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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and my guest today is Joshua Rosenblum, whose remarkable new book is titled Closer Than Ever, The Unique Six-Decade Songwriting Partnership of Richard Maltby and David Shire. Rosenblum's book chronicles the 66-year and counting partnership of two of the most gifted songwriters of our time and provides us with full behind-the-scenes accounts of their musicals, interspersed with deep-dive analysis of some of their standout individual songs. To tell their story, Rosenblum draws on his broad experience as a Broadway conductor, music journalist, and professor of musical theater composition at Yale.

And the well-known artistic figures who figure prominently in the story of Maltby & Shire include Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, Michael Stewart, Craig Lucas, Susan Stroman, John Weidman, Charles Strauss, Garth Drabinsky, and Jonathan Tunick. If you're a fan of this podcast, I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation and join John Schroeder, whose generous contributions help to make this podcast possible. If you're interested, there'll be information at the end of the episode about how you, too, can become a patron. Now here we go. Joshua Rosenblum, welcome to Broadway Nation. It is so fantastic to have you here today to talk about your new book, Closer Than Ever, the unique six-decade songwriting partnership of Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire.

[2:07] Joshua Rosenblum: Thank you, David. I am delighted to be here.

[2:08] David Armstrong: I know a lot of listeners in our audience are very excited about this book and about meeting you today, at least via podcast, because they are passionate about Maltby & Shire. For a lot of reasons, it's a team of songwriters who are at once extremely well-known to a smaller group of people and completely unknown to a much larger group of people. Your book is providing a great service to spread the word about Maltby & Shire.

[2:35] Joshua Rosenblum: Thank you very much. Well, that's exactly it. I got two sets of responses when I was working on this book and people knew I was writing it about Maltby & Shire. Half the people I talked to said, oh, gee, that's fantastic. I just love them. I love their music. It's great that someone's writing a book about them. And the other half said, who are Maltby & Shire? I felt like it was important for both sets of people that somebody get the word out about them in some detail.

[3:07] David Armstrong: And I think the book works very well in both regards, as an introduction and filling in the blanks for other people who know them but don't know nearly the details of their career that you go into.

[3:11] Joshua Rosenblum: Thank you. Good. I'm glad. That was definitely the balance I tried to strike.

[3:16] David Armstrong: You're a musicologist and, of course, you call on those skills and expertise. So you go into quite detail on many of the songs and some songs have their own chapters, in fact.

[3:23] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. So that was another tricky thing to navigate, because I knew people who know music would want to see those songs really broken down and talked about on a level of considerable detail. And I also knew that if I wasn't careful, I would lose half my audience because they don't read music. So I tried to make it so that you could get something out of those examples, even if you couldn't actually read the music. I tried to make sure there was enough description that made it clear the point I was making. Like, see, this five note pattern is the same in this song as it is in this song. And you can see it on the page, even if you don't read music. And also, I wanted to make sure that any song that had musical excerpts in the book was something you could easily find online and listen to it. So if you couldn't read it, you could easily hear it. That was my intent.

[4:00] David Armstrong: Well, again, I think you succeeded brilliantly in that regard.

[4:03] Joshua Rosenblum: Good. Thank you.

[4:04] David Armstrong: And you give equal attention to Maltby's lyrics as well as David Shire's music.

[4:10] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. Well, Maltby's such a brilliant lyricist, of course, one of the best living practitioners of the craft. And it was really fun to be able to break that stuff down. And of course, you don't need any special expertise to be able to follow an analysis of the lyrics like you might of the music. So that was easy to do.

[4:24] Joshua Rosenblum: In terms of the music, I also have to thank Jeffrey Block, who is the editor of the Broadway Legacies series at Oxford University Press, because he was very much in support of using musical examples. There are other publishing houses I've dealt with where they say that's going to put people off. And Jeffrey said, no, no, no, we're not afraid of that. Go wild. I appreciate that from him.

[4:41] David Armstrong: He is such a great guy. I had lunch with him on Friday, as a matter of fact.

[4:44] Joshua Rosenblum: Really?

[4:45] David Armstrong: Yes.

[4:46] Joshua Rosenblum: Oh, how about that?

[4:47] David Armstrong: Yeah, I meant to say hello to you from Jeffrey.

[4:49] Joshua Rosenblum: Thank you. And please send warmest regards right back. He's...

[4:51] David Armstrong: I will indeed. I also appreciated many biographies. This is not really a biography. It's more a study of the work of this team. But of course, you can't do that without going into facts of their life and how their lives are affected by their work and vice versa. I appreciated that you didn't spend too much time on their origins, because often I find in books, we spend way too much time about people's grandparents and great grandparents and things like that.

[5:19] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, it wasn't that interesting to me. So I figured it probably wouldn't be that interesting to the readers. I sort of wanted to cut right to the chase.

[5:24] David Armstrong: Again, I appreciated that. But your first chapter is indeed called Origins. So who are they? Where did Maltby and Shire come from?

