Why you can't get tickets

Keith Olbermann has seen The Book of Mormon five times and is planning a sixth. Last night he talked to show lead Josh Gad about politics during the show, and about the show in this web extra. Have fun watching Keith giggle like a fangirl:

Saturday Morning Snark

Somewhere in California, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are howling with laughter:

And that differs from these.....how?

Show Tune Hipsters

The Future of Broadway

There's a very strange thing happening in pop culture these days, and it has to do with show tunes.

Show Tunes. The very phrase has been associated with, variously, little old ladies with blue hair, tourists from Kansas, and Teh Gay. And yet, we're now finding that there is a Vast Show Tune Underground, a club that surely meets in dark basements in bad parts of town, serving up bad liquor and requiring a password for enter. Its members are neither little old ladies with blue hair, nor tourists from Kansas, nor gay men. In fact, they are some of the most unlikely people you'd ever think would be aficionados of the Songbook of the American Theatre. For one thing, they're straight guys. For another, they're "guy-guys", with sophomoric, Apatowan senses of humor which lean towards jokes about getting high and jerking off, about farts and anal probes and the reality that "clitoris" is a funny-sounding word. And yeah, there's a fair amount of undercurrent of homophobia to what they do, which is why they are as rich as Croesus and is no doubt their way of overcompensating for the fact that these guys really, really love show tunes.

Seth MacFarlane, who created Family Guy, a show that uses any excuse to include a musical number (preferably a big production number), has often revealed in interviews his love of show tunes and the American songbook. The CD Family Guy Live in Vegas, a collaboration with composer Walter Murphy, gave a taste of what MacFarlane's amazing pipes can do. But MacFarlane takes his American songbook as seriously as Michael Feinstein does, and in September will release Music Is Better Than Words, a compilation of "hidden gems" from musicals of the 1940's and 1950's. But because Mac Farlane's Broadway sensiblity is so tied up in his own voice, and because he's busy producing three hit TV shows and doing live performances, a move to Broadway is unlikely. Still, given the demographic of his audience, a guy with the snark cred of Seth MacFarlane can do a great deal to open the eyes of the youth demographic to the emerging Broadway that is not just for bluehairs anymore.

The bluehairs are the reason for the hue and cry over the years about the impending Death of Broadway, about where the next generation of audiences is going to come from when everyone who could possibly stand to sit through Andrew Lloyd Webber bombasts has already seen them and started to die off. All the hoopla about Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, at least before it became a national joke, was about keeping the same young audiences in the theatre that made Avenue Q a hit and a Tony Award winner in 2003-2004 -- one with staying power that is still playing off-Broadway.

The plethora of jukebox musicals that dot the theatre district like Starbucks these days aren't going to do it. The songs in these shows, such as Jersey Boys, Million Dollar Quartet, and Baby It's You, have no resonance for younger audiences. They're for the neo-bluehairs that constitute the first wave of baby boomers. Perhaps this group has enough disposable income to keep Broadway going all by themselves, because there's yet another one coming: Natural Woman, based on the life and music of Carole King. It's all enough to make me rue the fact that Leader Of The Pack opened in 1984, before the jukebox musical became a cheap way to make money. Frank Rich hated it, but I actually SAW Leader Of The Pack and was rewarded by some great belting by Annie Golden and a rendition of "River Deep Mountain High" by the great Darlene Love that turned the Ambassador Theatre into the First Church of Awesome Gospel. "Leader" ran for only 120 performances, which should give the producers of Natural Woman pause, Jersey Boys notwithstanding. The jukebox musical set is starting to retire, and doesn't have a whole lot of money for Broadway. There's only so many ways you can slice that bologna before it starts to go bad. At some point you have to bring in new audiences.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise that snark sells. Yes, musicals like South Pacific are classics, but among the high school drama club set from whence new audiences come, the standard bearer is the ubiquitous Guys and Dolls -- to this day the gold standard of marriage of wit and music. The wit is out there; the question was from whence the music would come.

And it's coming from some highly unlikely places.

Anyone who's followed Green Day over the years knows that even back in the Dookie days, it was clear that while Billie Joe Armstrong may have been a snotty punk pothead, he had a gift for ditties -- 3 minute pop songs filled with angst, rage, and yes, snark. We knew that Billie Joe was prolific, and we knew that his brand of 3-chord punk had those damnedly catchy pop hooks that left "Walking Contradiction" playing over and over in your head for three days. What we didn't know, is for all these years, what Billie Joe was writing was show tunes. What we learned when American Idiot hit Broadway was just how glorious some of those songs are when performed by people who can actually sing.

For example, here's "Whatshername" performed by Green Day:

...and by the original Broadway cast:

American Idiot on Broadway was a vibrant, exciting show with a great cast, hampered by a weak book, but it still played a respectable 422 performances, closing this year on April 24. And now we know that while Billie Joe Armstrong became a rock star writing songs about getting teenaged rage, there's something else brewing there -- a knowledge and feel for the conventions of theatre that in the aftermath of American Idiot have no doubt had him thinking he might at some point write something specifically for Broadway.

