ARTS&LIFE THEATER
An
Homage to ’80s Music An Officer and a Gentleman comes to the Fisher Theatre.
JULIE SMITH YOLLES CONTRIBUTING WRITER
O
Wes Williams and Mia Massaro star in An Officer and a Gentleman
46
|
JANUARY 27 • 2022
n March 11, 2020, casting for the workshop reading of the musical An Officer and a Gentleman, The Musical was a go. And then Broadway shut down the next day. In April 2020, the first script reading of An Officer and a Gentleman was moved from in-person to Zoom. “And then the world went silent,” said Dan Lipton, An Officer and a Gentleman music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator. “I honestly thought, at that point, that the project would just disappear. But our team at Work Light Productions decided that we would forge ahead. And, with their financial resources and logistical know-how, we were able to have the workshop.” That was in November 2020, pre-vaccine days. So 18 cast members and 10 creatives from the production team went into a quarantined bubble in Cleveland to hold the in-person script workshop. For three weeks, they only went back and forth from the hotel to the rehearsal hall. “That workshop is the reason why the show exists and why we are able to go out on tour,” said Lipton, who has been the music director
for many Broadway legends including Kelli O’Hara, Audra McDonald, Brian d’Arcy James, Sherie Rene Scott, John Lithgow, Judy Kuhn and for Sting’s The Last Ship. The first U.S. tour of An Officer and a Gentleman launched on Oct. 15, 2021, in Elmira, New York, and will come to Detroit’s Fisher Theatre Feb. 1-13. Prior to this production, previous versions of the musical were performed in Australia in 2012 and the U.K. in 2018. “The show is all about the American military, so it’s very appropriate that we’re finally putting it on in the U.S.,” says Lipton, who grew up in a cultured, upper middleclass Jewish family in New Jersey and received his music composition degree from Northwestern University. “My songwriting heroes — Stephen Sondheim, Irving Berlin, Stephen Schwartz, Marvin Hamlisch and Oscar Hammerstein — were all Jewish.” As a kid, Lipton, 46, attended Broadway shows, performat at arts summer camp, the high school preparatory division of Mannes School of Music in New York City and watched MTV. “Those MTV hits are
