After Prop. 8
passed, Hairspray composer Marc Shaiman made
headlines when he took a Sacramento theater director to task
for staging a production of his musical -- and
donating money to Prop. 8. The director ultimately
resigned, but Shaiman, still fired up, sunk his energy
into a new project -- Prop. 8: The Musical.
Shaiman talked to Advocate.com about FunnyOrDie.com's latest
Web sensation.
Like many gay
people, composer Marc Shaiman wrote a check to No on 8,
watched the polls enthusiastically and, perhaps blinded by
the promise of a Barack Obama presidency, thought
that on November 4, California voters would extend
this idea of change to marriage rights.
And like many gay
people, on November 5, when it became clear that Prop.
8 had passed and same-sex marriage had been banned
throughout the state, Shaiman sprung into
action.
First up was his
now well-chronicled call to a theater director in
Sacramento who Shaiman found out had donated money to Yes on
8. Coincidentally, California Musical Theatre’s
artistic director, Scott Eckern, had just produced one
of the first licensed regional theatre productions of
Shaiman’s musical Hairspray.
So the composer
called him up to ask why, then issued a public
decree that the theater would no longer be able to produce
any of his works. Other composers followed suit, the
public caught wind of the conversation, and days
later, Eckern resigned.
That exchange,
plus an idea Shaiman had thought up in passing during the
Prop. 8 campaign, sparked this week’s must see video
clip -- the FunnyOrDie.com-hosted
Prop. 8 -- The Musical.
“At the
risk of sounding insensitive to the people who did the
[anti-Prop. 8] commercials, they were good, but they
weren’t good enough -- I do remember sitting
there, watching the commercials and thinking to
myself, God, I wish someone would call me and ask me to
do something. But, I’m the fool who
didn’t figure out who I needed to
call.”
The mini-musical,
featuring an all-star cast of your typically outspoken
gay rights advocates (Margaret Cho, Kathy Najimy, Neil
Patrick Harris) mixed with some surprises (John C.
Reilly, Jack Black), premiered Tuesday, and Shaiman
talked to Advocate.com about what prompted this
engaging, albeit (his words) “six weeks late”
call to action.
Advocate.com:Howdid Prop. 8 -- The Musical come to be?
Marc Shaiman: Two years ago, I guess, Adam
[McKay, from FunnyOrDie.com] and I did this Oscar number
with Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly. Me
and Adam and Judd Apatow had written that together. So
that’s how I knew him. Anyway, he e-mailed,
amid all the e-mailing I’d been doing [re: the
Sacramento theater director] and said, "Why
don’t you do a song about it for FunnyOrDie?" I
thought, Oh, God. Why didn’t I just write a song
about it in the first place? That’s what I
do. So he planted that seed. Literally, I wrote it
on a Tuesday. We started thinking about how to put it
on Wednesday, cast it, brought in Adam Shankman. We got on
the phone and called friends, called agents and
managers -- we spread around my demo, which was just
me singing it. People said yes and wanted to be a part
of it because of what it was about, but because of the
nature of doing this so fast, if we had said
we’re filming it Monday night instead of Monday
afternoon (when we shot it), we’d have had a whole
different cast. It was right before Thanksgiving.
So once you had everyone in place, how long did the
actual shoot take?
Adam staged and filmed that thing basically in
four hours. As silly as it is -- even when
something’s silly, what he pulled off was
unbelievable. We all had the best time -- we felt like
we were 15 years old again.
It’s got that musical theater summer camp feel to it.
And that’s what I wanted when I wrote it.
I knew the second I started writing it, I was writing
just that -- music summer theater camp style of
cramming all this stuff into three minutes and writing in a
simplistic, unvarnished style. Kind of almost like
this Gilbert and Sullivan light opera. We kept
thinking, Where are we gonna film this? Luckily,
once Adam came aboard, he called production designers and
costume designers from films, and then I remembered
that this magic store in Santa Monica has a theater.
If you open this door at the back of this magic store,
you’re suddenly in this theater -- it’s this
bizarre thing.
Click here to follow The Advocate on Twitter.
Page 1 of 2