Broadway in the Morning. (Or Moss Hart, The 8th Fold, and why I’ll never give up on new writing).

On this day last year, in a rehearsal studio in Rotherhithe, we held the first day of the first workshop for a musical I co-wrote, The 8th Fold. I had spent the previous 4 years working primarily in a West End production office, on commercial enterprises designed, whilst giving the audience what they came for, to make money. The idea of spending the majority of my savings on a week of development that would never see a paying audience was alien to me as a producer; on paper, you could not have persuaded me. So why did I?

Because passion does not exist on paper.

I loved The 8th Fold. I love it. And without workshops, and people taking risks, new writing and contemporary theatre probably would not exist. As a producer, that makes my heart hurt for the future of the industry I love so much. As a human, and a theatre fan…it is unthinkable.

Recently, on the advice of my friend and colleague Ricky, I read Moss Hart’s autobiography Act One. It was the first time we had seen each other in a few months, and the first time I was telling Ricky about The 8th Fold. I was explaining how relatively easy it was to write the show, and how when a thing is right, it tends to just happen, when he stopped me and told me that everything I was saying reminded him of this book, which he’d recently discovered. It was out of print, but I managed to locate a copy, and started reading almost immediately. Act One was a revelation. In my history as a reader (25 years and counting), I have never owned a book with more folded pages, highlighted passages, and scribbled notes. It was lessons so familiar they took my breath away, and dreams so often dreamed that I felt as if they were happening to me. It tells the story of how Moss Hart (who feels, now, like an old friend rather than a theatrical legend) became a writer almost entirely by chance, and how, as an unknown entity on the theatre scene, he struggled for acceptance until he began to collaborate with better known writers, who validated him by association. We cannot, I have always believed, underestimate the power of one person’s belief. This is, and apparently always has been, the foundation of success, in new writing and probably in life. As creators, you keep working until you’re happy with what you’re producing…then comes the next challenge: getting somebody to listen.

Seeing these scenarios come alive in Act One was reassuring in a way I hadn’t imagined it would be. I guess I was naive in failing to imagine how new writers fared in what I suppose I was thinking of as a golden age for theatre. When we know these works only as classics, and these people only as legends, it just doesn’t cross our minds to imagine them working as office assistants to get a foot in the door, or directing children at a summer camp to be able to pay their rent. I had never thought about how Moss Hart ended up with a play on Broadway (I don’t think I’d ever thought about Moss Hart at all, if I’m honest). It felt, from 2014, like a different world; it felt as if the practitioners of that day had just always been there.

What a short sighted assumption. When you think about it, really, it could not be more obvious.

Of course there has always been new writing. It’s a cycle, and the only way theatre can ever move on. It has actually barely changed at all.

I can’t decide if that makes me hopeful or miserable. On one hand, I love the thought that the unknown shows and writers on the edge of the theatre scene will one day be as celebrated as all the luminaries that have come before. On the other, isn’t it about time we started embracing the new as it happens? Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I love the exclusivity I feel at discovering a composer or a musical that the mainstream hasn’t quite caught on to. It makes me feel as if I’m in on a really exciting secret. That said, the most thrilling part is alwayswatching other people discover what you’ve known all along was there…so how do we make them discover? (That’s a genuine question. I haven’t worked it out yet. If I had I wouldn’t be working a theatre bar to support my producing habit).

This season on Broadway, James Lapine’s adaptation of Act One is one of the most acclaimed openings. It was nominated for most of the Tonys it was eligible for, and won a few. It’s a testament to the fact that people like stories of the theatre. If the Moss Hart of Act One could see this, I found myself thinking as I finished reading the book, the same Moss Hart who was reaching the point where he had no idea what, if anything, he could do next, right up until the moment his play opened on Broadway…well…the obvious statement here is that he wouldn’t believe it, but I think he would. He knew how good he was by then, I think. All he needed was for everyone else to see it too.

And that is what it comes down to, in part. Supporting new work is often the difference between a career, and a person walking away, unable to take the unparalleled pressure any more. That is sometimes all it is. We just need to show our support.

Despite having gone to the theatre regularly as a child, and feeling like I was having a religious experience every time I heard an ensemble sing, I didn’t really ‘come to the theatre’ until I was 20 and saw a production of The Last 5 Years. I’ve told the story multiple times (so much so that as I write this I don’t even know which example I’m going to link to here), but to paraphrase, I saw something in that show, and those people, that I never had before. It was not a spectacular. It wasn’t a star vehicle. It wasn’t a sold-out-every-night kind of hit, but to 20 year old me, not a single one of those things mattered. It was brilliant.

That was, if we must place these things on a timeline, where my love affair with contemporary musical theatre began. I have always been someone who looks beyond the obvious to find something more, or roots for the underdog in the knowledge that there is something beyond the mainstream, award winning content, and that those creators are probably the ones who really need our endorsements. New and contemporary musical theatre, in the sense we think of it now, proved to me that song and dance spectaculars, though undoubtedly deserving of their place in the theatrical canon, were not all that was out there. I was completely won over by the intelligent, true to life stories that people like Jason Robert Brown and Michael John LaChuisa (if you haven’t listened to See What I Wanna See, let me tell you the extensive reasons you should) were creating. The theatre I’d previous been exposed to was designed to help it’s audience escape the real world. These shows were about the real world, and that appealed so much more.

The Last 5 Years was a gateway. I wanted to discover it all. Contemporary musical theatre was, it seemed in my eyes, absolutely thriving. It wasn’t just the tiny Off-Broadway shows either; I sat at the back of the circle for Spring Awakening in New York feeling as if I had stumbled upon a different world; I couldn’t get a ticket to In The Heights, a rap musical, essentially, because it had won 8 Tonys and immediately sold out. A few years later, along came Next to Normal, which I saw twice in 3 days, just to check it was as good as I suspected. These truly brilliant contemporary shows not only existed, but were being embraced on the highest level. I didn’t know much about the business of theatre back then, but it seemed to me like an absolutely golden time. The catch, though? All of those shows played in New York City. In London, where I had lived my entire life, Spring Awakening closed early. Next to Normal hasn’t arrived here to this day. Yes, contemporary productions were absolutely happening, and some of them were truly brilliant (Ordinary Days at Trafalgar Studios beingalways the first example I come to here, and Parade, both at the Donmar and the Southwark Playhouse existing on it’s own plane of exceptional) but the mainstream audiences just weren’t going.

Again, that’s a conundrum I don’t have the answer to. I don’t know how we make the general public care. I have no idea. But something that inspires me beyond most other things is that right now, we’re finding a way to carry on.

Producing isn’t easy. Even if you’re a billionaire who’s latest production recouped on opening night, I’m sure producing isn’t easy. But as long as people keep believing in the good stuff, and keep finding the means to create it…anything could happen.

That is why I produce. It’s also why I write.

I came on board with The 8th Fold about 2 years after it was initially conceived, when it’s composer Gianni Onori asked me to listen to some of his demos, mostly because we were friends, partly with the very slight possibility that I might want to produce it. I knew by the chorus of the first song I heard that I wanted to be involved, but without reading the script I couldn’t gauge what the right next step should be, so I asked Gianni who had written it. And that’s where it got exciting.

While the plot existed almost in it’s entirety (it’s changed somewhat since) there wasn’t yet a book. I never planned to co-write a musical. People had asked, multiple times, connecting in their minds my love of theatre and writing and coming to an obvious conclusion, but I had always insisted it wasn’t part of my plan. It feels in a way as if The 8th Fold wrote itself. It feels inevitable. The creative process involved a lot of coffee, a lot of talking at each other because we were so excited about everything we were coming up with, a lot of character development (I gained 4 new best friends writing this show…and they’re all fictional)…and then one day, when we couldn’t drag out the background work any longer…we just wrote it. It was almost as easy as that.

We workshopped last Summer, and I’ve never loved our show more than then, seeing 6 incredible actors bring it to life. In November, we took it to the West End in a gala concert staging, which I can barely type without laughing. Who gets a West End show before a full production? 2 months today, I land in NYC for it’s American debut (and the first time anyone will see The 8th Fold as a full show). Yes, I’m very proud of our work, both creating the show and promoting it since, but I’m not naive. I know, without the tiniest shadow of doubt, that we’re only getting any of this because people support us, and believe in The 8th Fold. And who knows how far that can go? But now, we’re gonna need audience support. We will need people to come. We will need people to tell their friends, and their friends to buy a ticket, and then tell their friends, who we need to do the same. Shows die.Good shows die. They need audiences to live. We need audiences so that our show can live.

And who are we? Why would a person who hasn’t heard our names come to a show that doesn’t star a Hollywood actor (yet)?

Well, why not? I wish it was the norm that people assumed new writing would be great. I wish that as a producer I could create good work in the knowledge that the risk would always pay off. I wish I understood audiences. I wish my friends who write contemporary musicals for a living could quit their ushering jobs and their call centre jobs and their bar jobs because people were coming to their shows.

Towards the end of the events described in Act One, having stayed up talking out his nerves until sunrise on the night before his Broadway opening, Moss Hart left the theatre and went out on to the deserted street.

“I thought I had seen Broadway in all it’s various guises, but I had never seen it like this”, he wrote.

“It looked, of all things, sleepy and innocent. The tawdriness and the glitter were gone. It seemed to stand hushed and waiting — as if eager to welcome all the new actors and playwrights struggling to reach it”.

That night, after torturous months of trial and error, and years before that of failed attempts, Moss Hart’s Once in a Lifetime opened to rave reviews. The Last 5 Years is a movie now. Last night, in a fringe venue 20 minutes from my front door, I saw a sold out performance of In The Heights a world away from the place it was set.

This summer, in New York City, Act One finishes performances a matter of days before The 8th Fold starts.

There are places, multiple, for all of these things; all of these pieces of art which exist only because people believed in them enough to keep on going. As long as people keep taking those leaps, there will always be a place for new writing. All we have to do, as an audience, is be there to catch them.

And that is how we start.

Is it naive to think that one day, maybe, the entire theatre scene could look like Broadway in the morning? Hushed and waiting, eager to welcome the new and passionate?

I hope not.

Because I for one will not be giving up.