Facing the Music

a Broadway memoir

David Loud

• Publisher: Regan Arts.
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781682451922
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Musical Director and arranger David Loud, a legendary Broadway talent, recounts his wildly entertaining and deeply poignant trek through the wilderness of his childhood and the edge-of-your-seat drama of a career on, in, under, and around Broadway for decades. He reveals his struggle against the ravages ofParkinson's and triumphs repeatedly.This memoir is also aremarkablelove letter to music. Loud is the 'Ted Lasso' of the theater business, ever the optimist! "'Music has consequences, ' a wise teacher once told a young David Loud; so does a story well-told and a life fully-lived. I lost count of how many times I laughed, cried, and laugh-cried reading this wonderful, wry, intimate, and inspiring book. David wields a pen like he wields a baton, with perfect timing, exquisite phrasing, and enormous heart."
— David Hyde Pierce, actor, Frasier, Spamalot, Curtains "Beautifully written, filled with vivid details, braided with love and loss and wit and the perspective of someone with an utterly unique story to tell."
-- Lynn Ahrens, lyricist, Ragtime, Once on This Island, Anastasia "Luminous and surprising, an extremely honest memoir of a life lived in the world of Broadway musicals, by one of the theatre's most gifted conductors. I can't think of another book quite like it."
-- John Kander, composer, Cabaret, Chicago, New York, New York Unforgettably entertaining and emotionally revealing, Loud is pitch-perfect as he describes his path to the podium, from a stage-struck kid growing up at a school devoted to organic farming and mountain climbing, to the searing formative challenges he faces during adolescence, to the remarkable behind-the-scenes stories of his Broadway trials and triumphs. Skilled at masking his fears, Loud achieves his dream until one fateful opening night, when in the midst of a merry, dressing room celebration, he can no longer deny reality and must suddenly, truly, face the music.

Chapter One 1967

{My mother moved slowly down the cramped aisle of the fabric store, examining the prints and patterns. She smiled to herself as she felt the different bolts of fabric, her dark brown shoulder-length hair kept in place, as always, with a black headband.

My mother made all my father’s underwear. He liked to wear boxers, and she took a surprising amount of pleasure in searching out the most outrageous fabrics she could find—wild stripes, bright paisleys, neon polka dots. She was a talented and industrious seamstress. What started as a goofy whim turned into a major collection. Shopping trips with my mother usually ended with a trip to one of Cincinnati’s fabric stores. It became our family game: find the perfect print for the next pair of boxers. Hawaiian hula dancers? Psychedelic butterflies? Bright yellow daisies?

She kept a swatch of fabric from each pair of underwear she made, and she created a book out of the swatches. The thick cardboard cover of the book had a cutout in the shape of a pair of boxers so you could see the latest print through the cutout.

I was five years old. I stared up at my mother. She was very pretty, her dark eyes dancing as they darted between the wads and twists of cloth. Endlessly patient, she could fix broken zippers and reweave unraveling scarves. Her hands were cool and soft, and she never tired of reading me stories, though she wasn’t as good as my father at doing the different character voices that I required.

Suddenly, she laughed out loud. There, stuck in with the checks and plaids, was a print made of Budweiser beer labels.

“Perfect,” she announced.

My father liked his beer. A six-pack a day.

When I was older, my mother made the tan corduroy suit that I wore for my high school graduation, and years later, my little sister’s wedding dress, a creamy creation dappled with faint autumn leaves. But the boxers were different. They seemed to be a secret that my mother and father shared. He may have looked serious and professional in his jacket and tie, but they knew there was something wilder underneath, hidden away.

---

MY FATHER TAUGHT ALGEBRA AND calculus at the Hillsdale School, an all-girls high school, in Cincinnati. Ruggedly good-looking with a vaguely military crew cut, he had a dry sense of humor and a rigorous love of mathematics. His first two years at Hillsdale, he was the only male faculty member. There was no men’s room in the school, only a tiny W/C labeled “Mr. Loud.”

We lived in a small red house on Madison Road, in a quiet neighborhood near the school. Violets grew in a small patch of grass near the back door. We had a cat named Panther and a dog named Fang. Fang, a basset hound, had long drooping ears that hung down on either side of his face. Panther, a gently striped, grey tabby cat, worshipped Fang. She followed him everywhere. My little sister, who loved all animals unconditionally, spoke to them both in a language of purrs and growls and sighs. It was clear that they understood her perfectly.

Our living room, paneled with blonde, knotty wood, held a dark green overstuffed couch, a big comfortable chair, a hi-fi stereo, a record cabinet, and a black-and-white television set.

