New York // It's 3 o'clock on the Thursday before July Fourth. Inside a fifth-floor rehearsal hall on West 26th Street, two dozen actors are preparing for the holiday.
But they'll be celebrating July 4, 1954, in Baltimore - the setting for the final scene of the Broadway-bound musical, Cry-Baby.
Based on John Waters' 1990 movie, Cry-Baby is a romance set against the rivalry between two factions of Baltimore teenagers - the "drapes," black leather-jacketed toughs who wore their hair slicked back in duck-tails, and the "squares," who sported crewcuts and varsity sweaters.
In half an hour, the actors will take their seats on two tiers of folding chairs with a music stand in front of each. For the second time today, they will perform a staged reading of Cry-Baby for 100 or so friends, Broadway theater owners and a few potential investors.
Cry-Baby is the second Waters movie to be turned into a musical, and everyone involved in today's performances hopes it will follow in the dancing footsteps of the first - the 2003 Tony Award winner, Hairspray.
A lot is riding on these readings. In February, Cry-Baby is scheduled to have an out-of-town tryout at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre, the same theater that was host for Hairspray's pre-Broadway engagement. If that goes well, Cry-Baby's producers would like to bring the $10 million show to Broadway in the spring - just in time for the 2007 Tony nominations.
Right now, however, in the lobby outside the rehearsal hall, guests are mingling and giving their names to a man with a clipboard, who stands sentinel at the door. Gathered nearby is the family of David Javerbaum, head writer of The Daily Show and author of the lyrics for Cry-Baby. Off to one side is William Ivey Long, who designed the costumes for Broadway's Hairspray. And, of course, there's Waters himself, clad in brown plaid and looking taller, thinner and more sepulchral than ever.
Then the rehearsal-hall doors open and the small crowd enters. The members of the show's creative team take seats in the audience. Cry-Baby's librettists, Thomas Meehan and Mark O'Donnell, also wrote the script for the musical of Hairspray. But Javerbaum and composer David Schlesinger (co-founder of the pop group Fountains of Wayne) will be making their Broadway debuts. Sitting with his relatives, Javerbaum pops out of his chair to shoot a quick digital photo.
