Encore Monthly - THE THEATRE MAGAZINE January/February 2022

A LONG LiFE iN THE THEATRE

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CHITA RIVERA

And Other Theatre Artists Who Are Still Making Magic Past Age 85

EDITOR’S LETTER

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First Anniversary Issue!

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ROBERT VIAGAS EDITOR IN CHIEF

Viagas at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on Broadway.

Photo by Donna Martin

lot of people said we were crazy to launch a new theatre magazine in the thick of a pandemic that shut down the whole theatre industry for 18 months, but we persevered and here we are, starting our second year of publication.

To celebrate, we bring you a selection of stories from some of the top writers in the business, on subjects as diverse as a new musical at Lincoln Center, a show trying out regionally, a director who helps actors to be comfortable with intimacy onstage and stories from places as diverse as Chicago, New York, Oklahoma and Oregon.

The late pop superstar Michael Jackson never worked on Broadway but inspired many of those who do. Writer Linda Armstrong asks two of his theatrical admirers what there was about Jackson that made him worthy of the stage musical treatment in MJ: The Musical.

Composer Tom Kitt, winner of Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, opens the door on his songwriting process and his collaboration with James Lapine and Michael Korie on the daring new musical, Flying Over Sunset.

To celebrate the Broadway revival of The Music Man, writer Cara Joy David asked some of our brightest stars to tell their favorite stories about working on that ubiquitous Meredith Willson musical at the dawn of their careers and how it shaped them as actors. The photos from their personal collections are also adorable.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, Keith Loria surveyed Broadway power couples about how their Love Bloomed Backstage.

Broadway gets a lot of attention in this issue, but we also take time to look across America at the world of School and Community Theatre that is coming back to life after the long pandemic shutdown with the help of a handful of companies that license the rights to popular shows.

With the new focus on stamping out sexual harassment and objectification in all areas of work life, the theatre has created a new job on the creative team—Intimacy Consultant. Claire Warden tells Frank Rizzo how she helps makes everything from a first kiss to nudity to scripted sex acts more comfortable for all.

Controversial producer Garth Drabinsky, who was instrumental in bringing shows like Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman to the stage, but who also served prison time for defrauding his investors, is making a comeback with the new musical Paradise Square.

Chicago correspondent Donald Liebenson offers a sneak preview of the show’s pre-Broadway tryout in the Windy City.

The spoken word is the fundamental building block of most theatre, but writer Bridgette M. Redman reports that there is a special group of performers who struggle with it every day. SAY—the Stuttering Association for the Young—is a unique theatre group with a bold mission: not to help stutterers overcome their stutter (which is not in their control) but to find the courage to stand at center stage and speak their truth to an often-impatient world.

Some of the most talented and dedicated theatre artists spend their lives under the stage rather than upon it: the instrumentalists who put the music in our musicals. Writer David Spencer sits in with professional Pit Musicians and reports on the sharps and flats of their lives.

Mugs, posters, keychains and the like may seem like an established fact of theatregoing life, but you may be surprised to learn that they have a history. Ken Bloom traces the modern crop of Theatre Swag back to a single incident in October 1965.

Anyone who has been through high school or even just seen “High School Musical,” knows that the worlds of theatre and Sports often conflict. But not always!

Peter Filichia takes you on a tour of shows that explored the drama inherent in the field of athletics.

As Steven Spielberg’s new film adaptation of West Side Story is earning accolades from critics and audiences alike, we close our first anniversary issue with a Quiz to test your knowledge of the classic musical based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

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Publishers Louis Doucette Brantley Manderson

Contributing Photographers Sydney Angel Chasi Annexy Kevin Berne Ken Bloom Brinkhoff-Moegenburg Julieta Cervantes Friedman-Abeles Getty Images Amanda Kranz Joan Marcus Donna Martin Matthew Murphy/MurphyMade James-Daniel Radiches Carol Rosegg Steve Vacariello Rob Wilkin/ Light Impressions Photography Evan Zimmermam

Editor in Chief Robert Viagas Photography Editor Joan Marcus Creative Director Doña Maria Jenicek Contributing Writers Linda Armstrong Ken Bloom Cara Joy David Peter Filichia Donald Liebenson Keith Loria Frank Rizzo Jose Solís Bridgette M. Redman David Spencer

Advertising Sales Southeast Director Maria Coyne, Inc. 305.975.9234 mecoyne@mecoyneinc.com Account Executives Madeleine Justice madeleine@encoremonthly.com Gerry Lair gerry@encoremonthly.com Sandy Weatherford sandy@encoremonthly.com Copy Editor Trisha Hutzler Digital Editor Full Nelson Productions Social Media Director Allie Johnson

Special Thanks to our industry partners 313 Presents • Atlanta Fox Theatre • Audience Rewards • Goodman Theatre • Tennessee Performing Arts Center The Fabulous Fox Theatre St. Louis • Tobin Center for the Performing Arts

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ENCORE MONTHLY / JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

STEPHEN SONDHEiM 1930-2021 Stephen Sondheim, the abundantly talented and awarded composer-lyricist, died Nov. 26, 2021 at age 91. He will be remembered for many things, but most significantly for reinventing musical theatre through a series of groundbreaking masterworks in the late 20th century, including Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, A Little Night Music, Assassins, Company, Passion, Into the Woods, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Merrily We Roll Along.

We asked Encore Monthly writers to remember times Sondheim inspired them, either through direct contact or through his work: Howard Sherman I met Stephen Sondheim for the first time when he arrived at a recording studio where I was to interview him for an hour. Just before we were to start recording, I stumblingly asked him, “What should I call you?”

He replied, slightly quizzically, “You mean my name?” He paused and then, realizing, said, “Oh, call me Steve.”

While it felt unnatural to do so—and still does to speak of him so causally—I took him up on the disarming offer. This is the man whose Sweeney Todd has been a touchstone for me since I saw the original production when I was in high school.

He was deserving of every award, every honor, every tribute and indeed every title we have ever found for the truly great who have walked among us.

Had he asked me to call him “your majesty,” I would have complied.

Ken Bloom I had a good professional relationship with Steve (as he always signed his correspondence). I never met him, and he wasn’t a friend, but he was willing to help on many of my projects. For example, he generously wrote a wonderful foreword for my two-CD retrospective of Hugh Martin’s songs. He recently wrote a few nice lines for my upcoming “Complete Lyrics of Sheldon Harnick” book. And he proofread my entries on his songs for my “American Song” compilation of theatre songs. If he had the time and inclination, he’d happily help me out. And when he declined my asking, that was alright, too.

Linda Armstrong I remember seeing West Side Story for the first time as a young child. It was this vibrant musical that made me cry, made me upset, but also let the world see people of color through their own eyes and its songs went against the stereotypes that were out there about Puerto Ricans. It proclaimed to the world that interracial couples happen.

Love is Love! The songs possess a power, an overwhelming energy that charges the soul. Stephen Sondheim’s songs were about imparting life lessons, truths and compassion.

Charles Kirsch I never got to meet Mr. Sondheim, but I was lucky enough that he responded to my letter, asking advice about how to be a lyricist. Included in his response was “I also suggest, immodestly, that you read two books I wrote called ‘Finishing the Hat’ and ‘Look, I Made a Hat.’” The Emmywinning songwriter Alan Bergman gave me the same advice. We’ll always read those books, sir—your words will live on forever.

David Spencer I was fortunate in having Steve Sondheim take me under his tutorial wing for a while, to observe the process of Sunday in the Park with George through workshop and preview performances that he’d discuss with me the day after I saw them. Of course, I learned a great deal during those months, but through the prism of gaining personal/professional maturity while working on my own shows Marcus Scott over the years following, I learned expoI had the blessing of meeting the musinentially more: the resonance of the lescal theatre grand master Stephen Sondsons inevitably increased, the context for Stephen Sondheim Photo by James-Daniel Radiches heim twice. On the first occasion, we were them inevitably widened. And if I’m to cite at a gala-and-show situation and locked eyes, he gave me the legendary squinty one lesson Steve taught me that made the most impact, it’s this: “The biggest Sondheim side-eye and waved hello, clutching a glass, and I waved back. On andanger is getting used to things.” other occasion, I sat behind him at A Bed and a Chair: A New York Love Affair, a Sunday did not go through the kind of massive rewrite out-of-town changes 2013 revue at the New York City Center, and afterwards I stood up, gave him a Broadway history is full of. The gestation I witnessed was a process of organic handshake, thanked him for his work and his output over the course of his illustrigrowth and, most relevantly here, bolt tightening. I remarked to Steve at the time ous career and when I went to leave, he asked me for my name and simply said, about the phenomenon of tiny tweaks making enormous differences, and he “Get to work.” The wunderkind that is Sondheim actually uttered those words and replied, with childlike excitement, “I know! Isn’t it astonishing?”

I’ve spent the last eight years hustling and bustling, and I’m just getting started.

My understanding of how subtle and camouflaged those dangerous little Remember folks, his greatest works were created between ages 40 and 60! “things” you get used to can be never stopped refining itself—the traps weren’t just lyrics and dialogue lines that might need sharpening for clarity—but mere Peter Filichia brushstrokes that could sabotage what you wanted the audience to perceive or Since 1987, Stephen Sondheim has helped me whenever I’ve been betrayed feel: as small as an inappropriate word, or a wisp of attitude. The more mercilessly or dropped by people that I’d thought were friends. Once I’ve discovered that I focused the microscope and applied the dictum, the more, yes, astonishingly, it they were nothing of the kind, whether I’ve ended the relationship or the other saved my bacon. person has, a lyric from Into the Woods is there to soothe me: “Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood.” Yes, this inevitable part of life still hurts, but Encore Monthly offers condolences to Sondheim’s family, his husband, his it’s been less painful ever since I heard and learned that lyric. The irony is that my friends and his millions of fans. next thought is “Move On”—and we all know who wrote that one as well.

in this issue JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

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CURTAIN UP

MJ: MICHAEL JACKSON’S LEGACY: The “King of Pop” takes on Broadway posthumously in MJ: The Musical.

by Linda Armstrong

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CURTAIN UP

FLYING OVER SUNSET: Composer Tom Kitt takes you inside his daring new musical. By Robert Viagas

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CURTAIN UP

MUSIC MAN MEMORIES: Just about every Broadway star has the show somewhere on their résumé.

By Cara Joy David

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BACKSTAGE

GETTING INTIMATE: When the show calls for sex or nudity, Intimacy Director Claire Warden is there to help. By Frank Rizzo

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BACKSTAGE

PARADISE SQUARE: A Broadway-bound musical with some heavy baggage tries out in Chicago.

By Donald Liebenson

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BACKSTAGE

A PLACE TO SPEAK: SAY opens the stage to celebrate stutterers.

By Bridgette M. Redman

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IN THE HOUSE

THEATRE SWAG!: Believe it or not, those mugs, keychains and t-shirts have a history.

By Ken Bloom

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INTERMISSION

WHAT I DID FOR LOVE: Broadway performers share their real-life stories of finding “The One.”

By Keith Loria

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INTERMISSION

SPORTIN’ LIFE: Contrary to cliché, theatre and sports are not always at odds. By Peter Filichia

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WHO’S WHO

ADAM PASCAL: The rock star who came to theatre and stayed. By Keith Loria

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CURTAIN CALL

GANG WAY! Test your knowledge of West Side Story.

By Frank Rizzo

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EXIT MUSIC

THEN AND NOW: Elaine Stritch (1970) and Patti LuPone (2021) in Company.

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BACKSTAGE

THE PIT MUSICIAN LIFE: Get to know the theatre artists you hear, but rarely see. By David Spencer

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IN THE HOUSE

EXTREME AUDIENCE REACTIONS: Audiences try hard to stay controlled, but sometimes get carried away.

By Linda Armstrong

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IN THE HOUSE

THE REBIRTH OF COMMUNITY THEATRE: Amateur theatre groups are reawakening the live theatre experience.

By Peter Filichia

ON THE COVER: CURTAIN UP:

A LONG LIFE IN THEATRE: Chita Rivera graces the cover and heads our photo survey of theatre artists beyond age 85 who are still delighting audiences. Meet 10 who continue to make magic for us.

By Frank Rizzo.

Photography by Joan Marcus Page 72

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CURTAIN UP

Two Views of Michael Jackson’s

Legacy

Broadway’s MJ: The Musical Takes on “The King of Pop”

BY LINDA ARMSTRONG

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ENCORE MONTHLY / JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

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inger/songwriter Michael Jackson was recognized as musical royalty around the globe. Crowned “The King of Pop,” he could have also claimed to be the King of Hearts as people fell in love with him and his music.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage has written the libretto for a new Broadway musical about his life, MJ: The Musical, starring Myles Frost as Michael Jackson and featuring direction and choreography by Christopher Weldon. The show is being produced by the Michael Jackson Estate and Columbia Live Stage.

At the age of 11, Jackson (1958-2009) came into our homes, radios and on our stereos as lead singer of The Jackson 5—along with his brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon. To this day their music is playing everywhere, and we are all guilty of singing along to their beloved songs like “Never Can Say Goodbye,” “ABC” and, at holiday time, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” I remember as a child between 1971 and 1973 tuning into the “The Jackson 5ive” cartoon every Saturday.

I would laugh at the child-friendly script, but we all watched because we knew that The Jackson 5 were going to perform a song in each episode. In 1971, when Jackson began his solo career, he proved that he was “BAD.” Jackson never appeared on Broadway during his lifetime, but he brought something special to the pop music world. He was not only a talented singer, songwriter and dancer, but also a great humanitarian. His songs are part of the fabric of our lives.

Opposite page: Michael Jackson.

Photo by Kevin Mazur/ Getty Images This page: The Jackson 5, with Michael at center.

Photo from Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Full of Wonderment In 2019, at a BroadwayCon panel I hosted on Black female playwrights, Nottage talked about her work on the MJ project. She said she wanted to tell a story that would enable people to understand Jackson’s creative process. The show includes more than 25 of Jackson’s hits.

For Encore Monthly, I had the opportunity to speak to two people who knew Jackson. One of them, Tony Award-winner and theatre, television and movie legend Ben Vereen, spoke about the developing artist and the man he became. Vereen recalled being at the Apollo Theatre for a benefit performance in the 1970’s and being backstage with Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor and Diana Ross. “This little kid getting ready to perform was a shy kid,” Vereen said. “He was just full of wonderment. But he was so anxious to get out on the stage and perform. When he performed as a child, I saw magic. He had something in him that was just unique. We had a chance to witness something that was genius.”

