'John Doe,' Unmasked

From a Capra Film, Team Writes a Musical in Tune With the Times

Composer Andrew Gerle, left, and lyricist Eddie Sugarman kept the Depression-era setting of Frank Capra's movie "Meet John Doe." Says Gerle, "I want this to have a real contemporary feel to it, but with flavor from that era." (By Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)

Composer Andrew Gerle knows precisely what it was about the Frank Capra movie "Meet John Doe" that spurred him to turn it into a new musical.

"Fraud in media, corporate handling of media, manipulating the electorate," recalls Gerle, who's sitting with lyricist Eddie Sugarman in a bright conference room just off the balcony at Ford's Theatre, where their "Meet John Doe" began previews yesterday.

"I liked it not because it's dark," continues Gerle, who adapted the show's book with Sugarman, "but because it's relevant."

The 1941 movie -- about a Depression-era reporter who fabricates a sensational column to keep her job -- is a peculiar mixture of American populism and paranoia, featuring crackling screwball dialogue, escalating religious overtones, unexpected power and a notoriously unbelievable ending. Gerle notes that the scandal involving Jayson Blair, the New York Times journalist who fabricated stories, was unfolding in 2003 as he and Sugarman worked on early drafts -- events that lined up tidily with the "John Doe" plot.

For Sugarman, though, the appeal was less serious. "I just thought it was neat," he says, in what seems to be a characteristically sunny style.

Meet two John Does, a pair of unheralded 34-year-old musical-theater journeymen enjoying their first really big break.

Sugarman's background teems with sweetness, starting with his teenage gig at Cleveland's Peanut Butter Players -- a lunchtime theater "by children and for children," he says. (He boasts that other future pros were in the group, including recent Tony nominee Hunter Foster and his Tony-winning sister, Sutton.) Sugarman's early ambition was to dance, and his open face and peppy demeanor all but blurt, "Let's put on a show!"

Gerle (pronounced "Girl-uh") is more laid-back, more conspicuously cerebral -- as Sugarman says, " biiig music geek." Born to classical musicians, Gerle acted a bit in high school but found that when he got to Yale University, "I was more valuable in the pit."

Confirming Sugarman's assertion, Gerle says that in Yale's generalized music program, "I took some theory and analysis, because I like that stuff."

They met as New York neophytes in 1994 and quickly became friends; four years later, Gerle wrote the march for Sugarman's wedding. Gerle has been music directing, orchestrating, performing and generally cobbling a theatrical living all along, while Sugarman's juggled day jobs with performing and writing.

In a story that sounds right out of Rodgers and Hart, Sugarman can pinpoint the day he gave up his dancing dream. On Oct. 20, 1996, he bought an expensive sport coat and auditioned for a songwriting workshop -- "Which I'm quite sure you played for," he says to a not-so-sure Gerle. Sugarman was accepted on the spot. Then he squired his girlfriend to the fountain outside Lincoln Center and proposed.

"Now I'm going to do something stable," he told her as she accepted. "Like write musicals."