Intricate and challenging musicals like Floyd Collins, Parade and Violet may not be standard fare for performers not yet old enough to drink (legally, anyway), but at New York University's Steinhardt School's Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions, students under John Simpkins direction have done all of these shows and more. Next weekend, the program will present Kander & Ebb's dark musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, again directed by Simpkins.
"I like to look for something that explores a part of our human condition that we don't typically get 
a chance to think about or talk about," Simpkins says about his directorial choices. "Men who live a more comfortable life 100 feet under the ground in a dark wet cave and feel happier there than they do in their family life; high school kids who are living what appears to be an outwardly suburban environment, but underneath that they're kind of dying from the weight of suburban expectations; unwilling people who are forced to be friends...In Spider Woman, how to deal with a man who's not a man, [but] a woman...the list goes on. I guess the easiest way to say it would be that I like to think about things that are tough to think about, that are deep in our human psyche, and hurt to think about. And I think theatre, this sort of theatre, lets you explore it artistically, which sort of impacts—definitely our lives, and hopefully the lives of the folks who watch it as well."
In his dual role as teacher and director, Simpkins believes that giving college students such difficult shows to perform helps them develop as both singers and actors. "They're learning how to prepare roles," he says, "and the more difficult or complicated or mature the show themes, I think they're forced to think and participate in the process themselves, which I think makes their experience better as an artist." Still, he acknowledges that there are difficulties in selecting shows like these. "They really hurt your brain," he laughs. "They really tax everyone's preparation and skills—and, for students, you often have them just as they're learning a process, so these complicated, mature shows sometimes require someone who's further along in their process. But what they lack in that kind of experience, they Make Up For in willingness and enthusiasm, so I think at the end of the day that's a positive anyway."
"One of the exciting things that I love about this program that NYU does is that they're a voice-based degree, so the students all sing incredibly well," he continues, adding that shows like Floyd Collins or Violet or Kiss of the Spider Woman require "a sophistication of musical style" of their performers. "The students already come with that sensibility, so it becomes wonderful to build on that, rather than teach that, which I think other programs might have a little trouble with," he says.
Each show presents its unique challenges, of course, and Simpkins has enjoyed unraveling the knots in his current production. "A show like Spider Woman has so many layers of complexity to it," he says happily. "You're dealing with what's in reality and what's in Molina's head, [and] if you're in Molina's head, how do you function as an actor, as a young person, as a dancer, as a singer." The actors, he says, "brought with them their research and their enthusiasm for trying to get to the bottom of that, which is what they learn in their coursework here." The actors' willingness to learn is especially exciting, Simpkins says. "Sometimes with older actors [or] more-credentialed actors, there's a sense of 'Oh, I know how to do that,' and with young people, because they don't yet know how to do that, they research it and they really dig in and roll up their sleeves and get to the bottom of it."
The show, he continues, has many "rungs of reality" that affect how the show can be staged--"For instance, the production numbers where Aurora's out front in Molina's brain, [we] make decisions like, is she speaking Molina's words or is she speaking her own words that he saw that he's now turning around and wrapping up into something else, or is she fully a functioning person that he's just borrowing? And how do you get actors to all be in the same world as you begin to make those decisions in how numbers develop. I mean, those are the kind of conversations that we're having and the kind of things we're forced to articulate to ourselves, which has been really complicated and exciting. As you get started, it almost blows your mind all the decisions you have to have about it before you understand it."
To get every aspect of the show, Simpkins says that he, the cast and the team "talk a lot," and adds that the six-week rehearsal time gives them a longer opportunity to find new layers to the show. "We don't have two weeks to put it up somewhere out-of-town, so we're afforded the luxury of screwing up a whole bunch," he laughs. "We can really mess up and we can go back and say, 'Well, that was perhaps the right idea, and really the wrong execution,' and we can stop and talk about it, and, again, because they're in their process academically, it becomes very easy to have those conversations as part of rehearsal and treat them as research, sort of character-based stuff. Sometimes you can do that with professionals, sometimes they won't let you."
