Playwright Mike O' Malley, director Christopher Ashley, choreographer Kelly Devine, singer/songwriter Jimmy Buffett and playwright Greg Garcia attend the after party following the Broadway opening night of Escape to Margaritaville at Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers on Thursday, March 15, 2018, in New York.

Invision/AP

Sarah Hinrichsen as Rachel and Chris Clark as Tully in Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville.

Matthew Murphy

Company of the National Tour, Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville.

Matthew Murphy

Rachel Lyn Fobbs as Marley, Matthew James Sherrod as Jamal and Company in Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville.

Matthew Murphy

Shelly Lynn Walsh as Tammy, Peter Michael Jordan as Brick, Chris Clark as Tully, Sarah Hinrichsen as Rachel in Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville.

Matthew Murphy
Fill 1
Fill 1
February 19, 2020
Online Originals

Escape to Broadway

Two television pros turn their writing talents to Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville

Libby Slate

Television Academy members who attend a performance this month of the touring Broadway musical comedy Jimmy Buffett's Escape to Margaritaville will see two familiar names in the credits: The book was written by TV comedy veterans Greg Garcia and Mike O'Malley.

An upbeat tale of two girlfriends' tropical island getaway before one's marriage to an incompatible fiancé, and their romantic complications with the men they meet, the show had a Broadway run in 2018. It plays the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa February 4-9 and the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood February 18-March 8.

Garcia, the creator-executive producer-writer of My Name Is Earl, Yes, Dear, Raising Hope, The Millers and The Guest Book, won an Emmy Award in 2006 for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series and a Humanitas Prize in 2007, both for the pilot of My Name Is Earl.

O'Malley was nominated for an Emmy in 2010 as Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Glee; he starred in Yes, Dear, recurred on Earl and behind the camera was creator-executive producer-writer for Survivor's Remorse and a consulting producer-writer on Shameless.

Escape to Margaritaville is their first Broadway musical; O'Malley has written plays produced Off-Broadway and in Los Angeles. They chatted with Libby Slate about their theater adventures.

For two writers who have never been involved in Broadway, how did writing the book for a Broadway musical come about?

Mike O'Malley: I had developed a television series with Frank Marshall [Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sully, TV documentaries] and Jimmy Buffett in 2007, inspired by Jimmy Buffett's short stories, Tales from Margaritaville. Like many television projects, it went to a certain level and then did not come to any future fruition.

And then in 2013 or 2014, I got a phone call from Frank saying that he had teamed up with a couple of people who wanted to turn the songs in Jimmy's catalog into a Broadway musical, and would I be interested?

I thought about it, and I thought I would be interested, but I would be even more interested if I did it with the friend who seems to have his finger on the pulse of what America finds humorous, and whom I'd had a great experience with.

What I'd realized about working with Greg was that he had a very facile mind and an ability to tell stories. When you work in television, you're breaking story after story in episode after episode, and the really successful men and women who do that have a firm grasp on story structure and how to build stories.

And I just knew that Greg had a specificity into how he approaches his work. And look, I'm just candidly going to say, I knew he'd do a lot of the work, and I ended up being right!

Greg Garcia: Mike calls me one day and I pick up the phone and he says, "Hey, you want to write a musical for Broadway?" And my first reaction was, "What? Are you drunk? What are you talking about?" I didn't even like musicals!

And so I said, "Well, yeah, what do we have to do?" And he says. "We just have to come up with an original script using Jimmy Buffett's music, that it'll make sense to sing 25 of his songs." And my wife is a huge Jimmy Buffett fan, and my oldest son, who's now just getting ready to graduate from Boston University theater school, was very much into musical theater at the time.

And I thought, "Well, why not? We could bang out a script in a couple of months and then I'll make some connections." And five years later, we're still staring across at each other as this thing is moving from city to city. But we had an absolute blast. We had each other and we just laughed the entire time, and had so much fun.

How was working on a stage musical different from working in television?

MOM: I think that the biggest adjustment for both of us, especially in the development of the musical, is that it's this massive ocean liner that you can't change too many things on, even though you want to rush ahead and change something.

GG: Mike and I have both done single-camera and four-camera television shows. Doing a musical is more like a four-camera sitcom, where you have run-throughs, you can change stuff during the week and then you perform it all later at the end of the week. But with a sitcom, you can go rewrite the script and make 50 changes overnight. And then the actors will do those changes the next day and you'll look at it.

But with the musical, at a rehearsal or even a preview performance, we may have 25 things we want to change within the next day. And you realize pretty soon that if you're changing two lines, well, now maybe the music is affected, and now maybe it's a bunch of rocks coming on stage at a different time, so that's going to take an hour to make sure people don't get hit by a volcano that moved in at a different time.

