February 2005 Archives

A MAUREEN McGOVERN SCRAPBOOK:
Tapping her troubles away at age five; What was she thinking,
in her blonde period, in shoot for 1974 LP cover?; Classic look
for 1979 LP; Not only flying as Sister Angelina in 1980's
Airplane!, but also a singing and guitar-playing nun; Cropped
8Os do; Mabel in 1981's The Pirates of Penzance; and on
recent Grammy-nominated CD, The Music Never Ends: The
Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman, which ranges from jazz
and torch songs to lush romantic ballads.

Even after all these years on various world stages, McGovern admits to having "pre-show nerves like almost every actor I know. But once I get out there the built-up energy takes over. In the lights, in the moment, I'm fine. And now that everything has been set, I'm more comfortable because I've found my way. It's good nerves, not panic nerves. We've been fortunate to have packed houses with audiences cheering and screaming at the end. We have a story to tell and we're excited about telling it. We know we're doing our jobs because word-of- mouth is good. Things look solid for the coming months."

McGovern says Little Women has broad appeal. "It appeals to more than just young women. The beauty of it is we're seeing a great cross section of audiences: CPAs, attorneys, doctors, executives in suits. And they've got their hankies out, wiping tears away. There are pieces of everyone's family onstage, which I think is one of the reasons it's such a timeless piece. It appeals to anyone who's has a dream and had obstacles in the way or anyone who's lost someone and thought they'd give up. But somehow they find the strength to overcome the hard times and plow on."

When she left New York in 1995, after 17 years, McGovern's goal was to get right back into theater. In between concerts and recordings, she did musicals in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and numerous regional theatres. During the aftershock of September 11th, she originated the role of Eleanor Bridges in the world premiere of Paris Barclay's Letters From 'Nam, based on the 1988 book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, at Boston's North Shore Music Theatre; and the West Coast premiere of William Finn's Elegies - A Song Cycle in Los Angeles, directed by Philip Himberg, who's the artistic director of the Sundance Institute's Theatre Program**.

At a recent Drama Desk panel McGovern attended, a speaker was Edward Albee, who stated that the most interesting theater is being produced outside New York. One reason, says McGovern, "is that to bring a show to New York costs so much. As a result, the stakes are so supremely high that great material is bypassed. Great theater material is not usually mainstream. The only thing that can make it is something considered very commercial, which is the antithesis of what theater in New York used to be. So New York does miss some good theater. Our duty is to open people's eyes, even with a traditional piece such as Little Women. It's our job to reach people on some profound level."

At a Little Women post show discussion two weeks ago, Janet Carroll, who plays Aunt March, spoke to a group of seventh graders. "Afterward," relates McGovern, "one of the teachers came up to her and pointed to one of her students. She told her, ëShe just lost her brother. These past few weeks, she's been aimless and despondent. I was watching her throughout the show and, in Act Two, when Marmee sang ëDays of Plenty,' she was in the moment. She got the message.'

"It's why we do what we do," adds McGovern. "A moment like that makes all we put up with in this business worth it. It's music therapy in motion. The message of ëDays of Plenty' is that you go on with your life in honor of the person missing from it. You don't give up. If you do, that life's been wasted."

McGovern is a national board member for Jerry's Kids/Muscular Dystrophy Association and has performed on the Labor Day telethons for 25 years. Now, she has established a foundation of her own to explore using music for therapy and healing.

"Intuitively, I knew music was therapeutic," she explains. "For years, I've received letters telling me how ëThe Morning After' and some of my other songs were used during surgery or from people telling me how they got them through a depression. If there was something healing about my voice, I felt it should be used for good. Music has power. It reaches us inside at a deep and profound level where nothing else does."

What made her dedicated to this type of healing was a request from a hospital after a Christmas Eve concert to sing for their severely sick and critically ill kids. "I had my flight booked to go home and spend the holiday with my family," she relates, "but I took my guitar and sang for the kids. These were the ones who weren't able to be home with their families. When they brought them in, I was more than a bit startled. They were hooked to IVs and all sorts of tubes. As I started to sing, I thought they were so out of it they wouldn't be responsive. Was I in for a surprise!

