Attention Deficit Delirium

Barbarians on Broadway?

With the economic slowdown affecting all areas of entertainment, Broadway producers have been banking on big names (i.e. movie stars) and high concepts (safe, crowd pleasing ideas) to help pack houses. And since famous properties like The Addams Family, Mary Poppins and Spider-Man are here or will be coming to the Great White Way, I began to think, “Why not just go over-the-top and really put on a wild spectacle people won’t forget?”

After pondering back to the Grand Guignol insanity of the terrorist black comedy The Lieutenant Of Inishmore that I witnessed in 2006, I began thinking of how great it might be to translate some major action movies to the stage. Sound crazy? Well, some other people have had the same idea, as you can see in the five clips below. Just imagine all the flying fists and kicks, crazy gunfire, slicing and dicing and rising body counts, live in front of hundreds of people every night. It would not be high art, but it would be hilarious fun.


Conan The Barbarian: The Musical





Wolverine: The Musical





Hugh Jackman singing from a proposed Wolverine musical — skip ahead to 3:30.
(Hugh’s a good sport.)





Terminator 2: The Musical (with Rebecca Romijn)





Rambo: The Musical — The second Rambo movie.




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Die, Humans, Die!





David Bryan (c) with Bon Jovi bandmates Richie Sambora (l) and Tico Torres (r) at the opening night of Memphis.
(Photo credit: Anita Shevett.)

An original member of Bon Jovi, keyboardist and backing vocalist David Bryan has a sweet gig. He regularly tours the world and performs before legions of fans every night, and he’s also ventured out on his own to become a successful, Tony-winning Broadway composer and co-lyricist with Memphis, a musical about turbulent race relations in the titular city during the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.

When I spoke with Bryan two months ago for a story about rockers turned composers for Grammy.com, he was in the midst of a world tour with “that other job I got.” Don’t worry, Bon Jovi fans, he’s not going anywhere. But David Bryan’s love for musical theater — no doubt stoked by his recent Tony wins for Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre and Best Orchestrations for Memphis — is taking him on exciting new adventures, and more are coming up ahead. (Part One can be found here.)


How do you think your image has changed from David Bryan the rocker to David Bryan the composer? What have people’s expectations been like?
The best part is that everybody [high up in theater] is about 70 or 80 years old, so they call me “The Kid”. In my world we’re old men, and in this world, I’m a kid, so I like that. With producers in that world, I always said I’m trying to class up the joint in my band by being a Broadway composer. They think it [the music] is raucous. It’s funny what people think the cliché is. Joe DiPietro and I are halfway through writing another one. We made a pact that we’re writing with each other, that we want to be the modern Rodgers and Hammerstein and want to take a partnership because we really enjoy what we do and do it well together. But he really understands the sensibility of what I do. It’s completely not theater, if you will. It’s just different.
[continued below]

Bryan mans the boards at the Memphis cast recording session.
(Photo credit: Chris Owyoung.)

Then Chris Ashley the director, the same thing. I would sit in there, and he would never squash my outrageous ideas. To him they were outrageous; to me they were not outrageous. But then I wouldn’t squash his outrageous ideas to me. Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to cut that out? He would sit there and say something is off [with one part] and say it’s the hi-hat. I would say, “Wow! You’re listening to that?” A musical is a really complicated beast, and the biggest example of that is at one point we had the song “Love Will Stand Alone,” which is kind of a scene that didn’t do anything. Now it does something, but they went into the studio, she sang a song, everybody clapped and to me it was one of my favorite songs that I ever wrote. It’s a hit song. It was a static theme and didn’t do anything, and he said, “No, that’s not right.” I’d say, “Yes, that’s right!” “No, that’s not right, there is something else.” We never argued. It was just a healthy debate. He brought the story in with the song because you want story-song-story-song to blend into each other. It’s great. That’s the marrying of two different worlds.

The Toxic Avenger rocks the stage.

Memphis isn’t a really loud show, which is refreshing.
You know what? That was a big thing that Chris Ashley and I had really honed in. Those are examples to me where it went a little awry because it’s not a concert. It’s a musical. Also, in a concert, I don’t think half the people really understand the lyrics unless they know them from the record. You can’t decipher it that clearly in any rock ‘n roll show I’ve ever been to in my life. In a musical you’re giving out information. You need that. But you also don’t want it to be wimpy sounding. If it’s loud all the time, your ears shut down. You want it to have some energy, so we took some rock ‘n roll tricks. You can get energy without volume. If you put it through a couple of gadgets, you can make it happen. The sound is a game of inches with the sound coming out not too hot, not too soft, and it has to build by the end. When you get it wrong it’s obvious. It’s just too fucking loud.

