On a warm Wednesday morning in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, as a throng of little girls and their mothers swells outside a Barbie-themed restaurant pop-up serving rainbow-sprinkle pancakes, another group has gathered in the service of very different IP.
Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells are inspecting the letterpress at Bowne Co. Stationers, inside the South Street Seaport Museum, where resident printers still operate machines from the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Bowne Co. itself dates back to 1775.) This month, more than a decade after starring in The Book of Mormon, the Tony-nominated actors return to Broadway in Gutenberg! The Musical!, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King. The show centers on Bud (Gad) and Doug (Rannells), two friends staging a frantic run-through of their musical about—you guessed it!—Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the movable-type printing press. A special kind of comic chaos ensues.
“Why don’t we do the show here?” Gad asks, poking around Bowne Co.’s charming storefront, where paper gifts and tote bags live alongside ancient printing paraphernalia. “We’d sell 10 tickets,” Rannells quips in response. “We’d be sold out!”
Banter like this—and the odd belted lyric from Sweeney Todd—continues throughout the morning, as the two gamely change setups and juggle the props that will be used for their Vogue portrait. They have, it’s clear, not one clue what to do with a tray of metal letters or a large wooden mallet (at one point, Gad swings at Rannells’s knee like a doctor with a plexor), but that’s kind of the idea: In the show, Bud and Doug don’t have a cast, set, costumes, or a lot of historical context to work with, much less an actual printing press. It’s just the two of them—plus their pianist, Charles—doing their level best with some empty boxes, a stack of trucker hats (each one duly labeled “Gutenberg,” “Woman,” “Drunk #1,” “Another Woman,” etc.), and their own startling commitment to the work. Those who know The Book of Mormon, or even just Rannells’s spirited performance at the 2011 Tony Awards, will know what I mean when I say that Gutenberg! has big “I Believe” energy. “It allows us to be our truest idiots,” Gad says. “And I say that in the most genuine way possible.”
It all began as a joke. In 1999, when Brown and King were in their 20s and sharing an apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, King worked at the Manhattan Theatre Club, where he was charged with going through unsolicited demo recordings and attending readings of new musicals. It was utterly illuminating, not only to see the kinds of (strange, bad) things that writers and composers hoped would someday be produced but also to hear the deadly serious passion behind each fledgling show. “I got obsessed with the idea of people creating musicals in a vacuum somewhere else, with the dreams of coming to Broadway,” King says. “And because they had to perform these songs, they would be full-out—like, with so much enthusiasm, so much energy.” To be sure, King and Brown (who had recently started at Entertainment Weekly) were hardly establishment figures themselves; in fact, they had a lot more in common with the faceless slush pile people than not. “We were listening to these, like, desperate dreamers on tapes,” Brown says, “but we were also two mildly crazy people living in a very hot apartment in an outer borough.”
One day, they decided they’d give the process a go themselves, and “write three songs for a bad idea for a musical and submit it under fake names,” King recalls. That bad idea was to build a show around the 15th-century invention of the printing press. “It’s just so fun to create anything, even something terrible,” says Brown. “Once it starts to take on its own life, you kind of can’t stop it.”
By 2003, Brown and King had stretched and shaped that unlikely concept into a 45-minute one-act, performing it at the former Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Chelsea and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. It wasn’t a straight historical piece, but more like Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, dramatizing the very act of putting on the show. (The format of a reading or a backer’s audition seemed especially fertile, funny ground: “It’s so bizarre, because you are asking the audience to just imagine what [the production] could be,” King says.) A two-act version of Gutenberg! premiered at London’s 70-seat Jermyn Street Theatre in 2006 (“Is there a producer in the house?” read one review that lauded King and Brown as “the real thing”), moving off-Broadway, to Midtown’s 59E59 Theaters, that November.
Alex Timbers, who directs the Broadway production, also helmed Gutenberg! at 59E59. “My background’s in improv and sketch comedy,” he tells me. “And so I always love material that sits between true comedy and a play or a musical.” When he was introduced to Brown and King, the connection was instant. “We had a lot of shared interests and sensibilities, and that same kind of playful attitude,” says Brown. One touch point was the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer: Watching it, King says, all three realized, “Oh, you can play it completely straight, but also have this sense of absurdity.” Timbers’s production of Gutenberg! was hailed a “smashing success” by The New York Times that season, earning best-musical nods at both the Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards.
