February 20, 2012

A wonderful event in my life has been my daughter and her husband are expecting their first child. They moved to Houston during the summer of 2011. As my only child, I shall miss her, but I have forged ahead making new friends and solidifying connections. I continue my volunteering at the English Speaking Union and have taken up tai chi and ballroom dancing at Fred Astaire Midtown Studio. I've had 4 hand surgeries as a result of a bad fall and broken my arm after another fall. Nevertheless I am in good health and try and make the most of life in Manhattan, which offers so many wonderful and enriching activities.

song "I'll Be Here" from Ordinary Days

Here's a song from "Ordinary Days" from the talented Adam Gwon, winner of the Fred Ebb award. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BealLlBO5qw
The story song is called "I'll Be Here."

"Ordinary Days" new Roundabout show - tickets on sale now

The "Roundabout Underground" Theatre presents new works by up and coming talent. Ordinary Days is the third production (and the first musical) of Roundabout Underground, an Off-Broadway initiative launched in 2007 to introduce and cultivate artists in a 62-seat Black Box Theatre within the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre on West 46th Street. Recently I attended the York Theatre where Adam Gwon presented selections from his new work. It has just been announced that Hunter Foster (Urinetown, Sutton Foster's sister) will be starring in it. Another talented performer that I met at the York presentation is Adam Gertner. You can read more about it here: Playbill article: Aug.19, 2009 http://www.playbill.com/news/article/132095-Hunter_Foster_Is_One_of_Four_in_NYC_Premiere_of_Musical_Ordinary_Days
also
http://www.newyorktheatreguide.com/news/ag09/ordinary555306.htm

Previews from	02 Oct 2009
Opens	25 Oct 2009
Booking to	13 Dec 2010

Here's a direct link for Roundabout ticketing for the show. It is open seating.
http://www.roundabouttheatre.org/secure/tickets/production.aspx?PID=5817

Al Tapper "Renaissance Man more info & interview

AL TAPPER

    Renaissance Man Al Tapper is an accomplished writer, composer, lyricist
and investment banker -- with a number of plays, musicals, albums and
corporate buy-outs under his belt. Mr. Tapper's latest project is as producer
of the documentary film "Broadway: The Golden Age, By The Legends Who Were
There," which shares the stories of such legendary Broadway stars as Carol
Burnett, Angela Lansbury, Shirley Maclaine, Jeremy Irons, Gena Rowlands, Jerry
Orbach, Martin Landau, Bea Arthur, Stephen Sondheim, Eli Wallach and more,
illustrating their tales with rare archival performance footage, as well as
their own home movies and photos. The film opened to wide acclaim in New York
and LA on June 11, 2004.

An Interview with Al Tapper By Allen W. Fletcher

Al Tapper

Albert Tapper is the producer of the award-winning Broadway: The Golden Age, which is premiering this weekend at the Bijou Community Cinema. He will be at the theater for a Q&A session after the 5 p.m. screening on Sunday. Born in Worcester, he attended Midland Street School, Chandler Street Junior High School and Classical High School, after which he earned a B.A. from Boston University. He co-owned Ziff Paper Co., selling it in 1986 and starting a successful venture capital investment company that was sold in 1998. Since then, he has pursued his musical ambitions, producing two albums of original songs and three off-Broadway musicals, among other creative endeavors. He is 62 years old and lives now in New York City and Boca Raton.

Were your first 60 years simply a misspent life?
Not at all. I was very lucky and had some great success in business and it was able to fuel all the other things I wanted to do. So it was never misspent. I always wanted to write music and always composed, and I started that very early in life. I had an opportunity to do it back in the early ’60s when CBS was wanting to buy some of my songs.

So you had some early success?
They wanted to negotiate buying my songs, and I was 18 and had some advice from someone who said you don’t want to do that, you want to work on a royalty basis. So I wrote them back and told them the same thing. Long story short, I never heard from them again, and I had that letter on the wall of my office when I first went into business, to remind me not to be greedy. I should have done it; I was wrong. It’s possible that I would have had a different career, but I think I never would be able to do the things that I do now if I didn’t have that life in business and didn’t find some success in it.

Do you compose on the piano?
Yes, that’s how I compose. I took piano lessons from a woman named Mrs. Myerson. She lived on Pleasant Street and I was about 10 when I started. But I didn’t really want to take lessons — I wanted to play baseball. There was a baseball field around the corner from where she lived and that’s where she would come get me to take lessons. I had a talent to be able to hear music and I could play fairly well by ear, so I used to fake my lessons; I never practiced. But she was too smart, and she finally called my mother and told her that she was wasting her money, and that “the boy was not interested in music.” So I stopped taking lessons.

