Jim Brochu: Finding God in the Temple of Musical Theater
Jim Brochu belongs to the rare breed who've found success both as an actor and a playwright—and his current off-Broadway show, The Big Voice: God or Merman? lets him flex both muscles. Written and performed with his longtime partner, Steve Schalchlin, the show is a musicalized version of their relationship and how their mutual love of musical theater subsumed their childhood desire to enter the ministry. Brochu and Schalchlin had already written one hit musical, the touching The Last Session, when they decided to share the ups and downs of their personal life and Brochu's encounter with the title diva in a show that's become a success at off-Broadway's new Actors' Temple Theatre. Brochu is also the author of the plays Zero Hour in which he starred as Zero Mostel, Cookin' With Gus, The Lucky O'Learys with Kathleen Freeman Fat Chance with Virginia Capers and The Lady of the House. Broadway.com asked him to share the show of how he and Schalchlin created a universal comedy out of their very distinctive relationship.
I have always believed that there are no accidents in life. Why do we choose to walk down a certain street where we meet an old friend rather than take a different path where there's no friend to meet? Right now, I'm fulfilling a dream by starring in an off-Broadway musical about my life because I went to a play instead of a movie, chose parochial school over public and took a cruise to Bermuda rather than Alaska.
These disconnected events led to writing The Big Voice: God or Merman? and coming back to my hometown and the Actors Temple Theatre after years of wandering the deserts of the San Fernando Valley.
Several years ago, my partner of 22 years, Steve Schalchlin, and I wrote a musical called The Last Session that played across the street from our temple/theater at the 47th Street Theatre. After a nine-month off-Broadway run, The Last Session opened at the Laguna Playhouse in California where it played to sold-out houses and enjoyed a six-month run. The director of the Playhouse invited Steve and me back for one night to sing a couple of songs and tell some stories about our life. And so The Big Voice: God or Merman? was born.
As teenagers, Steve and I both believed we had vocations to the ministry. He was a Baptist in Arkansas; I was a Catholic in Brooklyn. I kept going to church, waiting for the religious experience that would validate my heavenly career. It never came. When I was 13, my father introduced me to his friend Ethel Merman and I found Theatrical Nirvana. In what seems like minutes after seeing her performance in Gypsy, I returned to my neighborhood and wrote my first show, a revue in which I would star with my school chums.
For me, as for so many aspiring performers, the sound of applause was like a drug that I needed more of—in fact, one that I would need for the rest of my life. The night of our "Follies," my path changed from studying theology at St. Joseph's College in Yonkers to studying drama at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. My classmate Stephen Schwartz and I would fly back to New York on the weekends to catch the latest show. Seeing the opening night of Fiddler on the Roof together was one of my most memorable experiences ever, solidifying my desire to spend a life in the theater.
Then in 1985, I met Steve in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle and together we discovered God in the temple of musical theater. Since then, we have had more profound experiences in a theater than we ever did in a church. Every word and lyric in The Big Voice is true. It all happened. We fell in love, fell apart, faced more challenges than a Sondheim score and lived to sing about it.
People ask us if it's difficult to put on lives on stage every night, warts and all. Well, isn't that what writers do? Put their lives out there for people to examine? Some do it using a fictional framework, but for us, The Big Voice is reality theater. Rehearsals were a bit cathartic; sometimes like Freud and Jung having a field day. There were some painful moments, but there was also something about putting it all out there that was terribly freeing.
We've found that by being candid about our ups and downs, and by showing our humanness, straight people watching the show root for us to stay together. They see themselves in us and, suddenly, it's not a show about "gay marriage" at all. It's just about a marriage. An older couple came up to us after one of the Chicago performances and said, "You're just like us. We didn't know."
Steve and I are both so proud to be a part of the theater, a world that changes people one life at a time. And that's no accident.