An Assist From a Star Arranger

Stacks of music await Peter Matz.

Just arrived at his home in the Hollywood Hills, the scores contain orchestrations for the 1927 George and Ira Gershwin musical “Strike Up the Band,” which Matz is conducting for the Reprise! concert series.

These are his toys. “ ‘Play’ is the operative word for musicians,” he says with a grin. “They are playing.”

The 71-year-old Matz can count many illustrious names among his playmates.

He became a protege of Broadway and film composer Harold Arlen in the mid-’50s, then provided piano accompaniment for landmark Las Vegas performances by Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward. He was arranger-conductor for Barbra Streisand’s early albums and television specials, and after serving as bandleader for television variety shows such as “The Kraft Music Hour,” he held that post on “The Carol Burnett Show.”

Now, Matz is a driving force behind Reprise!, which presents semi-staged versions of rarely produced classic musicals.

“Musical theater is really a native art form,” he says, and should be preserved for “the same reason it’s important to preserve a Frank Lloyd Wright building or not let old movies decay in the can.”

As music director, Matz works with the singers and instrumentalists to achieve an authentic period sound. In performance, he conducts and plays keyboard from his post just right of center in the onstage band.

“Strike Up the Band” has him working with director Don Amendolia and a cast led by Charles Nelson Reilly. The show opens Wednesday for a two-week run at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse.

A political satire that takes aim at corporate America and the military-industrial complex, “Strike Up the Band” tells the story of a cheese magnate who masterminds a war between the U.S. and Switzerland after the Swiss protest America’s tariff on imported cheese.

Built of George S. Kaufman’s zingers and the Gershwins’ plot-forwarding songs, the show won the support of critics but was shunned by audiences when it began a pre-Broadway tryout in 1927. It closed before reaching New York.

After substantial rewrites and the casting of a popular comedy duo, it managed a run of 191 performances on Broadway in 1930--then disappeared. Eventually, its title and title song--but none of its story--were borrowed for the better-known 1940 film starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

In the 1980s, preservationists began to piece together Kaufman’s original script. California Music Theatre, then active in Pasadena, presented a version in 1988.

The concert adaptation to be presented by Reprise! was written by David Ives (“All in the Timing”) for a 1998 performance by Reprise!’s New York counterpart, Encores!

Although Matz strives “as much as possible to honor the style of the original,” he’s finding this to be a challenge with “Strike Up the Band’s” best-known song, “The Man I Love.” Today, the song is a favorite of torchy female singers everywhere. But as written for the show, it was neither slow nor touched with heartache.

“It was a fox trot and quite cheery,” Matz says. “If we do it really authentically, I’m afraid that people are going to think we’re trying to be funny with it. It’s going to be really challenging to see if we can get a little bit of the wistfulness in there and still have [the Gershwins’] intention of the tempo and the lilt to it.”

Matz’s devotion to such details has been integral to Reprise!’s success, says producing artistic director Marcia Seligson.

Looking back on the first four seasons, she says, “I don’t think I would do this without him. He’s an amazing person and an amazing musician, and enormous fun to work with. He’s just a delicious guy.”

Perhaps most important, he opened a talent pipeline. The series goes after big-name headliners in hopes that the short time commitment--eight days of rehearsal, two weeks of performances--will fit into their schedules. Matz’s presence encouraged many of the first season’s stars to sign on, Seligson says, including Jason Alexander, Jean Smart, Malcolm Gets and Lucie Arnaz.

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At home, Matz works in an upstairs warren of rooms where the walls are covered with photos--many of which show him collaborating with famous singers.

Now and again, the photos become illustrations as he talks about his career.

In what Matz jokingly refers to as his “terrible, misguided youth,” he studied chemical engineering at UCLA. In his free time, he picked up gigs playing woodwinds with area dance bands.

After graduating in 1950, he followed his heart instead of his head--which took him to Paris to explore its lively music scene.

In 1954, he moved to New York to study piano and music theory while seeking gainful employment. Through friends, he learned of a job as rehearsal pianist for Arlen’s Broadway musical “House of Flowers,” then advanced to writing orchestrations, vocal arrangements and dance music for Arlen’s next musical, “Jamaica.”

Arlen, whose songwriting credits included “Stormy Weather” and the score for “The Wizard of Oz,” “became a mentor,” Matz says. “He introduced me to people. He took me to parties. And he gently told me when I was writing something wrong: ‘The trumpets should really be above the saxophones.’ ”

It was Arlen who introduced Matz to Dietrich, who in turn recommended him to Coward. And so it was that Matz performed with the English songwriter and playwright during his triumph in the young Vegas of 1955.

Their association continued with Coward’s 1961 musical, “Sail Away.”

One of the photos in Matz’s office shows him, as co-orchestrator and conductor, at work with Coward on that show. “He’s saying, ‘That’s the worst orchestration I’ve ever heard,’ ” Matz recalls. “He was hilarious. He liked to get the knife in.”

In another photo, Matz stands alongside Streisand as he conducts the orchestra for the recording of her hit single “People.” “See her hand?” he asks. It’s raised in a “wait a minute” sort of gesture. “She’s saying, ‘It’s too loud. It’s too fast.’

“In the rehearsal sessions, there was a lot of give and take,” Matz explains. “But the fact is that she, perhaps more than any of the other people I’ve worked with, brought more to the table. She is tremendously creative. So, a lot of the stuff that I still get credit for having thought of--’How did you think of that modulation?’ or ‘Why did you change tempo there?’--those are things that she would create. She really has an incredible gift for knowing what will work for her.”

Matz arranged and conducted most of the material on Streisand’s first five Columbia albums in the ‘60s, as well as for her television specials “My Name Is Barbra” and “Color Me Barbra.” Years later, he returned to work with her one more time, on her 1986 multi-platinum “The Broadway Album.”

Matz joined up with “The Carol Burnett Show” in its third season, in 1971, and remained the musical variety program’s in-house conductor and orchestrator for eight years.

Burnett remembers looking forward to Thursday-night rehearsals “because that was when we’d hear the orchestra for the first time. I couldn’t wait to hear what he’d be coming up with.”

She particularly enjoyed Matz’s habit of inserting little musical jokes into his orchestrations. “There would always be something that, musically, was very hip and funny,” she says. “I remember, with great fondness, just laughing a whole lot.”

Matz’s resume is also crowded with roughly 140 TV movies and specials (for everyone from Bing Crosby to Tim Conway), for which he wrote scores or handled music, and a handful of films, including Streisand’s “Funny Lady.” He has produced, arranged and conducted albums for Kiri Te Kanawa, Rosemary Clooney, Melissa Manchester and others.

With his singer wife, Marilynn Lovell, Matz has performed extensively to raise money for charitable causes. As a composer, meanwhile, his projects have included the revue “The Gorey Details,” for which he set limericks and poems by macabre humorist Edward Gorey to music. The show drew mixed reviews in a brief off-Broadway run last fall.

His life truly moves to music’s beat. “I could be real obscure and say music is life,” he says, slyly. Pressed to elaborate, he ponders for a moment, then begins a catalog: “Music is breathing. Music is about evolution. Music is about love. Music is about sadness. Music is all the emotions, in the same room, sometimes at the same time.”

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“STRIKE UP THE BAND,” Freud Playhouse, UCLA campus, Westwood. Dates: Opens Wednesday, 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends March 4. Price: $55. Phone: (310) 825-2101 or (213) 365-3500.