Afternoon Delight

Had a lovely lunch with the delightful Susan Jacks. Susan has played Gypsy in all of our Piano Bar incarnations and has always more than killed with her brilliant 15 minutes (she's brilliant and so am I)She makes the audience laugh and feel great and I adore working with her. Hope we get to do it again real soon. Afterwards I went to hear most of the musical changes for Road to Qatar! David did a wonderful and incredibly speedy job, rewriting, recomposing, writing new stuff, stitching, hemming, everything that was prescribed and needed. He got up to the new audition sequence and we figured out a better way for it to happen and so he is redoing some of what he already redid. This is a very important moment and needs to be a kind of mini showstopper I think. It's all based on the song Behind Every Story, which was the opening number of Aspire. There will be five counter melodies and they will all come together in a musical tour de force if we are lucky. Behind Every Story was the first song that we wrote when the commission for Aspire came through. It was a lyric I had worked on way before Aspire and then redid as soon as I realized it would work as an opening number for that show. I can recall hearing the tune for the first time and realizing that I was a very lucky boy to have been arbitrarily paired up with Mr. Krane. He was able to capture everything in that first song. The Qatarian folk themes, the grandeur of the song, the telling of the story. Now we are taking the basic song and building on it. Can't wait to see how it works out. Other news of the day is that Liza is almost definate for the Kander and Ebb. This is amazing...I dare not even hope too hard. She is the finale I needed and of course she should be there but getting a major A list star is a coup for me and for the Morgan Library. The line up is now Karen Ziemba, Deb Monk, David Hyde Pierce, Cady Huffman, Jason Danieley, Marin Mazzie, Barbara Cook, Liza with Sheldon Harnick as host! Wow!