Musical Lyrical Lingo
We're Musical Lyrical Lingo!
Join Tim and Lj who delve deep into the wonderful world of musical theatre and more importantly the lessons they have learned from different musicals.
Join them as they explore some of the greatest musicals ever created, from the classics to the new and exciting shows that continue to teach us something new.
So whether you're a seasoned fan of the stage or a newcomer, this podcast is for you.
So sit back, relax and get ready to immerse yourself in the world of musical theatre.
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Musical Lyrical Lingo
Theatre, History, Mysteries, And The Human Heart
What if the best musical trivia isn’t trivia at all, but a map to why stories outlive us? We bring Professor and Theatre History and Mysteries host Dr John Bruschke into the studio to trace the hidden corridors between myth, history, and the show tunes stuck in our heads. From a British military escort for the silent Phantom film to real bones beneath the Paris Opera House, John unpacks how scandal and serendipity shaped the legends behind the lights and why audiences keep coming back.
We dig into the craft of adaptation where “accuracy” isn’t a scoreboard but a set of choices. Jesus Christ Superstar becomes a masterclass here: four Gospels, four angles on Judas, and room for a rock opera to find a human centre without flattening the source. John shows how the strongest retellings earn relevance by aiming at core truths of loyalty, doubt and mercy while accepting that history is rarely a single-thread narrative. The result is permission for theatre to be bold, and a reminder that care with sources is an act of respect, not restraint.
The conversation stretches from Cats and T. S. Eliot’s occult footprints to Man of La Mancha’s hard-won wisdom through Cervantes’ failures, then forward to Hadestown, where Greek myth’s many versions mirror our present anxieties about power and climate. We also talk method: how debate forged research helps translate dense scholarship into stories listeners can actually feel, and how a debate kid became a playwright-producer shepherding a new musical with his family.
If you love musicals, crave the backstory, or just want sharper lenses for art and life, this one’s for you. Hit play, then tell us: which musical taught you something you still live by? And if this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review it helps more curious people find us.
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Hello and welcome to Musical Eric Alingo. We're your hosts, Tim.
Lj:And LJ, today and every week we will be discussing musicals, but specifically what they taught us. But we probably won't be doing any teaching this week.
Tim:Yeah, and we're not on our own. No! We have someone much more qualified in the world of musical theatre knowledge and what it teaches us, right?
Lj:We feel very underprepared.
Tim:I feel very I don't feel I'm smart enough to be on top of this week, to be quite honest with you. We are really, really lucky to be uh joined by John Brushkey today. Hi, John. Hey, uh I I feel like I've been overcomplimented.
Lj:Generally not.
Dr Jon Bruschke:Listen, you better be brilliant. How do I live up to that introduction? Oh no.
Tim:Yeah, John, where are you joining us from today?
Dr Jon Bruschke:Uh so I'm uh Professor Cal State Fullerton. Today I'm in the city of Fullerton, sitting in my office. Um, and from my window you can actually see Disneyland uh off out there on the horizon.
Tim:That's uh you know we were there, wouldn't that be lovely? Look out the window and see Disneyland.
Lj:I would do anything to look out my um office window and see Disneyland.
Tim:I know. John, you have your very own uh podcast, Theatre History and Mysteries, where you take a musical theater production and you deep dive into questions it raises and the answers it provides. So, quite similar to our podcast, Musical Lyrical Lingo, where we look at musical theatre and what it taught us. However, you're so much smarter than us. I mean, we do a musical in one episode, but the musicals you choose, you have so much detail and so much research and background to them that you you can go across six or seven podcasts just on the one musical. But tell us in your own words, some of your podcasts and what it's all about for our listeners.
Dr Jon Bruschke:Uh uh, thank you. I you know, yeah, when I'm in my living room with my wife who got her PhD at MIT and my daughter's taking 17 AP classes or something, unless the cat is in the room, I'm the third smartest person there. So I appreciate all of your uh all the props you're giving me. Um so I'm uh I'm not a great musical theater audience member because I'll go and I'll watch the show, and I always come away with um like 17 other questions about the backstory, right? So um I remember actually watching Le Miz in the Theaters, uh and I actually I I saw that really bad 1999 movie was when I first saw it, and I came out thinking, man, there's gotta be more to the story than that. You know, this is it was a great book, and now it's this long-running musical. And so I I would always come away asking questions like, so what was the book about that was about the French Revolution? What happened in the French Revolution? What part of the French Revolution are they talking about? And that's always what I wanted to know more about. And you know, so I would just dive into grabbing all the books I could to read about um shows like that, and uh, there are always just absolutely crazy connections, and much like the two of you, I'm always at the end of that interested in there's some lesson about theater in here. What what makes the show work as a piece of theater, and then there's always some life lesson in there, like this, you know, 100 million people have seen cats. This can't just be about who gets to go to the heavy side layer, right? There's gotta be something some deeper message in there that tells us um, you know, something about the human experience, and so that's what I'm always interested in and always looking for when I when I go into the musicals and and the research.
Lj:Love it, love it.
Tim:How do you choose then the musicals that that that you've done? So, you know, your back catalog, you you've got episodes on cats there, you've mentioned Lame Is. Um, I'm really looking forward to the Lame Is ones. I just spent the last year working on because it's obviously the 40th anniversary of Lay Miz. Um, so in the UK, they granted um performance license for it to be performed by amateur companies for the first time. So I've just spent a year working on that. So it's still a bit too my life, has had too much Lay Miz in it. So I've left your Lay Miz episodes for the meantime, but I do look forward to jumping into them. Um, but you've done Lay Miz, you've done Phantom. You know, how do you choose the musical that you want to cover on your podcast?
Dr Jon Bruschke:Uh well so I'd start with ones that were interesting to me, right? So I'd I'd start with La Miz, I would start with uh the man of La Mancha, just because that was fascinating. That was another one where it's like, wow, there's there's something important here. And then honestly, I would just get to the end of like episode eight and I would say, and the next one will be uh chat. That would just sort of give me the direction. But uh, I have I have subsequently learned the mega musical, which is sort of a you know an Andrew Lloyd Weber UK export, yeah, um, is its own genre, and so you know, the um there's uh I'm in Fullerton, Chapman University is the Stones throw from us, and there's a woman there named Jessica Sternfeld who wrote the book that is titled The Mega Musical that traces the history of that, and so she would say there's kind of a golden age of musical theater that starts with Oklahoma and goes through Fiddler and the Roof. Then there's kind of the Stephen Sondheim era, then there's a little bit of a malaise, and then all of a sudden, Andrew Lloyd Weber explodes on the scene with Jesus Christ Superstar, and then now they're mega musicals, right? They're now productions that run for 10 years, 20 years, and make billions of dollars. Um uh so I just started starting. Uh your question was, how do I pick it? And the answer is I just kind of started with the ones that I know are a big deal, but I don't really have a firm grip in my own mind about what is going on with the story. Uh, and the other one I had done is Phantom of the Opera. There is an interesting UK bat. This is this is kind of what I have discovered happens every time you start researching a big musical. So Phantom of the Opera is written uh by Gaston Leroux, he's French, obviously, and it's set in the Paris Opera House. Um, then it becomes a movie, uh silent film that has Loncheney in it. And that film was taken to the UK to be released in the UK, and they used the British military to actually carry the film from the boat to the theaters, which caused such a massive public uproar. There were hearings uh you know in the British Parliament, uh, and eventually legislation passed that banned the Phantom of the Opera from being shown in the UK. Because there was outrage that there was a UK film industry of its own, and why were government resources and the military resources being spent protecting this American film? Shouldn't they be doing more to uh promote the uh the British film industry? And so interesting, interesting fact, Phantom of the Opera, the silent film, uh almost never got shown in the UK. It was a big deal everywhere else in the silent film era, but not not on your not on your island there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Tim:I crazy I've just lit um listened to all all of your phantom series, and that was one of the standout facts that I just went, that's insane. Like that is insane that that happened. Also, the other uh interesting fact that I took from those um episodes were about the original um opera house, like there being like a lake down in the in the very basement or the pits of the theater, and I was like, that's so bizarre, like that match like that's weird, right?
Dr Jon Bruschke:Well, right. So uh one thing that is always interesting to me, there's uh there's a great musical, The Phantom of the Opera, and it's fantastic. And so you go back and say, But uh, what what was necessary for like where did that come from? And the story is Andrew Lloyd Weber went to his bookstore and picked up a copy of the old book, and he read it and decided that would make a good opera. And the question is, well, why did that even happen? And the bridge between them is that movie, uh, the Lonchaney classic silent film. So then you go back and say, Okay, well, but the book was written by Gaston Leroux, what was he writing about? And it's set in the Paris Opera House, and famously, you know, their bodies, cadaver, you know, skeletons that are in the catacombs, and there was this love triangle. And so then you can ask yourself, is that was that historically accurate? Is there really are there really skeletons in the basement of the Paris Opera House? So as you as you're running down that rabbit hole, you discover the answer is yes. Yes, the uh at the end of the French Revolution, there was the Paris Commune, which was sort of its own little independent thing separate from the French government. The French government came in and crushed it, they put prisoners in the basement of that Paris Opera House. Those prisoners passed away, and those are the skeletons that were referenced in Gaston LaRue. And as you keep running down that rabbit hole, you say, but that's not the Paris Opera House uh that the original story came from. There was a love triangle that was about the previous Paris Opera House that had burned down, and so you're like, Wow, that you know, so there really was a woman who was really in love with somebody who uh uh was competing for her affection with a soldier in the French army, and he did die a terrible death. Uh and so you think, okay, well, that's fascinating. And then if you keep researching, you discover, and that never really happened. There was actually uh this kind of famous German opera that was dark and mysterious and very gothic, and they had fabricated the story, but released it in multiple different newspapers at exactly the same time to try to capitalize on you know, kind of the the mystery of it to say there's a real story here to get people to race there. So um, one thing I just find absolutely fascinating about knowledge and musical theater and life is you you you keep going back and it gets stranger and stranger and stranger until you couldn't, you know, if you wrote that as a movie script, they would say this is not believable. Yeah, yeah, and and throw it back at you. But um but it it does make it more fun to for me to see Phantom, you know, you see Phantom the Opera on the stage, and knowing that you know there there's a there's a long backstory to this before it gets to the gets to the gets to the stage.
Lj:Well, I have to say you not that my husband will help us a little bit on this podcast, but your podcast has overtaken our podcast, and yours is not his favorite musical theater podcast.
Tim:Thanks very much for that, John, because he's supposed to be our executive producer. He's now trying to jump ship. You know what I mean? So what's also really fun is I love that you never miss the opportunity to pursue the mystery or those bizarre coincidences. Um I also love your one man like trek for super defined supernatural in all of the you know the musicals that you look at. Where does that come from? Is that a genuine interest you have in the supernatural or those like mystery kind of things? Or I love that part of your podcast.