Considering Jackson’s process, Vereen said, “He watched all of us, Bob Fosse, Bill Bojangles Robinson, me.

And he took the best of what we had to give and he gave it back to us and that’s why we fell in love with him. I see my moves on him. His process to me was tenacious. He was focused, he didn’t deviate from what he had to do. The world moved to his beat and his rhythm. They are doing a show for him on Broadway. I hope they honor one-tenth of what this man was about because his universe was deep. I loved me some Michael Jackson!

He brought relevant issues of today into the form of art. He marched with the animals. He talked about the man in the mirror—face yourselves, people—who does that in a clear fashion that we can comprehend and digest?”

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CURTAIN UP Opposite page: Myles Frost plays Michael Jackson in MJ: The Musical. Photo by Regina Mogilevskaya This page: Michael Jackson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Vereen said, “His interpretation of music was amazing. His delivery, the style, brought uniqueness to the platform of artistry. He’ll go down with Duke Ellington and Count Basie from the jazz era, but in the pop world.

Let us not forget how he moved us. You go to parties and cars drive down the block and you hear his music [playing from the car speakers]. His legacy is his music, his dance, his songs, his magic. He made a stamp on our lives, and we have to embrace that. We have to say I’ll take this, and I’ll hold on to it. He made me feel good.

There will never be another Michael Jackson.”

Jackson’s Breath Regarding Nottage creating a book for a musical about Jackson’s life, Vereen said, “She’s doing it because he was an icon. My want is that she tells the truth, so that we, as a public reading her words, can feel Michael’s breath and breathe him in and be blessed. Because that’s all he wanted for all of us was to be blessed. We, as Black people, should hold up our icons.”

This is a busy season for Nottage. In addition to MJ: The Musical, her play Clyde’s opened on Broadway and she supplied a libretto for the opera Intimate Apparel at New York’s Lincoln Center. Clyde’s opened in November, but the other two shows are scheduled to open on successive nights, Intimate Apparel on January 31 and MJ on February 1.

Ralph Carter, who co-starred in the TV sitcom “Good Times,” recalled meeting The Jackson 5 and family when he was 13 years old and rehearsing the show during its first season. His rehearsal was suddenly interrupted and the next thing he knew, “Carol Burnett said there were people who wanted to meet me. She took me by my hand, and I’m being introduced to Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Michael, Randy, Janet and LaToya as well. When we got Janet Jackson [on seasons five and six], she was cute. By the time we finished with Janet on ‘Good Times,’ she was an artist. Michael and [she] were total confidantes. He respected the way I treated his sister. He was one of the nicest people. His humility—first rate. His class—first rate. And he was very grounded. When he was on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” everybody in the Black community watched that show.

Nobody missed that. The inspiration they gave us was wonderful. This guy was global, but also very sensitive and generous.”

Reflecting on Jackson’s process, Carter said, “His process was very focused and concentrated. He studied everybody—James Brown, Sammy Davis Jr. He studied the greatest who came before him and then made it his unique style. We never saw anybody do the robot or the moonwalk the way Michael Jackson did. He was the Bojangles of his era. Behind that was a thinking man, always thinking. He was very approachable. He understood his craft.

What an honorable man to know.”

Audacity To Be Himself Lynn Nottage created the book for a Broadway musical to honor Jackson and his creative process, according to Carter: “I think because she is such a brilliant writer herself, her work is going to celebrate Michael Jackson in an enormous way, because Michael Jackson validated himself. Ms. Nottage decided something was there to honor him. This will be her gift to us on his behalf.”

Thinking of the King of Pop’s legacy, Carter said,

I think to be an innovator. To be original.

His audacity to be himself.

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CURTAIN UP

A collage of Michael Jackson images from throughout his career.

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Jackson’s accolades are vast and include being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice (as a solo artist and as a member of The Jackson 5); into the Dance Hall of Fame; into the Songwriters Hall of Fame; 31 Guinness World Records, including Most Successful Entertainer of All Time; 13 Grammy Awards; 26 American Music Awards; 18 World Music Awards; and named artist of the “Decade,” “Generation,” “Century,” “Millennium.” Five of his solo albums are the world’s best-selling records: “Off the Wall” (1979), “Thriller” (1982), “Bad” (1987), “Dangerous” (1991) and “HIStory” (1995). On the humanitarian side, President George H. W. Bush in 1992 presented Jackson with an award as a “Point of Light” ambassador. In 2000, Guinness World Records acknowledged his support of 39 charities, including UNICEF, NAACP, Red Cross, Elizabeth Taylor’s AIDS Foundation and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

There was also controversy. Two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, accused Jackson of having sexually abused them for years, beginning when they were younger than 11. Jackson denied the accusations and his estate sued HBO for airing the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland,” which repeated the accusations.

MJ: The Musical reportedly will not deal with the controversy, nor the incidents surrounding Jackson’s death at age 50 in 2009 from drugs administered by his personal doctor. Nottage has said she plans on this musical being a tribute and a platform to share Jackson’s creative process and his music.

As I am writing these words, I can still hear Jackson’s youthful, sweet voice singing “Got to Be There.”

ENCORE MONTHLY / JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

CURTAIN UP

Composer Tom Kitt is High on His Daring New Musical

BY ROBERT VIAGAS

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rugs have generally been a touchy—or, rather, a notouch—subject in musicals.

Yes, Jenny and Bobbie in Company try to get David stoned. The characters in Hair celebrate weed. But there are precious few

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other examples, and none that treat getting high as anything more than forbidden fun, or a dangerous evil.

That changed with the newly opened Broadway musical, Flying Over Sunset. Based on a story that appeared in Vanity Fair more than a decade ago, the show delves into the ex-

ENCORE MONTHLY / JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

periences of three real-life historical personalities, and how their experiments with Lysergic Acid-Diethylamide—LSD—opened “doors of perception” for them and helped them to understand and deal with tragedies in their lives.

The three were movie star Cary Grant (Tony Yazbeck), author Aldous Huxley (Harry

Hadden-Paton), and diplomat and playwright Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack). The show is set in the early 1950s, a time when the drug had not yet acquired its counterculture reputation or been labeled a Level-1 controlled substance. At the time LSD was sometimes prescribed by doctors as a treatment for psychological illness.

It’s easy to see why Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist James Lapine (Sunday in the Park With George, Into the Woods) wanted to make a play of it, and how award-winning lyricist Michael Korie (Grey Gardens, War Paint) might find poetry in the subject.

But what of Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prizewinning composer Tom Kitt (Next to Normal, If/Then)? What kind of music could you find for such a diverse group of personalities? It’s set in the ‘50s so…rock ‘n’ roll? Jazz? Blues?

Kitt was asked to answer for members of the audience who will be attending the show, and eventually be listening to the cast album. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

freedom to explore where Michael [Korie]’s lyrics were taking me or if I had a musical idea. We had an initial one-act developmental reading that we did at the Vineyard Arts Project in the summer of 2015 and many of the building blocks of the musical’s songs that are still in it to this day were created for that very first presentation. But it felt like, even at the very beginning, we were all hitting on material that we were excited about.

Encore: What appealed to you about this subject?

Kitt: James’ [Lapine’s] work has been incredibly influential for me. It was part of what drew me to write for the theatre. So, the opportunity to collaborate with him attracted me.

Also, I was fascinated by the subject matter. I didn’t know its history. There was a time when LSD was something that psychiatrists were giving patients in their offices! It wasn’t anything I would have dreamed up on my own [for a musical] so the fact that [Lapine] was so passionate attracted me. I knew I was going to get to expand as a writer and also learn about something that I didn’t know. So, in all those regards it’s very exciting as a writer to come into something that feels new and exciting and is going to allow you to stretch yourself.

Encore: I’ve heard that your musical concept for Flying Over Sunset was that they would sing only when they were under the influence of the drug. Is that still the case?

Kitt: I think that is the case. That was a concept that we talked about early on, but we didn’t go there initially. We wrote a number of songs that were “book songs” for the characters. In the first act when we meet them, Clare Boothe Luce is being interviewed in the process of being considered for the ambassadorship to Brazil and we wrote a song for that moment. We also had a song for Cary Grant when he was announcing that he was leaving the movies. We loved those songs, and there may still be one heightened moment where they are not necessarily under the influence of the drug.

Encore: Before you started composing, what conversations did you have about the kind of music that would be heard in Flying Over Sunset?

Kitt: We talked generally just about tone and what we wanted the piece to do and the story but once we started writing I felt a real

Encore: What musical “dialect” did you choose for the show?

Kitt: The music isn’t written in a specific style. It’s music that’s just trying to be theatrical and serve the narrative and the dramatic moment that’s being written for. I didn’t want it to sound like it’s in a particular period—that would take you out of the story. But it’s a musical and, because the subject matter is so interesting and heightened, I never felt that I was restricted or trying to fit into any one thing. I just felt real freedom to write theatrical music.

But it just felt like the more interesting and theatrical conceit to do the bulk of the score when they’re under the influence. That gave us a really wonderful theatrical way into the music and how it was going to function in the show.

Encore: Did you create a special musical sound for each of the characters?

Kitt: You might find that there is, but only because it’s based on what they are going through at that moment in their life. Sometimes they all share in a musical moment. I have songs in the second act, for all of the characters: Clare Boothe Luce, Aldous Huxley, Cary Grant and Gerald Heard. When we meet them in the first act, the LSD takes each of them to very specific places. Claire’s moment when she sees her dead mother and daughter in a garden is going to be different than Carey’s trip, which brings him face to face with his younger self. Or Aldous: he’s almost blind in one eye and the drug gives him a heightened awareness that allows him to see out of both eyes. So those are three very different emotional responses to being given LSD and they’re going to bring about different music.

Opposite page: Tony Yazbeck, Harry Hadden-Paton and Carmen Cusack in Flying Over Sunset.

Photo by Joan Marcus This page, left to right: Librettist and director James Lapine, composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Michael Korie. Photo by Chasi Annexy

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CURTAIN UP But I didn’t go out and say, “What is Cary Grant’s theme?” I had to say, “What is Cary Grant experiencing in this moment and what is the music that I’m going to write for that?”

When we meet Clare, she’s at a pivotal point in her life, and considering an opportunity in government. But she’s still dealing with the trauma of loss and grief. She’s searching for answers in the life that she’s living and what it means. Those kinds of philosophical questions bring out a certain kind of music that wants to support the character’s arc.

Take Huxley. He lost his wife to cancer and his writing at this time in his life was about exploration. He’s writing to this moment in history. He’s also writing about his experiences and his beliefs. And he’s also dealing with this personal tragedy. These are all very emotional issues to be writing music for, which is exactly what you want a musical to do.

This page, top: Robert Sella and Carmen Cusack in Flying Over Sunset. Photo by Joan Marcus This page, bottom: Left to right: Laura Shoop, Harry Hadden-Paton and Robert Sella in Flying Over Sunset.

Photo by Joan Marcus Opposite page: Musical director Kimberly Grigsby with composer Tom Kitt in rehearsals for Flying Over Sunset.

Photo by Joan Marcus

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ENCORE MONTHLY / JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

Encore: Is there a special musical motif that appears throughout the score?

Kitt: There are aspects to the song “Flying Over Sunset” that come back throughout the show, but not a single repeated motif. I think that piece of music lends so many beautiful things that we wanted to express—what [the characters] are looking for and their desire to experiment with LSD. That’s a great example of a song that begins in a kind of heightened dissonance, then opens up into something that’s very melodic, and then watch it soar!

There’s sort of an angelic vocal quality to it.

That’s what you look for when you’re having an experience that you hope is going to open you up and bring you to a moment of beautiful self-realization. And I think that’s what that piece of music does.

In one scene Aldous Huxley is looking through an art book in the Rexall drugstore.

It’s a book of Botticelli’s works, and the painting he’s looking at is “The Return of Judith to Bethulia.” And it sort of comes to life in his trip.

For that, I wrote in the style of an Italian aria as the painting comes to life before his eyes.

When Clare Boothe Luce is in her garden and she conjures her mom and her daughter who were tragically taken from her, both by car accident, I wanted the music to have both a

There are these great passages of swirling music that then lead you to this beautiful realization. I’m a fan of that kind of writing.

melancholy kind of a sadness to it as well as something that was also bringing some kind of opening-up. I mean, think of what it would be like to be faced with people who have been taken from you, but suddenly there they are in front of you. What would that feel like?

One of our songs is called “The Sapphire Dragonfly,” and the opening piano chords are some of my favorites in the show. That’s a motif that I bring back again and again. When did I bring it back? It depended on the moment. I used what I thought was going to give me the most theatrical music that I was going to be most proud of.

Encore: You’ve described the music for the show as “dreamlike in nature.” How is that interpreted in the music?

Kitt: When we dream…we leave our bodies, and we enter a world where anything is possible, and anything can happen at any time. It’s a place where your subconscious takes you. That’s what I feel the score wants to do for the characters who are experiencing this heightened awareness [from the drug ]. It can be interpreted as a burst of energy from the music. It could be something that is kind of rolling and slowly gathering momentum. It could be things that stop and

start. Things that change on a dime. Things that feel like they’re opening up a world beyond you. There are certain sounds that can give you a shimmer or shimmery quality. It can be a tremolo or it could be some kind of high voicings or it could be something that has movement that creates a sonic palette of something that has a light to it that has a kind of probing quality. So, I think the music I was looking to create just felt like it had all of this potential energy in it. That it’s on the way to something you’re not quite sure where it’s going…and then it can land in something that might seem like it had nowhere else to go.

Encore: In addition to being a composer, you are a Tony Awardwinning orchestrator. What’s it like working with another orchestrator on this show?

Kitt: Michael Starobin is just wonderful. I was listening to his orchestrations on Sunday [in the Park With George] and I thought, “I have to talk to Michael about doing Next to Normal,” which he did. He’s got such a creative mind. He knows what I’m after and then he builds on it and adds an element to it that moves it to a whole other level. With this show especially, you want to serve the composition. But I also was excited for Michael to bring his own creativity to the

heightened world that we’re writing for. He’s found sound, he’s found dissonance, he’s found passages in the writing that bring out even more than what I started with. In rehearsal we put some of those elements into the piano vocal charts, so I get to hear, just on the piano, some of the stuff that Michael has done. And it always makes me so happy because having his voice is helping me tell stories even better than I could have imagined.

When you’re feeling the effects of this drug, your mind takes you to unexpected places. I wanted to really be able to do the same thing with the music. Michael helps me do that.

Encore: Which composers influenced you the most?

Kitt: I listen to a lot of Copland, something that I’ve always found to be very influential: the melodic contours in the dissonance.

Charles Ives is another and Samuel Barber has been incredibly informative. Some of the most meaningful music for me is usually inspired and influenced by Stephen Sondheim’s work. But Rachmaninoff, also. His melodic writing also has great drama to it. Out of storm clouds comes light! There are these great passages of swirling music that then lead you to this beautiful realization. I’m a fan of that kind of writing.

I think listening to music is a very physical experience. When there’s something that hits me in a certain way, I get goosebumps, an excitement, an adrenaline rush. I think we all have sometimes over-listened to music we love because you just want to hear it over and over.

Think about the first time you heard the opening notes of Sunday [in the Park with George].

You’re knocked out even before the song has begun. You’re immediately taken with this beauty of this gorgeous writing. Or the first time I heard the song “Beautiful Day” by U2, listening to the chorus and Edge’s guitar line.

Or the first time I heard “Appalachian Spring.”

There are certain pieces of music that get inside of you in a way that takes your breath away. And that’s kind of what we live for when we’re searching for music. We’re all looking for the same experience, which is music that really affects you and gets inside of you and gives you a powerful emotional response.

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CURTAIN UP

Just About Every Broadway Star Has the Show Somewhere on Their Résumé

BY CARA JOY DAVID

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W

hether people know it or not, they’ve probably seen a little of The Music Man, even if they have not seen the full musical.

Lin-Manuel Miranda played the titular con man Harold Hill in a spoof of the show’s “The Wells Fargo Wagon” on “Saturday Night Live.” In “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Rachel Bloom led the ensemble in the song “Cold Showers,” based on “Ya Got Trouble,” perhaps The Music Man’s second-most-famous song, after “SeventySix Trombones”. Even “The Simpsons” has gotten in on the action—the 1993 episode “Marge vs. the Monorail” is based on The Music Man with “The Monorail Song,” another take on “Ya Got Trouble.”

Then there are the people who know the actual show, whether from the film version, Broadway, regional stagings or the countless summer camp and school productions that take place each year. The Music Man is sort of a gateway drug to a life in musical theatre for many. In honor of the current Broadway revival of The Music Man at the Winter Garden Theatre, we asked some theatre actors about their own experience performing the iconic musical when just starting out.

Opposite page: Hugh Jackman in rehearsal for the Broadway revival of The Music Man. Photo by Julieta Cervantes This page: Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman as Marian Paroo and Prof. Harold Hill in rehearsal for The Music Man. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Nina Arianda, 2012 Best Actress in a Play Tony Award winner for Venus in Fur, the Amazon series “Goliath” and the film Being the Ricardos When Arianda was a teenager in Germany, she played Zaneeta Shinn, the oldest daughter of the Mayor and Eulalie, at the Roadside Theatre in Heidelberg, Germany (a theatre for which she also cleaned bathrooms at some point!).

Favorite memory: “Having the distinct pleasure of saying ‘Ye Gods!’”

Reason for the show’s longevity: “It’s a wonderful story with a brilliant score that is joyful at every turn in its own right—timeless!”

Shoshana Bean, Singer and former star of Waitress When she was about 7, Bean played Gracie Shinn, the Mayor’s youngest daughter, at Timberline High School in Olympia, WA. Favorite memory: “It was so long ago I barely have any memories, but I do remember one of the little boys in the production giving me a teddy bear as a gift for either opening or closing night and I remember cherishing that little bear for so many years.”

Reason for the show’s longevity: “I think the show has longevity because the music is fantastic, it’s a classic feel-good uplifting show, it’s an underdog story and Harold Hill is one of the greatest male characters in the musical theatre canon.”

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CURTAIN UP Danny Burstein, 2021 Best Featured Actor in a Musical Tony Award winner for Moulin Rouge As a 19-year-old, Burstein earned his Actors’ Equity card by appearing in the ensemble of The Music Man at the The Muny in St. Louis, MO. While Burstein could easily be the one playing Harold Hill these days, in this production he supported lead Jim Dale, who Burstein said was “absolutely brilliant” in the role.

Favorite memory: “My favorite memory of The Music Man is actually when my wife, Rebecca Luker, played Marion Paroo in Susan Stroman’s Broadway revival in 2000. When I first heard her sing ‘My White Knight,’ I wept like a baby. It was stunningly beautiful. I’ll never forget it.”

Reason for the show’s longevity: “It’s about love. Unyielding love. Absolute love. And, when it happens, you hold on tight.”

Jerry Mitchell, director and two-time Best Choreographer Tony Award winner (La Cage aux Folles and Kinky Boots) At age 10, Mitchell appeared in a community theatre version of The Music Man with the Paw Paw Village Players in Paw Paw, MI. He was in the ensemble and featured in the boys’ band that Harold Hill famously organizes.

Favorite memory: “At 10, I had found everything I had been dreaming of: music, dance, storytelling and applause.”

Reason for the show’s longevity: “It’s about a community, faith and love and the power of those three fundamental truths and their ability to change a person.”

Meghan Picerno, Christine in Broadway’s The Phantom of the Opera As a high school freshman in Illinois, Picerno shocked all the upperclassmen by landing the leading female role of Marian in The Music Man. This, even though it was the first show she ever auditioned for!

Favorite memory: “So many fond ones down that memory lane. I loved the dancing scenes like ‘Shipoopi’ and the library scene [‘Marian the Librarian’], and really loved when I would sing with the barbershop quartet [‘Lida Rose’].

And I absolutely loved the rhythmic nature of the train scene [‘Rock Island’]. It’s funny— looking back as an adult—some of the songs really resonate much more now. ‘My White Knight’ immediately comes to mind.”

Reason for the show’s longevity: “I love that it’s the music that ultimately brings people together and can be the catalyst for change!”

Bryce Pinkham, 2014 Best Actor in a Musical Tony Award nominee for A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder, The Heidi Chronicles and Holiday Inn A grade-school teacher recommended to Pinkham’s parents they find an outlet for his “reckless creativity,” and a career in theatre was born. After his first year performing in a

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It’s about love.

Unyielding love.

Absolute love.

And, when it happens, you hold on tight.

theatre class at summer camp, all the kids were offered a chance to be in the ensemble of The Music Man at a local community college. He did it. Years later, he immersed himself in River City again, playing Harold Hill in his high school’s production in Moraga, CA. Favorite memory: “The rehearsal schedule [for the community college production] overlapped with our family vacation that had been planned for a while, but I begged my parents to let me be in the show, so my Dad went to meet with the director to see if they could work something out. The director looked across his desk at my Dad and said: ‘Yeah, yeah, Bryce can miss a few days. Do you act?’ [He said:] ‘Ummmm, I did in high school, but it's been a while.’ The director pushed a script across his desk: ‘Would you read this?’ When my Dad got home he announced that not only could I be in The Music Man, and we could all still go on our vacation, but that when we got back, he would be joining the cast as Charlie Cowell. So, my Dad and I made our professional theatre debuts together, and we were both hooked in equal measure. Fast forward to high school when I was cast as Harold Hill and my Dad (who had continued to invest in theatre as his very serious hobby) was the production stage manager.”

Reason for the show’s longevity: “I think the musical is so enduring on one level because of its popularity with audiences across all age groups, but on a deeper level because there is a con artist within each of us, and we are comforted by seeing Harold Hill get thwarted and ultimately reformed by love.”

Opposite page: Jerry Mitchell, age 10 (third from right) in Prof. Harold Hill’s boys’ band in a Paw Paw, MI community production of The Music Man. Photo courtesy Jerry Mitchell This page, left: Jelani Remy as Prof. Harold Hill in a Cedar Grove, NJ, school production of The Music Man. Photo courtesy Jelani Remy This page, right: Bryce Pinkham as Prof.

Harold Hill in his high school production of The Music Man. Photo courtesy Bryce Pinkham

Jelani Remy, Eddie Kendricks in Ain’t Too Proud As a high school student, Remy played Harold Hill in a production featuring elementary school students in his hometown of Cedar Grove, NJ. Favorite memory: “My favorite memory was teaching the barbershop quartet ‘Ice Cream.’

What a cool and fun scene that leads to beautiful harmony!”

Reason for the show’s longevity: “I think the show is done so often because it’s got so many great themes. Love, togetherness, the underdog story, change and, of course, the beautiful music and ‘wonderful roses, they tell me, in sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and dew.’ ”

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CURTAIN UP

Emily Walton, Janice and others in Come From Away Walton did The Music Man twice as a kid—and, in an odd reversal, she was in a professional production before an amateur one. At age 9, in 1996, she portrayed Amaryllis, a young piano student of Marian’s, at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, MA. Then, at age 15, in 2003, she portrayed Marian herself with the Riverdale Rising Stars in Riverdale, NY. Favorite memory: “My favorite memory of the 1996 production is that my dad, Bob Walton, played Harold Hill, and my brother, Alex Walton, played [a member] of the River City [Boys’ Band]. The very last moment of the show was him playing one single solitary note on the triangle, and the audience went crazy. I was very jealous because all of the attention was clearly supposed to be on me! When I did the show in 2003, that same brother played Winthrop to my Marian. It was a really special experience, and I loved getting to play older sister to my actual little brother.”

Reason for the show’s longevity: “I think it is still done so often because it’s ultimately a story about the healing power of community and music! My favorite moment of the show is, of course, the final moment . . . It’s such a beautiful display of parental pride, based not on perfection or absolute mastery of a skill, but on seeing their children belong to something.”

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This page: Kyle Mooney and Lin-Manuel Miranda in a parody of “Ya Got Trouble” on “Saturday Night Live.”

Image from NBC Entertainment Opposite page, top: The marquee of the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City.

Photo by Avery Brunkus Opposite page, bottom, standing left to right: Choreographer Warren Carlyle, director Jerry Zaks and musical director Patrick Vaccariello in rehearsals for the 2022 revival of The Music Man. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

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When The Show Calls for Sex and Nudity, Intimacy Director Claire Warden Answers the Call

BY FRANK RIZZO

W

ith the increased sensitivity toward sexual harassment in the workplace, there’s a new job among the credits in professional theatre: “Intimacy Director.”

Claire Warden has worked in this nascent specialty field for several years now with Broadway credits including Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Jagged Little Pill, The Inheritance, West Side Story, Slave Play and Company.

Warden, who is also a fight director, talked to Encore Monthly about the challenges of navigating sex scenes on stage.

What’s the job of an intimacy director?

They are first and foremost an advocate for the actor and can go to bat on their behalf.

This page: Intimacy Director Claire Warden.

Photo by Sydney Angel

Prior to intimacy directors, how were scenes of nudity and sex staged?

There were directors and choreographers who tried in many different ways to support actors, and many have been

very sensitive while some have been, “OK, just get on with it.” But some have been deeply toxic and handled these scenes for their own gratification from their position of supremacy. No matter how sensitive and consent-focused a director is, there is an inherent power dynamic between someone who is the director and someone who is the actor.

When is an intimacy director brought in?

The ideal is that you’re brought in as part of the design team right from the beginning to understand the vision of the show and the stories that we’re telling. We’d also have conversations with the actors individually to gauge their consent.

I always bring it back to the story that needs to be told. Does it have to be fully nude or [have] really graphic oral sex? If we can find what the story is then there’s always a different way to tell the story.

Then we can work around the boundaries of the actor in a way that still tells the story and respects their needs and boundaries.

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What obligation does the actor have in accepting a role and answering to the needs of the play?

It’s back to communication. If the director is, like, “I have this vision for the end: it’s fully naked,” or if it’s in the stage directions and if that information is made known to the actor who auditions, then they can decide, “No, I’m not in a place where I can do full nudity, so I won’t accept the role or do the audition.” Or they might be in a place where they just need some support. If there’s an intimacy director, if it’s a closed rehearsal room, or about the lighting, then that’s a conversation that can be had at the casting stage. It’s like, “If there’s a massive tango sequence and I can’t tango, well, is the tango necessary? Could it be a cha-cha?”

And you facilitate that conversation?

Directors sometimes feel awkward and they don't know how to talk about it. That’s part of my job to help the director navigate that conversation. Hopefully any nudity or

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sex is an integral part of the story telling and it must be in conversation right at the beginning along with all the other aspects of the play.

“I’m being made to do this to this actress and we haven’t had a chance to make sure she’s OK [or] I know she’s not OK and I don’t know what to do about it.”

Is staging sex scenes like choreography?

If it’s a sex scene, then there’s choreography and you want to give the actors time to learn it, to settle into it, to tweak it, like any piece of choreography.

How do you deal with conflicting methods of acting, with actors who need to be “in the moment”?

Method acting is often used as an excuse for toxic and inconsiderate behavior and I don’t think that should be tolerated in any workplace by anyone. There are times boundaries will be set and I will be, like, “That is not acceptable.” That is part of the specialized skill of an intimacy director. But we also have to respect actors in the way that they work and understand that it’s a deeply vulnerable and difficult job to do. I always try to understand what their process is and how we can build consent into it.

One thing about a consent-based process is it can fit into any way of working. Some people are genuinely intimidated by [intimacy] choreography.… So, there’s going to be a compromise. Like, OK, we can move

Do men and women actors respond differently?

I don’t see it as gendered reactions. I have heard stories of difficult, painful or abusive sex scenes from an equal number of male and female actors and different members of the gender spectrum. The gaze of an entertainment industry has very much been in the objectifying and in the subservience of women. But I’ve spoken with men who have felt objectified, who have not been given even a passing notion that they might be needing consent. Or that they would say,

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the post a little bit. This is off boundaries, no touching or groping of the crotch or breasts, but other than that, anything else, the actors can play with that.

How do actors separate their characters’ sexuality from their own?

It’s interesting, right? There’s such weight, shame and power around sex. So, we might have a conversation before a scene talking about the characters and what does this moment of sex mean for these characters. You root it in the character as opposed to when, I, Claire, as a human being wants to have sex, this is how I do it. This is what Claire sounds like when she’s having an orgasm.

You want the actors to root it in their character, in the same way they do in everything else in the show.

What was the most challenging assignment for you as an intimacy director?

I think initially working in Slave Play because of the content and the deep human conversations of racism, objectivity, sexual trauma, sexuality—and especially me as a white British woman with that colonial aspect. I had a co-i.d. [Teniece Divya Johnson] and they are a Person of Color, so we worked as a team. It was one of the most challenging but also one of the most fulfilling assignments.

Are you unflappable?

[Laughs] Texts have gone out among intimacy directors: “Has anyone done wet naked spanking? Flying sex scene with feathers?” First of all, I get the script and I read it and I may go, “Oh my goodness, wow.” Then

I go, “How the hell are we gonna do it?” Then my thought is, “OK what are the actors’ needs?” I shake off any embarrassment because it’s much harder for them because they’re the ones who have to do it.

I always try to understand what their process is and how we can build consent into it.

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BACKSTAGE

The Broadway-bound musical tries out in Chicago

BY DONALD LIEBENSON

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P

aradise Square, the $11.5 million Civil War-era musical turous faces of the dancing interracial couples. “I could tell,” he said, scheduled to open on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore “the artist was making out that this wasn’t casual. A look of delight and Theatre on March 20 (previews begin Feb. 22), had its joy in each other beamed across the centuries to me. These were relagenesis in a history book of Lower Manhattan that Irish tionships. I had never heard of anything like this. I researched it and musician and writer Larry Kirwan found years ago in a there was actually a name for these people: amalgamationists. And I second-hand New York bookstore. In the book were thought, ‘This could make a musical.’ ” etchings of the 19th century Five Points neighborhood and its AfricanThus began a near-decade-long artistic journey that has seen KirAmerican dance halls. wan’s original theatrical work ambitiously expand in scope, and marks If the general public is at all familiar with Five Points, it is most likely the return to Broadway of producer Garth Drabinsky (Ragtime, Kiss from Martin Scorsese’s 2002 Oscar-nominated film, The Gangs of New of the Spider Woman, Fosse), who was convicted in 2009 and served York. But Kirwan, lead singer of the American Celtic rock band Black 17 months in prison for fraud and forgery.

47, had heard about it decades before from his grandfather who raised Paradise Square’s original iteration, then titled Hard Times, played him growing up in Wexford, Ireland.

Off-Off-Broadway in 2012 at Cell Performance Salon. That show was “My grandfather had a best friend named Ned, who emigrated with his family to New York probably around 1890,” Kirwan recalled for Encore Monthly. “Despite the two boys’ promises to each other, Ned never wrote. Even 60 to 70 years later, when Ned’s name would come up, my grandfather would always say, ‘Poor Ned, he probably got lost in the Five Points.’ It set off a time bomb Opposite page: Eilis Quinn, Chloe Davis and Ensemble in the Chicago tryout of Paradise Square. Photo by Kevin Berne in my head.”

This page: At center, Kevin Dennis (with cap), Matt Bogart, Joaquina Kalukango, Chilina Kennedy, Nathaniel Stampley and Ensemble in the Chicago tryout of Paradise Square. Photo by Kevin Berne

Rapturous Faces Kirwan was particularly intrigued by the etchings of the dance halls depicting interracial bands and dancing couples of the period. “There were usually two Irish musicians and two African-Americans,” Kirwan said. “The Irish guy would play fiddle and the other would sing, and the African-Americans played banjo and percussion. I wondered how did they know what to play; they came up in two different worlds.

Probably the Irish guy was playing jigs and reels but playing to beats he had never played to before.”

Something else in the etchings caught Kirwan’s attention: the rap-

set in Five Points in Lower Manhattan, a slum that appalled even Charles Dickens, who in his “American Notes,” described it as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” and speculated whether the actual pigs that lived there “wondered why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours?”

Brutalized Peoples Hard Times was set during the Civil War against the backdrop of the New York Draft Riots of 1863, which pit poor Irish immigrants

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BACKSTAGE against African-Americans, both free-born and escaped slaves. Prior to this catastrophic event, these “brutalized peoples,” as Kirwan calls them, had, for a brief and shining moment, lived together in unprecedented harmony.

The new world the Irish and Blacks created intrigued Kirwan. “I’d been fascinated by Five Points since I was a little boy” he said. “When I emigrated to the U.S., I lived in the East Village [section of New York City] and I was within walking distance [of the former location of Five Points]. Now I live in SoHo, and if I go to buy fish, I’m right back in it.

All these themes and ideas came together: the amalgamationists, immigration, the striving. Everyone thinks the American story is you come here, put in your work and you get ahead, but that wasn’t the way it was. There were generations of poverty and people fighting their way up and fighting discrimination.”

Hard Times was driven by the songs of Stephen Foster, who lived in Five Points at the end of his career. Foster was also one of the major characters in the piece.

Kirwan had a personal connection to Foster’s music. “When I was 17, I started to play the tough bars in the docks of Wexford,” he recalled.

“The gig was, you played the first hour and then the workers would get enough alcohol in them that they wanted to sing. They would come up and they would expect you to know the song. Quite often, they were Foster songs, ‘Old Folks at Home,’ ‘Camptown Races,’ ‘Old Black Joe’ and ‘Hard Times.’ It was a left-wing labor town, so they would self-edit the songs—‘darky’ was changed to ‘comrade’ in ‘Old Folks at Home.’ I knew that Foster, toward the end of his life, had lived around the Five Points and had drunk in a particular place on his downward arc. I thought that the music African-Americans and the Irish would have had in common was Foster songs.”

Hard Times was well-received. New York Times critic Daniel M. Gould called it, “a knockout entertainment.”

A Little Piece of Eden Peter LeDonne, an associate of Garth Drabinsky, loved the show, and invited Kirwan to meet Drabinsky, who was not allowed to travel to the United States because he was facing outstanding charges of fraud here. The U.S. charges were dropped in 2018, though he was convicted and served prison time in his native Canada. Drabinsky, the co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based Livent, the Tony Award-winning company, told Kirwan that he was interested in Hard Times as the third in a trilogy of musicals that tackled race relations that included a revival of Show Boat and Ragtime, both Tony Award winners.

“It was fucking mad,” Kirwan said with a laugh. “My manager was Elliott Roberts, so I was used to dealing with big characters, but there was something about Garth that I could tell if he said something, he would go to the wall to get it done. I said, ‘Alright, mate.’ ” Drabinsky told Kirwan that he wanted to make his musical epic,

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which would require a bigger screen to tell the story. From Hard Times’ core cast of six, the cast now numbers 38, including Tony Award nominee Joaquina Kalukango (Slave Play), Chilina Kennedy (Beautiful), Matt Bogart (Jersey Boys), John Dossett (Newsies), Sidney DuPont (Beautiful), A.J. Shively (Bright Star), Nathaniel Stampley (The Color Purple), Gabrielle McClinton (Pippin), Jacob Fishel (Fiddler on the Roof) and Kevin Dennis, a prolific Canadian actor making his Broadway debut.

“I wanted to do more with amalgamation,” Kirwan said. “Garth and I worked together and came up with two pivotal characters.” One is Nelly O’Brien, a Black woman, who owns and operates Paradise Square, a Five Points bar and dance hall that she describes as “a little piece of Eden.” The other is Annie, her sister-in-law, an Irish-Catholic who is married to Rev. Samuel Jacob Lewis, a free Black Abolitionist.

Nelly is married to Annie’s brother, Willie O’Brien, who has enlisted to fight for the North in the Civil War. Others brought into Paradise Square’s orbit include Owen Duignan, Annie’s nephew, newly arrived from Ireland, who shares a room with Washington Henry, an escaped slave separated from his beloved wife Angelina, and Lucky Mike, a white Irishman who becomes increasingly embittered and resentful when he’s unable to find a job after returning from the war.

The catalyst for the downfall of Eden is Frediric Tiggens, a corrupt politician who insidiously stokes Irish resentment against the AfricanAmericans for taking White jobs, setting the stage for the Draft Riots.

Tap Roots Drabinsky recruited a towering creative team to fulfill his vision of Paradise Square, including director Moisés Kaufman (The Laramie Project), Grammy and Emmy Award winner Jason Howland (Beautiful), lyricists Nathan Tysen and Masi Asare, and playwrights Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas and Marcus Gardley, who are co-credited with Kirwan for the book.

At the heart of the amalgamationists’ story is dance, Kirwan said.

“Garth wanted to the tell that story through dance, and who better to tell it than [Tony Award-winning choreographer] Bill T. Jones? When the Irish got here, the main entertainment in Five Points was the African-American dance halls. Through the competition between the Irish and Black dancers, tap was created.”

While dance was built up for Paradise Square, Foster’s music and Foster himself was de-emphasized. There are only three Foster songs remaining in the show. Jason Howland said, “When it was a Foster musical, it made sense all the songs were his; you were talking about the man and his music. This show is telling a very complicated story and Foster’s [sometimes racially problematic] lyrics don’t tell that story at all. Musically you want the songs to not just be about the emotional pathos of a moment, but also to advance a story. No matter how many ways we tried to twist [Foster’s] lyrics, they didn’t serve this much big-

Kayla Pecchioni, Jacobi Hall and Karen Burthwright in the Chicago tryout of Paradise Square. Photo by Kevin Berne

ger story we were now trying to tell. We could allow room for Foster’s music as the popular songs of the day, which is what we do in the play.

We needed songs that speak to who these characters are.”

Two songs that Howland crafted for the show include “Let It Burn,” an 11 o’clock number for Nelly. Another, “Breathe Easy,” came out of conversations asking where the hope was in the story, he said.

Kirwan credits Craig Lucas for creating the parallel Washington Henry and Angelina story that would dramatize “the awfulness of slavery and the desire for freedom.”

The Spine of the Piece Christina Anderson was brought in to more authentically sharpen characters in the book, Howland said.

“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know anything about Five Points,” Anderson said. “I had heard of the movie Gangs of New York, but I hadn’t seen it. I absolutely didn’t know about the Draft Riots. I’m a big fan of Moisés Kaufman and Bill T. Jones, so the team was exciting. When I was talking to Moisés, he had mentioned they were interested in developing the Nelly character further and making her the spine of the

piece. Here was a Black woman in 1863 who owns a bar and is a political force at a time when she isn’t allowed to vote as a woman or being Black. It piqued my interest.”

Another character she fleshed out was Frediric Tiggens. “There were previous iterations of the book…having a political force pulling the strings. The conversation was how do we make Tiggens more dynamic, active and a threatening presence in the show to put the heat under the tensions in the story.”

Anderson, a playwright herself, is no stranger to artistic collaboration. She worked in the writer’s room of the Edie Falco TV series, “Tommy”. “There is a lot of conversation,” she explained, “but at the end of the day, it’s the vision of the show runner (that prevails). I consider myself to be a collaborative artist. It’s great to show up and most of the Lego® pieces are there; you just have to put in the last couple of pieces.”

Kirwan still marvels at how his original creation has matured. “You have to be grateful for all the collaboration that’s gone into it,” he said.

“Not just the creators, but all the actors who have added to it down the years. We often forget the different workshops, how much has been

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Actors go on to do other things, but while they may not be here anymore, each one has brought something to [the show] in ways I can see today. It’s humbling; all this came from a moment in the bath when I got the idea.

Nathaniel Stampley as Rev. Samuel Jacob Lewis, Chilina Kennedy as Annie Lewis in the Chicago tryout of Paradise Square. Photo by Kevin Berne

given by so many to put something like this up. Actors [involved at various stages in the production] go on to do other things, but while they may not be here anymore, each one has brought something to [the show] in ways I can see today. It’s humbling; all this came from a moment in the bath when I got the idea.”

Inspiring Chicago Paradise Square premiered in 2019 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. This production, too, was well received, and Broadway looked to be the next stop for the show. Then came the pandemic. Theatres went dark.

Drabinsky opted to take one more look at the show before taking it to New York. “The choice where to go was clear,” he said in a press presentation. “I had to bring this company to Chicago. The city’s Midwestern values and integrity have never failed to inspire me.”

Drabinsky calls Chicago his “American home.” He not only mounted such successful productions as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Aspects of Love, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ragtime and Show Boat there, but he restored and renovated the decrepit Oriental Theatre, a former movie palace, re-opened as the Nederlander Theatre, which is where Paradise Square had its pre-Broadway run in

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November and December.

Another reason he selected Chicago, he said, was because the city boasts vibrant Irish and Black communities for whom the largely unknown story about how a new culture grew from “an accidental society” might resonate.

As with many shows, Paradise Square was further tweaked during its pre-Broadway run. Howland said that one song was cut and another, “Since I Met You,” was added. It is the moment in the show when Nelly and her husband part. It was originally “a playful song,” Howland said, “but that was the wrong emotional beat. ‘Since I Met You’ is a sweeter song.”

Kirwan said he was thrilled to watch the show further come together during its Chicago run. Night after night, he thought to himself, ‘It’s getting there, it’s getting there.’ And then one Saturday, he said, “it caught fire. And on Sunday, it had the same fire. I don’t know how… they got it, but they got it.”

Howland called the Chicago run an “amazing” experience. “It was the first time for a lot of us being back in the theatre in almost 20 months,” he said. “It was overwhelming just to turn around and there were people sitting behind me as I was conducting. I felt incredibly fortunate to be back.”

For Anderson, too, being back in a theatre has been “really power-

Front, left to right: Hailee Kaleem Wright, Karen Burthwright and Sidney Dupont; Back left to right: Chloé Davis, Sir Brock Warren, Jamal Christopher Douglas and Jacobi Hall in Paradise Square at Berkeley Rep. Photo by Kevin Berne

ful,” she said. “It has a spiritual element. You’re working with other human beings you’re meeting for the first time, or you have worked with before; it’s an exchange of energy that doesn’t exist truly in another art form.”

She also believes that audiences are ready for an original musical that challenges them. “TV and film have gotten very good at telling quirky, unique, grand and epic stories. I feel audiences are ready to come back to something new, and we were ready to lean forward and go on a journey.”

Drabinsky’s Legal Past As Paradise Square readies its highly anticipated Broadway premiere, some Broadway watchers are re-visiting Drabinsky’s legal past and allegations that he fostered hostile working environments. The OnStage Blog wrote, “Garth Drabinsky’s return is a threat, and a direct contradiction to the progressive forward motion to be found currently as some of the world’s most notable theatrical environments emerge from unprecedented periods of dormancy.”

