Just heard a recent interview with John Kander in which he mentioned that part of his process is to steep himself in the time period and place the show’s set in. He’ll listen to music of the era and setting, in hopes that some of the characteristics will emerge in the score he composes. One can hear the proof of this pudding in those Kurt Weill touches in Cabaret, the echt Greek spirit of Zorba, or the cheery minstrelsy of The Scottsboro Boys.
It seems to me good composers do this and careless composers don’t. I’ve always been particularly impressed with Berlin-born Frederick Loewe. Does anything yell Edwardian England better than those frilly bars leading into Wouldn’t It Be Loverly? Now think of that twang of a banjo that introduces They Call the Wind Maria, the burr of Down on MacConnachy Square, and the utter Gaul of Gigi. In a previous post, I praised Jerry Bock’s knack for such delineation in scores like Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me and Tenderloin. And here’s a contemporary example: Jeanine Tesori, with her lovable flapper tunes for Thoroughly Modern Millie. More remarkably, in two excellent shows set in the south in the 1960’s, Violet and Caroline, or, Change, she makes a distinction between the sound of black characters, the sound of whites, and the audience can hear exactly where these styles overlap.
So who’s being careless? France’s “gift” to recent musical theatre, Claude-Michel Schönberg, for one. Years ago, I heard a radio interview in which he talked about the pressure of coming up with a patriotic march for the students of the Paris Uprising. He knew he had to write a tune to stand in for his own country’s national anthem, as the actual students sang La Marseillaise. Schönberg’s rouser, Do You Hear the People Sing? uses dotted rhythms mixed in with the odd triplet, giving it a Scottish quality that is as out of place as biting into haggis when you’re expecting pâté. The bridge of the song is a direct steal from Wanderin’ Star, Frederick Loewe’s veritable vagabond folk song of the American West. Les Misérables also contains a British music-hall number, Master of the House, for a French country innkeeper. The tune would be far more suited for another Loewe character, the cockney Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
In some scores, it’s clear the composer is intentionally using a technically “wrong” style on purpose. The emo rock of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson perversely makes a connection between the 7th president and young people today. In Spring Awakening, dialogue scenes are true-to-the-time and then lights flash on for Duncan Sheik’s appealing contemporary score. Clearly, there’s a method behind this madness. But Elton John’s score for Aida is contemporary rock for no apparent reason. And, sometimes, the 1999 score isn’t all that contemporary: the witless nonsense, My Strongest Suit, sounding awfully similar to Elton John’s early hit, Crocodile Rock, which, itself, harkened back to an earlier age in pop when it came out in 1972.
Which reminds me of how much I enjoy the music of the Vietnam era. Hearing The Doors and The Stones et al. is always a highlight, for me, of attending movies set in Vietnam during the war, and these usually aspire to and achieve a certain degree of verisimilitude. But Schönberg’s musical set there, Miss Saigon, is, to my ears, far too modern and therefore wrong-sounding. Why God Why? is littered with Billy Joel licks, even if the main theme is pilfered from Rodgers & Hart’s There’s a Small Hotel (1936). And that song played on a solo saxophone? Really? Does this have anything to do with Miss Saigon‘s locale? Is the composer alarmingly lazy? Does anyone besides me care?
More than twenty Noel Katz musicals have been produced, mostly in his native New York. But also in Detroit, Los Angeles, Portland, Bethlehem, Birmingham, Newcastle, and thrice in Edinburgh. They’ve won a large number of awards: Such Good Friends picked up five at the New York Musical Theatre Festival; Meet the Composer Grants went to his family musicals, Not a Lion and The Pirate Captains. Camp Ginger won two and so did The New U., which led to his next show being produced a stone’s throw from Lincoln Center. He scored five revues for Second City and two industrials. His songs have been heard in cabarets all over the world.
(Photo by Diane Bondareff)
Musical Theatre is the wonderful thing it is, in part, because of the interplay between live performers and a live audience. Photographs, recordings and videos are but a distant reflection of what goes on. But, hey, it’s a website, so we all have to settle.
“I always try to make every musical I write different from the ones I’ve previously written. There’s usually a lot of comedy, because laughter is part of life. The melodies hit your ears and, nine times out of ten, you’re able to sing along. It’s common for audiences to hum my tunes as they exit the theatre. The lyrics always rhyme, and are filled with fresh and surprising images. A sign over my desk reads ‘Eschew cliché.’ The scripts – usually by someone else – contain unexpected turns, and depths of emotion.”
The Christmas Bride
Photo by Michael Eric Berube
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My friend Tom, as everyone who knows him will admit, is crazy. But there’s such thing as crazy-in-a-good-way, and, exactly twenty years ago, the combination of crazy-good and good friendship led to a musical that created a lot of joy.
Many readers of this blog wonder when and how they’re ever going to get a show on the boards. Sometimes, it’s a matter of luck, being in the right place at the right time. In the mid-nineties, I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new kind of improv group. A fiery redhead named Karen Herr had a vision about doing something that had never been done in New York before, the Harold. A Harold is a specific type of improvised play, long-form, and, as our story begins, it had only been done in Chicago. Karen was still on very good terms with an ex-boyfriend, Ian Roberts, who lived there. He and three like-minded improvisors, Matt Walsh, Matt Besser and Amy Poehler, had studied with the legendary Del Close.They’d formed a troupe called Upright Citizens Brigade and regaled audiences with Harolds and other forms. Karen felt her effort to get something similar started in New York needed much guidance from UCB, and also needed me, on stage, not doing music, not improvising songs; just acting.
When I met Tom Carrozza, he thought I was like him, an improvising actor. We ran into each other at some show, and he sheepishly admitted that he loved old-fashioned comedy songs, was working on a send-up of cabaret acts, but wasn’t quite clicking with his musical director. Did I know of anyone? Did I know of anyone? I was one. And so I outed myself as a musical comedy aficionado who’s really most comfortable behind the piano. Before long, we put up a hysterical show in the Stella Adler school cafeteria as part of a festival called Moonwork. It contained some comedy songs I wrote for Tom, one I translated (from German, but I made it funny) for Tom, some I found for Tom and one I wrote with Tom. The audience howled: a very successful adaptation of Tom’s craziness into something so-called “normal” people could eat up.
How to follow such a profound success? Tom had a notion. We were both headed towards a big birthday and Tom felt he was reaching an age by which he should have written a musical. This is, of course, crazy: nobody needs to write a musical. But it’s the good sort of crazy.
He showed me a sketch about a creature from outer space who has a headache. Humans bring him an aspirin and the alien get perturbed. “Aren’t you going to bring me water? Who takes an aspirin without water?” He then drinks the water and rubs the pill into the side of his head.
There are times you ask yourself, “Should I be doing this?” Tom hadn’t written a musical before. What was I getting myself into? This was crazy. Could it ever be good? The alien was acting so human; that was very appealing to me. I’m not a fan of science fiction, but our show wasn’t going to be serious science fiction, quite the opposite. Making fun of the hysteria surrounding visitors from outer space seemed a worthy shared goal.
Tom rented us a room with a piano to write the show in on 18th Srreet, near Bed Bath and Beyond. As I walked past, I felt I was leaving the quotidian drudge of beds and baths and entering The World of Beyond. Because writing with Tom was an adventure. Sometimes, he just wanted to gossip about people we knew in the improv world. But the more he focussed on things that could happen in our show, the more I found myself coming up with wild ideas for numbers.
You know my favorite musical is How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, partly because I’m so impressed that each of Frank Loesser’s songs manages to get the audience to laugh. So, I made that my goal: No serious moments, no explorations of human feelings, cris-de-coeur, or sober anthems. Keep it wacky – these were our watchwords.
Who would produce? Tom. Who would star? Tom. Who would direct? Not Tom. I put my foot down. We needed someone with experience directing humorous musicals and eventually settled upon Gary Slavin, a dynamo of good ideas. To my surprise and delight, there was no denying a significant overlap in their senses of humor. In a full-length, all-humorous entertainment, you have to appreciate someone who can get your more laughs. Gary got us there in spades, and we were also buoyed by the lunacy of musical directorJono Manelli.
The cast included some mainstays of the New York improv scene, as well as four Broadway performers: Kathi Gillmore, who now works with my wife, Gregory Jones, Jay Aubrey Jones (no relation), and the very young Mamie Parris, in her New York debut. Mamie’s played a whole bunch of leading roles on Broadway, including Mother in the revival of Ragtime, a show Kathi had done the First National of many years earlier. Interesting show, Ragtime, but that’s a different essay.
It’s safe to say Area 51 – did I forget to mention the name? – is the silliest thing anyone associated with it has ever done. Its success had a lot to do with all of us accepting Tom’s craziness, being confident that his madcap ideas would be embraced by an audience. Following his lead, we all came up with outré contributions. There were even singing alien puppets in glass tanks. And, in the end, we were chased out of the place by a lava-like explosion of marshmallow fluff.
To consider life after NYMF, my mind goes back to life before the New York Musical Theatre Festival, which premiered in 2004.
Creating musicals is a herculean task made more difficult by the thorns and nettles of producing theatre in New York. It shouldn’t be so hard. After all, New York contains a huge number of talents who are extremely good at what they do: performers, directors, choreographers, designers, musical directors. Being the crowded place that it is, New York, more than anywhere else, contains people who are interested in seeing new musicals, and this crowd includes critics, producers who might be from out of town but come to town to find material to produce elsewhere, a savvy audience that’s seen many a new musical before.
I tend to use the term, Critical Mass, a lot. What I’ve just described is the intersection of two Critical Masses – the makers of musicals, and those who appreciate new musicals. If one were to try to mount a show someplace else, say, Dubuque, Iowa, both masses would be far smaller, and the whole thing becomes harder. You don’t have a large-enough group of talented-enough folk to do a show and fill the seats with interested-enough theatre-goers. I picked Dubuque because I know a guy there who’s been attempting to create and produce a new musical there for many years. But, wherever you are, it can’t be denied that, compared to New York, your critical masses are puny.
But Gotham, that cruel mistress, throws stumbling blocks in your way. One is the price of real estate. So many people want to live in Manhattan, the laws of supply and demand make every inch of the island a spot likely to be used as a living space. And now I’m thinking of my beloved West 57th Street: I had a show in C.A.M.I. Hall and attended the BMI workshop in two different West 57th Street locations. But now one cranes one’s neck to gawk at the incredibly tall and thin Steinway Tower and the even taller Central Park Tower where a modest studio apartment goes for a million and a half. The longest-reigning Tallest Building in the World, the Empire State, is now the seventh tallest in Manhattan. Talk about puny!