How is the music from Toxic Avenger different from Memphis?
That CD is available from Time-Life. I sound like a commercial. That was a different thing. That was more of a rock band because there wasn’t a horn section.

“The best part is that everybody [high up in theater] is about 70 or 80 years old, so they call me ‘The Kid’.”

When you’re coming up with new ideas, do you find yourself recording things in unusual places?
Oh yeah, totally. A great story is the opening song for Memphis, “Underground”. We had a whole different opening and completely different song. I saw the pictures of the stage and saw there was a bridge going across [and] underground into this club. I thought underground was such a great word and says a lot of things — it’s an underground sound, it’s an underground movement, it’s underground. I was actually driving to New Brunswick to do Toxic Avenger rehearsals. I was in my car and it was raining, so the wipers were making [a percussive sound], so I was sitting there singing and pulled my phone out [and recorded] “We’re going down down underground”. I kept singing it over and over and over, and I walked in and everyone was there for Toxic. So I told everyone to take a break and not to talk to me, and I went straight to the piano and banged it out for Joe. He was like, “Oh my God, that’s great!” So we wrote that on the lunch break, and there you go. The process is so fun. Then I take it as a demo and bring it to the actors and singers. The good thing is I can sing and play, so I can play it to them with rock ‘n roll intent. That’s something that has to be taught, to show what rock ‘n roll intent means. I can only teach by singing right in everybody’s faces as fucking loud as I can. I’m sweating after I sing it, to show what the intention is, and everybody gets it. I get to put my force and my energy into everybody.





You said you were working on another show with Joe.
We’re probably about halfway through it. We’ve been working on for about a year or so and got about eight songs in it already. We found the heartbeat of it. So when Joe and I write when I’m on the road, I’ll call him up while I have a keyboard in my room, we’ll write over the phone. Sometimes if I’m in the city for five days, he’ll fly out and we’ll sit together and write for five days. Time marches on whether I’m on tour were not. We want to get another one out there.

The passion of the lovers in Memphis.

Can you say anything about what this particular show is going to be about?
Our tentative title is called Chasing The Song, and it takes place after Memphis and after the Fifties, right in 1960 before the Beatles came in. So that small window of time when everything was about the songwriter, before bands wrote their own songs. People always say, “How do you write songs? Do the words come first? Does the music come first?” This is going to be about songwriters and have a story as well, and we’re still developing it. Chasing The Song is you’re always chasing the number one hit as a songwriter.

Bon Jovi underwent this big resurgence in 1999, and it hasn’t stopped.
It’s killer. My whole goal today is to not get hit by a bus. I found something that I truly love. At the hundredth show for Memphis, I probably hadn’t seen it in about a month. It’s such a wild experience because you have given it away. It’s in your soul and then you give it away, and when you watch it all go down there’s a sense of removal that it’s not me. I’m sitting back enjoying it and going, “Holy fuck, I actually did this?” It’s such a mountain of work. It’s 15 hour days for six weeks. It’s insane. You walk into that building, and the workload is insane. To me, when I look at the finished product, I am completely satisfied in every inch of that show and care about every inch of that show. That is so rewarding to see that, and then to be also teaching audiences a little something while still entertaining them. I can do that until I’m 100 years old.






Do you think this is a healthy thing for musicians who might not want to rock out in their later years and find something else to do?
I guess it all depends, too. I’m lucky that my band didn’t end up just being an Eighties thing. We kept transcending and transforming and still have current records. We’re a current rock band. We have a number one record. Our songs are on the radio. We still matter. I could do nothing, but for me it’s so rewarding, and I get to use all those years of training. Memphis has nine musicians and 26 actors, and I’ve told everybody what to play. I sit there and do horn parts for the band, then tell everybody what to sing. When I sit there and close my eyes, I’ve got 35 people making my music. It’s insane. A musical is the most complicated beast. We didn’t have dance until [choreographer] Sergio [Trujillo] came along. I had guys flipping upside down while singing. You retool it for what it is. It came back to the first story I was telling you about. You should not be attached to your ideas so much. I don’t work that way. Nobody in my organization will ever work that way. Nobody’s that headstrong. We didn’t lose the patient here. We’re trying to make the best work that we can. In the end, everybody wants the best piece. You want the best product, and as long as you want that you can get there in a negotiable way.

