When does an author let go? In the case of musicals, ain’t never gonna happen. Something in the universe demands it, like atomic bonding, or gravity itself. Lousy or fine, grand or not, you and your […]
“How fast can you write a show?” he bluntly asked after shaking my hand. “When do you need it?” Lee and I joked in chorus without thinking. But it was a serious question that came […]
In late 2007, with the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial approaching, we were offered a commission by Muddy River Opera (Land of Lincoln) to complete a serious musical based on the adult years of Lincoln before his […]
We originally wrote Quality Street back in the 1980s. It was our third musical in two years. While waiting for Shine and Chaplin to somehow emerge from their cruel Broadway postponements, it was a breezy joy […]
Every author of a musical has a project (at least one) that never finds life beyond the heart or mind’s eye. I have many. But the one that was most peculiar, now feeling more like […]
In September of 2002, a unique and knowing play premiered at The Bank Street Theatre. Structured in three acts, it follows the lives of two boys who meet in New York City on the night […]
Once upon a time deep in the heart of Greenwich Village, off the square but hard to miss, there was a piano bar, famed and faded. Eldorado. A perpetual green room, visited nightly by Broadway […]
“So much music, I’m writing a ballet!” I was thinking that when working on Of Lives and Leaves in 1998. It was a beautiful evening of one-acts based on Chekhov stories, developed by John Alban Coughlan […]
Happy endings are frequent in tuners, but rare when writing them. Shine! began life (without the exclamation mark) glamorously in 1980. Yet while speeding to its scheduled Broadway premiere, producers talked, directors balked, movie stars […]
Sometime late in 1980 I was asked to write a song for a TV movie: Thin Ice, starring Kate Jackson. The song was to be sung by a cabaret singer known as Jane Olivor (née […]
In the spring of 1978 I was dashing around my studio walk-up in Manhattan, doing my best to tidy up from the naughty night before. I was expecting a visitor—a blind date, if you will. I was twenty‑five, a […]
I am not one of Hal Prince’s success stories. But I did benefit without measure from his best attempts to make me one. The 1980s had just begun. I was returning from lunch, heading back […]
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