, they were able to announce something called the Producer-Writer Initiative. This may be the weekend’s best news: According to the NAMT’s follow-up press release, the initiative “is designed to support the housing and travel costs of a musical theater writing team residence at a NAMT member theater for a minimum of seven days during the production of a reading, workshop, and/or full production of a new musical.”

 The five fellowships are being funded by ASCAP, the Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Theatre Foundation, and NAMT itself. When I buttonholed Celso Gonzalez-Falla on the stretch of 42nd Street sidewalk between the Douglas Fairbanks and John Houseman theaters — the venues where the designated tuners get their two showings each — he said that his and wife Sondra Gilman’s intention from the outset of their philanthropic venture was to “bring back the American musical,” a genre he’s loved since he arrived from Cuba and went just about immediately to his first tuner.

Well, NAMT has now been doing its bit in the challenging “bring back the American musical” crusade for 15 years by way of the festival. (The festival has had a few British shows in the mix during that time.) The festival process has evolved over that decade and a half; Bob Ost, whose Finale! was spotlighted in 1991 along with 11 other shows, reminded me that, in the early days, musicals were presented in their entirety. This was fine by him but for the fact that audience members tended to come and go during performances. Why? Because it was impossible to see everything without sampling. Ost doesn’t mind today’s truncated, 45-minute presentations, although he remarks that “some people know how to do an edited version and some don’t.”

Other changes in festival amenities include the handing out of CDs after every showing. Topol said of the disc dole-out that creators “have to do it” for promotional purposes; for one thing, final decision makers at any given member theater may not be the ones milling about in festival badges. She added that few of the songwriters file material on the Internet because potential producers don’t have downloading time to spare. Forty-five second excerpts of songs, she mentioned, are featured on the organization’s website (namt.net), although Alan Menken and David Zippel didn’t take advantage of this exposure for reasons of protecting their intellectual property.

One of the delights of the festival — aside from the number of reliable and stalwart actors recruited for it — is tracking not only how the Festival itself has been refined over the years but also what is suggested about the evolving musical theater genre. This year’s crop was of a higher quality level than previous years’ offerings thanks to Zippel and Jones, for instance, as well as to much less well-known tunesmiths. The songs heard tended to be extremely well crafted. Certainly, those in Sarah, Plain and Tall, written by Nell Benjamin and Laurence O’Keefe, were. So was the Barry Kleinbort-Joseph Thalken score for Was. Curiously, both musicals are set for the most part in Kansas and include a song that an absent mother sings to her daughter. (What’s up with that? And what’s up with Thalken also being represented as co-writer, with Tom Jones, of Harold and Maude? How fair is it for one composer to have two shows among the festival’s compact eight?) It should also be noted that, less curiously, the shadow of Stephen Sondheim hangs over the creators and has done so for many years.

Not so, though, with the rhythm and blues musical Two Queens, One Castle, written by Jevetta Steele, J. D. Steele, Thomas W. Jones II, and William Hubbard. Both that one and Was did include a sero-positive man among the dramatis personae. The David Zippel-Matthew Wilder Princesses seemed the biggest audience pleaser, although its story, taken from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, seemed an amalgam of Annie and Cameron Mackintosh’s not-so-recent London flop Moby Dick, in which the young misses at a girls school put on a musical version of the Melville classic. As in past years, a festival attendee could grow mighty cold waiting for a romantic ballad the likes of which thrilled musical comedy audiences in the past. Either songwriters can’t write ’em like they used to or they simply don’t want to.

Nevertheless, the NAMT Festival of New Musicals remains a place when the song hasn’t ended and where everyone hopes the melody will linger on.

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[For more on the National Alliance for Musical Theatre, visit the website www.namt.net.]