How a Striptease Got Dressed Up

It’s nail-biting time in the basement rehearsal hall of the Old Globe Theatre, where the hit movie “The Full Monty” is being revamped for the stage as a musical comedy.

Two days to final dress rehearsal, four before the first audience preview and just two weeks until opening night, the 12-member orchestra has played the 16-song, all-new score together only once. And this is the first time the 22-member cast, which has been working for months with just a piano, is hearing the full orchestration. Nevertheless, they’re doing a full run-through of the songs (no dancing right now) in front of the show’s producers, director and everyone else involved in the production, which opens here Thursday and is expected to move to Broadway in the fall.

The band warms up, the actors start to sing, and the place is hopping. In this concrete hall with bad acoustics and even worse aesthetics, dreams are coming to life.

Nearly everyone in the room is continually jumping out of their chairs to check in with somebody else. More than a little apprehension is in the air, but that’s not all. Ever present is the sense that this could hit the jackpot. Or not.

There is a lot working in the show’s favor. First, of course, is its enormous name recognition. Made for just $3.5 million in 1997, “The Full Monty” not only received four Oscar nominations, but by last estimate has grossed $256 million worldwide. Further, its story would seem easy to translate into a musical because it has what stage audiences love--dance, music and good old-fashioned triumph over adversity. All this in a bunch of down-on-their-luck guys who find a fun way to make a buck by taking off their clothes.

The timing couldn’t be better. Right now, there’s a dearth of successful big new stage musicals, even though audiences have proven time and again that there is still an appetite for what is Broadway’s mainstay, let alone that of regional theater. Films turned into musicals are actually one medium that seems to be working these days. Despite mixed reviews, “Footloose” and “Saturday Night Fever” are audience-pleasers. And of course there’s “The Lion King,” which has been sold out on Broadway for two years.

But you never know.

Even with favorable odds, any number of things can go wrong in a new work. Success relies most on the strength of the creative team. Here the players include some heavyweights, with one crucial unknown.

The first person on the project was Lindsay Law, the former president of Fox Searchlight who green-lighted “The Full Monty” when then-unknown screenwriter Simon Beaufoy’s script first was submitted. Clearly he has always had his heart invested in this surprise blockbuster, and now he’s left behind his successful film and television career to independently produce the stage show. Law, who worked extensively in the theater world when he produced public TV’s “American Playhouse,” claims that as soon as the film came out more than 80 theater producers from all over the world came to Fox seeking rights to turn the movie into a musical. Seeing an opportunity for the studio, Law persuaded Fox to bankroll its own production--with him on contract at the helm.

The San Diego show will cost between $1.5 million and $2.75 million, 80% of it Old Globe money and the rest from Fox. If it is successful here, Fox will provide all of the financing to market and adapt the show for a full Broadway production, with the Old Globe getting some royalties. Law won’t say how much the transfer will cost, but big Broadway productions usually run between $6 million and $10 million these days, and that’s in the ballpark for this show, confirms Old Globe managing director Tom Hall, a 22-year and 250-show veteran of the San Diego theater. After “Full Monty” opens in San Diego, Hall also will leave his job to produce theater independently, banking in part, along with Law, on “The Full Monty.”

Rewriting the story for the new “Full Monty” is Terrence McNally, one of New York’s most esteemed comedic as well as dramatic playwrights and certainly one of the most prolific writers for today’s stage. In the world of musicals, McNally’s turn-of-the-century pageant “Ragtime,” based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow, won him a Tony, as did his adaptation into a musical of Manuel Puig’s political novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” McNally’s other two Tonys are for his original dramas “Master Class,” about Maria Callas, and “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” about a group of gay friends on a series of weekend retreats.

The “Full Monty” musical’s plot is mostly the same as the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Beaufoy, who has no involvement in this production. A few new characters have been added, however. The central theme still celebrates the guys’ camaraderie under trying circumstances and embraces them as just ordinary men--fat, skinny, uptight or whatever. But McNally’s characters are not from Sheffield, England; instead, they hail from Buffalo, N.Y., a working-class town not much different in temperament, but without the heavy accents.

The show’s director, Jack O’Brien, saw the change as a way of distinguishing the new production. “My initial take was that it should be American,” he said. “If not, why are we doing it? And what is there about this piece that can’t be done in America? Nothing.”

The show’s staging isn’t really going to be like the film either, say the creators, and not just because the medium of theater is by its very nature even more artificial than film. Here the guys, along with their wives and friends, will burst out in song even before they learn to dance. And they’ll do it in a very American vernacular, with references to people like Michael Jordan and Carole King.

O’Brien, Old Globe artistic director since 1981, is directing and is an old friend of Law; the two worked together often when Law was with “American Playhouse” from 1982 to 1995. O’Brien is also friends with McNally, and he premiered the playwright’s “Up in Saratoga” at the Old Globe in 1989, albeit to miserable reviews. O’Brien’s numerous other stage credits range from opera to Shakespeare to musicals, but in recent years he is probably best known for bringing a new version of “Damn Yankees” to Broadway in 1994.

