INTERVIEW: Celebrated play ‘Indecent’ receives Broadway cast recording

Photo: Lisa Gutkin is the co-composer of the original music in the play Indecent. Photo courtesy of Nicholas Dembling / Provided by Lisa Gutkin rep with permission.

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It’s not every day that a play receives an original Broadway cast recording, but Paula Vogel’s Indecent has a track record of being a trailblazer. The show, which played the Cort Theatre in 2017, went on to win two Tony awards and earn that rare treat in Midtown Manhattan: an extension after a closing notice.

Now the show has released its soundtrack, which features period songs from the 1920s and original compositions by Lisa Gutkin and Aaron Halva. Yellow Sound Label has preserved everything from “Ain’t We Got Fun? / Ain’t We Got Anguish?” to “Old Devil Sea.”

Vogel’s play, which was directed on Broadway by co-creator Rebecca Taichman, deals with the true events surrounding the controversial 1923 Broadway debut of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, a seminal work of Jewish culture, according to Playbill. Throughout the scenes, both exuberant and heartbreaking, Asch’s play comes to life, and the audience is also able to see the behind-the-scenes tribulations of the actors set to perform the drama.

Vogel, speaking to the Vineyard Theatre where the show had its New York premiere before moving to Broadway, described the impact of God of Vengeance in its time: “God of Vengeance is set in a brothel run by a Jewish man who is attempting to raise his daughter piously, and it features a lesbian love story. When it was performed in New York in 1923, there was deep concern within the Jewish community about what Christians would think.”

Throughout the drama, there is a rich tapestry of music, both period pieces selected by Vogel and original compositions by Gutkin and Halva. For Gutkin, a Grammy-winning member of the Klezmatics, the journey of Indecent has been a wild one.

“I got a call around 2012 from Paula and Rebecca saying that they were fans of my music and that they were making this play,” Gutkin said in a recent phone interview. “Paula sent me the then script, and I read it in one sitting on an airplane and said, ‘Yes, I’m definitely interested.’ And then nothing happened for a couple of years. A couple of years passed by, and we would check in once in a while. I knew they were still working on it, so I knew that I would eventually start writing.”

Then came Sting.

Gutkin was performing in the singer’s Broadway musical, The Last Ship, when she received a call from the creative team that Indecent was ready for its big debut. She was asked whether she wanted to travel to Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and then La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego for five months of performances.

“And off I went, and that’s how it started,” she said. “And then we brought in Aaron Halva. We needed a music director, but it turned out he was also a lovely composer. So Paula set up a meeting for us at Yale that was that February [in 2015] just so we could meet and see if we wanted to work together, and I loved some of his music. So we brought him in also, and then we became this writing team.”

The story of the play inspired Gutkin and made all of these professional decisions much easier. She has a personal connection to a Yiddish-speaking community from the time period portrayed in Indecent, and this theatrical and musical journey has helped educate her on some family history.

“I was really, really close with my grandmother and her sister,” she said. “I grew up with them. I grew up in a summer community that was all Yiddish-speaking garment workers, and they had an amazing history. They had bought this piece of land in 1929 and pitched tents, and eventually they became little cottages. And I still have a house there, so I was very, very attached to them. And I saw this as a way of getting closer to their history. I feel when I’m on stage and when I’m writing that it’s as if they were young, and they were my colleagues. So it’s just been an amazing process, learning more about what was happening in their time period and going back and listening to more of the music that was happening in their time period, and the language that I grew up with and never fully learned. I mean, I speak some Yiddish, but to be honoring that language in a play was just unbelievable for me. It was just incredible, and it still is the fact that I’ve gotten to be in this whole process.”

Gutkin was not only the co-composer of the original music, she was also on stage for performances of Indecent, playing along with the band. In fact, she continues to perform in regional productions of the play to this day.

In many ways, Gutkin has had 360-degree journey with Vogel and Taichman’s creation. She co-wrote the music, performed in the original productions, took to the stage of the Cort Theatre and continues to breathe life into these words and melodies.

Now that journey has been preserved with the original Broadway cast recording, which reminds Gutkin of her days composing alongside Halva.

“It started off that we traded off a little bit, and then we started finishing each other’s sentences,” she said about the teamwork. “He would write a few lines of something, and then I would say, ‘Oh, I have another part that will go well with that.’ And we started interweaving his melodies and mine, so if you go through the play, there’s some that are purely mine. There’s some that are purely his, and there are some that I can’t even remember which notes are mine and which are his. The arrangements went the same. He kind of started the arrangements. He was much stronger in that area and started the arrangements, and then I would add quirky little things. And then he would add quirky things to my quirky things.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

The original Broadway cast recording of Indecent is now available from Yellow Sound Label. Click here for more information.