Callaway,
Streisand and the Millennium
By Peter Filichia, Theatre.Com
NEW YORK - Caught up with
Ann Hampton Callaway, who’s wonderful in Swing! after her matinee. She was en route
to working on material for Barbra Streisand’s New Year’s Eve Millennium Concert.
Funny, though Callaway has written "At the Same Time" and "I’ve
Dreamed of You" for the diva, this time she’s been assigned to work on
Striesand’s patter.
It started when Callaway
sent Streisand a song called "New World." "I hoped she’d use it in the
concert, but I don’t think she will. What she did like was my cover letter, where I
told how I felt about the millennium, how this was a time for us take inventory on our
lives, and though it may be an artificial point, it’s still a wonderful opportunity
for us to contemplate who we are and who we want to be. She liked those sentiments, and
asked me to include them in her script."
Callaway reminisced about
her writing the theme for TV’s The Nanny. "I thank my sister Liz for that. One
night in 1986, when I was doing my original songs at Don’t Tell Mama’s, Liz
brought Todd Graff, her co-star from Baby, who brought Fran Drescher with him. She liked
my songs, said she was working on some TV projects, and wanted me to write the themes. I
wound up writing pilot themes for shows that never went anywhere, spending a thousand
dollars on each demo. So when she called me about The Nanny, I thought, here’s
another thousand down the drain."
Not at all. But Callaway is
frank in admitting that one of the songs best lines came from Drescher herself. "When
I asked Fran who this character was, she said, Well, she’s the lady in red when
everyone else is wearing tan. And I thought, oh, what a lyric."
Callaway has been writing
songs for 38 years now - impressive, when you consider she’s only 41. "At three,
I wrote a song about food - a jingle, really. I’ve since written many jingles, but
none of them has sold. I’ve sung some, though. You’re looking at one of the many
women who’ve warbled, Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Another time, I had
to be Judy Garland for two measures."
Huh?
"When they were doing
the new fragrance Get Happy, they used Judy Garland’s original recording - but the
powers that be didn’t like The Lord is waiting to take your hand, so I had to sound
like Judy and sing, The world is waiting to take your hand. Can you imagine?"
Of course she’s glad
to finally be on Broadway. "I was 10 when my parents moved us to New York from
Chicago, and Liz and I immediately fell in love with musicals. The first one my parents
took us to was Company, wasn’t that weird? Later, we went to our first play, Room
Service, which starred my father’s friend Ron Liebman. Afterwards, we went backstage,
and he said, You know, John, Broadway’s dead. It’s over. And my mother was so
mad, because she knew her daughters already had Broadway aspirations."
Here’s hoping that
Callaway and Swing! are the latest rebuttals to Liebman’s erroneous assumption.
