Why a bukowski sondheim musical makes sense

Bukowsical works on two or occasionally more levels of reality. The actors at New Line are playing a troupe of actors in Los Angeles, who are playing the people in Bukowski's life. Without the show's original framing device of the backer's audition, this idea is more subtle during the first part of the show, but it becomes more explicit when the "performance" is interrupted by the lawyer.

When this New York lawyer takes a swipe at people in Los Angeles, the "actors" respond with the song "That's Los Angeles," a charmingly clueless tribute to the city of angels, chock full of very funny back-handed compliments. The audience knows this song is scripted, that it's been rehearsed and staged, but it's also "spontaneous" within the world of Bukowsical.

If the audience didn't consciously register this double layer of reality before, they do now. And it will pay off at the end of the show, after the song "Twelve Steps of Love.

It's always hard for the actors to figure out how to play this, if they haven't dealt with it before, but they always eventually get comfortable with the idea. And we've found that as long as the actors are comfortable with it, so the audience will be too -- whether they recognize the double-reality consciously or not. We get just a taste of the black Three Sisters with a fragment of the gospel-flavored "Sistah Sistah Sistah," and then we're told that the next song, "That's Los Angeles," was cut from Rootin' Tootin' Ramparts about which we find out nothing more , giving this troupe of players a little more backstory, a little more reality.

But just for a second, before this freight train of a show barrels on, we wonder what on earth Rootin' Tootin' Ramparts might be about, and how on earth "That's Los Angeles" would fit in a show with a title like that. But in the midst of all this craziness, this song also gets at something fundamental about Bukowski's work -- almost all of it is set in Los Angeles, where he lived most of his life.

But it's not the Los Angles we see in movies. Bukowski's L. So here's this anthem to Los Angeles, but everything in the lyric undercuts itself -- Maybe you've got concerts At Alice Tully Hall, And other high-class venues packed with Snobs from wall to wall. Well, we've got sitcom tapings, And they're absolutely free! And baby, that's Los Angeles to me. Not only are they comparing Lincoln Center's classical music venue to sitcom tapings, but the big selling point here is not that they're good , but that they're free.

It's a reminder that this is a city not of culture but of commerce, at least according to this song. It's a comically cynical and arguably accurate picture of Los Angeles that Bukowski would have appreciated, but it's delivered with such aggressive sincerity that it becomes even funnier. I know musical theatre. The Bukowsical writers are acknowledging what everyone in the audience is thinking. But it also brings up -- if only subliminally -- a more interesting point, particularly here in its production by New Line.

No, Bukowsical could not survive the commercial theatre, but commercial theatre isn't the only game anymore. Since the early s, when New Line was founded, there has been a growing nonprofit musical theatre movement across America, an alternative to the commercial musical theatre of New York and Broadway tours.

Musicals no longer have to be designed for the often non-English-speaking tourists and families who go to Broadway shows.

While these shows met with varying levels of economic and critical success, the very existence of this alternative home for the art form began to redefine the musical, offering an alternative to both the traditional Broadway musical and the new West End shows.

As the economics of the commercial theatre became increasingly forbidding, the nonprofit theatre became vital incubators for musical drama and nurtured a new generation of musical theatre writers. The times, they are a-changing'. Both Cry-Baby and High Fidelity died quick, humiliating deaths on Broadway at the hands of the chronically clueless, but New Line resuscitated them, produced them, demonstrated how outstanding both shows are without rewriting them , got rave reviews and sold-out houses, and now other companies around the country are producing both shows.

We hope the same thing will happen with Bukowsical. We don't need no stinkin' Broadway I know, easy for me to say When I was a kid, I guess I cared about Broadway. But now all I want is to work on amazing pieces of theatre with amazing artists and share it with amazing audiences. And that's what I do. The truth is I'm living exactly the life my four-year-old self always wanted. I'm making musicals. Although now that I think about it, my four-year-old self wouldn't be allowed to see New Line shows Ah, fuck him.

