The school remains the same

When I was in college, the theatrical attorney who’d introduced my mother to my father introduced me to a client of his, producer Ted Mann.  It was explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that this was a Great Man of the Theatre. At the time, I accepted this designation without questioning it.  But a few years later, I looked up his credits.  In the 1950’s, Ted co-founded The Circle in the Square theatre. Through his association with legendary director Jose Quintero, he produced three great plays by America’s two greatest playwrights: Summer and Smoke, by Tennessee Williams; and Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neill.  Pretty impressive, those.  Credits that validate the sobriquet, Great Man of the Theatre.

Years later, around the turn of the century, I started working for him.  He looked to be older than God.  It never left my mind that Ted was a Great Man of the Theatre, and that he was unlikely to be around much longer.  A dozen years went by, and Ted was still there; death finally came in February, 2012. 

Now, the trouble with my reminiscing about my times with Ted is that every anecdote inevitably makes Ted seem like a doddering old fool.  You have to keep in mind that six decades ago, he was an enterprising young lawyer with a love for the theatre.  And he started something pretty special off-Broadway and even Important.  We worked together on many musicals, including some new ones: he the credited director; I, the credited musical director.  And yes, I’m implying that in some cases, we didn’t really deserve the credit.

On one original musical, for instance, I did precious little other than teach the performers their parts. I attended one creative meeting in his office – it contained a Tony Award along with some tasteful photographs of a nude woman – but my job there was just to assure everybody we’d be able to find a competent cast.  The composer, a rock musician with a unique look – a carefully coifed long-hair and long-beard combo, would provide backing tracks for performers to sing to.  So, no live musician, and very little for me to do (I attended no rehearsals).

But there were other projects on which Ted did very little. With careful deference to the Great Man of the Theatre, the choreographer would often take over the de facto staging job, for the simple and sad reason that Ted was not competent, mentally, to stage the show. Or understand that he was director in name only. Eight years ago, in our second or third week of rehearsal of Godspell, he asked whether we couldn’t possibly depict the crucifixion in a non-traditional way. Of course, we weren’t planning to depict the crucifixion in a traditional way. No Godspell production does that. Which Ted would have known if he’d ever seen Godspell. Or bothered to read the script.

Yes, folks: In the overwhelming majority of shows I worked with him on, he didn’t read the script prior to the first rehearsal. Often, we’d start with the cast doing a read-through, and he’d be genuinely surprised by jokes, plot twists and other surprises. The notes he gave as director, nine times out of ten, had to do with loudness and diction. He was hard of hearing, and the actor who didn’t project at the top of their lungs would earn his scorn.

He liked me, though. He’d stop me in the hall so we could swap opinions about Broadway shows we’d seen. And, on one extraordinary occasion, he was particularly complementary. A scheduling conflict had kept the actor playing the minor role of a cop named Murphy away from our rehearsal of a non-musical scene. So, I thought I’d help out by standing in his spot, holding his script, bellowing out his lines. Afterwards, Ted gave notes on the scene, including “Murphy: Very good. Keep it up.” It seems he honestly didn’t know I wasn’t the actor, a hirsute ex-marine twenty years my junior.

Less happily, he could throw his authoritative weight around, arbitrarily, trouncing on emotional toes. I can recall a strong actress, with a good sense of herself, reduced to tears; she was coming from a rehearsal with him to a rehearsal with me and much of our time got used up comforting her. Once, we’d been denied access to the Circle-in-the-Square Theatre by the Broadway show Ted had rented the space to. Ted was sure we could work out some deal, but the rest of us on the production team, as well as the cast, knew that we’d already rented a different space, and not one in the round. Ted was too blind to read the handwriting on the wall and insisted on staging the entire show with the actors playing the 360-degree sweep. As we all knew in advance, the show then had to be restaged for a proscenium set-up.

When Ted spoke, I’d listen, eager to soak up some of the knowledge that made him legendary.  Poignantly, none ever came.  Perhaps Ted’s greatness was only as a producer.  The first Mann-directed musical I attended, a Pal Joey revival in which the two stars jumped ship during rehearsals, had the theatre set up like a cabaret, with short tables in front of front-row audience.  Naturally, people put Playbills and reading glasses on these.  Midway through the first act, dancing waiters came by, and, on a particular beat, whipped away the tablecloths.  Just like the standard magicians’ trick but here was no magic: debris went flying everywhere. 

I’m saving one Ted tale, the longest, for last, but first must remind you that just because a person does some frustrating things in his dotage, that doesn’t undo the stuff that makes one a Great Man of the Theatre in the first place. And if I’ve anything of a cautionary nature to say here, it is: don’t be enraptured by a résumé. Make sure the Greatness still persists.

