Cirque du Soleil’s Paramour (Photo by Joan Marcus)
I never wanted to run away and join the circus when I was a child. This is no doubt due to the fact that I never saw a circus live (I was aware of them through other cultural means) until I was 23 years old. The first circus I ever saw was the Big Apple Circus.
The founders of BAC began as street performers in England in 1974, but within three years they created a circus that quickly became a New York fixture, with a commitment not simply to selling tickets, but to educating young people about the circus – and through the circus – making certain their not-so-big top was accessible to people throughout the city (not just in Manhattan) at reasonable prices. Set up as a subsidised enterprise, it pursued its mission of a one-ring circus with a genuine intimacy that was in marked counterpoint to the famed Ringling Brothers shows that played arenas in the area annually. Last week, a feature by The New York Times laid out a rather dire outlook for BAC’s future, attributed in part to lost corporate group sales in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn. Their 39th season, at Lincoln Center this fall, is in jeopardy.
As it happens, the report came just after Cirque du Soleil’s Paramour opened on Broadway, the company’s third attempt at a sit-down production in Manhattan. Cirque has beginnings equally as humble as BAC, but its trajectory has been markedly different. Over 32 years, Cirque du Soleil has exploded into one of the major brands in entertainment, with shows both touring and playing in purpose-built venues around the world. I imagine, only slightly facetiously, that its beverage and candy sales each year exceed the entire budget of BAC. Since it arrived on the scene, with its distinctive production values and new approach to circus arts, even using the word circus has become old fashioned – there are countless cirques everywhere, and many have never been near France or Quebec.
In 2013, Cirque pared back its staff, as several shows closed or underperformed. At the time, I wrote about not being particularly worried for the company’s fortunes. Like any fast-growing multinational business, it took stock of where it stood and needed to restructure. It’s possible that BAC should have done the same thing a few years ago, or if it did, it didn’t fully anticipate the degree to which its income model was changing due to forces beyond its control. Even as Cirque’s Paramour opened to a welter of mixed to negative reviews, and pulled in only 56% of its potential gross revenue last week, I think the company can weather another shaky New York effort, while the hometown team is in direr straits.
Big Apple Circus (Photo by Maike Schulz)
Despite the divergence in scale between these two companies, I do wonder whether they both haven’t fully faced up to one common issue, namely the nature of their work more than three decades after they began. Each has a fairly distinctive house style that transcends any particular production or season; you could walk me into either BAC or Cirque with no foreknowledge and I could immediately tell you which company I was seeing. But whereas both probably emerged in response to the three-ring spectacle of Ringling Brothers and other circuses in that style, perhaps both Big Apple and Cirque now grapple with their own aesthetic histories. Big Apple hasn’t bowed to the Cirque style or scale, as so many other companies have, while Cirque still offers shows that echo the DNA of Nouvelle Experience, their first show to tour the US. Their efforts outside of those parameters are the ones that haven’t succeeded (such as their Las Vegas Elvis show or their first theatre venture, Banana Shpeel).
In the meantime, yet new iterations of circus have emerged, with my particular favourite being the Canadian Les 7 Doigts De La Main, whose stripped down, jeans and t-shirt style shows place the focus solely on the art of the performer, not on the man in the top hat or the clown babbling nonsense. In its simplicity, it is all the more remarkable. As for merging circus and Broadway, director Diane Paulus (who also staged Cirque’s Amaluna) already did that impeccably with her revival of Pippin, aided by 7 Doigts’ Gypsy Snider. This came after the singular Bill Irwin, both alone and with his occasional partner David Shiner, had created utterly original pieces, including Largely New York, Fool Moon and Old Hats, bringing clowning to new levels of artistry in theatres on and Off-Broadway.
I genuinely hope the charming Big Apple Circus finds the funds to sustain its mission, but uses the opportunity to explore whether its performance template has contributed to its financial decline. As for Cirque du Soleil, whose productions have sometimes thrilled me, perhaps they’ll take the time to ponder their future and realise that bigger isn’t always better – and that Broadway musicals are a unique art unto themselves. Maybe some new creative energies and artists, breaking from the past, can help to sustain these two circuses, both alike in revelry.
The bombshell article in the Chicago Reader by Aimee Levitt and Christopher Piatt, about serially abusive practices at Chicago’s Profiles Theatre, rightly zoomed around the theatre world from the moment it went online on Wednesday at approximately 5:30 pm eastern time. Profoundly troubling to virtually anyone who read it, this account of abuse masquerading as theatre will surely be one of the seminal articles to be read, shared and taught for years to come. It is a cautionary tale about how, under the guise of art and daring, unethical and perhaps even illegal acts can be sustained by those who choose to exploit both the ostensibly safe spaces of creative practice and the unending appeal of theatre for those just looking for a break, any break, seemingly no matter what the cost.
It is impossible to say much more than Levitt and Piatt have already done with their essential yearlong investigation. But there are a few items that have come to Arts Integrity’s attention.
“The Village Bike” withdrawn from Profiles
If one visits the website of Profiles Theatre right now, the company promises a production of Penelope Skinner’s The Village Bike beginning in late August. That production will not be happening, because the playwright has withdrawn the rights. Skinner provided a statement to Arts Integrity via her New York representative, Scott Chaloff at WME. It reads, in its entirety:
When the article in the Chicago Reader appeared, it was sent to me by a number of artists in the American theatre community and beyond it. Having read the article, alongside their emails, I feel it essential to withdraw the rights of my play ‘The Village Bike’ from that theatre. In light of the serious allegations made against the management, it would seem unwise for a production of this play – or indeed any play – to go on at that theatre until a full investigation has been made into their practices. I regret that it is not always possible from outside a community to hear the rumours of what goes on inside. Thank you to the brave actresses who came forward and to the writers of the article for raising awareness, and for giving the wider community an opportunity to take action.
Arts Integrity was advised that this would be Skinner’s only comment on Profiles Theatre.
It should be noted that in the wake of the revelations, the ad design for The Village Bike, shown above, which under other circumstances might be seen as merely provocative, seems to be further evidence of the pathology at work at Profiles.
Silence from the theatre
At approximately 5:50 pm eastern on Wednesday, Arts Integrity wrote to Larry Larsen, the senior vice prudent of Greentarget, the communications firm representing Profiles. The company had previously been represented by Cathy Taylor PR, a veteran Chicago press office, and it was Taylor who advised Arts Integrity to contact Greentarget. Taylor’s name was still on the Profiles site as the press contact for the theatre.
Asked for comment on the article and the situation at Profiles, Arts Integrity quickly received the following response from Larsen, about 20 minutes later:
I am representing the Profiles Theatre. As you noted, the article has just appeared. We are in the process of reading it. I will respond further once we have reviewed it.
There has been no further response from Greentarget, which is primarily a corporate communications firm. One of the specialties, according to their website is “Special Situation Communication: protecting reputation during the most critical times.” This seems to be doublespeak for what most people would call crisis management. In any event, Greentarget’s strategy to date has been silence.
Should people have realized sooner
In a follow up piece for the Reader, “A critic’s mea culpa, or How Chicago theater critics failed the women of Profiles Theatre,” critic Christopher Piatt publicly examined his own failure to recognize the pathology of Profiles through the kind of work they presented over 20 years, a brave statement on his part, and one that is equally important reading to the main story if the theatre community as a whole is to truly learn from these alleged practices. It should be noted that, in hindsight, beyond The Village Bike image shared earlier, Profiles was either insufficiently self-aware of the image they were telegraphing, or didn’t care, when one looks at some images still cycling on their website from past productions. (Arts Integrity is not reproducing the images, given the unethical circumstances under which they were created.)