Dr Jon Bruschke:Where does it come from? I uh well, thank you for that. I I really enjoy it. Uh you know, I I don't have a better answer other than as a kid, I always liked Halloween. And you know, there's definitely as I've meet other people who are like, there's the ghost chaser, real paranormal investigators, and to me, I I don't I don't object to it, it's just that it kind of stops being fun, yeah, for me at that point. Like if they if you really want to. So I just think the the question is, is there a spirit world in just about every human civilization or society that has ever existed believes there is one, but it's not the same everywhere. And to me, that is just intellectually a fascinating question. Like, I do really believe there's there is something that is a spirit world out there. Uh, I think most people would would say there's a spiritual component to my life, you know, even if it's not like I'm I'm a hardcore religious person, kind of intuitively people feel feel that there's you know a connection to the cosmos now. Uh and then if you're like, well, if we can find that, define it, and name it, and it's a scary ghost, that's not quite as much fun to me as just dwelling in the uncertainty of it all. You know, as long as it's as long as we don't know for sure, it can be fun and you can play with it. And as soon as you know for sure, then you can't, but uh just ghost stories are fun, Halloween's fun. Um, and so uh you know, uh for for cats, the I this is this was sort of interesting, but um cats is of course based on some poems by T. S. Elliot. So if you go back to look at the life of T. S. Elliot, and he was deeply involved in the occult. Uh there are there are academic journal articles written that have titles like T. S. Elliot and the Occult. It wasn't like a distant connection, it was like this guy was attending seances and you know, members, you know, knew everybody who was doing who was into it at the time. So that to me was fascinating. Uh and I had read something about the very first member of the T.S. Elliott line was Andrew Elliott, who emigrated from the UK, um, and ended up in Salem, Massachusetts, where he was an accuser. He accused other people of witchcraft. Then he was a juror, he served on the Salem witchcraft trials, then he recanted all of it, and he was one of the signatures on this thing that recanted. So here's I mean, here's like if you were to say American ghost stories, what's the first one? You would say that's gotta be the Salem witch trials, right? Like there, you can still do Salem witch tours in Salem, Massachusetts, and then just to trace that forward 200 years and discover that is a direct relative of T. S. Elliot, who is deeply into the cult, and then he wrote cats.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Dr Jon Bruschke:Uh, you know, that's just you know, uh there's some kind of you know, strange connection, some good ghost story that that surrounds all of that. And and to me, those are those are just fun to chase.
Lj:Yeah. Well, speaking of connection, our podcast, we've known each other since we were very little, and it was musical theater that brought us together. Um, and we're still best friends 34 years later.
Dr Jon Bruschke:I'm um well, but since we're both talking about 29, I'm not sure I can. You see, John, this is why we like you so much.
Lj:Um, so we we love musical theater, but and the our whole point of our podcast is what it taught us and how we have learned not only life lessons um and skills, but we also like learned what what words meant just from singing a song. Like the number one for me was fratricide in and Joseph. You know, that was the first time I'd heard about and then knew what that word meant. So, like, what do you think? Like, what are the most profound life lessons you've personally taken away from musicals or shows?
Dr Jon Bruschke:I guess I think that for uh a show to be cut to really resonate with an audience, it has to say something that's uh kind of a core truth about human life, right? It has to be something big enough that can resonate with a lot of people in a lot of different places with a lot of different backgrounds. So if you were to take uh the man of La Mancha, right? That is, of course, written by Cervantes. So that guy, he was a soldier. That's his life started. He's a soldier, and he got shot in uh in a famous battle. He's uh so now he's now he's a wounded civilian, but his job is actually to commandeer stuff that would uh become part of the Spanish uh armada that famously lost, right? So his job, okay, and in the middle of all that, he gets thrown in a medieval prison in Turkey. So he's captured after the battle, as he's doing this other job, and he he makes four separate escape attempts. Like four, like just imagine trying to escape from a prison once, now make it a medieval prison, now make it you're escaping four times, and then you get out of that and uh you spend your life uh working for the Spanish government, which you deeply believe in, only to discover everything that you have done um is in the service of the Spanish Armada, which then completely fails, right? It the end of the empire, right? You're you you have been part of the biggest failure in Spanish military history. That's your contribution to the world. Um, and in the meantime, he's right, he's a playwright and he's writing all these plays, and he's frankly not very good. And it is at that point that he is accused uh by the Spanish Inquisition of heresy, uh, of doing things because he's essentially on behalf of the Spanish government going into cities and trying to requisition stuff that they're gonna use for the armada. But the only entity that has anything is the church, so he's essentially taking church resources to give to the Spanish government for this military thing, and so he is accused of heresy, but it's not even by the people that he's taking the stuff from, right? Commandeer means I'm taking it from you, I'm not buying it. Taking it, that's not a popular job, right? Showing up and taking people's stuff. Uh, so he's but he is accused because one of the guys that he was escaping with had actually sold them out to their captors, and that guy knew he was in trouble, so he thought, ha, I will falsely accuse Cervantes of being the guy who uh sold us out, and I'll turn the Inquisition on him because the Inquisition will kill anybody. And then it actually turns out he is such a good guy, all the people he's been taking stuff from show up to his defense, all as do all the former prisoners and all the former soldiers. Okay, so now you are Cervantes, you were 58 years old in 1600 years, right? Like, you know, 58 is not, you know, that would not be unusual now. Yeah, but in the year 1600, making it to 58 years old as a former soldier who's been shot and been to prison is is unusual. And it is at that moment he sits down to write Don Quixote, um and proceeds to write what is now widely regarded as the best novel in the in Spanish in the Spanish language ever. It has never gone out of print, right? He writes it, it's published in 1605, and it it has never gone out of print uh right up right up till now. So, I mean, life lesson. What did we just learn about art and life? And I think part of it is, you know, art isn't really something that this dilettante thing that really pristine bookish people do, right? You can be a soldier from a Spanish prison who's been accused by the Spanish Inquisition and still produce fantastic art, right? Art concept experience from human experience. It can resonate that that's true. And then what else does that tell us about life? I mean, there's an awful lot of don't let setbacks discourage you, right? You know, maybe getting thrown in a medieval prison would have discouraged some people, but not Cervantes. Maybe getting caught the first three times you tried to escape would have uh discouraged some people, but not Cervantes. Um so I think those are life lessons. And here's what is just fascinating to me. He had tried repeatedly to be a playwright and never really caught on. But then he writes this book and it immediately becomes an international sensation. So, like in 1605, within two years, there are copies of it showing up in festivals in North America, right? So the book has to get from Spain across the ocean and then find an audience there. I mean, it's just it's just massive. So you would think maybe the message from God in the universe was, dude, you should write novels, you're really good at that. And he immediately says, Okay, well, that was cool, but what I really want to be is a playwright. And he spends 10 more years writing plays that all fail, none of them even get he just he's not a good playwright, and so then finally, after 10 years, he writes the second part of uh Don Quixote. So if you buy the book today, it now comes with the two volumes put together, but at the time there was a 10-year gap between them, and it's just as good as the first one, and so it again sells out immediately and becomes part of this iconic Spanish novel. So, uh, you know, how many how many life lessons are there in there? And you know, kind of it it's like on the one hand, never give up, yeah. Uh, don't get discouraged by the obstacles. On the other hand, it's like figure out when it's time to quit. Like, yeah, yeah, you have you've succeeded as an author, as a novelist, right? And you're not a good playwright, so just write more novels and be okay. And and I've got to be a hot off. Yes, uh, but to get back to the supernatural, but then of course it has to become a musical, and it originally started as a stage play and got a uh got an audience in the United States on television. So it first aired on the T on TV in 1960, and it was kind of interesting at that point was 1960 was, of course, the year of the first presidential debate, the famous Nixon Kennedy debate happened on American television. And the big thing about that wasn't that it was a good debate. The big thing about that was it was the first ever televised debate, which meant it was the first time most people had a television to watch something. And so TV had emerged as a medium, but there wasn't a lot of regular programming at that point, and so they were like, What do we, you know, what do we do? And so one thing that would happen is the producers would say, Every Saturday night we're gonna show a play, and so they contacted the author of uh Mav La Mancha and he put it on television, and then it slowly emerged, it went from there to eventually becoming a musical. But the good ghost story there is as he's working, he's so the author of this is trying to move it from a play to a musical and went to a restaurant in Palm Springs, which is about two hours from where I'm sitting right now, Palm Springs, California, at this restaurant that has five tables, and it has the person who's the owner, is also the cook and the server and the busser, uh, and the only employee of the whole place. And her menu has one item on it. So she wakes up that day, and whatever she wants to make, that's what they're gonna eat. So this so author goes to sit down. The woman comes up and says, Oh, by the way, I'm also a psychic. And he says, Okay, well, I'm trying to make this thing a play. What's gonna happen? So she, you know, flips down her tarot cards and she says, It's gonna be a huge success, it's gonna take over your life. Um, but it's not all gonna be positive. And then everything she says completely comes true. He it does become a huge success, it's a smash Broadway hit, but right in the middle of that, he has a panic attack that is so severe, he can't get out of bed. Um and and he was like, it did take over my it was a success, like she said. It did completely take over everything else I was doing, just like she said, and it uh and it did in fact have a huge uh you know, kind of in a in a Frankenstein way, right? My I made my creation took off, yeah, and then it kind of came back to bite me.
Lj:Yeah, oh my goodness, so fascinating!
Tim:Incredible. I have been so excited to do this interview because your episodes are just so interesting and there's so much content in there. Like, how long does it take you to do the reading and to do the prep for for one of the musicals that you obviously there's it varies depending on what the musical is, but how long does it take you to prepare for for an episode?
Dr Jon Bruschke:All right, uh, so I I'll just give my quick little advertisement for college debate. Um, there is uh in the UK, this was uh I don't know how to describe this. There's a in in the UK there are debating societies, but though they are typically back at the pub, you know, everyone has some drinks, uh trade, trade barbs, insults, and jokes, yeah, you know, and try to say something serious.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Dr Jon Bruschke:Um, and as an undergraduate, like 35 years ago, I actually qualified to be the American touring team that was gonna go on this British tour, and then it ended up getting canceled at the last minute. But I was able to have some British host some British debaters on our campus back in the day. But in the United States, uh competitive academic debate is as hyper competitive. Imagine the World Cup, right? That the students will compete. I once judged a debate where I was, I think it was Iowa against Northwestern, and I think it was nuclear proliferation. But the team from Iowa read like 27 pieces of evidence to disprove something that Harvard said from 27 different sources. And then Northwestern stood up and picked one of them out of the middle of the pack and said, Oh, you read this quote from this source, but that used a footnote. Do you know what that footnote is a reference to? And Iowa did not. And then Northwestern proceeded to stand up, say, here was the footnote. Now here's our indictment of the source in the footnote in the midst of this. I mean, it's just it is just so competitive you can't believe it. So uh, you know, there's there's kind of this joke the difference between a professor and a newscaster is a professor starts to learn more and more and more about less and less and less until they know practically everything about practically nothing. You know, so I specialized in the left-footed toe disease that are bacterially infected with three different treatments, right? That's what a professor's life is super focused on. And a newscaster, by contrast, knows less and less about more and more and more and more until they know practically nothing about practically everything. Yeah. And right in the middle of that is the college debate coach because you go to the tournaments, they're wins and losses, and then they always happen on weekends, and you come back on Tuesday and you're like, okay, what is USC saying today? What's what did Harvard have that we didn't have an answer to? What did Berkeley have to say? And then they'll you'll just compile these pile mountains of research evidence to handle in these debates because any issue could come up, and uh everyone's always trying to get a leg up and find some research somebody else did. So a typical college debate research assignment would be two to three hundred pages of stuff from lots of different sources. So for the podcast, I foolishly thought, you know, how hard could that be? It's just like doing a debate research assignment, like I used to do for 25 years of my life when I was a competitive academic college debate coach. And um I do less research than I used to because it turns out when you're 58 years old and not 28, you uh takes a longer to do stuff. Uh but uh, you know, I will, you know, but but my floor is always covered. There's you know, five to eight books that are stacked there that are some of them, you know, I kind of read cover to cover, and some of them I found the chapter I needed, and some of them I kind of skimmed and thought I'd come back to it if I needed to, and maybe another 20 or 30 articles from academic research journals that I would, you know, that are stacked up that have been highlighted in some places and skimmed in others to try to pull out the the interesting interesting facts. But I I I mean I will say this this what I what I do deeply enjoy is and in the lessons for life, right? Theater and life, um, there's a lot of misinformation floating around in the world, and everybody knows, like all sides of the political spectrum can acknowledge that even when I talk to my students now, like as soon as I say social media, they start rolling their eyes, right? They just know that there's a bunch of stuff there that is not true. And there are places where there is good information, it's just hard to get to. And a problem that I and my fellow academics have is we talk in really big words with long, complicated sentences that make it difficult to understand. So I very much enjoy the ability, especially the freedom of a podcast. Like when you're doing a university lecture, you got to be right, you got to be on point, and you have to follow the structure in the curriculum. And one thing I you get to do with a podcast is just take something interesting and talk about it for a long time. And so if I can find an interesting idea in a very dense academic article that I know a broader audience is probably not gonna read, but I can, you know, in my role as former debate coach, university professor, theater.
Tim:enthusiast translate some of that dense stuff into um into more common and accessible ideas that's that's fun for me i i really enjoy that yeah this is going to be a really hard question because it's like choosing between your babies but is there is there a musical that you have done to this point that you've released where you're going oh yeah I that was one of my favorites I really enjoyed doing that um the musical I enjoyed researching the most was Jesus Christ superstar I'm loving that at the moment it is so good well because it right because the idea is you you start with what you have and then just keep going back to find the original material.
Dr Jon Bruschke:So if you do Phantom of the Opera you can find Gaston LeRose's original novel. Yeah if you do Man of La Mancha you can find Don Quixote by Cervantes. If you do Le Miz you get Le Miz by Victor Hugo but if you do Jesus Christ Superstar you find the Bible and uh it you know as a younger person I was very traditionally religious in an American evangelical tradition. Like I was the kid who wore Jesus saved t-shirts to high school um and I would still say I have a deep and abiding faith but it's definitely not as churchy as it used to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Dr Jon Bruschke:And I had always been interested in the question where is the original text of the Bible? And so you know the hook to Jesus Christ superstar is there's the passion of Christ kind of last eight days of his life and all the events leading up between when he gets to Jerusalem and the crucifixion. And the musical says okay I'm gonna we're gonna retell that Bible story from the perspective of Judas. That's the hook of the musical you can't miss that about it. And so you might expect um that's gonna make a lot of people really mad right you're taking the Bible and retelling it as if you you know as an artistic choice well if you're a religious person that that seems like a dangerous thing to do should you be doing that in fact Billy Graham called Andrew Lloyd Weller blasphemous for even attempting to do that. So I was super excited to dive in there and and find out okay so what's the original biblical story of Judas and how does that change in the musical and oh my god it you know nothing disappointed me it was absolutely fascinating to uh to dive into that and it turns out there is not a single biblical story of the crucifixion yeah that you know there's of course Matthew Mark Luke and John and Acts which actually include in there but that's not the chronological order that they were written in it starts with Mark not Matthew and Acts comes before John and the story slightly changes every time yeah you know you weave your way through uh through the narrative of the gospel so that I mean you've probably heard there is that uh there's the famous kiss right Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss well that's in one gospel but there's a different gospel where he doesn't do that he just walks up and says Jesus walks up to the people who are to rest him and say I'm I'm the guy you're looking for right I and Judas doesn't betray anybody and there is no kiss. Well that that's not quite the same story and that's not even the strangest thing there are biblical uh the um in one's version Judas hangs himself which is what happens in the musical uh there's another version where he explodes like literally just explodes yeah um but that uh you know so I do think like what's the lesson for theater and for life and I think even at the time like when that movie came out in 1973 or the movie the musical came out in 1973 the thought was there's gonna be a lot of religious people who were super angry about this yeah um but as I started researching and I was like can you really get that mad about it like because there's the story itself is not a single story it's there's there's lots of ambiguity and it changes a lot and then it ended up there were of course some protests but they were kind of muted and I you know I guess what I took from that is I maybe there's more common sense out there than we generally believe that if if there is in fact not a single only true interpretation of a story and that is widely recognized even by the people who translate the Bible um maybe that means that this protest isn't really going to go anywhere stop the show and it and it didn't. Yeah so anyway uh for me it was super fun to go diving into questions of where does the Bible come from how does it get interpreted how does it get translated how many different versions of it are there and uh yeah and and and that was that was a blast.
