Perhaps you’ve already read the headlines about how members of the cast of Les Misérables, slated to play at the Kennedy Center next month, are opting out of the performance that President Trump plans to attend, which is tied to a fundraising event for the Center, where he has declared himself chairman. The stories thus far suggest that performers have been given the option to take the night off if they wish, while a CNN headline blares that they are boycotting the performance, which would suggest less accommodation and more precipitous action.
Whatever the precise circumstances, this reflects the politicization of art by outside forces – in this case the federal government – since the new administration came in, in line with the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Humanities Endowment and public broadcasting now underway. Even where the administration’s wrecking ball has been stayed by judges, such as with the reinstatement of reporters at Voice of America, we learn that the famously non-partisan VOA will now start carrying news reports from the specious OANN. That Les Misérables, a story about fights for justice large and small, is one of Trump’s favorite musicals suggests that he is drawn to the scale and grandeur but completely incapable of appreciating the politics buried within the show itself. The central story is about a good man forced to petty crime to feed his child and an implacable foe whose campaign to punish the man is wholly out of proportion with the infraction.
Buried within the news reports of the latest Kennedy Center contretemps comes the intemperate reaction of Richard Grennell, installed by Trump seemingly as the Vichy leader of the Center. Informed of cast members choosing to absent themselves from the performance when the president attends, Grennell made a statement about wanting to “out those vapid and intolerant artists to ensure producers know who they shouldn’t hire.” This is, without question, a new blacklist – names that the government doesn’t want hired if they won’t perform for the king, exposed in such a way as to make future employers think twice about engaging them and exposing them for a rabid subset of MAGA supporters to harass and intimidate.
In the current Broadway show Good Night and Good Luck, and in the movie upon which it is closely based, audiences see the story of Edward R. Murrow’s efforts to expose the perfidy of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunt against supposed communists in the 1950s. What the film and play don’t really show is the impact of those witch-hunts on the creative community – screenwriters forced to work under assumed names if they could work at all, actors who couldn’t be cast in films, artists turning against one another and outing their friends and colleagues to McCarthy’s minions, led by the rapacious Roy Cohn, later a Trump mentor.
Yet that is what Grennell believes is the proper treatment of actors who won’t assent to amuse the monarch, and he doesn’t even need a Senate hearing room to do it. Today, thanks to social media, all he needs to do is activate the center’s social media, or take to Truth Social, to make life hell for these conscientious objectors. In doing so, he will heighten the tension within the Les Misérables troupe, possibly provoking even more performers to opt out, in an “I am Spartacus” moment of solidarity.
When arms of the government publicly threaten people with exposure – and Trump’s bloodless coup at the Kennedy Center makes all official actions there part of the government – the witch-hunts have begun. From some actors choosing to sit out, we need more people to stand up, because we no longer have a Joseph Welch with the humanity, the dignity and the sanity to say “Have you no sense of decency” or even a government or a country that might be sufficiently chagrined to step back and come to its senses.
There are those who wield the term “theatre kid” as a pejorative. It bespeaks a certain teenaged volume of expression, a distinctive depth of passion shared perhaps a bit too wantonly, a tendency to hug and cry at random moments of joy, a habit of breaking into song or monologue at restaurants after rehearsals, a predilection for listening to the showtune de jour on endless repeat, bookshelves filled not with YA novels but scripts of plays as yet unseen to be read aloud without provocation. And so on.
To this I say, decades past my high school years: ich bin ein theatre kid.
I’m not sure the term was in vogue back in my day, or if it was, it was apparently spoken behind my back. I was certainly aware of being part of the drama club-chorus/choir axis, which also included the high school band/orchestra. We knew we weren’t the jocks and did not wish to be. My high school was large enough that we existed within our own not-small niche, and if some of us were bullied or ridiculed, it tended to have more to do with simply being nerds or geeks than any specific disdain for our theatrical pursuits.
The theatre kid term is on my mind these days for various reasons, in part because instead of being problematic, two authors have recently taken it as their own as book titles, for two very different adventures in theatre. John DeVore’s 2024 book Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off-Broadway is his account of a young man’s adventures in the downtown scene. Jeffrey Seller’s just published Theatre Kid: A Broadway Memoir, is obviously more uptown, coming from the producer of “Rent,” “Avenue Q,” and “Hamilton.” Clearly should I ever write a memoir (unlikely), the most obvious title has been taken, singularly and plurally.
Even more important to my ruminations on the term is the presence of theatre characters on stage in New York right now who are either theatre kids or theatre-kid adjacent. One might assume that this is because the playwrights are themselves theatre kids, but I think there’s something a bit deeper, namely the place that theatre kids occupy both in life and in the imagination, a singular archetype that is representative of many kids who find an affinity for an art, and for others who share their affinity, banding together under the guidance of Thespis and whichever ancient god cared for the stage crew as well.
Hawkins, Indiana, noted for its supernatural ruptures thanks to Stranger Things, finds its resident theatre kid via the character of Joyce Maldonado, embodied on TV screens as an adult in Netflix’s TV series by Winona Ryder. But on Broadway in the show’s stage prequel Stranger Things: The First Shadow, by Kate Trefry, a teenaged Joyce is the manic, shouty director of the Hawkins High drama group. She is no egocentric Rachel Berry clone, since her focus is on producing and directing, not starring; she’s closer to Max Fischer, the ambitious auteur of Rushmore, though even he starred in his copyright-flaunting mini-epics. But one does get the sense that Joyce could grow up – demons and demogorgons notwithstanding – to join New York’s experimental scene, because she eschews Oklahoma! in favor of a surreptitiously staged production of Dark of the Moon, designed to shock the Hawkinsians expecting a bright golden haze on the meadow.
A more complex theatre kid portrayal appears in Adam Gwon’s new musical All The World’s a Stage at Keen Company. At the center of the show stands Ricky Alleman, a new teacher in a semi-rural Pennsylvania town, closeted when it comes to his workplace in the play’s mid-90s chronology. While we quickly learn that he frequents local theatres and is an acolyte of the ascendant Tony Kushner, Ricky is a once and always theatre kid, but the archetype of the show is Sam Buckman, described in the cast of characters as a “tomboy with theater kid energy. Wry, impulsive, figuring herself out.”
Sam is determined to get out of her small town by winning a college scholarship at the regional Thespian Society monologue competition and, upon discovering Ricky’s affinity for the stage, she dragoons him into being her coach, all the while scheming – like Joyce – to pull a bait and switch. She won’t perform the anticipated Shakespeare, but rather a selection from Kushner’s then still-new, still-startling Angels in America. It seems that among their other traits, theatre kids, at least when dramatically portrayed, are sneaky little devils, challenging authority in pursuit of artistic dreams.
