Betty Boop Musical

[mgchan]

In The New York Times Magazine, February 13, 2005, is an article about the upcoming Betty Boop musical (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/magazine/13ABAIRE.html?). Here's a reprint of the article:


February 13, 2005
Crossover: The Musical
By JOHN HODGMAN

One morning last November, I met David Lindsay-Abaire in a small studio in a theater in Hell's Kitchen, where he was working on the opening number for ''Betty Boop,'' the musical. Lindsay-Abaire, a 34-year-old playwright, had been mapping out the show's book for several months on his own, and he had just begun brainstorming with the show's composer and lyricist, Andrew Lippa, a 40-year-old veteran of the musicals ''The Wild Party'' and ''You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.''

''Good morning, Betty!'' Lippa sang from behind his digital piano, in the booming voice of a chorus of singing appliances. His hands bounced over the keys.

''Good morning, Mr. Flowerpot!'' Lippa then replied in Betty Boop's singsong soprano. Lindsay-Abaire, meanwhile, sat on the couch, a legal pad on his knee, listening and scribbling notes. ''Chores to do and ballyhoo and Boop-oop-a-doop!'' Lippa sang. ''Good morning, Morning! Now give me the scoop!''

When he first signed on to the production in 2002, Lindsay-Abaire started watching every Betty Boop cartoon he could find, carefully studying their jazzy, hallucinogenic weirdness. ''Everyone expects something very specific from Betty Boop -- this absurd humor, this anthropomorphism,'' he explained to me from the couch. ''We wanted to get that out of the way right away, so she wakes up singing to the toaster and the flowerpot.'' Then, he said, things take a turn. The set falls away and it turns out that Betty's world is nothing but a dream. ''She actually lives in a junkyard,'' he said. ''It's the Depression, and she has no money.''

But that's for later. For now, Lindsay-Abaire has a dolphin singing in Betty's window, Santa is at the door and a leprechaun dances out of her singing oven. Various fixtures from the 30's make cameos. Herbert Hoover stops by. Amelia Earhart drops in on a parachute.

''What about King Kong?'' Lippa suggested.

Lindsay-Abaire liked that idea. ''Do we just have his giant hand come in the window?'' he wondered.

''What about Little Orphan Annie?'' Lippa said.

Lindsay-Abaire considered. ''And then King Kong eats her and spits out the red wig?'' He was getting into it. ''It should escalate, and then there's this huge tap break, and all these crazy and weird characters are dancing.''

In his nonmusical life, David Lindsay-Abaire is a much-admired young playwright whose credentials include two years at the Juilliard Playwrights Program and an early stint staging absurdist dramas in the East Village and SoHo. His big career break came five years ago when Ben Brantley, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, raved over the Manhattan Theater Club production of his quirky dark comedy ''Fuddy Meers.'' It was based on the sort of gimcrack premise typical of the old screwball comedies Lindsay-Abaire loves -- a woman loses her memory every time she goes to bed and wakes up each morning surrounded by the strange people who claim to be her family.

Lindsay-Abaire was only 29 and just out of Juilliard when ''Fuddy Meers'' made its debut, and he was lauded by critics and producers as an important new talent. His agent had landed him a screenwriting deal with 20th Century Fox and a commission to write a new play for the prestigious South Coast Repertory in California. He survived some requisite critical drubbing of his sophomore Off Broadway effort, ''Wonder of the World,'' and enjoyed critical re-embrace with his third play, ''Kimberly Akimbo,'' in 2003.

Now Lindsay-Abaire is finally going to make it to Broadway. But it will not be as a playwright. It will be as a writer of musicals.

He is in good company. Christopher Durang and Wendy Wasserstein are working on new or adapted musicals, and so is Marsha Norman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of '' 'Night, Mother'' who has just written the musical adaptation of ''The Color Purple.'' Norman was one of Lindsay-Abaire's mentors at Juilliard. ''Christopher Durang and I,'' she told me recently, ''we sort of think of David as an old-time theater guy, like one of the guys who would write plays, produce musicals, own horse-racing stables. A Ziegfeld kind of guy.''

Norman went on to say that many of her current playwriting students are keen to learn how to write musicals. ''They're all eager to have it as a skill in their bag,'' she said. Part of the reason, she said, was that collaborating on a musical is just fun for a playwright, whose working life is usually pretty solitary. But that's not the only reason: Norman and I were speaking on the day The Times published an ominous-sounding article that traced the writing on the wall for so-called straight theater: 13 new plays opened on Broadway during the 2003-4 season; this season there will probably be only 5.

Lindsay-Abaire, in a burst of Ziegfeldian verve, has signed on to no fewer than four musicals: in addition to ''Betty Boop,'' he is writing musical versions of ''High Fidelity,'' ''My Man Godfrey'' and perhaps his highest profile project: ''Shrek,'' the sardonic ogre-meets-princess animated epic that has become one of the most successful movies of all time. Everyone, it seems, wants that David Lindsay-Abaire feeling -- that rare affinity for both singing dolphins and the Great Depression, a fondness for outsiders and naifs tossed into a bizarre world they don't quite understand.

Back in the studio, Lindsay-Abaire was wondering aloud whether Satan should join the chorus line in Betty Boop's kitchen. Lippa noodled on the keyboard, and the tune grew stronger.

''What I love about mornings,'' Lippa began to sing, in that sudden, startling, loud way that only Broadway professionals and characters in musicals do. ''Then it comes back to 'Good Morning, Betty,' '' he said, still playing, ''but it's got to swing out.''

As Lindsay-Abaire watched silently, Lippa began scat-singing at top volume, virtuosically, imitating a drum kit, filling up the whole room. ''And then we end with a stupidly fantastic swing number from the 30's,'' he cried, and he wheeled his chair away from the keyboard, his feet tapping, hands clapping, acting out the whole orchestra as the opening number in his head came to a huge close. ''Bah Bah Bah Dadad Ad Zeee Bope D'bad Dah De Dahh!''

And then there was sudden quiet. David Lindsay-Abaire was smiling and speechless. There was something in his face that made me wonder if he knew what he had gotten himself into.

''You're looking at me oddly,'' Lippa said.

''No, no, no!'' Lindsay-Abaire blurted out, as if a spell had been lifted. ''I'm just trying to see it.''

[mgchan]

Two years ago, after signing on to write ''Betty Boop'' but before he agreed to write ''Shrek,'' David Lindsay-Abaire attended a musical-theater workshop at New Dramatists, a center for aspiring playwrights not far from the Theater District. He was assigned, for example, to collaborate on a duet in which someone had to start off thinking one thing, and then a second character comes in, and by the end of the song the first character has changed his mind. ''It was really about how to collaborate with another person,'' Lindsay-Abaire told me recently, over the phone, as he sat in his office in Brooklyn. ''It was about how to create together and open the avenues of communication.''

He paused. ''I just saw someone out the window rush out into his yard and vomit,'' he said. ''Oh. Poor guy.''

Anyway, he said, about the workshop: ''Having never really collaborated with anyone, I thought I should learn how to sit in a room with people and work with them. It basically laid out the rules of how to work together, and I went by the rules, and I had a really good time.''

He paused again. ''Oh, no,'' he said, his voice rising with real pity and dismay. ''He's going out for a second round.''

Though his plays share screwball's fizzy forward motion and clever structure, they are also fascinated with the grotesque: a foulmouthed puppet; a mysterious, lisping burn victim; a man who believes he is being possessed by figures in his wallpaper; another who has a bizarre fixation with Barbie doll heads.

Given this, you may be tempted to conclude that David Lindsay-Abaire is a wacky person. But in fact he is the opposite of wacky. He is a devoted family man (he and his wife combined her last name, Lindsay, with his, Abaire). His son just turned 4. He has a very normal haircut and wears plain polo shirts and clean sneakers. His diction is precise, his voice clever and brisk, with little traces of his South Boston upbringing hiding in it (he still pronounces scallops ''SKAW-lups''). He is the sort of person who will apologize at length for calling you back late because he and his wife happened to be celebrating their 10th anniversary.

He is, I realized, a very thoughtful and polite person who just can't help seeing the vomiting out the window -- the absurdity of it, and the sadness of it too. And it's this affection for the grotesque in all of us that earns his plays a humane depth that sometimes goes unnoticed amid all the quirk.

He's an avid puzzler, fond of crosswords and Scrabble. Without missing a beat he will tell you that the letters in his name can be rearranged to spell ''Daddy lives in Arabia.'' His strategy at the military board game Risk is thus: ''I try not to get crazy, attacking and attacking in one round. Maybe you take over a lot of countries, but the next person takes back everything that you just built.'' As a teenager he played his share of Dungeons & Dragons. If you must know, he was a dwarven fighter. ''Thieves are tricky and cool, but fighters don't die as quickly,'' he explained. ''They're in the game for a long time.''

