Michelangelo and Da Vinci. Tesla and Edison. Burr and Hamilton. History is rife with intense rivalries which result in everything from decades of friendly competition to decisive hilltop pistol duels, but perhaps no rivalry is as fresh in the public memory as that between the two giants of the tech world: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
The stories of Gates and Jobs ascendancy from Silicon Valley garages to steering two of the largest tech companies in the world have been recounted so often that they hardly warrant a recap here. Yet just because a story has been told ad nauseam doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement, which is precisely the opinion of Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner, the two dudes who are responsible for bringing the Gates-Jobs rivalry to Broadway with their new musical, Nerds.
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Nerds, which will premiere at the Longacre Theatre on April 21, has been over a decade in the making, the brainchild of Allen-Dutton and Weiner, who’ve known each other from well before their days together as writers for five seasons of Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken. The duo began working on Nerds back in the early aughts and after a stint in an NYU theatre workshop, it premiered with the Philadelphia Theatre Company in 2005. Despite Allen-Dutton and Weiner’s penchant for nerdy witticisms, Nerds was met with mixed reviews. Although it garnered a few local Barrymore Awards for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding New Music, a New York Times review was less favorable, noting that Nerds was “noticeably a work in progress…with as many dud jokes as inspired moments.”
In the intervening years, Allen-Dutton and Weiner have been honing their performance and touting the musical around a handful of local theatres, ditching the dud jokes but keeping the nerdy humor. Now they finally feel their software satire is ready for the big time, so I caught up with the duo as they’re putting the finishing touches on their “musical dot comedy” to talk with them a bit about their writing process, what it’s like to dramatize an operating system, and how holograms are going to factor into the performance.
Motherboard: So what made you guys want to do a Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates musical?
Weiner: The real impetus is I think that both Jordan and I are computer nerds. We grew up in northern California, Jordan more at the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto and I was in San Francisco, so it did feel like we were a bit more into the computer nerd culture as it was becoming a thing. The other impetus was a sketch we did on our MTV show that was about Bill Gates being picked on in high school and then becoming the richest man in the world. We thought that was just such a cool story where the kid who got picked on the most became the richest man in the world. That was the kernel we started writing from.
Has this been a continuous development for 10 years? Or was there a big event (like Job’s death) that kicked you back into gear?
Weiner: We stayed on top of it and were constantly rewriting. But when Jobs passed, you know it kind of slowed everything down. We have great reverence for both Gates and Jobs. While this is a comedy that also makes fun of them, it’s really irreverent and yet reverential at the same time. Out of respect to Jobs we weren’t pursuing bringing the show to Broadway during those years.
Allen-Dutton: It’s always kind of shady when like somebody’s on their deathbed and they’re shooting the biopic already. We love Jobs—we had to process it, it wasn’t an easy thing to think about and it wasn’t easy to think about how we wanted to memorialize him in the play.
Where are you guys getting your source material? Have you spoken with Bill Gates’ people? Are you on his radar?
Allen-Dutton: I think they’re probably aware of it.
Weiner: I’m pretty sure Microsoft knows. I don’t know if his assistant has gone into his office yet and been like ‘Bill, I just wanted to make you aware of something…’ But actually we contacted Steve Wozniak very early on. I think even during our NYU production. We just guessed his email from shooting emails to like ‘steve@woz.org’ or ‘woz@woz.org’. We went through like 30 combinations. I think it was ‘Steve@woz.org’ … anyway, he wrote back and was like ‘This sounds great! I love musical theatre, I’m coming!’ …and then he didn’t come. I think a friend of his came and his friend came up to us after the show and was like ‘guys, Woz doesn’t smoke weed.’ That was like the basic premises of our character at that point.
Allen-Dutton: He’s like I appreciate what you’re doing but it’s totally off base. From that point forward we just make Steve smoke weed and Woz didn’t.
Weiner: Woz was getting second hand high.
How much of the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Rivalry do you get into?
Allen-Dutton: We start with the Homebrew computer club in ’75 and basically hit a lot of the major checkpoints through to the Microsoft anti-trust. So first we watch Jobs getting us to the point of releasing the personal computer revolution on one hand with the Macintosh, and then you have Gates coming up with software in the context of the big heavy hitters from the ’50s and ’60s like IBM. You watch their rivalry in the sense that Gates is inspired by Job’s innovation and Jobs could kind of give a fuck about Gates. But then Gates really comes up with this notion of software which pretty much smokes Jobs in the face.
Weiner: I think we play with the rivalry and hopefully transcend it. The fun part we had in writing this show is that Gates and Jobs kind of switch a little bit in terms of who is the antagonist and who is the protagonist. You’re invested in both these characters. You kind of want to watch both of them succeed. But you kind of find yourself rooting for one side and then the other. I think that’s where we keyed into the drama of the rivalry more than just within the technological innovations.
And you’re incorporating a lot of tech into your show, right? Holograms, projection mapping, an interactive app—
Weiner: If there’s a show that can do it, this is the show. I don’t think we’ve answered all the questions on what that is yet, but I know our producers are going to figure out a way to get holograms up there, projection mapping within the house, and using the app to control the plot is more of a way to customize and mod your musical experience— there’s certain things you can control within the app and vote on which will change the show nightly.
Favorite bit in the story/moment?
Allen-Dutton: One of my favorite moments in the story is where we portray Tom Watson, the first resident of IBM, which was kind of this hegemonic power of blue suited guys who were very buttoned up and all that. But they also had a song book—and this is true story—and Tom Watson would make the employees sing from Tom Watson’s songbook. In Japan they do this every morning—if you go into Panasonic in the morning everyone’s singing songs together. That’s reality. So we wrote this song for Tom Watson where it’s this very ridiculous number and you have this really maniacal, psychotic, fascist leader of IBM doing this ridiculous dance number. Like some dark shit happens in the number but it all happens in this jazz hands kind of way.
Weiner: I’ve always loved the closer to act I, which is a rap number by Bill Gates where he releases Windows. It has one of my favorite lines in the show: “this microsoft office is no longer for a nerd, my outlook excels me to my powerpoint, word”. Mic drop.
Nerds the musical will begin previews on March 31 at Longacre Theatre. Tickets can be purchasedhere.
