“From Angels in America to Hamilton, so many Broadway shows have made important statements to their audiences, causing them to examine the reality of their lives. Chris Jones has written a wonderful history of that era that is extremely well-researched. His writing is lively and crisp, and his stories are well-told and entertaining. Anyone who loves theatre or cultural history or social commentary will love this book. This book deserves broad readership beyond those groups by anyone interested in our society today.” - Manhattan Book Review

“There is much to be praised, and so often the details are beautifully stated in the author’s clean, accessible voice ... Jones’ prowess as a critic is on great display here; shows you’ve never seen come startlingly alive on the page, their essence boiled down, their heart and soul expertly explained. What shines through most is Jones as a giddy chronicler of ideas and a lover of the theater, eager to draw the line from his own knowledge of the art form to what is happening offstage.” - Third Coast Review

“In his new book, “Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from ‘Angels in America’ to ‘Hamilton,’” Chris Jones … has chronicled the era in a singularly creative way, bringing to bear his prodigious gift for tapping into the nexus of artistic innovation, the business of show business, new forms of audience engagement, and (as the book’s title so clearly proclaims), the political fevers that can emerge during a given period of history … Whether you booed or applauded for all or some of the many plays and musicals discussed in “Rise Up!” there is no denying that Jones has vividly caught the unsettled spirit of the times in which they came to the stage. And given the wildly melodramatic nature of our current moment on this planet he leaves you wondering just where the theater might be headed over the course of the next 25 years.” - Hedy Weiss, WTTW

“Chris Jones [writes] cogently and intelligently in a fashion that is easy to read and understand. In fact, this is a real page turner.” ―British Theatre Guide

“A vivid compelling read that will form an important part of any Broadway-lover's bookshelf” ―Matt Wolf, theatre critic

“Some critics get it right, some critics get it wrong, but Chris Jones is one of the only critics who consistently reviews all shows trying to be helpful to its creators so they can put right what is wrong.
Chris brings his formidable analytical skills to examining the theatrical tissue and political discourse that has led to the spectacular rebirth of the American play and musical on Broadway. A hugely informative resume of the rise up over the last 25 years of the American theatre from “Angels in America” to “Hamilton”. It puts you into the room as it happened.” ―Cameron Mackintosh, theatrical producer

Rise Up!

Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

1993: AN ANGEL LANDS

As the audience at the Walter Kerr theater on West 48th Street strained its necks upwards, there was a creaking and a groaning, a raining down of plaster dust, a great swell of triumphal music. Lights turned harsh and cold, then warm and golden, then green, then purple. There was a sound designed to recall the sound of a meteor plummeting to earth. And a fabulous angel, a creation with great, opalescent, gray-slate wings, crashed through the ceiling of the bedroom of a gay man.

A man betrayed by his lover, his politicians and, above all else, his body. A man dying of AIDS. Like so many Americans living outside the doors of the theater.

"Greetings, prophet," said the arriviste Angel, four divine emanations manifest as one, the Continental Principality of America, a representative of religiosity of indeterminate denomination but invasive fervor.

"The great work begins," she said that warm spring of 1993, to all who would listen. "The Messenger has arrived."

She was heard. The American theatre would never be the same. "Not since Tennessee Williams," John Lahr would write in The New Yorker, "has a playwright announced his vision with such authority on the Broadway stage."

Subtitled a "gay fantasia on national themes," this Angels in America was a blend of historicism and fiction, AIDS politics and personal redemption, the fantastic and the fabulous. Its complex, multilayered plot involved the agonizing death of the real-life figure Roy M. Cohn (a notoriously closeted, scored-earth figure who was an advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and a man who understood that being gay meant having no political clout); the struggles of a young, sardonic, fictional man with AIDS, Prior, and his chatty but self-absorbed lover, Louis; and the travails in New York of a wandering family of Mormons — Joe, Harper and Hannah — each trying to reconcile the absolutes of faith with the messiness of their actual desires and lives.

The portentous angelic declaration notwithstanding, the owner of the bedroom, Prior, was not easily impressed with the pageant pastiche that had drenched him in sweat.

"God almighty," he said, "very Steven Spielberg," as audiences watched what later would be recognized as one of the most spectacular and revolutionary moments in the history of the American theatre, the centerpiece of a two-part magnum-opus play centered around the lives and collective consciousness of gay Americans, coming at the very moment that a plague was destroying the bodies of so many of them.

But in these final moments of "Millennium Approaches," the firstpart of this Angels in America penned by Anthony Robert Kushner, formerly of Lake Charles, Louisiana, now of New York City, Prior had summoned this angel to minister to his fevered dreams.

Fittingly, the angel that would transform Broadway first had come to Kushner in a dream.

The dream, Tony Kushner would recall years later, had occurred in 1985, after the death of the first person that Kushner knew personally who had later died from AIDS. In the dream, Kushner had seen his dying friend (a dancer), and then a collapsed ceiling and an angel. The young writer had gone away in distress and written a poem, calling it, in the prophetically plural, "Angels in America." So there had been pain, then a poem, then a play.

The Kushner agony that seeded the play hardly was unique to anyone in the creative professions, which were being devastated by AIDS at that very moment; projects were being put on indeterminate hold, rehearsals were dissolving into tears and Broadway show tunes were being heard at funeral after funeral. The agony, though, wrought change.

Unlike their European counterparts, many American playwrights of the mid-twentieth century had eschewed politics in favor of explorations of the schisms in the American family. If your intent was to get your play to Broadway, politics was not the way to go. Even as British writers like David Hare, Howard Brenton and others were writing rapid exposés of the Margaret Thatcher years, American writers in the 1980s generally were dealing with family strife, intergenerational angst or upper-middle class ennui. These were the topics that had dominated post-war American drama.

Autobiography told through a nostalgic gauze reaped palpable rewards. Two blocks south of the Walter Kerr, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs had opened in March 1983 and ran for 1,299 performances, not closing until May 1986. Lanford Wilson had thrived on Broadway with two early 1980s plays, Fifth of July and Tally's Folly, each part of a trilogy of dramas revolving around a family in Wilson's native Lebanon, Missouri.

As Simon's name dominated Broadway marquees, Kushner was passing time as a graduate student in the directing program at New York University. He'd met Oskar Eustis, who later would become artistic director of the New York Public Theater, but then still was the artistic director of the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco. In the spring of 1985, Eustis had happened to find himself in the audience at Theatre 22, a 28-seat theater on 22nd Street, for an earlier Kushner piece, A Bright Room Called Day, a rather dry play about the rise of fascism. Thrilled by what he'd seen and convinced that he'd witnessed the birth of a major new voice, Eustis called up Kushner and commissioned him to write a new play, stipulating in his commission that it be no longer than two hours.

In their grant application to the National Endowment of the Arts, Kushner and Eustis described a play with music featuring five gay men and an angel. Since there were three women in the resident acting company at the Eureka, that meant the play had to have female characters. As he worked on the grant application — $10,000 for the writer, $40,000 for the production — Kushner thought back to his poem, the one titled "Angels in America," and decided that he wanted to write a play about God, Roy Cohn and Mormons, there being, he would later say, only one real American angel, the one incorrectly identified by Joseph Smith as the Angel Moroni.

So if you had that title as your idea, Kushner's thinking went, you were deigned to pay a visit to Utah. Or, at least, to wonder what might happen if Utah came to New York.

As Kushner sat down to write, the theatre was being devastated by AIDS.

