BK, I was reading yesterday about your Bacharach friend Marilyn Fox. in 1998. In 1998 I had a disastrous situation orchestrating Redhead - a dreadful show - at Goodspeed. The director, who's done marvelous work on major shows, barely spoke to me. At the beginning, he said "I don't want this to be a bunch of ditties," and even when a group of us went out for luinch, he always talked around me. So, at the sitzprobe, I got lovely comments from the cast, the Goodspeed music staff, and one comment from the director. He whined, "It isn't sexy."
I snapped back, "Sexy? You've never mentioned that word once to me in four weeks!" He made sopme retort, and I muttered something like, "yeah, sure, in a pig's eye."
Well, Michael O'Flaherty, Goodspeed's two-faced asshole music director at the time, heard me and dragged out out into the hall to yell at me for being disrespectful to the director. Following that ugly scene, I went outside and sat down in the middle of the road, praying a car would come by and hit me. O still had a week at Goodspeed, and I no longer wanted to be there. After sitting there for maybe 30 minutes, I got up, went back to my room to ponder the situation.
The choreographer told me the "Pickpocket Tango" wasn't sexy, so I sent to a rehearsal, watched it again, made notes and rescored it. I doubt it was any better than the one before, but it's hard to be "sexy" when the show was scored like a 1910 ragtime ensemble. I had - I believe seven musicians.
The week was awkward, and I never heard from Goodspeed until 2004, when Tony Walton called and asked me to score Where's Charley?. I warned him that Goodpeed wouldn't hire me and why. Two hours later, he called to say, they would love to have me back. I went back and had a wonderful time. At some point while I was in the music dept., O'Flaherty asked me what show I would like to do the next season, and I said The Boyfriend, directed by Julie Andrews. I came back to NYC and told everyone I was working on that show, until I learned from Dan de Lange that he was orchestrating it. I've only heard from Goodspeed once since then; an invitation to a big reunion at Lincoln Center. I went, saw people I liked, and O'Flaherty, who kept our chat to a bare minimum before he went off to cozy up to someone worth talking to.
