NEW YORK / / Standing in front of 150 theater folk, John Waters holds up a newspaper. A huge picture shows lightning striking the Empire State Building.
"Lightning can strike twice. Did you see yesterday in the Daily News -- the Empire State Building? All the time it happens. It can happen again," he says with the deadpan delight of a man gifted at finding beauty in potential disaster.
The lightning Waters refers to, however, is metaphorical, not meteorological. Its first strike of good fortune was turning the filmmaker's 1988 movie, Hairspray, into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. That show has now been transformed into a movie that could become one of this summer's big hits. The second strike Waters hopes for is the success of the musical theater adaptation of his 1990 movie, Cry-Baby.
The crowd in the rehearsal hall at 890 Broadway has gathered for the latest staged reading of Cry-Baby, which is aiming for a spring 2008 Broadway opening. A handful of those assembled have navigated these waters before.
Thomas Meehan and Mark O'Donnell, who won a Tony Award for their script for the musical Hairspray, are repeating their playwriting duties on Cry-Baby. The show's producing team also includes several Hairspray alums, chief among them, Adam Epstein, who instigated the Cry-Baby musical and is serving as a Broadway lead producer for the first time.
From the song titles (including "I'm Infected," and "Screw Loose") to such inspired touches as a new character who's a combination priest and cop (Father / Officer O'Brien), the mastery of Waters' vocabulary and iconography proves undeniable. Waters-speak has clearly become a second tongue for Meehan and O'Donnell.
"Because they're veterans of John Waters, they have in many ways invaded and annexed part of his subconscious," Epstein claims.
"We're very lucky because we can go to that same place or a similar place and work there happily," says O'Donnell. "It's the old joke -- a neurotic builds castles in the sky, but a psychotic lives there. I'm not saying we're psychotic, but we're all living in the same castle in the sky."
Authenticity's an aim
The culmination of a month's rehearsal, the New York reading is produced by California's La Jolla Playhouse, where Cry-Baby will play a pre-Broadway run in November. Instead of being stranded at music stands, the cast -- directed by Mark Brokaw -- has memorized the script, the rockabilly songs and choreographer Rob Ashford's dances.