Lj:Yeah so fascinating we're on I think we're on episode three isn't yeah five episodes you've got yeah yeah so yeah can't wait can't wait for the last two I know okay well I'm gonna give you a spoil can I give you uh yeah yeah no uh um so the the the musical is I'm gonna retell the story of the crucifixion from the perspective of Judas there was you may not you but what you probably have not heard of is there is in fact a lost gospel of Judas it's an actual book that archaeologists have discovered um that was buried in a clay pot in the fourth century and discovered two decades after the musical happened so now there exists on the planet earth these dueling here's the Jesus Christ superstar reinterpretation that retells the gospel uh the story of the crucifixion from the perspective of Judas and 20 years after that came out archaeologists discovered a book called the Gospel of Judas which as you might you know expects the crucifixion story from the perspective of Judas just like the musical does so that'll be the fifth episode but you can just you know yes there are some absolutely stunning connections between the two of them how many weeks do we have to wait for that one it comes out every other week so yes oh hopefully I I think that'll come out right next year Halloween it'll be perfect our Halloween holidays no tell me that is a spoiler oh good I can't wait it's so it's so gauge and and for those that maybe um a bit like my husband who's kind of being around musical theater but maybe not as intense in it like we are your podcast really does bring another side to it where you can hook people in and we're always trying to to say that with our listeners as well if this is a musical that you haven't heard of before go listen to it go see because there might be something about it that intrigues you um so is there any musicals which you haven't done yet but you're really excited to tackle in in the future uh so the next one up is Hadestown love it oh big fans thank you uh well I am I am uh uh sort of shifting for the I it occurred to me I have done too many of the mega musicals right just the huge shows that everybody knows about and I haven't done too many of the more recent ones or the you know uh fascinating or important but not not in the canon yet uh and so Hadestown is the one that I it will be fun for me and that gets us to uh kind of Greek mythology yeah because you know we've done done things about Spain and things about the UK and things about the witch trials but we have not yet gone back to the to the origins of where the the academy right so the very first university was there at the same time these Greek myths were originating.
Dr Jon Bruschke:And what's fun about that is just like um you know Jesus Christ superstar if you start digging you'll discover there isn't really just one biblical story that uh about the crucifixion if you start digging into Hades Town which is of course you know the story of Orpheus uh there isn't just one original Greek story of Orpheus that there's a couple of different ones and so that I I'm looking forward to to which is you know something I had no idea about at the start of looking into it. You know I'd seen Hades Town on the stage and so I that's what got me to start looking at those original Greek myth stories and and you get back there there's interesting stuff like you know it is true Hades Town is a different take on the Orpheus story but at the time Homer was writing about it.
Lj:There were different takes on the Orpheus story and and learning how those have played out you know 26 centuries apart is uh does bring home the what what is the lesson that this theater has for life and kind of the answer is okay well there's this story he turns around he looks back and that goes poorly for him they were fighting about what that story meant 26 centuries ago and we're still talking about it now what about that event is so powerful that it it can resonate for literally uh 26 centuries uh and that that's something at the core of Hades Town that is yeah oh I'm excited because it's such a good musical and even why it came to be and you know came from sort of nothing and just perseverance um and then has become this really beloved musical but still not a huge amount of people know about it. So um that's exciting. Okay.
Tim:Yeah great choice John great choice what we noticed when we started uh our podcast was just the sheer number of musicals that are based upon a historical event or uh a a person in history from historical point of view have you come across um a musical that has got the the accuracy spot on or to the other end of the scale has been so inaccurate based upon history um I I I guess here here here's what has struck me about that the most there you kind of the knock on Hollywood is that it will find a successful formula and regurgitate it forever.
