By Harry Haun
12 Jun 2011

	Aaron Tveit in Catch Me If You Can.
	photo by Joan Marcus

Backstage at the Tony Awards, the night of their Hairspray triumph, was the first time Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman actually verbalized that they were working on a Broadway musicalization of Steven Spielberg's 2002 caper comedy about a con-teen bouncing bad checks around the globe, Catch Me If You Can. That was June of 2003; this is June of 2011. "When people hear we've been working on this show for eight years now, I fear they're going to think it's like 'The Ring Cycle,'" cracks Shaiman. The sound is '60s again, he notes, "a few years down the road from Hairspray. It's more adult and sexy. Hairspray was completely innocent and more girlie. This is more masculine and a bit more adult. It's a very male-driven kind of score because the principals are men. If Hairspray was Sixteen magazine, Catch Me If You Can is Playboy." Songs were cued either by specific lines and phrases from Jeff Nathanson's script, or by scenes supplied by their book-writer, Terrence McNally. "I write a full scene and hope Mark and Scott are going to find a song suggested by my dialogue that inspires them to write a song that will render anywhere from 15 to 80 percent of my dialogue unnecessary," explains McNally. "A playwriting life is a very different art form. The main job a librettist does is structure a musical."

	Janet Dacal in Wonderland.
	photo by Paul Kolnik

One of Broadway's most prolific modern composers is Frank Wildhorn, steady and holding at six musicals over the past 16 years. "People forget that Victor/Victoria was my first Broadway experience," he pointed out. "When Henry Mancini passed away, Julie Andrews asked me to finish the score. And what's cool is that show was in the Marquis Theatre, and that's where Wonderland is so I feel like I'm coming back to where it all started." Wonderland is his modern-day musicalization of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" — and the first show he specifically wrote for his children. "When you go to Wonderland — when you go to that fantasmagorical place — you have the freedom to go musically anywhere you want. The Mad Hatter, who's played by Kate Shindle — you can make her a jazz artist. You can take El Gato, the Cheshire Cat, and make him Santana. You can take The White Knight and make him Justin Timberlake, the leader of a boy band. The fact we have a Cuban-American girl, Janet Dacal, playing Alice with her curly red hair, again, is just trying to break down stereotypes and barriers. You can give all these iconic figures their own musical leitmotif, and this particular show is wonderful in the sense that you can do that. It gives you the freedom. In most shows, you write the time and place that you're in, or a version of that — you have to be pretty consistent with that — but this show let me have enormous freedom as a composer, and that was so much fun."

Baby It's You! is a sentimental journey back to the pop and doo-wop days of the '60s, with a deep bow to before-its-time feminism. It's the musical saga of the woman behind the women, Florence Greenberg, a fortyish Jewish woman who discovered The Shirelles, established Scepter Records and jump-started the career of Lesley Gore, The Isley Brothers, Chuck Jackson, among others. All these people come with hits to be replayed. An old hand at creating original musicals out of established songs (Blues in the Night, Play On!), Sheldon Epps co-directed this show with Floyd Mutrux, who wrote the musical book with Colin Escott as he did for their last slice of American musical history, Million Dollar Quartet. "Their whole esthetic philosophy about these shows," explained Epps, "is to find these interesting characters or incidents behind the lives of the people that we've heard a lot about and to use the well-known music that the people created to explore that incident or somebody behind the scenes in their lives." Hence, we have an original musical that twists and shouts with "Louie, Louie," "It's My Party," et al. In Epps' view, this is a win-win: "One thing you know is you're going to get a very pleasing score because the songs are so great. The other thing is that I find with music like this — especially pop music — that these are really the songs of people's lives, the songs that they dated to and fell in love to and met their husbands, so they strike a very particular emotional chord in people. As soon as people hear a song like "Soldier Boy" or "Dedicated to the One I Love," it takes 'em right back to the period."