A Fringe Player Enters the Fold

When the veteran creators of the new stage musical “The Full Monty” hired David Yazbek as both composer and lyricist, it was no small risk.

After all, he was a virtually unknown pop singer-songwriter. He had written only one musical--and that was in college. And he had only a handful of stage credits, mostly for work on background scores.

In fact, his biggest claims to fame were an Emmy for a year’s stint as a writer for David Letterman--15 years ago--and co-writing the kids’ TV show theme song “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?”

Yet today Yazbek is getting equal billing on Broadway with four-time Tony winner Terrence McNally for the $7-million adaptation of the runaway hit film “The Full Monty,” and much of the buzz about the show is about him. The musical, which premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in June and is backed by Fox Searchlight, begins previews Monday at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York and is scheduled to open Oct. 26.

The producers say they were looking for someone fresh to the theater; they wanted a new sound. To attract younger, hipper audiences, the show’s music had to have a pop feel. McNally’s story about a half-dozen unemployed steelworkers who decide to make a buck by stripping is close to the screenplay, but the setting has moved from Sheffield, England. The musical is set in present-day Buffalo, N.Y., and the story line is injected with a series of musical numbers, each different in style and tone.

Yazbek’s two CDs--”The Laughing Man” and “Tock,” both made before his involvement with “The Full Monty,” show the irreverence and musical skill that former Fox Searchlight President Lindsay Law (who developed the film for Fox) and then-longtime Old Globe manager Tom Hall first heard.

“Here’s my prediction/What I’m gonna do to you/I’m gonna break your heart but you’ll still love me,” go the first lines on “Tock,” released in 1998 by the tiny independent label W.A.R.?

A light, ‘60s-style, often bubble-gum sound mixes easily with a cynical ‘90s attitude. But, more important, the songs are hummable, matched by vivid lyrics.

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Yazbek was a big risk, but maybe not as huge as it might seem. Dig below the surface and it’s clear that while billed as a pop musician, he’s also been around the block in the world of entertainment.

At 40, Yazbek is an inveterate freelancer, a native New Yorker who has made a living doing everything from writing jingles (he won’t say for what) to penning occasional scripts for television (he conceived “The Puzzle Place,” a children’s show on public television). Despite encouraging reviews in San Diego--including some in the national press--consistent standing-room-only box office and wild responses from audiences, he never assumes that Broadway audiences will like “Full Monty.”

Still, he does admit to dreams of potential success--most notably hopes of enough financial security to buy a house for his family (wife Betsy, who teaches yoga, and their 4-year-old son, Omar)--and the wish that some “Full Monty” fame will spin off into a better record deal for his band, known simply as Yazbek.

But on this day, calling on his cell phone from a New York hall where rehearsals are taking place, he looks out a window and marvels at the passing cabs bearing ads for “The Full Monty,” then notes dryly that for each of those, there’s also a “Seussical” taxi. Asked if he’s feeling anxious, he says he’s mostly just tired.

And it’s not that stress over the show is keeping him awake nights.

“My son just started kindergarten,” he says, “and I’m taking him to school every day.”

It’s a delicate mix of ambition, awe at where he’s gotten and simple fatherly devotion that makes Yazbek charming, even as a New Yorker blurb about an upcoming gig at Joe’s Pub suggests “this may be the last chance to catch this composer/singer/pianist while he still possesses even a shred of humility.”

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Yazbek came to the show almost by accident, he explained in an earlier interview at a coffee shop near the Old Globe at the end of the San Diego run. About two years ago, “Tock” had just been released, and he found himself fed up with the record business.

“The thing I love to do most is write songs and perform them and make records,” he says. “But the business itself--I’ve worked in a lot of different entertainment-oriented businesses and it’s the worst.” So he called to complain to Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins”), a rising star among theater composers who is also a fellow New Yorker and friend of 15 years.

“I said, ‘I’ve had it. I want to keep writing songs, but can you suggest a musical theater workshop?’ He said, ‘You’re really an idiot if you go to one of those. They’re going to teach you stuff you don’t need to know and don’t want to know.’

