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04/27/2017 12:01 AMWhat’s a guy like Adam Gopnik doing writing a musical?
After all, Gopnik is the curious, questioning, au courant author and staff writer for The New Yorker whose subjects have included such weighty topics as gun control, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, and the doctrines of Edmund Burke.
“The funny thing is I grew up in the theater,” says Gopnik during auditions in New York for the Long Wharf Theater world premiere production of the musical The Most Beautiful Room in New York, formerly titled Table. The show runs Wednesday, May 3, to Sunday, May 28.
Gopnik always had a not-so- secret yearning to write Broadway musicals, he says. Its active pursuit simply ended decades ago.
But his show biz roots goes back to when he was a child actor in Philadelphia, working with director Andre Gregory in stage shows and as a professional child actor in commercials.
You might remember him as the kid in the Big Brothers of America commercial who says, “Won’t you be a Big Brother to someone like me?”
“That was me,” says Gopnik, now 60.
Gopnik’s ambition when he arrived in New York nearly 40 years ago was not to write for one of the most prestigious and erudite magazines in America, but to write for the theater.
In college, he says, he wrote a musical about the life of Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian constructionist artist.
“I assumed that the appetite for shows about Vladamir Tatlin and the Russian Revolution would be overwhelming,” he says.
When he moved to New York he hopefully sought out ways to establish theater connections for his burgeoning work. The closest he got was “someone we knew who had once been to dinner with someone who knew the sister of Art Garfunkel’s psychotherapist.”
He sent off the cassette of the show’s songs “and never heard back—and then I got waylaid. I continued writing songs and verse all the time, but not professionally.”
A widely admired career as author and New Yorker writer followed and his musical dream seemed like a long-ago notion.
Fate intervened when he was at a benefit about seven years ago when he met Didi Conn, an actress best know for her role as Frenchie in the film Grease, who asked him, “Would you ever be interested in writing a musical with my husband, David Shire?”
Gopnik, of course, knew well of the composer of such stage shows as Baby, Big, and Closer Than Ever, not to mention countless film and TV scores.
“I said, ‘I would love to,’ and she snorted with satisfaction because a few days before [Shire] had been reading something of mine in bed and he said to Didi, ‘Why don’t guys like this ever want to write for the musical theater?’”
Shire and Gopnik got together, and tossed some ideas around—“We knew we wanted to do a contemporary story about a family in New York.”
Then they started talking about food and chefs and restaurants—a subject Gopnik knew well from his writings in the field.
Soon a story developed about a family running a restaurant in New York, one that was not just a business “but an expression of their passion” and what happens when the family is faced with the potential loss of their building, their home, and their dream.
The show, staged by the theater’s artistic director Gordon Edelstein, stars Constantine Maroulis, Mark Nelson, and Anastasia Barzee, and yes, there will be cooking on stage.
“Restaurant people have to be one of the most passionate people around,” says Gopnik, “because their hours are absurd, the work is insanely difficult, and it’s extremely repetitive. They are like actors and for both you wouldn’t do it at all unless you thought it was the only thing you wanted to do in life.
“One of the things I’ve learned after doing workshop after workshop is that musical theater is communal in a way that someone who writes prose, even someone who’s written for The New Yorker for 30-plus years where there are fact-checkers, an editor, copy editor, and editor-in-chief weighing in on everything I write, but all that is monastic compared to a single day in the musical theater world. It’s one of the things that has been challenging for me, to be honest.”
The approaches are so different, he says.
“Actors can only work from their stomach and their genitals or they don’t really work well. Writers work from their heads. I’m coming from the north and they’re coming from the south and hopefully we meet at the heart.”
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.