May 15, 2013
80's aerobics return in SPANDEX
Spandex, the elastic material most notably worn in 1980s workout videos, has resurfaced off-Broadway in all its stretchy glory. Spandex: A New Musical for All Sizes, written by Daniel F. Levin and Annie Grunow with music by Julian Blackmore, celebrates bodies of all shapes and sizes while bringing the energy of 80s aerobics to life. Performances run through May 26 at the 777 Theater. Culturadar blogger Shoshana Greenberg talked to Levin about writing Spandex, memories of the 80s, and the challenges and rewards of self-producing.
Culturadar: Where did the idea for Spandex come from?
Daniel F. Levin: The idea came from [co-bookwriter] Annie Grunow, who discovered a YouTube clip of the 1987 Crystal Light National Aerobics Championship, hosted by Alan Thicke. Full of big hair, white teeth and waxed chests, it embodies the earnestness of the 80s and seemed like a ready-made-musical.
CR: What first hooked you on the idea?
DL: In truth, the genre that the Crystal Light video suggested--jukeboxy, campy, and winking--is the genre I most try to avoid. I'm a heart-on-my-sleeve Les Miz/Evita guy who likes high drama, not the making-fun-of-itself musical. But I was coming out of a Warsaw Ghetto-based show and an alternative Christmas show. It just seemed like it was time for a little comedy.
CR: Were Aerobics present in your life growing up?
DL: Aerobics were not present, but the 80s definitely were. And not just generic 80s like "totally rad" or jams, but my own very specific 80s: Polly-O String Cheese, a TV rule of one-hour-per week not including the news and Jeopardy, Castle Grayskull, Voltron, our blue Volvo station wagon. It's the one time period I barely need to research, as my memory seems to have just grabbed elements of my life then and, to an unhealthy degree, not let go. Aerobics were important to Annie, however, who remembers doing workout videos with her Mom or going to a local class with her.
CR: When did you and composer Julian Blackmore begin to collaborate?
DL: Julian was the Music Director for a staged reading I had in June 2012 when Spandex was still a jukebox musical with 80s songs. Julian, like me, is a child of the 80s, though from across the pond. I loved working with him and his British accent often made things he said sound good even when they were totally wrong.
The whole reason I was using found music was that I thought it would make the show marketable—that and I was feeling lazy. After the reading and shopping the show around, it was impressed upon me that having original music would not only be more artistically interesting but ultimately more marketable since it wouldn't tie the show up with 20 song license agreements. I got together with Julian and said, why don't we write original songs? Thus began Blackmore and Levin.
CR: You're also producing this show. Why did you decide to take on both roles?
DL: It can be very frustrating to wait around for something to happen. I felt I had a good product and didn't want to wait years to show it to the world. The turning point for me was a meeting at Crunch Gym Corporate shortly after the June 2012 reading. Two Crunch PR folks had been at the reading and, identifying with the "No Judgments" philosophy, had communicated their enjoyment to management. I showed up to meet with Marketing, [and] they asked what we could do together. I said, well, we could put up the show. To my vast astonishment, they said "sure." I left Corporate Headquarters with that clichéd air-under-my-feet feeling. Writing musicals is so incredibly lonely because no one can see the product you're envisioning. When a corporation like Crunch was willing to throw its weight behind this inchoate blob of a show, I felt it wasn't just me anymore. With Crunch ready to go as an above-the-title sponsor, I didn't want to sit around twiddling my thumbs until a producer came along.
CR: What has been the most rewarding part of the producing process?
DL: The most rewarding part has been to allow ownership to pass from me to a broader team of people who, like the circle wheel of pushups, are an interconnected web. A few weeks ago I took a picture I liked and threw it up on Facebook. A few hours later I received a disapproving email from our social media intern. He said if I had these urges I was welcome to use Twitter, but that he had a system and a lineup of Facebook posts which my impromptu posts were disrupting. At first I bristled. Then I thought this was fantastic.CR: What has been most rewarding about the creative process?
DL: I love the act one closer, "What Ever Happened to Caring?" We call it our "One Day More" moment, although instead of singing about whether or not to fight and likely die on the barricades, it's about aerobics and the smaller problems of folks in the 80s: a husband getting dragged into Cold War machinations, his wife desperate to have a partner who's present in her life, another woman fighting a diet-pill addiction and the pain of being dumped. Musically, Julian was able to infuse the number with the same kind of passion of Les Miz, only we're in this much more intimate and sometimes ridiculous world of competitive aerobics.
CR: What do you hope audiences take away from Spandex?
DL: I just want them to take away a feeling of being transported for a couple hours into a world of real characters with real dreams and some self-destructive tendencies—to feel alive because they lived in those characters' worlds and even sang along with them. Of course, I hope they have fun and crack up at parts, but that's not enough for me. Like any good aerobics class, leaving the event should not be the end but the beginning.
Short-lived off-Broadway, but a hilarious project nonetheless.
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