I realize as I work on this show that I have a lot in common with Charles Bukowski. Like Buk, I refuse to follow convention in my art and I don't care much about money. I make the kind of art I want to make, and people can like it or not. Like Buk, my art is often vulgar, often uncomfortable, often confrontational, but always suffused with truth. Because life itself is often vulgar, uncomfortable, and confrontational.

We don't make art that allows you to escape from your road in life -- we make art that helps you understand and navigate your road. Because that's what art is for. Bukowski understood that better than most. And in a weird way, so does Bukowsical. I Think I've Got Crabs. There are a lot of very funny musicals, even more now that we've moved away from the bombast of the musical theatre British Invasion and back toward the original form of the American musical -- the musical comedy.

These neo musical comedies Cry-Baby, Spelling Bee, Shrek, Lysistrata Jones are more self-aware, more political, more ironic, and more vulgar, but they capture the joy, the chaos, and the muscle of classic musical comedies. It's a perfect blend -- a uniquely American blend -- of innocence and irony, idealism and cynicism.

Maybe the funniest aspect of Bukowsical is its perversely good-natured, sunny tone. It's not Bat Boy or Urinetown. But with the irony turned up to eleven. The musical comedy has always had this kinetic tension, but it used to lean more toward the innocence and idealism, and now it leans more toward the irony and cynicism.

Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen wrote in her book, Directors and the New Musical Drama , "Rather than finding order through chaos, or offering the sense of resolution that even the more political Broadway musicals often give their audiences, some newer shows imply that emotional confusion is a reasonable response to the contemporary world.

Just as social playwrights have been doing for years, today's musical writers choose to raise more questions than they answer, and to reflect the world around them rather than trying to interpret it through a simplistic lens. Broadway composer-lyricist William Finn says, "Musicalizing something inherently nonmusical seems a very dramatic action -- arrogant, humorous, whimsical, yet serious. It says, 'We are in the business of making the world sing.

One of the differences between the classic musical comedy and the neo musical comedy is that the new form quite often uses funny music. That's not something Cole Porter or Jerry Herman even tried to do. Traditionally, the music has always done the emotional work, but today it does more. And it takes a special kind of composer -- and maybe a special kind of lyricist -- to make the music itself funny.

Bat Boy does it a lot, toying with the musical devices of horror movies and thrillers, so in tune with its mock serious tone. Shows like Urinetown and Cry-Baby use music comically, mostly in the dissonance between style and content -- in other words, Cry-Baby 's mash-up of John Waters craziness with old-school musical comedy music, or Urinetown 's mash-up of its silly story with agitprop music in the style of Kurt Weill.

Bukowsical does get many of its laugh from that kind of stylistic dissonance -- the perky musical comedy style matched to Bukowski's dark, vulgar, freaky life story. But Bukowsical goes further and finds small moments in which the music references something outside the world of the show, to reveal an ironic dissonance, to establish the ever shifting style of the show as the story races through the 20th century, and to connect the bizarre experiment that is Bukowsical to other iconic works of musical theatre.

That last use of music does two things -- it makes a meta-joke about the intentional, faux cluelessness of the show itself, and it also comments on the history of the art form that Bukowsical is deconstructing in front of our very eyes. Here are some examples In the opening number and also in its reprise at the end, the narrator leads us into the final chorus with the words, "Come on now, everybody It's a funny reference for those who catch it, but it also suggests a comically presumptuous parallel between Bukowsical and Sondheim's masterwork of concept musicals.

But this meta -self-awareness is part of the joke too. Later, in the middle of the song, "The Derelict Trail," composer Gary Stockdale uses some faux Aaron Copland in brief instrumental sections, for this fucked up American travelogue, but when the third instrumental comes up, it's the theme from the classic western The Magnificent Seven -- which was also the the theme for the " Marlboro Man " cigarette commercials in the s, featuring the solitary "quiet man" cowboy.

It's a perverse and funny choice for a dance break after the Indian's solo verse The wacky, vaudevillian "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty," cribs its intro from "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side Story , ending on a "wrong" note the tritone that holds, while a conventional accompaniment foxtrots beneath it. It invokes vaudeville and musical comedy, but it also tells us there's something wrong here. It's a fun choice because it's a similar kind of song -- a bunch of guys fucking around, being funny about pretty dark shit.

