Like doctors struggling to cure a sick friend, director Sheldon Patinkin and composer William Russo are struggling to revive the great American musical. Working out of Columbia College’s Theater/Music Center, they have gathered writers, composers, actors, and directors in an effort to create original musicals. This season the Theater/Music Center is producing two: Talking to the Sun, now playing, and State Street, which will open in May.
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Russo has come to admire musicals more recently. He was originally a trombone player with Stan Kenton’s orchestra in the early 1950s, and his style evolved through playing and composing jazz, classical music, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll. He claims to enjoy everything except “international sour,” an expression he explains by humming a few dissonant bars, but admits that his great love as a composer is opera. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “I might be the only one to call myself [an opera composer]. Hardly anyone knows my operas. They’ve never been recorded.” Operas are also extremely expensive to produce, and out of most students’ range of musical experience.
The result, says Patinkin, is that Americans are treated to revivals or to British imports that are “dependent more on spectacle than story.” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and his pyrotechnic Starlight Express, performed on roller skates, come to mind. While hardly a flag-waving nationalist, Patinkin is obviously bothered by this trend. “These are not entertaining,” he says of the imports. “They don’t make you feel good, and you don’t go out humming a song.”
In hopes of creating robust and spirited musicals, Patinkin began the New Musicals Project in 1987, with funding from the Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum Foundation, which provided $125,000 for each of five years. The project gives teams of writers and composers the environment and income to develop original works. “The entire focus of the grant is on development, not the product,” says Patinkin, a focus lie says is lacking in the commercial market. “We can pay artists to try stuff.”
Talking to the Sun runs through March 19 at Columbia College’s Getz Theater, 72 E. 11th Street, 663-9465. Admission is $6 Thursday and Sunday, $8 Friday and Saturday. Curtain is 8 PM Thursday through Saturday, and 3 PM on Sunday.
