Category Archives: Musical Theater

Stephen Sondheim: Now, Later, Soon, and Why I Became A Lyricist

The great Sondheim burst of the 1970’s was a decade of work unequalled by any other Broadway songwriter. [The Bock/Harnick run from “Fiorello” in 1959 through “The Rothschilds” in 1970 may be comparable, but that was their entire output. Sondheim, both before and after the 70’s, is responsible for several more musicals, including arguably three of the greatest of all time.] 

My own entry into his world started with “A Little Night Music.” The show premiered in 1973. I didn’t see it right away, but I still remember my parents, both musicians, coming home from a theater date, saying they fell in love with the show the moment the bassoon came in. Listen to the overture on the original cast recording, and you’ll hear that moment on the first introduction of the Night Waltz theme. You will fall in love, too.

I was thirteen when it opened. I remember still, oddly enough, the Clive Barnes review in the New York Times singling out the lyric “The hip-bath, the hip-bath, how can you trip and slip into hip-bath,” for particular praise, and not being overly impressed. Of course, he was on deadline, and the intricacies of what Sondheim did with that score are hard to jot down in the darkness of a theater. It would be a year later when I finally saw it. William Daniels had replaced Len Cariou [and I saw George Lee Andrews, his understudy], and there was a new Fredrika, but otherwise, it was the original cast.

I was an incipient lyric-freak, working my way through the Great American Songbook through my gigging dad’s fakebooks. But it was from my mother that I derived my delight in the cleverness of Cole Porter and Frank Loesser, and it was she who bought me the cast album to “A Little Night Music.” 

Which came with a lyric sheet.

There have been a handful of authors who have blinded me on my personal road to Damascus. There has been one songwriter, and this lyric sheet is what did it. 

Most people, when asked about this score, will bring up “Send In The Clowns,” perhaps Sondheim’s most well-known song as a composer/lyricist. It’s a lovely song, but for me, the supreme achievement of the show, and maybe the greatest achievement in any show, was the blending of the first three songs into the trio in “Soon.”

“Now,” sung by Fredrik Egerman. “Later,” sung by Henrik, his adult son. “Soon,” sung by Anne, his young second wife, still a virgin eighteen months after their marriage.

Now, later, soon. Three simple words, each containing within it both Time and Tension. Threes abound in the score, both melodically and lyrically. Each song is different in tempo and tone. Fredrik, the lawyer, a bouncy 6/8 while he analyzes his choices in gaining his wife’s amorous favors; Henrik, the sexually frustrated divinity student, a slower 3/4 while accompanying himself on the cello, bemoaning his own frustrations; Ann, the bride, an almost teasing, delicate Viennese waltz as she tries to convince herself that this marriage was what she wanted. Each song is different, yet Sondheim, in the latter part of “Soon,” brings the songs and the singers together.

Find the lyrics, break them down. He begins with each character singing his or her own song, albeit all to Ann’s lilting waltz. As they begin mingling, the words “Now, later, soon” are passed from character to character. The individual songs give way to every possible combination of two characters singing against a third: Fredrik and Ann, Ann and Henrik, Henrik and Fredrik.

And then they crash together, all singing their individual lines on the bridge to Ann’s “Soon.” As she sings, “And you’ll have to admit I’m endearing,” the others sing other lines in counterpoint, coinciding with the rhymes “peering” for Henrik and “hearing” for Fredrik, followed by the next stanza culminating in “domineering/cheering/interfering.” Interestingly, Ann’s dithering patter while Fredrik sings “Now” includes a line about “earrings,” another rhyme echoed here. Intentional? Accidental? Unconscious? I don’t know, but I like it.

And in the end, the words “Now,” “Later,” and “Soon” return to their originators as Fredrik drifts off to sleep, his young bride next to him in bed — only instead of naming her in the final word of his song of need, he names another woman. Which Ann, of course, hears.

Time. Tension.

Brilliant.

I would go on to discover “Company” and “Follies,” to see “Sweeney Todd” and “Pacific Overtures”, to hear, read and devour everything he’s done since. I have become a lyricist myself, largely due to my love of what he did, starting with these three songs.

Happy 90th Birthday, Mr. Sondheim. Thank you for everything.

New musical project, because I’m crazy

I’ve been plugging away at a pseudonymous mystery series, but I’ve tried to keep a musical project going simultaneously. For the last few years, it’s been an adaptation of “Gilgamesh,” for which I am doing the book and my old Lehman Engel Workshop classmate Lawrence Rush is doing the score. More on that as we get it out into the world, but the point is, it’s completed [although not done. Nothing is ever done.]

So, what now? I have promoted a back-burner project to the front burner. Back-burner, as in since 2004. At the end of my first year of the workshop, we had to write a short musical. I paired up with the then young, still pretty young Matt Frey to write a 14 minute musical that was about a murder.

Several years later, I started writing with the late, great Mark Sutton-Smith. The first musical we wrote was a one-act called “Bad Reception.” Which was, in part, about a murder. [You can listen to it here.]

See a pattern yet? I didn’t. It took me a few more years to think, “Aha! I have two short musicals about murder. I should pair them up.” But that only made for about 36 minutes of theater. I decided I needed more short musicals. About murder. With different composers for each, and no more than six performers for the whole shebang.

This has been sitting inside my head for maybe a decade, but with “Gilgamesh” complete, I thought now or never. I started looking for compatible composers. I will list them by their initials so as to keep a little, ya know, mystery going until the project is done.

RP I met when we both did the musical game show “Tune in Time” at the York Theatre. DA is someone whose work I’ve known, seen and admired for a while. We had our first long talk at a Tony Awards party, and he came to critique the “Gilgamesh” table read. SS was referred to me by the estimable Seth Christenfeld of the York. She’s half my age, but we clicked on the creative side. DH saw my want ad on the Dramatists Guild website.

How long will all of this take? Dunno. I have no deadlines. The nice thing about writing short musicals is that they’re, um, short. So the time-frame for completion is not like a full-length project, and people can write inside the gaps of their schedules.

Ideally, each musical will be a different style of story-telling and music. I have planned an absurdist black comedy, a ghostly romance, a country and western road story, a psychiatric thriller [à cappella, maybe?], a jazzy confrontation at a gravesite, and a genteel send-up of every British drawing room scene there has ever been.

What I have, at the moment, are the two completed shows from years ago — and one brand new song as of today.

My feeling is that you haven’t begun writing a musical until the first song is done. We’re on our way. I will try and post regularly on the progress.

Meanwhile, there’s another mystery to be written, and that pesky but financially sustaining day job.

Watch this space!

What’s “Better Than Dreaming?”

Composer Joy Son and I met in the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop — and never got to write together. We stayed in touch, however, and when we finally had a chance to collaborate, it was a blast. Joy can simply write anything and make it fresh and beautiful. Each song we produced was different, fun, and like nothing I had ever done before.

So, when we finished writing “The United States of Us,” one of my first reactions was panic. I wasn’t writing with her! I needed to come up with another idea for a show! Now!

Fortunately, it was Pledge Week on PBS. [There’s a phrase you don’t ever hear.] This meant that they showed a documentary about Broadway, this particular one being about the contributions of Jews to musical theater. Apparently, there were some. Who knew? I was watching the section on “West Side Story,” and my mind drifted into thinking about Shakespearean musicals. There basically have been four successful ones on Broadway: “The Boys From Syracuse,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” “West SIde Story,” and “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” I have seen other smaller adaptations  [check out Dave Hudson and Paul Libman’s “Muskie Love” for a hilarious setting of “Much Ado …” and the more recent “Desperate Measures” for two good examples], but the one that jumped into my mind was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

I had been a fan of this play since my first exposure, the Mister Magoo version. My writer brain jumped into What If? mode. What if Titania, after spending the night with Bottom, decided to stay with him? What if they had a child? What if she chose to live as a human with her family? What if she had to return to the Fairy Realm? What if later she decided she wanted her child back?

What if we set it in modern-day NYC?

By the end of an hour, I had put together the basic premises of the show and pitched it to Joy. And she said yes.

More conceptual breakthroughs would come. We decided to free up the plot and not be an analog of the original play. Alec, the central male lead, became a mixture of Bottom, Oberon, Theseus and Egeus. The mechanism of the magic changed, and every alteration of a premise sent the plotlines careening in directions Shakespeare never anticipated.

Joy’s score was earthy for the humans, ethereal for the fairies, funny and romantic and heartfelt. Once again, it was a blast working with her, and you can hear the results on the Musical Theater page.

I can’t wait to write with her again.

Theater firsts:

First show: “Carousel,” the Lincoln Center revival with John Raitt, 1965. I was 5 or 6. Odd fact that stays with me — the Starkeeper was played by Edward Everett Horton, whose name I recognized as the narrator of “The Fractured Fairy Tales” from The Bullwinkle and Rocky show.

First off-Broadway show: “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” Also, my second show. Not the original cast. I still think it’s better than the revamped version, but nobody remembers the character of Patty [not Peppermint Patty] anymore.

First non-musical: “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” by Molière, at the Comédie-Française. I was 13. My French wasn’t exactly fluent, but I enjoyed it.

First exposure to Shakespeare: The Mr. Magoo version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” on television.

FIrst exposure to non-animated Shakespeare: The Olivier movie of “Hamlet.”

First exposure to live Shakespeare: The musical of “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” still one of my favorites.

First exposure to Shakespeare, live, no gimmicks already: “Richard II,” RSC, London. Boring for three hours, then a sword fight.

First time seeing a Broadway show without an adult taking me: “Candide,” 1973.

First time seeing a Broadway show with a date: “Candide,” 1973.

First show that I went back and saw again: “Candide,” 1973.

First show that made me want to write for the theater: “Travesties,” by Tom Stoppard. The third writer to blow up my adolescent mind, after Kafka and Pynchon. I wanted to write like Stoppard, to make the language dance and the concepts and moments shift on a dime. I needed to know everything he knew. He led me to Joyce and Wilde. I still don’t know everything he knows and never will. And yet, and yet, and yet …

First show that made me appreciate perfect lyrics: “A Little Night Music.” The way “Now,” “Later,” and “Soon” blend into the trio is the greatest achievement in musical theater.

First show that made me appreciate how a musical could express real life: “A Chorus Line.” When they announced the Broadway transfer, I caught the 77 bus into NYC and stood in line in the summer to buy six tickets for the December holidays. Front row center balcony, the perfect vantage point to see the kaleidoscopic patterns of Bennet’s choreography. I love Sondheim’s mastery of lyricism, but Kleban wrote how people I knew talked. The tickets, by the way, were eight dollars each.

First time seeing nudity onstage: “Equus.”

First show with college girlfriend: “Eubie.”

First time seeing two shows in one day [also with college girlfriend]: Spring break, 1979. “Sweeney Todd” and “Wings.”

First play I directed: “The Real Inspector Hound.” By Stoppard. At Swarthmore College.

First play I wrote: Yeah, not gonna talk about that. It was in high school. It was pretentious and terrible.

First time at the Delacorte Theater, Central Park: “The Pirates of Penzance,” 1980.

First show seen with my wife [aforementioned college girlfriend]: Memory fades, but research suggests it was “I’m Not Rappaport.” We got free tickets, thanks to my brother. He got them because the play was staged in a house designated for musicals, so they had to pay some musicians under the union rules of the time as what were referred to as “walkers.” My brother, a cellist, was one of them, I’m not sure how.

First show seen with my son: “The Lion King.” Also with my wife and parents. My brother was playing in the pit. For real, this time! And he got us house seats, which was sweet.

First time at the Delacorte Theater with my son: “Twelfth Night,” 2002. Terrible production.

First time seeing three shows in one day: “The Coast of Utopia,” by Tom Stoppard.

First musical written by me: “Lamb to the Slaughter,” with music by Matt Frey, based on the Roald Dahl story. Fourteen minutes long, performed in front of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, with Masi Asare, Lawrence Rush, David Sisco, and me performing. A blast.

First musical written by me which people paid to see in public: “Math Anxiety,” a ten minute musical written in 48 hours with composer Michael Hunsaker and staged a week later by the Raw Impressions Musical Theater in an evening of rapidly written shows. Performed by Karen Hyland, Dennis Holland, and Darryl Winslow; directed by Tesha Buss, musical direction by future crossword champ Dan Feyer. Six performances, and I was at five of them. A crazy, thrilling ride.

First fully-staged full-length musical written by me which people paid to see in public: “The Usual,” with music by the late Mark Sutton-Smith, produced at the Williamston Theatre in Michigan, with Joseph Zettelmaier, Emily Sutton-Smith, Leslie Hull, Brandon Piper and Carolyne Rex. Directed by Tony Caselli. I was up for the last two weeks of rehearsal into the premiere. People unrelated to me sat in the audience and laughed, gasped, and cheered at words that I wrote. One of the greatest experiences of my life.

First full-length musical written by me to make it to Broadway: Watch this space.

Creating “The Usual”

Now that the libretto for our musical “The Usual” has been published, I thought I’d tell you how it came to be. It happened because of the Raw Impressions Music Theatre. This was a wonderfully insane, low-budget project that would put together evenings of ten minute musicals written in 48 hours. Eight writers and eight composers who had never worked together before would show up on a Friday afternoon; ten performers would sing for a minute each; then eight musical-writing teams would form and be given the theme for that program. It was like, here’s your composer, these three performers will be yours, here’s your director, here’s your musical director, you have 48 hours, see you Sunday, GO!

One week later, they would put on a fully-staged, off-book evening of eight ten minute musicals. Our theme was “Love by Degrees.” “Math Anxiety,” with music by Michael Hunsaker, was my first publicly performed work. There were six performances, and I went to five of them and listened and watched as an audience of strangers laughed and cheered for our show. It was a blast.

I started thinking about what I would do if I could run one of these. I remembered seeing Paul Sills’ All-Star improv group when they came to NYC. [Can’t remember all of them, but Paul Dooley, Severn Darden, Gerrit Graham …] There was one format where they were given a first line and a last line, and had to improvise a scene that got from one to the other. [“Put down that chainsaw!” was the final one that night.] So, what if a group of random sentences were drawn from a hat and used to start musicals?

The phrase, “I knew you’d come back,” popped into my head. And within 90 seconds, I knew the characters, the entire plot, the songs, and that it had to be jazz-based. [Da DOO be do BOP!]

Well, fun idea, but I wasn’t in charge of anything. But I kept coming up with ideas for short musicals, and wondered what an evening of such would be like. Then I met the composer Mark Sutton-Smith. He had responded to a personal ad I had put up in a Yahoo newsgroup of musical theater writers [“Lonely lyricist seeks composer …”] We met by the Lincoln Center fountain [cue Gene Wilder screaming, “I’ll do it!” as the water erupts orgasmically.] At dinner, we each pitched an idea. Mine was for the program of one-act musicals; he then growled, “I want to write a show called, ‘Girl Detective.'” We ended up doing both.

The problem: We never quite finished the collection of one-acts, entitled, “This Happened To Someone I Know,” although writing it was a good learning process and way for us to get a sense of what each other could do. I wrote for an imaginary group of six performers I knew either through my BMI workshop or Raw Impressions: Jill Abramovitz, Karen Hyland, Kristin Maloney, Nick Cearley, Steve Routman, and my Raw Impressions collaborator, Michael Hunsaker. Of the one acts, only the one I initially thought of was completed: “Bad Reception,” which Kristin and Mike performed sensationally at the Emerging Artists Theater. [You can hear them singing “I Knew You’d Come Back” and “Enough” here. The latter is one of the most gorgeous melodies you’ll ever hear.] We got caught up in writing “Girl Detective,” but more importantly, the one-acts never quite connected with an overall theme. This particularly hit home when we put together a private reading, amazingly getting Kristin, Nick, Steve and Mike, two-thirds of the dream team, and added in Lauren Blackman and Russell Koplin in the other female roles. In the post-mortem, it was suggested that we’d be better off finding an overall through-line.

I thought about that, and actually came up with an idea for one — six characters, two side-by-side locations [a living room; a bar] — but the frustrations were creeping in, so we put the project aside.

In early autumn, 2010, Mark called me and said [this is verbatim], “Hey, my sister’s theater is looking for original musicals for two to three performers and one set. Let’s write one of those.” He proposed that we salvage what songs we could from the earlier project. I re-examined one of the one-acts, “Kaypro II,” in which a woman named Valerie rediscovers the clunky old computer from her teen years and plays a computer adventure game that she never finished. The demons she encounters in the game parallel the demons from her real life.

It seemed like a possible second act, albeit with much rewriting. I took my idea for the through-line and cut it in half. One set, a bar. A guy walks into the bar, starts talking to the bartender. Then Valerie enters. And stuff happens.

My wife, Judy and I, were taking an anniversary trip to Hawaii. I can never sleep on planes. I took a spiral notebook and started riffing an opening scene. It flowed [“like butter,” said Mark when he read it later].

We still needed songs. Lots of them, in fact, to fill up this full-length show. They started to come. Mark and I worked by sending things back and forth to each other. He described his composing process to me as “Walking around the house, muttering.” Three new songs happened. The Williamston Theatre liked the first draft. They even did the opening scene for a fund-raising gala. But there was much to be done. Eight more songs to go, and we wanted to put together a table read for August so that Tony Caselli, the director, could come to NYC and take a look at the completed show.

Then I stopped hearing from Mark. No e-mails with music attached, no calls, no picking up on his end. We had lined up three performers [Tara Novie and Gil Brady from “Girl Detective,” and Kristin Maloney, who had inspired the original Valerie]. I was getting increasingly frantic, wondering what was going on.

Then things got worse. Much worse.

It turned out that Mark had been diagnosed with lymphoma. He finally called me and filled me in. I was stunned, needless to say. Horrified for him, and wondering if we’d be able to finish what we started.

We postponed the reading. On the other end of the life event scale, Kristin had become pregnant, and the new date was past her due date. She recommended a woman she had recently worked with who she said could do everything she could do even better, and that’s how I first met Jillian Louis.

Mark started chemo, which laid him out. We went ahead with the reading, which was encouraging and pointed out what needed to be rewritten. Then I received the first piece of music from Mark. Then another. Then another.

He ended up writing eight new songs in between bouts of chemo. They were wonderful. It was one of the most incredible things I had ever seen. To create while that ill takes courage beyond anything I’ve ever had. We completed the show in time to get it to Williamston.

The Williamston Theatre is a small theater, with 99 seats surrounding a small square stage on three sides. It was founded by four people, including Tony Caselli, our director, and Emily Sutton-Smith, Mark’s sister and our leading lady. The theater is an Equity house that also draws on the nearby Michigan State theater students. Our leading man, Kip, was played by Joseph Zettelmaier, an award-winning playwright long associated with the theater. Sam, the bartender, was played by Emily Hull, a graduate student at the time. Tony also had the clever idea of incorporating the two student  assistant stage managers, Brandon Piper and Carolyne Rex, as an onstage chorus when they weren’t changing scenery or operating demons. [When Mark heard about that, he said, “Five voices are going to sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in that space.”] The set, costumes, lighting and props were all beautifully done, and the musical director improvised cocktail piano for the underscoring that Mark couldn’t complete.

I was up for the last two weeks of rehearsal, rewriting in my hotel room by day. The layout of that room had the television mounted over the desk. The bottom of framework had padding on it. I remember thinking, “What kind of idiot is going to hit his head standing up from the desk?” The answer was me. Twice.

We had our first preview. The laughs were huge. So was the gasp of shock and dismay at the last twist of the final scene. [Joe came running up to me after, crowing, “Did you hear that?”]

And Mark made it to the premiere to hear his little sister sing his music for the first, and only, time in his life.

We got great reviews from the Michigan media, nominations for different awards. It was a blast, one of the great experiences of my life.

And the performance after the premiere would be the last time that I would see Mark in person.

He lived another year, composing to the end. We spoke on the phone. He gave me his blessing when the possibility arose for me to work with someone else, which we understood would be until he was well enough to work again on another musical. About a year after the premiere, we lost him.

A month or so after that, I received a call informing me that I had won the Kleban Prize for Most Promising Librettist for this little show. The ceremony was at the ASCAP building, and Mark’s music was played by Joy Son, my new collaborator, on Harold Arlen’s Steinway grand. She told me that she had never practiced so hard.

Oh, the title. The working title had been “These Two Walked Into A Bar.” Sometime in the rehearsal process, Tony suggested, “The Usual.” And we said, “Yeah. That’s it.”


					

MacBeth, by Lin-Manuel Miranda

My brain will do weird things without me. This is MacBeth, roughly fitted to the opening number of “Hamilton.”

 MACDUFF

HOW COULD A SCOTSMAN, NOBLE, TALL IN THE SADDLE,

BORN IN BLOOD, BRED IN BATTLE,

WHO HAD REVELED IN THE RATTLE

OF THE DEAD AS THEY BLED,

LAUGHED AT FOES AS THEY FLED

FROM THIS HARBINGER OF SLAUGHTER,

BECOME THE BLOODY THANE OF CAWDOR.

SO THE KING FROM HIS THRONE

SAYS, ‘THIS GUY IS SO DEVOTED,

I SHOULD THROW HIM A BONE.

TELL THIS GUY HE’S BEEN PROMOTED.

HE’S GOT BALLS, HE’S GOT GAME.

HE’S DESERVING OF MUCH FAME,

AND ALL OF SCOTLAND SHOULD REVERE HIS NAME.

WHAT’S HIS NAME?’

MACBETH

MACBETH, LORD OF DUNSINANE.

I’M MACBETH, LORD OF DUNSINANE.

AND IF YOU THINK I’M JUST ANOTHER THANE,

JUST YOU WAIT, JUST YOU WAIT.

HERE’S MY WIFE, CALL HER LADY, SHE’S BEAUTIFUL, AMBITIOUS.

AND WHEN THE GOING’S TOUGH, THEN THIS COUPLE’S GETTING VICIOUS.

ENTER KING, MIND THE GATE, PLEASE IGNORE THE DRUNKEN PORTER.

AND WHO’DA THUNK THAT DUNCAN’S SOME DUMB PUNK THAT WE COULD SLAUGHTER?

SO THE KING HAS CHANGED HIS STATUS FROM TO BE INTO NOT BE.

AND IT LOOKS LIKE THESE TWO SCOTS WILL BE GETTING OFF SCOT-FREE.

AND WHAT WILL BE THE PENALTY FOR ACTING SO DISLOYAL?

LADIES AND GENTS, MEET MR. AND MRS. ROYAL!

I’M MACBETH, BUT YOU CAN CALL ME KING.

‘CAUSE THE WITCHES SAID I’LL GET THE BLING.

AND IF YOU THINK IT’S JUST A SCOTTISH FLING,

JUST YOU WAIT, JUST YOU WAIT.

VARIOUS CAST MEMBERS

ME, HE KILLED ME.

I’M HIS FRIEND, AND HE KILLED ME.

ME, HE KILLED ME,

I’M A KID, AND HE KILLED ME.

I’M HIS WIFE, KILLED MYSELF

WHEN MY SANITY HIT BOTTOM.

MACDUFF

I’M MACDUFF, NO ONE KILLS ME.

I’M THE ONE WHO GOT HIM.

ALL

MACBETH, LORD OF DUNSINANE!

 

 

The Pi Song [posted on 3/14/15, natch]

Back when I was in the Lehmann Engel Workshop, I worked on a proposed musical adaptation of Douglas Coupland’s book Microserfs. Out of that came the following lyric — think of it as an Andrews Sisters number.

THE PI SONG

Way down yonder in Ancient Greece,
There once was a fellow who gained fame.
A mathematical sage from the Golden Age,
Archimedes was his name.
He once drew a circle in the sand,
And what he saw there made his eyes pop.
He discovered a number
That disrupted his slumber,
‘Cause once he got it going then it wouldn’t stop.
And since Roman num’rals weren’t invented yet,
He named it for a letter in the Greek alphabet.

He called it Pi.
Not beta, not theta, not chi.
And what was first discovered by those ancient Greeks
Is now a source of fascination to us modern geeks.
I like Pi.
Although I can’t explain why.
It’s beyond all computin’.
It even puzzled Newton,
So just keep salutin as the numbers march by
Some fellas try to tell us that they can solve Fermat’s Theorem.
But if they don’t know  Pi, I’d never go near ‘em.
I’d even fear ‘em.
Give me Pi.
Don’t be coy or shy.
If you know a thousand digits,
You’ll give me the fidgits.
No mental midgets need apply.

There’s always room for Pi.
If I don’t get it, I’ll surely die.
It may seem irrational; it don’t make sense.
But without it I can’t figure out my circumference.
If a man knows Pi,
He’ll make me swoon and sigh.
If he knows my conic sections,
He’ll conquer my affections,
‘Cause I like to make selections from IQ’s that are high.
I’m not a gal who mixes Pascal into her amours.
But if you know your Pi then the only number I’ll ever want is yours.
Maybe someday I
Will meet a man just like Pi.
If I met such a man, it would be so sweet.
He would completely knock me off my feet,
‘Cause he could go on forever and never repeat.
That’s my kind of guy.
He’d be neat as, sweet as,
Gimme a P, gimme an I, that’s all you need to spell it.
Neat as, sweet as,
This is the finish, so come on, ladies, sell it!
Neat as, sweet as,
Pi.
Pi.
Pi.
Come on, baby, gimme that Pi!

What I Learned From Irving Berlin

     By most reckonings, Irving Berlin was one of the greatest songwriters in the history of American popular music.

And he was, by and large, an abject failure.

How do I reconcile these statements? In fact, how dare I call someone like Berlin a failure? This is a man who, as a Russian Jewish immigrant, pulled himself out of the New York City ghetto and taught himself how to play the piano, albeit only in one key, making the harmonic sophistication of his songs all the more impressive. [He used a transposing piano which changed keys by use of a lever.] This is a man who had one of the all-time best-selling songs in “White Christmas,” who wrote one of the great Broadway song scores with “Annie Get Your Gun,” who lived to be a hundred and is estimated to have written anywhere from over 1250 to over 1500 songs in his lifetime.

Yet that last statistic backs up my second statement about Berlin. It is an unbelievable number of songs. By way of comparison, in my eleven years of an admittedly part-time, third career as a lyricist, I have written about a hundred songs, more or less.  And I depend on collaborators for the music, because I have no skills or training as a composer. Berlin did both, and did them extremely well at times.

So, let’s assume the total number is 1250. Now, suppose you could list these songs in order of quality. I would start with “Let’s Face The Music and Dance” in the top spot, followed by “They Say It’s Wonderful” and “Isn’t It a Lovely Day [To Be Caught In the Rain],” but that’s my list. Look at the first ten songs, and you have ten of the greatest songs ever written. Same with 11-20. And you keep going, through the great anthems [“God Bless America,” “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade”], through pretty much the entire score of “Annie Get Your Gun,” and so on.

By the time you get to 41-50, you’ve gotten to songs that maybe you’ve heard of, maybe even have heard played or sung, but rarely. After 60, you’d be hard pressed to even identify a title as an Irving Berlin song. The chronological Wikipedia list, found here, highlights sixty of the songs with their own articles. While not a perfect indicator, it gives a rough proxy as to which of the songs merited further discussion [although “Si’s Been Drinking Cider” seems to have been an accidental highlighting.]

Now for some math. Sixty out of 1260 is a success rate of about 4.8%. Flip it, and it’s a failure rate of 95.2%. Pretty damn high, which proves my second statement.

And this is why Irving Berlin inspires me and gives me hope as a writer. When people ask me for writing advice, the most significant thing that I tell them is to write every day. What you write may or may not turn out to be any good, but the sheer act of writing it will make you a better writer. It’s a muscle, a mental muscle that needs constant exercise if it is ever going to improve.

    And if you write enough, some of it will be good.

And if it isn’t good, set it aside and move on to the next thing. I knew a composer once who told me that he didn’t want to bother writing any bad songs because he thought he only had so many good songs in him. I disagree with that whole-heartedly. You learn from the bad. You develop an aesthetic sense that will help you down the line. Look again at the chronological list in Wikipedia and see how the percentage of significant songs increases as Berlin matured. [It goes back down as he ages out of his prime.]

The young Berlin wrote “Ephraham Played Upon The Piano” and “Don’t Take Your Beau to the Seashore,” and his career survived [the latter song is fun, by the way.] George Gershwin said of him, “The first real American musical work is ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’ Berlin had shown us the way; it was now easier to attain our ideal.”

I didn’t get Berlin when I was a young teen working my way through my dad’s fake book. The songs seemed corny, and he never completely made the transition to the integrated musical, although a case can be made for “Call Me Madam” in that regard. His greatest work came when Jerome Kern died before taking on the score to what would become “Annie Get Your Gun,” causing producers Rodgers and Hammerstein to bring him on. As I have developed and improved in my own lyric-writing, I have come to appreciate the idea of telling the story in the song without drawing attention to the songwriter. Simplicity, in other words. Sondheim, in his essay in Finishing The Hat, says “Berlin is a lyricist whose work I appreciate more and more the older I get. His lyrics appear to be simple, but simplicity is a complicated matter, as well as being hard to achieve without a quick slide from simple to simplistic.”

By most reckonings, Irving Berlin was one of the greatest songwriters in the history of American popular music. Most reckonings. Including mine.

About Casting

In my previous post, I wrote about visualizing actors for characters. I don’t do that for fiction, but when it comes to writing for musical theater, that changes. The reason is that the voice, specifically the singing voice, matters. Whereas a written character’s voice could be anything [and the few audio versions that I’ve heard of my work sound nothing like I hear the characters], when it comes to musicals, you have to be thinking, “She’s a soprano, not legit, with a theater belt and the ability to rock out when we need her to.” And once you do, you start remembering performers who meet those criteria.

Which means that you are essentially casting the show in your head while you’re writing it, and I have found that to be a useful thing. You’re moving the imaginary characters around an imaginary stage anyway to make sure that the scenes work and that people have enough time to change costumes, so you might as well have specific people for your templates rather than a SimRep group [and wouldn’t that be a fun game to have?]

The more I’ve gotten to work in theater, the more performers I have met. Every one of them is in my mental database, waiting to leap out and sing their imaginary little hearts out. And I don’t typecast them — the ingenue in one show becomes a biker chick bartender in another; the straight high school senior segués into a gay, thirty-something editor. It all comes down to the voice and, to a lesser extent, the age.

In the year after I had been in the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, I was looking for a compatible composer to work with. I had come up with an idea for a show to be made up of thematically-related musical sketches and one-acts. I had been influenced by my experiences both watching and participating in the Raw Impressions Theater Company, who put together evenings of eight ten minute musicals written in forty-eight hours by eight pairs of writers and composers who had never worked together before. They usually had a cast of ten covering the whole set, and the performers were seriously good.

So, as I began thinking about what I would write, I also thought about the practicalities. I wanted to use six performers, three men and three women, all versatile. And thinking about the characters in the pieces became mixed with thinking about who would play them. The characters suggested the performers, the performers suggested more characters, and in my head, where I was director, designer and audience, I was having a great time enjoying the show.

Of course, if you get to the point where you actually can have a reading or, if you’re lucky, an actual staging of the show, the actors you dreamed of may not be available because they selfishly have their own lives and needs. In the case of “This Happened To Someone I Know,” the anthology musical which I ultimately wrote with composer Mark Sutton-Smith, I did get four of the six to record some demos. I later got a different four of the six to do a reading, and it was sweet hearing their actual voices doing what the voices in my head had done [no medication needed here, folks. Relax.]

But, if you can’t get the performers you dreamed of getting, here’s the wonderful thing about living in NYC: There are a lot of performers here, and many will happily come in to read or sing for you, either because they hope that this will lead to work for them if you ever strike gold, or because they realize that all of us in this community [and I am willing at this point to include myself] need to have this symbiosis continue if musical theater is going to be created.

So, what happens when a performer you craved is unavailable? You network. You find others, and they know others, and before you know it, your imaginary repertory company is legion. And someone will come in who was nothing like the person in your head and put an entirely new spin on the character, and you, the writer, sit there and think, “Oh! This character can do that!” For example, when Mark and I wrote “Girl Detective,” we recruited Kimmy Brownell for the table reading. We had met Kimmy when she learned four songs at the last second for some demos when our original singer came down with a cold. Right before the table reading, Kimmy had a family emergency. She sent me a list of possible replacements, with a notation next to one of them, “She rules!”

Her name was Lauren Blackman. She looked nothing like Kimmy, and we didn’t know how good she was. Turned out she was real good. When we later did a staged reading in NYC, she came back for the role and came up with a reading of the line, “Like what?” that sent both Mark and me into hysterics. Too long to explain, but the point is, I wrote that line, and I had no idea it contained what she found in it.

Sometimes you get even luckier. We wanted a young voice for Casey Ames, Girl Detective. I remembered that the older sister of one of my son’s friends had gone to the Performing Arts High School in NYC, and then on to study musical theater at Pace University. I contacted her, and had her learn one of Casey’s songs. And that’s how I started working with Tara Novie.

Tara has become one of the mainstays of my imaginary repertory company. She’s not merely a great singer. She’s a great musician [not every singer is]. So good, that she allowed Mark and me to take musical risks, knowing that she had the capability to take them and run with them. There was a moment in “Girl Detective” where Casey, self-styled high school detective, comes across a murdered man, and breaks dow because things suddenly got real. Mark and I independently arrived at the idea of using musical fragments to create the theater equivalent of an operatic mad scene. The structure was unconventional, the meters shifted into some less standard rhythms, and we ended up writing a piece that I love to this day because Tara had come into this role and we knew she could do it [and she did]. Unfortunately, it’s not up on the website, but you can hear Tara [and Lauren and many other good folks] here.

So, when I began writing “The Usual,” which had its basis in one of the one-acts from the unfinished “This Happened …” musical, Tara took over in my mind from the actress who was part of the original six. “The Usual” was a three person show: two women, one man. For the visuals, I had Tara, the fabulous Kristin Maloney, who had done demos for “This Happened …” and performed the one-act “Bad Reception” from that show, and Gil Brady, who Mark had recruited for “Girl Detective” from his imaginary repertory company.

See how this works? Only when we got to the table reading and recording for “The Usual,” real life intervened in good and bad ways. The bad: Mark was diagnosed with lymphoma, the treatment of which naturally slowed down his composing. The good: Kristin was pregnant. The delay in the completion of the score pushed things past her due date. She recommended Jillian Louis, who was incredible, and a completely different type than Kristin. [Go to the Musical Theater page to hear Jillian, Tara and Gil on those songs.]

And then “The Usual” was done at the Williamston Theatre in Michigan, and that cast, Joseph Zettelmaier, Emily Sutton-Smith and Leslie Hull, was nothing like Gil, Jillian and Tara. Their takes were different; Tony Caselli, the genius director, found beats and notes that I didn’t know were there, and it was all brilliant.

So, what I have learned: I can cast as much as I like in my head, and, if I’m lucky, I’ll get those people. But if I don’t, I can’t wait to see what these characters of mine will turn into when the new folks arrive. I will keep writing for Tara, and Jillian, and Nick Cearley and David Perlman and so many others, because they help me imagine who these people are. Theater characters are meant to be played by actors, and by more than one if you want the show to live on.

And the other great thing about it is that you keep making new friends.