You drink more than I do; That is very rare indeed. Sheen scolds us about our sins and our failings -- in comic opposition to the opening number, which celebrates and accepts our sins and failings. Not only is Sheen presented as a cultural obstacle standing in for the whole of conformist s America that Bukowski must overcome, but also as the yang to Bukowski's yin.

We see in this very clever lyric that Sheen and by extension, religion is about control, repression, censorship; while Buk is about honesty, openness, complete freedom of expression. This juxtaposition is announced ironically in Sheen's entrance music, the famous hymn, " What a Friend We Have in Jesus. We don't actually hear the lyric in the show, but it's such a famous hymn that many in the audience will register its content anyway.

While Bukowski accepts what life throws at him, Sheen tells us our inherent badness brings on life's obstacles. It's Zen versus the Old Testament. Like Cry-Baby , this show's villain wears the costume of Good, while our real Hero wears the costume of Bad -- outcast, rebel, despoiler. In another context, this intro music might suggest goodness or hope, but in this context, it suggests hypocrisy and artistic peril.

About halfway through the show, a lawyer shows up to stop the show. After his scene, as he leaves, he tells the company that this show will never make it on Broadway, and that people in Los Angeles don't know anything.

Of course, he's just saying what everyone in the audience has been thinking all night -- this crazy, vulgar show could never get a commercial run. But that's also a big part of its subversion. Like Bukowski, this show just doesn't give a shit. In reply to the lawyer's put-down, the cast sings the slyly ironic "That's Los Angeles," a very funny anthem, full of mock solemnity and comically dubious claims of L.

And we answer that demand. It's a song of pride and defiance, with more than a modicum of pop opera pomposity thrown in for fun. The music takes itself so seriously -- too seriously -- while elevating the intentionally trivial, dubious content.

And it's really funny. There are even more bits of funny music, but you get the idea. This is a show that started as nothing but a joke, but perhaps even despite themselves, Stockdale and Green have written a musical with lots of truth, occasional depth, real wit, and a score that's far more sophisticated than it seems. It's not just funny; it's really good theatre. Yes, there is method in their madness. We've finished staging the show and now we just run it.

This is the fun part! I often end my blog posts with "The adventure continues Sometimes it's because the show is just so weird that none of us really knows what the end product will be Forbidden Planet, Robber Bridegroom, The Nervous Set. Sometimes it's because we know where we're headed, but we have no idea what kind of reception we'll get when we arrive Love Kills, Two Gents, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson , in that last case, usually because a show is exceptionally dark or vulgar, or both.

Bukowsical is in that last category. But what are people going to think of a musical with lyrics like: What's the feeling you get When you're coughing up blood And your liver is crud? I've already told my mother not to come to this one When I first started talking about this show, some folks said, "But do people know who Charles Bukowski is? After all, most people didn't know who Floyd Collins or Sam Byck were. Almost every season we choose one show that we know may lose a lot of money.

To be honest, every New Line show loses money, which we make up for with donations, grants, etc. But that's okay -- we build that into our budget. Nobody knows how Bukowsical will do in sales. But it's still worth producing because it's so smart, so funny, and so interesting. And the form the writers have chosen for their story, the neo musical comedy , is at the vanguard of the art form in Part of the fun for me working on his show is the research.

I love research. The more I can learn about the world and characters of a show, the richer and fuller our storytelling will be. It's such a blast. Judy Newmark, theatre critic for the St. Put them all together, and it's an era-by-era look at changing American mores.

I loved that so much, partly because it's true. I am -- and by extension, New Line is -- exploring American culture and politics throughout the 20th century, through the shows we produce. I'm one of those people who just doesn't understand the point of making theatre that doesn't explore the issues and ideas of our times.

As actor Ben Kingsley has said, "The tribe has elected you to tell its story. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you. Bukowsical is wild and silly and vulgar and outrageous. But it's also really smart and insightful. And I think audiences are going to love it. Well, the ones who don't walk out after the opening number It's so exciting working on a new piece, but particularly a fearless, original show like this one.

Sometimes, people ask me if I would like to be as "successful" as Stages St. Louis is. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. What a ratio that is. They must really be bad. All of you, over here. You seven — bad words! Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.

One of the things that was so subversive about Bukowski was his "obscene" language. But today, when lots of literature and other storytelling forms regularly use that kind of language — and yes, musicals too — it feels less subversive.

George M. Cohan probably would have loved this show. He would love its rowdy, aggressive, smartass tone. He would love the big laughs and the energy of it. Though we are in a new Golden Age of musical theatre, the age of the neo rock musical and the neo musical comedy, too many people still think of musicals as either Oklahoma! So by choosing what is so widely perceived as an innocent art form for their vehicle, Stockdale and Green are doing with Bukowsical what Bukowski did with his writing — challenging ideas of "acceptable," "appropriate," "good taste.

Should artists and storytellers wall off parts of reality in the name of good taste? Many scholars say that Bukowski changed American poetry, both in his rejection of strict form and also in his "adult" language and content. The story of Bukowsical is about survival — like any Hero Myth story. He knew that people are neither good or bad, wrong or right, mean or nice, happy or sad. Most of us live in the gray areas. While a lot of storytelling simplifies characters and stories down to their essence — often for legitimate reasons — Bukowski was a different kind of writer.

And that life included lots of alcohol, lots of sex, lots of violence, and lots of four-letter words. Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath, tell Bukowski to embrace sex and obscenity in his writing. To write in his true voice. To tell the truth about his life. Dark times call for dark art, to make sense of it all. He may have said fuck a lot, but he also fell in love and got his heart broken.

When he lets us get a glimpse inside, we see how much we are like him. We see the ordinary in the extraordinary. Just as Company forces us to look at marriage honestly, just as Next to Normal forces us to look at mental illness honestly, just as Spelling Bee forces us to look at our culture of competition honestly, so too does Bukowsical force us to look at language honestly.

The sheer intellectual audacity of it all is mind-blowing. His first novel Post Office becomes the song "Postal. See how smart this show is? He takes our horrors on himself and as we read his books — or watch this show — we feel better. Not because he had it worse than any of us did, but because we understand that even our worst experiences are essentially universal. We are all the victims of our own fears and expectations, and we all have to learn the lesson Spelling Bee brought us — "Life is random and unfair.

In his life and in his art, Bukowski knew the great lesson of the Hero Myth: You just have to stay on the road and keep moving forward. Bukowski had a much harder road than most of us, but he just kept plugging along and writing it all down. Like Bukowski, all we really need to know is to stay on the road. We each have our roadblocks and potholes, but we each learn to navigate around them as we continue on our journey. Just like Bukowski did. Even for those who know nothing about Charles Bukowski, this dissonance is really obvious and really entertaining.

As the song begins, a grade school teacher is asking the class about the Alien and Sedition Act, as a not-so-subtle reminder to young Bukowski that he is "foreign" having been born in Germany and therefore Other. The actual text of the act reads, "That it shall be lawful for the President of the United States at any time during the continuance of this act, to order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, or shall have reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government thereof, to depart out of the territory of the United States.

We all wish we could find some kind of way to. Push you off a freeway overpass. And kindly kick his fucking ass. But the song also has important structural significance. From this point forward, no matter how mean or vulgar Bukowski gets, we understand the psychic damage that got him here.

This song acts as an explanation — even an excuse? In the heart of a real poet,. But unless you get shitfaced,. Quaff and boilermake me,. It will help you more than you know Like Steinbeck and Papa and so,.

Shelley, Keats or Byron. This is the song in which the Hero convinces his Love that they belong together, and often they end up dancing or at least, harmonizing to show us how clearly they belong together.

But they all work the same way. We see this song type less often these days, because more new musicals are telling Hero Myth stories rather than love stories. Here, with "Take Me," Bukowsical is operating both as a traditional musical comedy as an ironic, postmodern, neo musical comedy. In Bukowsical , Boy gets two Girls and even more later in "Love is a Dog from Hell" , but we can all see how badly that will turn out During the s Bukowski traveled, living hand-to-mouth, living the life of a "hobo.

