DIARY OF A WIMPY KID WEEK: BOOK WRITER KEVIN DEL AGUILA
The Emmy winner and Tony nominee talks about his second career as a book writer on the musical Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
When Some Like It Hot debuted on Broadway in late 2022, the aspect of the show’s that immediately stole people’s hearts was the reimagining of the Jerry character from the beloved Jack Lemmon/Tony Curtis movie as someone for whom wearing women’s clothes unlocks their true self, Daphne.
Key to that journey of discovery is the millionaire Osgood Fielding III, who shows up late in the first act and promptly falls in love with Daphne. Played by Kevin del Aguila, Osgood is by turns eccentric and unexpectedly vulnerable. His song to Daphne, “Fly, Mariposa, Fly” is one of the show’s most emotional moments. And Kevin would go on to be nominated for a supporting actor Tony for his work.
After I saw the show I happened to mention to my nephew Patrick how much I loved it. And he said, “Oh, my friend Kevin is in that! He’s so nice!”
Patrick is himself a professional actor, with credits as the understudy for Young Cary Grant in 2022’s Flying Over Sunset at Lincoln Center, one of Virginia Woolf’s nephews in The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera, and, soon, Alec Baldwin’s grandson in the film Rust. He was also on SNL a few years ago, and he was delightful.
Not long after Patrick did SNL, he got cast to be the lead in a musical adaptation of the beloved children’s books, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, at Minneapolis Children’s Theatre. Composed by Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler, with a book by Kevin del Aguila, it was actually the second time round for the show, having first debuted there in 2016.
The thing that stunned about the show was its complexity. Normally when I hear “children’s theater” I assume I’m going to get something sweet but ultimately kind of simple.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid definitely has a sweetness to it, but this tale of a middle schooler whose drive to be popular ends up undermining his relationships had unexpected emotional depth, as well rich characters, dozens of inventive songs, and challenging production numbers involving over 20 middle school age actors. And the performances were outstanding. Rather than a local children’s theater production, it very much felt like a Broadway show on tour.
Ever since I saw Wimpy Kid, I’ve been wanting to talk to its creators about this jewel of a show. And Schmuckler, Mahler, and del Aguila all very generously agreed to be interviewed.
If you’re not familiar with the show, the producers released an album last Christmas featuring Norbert Leo Butz, Sutton Foster, Jessie Mueller and Kevin del Aguila.
And here’s “The Middle of It All (Part 1)", which introduces Greg and the characters.
Kevin, how did you first get involved with Wimpy Kid?
In 2015, a producer I was working with called and told me that a Wimpy Kid musical was scheduled to be part of the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company’s 2016 season and they were looking for new writers for it. He asked me to spend the next 24 hours reading as many Wimpy Kid books as I could and immediately put me on a plane to Chicago to meet the director Rachel Rockwell. I had dinner with her, we gabbed about middle school and wimpy-ness, and she introduced me to a couple of composer/lyricists that she knew from working in Chicago theater — Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler. The next day I was told we all had the job and started figuring out how to adapt these books for the stage.
It was definitely an “arranged marriage” between me and these strangers in the creative team. We barely new each other, but we had to write as fast as possible because the production date was looming and there was no time to waste. It could have gone HORRIBLY wrong. Luckily, everybody was talented, sane, and shared a similar sense of humor. Plus, the source material was so fun. The fact that we genuinely liked what we were adapting was a great help. Jeff Kinney [author of the books] came to see a reading of our first draft and loved it. We were so relieved.
The one giant wrinkle was that right before we went into rehearsals, Rachel was diagnosed with cancer. She insisted on continuing to direct and choreograph the show while undergoing chemo treatment. I can’t believe she actually did it. It was incredible to behold. Miraculously, her cancer went into remission after the production opened. She always said that being surrounded by kids and all of the laughter and joy she felt while working on the show was partly responsible.
Sadly, the cancer returned a few years later and we lost her. [More on Rachel, and the amazing work she did on this show and others, tomorrow.]
