I got off the plane from the 27th Edmonton International Fringe Festival, and headed right to Barnes & Noble – to moderate a panel celebrating the release of the York Theatre Company cast album of The Gig.

If you didn’t know this show before last Monday, you may have heard about it since then. What wonderful buzz there’s been for the showcase that Doug Cohen put together to display his book, music, and lyrics. Nine singers performed numbers from the show; five musicians backed them up; and four panelists – me, Frank D. Gilroy, Sheldon Harnick, and Cohen himself – commented on it all. The room was packed, and from my seat on the dais, I could see people with noses pressed to the glass doors looking like orphans hungrily lusting for what was inside a bakery window.

Even though The Gig hasn’t yet reached Broadway – though the crowd’s wild reaction sure suggested they thought it belonged there – you may know the source material on which it’s based: The 1985 film The Gig, written and directed by Gilroy, tells of six middle-class, middle-aged men: Marty, a used-car salesman; Jack, a financier; Georgie, a deli owner; Aaron, a clarinet teacher; Gil, a real estate agent; and Arthur, a dentist. Each week, they have a wonderful time meeting and jamming, just playing music for its own sake. To illustrate this, bounding onto the Barnes & Noble stage were William Parry (Marty Flynn), James Judy (Jack), Steve Routman (Aaron), Charles Pistone (Gil), Michael McCormick (Arthur) -- and Herndon Lackey (Georgie). They sang “Farewell Mere Existence, Hello Jazz!” – a line that Cohen took from the film – and one that Gilroy had written three decades earlier for a TV show that was to star (but never did) Imogene (On the Twentieth Century) Coca.

This didn’t come up in the discussion; I learned it in advance from reading Gilroy’s new memoir, Writing for Love and/or Money, about his life before penning the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Subject Was Roses. In it, he tells about his original goal to be a jazz musician (“or a gambler,” he said, dead seriously). “But then,” he said from the panel, “I discovered the difference between amateurs and professionals: Professionals perform well whether they feel the urge to perform or not.” Once he saw he wasn’t in that category, he stopped playing music and started writing plays.

Back to The Gig: Marty feels a bit as Val does in A Chorus Line about “Dancing for my own enjoyment.” Remember? “That ain’t it, kid, that ain’t it, kid.” So when Marty finds that Abe Mitgang at Paradise Manor in the Catskills needs a band, he hopes his five compatriots will jump at the chance. But the others all rebut with the reasons that men with wives, children, jobs, and even aged mothers always give for not being able to get away. Then Georgie tells them that he went to the doctors and “they found something.” Now – will these men find themselves by taking the job?

Lackey, as Georgie, then sang "Time Out," a musicalization of the monologue that Cohen says hooked him on this project, though he originally thought he’d leave the speech intact. But then he recalled that years ago, when he showed me the script, I told him it just had to be set to music. When he told this to the B&N crowd, I said, “A broken critic is right twice a day” – before asking Harnick and Gilroy, “Did a critic ever give you a useful suggestion?” Harnick recalled that Elliott Norton, a Boston theater critic for more than a half-century, gave him and his then-collaborator Jerry Bock excellent advice for The Apple Tree. Gilroy had quite a different story: He told about the time he was in a restaurant in a tough meeting with a producer who wasn’t responding to him, and Bosley Crowther, the esteemed New York Times film critic, came by and made a fuss over how talented Gilroy was. “That sealed the deal,” he said.

Once more, into The Gig: The person who takes Georgie’s place is Marshall, a genuine professional musician who plays with these guys between gigs, just for some extra money. His pedigree truly excites Aaron, who, thanks to Steve Routman, sang, “I played with a guy who played with Benny Goodman.” That spurred me ask the panel, “When did you have that same kind of reaction in your careers?” Cohen said he admired Liz Callaway from the moment he saw an early airing of Baby, so he was thrilled when she became part of the original cast of his No Way to Treat a Lady. Harnick mentioned that when he met Jerome Robbins in the early ’50s, he told the famed director-choreographer that he’d never forget one of his ballets. “When I told him the name of the piece,” said Harnick, “Robbins replied, ‘That was Michael Kidd.’ If you ever told me then that less than 15 years later, he’d be staging a show of mine (Fiddler on the Roof), I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”

“The next song is ‘Beautiful,’” I told the crowd. “That is not an opinion. That’s the name of the song – and writing a song worthy enough for the adjective can’t be easy.” Cohen showed he did that, though -- and more when McCormick, playing Arthur the dentist, sang to Lucy (Jill Paice), a waitress, “Beautiful -- your teeth are beautiful.” She later joined in, as did Pistone (Gil), who sang his feelings to Donna (Karen Ziemba), another waitress. I pointed out that the best writers are able to find surprising humor in pretty ballads, and Harnick took the opportunity to say that Cohen not only writes lyrics that are funny, but also ones that reveal a character's humanity. (It’s one reason why Harnick wanted to write the liner notes for the album.)

I also asked the guys what they thought was the most beautiful song they’d ever heard. “Look to the Rainbow,” said Harnick. “Poor Butterfly,” said Gilroy. (If you don’t think you know it, you actually might from Gerard Alessadrini’s parody, “M. Butterfly, strangest show since Equus.”) How fitting that Cohen likes a Gershwin tune -- "Our Love is Here to Stay" – given that he facially resembles the genius. I then offered mine: “Imagining You” from Birds of Paradise. And I would have said it even if its composer, David Evans, hadn’t been leading the five-piece band.

Cohen also noted that he first approached Gilroy about musicalizing The Gig in the early 90s. “At that time,” said Cohen, “he asked me why a young man would be interested in a story dealing with middle-aged men. I said that probably by the time the show got produced, I would be middle-aged. Okay, so I was off by a few years -- but I’m right on the money in terms of the release of the CD.”

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com