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Q&A with Composers & Lyricists Joe Drymala and Eric Svejcar
By: Maya Cantu Apr. 23, 2006
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Joe Drymala and Eric Svejcar aren't a songwriting team, but they have a few things in common besides the fact that they both write musicals. For one, the songs of both men will be sung by performers such as Euan Morton, Robert Cuccioli, Tyler Maynard, Kate Wetherhead and Amanda Watkins on April 26th for their Stuck in the Zipper concert at the Zipper Theatre.
ES: So with both White Noise and Prince Hal in
serious development (and inter-connected in that odd incestuous way so
much of the theatre world is), we thought it would be fun to preview
some of the scores for both and also play some songs from other shows
Joe and I have been working on.
MC: What can audiences expect to hear at the concert?
JD: From me, you'll be hearing three of the White Noise songs I wrote (you can preview two of them at whitenoisethemusical.com), and four songs from another, very contrasting show called The Golden City. White Noise is of course pure pop, while The Golden City is a more complex, more ambitious show musically, which fits the subject matter.ES: On my end, we'll be doing several songs from my show Caligula, including two sung by Euan Morton, who played the title role at the NYMF where the show premiered. Caligula is a '70s glam-rock take on the life of the Roman emperor, so the score for that is a very David Bowie-and-company-inspired rock-and-roll show with lots of loud guitars. We'll be previewing two songs from Prince Hal of SoHo, the new piece I'm working on, which is a bit more ambitious musically.
It's
still based in a pop-rock style, but a bit more contemporary and a bit
more unconventional. We're also doing a song from a show I recently
wrote called The Murder of Isaac, which is an aria for an operatic soprano and not rock-and-roll in the slightest.
MC: How did each of you get started, and who do you cite as your biggest musical influences?ES: I studied piano from an early age, and performed in countless musicals as a kid and all through High School. After college (where I studied classical voice with a double minor in Playwriting and German), I eventually found my way to musical directing, and after a few years playing piano bars in Chicago I came to New York to seek my fortune as a composer and musical director.Despite the heavy rock feel of a lot of what I write, I listened to virtually nothing but cast albums until sometime around my sophomore year of college when The Who started finding their way into my CD player and I was corrupted by the rock-and-roll devil. I'd say that Rodgers and Bernstein were always my favorites on the theatre side and had a pretty profound influence on what I write. I also love the music of Galt MacDermot, who is best known for Hair, but has an amazingly wide and eclectic body of work. I've gotten to know and work with Galt a bit since moving here, and I think his music sounds like no one else's I've ever heard. On the rock-and-roll side, I'd put Pete Townshend and Jim Steinman close to the top of the list of guys who wrote a lot of songs I wish I had. And Lennon/McCartney, of course. JD: Definitely Leonard Bernstein for me too; like him, I'm excited by layered rhythms and big melodies. There's no escaping Sondheim, of course (not that anyone would want to). A lot of rock has influenced me too, even though I'm not really a rock composer like Eric is; I love pretty much anything Radiohead has ever done, and draw on them harmonically in a big way. Also, the repetitive, driving ostinatos of mid-career U2 (Unforgettable Fire, Joshua Tree era). On the classical front, Beethoven first, and for more modern voices, John Adams and Steve Reich are really fantastic.I've always been self-taught, though I went to a music college in Boston for a year, and the experience was so worthless to my development that I decline to even name them. My first musical, Sky's End, was produced when I was 18 at Los Angeles' Blank Theater Co. and got some very kind reviews. I wrote and produced an experimental show after that, called To Catch Fire, and have been working on The Golden City since 2000, with of course a one-year hiatus to work for Dean.
MC: Let's talk about your "cautionary musical" White Noise, for which Joe wrote book, music and lyrics and for which Eric supplied additional music and lyrics (as did Rick Crom, Glen Kelly, Laurence O'Keefe and Stephen Sislen) . This seems to be a really ambitious, controversial new show, as it concerns a white supremacist teen band who infiltrate into the Top 40. Could you describe your intentions for this musical?
JD:
We were obviously inspired by the real-life band Prussian Blue, which
consists of a pair of blonde teenage twin girls singing about white
power. Ryan had the idea for the show first, and I was immediately
hooked when he told me about it. We're of the opinion that a whole lot
of repugnant ideas have been put forth lately in the U.S. by some very
slick, sophisticated messengers, and we wanted to push that idea
further. Also, the combination just seemed right -- there's something
sort of weird and oppressive and inescapable about top 40s pop; it's a
natural soundtrack for a fascist movement. Our goal is to demonstrate
how easily extremism can penetrate the mainstream, if the messenger is
appealing enough.ES: My intention was to write the most
horribly vile and offensive song I could and make it as catchy as
possible. The result can be seen in the show later this year.
MC: Next, here are a few questions for Joe! Could you please tell BroadwayWorld readers a little more about The Golden City, which was workshopped in 2002, as well as your future plans for it?
JD: The
Golden City is a big, ambitious piece that I've been working on for
some time. I touched on it earlier; it takes place in a theater in an
unnamed city that's being bombed. The theater company, led by an Orson Welles-type
director/lead actor, at first tries to use their little world as a
place of refuge, where they can hide from all the awful things that are
being done to their city. Eventually, that doesn't work -- the theater
itself gets bombed, and their set is torn to pieces, during a final
dress rehearsal. Unable to ignore the reality any longer, they decide
to use theater to transform their reality. They put on a
play-within-a-play that's sort of a fairy tale, which takes everything
terrible from the outside world and transforms it into something
beautiful within their show. So, it's about the power of theater, the
importance of art, in even the most difficult of circumstances.
Ryan
and I are planning for a summer 2007 production of the show, with a
reading somewhere along the way. It's a big show, with lots of cast
members, musicians, sound and visual effects, etc.
MC: You became Howard Dean's head speechwriter when you were only around 25. That's quite an accomplishment! Do you have any interesting stories about writing for Dean as the 2004 election began to heat up?
JD: It
was pretty unforgettable. What sticks out in my mind most is Joe
Trippi, the crazy genius campaign manager, who essentially came up with
the grassroots internet strategy that launched Dean into the
stratosphere by the summer of 2003. If anyone created a character like
Trippi, no one would believe it: he's a guy who, every day, drinks 40
Diet Pepsis and dips an entire can of Cherry Skoal; one minute he's
crumpling up your latest speech into a ball and ruthlessly pelting it
at you, and the next minute he's on the verge of tears as he ruminates
on the power and moral righteousness of Jeffersonian democracy. I was
really lucky; I got there early enough to make my mark with people, and
earn the trust of Trippi and Dean to the point where I was writing most
of his speeches (not that he ever delivered them; Howard Dean felt
about learning prepared speeches the way you or I feel about getting a
root canal).
MC: Do you feel that musicals should have some sort of social message, or that they should somehow reach out and change their audiences' perspectives about the world?
JD: They
should certainly do the latter. I used to shy away from social message;
propaganda, after all, is inherently undramatic. But artists like Tony Kushner (and Arthur Miller
before him) have shown that taking a moral stand in the theater can be
thrilling and courageous and entertaining all at once, so I'm starting
to be pulled more and more in the direction of theater that examines
tough questions. Most of all, I think theater should be amazing. It
sounds simplistic, but I don't think enough theater artists think in
those terms. The theater artists I admire most, like Kushner and Hal Prince and Sam Mendes, understand how to truly "wow" people. So, that's my goal: Stephen Sondheim meets Steven Speilberg.
MC: Now, here are some questions for Eric! Let's talk about Caligula, which won the Audience Award at the 2004 New York Musical Theatre Festival. As you said, you set the decadent Roman emperor's story to the sounds of 70s glam rock. How did that idea come about? ES: I wanted to do something as genuinely rock-and-roll as I could. For all the time I've spent going to the theatre, my single favorite thing I've ever seen was probably The Who playing "Quadrophenia" at Madison Square Garden. I really wanted to do something that would have a similar visceral rush and that same hard rock edge. I also knew that to do a story about Ancient Rome, it should be genuinely sexy, overly decadent, and have a real dangerous edge. It was the movie Velvet Goldmine that made me think that '70s glam really embodied all of those qualities - the androgyny and ambisexuality of "Ziggy Stardust", the overtones of blood and death in the songs of Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges, etc. - it just seemed like everything I associated with Ancient Rome was somewhere in the world of glam. And since I'm a musical theatre geek who secretly wishes he were cool enough to be a rock star but knows he probably isn't, I will take any excuse I can to pretend to be David Bowie for a little bit.
MC: I'm also guessing that the musical wasn't anywhere near as out-there or salacious as the legendary film! ES: I decided to write Caligula and had done all the research long before actually seeing the infamous Bob Guccione film, which was out-of-print for a long time and not easy to come by. Once I finally saw the film, I absolutely hated it and to this day have never been able to get through it in a single sitting. There have been several Caligulas - Albert Camus did a version, and the novel/miniseries "I, Claudius" covers the reign of Caligula pretty thoroughly. Both of those (and the biography by the ancient writer Suetonius, which is a fantastic read) were far more influential on my Caligula than the film was!
MC: Let's talk a little more about two of the upcoming musicals that you mentioned. The Murder of Isaac premiered at Baltimore's Centerstage earlier this year and Prince Hal of SoHo will premiere later this year.ES: The Murder of Isaac is a play by the Israeli playwright Motti Lerner about the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It's done in a similar style to Marat-Sade, in that it's a play-within-a-play put on by the patients in a PTSD wing of an Israeli government rehabilitation center, and the patients are all victims of various wars and terrorist bombings. It's a passionate, fascinating play so controversial it's never been performed in Israel. Centerstage, where I musical directed a fantastic production of Two Gentlemen of Verona last year, decided to mount the American premiere. Motti had included several songs in the play to be sung by the patients/actors, for which he had written lyrics in Hebrew and which were never set to any music. I was then given a more-or-less literal translation of Motti's Hebrew lyrics, and told to rewrite them as much as I needed to make them songs. Most of the actors had never sung onstage before, so I had to write music that both served the story and had the complexity and the depth necessary, but that could also be performed by mostly non-musicians. I did have one fantastic singer, Charlotte Cohn, who sang Musetta in La Boheme on Broadway, who played an opera singer who had been wounded in a suicide bombing. Charlotte will sing of her songs at the concert - a plea for peace entitled "Fire!" The show was a considerable success for Centerstage, and I'm very proud to have been a part of it.
Prince Hal of SoHo is a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, which I've been pitching as something akin to a Bret Easton Ellis novel. I've always loved Henry IV and thought there was something genuinely universal in the story of Prince Hal, the prodigal son dismissed by everyone as a disappointment but who knows he will eventually achieve greatness. (Gus Van Sant's movie My Own Private Idaho also uses the story as a jumping-off point). In this version, the Prince Hal character is an obscenely rich, bisexual, drug-taking party boy named Shane Callum who realizes it's time to move beyond the life he's made for himself or get stuck in it. It's about people around my own age and set in contemporary Manhattan and Brooklyn. We'll be doing the opening sequence at the concert on the 26th, which is the piece I'm most excited about. It spans twelve hours in the life of our protagonist - waking up at six in the evening, doing a lot of drugs, going out and hooking up with a boy, and generally contemplating the nature of it all. I feel like it's a chance to apply a lot of the lessons I learned working on Caligula, which was the most amazing crash course in theatre writing I could have ever hoped for.
You've worked extensively as a musical director, and recently did so for the Off-Broadway revival of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. What qualities in Brel's music do you think has kept it alive for decades? ES: Brel's material, more so than any other songwriter I can think of, comes directly from the soul. He was a man who felt passionately about life and wanted to get to know as many people as he good, and managed to convey in his music a depth and honesty and understanding that I don't think anyone else has ever matched. He was able to find the universal i life, and wrote with so much heart and passion (and a uniquely ironic French sense of humor) that his songs land like a direct punch to the gut. The response that he generates from an audience - both in his own performances and via his music - is probably the most genuine and enthusiastic I've ever seen from an audience.
MC: What's next for you each of you after the Stuck in the Zipper concert?
JD: We're planning an Equity Reading of White Noise in late May, then comes the real production in late summer. After that, it's back to The Golden City
for me. I also have a full-length play I've just finished, as well as a
1-hour television drama pilot and a screenplay (with two other
screenplays in the works). On top of that, I've begun writing my next
two musicals, both of which are radically different from one another
and from everything else I've written so far. It's been an extremely
prolific year for me.ES: Caligula
is back on track - we have new producers who have stepped forward, and
I expect that a major announcement about the future of the show will be
coming in the next few weeks. We've been doing workshops of it at the
Actor's Studio, trying to fine-tune the show from the NYMF production,
which we all felt was a bit long and unfocused. The show is in the best
shape it's ever been in, we'll be doing a small reading next month, a
big workshop later in the year, and then... Like I said - I expect an
announcement will be coming soon.In the meantime, I'm playing/conducting Jacques Brel
eight times a week. We're gearing up to record the cast album, and it
looks like we'll be running for the forseeable future. The Prince Hal
premiere will most likely be later this year, and I have several
musical directing/orchestrating projects to keep me from getting bored
and lazy (and so I can pay my rent). It doesn't leave much time for
sleep or a social life, but at the moment I'm loving all that I'm
getting to do and the amazing people I'm getting to work with.
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