Interview: Maureen McGovern Will Celebrate Women at 54 Below

Not long after she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her portrayal of Marmee in the short-lived 2005 Broadway musical of Little Women, Maureen McGovern packed up and moved out of New York, where she had lived for 18 years. But the city always welcomes her back, and she will be here March 10-14 to perform at 54 Below.

For her 54 Below show "Sing, My Sisters, Sing!" McGovern draws from the catalogs of women singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Laura Nyro, Carly Simon, Annie Lennox, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Melissa Manchester, Janis Ian and Kate and Anna McGarrigle, as well as dearly departed female singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee.

McGovern previewed the show for BroadwayWorld when we spoke by phone late last month while she was looking out, she said, on a "Currier and Ives" scene from the window of her Ohio home, adjacent to a state park. The former pop star, who had a No. 1 hit in 1973 with "The Morning After," moved back to her home state about nine years ago. She last performed at 54 Below during its inaugural holiday season in 2012, and she reminisced about her appearances on Broadway and other facets of her circuitous career in our extensive conversation.

Why did you leave New York?
I just really wanted peace and quiet. I lived in New York for about 18 years and L.A. for 14, 15 years, and a lot of years on the road, not really living anywhere. I figured, as long as I'm close to an airport... And being close to family is nice. My sister lives here, my godson, my nieces and grandkids. I missed so much of everyone's growing up. As long as I get my New York fix a couple times a year, I'm good.

Is the 54 Below engagement the premiere of "Sing, My Sisters, Sing!" or have you already performed it elsewhere?
We've done pieces of it, and we're breaking it in in New Hope the Saturday before we open. In truth this is a two-hour show; I'm having to cut it down to be an hour and 15 minutes for 54 Below. In the longer show we do some more Joni Mitchell; and a piece by Mary Travers that she wrote with Noel Paul Stookey called "But a Moment"; and I do "Angel in the House," that Jonatha Brooke wrote; and "The One Who Knows," a beautiful song Dar Williams wrote.

What was the genesis of this show?
It's kind of a natural progression from A Long and Winding Road, the album that I did seven or eight years ago. That was boomer coming-of-age greatest hits--Paul Simon and Bob Dylan and Randy Newman and James Taylor and Jimmy Webb--not treating them like a museum piece, but what's relevant about these great songs today. I took the same approach with women singer-songwriters. It's about time somebody started singing their praises. Jeff Harris, my musical director is a brilliant composer--I've recorded 14 of his songs and performed many others during the years--so he arranges with a composer's point of view, so we've done reimaginings or reinventions of a lot of these songs.

What happens when you sing music by women exclusively?
I love a woman's perspective, because they tend to write more introspectively, going through the pain to get to the other side. We call them--Joni Mitchell, particularly--confessional poets. There's just a real introspective point of view, and a working-through of things. I love that. Joni Mitchell has had a much more adventurous life than I did, and been blindingly successful at what she did, but there's lines of hers that just fly through my brain. They really resonated with me when I was a young person--she was going through all the things that we were going through, on a grander scale--and still today.

Have you worked with or gotten to know any of the women whose music is in the show?
I'm not "buds" with anybody, but I know Melissa Manchester, I know Annie Ross, I've met Carly Simon. I love Carole King and everything she's ever written, but I've never met her. For years I've done an Annie Ross song called "Jackie." She wrote so many great lyrics for Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. I'm also doing a throwback to the "early singing sisters," so some of them aren't with us anymore, like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.

How did you choose what to sing in the show from the women singer-songwriters' vast outputs?
I tend to make a menu and then the songs choose me--they pop up from the list. We play with things; some work, some don't. We just found songs that felt good for me to sing and could tell a story. I'm a storyteller at heart.

So you don't sing your signature song in every performance you give?
I always do "Morning After" in a concert. A couple of times in cabaret I've done "Morning After," if it fit the theme of the show. But cabaret is essentially What else are you about? That was so liberating for me when I first started doing cabaret in the early '80s, when I came to New York. In the '70s they were always looking for that next 3-minute-and-10-second son of "Morning After." I'm grateful for the hits that I had; the albums that went along with them were none of my choices, and I was always having to sing the songs from the next album. It was really hard to do a show that meant anything to me.

Do you do any writing?
I have a one-woman show about my life called Carry It On that I cowrote with Phil Himberg. I've done that at the Arena Stage [in D.C.] and Geva in Rochester and at the Huntington in Boston--I got the IRNE Award for best solo performance.
I am working on a memoir, called Surviving the Morning After, and right now it's a million little pieces. It's really about never giving up. You know, one foot in front of the other, you keep going. I'll probably work with someone to put it together; I'm not per se a writer. They give me stuff and then I turn it into McGovern-speak, so it's natural.

