Eileen Deutsch is a playwright, composer, lyricist, actress, dancer, singer, violinist and founder of a repertory and production company. She best describes herself as one of those “multi-” people. Eileen was inspired to write a musical called Worst in Show after attending an ASCAP showcase of a musical The River, about a small town where the levee was going to break. “I sat there imagining song titles such as There goes my Cow, Swimming in the Kitchen and Only Morons Live on Flood Plains.” She conjured a protagonist, Ned Bronstein, a “has-been” who once had a Broadway hit in the 1950s called Million Dollar Baby but whose career had since gone downhill. The character Bronstein was now writing jingles and performing at bar mitzvahs and weddings, while working in an office over a strip mall in Englewood, N.J. “He tries finding his way back on top, but he no longer understands Broadway and Broadway doesn’t understand him.”
Another musical comedy Eileen has written is LoveBytes, about finding love in the early days of the internet, when chat rooms were popular. “It’s a sweet play about two very shy people who are single in their 30s,” said Deutsch. One makes up an identity as a Las Vegas stripper, the other a New York detective. But in reality they work in the same hospital in Iowa, but have never met. Writing plays comes easily to Eileen. She said that writing lyrics and composing music dovetail together. “It’s a package deal. The words and music come out at the same time.”
She worked with a “wonderful arranger and orchestrator” named John Lesko, who had been musical director for the original stage production of 42nd Street, choreographed by Gower Champion. He was actress Mary Martin’s personal arranger and also musical director for I Do! I Do! when actor Robert Preston (The Music Man) was in the show and. John Lesko brought the best in the industry, including Broadway pit musicians, to New Jersey where Eileen lives. He arranged full orchestral recordings of two of Eileen’s musical comedies, Worst in Show and LoveBytes, with Eileen and two principals from Les Misérables as vocalists. He was “old school” and didn’t want to impose himself on her work: “He was respectful for the artist.” She and Lesko hit it off professionally. “We were so in sync with each other.”
Eileen subsequently worked with arranger, music director and conductor Charles Santoro, who had been working at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., and in the pit on Broadway. “He does it all. I guarantee that you’re going to hear about Charles Santoro in the future,” she said. She had a reading at The Lambs of Keeping Mum, a British farce about a boarder and a beloved dog who die on the same day. A dotty woman plans to switch them so that the dog would be buried in a casket in high style and the boarder laid to rest in the garden. Eileen recalls some great feedback that she received from the Shepherd of The Lambs, Marc Baron, as well as from James Lawson, the actor and producer. She said about The Lambs, “I just fell in love with it instantly. The Club is an intimate and inviting place where performers can hang out.”
Eileen cites the Bard at Stratford-on-Avon as her greatest influence: “I cut my teeth on Shakespeare when I was 10.” She also admires playwright Christopher Durang: “He doesn’t think a lot about structure and does not do a lot of outlining: He spews material out. I love the wackiness.” She describes Durang’s approach as “Just do it and see if people can handle it.” She also likes playwright Suzan-Lori Parks for her intensity and passion.
Eileen says, “My style of comedy is dark, edgy, really quirky, and sort of outrageous. I like shock value, because ‘Why not?’” One venue told her: “We’d love to do your play, but after the show, we’d have to call 911 during intermissions for our elderly patrons.” Bob Ost, who heads Theater Resources Unlimited, called her to say that readers either loved her work or hated it. She replied, “That’s good. It’s eliciting intense reactions.”
She says she loves shows like The Book of Mormon and Something Rotten. She describes her tastes as rather old fashioned. She said, “A lot of modern musicals do not land on my ear well. They’re more dissonant. My work is melodic and more classical, a mix of Gilbert and Sullivan and a little Gershwin.”
Eileen studied with Lisan Kay Nimura, who taught dance upstairs in one of the studios above Carnegie Hall. She recalls how Nimura, who was in her 70s, was an “amazing and demanding taskmaster. I admired her work ethic.” Eileen’s interest in dance was to become a teacher and choreographer. She also studied at Stella Adler Studio (“a supportive, open welcoming place”) and at Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Eileen has applied for a course in the fall at the Dramatists Guild of America on musical composition with Mark Hollmann, who wrote music and lyrics for the musical Urinetown. She has taken previous courses there with playwright Roland Tec (“The Artist as CEO”) and former Dramatists Club executive director Gary Garrison (“The Architecture of the Play”). Garrison is a “force of nature. So open, warm and accessible.”
Earlier in her career, Eileen has written professionally for many years in advertising and public relations. She also worked in development at the Joffrey Ballet as well as at the Brearley School. Eileen once landed at the cosmetic company on Fifth Avenue, called Orlane, where she rose from receptionist to copywriter in their public relations department. But a determined Eileen kept her leotard under her clothes and would take dance classes at lunch. “They called me the leotard kid.” She then worked at the Rowland Company as an account executive in their public relations department. She wrote press releases, conducted interviews, developed scripts for marketing campaigns, radio scripts and the like. Eileen once worked on a launch of a perfume that she describes as terrible. She has mined that experience for one of her plays where a perfume contains squirrel pheromones that cause squirrels to attack the women wearing it.
Regarding the jingle for a perfume campaign “Just call me Maxi,” she said internally they would disparagingly describe it as “Just call me a taxi.” Authoring plays has remained her passion, though. “Writing creatively is where my heart and soul are. Writing for the theater is where I feel most at home.”
Eileen was acting and dancing by the age of five: “I knew right away what I wanted in life.” Born in Arizona, her family moved to upstate New York where she danced in ballet at the Ithaca Ballet from age 13 to 20. Her father had been a journalist in the Air Force as well as a professor of journalism at Cornell University and managing editor of the local newspaper, The Ithaca Journal. She recalls him as a brilliant man who had a deep sense of truth and justice. Her mother was head librarian at her local high school. “The written word was everything in our house.” Her parents, though, did not encourage her to enter the theatrical profession. Eileen thinks this was because they didn’t see it as a stable career. “They wanted me to be an artist, which doesn’t make any sense, because many artists don’t have stable lives either.”
She left Ithaca College after two years and moved to New York in 1973 to pursue her dreams. She fell in love and got married, but her husband at the time wanted her to stop doing theater. A decade passed, she had a son and then felt she could not “deny who I was” and joined the local community theater in New Jersey. Her then husband thought this was in conflict with having a home life. “He said, ‘It’s the theater or me’ and I said, ‘it’s the theater.’” While raising a family, she had put a career in theater aside but always hoped that one day she would go back.
She met her present husband of 23 years, Arthur Deutsch, when he was her leading man in The Foreigner at the Village Players in Upper Saddle River, N.J. We played in Shot in the Dark, and City of Angels, and The Tempest. Regarding this Shakespeare play, Eileen said, “It was a horrible production in a church where actors were backstage getting high, the children who were playing faeries were padding their rears with toilet paper to make them larger. Prospero was forgetting his lines, so my husband would be loudly whispering the words from behind the curtain. One time our only audience member was a woman accompanied by her nurse.” She said, “This all would make a great screenplay.”
Eileen said that her husband is a hilarious, wonderful comic actor but “directing him was hell.” In a British farce, “I was playing the lead female character and he was hamming it up and holding the audience in the palm of his hand. I had to signal to him, “I’m over here.” She was preparing an Off-Broadway double feature, when her husband went into cardiac arrest in 2009 and she has since been nurturing the health of her husband, who drives daily to his office where he practices optometry. “Fabulous comic by night, optometrist by day,” she said. “He looks like Walter Matthau and acts like him, too.”
Eileen advice to young actors: “It’s the best life in the world. If you pursue your interests, you won’t regret it in the end. You will have done the work you wanted to. That’s the most important.” She added, “Theater is a tribe. Once you’ve acted with others, they’re your own family.”
