By SHARON EBERSON
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Well, practice, of course. And if you are Stephen Flaherty, you also become a hitmaker, and make your alma mater proud.
The Dormont native and award-winning composer of Ragtime, Once on This Island, Anastasia, Seussical and more will be honored by the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) with a concert songs old and new, almost all with lyricist Lynn Ahrens.
In an email, Flaherty mentioned that the January 14 concert “contains a song I actually wrote in the CCM practice rooms (with my own lyrics) at age 19, as well as a song from my most recent musical, Knoxville. That’s a span of more than 40 years!”
The concert will feature a student orchestra of 50, a chorus and other notable CCM alums, including Anya’s from two versions of Anastasia: Liz Callaway (the animated film vocals) and Christy Altomare (Broadway).
A song cut from Seussical, “The Lorax,” will have its New York premiere, along with a new song from a revised version of My Favorite Year, the Flaherty-Ahrens musical based on the 1982 film.
The team is known for its eclectic choices, changing style from show to show. As Seth Rudetsky noted in a Playbill.com article. “Stephen grew up in Pittsburgh and wrote the score for his first musical when he was still in [the former South Hills Catholic High School]. Each scene was set in a different Pittsburgh neighborhood, represented in different styles of song — rock ’n‘ roll, country and western, a big showstopper, and so on.”
Flaherty and Ahrens have been producing hits since the 1980s, when they met at a Lehman Engel BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. Their works gracing Flaherty’s hometown stages have included the premiere of The Glorious Ones at Pittsburgh Public Theater in 2007, and recent productions of Once on This Island (Pittsburgh CLO, summer 2023) and A Man of No Importance (Front Porch Theatricals, summer 2022). PCLO will end its 2024 summer season with the company’s first production of Seussical.
The Carnegie Hall concert will benefit CCM and its music scholarships. If you happen to be in New York City on January 14, tickets are available here:
ON BROADWAY
It’s not hard to find performers and creative team members with Pittsburgh ties on Broadway. I am headed to Broadway in a couple of weeks, with tickets to Purlie Victorious, starring Leslie Odom Jr., Sleep No More (under the wire before it closes), and the Stephen Sondheim triple play of Merrily We Roll Along, Here We Are and Sweeney Todd.
The latter boasts a bunch of Carnegie Mellon University alums, including star Josh Groban, who was a classmate of Odom’s during his six months at CMU, in 1999. Other cast members from the university include Patricia Phillips and Nathan Salstone, Sweeney Todd is directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail, who I like to point out has spent a lot of time in his mother’s hometown of Pittsburgh.
Point Park University and Carnegie Mellon are consistently among the top schools represented on Broadway, allowing Pittsburgh – with all of its other performing arts opportunities – to own a place at the head of the class in that regard.
There’s plenty to see here at home, of course, but I do revel in seeing our city’s exports on other stages, and checking out what’s happening in New York that may be coming soon, to a theater near you.
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