Murray Horwitz is a Renaissance man in an age of specialists.
He's been a professional circus clown, songwriter, playwright, public radio executive and arts administrator. He's directed TV soap operas, worked for the New York State Assembly and appeared on stage with performers ranging from Jonathan Winters to Wynton Marsalis.
"Specialization is highly overrated. We are living in an age when everybody is encouraged to specialize ... and we're discouraged from knowing anything outside of our own particular ken," he says.
"I think that way lies madness and death. The whole idea is to know as much as you can about as many things as you can." The 53-year-old Chevy Chase resident makes this pronouncement while sipping coffee on the sectional sofa in the room he calls his media room.
It's a room that contains some of the usual high-tech equipment, but it also has shelf upon shelf of LPs and even 78s. Framed early 20th-century covers of Theatre magazine decorate the walls; displayed behind the sofa are record albums (from jazz to comedy) and books (from poetry to dog photographs).
But while he may be a man of eclectic interests and accomplishments, Horwitz feels a bit self-conscious about the term "Renaissance man." "My mother might say 'Jack of all trades, master of none,' " he admits. Putting it another way, he suggests "dilettante."
"He is a jack of all trades and a master of many," insists Baltimore-born actor Andre De Shields, who starred in two Horwitz Broadway shows.
"What makes him a Renaissance man is the core of innocence and trust with which he approaches life. There's a kind of childlike appeal to Murray Horwitz. He has not lost the wonder. He has not lost the spontaneity. He has not lost the belief that all things are possible and that the universe always says: Yes. That's why he can bring to any situation so many skills, so many abilities, so many talents."
In recent years, those talents have taken Horwitz into the corporate suite. He spent 13 years at National Public Radio, the last five as vice president of cultural programming. He left in July to head the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, a historic Silver Spring movie house now undergoing renovations.
When Horwitz unearths a 30-year-old photo of himself in full clown regalia, it takes a minute to recognize the conservatively dressed man seated before you. But underneath the whiteface, exaggerated painted lips and red ball nose in the photo are the expressive eyes and slightly bushy brows of an animated talker, a man who has, indeed, never lost the playful curiosity of his inner clown. If he hasn't learned as much as he can about all sorts of things, it's not for want of trying.
"He is a knower of things and a knower of people," says director and lyricist Richard Maltby Jr., with whom Horwitz co-wrote the Fats Waller musical Ain't Misbehavin'. A new co-production of the 1978 Tony Award-winning show opens at Center Stage on Wednesday and will have a subsequent run at Washington's Arena Stage in the spring.
"He's a genuine idea person. I've always said Murray will never go hungry because he always has ideas," Maltby says.
Man of many stories
Ain't Misbehavin' was one of Horwitz's best ideas, and there's a story behind that. For that matter, Horwitz has a story about just about everything. There's the story about his late physician father treating Orville Wright (a musical about the Wright brothers, co-written with Bland Simpson of the Red Clay Ramblers, is one of Horwitz's current projects). Then there's the story about Horwitz joining the circus. And, of course, there's the story of how he fell in love with the music of jazz great Fats Waller (1904-1943).
Here's a condensed version of the Wright story. Horwitz comes from Wright's hometown of Dayton, Ohio, and his father's office was across the street from Wright's laboratory. One morning near the end of his life, the famed aviator collapsed from a stroke, and Horwitz's father was summoned. Framed in the house where Horwitz grew up -- and where his mother still lives -- is an autographed picture of the first flight, Dr. Horwitz's bill for $5 and his uncashed check from Wright's estate.
The story about joining the circus goes back to Horwitz's senior year at Kenyon College in Ohio. As his senior drama thesis, he created and performed a one-man comedy show for which he spent five weeks studying physical comedy at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.
"There were three big hurdles to overcome," Horwitz recalls. "I had to get admitted to clown college, which statistically was harder than getting into Yale Law School that year. And the second hurdle was to get Kenyon to let me go, which required a vote of the full faculty. And, you call up your mom and dad and say, 'Ma, Pa, I want to go to the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey clown school.' This when they're paying some extraordinary freight to send you to a liberal arts college."
It helps to know that his parents had done some performing themselves. His father helped work his way through medical school at St. Louis University by singing in the chorus of the Muny Opera and was also a violinist. His mother was a dancer and had done amateur radio acting. They not only supported his whim to attend clown college, his mother persuaded Kenyon's provost to acquiesce as well.
"It turned out to be a godsend, because what I really needed to be was on my own and discover self-discipline for the first time," Horwitz says.
His serious love affair with Waller's music began a few years earlier, when he was a freshman. As a child, he had enjoyed checking recordings out of the public library, first spoken word and documentary records and then jazz. A family friend had mentioned that Waller would appeal to his interests in both jazz and comedy, but it didn't sink in until he checked out a Waller album called Valentine Stomp during a freshman year vacation. He put it on the record player at home and "just went nuts."
He immediately ran downstairs and asked his mother to confirm that there was only one pianist at the keyboard. From then on, he was obsessed. "That was the music and comedy I'd been waiting for my whole life. That was an epiphany."
A number of years passed, however, before he did anything about his obsession. After college, he spent three years as a Ringling Bros. clown; he then did a stint in radio and eventually moved into the political arena, working for the New York State Assembly. He kept up his comedy skills by performing a one-man show about Yiddish humorist Sholom Aleichem.
He was concluding a successful run of An Evening of Sholom Aleichem in Philadelphia when a producer interested in taking it to New York introduced him to Maltby, who went on to direct the show at the Manhattan Theatre Club's cabaret.
One day, Horwitz played some Waller recordings for Maltby. "Nobody in those days knew me for more than five minutes without hearing the words 'Fats Waller' drip from my lips," Horwitz says. Despite some initial reluctance, "Richard got it instantly. He heard ... the joy and the wit and the exuberance."
The pair considered reviving a 1943 Waller musical called Early to Bed. Then they tried writing a traditional book musical about Waller's life. "But that's not what's most important about Fats Waller, even though it's a colorful life and not uneventful one. What's most important about Fats Waller is his music and his comedy," Horwitz says.
When the Manhattan Theatre Club suddenly had an opening at the cabaret, Horwitz and Maltby decided to turn the show into an evening of songs. Finding the songs, however, took some detective work. "Nobody thought of it as great art back then," Horwitz says, explaining that even the publishers who owned them didn't have copies of most of the songs.
"We had titles of something like 600, and we ended up finding about 80 or 90," he says. He unearthed a cache, including "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling," at the Library of Congress with the help of an elderly African-American clerk who led him into the closed stacks. Another song, "Find Out What They Like and How They Like It," showed up in the collection of an architect in Connecticut. Still others, such as "How Ya Baby?", popped up on a reissued French recording Horwitz discovered in the imports section of a New York record store.
Horwitz and Maltby also wound up writing new or additional lyrics to several songs. This turned out to be a useful skill for Horwitz, who went on to supply lyrics for the pop songs in John Harbison's 1999 opera The Great Gatsby. (He comes at his interest in opera legitimately; his wife is a mezzo soprano, and among his many jobs was that of acting director of the National Endowment for the Arts Opera-Musical Theater Program in 1989.)
More than movies
A huge framed poster for the Metropolitan Opera's production of Gatsby is propped against one wall of Horwitz's new office at Silver Spring's Silver Theatre. Conducting an informal tour of the construction site, he explains that he envisions a lot more taking place here than just movies. And a lot more probably will, since the things Horwitz envisions have a way of happening. For instance, there's a little restaurant area that he hopes will be used as a cabaret. Jazz could be performed there, maybe even some Fats Waller.
Whatever direction Horwitz's life takes, his enthusiasm for Waller remains a constant. The oldest of his three children, Alexander Thomas, is named for Thomas "Fats" Waller. And Horwitz acknowledges that there may be some vestiges of Waller's outlook in his own personality.
"One of the things is: Don't take this stuff too seriously -- that's something that he and I have in common," he says.
And he mentions another thing as well: "[Waller] always let you know, with a raised eyebrow or something, that there was at least one more joke inside the one he just told." Whether or not Horwitz's eyebrow is raised, you can bet there's at least one more story inside the ones he has just told.
Ain't Misbehavin'
Where: Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. most Sundays; matinees at 2 p.m. most Saturdays and Sundays. Through Feb. 16
Tickets: $10-$55
Call: 410-332-0033