And imagine the land use problem with finding a performance space for a show. Tiny theatres – and we’re not talking nice-looking ones – charge exorbitant rents. In 2000, my musical comedy, Area 51, played at the Sanford Meisner Theatre, way the hell west on the West Side Highway, across from Chelsea Piers. Audiences had to be really committed to walk there. Wasn’t anywhere near a subway. In a famous letter, Jason Robert Brown, whose Songs For a New World had played around the corner, said he didn’t venturee that far. The joyful noise of tap dancing paratroopers hit relatively few ears.
Something had to be done, and, one day, a group of young people who cared about the future of musical theatre – specifically, how new musicals are made – met to discuss ideas. What if they presented a bunch of shows at the same time, in the same small set of theatres? Normally, a musical plays for an hour or two and the rest of the day, the theatre lies empty. What if the same venue hosted different shows all day long? One at one, one at four, one at seven, one at ten. You could sell four times as many seats. The cost of producing could be split between many shows. Imagine the fee for renting a keyboard. Normally, one show pays the whole tab, but what if you had ten different musicals sharing – not so high a cost.
Now we’re talking a critical mass of new musicals, an economic structure based on sharing space, and maybe they all share a casting director who’ll run a huge audition, and a publicist. An individual musical like Area 51 failed to get press coverage, but “Hey, we’re doing 30 musicals over three weeks in New York!” warranted a full page in the Daily News. And a mass of critics would attend, and out-of-town scouts looking for new shows to do, a far-more fertile ground for Life After the Festival.
Just as many of us know all we know about Gypsy Rose Lee from the “musical fable,” Gypsy, there will always be those who know what they know about NYMF from one of its first-year offeringss, [title of show], Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell’s musical-à-clef about their process of getting in the festival. It went on to Broadway, as did Feeling Electric, but not until after Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt changed the title to Next To Normal. Both have small casts, as you’d expect from a festival situation. Two of my favorite NYMF experiences were two-man musicals about guys writing musicals, the hysterical Gutenberg! and the warm and winsome The Big Voice: God or Merman? But I’ll run out of space if I list the shows I loved there, including ones by friends, Night of the Hunter and Like You Like It.
Rather, I can illustrate the great goodness wrought by NYMF by discussing my 2007 career highlight, Such Good Friends. First, being accepted, by blind submission, meant something to a lot of people. Area 51 had been produced by my collaborator. Such Good Friends attracted a top-flight director, Marc Bruni, who hooked me up with a producer, Kim Vasquez, and Kim was one of the innovators at the founding-of-NYMF meeting described above. Musical Director Michael Horsley and choreographer Wendy Seyb were also dying to work with Marc. Our cast was mostly Broadway vets, including two Tony Nominees, Liz Larsen and Brad Oscar – fantastically talented performers who were willing to devote their time to the show because they wanted to be part of the creation of something new. All wanted to be a part of NYMF. We won raves from various esteemed media outlets, interest from a scout from a well-known out-of-state theatre, and all sorts of awards.
Our theatre, the Julia Miles, has since been knocked down for some massive apartment building. And now comes the news that NYMF has gone out of business. And again we’re all lost in the wilderness, our individual shows lonesomely looking for a home.
Don’t let it be forgot That once there was a spot For one brief shining moment That was known as the New York Musical Theatre Festival
So, yes, my birthday. The tradition, here on this long-running blog, is for me to get insufferably self-indulgent and express pride in my accomplishments. Such an activity stands in marked contrast to what Facebook would have you do, name some charity and beg people for money because it’s your birthday. Hell’s to the no right there. My natal day shouldn’t be used to guilt you out of cash, no matter how noble the cause. Asking people for money was, by far, the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in this life in musical theatre, but the demise of NYMF is subject for another day.
I wrote my first musical the month before I turned 15. And the third musical I wrote in my teens actually got produced. I’m not going to tell you these were pieces of high quality, but I will say this: The mere act of writing a show teaches one more about writing a show than any workshop or educational program. You’ll make mistakes – that’s a given – but the recognition of these rookie blunders is what leads you to not make so many in the future. Learn by doing.
And therein lies a homonym, as my wife’s last name is Dewing. Her high standards and professionalism revolutionized the New York casting community. She’s so widely-loved that I take a certain amount of pride in the fact that I loved her before anyone else did.
In college, I persuaded a student-run performance group that they ought to produce a musical I had not yet written. The Barnard Gilbert and Sullivan Society had only done – you guessed it – Gilbert and Sullivan. But I convinced them to do a Katz by assuring them that every note and word I came up with would be so drenched in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, audience members would be fooled. Indeed, that’s what happened, and the show – now called Murder at the Savoy – has been produced many times in Great Britain, where people still enjoy that sort of thing.
After college I worked with a brilliant young playwright who was attracted by my ability to write in the style of Brecht and Weill. But our musical was set in medieval France, and so I researched the harmonies and techniques to evoke the time and place. Because that’s what good composers do, Frederick Loewe is the sterling example: the Edwardian England of his My Fair Lady sounding nothing like the Wild West of his Paint Your Wagon, et al.
My daughter’s now doing a musical that mentions the famously expensive family eatery, Rumplemeyers, and I wrote a number that mentions it as well. This musical scene was inspired by a handsome young man whom young women kept getting crushes on, only to discover he’s gay. The audience was so delighted, the big reveal was greeted with gales of guffaws, sustained applause, and literally stopped the show. The notion that you can take true bits from real life, spin them the right way, and wow a crowd is a well I’ve returned to again and again. An entrepreneur in attendance bankrolled my next show in a tiny theatre near Lincoln Center.