After a long search for a new director, Jenn Thompson came into our lives. With her fresh perspective, we got to rethink and rewrite parts of the show that we didn’t have time to address in our rush into production before, and we presented the reimagined show back at the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company in 2022. It was strange to see the show back on that same stage again, but after Rachel’s passing and all the darkness of the pandemic, watching an audience and a new cast of kids laugh and delight in the piece again was like a glimmer of hope returning to the world.
There are so many rich characters and stories in the piece. Was it challenging to try and figure out how to serve all of them?
There were characters that we knew fans of the books would expect to see, like Rodrick, Patty Farrell, Fregley, etc. The trick was figuring out how to integrate them in a natural way that propelled Greg's story. Even though the books are very episodic, we were very aware that we wanted the show to have a clear throughline and worked to keep the ancillary characters that pop up tied to Greg’s main goals. Some characters like Greg’s Dad were hard to crack because his relationship to Greg in the books isn’t so clear-cut and doesn’t really play a big part in Greg’s quest for popularity at school.
I’m very proud of the way we got the Joshie character in the show. [In the books, Joshie is a Europop singer whom Greg’s best friend Rowley worships.] I thought he was such a funny character in the books (and one that sings, so he seemed a natural for the musical). Jeff Kinney said he’s glad he wasn’t involved in development with us initially, because based on his experience while developing the Wimpy Kid films, he was convinced that translating Joshie from the books to the stage would never work. He was thrilled to be wrong!
What's it like being a book writer? How would you describe the collaboration between composer, lyricist and book writer? What got you into it?
Honestly, it kind of stinks being a book writer. If the show works, nobody really notices your work and praises all of the songs. If a show doesn’t work, they always blame the book. Being a book writer is like being the maker of a jewelry display case. You want your work to be air-tight and attractive, but its sole purpose is to draw all attention to the diamonds inside of it. Nobody says, “What a wonderful display case!” when the diamonds are placed in the perfect context, shining their brightest.
The collaboration between composer, lyricist, and book writer can be tricky if everyone isn’t on the same page trying to tell the same story. Usually the book writer outlines the story, giving it some kind of structure and suggesting song moments throughout. From there, everybody starts to pitch in so that all departments are in alignment, working toward the same goal.
Usually, everything the book writer does always defers to the lyrics/music since they’re what’s happening at the most emotional points of the story. Whatever the composer/lyricists want to cannibalize from the book is fair game. In our 2016 production, we cut a song written for Fregley because it just wasn’t working and replaced it with a scene that I wrote. It was fine, but we all knew that the section really deserved a song.
For the 2022 production, Alan wrote a totally different song, but based it on the scene I had written, adding his own flourishes and taking it even further. It was an instant hit. Finally, Fregley had a musical moment that fit his character and brought down the house. [NB: It absolutely did. Stay tuned for more on that later this week.]
I stumbled into writing musicals. I was a playwright who was asked to write the book for a show called Altar Boyz that had gone through three book writers who couldn’t make the premise work. Once I was brought on board, I was happily surprised to find that I had a knack for musical structure and a feel for setting songs in dramatic context. The show was an off-Broadway hit that ran for almost five years and put me on the theatrical map. I’ve been writing musicals ever since.
You have so many interesting aspects to your career, each of which seem like they demand a lot. What made this story one that you wanted to tell? And what was it like for you?
The Wimpy Kid books are genuinely funny. That made working on the show such a delight. We really wanted to capture the sensibility and experience of the books but also wanted to give the story a bit of heart.
We talked a lot about how every experience seems bigger than life when you’re in middle school, and that’s what we thought could really “sing” when adapting these books into a musical. Middle school is this crazy transitional time of life when you’re thrust into a world of kids growing at different rates, new responsibilities, new social anxieties. You’re coming out of kid-dom and barreling toward teen-hood. It’s the time when you start to realize that the world doesn’t totally revolve around you anymore and you have to think about others. Having Greg realize that becoming best dressed or best dancer in school means nothing if you don’t have a best friend was a great way to dramatize that idea. It’s been so satisfying to watch audiences and fans of the books embrace the show so fully.
Big thanks to Kevin for agreeing to do this, and to my nephew Patrick, who was kind enough to let me mention that I was his uncle!
Tomorrow: Part One of Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler!