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So Podhoretz responded to our response, here:

Signs of Life Strife by John Podhoretz

A few days ago, I called attention to a quote from one of the creators of a new musical called Signs of Life, which is set in and around the Thereseinstadt concentration camp. (I compared it to The Producers, and specifically to “Springtime for Hitler,” the musical-within-the-musical, described by its deranged creator as “a gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.”) The quote in question averred that the questions about Nazi era Germans and how they responded to their leaders had a great deal to teach us about America over the past decade—an observation of which the best that can be said is that it is a bit more tasteful than the very notion of a musical set at Thereseinstadt.

The writers and creators of Signs of Life, evidently thrilled that anybody is willing to write about them at all, have fired a broadside at me using the old “how can he criticize our show without seeing it” gambit:

[He quotes here our letter in full.]

Now, while I do place myself very much on the anti side on the admittedly complex aesthetic question of using the Holocaust as an artistic setting—and, not incidentally, on the anti side when it comes to the use of the musical form as a vehicle for the serious treatment of just about any topic, notwithstanding my deep love of musicals and the American songbook they created—that wasn’t the reason I wrote the item. I wrote the item because of something the show’s composer, Joel Derfner, said. Which was this: “The message of our show is not ‘Killing Jews is bad.’ It’s: ‘What do you do when you find out you’ve been lied to? What is telling the truth worth?’ In the last 30 years this question has been vital to American life and especially so in the last nine years.”

Now let’s parse this. What happened 30 years ago in this country? Ronald Reagan’s election. What happened nine years ago? George W. Bush’s inauguration. Who’s making repulsive and unwarranted associations now? The Signs of Life team is right that someone said something contemptible, but it wasn’t I.

And thanks for the invitation, but I’ll pass; I already did my time years ago when, courtesy of P.J. O’Rourke, who secured it from God-knows-where, I once read the entirety of the screenplay for the Jerry Lewis epic, The Day the Clown Cried.

Well, before we could stop ourselves, we wrote a response to his response to our response.

Another Open Letter to John Podhoretz:

Upon learning that you were pressured into reading the screenplay for The Day The Clown Cried, we are left with nothing but compassion. No one could emerge from such an experience unscathed, and we will be sure to pen an angry letter to P.J. O’Rourke.

We will simply point out:

We seem to have hit the exact intersection of your two beliefs that the Holocaust is unsuitable as a subject for art and that the musical is a form unsuited for serious subjects. Though we clearly disagree with both points (and look for support to pieces like Shostakovitch’s Symphony No. 13, Anna Sokolow’s dance piece Dreams, and Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret on the first and Show Boat, West Side Story, and, well, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret on the second), we understand that your beliefs reflect the same goal we have—to do honor to the memory of the Shoah.

And to be clear: we believe that the Shoah transcends partisan politics, and we did not write Signs of Life to send a partisan message; the lessons to be found in it are moral ones. No single piece of art can hope to encompass the Shoah, and Signs of Life does not try: it deals with the specific perversities of Theresienstadt, and must therefore grapple with issues of truth and power, representation and reality. We explore what happens when leaders lie to their citizens. You and Joel undoubtedly have different ideas about which American leaders have done so over the course of the last few decades, but you also undoubtedly agree that these remain vital issues no matter who is in power.

In writing Signs of Life, we have tried to treat the material with honesty, and survivors of Theresienstadt, the only real judges, have consistently told us that they saw their own experiences mirrored accurately and without sentimentality onstage. We’d like to renew our invitation for you to see the show, perhaps with P.J. O’Rourke. We suspect you won’t take us up on it, but we’d love to offer you the opportunity to base your criticism of Signs of Life on experience.

