Adaptation of Jonathan Franzen Essay Heads to Stage - NYTimes.com

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AUGUST 30, 2012, 3:18 PM

Adaptation of Jonathan Franzen Essay Heads to Stage

By JOHN WILLIAMS

"House for Sale," a play adapted from an essay by Jonathan Franzen, is coming to Off Broadway.

In the essay, Mr. Franzen wrote about selling his family's house in Missouri after the death of hismother.

Daniel Fish adapted the essay and will direct the show. Mr. Fish's last production, "A (radicallycondensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN (after David FosterWallace)," featured performers listening to Wallace's voice through headphones and reciting what theyheard.

Mr. Fish described "House for Sale" as "five actors covering Franzen's essay, the way a band would covera song."

The show is being produced by the Transport Group and will be staged at the Duke on 42nd Street.Previews begin Oct. 13, with opening night planned for Oct. 21. The show is scheduled to run throughNov. 18.

"It doesn't take the form of a play, with characters acting out scenes in the essay," Mr. Fish said. "It'smore five people, all of whom have a story, and everyone's story happens to be the same story, andeveryone plays that story differently. In that sense, it's like the Wallace piece."

He added that the play would present Mr. Franzen's essay "word for word."

Rob Campbell, Lisa Joyce, Christina Rouner, Merritt Janson and Michael Rudko make up the cast.

Dreamers Who Sell Out on the Road to Success - The New York Times

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September 3, 2012THEATER REVIEW

Dreamers Who Sell Out on the Road to SuccessBy ANITA GATES

Whether you love or hate “Dreamgirls,” the vintage Michael Bennett musical about the rise and death of a1960s singing group that strongly resembles the Supremes, you cannot deny the power of its signaturenumber. When Jennifer Holliday opened her mouth to sing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” at theImperial Theater in 1981, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, Broadway history was made. And DionMillington’s performance as Effie at the Harlem Repertory Theater’s inviting chamber production of the showis a thrilling reminder of how and why. The lyricist, Tom Eyen (who also wrote the book), and the composer,Henry Krieger, gave theater an undeniable moment of greatness.

This sparkly, constantly moving showbiz drama, set in theaters from Harlem to Las Vegas, may seem anunlikely candidate for an intimate setting like the black-boxy walk-up theater at the 133rd Street Arts Center.Yet, for the most part, the effort is a success, and the audience’s physical closeness (at times, cast memberswere practically singing into my ear) exposes an extra layer of emotion.

If you needed one illustration of the director Keith Lee Grant’s strong, confident staging, “Steppin’ to the BadSide,” a number about payola, would do nicely. True, Mr. Grant’s choreography is occasionally too big for thespace. The singing voices range from Ms. Millington’s powerhouse belt to some actors’ slight off-keytendencies, and a couple of members of the cast I saw were shaky on the nuanced acting front as well. But evenat their weakest moments they are fully invested in their anger and confrontation, which is the show’s core.

Mr. Grant doesn’t exactly apologize for his casting, but he explains in program notes that it was not a commenton racial politics. In a mostly black and Latino ensemble the villains are played by Latinos. Oscar Aguirre isCurtis, the ambitious manager who discards Effie personally and professionally to take the Dreams from R&Binto white-dominated pop. Deena, who steals both Effie’s man and her job as lead singer, is played by NataliaPeguero (who also did the impressive costumes). And while Ms. Peguero does a fine job, it is a little distractingthat she looks nothing like Diana Ross and a lot like Juliet Prowse.

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Hal David, Award-Winning Lyricist, is Dead at 91 - NYTimes.com

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September 1, 2012

Hal David, Songwriter, Is Dead at 91By ROB HOERBURGER

Hal David, the Oscar- and Grammy-winning lyricist who in the 1960s and ’70s gave pop music vernacularthe questions “What’s It All About?,” “What’s New, Pussycat?,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and“What Do You Get When You Fall in Love?,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 91 and lived in LosAngeles.

The cause was a stroke, according to his wife, Eunice, who said he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Mr. David, whose lyrics could be anguished pleas, wistful yearnings, sexy mash notes or wry musings —sometimes all four in the same song — was best known for the long strand of hits that he and the composerBurt Bacharach wrote for Dionne Warwick.

He was something of a late bloomer: he did not have his first Top 10 hit — “Magic Moments,” recorded byPerry Como — until 1958, when Mr. David was in his late 30s. His greatest achievements came well after heturned 40, when many other successful songwriters were half his age and many young performers werewriting their own songs.

Mr. David’s words also found fertile ground on Broadway, in the hit musical “Promises, Promises”; in themovies, in the Oscar-winning song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from “Butch Cassidy and theSundance Kid”; and even at weddings, in the classic first-dance song “(They Long to Be) Close to You.”

If Mr. David and Mr. Bacharach’s oeuvre was more cosmopolitan and less hip than that of the Beatles orBob Dylan, their ruminations on love and heartbreak have nonetheless endured; after all, not everyonewent to Woodstock. Their alternate ’60s was populated on the one hand by the turtleneck-and-martini set,embodied by the likes of Tom Jones (who had a hit with “What’s New, Pussycat?”) or the debonair Mr.Bacharach himself; and on the other hand by the Everywoman just breaking in her first pair of workplaceshoes, like the protagonist of “I Say a Little Prayer,” who runs “for the bus, dear” and while riding thinks “ofus, dear.”

“I Say a Little Prayer,” a No. 4 hit in 1967, was the most successful of the three dozen or so singles that Mr.David and Mr. Bacharach wrote and produced for Ms. Warwick, whom they met in 1961 when they werejourneymen on the New York music-publishing scene and she was a 20-year-old backup singer.

After she sang on some demo recordings of their songs, a disgruntled Ms. Warwick complained to them,“Don’t make me over, man.” Mr. David turned that line into a full lyric, with an unusual (for the time)feminist stance, and Ms. Warwick’s recording of the resulting song, “Don’t Make Me Over,” became her

Hal David, Award-Winning Lyricist, is Dead at 91 - NYTimes.com

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first hit, in early 1963. From then until mid-1971, rarely a month went by when the troika were notrepresented on the Billboard singles chart, with charismatic hits like “Walk On By,” “Message to Michael,”“Alfie” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”

With Ms. Warwick’s voice in place, Mr. David found his own — writing with the intense romanticism of theTin Pan Alley songwriters he grew up admiring, but replacing the literary curlicues of, say, Lorenz Hart orOscar Hammerstein II with a conversational emotionalism.

Many years later, Mr. David wrote on his Web site that he strove for “believability, simplicity and emotionalimpact” in his lyrics. His words, combined with the slaloms of Mr. Bacharach’s melodies and rhythms, oftendrew — and required — the most skilled technicians and interpreters of the time. Among them were DustySpringfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love”), Gene Pitney (“Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa”)and Karen Carpenter (“Close to You”).

The two men’s songs became so popular that they were also recorded by performers not known for theirsinging, like the actor Richard Chamberlain, who did a recording of “(They Long to Be) Close to You” in1963, and the trumpeter Herb Alpert, who oddly gave Mr. David his first No. 1 hit, in June 1968, with “ThisGuy’s in Love With You.”

Geoffrey O’Brien, reviewing the Bacharach-David body of work in The New York Review of Books in 1999,called Mr. David’s lyrics “a peculiar blend” in which “the encroachments of the maudlin are generally keptat bay by the dexterity of the rhymes.” The fecundity and chemistry of the Bacharach-David team were oftenattributed by both men to their tireless, dedicated work ethic.

“Hal is so intense,” Mr. Bacharach said in a documentary on the cable channel A&E in the 1990s, addingthat Mr. David liked working with people who “torture themselves, just like me.”

In other ways Mr. David and Mr. Bacharach could not have been more different: Mr. Bacharach wassomething of a jet-setter and was married to the actress Angie Dickinson; Mr. David was a button-downcommuter who took the Long Island Rail Road. But Mr. David said their differences enhanced theeclecticism of their songs.

“We didn’t say, ‘We can’t do this because the range is so great,’ or ‘Who is going to sing it?’ or ‘Is thiscommercial?’ ” Mr. David told the music journalist Paul Grein in 1998. “We just wrote.”

Though Mr. Bacharach had the higher profile, Ms. Warwick has said that Mr. David was “the morestabilizing force” of the team and the one “who really got things done for us.”

Like practically all pop songwriters, Mr. David treaded most successfully on breakup-and-makeup terrain,but he would sometimes veer gently into political or social themes. “What the World Needs Now (Is Love),”which took Mr. David almost two years to write, reached the Top 10 in 1965 as sung by Jackie DeShannonand went on to be recorded by more than 150 performers. In “Paper Maché” (1970), recorded by Ms.Warwick, Mr. David skewered middle-class materialism with a sharpened Popsicle stick (“There’s a sale on

Hal David, Award-Winning Lyricist, is Dead at 91 - NYTimes.com

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happiness; you buy two, and it costs less”). And “The Windows of the World” reflected the country’sgrowing anxiety with the Vietnam War. Though it was only a modest hit (again for Ms. Warwick), it wasone of Mr. David’s favorites, perhaps because of a personal connection: when he wrote the lyrics in 1967, hehad a son, Jim, nearing draft age.

He and Mr. David’s other son, Craig, survive him, as does his wife, Eunice, and three grandchildren. Hisfirst wife, Anne, died in 1987.

Harold Lane David was born in Manhattan on May 25, 1921, a son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants whoowned a delicatessen in Brooklyn. One of his brothers, Mack, nine years older, became a successfulsongwriter first, writing “I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine” for Patti Page and the lyrics for “I’m Just aLucky So-and-So,” which was recorded by Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald, among others.

When Mr. David wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps, Mack David discouraged him, and Mr. Davidbecame an advertising copywriter for The New York Post. After wartime service in the Army, during whichhe wrote songs, skits and plays, Mr. David was determined to make songwriting his career.

With pop music on uncertain footing in the early 1950s, between the show tune era and the dawn of rock ‘n’roll, Mr. David wrote in an old-school style for big bands and singers like Vic Damone and Teresa Brewer,with only scattered success.

By the end of the ‘50s, though, he was writing more popular and memorable songs, like Sarah Vaughan’sTop 10 hit “Broken Hearted Melody,” and once Mr. Bacharach and Ms. Warwick were added to his mix inthe early ’60s, the hits, as they say, kept on coming.

The sophistication of Mr. David and Mr. Bacharach’s songs was a ticket beyond the Top 40 for them. Theyoften wrote for the movies, and four of their songs were nominated for Academy Awards: “What’s New,Pussycat?,” “Alfie,” “The Look of Love” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” the last of which broughtthem their only Oscar, in 1970.

Their Broadway musical, “Promises, Promises,” an adaptation of Billy Wilder’s film “The Apartment,”opened on Broadway on Dec. 1, 1968, and ran through 1971. It was nominated for a Tony for best musicaland won a Grammy for best score from an original cast album. Clive Barnes, reviewing the show in TheNew York Times, wrote that the score “excitingly reflects today rather than the day before yesterday” andcalled Mr. David’s lyrics “happily colloquial.”

“Promises, Promises” was revived successfully on Broadway in 2010, with Kristin Chenoweth and SeanHayes. At the time, Mr. David told NPR that working on the original show was “the most fun time I’ve hadon any project.”

But Mr. David and Mr. Bacharach had a disastrous failure with their score of “Lost Horizon,” a musicalversion of the 1937 Frank Capra film that was released in 1973. Though the score has aged better than thefilm, it was dismissed at the time as overcooked and inane, its reception coincided with major shifts in

Hal David, Award-Winning Lyricist, is Dead at 91 - NYTimes.com

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musical tastes (disco was emerging). Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David had a falling out, which they never fullyexplained; Ms. Warwick sued them when they stopped producing new music for her; and they did not writetogether again for almost 20 years.

In 1992, the three reunited for Ms. Warwick’s recording of “Sunny Weather Lover.”

While Mr. David did collaborate with other composers, most notably Albert Hammond on Julio Iglesiasand Willie Nelson’s 1984 hit, “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” he spent much of his later career as akind of songwriting éminence grise and did charitable and foundation work. He was president of Ascap, thesongwriters and publishers’ organization, from 1980 to 1986 and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall ofFame in 1972 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984. Ms. Warwick’s recordings of “Don’tMake Me Over” and “Walk On By” and the Carpenters’ recording of “Close to You” were inducted into theGrammy Hall of Fame. This year, Mr. David and Mr. Bacharach received the fourth Gershwin Prize fromthe Library of Congress.

Though Mr. David lived to see his songs re-immortalized in movies like “My Best Friend’s Wedding,”“There’s Something About Mary” and the Austin Powers series, and in a Broadway revue, “The Look ofLove,” he came to think of his art as a lost one.

“Pop songs are not as graceful as they used to be,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1999, adding:“Performers today haven’t gone through the regimen of learning how to write. And of course, everyonewants to own copyrights.”

“Rap culture is interesting and different and has purpose,” he said at the time, “but it has a nonromanticview of life and of social feelings. There may be a void in that.”

Yet with the emergence of neo-romantics in pop music like Alicia Keys and John Mayer — both winners ofthe Hal David Starlight Award, given by the Songwriters Hall of Fame to young songwriters — his outlookbecame more upbeat. “The talent is always there,” he told The Oregonian in 2004, “and art is cyclical. I’moptimistic.”

Marc Santora contributed reporting.