How Hollywood Director Cameron Crowe Rebooted Almost Famous—For Broadway

How Hollywood Director Cameron Crowe Rebooted Almost Famous—For Broadway

The inside story of how the filmmaker (a former Rolling Stone writer) and his muse (his overprotective mother!) transformed the rock-movie classic into a musical.

Go fishing,”Cameron Crowe’s mother, Alice, said on a sunny September day in 2019.

Crowe, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and director, was reluctant to go fishing. A few days earlier, Alice, age 97, had fallen out of bed, and he wanted to be on hand in case she needed anything. But he had a day off from grueling rehearsals for a new musical he was about to open at the Old Globe Theatre in his hometown of San Diego, and he’d planned to take some colleagues out on a boat.

“I’m going to be fine,” his mother insisted. “Have fun with your people. And this year—it’s going to be great. I’m so happy.”

The play was Almost Famous, a musical adaptation of Crowe’s 2000 autobiographical movie about a 15-year-old aspiring rock journalist (Crowe, in 1973, freelancing for Rolling Stone); Stillwater, the band he’s profiling; and the teenager’s loving but fiercely protective mother, a widow who fears rock and roll will trap her son in a hell of drugs and degeneracy.

Derailed by COVID-19 for two years, Almost Famous is set to open on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in November. It features a young, multiethnic cast of newcomers, a group of actors so sexy that they remind some old Broadway hands of the original cast of Rent. Look for Solea Pfeiffer, Casey Likes, Chris Wood, Jana Djenne Jackson, Emily Schultheis, and Julia Cassandra to light up the Great White Way.

When it comes to casting, Crowe, 65, knows what he’s doing. Almost Famous made stars of Billy Crudup as Russell Hammond, the handsome lead guitarist of the midlevel rock band Stillwater, and Kate Hudson as Penny Lane, the band’s chief groupie or, as she prefers to think of herself, its muse. But it was Frances McDormand as the mother—Elaine Miller—who stole the movie with such lines as “Rock stars have kidnapped my son” and her 11th commandment: “Don’t take drugs!”

Crowe’s mother, a college professor and social activist, loved the movie. But she was even more excited about the musical. She’d been a devoted theatergoer ever since she saw Marlon Brando in the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. When Crowe was growing up in San Diego—practically across the street from the Old Globe—she took, or rather dragged, him to the theater. “She would say, ‘Let’s go see these Shakespeare plays. You’ll brag about it later,’ ” Crowe recalled. “And I was like, ‘No, I won’t. I want to stay here and try and sneak rock music into the house while you’re gone.’ ” While Crowe was falling in love with Joni Mitchell in the early 1970s, his mother was championing Stephen Sondheim, especially his musical Company and her favorite song from the show, “Barcelona.” “You have it all in this song,” she told her son. “You have sadness and romance and humor and character.” It took Crowe nearly 40 years to get to the theater—detouring through Hollywood with movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything…, Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky—but when he finally got there, Alice was thrilled. Though dependent on a walker and requiring friends to help her get around, she reserved three seats on the aisle for the entire Old Globe run of Almost Famous. Crowe’s original draft of Almost Famous—the movie—had nothing to do with his mother or his teenage years covering bands such as the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, and the Eagles (Russell is modeled on Glenn Frey). The story was about a British publicist (Crowe wrote the part with David Bowie in mind) who represented a British rock band. There was a young reporter, but he was a minor character. Then, in draft after draft, “the publicist got smaller and the personal story of the reporter got bigger,” Crowe said. “It was like the personal was driving the story every step of the way.” As Crowe was writing his movie, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was released. “It was kind of burlesquing the British stuff,” Crowe recalled. So he ditched the British band and invented the Midwestern band Stillwater. Brad Pitt was originally going to play Russell. Meryl Streep was approached to play Elaine. And Kate Hudson signed on to play Anita, Elaine’s rebellious daughter. At the time, Hudson was a rising star. “Harvey Weinstein was already trying to get Kate into romantic comedies,” Crowe said. “And I think people were whispering to her, ‘You’re playing a small side part in this movie? You’re not the star?’ And Kate said, ‘I promised Cameron I was going to be in this movie. I love this movie. I’m going to play this tiny sister part.’ ” When Pitt and Streep decided others would be better suited for their roles, Crowe met with Steven Spielberg, whose company DreamWorks, along with Vinyl Films, was producing the movie. “The script is the star,” Spielberg told him. “Who’s the best actor for these parts?” Crowe immediately thought of Crudup, just then getting some attention in Hollywood. Crowe also sent his script to McDormand, who had just won an Oscar for Fargo. She wrote back: “I would love to be in your love letter to rock.” When Sarah Polley, cast as Penny Lane, withdrew, Spielberg advised, “Cast Kate Hudson.” “They say sometimes you get the cast you deserve, and that’s the one case where it actually came true,” said Crowe. To create the character of Elaine, Crowe dug into a cache of letters and aphorisms his mother had sent him over the years. Her pithy sayings—commands, really—inspired many of McDormand’s famous lines. Over dinner at Orso in Manhattan not long ago, Crowe handed me a folder containing some of Alice Crowe’s “Meditations,” mostly written in capital letters and all signed “M.” “These could be embarrassing. For me,” Crowe said. CAMERON—You’re in a rut! REINVENT YOURSELF! TAKE A RISK! FACE YOUR FEARS AND THEY DISSOLVE. ‘C,’ NOBLE SON WHO ELEVATES HUMANITY IN A DARK ‘HURLY BURLY’ WORLD: PLEASE SPEED UP CASTING! START DIRECTING AND THE JOY WILL COME! TO MY NOBLE SON, RE: DIET. DID YOU EXERCISE TODAY? I LOVE YOU! P.S. FACE YOUR FEARS AND THEY WILL BACK DOWN! Alice frequently visited the set during the making of Almost Famous. Crowe begged her not to bother McDormand. “I turn around 30 seconds later and she’s got Frances buttonholed,” he said. McDormand handled the situation deftly. “Alice,” she told Crowe’s mom, “[Elaine] is not going to be you, and it’s not going to be me. It’s going to be somebody else.” In the end, Alice adored McDormand’s performance, though she had one objection. “I didn’t go barefoot in the house,” she told her son. “I never went barefoot in the house.” Critics praised Almost Famous and Crowe won the Oscar for best original screenplay, but it flopped at the box office. It got “slaughtered,” Crowe remembered, by a rerelease of The Exorcist—from 1973. Crowe chuckled and added: “So 1973 comes back to pound us and our little movie about 1973. It really didn’t take off until people discovered the video.” Over the years several Broadway producers had approached Crowe about turning Almost Famous into a musical. It is, after all, a movie about falling in love with music. And its soundtrack—including Simon & Garfunkel’s “America,” Joni Mitchell’s “River,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” the Beach Boys’ “Feel Flows,” Clarence Carter’s “Slip Away,” Todd Rundgren’s “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference,” and Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”—has the makings of a hit jukebox musical, the kind of show in which old hits are shoehorned into a plot, the audience has plenty to drink, they sing and dance, go home happy, and the cash register rings. Crowe turned down all the offers. Almost Famous was too personal. He couldn’t see it as a musical, especially a jukebox musical. Lia Vollack, then the head of Sony’s music and theater departments, and British director Jeremy Herrin, who had staged the theatrical adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, convinced him otherwise. Vollack, who began her career at 16—as a roadie for Johnny Thunders and the Ramones—was mining Sony’s catalog of famous movies, looking for something that might have stage potential. She gave Herrin a list of 700 titles. Herrin’s first choice was Almost Famous. When he told Vollack, “she had a kind of quirky response,” Herrin said. “She twitched and said, ‘That’s funny because I’m trying to persuade Cameron to turn it into a show. This is a very good sign.’ ” “You left home at 15 to write about Led Zeppelin,” his mother once said to him. “Your sister went off to be a stewardess. Was I not fun?”Crowe still resisted until Herrin forced the issue. He flew from New York to Los Angeles and asked for a meeting with Crowe. “I’m a big rock fan,” said Herrin, adding that Almost Famous “was good territory for me as a director. I could really plug into my obsession with rock and roll. I wasn’t pitching ideas. I just turned up with a genuine passion. I think anything else would have stank of bullshit.” Herrin and Vollack emphasized that what they liked most about the movie was its intensely personal nature. The one thing they did not want, they said, was a carbon copy of the movie. And they rejected the idea of a jukebox musical. It seemed too cheap and easy. Yes, they’d use some of the famous songs from the soundtrack—“Tiny Dancer” had to be there, of course—but to deepen the emotional impact of the story, they wanted an original score.

