Story of the Week: Music City: A New Musical Is the Sleeper Hit of the Season

In November I reviewed the off-Broadway musical Music City at the 75-seat West End Theatre on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which has become the home of the scrappy little theater company Bedlam. Featuring songs by JT Harding (some written specifically for the show, but mostly preexisting) and a book by Peter Zinn, it tells the story of a struggling Nashville songwriter who sees his big break within reach but needs to come up with $2,000 to record a demo. He makes a Faustian bargain with a local drug dealer, resulting in a tense social drama set to a toe-tapping country music score. I just loved it, and I’m not alone.

Since opening, Music City has extended three times (it is currently running through March 2) and a commercial transfer to a larger theater is under discussion. That should in no way suggest that Bedlam is unhappy with its current digs (the company has recently started advertising the fact that its theater is well outside the new congestion pricing zone), but it’s safe to say that demand has exceeded the capacity of the intimate house, and everyone’s expectations.

Everyone, that is, but Bedlam’s artistic director (and the director of Music City) Eric Tucker. “I sort of thought it would,” he admits without any hint of false modesty. Tucker’s environmental staging, which drops us right into the Nashville dive bar where much of the story transpires, is a huge part the show’s allure. Mostly known for his experimental stagings of classic plays (his new production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV is currently in previews at Theatre for a New Audience), Tucker took a big swing with Music City and has hit a home run.

I spoke with Tucker about the show and how it fits into his vision for the future of Bedlam as the company approaches its 13^th year. We also discussed the challenges facing not-for-profit theaters across America, but especially in New York City. But first, for those who rarely venture off-Broadway …

What is Bedlam?

Tucker and a small circle of collaborators founded Bedlam in 2012 with a mission to “reinvigorate traditional forms in a flexible, raw space, collapsing aesthetic distance and bringing its viewers into direct contact with the dangers and delicacies of life.” That sounds like a lot of dull MFA jargon to me, but audiences quickly got a sense of what the company was all about with its first breakthrough hit, which was anything but boring.

That was Kate Hamill’s wild adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which performed at the Sheen Center in 2014 before playing extended runs at the Gym at Judson in 2016. The play has since been performed at theaters across America, and Hamill has become America’s foremost adapter of classic literature for the stage.

Bedlam went on to produce excellent revivals of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (2018), Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (2019), and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (2023). There have also been also stranger projects, like a 2018 mashup of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I haven’t always loved Bedlam’s more self-indulgent explorations of the theatrical canon, but I have always admired its willingness to break with convention. This is a small company that takes big risks, and Music City has been one of their biggest.

How did this company end up staging Music City?

A musical based around the catalog of a semi-obscure country music songwriter feels like a huge departure from the above syllabus of required reading. The original producers of Music City sent Tucker a script in the year following the Covid pandemic in hope of recruiting him to direct a workshop ahead of an eventual commercial run. But when that fell apart, Tucker began to seriously consider the show for Bedlam.

He was immediately attracted to what the story says about the lives of the working poor in 21^st-century America. “There’s poverty and drug abuse and people going into the military to make ends meet,” says Tucker. “Peter Zinn’s book is so good that it does not feel like a jukebox musical at all.”

While most jukebox musicals arrive onstage reeking of entertainment lawyers desperate to goose royalties and put out a self-serving memoir of the artist, Music City reveals nothing about Harding beyond his ability to write a great song that can appeal to a wide variety of people—not just country music fans.

“JT is a rock’n’roll guy at heart,” says Tucker. “He knows how to write a good pop-rock song and the music makes you want to move. Sometimes people stand up in the back and just dance.”

That’s the kind of behavior that would certainly get a Broadway usher’s flashlight moving, but Tucker sees it as a triumph completely in line with Bedlam’s mission. “My whole thing is trying to tell a story where the audience feels like they’re in the same room with us, and you feel like you’re part of the story. Music City has that.”

Is there a lesson here for New York’s not-for-profit theaters?

I think so. Tucker took a musical that had been written for a larger cast on a traditional stage and reimagined it for an environmental space (“You know, you could just go do it in a real bar,” he says) with a small cast of actors doubling roles. This is the inventive, imagination-forward style he has refined as a director over the last 13 years with Bedlam. It doesn’t just work for well-known classics, but world-premiere musicals.

Bedlam has also stepped away from the model of producing embraced by so many not-for-profits in which an entire season is announced a year in advance, locking the company into a tight schedule with very little room to extend. That model is important for selling subscriptions, but theatergoers are increasingly turning their noses up at season packages in favor of last-minute deals.

“It’s so much harder to predict since the pandemic, because people don’t buy their tickets early,” observes Tucker. He did correctly predict that Music City might be a hit, however, so Bedlam has yet to announce its next show, a strategy similar to the one the for-profit producer Seaview has pledged to follow in its new off-Broadway space.

Of course, having a dedicated theater really helps. “We’ve been in a situation where, because we didn’t have our own space, we’ve had shows that were super hits that we couldn’t really extend,” he says.

When you’re renting at a popular venue, there’s usually a new tenant lined up right behind you. That’s one of the reasons Tucker and company jumped when they saw an advertisement from St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church (where the West End Theatre is located) looking for a resident company to manage the theater. I have attended shows at the West End Theatre for years—mostly short runs and workshops. It was a decidedly unfashionable venue, but Tucker saw the potential: “It’s just such a beautiful space … right off the subway. And there’s obviously tons of theatergoers on the Upper West Side.” According to Tucker, the church has been a great landlord. Bedlam has been at the West End for two years now, and he envisions the company staying for another decade.

As consumer habits and donor behavior become more volatile, Bedlam has managed to secure this rock of stability. But agility will be the key to survival for New York’s not-for-profit theaters in the coming decade: seizing potentially profitable opportunities (like a country musical inside a church theater) even if those things don’t exactly conform to the brand the company has built.