[5:32] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. Well, the origins part of it is them meeting at Yale when they met when they were both Yale freshmen. Maltby grew up in Syosset and Shire grew up in Buffalo. I don't really spend much time on their childhoods, except to talk about how influential both of their fathers were on them, because both of their fathers, by an amazing coincidence, were band leaders. How unlikely is that?

[5:53] David Armstrong: I found that to be fascinating as well. So both of them are basically big band leaders during the big band era.

[5:59] Joshua Rosenblum: Yes, exactly.

[6:01] Joshua Rosenblum: And Maltby was fairly successful at that.

[6:03] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah. Richard Maltby Sr. had a bunch of albums. David's father, Irving, was very successful locally. They both were greatly influenced by their fathers. And I go into some detail about that in subsequent chapters. But Origins is not about their upbringing. It's about the origin of the team, which is when they met when they were freshmen. It's a great anecdote because they both concurred cheerfully that they disliked each other immediately. Richard thought that David was a hick and David thought Richard was a snob. Richard says, and we were both right. But they both wanted to write musicals and there was nobody else to write musicals with. They became Maltby and Shire.

[6:37] David Armstrong: I find it so fascinating, the odds that somehow these two people who are perfectly suited to work together end up being matched together by complete coincidence.

[6:46] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, just by fate.

[6:48] Joshua Rosenblum: And default, basically.

[6:49] David Armstrong: Incredible, isn't it? Yeah, that's exactly right.

[6:51] Joshua Rosenblum: Their first musicals are written while they're at Yale.

[6:54] Joshua Rosenblum: Yes, exactly. The first one was Cyrano. And Cyrano amazingly gave us the song Autumn. And Autumn, of course, is one of their enduring classics. That's practically the first song they wrote together when they were like 20 years old. And then Barbra Streisand went on to record it. It became part of Starting Here, Starting Now, their first breakthrough hit off-Broadway review. And it still gets done at auditions and masterclasses all the time. And literally, they wrote it when they were college students.

[7:20] Joshua Rosenblum: Autumn, it feels like autumn. Although the breeze is still, I feel the chill of autumn.

[7:39] Joshua Rosenblum: Oh yes, it's autumn. It's always autumn. However green the hill, to me it still is autumn.

[7:55] Joshua Rosenblum: I can feel the frost now, that makes my spring and summer dreams seem lost now. Why can't the autumn haze recall the days of one summer laughter that faded soon after in autumn?

[8:37] Joshua Rosenblum: He left in autumn. And though another season's here, I feel the emptiness of autumn all the same.

[9:09] David Armstrong: That's amazing. I love that song. I've always loved that song since we'll talk more about Starting Here, Starting Now, and especially the effect of that album. But that they would write the song when they're 20 years old in college, and that it would have this long history and become—isn't that the first song that Barbra Streisand records of theirs?

[9:27] Joshua Rosenblum: The first song of theirs, yes.

[9:29] David Armstrong: Yeah, and on one of her early albums.

[9:32] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, I think it's like her fourth studio album.

[9:34] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[9:35] Joshua Rosenblum: Maltby says she recorded it for her first, but it never got released. It stayed in the can, and then eventually she put it out on the fourth. But she recorded it very early in her recording career.

[9:43] David Armstrong: Let's pursue that subject. Let's go down the Barbra Streisand path for a moment, because they have this ongoing connection with Barbra Streisand very early in their career, and very early in Barbra's career. And how does that come about?

[9:55] Joshua Rosenblum: She was a young unknown. She was like 19 years old. She was singing at a New York nightclub, a village nightclub called Bonsoir. There was sort of a buzz around the idea that there was this stylish young singer, and she was going to be the next great recording star. And her name was Barbra Streisand. In the songwriting community, the idea was, if you could get Barbra Streisand one of your songs, and she sang it, that was going to be a really great thing for you. And her pianist happened to be a friend of Shire's. He was very big on saying, look, you should listen to songs by this team, Maltby and Shire. And she did. And then later, Shire ended up as a pianist in the Broadway production of Funny Girl, which, of course, Barbra Streisand created that role and it made her famous.

So he was the pit pianist. So he would go up to her dressing room on matinee days between shows and say, hey, here's a song of mine. See if you like it. So he had two great connections to her that way. She ended up recording six or seven of their songs.

[10:47] Joshua Rosenblum: Including Autumn, Starting Here, Starting Now. What About Today? Didn't she do that as well?

[10:53] David Armstrong: Yes. Yes, indeed. I think that's the title of one of her role albums. What About Today?

[11:22] Joshua Rosenblum: What about today? What about, yes, what about today? Till Nirvana comes, what about today? Till Messiah comes, what about today? Till the mountains move and oceans part and angels sing and life can start. What about yes, what about today?

[12:33] Joshua Rosenblum: And this is really their first notoriety.

[12:36] David Armstrong: Yes, this is long before anybody did any of their musicals. They did have an off-Broadway show called The Sap of Life, which attracted a lot of attention in certain circles, including among the young Stephen Sondheim and his coterie, which at the time included Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein. Those people all went to see Sap of Life and they were big fans. But it was a short run of an off-Broadway show.

[12:57] Joshua Rosenblum: You tell that story or you quote Maltby and Shire telling the story of how Sondheim came to see that show during the run and then came back several nights later with Hal Prince and then came back a week later with Jerry Robbins and Leonard Bernstein.

[13:10] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's incredible. And they get drawn into this circle of Bernstein and Hal Prince and that whole world.

[13:17] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, exactly. They became the fair haired boys, I guess.

[13:20] David Armstrong: Wow. Well, you really did your homework on this. Yes, that is exactly what Maltby said.

[13:25] Joshua Rosenblum: So they're invited to a lot of parties and a lot of social events with them.

[13:29] David Armstrong: I love that image. They said they all would sit down to play their party pieces. Sondheim would play Forum.

[13:32] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, what's that song?

[13:35] David Armstrong: A Pretty Little Picture.

[13:37] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah. And then Maltby and Shire would play Travel.

[13:40] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. Which, again, is a song that I've always just been completely drawn to.

[13:45] David Armstrong: Yeah, I like Travel a lot. I'm sort of surprised that that's the one Sondheim singles out. He put it on that famous list of 50 songs I wish I had written. But I think that would be somewhere in my top 20, maybe.

[13:55] Joshua Rosenblum: I don't find it as distinctive as a lot of their other stuff, but that's the one Sondheim singles out for some reason.

[14:00] David Armstrong: That's interesting. And I agree with you, although I just find Travel so infectious. I feel like it's a mood changing song. If you want to feel happy, you listen to that song. When I was in college, it was a favorite. We used to do it in all kinds of classes and things like that, too, for some reason. So I have a strong connection to it.

[14:19] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, well, you're in good company in liking it. Me and Sondheim, I guess.

[14:21] David Armstrong: Yeah, exactly. My wife is a singer and we do concerts sometimes and sometimes we put that on our playlist and people always love it. I think part of it is that vamp that it has is so sort of irresistible.

[14:50] Joshua Rosenblum: Take me different places, show me different faces, that's the life I like best. Travel, as the boat says to the river, when it's free and starting to float. Take me where you wanna go, make it anywhere you please. Ride the center of the flow or meander near the trees. Onward, onward, day by day. Rudder firm and steady, I am standing ready, sweep me up on our way. Travel, as the leaf says to the river.

[15:37] David Armstrong: So this early show, The Sap of Life, has some success and is regarded fairly well, but is not a hit by any means.

[15:45] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. It will start a pattern that we'll talk about in just a minute of a series of disappointments that they have.

[15:52] David Armstrong: There have definitely been a lot of disappointments.

[15:54] Joshua Rosenblum: But I think if you interview any creative team, you'll find that there are tons of disappointments that the world at large does not know about.

[16:00] David Armstrong: Yes. The world knows the successes mostly, but a creative life is inevitably full of things that didn't work out.

[16:05] Joshua Rosenblum: The sad part, I think, is that their successes, which are quite big and quite notable, all are revues, basically. And their book shows tend to all be disappointments.

[16:13] David Armstrong: Yeah, well, they're best known, I think, for Starting Here, Starting Now and Closer Than Ever. Those are their two big revues.

[16:21] Joshua Rosenblum: And there's a third one that I talk about in the book that is going to complete the trilogy. And that is kicking around and has had various outings and I think has lots of potential. Their Broadway shows were Baby and Big.

[16:34] David Armstrong: And Baby, I wouldn't say Baby was a disappointment. A lot of people love it. It ran for eight months, I think, which is not a long run, you know, by the standards of a lot of the blockbusters today. But for a relatively small show that didn't have any spectacle and didn't have any big stars, that was actually not bad.

[16:49] Joshua Rosenblum: A lot of people love the cast album.

[16:51] David Armstrong: It was a great cast album.

[16:52] Joshua Rosenblum: Oh, it's tremendous.

[16:54] David Armstrong: Big was the other one. We can get to that.

[16:56] Joshua Rosenblum: That was considered a disappointment.

[16:57] David Armstrong: What makes things so disappointing is when they have so much potential and then they just don't quite get there.

[17:03] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, exactly. I mean, certainly Baby is filled with amazing songs.

[17:07] David Armstrong: Yeah, and so is Big.

[17:08] Joshua Rosenblum: Absolutely. Before we jump into talking about that series of shows, I was fascinated by chapter four in your book, which is called Dealing with Steve.

[17:17] David Armstrong: Right.

[17:19] Joshua Rosenblum: And we all know who Steve is.

[17:21] David Armstrong: Steve is the giant. Don't go away. We'll be back to deal with Steve Sondheim right after this quick break.

