THEATER: Stepping up

Spring Awakening

Photo: Monquie Carboni

Showgirls with endless legs, grinning in high-stepping unison! Eager young lovers who tap, tap, tap their troubles away! Sequins that glitter, trumpets that blare! A pair of decrepit women in a house full of garbage, sinking into dementia! Teenage pregnancy, masturbation, suicide, abortion!

Granted, those last items may not leap to mind when one thinks about Broadway musicals. But the genre has been expanding its horizons for decades, and two of this season’s most promising offerings aim to continue that course. One is Grey Gardens, inspired by the cult 1975 documentary about Edith and Little Edie Beale, who lived a kind of Hamptons version of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The other is Spring Awakening, based on Frank Wedekind’s scandalous 1891 drama about teenage sex.

What the shows have in common—beyond a shared interest in aging and disillusionment—is that they both began on Off Broadway stages earlier this year: Grey Gardens at Playwrights Horizons, Spring Awakening at the Atlantic Theater Company. There was a time when no musical would dare come to New York before testing in a less judgmental city. But while most splashy spectaculars still debut out of town, many of Broadway’s most compelling and original recent offerings—such as Rent, Avenue Q and Caroline, or Change—have sprouted from Off Broadway roots.

“The reason so many of the musicals we do sound cockamamy is because they’re writer-driven,” says Playwrights Horizons’ artistic director, Tim Sanford. “And that’s ultimately what makes them interesting.” But debuting a show in New York is a dangerous proposition. “If it doesn’t work, you’re done—it’s over,” observes Spring Awakening’s director, Michael Mayer.

Both shows earned highly enthusiastic responses, but their creators hope to improve on them for Broadway. “The Atlantic was our out-of-town tryout,” Mayer says. “It did really well, and that has given us a fantastic opportunity to go back and make it better.” Perhaps he’s been talking to playwright Doug Wright, who wrote the book for Grey Gardens and who—in a separate interview—nearly mimics these sentiments. “Playwrights Horizons was our out-of-town tryout,” he notes. “Transferring to Broadway is our effort to truly finish the show to our satisfaction.”

Grey Gardens

Photo: Joan Marcus

Grey Gardens’ second act portrays the degraded Beales much as they appear in the documentary; the first act imagines them decades earlier, at the height of their glamour. “It’s an extraordinarily ambitious piece,” Wright says. “On one level it’s a very intimate story of a parent-child relationship, and on another level it’s a show about where the entire country was in 1941 and 1973.”

The consensus about the Playwrights Horizons version, directed by Rent controller Michael Greif, was that the show’s two halves were not ideally well connected. “Our original intent was to slam [the acts] up against one another in a kind of jarring juxtaposition,” Wright says. “That remains a strong impulse, but at the same time we provide connective tissue that allows audiences to see them as companion pieces.” Star Christine Ebersole will repeat her astounding performance as Little Edie, as will Mary Louise Wilson as her mother, but at least one of the other principal roles has been recast. And Wright is working on changes daily, he says, with the show’s composer, Scott Frankel, and lyricist, Michael Korie: “It’s all subject to investigation right now.”

Despite its marginal heroines, Grey Gardens is a fairly traditional modern musical, with a pastiche-heavy score. Spring Awakening, by contrast, sounds nothing like anything else on Broadway. Its music is by alt-rock singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik (with a libretto by Steven Sater), and director Mayer says he is excited to bring such a contemporary element to Broadway. “The musical vocabulary comes from the radio, as opposed to the history of Tin Pan Alley,” he notes.

Set in 19th-century Germany, the show switches into modernity whenever a song begins, and the intense young cast pulls out handheld microphones. “The music throbs, the kids throb, the lights throb—everything’s throbbing,” Mayer observes. “There’s even a kind of pulsating quality to the way the text interfaces with the songs. It’s an in-and-out sort of thing.” While Spring Awakening’s up-to-date tunes and edgy eroticism may attract a younger audience than the average Broadway fare, Mayer says that the material resonates with older audiences as well. “When that boy starts masturbating, you get this delirious response,” he observes. “These old men are remembering when their fathers were banging on the door!”

Changes to the show will likely focus on its tricky, tragic second act, which has already undergone many mutations during the show’s long gestation. But musicals are notoriously hard to control, and audiences who loved Spring Awakening and Grey Gardens Off Broadway will have to wait and see just how improved the new versions turn out to be. “At a certain point, the show is like a giant Macy’s balloon,” Wright says. “The rest of us are just hanging onto the tethers, trying to keep it on course.”

Grey Gardens begins previews at the Walter Kerr Theatre on October 3. Spring Awakening begins previews at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on November 17.

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