Booking a ‘Bombay’ trip
Long before David Letterman’s “Oprah, Uma” gag at the 1995 Oscars, there was Tom Meehan’s “Oona, Yma.”
In 1962, the then-New Yorker writer wrote a comic essay about a dream in which he is hosting a party for the famed Peruvian vocalist Yma Sumac. Because Sumac finds surnames too formal, he soon finds himself in a roundelay of escalating silliness as guests, including Ava Gardner, Abba Eban and Oona O’Neill, pour through the door: “Oona, Yma”; “Oona, Ava”; “Oona, Abba.” Meehan’s “Yma Dream” became an instant short-story classic, and the writer later adapted it into a sketch for Anne Bancroft’s 1970 Emmy-winning TV special, “Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man.”
“It was just two pages long, didn’t take me even a day to finish a draft, and it’s led to all this,” recalls Meehan, now 72 and still registering some astonishment at the curious turns this one piece of writing brought into this life.
The director of that TV special was Martin Charnin, who 14 years later would invite Meehan to write a musical he was developing about an orphan called “Annie.” On that same project, Meehan also met Mel Brooks, Bancroft’s husband, who would later invite him to collaborate on two films, 1983’s “To Be or Not to Be” and 1987’s “Spaceballs.” Oh, and Brooks was also thinking about a musical adaptation of his film “The Producers.” Its phenomenal success -- a record 12 Tony Awards, including one for best book of a musical -- would lead Broadway producer Margo Lion to tap Meehan to adapt with Mark O’Donnell a John Waters movie into a musical: “Hairspray.”
So the “all this” that Meehan refers to includes an additional two Tony Awards, royalty checks as fat as “Hairspray’s” Edna Turnblad and indisputable status as Broadway’s busiest writer. He is working on no fewer than six projects simultaneously, writing with Brooks both the script of the musical film of “The Producers” and a Broadway adaptation of Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein,” as well as developing a musical of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky” and Waters’ “Cry-Baby.” As if that weren’t enough, Meehan is working with his wife, Carolyn Capstick, on a new book for a revival of the 1956 classic “Carnival.” And in May 2005, “1984,” an opera he’s written with J.D. McClatchy based on the George Orwell classic, will premiere at Covent Garden.
All of those projects are on hold for now, while Meehan readies for Thursday’s opening of the Broadway production of “Bombay Dreams,” the lavishly kitsch Indian musical written by Meera Syal and composer A R Rahman, which Andrew Lloyd Webber presented in London’s West End, beginning in the summer of 2002. The production is slated to close this June.
Broadway producers Elizabeth Williams and Anita Waxman decided to hedge their $14-million bet on the transfer by coaxing Meehan to bring his structural expertise and keen editorial eye to a show that critics generally regarded as an entertaining mess. Still, it drew from England’s sizable Indian population and became a hit. With its spectacular settings, dime-store villains and bloated romance about a slum boy rising to become a movie star, “Bombay Dreams” was a sendup of “Bollywood” movies, which the multibillion-dollar Indian film industry churns out with the regularity of soap opera episodes.
American audiences, however, are not as familiar with Bollywood as the Brits, and consequently the producers decided to jettison the satire in favor of a more direct approach. “We felt Tom could bring heart and emotion to the show,” Waxman says.
‘A very unique project’
Sitting in the lower lobby of the Broadway Theatre on a recent afternoon, Meehan was a bit skeptical that he’s out of the woods with “Bombay Dreams.” It’s the reverse side of that sunny Irish optimism that has brought him far since he pounded out “Yma’s Dream” on an old upright Royal (now the admitted neat-freak uses a computer to turn out his copy).
“Whether we can pull this off or not is still very much in the air,” says Meehan, a modest man with a soft voice and a professorial air.
“It’s been very difficult,” he adds. “This is a very unique project, unlike anything I’ve done -- but then that’s part of why I wanted to do it. In a city where, on any given night, you can eat Thai, Mexican, Greek or French, why not a little Indian? Broadway should be able to accommodate that.”
Meehan’s priority on “Bombay Dreams,” he says, is to do what makes being a book writer one of the most thankless jobs in all of show business: to disappear. “Tom is like the roots of a tree -- you never see him,” Brooks has observed of his “Producers” co-writer. The film version of “The Producers” began in the office of Max Bialystock, the sleazy, down-on-his luck Broadway producer desperate for a hit. For the musical, Meehan suggested to Brooks that the show open by establishing what Bialystock might have been doing before the film’s opening scene. Producing one of his typical flops, perhaps? “Funny Boy”? Opening and closing on the same night? Hence came the show’s opening number with Bialystock bemoaning that he was once the king of Broadway.
Moreover, the job is thankless because the book writer never gets the satisfaction of writing the “aria,” the emotional climaxes of the play. That belongs to the composer and lyricist. What Meehan and his ilk provide is the far less flashy structure, concept, dialogue and characters that make the songs pay emotional dividends. This professional self-effacement probably explains why book writers of musicals are rare and, consequently, exceedingly busy.
“It’s not called a musical for nothing. My job is to get to the next musical number -- fast,” Meehan says, noting that audiences come to listen to the songs and to see the dancing. “But a book is crucial, a bad book can kill a musical. You have to tell a coherent, somewhat logical story, and you have to create characters who the audience care about. If they don’t care about them, then they can sing all they want but it won’t matter.”
