He Knows Broadway, Year by Year. Offstage, 2018 Was a Personal Worst.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/nyregion/scott-seigel-broadway.html

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Scott Siegel plans to walk across a stage not far from Broadway on Monday night and introduce songs from musicals that lit up the nearby marquees — in 1928 and 1935.

He will probably get some applause just for walking across the stage, one uneasy, uneven step after another, steadied by a cane, after a disastrous 2018, a year not celebrated in Monday’s show.

Mr. Siegel is the impresario behind “Broadway by the Year,” a series at Town Hall that anthologizes Broadway shows by the year in which they had their premieres. It draws a nostalgic crowd, largely people like Mr. Siegel, a baby boomer uncomfortable about having his actual age published. But it also has some appeal among younger song-and-dance fans who want to hear Broadway tunes from before “Cats” or “A Chorus Line” that are rarely performed anymore.

When he gets around to staging his show about 2018, his personal drama may eclipse “Mean Girls,” “King Kong” or “The Prom.”

Last October, he was riding a CitiBike to a rehearsal of a show to be staged later in St. Louis, a spinoff of another project. The rehearsal was in the West 50s in Manhattan. “Somebody’s apartment who has a piano,” he explained.

That meant pedaling across town from his apartment in the East 50s.

“I was late and it had rained,” he said. “I was hurrying to get there.”

He knew the terrain: the descent on West 55th Street and the uphill section on 10th Avenue, where he planned to turn.

“Anybody who’s ever ridden a bicycle knows that if you have to go up a steep hill, you want to get as much momentum behind you before you turn,” he said, “so I was going as fast as I could.”

Probably not as fast as the pack in the Tour de France, but fast enough that when he saw a pedestrian step off the curb, he had no more than a nanosecond to rethink the turn. He figured the options were to go wide, which would put him in front of the pedestrian, or short and sharp, which would leave him behind the man.

He chose short and sharp. It was the wrong call.

“The bike hydroplaned out from under me,” he said, “and I slammed into 10th Avenue.”

To hear Mr. Siegel tell it, the unfolding drama was peopled by helpful extras, starting with a couple of bystanders. One asked, “Can you get up?”

He played the role of the indefatigable, ever-practical New Yorker. To one of them he said, “I’ll shake this off, give me a minute.”

To the other, he said: “Can you take the CitiBike that’s lying in the middle of the street and put it in the rack?” There was a dock less than a block away; he worried that CitiBike would assess a charge if the bicycle was not properly returned. (CitiBike waives late fees for riders involved in accidents, a spokeswoman said.)

He still figured that he would be up and rehearsing again before long.

After 19 days in three hospitals, a three-hour operation and four pins in his broken pelvis, he went home.

So he missed the rehearsal, but the St. Louis show went on. “It was one of the rare times I was ahead of the game. It was cast, the songs were assigned, the script was pretty much written,” he said.

He did miss a performance of another of his productions at Feinstein’s/54 Below two days after the accident. From his hospital bed, he wrote checks to pay the cast.

Some of the performers tore them up. One of Mr. Siegel’s regulars, the pianist Ryan Shirar, started a GoFundMe campaign that has raised about $24,000 for Mr. Siegel’s bills, which included rent on a temporary apartment. His own place, in a building between First and Second Avenue, was off limits. “There are five steps down from the street to the lobby,” he said, “and I couldn’t take steps.”

He planned Monday’s show at Town Hall between physical therapy sessions. The “Broadway by the Year” series, which started in 2000, was a career change for Mr. Siegel, who with his wife had written more than 40 books, including “Jack Nicholson: The Unauthorized Biography,” “Richard Chamberlain: An Actor’s Life,” “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood” and “American Film Comedy.” They had also written as critics for a number of publications and websites; currently, they write “The Siegel Column” for theaterpizzazz.com.

“Town Hall, even though it’s in the theater district, did not have any theater-centric programming,” he recalled. “They wanted a theater audience. I had the idea for ‘Broadway by the Year.’ I didn’t have the title but I had the idea. They said, ‘Would you produce it for us?’ I said, ‘Happy to do it, but I haven’t produced anything in my life, not even a puppet show in the backyard” when he was growing up in Fair Lawn, N.J.

He started with 1943, “for the heavy anchor of ‘Oklahoma!’” — the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit — and got a taste of the performer’s life.

“Five minutes before the first curtain, I peeked out from stage left and saw the audience was full,” he recalled, “and I started to quake, literally shaking. I said, ‘I can’t go out there. I have to find a way to calm down.’” He did so by telling himself the audience was not there to see him but the performers he had hired. He said he has not had a case of nerves since.

Monday’s show will look at how music changed as Broadway went from the Roaring Twenties into the Great Depression. For 1928, he will highlight the shows that introduced “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “Makin’ Whoopee;” an operetta called “The New Moon” because, he said, operettas were big on Broadway in the 1920s; and “Animal Crackers,” the Marx Brothers comedy that was later filmed.

The other year on Monday’s bill, 1935, is remembered nowadays for Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” But Mr. Siegel will also look at Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “Jumbo” and Cole Porter’s “Jubilee,” among others.

He will be driven to Town Hall for the performance. He longs to go biking again, but while pedaling on a stationary bicycle is part of his therapy routine, taking to the street is not.

“My wife took my CitiBike key away,” he said.