30 Days of NYMF on BroadwayWorld Day 14: Gutenberg! The Musical!

by Anthony King

Scott had seven trucker hats piled on his head and was singing about "lederhosen pants;" I was wearing a fake moustache and singing about yeast rolls. And that's when it hit me – "We did it! We might have created the most inane musical project ever!"

When I first moved to New York, I was the musical theater intern at Manhattan Theatre Club. After a year of sifting through piles and piles of musical submissions that were mostly mediocre at best, Scott Brown and I decided to create a truly ridiculous, truly awful musical and submit it to the head of the Musical Theatre department under assumed names - just to read his feedback.

We started by creating the authors, two dolts named Doug Simon and Bud Davenport, guys with big dreams, small talent, and heaps of misplaced passion. As subject matter, we landed on what must be one of the least musical moments in history – Johann Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.

But as we continued to work, we didn't want to just submit the show on paper. We wanted to put it on stage. And Bug and Doug? They would perform all the roles in a "reading" of the show for "big-name Broadway producers."

The story was simple – Gutenberg is a wine maker in the German town of Schlimmer, a town where no one can read "because there's nothing to read." An evil monk likes it that way, so when Gutenberg turns his wine press into a printing press, the monk kidnaps Gutenberg's love interest, Helvetica.

I'm pretty sure there's not one true fact in that entire description, mostly because the full extent of Bud and Doug's research was "Google."

As we began rehearsals for the show, we realized Bud and Doug would be, ahem, unaccomplished actors, so the task of playing 20 roles would be monumental. Our solution (as Bud and Doug would surely have done) was to write the names of every character on 20 different trucker hats, and in performance, switch between them. One problem – the characters fly too quickly, not enough time to make the switches.

The solution? Pile the hats on our heads. Which is why Scott wears seven trucker hats while singing about "lederhosen pants."

It's always amazing when a necessary solution in rehearsal becomes a defining part of a production. As GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL! readies for NYMF, the trucker hats have become as much a part of the show as Bud and Doug themselves.

And speaking of the authors, as they would say, "The first NYMF performance is Saturday, September 24 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre – GET READY TO READ!!"