Is it a blessing or curse to have one song you're so identified with, as you've been with "The Morning After"?
In the beginning, when I was called the "disaster singer" and they just kept wanting more and more a formula song like that, it was frustrating to me. I was always grateful to the song, but kind of baffled at the success of it. I worked with the Muscular Dystrophy Association, doing the telethon, where I performed "Morning After" every year. The families would tell me what a source of strength it was, and I'd get letters from people saying they'd suffered a death or illness or lost their job or some traumatic thing in their lives and that song was really a beacon of hope for them. So, 12 years into volunteering for MDA, my youngest niece was diagnosed with dermatomyositis, which is one of the 40-some diseases that MDA covers. Here it is--right in my own backyard. I could barely get through the song [at the telethon]. It was my aha moment as to what this song means to everybody. We're always in need of hope.

How did you find that song in the first place?
My first manager put together a trio, and we went all across the Midwest to all the lounges--every Marriott, Holiday Inn--doing Top 40 covers. And my first producer's barber heard me in this Ramada Inn outside of Cleveland, and said to the producer, "You should come hear this girl." He sent around a tape to all the record companies; everyone turned me down except 20th Century Records, and Russ Regan was head of it at the time. He literally signed me sight unseen. That was October of '72. He said, "We'll look for something." And about a month later they sent me "The Morning After." He thought my voice would match that song very well. The writers had been given this task [to write a theme song for The Poseidon Adventure] and wrote the song overnight. They wrote it with Barbra Streisand in mind, but she turned it down--thank you, Barbra. The movie took off in December of that year, and the song did nothing, so they dropped it. When the Oscars came out in March, it was nominated, and some of the radio stations started playing it, and then it won and there were huge phone requests all across the country--literally, the public made that song happen. It forced the record company to rerelease it, and by August of '73 it was a No. 1 gold record.

But you didn't have the easiest time in the recording industry despite your hits, including "We May Never Love Like This Again," which won the Oscar for The Towering Inferno a couple of years after "The Morning After."
I walked away from the music business at the end of '70s for the second time. The first time, in 1976--after "The Morning After"--I was flat broke and went back to being a secretary in Marina del Rey. I had a manager that took 40 percent of my earnings. Whatever hideous showbiz thing could happen, that was the '70s to me. That's why I was thrilled to do Sister Angelina in Airplane! because I was known as the "disaster theme queen" in the '70s, and that was like a fitting end to my disaster decade, just to do a sendup of all those disaster movies.
I walked away again in 1980, from the recording end of it. I had had "Can You Read My Mind" from Superman and "Different Worlds" from Angie, and I was grateful to those, but the producers would not let the albums be anywhere that was somewhere in my heart. They would say, "Yeah, I know you want to do that stuff, but you have to do this first." I could see what I wanted to do getting farther and farther and farther away from ever happening. I stopped recording and I wrote children's music and went into Pirates of Penzance, replaced Linda Ronstadt, after only one week of summer stock, never even having done a high school play. Then I started doing eight shows a week on Broadway and a midnight cabaret on top of it. Putting a cabaret show together was the antithesis of your hits--What else are you about?--so I got to explore jazz and classical music and big band and great American songbook, and I could do whatever I wanted and I was like a kid in a candy store. That's what I love about the intimacy of cabaret. You can find the most obscure song, and someone sitting in your audience in New York is going to know that song! But I love that freedom to just take a topic and run away, and you don't have to do your hits.

How did your theater career get off the ground?
I had never in my wildest dreams entertained doing anything in theater. I was always in awe of people who did that, but I was a very shy performer. I was living in L.A. and I was asked to do The Sound of Music at Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera. I've always loved the show, and I love Rodgers and Hammerstein's music, and I play guitar, and I love working with kids, so I figured: If ever there was a baptism in theater to see if I liked it, go ahead and try. I'm a survivor of the Catholic school experience, so I knew from nuns. And it was just wonderful. I had lost my mother the spring of that year, and I felt very close to her doing that show--she would have loved it.
On my way to Pittsburgh in July of '81 for that one week of summer stock, I was asked to come to New York to audition for Joe Papp, for Pirates of Penzance. So I learned "Poor Wandering One." I went to New York, auditioned for Joe, then went to a restaurant in the Village, and Wilford Leach, the director, happened by where we were having lunch and poked his nose in and said, "By the way, you got it." So I did my one week of summer stock and three weeks later opened on Broadway. I did not know how terrified I should have been. The enormity of it didn't hit me until that [first] night. "Poor Wandering One" stopped the show, and Robby Benson was my Frederic and he was kneeling, looking at me, and we were stopped [by the ovation]. I didn't know what to do, like, This is disrupting everything... I'm starting to move, and he was so sweet, he's going, "[whispering] Take it, just take it... Stay put." It was a valentine of a show I did for a year and two months.

