NEW YORK -- Michael Rice is out of tissues, so he hands his guest a dish towel. "Just blow your nose on this, and I'll toss it in the wash," he drawls.
Then he bustles about, stacking cookies on a plate and pouring coffee. Rice is informal and hospitable. He stretches the word "God" into two syllables, as in "Oh, Ga-wd, I'm a Delta boy." He mourns Manhattan's lack of fried peach pies and passable barbecue, sells antiques in flea markets for fun, and spends spare moments watching deer gather in the yard of his Pocono Mountains cottage, 80 miles west of Manhattan.
Rice, 61, has been arranging and directing music for theatrical shows since 1976. He has worked with actors such as Anne Bancroft and Lucille Ball and directors such as Frank Galati and Richard Jenkins. He co-wrote an adaptation of The Good Woman of Setzuan, a 1943 Bertolt Brecht play about the dangers of materialism, into a musical and worked in Little Rock, New York and all over America.
But to see Rice in his eclectic, rent-controlled, Upper East Side apartment -- the same one that, fresh out of college, he shared with three other Arkansans aspiring to make it big in the Big Apple -- is to glimpse the dreamy Desha County boy of decades past.
That boy lived in Watson, where high schoolers played basketball in a gym bearing his father's name, and most people farmed land that belonged to someone else. At night the barges lit up the Mississippi River, and he stood on the bank, contemplating a world beyond the murky expanse. Just across the river was Rosedale, Miss., and Michael imagined children standing at the edge of their world, wondering about him.
Ask his friends to name their favorite Michael Rice song and the answer is nearly unanimous: "Fireflies and Shooting Stars," a nostalgic ballad composed for a play called American Beauty. Cliff Baker, founder of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, co-wrote the play, a respectful satire inspired by Rice's sisters' experiences in beauty pageants. But the song ("Tomorrow's dreams come from simple things/like watching fireflies and shooting stars") was inspired by Rice's experiences growing up in a town he likens to "the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird."
Michael's sister Diane, five years his elder, took piano lessons from a nun in neighboring McGehee. As a first-grader, Michael would mimic Diane, sitting at the piano and plucking out the childhood classic, "Down on Grandpa's Farm." So his mother, Bonnell Rice, decided that Michael should have lessons as well.
Sister Genevieve thought Michael was too young to learn. After he played for her, she changed her mind. "It was classical music," Rice says. "We weren't playing junk."
Diane and Michael would watch The Lawrence Welk Show and then retreat to Michael's bedroom to re-create the episode. Diane sang and twirled, while Michael played the piano. Even before he reached middle school, Michael was the town's go-to accompanist. He played for weddings, Methodist church services and elementary and high school plays.
"Everyone loved him. He was so adorable, walking up, little, to play the piano," says Diane Rice.
The Rice family was outside the norm for Watson in that both parents had earned college degrees. Some summers they packed up the kids -- Diane, Michael and Rhonda -- and headed to Fayetteville. While the elder Rices took classes at the University of Arkansas, the little Rices played in the on-campus museum. In the pioneer room, they mounted the taxidermy moose.
"I think we rode a lot of the hair off of that moose," Diane says.
Michael's father, Raymond Rice, eventually became the Watson school superintendent, overseeing racial integration in 1961 and starting a band program.
The school had no football team, but there was Yellowjackets basketball. It took Michael two tries to make the team. He was skinny and uncoordinated, and his teammates called him Twiggy, after the model. His career scoring tally is two points.
When Rice was 15, his parents drove him to Northwest Arkansas to audition for a job as a piano player for Dogpatch, USA, the now-shuttered theme park. For three summers, he lived in Harrison, playing ragtime in a Li'l Abner stage show. During his senior year at UA, Rice and other music majors carpooled to New Orleans to audition for jobs at California's Disneyland.
Rice auditioned as a piano player, but he had also prepared a song and soft-shoe number, drawing on performances he'd seen on those Lawrence Welk shows and his sisters' dance recitals and techniques learned in a college theater class.
"I'll be damned if they didn't hire me as a singer and a dancer," he says, laughing.
While still in college, Rice saw Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music at the Arkansas Rep. It wasn't the first musical he'd seen (that would have been Hello, Dolly! with Carol Channing at Robinson Auditorium), but A Little Night Music convinced Rice that he no longer wanted to be a high school band director.
"I thought, 'I don't want to stay here and teach. I want to go to New York and do musical theater,'" he says.
But he didn't have any savings, so when he graduated from UA in 1977, he moved to Little Rock and was hired to put together a musical revue for Community Theater of Little Rock. In his mind, the roughly $1,000 paycheck "was a million dollars." He bought a plane ticket and called John Benson, another UA theater graduate and the only person he knew in Manhattan.
LITTLE ROCK, BIG APPLE
Rice rented a four-room apartment in Benson's building, and he and two other recent graduates split the $263 rent. At first Rice worked as a bank clerk, making $93 a week. Then he supplemented his pay playing piano for ballet classes and performing at piano bars.
In 1985, Rice returned to Little Rock to premiere Good Woman at The Rep. He had spent nearly a decade adapting the play that he'd first read in college. Baker directed the production, which was too big for The Rep's facility at the time, a 120-seat church sanctuary. So they staged Good Woman at the Arkansas Arts Center, with an eight-piece orchestra and a 27-person cast.
