Interview: Brian Jucha of LOVE BOMB at Catastrophic Theatre

Brian Jucha has created original interdisciplinary theatre works for decades which is just a fancy way of saying he combines acting with dance and unique movement. He was an early participant in the development of Viewpoints Theory; he worked with Anne Bogart for years, culminating in forming Via Theater, which he ultimately took over from her as artistic director. As part of the downtown New York City performance landscape of the 90s, Via Theatre consistently produced two to three original works a year to rave reviews from The New York Times. They eventually closed in the early ‘aughts, but Brian Jucha continued. 

LOVE BOMB opens on November 15th at the MATCH facility in Midtown and runs into early December. This will be Brian’s fifth collaboration with Catastrophic and its forerunner Infernal Bridegroom Productions, including THEY DO NOT MOVE, TOAST, LAST RIGHTS, and WE HAVE SOME PLANES, which landed Jucha and the Catastrophic/IBG ensemble the cover of AMERICAN THEATRE magazine. It brought about bragging rights that the company uses to this day! Broadway World writer Brett Cullum got to sit down, talk to Brian Jucha, and geek out over their love of early 70s singing sensation Melanie. 

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Brett Cullum: I'm excited to have you because you've done a lot, and you're an artist of note, and you definitely made an impact here on the Houston scene. LOVE BOMB, the most recent work, is touted as a conceptual musical about “taxi dancers” set to the music of Melanie, who everybody knows because of that dang song about roller skates. 

I have been a theater critic for over ten years but missed WE HAVE SOME PLANES. And for some reason, another Broadway World writer took the assignment for every other collaboration that you've done with Catastrophic. I am coming in fresh. What can I expect? 

Brian Jucha: Oh, boy! Well. What I do is interdisciplinary dance theater. That has a loose narrative that can be interpreted differently from one audience member to the next. Text in my work is not the primary source of the experience. So, the text is as important as the music, the movement, the gestures, the dance, the songs, as what is happening between actors, relationship-wise, from one to the other. You know, the funny thing about WE HAVE SOME PLANES. There were eight company members in that, and we had some people come back and see it eight times so they could watch each person. Because, depending on who you glom onto at any given moment, you're experiencing something different. So, it's not site-specific; it is not interactive. It is not audience participation or immersive theater. 

Brett Cullum: The musician known as Melanie is a connection that we probably have because I'm a big fan of Melanie as an artist. 

Brian Jucha: Yeah, I heard that which I think is kind of crazy, and she is the musical Muse for this show. 

Brett Cullum: She is one of my musical muses as well. I stole one of her greatest hits albums from my parents when I was a kid! What made you want to do a piece exclusively with her music?

Brian Jucha: Well, okay. I was a teenage Melanie groupie. I discovered her when I was 10, and I went to see her in concert for the 1st time when I was 11. Between the ages of 11 and 20, I probably saw her 40 times! And then the joke is, I then went from Melanie to Patti Smith. That was my groupie status, but so I mean, I have known her forever and for ages. I have always wanted to do a piece using her songs and I was planning to do this last summer. I never anticipated that she would pass away. Melanie passed away in January, so I actually never got around to asking her if it was okay with her. I have gotten her family and children's approval and blessing. Also, her record company and manager, so I think she would have been pleased. You know what I love about her? Most people who know of her know her hit and have this conception of her as this Flower Child or Hippie girl. Her first two albums are very inspired by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil. They're gems of songs about relationships, falling in love, and falling out of love. So, most of what we are using are songs from her early career, which were written mostly when she was a teenager. So I've wanted to do this for a long time and am finally happy to get around to it.

Brett Cullum: You’ve wanted to do this since you were a precocious ten-year-old who was stalking Melanie. I see you, Brian Jucha. 

Brian Jucha: Yes, apparently, since I was ten. You know, the way it's being structured is that “taxi dancers” work as cabaret performers in our dance hall. So Melanie's songs are being performed as cabaret songs instead of having a book that the songs inform one way or the other, so they are informing the characters, but they're not like a traditional musical. The songs do not motivate the action of the play.

Brett Cullum: It's more like a live singing on a stage presentation, and actually, ironically, the play CABARET sometimes has these musical numbers that are just shown as performances, which is kind of an interesting dichotomy there. We call it diegetic music in theater classes - songs the characters hear, too. But do you have a favorite Melanie song? I was really curious. I know it's a “Sophie's Choice” for you, considering she has thirty-one albums, but...