Around fifty years ago, Ted started the Circle-in-the-Square Theatre School and this gave him the right to drop in, unannounced, on any class within its walls. Would his visit be disruptive? It was a concern. Last year, a teacher of a certain age, Sara, received such a visitation. She cautiously but cordially explained to Ted that we were in the process of suggesting songs that individual students should look at. Every title mentioned by Sara, me, or a student, made Ted go “What?”

If it was the student who’d spoken, Ted made the point, a bit meanly, that students should learn to speak up. Meanwhile, Sara had to repeat each title to him, and he’d either nod with recognition, or tell us he didn’t know the particular song.

This went on for some time, until Ted changed the subject: “Sara, you were never a performer.”

This was quite an odd thing for him to say. And false. Showing the deference due to a Great Man of the Theatre, she could only answer honestly. “Actually, Ted, I started my career as an actress in musicals.”

To which Ted said “And then you got pregnant.”

Sara was a little taken aback, and said “Noooo…”

Ted: “But you weren’t on Broadway.”

Sara: “Actually, Ted, I was.”

Ted wanted to know what show, and Sara described it. She’d taken over a role from an actress whose name Ted recognized.

Then, Ted said “And then you got pregnant.”

At this point, everybody in the room realized they were listening to an insane person. Sara politely said that parenthood was decades after her debut on The Street.

She continued to give details of her career. How friends in casts began to ask her to coach their auditions, and soon she was teaching her own class.

It was clear to me Sara was about to describe how she became a director. “My classes were filling up, so many people wanted me to coach them, that soon I wasn’t going out on auditions any more. And as this was going on, I felt something in the pit of my stomach.” 

To which Ted said “You were pregnant?”

No, the desire to direct.

Now, somewhere around this point, Ted realized his repetition of the line was making people laugh, so, at last, he appeared to be in on the joke, and continued saying this to be funny.

Sara, assuming Ted must have noticed her age and could do the math, said that her son is twelve years old.

Ted didn’t do the math, and asked when Sara had come to Circle. “Eleven years ago” she said. And Ted said “So you weren’t pregnant when you got here.”

To which Sara said, “Actually, Ted. I wasn’t pregnant at any point. My son is adopted.”

“Well!” said Ted, “Adoption is a wonderful thing.”

On that we could all agree. Class was over. La commedia è finita.

I’ll show them

It’s been a hell of a month, hasn’t it?

This blog has a strict No Politics Rule. I try to keep things light, and relate everything to musical theatre writing. So, I’ll start with this embarrassing story. There was a rare opportunity for my wife and I to watch something on television together, and she said she wanted to see 13. And I thought, great, there’s a presentation of a Jason Robert Brown musical I’ve never seen. Well, I thought Parade was depressing, but this took the cake: It was Ava DuVernay’s documentary about how the criminal justice system disproportionately incarcerates black people. We learned a disturbing history of justice injudiciously applied.

So, that’s a bit of a mea culpa, and June has become a month full of confessionals. I’ve read many people of color talk about horrific experiences in the theatre, and some white people have called themselves out on their own past behavior. The hope is that the theatre biz evolves into something with far less bigotry, but, as one white dude noted, “I’m a casting director; it’s my job to discriminate.”

My wife Joy, as you may know, has led by example, casting people of color and opening minds. Me, I’m a writer, and the very least we writers can do is to stop insisting that our characters must be caucasian when there’s no legitimate need. “Whiteness” – a word I pointed included in a translation of a musical theatre lyric once – is rarely essential. Leo Frank, in that depressing JRB show, is one of the few characters I can think of whom the audience needs to believe is pale. And Hamilton succeeds marvelously in casting people of color as America’s white Founding Fathers. But now I feel myself delaying launching into my mea culpa.

One of Lehman Engel’s assignments, in the first year of his BMI workshop, was to create a comedy song based on something in a newspaper. In the late 1980s, the Olympics were held in Seoul, South Korea. Now, every Olympics faces a delicate problem: some of the foods commonly eaten in the host country are occasionally considered, well, gross, by visitors from other places. I read an article about one such delicacy. In Korea, the newspaper said, people eat dogs. Something clicked. My New York neighborhood, at the time, was filled with restaurants serving cuisine of all the major Asian nations, but not Korea. Why was that? And might there be a possible subject for a comedy song? That’s often my main question.

Gleefully, I ran to my encyclopedia (for this was still the 80s) for a list of dog breeds. And then I poured on the puns and trick rhymes, with an eye towards coming up with sort of a comic jingle for a Korean restaurant.

We’ll serve ’em Seoul food…
If the food’s a bit too spicy, don’t start to pout
Dalmatian will put the fire out
Should a Boxer hit you and you feel hung over
Take the hair of the dog that bit you and swallow some of Rover

We’ll serve ’em Seoul food and sell it with beer
That delicately peppered German shepherd pie
Or some Beagle on a bagel, I mean, it is to die
Served with a cream cheese schmeer

Collie tamale and poodle-filled strudel
Dachshund au gratin and shi-tsu with noodle

When I played Seoul Food for friends and relatives, they howled with laughter. Which leads a writer to believe he’s done something right. My father (who died a year ago today) was a huge fan of the song, and so was a friend who practically doubled over with enthusiasm. A couple of years later, she and I were in a room with a piano, for the developmental sessions for The Company of Women. The assembled improvisers were all female, but an effort had been made to work with a diverse group: they were young and old, rich and struggling, black, white and hispanic. The show, and its unusual first step towards creation, had been my idea, and my old friend wanted me to share an original song to introduce my songwriting abilities to the company. And she had a specific song in mind: Seoul Food.

Gales of laughter rocked the rehearsal room, but Julie, our black actress, didn’t crack a smile. “Thank God I’m not Korean,” she said, “but then, if I was, you probably wouldn’t have played it.” There ensued some discussion in which people disagreed as to whether the song is offensive, but Julie’s words made me see my silly tune in a whole new way. There was no getting around it: Seoul Food was poking fun at an entire ethnic group for a specific cultural practice. Before long, I’d rewritten the song so there were no references to Korea. The revised Dog Food was a context-free advertisement for a restaurant of no particular ethnicity where, if you couldn’t finish all your Toto tofu, they send you home with a doggie bag.

My father was disappointed, thinking I’d caved to political correctness. He often told me how much he liked the song, in its earlier draft. Our actress from Puerto Rico included the revised number in her next show, a revue of my songs.

In a way, today, I’m bowing to the industry-wide pressure to confess my sins. One part of me thinks there’s little value to this admission of something I did more than three decades ago. I’m wary of virtue signaling, or for it to seem like I’m some wonderful person who got woke and you should follow my example.

I was trying to be funny, and maturing involves an awareness of how certain jokes might hit certain ears. Back in college, I had a tone-deaf moment, alone with my black roommate. He was a couple of years younger, and our dorm room was the first time he’d lived away from home. So, he asked me how to do laundry and I said I didn’t know much. “First, I separate; then, I add a half-cup of bleach when I’m doing my whites. But I’m never certain how to handle the coloreds.” He glared at me, hard.

One of you believers

June 11 has loomed large on my calendar for around nine months as the day my new musical, The Influencer, opens at the Wallis-Annenberg in Beverly Hills. The show will soon resurface in a completely different form. But the delay got me thinking about my shows that never got to be seen. And I’m embarrassed to confess I’ve been very, very lucky. Everything I’ve written as an adult has gone before an audience; the applause gave me life. So much life, I’m able to sustain myself through the disappointment of missing out on the applause I expected on this day.

Roughly ten years ago, though, a musical I was working on was cancelled because I no longer wanted to work on it. I no longer thought the show was a viable idea. And, in some ways, I never did.

One summer week, I got an unusual out-of-town gig. I’d be teaching musical theatre, and maybe musical improv, at a religious retreat upstate. Immediately, the mere mention of religion put me in an anxious state of extreme alienation. At the time, I had what amounted to a phobia. I have no spiritual beliefs. None. But, more important to this story, I had a deep distrust of anyone who did. And that’s a lot of people. And that would be everybody at the retreat.

To my great surprise, my time at the retreat was delightful and disarming. These people weren’t nuts. They may have shared a faith, but everyone had a different background, a different reason for being there – a swath of humanity that turned my head around. My prejudice – against religious people – evaporated.

When I came back from the retreat, I wanted to write about my experiences there. My normal format for such a thing, would be a long letter. But music seemed so integral to any account that I invented a new form. It was an autobiographical essay illustrated with show tunes. One could do this, we now know, far easier on a blog. All I had was a handful of pages with footnote numbers that corresponded to tracks on a CD. When you hit that moment in your reading, you were supposed to push play on a CD player. Sounds crazy, in retrospect. But, at the time, it seemed the best way to tell the story.

Readers/listeners reacted favorably. My little account entertained them, and they all had the same reaction: You really ought to turn this into a musical. I resisted, feeling that this memoir with soundtrack was the ultimate form. Yet, people kept insisting. And a little known fact about Sondheim was in the back of my mind: For most of his projects, he had to be dragged in to the collaboration. If he could get over his resistance and create a Tony-winning show, well, who was I to ignore the chorus of encouragement?

