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ildhorn is nothing if not versatile. Besides his trio of Broadway shows and his 1991 musical, Svengali, he wrote the score for the play Cyrano de Bergerac and composed incidental music for Arthur Kopit’s drama The Road to Nirvana. He also wrote several songs for the Broadway musical Victor/Victoria, and he was once commissioned by the Bolshoi Ballet to do a full-length ballet.
Before Broadway ever heard of Frank Wildhorn, he had written hundreds of songs for a mind-boggling array of artists. Pop diva Whitney Houston’s cover of his “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?” reached No. 1 on the international charts – a hit in 43 nations. Country singer Kenny Rogers took Wildhorn’s “Don’t Look in My Eyes” to the top of the country-western charts. “I Do,” recorded by Natalie Cole and Freddie Jackson, climbed to No. 10 on both the R&B and adult contemporary charts. Dance songs Wildhorn wrote a decade ago for the band Ana went to No. 1 and No. 3 on Japan’s pop charts.
His songs have been recorded by the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli, not to mention Julie Andrews, Amy Grant, Patti La Belle, Ben Vereen, The Moody Blues, John Raitt, Colm Wilkinson, Trisha Yearwood and Wildhorn’s wife, Linda Eder – the crystal-voiced chanteuse whom Newsday dubbed “a pop diva for the next millennium.”
Wildhorn met Eder 13 years ago, after hearing her tape from (this is true!) a “Star Search” TV talent show appearance. She auditioned in 1987 for the first ill-fated New York version of Jekyll & Hyde, and though the show didn’t take shape, a romance did. Since then, Wildhorn has written many songs and co-produced four CDs for Eder. She, in turn, has played Wildhorn heroines on concept albums and on stage. She created the role of Lucy in the original Alley Theatre production of Jekyll & Hyde, and reprised the soft-hearted hussy on Broadway. Pregnancy precluded her appearing in The Civil War Broadway cast (Eder gave birth to a son in August), but she was back on the concert circuit in December, appearing at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, in Costa Mesa, Calif., and making her Carnegie Hall debut on February 2. Eder is slated to star in one of Wildhorn’s next projects, a romantic musical comedy titled Havana.
That’s right: one of. Wildhorn can’t seem to sit still. At any given time, he juggles a dozen projects. Currently in development, says Wildhorn, are other musicals with the working titles Dracula, Queen Christina, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Bonnie and Clyde, and Alice (of Wonderland fame).
As much entrepreneur as artist, Wildhorn – on the merit of his recording successes – persuaded Time Warner a few years ago to launch a new division of Atlantic Records devoted to developing recordings of emerging stage shows. Atlantic Theatre was formed in 1994, with Wildhorn as its creative director. “It’s something I’m very proud of,” says the part-time record executive. “Of the many hats I wear, it’s a hat I enjoy very much.”
Wildhorn has used this unique perch to promote and nourish his own musicals, as well as develop concept albums for nontraditional projects like Smokey Joe’s Café and the “sublimely trashy” off-Broadway musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which played last fall in L.A.’s Henry Ford Theatre.
When he isn’t in Manhattan, Houston or Los Angeles, Wildhorn retires to his horse farm in Westchester, New York. He leaves the horses mostly to Eder; the pop guy can usually be found noodling at the piano.
“To say I’m a workaholic is an oversimplification,” he says. “I don’t feel like I’m working. It’s not a job. I write music – it’s what I do. I did it when they weren’t paying me.”
Wildhorn doesn’t know the meaning of the word blocked. “When I sit at the piano, [the melodies are] already there, and my job is to find them,” he recently told “60 Minutes II.”
“He’s a machine,” says Cuden, without a trace of disrespect. “Frank is prolific almost to the point of being frightening. He really cranks the music out.”
That seems to be the consensus among Wildhorn collaborators. “The guy oozes music,” The Civil War director Jerry Zaks recently told the trade magazine, InTheater. The four-time Tony-winning director re-tooled the sweeping musical for Broadway after its 1998 premiere in Houston, with apparently mixed results. The sweeping “musical tapestry,” as Wildhorn characterizes it, closed after only two months. And was promptly reborn – a two-year national tour started last month in Cincinnati.
Bad reviews can’t stop Wildhorn. Disappointing box office sales merely divert his course. The pop guy has the Midas touch as far as investors are concerned.
Why? Because a long run on Broadway isn’t the key to a musical’s success, according to Freddie Gershon, president of Music Theatre International, the company that licenses rights to Wildhorn’s musicals. A show’s afterlife matters much more: its rebirth on national tour and through foreign licensing; and ultimately its apotheosis in dinner theaters, regional theaters, colleges and high school productions.
If so, Wildhorn’s formula – with the invincible combo of hummable tunes, a familiar story and timeless emotional appeal – guarantees winners.
Jekyll & Hyde has all of the above. With more than 1,000 Broadway performances under its belt, the show already belongs to the elite pantheon of monster Broadway hits (an exclusive club with fewer than 100 members).
“It is going to be around for a really long time even after it leaves Broadway,” predicts Cuden. “It will be performed in schools, community theater, repertory companies, opera companies, forever.”
hort-lived as The Civil War’s Broadway run was, Wildhorn is extremely proud of his latest opus. An ambitious, unconventional musical, it’s peopled by nameless characters whose songs and speeches are adapted from original war-era diaries, letters, poems and news accounts. Instead of evoking a slice of the period, the show takes on the whole bloody conflict – from the ramparts of Fort Sumter to the fields of Gettysburg, and everything in between.
It seems to defy Wildhorn’s own formula. Or does it?
“Frank’s formula is no formula,” ob-serves USC School of Theatre dean Robert Scales. “It’s not like musical theater has to be this, this and this. Musical theater is to experiment with, to explore. I think that is a good thing.”
And experiment he does. The Civil War concept album, Wildhorn contends, features the largest, most diverse cast of American artists to ever come together in a theatrical recording. Pop (Hootie & the Blowfish) meets poet laureate (Maya Angelou), country-western (Travis Tritt) meets gospel (Bebe Winans) and New Orleans funk (Dr. John). “The Civil War,” Wildhorn says, “is the epitome of what I have tried to be – a bridge between pop and theater. It was an incredible journey, bringing those two worlds together.”
Like Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Civil War began its life as a recording, took its first theatrical bow in Houston’s Alley Theatre, and arrived on Broadway almost as an afterthought.
“None of my shows were developed or written in New York,” Wildhorn says proudly. That’s hardly a surprise coming from a man who considers Broadway hopelessly out of touch with America’s boisterous, multicultural, pop-loving landscape.
Wildhorn makes bold to predict that the future of American musicals lies somewhere between the Hudson and the Pacific.
“The majority of pop music today,” he points out, “is written by African-American and Latino original artists” – many of whom are based on the West Coast. “It’s a tragedy” he grouses, “that none of that is represented on Broadway.”
By his diligent example, Wildhorn hopes to rouse his comrades in the pop world to join him in revolutionizing Broadway.
Back in his hit-producing laboratory, the pop guy plugs away at his passion, each note he writes a stab at theatrical snobbery. But unlike the tortured Dr. Jekyll of his musical, Wildhorn has nothing to – er, Hyde. He doesn’t live in stuffy, repressed 19th-century London, after all. This mass-appeal, mass-media, mass-culture age is indubitably his moment.
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