Howland said he would not specifically address so-called “cancel culture” with regards to Drabinsky. “What I will say,” he said, “is that as a society, we incarcerate people with the idea that incarceration isn’t

just about punishment, but about rehabilitation. Unlike people you might think of who are considered titans of business who turn out to behave terribly, here is a person who went to prison, who was taken to trial and found guilty.”

He added, “What I can speak to is how his behavior has been. Like all collaborators, he’s been complicated. He is passionate. I’m passionate. I have certainly yelled in a meeting when I have gotten annoyed that people aren’t listening to what I’m saying. I’m not proud of it.

What I can say is that the show has been financially responsible. When the show asked for an EDI (Equity, Diversity & Inclusion) advocate, we received one, that when requests have come in for things that are needed, they have been honored and answered.”

Kirwan added, “Garth lives this…play in a way that I’m not even living it anymore. He is the Rock of Gibraltar. I’ve never seen anyone work as hard on this as he has worked for the last eight-and-a-half years. I’m not one to judge other people because I’ve made lots of mistakes in my own life. What I do see is a guy striving—as he tried to do with Show Boat and Ragtime—to make the work a better place through Paradise Square.”

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A Place to Speak SAY Opens the Stage to Celebrate Stutterers

BY BRIDGETTE M. REDMAN

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magine being so self-conscious about the way you speak that when a group of friends ask you what your mother’s name is, you pretend to be sick or say you can’t remember rather than attempt to speak a name that might lead you to reveal your stutter.

It was that seminal moment in his childhood that led Taro Alexander to found an organization, SAY: The Stuttering Association for the Young, that has been helping kids who stutter to know that they are not alone and to give them a place where they can perform on stage and no one is going to try to “fix” them.

More than 70 million people around the world stutter. Five percent of all children stutter at some point in their development, according to The Stuttering Asso-

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ciation. In 2001, Alexander, who by then had a successful career as an actor, wanted to create a place where children who stuttered would know there were others like them.

The initial program started with seven kids. Then called “Our Time,” the organization brought them together as a group, wrote an original play and spent the year working on it.

SAY now offers several programs for kids ages three to 18: • Camp SAY: A two-week summer camp for young people who stutter that helps build their confidence and communication skills while providing a traditional camp experience.

• Confident Voices: The after-school and weekend program that uses the arts to encourage confidence in kids and teens who stutter.

• Speech Therapy: Led by a bilingual speech-language pathologist, SAY offers therapy driven by the individual desires and needs of each child.

• Camp SAY: Across the USA: A mini-Day Camp experience that takes place over a weekend in cities across the country.

• Camp SAY: DC: A year-round creative arts program in the Washington DC area.

The Time They Need Travis Robertson, vice president of programming who works with Confident Voices and SAY ’s camp program, met Alexander in 2002. Both were in theatre and knew the power it had to change lives. “Using the

arts as a vehicle for creative expression has always been at the heart of what we do,” Robertson said.

“Confident Voices has evolved to explore different kinds of expression. In addition to playwriting, we’ve done songwriting, a poetry project online and this past year we’ve continued to explore many different avenues of creativity and ways that people can express themselves authentically.”

Noah Cornman, the executive director, is not a person who stutters but he says he was taken with the organization. He was in the front row of the first performance and has participated ever since. For years he worked as a volunteer, a teaching artist, a camp counselor and a member of their advisory board.

“I spent any free time I had with them,” Cornman

said. “I wanted to be around the organization. The kids were incredible, the energy and the philosophy of celebrating young people for exactly who they are and giving everyone the time they need and want to speak and be heard—to me philosophically, this transcended the specific community of people who stutter. I felt that was the world I wanted to live in.”

Opposite page: Actor Paul Rudd with SAY founder Taro Alexander at a 2019 bowling benefit for SAY. Photo courtesy SAY This page: A scene from SAY’s Confident Voices “The Short Play Project” performances.

Photo courtesy SAY

Really, Really OK to Stutter Cornman said that Alexander was in his mid-20s before he met another person who stuttered. By this time, he had found a career onstage as an actor and a teacher.

“For Taro [Alexander], the arts and the theatre arts are a wonderful environment that is welcoming,”

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BACKSTAGE Cornman said. “It’s where people can hear their voice, be on stage and be celebrated and listened to. It was a crazy idea he had and now, 20 years later, the organization has grown and we’re still doing some of that original idea of programming—bringing young people who stutter together to know they are not alone and to know that their voices are important and what they have to say is important.”

At SAY, kids get to decide what they want to do with their stutter. SAY does have a speech therapist they can meet with, but they decide the goals, whether it is fluency, greater confidence to speak how they speak or to work their way through “blocks” (moments when a phrase or sound gets stuck coming out), or anything else.

“One of our catch phrases is—It is really, really OK to stutter, really,” Cornman said.

Stuttering severity changes, sometimes one day to the next, in each individual. SAY accommodates that.

Some of the group’s event posters include the caveat to the audience that the running time of the show will vary “depending on fluency.” This removes pressure from the young performers.

Every Part of Me Was Welcome Isabella Negron first participated in SAY when it was still called Our Time. She joined when she was eight and stayed with the program until she graduated from high school. “I walked in and automatically felt at home,” Negron said. “They were so welcoming to every part of me, not only the part of me that stutters, but every part of me was welcome.”

When she reached high school, SAY started the speech therapy program, but she was reluctant to take advantage of it. “I had been so opposed to it for years,” Negron said. “I’d had not so great speech therapists who wanted to cure my stutter. They’d push, ‘Why are you still stuttering? Aren’t you using your tools?’”

She decided to give the SAY therapist a try and was surprised when he started by asking her what she wanted to do. “I was like, ‘I have options?’” Negron said of her surprise. “He said, ‘of course, it’s your speech. You can do whatever you want.’ ” She was told they could work on getting rid of her blocks or just learn skills to get through the block once she was in it.

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The Comfort to Speak However They Speak “In our program there are kids who have fluency as a goal, which is totally fine and great,” Robertson said. “There are also kids who stutter a whole lot, and their goal is to not take away their stutter, but to have the comfort to speak however they speak, to advocate for themselves and to be heard, to order the food they want and stutter, to raise their hand in class when they know the answer and stutter.”

The kids in the program learn to advocate for themselves. Too often, people who stutter are presumed to have mental handicaps or are told to slow down or have others finish their sentences for them. SAY empowers kids to be able to say what they want to say the way that they want to say it.

Robertson said the camp program came about as a way of extending the program to people who don’t live in New York. They would go to conferences to share the work their kids were doing and they’d get asked, “When are you coming to Chicago? To Los Angeles?

When are you coming to my city?”

The Coolest Person in the World Negron said one of her best memories of SAY was at camp. There was a big group of seniors graduating and all her older friends were leaving. They hung out

on the last night crying and telling stories. “It just felt like so much love,” Negron said. “I remember that feeling of, they’re about to go out and do all these great things.”

She said they wrote their favorite camp memories on the front of a paper plate and then on the back wrote things they wanted to let go of or dreams they wanted to come true. Then they lit a candle on the plate and let it drift away onto the lake.

Her other favorite moment involved movie star Paul Rudd who became interested in the subject after playing a character who stuttered in the play Three Days of Rain. He had contacted Alexander and sug-

gested that they do a skit involving Hamilton where he would play Aaron Burr.

“It was the day of the event and they called me two hours before saying, ‘Can you get here right now?’” Negron objected saying she lived in Long Island and couldn’t get to the city that fast. They told her that Paul Rudd wanted to sing with her. “I got in the car and went!”

She said she and Rudd sang “Guns and Ships.”

“I posted the video on Instagram,” Negron said. “All of my friends thought I was the coolest person in the world. I felt like the coolest person.”

Both of those experiences illustrate the sort of things SAY wants to provide—the camaraderie with

A number from SAY's Confident Voices “The Songwriting Project” performances at Joe’s Pub in New York City.

Photo courtesy SAY

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It is just a once-in-a-lifetime experience to meet all these amazing people and to grow as an individual.

This page: SAY participants get hyped before “The Mentor Project” performances.

Photo courtesy SAY Opposite page: SAY Alum Isabella Negron sings at the 2020 “Kelli O’Hara Benefit Concert for SAY” in Irvington, NY. Photo courtesy SAY

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other people who stutter and the opportunity to work with the stars of the industry.

Robertson says they get a wide spectrum of young people in the program from those who are thrilled to learn that there are other kids—and adults—who stutter, to others who aren’t quite ready for what the program has to offer.

“It is really hard to explain what SAY is,” Robertson said. “The world of SAY is not something that really exists in people’s daily lives—the idea that you can come into a space and stutter, and no one is going to interrupt you or finish your sentences or ‘help’ you out by telling you to slow down. You can take as long of a time to say what you want to say, and everyone will listen. Wrap-

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ping your head around that doesn’t make sense. I’ve had moments where I meet with a young person for the first time, and they hear me stutter and I can tell that’s the first time they’ve heard an adult stutter.”

A Willingness to Try Robertson said their face completely changes and they know that SAY is a place for them. On the other extreme, he gives the example of a young man who came figuratively kicking and screaming into the program. They spent an hour talking with him and his parents and he said maybe three words total. They shared their stories and would ask him questions and he would just shake his head yes or no and not say any-

thing at all. After he left, Alexander and Robertson were sure they’d never see him again.

Several months later, he came back, and they were completely floored. At the end of a day of programming, he said, “See you later.” They said he kept coming back and it took a year before they were able to have a conversation with him.

“It was a long journey, but he showed a willingness to be uncomfortable and to try something new,” Robertson said.

So Much to Say In each students’ graduation year, they have the opportunity to write and direct a one-act play. SAY invites professional actors to come in to perform and they have a full design team for lighting, costumes and set and the student is the director. In this young man’s graduation year, his one act was so long they had to beg him to cut it.

“He had so much to say,” Robertson said. “He had such a clear vision, and he took such ownership of having this kind of space that he just completely ran with it. It was so beautiful to see him have that kind of ownership and power and voice. We got into disagreements about it and he said, ‘I can’t cut this. All of it is important.’ To see him in that place, to have that engagement and specificity and conversations and looking back to the kid who said nothing that whole time.

It’s incredible. I never discount anyone’s journey or the time that it takes them.”

Negron encourages anyone who stutters to learn more about SAY. “Have one conversation with Taro,” Negron said.

“After one conversation, your life will change. It isn’t that you’ll automatically feel confident. He doesn’t have a magic wand. But after one conversation, you’ll open up and know that you have this one thing, but it doesn’t define you.”

Now a graduate of SAY and college, Negron said she is still in contact with the people she met in the program because they’ve remained her best friends.

“If you are part of SAY, you’re never not part of it,” Negron said. “It is just a once-in-a-lifetime experience to meet all these amazing people and to grow as an individual.”

She said it was transformative to be on stage and have an audience that didn’t care if you stuttered, that didn’t care if it took two minutes to say your line.

“It was a confidence booster,” Negron said. “If I can stand on stage and stutter and everyone still claps for me afterward and thinks I was great, then I can do anything in the world.”

BACKSTAGE

the pit musician life Get to Know the Theatre Artists You Hear, But Rarely See

BY DAVID SPENCER

B

ecause they’re usually out of sight under the lip of the stage or rendered part of the background when they are visible, theatre musicians are often taken for granted.

Ironically, they’re all idiosyncratic individuals who must perform on at least as high a level as any member of the cast, and even more exactingly, because there’s rarely any leeway for individual interpretation: The orchestra—colloquially often called “the band,” despite size or whether symphonic instruments are involved—must function as an organic unit, its usual stock-in-trade to balance dynamism with familiarity.

Of vital importance is how each player delivers his or her assigned “book.” Not to be confused with the musical’s libretto, the term book, to a theatre musician, refers to the component part on each music stand: the 1st trumpet book, the 2nd violin book, etc.

The interviewees for this article represent several generations of professional theatre musicians, as well as the gamut of experience: Broadway, national tour, regional, offstage, onstage and—primarily—in the orchestra pit.

Being a Theatre Musician: Why You Do It Cellist Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf has held chairs in 17 Broadway shows, including The Bridges of Madison County, and the recent revivals of A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George and My Fair Lady. Her debut album, Music of Broadway for Cello and Piano, features all-new arrangements of classic and contemporary songs and is currently on the 2022 Grammy Ballot.

Dorman-Phaneuf: One of the reasons I’m proud to be a Broadway musician is that [musical theatre is] a successful, self-supporting business. It’s not reliant on donations; and so, as art form, I think it’s underappreciated. Which was the point of my album, to bring classical and Broadway more into alignment. The craft of opening a show, and the level of musicianship required, has to be at the highest level, to match the quality and wide variety of music being written. New York demands it. We [theatre musicians often] sit next to colleagues who play at the Metropolitan Opera, and then we might go fill in at a rock show with the best rock musicians on the planet.

The reason I love shows is that as a teenager I used to put theatre into classical music: I wrote lyrics for Bach Suites, drew costumes

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for Brahms sonatas and created plotlines. I needed a story in order not to just worry about being in tune and playing it right. So, for me, the fact that there is that story happening and that there is an emotional purpose for everything connects me to every note of every show that I play.

Jeff Harris is a pianist, composer, arranger, conductor and lyricist.

He has worked with such diverse singers as Maureen McGovern (his longest association), Chaka Khan, Jack Jones, Barbara Cook, Lea Salonga, Marilyn Maye, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Megan Hilty. Harris has worked extensively on Broadway as both pianist and conductor for Gypsy (starring Patti LuPone), On the Town (both recent revivals), Fosse, Beauty and the Beast, Crazy for You, Jerome Robbins’ Broadway and many others.

Harris: This sounds very uninspiring and unromantic, but [playing in a Broadway orchestra] is solid work. It’s the closest thing, for a musician, to punching a clock. You sign in, you play your 2.5-hour show; you go home. And when you’re a sub, you go in like a relief pitcher, they’re like Oh God, we love you, you’re great. You’ve got your check, and a percentage of your payment on top of that goes into a pension fund. [That said], some people are just lifers in the pit, that’s all they do. For me, it needed to be just one piece of the pie, something I enjoyed doing while pursuing my other stuff.

