Paul Simon must be hoping there is something in the old superstition that seven is a lucky number. The Capeman, his first musical, which opens on Broadway in the new year, has been seven years in the making and has cost a reported $7 million to stage.
Chance should only have a small role to play, though. Simon, whose Central Park reunion concert with Art Garfunkel in 1993 attracted a record-breaking 500,000 people, clearly still has the pulling power. Even though the opening is still two months away, The Capeman has been the hottest ticket in New York since advance booking opened in August, and is probably the most eagerly anticipated Broadway event of the decade.
In his bid to wrest back the theatrical crown for America from Lloyd-Webber, Simon has assembled heavyweight collaborators. The book and lyrics have been co-written with Caribbean poet Derek Walcott - the first time a Nobel Prize winner for literature has worked on a Broadway musical. Choreography is by Mark Morris, the biggest name in dance for 20 years.
As a taster, Simon this month releases Songs From The Capeman, his first album since 1990 and only his second since the phenomenal success of Graceland in 1985. Sensing the buzz, his old record company, Columbia, is putting out a definitive three-CD box set comprising all of Simon and Garfunkel's classics, complete with 15 previously unheard recordings of the angelic twosome.
After the sound of silence for most of the decade, Simon is the man of the season again.
Simon has also tested the water by unveiling snippets from The Capeman before a select showbiz audience. On the evidence of the eight songs performed (there are more than 30 in the musical), he has lost none of the melodic dexterity or lyrical inventiveness that made songs such as Bridge Over Troubled Water and 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover so unforgettable.
There were no costumes, no stage sets and little choreography, yet it was immediately apparent that The Capeman is no half-baked rock musical, let alone a rock opera, but part of the great American musical tradition stretching from Jerome Kern through Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim. What is perhaps different is the quality of the musicians - a hot Latin band under the baton of Oscar Hernandez - and the calibre of the lead singers, three of the biggest stars in the world of salsa: Ruben Blades (a Grammy-award winner who also ran for president in the Panama election in 1994), Marc Anthony and the Puerto Rican diva Ednita Nazario. It is the first time any of them has worked in live theatre.
Simon also found an a cappella teenage group from the Puerto Rican community. The quintet sings like a dream, while the songs draw on the rich patchwork of American popular music - salsa, doo-wop, gospel and rock - to transcend it all. A relaxed Simon later explains that The Capeman is very music-based with barely 10 minutes' dialogue.
"It is unheard of to go to a Broadway show and say the band is incredible. That's what I'm aiming for. I hope we can bring the sound of a concert to a theatre without losing any of the theatricality." Dressed in black sneakers, tight black jeans, loose check shirt and a baseball cap over his receding hair, the 56-year-old songwriter explains how writing for a large cast differed from composing pop songs and how it forced him to develop new skills.
"I had to learn to write songs that had characters in them, multiple characters and scenes that changed within the course of the song. That range, from men to women in one song, I hadn't done before." Simon began working on the idea of a musical in 1988, when he talked about a collaboration with legendary salsa band leader Eddie Palmieri, the man he credits with having taught him about Latin music. He only hit on The Capeman story around the time he was making the Brazilian-flavoured Rhythm Of The Saints, his last album, in 1990.
Since then he has toured, including dates in South Africa and China, played a couple of reunions with Art Garfunkel (relations are again cordial after yet another falling-out at the beginning of the decade) and supported a series of benefits for worthy causes, from hurricane relief to farm aid. He also married singer Edie Brickell five years ago and has been tasting the joys of fatherhood in his 50s. But domesticity aside, The Capeman has taken up most of his decade.
Its subject makes it inevitable that The Capeman will be compared to West Side Story. Simon has used the true story of Salvador Agron, a young, virtually illiterate, Puerto Rican growing up in New York in the 1950s. Agron hit the headlines in 1959 as a member of a teenage street gang called the Vampires when he stabbed two white teenagers after mistaking them for members of a rival gang. All this happened just two years after Leonard Bernstein's peerless work had stormed Broadway and the New York tabloids were obsessed with the lawlessness of young Hispanics.
They dubbed Agron "The Capeman" because he always wore a dark blue nurse's cape lined with red satin - apparently inspired by Dracula. At 16 he became the youngest person sentenced to death in the state of New York. It was a brutal crime, but the case became caught up in the hysteria surrounding America's newest wave of immigrants.
Agron avoided the electric chair after a campaign for clemency supported by Eleanor Roosevelt. He transformed his life in prison, learned to read and wrote poetry so successfully that his verse was favourably reviewed in the New York Times.
The tale took another twist when, at the end of the 1970s and with less than a year before he was due for release on parole, Agron escaped to be with a woman from Arizona who had been writing to him in jail. He gave himself up, served another two years and died of a heart attack in the Bronx in 1986, aged 43.
For Simon, who had followed the original case as a student barely older than Agron, it was a classic tale of sin and literary redemption and he conducted meticulous research within New York's Puerto Rican community. "I'm not making him out to be a good guy, but he went on and tried to redeem himself," says Simon, who had the Agron family's blessing for the project.
One of the most affecting scenes features Agron's mother meeting the mothers of the two dead boys in a church after the killing, as the three women sing the heart-breaking Can I Forgive Him.
Simon may have had to learn new skills for Broadway but not for nothing was he once dubbed Rhymin' Simon. As one of the finest pop lyricists of them all, he never co-wrote with Garfunkel, so why the collaboration with Walcott? "That was a great privilege," he says. "He is one of the greatest poets in the English language. He became a great teacher to me and a very great friend. It's almost impossible to tell who wrote what line. He also brought a sense of structure because he's also a playwright."
Does he feel The Capeman is a comment on the life of the Puerto Rican community today? In the song The Vampires, Simon narrates Agron's initiation into the gang, but also graphically details the institutionalised racism that faced the 1950s immigrants, making a conscious effort to understand, if not excuse, the self-preservation instinct that fuelled the gang mentality. "The Puerto Rican community is worried that it is still a reflection. I think there was a kind of unspoken racism in the whole city to which nobody objected. That couldn't happen today. It's not to excuse him, but it would be thrown out of court these days.
"On the other hand, look at what is happening to the Haitian community. Maybe the Dominicans have those problems. The Puerto Ricans are now a long-established community. It's always the newest group of people who are the most discriminated against and threatened."
Songs From The Capeman is released by WEA on November 24th. Paul Simon's musical begins previews on Broadway on December 1st and opens on January 8th.