Lippa service

STAYING COMPOSED Lippa’s early work plays at Apple Tree.

A decade ago, Andrew Lippa achieved a modicum of fame—as far as musical theater goes, that is. The composer wrote new material for the 1999 revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and, in 2000, won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for his Off Broadway musical The Wild Party.

Lippa hasn’t had a musical staged in New York since. Yet suddenly in Chicago, he’s the man of the hour. Apple Tree Theatre is mounting a revival of Lippa’s first success, 1995’s cult fave John & Jen, an intimate two-hander about a woman’s relationships with her brother and, later, her son. And in October, it was announced that The Addams Family, by Lippa and the Jersey Boys team of Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, would appear here in November 2009, en route to Broadway. We spoke with Lippa about musical influences, out-of-town tryouts and the sanctity of marriage.

Time Out Chicago: When you wrote John & Jen, did you see composing for musical theater as a career?
Andrew Lippa: Kind of. I went to the University of Michigan, where I was a voice major; I was going to be an opera singer. I started writing musicals in college. When we got John & Jen up and going, I thought, I should write another show.

TOC: It’s interesting your background is in classical and opera. I’ve always thought you seem more comfortable than most theater composers with pop and rock sounds. “Raise the Roof” [from The Wild Party] sounds like something Santana could’ve recorded with the Michelle Branch of the month.
Andrew Lippa: Do you have his phone number, by any chance?

TOC:’Fraid not.
Andrew Lippa: Well, I don’t want to write my epitaph; I’ve got a lot more shows in me. But the adventure of writing for the theater is creating a new world and being able to work in a different vernacular. My score for A Little Princess, of which the recording’s going to be finished hopefully sometime next year and people will get to hear, still has a contemporary feel to it, but it also has a Western African meets Victorian England—whatever my version of Victorian England sounds like.

TOC: Where does The Addams Family stand right now?
Andrew Lippa: We did a reading in August, with about half the score and the whole script, and that particular reading had Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth playing Gomez and Morticia. It was quite thrilling for me to have Nathan say to me in front of other people how much he admires the score. That’s pretty cool.

TOC: You and the other creators have made a point of saying that the show is based on Charles Addams’s New Yorker cartoons, not on the TV show or movies.
Andrew Lippa: The original comic panels are so wonderfully dry and witty and say a lot with just a line or two. We’ve had to flesh out these characters, and it’s hard not to—we all know them from the television and the movies. We’re not taking anything in terms of story lines, but one can’t help having those images firmly fixed.

TOC: Does the out-of-town tryout still have the same value when anybody who sees it here can go online and gossip about the show?
Andrew Lippa: Yeah. A recent example would be Movin’ Out, which I never saw out of town but which I understand got a lot of negative criticism. They went back and made changes, and when they brought it to New York, it knocked everybody’s head off.

TOC: Much better received than it was here.
Andrew Lippa: On the Internet, it’s a terrible thing actually. People aren’t educated to understand that what we’re doing in Chicago is a step on the journey toward it being completed when we get to New York. If people blog things, they’re free to do that. [The tryout is] still a valuable process.

TOC: When you appeared at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts in August, you played an incredibly sweet song that you had written for your husband, David.
Andrew Lippa: Oh, thanks.

TOC: Since you got married in California in July, what are you feeling after the passage of Prop 8?
Andrew Lippa: Election night was the quintessence of bittersweet. We were very sad; since then, we’ve joined the growing number of people trying to do something about it. Our marriages, according to the Secretary of State of California, are valid. Which makes us something of a collector’s piece.

John & Jen starts previews at Apple Tree Wednesday 10.