TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022492/0224520.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 9.6 KB | 198 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 66

With a Song in His Heart


A classic composer of sophisticated melodies, CY COLEMAN keeps
the lights bright on Broadway with two recent hit musicals

By WILFRID SHEED


    American music has been moving so fast for the past
hundred years or so that it has hardly had a moment to look
back. Sure, ragtime was great -- but listen to this. Big bands?
Elvis! Hard rock? Soft rock. Acid rock. Get with it. Even a
Mozart would be only as good as his latest hit in such a hip-hop
marketplace as this.

    Yet, either because it's the '90s now and rearview time,
or because the stuff is too good to ignore any longer, many
Americans have been looking back in spite of themselves at the
incredible trove of Broadway show tunes and pop melodies
composed between roughly 1920 and 1950 and finding it not only
good but great, even classical, in a loose-jointed, informal
American sense of the word.

    And if it's so good, why not play it again? When Barry
Manilow helped open the new Paramount theater -- a symbolic act
in itself -- back in September with a volley of his favorite
Broadway standards, he was the latest of several Pop stars to
declare for the old-time religion: Maureen McGovern, Linda
Ronstadt and Carly Simon have all issued neoconservative albums,
to blend right in with your Bennetts and Clooneys and Sinatras,
while several talented young singers, such as Andrea Marcovicci,
Mary Cleere Haran and Harry Connick Jr., actually seem to have
been born that way.

    So if everybody's singing it, is anybody still writing it?
No form of music can be considered fully resurrected so long as
people suppose it was all written by Cole Porter, with maybe a
little help from George Gershwin. It has to start ringing bells
with today's geniuses as well -- and here the spotlight narrows
sharply to one put-upon hero, the great Cy Coleman, who, with
hits like Sweet Charity and Barnum, already has the honor of the
American musical riding on his other shoulder. His classic
songs, such as Hey, Look Me Over, If My Friends Could See Me
Now, Witchcraft and Big Spender, are near the top of the postwar
musical charts.

    Not that Coleman is the last American to write good
theater songs -- not while Charles Strouse, Jerry Herman and
Kander and Ebb are still banging them out. He just happens to
be the latest American to have had two first-run hits playing
on Broadway at the same time (City of Angels and The Will Rogers
Follies) since the glory days of Rodgers and Hammerstein, when
America ruled the boards, and probably the last active one
(unless Burton Lane and Jule Styne have something up their
sleeves) to write the classic American jazz song that the young
singers are just now rediscovering.

    A visitor to Coleman's office on Manhattan's West 54th
Street may feel as if he's stumbled upon the remains of Tin Pan
Alley: over there is the old upright piano on which Cy has
scored most of his songs, and next to it the thousand-year-old
desk, and everywhere theater posters and photographs ("He just
keeps putting them up till the wall is full," says his
secretary). And through the window pipe the New York City street
noises that have inspired the American song ever since Irving
Berlin first picked them up in the 1900s on the Lower East Side.

    So how has this throwback to another era managed to
survive not only the rock revolution, in all its geologic
phases, but all the distractions of country-and-western and
rhythm and blues? Coleman, who is no fossil but an immensely
energetic and youthful fellow of 61, has the answer wrapped and
ready to go. "Selective hearing," he snaps. To which he adds
that he is not writing imitation '30s songs ("Pastiche is for
college kids") but the same kind of music, as if it had
continued to evolve uninterrupted, fed by the latest
developments in jazz -- to which he listens voraciously.

    It's never too early to begin on a course like Coleman's,
and at the age of four young Cy was already playing everything
he could get his ears on on the family piano in the Bronx. "Did
you have any musical relatives?" he is asked. "No," he responds
with a charming non sequitur, "my family couldn't even speak
English."

    Coleman's father was, in fact, a carpenter whose sole
visible contribution to his son's art was to nail the piano shut
so he could get some peace around here. "Fortunately, as a
carpenter's son, I figured out how to open it." After which he
was left undisturbed, and unencouraged, until the local milkman,
who'd heard him on his morning rounds, somehow talked the family
into getting the kid lessons.

