Exploring Broadway's Bonnie & Clyde From a New Perspective at Bay Street Theater

On Broadway, the lifespan of Bonnie & Clyde, the musical, was shorter than the lifespan of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the real-life outlaws on whom the show is based. And yet, Bonnie & Clyde—with a Tony-nominated score by Frank Wildhorn and Don Black and a book by Ivan Menchell—has taken on a dedicated fanbase at home and internationally. Most notably, it played an extended run in London following the Covid shutdown, and a concert, led by original leading man Jeremy Jordan and Olivier nominee Frances Mayli McCann, is currently available for streaming.

For the first time since its original run, Bonnie & Clyde is returning to New York, albeit as far from Manhattan as you can get. It’s the annual summer musical offering at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, a venue known for rethinking and rediscovering big musicals like Ragtime and My Fair Lady by making them more intimate.

Bonnie & Clyde, helmed by artistic director Scott Schwartz, is no exception. Schwartz (known for his large-scale productions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame across the world and The Prince of Egypt in the West End) is doing the show with a cast of 10 young actors, a fair share of rewrites, and a focus on the relationships at the heart of the story. It’s a project he’s been working on for six years, and now is the perfect time for the outlaws to take on a new life.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

For those who’ve never been, tell me about the Bay Street Theatre and its mission.
We’re a 34-year-old theater based in Sag Harbor, New York, and I’ve been the artistic director for 12 years. We are open year-round, though our main theater programming is in the summer. We do three mainstage productions, plus a lot of supplemental work, like a new works festival at the beginning of the summer. Our mission is to bring the most innovative and exciting artists to Sag Harbor, and to support local artists, while doing fully professional, Equity productions of plays and musicals.

We have a particular focus on new work. Every season I’ve been here, we’ve done at least one world premiere. Sometimes, we do world premieres of musicals, sometimes we do well-known shows, or sometimes we do shows like Bonnie & Clyde, which are getting a new look. We’ve developed a signature approach to musicals. We’re a 299-seat theater. The furthest you’re away from the stage is eight rows. We’ve tried to embrace that and take big musicals like Ragtime or Evita or My Fair Lady and strip them down to focus on the characters, the music, and the relationships, and do them in a simpler way to really put the story and score at the front.

What’s always impressed me about Bay Street is how daring its willing to be in terms of programming.
We try to take risks. Out here in the Hamptons, it’s a sophisticated audience that, by and large, sees stuff on Broadway and at the major not-for-profits in New York. We want to give our audience something new and fresh, and we’re excited to be able to do that.

How does Bonnie & Clyde fall into this mission?
Well, the journey began about six years ago. I was working with Frank Wildhorn and Don Black on another project and Frank said he really wanted me to direct Bonnie & Clyde at Bay Street. It’s one of his favorite shows of his and he wanted to see it in an intimate space, with more of an off-Broadway approach to the story.

I knew of the show, but it had such a brief run on Broadway that I didn’t even see it. I got Ivan Menchell’s script, and I read it, and I thought it had very interesting, complicated, human characters. It’s the kind of show that I like to tackle as a director. You can really dig into the psychology of the characters and relationships. It has a gorgeous score that’s so variable and American. There’s gospel, there’s country. It’s a real theater score.

Then, the pandemic happened, and we were figuring out our trajectory at Bay Street. We rebuilt our audience, they’re very enthusiastic, and it finally felt like this year was the year.

The production is really intimate, with 10 actors. It’s a version of the show that’s never been seen before. Frank and Don and Ivan have allowed changes to be put in. We changed the whole opening of the show, and that’s different than any version that’s been done. Ivan has done rewrites to scenes; Don rewrote some lyrics for us last week. There’s a song that, I think, has never been in a full production of the show. This is really a new take on it.

Tell me about your actors playing Bonnie and Clyde.
Ivan, the book writer, was the first one who said, “We’ve never really seen a production where the Bonnie and Clyde are played by actors as young as the real Bonnie and Clyde when they were together.” They died when they were 23 and 25, respectively, and encouraged me to look a the fact that Bonnie and Clyde are very young adults.

We found two superstars in the making. Charlie Webb was the young soldier in Michael Arden’s Broadway production of Parade, and he was also in The Notebook. He would be a senior in college next year if he hadn’t come to Broadway. Lyda Jane Harlan got some attention last year because she played Anya in the Bucks County production of Anastasia. The two of them are astounding. Not only are they phenomenal singers, but they’re incredible charismatic.

I would be remiss if I didn’t ask if you’d ever consider exploring Hunchback of Notre Dame or Prince of Egypt with the Bay Street method in mind.
Funnily enough, for one of our galas very early on in my time here, we did a reading of the first act of Prince of Egypt, just to try it out in front of the writers. It was enormously successful, and it continued to push the journey along. So, you never know.

My [original] production of Hunchback still gets done internationally; it played very successfully in Japan and Germany and Austria, and I hear rumors it’s going to come back internationally in the next year or so. But Hunchback is actually an intimate story, even though you have this giant choir. It’s about four people: Quasimodo, Frollo, Phoebus, and Esmerelda. I could see it, but it would have to be a major rethink.