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[0:00] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: This is Jennifer Ashley Tepper, and you're listening to the Untold Stories of Broadway podcast.

[0:04] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Today I am so excited that my guest is Richard Maltby Jr., a writer who I've been obsessed with for many years.

[0:10] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: You might know Richard Maltby Jr. as lyricist of musicals like Baby and Big, Closer Than Ever, Starting Here, Starting Now, Miss Saigon.

[0:17] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: He also in 1978 directed and conceived a little musical called Ain't Misbehavin', which played the Longacre Theatre, and he has some incredible stories about it that we're so excited to share with you.

[0:49] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Hi, everybody. It's Jennifer Ashley Tepper here with the Untold Stories of Broadway podcast, and I'm here today with the great Richard Maltby Jr.

[0:58] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: So Richard is someone who I have worshipped since I was a child as a lyricist, as a director, as a theater artist. I grew up obsessed with many of his musicals, a lot of which I'm going to be asking him about today.

[1:08] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: And today's episode is about the Longacre Theatre.

[1:11] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: The Longacre, located at 220 West 48th Street, was built in 1912. It is named because of Longacre Square, which is what Times Square was originally called before they changed the name to fit with the newspaper.

[1:24] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: One of my favorite facts about the Longacre is one of the earliest facts, which is that Harry Frizzi built it. He was the owner of the Boston Red Sox and known for having sold Babe Ruth's contract to the Yankees to finance his theater ventures.

[1:35] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: And because of that, there was a rumor that there was a curse on the Longacre. So now the first fact I've given you on this episode is about sports, which is very weird because we'll probably never talk about sports again.

[1:45] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: So without further ado, I want to welcome Richard Maltby Jr. to the podcast.

[1:48] Richard Maltby Jr: Hello, Jennifer.

[1:50] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Hi, Richard. Thank you for being here.

[1:52] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, I love the Longacre.

[1:54] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I love that you love the Longacre. Some of my favorite stories I've heard about it were from you, and I'm excited to get to that.

[2:00] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, when Ain't Misbehavin' was moving, and it moved on an incredibly fast trajectory, I was taken to pick a theater. Can you imagine? I was taken to eight empty theaters to give my choice of which one.

[2:25] Richard Maltby Jr: And I picked the Longacre, which was not a popular theater. It's not on 45th Street or 44th Street. It's not a—in those days, walk-in trade meant something. So you wanted the theater to be where people walked so that they could walk by and go, oh, I want to see that and buy a ticket.

[2:42] Richard Maltby Jr: Longacre was, you know, two blocks off of that. And so it wasn't a popular theater, but it had an oddity. The stage was low, lower than most stages. Comparably the Music Box, which is where Derby Hansen is playing here, it's quite a high stage. This one was low, and as a result, the cast could have access to the audience.

[3:11] Richard Maltby Jr: This was all about the cast playing off the audience. And in fact, with Jung Lee Beatty, we actually added two steps down from the stage with sort of strip lights on them, so that the actors would actually step down to kind of make contact with the audience.

[3:29] Richard Maltby Jr: I wanted the actors to be able to really, I wanted the show to make contact with the audience. And so I really like that. So when I came back and told Manny Eisenberg, who was producing it, that I wanted the Longacre, there was this big long pause. Nobody wants the Longacre. It's like, you know, nobody wants the Longacre.

[3:53] Richard Maltby Jr: Aside from other things, it also has a second balcony, which means though it has a thousand seats, you know, 150 of them or something are way up high and they're hard to sell. So, you know, but I was the director. The show was a big success, and everybody treated me very well, so I got what I wanted.

[4:19] Richard Maltby Jr: And it actually everything about that turned out to be exactly perfect. The show had this tremendous immediacy with the audience. But after a year, the fact that you couldn't sell the second balcony and all of that began to sort of build up. So we moved to the Plymouth Theater where we played for two years, and then we moved to the Belasco and played for another year.

[4:46] Richard Maltby Jr: So, but the Longacre was wonderful. This show went into rehearsal on January 1st of that year of '78. It rehearsed for four weeks. It opened on February 1st, closed on March 1st. On April 1st, it went into rehearsal for Broadway. On May 1st, it opened on Broadway. And on June 1st, it won every award you can win.

[5:24] Richard Maltby Jr: So I just thought that's what, you know, theater is like. I should say when we went into rehearsal, we went into rehearsal in the cabaret space at the Manhattan Theater Club, a room that they didn't know what to do with. And they, you know, Lynn Meadow sort of twisted my arm and said, I don't know what to put in there in January. Come on, do that show. You were all excited about Fats Waller. Why don't you do that show?