And then you became an in-demand musical star.
On my vacation in the middle of Pirates, I went back to Pittsburgh CLO and did Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, and then one week after Pirates closed, I walked across the street to the other theater and did Nine, replacing Karen Akers. What a beautiful show. I would watch that on my Mondays off, for three or four weeks, and there were so many stunningly visual things Tommy Tune did in that show.
[Several year later] I did Threepenny Opera with Sting. I've done tons of regional theater--Elegies; Dear World at Sundance with Philip Himberg, who's my director of Carry It On; Lion in Winter; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And The King and I! I'd loved that movie since I was a child, and I had tried to audition for it the last go-round on Broadway, and they said, "No, we don't need a singer, we need an actress." Then I moved out to California and auditioned for an animated version of it, and the director, who was very, very young, said, "We want this perky, happy, we don't want any sadness in it." I said to him, "He dies at the end, you know?" So I didn't get that! I named my car Gertie after Gertrude Lawrence, 'cause I figured that's the closest I'll get to The King and I.
Then I just got a call out of the blue. Marie Osmond had been doing the tour--she took over for Hayley Mills. They wouldn't see me for the tour, either, because they had offered it early on to Hayley Mills. Donny and Marie got a new television show at the time, so she had to bow out early. There were only nine weeks left, and nobody apparently wanted to take on the enormity of that role for just nine weeks. They called me and said, Would you be interested? and I said, Yesss!!! It was perfect--that short a time, there was no fatigue that set in--and every night it was a joy and a learning experience. I was in Chicago for a month, our closing city: a hundred-degree weather in July, 50-pound costumes and hot flashes! I loved every minute of that show.

What music did you grow up listening to?
My dad sang in a barbershop quartet. He had a beautiful voice, and I think his secret dream would have been to be a big band singer in the '40s. So I grew up on Ella and Mel Tormé and all the big band singers from the time, and the big bands. Heard all those great standards, and had a real passion for all of them. My high school coming-of-age time, certainly the Beatles changed my life. Barbra Streisand, Dusty Springfield. I love anything Aretha Franklin did. We'll be doing a little bit of "Natural Woman" in the show, with "I Feel the Earth Move"-kind of a jazzy version of it. Judy Collins--I loved all her early albums, and Wildflower was an epiphany to me, just an incredible album. Peter, Paul & Mary were huge--you know, we all wanted to be Mary Travers, with the long blond hair. Actually, a dream come true: Two years ago I was doing a benefit in New Jersey called "Raise the Roof," and they [Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey] were on the bill. I asked them if I could sing something with them and they were very gracious, and we did "The Water Is Wide" together. We did another show this past summer, a tribute to Pete Seeger with "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. They were such a strong part of everything that happened in the '60s and early '70s, have led very powerful, rich lives encouraging and empowering people to get involved in politics and change, so that was a thrill. I [started out] doing folk songs in intimate places. It enabled me to say what I believed, because being a shy performer, I couldn't speak [on stage].

Are you fans of any of today's female musical artists?
Beyoncé is incredible, Kelly Clarkson is wonderful. But I do gravitate back--I listen to classical and jazz. Some of the music today, I'm baffled. And all the gladiatorial talent contests that are out there, I have a hard time watching. I feel so anxious for the kids, and I know that somebody's making a lot of money off these kids. I say, When you're eager and you're young, don't sign your name.

What about how the recording biz has changed in your lifetime?
I'm funding my own two records--this album, Sing, My Sisters, Sing!, and I'm doing a spiritual album. We've got several labels that want to release it, but they don't want to pay for it. That's the biz. In a way, you have more control over it, and that's a good thing.

Maureen McGovern's "Sing, My Sisters, Sing!" will have four performances at 54 Below from March 10 to 14. Click here for tickets and more information. Television viewers in NYC can catch Maureen on the American Songbook at NJPAC series, which is slated to air on PBS Channel 13 on April 11.

Top photo by Maryann Lopinto. 54 Below in 2012 photos by Walter McBride. Little Women photo by Paul Kolnik.