Starting Out Dorman-Phaneuf (Broadway): I was 29 years old, living in Denver, finishing my doctorate in cello performance at CU Boulder, subbing at the Colorado ballet, the symphony—and playing in pickup bands [road tour orchestras that hire local musicians to supplement a core of key players, who travel with the show], which came through town [such as] Jason Robert Brown’s show, Parade, and Cathy Rigby’s Peter Pan. And it was such a lightbulb moment, in terms of what made sense for me as a professional musician, what felt natural, instinctive, fun. Jason said he was writing this chamber musical, The Last Five Years, and I thought: Whatever this is, I want to play it. So, I went to Chicago [where it would have its debut]; Tom Murray, the music director put me up in his home because, for what the North Light Theatre was paying, I don’t know that I would have been able to find a place to live. And when the show came to New York, I came with it,

knowing I’d have three months of work. Again, I found a friend who gave me a couch for six months, but now I was on a mission. I was at stage doors handing out my resume, I emailed all the contractors, I put up a little website. And it was very hard because people are territorial about their jobs, and I didn’t know what that [resistance] was going to be [like] until I came face-to-face with it. But enough people came to see The Last Five Years—and it was such a heavily string-featured show—that it was a pretty great calling card to start out with.

Andrew Abrams has worked Off-Broadway, regionally, and on tour as a professional pit musician, musical director, conductor, composer and Equity actor. He holds an MA from Goldsmiths University in musical theatre writing and was a member of the Advanced BMI Musical Theatre writing workshop. He is also the Artistic Director of Capital City Theatre, an Equity regional company, in Madison, WI. Abrams (Tour): [When I began in Madison, Wisconsin], in college, I started my own theatre company. The first pit I conducted was a 20-piece orchestra for 42nd Street. Of course, I didn’t really know much about conducting at that point, I was a singeractor and a pianist. I went to the music store and bought one of those giant marching band batons the leaders use when they stand up on the scaffolding. The musicians didn’t say anything to me about it, but they must’ve thought I was crazy— or compensating. But [I was jumping] into the deep end and learned to do by doing. When I moved to New York, I wound up in a building full of musicians and singers. And I put little slips of paper under doors saying that I was in the building if they needed an accompanist or a vocal coach. And I actually got some bites; and one of the people said, “I have a music director friend taking out the national tour of Kiss of the Spider Woman who needs an associate conductor and keyboard/coach. Are you interested in doing it?” And I was like, “Yeah!” The music director said, “Come to my apartment.” So, I grabbed my Follies score, went there and played through that; and he’s like, “You want the job?” I was like, “Really?”

He’s like, “Yeah.” Over. Done.

One of Montreal’s most versatile and in-demand musicians, Beth McKenna has made her name as a rapidly-rising artist through her music’s reach all over Canada and across North America. She has just released her first solo album, “Beyond Here.”

McKenna (Regional): When I was a junior in high school, I had already learned clarinet and saxophone and I was looking for more challenges. I was, like, I’m bored, I’m practicing a lot, but the music’s not getting harder. And my mom, who’s a high school teacher, was the costume

Jonathan Monro (front) and the orchestra for the Montreal premiere of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

seamstresses for the musicals. So, of course, she was like, “Hey, go listen to the band rehearse for the senior high musical.” So, I knocked on the door of the senior band room. I’m like, “Can I come in and listen?” They’re like, “Can you come in and play?” I’m like, “What?” They’re like, “Yeah, we need someone who plays sax and clarinet, and this book also needs flute.” I’m like, “Okay, cool.” So, I started taking private flute lessons and doing [lots of ] musicals.

Then I moved on to McGill [University in Montreal] where I got my Bachelor of Education. That’s where I met Chris Barillaro [who would become a prominent and influential musical director in the Canadian theatrical community and was musical directing via McGill’s student-run Artists Undergrad Society], who was the volunteer musical director for [the Society’s production of ] Cabaret. After Cabaret, Chris’s career took off and he just kept ENCOREMONTHLY.COM

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BACKSTAGE bringing the same musicians with him [which took me from] community theatre to semi-professional to playing in professional bands for different contractors.

Substituting, a.k.a. Subbing Harris: [After a number of hugely positive experiences,] I didn’t do great [subbing] on Phantom, because, personally, I really don’t understand [identify with] that music. I thought I did fine, but I got a call the next week from the musical director, who was thinking of signing with my manager as a composer, so I answered his questions; and at the end, said, “It was really great playing for you the other night.” There was a long pause and he said, “Oh, was that you?” He subsequently left the show, and the next conductor, a friend, said, “Jeff, we’d love to have you back now.” And I said, “No, thank you.”

The experience taught me that there’s certain shows I’m suited for, and I should say no to the ones for which I’m not.

derstanding and an acceptance that comes with the gig. When you’ve been touring dozens of towns for months at a time, you realize that both the orchestra and cast get so bored with doing the exact same thing every night that they want [the unexpected] to happen [periodically], because it keeps them fresh. It is important that [there’s a consistent standard], but at the same time, [the regulars] learn how to adapt—like the Borg. Really, everybody knows everybody’s human.

On Orchestras Getting Smaller and Electronic Enhancement Since at least the 1970s, there’ve been long-run Broadway shows eliminating “non-essential” players from orchestra sections; and since at least the mid-1980s, orchestrations have routinely been conceived for ever-smaller bands, especially given electronic instruments able to emulate size…all concurrent with a ticket price inflation.

Jeffrey Lodin was a longtime pit musician and has since musical directed a number of world premieres. He has also composed a number of produced musicals with longtime collaborator William Squier and father-in-law John Allen. He has worked with numerous prominent performers (most notably Chita Rivera) as conductor and pianist (Andy Gibb, Mongo Santamaria). He is a faculty member of AMDA in New York City.

Lodin: If I’m [regularly] playing The Lion King, that piano is my chair. It’s my responsibility to have three subs ready. But each one needs to come in and play the show. And he’ll get one shot. Maybe two; but if a sub trumpet player hits that one “clam” [wrong note] that gets the conductor’s attention, and the conductor’s in a surly mood, that trumpet player’s not going to be back. It’s a grueling audition: You have to learn the show [beforehand]; you’re not being paid [for the homework]; and then you’re getting one eighth of a salary. And a lot of musicians say that it’s just not worth it, “I’ll wait till I get my own show.”

Abrams: There are two kinds of tours. Those that [have the orchestration reduced] to a fairly small amount [of players, who travel] with the show [perhaps enhanced by pre-recorded] tracks to thicken the texture. And those that travel with just a pianist, a drummer and sometimes a bass player; and pick up [the balance of ] instruments [in each town]. And while having that full orchestra is great, [the flip side is that] sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to get.

[A colleague told me about a retired local] trumpet player he’d hired who just didn’t have the chops for that stuff anymore; he was just kind of biffing the show left and right. So [he had to be replaced] by a player from further out.

[As to fitting in precisely so there’s no deviation from an expected norm], I feel that, because touring is its own animal, there’s an un-

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Cellist Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf

Dorman-Phaneuf: Well, you said it, [the producers] can get away with it; but then again, that makes [musicals] successful: Every theatre has a show, plus a waiting list of shows trying to get in. It’s a vibrant business and a lot of that comes from the ticket price.

My line on the number of musicians hired is always, if the right people are making the choices, we’re going to be okay. [For example, if a musical director like] Ted Sperling’s in charge, he’s gonna get his full orchestra. If [orchestrator] Jonathan Tunick says he needs 13 players and won’t do it unless he gets 13…you know. [But there are situations where the creatives] know that they would have a more successful product if they just had another trumpet player, and it’s maddening to think about that one trumpet player who was absolutely vetoed on the contract and [about the profound] difference his presence would have made to the reviews and opening night. It’s an ever-increasing battle about the bottom line. And my experience with the musicians’ union has been that of fighting tooth and nail—together—to try and help educate and explain and protect, as much as we humanly can, the industry.

Originally from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Jonathan Monro is a multi-disciplinary performer and creator. He has written eight musicals, 20 original scores for productions at the Stratford Festival in Ontario and played-conducted more than 30 musicals, new, standard-contemporary and classic. He teaches privately and resides in Montreal.

Monro: It’s a double-edged sword. If the story of a musical lends itself to synthesized music, then why not? Or if a composer-orchestrator team decides they can reduce the [required players] by using a synth in order to encourage more theatre companies to produce their show, then I support that. [But] only if high quality sound patches are used to maintain the integrity of the original orchestrations. I also believe that these reductions should be part of the [subsequent] rental [version of the show so, because the music directors for those productions] should not have to spend hundreds of hours creating reduced orchestra-charts just because a theatre company wants to cut corners.

Lodin: For my first Off-Broadway show, I went with the orchestrator to the [musicians’ union offices] and literally had to bring along a synthesizer to demonstrate the sounds that we wanted to use. And they were telling us, “You can’t use this sound or that sound because then you’re replacing a musician.” Now it seems to me the person playing the synthesizer is also a musician. And we had this technology [available to us], even as crude as it was in 1982, so why shouldn’t that count? We actually had to limit what we were capable of doing, and that’s really wrong.

A typical Broadway orchestra pit.

Photo by Donna Martin

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BACKSTAGE Keeping Repetition Fresh Monro: Shows change from performance to performance. The variations keep musicians on their toes and the audience reactions are a great way to keep musicians engaged.

Abrams: As a musician, you follow the conductor. You shouldn’t listen to the singers. I mean, obviously, if [a singer’s mistake throws you] off, you know to look to the conductor for [desperation:] What are we doing? But you should never anticipate what a conductor is going to want to do based on what you think you hear because that’s their job. Yours is to watch the conductor, as if you’re playing a concert, and follow exactly. And oftentimes the musicians won’t even hear the singers. At all.

Now the drummer, however, [is another story]. It’s really helpful for a drummer to have [an audio] monitor because if a conductor is trying to move the pit along or slow them down, the drummer’s hearing a singer can sometimes at least give him an idea of what the conductor’s trying to achieve—especially if the conductor’s playing [a keyboard book] too and can’t “get at it” with a stick.

Lodin: When I left [the theatre musician] part of the business, I started playing for commercials, working in a studio with the finest musicians in New York, guys whose names I’d read on the back of LP jackets. And they’d all say, “I would never do a Broadway show, because you get bogged-down playing the same thing.” You’re a jazz musician. You’re an improviser. How do you deal with that? In fact, there was one trumpet player, his show was Cats, and he finally left it because it was ripping his soul out. [But because currently there’s so much less work], those same players are now coveting doing a Broadway show.

McKenna: Even though you’re playing the same music every night, you’re [bonding while] working on getting everything just that little hair tighter. It’s not like playing a gig in a big band or backing up a singer for one night in a jazz club. It’s a very different kind of challenge, but still one I really enjoy.

Conductor Tales Harris: I was subbing on Crazy for You, playing Gershwin under Paul Gemignani, a conductor I really respected because of all the work he’d done with Sondheim, and he was every bit as good as one would imagine. He’s interesting, too: Some conductors conduct right on the beat; others, unfortunately, conduct a little behind the beat which is not helpful…and then there’s a European class who conduct way ahead of the beat, very consistently, but you get used to it right away. And that’s Paul’s technique. It wasn’t rushed, but in

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staying ahead, he was always pushing the show a little bit—and in theatre, that’s what needs to happen.

Lodin: The show I subbed on after Evita was My One and Only, which had the brilliant Michael Gibson’s orchestrations, rest his soul, and there was an excitement, the band was absolutely cooking; and a lot of it had to do with the [Gershwin] material we were playing.

That was Jack Lee conducting—who was really hard to play to: If I caught sight of his baton I was lost, because his beat looked like a triplet to the eighth note. So, I would try not to look and just fly with the band. [By contrast, Paul] Gemignani was so easy to follow, because he kind of danced.

On Connecting to the Show Monro: I always prefer when the musicians are visible [to the audience], because for me it adds to the experience. However, [their not being in a below-stage pit] makes it more difficult to balance the sound, and in musical theatre the story is the most important element. I do think a direct line [between the band and] a living, breathing conductor, not one on a screen, is a must.

I don’t like when musicians are forced to play in a separate room, far away from the stage. That, to me, is unacceptable. There’s no way for the musicians to feel the energy of the actors or the audience, so the music will undoubtedly feel disjointed and ruin the story. It is the height of poor design, carelessness on behalf of the director, and should not be allowed.

Dorman-Phaneuf: Totally depends on the show—some, I’ve been onstage, in costume—and on whether the nuance of acoustic sound is considered intrinsic to the listeners’ experience or if [those in charge] actually want a more controlled, dial-in-able [effect]—which is a specific kind of sound, which serves some shows, like Hamilton, for example.

The quality of the playing is always so high, though, that [you can look forward to what may] happen each night, which parts are going to land, which are not—because you notice those ever-soslight idiosyncrasies when an actor [is singing something differently]. And sometimes it’s inexplicable why an audience will suddenly laugh where they’ve never laughed before; or scream and jump to their feet. And sometimes you know exactly what happened. There’s just a magic moment that comes together.

Lodin: I go back to when I went into Evita. This would be 1981; I believe Patti [LuPone] was already gone. Had no idea what was going on up there on stage. Somebody once asked me, “What’s the show about?” I said, “It’s about a lot of minor and diminished chords and 7/8 time.”

The Communal Experience On a personal note…Throughout rehearsals, opening and the entire Montreal debut run of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (2015), which I wrote with composer Alan Menken, the eight-piece band clearly felt as proprietary about the show as we did, even unto playing cast album sessions for a lower-than-average fee. I wondered if such dedication was unique to an idiosyncratic confluence of elements—including Canadian musicians playing a classic Canadian story—or if it harkened to something more universal. The range of answers was typically surprising.

Monro [Duddy Kravitz, ConductorKeyboard 1 book]: There’s great camaraderie that develops between pit musicians. These friendships often last long after the show closes. Duddy was the show that kicked everything up a notch for me in terms of collaboration and participation. [The authors] gave me a lot of creative license over the score, and [orchestrator] Oran Eldor and I felt supported by that. We were also encouraged and inspired by [the creative team’s] clarity of mind and specificity when it came to the story and its tone. The musicians picked up on this state of metamorphosis and were really excited by it.

Their additions to the orchestrations were always right. All in all, the experience was indeed highly collaborative and a major turning point in my career.

McKenna [Duddy Kravitz, Reed 1 book]: We do feel proprietary [about a new show]. Because, you know, if it had been a revival, we [musicians] would still be really bonded as far as creating in great environments; but the fact that Duddy was brand-new, and hadn’t existed in that iteration, was why we felt excited; it isn’t an opportunity that comes along every single day.

