Some Thoughts On Pippin As He Turns 40

Pippin is forty years old? How can that be? Pippin, who in 1972 arrived on Broadway on his youthful, idealistic and naïve quest for an extraordinary life, returns to try again at the A.R.T. in 2012. And like any forty-year-old, much has happened to him along the way.

Actually, Pippin’s life began some five years prior to that, in 1967 at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. There was a club called Scotch ‘n’ Soda, which presented each spring a new student-written, directed, designed, and performed musical. I had cowritten the show my first two years and was looking for an idea for my junior year. A fellow drama student, Ron Strauss, had come across a paragraph in a history textbook about the first-born son of Charlemagne and his attempt to overthrow his father. This was at a time when we drama students were much enamored of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter, able to reel off line after line of its witty acerbic dialogue and delight in its double-and-triple crossing plot twists. What could be more fun than to do a musical medieval courtintrigue melodrama of our own? So we came up with Pippin, Pippin (I no longer remember why we had two “Pippins” in the title), full of plots and counter-plots, bawdy tavern numbers, bucolic love in the French countryside, and as much bitchy dialogue as we could muster. We and our fellow CMU students had a blast with it, and that, as we thought, was that.

But a year or so later, as I was getting set to graduate, I got a letter from a wouldbe New York producer who had heard the vanity cast recording we had made of the show, (basically for ourselves and our parents). He said he thought the show had potential, and asked if I would be interested in developing it. Ron gave me license, literally and figuratively, to do so. I will spare you the details of the show’s odyssey over the next five years, but suffice it to say that along the way it accumulated a book writer, the smart and funny Roger O. Hirson, an experienced producer, Stuart Ostrow, and a legendary director/choreographer, Bob Fosse. And by the time the now one-name-titled Pippin went into rehearsal for Broadway, not one line of dialogue, not one scrap of lyric, and not one bar of music from the original CMU show remained. The show had transmogrified into the story of a young man in search of himself, a story heavily influenced by the social upheaval happening in America at the time. It was of course the time of the Vietnam War and the so-called “generation gap,” with its slogan “Never trust anyone over 30.” America was as divided and polarized as—well—as it is now, although along somewhat different fault lines.

There was plenty of polarization in the development process for the Broadway show as well. It’s well-known that Bob Fosse and I often found ourselves on opposite sides of our own generation gap, with Roger frequently caught in the middle. But I’ve come to believe that the show benefited from it, since it heightened the dramatic tension of the central conflict in the show between the hopeful naiveté of its title character and the worldly-wise cynicism of the Leading Player and his cohorts. I have a feeling that if either Bob’s point of view or my own at the time had totally won out, the show wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.
Subsequent to the Broadway production, Roger and I as authors made revisions that brought the show more in line with our original vision. For instance, we cut many of the Leading Player’s intrusions in the middle of scenes because we felt they diluted the story’s emotional power. But then a funny thing happened: Over the years, and particularly as I found myself on the other side of the over-thirty generation gap, we put them right back in. We even added some. At one point, I found myself telling an interviewer that ironically I had become the “guardian of Bob’s vision” and that “somewhere Bob is looking up and laughing.”
Of course there have been other developments over time as well: We’ve found other cuts and improvements for lines, sharpening of lyrics, better focus for the story in spots. A decade or so ago, I wandered into a Fringe production of the show in London and found that they were trying a different ending, one that Roger and I immediately knew was better than any we had ever tried or considered. There have been several other interesting interpretations I have seen over the years. I particularly loved a brilliant production in 2009 by the Deaf West Theatre of LA in which Pippin was played by two actors, a deaf actor who signed and a speaking actor, and as Pippin’s internal conflict grew throughout the show, the two actors conflicted with each other more and more. I enjoyed a Pan Asian production in which the court of Charlemagne was a Japanese shogunate and a recent production at the Chocolate Factory in London, in which Pippin was caught inside a video game.

Now comes this new production at the A.R.T.. I’m particularly excited about it because director Diane Paulus, as she demonstrated with her wonderful productions of HAIR and The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, seems to have a unique ability with revivals, to reinvigorate rather than reinvent, to create a production that delivers what audiences loved about the original show and then goes beyond to enhance and illuminate the material. My hope is that, under Diane’s guidance, Pippin at 40 will remain forever young.