Jules Feiffer provides the book for a musical in the New Works Festival.
Among the six shows at TheatreWorks’ 2015 New Works Festival is a musical created by friends who have known each other for more than 40 years and an octogenarian legend who is finally trying his hand at musical theater.
The show is “The Man in the Ceiling,” with music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa, whose “A Little Princess” debuted at TheatreWorks in 2004 and whose Tony Award-nominated work has been represented on Broadway with “The Addams Family” and “The Wild Party,” among others. The show’s book is by Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, novelist, screenwriter and playwright.
First graphic novel
At 86, Feiffer has done just about everything. Only last year he published his first graphic novel, the acclaimed “Kill My Mother,” and now he’s adapting “Ceiling,” his 1993 young-adult novel, for the stage.
When Lippa first approached Feiffer in 2000 about turning the book into a musical, Feiffer went to see “The Wild Party,” which he loved. But his answer to Lippa was “no.” “Someone in my family writes music, and I thought it would be wonderful to help launch that career, but it soon became clear he didn’t have the interest or the chops for that,” Feiffer says from his Long Island home. “I got over that romantic notion of making it a family enterprise.”
Lippa instantly fell for Feiffer’s book, which tells the story of Jimmy Jibbet, a boy who feels like a failure in life and, amid dreams of growing closer to his emotionally distant father, longs to become a cartoonist.
“I love the story of a boy who has a passion for something,” says Lippa, 50. “He has to dig deep and wrestle with the notion that anything worth doing is hard and the hardest things are the most rewarding. Jimmy learning to do the thing he wants most to do in the world and then learning he can do it is powerful to me.”
Once Feiffer was on board as librettist, they began developing “The Man in the Ceiling” for Disney. “With Disney involved, things looked promising,” Feiffer says. “But then it got Disney-fied with notes and more notes and more notes until it turned into nothing. So I forgot about the show until about three or four years ago.”
That’s when Lippa called with the news that they had a new producer and director in Jeffrey Seller, the producer powerhouse behind such hits as “Rent,” “Avenue Q” and the current toast of Broadway, “Hamilton.”
It turns out that Lippa and Seller grew up in the same suburbs of Detroit, went to the same high school (Seller was a year ahead) and attended the University of Michigan, where they collaborated on musicals. Though he has been concentrating on producing, Seller has been getting back into directing. He directed Rajiv Joseph’s musical “Fly” for Dallas Theatre Center in 2013, and after he read a draft of “The Man in the Ceiling,” he was eager to work with Feiffer and his old friend Lippa.
“My conception of musical theater and my passion for musical theater is completely intertwined with the musical theater I started making with Andrew in college,” Seller says.
Cast albums
“Those early days, when we were making shows and listening to the cast albums coming out of New York — ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ ‘Follies in Concert,’ ‘Chess’ — made it clear to me that was the life I wanted — to be making musicals. I’m fortunate to say that’s the life I’m living.”
Like Lippa, Seller fell in love with Feiffer’s book, and admired the work they had already done on the musical. “I told them both it was a wonderful piece that needed organization,” Seller says. “It’s a tender, fragile, small piece. Not an epic, and I don’t know what its prospects are. I don’t know if Broadway is hospitable to a show like this right now. Jules doesn’t think Broadway ever was. I told Andrew and Jules we should work on it because we love it. And I love these characters — what they have to say and what they have to sing.”
Seller calls Feiffer a “legend,” and Lippa says he’s in awe of Feiffer.
“Here’s an octogenarian being more fertile than he was in some other parts of his life,” Lippa says. “It’s a little like Verdi — creating some of his greatest stuff later in life.”
“Here Jeffrey and I are much younger men but experienced at making musicals, and he treats us like friends and peers. I love that in theater, age doesn’t mean anything. It’s about your passion for the thing you’re making and what you have to contribute to it. I have to stop reminding myself that I’m working with a legend of American arts and letters so I can function and not be terrified all the time.”
For his part, Feiffer says his love of musicals — both the Broadway and Hollywood variety that he loved as a kid and adolescent in the Bronx — has been helpful in the musical adaptation process. So has a lifetime of work.
“I know how to say what I want to say and say it in an abbreviated form,” Feiffer says. “Having done a comic strip for 40 years, which gets a lot into six panels, I learned how to abbreviate. With a musical book, you say a lot in no time at all in no space at all. Then you keep cutting. You also have to get rid of stuff you cherish in order to make it work.”
His collaborators
Ultimately, though, for Feiffer it’s all about his collaborators.
“Work with people you admire,” he says. “Work with people who are as consumed with it as you are and who want to get the work right.”
Feiffer will be in Palo Alto for the festival, and dreams that Lippa and Seller will say, “Your work is done, Jules. Sit back and enjoy.” Feiffer laughs and concedes, “I know that won’t be the case. But Andrew is remarkable and Jeffrey is so smart. Collaborating with people like this leaves you with a sense of buoyancy.”