NOVEL: Writer's Block Information Page

They say that trying out a new musical can be murder. It doesn’t help that the show has a terrible second act, that the author has writer’s block, that most of the company can’t stand the composer/lyricist, that the show’s bombastic producer is threatening to close it, that two key people on the creative team are having an affair with the same person, and that the personalities of everyone involved are short-fused and volatile. In other words, it’s business as usual in the world of musical theater.

But when someone vital to the show turns up dead, apparently of accidental causes, it’s time for one member of the production team to become an amateur Broadway sleuth in search of the truth – was the death an accident or was it murder?

Set in the world of Broadway musical theater in 1969, Writer’s Block is a funny, bitchy, suspenseful tale of the creation of a new musical - from the start of rehearsals, through the tryouts in New Haven and Boston, to opening night and after. The arguments, the fights, the tensions, the betrayals – yes, there’s no business like show business.

About the Author

Bruce Kimmel has had a long and varied career. He wrote, directed and starred in the cult movie hit, The First Nudie Musical. He performed those same duties on his second film The Creature Wasn’t Nice (aka Naked Space), with Leslie Nielsen, Cindy Williams and Patrick Macnee. He also co-created the story for the hit film, The Faculty, directed by Robert Rodriguez. As an actor, Mr. Kimmel has guest-starred on most of the long-running television shows of the Seventies, including Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Partridge Family, The Donny and Marie Show and many others.

Since 1993, Mr. Kimmel has been one of the leading producers of theater music on CD, having produced over one hundred and thirty albums. He was nominated for a Grammy for producing the revival cast album of Hello, Dolly! and his album with jazz pianist Fred Hersch, I Never Told You, was also nominated for a Grammy. He created the critically acclaimed Lost In Boston and Unsung Musicals series, has produced solo albums for Petula Clark, Helen Reddy, Liz Callaway, Laurie Beechman, Paige O’Hara, Christiane Noll, Judy Kaye, Judy Kuhn, Brent Barrett, Jason Graae, Randy Graff, Emily Skinner and Alice Ripley, and has worked with such legends as Lauren Bacall, Elaine Stritch and Dorothy Loudon. He has also produced many off-Broadway and Broadway cast albums, including the hit revival of The King and I, starring Lou Diamond Philips and Donna Murphy, The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas starring Ann-Margret and Bells Are Ringing starring Faith Prince.

Mr. Kimmel has written three previous novels, a trilogy, comprised of Benjamin Kritzer, Kritzerland, and Kritzer Time.

WRITER"S BLOCK

He was late. He hurried up 58th Street, the rain pouring down so hard that it seemed like Ann Miller was tap dancing on his umbrella. If there was one thing that Arthur Myerson hated it was people who were late, and now he was one of those people; not only that, he was late to the first rehearsal of his new show.

He’d left in plenty of time to make the ten o’clock rehearsal, but, of course, given the torrential downpour there wasn’t an empty cab to be found. He never understood that—how every single cab in New York could have someone in it. Didn’t these people ever get out somewhere? But there were no empty cabs and that was that, and he’d had no choice but to walk from his Central Park West apartment all the way to the Broadway Arts rehearsal studio on 50th and 8th.

It didn’t help that he had a cold. Well, not just a cold; Arthur Myerson couldn’t have just a cold. No, Arthur Myerson had to have the World’s Worst Cold. His overcoat pockets were stuffed with Kleenex and, as he crossed 6th and headed towards Broadway, he continually pulled wads of the Kleenex out and blew his nose, which was red and raw as a piece of uncooked hamburger. He looked like a clown, with his huge red honker of a nose (courtesy of his father and his father’s father). He hadn’t slept at all the night before—partially because of the World’s Worst Cold and mostly because he never slept the night before a first read-through. He had deep circles under his eyes and he looked at least a decade older than his forty years. He kept his umbrella close to his head but it didn’t matter—the rain didn’t care about Arthur Myerson or his umbrella, and it just pummeled him from every direction.

By the time he got there it was ten after and he was soaked to the skin. The wind, which was fierce, had decimated his umbrella, which now looked like a stick figure with a hula skirt. He entered the Broadway Arts building and tossed what was left of the umbrella in the trash can by the front door, then took the tiny elevator up to Studio A.

He opened the door of the rehearsal room and there was everyone, schmoozing away, laughing, being amiable and friendly and dry. Arthur knew well enough that all that schmoozing and laughing and being amiable and friendly would evaporate in a matter of days—that’s just the way it was when you were working on a new musical.

The rehearsal hall was just as dank and dreary as the day, and it was freezing because, as always, the heat wasn’t working. Why were all rehearsal halls like this? They were the most unpleasant and depressing looking places you could ever want to work in—the atmosphere was oppressive and ugly and grim. In a room like that you were expected to make magic. It was to wonder.

Arthur took off his sopping-wet raincoat and hung it up on a coat rack in the corner.

“Arthur, you’re making a puddle,” bellowed Conrad Ballinger, the show’s bombastic and charismatic producer.

Everyone turned and looked at Arthur, whose dripping clothes were indeed making a nice little puddle on the floor.

“Yes, I always make a puddle when I enter a room. It’s an attention getter,” replied Arthur. That line was followed by an epic sneeze that was so loud they probably could have heard it in Queens.

Bruce Kimmel puts his talent for evoking the past, utilized so winningly in his nostalgic Benjamin Kritzer trilogy, to a sinister new purpose in Writer’s Block, a witty, disturbing murder mystery set in the late 1960s.

Broadway is the setting, and the plot revolves around a new musical called BUS AND TRUCK, a sort of KISS ME KATE combo of backstage antics and show-within-a-show. The year is 1969. We follow the first reading of the script (at which the librettist, songwriter, producer, director, and cast all realize that, while the first act is socko, the second is a lox) to rehearsals in the Bronx, then on to out-of-town tryouts in New Haven and Boston, back to Manhattan for previews, and finally to opening night—where producer Conrad Ballinger steps out on the stage during the curtain calls and dramatically proclaims that a key member of the BUS AND TRUCK production team is dead.

Sound familiar? Producer David Merrick did just that very thing on August 25, 1980, when he announced to the stunned cast and opening-night audience of 42ND STREET that the show’s choreographer and director, Gower Champion, had died. Ah, but here’s the catch—Champion died of a rare blood cancer; the novel’s decedent dies in a fire, the tragic result of falling asleep with a lit cigarette. That’s what the police say, anyway, but librettist Arthur Myerson begins to ponder, and what he ponders is whether the much-loathed, sexually masochistic victim—who threatened Ballinger with the disruption of the show, who seduced and harassed both chorus girl Allison and chorus boy Eddie, who fought bitterly with director Galen Chapman—was murdered.

The events that take place in Writer’s Block are a dizzying, exhilarating blend of fact and fiction. Galen Chapman is, of course, based on Champion (with a flash of Fosse). BUS AND TRUCK’s veteran stars Mary Masters and Robert O’Brien recall Mary Martin and Robert Preston, who actually costarred on Broadway in I DO! I DO! (1966). Songwriter Stanley Sherman is sort of an Even Stephen—namely, Sondheim and Schwartz—but it’s Arthur Myerson who, like Sondheim, loves to play games. Arthur also loves to write song parodies, including one for a musical version of PSYCHO (sung to the tune of “I’m Lovely” from A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM):

I’m Psycho
What I am is Psycho
I’m a little Psycho in my head
Shower
You don’t want to shower
Or within the hour
You’ll be dead.

The novel’s murder isn’t based on an actual crime, but so vividly does Kimmel bring the period to life, so deftly does he weave imaginary events with genuine theater history—Mary Martin’s difficulties remembering her lines, Stephen Schwartz’s conflict with Bob Fosse during the 1972 production of PIPPIN, David Merrick’s shocking revelation—that even the most learned show biz aficionado will wonder how the news of a brash young Broadwayite’s fiery finish ever escaped his knowledge.

Writer’s Block is extraordinarily clever throughout, but never more so than when Kimmel performs some theatrical sleight of hand in a manner that’s positively Hitchcockian. The Master of Suspense, who in such classic thrillers as THE 39 STEPS (1935), STAGE FRIGHT (1950), and TORN CURTAIN (1966) explored the ever deceptive world of the theater, would have smiled. And so will you.

—Richard Valley