Seven Decades Into Their Partnership, Maltby and Shire are Still Going Strong

Seventy years ago this year, Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire arrived on the campus of Yale University as freshman writers looking for a partner.

“We met,” Shire, now 88, remembers, “because a mutual friend who lived in the same dorm knew that Richard was looking for a composer and I was looking for a lyricist.” They didn’t hit it off, not at first. “Richard was a theater snob from Exeter, and he thought I was a hick from Buffalo, which was kind of true,” Shire says, before Maltby, the younger of the pair by four months, interjects, “It was totally true.”

By junior year, Maltby and Shire were Maltby and Shire, their earliest campus musicals being adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac, which featured classmates including John Cunningham, Austin Pendleton, and Dick Cavett, and Grand Tour, which added friends like Gretchen Cryer to the mix.

Even as they became prosperous on their own—Maltby has a Tony for staging Ain’t Misbehavin’ and an Olivier for Fosse; Shire’s got a Best Song Oscar for “It Goes Like It Goes” from Norma Rae and an Album of the Year Grammy for Saturday Night Fever—the bulk of their theater work has been as a duo, cocreating the musicals Baby and Big and the beloved revues Starting Here, Starting Now and Closer Than Ever.

At seven decades, their partnership has lasted longer than Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Kander and Ebb, and Bock and Harnick. Their latest project, About Time, begins performances on February 27 at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater on the Upper West Side.

The show’s creation owes something to Yale; Maltby and Shire debuted a few songs as part of the entertainment during the 65th reunion of the Class of 1959. “They loved it, an audience of 87-year-olds,” Shire says. Maltby joked from the stage, “If everybody here gave us $5,000, we’d finance the show in a minute.” Next thing he knew, people started pulling out their checkbooks. As a result, the Yale Class of 1959 is a producer for the off-Broadway run, having raised over $100,000 toward the million-dollar capitalization (times have changed: their first Off-Broadway show only cost $25,000).

“People have always commented that if we put our songs in chronological order, they would tell the story of a life,” Maltby says. “Starting Here, Starting Now is about being young and in love. Closer Than Ever is about the second time around.” About Time, adds Shire, “is all about looking back on your life and the wisdom you’ve gained in old age.” He’s quick to note that it’s a “very positive show. There are no colostomy jokes, no wheelchair jokes, and nothing in it that talks about the age of the writers.”

But age, of course, is inescapable, as is the wisdom that comes with it. “We spend all our lives living in the future,” Maltby shares. “At a certain point, you stop and realize that you can see your whole life as a total entity. That unlocks a whole lot of very personal stories.” Those stories, from their own lived experiences and those of their friends and colleagues, became songs like “Miss Byrd” and “Life Story,” from Closer Than Ever. The inspiration for the material in About Time is no different. “In a funny way, it’s the most personal show we’ve ever done, and it’s just kept getting deeper and deeper.”

In addition to songs about long marriages and the meaning of life, Maltby and Shire are proud to say that About Time includes the most overtly political number they’ve ever written, titled “What Do I Tell the Children?” In it, the writers work out, in the only way they know how, their feelings on the state of the country. “How do I say success will come to those who do things right when liars, cheats, and charlatans fill up the news each night?” cast member Darius de Haas sings. “If you have character, you may not win the day, but I say do good anyway.” Maltby is quick to remind that the show is an entertainment, “but it maybe has the deepest reverberations of any show we’ve ever had.”

Maltby and Shire will both turn 89 later this year, but working together still feels, in Maltby’s words, “like we’re doing the same thing we did when we were in the basement of Branford College, which was the only place that had a free piano, and we would go down there and write our musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac. I go off and write up a few lines, David writes a melody and tries to set them, and then he discovers that they’re not very useful. He writes melodies that are way better than I would have ever dreamed of, and then I have to go back and write to that melody.”

“The more quirky the melody,” Shire interjects, “the more Richard enjoys it. He finds something in the music.”

That’s the process they followed as kids, and it’s the process they still follow today. After 70 years, it’s safe to say that it really was about time.