30 Days Of NYMF: Day 5 WHATEVER MAN

Whatever Man
By Benjamin Strouse, Book, Music, and Lyrics

Imagine this. A really hot girl says you she'll go see this big-budget action-adventure movie that looks totally amazing. Let's say it's your first date. What's more exciting -- seeing the movie, or that this girl wants to see it with you? You don't know.

Either way, the movie starts - it's amazing - better than you ever could have expected. It's new. It's original. It creates an imaginary world that lasts after the movie is over. Then the girl lets on, she pretended she hadn't seen it before because she wanted to experience it with you...! Or maybe it was just that she liked it enough to watch a second time....

Either way, that was the movie I wanted to write.

I conceived of WHATEVER MAN in its first iteration not as a stage play but as an Oz-like tale of a slacker who walks through an inter-dimensional portal into a world where real superheroes acted like today's celebrity cliché, and he's forced to expose a "super-villain" to get home. Then I added a princess. Then I took her away. Then I took away all the superheroes except one. Then I added them back, and brought the story to New York City, put the princess back, and added a psychiatrist.

I was running on a treadmill at 2:38am when I realized what my *movie* needed was music, so I better write some - about 40 songs, which I recorded with my arranger friend Art Hays over a few months. Now, just to fit these 112 minutes of music into the 218-page script I'd written so far...

I should mention that during these writing years (a) I had a law practice, (b) I got engaged to the girl from the movie anecdote and was planning a wedding, and (c) I felt compelled to keep this project secret from everyone I knew because (i) I was a lawyer, and (ii) I'm crazy.

But surely not crazy enough to agree to mount the first public production of my musical in a NYC festival with newborn twin boys at home, right...?! Unfortunately for the girl from the movie anecdote - I was.

And while it would be a nice way to wrap up by saying that WHATVER MAN is my story - it's not. It's the story of a guy who wants to write that movie, but for whatever reason he can never get around to doing much about it. Yet, in the end, he saves the world and gets the girl - and, if I've succeeded with my part of the production, you'll agree he deserves at least one of them.