When he was a senior at Millburn High School, James Harvey noticed water bubbles in the ceiling of his mother’s Short Hills kitchen. The moment he left the kitchen, the entire ceiling collapsed. His reaction? “I thought it would be a really good idea for a musical,” he recalls.
Not only did Harvey, now 22 and a senior at New York University, write that musical—The Crack in the Ceiling—it helped him win a prestigious scholarship from Academy Award-winning composer Alan Menken (Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid) to further his studies in music composition at NYU. It wasn’t Harvey’s first musical, either. In middle school, “I wrote a satire about conservative Christians who protest TV violence. In trying to write that over several years, I taught myself to play piano.”
In Crack, David, age 10, and his single mom, Ellen, deal with a number of ineffective and increasingly wacko repairmen who try to mend the crack. The music is lively and the lyrics are clever. “Lyrics for me are the hardest part of writing, because there is an objective standard, something called a perfect rhyme,” he says. “And you don’t want to use words a character wouldn’t use. It’s a puzzle—frustrating, but fun when you solve it.”
The show was performed last summer at the New York Musical Theatre Festival on West 42nd Street. In the audience was Harvey’s mom, Cathy, on whom plucky but gullible Ellen is partly based. She raised Harvey and his older sister, Kate, after their father died when Harvey was a baby. “She has a great sense of humor, and she’s been very supportive of me,” he says. On Tuesday, April 22, at the 54 Below supper club in Manhattan, Harvey will perform songs from Crack as well as new material in a comic mode.