Donald Trump (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)

If I were given to cynicism, and if I thought I could get away with it, this week I would have submitted the same column as the one published on March 24 of last year. Why? Because we return to the same topic: President Trump and his antagonism of the arts.

The president has, for the second time in his presidency, submitted a budget to the US Congress eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Never mind that the new budget will balloon the national debt above and beyond the long-term damage done to the US by the tax cut passed in December – a plan that rewards the ultra-rich while penalising the rest of the country.

No, the president and his henchmen still want to make a statement against creativity, arts and scholarship. It would be a meaningless save in the context of the budget itself. But it’s catnip to those perceived as his core supporters.

Underlying Trump’s effort to wipe out the NEA, NEH and CPB is the fact he failed to do so last year. He’s hardly the first politician to use these entities as a political punching bag; they have long been convenient targets for the right who see them as pursuits limited to those who are politically on the left.

Certainly if the right, which always proclaims the value of free markets and self-sufficiency, wanted to prove that the arts don’t need federal support, they might have produced a conservative version of Sesame Street for commercial TV. Or perhaps we would have a wildly successful theatre company dedicated to works based on the writings of Ayn Rand and her acolytes. But as we know, that’s not the case.

Oh, sorry, but maybe I am getting cynical. It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.

Nowadays, I get calls to action to defend funding for these tiny slices of the federal budget via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and occasionally still from the post office. But I can recall the era when mail, phone calls and faxes – remember those? – were the organising tools of choice to face down these perennial assaults, whether they came from within the Oval Office or under the Capitol dome.

There’s no question that the efforts to minimise or eliminate these agencies have had an effect, since funding today is less than it was 25 years ago. Even with relatively steady funding of late, the net effect is to reduce the federal impact, since costs rise while the available monies remain the same. Should we hit a period of inflation, the impact would prove even greater, even if the numbers on the ledger remain the same.

All these efforts to wear down the agencies’ advocates must take its toll on the detractors too, right? But instead, each side plays its designated role, battling to, more or less, a draw.

Not to diminish the importance of the funding situation, but this exercise in political gamesmanship is almost like some vintage cartoon series, with antagonists fighting in endless variations on the same theme, only to take up their enmity again in the next instalment.

But fight we must. The identity of the wolf at the door may vary, but the goal is the same. The arts, the humanities and the public broadcasting outlets and their supporters cannot let the government wipe an entire professional discipline from its attention and funding programme.

This year, the battle even faces a new twist, since the changes in the tax code have reduced the tax benefits of charitable deductions for many citizens and the impact of that policy won’t be fully known until donations are tallied at the end of 2018.

And so we organise to hold back those who would overrun us. We make the case for our value spiritually, creatively and economically, as inventively, persuasively and as loudly as possible.

While some political pundits have already suggested the president’s budget is dead on arrival and Congress will assemble something at least marginally more saleable – to each other and to the public – we can’t take the risk that this is the year when our interests might get bargained away.

Yet again, to the barricades (to be very clear, not a wall). And to the phones, the computers and maybe even the fax machines.

Sesame Street music director Bill Sherman with Elmo and Zoe on the set. Sherman won a Tony Award for In the Heights in 2008 and has recruited Broadway peers to compose for the children’s show. (Photo: Howard Sherman)

You know how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. But do you know how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

Turns out there’s a shortcut from New York’s theater district — and it’s landed a number of Broadway’s top songwriting talents on the venerable children’s program.

The man to see is Bill Sherman, a 2008 Tony Award winner for his work on orchestrations for In the Heights. Sherman is in his fifth season as music director for Sesame Street. Back when he started the job, Broadway’s songwriters were an obvious go-to.

“I knew them,” he shrugs. “It was easy access. I was trusting songwriters I knew and loved.”

He’s since discovered that no matter whom he calls, Sesame Street meets with universal enthusiasm. “Everybody will stop some really important thing they should be doing and really focus on this.”