Bryan with Memphis stars Montego Glover (c) and Chad Kimball (r) on opening night.
(Photo credit: Anita Shevett.)

Have you seen Spring Awakening or Next To Normal or any of the other rock musicals that have come out over the last couple of years?
I did see Spring Awakening. I didn’t see Next To Normal yet. The last couple of years have been so insane. I had two shows in New York. Every Bon Jovi break that I’ve had from recording and touring, I go straight into a musical. It’s really nice to say that I had two shows New York at the same time, but the reality is it’s a lot of work. I didn’t get to see too many shows. I did see Spring Awakening, and I liked it. I don’t go out and see every show. I see certain shows. Nobody can say that I ripped off anybody’s anything. I’m nine years in.

What do you think of the future for the rock musical then?
Broadway is a wild thing. When Joe got All Shook Up, that was about at the end of the song cycle, when people took a bunch of groups like Abba and made a story out of it. And everybody thought those would go on forever. Then that ended and straight plays came in, and that’s the big thing. They call it a rock ‘n roll musical because the songs are in the form of a rock song. I’m going to keep doing what I do. I love to do it, and as I said I think the essence of a rock song is all about the emotions. The definition of that was created by the Beatles, which was a three-minute, thirty-second song. Play it on the radio, get us to the chorus, don’t bore us and that’s it. In that world it’s having songs that people walking out of the theater are singing.

The Memphis cast commanding the stage.

Are there any Bon Jovi songs that you would like to hear come back into the band’s set list?
On the tour we came in with our master list of about 90 songs, just to keep the boredom out. We first learn them, then walk into the sound check and play them. We’ve been playing some old ones from the first record. We’ve played “Roulette” and “The Hardest Part Is The Night”. Songs we haven’t done in forever. It’s fun to do that stuff.

Bryan on “Memphis”: “The talent on that stage is insane. Everybody is a performer extraordinaire that cares.”

And 10 years from now you can have your own David Bryan musical revue on Broadway.
Knock on wood. It’s great to see 1,200 people on their feet, clapping their faces off for Memphis. The talent on that stage is insane. Everybody is a performer extraordinaire that cares. They care about the story, they care about being the best they can be all the time. That’s something I can really relate to them, and they relate back to me because we’re both performers. It’s on a different stage, but it’s a great art form. I will do it till they nail the coffin shut.





Are you still doing the VH1 Save The Music charity?
Yes. We restored one school when we opened the box office. We gave them $30,000 and restored a music program at a school, so I continue to support that. Joe DiPietro and I are both involved in Inspire Change. He and I put some dough in and paid for 1,200 kids from a school in Harlem to come down in buses and see a Broadway show. It’s a matter of giving back. That’s what I’ve done for a long time. Once you get old enough and start having your own kids, you turn around and give back.

I worry about the arts education in this country, because every time we have economic problems, programs get cut in schools. I believe everyone should have an artistic outlet, regardless of whether they are doing it professionally or not. I have a lot of friends who have day jobs and do writing on the side for fun. It’s really important for your soul to have some way to express yourself.
I agree 100%. I can sit there and get as much enjoyment with a piano in a room alone and make myself cry and feel all the emotions on the planet and love it. I could go onstage to 70,000 people, or 15,000 people, or 2,000 people, or a couple hundred people, or two people and still get that enjoyment. The arts are a great thing. It moves you inside. It shows you that there’s a bigger force in the world, that you can move people and entertain people. There’s so much value to that.

Larry Fast: An influence on
and collaborative partner of David Bryan.

Are you still in touch with Larry Fast?
Yes. Like I said, he was one of the pioneers of electronic music.

You had a cameo in the house band in Netherworld.
And that was Edgar Winters playing sax on that song.

Isn’t it amazing that you got to do that?
It’s unbelievable. I was down in New Orleans, and there were floods. Edgar wanted to jam there, and I taught him the song in about three seconds. He’s just such a fantastic talent. That recording was live, live, live. We just found a local drummer, bass player and guitar player, and I taught it to them. I taught the violin player in the trailer in three seconds on a little keyboard. [On set] I was playing this upright where half the keys didn’t work. I was using my left foot to lift up the sustain pedal because it kept sticking.

Are there any other projects you are going to be working on?
The next plan is for Joe and I to keep writing. I’d like to do a version of me doing my songs because now I have a reason — not just doing a solo record for the sake of doing it. On the Memphis soundtrack there’s a version of me playing “Memphis Lives In Me,” where I sit at the piano and just sing it. I would love to do that. That would be great. A funny story: I was at the one other theaters, and afterward everybody was gone. A piano was up on stage, and I was singing all of the songs in the show — the girl songs, the guy songs, the mama song. Some woman was sitting down listening to me, and I didn’t even notice. She goes, “How do you know all of the songs?” “I wrote them.” So it’s pretty neat when you hear from the person who wrote it as well. I think it gives you a different viewpoint into where it came from.

Bryan at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.
(Photo credit: David Shankbone.)

I’m sure you’ve probably discovered some songs that you forgot about.
Oh yeah. We call those “trunks songs”. There are probably about six songs that weren’t used in Memphis, that were in it and then got cut. They go right into the trunk and will show up in another musical. They’re good songs. The thing I love about live theater or a live show, it’s live no jive. You do it right then and there. People say, “Wow, you guys are great! You make it look so easy!” I say, “You always have the opportunity to fuck up. You just choose not to.” It’s a conscious effort from the act of walking out there, and everything you do is to make sure that show is 100% and it’s live.










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David Bryan: Rocker, composer, world traveler.

David Bryan has a sweet gig. As an original member and the keyboardist for Bon Jovi, he regularly tours the world and performs before legions of fans every night. But he’s not simply content with that; he’s also become a successful, Tony-winning Broadway composer and co-lyricist with Memphis, a musical about turbulent race relations in the titular city during the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll in the Fifties. He’s making a successful transition into theater, which he wants to stay with as long as possible.

When I spoke with Bryan two months ago for a story about rockers turned composers for Grammy.com, he was in the midst of a world tour with “that other job I got.” Don’t worry, Bon Jovi fans, he’s not going anywhere. But David Bryan’s love for musical theater is taking him on exciting new adventures, and more are coming up ahead.


Bon Jovi is going strong after more than 25 years. It’s great to have that longevity, isn’t it?
You kidding me? Jon’s cousin and I went to high school together, so in 10th grade when I was 16 I got my permit, and that’s when we drove over the bridge and joined the band, as they say. Just a little band from Jersey.

Speaking of people who were there at the start, do you guys ever stay in touch with Aldo Nova?
Yeah, he’ll be at the show tonight. Aldo’s a good guy. He was living in Ireland, but I think he’s back here now.

He’s had some hits writing songs for Celine Dion and Clay Aiken recently. Did he record with you at all in the ’80s?
He was big with “Fantasy”. Jon was working up a lot at the Power Station when he did that. Then we would come in and do sessions with him.

An exuberant moment from Memphis.
(Photo courtesy of The Hartman Group.)

I went to the Memphis hundredth performance, and at the afterparty I mentioned the film Netherworld to you, and you seem surprised.
It’s bad.

A lot of the Full Moon stuff is a guilty pleasure for me.
It was bad, and it was supposed to be bad. You could see the flying hand of Satan coming in and see the strings on the hand a little bit, and it was pretty much a music video because I remember I had done that around 1990 when the band took a break. That’s when I was throwing everything up on the wall. I wanted to do a solo record, so I wrote songs on that, then I did an instrumental version of it. I tried to do soundtracks, and you have to start somewhere. There wasn’t the Internet at the time, so you had to live in California. I live in Jersey, and I didn’t want to move to California to do this. I like to do it, I thought I was good at it. I took classical piano for 15 years. You can play Beethoven and there’s no lyric, and you can have every emotion in the emotional palette, more because lyrics limit you. The emotion of happy and sad and getting happy and sad and being pensive and every word that is in the dictionary can be played out with music as an emotion, so that was such a huge instructional for me. When do a movie like that, you see someone getting scared or happy or whatever, when you look at what the emotion is you match the underscore, and in a musical you’re kind of doing the same thing except you’re matching the emotion with the song.





You did some of the Netherworld soundtrack with Larry Fast from Synergy, correct?
Yes. Larry is a technical genius and one of my heroes. I went and bought my first synthesizer. He built his first. There’s a very big difference in that.

How did you get into film initially, and then how did you get into doing Memphis? And how did you get involved with the Toxic Avenger musical off-Broadway?
The first progression was when the band took a break [in 1990]. I did Netherworld and got another film, Conflict Of Interest, which was a cable movie with Judd Nelson and Alyssa Milano. It was a cop movie, and I was starting to like it [composing]. But at the time it was the matter of the fact that I lived in New Jersey, and it’s impossible to be in the film business. There was no e-mail and barely cell phones. I kept working on that, then we went back on tour. I always write one or two songs with the band; on the first couple of records I wrote more. I wrote a couple of songs and was looking for outlets to see what I could do, and I remember in ’98 I got signed to a publishing deal because I had written a song on the Bon Jovi record [Keep The Faith]. I was talking to my publisher and said it’s not a banking deal, I want to learn how to do the art. I want to sit down with all of your writers and learn the craft of songwriting.

Is there a place between
Netherworld and Broadway?

That’s what I did. I worked with 10 different songwriters and learned a lot of things about co-writing and learning how to not be attached to your ideas, and there were a lot of valuable lessons in there. I learned people’s tricks, and they learn your tricks. I had 10 really good songs, and one of them got covered, “This Time” by Curtis Stigers. Clive Davis called me up and said it was the best song he heard all year, and he stopped Curtis’s record and made him put it on it. And they loved the song, which was big. Then I wasn’t getting any more covers. They’re just so hard in a rock band. In country it’s expected that very few artists write their songs. They just buy songs or get songs. In rock it’s really hard. I kept trying, and I was frustrated because he [my manager] wasn’t getting me any covers. Nobody else was doing it. I told him I wasn’t going to write another song and waste five hours of my day when I had 10 really good ones there that he could sell. “I’m not building any more houses. You sell the other 10 houses before I build another one.”
[continued below]



Then finally he said, “What about musicals?” I said, “What are those?” He said, “I can get you 20 songs covered eight times a week.” “I’m interested.” At the time he put me together with Frank Military. John Teeter was the publisher and Frank Military was an old Broadway guy who knew Sinatra and knew everybody because he was 80 years old at the time. He knew Francine Pascal, who was Michael Stewart’s sister, and Michael Stewart wrote Bye-Bye Birdie and Mack & Mabel. He was huge. He was also in Sid Ceasar’s Show Of Shows. He had passed away, and Francine had his whole world. She had a book series called Sweet Valley High that sold about 500,000,000 copies in 20 years around the world. She knew Michael Price at Goodspeed [Opera House] up in Connecticut, and there was no rock ‘n roll at the time on Broadway in ’98. I wrote all the music and lyrics about this character who went from point A to point B, and used in my mind what was a hit chorus. I did that [the basic rock formula] for 23 songs for that. We got to a certain point where we had done a reading and they put about $30,000 into it. Everybody’s opinion was, “It’s loud. It’s too loud. Why do the songs repeat like that?” “It’s not too loud, and it’s rock ‘n roll. That’s what a rock song does — it takes your emotions and is a simpler form than classical, but it is a highly complicated form of emotion.” So I got to certain point and then it stopped, and I sat around.
[continued below]

David Bryan and his Toxic Avenger and Memphis collaborator,
book writer and co-lyricist Joe DiPietro, at the opening night of Memphis.
(Photo credit: Anita Shevett.)

In 2001, a script came through the script gods and fell in my lap, and it was Memphis. Joe DiPietro had written it. He had shopped it around for couple years for a composer, and he was looking for an authentic rock composer not a theater rock composer. Not that that’s bad or good, but I am what I am. He had some lyrics put in there already, and I read the whole script. When you see Memphis, I saw that finished product in my brain. I knew it had to be horns, I knew every one of the songs. I called him up and said, “Joe, David Bryan from Bon Jovi.” He was like, “Okay.” “Listen, I hear every one of your songs in my head.” “Okay. Do you hear other things in your head?” I go, “Yeah, but we can talk about that later.” He said, “Okay, pick a song and take it from there.” I said, “I’m also a lyricist. Can I do mess around with the lyrics?” “Yeah, just have fun with it.” So the first song I picked was “Music Of My Soul” because I saw that that was the heartbeat of our lead character. That’s what meant everything to him. The chorus was there and some lines were there, but I added some things. I did that and went down into my studio, and I got the drum machine going. I played piano, bass, organ and guitar on it. I sang lead and all the background vocals. It mixed it onto a CD and FedExed it to him. He got it the next day and was expecting some whiny little thing on a cassette tape piano, and he said, “If you’re not crazy, you’ve got the gig.” I said, “I’m a little crazy, but I’ll take the gig.”





