Asher Muldoon Dissects His Bloody Good Musical 'The Butcher Boy'

The Butcher Boy, which is playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre, is one of the grandest (in a Guignol way) musicals to open in New York since Sweeney Todd. Based on the novel by Patrick McCabe and directed by Ciarán O'Reilly, the show follows Francie Brady and his all-too-easy descent into madness. Asher Muldoon, who wrote the book, music and lyrics, talked to Newsweek about the creation of the show.

When asked how he got the idea of adapting McCabe's book specifically into a musical, Muldoon told Newsweek the novel "was assigned to me as part of a class, and it came at a time when I was sort of looking for something a little off the beaten path to try and adapt into a show. It's also the first show that I've written the score for completely by myself. So, I wanted sort of a challenge. And I thought, Well, there's so much sort of natural musicality to the way that the book is written that I just felt it lends itself to that form.

"I'm someone who's generally of the mind that there is potential in most stories for being pieces of musical theater. I think you have to come at it from the right way. I think there's a lot of adaptations of things that could be good musicals that just do it wrong and don't really think through why it's a musical, which is how we get these movie adaptations that don't make any sense.

"But in Butcher Boy there's so much: There's musicality in that it's Ireland, it's the '60s. It's sort of chaotic and surreal. Those, to me, are all musical guideposts. So, I felt it was a pretty natural thing, honestly, putting the story into a musical in spite of the fact that the story itself is not common ground for many of us. There's obviously violence; there's a lot of surrealism. Those are things that we've seen a lot of in musicals at this point.

"The first show I ever saw was Sweeney Todd."

Like a lot of Stephen Sondheim's work, where one might go in saying, "What is the worst idea for a musical?" (Follies, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park With George, etc.) one comes out saying Butcher Boy is a very special, personal work.

It is also a very Irish work. It deals easily, often comically with dark issues, such as violence, abuse and death. No spoilers here. Muldoon says, "There's blood on the poster."

Muldoon does identify with that side of his ancestry. He says, "My dad is Irish. I am firmly in the half-Irish part. And I feel very, very attached to my Irish roots, as most Irish people do. For being such a small island, there's so much pride. There's so much Irish pride across the world, especially in people who really have a strong tie to their family history."

And then there is Irish theater. In many ways, the culture lends itself to that art more than any other. Muldoon says, "You talk about things in a very Irish way. There was some article I was reading about Ireland, where it said something like: 'In Ireland, the dead never stay dead' or something. Because the Irish have a very particular relationship, sort of this cross relationship between their art, their music, their dead and their sort of supernatural mythology. It's all tied up in each other. So much Irish art is about death and the supernatural. I think that that was something that really affected the way that I wrote the show, because, you know, the Irish have a very, very different relationship to death than Americans do."

A Wake and Singing

The classic wake scene in Edwin O'Connor's novel The Last Hurrah comes to mind. Muldoon told Newsweek, "The idea of a wake as really a celebration, as opposed to a dirge, is kind of a foreign idea to those of us who have been to a lot of funerals."'

That counterpoint between a light tone to dark material is all through Butcher Boy. From the beginning, we see the seeds of trouble within Francie presented in a light-hearted manner. The show starts with Francie and his friend Joe stealing comic books without a twinge of guilt between them. The haven't a care in the world. In fact, Francie says he can't imagine his life being better.

Counter to what Lehman Engel observed in most musicals, there is no "I want song" in Butcher Boy. In fact, Muldoon says, "Francie starts the show with everything that he wants. He already has everything that he wants, which is sort of a huge no-no when it comes to musical theater writing. Generally, in a musical, you want the character to start off wanting something, and then the musical is about them trying to go after it and somehow becomes better.

"The Butcher Boy is not that type of story. It's sort of the complete opposite. Francie starts the show with everything he wants. The story is really everything he loves getting taken away from him and he's getting worse. Already that is a different thing.

"Francie comes from such a terrible, abusive home, where he has had to put up this defensive wall of humor. He retreats into the TV and comic books and all that. He's built this sort of wall of fiction around his existence."

The TV is almost a character itself. It fills the back wall of the set and we see shows of the 1960s, most notably The Twilight Zone. And images of comics and candy cover the set, the walls and the props. Francie is a sponge for all of this imagery; his grounding in reality is—to say the least—not well grounded.

Flash Bars are a small but significant obsession of Francie. Muldoon says, "Flash Bars were real candy. They're not anymore. If Francie could live on the eating Flash Bars for his entire life, he would. And I think for a long time, he does. It sort of ties in to the whole thing of never really growing up. It's such a childlike idea that like, 'Oh when I when I grow up', not to paraphrase, Matilda, which is a show that I love, but like 'When I grow up, I'll eat nothing but sweets every day.'

"Francie starts the show at age 12 and I don't think he ever gets older than 12 mentally. He starts the show stealing comic books. And, by the end of the show, he's still that type of kid, but the stakes are much higher than stealing a lot of comics. It has the same weight in his head: stealing comics as dealing with Mrs. Nugent.

Then we have the pigs, which show up after a nasty comment from Mrs. Nugent. They are seemingly everywhere, on stage, in Francie's mind and on all the show's artwork. And they personify—or is it porcinify?—his inner violent feelings.

For Muldoon, "The pigs are planting the seeds of that idea that culminates at the end of the show. Right from that moment [when Mrs. Nugent slurs Francie's family with the term]. I would say the first act is about the pigs getting Francie to trust them. And then the second act is the pigs destroying everything. So, then they'll go and get Francie to do this thing that they wanted to do. And, of course, the pigs are just Francie. From a theatrical point of view, they are the forces that are trying to get Francie to do this incredibly violent thing."

Into Temptation

They act in a way, as the devil on the shoulder of the hero of a medieval morality play, urging him to commit violent acts.

"That's what it's all leading up to," Muldoon says. "The whole show is just one sort of building into that final moment."

All these elements come together to make for one very quirky show, one that is often very funny. Stephen Sondheim, who died last year, was a big fan of the work of Irish Rep, showing up regularly and remembering the company in his will he was also a famous letter writer. And had Sondheim lived to see Butcher Boy, it would not be surprising to hear that Muldoon received one of those thoughtful missives he would send out to talented young theater-makers. In his three creative roles here, Muldoon is off to a bloody good start.

The Butcher Boy is playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street, New York, through September 11.