From A College Buddy To Strangers In The Biz

Sherman’s first call, five seasons back, was to Lin-Manuel Miranda, composer and lyricist of In the Heights. “Lin has been my best friend for 10 years,” Sherman says. “We went to college together, so asking him to write a song was very easy.”

Miranda was followed by other Heights alumni, Alex Lacamoire and Chris Jackson, and by composers Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Last Five Years), Justin Paul (A Christmas Story) and Tom Kitt (Next To Normal). And while some of these artists typically write both music and lyrics, Sesame Street primarily taps into their composing skills.

“So much of what we do is curriculum-based that it has to go through many levels of approval,” Sherman explains. “So most of the lyrics come from the [Sesame Street] scriptwriters.”

Miranda, an adept lyricist, says being forced to focus solely on the music was “enormous fun.”

“The writer will say, ‘It’s very Harry Belafonte; it’s Ravel’s Bolero; it will build and build.’ You get a sense of what they were thinking, of the rhythm that’s in their heads.”

With “Elmo the Musical,” More Shots At The Spotlight

Sesame Street‘s musical universe expanded further when the show introduced its “Elmo the Musical” segments — stand-alone bits, eight to 10 minutes long, that take place entirely in the imagination of the childlike red fuzzball.

The Elmo the Musical segments are through-composed — musicalized from start to finish — “so each composer had their chance to really sink their teeth into the music,” Sherman says. “It became their episode, their thing. We tried to figure out a way to use the composers’ strengths for whatever particular episode it was.”

An installment called “Detective,” for instance, “asked for this complex, jazzy [sound], and Jason Robert Brown is known for that.”

Like all the composers, Brown — who’s never met Sherman — jumped at the opportunity.

“I had a 2-year-old who stared at Elmo all day long,” Brown says. “So there was nothing better than that.”

Then came the kicker: That episode’s script was to be written by John Weidman, a Sesame Street veteran and co-creator, with Stephen Sondheim, of iconic musicals like Assassins and Pacific Overtures.

“I called him and said, ‘So we’re finally writing a show together, only it’s for a furry red puppet,’ ” Brown says. “When I got the recording of Elmo, I could not have been more excited if it had been Frank Sinatra, if it had been Joni Mitchell.”

This fall, as puppeteer David Rudman laid down Cookie Monster’s vocal track on Tom Kitt’s “If Me Had a Magic Wand,” Kitt described the song using an old-school musical-theater term. It’s “a soaring, emotional ‘I want’ moment,” he said, a readily identifiable, recognizably Broadway kind of sound.

But as Sherman is quick to point out, the “Broadway sound” is very much in flux.

“I’ve been part of musical-theater situations that pushed boundaries, that brought new sounds to Broadway. Taking this job, like [working on] In the Heights, was an opportunity to put new sounds in kids’ ears. People assume musical theater is vaudevillian, epic ballads and tap-dance numbers. So to turn that on its head and bring in audiences that don’t go to Broadway shows is important to me.”

Is it a challenge for these sophisticated writers to gear their work for toddlers? “Sometimes,” says Sherman, “composers think that because it’s Sesame Street, they have to dumb it down. … [But] these days children have unbelievably sophisticated ears. I think dumbing it down is disrespectful to kids.”

“That’s Not What Cookie Monster Sounds Like”

When composers have kids of their own, they’ve got an in-house test panel. Brown did demos, complete with character voices, for his daughter.

“Her response was, ‘That’s not what Cookie Monster sounds like,’ ” he reports.

Sherman has met with greater success at home.

“If my 3-year-old hears something, and 15 to 20 minutes later she’s still singing it, then I know I did the right thing,” he says. “If the 1-year-old dances to it, then I know that it sounds right.”

There might well be more musical theater in Sesame Street‘s future; Sherman admits he’d like to work with Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin) and Marc Shaiman (Hairspray).

And there’s one more big fish he’d like to land — the whale of the business, really.

“We toyed a bit with going after Sondheim,” he said. “We haven’t gone that route yet, but to call up Stephen and see if he was down [for it], that’d be funny. Why not?”

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