When Ed Trach graduated from Yale University in 1958 he was going to be a playwright and a director. He expected to go straight to work for legendary Broadway showman Mark Hellinger.
But then he got an even more interesting offer, from Procter & Gamble, then in the big business of producing daytime soap operas. Trach was offered a starter position, “supervising producer in training,” he laughs now. “I wanted to learn television,” Trach says, so he figured he’d spend a year on the job.
He stayed for 36 years, starting with “As the World Turns,” then the first 30-minute serial (until then shows were 15 minutes.) It was created by Irna Phillips, credited with pretty much inventing the daytime form, and notoriously difficult. Co-workers warned Trach he’d be there for six months. He was still there 21 years later when she retired.
Working with writers, developing story lines, making sets work, dealing with a couple of dozen actors, “and not spending a lot of money” was so demanding Trach didn’t give a thought to the road not taken, but when he retired after 36 years, with “Guiding Light” and “Another World” also on his resume, Trach started thinking about stage drama – and musicals.
“People told me, “Write what you know.”
Which is what brings us to “Sugar ‘n’ Spice,” a musical comedy set in the black and white and live-TV soap opera world of the early 1960s, written and composed by Trach. It gets two free staged readings at 8 p.m. April 28 and 2 p.m. April 29 in CCM Master Classroom 3250 in Mary Emrey Hall of College-Conservatory of Music at University of Cincinnati. It will be performed by musical theater students and directed and music directed by grad students. It’s sponsored in part by a developmental grant from Cincinnati Playwrights Initiative.
“Sugar ‘n’ Spice” is about a talented young innocent who comes to New York to try her luck on a variety show, somehow ends up as the vixen on a daytime soap and starts behaving like her character. Trach promises dark family secrets, fractured romantic triangles, bizarre back stories and visits to the “True to Life,” the daytime soap opera within the musical soap opera.
It’s all happening here because Trach’s two sons ended up in Cincinnati and New Yorker Trach moved to Fort Mitchell a couple of years ago ”to be near the granchildren.”
Over the last few years, Trach has written a musical adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” and a chamber opera based on the two-person play “Love Letters.” A play, “Diamonds,” will get a reading from Cincinnati Playwrights on June 26 in the Aronoff’s Fifth Third Theater as part of CPI’s “New Voices” series. It was originally scheduled for February but the reading was cancelled due to ice.
These days Trach is outlining a holiday musical based on Currier and Ives prints, inventing storylines for the lithographs to come to life.
