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The Business of Broadway
Composer Wildhorn on the Shubert, New Haven and Broadway's desperate need to build new audiences
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Business New Haven
2/22/1999
By: Sheila A. LaSella
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When The Civil War travels from New Haven to its Broadway opening in April, Frank Wildhorn will become the only American composer of the past 20 years to have three shows running simultaneously on Broadway. Currently, his musicals Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel are playing in New York.
The Civil War project began in 1995 and was written by Wildhorn, Gregory Boyd, artistic director of Houston's Alley Theatre, and Jack Murphy (Silver Dollar). Wildhorn recently sat down with Business New Haven to talk about the business of Broadway.
Why did you choose New Haven
for The Civil War's pre-Broadway
tryout?
When Jekyll & Hyde did its pre-Broadway tryout, we were here, as well as 36 other cities, and the Shubert was our favorite place to be. This theater is more like a Broadway theater than any other theater you will ever play on the road.
And it's intimate. My shows are really based on the emotion of the music, and its performance, and how those performances connect with the audience. In this environment that can really happen. When you look on the wall here you see all my heroes and the great shows they wrote and which opened here. That's a great tradition. I'm much more of a throwback to that than I am to anything else, because they were the top writers of their day.
And their music was the popular music of its day.
Although I take some shots for being 'pop,' I do so with no apologies. The writers who put those shows on here were trying to write popular hits. So there is a history here and I love that.
Also the theater, like any other business, is very much the people who run it. I'm an associate artist of the Alley Theatre in Houston, where Jekyll & Hyde and The Civil War were born. I became like family with Gregory Boyd, who runs the theater. In the same way, Caroline Werth is a dear friend of my wife, Linda Eder, and myself. I think it was at Caroline's house that I played music from The Civil War on the piano before it was recorded.
What has it been like 'manufacturing' the musical at the Shubert?
On a personal note it's great because I live in North Westchester (N.Y.), so I can commute. On an artistic level this theater has the facilities, the crew, the staff, the technical support, the business support. You know you can do it first-class. You really can do the Broadway production here.
And that's important. We don't want to do it again. We want to take this and learn from it and the audience and use that to make changes. But the production of the show will be established here because of how good the facilities and support systems are.
What changed in show business that made New Haven tryouts of Broadway shows obsolete?
The economics of putting on a show changed in the 1960s and '70s to a degree where producers were afraid to spend the money to go out of town.
And on a larger scale, in the early '60s, when rock 'n' roll took over the world and became the music of the youth of America, what theater did was the absolute wrong thing. Instead of embracing the musical vocabulary that the rest of the world was listening to, they became very snobby and highbrow - in their own little society.
And that's why generations of younger people were turned off. Certainly I was. Much of it was brilliant - but I didn't get it. It didn't speak to me.
From the '70s to the '90s, except for Andrew Lloyd Webber, there are not a lot of theater composers speaking to the world. They speak to five blocks in Greenwich village and the 'New York intelligentsia,' whatever that is. The theater community really closed ranks and became an island unto itself.
How can the theater industry begin to draw more diverse audiences?
Vaudeville was the entertainment of the people. Every other entertainment medium embraces the musical vocabulary of the day. Eighty percent of the current pop charts is black music. There are no black composers on Broadway.
I try to be a bridge to the music industry. And The Civil War album was one way to do that with artists like Hootie & the Blowfish, Trisha Yearwood and Patti LaBelle performing.
It is called show business. For a business to be successful - let's face it, we are selling a product. To sell a product - especially one that people don't think they need - it's not like they have to buy a refrigerator and they have to buy a Broadway show. We're a luxury. So we have to work hard on selling it, and I think Broadway has been very behind the times in selling its own product, compared to TV, books and movies.
But, I'm an optimist and I think that will change. With The Civil War, we will have three shows on Broadway, and we're weaning audiences on our philosophy. Maybe it will make a dent one day and that will be a good thing.
Would you do another pre-Broadway production at the Shubert?
The next one I'm doing is Havana. But we're too far away from Havana being completely written to know what it needs, pre-Broadway, yet. As far as the overall picture, I'd do all my shows up here if they'd let me.
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