Now in its 35th Anniversary season, Urban Stages is debuting a brand-new festival patterned after its award-winning series Winter Rhythms. Dubbed Summer Melodies, the new series of shows begins on Thursday, June 20 and runs through Saturday, June 29. Summer Melodies will benefit the development program of new musical theater projects at Urban Stages. All tickets are $30 (unless otherwise indicated)
NiteLifeExchange (NLE) interviews Summer Melodies producer, Tom Toce (TT), with Six Questions”
NLE: How did Summer Melodies come about?
TT: I enjoyed producing Winter Rhythms last December very much. I wanted to get more deeply involved with Urban Stages, and I got elected to the board in January. I learned that a company that was slated to rent the theater for all or most of June backed out. The theater was going to be empty. I think an empty theater is a tragedy, so I asked Frances Hill, the artistic director, if we could do a mini-festival. This was an idea that Peter Napolitano, my Winter Rhythms predecessor, had always wanted to do. I thought this year we could make it happen. The planning horizon was much shorter than ideal, but I had in mind a few existing shows and/or producers who would put something together fast. And we did it!
NLE: What is your goal in producing this festival? What are its potentials?
TT: Just being able to fill a space with music is an achievement. I’d like to do better than break even (although that’s always a challenge) and so raise a little money for a larger goal I have at Urban Stages, developing new musicals. We’re doing a reading of a new musical in July, The Magnificent Seven, a show about the 1996 Women’s US Olympics gymnastic team, written by Gordon Leary and Julia Meinwald. Look for that reading on Monday, July 15. We won’t be able to raise a lot of money with this year’s festival. We’d need a “gala” or some other grand event to raise serious money. And we didn’t have enough time to make that happen. Since it’s only a 70 seat theater, and after discounts and comps, we’re lucky to net a few hundred dollars per show. Some individual shows may lose money. That’s okay; you have to try things. If this year’s festival does well, we may like the idea enough to put it on the calendar for next year. And if that happens, we can do more planning and have something even better the second time around.
NLE: How did you get started on a producing path?
TT: I’m just trying to make things happen. I’ve spent a lot of my life making a living. Always writing songs, sure, but not devoting enough time to it. I’m winding down my other career (I’m a consulting actuary), and I’m so hungry and eager to work. I’ve deprived myself too much for too long. I’m not trying to be a producer, really, I’m trying to do things and make connections that will help me write my own shows. You learn a lot, though, by helping other people and observing other people, and that’s what I think I’m doing.
NLE: You’re appearing in Summer Melodies with your show, Songwriter in the House. How did you come
to be a songwriter? Has this been a fulfilling path?
TT: I’ve met a lot of new people over the past two years since I performed Songwriter in the House at the Metropolitan Room. The show was nominated for a MAC Award, and the recording got some important airplay on the legendary radio program “Mixed Bag,” which is lately appearing on WFUV. I became a songwriter shortly after I took my first guitar lessons at age 10. I got serious about it in college, when Maury Yeston was my music theory professor. Maury introduced me to a world I never knew existed, and through him I met some very serious songwriters and composers, like Ed Kleban, Alan Menken, and Thomas Newman. Tommy Newman, a film composer who went on to get fourteen (and counting) Academy Award nominations, was a college classmate, and we became close friends. I also met Lehman Engel, the legendary conductor who originated the BMI Musical Theater Workshop. Interacting with people like that was necessary for me in order to convince myself that moving to New York and trying to write songs for musical theater was a reasonable thing to do. So I did it. The songs in Songwriter in the House aren’t musical theater songs. They’re from my singer-songwriter folkie side. But shows like Hadestown and Come From Away suggest that the genre of music I’m most comfortable in as a composer might have a chance on Broadway. My path has been fulfilling sometimes and frustrating sometimes. Most of the frustration has come because I’ve tried to have things both ways—songwriter and day job.
NLE: What’s your advice for a young person coming up, regarding songwriting and show business?
TT: That one’s so hard. Lehman Engel told me in 1978, when I was leaving college and petrified about my path, that musical theater wasn’t a young man’s game. Therefore, I shouldn’t burn out, shouldn’t drive a cab, shouldn’t work as an usher believing that would connect me to the theater. He advised me to take a job as far from the arts as I pleased, and stay in it for the long haul. I just didn’t know how long the haul would actually be! On the one hand, he was right. I’ve lived a full life. I raised two terrific daughters in NYC. I might not have been able to do that while waiting tables. I know people who chose not to have children just so they could concentrate on writing. I can’t imagine life without my kids. On the other hand, if I had gone full tilt at songwriting, maybe I could have had a hit Broadway show in my twenties or thirties. The main thing I would tell someone is that however talented you think you are, there are a lot of talented people out there, and you probably won’t make it to the top by out-talenting everyone. You have to work harder than everyone, too. And that takes time. If you want to risk it, great! Go all out. Or if you have family money you can rely on, or if you can marry someone who can handle the money-making, do that. But if you can’t, there is another path, namely the slow-walk one I’m on. I’m hungrier than ever, more active than ever, and happier than I’ve ever been in my life. It wasn’t what I dreamed of when I was 22, but my dreams are still alive. There are a lot of ways to be happy, would be my final advice. Live your life and pursue your songwriting in such a way so that you can always be happy about things.
NLE: What’s next for Tom Toce? Anything coming up between Summer Melodies and Winter Rhythms?
TT: I’ve got the Fifth Annual Harvard-Yale Cantata coming up at 54 Below in September. I created that series, and I host and produce it. Besides that, I’m working on three musicals in various stages, and I’ve recently decided to revisit a show I worked on fifteen years ago but put aside for the past several years. So I think I’ll spend a lot of the summer and fall writing.
For more information and tickets to Summer Melodies, click here.
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