Musical theater report: THE COMEDIANS

Javerbaum, left, and Schlesinger

Photograph: Dan Eckstein

It’s the 1950s, and a nice girl with a wild streak falls for a bad boy with a sensitive side. While the Grease-y setup of the new musical Cry-Baby—adapted from John Waters’s 1990 film—sounds familiar, chances are the score will sound quite different. That’s because its songwriters are not Broadway denizens: David Javerbaum, 36, is the former head writer and current executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and Adam Schlesinger, 40, cofounded the pop group Fountains of Wayne. As Cry-Baby’s preview period continues, TONY caught up with them at Schlesinger’s recording studio in Chelsea.

You both come to this job with an amount of pop-culture cred. Is musical theater getting hipper?
David Javerbaum: I don’t know if it’s hipper. There’s always been a stigma attached to it: The joke is So-and-So: The Musical. But the flip side of that is a fascination with the form, and the form is vibrant and vital enough to accommodate a lot of different styles. Hopefully, our take is fresh and original. It’s a rockabilly musical, but it’s contemporary-sounding.
Adam Schlesinger: We’ve had fun playing with the inherent cheesiness of the form, rather than pretending it’s not there. And we’re also playing with the limited nature of rockabilly, where basically if you add a third chord to a song, you’ve screwed it up.

How did you end up together?
Javerbaum: The producers wanted to do Cry-Baby—for purely commercial, venal reasons—and they had a lot of different lyricists and composers auditioning.
Schlesinger: When they called me to submit, my question to them was, “Have you seen anything you like so far?” They said, “We have this guy that’s a pretty interesting lyricist.” So I thought, Why don’t I just work with him? [Laughs] Even before I knew D.J., I was a fan of his from stuff that he had written for The Onion and The Daily Show.

D.J., did you know Adam’s work as well?
Javerbaum: Oh yeah, I’ve been a fan of They Might Be Giants for a long time. So I absolutely admire his…wait a minute!
Schlesinger: I think the idea was that he would be writing lyrics and I would be writing music. But at a certain point it just became silly to have that division.
Javerbaum: It’s been sort of an osmotic collaboration, which is why it says “songs by” us rather than “lyrics by/music by.” We already have another project that we’re working on together: Stephen Colbert is doing a Christmas special, and we’re writing some songs for it.
Schlesinger: You always have to hire two Jews to write the Christmas songs. It’s one of the rules.

How much of the John Waters sensibility can we expect to see in the musical?
Javerbaum: I think John Waters is very pleased with how John Waters–y this feels. Compared to Hairspray, it’s a little trashier, a little rawer, a little nakeder.

Have you been following the rabid debates about your show on the online theater forum All That Chat?
Javerbaum: Who are those people?!? One of them said, “This is literally the worst musical I have ever seen.”
Schlesinger: The first time my band went to England, we were coming off a wave of great press on our first album and we were all high on ourselves. And the first live review we got, the headline was KINGS OF ASSHOLES. We were like, Wow, not just assholes, but kings! I took that to mean that we had truly arrived.
Javerbaum: I didn’t realize the assholes were a monarchy.

The show is still in previews. Are you making any big changes?
Schlesinger: The major pieces of the show are in place, and now it’s just fine-tuning. The great thing about comedy in front of a live audience is that it’s an instant focus group. I worked with the Farrelly brothers on a couple of their movies, and they’re firm believers in the test audience. You might think that one of your lines is the greatest thing, but as soon as it doesn’t get a laugh, just cut it.

So what’s the secret to being funny?
Javerbaum: It takes years and years of intensive, all-consuming labor. It takes everything you’ve got. You’ve got to give it 113 percent. And if you try really, really, really hard, and approach it with an absolute humorless passion, you can be funny. Very, very funny.

Listen to a sample track by Javerbaum and Schlesinger. (It make take a few seconds for the audio player to load.)

Cry-Baby opens Apr 24, 2008 at the Marquis Theatre.