I enjoy telling the story of the day Richard Rodgers decided he wanted to write musicals. He’d been dragged to a Columbia Varsity Show, a student-written and performed musical comedy. The one he saw happened to star Oscar Hammerstein, who teamed Rodgers up with Lorenz Hart to write subsequent Varsity Shows.
Many, many decades later, it was my turn. I wrote the songs for the multiple award-winning Columbia Varsity Show, The New U., with Stephen Gee, Adam Belanoff and Alexa Junge. Those last two are big deal television writers, and probably wrote your favorite episode of your favorite show.
But Stephen’s experience as a handsome kid women pined for led to a show-stopping moment. Towards the end of a large ensemble number about dorm life, there was a funny surprise revelation and the audience howled. And they wouldn’t stop laughing. And the musical director, Jeanine Tesori, took her fingers off the keys to wait for everyone to simmer down before continuing. It’s safe to say nobody had ever seen a reaction quite like it.
Some have called this Joel Lipton photograph, “Leopold and Loeb and their victim”
In the audience was a young Wall Street phenom who soon wagered, successfully, that we could perform the same sort of magic off-off-Broadway, and he’d make a profit. This was On the Brink, my first “professional” work; it gets a page of its own.
There's Gotta Be a Song 