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 |
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment