Randy Newman’s Brilliant, Rarely Produced ‘Faust’ Gets L.A. Revival

The devil is making them do it… or maybe it’s actually an exercise in divine justice. “Randy Newman‘s Faust,” the only musical comedy ever written for the stage by the dean of barbed American singer-songwriters, has never been produced in its creator’s hometown before. In fact, it’s almost never been produced anywhere, despite its legend among some for being among Newman’s great works. That will change this weekend, as the Soraya will put on a concert version of the exceedingly rare show, for two performances only. Newman will be in attendance on opening night, and so, perhaps, will be the gods of irreverent theater.

This “Faust” is being done with narration to fill in the pieces of the storyline, rather than the between-song dialogue that was part of the only two full productions that were ever done to date, in pre-Broadway tryouts at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1995 followed by the Goodman Theater in 1996 (where David Mamet took a crack at revising Newman’s book). But fans of Newman are in for a feast of music. This production will include all 17 songs that were heard on his original ’95 concept album — where the parts were sung by Newman (as the devil), James Taylor (as the Lord), Don Henley (as Faust), Linda Ronstadt (as the innocent Margaret), Bonnie Raitt (as the temptress Martha) and Elton John — along with several more that were only ever heard in the stage productions, or as demos.

“If you leave the drama and the big thoughts about ‘Faust’ and what it means aside for a second,” says Thor Steingraber, the show’s director, “there are about 20 tracks in this piece that are incredible musical compositions that will be sung by incredible musical artists. So while I hope people take a little bit more away from it than this, if you want to just look at this as a concert, as a compilation of Randy Newman songs, there’s not gonna be one insignificant moment of music-making on that stage. We have a band of nine, many of whom are some of the greatest studio musicians in Los Angeles. We have this small gospel ensemble of eight. And we spent months and months and months and months casting the show.” The ensemble includes Reeve Carney, who created the role of Orpheus in “Hadestown,” getting back in the vicinity of hellfire as the devil, and, as the Lord, Javier Muñoz, who was the original star of “In the Heights” and became the first to take over the title role of “Hamilton” from Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Besides playing an avuncular Lucifer on his 30-year-old concept album, Newman performed the role live just once, at a 2014 concert production put on by Encores at City Center in New York. This weekend, he won’t be reprising that but will be coming out for opening night Saturday. “It’s the least I can do,” says Newman, still sounding a bit happily surprised that his creation is getting this belated revival.

The Soroya’s concert version plays Saturday night at 8 and is followed by a Sunday matinee at 3 before “Faust” goes back into the netherworld. The 1700-seat hall is on the Cal State Northridge campus; tickets are available here.

His legend notwithstanding, Newman has not been one to toot his own horn too loudly, and so his claims for “Faust” today are characteristically — almost comically — modest. “I thought it was funny and had some good songs,” he says now. “I thought it would have more of a life, but God knows if now it could go to Broadway. The world has changed” — and, he’ll allow, the theater world might be more open to its satirical subversiveness than it was at the time, before “The Book of Mormon” signaled at least a partial sea change.

Steingraber isn’t just the director of this weekend’s shows; he’s the executive and artistic director of the Soroyan generally. His past includes stints directing for the Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Pavilion for 14 years and becoming vice president of downtown L.A.’s Music Center. Like this writer (who penned the liner notes for the deluxe edition of Newman’s original album 20 years ago), Steingraber is a proud “Faust” cultist, and these shows represent the culmination of a long dream.

“Like a lot of people, I became familiar with ‘Faust’ as a concept album, and it was in rotation pretty regularly, particularly on road trips. When I came to the Soraya in 2014, one of the things I programmed earliest in my tenure was an evening with Linda Ronstadt, and I asked her about ‘Faust.’ Right around that time, the City Center was doing the Encores performance in New York, which I could not attend. But it was then that I thought, look, we should try and do this at the Soraya, because first and foremost, it’s never been done in Los Angeles itself. We should bring this to Los Angeles, where Randy lives and is sort of on the city’s masthead in many ways for popular music and songwriting. So that journey for me, personally, is a 20-plus-year journey, and the journey for the Soraya is a 10-year journey.

“It was October 2016 that I met Michael Ross, who’s been Randy’s arranger and music director for a very long time and has been associated with ‘Faust’ since its inception, and we started dreaming about creating this LA concert. That was in 2016. We programmed it in the spring of 2020, but you know what happened then. I was sitting in our rehearsal studio auditioning performers for ‘Faust’ when my phone started blowing up about the governor shutting down California, just as these very optimistic, lovely performers were coming in, singing excerpts. But now, we finally had a chance to have a second attempt at it.”

