Lucky
Stiff-- York Theater Program Notes
A
Note from the Authors
"Lucky
Stiff" was our first Off-Broadway show, produced in 1988.
It was supported by the Richard Rodgers Award, developed and produced
by Ira Weitzman and Andre Bishop at Playwrights Horizons and directed
by the masterful Thommie Walsh, with musical direction by Jeffrey
Saver. Since its off-Broadway premiere in New York City, the score
has been preserved on record by Bruce Kimmel and Varese Sarabande,
and in print by Warner Chappell; and it has been performed many
times around the country, most notably the Olney Theater production,
which garnered Washington's Helen Hayes Award for Best Musical.
But this
is its first visit back to New York City in fifteen years, just
a little east and uptown of where it began. We're delighted to
see it again, and grateful to Jim Morgan and everyone at the York
Theatre, as well as to Graciela Daniele and this fantastic, funny,
and hardworking company, for making it happen in such a short,
sweet time.
Lynn Ahrens
& Stephen Flaherty, October 2003
Lyricist Lynn Ahrens
and composer Stephen Flaherty met 20 years ago as members of BMI's
musical theater workshop. Ahrens, 34 at the time, had studied
journalism at Syracuse University and had spent several years
writing advertising copy in New York City, followed by a stint
as a freelance composer of commercial music, during which time
she created a number of familiar jungleincluding "What Would
You Do for a Klondike Bar?" and "Bounty, the quicker
picker-upper." During that time, Ahrens was also a mainstay
writer for the noted ABC show Schoolhouse Rock, and earned
an Emmy for "H.E.L.P.," an animated show she created,
wrote and produced for ABC-TV. She wrote music as well as lyrics
during the Schoolhouse Rock days. At 22, Flaherty was
just out of the Concinnati College Conservatory of Music, where
he majored in composition and was a self-described 'musical theater
nerd." Within seven years of first meeting, the collaborators
were authors of a Broadway hit, Once on This Island,
and the phrase "Flaherty & Ahrens"-- though it's
sometimes "Ahrens & Flaherty-- had become an idiom in
the theater-world vernacular, like "Beaumont & Fletcher,
" "Kaufman & Hart," or "Rodgers and Hammerstein."
Lucky Stiff,
Flaherty and Ahrens' first produced collaboration, won the Richard
Rodgers Development Award, and had its New York premiere on April
1, 1988, at Playwrights Horizons. Directed by Thommie Walsh, the
production featured Mary Testa, Paul Kandel and Stuart Zagnit.
Michael Kuchwara of the Associated Press praised Ahrens' "funny"
lyrics and remarked that, "to her credit, the humor comes
out of character rather than clever rhynes." Edith Oliver
of The New Yorker called the score"melodic and refreshing,"
and labeled Flaherty and his songs "the real thing."
Frank Rich urged readers of The New York Times to "cherish"
Ahrens and Flaherty "both for their promise and for their
willingness to embrace old-style musical comedy silliness without
apologies." Rich speculated that, in time, the team "might
give their generation its own Bells Are Ringing or Pajama
Game." When staged subsequently at the Olney Theatre
in Washington, D.C., Lucky Stiff received the Helen Hayes Award
for Best Musical.
Despite a few glitches,
the joint career of Flaherty and Ahrens has moved forward at a
rapid, sometimes dizzying clip. High points include Tony nominations
in 1991 for the book and score of Once On This Island,and
a 1998 Tony for the score of the well-lauded, long-running Ragtime
(which the pair created with librettist Terrence McNally.) Though
some of the team's works, such as Ragtime and Seussical
(2000). have been conceived on a large scale, Flaherty and
Ahrens have, in general, maintained a sturdy grip on their artistic
destiny by initiating projects which are modest enough in proportion
not to be daunting to producers. Last season's A Man o, f
No Importance which was staged by Lincoln Center Theater
( and won the 2003 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway
musical), is a case in point. The collaborators have also chosen
material for their shows which stirs their passions. Once
On This Island, for example, is based on a novel that Ahrens
found on a bargain rack at the old Barnes and Noble Annex on Fifth
Avenue and purchased on impulse. The story goes that she read
that novel, My Love, My Love, by Trinidadian
author Rosa Guy, in one sitting and rushed to Flaherty's apartment
to sell him on the idea of turning it into a musical play.
Lucky Stiff
is also based on a novel that Ahrens discovered (reportedly at
a second hand book sale in the New York Public Library. )That
novel, The Man Who Broke The Bank at Monte Carlo, is
a brief comic yarn by English writer Michael Butterworth, which
was first published in 1983. Set in the principality of Monaco
in the 1920s, the book concerns Ernest Rowbotham, a milquetoast
schoolmaster from "the kind of low-grade private school that
only England has the genius to produce." Rowbotham stands
to inherit a fortune from a Sicilian-American uncle he hasn't
met, but, to qualify for the legacy, must squire the uncle's corpse
on a deluxe excursion to the Cote d'Azur. Butterworth pits the
timid schoolmaster against a gaggle of inept gangsters from Chicago,
confounding the farce with infighting among the hoods. Set against
the backdrop of the Monte Carlo Casino and the Ballet Russes,
the novel includes cameo appearances by historical figures including
Diaghilev, Balanchine, the Dolly Sisters, Jean Cocteau and Maurice
Chevalier.
In writing Lucky
Stiff, Ahrens and Flaherty managed fidelity to Butterworth's
dizzy but dark brand of comedy while nonetheless reshaping the
source material to make it appropriate for the musical stage.
Much of the action of Lucky Stiff, like that of The Man Who
Broke The Bank at Monte Carlo, takes place in Monaco, but
the authors have advanced the time from the 1920s to the present
day. In deference to the strictures of production financing, Ahrens'
script requires only ten actor-singers-- five principals, an ensemble
two men and two women playing numerous smaller roles, and one
actor as a corpse.
In retrospect, it's
clear that, back in 1988, when the English were waging an assault
on the musical theater with all those "through-sung"
operettas, Lucky Stiff signaled the arrival of two American
artists with a distinctive joint voice and a sure sense of what's
theatrical. Michael Kuchwara summed up Lucky Stiff as
"a giddy little musical that...never stops moving."
During the subsequent decade and a half, Flaherty and Ahrens have
produced a string of diverse musical plays which prove that these
writers, too, never stop moving and, to borrow a phrase from their
colleague Stephen Sondheim, never do anything twice.
-- Charles Wright
