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Past Articles What's New on the Rialto Closer Than Ever: The Unique Six-Decade Songwriting Partnership of Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire
by Joshua Rosenblum Book Review by Mark Dundas Wood
Yet, despite the longevity of their association, they are likely not household names in a huge number of households. They're known principally for two narrative-driven book musicals on Broadway, Baby (1983) and Big (1996), along with the Off-Broadway musical revues Starting Here, Starting Now (1976) and Closer Than Ever (1989). Conversely, they can tally a long list of shows that closed quickly after opening, if they ever opened at all. Through it all, however, these two artists have remained not only collaborators but also friends: still on speaking terms and still working in tandem to bring works-in-progress to fruition. Now, teacher and writer Joshua Rosenbaum, who is himself a composer/lyricist, covers their careers (both as individuals and as a duo) in a satisfying new study: Closer Than Ever: The Unique Six-Decade Songwriting Partnership of Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire. It's part of an Oxford University Press book series called "Broadway Legacies," overseen by Geoffrey Block, who wrote this volume's foreword. Rosenbaum may have geared his book toward a relatively small audience of musical theatre buffs, but those buffs will be grateful that he spared no effort to make this an exhaustive study. Not only was he fortunate enough to have access to Shire's personal archives, but he also spent time interviewing the two men, both separately and together. He includes excerpts from some of his subjects' lively exchanges and describes Maltby and Shire's off-the-cuff repartee as akin to a carefully burnished vaudeville routine. Additionally, the author interviewed a variety of insiders who have inhabited the songwriters' orbit: singer Liz Callaway, playwright Craig Lucas, and director/choreographer Susan Stroman, among others. The book includes excerpted musical notations from certain M&S songs, which the author analyzes closely. In his preface, Rosenbaum notes that he wanted these explications to be "sufficiently rigorous [so] that readers with musical backgrounds can be fully engaged but also easily comprehensible so those who don't read music will be drawn in as well." As someone who's somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, I believe he has succeeded in this. He devotes entire chapters to certain essential songs from the M&S catalog, including "The Story Goes On," "I Don't Remember Christmas," and "The Bear, the Tiger, the Hamster, and the Mole." (He suggests that readers should make use of digital audio versions of the songs, listening to them while reading his commentary.) The Maltby/Shire partnership goes back to the 1950s when both artists were students at Yale. Initially, they didn't care for one another, but the ice melted in short order, and they began pooling their talents. A musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, presented at Yale, became their first produced collaboration (among its cast was Dick Cavett). Following was a string of shows: Grand Tour, The Sap of Life (their first Off-Broadway production), How Do You Do, I Love You, and Love Match. They couldn't seem to catch a big theatrical break, but they got a boost when Barbra Streisand recorded a few of their songs for her early albums. They also befriended Stephen Sondheim, who became a key figure in their lives (and they in his). Sondheim saw The Sap of Life numerous times and brought Hal Prince, Jerome Robbins, and Leonard Bernstein to the show on his return visits. He helped M&S secure a publisher and an agent in New York in the early 1960s. Sondheim's complex musical number, "Please Hello," from Sondheim's Pacific Overtures served as a sort of template for "The Ladies Singin' Their Song," from Baby. And the young Shire was even said to be one of the models for the character of "Bobby" in Sondheim and George Furth's Company. Perhaps you can attribute the team's long partnership in part to the fact that they each developed alternate careers to rely on, apart from the song-sculpting work they did together. Maltby, dissatisfied with being solely a lyricist, worked to become a respected stage director, while Shire was acclaimed for writing music for cinema, a vocation that really took off with The Conversation, a well-respected film from 1974 directed by his then brother-in-law, Francis Ford Coppola. Shire notes that he received more job offers because of his work on The Conversation score than for anything else, ever. The two songwriters also each collaborated on projects with other musical theatre makers. Maltby wrote the English lyrics for Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's Miss Saigon score. Shire joined budding lyricist Adam Gopnik on Our Table. As Rosenblum sums it up, the pair have "arguably had more success working separately than together." Among Maltby's biggest directorial triumphs on Broadway were 1978's Ain't Misbehavin' (which earned him a Tony Award) and 1999's Fosse (co-directed with Ann Reinking). Both of these were revues, rather than book shows. Clearly, Maltby had an affinity for the revue format. His biggest early theatrical success with Shire, Starting Here, Starting Now (all songs, no spoken dialogue), was developed by Manhattan Theatre Club and its artistic director, Lynne Meadow. The show used an array of songs, some from the duo's forgotten or unproduced shows, plus songs from those Streisand albums and a couple of brand-new tunes. As Maltby put it: "By accident, I invented the bookless book musical." (A similar formula would be used for Closer Than Ever.) While the original Starting Here, Starting Now didn't have a particularly long run Off-Broadway, it enjoyed a continuing presence in regional and community theatre, thanks in large part to a cast album that made the show's score widely known. Rosenblum seems to suggest that theatrical revues (sometimes nurtured in cabaret settings) can edge close to becoming "concept" musicals. True enough, a revue like Closer Than Ever has much in common with Sondheim's concept-y Company and Assassins. And Maltby and Shire's efforts inspired at least one appreciative younger-generation songwriter. The author quotes composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown, whose song-cycle musical Songs for a New World was influenced by Closer Than Ever: "Once I arrived in NY, I determined to create something exactly like Richard and David had done. Four characters, a piano and an onstage band, a non-narrative but thematically arranged revue..." This book, naturally, covers both Baby and Big in some detail, but the nature of the Maltby/Shire creative output means that Rosenbaum tends to focus on individual songs more than whole shows. The author's text is full and rich with detail, although there are occasional gaps. For example, discussing Shire's scrapped score for the Francis Coppola film Apocalypse Now, Rosenblum mentions that a recording of it was eventually made available to the public in 2017. But he doesn't discuss the nature of Shire's music for the film or the score's effectiveness (or lack thereof). In another instance, when writing of Maltby's enlistment by composer Boublil to help fix the script (as well as the English lyrics) for Boublil and Schönberg's The Pirate Queen, the author gives us neither a synopsis of the musical's storyline nor any real explanation of what, exactly, Maltby did in trying to fix it. However, such oversights are few and far between. Those hoping for dozens of photographs from the team's long career will have to do without. The book has very few illustrations and none in color, save for the dust cover's pleasant dual portrait of the songwriters. As for other extras, there are two appendices, designating the origin of songs included in Starting Here, Starting Now and Closer Than Ever. Other than end notes and an index, that's it. Later chapters of the book deal with relatively recent creative output from the team, including titles that foundered but may yet have a future, including Waterfall and Sousatzka. A more-likely new M&S show would be a third major revue: one that would recycle trunk songs from later shows in the team's catalogue in order to capture the same kind of pleasure and excitement found in Starting Here, Starting Now and Closer Than Ever. Anything remains possible. Maltby and Shire seem never to have allowed setbacks to stop them for long, and Rosenblum's book is a reminder that old-fashioned stick-to-it-iveness is always an asset. Their story goes on.
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Closer than Ever: The Unique Six-Decade Songwriting Partnership of Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire