Scott Brown: How to Write a Really Good Bad Musical

About the author:
Every week, pop culture fans eagerly await Scott Brown's droll take on celebrity headlines in his "Hit List" column in Entertainment Weekly. In addition to writing movie reviews and serving as an on-air show-biz pundit, Brown has turned his satirical eye to the world of musical theater. The result: Gutenberg! The Musical!, a delightful little show about Bud Davenport and Doug Simon, a pair of wide-eyed composers convinced that their musical about the invention of the printing press is a surefire Broadway hit. Yes, it includes a song called "Stop the Press," which follows the ditty "I Can't Read." Brown and co-author Anthony King were the original stars of Gutenberg!, passing the roles of Bud and Doug on to professional actors Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos in an award-winning mounting at the 2006 New York Musical Theater Festival. Fitzgerald has been succeeded by David Turner in the current off-Broadway run at the Actors' Playhouse. Broadway.com asked Brown to chart the progress of his deliberately bad musical-within-a-musical, which he and King first dreamed up almost nine years ago.

It can be said that the long journey of Gutenberg! The Musical! began in 1450, when Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press. It can be said that it began in 1989, when I met Anthony King on a school bus in suburban North Carolina. It can also be said that it began in 1998, when Anthony and I came up with the idea for the show. Because this is a short essay, I'm going to go with 1998.

We were just out of college and living in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Anthony was working from midnight to 8:00 AM, five days a week, and holding down an unpaid internship in Manhattan Theater Club's musical theater division from 10 to 6—to this day, I'm not sure why he's still alive. Meanwhile, I was making eight bucks an hour as an intern at Entertainment Weekly. Between us, we didn't really have enough money to leave the house. So we ate ramen and went to free readings of unproduced musicals, which Anthony had to see anyway, for MTC.

These shows … well, to say they were simply "bad" is to miss the point. They were, many of them, brilliantly bad. They were knockoffs of knockoffs of knockoffs. Most of them shared more DNA with the musical mega-spectacles of the '80s than with classic, golden-age shows, and even that DNA was seriously degraded. Others were frighteningly original in their awfulness: the worst subjects mated with the oddest executions, yielding the most unintentionally hilarious results. Even better, they were tremendously self-important, overblown and underbaked, puffing under the weight of their own hubris. They were the very best kind of very bad art.

And they were passionate. The readings themselves were wonderfully surreal: There was something magically, inspiringly absurd about watching actors and occasionally, the authors themselves attempt to illustrate the awesome scope of these productions in rehearsal rooms and church basements, describing dazzlingly cumbersome stage effects with nothing but mime and stage directions.

So Anthony, dazed from lack of sleep, suggested we write an intentionally awful show and submit it to his boss, just to test his reaction. And I, dazed from lack of money, agreed.

I sat down at my ancient electric piano, flexed my minuscule musical muscle, and asked, "What's the worst idea for a musical that hasn't already been done?"

Visions of cats in roller skates, suspended from helicopters, underscored by the opening bars of "Carrie the Musical"…

Anthony shot back: "The invention of the printing press." Sold!

From there, it was just a hop, skip and a Microsoft Encarta entry to the opening number. We wrote about eight bars and stopped, probably because we were hungry or tired or both.

Then nothing happened for more than a year. Every once in a while, Gutenberg! would come up. We decided that the show should be designed as a staged reading, hosted and performed by the authors. This would address the central mystery of a bad show: Who the hell wrote this? Also, an author-centric approach would allow the two of us to perform the show ourselves, and give us a ready excuse for our own shortcomings as musical-theater performers. We were very satisfied with this breakthrough—so satisfied, we didn't write a word for another year.

Then September 11 ended Anthony's night job he worked in the financial district, and I finished struggling through the entry-level hazing at Entertainment Weekly. We had a bit more time on our hands. One day, Anthony basically decreed, "We're finishing it." In the intervening years, he'd become affiliated with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, a popular venue for comedy, and he'd gotten us a tryout night. Suddenly, we had to make this thing happen. It was summer 2003.

The songs were coming along our original accompanist and arranger, Barry Wyner, was an enormous resource, but the author-centric approach needed refining: How would these good-natured dolts, as a mere duo, illustrate a large-cast musical onstage?

The answer, we concluded, was hats. Feeling strongly that these guys weren't good enough actors to pull off a Stones in His Pockets gambit, we decided that Bud Davenport and Doug Simon, our idiot avatars, would, quite literally, wear many hats: Each character would be designated with a different labeled baseball cap. This was a far more elegant solution than our first idea, labeled T-shirts. We would've entered the show mummified and nearly spherical under dozens of layers. It was only once we'd obtained the hats that we realized we'd have to stack them for quick character changes. This quickly became a its own visual gag and b a source of special terror for us as performers. The fear of wearing the wrong hat, we found, was much like the fear of leaving one's fly open—horrific, yet impossible to verify without drawing attention to oneself. And Bud and Doug, we felt, could not screw up. They had to be impossibly good at doing something irretrievably bad. Otherwise, the magic wouldn't work.

The show, in its original 40-minute sketch form, ran for more than a year at the UCB theater, with Barry at the piano and Anthony and myself as Doug and Bud. It then found its way onto a comedy sidebar at the 2005 New York Musical Theater Festival, which is where British producer Trevor Brown saw it. He sked if we'd be interested in bringing a two-act version of Gutenberg! to London in January. Thrilled, we said we'd be delighted, and only later wondered if the show was indeed expandable, and if we were capable of expanding it—in two months' time.

Luckily, everything turned out for the best: The show really came into its own in two-act form, the London reviews were beyond our wildest dreams, and soon we were back in New York, casting a stateside version for the 2006 New York Musical Theater Festival. From NYMF, we transferred to 59E59 Theatres for a six-week run.

Watching professional actors Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos come into the roles was, at first, an out-of-body experience: Anthony and I were so close to Bud and Doug at that point, so bonded with them. Seeing another person's interpretation of a character you've built from the inside out… that's an extremely strange sensation. Then again, we'd never even seen ourselves in the roles; we'd never had a director, never had the benefit of any objectivity save the audience's. The show existed only as we saw it, through the eyes of Bud and Doug.

Now suddenly, we were free to probe some of the show's weaknesses as writers, to make changes, and to celebrate the new flourishes Chris and Jeremy were bringing to the parts. The characters evolved in new and sometimes unexpected ways.

Alex Timbers, our spectacular director, did an incredible job policing the tone of the show, which is a fine science, really. It's easy to wink when you're performing this material, but if you do, the jig is up and the whole thing goes vicious. Bud and Doug are innocents, creatures of pure passion, undiluted by art or talent. To play them, you've got to love them. And these fantastic actors did just that: They fell in love with these characters. It shows.

The critics were exceedingly kind, and the production moved to the Actors' Playhouse, a perfect home for the show. Anthony and I have taken to smoking enormous cigars and blowing smoke into people's faces.

We just welcomed David Turner into the cast. He's taking over for Chris, who's headed out to pilot season in L.A. Apparently, TV pays a just a tad more than theater—live and learn! So David is Bud #3, totally different from Chris, who was totally different from me. But the sincerity is still there. And that's what makes it work.

Gutenberg! began as a prank, grew into an act and finally matured or perhaps metastasized into a show. In the end, I suppose we were seduced by our own bad art, much like those author-composer-aspirants whose bad art originally inspired us. Good thing, too—it kept our sense of the ridiculous tethered to absolute sincerity. And really, there's no other way to write such a gloriously unnatural thing as a musical.