Ron Melrose

This profile I wrote appears in the May 20, 2007 issue of “The Living Church” magazine.

Cast members from the hit Broadway musical “Jersey Boys” were signing autographs outside the stage door one Saturday between matinee and evening performances before heading out for dinner. Upstairs, in a small third floor dressing room used as an office, Ron Melrose, one of the people responsible for the success of this show, was ordering in.

Mr. Melrose had spent the first show in the audience, something that as musical director he does once a week to make sure the nearly two-year-old show stays fresh. That night he would be back in front of the orchestra conducting the music of Frankie Valli & the 4 Seasons in this musical about the group’s rise to the heights of rock and roll fame.

A few blocks away in a small Off-Broadway theatre an actress was preparing to take the stage in another Ron Melrose offering, “Early One Morning,” a musical story of Jesus’ forgiveness and love from the point of view of Mary Magdalene, for which Mr. Melrose wrote the words and music.

These two shows -- the commercial and the spiritual -- are but a small part of the creative force of this 52-year-old musician who began composing when he was 7 or 8. On a personal level, they represent, in many ways, key elements of his past, from his upbringing in an atheistic Jewish family to his baptism into the Episcopal tradition.

“I never put my center in a Broadway theatre,” said Mr. Melrose, whose casual attire of black pants, black T-shirt and blue work shirt are in keeping with his down-to-earth personality. “This is a wonderful work life and I try to give it everything I have, but I don’t look to it to provide a center for me.”

He finds his center in prayer and reading scripture and theology. With his “24/7” work schedule, which has just included a cross-country trip to audition actors for an upcoming second national “Jersey Boys” touring company, he has little time for churchgoing, although this wasn’t always the case. For a decade in the late 1980s to 1990s, he left commercial theatre and served as music director at All Angels’ Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. From that experience, “Early One Morning” was born.

Mr. Melrose had found his way to the Episcopal tradition thanks to the writer Madeleine L’Engle whose children’s book A Wrinkle in Time he used to check out of the Iowa City Public Library every other week; he returned it and immediately checked it out again. As an adult he discovered Ms. L’Engle’s Christian books and learned she was the librarian in residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. When he moved to New York to work in theatre, he called Ms. L’Engle to see if he could meet her. She invited him to tea and eventually to join her for the noon liturgy in the Cathedral. He was drawn to the ritual, but having been brought up by parents who taught him that religion was for weak people, he felt “huge resistance” at first. Finding it more and more inviting and compelling over time, he took Ms. L’Engle’s suggestion and was baptized in 1980 and confirmed three years later.

“I liked the Catholicism of it. I loved the pomp, the symbolism. There was majesty in a high Episcopal service, yet you didn’t have to believe that a little man in Rome had all the answers.”

His work at All Angels’ was fulfilling at first. He created a gospel choir made up of members of the church’s Sunday evening soup kitchen. Since he knew little about gospel music, he turned to some of his Broadway musician friends who had roots in that tradition and learned the songs this new congregation would want to hear. With the gospel music, the Sunday evening service that had had fewer than a dozen attendees grew to a congregation of about 150, both street people and longtime members of the parish.

But over time the parish began to shift to a more conservative stance, with vestry members even criticizing Mr. Melrose, who was going through his third divorce, saying he was not the kind of person they wanted in a leadership position. While church members were sitting in judgment, his theatre friends were providing love and support over the collapse of his marriage, so rather than look for another church job, he headed back to Broadway. “I thought, ‘Maybe I’m working in the wrong building.’”

The All Angels’ experience illustrated for him the dangers of judgmentalness, and from that he created “Early One Morning.” As he grappled with the question of who is worthy of God’s love, he wanted a character who would best illuminate God’s mercy. He chose to cast Mary Magdalene in the traditional light of prostitute because “that kind of healing could only come from that kind of brokeness.” The show is available for performances around the country through Connecticut-based Masterwork Productions, Inc. Lauren Yarger, executive director, said she saw the piece done years ago and, thinking she’s like to produce it, asked Mr. Melrose for his card.

“I thought he was a nice Christian writer struggling to get by in New York,” she said. “When I called to get together, he said: ‘Let’s meet at my office at Radio City,’ and I thought, ‘Radio City? Who is this guy?’ So I Googled him to find that I was dealing not with a struggling Christian composer, but a force on Broadway.”