Dr Jon Bruschke:Like how many fast and furious movies do we really need uh yes the car i the so this will during the pandemic um we were all had to be in the same house so yeah of course you know because we everyone was quarantined and so our kind of house rule was you could put whatever you wanted on the TV but you had to have the volume off unless everybody was watching it. And so what I started doing was I would watch the Fast and Furious movies with the volume off uh just to see if I could keep up with the entirety of the plot without ever hearing an actor speaking a word. And the answer to that is yes but what is startling to me was the amount of stock footage that was just a foot going down on a gas pedal or somebody shifting a gear. But like honestly 10 minutes of the movie is just junk junk yeah watching a hand shift a gear. But that that makes 11 movies so I do think especially in the entertainment world there's uh an inherent uh it is appealing to say what's worked that will get an audience to get people to show up and watch it you know before I invest another million dollars in a movie or 10 years of my life trying to make a musical takeoff how can I start with something that I know is gonna have an appeal and so almost everything in Hollywood and and even to a greater extent in the musicals they start with an existing story and they kind of always do um uh you know like the musical six the wives of Henry the eighth is that historically accurate um well probably not even that its point but it has got to start with some kind of a story and so for something like a piece of art or and even Hadestown is a pretty good example of that there's a story are you true to the story well you're resetting it in New Orleans and then you're playing around with the relationship between uh uh who the different characters are and then you kind of have uh climate change story in there does that make you historically inaccurate are you now no longer accurate and um one thing while I was doing Jesus Christ superstar is that it's of course a retelling of the Bible story but it's not the only one there are thousands of attempts to retell the Bible story or at least some part of it you know from the Ten Commandments to uh the Trinity Broadcast network trying to retell the create the you know the birth story of Christ and what uh we what I kept coming across is to try to tell the story of the Bible you have to take what is a bunch of texts written by different people in different languages different places over hundreds of years and condense it to a two hour video that someone can watch and to do that you have to make choices and you have to change it. There's just no other way to do it. And so your question is which of the stories is most accurate or least accurate? And I guess I would like to say what they have in common is they all start with something um that's got a kernel of truth in it. And they all have to be modified and significantly changed yeah for the story to be useful and worthwhile and to fit in the format of you know a two two and a half hour musical theater production. And the real yardstick is did you do it in a way that was entertaining and enlightening and had its own core element of truth about it? Or did it you know was it something that missed you know you you tried telling the story and it didn't capture what made the original the thing so powerful in the first place. And so for instance uh Jesus Christ Superstar starts the mega musical era right it clearly caught on with an audience people loved it and and as you know the history of that was it came in the United States and flopped right it had an eight month run on pre-ticket sales but it wasn't until it went back to the UK and they fixed some of the staging stuff that then it really it really took off. Yeah um and so the artistic choice was good and it resonated and that worked the movie of that musical uh came out a couple years later and even though it was the same songs and the same story that retelling of it just it it has kind of a cult following but nothing nothing like you know if you were to say here's two attempts to tell the same story this one hit and this one did not yeah it's really subtle differences in the performances and really subtle differences in how small change small things completely change the way the story lands that make a difference.
Lj:And so I I think that um uh I I I have not yet hit a story that uh has been so historically off it has offended me like oh my god yeah doing violence to the story but I am much more taken with how did you manage to retell it in a way to make it relevant to a contemporary audience that landed with them yeah um as opposed to retelling a good story with it still had that in nist and and there's you know there are nutso connections there too uh the the Phantom of the opera has been massively successful in the UK yeah massively successful in the Americ United States massively successful on international tours um and it's heart right the the heart of that story is the Paris Opera House and the only place it has failed is in Paris yeah you know how whoa I how does that happen right yeah um and to be able to uh answer you know to uh to me that's the fascinating question you're still selling the same tour what what happened you know what how does that happen but yeah you mentioned six and also about you know approaching some of the more modern musicals is that one that's on your list for further further podcasts or uh all right so um my my eldest child has insisted the next thing be Hamilton after um and uh my 17 year old daughter will insist that six follow maybe not next but shortly follows that right which but very gay well I can't wait to hear how long your Hamilton is because we had to do it over two podcasts and we there's a lot going on there John oh yeah we you know obviously are not taught American history so we were pretty much the musical taught us a lot um from that but uh yeah good luck because if we did it over two episodes I'm not sure how many you'll do well I I will say I read the original Cherno book before the musical came out um no this will be great this will be easy I'll just go back and pick that book up that I've already read and I was like I don't remember yeah like I I have forgotten at least 90% of what's in this book so any attempt to take this and see does this match up with the musical is not yeah I will say my eldest child and I watched it together and and what we'd come up with the core message is if you're in a duel you should shoot at the other guy.
Dr Jon Bruschke:Yeah right yeah yeah with this aim over his head shoot in the air man you're it's a gunfight shoot back surely when you get to that stage there's no other choice like it's not even an option pull the trigger say always a life lesson that's true is there like a historical event that you feel deserves musical treatment uh so the the United States Civil War is of course uh a bigger bigger deal here than it is elsewhere but that is um you know there have been movies that have been made about that there are shockingly comic elements to it that I think would work would work well but if you were to you know if you wanted to if you wanted to capture what Victor Hugo thought about the French Revolution you could find that yeah right uh in La Miz and if you were to say what captures the Civil War um you'd find a movie but you wouldn't find a musical and and it just seems like that's a place where there's got to be some powerful you know like if you just imagine what is the big closing number of a of a of the civil uh of a musical about the civil war that it's quite a bit and uh there's actually a local theater near me called the Maverick theater that is that does a version of the Civil War uh okay as a stage play and I think not yet as a full musical but I I do think that you know if I were that that would be one I would definitely show up to to watch yeah just to see what you what you could do with it. You know and the funny side note to that was of course the weird thing about the civil war is that people all went to the same military academy right so they were all former classmates and then many times families would be on opposite sides so brothers would be fighting on opposite sides of the of the war and um at the time the book Les Miz came out um both sides loved it uh and so during the battles right when during all that dead downtime someone would get a copy of the book and they just pass it around or they'd even have readings of it. All the soldiers would get around the campfire and someone would read Le Miz. And there was actually a famous moment where a truce was called so that the spouses the wives of the generals could meet on neutral territory and exchange their copies of the Le Miz books because uh you know the books divided into five different parts and it was published originally in the like Harry Potter right one two three four five it came out and so they'd have different copies and they would meet on neutral town to exchange their copies of Le Miz so that they could then take it back and read it to the different companies of troops and so wow of literature and art and everything that is wonderful isn't that class yeah yeah right and of course uh both sets of soldiers saw themselves as the miserables right we're the ones that really have it heart um and uh but did not find commonality enough to in the hostilities but yeah that does say uh yes but that that moment of art right why is this story resonating so much with people who are fighting against each other so fiercely um but they can agree on on this art yeah that to me does say something about the ability of art to transcend human conflict and we probably should have asked this question at the very beginning of the podcast John but when did musical theater first enter into your in into your life we were four like we were bad yes well uh you and my you and my my kids have had the same life path it was all are their kindergarten had a musical every year and the first thing they did is they were the everlasting gobstopper in the Willy Wonka production nice my experience I was a high school debate kid so I'd actually sign up for a metal shop class that filled up too quickly and so they randomly assigned me to the debate thing and then that really took off for me and I became a high school debater college debater college debate coach college debate professor is which is where it ended up really was what resonated for me. But at least in the United States they would have weekend competitions and they'd have the theater competitions and the debate competitions at the same school at the same time and so we'd drive out on the same bus and all the debate kids would sit on one side and all the theater kids would sit on the other side and there was like this icy wall you know icy social partition keeping us apart from one another so it had never really been all right it was uh the theater room was right next to the debate room you're right so we were all public you know you'd you'd walk in front of an audience and do your thing and it had just never been something that had stuck with me and uh until my kids got into it and then you know the I my background had been I'd kind of played in a in a bar band Orange Candy was the center of punk rock and our big thing was our our bar band got to play in the same it's this place called the doll hut but all the punk bands social distortion and the offspring and uh every Orange Candy band no doubt had played there right and so I had a background in music and then the kids' musical theater would start and they'd like uh who can record the background music and I was like well sure I'm the parent who can do that and uh but just watching the way the community formed around so that when uh our eldest graduated from high school I was talking to one of the other parents and like I was like this wasn't even a thing in my life I'd never done it before um but my kids got interested in it and it seems to be a value and what he said to me was the same story that you've got he was like I went here I did I did theater at this high school and so did my dad and I met my wife here and my you know now our kids are going to this theater program. I've been doing shows in this space for the last you know my family has been doing it since the high school was founded and I've been doing it for the last 45 years. And there is just something magical about the way a cast either you know gels or doesn't and something about creating together where everything you do depends so much on what other lots lots of other people are doing. Yeah right if you're a performer you want to make sure the costume people don't make you look stupid.
Lj:Yeah you know you want the musicians to be able to match what you're doing when you're a little ahead a little bit behind you need the other actors to time the lines right and it was just you know uh at least in my debate world there's you and your partner in that relationship is much like a spouse you know like you you'll you know you know what each other's daily cycles are and uh and but it's very just the two of you and to me what was amazing about theater was how many people were coming together like it truly was a community and um and so that that was my engagement with and then during the pandemic I thought uh you know the my band couldn't play anymore and my kids were head started and I was like you know what I'm I'm gonna write a musical how hard can that be it's just a song a script and a bunch of songs and and so I've now uh I completed that project and it's now performed on five stages and we just auditioned it last Monday and both my kids got to be in it and uh yeah so I have gone from the debate kid who wouldn't talk to the theater people to the parent of theater kids to I am now running and producing my own show um with uh you know with family and with uh in the local theater around here and hopefully some of these lessons that uh the three of us are learning about life in theater will show up in that production and and make it and maybe we have to cover your musical because it's called let me get this the the title right is it Change the game it is change the game yes so we should cover change the game in a future episode and then have you come on and talk to you yes we'll do it uh yeah it's um we're auditioning it for theaters now and if one of them picks it up I will definitely shoot it back to you yeah fantastic share some stuff but I would love to I would love to love to do more of that oh well this has been the most intellectual conversation that our podcast has had and we are so so blessed that you were able to come on and speak to us honestly you the the words and your podcast is so interesting and exciting um it's I really hope that our listeners just go and listen to it and discover world go and listen to theater mysteries and mysteries because it is absolutely brilliant do you yourself have a favorite musical John um I so I I I myself do not it's uh you know there are songs that that I I like better but I it's uh you know like I said and I do think this is uh first I feel like I need to say I'm gonna take the link to this episode I'll put it on our podcast and then yeah that this will be the most friendly interactive thing that is on my podcast like yeah man why can't why can't we hear those two talk more you keep exciting sources at us uh no like when I go to what I've noticed is uh an awful lot of musical theater commentary is what's your favorite show what's your favorite song who's your favorite performer and that is sort of even especially in the internet sites right that sort of tends to dominate what is discussed and that's important like that is what theater means to a lot of people what I when I approach it I I always want to think well what's the idea here where did where can that take me what can I get into where you know and that's what is interesting about musical theater to me and so I try to stay away from the you know uh pick 'em rank them yeah uh what what you know there there are times in the theater where it just hits you and that's great and it's different for different performances and even of the same show. Yeah yeah but like we can't answer that those questions like when people ask my um and um we sometimes come back with the same answer it depends on what mood it's a bit like music of any sort or Ardaman it depends because there'll be ones which really like evoke an emotion but I mean love that for that reason or one that has a memory attached to it and it's just too hard so we just like to do life lessons now what it's taught us.
Tim:Yes no that there is and your episode like your podcast has taught me so much on musicals I thought I knew you know I knew quite well like it's been really amazing like I look forward to your your next episode every other week it's it's very very exciting cannot wait to finish the Jesus Christ superstar episodes and I look forward you will teach me about Hamilton because I'm gonna be honest with you John I'm still all over the place with that fair enough no idea what's going on all right well uh your your your side of the pond taught us about the Phantom of the Opera and so we can teach you about Hamilton and yeah all right hey thank you so much the two of you been in absolute so much thank you and we know that our listeners will have 100% enjoyed this as well so thank you for joining us and we'll be back next week bye bye
