March 26, 2011
White supremacy with a catchy beat: 'White Noise' is the uptempo, Whoopi Goldberg-produced musical at the Royal George
MacKenzie Mauzy rehearses the musical "White Noise" at the Royal George Theatre. The musical begins previews Friday and opens April 9. (Brian Cassella/ Chicago Tribune)
NEW YORK — The studios of Ballet Hispanico are nestled on a quiet, bucolic street on the Upper West Side, far from the 42nd Street crush. On a March Friday afternoon, the thermometer roars past 70 degrees. Parents and their children from the nearby Abraham Joshua Heschel School linger delightedly on the sidewalk, lining up together for ice cream. The way to the upstairs space leads past a multi-ethnic collection of pint-size ballerinas — drinking in the sudden warmth and collectively evoking something painted by Degas. The elevator doors open near the rehearsal room for "White Noise."
"Hello," someone says, chirpily. "Lovely day for a white-supremacist musical."
That's not exactly the official subtitle of the risky, edgy new show that begins previews Friday at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago, with aspirations for both a long Chicago run and Broadway as an ultimate destination. But the songs include such titles as "Master Race," "Life, Liberty and Happiness" and "Live for the Kill." Someone sings the line, "I want to welcome you to Auschwitz." And the line, "With a blinding light / We'll turn black to white." And in the script, one of the early numbers is introduced as follows: "It's about ethnic cleansing. With a hell of a beat."
The show — which was completing its run of New York rehearsals and running through some sections that beautiful Friday — focuses on two aspiring pop stars: beautiful young sisters with a copious amount of talent but a strong connection to racism and fascism, and a nasty looking band mate, a boyfriend and co-conspirator named Duke.
In "White Noise," which you might think of as akin to "Dreamgirls," only with white supremacists, the sisters are plucked out of obscurity by a mercurial record producer who smells a fortune to be made — just as long as he can get these girls to replace their hate-filled lyrics with coded words set to catchy tunes. When his underling points out that he would, in fact, be promoting an odious ideology, he refocuses the question:: "Are they talented? Are they sexy? Can we sell them?"
Before long he has enlisted an outre but widely followed Internet gossip — clearly modeled on the blogger and TV personality Perez Hilton — to help in the viral spread of this white-hot new band.
"White Noise" is, of course, intended as a dangerous but cautionary tale designed to make the point that many people often fail to focus on what their favorite songs are actually selling and saying. And that the music industry is very adept at re-defining bands.
"Look at what happened to Katy Perry," says Sergio Trujillo, the accomplished Broadway choreographer ("Jersey Boys," "The Addams Family," "Memphis") and past collaborator with Ballet Hispanico as the run-through comes to an end. "She got rebranded," he says."That's what happens in the music business. Of course, we know that you also have to entertain people. I wanted the songs to be highly offensive and easy to dance to."
"We might have T-shirts made with that on," says Holly Way, the lead producer of "White Noise."
"There are delicate lines to be walked," says Whoopi Goldberg, one of the other producers, in a later phone interview. She was putting it mildly.
"If people don't want to see something raw, this will not be the show for them," Goldberg continues. "But I think this is a really amazing piece about the choices we all make and the consequences. I hope people will come and see it and think, 'Oh my goodness, is that me? Am I a soft racist? A soft anti-Semite? Do I make those kinds of jokes?' These things exist in the world, you know. You have to be alert."
The complicated history of "White Noise" began in 2004, with Howard Dean's ill-fated bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Two of the young guys working on that campaign, Ryan J. Davis and Joe Drymala (Drymala was one of Dean's main speechwriters) had become interested with the growing notoriety of an actual pop band called "Prussian Blue." Made up a pair of blonde, pre-teen, Californian twins named Lynx and Lamb Gaede, Prussian Blue sang a mix of folk and bubble gum-pop music that combined their love of catchy tunes with a reflection of their familial ties to white-nationalist groups.
