The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
New Yorker Gopnik Expands to Musical
Long Wharf Theatre premieres ‘The Most Beautiful Room in New York’
They say that no good deed goes unpunished. Adam Gopnik begs to differ.
Gopnik, the writer of amusing tales and a venerable essayist for The New Yorker, hosted a fundraiser benefiting A Theatre For A New Audience, an off-Broadway troupe. Gopnik, who had hosted a dormant theater bug for 30 years, was only too happy to volunteer his time for such a worthy cause.
Then, “out of the blue,” as Gopnik described the scene, actress Didi Conn approached the writer and asked: ‘Would you be interested in writing a musical with my husband, David Shire?’”
A few nights previously, Shire lay in bed laughing aloud at a particularly bracing line in The New Yorker, specifically one of Gopnik’s.
“It’s something I rarely do,” said Shire, a Broadway composer whose film scores may be more familiar to you.
“I said, ‘I wish guys like this wanted to write the book for musicals,’” Shire said. “She said, ‘How do you know he doesn’t want to? Why don’t you ask him?’ I said that I didn’t want to embarrass myself.”
Good thing Conn isn’t quite as reticent as her modestly accomplished husband, who, with Gopnik debuting as lyricist-bookwriter, rides herd on the world premiere of their musical, “The Most Beautiful Room in New York,” at Long Wharf Theatre, where it officially opens Wednesday night under Gordon Edelstein’s direction.
“The Most Beautiful Room in New York,” which continues through May 28, features a curious pairing of collaborators, creating a spirited curiosity among the fans of musical theater. Shire, after all, has been at this nearly 60 years, mostly in collaboration with Richard Maltby Jr. since they met during their first year at Yale. Together they brought “Baby” and “Big” to Broadway, and popular musical revues such as “Starting Here, Starting Now” and “Closer Than Ever” to offBroadway audiences. The pair’s latest work, “Sousatzka,” recently premiered in Toronto, under Garth Drabinsky’s aegis. Shire has also composed for TV and numerous films (“The Conversation,” “Norma Rae”), winning an Oscar and Grammy along the way.
Gopnik, on the other hand, is a virtual newcomer to the musical theater roulette table, though he’s been a stalwart at The New Yorker since 1986. He’s written essays, reviews, features and profiles for the magazine, and several books on his own. “I’ve been writing for The New Yorker so long now that people used to say, ‘Oh! You’re so much younger than I expected,’” Gopnik said. “Now they say, ‘Oh! You’re shorter than I expected.’”
It may surprise Gopnik’s fans to learn that he was a child actor, doing commercials and theater in a company under Andre Gregory’s direction. (“That was my imprinting, I guess I should say.”) Born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal, Gopnik undertook his first musical while in college at McGill University.
“I wrote a musical about the life of Vladimir Tatlin, the great Russian constructivist architect, which I imagined, in my folly, was a hugely commercial project that I could take to New York City when I immigrated there in 1980,” Gopnik deadpanned. “Hardly Jerome Robbins, but I had some background.”
When Shire discussed possible ideas for a musical during their first dinner together, Shire was glad to overlook Gopnik’s short theater résumé because he was long on ideas, wit and possesses a wide breadth of expertise.
“Adam has expertise on everything — especially food and chefs,” Shire said of Gopnik, author of “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.” The musical centers around David Kaplan
(Joe Cassidy), a consummate chef, trying to make a go of it with his Union Square restaurant. The cutthroat, competitive nature of the business, however, makes for extremely rough sledding. David’s old friend and rival Sergio (Constantine Maroulis) may be able to help David survive, especially if he’s willing to compromise his high standards.
“It’s set in a world of food, but it’s not really about food,” Shire said. “It’s really about family. It’s about a marriage, a chef who’s not only saving his business, but saving his marriage and family at the same time.”
Besides Cassidy and Maroulis, the cast includes Krystina Alabado (Anna); Anastasia Barzee (Claire); Darlesia Cearcy (Phoebe); Ryan Duncan (Gio); Danielle Ferland (Gloria); Anne Horak (Natasha/Franca); Tyler Jones (Bix); Mark Nelson (Carlo); Sawyer Niehaus (Kate); and Allan Washington (Irwin/Gabe).
John McDaniel serves as music supervisor and director, while John Carrafa (choreographer), Michael Yeargan (set design), Jess Goldstein (costume design), Chris Akerlund (lighting design) and Keith Caggiano (sound design) complete the artistic team.
Gopnik said that working with such veterans as Shire and Edelstein has been both instructional and inspiring.
“Having the chance to do it, and to be a student of it, from real masters, is just an incredible gift in my life. Gordon’s been fantastic — phenomenal in keeping me focused on narrative propulsion, even if it means losing a bit of charm along the way.
“I’m an essayist, and part of the fun is that it can be digressive or parenthetical, and you still enjoy it,” Gopnik said. “Part of what Gordon has ‘Karate Kid’ taught me is that the stage is a form where linear narrative is all important.”
Shire, Gopnik said, “is a man of a limitless reservoir of melody. It’s astounding to me. We’ll talk back and forth in a desultory way, about what a particular number or scene needs, and I’ll say something almost by-the-by, ‘You know, this can almost be like a Ravel waltz.’ David will kind of nod, almost absentmindedly, I think. The next morning, the phone rings at 9 a.m. It’s David: ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about that music: Can it be something like this?’ And he’ll play you this utterly ravishing melody, and you think, where did that come from? How did he find that?
“I think that musicians and composers are a superior class of human beings,” Gopnik said. “This chance to work with a really firstrate one has been endlessly, endlessly rewarding.”
Though Gopnik now knows the vast differences between writing essays and a musical, he still mines the sublime from the apparently mundane.
“This show, whatever else it has or doesn’t, is about ordinary people experiencing their lives as though it were at the highest emotional pitch,” he said. “Their questions may be small to us, but it’s very big to the people involved. That’s what we’re trying to articulate.
“I find that that way of thinking about the world, that way of thinking that something small can be very large, can be very moving,” Gopnik said. “And, to tell you the truth, that’s been what all my work has been about. I’m a micro-writer with an eye to the macro. That’s true about most of my books, and even more true about this project.”