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There’s plenty to mesmerize an audience onstage at Topdog/Underdog, the Pulitzer-winning play by Suzan-Lori Parks on Broadway now in a limited engagement (through Jan. 13, 2023). The production — starring Corey Hawkins (who portrayed Dr. Dre in Straight Outta Compton) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (an Emmy-winner for HBO’s Watchmen) in roles originated by Mos Def (Yasiin Bey) and Jeffrey Wright, respectively — has received rave reviews for good reason: the story of two brothers (named Lincoln and Booth) bound by a gradually-revealed, traumatic family history and a love of the three-card monte street hustle, is by turns hilarious, haunting and heartbreaking, and Hawkins and Abdul-Mateen give performances that seem destined for Tony nominations.
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But audiences are talking about more than the spoken dialogue — they’re bopping along to the hip-hop and R&B playlist heard in the theater before the play even starts, between scenes, at intermission, and as the audience exits after the final bows. That collection of tracks is the handiwork of sound designer Justin Ellington, a theater veteran who’s also a composer, arranger, musician and academic. Topdog/Underdog’s creative team, led by director Kenny Leon, knew from the get-go that music “would play a huge role” in the show, says Ellington, so he worked to ensure that “storytelling was happening throughout the playlist, versus just feeling and theme.”
Justin Ellington
Courtesy Photo
The mix Ellington eventually landed on touches on diverse eras of hip-hop and R&B, adding to the timeless feel of the play’s action. “This is music we let into our homes to bring levity, balance…sometimes music is an escape, but it can also pull you in,” Ellington reflects. “This show does so much, so we’re constantly looking for balance, and the music helps settle us a bit throughout it.” He spoke to Billboard about some of the Topdog/Underdog playlist highlights, and what they add to an already multi-layered night at the theater.
“They Reminisce Over You,” Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth The pre-show mix is a tour through hip-hop/R&B classics and innovators, from Flying Lotus and Thundercat’s “MmmHmm” to D’Angelo’s “Devil’s Pie” to Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man.” But “’Reminisce Over You’ gets them every time,” says Ellington of the ‘90s classic. “That’s like the song that brings in a different generation. There are people that really love that song: it’s a touchstone in their lives.” And lyrically, “Wow, it’s on point. It’s offering a different perspective to the story you’re about to hear, preparing your ears for trial and tribulation among people and different forms of that. I think it’s one of the first songs in the mix where the lyrics are super present; there’s something about it that really stands out.”
“Alright,” Kendrick Lamar The first of two Lamar tracks on Ellington’s show playlist is also part of the pre-show mix. Ellington hopes the repeated “It’s gonna be alright” line sinks in with the audience before the play has even begun. “Sonically it’s in line with today’s contemporary music and hip hop – something that attracts young people,” he says. But “the sound of it really envelops all people. You can’t help but start to tap a toe, and some people are rapping along to it, like, ‘This is my song.’ At the end of the day, if I heard no music playing and saw this very diverse audience all moving and grooving in their own way — that’s the pleasure for me.”
“Grinding All My Life,” Nipsey Hussle Ellington knows that plenty of people who saw Topdog/Underdog when it premiered off-Broadway in 2001 have no idea who the late rapper Nipsey Hussle was — and, likewise, that most Nipsey fans may be totally new to the play. So he loved the idea of kicking off Act I with this track. “It makes audiences lean in a bit more,” he says. “Nipsey’s music comes on, and the world starts to change. For those who don’t know what the word ‘grinding’ represents outside of coffee, maybe that’ll be understood by the end of the show, or even by the end of the first scene.”
Lupe Fiasco, “Kick, Push”
At intermission, the audience has just learned that Lincoln, who’s vowed to get out of the three-card monte game for good, is ready to get back into it after all. “The character is basically saying, ‘I’m back,’” Ellington says. “I wanted to know the soundtrack that would motivate him to get out there and get back into his hustle — what would be this character’s energy?” Inspired in part by the skateboarders in the song’s music video — a metaphor, as Ellington sees it, “for moving forward, getting it” — he chose “Kick, Push” to kick off the intermission mix. It immediately makes heads start bobbing, with its dedication to “the homies out here grindin’…legally and illegally.”
“Move on Up,” Curtis Mayfield Another intermission mix track that stands out to Ellington. “It’s a long song – almost nine minutes — but the energy is up,” he says. “It probably has the fastest tempo of any song we play. Just this up-up energy. It’s a song from two generations before that people are super familiar with” — in part, he adds, because Kanye “Ye” West sampled it for his “Touch the Sky” — which ensures there’s no lull between acts. “It’s a bop,” and it’s also on theme, exploring the idea of striving for a better place than you’re in while still recognizing the obstacles to getting there and how to get past them.
“If I Should Die Tonight,” Marvin Gaye Director Leon gave Ellington fairly free creative rein in building the playlist, but the sound designer recalls this track may have been one of his few suggestions. “I know he’s a big Marvin Gaye fan, and we get to hear so much of that song with this dramatic entrance into the second act,” Ellington says. “It’s like a cinematic moment – we hear these lyrics that are just perfect for the moment: the angst, frustration, irritation, depth of love that [these characters have], this song just embodies it all.” Those familiar with the play, he points out, will recognize some literal meaning in the song title, too. “A lot of people know what we’re coming to, so you can be a little more bold [with music choice] and not worry about showing your hand too much,” he continues. “It’s just so perfect and heartbreaking.”
Kendrick Lamar, “The Heart Part 5” Once the play is over, the audience leaves the theater as this standout Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers track plays. “There’s something about the intensity of it – it starts with this tension, the same note playing over and over, this rhythm that’s pushing,” says Ellington. “And when he starts — ‘I come from a generation…’ — it’s setting it up like, “Listen to me,” and “me” could be Booth or Lincoln or the kid sitting next to you or yourself.” The track isn’t meant to speak directly to the stunning last scene of the play, but to “get people out of the theater with some kind of resonance of that intensity without speaking specifically to it. I don’t know what it would feel like if the show ends and it’s just applause and no sound at all – I feel like that would be draining,” Ellington explains. “Now we start to think about what we just saw – we start to process, because the feelings are deep and rich. Kenny [Leon] always says the show isn’t over until the ghostlight comes on – so that Kendrick song will always play all the way out.”
If you’ve seen a musical — or, well, anything involving music onstage or onscreen — in the past decade or so, chances are high that Tom Kitt had something to do with it.
The composer, lyricist, musical director, music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator has inhabited one or more of those roles for projects as diverse as Grease: Live!, the Pitch Perfect films (yes, you have him to thank for the “riff-off”), the musical adaptations of Bring It On, SpongeBob SquarePants, Jagged Little Pill and American Idiot. In 2009, he won a Tony Award for his score for the musical Next to Normal, which in 2010 also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and though he’s comfortable writing in any number of idioms, he’s become especially well known since then for his keen understanding of how to organically integrate pop and rock sounds into a theater setting.
Right now, Kitt is, as usual, juggling multiple high-profile projects. Most notably, he wrote the score and, with Cameron Crowe, co-wrote the lyrics for the new musical adaptation of Crowe’s beloved film Almost Famous, which just opened on Broadway. He’s brought his vocal arranging expertise to the buzzy new dance musical Only Gold (playing off-Broadway at MCC Theater through Nov. 27) featuring the music of singer-songwriter Kate Nash. And in between, he managed to write a showstopper for a true icon — Elmo — in the new off-Broadway Sesame Street the Musical.
Kitt describes juggling his myriad projects with trademark calm. “Theater is the ultimate collaborative art form,” he says. “You’re always serving many other visions — it’s just a question of what you’re bringing to the project. As long as you’re in an exciting creative world, these [different] things can feed one another, and I don’t feel overwhelmed in any way.” Having worked on shows that have run the gamut of Broadway success, he has a healthy sense of the business’ realities, and has learned how to keep his creative priorities straight. “What’s most important is I’m expressing myself in ways that feel profound and exciting to me,” Kitt says. “I came into this art form so inspired by all the people currently writing, the legends who wrote for the theater. I wanted to be part of that history and hopefully have people say that Tom Kitt musicals have been a part of their life in important ways.”
Casey Likes and Solea Pfeiffer in Almost Famous.
Matt Murphy
Almost Famous
Though Kitt studied economics in college he dreamed of becoming a singer-songwriter and was heavily influenced by classic 1970s albums like Born to Run, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Piano Man —touchstones that came in handy for the moment in which Almost Famous takes place. “I get to now live in that sensibility as a composer and arranger,” Kitt says. The Almost Famous score is mostly Kitt’s original music but does incorporate iconic songs from the movie like Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” and Kitt’s job, in part, was “to make it feel like one voice, one score.”
While it may be Crowe’s first time as a Broadway lyricist, Kitt describes him as a natural. “Cameron already is a poet, a lyricist, just in terms of what he’s put into the world,” Kitt says, adding that the lines from Crowe’s movies are themselves “earworms.” As a writing team, “we found our groove right away,” Kitt continues. Crowe would send Kitt the starting thoughts for a song in various forms, and Kitt would start composing from there, with the two “batting it back and forth ‘til we both felt like we were saying what we wanted to say.”
