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Last fall, Larry Grossman, whose Broadway musical scores have brought him two Tony Award nominations and thousands of fans who hum his tunes without necessarily knowing his name, was out in Water Mill rummaging through “tons of old piles of music” in his basement.
“I had to stop because it got too cold,” he recalled, speaking recently by phone from his alternate residence in New York.
His reason for being in New York on a sunny summer day rather than lounging poolside in Water Mill had nothing to do with a preference for city life and everything to do with that search last fall through the accumulated evidence of four decades of writing music, not only for big Broadway shows but for television and film.
Mr. Grossman was in the city because the York Theatre Company, in its annual “Musicals in Mufti” series, is presenting “in mufti” (out of costume) performances of his work this summer, including scaled-down versions of Broadway productions. The series winds up this weekend, July 11-13, with “Compose Yourself,” an all-Grossman revue in which songs rescued from the recesses of his Water Mill basement will be heard along with some more familiar numbers at the Theatre at St. Peter’s Church (54th Street off Lexington Avenue).
Mr. Grossman pronounced himself “thrilled” with this tribute from the prestigious York Theatre Company, the more so because “they usually don’t do a whole series devoted to just one composer.” The series, which launched at the end of May, presents a new show every two weeks with five weekend performances of each show.
“It’s exhausting,” Mr. Grossman acknowledged, though clearly worth a few hectic weeks and even the forced absence from Water Mill when he would most like to be there.
“On the 14th of July, I’m going to crash out there,” he laughed.
Mr. Grossman was speaking on the final day of performances of “Goodtime Charley,” a successful and much-honored (14 Tony and Drama Desk nominations) 1975 musical for which he wrote the score. (Later in his career, Mr. Grossman would garner Tony Award nominations himself for his scores for “A Doll’s Life” in 1983 and “Grind” in 1985, when “Grind” also was nominated for a Drama Desk Award.)
“It was a fun show,” Mr. Grossman said of “Goodtime Charlie,” a screwball twist on history featuring the French king (Charlie), Joan of Arc and a good deal of corruption, cavorting and hilarity as the battle is waged over nothing less than the freedom of France.
To comply with Actors’ Equity rules, the mufti performances must forgo props as well as costumes and the actors must have scripts in their hands—limitations that are “problematic,” said Mr. Grossman, but in an odd way inspiring.
“Each director solves the problem differently,” he said. In “Goodtime Charlie,” for example, music stands became shields and whenever a character crossed a moat, “women waving large bolts of blue cloth” were stand-ins for water.
“It’s very scaled-down, very inventive and audiences just love it,” said Mr. Grossman.
In post-matinee talks throughout the series, Mr. Grossman has been giving audiences a little more of what pleases them.
“They want dirt,” he laughed, and with “Goodtime Charlie” he had an ideal back story to illustrate what he called “the ups and downs, the joys of theater and some of the disappointments.” When the show opened in Boston with Joel Grey and Anne Reinking to mixed reviews, it was three hours long and lacking something. As Mr. Grossman tells the story, he was out in the lobby after a performance when he overheard someone remark, “But I wanted to see Joel Grey tap dance.”
With that insight into what was missing, he and lyricist Hal Hackaday promptly repaired to the ladies’ lounge and wrote “Born Lover” for Grey, which turned out to be a show-stopper when they hit Philadelphia.
That was the good news. The bad news was that in order to squeeze it in they were obliged to drop two songs from the original score and scrap “hundreds of dollars’ worth of scenery.” Giant dummies, spears and a catapult were tossed into the alley behind the Colonial Theater, an alarming discovery, no doubt, for some unsuspecting soul the next morning.
With its pizzazz quotient elevated by the new number, “Goodtime Charlie” got raves in Philadelphia but then got mixed reviews again in New York. A down, followed by an up and then down for the count, but the music lives on and now even the two songs that were dropped to make room for Joel Grey’s dazzler will get a crack at the limelight. “We’re Still in the Same Boat” and “Tomorrow’s Good Old Days” will be heard in “Compose Yourself,” along with a few other numbers cut from shows or drawn from those that were never produced for one reason or another. In addition, there will be songs Mr. Grossman has written for television.
“A lot of people know what I have done for the theater,” he said, “but they don’t know the other part of my life. TV stuff is half of the body of work that I’ve done.”
Mr. Grossman said that he expects this final show of the series to be “a fun one, but daunting.” With the pared-down versions of his Broadway shows, he could be confident that most people in the audience were there because they knew and loved the material. But with a mixed bag of songs, many new even to his fans, he confessed to being a little nervous about “how they will be received.”
In fact, there seems little cause for concern, particularly since the six-person cast assembled for “Compose Yourself” is made up of “top performers with numerous Broadway credits.” Joining the actor who played the Phantom in “Phantom of the Opera,” the young woman who played Aida and other highly acclaimed professionals will be Mr. Grossman himself.
“I’m going to be in it, playing piano, singing, offering anecdotes,” he said. “God knows, I’ve got a lot of stories.”
on Jul 7, 2008