Interview with John P McEneny & Rob Parker

Few figures in Hollywood history are as iconic, complex or fiercely uncompromising as Bette Davis. The Bloody Ballad of Bette Davis takes that extraordinary legacy and transforms it into something completely unexpected: a camp horror musical that explores fame, ageing, ambition and the sacrifices artists make in pursuit of their craft. Ahead of the show's Edinburgh Fringe premiere, I caught up with writer John P. McEneny and composer Rob Parker to discuss the inspiration behind this wonderfully unconventional production, uncovering the woman behind the legend, and why Bette Davis still has plenty to say to audiences today.

I'd love to start at the beginning. What first sparked the idea of turning Bette Davis' life into a camp horror musical?

It wasn't Bette Davis. It was a cheap gray wig. I first saw Burnt Offerings as a kid and remembered being terrified by the haunted house. Forty years later, I watched it again expecting the same experience. Instead, I couldn't stop watching Bette Davis. Here was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived, wearing an unflattering gray wig in a modest horror film, giving a performance far bigger than the movie around her. She wasn't protecting her legend. She was showing up for work. Around the same time, I stumbled across B.D. Hyman's claim that her mother practiced witchcraft and transformed into a clawed demonic creature. I couldn't stop wondering what kind of relationship leaves behind a story like that. Somewhere between the gray wig, the witches, Oliver Reed, and one very inappropriate goat, I realized I wasn't writing about Hollywood at all. I was writing about what it costs to devote your life to making art, and whether the work is enough in the end.  JPM

Bette Davis has been the subject of books, films and documentaries, so what did you feel theatre could explore that those other mediums perhaps couldn't?

There have already been wonderful actors who have recreated Bette Davis, and I wasn't interested in adding another imitation. Our Bette carries echoes of her cadence, her humor, her ferocious spirit, but she belongs to a larger story. Theatre lets us watch transformation happen in front of us. An actor becomes Bette, then a demon, then a frightened child, sometimes with little more than a shift of the body or a change in the light. That felt right because Bette's life was also a story of transformation. Acting was her job, but survival required her to keep transforming herself as the business changed, the audience changed, and younger actors took her place. She had to move from ingénue to leading lady to character actress to a woman in a gray wig making a haunted-house film. Physical theatre allows us to make that struggle visible. Bodies age. Power shifts. One performer steps into the light while another is pushed toward the edge. A biography can tell us that Bette Davis adapted. Theatre can let us watch the cost of that adaptation pass through an actor's body.  JPM

During my research I was reminded just how fearless Bette Davis was throughout her career. Was there one particular aspect of her personality that fascinated you most while writing the show?

It was the contradictions. Every time I thought I'd figured Bette Davis out, she'd do something that made me start over. She could be funny, generous, impossible, cruel, vain, disciplined, all before lunch. She spent a lifetime caring for her daughter Margot, who had significant developmental disabilities, paying for the finest schools, doctors, and care she could afford. At the same time, her relationship with B.D. slowly broke apart. You read interviews before My Mother's Keeper, you can find Bette speaking about her daughter with real affection. It clearly wasn't enough, but it wasn't fake either. Then there was the work. She fought Warner Bros. when she was young, but what moved me even more was the older Bette. The one who took television. The one who made horror films. The one who put on that cheap gray wig for Burnt Offerings because there was still a part to play. I think we like our famous people to be consistent. Heroes stay heroic. Villains stay villainous. Bette refuses that. She was many things. Some admirable. Some heartbreaking. Some probably impossible to live with. I suspect they're all true. That's the woman I wanted to write about.  JPM

The production explores ageing, fame and motherhood alongside its horror elements. Why were those themes particularly important for you to examine?

I think I wrote this musical because one day I looked around the rehearsal room and realized I was the oldest person there. That sneaks up on you. For years, you're the young director, the young playwright, the young teacher, and then suddenly people start talking about "new voices" and "emerging artists," and you quietly realize they aren't talking about you anymore. I don't resent that. Theatre needs young artists. But I do find myself wondering where everybody else goes. I've watched so many remarkable men and women step away from the profession for ten or twenty years to raise children, and then the phone rings. "I'm ready to come back." My heart always sinks a little because the question isn't whether they're talented. It's whether we've made room for them. Who's writing stories about people their age? Who's putting them at the center? Annie Montgomery, who plays Bette, can sing, lift another actor over her shoulder, do handstands, make an audience roar with laughter, and then quietly break your heart. How could I not write a role worthy of that? I'm fifty-five. I don't have answers. I just know that ageism exists in our profession on a deep level, even if we don't always call it that. We celebrate what's next, which is important, but sometimes I wonder if we've confused "new" with "young." Bette Davis refused to disappear. She kept putting on the gray wig and going to work. I understand that impulse much more now than I did ten years ago. Maybe that's what this musical is really about. What does a life in the theatre look like if you simply keep going? JPM

Your score draws inspiration from artists ranging from Kander & Ebb to Elton John. How did those influences help shape the musical's identity?

“The Bloody Ballad of Bette Davis” is an eclectic piece of theatre and it has been a real joy creating music for this strange world. When the score requires everything from dramatic torch songs to attacks of killer cockroaches a composer must dig deep into their influences and experiences.

Long before Elton John started to write for the stage, he created driving rock songs that treated the lyric as an equal partner in the creation process. As a writer and composer, I take lyrics very seriously and, when needing to energise a moment, I find myself leaning into the piano songwriters, like him, who influenced me when I started.

Our show is not a traditional ‘American Musical’ but it is very much in the tradition of musical theatre, and I felt a lot of influences from Kander and Ebb’s ‘Cabaret’ creeping into our world. The mix of jangling discord within an essentially melodic score draws from the jarring world of that pre-war Berlin nightclub feel. The way ‘Cabaret’s’ “Emcee” breaks convention to talk to the audience with a knowing eye is present in our narrative.

Throughout the creation process I have worked towards the balance of variety within unity, marrying a wide range of genres and styles to build an almost cinematic score that helps the narrative move forward. Along the way I believe the music reinforces the multi-role physical theatre nature of our piece where themes build throughout the show to foreshadow or echo moments and emotions onstage

RVP.

Hollywood has always had its fair share of myths, rumours and larger-than-life personalities. Why do you think that era still captures our imagination today?

I love 1975 because everyone seems to be standing at a crossroads without quite realizing it. Bette Davis comes from the old studio system, where craft, discipline, and transformation were everything. Karen Black represents New Hollywood, where authenticity suddenly mattered more than polish. Then Oliver Reed storms in, all charisma, danger, and glorious unpredictability. They're making the same film, but they almost seem to be making different movies. That's irresistible to me. We tend to think history changes in big moments, but I think it changes in rehearsal rooms, on film sets, in the awkward conversations between generations. One way of making art is ending. Another hasn't quite figured itself out yet. Burnt Offerings just happened to catch all three of them in the same haunted house.  JPM

Did you discover anything during your research into Bette Davis that genuinely surprised you? 

Margot changed my understanding of Bette Davis. I knew about the feud with B.D. Hyman long before I knew about Margot. I didn't know that when Margot was diagnosed with significant developmental disabilities, doctors urged Bette to give her back. Instead, Bette spent the rest of her life trying to give her the best life she could. Margot attended the Lochland School in Geneva, New York, but Bette never simply walked away. She visited, brought her home for holidays and summers, searched for better doctors and care, and worried about her constantly. After Bette died, her son Michael (not a character in our play) quietly continued looking after Margot for the rest of her life. That surprised me. It complicated everything. We talk about B.D.'s book, and we should. It belongs to the story. But I found myself wondering why so few people talk about Margot. She doesn't fit neatly into anyone's argument. That's the Bette Davis I became interested in. Not the saint. Not the monster. Just a woman trying to hold together a career, a family, and a life, and not always succeeding. I understand that woman much better than I understand the legend.  JPM

Horror and musical theatre aren't genres people automatically put together, yet they can work brilliantly. What do you think makes that combination so exciting?

I think horror and musicals both ask an audience to surrender. When I was eight years old, sitting in my pajamas beside my sister watching Burnt Offerings, I wasn't asking whether the haunted house was realistic. I just believed it. I believed the smiling chauffeur. I believed the house could possess a family. I believed Oliver Reed might drown his own son. Forty years later, I realized that feeling had never left me. Music does something similar. The moment a character starts singing, we've agreed to leave realism behind. Suddenly, you can step inside someone's fear instead of simply watching it. That's what excited Rob Parker and me. We could write a song about artistic ambition, another about transformation, another about wondering whether a lifetime of work was worth the cost, and somehow it all felt perfectly at home inside a haunted house. Horror lets us externalize our fears. Musicals let us sing the thoughts we'd never dare say out loud. Put those two forms together, and the impossible starts feeling strangely truthful.  JPM

I imagine writing dialogue for someone as instantly recognisable as Bette Davis comes with a certain amount of pressure. How did you find her voice without slipping into imitation?

That worried me from the beginning because the world doesn't need another Bette Davis impression. There are people who do that brilliantly, and we consciously decided not to. In our play, Don, Bette's devoted assistant, keeps slipping into the famous voice. "Fasten your seatbelts..." "I'd kiss you, but I just washed my hair." Every time, Bette stops him. "I don't sound like that." One of my favorite moments in our Brooklyn previews was hearing the audience laugh every time she said it, because underneath the joke is something I care about. Somewhere along the way, we've mistaken a handful of famous lines for a whole human being. Annie Montgomery isn't trying to imitate Bette Davis. She's trying to understand what it feels like to be an actress who has devoted her entire life to the work and suddenly finds herself wondering what it all added up to. Bette Davis believed in transformation. She put on wigs, shaved her head when playing playing Elizabeth I, grotesque makeup for Baby Jane, accents galore, bad teeth, eye patches, whatever the role required. It would have felt strangely wrong to honor her by asking an actress to imitate her instead of transforming into someone truthful. I have a feeling Bette would have hated an impression. She would have wanted a performance.  JPM

What do you think makes The Bloody Ballad of Bette Davis stand out from everything else on this year's Fringe?

Every August, thousands of artists come to Edinburgh hoping somebody notices the thing they've spent years making. Most of us arrive carrying the same questions, whether we're twenty-three or seventy-three. Is this worth it? Do I keep going? What does a life in the arts actually add up to? I don't think The Bloody Ballad of Bette Davis is really about a Hollywood legend. It's about what happens if you never stop making things. Bette Davis becomes our guide because she refused to disappear. She kept working through changing fashions, changing industries, changing ideas about beauty, and changing ideas about what a leading lady should be. That's a story I understand much better at fifty-five than I did at thirty. We wrapped those questions inside witches, demons, Oliver Reed, Karen Black, one spectacularly inappropriate goat, and a score by Rob Parker that can turn on a dime from laughter to heartbreak. I hope audiences have a wonderful time. I also hope they leave thinking about someone whose work quietly changed their own life without either of them ever knowing it.  JPM

Looking back over the writing process, what challenged you the most creatively?

Compassion. That was the hardest part. Every time I thought I'd figured someone out, they did something that made me reconsider. Bette could be generous and cruel. B.D. could be wounded and unforgiving. Oliver Reed could behave terribly and still surprise you. Every time I turned someone into a hero or a villain, I knew I was writing the easier version of the play. The older I get, the less interested I am in certainty. I'm much more interested in compassion. I hope audiences leave arguing about these people. I also hope they leave recognising a little of themselves in all of them.  JPM

A huge thank you to John and Rob for taking the time to chat with me about The Bloody Ballad of Bette Davis. It's clear this is far more than a musical biography; it's a witty, haunting and surprisingly moving exploration of creativity, legacy and what it truly means to dedicate your life to making art. Blending horror, humour and heartfelt storytelling in equal measure, this promises to be one of the Edinburgh Fringe's most distinctive new musicals. The Bloody Ballad of Bette Davis  will play at Assembly Roxy Upstairs, Venue 139, 6 – 30 Aug (not 5,13,20 & 27), at 15.00 pm.