January – Obama is sworn in. MTEA at Shenandoah. The Journey of the Song continues.
February – with sister Andrea in Malibu, West Coast alumni in Santa Monica

Rainbow in Topanga Canyon, February 2009

March – NY Showcase, Stretch’s memorial, conference in the UK, visiting the Royal Crescent (Bath) and Hyde Park (London)
April – The newly-christened Ira Brind School of Theater Arts names its new director – moi. Grey Gardens begins rehearsals, but I bail out after a week.
May – James Lapine speaks at commencement.

CG introduces James Lapine, UArts Commencement 2009

June – Harold workshop, composing the score. D’s eye surgery. Alex turns 24
July – I orchestrate and record Harold. D and I celebrate 29 years of marriage. (Next year = big ass party)
August – Strathmere = Heaven. ATHE in NYC. Final rehearsals for Harold (the eternal tech). Rosi and Alex cohabit.
September – Another academic year begins! MTEA in Denmark and Germany, D comes too. Harold toddles off on tour
October – Follies at the Prince – Me and D are Ben and Phyllis. Phils win the division, then the league (Alex and Kerry at CBP for the NL championship game).
November – The World Series! No repeat but big fun nevertheless.
December – Harold in Philly. Kerry turns 19. Rosi and Alex to Zurich. (Zürich? When in doubt, add an umlaut.)

Discoveries this year: Gabriel Kahane, Jonathan Lethem, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, The White Tiger, Nik Bärtsch, Grey Gardens, Peter Mills’ Illyria, Mad Men, Newbold IPA. Re-discovered: Follies (being onstage in a musical with a big orchestra is a gas!), The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, A Tiny Miracle (ten years ago!). To my chagrin, I discover that I’ve seen none of the movies and none of the plays that the NY Times critics chose for their top ten lists, and have heard none of the musical groups or CDs they name. Doesn’t say much for my hipness, I’m afraid. I’ve downloaded some Vijay Iyer, though, and am hoping for the best.

Here’s to the end of the Noughties, a decade that was far more nice than naughty. It was when:

We move to Philly, and eventually acquire the property next door
My Hollywood moment with Kevin Smith and Jersey Girl
Gemini the Musical in Philly and NYC
Sabbatical travels through Europe and the UK in 2000, 2007, conferences in 2009. Hong Kong in 2006. Ersten mal im Berlin, mit Dreigroschenoper! A decade’s worth of stamps in the passport.
Alex completes a BFA at UArts, becomes partner in P’unk Ave
Promoted to full professor, then Director of the Brind School
Kerry shines in numerous stage appearances, then turns his back on the stage and enrolls at UArts for….?
D directs, performs, teaches, becomes increasingly magnificent
Phils win the World Series and make a valiant attempt to repeat the accomplishment the following year
Murphy breathes his last, Basket joins the family
We celebrate the lives of dear ones departed: Gran, Stretch

What will the next decade hold? Thoughts become things, baby!

I’ve been in the UK for the past 4 days. Thursday, Friday and Saturday I was in the lovely historic city of Bath, attending a conference entitled “‘Putting It Together’: Teaching Musical Theatre in UK Higher Education” at Bath Spa University. There, I had a chance to meet dozens of colleagues from UK musical theater training programs at conservatories and universities. I also did a demonstration of some SAVI exercises and some recruiting for another European conference, to be held in September in Denmark and Germany.

I had debated spending an extra day for an “artist’s date” in London. (The term comes from Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” and is a highly-recommended strategy for personal renewal.) It seemed frivolous to prolong my time away from home, and potentially risky to fly back on Monday when I’ve got an important interview back in Philly on Monday night. (Cross your fingers for me on that trip – and that interview!) But the cost to fly back on Sunday was substantially more than I wound up spending to stay in London on Saturday and Sunday night and treat myself to some downtime in one of my favorite (favourite) cities.

The morning dawned bright and sunny, and spring was clearly in the air when I left my hotel, located near the Bayswater tube station just north of Bayswater Road and Kensington Gardens. I headed for the park, and felt magically transported, as I stepped through the gate in the hedge, to an urban oasis. Lots of photos on the Flickrstream if you’re interested in the sights in the park. The Princess Diana Memorial Fountain was a particularly intriguing discovery – not like any fountain I’ve seen, to be sure.

After lunch, I hiked up Piccadilly Circus and Shaftesbury Ave. to the Arts Theatre (home to the English language premiere of Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s The Caretaker, among many others). I knew I wanted to see a show while in London, but I hadn’t bargained on the fact that so many shows take Sunday as their dark day. Nothing at the National or the RSC, and Priscilla the Queen of the Desert (the Musical) was likewise dark, so I selected “Saturday Night,” the only Sondheim musical I’ve never seen. Scholars of SS (or God, as he’s known in these circles) know this to be his earliest work, written before his collaboration with Bernstein and Laurents on West Side Story, the promising debut of a young writer in his 20’s that was never produced due to the death of its original producer. A charming story, indeed, and a very charming score, with a few numbers well known to me (including the title song, What More Do I Need, and So Many People) from jury lists and anthology revues. The songs I hadn’t heard were almost uniformly terrific, and I also loved the Epstein brothers’ smart, wise-cracking book (until the very end, when it gets very deus-ex-machinated). What I didn’t love (alas) was the production, which made two serious errors: (1) the use of a unit set and (2) the use of actor-musicians. Both these choices might be attributable to the need to do the show cheaply, but both seriously diminished the quality of the storytelling. With a single set and a bunch of sax-toting actors, the look and sound of the show lacked variety and visual nuance. The actors struggled bravely with the New York accents, but in a story that hinges on shades of class and economic background, the lead was a bit tone-deaf, a bit too posh and refined. He’s a Park Avenue wannabe, but his roots are definitely Brooklyn, and the dialect is one key to portraying that.

Traveled back to my hotel via tube – four quid, over six bucks, for a subway ride! – and took a quick nap, then decided to take in a movie at the nearby mall multiplex. (In Bayswater, a mall multiplex bears little resemblance to its equivalent in Philly.) The movie that I was most interested in was Duplicity, the thriller-romance written and directed by Tony Gilroy, whose work I enjoyed on The Bourne Identity. A crackerjack movie, full of smart dialog, terrific performances, mind-bending plot twists (I was surprised by the final resolution) and a first-rate score by James Newton Howard.

All that in a day that also provided opportunity for retrospection, and even a bit o’ blogging! Tomorrow morning I’ve just got time for a full English breakfast (rashers, baked beans, the works) then off to Heathrow for the flight home. Like I said before – let’s hope USAirways doesn’t let me down!

2007 set the bar for eventfulness pretty high, what with a semester-long sabbatical leave, three weeks in Europe, and a production of Gemini the Musical in NYC, but 2008 turned out to have its share of wonders. It was the year that Kerry moved out and Michael, who’d moved in with us in mid-2007, moved on. Suddenly, D’Arcy and I were empty nesters, and that could mean only one thing – time to get a dog! We found Basket, our new white standard poodle, at a rescue agency in Lancaster County in the late spring. He was a frightened, matted mess when he arrived, but now, he’s smartly groomed, highly intelligent – and still a bit high-strung.

2008 was the year of vacations – not just one but two! I guess we had a long era of vacation deprivation to make up for. We spent spring break in Key West, which started out cold and rainy (very disappointing) but eventually turned sunny and hot – perfect poolside weather at the Eden House. In August, we spent a week at a house in Strathmere, a tiny little town on the Jersey shore which we found exceptionally relaxing and commodious. Basket played on the beach every morning, and Alex and his girlfriend Rosi joined us for the last couple days, staying on for another week after we left.

2008 was the year of the Two Minute Tune-Up, a series of short video webisodes that D’Arcy made with the help of her trusty student assistant, Nitro. (If you haven’t seen them yet, you’re missing something wonderful.) D’Arcy also received a grant from Continuing Studies that funded studies in Alexander Technique and Yoga. The luster of her reputation as Speech Diva and beloved teacher and mentor continues grows brighter with each passing year.

Finally, 2008 was the year of the Interim Directorship, as I received a request mid-year to step into the position of Director of the School of Theater Arts. With the support and goodwill of my colleagues and students, it’s been a great experience so far, and in the next few months I’ll learn whether I’ll continue in this position on a more permanent basis.

2009 holds plenty of promise – I’ll be music-directing Grey Gardens at Philadelphia Theatre Company in May and June, and composing music for Enchantment Theater Company’s production of Harold and the Purple Crayon over the coming months. And maybe in 2009, Basket will stop being afraid of me!

It happened so quickly that it’s hard to recall when Gabriel Kahane showed up on my radar. I went back and searched my Google Reader sources and discovered that he had already gotten attention from Alex Ross (two years ago!) and Jeremy Denk, along with this fairly recent review of a Joe’s Pub concert on Sequenza21, a contemporary music blog. A couple weeks ago, I saw a DVD of a workshop of a new musical at the Ravinia Festival (filmed in 2003) and as Gabriel’s name flashed by in the end credits, I recall thinking, “The music director for this piece did a hell of a job playing faux-Ravel and decadent Viennese music.”

Recently, I went to his site and downloaded the Craigslistlieder (he’s posted the complete set!). It took a few days before I got around to listening to them, but I had a lot of listening time while setting up my new office/studio and gave the tunes a spin. Somehow the songs were the perfect soundtrack for my current state of mind: creative, smart, poignant. In a twinkling, I’d bought his EP CD on iTunes and found it equally felicitous. I ogled his music-theater credits via Google (Kyle Jarrow, Les Freres Corbusier, boy soprano in Street Scene in Berlin). And before I knew it, I was on a train to NYC to see him in concert at Ars Nova.

It was a fine show, though the circumstances were a bit less than ideal (tinny sour piano, bad mix), and affirmed my opinion of him as The Real Deal, a singular talent. Without meaning to sound dismissive or unduly reductive, I think it’s fair to describe him as the next generation’s Adam Guettel. (Only one per decade!) I remember the excitement I felt hearing Floyd Collins in the early 90’s, and Kahane’s work gives me the same buzz. He shares with Adam a Pop-Song-Meets-New-Music sensibility, a blithe commingling of high and low-brow influences that shows up often in sophisticated musical theater (Weill, Bernstein, the usual suspects). Interesting to note that he’s the son of conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane – raised in a hyper-musical family, again like Adam. The Ars Nova show began with a 7-song cycle of settings of Robert Lowell poems, after which he announced that he and his band would play through the music from an album he’s just finished recording. The instrumental ensemble was substantial in size and talent: violin (doubling electric guitar), viola, cello, clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), flute and trumpet joined the composer, who sand and played piano and banjo. He writes beautifully for this ensemble and they manage to navigate the jagged edge between new-music precision and downtown scruffiness adroitly. The encore was “Neurotic and Lonely,” from the Craigslistlieder; the audience’s delight was audible. The album’s definitely worth looking forward to, as is whatever else this guy chooses to apply himself to. Stay tuned!