Well-known radio host and American Musical Theater guru Bill Rudman will bring his popular WCLV-syndicated show, "Footlight Parade", to the third Chautauqua at Chagrin program in Chagrin Falls on Tuesday, July 27. His 4:00 pm appearance in the Chagrin Valley Little Theater is entitled "Everything I Know About Life I Learned from Musicals" and will be recorded for broadcast next February. We reached Bill Rudman by phone at his home in Lakewood to chat about his long connection with musical theater and the radio.

 

Rudman was first bitten by Broadway when he was a kindergartner growing up in Willoughby. "I always tell the same story! One night my parents said I was allowed to stay up late and watch TV. The show they wanted me to watch turned out to be Mary Martin doing Peter Pan. I was blown away by it. I still remember that the next day my parents ordered the LP from Halle Brothers and pretty soon the mailman delivered the record. I was so excited opening it up! I still have that record -- it's all dog-eared and virtually unplayable now, but it started me on a lifetime of record collecting".

 

Bill Rudman went off to college at Hiram and soon after his graduation began working in public relations for Great Lakes Theatre Festival. He soon crossed paths with WCLV's Robert Conrad, who shared his love for the American Musical. "When I was in high school, Bob used to have his own Saturday evening Broadway show on WCLV following the Boston Pops and before "Saturday Night. I used to listen to that whole lineup -- unfortunately I had no social life as a teenager, but I was certainly exposed to a lot of great stuff. In May of 1983, I finally had the guts to invite Conrad to lunch to pitch a Broadway radio show of my own. I asked him, 'Can I take a crack at doing what you used to do?'" Conrad, who loved American Musicals, agreed and hired him to start in two weeks at $35 a show. "Broadway Melodies" turned into "Footlight Parade", and Rudman is still producing a weekly show. "I just keep doing the same thing after all these years, but hopefully I keep doing it better and better."

 

Meanwhile, Bill Rudman developed plans that went beyond the radio show under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, The Musical Theater Project. "I wanted to create an infrastructure for the program because I wanted to see it get syndicated, which it is. It's heard on about 90 public stations and on Sirrius XM satellite radio as well. I wanted to develop educational programming to help raise consciousness of people to this great American art form. Over the past ten years, we've developed a very extensive concert and cabaret series that we do all over the seven county area, a school program for K-3 called 'Kids Love Musicals' and we've embarked on various recording projects. It's pretty ambitious for an organization that's run by just two people".

 

"The other person is a woman named Heather Meeker. I've known her since she was in graduate school at Virginia Tech where I did a seminar in the mid-90's. We clicked and knew that eventually we'd work on something together. She's originally from the Akron area, she came back here and is now married with a couple of kids. She's the managing director and she's moving mountains every day -- which is just the kind of person you want in that position".

 

Bill Rudman's Chautauqua in Chagrin program next Tuesday was partly inspired by previous remote broadcasts. "Bob Conrad and I started doing taped radio broadcasts at Cain Park in the early 90's even though he told me, 'This is crazy. Nobody's going to want to come hear you play records'. But we found out that people enjoyed it. If you did it in a compelling and entertaining way with useful introductions to the recording cuts. On Tuesday, it'll just be me, the audience, and cuts from sixteen recordings".

 

The "very cheeky" title ("Everything I Know...") was suggested by Rudman's colleague Lainie Hadden. "She is one of my trustees and a fellow musical theater fanatic. She said, 'You know, Bill, this would get their attention and you and I both know there's an element of truth to it'. The way I do this is by suggesting that most of us think of musical theater as this wonderful, escapist art form -- and it is -- but what I try to do is lay out eight topics that have been explored deeply by the art form that raise the ante a bit in the discussion of what a musical can do. The topics are Love -- we talk about songs that show us fresh views of love -- Sex, Dreams of Utopia, Patriotism, America's Social Conscience, we talk about aging, we even talk a bit about Death -- all of these themes explored in song -- and we wind up with a few examples of musicals exploring philosophy of life, all in sixty minutes!".

 

I asked Bill Rudman to name his top three titles from the whole repertory of Musical Theater. "It all depends on what day you catch me. I usually say my three favorite musicals are -- in no particular order -- Rodgers & Hammerstein's 'Carousel', and two by Sondheim, 'Follies' and 'Sunday in the Park With George'. Some of those cross over with opera in very compelling ways -- and 'Sweeny Todd' may be the second greatest American opera after 'Porgy & Bess' ".