From Rock to Broadway

They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway...They say there’s always magic in the air...

--”On Broadway,” the 1963 Drifters hit

*

Randy Newman is drawn to the world of musical theater for the same reason that impelled Hillary up Everest: Because it’s there.

Fourteen-time Grammy winner Paul Simon exposed himself to the harshest critical drubbing of his career with his $11-million Broadway musical “The Capeman” because he yearned to explore Latin music and childhood memories of New York in a way he couldn’t in a conventional pop album.

Jimmy Buffett talked Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Herman Wouk into letting him take Wouk’s 1965 novel “Don’t Stop the Carnival” to the stage because of a lifelong passion for musical theater sparked by seeing his mother in a community theater production of “South Pacific.”

In small but growing numbers, celebrated songwriters and performers cite varied reasons for leaving the safe confines of successful rock careers to roll the dice with musical theater projects. And in deed, if not by design, they’re starting to mend a decades-old rift between popular music and the stage ripped open by the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.

“It seems like since ‘West Side Story’--when you had the best writers working in that form--maybe the best people aren’t [writing for the stage] anymore,” says Newman, whose theater project, “The Education of Randy Newman,” gets its world premiere on Friday at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory.

“A good No Doubt album is more likely to have more good music in it than anything you’ll see on Broadway the same year,” Newman says. “They’ll work on that for years and come up with a really good record. I doubt there’ll be a Broadway show that’s as good.”

A couple of big hits aside--”The Who’s Tommy” and Disney’s “The Lion King,” with songs by Elton John and Tim Rice (to a lesser extent John’s “Aida”)--rock stars aren’t posing a serious threat to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Among those whose theatrical ventures have yet to light up Broadway are Newman, Buffett, the Kinks’ Ray Davies, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, the Doors’ Ray Manzarek, Texas country-rocker Joe Ely and alt-rockers Andy Prieboy and Alejandro Escovedo.

Trying to Find New Audience

Theatrical producers and presenters are, however, closely watching their efforts as a way to draw more of the coveted boomer generation into legitimate theaters.

“There’s a whole group of Jimmy Buffett fans who don’t come to centers like this,” says Jerry Mandel, president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center. “He can give us something that will bring in that audience.”

Likewise, “there’s a hunger in the boomer audience that is growing old with rock ‘n’ roll,” Pete Townshend of the Who told The Times in 1993. “There’s a hunger there to find some other way of spending their time and satisfying their need for entertainment rather than going to Italian restaurants and the cinema.”

But rock musicians alone aren’t going to solve the ongoing shortage of new musicals or the problem of finding new audiences.

“It’s an avenue, not the avenue,” says Scott Zeiger, president of New York-based SFX Theatrical Group, a leading producer of Broadway and touring shows. “Musical theater . . . should be and will be appealing to young adults--if it sings to them.”

A musical with songs by John or Billy Joel, the theory goes, stands a better chance of relating to audiences weaned on rock ‘n’ roll than yet another staging of “My Fair Lady” or “Show Boat.”

The composers of the Broadway classics, says Zeiger, “have a style that won’t necessarily attract people less than 35 years old.”

“I personally feel that revivals are wonderful,” says Broadway producer James M. Nederlander Jr. “But we also need new writers to give new blood to musicals. . . . There is a whole new audience that’s untapped that should be seeing Broadway shows.”

Such an audience exists because for decades musical theater and the music being made by the day’s most popular performers were almost mutually exclusive.

That wasn’t always the case.

During the first half of this century, such great pop songwriters as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were regularly turning out hit Broadway musicals that featured countless popular songs that became known as the Great American Songbook.

When Elvis, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and rock ‘n’ roll exploded, that changed.

The raw emotion, the directness and simplicity--even crudity--of expression and blatant sexuality of rock ‘n’ roll rendered the formal craftsmanship of theatrical songwriting quaint, if not utterly irrelevant, to the youth generation.

Broadway struggled to get hip in the ‘70s with quasi-rock musicals like “Hair” and, at the dawn of the Andrew Lloyd Webber era, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Yet shows like those and similar efforts since--whether incorporating true rock music like “The Buddy Holly Story” or just imitating it like “Cats” or “Rent”--never rocked like the real thing.

“I don’t think it’s difficult [to make rock work on the stage],” Simon told an interviewer in 1997. “But the people who were trying to write it weren’t coming from rock ‘n’ roll; they were doing an impression of rock ‘n’ roll. And since everyone knows what rock ‘n’ roll sounds like, it wasn’t fooling very many people.”

The question still to be answered conclusively is whether those with solid rock credentials can deliver shows that work dramatically as well as musically.

“I think the American musical is the hardest thing to get right because there are so many elements that go into it,” says Dessie Moynihan, creative projects director for the Shubert Organization. “It’s a very difficult thing to assemble, but when it works there’s nothing else like it.”

Dismal Reviews for ‘Capeman’ Book, Staging

Despite critical praise for Simon’s music in “The Capeman,” its book and staging got dismal reviews. The show closed early, proving that even a mantel full of Grammy Awards doesn’t guarantee success on Broadway. SFX’s Zeiger says that maybe one in 200 new shows gets so much as a staging on Broadway; which of that elite group becomes a hit is another matter entirely.

“Randy Newman’s Faust” premiered in 1995 at the La Jolla Playhouse, then moved to Chicago, where no lesser light than David Mamet took a stab at punching up the show’s often criticized book. Newman says that the Kennedy Center in Washington is still planning to mount a revival of “Faust.”

“I don’t think anyone is necessarily going to tour a show because it’s a rock ‘n’ roll show,” says Moynihan at the Shubert. “They’ll tour it because it’s a successful show.”

Still, rock and pop artists say they’re willing to brave the risks for the most basic of reasons: Theater is fun. And creatively stimulating.

“I really had a good time getting to meet and sit with people like Hal Prince in New York, and in Miami getting great advice from [veteran theater composers] Betty Comden and Adolph Green. I wouldn’t trade those days for anything,” says Buffett, who rejected offers from producers who wanted to take “Don’t Stop the Carnival” to Broadway, but only if they could substantially change what Buffett and Wouk created.

“There’s this [idea] that you can take pop music and pop singers and take them to Broadway,” Buffett says. “Of course it’s alluring, but it’s a different world. You’ll never be accepted in the traditional Broadway kind of world as a pop star.

“A lot of us think we could do this to get accepted in other careers. But in discussing it some with Randy and with Paul, if anything is true, it’s the contrary,” he says.

Besides, the “New York, New York” mentality--”If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”--isn’t what attracts rockers to theater.

“For me, it’s totally about each piece as it comes, what the challenges are, and what it’s trying to say,” says Ely, who teamed up with fellow West Texas musicians on “Chippy,” a 1994 musical commissioned by American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia and based on the diaries of a Depression-era prostitute in the Texas Panhandle.

It’s Fascinating, but ‘Not Really My World’

“I’ve been asked to work on other pieces in the theater, but it’s not really my world,” says Ely, who also worked with “Greater Tuna” writer Joe Sears on two other plays that were staged last year in Texas. “It’s real fascinating, interesting and fun and all. But I wouldn’t go into it full blown.”

Newman would, if it paid as well as his composing scores for “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2.”

“When I did ‘Faust,’ I did it just to do it, and I never enjoyed a job more in my life,” he says.

“I can write for orchestra, write for different voices other than my own and write dialogue. It uses everything I think I can do,” Newman says.

“There are more remunerative things to do, and it takes a long time. But if I could do it--if I could earn a living doing it like Jerry Herman did--I would tend to want to do it.”