Linda Eder's career is full of contrasts. She's a farm girl from Minnesota who also loves opera. A soprano in her church choir, she ran off with a teenaged boyfriend to sing Top 40 duets in nightclubs. A statuesque Protestant beauty from the mid-west, Eder later fell in love with a shorter Jewish man with roots on the East Coast who was recently separated and the father of a one-year-old. He's gregarious; she's shy. He's a sports fan; she loves animals.
But the contrasts seem to be working out. Eder and composer Frank Wildhorn have been together since 1988 and married in 1998. They live on a ten-acre horse farm which is an accommodation for him -- near New York City -- an accommodation for her. He has taken lessons in horseback riding. They had a son in August 1999 and are raising him Jewish. And they have a friendly relationship with Wildhorn's first wife. Frank & Becky's son, Justin, age 14 in 2000, spends a lot of time with Frank and Linda and his new brother. In fact, Justin helped his dad and Linda pick the baby's name, Jake.
Eder speaks of her first meeting with Wildhorn: "I wasn't looking for a relationship, but the moment I looked into his eyes I liked him so much. I think we're a really good couple who will, hopefully, stay together for a lifetime. I enjoy singing his music because it constantly reminds me of what brought us together in the first place." He talks about their first meeting: "We spent an enormous amount of time at the piano, where we developed immediate chemistry. Pretty soon, the other kind of chemistry kicked in." I ask her how quickly the romance started and she giggles, "pretty quickly." He and Eder moved in together during the try-out tour of Jekyll And Hyde.
Wildhorn had written and produced songs for Whitney Houston, Natalie Cole and many others. Although a success in pop music, he had been nurturing a project since he was a student at USC in 1980 -- a musical based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. He credits Linda for making Jekyll And Hyde a success. She recorded two concept albums of it -- one on RCA in 1990 with Colm Wilkinson and one on Atlantic in 1994 with Anthony Warlow. She performed in every version of it, starting in Houston in 1990 and in 35 cities over a seven-year period. She also plugged its songs in her concert appearances.
J&H came to Broadway in 1997 and is still running. Eder starred in it for the first year and recorded her third version of it with the Broadway cast including Robert Cuccioli as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Cuccioli speaks warmly about Eder. "She helped me a lot, teaching me how to sell a song to an audience, because her background was in pop music while mine was strictly in the theater. And she was great to work with. She's a grounded, down-to-earth woman, with an awesome voice." That same impression came through when I talked with her before and after a concert at the Mann Center in Philadelphia on August 8, 2000. She and Cuccioli earned a good reputation for spending a lot of time with fans during their Jekyll And Hyde run, and I saw her do the same thing on this sweltering summer night. Another sign of her consideration is the way she greets people while leaning against a wall, almost slouching, so that she doesn't tower over and intimidate them with her height. "Frank likes to tell people that I'm six feet [and some news stories have said six feet], but I'm five foot ten and a half."
Strikingly attractive on stage, Eder is even more so close up, with a gorgeous complexion and beautiful light brown eyes contrasting with her darker brown hair. It's easy to see how Wildhorn was smitten at their first meeting. Early in their relationship, Wildhorn wrote a musical based on the Svengali story, with Eder in mind, of course, for the role of Trilby. He even wrote an operatic aria for her character. Svengali was performed in Houston and Sarasota in 1990, then put on the shelf. Tentative plans are for it to be produced again, but Eder is urging Frank to try to "do it as a movie, not a stage play, so I can get it over with and not have to do performances of it for a year. I get bored if I do one thing too long. I'd rather be creating in rehearsal for something. I'm an artist by nature. I was going to be a painter at one point. I like the making of the thing, but doing it over and over for too long is hard for me."
Wildhorn is also developing a musical version of Dracula and has talked about Zorro and many other ideas, most of them romantic and dramatic. He's very prolific, says his wife. During the long development of Jekyll And Hyde, Wildhorn wrote many songs for Eder. She recorded a studio version of The Scarlet Pimpernel but never appeared in the show because, when it opened in 1998, Eder was in the middle of her Broadway engagement in Jekyll and Hyde. She also recorded songs on a 1998 studio, pre-Broadway two-CD set of The Civil War. When that show closed on Broadway, plans for a cast recording were shelved, so Eder's are the only available performances of two of its best songs, "I Never Knew His Name" and "A Candle In The Window."
Back to the early days: Linda's father is Austrian, a pastry chef, and her mother Norwegian. Linda was born in Arizona in 1961, two months after her parents arrived in the USA. Shortly after that they settled on a farm in Brainerd, Minnesota. "Neither of my parents were musical, and neither are my brother or sister." Eder's neighbor from the farm next door gave her two LPs by Eileen Farrell when she was around ten. "I fell in love with Farrell singing Puccini. I started singing arias in private, but I never thought I'd perform on a stage." She never heard Farrell's cross-over LPs on which the diva performed intimate jazzy versions of pop standards. In fact, Eder never did any pop singing until she became a Streisand fan towards the end of high school. "That's when I started belting." After Farrell and Streisand, her other favorite singer was Judy Garland, for the emotional intensity. How did Linda's voice sound then? "Kind of Streisand-esque," she says.