Abrams: Your [veteran regional] musicians, who are used to playing in the symphony, just like playing the music and don’t really care.

There have been times when [as musical director], I’ve invited the orchestra to come to a run-through, to see what they’re playing [in support of ]. Very rarely do they show up. On the other hand, show players, who are not necessarily symphony players, like to see the

Beth McKenna

show, and occasionally, when they get that opportunity, they will.

Lodin: I’ve been a working professional musician for about 50 years.

And there is a joy to doing what I do in collaboration with other musicians—and being in a pit is an extension of that. [I did have an experience with apathetic pit musicians that] left me with a small bad taste, but that was 40-something years ago. And that’s changed now, very much. And some of that is due to the younger contractors and younger players. The pits are usually smaller, but there’s just a dynamic of, “We now have one of the plum jobs in New York.”

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Extreme Audience Reactions

Audiences Try Hard to Stay Controlled, But They Get Carried Away

BY LINDA ARMSTRONG

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I

n the 36 years I have been a theatre critic, I think it’s safe to say that I have seen several hundred productions. During that time, I have not only noticed what was happening on the stage, but at times, what was happening to me based on what I was seeing and what extreme audience reactions were taking place around me.

As an audience, when we enter a theatre, we are agreeing to sit, be opened-minded and buy into the world that is being portrayed for us on the stage. Being in an audience can mean different things for different people. You see, there are people who go to the theatre often, some people who are first-timers and some people who can find themselves taken by surprise when witnessing a situation that is not familiar to them. In this piece I’m going to share stories of all these situations.

The Kindness of Strangers The audience at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre in 2012 gave an extreme reaction to Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. The production starred television and movie star Blair Underwood, making his Broadway debut and playing the lead character, Stanley. Nicole Ari Parker portrayed Blanche and Daphne Rubin-Vega played Stella. The play was directed by Emily Mann. This production was a first-time Broadway theatre experience for many people in the Black community and when the violent scenes happened in the play, I, as a Black person myself, sat there quietly as the Black people around me laughed.

When the play was over, I went backstage to tell Blair how he had made the part of Stanley his own. He introduced me to Mann, and she said, “Linda, something I have been wondering about. I watch from the wings and every time that a violent scene happens, even the rape scene, Black people in the audience were laughing, I don’t understand why.”

I responded to her question by saying, Blair being on Broadway has brought these folks to Broadway. They are used to seeing him in Tyler Perry movies and other types of movies and on television. If they have gone to theatre, it’s probably been the so-called “Chitlin’ Circuit,” where you can yell things at the actors and bring food in. They came into the Broadway theatre not knowing how to act and then they saw violent scenes. What do you do if you are put into an uncomfortable situation? You laugh. They’re laughing because they’re uncomfortable with what they’re seeing, but they don’t know any other way to react.

Mann looked at me and said, “I never thought of it that way.

Thank you.”

Scent of Beer

Namir Smallwood and Jon Michael Hill in Pass Over (2021). Photo by Joan Marcus

Sharing a lighter moment of audience reaction, my daughter Jasmine at the age of 11, eight years ago, went with me to see Rock of Ages at the Helen Hayes Theatre. I didn’t realize when I took her, that this was really a show for adults, evidenced by the fact that as we waited for the show to start, I smelled beer and looking around, saw that people were drinking open glasses of beer. At first, I felt self-conscious, but once the music by Journey, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, Poison, Steve Perry and Europe began to play and the storyline was engaging and funny, I decided, okay, she’s enjoying it.

The shock and amazement came for Jasmine when stars Adam Dannheisser and Richard Jarvis’ characters did a romantic duet of “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore.” Especially when one man jumped into the other man’s arms and was boosted up and held in the air as they continued to sing. My 11-year-old, held both hands open on both sides of her mouth and yelled, “YOOOOOOOOO,” for at least 20 seconds. She had never seen anything that dealt with the issue of a man falling in love with another man. Jasmine’s innocent, stunned extreme reaction, caused the surrounding audience members to burst into uncontrollable laughter, though part of it may have been from the beers they had been throwing back.

The Sound of Silence In 2018, the audience at the Booth Theatre was captivated and troubled by American Son, a drama by Black playwright Christopher Demos-Brown, starring Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale as Kendra and Scott Connor, parents of a son named Jamal, who is missing and had been pulled over by the police. This play had mesmerizing direction by Kenny Leon, and it showed the difficulty that this Black woman has in getting information about what has happened to her son. It depicted a White officer talking down to her and asking her stereotypical questions about her Black son, instead of giving her information, a role skillfully played by Jeremy Jordan. When she finally gets to speak to a Black Lieutenant John Stokes—movingly played by Eugene Lee—she is told that she did not do her job as a Black mother.

She didn’t teach her son the ways of the world when it comes to interacting with police officers.

When her White FBI husband Scott comes, some information is shared with him. In the final scene the couple learns rather suddenly that their son was actually killed by the police. The emotions that Washington displayed throughout the drama were so raw, vivid and understandable, by the time that their worst nightmare is realized, they can only shout out into the air. This is one of the few Broadway plays that I have seen in which the audience’s reaction was to stay silent. As the scene ended there was no applause. The only sound I could discern was that of sniffling, as many people in the theatre were crying. A lady with tears in her eyes, sitting next to her friend whispered, “That could have been my children.”

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Surprise Walkout Speaking of extreme audience reactions, I experienced one in October as I sat at the August Wilson Theatre and saw the Broadway debut of Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s drama, Pass Over. The play, which has two Black characters—Moses and Kitch—finds these men living on a street corner in the ghetto and they are terrified to leave.

They are terrified because so many of their family and friends have been murdered by racist police officers.

Moses and Kitch (portrayed by Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood) always fantasize about a Promised Land and what they would have if they made it to that Promised Land. Suddenly a White man (played by Gabriel Ebert) comes among them and offers them food he has in a picnic basket. Starving, they agree to eat some of his food, but he gives them an uneasy feeling. Later, a racist White police officer (also played by Ebert) comes over and starts to harass and humiliate them. They are terrified of what he might do.

These men’s dismal existences reach a point of being unbearable, at least for Moses and he asks Kitch to bless him by ending his life, hitting him in the head with a rock. The entire theatre sat quietly for a while. But then I was startled when four White people in the audience simply got up and walked out. I couldn’t help but wonder—Why? Throughout the play, everyone in the audience could be heard laughing at the banter between these characters and could be heard gasping following the racist cruelty they were shown by the White police officer. Ebert was so convincing in both roles, my best friend Denes said, “If I see him outside, I’m going to kick his ass, and I won’t be acting.”

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Giving Him His Due One of the most marvelous extreme audience reactions I’ve seen in a while was when I went to see Tony-Award winner André De Shields in Hadestown at the Walter Kerr Theatre. In the opening number, all the cast members run onto the stage and get into positions. Then, De Shields walks out, slowly, purposefully, elegantly and the audience just started screaming and yelling. Once he makes it across the stage, he methodically and delicately unbuttoned his suit coat to reveal his stylish vest and women throughout the theatre began cheering, clapping and screaming! Never mind, no one has said a word yet!

When De Shields came out, it was as if the entire theatre recognized the theatrical treasure in front of them and wanted to give the brilliant thespian his due. I was so proud and happy for him! It was wonderful to have him celebrated and let me say that I’ve seen the show more than once and every time the audience reacts the same, paying homage to an iconic performer.

Get Down Broadway shows were on hold for 18 months, along with much of the rest of the economy during the pandemic. But few shows were hit as hard as Six, which had been scheduled to open on the evening of the day the Broadway League announced the shutdown. Upon its return, Six at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre definitely received an extreme audience reaction. People were over-the-top excited to be back in a Broadway Theatre for a musical and the energy of this musical is off-the-chain.

My daughter, Jasmine, now 19, had been listening to the cast album of this musical during the entire pandemic and had memorized each song. When the performers—which include Adrianna Hicks as Catherine of Aragon, Andrea Macasaet as Anne Boleyn, Abby Mueller as Jane Seymour, Brittney Mack as Anna of Cleves, Samantha Pauly as Katherine Howard and Anna Uzele as Catherine Parr—began to address the audience, Jasmine burst into tears of joy and almost lost her voice shouting and screaming.

Her shouting was joined by everyone else in the theatre! We were all so appreciative to finally be in a Broadway house and see this incredible musical about the six wives of King Henry VIII. This musical is about women seeing themselves as more than a king’s wife but seeing themselves as being valuable for who they are as individuals. That lesson was very much appreciated by her. The audience appeared to be in sync with my daughter as they, too, were singing the songs and bursting with exultations at the powerful voices, songs and storyline of this tremendous musical.

Make Friends with the Truth I would like to conclude with a production that truly impacted my life as an audience member. In 2010, as I sat in the Lyceum Theatre, I found myself offended and disgusted by the musical The Scottsboro Boys. This musical set Broadway back to the mid-19th century when minstrel shows began. It did a retelling of the very traumatic story that happened to nine Black boys in Scottsboro, AL as they were accused of raping two White Alabama women in 1931. Crimes they didn’t commit. The musical used a comedic minstrel show format but had the Black actors in Whiteface.

In one song called “Electric Chair,” one of the boys, 12-year-old Eugene Williams, was having a nightmare. He dreamed that guards were taking him to the room with the electric chair and two dead men were there. They all began to tap dance, sing and took turns sitting in the electric chair. Black actors acted like buffoons and sang songs about Mammies. Several audience members nearby me found the minstrel jokes humorous and laughed as the Black actors wore Whiteface. Although they were comfortable with what they were experiencing, for me it was traumatic. To this day, I don’t understand why it was decided to make the telling of this story a comedic minstrel-style musical!

Audiences Matter Always realize that when you are part of a theatre audience, go on the journey led by the playwright, the actors and the rest of the creative team. Theatre is there to inspire, educate, thrill and transform in some cases. Each person’s take on what that experience means to them is important—audiences matter—without them a vital element of every production is missing!

Images, left to right: Mitchell Jarvis (front) as Lonny with the original Broadway cast of Rock of Ages (2009). Photo by Joan Marcus The cast of The Scottsboro Boys (2010) at the Vineyard Theatre.

Photo by Carol Rosegg Namir Smallwood and Jon Michael Hill in Pass Over (2021). Photo by Joan Marcus The cast of the Broadway musical Six (2021), left to right: Abby Mueller (Jane Seymour), Samantha Pauly (Katherine Howard), Adrianna Hicks (Catherine of Aragon), Andrea Macasaet (Anne Boleyn), Brittney Mack (Anna of Cleves) and Anna Uzele (Catherine Parr). Photo by Joan Marcus

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THE REBIRTH OF COMMUNITY THEATRE School and Amateur Theatre Groups Are Reawakening the Live Theatre Experience

BY PETER FILICHIA

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T

he stream is drying up, and most everyone is delighted.

Especially Steve Spiegel of Theatrical Rights Worldwide, Drew Cohen of Music Theatre International and Sean Patrick Flahaven of Concord Theatricals.

During much of pandemic-plagued 2020 and early 2021, the heads of these organizations that control what are known as the “stock and amateur” production rights to many of your favorite shows, saw streaming as close to a panacea as school drama clubs and community theatres could hope to have.

Streaming was a balm to those groups that had been rehearsing for months and were then only weeks or even days away from opening night when the pandemic stopped everything.

At least high school seniors who’d been waiting three years to get leads in the spring musical wouldn’t be totally denied.

Parents and grandparents could at least get a sense of their young’uns’ high school swan songs, if only on computers and mobile devices.

However, as we all know, there’s a profound difference between seeing The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley, Jr. on a flat laptop screen and experiencing it through three-dimensional bodies and on-stage scenery.

“And now that the situation has improved,” Spiegel said robustly. “About 75 percent of streaming has disappeared.”

Spamalot Got It Right Spiegel is the founder, president and CEO of Theatrical Rights Worldwide (or TRW, as it’s chummily known). Although it’s only been in business for 15 years, its roster includes the musical that, says the Educational Theatre Association, was most produced in high schools in 2019: The Addams Family.

Of course, it wasn’t mounted nearly as much in 2020.

Spiegel said, “Many planned productions of our shows—Jersey Boys, Million Dollar Quartet and We Will Rock You among them – were postponed. Then those ‘postponements’ became cancellations— nearly 4,000 in all.”

TRW discovered their clients’ major concerns through webinars in April and May 2020. “When we asked, ‘What do you need?’” said Spiegel, “we found that there was more interest in condensed versions of our shows. Not having an intermission meant that bathrooms wouldn’t be a problem.”

(At least not until the end of the show.)

For those groups that wanted to continue performing in any way possible, Jim Hoare, TRW’s executive vice president for education and community initiatives, and Fred Stuart, its chief marketing officer, mapped out socially distanced versions, condensed shows and concertized musicals.

Hoare singled out the concert version of Monty Python’s Spamalot at Oklahoma City University. “There were no dance breaks during the 85-minute show,” he said. “None of the 14 actors invaded another’s space. No audience members were seated in the first 10 rows, and there was plenty of social distancing in the house.”

“We even expanded the definition of performance venues to parking lots and playgrounds,” said Spiegel. “One theatre did All Shook Up as a drive-in movie with an FM transmission

to car radios.” That nicely supported a musical set in the ’50s when drive-ins saturated the nation.

Never Again Although many casts and audience members have since been vaccinated, to be on the safe side some upcoming shows still won’t be full-out productions but will be semi-staged.

They will, however, offer every word and song from first to final curtain. Those who savor choreography will mourn the loss of dancing, but the show will go on—live.

“As some teachers have told me,” Hoare said, ‘I hope I never have to stream again.’ ” Tickets sales are certainly one reason; groups made far less from streaming—just as TRW made far less in licensing fees.

So, Spiegel felt compelled to approach the creators of the musicals he represents and ask if they’d be willing to forego royalties or at least take reductions.

To his relief, he found that most librettists, composers and lyricists would. (As one of their own wrote long ago: “There’s no people like show people.” ) Still, TRW’s staff had to be halved. Those still employed have been, like the rest of America, working at home.

Opposite page: Students of Lincoln Southwest High School in Lincoln, NE, perform a scene from Music Theatre International’s Kinky Boots. Photo by Rob Wilken, Light Impressions Photography This page: A scene from the 2021 production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Muny in St. Louis, MO. Photo courtesy MTI

Trouble Ahead While many will always remember March 12, 2020, when all New York theatre came to an abrupt close, Drew Cohen, president and CEO of Music Theatre International (MTI), says Feb. 25 was the day that he sensed that serious trouble was ahead.