Autobiographical stories are fraught with many perils. I’d been talking to friends about something that happened to me. In the theatre, we’re talking to strangers, strangers who don’t already have an emotional connection to the storyteller. So, I set about fictionalizing until the thing became an original musical set at a Catskills religious retreat. The protagonist was still a faith-averse music teacher, but other than that, most everything was made up.

Many an etiquette book, back in the good old days when such things were published, warned against discussions of religion. It’s a problematic topic because most people have a pre-existing opinion, and usually that opinion boils down to “My sect is better that yours.” And there’s something offensive about that.
As I said earlier, I’m a man of no faith whatsoever, and yet 95% of my characters were believers. I came to feel that I was the wrong person to be writing this show.

And I was particularly hung up on defining the spiritual philosophy the show should be expressing. I wanted it both ways, or, I should say, all ways. I tried to have different characters articulate a panoply of concepts of God. This would be so difficult for my friend who majored in Comparative Religions. But I was way over my head.

Writing a musical can occupy five years of your life or more. You need to have a passion for telling that story that will sustain over time. My struggles to come up with a first draft of Haven were so great, the curmudgeon in me once again reared its ugly head. At that point, the problem wasn’t just that I didn’t understand the philosophy of those who pray. I no longer wanted to celebrate the diversity of opinions I’d witnessed at the retreat. Yes, there was something wonderful there in the woods, but I couldn’t find a way of communicating this with an audience of strangers. And so, Haven bit the dust, unheard and unseen.

A new Sioux-ciety

One year ago today was the final performance of my most recent musical, Identity. This show was extraordinary in so many ways, posed so many unique challenges, I barely no where to begin. When you first hear about this endeavor, you’ll leap to conclusions as to what those challenges were, and you’ll be wrong.

For instance, when I say this took place in a fancy performing arts complex in the heart of Beverly Hills, you might instantly imagine pampered and fancy people on both sides of the footlights. Then, if I tell you 90% of these people are part of families dealing with “special needs” kids, a different image emerges. Or what if I told you Identity is set in a near-future dystopia? Your mind might go to The Handmaid’s Tale or The Hunger Games and the reality is, it’s a funny musical comedy.

Throw out all your expectations.

The Miracle Project is an organization that uses performing arts to assist autistic people in their transition to adulthood. You’ve heard the term, “autism spectrum” and this carries an implication: There’s a wide range of abilities. Bill Gates, it’s been said, is on the Spectrum, and who’s more accomplished than him? Suppose his talent wasn’t software entrepreneurship, but singing-dancing-acting. Is your head turned around yet?

Like every essay in this blog, I’m going to talk about musical theatre writing. For that is my job. The summer before last, The Miracle Project hired me because, every year, they create and perform an original musical based on input from an elite set of talented folks. The show must entertain, of course, and it also has to be performable by autistic thespians and others. An experienced show-writer like myself could obviously come in handy. I have no experience working with the differently-abled.

So I asked about that. Would I have to know anything about autism to contribute, to musical direct, to run classes? To my bemused surprise, I was told not to worry about it. In the room, at all times, would be a set of people called the Co-Actors. They have the tools necessary to deal with any issue that comes up, so I was told I could do all the things I did with the students at the Broadway conservatory that was for twenty years my home. This seemed unlikely. So, I asked how will I know the co-actors from the autistic. Again, I was told not to worry about that. I wouldn’t know which was which. I was to treat everyone the same. And the Co-Actors would take up roughly half the roles in the show.

This was not what I was expecting. As time went by, I learned a few things about the neuro-diverse community. Being loud can cause problems for some. So, I could never call for fortissimo singing, and, instead of applauding, we wave our hands, using the sign language equivalent of clapping. Identity wasn’t greeted by thunderous noise of approval. The audience was wildly enthusiastic but knew to express it without a din.

For months, the weekly developmental sessions were group discussions that would frequently go off into tangents. I head a lot about anime characters, and one balding fellow obsessively spoke about Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The thing that seemed so unlikely when it was told to me, that I wouldn’t be able to tell the Co-Actors from the autistic, was true for me for months, and definitely for our audience. I learned that it’s a waste of time to think about the who-is/who-isn’t question.

What mattered was the fodder. Ideas about what should go into a show called Identity eventually emerged. But, for the longest time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a wildly improbable endeavor, doomed to failure. Sure, every artistic enterprise involves a leap of faith, but the stuff I was hearing couldn’t possibly be transmogrified into a coherent musical comedy.

Until it could. Near Thanksgiving (2018), I played around with a storyboard and I assembled ideas into elements of plot. IF the group wants to do this, THEN we’re going to need a song that does this. Then I’d write the song. There was also a desire to utilize particular talents people had. So, an operatic soprano needed a reason to sing a bit of Puccini. And the Sioux City fan was an accomplished rap artist. I think you can see how the input I received was challengingly wild. What original story could embrace an aria and a rap about a random Great Plains town?

