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From Class Project to Broadway Hit

Back in 1998, Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt had no idea they’d be the creators of a hit Broadway musical about a woman with bipolar disorder. The pair had met as undergraduates at Columbia University, where they began collaborating on Columbia’s annual undergraduate production, the Varsity Show, thanks to Kitt’s now-wife Rita Pietropinto who intuited that Yorkey and Kitt would make musical theatre magic together. A few years after graduation, the duo found themselves at the BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York where they were casting about for ideas for their final project: a ten-minute musical. One evening, as Yorkey watched a Dateline program about electroconvulsive therapy, he had an idea. Why not write a ten-minute musical about a woman who undergoes electroconvulsive therapy to treat her depression? Kitt was game, and they went to work on Feeling Electric, the show that—over the next ten years—would become Next to Normal.

Reactions to their final project were mixed: some people loved it and others were baffled. But Feeling Electric was just a class project, so Yorkey and Kitt moved on to other things. Yorkey returned to his hometown of Issaquah, Washington to become the Associate Artistic Director of the Village Theatre, and Kitt worked as a musical director, conductor, and arranger on and off-Broadway. When the pair reunited to conceive a musical adaptation of Jerry McGuire and hit a wall (how do we put football on stage?), they returned to Feeling Electric. It was now to be about a woman with bipolar disorder (known commonly as manic-depressive illness), a deadly mental illness that afflicts about 5.7 million Americans. People with bipolar disorder go through violent mood swings that range from the depths of depression to the highs of mania. Yorkey and Kitt read everything they could get their hands on about the disorder and wrote song after song. Ultimately, they realized that they had generated over three hours of music for a musical without a real plot. They went back and tried to create a coherent outline for the show, which they saw as a play about a woman navigating the male-dominated psychiatric establishment.

After a reading and a workshop at the Village Theatre, the pair presented Feeling Electric at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2005. It was over three-and-a-half hours long and still lacked something, but producer David Stone (Wicked) was in the audience and believed that it had real potential. He met with Yorkey and Kitt and challenged them to make it a show about the people rather than the medicine. The show “started in a little bit of a snarky place,” Yorkey recalled. “In your twenties… you think you’re smarter than everyone else. It’s much more of a risk to open up your heart to something that’s painful.” Now in their thirties, Yorkey and Kitt were prepared for the risk of vulnerability. Carole Rothman, the Artistic Director of Second Stage in New York City, expressed interest in producing the show, and director Michael Greif, a veteran of Broadway (Rent), was invited to join the artistic team.

Yorkey and Kitt went to work, this time at a much faster pace than in years past. Songs were cut and added, the relationship between mother and daughter developed, and the title of the show changed: instead of Feeling Electric, the play was now Next to Normal, which better reflected the play’s new sincerity. Through their research, Yorkey and Kitt had come to understand the devastating effects mental illness can have on families. Although not based on a single true story, Next to Normal represents realistically the difficulties of living with and treating bipolar disorder. To make sure they were accurately representing the illness, the medicine, and the doctors Yorkey and Kitt showed each new draft of the script to psychiatrists.

But as Yorkey put it, when Next to Normal opened at Second Stage in February 2008, the reviews were “violently mixed.” Ben Brantley of the New York Times summed up the critical confusion about the play saying, “One minute you’re rolling your eyes; the next, you’re wiping them . . . Though it gives off hot sparks of original wit, the show also sinks into what feels like warmed-over social satire, with detours to the giddy brink of camp.” Simply put: the show wasn’t finished. Although the team had had high hopes of transferring directly to Broadway from Second Stage, it was now out of the question. Yorkey considered calling it quits. But Stone urged him to keep at it. From the very first public performances of Feeling Electric/Next to Normal, audience members had come to Yorkey and Kitt with their own stories about struggling with mental illness. This was a story that needed to be told. So with the promise of a run out of town, Yorkey and Kitt did something radical: they cut a song (“Feeling Electric,” during which the doctor administering ECT to Diana ripped off his scrubs and turned into a heavy metal rock star) and changed the opening number. The difference in audience response was immediate and remarkably positive, and it enabled Yorkey to understand that there was more yet to do to “get it right,” something that he and the rest of the team now felt morally and artistically obligated to do.

When the show closed at Second Stage, Yorkey and the rest of the artistic team sat down with the notebook in which he had logged all feedback from friends, colleagues, audience members, and critics. They searched for comments that appeared on every page in order to determine their next steps. Furious rewriting and cutting ensued, and when Next to Normal opened at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. in December 2008, Arena Artistic Director Molly Sweeny said, “These writers finally located the beating heart at the center of their play.” Now producer David Stone had to decide whether to take the plunge and put the show on Broadway. Financial success on the Great White Way is rare even in the best of economic times, but launching a rock musical about a woman with a mental illness in the midst of a recession seemed… well… insane.

Nonetheless, Stone took the chance. Next to Normal opened on Broadway at the Booth Theatre on April 15, 2009 to rave reviews and ran for 733 performances. The show earned eleven Tony nominations and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010. The show’s success was a testament to Yorkey and Kitt’s perseverance and to the humanity of protagonist they had created in the character of Diana Goodman. As Yorkey put it, Diana is “not exotic and other. She’s one of us.”

Sydney Cheek-O’Donnell, dramaturg