The trolls come out to play
Remarkably, in an account that communicates emotional damage and the kind of practices that must be eliminated, there are always naysayers. LA Bitter Lemons, an outspoken Los Angeles theatre site which Arts Integrity’s director challenged over its pay for review strategy about a year ago, has posted a short piece by editor Colin Mitchell which seems, in essence, to “blame the victims” of Profiles for not speaking up sooner. Read it if you must, but given this manner of engaging with a serious problem at one theatre that, unfortunately, is likely happening at other theatres and in the arts at large, Arts Integrity believes Bitter Lemons has gone from bitter to vile, and will no longer give further consideration to writing that appears on the site again. If you do read the piece, be sure to share your comments with the author and, perhaps, the site’s advertisers.
Aftermath
Even before the Profiles situation was revealed, the Chicago theatre community had already begun to come together over abuses in non-Equity theatre through the Not In Our House campaign, which includes a code of conduct. This effort needs to be replicated in communities throughout the country, and Arts Integrity stands ready to support and participate in these initiatives – and to be a vehicle through which artists who feel they have no voice can find support and guidance when it’s needed.
As for Profiles, there is distinct irony that the company has employed the tagline “Whatever the truth requires” in its marketing. The truth requires that Profiles be held to account now that they have been exposed for twisting the theatrical concept of truth to their own ends.
Update, June 10, 10:15 pm: Sometime in the past hour a statement from Darrell W. Cox, artistic director of Profiles Theatre, appeared on the company’s Facebook page. It begins:
On June 8, 2016, the Chicago Reader published an article entitled “At Profiles Theatre the drama—and abuse—is real.” For those who have not read it, I recommend you do so. The article’s overarching message of zero tolerance for workplace abuse is powerful and right.
Unfortunately, I am the villain in the Reader’s approximately 12,700-word article. The article chronicles much of my life since joining Profiles as recalled mainly through selective accounts of three women in my life. Most of the article dealt with people’s views of my work as an actor, director and artistic director of Profiles. But a portion of the article made allegations about my private conduct. Many people who read the article did not recognize the distinction and seemed to believe everything in the article without question.
Cox’s post goes on to express dismay over retribution that has been directed at him and the theatre since the article appeared, and states, “Joe Jahraus and I (Profiles artistic directors) have never and will never condone workplace abuse at Profiles Theatre….All of our actors are here of their own free will.”
It continues:
Unfortunately, the article has made it impossible for me to respond further to the women’s statements in a way that would convince anyone who believes their statements are accurate. I must rely, instead, on those who were and are a part of my life and Profiles Theatre to know the facts.
The statement concludes by asking for a meeting with the leadership of Not In Our House.
It should be noted that the original Chicago Reader article sought Cox and Jahraus’s participation, which was declined. In addition, as noted above, Arts Integrity sought comment or an interview with the Profiles leadership which, after being told a response would be forthcoming, never came; it has now been more than 52 hours. It was not, and is not, impossible for Cox to respond. He has elected not to.
A prophetic image on the Profiles Theatre website?
Update, June 10, 10:55 pm: In addition to the accounts in the article, and Darryl Cox’s Facebook reply, another actress who worked at Profiles, and who had previously declined to speak with the Chicago Reader, has come forward, writing, “I should have shared my story when called for comment.” Her full post can be read here.
Update, June 11, 6:00 pm: In the wake of his essay about the Profiles Theatre, referred to above, Colin Mitchell has been removed as editor of the website LA Bitter Lemons. The site’s publisher wrote that, “Colin Mitchell’s recent article within the Chicago theatrical community crossed from controversial into unacceptable.” Paul Birchall gives a fuller report of the situation wth Bitter Lemons at Stage Raw.
Update, June 12, 6:00 am: Last evening, Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune wrote on his Facebook page about the Profiles Theatre revelations. He began:
People have been calling for me to comment further on the allegations reported in The Reader. I felt it was important that I speak to the Reader’s reporter, Aimee Levitt, on the record, and I did. Not all of what I had to say ended up in the piece, which is neither unusual nor unreasonable. But I have been asked to say more and am now doing so, speaking only for myself. It took me a little time to re-read everything I had written about Profiles. It does not need liking; there has not been much to like these last 72 hours.
I found the allegations contained in the piece to be exceptionally distressing and painful.
The theater is a place of trust – actors need to trust each other to be able to make great art; audiences, critics included, must be able to trust that what they are seeing on stage is the work of professionals operating in a professional workplace. Those allegations would suggest I took too much on trust, to assume all the actors felt and/or were safe despite the lack of union representation, or some other workplace protections, in the room.
In addition to reflecting on his own writing in response to specific Profiles productions, Jones wrote:
Some of this, I think, has flowed from my longstanding obsession with viewing only the work as it is, in the moment. I’ve always seen that as a fundamental matter of fairness, as a self-corrective against bias. But these allegations serve as a reminder that context must always be considered, perhaps more than I have been willing to admit. Many of the numerous theaters that I have chosen to attend, and those choices have been mine, regularly operate with little or no protections, in a gray area between legitimate employment and an informal interest group with powerful leaders and an artistic product. The piece. for me, raises some questions about whether I should have been in those theaters at all, inviting the public to follow.
If Chicago theaters are to be viewed as professional, they need structures in place to protect their courageous artists who are asked, as part of this art, to give deeply of themselves. Not in Our House is, as most of you know, is working hard on this.
Update, June 15, 7:00 am: In a statement on their website and Facebook page posted late last evening, Profiles Theatre announced its immediate closure.
The headline in London Sunday Times was certain to make anyone who advocates for diversity in the arts sit up, take notice and get quite upset. It read, “Lack of diversity not a problem, says RSC boss.”
Since headlines are written by editors and not reporters, it was possible that the statement was deliberately hyperbolic. But the article by David Sanderson began with three paragraphs that seemed to support it entirely.
“The head of the Royal Shakespeare Company has said he is not worried about the lack of diversity in theatre audiences, adding that he did not want the white middle classes sidelined.
“Gregory Doran said that while it was important that theatres reflected society, he wanted to ensure that the traditional audience had equal rights.
“Doran, artistic director at the RSC where he has worked for nearly 30 years, said that black people would feel that they did not belong when they saw that the entire audience was white.”
That’s as far as people who haven’t subscribed to The Times online, or who couldn’t pick up a print edition could read, thanks to the paper’s paywall. But even those first few paragraphs, deeply troubling though they might be, perhaps should have given all readers pause, since they weren’t quotes, but rather paraphrases constructed by Sanderson, sans context. Even reading the entire piece, as photographs of the rest of the article circulated quickly to defeat the paywall, seemed to support the headline and the first paragraphs.
RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran speaking at The Hay Festival
It turns out that Sanderson hadn’t conducted an interview, but rather had been cherrypicking a handful of statements from a talk Doran had given at The Hay Festival, and indeed all came in response to a single question from an audience member. That isn’t acknowledged at all in Sanderson’s piece.
The Times headline not only willfully misrepresents my view, but entirely reverses it.
Lack of diversity is a huge challenge and one which we at the RSC have taken to the very heart of our programming. There is much more we need to do to address it, but we are at the forefront of efforts to do so.
I made the point that just as Hamlet holds the mirror up to nature, if we hold that mirror up and large parts of our audience do not see their community reflected on our stages, then we are not doing our job.
I want to see the whole of society represented on our stages and in our audiences and I don’t want anyone to feel excluded, whatever their age, class or ethnicity.
The RSC has championed inclusion for many years and I want our theatres to be as welcoming as possible for everyone.
For those who view at this as after the fact spin, it’s worth looking to the same material from which The Sunday Times drew selectively. The actual exchange with an audience member begins by Doran being asked “the recent black production of Hamlet” and the fact that “most of the audience was white. Does this worry you?”
“Does it worry me?” replies Doran. “No, I don’t think it worries me, but it is a really important thing. Hamlet, in the speech we were just talking about, talks about holding the mirror up to nature. Now if we, a national Shakespeare company, are holding the mirror up, and the audience see their reflection and that audience is entirely white, then a black kid watching that might go, ‘Well obviously I’m not meant to be there.” He then relates a story about a friend who had recently taken the train to Stratford, sharing a carriage with a group of black students who were “buzzing with excitement” to see the Hamlet, “Because somehow their faces were being reflected on that stage.”