My collaborators and I figured all that out. The cast was heavily involved in creating their own characters and rehearsal time was often spent improvising scenes. So, more input to embrace. Honestly, the biggest jolt to the process was when the director announced that our rap star would create a number that wasn’t about Sioux Falls. So the show had to be retooled to omit mention of what was once central.

I rolled with those punches. The script went through countless drafts. Many songs were cut. Cast members added songs, in wildly different styles. Another unusual aspect is that the auditions were held before the script was completed. So each new draft (and there were many) dealt with the strong suits and limitations of individual performers. An actor’s discomfort with romantic embraces meant finding a way to convey feelings between characters without a traditional physical manifestation, such as a kiss.

We seek freedom. But, often, it’s the parameters we’re given to deal with that focus our creative thinking and bring out our best work. The stunning success of Identity, it seems to me, is a little like one of those cooking game shows in which chefs are given a bunch of disparate elements and told to make a gourmet meal. Here’s a turnip, pickled herring, lemongrass and boysenberries. Go! I got a Sioux City-loving rapper, an opera diva and a newlywed who doesn’t like to be touched. Go! 

Whatever

This may have happened on March 17, not May 17, a very round number of years ago. And it’s a key moment in my musical-writing career. In some ways, a success, but, mostly, a catastrophe. And I think of it as a turning point. Before that day, my life was full of new musicals – every year or two. Afterwards, it was a slog to get anything done. But, I’m not sure there’s causality. It was half my lifetime ago. You’re only young once, and, before this, I could be viewed as something of a prodigy.

Careers are built on a chain of connections. In the cast of my first musical to play New York, Pulley of the Yard, or, Murder at the Savoy, was a lass who became a long-term live-in girlfriend. She had two friends from high school, Margit and Adam.With Adam, I wrote The New U. and On the Brink. Margit didn’t attend either, but soon invited me to join her in a new theatre company devoted to developing new works. We wrote The Christmas Bride together. And then, I got a wild idea.

I wanted to create a musical about the way women support each other through friendships with other women. But, as a man, I’d be seen as an illegitimate vessel for telling that story. So, I thought of a novel idea. What if we gathered a bunch of actresses to improvise scenes from their lives? This could generate material on which I could base a show with a certain amount of verisimilitude – a word I use here so often, it gets its own tag.

There were a couple of antecedents. One was A Chorus Line, which began as a series of “rap sessions” in which Broadway ensemble performers talked about things that had happened in their lives. A script and score was fashioned by Nicholas Dante, James Kirkwood, Marvin Hamlisch and Ed Kleban. Most of them weren’t dancers, just like I’m not a woman, but the basis on actual choristers’ lives meant nobody questioned their bona fides. In my career, I’d worked on two shows with Adam that were based on improvisations, and another that was supposed to be, but we couldn’t find actors willing to spend that much time on such a process. Later, I worked on seven other shows that used improv in their development, most of them with Second City.

Margit’s theatre company would provide us with space, which, in New York, is likely to be the most expensive part of a production. We were given a free playground, and so had the luxury of time. The workshop went on for many weeks, and the performers enjoyed improvising, discussing, being part of something new. The company insisted a team up with an established playwright. I’m calling her Pookie to protect her identity. At first, she and I seemed to be on the same page, wanting to create a piece that was true to the lives of our participants. Funny urban women, grounded in reality.

Those improvisations inspired some exciting songs. And, over at Pookie’s loft, a set of book scenes came into being. These, unfortunately, had very little to do with my songs. You see, Pookie was a very imaginative downtown artiste, and she literally wanted to send our characters to outer space. So, our initial shared vision of a realistic contemporary musical splinted into two visions. Pookie’s involved going to another planet. Mine didn’t.

And so came the 17th of some month that begins with M, and all sorts of people connected to the theatre company showed up to listen to what we had wrought. Our developing actresses read the characters loosely based on them. Of course, none of them were astronauts, so I can’t claim the book scenes had anything to do with them. And that’s why the reading revealed we had a huge mess on our hands, a book and score at cross-purposes.

Pookie and I wisely decided to split up. I continued to develop the show for years, for a while in collaboration with a very smart female playwright. She then moved to Florida and somehow ran afoul of a theatre union. I wish I knew more of that story. Also, the developmental director moved to California. Orange-producing states have drawn too many talented ladies from me and the project.

The chain of connections, in my career, started reaching their ends. One of our improvising actresses put together a close-harmony quartet. This was seen by an impresario he commissioned me to write an opera. But that was the end. Subsequent shows were not built upon the network I’d built before. Of course, everyone grows out of being perceived as a prodigy. And maybe it’s wrong of me to make that disastrous reading a point of demarcation. But I do.

