Women on the Verge of a Big Broadway Gamble
By PATRICK HEALY
IN the world according to “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” the new Broadway musical about love and abandonment in 1980s Madrid, the gazpacho is laced with Valium, the boyfriends are cads and terrorists, and theater royalty, Patti LuPone, is in full diva glory. Playing a jilted wife fresh from 19 years in an insane asylum, Ms. LuPone glowed in platinum blonde curls and oversize jewels at a recent rehearsal - a wigged-out kinswoman of her Tony Award-winning characters in “Evita” and “Gypsy.” And her opening lines in the show’s first number, appropriately titled “My Crazy Heart,” set the tenor of the show to come.
“I can never explain/why I follow this lunatic moon/when it calls to my crazy heart,” Ms. LuPone sang. That mix of confusion and wonderment is also the world according to Pedro Almodóvar - the film director whose 1988 Spanish-language comedy of the same title inspired the musical.
In his first creative foray on Broadway, Mr. Almodóvar ended up working deeply on the show, unusual in a movie-to-musical translation, as he helped the creative team try to strike a balance between the characters’ oversize emotions and seen-it-all fortitude that Ms. LuPone’s Lucia conveys in the opener.
“Pedro thinks in a way that he called antipatico, a way of dealing with odious things, which I can only describe as ‘Puh!’ ” said Bartlett Sher, the musical’s director, who flicked his right hand dismissively as his lips spit out the word. “The more we understood it, the more interesting the dialogue and lyrics became, and the more resilient the women became.”
If only the high-stakes world of Broadway could be dispatched with a “Puh!” Instead, the risky journey to make a musical out of “Women on the Verge,” which began preview performances on Friday, has the creators in something of a state of anxiety themselves.
The $5 million show is a rarity: a new musical based on a foreign film from two decades ago that is probably not widely known among the tourists who are the backbone of Broadway box offices. And the show is opening in New York without the traditional out-of-town tryout used by every other new musical now on Broadway to test material and make corrections. The technical demands of the show, like the copious projections showing Madrid architecture and other images, have been such that the producer, Lincoln Center Theater, twice delayed preview performances, first from Oct. 2 and then from Tuesday.
Sherie Rene Scott, a two-time Tony nominee who plays the musical’s central character, Pepa, said that if she was not quite an actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown, she could see the brink in her mind’s eye.
“I’ve never opened a big show cold in New York before, and, really, I can’t quite put into words how intense it feels,” Ms. Scott said late last month, sitting in her dressing room beside a fold-out map of Madrid and a tiny Picasso print. She took several deep breaths before continuing. “I’m trying to focus on how we have a creative team who like to trust their gut instincts, who talk about not getting caught in second-guessing that an out-of-town tryout can create.”
For all that, the creators are confident that the show will gel into solid shape, and be a good time at that. Unlike the recent strain of serious new musicals like “American Idiot” (involving drug addiction) and “Next to Normal” (mental illness), “Women on the Verge” is in part a throwback to 1950s romantic comedies that were Mr. Almodóvar’s inspirations, like “How To Marry a Millionaire” and “Funny Face.” The musical is set in a Mediterranean capital where the characters speak accented English. Its design of bold primary colors and pastels - Almodóvar trademarks - conjure the feel of a telenovela. And the main characters are played by theater stars like Ms. LuPone, Ms. Scott, Laura Benanti and Brian Stokes Mitchell.
The creators have also been able to tap the considerable imagination of Mr. Almodóvar, a two-time Academy Award winner, for “All About My Mother” (the 1999 best foreign language film) and “Talk to Her” (best original screenplay, 2002). At one point early in the development of the musical, Mr. Almodóvar invited the creative team to his room at the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown to watch the movie again, frame by frame. For four hours, through an interpreter, Mr. Almodóvar described the choices that went into each scene, each color, even each dress of the 90-minute film. The purpose of the gathering was not to dictate changes; Mr. Almodóvar only asked for a few tweaks in the script, like wiping out references to the Spanish dictator Franco (whom he reviled). Rather, the creators recalled, he wanted them to strive for sharper authenticity in the language and actions of modern Spanish women as he knew them.
“We didn’t know then that Pedro had a guiding point of view about life: The world is a perfect place except for one thing - that men abandon and cheat on women,” said Mr. Sher, a Tony winner for his smash 2008 revival of “South Pacific.” “But he has an allergy to direct sentiment, and knowing that helped us think less predictably about the storytelling in this musical.”
To that end, much of the dialogue and lyrics in the musical have that sideways quality that Mr. Sher described. David Yazbek, the composer and lyricist, and a Tony nominee for his scores for “The Full Monty” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” said he was initially skeptical of signing on to the musical, saying that he was turned off by any semblance of “hysterical women flailing their hands or running around like their hair was on fire.”
While such chaos crops up at times in the “Women on the Verge” movie, Mr. Yazbek said that he also found - and was enchanted by - “a real depth of emotion among these women who felt lost without men, but who also had a chance in post-Franco Spain to take control of their lives for the first time.” His string-driven score, full of Latin inflections, combines brassy numbers with gentle songs like Pepa’s “Mother’s Day,” an ode to family that expands into a ballad about the difficulties of expressing love.
The origins of the musical date to 2005, shortly after the opening of another movie-to-stage comedy, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” Its first-time book writer, Jeffrey Lane, and Mr. Yazbek began receiving offers to team up again to adapt films by John Hughes or other American film comedies as a musical. But Mr. Lane said he rejected those offers in the interest of a greater challenge.
“David and I both knew we work best when we’re scared,” said Mr. Lane, a veteran television writer of series like NBC’s “Mad About You.” “We thought if we’re going to adapt something, we should look at European films.”
He narrowed his preferences to two Almodóvar films that he enjoyed for their theatricality and passionate characters: “Women on the Verge” and the 1987 “Law of Desire.” Mr. Lane opted for the former, he said, “because it had more joy and comedy.” But securing the rights from Mr. Almodóvar took two years, as the prolific director was busy with his 2006 picture “Volver” and other projects. Over that time the two men had heard that other artists, including Elton John (fresh off “Billy Elliot: The Musical” in London), were interested in “Women on the Verge.” Then in 2007, after Mr. Almodóvar met them for breakfast and listened to some of Mr. Yazbek’s music, the rights were granted.
Mr. Almodóvar, who provided lengthy replies to questions by e-mail as he was shooting a new film last month, wrote that he had long imagined “Women on the Verge” as a musical but “never did it myself before out of laziness.”
“The structure is very theatrical - I wrote it like that deliberately and took the American screwball comedy as a reference,” wrote Mr. Almodóvar, who cited Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen and Busby Berkeley as his favorite directors of film musicals. “I wrote the script of the film thinking that it would seem like a film adaptation of a nonexistent play.”
Mr. Lane quickly turned to lining up Mr. Sher, and the show was honed over 18 months during three intensive workshops, all including Mr. Almodóvar. He said he granted “all the freedom I would want for myself,” intervening mostly at Mr. Sher’s behest. Mr. Almodóvar, for instance, said that Pepa would never spit in a cloth to clean another character’s face, because such a gesture would be insulting. The creators, meanwhile, briefly thought about shifting the story to New York (“Women on the verge in Poughkeepsie,” Mr. Yazbek said, half-seriously) or to the present. But by then the creators were besotted with the place and period of the film.
At the same time they wanted to go beyond the movie, giving back stories to several of the female characters and sharpening their repartee, as well as altering the ending. The movie concludes with the downfall of Lucia, while the musical goes in a different direction.
Nor does the lead casting reflect Mr. Almodóvar’s devotion to Spanish actors; none of the top-billed actors are Hispanic. Mr. Almodóvar said he had no quarrel with the casting; he went so far as to send an e-mail to Ms. LuPone urging her to take the role of Lucia. Ms. LuPone said that her agent had tried to talk her out of the musical because Lucia was not the leading role, but she took it because “it connected to my own emotional makeup.”
“This is a Mediterranean piece, and, let’s not forget, I’m Italian,” Ms. LuPone said. “Most of all it’s a story of big emotions and bright colors, and a chance for a bunch of great Broadway women to sing their hearts out. It’s something we don’t see nearly enough of - this wild world of women.”
At a rehearsal last month Ms. LuPone let out a “C’mon girls!” to beckon Ms. Scott, Ms. Benanti and other actresses to line up shoulder to shoulder to run through a number. Even though they were not wearing their pastel-colored costumes or their vertigo-inducing high-heels, the women presented a striking tableau all the same: a rare instance of a major musical led by an ensemble of female theater stars. In that moment, singing about how “it’s murder on a hairdo when your head is underwater,” they all broke into a chorus of smiles - a nervous breakdown seemingly nowhere in sight.
More pictures and a video at the source.
I want to see this show so, so gorram bad. I've not seen the movie (or any of Almodóvar's films), but THIS CAST, you guys.