And you're looking at the clock and you're like, "Oh, we've only gotten to two things." 


It's a little bit of torture, because now you've only changed the two things, but you've got an audience coming in for another preview performance and you know you're going to change five or six more jokes, but you haven't gotten to it yet. So you're hearing jokes maybe not getting the response you'd like, and you want to stand up and go, "Hey everybody, listen – there's a better joke coming!"

MOM:  As writers, we're very result-oriented. We'll move on when we know that it's being done the way we intended to have it done. When you're sitting there and you're watching, all the writers care about is how the whole thing holds together: Are the jokes being delivered? Does it make sense? I would rather a scene go a little bit longer than normal because I think it would give the characters more depth.

But you can't be sitting on stage for an hour and a half. People are sitting in the audience; they have to go to the bathroom. It's just so complicated and so big. Like I said, it's an ocean liner.

GG: The hardest part was not being able to directly talk to the actors. With a TV show, we're very used to talking to actors and giving them notes and getting the performance the way we want it, and shooting it and you're done. You move on and it's in the can. Whereas in this process, the director is more a conduit to talk to the actors.

So you're filtering your notes through him, which sometimes is efficient and sometimes isn't, but you're also looking at the long game. It's not about getting it right once and moving on. It's not about giving a line reading to somebody and going, "Look, just do it like this." They have to know it and learn it and be it.

MOM: I think writing is writing. But I think one of the cool things about writing the show was, it wasn't starting with a blank page. It was actually starting with a very rich trove with stuff that we were able to lean on.

In writing for television, you have original ideas. When you create the show, it stems from: How do you write about people trying to live good lives in the world and do the challenges of their own humanity, in a comedic or an even a profound way?

So when you're creating, just from what motivates and drives you as an individual, as a writer, the pages are completely blank. Here, these pages were filled. Certainly all of the musical pages were already filled. And so it was our challenge to start with that, but it was also a greater wind at our back, too.

What was your writing process like?

GG: They basically said, "Here are the songs that Jimmy had said, 'If I don't play these in concert, they riot.'" So you know those have to be in. Then other people are throwing in ideas, and I had a couple.

So we had this list of songs, and even before we started figuring out the story – we knew we wanted to do a love story, something that's kind of universal, not the most complicated story of all time – we had to figure out how to sing these songs. We didn't want to do something where they just sing the songs, but something where the song is supposed to move the story forward.

Mike and I really wanted to make sure that the songs were earned. So what we did was listen to the songs, and we created characters based on the songs. "He Went to Paris" is a substantial song. It means a lot to the one singing it: It's their history. They're talking about their wife and their child dying and whatever. Who's going to sing that song?

We need to create a character who is a fun character to have on stage, but in the moment that he's going to sing that song, it really means something to him. And then "Cheeseburger in Paradise." It's just a goofy, fun song, but how do we create a character that when they sing that song, it is a huge moment for them?

From there, we started to figure out the story and find twists and turns that are hopefully unexpected along the way. And we found ways to use this music where, if you're a big Jimmy Buffett fan, you're going to see these songs in a different light.

MOM: I really have to give credit to Greg, because it was his granular exploration of lyrics that really ended up weaving a story together that we could use. And then I jumped on board and tried to do what I could to enhance the jokes and the dialogue. But he did a really good job.

Is there anything about this experience that you took back to your TV work?

GG: I wouldn't trade anything in the world for what we went through and doing the whole thing, but at the same time, TV is a writer's medium, whereas movies and musicals are not necessarily as much. In TV, the writer's in charge and, selfishly, I think TV's got it right! One thing I definitely learned is that I'm a control freak, so I'm going to stick with TV.

MOM: I am currently running a new show called Heels, which is about the world of independent pro wrestling set in Georgia. It's a show for Lionsgate and Starz. One of the great things about having done Escape to Margaritaville is that it's going to be starring Alison Luff, who starred in Margaritaville [on Broadway].

This is going to be her first major starring role on television. If I'd never done this musical, it's unlikely I ever would have met her. And she's now going to be one of the leads in my new show, and I couldn't be happier.

Are you looking forward to the show playing here in Los Angeles?

GG: I think it's both exciting and for me it's also a little nerve-racking, because now your friends, your peers, the people you work with know that you did it. Maybe they're going to come and check it out. When you have a TV show, sink or swim, it's on you. This is not 100% on you. There's a lack of control there. You hope that everybody goes and enjoys it and has a fun time, and I think they will, but there's some anxiety there.

Well, as the saying goes, break a leg!




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