New musicals strike a chord

NEW YORK — The dream sequence from “The Scottsboro Boys,” a musical at a Manhattan theater, is a nightmare: An imprisoned boy is forced to tap dance around an electric chair.

Based on an infamous 1930s case in Alabama involving white women, black men and false charges of rape, it's hardly the stuff of traditional musical theater. But the show isn't the only off-Broadway production this season to tackle topics that are serious — grim, even.

“Signs of Life,” about Jewish people in a concentration camp, opened Feb. 25 at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, and “The Burnt Part Boys,” about the sons of men killed in a mining accident, begins in May at Playwrights Horizons.

Sober subjects have found their way into musicals before, from Broadway musicals such as “Carousel” (domestic violence, class prejudice) in 1945 to “Next to Normal” (bipolar disorder) last year — but the off-Broadway offerings this winter and spring seem particularly fitting for our troubled times.

“There's a darkness in our zeitgeist today: the economy, we've been at war for more than a decade now,” said Isaac Robert Hurwitz, executive director and producer of the New York Musical Theater Festival.

“Something like ‘The Scottsboro Boys' speaks to where we are as a culture,” he said, “that we are willing to engage challenging subjects in a lot of different formats and are not just looking to theater to escape.”

Alfred Uhry, the playwright whose Tony Award-winning 1998 musical, “Parade,” revolved around the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager, said artists and audiences each might be in a solemn mood.

“They don't have the romantic gloss they had in the post-World War II period, when they believed that things would turn out fine,” Uhry said.

As part of a storied partnership that created the “Cabaret,” “Chicago” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” musicals, John Kander and Fred Ebb — Ebb died in 2004 — also wrote the music and lyrics for “The Scottsboro Boys,” about nine young black men who faced possible death sentences and endured numerous trials after two white women said they had been raped.

“Music does things sometimes that words cannot do, and musical theater can do things that strict drama cannot do,” Kander said, “which gives it a real capacity to understand and portray human suffering.”

That complexity is something audiences have been searching for, said Nathan Tysen, lyricist for “The Burnt Part Boys,” and Tim Sanford, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, which is co-producing that show with the Vineyard Theater.

“The Burnt Part Boys” (with a book by Mariana Elder and music by Chris Miller) is a fictional coming-of-age story about teenagers who must deal with the social and emotional repercussions when the West Virginia mine where their fathers died a decade before is scheduled to reopen.

“Our director said ‘I think you guys wrote the first 9/11 musical without knowing it,' ” Tysen said. “Something tragic happened, and there is the promise the site will never reopen. There are parallels with the Ground Zero site, but we were not even aware of it.”

The creators of the new shows said they sought to avoid trivializing their subjects or being didactic, saccharine or overwhelming, and to inject some humor.

“You can't tell a story about injustice and cruelty; you have to tell a story about people,” said Joel Derfner, who composed “Signs of Life” about Theresienstadt, considered a “model” World War II concentration camp. That show centers on Lorelei, an artist who agrees to create pretty pictures of the camp for Nazi propaganda but who, with other prisoners, schemes to get her drawings of the real horrors to the outside world.

“The message of our show is not ‘Killing Jews is bad,' ” Derfner said. “It's ‘What do you do when you find out you've been lied to? What is telling the truth worth?' In the last 30 years, this question has been vital to American life, and especially so in the last nine years.”

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