Quick Q&A: David & Joe Zellnik

Joe writes music, David the book and lyrics. I talked with the Zellnik brothers as rehearsals began for their brilliant 40’s-style musical Yank!, which will open off-Broadway later this month at The York.

photo: Adrian Miranda

How do two brothers grow up to both work in theatre?

JOE: I think it’s mostly genetic but you can blame our mom. She raised us on musicals and took us to shows at a very young age and that was the most often played music in our house.

DAVID: We had the only Jewish mom who would have been sad if we’d come home and said we wanted to be doctors. She really wanted us in the theatre. I think I was like 5 when Annie came out. We listened to it all the time and tried to memorize the lyrics. Then we saw the revival of Oklahoma! and that made us want to learn the scores for all the musicals and have little competitions about who knew them better.

JOE: We did a lot of little skits. We started writing songs together before we were teenagers. I would play the piano and David would sing and we did that pretty much every day after school for a couple of hours. That was our youth.

Is Yank! the first full length musical you’ve written together?

DAVID: No, it’s not. We wrote bad musicals together when I was 11 and Joe was 13. We’ve written real musicals together really our whole adult lives. We wrote one called City of Dreams which did the festival circuit in the early 00’s, and we wrote a childen’s musical for Theaterworks USA called First In Flight. This is the most personal show we’ve written.

In what way is it personal?

DAVID: I think it feels very personal because we decided very early on that we wouldn’t approach it with a detached sense of irony or by making fun of the fact that it’s a 40’s-style musical. At the time we started writing Yank! it seemed like so many musicals around us, even great ones, had a joke that they were musicals and the audience was supposed to be in on it. We decided to take this story, these characters and this form to heart. To take it seriously. To love it on its own terms.

JOE: We often forget this reason, because it seems so obvious to us, but it’s also personal because it’s the first musical we’ve written that has gay content. Both of us are gay so to tell a gay love story in a sentimental old fashioned way is meaningful for us.

DAVID: I’m not a tremendously spiritual person but it seems like the universe is aligning in a really beautiful way with this production and with the cast that we’ve managed, against all odds, to assemble. At this particular moment, both with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell potentially ending this year and the several-year journey of gay marriage, it does feel like Yank!, while not a very political show, feeds into a larger political and historical moment.

One of the most exciting things about Yank! for me is that it is both culturally relevant right now and yet is old-fashioned. Did you ever catch yourselves veering out of the style of 40’s musicals?

JOE: I think we did intentionally go outside the 40’s idiom. Some of the early decisions we made, while avoiding irony, were to make it a modern musical. It’s not structured with long book scenes and 3 or 4 numbers. We wrote it cinematically like a modern play. The opening sequence has interior monologues and covers about three weeks – that’s not the way they wrote musicals in the 1940’s. What there isn’t is any influence of rock music but there is modern music theatre writing.

DAVID: But there’s tremendous attention to where people’s heads were at. We did feel we had to be true to how people understood sexuality and masculinity, and how they understood the world. Definitely there are many moments in Yank! that are deeply true to a 40’s aesthetic. The tension is that we don’t have any popular culture record of gay life in the 40’s. So to see two men singing a love song to each other in the style of a universal Rodgers and Hammerstein song is, while being incredibly true to the aesthetic of the period, actually being very modern on some level.

Without a popular culture record of gay life in the 40’s, how did you construct the world?

DAVID: The beginning and the end of the show take place in the present and are about someone who found a journal that make him try to imagine the past. That echoes what Joe and I are doing: how do you construct a past that you weren’t there for? There’s two broad answers. For the history, the key work was “Coming Out Under Fire” by Allan Berube, which blew the lid off what WW2 was for gay people both in terms of gay history within the war and what the war did for the larger gay movement. The other part of the history has nothing to do with gay stuff, it was Studs Terkel’s “The Good War” and a lot of old movies and plays written at the time.

Tell me about the orchestrations, Joe. How many pieces do you get to play with?

JOE: This time I’m doing new orchestrations for the show. There will be 5 pieces. We will be using a synthesizer for the first time and that will allow us to bring in some colors we couldn’t before. It’s an exceptional group of musicians. We have a new song in the show for this production, and the music for the dream ballet is substantially new.

DAVID: You can’t have a 40’s musical without a dream ballet!

photo: Bobby Steggert, Nancy Anderson and Jeffry Denman in the 2007 production of Yank! at Gallery Players. credit: Jennifer Maufrais Kelly

Are there plans to record a cast album?

JOE: There has been talk about a recording with this cast, but we can’t say anything officially right now. We’ve managed to assemble our dream cast. Our four principals have all done the show before. We’ve managed to get them all here at the same time and couldn’t be more thrilled about that. Both of us feel we have an amazing support cast of mostly new people.

DAVID: I don’t always allow myself feelings of pride but when I do it’s in moments when I look around a room and see these amazing people who I love and respect so much and they’re here because of what Joe and I wrote. Jeffry Denman, Bobby Steggert, Nancy Anderson – they did the show when it was in a basement in Brooklyn, getting next to no money.

JOE: It was amazingly moving at the meet and greet the other day to see the number of people who have lined up behind this show and who really want to see it succeed. For so long it was just us trying to push this boulder up a hill.

Why does it take so long to put together a musical?

DAVID: Musicals take a lot of people, and a musical like this that is unapologetically gay takes time to find the people to trust and love it enough to give it a chance to live in the world. Also, Joe and I are perfectionists.

Good collaborations have some friction. How do your tastes differ?

JOE: I have much more of an old fashioned musical theatre queen sensibility. David is more politically and historically aware. On this show we were able to bring both of those things together in an interesting way.

DAVID: As we’re writing I tend to like the weird and non-linear where Joe tends to be more nuts and bolts about what will hold up.

JOE: Most of the disagreements we have are in the theoretical stage. Once something is up both of us are pretty much in agreement about whether something is working.

DAVID: In our collaboration, the reason doors don’t get slammed is that I’m very musical on my own and Joe writes lyrics on his own and they’re dramaturgically savvy for a composer. At the end of the day we both have veto power over each other’s work. If the other person doesn’t like something then that has to be the end of the discussion.

When was the moment, if there was a specific moment, when each of you realized that Yank! was worth fighting for?

JOE: I feel like we had a very early reading of the first act in late 2003 or 2004 and it was immediately clear that people were excited by it. We didn’t know how it was going to go or how the story would work out but it was just clear that people were loving it. In terms of when we realized it would really live and breathe, I feel that was as recent as last December. There’s an army of people who want it to happen now.

DAVID: I still can’t quite believe it, what the last two years have taken to get us here. For me, the moment I knew this was special and the musical that we were born to write was in Brooklyn. In between the version at NYMF in 2005 and the version at the Gallery Players in 2007, the show was ripped apart and got an entirely different structure and framing device. We weren’t sure if it would work and be moving. Somehow when it did work, and worked more beautifully than the NYMF version ever did, it was as good as anything as I could ever hope to write. I hope to write things as good but I think Yank! for me represents what we can do and what I love in theatre.