These Paper Bullets! ends Saturday at the Yale Rep. I saw the show a second time last week, and lament that I probably won’t have time to see it a third (or fourth or fifth) time before it closes. It’s the kind of show you can blissfully revisit. A good chunk of it gives you the same pleasure you get from seeing a favorite band play their hits in the same club over and over.
The other good chunk of it is Shakespeare, transmogrified to Swinging London in the 1960s by a contemporary playwright, Rolin Jones. The modern writer is not afraid to point out the deficiencies in the work (and culture) of the older one.
The show’s great. Everyone I know who’s seen it thinks so. I’m sure there are naysayers out there—perhaps they’d prefer a Rolling Stones version of Tamburlaine the Great or something—but I haven’t come across those people.
The people I come across, the “These Paper Bullets! is great!” people, invariably say this:
“Do you think it will go to Broadway?”
“Do you think it will go to Broadway?”
“Do you think it will go to Broadway?”
Now, I try to answer such questions truthfully, based on stuff I know. In the case of These Paper Bullets!, I initially answered like this: That from what I can tell, the show wasn’t designed with a commercial transfer in mind; that it is too large for Broadway; that it’s not quite a musical, but might get treated like one when the unions get involved, adding to production costs…
But I came to realize I was getting the question wrong. The question, properly translated, means: “Wasn’t that a great show?” And the only reference point these people have for great shows, apparently, is Broadway.
These Paper Bullets! is great. Therefore it should be on Broadway.
This logic unnerves me. It supposes that so little great theater happens outside of Broadway that when it does, we should immediately rectify the situation by getting that anachronistic praiseworthy piece of entertainment to New York, where it belongs, pronto.
It also suggests that, if Broadway producers had been in on These Paper Bullets! from the start, it would have been exactly the same show that’s been wowing audiences at the Rep this month.
But These Paper Bullets! is the perfect example of a show that wouldn’t be what it is, what everyone seems to love about it, if it hadn’t been developed at the Yale Rep.
Over a dozen of the nearly 20 cast members are graduates of, or current students at, the Yale School of Drama. That’s also true of the playwright, the director, the stage manager, the projection designer, the scenic designer and both dramaturgs. The “Class of…” years for all these folks range from 1972 to a few years from now, but the show is strong evidence that they speak a special Yale shorthand that gets things done well and fast in a special way. Moreover, Rolin Jones is known to write roles specifically for actors he likes, or rewrite roles once he’s seen who’s been cast. Cast differently, rehearsed differently, staged elsewhere, there’s a very good chance that much of the ensemble magic of the Yale Rep production of These Paper Bullets! would be lost.
Just as importantly, the main Rep staff (James Bundy, artistic director; Victoria Nolan, managing director; Jennifer Kiger, associate artistic director; Bronislaw Sammler, head of production, James Mountcastle, production stage manager), all of whom teach and/or administrate at the School of Drama, took a risk, production-wise, that few theaters these days would attempt, especially regional ones.
The Rep/School of Drama (Bundy helms both) has a wondrous eternal justification they can use any time: “It’ll be good for the students.” That was certainly true of These Paper Bullets! But it’s nonetheless a costly, mammoth undertaking, created on a whole other model than the investors-and-angels-and-advance-sales equations of Broadway. The Rep deserves a ton of credit for taking a leap here.
Now, back to that nagging question. For those who really want to know, it seems (strictly from hearsay, I hasten to add—nothing on the record) that Rolin Jones is continuing to revise his script, that there might be interest from other regional theaters and that, especially with the coverage the show has gotten in the New York Times and the interest in the songs by Broadway-friendly rock star Billie Joe Armstrong (American Idiot), that some producers are pricking up their ears.
“Do you think it will go to Broadway?”
“Do you think it will go to Broadway?”
“Do you think it will go to Broadway?”
But what I want to ask is, why isn’t it OK to say “Wow, what a great job the Yale Rep is doing! What are they doing there next? Can I subscribe?” (You can, and attend six plays there for not much more than it would cost to take a train from New Haven to New York City and see a single Broadway show.)
These Paper Bullets! is grand and wonderful, but it’s not exactly a fluke. I mean, the last time the Yale Rep had a show in which original rock songs were played live onstage by a band made up of actors from that show, while slamming doors materialized out of nowhere, it was the show right before this one, Meg Miroshnik’s The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls. The last time the Rep got across-the-board great reviews for doing a big bright colorful, dance-filled Shakespeare comedy, it was A Winter’s Tale, just two seasons ago. (The Shakespeare tragedy which the Rep did in between that comedy and this one was not too shabby either: Hamlet starring Paul Giamatti).
Do I think These Paper Bullets! should go to Broadway? Sure! Why not? That’d be lovely. In fact, two shows that originated at New Haven theaters during the 2012-13 season are in New York right now: Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf (at the Westside Theatre on West 43rd St.), with the same star and director it had in its world premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre a year and a half ago; and Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses (at the Lyceum) with the same director plus Tracy Letts from the Yale Rep’s world premiere production in May 2012. I don’t have any problem with that.
But do I think we should sit around waiting to see which lucky shows are star-studded or economical or surefire enough to succeed—often with their scripts or casts compromised for commercial concerns—in a theater 80 miles from here? Nah. We’d miss too much good stuff. Do I think more people should check out what’s happening year-round at their local regional theater? That’s the question that’s the easiest to answer of any of them. Yes. Unequivocably yes.