From there, the show traveled across the country and around the world—cropping up at regional theaters from Boston to Seattle, as well as in Sydney, Paris, and, just earlier this year, Madrid. (From a purely economic standpoint, it’s difficult to imagine a fleeter, leaner musical to mount.) And it inspired another collaboration: Broadway’s Beetlejuice, for which Timbers served as director, and Brown and King wrote the book. (Eddie Perfect handled the music and lyrics.) Given all of that, I ask Brown and King, did they ever wonder if Gutenberg! might someday see the Great White Way?
“No,” King replies with a laugh. “This is completely insane.”
When Gad, Rannells, and I reconvene at Il Brigante, a quaint Italian restaurant not far from the South Street Seaport Museum, they’re still cracking each other up, several hours later. Timbers likens their joyful dynamic to that of the great comedic duos of the last century: “You think about Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—it’s not the lengthiest list.”
For the actors, their chemistry is practically compulsive, and it’s been that way since Mormon, when they starred as hapless missionaries-slash-partners-in-crime. (Both departed the show after a year, in 2012.) “A part of the fun of Mormon was that when we were onstage together, we just tried to make each other laugh,” Gad says. “We genuinely have this admiration and joy for breaking the other.”
Keeping things under control for Gutenberg! is “going to be really difficult,” says Rannells.
“Audiences should be aware,” adds Gad, an impish glint in his eye.
It wasn’t actually Gad’s plan to take a decade-long break between Broadway roles; in the interim, as Rannells led productions of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Falsettos, and The Boys in the Band and Gad worked mostly in film and television, they’d been carrying on separate conversations with Timbers, while also looking for something to do together. Finally, Timbers approached them both about Gutenberg!, which had been rattling around in his head for years. The group gathered for a reading in Los Angeles, the quick takeaway being that Gad and Rannells simply had to do it. There was a lot to love—ridiculous lyrics like “When I got out of bed today, history was a lot more boring / But then I thought in a different way, now the bird of inspiration’s soaring”—but what perhaps appealed most was the rendering of Bud and Doug. “They really are fans of each other, and there’s not any sort of snark to it,” Rannells reflects. “It’s rare, because—I sound like an old man saying this, a lot of humor these days…”
“…is cynical,” Gad offers.
“Yeah, it’s very cynical,” Rannells says. “I am snarky as fuck, so I get it. But it’s nice to get to play two people who are really, truly joyful about what they’re doing.” They may know virtually nothing about the real Gutenberg—after all, they give him a romantic interest named Helvetica—but Bud and Doug obviously adore the theater. “As you’re watching the show, you know what musicals they’ve seen,” says Timbers. “They love Les Mis, they love My Fair Lady, they love Oklahoma!”
So, Gutenberg! had its stars. “It was immediate, I think, to both of us that this was the thing,” Gad says. Then comes the perfect punch line—and the awful truth: “That was March of 2020.”
Suffice it to say that three years later, Gad and Rannells are entering a somewhat wobbly theater landscape. Yet neither one seems overly concerned about how Gutenberg! will fare this fall, even as it goes head-to-head with flashy new revivals of Merrily We Roll Along and Purlie Victorious. To them, Gutenberg! ’s small scale is an asset: While Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre, which normally seats about 1,100, is surely one of the biggest venues that the show has ever played to (on YouTube, I found a full-length production ostensibly staged in a high school classroom), Timbers has conspired to make it feel as cozy as possible, removing several first-row seats and bringing the proscenium slightly forward. The effect, he says, is that “our stage pushes past the fourth wall. All of that stuff accumulates to create something that feels really intimate, like you and Josh and Andrew are all sitting in the living room together.”
“I get teary-eyed at the end,” says Gad of the show. “I think we’ve all become super skeptical of reality and the hardships of life, of industry, of all of it.” The SAG-AFTRA strike is underway, and before they begin rehearsals for Gutenberg!, both Gad and Rannells plan to join a picket line. “It’s nice to have two characters who so fully believe in possibility,” Gad continues. “I think that is the profound beauty of the show, despite the insanity of the comedy. It’s got this beating heart that I think is really beautiful, and I hope audiences leave uplifted.”
“That’s a good way to say it,” Rannells remarks.
“…like they do from Cabaret,” Gad deadpans.
Rannells laughs. “ ‘Just like Cabaret.’ Throw that on the poster.”
Grooming for Rannells, Melissa DeZarate; grooming for Gad, Jessica Ortiz.