This week in the life of Seth Rudetsky, Seth shares stories from a recent interview with Be More Chill composer Joe Iconis, plus teases upcoming concerts with Jeremy Jordan and Gavin Creel.
It’s not that I forgot to write my column this week, it’s just that I kept putting it off and it’s now Friday. Regardless, here it is! Last week was my second week in L.A. and it was basically me in my hotel room with the flu and James repeatedly saying, “I better not get sick.”
My friend Marco Pennette offered to cater a full dinner party for me and my friends on my birthday (February 28) but the doctor told me that I was still contagious until I had 24 hours with no fever. Sadly, by Wednesday morning I still had fever, so I put the kibosh on the party. Ugh! I was so disappointed…although, I don’t know if my guests were that upset since I insisted it be a full vegetation meal. I guess it’s passive aggressive to invite people to dinner and then tell them their meal is basically a side salad. It reminds me of Dick Scanlan (with whom I did Pageant and who wrote the script and lyrics to Thoroughly Modern Millie) who always used to say, referring to the amount of travel time, “It’s rude to invite people to a party in Brooklyn.”
I had composer/lyricist Joe Iconis on Seth Speaks, my SiriusXM talk show. He told me that in 2012, he was doing one of his signature concerts and Joshua Safran approached him afterwards and told him that he was the new showrunner of Smash and he was interested in Joe writing music for the show. Joe later found out that Josh was a fan of his and had seen a lot of his concerts and when he submitted his spec script to get Smash, he used Joe’s song “Broadway, Here I Come” as a plot point! He actually based aspects of songwriter Jimmy Collins (played by Jeremy Jordan) on Joe.