Murray Horwitz: from the Big Top to the Silver Theatre

BY MITCHELL TROPIN

Inside Murray Horwitz's office in downtown Silver Spring are gold Peabody awards for excellence in broadcasting, a Thomas "Fats" Waller screen saver, and a framed oversized poster for the operatic version of The Great Gatsby.

The items represent key moments in Horwitz's renaissance career: Broadway, opera, television, radio, and, most currently, film. Since January 2001, he has been director of the American Film Institute's new AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, a major element in Silver Spring's renaissance.

These are heady times for Horwitz, who saw the AFI Silver's three-screen complex open officially in April, while across town, Arena Stage is staging "Ain't Misbehavin," the show that he co-created based on Fats Waller's music.

Horwitz is of medium build, with small wire-rim glasses, mustache, tousled hair, and genial smile. Many years ago he covered his pleasant appearance with the greasepaint and accoutrements of a clown.

Horwitz in the lobby of the AFI Silver Theatre & Cultural Center, where he has been director since 2001.

Horwitz's love for the arts goes back to his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, where his parents urged him and his two brothers to explore many cultural influences from stage musicals to rock and roll, and "not to make any artificial distinctions between high and low culture. We were not discouraged from reading comic books, but we were encouraged to go to theaters, go to the movies, and see a wide range of films. Not everything was good, but everything was worthy."

Horwitz's father, a doctor, performed light opera in St. Louis. His mother was a pianist and a radio actress. They emphasized the value the arts provided others, Horwitz remembers, and they believed that entertainment should be a form of public service.

"My father considered three professionsÑmedicine, teaching, and entertainmentÑto be the most worthy, because they sought very directly to improve people's lives," he said.

While enthusiastic about the arts, the Horwitzes wanted their son to go to college to have something to fall back on. Murray entered Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school, declaring a double major in drama and history. He figured he could teach history, go into government, or enter politics. But he discovered that his talents lay in the arts.

While studying French dramatists and British satirists, Horwitz developed a passion for humor. "I could appreciate irony and satire. I could read Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal and say, ÔI know what this guy is doing,'" he said.

For a drama class, Horwitz prepared a one-man production showing clowns through the ages. Then fate stepped in.

"While preparing the show I discovered there was a clown college in Florida run by the Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Brothers Circus. I went to my professors, saying this is where I could learn how to do physical comedy," he said.

The young performer discovered that the circus is a tough arbiter. "The life tends to quickly sort out those who lack talent or skill," he said. "Nobody can teach you how to be funny. But if you are funny you are going to need to know some techniques, some skills. Where you really learn those skills is on the job."

After three years as a successful clown, he left in 1972 to pursue an acting career in New York. He took on several jobs, working at an all-news radio station. He got the idea of creating a one-man show based on the stories of Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichim.

With no track record in the theater, Horwitz found it tough getting a backer. Then he ran into a Philadelphia theater owner who remembered his one-man show back at Kenyon College. The owner agreed to put the show on in Philadelphia, which Horwitz remembers as "the city of brotherly love, rather than perceptive critics."

The show went well and was brought to New York, where Horwitz met another struggling actor and director, Richard Maltby, Jr. Horwitz described listening to Fats Waller recordings with Maltby in his New York apartment.

"What caught our attention was the wit in the piano music, not the comic asides," Horwitz said. "This convinced us that Waller's music and personality could live on stage."

After sorting through the enormous amount of music that Waller had written, the two men started preparing a show. The result was the award winning Ain't Misbehavin'.

Horwitz had discovered Waller as a teenager, when a friend told him that any-one interested in comedy and in jazz had to listen to Fats. Horwitz was mesmerized when he first heard Fats' stride piano, thinking it must be two men playing piano.

"I ran downstairs to my mother, who played piano, dragged her upstairs and exclaimed, ÔPlease tell me this is not impossible!'"

Ain't Misbehavin' was an unusual production for Broadway because it did not fit into the traditional categories: It was not a musical comedy or a revue, and it did not have a plot, but there was humor and drama. Maltby and Horwitz had the task of creating jokes and lines that sounded as if they actually came from the big man's imagination.

The show opened on Broadway in 1978, where it won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Actress (Nell Carter). The original production ran for 1,604 performances. In celebration of the show's 25th anniversary this year, Arena Stage and theaters in other cities are staging productions.

Horwitz followed the show with other musical projects, such as Harlem NocturneÑa history of African-American music, and a show celebrating the music of jazz pianist Moses Allison. While they enjoyed some success, Horwitz found himself scrambling for workÑgoing so far afield as directing daytime soap operas and making occasional TV appearances on such shows as Kojak.

By this point in his life, Horwitz and his wife Lisa, married since 1974, were raising three children: Charles, Ann, and Alexander Thomas. Lisa is a hometown girl from Dayton, but Horwitz met her in New York City. She was a mezzo soprano opera singer and he was a clown.

"It's Pagliacci" Horwitz joked.

With a family but without steady work, Horwitz moved to Washington to look for new opportunities. One came along when Horwitz ran into Richard Maltby's fianc?e. She was working for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) as deputy director for opera and musical theater. When she moved to New York to marry Maltby and quit her NEA job, Horwitz asked friends whether he could be an arts administrator, despite a lack of experience. They assured him he could.

Horwitz got the position she vacated, learning a valuable lesson in the process.

"In general I have never known a lot about business or the world of institutional art. What has served me well is that I did know the art form," he said. "You also need to know taste and what is good and bad; being able to look at, let's say, a list of songs and say, Ôwow, what great songs!'"

After several years with the NEA, Horwitz joined National Public Radio as vice president for cultural programming. Horwitz would receive two Peabody awards for Excellence in Broadcasting for two major NPR projects he co-created.

The first project, Making the Music, was the joint effort of Horwitz and the renowned jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. The 26-part "swing through Jazz" was designed to present the joyful and expressive energy of Jazz.

A second Peabody was for The NPR 100, a millennium project that highlighted the 100 most significant American musical works of the 20th century. Compiling the list launched a thousand arguments over what is American music, Horwitz said. The most often asked questionÑespecially by talk show hostsÑwas "What's number one?"

Horwitz said the answer is that there is no number one. "Some television host would say to me, ÔWe've got 45 seconds left. What is number one?' only to be told there was no such thing. We were not going to make the same mistake made by so many millennium lists. We were not going to say one song is more important than another."

While with NPR, Horwitz completed a fairly unique projectÑproviding lyrics to songs that were part of a modern opera based on The Great Gatsby. Pulitzer Prize winner John Harbison wrote the music and libretto, but asked Horwitz to write lyrics for songs that the F. Scott Fitzgerald characters would hear on the radio. The Great Gatsby premiered in 1999 at the Metropolitan Opera.

"This was clearly different for a post-Oscar Hammerstein, post-Stephen Sondheim musical theater writer, where you want the songs to be sung by the characters and to advance the plot," Horwitz said.

When growing up, Horwitz would go to nearby Yellow Springs, home of Antioch College and the Little Art Theater, a movie theater that showed the many worlds of cinema: Alec Guinness comedies, French New Wave, Akira Kurosawa films from Japan, and classic Buster Keaton silent films. Horwitz sees AFI Silver fulfilling a similar role. "Essentially we are an art house," he said.

Horwitz also sees AFI Silver offering him a chance to use the media's entertainment value for public service and to use his talents to make life better for people. "I believe film and video offer have much to contribute to the proffering and cementing the view that all men and women are brothers and sisters."

What bothers Horwitz is the fact that there was a broader range of cultural options available in the 1950s and 1960s.

"Nowadays marketing and demographic segmentation has separated us. There is no longer an Ed Sullivan show where you would see violinist Sasha Heifitz, followed by Ethel Merman, followed by Fats Domino. Strangely, with the proliferation of media and technologies to enjoy them, people tend to navigate in a narrower cultural channel," he said.

With marketing dividing people, Horwitz wants to exploit "movies' traditional ability to bring people together." Looking at the attendance at AFI Silver, Horwitz said, "the diversity of the audiences so far has shown that we can be right."

Horwitz sees AFI Silver making a large contribution to downtown Silver Spring's rebirth. During AFI's April 12 open house, a young professional approached Horwitz, telling him that AFI Silver cemented her decision to buy a home in Silver Spring. Retelling the story later, Horwitz smiles broadly and makes a celebratory gesture. From his expression, one could tell hearing the woman's news felt as good as the roar of a Big Top crowd.

AFI will present this summer several special offerings, including a documentary festival, Silver Docs, scheduled for June 18-23. Takoma Park's documentary filmmaker, Nina Gilden Seavey, is festival director. For more on AFL Silver Theatre, visit its web site, www.afi.com.