Working with Terkel

BY CRAIG CARNELIA   

I bought a chubby little paperback in '77 at the Coliseum Bookstore and started reading it on the bus home to the Upper West Side. My first Terkel.   

I had met Stephen Schwartz the night before when Craig Zadan, a mutual friend, had brought him to a SoHo club where I was performing my own songs. Steve was putting together a musical based on Studs Terkel's bestselling book Working and was looking for one more songwriter to fill out a group that already included James Taylor, Micki Grant, the team of Mary Rodgers and Susan Birkenhead, and Schwartz himself. Steve would also be adapting the book and directing the show. "Had I read the book?" "Was I interested?" "Was I available?" "Could I meet with him next week?" No, yes, yes and yes.   

I was 27 and had written four musicals, my schoolwork, though I didn't know that's what they were at the time. The last of these was a big, traditional book musical about immigrants in which my songs were both professional and fraudulent. I didn't know those people; I only knew the musicals other writers had written about them. I came from Long Island, with no grandparents to speak of and no religion that held any real meaning for me. The only family history I'd ever heard about while growing up was recent history, my parents' meeting in Brooklyn, marrying during World War II, moving from Brooklyn to Bellerose to Floral Park, no "old country." So seven or eight months before the night in SoHo, I decided to give up on the immigrants and start writing songs again about things that actually interested me, things I knew and cared about. I took a pad to Riverside Park and jotted down what those things might be. These were the songs I sang in SoHo, the ones that got me the job.   

Steve and I met the next week and talked about how I might begin to contribute to the show. "What did I think of the book?" "What moved me?" "What sounded like a song?" The whole book, from steelworker to fireman, had sounded like a song to me, the language unlike any I had ever heard before. The book is simply a collection of edited transcripts of interviews Terkel conducted in the Chicago area with a wide variety of people talking about the work they do and how they feel about it. But something extra seems to happen, something to do with Terkel himself, his presence, his eyes, his ears, when people talk to him, so that each interview becomes bigger than its content. It becomes a study in human behavior, in how people truly reveal themselves, how direct we are and aren't, how inadvertently poetic we become as we haltingly fumble to say what we mean, how strong and vulnerable and gorgeously transparent we humans can be as we attempt to mask our deepest feelings while, at the same time, we long to be seen and heard and acknowledged.   

At this first meeting I told Steve I'd like to do something with the steelworker's line "Everybody should have something to point to," and Steve asked me to look at the chapter on the retired man, Joe Zmuda. Both songs ended up being in the show, but "Joe" became my first project, and what a project it was. The challenges were these: how to use the chatty eccentricity of Joe's one-of-a-kind language and still have it sound like a song, and how to have the man's inner life revealed with subtlety and a lack of sentimentality?   

Four weeks later I had written this odd five-and-a-half-minute "thing" that opened and closed with a monologue, alternating throughout between singing and speaking, using about 50% authentic language from the book and the rest invented, and somehow it worked. In the process I had also begun to identify the kind of writer I wanted to be. The liberation that had begun by giving up on the immigrant musical had led me to this show, and working with the plain-as-mud poetry and rich, resonant subtext of Terkel I was going further with a voice I had started to find in those SoHo songs.   

We opened at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago on one of the first days of January 1978 and immediately began to retool the show for Broadway. I had three songs in the show in Chicago: "Joe," "Something to Point To," and a song we ended up cutting called "Hots Michaels at the Piano." Steve asked me to get to work on two new songs for New York: one for a housewife and one that could be played on guitar by one of the actors and be a positive statement about the work being done. I had been drawn to the chapter on the mason when I first read the book and it seemed to fit all the needs of the moment perfectly, except that the character was an older man and our two guitar players were young. So I wrote the song in third person, allowing David Patrick Kelly to sing "about" the mason, while Arny Freeman played the character he was singing about.   

Now for the housewife. The title of the chapter in the book is "Just a Housewife," and I suspected that would be the title of the song as well. It would be a character study like "Joe," an unintentional revealing of herself, this I knew. But how? After dozens of failed attempts and countless times through the chapter, I noticed that the woman's point of view kept shifting. She didn't know what she felt about her life, her work, her self. So when she's asked to tell about it, to account for herself, she doesn't know what to say. In the process of the chapter and the song she finds out, and so do we.   

One day late in rehearsals in New York, I was standing midway up the house at the 46th Street Theatre (now the Rodgers) when Studs Terkel tapped me on the shoulder. We had not gotten to meet in Chicago and he was looking for me. We embraced, which surprised me. We talked, and all he wanted to talk about was me, "Joe" and me. This too surprised me, though it shouldn't have. I tried to thank him, to praise his book, to tell him that I was becoming a better writer from working with his beautiful text, but I don't think he heard me. The lights dimmed for a run-through and that was that.   

Working had a disappointing run in New York, but starting the moment we closed and continuing to this day, we have had thousands of regional, stock and university productions throughout the country, and there's nothing I've written since that hasn't profited from the lessons learned on Working.   

Twelve years would pass before I'd see Studs Terkel again. In 1990, I was doing a concert in Chicago and Studs invited me to be a guest on his radio show to help publicize the event. Everything the brief encounter at the 46th Street Theatre hadn't allowed for, this one hour in Chicago offered. Time, ease, give and take, and the benefit of not being 28 and about to go into previews with my first show. I remember lots of laughter in the interview, his and mine, and I remember something he told me that I hadn't known. The housewife in the book Working was in real life the daughter of Joe, the retired man. I was amazed to hear this because I had actually met this woman on opening night in Chicago, before Steve ever asked me to write a housewife song. I was onstage after the performance with a crowd of people when she approached me. Her father hadn't been able to make it to the performance, but she took my hand, thanked me and said "You've made my father a hero."   

As Studs and I were parting that day in 1990 he asked me to wait for a moment while he popped into his office and came back out with a hardcover copy of another of his books to give me. He just thought I'd like this one. The Good War. I read it, loved it, put it on the shelf and went on with what was becoming a very busy life.   

New Year's Day 2003, my dear friend and all-time favorite collaborator David H. Bell and I were having dinner in New York. David and I had been close friends since the mid-'80s when he directed a beautiful production of my show Is There Life After High School? at Ford's Theatre in D.C. We'd also collaborated on an original musical in the late '90s called Actor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, with David writing the book and directing, and had had great experiences together through several productions of it. So when David told me that Northlight Theatre in Chicago wanted to commission us to develop a musical based on Studs Terkel's The Good War, I said yes without hesitation. We would adapt the book together, David would direct and I would be responsible for researching, choosing, arranging, and orchestrating the vintage '40s songs we would use in the show. Everything about The Good War was a gift: the timing, the subject matter, the collaboration with David, and the chance to come back to Terkel.   

I was born in 1949, and though the war had been over for four years, my parents' record collection seemed to have been frozen on V-E Day, so I was actually born into this musical era I needed to live in for the show. And what a fascinating time-capsule of an experience I had listening to the dozens of compilations of '40s material David and I found. There was so much buried and forgotten treasure in these collections. We ended up favoring songs that could only have been written during the war, with very few exceptions. The more content they had that made them "of the moment," the more likely we were to choose them. And since these songs were not written to "take stage," to be in any way theatrical, we were also always keeping an eye and an ear out for how a given song might be made stageworthy by its juxtaposition with the Terkel text, or how a song might be arranged to cause it to take stage better.   

Working at Northlight was a pleasure. B.J. Jones, Phil Santora and Janet Mullet, who run the theater, saw us smoothly through two workshops and a fabulous world premiere production, with a cast full of Chicago's best singing actors. And then there was the unexpected gift of the Northlight experience; Studs was around, sitting in the back of the house, offering an alternative solution to a problem, showing us a cut we might not have seen, and more often than not, just being there.   

Early in 2006, Steve Spiegel, who had run Music Theatre International for many years, called Northlight to inquire about the stock and amateur leasing rights to The Good War. He had left MTI and was starting a new company of his own called Theatrical Rights Worldwide. We sent a script and demo and received a quick affirmative response. I just delivered the final script and score this past week, so as I write this, The Good War is on its way to press.   

My father would've liked this one. He was a sergeant in the Army during the war, serving in France and Germany with the Fourth Armored Division. The war had clearly been the most important event of his life, and yet he had very little to say about it. After the war, he went back to his job at Macy's, where he worked as an accountant for forty years, although what he really wanted to be was a carpenter. I never understood that. Why not just be a carpenter? Why not just do what you want to do with your life? When I wrote "The Mason" twenty-eight years ago, my father was in there somewhere.   

But today, as I end this piece on my work with Terkel with the last verse of the song, all I can think of is Studs.   

He builds a house

With his hands

A hundred years go by It stands

It tells you who he was

A life goes fast But the work a mason does

It's made to last

The work a mason does It's made to last