Brian Jucha: Well, you know, it's really, really weird because I would have answered that differently six weeks ago, but because of the seven songs that we are doing, I've fallen back in love with some of the early ones that I had kind of forgotten about. Melanie's manager suggested one of them, and it has turned out to work out so brilliantly! The song is called “Take Me Home,” which I had forgotten about, and he said, “You should consider it.” I went and listened to it, and I was like, “Oh, my God, that's perfect!” One of my favorite songs is “Leftover Emotion,” which we are doing. It was written in her later years. It didn't get the due that it should have gotten when she was younger. She recorded it several times. The album Photograph is my favorite. I think that that's her work of genius that didn't get the attention it deserved.

Brett Cullum: One of my favorite Melanie songs is “Leftover Wine,” which I have a feeling probably wouldn't be in the show. I also really like “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)”... 

Brian Jucha: Yeah, that's not in the show either.

Brett Cullum: You're killing me!

Brian Jucha: And neither is “Brand New Key.” 

Brett Cullum: That I'm fine with. Skip the song about roller skates! To me “Brand New Key” was always like the gateway drug to Melanie for people. It was the hit you knew, but it was this novelty song. It wasn't my favorite of hers. It's a cute, kooky song, very catchy, and obviously used to great effect in film and commercials. But it’s not representative of these songs of love and longing you keep talking about. She's kind of the Taylor Swift of her time, as far as breakup songs and writing her own stuff about her own experience.

Brian Jucha: She was. I honestly do feel she didn't get her due because in 1970, 1971, and 1972, she was Billboard's top female vocalist! She started her record company after a falling out with Buddha. So she's the first woman that did that! Imagine a woman in 1971 starting her own record company; that was completely unheard of. But by 1978, she was gone. She wanted to have children. So, she had three beautiful children, which was more important than her career. 

Brett Cullum: Let’s get back to LOVE BOMB! Now you mentioned it is about “taxi dancers.” What, exactly, is a taxi dancer?

Jucha: Well, a taxi dancer is a term for something that happened in the thirties and forties before the wartime period, where there would be clubs where and it's largely thought that it's mostly men going to women, but it also was women going to men. You could go and pay someone to dance with you, and they were called taxi dancers because then afterward, everybody would get in their taxis and go home. But it's basically what SWEET CHARITY is based on. Sweet Charity is a taxi dancer in that show. If you look at the number of “Big Spender,” that is completely about taxi dancers. I first heard about this in an interview with Rudolph Valentino because, apparently, he was a taxi dancer before he was famous. Of course, he implied that it was more than just being a taxi dancer and that it led to prostitution. I found it very interesting in terms of a dance hall place where people would go to dance with somebody and pay them a nickel. I think it's a great premise for human interaction.

Brett Cullum: You know I would do it now, I'm gonna be honest. (Brian Jucha goes slack-jawed for a second)

Brian Jucha: You would go pay someone for a dance?

Brett Cullum: Sure, absolutely. I see nothing wrong. We should bring this back to nightclubs and wedding receptions. Anywhere you need a partner to dance! How handy would that be?   

Brian Jucha: Maybe we should have a night after the show where we just taxi dance with the audience and the whole cast!

Brett Cullum: Yeah, genius, let's do it. Alright! I am so there! I have heard an urban myth that you often come to Houston with a concept, and maybe you have a beginning or an end. You get together with the cast of the CATASTROPHIC company, and you all collaborate and create this whole show organically. Tell me a little about your process and how you differ from somebody who comes in with a fully realized script.

Brian Jucha: Normally, I have themes and I have ideas for things that will happen. There might be a structure that we play off of. We once played off of Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring” ballet. With WE HAVE SOME PLANES, it was really easy because it was textual transcripts from the morning of September 11th. We literally used that as the structure. So they said the text at the time it was said that morning. We will do composition work where the actors will create original characters. What they do is what becomes the basis for what the audience sees. We also use something called Viewpoint improv work, which goes way back. I did study with Anne Bogart in 78 and 79 at NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing. We use the viewpoint method of improv to really create the human interactions that happen. I tried not to have a text with LOVE BOMB, but I found that to put it together in four weeks we needed something structurally to ground it. I won't say what it is, but… some people may recognize it, and some people may not. I don't know. But it does have something to do with serial killers… but… (Brian goes quiet) 

Brett Cullum: What is it with you, CATASTROPHIC people? You always get so hush-hush. I remember when I interviewed Walt Zipprian about CLEANSED, he wouldn’t say a thing. 

