If there were two great constants to Mark Schoenfeld’s life, they would be music and poverty. And while he has happily shed the latter after approximately half a century of struggling, the former will always be there.
“Yes, I understand what happened to me is incredible, but everyone has something in their life that’s incredible,” says Schoenfeld, the co-writer and lyricist behind “Brooklyn: The Musical,” which will play San Jose from Aug. 9-13.
Sorry, Mark. Not everyone has a story like this.
Schoenfeld grew up poor in two different Bronx housing projects, the son of a poet mother (not a lucrative field) and a cabdriver father who eventually found work as Jake “Bronx Bull” LaMotta’s chauffer. He was often the only white kid (let alone Jew) in entirely black neighborhoods. His mother had a tendency to call him “Matzahleh” — in public, no less — which partially explains his childhood nickname of “Matzah Boy.”
He got married, had kids and worked a series of blue-collar jobs to make ends meet while he pursued his dream of becoming a singer-songwriter. But that’s not how things worked.
Burdened by poor mental and physical health and a string of deathly luck, Schoenfeld lost his marriage, his family and everything else — except his musical dreams. After surfing from couch to couch, he ended up a middle-aged, homeless street performer living in Central Park, serenading passers-by with a song and a boom box held together with duct tape and prayers.
That sounds like the end of many people’s stories, but for Schoenfeld it was just the beginning.
While doing his song and dance act in the park, Schoenfeld bumped into Barri McPherson, a singer he’d hired nine years earlier to perform one of his songs. Rather than just handing Schoenfeld a quarter, McPherson decided to provide him with quarters. She took him to the home she shared with her husband, where the two musicians began writing songs. That was several years ago — and today “Brooklyn: The Musical” is touring the nation after a 10-month run on Broadway.
“The subject that always comes up is persistence. It’s not like I consciously knew I was persisting, it was just my nature, like breathing. So I get a lot of credit for persisting, but it’s like someone getting credit for breathing,” rationalizes Schoenfeld, now 56, in his unmistakable Bronx burr.
Rather than persistence, the former homeless man, who struggled to whittle out a meaningful existence well into his 50s, credits “good luck.” Perhaps it’s a little from Column A and a little from Column B.
“Brooklyn” is the story of a young girl moving to New York City to locate the father she never knew told through the lyrical stories of a handful of street performers. Some reviewers claimed that impoverished street performers wouldn’t break out into Broadway-caliber musical numbers, a charge that wounded Schoenfeld. These aren’t just characters he pulled out of thin air, after all. They’re the vestiges of his childhood; the long summers listening to soul music and shooting hoops with the guys who called him “Matzah Boy.”
“The [reviewers] who said that, really, they have no idea what they’re talking about. You see the poverty right on the streets and people are singing all the time,” he said.
“If they’re saying it’s not realistic because these poor characters have such great spirits, that’s really what you do see in poor neighborhoods even more than affluent ones.”
Schoenfeld now commutes between Manchester, N.H., and the Big Apple, and is working on a second musical called “Music Boy.” While he’d have loved for “Brooklyn” to have enjoyed more than its 10-month Broadway run, he does note that 10 months was longer than either of the last offerings from Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Weber, so you could do worse.
Many of “Brooklyn’s” backers are Jewish, and Schoenfeld is often invited to their homes for Shabbat or High Holy Days. And the traditions his mother tried — unsuccessfully — to teach her son bring joy, but also sorrow.
“I miss it. I didn’t miss it during all those years, but I do miss it now,” he says.
“I wish I would have taken heed of everything my mother did. And my children don’t have it because I didn’t have it.”
But Schoenfeld’s phoenix-like rise has given him faith, and faith in humanity.
“You could say I was an atheist. But when I started writing [Brooklyn] … all that changed.”
“Brooklyn: The Musical” runs from Aug. 9 to 13 at the American Musical Theatre of San Jose. Tickets range from $13.75 to $73. Information: Visit www.amtsj.org or call (888) 455-7469.