Yours truly,

Joel Derfner (composer)
Len Schiff (lyricist)
Peter Ullian (bookwriter)

A few days ago, an article in the New York Times mentioned my new show, Signs of Life, and quoted me talking about some of the resonances the piece has in society today. John Podhoretz, neoconservative columnist for the New York Post and editor of Commentary magazine, took exception to my words and wrote this:

SPRINGTIME FOR DUBYA?
by John Podhoretz

I’m sure you’re looking forward to the new off-Broadway musical, “Signs of Life,” which offers what promises to be a wonderfully tuneful look at the Thereseinstadt concentration camp. But it turns out, according to tomorrow’s New York Times, that the musical really isn’t about the Holocaust after all, which is probably a wise thing, since The Producers got there first with its signature number, “Springtime for Hitler.” No, it turns out, the Holocaust exists as a dramatic trope to teach us lessons about America in the age of Bush:

That show, which had its premiere on Thursday, centers on Lorelei, an artist who agrees to create pretty pictures of the camp for Nazi propaganda but who, with other prisoners, schemes to get her drawings of the real horrors to the outside world.

“The message of our show is not ‘Killing Jews is bad,’ ” Mr. Derfner said. “It’s: ‘What do you do when you find out you’ve been lied to? What is telling the truth worth?’ In the last 30 years this question has been vital to American life and especially so in the last nine years.”

No, this is not, as they say, from The Onion.

My collaborators and I were taken aback by the post, and we would like to respond by posting the following open letter to Mr. Podhoretz.

Dear Mr. Podhoretz:

You are well-known as a protector of the memory of the Holocaust and as someone who, by his own admission, knows “the lyrics to every show tune ever written.” We were therefore dismayed to read your post on Commentary about our new off-Broadway musical, Signs of Life. Your casually insulting aside about the “wonderfully tuneful” quality of the show—which as far as we can tell you have not seen—is irresponsible enough, but to make the ugly accusation that we believe “the Holocaust exists as a dramatic trope to teach us lessons about America in the age of Bush” is contemptible.

The characters in our show must participate in the Nazi propaganda machine in order to survive; when they realize the implications of their participation they face ethical choices that endanger their lives. But the obligation of citizens across the political spectrum to question our leaders and evaluate the truth of their answers did not end on V-Day.

The idea you seem to advocate—that if you put an event as vastly horrific as the Holocaust onstage you should do it as a museum piece, rather than exploring what we might learn from it about human nature—implies that today’s society is no longer capable of a Holocaust, which is a position both false and dangerous.

We would like to invite you to see Signs of Life and to judge based on experience rather than distortion and mockery whether our show honors the memory of those slaughtered in the Holocaust. Please e-mail us and we’ll arrange tickets for whatever date you’d like.

Yours truly,

Joel Derfner (composer)
Len Schiff (lyricist)
Peter Ullian (bookwriter)

Harlan Ellison: Pay the writer. (I can’t quite remember but I think he says “motherfucker,” so if you work for, you know, the Daughters of the Confederacy you might want to wait until you get home to watch it.)

My collaborators have written about the issue on their blogs, so I thought I might as well weigh in on singing Nazis.

Len points out that when characters sing they are often in a state of heightened emotion, a state in which, whether accurately or otherwise, they believe they’re being honest with themselves. “Did we want to dignify,” Len asks, “the honest reflections of SS officers?”

Peter notes that it was most definitely not his intention that the audience sympathize with the two Nazi characters in our show.

The question is equally tricky from a musical point of view.

There are three moments in our show when the Nazis sing. Two are performative (they lie, respectively, to the Jews of Prague and to the Red Cross inspector who comes to visit the ghetto), and the music sounds like the attitude they have assumed for the deception (respectively, reassuring and jolly), but the third is an honest moment, in which Heindel, the younger of the two, sings about his true belief in the Nazi aim.

I agree with Len that, in this moment, the character is being honest with himself, or as honest as he can be. And since the character feels—rightly or wrongly—that he is motivated by the noblest and most humanitarian of aims, the music has to feel noble and humanitarian.

But I also agree with Peter that we don’t want anybody to sympathize with the Nazis in our show. So how can the music feel noble and humanitarian? We all—at least most of us—feel noble and humanitarian emotions at one time or another, and if such a song is not an attempt to make an evil character sympathetic, then what is it?

The answer, I believe, can be found (as can the answers to most things) in ancient Greek, in the sources of the words “sympathy” and “empathy.” “Sympathy” derives from “pathe” (experience, suffering) and “syn” (with); “empathy” from “pathe” and “en” (in).

