Happy birthday to Tony-winning composer Maury Yeston, born Oct. 23, 1945, in Jersey City, NJ. After earning his bachelor’s in music at Yale and his master’s at Cambridge, he taught at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, before returning to Yale to pursue his doctorate and eventually join the music faculty. While teaching at Yale, Yeston attended the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, traveling from New Haven to New York each week.
At BMI, he developed a project he’d begun in 1973: the musical Nine, which made it to Broadway in 1982, earning five Tony Awards, including best musical and best score, and a Grammy nomination. (In 1982, Yeston also became director of the BMI workshop and began two decades of mentoring writers, of which I was fortunate to be one.) Nine later saw a Tony-winning and Grammy-nominated revival in 2003 and an Oscar-nominated film adaptation in 2009. Below is Antonio Banderas and the revival cast in “Guido’s Song” at the 2003 Tonys.
After the success of Nine, Yeston left Yale and began writing his adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. He had completed much of the show and was raising money for a Broadway production when Andrew Lloyd Webber announced his version. Yeston’s show eventually premiered in 1991 at Theatre Under the Stars in Houston.
In 1989, Tommy Tune, who had directed Nine, asked Yeston to work on the score of Grand Hotel. Yeston wrote eight new songs and rewrote about half the lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in November 1989, earning Yeston a Tony nomination for best score. Below are David Carroll and Tony winner Michael Jeter with the original cast in “We’ll Take a Glass Together” at the 1990 Tonys.
Yeston’s next (and most recent) Broadway musical was Titanic, which opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in 1997 and swept all five categories in which it received Tony nominations, including best musical and score. Yeston also received a Grammy nomination for the cast album. His other musical theater works include History Loves Company (1991), In the Beginning (1998), and Death Takes a Holiday (2011). Below is Michael Cerveris and the original cast singing “There She Is” at the 1997 Tonys.