His force has been felt on Broadway in “Imaginary Friends,” “Jekyll & Hyde” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” to name a few of his shows; he also has written songs for cabaret and “Saturday Night Live”; two other liturgical works, “The Missing Peace,” which introduces a feminine element into the Trinity, and “Songs I Won’t be Singing,” and holds a degree in choral conducting from Westminster Choir College.

Those who make their living on the stage find working with Mr. Melrose to be a blessing.

“He’s a phenomenal human being -- kind, wonderful, loving and wickedly smart,” said Cindy Marchionda who has played his Mary Magdalene for six or seven years. “When he accompanies you, he breathes with you. He’s very in tune with the performer, the person up there doing the work. He’s a consummate professional.”

Ms. Marchionda says working with Mr. Melrose has made her a better singer.

“He knows exactly how to tell you to sing a phrase to make the words come out. Mostly he’s made me be a better storyteller. I would sing his music anytime.”

Mr. Melrose’s musical seeds were sown early. When he began composing as a child, he drew from liturgical music and texts of the Latin mass because he knew all the great composers had wrestled with those texts. “My music was Christian long before I was.” His parents were professors at the University of Iowa where faculty members in the music department were asked to provide private tutoring to children. Mr. Melrose was a lucky recipient, receiving free instruction in keyboard, harpsichord, horn, vocal repertoire, music theory, composing, harmony and more. With all that to his credit, when he went to Harvard he majored in philosophy rather than music, feeling he already had what amounted to a free conservatory education.

As for the future, it’s likely to hold more Broadway as he seeks to bring a revival of “The Wiz” to the Great White Way. When not working, he finds another center in his life in Astoria, Queens, with his fourth wife, Alexandra. His son, Jake, is a student at Brown University.

Mr. Melrose also keeps an eye on the controversies in the Episcopal church, especially in light of what he learned at All Angels’. The judgmentalness is familiar.

”Anytime the world says this is less than perfect, the church needs to affirm that’s exactly why we’re here. I don’t hold myself out as the great way for a Christian to live. I just get still and help lead the music.”

'Summer: The Donna Summer Musical'

     Summer: The Donna Summer Musical lacks one of the major elements that made that singer a superstar — heat.  Her interpretation of songs was hot, but as performed by the three actresses who play her, and as directed by Des McAnuff, they are only lukewarm, making her more the Queen of Easy Listening than the Queen of Disco.  Nothing even begins to sizzle until about a third of the way in when she sings “MacArthur Park,” a song that wasn’t even one of her hits.

     An equally major problem for a show that is supposed to be biographical is the weak book by Colman Domingo, Robert Cary and McAnuff, which offers highlights of Summer’s troubled life without much development, sort of like headlines appearing one after the other on a news ticker but with no story to fill them out.  I knew nothing about Summer before I went in and I left feeling I had only vaguely encountered her.  But then how much can you develop a show with two dozen musical numbers— and tell a life story — in only 100 minutes?

     Adding to the list of flaws are choreographer Sergio Trujillo’s sexless dance numbers that seem more like a cardio-dance class at the gym — for middle-aged people.

     Biographical jukebox musicals like Jersey Boys and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and to a lesser degree On Your Feet about Gloria Estefan, might not offer original songs the way new musicals used to, but they tell good stories about the lives of people we’ve been listening to for years.  

     That should have been the case with Summer, now at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.  Certainly enough happened in her life to make an involving plot — she was sexually abused for five years by her pastor as a child, she experienced, at 18, being “the only black woman in Munich” while touring Europe with Hair, had a failed marriage, recorded 20 albums and became wildly successful, turned religious and died of lung cancer at 63.  After all, it was the events of her life that inspired her to write all those hit songs.

     When I had read that three actresses would be portraying Summer at different stages, I expected a developed life.  LaChanze, as Diva Donna, Ariana DeBose as Disco Donna and Storm Lever as Duckling Donna all sing and act well, but they are held back by the weak script.

     They do get to wear beautiful costumes designed by Paul Tazewell, but he goes overboard in being true to Summer’s signature color — blue.  I like that color but I got sick of seeing it in scene after scene, on all three actresses.  It’s a relief when Summer has a rare change of look in a black dress for a funeral and later a striking white pants suit with silver sequins for her “Last Dance” number.

     But about that funeral, which was for her former producer and early supporter whom she had abandoned for a new recording label.  While I was relieved to see her in something other than blue, the scene is the weakest by that point.  (Another to come was even worse.)  The lighting, by Howell Binkley, is low.  Summer is center stage surrounded by mourners farther behind her.  They were holding something I couldn’t quite see and I thought, Oh, God, are they lilies?  As they moved forward, I saw that they were.  How cheesy.

     It gets even worse, though, when Summer slowly and mournfully sings one of her greatest disco hit, “Dim All the Lights,” turning that great dance song into a funeral hymn.  Question for McAnuff and Ron Melrose (music supervision and arrangements), What were you thinking? 

     Now for the rock bottom:  Summer, feeling she needs to get back to the religion of her childhood, has a come-to-Jesus scene that finds her singing “I Believe in Jesus,” ending with her hand raised in an evangelical praise salute.  It is awful.

     The show concludes with her at Studio 54 singing “Last Dance.”  Reflecting on her life she says, “I wasn’t just at the party, I was the party.”  If her party — career — had been a dud like this we’d never know her name because she wouldn’t have gotten far.  

     Fortunately she didn’t live to see this memorialization.  Before her death she had been developing an auto-biographical musical, Ordinary Girl, in which she planned to star.  That work became the basis of Summer.  If only she had lived, we might have had a show worthy of her life and talent.  

Dr. Zhivago -- happily ever after?

     I don’t know when two hours and 45 minutes have flown by as quickly as they did at the new Broadway musical Doctor Zhivago, which opened last night at the Broadway Theatre. Under Des McAnuff’s direction, with a book by playwright Michael Weller, the span of years between 1903 and 1930, covering a world war, bloody revolution, love, betrayal, marriage, death and so much more, fly by.

   Based on the 1958 Nobel Prize-winning novel by Russian author Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago tells the story of Yurii Zhivago, an upper class doctor and poet, and Lara Guishar, a struggling seamstress turned revolutionary.  Both are married to someone else but their love affair plays out through all the strife and turmoil of early 20th century Russia.  Tam Mutu, a leading man in London who is making his Broadway debut, plays Yurii and Kelli Barrett (Wicked, Rock of Ages) is Lara.

  Composer Lucy Simon provides an appropriately sweeping score and Michael Korie and Amy Powers offer rousing songs and some nice duets.  Ron Melrose is the music director.

     I was involved throughout, but at a distance.  I didn’t feel a sense of intimacy as we whirled from scene to scene, pausing for a song or two then moving on, ending on an upbeat note with the final number.  If you liked the 1965 movie, which I did, you’ll catch glimpses of it, but the tone and pace are brighter and faster. It’s an entertaining evening of musical theatre, but without the sense of history of its predecessor. And I don’t know why Weller changed the ending so much.  

     Michael Scott-Mitchell’s sets are often incomplete, taking up just the sides of the stage, which helps convey the large scale of the story as well as enhance the feeling of destruction and desolation of the country.  But they also contribute to the lack of intimacy, except in the scene in the ravaged country mansion where Yurii and Lara are able to shut out the world for 10 days and be together. Large icicles hang from the ceiling and the windows are covered with frost.  Howell Binkley’s lighting casts a blue glow over the room, giving the sense of deep cold that was so much a part of the movie and yet is otherwise missing from the musical. 

     The opening number “Two Worlds” sets the theme of the show — aristocracy and peasants, humbled aristocracy (those lucky enough not to have been murdered) and revolutionaries, White Army and Red Army, wife and mistress.  These opposing world are often presented together at opposite sides of the stage.  This is most effectively done in the library scene when Tonia Zhivago, Yuri’s wife (Lora Lee Gayer), and Lara meet for the first time and find a bond between them. On the left, in “It Comes As No Surprise,” Lara sings of her guilt over her love for Yurii and Tonia on the right sings of her love for him and her discovery that she can’t hate Lara after meeting her.  “I feel him closer when she is near,” they sing. 

   Barrett, whose voice is especially lovely, portrays a more innocent Lara than Julie Christie did in the movie.  It’s harder to understand why men are so obsessed with her — Yurii, as well as her husband, Pasha Antipov (Paul Alexander Nolan) and the aristocrat Victor Komarovsky (Tom Hewitt), who had an affair with her when she was a vulnerable teenager in need of financial support.  When she and Yurii sing “On the Edge of Time” in the decaying mansion just before they are to part, their love seems more tender than passionate. Yurii had sung a similar duet, “Watch the Moon,” when parting from Tonia at the train station on his way to fight in the war against Germany.     

     Kelly Devine choreographs some lively Russian dances and Paul Tazewell’s costume’s nicely carry out the two worlds theme — “the oppressed and the elite and never shall they meet.”

     Dr. Zhivago has been making its way to Broadway for nearly a decade.  It premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in May 2006.  In 2010 it was revised in Australia with McAnuff as director.

     My friend Janet and I left the Broadway Theatre in high spirits after the stirring “Finale,” but a feel-good ending is not what Dr. Zhivago is about.  It is, though, what Broadway is about, so, to borrow from one of the songs, it comes as no surprise.

   

'The Who's Tommy'

 The music and dancing in the Broadway revival of The Who’s Tommy at the Nederlander Theatre are fabulous but I left feeling disappointed by the production, which is directed by Des McAnuff.  After an exciting first act the story more or less falls away in the second.  And Ali Louis Bourzgui, in his Broadway debut, doesn’t have the magnetism to carry the act as the adult Tommy, or at least he didn’t when I saw him last night.  I was surprised to read in Playbill that he won a Jeff Award for his performance in the Goodman Theatre pre-Broadway production last summer.

I’ve loved the music since it was released as a rock opera concept album in 1969.  I was in elementary school but I appreciated the electrifying score.  I bought the cassette and wore it out.

Pete Townshend’s music, under the direction of Ron Melrose, is still thrilling.  And choreographer Lorin Latarro’s syncopated dances with the large chorus are exciting as they fill David Korins’s stylized, minimalistic sets.  Amanda Zieve’s broodingly dark lighting interspersed with vibrant colors and Peter Nigrini’s projections all create the perfect atmosphere for the popular rock score.

So much drama is packed, and carried out well, in the first act that there was hardly anywhere left for the book, written by Townshend and McAnuff, to go.

It’s a creepy story, starting in England in 1941 when Mrs. Walker (Alison Luff) get a telegram that her husband, Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs), was killed in the war.  She is pregnant and months later gives birth to Tommy.  I was happy to hear “It’s a Boy” again.  It’s been years since I’ve heard any of this music.

Four years later Tommy (Olive Ross-Kline last night) is at home with his mother and her lover (an unnamed Nathan Lucrezio) when Captain Walker unexpectedly comes home after being released from a P.O.W. camp.  When a fight breaks out between the men, Mrs. Walker turns Tommy away, unaware that he is now looking in the large mirror of the wardrobe.  Captain Walker shoots and kills the lover and Tommy witnesses it all.  Frightened, his parents sing frantically and insistently to him: “You didn’t hear it./You didn’t see it./You won’t say nothing to no one/ever in your life./You never heard it./How absurd it’ll/seem without any proof.”  They conclude with: “Never tell a soul/What you know is the truth.”  From that point on Tommy is emotionally “that deaf, dumb and blind kid” we know so well from “Pinball Wizard.”

Most of this, like all of the story, is told through song and pantomime.  Little dialogue is used.  That’s interesting to watch even if it distances the story.

Walker is cleared after a court rules he acted in self-defense.  The parents spend considerable time taking Tommy to doctors who lift and manipulate his tiny body trying to connect with him, to no avail.  Olive plays unresponsive beautifully, not tensing her body or allowing it to go rag doll limp.  Ten-year-old Tommy (Quinten Kusheba) is also excellent in Tommy’s unresponsiveness as he is sexually molested by Uncle Ernie (John Ambrosino) and bullied and physically abused by Cousin Kevin (Bobby Conte).

But Cousin Kevin ends up giving Tommy a surprising new way to live.  He takes him to an arcade where Tommy outplays everybody through “sense of smell” and “intuition.”  The act ends in a rousing “Pinball Wizard” performed by the Local Lads, Cousin Kevin and the Ensemble.

After all that drama and trauma Act Two dragged for me.  Even Tommy’s awakening seemed anti-climactic.  It was nice to hear “I’m Free” again but, as I mentioned, Bourzgui didn’t give it the electricity it needs.  The show is only two hours and 10 minutes.  Doing it without an intermission would have helped.