My mother wanted to learn how to play the guitar. She found a television program called “Folk Guitar Plus” that gave lessons. It aired at 6:00 a.m., featuring a stylish lady named Miss Laura Weber. The “Plus” referred to the additional instruments she taught: the soprano recorder and the autoharp. I asked my parents for a recorder. We ordered workbooks from an educational television station in Nebraska.

My mother and I would stumble groggily into the living room and pull the television set close to the couch—me in my pajamas, with my wooden recorder, my mother in her nightgown, with her guitar. I learned how to read a melody line, following the notes as they went by in the workbook. I studied the fingerings, and we played along while Miss Laura Weber sang “Greensleeves” and “My Grandfather’s Clock.”

One morning, after weeks of struggling with how to cover the holes in the recorder with my little fingers, how to get a clear tone that didn’t crack or whistle, and how to coordinate my fingers with my breathing, my mother and I made it through “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” without any mistakes.

We sat in silence for a moment, surprised. I liked hearing how my part fit snugly into the other part; I liked making music with another person.

When I was six, I started piano lessons. My teacher, Miss Corn, old and portly, had gnarled hands. She wore bright red lipstick and had a big black mole on her face. Clear and precise, she began teaching me the fundamentals of music theory and gave me a small book of pieces to learn. She never allowed mistakes to go by uncorrected, usually balancing each criticism with a compliment. “That’s an E-flat there, David, not an E-natural,” she would say, “but my goodness, your rhythm is exactly right.”

My mother and father bought a used, upright piano for $100, and they made the odd choice to put it in their bedroom. On weekends, they liked to sleep late. I’ve always been an early riser. At 6:00 a.m., I would march into their bedroom and practice.

Miss Corn taught her lessons from a cramped house she shared with her sister, a harpist. Its shelves were stuffed with ancient sheet music, frayed and crumbling. The piano was jammed into a wide doorway between two rooms. The low notes were in the dining room; the high notes were in the vestibule.

One day, while I was playing a Minuet I had learned, Miss Corn leaned over and put her surprisingly strong hands over mine.

“David, stop,” she said.

Her face was uncomfortably close. The gentle smell of her clinical, lemony perfume wafted over me.

“You play all the right notes, but you play without… inquiry. Have you ever asked yourself, ‘Why is the next note the next note?’ ”

I had not.

“You must think about what Mozart was doing when he chose that particular note to be the next note. There are so many other notes he could have chosen! I want you to think about each note before you play it, as you play it, and after you play it.”

She let my hands go. Settling back into her chair, she looked down at her lap, then up at me. Her dark, watery eyes gleamed.

“Music has consequences,” she said.

Somehow, I understood what she was saying.

I tried to put it into practice.

---

SCHOOL WAS A BEWILDERING SEESAW of triumphs and failures. I won spelling contests and aced math tests, but I couldn’t throw or catch a baseball. When I played “The Mountain Gnome” at a recital, everyone applauded. At football practice, I sat on the bench—sweating, miserable, petrified—wearing the oversized shoulder pads, jersey, and plastic mouthguard that had cost my parents seventeen dollars.

The record collection housed in our living room cabinet included a dozen or so original cast recordings of Broadway musicals: My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, Bye Bye Birdie, Bells are Ringing, The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, Carousel, and Oklahoma! Entranced, I played them over and over on our hi-fi stereo.

My parents kept strict control over the black-and-white television set. My sister and I were occasionally allowed to watch, but our viewing had to be planned in advance. Saturday morning cartoons were strictly rationed. Our neighbors, the Glovers, had a large color TV, which we were never allowed to watch. One spring evening, however, my mother worked out a secret plan with Mrs. Glover.

After an early dinner, my mother casually suggested that we go next door. Mrs. Glover invited us into her parlor. She had baked chocolate chip cookies, and she sat us down with delicate china plates in our laps, in front of the large console TV.

A movie started. It was in black-and-white. I was disappointed. Why would we come over here, I wondered, to watch a black-and-white movie? A mean lady on a bicycle was trying to take a girl’s dog. The girl sang a sad song about wanting to be somewhere else. There was a scary storm, and her house blew up into the sky. When it landed, she opened the door, and I saw both color TV and the Land of Oz for the first time. It was the best day of my life so far.

At that time, The Wizard of Oz was broadcast annually, nationwide, each spring. Starting that year, I never missed a viewing. I thought about Oz a lot. At six years old, I already knew, inside, that I needed to be somewhere else, far away from this world in which I already felt, for reasons I didn’t understand, like an outsider.

