Brava Seth Rudetsky for all you do for the theater, media and entertainment worlds. To say that Seth is passion-driven is clearly an understatement. I had the pleasure of working with Seth a few years ago when producer Missy Greenberg had the great foresight to bring his one man show “Deconstructing Broadway” to Chicago to share his brilliance with audiences here. To borrow a word from the voice of Broadway on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, he and his show are simply a-maah-zing! I look forward to his return to Chi town in the hopefully not too distant future. In the meantime, there are several other ways to see and/or hear the talented Seth Rudetsky, as described in the below New York Times article. Seth Rudetsky is my kind of Broadway legend.
The Theater’s Indefatigable Multitasker
Seth Rudetsky, left, in Central Park with his husband, James Wesley. They each wrote two of the four plays in “Midtown March Medley.”
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By ERIC GRODE
Published: February 28, 2013
Seth Rudetsky, who has managed to turn “show queen” into something like a job title, works hard at his job.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
The comedian Sarah Silverman with Seth Rudetsky on one of his radio shows.
When he isn’t doing his radio show on Sirius XM or filing hisPlaybill.com diary or hosting his weekly “Chatterbox” series of onstage interviews or writing theater-theme novels or uploading cheeky YouTube deconstructions of Broadway legends or doing his other Sirius show or writing new musicals or coordinating diva-heavy benefit concerts or masterminding his SethTV Web siteor directing his young daughter’s school chorus, Mr. Rudetsky spends a lot of time on the road. There are command performances of solo pieces, theater-theme cruises, master classes and piano gigs in support of other performers.
“He’s the mayor of Broadway,” said Audra McDonald, who used Mr. Rudetsky as her accompanist back when she was auditioning for summer stock. “Actually ‘mayor’ may not be an elevated enough term to describe him.”
For Mr. Rudetsky, who started out playing piano in the pit orchestras of more than a dozen Broadway musicals, the smattering of projects suits his attention span. “I have A.D.D., I know that, but I actually don’t think the work adds up to much more than anyone pulling a 9-to-5 job,” Mr. Rudetsky said as he walked briskly out of the Sirius studios in Midtown, having managed to record all of one show and portions of three others within less than two hours.
Every now and then a full-time project gets added to the mix. That was the case in 2007 when Mr. Rudetsky appeared in a Broadway revival of the Terrence McNally bathhouse farce “The Ritz,” for which he also created a disco-meets-Broadway train wreck of a medley for Rosie Perez. And now, starting Wednesday, he’ll be concentrating on“Midtown March Medley,” a smorgasbord of four pieces written, produced and performed by Mr. Rudetsky and his husband, James Wesley.
In lieu of playing piano for four Broadway shows in a week — “I would sometimes do the ‘Les Miz’ matinee and then ‘Phantom’ that night,” he said — he and Mr. Wesley will spend the next month putting on as many as four shows a day at the 30-seat Bridge Theater at Shetler Studios in Midtown.
For Mr. Rudetsky the shows represent the latest chapter in a biography that has found room for a predictably nightmarish Long Island high school experience, classical training at the Oberlin Conservatory, an Emmy-nominated stint on the “Rosie O’Donnell Show” writing staff, a one-man revue called “Rhapsody in Seth,” a “Legally Blonde”-theme reality show and more viewings of Bea Arthur’s rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” than is perhaps wise. “Seth was this high school theater nerd who had the musical ability to actually become a peer to the people within this community,” said Ms. O’Donnell, who also performed with him in the 1990s “Grease” revival. “Everyone knows how much I love musical theater, but I bow to his superiority.”
That knowledge manifests itself a few different ways in “Medley,” which the two men are bankrolling in hopes of drawing commercial interest in any or all of the plays. They each wrote two of the four shows, but that doesn’t quite reflect the division of labor between Mr. Rudetsky and Mr. Wesley, who first gave their ages as “early 40s” before begrudgingly appending an “early to mid.”
After all, the week before their self-produced project opened, one of them was heading off to accompany Megan Mullally in Australia. (Guess who?)
So Mr. Wesley, who does closed captioning for television and DVDs for the hearing-impaired, had a firmer grasp of just how many seats were in the Bridge Theater, let alone how many of those they needed to sell to break even. Still, Mr. Rudetsky was doing his bit, finding ways to slip in references to the “Medley” Web site on his radio show, “Seth Speaks,” and in the brief passages introducing songs on his other show. (“Let’s hope my producer isn’t listening tomorrow,” he said after one particularly brazen plug. “I’m not really supposed to do this.”)
His fantastically deep list of contacts presumably played a role in the starry cast for this Equity showcase, which includes the Tony nominees John Tartaglia (“Avenue Q”) andTony Sheldon (“Priscilla Queen of the Desert”), along with Eve Plumb of “Brady Bunch” fame.
The subjects of the pieces correlate with the two men’s temperaments. Mr. Wesley’s “Unbroken Circle” and “Art and Science” both have sensitive autobiographical components. “Unbroken” also features the couple’s 12-year-old daughter, Juli Wesley. “That was one reason we had to hurry to produce these shows,” Mr. Wesley said. “Juli was about to outgrow the part.”
Mr. Rudetsky’s contributions, meanwhile, hew more closely to the sensibility of the man who brought you “Chatterbox.” “The Daring Duo” features him and David Turner as a pair of classical musicians running for their lives, while he reteams with the brassy comedian Kristine Zbornik in “Seth and Kristine: Together Again!”
The subject matter of “The Daring Duo” — skilled but imperiled musicians — dovetails with an interest of Mr. Rudetsky’s. His speech is riddled with superlatives like “obsessed” and “brava” and “amazing.” And while he was game for a bit of off-the-record dishing — a much-loved soprano can be “a little sharp,” an acclaimed director was tyrannical in a set of auditions — there was only one subject on which he was willing to drop the upbeat chatter and go for the jugular. “I am on record as having no use for the Broadway musicals that are cutting their orchestras,” he said.
What remaining energy Mr. Rudetsky has left has gone toward creating new theater pieces or rethinking old ones, each with an eye toward more onstage work. They include “Disaster!,” a campy musical love letter to the beloved 1970s disaster movies of his youth, which had a well-received run last year at the Triad Theater.
Ms. O’Donnell, for one, said the only thing getting in the way of Mr. Rudetsky’s success is Mr. Rudetsky. “He’s so frenetic, but the ideal stand-up routine is this beautifully presented package that you and the audience unwrap at the same time, at the same pace,” she said. “He’s phenomenally gifted, if he would only slow down.”
A version of this article appeared in print on March 3, 2013, on page AR6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Theater’s Indefatigable Multitasker.
