For Kent Gash and Darius de Haas, Billy Strayhorn was much more than just the kid from Pittsburgh who enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration with jazz icon Duke Ellington.
“If you’re a jazz lover, then Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn are at the top of the pyramid,” said Gash, an accomplished Broadway theater director and 1982 Carnegie Mellon University graduate. “They’re royalty and the great geniuses of the music.”
De Haas, a Broadway actor and concert singer who has been known to perform Strayhorn’s work, took his admiration even further: “Billy Strayhorn was in the slow but steady zeitgeist that we as Black gay men grow up with. He was always in the periphery. For those of us Black gay men who are very sensitive to things and want to connect to something ... Billy Strayhorn truly is our north star, in a way.”
With all that in mind, you can imagine what a thrill it has been for Gash and de Haas to be shepherding along “Billy Strayhorn: Something to Live For,” Pittsburgh Public Theater’s new musical about Strayhorn’s life and work making its world premiere Sept. 19 at Downtown’s O’Reilly Theater and running through Oct. 11. Gash is directing and co-wrote the book for “Something to Live For,” while de Haas has the honor of embodying Strayhorn himself.
Tickets for “Billy Strayhorn: Something to Live For” are available via ppt.org. There has been some early buzz surrounding its future Broadway potential, but neither Gash nor de Haas are worried about that at this point in the show’s development.
“What we have aspirations for is to make the very best piece of theater about an iconic American genius as we possibly can,” Gash said. “If Broadway is its destination point or part of its journey, that’s great. But what’s most important is that we spread the gospel of Billy Strayhorn and the genius of jazz, Black excellence and creativity as something that’s uniquely American.”
The show follows de Haas’ Strayhorn as he emerges from a humble Pittsburgh upbringing and starts establishing himself as an all-time great jazz composer. The “Something to Live For” cast also includes J.D. Mollison as Ellington; Keziah John-Paul as Strayhorn’s mother, Lillian, and jazz singer Ivie Anderson; Richard McBride as Ellington’s son, Mercer Ellington; Arielle Roberts as celebrated jazz singers Lena Horne and Billie Holiday; and Charl Brown as jazz pianist Aaron Bridgers.
“Something to Live For” contains a lot of Pittsburgh beyond just portraying Strayhorn’s formative years here. The show’s book was co-written by Rob Zellers, a Youngstown, Ohio, native and Pittsburgh resident who also co-wrote the one-man Art Rooney stage biopic “The Chief” with Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier. Its creative team also includes musical director Matthew Whitaker and producers Steven Tabakin and Billy Porter, both of who hail from the Steel City.
“People don’t know or appreciate who Billy Strayhorn was,” Porter said in an August statement to Deadline. “He was an accomplished musical genius and an openly gay Black man back in the day. His story needs to be told, and Darius de Haas is the perfect person to bring Strayhorn to life. This new musical, under the inspired direction of Kent Gash, deserves to have its world premiere in Pittsburgh where Strayhorn first discovered his love of music.”
Gash also first began exploring his creative side in Pittsburgh as a CMU student studying alongside the likes of “Chicago” director Rob Marshall and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” star Tamara Tunie. He was here last year directing City Theatre Company’s production of “Paradise Blue” and was also instrumental in helping Pittsburgh CLO establish and maintain the Jimmy Awards, a celebration of excellence in high school musical theater nationwide held annually in New York City.
This is only de Haas’ second time in Pittsburgh after a brief stop here years ago with the national tour of “Once on This Island,” a show that happens to boast music written by Pittsburgh native Stephen Flaherty. Both he and Gash grew up in households with great appreciation for jazz. De Haas’ father Eddie was a jazz bassist and his mother Geraldine was a jazz singer whose Duke Ellington tribute following his death in 1974 soon morphed into the Chicago Jazz Festival.
Performing Strayhorn’s music helped launch de Haas’ singing career, so he’s naturally ecstatic to be portraying someone who he feels has “an enigmatic presence in our history” due to being the rare fully out Black man in the early-to-mid 20th century. He has always found Strayhorn’s songs to have a unique quality that invites listeners to “give yourself over to the opening up of his heart.”
“He draws people from so many different parts of life,” de Haas said. “Even though he isn’t as well-known — and we’re going to work on that — people hold him extremely close.”
It’s not often that a new musical gets to debut in its subject’s hometown. After being approached to direct “Something to Live For,” Gash was “chomping at the bit to tell this story” that spoke to him even more deeply thanks to his own familiarity with Western Pennsylvania. He’s excited for Pittsburghers to see the “couple of surprises in what we’re doing” that he thinks they’re particularly equipped to recognize and enjoy.
“Pittsburgh is very dear to me as a city,” Gash said. “It’s important to me that the various ways Pittsburgh impacted Billy’s development are an essential part of the story.”
He brought up how many Atlanta residents still claim “The Color Purple” as theirs since it premiered there in hopes that Pittsburghers who check out “Something to Live For” will also one day be able to proclaim, “I saw it first.” De Haas can tell that this show is “a seminal event” because he knows many folks who are preparing to visit Pittsburgh purely to see it. Like Gash, he’s more focused on “doing the work and [making] it as good to everyone” to worry about eventually taking Broadway by storm.
There’s a solid chance that a lot of Pittsburghers mostly know the Strayhorn name because it adorns the Kelly Strayhorn Theater in East Liberty. For that reason, de Haas implored local theater enthusiasts to think of Strayhorn as “one of Pittsburgh’s own” as they experience the “beauty and heartache” of his artistic journey through “Something to Live For.”
“I would love for the Pittsburgh audiences who come see the show to really recognize that this is one of your sons, so to speak,” he said. “Look at what he created and who he is, and embrace it.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: September 14, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: September 15, 2023, 8:49 p.m.
