Facing the Music: a Broadway memoir

Prelude : 2007

Where the hell is my music?

I was standing at the podium in an orchestra pit, a baton in my right hand, ready to begin. But due to a series of mishaps, there was no music on the music stand in front of me. It was the opening night of a new Broadway musical, Curtains, a cheerful murder mystery set in the hectic backstage world of a new Broadway musical.

I was the conductor of the musical, but I was also playing the small role of Sasha, the conductor of the musical-within-the-musical. I was wearing an elaborate set of tails, and my hair had been slicked back, 1950s style, by one of the show’s hairdressers. The platform I was standing on was actually a motorized elevator lift, allowing me to rise into the audience’s view to perform my lines and my song, then disappear back down into the pit.

I waited, listening to the murmurs of the audience mixing with the sounds of the orchestra warming up. It was disconcerting, staring at the empty wooden podium, where my score usually sat.

Curtains had been in previews for the last four weeks. Countless changes had been made to the show and to the score. Each cut, rewrite, and addition had to be copied into every musician’s part and rehearsed. It had been an exhausting month.

That morning, I had asked a young music intern to copy a final set of corrections into my conducting score. Orchestra pits are cramped spaces, so he carried the large manuscript to a table in the orchestra locker room. For the past month, the show’s orchestrator had been working at the same table, making his revisions during previews. When the intern finished, he left my score there with the orchestrator’s music, intending to return the score to my podium before the performance.

AN HOUR EARLIER, I HAD arrived at the stage door. My mood was bright. The long path to this particular opening night had been a singularly joyful journey. Bouquets of flowers, colorfully wrapped packages, cards, and telegrams spilled out of the dressing rooms into the narrow backstage hallways and staircases. Dodging clusters of balloons and elegant fruit baskets, I made my way up to my fourth-floor dressing room, where I discovered the young intern, wide-eyed and trembling.

I can’t find your score, he blurted out.

The jubilant opening night soundtrack playing in my brain came to a screeching halt.

I’ve been searching for it for half an hour, he added.

Hoping that I had misunderstood him, I asked quietly, My conducting score?

He looked frightened. Like he expected me to start throwing things.

My knees felt weak. I sat down. We both knew that there was no backup score.

I could cobble something together from the rehearsal piano book, he offered wanly.

It would only confuse me, I said.

None of this made sense. Who would take my score?

It has to be here somewhere, I said.

I interrogated the young intern and we retraced his every step.

The hallways and tunnels beneath the Martin Beck Theatre are filled with odd angles and mysterious doorways. We searched the pit and examined every nook and cranny we could access, to no avail. Our perplexed sleuthing was made more difficult by the constant stream of opening night gifts, notes from friends, and flowers being delivered to my small dressing room.

I made a decision, in the heat of the moment, not to broadcast my dilemma. A Broadway opening night is special—the culmination of an arduous journey—and I didn’t want it to become about me. But my mind was working overtime, alternating between numb resolve and breathless panic.

You know every note of this score, I told myself. It’s going to be fine.

You’ve never conducted this show without a score in front of you, I told myself. It’s going to be a disaster.

When the stage manager announced, Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to showtime! over the backstage speaker, I left my fate in the hands of the young intern and concentrated instead on dressing and preparing for the performance.

The woman who dealt with my hair didn’t notice that I wasn’t listening to her nightly monologue about her mother—I was mentally going through the more complicated sections of the score I was about to conduct. And as I changed into the first of the two crisply starched tuxedo shirts that had been delivered to my dressing room, my fingers inserted the studs and cufflinks without the benefit of my brain, which was obsessively cataloguing all the dialogue cues which were written so helpfully in my missing score. Properly combed and costumed, I took my baton from its velvet-lined case and made my way downstairs to the stage. The company was gathering for a special meeting before the performance. The baton’s wooden handle felt cool against my hot palm.

