In his new autobiography, Put on a Happy Face, composer Charles Strouse at one point writes, “If you speak of musical failures, to most people, it’s as boring as hearing about ‘the four hours I spent waiting for a plane at the Buffalo airport.’”
Most people—except for musical-theater fans, that is! America is said to be obsessed with success, but Broadway has a singularly obsessive relationship with failure; no wonder one of the most beloved books about theater, Ken Mandelbaum’s Not Since Carrie, is subtitled “Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops.” It’s not surprising, then, that the most interesting parts of Strouse’s books concern his misfires. read more
The opera stage is filled with tragic characters who have lost touch with reality—one of the best-known examples being Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, seen in Mary Zimmermann’s new Met production earlier this season with the high-flying soprano Natalie Dessay.
But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez tells it in his new book The Soloist, out from Putnam on April 17, real-life tragedies with mental illness at their center are playing out on our streets every day, and some of them involve musicians. Lopez literally stumbled on a story one day three years ago: a middle-aged, schizophrenic homeless man playing a violin in Pershing Square, who clearly had had some serious musical training in a former life.
The story of this man, Nathaniel Ayers—who once attended Juilliard—was originally the subject of a series of newspaper columns. Readers began donating musical instruments, and Lopez became more and more involved in trying to get Ayers off the streets and into treatment. The book is now being made into a movie for release later this year, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement) and starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez. read more
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