Do You Hero the People Sing? (feat. Doug Reside)

A cape, a sponge, and a big question: what makes a superhero musical fly? We put It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s Superman (1966) side by side with The SpongeBob SquarePants Musical (2017) and trace how Broadway turns comic book logic and cartoon chaos into real character arcs, zany jokes, and genuinely smart songcraft. 

After we discuss each show and run our Tech Check, rating each show's scientific plausibility, we welcome Doug Reside, curator at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Doug breaks down how theater archives work, what you can actually view at NYPL, and how recording technology helps decide which musicals become widely known over time.  

If you’re into sci fi musical theater, Broadway history, cast recordings, and the weird joy of watching a genre mashup commit to the bit, hit play. Subscribe, share this with fellow theater nerds, and leave a review with your pick for the most underrated superhero musical.

Show Notes:

• Get Doug’s Book
• Watch the 1975 Superman TV special
• Watch the 2013 Encores Performance of Superman
• Find the Spongebob TV special:
  • Paramount+
  • AppleTV
  • YouTube
• NYPL Links:
  • Digital Collections (search for Superman photos in Mary Bryant Papers, etc)
  • Research Catalog (search for everything else)
  • Michael Friedman Reading of The Stranger
  • Across A Crowded Room 2020 Videos:
    • Jonathon's Show (The Carousel of Inevitability and Certain Foreboding)
    • Andi's Show (Rejected)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Andi: welcome back to the Sci-Fi musicals podcast. We are your hosts. I am Andi Lee Carter. 

[00:00:05] Jonathon: And I'm Jonathon Lynch. 

[00:00:07] Andi: And today we are talking about superhero musicals, 

[00:00:09] Jonathon: Bum bum bum! 

[00:00:010] Andi:we're talking about the Superman musical, otherwise known as It's a Bird… It's a Plane… It's Superman! 

[00:00:20] Jonathon: with a lot of ellipses in there, a lot of periods in that title.

[00:00:23] Andi: Yes, it's very punctuated. And we're also talking about the SpongeBob Squarepants musical.

[00:00:30] Jonathon: Two superhero narratives, two very different kinds from different sources, but we love talking about that sort of a thing. We love talking about how these very disparate things actually have a lot in common with each other.

[00:00:41] Andi: And it's funny because our first episode, we were talking about anime and comics and we're still kind of on that train, right, Jonathan? 

[00:00:49] Jonathon: Yes. For at least one of them. I mean, SpongeBob I'm sure has been turned into comics, but SpongeBob's origins is as a cartoon. 

[00:00:56] Andi: Right. But it's still animation.

[00:00:58] Jonathon: It's still animation. Absolutely.

[00:00:59] Andi: What do you say? Let's jump right in and talk about Superman. So the musical. It's a Bird… It's a Plane… It's Superman! 

[00:01:07] Andi: It was written in 1966, composed by Charles Strouse with lyrics by Lee Adams, and a book by David Newman and Robert Benton. And of course, it's based on the comic book character Superman, which was created by Jerry Siegel. And Joe Schuster, published by DC Comics.

[00:01:28] Andi: It did come out on Broadway in 1966. It got great reviews, but it was not well received with audiences. And so it closed after three and a half months. And it was considered a big flop at that time. It lost around $600,000. Hal Prince directed. So he says it only lost $400,000. 

[00:01:54] Jonathon: Directors would say that… 

[00:01:55] Andi: yeah, he was probably a producer as well, but it was still considered one of the biggest flops at that time.

[00:02:00] Jonathon: And the only reason why we don't, I think, talk about this as being such a huge flop nowadays is because we've had such bigger flops since then. 

[00:02:06] Andi: Right. 

[00:02:07] Jonathon: Is the Spider-Man musical still the biggest flop out there? 

[00:02:10] Andi: I don't really think Spider-Man is considered a flop. 'cause it actually ran for five years.

[00:02:14] Jonathon: It did, but I don't think that it earned any of its money back.

[00:02:17] Andi: Oh yeah. Money wise, yes. It was a big old flop. 

[00:02:20] Jonathon: I suppose we could really get into the weeds here about what constitutes a flop on Broadway and what does not. Like how can you get your poster hanging in Joe Allen's? 

[00:02:28] Andi: Right. Right. If you're a producer and you didn't make any money or you lost millions or billions of dollars, then yeah, that would be considered a flop for sure.

[00:02:38] Andi: But if you're looking at it as well this show ran for years and years, how could it be a flop? 

[00:02:42] Jonathon: Or like how often these shows are done in rep or in schools nowadays? 'Cause there have been a lot of Broadway flops and I put that in big quotes where now it's beloved by everybody.

[00:02:51] Jonathon: And people just say they'd done it in high schools and in their community theaters. 

[00:02:55] Andi: It could become a cult classic. 

[00:02:56] Jonathon: Yeah. Yeah. So, let's leave the concept of flop alone for the time being. I'm sorry that I opened that Can of Worms. 

[00:03:02] Andi: Classically, if you take a look around the interwebs, you will see this described as a flop.

[00:03:08] Jonathon: Yes. 

[00:03:08] Andi: But we're gonna talk about it not from the flop perspective. We're looking at it from the sci-fi musical perspective. 

[00:03:15] Jonathon: Absolutely. 

[00:03:15] Andi: So the show was at the Alvin Theater, now it's the Neil Simon, 

[00:03:20] Jonathon: What's playing there right now? 

[00:03:21] Andi: What is playing there right now? Ah. MJ The Musical. 

[00:03:26] Jonathon: Okay. At least speaking for myself, going out and seeing jukebox musicals isn't something I do as frequently as seeing original work.

[00:03:33] Jonathon: That's not a dig on jukebox musicals. 

[00:03:35] Andi: No. Some are really good. In fact, I've heard MJ The Musical is very good. I've heard that too. And I would like to see it. It's just that when it came out, there was another musical by Michael Jackson, who was a friend of mine that I wanted to see more than the other MJ musical.

[00:03:51] Andi: Yeah, different Michael Jackson. But anyway, I digress. After the Broadway production in 1975, they decided to do an ABC TV special. And there have been some revivals including a 2013 New York City Center Encores production. There was a production in the West End in 2015, and I believe there's some regional productions including one this summer in L.A.

[00:04:19] Andi: And as you mentioned before, this is one of those shows that local theater companies are very interested in doing because it has a big cast. It is a great score and it's a lot of fun to do because, a franchise, a brand like Superman is such a big thing. It's kind of never going outta style.

[00:04:40] Andi: And Strouse and Adams are classic as well, having written Bye Bye Birdie and Strouse wrote Annie, and it's a show that even though it didn't do well in its time, has some staying power. 

[00:04:51] Jonathon: You can understand why people would be interested in doing this show now.

[00:04:53] Andi: …especially right now when Superman is hot.

[00:04:57] Andi: Let's talk about the story. 

[00:04:58] Jonathon: Alright, so It's a Bird… It's a Plane… It's Superman! is the story of Superman. For you two listeners at home who have subscribed to a musical theater sci-fi podcast and may not know Superman's story, I should probably get into this because every version of Superman is a little bit different.

[00:05:19] Jonathon: In this one, it really focuses on Superman when he's in Metropolis and he has his alter ego of mild-mannered Clark Kent who works at the Daily Planet with Lois Lane and a host of other colorful personalities who all work at the newspaper. This is something that I really love about the show, is that there's this supervillain team up to take down Superman, which I feel is such a modern idea.

[00:05:45] Jonathon: None of these villains are, as far as I can tell, established comic book villains like they were created for the show.

[00:05:50] Andi: No. In fact, they specifically decided not to go with an established comic book storyline and create an original storyline for the musical.

[00:05:59] Jonathon: Great. So there is a mad scientist named 

[00:06:04] Jonathon: Dr. Abner Sedgwick and his big claim to fame is that he's a ten time Nobel Prize loser, which he's got a great song about all the times that he lost. And for sci-fi fans out there, this is gold, it's nerdy. He talks about all the science stuff. It's great lyric writing too. I guess if we have a primary villain, it's probably him, he's probably the one who does the most damage to Superman ultimately.

[00:06:25] Jonathon: Then we have Max Mencken,

[00:06:29] Andi: …no relation to Alan. 

[00:06:30] Jonathon: who is another reporter at the Daily Planet. He is with Sydney, who is another “girl reporter” along with Lois Lane at The Daily Planet. And I'm gonna put “girl reporter” in big quotes here. 

[00:06:41] Andi: It's the sixties… 

[00:06:42] Jonathon: But he doesn't really wanna be with her. He really kinda wants to be with Lois Lane.

[00:06:46] Jonathon: But Lois, in this version of it, is very much in love with Superman. And so he figures if he could get rid of Superman, then he could have a shot with Lois Lane. If Dr. Abner Sedgwick is like mad scientist trope walking and talking; Max Mencken is like toxic masculinity, trope, walking and talking. Then we've got the third villain, which, okay....

[00:07:05] Jonathon: So if there's a reason why companies should not put it up nowadays, it's probably this. 

