You have seen the musical and you know how the story ends: Aaron Burr shoots Alexander Hamilton.  This is the podcast where we ask big questions, so let’s ask the biggest of all: Why?  Why did these two guys do it?  There IS more to know about the whole event…why was dueling even a thing?  It was the 11th duel Hamilton had been involved with…was that a little or a lot?  But there’s a bigger, more existential question here.  Did those guys hate each other that much?  Was it the election of 1800, where Burr had a shot at being President but lost?  Did it start earlier? 

Not only did they not always hate each other, but their first meeting…was about as far from a duel as you can possibly get.  And their first experience with a duel that involved each other…was also nothing that would lead you to think these guys were destined to shoot the most famous duel in American history.

Of all the guys in all of the revolutionary period, why were these two the ones so at odds that it ended with one of them killing the other?  

I’m not sure I can answer all of it, but I’ll take my best shot on this episode of Theater History and Mysteries.

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What if history remembers you, but for the wrong thing?  Not like, for a bad thing, but you did a bunch of amazing things that are all forgotten, and one kinda stupid thing is all that people can remember about you?

Here’s an example.

Have you ever heard of Herbert Marx?  Nope, that’s not Karl’s brother.  (Herman and Edward are Karl’s brothers)

This Marx created a company called Marman products, which produced and sold a motorcycle between 1948 and 1949.  In World War II the company manufactured lots of stuff, including the Marman clamp, used to secure cargo.  It was what held the atomic bomb on the Enola Gay, and is still used on spacecraft.  Also, Herbert invented a vapor delivery heating pad, and a wrtiswatch that was also a cardiac heart rate monitor that alerted the user to an irregular heart beat.

If that sounds like an early version of the iWatch, or the FitBit, that monitors your biometrics, it WAS, and it was invented by the intrepid Herbert in the 1950s.

Elizabeth Marshall, herself a scientist, wrote in 2024: 

“Marx’s contribution to the field of medical technology had a lasting impact on both innovation and patient care. While his wristwatch with a heart monitor and heating pad may not have reached widespread production, its concepts and principles laid the foundation for future advancements in wearable health technology.”

And ends the article with:

“The wristwatch with a heart monitor and heating pad exemplifies Marx’s commitment to using technology for the betterment of humanity, leaving a legacy that continues to inspire innovators today.”

You’d think at this point I was going to talk about how history has forgotten this medical research pioneers, who’s work has been overshadowed, overlooked, or just forgotten.  But that’s not what we’re here for!  We’re here to look aghast at people who have been remembered for all the wrong reasons.

You DO know Herbert Marx, but not because he set in motion improvements in medical technology that still inspire researchers today.  You know him by the name “Zeppo” – the fourth of comic team of Marx Brothers, who made films like Duck Soup, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers.  Even his own family looked at him as a second fiddle – his second wife left him for Frank Sinatra (although a lot of that, frankly, was his fault).  Anyway, if he’s remembered at all, it’s as the straight man to Groucho, or just as the least funny Marx brother.

That’s some fate, huh?  You come up with a iWatch 70 years ahead of it’s time but all you’re remembered for is feeding Groucho Marx straight lines?

Well, how about this: You single-handedly saved the United State from financial ruin and are more responsible than anyone else for the creation of the United States constitution, and all you are remembered for is losing a pistol duel to Aaron Burr

Today, we’ll dive into what Alexander Hamilton should be remembered for but isn’t…we enter the world of high finance on this episode of THM.

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Alexander Hamilton did some major things that still impact the world we live in today...but you might not really get what those are from watching the musical.  Today's episode is designed to review those things and figure out what the musical focuses on, what Hamilton really did, and why it might be even more impressive than you might think.

My goal is to tell you something you don’t already know about Hamilton the musical, and Alexander Hamilton the guy.

Here’s an opening: Grew up in Utah.  We had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Donny and Marie Osmond, a very LDS influenced state legislature, and we did NOT have underground hip hop scene.

You would have bet me in 1994 that this would have happened, I would have told you that you were crazy: 

“Consider the following. On March 9, 2016, Utah State Senator Jim Dabakis, an openly gay Democrat and founder of an advocacy group called Utah Progressives, and Utah State Representative Ken Ivory, a conservative Republican best known for urging state officials to seize federal land, donned eighteenth-century costumes to extol the virtues of Hamilton to their fellow lawmakers. With Dabakis dressed as King George III and Ivory as Hamilton, they urged their peers to pass a resolution honoring Lin-Manuel Miranda and his historically inspired musical. Despite their many political disagree-ments, these legislators’ love of Hamilton had brought them to-gether. Their resolution praised the musical for capturing “the human drama, intrigue, passion, perplexity, and promise of Ameri-ca’s founding in a way that resonates with a modern and ethnically diverse America” and for captivating audiences “regardless of eco-nomic circumstances or political stances.”1 The resolution easily passed in both the House and Senate, and was quickly signed into law by Utah’s Republican governor Gary Herbert.”

From Historians on Hamilton, chapter 14.

That is mind-blowing.  I want to tell you more things you don’t expect. 

I’ll start with the BASIC history about Hamilton.  Pretty sure that I can do it at least once in this episode of THM.

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What’s the most awesome theater moment you’ve had?  Not, like, the biggest show you’ve been in, or the biggest audience you’ve played to, or the best tickets you ever had…those are important.  I want you to think about awesome…the time you were in times square on the way to a show, stopped to take a picture with Elmo, and got photo bombed by Patrick Stewart.  Or the time you were in a production of In the Heights and right before the blackout scene the power really did go out…Or you were on stage and your fellow performer forgot all their lines and you successfully improved Weird Al Yankovich lyrics for 5 minutes.  I mean, AWESOME.

Today’s guest is Emily Clark, and she’d have a tough time answering that question, because her life, and she, are awesome.  But for my money, it was this:

BIGFOOT!!  She was in Bigfoot the musical!  That’s like an 11 out of 10 on the awesome scale.  And it’s obviously tounge-in cheek, but works as a comedy, has great music, according to Emily is about to open off-broadway, definitely won the 2024 Best of Fringe award…but more than any of that…it’s just awesome.

Today we are going to meet performer, educator, townie in Bigfoot, and Cal. State Fullerton Master’s candidate Emily Clark, who is going to share with us her research about the Secret Garden, which is of course a beloved children’s book and was a Broadway musical that had 7 Tony nomination and 3 wins in 1991…and it was one of the first ever show with an all-female production team.  We’ll cover all that ground, and get to meet Emily, but first…let’s run the intro…

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To really understand the smash musical Hadestown, you have to understand…mines.  Hear me out.

Hadestown isn’t just a re-telling of the ancient Orpheus tale, as the name suggest it’s a story that focuses on a particular location…the underworld.

And there is obviously a conscious choice to make the underworld much different than the Greeks imagined it, and much more like the company towns associated with the early industrial era.  And not just any company towns, but mining towns.  What you can’t really miss about the show is that it’s focused on Hades and it’s a mining town.

The other thing you can’t miss is that it’s about environmental destruction and oppression – Eurydice has to make a deal with Hades because she can’t find food and shelter on the surface, and Orpheus can’t provide it.  The only one with control over resources is Hades, and he is obviously mostly interested in keeping himself at the top of the food chain.  The show is an invitation to think about the themes in the Orpheus myth, but do so in the context of a real world threatened by growing levels of corporate control and ever-greater threats to the natural environment.

And it’s all centered around…mines.  So what is it about mines that is so important to the central themes of the show?  Grab your pickaxe, put a canary in a cage, strap on your hard hat, and let’s go into the tunnels together on this episode of THM.