A big part of the thrill for Steingraber is that “Randy Newman wrote songs primarily for Randy Newman to perform. Imagine being at the height of your songwriting powers and thinking to yourself, ‘Oh, now I get to write for other voices,’ like Linda Ronstadt’s, and those voices are portraying characters that advance a plot. You get to hear all these other flavors and tones and colors of Randy Newman through these other characters, and the thing that I think is unbelievable is that this is the first time he takes that on, and he crushes it. Nobody can hear ‘Gainesville, Florida’ without feeling and understanding that character, and it’s completely fresh. I can’t think of another song in a musical that has that level of kind of simplicity and yet depth. And it just destroys every time, even though I’ve heard ‘Gainesville, Florida’ probably a thousand times in my life, up to the point I was hearing it on our stage last night in rehearsal, live in front of me… It’s a window into a level of brilliance that I think is unmatched in contemporary songwriting.”

Ask Newman for his thoughts, and he says, “I was proud of it, and I enjoyed doing it all around” — which is a rare concession from someone who has often been candid in saying he usually doesn’t literally enjoy the labor he puts into songwriting or film scoring. “There was always something to work on with the songs,” he says, making it sound as if multi-tasking on the book as well as music kept the pleasure flowing. “It wasn’t a small thing to do at all. But if the song wasn’t going well, I could work on another aspect of it, which I liked that. And I liked people dancing to the music and singing – it was very different for me.”

As composing for the theater goes, “I think if my career had been in a different place, in New York, maybe that’s what I would’ve done. Well, I’m not sure,” he adds. Newman talks about having an appreciation more for the “Bye Bye Birdie” era of musical-comedies than what was contemporaneous to “Faust.” “That whole period there, I didn’t find what was going on very interesting, except for Sondheim. But things have improved from there, I think,” he says, citing “Book of Mormon” as “a genuinely fine show.”

Irony figures big into the Newman oeuvre — obviously — and there’s some serious irony in the fact that, while “Faust” as a musical never got the life it deserved, one song from the show, “Feels Like Home,” has become arguably his most enduringly successful song, at least outside the realm of the tunes he subsequently wrote for Disney films. At least it would be in competition with “Short People” and “I Love L.A.” for the crown of Newman’s most popular title… but unlike the aforementioned numbers, it’s a sincere love song.

Or is it? Therein lies a big rub. One of the ways “Feels Like Home” got turned into a standard was through an earnest recording Ronstadt did for one of her solo albums. But it was not sung by her on Newman’s 1995 concept album, although she did “Gainesville, Florida” and several other numbers on that. It was Raitt who first recorded it with Newman, and it was meant not to be taken seriously but, yes, ironically, since Bonnie was playing the role of a woman who tempts and tricks the devil into falling in love, not actually meaning any of the hauntingly beautiful words she’s singing.

“Well, it shows you how perverse my (approach) is,” Newman says, “that the only way I could write a straight-ahead love song was in the guise of the girl trying to trick the guy by expressing those sentiments. But I mean, I shut up about it now,” he adds, “because, you know, why take it away from people? They use it at weddings and everything, and there’s nothing in it that is superficially dishonest. You know what I mean? It is a straight love song, as it comes out. It seemed to work on the devil, and apparently people like it.”

Steingraber had his own conversation with Newman about the song. “Randy said, ‘Well, it’s funny — when I wrote “Feels Like Home,” I didn’t realize I was writing a love song, because I’m Randy Newman and I don’t write love songs.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I hate to break the news to you 30 years later, but you wrote a love song.’ And we did joke about how many weddings ‘Feels Like Home’ has been sung at. You know, he lives in the world of irony, satire, traumatic twist, call it what you will.” But then the director turned to the final ballad of the show, “Sandman’s Coming,” which — without giving too much away — could not be any darker, and will never be sung at a wedding. “I said, ‘Whether you intended that or not, by the time you get to the end of ‘Faust,’ you must have realized that you were shredding the audience’s hearts at the demise of poor Margaret. You must have. I mean, there’s not one iota of irony in that character, or in that song.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, that’s definitely true.’ You know, he admitted that even Randy Newman is capable of tugging at heartstrings.”

The music and moods of “Faust” are all over the map, from heaven to hell and back again, and from heartbreaking balladry to satirical rockers and gospel romps. There’s an argument to be made that “Faust” includes the funniest songs Newman ever wrote and the saddest. No wonder the musical wasn’t an easy sell, even as the score became known to the cognoscenti as a tone-skirting masterpiece.