[00:07:09] Andi: I think it's been rewritten. 

[00:07:10] Jonathon: Okay, good, in the original, it was a set of Chinese acrobats who also do crime on the side. 

[00:07:16] Andi: Of course, at the time was done in a very racist way. 

[00:07:20] Jonathon: Oh yeah, yeah. 

[00:07:21] Andi: It was bad, and the actors were not Chinese. 

[00:07:24] Jonathon: Bad musical cliches going on, but later they did rewrite it.

[00:07:28] Jonathon: You can see this in the TV movie version of it as Italian mobsters, which is, it's sometimes problematic 'cause they're very cliched, but I guess a little less. However, they do have one of my favorite songs in the show. And I think that they're the muscle behind the operation.

[00:07:45] Jonathon: They're all upset that Superman is coming in and stopping their crime spree from happening. So they figure if they can get rid of Superman, then they can just run amuck and do crime. So they team up together it's a fun direction that they take to try to take down Superman because they psychologically torture him.

[00:08:04] Jonathon: Dr. Abner Sedgwick comes in and psychoanalyzes Superman and basically emotionally stunts him.

[00:08:11] Andi: He gets all sad, and mopey in act two. 

[00:08:14] Jonathon: Yeah. 

[00:08:14] Andi: Superman does and sings a song about. Being sad… 

[00:08:18] Jonathon: …and mopey 

[00:08:19] Andi: …and he's like, “why can't a man of steel be a man who is happy?” That's not it. 

[00:08:25] Jonathon: He’s like, “doesn't anybody realize that I can cry too?”

[00:08:28] Andi: Yeah. Like “Superman can cry.” Yeah. That's not the song. 

[00:08:31] Jonathon: Yeah. 

[00:08:32] Andi: It's funny. It's sappy, it's silly, and it's great musical theater. But the rest of act two is, Superman gets his mojo back and he beats up the bad guys in a final battle. 

[00:08:44] Jonathon: In a final battle that is called "Pow! Bam! Zonk!" all exclamation points after that.

[00:08:51] Andi: That’s great. That's how you want a comic book story to end.

[00:08:54] Jonathon: You want fists flying, you want the big epic fight at the end of it. 

[00:08:57] Andi: Yeah. So it's classic superhero stuff. 

[00:08:59] Jonathon: And that's something that I do wanna touch on with this one is I feel that with a lot of the other kinds of material that, we've already talked about and that we will be talking about in this podcast, it's gonna be a lot of the format of the story is adjusting to the science fiction conventions that we're talking about.

[00:09:18] Jonathon: When we were talking about Starmites, it's this wild comic book romp, how it feels episodic, the lyric writing is such that it feels like yolpy from a comic book and less fully formed articulate lyrics at times.

[00:09:31] Jonathon: When we were talking about Death Note, the sort of like grand scale of it, how that affects the music and that affects the format that affects the staging. I feel that It's a Bird… It's a plane… It's Superman! is interesting because they treated the comic book origins.

[00:09:46] Jonathon: They treated this big science fictional kind of a topic like its source material for any other musical that they might have written. Now it does affect some things of it, like the orchestrations of it where it's this big brassy, comic booky kind of a thing. But like at no time was I listening thinking, oh wow, this is really outside of the box from what I would expect from a golden age musical.

[00:10:10] Jonathon: This is 100% a golden age musical that they do some interesting things with, to pay homage to the sort of more outstanding origins of the source material. 

[00:10:21] Andi: I think in the TV adaptation they do a lot more comic book-y transitions and 

[00:10:27] Jonathon: Yeah, 

[00:10:27] Andi: Announcer-y voices. That they definitely don't do in the stage show and I personally think are unnecessary and interrupt the action.

[00:10:36] Jonathon: Something else too that the listeners at home should be aware of is when I talk about how awesome the orchestrations are, when Andi's talking about the orchestrations, I think we're specifically referring to the original production of it or to the cast albums of it and not to the television adaptation.

[00:10:51] Andi: Absolutely not. 

[00:10:51] Jonathon: What they did in the television adaptation was they updated the music to a like mid 1970s kind of sound rather than the sort of golden age mid-1960 sound of the musical. I understand the impulse to do that. 

[00:11:04] Andi: They modernized it. 

[00:11:05] Jonathon: Yeah. And doing something different with it and putting it up to date, I appreciate all of those things.

[00:11:10] Jonathon: I think that it also just flattens out the score and makes some of it sound, instead of UpToDate and cool—It makes it sound cheesy even for the time. 

[00:11:18] Andi: It's like when you paint over brick. 

[00:11:20] Jonathon: And meanwhile, that original orchestration is very good. They're doing some really cool creative things.

[00:11:26] Jonathon: The overture starts with, starts growling, trumpet of the many things that I do. I also play trumpet. Like the effect you get when you play it, like your lips pursed, but then you put a voice behind it. So you go, (trumpet sound) it gives these weird harmonic overtones in the instrument and just makes it sound like this, like rock is kind of growl.

[00:11:45] Jonathon: And I so appreciate that. That's how the show started. It starts with your traditional musical theater brass put into this growly, jazzy, raucous kind of a place. 

[00:11:56] Andi: So I wanna talk about the cast. Superman was played by Bob Holiday and he was actually the second person in history to ever play Superman after George Reeves in the live action TV show.

[00:12:13] Andi: And because of his appearance on stage so many times, he has a record for the most live appearances in character. 

[00:12:26] Jonathon: Wow. And that stands to today. 

[00:12:30] Andi: And because he lived a long time, he also reigned as the eldest surviving live action Superman until he died in 2017. 

[00:12:42] Jonathon: Wow. 

[00:12:42] Andi: Playing such an iconic character, he got to be in this tradition of that character as well, even though it was just the musical I'm putting air quotes on and being sarcastic.

[00:12:56] Andi: He also did a bunch of Tonight Show appearances, with Johnny Carson and he was in the Macy's Day parade and, he did ads, he did a lot of commercials as Superman, and he attended the Encores production in 2013.

[00:13:18] Andi: Sydney, the character who was Max Menckin’s girlfriend, slash the one he forsook because he was in love with Lois. She was played by Linda Lavin; she went on to play Alice in the TV show, Alice which was one of the longest running shows on tv.

[00:13:43] Andi: And then in the TV special version, that character Sydnee was played by Loretta Sweat, who was Hot Lips on M.A.S.H., which was one of my favorite shows as a kid. And then also in the TV special, the character of Lois Lane was played by Leslie Ann Warren, who was one of the women who screen tested for Lois Lane in the 1978 movie version.

[00:14:12] Andi: But that part of course went to Margot Kidder. And also, an interesting fact about the movie, the book writer for the musical, David Newman wrote the screenplay for the 1978 movie. Hmm. As a book writer myself, it's very exciting to see okay, he wrote technically what is known as a Broadway flop. And then he went on to write one of the most successful blockbuster hits of its time.

[00:14:44] Jonathon: There's hope for all of us. 

[00:14:46] Andi: Let's talk about the songs, let's talk about the music. 

[00:14:48] Jonathon: Awesome. Yeah. The standout song from this show at the time, and nowadays is the song “You've Got Possibilities.” In a book, Sondheim once wrote that that is one of the songs that he wished that he would've written.

[00:15:04] Andi: Oh, I wanted to say something about Sondheim. 

[00:15:06] Jonathon: Oh, yeah. 

[00:15:07] Andi: So there is a story that on opening night, the crowd just didn't get it. No one was laughing or clapping at the show. Mm-hmm. Except for one person.

[00:15:19] Andi: One man kept laughing and someone in the lobby at intermission said, “who was that young man that kept laughing in all the wrong places?” Turns out it was Stephen Sondheim. 

[00:15:30] Jonathon: Yes. 

[00:15:32] Andi: So, anyway, he got it. 

[00:15:33] Jonathon: He got it. “You've Got Possibilities” is a great number. It lives up to the hype not just for how fun it is itself for the staging of it and for the performance possibilities.

[00:15:44] Jonathon: So the premise of it is that Sydney, the other quote, unquote girl reporter at the Daily Planet she looks at Clark and is like, “Hey, you know, you could be pretty handsome too if we just like put a little bit of work into you…”

[00:15:57] Andi: took off those glasses. 

[00:15:58] Jonathon: And then she sings this whole song about, yeah, get rid of the glasses, do your hair.

[00:16:02] Jonathon: My favorite bit of staging in almost any musical is in this song and it's where like Sydney's, taking his hat, like messing with it and at one point she goes up behind him and undoes his tie and starts unbuttoning his shirt to be like, flirty, fun. But of course, like he's Clark Kent, so he’s got the Superman suit underneath that and it's a big S and he is like, “whoa, my cover up!” 'Cause like he doesn't want a secret identity to be revealed, but she's like, oh, but you're being so shy. 

[00:16:31] Andi: He’s so coy... 

[00:16:32] Jonathon: It's just a perfect little nugget of a moment in this musical. 

[00:16:35] Andi: It's also a Pillsbury commercial. 

[00:16:36] Jonathon: It's a Pillsbury commercial. Yes. 