“I think it’s really important that we have the whole community, that we reflect that community. That’s not just black actors. Actors of British East Asian origin have very much less visibility than the black actors do. But it’s growing and it’s really important that it does continue to grow.”
Ayesha Darker and Chris Clarke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The RSC (Photo by Zuleika Henry)
After noting the casting of Ayesha Dharker as Titania in Erica Whyman’s recent RSC production of A Midsummer NIght’s Dream, Doran continued:
“I think it’s important that we reflect the communities that we want to enjoy our productions as well. That is not to say those of us who are white and middle class, or whatever our education backgrounds are, don’t have the equal right or shouldn’t feel that we’re somehow being sidelined, because it’s very important to make sure that the whole balance of the community is addressed.”
The moderator, unidentified in the video or on the BBC iPlayer site, wraps up Doran’s comments by saying that, “Cultural ownership belongs to everyone.”
Was Doran’s statement in support of diversity on stage and in his audience as definitive as some might like? No. He might have said that he was in fact worried about diversity, rather than parsing words. Should he have invoked the term “equal right” when speaking about sustaining his traditional core audience as he advances diversity? Those important words do not speak clearly to a wholly inclusive audience, but suggest that the existing audience has some ownership that they might be losing in the push towards diversity, playing to those who want to advance a racial divide. Could he have cited more examples of diversity on stage than the Hamlet production or the casting of Dharker? That would have been helpful, especially in light of his own 2012 production of The Orphan of Zhao, which saw an almost entirely white company performing an Asian story.
But the entire exchange on diversity took less than three minutes, because the event was only an hour long; the question came 56 minutes in, and on balance, it was supportive of diversity at The RSC. There’s no question that if Doran is committed to diversity, he needs to be better at expressing that commitment unequivocally every time it comes up, planned or by chance, in addition to demonstrating it at every turn with the choices he makes for the company, both in developing the audience and through the artists he chooses to create the company’s work.
In this case, it seems clear that David Sanderson and The Sunday Times were out to make trouble for Doran and The RSC. While they might have raised a stir, they spun it out from the thinnest of material and their insinuations and misrepresentations shouldn’t be allowed to stand as the final word on the subject.
Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College for Performing Arts and interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.
While much will be written about the passing of Muhammad Ali, he does leave us with a theatrical footnote. I’m speaking of his single Broadway role, as the lead in the musical Buck White. Oscar Brown Jr. directed (with Jean Pace) in addition to adapting Joseph Dolan Tuotti’s play Big Time Buck White, and writing the lyrics and music. It lasted only five days in 1969, during the period when Ali had been suspended from boxing due to his refusal to join the Army and fight in Vietnam.
It’s interesting to note that while he had taken on the name of Muhammad Ali several years earlier when he joined the Nation of Islam, his Broadway appearance ultimately saw him billed by his earlier name, which he had denounced as his slave name, Cassius Clay, though ‘Muhammad Ali aka’ appeared in smaller type above it. He had also recorded an album, I Am The Greatest, as Clay.
While the review in the New York Times for Buck White carried a sub-headline which declared that “Champion Does Himself Proud in Musical,” the Times critic Clive Barnes, who generally didn’t care for the show, was somewhat more guarded in description of Clay/Ali’s performance in the review itself, writing, “How is Mr. Clay? He emerges as a modest, naturally appealing man; he sings with a pleasant slightly impersonal voice, acts without embarrassment and moves with innate dignity. You are aware that he is not a professional performer only when he is not performing.”
Although it was promised on the title page of the play, there is no evidence that a cast recording of Buck White was ever made. However Ali’s performance was partially preserved thanks to The Ed Sullivan Show, which featured a number on its then dominant Sunday evening broadcast:
https://vimeo.com/76187446
There’s also footage of Ali performing a number from the show, possibly in the theatre or perhaps at another venue. Intriguingly, there are cuts to another character who seems to almost unmistakably be played by the original Man of La Mancha, Richard Kiley, even though Kiley didn’t appear in Buck White. The footage is found in a documentary about Ali, and the voice of a narrator, an interview clip with Ali and even some offstage footage, punctuate the clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgD24xmkP7E
Ali made a very few other forays into acting, but never again on stage. He played himself in the poorly received bio pic The Greatest, as well as appearing as himself on an episode of Diff’rent Strokes. He did play one more dramatic role, co-starring with Kris Kristofferson in the TV movie Freedom Road.
Ultimately, Ali expressed himself best as himself… in the ring, in his often hilarious interplay with sportcaster Howard Cosell, as an entertainer who sometimes spoke in verse, and as a man who spoke and traveled constantly as a messenger of goodwill and philanthropy. His greatest role was that of Muhammad Ali, and he was sublime.
Patrick Page and Damon Daunno in Hadestown (Photo by Joan Marcus)
Walking into most theatres, the experience is much the same. At one end of the space, ornate or otherwise, there is a box, which will contain the play you’re about to see. It may be open to view, it may be shielded by a curtain, but we know the box is there. Thrust stages and theatres in the round, while rarely curtained, have their defined footprint, and to a degree the audience becomes the box, surrounding the first setting of the play. Of course, environmental or immersive productions blow up these divisions entirely. But we grow used to the parameters of a given space, of our relationship to the stage, if we visit performances with any regularity.
That’s why one of the more enjoyable experiences of visiting Off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop is its willingness to alter the space entirely from show to show. While plenty of productions there fall in with the prescribed model, others play with the audience/stage relationship so often that entering the small East Village theatre can be a complete surprise. Right now, there is a three-quarter oval seating space, echoing a Greek amphitheatre, for the musical Hadestown. It’s a fitting choice, since the show is a modern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, drawn from Anais Mitchell’s album.
For Ivo van Hove’s Scenes from a Marriage, the seating and playing spaces were trisected in Act I, with the audience moving from space to space, before a mid-show makeover removed all scenery and stripped the house to the walls, changing what was noticeably reduced into something seemingly vast.
For the US premiere of Caryl Churchill’s A Number, the theatre’s seats were placed on to steep scaffolding, putting one in mind of a vintage operating theatre.
By upending our expectations the moment we walk into a theatre, a show begins to exert its pull, and while it may be lost on newcomers, regular visitors have a special insight. Of course, NYTW is a 200-seat Off-Broadway theatre, and while its reimagined settings involved significant and singular construction, it’s not the same as if they had 1,000 seats. That said, even Broadway shows try to realign our relationship with the stages – the big boxes – from time to time.
Seating chart for Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812
The seating charts for the upcoming musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 caused a stir when they were posted online because they looked less like the map of a theatre and more like a particularly challenging version of Snakes and Ladders. Neat little rows remained in some places, but what were those yellow squares? The grey dots? The blue dots? The gentle ‘s’ making its way through the centre of the stalls? The white striped curvatures jutting out from the mezzanine? They were ramps, chairs, tables and more, all designed to add a fluidity to the Imperial Theatre that evoked the environmental intimacy of Ars Nova, where the show began, and the large tent where it played extended runs both in the Meatpacking District and just off Times Square.
Broadway has certainly played with seating occasionally in the past. Hal Prince’s 1974 Candide comes to mind, as does the mid-Act II transformation of the Winter Garden Theatre for Rocky. The short-lived Holler If Ya Hear Me created stadium seating in the Palace Theatre, building up from the stalls so that the seating flowed in the front of the mezzanine, leaving a good portion of the stalls area blocked off and empty. Fela removed seats to allow the actors to cross through the Eugene O’Neill Theatre and pass among the audience beyond the standard aisles.
