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Neighbors: Funny Girl

Wed, 06/29/2022 - 17:29
Amanda Green has earned Tony and Drama Desk nominations for "Mr. Saturday Night."
Tess Meyer

“I was pretty much living there for Covid,” says Amanda Green of the weekend house in Springs she escaped to during Broadway’s prolonged darkness in 2020 and 2021. “I started moving back when my show went into rehearsals. But boy, was I grateful for East Hampton and long walks!”

The show is Mr. Saturday Night, which opened in April at the Nederlander Theater in Manhattan starring Billy Crystal as a late-career comic grappling with faded stardom and broken relationships. The musical is based on the 1992 film of the same name, also starring Mr. Crystal as the stand-up comedian Buddy Young Jr.

Green, who was nominated for a Tony Award for the musical Hands on a Hardbody, earned another Tony nod (one of five, total, earned by Mr. Saturday Night), as well as a Drama Desk nomination, for the lyrics to the new show. Its music is by Jason Robert Brown. “It’s about a Jewish family in show business — like me — so there’s a lot to mine from there.”

“Billy is a wonder,” she said of Crystal. “He’s the engine running this whole ship. At 74, he is incredibly energetic. I was a fan of his before I started writing; now I’m just in awe. In rehearsal, he’s so deeply funny. He has a way of saying things and I laugh the first time, and the fifth, and the 50th.”

With Mr. Saturday Night charming critics and Female Troubles, an original musical comedy about women’s reproductive freedoms set in the world of Jane Austen, in development, Green is as active as Broadway itself, after that long hiatus. “At the moment, I find it’s one of the safest places to be,” she said, “because you have to be masked and vaccinated. People are very well behaved and happy to be gathering.”

Her Broadway credits also include the Tony Award-nominated Bring It On: The Musical with Lin Manuel Miranda and Tom Kitt, High Fidelity, On the Twentieth Century, and a Tony-nominated revival of Kiss Me, Kate. Television credits include Peter Pan Live and The Kennedy Center Honors.

Green is the first female composer to receive the Frederick Loewe Award for outstanding composition from the Dramatists Guild of America. Today, she is the guild’s president. Also a performer, she and friends from Broadway perform her songs at nightclubs and theaters around New York, including Birdland, Joe's Pub, Second Stage Theatre, and 54 Below.

As she is the daughter of the lyricist and playwright Adolph Green and the actress and singer Phyllis Newman, it may not be surprising that Green landed in musical theater. In fact, while she grew up loving the theater, “I was more into pop when I started being a songwriter.” That began to change when she heard the country artist Lyle Lovett, “who was writing very funny, wry songs. So on my own time — I had a day job — I would take vacations and go to Nashville and write.” There, she learned the art of collaboration in a kind of trial by fire. “You have a writing date where you meet someone for the first time,” she says.

On a whim, she applied to the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, a free program founded by the composer and conductor Lehman Engel and the performing rights organization BMI. “I got in, wrote my first theater song, and was, like, ‘Yeah, this is where I belong.’ It’s where all my quirks and talents funnel themselves, where I find expression.”

If you can’t make it to Broadway this summer, you owe it to yourself to at least watch Shoshana Bean’s exuberant, moving performance of "Maybe It Starts With Me" from Mr. Saturday Night, performed on "The Today Show" in May and archived on its website. Green’s humorous way with words is also evident in the songs of Hands on a Hardbody, based on a documentary about a contest in which contestants vie to win a truck in Longview, Tex. She had a perhaps-unlikely collaborator for that one: Trey Anastasio, the guitarist and frontman of the jam-band legends Phish.

“Our worlds couldn’t have been more different,” she says of the rock ‘n’ roller. “Interestingly enough, a mutual friend introduced us and thought we’d like writing together.” Before that, she and the playwright Doug Wright hadn’t found the right composer. “I had been writing the score myself,” she says. As Hands on a Hardbody is set in Texas, “we didn’t want an ersatz Broadway sound. It couldn’t just be simple alt-country. It’s Broadway, so the songs had to move the plot forward. I asked Trey if he was interested, and he revealed that it was always his ambition to write a Broadway show.”

As it happens, she and Anastasio are practically neighbors. “We started writing songs and really hit it off,” she said. “He saved our show. It was a great collaboration.”

Her famous father, of course, collaborated with Betty Comden for some six decades, but Green has been notably versatile in building her own oeuvre. “It’s a different collaboration each time,” she says, “and you have to adjust to a new way of working. There’s a level of trust and respect. It doesn’t mean you’ll always agree. But it’s always about the song and the moment. That’s what keeps it interesting. My father had Betty Comden his entire life. I jump from person to person, so I have to learn new ways, which keeps it exciting.”

Owing to their careers, Green and her husband, Jeffrey Kaplan, who is a doctor, split their time between Manhattan and the South Fork, where her parents bought a house on Georgica Road in East Hampton in the 1960s.

“I grew up a summer kid,” she says, recalling her parents’ friendships with the illustrious figures of the era’s theatrical and literary worlds, in the era “when the Laundry” — that’s the much-missed restaurant on Race Lane — “was at its height.” The circle included Sidney Lumet, Peter Stone, Gene Saks, Betty Comden, Lauren Bacall, Tony Walton, Irwin Shaw, Bob Fosse, and Gwen Verdon. Plus Truman Capote, Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, Winston Groom, Willie Morris, Shana Alexander, Lukas and Cornelia Foss, and Betty Friedan. “There was an incredible artistic crowd out here.”

Today, “a bunch of my friends have moved out there and stayed. I could happily live there, but the business is here.”

The Laundry may be only the stuff of legend today, but she has her favorite East Hampton haunts. “Sam’s is the best,” she said of the venerable red-sauce-and-pizza Italian place. “Hampton Chutney — I will follow them anywhere and am so glad they landed in East Hampton. CittaNuova I like a lot, and taking out food from Carissa’s [Bakery].” Like a true longtime East Hamptoner, she adds ruefully: “I miss the A&B Snowflake.”

During the pandemic, she volunteered at the East Hampton Food Pantry, “a great place. That kept me sane.”

Otherwise, time out east is about “the ocean, the ocean, the ocean, Albert’s Landing, Louse Point.” A good day, she said, “is if I get to the ocean, the bay, and the inlet. I love the ocean,” she says. “That’s what makes East Hampton so special.”

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