10th CMU cabaret brings Tony winner David Yazbek to town
David Yazbek was mentoring a group of Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama juniors on how to sing his songs when he digressed for a story. It was a memory involving CMU alumnus Patrick Wilson, who starred in Yazbek’s first Broadway show, “The Full Monty.”
Yazbek is the Tony- and Grammy Award-winning composer of 2018 best musical “The Band’s Visit,” plus “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and the current Broadway hit “Tootsie.” He’s also recorded with his own band, performed stand-up comedy and was a writer for David Letterman. His next project is a musical of “The Princess Bride.”
But back to his story. At a signing for the CD release of “The Full Monty” cast album, he noticed that it included a pulled quote calling his songs “accessible soft rock.” He let it be known that he was not pleased. Wilson signed the CDs and circled the quote.
Yazbek said his music “is too eclectic” to pigeonhole. “I like to think if you hear my music, you know it’s me, but that doesn’t mean you can stick it in a genre.”
His range was on full display Sunday at the Greer Cabaret, Downtown, in CMU’s 10th annual Songwriter’s Cabaret with the Junior Musical Theater Ensemble. Past composers have included alumnus Stephen Schwartz and Dormont’s Stephen Flaherty.
Yazbek’s songs include fast-paced comedy, such as “What’s Gonna Happen” from “Tootsie,” delivered with wit and speed at the Sunday showcase by CMU’s Madeleine Rubin, and “Model Behavior” from “Women on the Verge,” sung by Lauren Medina while scurrying from mic to mic. And then there are the sultry longings of songs such as “Something’s Different” from “The Band’s Visit,” sung by Simone Jones.
“I go through thousands of auditions sometimes to hear a voice like that,” Yazbek told the cabaret audience. He said he doesn’t like to revisit his own songs but that the CMU juniors had made it a pleasurable experience.
Singers in the revue on Sunday were Victoria Bartolotta, Daniel Bittner, Nuala Cleary, Major Curda, Khailah Johnson, Simone Jones, Miller Kraps, Lauren Medina, Carolyn O’Brien, Grant Reynolds, Madeleine Rubin and Tristan Hernandez, who also provided percussion on a drum box seat. Director and CMU instructor Gary Kline had an emergency appendectomy on Friday, but he was seated front and center during Sunday’s cabaret.
Accompanying the students on piano, as he has for all 10 of these shows, was Richard Teaster, with George Hoydich on clarinet. Yazbek took the stage himself for three songs to end the set.
The composer said the CMU cabaret was unusual in that he often works with students for a week, rather than two days, leading up to a performance. One of his goals was to bring greater understanding to songs outside of their scripted context. That included helping Medina and Kraps on the “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” duet “Love Is My Legs,” which in the play has two con artists conning each other. Yazbek offered suggestions, such as telling Kraps to clip the end of the lines, explaining, “It’s just funnier that way.”
Yazbek knows funny, and he knows music, but he hadn’t imagined writing “a big Broadway show right out of the gate” until the offer came for the Tony-nominated “The Full Monty.” What followed was a series of shows based on movies — just a coincidence, he said. Yazbek currently is working on original projects with writer Jeffrey Lane and with Robert Horn and “Dreamgirls” composer Henry Krieger. “Everything except for ‘The Princess Bride’ is not a movie,” he noted.
“The Princess Bride” has been much in the news lately because a new movie version has been rumored, which sent the film’s stars and its fans into a frenzy of protests. “But no one is saying, ‘Don’t do a musical,’” Yazbek said.
Busy though he is, when the tour of “A Band’s Visit” makes its first stop in Pittsburgh in March of next year, the native New Yorker hopes to be back. After his own visit last weekend, he has only a sense of what his friends tell him to be true.
“Everyone I know who’s lived in Pittsburgh says it’s the greatest thing, and then I always say the same thing, which is, ‘Why do you live in Brooklyn?’” he said. “The answer, of course, is, ‘I left because I want to have shows on Broadway or work in L.A.’ But my point is, nobody has ever said they wanted to leave Pittsburgh.”
Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.