How about your baseball career?
I played in high school and college, but I wasn’t good enough to go further. I think it took that many years for the dream to die. In order to go get myself to fall asleep at night, I would daydream that I was playing for the Red Sox — that I was the youngest person to ever play for the Red Sox. That’s when it started. Well, that habit of falling asleep lasted until I was the oldest person to play for the Red Sox, and then I gave it up.

Tell me a little bit about the creative process. Is there any similarity between the creativity manifested in venture investment and in song-writing?
I have thought about that a lot, and I think so. I think that business is not really a science at all, but it’s an art. I think it’s a matter of how well you read people, how well you put the music with the lyrics, in doing a deal or negotiating something or even hiring people and having them work for you and having them put out the best effort that they can — and how you treat them — and I think they are all pieces that go together in the same way as a 32 bar song. A lot of it is instinctive. You have to know numbers and be able to read a balance sheet and all of that, but business is more of an art than a science.

Have you written the Great Worcester Musical yet?
I’ve written two songs about Worcester — one that was for a show in Worcester a number of years ago, which was poking fun at the city — like they keep redesigning Lincoln Square, they don’t have an exit on the Mass. Pike, do they? And then I wrote a song which was a love song to Worcester, which ultimately got into one of my shows, called “From Where I Stand.” But since it was a New York-based show, Worcester became Brooklyn. But it was originally written for Worcester. It was like a Valentine to Worcester, but then when I did the show, Worcester didn’t fit into a show based on an evening at Bemelman’s Bar at the Hotel Carlisle. The bartender was from Brooklyn, so I rewrote the song and it became Brooklyn. Brooklyn and Worcester both have two syllables. If it was Peoria, I would have had a little bit of a problem.

I hope you still have a sense of shame about having done that.
I’m not sure the right person to tell that to is you. You’ll put it in the newspaper article.

How did the Broadway film come about?
Rick McKay is the director of the film and I can actually tell you how the whole thing came about. Rick was in California and he was working for PBS at the time, doing an interview with Patricia Morrison, who is the original star of Kiss Me Kate, one of the last great old-style musicals. He was interviewing her for something else and then she just kind of got off — she was 90 years old and she just got off on a tangent talking about Broadway and he just let it go, just let the tape recorder run. I met him at a party — I didn’t know him at the time — and we discovered that the name of his company was Second Act Films and the name of my company was Act Two, and we both sort of looked at each other. So he played me a little bit of the interview and a couple of others that he had done and I said, “Gee, we’ve got to make a movie out of this, because if we don’t make it now, we won’t.” Broadway is live and if you don’t get it down historically and interview these people, they won’t be around.

How involved were you in actually making it?
I would be involved in the sense that I would see 20 different versions of the movie and we would keep talking about it and add all the people and maybe change a little bit of the direction of the film. There was one thing in it, we felt that we didn’t want to knock what was going on today, so we didn’t. We do say that it’s not the same today; but we don’t say it, we let the performance say it, with the Jerry Orbachs of the world, who appeared in so many Broadway shows. Everyone thinks Jerry is Detective Brisco in “Law and Order”; they don’t realize he’s one of the great Broadway stars. He’s marvelous and he was the original star of The Fantastics, and we got him singing “Try to Remember” a capella in the credits of the movie. So there are some very classic moments in it. There really are.

As an investor, is this going to work out for you?
I think that if it works out, it would be frosting on the cake. If it doesn’t work — well, I didn’t do this for money, but I believed that this movie would someday be important to any drama school, library, film school or whatever, because there is no other way to tell the story. And I felt that that would be the great lesson and a gift. I still don’t view profit as anything but a very good word, but I didn’t do it for that reason. But that’s a little bit of my background, so it may turn out to be a very profitable venture. Allen Fletcher may be reached at afletcher@wpltd.com.

Al Tapper musical theater genius

Al Tapper is multi-talented genius.

Al Tapper

He is the producer of the award-winning Broadway: The Golden Age, as well as numerous other works, including books.

An Interview with Al Tapper
Thursday, July 2, 2009; Posted: 02:07 PM - by TJ Fitzgerald

What's it like to have two of your shows being performed on stage simultaneously? Well, you're about to find out as Al Tapper shares his enthusiasm with us as he talks about his two shows being performed at the Algonquin Theater, An Evening at the Carlyle and Sessions: The Musical, which now features Robert Newman, best known as Josh on GUIDING LIGHT.

