Red Bull Theater's benefit concert of John Guare, Mel Shapiro, and Galt MacDermot's Rock Musical TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA will premiere in person at 7:30 PM on December 16, 2023 at the Peter Norton Symphony Space. Get full details here.
Notes On TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA The Rock Musical
When the rock musical Two Gentlemen of Verona opened in New York in 1971, it was like no other show that had come before, owing much to Hair, which its composer Galt MacDermot had also worked on, and also to the other experimental theatre of the 1960s. But its biggest influence was Joe Papp, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival. It was Papp’s commitment to bring the entire Shakespeare canon to the people of New York, for free and in newly relevant terms, that sparked the project. This musical wasn’t merely based on the Shakespeare play; it was the Shakespeare play, transformed into a rock musical, a still new form.
It was the perfect Shakespeare play for the composer of Hair to tackle. Two Gents was Shakespeare’s Rent, youthful, raw, rowdy, messy, rude, wild; and Jonathan Larson often said he had intended Rent to be the new Hair. Jonathan Larson was in his mid-30s when he wrote Rent, but Shakespeare was still in his mid-20s when he wrote Two Gents. Just as Rent was inspired by Larson’s own life and friends, the same was true of Two Gents.
Shakespeare had only recently arrived in the Big City, coming from small town Stratford, a young man ready to take on the world, just like his character Valentine. Young Will reinvented himself in London, exactly like his characters, living as a single man even though he had a wife and family back in Stratford.
Hair, Two Gents, and Rent, all born out of similar impulses and out of youthful experiments in presentation and storytelling, form an unintentional triptych of rock musicals about American culture. All three shows intentionally lack the polish of standard Broadway fare, but it’s that lack of polish that gives these three shows their rawness, urgency, and potency. They don’t feel manufactured or focus-grouped. They possess that same authenticity that the best rock and roll has.
This was Shakespeare’s first play, and director Mel Shapiro and playwright John Guare fixed some of its problems. With MacDermot they fashioned a new work, still organic to Shakespeare’s play but with a contemporary sensibility that brings it to vivid, modern life. The updated cultural vibe carries with it so much more complexity and such high stakes, adding to Shakespeare’s plot an unplanned pregnancy, a decision about abortion, and a politicized war not unlike Vietnam.
Papp and the musical’s creative team honored the original spirit of Shakespeare’s play – wild, rowdy, sexy, dirty, funny, populist, irreverent, rule-busting, and most of all, deeply, crazily human. Even decades (centuries?) later, this story still teaches us something about becoming an adult, about caring for others, about civility, empathy, love of our fellow humans, and a rejection of the nasty, hateful public discourse of 1971 America – and of America today. Both then and now, America needs to heal, these young people tell us in the finale, and like the end of Hair, it takes innocents to tell us what we should already know.
- Scott Miller
SCOTT MILLER is a musical theatre composer, lyricist, bookwriter, historian, fanboy, and the founder and artistic director of New Line Theatre, the alternative musical theatre company in St. Louis, founded in 1991. He holds a degree in music and musical theatre from Harvard, and he’s written twelve musicals, two plays, and more than a dozen books about musical theatre. He also writes the Bad Boy of Musical Theatre blog.
Red Bull Theater's benefit concert of John Guare, Mel Shapiro, and Galt MacDermot's Rock Musical TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA will premiere in person at 7:30 PM on December 16, 2023 at the Peter Norton Symphony Space. Get full details here.