American Idiot, From Berkeley to Broadway: 6Q4 Susan Medak

“There are parallels between the band’s success and our success….Telling Green Day’s story helped tell Berkeley Rep’s story.”—Susan Medak, Managing Director, Berkeley Rep

Some of the hottest shows on Broadway began in Your Hometown, USA. Come Fly Away originated at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, for instance. Memphis may not have developed in Tennessee, but it did do a test run at the La Jolla Playhouse, the California theater that also gave New York Jersey Boys, The Who’s Tommy, Big River, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and over a dozen other shows.

Now, American Idiot comes to you from the Berkeley Repertory Theater. Bridge & Tunnel, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Passing Strange and Wishful Drinking found their way from Berkeley to Broadway, too.

This is either a wonderful thing or a terrible thing, depending on what you think about when you think about it.

With exorbitant Broadway production costs and ticket prices that make it impossible to see live theater if you don’t have three jobs and a trust fund, developing shows in the regionals seems like a pretty good idea. Broadway producers cut costs dramatically by doing a lot of play development and rehearsing outside New York. Regional audiences have a chance to see mega-musicals their theaters might not be able to afford if Broadway producers weren’t helping to foot the bill, and they see these without having to take out a third mortgage to pay for tickets. “Come see tomorrow’s plays today at Berkeley Rep,” the theater’s website invites.

So far, so perfect, but there’s a dark underside to this. Others, including critic Robert Brustein and NEA chair Rocco Landesman, have explored aspects of this in print, so I’ll just give you the gist of a key argument against collaborations between Broadway and the not-for-profits.

The whole idea of having a not-for-profit theater is that it can be, well, not-for-profit. Back in the day when regional theaters thrived with a healthy amount of government support and maybe a little corporate support, too, some theaters played to their regional audiences, doing work that might not be popular elsewhere. Others expressed a deeply felt vision of an artistic director who had founded the theater in order to communicate in a particular way. Many theaters felt free to take creative risks, even if some of the work didn’t please any audience anywhere.

In short, not-for-profit theaters were engaged in art and only art. They didn’t need to work with outsiders who would help defray production costs by developing shows for Broadway at their venues; they didn’t need to raise money by hoping for residuals from a show they sent to New York. Subsidized, all they had to think about was putting on the plays they truly wanted to share.

On the third hand-an octopus has nothing on me-some commercial ventures are genuine artistic efforts as well.

Besides, it’s hard to blame the regionals for engaging in commercial efforts when the only alternative is shutting down, and I have seen some terrific theaters close up shop.  (I wrote a book about one of these, the Chelsea Theater Center, which was in residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the 70′s; in spite of critical acclaim and loyal audiences, the Chelsea couldn’t get the money to do the kind of work that made it exciting.)

When I talked to Susan Medak, Managing Director of the Berkeley Rep, I didn’t ask questions that confronted the issue directly. People tend to  get defensive when you ask if they are selling out their vision or if they’ve forgotten why they started a theater in the first place.

I’m happy to report that she spoke to my concerns anyhow, and I’m reasonably comfortable with this particular move from a top regional theater to the center of the commercial theater world. Though clearly a commercial venture from the start, it seems to have been developed at least partly to serve the genuine vision of a theater that began in a storefront in 1968.

See what you think when you read Medak’s responses to the questions I did ask about the Green Day musical that broke ticket-sale records in Berkeley, and if reviews are indicators, is likely to do the same on Broadway where it opened last week.

DN: How did the project begin? Did you know American Idiot was bound for Broadway from the start?

SM: Michael Mayer had this fantastic idea to adapt the Green Day album into a stage piece. Tom Hulce, one of the lead producers on Spring Awakening, thought this was a great idea and wanted to further Michael’s interest in it.

At about that time, Spring Awakening was here on tour. They came to see our new facility in Berkeley, and they loved it. We had a previous relationship with Tom, we had been discussing projects with him for years, and with Michael Mayer. We wanted to work with him for another project.

This was a project that completely fit within our sensibility. It would have made no difference if it went on to Broadway or not. Increasingly, over the years, we want to develop work that crosses disciplines and that play with the notion of what theater is, so we jumped at this. Although we always sensed that this show might have a future life, that wasn’t automatically guaranteed, and nobody knew if the project would be ready when it came out of Berkeley.

DN: Are the performers people who have worked at the Rep before or did you put together a different kind of company for Broadway?

SM:  Berkeley Rep hasn’t done many traditional book musicals, so we didn’t have a pool of actor/singer/dancers who we would have felt we could bring to the table, whereas Michael has been working with a group of actors for a number of years now. Michael had a real desire to work with some of the people he worked with before, particularly some of the people from Spring Awakening. And there had been workshops, and people emerged from them.

DN: How did you work with the Broadway producers?

SM: What was really important to us was that the theater was part of the producing team. We’re not interested in handing the theater over to a  group of outside artists and simply having them mount a show. It’s not the way we work. We went into this with a feeling of faith and trust in Michael and Tom, people we could have a relationship with.

Michael Mayer & cast

 We have been consistently looking for work that crosses generational line, that stretches our aesthetic vocabulary. What made this particularly attractive is that the band comes from here and there are parallels between the band’s success and our success. Both started as scrappy entities in small storefront locations and had nontraditional roots, each of us have within our own disciplines received accolades and achieved success.  The band now has an international fan base, and within our field, we’re very happy with where we are. Telling Green Day’s story helped tell Berkeley Rep’s story. I would say American Idiot became a bit of a calling card, a short hand for the quality of the work were able to produce.

DN: Tell me about some of the other productions you do at the Rep.

SM: The eclecticism of them says everything about who we are-Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher’s play, and Sarah Rule’s Vibrator Play originated here. We co-commissioned Passing Strange with the Public Theater, and we produced it before sending it there with the same cast, musicians, and design team.

Some theaters open their doors [to Broadway teams] and hand them the key. We feel a sense of ownership for the work we do. We have a full staff of technicians and crafts people who take great pride in work coming out of the theater. As you can imagine, with increasing frequency we’re getting calls from producers wanting to hawk their productions. We continue to do only the work we want to do that furthers our artistic interests and our organizational interest. We’re opening a tiny sweet delightful musical, Girlfriend-it’s a fluke we happen to be doing two musicals in one season. One is a huge piece that filled our larger theater; the other is small. We’re also doing a rumination on authenticity and reality by Naomi Iizuka, whose work has not been known for its commercial success. A new play we’re co-producing with the [Mark] Taper [Forum] by Lisa Kron, who wrote Well, will open next fall at the Public Theater.

DN: Do co-productions always begin at the Rep?

SM: Sometimes they start at our theater. The common rule of thumb the first theater gets the pride of midwifing, and the second theater gets a better production. Sometimes we take the first leg, sometimes the second. Even when we take the second leg, our casting director gets involved with casting, we provide dramaturgical input, and Tony [Taccone, Artistic Director] or Les Waters [[Associate Artistic Director]] will be there at selected points throughout the production to help mold and shape the piece in a constructive way. A lot depends on the artists we pick in the first place.

DN: American Idiot broke box office records. Did it do anything else for the Rep?

SM: Working with such an extraordinary team of artists and such a new set of issues was for us the best thing. Every member of our staff learned something new. That’s what you hope will happen.

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Read what scenic designer Christine Jones has to say about the thematic continuity between Spring Awakening and American Idiot.

Read why TFT theater reviewer Jonathan Mandell likes American Idiot more on Broadway than when he first saw it at the Berkeley Rep.

Find out why American Idiot gave TFT correspondent Eryn Loeb a nostalgia headache.

All photos courtesy of the Berkeley Repertory Theater.