The third character in the current triumvirate is only studying a work of theatre, not preparing to perform in it, though, like a pro she nails a cold read of scenes from The Crucible. Shelby Holcomb is, ultimately, the central character upon whom the plot turns in Kimberly Bellflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, the whiz at textual analysis, the dramaturg-in-the-making who upends classroom discussion of Arthur Miller’s work by looking at it from the perspective of a modern woman, not a 1960s pedagogue or drama critic, informed by her personal experience. Make no mistake: Shelby has drama kid energy, causing one of her contemporaries, after Shelby’s bombshell return to classes after a mysterious “sabbatical” out of town, to exclaim, “She’s a lot,” eliciting the reply, “She kind of always has been.” One senses that if Shelby has it in her power to substitute another text into the curriculum, she would be astute enough to realize that her English class, as constituted on Broadway, might be better served by studying Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves or, if things were to get truly metatheatrical, Kimberley Bellflower’s John Proctor is the Villain.
If Joyce takes a backseat to the supernatural shenanigans of Henry Creel and the Upside Down, if Sam’s story is still perhaps secondary to that of Ricky, if Shelby’s audience is limited to that of her classmates and not an audience of parents and students in the auditorium, there is no doubting that theatre kid energy is a driving force within these shows. That these three instances are all female characters should not be construed to suggest that only young women are theatre kids; the same energy can be found in young men of the same age (or in my case, any age), because theatre kids can come in any gender, any setting, any sexuality, any physicality, or any era.
What binds them is their too muchness to some, their boundless enthusiasm for drama and the dramatic that some of us recognize like a secret handshake when we spy it on stage or in a classroom or making too much noise at the next table in a restaurant. At this season of theatrical awards-giving, we may be focused on the theatre kids who professionalized their affinity, but what we should always celebrate are the countless theatre kids who make theatre as well as those who attend it, because without them, there would be no theatre.
[Photos, from left to right: Eliza Pagelle as Sam in “All The World’s a Stage” at Keen Company, photo by Richard Termine; Sadie Sink as Shelby in “John Proctor is the Villain” on Broadway, photo by Julieta Cervantes; and Alison Jaye as Joyce in “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” on Broadway, photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.]
Show of hands – who out there has read about the new play Irishtown at Irish Rep? How about the musical All The World’s a Stage at Keen Company? I ask because I saw both of these shows a couple of weeks ago and having seen little in the way of features or reviews – at the latter, I asked Keen’s artistic director when the show would open only to be told it had, three days earlier – I wondered what was at play.
Playbill and Broadway World’s review round-ups show only three or four reviews for each show, even though they say they are updated as reviews come in. Review aggregator “Did They Like It?” shows nothing on either, though they still feature Off-Broadway reviews for Blue Man Group, which has closed, as well as summaries of English and Prayer for the French Republic in their Off-Broadway runs, even though both later reached Broadway. Show Score, an audience-based aggregator does acknowledge these shows, but with just over 50 opinions formed for All The World and only six for Irishtown.
I raise this because it’s representative of what’s happened to attention for some Off-Broadway shows, those that are neither produced by large organizations like The Public, MTC or Atlantic, or newer trend-setting companies like Bushwick Star or Ars Nova. There’s no meaningful Off-Broadway coverage in the Daily News or the Post unless there’s a big name attached, and the Times’s attention is clearly variable beyond Broadway.
Having long ago decided to forego the critical route, I mention these shows simply because I saw them and I’m glad to have done so. In each case, I was motivated to attend for different reasons: with Irishtown, because it features a friend of four decades in its cast of five and because a comedy seemed like a good idea these days; with All The World, I’d read that it involved a high school drama competition, and school theatre is a particular interest of mine.
It concerns me that these shows are so unremarked upon, because it suggests that there’s less interest by the larger media in drawing a spotlight to work on smaller stages, that what was once a lively feature and critical array of thought and opinion has stratified and left a gaping hole. Admittedly all media (including independent media) struggles with budgets and can only allocate so many resources, but where does that leave new work that not only needs support while on New York stages, but also needs to recognition that may allow it to land on stages around the company. With casts of five for Irishtown and four (plus four musicians) for All The World, these are the types of works that might find favor on regional stages, or at colleges, if only people manage to read about them.
I don’t single out these two works in some stealth way of circumventing my own critical silence, but merely as exemplars, because I managed to see them at a time when so much attention is being directed to the welter of Broadway openings that characterize every April. I am entirely aware that there’s works I’ve missed and perhaps not even heard of, because I have limits on both time and stamina, and because I must make choices about what might land in my own paid writing. With no particular outlet to discuss this topic, I turn to this long Facebook post, even as I think about whether starting to blog again more regularly might be useful in supporting the theatrical ecosystem.
I have no bold conclusion nor specific exhortation, except to say that I’m concerned for the health of the Off-Broadway sector (and some will point out that Keen Company, in a 99-seat house technically adheres to the perhaps outdated definition of Off-Off-Broadway) if no one knows the work is out there – and when produced by fully professional companies, equally deserving of attention and assessment, to take its place in the theatrical conversation. And this post itself is meant as a conversation starter.
UPDATES: Five days after I posted this to Facebook, the NY Times posted a review of All The World’s a Stage, in its penultimate week. The critic described it as “an unassuming, 100-minute marvel.” 16 days after this was posted to Facebook, the NY Times posted a Critic’s Notebook that included Irishtown.
[Left: Elizabeth Stanley, Eliza Pagelle, Matt Rodin and Jon-Michael Reese in “All The World’s a Stage” by Adam Gwon at Keen Company, photo by Richard Termine. Right: Kevin Oliver Lynch, Saiorse Monica Jackson and Kate Burton in “Irishtown” by Nicola Murphy Dubey at Irish Repertory Theatre, photo by Carol Rosegg]
February 14th, 2024 § Comments Off on In New Jersey, Stopping a Play About The Power of Listening § permalink
Blake Stadnik and Matt Monaco in a scene from Rift, or White Lies by Gabriel Jason Dean, directed by Ari Laura Kreith, at Luna Stage in New Jersey. Photo credit: Valerie Terranova.
There is a sad irony in hearing that a play about repairing relationships and rescuing people from racist ideologies through listening was shut down at a New Jersey high school less than 10 minutes into its performance, with silencing standing in opposition the act of hearing. The play’s title? Rift, or White Lies.
Currently in production at Luna Stage in West Orange NJ, playwright Gabriel Jason Dean’s Rift is the story of two half-brothers’ encounters while one is incarcerated, and their meetings after a long silence resulting from the convicted brother’s embrace of white supremacy. It is a strongly autobiographical story, echoing that of Dean and his own half-brother, who, as Dean explains in a playwright’s note, was sentenced to life in prison plus 40 years for murder and other felony charges in 2000.
