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Hoping for a long-playing hit

Port Washington-raised songwriter Tom Kitt finds his groove with the new musical 'High Fidelity'

BY ROBERT KAHN | Newsday Staff Writer

December 3, 2006

Everyone is a music elitist to some degree, but even the snobbiest audiophile has a weak spot, says the man who has turned one of the past decade's bestsellers into Broadway's latest songfest.

"Say you're on a road trip with four friends and a song comes on the radio," proposes songwriter Tom Kitt, sitting in a Theater District cafe. "All four guys groan, 'Oh God,

turn it off!' And you sit there thinking to yourself, 'Leave it. Leave the song.' But of course at that point, you can't admit you like it.

"Whatever that song is, it's your musical Achilles' heel," says Kitt, a Port Washington native whose first full-scale Broadway show, "High Fidelity," opens at the Imperial Theatre on Thursday.

Musical elitism is an issue near and dear to Kitt as he makes last-minute adjustments to "High Fidelity," which, like Nick Hornby's novel of the same name and the 2000 movie version starring John Cusack and Jack Black, follows the travails of a rock-obsessed record-store owner. Able to come up with a Top 5 list for any occasion, the hero is less adept at communicating with his girlfriend, who has just dumped him for a New Age guru upstairs.

Kitt hopes that a fan base turned on by obscure references to the Velvet Underground will warm to his musical adaptation with its original songs.

Unlike the movie, which featured early Stevie Wonder and music by Katrina and the Waves, Kitt's "High Fidelity" is as much an homage to Hornby's text as it is a showcase for Kitt and lyricist Amanda Green. She is the daughter of actress Phyllis Newman and legendary writer Adolph Green, who co-wrote the book and lyrics for such classics as "Wonderful Town" and the movie "Singin' in the Rain."

"High Fidelity" the musical has a pedigree, too: The book was adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire, author of last season's "Rabbit Hole" and the coming Broadway adaptation of "Shrek." For the Rialto incarnation, he has relocated the story from London (the novel) to Chicago (the Stephen Frears movie) to "a remote neighborhood in Brooklyn."

A career in music

Kitt, 32, is the son of onetime New York Yankees pitching prospect Howard Kitt, who moved his family from Long Island to Westchester in 1987. The singer-songwriter graduated from Columbia University in 1996 and set his sights on a career in the arts, forming the Tom Kitt Band with three buddies. The group would go on to provide tracks for the TV series "Dawson's Creek."

In 1998, three years after "High Fidelity" first hit bookstores, a former high-school teacher recommended the novel as something "a little beneath the radar." Kitt read the story, which begins with album hawker Rob Fleming (Americanized to Rob Gordon for the film) sounding off on his "desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups," and thought immediately that Hornby had the prose of "the greatest singer-songwriter ever."

"You read it and song ideas just leap off the page at you," Kitt says. "I remember thinking, 'Rob is obsessed with pop music. What if that pop music became his voice?'" He began sketching out songs the next year, while he slowly established himself on Broadway, eventually as music director and conductor for shows including "Urban Cowboy" and Mario Cantone's "Laugh Whore."

From 1997 to 2002, Kitt participated in the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, a popular songwriters' support group. He palled around with "Avenue Q" creators Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx and met Green, to whom he offered his services as a piano accompanist.

The two forged a friendship, with Kitt enchanted by Green's ability to move swiftly from emotional material to the "devastatingly funny." They have written songs for Kristin Chenoweth, though "High Fidelity" is their Broadway debut as a composer-lyricist team. They alternate in "taking the lead" in their collaborations, with Kitt's bringing Green music without lyrics half the time and Green's bringing him words in search of a melody the rest.

"Tom doesn't gnash his teeth," according to Green. "You bring him something and he says, 'How about something like this?' If you say no, he just says, 'OK, then how about something like that?' He's incredibly facile in that way. Comedy songs often have to be lyric-driven. I'll come up with a bunch of lyrics and say there's no form here, and he'll say, 'Well, actually, that could be the verse.' I always feel like, between the two of us, one of us will come up with 'the idea.'"

The duo began writing songs for "High Fidelity" about six years ago, but worked slowly because they were unsure if they would ever obtain the rights from Disney. Green got a meeting with a friend at Disney Theatricals and the project moved into high gear after 2003. Her connections helped in other ways, too: She had played Gary Coleman in workshop productions of "Avenue Q" and had an affable relationship with that show's Tony Award-winning producers, Jeffrey Seller, Kevin McCollum and Robyn Goodman, who eventually backed "High Fidelity."

A book, a movie, and now ...

The Broadway story is a slimmed-down version of the book and movie, with Rob played by Will Chase, the good-looking "Lennon" and "Aida" vet whose slacker vibe makes him a credible successor to Cusack. Memorable cinematic scenes with Rob recounting his top five breakups, and then visiting the women involved, have been distilled into one song.

Meanwhile, catchy bits from the novel have been built into songs. For instance, Rob's mother criticizes his relationship pattern: "You meet someone, you move in together, she goes." And Rob's best gal pal delivers a diva-style R&B rendition of "She Goes" in the record store.

Kitt and Green also have constructed an anthem to close the first act that was inspired by a crack from Rob's fleeing girlfriend, who tells him that "9 percent" is the numeric likelihood that she will reconcile with him. Kitt has infused the infectious "9% Chance of Your Love" with a new-wave sensibility detouring into ska by way of Carl Perkins.