Few Happy Endings on Broadway

From the kitchen window, the bright lights of Broadway are twinkling, and on a clear night they seem tantalizingly close. But not close enough for the pair who live in Apt. 5S, a tiny walkup on the edge of the city’s theater district.

Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart are roommates by necessity, best friends and collaborators in a dream as old as the Great White Way: They want to write a big-ticket musical and see it produced on Broadway. And then they want to write another.

Rockwell (on the phone with his agent): “We need an idea for a new show.”

Bogart (rummaging through old videos): “How about a musical of ‘Citizen Kane’?”

Rockwell: “I can hear the closing number -- ‘Everything’s coming up Rosebuds.’ ”

Bogart: “Maybe you need a better punch line.”

Rockwell: “Maybe you need a better idea!”

Think middle-aged Will and Grace. Or Buddy and Sally, the zany writing team from “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Rockwell and Bogart share an easygoing rapport, a wicked sense of humor, and nicknames, “Poodle” and “Doodle,” of long standing. He writes the music and sees the big picture. She writes the words and frets over the details.

Both have a lifelong passion for theater, hoping to carry on the tradition of Rodgers and Hammerstein and other teams that cranked out one Broadway hit after another. And these days, against all odds, they have reason to be hopeful.

Their newest work, “The Musical of Musicals (The Musical!),” was nominated for five Drama Desk Awards and got sterling reviews. The spare, four-person show, which satirizes and celebrates American musical theater, is playing an extended run at a small off-Broadway house, and there is talk now of taking it to London and other cities.

Yet Rockwell and Bogart know the curtain could fall on their dream at any moment. Indeed, they are an endangered species -- an odd creative couple in a youth-oriented culture that has come to see musicals as entertainment for older people.

New York is filled with tales of musicals that never got produced and collaborators who gave up.

The costs of mounting new shows have become prohibitive, and few investors are willing to gamble on untested talent. Somehow, Rockwell and Bogart are surviving -- barely -- in a chilly, unforgiving climate.

“You could spend the rest of your life writing a perfect musical in New York, but if you’re not well known it could be a one-way ticket to waiting tables,” said Thomas Meehan, a veteran Broadway writer whose credits include the books for “Hairspray,” “The Producers,” “Annie” and the forthcoming “Young Frankenstein” with Mel Brooks.

“To be successful in this world requires enormous talent, patience, confidence and very good material to work with,” Meehan added. “It also wouldn’t hurt to win the lottery.”

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Broadway shows once dominated musical tastes, and songs from productions like “My Fair Lady” and “West Side Story” topped the charts. Those days are long gone, and musicals have less influence on pop culture.

The opportunities to stage new shows -- and the financial rewards -- are also limited. Rockwell and Bogart were lucky to get their musical produced in an off-Broadway house, and the standard $500 they each earn weekly is tough to live on, even with day jobs. Moreover, most musicals born off-Broadway stay there, no matter how promising or original.

Composers fare much better with a musical on Broadway, where the union minimum weekly is $1,300. But there are fewer chances than ever to stage a musical on Broadway because the number of theaters and opening nights have declined. In 1928, at the height of the so-called Golden Age, there were 264 new productions, including musicals and dramas. Last year, there were 39 new productions.

Traditional musicals have always been expensive to mount, but they now cost as much as $14 million on Broadway. And shows that once repaid their investments after a few months must play several seasons or go on tour.

As a result, musical theater has become a risky investment that mainly attracts corporate entities. Most of the money flows to guaranteed box office hits -- revivals such as “Gypsy,” plus remakes of movies such as “The Lion King” and the forthcoming “Mary Poppins.”

The picture is not all bleak. Broadway sold $771 million in tickets last season, a gain over the previous year.

And the Tony Award for best musical went to “Avenue Q,” a show with puppets written by a young creative team. A box-office smash on Broadway, the comedy about urban slackers is also headed for a simultaneous run in Las Vegas.

But many call “Avenue Q” an aberration. And musical theater’s unforgiving economics have caused promising writers and composers to head for Hollywood, where the rewards in movies and pop songs are considerably greater.

During the late 1980s, for example, Marta Kauffman and David Crane wrote and contributed to several well-reviewed musical shows, including one that explored the quirky world of New York singles looking for romance. But the team never had a Broadway hit and found a bigger audience in Los Angeles, where they eventually developed “Friends” for NBC.

Rockwell and Bogart do not expect such good fortune, but on Christmas morning they came close. Their show -- in which they perform along with Lovette George and Craig Fols -- got a review from the New York Times that said it “has real wit, real charm, deft performers and no pretensions.”

Now extended through Oct. 2 at The York Theatre, the “Musical of Musicals” is built around a hackneyed plot: A young lass says she can’t pay the rent, the landlord says she must pay, and at the last minute a hero says he’ll pay.

The fun begins when Rockwell and Bogart imagine the story as five mini-musicals, written in the style of Rodgers and Hammerstein (“Oklahoma!”) Stephen Sondheim (“Sweeney Todd”) Jerry Herman (“Hello Dolly!”), Andrew Lloyd Webber (“Phantom of the Opera”) plus John Kander and Fred Ebb, (“Chicago” and “Cabaret”).

Rockwell, 44, spends much of the show at the piano, and plays the tall, dark-haired landlord with demonic glee. Bogart, 50, is cast as a world-weary redhead who offers dubious advice to the ingenue, and her performance has echoes of Beverly Sills, Carol Burnett and Lotte Lenya.

The satire features songs like this, when Big Willy, the clueless hero, parodies the opening of “Oklahoma!”:

Farmin’ the land is the life for me

It calls me and I cain’t say no

But I’d gladly forsake any shovel or rake

I’m in love with a wonderful hoe!

Oh, What beautiful corn!

What beautiful, beautiful corn

I said it before and I’ll say it again

Oh, what beautiful corn!

*

Rockwell, who was born in Lake Tahoe, started performing early.

His parents found him tap dancing in the kitchen one day and encouraged him to study piano, voice and drama, anything that expanded his musical interests. He loved Broadway shows and appeared in high school and college plays.

“I knew this was what I wanted,” he said. “And nobody stood in my way.”

Bogart, born in Queens, took longer to realize her ambition. As a little girl, she had a talent for imitating other people’s voices, and she repeated her older sister’s piano lessons, playing by ear. She gravitated to musical productions and eventually married a high school sweetheart who had played opposite her in “The Music Man.”

But family pressures discouraged her from choosing a life in the theater.

“I got married early, and music was a hobby, not what real people did,” she said. “I had to finally choose in college between majoring in music or accounting, and at the very last moment I chickened out.”

In 1984, Rockwell and Bogart made crucial life decisions: After working in a Tahoe casino, he took a plane to New York, began auditioning and was cast in a small musical revival. She quit her job in accounting and began exploring a music career.

The pair met in 1987, while both were in the chorus of a summer stock company in New Hampshire.

Bored by their lines in “Camelot,” they began satirizing the show. They liked each other’s wisecracking personalities and hit it off immediately.

After trying stand-up comedy, Rockwell decided to see whether he could create his own material. He eventually joined the prestigious BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in New York, where artists develop musicals under the guidance of Broadway veterans.

Bogart wanted to join too, but to get in she had to sing an original song to the group. She turned to Rockwell for help and the two wrote their first number.

They came up with “Follow Your Dream,” a satire of melodramatic arias by Rodgers and Hammerstein like “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Climb Every Mountain.”

In a trembling, mock contralto, Bogart sang:

Walk on through the wind

And trudge through the rain

Though your hair’s all blown

And you look insane

And your eye makeup’s running

And your nose is red.

The hills are alive, but you’re half dead!

The next step in the workshop was to write a musical. It dawned on them: Why not expand on “Follow Your Dream” and create mini-shows evoking the giants of musical theater? It took Rockwell and Bogart five years to complete the task.

They had competition, because Broadway has a long tradition of shows mocking the theater. Hit musicals like “Kiss Me Kate” and “The Boyfriend” milked this theme in the 1940s and 1950s, while shows like “The Producers” have exploited it in more recent years.

“Our goal was to do something original, with words and music all our own,” Rockwell said.

And so it began. Bogart was working as an office temp, and she’d write lyrics on coffee breaks, whenever she had a spare moment. Rockwell, who by now had a thriving career as the director of a children’s musical theater, began to compose the musical score as soon as he got her words.

The collaborators moved in together four years ago, after Bogart’s marriage ended and money got tight. Their studio apartment -- the same one they live in now -- had two pianos, two cats and no bathroom sink. Rockwell slept on a sofa-bed while Bogart took the Murphy bed 15 feet away.

They scheduled regular meetings in this comically confined space, working together on concepts, writing separately, then batting drafts back and forth.

“We shared moods and emotions as the work went on,” Bogart recalled. “When we were writing the segments on Jerry Herman we were very upbeat, just like his shows. And then, when we wrote the Sondheim segment, it all got a little darker. We were bickering. We had disagreements. It fit the material perfectly.”

Nearly all the people who heard early versions of the show loved it, Rockwell said, and it was performed night after night in workshops, cabarets and at readings for potential investors. For a long time, though, no one offered financial support.

And then a miracle happened: James Morgan, artistic director of The York Theatre Company -- a nonprofit organization that nurtures new musicals -- said he loved the show and wanted to produce it.

The musical has almost no scenery, and the cast is accompanied only by a piano. Still, it cost Morgan nearly $200,000 to mount the production for an initial six-week run in December, counting rent, advertising, insurance and other costs.

During a recent intermission, audience members buzzed when Sondheim appeared in the lobby. “I had a very good time,” he told a reporter, reacting to the comic segments based on his work and that of Rodgers and Hammerstein. He later went backstage to congratulate the cast.

Other luminaries followed him in the days to come, including Kander, Carol Channing and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the books for “Gypsy” and “West Side Story.”

With success has come an age-old question for collaborators: Will they remain faithful if someone comes along and offers one of them work on a show?

Bogart: “I think the team is more important than anything.”

Rockwell (jokingly): “Don’t we have an open relationship?”

Bogart: “If Sondheim wants to work with you next week, I won’t say no.”

Rockwell: “I’ll keep you posted.”

They’re amazed by their good fortune, because it has given them a cushion to keep writing and, one day, land a hit show on Broadway. They’re also realistic.

“I think we’re still at the back of a long line of people who want to do musicals,” Rockwell said. “But we’ve moved up a notch or two. We’re ready for the next step.”

For now, at least, they’ve got framed photographs of themselves with Sondheim, a guaranteed run off-Broadway through September, and an original show to do eight times a week.

“I need you!” Rockwell said teasingly to his partner, relaxing in their living room.

“We need an idea for a new show,” Bogart answered.

Both slumped in their chairs, looking pensive and falling silent.