The presentation at Montclair High was only to be of one scene of the play, its third, accompanied by discussion of the issues within it. Luna Stage artistic director Ari Laura Kreith, who commissioned and directed the production, said that the company approached several schools about bringing students to the show, but the offer to bring the show to Montclair High was a unique offer, as the school doesn’t typically have the funds to arrange school buses for field trips; the company also solicited outside funds to cover their expenses for taking the two-actor play to Montclair. Montclair High accepted Luna Stage’s opportunity, with a local news outlet reporting that it was targeted for students in the school’s Center for Social Justice program (CSJ) and the Civics and Government institute (CGI).
In an email chain with Montclair educators in advance of the school presentation, Kreith included a detailed synopsis of the play, as well as a content note regarding the scene which included: “White supremacy, physical violence (including a discussion of violence and staged injuries—no physical violence takes place on stage), mention of sexual violence (discussion/not staged), prison, discussion/examples of racism and sexism.”
Kreith was on hand for the Montclair presentation of Rift’s scene three, and verbally provided the same notice previously given to teachers in writing for the assembled students and teachers. Recalling the day, Kreith said, “I introduced the whole piece as being about a character who had become a white supremacist while in prison, and that the other character has choosen not to speak to his brother for 12 year and then resumes contact.”
Referencing Dean, who was interviewed with her, Kreith continued, “I talked about you in 2020 and your sense that maybe the moral thing to do was not to shut your brother out, but to attempt to re-engage and try to see what could be accomplished by listening and talking. I definitely talked about how he became a white supremacist in prison that the piece was about your journey to try and to shift that.”
Despite the advance cautions, Kreith describes a series of rapid events unfolding in the span of perhaps ten minutes once the scene began by her account, the timing corroborated by the participating actors. An email request to Jeffrey Freeman, the school’s principal, for an interview received no response.
Very quickly after the start, Kreith says that someone came to get her saying the performance needed to stop and bringing her straight to the principal. According to Kreith, one teacher believed that the actors had spoken the n-word from the stage and raised an alarm, though the play does not contain the epithet. When the teacher spoke with Kreith and Freeman and was assured they had misheard, they seemed satisfied.
Nonetheless, when Kreith returned to the auditorium, she almost immediately witnessed a different faculty member getting on to the stage in order to stop the show. Matt Monaco, playing the character referenced in the script as the “inside brother,” recalled the moment saying, “Blake [Stadnik, playing the outside brother] and I are in the middle of the scene. It’s getting to the point where we are starting to get into a deep conversation about James Baldwin. The scene ends in a type of catharsis. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get there. But we were working our way towards that and the teacher jumped on the stage and is filled with some passion and concern. She says, ‘I’m sorry, we need to stop.’ Blake and I exited the theater out into the hallway.”
Stadnik described the moment adding a personal detail, saying “I’m actually legally blind. When I’m on stage, really, the only person I have any semblance of seeing is Matt. So I’m very focused on him. But you can kind of feel when the audience is there with you. You could tell that there were several students – I mean, many actually more than several – who were sitting forward, engaging. When it was stopped, I was just confused. I wanted to make sure that because I can’t see it, I wanted to make sure everyone was okay, because we are dealing with some intense topics. And if anyone has experienced these sorts of things in real life, I wanted to make sure that they weren’t having any sort of traumatic event.”
Monaco concurred with his impression of the student response, saying, “I was feeling quite moved and touched by the active listening. I’ve performed for high school students before and this was a completely different experience. They were engaged. And I even looked at some of them, eye to eye. They were in it.”
Monaco said that the teacher who had mounted the stage continued to speak after the actors had exited into the hallway, but that only partially hearing what was being said, and prompted by a student who came into the hallway to express upset over what had happened, he felt compelled to return to the stage.
“I was driven to walk out there,” he describes, “and just apologize for any confusion or concern that may have entered the room. I apologized to her. I said, ‘I’m sorry for barging in here. I just want to tell everybody what this play’s about, where this was going.’ I couldn’t leave that way. I had to go back out there and explain what this what this play is about and where we were headed before we were silenced.”
Kreith said at that point she and the actors were told they must leave and did so. It’s her understanding that conversation may have continued in the auditorium, but she and the actors were not privy to it.
Subsequent to the presentation and its abrupt cutoff, Luna Stage has offered complimentary tickets to any Montclair High students wishing to see the entirety of Rift, and she says that several have begun to take her up on her offer. The two actors, Kreith and Dean, in conversation, were clearly struggling with the experience.
Kreith immediately attributed the problems to a lack of communication. She believes that while the email chain arranging the presentation included a number of teachers, not all of those who brought their students on Monday were part of that communication. Kreith suggested that the cutoff came from “a moment of panic.” They agreed that what has happened must be an opportunity, as the presentation intended, to open up communication both on the topic of the play and for opportunities like their presentation to remain available at the high school.
After listening to the actors and director recount the experience, Dean, who was not present at the school and relied on various reports, including one on a local news site, said his perspective on the incident had changed.
“I’ve moved from my anger to having sympathy for this person. This person who’s an educator who is –in the time that we’re living in, in the in the in the world that we’re living in – struggling with what kinds of conversations can I am I allowed to have with these kids? The idea of suddenly having to contend with white supremacy, childhood abuse, trauma – all of that puts that body in a place of fear puts, that body in a constricted place, rather than an embracing place. So I can understand that. But at the same time, if we could have gotten to the end of the scene, perhaps some catharsis could have occurred.” Both Dean and Kreith were emphatic that what transpired should not provoke a situation where teachers or administrators are demonized or penalized, only that something positive come out of a difficult moment.
The Luna Stage cohort has, to date, not been told exactly why the performance was stopped, but what is evident from their retelling is that while the school admirably chose to bring in work that raised important issues, it appears to have not properly contextualized that work in advance for students and teachers, resulting in misunderstanding and silencing. The school now has a responsibility for transparently addressing what occurred and making certain that the shutting down of ideas, on the page or in performance, doesn’t become an accepted part of their pedagogy. Better internal communication between the administration and teachers is essential.
Nonetheless, even in truncated form, Rift made a connection that showed the students were more than mature enough to handle the content. Kreith shared one email she received from a student, which read in part, “I saw part of the performance yesterday while in school and was very disappointed when it was abruptly stopped. I feel like the play reflects the reality of the world we live in, I thought the actors were great, and overall I really enjoyed the part of the performance we got to see. A group of us would like to see the show Sunday at 3:00pm. I don’t know exactly how many people yet, but I thought I would just reach out to make sure there are seats available. Apologies on behalf of my teachers for cutting your performance short and thank you for allowing us the opportunity to see what we missed.”
