The story is a classic, but the distinction is in its telling.
With the use of a single whitewashed door on wheels, Paul Scott Goodman’s Rooms: A Rock Romance cleverly orchestrates each entrance and exit in the lives of two young Scots. The duo comes to New York in search of romance and rock ’n’ roll, and learns a little something about the transience of success and the permanence of love along the way.
A composer, lyricist, and writer, Goodman had some trepidation about coming back to the New York stage for a recent performance—after all, it’s been exactly 10 years since his freshman effort Bright Lights, Big City opened to less than stellar critical acclaim and quickly closed. But Goodman, like the characters in Rooms, seems excited to break down the fourth wall this time around. He’s even read all the reviews.
“The attitude of this show is this,” said Goodman, a native Scot who wears his tinted blue glasses both in- and outdoors. “You don’t need 50 million dollars to write a musical. If you’ve got an instrument, two or three great performers, and some good material, you can have a musical.”
Sitting just beyond the stage door at New World Stages—where Rooms is getting its off-Broadway debut—Goodman spoke about the many incarnations of this production. Beginning work on the musical in March 1999, he said, “It’s kind of weird for me because not a lot of material in the show is brand new.” Goodman worked on Rooms in between other projects like Bright Lights, Big City and Alive in the World, so “a lot of it has been tried and tested, and I kind of know what’s working,” he said.
Rooms got its first run during the 2005 New York Musical Theater Festival. Both, director Scott Schwartz (son of Broadway mega-composer Stephen Schwartz) and co-book writer Miriam Gordon (Goodman’s wife), have been involved with the show since its inception. After recognizing that the second half of the script needed work, Goodman and his team revamped the material for a reading at the now-defunct Zipper Factory in October 2006. More recently, the show enjoyed a successful out-of-town tryout in Washington, D.C., which enabled producers to get it up and running in Midtown earlier this year.
Goodman explained that the transatlantic story hits close to home, as he himself moved from Scotland to New York City in 1983. “The show started off with the premise of me being this Scottish, middle-class Jewish kid, who collaborated with this Catholic working class boy to write songs,” said Goodman. And it was this challenge of writing a small-scale show that ultimately kept him working on the project. “How do you write a two-person musical and keep it interesting ... rely totally on the performances and the material and yet make it universal?” he added.
The result is a musical with a strong voice and a lot of heart, that has caused the critics to reconsider the talents of this now seasoned musical composer. Rooms’ co-stars Leslie Kritzer and Doug Kreeger infuse Goodman’s music with a constant carnal energy, taking the audience along for the ride, as they move from working at a bat mitzvah to booking gigs at CBGBs.
And Goodman—who still feels the rush each time he sees a Rooms advertisement in the subway—is just grateful for the experience. “To get a show up in the best of times is a miracle, and to get a show up now is a double miracle,” he said.
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