* * *

Even as Kushner was working on Angels in America, the closeted film star and heart-throb Rock Hudson was dying of the disease. He figures prominently in And the Band Played On, the spectacular and definitive work of narrative journalism by Randy Shilts that told the history of the AIDS primarily through a political and cultural lens. For Shilts, Hudson's death had been the moment when AIDS became an acronym familiar to everyone, a demarcation of America before the plague, and America thereafter. This was hardly the beginning of the crisis: Shilts reported that, even before the world learned of Hudson's diagnosis, some 12,000 American were already dead or dying of AIDS.

Shilts had chosen his title carefully. Despite its cool, level-headed tone and well-sourced reportage, And the Band Played On attacked any number of constituencies for what Shilts found to be either willful inaction or sheer malevolence, especially during the early years of the crisis in the early 1980s. Shilts had plenty of blame to spread around: he went after politicians both local and national and had harsh words for the commercial interests who failed to act quickly to close the gay bathhouses that were helping the disease to spread. He generally praised the doctors and early research workers who tried to understand why all of these young men were dying, as he did many early gay activists, but he was sharply critical of the U.S. health establishment, not to mention the ego-driven battles over territory and jurisdiction that slowed progress at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute. "The bitter truth was that AIDS did not just happen to America," Shilts wrote. "It was allowed to happen by an array of institutions, all of which failed to perform their appropriate tasks to safeguard the public health. This failure of the system leaves a legacy of unnecessary suffering that will haunt the Western world for decades to come."

One of Shilts' heroes was Larry Kramer, a Cassandra who just happened to be a playwright.

Kramer was not without controversy in the gay community. In a 1978 book called Faggots, he had argued that his fellow gay Americans had become so obsessed with sexual expression that they either lacked time or failed to understand the need to fight in the political arena (the book famously was removed from the shelves of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, then Manhattan's only gay bookstore). This was an argument with which Kushner's Cohn character would not have disagreed and it set Kramer at odds with many in his community.

Once Kramer understood the consequences of the sudden increase in deaths by younger gay men from a rare form of cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma, Kramer raised his fists. He attacked the New York Times for what he saw as its shameful lack of press coverage, even as New Yorkers died. He excoriated public health officials for their fiefdoms and time wasting. He accused then-Mayor Ed Koch of devastating inattention to young human life. He was part of one of the first major network news story about AIDS, on the CBS Nightly News in 1982. By then, Kramer was being widely viewed as an alarmist; as writ large in a Cri de Coeur called "1,112 and Counting." Penned in 1983 for the New York Native. Kramer's article was a game changer when it came to awareness of AIDS within the gay community in New York, a group that included many who worked on Broadway.

And some who would not work there again.

The first sentence of "1,112 and Counting" read: "If this article doesn't scare the shit out of you, we're in real trouble." Kramer went on from there: " If this article doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get."

By the summer of 1983, Kramer had channeled his rage into the beginnings of an autobiographical play. It would be titled The Normal Heart, which Kramer took from W. H. Auden's "September, 1939," a poem that ends with the line "We must love one another or die." The Normal Heart was to be a then-definitive dramatic exploration of the AIDS crisis and a thinly veiled allegory of Kramer's own travails between 1981 and 1984 at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York (he wrote himself into the play, in the guise of a character named Ned Weeks). Under-appreciated at the time, The Normal Heart was an act of enormous political courage, a screed that demanded America wake up, while more of its young men still were alive. And unlike most every other play of that decade, The Normal Heart had been produced (at the New York Public Theater) within a year of the events depicted in the play taking place in reality. So this was a rare thing in the American theatre of that time: a reactive piece of docudrama, penned in the kitchen and produced while the burners still were hot.

And it was ecstatically reviewed. Such was the level of publicity surrounding the work that many city officials, including New York City Mayor Ed Koch, were forced to respond publically to charges made in what was, in essence, an allegorical play.

Remarkably, Kramer had inserted the non-profit theater right into the center of the public discourse. He had written one of the only plays of the latter half of the twentieth century that made news. By doing so, he leapt out of the theatre ghetto and demonstrated that theatre could and should be first, that it should go where Hollywood and the televisions networks feared to go. And if there was one topic they all were scared of, that topic was AIDS.

