Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford are one of few all-female composer-lyricist teams in musical theatre history. Born in the 1930s, the two met while attending DePauw University in Indiana, where Cryer was an English major, and Ford, predictably, was studying music. Their friendship continued to grow through grad school at Yale, where they completed their first collaboration, For Reasons of Loyalty, and both met their future husbands.

After graduation, they both moved into the married student dormitories at Yale with their new husbands, who were both graduate students in theology. They both got “day jobs” as secretaries; Cryer also earned a little money as a performer (she sang in the chorus of the Broadway productions of Little Me in 1962, 110 in the Shade in 1967, and 1776 in 1969) while the two continued their artistic collaboration.

Their first professional production was Now is the Time for All Good Men in 1967, a pacifist polemic that was panned by critics despite its charming score. Their next piece, The Last Sweet Days of Issac, won rave reviews as well as an Obie, a Drama Desk, and an Outer Circle Award.

During this time, Cryer’s husband had given up the ministry to pursue a career in musicals, and Cryer’s need to seize the reins of her own life became increasingly urgent. The couple divorced in 1968. Cryer’s ‘consciousness-raising’ experience appears in musical form in the largely-autobiographical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road. Cryer also performed in the original production, which played at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre—to poor reviews. Despite the reviews, the show moved people, particularly women, and word of mouth kept the audiences coming. Papp moved it uptown, to Circle on the Square, where it ran for another three years, with Betty Buckley replacing Cryer in the role of Heather in 1980.

Now seventy, the two continue to make beautiful, women-centric music together. Their latest collaboration, which opened at the American Girl Place in New York in 2003, is Circle of Friends: An American Girl Musical. Presenting many of the famous dolls and their stories, the musical encourages girls to learn history as well as to make it. Cryer also teaches workshops on creating solo performances pieces in New York.

[November 2005]

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