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[0:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: And as it pertains to the American Dream, I do think this musical gets to something that we quite literally see today, which is that we've declared ourselves a land of opportunity, that everyone has the right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and I guess a gun, which makes for a dangerous recipe when the systems in place don't seem to be making those rights a reality. Welcome, everybody, to A Musical Theatre Podcast where we discuss the cultural and emotional impact of some of our favorite musicals in theatre history. My name is Jeffrey Scott Parsons. You can call me Jeff. Today, we're bringing you a bonus fourth and final episode in our American Dream miniseries on A Musical Theatre Podcast.

I have really enjoyed looking at these shows with such wonderful guests. A reminder that these have all been listener requests. So we started out with Rags, the musical Rags, followed that up with 1776 and Barnum, and today we are discussing the musical Bonnie and Clyde, which, like I said, was a listener request from a few of you, including Austin, who wrote in and said, quote, I was lucky enough to perform this show in college and was surprised to find that it was fast becoming one of the most produced shows for community theaters in spite of its lackluster Broadway run, but I also knew that it had quite the passionate fan base. Doing the show myself, I could absolutely see why people love the music so much, and I was equal parts thrilled and terrified to be singing those songs each night.

Jeremy Jordan is an intimidating vocalist. I would be so interested to hear your opinions on the show, and I'm fascinated by any insight you or a guest could bring to the production process and exactly what happened along the way that led to this show closing so soon. Unquote. Well, Austin, me thinks this episode might provide you with a few insights you've been looking for. Ivan Menchell wrote the book. He wrote the book, you guys, for Bonnie and Clyde and was also represented on Broadway with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He's worked on many TV shows and films you probably know and love, including The Nanny, Phil of the Future, for those of us millennials. Just to name a few. Everyone, please, please welcome someone who knows Bonnie and Clyde very well. The great Ivan Menchell. Yay!

[2:26] Ivan Menchell: Hi, nice to be here. Nice to meet you.

[2:29] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: So grateful you're here. We're going to dive right in because I know you're a busy man. Can you talk to me a little bit about why you think this story has connected with audiences for so long, beginning literally in the newspapers as it was happening? Of course, then when the movie came out with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway led to a whole other wave of interest, including fashions. And then, of course, like our listener Austin said, there's an incredibly passionate fan base around the musical that you all created. What draws people to this story, maybe in particular people in the United States?

[3:09] Ivan Menchell: Well, I think first of all, anytime that there's a crime committed anywhere in the world, and it's a male and female, they're always referencing Bonnie and Clyde. I think the allure has been the story of two kids who really had very little hope growing up in poverty, having maybe not the best role models and looking for a way out. And you mix that with a little sociopathy and you've got the story. I don't know if most people realize that they were about 18 when they met and 23 when they died and killed 14 people in between. So that's what they did instead of going to college. What an education.

[4:00] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Exactly. In their day, they were as notorious for sharing motel rooms together as they were for anything else that they did.

[4:06] Ivan Menchell: Well, it really feels like it taps into the taboos that are most inflammatory for an audience, which is violence and sex, right? You got this unmarried couple, great looking kids, and I don't know why, but sex and violence is always going to be something that really fans the flame of public interest.

[4:23] Ivan Menchell: Yeah. And with this most recent production, and even in the West End, I've always stressed that the two things that were most important to me were their ages that they cast as young as possible. It's a big difference when you see somebody who looks in their late teens and 20s doing all this stuff than somebody who looks closer to 30. If you ever see a regional production of West Side Story and they're in their 30s, you're like, really? You fell in love across the gym? So the hormones, the rage, the dreams, the anger, all that youthful energy is such a part of the story. And the other thing I've always felt is that it's more about sex than it is violence. The violence happens, but at least in this story, in this version, it's their deep, deep need to get out of the poverty they were in and their attraction to each other. And they just brought it out in each other.

[5:24] Ivan Menchell: Do you know the movie Heavenly Creatures? Yes, with Kate Winslet.

[5:28] Ivan Menchell: It's that kind of thing where at the end of it, their sentence was that they could never be together because separately they were okay, but together they were just lethal. With Bonnie and Clyde, certainly Clyde was lethal on his own, but I think they both brought out the best or the worst in each other. It's interesting as you're talking, I'm seeing in my mind how the "and" perhaps is maybe one of the most important parts of the title. It's them together, right? You've already mentioned West Side Story, which means that you're a musical theater guy, like maybe deep down?

[6:01] Ivan Menchell: Yeah, I guess.

[6:07] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: How did you get involved in this then? In Bonnie and Clyde?

[6:11] Ivan Menchell: Yeah, because obviously you were doing a lot of TV film. Was it the goal to get into theater?

[6:18] Ivan Menchell: Well, my origin is theater. Going back further than that, it was standup. My dad was a standup comic, my mother a singer. So, I started performing when I was two. I started writing comedy material when I was like 12. And so, that was my background. And then I was at SUNY Purchase, where I created the drama writing department, because it was a performing arts school. Then I got a Fulbright for playwriting, and I went to Israel for a year. And then I went to Yale Drama School. So, theater was always my background. TV was sort of a departure from that. And I actually wrote Bonnie and Clyde while doing Phil of the Future and the Jonas Brothers, funnily enough. But I've always loved musical theater.

I can't remember, but now one of my dearest friends, Jeff Calhoun, and I had hooked up, and we were looking for something to do together. And oh, I know what it was. I had done an adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper. And Jeff and I worked on that for a bit. And then we were looking for something else to do, and Frank Wildhorn had approached Jeff. He had met him as a new director in his life. And fell in love with Jeff and said, you know, it's Frank. So he said, here's 20 musicals I'm working on. Are you interested in any of those?

[7:37] Ivan Menchell: He is prolific. Very prolific, that guy.

[7:40] Ivan Menchell: Give him a weekend, he'll give you a musical. And yeah, he's amazing. And so, Jeff went through a bunch of material. One of the things he had was a song cycle that he had done. I don't know if you know about this. So, he came up with the idea of doing a song cycle about the world's greatest relationships. It could be Adam and Eve, it was Abbott and Costello, it was Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde. And then he approached different lyricists and said, let's write a couple of songs for each one of these. So he approached Don Black on the Bonnie and Clyde, and they wrote, I think, three songs. And that's, you know, that's what he had. And then Jeff loved those three songs. I think it was The World Will Remember Us, You Could Do Better Than Me, which is what it was originally.

And I turned it into the duet of You Could Do Better Than Him. And I can't remember what else. But I heard the songs, and I thought they were amazing. And Jeff said, you want to do this? And I said, absolutely not. You know, it's just not in my wheelhouse. I said, I can write Jews on a shopping spree. I can't write Gentiles on a shooting spree.

[8:49] Ivan Menchell: Okay, so you are the child of a stand-up comedian.

[8:54] Ivan Menchell: He said, you know what, if you can write that, you can write anything. And I said, well, you know, I'll give it a try. So I did some research, and it turned out that everybody they pointed a gun at wrote a book. And so there was no shortage of material. And, you know, I knew the movie, but the movie was more about its stars than it was about Bonnie and Clyde. And it was all, you know, it was very much of its era where everything was seen.

[9:20] Ivan Menchell: Yeah, it was definitely a vibe. It was definitely seen through a sexual lens, as was every story told at that time. And I wasn't interested in that. And I certainly wasn't interested in putting action and car chases on stage. And then I came across a book that Bonnie's mother and Clyde's sister, or maybe I think that's what it was, wrote together, which is really odd. And it was about the two of them. And in it were a lot of their letters when Clyde was in prison, back and forth to each other. And that's when I finally thought, oh, I could see this, I get it. And I realized what I wanted to do was focus on all the times in between the holdups, what made them who they were, you know, which is why the show started with them at 10 years old. How did they get there? One of the wonderful lines that really guided me was Clyde's mother, who said that poverty made Clyde a criminal, prison made him a murderer.

[10:25] Ivan Menchell: And that line, good line. And, you know, and it's where we are in a lot of ways today. Now, obviously, poverty alone doesn't make you anything. But combine that with desperation, and again, some sociopathy, and you've got the perfect storm for what happened.

[10:45] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: That's fascinating. And as it pertains to the American dream, I do think this musical gets to something that we quite literally see today, which is that we've declared ourselves a land of opportunity that everyone has the right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and I guess a gun, which makes for a dangerous recipe when the systems in place don't seem to be making those rights a reality. Now, that being said, nobody was forcing Bonnie and Clyde to kill people any more than anyone else recently was forcing presidential assassinations, political murder, CEO murders. So please know, I don't think you gain life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness by destroying that for other people. Like that doesn't align with the original intentions either.