[00:16:38] Andi: Yeah, it's the little Pillsbury Doughboy dancing to it.

[00:16:41] Andi: It's adorable. 

[00:16:43] Jonathon: One of my favorites is, “You've Got What I Need,” and it is the duet between Dr. Sedgwick, the mad scientist, and Max the reporter. And this is the moment late in Act Two when they finally decide, yeah, we're gonna team up. We know Superman, secret identity, we're gonna bring 'em down and we're gonna do it together.

[00:17:04] Jonathon: And it's a fun, well constructed number. It's a buddy comedy and just the gay subtext is barely subtext and at this moment in the show with these two semi camp characters coming out and practically being like, look, we're in love is just fantastic.

[00:17:23] Andi: I love that for them. 

[00:17:25] Jonathon: “Doing Good” is a fun number. That's Superman's character defining song. That's a lot of fun. 

[00:17:30] Andi: That's his opening number, right? 

[00:17:31] Jonathon: Yeah. I like the, “It's Superman” song a lot and 

[00:17:37] Andi: I love, that's stuck in my head. 

[00:17:38] Jonathon: Okay. A I think it gets stuck in your head just from the way that the song is structured, the, , the sheer hookiness of the material.

[00:17:44] Jonathon: And I think that Strouse and Adams knew how hooky the song was because they kept peppering it throughout the show. There's some really good compositional heft going on through this. Themes come back through the course of it. They have sections where you've got multiple numbers weaving in and out of each other.

[00:18:00] Jonathon: Reprises of things. This is a well structured show and one of the pillars of this construction is this song, “It's Superman” and it's Lois Lane singing about how she wishes she weren't in love with Superman because how can you compete? It's this guy who's amazing and what am I to him?

[00:18:19] Andi: I was also thinking about how “It's Superman” is a sort of unconventional love song. 

[00:18:26] Jonathon: Yeah. 

[00:18:27] Andi: Because I'm working on a love song for a show that I'm writing and I was like, I want it to be like a more upbeat, unconventional love song. Kinda like, “It's Superman.” 

[00:18:36] Jonathon: No, it's very clever.

[00:18:38] Andi: It moves quickly, but there's still the longer held notes and the orchestra does a lot to keep it moving, but it's still romantic.

[00:18:46] Jonathon: Yeah. My favorite. Not counting. You've got possibilities. That's a very deep cut in this one, written specifically for the movie. So this is the one reason to see the TV movie in my opinion.

[00:18:58] Jonathon: It's a song that the Mafiosos sing called, “It's a [Great] Country” and it follows in that musical theater tradition of songs like “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” where you get the mob bosses coming in and having just a fun moment on stage together where they get the show cleverness even though they're given accents like this going on.

[00:19:18] Andi: We should finish up with Superman to say what makes this show Sci-fi Musical gold? 

[00:19:25] Jonathon: So yeah, superhero narratives, I believe, are inherently somewhat science fictional because what is giving somebody their powers? Is it technology? Is it magic? Either way, we're going through that line of speculative fiction.

[00:19:39] Jonathon: So you have somebody who is, an alien who has all these super powers who for some reason his skin is charged by the yellow sun, which they don't get much into…

[00:19:50] Andi: Not in the musical, but it's a big plot line in the movie.

[00:19:53] Jonathon: Right there. We're in a science fictional world, even if everything else is very like, oh, I'm stopping bank robbers and I'm getting cats outta trees, if nothing else is science fictional, that happens.

[00:20:03] Jonathon: But we're also in a world that happens to have a university sponsored death ray. We've got doomsday devices going on here and. It is a scientific world as well, judging by the fact that we have a mad scientist villain who's talking about all of his Nobel Prize losses and bringing in real science or at least real science terms into the mix for this.

[00:20:23] Andi: Yeah. For me it's the alien of it all. He is literally an alien. That to me is science fiction. When we're talking about superheroes we forget, Superman is so a part of our culture as just a guy we know on earth, but he's a full on alien.

[00:20:39] Jonathon: And different versions of him I think are on a spectrum of how much he's trying to insist, “oh, I'm just a farm boy from Kansas” versus “I am an alien who works very different from everybody here. But I love and care for all of you, and I just wanna help.”

[00:20:55] Andi: Yeah. And again, I think that this new movie is really emphasizing the “Superman's an alien. Let's get him!” aspect of it.

[00:21:05] Jonathon: It's science fiction that always says more about the culture we're living right now than it does about any sort of real prediction about the future. 

[00:21:13] Andi: Yeah, it totally, and that's what I love about it, because it allows us to talk about prescient issues in an allegory that's just like, “oh, it's just a, it's just a story.”

[00:21:26] Jonathon: “Don't worry about it just telling a story. It's fine.” 

[00:21:28] Andi: “It's a story. What are you getting mad about? He is just a guy in a cape. Uh, what? It's not politics.”

[00:21:35] Jonathon: “He wears underwear on the outside. Like, what, what these, he is goofy. It's fine.” 

[00:21:39] Andi: All right. Let's move on to one of my favorite musicals ever.

[00:21:45] Andi: The SpongeBob musical. Yay!! SpongeBob The Musical is co conceived and directed by Tina Landau, with a book by Kyle Jarrow, based on the Nickelodeon animated TV series, SpongeBob Squarepants with music by various composers and orchestrations and Arrangements by Tom Kitt. It was developed by the Flaming Lips Lead Singer Wayne Coyne.

[00:22:15] Andi: It was announced through Nickelodeon's Development project in 2015 and originally premiered in Chicago in 2016, and then landed on Broadway in 2017. It opened at the Palace Theater, so it was nominated for 12 Tony Awards, and it won one for Best Set. It was a really cool set, but I personally feel it was robbed.

[00:22:42] Jonathon: What else is going on that year? What, what won in 2017? 

[00:22:46] Andi: The Band's Visit

[00:22:48] Andi: and I have nothing against The Band's Visit. It's a great show. I love David Yasbeck. 

[00:22:54] Jonathon: Anyway, back to SpongeBob. 

[00:22:55] Andi: So after a devastating Tony's blow it closed September 2018, due to theater renovations.

[00:23:08] Andi: And at the time it had played 29 previews and 327 regular performances, which is not terrible. 

[00:23:15] Jonathon: Yeah, that's, it's a fine run. 

[00:23:17] Andi: It's basically a year. It ran for a year, which is not great. Not horrible. It was good enough for a tour, right? 

[00:23:26] Jonathon: Yes.

[00:23:27] Andi: So then it went on tour and it went to a North American tour as well as a UK tour. And, then it did a live taping, just like Superman. 

[00:23:42] Jonathon: But this one's good. You should definitely watch this. 

[00:23:45] Andi: Yeah. This one I recommend.

[00:23:46] Jonathon: It’s gonna give you a great idea about what the show is and what it's about, and why it's so exciting.

[00:23:51] Andi: It's really fun. They made a couple of adjustments, but overall you get a similar experience to what the live show was. It's very good. Do you wanna talk about the plot? 

[00:24:02] Jonathon: Yeah, let's do this. Alright. It's SpongeBob. It is all of the characters that you know and love from the TV series.

[00:24:11] Jonathon: It's a little difficult to talk about plot quickly in this one because there are eight or ten plots going on all at the same time. But the sort of overarching thing going on with this is that there is a volcano nearby SpongeBob's hometown of Bikini Bottom, and it is set to explode and wipe the town off the face of the earth.

[00:24:34] Jonathon: And we see everybody react to the volcano going on. SpongeBob decides that he's going to save the town. And Sandy Squirrel decides to go with them because she's also a scientist. And she's invented a device that's gonna stop the volcano from blowing up.

[00:24:48] Jonathon: But she has to overcome the prejudice of the town who sees this land mammal in their midst. And it's like, oh, let's go after you. You're somebody different so you don't belong here. Even though she just wants to save the town. And then we got SpongeBob's best friend Patrick, who's a starfish.

[00:25:05] Jonathon: And, at one point, there's a school of fish who decide that he is the Messiah and he starts a cult. So his struggle then is which community do I truly belong in? Is it where I have all these adoring fans who regard every word that I say is some sort of prophecy?

[00:25:21] Jonathon: Or is it with my BFF? We get Squidward, who's trying to put on a concert to save the town, to raise funds for it. And he just wants to perform and be a star. And that kind of doesn't happen. Mr. Krabs is trying to make a buck before the end of the world and plankton, who's trying to use the opportunity to, so fear and division in order to brainwash the town.

[00:25:47] Jonathon: So they will all eat at his restaurant instead of Mr. Krabs. We get Mr. Krabs’ daughter, a whale who just wants to sing and join the rock band that's coming to town. Oh. And then, patchy the pirate who all he wants to do is break into the Broadway theater and meet SpongeBob. And so he propels from the rafters at one point and breaks in and sings a pirate song about how pirates aren't respected.

[00:26:08] Jonathon: Did I cover all the plot points? There's a lot. 

[00:26:11] Andi: Ah, you did pretty good. 

[00:26:13] Jonathon: Oh, right. Yeah. SpongeBob wants to be a manager. He wants to be management material. And, Mr. Krabs is like, no, you're just a simple sponge.

[00:26:20] Andi: “A simple sponge is all you'll ever be.” 

[00:26:22] Jonathon: That's the sort of thing that he has to overcome. But in the end, it's the fact that he is a simple sponge who's good at management that ends up saving the day.

[00:26:30] Jonathon: And that's sort of his superpower. 

[00:26:31] Andi: Superpower is managing. 

[00:26:33] Jonathon: Yes. And in the end he gets promoted to manager, but there's no extra pay, just more responsibilities. And of course SpongeBob is thrilled about that. If Superman's big thing in his show is that I need to accept who I am, that I am a force for good in the world, and that I can use my powers for good.

[00:26:53] Jonathon: It's kind of a similar arc to what SpongeBob has to do. Honestly. 

[00:26:56] Andi: It's exactly the same. That's why I wanted to put these together. 

[00:27:00] Jonathon: Yeah. Where SpongeBob has to overcome the psychological manipulation, intentional or otherwise, of Mr. Krabs who's like, no, SpongeBob, you're just a simple sponge. Overcoming that and saying, well, I can be more than just a simple sponge.

[00:27:13] Jonathon: And actually your simple sponge-ness is your superpower. 

[00:27:16] Andi: And I think they're both equally eternally optimistic. 

[00:27:21] Jonathon: Yeah. Yeah. It's not, we're not talking like Batman, a dark brooding character who wants to clean up the streets from those criminals. These are the happiest, most positive characters you can think of.

[00:27:35] Andi: They both believe in the best of humanity. They both have the most faith in people, whether they should or not. 

[00:27:45] Jonathon: And in true musical theater form, we see that in both of their songs. Doing good from Superman where he is like, Hey, I believe everybody's great and we should all be doing good.

[00:27:53] Jonathon: And then SpongeBob, who is singing about how it's the best day ever, even if the volcano is gonna erupt in seven minutes. 

[00:27:59] Andi: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

[00:28:01] Jonathon: Something that I love about the plot of SpongeBob.

[00:28:04] Jonathon: I'm fascinated by the idea of television shows being adapted into musicals because they seem like they would be good fits for each other, but television shows are structured so differently.

[00:28:16] Jonathon: They work in terms of these tiny little, episodic, arcs that, how would you expand that into a fuller musical? And for SpongeBob, because so many of these characters are so beloved and so interesting and unique. We live in this very well developed world where there are a lot of these things going on, and they all still tie into the theme about community and what we can do for, and how our community gives back to us.

[00:28:41] Andi: I think it's really interesting how much it stays true to its source material. 'Cause you would find that kind of heavily stuffed multiple-multi plot in a television series even one episode would have multiple plots, because that's how TV is written.

[00:29:01] Andi: You have the A plot, the B plot, the C plot. You have all these characters and they're all converging towards the end of the episode, but they all have their little things going on and they're all gonna tie together towards the end.

[00:29:16] Andi: And another thing I love that is very similar to the television show is the fricking Foley artist on stage. 

[00:29:25] Jonathon: They have a Foley artist on stage. It's awesome. Characters will wander through and they'll be squeaking as they go. It's so fun. 

[00:29:34] Andi: I'm obsessed with Foley. Foley is one of my favorite things ever.

[00:29:38] Jonathon: It feels like so much of the show is we're really gonna be bringing the cartoon sensibility into the fabric of the show.

[00:29:46] Andi: We haven't talked about the score yet, but I will say, Tom Kit is the genius that brought it all together as the music, arranger, orchestrator and brilliant person that made it work.

[00:30:00] Jonathon: So for those of you at home who are more toward the science fictional end of this, unless toward the trenches of musical theater in shows you have your composer and your lyricist and your book writer, there're three writers behind the work. But composers can come from anywhere in the music world.

[00:30:17] Jonathon: And this is a thing going back to even the earliest days of musical theater, where you would have some people who could come up with a really good tune but couldn't actually write it down or who had a band. And so they'll come up with this amazing demo and then just hand it off to the creatives and be like, here you go.

[00:30:31] Jonathon: Do something with this. And even your more traditional kinds of writers, sometimes you just need somebody to be there and change the music a bit. I'm not talking about changing the DNA of the music but by arrangement I mean like the style of it or rearranging things or putting things in a different context or adding repeats to stuff adding underscore and, scene change music.

[00:30:56] Jonathon: Those are all the purview of the arranger.

[00:30:58] Jonathon: Not every show has an arranger. When Bernstein does a show, you can guarantee that Bernstein is also the orchestrator of the show.

[00:31:06] Jonathon: But in a show like this where you have a dozen writers who are all contributing. I'm just gonna run through a quick list. Jonathan Colton, who's a nerd rocker who did the score for, portal the video game.

[00:31:21] Jonathon: David Bowie and the Plain white tees and ti and panic at the disco. You get the flaming lips, you get Sara Bareilles, and John Legend, They Might Be Giants.

[00:31:28] Jonathon: And those are just a few of the names on this one. These are very idiosyncratic musicians who are very recognizable by their own work.

[00:31:38] Jonathon: So each of them is in their own separate universe. And this is the genius of Tom Kitt, is that he was able to bring all of these wildly different artists together to create a full score.

[00:31:52] Jonathon: One that sounds like it's of a piece with each other. And that still sounds like their original creators and he was able to put those creators in charge of the songs and the moments in the show that would suit them best. And that's the fricking genius of the guy.

[00:32:10] Jonathon: So for example “Chop to the Top,” which is a Lady A song. It starts with Sandy being like, come on, we can chop to the top of the volcano. 'Cause it's canonical that Sandy, the squirrel is a martial artist and a scientist and she's from Texas.

[00:32:27] Jonathon: So having a folkier kind of group, like Lady A coming in and writing chopped to the top makes a lot of sense for the character. You get the ballad between SpongeBob and Patrick, “I Guess I Miss You.” Which is John Legend and the guy can write a hook. And just the longing for being with somebody you love 'cause it really is a love ballad.

[00:32:51] Jonathon: Having Yolanda Adams do “Super Sea Star Savior,” which turns into this raucous gospel number about the cult that Patrick is inadvertently starting is perfect. So there are just so many clever ways that Tom Kitt was able to wrench all of these artists into one vision on the show while keeping their own unique kind of qualities is nothing short of a miracle.

[00:33:17] Andi: And I have to mention my absolute favorite song I'm Not a Loser, by They Might Be Giants, sung and tap danced by Squidward and his many feet. It's a four-legged tap dance and the lyrics are genius. 

I'M NOT A LOSER. 

I DON'T SECRETLY HATE MYSELF. 

I'M NOT SINGING THIS TO NO ONE.

IT'S NOT THE CASE THAT NO ONE CARES. 

I'M NOT A FAILURE. 

I DON'T NOT HAVE TALENT. 

WHEN OTHERS SEE ME, 

THEY CAN'T SEE THE NOBODY THAT ISN'T THERE.

[00:33:48] Jonathon: This feels like it goes back to the roots of musical theater with the conditional love song as not necessarily love, more like love of self, I guess.

[00:33:56] Andi: And then on top of this delusion, he has a literal delusion where the Sea anemone chorus comes out and sings with him and says, no, you're not delusional. You're not fantasizing about a sea anemone chorus singing along with you. 

[00:34:11] Jonathon: Put that in Exhibit A about what great subtext is in musical theater about a character saying something, but really there's something else big going right underneath the surface of that.

[00:34:19] Andi: Also the way, the humor of They Might Be Giants and the way they capitalize on that kind of silliness was a match made in heaven right there. 

[00:34:32] Jonathon: And that was their Tony presentation, right? 

[00:34:35] Andi: Mm, that's right. Yes. He did do it for the Tonys. 

[00:34:38] Jonathon: So yes. Uh, you listeners at home, you can check out the full musical, but you can also just check this song out too, because that's a thing that exists and is amazing.

[00:34:49] Andi: Oh, yeah. I wanna shout out the Foley artist, Mike Dobson.

[00:34:53] Andi: Just. Brilliant.

[00:34:54] Jonathon: Yeah. 

[00:34:54] Andi: I also happened to be working on a musical about a volcano. Completely unrelated, but I was always like, well, we'll just use SpongeBob as an inspiration for this.

[00:35:06] Jonathon: It's also very timely. There's a disaster going on. Let's turn on the outsider

[00:35:14] Andi: what makes this show Sci-fi 

[00:35:16] Jonathon: Okay. Anytime that we're getting into, animals as characters. And I don't mean , oh yeah, put a GoPro on my cat and watch my cat run around the apartment. Anytime that is a speaking, thinking animal.

[00:35:29] Jonathon: I think that we're already in this science fiction fantasy sort of realm. Why are these animals the way they are? Who knows? Is it that important? Not really. When we're dealing with Bikini Bottom, there's some allure about that, that it takes place at the Bikini, atoll where they tested a lot of atomic bombs.