A block away was ASCAP, so I invited a kind old lady who worked there to see the show, since it wouldn’t be inconvenient. I was stunned when she showed up. Before Act One began, she said she’s supportive of young writers but always, ALWAYS, leaves after the first act. When the curtain came down, she rushed up to me, saying she broke her rule about leaving since she was so charmed by the work.
ASCAP’s musical theatre writing workshop was held in a room decorated with a poster of all the Tony-winning shows created by the organization’s authors and composers. The most recent row was practically all Stephen Sondheim and indeed I once rode the elevator with him. Which doesn’t explain how he came to attend my Dickensian romance, The Christmas Bride, but, lo and behold, he was there. I’m particularly proud of a huge musical scene, covering several locations and turns of events, to a propulsive push-beat. My friend Eric was so energized by it, he started bouncing up and down in his seat. Another audience member admonished him, “Simmer down!” but it was that exciting.
I tend to see these large ensembles as the thing I do best. The Seeing Stars sequence in Area 51 reminded people of Les Miserables’ One Day More but that’s unfair since mine is completely humorous and includes tap-dancing underground paratroopers while that French epic has its masses marching in box steps. Others tend to see me as particularly adept with comedy songs, and I’ve been working on one this week that will go in front of audiences in June. Sometimes you have to wait for the laugh.
“Not to pin laurels on myself” is a line from my second musical, but on this immodest day I gotta say that if you’ve failed to put an effective comedy song in your musical, you’ve failed. Period. Now, you can argue that your show is so serious it can’t afford to crack a smile. But life is rarely mirthless, and why you got to be so dramatic? These things have got to be fun or they’re not worth doing.
My most famous creation is the show in which I married Joy. When people hear about it, they leap to the conclusion it’s terribly romantic. But people who’ve actually heard the musical – and I’m happy to sell you the CD for $20 – is that it’s chock full of solid comedy songs. Our guests, who filled the Soho Playhouse, were surprised and delighted to find themselves laughing throughout.
I’m not saying musicals shouldn’t cover serious subjects. For years, I wanted to write something about what McCarthyism did to people in the entertainment industry. The key to making this dour history palatable was to deal with comedians, quipping through the pain.
I take perverse delight in doing the reverse: An audience expecting something hysterical gets served up a heart-felt ballad and tears burst forth. I turned that trick towards the end of an all-silly Industrial, stunning conventioneers in Las Vegas: You know, the place you go for poignant emotions.
Prompted by a preternaturally expert tween-age production of The Addams Family, and in the midst of the hangover that follows one abnormal night in which my family was Gomez, Morticia and Wednesday, I’ve a couple thoughts about the surprisingly popular musical version.
Ten years ago, a Broadway actress hired me to accompany her audition for Grandma at the Telsey office on West 43rd. An impressively large crowd watched some finely-tuned shtick without reacting, and the moment we were out the door, the comedienne said “They’ll probably give it to Jackie Hoffman.” Indeed, that’s what happened.
Perhaps ten years seems like long ago, but the Addams’ road to the Main Stem was the traditional twisted path that commonly occurred fifty or more years ago. Big budget, packed with stars, and not quite clicking in its out-of-town pre-Broadway run. The producers understood some drastic action needed to be taken, so they fired the directors (there were two, avant garde guys) and brought in the most experienced and Tony-honored helmer of comedies they could find, the zany Jerry Zaks.
The buzz on the Street was that The Addams Family would change from a cutting-edge parade of creepy thrills into a laugh-a-minute joke-fest. The writing team, comprised of hit-makers, would seem to be more appropriate for the funnier take. Marshall Brickman, decades earlier, had written some of the most hysterical screenplays of the time, such as Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan, in collaboration with someone too controversial to name. His collaborator on stage musicals, Rick Elice, had penned the very amusing play, Peter and the Starcatcher, and together they’d written the most successful of American jukeboxes, Jersey Boys. The Addams Family has music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa; more on him later.
The show opened to lukewarm reviews, but ran more than a year and a half. And then… its popularity exploded. Schools and community theatres ate it up; it became one of the most-produced musicals in the United States. And this prompts me to make an unfair comparison to a recent musical about an unusual family, whose house is a museum, and they literally live in a funeral home. That would be Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s high-quality memory musical, Fun Home. Now, say you’re running a theatre some place where nobody reads New York theatre reviews. You consider Fun Home a hard sell, because your audience hasn’t heard the title, is unaware it won the Tony Award and might possibly find the subject matter a little discomfiting. In contrast, The Addams Family seems an easy sell: people know the title, already love the characters, can picture it’s good and funny, and are unaware of the tepid critical reception and lack of Tonys. Quality is totally beside the point.
It seems we’ve stood and talked like this before. But it sticks in my craw, as a writer who strives for quality, that a mediocre musical can rake in the chips while an admirable one gets seen less.
Speaking of sticky things, this sustained note in the opening number kept replaying in my mind. Where had I heard if before? “Poison in your DAY.” A clue arrived with Halloween, when I read the fivethirtyeight.com “scientific” ranking of candies. I thought of this lyric line,
More addictive than Reese’s Pieces Here the party never ceases
And the note that precedes this, held for the same length of time and with the same harmony was the one I couldn’t place. Oh, and the song, another Latin up-tempo, written ten years earlier than the Addams one: I wrote it. It’s The Cave from Area 51.
