Marvin’s Womb

The last time Bernadette Peters performed with the Kansas City Symphony — at the Music Hall in downtown Kansas City, Missouri — she made an unexpected comment at her introduction that left the packed auditorium groaning: “I’m so happy,” she blurted out, “to be back in Kansas.” The audience forgave her, however, and Peters surely was set straight by her longtime music director, Marvin Laird, who knows the difference between the Kansas and Missouri sides of the city all too well.

Laird was a skinny young pianist from Kansas City, Kansas, who packed his bags and said a final farewell to Cowtown just a couple of years before he met Peters, all of 13 years old then and not yet a star. Peters had a tiny role in a New Jersey production of Gypsy and Laird was the assistant music director.

But Laird, whose parents had won a Depression-era radio contest and gotten married on top of the marquee at Wyandotte County’s long-since-razed Electric Theatre, had show business in his blood. He recognized that Peters, the former Bernadette Lazzaro of Queens, New York, had real star quality.

“She was very shy, but when she opened her mouth to sing, everyone knew that this would be a force to be reckoned with,” Laird tells PitchWeekly, speaking by phone from his dressing room in New York’s Marquee Theatre, where for two years he has been music director for Annie Get Your Gun, which previously starred Peters and Tom Wopat.

Laird’s and Peters’ careers have been interwined for more than 30 years. Wherever Peters goes, Laird is at the piano. When Peters made her Las Vegas debut in 1970, opening for Bob Newhart, Laird was there. When her performance in Annie Get Your Gun won her a Tony three decades later, Laird was around for that too.

From time to time their paths did diverge. Laird worked as conductor for Diana Ross, Mama Cass, and Juliet Prowse and can now laugh that he was the music conductor for some of Broadway’s greatest flops, including the ill-fated Breakfast at Tiffany’s (with Mary Tyler Moore) and a show called One Night Stand, which closed before it even got to Broadway: “It ended with a suicide onstage,” Laird says. “Is that fun or what?”

But his longtime collaboration with Peters has been Laird’s greatest success: “I can’t think of any other artist I’d want a lifetime relationship with,” says Laird, who returns home this week to oversee Peters’ appearance with the Kansas City Symphony. He’ll stick around after the show to spend time with his mother, Vivalore, in Overland Park before hurrying back to Manhattan to smooth the transition for Peters’ and Wopat’s replacements in Annie Get Your Gun (both stars have left the long-running show): former Charlie’s Angel Cheryl Ladd (“She has a lower range than Bernadette but is very believable in the role,” Laird says) and Patrick Cassidy, younger brother of ’70s teen star David (“Patrick is gorgeous, very charming, lovely voice, and an incredible body”).

Laird will stay with the Broadway show until December, but audiences surveying the orchestra onstage won’t catch him in the long, braided “Indian” wig he wore two years ago, when the musical first opened.

“I finally got rid of that stupid thing after the third week,” he says. “One day I just threw it on the floor and said, ‘I didn’t join a Broadway show to wear a wig cap.’ It was ridiculous.”

It’s that kind of rebellion that has inspired Laird and his partner, Joel Paley, to write stingingly funny musicals that are the exact opposite of such old-fashioned crowd-pleasers as Annie Get Your Gun. Their big-gest hit, Ruthless, was a twisted show-business story that blended the nastiest elements from The Bad Seed and All About Eve into a musical romp that ended with an onstage massacre. It’s still produced all over the world.

Laird and Paley went on to write a Jewish variation on the ever-popular Nunsense — The Tsuris Line (formerly titled The Jewsical) is about dueling synagogues (it opens in Florida this month). And they’re currently writing a jazz show called The Jive Piper of Hamlin. They’re also working on a musical version of the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which they hope will attract the attention of Peters’ Goodbye Girl co-star Martin Short.

Until then, Laird is packing for both sides of State Line. “My mother lives in Kansas,” he says slyly, “but Starlight is still, I believe, in Missouri.”