At far few times in your life, you immediately know that the person you’re meeting will be your friend for life. That was Mike and I. We met the day after I made a cold call to him in August, 1987, asking if I could write for Theater Week, the magazine he had just co-founded. He agreed to meet me for lunch, and soon we were discussing our admiration for Sondheim. Because he grew up in Iowa — where seldom is heard a Sondheimian word — and I spent my formative years in Boston, he sure enjoyed hearing about the tryouts of Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and, yes, even Do I Hear a Waltz?

Yet the one thing on which we didn’t see eye-to-eye was Chekhov. “I can’t get enough of him,” I said; “I can’t stand him,” he replied. Considering that Mike was 30 at the time, while I was 41, I told him, “I saw my first Three Sisters at 23 and walked out, yet now it’s tied with Our Town as my favorite play. Maybe one comes to appreciate Chekhov with age.”

I didn’t see Mike much in the ‘90s, for he’d relocated to California. When he returned to New York in late 1999, I remember that my greeting to him was, “So — do you like Chekhov now?” He snorted, laughed, and said, “No, “It’s still all talk, no action. Playwrights are supposed to show, not tell.”

“Haven’t you noticed how prescient he was?” I added, to which he immediately challenged, “How?” But I was too glad to see him to argue any more. I switched to the much safer topic of Sondheim, and mentioned the then-current Putting It Together. Mike said he’d heard that Kathie Lee Gifford, of all people, was going into the show, and he was going to attend so he could laugh his head off. As it turned out, on the night he did attend, he cell-phoned me seconds after the show was over to say Gifford was brilliant. “I had a smirk on my face when I entered that theater,” he said, “and she wiped it right off.”

So Mike WAS capable of changing his set-in-his-ways mind. He’s not here to see Ian Rickson’s current revival of The Sea Gull, but I’m sure he would have been impressed by most of the acting. How could he not be dazzled by the stylish Kristin Scott Thomas as Madame Arkadina? I especially loved the scene where she knows — KNOWS — that her lover Trigorin is falling for the young Nina, and yet she is too well aware from previous affairs that acting furiously jealous won’t solve anything. This time, she’ll smile as if nothing is wrong, giving Trigorin every chance to think, “Well, she hasn’t caught on, so if I give up Nina right now, we can resume as if nothing’s happened, and I’ll have got away with it.” Thomas lets us see through that false smile, though, that she is aware that keeping the guy is a long shot, and that she most likely is in a checkmate-fated game.

Peter Sarsgaard’s uncharismatic and fey Trigorin wouldn’t impress Mike. But Mackenzie Crook’s passion-filled Konstantin and Carey Mulligan’s slowly sadder-but-somewhat-wiser Nina would, I suspect, hit the spot for him. And could Mike be unmoved by Pearce Quigley’s Masha-obsessed Medvedenko, Zoe Kazan’s Medvedenko-weary Masha, and especially Art Malik’s ever-fading Dr. Dorn? Time always takes its toll in Chekhov plays — as it does in all our lives.

As for the writing, maybe by now, Mike would notice that Sondheim wasn’t the only one who agreed with budding playwright Konstantin that we need for “new forms” in theater — for Chekhov managed to find one: Drama without conventional drama. That may sound odd for The Sea Gull, where one character has two suicide attempts, the latter of which is fatal. But all the rest is talk. Here’s the thing, though: While dramatists have indeed always been told to “show, not tell,” Chekhov’s characters wind up showing us who they are through their telling dialogue. Yes, in one way they are “undramatic,” but there sure is drama in the ways they lie to themselves and each other. How they deny their feelings and contradict themselves, too, pack a strange kind of quiet wallop.

Wouldn’t Mike now smile as broadly as I did at Rickson’s staging of Konstantin’s avant-garde play in the round, many decades before Margo Jones popularized the form? Could he really tell me that Chekhov wasn’t prescient by setting Konstantin’s play in the garden to take advantage of the moon’s being in a certain position? This was long before Annes Bogart and Hamburger were doing site-specific work.

Many have followed Konstantin’s lead in new forms in musical theater, where jukebox musicals to rock musicals now dot the landscape. Word has it that the revival of the one-set melodrama All My Sons is rather radical in its set and staging, too, done much in the style of Our Town. And the more things change, the more they remain the same: Konstantin’s hatred of the success of “pathetic, trivial plays” would these days have to include the now-successful Boeing-Boeing.

During intermission, while I was waiting in the interminable line for the men’s room (the Kerr has the worst facilities on Broadway), I thought about Mike’s not seeing that Chekhov was prescient. The Sea Gull has schoolteacher Medvedenko yearning to see a play about teachers. Well, I won’t say that authors specifically heeded Chekhov’s advice, or that teachers weren’t seen in such previous plays as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost and Moliere’s The Would-Be Gentleman. But shows about teachers have proliferated in the 100-plus years since he wrote that. Right now, Broadway theatergoers have their choice of Kate Monster, Dora Strang, Miss Lynch, Mrs. Wilkinson, Professor Callahan, as well as Drs. Dillamond and Frankenstein, not to mention that unnamed gym teacher in Hairspray. (Medvedenko, though, might be slightly offended that Madame Rose doesn’t want to take her daughter Gypsy’s suggestion to open a school.)

Most of all, Mike would be impressed at how incessantly Chekhov showed that people wind up loving the wrong people — just like The Phantom with Christine; Nessarose with Boq; Jill Mason with Alan Strang; Gabriella, Gloria and Gretchen with Bernard; and all the female inmates in the Cook County jail. Indeed, Roxie Hart learns much the same lesson from her marriage to Amos Hart that Masha discovers after she settles for Medvedenko: “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” When I see 13 this weekend, I’m sure I’ll find a few teens who make wrong romantic decisions, too.