If you’re headed to the Soroyan, don’t worry about taking too many hankies — the tragedy takes a back seat to the comedy, though the former is deeply felt in the few moments where Newman is really going for it. Ask Newman what he likes best about his score, and he singles out the opening number, a semi-gospel number in which James Taylor’s Lord has such a casual attitude toward the universe, Newman once compared this vision of God to a very leisurely Bing Crosby type. (Anyone who is threatened by irreverence should know ahead of time that this Lord is kind of a fun hang, but he doesn’t shy away from having a laugh over turning away Buddhists from the pearly gates.) Meanwhile, it’s the devil who is really the most sympathetic character in the show, or at least sort of the audience surrogate, as someone who questions God’s mysterious ways.

Says Newman, “Whenever they do God and the devil in ‘Faust’ by Goethe or the opera or anything, the devil is always the best part. There’s no doubt about it. You can’t keep him out of it. I always pictured it as if he can’t understand” how the Lord is staying ahead. “It’s like that ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch, if that rings a bell, with Dukakis and Bush. Bush was talking about points of light — you know, that kind of odd rambling Bush used to get into. And Dukakis said, ‘How is this guy beating me?’ And that’s what the devil wonders about God. You know, he’s got a clean desk; he isn’t even trying at all, and he’s just out playing golf. The devil doesn’t understand that, because he’s working so hard all the time. So, I like that.”

Back in 1995, when I interviewed Newman in La Jolla as the show was about to have its first (and almost only) production at that frequent Broadway launching point, the composer downplayed the more serious aspects of the show, which really do explore big questions about whether God exists and the nature of evil… amid a cavalcade of jokes. At the time, Newman told me he didn’t really see the show as having ambitions that much bigger than something like “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” He still doesn’t tend toward making big claims for it as a serious work, but he puts it into the context of all his songwriting, saying: “If there isn’t something else going on, it isn’t worth it for me. I’ve written comedic songs all my career, but if there isn’t something else going on, I like it less well. And I do think that that can break both ways a little bit, and you can say something besides the laugh.”

Yet he remains proud of its comic achievements. Was it ahead of its time? “Maybe. Maybe,” he allows. “I mean, I saw some shows that if you laughed three or four times, it was a successful evening, and there are more than that in ‘Faust,’ I think.”

Says the director: “I would hope two things happen at a minimum. I hope a lot more people are discovering ‘Faust’ because it’s available on streaming now, and it would be great to think that people add Faust on their Spotify playlist. That in itself would be a win, right?

“But the other thing is, Broadway is a completely different place than it was 30 years ago, when it was arguably a little bit struggling… Then you fast-forward 30 years, and really the pivotal moment, no doubt, has to be ‘Hamilton.’ And what ‘Hamilton’ has allowed audiences to do is to view the many musical forms and styles as all being contributors to and appropriate for, and in fact additive to, what we think of as Broadway musicals. And I think ‘Faust,’ in an era in which we’ve all come to know and love ‘Hamilton,’ has lands on a very different audience today than it would’ve 30 years ago.

“And to cast a major performer in the ‘Hamilton’ trajectory or history, in Javier Munoz, is because Javier just understands that. It’s just part of who he is, from ‘In the Heights’ first and ‘Hamilton’ second. We had a weekend of rehearsals in New York two weeks ago, and Javi just walks in and he embodies that instantaneously. There’s no hesitation of doing this big rousing gospel song at the start, and then boom, right into this very lyrical and very complex ballad that he sings, ‘Another Perfect Day.’

“So because of Spotify and streaming, and because of the world today vis-a-vis ‘Hamilton,’ I think the ground is much more laid and fertile for a new ‘Faust’ audience. And I hope we can help make that happen.”

Other cast members for the Saroyan production include Jordan Temple, a writer for “Abbott Elementary” who wrote and will deliver the program’s new narration; Ryan McCartan, who originated the lead role in “Heathers: The Musical” in L.A. and did “Wicked” and “Frozen” on Broadway, as the callow Henry Faust; Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, a classically trained vocalist who has done opera as well as musical theater, as Margaret; jazz singer Veronica Swift, who has recorded multiple albums for the Mack Avenue label, as Martha; and the ensemble called Tonality as the chorus, along with Angelica Rowell.

Newman is due for more celebration this fall as former L.A. Times music critic Robert Hilburn’s biography of the singer-songwriter will be published in October. Hilburn will be at the theater Saturday night, doing his weekly KCSN radio show from outside the auditorium, and pre-selling copies of his book.