This big, upbeat, company number turns hobos, hookers, and Native Americans into cardboard caricatures out of a s Broadway revue or Ziegfeld Follies , nothing more than travelogue props.

In its meta -layer, the song makes us a little uncomfortable, reminding us that until a couple decades ago, no one even thought about the homeless, other than as punchlines and clowns. Interestingly, when we hear the reprise of "The Derelict Trail" later in the show, the title phrase subtly changes its meaning. In the earlier song, the phrase means life on the road; in the later song, as Bukowski finally finds early commercial success, the phrase now refers to the life path Bukowski the self-styled derelict has chosen for himself, a path that will take him where he wants to go.

That tritone pedal note also makes the key ambiguous. With everything in American culture changing rapidly and fundamentally rock and roll, sex, drugs, movies, TV, the Beats , Bukowski finds himself visited by four great American writers — Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, William S.

Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath. These four fearless, groundbreaking iconoclasts offer Bukowski a lesson: if he wants to be successful, he must "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" —. Trying to write the perfect novel. Like some loser with a useless Ph. Hit below the belt and you can never fail Get down, get dark, get dirty. Face the truth, you crazy bastard That will guarantee your place in history. Even Willy Shakespeare liked to tongue some tail For more on this, see the documentary Fuck.

But behind the comedy here is some serious truth — great artists become great when they are freed from constraint. This song is about freeing Bukowski to write about what he wants to write about.

This is the moment when Bukowski becomes an artist. That last line is funny but it also implies a question that pervades Bukowsical. Why are all these great writers so damaged? Is it the same thing that makes them great writers and also makes them fucked up? With candor and sagacity,. With fervor and tenacity,. But please, sir… No mendacity!

Get down, get dark, and just get dirty Yes, they are all alcoholics, but they are serious about their work and they cannot stomach less than the truth. No mendacity. No lies. Fictions, sure, but not lies. This is a song about artistic — and spiritual? The last line of this song is, "Jerk it while you work it, baby, dirty it up! And right at the center of the evening is this song, which gets to the heart of the show.

As rowdy and raunchy as it is — and it really is — this is a song about the moment when an artist learns to free himself, to reject the conventions and expectations of others, and to find his true voice, his authenticity.

It does some important storytelling. In Assassins , all the American assassins from throughout history all converge on the Texas Book Depository in to convince Oswald to shoot Kennedy. Suddenly, instead of a crazy loner, Oswald becomes part of a force of history, and that gives him the courage to shoot Kennedy. Likewise, in Bukowsical , in order to dramatize the influence of the other great American writers on Bukowski, Stockdale and Green present those writers in the flesh, to have a conversation well, a vaudeville number with Bukowski.

Williams S. Burroughs, one of the founders of the Beat movement, was one of the most politically and culturally influential, and most innovative artists of the 20th century, writing about drugs, homosexuality, and other controversial topics. Like other writers discussed here, Burroughs wrote a lot of autobiographical fiction. His most controversial work was his novel Naked Lunch in , which included a talking anus. According to Wikipedia:.

Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift," a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism.

Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War," while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius. Burroughs shot his wife Joan in , playing drunken games, and he later wrote:. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

We think of Tennessee Williams plays as "classics" today, but many of them were extremely controversial when he wrote them — the prominent sexual content of many of his works, the only barely veiled homosexuality at the center of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer , the domestic abuse and sexual content of A Streetcar Named Desire , and of course, his works of dark autobiographical fiction, most notably, The Glass Menagerie.

His plays were R-rated enough that most of them had to be substantially rewritten for film. Like Bukowski, Williams suffered from depression throughout his life. William Faulkner is considered one of the greatest of American writers. In the earlier song, the phrase means life on the road; in the later song, as Bukowski finally finds early commercial success, the phrase now refers to the life path Bukowski the self-styled derelict has chosen for himself, a path that will take him where he wants to go.