And then there’s composer-lyricist David Yazbek, the most unlikely member of the team and the crucial spice that could make “Full Monty” either soar or bomb. A sometime rock-popster who has made two albums, “Laughing Man” and “Tock,” for the W.A.R. label, Yazbek is a man of all trades, always, it seems, with some roots in comedy. In 1984, right out of college, he worked as a writer for David Letterman for a year. He won an Emmy for the effort, but his personal Web site makes that job sound like torture.

Yazbek also co-wrote the theme song for “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” and he helped create the PC television puppet show “Puzzle Place.” Certainly these are unusual credits for someone writing a musical about lovable unemployed losers in Buffalo, but Yazbek occasionally has also composed for the stage. In addition, one of his closest friends is up-and-coming Broadway songwriter Adam Guettel, who’d worked at the Old Globe recently on “Floyd Collins.” When Guettel was approached for “Full Monty,” he persuaded Hall, Law and O’Brien to give Yazbek a shot. Three spec songs later, they did just that, and now Yazbek is both composer and lyricist for the entire show, with two of those original tryout pieces still in the production.

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Dressed in shorts, jeans, tank tops and summer plaids, the six lead actors--John Ellison Conlee, Jason Danieley, Andre De Shields, Romain Fruge, Marcus Neville and Patrick Wilson--even out of costume, all look in rehearsal like the regular guys they’re meant to portray. There are no big names, and nobody’s a star here. As they stand in a line at a row of mikes set up for the raw run-through, they nudge one another and joke around nervously--just like the unemployed steel workers in the film. Just like guys who can’t dance, but decide to do just that, naked, for money.

In fact, says Jerry Mitchell, the show’s choreographer, these are actors and singers first, not dancers. And the trick was getting them to dance at the beginning like they can’t, and then later like they can, all the while singing Yazbek’s songs. (Think “A Chorus Line” meets “The Music Man.”) In one crucial song at the end of Act 1, they’re trying to get motivated to move around like dancers by imitating Jordan’s moves as a basketball player. As they sing “Michael Jordan’s Ball” now, without doing all the moves, they can’t help playing their own version of air ball--never missing because, of course, there is no ball and no basket. And the music, which includes a few basketball sound effects in addition to the infectious bouncing rhythm of the drum, makes it all seem visible.

Yazbek’s lyrics are jocular too. In one ballad, the overweight Dave (Conlee) sings what starts out with a “we’ll always be together” kind of lyric that you suddenly realize is addressed to his rotund stomach, not his loving wife.

For now, though, there’s no taking it all off. One can only imagine what the finale will be like; that’s an element of surprise everyone involved is adamant about not revealing. Still, it’s inevitable that it will end with a razzmatazz strip act like the movie, and Mitchell may well be the most appropriate man in theater today to put that together.

Having worked under legendary choreographers Jerome Robbins and Michael Bennett and choreographed last season’s revival of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” Mitchell sheepishly admits in an interview that “I have a little bit of stripping in my own background,” then goes on to explain that he originated New York’s annual “Broadway Bares,” a benefit for the AIDS charity Broadway Cares. It began a decade ago with some friends, dancers but by no means strippers, doing the full monty in a club to raise money for the cause. On the first night they raised $8,000. (Last year, they raised $240,000.) Mitchell, therefore, not only knows how it’s really done, but is also a true believer in “Full Monty” magic.

So is McNally, whose own “Love! Valour! Compassion!” focused on male friendship and survival in the face of adversity every bit as much as “Full Monty.” McNally says that he signed on, about two years ago, as soon as O’Brien called. “I thought it would make a good musical comedy,” he remembers, and he wanted to participate, even though “The Full Monty” is so different from what he’d done in musical theater before.

“It’s about as far from ‘Ragtime’ as you can get, or ‘Spider Woman,’ which were both more serious,” McNally says. “I think one of the things I liked about this is that these are people of substance that I care about, I have an emotional involvement with all six of those men and what happens to them.

“We live in a society that is so obsessed with body image--men even more than women lately, it seems. This show is liberating people from feeling skinny or fat or ugly or too old or too short. Too anything. So on a lot of human levels it speaks to me very deeply. But it’s a true comedy too.”

McNally says he wrote the book for the musical much as he would a play, straight through without any indication of where songs should be performed. When Yazbek came on board, the two met and agreed that they were not setting out to break new theatrical boundaries with the show. It was a necessary starting point for this pair, who would seem to have very different points of view.

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At 61, McNally is a soft-spoken, intense but confident theater veteran, someone who’s seen the ups and the downs of it all, firsthand. Harold Prince, who directed McNally’s adaptation of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” says it’s a cause for celebration that a playwright of McNally’s standing who is used to working alone should continue to work in the collaborative world of musical theater.

“He’s real good at it,” Prince says. “A playwright writes arias, long wonderful speeches, and [for musicals] he must be prepared for a composer and lyricist to come right in and devour that material and turn it into musical material. And Terrence is, and so it’s a very, very good collaboration.”

Yet in this case McNally’s collaborator is someone 23 years younger whose only previously produced musical is one he did in college. Now 38, Yazbek comes across as an engaging smart-aleck with a swagger that has probably helped him sell his varied projects on more than one occasion. He’s also a bit in awe of the undertaking and is quick to point out “one thing I’ve learned: I don’t think I’m capable of writing the book to a musical. I can’t imagine a harder job. Especially based on a successful movie. You’ve got to be Terrence McNally to pull that off.”

Despite differences, when the two met for the first time on this project, both claim they were quickly compatible.

“The first discussion I had with Terrence was when I went over to his house,” Yazbek says, “and he said, ‘So what do you think we’re doing with this? We’re not trying to change the art form. We’re not trying to puncture musical theater.’ ”

Yazbek laughs at the memory. “I said, ‘I want to write “Guys and Dolls.” ’

“This is a story about guys. These aren’t icons, they’re not archetypes, they’re just working-class guys, and I’d like to write a musical that has a soundtrack that I’d want to listen to, every song.”

More accustomed to writing albums than scores, Yazbek says the biggest challenge has been coming up with songs that get their point across right away.

“If you use subtlety, you have to pay it off either later in the song, or later in the show,” he says. “Because you can’t expect people to pay $80 [Broadway ticket prices] over and over again just to hear that song again.”

Yazbek’s baby-boom pop references and sardonic nature mixed with McNally’s sometimes operatic sensibility (this is, after all, a man who’s appeared often on the Metropolitan Opera’s radio quiz show) might seem a stretch, but the cross is intentional. The producers wanted to appeal to all ages, like the movie did, with its mix of disco oldies and slacker attitude.

“Rent” got the Gen-X crowd into the theater, but that music was too loud and screechy for the older set. This show aims for a broader range, which could either be its strength or spread it a bit too thin.

It is not exactly a rock musical, the creators say, although it will have rock elements to it. It is also not exactly conventional Broadway, at least what’s seen there these days. Most of all, everyone stresses, it’s going to be funny.

“We’re certainly not in the ‘Marie Christine’-Stephen Sondheim end of the perspective,” says director O’Brien. “And we’re certainly not old-fashioned. Although Terrence has written a funny book. These days musical comedies aren’t funny. They have a kind of appeal, but not because they’re entertaining. They’re almost incidentally entertaining. I bet it’s been a long time since you got a good laugh in a musical. That’s really what we’re doing.”

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Outside the rehearsal hall, a large, complicated jigsaw puzzle sits on a table, almost finished. A week ago it was only half done. This puzzle, as much as anything, evokes the hours put into this production--as well as the hours spent waiting for the next rehearsal to start. One cast member fusses with a remaining piece and laughingly suggests that when the puzzle’s done, it will be time to move onto the stage.

At this point that’s only a day away. And then the much bigger puzzle will also get its final pieces put in place. One thing it has going for it is money. Fox’s commitment to the project has allowed everyone to focus on their art, without worrying about finding backers. That’s a luxury in the theater, where playing to the checkbooks can compromise a lot in the early stages of a show.

It’s a new game for Fox, which saw another of its prize films, “Big,” turned into a Broadway musical fiasco after the studio licensed the story to outside producers a few years ago. In the 1970s, Fox was initially involved in the stage version of “The Wiz,” the movie of which was eventually made by Universal and Motown. Law, ever a risk-taker, saw an opportunity to get something more out of “The Full Monty” and made the case against letting anyone else try first.

“I said, ‘You’re taking something of enormous value to you, then you’re [thinking of] giving it to a group of people you have no control over,’ ” Law remembers. “I said, ‘Let’s protect the franchise.’ They said, ‘Sure, but nobody here knows anything about that.’ ”

Law reminded them that theater is a big part of his background, enough so to persuade them to let him go it alone on this. On public television, Law has produced acclaimed stage productions ranging from Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods” to Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” and “An Enemy of the People” (the latter two directed by O’Brien). He’s also known to have an instinct for what might stand out, even though not everything he’s done has been commercially successful. In his five years as president of Fox Searchlight, he oversaw such acclaimed art films as “Looking for Richard,” “Waking Ned Devine,” “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Titus.”

So, now the question remains: Is Law right? Will “The Full Monty” have the same magical chemistry on the stage? Among those outside the project who think so is the venerable musical director Prince.

“It sounds like an awfully good idea for a musical to me. Steve Sondheim’s always used the phrase ‘it sings’ or ‘it doesn’t sing.’ And while that may be a very personal, subjective standard by which he reacts to material, I think there’s some accuracy in it. And I can’t quite define why, but you say ‘The Full Monty,’ and it sounds like it sings to me. It’s not just a light comedy, it’s a social piece, and there’s a good, strong metaphor at work. As such it all seems musical to me.

“Then quickly I’m reminded that there were musical interludes in it, and there’s one scene that I’m reminded of when they’re all rehearsing as they’re standing on line to get a job. And that’s perfect fodder for not only the composer, lyricist and book writer, but also the director and the choreographer. So it’s quickly a terribly good situation for a number.

“It seems a swell idea to me.”

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“The Full Monty, the Musical” opens Thursday at the Old Globe Theatre, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, San Diego, (619) 239-2255. Performances: Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends July 2. $23-$42.