Starting with Next to Normal, and in the years since, Kitt says, he’s learned that while pop music often adheres to a defined form, in theater a pop song needs to serve the plot above all, providing the audience with new information. “It’s about really keeping yourself honest and not just saying, ‘I’m gonna write a pop song and It’s gonna adhere to this form,’ so we feel like we’re building something and don’t stay in the same place, or get there too early.”
Only Gold
Choreographer and director Andy Blankenbuehler is a longtime friend of Kitt’s; the two collaborated on Bring it On: The Musical (a now cult-favorite that opened on Broadway in 2012). This past summer, Blankenbuehler asked Kitt’s recommendation on a vocal arranger for Only Gold, and he volunteered his own services. “Kate Nash is a brilliant writer,” Kitt says. “Her songs are filled with visceral energy and beauty, and you can see how they’re going to be theatrical.” His duties for the show mostly happened before he got into rehearsal with Almost Famous. Blankenbuehler broke down the show by song, filling Kitt in on who would be available to sing each and what kind of tonality he wanted from the vocal arrangements. “I had great guidance going in, and then you hear it in the room and discover new things,” Kitt says.
Jacob Guzman, Ahmad Simmons, Ryan VanDenBoom, Voltaire Wade-Greene, Hannah Cruz, and Reed Luplau in MCC Theater’s 2022 Production of ONLY GOLD
Daniel J. Vasquez
Sesame Street the Musical
In recent years, Kitt has composed for Sesame Street: he wrote a song for Cookie Monster called “If Me Had a Magic Wand,” and a spoof of a famous song from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park With George called “Look I Made a Splat.” The call for Sesame Street the Musical came through his agent, and it was fairly simple. “They said, ‘We want to craft a big 11 o’clock-style number for Elmo,” Kitt recalls, “and I knew it was a song about imagination.” He thought about the sensibility of classic Sesame Street songs like “Sing,” and asked himself, “What’s something expressive in that world for me to write?” The end product channels the sweetly melodic, anthemic feel of the classics Kitt wanted to channel, but he didn’t hear Elmo sing it until opening night of the show, “and it was everything I hoped it would be. I mean, who doesn’t want to write a song for Elmo? I jumped at the chance.”
The ASCAP Foundation recognized playwright, composer and lyricist Michael R. Jackson, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, with The ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award.
The award was presented to Jackson by ASCAP Foundation president Paul Williams, composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, The Prince of Egypt) and composer/lyricist Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza) at a private luncheon in New York City. Also on hand to honor Jackson were Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen, La La Land) and ASCAP chief executive officer Elizabeth Matthews.
The annual award is given to encourage promising young ASCAP composers of musical theater and is funded by Mary Rodgers and the Rodgers Family Foundation. Previous recipients include Lin-Manuel Miranda; Pasek & Paul; and David Hein & Irene Sankoff (Come From Away).
“Michael R. Jackson is a fearless storyteller whose stellar work is a gift to audiences and the creative community,” Williams said in a statement. “We love having him as part of our ASCAP family and are excited for him to receive this well-deserved award.”
“In a cultural climate when so many have confused activism and/or being a savvy businessperson with artistry, it has been a brutal, lonely time to believe in making art for art’s sake,” Jackson said in a statement. “And yet, making art for art’s sake is the one life raft I’ve had since 23-year-old me first put pen to paper to begin writing A Strange Loop. Receiving the Richard Rodgers Award from ASCAP is deeply meaningful to me and gives me a much needed second wind to keep paddling the stormy high seas,” said Jackson.
A Strange Loop, which was billed as “the big, Black, and queer Great American Musical for all,” received 11 Tony nominations and won two – best musical and best book of a musical for Jackson.
In 2020, Jackson joined The ASCAP Experience for “The Making of a Groundbreaking Black Queer Musical.” The discussion about the creation of A Strange Loop with Kobalt Music’s Sue Drew is available on demand on @ASCAP YouTube.
Founded in 1975, The ASCAP Foundation is a charitable organization dedicated to supporting American music creators and encouraging their development through music education, talent development and humanitarian programs.
To celebrate the opening night of previews for the original Broadway musical & Juliet on Friday (Oct. 28), the complete cast recording is now available on streaming services. The album features a brand new version of Kelly Clarkson‘s 2004 hit “Since U Been Gone” performed by the show’s star Lorna Courtney along with Clarkson herself.
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& Juliet is set to open at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York City on November 17 and features songs by the legendary and Grammy-winning songwriter and producer Max Martin. In addition to “Since U Been Gone,” the track listing also features pop anthems like Katy Perry’s “Roar,” Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time,” Backstreet Boys’ “Larger Than Life,” Celine Dion’s “That’s The Way It Is,” Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” and many more.
The show reimagines the classic Shakespeare play Romeo & Juliet, picturing what life would have been like for Juliet had she not ended it for Romeo. Tickets for & Juliet start at $79 and are available through andjulietbroadway.com.