Climate myth citations

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/hadestown-coal-fired-lights-are-bright-broadway

https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/06/too-late-climate-crisis-myth/

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-battle-of-blair-mountain/

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/workers-rights-won-by-unions

https://energyhistory.yale.edu/coal-mining-and-labor-conflict/

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Hadestown is a story about politics.  You’ve seen the show, so you know that it’s the ancient Greek story of Orpheus put in a fictional but modern setting – a “a post-apocalyptic  American Depression  era.”  It’s a world of environmental ravage and resource scarcity.  Hades himself is unambiguously an industrialist, a mine-owner, and a tyrant.  “It was hard times” is a line straight from the dialogue of the show

There is no doubt that Anais Mitchell, the author, is putting political issues right in the front and center of the audience.  And the question is – what are we gonna do about it?

Today we will talk about Mitchell’s answer – how should the public respond to income inequality, unfair working conditions, environmental destruction, and sexism?  A truism is that those who benefit from our current arrangement aren’t going to walk away from the things that are making them filthy rich just because it’s the right thing to do.  We have to do something to force the change.  There aren’t a lot of great models out there –

So, what should we do?

And to me, this is really the heart of the show, because while the problems that Mitchell puts in the script are obvious, the obvious answer to all those problems in the script is – seems a little futile.  We should find a musician who will write a song good enough to restore balance to the universe, it won’t work, and then we’ll toast him for trying.  Just like Sisyphus pushing his rock up a hill for all eternity, we should try again.

I mean, that’s not Annie.

Is that all there is to it?  Is that enough?  Is that a satisfying answer?  Mitchell is right – the environment is in a lot of trouble, and the guys who are destroying it are all about building walls and not so much empowering the workers.  What should we do?

If you want a big answer you gotta ask a big question, and Mitchell has certainly done that.  How do you get out of Hadestown without looking back?  We’ll see if we can figure out what Orpheus could not, on this episode of THM.

References

UNEP: https://www.unep.org/interactives/geo-7-feature/2025

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Are there crazy connections in the world?  In 1984 I was a 4th-year college debater at Cal. State Fullerton with aspirations of finishing in the top 16 in the country when my partner quit.  In January I was paired up with a sophomore, and we needed an argument nobody else was talking about…right when a change of power in Egypt put Hosni Mubarak in the geopolitical spotlight.  We based our entire argument strategy on how various government actions might mess up that transition and the global impact it would have.  In our sophomoric tone, common to 20-year-old males and strangely tolerated in the world of competitive academic debate, we labelled the argument “You hose Hosni.”  The basic claim was that the regime was fragile, and easily disrupted.

In what must have been very close to that same year, Anais Mitchell – who would go on to write Hadestown – had this experience, which she recounted in her book “Working on a song” – In college I studied abroad in Cairo, Egypt.  May Arabic Lit professor was an older woman with dark eyeliner who took it upon herself ot introduce leftist, bohemian values to a generate of distracted young Egyptians.  She barely concealed her disdain for then-President Hosni Mubarak”

Both the Arabic Lit professor and our undergraduate drivel were proven right by history!  In February of 2011, Mubarak was ousted from power following violent protests…

Unlike Hosni Mubarak, both Anais Mitchell and, in a far less spectacular way, I understood that the world was changing.  The future would not belong to autocrats, but to those who explored the emerging concerns of that bohemian, mobile-phone using generation: Race, gender, the environment, and the working class.  This is where the revolution lies, and this is where it’s dangerous to light the match.  So we’ll use of phone flashlights as we look at race, gender, and the environment as the issues play out in this episode of THM.

Rosalind Henderson

https://medium.com/@rosalindhenderson_54321/toxic-masculinity-a-leading-cause-of-our-environmental-issues-d2e9d6fb58bf

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Hadestown Episode 5 script – Autism

In my favorite episode of this show, I went to the Phantom of the Opera sites on Facebook and asked people what they thought about the show and why it worked for them.  The follow-up question was whether they would come on to the show and speak about their experiences.  

Of the responses I got, a surprising number of folks identified that they were neuroatypical.  I didn’t even know that was true of them until they told me.  But descriptions of hyperfocus and late-life diagnoses were, honestly, more powerful than most of the topics we have delved into on this show.

I can’t really say how much I respected those people and the stories they shared.  I don’t want to present their lives like I have some master understanding of the issue, but I do think that just listening to what they had to say rounded out who they were as people and provided a whole new depth to what neurodivergence is and, importantly for this show, how it relates to theater.

This series, however, is about Hadestown, not the Phantom.  The big bad isn’t a shunned creature who lurks in the shadows, but a god who rules over one-third of the universe and is in charge of hell itself.  The central character isn’t a warped man living in the catacombs, it is the beautiful, naïve poet who still believes he can change the world with a song.

Imagine my delight when I found in the hallowed pages of the academic journal Studies in Musical Theater an article with the title: Hadestown’s Orpheus: The autistic hero musical theatre didn’t know it needed

I didn’t know I needed it on this podcast, but here we are!

What is the connection between autism and Hadestown?  Does it play out in the actual plot?  Was it part of Anais Mitchell’s rewriting of the Orpheus character as the show developed?  We’ll crack the cover and leaf through the pages together on this episode of THM.

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Hadestown Episode 4 script – The song (Epic 3)

What does it mean to be a tortured genius?  

Does it mean getting your show to Broadway, and finding yourself unable to get out of bed one day, crushed by the weight of all the things that happen because of your work?  

Maybe.  And that happened to Dale Wasserman, the author of the Man of La Mancha.

Does it mean you wander around inside your own head, unable to tune out the art and music and math and magic inside your own cranium, also unable to conquer and control it?  

Maybe.  And we’ll see one of those is a character in HT.

Does it mean that you find yourself curled up in bed, knowing that you need to fix a song, working yourself past the point of exhaustion and insomnia and reason, unable to sleep, unable to stay awake, but more than anything, unable to stop working on a song?

Mabye.  And that happened to the author of HT, Anais Mitchell.

Why is it so important to have that one song, the one that fits perfectly, that makes the show?  Why was this the demon that stalked both Jonathan Larson and Anais Mitchell?  We’ll find out this episode of THM.

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The ancient poet Virgil died of a fever with his master work still unfinished…and it was left to his executors to finish the work.  The book was the Aeneid, and it would be, in its time, the definitive work on the founding myths and stories of the Roman state.  This would cement his role as the greatest poet of his day, and it is a legacy that has never died.  Virgil is still read today.  

But the stories he told were his own adaptations.  His version of Orpheus was different from that of Homer and Euripides.  He wasn’t even re-telling the story so much as inventing it.

He was followed by Ovid, who would also have impacts at a historic level.  His books, too, are still read, and his contributions, too, carried on the Greek and Roman tradition in a way that is still recognizable today.  And he, too, told the story in his own way.  Scholars would write that he very consciously not only adapted the ancient stories for his own use, he would take VIRGIL’S story and freely change them for his own use.

And twenty centuries later, a folk musician named Anais Mitchell would take this great story, powerfully carried forward in these two great works, and do what Virgil and Ovid had both done: Told their own story, in their own way, to make the story ring true for their audiences.

What changes did Mitchell make, and why did she make them?  Did she ever ask “Who am I to think that I can hold my head up higher than my fellow humans?”  Could this modern bard write something that would improve on Virgil and Ovid.  She sure did, and we’ll find out how in this episode of THM.

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The Romans stand at a key moment in human civilization.  Starting with roots in Greece, they are looking back at the Trojan war, they are thinking about their gods.  They have founded the first university in the western tradition.  And they are modifying and inheriting a series of explanations for the world.

Where does the wind come from?  What controls the oceans, or causes lightning, or earthquakes?  Why do the seasons pass?

What is nature like?

Their answers, at least in part, involve the gods.  And they have been engaging those gods.  They have prayed to them, made sacrifices to them, asked them for favors.  And the gods, looking down, have picked their favorite champions, and intercede arbitrarily and for self-serving reasons in the affairs of humans.

