An Interview With
Tony Asaro & Dan Collins

Our Country

 

What was the inspiration for writing Our Country? What made you choose country/western music as opposed to a genre that we might associate more readily with gay artists?

Tony: Well, initially, Our Country started as a lyric writing exercise.  In 2000, I had just finished a small production of my first musical, Family at a small theatre company in Brooklyn.  I didn’t live in New York at the time.  I flew out to NYC for four months to rewrite during the rehearsal process and for the production.  Watching the show, I could see that it had promise, but I recognized right away that my lyrics were atrocious.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know why they were atrocious.  A friend of mine had recommended a book called The Craft of Lyric Writing by Sheila Davis.  I read the book, and I learned a ton.  I was very eager to put the formal lessons I gleaned from the book into practice.

Around that same time, back in San Francisco, my good friend Liana had formed an alternative country western band with her boyfriend.  In the early 2000s, alternative country music was all the rage with the young hipster crowd in San Francisco.  Liana invited me to one of their gigs.  I had never really thought much about country music before, but it sounded like a fun excuse to drink with friends.  Well, their duo was pretty terrible, but some of the songs were funny.  Also, I noticed something that I had never noticed before: country songs are story songs.  They tell a narrative like musical theatre songs.

I was inspired.  Wanting to show off my new lyric knowledge, and finding this new and fun genre of music to explore, I started writing my first country western song.  Having read an article on the secret lives of gay truck drivers in Out Magazine or The Advocate or something like that, I set about writing “The Ballad of the Gay Trucker”.  It was a six-minute ditty musically in the style of Johnny Cash, and featuring a touching story about rejection, perseverance, blackmail and Mexican prostitutes.  I had so much fun with it, that I wrote a few more: “Your Love Is In My Eye”, “Clean as a Whistle”, “Lady, I’m Movin’ On”.  I was surprised to find that I really found a voice writing gay country songs.  Then I started thinking that this could be a fun idea for a show.

I tabled the idea when I started my application to NYU, and during grad school.  After having written my NYU thesis—a depressing chamber opera about love, art, and cancer—I decided that I wanted to work on a fun project.  I dusted this gay country western idea off, and started working on the beginnings of a story and a protagonist.  I thought, what would happen if a country crossover star got caught in a George Michael-esque scandal?  George Michael was able to bounce back from his sex scandal because his following was comprised largely of liberal-minded and gay-friendly followers.  But, what if a country star was caught in a similar scandal?”  The conservative audience of country music turned its back on the Dixie Chicks for a single negative comment about George Bush.  What would their reaction be if one of their own were discovered to be a sexual deviant?  More importantly, what would be the journey of the outed celebrity?  The country music scene is hostile to homosexuals; it was this hostility that drew me to the genre—it was rife with dramatic possibility!  With “Protect Marriage” coalitions making their presence felt all over the country, I began seeing the landscape of country music as a metaphor/microcosm of the United States as a whole.  That’s how Tommy Dautry was born.  Immediately I saw the potential for a thought-provoking comedy that is timely and poignant.  Right away though, I knew that I couldn’t handle writing the score and the book.  That’s when I put in a phone call to Dan Collins.  I knew that this project would be right up his alley.  Thankfully he agreed!

The structure of Our Country is fairly unusual in that you use a single actor working with the members of the band, who play all other roles. Why did you decide to shape the show in this fashion? Was it strictly a matter of economy, or were there artistic considerations?

Dan: Our choice to have only one performer while the band played all other roles grew from our desire to have the evening play out like a concert.  It is Tommy’s comeback concert in which he finally gets to tell his side of a story that has only been told through a massive media lens.  And while Tommy’s new songs have all come out of his experiences, he did not create a musical—that’s just not the kind of writer he is.   So when he sets out to communicate his story through his songs, he uses the familiar format of a concert but enlists a little extra help from his band; allowing him to fill in the blanks while also setting this evening (and himself) apart from the concerts of his past.  Economy was just wonderful icing on the proverbial cake.

Who would you say are the main inspirations for your work? Which playwrights/composers/lyricists do you most admire? What recent musicals have excited you most?

Tony: For this show, my main inspirations were country and folk artists.  The Indigo Girls are always an inspiration to me.  There are little homages to Amy and Emily all over the Our Country score.  But I also did a lot of research on pop-country.  I found inspiration in Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, Tracy Byrd, Toby Keith, Rascal Flats, The Dixie Chicks, and others. 

In general, I find inspiration in the storytellers of musical theatre: Sondheim, La Chiusa, Loesser, Flaherty and Ahrens, Porter…  I love a score that functions dramatically.

Dan: I can’t deny the fact that Les Miserables and Miss Saigon really ushered me into my musical theatre fascination; with a lot of help from the animated Disney musicals of "The Little Mermaid Era".  But of course Sondheim is also always an inspiration to anyone writing (or watching) musical theater, and he constantly works with inspiring bookwriters such as Hugh Wheeler, James Lapine and George Furth (to name just a few).

Tony:  Ha!  Les Miz was the show that made me want to do musicals!  I remember  being 17 and crying during Fantine’s death, thinking, “I want to do THAT!”

It used to be the case that composers and lyricists would write songs for musicals with the idea of creating a "hit" song that could be pulled out of context from the show. Did you ever have that idea in your heads as you wrote Our Country? Can Tommy's songs become hits on their own?

Tony: At a collaboration meeting one night at a restaurant in Inwood, Dan had an idea—Tommy needed to write a love song for Duane that would be the song that makes him famous.  Once Duane is ejected from the band and from Tommy’s life, the song would then be painfully ironic to the audience as Tommy uses the song heartlessly to rise to stardom.  On the subway train home from that meeting, I started sketching the lyric for “Honestly”.  I was so inspired that I had a full stanza and melody written by the time I reached my house.  The song needed to be a hit in the world of the show, which is ostensibly our world, so I knew that the song needed to be radio-worthy in the pop-country genre. Lyrically, it’s the least musical theatre-y song in the show—it was written to be a pop song within the show.  We never intended for the song to stand alone, although we did submit the song to the Song of the Year songwriting competition, and it was a finalist in March of 2009.

How did you two meet, and what made you decide to collaborate in the first place?

Tony: Dan and I met in the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU.  All through school, I admired his writing and his unique voice so much.  Dan is an amazing bookwriter, and though you don’t get to see it in Our Country, he’s a phenomenal lyricist as well.  Dan and I worked together on a song in grad school.  We were only collaborators for two weeks, but the song was by far the most successful song I’d presented all year.  I responded artistically, enthusiastically and speedily to his imaginative ideas.  It was thrilling to work with him.

When it became evident to me that I needed a skilled bookwriter as a collaborator for Our Country, Dan was my first choice.  The themes of Our Country are all themes that I’ve seen in Dan’s work over the years: the triumph of self-acceptance, outsiders being somehow caught in the center of the world of which they’re purportedly outside, the homosexual community at odds with the Christian Right…  All of these things spoke to Dan’s sensibilities.  Also, I knew that the book needed to be hilarious, smart and a little dirty while also being earnest, and sympathetic.  I knew that Dan could provide all of these things and more.  So in June of 2007, I pitched the project to Dan.  The day he agreed to be part of the process was a very happy day for me.

How do you work together? Does Dan sketch out the book first, and then Tony fill in the songs? Or is it more of an iterative process?

Dan: We both work in a myriad of different ways depending on the project/collaborator/style etc.  In the specific case of Our Country, Tony brought me into the project after already having completed a number of the songs, and then the script was really built around those songs.  This was actually a very appropriate and essential process for this piece, since Tommy would have gone through a similar process himself while creating his concert.  Of course as early drafts of the book began to take shape and new and more specific plot elements were born, songs were added and some were unfortunately cut in order to streamline the narrative that was being realized in the script.  But in the end, Tony’s songs are really the originating and driving force behind our process and the piece as a whole.

What is coming up next for the two of you?

Dan: I’m writing book and lyrics for the musical Southern Comfort (music by Julianne Wick Davis) which is based on the Sundance Grand Jury prize-winning documentary of the same name.  I’m also writing book for a two person musical currently entitled When We Met with Julianne Wick Davis serving as the composer lyricist—this project was conceived in collaboration with performers Sally Wilfert and Michael Winther.

Tony: My next big musical theatre project is a modern day adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native set in the affluent San Francisco suburbs.  The project is entitled Going Nowhere.  I am writing music and lyrics, and playwright Dan Moyer is writing book.  (We met because of the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity!)  I also wrote the libretto for a full length oratorio entitled Such Beautiful Things with composer Jeff Parola which will be receiving its world premiere this month by NYC’s innovative chamber chorus, The Choral Chameleon.  I am also working on putting together a concert called The Many, Many Men of Tony Asaro for 2011.  For more information on my upcoming projects, please visit my website:  www.unrelentingmonkey.com.

Editor's Note: Our Country won four awards at the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity

 

 

 

Interview with Tony Asaro and Dan Collins was conducted by Martin Denton April 2010

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