In the earlier song, it's other people's path, which he joins; in the later song, it's his path. Most of us would recognize the intro to " Gee, Officer Krupke ," from West Side Story -- it starts with a short, quick little four-note run down to a "wrong" note the tritone , known as "the Devil in music" that rings underneath a fun but dissonant vaudeville accompaniment remember that in the s, vaudeville wasn't all that long ago.

That tritone pedal note also makes the key ambiguous. Long before the neo musical comedy emerged, this song worked the same way -- dark, ironic lyrics set to perky, subtly altered, old-fashioned music -- always with that "wrong" note starting every verse Something's not right here Bukowsical 's "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" borrows that wrong note and the older song's split personality, as it portrays Bukowski's evolution as a writer in the late s.

With everything in American culture changing rapidly and fundamentally rock and roll, sex, drugs, movies, TV, the Beats , Bukowski finds himself visited by four great American writers -- Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, and Sylvia Plath. These four fearless, groundbreaking iconoclasts offer Bukowski a lesson: if he wants to be successful, he must "Get Down, Get Dark, Get Dirty" -- Don't huddle in some hovel, Trying to write the perfect novel.

Like some loser with a useless Ph. Hit below the belt and you can never fail -- Get down, get dark, get dirty. Don't be shy, the world is waiting -- Writing's like ejaculating. Get down, get dark, get dirty. Face the truth, you crazy bastard -- You write better when you're plastered! Even Willy Shakespeare liked to tongue some tail It's such a fun lyric, partly because it takes these great writers down off the pedestal, and partly because they're right -- Shakespeare wrote tons of dirty jokes into his plays, because audiences love it.

Most of what our culture calls "dirty" is really just human and natural, but it's treated as perverse and dangerous, thanks to our Puritan roots -- and never more so than in the pre-HBO s. I highly recommend the documentary Fuck. But behind the comedy here is some serious truth -- great artists become great when they are freed from constraint.

This song is about freeing Bukowski to write about what he wants to write about. This is the moment when Bukowski becomes an artist.

Bukowsical 's writers have dramatized the influence other writers' work had on Bukowski by physically placing four of them onstage with him, offering advice. But the larger point is not lost in all the laughs -- the times were changing and Bukowski was right in the middle of the revolution. He started writing poetry right around this time, in the mids, and his first poetry collection was published in But Bukowsical 's story stays in the s and early s for a while, as we move on to the cultural response to the revolution those great writers were leading Because Bukowsical is such a weird and unconventional Hero Myth story, it's hard to identify one antagonist -- this is more of a Man vs.

Society story than a Man vs. Man story. In this song, Bishop Sheen represents the repressive s culture that Bukowski, Williams, Faulkner, Burroughs, and Plath were raging against, the cultivation of a homogenous, even bland, national culture.

And TV was a huge part of that effort. So to musicalize that idea, the show's writers give us Sheen's telecast in the form of an Italian tarantella , the perfect ironic musical form for America's ultimate Roman Catholic. And as fundamentalist Christians often do, Bukowsical 's Sheen seems to get perverse pleasure in cataloguing all our sins in lurid detail, which makes it all even funnier.

And here's the weird part -- probably unintended by the writers -- the Italian tarantella was originally a frantic "medicinal" dance, once thought to be the only treatment for a tarantula bite, to literally dance the poison out of your system. How funny that this musical form becomes Bishop Sheen's apocalyptic warning of America's demise, as he tries to preach the poison out of the American culture, and as his singing turns the ever-so-earnest bishop into an Italian comic opera villain from a 50s TV variety show.

The whole score is built with this kind of wit and deft touch. The song "Postal," about Bukowski's soul-crushing time working for the Post Office in the s, is rendered as a driving, anxious, dissonant piece of music -- constantly setting two eighth notes in the vocal line against five sixteenth notes on every beat in the accompaniment.

That gives the music a feeling of wrongness, of not fitting, of discomfort, a musical equivalent to Bukowski's struggle to fit in and conform if only for a paycheck versus his hunger for freedom.