Abortion

Upright Citizens Brigade has closed the doors on its theatre and training center in New York and since I was there at the very beginning, it seems high time – did the news come on 4/20? – I tell the story. This might not seem specific to our world of musicals, but sit tight and I’ll draw the connections towards the end.

See what I did there? Anyone who’s done a Harold is nodding right now. A Harold is a type of long-form improvised play. Towards the beginning there are three seemingly separate plots, with no apparent relationship to each other. Towards the dénouement, connections emerge, and the audience comes to understand the three threads as part of a larger theme. And did I mention it’s all hysterically funny?

For this story to make any sense at all – and I don’t know it will – you have to know what a Harold is.

A quarter century ago, it’s fair to say, nobody in New York knew about the Harold. None had been performed on our stages. Improvised shows existed, but these were revue-like: individual scenes that each began with a suggestion from the audience. Part of the experience was an understanding of how challenging it is to be an improvisor, to make something of the suggestions, which were often intentionally difficult.

I’d been dragged, kicking and screaming, into New York’s improv community by a tall redhead named Karen Herr and she had an old friend named Ian Roberts. Roberts was doing improv in Chicago, performing at Second City and the ImprovOlympic and learning from master improv-teacher Del Close. When Del died, a few years later, it was revealed he’d bequeathed his skull to a theatre to be used as poor Yorrick in productions of Hamlet. But I digress.

Ian Roberts, along with two guys named Matt and the girlfriend of one of them, Amy Poehler, was regularly performing Harolds in Chicago. Del Close had invented the form. The quartet gave themselves a name and a logo that seemed to refer to a political movement, but did it? They were the Upright Citizens Brigade, and Karen got wind of what they were doing.

At the White Horse Tavern, Karen told me she was starting an improv group and I had to be a part of it. I told her that playing piano for improv was something I’d done as a teenager, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it again. She said she wasn’t interested in my playing piano; I needed to be on stage, improvising this thing that nobody had ever done in New York, the Harold. Among the other players would be the cue card holder at Saturday Night Live. Seemed legit. I joined what became known as The White Horse Experiment.

Our group took what amounted to a class field trip to Chicago, where we saw shows at ImprovOlympic and Second City, attended a party at The Annoyance, and, most memorably, spent a lot of time with UCB. The fab four were considering moving to New York. They dipped their toe into the Croton aqueduct-supplied water by spending a month teaching free classes, just to see whether they could convey the wonders of the Harold to New Yorkers. And what New Yorkers did they use as Guinea pigs? The White Horse Experiment.

At the end of our Chicago visit, UCB told us of their intention to move and Karen said, “Great! We’ll prepare the way.” But here’s where things get really crazy. What did “prepare the way” really mean? UCB had no website, no mailing list, no publicity staff. Karen and I and comedian Bill Chott stood on a Greenwich Village street corner, with the busker’s typical open guitar case at our feet. We may have had a bullhorn.

“People of New York! Prepare yourselves! The Upright Citizens Brigade is coming! Enjoy a free Scooter Pie!”

The guitar case contained no coins. Just Scooter Pies. Until we gave them all out. For this was how we prepared the way.

Once Ian, Amy, Matt and Matt arrived, word got around a lot quicker. Something funny was going on. It was improvised, but only involved one audience suggestion, right at the beginning. It had intricately-drawn characters doing improbable but risible things. And, by the end, things tied together in a satisfying way.

UCB, before long, had an inexhaustible supply of students, young people dying to learn the ways of the Harold. And they converted a tiny strip joint into their own theatre in Chelsea. Every Sunday night, they filled their stage with funny people for improvised mayhem. This helped word get around. They were a “happening” – the thing cool young people would attend every week.

The funny people who joined these shows were not household names – then. They were geniuses who’d not yet been discovered. Tina Fey. Stephen Colbert. Other people you’d see on TV a few years later. Of course that could be said of my UCB pals. Amy went to Saturday Night Live and on to Parks and Recreation. Matt Walsh went on to Veep. Matt Besser and Ian Roberts went on to countless other appearances in front of the camera. One night I showed up at the Red Room to run lights for them, but those numerous other gigs had prevented all four from appearing. So, knowing I knew the Harold, they threw me on stage. So I can proudly state I was on stage as an actor in a UCB show.

At The Ballroom, though, I was on stage as a musician when a short-form improv host told the audience they were going to improvise a song based on something that happened to an audience member that day. Unfortunately, the person chosen had an awful experience, one that couldn’t possibly be made fun of. So, the host picked someone else, and the audience could see why. However, the someone else had also undergone a particularly tragic day. The host said, “Folks, I don’t think you want to hear a song based on that, so I’m going to go with one more person, and I promise you, we’ll make a song out of it, whatever it is.” By now, I suspect you see where this is going. The third person had an even-more-impossible to songify occurrence that day (the title of this piece), and yet we sang. But the whole thing was fake; I’d pre-written the song with Matt Walsh, hoping to fool people. We did.

