The Roots of Hair

My friend and colleague Eric Grode has a new book out today about the creation and history of the musical Hair, which is a remarkably rich story of theatrical will and happenstance, art and commerce, experimentation and error--I should know, we're printing a long excerpt from the book in the January issue of American Theatre, and it was very hard to choose a section to pull out, it's all so good. As Eric explained in a recent email, he didn't just talk to all the surviving creators and contributors:

I even tracked down one of the Apollo 13 astronauts who walked out of the show at intermission. There are all sorts of incredible anecdotes--including a few that are relatively damning for an authorized history.

It's all true. This is one coffee table book that you won't be able to keep on the coffee table.

The Other Texas

Holland Taylor as late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, in a one-person show she debuted at the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston last May. Then it was titled Money, Marbles & Chalk (a Texas expression that was a favorite of LBJ's, meaning "I'm all in!"). But for its May, 2011 run at the Paramount in Austin, it's called simply Ann - An Affectionate Portrait of Ann Richards. I wrote about the Galveston bow for the May/June issue of American Theatre:

When Richards died in 2006 of cancer, Taylor found herself “unnaturally sad,” and almost immediately started planning a one-woman show about Richards. “The idea really grabbed me by the scruff of the neck—I’d never done anything like this before,” Taylor says. Welcomed by Richards’s family and inner circle, Taylor conducted three years of interviews and research...

How does it feel for Taylor, a native Philadelphian, to portray Richards in front of her fellow Texans? “I’m kind of wild-eyed—my eyes snap open in the morning and I think, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ ” Taylor, who will wear a body suit and wig to portray Richards, has been training with a dialect coach and studying video of the late Guv. She trusts that her audience will appreciate how hard she’s worked: “Texans are so generous and willing to accept you on your own terms. I’ve never been treated so affectionately, and I can’t figure out why: Here’s this Yankee, trying to do a play about their darling daughter.”

Free-Purposing

Interesting Onion AV Club interview with Mike Birbiglia, who's putting out a book called Sleepwalk With Me that's based on his one-person show, which in turn contained material he's previously offered on a blog and performed on This American Life. I thought being a journalist in the age of blogs and social media was confusing, but consider the life of a comic/storyteller. Birbiglia:

It actually is a weird and complicated media landscape that we’re in now, where you blog and then you write about something that happened that week, and then you refine it, and it becomes funnier and funnier and better and stronger, and you do it onstage, and people are like, “Yeah, but we knew that from your blog.” It’s like, “What do you want from me? I’m writing my fucking ass off.” I write like crazy. I’m putting out as much new material as I can of a caliber that people will be happy with, and then I’ve done pieces on This American Life, and some of those pieces are integrated in my forthcoming one-man show which I’m opening in New York this winter, and it’s actually what I’m touring with right now...People go, “Yeah, I heard that on This American Life. It’s like, “Okay. You heard that story on a free podcast, and I’m sorry about that.”

In the days when a comic would tour with the same set and buff it to a fine sheen until he got his cable special or album or sitcom deal, this was less of an issue, of course. As Birbiglia points out later in the interview, Twitter has perhaps made comics too accessible, and in a world where your niche fans follow everything you do, where can you go to try out and develop material? The parallels with music and journalism may be tenuous, but the general theme holds: that the media landscape seems to continue its long warp into a kind of click-through, on-demand meritocracy with dubious returns for the creators of the media itself, except to the extent that we can all share the pleasant illusion that somehow we're all collaboratively creating this media soup we swim in, and at a relatively low cost--with accordingly low financial returns.

As someone who snipped my cable TV subscription earlier this year because the Web can deliver more than enough of the content my household requires, and who not only does a large majority of my reading online but also increasingly writes with an online readership in mind, I'm as uncertain as the next guy how long this can possibly continue. On the other hand, precisely when and where have the performing arts, let alone writing about them, ever offered the kind of stable and lucrative careers our parents would have wished for us?

Another Strike Against Memphis

By almost any metric except quality, the Broadway hit Memphis is an inspiring success story: the years on the road building support in regional theaters, the leads (particularly Montego Glover) who bring down the house every night, the Tony validation. As I've noted in this space before, this Memphis wasn't built in a day but painstakingly reached out and found its appreciative audience. More power to that. I just wish the show were better.

But now I've got a brand new reason to deplore the Joe DiPietro/David Bryan tuner. My colleague Isaac Butler alerted me last month to this quote from a Sarah Ruhl interview in Playbill, which seemed damning but not conclusive:

I heard somewhere that you might be writing a musical. Is that still happening?
SR: I had been working on a musical, and then there were so many musicals about Memphis in the '60s that we just had to abandon ship. It had been a musical about a woman's radio station in Memphis in the '60s, and it just kind of fell apart because of the zeitgeist. [The 2010 Tony Award-winning Memphis, coincidentally, is about a disc jockey in Memphis in the Civil Rights era.]

Who was your collaborator?
SR: It was Elvis Costello, who I love and adore and worship! It was sad not to continue working with him. And he wrote three songs … [Hopefully we'll work together] another time! [Laughs.]

But then, in Nick Paumgarten's intriguing if problematic New Yorker feature on Costello, the voluble tunesmith touches on it briefly:

"Sarah wrote some scenes, I wrote some songs," he said. But all for naught. "Turns out someone else had a Memphis musical. Two Memphis musicals--what are the odds?"

Grrrr.

Today, incidentally, is a holiday in the Weinert-Kendt household, as it is whenever Declan releases new product (National Ransom is his 26th studio album, give or take). I'm one of those fans who will follow this pop polymath down just about any side alley he cares to go (love that string quartet record, for instance, though I'm less sold on North), and I remain hopeful that he'll harness his talent to the stage sooner or later. If Stew can rock Broadway, I think Costello has it in him, though I have to admit the feminist/fabulist Ruhl is a rather exotic pairing for the author of "Honey, Are You Straight or Are You Blind?"

Best. Halloween. Costume. Ever.

I thought my son's skunk outfit was pretty cute, but this, from my friend Dave and his daughter Amalia, really takes the (bloody) cake.

Quick Hit Tuesday

Apologies, this blog might as well be a Twitter feed these days...

• The November issue of American Theatre is out, and it's got a cover story about Cornerstone (a favorite company) by Steven Leigh Morris (indispensable), with a cover photo by Gary Leonard (a national treasure). Wish I could say I had something to do with all of these, but it's actually more a case of having found a place to work where other people actually get how important these folks are.
  
• If there's a better profile writer than Jesse Green, I haven't read him. His Kushner exegesis for New York is a work of genius.
  
• If you haven't checked in at StageGrade lately, the season is heating up (most recently graded: In the Wake and The Scottsboro Boys).
  
• Voice more or less rested, I plan to rock the Path Cafe with (mostly) other people's music this coming Sat. night.

Two Trends Worth Noting

1. Isherwood and Brantley seem to have switched places at the Times; for the second time in a week, the day's paper has Isherwood on the Broadway beat (Scottsboro Boys) and Brantley Off-Broadway (Merry Wives); last Wednesday Isherwood caught Rain on Broadway and Brantley Penelope at St. Ann's Warehouse. It's not unprecedented, but it does seem notable.

2. See anything missing from this roster of "Arts + Culture" options on Time Out NY's newly redesigned site?