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Broadway Lyrics: The Family Business
December 3, 2006
By JOANNE KAUFMAN
 THE theater producer Jeffrey Seller didn’t much like the movie “High
Fidelity” when it came out in 2000. Based on ’s bestselling chronicle
of a 30-something record store clerk with a fondness for making Top Five
lists and a distaste for making like an adult, it seemed “lugubrious,” recalled
Mr. Seller, whose credits include “Rent” and “Avenue Q.”
But when he discovered that Amanda Green was working as the lyricist on a
musical version of the novel, he figured he would check it out. “I knew
Amanda,” he said. “She’d
done some workshops of ‘Avenue Q,’ playing the Gary Coleman part,
and I must say she was hilarious. I was very fond of her, so I went to
hear the songs.” During a presentation at the West Bank
Cafe, a young actor got onstage and began singing something called “Desert
Island Top Five Break-Ups.” That was when “I knew ‘High
Fidelity’ was going to be my next musical,” Mr. Sellers said. “These
were funny songs that were also pop songs, which leads me right to Amanda.”
But when he discovered that Amanda Green was working as the lyricist on a
musical version of the novel, he figured he would check it out. “I knew
Amanda,” he said. “She’d done some workshops of ‘Avenue
Q,’ playing the Gary Coleman part, and I must say she was hilarious.
I was very fond of her, so I went to hear the songs.”
During a presentation at the West Bank Cafe, a young actor got onstage and
began singing something called “Desert Island Top Five Break-Ups.” That
was when “I knew ‘High Fidelity’ was going to be my next
musical,” Mr. Sellers said. “These were funny songs that were
also pop songs, which leads me right to Amanda.”
“Before Amanda I had never heard the pop-rock style so witty,” he
added. “She just has an ingenious take on things.”
The “ingenious take” brought to mind another lyricist — Ms.
Green’s father, Adolph, who died in 2002. Mr. Green and Betty Comden,
who died on Thanksgiving, supplied the words to classic shows like “On
the Town,” “Wonderful Town” and “Bells Are Ringing.”
“If you look at some of Adolph’s work, he was a lyricist writing
contemporary musicals about life in New York City,” Mr. Seller said. “And ‘High
Fidelity’ is a contemporary musical about what it’s like to live
in New York City.”
Sitting in the conference room of Mr. Seller’s company, the Producing
Office, Ms. Green, 41, was working on what she hoped would be the Act II showstopper, “11:00
Number.” The show’s monthlong tryout at the Colonial Theater in
Boston had gotten decidedly mixed reviews, and the creative team has been
working furiously on revisions before the opening on Thursday at the Imperial
Theater. “It’s a hard moment to nail, but we’re zeroing
in on it,” she said, snapping shut her laptop. “The thing about
musicals is you keep writing until they say: ‘Time’s up. You have
to put your pencil down.’ ”
Ms. Green speaks with considerable authority here. She and the show’s
composer, Tom Kitt, who met in 1997 at a BMI Musical Theater writing workshop,
have been working on “High Fidelity” for five years. (David Lindsay-Abaire,
whose play “Rabbit Hole” was nominated for a Tony award last year,
wrote the book, with Walter Bobbie directing. The show is co-produced by Mr.
Seller, Robyn Goodman and Kevin McCollum.)
“When we started the project, we were our own bosses, and we were,
like, ‘Hey, let’s write a song this week,’ ” said
Ms. Green, who estimated that she and Mr. Kitt have written and jettisoned
some 22 songs. “Now it’s ‘Let’s write a song tomorrow
because we have to put it in the show tomorrow night.’ ”
For Ms. Green the stint at the Colonial Theater was more than a tryout, it
was also a sentimental journey. “I remember spending a weekend with
my dad there when ‘On the Twentieth Century,’ was trying out,” said
Ms. Green, referring to the 1978 Tony Award-winning musical. “My dad
and Betty were ebullient, greeting everyone with hugs and laughter, the mayors
of the theater.”
In an e-mail message that Ms. Green sent after reading Ms. Comden’s
obituary, she said: “I was taken aback to see a relatively recent picture
of her and my dad which I had never seen before, and it took my breath away.
Their deep affection for, and connection with, one another — their whole
story is right there in that photograph.”
Ms. Green has images of them “hunched together over their notepads,
glowering and scribbling furiously during a number, then charging down the
aisle to confer with the director. My dad chewed gum endlessly. He also chewed
on the filters of unlit cigarettes,” after he had given up smoking.
