By PATRICK HEALY
In “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” the new Broadway musical about love and abandonment in 1980s Madrid, the gazpacho is laced with Valium, and the boyfriends are cads and terrorists.
“I can never explain/why I follow this lunatic moon/when it calls to my crazy heart,” Patti LuPone sang at a recent rehearsal, playing a jilted wife fresh from 19 years in an insane asylum. In his first creative foray on Broadway, Pedro Almodovar - the film director whose 1988 Spanishlanguage comedy of the same title inspired the musical - ended up working deeply on the show .
“Pedro thinks in a way that he called “antipatico,” a way of dealing with odious things, which I can only describe as ‘Puh!’ ” said Bartlett Sher, the musical’s director.
“The more we understood it, the more interesting the dialogue and lyrics became, and the more resilient the women became.” The $5 million show is a rarity: a new musical based on a foreign film from two decades ago that is probably not widely known among the tourists who are the backbone of Broadway box offices. And the show is opening in New York without the traditional out-of-town tryout .
The technical demands of the show, like the copious projections showing Madrid architecture and other images, have been such that the producer, Lincoln Center Theater, twice delayed preview performances.
“I’ve never opened a big show cold in New York before and, really, I can’t quite put into words how intense it feels,” said Sherie Rene Scott, a twotime Tony nominee who plays the musical’s central character, Pepa. At one point early in the development of the musical, Mr. Almodovar invited the creative team to his hotel room to watch the movie again, frame by frame. For four hours, through an interpreter, Mr. Almodovar described the choices that went into each scene, each color, even each dress .
The purpose of the gathering was not to dictate changes. Rather, he wanted them to strive for sharper authenticity in the language and actions of modern Spanish women as he knew them. “We didn’t know then that Pedro had a guiding point of view about life: The world is a perfect place except for one thing - that men abandon and cheat on women,” said Mr. Sher .
“But he has an allergy to direct sentiment, and knowing that helped us think less predictably about the storytelling .” David Yazbek, the composer and lyricist, said he was initially skeptical of signing on to the musical, saying that he was turned off by any semblance of “hysterical women flailing their hands or running around like their hair was on fire.
” While such chaos crops up at times in the “Women on the Verge” movie, Mr. Yazbek said that he also found “a real depth of emotion among these women who felt lost without men, but who also had a chance in post- Franco Spain to take control of their lives for the first time.” The origins of the musical date to 2005, shortly after the opening of another movie-to-stage comedy, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.”
Its firsttime book writer, Jeffrey Lane, and Mr. Yazbek began receiving offers to team up again. “David and I both knew we work best when we’re scared,” said Mr. Lane . “We thought if we’re going to adapt something, we should look at European films.” Mr. Almodovar said in an e-mail that he had long imagined “Women on the Verge” as a musical but “never did it myself before out of laziness.”
“The structure is very theatrical ? I wrote it like that deliberately and took the American screwball comedy as a reference,” said Mr. Almodovar, . “I wrote the script of the film thinking that it would seem like a film adaptation of a nonexistent play.” Mr. Lane lined up Mr. Sher, and the show was honed over 18 months during three intensive workshops, all including Mr. Almodovar.
He said he granted “all the freedom I would want for myself.” The creators did go beyond the movie, giving stories to several of the characters and sharpening their repartee .
At a rehearsal last month Ms. LuPone let out a “C’mon girls!” to beckon Ms. Scott and the other actresses to line up and run through a song. Even though they were not wearing their pastel-colored costumes or their vertigo-inducing high heels, the women presented a striking tableau : a major musical led by an ensemble of female theater stars. In that moment, singing about how “it’s murder on a hairdo when your head is underwater,” they all broke into a chorus of smiles ? a nervous breakdown seemingly nowhere in sight.