By the way, I'm just so happy you're here. I love talking to writers because you bring just so much great stuff to the table. Let's talk about some of your collaborators and bring a little context there. Frank Wildhorn, we've discussed him on our Jekyll and Hyde episode, which I mean, of course, is one of his biggest smash hits and was his introduction to Broadway. And yet, poor Broadway doesn't love him, regardless of how big his hits are or how terrible his show is or how great his show is. It just feels like the Broadway community, not a huge fan of Frank Wildhorn. That's always been.

[12:11] Ivan Menchell: The message that has come back to me and one of the big reasons why people have surmised that Bonnie & Clyde wasn't a huge hit when it appeared on Broadway. Why is that? I don't really know, but it can definitely be linked back to its premiere on Broadway when Jekyll & Hyde didn't get great reviews. It was kind of made fun of and yet was this huge hit that was long running. Not only was it long running, but then he had a second show open and close and open and close and open and close in The Scarlet Pimpernel. And then while that is going through its great journey, which I'd love to do an episode about, the Civil War opened. So this guy who had kind of been seen as an outsider had three shows on Broadway at the same time in the late, late 90s. It just felt like even though audiences loved him, loved his music, he really has just this incredibly deep well full of beautiful and accessible music.

It just always felt like the theater community wasn't really cheering for him very much. Now, I'm not asking you to comment on it, but do you want to comment? Does that feel accurate? The guy people love to hate kind of thing?

[13:35] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah, a little bit, right? Obviously not true worldwide. You know, I think had Frank arrived on the scene today, it would be different. Because today, we're much more embracing of the pop world. Back then, he had Whitney Houston's greatest hit, Spooky Pocky Pops. All of that. And maybe at that time, there was this, you know, you can't bring that over into our world. We're different from that. Well, now, the biggest shows that we have are so pop influenced. Pass it to Paul. All of it. So I think it would be different.

[14:14] Ivan Menchell: It does feel like Frank Wildhorn laid the groundwork for something like Ann Juliet to be actually respected.

[14:22] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah, yeah. And that was his world. That's still what he is attracted to. He loves that sound. He loves those voices. And then when you get somebody like a Jeremy Jordan, who can live in both worlds, like every note is equally as theater as it is pop. So I don't know. I'm not in their heads. I don't know. Bonnie and Clyde's failure on Broadway was due to a number of things. We had no stars. Remember, this was the first role that Jeremy had created, the first role that Laura had created.

[15:03] Ivan Menchell: His pre-newsies. Yeah. And so we had no names. We had no advance. There were issues with our producers financially. And so unless we sold, you know, like 80 percent of the house right out of the gate, we were never we never had a chance. And there's no way you're going to do that. You need time. You know, you need word of mouth to build. If you don't have the stars, if you don't have the reason for people to buy a ticket right away or in advance, even the word of mouth was great. You know, it was it was heartbreaking. You know, I remember Lauren, Jeremy going around putting up wanted audience posters on subways. You know, everybody was fighting so hard. But, you know, listen, it's it's the way it goes.

We like to think it's not like any other business because there's art involved, but it's still a business and the funds aren't there. If it's not, you know, managed properly, if there's not the advance, if there isn't the money for publicity, it's very hard for a show to succeed.

[16:06] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: It feels, however, that audiences always enjoyed it when it was in New York. I remember reading a quote from Jeff Calhoun where he's like, I've never had a show close that was playing like a hit with audiences. Can you tell me a little bit about the pre-Broadway? Because you started out in San Diego. Shout out. By the way, listeners, you may not know I live in San Diego now. You started out here and then went to Florida, right? How different was the show then? Because it's so different. It's had many revisions and continues to have many revisions.

[16:39] Ivan Menchell: Well, OK, so in La Jolla was, you know, Chris, God bless Chris. You know, he he bought it in the room like, you know, we did a reading in New York and and people were very excited about it. And Chris wanted it in La Jolla. Chris Ashley. And we were beyond thrilled to have that. And it's an incredible theater. We did it there and it did well. I would say mixed to positive reviews. Audiences loved it. It was good. And then it wasn't ready. So there was probably changed a third to half score. Oh, wow. Oh, I'd say that Frank wrote a good 50 or more songs for this show over the course of the time as we but I don't think that's unusual, you know, for maybe not for shows, certainly not, you know, or unfortunately working with me.