While his half-brother may not know about the incident at Montclair High, he is fully embracing of the play. Dean related, “He sent the guys an opening night message, to say, thank you, thank you for this work.”
As for his brother’s white supremacist beliefs, Dean says, “He has moved away from it. He’s moved away from the ideology, and he’s moved away specifically from acts of violence in prison. The rift that existed between us has been mended as a result of this project, of writing this play. The play leaves us with ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,’ but he knows about it and has been changed by it as have I.”
Clive Owen and Jin Ha in the 2017 Broadway revival of M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang (Photo by Joan Marcus)
“There is more than one way to burn a book,” wrote Ray Bradbury, in an afterword to his novel Fahrenheit 451. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
It is no small irony, consequently, that Bradbury’s classic tale of book burning, written in the wake of Germany’s affinity for book burnings leading up to and during World War II, finds itself banned at times in the present day. Book challenges and resulting book bans may not send a plume of smoke into the sky, but the goal is the same: to make it difficult for people to be exposed to certain ideas, to control what they may learn and think. Another classic of thought control, George Orwell’s 1984, often finds itself alongside Bradbury’s novel where such censorship takes root. Both appear on PEN America’s dataset of some 5,800 books banned in US schools between July 2021 and June 2023.
There are multiple compendiums of banned books in schools that have been developed by different organizations. In addition to the expansive list from PEN America, The Washington Post studied trends within book challenges numbering roughly 1,000, drawn from 150 school districts during the 2021-22 year, publishing their results in a multistory report on December 23. Days earlier, on December 20, the Orlando Sentinel listed 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida this year alone, primarily due to new Florida laws which require school media specialists to remove books with pornography or so-called “sexual conduct.”
The 673 books from Orange County described many of the same trends as those summarized by the Post and PEN: young adult books, books with LGBTQIA+ content, books by authors of color. Among the authors whose works were placed into review were Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Gordon Parks, Ovid, Marcel Proust, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker; among the perhaps more unexpected titles are Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.
It’s impossible to know what books are in Orange County schools but presumably the number and range is considerable. US News says the district serves over 200,000 students and has 91 middle schools and 60 high schools. That said, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the source of the challenges matches the profile ascertained by the Post in its study, which revealed that 60% of the book challenges came from only 11 people.
Within the 657 books detailed by the Orlando Sentinel, it’s worth noting that a small number of plays were placed under review. They are, in alphabetical order by author:
Four Plays by Aristophanes
Dance Nation by Clare Barron
The History Boys by Alan Bennett
The Bridges of Madison County by Marsha Norman and Jason Robert Brown
The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico Garcia Lorca
The Collected Plays by Lillian Hellman
M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang
The Beauty Queen of Leeanne by Martin McDonagh
Sweat by Lynn Nottage
Equus by Peter Shaffer
The Food Chain byNicky Silver
That’s right: in Orange County, Florida, students currently can’t read three Tony Award winners for Best Play, as well as a major work by a Pulitzer prize-winner, let alone a collection of plays by one of the earliest major dramatists in world history. There is no indication as to the specific reason why these books have been withdrawn or what universe of books these were drawn from. Is the list so short because the district hasn’t provided schools with a representative sampling of play texts or because the individuals lodging complaints simply haven’t focused their attention in that direction?
Curiously the significantly longer PEN list for 2022-23 doesn’t show any dramatic works, suggesting something in their methodology may be at play, though prose works by writers who are strongly affiliated with theatre can be found, including Alan Cumming, Tim Federle, Lupita Nyong’o, and Adam Rapp; a manga edition of Hamlet also appears. If for some reason PEN has extracted dramatic works intentionally, then they have done the field a great disservice, since the challenging or banning of any text must be brought into the light.
The presence of play texts in school classrooms and libraries is essential, because even in districts where drama has escaped the censors’ eyes, there simply are too few production opportunities for students to be exposed to the breadth of dramatic literature. Incidents of production censorship make the news intermittently, but my own workshops reveal how many titles are refused for production by school officials, and yet more aren’t even proposed by teachers who fear blowback for even suggesting them.
In the wake of the Orlando Sentinel article David Henry Hwang wrote on the social media platform Threads, “Proud to have my play banned in Florida! When the MButterfly movie was banned in China in the 1990s, this led to everyone there wanting to see it. Remains to be seen how Floridians react.”
Nothing would be more gratifying than to find that bans only increase the popularity of the works under fire, sending students to public libraries and bookstores to seek out the forbidden fruit. If that were the case, we’d see authors clamoring to be banned. But once a book is banned, even if the ban generates attention, time passes and attention eventually fades, while the book remains unavailable as part of an educational experience, whether in a classroom or in a school library.
As expansive and valuable as all three reports are, those from PEN and the Washington Post are surely not fully representative of the full extent of book challenges and bans across the country, since they rely on various forms of public records releases, external submissions in response to requests, and direct discovery through interviews. As with so many such cases, they still must be looked at as the tip of the iceberg and, when it comes to dramatic works, as largely insufficient, except to highlight the degree to which a relatively small activist group of narrow-minded people want to dictate what literature can be accessed by young people who are inquisitive, broad-minded and in search of thoughts and stories beyond those that have passed some manner of purity test invented by unqualified individuals on censorious crusades.
As the Sentinel and the Post note, challenges don’t always result in bans and some works may yet be restored to school shelves. That’s why the only response is to support the books and the opportunity for expansive learning – and to watch for where theatre is being silenced, be it in performances, or just as text on shelves in schools.
School board meets in Sherman TX on November 13 (YouTube screenshot)
On November 13, following close to three hours of public comment by more than 60 individual speakers, each allotted up to three minutes to speak – the vast majority of whom vigorously supported the drama students and questioned the process by which decisions were being made in the Sherman school system – and more than two hours of closed session, the board of the Sherman TX Independent School District voted unanimously that the original script and cast of the musical Oklahoma! should be allowed to proceed at the high school.
This follows a week and half in which the school’s administration initially informed parents and then students that no student would be allowed to perform any role where a character’s gender that did not align with the gender the cast member were assigned at birth. While this affected as many as 20 students according to statements at the meeting, the decision was widely interpreted at being focused specifically at Max Hightower, a trans male student who had had been cast as the secondary character of Ali Hakim, a role from which he was now being removed.
That decision, announced on Friday November 4, was followed on Monday, November 7 with a statement that the school was now reviewing the text of Oklahoma!, one of the most popular musicals in US high schools for more than a half-century, for material which was inappropriate for high school performance.
On November 11, late on a Friday afternoon, the school announced that there was an alternate Oklahoma! script that would be performed, one which would be acceptable for all ages. That was in fact a cut-down one-hour version of the musical which was intended for pre-high school performances and audiences with short attention spans. A statement to this website from Concord Theatricals , which licenses Oklahoma! for performance, confirmed that the district had applied for the rights to the alternate version, but did not say that such rights had been granted.
Coming after more than five hours of meeting time that went well past 10 pm, the following resolution was adopted by the school board by unanimous decision: “As the board has not adopted a board policy regarding the casting of students in theater productions or performances, I move that the board direct the superintendent to reinstate the original script of the musical Oklahoma at Sherman High School and cast that was assigned as of November 2, 2023.”
School board president Brand Morgan then went on to read a statement on behalf of the school board as follows, “We want to apologize to our students, parents or community regarding the circumstances that they’ve had to go through to this date. We understand that our decision does not erase the impact this had on our community. But we hope that we will enforce to everyone, particularly our students, we do embrace all of our board goals to including addressing the diverse needs of our students and empowering them for success in diverse and a complex world. The board is committed to uphold its ethical duties to including being continuously guided by what is best for all students in our district.”
The more than five dozen speakers at the meeting ranged in age from high schoolers to grandparents, and included speakers who identified themselves as lifelong Sherman residents, residents who had moved away and returned later in life, students matriculated at Austin College in Sherman, parents and siblings of current students and more. Several speakers identified themselves as gay, queer and trans.
The Austin College students each spoke to their personal experiences, but all shared and reiterated the same concluding statement when it came their turn: “I demand that the school board upholds its self-reported goals V & VI by supporting LGBTQ students. I demand the school board allow Sherman High School to perform ‘Oklahoma!’ and all future shows in its original form with students cast in roles they earn. I demand the board maintains SISD theatre department as a welcoming and inclusive space.”
A number of speakers cited statistics about rates of suicidal ideation and suicide among gay and trans young people and charged the school administration and board with ignoring such concerns. One speaker bluntly asked, regarding the school’s gender policies, “Are you telling me that instead of writing biographies in playbills you would rather be writing obituaries?”
One Austin College student who spoke at the board meeting, identifying themselves as a trans male, stated that theatre is a safe space but that Sherman itself is not. They went on to say that by standing up at the meeting, “I am risking coming out to my entire homophobic family because this is a hill I will die on.”
This does not, however, mean that all discussion on the matter of future productions and casting is necessarily over. One school board member asked for additional conversation on the matters raised at the meeting, stating, “I would like to request a special called meeting Friday at noon of this week here at the central office boardroom to continue this discussion with the board and with legal counsel.” Board president Morgan said that such discussion would be scheduled within 72 hours.
No announcement has yet been made regarding the performance dates for Oklahoma!, originally scheduled for next month.
The Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little Ladies of River City, Iowa ain’t got nuthin’ on the district administrators and school board of Sherman, Texas.
Don’t remember the Pick-a-Little Ladies? They’re the gossipy gaggle of book banning biddies who take time out of their perpetual puncturing of their neighbors’ foibles to rail against the presence of classic works by Chaucer, Rabelais and (horrors) Balzac in the local library.
The Sherman Independent School District honchos are the hypersensitive monitors of morals who have found shocking sexuality and impermissible profanity in the beloved 1943 classic Oklahoma!, widely acknowledged as a turning point in the development of modern musical theatre.
Oklahoma! has been performed tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times around the world on stages large and small, professional, amateur and academic. It was the most popular musical on high school stages in the 1960s and 70s and the second most popular in the 1980s and 90s, demonstrating that thousands of teachers, principals, superintendents and school boards have found it to be a wholly acceptable, even ideal, show for their students across decades.
One key difference in the two aforementioned groups: the Pick-a-Little Ladies aren’t real, but instead are characters in another beloved musical, The Music Man, created by Meredith Willson to puncture the hypocrisy of small-town, small-minded self-appointed arbiters of what is right and wrong. The Sherman ISD folks are alive and well imposing their ridiculous regulations on what was heretofore an unassailable standard of the American theatrical repertoire.
When we last left the Sherman ISD crew, they had announced that the already-cast high school production of Oklahoma!, slated for performance in December, was being recast, specifically targeting any student who had a role of the opposite gender from their own. This edict came down in order to displace Max Hightower, a trans boy who had been cast in the secondary role of the traveling peddler Ali Hakim. It seems that the Sherman ISD leaders couldn’t countenance a trans boy acting a role in a comical love triangle, so they invented new rules to stigmatize every gay, trans, non-binary, and queer student under their thumbs, even managing to displace some of the straight kids as well.
But one week after their ham-handed actions raised an outcry from local students, parents and, increasingly, the media, the Sherman ISD brain trust announced late Friday afternoon that they had found a solution to this problem of their own creation. Declaring the script and score of Oklahoma! that has delighted generations on stage and film to have been intended for “older audiences,” they patted themselves on the back for moving forward with an alternate Oklahoma!, “a musical that showcases each student’s talents while also being age appropriate, with no concerns over content, stage production/props, and casting. By utilizing a new version that’s age appropriate, sex will not be considered when casting the new production. Students will be able to play any part, regardless of whether the sex of the character aligns with the sex of the student assigned at birth.”
How did they achieve such a magical transformation of such trash as one of the important musicals in the history of the form? In a move that would have made the Pick-a-Little Ladies proud, they have opted produce the Oklahoma! Youth Edition, a version of the show so cut down that in contrast to the original, which according to the licensing house Concord Theatricals runs more than two hours, the young people of Sherman will be required to only be on stage for an hour. Yes, the Oklahoma! Youth Edition might be more appropriately called Highlights from Oklahoma! (Minus All the Not Very Naughty Bits).
Taking a closer look at the Concord website, one can easily find that this truncated Oklahoma! being produced at a high school wasn’t designed for high schools. The site states, “In this adaptation for pre-high school students, the content has been edited to better suit younger attention spans.” There’s even one character from the show who has entirely disappeared, as the number of male principals has dropped from 6 to 5. Without immediate access to the Youth script, one can surmise that the missing man could well be the ill-natured (and perpetually ostracized) Jud Fry, that fly in the ointment in the otherwise placid settler community.
What’s evident is that in their rush to eradicate anything that goes against their desire to keep Sherman safe only for cisgendered heterosexuals, they have decided to infantilize the entire student body by giving them the opportunity to perform and see not Oklahoma! but Oklahoma!-lite, a skeletal script reworked to take an impressionable pre-teen from song to song without the slightest spectre of sensuality, and to be sure, it’s pretty slight in most Oklahoma! productions to begin with, sublimated into song and dance.
Heaping a dollop of self-congratulation on themselves in yesterday’s statement, the Sherman ISD spin doctors “thank our community for the care and patience they have shown as we have navigated these difficult circumstances.” There was nothing difficult until these folks decided to make it so and they haven’t demonstrated the slightest care for a significant number of their students, least of all Max Hightower, who found love, acceptance and understanding everywhere except from the Sherman ISD leadership.
As for patience, segments of the community shouted that they can say no from the moment the decision came down one week earlier. The outcry forced the cadre that exerts their will over Sherman students to bumble into another decision which only reinforces their fear of high schoolers encountering anything that doesn’t advance the America seen in such sitcoms as Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best. That happens to the be the very same era in which the film of Oklahoma! was a box office hit.
With a Board of Education meeting looming in Sherman on Monday evening and the board itself thinking it has tied up everything quite neatly, they are likely to learn during public comments that their alarm over a masterpiece of musical theatre and their disdain for children they’re supposed to be building into smart, compassionate adults has fallen flat. They would do well to listen to the wise words of the character of Aunt Eller in Oklahoma!, mildly profane but also utterly humane, who seeks to quell a community conflict with this lyric, which along with the entire script and score won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944, a declaration that all people are created equal, with equal rights:
I’d like to teach you all a little sayin’ And learn the words by heart the way you should I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else, But I’ll be damned if I ain’t jist as good!
Update, November 11, 5 pm: In response to questions regarding the situation with Oklahoma! at Sherman High School, the licensing house Concord Theatricals provided the following statement, reproduced in its entirety:
“Equity, diversity, inclusion and freedom of speech are key tenets for Concord Theatricals as champions of authors and artists. We encourage all producing organizations to consider diversity and inclusion in their casting choices.
Concord Theatricals supports our licensees and all who work on their productions, so long as they adhere to their contractual agreement and do not enact unauthorized content changes.
Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! is a classic title that has been performed in its entirety thousands of times across the U.S. since it debuted 80 years ago, including in High Schools. Concord Theatricals additionally offers a popular 60-minute Youth Edition designed especially for young performers; we can confirm that Sherman has now applied for this version.”
UPDATE: For the resolution of this situation following a school board meeting, posted on November 14, click here.
Background of lead image photographed at the Museum of Broadway’s Oklahoma! exhibit in New York.
“It was brought to the District’s attention that the current production contained mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content,” reads the communication from Sherman High School in Sherman, Texas. “Unfortunately, all aspects of the production need to be reviewed, including content, stage production/props, and casting to ensure that the production is appropriate for the high school stage.”
The scurrilous, sensual, and shocking show in question? Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! The date of this communication? November 6, 2023.
It would be easy to simply find this ludicrous. Oklahoma! is, after all, widely considered to be the first musical of the modern era, a landmark of marrying song and story. It was a long-running smash that was seen as representing the best of America in its original run, which overlapped with World War II; there are many stories of military inductees seeing the show just before they were sent over to the war in Europe, or as the first thing they did when the returned stateside. Oklahoma! as Americana may gloss over the subject of how the territory was opened to white settlers by banishing the indigenous residents, but it’s worth noting that the musical was faithfully based on a play by Lynn Riggs, a member of the Cherokee nation.
The widescreen movie in 1955 starred Shirley Jones and Eddie Albert among others, and has been played and replayed on television, home video and streaming seemingly ever since. There have been multiple Broadway revivals and it’s popular outside the US as well; over two decades ago, a production at London’s National Theatre made a star of an unknown Australian named Hugh Jackman.
Oh, and Oklahoma! was the single most popular musical in US high school theatre nationally in the 1960s and 1970s, before falling into the second position in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s the salacious tract that Sherman, Texas officials feel they need to clean up for public consumption. Presumably they will next be coming for that cesspool of sin, Annie. Mind you, Sherman High has produced Oklahoma! at least twice before, the most recent production coming less than 10 years ago.
Looking deeper into the school’s statement comes this peculiar language: “There is no policy on how students are assigned to roles. As it relates to this particular production, the sex of the role as identified in the script will be used when casting. Because the nature and subject matter of productions vary, the District is not inclined to apply this criteria to all future productions.”
What’s that about precisely? It’s about the fact that last week, the powers-that-be at Sherman decided that students must be cast according to the gender which they were identified by at birth, and in the case of the trans male student cast as Ali Hakim, that meant Max Hightower was being removed from his role with zero clarity as to whether he would receive any other role, as most assuredly wouldn’t get one according to his gender identity. This despite the fact that Oklahoma! has been open to cross-gender casting for a number of years, as well as multi-racial casting, so it is not trapped in the limitations of the era in which it was first produced by rigid rights holders.
Philip Hightower, Max’s dad, retells the story of how this casting edict was shared with parents, saying that he received a call last Friday from the school principal, explaining the new policy that was being imposed. After this brief call, Hightower immediately tried reaching Max’s guidance counselor, so the student might have some immediate support when informed of the decision. Reaching a different counselor, as Max’s was unavailable, Hightower asked for a copy of the new policy. Hightower says the counselor seemed completely flustered and had no idea where to find such a thing.
“I do want to stress this,” says Hightower, “because I think it really shows the current state of education, especially in Texas. This guy wanted to empathize with me, like really on a personal level. He would start all these sentences about caring and never finishing. The one that sticks out the most is he said, ‘You know, man to man,” and there was a long pause. ‘Father to father.’ He never finished. They’re terrified. They’re terrified of this situation, they don’t know what to do.”
Hightower said that on getting home from work, he expected to find a profoundly upset Max. But that wasn’t the case.
“I realized I should have thought better because I know Max,” said Hightower. “Max is a fighter, The first thing he said to me when I came in was something along the lines of, ‘Can you believe this shit?’ I said, ‘Max, what do you want me to do?’ I told him, I’d reached out to the local news. And he said, “I want to fight.”
While initially, going into the weekend, local media was slow to pick up on the story, but after Hightower and his wife posted their accounts of the situation on social media, they were met first with a groundswell of local support, and then local outlets began to do interviews. As of Tuesday afternoon November 7, The New York Times was on the case.
But does Hightower think the decision can be altered?
“No,” he flatly declares. “You don’t know these people. These people here have the majority and they know it. And they don’t care. I mean, we’ve seen it every day.”
Brett Boessen, parent of another Sherman high student, his daughter Lucy, who was cast in the play, says the recent actions have given him a new perspective on what’s happening in his community.
“This one decision,” said Boessen, “more than any other decision that I’ve seen, that the school has made in the past year or two, has got me really thinking that school board elections are important. There are some people on the board right now who need to be removed when the next election happens in the spring. This just is not a way to protect and nurture students in the school system. It sends absolutely the wrong message to students about how the school board thinks about them and everything else.”
Boessen, who was speaking as a parent but happens to be the chair of the Communication, Media, and Theater Department at Austin College, was also skeptical of what might be done.
“I would hope that the parents would be upset about this in sufficient enough numbers to be able to make some kind of change,” said Boessen. “But I’ll be honest, I think a lot of people have real fears right now. Maybe some of them are unfounded. But maybe some of them are realistic about the kind of pushback and reprisal that people make on social media, but then through social media in the real world might have against people who speak out and who say something about these kinds of policies. So I’m not holding my breath that the community will stand up and say, ‘Absolutely not, this is this is wrong, get this fixed right away.’ I don’t know that that will happen. Even if there is a kind of majority sentiment, I think a lot of it is probably silent.”
As if the motivations of the school administration and board were not self-evident in their attempts to suppress and deny trans identity, it’s worth noting that the Sherman school district has adopted a program called “Stand in the Gap.” It is described on the Sherman Independent School District website in detail, but the following stands out:
For this year, we’re going a step further and asking our church congregations and community to “Stand In The Gap” for us. Stand in the gap between the challenges of this world and our staff and students through prayer.
The gap is ostensibly the place where families and communities have “failed,” taking in loco parentis far beyond its intent to a place of superseding the parental role. This alignment of church and state, as opposed to separation, suggests that Sherman has taken a theological approach to education, going on to outri
ght ask for prayers for staff and students. Even though one of their tenets is “protection from harm,” such protection is being decided selectively, presumably something that can be lain at the feet of the school superintendent, Dr. Tyson Bennett, who signed the Stand in the Gap policy. They appear not to be concerned about protecting trans and queer students, or students who just want to find a good part in a show.
There are some dark elements of Oklahoma! that director Daniel Fish emphasized in his radical reworking of the show for a production that played to acclaim in New York and London, and on national tour. But high schools aren’t pursuing that interpretation. Someone has suggested to Sherman High officials that such darkness must be rooted out, such as the wanton Ado Annie, who perhaps kisses a few too many men, or the scantily clad women tacked up in Jud Fry’s shed. In keeping with the time period in which it was written, Oklahoma! is decidedly chaste, if not completely sanitized.
In their statement, Sherman High suggests a production will go forward, after these troubling elements have been addressed. But they should be reminded that they can’t simply alter the work to suit their tastes, and of course they’ve really brought these elements up as a smokescreen to distract from their retrograde attitudes about student identity.
Will a production happen, delayed by a few weeks? That remains to be seen, and there’s a school board meeting at the beginning of next week, but according to Phillip Hightower, a significant number of cast members have already quit the production. So Sherman may not only clean up Oklahoma!, but eradicate their school musical. Perhaps that’s what they really want. But that’s not what’s best for their students. That’s why voices in Sherman, when it comes to transphobia and censorship, contrary to Ado Annie’s plaintive cry, must say “No!”
For an update on this post, read “Oklahoma! Santized for Your Protection” posted on November 11.Click here.
For the resolution of this situation following a school board meeting, posted on November 14, click here.
The irony is almost too neat: a college student plans a program of songs from musicals that have faced censorship – and with less than two days’ notice, her university informs her she has to take it off-campus. That’s the situation that confronted Friends University student Caitlyn Fox earlier this month as she was in final preparations for “The Shows They Don’t Want Us to Produce: A Study of Censorship Throughout the History of Musical Theatre.”
The performance was Fox’s senior recital, part of the academic program for musical theatre students at Friends, “a Christian University of Quaker heritage” in Wichita, Kansas, according to the school’s website. Fox is also a student in the honors program at Friends, and the recital would then inform her still-to-be-written honors thesis, on the same topic.
The performance was scheduled for 6 pm on Saturday February 12 in the campus’s Riney Fine Arts Center. However, an email from the school’s president of academic affairs and dean of the faculty, Dr. Kenneth Stolzfus, sent at 11 pm on Thursday, February 10, informed Fox that, “We have received significant complaints from staff members and donors…People who have worked at and/or supported the university for a long time are considering withdrawing their support if we move forward with having the recital at Friends.”
As a result, wrote Stolzfus, to both Fox and her father, Russell Fox, who is a political science professor and head of the honors program, “We can’t host the recital on campus. I think the best option at this point is to move the performance to an off-campus location and to not require Friends staff members to be involved in the performance.”
There had not been any announcement of the recital’s contents, so complaints were presumably prompted solely by the topic/title, which had been announced, consistent with all other student arts events according to Fox, on the school’s Facebook page. The very idea of a program of songs from shows that had at one time or another faced censorship was sufficient to provoke some manner of outcry and for Stolzfus to favor anonymous voices over the academic work of a student. He wrote to Fox that part of the issue was that the Facebook announcement, “gave the appearance that the university is sponsoring the event.”
The program, according to Fox, included “Aquarius” from Hair, “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret, “Unworthy of Your Love” from Assassins, “The Dark I Know Well from Spring Awakening, and “Gethsemane” from Jesus Christ Superstar. She thought the most risqué songs in the program were probably “Schadenfreude” from Avenue Q and “My Unfortunate Erection” from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Potentially more button-pushing songs such as “Sodomy” and “Totally Fucked” were not included. Her academic advisors were aware of her plans, as she had reviewed the program and why she had chosen certain songs.
Stolzfus himself was also apprised. Fox said she met with him on Monday, February 7, just three days before he pulled the rug out from under her.
“I had met with him to just go over some final things before the presentation,” she explained. “He asked me if I had my disclaimer. I told him yes. I sent him my entire script for the show, including all of the information that I was going to mention and he told me good luck with my performance and that he hoped it went well.”
Fox said she had previously met with Stolzfus in June 2021 to outline the project for him, thinking it might be rejected. She described being pleasantly surprised in that meeting that he was, in her words, “incredibly supportive of the project. He told me that I 100% had university support, as long as I wrote a disclaimer – as long as we made it very aware that I would be covering more mature topics, as long as I made it abundantly clear that I was not doing this to shock and offend and I was doing this project for educational purposes.”
Arts Integrity reached out to Friends University through the school’s public relations and communications manager Laura Fuller, via a contact page on the university website, with advance questions and requesting an interview with Fuller or Stolzfus. There was no response.
With the help of members of the theatre faculty, Fox did secure an off-campus location 24 hours before the designated time, performing instead at Plymouth Congregational Church in Wichita. There were some expenses with the move which became Fox’s responsibility, rather than the school’s. She said the result of the turmoil was that it may have in fact generated a larger audience for the program, which featured Fox and five of her classmates.
Fox’s interest in the topic was born of an incident at the Wichita high school she attended – even before she was a student there. She said that a production of Jason Robert Brown’s 13, circa 2009, had been shut down a month into rehearsals because of complaints over two boys kissing.
