CURTAIN CALLS
GM Morey makes the time to indulge in his longtime passion for musicals
Long before Rockets general manager Daryl Morey emerged as an analytics whiz and salary-cap savant, becoming a poster child for the 21st century wonk uprising in professional sports, he dreamed of immersing in musical theater. • Morey calls it his “obsession.” • “The theater has its fair share of fanatics,” said James Lapine, a Tony Award-winning director befriended by Morey. “They’re usually not general managers of a basketball team. Most of them have never been to a basketball game.”
Morey supports local companies Theatre Under the Stars and Catastrophic, and he has his own project in motion. He has collaborated with playwright Mickle Maher on a treatment for a musical he titled “Small Ball.”
The premise: The people of Lilliput, a fictional island nation that appears in the 1726 novel “Gulliver’s Travels,” want to join an international basketball league. But to be competitive enough for that, they import “Michael Jordan,” a man who turns out not to be the NBA Hall-of-Famer but happens to have the same name.
This merger of his life passions is not a pipe dream. Morey said the show will debut in Houston within 18 months.
“It’s definitely happening,” he said.
At a performance in The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, Morey recently flaunted his fan boy familiarity with “Into The Woods,” which chronicles several fairy-tale characters converging to perilously defend their kingdom.
Over the two-hours-plus show, Morey bopped his head to the piano arrangements, whispered lines just before the actors recited them and mouthed the words to songs. When singers belted out long notes, Morey held his mouth agape.
“I really get transported when I watch these things, almost like I’m part of the show,” he said.
He knows countless productions by heart after attending hundreds of performances and listening to recordings thousands of times. He also knows that sounds weird: an NBA executive gaga for musicals.
But in keeping with his unconventional methods as a stat-driven geek orchestrating athletes, he does not let perception derail his zealous interests.
“From never fitting in, I’m just used to it at this point,” he said.
He grew up in a gentrifying, semi-rural Ohio town called Sharon Center, where his father moved the family so he could be a founding member of a company that sold motion-control components and photo elec- trics for automation assembly lines. He played table tennis with his older brother in their basement for hours while they blasted their father’s vinyls and 8-tracks. Albums-turned-films like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and The Who’s “Tommy” enthralled Morey.
The operatic qualities of those epics triggered his senses for music composition, the complexity of which appealed to Morey’s mathematical mind. He took piano lessons as a kid and gravitated to brass instruments. He could play anything with a mouthpiece and had a gift for sight-reading, the ability to play a piece of music having never seen the notes on the staff before.
“He viewed reading a new piece of music like solving a puzzle,” said Terry Orcutt, Morey’s childhood friend, who is a professional oboist for orchestras in Ohio.
Morey’s insatiable pursuit of musicals began at band camp, where he performed the score to “Les Misérables.” He had never heard or seen anything like it. He searched for the album, only to find the highlights.
“I was so mad,” he said. “I finally found the full libretto, which was amazing.”
He bought cassette tapes of more productions, most by legendary composers Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and played them until their reels spilled out in hot tangles from overuse.
“One of my principles is, before you go, you have to listen to the music seven times,” he said. “For sure not less. The eighth listen is when you get it.”
Eclectic tastes
He celebrated his discovery of a rare 1970s “Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat” recording released only in Britain like some might the lost Bob Dylan basement tapes. He also adored the 1980s pop music of his teenage years. He showed up in high school praising “Fiddler on the Roof” one day and “Purple Rain” by Prince the next.
“Something about Daryl, which was unique for his age, he really didn’t care what anybody else thought about the music that he liked,” Orcutt said. “He would come to school with a cassette tape of (Webber’s) ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ and George Michael’s ‘Faith’ album. He liked it because it was good music.”
Morey emphasizes that point when he explains his love of theater.
“I have zero interest in who plays the parts,” he said. “I don’t like actors.”
Crafting a production
Morey is less fascinated with casts because usually they are all good. Instead, he studies how the myriad storytelling elements come together. The score, script, songs and stagecraft must flow well and circle back to a theme.
It is the same when he watches the NBA: Fans admire whoever has the ball; Morey observes the system of players coordinating every action.
“His taste is very high brow,” said Lapine, who directed “Into The Woods.” “There are a lot of sports guys that go to the more mainstream shows, the Disney shows, and they take their kids, but Daryl’s tastes are of a certain order.”
Lapine describes his work as “elitist,” so he was surprised when Morey, whom he expected to be more of a novice, contacted him for advice about producing shows.
Morey briefly considered pursuing a theater career as a postgraduate student in Boston, but he did not believe he had the chops. It took until he established himself as a sports executive to network with Broadway types and start investing.
He almost became an investor in “Hamilton.” Before the show became a sensation, Morey introduced himself to the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and gifted him a Jeremy Lin jersey. They attended Brooklyn Nets games together. Morey wanted in on this “Hamilton” project he was hearing so much about. In the end, he was unwilling to put up the seven-figure funds the show garnered from other backers.
Still, Morey’s connection got him in to “Hamilton” — famously the hardest ticket to come by the last two years — four times.
He recently helped finance the comedy musical “Disaster!” by Seth Rudetsky and finally enjoyed the Broadway producer perks. He saw early showings and joined Matthew Broderick, Tina Fey and Rosie O’Donnell for opening night.
Morey read an article about Rudetsky and in 2011 began emailing him for recommendations on obscure musicals.
“He seemed like a student,” said Rudetsky, an actor, writer and host on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio’s “On Broadway.” “He was coming to me for more knowledge.
“It’s funny to me to think of him as a general manager, which is such a ruthless position: the hiring, the firing, the negotiating. He’s so gentle and wideeyed when I talk with him about something.”
Morey emailed Rudetsky feedback after finishing his “homework” assignments.
Morey dove deeper, acquiring bootlegged DVDs of decades-old productions.
“He’s more die-hard than I am,” Rudetsky said.
That is not to say Morey is tired of popular works.
“Great music and oppressed people is drama catnip for me,” he said.
Anight at the theater can be as dramatic for Morey as the production he will see.
While in New York in early November, he planned to see “Falsettos,” another Lapine production. He encountered a problem two hours before showtime: It was sold out.
Morey usually waltzes up to will call and pays top dollar for orchestra seats theaters traditionally reserved for celebrities who arrive after the crowd files in. No seats were available this evening. The die-hards had committed.
Sitting in a booth at a brasserie, Morey opened his laptop, angled it between his thigh and abdomen and frantically surfed the internet for tickets on the secondary market. He was comfortable overpaying, but he could not find anything close enough to the stage.
Manhattan transfer
He looked out of place at the flirtatious café on 44th Street: an anxious man in a Rockets polo shirt tucked into his jeans, scanning websites, nibbling his bottom lip, wrenching the back of his neck and ignoring the Caprese salad in front of him.
He took a risk and made a purchase through a questionable site. The show would begin in less than an hour and he worried he would not receive a digital copy of his ticket by then.
The Walter Kerr Theatre was almost full by the time Morey arrived, panicked and out of breath after dragging a rolling suitcase through Times Square. He checked his phone again for the tickets.
“Yes!” he said, pumping his fist and wiping sweat from his brow.
He settled into his seat five rows from the stage. The stress was lifted. He was back to his normal, meticulous self.
He complained the seats were too close. At NBA games, he likes to sit 12 rows from the action.
“Red Auerbach taught me that,” Morey said.
Relentless evaluator
He has prevailed in the NBA as an outsider because of his vigilant evaluations. He scrutinizes a theater experience just as scrupulously. He is fiercely protective of original renditions. When “Falsettos” began with a new number, he sneered. Certain set transitions bothered him: “What is this, night or something? Weird.”
Then another alteration disrupted his consistent bopping and mouthing along.
“New song,” he said disapprovingly, sucking in his cheeks.
Just before intermission, Morey got more into it and never felt out of it again. The protagonist, a father, sang to his adolescent son in an attempt to rekindle their bond.
It made Morey tearful. For all of the absurdity and knee-slapping comedy in American musicals, they typically explore the fissures and amends of families.
“For me, it’s the most important song,” Morey said. “He doesn’t want to mess up his son and his son doesn’t want to be messed up.”
His favorite song from “Into the Woods” also focuses on a father-son dynamic, which finishes with the son sobbing.
Morey pondered if those moments resonate with him because his father, who for a brief time had to commute two hours to Chicago, often was away working. He wondered, too, if that is why he is so motivated to regularly drive his son Scott, 14, to school.
Professional basketball tends to flush out emotion, whereas theater embraces it. Morey operates in both worlds and is unusually candid for an executive.
“I could have daddy issues, I guess,” he said, with a shrug.
Knowing the ending to “Falsettos” did not prevent Morey from shedding more tears during its climax, when a beloved character dies and a family reunites.
The lights came on to reveal Morey rubbing his reddened eyes and clapping slowly. Many in the audience appeared to do the same.
With the crowd applauding, Morey offered his take on the performance.
“So good. Damn.”