Guild Hall, Southampton Arts Center Partner Up To Bring Broadway Talent Out East

There once was a time when rocker Adam Pascal had, quite frankly, no fans.

A guitar or bass slung across his chest, the musician was playing nightclubs in Nassau County, not far from his home in Syosset, and in Manhattan, but going nowhere.

Then he got a call from a childhood friend with a bit of news.

His girlfriend, Idina Menzel, had just been cast in a new, 10-week, off-Broadway show about a gaggle of young, struggling artists fighting to survive on the Lower East Side against the backdrop of a growing epidemic: HIV/AIDS. They were having trouble casting their leading male role, Roger Davis, a singer with a rock edge.

Mr. Pascal immediately auditioned, and landed the role in what was then an unknown musical titled “Rent.”

Until it wasn’t.

It hit bigger than big—moving to Broadway, winning a Pulitzer Prize and four Tony Awards in 1996, including Best Musical, and going on to be adapted into a motion picture starring most of the original cast members, among them Mr. Pascal and Ms. Menzel, now best known for her Broadway role as Elphaba in “Wicked.”

Suddenly, every fan Mr. Pascal had was thanks to musical theater. And they wanted to hear him sing “One Song Glory,” and, later, hits from “Cabaret” and “Aida”—not music from his younger days.

“I did rock bands right up until that moment I was cast in ‘Rent.’ I had just turned 25,” he recalled last week during a telephone interview from his home in California. “And I never considered musical theater as a career. It was just so not on my radar. It wasn’t until I started doing it that it felt so natural. And I became successful at it. All of a sudden, here I am. This is my career. And now, I’m rearranging the standard versions of those songs.”

This Labor Day weekend, Mr. Pascal will close the first-ever, collaborative, salon concert series between East Hampton’s Guild Hall and the new Southampton Arts Center with his rearrangements of musical theater favorites. The partnership, which kicks off Saturday, July 5, with Broadway star and Southampton native Melissa Errico, is a major move for the burgeoning arts institution in Southampton Village, which opened its doors last summer and hired Michele Thompson as executive director just this past January.

“When you think about who you would want to partner with on eastern Long Island, somewhere at the top would be Guild Hall,” Ms. Thompson said.

“Thank you,” Josh Gladstone, artistic director of John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, smiled, seated across from Ms. Thompson in her Southampton office. “It’s a great, small venue. Where else are you going to be that up-close with an artist of Broadway caliber? It’s pretty unusual.”

“This is an experiment,” Ms. Thompson added. “My hope is that this one will morph into an anchor for who we are year-round. It’s really important that we provide a warm cultural space for the residents of Southampton in the dark days, as well as the bright, sunny summer.”

The collaboration also serves Guild Hall, which has been looking to plant its flag westward during its summer season, which is bursting at the seams with big talent—once including that of vocalist Maureen McGovern, who will perform during the salon series on Saturday, August 3.

Known for her Oscar-winning song “The Morning After” from the 1972 film “The Poseidon Adventure,” Ms. McGovern happened upon the Broadway scene “later in life,” she said. The year was 1981 and she was 30 years old.

“My record company had dropped me, I was embroiled in a lawsuit with a manager. You couldn’t pay me to go back to the ’70s again,” Ms. McGovern said last week during a telephone interview. “I call it my ‘Disaster Decade.’”

Struggling to make ends meet, the star settled into a secretarial position at a public relations firm, working under an assumed name, “Glenda Schwartz”—though she was still booking gigs as Maureen McGovern, mostly overseas.

“It was very schizophrenic for me,” she said, “to be a secretary one moment and then go to the Philippines, or South America, and be treated like Beyoncé.”

Without any previous acting experience, Ms. McGovern was busy starring in “The Sound of Music” with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera when the powers behind the 1981 revival of “The Pirates of Penzance” asked her to fly to Manhattan to audition. Three weeks later, she was opening on Broadway.

“Not even had a high school play,” Ms. McGovern chuckled. “They hired me on the spot. I had left California, where I was living, with only enough clothes in my suitcase to last me two weeks in Pittsburgh. This was a whole rebirth to my career.”

In Southampton, Ms. McGovern will sing to a cabaret-sized audience of 130—“an antithesis of your hits,” she said. It is exactly this type of space that used to terrify Mr. Pascal.

“It’s interesting, when I was in rock bands, that kind of thing scared me,” he said of small venues. “Now, it’s the kind of thing I love. I love to talk to the audience—I have some stories I tell. I like to see people’s faces. In a large venue, it can feel a bit distant and cold. I much prefer this, because it’s just me and a piano player.”

Guild Hall’s Songbook Salon Series at the Southampton Arts Center will kick off with a performance by Melissa Errico on Saturday, July 5, at 8 p.m., followed by concerts by Maureen McGovern on Saturday, August 3, and Adam Pascal on Saturday, August 30, also at 8 p.m. Tickets are $60, or $58 for members, and $85 for VIP, which includes a meet-and-greet. For more information, call (631) 324-4050, or visit guildhall.org.