Two men…one resounding, loving ‘Big Voice’

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 12 / December 15 - 21, 2006

Photo by Hank Gans

Jim Brochu and Steve Schalchlin, together again in “The Big Voice: God or Merman?” at the Actors’ Temple Theater, 47th Street

By Jerry Tallmer

This is a love story. It is sort of a continuation or an expansion of an Off-Broadway show, “The Last Session,” which nine years ago tore the guts out of almost everybody who came to it. It was a musical about a songwriter who, dying of AIDS, has decided to commit suicide before that other, worse death can take him. Its music and lyrics were by a tall, skinny songwriter named Steve Schalchlin (rhymes with cracklin’), its book was by his lifemate, a big bulky fellow named Jim Brochu, and the core truth about “The Last Session” was that it had sprung into being when Schalchlin, himself dying of AIDS, was pushed by Brochu into writing some songs that seemed to stave off the fatal hour.

Got it?

“The Big Voice: God or Merman?,” now in being at the Actors’ Temple, a theater and synagogue on West 47th Street, is a less disguised — an undisguised — autobiographical look at the long-lasting Schalchlin / Brochu romance, including one brief interval when they split apart before coming back together again.

It has a cast of two. That’s right, Steve Schalchlin plays Steve Schalchlin, Jim Brochu plays Jim Brochu, and between them their wry restatements make for a lot more laughs than in all but a few moments of “The Last Session.”

That’s in the theater. Here, in a makeshift living room in the Times Square area at the end of a recent rehearsal day, Brochu and Schalchlin, nudged by the press, kick the gong around without a script.

“When I was a kid in Brooklyn,” said Brochu, whose mother had died when he was 2, “I wanted to be a priest. The Mass, to me — the incense, the chanting — was like a musical. That’s what attracted me to the Church — the theatricality. I felt it my destiny to be the first Brooklyn-born Pope.”

But one day, reaching in a record bin at random — the “A” bin — 13-year-old Brochu pulled out a disk labeled “Annie Get Your Gun,” and when he put it on the record player, the voice that boomed out seemed as loud and positive as God’s. What was that? Who was that?

Why, it was somebody named Ethel Merman. “Everybody knows you’re either an Ethel Queen or a Judy Queen. Well,” Brochu will say in the play, “I signed up in the Ethel camp.” He ran to tell his dad about Ethel Merman. Jim’s dad, Peter Brochu, said: “I know Ethel Merman. I’m an old friend of her father, Ed Zimmerman. He’s an accountant whose firm keeps the books for Allen & Co., where I work.”

And Peter Brochu took Jim Brochu to “Gypsy,” the big hit in which Merman was at that moment starring. They went backstage after final curtain, and Merman couldn’t have been more cordial. (Years later, she and Brochu would work together in a show.)

“ ‘Gypsy,’ the Broadway Theater. June 20, 1959,” said the Jim Brochu of 2006. “I remember the date very well. The trouble was, I had to go back to my Catholic school where I knew I’d be told I’d burn in hell for seeing ‘Gypsy.’ The Pope had issued an edict against it. Remember Cardinal Spellman?” Throway line: “He was a faggot too.”

“I was 6 years old and in Arkansas,” said Steve Schalchlin, the son of a Mammoth, Arkansas, Baptist minister and a piano-teacher mother who had been a nurse. “I didn’t know Broadway existed until I was 24 years old. I knew movies existed. That was what I thought Broadway was. Fred Astaire musicals.”

And when you were 24?”

“I was in Dallas, Texas, where there was a club on its last legs, the Gran’ Crystal Palace, a place kind of aimed at Old Westerners, if you were French. I wandered in, and they needed a tenor that very day. I was a tenor but a Baptist … ”

You weren’t going to hell …

“Well, I knew I was going to hell because I was gay. They let me sing but kept me out of the dance numbers … ”

“We still do,” said the other half of “The Big Voice.”

“I have Baptist’s feet,” said Schalchlin. “So there I am in the dressing room of the Gran’ Crystal Palace, and all these actors and dancers are talking about Broadway, and I don’t have a clue as to what they’re talking about.”

Two members of that batch were in fact, a couple of years later, heading by truck for Broadway. Schalchlin went along to help them with their furniture. His boyfriend went along for the ride.

“I don’t remember how I got back home, but I do remember Washington Square at 6 o’clock in the morning. Then my boyfriend said: ‘While we’re here, we have to see some shows.’ I said: ‘What shows?’ ”

Which is how “Sweeney Todd” — “a balls-out unbelievable show!” — became the first Broadway production Steve Schalchlin ever saw in his life. That weekend he also saw “Evita” and “Elephant Man,” a play about a human being whom fate has set apart from other human beings.

Big quick jump-cut here to 1985 and the S.S. Galileo, sister ship of Italy’s proud Andrea Doria, which had gone down off Nantucket in July 1956.

Steve: “I had been on the road with a band that broke up. I had $50 in my pocket, was waiting on tables on the Upper West Side, was living in a friend’s apartment while she was away. Then a friend from Dallas told me: ‘There’s this cruise ship needs a pianist. Do you want it?’ ”

Jim: “I had just come out of the seminary, my father had died, I was very scared and didn’t know what I wanted to do. And then” — Brochu stops, gestures, says: “This is why I know there are no accidents in life… I was cleaning out my wallet. Out fell this card for a travel club; the card was going to expire in a week. It advertised a five-day discount cruise to Bermuda for $200. I reached for the phone.”

The S.S. Galileo was adorned with a Fantasy Lounge.

“I went up there the first night, and here was this piano player in a tux, looking very snotty … ”
Steve: “Translate: handsome.”

Jim: “The next night I went back in my tux, and there was only one other person in the room: that piano player. I started singing ‘Falling in love is wonderful,’ and the piano player said: ‘How do you know that song?’ I said I learned it from Ethel Merman. One week later I said: ‘Come live with me’ — and that was 20 years ago. Which is 144 straight years,” said Jim Brochu.

The rest of this story — Steve’s near death, the making and huge success of “The Last Session,” Schalchlin’s resuscitation thanks to the songwriting, the show, and the new miracle AIDS cocktails, his and Jim’s breakup and coming back together again — are told in less than 144 lively minutes at the Actors’ Temple Theatre on West 47th Street, right down the block from where “The Last Session” was once, golden-gloriously, in session.

On May 20, 1999, the S.S. Galileo — renamed Sun Vista — had an engine-room fire that took it to the bottom of the Straits of Malacca. That piano must still be down there in the depths. “Falling in love is wonderful” lives on.

THE BIG VOICE: GOD OR MERMAN? Book by Jim Brochu. Music and lyrics by Steve Schalchlin. Directed by Anthony Barnao. At the Actors’ Temple Theatre, 339 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200.