ahrens & flaherty
last week's main attraction
Originally uploaded by embem30. Last weekend was the long-awaited Ahrens & Flaherty show at Broadway by the Bay. I heard about it at this time last year, when Steve and I went to see Miss Saigon. At that point, I wasn't working for Broadway by the Bay, so I figured I'd have to get tickets to it when the time came. A few months ago, I was working for BBB, but then I wasn't sure whether to buy tickets for it or not. They were selling out fast, I didn't know what my rehearsal schedule would be like, and I wasn't sure if I'd get tickets for free from work. Luckily, Erica got tickets for Alyson and me for Thursday's opening show, so we went after rehearsal that night.
A little background for those of you who aren't complete musical theatre geeks: Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty are the lyricist and composer, respectively, of such Broadway shows as Ragtime, Once on This Island, Seussical, Lucky Stiff, and The Glorious Ones, which just opened at Lincoln Center. (My friend Danielle, who also works for Broadway by the Bay, had to FedEx some of Stephen Flaherty’s latest revisions to the show in NY. No pressure…) They've been working together for 24 years, and they're still turning out shows that are getting produced. I did a day on them when I was teaching the musical theatre history class at ASU, and we had an Ahrens & Flaherty day in our Broadway repertoire class as well. So it's a pretty big deal that they came to San Francisco (San Mateo, really) to do a cabaret show of their songs.
They also brought with them Jason Danieley and Marin Mazzie, both taking a short break from starring in Broadway shows (Curtains and Spamalot). Turns out, both of those shows were shut down because of the stagehands strike in NY, so I guess they picked a good time.
The show on Thursday was really enjoyable. Because it was opening night, there were a couple mistakes: mostly missed lyrics and one instance where Mazzie modified the vowel on "you," mid-word. (It happens; things were covered well.) The beginning of the show also felt a little contrived and overly cabaret-ish, but they all relaxed into it pretty quickly. I'm sure that things went a lot more smoothly as the weekend progressed.
The evening mostly consisted of Flaherty playing the piano, Ahrens talking about the shows, and Mazzie and Danieley singing the songs. There were solos and duets, Ahrens and Flaherty singing back-up, and some songs sung by Ahrens and Flaherty themselves. They did something from each of their shows, except for Dessa Rose, which is more of a folk opera and less excerptable. There were even songs from the movie Anastasia, for which they did the music.
Rather than writing about each song individually, I'll just copy and paste at the end of the post the list of songs that they did. I wrote it the next day from what I remembered. The order of the sets is likely wrong towards the middle, but I think I got everything. The most thrilling for me was probably Flaherty playing the opening from Ragtime. The applause was noticeably louder after that one. He mentioned on Friday afternoon that it's really hard to play. :) How cool is it to hear the composer play something you've heard so many times before? (Answer: very cool indeed.)
So the show was great fun, but I also got to go to the question and answer session on Friday afternoon. Despite Erica talking it up to the kids the previous week, there weren’t many people who came. There were some students from San Mateo High School, a few drama teachers from the area, etc. Apparently, it was spirit week just about everywhere, so the kids had “better” things to do. It’s too bad that they missed it, but the smaller number of people probably made it better for us. We sat in the first few rows of the theatre, and Ahrens and Flaherty sat in front of us on stools. Greg, the executive director for BBB, sat with them and asked them questions.
Greg had Ahrens and Flaherty explain their backgrounds and how they each got into musical theatre. Flaherty always wanted to compose, did some in college, and went right from CCM to the BMI workshop. Ahrens got a journalism degree, worked in advertising, got into writing jingles (Bounty, Klondike Bar) and Schoolhouse Rock songs, and then decided to go to the BMI workshop. I knew most of this already, but it was cool to hear it from them and fill in some details. As you might have guessed, they met at the workshop. However, it wasn’t until the end of the first year that they started working together. Flaherty said he was boring himself, working alone, and he noticed that 5 of his words were as good as 1 of Ahrens’ word choices. So when they had to pick a partner for the final project (write a song with two people singing from completely different places), Flaherty saw Ahrens outside and asked her. Actually, he walked by her, got a ways away, turned around suddenly and yelled, “Hey! You wanna do that project together?” According to them, the song they wrote, about two people writing personal ads, was pretty bad. Nevertheless, they kept working together.
Next, they talked about their early projects, through to their first off-Broadway show (Lucky Stiff) and their first on-Broadway show (Once on This Island). Both were inspired by Lynn Ahrens, looking around at bookstores and finding novellas. We pretty much got to talking about Ragtime-how they got the gig, how fast they wrote it-when they stopped to take questions from the audience.
Most of the audience questions were interesting, although I may have preferred to just keep hearing them talk through the history of their shows. One student asked, “What’s a good audition song?” That’s a better question for a director or music director than a composer and a lyricist, but even then it’s such a general question.
To wrap it up, here were my impressions of Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens. First, I was surprised to see that they’re both pretty short-like 5 feet, if that. Also, they look older than the picture they’ve been using for publicity for the probably last 10 years. (They should probably get a new picture; I thought they looked great.) Most importantly, though, they seem like very nice people. They were quite personable, and willing to take time to do the question/answer session for a group that wasn’t very big.
Next year at this time, Stephen Schwartz (composer of Godspell, Pippin, and Wicked) is scheduled to come and do a similar show with a couple of his performer friends. Now I don’t feel so bad about missing Jerry Herman coming to ASU last fall.
Here’s the song list from the show:
At the Beginning (Anastasia) - Ahrens, Flaherty
The Showbiz (cut from Ragtime) - all
Larger Than Life (My Favorite Year) - Danieley
Love Who You Love (A Man of No Importance) - Mazzie
The Streets of Dublin (A Man of No Importance) - Danieley, all
Speaking French (Lucky Stiff) - Danieley, Mazzie, Flaherty
Times Like This (Lucky Stiff) - Ahrens
At the Beginning (Anastasia) - Danieley, Mazzie
Once Upon a December (Anastasia) - Danieley
Journey to the Past (Anastasia) - Mazzie
Opposite You (The Glorious Ones) - Danieley, Mazzie
Mama Will Provide (Once on This Island) - Mazzie
Green Eggs and Ham (Seussical) - all
It’s Possible (McElligot’s Pool) (Seussical) - Flaherty, all
Prologue: Ragtime - Flaherty
Our Children (Ragtime) - Mazzie, Danieley
Goodbye, My Love (Ragtime) - Mazzie
Back to Before (Ragtime) - Mazzie
Make Them Hear You (Ragtime) - Danieley
Ragtime - all
Encore:
Silent (new project: Legacy) - Mazzie
I Was Here (The Glorious Ones) - Danieley
Nice (Lucky Stiff) - Ahrens, Flaherty
To read more about it and see a couple pictures, take a look at this and the second half of this.