Andrew Lippa was in fourth grade when he discovered his future career — as a Tony Award-nominated composer and a performer — at a Conservative synagogue in suburban Detroit.
Enthralled by the pageantry of the rabbi and cantor leading the congregation in song as they marched from the bimah to the post-service Kiddush, he joined the junior choir — his first step on a musical journey that has led him to Broadway and beyond.
Lippa, 51, has written the music and lyrics for shows including “The Addams Family” (which received a Tony nomination for Best Original Score) and “Big Fish” and now is starring as himself in a musical revue of his career. The retrospective, titled “The Life of the Party,” is now getting its U.S. premiere at TheatreWorks in Mountain View.
Lippa also wrote and has sung the title role in “I Am Harvey Milk,” an oratorio commissioned in 2013 by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and six other gay men’s choruses around the country.
It all started when Lippa, who was born in Leeds, England, and moved with his family to Canada and then the Detroit area before he was 3, was asked by an Israeli friend to come along to Shabbat services. Lippa’s parents had attended an Orthodox shul in England, but didn’t join a synagogue when they moved to the U.S.
Lippa was captivated by the hazzan’s robes and mitre, especially when he helped lead congregants down the center aisle of B’nai Moshe in surburban Detroit and through the doors that were opened at the end of the service.
“My earliest theater experiences were in the synagogue,” Lippa said in an interview Aug. 18 during rehearsals for “The Life of the Party.” “It was so amazing so see those accordion doors open.”
He had his bar mitzvah at B’nai Moshe, but dropped out of Hebrew school during his high school years to perform in a production of “The Pajama Game.” By then, he had already started to play the piano, and a few years later studied musical theater at the University of Michigan.
He recounts another telling memory from his childhood in “Marshall Levin,” the opening song of the revue, in which he accompanies himself on the piano. The song tells how his 1981 crush on a schoolmate who invited Lippa over for lunch and for listening to records turned into an infatuation with composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim:
“Marshall Levin, it was Sondheim and you,’’ he sings. “And of course it would be good, because he too was a Jew.”
Lippa says Sondheim and another 20th-century musical titan, composer Leonard Bernstein, influenced his career because they both showed and preached that there were no limits to the subjects for musicals (Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” is an example).
That sense of artistic freedom helped inspire one of Lippa’s earliest shows, “The Wild Party,” based on a 1928 poem about the alcohol-fueled revelry and rage of a bunch of degenerates. He wrote the book, lyrics and music for that show, which had a 2000 off-Broadway run with rising stars Idina Menzel, Taye Diggs and Brian d’Arcy James.
Contrast that with Lippa’s more recent work, like “I Am Harvey Milk,” his homage to “one of my greatest spiritual teachers — he is my Gandhi, my Martin Luther King.” Lippa says he “wouldn’t and couldn’t” have written his Harvey Milk piece 20 years ago.
“I had to go through some personal trials to unlock things,” he says. “It’s a very Jewish idea, the idea of unlocking truths. All revelations are things you already knew. … Anything that I’ve written that I think is good and that pleases me comes from a true story inside me.”
And that’s the whole point of “The Life of the Party” — through his songs, Lippa goes on a voyage through his development as an artist, and as a man whose husband is a Hollywood marketing executive. When the show was first performed in London in 2014, the Telegraph called it “sexy, sophisticated and funny, with just a dash of melancholy.”
“I think we’re taking the audience on a fun journey,” Lippa says. “I think there’s an eventual buildup for the audience to the man I am today.”
The man he is today is far from the young Lippa who attended B’nai Moshe. Lippa was ordained as an interfaith minister in 2013 after two years of study at the New York-based OneSpirit Learning Alliance, and he was the minister at his nephew’s wedding earlier this summer.
“I had always been connected to Judaism, but not as connected to the infinite,’’ he says. “I never knew where God was.”
Lippa says Judaism continues to “teach me a lot about how to live in the moment, how to grieve, how to celebrate — celebration is an imperative in Judaism.
“My mother asked me, ‘Does this mean you’re no longer Jewish?’ ” he says. “No, it means I’m Jewish and I’m the other things.”
“The Life of the Party,” through Sept. 18 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., $19-$80. www.theatreworks.org