We stood on stage in a large circle. The thick red house curtain was down. We could hear the audience buzzing behind it. Our tightly-knit Curtains company, bound together by years of readings, workshops, and a lengthy out-of-town engagement, had endured the deaths of its original book writer and its original lyricist. Tonight, their ghosts were palpably present. The director showed us how their names had been inscribed discreetly on the backs of two set pieces, visible to the actors, not the audience. He acknowledged how hard we had all worked to reach this night. The number of songs written and discarded exceeded the number of songs in the show. Even the title song, Curtains, had been tossed. In the Playbill, the director had thanked, by name, the fifty-seven actors who had participated in readings of the musical but hadn’t made it into the opening-night cast. As I’ve learned repeatedly, showbiz is a fickle bitch.

Break a leg, said the director. We disbanded.

I made my way downstairs to the pit. The stage manager’s voice rang through the backstage speakers: Places! The call is places. My heart skipped and skittered. The show would be starting momentarily, music or no music. Pausing outside the doorway to the pit, listening to the pre-show cacophony of squeaks, blasts and wheezes from within, I briefly considered running for the hills. Instead, I squeezed through the gathered musicians and stepped up onto the podium. My hands were moist with sweat. The baton’s wooden handle felt slippery in my fingers.

I waited.

Where the hell is my music?

From my position at the podium, I saw a small flurry of movement at the back of the pit. The young intern had darted in, handed a note to the French horn player, and dashed out. The horn player passed the folded piece of paper through the woodwind section and up to me. I opened the note.

Operating on a hunch, the intern had located the orchestrator in a bar near the theater. The orchestrator had finished his work on the show. To avoid lugging his heavy manuscript to the opening night performance and party, he had bundled up the music on the table, accidentally including my copy of the score, and instructed his driver to take it all back to the orchestrator’s home in Connecticut.

When the intern alerted him to the crisis he had caused, the orchestrator called his driver, who had now turned around and was heading back toward New York City with my score. The intern was now driving, in a borrowed car, to a pre-arranged meeting point at a gas station somewhere in Westchester.

A little red light on my podium flashed twice. I picked up the phone and greeted the stage manager, and I confirmed that the musicians were in place. I told the stage manager that if the young intern came backstage during the performance, he must be allowed to come down to the pit to deliver something important. The stage manager was intrigued but had more pressing things to worry about. Tell me later, she said, at the party.

I nodded into the camera. I knew the stage manager was watching me on a TV monitor from her station in the stage right wing. She was an old friend, having been the stage manager for Merrily We Roll Along, the show in which I had made my Broadway debut twenty-six years earlier.

Soon the red light flashed on again, and this time I raised my baton, gathering the attention of the orchestra. The players were instantly ready. But a hard knot of fear had lodged itself in my stomach.

The musicians stared up at me, trusting and alert, utterly unaware that I would be flying blind.

The red light went out. I took a carefully timed breath, willing the brass and wind players to breathe with me, and I gave the preparatory beat that triggered the overture. Arpeggios and glissandos cascaded around me. A brass fanfare rang out as we charged into battle, a lickety-split rising scale catapulting us into the snappy first tune. As the trumpets blared the melody, the rhythm kicked in, the bass player and drummer laying a foundation on which the other players confidently rode. We sailed into the next melody and the next, seamlessly gliding through the music, building to a snazzy high climactic chord, and ending with a big low plunk—what we in the business call a button. I turned around, bowed to the audience, acknowledged the orchestra, and turned back around to go on with the show.

The theater vibrated with the extra energy of an opening night performance. The show raced smoothly along. To my surprise, once I got used to it, the experience of conducting without music was freeing. The long weeks of previews had ingrained every eighth note, fermata, and trill into my cerebellum. My body instinctively knew the crucial sequences of cues and cutoffs that made up each musical number, and the extra tingle of danger seemed to oxygenate my brain.

Forty minutes into the first act, something down in the pit caught my eye. It was the young intern, sweaty and bedraggled in his rumpled opening-night tuxedo, grinning up at me. He was creeping through the tightly packed musicians with my score. Reaching up, he handed it to me, its pages open to the upcoming song—a rueful ballad called Coffee Shop Nights. I silently mouthed to him, Thank you. You saved the show. He beamed with pride. The dialogue cue came from the stage. I started the introduction to the song, and I shifted my focus away from the pit and its dramas, back up to the stage, where the show was barreling forward.

ON MY PODIUM, I AM at the focal point of three distinct worlds. From the pit, I look up at the actors, who aim their performances over my head, occasionally glancing down at me to ensure that we are synchronized. I see their shoes, mostly, if they’re downstage, close to me, but as they move upstage, I see them clearly, and I hear the rustle of their costumes and the breaths they take to sing.

Below me is the orchestra, packed tightly into the pit, every inch of space a negotiated treaty. The musicians divide their focus between the music on their stands and the baton in my right hand, which tells them when, and how fast, to play. I tell them other things with my left hand and my body. I control their volume so they blend properly. I show them how the notes should be articulated and how to shape the phrases. One of the numbers in Curtains has a Western feeling; another has a vaudeville pizzazz; yet another evokes the smooth sheen of a Hollywood movie musical. I try to physically embody the style of the music we are playing, encouraging the players to join me in the spirit of that style.

Behind me, unseen but always felt, is the audience. I feel them on the back of my neck. I sense their attention and their boredom; I hear their laughs and their coughs. I try to watch the show through their new eyes and listen through their fresh ears.

The intersecting energy of these three worlds is heady, intoxicating. The thrill of making music overwhelms me. I am hyper-alert, monitoring conditions in three directions. I have rituals that I repeat at every performance: eye contact with the actor playing the composer as he launches his high note, a wink at the actress playing the producer when her first joke gets a laugh. A cue I always give to the drummer in a particular way, guaranteeing that he will strike his triangle at the precise moment that the ingénue and the police inspector kiss. I raise my hands high to cue the ensemble for a vocal entrance or to help them cut off precisely. Occasionally, I conduct toward the camera so the stage manager can synchronize her lighting cues with my tempos. I breathe with the singers. The musicians breathe with me. On a good night, we become entwined, lifting each other into effortless flight.

Tonight is a good night.

TWO HOURS LATER, AFTER THE finale and the curtain call and the exit music had all been played, I remained on the podium for a moment. My relief at having successfully led the company through tonight’s performance was undercut by another, unexpected feeling. A feeling of dread. My left shoulder hurt in a way that I didn’t recognize; the pain was making my left arm stiff. And the forty minutes I had spent conducting without a score had illuminated something else, something I had been willfully ignoring for months.

The left side of my body was off-kilter. A slight tremor had developed in my left hand. Occasionally, at home, I found myself typing using only my right hand. I was also having trouble putting on shirts and jackets, my left arm searching in vain for the opening of the sleeve.

During those first forty minutes, my left hand, usually occupied with the simple task of turning the pages of my score, had hung without expression. I realized that during the four weeks of previews, I had essentially been conducting with my right hand alone. I had been compensating for this in ways I hadn’t noticed before. I was giving cues with my eyes and head instead of with my left hand, and I was avoiding large movements in favor of smaller ones, movements that were occasionally difficult for the musicians to see.

Shaken, I climbed down from the podium and made my way back up the stairs to my dressing room, stopping by the stage manager’s office to request a physical therapy appointment with someone from the team of specialists that kept the dancers in working order.

My dressing room, already hosting a small crowd of friends, was bursting with merriment, the laughing and hugging overflowing out into the hallway. My father and stepmother had found their way backstage and were pouring champagne. Everyone was celebrating. As a longtime expert at masking my fears, I joined in. It had been a terrific night. But I knew something was wrong. Very wrong.

Chapter One

1967

{My mother moved slowly down the cramped aisle of the fabric store, examining the prints and patterns. She smiled to herself as she felt the different bolts of fabric, her dark brown shoulder-length hair kept in place, as always, with a black headband.

My mother made all my father’s underwear. He liked to wear boxers, and she took a surprising amount of pleasure in searching out the most outrageous fabrics she could find—wild stripes, bright paisleys, neon polka dots. She was a talented and industrious seamstress. What started as a goofy whim turned into a major collection. Shopping trips with my mother usually ended with a trip to one of Cincinnati’s fabric stores. It became our family game: find the perfect print for the next pair of boxers. Hawaiian hula dancers? Psychedelic butterflies? Bright yellow daisies?

She kept a swatch of fabric from each pair of underwear she made, and she created a book out of the swatches. The thick cardboard cover of the book had a cutout in the shape of a pair of boxers so you could see the latest print through the cutout.

I was five years old. I stared up at my mother. She was very pretty, her dark eyes dancing as they darted between the wads and twists of cloth. Endlessly patient, she could fix broken zippers and reweave unraveling scarves. Her hands were cool and soft, and she never tired of reading me stories, though she wasn’t as good as my father at doing the different character voices that I required.

Suddenly, she laughed out loud. There, stuck in with the checks and plaids, was a print made of Budweiser beer labels.

Perfect, she announced.

My father liked his beer. A six-pack a day.

When I was older, my mother made the tan corduroy suit that I wore for my high school graduation, and years later, my little sister’s wedding dress, a creamy creation dappled with faint autumn leaves. But the boxers were different. They seemed to be a secret that my mother and father shared. He may have looked serious and professional in his jacket and tie, but they knew there was something wilder underneath, hidden away.

MY FATHER TAUGHT ALGEBRA AND calculus at the Hillsdale School, an all-girls high school, in Cincinnati. Ruggedly good-looking with a vaguely military crew cut, he had a dry sense of humor and a rigorous love of mathematics. His first two years at Hillsdale, he was the only male faculty member. There was no men’s room in the school, only a tiny W/C labeled Mr. Loud.

We lived in a small red house on Madison Road, in a quiet neighborhood near the school. Violets grew in a small patch of grass near the back door. We had a cat named Panther and a dog named Fang. Fang, a basset hound, had long drooping ears that hung down on either side of his face. Panther, a gently striped, grey tabby cat, worshipped Fang. She followed him everywhere. My little sister, who loved all animals unconditionally, spoke to them both in a language of purrs and growls and sighs. It was clear that they understood her perfectly.

Our living room, paneled with blonde, knotty wood, held a dark green overstuffed couch, a big comfortable chair, a hi-fi stereo, a record cabinet, and a black-and-white television set.

My mother wanted to learn how to play the guitar. She found a television program called Folk Guitar Plus that gave lessons. It aired at 6:00 a.m., featuring a stylish lady named Miss Laura Weber. The Plus referred to the additional instruments she taught: the soprano recorder and the autoharp. I asked my parents for a recorder. We ordered workbooks from an educational television station in Nebraska.

My mother and I would stumble groggily into the living room and pull the television set close to the couch—me in my pajamas, with my wooden recorder, my mother in her nightgown, with her guitar. I learned how to read a melody line, following the notes as they went by in the workbook. I studied the fingerings, and we played along while Miss Laura Weber sang Greensleeves and My Grandfather’s Clock.

One morning, after weeks of struggling with how to cover the holes in the recorder with my little fingers, how to get a clear tone that didn’t crack or whistle, and how to coordinate my fingers with my breathing, my mother and I made it through Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring without any mistakes.

We sat in silence for a moment, surprised. I liked hearing how my part fit snugly into the other part; I liked making music with another person.

When I was six, I started piano lessons. My teacher, Miss Corn, old and portly, had gnarled hands. She wore bright red lipstick and had a big black mole on her face. Clear and precise, she began teaching me the fundamentals of music theory and gave me a small book of pieces to learn. She never allowed mistakes to go by uncorrected, usually balancing each criticism with a compliment. That’s an E-flat there, David, not an E-natural, she would say, but my goodness, your rhythm is exactly right.

My mother and father bought a used, upright piano for $100, and they made the odd choice to put it in their bedroom. On weekends, they liked to sleep late. I’ve always been an early riser. At 6:00 a.m., I would march into their bedroom and practice.

Miss Corn taught her lessons from a cramped house she shared with her sister, a harpist. Its shelves were stuffed with ancient sheet music, frayed and crumbling. The piano was jammed into a wide doorway between two rooms. The low notes were in the dining room; the high notes were in the vestibule.

One day, while I was playing a Minuet I had learned, Miss Corn leaned over and put her surprisingly strong hands over mine.

David, stop, she said.

Her face was uncomfortably close. The gentle smell of her clinical, lemony perfume wafted over me.

You play all the right notes, but you play without… inquiry. Have you ever asked yourself, ‘Why is the next note the next note?’

I had not.

You must think about what Mozart was doing when he chose that particular note to be the next note. There are so many other notes he could have chosen! I want you to think about each note before you play it, as you play it, and after you play it.

She let my hands go. Settling back into her chair, she looked down at her lap, then up at me. Her dark, watery eyes gleamed.

Music has consequences, she said.

Somehow, I understood what she was saying.

I tried to put it into practice.

SCHOOL WAS A BEWILDERING SEESAW of triumphs and failures. I won spelling contests and aced math tests, but I couldn’t throw or catch a baseball. When I played The Mountain Gnome at a recital, everyone applauded. At football practice, I sat on the bench—sweating, miserable, petrified—wearing the oversized shoulder pads, jersey, and plastic mouthguard that had cost my parents seventeen dollars.

The record collection housed in our living room cabinet included a dozen or so original cast recordings of Broadway musicals: My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, Bye Bye Birdie, Bells are Ringing, The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, Carousel, and Oklahoma! Entranced, I played them over and over on our hi-fi stereo.

My parents kept strict control over the black-and-white television set. My sister and I were occasionally allowed to watch, but our viewing had to be planned in advance. Saturday morning cartoons were strictly rationed. Our neighbors, the Glovers, had a large color TV, which we were never allowed to watch. One spring evening, however, my mother worked out a secret plan with Mrs. Glover.

After an early dinner, my mother casually suggested that we go next door. Mrs. Glover invited us into her parlor. She had baked chocolate chip cookies, and she sat us down with delicate china plates in our laps, in front of the large console TV.

A movie started. It was in black-and-white. I was disappointed. Why would we come over here, I wondered, to watch a black-and-white movie? A mean lady on a bicycle was trying to take a girl’s dog. The girl sang a sad song about wanting to be somewhere else. There was a scary storm, and her house blew up into the sky. When it landed, she opened the door, and I saw both color TV and the Land of Oz for the first time. It was the best day of my life so far.

At that time, The Wizard of Oz was broadcast annually, nationwide, each spring. Starting that year, I never missed a viewing. I thought about Oz a lot. At six years old, I already knew, inside, that I needed to be somewhere else, far away from this world in which I already felt, for reasons I didn’t understand, like an outsider.

When I read the book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I discovered, at the end, that Dorothy Gale’s trip to that magical land hadn’t been a dream. That dream was Hollywood’s cruel invention. I took comfort in the knowledge that there really was an Oz, after all. I just had to figure out how to get there.

THE HILLSDALE SCHOOL HAD AN ambitious theater teacher, Mr. Emerson. Tall and thoughtful, his dark brown hair was a bit longer than I was used to seeing on a man. He lived in our neighborhood. Noticing my interest in the theater, he started putting me in the high school plays when they needed a little boy. My first appearance on stage was as a dead child, in a multi-media show Mr. Emerson created about the horror of war. I had to stay completely still, as if I weren’t breathing, in the arms of a high school junior, who was playing my mother. Apparently, I was convincing.

When I was in the second grade, Mr. Emerson directed a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which I played the Boy. The role of Vladimir was played by a high school senior girl. She was white, and Mr. Emerson had her wear blackface. Estragon, played by another senior girl, who was black, wore whiteface. I don’t know what the