Sort of like what Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done with The Book of Mormon. Back in February, I started receiving postcards for bargain preview seats for this show. I knew that these two guys combined with Bobby Lopez, who along with Jeff Marx wrote the hilarious, yet still tinkly songs for Avenue Q, would produce a winner. But Mr. Brilliant had been jettisoned from his employer a month before, and I couldn't justify spending even $49 a head for a show.

Of course now I'm kicking myself, now that Book has become a monster hit, and is expected to pick up a wheelbarrow of Tony Awards this weekend. Who would have thought that the same people who fifteen years ago created a cartoon that started with a foul-mouthed character getting anally probed by space aliens via an expanding satellite dish would become the Toast of Broadway? But even if you can't get tickets until sometime in 2016 (which is what seems to be the case; just try looking for tickets during the time period that Telecharge allow you to enter and if you want to really get sick, try looking for tickets at StubHub), you should run out and buy the original cats recording.

Here's composer Bobby Lopez on this week's Studio 360 on NPR (full interview link) playing the opening to "I Believe", which I've read will be the song performed on the awards show tonight. It wouldn't have been my choice, but this song is a small miracle -- it demonstrates the full goofiness of some of the Mormon precepts, and yet for one brief moment, it makes you believe them too.

Parker and Stone may be getting all the press, but for my money, it's Bobby Lopez, likely to be two-for-two by the end of this weekend, who is the unsung hero of this production -- a Frank Loesser for a new generation.

Some advice for the Zombie Apocalypse

Sahr Ngaujah as Fela Anikulapo Kuti in last year's musical, Fela!, educates us about zombies:

Grab the shovel and backhoe

You're going to need it to dig out after reading this:

Four minutes into the Act I rehearsal, a “Spider-Man” crew member announced on his mic, “We’re gonna hold.” It was the first of several pauses to deal with technical glitches, mostly in transitions between scenes. By the dinner break, only 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour show had unfolded. And the first scheduled performance (this Sunday at 6:30 p.m.) was just eight days away.

In the last week, the nervous creators of the show, the most expensive in Broadway history, have begun to see the hand-drawn sketches, the digitally animated videos, the comic-book-inspired costumes come to life — to see “Spider-Man” finally, literally, take flight.

“Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. “This feels like it.”

Yet time is running out.

At the creators’ last dinner on Friday night before Bono and the Edge left for a U2 tour in Australia, Bono said bluntly that the show “won’t get out of the gate” and have a chance to catch on with audiences if technical problems persist, as they have in rehearsals.

Still, he and the others did not dwell on mundane matters like flying harnesses. They are all artists who dream big, who compare the show’s themes to great literature and philosophy.

“We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you’re separate from others,” Bono continued. “If the only wows you get from ‘Spider-Man’ are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we’ve failed.”

There you have it: Why I Hate Bono, despite all his good works.

And by the way, I heard a radio segment this morning on this show, where they played an audio snippet. It sounded like a high school kid trying to sound like Bono. "Creating art that has never been done before"? Is that why every U2 song sounds like every other U2 song?

Oh the humanity.

And the two and a half hours of sheer exhilaration that is Fela! is closing January 2.

There is no God.

Why, yes, I really DO need to get a life. Too bad I don't have time for one

I am just enough of a pathetic geek that I wish I had been able to see this:

Yes, that really IS Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong in one of eight performances of American Idiot, in which he stood in for Tony Vincent as "St. Jimmy".


Thoughts about this development here, here.

Rage and the Tony Awards

OK, so I didn't get to live my dream of watching Harvey Fierstein hand Billie Joe Armstrong a Tony Award last night. Frankly, I'm a lot more livid at the indescribably wonderful FELA! getting jobbed on just about everything but the technicals and the "Boy Those Black People Sure Can Dance" choreography award for Bill T. Jones. For my money, FELA! is the greatest package of design, music, dance, and powerhouse performances by a cast that truly believes and feels this work in their hearts and souls that has ever been seen on Broadway. Mr. Brilliant knows Fela Kuti's music well, and he said this was better than the real thing.

So what happened? Was it just a question of dollar signs, since neither the cuss-riddled American Idiot nor the Africanism of FELA! mean an extended life in road companies, community theatre, and your local high school? Or was something else at work here?

The old Broadway audience is dying off. Melina heard a woman leaving the theatre when we saw American Idiot who must have been one of those people who see everything -- and she was appalled at what she'd just seen. But then there was another elderly man for whom it was his third time at the show, because he loved it. But mostly crowding the theatre at American Idiot, you have kids in their teens and twenties. At FELA! on Saturday, the audience was only about half white, and a good chunk of it was under 40.

