'With Open Hearts and Full of Hope'

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The third annual Milwaukee Fringe Festival is full of tremendous offerings from near and far. The one nearest to my heart, though, is a one-man show by my friend and mentor, John Schneider. A founding member of Milwaukee’s Theatre X, an active musician for three decades with his band the John Schneider Orchestra, a beloved educator and arts critic, and a founder of the Fringe, John is a force to be reckoned with. His festival offering, Where or When: The Life and Songs of Lorenz Hart, is sure to be the same. Accompanying John in this performance is his longtime collaborator and bandmate in the John Schneider Orchestra, Connie Grauer. A veteran jazz pianist, she is also one half of the duo Mrs. Fun.

Taking place at 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 25, in the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts’ Todd Wehr Theater, Where or When has one performance only and is not to be missed. Tickets can be purchased at mkefringe.com. I sat down with John to learn more about his background in the arts, the show’s development and why he’s chosen to restage it now.

Please tell me about the show’s production history.

It was originally staged in 1997 as one of the first Skylight-sponsored cabaret shows. It had a run of a few weeks, probably right at the beginning of what is now the Skylight Music Theatre’s Cabaret Series. Once the Skylight bought the building from us [Theatre X] and built that bar and lounge on the second floor, I always wanted to perform there, and the opportunity came to be that I could. I thought to do a play about Larry Hart. The Rodgers and Hart songs were very, very dear to me. I had been singing in public since the mid ’80s wherever I could. I started in 1987 at Café Mélange in the Wisconsin Hotel. Theatre X had been touring a lot and I was living in the Plaza Hotel because we weren’t even in Milwaukee long enough to rent an apartment. In the mid ’80s, when Theatre X began performing in what’s now the Broadway Theatre Center, our board said, “You guys have to have a presence in Milwaukee,” so I rented an apartment in Walker’s Point and it was big enough that I could have a piano. I went to a music store and found a collection published by Hal Leonard that changed my life—a big collection of songs by Rodgers and Hart, most of which I didn’t know, but a few I did. I played them and sang them all on my own in my apartment. I loved them so much and I wanted other people to love them too [laughs]. I would tape record myself singing them and then listen and try to do it better the next time and so on. When I started performing at Café Mélange and I started doing those songs and some others with a piano player.

So now we’re in the mid ’90s and I’ve been singing for a long time, almost 10 years at Café Mélange. When this opportunity presented itself to do a show, I wanted to do a show about Larry Hart and sing those songs. Theatre X’s manager at that time was a man named Michael Ramach and when I said I wanted to do this show he said, “Oh, well, I have a biography and I know how to do this because I lived in New York and there were lots of shows like this.” We talked about what songs should be in it and he scratched together the script and we worked on it together. I got my friend Dan Dance, a brilliant piano player, to do it with me.

It was a collaboration between the three of us: me, Dan and Michael. And I remember arguing with Michael about what songs to put in it. Michael would say, “Oh, no, you can’t have all those ballads. We need more variety in terms of tempo and comedy and sentiment and wit.” That was very useful. We made it and it was kind of long—an hour to an hour and a half. This has to do with now, with my decision to do it again in the Fringe Festival with my now longtime piano accompanist, Connie Grauer, at the piano. It’s been about 20 years, so I looked at the script again and did some changes and some fixes and some tightening because I had to get it down to an hour. That was really hard because I had to cut songs out that I didn’t want to cut out. I also snuck in one more of those ballads that Michael wouldn’t let me do, the reason being, I’m 70 years old and this means even more to me than it did when I did it 20 years ago and I feel like I have the right to put another ballad in.

What ballad did you add?

“You’re Nearer,” which is toward the very end. I took some slower things out too [laughs] so there’s still only a couple real ballads in the thing, but that one had to be there for me because of where it’s placed in the show and Larry Hart scribbling the lyrics for it on an envelope while everybody else is across the street having dinner, and coming in and handing it to Dick with, in my mind, a sense of the fact that their relationship was heading toward an end. It just had to be there. I think that I am much better than I was 20 years ago in singing the songs and in knowing what life is about. I can bring a lot more life experience to it in doing it this time.

I’m an actor-singer. I can carry the melodies fine and I’ve listened to hundreds of recordings of hundreds of great singers sing these songs and, of course, had my singing career. I’m past how somebody else sang it and I’m on to how I sing it. That’s been true for a while, and it’s very true now. I don’t even remember where I got my interpretations from now. They seem to be really authentically mine and I’m good at bringing a lot to the lyrics, interpreting the songs that way. I don’t have a power ballad voice. I would not win “American Idol” [laughs] or make it through the auditions to be on “The Voice” or something. My live presence has a lot to do with it, and I think I’m better at that than I have ever been. I hope so.

Can you expand on your personal connection to Hart’s work and the American Songbook in general?

There are a couple levels on which it’s identifiable. On Broadway, I think anybody, any artist, will relate in one way or another to his story because he’s a great artist. In my life in art, I make many connections with his story: the hopes and fears and struggles of an artist’s life, and the values of art. I think everybody can relate to it on that level and I know I do, too. But also, I came from German immigrants who valued the arts highly. My mother, in particular, valued her Catholic religion very highly, but she also valued the arts very highly. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live if it were not for art. I grew up with this music and I didn’t even realize, I think, until I started singing these songs how much they meant to me.

So, there’s some really, really deep connection to my childhood. I say in the piece that I knew all the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs by the time I was 10 because we had all the Rodgers and Hammerstein music and very little of the Rodgers and Hart music. There were a few—“My Funny Valentine” of course, and I think Barbra Streisand was the first person I ever heard sing “Where or When.” This was in high school or late grade school. I was listening to Barbra Streisand sing the American Songbook. I don’t know, it might have something to do with being gay, it might have something to do with love and being unlucky in love, and not knowing how to think about love when it was directed toward another boy in seventh grade or certainly in high school.

I was going to be a priest. I was in the seminary, and here I was having these intense emotional relationships with fellow seminarians. It never crossed over into sex because I was going to be a priest and I couldn’t go there. But I could certainly go to a deep, deep kind of love that didn’t seem to have a way to express itself fully in life the way boyfriends and girlfriends and proms and stuff like that did for other kids in high school. I think I suffered in some way exquisitely, I suppose, and in some other way tormentedly with those feelings, with how to direct those feelings. I don’t know how that connected to Barbra Streisand and these songs but somehow these songs were full of that. Maybe it’s because it came from an earlier era where people struggled with that, I don’t know. It seems to have been part of my upbringing and makeup and identity from even before I could begin to think about identity.

How did you choose Hart’s song “Where or When” as the title?

That comes from what we were just talking about. Because he’s in the 1920s and ’30s, beginnings of the 1940s, when it was difficult and actually dangerous to feel yourself to be gay in the United States. There’s that generation, and then there’s my generation where it was also that in the beginning but then went through radical, radical changes in my lifetime. And I embraced that. In the early ’70s, when I was able to come out to myself, I also came out in the arts, through my art, onstage with Theatre X, and championed it and stood for it and all of that. But still I could completely relate because of high school, grade school and even difficulties after I graduated. I was engaged to be married when I graduated from college, so it was a big, big deal to grapple with that—to come out to myself and then to come out to my family, which I did, really in the early ’70s. There’s this new era—there’s the “where or when.” Larry Hart is New York in the early part of the 20th century and I’m Milwaukee in the second half of the 20th century, but there’s all sorts of parallels.

And it still, today, holds up as I’m doing it. I know it’s on a different level and it probably involves a larger number of people now because we can now talk about non-binary people. I don’t think that the struggle for sexual identity and gender identity has stopped. If anything, it’s intensified now, so I think there’s three generations including the current one that have to do with the “when” part of it. Where or when does a person go through what Larry Hart went through, and which is embodied deeply in his lyrics? It still makes sense to me as a title. And then that song talks about literally how it feels like I’m living a life that maybe I lived some generations before I was born. How can that be? Like what I was talking about with the German thing before—my ancestors coming to Wisconsin and that whole sense of the value of art and its role in our lives and liberalism. I have an ancestor, Henry Schneider, who was Solomon Juneau’s interpreter because he spoke French and German fluently and he was one of the 48ers who left Germany because they wanted a democratic life. They failed in their revolution to overthrow the monarchy and establish democracy and it was dangerous for them to stay so they came to America and wound up in Milwaukee. So, there’s all these weird sort of waves of where or when-ness, of feeling like I’m living my life now but I’m somehow connected to lives before me. That’s why it’s called Where or When and that’s why the song comes where it comes. It has a really special place.

I’d like to talk about Larry Hart’s place in the canon. It seems that he is essential but less well known among the founders of 20th-century Broadway than, say, his partner Richard Rodgers. Can you explain how Hart’s legacy as a musician is still alive today?

I think he’s made a big comeback, actually. I think that he’s been rediscovered by people my age and even younger who are interested in the history of the American Songbook, of American music. He was a pioneer, he and Richard Rodgers. Oklahoma!, which is the first Rodgers and Hammerstein show, is still in the theater history books and is pointed to as this big leap forward in terms of the American musical. The musical is America’s first major contribution to the history of theater, and Oklahoma! is often pointed to as the first time the songs, the music and the lyrics are in service of telling the story of the play—of revealing character, of doing all the things that had been done by a playwright and are now being done by a playwright and a composer and a lyricist.

But Pal Joey by Rodgers and Hart, although it was panned when it first came out, actually does that before Oklahoma! does. The only difference would be that one of the major characters in Pal Joey is a singer in a nightclub, in cabaret. Before Pal Joey, it was characteristic of the serious American musical theater for there to be a realistic opportunity to sing a song. There’d be singers or entertainers, but there’d be story too, and there’d also be scenes that took place in a musical setting where a song could happen. Like Judy Garland’s “Let’s Put on a Show.” And that still existed here. Joey could still, in his cabaret, sing a song, but the songs he sang in the cabaret had everything to do with the character of who Joey was and the complicated relationships that he was involved in and there were other characters that had nothing to do with it and weren’t singers at all that were characters in it. People have been looking at that for some decades I think, and Larry Hart has been restored to his rightful position as a pioneer in the creation of the American musical.

I think with Hammerstein—where it’s very, very sophisticated lyrics—lots of people will argue over who’s best and that’s really a stupid argument because they’re really different. I was listening to a commercial that uses “My Favorite Things,” which is Rodgers and Hammerstein: “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens / Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens / Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings.” It’s such exquisite poetry. It’s poetry at a level that is probably not Larry Hart. But when you want to cut deep to the heart of human experience, all of that is really lovely and beautiful, but Larry Hart just slices through to something so deep and simple in terms of human experience on an emotional level.

That is invaluable, and I don’t think of Hammerstein the same way. Hammerstein almost lets Richard Rodgers do that with music and then he writes this exquisite poetry on top of it. Also, I think Hart is funnier. “Sir Atherton indulged in fratricide. / He killed his dad and that was patricide. / One night I stabbed him by my mattress-side.” It’s of a whole other world than anything Hammerstein would write, and then to further that with the refrain, “To keep my love alive” is something really special. So, I think it’s only people who don’t pay very much attention to the American Songbook who don’t hold Larry Hart in the highest esteem. I’m not doing this show because I want to push Larry Hart into people’s consciousness up to a position comparable to anybody. I’m doing it because it just slays me.

Hart’s life included tremendous tragedy and his work is still celebrated today. What do you hope audiences will take away in terms of message or questions to consider?

I hope they’ll laugh and cry. I think it’s a time when we need to do both of those things. I think the Fringe Festival is about this, isn’t it? Isn’t it about the effort on the part of all of the people who are participating and coming to it to re-embrace our humanity, to do that together—to hug each other and hold hands and acknowledge on a moral level and a philosophical level what it means to be alive and what’s important? The fundamental basis of politics is that and its values and ethics and our shared experience. So that’s what art is about in its existence, not in its content, but in its reality. I’m thinking back now to my German ancestors and why my mother valued it as much as she valued her religion. So, you know, I hope that people will laugh and be touched and remember the struggles that we all go through. When we look at each other—when I look at the people sitting around here—and I think of them all as children full of hope with open hearts… It’ll take us all back to that. The country’s frightened. We have to be able to see all of the scary people in the country as children with open hearts and full of hope.

Could you tell me about your long-term collaboration with Connie, how you met, and how she came to be in this role with you?

I started with just a piano player in my professional singing career at Café Mélange, my friend, the late David Carroll, who was really a classical pianist, not a jazz player. He loved the songs as much as I did but actually came to love them because we were friends and I would say, “Oh, David, you’ve got to listen to this,” and David would sit down at the piano and of course he could sight read and he could embellish on what was printed in the Hal Leonard book. He and I started performing at Café Mélange. Because of my position in the community, lots of artists came to Café Mélange and it became a kind of scene that came about fairly quickly. Rip Tenor is a wonderful saxophone player and he came a couple of weeks after I started and said, “Hey, could I bring my saxophone next time and play with you guys?” and I said, “Oh, yeah!” and then we were three. And then a bass player, Dave Maleckar, finally came around and said, “Hey, can I bring my bass fiddle and play with you guys?” That was a little harder for David Carroll because he was used to reading and he had to let this bass player in. And then Victor DeLorenzo wanted to play the drums. And John Dereszynski was the guitar player. It was quite a band. And then Claire Morkin said, “Hey, can I sing with you?” so it became unwieldy for David to be playing sheet music for everybody else who was basically improvising. Then Connie Grauer and Kim Zick, MRS. FUN, came back to Milwaukee. They had been living in Nashville, although they were from Milwaukee, because that’s where the music industry was and they were serious and ambitious about their careers. They were really young at the time. They were friends with Victor and he brought them. Kim sat in on drums when Victor got busy with the Violent Femmes and then took over from him and became the regular drummer. And Connie would come and probably sit in a little bit at first, too, but David Carroll basically gave it to her because she was a jazz piano player. So, she then became the piano player.

This is the history of the John Schneider Orchestra, really. We didn’t really give it a name until we’d been doing it for six months or so and we had the whole bunch with Claire there. We were the house band at Café Mélange. We played a couple times a week. Then MRS. FUN became a band in their own right on another night at Café Mélange. We did that for 10 years. Lots and lots of jazz players in Milwaukee played with us. Somebody in the band wouldn’t be able to be there and they’d get somebody else—some big jazz player—to come and sit in with us. I was always the least of my band [laughs] but I could tap dance and turn a cartwheel and I had brilliant musicians behind me and I could interpret a lyric.

All this time, I was just working like a dog to try and keep up with them, trying to learn to sing, first of all on a technical level—to become a better singer than I was—and then to listen to the great jazz songs from the beginnings of recordings. I went through a period of time where I was singing like every Billie Holiday song and trying to figure out, what did she do that made those songs so incredible? Everybody who was a serious singer of the American Songbook listened to these people. Rosemary Clooney turned out to be a big inspiration to me, too. Frank Sinatra more so as the years went by. I loved the young Frank Sinatra because he sang the ballads really, really soulfully with his whole heart and in a really straightforward way. I didn’t like the Los Vegas swing guy so much, but now, in the Larry Hart show, there’s a part where I put on a hat and perform like Frank Sinatra would’ve in Los Vegas with a really hard swing beat. It’s really hard to learn how to do that. Tony Bennett was a really big influence on the Velvet Fog, Mel Tormé. People used to always compare me to him [Tormé]. That was the most flattering thing that people said to me for years at Café Mélange, that I reminded them of him because he had sort of a breathy voice. I listened to him a lot too, especially when people told me I reminded them of him. So, I listened to them and really, really, really, really worked at it because I had musicians who were way ahead of me with these songs and I think I’ve continued to do that for the rest of my life and I’ve gotten better and better.

It would have been 1990 that Connie became the primary piano player of the John Schneider Orchestra. I remember that birthday and we had a big to-do—the John Schneider Orchestra fully existed in 1990. I also had a pianist named Dean Lea. Dean and Connie took over after David Carroll and, because Connie and Kim always put Mrs. Fun ahead of the John Schneider Orchestra, Dean was the sub for Connie when she couldn’t do it. And we’ve done stuff over the years, just the two of us, or just the three of us, or just the four of us. It hasn’t always been the full band. The Third Ward Christmas Party has been me and Connie for most of the past 25 years.

For learn more about Where or When: The Life and Songs of Lorenz Hart and purchase tickets, visit mkefringe.com.