Jason Robert Brown

2002-11-10
The Miami Herald
Christine Dolen

Aaron Latham had already spun a magazine piece into a hit movie when a fellow Texan named Phillip Oesterman sent him a letter out of the blue, asking: How about Urban Cowboy, the musical?

After five years, many fights, cast and creative team changes, a tragic death, millions at stake and a balky bull that refused to behave, Oesterman’s question is about to be answered. Urban Cowboy — A New Musical will have its world premiere at Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse on Saturday after seven days of previews (if not for that bull, it would have been 10). And one more “movical” may be poised to hit Broadway as a $4.5 million production.

Sometimes, turning a popular movie into a smash musical is as simple as Mel Brooks deciding it was time to put his 1968 cult hit The Producers on Broadway. He wrote a script, composed songs and wrote lyrics in the spirit of the movie’s show-stopping (and goose-stepping) Springtime for Hitler. He hired Susan Stroman to direct and choreograph (after her director-husband Michael Blakemore passed away), got Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick to star, and took home more Tony Awards than any musical in history.

Easy, no?

Actually, no.

Turning a hit movie into a successful Broadway musical isn’t as simple a fait accompli as smashes like The Producers, Hairspray and The Lion King might suggest. Consider the journey of Urban Cowboy.

CRASH COURSE

First came the productive but sometimes fractious relationship between director Oesterman and Latham. Latham’s 1978 Esquire article inspired the 1980 movie about the tempestuous relationship of a refinery worker named Bud (John Travolta) and the tomboyish Sissy (Debra Winger), the gal who catches his eye at Mickey Gilley’s huge Texas nightclub.

Latham, who collaborated with Oesterman on the musical’s book (as he did with director James Bridges on the movie’s screenplay), is the first to admit Oesterman gave him a crash course in writing a musical.

But they would fight. Once, Latham stormed out of Oesterman’s apartment when the director said he wanted to introduce the story’s famous mechanical bull during the wedding scene.

“Then we had a fight about a song. I got so mad I got up to storm out again. Then I remembered: We were in my apartment. Oh, to hell with it, I stormed out anyway,” Latham recalls with a laugh.

The team tried to persuade country singer-songwriter Clint Black to write all the songs for the show, though that would have meant discarding numbers like Lookin’ for Love, which became so identified with the movie. Black passed, though two of his songs are in the show.

Actors came and went through a drawn-out process of readings, a small-scale workshop production and another workshop. Then in July, Oesterman died of a heart attack at his home in Fort Myers. Though the show could have stalled or vanished, producers Chase Mishkin and Leonard Soloway were determined to soldier on and have that world premiere at the Grove Playhouse as planned.

Tony-nominated actor-director Lonny Price became the show’s new director. The first actress cast as Sissy was replaced by newcomer Jenn Colella during New York rehearsals before the show moved south. After disagreements with the original musical director, Price recruited composer Jason Robert Brown — two weeks ago — as the new musical director and composer of three (maybe four) new songs.

And then, to top it all off, the gosh-darn mechanical bull proved almost as dangerous and scary as the real thing, so the show’s first two previews were canceled.

TITLE VALUE

“Nothing’s as much work as a musical,” says the flame-haired Mishkin, a New Yorker who looks as if she could be a character in Urban Cowboy. "The movie wasn’t a musical, even though a lot of people think it was. We paid a lot of money to Paramount for the rights, then we had to negotiate for each of the songs. But there’s a great value to having a title that’s familiar.”

Price, who got his Tony nominations for A Class Act (a show produced by Mishkin), almost turned down Urban Cowboy. He was busy with other projects and said he didn’t have time to tackle the musical. But he agreed to meet with Latham to discuss the show, and afterward, Latham said, "You’re sure you can’t do this?”

Once Price said, well, yes he could, the condensed developmental period began in earnest. He brought in Brown, composer of the Broadway musical Parade and the Off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years, to shape the sound, both on such familiar tunes as the Dixie Chicks’ Cowboy Take Me Away, Brooks & Dunn’s Boot Scootin’ Boogie and Shania Twain’s Honey, I’m Home, and three new songs he had already added to the score: It Don’t Get Better Than This and I Take It Back, for Bud, and That’s How She Rides the Bull, for “. . . the key moment when the mechanical bull comes out and the bad guy tries to seduce the good girl,” Brown says.

The songs, which Price describes as sounding like “Jason Robert Brown on a horse,” have helped create a score that is ". . . coherent and intelligent. When you use pre-existing songs, you have to motivate them in the story so they make sense dramaturgically. But Aaron knows these people, and he’s been a very willing and able collaborator.”

The musical storytelling, says Brown, isn’t just about the lyrics, though.

“The job here is to take pop songs and theatricalize them,” he points out.

‘And then we realized we didn’t have some numbers to serve certain purposes, and everyone looked at me with eyes that say, `Well, you write songs.’ I’m very much a honky-tonk and gospel-style pianist, so it wasn’t remotely uncomfortable for me. Country music prides itself on not being sophisticated and complicated. It’s been a lot of fun in the tumultuous two weeks since I’ve been here.”

Turning Urban Cowboy into a musical might be challenging, Price says, but it’s logical.

“Certain movies just seem to sing. This takes place in Gilley’s, where there’s music and dancing, so it’s a natural, like Cabaret was,” he says. "People don’t want to see people singing onstage unless it makes sense.”

BROADWAY BOUND?

The show’s leads, Colella and Matt Cavanaugh, are both young actors (“I was 2 when the Urban Cowboy movie came out,” says Cavanaugh) who were drawn to the musical’s simple power.

“Sex and anger are very immediate and primal for the characters,” says Colella. "But the story is also very poignant. Sissy has a tough veneer. She likes to be perceived as strong. But underneath, she wants to be swept away and start a partnership like she’s heard about in all these songs.

“It’s a beautiful love story,” says Cavanaugh. "Bud’s a simple man who knows what he wants and goes after it. But he’s vulnerable, too. He’s had his heart broken, and he’s afraid to open up again.”

Both actors realize that this South Florida tryout could lead to their big break on Broadway. But they swear their focus is on the two weeks of previews and two weeks of post-opening performances at the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

“We’re here now, and you always hope to make it better,” says Colella.

Adds Cavanaugh, "Looking ahead only adds pressure.”

For now, Mishkin is doing the looking. She concedes that the hope is to open on Broadway this season, possibly after a stop at another regional theater, though she’s vague because ". . . it’s not good form to talk about theaters in New York that might become available [if other shows close].”

Latham, the guy who started it all with his Esquire story, thinks the time is right for a new round of interest in America’s mythical figure.

“You have a president with a ranch in Texas,” Latham says. "And he’s either the worst kind of cowboy or the best.”

Credits: