Telling the Story:

CCM grad Steve Flaherty showcases his Broadway success back in Cincinnati

Interview by Rick Pender

Cincinnati City Beat, July 4-10, 2002

When I moved to Cincinnati in 1980, I was delighted to find a new summer theater program just getting off the ground at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music (CCM): They called it Hot Summer Nights, and they staged several shows I'd never seen. In particular, I got my first taste of the breadth of legendary composer Stephen Sondheim through the revue Side by Side by Sondheim, performed by a handful of young singers and a startlingly good young pianist.

Little did I know that the pianist, Steve Flaherty, then in the middle of his undergraduate education at CCM, would go on to become something of a legend himself. When I was in Chicago a few weeks back for the annual meeting of the American Theater Critics Association, one of our speakers was another legend, Jerry Herman, whose works include Hello Dolly, Mame, and La Cage Aux Folles. When asked whose work he admired among contemporary theater composers, he cited only one show: Ahrens and Flaherty's 1996 (sic) Tony Award-winning musical, Ragtime.

In fact, now 20 years after Flaherty's years at CCM, some of his songs have been assembled into a brand new revue for the 2002 edition of Hot Summer Nights. We Tell The Story: The Songs of Ahrens and Flaherty will draw from composer Flaherty's many successful shows with lyricist Lynn Ahrens-- Lucky Stiff (1988), Once on This Island (1990), My Favorite Year (1993), Ragtime (1996), the animated film Anastasia (1997) and Seussical (2000).

"I was interested in writing for the theater since the age of 12," Flaherty tells me by phone from an early work session for his current collaboration with Ahrens, A Man of No Importance, set for a New York premiere at Lincoln Center in September (two songs from that show, "The Streets of Dublin" and "Love Who You Love" actually get their first public performances at CCM this summer).

"I wrote my first musical when I was 14, " he says "but I wanted a formal composition background, and when I heard that CCM not only had a fantastic musical theater performance program but also a composition fivision, I thought, 'Ah this is the place for me.'"

The CCM experience was perfect, he says, and he met lots of folks he's subsequently worked with. "Faith Prince was a senior when I was a freshman," he recalls. The Tony winner ( for Miss Adelaide in 1992's revival of Guys and Dolls) plays a leading role in A Man of No Importance.

Richard Hess came to CCM a decade after Flaherty's graduation, but they've communicated regularly when the composer returns to campus for master classes. Hess proposed the revue, but Flaherty was hesitant, still feeling himself mid-career. "I told him that I'm not ready to hang up my pen and inkwell yet. He said he was really intrigued by the diversity of our material."

In fact, 2003 is Flaherty's 20th anniversary of working with Ahrens. They met shortly after his CCM graduation. "I came to New York and enrolled in a musical theater workshop for composers, librettists and lyricists." Ahrens was also in the workshop. "She had done other kinds of (musical) writing . She had also been a producer in television and theater. This was her fourth career, so we were really coming at it from different places. We wrote our first musical about six months later, and we've been writing ever since. I've never really collaborated with anybody other than Lynn."

Flaherty sent some music to Hess, and they began to think about which numbers to include. "I started having ideas about what the show could be," Flaherty recalls, "that it wouldn't just be a revue about singing songs. There were certain styles about one piece that were thematically linked to another piece, or different ways of re-conceiving material. It's almost like we were taking an earlier artwork and creating a new piece oout of found objects."

Initially, Hess was going to assemble the material, but Flaherty's own enthusiasm took hold. He involved Ahrens. "We've really crafted the shape of the revue. In a lot of ways, it feels like a new show, even though it contains material that's been featured in other shows. But we do quite a few songs that have never been performed on the stage," including pieces from the film Anastasia, from a work in progress, The Glorious Ones, and the soon-to-debut Man of No Importance.

"Certain themes began to emerge, so we began to pair material together. For example, the word 'journey' appears a lot over the course of our work, and also the concept of storytelling, be it oral storytelling or through the theater, the use of myth...Also, there is the theme of parents and children, children growing up and leaving home and making choices and becoming parentd."

Flaherty decided to present the show without explanatory narration. "We actually wanted the stories, the characters and the drama to emerge from the songs without having to know where they came from."

Flaherty is especially excited that "We Tell The Story" is debuting in Cincinnati at CCM. "It was in Patricia Corbett Theater where I performed my first college show, a revue of songs that I had written. It was the biggest, most exciting creative experience of my life, because it was really the first collection of material and music that I had put forth to the public. I love that this revue is going to be in that theater."