If I throw it out, if I was talented enough to get it all right the first time, they probably wouldn't have to write so much. Oh, but I I realized there were two key, key moments missing from the show in La Jolla. La Jolla had the best information of any show that has ever been or will ever be. Act one ended with Clyde's first killing. Well, what I thought was Clyde's first killing. It was a cop in a grocery store. And so that one literally ended with a shootout. The cop goes down, Clyde standing over the body. That's the end of the act. Clyde runs off and the cop stays there and just bleeds all throughout intermission. He had a big bladder bag under his arm that he would gently squeeze that you couldn't see and a pool of blood would just get bigger and bigger and bigger around him.

It was so sensational. Concessions didn't love it because, you know, half the audience just stayed there going, I can't believe what I'm seeing. And then act two picked up in real time with the cops arriving on the scene. Twenty minutes later, it was fantastic. It was so cool. But from a storytelling standpoint, I had missed two things that were super important. One was that Bonnie broke him out of jail. And that's a huge thing for a straight A student, good girl working at a diner to go from that to smuggling a gun to her lover in prison so he could bust out. And so I was like, all right, well, obviously, that's a huge turning point that shouldn't happen offstage. And then also Clyde getting raped, because that was his first kill.

And it's a very different story when you see Clyde Barrow as a really young guy, as a victim first killing somebody who was repeatedly raping him in a really, really hard prison designed for really hardened criminals, where he was serving a sentence that was five, six times longer than it should have been to set an example. So you know, he was he had no way out. He's serving 16 years for really just like small theft stuff, you know, armed robbery, but stuff he would have gotten a couple of years for in other circumstances. And I thought, Okay, well, that shouldn't happen offstage either. Because those are both turning points in both their lives, right? There's no turning back once he kills the guy in prison, no turning back.

And once she smuggles a gun in. So for Sarasota, which was the next production a year later, those were in in the show, I moved Clyde killing his first cop or his first kill outside of prison to act two. So act one really focused on the journey, how they got there, him being incarcerated, killing the guy who raped him, and then of course, ending with Bonnie breaking him out. And the two of them feeling like they've got the whole world, you know, ahead of them.

[20:36] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Right, you know, and sort of, you know, the traditional end of act one is, you know, your lead character gets what they think they want. Right? And the back to they get what they actually need. That's what they wanted. That's what they thought they got. She's on her way to Hollywood, he's on his way to become Al Capone. And again, I think that taps into very much what's going on today, you know, is who our kids are, are idolizing, you know, I mean, we have, I mean, we've denigrated so far now, when you look at, you look at, you know, whether it's the president, when you look at the government, you look at how people are behaving, whatever side you're on, you can't argue that political discourse has just become hideous, you know, it's like, never before did you have to turn the news off so that a child couldn't hear it, because it was going to be profane and awful behavior.

And, and that was just, you know, Congress. So, you know, she worshipped Clara Bow. And that is real, because right at the beginning of the show, you set up these two kids that honestly, in a very American way, have these big celebrities that they're looking up to, you know, aspirationally, certainly we're in the Great Depression, not only the Great Depression, we're in the Dust Bowl, you know, I'm in the middle of a production of Annie right now. And so the kids are learning about the Great Depression, but the New York version of that in the Midwest, in the Texas area, there's this whole other awful situation, which is climate, the crops have maybe very similar to Broadway, due to both mismanagement and, and climate have dried up. And so not only is there a Great Depression, there's a great drought. That's where we learned about crop rotation.

[22:25] Ivan Menchell: Yeah, exactly. You know, was one of the things that came out of that. But yeah, it was, you know, it was terrible. And, you know, somebody like Clyde lived in a tent for three years, you know, under an overpass. And the show doesn't condone or excuse any of this, it just lays it out there, and shows what can happen, what did happen, what is happening. And I think that makes it, you know, listen, social media now is, you know, everybody wants to be Twitter famous, and you know, and TikTok famous, and people want fame. It's interesting, we went from like, in my generation, if you ask kids what they wanted to be, it would be astronaut, rock star, you know, that kind of stuff. Now it's just famous.

And it's like, well, what do you want to do to become famous? And they kind of bypass that. They just want to be famous. Like it doesn't matter. You know, fame is identity and who you are. I mean, kids today have very often a brand before they have an identity. That's terrifying, isn't it?