Tapper is a true triple threat....writer, composer and lyricist having written three off-Broadway musicals. He wrote his first musical in college. Since then he has written special material for regional productions and has produced two albums of his own songs. He composed the ballet The Seduction of Bathsheba whose premiere performance at Mechanics Hall was presented by the Central Massachusetts Symphony Orchestra. His Off-Broadway show, Imperfect Chemistry for which he composed the music and created the story, opened at the Minetta Lane Theater in New York in April of 2000. From Where I Stand, a musical revue, opened at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in March of 2003.

He has also written numerous books on humor published by Andrews McMeel and Company and MJF Publishing. They include A Guy Goes Into a Bar; A Minister, A Priest, And a Rabbi; A Guy Goes Into a Doctors Office and Flunked. He also wrote a new non-musical play titled, Conversations with Max. He is also a producer having produced the award winning film Broadway: The Golden Age.

TJ: Hi Al. where did you come up with the idea for Sessons: The Musical?

TAPPER: I had written a few musical plays, straight plays and books on humor and thought it might be a good time to write about something I knew about...therapy. I have certainly had my share of it. The idea came to me in a romantic way (for lack of a better word) as I was on a cruise with my kids and I was sitting overlooking the horizon in the Gulf of Mexico when I started to think about the project. By the time I got up from the lounging deck chair I had sketched out the characters and the specific issues that brought them to therapy. I also realized that every therapist is first a human being and has his or her own problems to deal with

TJ: How long did it take you to write the show?

TAPPER: It took about 3 months to write the show, but in theater that is sometimes the easy part. That hard part is mounting a showcase, getting it produced, finding a theater, and finding other creative people who could help with suggestions and would keep my feet to the fire so to speak. I was lucky and found a great producer who is also the artistic director of the Algonquin Theater---Tony Sportiello.

TJ: This must have been a difficult project for you writing the book, music and lyrics for a show?

TAPPER: Well, I don't plan on doing it again or at least not very soon. :O) I have 2 shows running where I wrote the entire piece yet I miss the collaboration that comes from sitting down with a co-writer, martini in hand, just to talk things over. Now I have to talk it over with myself. :O)

TJ: When did the show have it's first performance and where? Were you happy with the result at that time?

TAPPER: The show ran at Playwrights Horizons (The Peter Sharp Theater) in the summer of 2007. I was pleased with it and it got some terrific notices, but at Playwrights you can only have a limited run, so although we were sold out for every performance, we had to close as another show had been booked. So we waited until we could get another theater and reopen it. It also gave me and the creative people an opportunity to look at it carefully and try to improve on it. Which I believe we did so that the show running now at the Algonquin Theater is, I believe, more grounded... thus stronger.

TJ: Did you have many rewrites along the way?

TAPPER: I never stop rewriting even after a show opens, so if you include a minor change such as a single typo and a major change like the addition of a new character than we are now at about the 207^th draft. Slight exaggeration, but close.

TJ: Is there a character in the show that you personally identify with?

TAPPER: I am asked that question a lot and have truly reflected on it and my best answer, and I am not trying in any way to deflect, is that there is a little piece of me in every character. The Therapist, his Superego and Id, and his 9 patients. So in a sense we have 12 characters. I suppose that's makes me a bit schizophrenic but hopefully in a dramatic sense only.

TJ: How have the audiences been accepting the show?

TAPPER: The audiences seem to love the show and respond very favorably to both the humor of the piece and its serious nature. I believe everyone who sees it can identify with someone on stage. The interesting part is that every night I am told by the staff that people say "I have seen this show three times or four times" and I find that rather astounding. My own diagnosis is that they come for 2 hours and have therapy and it only cost $50 a ticket and so they save a fortune than if they went to a real therapist. But, that's only my theory. Maybe they come often simply because they like it.

TJ: Might there be an opportunity for the show to move to a Broadway house?

TAPPER: Yes, we have had interest from both Broadway producers and from larger off-Broadway houses. Also lots of interest from regional theaters across the country. Believe it or not, a Japanese promoter saw the show and is seriously interested in bringing it to Tokyo. Now that I'd have to go see!

TJ: Has the economy crunch hit off-Broadway to a great extent?

TAPPER: I think the opposite has happened. People are struggling to make ends meet and they have cut back on certain luxuries, but it seems as if they need to be entertained and are willing to go to the theater even if it's just to get away from all their trouble and personal turmoil.

TJ: Do you have any other projects coming up that we can look forward to?

