Performing Arts

IRVING – Musical comedies have given us singing cowboys and singing Siamese kings. More composers than you might expect, from Irving Berlin to Michael John LaChiusa, have even given us singing American presidents.

Brandon Thibodeaux / Special to DMN

Dallas native Dean Nolen (left) stars as Lyndon Baines Johnson in The Winner, which centers on the infamous 1948 election for U.S. Senate.

The Winner, however, is probably the first musical built around a real and scandal-producing election that brought a future president to power. Saturday night, Lyric Stage will present the world premiere of this piece based on Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1948.

If the subject matter seems an unlikely basis for musical theater, so does the matchup between its librettist-lyricist, Joe Sutton, and composer, Lewis Flinn.

Mr. Sutton mostly writes dramas about important historical and social topics. His Voir Dire, written for Seattle Repertory Theatre and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, tackles the issue of racial inequities in the justice system, and he's working on a commission about Hurricane Katrina's devastation of Louisiana. He also teaches playwriting at Dartmouth College.

He doesn't even go to musical theater all that often, though he did see Caroline, or Change because of his admiration for playwright Tony Kushner.

About 10 years ago, Mr. Sutton decided he wanted to expand his horizons.

"Most of what I had written was pretty small, pretty domestic," he says. "I wanted to work on a larger canvas."

New Dramatists, a New York nonprofit group promoting new work for the theater, had a program that introduced playwrights to writers of musical theater. Mr. Sutton met Mr. Flinn at one of the New Dramatists workshops.

Trained as a classical pianist and the former lead singer of the East Village rock band Acoustic Blue, Mr. Flinn makes most of his living writing music for TV shows and commercials and composing incidental music for plays such as The Little Dog Laughed. In fact, he'll fly home to New York on Sunday to attend the party marking that show's Broadway closing. He has written a half-dozen musicals, but also songs for pop artists such as Jennifer Holliday.

"There, theater is such a bad word," he says.

Although President Johnson had always seemed an interesting figure to Mr. Sutton, the playwright had no thoughts in his head of a play based on LBJ.

"My first idea wasn't a regular musical theater piece, which I don't generally do, but, 'How about an American Threepenny Opera? How would that work? What about LBJ in that pivotal MacHeath role?' " Mr. Sutton recalls.

The show that eventually became The Winner soon moved beyond that initial inspiration, but Mr. Flinn says he still tells people, " The Threepenny Opera meets Ragtime," to give them a sense of the piece.

For those whose Texas history needs some brushing up, that Senate election of 1948 is the one that gave the future president the ironic nickname "Landslide Lyndon." Mr. Johnson won the race against former Gov. Coke Stevenson by 87 votes – and only after Duval County political boss George Parr delivered 202 controversial votes a week after the runoff election.

Brandon Thibodeaux / Special to DMN

Joe Sutton (left), who wrote the book and lyrics for the musical The Winner, and Lewis Flinn (right), who wrote the music. It stars Dean Nolen (center).

Mr. Sutton chose to focus on this stage of the LBJ career because he thought it "would be fun to play with our preconceptions as to who he was. It certainly opened up a sense of license, because we don't know that younger man so well. It allows the playwright to have more leeway and maybe an audience to be more open."

The playwright also saw in that election a foretaste of the way American politics have been going ever since.

"We went from something more naive, reminiscent of the 19th century, to a modern campaign in which the roof was blown off by the media. This was a pivotal point," Mr. Sutton says. "Also, in our show, it is a pivot point for Johnson, who goes from being more idealistic to vowing to himself that he would win at whatever the cost."

In The Winner, Lady Bird Johnson is a strong figure who not only stands by her man but also provides him with something of a moral compass. The young John Connally, who was Mr. Johnson's campaign manager in 1948, is a conduit to the more corrupt elements of the plot – and his loyalty to his boss is tested when the older man kisses his wife, Nellie. (This is a fictional event, Mr. Sutton says, but the Johnson biographies do record similar passes made at the wives of other close associates of the future president.)

The story of that scandalous election remains fascinating, no doubt, but is it really fodder for musical theater? Mr. Flinn, the composer, says he wasn't really interested in creating a normal sort of musical, either.

"I call it a Texas-influenced score," Mr. Flinn says. "Some of the numbers are very 1948, very Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys."

Mr. Sutton and Mr. Flinn went back and forth about whether to change the names of their historical characters. For the first workshop in the late 1990s, the musical was called Democracy, and the hero wasn't called Lyndon Johnson. After other readings around the country, the script lay dormant. When a mutual friend told Mr. Sutton and Mr. Flinn about Lyric Stage's Steven Jones and he expressed interest in the show, they had to change the name because of the subsequent Michael Frayn drama that played at Theatre Three last month. They changed the names of the characters back to the original monikers, too.

Both creators are persuaded that the story has all sorts of contemporary resonance. Its hero, after all, is a Texan whose election is decided in a hard-fought court battle.

"I'm not saying anybody else stole an election," Mr. Flinn says coyly. "I'm not saying that. No-o-o ..."

Mr. Sutton puts it all in more lofty terms.

"For the rest of the 20th century, President Johnson was that defining presidential figure, period," the playwright says. "He was clearly a man who in life provoked extreme emotional reactions and expressed them himself."