The schizoid number "Through a Glass, Barfly" gives us a comic and madly exaggerated behind-the-scenes glimpse into the casting of Bukowski's film Barfly. To dramatize French director Barbet Schroeder choosing between his two possible leads, Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, Bukowsical 's writers give Schroeder a European waltz -- a French chanson , worthy of Maurice Chevalier or Charles Aznavour -- alternating with Rourke and Penn's aggressive s rock and roll verses.

I think there's also another sideways reference to West Side Story late in the show, when the Bitch Goddess of Fame and the Bitch Goddess of Fortune get a twisted jazz vocal line in the song "Bitches" that's gotta be a nod to West Side Story 's "Cool.

And then there's the operatic "Elegy," but I don't want to ruin that surprise for you Maybe the biggest musical surprise at least to me is the song "That's Los Angeles to Me," a weird, comic interruption in the show that sounds a lot like "Look for the Union Label," both songs about pride and community and a demand for respect. Got the World Right By the Balls. So how do you stage a wild, even bizarre show like Bukowsical? Good Question. I'm working on it Sometimes when I'm directing, I get lost in trying to find a "clever" way to stage something, or to avoid being "boring.

The right goal is to figure out what this story and these writers are saying, then come up with the clearest possible way to tell that story. How can my physical staging make each moment as clear as it can be? If I'm working on good material, I don't have to add to it; I just have to reveal it.

I realized a while back that most New Line shows share a common trait -- they are sui generis , completely and fundamentally unlike anything else, original in the extreme. I could keep going So for every show, I have to start back at square one and figure out how this show works, what the rules are this time.

The answers are never the same twice. And of course, Bukowsical is also on that list. I've never encountered anything like it before. Its fundamental premise is so "wrong," so hilariously dissonant, that it feels like it could only have been born of copious amounts of incredi-weed.

I have no actual information on whether that's true. Sure, there are other shows that are mash-ups of dissonant genres -- Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Catch Me If You Can, Urinetown, Forbidden Planet , and others -- but Bukowsical chose two forms that are even more dissonant, and surprisingly, also more revealing. Bukowsical is a subversive, rule-busting musical about a subversive, rule-busting writer. It is "carnivalesque," which Wikipedia describes as a term used by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos.

Bakhtin traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival , itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival, in which the humbler cathedral officials burlesqued the sacred ceremonies, releasing "the natural lout beneath the cassock. As always, Content Dictates Form. Ask somebody if they like musicals, and if they don't, ask them why. Almost everything they say they hate about musicals is generally no longer true.

Many contemporary musicals reject the love story for the Hero Myth. Most new musicals reject the awkward Fourth Wall "naturalism" of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Yes, characters still break into song, but there's no pretense of "reality" before they break into song, so it doesn't feel phony in the same way.

After all, people break into song in music videos. It's not really the singing that bothers people; it's the "breaking" into song think about that verb , the cracking of the "reality" we're asked to accept. I think it was largely the laughable Fourth Wall "lie" of mid-century musicals, coupled with their simplistic, faux romanticism, that has turned off so many people to the art form, at least since the s. Musicals used to be an incredibly popular, mainstream form, but for a big part of the later 20th century, the art form didn't keep up with the culture.

But that's changing We sometimes joke that New Line produces musicals for people who hate musicals. The truth is we produce musicals for people who hate old-fashioned, phony musicals that traffic in shallow love, shallow morality, and superficial Happy Endings. I'm lookin' at you, Brigadoon.

New Line shows are honest. Even at their most outrageous, they are about the real world as it really is, and they reject the lies of the midcentury musical.

Almost none of our shows have a Fourth Wall, and those that do, violate it repeatedly. Classic musical comedy and its latest descendant, the neo musical comedy , are fundamentally honest because they never pretend to actually represent reality. The actors often face front and sing directly to the audience. The actors can see the audience, even interact with them, in a way they never would have in the Rodgers and Hammerstein model.

They sing in harmony and move in choreographic unison, without explanation; while in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the dance must be explained away as a party, a dream, a performance. In musical comedy, dance is part of the base language, not a device. In neo musical comedies, there's always an ironic, self-aware, meta layer interacting with the story and the storytelling. For instance, in the finale of Cry-Baby , the meta layer of what the audience actually knows about America today comically contradicts the utopian America these characters in think they see coming, in the song "Nothing Bad's Ever Gonna Happen Again.

The audience completes the circuit. Likewise, so much of the humor in Bukowsical comes from the raw, bleak content smashing up against a form once known for rose-colored escapism. By choosing the neo musical comedy as their form, Bukowsical writers Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green chose complexity and honesty, two things Bukowski cherished. Never does this show ask the audience to pretend this is something that it is not.

It's a performance, right here, right now, in this theatre. Nor does it whitewash the horrors of growing up Bukowski, despite its absurdist tone. Bukowski himself seemed constitutionally incapable of bullshit, and though Stockdale and Green seemingly chose a form many people often associate with bullshit, the show's sly self-awareness reverses that polarity.

Which is kind of the whole point of the neo musical comedy. The audience's expectations about musicals -- and the subversion of that -- is part of the storytelling. But Bukowsical is so well-crafted, so carefully and intelligently wrought, that it works both as a straightforward musical comedy and a satirical meta-musical. The jokes are great; the music is really fun and interesting and surprising; the lyrics are clever, fearless, and technically impeccable.

It's every bit as entertaining as Anything Goes , but with a rich layer of irony on top thick enough to choke Brecht. But one thing bothered me when I first read the script. There was a framing device about this misguided, mediocre theatre company holding a backer's audition to raise money for their new show Bukowsical.

Right away, the frame didn't feel right to me. It made the show seem more like sketch comedy than the smart, Brechtian theatre that I think it actually is. The framing device takes the audience off the hook by putting up a wall of "We Don't Really Mean It" between them and story -- so the audience doesn't have to grapple with any of what's onstage because it's just some silly musical.

I think my reaction was partly about the comparative dis honesty of that frame, in what is otherwise a weirdly honest show. Also, it seemed like the writers were giving themselves an "excuse" for writing this vulgar, fearless show, by putting its creation in the fictional hands of the clueless, nameless egotist, "The Founder," and his merry band of players. To me, that feels like a cop out. Why not just dive in? In , in front of an audience who's seen Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Wild Party , there's no need for excuse or explanation.

They can handle anything we throw at them. Luckily for me, the authors are very cool, and they're letting me cut the framing device. So I've come to the conclusion that the way to approach this show is just to treat it like a rowdy, wacky, big-hearted George M. Cohan musical comedy , and let the dark, oppressive, vulgar, offensive content do its own work, supplying the "neo" that makes the show a neo musical comedy. The original production played more like sketch comedy, but New Line's production will be in what I call the Bat Boy style -- completely straight-faced, emotionally honest outrageousness.

No winking at the audience. That's what the neo musical comedy is -- serious comedy. After all, Bat Boy is about religious intolerance, Forbidden Planet is about the clash between morality and science, Cry-Baby is about class injustice, Urinetown and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson are about the shallowness and self-destructiveness of political movements, and Bukowsical is about the struggle between an artist's life and his work.

All hilarious shows about very serious shit. With Bukowsical , we give the audience storytelling that seems shallow but is actually really smart and insightful, and we give them a form that seems light and superficial, even as it tells a dark, complicated story.

We depend on the audience to discover this dissonance and this irony, which is what makes it all so funny. Even more so than with most other shows we do, here the audience has to complete the equation. Great comedy requires two things -- surprise and truth -- and Bukowsical has lots of both.

Despite the style, we are telling the audience the truth about the horrors of Bukowski's life. And every song is a surprise in its crazy dual personality, exploring Bukowski's alcoholism while he dances a waltz with a seductive bottle of booze, or putting four great American writers -- Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, and William S.

Burroughs -- into the middle of a Vaudeville number about obscenity. And wait till you hear "Elegy. In all these ways, Bukowsical is a companion piece to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson , which started off this season for us. BBAJ is angry and aggressive, while Bukowsical is warm and friendly, but they have a lot in common.

I've been writing a lot lately about the New American Musical , but I'm not just writing about it. We're putting it onstage, show after show. We're letting our audience watch the evolution of this most American art form, right in front of their eyes, as it's happening.