[17:52] David Armstrong: What made it clear that you had to have a chapter that dealt with Steve when you're talking about Maltby and Shire?

[18:06] Joshua Rosenblum: He does come up a lot when you're talking to them. They were very close to him personally. There was a lot of back and forth influence. But really, it was in about 2010. I teach a class in songwriting at Yale and there's a whole curriculum on musical theater. And I was hosting Richard and David as guest lecturers in a master class. Somebody asked a question, nothing to do with Sondheim, but I actually quote this in the book. Out of nowhere, Richard says, well, I guess it's something like, where do you get your ideas or where do you get your inspiration? And Richard, out of nowhere, says, you wake up in the morning. There sits Stephen Sondheim. And anything you can think of, he's already thought of it.

You decide you want to go up this road. He's sitting in the middle of the road. You decide you want to go up that road. He's sitting in the middle of that road, too. And I thought, wow, this is like a constant lurking presence for you. You know, we barely scratched the surface of creativity and out comes Stephen Sondheim. I never forgot that. That was before I ever dreamed that I was going to write a book about them. But I always remembered that little divergent monologue about Stephen Sondheim that Richard Maltby delivered apropos of nothing.

[19:05] David Armstrong: So I think when I sat down to write the book, there's going to have to be a chapter about Steve.

[19:09] Joshua Rosenblum: You say in the book that was during that period when every songwriter was under the shadow of Stephen Sondheim, which has changed a bit since then.

[19:18] David Armstrong: Yes, for sure. It's definitely not that way now, but there was a time where it seemed like every young composer was just imitating Sondheim, either intentionally or unintentionally.

[19:26] Joshua Rosenblum: And that famous, was it the New York Times? Is Stephen Sondheim God? Where was that article?

[19:30] David Armstrong: Yes, that was New York Magazine.

[19:32] Joshua Rosenblum: Oh, New York Magazine, right. That was infamous.

[19:34] David Armstrong: Yeah, that was a really well-written piece. I've quoted from that a fair amount.

[19:38] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, and it certainly reflects that moment that you're talking about.

[19:41] David Armstrong: Right. That was right before Passion, which did not turn out to be a big hit. But, you know, we had already had Sweeney Todd and Merrily and Sunday in the Park and Sunday in the Park won the Pulitzer Prize. And what are Lapine and Sondheim going to do next? And so this was in the wake of that. And all the writers, Jason Robert Brown and that whole school of writing that was happening then was clearly under the influence of Sondheim.

[20:02] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, no question.

[20:03] David Armstrong: Yeah. Couldn't ignore him.

[20:05] Joshua Rosenblum: You bring up some amazing connections between Sondheim and Maltby and Shire, their friends and colleagues and admirers. And Sondheim helps to kickstart their career at one point by helping them get an agent and a manager or something.

[20:19] David Armstrong: What I thought was the most mind-blowing was that David Shire believes he was the model for Bobby in Company.

[20:26] Joshua Rosenblum: He says that. And he says that more than one person told him that. So, you know, he's not making it up. I read somewhere else that Warren Beatty was the model for Bobby.

[20:35] David Armstrong: Yeah, I've heard that, too.

[20:36] Joshua Rosenblum: Yes. But David says he got it confirmed. And, you know, David does not want to make things up.

[20:42] David Armstrong: Yeah, I'm not sure I'd cop to that if I were.

[20:46] Joshua Rosenblum: He's proud of it.

[20:47] David Armstrong: He's proud of it.

[20:48] Joshua Rosenblum: Yes. And then Richard Maltby ends up taking Sondheim's place, writing crossword puzzles.

[20:54] David Armstrong: Yes. Writing those cryptic puzzles.

[20:56] Joshua Rosenblum: He does them for Harper's now. New York Magazine doesn't do them anymore. Sondheim started them at New York Magazine, did them for a while until just got to be too much. And I think it was then when Company was going into rehearsal. He said, I just can't do these anymore. And Maltby said, I love doing these so much. Could I take them over for you? And Sondheim said, sure. And they went to the editor in New York and he said, sure. So Maltby did them for New York for a while. The pace got to be too hectic. I think he said he was doing them every three weeks. So he stopped for a while. But then Harper's Magazine wanted them and they said, hey, you can do it. It only has to be once a month. So that is a slightly less hectic pace. He's been doing them for Harper's for 30 years, something like that. And he's still doing them.

[21:30] David Armstrong: Amazing.

[21:31] Joshua Rosenblum: David says, if it weren't for those damn cryptics, we'd have written five or six more musicals.

[21:38] David Armstrong: That's hilarious.

[21:39] Joshua Rosenblum: They have a great repartee between them.

[21:41] David Armstrong: Absolutely.

[21:42] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, exactly. It is very entertaining being around them. It was very fun to interview them. I interviewed them together and separately. But the together sessions were particularly enjoyable. It was like a polished vaudeville act.

