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Festival Show Update: Beatsville

Beatsville, written by Wendy Wilf and Glenn Slater, appeared in the 2008 NAMT Festival. The show is now preparing for its world premiere in a co-production with NAMT member the 5th Avenue Theatre and Asolo Rep Theatre. This month, we caught up with the writers to hear about the work they’ve done on the piece since the Festival leading up to this premiere.

What was the response to Beatsville like after the 2008 Festival?
We had a great Festival—our cast was spectacular, and made the show look fantastic—and we received a hugely gratifying outpouring of interest from various theatres and organizations who wanted to help us take the next step forward. We sort of fumbled the ball a little—we felt that we still had some writing to do, and weren’t sure what that next step should be, and then we got swept up in other projects. Luckily for us, when we were finally ready to move forward, there was still a lot of goodwill in the community from people who remembered it from the Festival, and they proved instrumental in helping us get the show back on track.

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Festival Show Update: BEATSVILLE

Last month, we caught up with alumni Wendy Wilf and Glenn Slater about the development of their 2008 Festival show, Beatsville, and their upcoming production at NYU-Steinhardt this spring.
   
Greenwich Village, 1959—Playground of bohemians, beatniks and jazzbos. Tragically square Walter Paisley finds that his clay figures, sculpted nudes and papier-mâché busts bring him the acceptance he desperately yearns for. But what if the world discovers that Walter’s body of work consists of actual bodies? A bebop-inflected black comedy/satire.

Beatsville was very well-received after the 2008 Festival so many people would be shocked to hear that it has taken this long for it to finally be seen in the States.  Do you want to talk a bit about why it took a while to get the show off the ground over the last few years? 
We were extremely pleased with Beatsville’s reception at NAMT, but as exciting as the response was, we also knew that we had a lot of work to do before we were ready to move to the next step. Then we hit a unexpected roadblock: a number of Glenn’s other projects all moved towards high-profile productions simultaneously. Every time we began to make real progress on our rewrites, another project demanded his time and attention.  It took a few long and frustrating years before we were able to regain our momentum as a team, but fortunately I was able to keep moving forward on the music and lyrics, writing several new numbers and reworking some of the old ones. When Glenn’s schedule finally eased up, we were able to hit the ground running.

How has the show grown and changed since being at the Festival? 
We loved the version of the show that we brought to NAMT, but as we began our next draft we started running into second-act problems, most of which stemmed from our faithfulness to the source material.  We had to take a big step back and reassess which elements of the original property were integral to our story, and which needed to be rethought and, if possible, improved upon. We also wanted to find ways to heighten the stakes—the story is a sort of whodunit, but since the audience already knows who the murderer is, we realized the tension (and hence the comedy) instead needed to revolve around the mystery of who would catch him, and how. Finally, we had always seen our 1959-set piece as having some satirical points to make about today’s culture, but while our first pass worked as a comedy, we felt the satire wasn’t jelling the way we had hoped. To get to where we wanted to be, we spent a long time looking for ways to make Walter, our main character, feel less passive and to give Carla, our female lead, a strong story arc of her own.  We’ve drawn the supporting characters with much more sharply-etched motivations, and jettisoned a lot of the original source’s second-half story to give our piece a tighter plot and a broader scope. In the process, we’ve also cut a few songs we loved—but added several new ones that we love even more.

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FROM THE ROAD: A Coast to Coast Summer

One of my favorite parts of my job is getting the chance to visit our members around the country.  There is no better way to take the pulse of the industry and help discover new ways for us to serve our members than to meet them on their home turf, see their shows and meet their staffs.  Summer is the busiest travel time for the NAMT staff because it is when the number of shows skyrocket in our member theatres.  My summer was filled with 10 productions (7 of them premieres),  2 workshops and 6 readings from New York to California, from Vermont to Tennessee.  We a few Festival shows and National Fund for New Musicals (NFNM) grant recipients along the way.

Here is the quick rundown (NAMT member theatres and Festival shows are bolded blue):

MAY

Los Angeles, CA- World premiere of Los Otros at Center Theatre Group 
San Diego, CA- World premiere of Nobody Loves You (NAMT Fest ’12, past NFNM Project Development Grant) and Scottsboro Boys at The Old Globe, world premiere of Hands on a Hardbody at La Jolla Playhouse, and the chance to sit in on a rehearsal for Harmony, Kansas (NFNM Production Grant, past Writers Residency Grant) at Diversionary Theatre.
New York, NY- World premiere of February House (past NFNM Project Development Grant) at The Public Theater, reading of Suprema (NFNM Writers Residency Grant) at Ars Nova and Speargrove Presents (NFNM Writers Residency Grant) at New York Theatre Barn

JUNE
Connecticut- Readings of When We Met and String at The O’Neill Theatre Center, production of Mame at Goodspeed Musicals

JULY
New York, NY- Production of Triassic Parq (by Festival alumnus Marshall Pailet) produced by Amas Musical Theatre and New Musical Development Foundation at SoHo Rep  
East Haddam, CT- Final dress of Carousel at Goodspeed Musicals
Poughkeepsie, NY- Workshop of Murder Ballad (by Fest alumna Julia Jordan) at Vassar Powerhouse

AUGUST
Rhinebeck, NY- Reception for Beatsville (NAMT Fest ’08) at Rhinebeck Writers Retreat
Palo Alto, CA- TheatreWorks Festival of New Works with readings of Being Earnest and Triangle (NAMT Fest ’12) and a developmental production of The Trouble With Doug (NAMT Fest ’10)

SEPTEMBER

New York, NY- Reading of notes to MariAnne (NAMT Fest ’11) at New York Theatre Workshop
Weston, VT- World premiere of Pregnancy Pact (NAMT Fest ’11) at Weston Playhouse Theatre Co.  
Crossville, TN- Regional premiere of Golden Boy of the Blue Ridge (NAMT Fest ’11) at Cumberland County Playhouse
New York, NY- Broadway Bound concert at Merkin Hall featuring songs from Watt?!? and The Dogs of Pripyat, both from the 2011 Festival 

And I am pretty sure I am missing a few.

I got a lot more out of these trips than a wallet full of receipts and slight confusion as to my time zone.  I was fortified in my belief that our members and alumni are creating, producing and exploring the best musical theatre in the country.  They are continually engaging, challenging and building audiences through their great work.  They are not resting on their laurels but pushing forward.

It is very hard to find a show today that does not have the NAMT stamp somewhere on it…and that makes me very proud to be just a small part of any show that adds to the crazy tapestry of musicals across the country.  The great work continues all over the country, and I’m the lucky one who gets to take in at least a fraction of it.

Branden Huldeen
New Works Director

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A Joyride to Beatsville

As you can imagine, for Slater there’s a lot of jetting back and forth these days between Los Angeles, New York and London. Then there’s life at home, where a little magic continues to brew with Beatsville, which I (along with a few other fortunate attendees) was able to catch a glimpse of at the National Alliance for Musical Theater (NAMT) new-works presentations this past October.
Beatsville is based on the Roger Corman cult film A Bucket of Blood. “As a script and as a film,” Slater says, “it’s very unformed. The characters aren’t really characters the way we think of them in theatrical terms-they’re more like placeholders in the narrative. But Wendy and I were attracted to the film precisely because it is short and not fully developed. We didn’t have to worry about dismantling a great film in order to resize it for the stage. For us the question was, ‘What do we need to add to make this a viable story?’ It was an idea in search of its final form.”

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