Memphis beats
The winner of four 2010 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Memphis took a long and circuitous route to Broadway. “We played the show in four major regional theater venues and kept working on it before we got to Broadway,” book writer Joe DiPietro says on the phone from New York of the musical about a white DJ and black music in the segregated South. Beginning with a workshop at Palo Alto, California’s TheatreWorks in 2002, Memphis went on to a full production there and others at Massachusetts’s North Shore Music Theatre, San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse and Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre before finally bowing on Broadway in 2009.
The show’s origins are perhaps as unlikely as its path, pairing DiPietro, the author of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, with Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan. The project began with a magazine piece about real-life Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips, “one of the first white disc jockeys to play rhythm and blues music in the center of the radio dial in the South in the early ’50s,” DiPietro says. “Those disc jockeys of the era were very influential in essentially integrating the radio.”
DiPietro wrote an early draft of the show’s book, but was stumped when considering a musical collaborator. “I thought, y’know, I know a lot of great theater composers, but this story is about the birth of rock & roll; I’d really like to work with a rocker,” he recalls. “And I know exactly zero rockers.”
DiPietro’s agent passed the script around to some rock & roll–manager acquaintances; DiPietro soon received a call from Bryan, a musical-theater novice. “He said, ‘I just read your script, and I hear every song in my head. I’d love to write the score.’ Since rock stars don’t call me every day, I was intrigued,” DiPietro says wryly. He asked Bryan for a demo.
“The next day there was a FedEx at my doorstep with a CD inside,” DiPietro says. “He’d written [what’s now] the second song in the show [“The Music of My Soul”], in which the lead character speaks about what drives him. I listened to it once and I said, I hope he’s not crazy, ’cause this is the guy.”
The pairing worked so well that, while shepherding Memphis to Broadway, DiPietro and Bryan took on a second project. The Toxic Avenger, a pop-rock adaptation of the Troma Entertainment horror spoof, opened Off Broadway in 2009. The goofy gross-out comedy, about a New Jersey nerd who transforms into a gooey mound of muscle after bullies push him into a vat of sludge, played more than 300 performances and was named best Off Broadway musical by the Outer Critics Circle.
The songwriters and director John
Rando are retooling Toxic Avenger for
a January run at Houston’s Alley
Theatre that could, DiPietro confirms,
lead to a Broadway production in the
spring, depending on theater
availability and other factors. “If it
doesn’t, it’ll have a life in regional
theater,” he says. “It’s a really funny,
out-there show.”
Post a comment