As the 20th century turned into the 21st, songwriter David Yazbek was at a crossroads. He had his own rock ‘n’ roll band and had released two albums on a then-high-profile indie label, What Are Records? And while those records were admired for their smart wordplay and ambitious chord changes, they hadn’t gained much traction in the marketplace.
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He had left an enviable job writing for the TV show, Late Night with David Letterman, to pursue the rock ‘n’ roll dream, but it wasn’t working out as he’d hoped. He was paying rent on a New York City apartment by writing jingles, but that was as unsatisfying creatively as it was lucrative financially. What to do?
He knew Adam Guettel, who had already had two hit musicals off-Broadway. “Maybe I should do what you do,” Yazbek told his friend, “and write for musical theater.” Guettel remembered the conversation when director Jack O’Brien approached the composer about possibly adapting the British movie The Full Monty. Guettel wasn’t available to take it on but recommended his pal Yazbek.
He was a good choice. Yazbek’s songs helped The Full Monty run for nearly two years on Broadway and get nominated for nine Tony Awards before enjoying continued life overseas. Yazbek even won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a show. It was the launching pad for a career that found the songwriter working on five more Broadway shows, including 2017’s The Band’s Visit, which brought Yazbek both a Tony and a Grammy.
Yazbek isn’t the first pop musician to dream of writing stage musicals, and he won’t be the last. But there are reasons why he succeeded and so many others have failed. For one, his brain is what he calls “a small furnace that’s creating stuff all the time.” So writing on assignment and deadline was not a problem for him. For another, he was as familiar with show tunes as he was with funk and rock, and he refused to condescend to any of those styles.
“I think musical theater doesn’t demand enough of music,” he tells American Songwriter by phone from his Rockland County home, an hour north of New York City. “Broadway is able to take any genre and ruin it. It can round the edges off soul music, it can take punk, rock, jazz, Afro-Cuban or anything and put it through the grinder of Broadway till it’s not interesting anymore.
“You have people who don’t really understand a kind of music trying to bring it into a Broadway format. It’s like movies in 1967 when a composer who really didn’t get it would write music for what a bunch of hippies are dancing to. It would have the Farfisa organ and the sitar, but it wouldn’t work.”
At the same time, Yazbek acknowledged the legitimate demands that musical theater makes on a songwriter. You’re not running the show the way you are when you’re a singer-songwriter or a band’s frontperson. You’re a collaborator who’s writing to satisfy a large cast, book writer, director and choreographer; what you’re doing has to fit in with what everyone else is doing.
And each song has to serve the larger arc of the whole show. Even if it’s a great song, you have to get rid of it if it doesn’t forward the momentum of the larger narrative. The demands are far stricter than even a rock concept album, where the songs merely have to fit under the umbrella of a theme. In live theater, each song has to be a link in the chain.
“Lyricists new to musical theater sometimes make the mistake of writing each song as a complete story, when it needs to serve a larger story,” Yazbek points out. “People like Randy Newman, Paul Simon and Sting are truly great songwriters, but when they try to do a show, it doesn’t work. You’re used to each song being the whole thing, and now it’s just part of the thing. If the song is the complete story, you’re not keeping the momentum going. The plot line is a thread that pulls the audience through the emotions.”
Yazbek knows all this now, but he didn’t know it when first offered the chance to write the songs for The Full Monty. Broadway musicals were in a pretty bad place at the end of the ‘90s. It was all overstated operetta by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg; remakes of multiplex movies with watered-down modern-pop; and retro jukebox musicals.
“The last thing I wanted to do was get my hands on something and turn it into something that was neither good pop music nor good musical theater,” Yazbek recalls. “Every genre in every era has its own vocabulary and sensibility, and after a while that gets stale. I hadn’t been writing music like that, and eventually I realized that was why they were interested in me.”
If he was going to give this a try, The Full Monty seemed a good vehicle. This 1997 British film, set during the 1980s in Sheffield, the Pittsburgh of England, tells the story of six laid-off steel workers who hope to earn some money by creating an all-male strip tease act. Most of the men are in their late 30s, as Yazbek was in 2000.
These men are listening to ‘80s dance music, as Yazbek had while attending Brown University. In fact, he had sung and played piano in a Rhode Island funk group with the ultimate ‘80s band name: Coke Machine. He had so much in common with the characters that he was confident he could write a lot of himself into the songs.
“One of the characters had a young son and was insecure about being a father,” Yazbek points out. “I had a two-year-old son, and every first-time father harbors those doubts. As I was writing that lullaby, ‘Breeze Off the River,’ for the father to sing, I was tearing up. I thought the movie was really good, but I thought it had flaws. That’s always a good thing because you can see how you would change it. Why adapt something perfect? Sure, you could do Citizen Kane, but why?”
So he accepted the assignment and got to work. Lots of ideas go through his mind, but he only starts writing when he gets excited about one of them. For example, he imagined a character singing a Carole King/James Taylor kind of ‘70s soft-rock ballad in the dark. That got him going. Only gradually does the listener realize the singer is crooning to his stomach. The joke wouldn’t work if Yazbek didn’t know that genre so well and like it so much that he could make his parody sound like the real thing.