[00:35:46] Andi: I was gonna say, isn't there an atomic or nuclear connection? 

[00:35:50] Jonathon: Yes, there is. Which could say why all of a sudden, this simple sponge could be running around working at a restaurant run by a crab. Does that impact the lore? Not really. No. But it's remarkable that Bikini Bottom Yeah, it's a cheeky kind of name of a town, but it might also reference this real world thing, right?

[00:36:08] Jonathon: It takes place in the urban ish center. There's a news reporter that comes up. There's a mayor who is trying to curry favor with her constituents. People watch tv.

[00:36:19] Jonathon: So we're in this modern day science-y world. And then we've got sandy cheeks, the anything but mad scientist, 

[00:36:28] Andi: right? The most down to earth scientist. 

[00:36:31] Jonathon: Yes. Like the opposite of Dr. Abner Sedgwick from Superman who comes up with a jet pack and a device to stop a volcano from blowing up and is all about science and lives in this bubble under the sea because she enjoys living there more.

[00:36:49] Jonathon: She didn't like Texas that much. And we've got plankton who has a robot wife, Karen, and he wants to do mass hypnosis on the entire town, and every step along this way, we're dealing with some weird science magic thing that's happening. It's not a quote unquote realistic world. We're very much in science fiction fantasy here.

[00:37:09] Andi: Absolutely. I agree with all of that. It's a full on cartoon that's already living in that very heightened reality. There's nothing super grounded about it. What are the rules within this world? What can't you do? 

[00:37:30] Jonathon: I think we're operating by rule of funny here. If it's funny, go for it. And in the TV series, there are Gods running around and there are like people who go around as superheroes which they reference in the show 'cause they're watching them on tv, right?

[00:37:48] Andi: Yeah. There's not a lot of rules of the world that can't be broken if they want to, 

[00:37:56] Jonathon: There's even a lot of break in the fourth wall, turning to the audience, interacting with them. Patchy the pirate is a character who lives in the audience and who's trying to break into the show and is successful by the end of it. I think the only rules that are here are who are these characters? How are they interacting to this situation? 

[00:38:14] Andi: I really enjoy that kind of silliness and campiness and just getting to the heart of the relationships of the characters and having such rich backstories really does a lot of work for the show.

[00:38:35] Andi: You don't have to create these characters from nothing. They already exist so fully that you can write a story that they already live in. It gives a lot of freedom to tell the story. 

[00:38:46] Jonathon: Yeah, and I think one part of that is related to like audience's knowledge of these characters.

[00:38:51] Jonathon: If we don't know who SpongeBob is, we know who SpongeBob is within the first eight bars of him singing his song. If we don't know who Patrick is, we find out from the first eight bars of his singing [00:39:00] the song and we get the benefit of the enormous backstory to funnel it through the character.

[00:39:06] Andi: I did not grow up watching SpongeBob but I did not feel like I missed anything by not knowing the backstories of these characters.

[00:39:17] Jonathon: When SpongeBob first aired, I was probably a little bit old for the demographic of it. And so I never really got into it at the time. However I've got a brother who is nine years younger than me, and he got into SpongeBob for a while, and then my kid got into SpongeBob for a while.

[00:39:32] Jonathon: So I feel like I was exposed. I had seen at least in some capacity, all of the characters who were on that stage. There were some gaps in my own knowledge of it, for example, I didn't know that like Karen and Plankton were a romantic partnership.

[00:39:46] Jonathon: And the minute that he said Yes, my robot and wife, I'm like, oh, okay. That's just some of the lore that I missed. Great. Done. I get it.

[00:39:53] Andi: Yeah, exactly. I felt like because the characters were already so developed you could easily deliver the exposition. I wish that when we create new characters that we could so easily deliver exposition in that way. 

[00:40:08] Jonathon: We are frequent members and contributors to a number of different songwriting workshops here in New York City, and how many times have we been in that workshop?

[00:40:17] Jonathon: And I'm including myself and probably you in this too. I know that my character wants this, and so they're gonna sing this song about it, but I'm just not sure where it's going after this, or what else the character wants. But if somebody with as much backstory as SpongeBob says, Hey, what would SpongeBob do? You'd be like, oh, well I can answer that. SpongeBob would do one of these 15 things. 

[00:40:39] Andi: I feel like the lesson might be for me: get to know your characters. Write ten seasons of a television show. And then write a musical. 

[00:40:48] Jonathon: Yes. That is the most practical way to do this. 

[00:40:51] Andi: All right, so now let's do our segment called Tech Check, where we check in on how futuristic or scientifically plausible each world of the musical is.

[00:41:04] Andi: We're gonna rate from one to ten how scientifically plausible the world of Superman musical is. 

[00:41:15] Jonathon: Whew. Alright. Humanoid Alien coming to Earth superpowers meets Mad scientists with Death Ray. None of the science fictional elements in It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman! are very plausible at all.

[00:41:28] Jonathon: Maybe you can stretch it and say a death rate could be possible, but it would probably just be we're exploding nuclear bombs now. It could be a laser or an acoustic weapon so the death ray is the most plausible thing about, It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman!

[00:41:41] Jonathon: And for that matter, I would say the most plausible thing about it is that it's a university death rate too.

[00:41:46] Jonathon: I would say though beyond those elements, we don't really need to explain what Metropolis is. It seems to operate by the scientific rules that we're familiar with. Gravity exists. Biology as we know it exists apart from [00:42:00] Superman. So a two, a three, somewhere around there.

[00:42:03] Andi: Yeah, I'd agree with that. And we're just talking about the musical, but even bringing in what I just saw in the movie, they are trying to make it semi plausible what could happen if we understood things like quantum physics and multiverses. Those are potentials, but they're definitely not things we understand or potentially could happen in this reality that we know. So it's definitely low for me. Yeah, probably a two. All right. How about SpongeBob?

[00:42:30] Andi: Will we rate SpongeBob one to ten?

[00:42:32] Jonathon: If Superman got the points that it did from me, because at least Metropolis seems to operate under fairly normal scientific principles.

[00:42:40] Jonathon: SpongeBob doesn't even do that. There's nothing scientifically plausible about this world. The only potential thing would be if it were bombed out from a nuclear blast, at Bikini atoll,

[00:42:52] Andi: yeah, that's the only thing that almost makes sense. 

[00:42:57] Jonathon: And almost is really stretching the term almost too, because not how radiation works.

[00:43:03] Andi: No, it doesn't make animals talk. 

[00:43:06] Jonathon: Nothing about SpongeBob is realistic. I'm gonna have to give that a one. It is. Yeah. I'm sure plankton has a death ray and that's that's realistic. Maybe the jet pack, 'cause the jet packs that I see on my TikTok feed, they're like water operated, where like somebody has a hose leading to the water and they like, fly out over the water so I feel like that's the only fairly plausible thing in it. I don't think it's enough to raise my score above a one.

[00:43:32] Jonathon: Honestly, 

[00:43:33] Andi: No. I'd still, I'd give it a zero or a one. 

[00:43:37] Jonathon: Okay, we're saying what are the rules of the science fiction world? And if we're saying there are no rules to it, then there's no plausibility to it either. 

[00:43:45] Andi: We said there's no rules. So how could we say anything's plausible? Because anything's possible. 

[00:43:50] Jonathon: We live in a rule based world here.

[00:43:53] Andi: No, the obviously cartoonish nature of it makes it [00:44:00] clearly not plausible. But it's fine. That's okay. That it's not, that's part of the fun of it. 

[00:44:08] Jonathon: Getting a low score on this isn't a judgment call of the quality of the work.

[00:44:11] Andi: No.

[00:44:12] Jonathon: And we're writing these pretty low so far. I'm sure that, , if somebody writes an adaptation of The Martian as a musical and why hasn't that been done yet? 

[00:44:20] Andi: Matt Damon, call me. 

[00:44:21] Jonathon: But when that happens, you're gonna have a song about potatoes in there. As soon as we do that, this is 9.8 plausible.

[00:44:30] Jonathon: This is almost as plausible as one could get in a science fiction world. 

[00:44:35] Andi: I actually did write a short musical about living on Mars, and I do have a lyric about Matt Damon and potatoes. 

[00:44:41] Jonathon: Nice. Great. And I am writing a musical right now where it's somebody stranded in space in very hard science, but not on Mars at least.

[00:44:50] Andi: Yes, that's right. 

[00:44:52] Jonathon: Hard science I'm sure is possible in a musical. We just haven't seen it yet in, in our reviews here. 

[00:44:58] Andi: Not yet. But we might get there. We are looking at shows maybe next season, like Space Dogs, which is based on real dogs that went to space.

[00:45:08] Jonathon: If we're taking that expansive view of science fiction, we could cover singing in the rain, which is 10. It is science fiction in that hey, we're a new science, new technology, and how we as humans are reacting to it. And it is not only very plausible technology, it is technology that actually existed and affected humans the way that we see it on the film.

[00:45:29] Andi: Why don't we welcome our guest? 

[00:45:31] Doug: Thank you. Hey. 

