Playwright Itamar Moses (Tony Award winner for The Band’s Visit and Drama Desk winner for Dead Outlaw) and musician Gaby Alter grew up near one another in Berkeley, and their parents were friends. But when they were kids, their three-year age gap—Alter is older—made a big difference and they didn’t hang out much. Moses says Alter was a wonderful musician, making up comic songs about Jewish holidays and writing rock operas, and he always wanted to be part of Alter’s creative output.
When they were both in their 20s and living in Brooklyn, that’s exactly what happened. The two of them created Nobody Loves You (through March 30 at Toni Rembe Theater, SF), a musical based on the idea of a reality TV show, where the contestants hope to find love, along with some social media stardom. Directed by A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon, the show is making its debut here, after playing Off Broadway a decade ago and gaining new life.
The two spoke on a video call about why a reality TV show is a good premise for a musical, their way of collaborating and how it’s changed, and the play’s classic—and comforting—rom-com structure.
48 HILLS Moses, this was your first musical, right?
ITAMAR MOSES At the time this came up, I was mainly just focused on playwriting. I hadn’t really done a lot of work in musical theater. I worked on one or two ideas for musicals with other people that never went anywhere, so Nobody Loves You with Gaby was the first musical that I completed. Slightly after that, I started working with Daniel Aukin and Michael Friedman on the adaptation of the Jonathan Lethem’s novel Fortress of Solitude. So from 2007 to 2010, those two musicals were kind of being generated parallel to one another.
48 HILLS Who came up with the reality show idea—was that something you decided on together?
ITAMAR MOSES I think I pitched it to you, right, Gaby?
GABY ALTER Yeah, because Itamar had been working on this other project in which reality TV was a part of the show.
ITAMAR MOSES It was about a documentary news magazine, and it was very different, but it gave me this idea that people act in a performative way when they’re on camera. I thought, “Oh, if you did a musical about a reality TV show, then people will feel they’re in a heightened reality where they have to perform, and maybe that earns you the song.”
48 HILLS What did you like about collaborating? Sometimes that doesn’t work for friends.
ITAMAR MOSES We can’t stand each other. [laughs]. No, Gaby, what do we like about collaborating?
GABY ALTER I think we like hanging out. First of all, I think Itamar is very funny, as do many other people. You will see from this musical that he’s very funny, so it’s fun to get together. It’s sort of a combination of hanging out and then having ideas. And we’ve known each other all our lives. It’s very familiar but fun because we both like each other’s art.
ITAMAR MOSES I think that we have a good combination of overlapping concerns and things we care about. We’re these two Northern California slightly hippie Jews of the same generation, who grew up a few blocks from each other. It’s not surprising that we have some of the same values and things we want to make art about, and humanistic things we want to argue for.
But then if we agreed on everything, I don’t think the collaboration would work. I think we also have a useful set of complimentary skills and impulses, not just that Gaby can write music, and I write dialogue, and then we seem to work well writing lyrics together. That’s on a very practical level.
I get really concerned with what the metaphor of something is, or what larger idea is being dramatized, and how to get there. Then Gaby is really good at pulling that back down to, OK, what is the basic human concern that this person has in this moment? Also, I think it’s funny because that answer maybe applied to us when we started working on this 15 years ago. I think that we’ve both from our own growth and maybe influencing each other we’ve both gotten better at the stuff that the other had to sort of fill in when we started.
48 HILLS How does the collaboration work? Do you go and spend the whole day in a room together? Or do you go off and each do something and come back together and talk about it?
GABY ALTER We’ve done different things. When we started this show, literally Itamar came over to my apartment in Brooklyn, and we sat in my bedroom, And Itamar was like, “All right, I’m gonna write a scene, and you’re going to start writing a song.” And I was like, “Yay!” Then then we showed each other what we had, and then Itamar wrote some of the next verse, and we sort of went back and forth.
Sometimes we will just email or text each other at this point. Sometimes I go off and write a song and play it for him. We did that last week, right? We work in a lot of different modes.
ITAMAR MOSES There’s also a difference between generating the initial draft, which was many years ago now, because this is sort of a return to a show. When we were writing it in the first place there was a long period of us figuring out who the characters were and writing a bunch of what we thought would be the early songs in the show. Then I remember sitting down when we had four or five songs and writing a first draft of a script that connected them that got us some distance into the show.
But now we’re at a point with it where it’s the work is very pinpoint, where we know that this section and this section and this section are all working and we think we can make something better. So, we’ll get together to have a very pointed discussion, or work session about one thing we’re trying to address. Like Gaby said, we did replace a song in the show last week, and it started with the two of us texting each other from our artist housing apartments here in San Francisco with ideas. And then when we had something that felt concrete enough, we just both went to sleep and met up the next day, and Gaby had started writing it, and we went from there.
48 HILLS Has the show changed significantly?
ITAMAR MOSES I massively rewrote the first version of the play between its last regional production and the version that was eventually Off Broadway. I threw out 75% of the play and completely rewrote it. The regional production of the previous version had been in South Florida, and this old couple came up to me at the back of the theater after seeing it Off Broadway, and they said, “We live in West Palm Beach, and we saw this down in Florida a few years ago. What’d you change?” I was like, “What didn’t I change?” I mean, literally, 75, 80% of the script had been replaced.
So, I think for the for the casual audience member, they say, “Oh, you know, it’s basically the same journey involving basically the same characters, but what would you say, Gaby? Maybe half the songs are the same as the Off Broadway version from 12 years ago, and half we’ve replaced.
GABY ALTER More than half are the same, yeah, but we’ve done a lot of tweaks and also the ones that we did change are very significant. There were key moments in the show where we’d think, OK, this song is going to do this thing, like it’s going to show the love of one character for another. And it never worked. So we figured out a new strategy that I think makes this show work in this way that it didn’t before.
The new songs are sort of a byproduct of new story decisions and structural decisions. The basic setup is the same, and the basic group of characters is the same, and the overall arc is largely similar. But there are many links in the chain along the way that have been like completely swapped out for things that get us from A to B in a way that feels more elegant to us.
48 HILLS Is that what you like about it? It feels more elegant?
ITAMAR MOSES I think that we knew what we wanted to achieve always. But I think when you’re when you’re starting out, you might be more precious about holding onto stuff you know, you get more sentimental like, “I remember how hard it was to write X, Y or Z,” and now I think we’re just faster and more ruthless about recognizing when things don’t work. I think a lot of people write musicals will have this experience where you write a song and on its own terms, in a vacuum, it’s a perfectly great song, but it doesn’t work for the moment, for what it needs to achieve in that moment in the show.
And you can spend months trying to jerry-rig it, like “Let’s change the lyric a little bit. Let’s make it about something slightly different. What if another character interrupts the song and says, Actually, you’re wrong? So we make it be the opposite.” What you eventually learn is that a song is almost it’s like a complete impulse on its own. You can almost never make it be something else, other than what it was meant to be. We’ve gotten much faster about our own sentiment for a song. Audiences just want the thing to flow.
48 HILLS What do audiences tell you they like about the show?
GABY ALTER I think one thing is that this is similar to a classic musical and romantic comedy, in that there is an A couple and a B couple. And what we found when we did it off Broadway, everybody loves the B couple, which I think is in common, right? Like, they’re comedic, like with Guys and Dolls, there’s Adelaide and the gangster that she has a relationship with.
ITAMAR MOSES Nathan Detroit, Gaby, it’s Nathan Detroit [laughs].
GABY ALTER Anyways, they’re the B couple. They’re like, funnier, but you know, kind of lovable. We have that B couple as well, and everybody always responded to them really well. But the main couple in second stage, I think we had not dialed them in enough, and that was the feedback we got where it took us a long time to kind of understand how to really make that couple sympathetic and likable in their own way.
ITAMAR MOSES I think the advantage we have is that both couples are funny in our show. It’s just we had to lock in how they were funny in different ways. I think what people like about the show always, and I think it will still be true, maybe even more so, is that it satirizes reality TV in a way that doesn’t aim low. It’s not just punching down at this ridiculous thing. It sort of takes its it takes its place in the culture seriously, while sending it up. It’s, on the one hand, a romantic comedy, and on the other hand, this as the satire of this absurd thing that is such a huge part of our culture. The braiding of those two things, I think, makes it a pretty unique show.
48 HILLS This is your first time at ACT, right?
ITAMAR MOSES I’ve never had a full production here. It’s funny, long before Pam was the artistic director, she and I came here 20 years ago to do a workshop of a play of mine called The Four of Us. We were here for two weeks, workshopping the play. I was just realizing it was exactly 20 seasons ago. I was an intern, and I read scripts, and I was a TA in the Young Conservatory, but this is my first production there.
48 HILLS What’s that feel like for both of you to be here?
ITAMAR MOSES I mean, God, it’s our goal in life.
GABY ALTER Well, you know, for me, the thing is that, as Itamar mentioned, I started doing musicals here in Berkeley, and we did them at the Subterranean Theater, so I came up doing black box theater, in my late teens, early 20s, and then I went to New York when I was 29, so coming back to do something at ACT is kind of incredible. I remember being here when I was younger, and it’s an amazing theater. It feels like getting to do what I wanted. This was my goal, to do what I wanted to do, but in a much bigger venue, and this is it.
NOBODY LOVES YOU runs through March 30 at Toni Rembe Theater, SF. More info here.
