How to Make a Nonprofit, Off Broadway Musical

By MARK BLANKENSHIP

Break a Few Rules

Take The Shaggs: The Philosophy of the World, now in previews at Playwrights Horizons (in a co-production with New York Theatre Workshop.) Based on the true story of three sisters whose father forced them to form a rock band, despite having no musical ability, this strange, spiky, and emotionally piercing rock musical breaks several conventions.
 
Most of the songs, for instance, reflect the characters’ emotional states without forwarding the plot. When Austin Wiggin, the girls’ father, takes them out of school so they can practice full time, he tells his wife, Annie, that she has to home school them: Annie responds by singing lines from the textbooks she’s supposed to teach from, and every “lesson” about capturing butterflies or the ruin of Pompeii reflects her own emotional turmoil.

Elsewhere, composer-lyricist Gunnar Madsen and lyricist-librettist Joy Gregory toy with the Shaggs’ own legacy for making terrible music (their 1969 album The Philosophy of the World is a cult classic.) In several scenes, they blend original Shaggs recordings with more elegantly orchestrated versions of their songs. The “good” versions suggest what Austin thinks his daughters sound like, but they’re still not fantastic. The melodies are nonexistent and the lyrics are bizarre, and it feels risky to unleash them on stage at all.

“Gunnar and Joy have created something that doesn’t exist in a traditional musical theatre form,” says Kent Nicholson, Playwrights Horizons’ Director of Musical Theater Development. “They’re standing outside the form and saying, ‘Well, if we did a more traditionally structured musical, it wouldn’t feel like The Shaggs. It would feel false somehow.'”

The creative process was as unusual as the show’s structure. At first, Gregory and Madsen just wrote songs that felt “Shaggy,” without knowing where they’d turn up in the story. For instance, a second-act number called “My Head is an Empty Birdcage” gives the awkward middle sister, Dot, a devastating moment to reflect on her sadness, but that wasn’t necessarily what the song was created to do. “That was one of the first songs we wrote,” Gregory says. “We didn’t know where it would go. We just wanted to start hearing how these girls would express themselves.”

He explains, “It’s a piece that, while it had had a couple of productions, actually had never reached the kind of exposure that would guarantee it was going to have a life after. That’s what makes it a Playwrights show. That’s our functioning goal.”

All Hands On Deck

On top of that, musicals tend to involve more writers than a play, and they require years of finesse to balance songs and book scenes. That means extra workshops and development productions, and those cost money, too.

That’s three companies uniting for a single production, with Prospect artistic director Cara Reichel serving as director and NYTB artistic director Joe Barros serving as choreographer. For Sheilah Rae, the musical’s lyricist and co-librettist, the breadth and intensity of this support has been a shock. “When it finally happened, it happened so fast,” she says. “The writers, we all looked at each other and went, ‘Oh my God.’ We’d been pushing and pushing this thing, and then all of a sudden, it was, ‘Boom.'”

So Many Chefs, Just One Kitchen

Sometimes, all this collaboration can derail a show. Jim Nicola, artistic director of New York Theatre Workshop, says, “It’s really tricky when you have two co-producers or the producer and the artists looking at what’s on stage and seeing different things. They’re describing problems or issues differently and therefore solutions are different. That’s when it gets very complicated and almost impossible to get out of.”

He adds, however, that NYTW and Playwrights haven’t had that problem with The Shaggs. “Luckily for us, all parties seem to be seeing the same things.”

Gunnar Madsen agrees, saying, “In this particular production, it feels like I’ve got an army of dramaturgs who are not getting in the way, but who are really helping to clarify the piece and make it stronger.” Gregory adds, “They’ve held my feet to the fire on some clarity things, and I always appreciate that. You hate it at first, but then you find a way to own it, and then you say, ‘No. Dammit. They made the play better.'”

So What Type of Show Are We Seeing?

“I work very hard to keep that out of my head,” says Nicola. “And I work hard to get that out of the artist’s head as well. The key thing is to focus on the here and now and get this right in this room. If we don’t do this right, then nothing is going to go anywhere.”

Beane echoes him, saying, “It’s essentially the same work, wherever you’re writing. It is very much the same job. You do quickly realize that a song is a song, dialogue is dialogue, and something touching is something touching.”

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Mark Blankenship is TDF’s online content editor

Photo credits: Top, "Lysistrata Jones," Carol Rosegg; second, "The Shaggs," Joan Marcus; third, "I Married Wyatt Earp," Gerry Goodstein; fourth, "Lysistrata Jones," Carol Rosegg