As exciting as the reconfigurations can be creatively, they can be expensive – and not simply to build. If seats are removed to create a new dynamic, that’s revenue lost, and especially on Broadway, with seats selling above $150 each for musicals, you can be talking at least $1,200 in lost revenue per seat per week, provided the show is selling well. While it appears that Great Comet has added onstage seating, and may well be netting out with greater capacity, Holler If Ya Hear Me surely reduced the overall earning potential with its redesign. Obviously, this is a matter for careful budgeting, and negotiating artistic goals with the hard facts of economics.
As an audience member, I delight in the unconventional; as a theatre manager, I find myself pondering what that lack of convention cost, and whether it might make the show’s path to fiscal success more difficult. At least in subsidised settings, grants may rebalance the books (NYTW hasn’t lost a single seat for Hadestown). But as audiences come to desire ever more interaction in their live experiences, whether at the theatre or theme parks, and as virtual reality nips at the heels of a discipline that has long offered the benefit of having always been in 3D, breaking out of the box and erasing the proscenium divide seems ever more essential, even if our largest and most popular theatres may be the least suited to making that happen.
Protesters at Me Before You screening in Manhattan
Before you start shouting about spoiler alerts, let me point out that the headline of this piece does not indicate in what context this suicide occurs. Could be real life. Could be a play, a movie, a TV, or a book. In fact, it’s several movies and at least one book; I’m sure there are many more. Because when it comes to representations of disability, the cliché of the person in the wheelchair who can’t accept life after becoming disabled is a fairly standard device, sad to say.
I am not, however, writing in the abstract, so let me now make clear: the headline refers, in this case, to the film Me Before You, which opens nationally this weekend. Marketed as if it were from the word factory of Nicholas Sparks, Me Before You is the work of romance novelist Jojo Moyes. It has reportedly sold some six million copies, which means that the target audience for the movie, namely fans of the book, already know the outcome. So I haven’t really spoiled anything. The spoiler, had the movie diverged from the book, would be, “The Guy In The Wheelchair Decides To Live And Love Like Countless People With Quadriplegia Do Even Without Having Bags Of Money Like The Dude In This Story.”
Protest leaflet handed out at Me Before You screening
Having seen the film, I would even argue that my headline serves as a useful translation of what takes place. Why? Because when it comes time for Will, the dashing wheelchair user, to end his life after being brought out of his shell by kooky Louise, who has been hired to be his companion, he merely asks her to bring his parents into his oh-so-charming bedroom at the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. Then we watch a single digitally rendered leaf fall from a tree, changing colors and turning brown before it reaches the ground. Yup, his suicide is equated with nature’s inevitability and we don’t see any of it, lest it trouble the sensitive viewer with anything nasty.
I want to be clear about this: whatever your position on assisted suicide, it is not part of the circle of life. Rather, it is a choice to alter life’s path drastically, and for god’s sake it’s not a metaphor. It is death. But the gauzy view of disability and dying on display in Me For You has no use for such truths, because that would mar the Cinderella/Pretty Woman paradigm it struggles to project. The film is so rigged in favor of Will’s choice that his parents barely appear on screen with him and both his pre-accident friends and Louisa’s athletic fiancée are insensitive dolts. There’s also a gender paradigm at play, with the film’s women arguing against Will’s decision, while the men position his choice as being somehow the manly thing to do.
Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke in Me Before You
Both Jojo Moyes and Emilia Clarke, who plays Louisa, in interviews, have tried to convey that Me Before You is meant simply to be one story, complete unto itself, rather than a tract about disability and assisted suicide. While that may well be true, and they ultimately have the right to tell any story they choose, the fact that the end result plays more like a lengthy public service announcement for the assisted suicide organization Dignitas than an actual drama does undermine their argument.
If Me Before You existed in a vacuum their defenses might help them get by, but the fact is that when major films choose to display disability narratives, they tend to be inspiration porn (look how Christy Brown overcame his disability in My Left Foot and how brilliant Daniel Day Lewis is in contorting himself to pretend to disability), legal debates (Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway?, from which Me Before You filches some repartee about the proximity of breasts to a man with paraplegia) or stories of spirits set free from their broken, damaged bodies (if Hilary Swank can no longer box, she has nothing left in her life and it’s only right that Clint Eastwood help kill his Million Dollar Baby).
Me Before You is really about how knowing Will has transformed Louisa’s life, since hers is the story that will go on and puts the selfless suicidal guy in a wheelchair up there with such other overplayed tropes as the magical black man and the wise Asian. Louisa is in fact a manic pixie dream girl. So the film is about two tired stereotypes and their stereotypical families. One family represents the coolly removed British aristocracy, who are so generous as to convert their stables as a private home for Will, rather than actually renovating their stately manor; part of their estate which also includes a castle, reinforcing the fairy tale elements of the story. The other family is salt of the earth working class. But make no mistake – Louisa is the heroine and Will is a device.
While we’re told Will experiences bouts of pain that causes him to scream in anguish, he faces nothing so agonizing on screen. Yes, we do see him fighting off pneumonia, but his other “challenges” in the film amount to: 1) having to have his chair lifted out of the mud by three passing burlymen because Louisa is an idiot, 2) grappling with the discomfort of a clothing sales tag that remains in his collar, and 3) having Louisa ladle hot soup into his lap. These are all played for laughs, and the last glosses over the possibility that while Will may not feel it, he may have sustained a burn. All of this is representative of the film’s effort to use disability as a plot device, without ever doing more than skimming the surface, oh so politely, of life with disability.
Look, I’m a middle aged guy who has no disability. So I’m not the target audience for this film. But I still want to speak out, among many other voices. At a Wednesday night screening in New York, the theatre was filled overwhelmingly with young women, and if this film manages to succeed, I worry that it will fetishize romantic supermodels in wheelchairs who serve to empower and enlighten young women before taking themselves out of the equation so those women can realize their true potential in life and love. Think I’m being harsh? Moyes wrote a sequel, providing further adventures for our Louisa, confirming that the story is indeed hers and not even hers and Will’s.
I also can’t presume to speak for people with disabilities, but they’re working hard to make their feelings about this film known, and you can look to places like The Chicago Tribune and Salon for more personal accounts. But as someone who advocates for artists with disabilities, and for truer portrayals of disability on stage, screen and television, I find Me Before You to be simultaneously dull and dangerous, because it both sugarcoats and homogenizes every element of its story to the point that both the disability and mortality at its core are rendered as negligible, beyond the extent to which they have an effect upon the emotions of the non-disabled protagonist.
As a film, Me Before You is pedestrian. As a story that deals in significant issues, it is at best clueless and at worst callously indifferent. As a statement about disability and assisted suicide, it is a Hallmark ad in favor of the latter. See it if you must, but try to pay attention to what it leaves out, namely the reality of life for countless people with disabilities. If anyone deserves to brandish the film’s marketing slogan (and hashtag campaign) “Live Boldly,” it’s them, not anyone in this bland contraption.
P.S. One small side note: Me Before You asks us, in its opening scenes, to believe that a Londoner walks out into a downpour in a bespoke suit without an umbrella. If nothing else I’ve written convinces you of the film’s lack of truthfulness, that certainly should.
For more information about the disability community’s perspective on Me Before You, visit Disbeat.
Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.
Since 2005, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, the British playwright and director, has been bringing plays – often two or even three at a time – to 59E59 Theaters in New York from his home base at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, where he was artistic director for more than 30 years. On each of his six visits to the U.S. – save for one where he fell ill at the last moment – I’ve moderated a public conversation with him, prompted by our friendship dating back to 1996 and the U.S. premiere of By Jeeves at Goodspeed Musicals, where I was general manager at the time.
For the first time, this year I remembered to record our conversation on May 29. Because I always learn so much from discussing theatre with Alan – we’ve also done two lengthy audio interviews, the most recent (2011) of which can be found here – I thought I’d set down a bit of this year’s conversation, focusing entirely on what Alan had to say. These pieces of the conversation have been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.