Brian Jucha: Well, you know, part of it is, you want people to be surprised, and you don't want people to come in with a preconceived notion. For TOAST, we used the script of the movie ALIEN. If I said that to people before they came, that was just one thing. There was a lot of other text with it. If I said to people, we're doing the script of ALIEN. Well, you would think that that's what you would think that we were doing, ALIEN, which is not what we were doing. So that's why I don't want to say what the text is from; it would lead people to think of one thing rather than experience it for themselves.

Brett Cullum: This blows my mind because I told you I've been a theater critic for 10 years, and I've been an actor for a lot longer than I want to admit. But I think about this process, and if you want to restage TOAST or WE HAVE SOME PLANES. It would be a different show, wouldn't it? I mean, even if you cast the same people, they probably would come up with different things. Am I getting that wrong?

Brian Jucha: I think it would be interesting, and I would love to restage WE HAVE SOME PLANES because so many people were afraid of it cause we did that in March of 2002. I think it would be the same. I believe that the actors would have to learn what the original actors did score-wise, and then they could make changes to some extent, but you'd still have to honor what the person originally did.

Brett Cullum: So they just go through this process once. If you ever do it again, you've got the basis.

Brian Jucha: Well, yeah, we don't. Actually, we don't have the history of that because we haven't done it. I love doing new things with CATASTROPHIC THEATRE, and I have to tip my hat to them for doing this for several decades and keeping basically the same artists that whole time. 

Brett Cullum: Well, I've always thought that CATASTROPHIC is one of the jewels of the Houston Theater scene because they do stuff nobody would touch. Your larger houses? Doing actual art? They're never going to do it. They're not going to take a chance with experimental theater. They're going to run away from it shrieking because they've got money makers like A CHRISTMAS CAROL, they've got WICKED, and they've got PHANTOM OF THE OPERA that's going to make them tons of money. So, putting on a musical with Melanie's songs about taxi dancers is not on their bucket list. I love the the viewpoint that CATASTROPHIC brings and the fact that they do have this longevity and they do have this history. You can feel that connection between some of their company and the audience. I think is unique, not only to Houston but to CATASTROPHIC itself. I have not seen very many companies like this around the country, and so often, we get artists who can't do the business side to keep the company afloat. And that's one of the problems with our industry. There is a lack of truly daring and experimental art. So it's it's interesting we have this. And Houston really embraces CATASTROPHIC, which I think is wonderful. And definitely anytime that you come to town. It's always a big event.

Brian Jucha: And I have moved here. (Brett goes slack jaw for a second, stopping his art rant)

Brett Cullum: Have you?

Brian Jucha: I have moved here. Yes. The way this partnership all started as I had done the first two shows with INFERNAL BRIDEGROOM (the company before the current one). Jason was asking me every year if I would come and do a show, and I kept saying I wasn't ready.  I wasn’t ready to leave New York. 

I'm very unusual because I like to go to every performance, so it drives me crazy if I have a show running and I can't go. I would do a show for this company and open it, stay for a week, and then leave for two weeks, and then come back for the closing, which drove me crazy with TOAST. To remedy that I had a NEST camera in the theater, and I watched it every night from home. But now, the idea was before COVID, I was gonna look for a place down here and “snowbird.” But then with COVID and people working from home. Not to mention as somebody who lives in Manhattan and is trying to find property in Manhattan! I found a condo in Houston. The bedroom was the size of what I could afford in Manhattan alone, and I just liked it. 

Brett Cullum: Welcome to Houston as a resident! That's exciting. Does that mean that we will see more collaborations with Catastrophic on a regular basis?

Brian Jucha: Well, we hope.

Brett Cullum: Thank you so much for taking this time with me. Let me know when you can go get coffee and we can go somewhere and fill the jukebox up with ONLY Melanie songs, and we can offer folks dances if they give us a nickel. I am so thrilled you live here now! 

LOVEBOMB runs at the MATCH opening on November 15th and plays through December 7th. It is the perfect holiday show about taxi dancers singing Melanie songs! CATASTROPHIC THEATRE is always “pay-what-you-can,” and they have free beer on Fridays.

Photo of Brian Jucha was taken by Atticus Stevenson. Photo of Brian with Melanie is from his own collection. 

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