I Wanted to Hear His Music Again: Uncovering the Lost Michael Friedman Musical Stranger

Before Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Fortress of Solitude, and Pretty Filthy cemented Michael Friedman’s brilliance as a theater artist, there was Stranger, a provocative, eventually abandoned musical he created in the early 2000s with friends Trip Cullman and Micah Schraft. Loosely adapted from an Italian art movie with just 973 words of dialogue, Stranger never made it past a pair of developmental readings and an ill-fated concert, existing ever since in far recesses of its surviving authors’ minds as a piece of juvenilia that built a friendship, if not careers.

Now, for the first time in two decades, Stranger is seeing the light of day, as part of a celebration of the 60^th anniversary of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which preserves Friedman’s archives. Taking place on Wednesday, July 23, this free reading reunites director Cullman and book writer and lyricist Schraft, and has a cast that includes Tony winners Katrina Lenk and Lindsay Mendez, as well as Will Swenson, Leslie Kritzer, and Andrew Barth Feldman.

Cullman and Friedman met when they were 18 and serving as assistants to the eminent theatermaker Elizabeth Swados. Through another friend, Cullman met Schraft, “and then,” says Cullman, “the three of us—Micah, Michael, and I—became really, really, really, really close very, very quickly.” Over drinks at Bowery Bar, Cullman pitched his pals an idea he had, and that’s where the creative journey of Stranger begins.

Stranger is inspired by the 1968 Pasolini film Teorema, in which Terence Stamp plays a character called “The Visitor.” As recounted by Cullman, the Visitor mysteriously arrives “and then proceeds to seduce each member of a family, having sex with the daughter, the son, the mother, the father, and the housekeeper. Then, just as mysteriously as he arrived, he vanishes. In his absence, after this volcanic sexual awakening, each member of this bourgeois family experiences a paradigmatic shift in their identity.” Cullman recalls being attracted to Pasolini’s interests in “Marxism, Catholicism, and faggotry,” as well as the film’s transgressive narrative. It’s general lack of dialogue made it ripe for adaptation.

Both Cullman and Schraft recognized that Friedman was operating at a level of “true genius from the very beginning,” says Cullman, even at the tender age of 21. The structure of the piece—a play that becomes a musical once the visitor abandons the family—was essentially Friedman’s concept. “Part of his [creative] discovery goes straight through this musical,” Schraft notes. Playing with the age-old musical-theater trope of characters only singing because speaking can’t contain the emotion they want to express, Stranger introduces song only “when the family can no longer express themselves in words,” Schraft says. “They’re so emotionally broken that they start singing.”

In May 2001, Stranger had two successful readings with the then-fledgling theatrical incubator Page 73. It featured the likes of Laura Bell Bundy, John Benjamin Hickey, and Karen Ziemba.

“It was all very fresh and very new,” Schraft recalls. “We had great people and it was all gravy. The expectation was nonexistent of what it was going to be, so people were delighted and taken by surprise.”

The Public Theater expressed interest, too, and Stranger got a spot as part of a new works festival at Joe’s Pub. That went “very badly,” Cullman remembers. “It’s a specific tone, and it was a new works festival, so we were trying to wedge the whole musical into an hour,” Schraft adds. “We couldn’t really rehearse enough, there were stage lights, people bought tickets. We were young, and because the Public was interested in it, we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we want to do it at the Public!’ But it was the wrong venue for where we were in the creative process, versus the expectation of the audience going into it.”

The three writers closed the door on Stranger shortly thereafter. “Because it went badly, we got scared to continue working on it,” Cullman explains. Not wanting to ruin their friendship played a part, too, as did their individual preoccupations with other projects that were gaining more traction (including Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the musical Friedman cowrote with Alex Timbers that eventually put him on the map). “We had these other things that felt less complicated, and at 24, you’re going to follow the thing that is working,” Schraft says.

Scraft describes Stranger as “the problem child we love the most. … It was this thing we only could have made when we were in our early 20s, and it was what forged this amazing friendship, so that’s the place that it held. But I don’t think anyone was losing sleep over it.”

It’s safe to assume it wasn’t the musical-theater white whale that Friedman was thinking about when he died in 2017, at the all-too-young age of 41, from HIV complications.

It wasn’t even what the Performing Arts Library initially pitched. They requested Cullman stage a reading of American Pop, a project he and Friedman were creating in the mid-2010s that explored the history of American popular song and Friedman’s relationship to it. “I’m so happy that the Library for the Performing Arts wants to celebrate its archives and honor Michael, but the engagement around the issues of that musical and how to represent Michael in his absence is so emotionally fraught for me that it is not what I want to be doing with my summer. It’s just really painful and traumatizing, to be completely honest with you.”

The Stranger that audience members at the Bruno Walter Auditorium will experience features a tonally and structurally daring score that has been relatively untouched from 25 years ago. Friedman somehow dabbled in and anticipated new forms that weren’t even thought about at that time, layering Italian arias, pop, and traditional theater music on top of one another. And there’s an unexpected clairvoyance about Schraft’s script, which touches on political and sociological issues, like self-deportation, that seem all too prophetic in light of current events.

Still, they’re doing small rewrites to the book, if only to make it a little more viewer-friendly. “We really wrote this show for us,” Schraft says. “We wanted to see what would make each other think or laugh or feel provoked. We weren’t thinking about the audience that much. Now, we’re older, and saying, ‘Oh, wait, there are people here who want to have an experience.'” Adds Cullman, “It had a complete disregard for how you would hold an audience’s hand along the journey of an unusual story, which is something that we’re trying to maybe zhuzh a little bit now that we’re significantly older than 21.”

So why did Cullman ultimately suggest Stranger, a show that, despite its potential relevance, was locked away for a reason? It goes back to when he was directing Friedman and Daniel Goldstein’s musical Unknown Soldier in 2020. “I remember truly feeling the conjuring of Michael’s creative spirit in the room when I heard his music. Selfishly, I wanted to have that experience again. I really, really miss my dear, dear friend, and I wanted to hear his music again.”