STARTING HERE WITH MALTBY, SHIRE AND ROSENBLUM By Peter Filichia
“My first reaction was that all of the songs were losers.”
“A terrible idea.”
That first quotation, reported by Joshua Rosenblum in his excellent new book CLOSER THAN EVER, came from lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr.
The second quip came from Maltby’s longtime writing partner, composer David Shire.
Understand that Maltby wasn’t evaluating such Broadway abominations as INTO THE LIGHT or IN MY LIFE.
For that matter, Shire wasn’t giving his opinion on making a musical about the life of KFC founder Colonel Sanders.
Now that was probably “a terrible idea,” given that KENTUCKY LUCKY, as they called it, never saw the light of day or a lit marquee.
No, the irony is that 47 years ago, Maltby was referring to the songs that he and Shire had written for their half-dozen or so musicals –
shows that, alas, were only marginally more successful than KENTUCKY LUCKY.
Nevertheless, in 1977, Manhattan Theatre Club artistic director Lynne Meadow suggested that an evening of Maltby and Shire songs would be perfect for her new cabaret space.
That’s when Maltby called their songs “losers” and Shire damned the entire idea as “terrible.”
( …and they say critics are critical… )
But, as Rosenblum reports, when Shire re-heard the songs that Maltby had assembled, he said, “This does not sound like an anthology of failure.”
What they called STARTING HERE, STARTING NOW started strong and soon moved to a Restaurant Row supper club. There it spawned a stunning album that inspired Theatermania reviewer David Wolf to state, “Few cast recordings are as good as this one.”
And now, almost a half-century after its cabaret premiere, STARTING HERE, STARTING NOW is still being produced, as theatergoers who attended it earlier this month in Michigan City, Indiana, can attest.
Shorn of unwieldy and unworkable books, the songs shine, mostly because, as Rosenblum astutely notes, “the conflict between the intellectual and the emotions is a recurring theme in the Maltby-Shire canon.”
That’s certainly true of “I Don’t Remember Christmas,” which doesn’t conjure up images of chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Instead, the fire comes from the man singing it. He openly roars that he’s over his broken marriage, but Rosenblum details the reasons why we come to a different conclusion.
Rosenblum also describes “Crossword Puzzle” as “a classic ‘head vs. heart’ number.” In it, a woman who once enjoyed a weekly ritual doing the Sunday Times puzzle with her boyfriend is furious that he abandoned her and is now doing it alone.
Was the problem that she was better at filling in the blanks than he? Lord knows she tried to be nice about the situation: “I’d let him hold the pencil; he could write in the word.”
“Travel” was also included in STARTING HERE. It includes the lyric, “As the wife says or the husband, when they’re starting out on their life, ‘Take me where you want to go.’”
Pretty prescient for Maltby in 1958 to write “As the wife says or the husband,” as opposed to “As the wife says to the husband.”
Perhaps that’s one reason why, in 2000, when Sondheim made his now-famous list of “Songs I’d Wished I’d Written (at Least in Part),” he included “Travel.”
STARTING HERE traveled, too, to London and beyond. Spurred by that success, Maltby and Shire couldn’t help noticing that they still had songs to spare from their short-running shows and out-of-town closers. That led to the 1989 off-Broadway revue CLOSER THAN EVER (which explains where Rosenblum got his title).
This revue received a more detailed recording on two compact discs. Highlights include “Miss Byrd,” a real estate office receptionist who takes advantage of those empty apartments and doesn’t wait until lunch hour to do it. “The super’s aptly named,” she says.
(Turns out that Miss Byrd was aptly named, too.)
“Life Story” doesn’t take us from womb to tomb but begins with a woman recalling her “liberated marriage” – such a liberated one, in fact, that it soon ended.
That left the single mother to “fight the battles of the sixties,” get “equal pay” as she “faced down chauvinistic slobs… won the fights,
improved the jobs.”
Now she’s 49 and goes on job interviews where younger women “smile and ask what I have done when they got their jobs from the fights I won.”
It’s an excellent point, as Stephen Holden reiterated in his New York Times review of the song that received an even bigger honor when Jeffrey Sweet, one of the co-editors of The Best Plays of 1989-1990, included the entire song in his introductory essay. In the nine-decades-long history of that publication, the closest anyone came to quoting a song was Henry Hewes, who gave a four-line excerpt from LET IT RIDE’S “Just an Honest Mistake” in The Best Plays of 1961-1962. Sweet, though, wouldn’t settle for anything less than the whole “Life Story.”
“One of the Good Guys” may be the most heartbreaking song that Maltby and Shire have yet written. A middle-aged man has been ostensibly happily married for decades. Now, though, at 44, he can’t help wondering what he’s been missing during those years of wedlock (with an emphasis on the second syllable).
Rosenblum lets Maltby do the talking here about extra-marital sex or the lack of it: “If you do it, you’ll regret it; if you don’t do it, you’ll regret it. Either way, you’re screwed.”
(Maltby’s last verb is an interesting choice, considering the subject of the song… )
And now, almost 35 years after its off-Broadway premiere, CLOSER THAN EVER is still being produced, as theatergoers who attended it earlier this month in Erie, Pennsylvania, can attest.
Each recording has many more songs, of course, and you’ll revel at how astonishing they are. The secret of their success is best exemplified by a quotation that Rosenblum found from Kevin Stites, the original musical supervisor of TITANIC: “Richard cares more about the music than David does, and David cares more about the lyrics than Richard does.”
The musically literate will find Rosenblum’s book an extra-special treat. He was musical director of the teeny, tiny band in the first Broadway production of FALSETTOS and did similar chores for a WONDERFUL TOWN and INTO THE WOODS revival. As a result, he’s sharp when it comes to sharps and flats and has included generous replications of G-cleffed measures of music that incisively display why Shire chose the notes that he chose.
In 311 pages, Rosenblum of course also goes into details on the many book musicals that brought a few highs and many lows into their creators’ lives. Nevertheless, this new work from Oxford University Press will bring you closer than ever to appreciating Maltby and Shire – and Rosenblum.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new book – BRAINTEASERS FOR BROADWAY GENIUSES – is now available on Amazon and at The Drama Book Shop.
