As we enter the last week of the Issaquah run of Stunt Girl, and prepare to move the production to Everett, we thought we’d share some funny thoughts from Stunt Girl book writer and lyricist Peter Kellogg about musicals and his hopes for Stunt Girl. Read on below…
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In 1932, Vernon Duke and Yip Harburg wrote a musical called Walk a Little Faster, a show chiefly known today for one song: “April in Paris.”
A few years later, a friend of Vernon Duke’s, inspired by “April in Paris,” decided to spend the entire month there. The weather was terrible. It rained every day. Upon his return, the friend called Duke to complain.
“What made you go to Paris in April?” Duke asked. “The weather then is always terrible.”
“I went because of your song,” the friend cried.
“Ah,” said Duke apologetically. “We really meant May, but the rhythm required two syllables.”
This is what musicals do. They take the facts and bend them to make a better story or sometimes just for a better rhyme. And musicals about real people and events are the worst offenders. They simplify, omit, exaggerate, combine characters or change chronology all in the name of entertainment.
Of course, musicals aren’t unique in this respect. Movies and plays about real people do it all the time. Shakespeare was notorious for altering facts as needed.
But musicals – musicals are insidious. They give you these catchy little melodies that purport to represent a person’s feelings and then reprise them over and over till you can’t get them out of your head.
When you think of John Adams, what do you see? Perhaps the more erudite of you see the Gilbert Stuart portrait of a mature, serious Adams with a baldpate edged by two wiry outcrops of silver-grey hair. Perhaps some of you see Paul Giammati, the actor who portrayed him in the HBO miniseries. I will always see William Daniels in 1776.
The critics hated 1776 when it first came out, finding the whole idea of the founding fathers singing and dancing offensive. Yet interestingly, this did more to rescue John Adams from obscurity than all the legitimate histories. His crankiness and stubbornness, his affectionate and respectful relationship with his wife, his conviction, only recently proven wrong by the musical itself, that history would remember Franklin, Washington and Jefferson while ignoring him – all this came to life in the musical because of singing “The Egg,” “Who should write it,” and “Does anybody see what I see?” 1776 captured in song and drama a truth of spirit no history ever has and made John Adams into a real, flesh-and-blood person.
My collaborator, David Friedman and I have written a musical called Stunt Girl, which premiered March 19, 2009 at Village Theatre. It purports to tell the real-life story of Nellie Bly, New York’s first female reporter and perhaps its first investigative reporter. To get a job with Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, Nellie pretended to be insane, got herself committed to the Woman’s Insane Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, and then wrote a series of articles about the appalling conditions. Her series was so popular and successful, that she spawned an entire generation of Stunt Girls, woman who risked their lives going undercover to get a story. At one point every major paper in New York had a stunt girl. But Nellie was the first and most famous.
She then went on to achieve a slew of other firsts that we should all be grateful for today. For example, when she took over her husband’s company, she became the first person to provide equal pay for women and one of the first to provide health care. Yet somehow, like John Adams before 1776 only more so, she has disappeared from our collective consciousness, largely forgotten.
Our goal is to make Nellie Bly as well known through our musical as John Adams is through 1776. Because she deserves to be recognized and celebrated, and because, if we succeed, we’ll be very rich!
–Peter Kellogg
Village Theatre Blog 