Memphis will take a bite out of the Big Apple when the production of Paperboy opens in New York March 24th and runs through March 26th at the Manhattan School of Music.
The musical is based on the 2013 book by the same name written by veteran newspaper editor and publisher Vince Vawter who grew up in the Bluff City. Memphis theatergoers and transplants will recognize identifiable locations.
“There’s a whole lot of Memphis in it,” Vawter says. “I was afraid it would be kind of sanitized and there wouldn’t be any Memphis in it. No, it’s all Memphis. It’s set in 1959 Memphis and there’s no doubt about it.”
Vawter, 76, now lives in Louisville, Tennessee. He worked in newspapers for 40 years beginning with the old Memphis Press-Scimitar, where he was news editor, and continued as managing editor of The Knoxville News Sentinel. He then became publisher and president of the Evansville (Indiana) Courier & Press.
The book, published by Penguin Random House, is about a boy who stutters and takes over his friend’s newspaper route for a month one summer. In addition to the challenges of stuttering and collecting money in person from his newspaper customers, the book deals with growing up in the segregated South.
Vawter is excited about the opening of a New York musical based on his book about how he dealt with stuttering as a child, and how throwing the newspaper and meeting all the characters on his route was therapeutic.
Manhattan School of Music is “kind of the Juilliard of musical theater,” Vawter says. “It’s well respected.” The students “are on their way to Broadway. They’re all just fantastic.”
Paperboy won a prestigious Newbery Honor in 2014. In 2018, his sequel, Copyboy, was published by Capstone Editions.
Vawter was surprised how Paperboy took off. “I had no idea. I didn’t know if anybody would buy the book. I didn’t know if anybody would read the book. And it has been translated into 17 foreign languages. It’s just unbelievable.”
The performing arts community took notice after the book was published. “We started getting a lot of feelers from movie production companies. And I kind of had in mind it was going to be made into a movie.”
Then around 2016, Vawter began talking to John Verlenden, an old classmate from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). “I said, ‘John, I think I’m going to try to write a stage play based on Paperboy.’ And without missing a beat he said, ‘Vince, I think it should be a musical.’”
Verlenden told Vawter he should talk to Jim Wann, a friend he grew up with who lives in Chattanooga. “Jim was nominated for a Tony for writing and performing in Pump Boys and Dinettes.” Vawter contacted Wann, but then put it out of his mind because he didn’t think anything was going to come of it. “Then I started getting these songs on MP3s. He wrote them and he sang them with his guitar. I’m saying, ‘Golly, Bill. There is something to this.’”
He and Wann worked together for a couple of years. “I tried to write what is called the ‘musical book.’ Well, I just kind of replicated my story. We finally realized what we needed was some real Broadway talent.”
Wann contacted producer friends in New York — Don Stephenson and his wife, Emily Loesser. And that’s “Loesser” as in the legendary Broadway playwright Frank Loesser of Guys and Dolls fame. “He contacted them and they got interested. And this is the thing that I just can’t believe: In addition to being a Broadway producer, Emily Loesser is a licensed speech pathologist. She still teaches there in New York.”
Stephenson, a Broadway actor and director, also teaches at the Manhattan School of Music. “He’s taught and directed plays there for years and years.”
Stephenson and Loesser “took what I had written and turned it into the language of Broadway.” David Shenton, who orchestrated the music, “put it into sheet music and everything.”
The musical features a variety of music associated with Memphis. “It’s got a lot of rockabilly in it. It’s got a lot of blues. It kind of taps into the Memphis sound, because it’s set in Memphis in 1959 like the book is.”
As if everything wasn’t fantastic already, veteran Broadway choreographer Liza Gennaro choreographed the show. Her father, the late Peter Gennaro, was the choreographer for the 1957 Broadway production of West Side Story. “She is the dean of musical theater at the Manhattan School of Music. Liza came to a few of our readings and she was so enthralled that she signed on as choreographer.”
Vawter got together with Gennaro, Stephenson, and Loesser. “We read through it. We played the music. And then Don said, ‘I’m going to try and get a workshop at the Manhattan School of Music.’”
They did one workshop at the school. “Then Covid hit and everything just got thrown up in the air. But we did two workshops in ’21 and ’22 with the Manhattan School of Music. And then I think once Liza saw what we had, she said Manhattan School of Music would like to produce it.”
The theater on campus seats 625. “It kind of reminds me of the Orpheum. It was an old theater and they’ve completely redone it in style.”
They began rehearsing January 11th. “They rehearsed three and a half hours a night six days a week. It’s just so intense. We’d Zoom into all the rehearsals.”
Kolter Erickson, who plays the paperboy, is a “great singer and dancer,” Vawter says. “He just nails all the songs.”
Erickson, who doesn’t stutter, had help learning how to stutter from Emily, Vawter says. “Occasionally, I would jump in with something, but he kind of nailed it on his own. He doesn’t stutter like I do. He stutters in his own natural way. He’s very fluent.”
And, Vawter says, “He stutters a lot better than I do. Truly. His stutter now is just very natural. In fact, at one of the rehearsals I told him if he needed to go to speech therapy after this is over, I’d fund it. One of the underlying themes of this whole production is that 98 percent of the people who stutter can sing without any problem. So, his songs are beautiful. He doesn’t stutter when he sings.”
The story is “just like the story which is in the book. But it’s told in the language of musical theater. So, while I had some input in how the narrative was created, it’s mostly Don and and Emily because they speak that language. But the main plot of the story itself is like the book. Some of the characters are different, but it’s told for the 2023 New York musical stage.
“I will say, Don and Emily, when they made a big change they did run everything by me and I so appreciate that. I said, ‘I don’t care what you do with the story, I do want to keep it my story, though.’ In fact, they did it a lot more than I anticipated. It starts out with the old paperboy who is my age who has written a book. Then the middle of the story is the 11-year old paperboy that one summer.”
Vawter and his wife Betty traveled to New York three times to watch the rehearsals. And they’ll be back this week for the two live dress rehearsals before the show opens, as well as opening night.
“What most amazed me is there are things I wanted to do in the novel, which I couldn’t do because it was on the printed page. And they can do it on the stage. Like there is one scene where the paperboy gets embarrassed at a big party.”
The scene is based on an incident that happened to Vawter at the old Grisanti’s restaurant downtown on Front Street. “I said something. I stuttered a lot. And some grownups started laughing at me and I got embarrassed and I wound up throwing up all over the table. I threw up my spaghetti. There’s a whole song written about this called ‘Splishghetti.’ It ends with a crazy Jerry Lee Lewis type of dance.”
The songs, backed by a 16-piece orchestra, include “Streets of Our Neighborhood,” which include recognizable Memphis streets. “Vinton, Melrose, Goodbar, and Carr, Bellevue, and Belvedere. He took all the names of the streets I had in my book and he turned it into a song.”
“Memphis Minnie,” which is about the late blues singer, is one of the most popular songs in the show, Vawter says. In the musical, Vawter’s speech tutor “sings how Memphis Minnie turned her life around by her force of nature and that the paperboy can do it, too.”
The show’s creative team are inviting “every commercial producer they know to come to the performances. And we’re probably talking at least a couple of dozen.”
The Vawters, of course, invited their friends. “There’s a bus going up from Knoxville and it’s got 60 people on it. And I’ve got another 40 or 50 friends and family that are coming up from all over the country. So, it’s going to be a Tennessee takeover of New York on that weekend.”