If you feel sympathy for someone, you’re “with” him—you’re on his side. You feel wounded when he feels wounded; you feel angry when he feels angry; you feel joyful when he feels joyful. If you feel empathy for someone, you’re “in” him—you’re in his shoes. You discern, however distantly, what he feels when he feels wounded, angry, joyful. You understand what it is to be him. Sympathy is a centripetal force, empathy a centrifugal one. Sympathy is about you. Empathy is about somebody else.

So unless our Nazi is a sociopath—which he’s not, though of course many were—then the only honest way to portray him as a character is to try to empathize with him and to try write him so that the audience empathizes with him too.

Which means that the song, if I’ve succeeded (you can listen to it here to decide for yourself), is horrifying, because it allows the audience to glimpse something in themselves that, pushed far enough, might not look too different from this monster.

To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.

To find out more about Signs of Life, click here.

My first off-Broadway show (which with luck will not be my last) opens one month from today.

Signs of Life is the story of a young girl who comes of age in the Czech ghetto Terezin, rechristened Theresienstadt by the Nazis, who filled it with Jewish artists, musicians, and intellectuals and turned it into a propaganda tool. Once she and her friends and family realize what lies in store for them, they begin to discover that some truths might be worth dying for.

If you live in or around New York and are interested in seeing the show, go to https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/425 to buy tickets, which are $40-$55 unless you use the promotion code “AMAS,” in which case they’re $32-$47 ($8 off).

If you want to find out more about Signs of Life, you can go to terezinsings.org, a fundraising site the writers set up, and/or terezinmusical.com, a site the producers set up. If you want to hear some music from the show, go to joelderfner.com/music and check the sidebar on the right.

We’ve been in rehearsals for a week, and it’s going to be fabulous, if I do say so myself.

This is the thing I always forget:

Rehearsing a show is fun.

Because you get to fiddle with all the little stuff. In between presentations (of whatever sort—readings, workshops, etc.) you’re spending your time trying to fix things that are genuine problems, like “The opening number feels disjointed and too long” or “We have three ballads in a row in the second half of act two, so we need to cut two of them or move them to elsewhere in the show.”

But once you get into rehearsal (assuming you’ve fixed most of the genuine problems you’ve been worried about) you get to play with the fun stuff. Like, today we decided that (for now at least) two characters who used to not sleep together are going to sleep together. We’re not sure it will work—there are later scenes that might be affected adversely by such a development—but we’re hoping we can keep it, because, hey, more sex is always better.

I’m sitting in the first day of rehearsal for my first off-Broadway show.

This is kind of fabulous.

My boyfriend is an insane lunatic who belongs in an asylum.

At least this is my contention; he for his part thinks rather that I am avoidant and passive-aggressive, which as we all know is a ridiculous idea.

In order to help me prove to him that I am right and he is wrong, I would appreciate your answer to the following question.

If you and your boyfriend/girlfriend/lover/partner/husband/wife/whatever are having a fight—say one of average proportions—and it gets to be bedtime and you’re sleepy but, even though you’re past the first flushes of anger, you haven’t resolved the issue(s) you’re fighting about yet, do you

a) say goodnight and you’ll talk about it more tomorrow and go to sleep, even though the fight isn’t over, or

b) stay up and talk about what’s going on until you’ve made up, even if it takes a few hours?

My boyfriend says that every relationship takes one option, or at least every healthy relationship; I contend that any couple choosing that option would very soon be imprisoned for attempted or actual murder.

Note, please, that to avoid protests on my boyfriend’s part I have worded the question as evenly as I could, without indicating which answer I want you to give.

So Michael Swanwick is teaching his week at Clarion [a science-fiction writing workshop], and one of the students hands in a long somber story full of angst and sodomy. Swanwick considers it and says, “What this story needs is more dinosaurs.”

The student is flummoxed, and protests that he’s just trying to put into practice what he’d been told. Swanwick explains, to him and to the rest of the students, that writing is a matter of finding the appropriate balance of dinosaurs and sodomy.