Several national publications have done “whatever happened to…” stories this month about composer/entertainer Paul Williams, suggesting that many thought he was either dead (Entertainment Weekly’s conjecture, in the June 15 issue) or, as USA Today put it in a June 6 feature, “hiding out for more than two decades.”
They could have asked Goodspeed Opera House, which in the past few years has:
• adapted Paul Williams’ score for the TV special Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas into a stage musical which ran for two winters at the theater.
• workshopped a musical by Williams and Garry Marshall based on the Happy Days TV series.
• awarded Williams the theater’s Goodspeed Award at a gala fundraiser.
These weren’t exactly secrets. Happy Days also had a run in L.A. and toured nationally. Williams has toured too—he did a FIVE-night stint at Mohegan Sun Casino in 2005, for instance.
You know who else knew he was around? Fans of The Larry Sanders Show, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and Yo Gabba Gabba. Those who watched a more recent Muppet Christmas special, Letters to Santa, in 2008, or the movies The Rules of Attraction (2002), Princess Diaries 2 (2004), Georgia Rule (2007) or another Garry Marshall project, Valentine’s Day (2010).
Honestly, he hasn’t been that hard to find, or admire. And he’s 71 years old—how much more active would you have him be?
The idea that he was “dead” can be blamed on the new documentary Paul Williams Still Alive, which has all these publications buying into the myth that he vanished. Well, he did have a drug problem—which he appears to resolved in the late 1980s.
In any case, it’s nice to think of the Goodspeed as the home of live, vital composers and not just the revival house of dead ones. The live theater can teach a thing or two to the canned medium of film: it’s rude to deem a guy dead just because you maybe haven’t seen him in a Smokey & the Bandit movie lately.
…or perhaps because Williams died so well in Phantom of the Paradise. Hey, Goodspeed! Make a stage musical out of that!
There’s been a slew of new works on local stages in recent weeks, which I been happily attending but can’t (won’t) be able to discuss in detail. That’s because the time-honored process of workshops and try-outs is alive and well in New Haven, and I won’t mess with that delicate procedure.
Currently, Jim Dale is at Long Wharf Stage II with his autobiographical show Just Jim Dale (through June 24). The Yale Institute of Music Theater had staged readings of two new musicals this weekend.
Among other recent workshops that I didn’t catch personally was Goodspeed Musicals’ premiere of Amazing Grace, which closed at the Norma Terris Theater June 10; the Goodspeed’s got two more new works at the Norma Terris this season,T The Bikinis (Aug. 9-Sept. 2) and The Great American Mousical (beginning Nov. 8).
The city with a great legacy of preparing and shaking-down new shows