“The thing they’d tell me all the time is that [in the theater] there are no close-ups. ‘You know there are no close-ups, right?’ And I was like, ‘I know there are no close-ups,’ ” Crowe recalled. In the theater, Herrin told him, the close-ups “are called songs.” It was a tall order to blend new theater songs with Led Zeppelin “and have it all feel like it’s of the same world,” Vollack said. “We wanted to have our cake and eat it too.” They briefly considered Elton

It was a tall order to blend new theater songs with Led Zeppelin “and have it all feel like it’s of the same world,” Vollack said. “We wanted to have our cake and eat it too.” They briefly considered Elton John to write new songs, but scheduling issues made that impossible. Vollack then turned to Tom Kitt, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for the musical Next to Normal. In addition to composing, Kitt, 48, is one of Broadway’s most sought-after arrangers and orchestrators. And he knows his way around rock music. He orchestrated Green Day’s American Idiot and Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill for Broadway. Kitt leapt at the chance to work with Crowe. Almost Famous was one of his favorite movies—“every Cameron Crowe movie for me was an event,” he said. Growing up in Bedford, New York, Kitt had aspired to be a singer-songwriter in the mode of Billy Joel, Elton John, and James Taylor. He discovered the power of a well-crafted, intimate rock ballad when he entered a high school battle of the bands competition. He didn’t belong to a band, so he performed Joel’s signature “Piano Man,” accompanying himself on the piano and harmonica. The band before him was so loud, “the whole place clears,” he recounted. “So I’m playing to an empty gym and I’m not looking up. About midway through, I look up and it is standing-room packed. And the rest of my set was just me and my guitarist friend. And we tied for the win. They weren’t sure if I qualified as a real band.”

Chris Wood, Solea Pfeiffer, and Drew Gehling.

Kitt and Crowe wrote much of the score to Almost Famous on weekends in a room on the 28th floor of the Sony building in New York City. The room is red, with a wraparound photograph of the classical pianist Glenn Gould. Crowe would write memos outlining scenes, relationships, and key moments in the story, and then Kitt, sitting at a grand piano, would fashion the memos into songs. Crowe is credited as co-lyricist, but any suggestion that he’s in league with Oscar Hammerstein II, Larry Hart, or Stephen Sondheim makes him blanch. “I’m just happy to shovel coal into the furnace and let Kitt cook,” he says.

Prodded by Vollack, Herrin, and Kitt, Crowe dug deeper into the family dynamic. As a teenager, he was pulled between his strict mother and his rebellious older sister, Cindy, who left home to become a flight attendant.

“You left home at 15 to write about Led Zeppelin,” his mother once said to him. “Your sister went off to be a stewardess. Was I not fun?”

“She wasn’t aware that her dogma was not fun, generally,” Crowe said. “It could be. I thought it was a little more fun than maybe my sister did.” The tension between mother and daughter is funny in the movie, but in reality “it wasn’t a cute rebellion,” Crowe said. “To survive, she had to leave the family. It was kind of a life-or-death move. And the fact that it’s not cute [in the musical] makes the whole story deeper.”

“My mother and I had a very complicated relationship,” Cindy wrote in an email. “Music and travel became a refuge for me. The unbreakable bond I had with my brother was our lifelong passion for music. The play and its music have done much healing for our family.”

Kitt and Crowe’s challenge was to fit their new songs snuggly next to the classics. They did not want the narrative to grind to a halt every time an old favorite jumped out of the score. Judging from the reviews in San Diego, they’ve succeeded. “While plenty of pop culture’s greatest hits have been turned into jukebox musicals, Almost Famous is not one of them,” Variety wrote. “The majority of the music consists of 20 original numbers. The end result? A backstage pass to peek into a world that feels fantastical and real.” In the Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty noted: “Seamlessly incorporated into the score are carefully chosen hits from the period…including a mesmerizing rendition of ‘Tiny Dancer’ and a haunting rendition of Joni Mitchell’s ‘River.’ Kitt’s arrangements artfully weave these vintage treasures into an enchanting tapestry of sound.”

Tom Kitt in the “Red Room”—the music room—on the 25th floor at the Sony Building, NYC, in 2018. Kitt is composing “Morocco” an original song for Almost Famous the musical.COURTESY OF CAMERON CROWE.

“We’re lucky enough that Joni Mitchell gave us ‘River’ and that’s tucked into a Tom Kitt song called ‘Lost in New York City,’ ” Crowe said. “The two do a little dance together. That’s my favorite music moment in the show.” Another favorite is “Morocco,” sung by Penny Lane. It’s a plaintive, tender early-’70s-style ballad inspired by his mother’s favorite song, “Barcelona.”

To play Alice’s role—Elaine—the creative team cast Anika Larsen, a veteran of five Broadway musicals, including Beautiful: the Carole King Musical, in which she delivered a delightfully funny turn as King’s close friend, songwriter Cynthia Weil. Larsen had never seen Almost Famous when she got the call, but as soon as her agent told her she was up for the “Frances McDormand part,” she said, “Oh, done. She’s my favorite actor of all time. I will do a musicalized version of any role Frances McDormand has ever played.” She watched the movie a few days before the first pre-pandemic reading of Almost Famous, back in 2018. She loved the script and was thrilled to discover she had three “great songs.” But she was off her game during the run-throughs. “I [didn’t] feel comfortable reading the lines. And then I realized I’m trapped in Frances McDormand’s performance.” Larsen battled it out and, with the help of director Herrin, eventually created her own Elaine. She won’t watch the movie again “until the day I leave the show.”

Solea Pfeiffer, making her Broadway debut at 28 (she toured in Hamilton), is also steering clear of the movie while she’s in the musical. She’s up against Kate Hudson’s portrayal of Penny Lane. “I have adopted this attitude of when you are tackling something iconic,” she said, “just by virtue of being yourself within it, you are already taking ownership.” It helps, she added, that “I am 10 feet taller than Kate Hudson. And I’m not white.”

Crowe’s sister, Cindy Weber, and Emily Schultheis, the actor playing Anita, the character based on her. At the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in 2019. COURTESY OF CAMERON CROWE.

Penny Lane, the leader of the “Band-Aids,” a group of young women who hung around rock bands at the time, is something of an enigma in the movie, shielding herself from the world with a pair of blue sunglasses and her suit of armor—a shearling coat. We learn more about her in the musical through songs such as “Morocco,” “The Real World,” and “Lost in New York City.”

“I love the idea of giving Penny Lane a little bit more back-story, more agency,” Crowe said. “To me, Penny Lane is generally the smartest person in the room. So it’s good to bring more of that to the story.”

“One thing that I have really had to keep in mind is recognizing what it meant to have sexual autonomy [in 1973],” said Pfeiffer. “Penny Lane was living in a world where a few months before our story takes place, Roe v. Wade was passed in the Supreme Court. What is really blowing my mind is that I’m playing a character that actually has more rights than half of the women in America right now.”

During early workshops for Almost Famous in New York in 2018, Crowe sometimes ducked into a room “to hide for a while because it stirred up so much stuff.” The stage depictions of fights between his mother and his sister, and his desperate attempt to keep the peace, were raw and painful. “But the more we did it, the more I would come back in the room and people would still be talking about it. I knew we were in the right direction when it started to [have] that beautiful-happy-sad pain, as well as the giddy love of the music and where the music takes you. But it wasn’t always easy to kind of smile through sometimes.”

His mother kept tabs on the musical. She’d pop up on Zoom chats and say, “Don’t do drugs!” She gave her stamp of approval to “Morocco” and to Anika Larsen. Crowe has a photograph of Alice watching a video of Larsen in rehearsal “and she’s just sparkling. It’s all in her eyes.”

When the actor originally playing William Miller—the adolescent Crowe—left to do a TV show, the creative team cast Casey Likes, who, as a high school junior from Arizona in 2019, was a finalist inthe National High School Musical Theatre Awards. Alice saw his performance tape and said, “Don’t let Casey Likes get away. He’s great.”

Cameron Crowe’s mother, Alice Crowe, in San Diego in June 2019, watching the workshop video of Almost Famous with the current Broadway cast.COURTESY OF CAMERON CROWE.

“She was into the guerrilla warfare to the very end,” Crowe said of the fight to keep a show going despite Broadway’s long odds.

During rehearsals in San Diego, Larsen repeatedly asked Crowe if she could meet Alice. “You will, you will,” he told her. And then she heard Alice was in a coma as a result of cardiac arrest. Larsen emailed Crowe: “I don’t know if I’m overstepping saying this, but could I just go visit her in the hospital? I know she’s not awake, but they say people in comas can hear. We don’t know.” The next day Crowe drove Larsen to the hospital. She introduced herself to Alice, held her hand, and sang one of her songs from the show.

Alice Crowe never saw Almost Famous at the Old Globe. She died on September 11, 2019

two days before the first preview.

“A dramatic exit,” said Crowe.

She’d never been shy about promoting her son. As her health began to fail in her later years, she’d made frequent visits to the Kaiser Permanente clinic. She’d ask the staff if they’d ever seen Almost Famous or Jerry Maguire. If they said yes, she’d tell them who her son was, call him up, and put them on the phone with him: “Cameron, say hi to Warren. He’s looking after me.”

“She made so many friends that way,” Crowe recalled.

Many people who knew Alice in San Diego came to see Almost Famous and would talk to Crowe about her after the show. Everybody had a story. Sitting there, night after night, in the courtyard of the Old Globe, where his mother had dragged him to see As You Like It and Richard III, Crowe had to laugh. “So this is what the show has become,” he said. “The Alice Crowe jamboree.”

Crowe: grooming, Vaughn Acord. Cast: hair, Craig Miller and Susan Corrado; makeup, Brandalyn Fulton Williams; costumes, Josh Garon and Debbie Lou Allen; props, Matthew Frew and Addison Heeren. Produced on location by Area1202. For details, go to VF.com/credits.