[21:57] David Armstrong: Yeah, I've enjoyed a little bit of that as well to be in the room with them. When they I wouldn't ever say they disagree, but they definitely are like an old married couple in a way.

[22:07] Joshua Rosenblum: That is it. That is exactly what they're like.

[22:09] David Armstrong: Didi Khan, who's David's wife, has a great line on that. She said Richard is like David's other wife. I mean, I wish he'd help more with the cooking.

[22:17] Joshua Rosenblum: That's really good.

[22:19] David Armstrong: Again, something she's used a million times, I'm sure.

[22:22] Joshua Rosenblum: Probably.

[22:23] David Armstrong: She's adorable. So let's talk about these musicals that we don't know. These book shows that sound fascinating and all of which produce songs that we do know eventually.

[22:34] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. Did you want to just go in order? I Love You, I Think, is one of their earliest ones, which they write with Michael Stewart.

[22:42] David Armstrong: Is that right?

[22:43] Joshua Rosenblum: Yes. Yeah, that must have been really something that was sort of rock and roll. Richard claims it was the first rock musical, even though no one really knows it. And it was almost exactly contemporaneous with Hair, which most people say actually was the first rock musical. Obviously, Richard and David did not copy from Hair because it was going on. They were doing them at the same time, of course. But they just thought that was the music of today. Why shouldn't that be what theater is? That did a tour. It toured the music. What do they call it? The music tent.

[23:10] David Armstrong: The music tent circuit.

[23:12] Joshua Rosenblum: Music fairs.

[23:14] David Armstrong: Yeah. But never made it into New York. But they did extract a bunch of songs from that that were used in Starting Here, Starting Now. And then Love Match followed quickly on the heels of that.

[23:24] Joshua Rosenblum: Right.

[23:25] David Armstrong: And that's more of a period piece, isn't it?

[23:27] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. That was the story of Albert and Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. That also gave a lot of great songs to Starting Here, Starting Now, including I Think I May Want to Remember Today. And, of course, the memorable Albert, Albert, Albert.

[23:41] David Armstrong: Exactly. Albert is where that is coming from.

[23:43] Joshua Rosenblum: Yes. And you listen to that song, you think, who is Albert? Is that just a name they picked at random? It turns out it was Prince Albert.

[23:48] David Armstrong: Yes, that's so funny.

[23:49] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, that was a revelation to me. I didn't know that.

[23:51] David Armstrong: Yeah, I remember the first time I heard that or figured that out. I thought that was amazing.

[23:55] Joshua Rosenblum: It is. And then they wrote a show that they called The John Reed Show.

[23:59] David Armstrong: Right.

[24:00] Joshua Rosenblum: That's about the communist John Reed. Wasn't there a movie with Warren Beatty about that?

[24:04] David Armstrong: Yeah, Reds.

[24:05] Joshua Rosenblum: Reds, yeah. Which was about John Reed. And he was apparently a very interesting character. That show fell through, and that was particularly disappointing to Maltby because he wanted to work with Hal Prince more than anything. And Hal Prince was directing it. Lincoln Center was going to do it, I think. An earlier incarnation of Lincoln Center Theater. They said they'd do it if you could find a book writer of sufficient stature.

[24:25] David Armstrong: Who did they have?

[24:26] Joshua Rosenblum: Peter Schaefer?

[24:27] David Armstrong: It was a British, yeah. I'm trying to remember.

[24:29] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah. And he fell through, and they couldn't get someone else that Lincoln Center thought was good enough. And apparently Hal Prince said something pretty unpleasant to David about you need a better colleague than Richard Maltby. And Richard heard that, and he was devastated. I think he then went into therapy. Maybe not as a direct result of that. But at the time, it seemed that Hal did not appreciate Richard as much as he appreciated David.

[24:50] David Armstrong: But didn't really understand that the whole point was they brought the best out in each other. And they're both great artists in their own right, but what was really great was their collaboration.

[24:57] Joshua Rosenblum: When you go into a lot of detail about their working process and that collaboration and how David Shire gives Richard all the credit, basically, for teaching him how to write songs for the theater, how to create a theater song.

[25:10] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's incredibly self-effacing of David. He says I was basically Richard's student, overlooking the fact that he himself is a brilliant world-class composer.

[25:18] Joshua Rosenblum: And often a lyricist.

[25:19] David Armstrong: Yes, right. Some of those songs are music and lyrics by David. They always say Maltby and Shire. Richard freely admits that David wrote all the words to Starting Here, Starting Now, for one. Or Richard contributed one line where David was having trouble finding a rhyme. And David wrote lyrics for What About Today, music and lyrics. And I thought it was interesting, as you just alluded to, David will always then say, yes, but the best line in the song came from Richard. They love nothing more than to give each other credit. That's one of the best things about them. And that, of course, is why their partnership has endured for almost 70 years now.

[25:50] David Armstrong: Wow, amazing. Has there been any other partnership that's lasted that long?

[25:53] Joshua Rosenblum: No.

[25:54] David Armstrong: Not Comden and Green.

[25:55] Joshua Rosenblum: I'm trying to think who were the other long ones.

[25:57] David Armstrong: That was pretty long.

[25:58] Joshua Rosenblum: That was long, but not 70 years.

[26:00] David Armstrong: Maybe 60 years.

[26:01] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, I remember checking. Jeffrey Block would not have let me get away with it. But yeah, it is the longest collaborative partnership of that kind.

[26:09] David Armstrong: After these setbacks and, you know, as you said, this devastating assessment from Hal Prince, Maltby and Shire sort of go their separate ways for a while and have a great deal of success.

[26:21] Joshua Rosenblum: What is David Shire's? Where does he go?

[26:23] David Armstrong: David goes to L.A., to Hollywood to be a film composer because he had a friend, a former colleague from the New York theater community who was out there writing TV scores and movie scores. And he said, you'd fit in great here. David says they start you out writing the obituaries, basically, like an up-and-coming newspaper journalist. The equivalent of obituaries is like doing episodic TV series. And then gradually you get better TV shows and then you get, as he puts it, crappy movies and then you get better movies. And he's had incredible success. He's done some of the great classic movie scores. The Taking of Pelham 123 is an enduring David Shire classic.

[26:59] Joshua Rosenblum: And that, for music geeks, is noteworthy because it was the first. It wasn't the first, but it was probably the first breakout film to use the 12-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg for composing atonal music. A lot of people think, oh, atonal music, I don't like it. If you're sitting in a concert hall, it might be hard to listen to. But if you're watching a movie, sometimes it's very appropriate. It's very dramatic.

[27:19] David Armstrong: Yeah, exactly. Violent or scary or dramatic. Like you said, you don't want to hear something pretty.

[27:24] Joshua Rosenblum: David was brilliant at that. And that score is very dissonant, but it's also brilliant and perfect.

[27:31] David Armstrong: I saw that movie. I remember that movie being gripping and thrilling.

[27:34] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah. And a lot of it was the music.

[27:36] David Armstrong: Yeah. It would be interesting to go back and revisit that with that in mind now, knowing that David Shire did it.

[27:41] Joshua Rosenblum: There's some comment on a YouTube thread of the title track to Pelham 123. And the listener wrote, oh, my God, that theme is so dirty. I want to leave my wife and kid and run off to Mexico with it.

[27:55] David Armstrong: That's hilarious.

[27:57] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah. I put that in a footnote. A lot of people might not see it, but I thought it was worth mentioning. He does a famous Francis Ford Coppola movie as well.

[28:04] David Armstrong: Yes, exactly. That was The Conversation.

[28:06] Joshua Rosenblum: And that was a piano-only score. That has a cult following, too. And Francis Coppola was his brother-in-law because he married Talia Shire. They've been divorced for decades now, but he married Talia when he was first moved out to Hollywood. She was Talia Coppola then, Francis Coppola's sister. He met Francis through her and they got to know each other. And Francis heard some of his music and said, hey, you're really great and hired him to write The Conversation. And they wrote theme songs as well as part of that Hollywood world, probably most famously the theme from Norma Rae.

[28:35] David Armstrong: What is that song?

[28:36] Joshua Rosenblum: Oh, yeah. It's slipping my mind at the moment.

[28:38] David Armstrong: But he won an Oscar for that.

[28:39] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah. It goes like it goes.

[28:41] David Armstrong: Thank you very much. As I said, I submitted this book about a year and a half ago. But thank you.

[28:47] Joshua Rosenblum: That's actually a song I remember very vividly from the time. I like that song. I had no idea it was David Shire, though, at the time.

[28:53] David Armstrong: There's a story about he had written the music and Norman Gimbel had written the lyrics. And then the star backed out and somebody else took that star's place. All of a sudden they said, well, we need to rewrite this song. This star has a much better range. We can do much more with it. But Gimbel had only been contracted to write lyrics for this song. Shire had been contracted to write the whole score. I'm going to write another song. Gimbel said, no way, man. Not if they're not going to pay me again. I'm not doing it. Shire said, come on, we've got to do this. And Gimbel said, all right, I'm sending you another set of lyrics, but do not change a single word. And he then didn't speak to David for like a year.

The movie came out. The song got an Oscar nomination. They're sitting there at the Oscars next to each other, not speaking. Song wins the Oscar. They go backstage up to the post-Oscars party. They're in the elevator together. And Gimbel says, all right, fine, I guess I have to speak to you now.

[29:36] David Armstrong: I love that story. Yeah, that was great.

[29:39] David Armstrong: So simultaneously, Maltby is off on his own, and he starts directing.

[29:43] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, exactly.

[29:44] David Armstrong: And had he really directed before this? What was his background in directing?

[29:49] Joshua Rosenblum: None. He had no background in directing. Again, he says this came out in therapy. He said, what I was really sitting on was I need to direct myself so I can direct these songs properly, because I don't think our songs are being directed properly.

[30:03] David Armstrong: So in a way, it came out of this series of failed shows that he didn't think the direction, and sometimes the direction really was off base in them. He wanted more control.

[30:12] Joshua Rosenblum: Yes, absolutely. And he was always afraid to challenge authority, which he said was because he was always afraid to challenge his father. You know, these are the kinds of things that come out in therapy. He said, you know, he and his father had a wonderful, spectacular relationship. At one time, his father said, hey, let's write a song together, me write music and you write lyrics. And he said he took the same approach he used to take with David, which was, I don't think this is quite right. And his father could not deal with that kind of thing and sort of shut down immediately. Richard said, ever since then, I've had a problem with challenging authority. So I had to be a director myself because then I was the authority.

[30:42] David Armstrong: He has great success with it, doesn't he?

[30:44] Joshua Rosenblum: Huge.

[30:45] David Armstrong: And with serious plays in the beginning.

[30:48] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. Yeah. A Long Day's Journey Into Night, that was one of the first things he directed. Not what I would recommend for a first-time director.

[30:51] David Armstrong: No, definitely not.

[30:52] Joshua Rosenblum: But he had the opportunity and he took it and it worked out fine. And he was very eloquent about how much he learned on that project. And then he did something with Lynn Meadow at Manhattan Theater Club and it was not a success. And she felt really bad for him. She wanted to give him another project. And she said, hey, I remember you talking about how much you like Fats Waller. What if you did like a review of Fats Waller songs? The rest is history because that was Ain't Misbehavin'. And Ain't Misbehavin' won best musical, best director, best everything. It was the first non-book musical to win best musical. In other words, it's a review, it's a collection of songs, no plot, no characters, but it won best musical. And that was the first time in history. And that was Richard Maltby's Brainchild.

[31:29] David Armstrong: And that put him in a position to be the king of reviews, basically. But before we get there, didn't we jump over Starting Here, Starting Now?

[31:38] Joshua Rosenblum: I think you're right. I think Starting Here, Starting Now predates Ain't Misbehavin'.

[31:41] David Armstrong: And that, again, is Lynn Meadow and Manhattan Theater Club inviting Richard and bringing Maltby and Shire back together.

[31:48] Joshua Rosenblum: Yes, exactly. Lynn Meadow, as a girl who grew up in New Haven, was in the cast of their second musical, The Grand Tour. That was the musical they did when they were seniors. And 10-year-old Lynn Meadow was in that cast as a local New Haven townie because her mother was friendly with them and she was in it, too. Lynn Meadow grew up, went to Yale School of Drama, graduate degree in directing, went to New York, was hired by the Manhattan Theater Club, which was then a struggling small organization. She turned it around. It's now a big New York theater powerhouse, you know, for 40 years. So she revered Richard and David. They were like her childhood heroes. And when they sort of had their, as they put it, their divorce and David went to Hollywood and Richard started directing, Lynn said, hey, these guys have these great songs.

I'm sure that if they started digging through their trunk, we'd be able to make something out of it. And she said to Richard, try to put something together. And he said, that sounds crazy. You know, these songs are all from failed musicals. Why would we want to put them in a review?

[32:40] David Armstrong: Doesn't he say he sort of hated the songs at that point or was very down on the songs because they hadn't worked in the shows or the shows hadn't worked?

[32:46] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. They reminded him of all these flops. He says as he started looking through them, he said, hey, these songs are pretty good. And maybe out of context, they can add up to something. And sure enough, that's how the world first heard of them really was from this off-Broadway review that was on its own terms, a big hit. It was a collection of failed songs and it was after the team had parted ways. So this huge history before starting here, starting now. And they essentially gave up as a songwriting team and Lynn Meadow brought them back together and resurrected their career.

[33:10] David Armstrong: I love that story. And I find it so interesting that their career of note basically starts with a retrospective of their failed work in a way.

[33:22] Joshua Rosenblum: That's exactly it. Yep. Yeah.

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[35:11] David Armstrong: With some new songs that were written for Starting Here, Starting Now.

[35:15] Joshua Rosenblum: That is correct. But just a handful.

[35:21] David Armstrong: Yeah, I have a great affection for that score for that album for that show. As I said, it came out when I was in college. It was the go-to collection of songs for every musical theater major at the University of Cincinnati. It was the be-all end-all.

[35:34] Joshua Rosenblum: Wow.

[35:34] David Armstrong: And so it's emblazoned. I mean, I know every note of that record. What was your first exposure to this score? You're quite a bit younger than I am. This record probably doesn't loom in your history the way it does in mine.

[35:45] Joshua Rosenblum: Yeah, actually, I had a very noteworthy first encounter with it, which was I guess it was after my junior year in college, I was hired to be the piano player for a season of Summer Stock in Connecticut. And the first show they were going to do was Starting Here, Starting Now. And I had never heard of it. Later on, they were doing a little night music. And I knew that very well. And a few others I knew well, but I'd never heard of Starting Here, Starting Now. So I went to my local record store and bought a copy and listened to it and thought, hey, wow, this is really good. Who are these guys? I learned more about them, played through the score, learned it because I had to in a few weeks be able to play it.

And I just thought, wow, he's a really interesting composer. And this guy's a really brilliant lyricist. And then I read, oh, they're both Yale alums. And I was a junior at Yale at the time. And I thought, oh, wow, well, these guys are sort of role models for me because I was a composer and interested in writing concert music, but also getting very interested in musical theater, being at Yale where lots of musicals got done. So that was a very distinct first impression I got of them. It was my job to learn that show. And I had only like two or three weeks to do it between the end of school and the beginning of summer stock. So that was my first experience with that album. I learned it really well.

[36:49] David Armstrong: Also, give us a sense of and you go into great, wonderful detail on many of the songs. So you have a whole chapter, I think, on I Don't Remember Christmas.

[36:54] Joshua Rosenblum: That's right.

[36:54] David Armstrong: But just overall, as a collection of songs, why is it so impactful? There's no through line to it in any way, shape or form is literally a review. It's a cast of three. Not only was it a hit in New York, and I think the most important thing about it is it was done in every regional theater in America.

[37:09] Joshua Rosenblum: Right. Exactly. It's so easy to do. It's only three people and a pianist. You can do it with a few other musicians, but it works just fine with someone at the piano, as I can attest. Well, it's the quality of the individual songs, which I've, as you said, devoted a whole chapter to a few of them. I think the fact that they are self-contained mini musicals, they're story songs, as some people call them. I think that is partly why they don't all necessarily work in the musicals that they were originally written for, is because they're fully self-contained. They don't really advance the plot. They are the entire plot of a story. They all have dramatic action. That's Maltby's term. They all start you somewhere and take you somewhere in a very specific, dramatic way.

And that's what Maltby says all theater songs have to do. They all have text and subtext. And that's what Maltby says most of the directors miss when they direct his songs, is they miss the subtext. The song is often about something that is completely the opposite of what it sounds like it's about. Some of them are liar's songs. That's my term for a song where the person singing it is outright lying to you. Like, I don't remember Christmas is a liar's song.

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[38:45] Joshua Rosenblum: He's trying to say he's forgotten this woman completely, but obviously he is completely obsessed and can't think about anything other than her. Those are some of the things that I think make them so memorable. And just the beauty of the music, Shire's unerring instinct for exactly the right chord on exactly the right melody note and his ability to sort of expand tonality beyond the conventional without getting too far out so that it's off-putting. But he has a very sophisticated harmonic language. Richard is brilliantly sophisticated and witty, but he also manages to make every line sound like what you would have said anyway if it didn't have to be a lyric and have to rhyme and scan. He somehow manages to make it rhyme and scan perfectly, but also sound like normal conversation. That's his great gift.

[39:29] David Armstrong: And I also remember feeling at the time, what year is this? 1977? I just remember being in college that this felt like cutting-edge contemporary musical theater. Wow. Right now, of the moment, equally valid with Sondheim. There was nothing about it that seemed from the past, although certainly there were pastiche elements to it at times, but on purpose, it defined contemporary musical theater for that moment, I think, for my generation.

[39:52] Joshua Rosenblum: Wow. That's such a great quote. I wish I'd had that in my book. I just checked it. The cast album came out in 77. It started at Manhattan Theater Club in 76 and transferred off-Broadway to Barbara Ann in 77, and that was the year of the album also.

[40:08] David Armstrong: And I did it in summer stock in 82. And then the following year, my first year in graduate school, I met a freshman young woman who was a singer and really terrific. We did a cabaret together. The first song we did together was Crossword Puzzle, Great Maltby and Shire Crossword Puzzle. And flash forward, and that woman is now my wife of many years. We have a soft spot for that song. So that's another way that Maltby and Shire sort of interweaved with my personal life.

[40:31] Joshua Rosenblum: That's a great story. They brought you together.

[40:34] David Armstrong: They did.

[40:34] Joshua Rosenblum: On the next episode of Broadway Nation, Joshua Rosenblum returns to share more of the unique six-decade songwriting partnership of Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire, the subject of his fascinating new book, Closer Than Ever.

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[41:53] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and want to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation. For as little as $7 a month, you can receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of many of the interviews featured on this podcast. I often record twice as much conversation as ends up in the edited public episodes. And you also have the exclusive opportunity to hear additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host, Albert Evans. And all patrons will receive special on-air shout-outs and acknowledgments of your vital support. To join, simply go to broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. That's all one word, broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. Or simply click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pauls Mox for his help with editing this episode, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

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