"I don't know what happened," she continues, her voice cracking and breaking into tears at the still vivid memory of that night. "Maybe they took it in by osmosis but, one by one, they responded. Afterward, the parents came up and hugged me. One mother told me the songs had made her daughter smile for the first time in months - and that smile gave her heart a smile, something she hadn't been able to do in over a year. I nearly collapsed in tears. It was just for a moment, but, oh, what a moment."

The Maureen McGovern Works of Heart Foundation, based in Beverly Hills, provides a musical library of life-affirming, positive music for patients and caregivers. "Another goal," says McGovern, "is to educate the public regarding the power of music to aid in the healing process."

McGovern's newest CD, Works Of Heart, contains "The Morning After," Sondheim's "Children Will Listen" from Into the Woods, Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" from South Pacific, the Bergman's and Marvin Hamlisch's exquisite "Ordinary Miracles" [originally written for Streisand's concerts] and eight other songs of comfort, with all royalties donated to the American Music Therapy Association.

According to family lore, before Maureen McGovern could put words together to make sentences, she was singing. "Whatever my parents listened to on the radio, I'd sing it back to them," she recalls. "Dad sang in barbershop quartets and I'd sing all of the parts right along with them. "I was five and that was my first lesson in harmony. When I was singing, nothing else mattered."

But it wasn't exactly smooth sailing. Her dyslexia made it difficult for her to read music. And it was quite a blow in the fifth grade when her piano teacher told her her parents were just wasting their money on lessons. But she persevered, believing that it's not the smartest or most talent who make it in life, but the ones who don't give up.

In high school, she took up playing guitar and sang in the choir. "I never studied voice," notes McGovern, "but I listened to great singers. Ella, Garland, Mel Torme, Jo Stafford, Streisand, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins - all different styles."

In 1967, at 18, singing led to romance when she was hired to sing and play guitar between sets of a jazz trio at Eddie's Stag Bar on the campus of Ohio's Kent State University. It didn't take long for her to be smitten by the band's drummer. They married the following year.

One of those accident-of-fate stories eventually brought McGovern stardom, "but it was far, far from being an overnight sensation."

She was singing Top-40 and rock in lounges. One Cleveland audience member she impressed was a barber who told one of his customers, a local record producer, about what a great voice he'd heard. He had McGovern record some sides, which were sent to producer Russ Regan, who ran the record division of Twentieth Century-Fox studios.

In 1972, she was signed, sight unseen, and told they'd soon find some suitable material. A month later, she was in the studio recording what has become her anthem, "The Morning After" by Joel Hirschorn and Al Kasha, which was sung by the Carol Lynley character [lip syncing to the voice of Renee Amand] in the upside down thriller The Poseidon Adventure. As a result, it was submitted to the Motion Picture Academy as a Best Song candidate and accepted.

"We recorded the theme in November, 1972. The movie was released the following month and became a huge box office hit, but the song did nothing. The label dropped their promotion efforts and they dropped me. I was back playing lounges and clubs. Then, when the song won the Academy Award, stations started playing my record. Suddenly, a year later, it was zooming up the charts, and not just in the U.S."

An excerpt from "The Morning After":
"There's got to be a morning after.
If we can hold on through the night,
We have a chance to find the sunshine.
Let's keep on looking for the light.

Oh, can't you see the morning after?
It's waiting right outside the storm.
Why don't we cross the bridge together
And find a place that's safe and warm? Ö"

In 1974, she recorded Hirschorn and Kasha's "We May Never Love This Way Again," the theme for Irwin Allen's The Towering Inferno. It was Oscar-nominated for and won Best Song. Unfortunately, McGovern, even with a record that had gone Gold, didn't get to sing it on the Oscars. "Howard Koch, who was producing the show, refused because I was an unknown." It also won and became a hit [but never reached the Top 40].

When success happened, says McGovern, she was young and naÔve. "My manager convinced me to sign a contract. What I didn't realize was that it gave him a guaranteed percentage of up to forty percent of my earnings. He figured the more I made, the more he should make! Math not being my strong suit, I signed. He also paid my band a salary whether they worked or not. The beginning of my career was a mess. I let a lot of people make my decisions for me. Whoever spoke the loudest could shut me up. I had to learn that by not making a choice, I was making a choice."

She attempted to get her life and career back on track. In 1974, she obtained a divorce. She also sued to void her contract with the manager. But just as she was beginning to cope, her mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. Even two years after having hits with two Oscar-winning songs, a series of miscues and bad advice threatened to make her a washed-up, one-hit wonder. "My records were selling around the world and I was in demand for concerts," she recounts, "but I couldn't get arrested in the United States."

McGovern found herself "flat broke." She relocated to Los Angeles and began working as a secretary for a PR firm under the assumed name of Glenda Schwartz. When she got overseas bookings, "My boss' wonderful wife would fill in for me. When I'd return a few days after having audiences cheering for me, I was back behind the typewriter."

She did occasional radio jingles to help pay the bills. Then the winds changed. In 1978 when John Williams and Leslie Bricusse choose her to record the main theme from Superman, "Can You Read My Mind." It was a Number One Adult Contemporary single. Ironically, because it wasn't sung in the film, it wasn't eligible for Oscar consideration, but McGovern was on her way again.

Thanks, in no small way, to legendary crooner Mel Torme. "As much as George Rose was my theater mentor," states McGovern, "Mel was my music mentor. We became dear friends and I learned so much about styling from him. He was amazingly generous, even taking me on the road and featuring me in his TV specials."

McGovern made her Broadway debut in 1981, replacing Linda Ronstadt as Mabel in Joe Papp's production of The Pirates of Penzance. "I didn't know enough to be as frightened as I should have been," she laughs. "I had the goal, but I didn't have the plan. George Rose put me on the right path. I learned so much from just watching him. I never knew a star who was as supportive of other actors as George was. The best advice he gave me was to trust my instincts." As a result, she got very serious about theater, studying voice and acting.

Later, she replaced Karen Akers for six months as Luisa Contini in the Tony-winning Best Musical Nine opposite Raul Julia. Later came playing Polly Peachum in Threepenny. She's written children's musicals and, of course, there've been dozens of recordings. Three of her CDs salute the Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin and Harold Arlen songbooks.

Now there will be another. Foster, McGovern and the Little Women will "march" into the recording studio February 28th to record the original cast CD for Ghostlight Records/Sh-k-boom Records. Product is expected in stores in early April.

For much more on McGovern, including information on her charity work and an extensive photo gallery, visit www.maureenmcgovern.com.

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[*when she co-starred with Sting, Georgia Brown and Kim Criswell. You may have missed McGovern, as she almost missed the entire run, thanks to a ruptured blood vessel on her right vocal chord a week before the opening. "I missed twenty-one performances," she recalls, "and returned for the last ten days before it closed. It was Georgia's last show. I missed that opening night altogether. That's why Little Women has been so meaningful." ]

[**where McGovern has done several shows, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Jerry Herman's revised Dear World. "Two gorgeous experiences," she says. "It's this outdoor theatre, with the moon hanging brilliantly over the mountains. God's country! You hear the coyotes howling and, once, a moose came down to watch the show. In Dear World, I played Countess Aurelia, working with a new book and orchestrations. In Los Angeles, I was able to work with Jerry on some new songs. This is one of his most unappreciated, and has one of his best scores. He intended it as a chamber piece, but it was done on Broadway at the Hellinger, this humongous theatre, with a large chorus, dance numbers and big orchestrations. That was never his intention. He came to our opening and was so extremely pleased with the results. I'd love to see it come back.]