This is Part 3.  If you haven’t yet read Part 1 & 2, I highly suggest you do so first.

For a little more than five years when I was in my late 20s and early 30s I was composer-in-residence at the NY Shakespeare Festival (The Public Theater) working with producer Joseph Papp in what was, at the time, the most creative theatrical hot spot in the country.  Joe Papp and his plays and musicals had an amazing run of success during the 70s that we haven’t seen the likes of from a theatrical producer since.

It was at The Public where I learned my craft having the opportunity to work on some 40 shows in those 5+ years working as composer for Joe.  Besides many other theaters in The Public complex, the NYSF also produced two Shakespeare plays per summer at the outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park.  I created incidental music for a number of these productions and I remember one particular production of Shakespeare’s Comedy Of Errors where I was backstage standing in the wings one night.

An older actor was on stage in a scene with one other actor one night when the older actor simply stopped in the middle of one line and kind of slumped over, still standing, into a frozen position.  The long pause brought us all to quick alert.  His fellow actor fed him his cue again to no response.  The stage manager in the wings downstage of me also fed him his lines in a stage whisper several times to no avail.  The audience began to buzz and we all quickly realized that there was something very wrong with the older actor.

Truth is, he had had a small stroke.

The stage manager, taking charge, simply walked out on stage calmly, and taking the arm of the older actor, led him slowly off stage.  Then the stage manager went back on stage and announced to the audience that we would take a short intermission and resume the play after 15 minutes.  The audience, still abuzz, did as they were told to do peacefully.

Backstage it was anything but peaceful.  Rather, it was a pretty wild scene as the older actor was addressed and cared for, an ambulance was called and his understudy was frantically preparing to go on in the older actor’s place.

The costume mistresses scurried about preparing the understudy’s costume changes, I got in his face discussing his musical cues and the stage manager ran through a litany of reminders for the young, inexperienced understudy.

As it was very early in the run, the understudies for each role had only had up to that point one two-hour rehearsal — far too little for a three and a half hour Shakespeare production, and we soon discovered that the understudy had not totally committed his lines to memory.

On top of that, the understudy was also one of the townspeople in the play so his role had to be covered by the swingman and that had to be organized as well – all in the announced 15 minutes.

It was quickly decided that the understudy should carry the book – that is, hold the script from the play while acting his part on stage.  This, of course, would kill the reality of the play, but there seemed no other choice and we hoped that the audience would simply understand the predicament and put up with the solution.

The understudy was a cute, funny little unknown fellow with the unlikely name of Danny Devito.  Yes, that Danny Devito – pre-stardom and yet undiscovered.

No one knew that frantic night backstage that a star was about to be born.

The announcement that we were about to resume brought the audience back to their seats and the announcement that the role once performed by the older gentleman would now be played by Danny Devito brought the dreaded groan of disappointment from the audience.

And then this tiny little man, script in hand, nervously walked out on stage and resumed the scene where we had left off.  I watched nervously from the wings.

The role was never a particularly funny one as played by the older actor.  Danny read his first line nervously and somehow caught the humor of it and the audience tittered at this little fellow.  That titter seemed to give Danny courage to go on and by the end of the scene he magically held the audience in the palm of his hand and had them roaring in the aisles.

It was an amazing transformation and afterwards, talking to several people who were in the audience that night, I discovered that they did not even remember that he held the book throughout.  They just remembered Danny and how funny and charming and adorable he was.

In the bows afterwards, Danny got the grandest of standing ovations from the audience and also the entire cast.  It was as sweet a memory as I have in life to see this little guy triumph over such adversity the way he had.

The next day the NY papers were full of the incident and Danny finished the production that summer doing the role.

The actor’s nightmare puts the actor on-stage in a role where he does not know his lines and often does not even know the name of the play he or she is in.  All actors have this nightmare from time to time.  One always wakes gratefully from it in a sweat.

The composer’s nightmare is similar.  For me, I stand in the wings watching my own musical, but the songs are not mine, don’t really fit the play and are not performed well.  I can’t figure out what has gone wrong and finally I too wake gratefully in a sweat.

