from American Theatre Magazine

Michael Friedman: Musical Ventriloquist
The highbrow and the lowbrow mix it up in the composer-lyricist's tuneful oeuvre

By Wendy Weisman

May/June 2008

I have almost no taste in music,” prolific composer-lyricist Michael Friedman will tell you matter-of-factly. “I’ll listen to everything you give me.”

He’s apparently not exaggerating: At any given moment, Friedman, a 32-year-old New Yorker, might be found charting the chronology of emo rock (“Weezer is really more early-mid-’90s”), delving into chansons from 19th-century France, extolling the Christian pop band Hillsong United, or listening to a Motown CD given to him by Jonathan Lethem, whose novel The Fortress of Solitude Friedman is currently adapting into a musical with Daniel Aukin and Itamar Moses. Friedman’s eclecticism inevitably begs the question: Does the staggering catalogue of songs in his head betray any genuine preference for one genre over another? Or, as he facetiously claims, is there simply a failure to discriminate?

Not quite. “I’ve always listened to music on two levels,” reasons Friedman, whose greatest affinity is for Romantic-era composers like Brahms. “I approach the writing of pop music a bit anthropologically. I like to be the outsider looking in, trying to figure out how a song works and what makes it tick.”

Such a scientific approach might seem like an incongruous method for generating catchy tunes. Yet one need not look any further than Friedman’s work with the downtown Manhattan troupe the Civilians, of which he is a founding member, to see how meticulous mimicry—of a breezy cabaret torch song or lovelorn indie-rock—can leave audiences with infectious melodies stuck in their heads. Maintaining a scholarly fascination with a myriad of musical forms has proven advantageous for Friedman. He was awarded an Obie for sustained excellence in music in 2007, and his pop-inflected musical Saved, based on the 2004 movie and co-written by Rinne Groff and John Dempsey, opens at New York City’s Playwrights Horizons May 9. The demand for his work is reaching fever pitch.

Friedman composed music for the Public Theater’s outdoor Romeo and Juliet in New York City this past summer, and the Civilians’s Gone Missing extended its Off-Broadway this winter. He was in Los Angeles in January for the premiere of his irreverent rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at Center Theatre Group, then headed off to Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky for the March debut of the Civilians’s exploration of evangelic Christianity, This Beautiful City, at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. This was closely followed by an April run of the Civilians’s Paris Commune in a lab production by the Public Theater in association with LAByrinth Theater Company. A sampling of other Friedman projects on tap, in addition to Saved and The Fortress of Solitude, include The Essential Alice, with director Des McAnuff and writer Annie Weisman Macomber at California’s La Jolla Playhouse; Post Office with Melissa James Gibson at Center Theatre Group; an untitled commission with Rachel Sheinkin from Playwrights Horizons; The Great Immensity with the Civilians’s artistic director Steven Cosson at the Foundry Theatre in New York; and Unknown Soldier with Daniel Goldstein at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company.

“Every time I turn around, there’s Michael Friedman!” declares Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director.

Friedman’s artistic education was initially forged through classical training in cello and piano while growing up in Philadelphia— but he didn’t begin creating original work for the theatre until he was 24. “I always listened to pop music, but never thought of myself as someone who wrote it,” he says. “I’m not someone who’s been writing songs on his guitar since he was three.” As an undergrad at Harvard University, Friedman indulged in music electives but majored in literature and history. Envisioning a career in academia, he assumed that music “was the thing that was supposed to be the hobby, the central side passion.” Then he volunteered to assist on an extracurricular student musical. Theatrical composer Elizabeth Swados, a guest artist at Harvard, saw something she liked.

Swados handpicked the newly minted Harvard grad to serve as music director for Andrei Serban’s 1998 Cymbeline at the Public Theater—one of several engagements she helped arrange. “If Liz hadn’t asked me to work on something in New York when I got here, I don’t know what I’d be doing now,” says Friedman. He worked with Swados and Serban again at American Repertory Theatre, in Cambridge, Mass., on The Merchant of Venice in late 1998, which led to a subsequent music-director gig for Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato’s The Idiots Karamazov at ART in 1999. Friedman’s speed at grasping theatrical conceits and his far-reaching knowledge of music were not lost on Idiots composer Peter Golub, now director of the Sundance Composers Lab, who encouraged Friedman to create his own work. Equally significant was Friedman’s internship at Massachusetts’s Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1999, where he met future collaborators Cosson, Goldstein, Will Frears and Nicholas Martin.