At age 12, Lindsay-Abaire received a Boys and Girls Clubs of America scholarship to Milton Academy, a private school in a wealthy suburb of Boston. As a day student who worked in a circuit-board factory during the summers, and as a clearly collegebound non-Irish smart aleck living in working-class Southie, he was something of a stranger in two worlds at once. Though he had an early reputation as a formidable wrestler, he gave up his spot on the team to appear in the ninth-grade production of ''A History of the American Film,'' by Christopher Durang. He loved plays, he found, and he quickly steeped himself in influences that he says still resonate in his work today: John Guare, Georges Feydeau and especially the absurdist works of Eugene Ionesco. It took him some time to find his voice. He admits that his first work, ''Mario's House of Italian Cuisine,'' was a direct rip-off of Tina Howe's art-world parody ''Museum'' -- though, to be fair, he was only 15 at the time.

He found his place as the school's genius playwright in residence. He even wrote a musical, which was set in a prison that was forced to go co-ed. (''Overcrowding,'' he explained with a sheepish shrug.) It did not really occur to him that, 18 years later, he'd have to write another one.

When, as an adult, he did turn to the somewhat esoteric puzzle of constructing a Broadway musical, he took the task seriously. He stocked up on cast recordings and consulted weighty academic texts on the psychology of fairy tales, and one day about a year ago, he sat down to watch ''Shrek.'' He had seen it, by his own half-joking reckoning, dozens of times -- he has a 4-year-old, after all. But this time, he told me, he was alone, a yellow legal pad by his side.

As he watched the movie, he said, he paused frequently, and the legal pad filled up with question marks. Is that a song? Is this a song? Can we combine these two scenes? Can we introduce Fiona earlier? ''Musical theater has to be much more economical,'' he explained, than straight theater: in musicals, what with everyone bursting into song and singing for four minutes at a time, there is much less time for dialogue and character development.

It may seem unusual for the first creative person involved in a musical to be the book writer, as the author of the nonmusical parts of a musical is known. The heart of the musical is, of course, the songs, the book serving to fit and flatter them. In the lore of Broadway, it is the sad fate of the professional book writer that he be forgotten. It is the composers and lyricists who are remembered as the ''authors'' of the musical. For ''Shrek,'' however (as with ''Betty Boop''), Lindsay-Abaire was hired before the composer.

Working alone, he found that his task was primarily structural and thematic, opening the accordion of the story at those moments of heightened emotion when someone might plausibly burst into song, and closing the accordion on, for example, extended conversations. ''It's not my job to put in lots of snappy dialogue and great scenes,'' he explained. ''You're trying to find where the story sings.''

One of the first things he discovered was that he could combine a few scenes from the beginning of the movie into a single number called ''Beware Ogre,'' one that would introduce the essential tragedy of Shrek: that all the villagers were desperately afraid of him, when all he desired was to be left alone in his swamp. Most every musical has this sort of ''I Want'' song: that direct out-belting of the character's formative desire, his ''big want'': a place for us, a room somewhere, anything like a dame.

Both Lindsay-Abaire and Norman told me that having this kind of emotional frankness to work with can be empowering to a playwright. ''In song,'' Lindsay-Abaire said, ''the emotions are heightened, and you get to see into a character in a very intimate way. It's hard to accomplish that in a play.''

But those frank expressions of emotion lend the musical a reckless unsubtlety that makes it feel corny and even a little unseemly to some people, myself included. And so it took a bit of hard swallowing for me to ask Lindsay-Abaire the obvious: What is he getting out of these musicals? What is his big want?

''How do I answer without being schmaltzy or gross?'' he said, somewhat embarrassed. ''I just want to be happy.'' He's not averse to making some money. And while scriptwriting for Hollywood is usually less work and more lucrative, writing musicals allows him to stay in New York and in live theater. Moreover, the task of writing for Broadway is, it seems, a particularly intriguing new puzzle. ''I want to have fun,'' he concluded. ''I want a happy family and a happy life.''

After thinking about it for a while, though, he admitted that his answer would make a terrible ''I Want'' song.