Upon its release, Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” peaked at No. 2 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 songs chart. The singer said of her Breakaway hit in a 2020 interview, “I love what the song does for people, I love that it was very different in demo form sent to me. Behind the scenes, it was not so fun to record because of situations I won’t talk about, because I won’t sell people out.”
“But I will say, my favorite memory, if I’m being more positive about it, was the fact that I got to show up to a video shoot and completely trash an apartment, and that was my job,” she continued. “That video was possibly one of my favorite videos ever to make, because literally I just got to just have rage, and just break stuff all day long.”
Listen to Courtney and Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” below.
Lucy Simon, the composer who received a Tony nomination in 1991 for her work on the long-running Broadway musical The Secret Garden, has died. She was 82.
Simon, sister of pop superstar Carly Simon, died Thursday at her home in Piedmont, New York, a family spokesperson said. Simon had breast cancer.
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The Secret Garden, with a book by Marsha Norman, opened in New York in 1991. Reviews were mixed, but it won a Tony for best book of a musical and went on to play for almost two years. A slightly revised version opened in London’s West End, and a pared-down-from-Broadway version went on tour.
The musical — adapted from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s novel — focuses on Mary, a young English girl forced to move to England from colonial India when her parents die of cholera. She moves in with her Uncle Archibald, a hunchback who is mourning his late wife, Lily, and blaming his bedridden son for her death.
While living in her uncle’s home, Mary discovers a hidden and neglected garden that once belonged to Lily, and she and a young gardener bring it back to life. At the same time, she brings new life to her uncle and cousin. The songs include “The Girl I Mean to Be” and “How Could I Ever Know.”
Steven Pasquale and Sierra Boggess were among the Broadway stars mourning Simon’s passing. “Her music is her gift to the world. In one of her last messages to me she said ‘I was going to ask you to carry my voice onward’ and I sat and wept,” Boggess wrote on Instagram.
Simon was born in New York on May 5, 1940, to publishing giant Richard Simon and his wife, Andrea. She was the second oldest of four children Joanna, Lucy, Carly and Peter.
Carly and Lucy once performed as The Simon Sisters, opening for other acts in Greenwich Village folk clubs. Their recording of “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” hit No. 73 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964.
While Carly Simon would find huge success with such hits as “Anticipation,” “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” and “You’re So Vain,” Lucy went to nursing school.
After marrying and having children, Lucy Simon recorded two solo albums, Lucy Simon (1975) and Stolen Time (1977), for RCA. Lucy and her husband, David Levine, produced two Grammy-winning children’s albums, In Harmony (1981) and In Harmony 2 (1983).
Her return to Broadway with Doctor Zhivago in 2015 was less successful. The tale of five intertwined lovers set during final days of czarist Russia lasted less than two months after blistering reviews.
She is survived by her husband; her children, Julie Simon and James Levine; and four grandchildren Sophie, Ben, Charlie and Evie.
RIP, Lucy Simon. So sad to hear this news.A great woman and writer.That Secret Garden score goes right in the pantheon.💔💔💔— steven pasquale (@StevePasquale) October 21, 2022
Lea Michele was filled with glee when she saw which young pop star was in the audience at Funny Girl Wednesday night (Oct. 12). Posting on Instagram, the 36-year-old actress revealed that Olivia Rodrigo had attended the night’s show, and had posed for a backstage photo with Michele, who’s starred as the titular role of Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival since taking over for Beanie Feldstein in September.
In the Thursday (Oct. 13) Instagram photo, the two stars cozy up next to each other, Michele’s hand on the “Drivers License” singer’s shoulder, and smile into the camera behind the stage curtain at New York City’s August Wilson theater. “This beautiful girl came to see @funnygirlbwy last night,” the Glee alum captioned the post.
“Loved seeing you @oliviarodrigo,” she added. “Absolutely adore you!”
“LOVE U!” Rodrigo replied in the comments. “U WERE INCREDIBLE!!!!”
The High School Musical: The Musical: The Series actress isn’t the only famous friend to have stopped to see Funny Girl as of late — though she is probably the only one to have written a No. 3 hit single (“Deja Vu”) that specifically mentions Michele’s breakout TV show by name (“Watching reruns of Glee / Being annoying, singing in harmony”). One week ago, Michele’s former Glee costar Darren Criss came to see the show with his wife, Mia Swier, both of whom also posed for a photo backstage with the “Funny Girl” herself.
“The amount of times this guy has heard me sing Don’t Rain On My Parade,” Michele joked at the time, referencing in her caption the multitude of times her Glee character Rachel Berry performed the song Barbra Streisand made famous. “I love you.”
See Lea Michele’s photo with Olivia Rodrigo backstage at Funny Girl on Broadway below: