A Joyride to Beatsville

For GLENN SLATER and WENDY LEIGH WILF, the balancing act begins with being husband-and-wife

By Terry Berliner

In 2002, the choreographer Jen Copaken whispered to me, "You have to meet Glenn Slater and his wife, Wendy Leigh Wilf." Copaken had gone to Harvard with Slater, a native New Yorker, who was at the time just beginning to work as lyricist with composer Alan Menken on The Little Mermaid for Broadway. With that assignment, Slater had begun to break through the cloak of musical-theatre anonymity. Meanwhile, his wife Wilf, originally from outside Philadelphia, was not yet pregnant with their first child. She and her husband were collaborating on a new musical of their own called Beatsville.

At the end of our first meeting, Slater did what many writers do: He handed me a demo CD for a show. The recording was of a musical he had started working on in 2001 with another writing partner, Stephen Weiner. Scribbled on the CD was a title familiar from a popular 1994 Coen Brothers film, The Hudsucker Proxy. I went home and listened to it. I thought, "Wow! These guys are talented!" That was seven years ago. Just recently it was announced that The Hudsucker Proxy is slated for a "Page to Stage" workshop production at California's La Jolla Playhouse later this year, with a Broadway production scheduled for 2010.

A few other projects currently on Slater's very full plate: Sister Act with Menken, which has received productions at Pasadena Playhouse in Southern California and Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and is due to open in the West End at London Palladium this May; the gospel musical Leap of Faith, a work-in-progress also with Menken; the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera with Andrew Lloyd Webber; and a new musical with Danny Elfman.

When I got together with Slater and Wilf (both now 41 years old) at their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I asked them how they could do all they do at once, including raising two children and writing a musical together. Slater's reply: "I don't sleep." Based on our conversation, I don't think he ever slept, even before he was handed the challenge of so many high-profile projects.

As you can imagine, for Slater there's a lot of jetting back and forth these days between Los Angeles, New York and London. Then there's life at home, where a little magic continues to brew with Beatsville, which I (along with a few other fortunate attendees) was able to catch a glimpse of at the National Alliance for Musical Theater (NAMT) new-works presentations this past October.

Beatsville is based on the Roger Corman cult film A Bucket of Blood. "As a script and as a film," Slater says, "it's very unformed. The characters aren't really characters the way we think of them in theatrical terms-they're more like placeholders in the narrative. But Wendy and I were attracted to the film precisely because it is short and not fully developed. We didn't have to worry about dismantling a great film in order to resize it for the stage. For us the question was, 'What do we need to add to make this a viable story?' It was an idea in search of its final form."

Which brings us to another challenge every musical-theatre aspirant faces: whether to write something original or base your musical on a known property. As Slater says, "Every musical balances on the edge between the inspired and the inane. When everything goes right, it can be the most amazing thing in the world. Yet all it takes to tip it over into stupidity is the wrong set-up line, a bad rhyme, a musical phrase that feels too familiar, a character going a little bit too deep into the emotion to be believable. Almost anything can kick you out of that dream-state that you need to be in, and once the audience is no longer in it, they stop caring. Everything needs to be perfectly balanced. It's not that it's easier to take something that already exists and adapt it—but it's one less variable that you need to balance. Having a property that already exists gives you a framework that you can follow, so you can arrange all the other elements into a harmonious whole."

Balance is a central theme in the life and art of Slater and Wilf, who first met at the BMI Workshop in New York City. "As a married writing team, we have to balance our 'life' with our writing life," Slater says. "There's no space between the personal and the professional." Wilf agrees. "We can be out to dinner and come up with solutions to writing problems without thinking of it as 'working.'"

Without question, both husband and wife feel the weight of the stress from all the other projects Slater has on his plate. For six years back in the 1990s, Slater was working in advertising as a copywriter. He started at 9 a.m. and didn't leave the office until midnight. In 1996, he won the Kleban Award, which came with a $100,000 prize, and that enabled him to quit his day job and focus on his writing. When he and Weiner did a presentation at ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), a representative from the Disney organization just happened to be in the audience. According to Slater, "Disney hired us for a program they had created to find young, up-and-coming songwriters to work on film scores." Disney gave Slater and Weiner a modest amount of money to work on Marco Polo, a property that Disney already knew was not going to get made into a film. They were told, "Here's a typical script. Go write three or four songs and let's see how you work with us and with the animation genre." They spent eight months writing four songs for the film, and then were told, "We love this. It's very nice. We'll put it in our files. Thank you." The process was, in effect, an audition.

Shortly thereafter, Slater signed with a manager, Scott Shukat, who also happened to manage Menken, one of Disney's house composers. About a year later Shukat said, "Menken's working on a project, and he needs a lyricist. Your style is close to Howard Ashman's—you'd be a perfect match. Why not give it a shot?" The project was a sequel to the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Though he and Menken spent nearly a year working on it, it never got made. But a new writing team had taken shape.

When I ask Wilf if it is hard for her to be living and working with another songwriter, she avows, "Not at all. If anything, it's been inspiring. If we were both lyricists competing to work with the same composers, maybe that would be more difficult." The good news is that Wilf is both a lyricist and a composer (on Beatsville, Slater is only writing the book).

Wilf's voice is unique in the musical-theatre world. Though she can write in virtually any style, it was a two-year immersion in jazz that opened up the possibility of Beatsville. As she says, "In my late twenties I got an opportunity to go back to school for a master's degree in jazz piano at the Manhattan School of Music. I wasn't going to get all these jazz chops so I could write a musical—I wanted to be a musician. But sure enough, after two very intense years of playing nothing but jazz, I was ready to go back to musical theatre. And the idea of being able to fuse these two worlds together seemed very exciting."

Where most writers start with the story or plot (and then suss out the best musical style), Slater and Wilf approached Beatsville differently. They said, "We want to write a jazz-style musical—now let's find a property that lives in that world." As Slater notes, "The musical style and the visual vocabulary of the beatnik era seemed like a fun place for a show to be. The language is so rich. By 'beatnik,' I don't mean the Beats, who were serious artists, but rather the hipsters and wannabes who followed in their wake and made bongos and goatees the fad of the hour. That was actually a very brief cultural moment—you can count the actual films and books that are set in a beatnik milieu." Slater and Wilf soon zeroed in on A Bucket of Blood, a semi-obscure relic from the late '50s that satirized the scene as it was developing.

Now they faced a tricky balancing act. As Wilf explains, "How were we going to make the jazz vocabulary feel authentic, but have it still be accessible to a musical-theatre audience?"

"There are other shows (City of Angels is a great example) that are considered to be 'jazz-based,'" muses Slater, "but they tend to use the idiom in the service of a safer, more familiar musical-theatre-ish style. We wanted to write something with the wild propulsion that real jazz has, the giddy sense of kaleidoscopic variation, the raw immediacy. But if you have a show that's all immediacy and urgency and authenticity without some sort of musical theatre craft behind it, you're going to have an unfocused mess. It was a big challenge for Wendy to balance those two."

Wilf decided to write the score in the freewheeling style known as bebop. For the lyrics, she called upon a technique, also popular in the late '50s, known as "vocalise." As Wilf describes it, "In traditional vocalise, you let a jazz player improvise an instrumental solo, and then use that melodic line as the basis for the lyric. For the theatre, however, the vocalise was a challenging device to figure out. Do I write music first? Do I write the lyric first? When I tried it the traditional way, playing a jazz solo and laying the lyrics over the top, it didn't have the structure that a song needs to stay coherent. Likewise, writing lyrics first led to songs that felt a little too symmetrical, and lacked the excitement of the jagged bebop rhythm. Ultimately, only a lot of painstaking back-and-forth got the vocalise to work on both levels."

With a lot of trial and error and more than a few false starts, the score and lyrics finally began to jell. Consider, for example, "Nowhere," in which the beatniks criticize the hapless hero's attempt to create a sculpture:

You call that a nose?
Man, that could be anything at all, I suppose—
Except a nose.
It hasn't got any shape or style or form or flair—
There's nothing there.
Like, it's a lopsided mess.
Just who do you think you're gonna impress?
I can't even guess,
Unless
Another square
Who's also going nowhere.

Over the years of watching her husband work with so many different and experienced collaborators, Wilf says she learned a key lesson: "Glenn has never been afraid to throw something out if it doesn't quite work for the show, even songs that were fantastic. Had I not watched Glenn be so willing to start again, I don't know that I would have realized that that's what you do. Every time I threw something away, the new songs really were better."

On that subject, Slater adds, "You need the confidence that you can top yourself, no matter how much you like what you've done."

While Slater is working with some of the biggest names in musical theatre, crossing the country in one direction and the ocean in another, Wilf takes care of their boys and keeps carving away at Beatsville. They both know that they need a workshop to help clarify the story that they're trying to tell.

But meanwhile, they're tuned into the key ingredients of a successful writing partnership: 1) Agree that you are both telling the same story; 2) Be brutally honest with each other; and 3) Love, trust and respect each other. As Slater says about this particular working relationship, "That last challenge isn't really a challenge—it's a kind of joyride to be working with my wife."