“Adam said, ‘You’ve got to jump right in, over your head.’ ” About three weeks later, Guettel called to say producers who were looking to make “The Full Monty” into a musical had invited him to write the score, but he wasn’t interested. So he’d given them Yazbek’s number.

“I knew they needed somebody with the edge of inappropriateness,” remembers Guettel. “And David has that in abundance. He is the Ginsu knife of inappropriateness.”

When Yazbek got the call from director Jack O’Brien, he says, he was skeptical about the idea of making another movie into a musical. He has followed Broadway’s evolution and wasn’t looking to do another, more or less straight conversion, like “Footloose” or “Saturday Night Fever.” But two minutes into the conversation, he jumped at the chance.

“I got excited about it pretty quickly,” he says. “All these really cool characters, lots of different musical idioms, but all kind of pop- or rock-oriented, or soul.”

After a couple of demos, lots of meetings and hours of writing and rewriting, that pop, rock and soul combination is precisely what he came up with. Yazbek’s lyrics aim to be funny, often in a twisted way. In “Big Ass Rock,” singing to a fellow laid-off steelworker whom they’ve just rescued from a suicide attempt, two of the characters use reverse psychology to talk the depressed character out of trying again: “Let’s find a rock/I mean a big-ass rock/or maybe something like a cinder-block is better/I’ll hoist it up/and drop it on your face . . . my buddy.”

Virtually the same scene is in the film, but the sweet overtones of Yazbek’s cynical version, punched up by Harold Wheeler’s orchestrations, bring its own surprises.

Fellow pop artist Andy Partridge, of the British cult band XTC, has produced Yazbek’s music in the past and has been a fan since he first heard it on an unsolicited demo tape. Yet he’s not surprised that Yazbek has transitioned so easily to writing for the stage.

“Stylistically, he’s always been based in musical theater,” Partridge said by phone from London. “but he has a quick facility with all types of music. You can say to him, ‘Do Jewish speed metal,’ and he’ll do it. Then say, ‘Do ambient rockabilly,’ and he’ll do that. He’s got the spirit of the American musical, with a dash of Steely Dan in there.”

So far, Yazbek’s songs have been the most noted element of the show. Bruce Weber, writing in the New York Times from San Diego, commented that “his wordplay is sophisticated, his sensibility brusquely unsentimental and occasionally risky.” Michael Phillips, reviewing for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that “while often strident, Yazbek’s lyrics at their best have a way of getting laughs on the fly, as they’re carried along on his surprising, spiky, wrong-note melody lines.”

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On his albums and with his band, Yazbek is used to being in charge, but not in this case.

Asked who’s driving the vision for the show, he immediately says it’s director O’Brien. “It’s very collaborative, there’s a lot you can say and suggest, but I’ve stepped back, in deference to his experience, not to mention that everyone’s more experienced than me,” Yazbek says with a laugh.

“It was hard, but I made a conscious decision to choose my battles really carefully. I’ve never done this, they’ve done it a million times.”

Nevertheless, Yazbek says, he has interjected himself: “There were times when I felt like it’s time for me to say something because I’ve never done it.”

Producer Hall, who left the Old Globe in part to continue to produce “The Full Monty,” says that with McNally already signed on to write the book, they deliberately looked for a composer who wasn’t well-known. Yazbek’s input, he says, has brought new light to an otherwise established form. “When you get into production and you have a problem to solve, you often don’t get through it because no one’s thinking in a different way. I found with David and Terrence, when one doesn’t have something to say, the other does.”

For his part, Law plays down the element of risk in bringing Yazbek aboard: “Because of the process of developing a musical, if it wasn’t working, it would have become evident early on,” he says. “Although we would have lost time, the development process is not an expensive one. And at the two workshops we did, we could tell it worked. We definitely would have known if we’d made a mistake.”

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Although certainly green in terms of professional work in the theater, Yazbek is not entirely a novice.

A 1982 graduate of Brown University, he says he “hated everything about the theater department,” and instead majored in English and American literature. He also played in a band that he remembers as “the filthiest funk band in Providence.”

Nevertheless, when invited to do so, he wrote a musical for the annual Brown Brokers show--Brown’s version of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding, as he describes it. Then during his senior year, he directed a student production of “Hair.” That show was so successful in Providence, R.I., that the group decided to move it to Boston, where Yazbek took on the role of producer and helped keep it playing for a full year on only a shoestring budget.