Friedman hit it off with Cosson, who needed a music director for his Williamstown production of The Time of Your Life and was dazzled by the young musician’s acute sense of dramaturgy in scoring a show. “Not only does he have a real facility for music,” Cosson relates, “but he understands what everybody else is doing and has an eye on the whole of the play.” Those were the talents Cosson sought to enlist when forming the Civilians in 2001. Fresh from composing his first original theatre songs for Frears’s production of A Servant of Two Masters at Williamstown, Friedman began work on Canard, Canard, Goose? with the new company—and has worked with Cosson consistently ever since.

“Get to know everyone and work for free,” advises Friedman. “But most important, meet the non-fancy people as much as possible, because they’re the ones who will want to work with you.” He’s talking about a network of hot directors—such as his Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson collaborator Alex Timbers, along with Trip Cullman and Davis McCallum. “At the time none of us really had careers,” he notes. But when Friedman began to transition from music director to composer-lyricist, he realized, “I had developed these great relationships.”

Friedman’s ability to emulate a broad palate of styles—from film noir, for Michael Greif’s revival of Landscape of the Body, which they began at Williamstown in 2003, to ’40s-era music, for Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle’s vaudeville take-off all wear bowlers— secured his reputation with his colleagues, fancy or not. “Maybe that means I have no style of my own,” he volunteers, an admission that clearly doesn’t cause him to lose sleep at night. When Friedman collaborated on In the Bubble, Rinne Groff and rock musician Joe Popp’s 2007 work at Chicago’s American Music Theater Project, Eustis, who served as dramaturg, recalls, “Michael swooped in and constructed a seamless intersection between his music and Joe’s, so you can’t tell the difference.” For Eustis, that Friedman can “work within a vocabulary created by someone else” actually renders him unique.

Those skills are also manifest in a slate of well-received documentary-style musicals created by the Civilians. The first song Friedman wrote for (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch—which premiered at New York City’s P.S. 122 in 2004 and is perhaps the world’s only musical about epistemology—would sound familiar to aficionados of Kurt Weill. “The Song of Progressive Disenchantment” winks at the earlier composer’s jazzy dissonances and, in particular, the Brecht collaboration “Surabaya Johnny”—but audiences need not be experts on art songs to get the joke. At one point, Friedman substitutes “take that pipe out of your mouth” with “take that Nicorette gum out of your mouth.” “I am a bit of a ham,” he admits, and seems unable to resist adding a wry, goofy twist to the tragic, or unexpected cynical aside to the purely comic.

Cosson emphasizes that the Civilians team conceives new work by looking outside theatre, relying on interviews and research, then identifying similar themes among disparate material. As it happens, looking outside the realm of theatre is something Friedman excels at. “If I’d really got my way,” he deadpans, “I would have gone after a Ph.D. in architecture and written my dissertation on the county courthouses of Indiana and Ohio.” A film buff who loves Hitchcock, German filmmaker Max Ophuls and overstuffed American musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis, Friedman inherited his enthusiasm for history and architecture from his family—particularly his father, a retired newspaper manager.

As Friedman’s popularity brings more commissions, however, he is undertaking the challenge of working with prescribed narratives rather than collaboratively dreamed-up concepts. Projects such as Saved demand that the composer brandish his skills to accommodate more conventional musical theatre. Though Playwrights Horizons artistic director Tim Sanford saw potential in Friedman, he initially wasn’t convinced that the cabaret style of the Civilians was adequate preparation for writing a musical. But, says Sanford, “I was thunderstruck” when Friedman presented his material for Saved, which chronicles the social struggles of teenagers at a Christian high school. Newly inspired by the rock concerts he had attended while composing This Beautiful City, Friedman created a tuneful opening number, “In the Light of God,” that Sanford describes as “hilarious, smart, apt and an embodiment of real musical theatre.”

So will more mainstream work soon overshadow Friedman’s quirkier, more avantgarde projects? Friedman himself eschews such distinctions. “I want to make something popular—not commercial, not populist, but something people will enjoy, or be intrigued by—all the things ‘popular’ can mean. The avant-garde and the lowbrow are always cannibalizing each other, so pop music gets picked up by high culture, and vice-versa.”

The belief that high and low culture are interdependent is fitting for an artist who alludes to philosopher John Locke in Gone Missing and invokes the rock band Dashboard Confessional in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. And there’s even more genre-bending on Friedman’s mind: He’s lobbying the Public to produce Verdi’s opera Falstaff in Central Park. “I’m sure he’ll convince me eventually,” speculates Eustis. “He’s been able to convince me of everything else.”

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