Malcolm Gets, left, and Will Chase starred in the short-lived Broadway production of “The Story of My Life.”
At Monday night's Joseph Jefferson Awards in Oakbrook Terrace — where the coronation of “Ragtime” was the high-water mark of the entire creative history of Drury Lane Productions — Richard Maltby Jr. (right) sat quietly in the audience. The 73-year-old, Tony Award-winning author (and/or director, and/or lyricist) of such blue-chip titles as “Miss Saigon,” “Fosse,” “Ain't Misbehavin',” “Starting Here, Starting Now,” “Big” and “Baby” (and so on) went unnoticed by most attendees.
Afterward, a cheerful and genial Maltby was musing about the Chicago appetite for theatrical risk. “It's really remarkable here,” he said. “I just really like it.”
Maltby has been seen a lot of Chicago shows. In one weekend, he said, he went to see David Cromer's “A Streetcar Named Desire” at Writers' Theatre (my choice for the best production of last season) and TimeLine Theatre's “The Farnsworth Invention” (which did nicely at the Jeffs), and he thrilled the mostly unknown Actors' Theatre by showing up at its non-Equity production of “Baby.”
These sightings are partly because Maltby's daughter, Emily, is studying theater at Northwestern University. But it's also because Maltby is an inveterate creature of the theater who was thinking of directing a show in Chicago.
That show is “The Story of My Life,” a two-character musical about a pair of lifelong male friends, penned by Neil Bartram and Brian Hill. On Broadway during the 2008-09 season, “The Story of My Life,” also directed there by Maltby, opened and closed in five days.
I had a ticket to see it a week after its opening, but the show was already gone. Very few people actually saw the piece.
There is to be another opportunity to see a revised version (including a different cast, a retooled book and at least one new song). On Nov. 9, “The Story of My Life” will become the inaugural production of the Chicago Music Theatre, the group that once was known as Theatre Building Chicago before the venue was sold. New executive director Sean Cercone has said that he wants to return the company to its core mission of producing new musicals.