Banking It All on Robin Hood

Timothy Frey is putting it all on the line.

This comes from putting pen to paper. In 2002, he started thinking that the Robin Hood legend would make a good musical. Now, in 2008, Frey's putting money where his mouth is — on his book, music, and lyrics — by paying for a developmental reading at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. Come this Thursday, Oct. 2 at both 2 and 5 p.m., Robin Hood and his bow and arrow will bow at 37 Arts.

I can say that based on reading the script and hearing the score, Robin Hood has hummable tunes, apt lyrics, colorful characters, and a story with a terrific surprise ending. As we all know, Robbin’ Hood, the show-within-a-show in Curtains, wound up as a substantial success, Here’s hoping that in real life, Frey’s Robin Hood is just as successful.

Frey — pronounced “Fry,” a la Jud — is 53, and, like so many baby-boomers, had his music defined by the Beatles. Growing up in Tatamy, Pennsylvania — where the population hovers a little below or above 1,000 — there wasn’t much else to do but listen to music — or play it. Frey learned guitar, and founded a punk/new-wave band called The Midniters. He wound up scoring three movies that admits were “grade B horror films.” But show music? Tatamy is much more than 45 minutes from Broadway, so Frey had no knowledge of it.

But in 1984, when Frey came to New York with a band called Panty Raid, he saw an ad in the Village Voice requesting a composer for anoff-off-Broadway show that would be called A Modern Vaudeville. He applied, was selected, and wrote. He liked seeing his work get on its feet — and causing an audience to get on theirs, too. Suddenly, theater was a fun new medium, and by the time Frey saw The Who’s Tommy on Broadway in 1993 — “It had passion, power and the emotion, and wasn’t just a ‘rock’ show” — he thought about seriously writing for the theater.

By then, though, he had just started a new job as a sound designer and composer at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, just a few stones’ throw from his boyhood home. What’s more, he and his wife —”my high school sweetheart and number one fan,” he likes to say — were tending to a son, which takes time, and takes time away from finding a project, let alone working on it and finishing it. Every now and then, though, Frey would be reminded of a favorite film from his childhood — The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn as the man who was feared by the rich and loved by the good, and Olivia DeHavilland as the object of his affection.

But Frey was busy at Lafayette, not to mention at the Touchstone Theatre in nearby Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he was a composer — “and lighting designer, AND stage manager, whatever they needed me to do,” he says. His travels also took him in 2000 to Wagner College on Staten Island, where he collaborated with Randy Curcio, head of dance at the school. First they did a parody of The Nutcracker, where Frey had to adapt the classic Tchaikovsky music to hip-hop (hence the show’s title, Busted Nuts). Then they took a new look at Alice in Wonderland — The Other Side of Alice — which used music as diverse as Patsy Cline and the notorious disco version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Says Curcio, “Tim composed a marvelous mega-mix for us.”

Six years ago, Frey started his project in earnest, unaware, of course, that Broadway once had a mammoth-hit Robin Hood. Granted, that one was an operetta that opened in 1891, but it was such a smash that it yielded seven revivals between 1900 and 1944. “O Promise Me,” which was sung at virtually every wedding in the first half of the 20th century, comes from it. That Robin Hood had a happier fate than the one written in 1965 by Lionel (Oliver!) Bart. Twang!! (note the desperate double exclamation points) was one of London’s most notorious flops, though it did eke out a six-week run, not to mention one marvelous song, “With Bells On.”

For a while, it appeared that Frey’s Robin Hood would fare no better than Twang!! Two years ago, when he applied to the New York Musical Theatre Festival, he was rejected. Instead of saying the hell with it, he went back to work, rewrite, and applied again. Two months ago, Jess McLeod, the festival’s director of programming, called and said there was a slot open for a developmental reading, and that considering the dark nature of some shows at the festival — subjects included pedophilia, mutated bedbugs, serial killers, and the Jewish underground — she felt that they could sure use something more family oriented.

Happy ending? Not quite yet. A little-known fact is that those selected for developmental readings at the festival must foot the bills, and the prices can give a foot gout. First comes a $600 participation fee; then the rental of a theater for rehearsals and the eventual showcase runs into the hundreds of dollars a day. Then there’s a director and everything else. “You’ve got to put together your own team,” says Frey, who admits he didn’t take long to call the person he was most hoping would help him: Rusty Curcio.

Curcio read and heard Robin Hood, and was enthusiastic enough to accept the directorial reins and gets Wagner alumni and current students — 21 in all — to do the reading. Meanwhile, that Tim’s small Frey son has grown to college age, and even though he gets free tuition at Lafayette thanks to his daddy’s working there, the current estimate to raise a child from infancy to adulthood is currently a quarter of a million dollars.

So where would Timothy Frey get the five thousand — no, six thousand — no EIGHT thousand, as he now estimates Robin Hood will cost? Given that Frey is a child of the Beatles, it’s a safe bet that he’s never heard “Mother Angel Darling” from the 1973 revival of Irene, but his darling mother has become the show’s angel, putting up all the dough. “She’s 88 years old,” Frey admits, “but I said to her, ‘If Dad were alive, he’d have given it to me.’ But I know she would have given it to me, anyway, even if I hadn’t said that.” As for that high school sweetheart and number one fan wife, Frey concedes, “She’s wailing and not always smiling, but in the end, she’s supportive.”

Thursday will tell. By the time this column fades into the archives, Frey will know if his gamble has paid off or not. Here’s hoping.