Posted on January 11, 2009 at 8:57 pm

[Part 1 can be read here, and Part 2 can be read here. You’re in for a long night.]

I was in Philadelphia in May 1996, doing the very first reading of Parade. Every night was spent arranging and rewriting material, and all day was spent rehearsing with Hal and the cast. It was exhilarating work, and for the first time in my career, I felt like I was right where I belonged: in a room with the best people in the business, creating something magical.

At the end of the day before the final presentation, one of the actresses from The Predator’s Ball called me from Italy, where she and the rest of the New York cast had been in rehearsals for two weeks. It was a lousy connection, and she didn’t want to get very specific, but I got the sense that rehearsals weren’t going well. I reassured her as best I could that I would take care of things when I got there, which was only a week away. After I hung up, I forgot all about Italy and went back to Leo and Lucille Frank and this show that I loved.

When I got back to New York, there was a message from Karole Armitage on my answering machine. She said that, first of all, she was changing a lot of my music and bringing in a rapper and a house music composer to replace some of my work; and secondly, she was canceling my trip to Italy because she thought I’d be a disruptive presence.

Oy.

There’s probably no “right” response to something like that. I called some of the cast members in Italy and heard their side of the story: nothing was getting done, the dancers would only rehearse for an hour a day and were surly and difficult when they showed up (this is fairly typical of Italian ballet companies), and Karole was responding by throwing out huge chunks of the show because she didn’t have time to rehearse them. Furthermore, she was rewriting the script on the spot, and some of the actors were concerned that she was cutting them out for personal reasons. In the middle of all of this, I doubt Karole thought very much about my feelings or my music; she was in crisis and doing what needed to be done to get the piece up and running. (That’s my rational thirteen-years-after-the-fact response. My response at that moment was rather less generous.)

My lawyer didn’t think there was much he could do since everything was happening in Italy, so he suggested I hire an Italian lawyer to deal with the situation. I decided to give my credit cards some exercise: I booked two tickets to Italy and set up an appointment with an avvocato named Vincent Lualdi, who was born in Massachusetts but practiced law in Florence. Lualdi hadn’t done much work in entertainment law, but he thought the whole story was funny and bizarre (“Oh, you crazy show people!”), so he agreed to take my case.

There was no strategy, there was no plan, I just wanted to make Karole respect the work I had done, and if she wouldn’t do that, I wanted the performance to be canceled. First Lualdi filed suit with the local magistrate, and then he told me to go serve Karole with an injunction. So I walked into the Teatro Comunale, a beautiful old theater from the late 1800’s, while Karole was in the middle of a typically chaotic tech rehearsal, and I headed towards her, the legal document shaking in my hand.

I am very bad at confrontation, and I was much worse at it then. If I can write a letter, I can be fierce and aggressive, but in person, I just want to crawl under a table. So when Karole looked up from her desk in the theater, she looked surprised because she hadn’t known I was coming, then she offered some kind of perfectly pleasant greeting, and I said, trying to contain my emotions, “Hi, Karole, listen, we filed for an injunction against the production which was granted this morning, so you either have to restore all of my music or the show is canceled,” and I calmly handed her the paper. And then I broke out in a sweat, turned, and ran.

I didn’t run straight out of the building. I meant to, but I didn’t know where the exits were. So I just ran, with Karole following me trying to talk to me. She gave up after a while, but I just kept going, through the tunnels under the theater, opening any door I saw, not knowing where I was going to end up, until finally I pushed open a huge metal portone and all of a sudden I was in the bright Florentine sunshine. Weirdly, I kept running, even though there was no one following me and it was beastly hot. At last, I ducked into an ancient church and sat down on a pew in the back, panting, crying, exhausted.

Lualdi was very excited because he got the story on the front page of the newspaper the next morning. The headline was something like “Americans in ridiculous fight about dancing,” and there was a picture of me looking oddly smug in front of the courthouse. We met with an arbitrator, Karole was told she had to restore all of my music; she didn’t; the show went on anyway.

The article in the Florence paper after the opening focused more on my fight with Karole than it did on the piece itself. I was there watching the show (taking notes, of course, for my “legal team”), so I can confirm the reports that “alla fine della rappresentazione applausi cordiali.” As for me, it was obviously hard to be objective about what I was seeing, but I couldn’t help but feel vindicated in one respect: whenever the interpolated music started playing, the audience got restless.

So whatever. The ballet played out its run, I didn’t bother suing for damages because I didn’t have the money for the legal fees and, really, how much had I been damaged? I wrote some great music for a shitty piece, got to hang out with some crazy Italians, and had a fantastic European adventure. I left Florence with my wife, we toured around the country going heedlessly deeper into debt, and after a couple of fabulous weeks, we came home to New York to try to repair the damage I’d done to the bank account.

The piece was performed again at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that fall, but none of my music was included by then.

For several years after that, I tried to fashion a new libretto around my score. I shopped the project around with a couple of producers and a few regional theaters, but it was a weird piece under any circumstances, and I really didn’t have any particular passion about Michael Milken or the financial industry. I love much of what I created, but eventually I realized that it just wasn’t ever going to be a show. I took all the scores and tapes, put them in a large file box, and that box is now sitting in storage. If you open it up, the first thing you’ll see is a yellowing copy of the Corriere della Sera with my picture on the front page.

*

Three more excerpts from the score, and then I close this chapter:

One of the characters in the show was a narrator of sorts, who also functioned as a moral conscience. I just saw him as Ben Vereen in Pippin, and so I wrote this opening number with that in mind. (Hence my irritating attempt to sing “black.” Sorry.) At the midpoint, as the narrator begins introducing the other characters, you’ll hear all the motivic material that defined them throughout.

“Money Gonna Make You A Real Man”
from The Moneyman (1996)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
JRB: piano, vocals, synth programming
Brooks Ashmanskas, Christy Baron, Peter Flynn, Jenny Giering, Audrey Klinger, John Sawyer: ensemble vocals
Kevin Kuhn: electric guitar
Randy Landau: electric bass
Mia Wu: violin
Sal Spicola: alto sax, clarinet, bass clarinet
Tom Partington: drums
Robert McEwan: percussion
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser
Instruments recorded at RPM Studios, NY, NY, 5/2/96 (Engineer: Suzanne Dyer)
Backing vocals recorded at Knoop Music, River Edge, NJ 5/29/98 (Engineer: Manfred Knoop)

Vocals recorded at Warehouse Recording Studio, NY, NY, 9/17/96 (Engineer: Billy Eric)

A moment of introspection: Milken’s wife, Lori, sings about the mundanity of her day-to-day existence, and Milken explains his worldview. Special thanks to Lauren Mufson, who sang the hell out of the score even when Karole drowned out her song with hip-hop music in the second verse.

“I Rise”
from The Moneyman (1996)
Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Lauren Mufson: vocals
JRB: piano, vocals
Kevin Kuhn: acoustic guitar
Randy Landau: upright bass
Mia Wu: violin
Sal Spicola: clarinet, bass clarinet
Robert McEwan: vibraphone and percussion
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser
Instruments recorded at RPM Studios, NY, NY, 5/28/96 (Engineer: Suzanne Dyer)
Vocals recorded at Warehouse Recording Studio, NY, NY, 9/17/96 (Engineer: Billy Eric)

And finally, an inscrutable farewell: At one point in the second act, Karole wanted to dramatize Milken’s exploitation of the Mexican financial crisis by doing a Day of the Dead celebration onstage. It all sounded insane to me, but I really like the wacky music I came up with. (Note also that there’s one spot where Kevin Kuhn plays the completely wrong chord at the beginning of one of the ostinati. This is a very strange moment in my history: I heard him play it wrong, I pointed out that he played it wrong, and he somehow convinced me to keep it. I don’t mind it, actually, but I still can’t figure out what kind of hypnosis Kevin employed to keep that particular clearly audible mistake on tape. He’s a magician, I tell you.)

“Mexico”
from The Moneyman (1996)
Music by Jason Robert Brown
JRB: piano
Kevin Kuhn: acoustic guitar
Randy Landau: upright bass
Mia Wu: violin
Sal Spicola: flute, piccolo
Tom Partington: drums
Robert McEwan: xylophone and percussion
Recorded and mixed by Jeffrey Lesser
Instruments recorded at RPM Studios, NY, NY, 5/28/96 (Engineer: Suzanne Dyer)
Vocals recorded at Warehouse Recording Studio, NY, NY, 9/17/96 (Engineer: Billy Eric)

Everything else to the side, I have to thank Karole for the opportunity to write some really fun music. It sucks that it didn’t all work out better for either of us, but we both seem to have survived just fine.