Calculating success

DRONE WOLF Joel Hatch, center, is a working stiff ready to go postal.

Photograph: Carol Rosegg

Over the years, plenty of macabre subjects have received the musical treatment. One need look no further than the local cineplex to see a warbling, razor-swinging Johnny Depp. Nevertheless, Elmer Rice’s 1923 Expressionist downer The Adding Machine still seems an odd basis for a tuner. The work, a staple in college drama courses, is a three-hour tragedy about the contemptible Mr. Zero, a corporate accountant who snaps when he learns that he will be replaced by a mechanical device. Is this really commercial material? Apparently. A hit at Evanston, Illinois’s Next Theatre Company, Adding Machine, with music by Joshua Schmidt and a libretto by Jason Loewith and Schmidt, opens this week at Off Broadway’s Minetta Lane Theatre.

“If by musical you mean something delightful and melodic and happy, then The Adding Machine is the wrong play to be one,” concedes director David Cromer. “But if you can picture a serious and brilliant composer taking a play that is several levels above naturalism to its next level, then you can see this musical.”

Loewith, 39, Next’s artistic director, saw the text as ripe for song. “When I read Rice’s play, I suddenly heard the first scene—in which Mrs. Zero berates, harangues and verbally emasculates her schlub of a husband for six pages—as an operatic aria,” he says. Loewith believed in the idea so much that he wasn’t deterred when the first three composers he approached failed to realize his vision. Undeterred, around three years ago he found Schmidt, who was working as a sound designer on a different Next project.

The result of their collaboration is a moody chamber musical with a heavy industrial-style sound created by three musicians on piano, synth and percussion. Despite an abbreviated 90-minute running time, all the major elements of the plot, including a murder and an execution, are present. In other words, this shows’s aesthetic—while interesting for students of theater history—isn’t necessarily crowd-pleasing, a fact its creators understand. “I decided I wanted to keep the tone as close to the play as I could possibly get,” Schmidt, 31, explains. “Not everyone is going to be bopping to these tunes. But that’s the piece of literature I was handed. I could have turned it into something that it wasn’t, into something that the masses wanted to hear, or I could have been faithful to [Rice’s play] and confronted people with something they haven’t been faced with a lot in musical theater. I chose to stay faithful.”

So far, Schmidt’s gamble has paid off. After a couple of workshops, the show had its world premiere at Next last February. The piece found a following fairly quickly, receiving rave reviews from local critics, high praise in The New York Times and the Chicago area’s highest theater honor—the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Musical.

Scott Morfee, artistic director of New York’s Barrow Street Theater, caught the show in the Prairie State due to his friendship with Cromer (who helmed Orson’s Shadow at Barrow Street in 2005). Morfee considered the production “magnificent” but wasn’t sold on the idea of a transfer immediately. It wasn’t until he received the demo recording that he decided Adding Machine should move. “It was listening to it in my car that did it,” the producer says with a laugh. “From that, I decided we didn’t need to go anywhere else, that it should come here.” Morfee brought into the producing circle his Barrow Street partner Tom Wirtshafter and Margaret Cotter (president of Liberty Theaters, Inc., which owns the Minetta Lane), and soon Adding Machine was headed to Gotham.

Despite the good word of mouth, there are obvious challenges to success in New York. In recent years, the market has not been robust for long-running Off-Broadway commercial musicals. Earlier this month, Altar Boyz received tons of press for recouping its original investment—after playing for three years. (And this is a show which is supposedly a success, with relatively low production overhead.) Countering naysayers, those involved with Adding Machine stress its universal appeal. Cast member Amy Warren, who has been with it since the first workshop, noted that “everyone, everywhere has been in the machine.” And Morfee maintains hope. “I’m confident in its [chances],” he says. “We’ve already had interest from foreign markets. At the end of the day, it’s not like anything else. So it will find its place.”

Adding Machine is now playing at the Minetta Lane Theatre.