I’m proud to have been one of the very first students UCB taught in New York. Over the years, their school trained an entire generation of mirth-makers. Kate McKinnon, Donald Glover, Aziz Ansari, Nick Kroll, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, for starters. Who’s like them? Damn few.

Heaven is here

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.

You had to be there.

My chiropractor’s hands

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.

How to be happy (reprise)

    Just got back from taking a tour of an Arts Magnet elementary school we’re considering for our daughter. It’s two miles away, and so the difficulty of bicycling there is a drawback. When I was a kid, I biked a half mile. And so did Holly. And Holly was – is – very pretty.

     You all know what the title, Spring Awakening, refers to. In life, at some point, you feel the first stirrings of attraction. In all likelihood, you feel crippling shyness about it. Rare is the pubescent lad who can utter, “Holly, I like you,” and so…

     I did the bravest thing I could. I bicycled about fifty feet behind her. And I sang. I sang original songs at the top of my lungs. One went, “Who looks at you the way I do?” Don’t get the wrong impression. Holly never heard any of these songs. When you’re riding downhill, wind rushes by your ears, and the cracking voice of the boy singing into the wind behind you is a wave of sound stilled by circumstance.

     By Ninth Grade, I’d written a good number of songs. This was a fairly round number of years ago, which is why we all had a reunion last year and I was able, at long last, to relate all of this to the still-gorgeous Holly. (I turned red, but I did it.) As a 14-year-old, I embraced the notion that songwriting needs a purpose. I loved musicals, show tunes and standards. I searched for opportunities to write. Then Ms. Steele, our sometimes shockingly progressive English teacher, gave our class an assignment: Write a few pages in dramatic form. A short play, or skit. Eureka! Opportunity had knocked.

     A few pages? That was for other kids, not for me. I wrote an entire musical, with intermission; book, music and lyrics. The pieces were to be read out loud in class, so, I recorded the accompaniment on cassette tape, brought in a portable player, and entertained the whole class, singing at them.

     Everyone was dumbfounded. Friends began planning to produce the show at school. We cast it, and I made a poster with everyone’s name. Because a friend’s older brother played the trumpet, I wrote a trumpet part. Eventually, the plan fell through, but the mere fact that anyone wanted to do it was quite a compliment at the time. Our would-be leading lady died in the past year, and so did Hal Prince. The latter was a character in the show.

     You see, my original musical was based on my Walter Mitty-like fantasies of what my life could be. How To Be Happy was about a teen boy who writes a musical that attracts the attention of Hal Prince and Jerome Robbins, becomes a smash hit on Broadway, starring the kid. The dramatic conflict, inspired by the old play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, had to do with whether the kid would write a second hit Broadway musical. He’s lonely at the top, and Prince and Robbins have the bright idea of paying a girl to fall in love with him. Ew.

Robbins, Abbott

Adolescent scribblings, of course, usually look ridiculous in the cold light of adulthood. But How To Be Happy was the first link in a long chain. Encouraged by the classroom response, I began a more ambitious musical, based on a truly ancient play. It had been co-authored by George Abbott when he was a young man, and, as any Broadway old-time will tell you, Mr. Abbott was never a young man; he was always old. So, at 15, I was playing my new score for anyone who’d listen. Since the piece was set in the Roaring Twenties, it didn’t sound like a new score at all. But among those that learned of my musical-writing – what’s the word? Talent? Passion? Proclivity? – was a bright girl of similar interests. She asked me to collaborate on a show.

     The idea was for her to do the book, but I didn’t get to see the script until a few days before we were to present it to the drama teacher. And, it wasn’t good. Dialogue from our source novel was simply stuck around my songs, and as a result, I felt, the characters didn’t sound like real people. So, I hurried to a manual typewriter and rewrote the whole thing. At that point, it didn’t seem like having a collaborator had saved me from doing much work.

     I was encouraged, through a lady I met in the improv world, to apply for Lehman Engel’s BMI musical-writing workshop. And, once again, I recorded on cassette. I was, by far, the youngest person accepted that year. Whether these teenage efforts were any good or not, there was no denying that, by the age of 17, I’d written three musicals. And the mere act of writing musicals is the best lesson in how to write them. My fourth show, Pulley of the Yard, or, Murder at the Savoy (the subtitle has taken over as the title) got produced in New York a couple of times, then at the Edinburgh Festival three times, and also elsewhere in Britain.

     It wasn’t my U.K. debut, however. Because the collaborator on that third show, without telling me in advance, got it produced in England. The audience, she told me, consisted of people with what were then termed “mental problems” which closes a circle, as I’m now creating musicals co-written and performed by autistic youth. That collaborator who once seemed valueless was, in fact, indispensable in getting my first show produced.

Theresa

It was December, in New York, in a year ending with 9. I had an idea for a musical, a theatre company that could offer me space, a director I trusted and a book writer I didn’t quite trust. But the more remarkable thing is that I conceived of an entirely radical new way of developing a musical.

The Company of Women was designed to celebrate female friendships, but I, a male, could claim no first-hand knowledge of the subject. I’d need to do research, and came up with the notion that my investigation could take the form of a troupe of players – all women – improvising scenes that, in some way, related to their actual experiences. I’ve a near-religious faith in improv, and here it was the secret sauce that, we all hoped, could develop an interesting show in an innovative way.

The actresses we cast were a diverse bunch: that was our intention. I think there were about a dozen. Two were friends. Two were named Sara, and they were the youngest and the oldest of our ensemble. One African-American, and one who’d grown up in Puerto Rico. One was so patrician, a rumor started that she had lots of money. At least one clearly didn’t. What we had them do was to write premises for scenes on index cards. The premises were true things that had happened to them. The people improvising were never the card-contributors, so, individuals had the fun of watching how other players were acting out events from their own lives.

I watched, fairly silently, and took notes. Ideas for songs occurred to me. Somebody humorously dismissed the male gender with a line, “They’re good in the winter,” that struck me as a great song title. And this suggested a context. If a bunch of gal pals became aware they were sitting around, drinks in hand, ragging on men, they might challenge themselves to speak in positive terms. And struggle with it … the premise of my song.

My grandfather’s wife had once been an actress, and, hearing about the project, she pooh-poohed it as if I were doing something immoral. “What’s in it for them?” she demanded. The couple who ran the theatre company had the opposite view: Our participants were gaining valuable experience in developmental improvisation. Their improv skills improved and they had the satisfaction of contributing to a new musical. No money flowed in any direction.

In the 1970s, Michael Bennett recorded rap sessions with working Broadway dancers, known of whom were stars. The show that evolved from these, A Chorus Line, cast its contributors and became the longest-running Broadway show of all time. With all that profit, there developed a problem: how to adequately compensate those that provided the fodder for the writers? We should all have such problems!

While I was aware of A Chorus Line, I knew nothing of a then-not-popular sitcom that was running on HBO. It focused on the man troubles of four upper class urban white girls. It seemed the characters barely had a thought that wasn’t connected to dating. Shoes, clothes, cocktails, and tales-of-cock – these were its concerns. Since cable networks didn’t live and die based on ratings, the show was given many seasons to develop an audience, and, eventually, it did.

The Company of Women, we all felt, shouldn’t show females as dependent on males for emotional well-being. Our lesbian character wouldn’t derive self-worth from a girlfriend, either. There’d be no supply of disposable income magically coming from nowhere. This would be a musical that would reflect contemporary reality.

But the untrusted librettist wasn’t quite down with that last goal. She kept talking about having our characters receive mylar envelopes in the mail, inviting them to hop a spaceship to a far-off planet. Why mylar? I don’t know, but it was very important to my partner.

How real to make the show was a collaborative disagreement that couldn’t quite be settled. I kept writing songs that were inspired by the improvs. Pat kept writing scenes that were products of her wild imagination. I got increasingly annoyed by this. The producing pair called a meeting for us to settle our differences. I anticipated this with a great level of intensity. The longer we kept on divergent paths, the more likely the show would end up a mess. Were we not cut out to be collaborators?

I had something of a head of steam as I reached for the doorknob. This thing had to be resolved, and communication had to be repaired. I entered the space and a roomful of people yelled “Surprise!” It was my 30th birthday, and everyone – including Pat – wanted to celebrate. Indeed, I was surprised, but that hoped-for resolution had to wait. I could barely enjoy the party, cake and gifts.

Two months later, we presented a draft to the gang that had inspired us. They cold-read the script and I sang all the songs. And then we all parted ways. Pat went on to write a musical about women journeying to a distant planet. And I went on to work with a new librettist who shared my vision of keeping things as real as possible. When she moved from New York, I soldiered on, alone.

All these experiences, that journey of learning-through-improv, led to a script with an impressive amount of verisimilitude. Its commercial prospects, though, were completely hamstrung by the existence of that homogenous television entertainment. It had captured the zeitgeist and become extremely popular. My six women, of various ages, races, and social status who’d go out drinking together were no match for the four white clotheshorses sipping cosmos America fell in love with.