Composer and Broadway Pianist Invites Listeners ‘Inside His Head’

When Zak Sandler was 12 years old, the young pianist—a student since he was 5 at the elite Levine School of Music in Washington, D.C.—observed that when he adjusted the piano lid in a certain way, he could see the wooden piano keys extend to the end of the interior of the piano. And some of them were bent or crooked in an interesting way to accommodate the metal structures in the instrument.

Fascinated, he began to experiment musically, playing the crooked keys. With the advice and encouragement of the late Irena Orlov, Sandler’s mentor and teacher at Levine, he began to build on this musical experiment, embellishing it until he had composed an entire symphony: “The Crooked Key Symphony.”

It went on to win an award from the Friday Morning Music Club, an organization of music lovers that has promoted classical music in the Washington area for over 130 years. The piece was also performed by the Mount Vernon Youth Orchestra in northern Virginia.

“The Crooked Key Symphony” was an early indication of a fertile musical mind that would be drawn to the creative potential in brokenness, in that which was bent or crooked.

Some eight years later, as a promising student of music and drama at Yale, Sandler experienced an episode of mania. Recognizing a crisis, his mother and father (an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine) drove to New Haven. Sandler was admitted to the hospital and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

In 2015, he was hospitalized again. “It was then I thought, ‘Well this has happened twice now, so I guess I should just accept it as a part of who I am.’ ”

Today, Sandler is a successful musician, composer, dramatist, and teacher. He has played keyboards on Broadway for “Wicked,” “Mean Girls,” “The Color Purple,” and “Motown.” With his collaborator, Adele Powers, he wrote the lyrics and music for “Anthem,” a musical about why Americans sing the national anthem, that ran at the 2014 New York Fringe Festival and the Chicago Musical Theater Festival. He is now working on commission with Powers on a musical comedy about Jewish celebrations called “Happy Challah Days!”

Sandler speaks openly and publicly about his psychiatric condition. He addressed the 2017 National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) National Convention in Washington, D.C., and the NAMI New York State Conferences in Albany in 2017 through 2019. He is the recipient of the 2018 NAMI New York State Young Leader award.

The musical he considers his most personal, “Inside My Head,” is a lively, poignant, and funny portrait of a man and his relationship with his bipolar condition. In it, Sandler imagines the changing aspects of his mental state as people—his depression is Doug, his mania is Marc, his paranoia is Patty.

In this way, Sandler hopes to make his condition familiar to those who know those voices too, even if they are not as loud or overbearing or unmanageable as they are for individuals with a diagnosable psychiatric condition.

“I wanted to convey what it is like to go through these experiences of depression and mania, and maybe help people see that it is more relatable than they may think,” he said.

(A video of a talk Sandler gave at Staten Island University Hospital/Northwell Health, followed by an abbreviated performance of “Inside My Head,” is available on YouTube; see end of article).

Information about Sandler, including his music and current projects and his talks on having a psychiatric condition, is posted here.

A video of “Inside My Head” performed at Staten Island University Hospital is here.