What's Truly Important

"Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Steve Jobs

Records On Broadway

A record breaking 299,090 people saw a Broadway show last week. Among new shows, Disney’s “Aladdin” sold most tickets, worth $1,207,953. The revival of “Les Misérables” did almost as good. The most successful shows were again long-running musicals – “The Lion King,” “Wicked,” and “The Phantom of the Opera” – as well as newer hits like “The Book of Mormon” and “Kinky Boots”. Some big-budget new musicals could not compete: “Rocky” and “Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical” were down slightly compared with the already modest results of previous week. The Broadway League, the trade group for theater owners and producers, also announced the year-end total statistics for the 2013-14 season, which concluded on Sunday. As expected, Broadway grosses overall increased 11.4 percent compared with the previous season, totaling $1.27 billion versus $1.14 billion. Attendance was 12.21 million for the 2013-14 season, compared with 11.57 million for the prior season.

Four Tops 1966

"When I first walked into the Motown offices in Detroit, it felt like I had walked into a cult. It was a club, a family. Mr Gordy was always searching for the new thing. His motto was: "Listen to the radio and hear what's going on." He'd been listening to Bob Dylan and the psychedelic soul stuff the Temptations were doing. He realized music was shifting away from straight rhythm and blues. Holland-Dozier-Holland are now regarded as legendary, but at the time they were just twentysomething boys constantly searching for something new, in the same way as the Beatles were. That's what the Tops needed, because by 1966 they were so huge, there was no way of taking them to another level commercially – only artistically. That piccolo flute intro on Reach Out, which became a transatlantic No 1, is typical of how Motown would do something unexpected. But it was a team effort, like all their hits. Levi was the greatest singer in any group. I say that as someone who also managed the Temptations – and Otis Williams [Temptations singer] agrees. Mr Gordy was the genius at the top of the pyramid. He had an uncanny ability to spot hits."

Shelly Berger, Four Tops manager

What Made Frank Wildhorn A Top Musical Composer

"One of the first things I talk about when I do master classes at theatre programs is, 'Stop listening to theatre music! Listen to everything and try to find something you love in every style of music.' The point is that there is room for everything and, certainly in their day, the Cole Porters and Berlins and Gershwins - they were the popular songwriters of their time. Pop seemed to be a good enough word then…I grew up with so much music in the house - and such eclectic music in the house. I always thank my parents for that because they always taught me what I try to teach, which is: 'Frank, try to find something you like in every style of music - and be open! Just keep being open and keep being a student of it all.' And, whether it's Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff; or it's Matchbox 20 or Linkin Park; or it's Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye; or if it's Traffic or it's Crosby, Stills and Nash; or it's Julie Andrews and Sammy Davis; or it's Whitney Houston - the point is: try to find something in every style that really speaks to you. That's really my philosophy: to be a student of it all and don't close yourself off… I remember when I was fourteen or fifteen when I was teaching myself to play the piano - and I was just kind of just playing jazz - and I heard the scores of SUPERSTAR and WEST SIDE STORY back to back. What I remember about that - and it was very important to my life at that time - I remember saying to myself, 'Oh, my God! So many musical vocabularies are in these two scores: classical, jazz, pop, Latin, theatre, et cetera. So many vocabularies with these big, giant, commercial melodies'. I just got so turned on by the combination of those two scores at the same time… There is no question that my background and learning years as a pop songwriter was by far the best training I could have ever had for the theatre because on a daily basis you are constantly having to write for so many different points of view. Whether it's a sixteen-year-old African American girl or a forty-year-old white country singer from Nashville - everyday you do that when you are working for a publishing company. Sometimes you don't even know who it is you are going to collaborate with until you meet them that day! Every. Single. Day. It was the best training ground I could have had ever had for theatre."

Frank Wildhorn

Eternity

I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get. But, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.

John Green ("The Fault in our Stars")

Sad Truth

Sonnet 73
William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
      This thou perciev'st which makes thy love more strong,
      To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The Challenge

"I think the challenge in getting people to come to a Broadway theater is so immense ... you're talking about getting people to come to a piece of real estate that's within an eight block region of New York City. So your whole audience base has to come from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut or through tourism. And when you can only get that group of people, you're trying to create something that's as broad as possible so that every single one of those people comes. You want to create something that nobody can say, "Oh, I don't want to be a part of that," because you are talking about such a small possible percentage of people. And that's no way to create an artistic statement; it's a way to create a product. I think we need to accomplish the feat of making theater either a countrywide or an international phenomenon that can happen synergistically.

I think that everybody focuses too much on Broadway as a piece of real estate where you have to make it work in order for a show to be a success. Parade didn't work in New York, and so getting this tour to happen was ... not like merely pulling teeth, but reaching in and pulling out livers. It would take an incredible feat to get Parade to become some national phenomenon. Whereas Rent came in with all these great reviews and a Pulitzer Prize and it made splash in New York. So you can do your tour and make your money ... because the tour is where you make your money, not New York. So the way it works is that you have to hit Broadway and you have to hit it hard, and if you don't make it there you are dead, and that's a problem. Until producers find a way to keep New York from being the be-all and end-all, then what happens in New York is going to be prefabricated, predigested material which will appeal to the family audience, who buy four tickets instead of two, or will make the Times' critic happy. Or do limited runs. There are all these strategies to make a show run in New York and it's depressing, because it means that work which doesn't become a hit within that narrow stretch of the world, doesn't get a chance to exist.

If we take, for instance, Prince of Central Park, which was written by a friend of mine, and was a disaster of a show ... I could say that it had as much value on a theatrical level as, say, Footloose. But Footloose was produced very cannily, with an eye on a specific audience, and it had the value of a name; people had seen or heard of that movie. Neither is a good show, but Footloose got a national tour and will or will not make money for the people involved; it won't have lived and died solely based on the first two weeks that it was running in a city in the north-eastern portion of the United States. Are producers going to look at that and say, "Let's produce a new show that's risky and no one's heard of!" or are they going to say, "How can we insulate ourselves best against failure?"

Any new show is better, in my opinion, then Jekyll and Hyde. I run into a lot of people who don't agree with me, which is fine, but my basic point is that I don't see why Jekyll and Hyde is any more worthy than my show or Michael John's or Ricky Ian's. But there's something very important about Jekyll and Hyde; it exists as this 'thing' outside of its relative success in New York. And that's the challenge of any producer who wants to produce new and interesting work; to figure out how to replicate that phenomenon. And I don't think most people are up to it; I don't think most producers are smart or talented enough to do it."

Jason Robert Brown

Closed "Bridges"

Yesterday “Bridges of Madison County” ended its four month run on Broadway with record gross revenues of $590,791. Obviously many potential visitors could not believe that the show would close so soon. It opened in February to mostly favorable reviews. The composer, Jason Robert Brown, is a love child of Broadway, and quite rightly so. His talents are exceptional, he has his own style and the courage to leave the trodden paths of success. His "Bridges" score is nominated this year for a Tony Award. Other new musicals are struggling as well, such as “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” “After Midnight,” and “Rocky”. This is no consolation for the investors who lost most of the mounting costs of $ 8.5 million. As for “Rocky,” the show’s weekly box-office grosses have been disappointing so far, although it was regarded a "commercial" show and sure hit.

Invitation To Shanghai

ELISABETH, the musical I wrote more than 22 years ago with my friend, Sylvester Levay, has now reached China. A limited performance of the original Viennese production in German (!) will open on December 12th, 2014 in Shanghai.

Paradise

"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."

Bertrand Russell