"Monica! (The Musical?)" by Rebecca Traister The New York Observer April 16, 2003

The state of political satire is in jeopardy. While Saturday Night Live struggles to address an unfunny war, and the best unintentional parody around involves photo-shopped weasels on the cover of the New York Post, one team of composers has chosen to take another route to controversy by setting their new musical in the blowjob-heavy, war-light days of the Clinton administration. Monica! The Musical will get its first reading at the Manhattan Theatre Club on May 7. Its creators, Daniel Blau, Adam Blau and Tracie Potochnik, hope that the reading will lead to a stage berth here in New York, where it would join unlikely post-post-ironic musicals such as Debbie Does Dallas, Urinetown and the new Zanna, Don't! Mr. Blau, who scored the show that his brother Daniel and Ms. Potochnik wrote, most recently wrote music for Call Us Crazy: The Anne Heche Monologues, in which 14 actresses read verbatim from the actress' memoir about aliens and her alternate personality, Celestia. The Heche piece created a hefty ripple in Los Angeles when Ms. Heche and her husband paid a visit to the production halfway through a performance. "It was a bad moment for her to walk in," explained Adam guiltily--bad because it was a scene in which all 14 monologists were running around the stage "blathering incoherently." As reported in gossip columns, Ms. Heche promptly walked out muttering, "This is sick." If Ms. Lewinsky is curious about her show, she should arrive late at the Manhattan Theatre Club reading: Only the first act of the three-hour musical will be read there, and the titular White House intern doesn't appear until 36 pages in. Instead, Monica! first focuses on Bill Clinton. Growing up in Hope, Ark., the future Commander in Chief is visited for the first time by his personal demon, a woman named Desire. "I feel I've lost my head," sings young Bill. "Don't look too hard for you will find it / Beneath my dress of red," responds the siren. Mr. Clinton goes on to college, where he first encounters his wife, future New York State Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: "My God, what's taking hold of me? / I don't even know her name / Where once it was just my draft card / Now it's all of me that's aflame," rhymes Bill during his first musical encounter with Hillary, entitled "Who Was That Freaky-Deaky Thing?" At the Brooklyn bar the Gate on April 13, the Blau brothers--Adam, 28, is skinny, bespectacled and hyper; Daniel, 27, is cherubic and on the short side--told The Transom that Monica! began as a musical with a different focus. In 1999, Ms. Potochnik--who lives in Providence, R.I.--and Daniel began trading scenes for a musical based on Ken Starr's growing investigation into Mr. Clinton's relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. Later, Adam set some of their lyrics to music, fueling the trio's belief that they could put a real show together. The Blaus grew up in Massapequa Park, Long Island, where their mother is a piano teacher and their stepfather a music professor and composer who, they said, helped to invent the first synthesizer. Adam attended Yale, sang a cappella--think Whiffenpoofs--and spent some time working as a day trader. After realizing that finance wasn't his bag, he began performing as a solo singer-songwriter and in bands, including VH1's Bands on the Run group, the Josh Dodes Band. He wrote scores for film and stage and made money by recording demos in the sound studio in his Park Slope apartment. Daniel went to Vassar, where he met Ms. Potochnik, his "best friend in the universe." When he graduated, he became an assistant editor at a newsletter for the home-furnishings industry--"literally the most boring writing in the history of printing since papyrus," he said. Somehow, this led to a job as a contributor to TelevisionWithoutPity.com, a Web site that recaps television episodes in 6,000 words or less. He's just back from a year in Los Angeles and has rented an apartment at 16th Avenue and 72nd Street in Brooklyn, a neighborhood he refers to as "Delaware." The Blaus are the kind of self-aware, well-educated brainiacs who have spent their sporadically employed post-Internet-boom years accumulating pent-up critical energy. Both brothers make self-conscious references to their Long Island upbringing, their love for such lugubrious musicals as Chess and Aspects of Love, and their devotion to Billy Joel. Mr. Joel does not appear in Monica!, but Tom Jones does. The well-packaged crooner turns up during Bill's Rhodes scholarship, which the play sets in London. "The two main reasons I love this town / Are me going up and the girls going down," Mr. Jones sings. That Mr. Clinton was actually at Oxford for his Rhodes years is beside the point. "These events have only the most random relationship to history," said Daniel. Which also explains a scene in which a betrothed Hillary finds Janet Reno in the Wellesley College library--it may be unnecessary to point out that the two women didn't attend Wellesley at the same time--and confronts her about the rumors that she is "a l-l-law student." Ms. Reno responds by encouraging Ms. Rodham's curiosity about "p-p-practicing law" and sings to her: Hillary, you are so young Your ways are so endearing Pay attention and my tongue Will make you feel what you are hearing ... The things you can't imagine Soon you'll want to try them They'll come so hard Catch you off guard You know you can't deny them. The show treats the physical relationship between Ms. Lewinsky and the President with comparative kid gloves. And despite the fact that one of Monica's lyrics is "My poor dreams do need some dusting ... / Dreams of Presidential thrusting," the Blaus maintained that they think the newly minted reality-television star is "groovy" and "not a hussy" and that they would "totally love it if she showed up" at the M.T.C. reading. "Ken Starr is our über-villain," said Adam. The Independent Counsel's big Act I number is "Loser," in which he croons "I don't even think I have to mention / That I attend every Star Trek convention." The whole Clinton gang is crammed into Monica! The Musical, including Vernon Jordan, Fleetwood Mac, George Stephanopoulos, all three network news anchors and Al Gore, who plays the White House janitor who bucks up the flagging President with the solemn "Never Let Them Wipe Away Your Smile." The show's big roof-raiser is Betty Currie's "Access Denied." The reading, which is being presented by New York theater production company Page Seventy-Three, will star a number of the Blaus' friends and acquaintances, including Jay Douglas, who was recently in the Broadway production of The Full Monty, as Bill Clinton. Representatives for Mr. Clinton, Senator Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky did not return calls for comment by press time. The Blau brothers claimed that they aren't worried about lawsuits. "After the Anne Heche thing, I have no fear. That was actual plagiarism, with people reading verbatim from a book without having the rights," said Adam. "Yeah, this just borrows from the canon of shit everyone finds funny," said Daniel, who contended that "finding a place to rent cheap music stands is much higher on our list of anxieties than Hillary's angry lawyers." --Rebecca Traister