30 Days of NYMF: A Show Dances Off The Page

A SHOW DANCES OFF THE PAGE
by Jeff Hochhauser (book and co-lyricist of Mud Donahue & Son)

The show was born in a junk store in Greenport, NY. This junk store had a huge collection of very moldy books selling for a buck a piece. While I was happily gathering copies of almost every play Maurice Maeterlink ever wrote, my long time 'euphemism' Howard Hamm interrupted me with a thin, watermarked blue volume. He had an ingenuous look on his face that I've seen a whole bunch of times. He knew I was going to jump out of my skin!

He was right.

"Letters of a Hoofer to His Ma" by Jack Donahue.

I'd never heard of the book but I knew who Jack Donahue was: a fabled eccentric tap dancing comedian, in the day often mentioned in the same breath as Fred Astaire and Bill Robinson. Also a frequent and favorite dance partner of the legendary Marilyn Miller.

Looking the book over, I discovered it to be a correspondence between Mr. Donahue and his mother (Mud) dealing with his adventures on his first Vaudeville tour in 1910.

And her utter disapproval.

I hadn't read the first three letters (or even yet bought it!) before looked at Howard and said; 'this could be a two character musical!' By the time I'd completed reading the book (later that evening) I was convinced that I just had to do it. Here was an opportunity to explore Vaudeville, the zest, humor and courage of our immigrant ancestors and lost art of the eccentric hoofer.

A few days later I made a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Center Library and started researching Mr. Donahue. It turned out that Mr. Donahue passed away at the age of 39, just a few months before the book was published. Largely because of alcoholism. This fact would have a lot of resonance, I knew, on our approach to the project,

When I say 'our' I was immediately including my writing partner Bob Johnston. I assumed that Bob would write the music and co-write the lyrics with me and I assumed correctly. Within six months or so, we had a very very rough first act. We brought it to Lynne Taylor-Corbett who directed and choreographed our Theda Bara & The Frontier Rabbi off Broadway and to our delight she jumped right in.  We had never had a director join us so early in a projects development but what a wonderful third pair of eyes she's been in the shaping of what we originally called Mud Donahue's Eccentric Son.

Lynne decided to do a reading so we could judge our progress. The York Theatre Company scheduled us for their Monday night new musicals reading series. With Sandy Duncan and her son Jeffrey Correia as Mud and Jack, the response to the reading was pretty gratifying.

Bob and I, with Lynne always riding shotgun, continued working on the show, which we re-titled Mud Donahue & Son. Bob and I had to put Mud aside for awhile when another project, Anne & Gilbert, a musical based on the second and third of LM Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables" novels that we'd written with Canadian songwriting icon Nancy White went into production.

But last spring, with A&G now pretty much complete and running successfully in Canada, Lynne suggested we submit Mud to the NYMF Festival, where last year she had directed Robert Nassif-Lindsays's charming Flight of the Lawnchair Man. When NYMF accepted the project, we brought it to Melanie Herman, producer of the off-Broadway success The Musical of Musicals, The Musical, who continued the tradition of jumping into this musical feet first that Lynne, Bob and I had begun.

And now, in league with the brilliant team of actors, Karen Murphy and Shonn Wiley, musical director Doug Oberhamer, designers Jim Morgan, David Toser and Jason Kantrowitz and in association with the York Theatre Company, the little watermarked blue volume is in the process of coming to life as a part of this year's festival.

Eccentric tap dancing is back!