Rick Antonson and Shawn Macdonald are on a quixotic quest to unite America. They’re writing Route 66: The Musical as both a metaphor for a country that has lost its way politically and a road map back to its future.
The enormity of the task isn’t lost on them. Nor is the sheer implausibility of two Canadians creating a musical as a way of getting Americans to start listening to one another again.
But hey, someone once told Antonson, the former head of Tourism Vancouver, that his plan to have Vancouver host the Winter Olympics would never happen and look at how that turned out.
Their ideas are big ones — how to let a couple’s modern-day journey across “the mother road” speak for everything that ails politics in the United States. And yet, they also want the audience to leave the theatre having a hard time deciding which song to sing first on their way home.
“The musical is on the spectrum of a Route 66 tribute and a Route 66 PBS special,” Antonson says with the grin that makes resistance to his ideas futile.
Here’s the plot: Cynthia is an ambitious, driven marketing executive whose boss wants to be the next Republican president of the United States. To win him — and voters — over, she needs to come up with a five-word rallying cry that will not only fit onto a bumper sticker but somehow sum up what America means to ordinary Americans.
To do that, Cynthia needs to talk to “ordinary” Americans. And where will she find them? On the road that leads right into the country’s soul.
She and her boyfriend, Bobby, an ardent Democrat who’s adapting his novel into a screenplay, get in a car and start driving from Chicago to Los Angeles(more than 3,000 miles all the way.) Oh, do they have baggage.
The trip splits their differences wide open, says Macdonald, a well-respected Vancouver-based actor and writer whose play Prodigal Son won the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for Outstanding Original Script. “Their political beliefs are revealed and by the end of Act One it doesn’t look good for them.”
Bobby and Cynthia are so intent on being right that they put their own individual needs ahead of their needs as two people whose sum is better than their parts.
“The dysfunction of the couple is a surrogate of American politics,” Antonson says, with Macdonald adding, “America has abandoned an America where it worked for everyone.”
Antonson nods. “America has lost ambiguity, a way to accept differences. Route 66 evokes every type of America you can think of — it’s a thread of continuity. The musical is a metaphor for an America that’s not as lost as people think it is.”
This ability to admire America while being dismayed by some of its realities will be familiar territory for readers of Antonson’s book, Route 66 Still Kicks. He loved the America he found on the road and, at the same time, was bewildered by its blind spots.
Although it’s never revealed in the book, the “Peter” sitting beside Antonson in the Mustang was Peter Armstrong. Friends even before their days working together at the fledgling Rocky Mountaineer, which Armstrong owns, there’s a continental divide between their political views. While Antonson’s flow to the left, Armstrong’s always veer true right.
They sometimes bickered; their silences were not always companionable and the Mustang’s doors got slammed a couple of times for dramatic punctuation. But years after pulling up to the Santa Monica pier at the end of their journey, they remain the best of friends.
Potential spoiler alert: If Antonson and Armstrong could work out their differences, Cynthia and Bobby stand a good chance of driving into the sunset together, too. (The musical’s script changes nearly every time the writers get together so the actual ending is anyone’s guess, including Antonson’s and Macdonald’s at this point.)
“They’ve each got their own journey and need each other,” says Antonson. “That’s a lot like American itself. They’re both with sin and have the potential to rectify the mess.”
“Our hope is to challenge people’s perception about the ‘other,’” Macdonald says. “If we can get the audience engaged in these two people’s lives and root for them along their journey, at the end we might be at a place where they change their minds a little bit, with Republicans starting to question Cynthia; and if Democrats like Cynthia and care about her, minds have been opened up a little bit.”
The improbable art of writing a musical
Antonson first met Macdonald four years ago when Antonson was the CEO of Tourism Vancouver and Macdonald was hired to add a little razzmatazz to the organization’s annual general meeting. (Now there’s an oxymoron for you: an entertaining AGM.) A year later, when Macdonald was hired back, Antonson pulled him aside and said, “I have this crazy idea. Here’s my book; I think it could be a musical.”
For Macdonald, the emphasis was on the crazy, not the idea. It wasn’t until the next year, when Antonson cornered him once again and said, “I’ve spent the last year reading books on how to write a musical and here’s my pitch” that Macdonald was hooked.
Now Antonson calls Macdonald, who’s never driven Route 66, one of its apostles.
The project’s credibility in the theatre world shifted into high gear when, with the support of the Arts Club, Robert McQueen (associate director of Mamma Mia on Broadway, resident director on the national tour of the Hal Prince and Susan Stroman production of Showboat) signed on as director and Bob Foster (music director of Toronto production of Cinderella and associate music director of the Toronto production of Billy Elliot) became the music director.
“Two years ago, I didn’t know what I didn’t know about musicals. Now I know I know nothing,” says Antonson, adding that when he’s introduced as one of the script’s co-writers, he says: “I’m the co- and Shawn’s the writer.”
“And when I say I’m in a musical with Shawn Macdonald, Robert McQueen and Bob Foster, I have absolute immediate credibility.”
Route 66, which was decommissioned in 1985, has never been just about the road itself. It’s about what it means to the people who travel on it, whether they were living straight out of a chapter of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or pulling up to Delgadillo’s Snow Cap drive-in in their 1957 Chevy in the post-war boom years. Every era has its own Route 66 soundtrack, music which evokes deep-rooted nostalgia about what Steinbeck called “the road of flight.”
Antonson and Macdonald started with a playlist of 300 songs and then winnowed it down to about 24. Then, McQueen did something that shocked Antonson. The director told them to take out all the songs and start again. Did the script work on its own?
“It was both exhilarating and terrifying,” Macdonald says. “For Rick all the signposts were gone.”
When they started putting the music back in, the choices were equally surprising. Although they started out with the typical put-your-quarter-in-the-jukebox songs you’d associate with the halcyon days of Route 66, now the main consideration is whether the song moves the plot along or, as Macdonald puts it, does what words alone can’t do. The song could be from 1920 or 2010; its job is to give each scene its starting or end point.
Antonson loves what Macdonald calls “Easter eggs”: those special, hidden treats that only a few people will get. Theirs are the names of the characters: Bobby for Bobby Troupe, who wrote the song that Nat King Cole made famous; Cynthia for Troupe’s first wife who, on a car ride from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, vamps the words “get your kicks on Route 66” into his ear; and Trucker Cy for Cyrus Avery, the father of Route 66.
(Trucker Cy “is old, has a heart condition, misses the past and is still a place holder for the values of Route 66,” Antonson says. “Trucker Cy says, ‘You’ll never understand America until you drive Route 66. That’s old Route 66 — all of it.”)
In an ideal world, the musical will open in Chicago where they know there will be questions about how two Canadians could write a musical about the quintessential American highway, just as one American reviewer of the book questioned how Antonson could write about Route 66 without mentioning the American constitution in the first 20 pages.
Macdonald says he used to puzzle over why so many Canadian comedians were so wildly successful in the U.S. He believes it’s our outsider stance — always being on the outside looking in — that gives us a perspective, and a perception, that Americans can’t have. It allows both insight and satire and, Antonson adds, a sense of irony.
Opening night is a long way away, though. In the meantime, Route 66: The Musical is one of the several productions being featured as part of In Tune 2015: The Art of Canadian Musicals, which develops and showcases new Canadian musicals (June 12 to 21 at various venues around Granville Island.) The first scene from Act One will be performed, with feedback to follow, on June 16 at the Revue Stage. Admission is free but there is limited seating so you’re advised to get there in advance of the 8 p.m. show time. Details at touchstonetheatre.com.
