‘Urinetown’ creators develop zombie musical at the O’Neill

July 04, 2015 12:01 am • Last Updated: July 13, 2015 8:17 am

By Kristina Dorsey
Features Editor

Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann’s stage collaborations certainly haven’t trafficked in mundane ideas or stock music-theater material.

They won Tony Awards for “Urinetown,” their 2001 musical in which a drought has led to such a water shortage that people are only allowed to use for-pay public toilets. And those bathrooms are controlled by a nefarious corporation. “Urinetown” offers crackling comedy but also satirizes capitalism and so much more.

Another show of theirs: “Yeast Nation,” set around 3 million B.C. when salt-eating yeasts became world’s first life form.

Composer Hollmann and librettist Kotis are now working on “ZM” — and those letters stand for “Zombie Musical.” They are developing the piece during this year’s National Music Theater Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.

The concept driving “ZM” is this: a fast-food restaurant launches a new sandwich that turns people into zombies.

While the zombie angle certainly captures the imagination, “ZM” has some deeper things on its mind, too. Kotis says that the fun thing about the zombie conceit is that it provides a chance to talk about “fast food as the most egregious example of the problems of modernity, I suppose. Fast food, the way that the food is made, the way it’s sold and what it does to us — there’s really been a lot written about it.”

That said, Kotis acknowledges having a weakness for McDonald’s cheeseburgers. There are times when he has to have one — and then he regrets it, which he realizes isn’t an uncommon thing.

He goes on: “Fast food is the most apparent example of what we’ve done to every element of our economy and our society, where things have been mechanized and industrialized, and waste of every kind is just accepted as the cost of doing business — not the financial cost, but the social cost, the social cost of convenience and cheapness and all those things.

“To be able to talk about fast food as a part of a larger fact of what it means to be alive today — that to me is very compelling. The issue of sustainability and greener stuff is the perennial constant of our time. It’s in many ways the source ... the well from which all other problems and issues will come from.”

Both Hollmann and Kotis studied political science in college (Kotis majored in it), and they are both still interested in current events and politics — which is apparent in their work.

And the comedy? Well, they both did improv in their younger years.

“Fear of some kind or another was always the engine of the comedy,” Kotis says. “What you’re afraid of and what’s hurting you is where the comedy comes from.”

On the music side of “ZM,” Hollmann says that one issue that had to be resolved during the show’s development was “trying to figure out how the zombies sound when they sing or even if they sing at all. ... We think the zombies sing beautifully to each other. It’s that we humans can’t understand them.”

In short, the zombies have their own reality. Kotis adds that the musical numbers are where the audience gets a peek into what the zombies are preoccupied with.

Which is?

“Brains. Eating brains,” he says.

Of course!

“They get to be very articulate about how they feel about that, but they really are single-minded,” Kotis says.

The romantic leads, meanwhile, are two teenage fast-food workers, and their songs lean toward pop.

“We’re definitely writing toward a young sound that teenagers would be singing,” Hollmann says. “What the zombies sing is kind of minor key and gothic, although their big number in the first act is a major key; it’s sweeping and romantic.”

From the book point of view, Kotis says, he had to figure out how to create a story that lives up to the best models of zombie stories, which usually boast an extended chase scene and/or a sequence where people are barricaded in a house. At the same time, the show deals with the musical-theater model, with its tradition of two people meeting, falling in love, falling out of love and then falling back into love.

“Reconciling those two forms, if you call the zombie story a form, and making them function in a satisfying way to both parents, that’s been the challenge,” Kotis says.

The writers can’t quite pinpoint when they began talking about what ended up becoming “ZM” — “Weren’t you pitching me something about it in Alaska in 2007?” Hollmann asks Kotis (“Yeast Nation” premiered in Alaska in 2007). But here’s a little about the show’s early development: Hollmann and Kotis were approached by Denis Leary’s film production company about whether they wanted to write a zombie musical. They suggested the “ZM” story (they can’t recall if they had generated the idea before that or not). The company passed.

They were later contacted by theater production company True Love Productions. True Love had been asked by people connected to a fast-food company about finding someone to create a musical about the history of the hamburger. If the fast-food organization liked whatever idea writers invented, they would pay for it.

Kotis and Hollmann thought about it but didn’t come up with anything — and felt as though it was a little too much like advertising.

They did, though, pitch True Love the “ZM” idea. True Love eventually said that the hamburger project was off but that they loved the “ZM” notion and wanted to commission Hollman and Kotis to do it.

As they developed the piece, they worked on it at Goodspeed Musicals’ inaugural residency program for music theater writers in 2013.

During a recent session at the O’Neill with director Sean Daniels and music director Steven Gross, Hollmann and Kotis listened to all the songs that had been cut from “ZM” over time. Kotis says it was like “seeing all the paths we’ve walked down. ‘It’s a serious show, not really a comedy’ — that’s not going to work. ‘It’s a very broad show, and maybe a completely alternative universe’ — that’s not going to work.”

They settled on something that is like the current world but with a heightened comedic voice.

“It’s taken a while for us to get to decide this is the path we want to walk with this particular story,” Kotis says.