* * *
Richard Stacey and Elizabeth Boag in Confusions
On Confusions, his 14th play, from 1974, which is only now having its U.S. premiere at 59E59 Theaters.
I hardly recognize the boy who wrote Confusions. He was very, very young. I never rewrite them, I just them be. I just don’t know the guy who wrote it and I don’t want to meddle with his work, in case he comes forward in time and beats me up….
It’s a great art form, one-act play writing. Just because you can write full-length plays doesn’t necessarily mean you can write one-acts. One of our great one-act writers was a guy called John Mortimer who wrote some wonderful one-act plays. But I think his full-length ones were slightly less certain or sure-footed than his one act plays, plays like The Dock Brief and What Should We Tell Caroline and all those were marvelous little examples.
It’s like the way Saki wrote a short story. It’s akin to short story writing because you just need a different set of muscles. Like an athlete, just because you’re a 100-metre sprinter doesn’t mean you can run a marathon, in fact you probably can’t. It just depends on the discipline.
The one-act is a fascinating discipline because everything has to be very concise, very quick By the time one of the Confusions plays is over, Hero’s Welcome [this year’s other Ayckbourn production in New York, his 79th play], in time span, is just getting underway and you think that’s leisurely, you can establish the characters, you can establish the situation, you can plant questions in people’s minds.
On working in theatre.
One of my crusades is live theatre and keeping it alive. I’ve never worked extensively in movies, or television or radio. I’ve always concentrated in theatre.
About every five years, we need to stop and just ask ourselves, why are we staying in theatre? The depressing Sunday morning when nothing’s happening or the Wednesday afternoon when nobody’s coming in, you think “What the hell are we doing this for?” and I just have to list the things which I consider important with live theatre.
One of those things, and it sounds like a total cliché, is it’s live. It’s when you do something here in this space, we’re all in the same room and in this tiny space a group of people will perform something and hopefully you will interact with them and they will interact with you. It’s a live, living experience.
It’s the one facet of theatre that’s totally unique. You can forget all the other things: big flying pieces of scenery and spectacular lighting effects and the huge orchestras that swell up. In the end it’s just a group of human beings with a certain talent for acting getting together and doing something, trying to tell a story which somebody else who has a certain talent for writing has constructed, and allowing it to happen.
On his eight-hour narrative for voices, The Divide, performed only once to date.
I think one of the things that drives me, apart from live theatre, is the need to surprise myself, or indeed in the case of The Karaoke Theatre Company [his newest play, debuting this summer at the Stephen Joseph], to terrify myself.
I’m aware that when you get to my length of career, 80 plays and counting, the danger is to rely on the tried and tested. There’s nothing in new in theatre. Always when you do something you consider totally new someone will come up and say, ‘I saw in 1921 an identical play to this’ or it was just slightly different, so you don’t try to do that but do something different.
Because I’m a director and a writer and the two roles are simultaneous – as I’m writing a new play I’m directing it in my head, I’m solving the problems, at least to a certain extent. I’ve got no unsolved problems by the time I’ve got them onstage, because I know what I’m doing. That’s not conceited, it’s just practice really. So when I sat down for The Divide, I wrote something I knew I couldn’t stage.
On science fiction.
Sci-fi gives you common ground with the generations you are no longer part of. You can invent a world which hopefully they will accept which doesn’t depend on me knowing their jargon or their way of texting or anything like that. I invent the ground rules. You ask them please accept the ground rules of this….
When you try and do an Isaac Asimov, when you start prophesying the future, you try and think of the trends. I got quite a lot in Henceforward [his 1987 play being revived this summer at the Stephen Joseph] right. What I haven’t got right is the technology, which has leapt through. Who could anticipate that since 1987 digital technology would advance as far as it has?
On relationships between men and women in his plays.
Russell Dixon and Stephen Billington in Hero’s Welcome
I always felt that I’m probably very calm and I hope pleasant person, but whenever I’ve hurt people, they’re always people I love, because it’s a sort of defensive thing. Over the years, when I was very young, I got quite aggressive to some people with whom I should have known better.
Nevertheless, you must have perceived in some of my plays that when men and women cohabit, when they choose to live together, they proceed to destroy each other and do terrible things they never would dream of doing to a complete stranger – even if it’s non-physical, saying terrible things.
On whether he sees much theatre beyond his own work.
When I go into a theatre I go to work. I sit in the auditorium, and I sit and worry, quite often. I think about how can we make this better, how can we make this right? So I go to the movies. I don’t have to worry there.
If you’ve ever been to the movies with a film editor they are appalling people. They go “No, no, no. Cut, cut, cut. For god’s sake they’ve let that shot go far too long.” And I just sit there going, “Oh, that’s good.”
Responding to an audience member who asked how, since he works so much, he’s learned such a great deal about human nature.
I’ve worked with human beings. They are actors, admittedly, and they’re rather extraordinary human beings. Actors have a tendency to live very close to the surface and they tend to be very fluent about themselves because they use themselves so much. I learn a lot about human nature from actors, and the rest I observe, staring out of the window and walking around.
The deep and interesting things, the psychological things I learn by working as a director. The director is an interesting mix of facilitator and dictator really and a little bit of something else, a sort of counselor, who hopefully is helpful.
Once I asked Stephen Joseph, “What’s the secret of directing?” and he said, “The secret to directing is to create an atmosphere in which other people feel free to create.” That is the most extraordinarily easy answer and the most difficult thing to achieve. Because you get a group of actors who are different, they’re fairly centered a lot of them, and you can persuade them, cajole them, to work together and sometimes they do very willingly and sometimes with great reluctance. It’s most interesting and informative thing for a dramatist and also I think it brings me a lot closer to the psychology of what makes people tick.
On casting and creating an ensemble.
Like many directors I try not to always rely on the same team because there’s eventually something stupefying about that. You sit there thinking, ‘Aren’t we wonderful, aren’t we wonderful?’ No, we’re not wonderful. You have to bring new blood in. I have a sort of rolling system. Hopefully I have enough actors at any one time in the company who understand the ethic of the way I like to work and then you bring the new people in who provide the new spark. It is a growing thing.
I’ve always worked on the assumption, it’s an old show biz cliché really: Take the work seriously, but never yourself. A lot of the time we work from having fun, just enjoying each others’ company and I think that is very helpful in the process of creation, because it relaxes people, they feel confident, perhaps. If you’re going to act, you’ve got to try a role out, try to do something with it, chances are you’re going to make a bit of a fool of yourself in the early stages, because you’re going to go too far or just do something that’s totally wrong, but if you give the actor the feeling they can do that without you going “Ga-ah, stupid,” you just say “Well that hardly worked, but well done. Moving on. Shall we try another one?” So it’s that sort of trust. I hope the actors who work with me trust me to say the right thing.
Brandon Victor Dixon and Audra McDonald in Shuffle Along (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)
The act of making theatre is of endless fascination to those who make theatre, which accounts for the litany of backstage plays and musicals going back to, at least, the mechanicals’ scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By sheer coincidence, New York is home to two new entries in this genre, both focusing attention on actual productions from the 1920s, and in the process restoring currency to forgotten works.
The more elaborate of the two shows is the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, Or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, written and directed by George C Wolfe. This chronicles the history of Shuffle Along, America’s first all-black musical – both on stage and behind the scenes. It was a groundbreaking, bona fide smash in its debut, playing nearly 500 performances and making stars of many cast members. However, the show itself was very much of its time, and in the days before cast recordings, and no doubt as a result of failed revival attempts in 1932 and 1953, it faded from memory. Only thanks to Wolfe’s creative efforts has the show regained a foothold in theatrical history, beyond the realm of scholars.