Was the show performed off-Broadway originally?
Any journey of a musical is painfully long. It’s original songs and original story, which is even harder, and it all depends sometimes if the song cycles ae big. We got a reading it at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, California, and at that little reading we put it up for the first time. Two theaters — the Palo Alto and the North Shore [Music Theatre] in Boston — came together and came up to us at intermission. The guy from Boston said, “I’ve got to fly home, but I love this. We’re not going to do a reading, we’re going to do a full-on production. ” Which meant that both theaters were putting up $500,000. You go from $10,000 to $1,000,000, that’s a good jump. Joe whispered in my ear: “People don’t usually do this. They usually like to see the second half before they commit a half million bucks. Just nod your head yes.” I was green. And they did it. We put it up in Boston and put it up in California, then it sat for a couple years because of the business and the producer and a bunch of bullshit that business can always lead to. It sat there on the shelf. Good things happen for a reason. We mounted it up again with our new producers in New York — Junkyard Dog [Productions]; Randy [Adams] moved to New York and Sue Frost moved there from Connecticut and they started a company —  and we were really comfortable with them. We put it right up and got a new creative team. Chris Ashley was just made head of La Jolla Playhouse, and he wanted to direct it and have it be his first piece. So we went there, then we went up to Seattle, collected all of our money and then raised the curtain.
[continued below]

David Bryan (l) performing live with Bon Jovi in Montreal in 2007.
(Photo credit: Rosana Prada.)

The interesting thing is that when we went into the California production we still had most of the same cast. We just picked up a new lead. So they had been with us the whole time. We saw the story, and everybody believed in it. Even when we did the first reading there was a piece that resonated with me because he was talking about hate and racism. It’s not a racial dirge but it’s talking about that, and that’s entertainment with a meaning. That’s what drew it to me in the first place. It’s always worked with even a small audience, or just in the reading stage, not even honed, and that’s what rock ‘n roll does. It puts you into a frenzy by the end.

Diana DeGarmo in "The Toxic Avenger: The Musical."

Was it frustrating going through the process of watching this grow? Did you do it for fun before you got to Broadway?
I wanted to find that something. I was searching for a creative outlet. I love to make music. When I mounted the first production and saw the power from the page to the stage, I thought it was powerful. Not growing up in the world it’s a really powerful art form, and I liked it. During the previews, it’s a live focus group. It’s right then and there. Everybody’s there, they get it, there with you. They didn’t think it’s funny, they think it’s funny. You can tell if their backs are off their seats because they’re really paying attention. It’s really neat to take a character and bring it all the way through and really problem solve and fix everything. I truly love the art form. In that hiatus for Memphis, I never left the band [Bon Jovi]. We made records and toured, and meanwhile the whole Broadway world was changing. Joe came out with All Shook Up and was now on Broadway. Then Duncan Sheik happened with Spring Awakening. That was around ’06, and I was five years in already. During that, that’s when we did the Toxic Avenger because we were on a break and my hands were tied. So Joe came to me, and we put that up relatively quick. It went right into New Brunswick and then straight to off-Broadway, and we won Best Musical [from the Outer Critics Circle].

Is it still playing?
It closed in January. We ran for almost a year. Off-Broadway is different, and due to the recession it wasn’t easy. A year is great, and it will be out on the road. It’s amazing that musicals are all over the place on the planet. Joe DiPietro wrote I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, and that’s been running for 12 or 13 years in 15 countries. We have a couple deals with the Toxic Avenger pending in Japan, Korea and the Far East, then into Europe, and it is going to tour in America. It’s pretty wild. It’s big business.


Coming Soon in Part Two: David Bryan discuss the Toxic Avenger musical, playing vintage Bon Jovi songs, his charity work and “trunk songs”.


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The cover of the May 2010 issue of Stage Directions with my Duncan Sheik feature.

Even though he initially came into the public’s ears with his Grammy-nominated pop hit “Barely Breathing” from his debut album in 1996, singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik’s chance encounter with lyricist Steven Sater in 1999 lead to a long, fruitful collaboration that has begat the Tony, Grammy and Olivier Award-winning Spring Awakening, an exuberant rock musical that continues to tour, and the forthcoming musical The Nightingale, which has been in development for nearly a decade.

As he continues with his solo career, Sheik balances out that endeavor with his life in theater. His latest musical on stage, the ghost-laden Whisper House, was written with playwright Kyle Jarrow and debuted at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego at the beginning of 2010. Sheik recently toured and performed songs from that production, which will be workshopped at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York on July 10 and 11.

I recently spoke with Sheik about his work in the theater for both a story on rockers turned composers for Grammy.com as well as a cover story in the May 2010 issue of Stage Directions.

The Stage Directions cover story is available in two forms:
PDF
Expanded online version