    With just this lick of help, it was the work of a moment
for Coleman to become a child prodigy, with a particular
affinity for Beethoven. "I could already do the technical stuff,
and I was looking for `feeling' " -- an excellent career choice
for a seven-year-old, because to this day virtuosity and
feeling fight it out for attention in Coleman's work, which
sometimes sounds almost too clever to be quite great.

    But what his critics are hearing is not emotional coldness
(the act of composition moves him to the roots of his being)
but the coolness of modern jazz laid on top of the type of
supersophisticated melody lines he first heard from his major
influence and first great love, the radio.

    In those days, announcers seldom told you who wrote what,
so Coleman simply fell in love with the whole period, namely
the middle to late '30s, by which time the American song had
reached a pitch of harmonic subtlety and adventuresomeness. And
it is this kind of song that Coleman started playing in clubs
as a teenager ("a school you can't pay tuition to") and still
writes today with whatever refinements Miles Davis, Bill Evans,
et al., might have brought to it.

    "I think of myself first and last as a professional
pianist," he says, and this order of things, which he sustains
with a few dazzling concerts a year, gives him the serenity to
continue when rising costs threaten musical theater with
extinction. If extinction comes, "I'd probably become my own
publisher and produce my own videos. I would always write
music."

    Since he can hear a full orchestra in his head, he
probably has no choice. Tunes have come to him unbidden during
cocktail conversations, and if there's no polite way of writing
them down, he just remembers them with one ear and fields
dialogue with the other.

    And what if somebody else has written that song already?
"I just tip my hat and move on." But he doesn't often bump into
familiar stuff as an amateur might, because his tunes "come from
a different place -- a very primitive place," his own private
cellar, where the melodies are marked COLEMAN ONLY. And you
don't have to be a professional to spot a vintage one.
Witchcraft, The Best Is Yet to Come would simply never have got
written at all if a certain musical milkman in the Bronx hadn't
kept his ears open.

    Yet it's also notable that some of his most characteristic
songs were written with different lyricists. Unlike George and
Ira, Gilbert and Sullivan, Cole and Porter, Coleman changes
partners in song, because they all do different things well,
which helps him do likewise. It is no accident that the lyrics
for The Will Rogers Follies, the ultimate in brassy,
knock-'em-dead show-biz shows, were contributed by the
stage-wise troupers Adolph Green and Betty Comden, whereas the
cerebral City of Angels was done with David Zippel. The result
is two utterly different scores, held together only by the fact
that nobody else could have written either of them.

    You might land one Broadway hit by shooting arrows in the
air, but never two. And Cy Coleman probably knows more about
the mechanics of a Broadway musical than any other composer
since Richard Rodgers. "The business, the politics, the script,
the scenery, the transition" -- Ira Gasman, a young lyricist
who has been working with Cy on his next show, ticks off a few
of the things he has learned at Cy Coleman Academy. "Songs
emerge from him like giggles coming out of a baby."

    Obliged, for instance, to come up with something for a
stage-frightened and vocally challenged Lucille Ball in Wildcat,
he dashed off the almost singerproof Hey, Look Me Over, a number
that really tears up the joint and did wonders for Lucy's
nerves. For Sid Caesar in Little Me, he contrived a waltz (Real
Live Girl) well within the minuscule range of that star and
every bathtub basso in the land. Nevertheless, Coleman's
greatest claim on the future remains, so far, the score for
Sweet Charity, words by the immortal Dorothy Fields,
choreography by the likewise Bob Fosse, which conveys in every
swashbuckling note the vitality and glittering professionalism
that not so long ago made the American musical the toast and
envy of the outside world, like the American automobile. How
does Coleman feel about his responsibilities as a species of
one-man Big Three to the U.S. musicals industry? "I don't mind
waving the flag a bit," he says, and adds, "I am not alone."

    He continues to work like three songwriters in one, while
apparently enjoying life enormously. Buzzing back and forth
between New York and Southampton, he has never stopped writing
long enough to get married but has picked up a lot of friends
with whom to share the laughter that also comes pouring out of
him -- easy, loud and often -- between songs.

    And if that ever fails him, he can always turn on the
radio in his head and listen to the world's finest music,
including -- who knows? -- maybe the score to his next show.