30 Days Of NYMF: Day 14 ANDY WARHOL WAS RIGHT

Andy Warhol Was Right
By Sammy Buck, Book

The best part of starting a new show is research. When Dan Acquisto and I began writing Like You Like It (NYMF 04), which sets Shakespeare's As You Like It in the 1980s, it was all about watching old John Hughes flicks (may he rest in peace). Now some people call it procrastination, and well, maybe we are: because for Andy Warhol Was Right (or our swanky moniker AWWR), we are all about the Youtube.

See, AWWR is a fantasia of the future Mr. Warhol might have envisioned when he lay unconscious after he was shot. You may know which future we mean: the one where everyone is famous for fifteen minutes. His future, in short, is our present - one rife with über-popular videos of babies' biting their brother's fingers, Bill O'Reilly's shouting obscenities, and Scarlet's taking a tumble, as well as the multitudes of parodies of those videos. All of us on the AWWR creative team are certainly fascinated and inspired by these videos and would think Mr. Warhol would have been, too.

Dan and I are no strangers to the dance-musical Born-at-NYMF get-no-sleep-for-two-months experience. I wrote the book for the first dansical, Common Grounds, three years ago; Dan wrote the music for last year's Wild About Harry. The process of creating this show is lightning-quick. Producer Melinda Atwood assembled the team in June, we spitballed the idea of a Warhol-esque piece and came up with this concept. We're now in rehearsals and working with the brilliant director, Giovanna Sardelli and awesome choreographers, Shea Sullivan, Darren Lee and Daryl
Gray, to flesh out the story even further and for Dan to hone the music. Working on this piece is the purest definition of collaboration.

When friends ask me how someone can write the book to a dance piece, they scratch their heads: "Book? Dance? But there aren't any words!" Well, there are a few words in these dance pieces. In Common Grounds, there was a passage of prose to which a pas de deux was choreographed. There was a recurring line of dialogue in the '07 piece Platforms, and Leona's words were on the soundtrack last year. The core of my job as bookwriter is structure, but this year there is a new component: video. It's truly a multimedia fantasia, with story happening on screen and onstage. Andy's dream follows three camera-worthy stories, each showing a different take on what fame means: a neglected woman who auditions for reality TV, an ordinary guy thrust into the spotlight after becoming a subway hero, and a politician who deftly manipulates the media until... well, you'll just have to see.

We are thankful for our long-standing relationship with NYMF - between the two of us, Dan and I have had a show in four out the five festivals. In fact, our 07 show, The 7-Year B*tch received an Outstanding Musical citation from talkinbroadway.com. To paraphrase the great Garrett Morris
(kids, he used to be on SNL in the 70s), "NYMF been berry, berry good to us."