The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

By Monty Arnold
November 7, 2009

Prior to touring, a revised Dreamgirls takes to the iconic Apollo stage in a dream come true for the show's original composer.

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Most shows go into their national tours brandishing "Direct From Broadway" banners. Not Dreamgirls. It'll be flying "Direct From The Apollo" colors.

A monthlong (Nov. 7-Dec. 6) engagement at that famed Harlem theatre — where the walls still shake and sway with R&B from generations ago — is an apt launching site for the eight-month, 14-city tour, directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom. This time out, the catfighting backup singers in the center ring are Moya Angela, Syesha Mercado, Adrienne Warren and Margaret Hoffman.

Nobody knows better than Henry Krieger, the show's composer, what secret circle is completed by the fact that Dreamgirls is playing the Apollo.

At 64, he's the show's only surviving creative (director–choreographer Michael Bennett and lyricist–book writer Tom Eyen died in the first decade after Dreamgirls' debut) and he continues to write songs for the show.

Three new ones for the 2006 movie version, each dashed off with a different lyricist — "Patience," "Listen" and the Grammy-winning "Love You I Do" — all made the Oscar running (a hat trick equaled only by Alan Menken, who did it twice). Now, Krieger's sending the road company out with a brand-new second-act curtain-raiser, "What Love Can Do," and a new lyric that makes a different theatrical use of "Listen."

These musical roots started forming a good four decades back. "When I was age 25, I worked at the Apollo," he recalls warmly. "I was press agent for a lot of R&B acts — Jerry Butler, for one — so I was around there a lot. Even before that, when I was in high school, my friends and I would cut class to go to the Apollo to hear that music.

"The music led me, like a jungle gym set, to my life's work — going from one thing to the next to get up higher to what I wanted to do. My love of theatre from high school morphed into my mid-twenties, saying, 'Hey, wait a minute. I want to be part of all that. I want to be part of theatre. I want to live in my adored idiom, which is R&B.'"

Eyen, a downtown playwright of considerable note, was the link that connected Krieger to the big time. Their paths crossed doing an Off-Broadway show called The Dirtiest Musical in Town with Nell Carter.

During rehearsals, the composer remembers, "Tom was talking about what life might be like for backup singers with ambition, what kind of story that would make. And I always had dreams of putting the music that I liked into a dramatic form — the R&B thing — so each of us had something we wanted to do to re-create what we'd grown up with. They say, 'Do what you know.' That's what we believed we were doing."

Bennett, all brilliance and flash, completed the picture — if not overwhelmed it — and Krieger was on his way to Broadway. "For me, who was just coming onto the scene, the fact that I was starting with someone like him was absolutely staggering!

"He and Tom were, simultaneously, spilling over with ideas, and it was exciting to be the one who painted those ideas musically. My job, as I saw it, was to fill in the blood and guts of the reality and facilitate the interface between audience and character."

Krieger has always made a practice of composing for a character. "You know those fine old tailoring houses where some Italian-trained tailor makes coats and suits for the billionaires? Well, I aspire to that kind of piecework — to make sure that the characters are being expressed through every color of the music that I create. I'm not much for writing a number to be sung just so people will say, 'Wasn't that good?' It's more than that. It's 'Oh, I see how she feels.' I like to make it very personalized."

Backstage back-stabbing among backup singers is pretty universal the world over, and part of the fascinating fun of Dreamgirls is the ghostly overlay of The Supremes that seems to hover over the plot. You think you're getting the hot skinny.

Diana Ross has steadfastly said she has never seen the piece in any incarnation, but Mary Wilson has seen it — and liked it. And on Dec. 20, 1981, the night the show opened, there was a fellow sitting in the back row of the Imperial Theatre balcony who would direct and adapt the screen version a quarter of a century later — Bill Condon.

That movie proved to be such a popular piece of entertainment that Krieger expects it will be a powerful advance man for Dreamgirls, once it comes out of the home chute and hits the road. His, he has to admit, is a dream that doesn't go away.