Sparks from the Fire

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…)

This is Part 3 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 summer before my senior year in college I, on a whim, auditioned for a job in the chorus of the St. Louis Muny Opera, the largest outdoor summer stock musical theater in America.  I don’t know why it was called “Opera”, as far as I know they never did anything other than musicals.

It’s an entirely different story, but, as luck would have it, I got the job.  There I learned about musicals, having the opportunity to play and understudy in 10 shows a summer for two summers.

I sat in between two male dancers in the dressing room in assigned positions for both summers and for the first time in my life, got to know and became fast friends with two gay men – one, Michael Shawn, who later became my choreographer for several shows that I wrote and directed in NYC and at whose bedside I sat as he died of AIDS.  The other, Nicholas Dante, like Mike, went on to be a working Broadway dancer and was always dabbling with playwriting.

One evening, after the show in St. Louis that first summer, Nick invited me to participate in a reading of one of his plays.  I gladly accepted, knowing that I would be attending the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater that next fall in NYC and I thought that I might get a little more experience under my belt.

I don’t remember much about the reading – the play was OK and the food was much better.  I do remember that we all got to play actors auditioning for a musical and that’s about it.

Years later, when I was Composer-In-Residence at The Public Theater, Joe Papp asked me to work with the director of a new experimental piece that was work-shopping in one of his theaters.  It seemed that the composer was in Hollywood finishing a film-scoring job and would not be able to attend auditions, so Joe asked me if I would help the director run auditions and sit in for the composer.  Of course I agreed.

The day of auditioning started and just before we saw our first victim, in walks my old pal Nicholas Dante.  I said, “Hey Nicky, what are you doing here?”  He answered, “Oh, this is my play – you know, the one we did the reading of that night back at the Muny in St. Louis.”  He had actually gotten that show on and now was work-shopping it at the most powerful developmental theater in America.  I was so happy for him to have such a lucky break.

In the ensuing years I was to become even happier for my old pal Nick, for the director of that workshop was Michael Bennett, the composer who I subbed for was Marvin Hamlisch, and the show was A Chorus Line. (more…)

Peter Link at the Delacourt Theater

This is Part 2 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.

As a studied musician I never really had much formal training.  Oh, as a kid I learned my drum rudiments, I took a couple of years of piano lessons resisting nearly every practice session with dreams of baseball until my mom regrettably let me stop.

I picked up the guitar in college knowing that there just had to be more to music than just backbeat drumming.  I was the student choir director under my mentor, Jack Eyerly, throughout high school and college, and I also took a course while at the University of Virginia my freshman year in music composition from an extremely boring graduate student teacher that I nearly flunked because I rarely knew what key I was in.

So here I was suddenly serving as composer-in-residence at America’s greatest developmental theater in the 70s cranking out show after show and learning my theater craft on the job.

Joe Papp introduced me to a strange, quirky young ex-Jesuit priest who had just started directing at The Public Theater named AJ Antoon.  He was to become my favorite collaborator and best friend for many years and together we were to create a surprising number of hit shows.  One of the first projects that we worked on together was Wm Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing which AJ set gracefully and brilliantly into the period of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

We staged the show first at the NY Shakespeare Festival’s Delacourt out-of-doors Theater in Central Park where it became the hit of the summer, then moved it to Broadway in the fall where it then got even better reviews and became the longest running Shakespeare play to ever run on Broadway.  It was also produced by Joe Papp for television in a 3-hour IBM special that has played perennially year after year since then.

I wrote a few songs for the show and over an hour’s worth of underscoring that gave the show an almost musical quality and, in fact, I was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Composer for a musical even though the show was definitely not a musical.

It was the most graceful and smooth experience I ever had in the theater.  It was, for me, my penultimate experience.  A great play, a terrific concept by a brilliant young director at the height of his powers and a wondrous cast led by a young Sam Waterston.

Working at Shakespeare in the Park was always the best of times.  The theater, sponsored by NYC, was hugely supported by the city and would sell out every night because the tickets were free, so whatever was produced would be appreciated by the astute Shakespeare loving audience.  The setting of the theater by the lake in Central Park is gorgeous and families would bring picnic dinners to the park and eat pre-show and enjoy the good ol’ summertime. (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…)

Snoopy, the famous dog, of Peanuts renown and brilliant creation of Charles M. Schulz, was famous, among many reasons, in particular for his writer’s block.  Who hasn’t giggled understandingly at the quizzical look on Snoopy’s face wondering what to write after his famous opening line “It was a dark and stormy night …” as he set out upon the writing of his novel perched upon his doghouse roof with his miniature typewriter?

We laugh because we so understand the moment.  It’s a moment that has happened to each of us as we set upon a creative task.  It is a problem of great renown for writers and creators the world over.  For most it’s very real and very much a mystery.  “Why, when I so want to create, does nothing come?  Where is the muse?  On vacation?  How do I get started?

Well, I’m here to tell ya’ that if you’ve suffered from this before, your problems are now over because writer’s block is simply not real.  It’s nothing more than a misunderstanding of the creative process.

A dear friend wrote me just the other day seeking help on just such a thing only he called it “writer’s cramp”.  No matter what you call it, cramp, block or just creative anxiety, it’s all the same big nothing.

Wikipedia states, “Writer’s block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some “blocked” writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers. Throughout history writer’s block has been a documented problem.^[1] Professionals who have struggled with the affliction include author F. Scott Fitzgerald^[2] and pop culture cartoonist Charles M. Schulz.^[3]It can manifest as the affected writer viewing their work as inferior or unsuitable, when in fact it could be the opposite. “

Writer’s Block

Interesting that Charles M. Schulz is one of the famous sufferers.

Causes: Again from Wiki, “Writer’s block may have many or several causes. Some are essentially creative problems that originate within an author’s work itself. A writer may run out of inspiration. The writer may be greatly distracted and feel he or she may have something that needs to be done beforehand. A project may be fundamentally misconceived, or beyond the author’s experience or ability.”

I say, “Bah!” (more…)

I think about truth a lot.  It’s fast becoming my life’s greatest interest – far out-pacing music, money, and the Yankees.  Daily dealings with all the various concepts of the word “Inspirational” seem to focus my life more and more on the spiritual.  I’m not resisting it; in fact, I’m opening up to it.  And it’s certainly opening up to me.

We’re in a spiritual age.  Looking back through history, these ages come in cycles.  This is the next one.  Go into any bookstore.  Books for seekers abound.  Christian music is the one genre of music that has actually grown during this terribly trying time in the music industry.  Oprah announces discussions with Eckhart Tolle on line and millions show up to partake.  Never before has content for seekers been more available.

I study my own religion, but I read voraciously Wayne Dyer, Yogananda, Ram Dass, Spalding’s Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East, Joseph Smith’s Book Of Mormon, The Gospel According to Jesus, Tolle’s A New Earth and on and on.  I like to say, “I’m getting’ it any way I can.”  Truth, that is.

Stop at Judgement; turn right on Truth

One thing strikes me along this road.  Why is it that so many people think they have a corner on truth?  How preposterous to think that the Christians are right and everybody else is wrong – that the Sunnites are better than the Shiites.  There’s gotta be truth to every religion – otherwise, why would people be drawn to it in the first place.

I suggest it’s not religion that separates us, but language.  “The words are different, so the philosophy’s gotta be different” is the mistake we humans make.  And we Christians are some of the worst offenders.  How arrogant to think that only Jesus got it right.  Jesus did get it right, but he wasn’t alone. (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…)