The opposite experiences are the joys of my life.  To stand in the wings and watch the magic of my own hit show night after night, to hear the laughter, to feel the confident throb of the music and hear the audience cheer in response, to feel my songs touch the hearts of hundreds or even thousands is, of course, pure pleasure.  It is a gratification that runs deep and that I’ll probably never get enough of.

Two particular shows provided that gratification night after night for literally hundreds and hundreds of performances.  The first was another NY Shakespeare Festival production done at The Public Theater of a rock opera that I wrote back in the 70s.  The Wedding Of Iphigenia was an assignment given to me by Joe Papp to help me learn my theater craft and work with a master.  The master was Euripedes, one of the greatest of the Greek playwrights, and the two classic works of his that I drew my opera from were Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Taurus.

We performed the show both at The Public Theater in NYC and The Old Vic (their experimental theater, The Young Vic) in London under the leadership of Sir Lawrence Olivier.  The opera simply worked form the beginning and melted the paint from the walls every time it was performed over the course of a couple of years.

When we first cast the show, I knew the show would have a Greek chorus of women to support the young maiden lead, Iphigenia.  In casting we had so many wondrous young women try out that we could not decide who should play Iphigenia so we hired them all with the stipulation that we would decide in the course of rehearsals and the others would be in the chorus.

At the end of each day, the director, producer Joe Papp, and I would discuss the choices.  Every day we changed our mind to a different girl.  Two weeks went by and they were all so good and so original that we were dumbfounded at our own inability to decide.  The girls were, of course, getting restless and impatient to have a decision and our inability to decide was beginning to create negative vibes in the company.

Finally Joe Papp had a most original and courageous idea.  They should all play Iphigenia.  At first we laughed at the idea, but then, as we discussed it thoroughly, we got first intrigued and then excited about the possibilities.

The idea worked like gangbusters.  It unified the women and brought an amazing style and power to the play and to the music.  It was so different from anything audiences had ever seen – the leading role of a Greek tragedy being played by 12 women at the same time — but we laid it out well and the music took you to powerful places of drama and passion.  It also helped that the music, rock music, was very new to the theater and so created an ambiance of “anything goes” in the theater.

I watched these ten women tear this opera up night after night as they ripped through every conceivable passion provided by Euripedes’ masterwork.  Trish Hawkins, Nell Carter, Margaret Dorn, Marta Heflin, Linda Lawley, Leata Galloway, Pamela Pentony, Marion Ramsey, Julianne Marshall, Andrea Marcovicci, Bonnie Guidry, Sharon Redd and even Patti LuPone all played this one little girl together and sang their way to standing ovations night after night.

I got to watch it from the wings.  It was a time I shall never forget.  A number would start and I knew each night that it would scrape the moon and each night it did.  It was a great feeling.

Years later I had a very similar experience with The Jenny Burton Experience.  Jenny, and a choir of nine of the top studio singers in NYC, played to sold-out audiences every Thursday night at a NY club called “Don’t Tell Mama”.  The act won, in that time, every conceivable music award given and drew thousands of people – many of which came back time after time.

Here again I got to watch from the wings great performers sing my music in magical ways.  The choir, led by vocal arranger, Margaret Dorn, was a superb blend of R&B and Gospel voices and could raise the roof at the drop of a hat, but it was Jenny herself who grabbed us all by the socks each night and carried us.  She was a radiant performer at the height of her art, able to both touch the center of your heart with a ballad and dazzle your mind with an up song and set your feet a’dancin’.

And she was, on top of it all, funny.  She developed into a tremendous ad libber and could run with an improvised moment away from the written show and then get back and keep the audience in stitches.  She was the consummate performer and the group backed her up beautifully.

She also had the so important ability to recreate the performance every night.  One night during a terrible snowstorm they performed the show for the 6 people who trudged through the blizzard and showed up and the show was as good as it had ever been.  I was one of those six.  I sat that night in the audience at a table just to make the room look fuller.  At the end of the show I was also one of the six who stood up and cheered.  There were more people on stage that night than in the audience.

Standing in the wings for the hundreds of performances throughout those seven years is also one of the most cherished times of my life.  The opportunity to be so close to such talent and to actually be a part of it, even though I hid behind the curtain, brought me the joyous satisfactions of a lifetime.

Stay tuned for Part 4 – the last if this series – yet to come.