[23:21] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Very true, though, you know, they have a presence, they have an image on social media, has nothing to do with who they are, they still don't know who they are, but they 100% know who that brand is. And so I think it taps into all of that. And, and so we did that for Sarasota. And then I don't remember specifically what the changes were from Sarasota to Broadway. But they were not as big as the changes from La Jolla to Sarasota. And then we did the Broadway version. And then that stuck. And that's been the version that's what MTI licenses.

[24:03] Ivan Menchell: Then we went to the West End, which was four years ago. You know, and this is what's incredible about theater as opposed to film and television is, you know, you do have the opportunity to go back in. It is a living thing. Not only does every production reinterpret the material in its own way, but the writers have an opportunity to go in. There's very, there's, there's a lot of shows out there when you go to MTI that there's two versions of, because they did the Broadway version.

[24:22] Ivan Menchell: In the creative process, there is this danger of being too precious with your own material. Where's that line for you in terms of let it lie, don't mess with it anymore, let it be what it's going to be, and let's actually be totally okay with throwing things out and starting over again?

[24:52] Ivan Menchell: I'm always open to re-examining. As they say, musicals are never finished, they're abandoned. It's just however much time you have, that's how much time you work on it. I don't know other writers if they feel like, oh my god, this is absolutely perfect, I don't ever want it to change. I don't know that I would ever feel that way if I have an opportunity to go back into something. I'm doing it now with Death Note, which we launched 10 years ago, and going back in and reworking that. With this version of Bonnie & Clyde, this will be the end. And again, the Broadway one, we left it for many years. It did fine. But if I have the opportunity, and Frank always teases me about it, I will just constantly rewrite. Even if it's down to syllables, or these words could be reversed and the line just sounds better. There's always something that I will go in and find to fool around with.

[25:22] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Well, it seems like someone as prolific as Frank Wildhorn is also a good collaborator in that way, because he has no problem writing a new song if you want it.

[25:52] Ivan Menchell: No, he's great. And we've done four shows together.

[26:22] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Have you done four?

[26:52] Ivan Menchell: Yeah. Bonnie & Clyde, Death Note, Mata Hari, and Excalibur.

[27:22] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I didn't know you'd done those last two. How cool.

[27:24] Ivan Menchell: Yeah.

[27:46] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Can we talk a little bit about Don Black? Because he is somebody who really came on, I think, everyone's radar with Andrew Lloyd Webber. He wrote the lyrics for Song and Dance, one of my all-time favorite breakup songs, Tell Me on a Sunday. He also contributed to Sunset Boulevard with Christopher Hampton, a really interesting lyricist who is able to do a lot with pop music.

[28:15] Ivan Menchell: I think sometimes we think that a pop song can't really drive a moment forward dramatically because traditionally it has just been like an express yourself in the moment type experience. But he really finds interesting ways to get a second verse going dramatically. Any thoughts on Mr. Black?

[28:26] Ivan Menchell: I loved working with Don. I would do my walks with Don every morning. I was in LA, he was in London. I would take my dog out for a walk and we would talk through the show, talk through moments, through song moments. He was incredible. And then he'd write something and then I'd give him a couple of notes like, no, that's not American, that's more British. But he really got the language, the lingo. He really got into them and loved writing them. Very collaborative.

[29:01] Ivan Menchell: Talk about rewriting. So Dying Ain't So Bad, we had the melody, which we loved, but it was two other songs before it was Dying Ain't So Bad. You can't turn back now and I don't know the way. And then it was Dying Ain't So Bad. And a lot of lyricists, it's very hard to write a lyric to a song to a melody and then throw it out and write another one.

[29:23] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah.

[29:30] Ivan Menchell: Let alone to do that three times. So.

[29:35] Ivan Menchell: And then end up with the third one, not just going back to the first one was the best of these. And even in that, realizing that, you know what, which is unusual, let's start with the chorus, which that song does. You know, they were both were so open to any ideas, you know, in the early productions, the cops had songs and then it was later on that I took out all of that and thought, you know what, we're not going to have singing lawmen. But they were wonderful to work with. Very supportive. You know, I was, you know, as David Zippel said, I was the only one I never heard of. And I had to sell myself when Jeff said to me, do you want to do this? And I came on board. I had to fly to New York and I had to meet with Frank and convince him to let me do it.