But now, just before the birth of Jesus, there is a Roman poet who comes up with a totally different take.  In his story, there is a mortal, who will try an entirely different way to earning the favor of the gods.  

He will sing to them.  And this will open an entirely new way to look at the ancient Greek and Roman myths…and start a new way of thinking that will trace through history, to the earliest operas, and the fable of Robert Johnson playing for the devil at a crossroads, to Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown.

We’ll look back at that story today, on this episode of THM.

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In ancient Rome, there is a poet.  What we now call western civilization is just beginning to find its first roots take hold … there’s an academy, and Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle are writing books that will be read for centuries.  In fact, books that we still read and talk and think about today.  And in this line, just around the time of Jesus, is our poet.

His star is rising, then crossed.  The Encyclopedia Brittanica documents his rise: “No single work of literature has done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to posterity. By 8 ce the Metamorphoses was complete, if not yet formally published”

The poet doesn’t yet know the impact that his work will have; he can only know that his work is just now complete.  It’s fate, like that of the heroes he’s writing about, is not to get to a final destination unscathed.  Brittanica continues: “and it was at that moment, when Ovid seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful achievement, that he was banished to Tomis by the emperor.”

The work would have to be finished in exile.  And the travails would not end there; the emperor would ban his books from public libraries.  He would write his own autobiography…the title would be “sorrow.”

But history has a way of turning a censor’s work to folly; you can try to ban books but you can’t stop ideas, and when a good book finds it’s audience that genie won’t go back in the bottle.  I’ll keep reading from the Brittanica entry; our poet’s “chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing: its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and sensuous quality…It is those things that have recommended him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Ezra Pound.”  

Really, Ezra Pound?  Ew…yuck.  That dude was a racist monster who sucked in all the ways our poet did not.

The poet’s name was Ovid, the 12th and 13th centuries are called the “age of Ovid,” and he flourished again in the Renaissance.

The book he wrote was called Metamorpheses, and in there is the tale of Orpheus and Eurdyce.  Among those who would not share the Emperor’s scorn for the work was Anais Mitchell, who would pick up the tale in 2006 and turn it into a Broadway smash hit a decade later.

And today, we’ll learn where that story came from.

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Normally we release every other Tuesday, but this is our first special episode that uses the more traditional podcasting interview format.  This off-week episode comes just in-between Jesus Christ Superstar and Hadestown, which will start next week.

*               *                 *                *                  *

Imagine a scared kid going to their first day of high school.  Maybe they’re new at the school and don’t have any friends yet, maybe they’re just a nerd and not all the cool kids are being nice, maybe they have some stuff going on at home and they’re nervous and uptight all the time.

For it all to work out for these kids, something has to go right.  They walk into a room to start an activity that they barely know about, and it changes their life.  Maybe it’s a debate room, or a science class, or a high school paper newsroom.  And maybe…it’s a theater class.

This has happened so often it’s actually a theme at the Tony’s.  When Elaine Strich won in 2002 she invited her high school drama teacher, Mr. Bodick.  When Neil Patrick Harris won for Hedwig he thanked both Churchill Cooke and Danny Flores.  He said “These are teachers in small town New Mexico who when sports was the only option, showed that creativity had a place in the world. Without them I would never be able to do any of this.”

Melody Herzfeld, a high school drama teacher, got special recognition at the Tony Awards in 2018.  She was a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS, and she hid 65 students during the horrific shooting there.

If the measure of a life is the impact it has on other lives, there is no doubt that one profession that may lead the pack in changing lives are high school drama teachers.  Before almost everyone who has made it to Broadway is someone who made it to Broadway, they were theater kids, and they wouldn’t have been there without theater teachers.

And today we’re going to take a departure from our normal formula and talk to one of the best high school teachers, the FUSD’s Teacher on Special Assignment, Michael Despars.

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It is the 4th century AD…Jesus has been dead for at least 300 years but the stories and ideas about him have not.  After having been persecuted for decades, and fed to lions in the Coliseum, the Christians are now becoming the dominant religion under the new emperor Constantine.  But they aren’t the only Christians, and they aren’t the only ones with ideas about who Jesus was, and who Judas was.  They are becoming the institution that would later start the inquisition, and torture and suppress every other form of thought.

We aren’t there yet, but non-catholic ideas about Jesus are being actively suppressed.

In upper Egypt, on the west banks of the Nile, there is a true believer in Gnosticism.  The gnostics have their own writings, their own theology, and even their own gospels.  And one of those Gospels is the gospel according to Judas.  And books like this are exactly the sort that Rome is seeking out to destroy.

To protect these ideas, these books, and this knowledge, the gnostic believer takes his manuscripts, stores them in a clay container, and hides them away in a cave.  There they will sit for 15 centuries and when they are final discovered in the 1980s, and finally published in 2006, they will have the exact same approach to understanding the crucifixion that the musical JCS superstar launched only decades earlier.  What are we to make of that?  Let’s excavate together on this episode of THM.

[Footnotes in episode 24]

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There is a new musical about to open, and boldly it declares that it will re-tell the story of the crucifixion, and do so from the perspective of…Judas.  The advanced publicity is massive – as will become a hallmark of the coming age of megamusicals – and the theme of the show has not escaped notice.  No less an evangelical figure than Billy Graham himself said the show was “bordering on blasphemy and sacrilege.”

His concern about the content is shared.  In a rare moment of agreement between Graham and the National Secular Society, both groups showed up to protest the opening of the show.  The Secular Society handed out leaflets entitled ‘Jesus Christ Supersham.’  The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee also responded … rather strongly … to the show.

Ted Neely, who has played the lead role of Jesus in scores of productions, looked back at the role when he had passed his 80th year.  He “by the controversy the show stirred up.  "I gotta tell you, it was very strange," he told Tapestry.  "Our production company said, no matter what they may say to you, don't say anything, because they might punch you right in the face. So we were silent."

But the show would not be.  Would the controversy shut the show down?  Would protestors block the doors?  Or would the show simply go on?  We’ll talk about how the audiences, the critics, and the world reacted to the opening of Jesus Christ Superstar in this episode of THM.

[Footnotes in episode 24]

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There is a new show out there, and this one is, boldly enough, a re-telling of the story of Jesus Christ from the perspective of Judas.  That, by itself, is likely to be controversial.  And to take on this sacred topic the cast prepares itself by…covering the body of performer playing Christ and having the castmates lick it off of him, to get “closer to Jesus.”

The stage crew is pulling together the props and set pieces to make the show work which include… plastic tambourines, fish, enormous protozoa-like creatures, representations of the man in the moon, strings of beads hanging from poles, boulders, and a gigantic set of false teeth.

Jesus will need to be crucified, and for that the actor playing Jesus will be wrapped in what one reviewer will call an “auto-erotic silver artichoke.”  He’ll be followed around by his conscience, which will be represented as a group of performers dressed in puffy suits that look like the stay-puffed marshmellow man.

Do these seem like typical staging choices to represent the final days of Christ to you?  And this is definitely NOT a parody; this is miles from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.  None of these are attempts to make fun of, or deconstruct, the story of Jesus.  They are legitimate efforts to enhance the story.  Why are they so weird?  Why were they there?  Did they propel the show to success or did they have to be overcome for the production to become the very first to run for 8 years in London and serve as the protype for both rock operas specifically and megamusicals overall?  Our sermon will be begin shortly, no this episode of THM.

[Footnotes in episode 24]

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It is 1432 and the small, medieval French village is abuzz.  There’s a travelling theater troupe and they’re going to perform what is, far and away, the most exciting show the town will ever see.  It happens every year, but only once a year, and everyone – from the smallest child to the oldest farmer – is going to see it.  It’s like a modern musical; you’ve seen it before, but the performance itself is so spectacular you see it again.

The crowd is absolutely alight before the show even starts.  There is energy and chatter; think of a heavy metal concert crossed with a soccer match.  And it’s a heavy metal show with a huge amount of fake blood.  There’s man who gets lashed over and over, his side is pierced with a spear, nails are driven through his hands, thorns are dragged over his scalp.  His tormenters take turns pulling out his beard until his flesh comes off with it.

This tale, gory as it is, does come from original source material.  But there is one key change.  In the original version, the people killing this poor victim are Roman soldiers.  In this play, they are Jews.  And it’s not hard to tell they are Jewish – the features of the performers are grossly exaggerated so everyone, including those small children, can tell who they are.  They live on the edge of the village and you’d never hire them to work for you, but they never go away, either.

The crowd is pumped by the action.  The tormenters are pure evil; the victim is pure good.  This is a passion play of Christ, and Judas the villain is portrayed so convincingly, and his identity is so linked to his race, that everyone knows what to do when the show is over.  They move as a vigilante mob to the Jewish sections and dispense street punishments for these children of Judas, beating them, breaking their possessions, burning what they can, and of course a few will die actual deaths to atone for the staged death that everyone has just witnessed.  It will happen this year.  It happened last year.  It will happen next year.  This is just how the village celebrates the miracle of Easter.  But looking back over history, it’s not hard to conclude that this was less a celebration of Jesus than a condemnation of Judas, a man who’s name is synonymous with betrayal, a man who bears the most hated name in all of western history.

Eight centuries later two Anglicans would take up the story again, with modern and elaborate staging, but with two important differences.  Their story would include music, and their story would be told from the perspective of Judas.  

They couldn’t be more opposite in their sympathies, but neither the passion plays of the middle ages nor the modern rock opera JCS are the Biblical story of Judas – and maybe, neither one could be.  

What is the Biblical story of Judas?  It is NOT the same in all of the gospels…and a large chunk of what is considered the Judas story was added after the Bible canon was written.  What was the historical Judas, who was the Judas in the Bible, how does all that connect to JCS, and what does it tell us about life and theater?  We’ll take our own reflective walk through Gethsemane together on this episode of THM. 

[footnotes in episode 24]

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The year is 1525 and William Tyndale is doing what nobody has done before…he has translated the Bible from Latin to English.  This as not well received; the church condemned the book, and one Bishop Tunstall bought all available copies and publicly burned them.  Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic.  The English government had sent agents out for his arrest.

That did not end matters for Tyndale.  He roamed the continent staying where it was safe for 10 years, spending much time in Antwerp.  But then, in 1535, he was betrayed by Henry Phillips who turned him over to church authorities.  He could be put to death by the secular state if was a deemed a heretic, but he could be spared if he proved to the church that he was not.

He had no illusions.  The trial would be for show.  He spent 18 months in the Filford prison in Brussels, where he prepared his statements and continued to translate.  And what a process it was.  His prosecutor was the Roman Catholic inquisitor, Jacobus Latomus, gave him the opportunity to write a book stating his views; Latomus wrote a book in response to convince him of his errors; Tyndale wrote two in reply; Latomus wrote two further books in response to Tyndale. Latomus' three books were subsequently published as one volume: in these it can be seen that the discussion on heresy revolves around the contents of three other books Tyndale had written on topics like justification by faith, free will, the denial of the soul, and so on. See Latomus' report of Tyndale's beliefs below. Latomus makes no mention of Bible translation; indeed, it seems that in prison, Tyndale was allowed to continue making translations from the Hebrew.

He was not specifically accused of heresy for his translations; he did not recant or seriously contest the rest of the charges against him.  He was condemned.

In October of 1536 he was led to a town square where a circle of stakes surrounded the place of execution.  He was offered one more chance to recant.  His words were, instead, defiant: “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

He was burned at the stake, but not burned alive.  He was given the courtesy of being strangled to death before his body was lit on fire.

This ended the life of a Luthern, reformer, and first translator of the Bible to the English language.  Be careful when you mess with the ineffable word of God.  For hundred and fifty years later two other Englishman would be even more bold: they would take the Biblical story of the crucifixtion, put it to music, and open it on Broadway.  Nobody was going to strangle them, but the heart of the matter remained the same: Were mere mortals allowed to re-translate and re-interpret the Bible, outside the sanction of an official church?   To know what’s OK and what isn’t, don’t we need to know how the Bible get translated in the first place, and who decides what goes into it?  In the words of Barnett College Biblical scholar Indiana Jones, only the penitent man shall pass.  We humble ourselves in this episode of THM.

[References and bibliography for the Superstar series are in this episode]

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I have promised that this podcast will explore the lessons that different shows have for theater and for life, and to explore the unexpected and unlikely connections the bring cross human lives on the plane of theater.  To help me better understand all that, I reached out to the internet to ask, anyone who was willing, to share with me what made their favorite show work.  That’s it – not anything deep or all that philosophical, just why Phanton of the Opera drew you in.

What I got back was so, so much more.  What kind of people are drawn to musical theater?  How does it affect them?  How does musical theater fit into a human life?  And how are those lives changed?  In ways that I, at least, could never have imagined.  I imagined I was asking what made a show your favorite form of entertainment, and what I learned is how it could change your life forever.  And that, my friends, may be the greatest theater mystery of all.  I will be your spirit guide today, on a totally different episode of Theater History and Mysteries. 

Holli performing at the white party.  A second image.

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I am writing this on Father’s Day, 2025, and to mark this occasion I will share my greatest parenting victory.  Last spring, during Taylor Swift’s eras Tour my daughter did all the things one does to try to get a ticket.  Tried the presale, pre-registered, looked at the fan resale sites, looked at the predatory reseller sites, put alerts on all her accounts.  But, no dice.  The only tickets that were available were well out of our price range.

And then, 2 days before the last concert in LA, a family friend found tickets we could – barely – afford, and asked if our daughter wanted to join.  Sending the text message announcing that she had tickets made me feel like the parent of the year and, undoubtedly, badly interrupted her AP English class.

And so, with 48 hours to go, my daughter came home, disappeared into her room, and took to her homework like any good AP student would and announced that she needed to make sure that she had memorized every song that was on the set list, plus every song that might be one of the two “surprise” songs that Swift added to each concert performance.  If there was any song, in any format, that Taylor Swift had ever recorded, my daughter was going to make sure that she could sing along with it word for word at the concert.

When she came home, she described the experience as a “fever dream.”

Ms. Swift, if you are out there listening to this podcast, or more likely the lectures I have uploaded to YouTube on advanced linear multiple regression heterogeneity tests, I just want you to know that you made my daughter’s year.

So imagine my surprise when I was researching this episode, asked her what she thought of “beautiful ghosts.”  To my stunned amazement, she had never heard of it.  Ever.  Beautiful ghosts is the original song that Taylor Swift had recorded for the fraught, and failed, CGI animated version of Cats.

How is it possible to make a show with a budget that large, with an all-star cast, including the single most popular entertainer on the face of the planet earth (who can date whoever she wants but should really be cheering for Justin Herbert and the San Diego Chargers) – how can you put together a production with every single bit of mass marketed momentum going for it, and end up with a flop?  That is a more commercial but harder to untangle mystery than most that we’ve dealt with, and we’ll be watching it from the cheap seats in this episode of THM.

Show watching

https://www.broadwayleague.com/research/statistics-broadway-nyc/

Musical artist net worth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_artists_by_net_worth

The success of Andrew Lloyd Webber

https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/theatre-news/news/prepare-for-yet-another-very-andrew-lloyd-webber-summer

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An already famous poet is working, for the first time, on something light and fun.  It’s a children’s book of poems about Cats.  All his previous work has basically been about the anxious terror in the modern world, but he is going to do something delightful, for a change.  His Dad likes cats, he likes cats, his friends have kids who like cats.   The book is about cats.