Which leads to Meehan’s biggest challenge on “Bombay Dreams”: how to avoid a cheesy musical based on a genre that is all about cheese. “It’s a tightrope. In London, the book didn’t work at all,” says Meehan, describing a plot with corrupt gangsters, a suicidal eunuch and a scheming seductress. While the eunuch and seductress remain, along with obligatory “wet sari” scenes, Meehan has focused the musical on the star-crossed lovers at its heart -- Akash, the slum boy, and Priya, the rich would-be moviemaker and daughter of a Bollywood producer. Still, the show does afford the occasional wink or two at the genre itself, as when the eunuch Queenie, unrequitedly in love with Akash, says that his friend’s meteoric rise could only happen in “the farfetched script of a Bollywood musical.” Akash, says Meehan, is really Annie. Or for that matter, a slimmer, male version of Tracy Turnblad, the bulky Baltimore high-schooler with big dreams. Almost all of his musicals, he adds, are ultimately the Cinderella story. Usually, the book writer gets help in telling that story through songs, which are meant to advance the development of plot and characters.
In “Bombay Dreams,” however, Rahman’s songs defy that cardinal rule. Some are just jazzy dance numbers, like “Shakalaka Baby” and “Chaiyya, Chaiyya,” which became hits on the London club scene. “People may feel that we’re Americanizing the story too much, taking all this Indian flavor out. But I think there is enough of that flavor in the songs; some are entirely in Indian,” he says with a little frustration.
Nonetheless, it was the score that ultimately led Meehan to re-adapt “Bombay Dreams” after at first turning down the job. He saw the show twice in London and noted how his 30-year-old stepdaughter, Carrie, made a beeline to purchase the cast album at intermission. Back home at his West Village apartment, the catchy tunes captivated wife Carolyn and his young grandchildren. “They think it’s better than ‘Hairspray.’ That shows how much they know,” he says with a laugh. Still, it’s a very entertaining way to get to another Meehan rule: It’s got to have a happy ending.
Learning comic precision
Meehan’s musical book paradigm stems from his own rags-to-riches story. “My friends think I’m Annie, but I think I’m probably more like Leo Bloom,” he quips, referring to the nebbish accountant in “The Producers.”
He grew up the eldest of four in a “poor but happy family,” in Suffern, N.Y. His working-class father died of pneumonia when Meehan was 14 and his mother went to work as a night supervisor in the local hospital. “She was my first audience, the first one I could make laugh,” he says of Helen O’Neil. “She’d had a rough upbringing; both of her parents died young, so there was a dark edge to her laughter.”
Graduating from New York’s Hamilton College, he longed to write in the manner of his hero, William Faulkner. “But whenever I wrote Faulkner-esque, it came out lousy-esque,” he says of his “long, gloomy” attempts.
At 24, he landed a job at the New Yorker, where his editors responded enthusiastically to his humor stories, including satires of a Hollywood producer trying to adapt James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and a sendup of Saul Bellow that infuriated the Nobel Prize-winning writer. Meehan stayed at the august publication for 10 years until the mid-’60s, occasionally writing for television, including the topical satire “That Was the Week That Was.”
What he learned during his stint at the New Yorker was simply to ply his craft, week after week, and to learn comic precision from the masters. His favorites were Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and the humorists S.J. Perelman and James Thurber. Not that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, along with Charles Dickens, were not part of his pantheon as well. It’s just that he felt morecomfortable in an airier, more redemptive atmosphere, which is something of a family trait. “I recently spoke at my brother’s funeral,” he recalls, “and I said that he was the type who saw the glass not as half-empty but as half-full. And then he drank it.”
Still, despite pride in his accomplishments, Meehan appears almost embarrassed by his success. Indeed, not everything he’s touched has reaped gold, with such flops as “I Remember Mama,” starring Liv Ullmann; “Ain’t Broadway Grand,” with Mike Burstyn as Mike Todd; and “Annie Warbucks,” the crash-and-burn sequel to “Annie.”
A couple of times during the interview, he apologetically describes his books for musicals as “Not ‘Sweeney Todd,’ ” referring to the Stephen Sondheim musical with a book by Hugh Wheeler about a vengeful 19th century homicidal barber, who ends up popping his victims into pies. For Meehan, that show is the gold standard of all book musicals, notwithstanding its ending, which is far from happy. In fact, he says, he’d love to work with Sondheim, who in many ways is the reverse of Meehan’s previous collaborators. He even has a project that might be suitable: a musical version of “Shadow of a Doubt,” the 1943 Alfred Hitchcock film noir about a charming serial killer. “I know Steve, but not well,” Meehan says. “I’m working up the nerve to approach him.”
Sondheim must be familiar with Meehan’s work, but one wonders if he’s seen “To Be or Not to Be,” the Brooks-Meehan remake of the 1942 Jack Benny-Carole Lombard comedy classic. In this play-within-a-movie, the team concocted a character named Sondheim who is the stage manager for a Polish troupe of actors under Nazi occupation. At one point, recalls Meehan, he wrote the line, “Sondheim, send up the clowns.” Brooks said, “No, no, no, no. The line has got to read, ‘Sondheim, send in the clowns. You’ve got to ring the bell.’ ”
“That’s Mel’s way of saying that you’ve got to have the courage to go all the way,” Meehan says. “You’ve got to be willing to ring the bell.”