When I read the book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I discovered, at the end, that Dorothy Gale’s trip to that magical land hadn’t been a dream. That “dream” was Hollywood’s cruel invention. I took comfort in the knowledge that there really was an Oz, after all. I just had to figure out how to get there.

---

THE HILLSDALE SCHOOL HAD AN ambitious theater teacher, Mr. Emerson. Tall and thoughtful, his dark brown hair was a bit longer than I was used to seeing on a man. He lived in our neighborhood. Noticing my interest in the theater, he started putting me in the high school plays when they needed a little boy. My first appearance on stage was as a dead child, in a multi-media show Mr. Emerson created about the horror of war. I had to stay completely still, as if I weren’t breathing, in the arms of a high school junior, who was playing my mother. Apparently, I was convincing.

When I was in the second grade, Mr. Emerson directed a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which I played the Boy. The role of Vladimir was played by a high school senior girl. She was white, and Mr. Emerson had her wear blackface. Estragon, played by another senior girl, who was black, wore whiteface. I don’t know what the significance of this was, but it was the ‘60s and I’m sure it meant something important to Mr. Emerson.

I had to memorize lots of lines for Waiting for Godot. After dinner, I would sit on my father’s lap in the big comfortable chair in our living room, while he ran my lines with me. When the show was over, I was sad that our evening ritual wouldn’t continue.

The following year, I was in Mr. Emerson’s adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I played the Knave of Hearts. I had a red velvet costume with an elaborate crown and a long monologue, which I delivered alone on stage. It began, “I did steal the tarts,” which got a big laugh.

I waited for the laughter to crest before saying my next line. I felt safe on that stage. I was in Wonderland.

At moments of celebration, like the night after my third and final performance as the Knave of Hearts, my mother and father would gather my sister and me into a tight circle, our arms wrapped around each other, and we would hug each other as tightly as we could.

I thought we had the happiest family in the world.

---

WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS old, my father announced at dinner that he had been offered a position as assistant headmaster at North Country School, a progressive institution in the Adirondack Mountains, near Lake Placid, New York. We would be moving there permanently. It was the job my father had always wanted. He had grown up in New York City, but he had spent his summers at Camp Treetops in the Adirondacks, and he loved hiking and climbing. He felt at home in the mountains. My parents had met and fallen in love at Camp Treetops in the summer of 1959, when they had both been counselors there. North Country School operated on the camp property during the school year.

My mother told us that North Country School was a boarding school for a hundred students, fourth grade through eighth grade. The school was on an organic farm.

I packed my books and clothes into cardboard boxes.

Miss Corn wrote me a note telling me to keep practicing. Mrs. Glover came from next door to say goodbye; she hugged my mother tightly. Mr. Emerson waved from his porch as we drove away. Everything we owned was in a Mayflower moving van that drove behind us.

My sister and I sat in the back seat. We held hands. I looked out the window at the small red house, wondering if I would ever see it again. Tears streamed down my face, but I didn’t make a sound.

Chapter Two 1970

{“Hallo. My name is Chris Nicholson.” The sandy-haired boy, taller than me, was to be my roommate for the year. He had light blue eyes that crinkled when he flashed his ready smile. I shook his hand and wondered about his accent. British? Australian? It turned out that his family lived on the island of Antigua, in the West Indies, and Chris’s refined, clipped way of speaking came from spendin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Prelude: 2007
• Chapter One: 1967
• Chapter Two: 1970
• Chapter Three: 1972
• Chapter Four: 1974
• Chapter Five: 1975
• Chapter Six: 1976
• Chapter Seven: 1980
• Chapter Eight: 1980
• Chapter Nine: 1981
• Chapter Ten: 1981
• Chapter Eleven: 1981
• Chapter Twelve: 1981
• Chapter Thirteen: 1981
• Chapter Fourteen: 1982
• Chapter Fifteen: 1984
• Chapter Sixteen: 1990
• Chapter Seventeen: 1991
• Chapter Eighteen: 1993
• Chapter Nineteen: 1994
• Chapter Twenty: 1995
• Chapter Twenty-One: 1997
• Chapter Twenty-Two: 1998
• Chapter Twenty-Three: 1998
• Chapter Twenty-Four: 2000
• Chapter Twenty-Five: 2007
• Chapter Twenty-Six: 2008
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: 2010
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: 2011
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: 2014
• Chapter Thirty: 2014
• Chapter Thirty-One: 2015
• Postlude: 2015
• Chapter Titles
• Musicals the Phillips Exeter Academy Library should have in its record collection
• Acknowledgments
• A Note About the Author
• Copyright