They Have Teen Angst to Thank

As hushed and reverent as a funeral congregation, the Hudson Mainstage Theatre audience trains its eyes on a buff, handsome young man who has come to a tragic end. Deserted by his faith, estranged from his friends and at war within his own soul, he collapses before a painted tableau of Roman Catholic saints just as a swooning synthesizer melody whips the large ensemble cast into its anthem-like finale.

“No love, no truth, no voice!” they sing, while the overflow, demographically mixed audience stops sniffling long enough to clap and whoop itself silly.

Minutes later, at a coffeehouse adjoining the 87-seat theater in Hollywood, composer Damon Intrabartolo and director Kristin Hanggi are basking in the afterglow of yet another sold-out performance of “bare.” Among the show’s acolytes is a growing handful of repeat attendees affectionately known as “bareheads.”

“I remember when we opened the show looking out at the audience and going, ‘My God, there are 16 people!’ ” says Intrabartolo, co-author with Jon Hartmere Jr. of this emotionally bruising yet decidedly up-tempo pop passion play about the sexual trials and spiritual strip-searchings of a group of Catholic boarding-school students.

Those empty-seat nights are history for “bare’s” foreseeable future. Two months after its Oct. 14 opening, “bare” is one of L.A.’s hottest tickets this side of “The Lion King.”

Produced on a fat-free $60,000 budget and recently extended through Feb. 11, the 2 1/2-hour home-grown show has been winning the sort of accolades most first-time musical theater auteurs can only dream about. “A magnificent, totally original contemporary musical extravaganza,” opined Variety. The Times praised the show’s distinctive authorial voice in telling a “well-produced, smoothly orchestrated ode to self-absorbed teenage angst.”

“Bare’s” authors and director admit that the musical is still a work in progress. They acknowledge that the book, in particular, needs revisions, especially in the second act. “There are certain dialogue elements that need to be tighter; there are certain relationships that need to be clearer,” Hanggi says.

But “bare’s” strong notices and word of mouth already have attracted attention from some powerful show-biz players. Veteran Broadway producers Anita Waxman and Elizabeth Williams, who won a Tony Award last year for their revival of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” are in discussions with Hartmere and Intrabartolo about developing “bare” for an eventual Broadway run.

“You don’t find that kind of music from a first-time writer. That music is spectacular,” Waxman says, speaking by phone from New York.

In an age when a typical Broadway musical costs $10 million and up, producing new work is a dicey enterprise--even for practiced hands like Waxman, whose credits include “The Music Man,” “The Wild Party” and “The Young Man From Atlanta,” and Williams, who helped finance the West End and Broadway companies of “Les Miserables,” “Miss Saigon” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”

But while acknowledging that the show’s characters need to be developed “a bit more,” Waxman says she and Williams hope to workshop “bare” early next year, most likely at a nonprofit venue specializing in new musical theater, en route to a Broadway opening in spring or fall 2002.

An independent Hollywood production company is also mulling “bare’s” cinematic potential. “We are really interested in bringing musicals to the screen, and these are exactly the kind of fresh voices that we’re dedicated to working with,” says Amy Israel, a former Miramax executive and now co-president of Blum Israel Productions.

Focusing on two male students--golden boy Jason, a closeted AC-DC scholar-athlete, and his introspective part-time lover Peter--”bare” addresses the painful psychological hurdles that confront gay youth, and the moral dilemmas and healing power that stem from organized religion. The unusually large cast of 21, whose credits range from film and television to experimental off-Broadway theater and the national tour of “Miss Saigon,” also portrays such de rigueur teen archetypes as the chubby female freak no one understands and the popular beauty queen who steals Jason’s heart--and winds up carrying his child. Other characters include an emotionally conflicted priest and a sympathetic nun who teaches at the school.

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Hartmere, who wrote the show’s lyrics, and Intrabartolo--both 26, gay and raised in devout East Coast Catholic homes--say “bare” is essentially the story of their late high school and USC years: the emotional roller coaster of coming out sexually and the havoc that wreaks on one’s spiritual life.

“Peter and Jason are two halves of one person,” Hartmere says. “The fear that Peter goes through is what I went through. So as I started working with Damon, who’s a little more irreverent, a little less pious, the show started lightening up. Sometimes I see those things in the show and I’m like, ‘What is all this angst about?’ And then I read my journals, and it all comes back.”