"The mainstream media seemed to be giving them a pass on their ideology and focusing on their prettiness and blondeness," recalled Davis. "They were being covered as interesting teenagers rather than neo-Nazis."
As the Dean campaign floundered, Davis and Drymala became frustrated by what they saw as the far right's increasing use of coded racist messages. "So we came up with this idea for a musical about these super-talented girls who were able to hide the ideology in their music."
And thus the first incarnation of "White Noise" landed in 2006 at the New York Musical Theater Festival, a showcase combed by producers looking for new musicals. "We wanted to make the audience feel uncomfortable," Davis said. "We wanted to make a statement. This wasn't supposed to be a show that went to Broadway."
But "White Noise" was nonetheless optioned for Broadway by a controversial producer named Mitchell Maxwell, who decided to further develop the idea with Way as his partner (Way joined the project in 2007). He also decided to stage the next incarnation of "White Noise" in New Orleans, taking advantage of incentives offered to commercial theater projects by the state of Louisiana. (Illinois offers similar incentives to movie producers, but not to those developing live shows.) "White Noise" reopened at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre in the summer of 2009 and was expected to move to Broadway that fall.
Maxwell brought on a new writer, Matte O'Brien. And he hired a different team of songwriters: brothers Robert and Steve Morris and Joe Shane. The original plan was to add to the songs in the first version, but in the end, the new writers wrote a whole new score.
What happened backstage in New Orleans totally eclipsed the show itself.
Members of the cast and crew accused the notoriously volatile Maxwell of harassment. As reported at the time by Michael Riedel in the New York Post and the New Orleans paper Gambit, Maxwell threw an enraged fit in the lobby of the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel that led to other hotel guests calling the police. The Le Petit Theatre banned Maxwell from the premises so he could no longer watch his own show, which went on without the guy supposedly signing the checks.
New Orleans lacks a big professional theater scene and full time theater critics. The production didn't get any thoughtful reviews and, although it did decent business, it didn't make of a splash beyond the bayou.
With Maxwell gone from the project, Way was the new lead producer. Maxwell had already parted ways with Davis and Drymala (although both still get credit as the originators of both the idea and the basic characters, and both are still part of the royalty pool).
Goldberg, who had produced shows before, had heard about "White Noise" while it was in New Orleans — "everyone was talking to me about it," she said. Goldberg called Way and signed on as a highly desirable producer. Early in 2010, Hay hired Trujillo as director.
"I was looking to find some new challenges for myself," Trujillo says.
Everything was rewritten, rethought and recast. An additional plot involving a duo of rappers whose art is also cheapened and manipulated by Max was further developed.
Trujillo decided that "White Noise" needed another production before going to New York — and he'd just spent several months in Chicago working on "The Addams Family" and came to think that the Chicago audiences would probably teach them the most about what they would encounter on Broadway. He hired set designer Robert Brill, who has worked frequently at Steppenwolf Theatre. Trujillo kept MacKenzie Mauzy from the New Orleans production in the role of Eva, and hired the young Broadway actress Emily Padgett to play her singing sister. And after a brief period with a different actor, Trujillo brought on the Broadway veteran Doug Sills to play Max, the nefarious producer. "Doug," Trujilo said, "has the gravitas the role needs."
Although he'd only been in the company for a few days, Sills seemed to be enjoying some of Max's lines: "I want to lose the content," his guys says of his sexually charged discovery, licking his lips at the commercial possibilities, "but keep the danger."
"We are never far from the idea of a concert," Trujilo said that afternoon in New York, as he demonstrated the model for what will surely be one of the biggest productions on the Royal George stage in years. The design motif of "White Noise" involves speakers, rigging, platforms, video and broadcast towers, all intended to provoke the excitement and adrenalin rush of a hot pop concert featuring beautiful young woman.
And to suggest the rapidity with which a hate-filled message can spread.
Posted at 02:00:00 AM in Broadway, Royal George Theatre
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"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Michael Santomauro, March 23, 2011
Being happy–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro
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