And I told him my take on it. And he was 100 percent behind me. Then I had to fly to London. I mean, this is all on my own dime. I'm like, oh, my gosh. And then Don, I met with him and he totally loved the take. And, yeah, I mean, you know, there's the only place where you spend all of this money to get a job you're then not paid to do. I mean, all of that was to get to have the right to work on spec and to spend a year writing a show and then hope something happens, you know, it's but that's really what I've done most of my career. I mean, I've had a lot of commissions, but, you know, some of the best things and my favorite things are things that, you know, you just you just do because you have to because you just go, this is I get this. I want to write this. I need to write this. And I'm doing that a new one with Jeff now called Elephant Shoes. And we open in June at Two River.

[33:18] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Incredible. Congratulations.

[33:20] Ivan Menchell: Oh, thank you. Yeah, very, very excited. It's going to be make it will hopefully be groundbreaking. Well, it will be groundbreaking. It will hopefully make Broadway history as it will be the first musical with a deaf character as the lead.

[33:32] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow.

[33:33] Ivan Menchell: Not a deaf actor playing a character and actually a deaf character.

[33:38] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Wow. I love that.

[33:40] Ivan Menchell: It's going to be it's very cool. It's a it's an adaptation, a loose adaptation of Cyrano.

[33:46] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Okay, I'm starting to see how yes, yes, starting to see that. That's really cool. Okay, well, we'll definitely be on the lookout for it. With the time that we have left, I would love there. There are just some key moments in the show that I would love to tell you about and also hear your reflections on and if you have any favorite moments by all means, let me know.

[34:06] Ivan Menchell: Right at the beginning of the show, we talked about how these two characters are looking for a way to get out of the place that they're in and aspirationally they look to famous people like Al Capone and Billy the Kid and Clara Bow in the films. And the lyric that pops out to me almost immediately is bang bang you're dead. And that feels like an additional ingredient that really makes this story American in a way and I'm not anti-gun and I have a lot of family who have who are gun owners and go to the shooting ranges and everything. But I'm not sure that a lot of people internationally play cops and robbers and have toy guns as much as we do here in this in this country. And to think of like a young Clyde playing bang bang you're dead is is confronting.

[35:02] Ivan Menchell: Yeah, you know, it's well, the show exists very differently in London than it does in New York. In London, it's a fantasy; in New York, it's reality.

[35:09] Ivan Menchell: So that's interesting. The bang bang you're dead. You know, it all starts. It starts with words and pointing a finger. And it goes from there. And again, his idols were Jesse James and Al Capone. You know, we had it with I forget the name of that guy who killed the health insurance. Luigi.

[35:27] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Right.

[35:28] Ivan Menchell: You know, I mean, people idolizing him, people thinking he's a hero. I mean, that's exactly what we're talking about. He's also attractive, which once again plays into your whole thing about it being just as much about sex as it does violence. It feels like since Luigi has a six pack, then we're like, oh, he's got some ideas. Maybe we should listen to this guy. As we see these two characters coming from their places in life and coming together to become the team that we know them to be.

[35:57] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I got to say, one of my favorite scenes in the whole show. It's the scene where can I have a dance happens by the car when she sings for him. I feel like every couple needs a great bench scene, if you will, right? In which we see chemistry. We see evidence of what's going to keep them together through all of the craziness that's about to ensue. That's got to be fun to write. And it's got to be fun when you feel like you nailed it.

[36:21] Ivan Menchell: It really was. It's I love that scene. First of all, it's her poetry that's used in the show. That is her poetry. She reads.

[36:33] Ivan Menchell: So fun all of it and I do love that moment because it's about song. It's about her poetry. It's romantic. It's all the things that are gonna start to fade away as their relationship goes on. And it's the fantasy. I think probably my favorite scene is the one after that where they're in Buck's apartment and Blanche and the four of them. He slaps her across the face and then she slaps him. She slaps him right back. Don't you ever! I love that moment because you're like, okay, they're meant to be together. Yeah, absolutely meant to be together. Just for fun, I do want to read that poem in the scene because it's both a great little window into Bonnie as a person and it also becomes a source of comedy in the scene because it's very triggering to Mr. Clyde.

Billy rode on a pinto horse, Billy the Kid. I mean, and he met Clyde Barrow riding in a little gray machine. Billy said to the Barrow boy, "Is this the way you ride in a car that does its 90 per machine guns at each side? I only had my pinto horse and my six gun tried and true. I could shoot, but they got me, and someday they will get you."

[38:03] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Now Bonnie was married, correct?

[38:03] Ivan Menchell: Yeah, and he just wasn't interested. Yeah, just bad husband, just faded away. You know, wasn't divorced, went to prison. You know, just a bad marriage.

[38:10] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: So then how old was she when she got married that first time?

[38:18] Ivan Menchell: I mean, she had to have been like 16, 17. Crazy. Yeah.

[38:26] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: It's interesting also how, and I don't know, the average life expectancy then was mid-50s.

[38:33] Ivan Menchell: Of course, of course. So, and that's not that long ago.

[38:42] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah, that's a great point. The thing that interests me though, and I don't know if you made this consciously, it does seem like in many ways Clyde, maybe from his sociopathic tendencies, is testing her a little bit in terms of what she's willing to lie about. And when he finds out that she is married and that she's still interested in him, I gotta feel like that's a sign for him of like, oh, maybe she's a good match for me because she's not as, I don't want to say honest, but as pure maybe as she may seem.

[39:16] Ivan Menchell: Yeah, I think he definitely could see a darker side to her.

[39:20] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: So then you said you took us through the kind of the first act. One of the other big characters is Ted, who kind of becomes this love triangle. How much in real life was that?

[39:35] Ivan Menchell: There was one thing, like I said, everybody wrote a book. He wrote a book and started out as a postal worker. And there was just one line in his book about how he went to the American diner and Bonnie was the waitress. Hmm, and I can't remember what the line was, but it was clear to me in that line that he was attracted to her. And so from that, I kind of extrapolated the story and thought, you know, it was interesting because she had a choice. She had a choice of two very different kinds of men, two very different kinds of lives. And had she, you know, it's the sliding doors, right? Had you gone left instead of right, it would have been entirely different. Not only did she not go down that road, but she actively pushed it away.

[40:20] Ivan Menchell: Mm-hmm, and I think that's, you know, it taps into the good girl, bad boy scenario, which is very common until, you know, hopefully most realize that, you know, the bad boy was fun, but not someone I want to be the father of my kids who will probably end up in jail.

[40:38] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah, exactly. The B couple in the show, if we want to talk about in terms of traditional musical theater, is Buck and Blanche. Buck, who is Clyde's brother, and Blanche, who is his wife, provide a lot of comedy, but also a lot of really interesting contrast to our lead characters. Can you talk to me a little bit about them? Because this really does show your comic chops. Blanche is a great character.

[41:03] Ivan Menchell: Yeah, Blanche was fascinating to me because she just kept trying to do the right thing and just kept getting sucked into the wrong thing. And Buck, her husband, just didn't, he just wasn't strong enough to stand up on his own. You know, he just followed Clyde. He worshipped, you know, he worshipped Clyde like Clyde worshipped Al Capone. And you know, there's the irony that, you know, she's the one that gets, Blanche is the one who gets arrested in the end. She actually was blinded in one eye, you know, injured in that gun battle in real life and ended up in prison. You know, the only one who didn't really, you know, shoot anybody or commit a crime in that way. So I was kind of really fascinated with how they participated, how Buck was sucked into it all, all of a sudden getting things, affording things he, you know, didn't have, seeing a life that was what they dreamed about as kids and how Blanche got sucked into it by just trying to save her husband, trying to keep him out of it, but getting deeper and deeper into the very thing that she wanted nothing to do with.

[42:12] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah, by the end of the show, it's a cat-and-mouse game. Like people are chasing. You said that they killed 14 by the end of their career. That's crazy. And then you've mentioned the song, which is one of the greatest songs in the show, "Dying Ain't So Bad." Was there this inevitability that you sensed from them that they knew it would, it had to end this way, that their reality was gonna come to an end?

[42:40] Ivan Menchell: Bonnie's poem, you know, she wrote that poem that she reads at the end. That's hers. She knew that they were gonna end, they were gonna go down together. In fact, "Go Down Together" is a great book that was written about them as well. Yeah, they knew, you know, and it was, that was their tragedy. Also, they never really had, got the money, got anything because when you're going around robbing places, you don't get to like get your money and invest it and watch it grow, you know? Yes, let's go deposit it in another bank. You have to pay everything in cash. You know, if you get an apartment for a month, you've got to give them all the money and then, you know, the cops come and you're fleeing and you left it all there.

Now, then you start to be recognized, so you can't, you got to go in disguise to a diner and get takeout. You know, it's, you're living in your car. It's the opposite of the life that they had dreamed up. It's a whole other racket that they didn't know they signed up for.

[43:39] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Well, I know you got to go. So looking at this story, because the show has a huge fan base and I think it will continue to be done, what do you think is the lasting impact of these two in particular?

[43:53] Ivan Menchell: Well, like I said, you know, anytime there's a male-female crime committed, they're always referred to as Bonnie and Clyde. I don't think, you know, most people, and this was a, I remember a debate with the producers, most people don't really know anything about them. They know the name, you know, Bonnie and Clyde, and they know they were robbers, but they don't really know. And then some maybe know that they were killed at the end. So they've just been elevated to the status of defining criminal activity for a man and a woman as a couple. As far as the story goes for those who know it or see the show, I think what lasts is, you know, the choices that we make, the dreams we have, the environment we live in, our priorities.

How are our kids growing up? What chance do they have? What chances are we giving them? Part of which we haven't talked about, but one of the main themes in it is how they become folk heroes in the story while they're alive. You know, people were rooting for them because they were robbing the very banks that foreclosed on them. And so when people are living in a system where they don't feel like they have hope, they don't feel like they have a future, they don't trust the government, and somebody comes along or a couple come along and start to kind of avenge that, even though it's awful and even though they're killing people on the way, just like we said with Luigi, you know, they're romanticized.

And then it'd be, you know, there's more and more of them. And then you look at all of the films and, you know, "Natural Born Killers," I mean, there's tons of them, you know, that have been made that are just different iterations of Bonnie and Clyde. So we, you know, we are really fascinated with the idea of a couple doing this together. You know, it's nice to have a shared hobby. It's like it's a story of a great marriage is what these marriages strong. The couple that slays together stays together.

[45:55] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: You have given us so many golden nuggets. You are truly a writer, my friend, Ivan. Thank you so much for doing this. What a total privilege to have you on today. Thank you. You're terrific.

[46:06] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: As always, if you have recommendations for shows you'd like us to cover on "A Musical Theatre Podcast," you can see I'm trying to get through all of these listener requests. Message me at amusicalpodcast@gmail.com. Also, remember we're on social media, so please share that great content so that our community can grow even bigger. Speaking of growing communities, come over to Patreon! That's patreon.com/amusicalpodcast, where you will receive bonus episodes, polls, ways to participate that are so fun. As of today, there's a bonus "Bonnie and Clyde" episode in which we talked to maybe the biggest fan of all time of "Bonnie and Clyde," Miss Jennifer Lynn, who is also the president of the Jeremy Jordan fan club.

It's a really fun conversation. So go once again, patreon.com/amusicalpodcast to join our Patreon fam. It is not much money, and you get to both support the podcast and receive all of this great content. More than anything, I am grateful you are here. So we always try and make this place fun, enjoyable, welcoming. We have products over at our TeePublic store. Thank you for being here. Truly, Ivan, thank you so much for being here.

[47:14] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Once again, can you please tell us how we follow you and keep up to date with all of these exciting projects you got coming?

[47:20] Ivan Menchell: Oh, absolutely. Only the only social media that I'm on is Instagram, and it's just Ivan Menchell. But I do post a lot of really cool stuff. If you go down there and if you go down to my feed, you'll see when Don did his last set of lyrics for "Dying Ain't So Bad." We were in the city, and he said, "I'm gonna go out for a walk," and he came back with an envelope, and I have a picture of it there, and just handwritten on the envelope, it was him figuring out "Dying Ain't So Bad." So there's a lot of fun stuff. I also have a lot of great pictures from the first production, the second brush of La Jolla, Sarasota, some stuff. So there's a lot of cool stuff. And as I said, we've got "Death Note" coming up in "Elephant Shoes," so it's an exciting time.

[48:03] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: That's wonderful. Congratulations! We can't wait to see more. Thank you, sir. Have a great day, listeners out there. Thank you for listening.

[48:10] Ivan Menchell: Well, now that you mentioned it, I do want to read the end poem here, the poem that she reads at the very end. Someday, they'll go down together. They'll bury them side by side. Too few, it'll be grief to the law, a relief, but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.