The Normal Heart was not the only play about AIDS to predate Angels in America. William Hoffman's As Is, a moving and intensely grief-stricken play about a group of New York friends living (and dying) with the disease, opened a month before The Normal Heart, even if Kramer had begun his work first. And Kramer surely did not abandon the American playwright's love of the surrogate family, given that the men fighting therein were, in fact, a surrogate family in Kramer's telling, each being the only supporters many of them could trust.

But this remarkable play took a crucial step forward by focusing on politics over grief, the public square over the bedroom: Kramer saw his playwriting as an explicit extension of his activism and he thought that a well-publicized play at a high-profile theater might shame some recalcitrant city officials into action that could save lives. And, to a surprisingly large degree, he was right.

Moreover, The Normal Heart articulated Kramer's contention that AIDS had been an avoidable plague, a horrific manifestation of widespread homophobia. As Shilts noted, the play argued that the gay-rights movement always should not just have been about sexual revolution (as it was so widely seen at the time) but about a revolution in human rights. The play's most sympathetic character, Dr. Emma Brookner, based on a pioneering and wheelchair-bound New York doctor called Linda Laubenstein, was speaking for Kramer when she said that "health is a political issue."

Hoffman's As Is opened on Broadway even before Kramer's play had made it to the Public Theatre; it was an important and poignant play about human grief, but a work that built sympathy rather than expressing fury. As Is was nominated for a Tony Award, no small achievement for the era, although it ultimately, and unsurprisingly, lost to Simon's Biloxi Blues. For all its accommodations, the Broadway establishment still kept its eye on what was good for long-term business.

The Normal Heart did not make it to Broadway until 2011, when Joe Mantello (who, a decade after Kramer first sat down to write, had played Louis in Angels in America) helmed a deeply moving revival: it felt like a victory lap for, maybe even a vindication of, the author. Not that Kramer saw it that way, being of the conviction there was still too much unfinished business for any kind of celebration.

Indeed, on one warm night that spring, a 75-year-old Kramer could be seen outside the Golden Theatre, handing out old-school flyers in semi-anonymity as his audience filed out of the theater, brushing off compliments and still reminding anyone who would listen that America had slept while AIDS burned through a nation, and that people were still dying.

The flyers were headed "A Letter from Larry Kramer." In the first paragraph they said, "Please know that everything in The Normal Heart happened." Most people who got one did not who had handed it to them. But a few people knew the messenger: A critic exiting from the show found himself staring at Kramer, and watching the brows that surrounded him furrow in wonderment and disbelief.

Kramer just went about his business. His unchanged business, there still being work left to do.

As Kramer's play was opening at the New York Public Theatre, the man who would later run that institution, and help develop Hamilton, was discovering Kushner. As Kramer's play ran throughout 1985, and then into 1986, Kushner was at work on Angels in America, an act that involved the reconciliation of death and belief.

It did not come to him easily nor quickly.

After Eustis moved to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, plans for the show moved with him there: developmental work on "Millennium Approaches", the first part of Angels, finally intensified during 1989. By the spring of 1990, there was a workshop.

If Kramer had put himself in The Normal Heart as Ned Weeks, so Kushner put himself in Angels in America (mostly) as Louis, an over-intellectualizing New Yorker unable to stop kvetching and analyzing and self-justifying and talking, invariably out of sync with the actual needs of the situation.

Interestingly, both Kushner and Kramer painted critical portraits of themselves: Ned Weeks' inability to compromise generally puts people's backs up in The Normal Heart, while Louis fails the man he loves, Prior, by abandoning him in his hour of greatest need. It is an act for which the play does not forgive him. Perhaps there also is something of Kushner in Belize, the African-American nurse who rivals Lewis in his intellectual curiosity but who also has the moral clarity that the dribbling and driveling Prior lacks. Belize knows what's up, and when to shut up.