He’s a handful of lines in when he stops himself – he’s writing about a female cat, a fallen star, and he decides not to go on.  This super-educated man realizes that, probably unconsciously, he’s modeling his character study after something that’s been done before, albeit centuries earlier and in another language.  The risk of plagiarism doesn’t stop him, he just realizes that the story is just too sad to put in a book designed to entertain kids.

Those poems and finished and eventually are read on the radio on Christmas day in 1937 to a delighted English audience, and one of the youngsters who hears them is Andrew Lloyd Webber, who will go on to become what can safely be called the most powerful force on broadway.  He turns the poems into a musical, and with the help of TS Eliot’s widow Valerie combines the figure with some other poetry to produce the song “Memory,” which will become absolutely iconic.

TS Eliot pointedly did not sexualize the character.  Critics would write that the ALW production team would go out of its way to say nothing sexual about Grizabella or her past.  And yet, today, those who write about the character the most closely argue convincingly that she is widely understood to be a former prostitute…and she is, just not in any English language version.  

Why is she understood this way when there is no reference prostitution in the text for the musical, and when she doesn’t appear at all in the original book of poetry at all?  Does it matter, and if so, why?  We’ll trace the rumors on this episode of THM…

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You’ve heard this one before.  Maybe it’s a beautiful Siren, singing a gorgeous song only to lure unsuspecting sailors on to the rocks and eventually their death.  Or a snake, promising you a delicious apple, only to curse all of humanity with the knowledge of good and evil.  Or a wolf, disguising itself as an old woman, to trick an innocent child into letting it into their house, only to have the beast devour the youngster as prey.

Or maybe a demon posing as a child’s playmate – maybe using the name “Captain Howdy” or something like it – only to trick the child into letting the ancient, evil entity possess them bodily, unleashing a series of horrors and torments that you only really hear in horror stories.

This episode is a Theater History and Mystery version of the War of the Worlds – a story that is entirely made up, but made up as a good Halloween story to entertain an audience prone to good ghost stories.

The events here are mostly made up, but the twist is – all the dates, actors, and even the seances – are confirmed historical events.  This isn’t a ghost story that really happened, but one that sure could have.

Taking a new turn, I’ll try as hard as I can to blur fact and fiction in this episode of THM and, if you get a chance, replay it on Halloween…

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A young TS Eliot is at Harvard where the field of psychology is just now emerging.  You can read Freud, of course, but there’s nothing like behavioral or analytic psychology that have yet to be developed.  But there are dreams – and what, exactly, are those?  Freud himself starts his book by citing what the Greeks thought that they were, which in many cases were visions of alternate realties, a channeling of the gods, a means of clairvoyance where the future, or at least possible futures, were revealed.

What was science supposed to do with all of that?

Well one answer, and one that TS Eliot studied, was that there was a place between heaven and earth, between the purely spiritual and the definitely physical.  Eliot begins to wonder, as did Hamlet and then Victor Frankenstein, whether there was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in philosophy – or science.

And so the youthful Eliot, seeking a truth that the world itself was only beginning to come to grips with, would not only experiment with the occult but put it rather directly in the forefront of his literary work, including and especially his defining poem, The Wasteland.

After his fame arrived, he would take up a side project, writing a light book of children’s rhymes.  About cats.  One of those poems he never finished.  That poem talked about the dreamspace, maybe that third space between heaven and earth.  But that poem went nowhere.  It was probably too serious for a children’s book.  He just stuck the poem in the back of his stack of paper – the heavyside layer would not come out in his book about cats, but it would get resurrected after his death to form the central frame for the musical.

How deeply was TS Eliot involved with the occult?  Why did he put that theme in such a central place in his best poem?  How come he kept describing writing poetry like an instance of demon possession?  Grab your rosary beads, let’s all stay safe in this episode of THM. 

Poll about belief in God and the devil

https://assets.realclear.com/files/2024/01/2334_RCORToplineJan92024.pdf

Cursed books

https://bookbindersmuseum.org/you-have-been-warned-book-curses-and-cursed-books/

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Episode #4

The year is 1982.  The liberatory vibe of the 1960s is long gone…Ronald Reagan is president, and it’s a bad time to be an air traffic controller, or a union member, or an Iranian hostage, or, maybe most tragically, if you’re gay.  But there remain progressive voices, and one of those is the Village Voice, still an open champion of the avante garde in the world.  If you have a new, edgy, and experimental piece of theater, the Village Voice should be your core audience.

But Michael Feingold, the theater critic for the Voice, does not like the genre-busting production he just watched, and he’s dripping acid off his pen to try to come up with something more demeaning than his previous paragraph, and by and large it’s working.  Jessica Sternfeld recounts his prose: “Feingold tidily listed each disastrous element and how it contributed to a show clearly doomed to failure…the poetry itself, Feingold began, struggled painfully and unsuccessfully…the music is such inane, characterless drivel that only a generation of stoned clones and TV drones could have summed it up…the music doesn’t sound composed.  It doodles randomly from chord to chord, never developing a theme or structure…Feingold did not further elaborate his problems with the music, but moved to the third horror, [the] choreography, which looked borrowed and represented all too directly the choreographer’s undistinguished career.”

“Cats,” wrote Feingold, “is a dog.”  And with a special crescendo: “To sit through it is to realize that something has been peeing on your pants leg.  For two hours.”  And for the finale: “It ought to be retitled 101 uses for a dead musical, a reference to the popular book 101 uses for a dead cat.”  

As we know, that view of Feingold would not be widely shared, and the musical would resonate with all those marginalized groups that the Village Voice would otherwise represent.  In fact, it would become the longest-running, most lucrative, and probably most popular musical of all time.  We’ll figure out what Feingold missed, with urine-busting scotch guard on our pants, in this episode of THM.

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Cats, 3rd episode

A show is about to open in two days.  It features a power-packed pair of producers who would re-write Broadway history with two of the biggest musicals of all time, POA and Les Mis.  The female lead is in one of the final rehearsals, and it will be her place in history to sing into the world a song so powerful, so vital, so memorable, that it will immediately become a top-10 hit, get re-recorded more than 600 times, including two MORE trips to the top 10 by two others who are mega-stars in their own right.

I can’t fool you.  You are listening to a musical theater podcast.  You know the performer, and you know the song.  Elaine Paige is performing to an empty house, but she’s doing one of the final run-throughs of Memory, performing in Grisabella before the opening of Cats, and the mega-stars are Barbera Streisand and Barry Mantilow.

The other performers watch from the wings – it’s almost the only moment of the show where they aren’t all dancing during the musical numbers.  The orchestra rises in anticipation; this is the song that will make the show.  In fact, it’s the song that almost all the critics will point to as holding the entire show together, and show that will go on to play tends of thousands of times, win every major award, break all records for longest run and largest return.

It's a formula that’s worked before; Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, has paired with lyricist Tim Rice, and the magic that is conjured with the fusion of those two genius minds never fails to move audiences.

And then, breathlessly at first, she trills words that will soon be immoral: “Daylight / I won’t care if it finds me / With no breath in my body / With no beat in my heart.”

Wait.  What?  No, those aren’t the words.  I really can’t fool you!

But they were almost the words…that’s right, the lyrics to maybe the most immortal song in Broadway history were changed 2 days before the show opened.  And that was after the female lead had to pull from the show because she snapped her Achilles tendon, before the producers declared what the director had been done was not fit for the stage and threatened to pull the whole thing, before all the costumes were scrapped and re-done one week out.

And these are just some of things that almost derailed the show before it ever started.  But, as we know, these obstacles were overcome.  What had to happen for the show to get off the ground, and, most importantly, why did it work?  In the words of director Trevor Nunn, “the theater creaked, the ghosts walked…” and we’ll find out where they went in this episode of THM.

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TS Eliot is the author of Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats.  That’s a book of poems that will get transformed into one of the greatest broadway musicals of all time.  In fact, it might be the Broadway musical – it so shaped what a Broadway musical is that it’s changed the way the world thinks about musicals at all.