If the people who vote for the Tonys (except you, ModFab) want to throw those people under the bus in order to keep their exclusive little club alive just a bit longer, they're going to find themselves at some point with a whole bunch of empty theatres.

I suppose if you are an American-born black son of a father from Sierra Leone with a background in avant-garde theatre and a name unpronounceable unless one practices it, as is the electrifying Sahr Ngaujah, and you powerhouse your way through five performances a week in which you are on stage about ninety percent of the time, you're going to have trouble winning over Tony voters over a guy in a dress. La Cage Aux Folles may be great, and it has a fantastic empowerment showstopper in I Am What I Am, but I don't care -- Sahr Ngaujah was robbed.

Why?

It could be just commerce, but I think there's something else going on.

Rage.

American Idiot and FELA! are musicals about rage -- rage at a whore media that only cares about the Gulf of Mexico to the extent that they can twitter about whether Barack Obama is showing enough emotion. Rage at eight years of George W. Bush. Rage at a corrupt Nigerian government that throws a woman out a window because they feel threatened by the activism of her son. American Idiot is about angry youth. FELA! is about that most threatening of phenomena if you're a white theatregoer: The Angry Black Man. These are two very angry shows. The anger is where these productions get their power, but while the old farts of the Theatre Wing were willing to overlook puppet sex in 2003 because of the tinkly Broadway-style songs, "Zombie" and "Jesus of Suburbia" aren't going to cut it with this crowd.

And that's why I loved this moment from the awards show last night, when Billie Joe Armstrong, knowing full well from the rip-roaring renditions of "Holiday" and "Know Your Enemy" that these were NOT his peeps and there was going to be no mosh pit that this particular show, came out and proceeded to make very clear that HE appreciates what Michael Mayer did even if the Tony nominating committee didn't, and his band will do quite well no matter what the Theatre Wing thinks:

Best. Musical. EVAH.

Look, I loves me some American Idiot. But there just aren't words to describe FELA!

It's American Idiot week!

Yes, folks, the musical of our age, American Idiot opens Tuesday night.

There's talk of a movie, which will undoubtedly then be turned back into another musical, which means not only that Green Day has become Mel Brooks, but also that a trio of guys who used to do 3-chord punk about getting high and jerking off have become the Most Important Band in America.

So in celebration of this much-anticipated event (which Melina and I will have the fun of attending next Saturday, which means my anticipation is as much about not having to work two 15-hour days next weekend as about the show itself), here at B@B we're declaring this to be officially American Idiot week, so every day (time permitting), we'll point our fingers and laugh at a particularly fine specimen of American Idiot.

Our first Idiot, as Blue Girl reminds us, is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who just over a year ago, scoffed at the idea of volcano monitoring:

Still think volcano monitoring is something to be mocked, there, Bobby? Here's something around which your greedy little Republican mind can perhaps wrap itself.

Count me in.

I know I'm a bit late to the party on this, but count this as my first "I am SO there!" moment of 2010:

Just as the characters in Green Day's rock musical American Idiot search for meaning in a chaotic world, so do the fans of that show's score seek an answer to a larger question: When is it coming to Broadway?

A casting notice made public on Nov. 9 indicates that producers are indeed planning a Broadway move for the hot-selling, critically-praised American Idiot, currently playing an extended world-premiere run in Berkeley, CA, through Nov. 15. Until the appearance of this industry casting alert, there has only been mention of a hope for a commercial life for the Michael Mayer-directed musical. "There is a Broadway future for the show, but at this time no dates or theatre are confirmed," spokesman Michael Hartman told Playbill.com on Nov. 9.

The casting notice does not indicate a production schedule or timeline for the dark-hued rock musical, which borrows songs from the punk album of the same name, plus numbers from Green Day's latest album, "21st Century Breakdown."

As was known, Tom Hulce and Ira Pittelman are the lead producers; they were also behind the Tony Award-winning production of Spring Awakening, for which Mayer won a Tony for Best Direction of a Musical.

Yes, it's THAT Tom Hulce, old Wolfie Mozart himself.

Everything in life is only for now

...including AVENUE Q, which closes on September 13th after a six year run.

For all that I'm not the demographic portrayed in AVENUE Q, I have a special fondness for this show. Some of it is the unparallelled combination of sweetness, snark, and cynicism in the book and the songs; some of it is the tinkly catchiness of the tunes, and much of it is that it's the only Broadway show that Mr. Brilliant has ever really liked -- enough to sit through it twice.

It's seemed as if AVENUE Q would be like THE FANTASTICKS -- a quirky little show that for some strange reason would just go on forever. But alas, all good things must come to an end. So if you're in the New York area and haven't seen it yet, or if you are coming to New York in the next few weeks, stop by the Golden Theatre and take it in.

Because nothing lasts, life goes on, full of surprises...you'll be faced with problems of all shapes and sizes...you're going to have to make a few compromises...for now: