PUTNEY — There’s a Steinway grand piano that Tony Award and Grammy Award winning pianist David Yazbek has played at Next Stage Arts in the past but has never played publicly.
“Billy Strauss (co-founder of Next Stage Arts) is one of my best friends, since we were 12,” said Yazbek during a phone call from his Hudson Valley home just days before Thanksgiving.
Yazbek, who won a Grammy and a Tony in 2017 for The Band’s Visit, often travels to Putney to visit and maybe play some music with his old friend, but this will be his first time before an audience in town.
The show is set for Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Next Stage Arts.
Dubbed by Yazbek as “A Few Cheery Songs About Death,” this will be only the second performance of the act; the first time was several months ago in Chicago.
“A solo show. Me playing piano, singing and talking and trying to structure something I can bring to regional theaters. I’m just winging it. It’s almost like a stand-up comic routine. I’m trying to figure out what the set is. They’re going to see something that feels finished, which I know is not finished.”
Why he will be singing a few cheery songs about such a dreary subject is a story that includes “massive amounts of talk therapy” to address his “crippling anxiety.”
“It started when I was pretty young, and it was around the concept of people I knew dying.”
Later in life, a success after accepting an Emmy Award as a writer for Late Night with David Letterman, Yazbek had a full-blown panic attack on the flight home. He had another attack taking an elevator up to a meeting with TV executives to discuss a show he was piloting and was experiencing claustrophobia anytime he got on a train or subway.
“It didn’t take long for my therapist to point out I was having anxiety attacks on any form of transportation.”
Now that he had achieved success in the industry, asked his therapist, what’s at the end of the trip?
“I said it ends up when you die,” said Yazbek, who said the only real relief to the thought of death is connecting with other people.
“I want to share. I want to feel that connection. I want to be in a room with other people. I studied Zen Buddhism for many years and I’ve been a meditator for 35 years. But for many people, like musicians, music can save your life.”
A performance is a living thing, maintained Yazbek, with a heartbeat from the stage and the audience, “getting in sync.”
“It’s a rare church-like thing. There’s fellowship there.”
Part of connecting with the audience includes a “jazzy” question and answer session that will include some improv.
Over the years, Yazbek and Strauss collaborated, writing songs for and producing Broadway musicals such as “The Full Monty” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?”
“We wrote jingles together,” said Yazbek. “We wrote children’s songs.”
Yazbek also wrote the songs for “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Tootsie” and “Dead Outlaw.”
“When you write a song for a show, you’re often writing on assignment, meaning there’s a story. There are characters and you’re writing for the story and for the characters, and what I learned over the years … by embracing it I was able to write more personal stuff. The characters were able to speak what I was thinking. And that’s when I started really understanding that this … this is what I do.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.reformer.com ’
