Theater News

Music, Music, Music

Filichia chats with Michael Lavine, who lays fairs claim to being the ultimate sheet music collector.

Michael Lavine(Photo © Matthew Murray)
Michael Lavine
(Photo © Matthew Murray)

At intermission at a Broadway show, Michael Lavine rushed up to me and said, “I’ve got a great idea for a column for you. How about mistakes printed in sheet music? For example, in ‘The Song Is You,’ the actual lyric is ‘I alone have heard this lovely strain’ — but the published version has ‘I alone have heard this lonely strain.’ And in ‘A New Town Is a Blue Town,’ what should be ‘ain’t gonna lick me’ has been printed as ‘ain’t gonna like me.'”

I shook my head no: “Michael, I will not do such a column because you are the undisputed king of sheet music. You know those mistakes, I don’t. But I’d love to write a column on you because you have provided countless copies of sheet music to singers who haven’t been able to find that music anywhere else…not to mention how you have helped so many hundreds of students get jobs in shows through your coaching…not to mention your fine work as a conductor.”

So this is a celebration of The Real Music Man, who — as many New York performers are relieved to find — does not live in River City. Want to see the complete score to Breakfast at Tiffany’s? It lives at Lavine’s West Side apartment. Sheet music for All’s Fair before it became By Jupiter? It’s there, too. And the Oklahoma! sheets from the time when the show was called Away We Go! are back, though they were recently on loan to PBS for the documentary on musical theater that we’ll see in October. Lavine isn’t bragging, but merely tells the truth when he says, “There are things here that Lincoln Center doesn’t have.” You might assume that, because Lavine possesses approximately 75% of the sheet music ever published from Broadway musicals (and plenty that was never published), his apartment would be a stack-upon-stack pigsty, but no: Felix Unger’s pad would look like the Collier brothers’ in comparison.

Lavine began playing piano at five and was soon attending musicals with his enthusiastic parents. “My mother always talks about the time she went on a date with a man who took her to see an early New Haven performance of My Fair Lady,” he tells me. “She was sitting next to Moss Hart, whom she still recalls furiously taking notes.” (That apparently helped the show, wouldn’t you think?) By the time Lavine was 15 and living in suburban Maryland, he was looking forward to visiting his grandmother at 93rd and Amsterdam — partly because she lived across the street from a sheet music shop. That’s where Lavine bought the score of Company (“for $12.50 instead of the regular $25,” he recalls) and a spiral-bound Sondheim collection with “The Boy From …” and “Can That Boy Fox Trot.” It set the tone for the rest of his life. Although he majored in English at Columbia, he was often found in the District of Columbia at the Library of Congress, where he stood at the copy machines making copies of “The Wedding Is Off” — the precursor to Company’s “Getting Married Today.” But that isn’t the most obscure Sondheim song in his collection. When he finally met the great composer-lyricist, not much time went by before he got from him “They Do an Awful Lot of Dancing, the Dead,” which had been cut from The Frogs. “Steve even sent me original sheets from Evening Primrose and Phinney’s Rainbow, the show he wrote in college,” Lavine says.

He remembers driving back from New Haven with a big cache of sheet music from a longtime collector who was selling. “I was so scared,” he says, “because I couldn’t see out the back window. Every inch of the car was filled with music — the trunk, the back seat, the back dashboard, the front seat. I’m so glad I didn’t take anyone with me because there wouldn’t have been any room for him to sit.” That’s one reason why, when the folks at the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization found that they didn’t have a copy of Irving Berlin’s “I Can’t Tell a Lie” from Holiday Inn — rather surprising, in that the organization represents Berlin — they called Lavine, who furnished them with the music.

That’s the best part of this story: Lavine shares the wealth. When a budding or seasoned performer comes to him for coaching, he gets the benefit of Lavine’s exhaustively encyclopedic knowledge. “Once I see who the person is and determine his strengths,” he says, “I usually find myself saying, ‘Have I got a song for you!’ Then I’ll either record or photocopy it. I don’t do technique — that’s for voice teachers — but I do tell each person how to act the song. And that’s really important. Find a song representative of who you are rather than how you sing. The reaction you want to get is not ‘What a beautiful voice you have!’ They want to see you take stage with energy, presence, and a joie de vivre. The single most important thing you can do in any audition is reveal your sense of humor, and the worst thing you can do is to conceal it. I’ve sat through so many auditions where we hear ballad after ballad and everyone’s sleepy; then someone comes in and does something funny and the director says, ‘That’s great! Can you do something else?!’ The only time to do a ballad is when they specifically ask for one. I even believe that when the ad in Back Stage asks for an up-tempo and a ballad, the director and everyone else wants to hear the up-tempo song.”

Michael Lavine(Photo © Matthew Murray)
Michael Lavine
(Photo © Matthew Murray)

Over the past dozen years, Lavine has coached so many students that he now must put a moratorium on certain songs: “I used to give out ‘Slightly Perfect’ from Are You With It, a 1945 show, because it’s my favorite song. Then I was told that a person who was about to audition with it heard two people before him had just done it. But there are plenty of songs with my important condition: that they be active. I find songs that have ‘I’ or ‘me’ featured in them; no one should audition with a loser’s song like ‘Nobody Does It Like Me’ from Seesaw, which was supplanted by the equally negative ‘You Can Always Count on Me’ from City of Angels. They’re funny, yes, but you should be seen in a positive way. That’s one reason why I like to recommend Douglas J. Cohen’s ‘So Far, So Good’ from No Way to Treat a Lady. It’s optimistic and it looks to the future.”

Of course, it’s not only what you sing but how you sing it. “Clean enunciation is vitally important,” says Lavine. “Close those consonants! ‘V’ is the most commonly mispronounced consonant in musical theater. People don’t correctly sing the ‘v’ in ‘love.’ I keep telling students their motto should be, ‘Savor the “v”‘ On the other hand, don’t savor the ‘t,’ a consonant that can be an enemy. I’ve seen so many people over-enunciating the ‘t’s’ in ‘Gett-tting to know you; gett-tting to know all about you.’
Terrible! Musical theater should be an extension of regular speech but so many people over-sing. They scrunch up their faces when they know that high E is coming. The only time I want to see a scrunched-up face is when the emotion of the moment demands a scrunched-up face.”

Lavine is also a conductor. He helmed the orchestras not only for the North Shore Music Theatre’s Honk but for Music Theatre of Wichita’s production, too, working hard on the cast album that the latter production yielded. As a result of his being in demand both as coach and conductor, he’s now had to hire a staff of three to deal with the sheet music. “But if I hear that someone has manuscript sheets for a show that had no published music,” he says, “I’m there.”

********************

[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]