"EVER AFTER" THE BOOK PARTY

EVER AFTER is out today, at last, officially. With musicals just beginning to return to Broadway, the timing has proven propitious — Hadestown, Waitress, The Lion King and Hamilton thus far have reopened, all of them shows I write about at length in EVER AFTER.

How to promote EVER AFTER's arrival? Ah, that is the question. An in-person book party (as in days of yore)? Out of the question. A Zoom book party, or even a Zoom book reading? Too dreary to contemplate.

How about the book launch in my head, the book party that never will be, except right here, as I write it.

You're invited.

We're at Sardi's, upstairs. I'm sitting at the bar opposite my dear, longtime, bartender pal Joe, who is pouring. He's passed me the cheese and cracker platter — which was discontinued as no longer PC from a sanitary perspective even before the pandemic but, what the hell, it's my party, and I'll cracker and cheese if I want to.

I'm throwing this bash on a show night, so everybody working in something will be here after their curtain comes down. We’re going late. That's good.

Can this be Donna McKechnie coming up the stairs? How many times has she made this Sardi's ascent? Ms. McKechnie opens EVER AFTER, in an “Overture” subtitled: “And Now Life Really Begins,” about the closing of A Chorus Line in April 1990, and the “Tag Sale” that ensued, in which every scrap of costume, scenery and prop was sold off in one massive final fund raiser for the New York Shakespeare Festival — right across the street, there, at the Shubert Theatre. Ms. McKechnie makes time stand still.

I think I see Ira Weitzman, whose career as a nurturer of new musicals and the people who write them spans EVER AFTER and is, in many ways, the book's through-line. Ira, characteristically, is at an out-of-the-way table. I toast him from afar.

Stephen Sondheim joins me at the bar. I buy him a Scotch. He deserves one.  Mr. Sondheim proofed EVER AFTER the first time around (no kidding), line-editing down to the last comma (a punctuation mark he maintained I abused. He was right). I buy him a double.

The fabulous food at this EVER AFTER book party comes from my buddy Neil Kleinberg, owner of the Clinton Street Baking Company; who catered my 40th Birthday, my wedding and all manner of other social highs and lows. Sardi's has deferred graciously to Neil tonight and his menu is simply delish: Mini Goat Cheese Tomato Quiches, Organic Vegetable Crudités with Buttermilk Dip, Caramelized Onion & Wild Mushroom Pizzettes, Bite-Sized Crab Cakes Remoulade, and Fried Chicken Bites in Honey Tabasco. By far, the tastiest imaginary food ever served at an imaginary book party.

Sardi's has a piano here on the second floor, and Adam Guettel is playing it. I figure if I can't have Gershwin (even my imagination has limits), I want Adam, composer of A Light in the Piazza, of which I wrote in EVER AFTER: “The Light in the Piazza simply remains one of the finest works of musical theater that I have ever seen. It won Guettel a Tony Award for Best Original Score. But that does not even begin to do it justice.”

I perceive Audra McDonald standing beside Adam, her elbow on the piano. “When it’s music that fills my soul there’s just no fear,” Audra told me in EVER AFTER. I hope she decides to sing.

Somebody has thrown open a window. I invite my guests to join me in pitching maraschino cherries at the Majestic Theatre marquee across 44th Street still emblazoned Phantom of the Opera, that “juggernaut of clichés,” as I characterized it in EVER AFTER. Andrew Lloyd Webber actually makes a personal appearance in his own EVER AFTER chapter. He is not, however, in attendance tonight.

There's Disney Theatrical chief Tom Schumacher and his old Disney teammate, Peter Schneider, the one-time “Disney Boys.” “The face of the Walt Disney Company on Broadway had many masks in 1998,” I wrote about them. “Some were daring and innovative like those of The Lion King, others were theme-park safe yet commercially intimidating, both beauty and beast. All were nearly impenetrable. Behind those masks, though, stood two real characters—a matched pair of Disney executives who together constituted the company’s unvarnished Broadway face.” Nice guys, still. I ask Joe to send them over some champagne.

Stephen Schwartz is here, surely having a ball. He and I have some cool history. “One short day back in February 1999,” as I wrote in EVER AFTER, “Stephen Schwartz, the composer-lyricist creator of just about everyone’s favorite musicals from Broadway’s bell-bottom era—like Godspell and The Magic Show and most especially Pippin—breezed into the conference room we were occupying that day as co-panelists for the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation...Stephen began effusing before he’d even sat down. He’d read this great book, he informed us, a novel, that imagined the backstory behind The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch. This was going to be his next musical, Stephen announced.” Yep, I was there.

Absent, of course, is my friend Jonathan Larson, to whom EVER AFTER is dedicated (along with my daughters, Lea and Sara, who share their own private table tonight). Jonathan's sudden shocking passing in 1996 launched his musical Rent and the era that I (and others) believe he still dominates. “I believe there has been a Renaissance in the Broadway musical and it begins with Rent,” Jeffrey Seller, the producer of Hamilton and so many others insisted to me in EVER AFTER. Jeffrey and I were first introduced to each other by Jonathan at a "Peasant Feast" in his apartment, when Rent was just a gleam in Jonathan's eye and Jeffrey shared it. “You know Giotto, the great Italian painter of the 1300s who brought in the Italian Renaissance?" Jeffrey concludes in EVER AFTER. "Jonathan was our Giotto.”

Jeffrey, of course, is here. I ask Joe to shoot him a flute of bubbly. And since this is my party, I decide to imagine for a moment that Jonathan is here too, having a helluva good time. I mean, why not?