[mgchan]

With the exception of the novel, few art forms have died as often as the musical. Miles Kreuger, president of the Institute of the American Musical, which makes its home in Los Angeles, has not been to a musical on Broadway since ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood'' in the mid-80's. He left New York, he told me with a heartbreaking sigh, ''because it wasn't there anymore.'' It's true that around the time Kreuger went into exile, Broadway did, too. Rock had long before stolen its franchise to supply popular music to the 20th century; local audiences began fading as European supermusicals like ''Cats'' and ''Les Miserables'' were imported to amuse tourists; and the American musical became increasingly insular and self-regarding. The street that once ran through the center of American culture soon enough became something of a vestigial cul-de-sac, tended lovingly by a besotted class of despondents and devotees as they might the tradition of silent movies shown on trans-Atlantic liners.

But the American musical is now in the midst of a curious sort of revival. Broadway took in almost $750 million last year and has increased its audience by 40 percent compared with a decade ago. It is probably not coincidental that 10 years ago is when Disney arrived on Broadway with its first musical, ''Beauty and the Beast.'' Disney's dominance of a new family-friendly Broadway has been simultaneously invigorating to Broadway's bottom line and enervating to its purists. And Disney's success in adapting its own properties, especially ''The Lion King,'' prompted a second wave of less obviously tourist-friendly movie-to-Broadway transfers, like ''The Producers'' and ''Hairspray.''

When the subversive, bawdy puppet musical ''Avenue Q'' beat out the heavily favored, Universal Pictures-produced ''Wicked'' last year for the Tony for best musical, the show's creators, Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez, were bombarded with offers to adapt movies into musicals. ''New Line opened their catalog to us and just said, 'Take your pick,' '' Marx told me. '' 'Anything except ''Boogie Nights.'' ' '' (''Which, the minute they said it,'' Marx added, ''was the only thing we wanted to do.'') Movie studios, which once looked to Broadway for material, are increasingly working the opposite way, viewing the Great White Way as yet another revenue stream, a way to capitalize on proven brands (like ''Shrek'') and to mine new profits in near-forgotten ones (''The Wedding Singer,'' anyone? ''Dirty Rotten Scoundrels''?).

It was also about a decade ago that ''Rent'' came to Broadway, and in its powerful wake a series of original musicals have eddied onto Times Square -- provocative and subversive shows like ''Avenue Q,'' ''Urinetown'' and ''Caroline, or Change'' that began Off Broadway and catered initially to that hardy minority of theatergoers who actually live in New York City.

Lindsay-Abaire had never been particularly tempted to write a musical until he saw shows like these. ''I was never actively against musicals,'' he clarified. ''Yes, I found most of them cheesy, bloated, sentimental and self-important, but there were also many I really liked -- because cheesy can be really fun, after all.''

When ''Urinetown'' came along, he said, ''For the first time I thought, Oh, wait, that might be fun. It obeyed all the satisfying rules of musical theater while undermining and twisting them up at the same time.'' He describes Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's ''Caroline, or Change'' -- a true playwright's musical if there ever was one -- as the most exciting show he's seen in years: an uncompromising story full of complex characters that just happened to be told through song. And yet when we spoke last summer, not long after Kushner's play moved from the Public Theater downtown to Broadway, Lindsay-Abaire despaired for its chances. The Times review of the Broadway production was lukewarm, and word spread on the Internet that the show was pretentious and, worse, not funny. And in fact, ''Caroline, or Change'' closed after 136 performances and was supplanted at the Eugene O'Neill by ''Good Vibrations,'' the Beach Boys musical.


It is all a difficult balancing act. Even if we reimagine Broadway as merely a gala launch party for powerful brands, it is a pretty expensive party. Any new musical must court a broad swath of tourists while at the same time managing not to completely alienate a small group of powerful critics and the Broadway devotees, all at $100 a seat. Gaining credibility with both, as ''The Lion King'' did under Julie Taymor's decidedly mature, uncartoony direction, helped make that show perhaps the most successful musical of all time.

It's the kind of dual success that Bill Damaschke, the DreamWorks executive overseeing the musical adaptation of ''Shrek,'' says he hopes to emulate. The production's artistic credentials, so far, are impeccable. The project was originated by Sam Mendes, the London theater director perhaps best known as the director of the film ''American Beauty,'' and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who, when he was at Disney, was credited with reviving the movie musical, albeit in animated form. Mendes and Damaschke recently hired Jason Moore, the director of ''Avenue Q,'' to direct the show. In this risky game, Lindsay-Abaire joins them as a kind of goodwill ambassador -- between New York and Hollywood, between the daring shows and the safe bets, between the contemporary acid irreverence of ''Shrek'' the film and the sincere, hammy sentiment the old-fashioned musical still requires.

''David loves musicals,'' Damaschke told me. ''And he also knows why some people don't.''

But of course, as the old Broadway saying goes, ''Shrek'' is no ''Urinetown.'' Perhaps in Lindsay-Abaire's hands, ''Shrek'' will share some of ''Urinetown'''s witty deconstruction and its renewal of the musical form. An early treatment that Lindsay-Abaire showed me was full of smart references, including a troop of ''Lion King''-ish antelope puppets running for their lives.

But as Lindsay-Abaire himself pointed out one night as we were playing Risk, ''You don't want to go to 'Shrek' and get some Brechtian deconstruction of a musical. It could be a very interesting musical, but there would be a lot of disappointed children.''


If ''Shrek'' makes Lindsay-Abaire a lot of money in the end, who would ever blame him? Well, Broadway might. There aren't a lot of musicals, after all, about a young artist who runs off to Broadway in order to become an unassuming gun-for-hire, comfortably supporting his family thanks to global corporate-media trends. If this were a musical -- let's call it ''Daddy Lives in Arabia'' -- Lindsay-Abaire might end Act One sitting atop a great pile of ''Shrek'' money with a cigar and a monocle, but suddenly feeling hollow. He would realize that success means nothing if you lose your art, and of course he would sing about this, and confront Act Two a changed man.

But Lindsay-Abaire, the actual person, does not seem to worry about any of this. In fact, during the months we were meeting, he very swiftly and quietly finished a new play that will make its debut at the Manhattan Theater Club next season. It is about a young couple dealing with the death of a child. It is very powerful and very sad and about as far from wacky as it gets, especially for a father of a young child himself. When he wrote those earlier plays in his 20's, he told me back in his office: ''I don't know if I was really scared of anything. It didn't come from a scary place. It came from an adventurous place. This new play is just a terrifying thing to write. It's the hardest thing I've ever written.''

I asked him why he was undertaking this change in direction at the same time that he was, in effect, writing bouncy show tunes. Whatever happened to just having fun? ''Oh, that's right,'' he said, remembering. ''That was my rule, wasn't it?'' He took a moment to think about it and then laughed darkly. ''Maybe I was having too much fun. Maybe I think I'll balance it out if I write a dead-baby play.''

Just as Shrek realizes at the end that he doesn't exactly want to be alone, so Lindsay-Abaire isn't only interested in fun. He wants to grow and to challenge himself, to throw off the mantle of young success, to not get too crazy and to stay in the game for a long time.

I asked him, since he's the expert, how this story would end if it were a musical. ''I imagine I'd be tap-dancing, as fast as I could,'' he said. ''And maybe I'd be wearing a cat costume.'' Picture a chorus line of wrestlers and dwarven fighters. Bah Bah Bah Dadad Ad Zeee Bope D'bah! And we end it with a stupidly fantastic swing number from the 30's.


John Hodgman is a contributing writer. His last article was a profile of Ted Haigh, a cocktail scholar.

Reprinted from The New York Times Magazine, February 13, 2005

[Cute Pudgy]

I have known about this for quite a while, as it happens, my mom's cousin is one of the people working on it. I have been wanting to see it since i found out. I think that it is quite a whiles away though

[BBooper]

:eek: *is amazed but v v happy!*

BBooper
xxx

[Bikerbettyboop]

wow what a great article and very informative... it took 15 minutes to read it all but well worth it! Thanks for sharing it! It would be wonderful to see Betty Boop on broadway!

[fireykristyn]

coolness:) *pretends to be there*

Kris

[chess nut]

Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease let it be good!

[ooohlala]

Lol :d !!!!!!

[Bikerbettyboop]

Any news or update on the Broadway show???????

[ladyboop2929]

;) Oh My Goodness! A Must See! ;)

[boopbimbo]

Pretty exciting, does anybody know who will play Betty? :)

[Cute Pudgy]

I know production is going slow right now, script issues from what i have heard- so actors are not top on thier list

[bettyboop0398]

This is awesome;can't wait for it to happen!I will definitely go see this show!:D

[bboop480]

Pretty exciting, does anybody know who will play Betty? :)
Welcome to Boopland!

[bboop480]

Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease let it be good!
Welcome to Boopland!!!!

[bboop480]

thanks so much for the info...wow....fabulous of course...

[Bikerbettyboop]

Whatever happened to the plans for this musical anyway?

[BettyBoopVB20]

oh i would want to see that.i bet it was great.

[bettyboopfan]

Whatever happened to the plans for this musical anyway?

That is a great question!