"I didn't break the barrier of the fourth wall until the end of the play, which is when the lead character exposes her breasts to the judges, which is also the audience. So that in itself was shocking," Baker says. He knew Good Woman would be expensive and noncommercial, but he didn't care. He thought the show was worth the investment.
"When I sat down at the piano, and Mike played me through the first third of the show, the music was so exciting; it was an easy sell," Baker says. "It's got some meat underneath the facade of the music, and Mike wrote some tender little ballad pieces."
Rice was on a roll. After Good Woman he returned to New York and got his first break, as the arranger and original musical director of Dan Goggin's Nunsense. The show became a mega-hit with a decade-long run -- one of the longest in off-Broadway history. It won four Outer Critics Awards (the off-Broadway equivalent of a Tony) in 1986 and spawned six sequels, a television series and a straight-to-video movie.
"I wish it had been my own writing, but it wasn't. At least my talent helped make that piece the hit it was," Rice says.
He worked with Nunsense on and off for seven years, and afterward never had to take a job that didn't genuinely hold his interest. Among the interesting jobs: arranging music for Broadway touring productions of Cats, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar; music for the film Bert Rigby, You're a Fool; and scores for a host of regional productions.
"I've worked at some of the best regional theaters in the country. I'm very proud of that," Rice says. "I'm drawn to the idea of art for art's sake, not because there's a TV star in it."
(BACK)STAGE NOTES
When people discuss Michael Rice, three words are in heavy rotation: talented, funny and Southern.
"Even though Michael's lived in New York for almost 40 years, he's a true Southern artist," says his friend Randy Auman, who was born in Harrison and now lives near Rice's Poconos home. "He's never forgotten his Arkansas roots. Not only has he not forgotten, he embraces them."
At Trinity Theater in Rhode Island, where Rice has worked on eight musicals in eight years, the staff has "Rice-isms" -- quips they use to channel Rice when he's not around.
The best Rice-ism comes with a story: During a production of Camelot, the actor playing Lancelot forgot the second verse of his solo. He stood there, silent and panicked, as several beats passed, and finally the music died out.
Then from the orchestra pit someone shouted, "soul of the ni-ay-ght, soul of the ni-ay-ght," with broad, Southern vowels. The actor started singing, the music started up, and the show continued.
"So now we'll walk around going 'soul of the ni-ay-ght,' in his adorable little Arkansas accent," says Kurt Columbus, Trinity Theater director.
Arkansans have their own Rice-isms.
Jana Beard and Rice were dancers in a Rep production of Seesaw. Because they only had scenes at the beginning and end of the show, they would dash to a nearby fast-food place and eat during the middle, still wearing their sparkly costumes.
"Michael would buy corn dogs there. He always talked about corn dogs," Beard says.
Years later, Beard danced in Good Woman, at one point moving downstage toward Rice, who was playing piano and conducting. When she was directly in front of him, Rice stood up and held out a mustard-slathered corn dog.
"If I had not taken it he would have been standing there, the whole audience watching, with a corn dog in his hand. So I had to take it. I had to get it off stage," Beard says.
The incident inspired a few years of annual Miss Corn Dog pageants, fundraisers for The Rep. As King Corn Dog, Rice played the piano. The Afterthought bar in the Heights served corn dogs, fries and Moon Pies, the door prize was a Fry Baby deep fryer, and the constants included Miss Highway 10 and Miss Ray Winder Field (original home of the Arkansas Travelers baseball team).
"If there's a piano around, sooner or later Michael is going to be found at it," Baker says. "He's one of those guys that can play 16 bars of every different sitcom, television game show, any musical that you can think of. He's just amazing. He can play any key in any tempo."
Baker describes Rice as "a consummate professional, but he's also totally human and accessible, so singers will open up for him."
"There are two other things that are most important with Michael," Columbus says. "One is his understanding of how music works within a theater event. He doesn't come at it with a rigid understanding. He actually enters the process and then figures out what's needed ... and he's just great working with actors and getting them to sing and act at the same time."
Last year was among the toughest of Rice's life. His mother, struggling with dementia, had to move to a long-term care facility. His 18-year-old cat Walter (a true road warrior, traveling from Manhattan to the Poconos to Rhode Island with Rice) had to be put down. Rice underwent treatment for lymphoma.
"You've got some people who like to broadcast the negative and be martyrs, but everything was really upbeat with Michael," says Little Rock lawyer and singer Kathryn Pryor. "He'd be sitting in chemo and thinking of certain songs. Everything had a positive edge and a sense of humor."
Rice, who has been cancer-free for six months, says his 2015 New Year's resolution is to "try and not be stressed."
"I feel so lucky. My treatment was a piece of cake," he says.
Rice is working on A Delta Family Album, an operetta with author Margaret Bolsterli (who also grew up in Desha County), and traipsing from Salt Lake City, where he's directing music for the May 1-16 run of The Music Man at the Pioneer Theatre Company to Little Rock. He played piano at the Arkansas Art Center's March 14 $750-a-head Tabriz fundraiser. The following week he was off to his old stomping grounds to catch the 55th annual Watson Fish Fry.
Things haven't turned out as Rice expected, but they've turned out, even so.
"I came here to become a composer-lyricist, and I've done it, but I have not become the next Stephen Sondheim or Irving Berlin. ... I never thought I would be a music director/conductor, but that's what I do more of these days," Rice says. "I'm an organic person. I'm a slow starter. I just believe in the flow of stuff."
High Profile on 04/12/2015