Dan Rodricks: Hey, Baltimore, it’s William Donald Schaefer, the musical | COMMENTARY

The reported troubles in the Angelos family raised the specter of the Orioles being sold and transplanted to Nashville, a worrisome speculation dismissed firmly Monday morning by the organization’s chairman and CEO, John Angelos. He said the Orioles will never leave Baltimore.

Thanks. We needed that.

For a moment, with news of a lawsuit between Angelos brothers, a Baltimorean of a certain age might have experienced flashbacks to 1984 and the snowy, overnight departure of the Colts, leaving this football-mad city without an NFL team.

And leaving its mayor and biggest booster, William Donald Schaefer, in a midnight blue mood.

So down in the dumps was the irascible mayor that his staff organized a citywide cheer-up for him and his beloved hometown: Pink Positive Day.

Curbs were painted to put Baltimore “in the pink.” There were pink balloons and pink flowers throughout downtown and around City Hall. One of the newspapers — not this one — published its front page with a pinkish hue. Anchors on the local TV channels wore pink. A gloomy Schaefer emerged from City Hall and waved to a crowd from the balcony. Hundreds of people in pink cheered. It was a truly bizarre tableau, and one that former Sun reporter Richard Ben Cramer, back in Baltimore to write a profile of Schaefer for Esquire, might have missed had I not suggested he stick around for the spectacle.

In a cover story in October 1984, Esquire declared Schaefer America’s best mayor.

Given the results of elections that had kept Schaefer in office since 1971, and given the Baltimore Renaissance — Harborplace, the National Aquarium, new housing — it was hard to argue with that title. Schaefer was a promoter of the city who wore funny hats and practiced politics as performance art. (Mayor Brandon Scott’s happy leap into the redesigned Druid Hill Park swimming pool on Saturday was very Schaeferesque.)

Schaefer was a man who insisted on action and chided others for moving too slowly to make the government responsive to citizens and their neighborhoods. And he did this as Baltimore experienced white flight, losing significant population even as redevelopment made it more attractive.

Attorney Billy Murphy, challenging Schaefer in the 1983 Democratic primary, referred frequently and incisively to the “other Baltimore” that had been ignored while the waterfront got most of City Hall’s attention. But Schaefer maintained wide appeal and won a fourth term.

So wide that, three years later, he won election as governor of Maryland.

As a crane lifted Schaefer (in a crate marked, “Baltimore’s Gift to Maryland”) onto the deck of a boat for the trip to Annapolis, I could not resist having some fun with this peculiar and moody man.

At the time, I was in the cast of “The Pirates of Penzance,” a production of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta by the Young Victorian Theater Co. (The Young Vic celebrates its 50th season next month with another staging of “Pirates” at the Gilman Alumni Auditorium.)

The G&S music and libretti inspired “Don Donaldo,” an opera I imagined based on Schaefer, which appeared every few months as a series of three columns, one scene per column. It became a “ring cycle” of stories because Schaefer, given to antics and temper tantrums, provided plenty of material.

This continued throughout Schaefer’s Annapolis years and went, like his governorship, from the high seas of comedy to the rocky shores of tragedy. The more frustrated and unpredictable Schafer became, even after soundly winning a second term in 1990, the more Wagnerian became the columns.

I only continued to write about the governor in this form because the crowd, so to speak, cried out for more. (Schaefer claimed he never read the “Don Donaldo” columns, but I found that unbelievable.)

At one point, I consulted with musicians about producing “Don Donaldo” on stage, telling the story with new lyrics applied to familiar works of Wagner, Puccini, Verdi and G&S.

Alas, as with several other brainstorms, it never made landfall. I did not have time to develop the show, and when Schaefer’s longtime companion, Hilda Mae Snoops (Brunnhilde Mae in the “Don Donaldo” columns), died in 1999, I thought the moment for my opéra bouffe had passed.

But, get this: On Monday, Kay-Megan Washington handed me a colorful postcard for “Do It Now!,” a new musical about Schaefer coming to the Fells Point Corner Theater for a run in July.

Unlike my idea, to use classic opera pieces, all the tunes in “Do It Now!” are original, composed by Jonathan Jensen, a bassist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra who has written and arranged music. The book is by Richard Espey, and the lyrics by Espey and Jensen. Timoth David Copney is director and choreographer. John Covaleskie, who looks strikingly like Hizzoner, has the lead role. The production is a partnership of the theater and the Maryland State Arts Council.

Jensen has been working on the musical since Schaefer’s death in 2011, and Washington is a member of its cast. I’ve heard a couple of the songs and found the tunes impressive, the lyrics clever.

The title of the musical, “Do It Now!” was Schaefer’s mantra — his insistence to city employees that, if you’re going to fill a pothole or clear trash from an alley, do it today, not tomorrow.

Indeed, those are three little words to live by.

I wish I had listened. I wish I had done “Don Donaldo” back then, but glad someone is doing “Do It Now!” now.