By sheer coincidence of timing, Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichmann, with their Off-Broadway play Indecent, have performed a similar act of resurrection on God of Vengeance, a play with its roots in European Yiddish theatre, which played in two Off-Broadway theatres in 1922 before reaching Broadway, in an English language version, in 1923. Like Shuffle Along, God of Vengeance was largely lost to time, but not after a long successful run. God of Vengeance was effectively shut down when its cast and producer were charged and convicted with offering an immoral performance, and subsequent legal proceedings continued for the next three years, ultimately exonerating them long after the play had shuttered.
Adina Verson and Max Gordon Moore in Indecent (Photo by Carol Rosegg)
Reading press coverage from that era, any number of reasons were cited for exactly what it was that made God of Vengeance so offensive, ranging from depictions of prostitution to portrayals of the desecration of Jewish religious symbols. What the press accounts of the charges left out, like many of the reviews that preceded them, was that the play depicted a lesbian relationship. While that love story was judged harshly by other characters in the play, it was portrayed as liberating by the playwright, Sholom Asch, rather than as shameful, which might have placated the moralists of the time.
As a student of the theatre, I was not unaware of Shuffle Along or God of Vengeance, but these new works certainly made them more vivid for me by recounting their histories theatrically. Working against theatrical censorship 90 years after those plays were first seen in New York, I confess to having invested deeply in Indecent long before I saw it. I went in anticipating a work that might in some way inform my own work, that would show me parallels to the small-mindedness that fuels censorship then and now.
While that is certainly a strand in Indecent, I was surprised to find that it was not, as I’d imagined, a straightforward anti-censorship tract. In fact, it is a love letter to the people who struggle to make theatre against all odds, in this case against those who wish to police morality, just as the new Shuffle Along pays tribute to the men who broke through a theatrical colour barrier, through racism, even though there were (and are) many more societal challenges to face. Both works are about vision and tenacity, with the more mournful Indecent putting me in mind of yet another play about the making of theatre, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good.
While I don’t necessarily think those who forget theatrical history are doomed to repeat it, it’s impossible not to think about the histories of these plays in light of the discourse surrounding America’s endless presidential campaign, where racial bias and limits on free speech are discussed as if they are viable planks in a political platform. I don’t think theatre artists want to turn the clock back one bit – but it’s worrisome to think that the attitudes that artists faced in the 1920s might once again gain political currency, even if they have always been present in our society, both covertly and overtly.
The new Shuffle Along and Indecent are reminders, as they honour and celebrate achievements and travails of the past, of why barriers broken cannot be allowed to be rebuilt. It is why, like the ghostly troupe in Indecent that reanimates nightly to tell the story of God of Vengeance over and over again, we must utilise and support theatre, and all of the arts, in an effort to dispel the worst impulses that will shape not just our stories and our ability to tell them, but our lives.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Lin-Manuel Miranda—bookwriter, lyricist, composer, and star of the Broadway hit musical Hamilton—has already given a matinee performance and served as master of ceremonies for a streetside #Ham4Ham show. He is optimistic there will still be time for a nap after talking with this writer and before a second performance of Hamilton in less than two hours.
“The sense of community I get from doing it is really why I’m here,” he says, sipping a cup of tea. “That’s joyous to me. That’s the thing that I loved most about doing high school theatre. I always try to stay connected to that same impulse. It’s the running joke that Jonathan Groff and I have: ‘We’re in the play.’ There’s nothing better than being in the play, of being chosen from everyone in your school and showing the world what you have.”
At thirty-five, with Hamilton, Miranda is at the top of the theatre world after only three Broadway musical credits, following his Tony Award-winning In the Heights and his contributions of music and lyrics to Bring It On. He’s already broken into film, writing cantina music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and writing the score for an upcoming Disney animated feature, Moana, to be released next fall. He has performed at the White House, and the president has come to see him in New York. He’s welcomed at events from the Kennedy Center Honors to gatherings of historians who seem to love Hamilton just as much as die-hard musical theatre buffs. In the midst of all this attention and activity he’s still very connected to his roots. Anyone who follows him on Twitter can find him relating stories about his parents, his wife, his young son, his relatives, and his countless friends, as well as chatting with as many fans as he can.
The experience of high school theatre never seems to be very far from Miranda’s mind. He speaks of it often, and his school theatre experiences are the explicit topic of our interview. He tells me his earliest artistic goal was to be in his sixth grade play.
“We had an extraordinary music teacher at my elementary school who started the tradition of the sixth grade play,” Miranda recalls. This was at Hunter College School, a public elementary and high school for gifted students. “I’m very lucky that she started it just when I got there. I think the first sixth grade musical they did was West Side Story when I was in kindergarten.
“The entire school would watch the sixth grade play. I remember as young as second or third grade already fantasizing, ‘What’s going to be the sixth grade play when we get to sixth grade?’ It’s funny in retrospect to think how much of my life was spent thinking, ‘What show are we going to get to do?’ which is not the usual elementary school concern.
“Then, the crazy thing that happened was we got to sixth grade and they said, ‘We’re going to do the previous six years’ shows. We’re going to do short versions of all of them.’ So we get this lethal dosage of musical theatre at age twelve. I was a cowhand and a son in this unwatchable four-hour show that our parents had to sit through. But for me, it was the greatest experience of my life.”
Miranda didn’t go out for theatre at all in seventh grade but returned as an eighth grader with the encouragement of his English teacher, Rembert Herbert, whom he thanked in his Tony acceptance speech.“He really got me engaged as a student first. He told me, ‘You’re writing all this stuff in the back of my class, but none of it is for class. So can you join us?” Pressed on what he was writing at the back of class, Miranda confesses, “Bad love songs to girls.”
“What caught Dr. Herbert’s attention,” he explains in more detail, “was that we had an assignment where we were put into groups and we had to teach three chapters of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which was a book I really love. I decided we’re going to make a musical version. I wrote a song for each chapter, and I was such a control freak that I recorded them all a capella and the other kids lip-synced to my voice.”
Herbert encouraged Miranda to contribute to the annual student-written, student-directed Brick Prison show, and beginning in ninth grade, Miranda also began auditioning for shows.
“I was in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and in You Can’t Take It with You. Those were my plays. In ninth grade, I got cast as the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, which was huge, because I beat out the seniors. Then, Godspell in tenth grade. I started dating the assistant director and she became my high school girlfriend. Then she directed A Chorus Line junior year and I was her assistant director, so I kind of apprenticed into the directing track. Then I directed West Side Story my senior year.
“So I got too busy to [act in] the plays. But I was a president of Hunter Theatre, even though I didn’t participate. I would do their budgets. We all hung lights. We all did all the stuff.”
Directing West Side Story as a senior was an important time for Miranda.
“West Side Story is such a controversial show, because everyone’s unflattering in that show. The Puerto Ricans say, ‘That’s our only thing and we’re all gang members.’ I’m sensitive to that. At the same time, for me, it was an incredible teaching experience. I got to bring Puerto Rico to school. My dad came in and gave dialect lessons to my white and Asian Sharks. There was no brownface, nothing stupid like that.
“But I wanted to make sure that while they’re in America, they’re yelling Puerto Rican things like ‘Wepa!’ It was a way for me to actually engage the part of me that only existed at home and bring that into school. That was really lovely.”
Were there any parts Miranda wished he could play again or roles he missed out on?
“If I could do the Pirate King again,” he says, laughing, “having more than a reliable half-octave of range, I’d love another crack at it. That being said, I have no regrets. I had a wonderful time doing everything. Those are the shows that are just in your bloodstream forever—because you did that. It’s a totally different thing than loving a cast album or seeing a show and loving it.
“That’s why, for me, a show I write becomes real when a high school gets to do it. Because I know there are kids who had their first kisses as Benny and Nina [in In the Heights]. I know there are salon ladies who are going to be friends for life because they were Daniela and Carla together. I had that experience with my friends on the shows we worked on. That’s what I love most about being on this side of the process now, being the one who makes the musicals.”
Theatre wasn’t Miranda’s only interest in high school. In addition to writing some short musicals, he was making films as well, pulling his friends together from all of their other activities to work on them. But he relates that experience back to theatre.