Though his co-creator jokes that he prefers the term “advanced” to “irreverent,” Intrabartolo doesn’t make light of those shared struggles. “Gay men for the most part learn to be really great masters of deceit,” he says. “You lead two lives. You have this other life and then you have this great facade.”

Working closely with director Hanggi, the authors have attempted to tweak what might have been read as a garden-variety boy-meets-boy coming-of-age parable--a sort of after-school special with a backbeat. Shifting rapidly if not always seamlessly from prickly satire to heartfelt melodrama, from intimate duets to boisterous ensemble numbers, “bare” steers clear of predictability through most of its first act.

While its second half falls into more conventional rhythms, the witty, emotionally nuanced fusion score, with its tricky internal rhymes, lush keyboard overlays and subtly repeated R&B; motifs performed by a seven-piece orchestra, elevates the show’s more mundane dramatic stretches.

Freely mixing New Testament verse with topical allusions, and a Shakespearean subplot with songs titled “Plain Jane Fat Ass” and the gospel-infused “God Don’t Make No Trash,” “bare” alternates between gritty naturalism and comic surrealism: “Fame” meets MTV’s “The Real World.” Dialogue-light and virtually sung-through, the show resembles an opera more than a Broadway musical.

Not surprisingly, “bare’s” frank depiction of teen sexuality and its questioning attitude toward religion have provoked strong reactions. “Some people think it’s a very anti-Catholic show, and some people think the exact opposite,” says actor John Griffin, 24, who plays Jason and was raised Catholic himself.

Several Catholic clergy have seen the show, including Father Peter Liuzzi, director of the Los Angeles Archdiocese’s Ministry of Lesbian and Gay Catholics. Though initially concerned that the musical would present an angry anti-Catholic message, Liuzzi thinks that “bare” offers a complex and balanced depiction both of individual conflict and the church’s struggle to accommodate believers who happen to be gay.

“It’s a somber piece in the sense that it leaves you thinking it must be difficult to find yourself in a situation where there is so much ignorance and misunderstanding,” he says. “At appropriate times there’s also tremendous humor that seems very well-timed as comic relief.”

Director Hanggi, 23, who was raised in a staunch Christian family in Huntington Beach, believes that “bare’s” main characters represent “a struggle that everyone goes through, in high school or even in adulthood,” a basic quest for love, empathy and self-knowledge, including sexual self-knowledge.

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With Broadway producers knocking on their door, “bare’s” authors are thinking big. “They’re saying that this could easily be the next ‘Rent’ or ‘Hair,’ ” says Intrabartolo, the duo’s more voluble and outwardly ambitious half.

“Bare” has a long way to go to crack that elite cadre of landmark rock-era musicals. Yet such comparisons seem inevitable. Like Jonathan Larson’s 1996 Tony Award-winning “Rent,” or the downtown Manhattan cult hit “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “bare” came to life as a raw, urgent experiment in musical theater for a new generation.

“ ‘Rent’ made up for a lot of lost time,” says Intrabartolo. “The era of [Stephen] Sondheim was dead, dead, dead after ‘Passion,’ and we’re tired of Andrew Lloyd Webber.”

Flashes of youthful hubris aside, the creators of “bare” are determined to bring fresh blood to a vampire entertainment form that today subsists mostly on sclerotic revivals. Where the show goes from here may depend, in part, on how willing its creators are to temper their iconoclastic vision in order to please investors and attract wider audiences.

“I just can’t ever see this being watered down to be something palatable to a [mainstream] American audience,” Hartmere says. “It should be for everyone, but it won’t be.”

Intrabartolo, while conceding that the second act needs “solidifying,” says, “There are certain concessions that I really wouldn’t be into making.”

Though somewhat surprised by its success, “bare’s” creative team is full of precocious, self-assured talent. New Jersey native Intrabartolo is a former USC School of Music student with numerous film and TV orchestration and conducting credits, including “The Cable Guy,” “The Usual Suspects” and the Emmy-nominated score for ABC’s recent version of “Fantasy Island.”

Hartmere grew up in an Irish American family in Massachusetts and turned down Harvard to study economics, international relations and creative writing at USC, where he met Intrabartolo. While working on “bare,” he has kept his day job teaching third and fourth grade at an inner-city Los Angeles public school--sometimes to his creative partner’s consternation.

“I think he cheats American musical theater by not committing to it full time,” Intrabartolo says with characteristic bluntness. Responds Hartmere: “It’s been hard for me to see writing not as something selfish. [By teaching school] I’m in the trenches, and I know I’m making a difference.”

Hanggi, a playwright as well as a director, has theater degrees from USC and UCLA, and has directed professional productions around Los Angeles. She joined “bare” last April after hearing a CD of the score and subsequently meeting Intrabartolo at a party.

Also among the show’s young artistic personnel are vocal director Eric Anderson, classically trained choreographer Onalee Hunter and music producer-arranger Deborah Lurie, another USC grad who has composed music for Disney’s “Hercules” animated TV series and served as orchestrator on the movie version of “The X Files.”

It was Lurie who first introduced her friends Hartmere and Intrabartolo and who produced and paid for a studio-recorded CD version of “bare” that preceded and helped raise interest in a stage production. Befitting its teen-to-twentysomething target audience, the show has gained momentum through Internet chat groups and e-mail exchanges. Some tunes can be heard on the Web site https://www.barethemusical.com; a bootleg version has been spotted on Napster. The show is being co-produced by the Hudson Mainstage Theatre and Elizabeth Reilly, artistic director of the Hudson Mainstage and Guild Theatres.

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The show’s autobiographical roots run deep.

For Intrabartolo, growing up in suburban New Jersey “was very stifling. The only escape I had was New York.” His grandmother used to take him to Broadway shows, and his musical talents asserted themselves early. He started piano at 9, French horn at 10, and played in his high school band.

As a teenager, his skepticism of Catholic doctrine began to increase. But he still loved the pageantry and theatricality of church ritual. “Catholic Mass is really a great show, and as an altar boy I loved being part of that show.”

Later, the 3 1/2 years he spent as a church organist taught him how to read complex musical scores. But he was fired when he started playing stately versions of Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara” and Madonna’s “Vogue” during communion services. “My mom would get really mad. She’d be praying and she’d turn around and grit her teeth.”

Hartmere chuckles at the anecdote. “I would’ve fired you!”

Though Intrabartolo left Catholicism “with a great boyfriend and a lot of anger,” Hartmere relied on his faith throughout adolescence and still considers himself a devout Catholic. “The nuns must have done their job,” he says. “I have an enormous respect for the church. I think going to Catholic school has an amazing effect on your outlook on the world.”

But sexual doubts were always gnawing at him. A straight-A student, he was president of numerous high school clubs and captain of the track team. “I filled up every minute of the day so I wouldn’t have to think about other stuff.”

At USC he joined the fraternity Phi Kappa Psi and went on to become president, surviving a hazing initiation in which another pledge who’d recently come out of the closet was threatened by his frat brothers with baseball bats. More than physical danger, Hartmere feared “losing my relationship with the church, then losing my relationship with my family, then losing my relationship with God.”

Around that same period, Intrabartolo found acceptance within the free-spirited Trojan marching band, and developed a lasting friendship with film composer and editor John Ottman (“The Usual Suspects,” “Apt Pupil”), who executive-produced and helped finance “bare.”

Three years ago, Hartmere and Intrabartolo met at a time when the latter was searching for lyrics to complement what was then a five-song outline of “bare.” Hartmere’s only hands-on experience in musical theater was writing lyrics for USC’s annual Songfest talent show. He was sure Intrabartolo would deem him a fraud.

Instead, Hartmere says, Intrabartolo “blew into the room and we really hit it off.” When Hartmere, who’d only recently come out, told his new friend that he was gay, “it was like a dam had burst,” says Intrabartolo. Soon, they were collaborating.

Whether or not “bare” goes on to greater glory, the two men and Hanggi say they plan to keep working together. Intrabartolo is looking forward to his father seeing the show, while Hartmere and Hanggi say they’ve both drawn closer to their parents as a result of “bare.”

For Hartmere, acknowledging his homosexuality to his parents and priest was difficult at first. Now, he says, his dad passes out “bare” reviews around the office. “I think the worst tragedy you can do to people is to tell them that God is not listening anymore,” Hartmere says, “to think that you’ve lost that connection to God.”

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“bare” at the Hudson Mainstage Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m. Dark Monday-Jan. 3. Ends Feb. 11. $27.50. (310) 289-2999.