My guest today is Joshua Rosenblum, author of Closer than Ever — The Unique Six-Decade Songwriting Partnership of Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire.
This remarkable new book chronicles the sixty-six-year (and counting) partnership of two of the most gifted songwriters of our time and provides us with full behind-the-scenes accounts of their musicals interspersed with deep-dive analyses of some of their standout individual songs. To tell their story, Rosenblum draws on his extensive experience as a composer, Broadway conductor, music journalist, and professor of musical theater composition at Yale. Maltby and Shire are quoted liberally throughout the book in exclusive interviews that create the impression that one is spending time with two inspiring creative artists who happen to be great company.
In part one of our conversation, Maltby & Shire’s origin story, the challenges of their early musicals, their association with Barbra Streisand, their long friendship and rivalry with Stephen Sondheim, and the surprising success of their first hit revue, Starting Here, Starting Now, and its influential Grammy-nominated original cast album.
Among the well-known Broadway figures who feature prominently in the Maltby/Shire story are Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, Barbra Streisand, Michael Stewart, Francis Ford Coppola, Susan Stroman, John Weidman, Charles Strouse, Garth Drabinsky, Jason Robert Brown, and Jonathan Tunick.
Joshua Rosenblum teaches Composing for Musical Theater at Yale University and Conducting at New York University. As a composer/lyricist, he wrote the scores to the off-Broadway musicals Fermat's Last Tango, Bush is Bad, and Einstein's Dreams (four Drama Desk Nominations). He has conducted fourteen Broadway and off-Broadway shows and has performed as pianist with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, the City Center Encores! Orchestra, and the American Symphony. A longtime contributor of reviews and features to Opera News, Rosenblum is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale College and holds a master's degree in Piano from the Yale School of Music.
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