THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2019 N C5Theater
One thing the team behind “The Lightning
Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” wants to
make abundantly clear: “Maybe you’ve
heard of a movie with a similar title,” the
show’s Twitter account warns. “We’re not
that.”
It is not “The Lightning Thief,” the 2010
film that Rotten Tomatoes granted a me-
diocre 49 percent — or the sequel that
scored even lower. The film that The New
York Times called “flat and mechanical”
with a title character who was “blandly ap-
pealing.” The film that plunged Rick Rior-
dan into despair.
“If I were intentionally trying to sabotage
this project,” Mr. Riordan wrote, “I doubt I
could have done a better job than this
script.” He would know. He wrote the best-
selling Percy Jackson series on which the
film was (loosely) based.
So when the Broadway musical — now in
previews for an Oct. 16 opening at the
Longacre Theater — started coming to-
gether several years later, the actors and
creative team got the message. They read
the books. They reread the books. When
faced with a question of what would happen
next, who would say what, how to make
something happen onstage — they went
back to the books.
“It’s been fun to see the transition from
the early, ‘Really? The movie didn’t work
and now they’re making a musical?’ to, ‘Oh,
this is made by people who love and under-
stand what we love and understand about
these stories,’ ” said Joe Tracz, who wrote
the musical’s script.
The film made the characters older and
lost the story’s adolescent spirit in the
process. The musical returns to the eccen-
tricity and silliness that got readers on
board in the first place.
For newcomers, the opening number lays
it out: The Greek gods are real. They have
kids. And being their kid — chased by mon-
sters, ignored by all-powerful parents run-
ning the universe, put into constant mortal
peril — tends to suck. (Angsty teenagers on
Broadway — sound familiar?)
Percy Jackson, a son of Poseidon, is one of
those kids. Having a learning disability and
being kicked out of six schools, as it turns
out, are side effects of his mind being hard-
wired for battle and reading ancient Greek.
He winds up at Camp Half-Blood, a safe-
haven/summer-camp for children of absen-
tee deities, and embarks on a cross-country
quest with the tough, brainy Annabeth and
his goat-legged satyr pal, Grover, to recover
Zeus’s stolen lightning bolt and save his
mortal mom.
Social media-fueled teen musicals re-
main a gamble on the big stage of Broad-
way. “Be More Chill” — also written by Mr.
Tracz and directed by Stephen Brackett —
closed after several months, while “Dear
Evan Hansen” has maintained its popular-
ity for nearly three years.
“The Lightning Thief” played to just over
half capacity last week, but the commit-
ment to the original story seems to be pay-
ing off with fans. Wherever the show goes, a
mini Comic Con of Percy Jackson fans fol-
lows, usually clad in the story’s orange
Camp Half-Blood T-shirts — or, for at least
one performance, homemade goat legs.
Mr. Riordan is known to avoid seeing ad-
aptations of his work, and he doesn’t plan to
visit the Longacre during the musical’s run,
his publicist said. But his fans — from mid-
dle schoolers picking up the books for the
first time to millennials who still reread the
young adult novels as not-so-young adults
— will find plenty that registers as familiar.
The first and last lines Percy has in the
book are also the first and last lyrics he
sings onstage, and our introduction to
Annabeth — “You drool when you sleep,”
she tells Percy — remains the same. Desti-
nations will be familiar, whether a Las Ve-
gas hotel where time stands still or the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, where Percy
faces his first monster on a school field trip.
There are also smaller hints, Easter eggs
hidden onstage for the eagle-eyed. Mr. D,
for example — the wine god Dionysus,
whose punishment from Zeus in the novel
includes an alcohol-free century — takes
enraged swigs of a Diet Coke, a small but
notable nod to the source material.
Fidelity to the source has been a priority
from the start, but it hasn’t always been
easy — especially as Mr. Tracz and the com-
poser, Rob Rokicki, first packed a 375-page
novel into the initial one-hour production
with TheaterWorksUSA in 2014.
The show expanded to a full, two-act mu-
sical for a brief run Off Broadway in 2017; it
then toured the country before returning,
this time on Broadway, last month. (It is
scheduled to play through Jan. 5, which in-
cludes the lucrative holiday season.)
Through the show’s evolution, the min-
imalistic D.I.Y. aesthetic — a necessity in
the early stages, Mr. Brackett said — has re-
mained intact. In the book, Percy’s sea-god
parentage lets him unleash a stream of toi-
let water to wallop a rival. But onstage,
pressurized waterworks aren’t easy to
come by — so Percy pelts her with a speed-
ily unraveling, leaf-blower-propelled roll of
toilet paper instead.
“It’s really capitalizing on having the au-
dience use their imagination to fill in the
blanks in the storytelling, which is one of
the things that I thought was so beautiful
about reading the novel,” Mr. Brackett said.
For fans still feeling burned by the movie,
that spirit is a reassurance — a restoration
of what the film lost. A 2014 review of the
one-hour version in The New York Times
said that the show struck “a tone that’s
sassy though not snarky, and energetic
without being hectic.”
Chris McCarrell, who plays Percy, said
the stage script refused to let him or the
other actors take themselves too seriously,
which is appropriate. “The magic of those
books is the tone that does not waver the
whole time,” he said. “This is a mess of a 12-
year-old trying to figure out what is happen-
ing, which I love. And I try to keep that alive
in the musical, which is pretty easy to do.”
The cardinal rule for the cast? “Don’t
show Stephen something if you don’t want
to put it in the show,” said Kristin Stokes,
who has played Annabeth since the show’s
inception.
“Trust me,” said Jorrel Javier, who plays
both Grover and Mr. D. “If the choice that
you made just happened to coincide with his
vision, then sometimes you end up having
to kick your leg to your face eight times a
week.”Lightning Bolts
Over Broadway
The creators of the Percy
Jackson musical say they won’t
make the movies’ mistakes.
By NANCY COLEMANAbove, a scene from “The
Lightning Thief: The Percy
Jackson Musical” (fighting
demon math teachers on a bus)
at the Longacre Theater. Left,
Chris McCarrell, left, Kristin
Stokes and Jorrel Javier,
members of the play’s cast.RACHEL PAPO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAMY LOMBARD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES‘The magic of those
books is the tone that
does not waver.’
Describing an interview with Gary Busey is
nearly impossible. On one hand, the experi-
ence is exactly what you might think: fre-
netic, unfocused, the works. His sentences
are sprinkled with what he calls
“Buseyisms”: acronyms he’s spelled out for
decades that hint at his philosophy on life.
B.I.B.L.E., for example, is “Basic Instruc-
tions Before Leaving Earth,” and part of the
title of his memoir.
On the other hand, Mr. Busey, 75, still
manages to surprise. He came by The New
York Times recently to discuss “Only Hu-
man,” a new Off Broadway musical in which
Mr. Busey plays the role of God. The show,
which begins previews on Tuesday and
opens on Oct. 21 at Theater at St. Clement’s
in Manhattan, is a contemporary workplace
comedy featuring a showdown between Je-
sus and Lucifer, who battle over their new
creation: Earth.
While this may seem like an odd fit, Mr.
Busey said he hadn’t been as excited about
a part since his Oscar-nominated title role
in “The Buddy Holly Story” in 1978. And
why not? He has been a musician for dec-
ades and counts several A-list musicians as
friends, including Bonnie Raitt.
But Mr. Busey, who studied drama at Ok-
lahoma State University, fell into acting and
became a mainstay in television and film.
Substance abuse and a serious motorcycle
accident in 1988 derailed his life and career.
In the past 20 years, he’s received more
attention for eccentric appearances on re-
ality television shows like “Celebrity Ap-
prentice” and “Celebrity Rehab With Dr.
Drew.” In 2016, he did a two-week stint in the
Off Broadway murder mystery “Perfect
Crime.”Mr. Busey discussed the new show and,
really, whatever else he wanted, alongside
his fiancée, Steffanie Sampson. This inter-
view has been edited for length and clarity.You’ve played so many roles in film and
television. Why does God in particular hold
such meaning for you?
O.K. On Dec. 4, 1988, I went off a Harley-Da-
vidson without a helmet. Hit my skull on the
curb, split my skull off the side, knocked a
hole thatbig, and I passed away after brain
surgery and went to the other side. Thespiritual realm. The supernatural, and was
surrounded by angels. Angels were big
balls of light. Not quite as big as a volleyball.
They’re moving. They’re breathing.
They’re shining. They’re all different colors.
They were all around my essence.
And three of the angels —woop, woop,
woop— came up to me, and I felt love, pro-
tection and trust like I have never felt on
Earth. One of them talked to me in an an-
drogynous voice and said: “What you’re do-
ing is wonderful. You’re going in a great di-
rection. But because of your responsibility
to mankind, you need to look for help in the
spiritual realm. You may come with us now,
or you may return to your body and contin-
ue to your destiny. It’s your choice.”Do you feel that you were destined for this
role?
Dustin Hoffman?No, sorry. Destined.
I’m just kidding. I don’t know, but yes. Yes! I
do know. Yes. Of course, yes. What hap-
pened, Jesse Murphy, the producer, he saw
my book cover, and he saw the halo over my
head. He said: “Ah ha! I found God.”
Is doing theater fun for you?
If you can’t enjoy something, why do it? I
enjoy everything in life. My motto is giving
love with fun. And the word fun — F.U.N. —
stands for Finally Understanding Nothing.
And that’s fine.Give me a sense of how spiritual you are. Do
you believe in God?
It’s not believing. It’s understanding the
power that is here. The energy of the cre-
ator lives in its essential point of existence.
That’s where all life begins. And all life be-
gins before time began. It’s a beautiful flowof loving energy that creates wonderful and
beautiful things.You live in Malibu. Do you like New York?
I loveNew York. Oh my gosh. I’ve been all
around the world making movies and doing
tours. This city is the city that never sleeps.
When it does, it sleeps with its eyes open be-
cause you don’t know it’s asleep when it is.What’s the first thing you do when you wake
up in the morning?
I have some vitamins. Then I stretch. I put
on a hearing aid. Put on my watch. This
morning, I did great. You’ll be very happy to
hear this. I took a shower. I got scrubbed
down [points to Ms. Sampson]. Washed my
own hair. All because I have a leader in my
house that wears a dress and pants. Right
there, Steffanie Sampson Busey.What haven’t you done yet that you’d like to
try?
Music. Producing and write. Do music with
my friends. Release it. And also direct a
movie. Me in it. Jake in it. My 48-year-old
son who is doing great. Has been since he’s- He played my son in “Straight Time” with
Dustin Hoffman. No acting required.
Would you like to do more theater?
Oh, yes. That’s how I started. I was playing
football in high school, starting center. I was
also very funny. Football team got together
and said, “Busey, go out for the play.” I said:
“What? I’m not doing that, man. I’d be a
sissy.” “No, you’re funny. We dare you to go
out for the play.” So I went out for the play. It
was “South Pacific.” I got a part. People
laughed at me. I loved it.
Are you nervous for previews?
The word nervous is not in my vocabulary.
Gary Busey Is Playing God. Seriously.
The actor, 75, is in
an Off Broadway
show called ‘Only
Human.’
By SOPAN DEBA Buseyism: The word fun — F.U.N. — stands
for Finally Understanding Nothing.CHRIS MAGGIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES