PUTNEY-This Saturday at Next Stage Arts, David Yazbek offers a one-man show, A Few Cheery Songs About Death, which, according to a press release, “promises an intimate night of music, witty repartee, and behind-the-scenes storytelling.”
Yazbek, whose Putney stop is the show’s only stop in New England, has been described by The New York Times as “a daredevil juggler catching spiked pins in the traveling carnival of his imagination.”
His current project is this 90-minute solo work — a weaving of stories, wit, and songs, most from his Broadway musical scores and the rest from his life and work as a comedy writer and in rock ‘n’ roll.
Though Yazbek says he’d never thought of himself as a theater person, he’s managed to write music and lyrics for some big Broadway projects: The Band’s Visit, The Full Monty, Tootsie, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Dead Outlaw, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, garnering many awards, including the Tony Award for Best Original Score (The Band’s Visit). And he consulted on the music for Buena Vista Social Club.
Yazbek is an old friend of Next Stage co-founder Billy Straus, a Putney-based award-winning musician, songwriter, and music producer/engineer.
The two met when they were 12 — through common friends, Straus explains, and have been close ever since. They played in some bands together and eventually ended up at Brown University in 1978.
They “worked on a wide variety of musical projects over the years,” including opening a recording studio on 14th Street in New York City in 1985, Straus says.
Among other feathers in the cap, they recorded Brattleboro resident Keene Carse with the New York City ska band Urban Blight. They collaborated on music for various children’s television projects in the 1990s and, with Sean Altman, on the theme song for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
After Straus moved to Putney, “David invited me to help with his first couple Broadway cast albums — The Full Monty and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels — which we recorded in NYC and mixed here in Putney.”
Noting that this is Yazbek’s only appearance outside a major city, Straus expects it will be “a great treat for our community to have a chance to experience the show locally. There’ll be music, definitely some behind-the-scenes anecdotes, a chance for Q&A,” and a lot of laughs, he says.
The Commons had a chance to talk with Yazbek recently.
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Annie Landenberger: What about the title of the show?
David Yazbek: You know, I’m experimenting with that. The New York Times [rock critic] did a review of one of my [David Yazbek Band] shows maybe 10 years ago. It was satisfying because the headline for the review was “David Yazbek and a Few Cheery Songs About Death.”
I do write a lot of songs that touch on the concept of mortality and the idea that life is short, hence it’s precious. I play in that playground a lot — with my own stuff, with my album tracks where I get to say anything I want. When I recorded it, my mother had just died. [But] none of it’s maudlin.
A.L.: So the spine of the evening...
D.Y.: I’ve written 600 songs, and I probably know how to play 50 of them. So it’s easy for me to get up and perform them. Because I’m also good at talking to an audience and I’m a comedy writer, I’m trying to make an evening that isn’t just “then I wrote, and then I wrote.”
I’m trying to cook up something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end — and that connects with people. That’s the real reason I want to do it: I want to connect with people.
A.L.: What numbers from your musicals are in the show?
D.Y.: A sampling — I’ll be singing (and playing) “Omar Sharif,” “Haled’s Song About Love,” and “Beat of Your Heart” from The Band’s Visit; “Breeze Off the River” from The Full Monty; “Up to the Stars” from Dead Outlaw, and songs from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tootsie, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. We’ll have some songs off my solo albums and a few surprises.
It’s about two-thirds songs from my shows. And I tell a story. It’s about the creative process. I found that people really love to know the background to certain songs and then to hear them. That’s my experience, too.
It’s about going from this frustrated, touring rock guy to something I never in a million years thought I would be: a Tony-winning guy — like you said, a theater person.
I write music and lyrics. I love doing it. And I do it now for characters I love writing for. And for ideas that I want to express — along with lessons I’ve learned about life and mortality along the way.
A.L.: So rock ‘n’ roll, musicals, comedy writing...
D.Y.: A large part of that is letting go of conflicts. Parallel to my theater career, I studied Zen Buddhism for many, many years. And I was in therapy right around the time I was doing the first shows. It was my personal journey from conflict and anxiety to acceptance and, to a large extent, to getting joy in the process, too.
A.L.: The curses and blessings of the multi-talented.
D.Y.: That’s why it’s hard for me to put it together in a way. It’s so personal, and I keep trying to find ways to make the personal universal, but you have to present it the right way.
A.L.: We share an alma mater. Were you a music concentrator at Brown?
D.Y.: No. I got a great piece of advice from a friend of my parents who was actually a music critic for The New Yorker. She said, “Don’t major in music.”
And I said, “Why?”
“Because you’re going to be involved with music anyway.”
I ended up majoring in English and American lit.
It was great advice, because there are some people I know who went to Berklee or Juilliard for music and are spectacular musicians, but they just can’t write a song [or] a compelling melody, you know?
A.L.: Did you do theater at Brown?
D.Y.: I actually did a lot. So I guess I lied: I am a theater person. I just never thought I would be a musical theater writer. I acted in a bunch of stuff; I wrote a few one-acts.
I’ve always been someone who does a lot of things at the same time. I’m trying to ease off on that, but college was like that.
I wrote incidental music for a lot of things, too. [A sold-out production of Hair co-directed at Brown] was my big dose of musical theater before I came back to reality and went to write for Late Night With David Letterman and got involved in a recording studio with Billy [Straus].
A.L.: Tell me about writing for David Letterman.
D.Y.: Writing for Letterman: probably one of the best moments in my career as a showbiz guy was when I was out in Long Island fishing in Montauk, and I’m at this motel. And I got a call [from a writer friend/collaborator].
Six weeks before this showbiz moment, we’d heard [that most of Letterman’s writers were leaving the show to write for Lorne Michaels’ The New Show].
I said [to my friend], “Let’s go to your house” — he lived at his dad’s massive apartment that had a stocked kitchen. “It’s a long weekend. We will spend all of Saturday writing with the television on. We will spend all Sunday writing. Then we’ll spend all Monday editing what we wrote. And we’ll send it in.”
And we did. And then, then two months later, I’m in Montauk and [that friend calls]: He goes, “You’ve got to come back.”
“Why?”
“Letterman wants to meet us.”
And I was like, “Holy shit. We got the job.” It was just like all the sort of weird showbiz dreams — at 22 years old. It’s like, I’m going to write for one of my comedy idols.
So that’s that moment — the phone call was the peak — where all the illusions were still in place. Then we get there and, you know, I’m there less than a year; [my friend is] there for like three months.
It was grinding work with a very high kill rate for someone who was extremely neurotic at the time. I wanted it to be like The Dick Van Dyke Show or like the stories you hear about Sid Caesar’s show [in the 1950s].
That wasn’t it. It was a little bit fun sometimes because it was glamorous showbiz: There were always very famous people walking around. We got to sit in a room with Steve Martin and come up with stuff. That was fun.
But I got out of there and flew right to music. We’d won an Emmy, which made it very easy for me to make money writing pilots and a lot of children’s scripts. There were weeks when I would write three children’s shows and like five or six children’s songs.
A.L.: You grew up in Manhattan.
D.Y.: Yeah, first on the Upper West Side in an expansive apartment that cost $300 a month. And then on the Upper East Side; then I went to Brown and then I came right back to the city.
My dad was a clothing designer; my mom was a homemaker and a really great pianist.
A.L.: And you?
D.Y.: Well, piano was my first instrument because we had a piano. When I was 7, they sent me to lessons with the piano teacher who lived in the apartment right under ours. I didn’t like the lessons. I didn’t like playing. I didn’t like the dots on the paper.
[Then] I started playing cello — for like 10 years. That’s a tough instrument on the body.
And it was very frustrating to my teacher, because I just couldn’t bring myself to practice for an hour a day. So I was just this vessel of untapped potential to her.
A.L.: When did you start composing?
D.Y.: I started composing as soon as I started playing. A little melody would come out — even when I was 5, 6, 7. I wouldn’t say I was composing great full songs or anything, but I was writing stuff, certainly.
A.L.: You and Billy met when you were in seventh grade?
D.Y.: He had just started playing guitar. And we played in a band with some people. We went to different schools, but there was some connector.
A.L.: You were at Brown together?
D.Y.: We met up again in Providence. And then Billy had become like this young whiz kid engineer. And we recorded. I would often record my own stuff or band stuff with him engineering it and producing it. It was very collaborative.
We’ve written so many songs together — jingles, a lot of songs for children’s shows. He hired me sometimes; sometimes I would hire him. We’ve just been in each other’s soup for many decades.
A.L.: You’re taken with the piano at Next Stage?
D.Y.: It’s just a cool Steinway concert grand. It’s a great piano. I’ve only tinkered on it once, and I was like, “Ooh.”
Getting to play a really good piano is a real treat for me. I’m an idiosyncratic pianist who might not deserve a concert Steinway, but I’ll take it when I can get it.
A.L.: So who are your idols? There’s Letterman. Did you ever glom onto Tom Lehrer or—?
D.Y.: Well, that’s funny you’re mentioning that, because I did glom onto Tom Lehrer, but not as strongly as I did to Allan Sherman. Allan Sherman just made me laugh, even when I was very little. I didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about, but I was laughing really hard because it was so clearly funny and original. And he sang in front of a live audience that really appreciated him.
Also Spike Jones, you know, just for sheer pure musical comedy.
I’ve also always loved Frank Loesser’s musicals [e.g., Guys and Dolls]. He’s sort of my guy. I’m not a Sondheim guy, even though I’ve been inspired by five Sondheim songs that just are gorgeous and I listen to them to psych me up.
A.L.: Such as...?
D.Y.: “Please Hello” [from Pacific Overtures]. It’s such a clever song, and it goes so many places. And I love “The Ladies Who Lunch” [from Company] because of the rhyme scheme, because of the depth of it, and because of how he lands the plane.
At the end of the [penultimate] verse the line is “everybody dies,” but it ends on this high note, and it just breaks your heart if it’s done right.
That’s the key to musical theater.
A.L.: Last question. You’ve been up here several times. You and Billy are great friends. This Putney night is off your current circuit. What are you looking forward to?
D.Y.: I’m trying out this show, you know. I’m looking forward to meeting some more Putney people and Vermonters from surrounding towns. I just love staying with Billy and Lynne [Weinstein, Straus’s spouse, a photographer].
It’s always just a great hang. It’s spending time with people you’ve known for many, many years, who you’re comfortable with, who you’re not in competition with, because in the arts there’s a lot of that.
I’m looking forward to the entire long weekend that will peak, hopefully, at Next Stage Arts.
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David Yazbek performs his 90-minute one-man show, with an audience discussion following, on Saturday, Dec. 13, at 7:30 p.m. at Next Stage Arts, 15 Kimball Hill, Putney. Advance tickets are available at nextstagearts.org.
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Editor’s note: Stories presented as interviews in this format are edited for clarity, readability, and space. Words and ideas of substance not spoken by interview subjects appear in brackets.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.