Then she went on the road with a teenage friend, Paul Todd, in an act called "Paul & Linda." "We were innocent when we met," said Eder, "and we were both each others first dates. We got romantic, but after a few years the romantic relationship ended and we just continued our working relationship. We traveled in Paul's van and did Top 40 and some Broadway standards. Most of our engagements were in the Minneapolis area, doing everything from nightclubs to Holiday Inns. I met a musician named Jeremy Roberts who developed a solo act for me that was going to start in Atlantic City, and Paul and I agreed to end our act. Then `Star Search' held auditions in Minneapolis, and both Paul and I sang for them and I got it, and not he. I guess it was fate." Roberts has been Eder's pianist and conductor ever since. Eder became a 12-time winner on "Star Search," singing songs like "Looking Through the Eyes Of Love," "Out Here On My Own" and "The Wind Beneath My Wings." A friend of Wildhorn's saw her on TV and recommended that Frank listen to her. According to Eder, "He said `She has just the type of voice you've been looking for; she can sing theater and pop. She's perfect for you.' I sent him a tape of me singing `Don't Cry For Me, Argentina,' and he liked it and asked me to fly down and sing for him in person. It was late 1987, and he was in the process of casting his earliest version of Jekyll And Hyde.
`Jekyll & Hyde was so different, then, had a different book writer, and Terrence Mann was the male lead. They were thinking of Lorna Luft for Lucy before Frank met me. He wrote `Someone Like You' right after we met. That became our romantic theme song `If someone like you found someone like me, then, suddenly, nothing would ever be the same. My heart would take wing and I'd feel so alive, if someone like you loved me!'"
When asked what differences there are between her singing then and now, Eder says "I've gotten more control of my voice. And I think I sound more unique. But maybe that's because now I sing songs written specifically for me, so there's no other version to compare." Eder took voice lessons for only a brief period in New York, "early in my career, because it's what you do. But I stopped very quickly." Eder also never took acting lessons, and Jekyll And Hyde is the only play she's ever appeared in. "I'm really not a trained actress. I learned what I do naturally, and I learn from what the audience is giving me and what the other actors are giving me."
She was not the first singer to sound something like Streisand. Think of Julie Budd and Streisand's own half-sister, Rosalind Kind. But Eder has risen above the comparisons, partly because she does it whole-heartedly, without self-consciousness. Another thing that helps is that Eder's voice is even bigger and warmer than Streisand's. Eder talks openly about the similarities. "I'm a fan of hers, and of course she's a big influence. There's one classic Broadway role that I'd love to do but never will, and that's Funny Girl. It wouldn't be good for me because of all the Streisand comparisons." But Eder does sing "Don't Rain On My Parade" in some of her concerts. She does it in a style similar to Streisand's version, but even more soaring in sound.
Eder talks openly about the comparisons people make: "Some people say that I'm a Streisand wannabe. That's not true. I'm a Martha Stewart wannabe. You know, I love gardening and animals and doing things around the house." Michael Feinstein, billed with Eder at many concerts, follows through in the same vein: "I get pissed off when people say Linda's a Streisand wannabe. I'm the one who's a Streisand wannabe." Eder faces the issue openly because she knows people are whispering about it anyway. Literally whispering, in her presence. "I can hear whispers from the audience when I'm up on stage. Sometimes I can't make out the words but I hear the sibilance of the s's. They're saying `she sounds like Streisand.'"
"I'm happier now than at any point in my life," says Eder in the summer of 2000. "When I was young I thought someday I'd like to be a mother, but I pushed it to the back of my mind because I had a career and everyone said you had to devote yourself 1000 percent to your career if you want to succeed. But becoming a mom is the best thing I've ever done. I love being a mother, and I could really retire tomorrow and be happy." She and Frank gave up their earlier digs in California and Manhattan and live in Westchester County north of Manhattan. They have ten acres and several horses, and Linda's sister lives next door, so she's available to help out when Linda goes on tour. Justin comes to visit when he's off school.
How's the relationship with Franks ex-wife? "Great. They had a friendly divorce. They went to a child psychologist with Justin and were really into caring how he'd come through it. He's an extremely well-adjusted child. Becky married a family friend who has a son a little older than Justin who was his best friend and now is his step-brother. You couldn't have a more perfect scenario.
"Frank and I really bring out the best in each other, and at the same time we're each others severest critic," Eder says. "He can write songs for me with my voice as a reference point in his head. I think there [are] a lot of female singers out there who envy me. He's very motivated and I'm not always, so he's good for me that way. We've always been good for each other because we're in the same business but we don't do the same thing within the business. We both do well on our own, but we're even better when we're working together. We're supportive of each other."
Eder's latest Atlantic CD, "It's No Secret Anymore," includes songs from Wildhorn's upcoming musical, Havana, which will star Eder. "The neat thing is I'll be a performer, singing in a night club as part of the plot of the musical. They recently signed a big name director for it, but I can't reveal his name. We're aiming for the season of 2001-2002," she says.
Eder achieved a long-time wish in February 2000 when she gave a solo concert at Carnegie Hall -- though it didn't include the opera arias she had dreamed of when she was a youngster. She's recording a Christmas album for December 2000, and she and Frank are developing a concept CD called "The Romantics," with Anthony Warlow and Michael Ball among the men accompanying Eder on the disk. It will take the love stories of various couples from literature and set them to original music -- some solos and some duets. "The Romantics" will be released on Valentines Day 2001.
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