“I think that one of the best things getting to be in a position of authority in theatre in high school gets you is that you have no power to hire or fire or replace anyone. So the only voice you have is your self-created authority. I learned to harness that: ‘All right, guys, this is the plan,’ knowing at any point that anyone could say, ‘I don’t want to do this. I want to go home.’”
Given the wide variety of skills Miranda displays as writer, composer, and lyricist, I ask him about his musical training.
“I took orchestration and composition, which was a class available in high school, but really just piano lessons and basic music theory. I actually have a couple of friends I would call up in the middle of the night and ask, ‘Hey, I’m playing an F#, an A and a C. I don’t know what this chord is called. What is it?’ And they’d say, ‘You’re playing an F# diminished.’ I kept thinking I was going to invent a new chord. And they’d say, ‘No, they all exist.’”
Miranda discovered the friendships he made while working on shows gave him shortcuts across the usual boundaries of the school’s social order.
“The saving grace of being a theatre kid,” he explains, “is that you get to make friends in every grade. So if your grade is kicking your butt, which was true for me some of the time, I had friends in other grades. The heartbreak that comes with that is sometimes your best friend will graduate because they’re two or three years older than you.
“And that’s something. I knew even then that was something my peers weren’t sharing. They were relentlessly involved with who is friends with who, and what clique is big, and who is in and who’s out in my grade. Being a theatre kid allows you to have this birds-eye view of it. I would spend my lunch period with at least four different groups. So I was always a little friends with everyone.”
Miranda went off to college planning on a dual major in film and theatre, and those interests narrowed the schools he applied to very quickly, since few offered both. He chose Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he eventually dropped his plans to also study film.
“I got to college thinking I knew everything. I got the rude awakening of, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything. I know how theatre at my high school worked. There’s still so much I have to learn.’ I was both humbled and empowered by this. We thought we were hanging lights right—we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. And that’s the fun of it. You learn the skill set you need to prepare you to work with lots of different kinds of people.”
Although we agreed the interview would focus on Miranda’s school experiences, it’s impossible to talk with him right now and not ask about Hamilton. Hip-hop, rap, and historical biography are not the usual ingredients of musical theatre. Had he always envisioned it on Broadway?
“I honestly thought of it like Jesus Christ Superstar,” he says. “I thought, ‘This will be a show, but I’m going to write it by writing the music first,’ which is exactly how Andrew Lloyd Webber did Superstar. It was a concept album. I had the good fortune to ask him about that. I peppered him with questions like ‘How did you get these for-real rock singers on that concept album?’ He said, ‘Because they were just around. We recorded the Jesus Christ Superstar concept album next door to where Led Zeppelin was recording album number III. You would just say, ‘Hey, do you want to come in and sing this part?’
“My vision for having rappers play the founding fathers started as ‘I’m going to get the artists first.’ Then we just started writing the show and I stopped worrying about landing the rapper and said, ‘Let me make the thing.’ Now we’re reverse-engineering it. We’ve got this mix tape coming out and hip-hop artists are going to be covering songs from the show.
“It worked out the way it was meant to work out. I was going to make a concept album that someone else was going to stage. It turns out I made a staged piece that someone’s going to turn into a concept album.”
Given the enormous demands on his time right now, one has to wonder, is Miranda having fun?
“What I’m enjoying so much about the success of Hamilton is it’s an opportunity to get together everyone who loves musicals. I know a lot of people who don’t love musicals like our show, but you can get them in because of history. You can get in because of politics. You can get in via hip hop.
“For me the fun is getting on Twitter and talking about Les Mis or Wicked for a little while, talking about the shows we all love, and reminding the pop culture world at large. Because you know what? We all do love shows. I know everyone likes to think of musical theatre as this niche genre. But a lot of us did the school play. A lot of us watched Glee. A lot of us, even if we never saw a Broadway show, could sing a few show tunes because of school and because of our parents. So it is this secret thing that we all know that we don’t all talk about together. That’s what I’m enjoying about this part of the process.”
What part of the creative process gives him the greatest pleasure?
“For me, it’s all about what I can bring, because musicals are such a hybrid art. They’re fourteen art forms mashed into one. So it becomes a simple calculus for me of ‘What can I bring into the room?’
“One of the things I love best about writing is being able to bring a song to my creative team—walking into a room with people you trust, showing them a new song, which is like being naked in front of them, to be honest. That’s why it’s important to get the right people in the room, and knowing you’re going to leave with a better song because of the people you’ve allowed. That’s an exhilarating process.
“Expand that to the whole show entirely. That’s a pretty great moment,” Miranda continues, enthusiastically. “Seeing a cast read your work for the very first time, that’s a really exciting part of the process.
“You know, it’s not lost on me that as someone who kind of felt like an outsider in my own community growing up, I’m just writing communities for myself. That’s what I get from being in the show, too.”
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Lin-Manuel Miranda—bookwriter, lyricist, composer, and star of the Broadway hit musical Hamilton—has already given a matinee performance and served as master of ceremonies for a streetside #Ham4Ham show. He is optimistic there will still be time for a nap after talking with this writer and before a second performance of Hamilton in less than two hours.
“The sense of community I get from doing it is really why I’m here,” he says, sipping a cup of tea. “That’s joyous to me. That’s the thing that I loved most about doing high school theatre. I always try to stay connected to that same impulse. It’s the running joke that Jonathan Groff and I have: ‘We’re in the play.’ There’s nothing better than being in the play, of being chosen from everyone in your school and showing the world what you have.”
At thirty-five, with Hamilton, Miranda is at the top of the theatre world after only three Broadway musical credits, following his Tony Award-winning In the Heights and his contributions of music and lyrics to Bring It On. He’s already broken into film, writing cantina music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and writing the score for an upcoming Disney animated feature, Moana, to be released next fall. He has performed at the White House, and the president has come to see him in New York. He’s welcomed at events from the Kennedy Center Honors to gatherings of historians who seem to love Hamilton just as much as die-hard musical theatre buffs. In the midst of all this attention and activity he’s still very connected to his roots. Anyone who follows him on Twitter can find him relating stories about his parents, his wife, his young son, his relatives, and his countless friends, as well as chatting with as many fans as he can.
The experience of high school theatre never seems to be very far from Miranda’s mind. He speaks of it often, and his school theatre experiences are the explicit topic of our interview. He tells me his earliest artistic goal was to be in his sixth grade play.
“We had an extraordinary music teacher at my elementary school who started the tradition of the sixth grade play,” Miranda recalls. This was at Hunter College School, a public elementary and high school for gifted students. “I’m very lucky that she started it just when I got there. I think the first sixth grade musical they did was West Side Story when I was in kindergarten.
“The entire school would watch the sixth grade play. I remember as young as second or third grade already fantasizing, ‘What’s going to be the sixth grade play when we get to sixth grade?’ It’s funny in retrospect to think how much of my life was spent thinking, ‘What show are we going to get to do?’ which is not the usual elementary school concern.
“Then, the crazy thing that happened was we got to sixth grade and they said, ‘We’re going to do the previous six years’ shows. We’re going to do short versions of all of them.’ So we get this lethal dosage of musical theatre at age twelve. I was a cowhand and a son in this unwatchable four-hour show that our parents had to sit through. But for me, it was the greatest experience of my life.”
Miranda didn’t go out for theatre at all in seventh grade but returned as an eighth grader with the encouragement of his English teacher, Rembert Herbert, whom he thanked in his Tony acceptance speech.“He really got me engaged as a student first. He told me, ‘You’re writing all this stuff in the back of my class, but none of it is for class. So can you join us?” Pressed on what he was writing at the back of class, Miranda confesses, “Bad love songs to girls.”
“What caught Dr. Herbert’s attention,” he explains in more detail, “was that we had an assignment where we were put into groups and we had to teach three chapters of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which was a book I really love. I decided we’re going to make a musical version. I wrote a song for each chapter, and I was such a control freak that I recorded them all a capella and the other kids lip-synced to my voice.”