Hey, at least they’re kids who can be excused for not knowing better. But the last time I had dinner with Mike in 2003, he was regretting that he got involved with his then-current boyfriend. In retrospect, he would have agreed with Chekhov’s point that people love the wrong people, for that boyfriend introduced Mike to heroin, which was certainly a cause in Mike's death at a mere 46.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com

This comes from putting pen to paper. In 2002, he started thinking that the Robin Hood legend would make a good musical. Now, in 2008, Frey's putting money where his mouth is — on his book, music, and lyrics — by paying for a developmental reading at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. Come this Thursday, Oct. 2 at both 2 and 5 p.m., Robin Hood and his bow and arrow will bow at 37 Arts.

I can say that based on reading the script and hearing the score, Robin Hood has hummable tunes, apt lyrics, colorful characters, and a story with a terrific surprise ending. As we all know, Robbin’ Hood, the show-within-a-show in Curtains, wound up as a substantial success, Here’s hoping that in real life, Frey’s Robin Hood is just as successful.

Frey — pronounced “Fry,” a la Jud — is 53, and, like so many baby-boomers, had his music defined by the Beatles. Growing up in Tatamy, Pennsylvania — where the population hovers a little below or above 1,000 — there wasn’t much else to do but listen to music — or play it. Frey learned guitar, and founded a punk/new-wave band called The Midniters. He wound up scoring three movies that admits were “grade B horror films.” But show music? Tatamy is much more than 45 minutes from Broadway, so Frey had no knowledge of it.

But in 1984, when Frey came to New York with a band called Panty Raid, he saw an ad in the Village Voice requesting a composer for anoff-off-Broadway show that would be called A Modern Vaudeville. He applied, was selected, and wrote. He liked seeing his work get on its feet — and causing an audience to get on theirs, too. Suddenly, theater was a fun new medium, and by the time Frey saw The Who’s Tommy on Broadway in 1993 — “It had passion, power and the emotion, and wasn’t just a ‘rock’ show” — he thought about seriously writing for the theater.

By then, though, he had just started a new job as a sound designer and composer at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, just a few stones’ throw from his boyhood home. What’s more, he and his wife —”my high school sweetheart and number one fan,” he likes to say — were tending to a son, which takes time, and takes time away from finding a project, let alone working on it and finishing it. Every now and then, though, Frey would be reminded of a favorite film from his childhood — The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn as the man who was feared by the rich and loved by the good, and Olivia DeHavilland as the object of his affection.

But Frey was busy at Lafayette, not to mention at the Touchstone Theatre in nearby Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he was a composer — “and lighting designer, AND stage manager, whatever they needed me to do,” he says. His travels also took him in 2000 to Wagner College on Staten Island, where he collaborated with Randy Curcio, head of dance at the school. First they did a parody of The Nutcracker, where Frey had to adapt the classic Tchaikovsky music to hip-hop (hence the show’s title, Busted Nuts). Then they took a new look at Alice in Wonderland — The Other Side of Alice — which used music as diverse as Patsy Cline and the notorious disco version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Says Curcio, “Tim composed a marvelous mega-mix for us.”

Six years ago, Frey started his project in earnest, unaware, of course, that Broadway once had a mammoth-hit Robin Hood. Granted, that one was an operetta that opened in 1891, but it was such a smash that it yielded seven revivals between 1900 and 1944. “O Promise Me,” which was sung at virtually every wedding in the first half of the 20th century, comes from it. That Robin Hood had a happier fate than the one written in 1965 by Lionel (Oliver!) Bart. Twang!! (note the desperate double exclamation points) was one of London’s most notorious flops, though it did eke out a six-week run, not to mention one marvelous song, “With Bells On.”

For a while, it appeared that Frey’s Robin Hood would fare no better than Twang!! Two years ago, when he applied to the New York Musical Theatre Festival, he was rejected. Instead of saying the hell with it, he went back to work, rewrite, and applied again. Two months ago, Jess McLeod, the festival’s director of programming, called and said there was a slot open for a developmental reading, and that considering the dark nature of some shows at the festival — subjects included pedophilia, mutated bedbugs, serial killers, and the Jewish underground — she felt that they could sure use something more family oriented.

Happy ending? Not quite yet. A little-known fact is that those selected for developmental readings at the festival must foot the bills, and the prices can give a foot gout. First comes a $600 participation fee; then the rental of a theater for rehearsals and the eventual showcase runs into the hundreds of dollars a day. Then there’s a director and everything else. “You’ve got to put together your own team,” says Frey, who admits he didn’t take long to call the person he was most hoping would help him: Rusty Curcio.

Curcio read and heard Robin Hood, and was enthusiastic enough to accept the directorial reins and gets Wagner alumni and current students — 21 in all — to do the reading. Meanwhile, that Tim’s small Frey son has grown to college age, and even though he gets free tuition at Lafayette thanks to his daddy’s working there, the current estimate to raise a child from infancy to adulthood is currently a quarter of a million dollars.

So where would Timothy Frey get the five thousand — no, six thousand — no EIGHT thousand, as he now estimates Robin Hood will cost? Given that Frey is a child of the Beatles, it’s a safe bet that he’s never heard “Mother Angel Darling” from the 1973 revival of Irene, but his darling mother has become the show’s angel, putting up all the dough. “She’s 88 years old,” Frey admits, “but I said to her, ‘If Dad were alive, he’d have given it to me.’ But I know she would have given it to me, anyway, even if I hadn’t said that.” As for that high school sweetheart and number one fan wife, Frey concedes, “She’s wailing and not always smiling, but in the end, she’s supportive.”

Thursday will tell. By the time this column fades into the archives, Frey will know if his gamble has paid off or not. Here’s hoping.