In the song But The World Goes Round from New York, New York by John Kander and Fred Ebb, the lyrics express disappointment and how to handle it as only Ebb could put into words:
Sometimes you’re dreams get broken in pieces
But that doesn’t matter at all
Take it from me, there’s still going to be
A summer, a winter, a spring and a fall
For the creators of the Broadway musical – writers David Thompson and Sharon Washington; composers Kander and Ebb and Lin-Manuel Miranda; director/choreographer Susan Stroman – their big-budgeted musical didn’t make it in the city that doesn’t sleep. The show closed after only 110 official performances.
But for fans who loved the musical or the people who never got a chance to see the show, there is the ultimate souvenir to experience: the original Broadway cast recording (OBCR).
As they did for the show itself, orchestrators Sam Davis (who was also the arranger) and Daryl Waters were in the studio with the cast and creators to memorialize the enormous amount of work that went into this show so that their little town blues could melt away and they could all make a brand new start of it. And more importantly, so you could hear the 28 songs and 5 demos.
It’s not unlike how they first became aware of musicals.
“Everything I know about musical theater, and my whole love of shows and show music, all came from albums,” said Davis for whom New York, New York was his twelfth Broadway show. “I would get cast albums as a kid and listen to the songs and love the songs, but not know anything about the plots. So, for instance, I made up my own plot for South Pacific.”
Waters, who grew up in Cleveland, got to see shows, “but certainly not Broadway quality,” he recalled. “Listening to all this glorious music just draws you even that much closer to the whole scene and makes you want to be a part of it. That’s how I ended up here.” It was Waters’ work on Shuffle Along, or, The Making of The Musical Sensation of 1921 and All that Followed, that prompted Davis to bring Waters in for New York, New York.
Davis recalls, “I had never worked with Daryl before this, but Shuffle Along made me think he’d be really great with Stro [Stroman] working with dance. I arranged the whole score of New York, New York, but wasn’t going to orchestrate the whole thing myself because it would be too much work. It was such a stylistic hodgepodge that there were definitely areas that were taking me out of my comfort zone as an orchestrator. So I thought it would be great if we could get someone else to do a lot of the orchestrations and bring their flavor to it. Darryl was the perfect person.”
The hodgepodge that Davis was referring to was the various sources for the songs that made up this musical.
“We have classic Kander and Ebb songs like New York, New York and But The World Goes Round, and then we have lesser known Kander and Ebb classics like Marry Me [from The Rink],” Davis listed. “Then we also had these new songs that Kander was writing with Lin. We had a song from Funny Lady [a 1975 film sequel to Funny Girl – the song is Let’s Hear It For Me]. And the danger would be that they would all sound like they were from different shows – which they are.”
According to Waters, they made it work. “The way that Sam has delivered that thread throughout the show was absolutely incredible to me. When you talk about art, threads are important. All I had to do was layer in my own part. Sometimes I feel like I have to superimpose something on there that wasn’t there. It was all there this show.”
When it came time to go into the studio to make the OBCR, Davis and Waters faced some challenges in recording an album that mirrors the show.
Davis recalls, “The show is such a big dance show and it’s such a visual show. How do you create that? How do you keep the joy of that when you don’t have anything to look at? Mostly that just meant in the way that the songs were performed. We have a big production number in Act Two called the San Juan Supper Club. When you see it in the audience with Susan Stroman’s choreography, it was thrilling. But when we recorded it the way we do it in the show, without the visuals it seemed a little lackluster. So we ended up doing it almost twice the tempo that we do it in the show to create all the excitement that you saw visually. There were lots of little tweaks like that.”
But they also go to enhance the experience as well for the album. Waters reveals, “Let’s not forget something very major: You try and keep to the minimum number of players because every year it gets more expensive. For the album we had the luxury of actually adding some strings that gave us a much richer sound than you would normally hear.”
During our conversation I mentioned to Waters and Davis that seven years earlier I had interviewed Kander and he mentioned that he hoped that revivals of his shows The Rink and Steel Pier might happen soon. Neither show was a hit, though he was deeply passionate about them.
So if New York, New York gets a revival in the future, what do Davis and Waters think the reason for that revival would be? What discoveries could be made that didn’t engage an audience this year?
Waters responds first, “This is the everyman story – at least for New York City. We all can relate to all these stories. I’m disappointed more people didn’t get a chance to see it this time. Next time, it’s just have to come on in there and take a look at it. Because the storylines are real. The truth is real.”
That truth, that honesty, is also important to Davis.
“What lasts in theater is when pieces have something to say that is honest. If a little time goes by and we forget arguing which plot line we should have cut or which scene didn’t work, people will realize the show really does say something genuine about New York. Every scene, every song and every musical moment expresses all of our collective love and our fantasy about what that means being in New York and arriving in New York from somewhere else. We all put it so fervently into the piece. I just feel like it’s there waiting to be discovered.”
Until then there’s the cast recording. A recording that will last as a permanent document of the show. So what happens in five decades from now when someone first listens to New York, New York? Will they create their own storyline as Davis did? Davis has some ideas.
“One thing that may not be clear 50 years from now, but what I think is so unique now, is how unusual it was for a show like New York, New York to open in 2023 – just a couple of years out of the pandemic and and in a time where everyone is scaling down and so many shows have contemporary pop scores – that we were doing a show with a big budget that had a huge set, fantastic lavish costumes, great choreography and a full orchestra with strings. It’s like a defiant throwback in a way.
“Maybe in 50 years every show will be like that again. But I would love people to know how brave and unusual that was that we did.”
To see my interview with Sam Davis and Daryl Waters, which has plenty of other stories about New York, New York and other shows and collaborators, please go here.
Main Photo: The company of New York, New York (Photo by Paul Kolnik)