If you were cataloging the signs of a stage musical that has had a robust life over a period of not just years but decades, here are two things that might be included on that list:
A) The show engenders such a sense of family among those who’ve performed it that even members of casts from different times and places mix well together, and…
B) You could practically create an entire alternate version of the musical just by doing a separate assemblage of the very good songs that were cut as the show went through different incarnations.
Both these signposts came to the fore in “Reefer Madness: The Musical Reunion Concert,” a one-time performance bringing together actors and creatives who’ve been a part of different productions of the cult show “Reefer Madness” over the past quarter-century-plus. The retrospective concert was produced as a benefit last week at the Whitley Theatre in Hollywood, where the currently revival has just been extended through Sept. 15. (Read Variety‘s enthusiastic review of the current production here.)
Kristen Bell, who played the role of Mary Lane in the 2001 New York stage production and2005 Showtime movie version, and Christian Campbell, who joined her in the film adaptation as the weed-addicted Jimmy, both got substantial time in the reunion concert. They’re among the producers of the Hollywood production now playing, as is Alan Cumming, who did not make it to the concert but introduced the evening via video.
Another marquee name who joined the intermingling of past and present cast members was Rachel Bloom, who has never appeared in “Reefer Madness” but came down to Hollywood to belt out “The Monkey Song,” a long-discarded number that dates back to the show’s earliest days at the Hudson Theater down on Santa Monica Blvd. in the late ’90s.
Although the reunion event’s host, original director Andy Fickman, did not lay out the terms of the concert at the outset, it soon turned out that the plan for the evening was to tell the story of the different versions of “Reefer Madness” almost entirely via songs that got dropped along the way. These even included two numbers, that were a part of the current Hollywood production when it opened on May 30, “to keep it a mean, lean 82.5 minutes,” as the writer of the music for all the songs, Dan Studney, regretfully explained.
There was a bittersweetness to the parade of musical excisions. Condensed down into a one-act musical, the version of “Reefer Madness” now running works like a well-lubed-with-cannabis-oil machine. And Studney may not be just blowing smoke when he says “it’s my favorite production in 25 years.” But the effect of hearing 10 numbers that have gotten the boot was to think, following each one, “That definitely should be put back in the show.”
One song that is still in the show, “Mary Jane/Mary Lane,” served as the reunion concert’s full-cast finale, led by Bell and Campbell. It’s enough of a staple that fans of the show may have a hard time remembering it wasn’t there for the original L.A. and New York productions. As Fickman explained, during the Showtime shoot, “We were in Vancouver and Kevin (Murphy, the book and lyrics writer) and Dan had to write one new song so we could be considered from some awards. They kept writing song after song after song, and Kevin and Dan wrote this song quicker than any song. K-Bell and Christian rehearsed the choreography on this number endlessly. The day we were supposed to film, we had a permit issue and we didn’t have time to finish it. So it was pretty much: ‘You two, just be adorable and we’ll shoot it.’ And this song won us an Emmy award.”
Fickman told how the Showtime version came about, as the cabler’s one-time head, Bob Greenblatt, sat in the audience. “Like so much (others) in the world, we had a show that was opening (in New York) during 9/11… and we closed and we bonded together as a family… We thought that was the last time we would have ‘Reefer Madness’ and it ended pretty bittersweetly. (But) Kevin and Dan had written a screenplay. and we decided to do a reading at what was the Coronet — now Largo — and we asked K-Bell to come join us and we mixed and matched our L.A. and New York casts. And that night there was an angel with us. It was about his third day working as the head of Showtime, and our friend Bob Greenblatt, saw it and said, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing at Showtime. Let’s try it.’ They sent Kevin and Dan and I to Vancouver, where they had just shot the pilot for ‘The L Word,’ which is set in present-day West Hollywood. ‘Reefer Madness’ takes place in Americana in the 1930s. They gave us a tour and said, ‘we just did this pilot. ‘We don’t know if we’re gonna pick up the pilot, but if you can find a way to shoot your 1930s movie on the “L Word” set, you have a green light.’ And I remember looking at Kevin and Dan, and looking at all the fine people at Showtime, and I said, ‘It’s exactly what we had hoped for.’ So Bob Greenblatt, we’re here today still because of you.”
Fickman and Studney both talked about the spiritual origins of the show. The director and two co-writers were all “Rocky Horror Picture Show” fans, but Murphy and Studney also drew inspiration from another irreverent musical. Said Studney, “When we went to school, Kevin and my musical theater teacher growing up was the developing producer of ‘Little Shop of Horrors.’ If you know our show, and you know that show, you might see a bit of crossover there. And just because it’s a fun night, we thought maybe we just steer away from ‘Reefer Madness’ for a second.”
With that, the concert diverged for just one song to a cover: “Suddenly Seymour,” sung as a cross-cast duet between Bell and Anthony Norman, who plays the earnest Jimmy in the current incarnation. (Norman seemed thrilled enough to be singing with Bell that he prefaced it by saying he hoped someone was filming, for his family’s sake.)
Bloom performed “The Monkey Song” as if she were a veteran cast member. “We have a long tradition about having special guest stars who were not in our production be in our production,” Fickman said, handing the baton to Studney to name-check Lea DeLaria, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Lena Hall and others who’d sat in for a number. “This was a scene where Jimmy was trying to kick the monkey off his back. This song we always loved so much because it was a song in which we actually literally had a monkey on stage. Now, after the police got involved, we were no longer to have that monkey on stage, and had to put an actor in a costume. Boo. But we’ve got our original three (human) monkeys joining us tonight.”
Other risky moves were recalled. The musical was based on an infamous 1936 exploitation/scare film that had been created ostensibly to warn youth about the slippery slope to madness and murder that would result from puffing marijuana. “There was one surviving cast member, Thelma White, who played the original Mae in the movie,” Fickman recalled. “She was in her late eighties, maybe early nineties, and we invited her to come see our show at the Hudson. We sent a car for her; we wanted to treat her special. She came in in a wheelchair and had a full oxygen tank. We made sure she was in the perfect spot on the front row.
“About the middle of our show back then, when we did the orgy — and we did do the orgy — Christian Campbell, aka Jimmy, would be on the ground just inches away from where Ms. Thelma White was. What we also had, because I was all about flare, was a fire dancer who had long fingernails on fire, and she would dance and gyrate over Christian. Now, in order to not burn down our theater, the best direction I have ever given was ‘Stay away from the backdrop,’ so they brought it forward. It was that night in the booth that I noticed the fire was very close to the oxygen tank. And somehow our fire dancer, who was very talented, did not make the connection. But Thelma White had never shown so much life in her eyes, with every swipe — and all I thought was, ‘Oh God, we’re gonna blow up Thelma White.’ At the end of the show, we all gathered around to take pictures and we said, ‘Did you love it?’ And she said, ‘Well, yes, except for the part where I almost died.’”
Although the reunion concert did not have anything quite so cross-generational as a nonagenarian cast member, the show did include one enduring signature number, “Little Mary Sunshine,” that joined together three different duos from three different productions, with the Mary Lane character being taunted upon her visit to the drug den by the depraved Ralph. Paul Nygro and Stacy Sibley from the original L.A. cast were joined by Bell and John Kassir, who played the pair in New York and in the film, and Thomas Dekker and Darcy Rose Byrnes, who now inhabit those roles in Hollywood.
Kassir is known for being the voice of the Crypt Keeper, which he brought into his performance of “Lulla-bye,” a song sung partly from the point of view of a fallen character’s dead baby. Karris noted that “occasionally the cast would get a little punch drunk, and between Harry (Murphy) and I with our improvisational background, we’d do a little entertaining and maybe a little bastardization of the show.” With that, he offered a version of that song that devolved from baby bonnets into a “Tales From the Crypt”-style reading, complete with skeletal cackling.
The show did lose some of its darker material over time. “The Stuff,” which is an early highlight of the show now and then, used to come back near the end, as what Fickman called “Stuff Reprise — Gross-Out Version.” “There’s a bloodbath,” the director recalled, “and when we first wrote that reprise, a lot of people had died in the show — not Thelma White, but Sally, Ralph and Mary were dead by then, and so Mae was left with the unfortunate task of cleaning up the mess.” Veteran cast member Lori Alan was then charged — sans any vivid props or substances — with singing a long-gone number that rhymed “Madame Bovary” with “Is that an ovary?”
Other cut highlights from the reunion show included “Dead Old Man,” the first song ever written for “Reefer Madness,” with Christian Campbell semi-poignantly wondering about the long life Jimmy just snuffed out in a hit-and-run; “Listen to Jesus, Jimmy Reprise,” in which Jesus — the current cast’s Bryan Daniel Porter — shows up as a deus ex machina just before Jimmy’s execution, but only to gloat; and “Lonely Pew Reprise,” in which Bell’s Mary prays for Jimmy, even though she has been consigned to hell and has to sneak in her appeals to God while Satan is on the toilet.
The two numbers that Studney said it hurt to take out a week into the current production were both such show-stoppers, it seems like there’d be a strong case for reinstating them. (They could go back in and the show would still run under a “lean, mean” 90 minutes.) In full belter mode, J. Eiaine Marcos knocked a razzle-dazzle number called “Kindergarten Teacher” out of the park, as Sally, a hopeless dope moll who really only ever aspired to be “the best teacher of kindergarten in the goddam universe.” And Norman beautifully delivered an earnest “Cautionary Tale,” the kind of dead-serious song that a satirical musical can occasionally afford to sneak in for actual pathos… even if it’s understandable that producers would be worried about bringing an audience down with lines like “Heaven’s empty, God has gone away” so close to the end of a largely camp-fueled crowd-pleaser.
If the end result of all these first-rate outtakes was to convince attendees that an ideal version of “Reefer Madness: The Musical” would be nearly three hours long — which is to say, not ideal by most standards of musical satire at all — that speaks well for the ongoing evolution that has resulted in the streamlined version L.A. theatergoers are seeing today, with surely more revisions due in years to come.
The director sees an ongoing life for the show he couldn’t have imagined in the wake of the post-9/11 off-Broadway shutdown, or probably a lot of years since: “All of you being here means the world to us,” Fickman said. “They say nobody comes to L.A. to do theater. All these people would tell you otherwise. … We need help staying alive, and that’s where you come in. It’s been 25 years for this family to be here. We now have ‘Reefer’ babies, and those babies, in 25 years, we want them doing this.” Stonier things have happened.
“Reefer Madness” is performed at the Whitley (redubbed the Reefer Den for the occasion), at 6555 Hollywood Boulevard, through Sept. 15. Tickets are available at ReeferMadness.com.
