Laughs In Store
Madison Playwrights Take Aim At Wal-mart Empire With Their New Musical Comedy

When Madison playwriting duo Catherine Cappellaro and Andrew Rohn penned the hit Madison musical "Temp Slave" in 1997, the nation's largest employer was Manpower, the coast-to-coast temporary worker placement agency.
Today, the nation's largest employer is ... well, who else but? Wal-Mart. Biggest retailer in the world. Icon of 21st-century capitalism. Source of Every Day Low Prices. So loved, so hated!

And the perfect subject for a musical, thought Cappellaro and Rohn -- who've spent the better part of the last two years writing the campy, caustic and comically irresistible "Walmartopia" for Mercury Players Theatre. The show runs at the Bartell Theatre through Jan. 14.

The story begins in a Wal-Mart Supercenter circa 2005, where frustrated, long-term department supervisor Vicki Latrell (played by Anna Jayne Marquardt) is hoping to rise up the ranks in a company that's long been slammed for its thick glass ceiling. Along the way, Vicki meets plenty of other barriers to job satisfaction, including lousy hours, worse pay, and a boss firmly entrenched in the good-ol'-boy network who conducts his management meetings at Hooters.

By Act II both Vicki and her Madison audience have been catapulted into the year 2035, when all of State Street -- including the Overture Center -- has been usurped by a gargantuan retail island known as "Walmartopia."

"One nation under Wal-Mart," sings the "Walmartopia" cast in the show's title number. "Med-Mart has the pills to pop/when the nightmares just won't stop/School-Mart teaches us to shop/how to stock and sweep and mop/News-Mart tells us what is real/what to think and how to feel/Smash our enemies all apart /at National-Security-Mart!"

Like the retailer's critics, "Walmartopia" paints a picture of a behemoth corporation that exploits workers around the world, neglects the environment, undermines small-town economies and hastens the all-round uglification of the American landscape.

But this is a musical, after all! So with plenty of upbeat, deadpan humor similar to The Onion's, "Walmartopia" is full of hummable tunes sung by a peppy cast with big smiles and friendly blue vests.

Which is meant to make it all the funnier.

"It became a challenge to not beat people up with the information in the first act, and also how to imagine how it could get worse in the future if we continue to follow this trajectory," says Cappellaro. So she and husband Rohn tried to create believable characters as well as over-the-top caricatures - and slid in the occasional local joke. Rohn composed a score for a six-piece band (including cameos for glockenspiel, cow bell, jug and theremin) and songs in eclectic styles ranging from Latin, jazz and rock to that signature Broadway sound.

Doing their research Neither Cappellaro nor Rohn has worked at Wal-Mart (although "we belonged to Sam's Club for awhile, I'll guiltily admit," says Cappellaro). Much of their script material is based on news clippings, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's autobiography, Liza Featherstone's book "Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart," and above all, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Ehrenreich's book includes a first-hand account of applying for a Wal-Mart job and going through the company's orientation, says Rohn, who used that information to write the lyrics for "We Want to Know You." The song is based on the actual employee questionnaire that asks - yes or no - whether there "is room for a non-conformist in our organization." (The Wal-Mart answer, says Rohn: "Absolutely not.")

"That's the whole thing about this show," says Cappellaro. "It's hard to make up fiction that's weirder than some of the stuff that goes on at Wal-Mart. They're feeding us new material every day, so keeping up with the latest news and their dealings is difficult."

Some of the headlines are just too good to resist - like Wal-Mart CEO Scott Lee's complaint that attacks on the store chain felt like "being nibbled to death by guppies." That quote morphed into a rousing

Walmartopia" number performed, yes, by dancers wearing guppy heads.

Writing about workers

Cappellaro and Rohn based their first topical musical, "Temp Slave," on real-life experiences they had while trying to make the rent as temps in New York City. That show had four productions in Madison, a brief tour in San Francisco and a staged reading in New York.

" 'Temp Slave' was about downtrodden workers," says Cappallero. "There's little theater that portrays the life of the low-wage worker in this country, and that's something we're really committed to doing." (Tickets to "Walmartopia" for Wal-Mart employees are being underwritten by the Teamsters and the UCFW unions, and will cost only $5; on Wednesdays, students pay only $5, too.)

Cappallero, a New Glarus native and UW-Madison grad, and Rohn, who grew up in Vermont, both discovered musical theater in high school but developed other interests in college - journalism and activism for her, music for him. They joined forces after Rohn moved to Madison on the suggestion of a friend.

"We met doing a musical, Joel Gersmann's 'My Fair Arab,'· " at Broom Street Theater, says Cappellaro, also a singer and trumpet player. "For me, that was kind of a reawakening of this passion I've always had for performing and being a part of musicals. It took a few years for us to think we could make one ourselves."

When friend Marcy Weiland became artistic director of Mercury Players Theatre, the pair knew that if they could write a decent show, they could also get it staged. After "Temp Slave's" success, they attempted (and abandoned) an idea for a musical called "Brainsluts," about people who are paid to undergo psychological and medical experiments.

By 2004 they were parents of twin five-year-old boys, and "we were invited by Mercury Players to write some kind of political musical for their 10th anniversary," says Rohn. "The idea was to do something on the idea of the new Overture Center, some of the protests about it - that it was very top-down, and that it didn't nurture local artists."

But that idea kind of bombed, too. "It just wasn't juicy enough for us. It's not like we're against the symphony and the ballet," says Rohn, who makes his living as a massage therapist and leads the "Walmartopia" band on keyboards.

"So the seeds of this play about the Overture turned into a Wal-Mart play," he explains. "It was a lot easier to hate Wal-Mart."

Growing the show A one-act edition of "Walmartopia" played the Bartell and (ironically enough) was featured as part of the Overture Center's grand opening ceremonies in October 2004. The current production has been expanded, re-staged, and now includes a cast of 24 performers, many of whom play two or more roles.

"We wanted to have a big cast," says Cappellaro, who is co-directing the show with Casey Sean Grimm. "Wal-Mart's huge; why not have a huge musical about Wal-Mart?"

With 13 stores within a 50-mile radius of Madison, Wal-Mart seems to be doing just fine - even with the negative press and the recent big-screen documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." So far, Cappellaro and Rohn - who also perform with the children's group Madgadders, in Cherry Pop Burlesque and in their own dance band VO5 - have not had any Wal-Mart lawyers come knocking on their door.

"We invited them (to see the one-act show) last fall," says Cappallero, who in her day job is managing editor for Rethinking Schools magazine.

"Satire is protected under the First Amendment, so it would be interesting to see them try to stop us mount the production. But I think they're too smart to do it.

"I would say, 'Bring it on,'· " she says. "I would really love for the show to get enough publicity that they would actually hear about it."