By Harry Haun
12 Jun 2011
The original musical, in the view of Alan Menken who has collected a shelf-full of Oscars and a few Tony nominations for composing them, "is the most creative medium for songwriters. Your songs are attached to a story. They're driving something that's dramatic. You get to pick musical styles and have them comment on an era. You get to work in so many forms and shapes. And you have an audience." All that — and he still had trepidation about taking on Sister Act, a Whoopi Goldberg flick about a lounge singer hiding out as a convent choir director. "I didn't want to work in R&B again," he explained. "I'd already done my R&B musical [Little Shop of Horrors], and I was working at the time on a gospel musical [Leap of Faith]. Then, it occurred to me the story would work just as well if told through disco and funk and all those '70s musical styles — y'know, Donna Summer and The Bee Gees. Once I came up with that palette, it became exciting to me." Resetting the story 20 years earlier than it was in the film also jump-started his lyricist: "Very quickly the main tent-poles of the score appeared to us," recalled Glenn Slater. "Almost immediately, which sound went with which character — and how they came together into a full score — sprung in our minds. We laid it out very quickly. I think we did the first draft of the show in about four months. That's pretty fast work — about a song a week. We rewrote the end of those songs for the London production, and we have several new ones for Broadway. Having Victoria Clark play Mother Superior — a voice like that in such a key role — made it almost inevitable that we would add something new for her to sing. Those are the kinds of adjustments you make as you help the show find itself."
Patina Miller in Sister Act. photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN
It was Iris Rainer Dart's love of the strong melodic line that led her where no woman (or man) had gone before — to the doorstep of Mike Stoller to write the music to her lyrics and book for The People in the Picture, a Holocaust-haunted saga spanning three generations of women. Stoller had never written for the Broadway theatre before, but a jukebox replay of the Greatest Hits he wrote with lyricist Jerry Leiber during their 60-year collaboration — called Smokey Joe's Café — became the longest-running musical revue in Broadway history. "I wanted somebody who wrote a great tune that was singable," says Dart, whose standards were pretty much set at age 14 by Ethel Merman in Gypsy. When somebody suggested I speak to Mike, I said, 'Oh, my God! Mike Stoller! Even I, with my bad singing, can sing every song he wrote.' So melody is back, in this show, for sure!" Seconding that motion by augmenting Stoller's music is Artie Butler, who arranged most of the Stoller-Leiber output and wrote "Here's To Life." "We don't have an 11 o'clock number," quips Butler. "We have a 10:45 song."
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Harry Haun is a longtime staff writer for Playbill, and writes the Playbill On Opening Night column for Playbill.com.
