Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve always liked musicals. Not all musicals: I have a blind spot for Les Mis, which seems to me what you would get on Whose Line Is It Anyway? if the subject shouted out was “19th Century France!” and the style “Light Opera!” and the show went on for nearly three hours. That’s no doubt my fault as I don’t like opera in general, and therefore musicals that sort of pretend to be opera are not my thing. What I like is pop musicals, by which I mean Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell (I like the Jesus ones in general), and Wicked. I even like Shrek. Because I like musicals with songs, not cod arias.
Storywise, however, the reason to do a musical must be clear. There must be points in the narrative when, for whatever reason, it makes more emotional sense for the characters, instead of speaking, to burst into song.
When I came to revisit my film The Infidel with a view to making it into a musical, the key thing for me was finding a composer whose music would chime with these points; who could write those emotions into song. An obvious choice was Erran Baron Cohen – he’d written the score for the movie as well as scoring his brother’s films, Borat and Bruno. But I still thought of Erran primarily as a film composer. I’d never heard a song by him, apart from the Live Aid pastiche at the end of Bruno. To be honest, I wasn’t sure it would work.
Brian Wilson writes in his autobiography that in the late 1960s, Elton John came to him (before he was famous) and played him Daniel and Your Song, and Wilson knew “that he was tapped into the great source”. Now I’m not (for a million reasons, some of them very healthy) Brian Wilson, but after one afternoon in Erran Baron Cohen’s slightly shabby studio in north London with a batch of rough lyrics, I knew that he too was tapped into that source.
I genuinely think that he has spent most of his life doing the wrong thing, successful though he’s been at it. Erran has inside him endless pop melody, an astonishing ability to come up with hook after hook after hook. That sold me – on him and this project. A few months on, we’ve now done a number of workshops with the brilliant Theatre Royal Stratford East, and the musical is ready to go.
Well, almost. Stratford East is a charity – its work is about putting on radical and alternative theatre, not purely commercial, for-profit stuff. So the budgets are not huge. Moreover, this is a potentially complicated enterprise. I note that when Book of Mormon came out, one of the sniffier reviewers wrote: “Surely it can only be a matter of time before some enterprising impresario takes up my own brilliant Muhammad! the Musical, sure to be an explosive new West End hit, with terrific sing-along show tunes including Ramadan-a-Ding-Dong and Baby You Look Better in a Burqa!”
Meaning, of course, that no-one would do such a thing. Well, The Infidel is not Muhammad! the Musical – that really would be crass – but before that review came out, we had already written a song called Sexy Burqa, which remains very much in the show. As does a ska number called Put a Fatwa on It. The Infidel will be a musical about Muslims and Jews, somewhat upending those critics of Mormon and Jerry Springer who like to say, oh yes, it’s all very well doing this stuff about Christians, but what about ... etc. And while that pleases me, it doesn’t necessarily flood the show with safe commercial investment.
And so we come to our Kickstarter campaign. The movie has form on this kind of thing. It was turned down by every major distributor and film production company, because it was about Muslims and Jews, and because it didn’t have any stars in it, and because it centred around the relationship between two bald middle-aged men. So it had to be financed independently. Translation: we asked people we knew for money. Since its release, it’s been shown in some 60 territories worldwide, and become something of a cult hit in the US. So this was always a story supported by people, rather than by the showbusiness establishment. And this time we hope even more people can get involved. See you at Stratford East in October. Inshallah, or אינשאללה as it’s written in Hebrew.
Theatre Royal Stratford East has launched the Kickstarter campaign for Infidel: the Musical here. David Baddiel’s stand-up show Fame: Not The Musical runs from 29 April at Menier Chocolate Factory, London