Inside Baseball: Behind the Scenes With Ron Shelton and “Bull Durham, a New Musical”

Before Ron Shelton began filming Bull Durham in 1987, he hung out with Durham’s minor league baseball team for several months—clocking curveballs, chewing dugout tobacco, and getting a grasp of the liminal small-town feel that would define the film. 

And before Theatre Raleigh debuts its musical iteration of the classic on September 10, Shelton is spending the month, off and on, with the cast as it rehearses a new chapter for baseball’s favorite love triangle: Annie Savoy, Crash Davis, and Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh. 

Shelton, now 78, is behind the scripts of both Bull Durham the movie and the musical; singer-songwriter Susan Werner wrote the music, repurposing movie lines into songs. The musical has run once, in Atlanta in 2014, though Theatre Raleigh executive director Lauren Kennedy Brady says the script has changed significantly since that first run. Kennedy Brady herself has championed the musical for more than a decade—first as an investor, when she was a Broadway performer and the show premiered in Atlanta, then, later, as its producer, when the commercial rights became available.

The musical has had a long road; after its 2014 premiere and initial adjusting and capital-raising, it hit several road bumps, the pandemic among them, before arriving in the Triangle. Now reworked, the show is back with Raleigh’s professional nonprofit theater company, taking the stage at Duke’s Reynolds Theater in its titular hometown. 

“The team is top-notch, and I just think it’s so cool that our Raleigh and Durham audiences are going to experience it,” says Kennedy Brady, who has previously brought the likes of Ariana DeBose and Norm Lewis to Theatre Raleigh. 

And if all goes well? Next stop: Broadway, the major leagues of musical theater. 

And so, one evening, mid-August, the cast convenes in a half-moon sweep of chairs at Theatre Raleigh. It’s the first cast reading and a kitschy ’80s mood has been crafted for the occasion: there are hourglass Dr. Pepper bottles, a baseball bat lying across a checkered red tablecloth, a screen door propped against the wall. Several actors chew gum with a considered outfield concentration. 

Nevertheless, a mood is not a meme: Director Marc Bruni stresses that he’s not here to create a cartoonish ’80s performance. He wants to evoke something human. 

“These are real people,” Bruni says, standing in front of a panel of mirrors that reflects back the two-dozen-some cast members. “We’re trying to say something universal about relationships.” 

This cast—half of whom are principals brought in from out of town, the other half actors hired locally—seems up for the job. Raleigh’s Ira David Wood III commands Uncle Roy Tuck’s friendly baritone. Nik Walker (Aaron Burr in Hamilton) plays Crash, the jaded major leagues’ has-been brought in to mentor Nuke, the Bulls’ star with pro ambitions and a “million-dollar arm and five-cent head.”

John Behlmann reprises the role of Nuke—Behlmann played him in the Atlanta show run, and it’s obvious why. Even from a seated position, Behlmann’s affable physicality is at the fore, delivering each of Nuke’s lines (“I like some things fancy but some things regular—like screwing!”) like a cutter pitch. 

Behlmann tells the INDY that the production has gotten “better and better” since its first run. 

“I could do it all day,” he says. “It was not a hard ask, emotionally, to be like, ‘Do I want to do this again?’ The answer is yes. And the show, having been part of it for such a long time, it’s part of my life now, in a weird way.”

Two-time Tony nominee Carmen Cusack, clad in head-to-toe denim, plays Annie Savoy, the local community college English teacher, scholar of foul balls and William Blake, who takes it upon herself to bed one player each season. Cusack begins: 

“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career. Makin’ love is like hittin’ a baseball.”

In the corner, Shelton—unassuming in a baseball cap and Blundstones—is smiling. 

When the cast breaks for 10, Kennedy Brady introduces me to Shelton. I ask if he makes it back to the area much. Yes, he says: “I never have to buy a drink in Durham!” 

“But,” he adds, “you could never imagine how much it’s changed.”