TAPPER: Well, I have another musical, An Evening at the Carlyle which is also running now and it's doing quite well. I have a new book out, Conversations with Max, that deals with the lives of two very dear friends and what goes on in their everyday lives. It would be as if George and Jerry (Seinfeld) were talking on the phone and discussing mostly nothing.

TJ: Speaking of An Evening at the Carlyle, this sounds like quite an entertaining evening. Had you spent time at the bar that the show is based on?

TAPPER: have certainly spent my fair share of time at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle. In fact, I used to think of it as my own person library. You see, I lived at the Carlyle for 11 years and spent many a creative hour in my "library."

TJ: Did you draw your characters from people you met or are they caricatures that you just came up with?

TAPPER: I have met them!! I won't give up any names, but all the people you see coming into the bar are people I have met over the years. And of course Bemelmans is one of the few bars that really caters to celebrities. Some want to be left alone and some will agree to sing or dance at the slightest provocation.

TJ: I read someplace that one might run into Liza or the Donald on a given night. Care to expand on that?

TAPPER: I have run into both of them. And they really are the nicest people. I poke fun at them, but it's just for fun and I believe they would probably laugh the hardest if they came.

TJ: What is it like to have two shows running at once in New York? Did you plan it that way?

TAPPER: I didn't plan it that way. I didn't think Sessions would have such a long run, but now it looks like it will stay open at least through all of 2009 as it has been received so well. So, it is a real genuine kick to have 2 shows running everyday in New York. So now I guess I have to begin on a third.

Special thanks to Al for some great answers. So you can see one or both of his shows now. AN EVENING AT THE CARLYLE, A New Musical Revue presented by Algonquin Theater Productions, will extend its previously announced four-week engagement to an open-ended run at The Algonquin Theater (123 East 24th Street) where it plays in repertory with the musical Sessions, now in its 2^nd year!!!

For tickets to An Evening at the Carlyle, A New Musical Revue, click here or Sessions: The Musical, click here. So for now, ciao for now as I am off for an evening of margaritas and remember, theatre is my life!

SHOWS: An Evening at the Carlyle and Sessions

No, it's not a hotel. It's a delightful little musical revue called "An Evening at the Carlyle" now playing at The Algonquin Theatre. And no, it's not at the Alongquin Hotel either. It's at a small new lovely off Broadway theater called the Algonquin Theater which is located on 24th Street, between Lexington and Park Avenue. http://www.algonquintheater.org/ It's a brand new theater and it's worthwhile checking out their productions. Another open ended show that is worthwhile seeing in called "Sessions. The talented Al Tapper has written the music and lyrics for both of these shows.
The Algonquin Theatre hosts Sessions. Al Tapper's new musical tells the story of a prominent New York therapist, and his bizarre assortment of patients, ranging from a rich kid obsessed with Bob Dylan to a depressed billionaire. Deftly blending comedy and drama, the show features a number of catchy tunes. MORE ABOUT AL TAPPER in my next blog.
Algonquin Theater
Sessions
A candid and witty new musical about the trials and tribulations of everyday life as seen through the eyes of a New York therapist and his patients. Their experiences remind us that even those we look to for guidance are susceptible to the same issues we all endure. Show Dates: performances from 28 Oct 2008
Closing Open-Ended

Performance Schedule:
Wednesday, Friday & Saturday, 3PM & 8PM
Thursday, 8PM
Sunday, 3PM

Tickets:
212.868.4444
Pricing: $50 Students and Senior $15.00

An Evening at the Carlyle Algonquin http://aneveningatthecarlyle.com/
A musical entertainment featuring a talented young cast and a bright, original score commenting on current events, celebrities and life and love in the Big Apple, An Evening at the Carlyle will transport you 40 blocks north to the swankiest “mecca northeast of Tribeca," Bemelmans Bar in the Hotel Carlyle. "Come to Bemelmans Bar, where everybody knows your name....and your income."


During an evening at the Carlyle Hotel's famed Bemelmans Bar, veteran bartender Tommy encounters an eclectic, humorous and occasionally infuriating variety of New Yorkers; neurotic barflies, frustrated renters, Sondheim haters and Sinatra fanatics, ex-con executives, thwarted lovers, and even a surprise celebrity or two.
Show Dates:
Performances from 08 Jun 2009
Closing Open-Ended Performance Schedule:
Sunday - Tuesday, 7PM SmartTix 212-868-4444
or online ticketing
http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=EVE118&GUID=d94e3b40-b0d3-4ba2-8d36-1ce20ccdec83
Length: 1 hr 20 mins
Intermission: None
Seating: Assigned by SmartTix
Seat assignments are assigned by the SmartTix, based on the best seat at the time the order is completed.