Last Sunday's New York Times Arts & Leisure section profiled a new film called Show Business by Dori Berinstein, a filmmaker and theatrical producer. ("The Film About The Show Behind The Show" by Jesse Green, New York Times, Sunday April 26, 2005 ).

This film, which opened Monday April 27, 2005 at the Tribeca Film Festival, focuses on four musicals (Wicked, Avenue Q, Caroline, or Change, and Taboo) as they face their first performances, their opening night reviews, and their hopes for Tony awards. Okay, I'm loving it already and I haven't seen it!

I can imagine how fascinating the different journeys would be to watch, given how differently each of the shows ended up.

In the article Jesse Green interviews three of the directors of the four profiled musicals (Jason Moore of Avenue Q, Joe Mantello of Wicked, and George C. Wolfe of Caroline or Change) about their role in the process.

They talk about how the creation of a musical is an intimate, sometimes plodding process. About how a musical is a long, arduous emotional journey. (Yes and Yes). And they talk about the conflict that is inevitable when creative heads collide.

I loved the expression Peter Stone (a Broadway book writer) used to describe such conflict on a musical "Let me put it this way: The patient lived, the doctors all died."

Joe Mantello talks of experiencing sympathetic nausea when he hears of a show that is in trouble. He goes on to say "In a business that's full of schadenfreude, it's the last thing that I take any pleasure in."

But difficulties aside, they all share the passion, the joy, and the excitement of this fantastical musical theater business. As Jason Moore says, the part he loved in the movie was "that little girl who's crying when Kristen Chenoweth signed her Wicked CD."

Yep, I know how that feels.

Here are some tasty bits from the interview:

Q: I think the popular image, if there is a popular image, of what a director does is that he or she moves the actors around onstage.

MANTELLO: If you've done all the other work, the staging starts to stage itself. Sometimes I think that the main part of my job is to be a stand-in for the audience until they get there. So when I'm working with the writers, I say, "I don't get this." Or, "I'm confused: How do we get from here to here? What is the tone? What are you aiming for?"

Q: You become part of the story, in a way. It's not just the authors' story anymore, but yours.

WOLFE: And the performers' and the audience's, in turn. When you form a collaboration, particularly on a musical, be careful who you marry because that's who the child is going to look like.

Q: Well, that raises a question. In the movie, one of the songwriters on "Avenue Q" talked frankly about the conflicts he had with Jeff Whitty, the book writer, and how they were miraculously healed upon receiving the Tony Award.

MOORE: Imagine that.

Q: Is conflict inevitable in the development of a musical? Is it useful?

MOORE: What's tricky about a musical is that it's not just two people in a room. You've got a lot of heads butting up against each other. What our role becomes is to facilitate that conflict in a way that channels everybody's energies in the same direction. It may not be fun, and it may look awful, but eventually you get the thing on track. You have to keep your distance as much as possible to facilitate that.

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