This is no accusation of theft. It’s an indication that Andrew Lippa and I occasionally have intersecting sensibilities. We’re similarly old, write music and lyrics, and, more frequently than most of our contemporaries, we’ve gotten people to laugh at our comedy songs. I’m not saying I’m like Lippa, but I am saying I like Lippa. I find it puzzling whenever people don’t.
Suppose, twenty years ago, you were making wishes for the new millennium. You might envision a musical theatre writer who wasn’t afraid to be romantic…
You’d hope he had a way with comedy…
And that, when appropriate, his tunes would have a contemporary feel…
Given that set of talents, Lippa always seemed to me a perfect pick to write The Addams Family score. That was a good move. The chock-full-of-jokes book by Elice and Brickman was a good move. Going with Voice of Experience Zaks over a couple of off-Broadway tyros with no Broadway experience – seems fine. And yet The Addams Family is not nearly the sum of its parts. The daughter, Wednesday, is saddled with a desire for normalcy – completely out-of-character. Another personage is defined mostly by her predilection for speaking in rhymes, a weird quirk in a musical, where everybody rhymes when they break into song. Marital problems between Morticia and Gomez? Unthinkable! The plot gets tied up and then we hear a ballad from the laconic butler. Huh?
Long ago, I saw kids similar ages essay another musical that started as drawings, Li’l Abner, it was hysterical. Charles Addams’s inky creations seem resistant to the emotionality musicalization naturally provides. I can recall nothing particularly moving in the old TV sitcom, nor the three films about them. So, when Lippa provides a sentimental dad-to-daughter waltz, the choice is a bit weirder than the ooky clan itself.
Of course, my daughter and I dressed as Wednesday and Gomez for Halloween and naturally I fell for this moment of poignancy. Others may be less taken. But I take this touching bit as further proof that Lippa fires on all cylinders, and someday I predict the elements will come together and he’ll write a show everyone, including critics, will embrace.
Every time I see my friends who have a child in an Ivy League school, looking to make a career for himself writing musical comedies, I naturally think back to when I fit that description. So, it occurs to me that this semester marks a big anniversary: my first paid job musical directing a show in New York.
It was a strange show, an anthology evening called Bertolt Brecht: Masks of Evil, and it was a presentation of Columbia’s Graduate School of the Arts. Somewhere, I imagine, eyebrows were raised over the gig going to a college freshman, but, somehow, I’d managed to impress some key powers-that-be with my piano-playing abilities. And it’s true I had a certain affinity for Brecht’s idiosyncratic corner of the musical theatre world. He used songs to make political points, criticizing the establishment. As an impressionable youth, I found agitprop and leftist politics more than a bit intoxicating. I loved Kurt Weill, and wondered what other composers Brecht collaborated with. I attended Mahogonny at the Met. Harsh sounds in jazz rhythms? Catnip to me. Soon, I started a musical where I could exercise that muscle, and, a few years later, wrote an extended parody with Alexa Junge called A Clearance Line. And my most famous song, in those early years, quoted Alabama Song.
The most memorable aspect of Masks of Evil was Chrysis, the singer of Alabama Song and whatever other songs I played. And Chrysis had a habit of parading around the green room totally topless, the first pair of naked breasts I’d seen. But – you knew there’d be a but here – their round perfection didn’t have the effect on me you might expect, because Chrysis was transgender. Altering the parts normally hidden by clothes is much discussed now, but extremely rare back then. 19-year-old me didn’t quite know whether to be excited. I recall thinking that I ought not to have my mind on the process of transitioning from him to her, and I was doing fairly well taking this in stride until we got around to staging her numbers. Like Sally Bowles, Chrysis wore fishnet stockings and was placed on top of the upright piano I was playing, my back to the audience. She put one high-heel on the space above my treble keys, the other below my bass. At eye level, then, was a crotch that may or may not have been the creation of a cutting edge surgeon. I suppose a good dance belt is a great equalizer, but wouldn’t you have wondered what, precisely, you were staring at?
Over the next decade and a half, there were more productions of musicals I’d written than those with me as musical director. My reputation, such as it was, was as a guy who wrote songs, not as a piano-player. Of course one might have assumed a composer must be a competent musician. And you know what they say about “assume” – it turns you and me into a musical director. I got some odd gigs, such as playing rehearsals for an original musical celebrating Italian culture called Wine In My Blood. It was so poorly written, my mind wandered to a silly What If. What if a mafia don had such a love for musicals that he decided to commission and produce one? It would either be exactly like Wine In My Blood, or, perhaps based on mob rub-out experiences, Blood In My Wine.
MD-ing, 2011
I musical directed another original show no one’s heard of, The Big Orange Splot, at the York Theatre, and this one was so good I think of it practically every week. It’s about a town with legally-imposed conformity; all the houses must be the same color. Until the titular bucket of paint falls from the sky. I frequently find myself in neighborhoods where all the homes look exactly the same, and cast my eyes skyward in hopes that an illicit color will fall. Alas, that never happens.
But that premise was on my mind as I wrote a song called This Thing Fell Out of the Sky for the musical I wrote with Tom Carrozza. I met the master improviser when I was part of The White Horse Experiment, New York’s first long-form troupe. They insisted I appear on stage, not behind the piano, and, for a while, I kept it a secret that I even knew how to play. Tom and I ran into each other at some show, each of us with no date. So we talked long enough for Tom to confess, in something of a whisper, that he secretly loves singing obscure old comedy songs and was looking to replace his musical director. Well, if he was going to reveal such a secret about himself, I certainly wasn’t going to keep my light under a bushel. Which led to an extraordinary cabaret act and our sci-fi musical comedy, Area 51. Soon, the whole New York improv community knew me as a top tier improv player, and I was hired for countless shows and teaching gigs.