[00:45:34] Jonathon: We are here for the interview now, and today we have Doug Reside of the New York Public Library System. Hey, Doug. 

[00:45:40] Doug: Hey, how are you? 

[00:45:41] Jonathon: Why don't you, just say your big official title just so that we have it coming from you.

[00:45:47] Doug: So I am the Louis and Dorothy B. Coleman, curator of the Billy Rose Theater Division at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. 

[00:45:55] Andi: Say that three times fast. 

[00:45:56] Jonathon: That's why I let you say it and not me. Thank you. 

[00:45:58] Doug: Yeah, right. Yeah. 

[00:45:59] Andi: Does that fit on a business card? 

[00:46:01] Doug: Barely. It's one of the longest ones, I think.

[00:46:03] Andi: We wanted to talk to you today about what you do at the library, but also, our episode is about superhero musicals. And we know that you have some things there about Superman perhaps, and I don't know how much you have about SpongeBob, but that's one of the other musicals that we're talking about today.

[00:46:25] Doug: Yeah. Yeah. So as you heard in the long title, I'm the curator of the theater division here, which means that I oversee the things that relate to theater archives and research in the research libraries at New York Public Library. So if, for those of your listeners that don't know New York Public Library is, in some ways much like the public library that's probably in your non-New York hometown or whatever, in that we lend out books.

[00:46:49] Doug: We have all sorts of programs, story times, you can check out DVDs and CDs at a lot of our branches. We have tech centers with Maker bot or, 3D printers, that sort of thing. But we also have three facilities, the Schaumburg Center for Black History and Culture, the, Schwartzman building, for the humanities and social sciences.

[00:47:09] Doug: And then the library that I work at, the Performing Arts library that are all, more like what you might think of as like the Library of Congress, where we have research books that you can't actually check out, that you can read while you're here. And then also one of a kind things that come to us when donors, sometimes the children of artists, sometimes the artists themselves give material to us, either after they die or, whenever their storage unit gets full and they wanna offload it onto the library.

[00:47:34] Doug: Or when I come and ask them and say, will you please give us your stuff now? So that part of my job is going out and essentially finding collections that I think will help tell the story of theater in New York at this time. So we also go out and film shows. We have permission from the Broadway unions and guilds to go into theaters with our own videographers that we hire and do professional video recordings of theater mostly in New York, but sometimes even in regional and international productions.

[00:48:01] Doug: And because of the contracts that we sign with the unions and guilds that allow us into the theaters in the first place, we're not allowed to put those videos online or really share them anywhere outside of the library itself. But if you are researching something or you're an actor or a student, you can come in and view our collections.

[00:48:18] Doug: You don't have to really have anything other than the library card , and a research project. So as long as you've got a research reason to view the collection, you're able to do so. So those are the big kinds of collecting things. We also do exhibitions. Right now I'm working on finalizing an exhibition that was originally to be curated by a professor at NYU Michael Denwoody, who very sadly passed away. But he was working on an exhibition on the history of black musical theater. We also do public programs.

[00:48:43] Doug: We just finished out a week of celebrating our 60th anniversary here at Lincoln Center, where we brought together original cast members from the production of the original Broadway and public theater production of a chorus line, to talk about their experience with the show. We did a flash mob of several dances from the show afterwards on the Lincoln Center Plaza.

[00:49:00] Jonathon: And that definitely came up on my TikTok and not just because I follow the library on my TikTok page, but because it's very much my content.

[00:49:06] Jonathon: There were a lot of likes on that page. 

[00:49:08] Doug: Yeah. Yeah. That one really went pretty viral. And then we also did a reading of one of the writers whose collection we have and actually relates somewhat to the topic of today's episode is the work of composer and writer Michael Friedman.

[00:49:19] Doug: Oh, yes. I love Michael who did a musical at the public theater called Fortress of Solitude. Yes. That's very much a comic book musical as well. It is. Yeah, so we did a reading of one of his unproduced plays called The Stranger which is a very strange piece that he wrote, I think when he was in his early twenties.

[00:49:35] Doug: The recording is available on YouTube, in the libraries channel. And if you want to see the early work of a person who went on to become an award-winning composer, that's a fun little experience. 

[00:49:45] Andi: Yeah. That's awesome. And also a program that both Jonathan and I have participated in, is something that, that you do, you could tell us about.

[00:49:56] Doug: Yeah. So, when I first moved to New York for this job, actually, originally I was the digital curator, and then I became the theater curator in 2014. But so in 2011, I was interested, I'd always heard about the BMI workshop, and I thought I would try to audition for it. And so I submitted a couple of songs and I was called in to present them for the judges at the workshop.

[00:50:15] Doug: And, I didn't have any music to accompany them. I'd just written these lyrics for several projects that I was thinking about. And as I was waiting outside for my audition, I could hear the audition before me. It was a lyricist audition, so it should have only been lyrics, but there was a kind of fully performed song with a tuba, I remember.

[00:50:32] Doug: And so I came in and read my little lyrics, and they smiled appreciatively. And then Told me that I could apply again next year.

[00:50:39] Andi: Aw. You forgot your tuba. 

[00:50:42] Doug: Yeah, exactly. And so it occurred to me that, I was just interested in the experience, but for those that don't that really want to become musical theater writers or maybe were just like me, that are just interested in trying to write a musical because musical theater is so collaborative and it's rare there are the Jason Robert Browns and Meredith Wilsons in the world that can [00:51:00] do all the pieces of the writing about musical, but that's rare.

[00:51:02] Doug: And so often you do need to find a collaborator to work with. And so I wanted to find a way for people that didn't have any connections in the city to meet each other and write a musical together. So the first iteration of that I was digital curator at the time, so everything was digitally focused and it was just a Twitter challenge.

[00:51:19] Doug: I got a bunch of musical theater writers to give prompts for possible songs. And encouraged people to either submit lyrics or music to the prompt and then to find a collaborator in this online space to write a song together. And several people did and we decided at the end of the program to have an in-person event.

[00:51:40] Doug: It was just a song where people could write one song in response to the final prompt. And it was really successful, I thought. It felt like it was possible to try to think about something a little more complex where people would write together for the length of several months and then present a 20 minute musical.

[00:51:56] Doug: And that program became known as a cross crowded room after the Hammerstein Lyric. And, we've been doing it for over 12 years now, I think. 

[00:52:04] Andi: Yeah. I think Jonathan and I probably met at one of those. 

[00:52:09] Jonathon: I wouldn't be surprised. We crossed paths on a lot of things, but that could definitely be a spot where it happened.

[00:52:13] Andi: I'm pretty sure that's where we first might've met. And I don't know which year I first did it, but it was probably maybe the fifth year. 

[00:52:25] Jonathon: Mine was the first year I was right there at the beginning. Yeah, 

[00:52:28] Doug: You were the Twitter group. Yeah. 

[00:52:30] Jonathon: But clearly it's accomplishing its goals because Andi and I met at this and are working together, so there we go.

[00:52:36] Andi: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:52:38] Jonathon: Mission accomplished. Fun collaborators. 

[00:52:41] Doug: Hurrah. Yeah. 

[00:52:43] Andi: Yeah, it's a great program and there's no bar to entry, which is great too. There's no audition process unlike, other programs where you 

[00:52:53] Jonathon: bringing in a tuba to the BMI audition for example. 

[00:52:57] Andi: Yeah. Or there's some level of gatekeeping and it's not that gatekeeping is always a bad thing. Sometimes it's a necessary thing because there's only a certain amount of slots available. But in Across A Crowded Room, what's great is that the only limiter is can you finish it? 

[00:53:16] Doug: And that turns out to be a sufficient enough limiter in the case of a musical. Right? Yeah.

[00:53:20] Andi: Yeah, I've dropped out of plenty

[00:53:22] Jonathon: Yeah, same here. 

[00:53:26] Andi: So that's what's really nice is that there's no judgment on level of talent. It's just, can you do it? And I think it's a really nice opportunity for people who have felt like they're not given a chance, maybe in other spaces.

[00:53:40] Doug: No, I've been, and what's also interesting is that I feel like the quality of the work is always pretty good

[00:53:45] Andi: yeah, it's always great 

[00:53:46] Doug: And I think that's just it, unlike other art forms where you can just write your own thing in your room. Part of the limiting factors, you also have to be able to play well with some others anyway.

[00:53:57] Doug: Enough to be able to finish a show

[00:53:59] Andi: Yeah, that's the other limiter is can you find a couple of other people to work with? So there's two limiters. Can you find a couple of other people to work with and can you finish it? 

[00:54:11] Jonathon: And those aren't the typical limiters you see in these kinds of programs too.

[00:54:14] Jonathon: So it's, it feels less like there's an organization that's gatekeeping the opportunity and more like it's within you all along. 

[00:54:23] Andi: Great. Well, thank you for telling us about what you do because I know that we love what you do. Mm-hmm. And we want the world to know 

[00:54:31] Jonathon: We're not gonna gatekeep this at all.

[00:54:34] Andi: No we're not gonna gatekeep Doug. Let's talk about sci-fi musicals, and specifically superhero musicals. 