Fox said, “I grew up in this environment, going to high school, hearing these stories about what happened to the fellow students. Then I went on to college, to Friends, which being a religious institution, we’ve always had to toe the line between what we were allowed to do and what we weren’t. That just continued to fuel my interest in researching more and more about these kinds of situations, where schools or universities or wherever have censored material. I really wanted to talk about why I don’t think that’s okay, why I think that’s detrimental to arts education.”
The Friends University website, while referencing faith, does not suggest a doctrinaire approach to education that would specifically foreshadow censorious behavior by the school. “As searchers and learners, we support curiosity and research, and assign great value to diversity of experience,” reads the information on the site’s About page. “As people who value such diversity and openness, we approach new situations and people with good will and humility.”
In the absence of any response from the university – a Wichita Eagle article on February 12 did not quote Stolzfus beyond his email and Laura Fuller said she couldn’t comment on student academic issues – the student body and the arts community at large are left with the distinct impression that student progress and academic freedom proved less important to Stolzfus and Friends than the voices of unnamed donors and staff.
In his email, Stolzfus attempted to make a distinction between “a delicate balance between promoting academic freedom and entering into territory that alienates and offends other members of the community.” Fox says that given the limited circle of people who knew her program in advance, there is no way that donors could have known what would be performed, yet Solzfus acknowledges their influence and supposed alienation.
Speaking five days after the off campus recital, Fox says, “This entire situation – though it was incredibly stressful, and not at all how I expected my senior recital and senior thesis to go – it’s why I wanted to do this project in the first place. I also think it says a lot about, unfortunately, where arts education is, where we value more about the people who can threaten to pull funding over the content and the artistic expression that we could be exploring as students in our arts education.”
Fox still has to write her thesis on theatre censorship and now, thanks to the school’s actions, she will be part of her own study. The university might well just give her the highest marks already, because thanks to their actions, she has already shown that censorship is ever-present, even when a student merely sets out to examine it.
Conventional wisdom is difficult to alter, but here goes: contrary to what has been widely written, Jesus Christ Superstar was not the first concept recording of a musical to spawn a wildly successful hit show. Sorry Andrew, sorry Tim.
It may well be that JCS was the first concept album to be the basis for a hit Broadway show, but the songs that formed the core of a hugely popular international success were first heard on vinyl in 1966 and landed on stage in New York in March 1967, for a run that would last for 1,597 performances, more than four years before the biblically-based musical. That show – and feel free to start singing the title tune now – was You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Composer Clark Gesner, who had previously written songs for television’s Captain Kangaroo children’s program, wrote the songs for YAGMCB with permission from Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz. According to Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis, Gesner’s first songs, the title track and “Suppertime,” kicked off conversations about a televised animated musical revue. Those plans were superseded by what became A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, the first animated Peanuts special, with memorable musical soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi, but not a musical under any conventional definition.
Consequently, Gesner’s songs first reached the ears of listeners, predominantly young listeners and their parents, in the autumn of 1966 when the 10-track, 25-minute concept recording of You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown was released on King Leo, the children’s division of MGM Records, a major label at the time Records (later issues were on Metro Records). It was billed as “an original MGM album musical” on the cover. The cast was Gesner as Linus, Barbara Minkus as Lucy, Bill Hinnant as Snoopy, and as Charlie Brown, actor-comedian-raconteur Orson Bean. Bean was had already appeared in eight Broadway shows, his most recent credit at the time being The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd.
Part of the reason the King Leo release has likely been lost to time was how quickly it was supplanted by the original cast recording – there was less than six months between the two – and as they were both released by MGM, no doubt marketing focused on the latter as soon as it was on record store shelves. Yet the 1966 concept recording is a fascinating document for fans of the musical, because it reveals how fully formed much of the score was before a stage incarnation was actually in the works. As a note for those who own the CD reissue cast recording on Decca Broadway dating to 2000 with tracks featuring Gesner and Minkus, those are from the demo entitled Peanuts in Song, which were the recordings Gesner sent to Schulz to secure his permission.
All ten of the songs on the King Leo album, including “Happiness,” “Snoopy” and “Little Known Facts” were in the show, some renamed, with the most prominent additions being “The Book Report” and “The Red Baron.” What’s most unexpected about the 1966 recording is its more varied orchestration: horns, strings and a most insistent clarinet are in evidence, no doubt replaced by the simpler piano and percussion mix of the show for financial reasons. Not unlike The Fantasticks, which kept TAGMCB from ever breaking records despite its notably long run, the show’s success was in part due to its small and economical scale.
To be fair to Rice and Lloyd Webber, their JCS concept album was for all practical purposes the complete score and libretto of their show. The YAGMCB album did not have an accompanying book and it was not through-sung, although some of the material which toggled between speech and singing were in place, as were some the introductory dialogue to the songs. The musical itself was largely written during the show’s four-week rehearsal, or, more accurately, assembled using the songs and Schulz’s strips to date, which at that point, with daily and Sunday counted, would have numbered roughly 5,875 through the end of 1966.
When Charlie Brown opened at Off-Broadway’s Theatre 80 St. Marks on March 7, 1967, only Hinnant remained from the concept recording, joined by his brother Skip as Schreoder, Bob Balaban as Linus, Karen Johnson as Patty, Reva Rose as Lucy and Gary Burghoff as Charlie Brown. The director was Joseph Hardy and the choreographer was Patricia Birch. The shift from Bean to Burghoff may have been simply a case of a successful Broadway and TV actor not wanting to commit to a small Off-Broadway show, but it also made sense because Burghoff was 15 years younger than the 37-year-old Bean; the role launched Burghoff into a career defining role as Radar O’Reilly in the film and TV versions of M*A*S*H. Minkus could have easily played Lucy on stage, but it appears she was otherwise committed when the show opened, as one of the standbys for the role of Fanny Brice in the Broadway production of Funny Girl.
Were there other concept albums that preceded YAGMCB? Perhaps. This post isn’t meant to be the final word on the subject. But it should lay to rest the idea that Lloyd Webber and Rice were somehow the first to bring a show to the stage in this way, and certainly not the first to have enormous success as a result. After all, per David Michaelis’s book, the original production yielded 13 touring companies in the US (though more likely some of those were sit-down productions) and 15 international companies. It has been a staple of the musical theatre repertoire ever since, notably revived on Broadway, with new musical contributions by Andrew Lippa, in 1999.
So step aside, Jesus Christ (Superstar). Just as he was anointed in the Schulz drawing that introduced the 1966 album, the musical theatre concept album crown belongs to Charlie Brown.
The complete 1966 recording can be heard here:
For those unfamiliar with my lifelong affection for the Peanuts comics, you can read about it in my post, A Man Named Charlie Brown, from 2013.