“We went to Boston, to one of the smaller theaters there, and the guy said, ‘You need $30,000 to put on a show in Boston, that’s the very least you need.’ Now it sounds like nothing. But for a kid! I can’t remember exactly what we did, but we did it for $2,000. And part of the reason we could was no one in the cast was a union member. We were all out of Brown, and we all worked for total peanuts, even the band. We were all doing it just for fun.

“The cast would go in groups, ride the subways and sing, to get people to come. We were basically just out of money when we opened, then we got a great review, and we were fine. Michael Butler, the original producer of ‘Hair,’ gave us some money too, I forget how much, but not very much,” Yazbek says.

The enterprise--and its success--only encouraged the kind of chutzpah that has characterized much of Yazbek’s life. While in Boston, he found friends among the staff of the Harvard Lampoon. Among those working for the famed satiric magazine was Ted Greenberg, Yazbek’s best friend from high school. It was the Lampoon association that led to ambitions to write for David Letterman.

“ ‘Letterman’ was populated by Lampoon guys, there was a staff of probably 10, and we heard that a lot of the writers were leaving to do a new show for Lorne Michaels. So we sequestered ourselves in my friend’s apartment for a long weekend and spent two days just coming up with ideas. We watched television, we ate, but we didn’t leave. No matter how bad the ideas were, we’d write them down. It was really fun. And the last day, we took all the ideas and we winnowed them down to five to seven pages and sent them in. Then we waited for five to seven months, because apparently they had thousands of submissions. And then we got hired.”

Yazbek lasted only a year with Letterman. “At the time, Letterman was really nervous because he was getting pretty successful. The show was great, but I’m not sure he was having fun. He was doing dangerous stuff. We got there and the ratings spiked--and it wasn’t because of us, it was the critical mass. And he got very nervous, because he saw that he might have something he could do for the rest of his life. It’s hard to work when the top guy is a nervous wreck. Then everyone’s a nervous wreck.”

Still, he walked away with a writing-team Emmy for an episode that he says was written mostly by Chris Elliott. Asked whether he’s still friendly with anyone from the show, he pauses and then laughs. “Yeah, they’re all millionaires now.”

But Yazbek says he has no regrets about leaving. The money he made from “Letterman” enabled him to buy a recording studio with some friends. There he produced records and also wrote advertising jingles, commissioned by a friend who worked at a large ad agency. He also wrote scripts for TV, including some episodes for the 1987 remake of “The Monkees,” which he describes as “pretty horrible.”

Hooking up with XTC’s Partridge, whom he calls “my hero,” Yazbek went to London in 1990. There, he got a promising record deal that ultimately fell through. In 1994, he produced an XTC tribute album that includes Sarah McLachlan, They Might Be Giants, Ruben Blades and Freedy Johnston.

Keeping his entrepreneurial side alive, in 1992 he co-wrote the theme song for “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” A complicated publishing deal for the song allowed him to retain enough rights to make two subsequent related children’s albums.

The income from those paid for the production of his first album, “Laughing Man” in 1995. “Tock” followed three years later, but neither record has made money.

“I have a tiny, tiny fan base that’s very intense,” Yazbek says.

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How much Yazbek’s life will change once “The Full Monty” opens in New York remains to be seen, of course. Next on the agenda is the cast album, due out in mid-December, which Yazbek will produce for RCA “more like a pop album than the usual cast album,” he says. Yazbek also says he has ideas for other musicals and wouldn’t mind another shot, but most of whatever excess energy he has outside the show right now seems to be focused on his pop career.

One foot in, one out, he remains both observer and full-fledged participant in a lot of different worlds. But he always gives the impression that his goal is to have fun.

“I’m so glad this is a good show, because I have no choice, I have to watch it over and over again,” he says dryly of the time he’s put into “The Full Monty.”

“If I didn’t like the book, I would have had a nervous breakdown by now.”

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“The Full Monty” begins previews Monday and opens Oct. 26 at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, 230 W. 49th St., New York. Telecharge: (800) 432-7250.