We`re having lunch with David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr. and right away they rev up their comedy act.
”You know you`re in trouble,” says Maltby, eyeing the menu, ”when you`ve never heard of a single ingredient served on the pizza. Asiago, Fontanella, carmelized onions, sage and walnuts.
”Well,” he adds, ”I guess I`ve heard of sage and walnuts-just not on a pizza.”
Apparently Maltby is the funny one and Shire the quiet and unassuming partner. ”How could you possibly make such a conclusion so rapidly?” Shire fires back with feigned hurt feelings. ”And be 100 percent wrong.”
Shire and Maltby aren`t professional comedians. They`re songwriters, the force behind ”Closer Than Ever,” a musical revue opening Sunday at Highland Park`s Apple Tree Theatre.
Their longtime collaboration-and gift for luncheon banter-goes all the way back to 1958, when they were mere students at Yale.
They co-wrote a musical based on ”Cyrano de Bergerac” and, for a production by college juniors, it turned out to have quite the pedigree: Dick Cavett, film director John Badham and actor John Cunningham (now starring on Broadway in ”Six Degrees of Separation”) were all in the cast and crew. Even then, Broadway producers talked of mounting this undergraduate exercise.
”We were more sure of our success together then than we are today,”
jokes Shire. Indeed, as Maltby adds, when they finally made it, as it were, it wasn`t as a team and it wasn`t for a musical.
Instead, they hit paydirt apart: In 1978 lyricist Maltby won a Tony Award for staging ”Ain`t Misbehavin”` and composer Shire won an Oscar a year later for ”Norma Rae.” Their one Broadway show together, ”Baby,” actually had greater success in Chicago than in New York.
They continue what Shire mockingly calls their open marriage: Maltby is at the moment enjoying great success as one of the lyricists for the London blockbuster ”Miss Saigon” and is working on ”Nick and Nora,” an upcoming Broadway adaptation of ”The Thin Man.” Shire is working on movie scores and a new sitcom with music for CBS, to star Angela Lansbury as a Broadway composer.
But they persevere together still, too, and it`s as a team that, in the view of a core of admirers, they do their best work. A handful of songs recorded by Barbra Streisand (”Autumn,” ”Starting Here, Starting Now”) are among her more memorable offerings. (The duo met the singer in her early cabaret days, before ”Funny Girl,” and Shire once served as her
accompanist.)
And their latest off-Broadway revue of songs, ”Closer Than Ever,” has been called one of the best scores of the 1980s. As a 1989 off-Broadway venture, ”Closer” won Outer Critics Circle Awards, but, in the strange fate that dogs this duo, it wasn`t a financial blockbuster.
”Closer” struggled along for a year in New York, haunted by a negative review in The New York Times. Even there, fate seemed stacked against the partnership. ”Closer” was reviewed by a critic who had a short-lived career at The Times. ”She was proving her mettle at the time, we were one of her victims, and she was fired after a short period there, in part because of what she wrote about our show,” says Maltby.
”In part, it seems people either really love our work or don`t,” says Shire.
”Closer” is about relationships, although not necessarily romantic ones. The songs includes stories that reflect on friendships and parenthood, and Maltby and Shire agree with those critics who find a subtle link between the individual numbers.
”It started with the random collecting of ideas,” says Maltby. ”We had a song from `Baby` for a character we liked, but whom we eventually wrote out of the show. We wrote her out of the show in part because the song was self-contained, like a story-there was no reason for her to continue after she sang it.
”We also wrote together some songs in that same vein for a project at the Manhattan Theatre Club, called `Urban Blight.` After that, someone we`d worked with was looking for a project and asked if he could put together some of these songs, plus some trunk songs left over from some of our other projects, into a cabaret evening.
”He did,” continues Maltby, ”and it got great reviews.”
That 50-minute presentation was enough to inspire RCA to want to release a recording. Maltby and Shire sensed they had something, and ”Closer”
resulted.
”I guess what really put the idea over for us was discovering that when we took all these seemingly disparate ideas they had a unity, they had a voice,” Maltby says. ”We seemed to be saying something about lives lived over time. That you start someplace and find yourself someplace else and that your relationships change and alter over time.”
To elaborate, they cite a song from the show called ”Three Friends.”
”It stemmed from an observation made by both of my wives,” Maltby says wryly. ”That you can have a tremendously close relationship with a bunch of people over time, and yet when you get together, you sometimes find yourself wondering, `What do these people have in common except that they`re friends?”`
”There`s another song about our relationships with our fathers,” adds Shire. ”It`s called `If I Sing,` and it`s about the fact that both of our fathers were bandleaders, and about the heritage we got from them, why we do what we do.
”And it`s about the bigger theme of that capacity to love or find joy in something that we learn from our parents, sometimes over our dead bodies,” he continues.
If all goes well, ”Closer” and its four-member cast will finish at Apple Tree and reopen for a longer run at the Halsted Theatre Center on the North Side-a testing route that hints at the precarious nature of theatrical success, particularly in a category as esoteric as the musical revue. (The team enjoyed success with an earlier revue, ”Starting Here, Starting Now.”) Why do they doggedly keep returning to the theater?
”That`s where we both started out, and there`s nothing more exciting than standing in the back of a theater and listening to a song and hearing it somehow change every night,” says Shire. ”When you write for movies, it`s done and they`re gone.”
”And it`s that thrill of finding out whether the audience loves it right then and there,” adds Maltby. ”It`s the stillness when you`ve got their attention, and the coughs when you know you`ve lost them.”
They`ve said enough, the lunch is over and so is the interview-well, almost. ”But,” says Shire, ”you haven`t even asked us a single thing about the Persian Gulf.”
