New Yorker's Adam Gopnik Orders Off The Menu
What’s a guy like Adam Gopnik doing writing a musical?
After all, Gopnik is the curious, questioning, au courant author and staff writer for The New Yorker whose subjects have included such weighty topics as gun control, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, and the doctrines of Edmund Burke.
“The funny thing is I grew up in the theater,” says Gopnik during auditions in New York for the Long Wharf Theater world premiere production of the musical The Most Beautiful Room in New York, formerly titled Table. The show runs Wednesday, May 3, to Sunday, May 28.
Gopnik always had a not-so- secret yearning to write Broadway musicals, he says. Its active pursuit simply ended decades ago.
But his show biz roots goes back to when he was a child actor in Philadelphia, working with director Andre Gregory in stage shows and as a professional child actor in commercials.
You might remember him as the kid in the Big Brothers of America commercial who says, “Won’t you be a Big Brother to someone like me?”
“That was me,” says Gopnik, now 60.
Gopnik’s ambition when he arrived in New York nearly 40 years ago was not to write for one of the most prestigious and erudite magazines in America, but to write for the theater.
In college, he says, he wrote a musical about the life of Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian constructionist artist.
“I assumed that the appetite for shows about Vladamir Tatlin and the Russian Revolution would be overwhelming,” he says.