‘Flying Toward the Sun’
Rockland theater presents Jewish playwright’s show about immigration
By his count, Bill Nabel has appeared in more than 9,500 performances on Broadway. That translates to a little more than 1,187 weeks of performances. That’s almost 23 years.
This count includes the entire run of “Beauty and the Beast” (April 18, 1994 to July 29, 2007), eight years on the original “42nd Street” (August 25, 1980 to February, 25, 1989) and his first appearance, in “Home Sweet Homer,” starring Yul Brenner (January 4, 1976 to, no typo, January 4, 1976).
Most of Mr. Nabel’s roles were in the ensemble, as one of the background singers and dancers. In that capacity, he understudied the lead players, replacing them when they were on vacation or ill.
I’m Zooming with Mr. Nabel, 76, who is sitting on the patio at the Penguin Theater in Stony Point, N.Y. I ask the obvious question: To what do you owe your longevity?
Part of the answer: “I worked hard. I studied hard.” But also, he adds, “I was valuable. I was a great singer, a great dancer, and I was a good actor. My niche was that I could cover all the principals in a show.”
Now he no longer performs. Turns out, though, that he has other, related talents as well: he writes scripts, music and lyrics. That’s why he is in Stony Point. The Penguin is presenting his latest (this time with music and lyrics by Neil Berg): “Flying Toward the Sun.”
The writing part of his career started on “Beauty and the Beast,” he said. “I had [composer] Alan Menken in my ear eight shows a week. I had some ideas in my head, and I started writing them down.”
But the gap between new idea and producible show is sizable. To bridge it, “I applied to the BMI musical theater seminar group,” Mr. Nabel said. “I got it and did that for two years. Then I studied with David Spencer,” the noted musical theater teacher.
Something else in his favor, he said, was that he always could tell how his words would sound right away. “I was fortunate because I would come up with a scene and I was surrounded by 30 actors. I’d say, ‘Can you read this for me? I want to hear how it sounds.’
“And everybody was very eager to do it. They were always interested in trying something new. So I always had a ready stable of Broadway-caliber actors to try anything I was writing.”
“Flying Toward the Sun” is about the asylum process, a subject he addressed earlier in “Take Me America.” “I remember very well where I got the idea for it,” Mr. Nabel told me. “I was in ‘42nd Street’ at the time. I had just finished my run in ‘A Chorus Line,’ and I saw a documentary about people applying for asylum in the United States.
“I was driving down the West Side Highway, ready to turn to go to the theater, and thinking about what I had just seen, the individual stories about people applying for asylum and how that sounded very much like the individual stories in ‘Chorus Line.’ I thought to myself, ‘Hmm. Chorus Line for refugees.’ And that’s how it started.”
It ended as a finalist for the American Academy of Arts & Letters prestigious Richard Rogers Prize. But, Mr. Nabel added, “Flying Toward the Sun” is not “Take Me America Redux.”
“‘Take Me America. was about 10 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. In fact, Joe has been very much on point about the differences between asylum then and asylum now.” (Joe is Joe Brancato, the Penguin Rep’s director.)
“That’s the focus of ‘Flying Toward the Sun,’ because we start the show in 2016, the year before Trump was first elected, and we finish in the present, where asylum effectively doesn’t exist anymore.
So Mr. Nabel reworked the play. The themes addressed in “Flying Toward the Sun” are the same as “Take Me America,” but the newer play has different characters, who have different experiences than those in the older one. That’s a result of the way the world has changed, he said. And the new show also “has about 15 new musical numbers.”
It strikes me that the subject doesn’t translate easily into musical material. “It’s about people that are applying for asylum and some of the stories are tough,” Mr. Nabel conceded. “It is a very dramatic scenario. But I did it as a musical because that’s where my brain goes. I see things and I sing them. I hear the rhythm of the words I write and they sing to me.”
Mr. Nabel’s interest in the subject was in part fueled by “my parents, who were Polish Holocaust survivors. They escaped from a concentration camp, so I’ve always been interested in stories of this type.
“My mother always told me I was made in Germany and born in America.” Mr. Nabel was born in the Bronx but grew up in Connecticut. Both his parents ran businesses from their home — his father’s was a machine shop and his mother’s a beauty salon.
He still lives in Connecticut — his home in Stamford once belonged to the Jewish Broadway impresario David Merrick.
But his parents’ America — where an immigrant could come to this country and build a life — seems almost a distant memory. So I asked Mr. Brancato, who in addition to directing this play is the Penguin’s founding artistic director, if this production is poking the bear a little bit. After all, it is the policies of this very vindictive administration that are at the center of “Flying Toward the Sun.”
“I don’t even think of that,” he said. “I do what I feel is important for my audience. I know what my audience’s sensibility is and I always try to deliver for that.”
Even if the bear decided to growl, there’s very little the administration could do. The Penguin receives no federal funds. “We get our grants from like the Schubert Organization, the New York State Council on the Arts, and all those incredibly supportive organizations and individuals who support our mission,” Mr. Brancato said.
“And our mission is to do great theater that makes you laugh, but also stirs up the gray matter and moves the heart. So that’s exactly what I believe our new season is doing. And in this musical, which I’m very excited about, Bill and Neil Berg have put together a beautiful score that reminds us of what it once meant to come to America and how important that was.”
“Flying Toward the Sun” will run from August 14 to September 6 at the Penguin Playhouse in Stony Point.