“From a very early age,” he says, “I’ve voraciously listened to so many kinds of music that there are a lot of sounds in my head. And I’ve read so much poetry and fiction that there are a lot of words in there too. It’s all there, ready to come out through whatever filter my current project provides.”
Yazbek was responsible only for the songs. The five-time Tony Award-winning book writer Terrence McNally wrote all the dialogue. In fact, McNally wrote an entire script, as if for a play, and then met with Yazbek and O’Brien to decide where the songs should go.
“The worst thing you can do in the musical theater is to think of it as ‘your’ show,” Yazbek warns, “to think of yourself walking into a restaurant and everyone will know who you are. The best test of that is when it comes time to cut a song from a show. It might be the best song you ever wrote, but if it doesn’t work in the show, you’ve got to cut it.
“If you resist, you’re not only hurting the show, you’re hurting the chances of all your collaborators of having a hit that will change their careers. You can’t think, ‘The critics will really love that song.’ You can’t be worried that ‘people will think this’ or ‘people will think that.’ The worst decisions by talented people are usually made when they’re obsessed with that.”
Yazbek’s songs and McNally’s dialogue are so effective that by the time the show reaches its climactic number, “Let It Go”—with the six misshapen men taking it all off in a chorus line on stage—we in the audience are more interested in the characters’ courage than their anatomy. The show was soon a huge hit.
Once you’ve proven you can sell tickets on Broadway, the work comes looking for you. Having proven that he could turn a recent movie into a successful Broadway show, Yazbek was asked to do it again and again. He adapted Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the 1988 film starring Steve Martin, Michael Caine and Glenne Headly, into a 2004 musical with Jeff Lane writing the book and O’Brien once again directing. Starring John Lithgow and Joanna Gleason, it ran for 626 performances and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards.
The next Yazbek project to reach Broadway was a 2010 adaptation of Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 Spanish film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, with a book by Lane, direction by Bartlett Sher, and a cast led by Patti LuPone and Brian Stokes Mitchell. Unfortunately, it was rushed through an abbreviated rehearsal schedule. Obvious problems went unsolved, and it flopped, closing after just 69 performances.
“That summer after it closed,” Yazbek remembers, “Jeff and I made a point of spending three or four days every week picking the show apart and putting it back together again. When this producer in London wanted to do it on the West End, we saw it as a chance to do it right. In New York, the whole cast had been Broadway superstars, and the audience wanted to hear them each sing three or four songs. But they didn’t all deserve that many songs. When we concentrated on the trajectory of the show, we realized we had to replace several songs, including one I really loved. I had spent a pint of blood writing the song, and now I had to shed another pint of blood getting rid of it. That’s why this is so fucking hard.”
Yazbek would also adapt the 1982 Dustin Hoffman movie Tootsie into a 2019 Broadway show and would release three more rock albums in the 2000s. But his biggest triumph would be The Band’s Visit. Based on the 2007 Israeli film, The Band’s Visit, an arthouse hit in America, the show tells the story of an Egyptian municipal band visiting Israel. The musicians misunderstand the directions and end up in a small desert town instead of the bustling city where they’re booked. Forced to stay overnight, the traveling Arabs and local Jews spar and then bond in ways that seem authentic.
“My initial interest had to do with the music,” confirms Yazbek, whose father is Lebanese-American. “I didn’t want anyone else to do it; I didn’t want it to become mere cultural tourism. I wanted to find out how those microtonal scales make you feel like you’re eating cumin. The first thing I said was, ‘We have to get a world-class band of Arabic musicians on stage, because just hearing them play will represent everything the show is talking about.’”
While he was researching the show, Yazbek found himself in Fez, Morocco, visiting a shop that sold artisanal lighting fixtures. When Yazbek mentioned Umm Kulthum, the Ella Fitzgerald of Egypt, the 75-year-old shop owner dove into a two-hour conversation of Arab music. The owner even reduced the price on a metal lampshade carved with the calligraphy from a Kulthum song lyric. When the shade arrived in America, it came with 20 burned CDs of Arab music.
When The Band’s Visit opened on Broadway in 2017, the signature song was “Omar Sharif,” where a female Jewish café owner and the male Egyptian bandleader share their memories of a romantic movie starring Sharif and Kulthum. Yazbek’s music and lyrics capture not only the romance between the Egyptian stars, not only the romance between the two lonely characters in the desert, but also the romance of every audience member who longs for reconciliation rather than constant conflict.
“I distinguish Broadway and musical theater,” Yazbek argues. “The former is a business, and the latter is an art form. Not that there can’t be great stuff on Broadway. When we did The Band’s Visit, the book writer Itamar Moses and I agreed right from the start that if we’re writing about Broadway when we write this, we’re not going to write the right show. We have to write the show we want, so it can play off-Broadway. If we do it that way, we might make it to Broadway.”
And they did.
Photos by Susan Stava
