Christina Aguilera, Stevie Wonder, Ricky Martin and Michael Bolton have sold millions of records with his songs, making him one of the most prosperous of all theatrical lyric writers. But David Zippel says that his name is still just an answer to a trivia question. He modestly recalls that, when a revue of his songs, "It's Better With a Band," opened, he couldn't even afford a band, and the show used only a piano.
Then came his Tony Award-winning private-eye musical with Cy Coleman and Larry Gelbart, City of Angels in 1990. "That was a life-changing event," Zippel says. "After that, I still was a trivia answer, but now the question was a little easier."
An expanded version of It's Better With a Band was premiered by the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia in October of 2002. The original show with that title was "a little, off-Off-Broadway revue with piano at Don't Tell Mama. This was before I wrote anything with Cy Coleman or Marvin Hamlisch and when I was just starting to write with Alan Menken." The 1983 singers included Nancy LaMott, Scott Bakula and Jennifer Lewis, with Donna Murphy as an understudy. All of them were virtually unknown then. The 2002 version starred John Barrowman, Judy Blazer, Marva Hicks and Sally Mayes. Christopher Marlowe was the musical director with a five-piece band.
After he won the 1990 Tony for City of Angels, Zippel returned to Broadway with The Goodbye Girl, which wasn't as successful, but he won Oscar and Grammy nominations for his lyrics for the Disney films "Hercules" and "Mulan." He was fired from a production of Lysistrata this year but says that the controversy only increased interest in his work. You will recall that Robert Brustein hired Larry Gelbart, Alan Menken and Zippel to write a musical version of the anti-war Aristophanes comedy for his American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shortly before the opening, Brustein dismissed the team and wrote his own adaptation of the story, adding songs by Galt McDermot and Matty Selman.
"Brustein behaved horrendously," according to Zippel. "When he read our work he sent us e-mails saying 'I love the show so much, I'm thinking of giving up sex myself.' (The play is about women who refuse to have sex until their men renounce war.) Then, when he fired us, he said our version was 'too Disneyfied,' then said Gelbart's script was 'ferociously obscene." (How can anyone reconcile those two criticisms?) But our show is fun, and it will have a future life. His calling it obscene enhances our commercial value."
Zippel's lyrics are currently heard in the theme song he wrote for the television sitcom "Veronica's Closet." He and Alan Menken are working on a spectacular Busby Berkeley musical titled Buzz!!, or Nothing Succeeds Like Excess. Zippel, Cy Coleman and Larry Gelbart are writing a comedy musical, The Private Lives of Napoleon and Josephine, and Zippel, Coleman and Wendy Wasserstein are working on Pamela's First Musical, a story about Broadway.
He and director Joe Leonardo also want to revive a show Zippel wrote between 1982 and 1984, Going Hollywood, which never made it to the stage. It was a musical version of George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart's Once in a Lifetime. A song from that show, "Another Mr. Right," is included in It's Better With a Band. Zippel says that the failure of the Going Hollywood project was the most discouraging thing that's happened in his career, and the death of singer Nancy LaMott -- who was involved with that project -- is the saddest.
What were the most positive moments? Does he have a favorite song? Zippel replies that choosing one would be like choosing among your children. "Nevertheless, certain songs recall wonderful moments. I'll never forget the first time Randy Graff performed 'You Can Always Count On Me' from City of Angels in front of an audience. She stopped the show cold. It was a thrilling moment during our first preview which was beset by countless technical difficulties. It was particularly sweet for Cy Coleman and me because one of our producers had been pushing us to cut the number. At the production meeting the next morning he applauded our suggestion that we make the song longer. We added a verse."
"Go The Distance" is another song for which Zippel has a strong sentimental attachment. "It was the last song written for the Disney film, "Hercules," and it was written very late in the game. Because of several changes in the movie, we realized that this song would have to accomplish a variety of tasks. It would have to illuminate the emotional state of young Hercules, serve as the theme for the underscoring of the picture, and it would have to work as a pop single. Alan wrote the theme during a recording session for the song we originally planned, called 'I Won't Say.' I thought the music was so beautiful, and it inspired me to come up with the title, 'Go The Distance' almost instantly. Ultimately the song worked well and went on to get me my first Oscar nomination (Alan's 11th) and to become a number-one single."
Zippel says that he thinks of himself as a storyteller. "My job as a lyricist is to marry the songs to the book. To make certain that when a characters speaks and sings he or she sounds like the same person. I try to make sure that the book and the lyrics sound like they have been written by one person. One of the pleasures of writing for different characters is that one has the opportunity to write in so many styles and voices. This is also why I feel fortunate to have written with so many wonderful composers and book-writers."
Four different composers are represented in the new show. Zippel says he works differently with each of them, but the most common way a song starts is with a conference where composer and lyricist discuss what its dramatic purpose should be. "Sometimes I throw out a possible title," says Zippel, "Then the composer plays a bit of a melody. We establish a form. Then I go home and write a lot of verses and bring it back to the composer. Each composer brings out a different facet of me."
Rhyming is important to Zippel, especially if the character is smart. "Rhyming connotes intelligence," says the Harvard Law School grad. "You try to write what your character would sing, but not exactly, because audiences enjoy something that lights up the stage and is more show-bizzy." He says the lyricists he learned from are Alan Jay Lerner and Stephen Sondheim, but especially Sheldon Harnick. "Harnick is so good because his craft is high but he's almost ego-less. You hear his characters, not him."
Zippel grew up in Easton, PA, wrote parody lyrics making fun of his junior high and high school teachers, then went to the University of Pennsylvania. When he was a senior there in 1975, he and Joe Leonardo, now head of theater at Temple, wrote "a bizarre musical about politics called Rotunda. Joe and I have remained friends, and he's responsible for shaping It's Better With a Band."
Zippel graduated Penn and Harvard Law School. "I thought I'd be good at law because I like words. I wanted to be in the theater, but if that couldn't happen then at least a theatrical attorney who represented artists." He says that law teaches you to look at a problem in many different ways, and that's good practice for lyric-writing, so studying law played right in to his theatrical ideas. While at Harvard he met a singer who needed disco songs and he wrote for her. Then Zippel attended a Barbara Cook concert in Boston. "I went up to her pianist, Wally Harper, to congratulate him and discovered that he was looking for a song-writing partner." In particular, he and Barbara wanted an opening number for a Carnegie Hall concert she was about to do. So I wrote:
'I like to sing/ but it's better with a band / ... Give me a bass / It's a perfect place to start.'
It started softly but it built, and it ended big, and what started out to be her opening number turned out to be her closing number."
That song, plus two others which Zippel and Harper wrote were sung by Cook in that famous Carnegie Hall concert, and Zippel's name began to be noticed.
"Whenever I get discouraged, I put on the recording of that concert and listen to the applause on it," he reveals.
In 1982 Zippel heard Nancy LaMott singing in a piano bar. "A little dive on Columbus Avenue, on the Upper West Side," he remembers. "I heard this great voice and I flipped. I introduced myself and said I'm a songwriter, and I could see her roll her eyes because she had so many guys approach her and try to get her to sing their songs. But she and I came to adore each other, and we became family. She became my muse, and did all my demos -- all the recordings I use to demonstrate my songs."
Zippel wrote frequently for cabaret in those days, "so I could hear my songs performed in front of audiences." He wrote more songs for LaMott than for anyone else. Zippel remembers how she was fun to be with -- "witty and smart; all the things that you hear in her music were in her personality." She appeared in It's Better With a Band and sang the demos and backers auditions for Zippel's Off-Broadway production of Just So, based on Kipling stories, and for Going Hollywood.
Zippel raved about Nancy to his friend, the composer David Friedman, and the men put up $10,000 each to form a company to publish and record Nancy's songs and promote her career. They called the company Midder Music after Nancy's pet dog, and their headquarters was the small kitchen of Nancy's fifth-floor apartment on Manhattan's West 96th Street. LaMott died of uterine cancer at the age of 44 in 1995.
Alan Menken became friendly with Zippel around the same time that both men met LaMott, around 1981 or '82, and her voice was the mutual point of interest that brought them together. "At that stage in my career, most of my writing was for cabaret," discloses Menken, "and Nancy sang two of my most popular, my cabaret 'classics,' if I can call them that." Zippel and Menken wrote songs together for the first version of It's Better With a Band and then "In the Cards" for the Hal Prince musical revue about baseball, Diamonds. Eventually they did Hercules. Their recent work together includes Lysistrata and the upcoming Buzz!!
"David can create an entertaining, clever song out of almost nothing, because his lyrics are so clever," says Menken. "His sense of word play is brilliant. He creates substance sometimes out of thin air."
Zippel also has contributed lyrics to A, My Name is Alice and wrote the original songs for 5,6,7,8...Dance!, which starred Sandy Duncan at Radio City Music Hall.
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