The way I heard it was that there was a list of composers approved by George Lucas, and the first name on the list, apparently, was Jan Hammer.

Jan Hammer was famous at that time for having written the Grammy-winning theme song to the television show Miami Vice, which featured his signature use of synthesizers and electronic drums. This futuristic sound, I guess, is what made him the front-runner when Lucas was approving a list of potential composers for a stage musical version of Star Wars in 1992.

The Broadway producers in charge of this effort duly signed Hammer up and paired him with the Tony-nominated lyricist Ellen Fitzhugh, and Jan and Ellen wrote several songs together. Unfortunately if predictably, the demands of the lyric theatre were somewhat beyond Hammer’s expertise, and their songs were deemed unsatisfactory. (You can hear their song “Torture,” written to be sung by a robot controlled by Darth Vader, performed by the composer on YouTube.)

Having gone the unconventional route, the producers now pivoted in the opposite direction. No more experimental prog-rock outsiders; it was time to call in an experienced Broadway master craftsman, and the name on Lucas’s list that fit that bill was Charles Strouse.

To be sure, Charles was a risky choice in other ways. Since 1978, he had written the music to an unrelenting series of flops, six Broadway shows that played a combined total of 36 performances. While those shows contained some extraordinary music—particularly Rags, an impassioned kaleidoscope of klezmer, vaudeville, Broadway belting, and verismo opera—the sense around town was that the composer of Annie and Bye Bye Birdie had had his day.

Perhaps Charles took on the Star Wars assignment in a bid to restore his credibility. Perhaps he said yes because he loved the movie. Perhaps he just didn’t like saying no. Whatever his motivations, he used the opportunity to reunite with the lyricist with whom he had written all of his first big hits in the 1960s and early ’70s, his best friend, Lee Adams. Armed with what I have to assume was a pretty hefty paycheck, the two of them cracked their knuckles, turned on the VCR and got to work.

That’s where I come in.

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The bite of the musical theatre bug affects people differently, but I think if you’re the kind of person who moves to New York to be on Broadway, there are three stages in your career: You see the names on the poster; you work with the names on the poster; you become one of the names on the poster.  By the time I got to New York in 1989, I’d certainly seen Charles Strouse’s name: I had played Mr. MacAfee and Rooster Hannigan in summer camp, for Heaven’s sake, and I’d just spent a year in Miami as the accompanist for a singer named Paula Wayne, who had memorably co-starred with Sammy Davis Jr. in Strouse and Adams’s 1964 masterpiece Golden Boy. 

Within two years of arriving in NYC (three bucks, two bags, one me), I had made the rounds of all the piano bars and children’s theatres, brashly advertising to anyone who would listen that I could play any instrument (I couldn’t), that I could sight-read any score (I couldn’t), and that I was a master of all the new musical technology (I absolutely was not). Somehow, word of my fictional expertise had made its way to the Star Wars producers, and after I bluffed my way through an interview, they asked me if I could work with Charles to give his retro, showbizzy score a techno, sci-fi sound by scoring it for synthesizers. The whole thing sounded insane to me—if you play “Put On A Happy Face” with a bunch of synthesizers, it doesn’t sound “futuristic,” it just sounds like you pushed the wrong buttons—but I really wanted to meet Charles and move into the second stage of my career. (For the record, I always called him Charlie; folks who knew him when he was younger called him Buddy, but I’m told that he preferred Charles, so I’m sticking with that.)

It wasn’t just opportunism that made me want the job. I saw Charles’s career as a template for what I wanted mine to be. Like me, Charles had started out aspiring to be a serious classical composer, and he and I had both gone to the same conservatory, the Eastman School of Music, 40 years apart. By the standards of Broadway composers, Charles had an astonishing pedigree, having studied with Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger, and while Sondheim or Bernstein might be thought of as more sophisticated in terms of harmony or structure, Charles’s work was expertly crafted and surprisingly adventurous if you looked under the hood. Charles could not only write a great tune, he could build an entire world underneath to support it, and I’d argue that he had a greater understanding of style and genre than any of his contemporaries except maybe Cy Coleman.

If you were looking to build an ideal Golden Age Broadway Composer, someone who could write funny, write heartbreaking, write toe-tapping, write ferocious, and make each score its own perfectly integrated universe, your model would be Charles Strouse. I figured nothing could be a better or more apt apprenticeship for me than to spend some time deeply immersed in Charles’s world.

If Charles thought that a Star Wars musical was a ridiculous proposition, he never betrayed it to me. I have always been prone to injudicious eye-rolling, which I surely did whenever Charles would show me some tender ballad for Princess Leia or demonic atonal aria for Darth Vader, but Charles would really get into it, fingers expertly dancing across the keyboard while he crooned Luke Skywalker’s big “I want” song, his eyes twinkling with gentle humor. His score was ambitious, but Charles was always playful—he’d giggle when he showed me an unexpected meter change, or the daredevil basso profundo pitches he’d given Vader, or some particularly felicitous rhyme that Lee had come up with to complement one of Charles’s riffs. Look, I wish I’d been around when Charles was writing Golden Boy, or even his beautiful but underrated score for Charlie and Algernon, but what I saw with Star Wars The Musical (it’s embarrassing even to type the title) was in a way even more instructive, because Charles didn’t look down on the material, he didn’t coast, he didn’t fake it—he wrote every song in that score the same way he wrote about the sun coming out tomorrow. He loved writing music, he loved being in the theatre, he loved bringing stories to life. Even after a decade and a half of high-profile rejection, he was not a defeatist and he was never a cynic.

For a year or so, I would trot up to Charles’s apartment across from Carnegie Hall to play him my arrangements and to hear whatever new piece he had written for Han Solo or a choir of Jedi Knights—I swear to God there was a song for Yoda called “The Power of the Force”—and then I was dispatched to go into the recording studio to produce a demo of all the songs in Act One, which would then be sent to George Lucas. Charles was unfailingly enthusiastic about the electronic textures I was coming up with, and I really treasured the chuckles I’d get out of him when I’d take a song in a wildly different direction than his original. He cared about the work but he wasn’t precious about it. (In an effort to keep things somewhat confidential, I was asked to hire young unknown singers instead of Broadway stars for the demo, which is how Andrew Lippa ended up singing Obi-Wan Kenobi. I myself essayed the role of C-3PO. And yes, some of the songs have found their way to YouTube, but you’re on your own.)

All of our efforts notwithstanding, a Star Wars musical was always going to be a stupid idea, and I’m told that George Lucas let the option lapse without even listening to the demo we labored over. I doubt Charles was too worked up about it. He just got started on the next show.

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Several years later, my show Parade was running at Lincoln Center, and I happened to be in the orchestra playing the piano on the night Charles came to see it. At the end of the performance as the audience was filing out, I looked up and saw him standing at the orchestra pit rail. He gave me a huge smile and clapped, and then pointed right at me and winked. He wasn’t just congratulating me on the score. Charles saw the transition happen: I wasn’t an apprentice anymore. I was one of the names on the poster.

Jason Robert Brown is the three-time Tony-winning composer/lyricist of Parade, The Bridges of Madison County, The Last Five Years, Honeymoon in Vegas, 13, Mr. Saturday Night, and The Connector.