Most people can’t say they’ve ever lost a million dollars on Broadway, or that after doing so they decided to become an artist and wound up with their work in the Guggenheim. But most people are not David Black.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Black’s life story is one worthy of the big screen, and in fact has already made its way to the stage with Black, fittingly, playing the lead. Yet before this Broadway producer turned internationally acclaimed artist hits the stage at the La Grua Center in Stonington to perform his self-produced show, Falling Off Broadway, the Times caught up with Black to learn more about his life and the road less traveled.
Growing up, Black said he always had a love for show business and aspired to make his mark on stage, even performing in his first show, The Greatest Show Off Earth at age 8 in his grandfather’s living room. As a young adult Black had learned to play the violin, sang opera, and acted in various shows, yet by 1958, by his own admission, didn’t have a nickel to his name. To earn a living Black had to put his dreams on hold and wound up working on Wall Street as a salesman, where he learned very quickly how to raise money in a hurry.
Financially successful but unfulfilled, Black began to feel the gravitational pull of show business once again but now found he had learned some useful skills to help him break in.
“A producer raises money, and I was qualified to do just that,” Black explained. “So this was a chance to get somewhere near something I loved, namely theater.”
And thus the beginning of what would end up being a lifelong journey through the arts began. From 1960 to 1972, Black produced 18 Broadway shows, but after 12 years of being what he called “the money man,” Black was still feeling creatively stifled.
“Here I am a Broadway producer—you know, everyone thinks of Broadway producers as some kind of god or something, but in fact they are usually some unhappy people,” Black said. “In any case I’m paying the salaries of all these actors and directors, I’m employing them but the producer is not even included in artistic discussions, so I made a rule and I told myself I wasn’t producing any more shows unless I could direct them as well.”
Finally involved in a creative process he loved, Black continued to produce and direct Broadway and off-Broadway shows for eight years. In 1980 his luck would turn because of a hit show.
“I was now a director as well and really enjoying being so involved with theater and then I had the misfortune to direct a hit,” Black said. “It was great because it was an off-Broadway show called The Guys In The Truck in a tiny theater with a no-name cast. And Mel Gussow from The New York Times showed up and wrote a rave review and it sold out for six months.
The only problem was that every time it sold out it lost money because there were 10 people in the cast and 54 people in the theater. That was the economics of Broadway and it was killing me there. So now I have this rave review in The New York Times as a director but the play was going to close because of the economics of Broadway.”
In an attempt to keep a good thing going, Black decided to move the play to a much larger theater on Broadway but needed to raise $950,000 to do so. Deciding it was nearly impossible to do with an unrecognizable cast, Black flew to Hollywood to speak with a few of the stars with whom he was acquainted, including Jack Lemmon and Gene Hackman. With somewhat warranted trepidation, Lemmon and Hackman both turned down Black’s offer, wanting instead to make the show into a television series. With Broadway on his mind, Black searched for someone to headline his show and came to terms with Elliot Gould. With star power on his side, Black was able to quickly raise the necessary funds and the show was set to hit Broadway, except for one small dilemma.
“We got into rehearsal and within a few days I discovered I couldn’t hear [Gould] beyond the 10th row in the theater,” Black explained. “So here I am with the money and the show is about to open and I had to fire him. But I fired him and I wasn’t worried because the understudy was Harris Laskaway who played the original role when it was off-Broadway. So I’ve got the money, I’ve got the same cast, and Mel Gussow comes back out to see the show and writes a review which I guess was tepid...he said some nice things here and there but in the first paragraph he noted that Elliot Gould, who was supposed to be the headliner, wasn’t in the show. Well, Broadway is like the stock market; everybody panics and runs like crazy when they’re scared of something. So as soon as everyone found out that the star was no longer in the show, no one showed up and we had to close the show, and I lost $950,000 and it really knocked me down.”
Having worked his way up through the ranks of the world of theater since 1960, Black was crushed by the Broadway mishap and, depressed, came to Stonington, which he had discovered in 1979, and took a hiatus from his New York life. Black began to draw as an emotional outlet, and what began as small, simple line sketches, soon became a short book about what had happened and Black’s life at the time. As a joke of sorts, making fun of the traditional cheery Christmas cards, Black sent his book out to his friends during the holidays. What he didn’t know was that his girlfriend, Anne Rivers, who is English, was well acquainted with the girlfriend of esteemed English artists Patrick Caulfield and John Hoyland of London’s Royal Academy of Art. Upon seeing his work, Hoyland encouraged Black to continue to draw, telling him that his drawings were “quirky and arresting” with their “twitchy edginess” and that his line had “a life of its own” and even to start painting.
Within a few years Black had begun showing his sketches and his book, Drawings was published and now resides in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Told by Hoyland not to study art under a professor, because he might get a bad teacher, Black decided to work on his own. In 1985 Black created his first painting, a vibrant oil of the old Stonington Borough Firehouse and was hooked. He began painting a wide variety of social scenes, landscapes, and cityscapes.
First gaining exposure in England and later earning praise in the U.S., Black’s work has been featured in numerous museums and art galleries around the world and in such notable publications as The New Yorker in 1998, where critic Grace Glueck wrote of his “nicely observed New York Vignettes,” and “cartoony, untutored oils, bubbling with color, unabashedly tackling everything from landscape to social mores.”
In 2004 Black was honored at the White House for his participation in the ART in Embassies Program, which sees American artists loan their work to the American embassies in various countries. And in 2008, Black was invited to Tunisia where he is staying for two weeks, from Oct. 26 through Nov. 8, to be honored for his work and to instruct master classes on his style to a handful of promising Tunisian artists. Upon his return home Black will come full circle, back to his first artistic love, theater, as he performs Falling Off Broadway at the La Grua Center in the Stonington Borough on Saturday, Nov. 15 at 8 p.m.
“My whole life in a way has been a search to find my own creativity, I was just sort of assuming it was there,” Black explained. “My mother was an expert on Shakespeare, but she quoted things at the wrong time. When I didn’t do the dishes she’d say, ‘Assume your virtue if you have it not.’...It’s very interesting because Shakespeare was some kind of genius, and to me, ‘Assume your virtue if you have it not,’ is the essence of the creative process. In other words you have to assume that you can do something in order to try to do it. And I also believe that what you want to do you can do.”
Black seems to be proof of that himself.
By Russ Morey
Times Staff Writer
For tickets to Falling Off Broadway visit the La Grua Center at 121 Water St. or call 535-1030. Tickets are $50 each and all proceeds will go to the benefit of the La Grua Center.