Bobby Cronin: Off the Beaten Path

One never knows where the inspiration for an original musical might come from, though we'd be hard-pressed to find very many that were born from a reality TV program. There's the notorious and controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera-and, gathering attention, is The Beaten Path, inspired by a TV show about troubled teens at camps. Garnering just as much attention is the show's composer/lyricist/bookwriter Bobby Cronin, whose work will be featured at a concert on Sunday at the Metropolitan Room.

The Beaten Path was conceived back in 2005, when Cronin and several friends were watching a TV show called Brat Camp. At a commercial break, Cronin ran to his piano and, jokingly, began playing a song inspired by the program. Encouraged by his friends' reactions, and with some free time in the following years due to his partner's work in the Chicago run of Wicked, Cronin was able to start crafting that one song into a new musical comedy.

As the youngest of five siblings and the uncle of eight nieces and nephews, Cronin felt comfortable writing about children and their issues. "As a writer, I'm really interested in the loss of innocence-when it is," he says. "I feel like it's harder to forgive an adult for something they've done wrong in a show [than it is for a child.]" As such, the idea of what makes a child "go wrong" appealed as a subject matter to him. He wrote the show-at the time entitled B.R.A.T.T Camp-in one year, and did a workshop in Chicago with some actors from Wicked (at this point, all of the children in the show were played by adults). That early production ran three-and-a-half hours, but was still strong enough to get a second workshop at Manhattan Theater Club.

That was where he met Jessica Redish, who took an interest in the project. About a year after  that MTC workshop, Redish reached out to Cronin. "She was starting a theater company in Chicago, where theater is thriving, as opposed to NY, where it's risky," Cronin recalls. Redish said that she wanted to produce the show at her new company. "I said, 'Of course! Anything!' And she said, 'But I want the kids to be played by real teenagers.'" That was a paradigm shift for Cronin, who had always imagined the roles as played by adults. "I was nervous that the audience wouldn't go on this ride with real teenagers. I thought it was easier to make a joke of it than to make it serious," he says. But he agreed, and sat in auditions for a new cast. It was the first time he heard the songs performed by anyone outside of the Chicago cast of Wicked-and he left the room weeping. "There's a distance when an audience watches an adult playing a kid, and when an actual teenager is talking about suffering," he says. "I turned to [Jessica] and said, 'You have fixed my show.'"

While the show was originally intended to be a comedy, it always had an emotional depth. "As a composer, I can only write from the heart," Cronin says. "Even my silly songs were from the heart.  And what I was doing for the script to try to ease that along for an audience was make a joke." In the Chicago rehearsals, he began cutting the excesses away to find its heart. "From the first rehearsals to the final productions, it was a 50% different show," he recalls. "And what was really cool throughout the performances is that we had talkbacks-and it was in Chicago, so we had intelligent people who love theater who understand this world of kids being sent off to these camps. And the feedback that we got was astounding. People loved these kids, they loved their stories, they found some issues with what their stories were, and then came a really cool link in the process: We met this woman named Karen Mabie, whose job is to put kids into these camps. And she came to the show with a mother who she had worked with, putting her son in a camp." Mabie came to see the show, and offered feedback afterwards-starting with asking Cronin what camps he had visited. When she learned that he hadn't been to any, she was stunned. "She said, 'You have these kids right, but your adults-your counselors-are wrong.'"

Mabie arranged for Cronin to visit two camps in Utah, where he lived like one of the kids for three days. "It was honestly the best three days of my life," he remembers. "Better than college. I can't even describe in words-not even as a writer, but as a human being-how influential  going to these camps was for me." When he got home from the camps, he cut half of the show and-out of respect for a kid who found it offensive-changed the title from B.R.A.T.T Camp to The Beaten Path. Redish was brought back into the process, reminding him that if the music could be from the heart, then the whole show should be as well. "It was so, so exciting to have that opportunity to do real research and be able to write lyrics that were honest instead of funny," he says. "And there are still a bunch of them in there, but the reason that the funny lyrics are honest is that they're honestly trying to be funny to protect themselves. As any stand-up comic will admit, humor is the easiest defense mechanism."

That sense of honesty is what gives the show its heart. "I feel like the teens of today...want realism so they feel like they're normal," Cronin says. Like the family in Next to Normal, he feels that the protagonists in The Beaten Path are relatable to everyone. "These five kids have issues. They have problems that they need to overcome. They just need a conduit to do it. And kids today are smarter. They're much savvier-everything's not a Disney happy ending. And they want to feel like, 'I'm normal that I'm depressed.'"

Cronin's work on the show has brought him a new range of fans. "As a composer whose music is out there on the internet, I get daily messages from teenagers," he says. "It helps keep me going." Kids write him when they feel depressed, he continues, and tell him how his music helps them. "The feeling that I get from these emails is what keeps me going," he says. "We don't make a lot of money. It's not about the money; it's the art. Audiences want more of that challenging art form...the raw honesty that we're ready to face. We're in a recession! People are losing jobs! They have to travel and leave their children. We're in a place where honesty is good."

"I'm a very honest, real person," he continues. "I don't believe in bullshit. I'm not that guy. And to have someone see that in me as a person, to help me bring it into my work, is invaluable. That is what any of those great artists out there have done. That's why it's great art, because it's honest. It's not about pleasing somebody; it's about making something be the best fit for what you're trying to say... And that's why we changed the title. I wanted to reinvent the piece and let people know we really had something to say...It's risky, but that's what art is. It's risky and powerful."