“I wasn’t there to see it — I hadn’t been born yet — but
my dad loved to tell the story of an out-of-town tryout for a show he did
with Betty and Jule Styne. It was 2 a.m. They were in a hotel room scrambling
to write a new number. They all were huge passionate personalities and had
had a huge fight. Jule blew up, stormed out, then moments later came back
in totally naked and danced a jig, and everyone roared with laughter.”
Despite Ms. Green’s pedigree, or perhaps because of it, “writing
for musical theater didn’t naturally occur to me for some reason,” she
said, breaking into a big infectious laugh. “I’m sure my shrink
would have something to say about that. I’m sure all the shrinks in
New York would have something to say about that.”
Ms. Green was raised on the Upper West Side in a swirl of Broadway celebrity.
(Her mother, the actress Phyllis Newman, met Mr. Green when she successfully
auditioned to be Judy Holliday’s understudy in “Bells Are Ringing.”)
At her parents’ frequent parties Leonard Bernstein might “be at
the piano, and then Jule Styne would take over and then Cy Coleman,” she
recalled. “It was exciting and fun and raucous. They trotted me out,
and I did my numbers. I had a nice little belt. My ‘Bali H’ai’ brought
the house down.”
When Amanda was 9, she starred as Maria in her camp’s production of “West
Side Story.” “I got an opening night telegram from Lenny,” she
said, referring to Mr. Bernstein. “I had a pretty incredible childhood
in that respect.”
Ms. Green’s adulthood has been pretty incredible too. Three years ago,
when she released a CD of her lyrics and vocals, “Put a Little Love
in Your Mouth,” Steven Sondheim sent her a fan letter that has pride
of place in the West Side apartment she shares with her husband, Jeffrey Kaplan,
an orthopedic surgeon. At the couple’s wedding seven years ago they
danced to one of Ms. Green’s favorite Comden-Green songs “Lucky
to Be Me.”
The first composing that this quintessentially New York City denizen tried,
though, was country music — in Tennessee: “I was interested in
pop music and I fell in love with Lyle Lovett’s writing. He was writing
witty songs, and that’s what I wanted to do. So I went to Nashville
in the mid-90s and wrote country music for a while. I never had great success
there, but I loved doing it.”
Back in New York, Ms. Green heard about the BMI workshop, “and I went
to do that and immediately thought: ‘What have I been wasting my time
for? This is where I belong,’ ” she said. “I was so happy
to be writing for characters and situations.”
The BMI program also redirected Ms. Green’s ambitions. Originally her
focus had been on performing. After graduating from Brown University she attended
an actors’ training program at Circle in the Square and spent two seasons
at Williamstown Theater. She began writing songs and singing them in New York
cabarets, like Joe’s Pub, with Mr. Kitt as her musical director. “It
was a way I could be working and expressing myself, and be doing things besides
waiting tables,” she said. And “I was a terrible, terrible, waitress.”
While “High Fidelity” is her first Broadway musical, she has
tried her hand at a few other works: “Up the Week Without a Paddle,” a
sort of West Coast “Sex in the City” that she wrote with Curtis
Moore, had a run in Los Angeles in the summer of 2000. “For the Love
of Tiffany,” a send-up of Lifetime network movies, also written with
Mr. Moore, was part of the 2003 New York City Fringe Festival. In addition
to supplying the show’s lyrics, Ms. Green played a triple amputee housekeeper. “That,” she
said, “was a lot of fun.”
Asked about the similarities between father and daughter, Phyllis Newman
said that Amanda “has the great gift that my husband had of total focus
and commitment to her work. She’s not sloppy, nor was he.”
She added that Mr. Green went to every one of their daughter’s cabaret
performances. Ms. Green, who once wrote a musical tribute to her father called “On
Daddy’s Shoulders,” remembers what those ringside visits were
like. “He’d come to a show and say: ‘My kid is the greatest.
No kidding. And it’s not just because she’s my daughter. I swear
it,’ ” she said. “I just wanted to go under the table because
I knew what they were all thinking: It’s because it’s his daughter.”
In an e-mail message, Ms. Green wrote of Ms. Comden: “Her passing away
feels not only like losing her, but also like losing him all over again. And
it makes me sad to think of a world without Comden & Green.”
She continued: “Selfishly, I wish she and my father could be here for ‘High
Fidelity.’ It would have been a helluva’n opening night!”
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