Herbert encouraged Miranda to contribute to the annual student-written, student-directed Brick Prison show, and beginning in ninth grade, Miranda also began auditioning for shows.
“I was in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and in You Can’t Take It with You. Those were my plays. In ninth grade, I got cast as the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, which was huge, because I beat out the seniors. Then, Godspell in tenth grade. I started dating the assistant director and she became my high school girlfriend. Then she directed A Chorus Line junior year and I was her assistant director, so I kind of apprenticed into the directing track. Then I directed West Side Story my senior year.
“So I got too busy to [act in] the plays. But I was a president of Hunter Theatre, even though I didn’t participate. I would do their budgets. We all hung lights. We all did all the stuff.”
Directing West Side Story as a senior was an important time for Miranda.
“West Side Story is such a controversial show, because everyone’s unflattering in that show. The Puerto Ricans say, ‘That’s our only thing and we’re all gang members.’ I’m sensitive to that. At the same time, for me, it was an incredible teaching experience. I got to bring Puerto Rico to school. My dad came in and gave dialect lessons to my white and Asian Sharks. There was no brownface, nothing stupid like that.
“But I wanted to make sure that while they’re in America, they’re yelling Puerto Rican things like ‘Wepa!’ It was a way for me to actually engage the part of me that only existed at home and bring that into school. That was really lovely.”
Were there any parts Miranda wished he could play again or roles he missed out on?
“If I could do the Pirate King again,” he says, laughing, “having more than a reliable half-octave of range, I’d love another crack at it. That being said, I have no regrets. I had a wonderful time doing everything. Those are the shows that are just in your bloodstream forever—because you did that. It’s a totally different thing than loving a cast album or seeing a show and loving it.
“That’s why, for me, a show I write becomes real when a high school gets to do it. Because I know there are kids who had their first kisses as Benny and Nina [in In the Heights]. I know there are salon ladies who are going to be friends for life because they were Daniela and Carla together. I had that experience with my friends on the shows we worked on. That’s what I love most about being on this side of the process now, being the one who makes the musicals.”
Theatre wasn’t Miranda’s only interest in high school. In addition to writing some short musicals, he was making films as well, pulling his friends together from all of their other activities to work on them. But he relates that experience back to theatre.
“I think that one of the best things getting to be in a position of authority in theatre in high school gets you is that you have no power to hire or fire or replace anyone. So the only voice you have is your self-created authority. I learned to harness that: ‘All right, guys, this is the plan,’ knowing at any point that anyone could say, ‘I don’t want to do this. I want to go home.’”
Given the wide variety of skills Miranda displays as writer, composer, and lyricist, I ask him about his musical training.
“I took orchestration and composition, which was a class available in high school, but really just piano lessons and basic music theory. I actually have a couple of friends I would call up in the middle of the night and ask, ‘Hey, I’m playing an F#, an A and a C. I don’t know what this chord is called. What is it?’ And they’d say, ‘You’re playing an F# diminished.’ I kept thinking I was going to invent a new chord. And they’d say, ‘No, they all exist.’”
Miranda discovered the friendships he made while working on shows gave him shortcuts across the usual boundaries of the school’s social order.
“The saving grace of being a theatre kid,” he explains, “is that you get to make friends in every grade. So if your grade is kicking your butt, which was true for me some of the time, I had friends in other grades. The heartbreak that comes with that is sometimes your best friend will graduate because they’re two or three years older than you.
“And that’s something. I knew even then that was something my peers weren’t sharing. They were relentlessly involved with who is friends with who, and what clique is big, and who is in and who’s out in my grade. Being a theatre kid allows you to have this birds-eye view of it. I would spend my lunch period with at least four different groups. So I was always a little friends with everyone.”
Miranda went off to college planning on a dual major in film and theatre, and those interests narrowed the schools he applied to very quickly, since few offered both. He chose Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he eventually dropped his plans to also study film.
Although we agreed the interview would focus on Miranda’s school experiences, it’s impossible to talk with him right now and not ask about Hamilton. Hip-hop, rap, and historical biography are not the usual ingredients of musical theatre. Had he always envisioned it on Broadway?
“I got to college thinking I knew everything. I got the rude awakening of, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything. I know how theatre at my high school worked. There’s still so much I have to learn.’ I was both humbled and empowered by this. We thought we were hanging lights right—we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. And that’s the fun of it. You learn the skill set you need to prepare you to work with lots of different kinds of people.”
“I honestly thought of it like Jesus Christ Superstar,” he says. “I thought, ‘This will be a show, but I’m going to write it by writing the music first,’ which is exactly how Andrew Lloyd Webber did Superstar. It was a concept album. I had the good fortune to ask him about that. I peppered him with questions like ‘How did you get these for-real rock singers on that concept album?’ He said, ‘Because they were just around. We recorded the Jesus Christ Superstar concept album next door to where Led Zeppelin was recording album number III. You would just say, ‘Hey, do you want to come in and sing this part?’
“My vision for having rappers play the founding fathers started as ‘I’m going to get the artists first.’ Then we just started writing the show and I stopped worrying about landing the rapper and said, ‘Let me make the thing.’ Now we’re reverse-engineering it. We’ve got this mix tape coming out and hip-hop artists are going to be covering songs from the show.
“It worked out the way it was meant to work out. I was going to make a concept album that someone else was going to stage. It turns out I made a staged piece that someone’s going to turn into a concept album.”
Given the enormous demands on his time right now, one has to wonder, is Miranda having fun?
“What I’m enjoying so much about the success of Hamilton is it’s an opportunity to get together everyone who loves musicals. I know a lot of people who don’t love musicals like our show, but you can get them in because of history. You can get in because of politics. You can get in via hip hop.
“For me the fun is getting on Twitter and talking about Les Mis or Wicked for a little while, talking about the shows we all love, and reminding the pop culture world at large. Because you know what? We all do love shows. I know everyone likes to think of musical theatre as this niche genre. But a lot of us did the school play. A lot of us watched Glee. A lot of us, even if we never saw a Broadway show, could sing a few show tunes because of school and because of our parents. So it is this secret thing that we all know that we don’t all talk about together. That’s what I’m enjoying about this part of the process.”
What part of the creative process gives him the greatest pleasure?
“For me, it’s all about what I can bring, because musicals are such a hybrid art. They’re fourteen art forms mashed into one. So it becomes a simple calculus for me of ‘What can I bring into the room?’
“One of the things I love best about writing is being able to bring a song to my creative team—walking into a room with people you trust, showing them a new song, which is like being naked in front of them, to be honest. That’s why it’s important to get the right people in the room, and knowing you’re going to leave with a better song because of the people you’ve allowed. That’s an exhilarating process.
“Expand that to the whole show entirely. That’s a pretty great moment,” Miranda continues, enthusiastically. “Seeing a cast read your work for the very first time, that’s a really exciting part of the process.
“You know, it’s not lost on me that as someone who kind of felt like an outsider in my own community growing up, I’m just writing communities for myself. That’s what I get from being in the show, too.”
While much will be written about the passing of Muhammad Ali, he does leave us with a theatrical footnote. I’m speaking of his single Broadway role, as the lead in 
While we’re told Will experiences bouts of pain that causes him to scream in anguish, he faces nothing so agonizing on screen. Yes, we do see him fighting off pneumonia, but his other “challenges” in the film amount to: 1) having to have his chair lifted out of the mud by three passing burlymen because Louisa is an idiot, 2) grappling with the discomfort of a clothing sales tag that remains in his collar, and 3) having Louisa ladle hot soup into his lap. These are all played for laughs, and the last glosses over the possibility that while Will may not feel it, he may have sustained a burn. All of this is representative of the film’s effort to use disability as a plot device, without ever doing more than skimming the surface, oh so politely, of life with disability.
