‘Closer Than Ever: The Unique Six-Decade Songwriting Partnership of Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire’
By Joshua Rosenblum
Oxford University Press, 328 Pages 

The American Popular Song Society Presents a Gala Celebration of Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire
Streaming Here

For more than 65 years, Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire have written songs and shows together and given us an extraordinary body of work. 

I’ve had reason to contemplate their careers, both as a team and individually — Mr. Maltby is a librettist and director and Mr. Shire is a composer — thanks to an all-star tribute concert that can be viewed on YouTube and an excellent new biography of the two creators by Joshua Rosenblum that studies their output.

It’s no insult to Messrs. Maltby and Shire to say that their general reputation needs a book like this, though not to make a case for the overall excellence of their work. As the concert proved over and over, their songs speak for themselves, and to hear even a few of them is to agree that Messrs. Maltby and Shire are two of the finest creators of musical theater of their generation, and ours.  

Rather, these two co-creators need this book because their output is so vast, varied, and untraditional that it otherwise would be impossible to take the full measure of it all. By comparison, it’s relatively easy to appreciate such approximate generational counterparts as Stephen Sondheim — a larger than life figure who hangs over the whole of musical theater of the last 50 years — and Jerry Herman, as their successes can be measured in the number of full-on book shows that ran on Broadway. So far, Messrs. Maltby and Shire essentially have created only two major Broadway shows, “Baby” (1983) and “Big” (1986).  

Yet that’s just the beginning of their oeuvre; as Mr. Rosenblum shows, there has hardly been a moment since 1955, when they met as undergraduates at Yale and, reluctantly at first, started working as a team, that they have not been doing remarkable things together. Apart from the two works that actually made it to the Great White Way, they have done dozens of projects that have played off-Broadway, regionally across America, and around the world. 

In fact, it’s safe to say that their two major off-Broadway pieces, “Starting Here, Starting Now” (1977) and “Closer Than Ever” (1989), are perhaps even more widely loved than “Baby” and “Big.” In referencing these works, the producer and host of the concert for the American Popular Song Society, Michael Lavine, described them as “revues,” and that’s probably as good a word as any but it still isn’t wholly accurate. Up through the 1950s, revues were a kind of very advanced vaudeville that combined production numbers with comic sketches and dance routines, as well as songs usually provided by a wide range of writers.  

“Starting Here, Starting Now” and “Closer Than Ever” are not that. Perhaps they’re better described as song cycles, except that song cycles aren’t staged and presented theatrically.  Messrs. Maltby and Shire have essentially created a musical-theatrical form that is uniquely theirs.  

Both are collections of story songs — musical monologues — that offer unique perspectives. Rather than hewing to the ideals of Rodgers & Hammerstein and everything that came after them, these songs don’t tell part of a story but are complete narratives in and of themselves. They each offer a wide range of characters, points of view, and life experiences, to the point where there’s both admirable variety as well as consistency. As Mr. Rosenblum puts it, “Starting Here, Starting Now” was largely about “the excitement of young love and ‘Closer Than Ever’ offered more lived-in midlife perspectives.”  

These two works function so well as entire programs that I was surprised to learn that they were cobbled together from earlier book shows that never got off the ground. 

The racy “Miss Byrd,” sung sexily by Kaye Tuckerman, was from a 1987 production titled “Urban Blight.” One of the team’s most widely performed numbers, “The Bear, The Tiger, The Hamster and the Mole,” a witty reflection on relationships in the animal kingdom from a female perspective, had been written for “Baby” but was cut from the final script. At the concert, it was delivered winningly by Christiane Noll, reprising it from the 2012 York Theater revival of “Closer.” 

As Mr. Maltby’s daughter, singer-actress Charlotte Maltby, put it at the concert, “These songs are little plays. In just three minutes, they are able to create a world that is so fully-realized, voiced from a character as rich and real as anything.”

Mr. Rosenblum does a thorough job in documenting and discussing all of the team’s individual projects. For Mr. Shire, it’s mostly film scoring, and, to that end the concert featured two instrumentalists playing his tunes, saxophonist Danny Bacher with a suite of themes from “Return to Oz” and guitarist Sean Harkness with the well-known “Manhattan Skyline” from “Saturday Night Fever.” Mr. Maltby’s specialty is assembling existing songs into cohesive shows in unconventional, “non-book” formats, most famously with the 1978 “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

Mr. Rosenblum’s book ends with a thorough discussion and analysis of three more M&S works that may yet make it to Broadway, “Take Flight,” “Sousatzka,” and “Waterfall,” as well as a new version of “Baby” updated for the 21st century. Still, the project their fans are probably most looking forward to is a new, third song cycle/revue in the tradition of “Starting Here” and “Closer.”

Most theater fans would probably name either “I Don’t Remember Christmas” or “What About Today” as their favorites. Yet it illustrates both the quantity and quality of their work that the concert didn’t didn’t feature the M&S song that I love most, “Back on Base.” On second thought, after hearing Mr. Maltby himself perform “If I Sing” — a song dedicated to his and Mr. Shire’s fathers — I might be changing my mind about what’s their best.