It’s true; Durham has changed. In 1987, the year that Bull Durham was filmed, Durham had a population of 172,450. A year earlier, in 1986, Durham’s last cotton mill—Erwin Mill, now an apartment complex—shuttered; the year following, in 1987, the American Tobacco Company relocated to Reidsville after more than a century as the manufacturing engine of the city. 

These closures dovetailed with two decades of widening economic inequality that followed the 1967 construction of NC 147, a failed stab at urban renewal that razed Durham’s largest working-class Black neighborhood, displacing 500 businesses and 4,000 families. 

This is the derelict town that Shelton—a fledgling screenwriter who’d put in some five years in the minor leagues—encountered, as he traced the Southern backroads of the Carolina League, narrating monologues into a microdisc and trying to decide if he was going to attempt a baseball movie. From the beginning, he had a tough time persuading Hollywood to get behind the film: the first two times he shopped it around, every studio rejected the project—an underdog, just like the town and team it was portraying. 

“I was a first-time director, which is a problem,” Shelton says. “The subject was baseball, which was a problem.” 

But once greenlit, the bet paid off: Bull Durham, which cost around $9 million to make, ended up netting $50 million and several Oscar nods; the performances by Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins, who play Crash, Annie, and Nuke, were all widely celebrated. (Upon meeting on the set, Sarandon and Robbins began a decades-long relationship; Shelton is the godfather to one of their children.) Shelton became the kingmaker of smart sports movies, going on to make hits like White Men Can’t Jump and Play It to the Bone. 

And the Durham Bulls became famous: In 1995, the team graduated from its old home off Washington Street to the ambitious Durham Bulls Athletic Park; by the time the movie had minted a decade, in 1998, the Bulls were a Triple-A team, raising Durham’s profile. 

All this because Shelton believed in his material—in part because he’d lived it, having had to wrestle with his own bittersweet feelings about leaving the Appalachian League for grad school, as he did in 1972. 

In this way, he’s a bit like Crash.

“Crash is trying to reinvent his dream quickly—‘OK, maybe I’ll be a manager,’” Shelton says. “I was trying to reinvent my dream quickly, too. I couldn’t watch baseball for several years. It was painful.” 

“Ron Shelton is a baseball celebrity,” Behlmann confirms over a phone call. “Every time we’ve done any version of this show and been around actual ballplayers, it’s like having Brad Pitt with you. People know him. They think it’s so great. They love this movie. They think the authenticity of the movie is like, ‘Oh, this is the only one that gets it right.’”

To translate a movie into a musical, certain concessions have to be made. 

Sitting in a diner chain near his Raleigh hotel, a few weeks out from the premiere, Shelton forms a frame around my face with his hands. 

“In the movies, you have close-ups,” he says. “You don’t have that in theater.” 

The unforgettable visual of Annie tying Nuke to her floral bed while she reads him Walt Whitman, for example, is cut in the musical, as are the montages. Time contracts: the scenes go from the ballpark to the bar, to Annie’s house, back to the ballpark. Not every character stays, though some, like the subplot with flirty baseball groupie Millie marrying a devout Christian player, get extra airtime and their own musical numbers. 

The music, though, is not a concession: it gives a playful script a playful second life. 

“What Susan Werner, the composer-lyricist, has done is to create an incredibly catchy, fun score that is as emotionally complex as it is musically appropriate for the period,” says Bruni, the production’s musical director. “Her task has been to create a score that sounds like it would be the kind of music playing at a roadside bar in 1988 with sawdust on the floor and peanut shells.”

Bruni first saw the movie on VHS, a couple of years after it came out. 

“I didn’t really understand it,” Bruni says. “I certainly enjoyed the baseball aspect of it, but I think it’s a movie that benefits from gaining some life wisdom, as Annie would say. You realize how wise it is at examining human nature and the way that time affects people.”

“Ultimately,” he continues, “this show is about two people reaching a point in their lives where the thing that’s been working for them for a long time is no longer working, and they have to find out what that next chapter is. That’s at the heart of the romance.” 

This is another reason he doesn’t want to create something cartoonish—the movie, somehow, never is. Even though it’s eminently quotable and Annie has constructed a vampish Southern melodrama of red lipstick and florid speeches, the characters have skin and spit and sweat to them.

Sarandon’s and Costner’s acting evinces a glancing, self-aware vulnerability—they know how to pantomime; they also know how to desire. 

Author Raquel S. Benedict describes the state of contemporary cinema in a 2019 essay like this: “Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.” The essay goes on to make a sophisticated argument about post–Cold War paranoia about fitness, but basically, Benedict’s idea is that Hollywood now prioritizes sex appeal over sexual chemistry, veneers over layers—and movies are worse off for it. 

Bull Durham decidedly does not have this problem. Crash and Annie are not 25, or even 35. They are beautiful but they have lines around their eyes and mouths. (Don’t worry: I’m not going to pretend for the sake of this feature that Sarandon isn’t still the hottest woman alive.) 

“She was 41 and, they thought, over the hill,” Shelton says, recounting how Sarandon was not on the production shortlist and had to fly over from Italy, untapped and on her own dime, to chase the film herself. 

“I said, ‘She’s written as a 41-year-old,’” he continues. “That’s the whole point—[Annie and Crash] both have to stop playing with boys, that’s the unspoken text. It’s been great, playing with boys, but now they run into each other and are forced into a decision.” 

Compellingly, for a story steeped in the South, no one really remarks on Annie’s age or unconventional dating habits, and the one time one of the players takes a crack at Millie’s sex life, Crash quickly shuts them down. 

“He’s really good at his job and there but for the grace of God could’ve had a major league career of some sort,” Shelton says of Crash. “She’s invented this fabulous character that can’t last. What she’s done is build in this affair that’s poetic and philosophical—which is fine, God bless you! But the guy’s gonna leave in September, because the season’s over, and they don’t come back. The hardest thing in the world is a long-term relationship, and she never has to go there.” 

Bull Durham is the kind of movie that feels like a secret handshake. I saw it for the first time in college when a friend invited a group over (“What! Y’all have never seen Bull Durham??”) and most recently, last summer, when the Carolina Theatre showed it for the first time since its June 1988 premiere. At that showing, last summer, I took an INDY intern who’d never seen it; when it ended, the local crowd gave a standing applause.

It’s a story imprinted all across Durham—a timelessness that transcends, by a thread, the great speed at which the city is changing. From the perspective of working at a local newspaper (one that was a few years old at the time of the movie) and reporting on local artists, tenants, and the growing unhoused population, it’s hard not to share some of Crash’s world-weary cynicism. These days, beloved local businesses seem to go down like dominoes as out-of-town developers prospect and landlords sink their teeth into a population with stagnant wages. 

I thought about this, the night after sitting in on the first cast reading, as I was biking to a Bulls game (incidentally, to meet up with a friend named Annie)—a short, sweaty ride rewarded with a cold beer and tremendous fizz of fireworks. It’s nice that you can still catch a weeknight Bulls game or shoot pool at the Green Room; they’re pleasures worth fighting for. 

Of course, it’s not just Durham that is changing. Over lunch with Shelton, later, the conversation shifts to Hollywood, where production is down 40 percent, a downturn that Shelton attributes to Silicon Valley’s austerity measures and the fact that theaters are “only for superhero movies now.”  

“Tech takeover is destroying the business. They’re bringing in corporate algorithms, demographic studies, slashing people’s pay,” Shelton says. “We were on strike for a year, almost killed us. Production hasn’t come back. They don’t care—they love the idea of AI getting rid of everything.” 

Bull Durham may have had a hard time getting made in 1987, but it’s even harder to imagine a movie like it getting made today—the algorithms might not be so jazzed about a sports story with love interests over 40 and no big turnover in the ninth inning; no second chance for Crash in the majors.

The real human drama is in the details, in the trying to figure things out. As Shelton puts it: “It’s never about the big game, ever, ever, ever. There’s almost never a big game.” 

And, Hollywood and the real estate market aside, here we are getting a joyful musical version of the story, right here in Durham. It feels like it means something. 

“That’s one thing about live theater,” Shelton continues. “Until the holograms take over, there’s no substitute for people coming out on stage and singing and talking to the audience.”

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