The Waiting Game

Still haven't solved the rights issue? Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler are moving on—to an Internet musical

By Terry Berliner

Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler are tired of waiting. And waiting.

These Chicago-based musical theatre writers have been commissioned to write a new musical by a well-respected not-for-profit theatre in the Midwest. They've already chosen the source material, and they're chomping at the bit—but unfortunately they have to wait for a year or two (or maybe even longer) for both sides to hammer out an acceptable agreement. Negotiations involving property rights are notoriously slow. Sometimes going slow can be a tactic in and of itself: To get what you want, wait—or make the other party wait. Whoever can wait it out the longest (usually the party that has the least to lose by waiting) has got the upper hand.

Their solution to the dilemma? Move on. Mahler and Schmuckler are putting their much-anticipated project on a back burner while they fashion something entirely new—an Internet musical. Called Boyfred, this web-TV musical will serve as the pair's creative outlet while they wait (and wait). In the process, they might be opening the door to a brand-new, virtually untapped venue for new-musical development.

In hopes of keeping their juices flowing, Mahler and Schmuckler are collaborating with an actor/web designer, Jarrod Zimmerman, and a film director/editor based in Los Angeles, Blake Silver. All four of them are graduates of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Mahler and company hope for Boyfred to be an interactive site. He says, "The leading character, Fred, has created a website of a fictional universe for his fictional girlfriend who works with the Peace Corps in Kenya. The idea is that Fred wants to keep her abreast of everything that's going on in his life and in the lives of their friends in Chicago." The Boyfred site will have musical elements ("Characters break into song to propel the plot forward and reveal character") and is made up of postings that Fred and his fictional friends have put up from various sources. "For example, they recorded something from game night on a camera phone," he says.

Perhaps not ironically, the title character sings about the frustrations of waiting in Boyfred's opening number:

I get no play.
I get upset.
I got a lady in Tibet.

So here I'm stuck.
So here I wait.
So life can suck
And still be great.

The road to Boyfred began after Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire asked Mahler and Schmuckler to write a new children's musical several years ago. When the writers settled on adapting The Secret of NIMH—using both the children's book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and the 1982 Don Bluth movie as sources—they were thrilled with the idea but afraid to go too far. "We were all gung-ho and ready to do it, and all these ideas and brainstorming and writing sessions were happening," says Mahler. "But you don't want to write too much until you have the rights, because if the rug gets pulled out from under you, you've wasted all that time. Still it's hard not to write when you're inspired." Indeed, if you ask the two writers to pinpoint the biggest challenge they've faced thus far in their young careers, they'll tell you how tough it is to find an idea that speaks to them strongly and persistently enough to write a whole piece about it. And then there's the problem of attaining the rights to that chosen piece.

The organization holding the rights to The Secret of NIMH has a somewhat different idea in mind about how to adapt the property. Its representatives have expressed interest in a family-oriented, full-length musical, as opposed to a show designed expressly for children. For Mahler and Schmuckler, this difference wasn't an issue. For the commissioning theatre, in the market for a new children's musical, some concessions might have to be made in future season planning, but the Marriott is still on board and driving the negotiations.

Though young and low-profile, 27-year-old Mahler and 25-year-old Schmuckler have a strong support system in Chicago. As actors who worked consistently since their graduation from Northwestern, these two artists have been hired to act, write and music direct at such stalwart venues as Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST), Provision Theater and the Marriott. Prominent individuals in the Chicago theatre community are also behind them, connections that might be one of the most valuable tools for "making it" in the musical-theatre business. One of those connections is Stuart Oken, CEO and producer of the commercial production company Elephant Eye Theatrical (which is currently developing the highly anticipated Addams Family musical, written by Andrew Lippa and the Jersey Boys team of Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice). Another anchor of the Chicago theatre community, Rick Boynton, who oversees CST's new-classic program and is involved in artistic planning and production, brought Mahler and Schmuckler together with New York-based director Peter Flynn, a colleague of Boynton's from Northwestern, to develop a successful children's musical, How Can You Run with a Shell on Your Back?, for CST's 2007-08 season.

"While working on Shell, I learned from my mistakes and did piles and piles of rewrites," says Schmuckler, reflecting on the experience of first working with Mahler right out of school, "and slowly but surely figured it out. I would never purport to say I know the way to write a musical—there's no rule book. Even if there was, all the fun is breaking the rules and making your own." Schmuckler continues, "Certainly a challenge is allowing yourself to acknowledge that your idea isn't always necessarily the best. That's one of the beautiful things about collaboration: Your idea may serve as a springboard to someone else's, which may be the idea that you need."

Another "unending champion" of his, says Mahler, is David Bell, an associate professor of music theatre at Northwestern and a well-respected Chicago-based director, whose pedigree includes the artistic directorship of Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., and a stint at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. Bell has hired Mahler on numerous occasions, including as composer and co-lyricist for a production of Knute Rockne All-American at Theatre at the Center in Munster, Ind.

And then there's the man whom both Mahler and Schumckler credit for the early support and encouragement that sparked them to first try their hands at writing a musical—Dominic Missimi, chair of the American Musical Theatre Project's executive committee and director of Northwestern's certificate program in musical theatre. Missimi runs the writer's meetings for the annual Waa-Mu student-written revue at Northwestern.

So will the project that rings their chimes be worth the wait? Absolutely—especially when you have this kind of community and individual support, you'd be foolish not to stick with it, the partners agree. Besides, if you don't have the ability to endure the passage of time, writing new musicals probably won't be your bag anyway. Every step of the way from conception to production takes time. As Schmuckler reasons, "You can't just sit down in a room and come out a couple of months later with a fully formed musical."

Mahler and Schmuckler are in this waiting game together. Meanwhile, they continue to moonlight as actors and writers.

While most songwriting teams are made up of people with different but complementary talents, Mahler and Schuckler have over time had to figure out how to deal with their similarities in aptitude and interests. As Mahler says, "We looked at all the great writing teams of the past, and there would be one that would write music and one that would write lyrics, so we tried that. When Alan wrote lyrics and I wrote the music, it didn't work. Then we switched, and that didn't work either. We finally settled, after many time-consuming attempts, on both of us sitting at a piano nose-to-nose and writing all of it together."

Schmuckler agrees: "Once you're collaborating with people you trust, like Michael in my case, there are really no wrong solutions. There are no bad ideas. I'm finding that the more I can put my trust in my collaborator, the more exciting our product is. New musicals are not the sort of thing you can produce in a vacuum."

Declaring that they're in it for the long haul, the two men know that time is a part of the package. If that means they end up finishing the Internet musical before their hoped-for adaptation of The Secret of NIMH goes on the boards-so be it. Schmuckler says, "The challenge is to allow your career to happen, and not try to force it into a pre-conceived idea."