Gutenberg! The Musical!

Amphibian Stage Productions is currently doing Gutenberg! The Musical! in the Sanders Theatre (a black box theater) in the Community Arts Center in Fort Worth.

The set consists of a piano at stage left, a table with various props at stage right, a two-level rack holding lots of lined-up baseball caps with the characters’ names on them at up stage center, and a stool that is moved around as needed.  Each of the two actors plays many characters, indicated by which baseball cap(s) they were wearing at the time.  There is a lot of switching of caps throughout the musical, sometimes very rapidly.  The simple lighting works pretty well.  Aside from general lighting, they have fixed spots on several places on the stage where the actors stand when they needed to be esp. highlighted.

The story is about two guys who have written a musical.  They are giving a “reading” of it to an audience of potential producers and we happen to be in that audience.  This explains the lack of a full cast (represented by the caps) and the minimal set.  It also explains why the actors occasionally break out of their roles in the musical and talk to the audience, esp. to the supposed producers in the audience, about their lives, their aims for their musical, etc.  This is an elaborate sales pitch.  Since there are non-theatre people present in their audience, they occasionally explain what they are doing, what the roles of the songs are, how they fit into the tradition of musicals, the meanings of technical terms used by theatre people, etc.  This is all rather humorous.

The musical they are “reading” is about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press.  They explain that in writing the musical they used Google to do their research and found that little was known about the invention of the printing press; so they describe their musical as a “historical fiction,”  i.e., they just made it up.  The goal of their Gutenberg is to foster literacy by means of making books—the Bible will be the first one—available to the masses.  His antagonist is a monk who is not interested in the masses being able to read the Bible for themselves.  The monk persuades a female assistant of Gutenberg to destroy the first printing press.  Subsequently the town turns against Gutenberg and everything turns out badly for him.  The story is humorously absurd.

The actors were decent and not bad singers, but not good enough to suit me.  Of course, they were playing the writers of the musical, so one might not expect them to be wonderful singers.  Nevertheless, better singing would have made a better show.  I enjoyed it, though.  It was funny, although some of the jokes were strained.  There was some humor based on one of the writers supposedly being gay.  I didn’t think that worked very well.  In part it was because of the difficulty of keeping in mind that when the actors broke out of being characters in the Gutenberg play and talked to the audience, they were still just characters in our play.  I had the feeling that our audience didn’t always get that.  I noticed that one of the actors wore his wedding ring in Act 1 and was not wearing it in Act 2, when he revealed he was gay.  Oops!  

As is my custom in such settings, I sat on the front row, in the center, so I would have no audience distractions, other than audible ones.  When down stage, the actors were right in front of me.  I had a great view of everything.

Gutenberg! The Musical! was written by Scott Brown, Anthony King, and T. O. Sterret and was originally produced at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London, January 2006.  It was produced Off-Broadway in 2007.