'Sing' Producer 'Saves' a School

"I had the story, but he had the vision." That's how Dean Pitchford, the Academy Award-winning lyricist and screenwriter, describes his collaboration with Craig Zadan, the producer on their blockbuster 1985 film "Footloose," which yielded for Columbia Records its all-time, best-selling sound track album.

For nearly 20 years, Mr. Zadan has followed his vision of contemporary musical theater from Far Rockaway and Garden City to Broadway and Hollywood. His latest effort, "Sing," another collaboration with Mr. Pitchford and Mr. Zadan's long-time associate, Neil Meron, opens Friday at theaters across the country.

"Sing" is the fictional account of a dying Brooklyn neighborhood whose high school is scheduled to be closed.

Set against a backdrop of preparations for Sing, the school's annual musical theater competition (a real, although rapidly fading, tradition in Brooklyn schools since 1947), three generations of students attached to mythical Brooklyn Central High School struggle to hold on to their community and traditions in the face of crime, drugs and neglect.

" 'Cabaret' is the most important thing I've ever seen," Mr. Zadan said in a telephone interview. "It's the perfect synthesis of social drama and the musical art form.

" 'Cabaret' made me realize that you could have a musical play or movie that's layered so that you have an entertainment, and underneath that have something very important to say."

Using that formula for "Footloose," his first film, Mr. Zadan, by making use of dance as a metaphor for freedom, successfully fused his outrage about the rise in censorship championed by the ultra-religious right to a musical about a town that had banned dancing.

The subtext of neighborhood decay and loss of traditions in "Sing" is more diffuse and not so easily depicted, although snippets of social commentary make cameo appearances through various bits of stage business and plot devices.

The movie is the brainchild of Mr. Meron, who participated in three Tilden High School Sings in Brooklyn.

"Tilden doesn't have Sings anymore," Mr. Meron said in a telephone interview. "The emphasis of the movie 'Sing' is the attempt to keep tradition alive in a changing world." Craig Zadan was a stage-struck youth from Far Rockaway who traveled to Broadway for "every Saturday matinee" before a brief stint in Hofstra University's drama department convinced him to work directly in the theater.

"I was in the drama department, but I was also the arts editor of the school paper," he said. "It was very difficult to be a student in the drama department and also review my professors' school shows. I got a lot of pressure from them to quit the paper and concentrate on studying dramatic literature.

"But the more they pressured me to quit the paper, the more determined I became to quit school because the paper was more important to me.

"Everything I learned about life I learned from working for the paper: How to get along with people, how to write, how to interview, how to be a journalist."

After two years at Hofstra, Mr. Zadan wrote theater reviews and feature articles for the magazine After Dark, The Daily News and New York magazine.

He also produced "Broadway at The Ballroom" (a series of evenings with Broadway composers performing their own music at the New York nightclub), staged Peter Allen's Broadway musical "Up in One" and worked as director of theater projects for Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

The springboard for Mr. Zadan's success was his backstage story, Sondheim & Co., a book that details the business of mounting Stephen Sondheim's musicals.

"Writing that book was the most satisfying thing I've ever done," Mr. Zadan said, although he described writing as "a painful process." Sondheim & Co. represents my love and passion for the theater, and it helped me go on to films because I was able to leave something behind of my participation in American theater."

When he began to feel that Broadway was "becoming Las Vegas," Mr. Zadan said, he transferred to Los Angeles to make movie musicals.

There have been very few "contemporary movie musicals," he said. "First, because studios lost lots of money making old-fashioned musicals for contemporary audiences and, second, because musical films fell out of fashion as audiences became more sophisticated.

"People could not handle the notion of someone breaking into song onscreen. But that's changing. You can check the barometer of youth today by watching MTV.

"Recently, kids have seen lots of videos with their favorite rock star - in costume on a set - performing a three-minute movie musical with a plot.

"I think that contemporary audiences are being weaned on their stars telling a story with characters in full-blown mini-musical productions."

Mr. Zadan notes that Madonna's new video, "Like a Prayer," shows the cast taking a bow before the final curtain drops. "So, in effect, we've gone back to the traditional form of musical theater," he said.