What's New on the Rialto

Ta-Tynisa Wilson, Adrian Galante, John Pagano, and Hilary Kole Photo by Russ Rowland

"Since that experience, I've been racking my brain," Lewin told me recently. He'd long wanted another subject for a revue: one that could match the popularity of the Sinatra show.

Inspiration finally arrived while Lewin was enjoying a jazz cruise about two years ago.

I was talking to a couple of the great jazz pianists, Emmett Cohen and Sullivan Fortner. They were talking about doing maybe a double-piano show and were throwing out names–the typical [ones]: Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hart. And one of them said, "That stuff is great, but it's done to death." He said, "You know, [Burt] Bacharach wrote all of these songs." The two of them started noodling on one piano–this was not during performance hours but during the day–and they were rolling out one song after another. And I said to myself, "You know, I think they're right: What the world needs now is not another Cole Porter musical revue"–and [I thought] how great a Bacharach revue could be.

Lewin's nautical epiphany has now resulted in a show called Going Bacharach: The Songs of an Icon. It opens tonight (following a handful of preview performances) at The Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater at 10 W. 64th Street in Manhattan. Songwriter/director/producer David Zippel helms the three-singer ensemble in a nonprofit production that Lewin is presenting in conjunction with Amas Musical Theatre (Donna Trinkoff, Artistic Producer).

Principal among Lewin's co-creators for Going Bacharach is Australian-born arranger and music director Adrian Galante, who also serves as an onstage musician for this show, playing both piano and clarinet. He also takes the lead in the spoken narration. It could, in fact, be argued that he's the show's star. Galante is a generation younger than Lewin, but his enthusiasm for the Burt Bacharach catalog burns just as brightly as the producer's.

Galante's parents had Bacharach records in their Perth home. But it wasn't until his family attended a concert featuring the composer himself, along with the West Australia Symphony Orchestra, that teenage Galante gained a full appreciation of Bacharach's talents.

"You're seated there for 90 minutes," he recalled, and you're hearing all these songs. I realized, My God, these are so different from any other popular songs ... It was really a life-changing moment, experiencing this stuff."

Why, exactly, Bacharach's songs are so different from those of other pop composers is something I've long wondered about myself. I knew that the answer had at least something to do with shifting time signatures–a component referred to in Going Bacharach's narration as "mixed meter." But, according to Galante, the composer's singularity has most everything to do with these rhythmic shifts. They're most evident, he suggested, in up-tempo compositions, such as the title song from the 1968 Broadway musical Promises, Promises (which Bacharach wrote with his most famous collaborator, lyricist Hal David). When first looking closely at the song, Galante marveled that it changes time signatures five times in the first seven bars. He noted that the shifts happen in Bacharach ballads as well. It's just that they're less noticeable when the tempo is slower.

Galante explained that, as a young man, Bacharach studied with classical composer Darius Milhaud, who also happened to have taught another musical talent with a penchant for mixed meter: jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck. Added Galante: "Harmonically, Burt comes up with chords that have more to do with the classical tradition, I find, than with American popular music or jazz music or standard songs."

The complexity and range of influences heard in Bacharach's music had a role in the selection of the three singers who appear in Going Bacharach. The show's creators wanted an ensemble with varying musical backgrounds.

Hilary Kole is someone Lewin knew well, as she had performed in the original cast of Our Sinatra. Having sung the Sinatra repertoire, however, didn't guarantee that this popular jazz singer would excel with Bacharach tunes. Kole soon made it clear, though, that she had the knack for them. Said Lewin: "We were just so thrilled, from the first time this material got into her hands, how these songs were coming out."

Having John Pagano in the cast is a very special component of the show for both Lewin and Galante. For 26 years Pagano was a featured singer with the touring Bacharach band, and he became both a protégé of and a friend to the composer. Galante, who had remembered seeing and hearing Pagano at that concert in Perth–where he sang the Bacharach and Elvis Costello song "God, Give Me Strength"–declared, "My God, we've got to get him!" He and Lewin both thought the chances of Pagano's participation were slim. But it turned out the singer had moved from L.A. to Rhode Island after COVID had struck, and he was happy to join the cast.

The only cast member to attain her role through an audition is Ta-Tynisa Wilson, a young musical-theatre performer (Hamilton, The Color Purple) who had no clue who Burt Bacharach was when she responded to the casting call, although she soon learned that she was familiar with some of his music. Wilson quickly learned the Bacharach-David classic (and 1964 Dionne Warwick hit) "Anyone Who Had a Heart," nailed it at the audition, and soon became an enthusiastic Bacharach booster who hopes that others of her generation who aren't familiar with the songwriter will join her on the bandwagon.

Lewin knows that the primary audience for this show is 60-somethings and above, but he believes younger listeners may–like Wilson–come to realize that they already know some Bacharach songs. They've probably had some exposure, for instance, to such later compositions as "That's What Friends Are For" and the theme from the movie Arthur, aka "The Moon and New York City." And 1980s babies will likely also recall the Naked Eyes cover of "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me."

Despite their different backgrounds, the three cast members of Going Bacharach sound particularly good together on the group numbers, according to Galante, who finds a more interesting vocal blend with diverse singers than with those who sound alike.

Hiring Zippel as director was as astounding a piece of good fortune as signing Pagano had been. Lewin and Galante sent him a videotape of a workshop staging of Going Bacharach from spring of 2025. Said Lewin: "He called me, and he said, 'I love this. I want to do it. I have a bunch of ideas.' So that was very flattering to us."

Other personnel on the creative team include pop and jazz expert Will Friedwald and the highly respected music supervisor Tedd Firth, who has served as another pair of ears for Galante in rehearsals.

One of the creators' biggest challenges has been to determine which songs from the Bacharach catalog to include and in what order they should be presented. There was some precedent to be found in a couple of previous Bacharach revues: Broadway's The Look of Love (2003) and the West End's Close to You (2015), an earlier version of which was called What's It All About? Bacharach Reimagined. Lewin and Galante were aware of these shows, but they chose to keep them at a distance and not let them cloud their own artistic vision.

The team realized that they needed to feature such Bacharach megahits as "Close to You," "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" and "Alfie." But they wanted room for some surprises too: songs that even savvy audience members aren't familiar with–or songs that people recalled but didn't know Bacharach had composed. The team briefly considered including only Bacharach & David songs, but they soon realized they didn't want to exclude such later beauties as "God, Give Me Strength."

Lewin and Galante stressed that musicians in the Going Bacharach band are almost like cast members. Their presence will be strongly acknowledged, said Lewin: "We wanted to have enough instrumental moments in the show and not just fill it with singing at every moment, because Adrian's arrangements are so good–and Burt's music deserves to be played without necessarily being sung all the time."

For Galante, arranging the music for the project has been "a ball": "I was able to use elements of jazz, pop, funk, rock, film-score-y kind of stuff. The palette is wide open to do whatever you possibly could. And Jack–and all the creative contributors–allowed me to paint the picture as I saw it. Which is really rare ... Sometimes the confines are really, really narrow. With this, I had [a] wide scope."