Sparks from the Fire

The Aladdin Hotel – Las Vegas – Yikes!

This is Part 9 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

Epilogue to Iphigenia:
One day, around five years later, I received a telephone call from Ralph Alswang, a prominent theater designer, who told me of a national contest for The Best Rock Opera being staged by the Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas.  They were just completing a new 7500-seat theater at the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas and the show winner of the contest would receive at least a year contract running nightly in Vegas,

I laughed at the thought of Iphigenia, a Euripidean classic and Greek tragedy to boot, in Vegas, but after he explained that if I won, it would make me a rich man for life since I was the sole owner of the piece and would receive 5% of the gross, I reconsidered the strange idea.  My lawyer felt that it would not be a bad move at all.  Lawyers well understand the dollar signs.

Ralph Alswang, having seen Iphigenia at The Public Theater, felt that I actually might have a pretty good chance of winning it if I were to submit.

To make a long story short, I took a couple of weeks and reworked a new draft of the piece with Ralph’s suggestion that Iphigenia become one performer (instead of 12) with a large 40 voice chorus of women around her.

We also renamed the piece, Masquerade.  To this day I have no idea what that title meant and what it had to do with Euripides’ play.

I was flown to Vegas, pitched and sang the idea to a bunch of Italian-type business-men in suits and won the contest. (more…)

Madge Sinclair and Girls

This is Part 8 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

The New York Opening:

We went to London a nervous group of apprehensive American performers hoping to receive some sort of nod from the English masters of classical theater with our experimental rock opera based on a famous Greek tragedy and came home swaggering with a hit show.

The people of London ‘got it’.  Even the critics ‘got it’.  The critics, with their well-written reviews has pointed us in several directions that we wanted to fix before opening in NYC, so our producer, Joe Papp, once again put us back into rehearsal – this time for a month.  Doug Dyer, our wild, avant-garde Texas director was full of new ideas far too exotic to even attempt in that short period of time.  What we needed was to have the rough stone polished to a high gloss.

Unfortunately, we wasted two of the weeks trying some of Doug’s ideas and finally, a frustrated Joe fired director Doug and brought in Gerald Friedman to direct and work with our brilliant young choreographer, Lar Lubovitch. Gerald was the guy he should have brought in as soon as we got back from London.  He was an experienced Broadway professional who really knew the theater.

One of the biggest disappointments was that neither Joe nor Gerald had seen the show at its best in London and though the hearsay was excellent, neither had a strong sense of how well it had worked for the audiences.  Nonetheless, Gerald went to work in the two weeks remaining and did wonders cleaning up and polishing the show and readying it for the NY critics.

The Achilles character was cut and Iphigenia’s potential husband was only talked or sung about.  What worked was the music and the girls and Clytemnestra (Madge Sinclair) and Agamemnon (Manu Topou) were strong classical performers with the size to match our Iphigenia of twelve.

We went into NY previews with an even better show than in London with the additions, deletions and savvy corrections of our new director.  Oh how I wished he had had the chance to work on the piece longer, for his work was smart, sharp and just what the piece needed.

Previews were a smash.  The audiences went wild every night and Joe was most excited to present NYC with still another big hit show.  But Gerald and I were wary.  In New York, in the 70s, you had to get the NY Times critic to love you or else you would never have a true hit.  Without The Times rave review, you wouldn’t have a blockbuster. (more…)

Les Girls of Iphigenia

This is Part 7 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

Les Girls of Iphigenia:

Twelve young starlets play one classic role in the same opera.  Twelve variations of the same young girl facing her death at the hands of her father all in the service of her country.  We wondered if it would work, if the audiences would ‘get it’.  They had no trouble with the concept and the musical/rock opera rode on the giant wings of these twelve amazingly talented women in every performance.

How I loved these women!  Twelve of the top talents in NYC to work with, to write for, to arrange for.  It was a composer’s dream come true.

Over the couple of years of the run, first in workshops in NYC, then in London and then again in performances back in NYC, there were a number of other women who came in and out – understudies, swings and replacements, (Broadway star Patti Lupone was one) but the core twelve were something special and over the years, after the run of the show, I had the gratifying opportunity to watch nearly every one of them blossom into a star on a major scale.

Jullianne

Julianne — Julianne Marshall was our rock.  She was there for the entire run of the show and I can’t remember that she ever missed a performance.  She was a beautiful presence on stage, one of the quieter side of Iphigenia, but the leader of the kettle drum choir – six of the twelve learned to play timpani and would erupt periodically throughout the show in a grand tattoo of rhythmic pounding which represented the war around them.  Julianne would radically change in an instant from demure to powerful when she got those mallets in her hands.

Nell

Nell – Nell Carter was our trumpet.  With a voice that would cut diamonds and shatter glass she was a tremendous presence.  There were moments when I could put Nell on the melody and everybody else on the harmonies and Nell’s voice would still cut through the other eleven and state the theme.  And she was funny – probably our one true comic relief in the cast – with her wide body and her crazy spirit, she could have handled the role by herself in another production.

Nell in Ain’t Misbehavin’

Nell went on to win a Tony Award for her performance in the Broadway musical Ain’t Misbehavin’, as well as an Emmy Award for her reprisal of the role on television.

She also received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for her starring role in the long-running 1980s’ sitcom Gimme a Break!.

Sharon

Sharon – Sharon Redd was simply beautiful and talented.  She had the fire and had one of those classic R&B voices that you heard on the radio.  Often it was Sharon, singing on commercials, as one of Bette Midler’s Harlettes and finally having a most successful career as a background vocalist, most notably with the group Soirée, which also included among its members Luther Vandross and Jocelyn Brown.

Trish – Trish Hawkins was the vulnerable side of Iphigenia.  Trish always felt to me like a fresh breath of air from the country.  She was the strongest actress of the group and, consequently, the turn-to girl that handled most of the spoken lines.  I secretly fell in love with her in the course of the run because of her natural beauty and great presence.

Trish with Judd-Hirsch

Later in life she became Lanford Wilson’s female lead in his Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play Talley’s Folly, as well as his Broadway plays The Happy Hooker and Fifth of July.

Marion

Marion – Marion Ramsey was the energy!  Here was a blast-‘em-through-the-roof R&B/Gospel singer with serious chops and the great ability to get the audience standin’ up and clappin’.  Her big number was a song called Gate Tender which never failed to bring the house down.

Marion in Police Academy

She seemed always happy and ready for a laugh and was one of the most popular among the girls. She was later a regular on the TV series Cos but is best known for her role as the timid Officer Laverne Hooks in the Police Academy movies.

Pamela

Pam – Pamela Pentony was our Janis Joplin.  The music of the show covered many pop genres and Pam’s number, I Wonder, was a screamin’ gut wrenching rock n’ roll moment that she just tore up every night.  One wondered how she could sing like that whiskey-voiced and rockin’ and rollin’ night after night.  How could her voice possibly hold out?  But it did – 8 performances a week for a couple of years.  Pam was special.  Everybody loved her because she gave it everything she had night after night, night after night … (more…)

This is Part 5 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

 Casting:

The casting of Iphigenia would be problematic because Doug Dyer, the director, and I had decided that only three people could speak in the piece – Agamemnon, played by Manu Topou who had played the king in the movie “Hawaii” that at the time was so popular, Clytemnestra, played by Madge Sinclair, who you might remember from long-running stint in the 1980s as nurse Ernestine Shoop on the series Trapper John, M.D. opposite Pernell Roberts.  She received three Emmy nominations for her work on that show, or perhaps in 1988, she played Queen Aoleon opposite James Earl Jones‘ King Jaffe Joffer in the Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America.  Achilles was first played by a young Tommy Lee Jones.

All three were classically trained actors, perfect for the roles and would not sing in the show, but would handle the minimal Euripidean dialogue with aplomb.

The tough casting choice, however, was Iphigenia.  She would have to be a young, beautiful rock/pop/folk singer with powerful acting chops and she would have minimal dialogue, but a tremendous role to sing.  And we wanted a real authentic rock n’ roller – not some theater chick who thought she was hip enough to do it.  We also needed to cast 12 ladies in waiting to be the Greek chorus.

We saw some wonderful talent.  In that day everyone wanted to work at The Public, so the turnout was fantastic.  We easily cast our Greek chorus with 12 of the top twenty-something ladies in NYC.  I was absolutely thrilled with the potential of that chorus and could not wait to get into rehearsal.

But we could not find our Iphigenia.

Finally Joe Papp told us to go into rehearsal without our leading lady for he suspected that she would emerge in the course of our rehearsals from our wondrous chorus.  When Joe said it; you did it, and so that’s what we did.

In the first week of rehearsals I taught only the music.  At the end of each day Doug, Joe and I would meet and discuss our leading candidate for our starring role based on who had been our favorite that day.  And at the end of each day we had a different choice.  By the end of the week we were no further in casting our lead than we were on the first day of rehearsal.  Then Joe had a fascinating idea. (more…)

Joe Papp

This is Part 4 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

One afternoon about a year into my tenure as composer-in-residence at The Public Theater, Joe Papp called me into his office, sat me down and announced, “It’s time you did a work of your own – a musical.  As part of your education, I’m going to give you the works of three playwrights.  Read their plays and choose one that you think you can convert into a musical.”

He went on, “By doing this, you will have the opportunity to both study and work with the masters.  Have it finished in six months.”  Whew!  A rather heady assignment for a 26-year old man-child who was already pretty busy with everybody else’s works as well.

The three playwrights he gave me were William Shakespeare, Aristophanes and Euripides.  Fortunately, I had aced a terrific course in college on the works of Shakespeare, so I did not have to read all his plays, so I went back to my study notes and picked a few possibilities.  The trouble, of course, with Shakespeare was the language.  It would have to be a modernization of his language for a musical and who would want to mess with the master’s words.  It would be like writing pop songs from the works of Beethoven.

So I turned to the Greeks.  Long story short, after about a month of plowing through Aristophanes, I turned to Euripides who I had barely even heard of.  There I found not only a master playwright, but one of the great creators of the art of the playwright and a weaver of tales that have fascinated me since.

Weeks later I returned to Joe’s office and announced that I had, at last, made my choice.  It would be Euripides’ Iphigenia In Aulis, the classic story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and how, when King Agamemnon, mired with his army on the shores of Aulis because he had no wind to sail his ships to Troy to bring Helen back, decided to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods to get his necessary wind.  He then plans a ruse and orders his queen, Clytemnestra, to Aulis with Iphigenia in tow for she is, he lies, to marry Achilles, his greatest of warriors.  Settin’ her up to let her down and definitely a tragedy!

But musicals are rarely tragedies – usually they have happy endings – so it was my choice to write the show as an opera, and a rock opera to boot. (more…)

A Younger Peter Link

I have to blame my father.  He got me started on the drums at the age of 6.  It was my passion as a youth and I never had to be told to go practice.  So I grew up inside the rhythm.  A solid start.

And then there was Jack Eyerly, my first real mentor and our chorus director at Principia Upper School.  He grabbed me up and taught me, stimulated me, believed in me.  And he pushed me, though he never had to push hard.  He mostly helped me see that I could do it – that I had real talent.

And then there was Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, my life teacher, the man who taught me how to be a creator, how to get inside the character, how to stimulate the emotions, how to concretize the moments, how to hook on to the muse.  He was the best teacher I ever had – besides life.

And finally I was thrust out into the world – age 23, green, naïve, … extremely lucky.

I wrote, with a partner, named C.C. Courtney, an Off-Broadway musical called Salvation.  He wrote book and lyrics and I wrote the music.  We both starred in the show.  It was in the heyday of Off-Broadway when the real action was in the small theaters and Broadway was stale and confused.  Hair was pretty much the only thing happenin’ and the rock musical was very unrealized.  Salvation was an 8-character rock musical that was what one might call “anti-religious”.  Anti organized religion really.

The show was meant to be revolutionary, to slap the audience in the face following in the footsteps of Hair.  It did, and the audience and the critics loved it.  Looking back, it was definitely sophomoric and not a piece that I’m proud of.  But it was Off-Broadway’s biggest hit and ran for 2 years and played in 11 different countries.  Out of the show came a song that was a million-selling hit and #1 on the Billboard Pop charts in the summer of 1970.  It’s ridiculously long title broke all the rules, but also gathered a strange kind of attention – If You Let Me Make Love To You Then Why Can’t I Touch You?

It gave me my start.  It set me up immediately as a NY composer for the theater.  Suddenly I was a Broadway composer and I probably had not seen more than 10 musicals in my life.  I thought, “Boy, this is easy!  Write some songs, be a star, make lots of money.”

Then came the fall.  With my same partner I wrote another musical called Earl Of Ruston.  My partner and I disagreed throughout the experience and actually broke up before opening night, this time on Broadway.  I hated the show and walked away from it.  He was the star and the director, the book writer and the lyricist and held the power this time.  I wanted no part of what I thought was a mess.  The critics agreed.  It flopped and ran for just 4 performances.

My career looked to be short lived. (more…)

This is Part 3 of a 3 part series reflecting on an experience I had as a much younger man as an actor playing a lead role on CBS television’s daily soap opera, As The World Turns.  I recommend, for clarity’s sake, starting with Part 1 if you can.

The ability to memorize nearly anything has been an elusive skill that has unfortunately haunted me all my life.  Ever since the sixth grade when I completely blew my Captain of the Patrol Boys’ speech in front of the PTA, I have struggled with this seemingly simple act.

I jealously watched my wife, Julia, miraculously memorize her solos week after week for seven years and perform them flawlessly when she had her church gig in Boston.  That’s one area where we are polar opposites.

Probably the first reason why I did not continue with my most successful career start as an actor was that I never really felt comfortable in anything I ever did because one part of my brain was always clutching up trying to remember my lines.  Having written well over a thousand songs in my life, I could not sing one of them through for you without having the lyrics in front of me.  The melodies?  Easy.  The words?  Fogeddaboudit!  And so I did.

Mind you, I can teach you how to memorize – I know all the tricks and all the roots of the process – I just don’t even try to do it anymore after a lifetime of failures.

So don’t try and write me your technique to show me how it’s done.  I’m no longer interested – not in this lifetime.

So there …

Yeah, so here I am in this television soap opera struggling with 4 scripts a week, getting through it all somehow, receiving hundreds of letters of fan mail a week, but working under an enormous self-imposed pressure and never really enjoying the work because of this one sticky wicket.  On top of it all, I was then a bit near-sighted and my character was not the eyeglasses type, so I could not read the teleprompters while performing, and was left to my own flawed devices – a boat without a paddle.

With all that said, I shall recount a harrowing story with a peculiar twist.

I played Tom Hughes, a troubled teen just starting college.  On one particular day I had a rather long scene in my dorm room with my roommate, an actor who had just recently been introduced on the show and had only spoken a few lines a couple of times on previous days.

In this scene I was to get out of bed, get dressed and gather my books and papers for class as the scene progressed.  My roommate was to come in the door just coming back from an earlier class and we were to discuss some drama as we both went about our daily business.  The scene, as I said, was long (close to 10 minutes – long for a soap) and there were all kinds of timing problems and blocking to learn in our early morning rehearsals and run-thru for camera.

I remember that, knowing it would be a long and difficult scene, I had put extra time into the preparation in terms of my memory work, so I felt somewhat confident going into rehearsals that morning.  My acting partner was young and somewhat inexperienced and struggled a bit with his lines in rehearsal, but it was nothing out of the ordinary.  It was, however, just enough to put me on my guard and throw things a little off balance. (more…)

This is Part 2 of a 3 part series reflecting on an experience I had as a much younger man as an actor playing a lead role on CBS television’s daily soap opera, As The World Turns.  I recommend, for clarity’s sake, starting with Part 1 if you can.

A sub-title for this post might be “Christmas Dinner At The Hughes.”

One of my most memorable adventures as an actor on “As The World Turns” was one year’s Christmas dinner.  As CBS-TV’s number one leading soap opera, when the final show before Christmas came, they would pull out all the stops.  On this particular Christmas show we were to have an assemblage of the entire Hughes family, about 20 or so troubled souls, (it was, after all, a soap opera) all coming together for an elegant dinner.

No expense was spared as the long banquet style table was appointed with elegant china, crystal glasses, silverware and food – real food, not plastic turkey props, but two gloriously cooked 25 pound turkeys replete with stuffing, mashed potatoes, vegetables of every kind, cranberry sauce – the whole works.  The scene was to be a long one covering several commercial interruptions.

Technically it was difficult because with all those actors and all those dramatic stories all gathered at one table, touching each life problem for each character was a difficult objective.  But the scene was clever and well written and we were all excited to work together and pull it off.

We rehearsed it and rehearsed it until we had the dialogue down and the banter back and forth natural and the camera shots organized.  It was a massive rehearsal for a show that normally featured two talking heads discussing their life problems.

And please remember that the show was live – in front of 30 million people.  There would be no fixing in the editing room at a later date.  What was worse is that the entire scene, which probably ran nearly a half hour, ended with a total surprise, as drama would have it.

To digress momentarily, I loved working with Eileen Fulton, the star of the show, who played my mother.  She was always kind, considerate and professional to me, the youngster.  We developed a sweet friendship over the course of the show.

Don Hastings

But my favorite actor and person in the entire experience was the actor who played her husband, and my father, Don Hastings.  First of all he was a truly funny guy and kept all on the set constantly loose with his banter, enthusiasm and general good humor.  On top of that, he was the consummate pro – always solid on his lines and a natural actor to play with in scenes.  As head of the household, he, of course, played the role of a doctor and a surgeon at that.  He was the good guy in a field of bad guys or confused guys or cheating guys or sad guys.

At Christmas dinner he sat at the head of the table where he belonged, surrounded by wife (Eileen), grandparents of both, as well as nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles and their troubled spouses on down the table.

After all the toasting, Christmas cheer and drama while we lingered on the salad, we were then, after the second commercial break, to move into the climax of the scene – and the climax of the year, for that matter.

Grandpa, sitting to Don Hastings left, was scripted to begin to choke on a hard roll with butter.  Grandma would then discover him choking and begin to pound him on the back further lodging the supposed roll in his throat.  Someone then was to grab Gramps and try the Heimlich maneuver on the old guy to no avail.  With all hope lost and Gramps turning blue and dying in front of us all, Don (the surgeon) was to swing into action and save the day by sweeping the entire dinner — china, turkeys, and all — off the table onto the floor and hoisting Gramps, with the help of three others, on to the table laying him on his back. There Don would perform open throat surgery on Gramps with the turkey carving knife in front of us all and miraculously save the day … and Gramps. (more…)