But that wasn’t the poetry that put TS Eliot on the map.  In fact, TS Eliot himself would have smash hits on Broadway during his lifetime…but none of them had anything to do with the poems or cats or anything other than his own, distant observations of his own failed marriage and his strange connection to very conservative religious beliefs.

And in the middle of all that, somehow, improbably, this guy has to write a children’s book about Cats.  

How did that happen?  What made TS Eliot tick, why did that result in a frightening move to the ugly right, and why was all that necessary for him to write Old Possum’s Practical Cats?  We’ll curl up on a couch and find a nice, comfortable beam of sunlight as we share this saga in this episode of THM.

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TS Eliot had demons.  He wrote about his demons.  He said that writing poems were like demons escaping from his body, and that when he finished writing them he would experience a “moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable.”

He wrote a poem that would become the archetypical anthem of a newly-emerging modernist movement in literature – it was dark, and brooding and anxious, and grim, and disturbing and unsettling.  That poem would be called, cheerily enough, the wasteland.

And in the middle of all that, he would write a delightful children’s book about cats, that would be picked up by Andrew Lloyd Webber and transformed into one of the biggest Broadway smash hits of all time.

What’s up with TS Eliot?  What shaped this guy and made him tick.  What were his demons…and how does Cats fit into all of that?  

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 A young music producer has just seen a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar and was hit by his muse … he wandered the streets of Manhattan, unable to sleep.  A native of France, Alain Boublil felt he had to keep walking until he found a theme that could match the power and emotional intensity of what he’d just seen, and something uniquely French.  He came to the defining national moment…the French Revolution.  That idea would develop into a rock opera, then a concept album, and finally transform into what has been rightly called the most successful musical of all time, in a show that has been seen by 70 million people in 44 countries and translated into 22 languages.  It has been a hit everywhere it has been except…France.  Why?

That second turn would see Boublil trade the muse for a mentor…the original production was about the French revolution but it was not about it was not based on Victor Hugo’s famous book.  That would take inspiration from Hugo’s cross-channel counterpart, Charles Dickens.  Boublil walked into a production of the quintessentially English show Oliver and walked out inspired to base the production on Les Miserables.  Incredibly enough, that show will be produced by the same man who was running the production of Oliver.

Which is only one of two incredible connections between England and France…the production of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece will, in the end, depend NOT on France’s greatest novelist but England’s greatest author.  How does the production of Les Miserables depend as much on William Shakespear and Victor Hugo?  We will trace all these fascinating paths of lineage on this episode of THM.

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Errata: At about the 12 minute mark I say that Phantom of the Opera is a Victor Hugo story.  It isn't -- it's French, but the author is Gaston LaRoux.

A young music producer has just seen a production of Jesus Christ, Superstar and was hit by his muse … he wandered the streets of Manhattan, unable to sleep.  A native of France, Alain Boublil felt he had to keep walking until he found a theme that could match the power and emotional intensity of what he’d just seen, and something uniquely French.  He came to the defining national moment…the French Revolution.  That idea would develop into a rock opera, then a concept album, and finally transform into what has been rightly called the most successful musical of all time, in a show that has been seen by 70 million people in 44 countries and translated into 22 languages.  It has been a hit everywhere it has been except…France.  Why?

That second turn would see Boublil trade the muse for a mentor…the original production was about the French revolution but it was not about it was not based on Victor Hugo’s famous book.  That would take inspiration from Hugo’s cross-channel counterpart, Charles Dickens.  Boublil walked into a production of the quintessentially English show Oliver and walked out inspired to base the production on Les Miserables.  Incredibly enough, that show will be produced by the same man who was running the production of Oliver.

Which is only one of two incredible connections between England and France…the production of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece will, in the end, depend NOT on France’s greatest novelist but England’s greatest author.  How does the production of Les Miserables depend as much on William Shakespear and Victor Hugo?  We will trace all these fascinating paths of lineage on this episode of THM. 

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Starting in September 1853 Victor Hugo, exiled to an island off the coast of France because the now-Emperor Louis Napoleon has told the army to shoot Hugo on sight, has been holding a series of seances.  There are been hundreds of them.  They have all been transcribes.  Scores of people have participated.  Many have served as amateur mediums.

 he results have been spectacular; they’ve made contact with their tragically deceased daughter, and other ghosts on the island, and some of history’s most important figures, from Plato to Jesus to Shakespeare.

And then, in October of 1855, the seances abruptly stop.  Why?  Who ended them?  The spirits told Victor Hugo to pick up his unfinished manuscript and get it published…was that the reason the novel came into being?  Does the end of the seances say something about whether the seances were real.  WERE the seances real?  Did spirits from beyond the grave come to speak to Victor Hugo?  We might not catch ‘em, but we will chase those ghosts as far as we can in this episode of THM.

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Seance transcript images:

Pages 1187 and 1189 of the seance transcripts contain the words "fille" and "morte," but neither includes the words Leopoldine.  Page 1189 of the seance transcripts.  Page 1187 of the seance transcripts.

Show summary:

It is September 11, 1853, and the already famous author Victor Hugo has been mourning the loss of his daughter for 2 years.  He’s also been exiled from France, and having barely escaped with his life he’s now living on a small island off the French coast named Jersey.  He’s there with his wife, his mistress, his children, and some friends.  He’s sitting on 2/3rds of a manuscript for Les Misérables, and his plans for it’s future and its publication are in limbo, as is the rest of his life.

Days earlier they have received as a guest the distinguished Mademoiselle de Girardin, herself an accomplished author, member of high society, and well-connected member of the continent’s literary class.  She has brought with her a device that is all the rage in the Europe that Hugo can’t visit…a séance table.  It’s not sophisticated, and it’s really just a small table on top of a large table that’s supposed to tap when the spirits arrive.  In a few tries so far it hasn’t really done anything.

But the group has gathered again, with a designated transcriber ready to take the minutes of the event to save an accurate transcript for the historical record.

Tonight IS different.  When called upon, the spirits will move the table.  In fact, they will tap out a message so precise and so clear that nobody could doubt it’s authenticity…and nobody did.  Skeptics were turned into believers instantly.  What did the table say?  Why did it resonate so strongly with the Hugo family?

This table would send Victor Hugo a very specific message about the  Les Misérables manuscript … and introduce the family to William Shakespeare as well.  What did the table say about Les Mis, and how would that affect the eventual production of the novel?  We’ll talk to the ghosts on this episode of THM.

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Thanks almost entirely to his mistress, Victor Hugo escaped France with his life and an early manuscript of Les Miserables.  While living in exile and on an island close to the coast but under British control, he finishes the book 10 years later.  It’s an immediate international smash hit, with an appeal so broad that even soldiers on BOTH sides of the US civil war love it.  

From there it’s a roller coaster…hugely popular between 1860 and 1900 it falls out of favor as France turns conservative between 1900 and 1940.  Its popularity re-energizes starting with the second world war, and then by 1980 it becomes one of the first big musicals in France, then takes over the London stage, and finally explodes on Broadway to become what many would call the most successful musical of all time.

So what has made this story so powerful?  Is it the love story, the redemption of the main character, or the call to a revolution?  Is it the intricate plot or the famous digressions, on topics from raw sewage to criminal slang, that run on for hundreds of pages?  We’ll consider all of these possibilities in this episode of THM.

Report on Homelessness in Orange County; interviews with unhoused people

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This episode covers 5 real historical figures that helped inspire the novel, and a whirlwind plot summary of the original Victor Hugo novel.

Errata:  For some reason I kept referring to the character Marius as "Marcus" -- please just skip that.  

Here's a link to the image of the Bishop's plaque, identifying that character in the novel is based on the actual Bishop of Deign.

Introduction

Against the odds, an early draft of Les Miserables made it out of Paris, with it’s author – Victor Hugo – in hiding for 9 days and with a price on his head.  The hero who saved the book is his mistress, who was also his copyist.  She smuggled a trunk with the manuscript to Brussels and then the island of Jersey, where she maintained a residence a stone’s throw from where Hugo was living with his wife and family.

When the book is finally published almost a decade later, Les Miserables instantly becomes the most commercially successful novel to that point in history.  Embedded within it are at least 3 different numerological references, what gamers today would call easter eggs.  These numbers are so obscure even the most crazed Les Mis fans would miss their significance.  What were they, and what did they mean?

And Les Mis is a work of fiction, but it very much is a commentary on its time. That time is one where who’s in charge of France shifts dramatically, and violently, about every 10 years.  Hugo writes the book in exile and has to recall the city of Paris from memory.  As he’s doing that, were his characters based on actual historical figures?  Was there an actual Cosette, or Fantine, or even Jean Valjean?

And, as always, what was this book about what was it’s message that has resonated with the audience?

We’ll figure this out and walk through the plot of this 1,500 page masterpiece, which takes as many twists, turns, and side trips as a barricaded French alley.  Let’s do it!  In this episode of Theater History and Mysteries.

Footnotes available in Episode 7 

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It's ​1860, ​and ​Victor ​Hugo, ​having ​taken ​to ​the ​barricades ​against ​the ​hated ​Louis ​Napoleon, ​has ​escaped ​Paris ​with ​a ​price ​on ​his ​head. ​And ​his ​mistress, ​not ​his ​wife, ​has ​successfully ​smuggled ​both ​he ​and ​his ​unfinished ​manuscripts ​out ​of ​France. ​But ​now ​he's ​in ​exile, ​living ​in ​an ​island ​off ​the ​French ​coast ​but ​under ​British ​control. ​How ​is ​he ​going ​to ​get ​his ​masterwork ​published? ​And ​as ​the ​text ​comes ​to ​be ​finished, ​it ​will ​be ​rightly ​remembered ​as ​a ​definitive ​statement ​on ​the ​French ​Revolution. ​But ​where ​in ​the ​book ​is ​the ​Revolution? ​The ​text ​is ​​1,500 ​pages ​long, ​and ​one ​of ​the ​five ​volumes ​is ​entirely ​dedicated ​to ​a ​revolt ​that ​happened ​over ​two ​days ​in ​1832. ​But ​in ​that ​skirmish, ​the ​revolutionaries ​lost, ​and ​all ​historians ​agree ​that ​the ​fight ​had ​almost ​no ​military ​or ​political ​significance. ​In ​fact, ​the ​most ​significant ​outcome ​of ​the ​battle ​is ​the ​painting ​Liberty ​Leading ​the ​People ​by ​Eugene ​Delacroix ​was ​banned ​from ​being ​shown ​in ​public ​because ​it ​might ​inspire ​people ​to ​revolt. ​H ​m, ​that's ​interesting. ​A ​piece ​of ​art ​is ​taken ​down ​from ​display ​to ​its ​possible ​political ​consequences. ​But ​back ​to ​our ​question. ​Surely ​that ​skirmish ​is ​not ​what ​Hugo's ​central ​theme ​is. ​Where ​is ​the ​revolution? ​In ​the ​most ​famous ​novel ​about ​the ​French ​Revolution?  We ​will ​go ​down ​those ​winding, ​narrow ​Parisian ​back ​alleys ​trying ​to ​find ​it ​in ​this ​episode ​of ​Theater ​History ​and ​Mysteries. 

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It’s 1848 and there is yet another violent transfer of power going on in France.  One of its greatest citizens – both a member of the legislative body and the Legion of Honor, has been in hiding for 9 days with a price on his head.  If he’s found by the wrong people he will surely be killed.  He is an author and he does have a pile of manuscripts he’s working on, but first he’s got to get out of France.  How did he do it?  Was he the hero who saved the manuscript that would become the most famous French novel, or was it someone else?  How was the manuscript saved?

The story did get out and did get published and is considered the quintessential story of the French revolution.  But the central event on the barricades isn’t about the big French revolution in 1789 or even later events in the mid-1800s where Hugo himself was ON the barricades.  In fact, the 2 days on the barricades that consume almost a fifth of the whole book had almost no military significance at all.  Why did Hugo center on this event for inspiration instead of the much more significant revolution of the 1790s or the much more consequential events that Hugo himself was a part of?  Where is the revolution in this, the most famous fictional account of the French revolution?

REFERENCES in transcript.

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Errata For some reason I keep calling Andrew Lloyd-Webber Andrew Lloyd-Wright, which is weird because I know nothing about architecture.  Anyway, the author of Phantom of the Author is Andrew Lloyd-Webber, not Andrew Lloyd-Wright.  Together, however, I feel they would make a spectacular opera house.

Intro: On Oct 13, 2016 the Phantom of the Opera is scheduled to open in the Mogador Theater.  The narrative is, of course, set in the majestic, surreal, very gothic Palais Garnier, and the opera house is also key to the plot.

The show has been running in London for 20 years, never been performed in Paris.  It's getting a little prickly; the musical is based on a book by French writer Gaston LaRoux and there’s some kerfuffle afoot.  Andrew Lloyd Webber isn’t exactly forthcoming crediting the LaRoux estate.  Since LaRous was French, that complicates matters.  But it has all been worked out…to the satisfaction of the estate, the lawyers, the production company, and the theater.  But not, perhaps, to the satisfaction of the Phantom.  A disaster would strike, and the production would never open.  To this day, this classic French story, in an iconic French location, that is the archetypical example of French Gothic storytelling, has not been performed in France.

This episode will explore the musical production, starting with the Lloyd-Webber version of events leading up to it, looking into the various charges and counter-chargers, and trying to find out if the musical succeeds because of the book, if the book only survives because of the musical, or if there's some other formula out there.

And finally, what happened that prevented the musical from being performed in France?

(References in Episode 4)

NYT: On the credits issue: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/11/theater/old-novel-returns-to-haunt-a-current-musical.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap

 What the fire looked like:

https://www.tumblr.com/operafantomet/184591545852/do-you-what-ever-happend-after-the-fire-in-the

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It’s the fall of 1923, and Lon Chaney Sr. has just starred in a smash hit based on Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.  There is going to be a follow-up show, and it is going to be a hit.  But who’s idea was it?  And why will that matter to the critical reception of a musical that won’t come out for another 80 years?

Flash forward two years, and now It’s the summer of 1925.  Universal Pictures has invested a pile of money in a new movie, but there’s a war council that’s been called because the production is going so poorly that it’s on the edge of collapse, and had so much been invested in the show it might simply have been dropped.

I’m sure you’ve guessed the title by now.  But if this movie isn’t made, the Phantom story will languish, and it’s very likely the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical mega-hit will never come to be.

What happened?  Why was the show in such dire straights, and what was done to save it?

How many endings were considered, scripted, and shot?  And after the brush with disaster, what finally made the movie work?

And….where ARE THE GHOSTS?  If one Hollywood production should have some really juicy ghost stories surrounding the set and the performers, it’s this one.  If there’s a good ghost story out there, by god, I’m going to find it.

We’ll try to find them in this episode, part 2 of a 3-part series on the Phantom.  Season 1, ep 4 we looked at the book.  Today the movie, and next time the musical.  But the themes here will make a difference to understanding what may be the most profitable musical of all time.

(References in Episode 4)

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This is EPISODE 4.  The next episode, EPISODE 5, will drop on December 16.

It’s 1786, and a male ballet dancer (“Dahn- sir”) and ballerina both dance at the Paris opera house, and the man falls in love with the woman.  But so does a solider, and in the love triangle the dahn-sir is killed.  With his dying breath he asks that he be buried in the opera house to be near his love in death if not in life, and his bones are later used as props in theater productions.

Could this story be the inspiration for the Phantom of the Opera?

