New Haven Independent

The piece is set in 1968 and uses as its launching point the shooting of the pop-art icon. Pop!, though, is not a biographical piece, nor is it a staged documentary. Loosely, it’s a murder mystery. Below the surface, it is a story that imagines what’s behind the Warhol façade. That is, Pop! is not an exploration of the enigma that was Andy Warhol but a piece that explores the imagined person behind it.

With a book and lyrics by Coleman and music by Jacobs, Pop! first took shape in 2008 as a collaborative MFA thesis at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where Coleman and Jacobs studied in the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program.

After graduating from Ithaca College, Coleman worked for a film company that produces documentaries about art, one of which examined the New York art world of the 1960s — during which Warhol produced much of his familiar pop art and facilitated the goings-on of a group of “Superstars” at “The Factory.” Coleman’s interest in Warhol was piqued and meshed with Jacobs’ interest in contemporary pop art. Though she didn’t know a great deal about Warhol at that point, Jacobs enjoyed seeing a connection between what Warhol represented in the 1960s and how his influence has carried over into today’s culture.

While Coleman and Jacobs set out to create a murder mystery, Director Mark Brokaw (at right in top photo) said Pop! seeks to “recapture the spirit of The Factory … through Andy’s eyes.” It’s about creating a Warhol “happening” in which the artist “is putting himself at the center of it as a star.”

While Pop! takes place in 1968, it certainly unleashes the relevance today of Warhol’s remark at the time that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Coleman said the musical is “sort of a theatricalized version of a piece of pop art.” Warhol painted Coke bottles, Jacobs pointed out, further describing Pop! as a sort of musical-theater Coke bottle: glossy, pretty, superficial — at least, Brokaw said, “that’s Andy Warhol’s intention” in terms of his telling of the story.

Warhol was a “passive-aggressive control freak,” Brokaw said, which is part of the reason the artist-as-imagined takes control of the situation surrounding his shooting in Pop! And while Coleman said the presence of “Superstar” über-drag-queen Candy Darling “allows (Warhol) to play his favorite role of observer” for a while, Brokaw said the musical is a story that Warhol is telling but loses control of as his “allies” begin to tell the story, though “not necessarily the version (Warhol) would like to be told.” In a way, Brokaw said, Pop! showcases the struggle over “who is telling the tale.”

Pop! is, to use Yale Rep Artistic Director James Bundy’s words, the first “original book musical” to be produced at the theater since Triumph of Love in 1997. It was one of three pieces workshopped during last summer’s inaugural season of the Yale Institute for Music Theatre, though it is not the goal of the Institute to see works through to production. Brokaw, who serves as artistic director of the Institute and directed Pop! in the two-week development process, said serendipity played a role in producing the piece’s world premiere at the Yale Rep, which happened, in June, to have an open slot on its calendar.

“We weren’t looking for a musical,” Bundy said in an e-mail, “but I responded strongly to Pop! in the workshop.

Talking about the work’s relevance today, Brokaw pointed to the so-called reality TV genre and said, “Every reality show has its beginning in Andy Warhol.”

Jacobs, who made a comparison between Facebook and Warhol’s famous “Screen Tests,” described her score as “eclectic” and incorporates a wealth of genres and contemporary references, from “Beatle-esque pop songs” to a “Catholic Mass sequence that sounds like Bernstein” and elements of ragtime. Jacobs said that one song, “Big Gun,” is a mash-up of beat poetry and gospel music a la The Supremes. This amplifies the work’s contemporary relevance.

Just as the score incorporates contemporary references, the characters, including a number of pop-art figures from the 1960s, are presented in a less-historical and more contemporary context.

Jacobs pointed out that different age demographics connect with Warhol in different ways. People in their 40s or 50s or older were around during the artist’s heyday. Younger generations might know little about him beyond some of his most recognizable paintings, such as his Campbell’s Soup Cans.

Pop! is more than the murder mystery that weaves a thread through the story. And it’s more than a portrait of an American icon. It is, Brokaw said, about the man who “made fame famous,” it’s about what brought people to “The Factory,” what kept them there and what happened to them while they were there. And it’s more than that. It is about the Warhol that Coleman and Jacobs have come to know.

“They have devised their own Andy Warhol,” Brokaw said.

This story first appeared in The Arts Paper ,a publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.