[00:54:43] Doug: Let's do Superman. 

[00:54:44] Andi: So we talked a long time about Superman, so let's hear your thoughts. 

[00:54:48] Jonathon: They're sick of us talking about it, I'm sure, right? Listeners? 

[00:54:51] Andi: Yeah. Have you seen it? Can you tell us about, what's available at the library perhaps?

[00:54:56] Doug: Yeah, so there was a very strange television. We go into [00:55:00] that. 

[00:55:00] Andi: Yeah, talk about that. 

[00:55:02] Doug: You talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that's the only production, so to speak, of Superman that I've actually seen. But we have a lot of the collaborators work here at the library. It came in, 65, 66. if I remember correctly.

[00:55:16] Doug: It was right before Cabaret. Hal Prince was working on that. And then cabaret in the background. But it's one of the first shows that Hal Prince directed. And so we have Hal Prince's papers that talk about his direction for the show. We have Charles Strouse's papers as well.

[00:55:30] Doug: And, a lot of photographs and promotional materials. Mary Bryant was one of the publicists for a lot of the hell print shows. And we have pictures of the actor playing Superman, talking to kids and standing in phone booths and that sort of thing.

[00:55:42] Doug: So while we don't have the actual. Production on video? 

[00:55:47] Andi: No, actually you do, you don't have the original production, but you do have the Goodspeed. 

[00:55:49] Doug:  Oh, we do have the encore's production. That's 

[00:55:50] Andi: The Goodspeed.

[00:55:50] Doug:  Oh, Goodspeed. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, then nevermind. I'm glad. And that's what's good about the New York Public Library.

[00:55:57] Doug: Anybody can search our catalog Yeah. No gatekeeping required. Anyway, the original production was before us, but yes. It sounds like we do have a production. 

[00:56:07] Andi: Cool. So, but you've seen the television version 

[00:56:10] Doug: I did when I was working. We had an exhibition on the life and work of the producer, director, Hal Prince back in 2019.

[00:56:16] Doug: And as part of that work, I watched the television version.

[00:56:19] Andi: So are you a comic book fan yourself? 

[00:56:22] Doug: I wouldn't say that by any modern standards. I'm a comic book fan. But I do enjoy superhero stories and I was the DC kid growing up, so I feel like that's less cool these days.

[00:56:32] Doug: Yeah. 

[00:56:32] Andi: It’s coming back. And we are also talking about SpongeBob. Did you get a chance to see that when it was on Broadway? 

[00:56:40] Doug: I did, yeah. The Palace Theater right before they closed it down. I remember as we were preparing for the 2019 Hal Prince exhibition that I mentioned, we were looking for a prop chandelier that we could use for the phantom section.

[00:56:53] Doug: And I've. Thought about how, there's lots of chandeliers in theaters and maybe the palace that was about to be demolished would be willing to give us their, I mean, it was semi demolished and they lifted the space up in a couple stories. And, but anyway, the lobby was not the same anymore.

[00:57:09] Doug: And so we looked at the chandeliers there, but at the end of, SpongeBob, if you remember, they shoot out the confetti cannons and it was the strangest space ever because it was like Follies, a theater being demolished. But around everywhere was the detritus of SpongeBob Squarepants.

[00:57:25] Doug: So there were fish on the wall and screamers on the back of the things. It was some weird dystopian story of SpongeBob destroyed. 

[00:57:35] Andi: It sounds like a video game. 

[00:57:36] Doug: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:57:37] Jonathon: See, that would be an adaptation of Follies that would either be amazing or terrifying. Fish on the wall from the last production.

[00:57:45] Andi: Yeah. Like Patrick Star, staring at you from around the corner. Yes, I do remember the feeling of being showered in confetti, 

[00:57:55] Doug: and it was such a strange show too, because of the number of composers that were involved in it. It's like Jonathan Colton, who I'm a big fan of, had written the opening song and maybe one other song for the show.

[00:58:04] Doug: Yeah. It's a weird, not exactly jukebox, but I guess review, I don't know what you call it. Such a multi-author score. 

[00:58:13] Andi: Yeah. How would you describe the score? Because it has so many different composers, like what would you call that? It's not really a jukebox, except there is that Bowie song.

[00:58:26] Doug: Yeah. But it's mostly purpose written songs written for the show. But yeah, I imagine that the music arranger and the orchestrator tried to bring some coherence to the many songs, but it certainly isn't integrated in the sense of like the Oscar Hammerstein integration of the score.

[00:58:40] Andi: No, definitely not. In the same way. 

[00:58:42] Jonathon: And that was something I found remarkable about the show, honestly, is that like all these different composers, they also seem to set them up with the songs that would be closest to their own style. I also imagine that Tom Kit would have certainly earned his money as the arranger of the show, just trying to cobble all of these different writers together into a [00:59:00] whole.

[00:59:00] Andi: He really put in the work, put in the elbow grease. I heard that you are a video game fan. 

[00:59:08] Doug: I'm a big fan of 1980s Text Adventures in particular. I grew up in the era of the Commodore 64 and my dad was of the generation where if you've got something that's still working, you don't replace it.

[00:59:18] Doug: And computers don't always follow that model very well. So as a result, I was still using the Commodore up until 1997 or something like that as my personal computer. But, yeah, and I played Portal and I feel like things like comic books and computer games have such dedicated fandoms that I don't take on that identity because I feel like I'm at such the margins of the community.

[00:59:39] Doug: But I, casual fans of both, I suppose. 

[00:59:42] Andi: Well, you must be a fan of musicals though, right? 

[00:59:44] Doug: Yes. That I proudly embrace the fandom. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:59:48] Andi: And then would you say that you're a fan of sci-fi musicals as well? 

[00:59:53] Doug: Yeah, sure.

[00:59:53] Andi: All musicals. Yeah. All musicals. They count. Could you tell us more, maybe from a fan or a researcher, a librarian's perspective about Charles Strouse? 

[01:00:04] Doug: This is again, where I know enough people that know the work and life of Charles Strouse so well that I feel like I'm speaking a little bit as an amateur, about his work.

[01:00:13] Doug: But certainly best known for Annie, I think, was another, comic book musical. I think someone who was very much a classical composer as well had done a lot of really interesting kinda more, sophisticated is not quite the right word, but whatever you think of classical as compared to musical theater works.

[01:00:30] Doug: And that doesn't always mean there's any less sophistication, I don't think, but it's a different kind of sophistication. It's interesting that he's known perhaps best for these lighter works of musical theater. You don't think of Annie in the same breath as Sweeney Todd. But they both were roughly the same year, if not exactly the same year. And, they're both very well trained composers in both cases. 

[01:00:51] Andi: Yeah. I never thought that. But yes, they are of the same era.

[01:00:54] Jonathon: I will say this though, about Annie, and then part of why I am such a big Annie fan is that it's got teeth to it. From the outside you think, oh, it's a bunch of little orphan girls. It's screaming out, Hey, hobo man, hey Dapper Dan. But they've got the Herbert Hoover number in there and they address these bigger systemic kinds of issues.

[01:01:11] Jonathon: Like the country's falling apart in poverty and what the heck are we gonna do about any of this? And then if you really dig deep, like the guy's name is Warbuck, he's a war profiteer he has blood on his hands with the kind of money that he is making. And now this little orphan enters his life and opens his heart.

[01:01:28] Jonathon: I could go on about this. It's not a science fiction musical though, so I'm getting off topic. 

[01:01:33] Andi: Not technically. It's a comic book musical.

[01:01:34] Jonathon: It's comic book musical. That's true. 

[01:01:36] Andi: It's a rich man who helped a president. 

[01:01:38] Jonathon: Oh no.

[01:01:41] Doug: And of course there's, as Andi knows, there's the, Star Wars. Yeah.

[01:01:44] Andi: So let's talk a little bit about Star Wars. We are gonna do a whole thing about it, but Yeah. Tell us more about Star Wars Doug. 

[01:01:51] Doug: Yeah. Star Wars was such a huge hit as a film and was described as a space opera, which I think got all the musical theater people thinking about how it could be a musical.

[01:02:00] Doug: Hal Prince was involved for a minute. Charles Straus wrote part of a score, Muary Yeston wrote part of a score. One of the very recent acquisitions, the library is the, collections of the papers of Ed Gallardo, who wrote the book

[01:02:12] Andi: I’ve been digging into those.

[01:02:13] Doug: And there's at least three copies of the recordings of that work. Jason, remember Brown, I think actually orchestrated.

[01:02:19] Andi: Yes, that's true. 

[01:02:20] Doug: So yeah, a lot of really great talent associated with it.

[01:02:23] Doug: But, yeah, that never happened. 

[01:02:24] Andi: Yes, no, Star Wars is very cool and very cool that Charles Strouse was involved until George Lucas was like, ah, nevermind. I'm gonna make more movies. So we have a couple silly random questions that we like to ask guests: if you could put any musical, on the moon or underwater, what would it be? Those are two different questions, you're Hal Prince and you can produce it on the moon or you can produce a musical underwater. 'cause Superman went to the moon and SpongeBob lives underwater. So which one would you put where? 

[01:03:00] Doug: Oh, there's so many possibilities in my fantasies spinning.

[01:03:04] Jonathon: Would you say “You've Got Possibilities?”

[01:03:06] Doug: Yes. I feel like Urinetown might be fun underwater. 

[01:03:11] Andi: Oh, gross.

[01:03:14] Andi: That would be ironic. 

[01:03:16] Jonathon: Yeah. Oh no, we're outta water. Look around. 

[01:03:20] Doug: Oh, on the moon. I would like to see A Chorus Line with the high kicks or CATS dancing around 

[01:03:22] Andi: CATS on the moon!

[01:03:22] Jonathon: Ooh CATS!

[01:03:24] Doug: And then at the end with a Heaviside Layer, they just float off into space.

[01:03:31] Andi: I'm trying to think, what would I put underwater? Maybe Phantom. Since they're doing immersive stuff with Phantom now, Just on my mind

[01:03:40] Doug: truly immersed. Yeah. 

[01:03:40] Andi: Yeah. Literally immersed.

[01:03:42] Andi: Any ideas for you, Jonathan?

[01:03:44] Jonathon: Yeah. I wanna see and this might be a cop out everybody, but I wanna see Via Galactica. 

[01:03:50] Andi: Ah, that'd be good. 

[01:03:52] Jonathon: Yeah. No deal with trampolines, just the microgravity going on up there. That's truly the way that musical should have been staged to begin with.

[01:04:03] Andi: Yeah, that's true. And we'll talk about that next time. Another silly question is, what do you think is the worst sci-fi trope? 

[01:04:13] Doug: Oh, man.

[01:04:13] Jonathon: It could also be like the most overused one or one that you just wanna take a nice ten year long break from something along those lines.

[01:04:20] Doug: I feel like the multiple realities thing is interesting, but it feels like it's never really thought through particularly well. Somebody just had this notion of what if there's multiple universes and then they don't think through the way that might work in any very specific way, or that, that's often a problem, I think is it doesn't have the specificity of what it means.

[01:04:38] Andi: Yeah. I just watched Sliding Doors for the first time and I was thinking that too. First of all, it makes no sense why it just suddenly created two timelines. There's no explanation. There's a lot of questions, so I agree with you there. How about you, Jonathan? What do you think is a sci-fi trope? 

[01:04:54] Jonathon: I got distracted thinking about alternative universes, so maybe you agree that's probably one we could put away for a little while.

[01:05:00] Jonathon: Yeah. I read somewhere somebody crunched the numbers about if we're really following the physics on it, how many alternate universes are there out there? And basically the idea is that like anytime that an atom goes one direction instead of the other direction, that creates an alternate universe.

[01:05:14] Jonathon: There's something just like cosmic unfathomable horror about the actual implications of alternate realities that I would love to see. So let's retire the baseline alternate realities and get into the true, horrifying implications of this. 

[01:05:27] Andi: And then our final silly fun question is if you could time travel to any musical premiere in any time, what would it be?

[01:05:38] Doug: It's funny how often as theater curator I get asked a version of this question, and so I do have a go-to answer for it, which is the black crook. 'Cause I'd like to see what exactly it was. In 1866. I also think that it was five and some odd hours, and this was in an non-air conditioned theater in September in New York, which I mean, 1866 might not have been that hot, but still it probably smelled pretty bad.

[01:06:00] Doug: And I think the experience would not be particularly pleasant, but I wouldn't mind being able to get a pro shot of it, let's say and see what it looked like. That'd be cool.

[01:06:07] Andi: Yeah. Bring your iPhone. 

[01:06:09] Doug: Yeah, right. 

[01:06:10] Andi: I used to teach theater history to like sixth graders and I always tell them about the black crook and how it all came together,

[01:06:17] Jonathon: I tell that to my college kids. And they love the story 

[01:06:20] Andi: Too, which technically we can put in the sci-fi musical category, I think. Oh, yeah,

[01:06:24] Andi: Especially because as you define sci-fi where, new technology is being introduced and as it is the invention of musical theater that is maybe a new technology being introduced to the world.

[01:06:37] Jonathon: Well, Doug's book is all about how new technologies were influencing the history of musical theater. And that's an idea that I continue to return to how new record technology allowed Oklahoma! to be heard as a whole piece instead of as a series of songs which made the integrated musical be the thing all writers had to be doing after that.

[01:06:59] Jonathon: I feel like with your book, Doug, that you are tracking that very science fictional idea across real life musical theater.

[01:07:07] Andi: Yeah. Tell us more about your book, Doug. 

[01:07:09] Doug: Yeah, so it came out in 2023, so maybe almost two years old now. It's Oxford University Press. I'm trying to think of other things to help you find it in the library. The author is Doug. So anyway, it's called Fixing the Musical, how technology shaped … I had to call it Broadway repertory, even though it's not only Broadway.

[01:07:28] Doug: But, the editors of Oxford thought that Broadway was an important keyword to put in there that would define a particular kind of thing, even if it wasn't one of the 41-ish theaters.

[01:07:37] Jonathon: Broadway is such a brand, I feel like, if you say musical, then that's 

[01:07:41] Andi: like such a vague search term.

[01:07:42] Andi: When you're talking about mainstream professional musical theater, I guess. Broadway is the easiest way to say that. 

[01:07:49] Doug: Jonathan gave a pretty good precept of the book I think. When you're teaching, when you're putting together a musical theater syllabus or when you're talking about what shows form, what they call the canon of musical theater.

[01:07:58] Doug: There's all these debates about what kinds of privilege led to the formation of different things. What types of preferences and aesthetics led to these works being considered better than other works and what does better mean in the case of a musical? So I was thinking though, that it is possible for, certainly our range of titles that we can refer to Via Galactica, for instance, is wider than maybe the average musical theater gathering.

[01:08:23] Doug: But still, if you're gonna attend a scholarly musical theater conference, there's some titles that you have to gloss and explain, this is the title by this thing. But you can just say Annie or Sweeney Todd, and everybody knows what those are. And so I was interested not so much in what shows are better, but like what are the shows that everyone knows and how did those shows get to be known?

[01:08:41] Doug: And so the book proposes or theorizes that the reason that we know the shows is because these are the shows that were recorded, and in a way that made them able to be transmitted. And then also that the recording technology that was around at the time that the show came out began to define what the musical is at that point.

[01:09:00] Doug: Like Oklahoma! was the first cast recording that had the full orchestra with it. And because it came out at a time when records released an album so it can put them all together in a particular set that said, these songs are part of Oklahoma and this is what Oklahoma's defined by.

[01:09:17] Doug: And also it came out after the record changer where, if you would put a stack of records on your machine so you didn't have to get up and change the record each time. It would drop a new record onto the platter each time the record ended.

[01:09:29] Andi: So you could listen to both acts.

[01:09:31] Doug: Well, you could actually only listen to the first act without changing them, but because you had to flip the records over, so it would be, side one. So the A side would be in sequence and then you'd flip the whole stack over and do the B side. But that then meant that the order of the songs was pretty defined, because you would have disc one side A or whatever, and you would understand that the next song would be on the next record and so on.

[01:09:54] Doug: So it set up a kind of order that the other forms of transmitted music, aside from I [guess the full score like a conductor score or something was, the commercially released versions tended to be, divided into parts. So whether it was sheet music or even, the early well wax cylinders or or the early discs.

[01:10:13] Doug: Before the record changer and before the album, there was not really, the songs were interchangeable, but that technology forced a set and an order within that set. 

[01:10:23] Andi: Yeah. That's really cool. I definitely wanna read your book. 

[01:10:26] Doug: It's a 

[01:10:26] Jonathon: good read. So, hey, listeners out there,

[01:10:28] Jonathon: high recommendation. here, 

[01:10:30] Andi: go to the library and find this book

[01:10:32] Jonathon: or buy a dozen copies yourself, because buying books is great too. 

[01:10:35] Andi: Yes, we'll put it in our show notes for people to find it as well.

[01:10:41] Andi: Thank you so much Doug, for talking with us today. 

[01:10:45] Jonathon: Yeah, thank you very much. 

[01:10:46] Andi: We really love what you do and we love you. And we'll definitely have you back on again to talk more about musicals. 'cause you know a lot about them. 

[01:10:57] Jonathon: Oh, anytime we can get you, we'll have you back on this.[01:11:00] 

[01:11:00] Doug: Oh, thanks. Yeah, I'd love to come back.

[01:11:04] Andi: So we have come to the end of our episode for today. Thank you so much for joining us, 

[01:11:11] Jonathon: and we wanna thank our guest, Doug Reside. Thanks a lot, man. 

[01:11:14] Andi: If you like what we have to say, please make sure you join us on Patreon and become a patron for exclusive content.

[01:11:24] Andi: And you can find our blog at scifimusicals.com and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, BlueSky, all those social medias @scifimusicals. 

[01:11:35] Jonathon: Thank you very much everybody. 

[01:11:37] Andi: Bye.