Or in 1873 the original opera house burned down just as the majestic new Palais Garnier is being finished, leaving a ballerina dead and her fiancé disfigured.  

Could this story be the inspiration for the Phantom of the Opera?

Ironically, the Phantom of the Opera isn’t a phantom at all – it’s a real guy and not a ghost.  So it might not be that surprising that number of non-ghostly mysteries surround the Phantom of the Opera.  SO MANY QUESTIONS.

• What, and who, inspired the characters?
• Was there a real chandelier accident, and if so, what happened?
• The story has obviously gained traction, but when the book was published, was it a flop or a hit?  
• How did Carl Lemmele, the CEO of Universal Pictures, find out about the book?
• What makes the narrative so enduring, that it’s inspired a book, a movie, and musical?
• What makes the musical so popular – maybe even more popular than any entertainment production, including any movie – and is it the same thing that makes the book work?  Does the narrative of the book make the musical work, or did the musical resuscitate a poorly written book?
• Was Andrew Lloyd Webber a fan of the book or did he consider it a classic penny dreadful?
• How does the story end?
• As interpretations fly, an intrepid “independent scholar” finds a previously undiscovered ORIGINAL manuscript that shows what the author was thinking at the time the book was printed.  What did that manuscript reveal?
• And where are the ghosts?

In this episode we'll discuss the author, the original books, and separate out what real and imagined incidents inspired the original book.

REFERENCES

Babilas, D. (2013).  Paris Opera as an Edifice and a Literary Haunted House.  In Dark Cartogrophies – Exploring Gothic Spaces (pp. 67-87).  Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Biancorosso, G. (2018). The phantom of the opera and the performance of cinema. The Opera Quarterly, 34(2), 153–167. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/8/article/716827

Blake, M. F. (1995).  A thousand faces: Lon Chaney’s unique artistry in motion pictures.  New York: Vestal Press.

Chandler, D. (2009). “What do we mean by opera, anyway? ”: Lloyd webber’s phantom of the opera and “high-pop” theatre. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 21(2), 152–169. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2009.01186.x

Cui, A.-X., Motamed Yeganeh, N., Sviatchenko, O., Leavitt, T., McKee, T., Guthier, C., Hermiston, N., & Boyd, L. (2022). The phantoms of the opera—Stress offstage and stress onstage. Psychology of Music, 50(3), 797–813. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356211013504

Curiosity Damsel. (2017, July 24). The opera ghost really existed.. Curiosity Damsel. https://curiositydamsel.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/the-opera-ghost-really-existed/

Frey, A. (2016, July 22). The Phantom of the

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In the early 1970s and a writer for plays, movies, and television is holed up in Palm Springs at one of the most unusual restaurants in operation.  There was a sole proprietor, the menu has one dish, and there is no advertising or tourists because there are only 4 tables.  The topic of conversation is whether to turn a stage play into a musical, and the server, cook, owner, and sole employee is also a psychic.  

The cook is consulted about the project and predicts: “It will be extremely successful,” she says, “In fact, it will overwhelm your life.”

Two years later, in 1972 the production would open as a musical.

The playwright was Dale Wasserman, the project was converting The Man From La Mancha into a musical, and it would go on to play over 2,000 shows

There was something mystical afoot: “Facts cannot explain the success of the Man from La Mancha.  Something more was at work…”

Part 1 looked at the significance of the book Don Quixote.  Part 2 looked at the life of Miguel de Cervantes.  This episode, part 3, looks at how the book was converted into a musical that went on to be one of the most successful musical  theater productions ever.  And the crazy coincidences that were necessary to bring it about...

(References listed in episode 1)

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This is the story of how one of the greatest books ever written, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, became one of the most successful musicals in broadway history, which of course was The Man from La Mancha by Dale Wasserman.

The year is 1579, and a solider being held in an Algerian prison, and he’s about to make his 4th, and failed, attempt to escape.  And this is only one of a multitude of life mishaps that makes it very unlikely the solider even survived.  And it wasn’t until the age of 58 that the solider, then prisoner, then tax collector, would write the world’s first novel.

 What utterly impossible set of circumstances had to happen for this prisoner to even get out of prison, much less become one of the greatest writers of all time?

 Flash forward 350 years to the mid-1960s where a playwright is looking to convert a stage play into a musical, he has an acquaintance who is a psychic, so the writer asks whether the musical will be a successful endeavor.  The psychic predicts not only that it will, and will soon overwhelm the writer’s life.

Both predictions are entirely accurate.

This is a 3 part dive into Don Quixote.  In part 1 we looked at the impact of the book and what made it so important.  Take home points are that it is  a really big deal, and it had a lot of important ideas wrapped around a really funny and accessible story.

In this part we’ll look at the star-crossed life of Cervantes, including the ominous predictions surrounding 1588, his deeply ironic relationship with the greatest playwright of his day, and try to answer the question of how someone with his life could possibly write comedy.

In part 3 we’ll ask how that narrative, 350 years later, get translated into one of the most successful musicals in broadway history?

What series of impossible and unlikely events had to happen for the world to inherit Don Quixote?

(References in Episode 1)

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Thank you to the fan from Los Angeles who writes: "Hi. I've been enjoying your Cervantes podcast but unless the show on Broadway that was made from the book by Cervantes turned it into a spy story, the proper title of the musical is "Man of La Mancha." Not the man and not from."  All true, I can only identify this as errata.

This is the story of how one of the greatest books ever written, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, became one of the most successful musicals in broadway history, which of course was The Man from La Mancha by Dale Wasserman.

The year is 1579, and a solider being held in an Algerian prison is about to make his 4th escape attempt.  It will fail, and there’s a very real chance that although he’s escaped severe punishment the first 3 times, this failure could be fatal.  (McKendrick 82)  His foiled attempt will not result in being put to death, but will leave him utterly without hope of escape. 

What utterly impossible set of circumstances had to happen for this prisoner to even get out of prison, much less become one of the greatest writers of all time?

The year is 1615, and a very conventional playwright is writing the second part of a very unconventional book.  Really wanted to be a playwright, seemed almost ambivalent about being an author of books.  In it he pens the phrase “My guess is that there is not a nation or language into which the book will not be translated.”  This prediction will prove to be entirely true.

What about this book is so compelling that it makes its own equivocal author an accurate prophet, beyond his own wildest dreams?

The time frame is now the mid-1960s a playwright is looking to convert a stage play into a musical, and he’s having a meal at small restaurant where the cook is also the sole proprietor and the menu has one item.  The cook is also a psychic, so the writer asks whether the musical will be a successful endeavor.  The psychic predicts not only that it will, and will soon overwhelm the writer’s life.

Both predictions are entirely accurate.

Not only are these 3 events connected, but they are connected by a straight line and by the exact same narrative.

In this 3-episode series I pursue the history Don Quixote, and episode 1.1 starts with the book -- how did it get written, what's it about, and why has it become such a class?  Episode 2 will explore the life of the author, MIguel de Cervantes, and episode 3 will get to how the author and the story got woven into a musical.

REFERENCES

Albrecht, J. W. (2005). Theater and politics in four film versions of the Quijote. Hispania, 88(1), 4-10. https://doi.org/10.2307/20063070

Bayliss, R. (2006). What Don Quixote means (today). Comparative Literature Studies, 43(4), 382-397. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25659541

Gregor, K. (2016). Collaborative encounters? Two recent Spanish takes on the Shakespeare–Cervantes relationship. Palgrave Communications, 2(1), 16033. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.33

Johnson, M. (2007, April 23). Why Don Quixote needs show tunes. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2007/apr/23/whydonquixoteneedsshowtun

McKendrick, M. (1980).  Cervantes.  Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Miller, S. (2024). Inside man of La Mancha. In New Line Theatre. https://www.newlinetheatre.com/lamanchachapter.html

Mineo, L. (2016, April 25). A true giant. Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/a-true-giant/

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