Of course there are huge differences between spontaneous theatre and thoroughly-rehearsed musicals. The former requires complete flexibility; you have to be so “in the moment” that if an actor sings a less-than-mellifluous note, you adjust what you’re playing to make him sound good. Conducting shows requires precision, attention to detail, and countless tiny adjustments to wrest the maximal emotional power out of every measure of music. I was thinking about this contrast in rehearsing a part of Identity – where I’m both songwriter and musical director – involving a bit of rhythm-less recitative. The performer, learning the piece, is intent on getting it right. But, the goal of the music is to have the band adjust to whatever rhythm he chooses, and that could differ from performance to performance. I have to slake his thirst to get it “right” before he feels the freedom to do it in a way that seems “wrong.” Composers use the adverb “freely” to give performers power to make their own idiosyncratic choices about the rhythms they act their lines with. As I write this, I’ve no idea whether we’ll ever achieve the goal of true rhythmic freedom, but you can come see May 23.
All I really wanted for my birthday was a website. In lieu of that, I’ll do the annual indulgent thing of talking about my musicals. There are so many, and so few of you have seen them. And – I don’t know this for sure – but I expect the word I use most on this here blog is “craft.” And that, like so much these days, leads me to thoughts of craft beer. It’s made in small batches by individual brewmasters and gets shared with select group of aficionados. I put a lot of care, time and love into my bubbly creations, and share them with a small but lucky few. O.K. Enough torturing the analogy. On to the shows.
At 14 I wrote a rather short two-act musical called How To Be Happy, about a kid who writes (alone) and stars in a Broadway show. That could never happen! (Right, Lin-Manuel?) Like a lot of things one does in adolescence, it’s pretty embarrassing now.
At 15 I adapted a play called Broadway into a musical called The Great White Way. I can still recall my composition teacher’s suggestion about a song called One of These Mornings. I’d set the title on quick notes, very much like St. Louis Woman. He got me to slow down, suggesting melissmas could extend the line. To this day I obsess a lot over the quickness with which new words hit the ear.
My first produced musical, Through the Wardrobe, contained the word “exultation.” Who talks like that? A teen with a thesaurus, I guess.
The first work of mine I saw produced, Pulley of the Yard, offered a justification for profuse rhyming and odd vocabulary, since it was a whodunit set backstage at a Gilbert & Sullivan troupe. I mimicked their style, which led to self-consciously clever bits like
The audience must be treated well Don’t take secret glee in The fact they’re plebian Or act like Marie Antoinette
The show I created at 21 has seen more different productions than any other of mine, but with a different title, Murder at the Savoy.
The less said about A Diary, the better. But here’s what Lehman Engel said about the line that ended the title song, “Thirteen is a very good age to start to use a diary.” “I thought she was going to say ‘diaphragm.’”
The Heavenly Theatre: Hymns for Martyred Actors was such a difficult collaboration, I was barred from attending rehearsals. If this ever happens to you, take comfort in the fact that Bob Fosse forbade Stephen Schwartz from attending rehearsals of Pippin.
The New U. successfully skated a fine comic line in a way that’s hard to imagine today. The administration of an all-male college oversold the notion that going co-ed would bring about massive improvements. An excited chorus sings:
They’re rosy; they’re peachy They understand Nietzsche Those beautiful brainy girls
They write well; they work hard They talk about Kierk’gaard Those beautiful brainy girls
Each one is undeniably intellectual And, thank God, they’re certifiably heterosexual
They know their Cervantes Although they wear panties Those beautiful brainy girls.
It’s supposed to be offensive, as the object of our satire was patently sexist promotion of coeducation as a panacea. And what better measure of success than a well-off person in the audience saying “I want to produce the next thing these writers write.”
This was On the Brink, the legendary revue I co-created when I was 25 and the oldest member of the writing team. I found room for feminist messages and a couple of songs that were poignant rather than funny. We turned a profit, which shouldn’t be one’s measure of success; but certainly a nice way to start my professional career.
When a well-established California theatre wanted to do Through the Wardrobe, a rights problem necessitated a massive overhaul, and what ran three or four months as Popsicle Palace then had to be retitled Not a Lion. A lot of musical writers tell very sad tales about rights problems. Beware!
So my next musical was based on a public domain story by Charles Dickens. We called it The Christmas Bride, and it’s a melodrama packed with plot turns, so I had to write passionate romantic music that wouldn’t derail the story train.
Stephen Sondheim attended and, without being asked, sent the producing organization a nice check; with being asked, he sent me a helpful and encouraging letter.
This inspired us to try something new and innovative, an overtly feminist musical developed through rap sessions, a la A Chorus Line, and also improvisations. I learned a lot, but, after many attempts and two utterly different librettists, could never get The Company of Women to a producer willing to put a celebration of female friendships on stage.
Many songs from that score found their way into subsequent trunk song revues: Spilt Milk, Lunatics & Lovers, and Things We Do For Love. An opera-for-kids entrepreneur saw the first of these and commissioned The Pirate Captains, inspired by actual female pirates, and it played for years.
My next two shows were also work-for-hire. Industrials are intended to be seen by specific folks in a business context – people who’ll get the jokes. For years, this was how Jason Robert Brown earned most of his income. But you haven’t heard those songs, or mine, because the material is owned by the clients.
An exceptionally funny fellow, the same age as me, proposed we write a musical because we were both turning 40. Now, by this point, I’d written a number of shows, but never a purely humorous book musical in the tradition of my favorite, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. Area 51 was my opportunity to write the sort of big production numbers and hysterical comedy songs that hadn’t been seen in many an overly serious season. We knew a lot of clowns from New York’s improv community, and festooned many of the roles with things we knew they’d do well. In that sense, Area 51 revived the tradition of 1960s star vehicles (like Once Upon a Mattress and Little Me) where creators came up with wacky stuff with an awareness of the zaniness of well-loved wags. As I fashioned 18 varied and guffaw-producing numbers, I was collaborating with crazy quipsters I knew and loved. So turning 40 was the epitome of fun.
“The people up on stage with me feel like a friendly family,” I once wrote.
But what if everybody involved in your musical was literally friends and family, including the audience? Seems like the wildest of fantasies, but – you could read about it in the Times – fantasies come true. Our Wedding – The Musical! involved writing for specific people again, but this time it was my mother, my mother-in-law, my father, my father-in-law, my sister, my 4-year-old niece and a bunch of our talented professional performing friends, one of whom has the credentials to matrimonify. (Sorry, another word from Gilbert & Sullivan snuck in there.)
Many years ago, some musical theatre experts used an intriguing phrase, “serious musical comedy” to describe basically tragic stories leavened with a whole heap of humor, such as Cabaret, Gypsy and Fiddler on the Roof. Creating one seemed a worthy challenge, unlike anything I’d done before, and I had a subject in mind. The McCarthy-era blacklisting affected the lives of many truly entertaining people, and there’d never been a musical about it. Since television was a brand-new technology, there’d be much mirth in the pressures to put on a live variety show, as well as in the on-air songs and sketches. Such Good Friends, which racked up a number of awards and raves at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, was the culmination of years of research, rewrites, and punch-ups. I got my audience to laugh and cry, tap their toes, and get truly invested in What Will Happen Next.
Thanks for reading this far. I consider it a birthday gift. Discussing eighteen musicals ain’t nothing like being there, in the audience, taking them in as they were meant to be taken in. Let’s hope What Will Happen Next is a production you can catch, somewhere near you.
I’ve a friend with a good idea for a musical. But she keeps putting off writing it. And I think it’s because she’s worried it won’t be good.
Sound familiar? As I was contemplating what to write next, the wonderful pop song Try Everything came on. Seems like a magic message, with its acknowledgement that one might fail. But failure is only certainty if you don’t try. Nothing ventured, nothing win, as the Iolanthe trio trills.
Those writing prizes I apply for every year: The only certainty about them is if I don’t apply, I won’t win. Occasionally, a friend wins, giving me the mild frisson of thinking I’m sorta on the right track. But the friend mentioned above ain’t winning anything, since her idea sits there, unwritten.
Yet, writing a musical is a long-term extension of time and effort. I’ve certainly had ideas I didn’t bring to fruition. About 25 years ago, I thought the Anita Hill experience with Clarence Thomas might make a good opera. I threw that one out expecting my dramatization would have trouble finding acceptance since I’m neither black nor a woman. But if a female composer of color had illuminated the subject, audiences today might be particularly interested.
Similarly, I spent many years refining my musical comedy about female friendships, The Company of Women. Eventually, I concluded the world didn’t want to see such a show, and my time would be better spent working on something else. More recently, I toiled on something about a religious retreat until I decided the subject and milieu didn’t interest me enough to continue. So, those were my musicals that wouldn’t see productions.
Having the sinking feeling that what you’re writing isn’t going to be good: I’ve been there a lot. But when I’ve made the effort to see things through, the effort has been rewarded. The season being what it is, the example that comes to mind is A British Christmas. I needed to write a carol that might be sung at a holiday gathering in Victorian England. Research was done into what might happen at such a fête and we settled on the idea that a flaming plum pudding would come out of the kitchen, to oohs and aahs. In some sort of goofy mood, I wrote a verse about how this is the best part of a Yule party. (As opposed to the best part of a Yul party, which is dancing the polka with Yul.) The veil of silliness continued to hang over me as I wrote a bridge about how plum pudding was better than other puddings, such as rice and bread. Not really the sort of thing any actual Englishman would be likely to say, but at least I was making progress on the song. Once I had the form set for my A section and release, I came up with further stanzas. Now I had too much, to a rather dull tune. But when I played it for my collaborator MK Wolfe, she deemed it just what she needed to construct a wonderfully dramatic musical scene.
The plot is so fraught, the tension so heightened, it didn’t much matter how inert my carol was. Four A sections and one bridge is a bad balance. And I was called upon to add incidental underscoring and dance accompaniment that dressed the simplistic melody in various tempos and feels. I get tired of hearing it, but the crux here is that the audience was so fascinated by the libretto’s histrionics, nobody noticed my song’s insufficiencies.
When performed out of context, though, it lays there. When asked to name my least favorite Christmas song, A British Christmas is the first thing I thought of. I’m embarrassed by it. But I sure didn’t mind it in the middle of the Connecticut presentation of The Christmas Bride six months ago. Played like gangbusters – in context.
“Are you embarrassed easily?” asked a comedy album I heard as a kid. This business of making musicals might not be for you if you are. Which reminds me of the only sincere moment in Area 51. In creating a musical in which each scene and song is funny, I noticed, at one point, that the show was a little low on emotion. Librettist Tom Carrozza knew we’d want a triple wedding at the end, and of course this meant that the leads would need to decide to get married. Trouble is, Tom was playing the lead, and wasn’t confident that he could pull off a love song. So, he tried to arrange it so the leading lady would sing to him. The draft of the scene suddenly seemed convoluted, emotionally strange. I wrote a gentle, twinkly ballad, sort of a cross between Of Thee I Sing and Twilight Time.
Come with me to Dreamland Dance the night away All is quiet; all is cool Tomorrow morning, there’s no school…
The earnestness of the moment gets quickly deflated when the character admits he’s talking about an Air Force base on a dry lake named Dreamland. He goes into such detail as to what goes on there, the audience believes it’s unromantic, despite what the music tells them. (Did I mention that aliens from outer space are repeating the tune in their other-worldly voices?) And the lady listening is so goofy, she responds “Yes! Yes, I’ll marry you.”
The audience giggled throughout, partly because their expectations had been so thoroughly thrown. And Tom’s character, to his way of thinking, wasn’t being romantic, therefore the actor was comfortable with delivering this bit of lunacy. After all, he hadn’t intended to propose marriage; her acceptance of his unmade proposal led us to our ending.
So I guess that’s my suggestion for the New Year: Don’t let embarrassment stop you from creating, and you’ll come up with delightfully off-center funny business. Or, at the very least, a paean to plum pudding that only works with the rest of the show around it.
Circumstances – some unforeseen, none about health – have led me to consider the topic of retirement. What if – and this is a big
WHAT IF
– I didn’t write musicals any more? Some of my favorite writers stopped, at some point: Jerry Herman, Harvey Schmidt, Craig Carnelia. They’re alive. Late masters like Irving Berlin, Frederick Loewe and Cole Porter put down their pens many years before dying. Do we view it as a great shame that Loewe wrote so little after Camelot and Herman nothing after La Cage aux Folles? Well, yes, actually, we do.
But I’m not them. No legions of fans are shuffling on their feet, biding their time until my next work hits the boards. I’m known by few, and that can certainly be viewed as a failing of some sort. I’ve failed to make such a mark of The World of Musical Comedy that a significant coterie feels any sort of anticipation for a new Noel Katz show. So, that’s a thing: If you’re not particularly wanted, leave and you won’t be missed.
Readers of this blog know I too often celebrate the rounder anniversaries of my past musicals’ openings. Every production has led some to exclaim “I love what you do! I love your writing!” Those cheers ring in my ears, feeding my fragile ego years and years after the fact.
Having just visited a relative who is a horse-racing maven, I have this analogy for my career: Very fast start, then petered off toward the end. Thoroughbreds who do that are exciting but ultimately disappointing. So, I look back on the six shows I got to see on stage in my twenties and think, well, those were really fabulous times. The past ten years, though, well, nobody would call them fabulous. I spent a lot of time and energy rewriting my award-winning 2007 show, Such Good Friends. Then I started a project, which I decided to abandon. There was a trunk song cabaret, which then got revived. The first draft of one of my current projects was done in a private reading in 2014. That means that, at this turn, the amount of positive reinforcement has seemed comparatively small.
My natural bent is to soldier on. I realize I lived a charmed life in my twenties. Projects don’t always pan out. Sometimes you have an idea for a show and it turns out to be the wrong idea for you – which is why I abandoned Haven. But starting to write a theatre piece is a huge leap of faith. You’re going to put words on paper and hold on to this shred of hope that says that someday, maybe years from now, actors will do this on a stage for an audience. If you’re very lucky, you might have a project that’s definitely going to be produced by a specific date. This was true for me on The Heavenly Theatre, The New U. and The Pirate Captains. I also had strong reasons to believe The Christmas Bride and Area 51 would get done because my collaborators had the wherewithal to produce and that’s what eventually happened. As I said, that’s leading a charmed life, and, these days, my life seems a lot less charmed.
Merely writing this has pointed to a paradox: To write musicals, one must be extremely optimistic. At this time in my life, lacking those cheering affirmations, I’m extremely pessimistic. It doesn’t seem like I can take a leap of faith when I’ve so little faith I’ll get through August.
For me, though, the way I get through anything is, usually, by writing. Not sure how healthy this is, but when I’m stressed I often shut myself away and just concentrate on creating songs. Which leaves me with a bunch of songs, unheard, and what are you going to do with those? If the way I get through a day is by retreating to my writing pad, then stopping writing musicals is eliminating my primary coping mechanism. (Or blogging, to use the current moment.)
A relative is having a brain surgery, and a good friend had brain surgery last summer. So, what keeps coming to my mind is a metaphorical image, that part of the brain is being cut away. Here I am with tons of experience writing musicals. Stuff I put on paper gets all the way to a paying audience and from this comes a certain amount of “smarts.” And if I’m not using this chunk of know-how, it’s as if a huge concatenation of brain cells is being surgically removed. How can I stop now? It’s tantamount to a self-mutilation.
As this blog approaches 400 essays, I sometimes think, well, at least I’ve put a lot of this knowledge down on a web page. That’s nearly half a million words, and, if you’re interested in knowing my opinion, methodology, and experience, a lot of it is contained here. So many pages, so much information, that the blog doesn’t really need the additional wisdom I’ll glean working on more shows. This blog will go on – I’m unable to kick the habit of sharing thoughts about the writing of musicals. So, you readers will be fine. But you gotta keep me away from knives, O.K.?
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There's Gotta Be a Song 