[5:51] Richard Maltby Jr: And so I said, Well, okay. I love that. And it led to the longest running show at the Longacre. Is it the longest running show at the Longacre? Oh my god, how very, very nice.

[6:01] Richard Maltby Jr: I'm gonna make you rewind. I want to hear more about the beginnings of Lynn Meadow. You go way back with her and just the beginnings of your roots as a musical theater creator.

[6:10] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: So tell us about what was the first Broadway show that you ever saw? How did you start get started in the theater?

[6:18] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, I don't know. My father was an orchestrator, and he did sort of symphonic orchestrations and he was brought to New York when I was seven. And so I guess what should I see first? I think maybe I think I saw Carousel first, and I was sitting in the balcony and I kept saying, When is the carousel coming back?

[6:48] Richard Maltby Jr: And my mother said, Shh, quite next scene. Next, if you remember, the scene after the carousel is about a half an hour long. It's a big love scene, and I'm sitting there bored and bored. It's like when is the carousel coming back? Next scene. Of course, the carousel never comes back, and we got to the end of the show. And I thought, oh, that's okay. But I wanted to be a set designer.

[7:11] Richard Maltby Jr: So what I loved was not so much the theater as the Radio City Music Hall. I loved the scenery in the Radio City Music Hall. You know, big overblown things. And my big excitement was that one year my father got to orchestrate the Easter show. So I got to go to the rehearsal. Wow. Which was so great.

[7:33] Richard Maltby Jr: Those shows, they did four shows and five movies a day, opening at 9:30 in the morning. And they did it every day. So when there was a changeover, it happened overnight. By the time the last movie was starting, they were loading the scenery out and loading it back in. We drove in at like four o'clock in the morning at four, the court de ballets on stage, at five the Rockettes are on stage, at six, you know, and he took me underneath the stage where the hydraulic lifts are, and they did that Easter, the fat big Easter pageant that took place in a big cathedral where everybody, the dancers, they were all nuns.

[8:23] Richard Maltby Jr: They were all holding these great white lilies, and they were so beautiful, and I stood in the wings, and as they walked stately like nuns off stage, then tossed the old prop lilies into those baskets, which were kind of gray and old. Wow. Anyway, I just, but I learned something because they did a run, a dress rehearsal of the whole show that ended at about 9:30. The audience was already coming into the theater when they were clearing the tables, and they padded the show on the first day with some short subjects.

[9:00] Richard Maltby Jr: They showed the movie and then they started the show, and they had rewritten it. I didn't know you could do that. My little seven-year-old brain went, oh my god. I just didn't. Yeah. It wasn't what they had rehearsed three hours earlier. I thought that was wonderful.

[9:22] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: So tell me about your time at Yale and how did you get started as a lyricist and then as a director? What was that time like and your early years in New York?

[9:31] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, I always wanted to be a—I wanted to be a set designer. I wanted to, you know, which lasted all the way through my second year at Yale when I discovered that I couldn't draw. And that was like the end of that. My roommate was John Conklin, who was a world-class opera designer. So I was—it was clear I was not in that league. I wanted to do musicals because the scenery is more interesting, and so I did—I put on some kind of show in eighth grade. I put on a—I wrote a musical in my senior year in prep school. You can find somebody to write the book, and you could find somebody to write the music, but nobody wants to write the lyrics. So by just process of elimination, I wrote the lyrics.

[10:26] Richard Maltby Jr: I had no interest in being a lyricist, but I just wrote the lyrics. I then, uh, went to Yale because, uh, Yale had a theater. Harvard didn't, but yeah, Yale had a theater, and, um, in my freshman year, I met David Shire. I came to Yale to write musicals. He came, he was a composer, he came to Yale to write musicals. There was nobody else. I mean, we didn't all that much cotton onto each other immediately, but, um, there was nobody, there was no way we weren't gonna work together because there was nobody else. And, uh, so, uh, we started and, uh, we wrote two musicals when we were at Yale. And, um, the first one we, we, we, we, our first attempt was we decided to adapt, um, What Makes Sammy Run, the Bud Schwert novel, and, uh, we were all trotting along until somebody pointed out that you can't do it unless you have the rights.

I didn't know that you didn't have that you had to get rights. So the next year we picked something in the public domain. So we picked Cyrano de Bergerac, wonderful romantic thing, great. We didn't sort of factor in that we were picking the period with the most elaborate costumes that ever was. I mean, everybody is going to wear incredible clothes. We're doing a Yale dramat with no money, you know. I don't know how we did it. We got somebody, someone in one of the women in the, um, who was a costume major at the drama school did it. These incredible clothes appeared. Um, and we, and the show is really sumptuous. We had a full orchestra, we had a New York orchestrator came up to orchestrate it.

Uh, had five huge sets. It was a big deal. And we also decided to tour it because in the Cole Porter days, the, um, uh, the shows would, would, would, uh, would tour after they were done at the Schubert Theater and then they would tour. So we thought, well, of course we'll do that. And we got sort of picked up, and so we did it at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival Theater because the Yale Club of Fairfield County decided to sponsor it, and we brought it to New York and played at the Phoenix Theater for one night. It was all fine. I was the treasurer of the city. That's a good thing. I didn't even know that. And I know I, I was, I was the treasurer and, and, uh, I had it all worked out except that I didn't factor in that stagehands have to get paid, you know, in the theater.

Um, in at, in college, you just stay up all night. Right, right. Um, so, um, years later I met Hal Prince and I, and he said, you know, I, I saw Cyrano and I said, you did? Who, why on earth did you do that? I said, oh, we were all there, everyone in New York was there. I said, you, you were? He said, yes. I mean, a show from Yale was coming into the Phoenix Theater. Of course we were gonna go and see it. I said, well, why didn't anybody say anything to us? We didn't hear anything. For people who don't know the Phoenix, it's a fascinating theater. It's where The Golden Apple started before it moved to the Alvin, which is my, you know, favorite Phoenix fact. But, um, it was like a beloved off-Broadway theater where lots of shows played.

Um, and it, on the bigger, it was a little more than an off-Broadway theater. It was a big, it was a full-size Broadway house. Yeah, they did shows sometimes that I think campaigned to be considered Broadway and were. Yes, and, and it was, um, um, uh, T. Edward Hamilton and, uh, I can't remember the name of, uh, um, of his partner, um, decided to do a sort of repertory theater. And they produced a sizable number of plays, um, starting a whole bunch of careers. Um, really, really interesting work. Yeah. Um, and so Cyrano, I know there's like a recording that I've heard, but there are songs from that that have ended up in other projects of yours. So what songs from that?

[14:49] Richard Maltby Jr: David and I recycle everything. Um, Autumn. Yeah, which is one of the first songs we ever, the first really good song that we wrote. The first moment that I really knew David was a writer. Um, Barbra Streisand recorded that. And, um, and that sort of, do you want to tell us how that happened? Because it's a great story. Well, um, oh, um, when we came to New York, um, I can't exactly remember the sequence of events, but, um, Peter Daniels, who was, um, Barbara's, um, arranger who did all those, the arrangements for those early albums, um, heard some of our songs somewhere and, uh, got to know David, and, um, he kept putting these songs in front of Barbara. Um, you, that's what you do with Barbara.

You don't tell her you should, you, you don't ask her to do a song, you place it on the piano and, and just don't say it's there until she says, what's that? Although this is not for you, Barbara. It's not for you. I'm not, what do you mean it's not for me? What's for a man? Oh, I'm gonna hear it. Um, so, uh, that, that's what he did with, uh, with Autumn, uh, which we always thought was gonna be a song for a man. And, um, he then, he then, uh, went on to be, uh, the pianist for the, for the new musical Funny Girl that was coming in and then assistant conductor, and then he ended up conducting about a hundred performances of the show, which was fun.

[16:34] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: So you're these Yale students who've written this song that Barbra Streisand recorded, and you've moved to New York, um, and you're writing musicals together. What were the first shows that you and David wrote together, um, that happened after college?

[16:47] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, um, they, we did a review called Graham Crackers that was at the Upstairs at the Downstairs. Uh, Ronnie Graham, who was the star of New Faces of '52, did a, um, was doing a show and looking for people, and we happened to have some songs, Crossword Puzzles from that. Um, and, uh, Autumn is in it. Um, you can hear Autumn and Crossword Puzzle on any recording of Starting Here, Starting Now. That was a plug for one of my favorite musicals.

[17:21] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Cool.

[17:23] Richard Maltby Jr: I like that. It's still out there. Somebody just called up and said they want to do a big production of it in, um, Toronto.

[17:29] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Oh, cool.

[17:30] Richard Maltby Jr: I said that's great. I said I can't see the Statue of Liberty without singing Crossword Puzzles, so it sticks with us all. That's good. That's good. So, um, you know, we, we did that. Ronnie was incredible. He was a manic genius.

[17:49] Richard Maltby Jr: And he would, he would improvise a sketch, just improvise it, and it would be flawless. It would be just perfect. And we were laughing everything. Ronnie, we just got, that's that, let's write that down. And he would say, write what down? Had no memory of what he had just done. And, uh, I mean, I kept trying to be a stenographer was the before you had little recording things in your hands.

[18:17] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Um, so, um, can you also, what was Upstairs at the Downstairs like for people who didn't know it?

[18:24] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, there were a series of, uh, sort of chic supper clubs that did after dinner, um, uh, uh shows. The, the, there were a lot number of people who did them. Bill, uh, um, Ben Bagley was one, but sort of the most chic, the most epicene of them all was Julius Monk. He had this club for himself called The Upstairs or the Downstairs. He also moved on to the Plaza Hotel and did a show called Plaza Nine that ran for, you know, 10 or 15 years. The people were always in tuxedos, the women were always in evening gowns, and it was all very, very chic.

[19:10] Richard Maltby Jr: Songs like Fifth Avenue Buses Never Go Out Alone. That sort of, that, that sort of comedy. Um, what we played, we, we played a song for him about David's first brownstone in New York, and Julius said, no, no, no, no, David, we don't, we don't write, we don't do songs about first brownstones. We do songs about the doorknobs on brownstones. But they were very chic. And, and, and s and a lot of really wonderful, um, uh, young performers played there.

[19:42] Richard Maltby Jr: And, uh, he was doing this one show at the, uh, the Upstairs of the Dancers. Pat Stanley was in it. And Elaine Hanley, who had married Pat Stanley's husband.

[19:59] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Oh gosh.

[20:00] Richard Maltby Jr: So she was Pat Stanley.

[20:02] Richard Maltby Jr: It was no, no, it was the other way around. It was Elaine Hanley and Pat Stanley Hanley. That was amazing. They were, they were in it. Um, uh, who else was in it?

[20:14] Richard Maltby Jr: It was a guy who went into, um, MASH. Um, whose name I will, everybody's name I just can't pull out.

[20:23] Richard Maltby Jr: Um, so tell me about, I am so curious, I always want to know about it, The Sap of Life, which, um, I was in a theater all summer that was like a block away from where you guys played, and I would always go, that's where The Sap of Life played, right near Sheridan Square.

[20:36] Richard Maltby Jr: It's true, it's true. We, um, David and I wrote a second show at Yale, and we formed, uh, a kind of a, a, um, you know, real connection with people.

[20:47] Richard Maltby Jr: Um, there was a wonderful director named Bill Francisco who went on to teach at Wesleyan and where his prime student was Lynn Manuel. So I consider that I'm responsible for Lynn. Um, he was a director, a couple of people wanted to be producers. Um, we wrote this show that was based upon um, there was a wonderful book by John Cheever called The Wapshot Chronicles. I picked it up and read the blurb on the back, and I thought, that is a really good story for a musical. I then read the book. The story in the book is not the story on the back of the book. So I thought, okay, we'll just write the, we'll extrapolate a story from the back cover of the Wapshot Chronicles. And then we don't have to pay any royalty.

Right. You learned about getting ready to be able to do it. Well, yes. We had learned by then. So we did it. And um, the Fantastics had just opened the year before, so the idea of doing a small show, you know, with real intensity was really good. We took it to Williamstown and tried it out. We did about 25 backers auditions in people's living rooms to raise $25,000, which is what you had to do to, you know, to get the show. So it was a thousand dollars here and five hundred dollars there, and twenty-five hundred dollars maybe here. Um, and uh, and we did it and um that we tried it at Williamstown, then we brought it into New York. We had a different cast, it was not as good as the Williamstown cast, um, when we moved.

It um, it only ran for six weeks. It didn't get terribly good reviews. Um, got one rave review, but a bunch of sort of okay reviews. But from our point of view, um, uh, in the second week, Steve Sondheim came to see it. And the next week he came back and brought Jerry Robbins, and the next week he came back and brought Hal Prince and Leonard Bernstein. And somebody just called us up recently at a college someplace, a college, well, not someplace, it's Virginia Tech. Um, and they had wanted to do a concert version of the show. Nobody has asked us to do this show. It there isn't even a legitimate recording of it. We did record the score, but it allowed me to listen to the score again. The lyrics are there are a few really good lyrics, but mostly they're just sort of okay.

But the score is breathtaking. I mean, no wonder Steve and all these people went bonkers for it. It was two pianos and a percussionist. Um, and it was thrilling. I I I had sort of forgotten how completely wonderful it was. There's that song Love of Your Life that is as good as anything from a 60s musical. It's so like poppy, it's so great. Um, how so did you feel like um at that point? Were you already working on other shows? Um, were there things in the pipeline at that point?

[24:15] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, we worked on um a show called uh an adaptation of Rumor Gauden's novel The River, which was um uh uh a difficult show. It had a it was mostly a kind of a uh uh tone poem. It didn't have a lot of story, but for some reason I loved the movie and uh the movie was by John Renoir, it was a beautiful sort of evocative piece about an English family in India. Why we would choose this. What uh what did we know about India? What did we know about India? What did we know about English families living in India? Um, but we got pretty pretty c uh close to it. Um, and then we didn't not get the rights from uh Rumor Gauden, who wrote the novel. Uh um, and um we were working on another uh uh project that was uh about um the about John Reed, the the main the the only American who was buried in the Kremlin Wall, uh the subject of the movie Reds that uh um and we couldn't crack the story, but it was just this fabulous story about the radicals in in Greenwich Village before the first world war, in the years leading up to 1913 or whatever it was, um so much passion, so much vision for so much of a uh uh um uh energy to to create a new world.

Um, and of course we were doing this in the 60s, where it had a certain amount of um contemporary uh resonance. Um, so um, so we were we were doing that when the movie came out uh I saw it. And the uh Warren Beatty had hired Trevor Griffiths, the really wonderful English uh playwright, and he wrote an opening scene. And it's so good. I thought, why didn't we think of it? Um, Warren Beatty is a kind of uh John Reed was a kind of a charismatic young man, right? Very, very attractive. And um, and he's giving speeches all over the place. And he goes to, I think Portland, Oregon, and this young woman wants to interview him. Well, he knows what that means. If a young woman wants to interview him, he's gonna have her.

And this scene goes on, and slowly he catches on that she wants to interview him. She wants to interview him because of the passion of his politics and everything else. Slowly he settles down and says, Oh, realizes he's gonna spend the night talking to this woman. And then in the morning, she goes off to publish her story. Um, they then meet again in New York. But it's it's just a great scene. It's just a great opening because you know it's gonna be one scene that it turns out to be something else. And I thought, I wish we had been smart enough to think of that scene.

[27:38] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, what I love about so many of those projects that you were working on is that in addition to the book musicals that you and David eventually ended up having, you know, produced Baby and Big and all the others, um, all of these shows ended up with material that um a lot of them are in Starting Here, Starting Now or Closer Than Ever, which um the next question I'm gonna ask you for this is background on, but you know, I was obsessed with the Starting Here, Starting Now and Closer Than Ever Cast recordings and wanted to learn more about those songs. And when I found out that Pleased with Myself, which is an amazing song from Starting Here Starting Now, was from a musical called How Do You Do I Love You.

Of course, I tried to dig into what that was and became very much in love with that show, which um I'm gonna you should be committed. Richard, I'm telling you, there's there's so much in that show that like when I first heard the recording from the out-of-town tryouts. Um, you know, it's so funny and it so satirizes the social mores of that time. Um, it's like a musical about computer dating from the 60s. Like how did you come up with that?

[28:36] Richard Maltby Jr: Well, it was Michael B. Michael uh Stewart's uh idea. And um, but him comp the computer he was talking about was those computers who that filled up entire rooms in um in insurance companies. This woman decided that she was going to make use of the database in an insurance company to find the most appealing eligible men in New York because she wanted to find a husband. I mean, not exactly the most uh feminist drive for a plot, but uh that was you know, it manages to satirize so you know the opening or maybe the second number, the houses in Larchmont, it managed to satirize what was going on and why women, you know, might go on that journey, as well as it was, you know, of its time. Well, um I think I think it's more satirical now than it was when we wrote it.

Um, but we you know, we were doing a send-up of of the um uh the things that women had to do in order to get lead interesting lives. I mean, how they had to get jobs, which were manipulative things to get a husband, you know, and uh and the life that they were looking towards, like houses in Larchmont. I mean, the shining goal for them was something that now we would just consider so limited. And so, but that's what women in the 50s and 60s. Um, that's what what the what that was the goal. That's why women had so many nervous breakdowns. They go, they'd go out and they'd have this happy life with children and everything, and they'd be in this house, and one day they'd just have a breakdown in the middle of the street. Well, I think that's all in the musical in a pretty ahead of its time way.

[30:39] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Untold Stories of Broadway podcast with our guest, Richard Maltby Jr. Stay tuned for part two, featuring more stories about the Longacre Theatre. Thank you to our producer Dori Berinstein and my publishers of the Untold Stories of Broadway, Briesa Trincaro and Roberta Pereira, Zach Zadek for that theme music, and thank you to all of you for listening to the podcast. You can buy the Untold Stories in the book version on Amazon.com.