However, being a musical theatre man also means being an optimist. Cohen assumed that any break in the live performance action would last only a few weeks.

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IN THE HOUSE For he’d been through this before when SARS—Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—was a viral respiratory disease that plagued Canada in 2002.

“It came on just around the time I started at MTI,” he said.

“Soon I was seeing productions in Toronto close early.”

SARS, though, wasn’t nearly the menace that COVID-19 has been; most Toronto productions shuttered for what was expected to be two or three months.

“So,” he said, “when we initially heard that shows might be able to resume in the summer of 2020, that was both nice and terrible information, for we of course had hoped that everything would open up earlier. Then,” he said with a sigh, “all estimates turned out to be artificially man-made milestones that didn’t happen.”

He said, “With customers in the forefront of our minds, we wondered what we could do, be willing to do, or be allowed to do. We told organizations ‘Hold onto your scripts. We won’t penalize you if you do the shows later. We hope that you can reschedule in weeks, not months.’ ” Unfortunately, even that largesse didn’t result in a turnaround. “We usually have 200 cancellations in a year,” said Cohen. “We had 4,000 in a month. Yet we couldn’t just turn off the lights or the phone, for our business involves customer service, too, to 25,000 high schools, 75,000 elementary and middle schools, 12,000 community theatres and thousands of regional theatres. And that’s only in the United States; the United Kingdom has a great deal of activity, too.”

The Theory of Relativity Yet some directors throughout the world pressed on. An MTI musical that unexpectedly benefited was The Theory of Relativity. What helped was that the musical has no sets and minimal costume demands; what the performers have at home in their closets will do.

Despite its not enjoying a Broadway or even Off-Broadway pedigree, it’s currently the company’s most popular title. The songs by Neil Bartram and Brian Hill are pungent looks at 21st century life. A brainy student wishes that his girlfriend was as easy to figure as math. Two girls meet at the age of 10, then one outgrows the other, only to find that the one she left behind eventually outgrows her. Children of immigrants note the great expectations their parents have for them, and never mind what the kids want.

“Once people saw that so many were doing it,” said Cohen, “more did.”

Unlike TRW, which eschewed Zoom (“Theatre that’s performed in a living room, kitchen or bathroom isn’t theatre,” said Spiegel), MTI approved productions that would be remotely performed from cast members’ own homes.

“Whatever was best for them was fine with us,” said Cohen.

“We know that when a drama program or a theatre goes

away, it’s hard to come back. We don’t want to see that drama teacher fired.”

MTI, too, experienced layoffs for the first time ever. “I don’t know of any business that was hit harder,” said Cohen.

New Home for R&H, Samuel French, Et al.

Matters have been a little rosier for Sean Patrick Flahaven, Chief Theatrical Executive for Concord Theatricals. “No one here has been furloughed or fired,” he said.

In the last few years, Concord has brought into its fold The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization (49 titles, including musicals that Richard Rodgers wrote with Lorenz Hart); The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection (18 shows); Tams-Witmark (an even 100 titles) and Samuel French (which has hundreds of plays and dozens of musicals). These four arms of the company usually result in 60,000 to 70,000 annual productions.

In terms of postponements and cancellations, here, too, Flahaven has slightly better news. “Most of the organizations that signed to do a show preferred to schedule it later rather than not do it at all,” he said. “Not that we asked anyone to specifically name the future date on which they expected to do the show—as long as it would be within a year or two,” he amended. “We continued to be flexible even with those who have postponed multiple times. There are also rights that vary if a show is streamed from a theatre, home or done live.”

Concord is the place to contact for those interested in staging Anastasia, The Lightning Thief or SpongeBob SquarePants— “available for educational licensing even when the professional productions or national tours are happening,” said Flahaven.

The company also has a popular property that hasn’t had an open run either on or Off-Broadway: Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters, a riff on the role-playing games that were the rage in the ’90s.

“The author adapted it for Zoom,” said Flahaven of the nine-character comedy-drama. “The nature of the play suits it. It’ll even be available in this form after the pandemic is over.”

All Together Now! The sooner the better, of course. And that brings us to All Together Now! Cohen, John Prignano (MTI’s Chief Operating Officer and Director of Education & Development) and others at MTI have created this “Global Event Celebrating Local Theatre.”

It’s a flexible and amorphous revue that was available absolutely free of charge from Nov. 12-15, 2021.

The show offered musical hits from the ’50s (Guys and Dolls), ’60s (Fiddler on the Roof), ’70s (Godspell), ’80s (Into the Woods), ’90s (Rent), ’00s (Mamma Mia!), and ’10s (Matilda).

The songs range, if not quite from A-to-Z, at least from A (“Astonishing” from Little Women) to Y (“You Can’t Stop the Beat” from Hairspray).

Opposite page, top: Students of Lincoln Southwest High School in Lincoln, NE, perform a scene from Music Theatre International’s Kinky Boots.

Photo by Rob Wilken, Light Impressions Photography Opposite page, bottom: A scene from the 2019 Caryl Crane Youth Theatre Production of Concord Theatricals’ Cats. Photo by Amanda Kranz Photography

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Lukas James Miller as Max Van Horn and Ashley Alexandra as Julie Nichols in Music Theatre International’s national tour of Tootsie.

Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

There were 15 slots for musical performances with multiple song options per slot. Thus, a director could choose “Let It Go” for that young miss who has already proved she could let herself go on such a showpiece. But if she’s more likely to do better by the haunting “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife, the director could give that to her instead.

Depending on the mores of the community, a director could include Company’s “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” if the presumption were that the audience would smile and enjoy it. However, if the theatre is in an area that would prefer to hear the equally jaunty but less confrontational “Consider Yourself,” that was an All Together Now option, too.

“It’s our version of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ combined with ‘Hands Across America,’ ” said Cohen.

And, as TV commercials are fond of saying, that’s not all.

MTI sends support materials that will help with rehearsals and marketing. These, too, are free.

Can Be Done Anywhere So, this year, the number 4,000 has changed from the number of cancellations to the number of mid-November per-

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formances that All Together Now! saw at 1,600 schools and theatres in 36 countries and territories as well as all 50 states.

MTI is also allowing theatres the option to do the show live, streaming or a combination of both. Their choice.

Although in the past many directors have had their hopes dashed when discovering that the show they were aching to do wasn’t available in their geographical area, All Together Now! has no such limitations. MTI is amenable to directors staging it however they want to, from a modest concert to a great big Broadway show.

Said Cohen, “Excitement surrounding the return of theatre has only grown, not just with performers but with our customers and their patrons. Even the casual theatregoer has told me ‘I only went to about one show a year, but I miss it.’ ” So have fervent theatregoers all the way from sea (Broadway in New York City) to shining sea (Broadway in Coos Bay, Oregon, on the street where that town’s community theatre is located). With the proverbial little bit of luck, they’ll be all together again.

Steve Spiegel, Drew Cohen and Sean Patrick Flahaven have their fingers crossed.

in the house

Theatre Swag!

Believe It or Not, Those Mugs, Keychains and T-Shirts Have a History

BY KEN BLOOM

M

This page: A beach ball from Escape to Margaritaville (2018). All images courtesy of Ken Bloom Opposite page, clockwise from top left: A syringeshaped pen from Jekyll & Hyde (1997); a mug from The Lion King (1997); photos celebrating the 16th anniversary of Chicago (1996); a monkey doll from Inherit the Wind (2007); a rain poncho from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (2011); a variety of small keepsakes from The Cher Show (2018), Ain't Too Proud (2019) and Kiss Me, Kate (2019); a pair of dice from Guys and Dolls (2009).

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ugs, keychains, T-shirts, posters and other custom souvenirs are a fact of life in the commercial theatre of the 2020s. But it wasn’t always so. Like everything else, the world of theatre swag has undergone a fascinating evolution.

“How do we get space in newspapers, radio, television and gossip?” is the question on every show’s mind. Getting the word out and engaging the public has been an important job since the earliest years of Broadway.

At the start of the last century, radio was in its infancy and there was no television, of course.

So, producers relied on billboards and newspapers to stimulate the word-of-mouth used to sell shows.

There were many papers in New York at the beginning of the last century. These included the Times, Journal, American, Sun, World, Telegram, Graphic, Globe and more.

And starting in 1905, Variety covered theatre and vaudeville. They all hungered for news of the Great White Way. One sure-fire way to get into the papers was the creation of stunts.

Press agents were there to see to it that their clients received their share of column inches.

Beautiful girls from the Zieg feld Follies competed in cow milking contests, boat races in Central Park and strip golf matches (!) and pet lambs. Suitors offered $100,000 rings to cho-

rus girls, crawled over glass to their inamoratas and performed other wildly imaginative attention-getters.

Stunts continued to make the news through the 1950s and into the 1970s. Television and newspaper columns by Earl Wilson, Dorothy Kilgallen, Walter Winchell and others took up much of the slack but soon the newspaper business withered and there was only the Times, News and Post plus Newsday, which covers Long Island.

Broadway press agent Kevin McAnarney recalled that in the past, “You did promotions with Macy’s and Gimbels department stores.

Show logos graced grocery bags and milk cartons. There were promotions with restaurants like the Stage Deli where sandwiches were named after a show’s star. Marketing was another expense on the production’s bottom line. Sometimes marketing had an even bigger budget than the press agent.”

Posters for the Public In October of 1965, Broadway merchandising changed forever.

Triton Gallery, on West 44th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, was Broadway’s first theatre poster shop. Its genesis in October 1965 was almost accidental. As its founder, Roger Plunkett, explained, “It was originally Hauptshine’s Frames. The framer was on street level and storage for Ray’s

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IN THE HOUSE

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Beauty Supplies was downstairs. I had just finished a gig as a performer at the DuPont Pavilion at the World’s Fair. In the frame shop’s window were posters (usually the 14” by 22”inch window cards; less frequently the 41” by 81” “three-sheet” posters) from Broadway, Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera placed there to show the fine art framing. But customers came in wanting to buy the posters, with or without the frames.

“Mr. Hauptshine wanted to teach me about frames. I wasn’t interested. I bought the business and the turning point for us was David Byrd’s poster for the original Follies. I made a deal with Hal Prince and David Byrd.

And the frames sold like hotcakes. They sold out and posters made just for sales purposes became a business. That was huge. Previous to this, the public couldn’t purchase posters.”

One Shubert Alley The next revolution in merchandising came in July of 1979. It was the opening of the tiny shop One Shubert Alley, which was carved out of the Booth Theatre’s backstage.

The success of that store started a Broadway merchandise revolution. At first there were only T-shirts, tote bags, mugs and posters.

But soon, a younger generation demanded more souvenirs of their visits. And an industry was formed.

Today, Peter Milano of Creative Goods supplies much of the merchandise for shows.

As he explained, “Broadway merchandise has evolved so much in the 14 years since 2008.

Tacking a brand on a shirt or a mug was the baseline of the business. Fans now want the iconic logos of the shows. The black T-shirt with the Annie logo was the best [seller] of all time. Now we try to give variation and fashion-forward design and cuts. The baseline of what you do is quality.”

Then there are opening night gifts, gifts from producers to their staffs and artists and holiday gifts. And the days of the plastic or glass cube with the name of the show and opening date embossed on it are over. As Milano explained, “Gifts have gotten more and

more classy. These days they can be high-end with a blue tooth speaker and a tote bag. For Dear Evan Hansen we made charm bracelets.

Elephant Man gifts were North Face vests.

And for West Side Story we made custom skateboards. My biggest fear is someone will ask for something we can’t make.”

Never Seen by the Public The souvenirs and opening night gifts were all well and good. When people walk down the street wearing caps or T-shirts of Broadway logos, it’s advertising. The plus is the ads on bodies pay for themselves. But there’s an entire section of merchandising that is never seen by the public.

“Swag” is the word for promotional objects that are given out to award voters and influencers in the hope that they’ll come through with a vote or mention. They were a fun “bribe” given out by the show’s marketing department. Harvey Sabinson, the past head of the Broadway League (then known as the League of the American Theatres and Producers) hated the term. He famously said, “Marketing is going to the A&P [grocery store].”

In previous years, the marketing department sent out She Loves Me hand soap from the fictional Maraczek’s Parfumerie. Spamalot distributed two hollow halves of a coconut for making a horse clopping sound effect, as in the show. They also sent out cans of Spam® spiced ham with the show’s logo on the can.

Today there’s still a lot of swag to be found up and down Broadway. Some of it has even become the subject of collectors. But a few years ago, the American Theatre Wing announced that swag could not be given to Tony voters. Whether a cheap ballpoint pen with the logo of a show on it would sway someone to vote for a specific show is doubtful. But it’s the image it projects that counts. The Wing does allow souvenir books, CDs and scripts in addition to collections of quotes pulled from reviews.

Still, as Peter Milano explained, as far as swag goes, there’s nowhere to go but up.

Enjoy Encore Monthly’s pictorial voyage through our virtual swag museum.

This page: A candle from The Cher Show (2018) All images courtesy Ken Bloom Opposite page, clockwise from upper left: A mask from The Phantom of the Opera (1988); a pair of rubber feet from Monty Python's Spamalot (2005); a parrot doll from Escape to Margaritaville (2016); a set of buttons from Company (2021); a pair of pens from Big (1996); a fan from Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope (1972); a set of drumsticks from Stomp (1994); and a keychain from Aladdin (2014).

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WHAT THEY DID FOR

love

With V-Day coming up, Broadway performers share their real-life stories of finding “The One”

BY KEITH LORIA

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INTERMISSION

J

en Cody still remembers the first time she saw Hunter Foster walk on the stage when the two were performing in the national tour of Cats in 1982, and thinking he was “paw-fect.”

That led to what Foster described as Cody “stalking me at the hotel,” though she notes there were “reasons behind it.”

“He was coming in as the new Rum Tum Tugger and all the women were very excited when they saw him,” said Cody, who was playing Rumpleteazer in the show. “I had to use what I had—I’m 4-foot-11 and tiny, and the other women are leggy and beautiful, so I would call the hotel where we would be going to in the next stop and ask what room he was staying in, and I would always get the room next door.”

How She Won That allowed her to hear when Foster would go to breakfast each morning, and she would leave soon after so they would arrive at the same time, and he would always ask her to join him. “The sexy thing I found about him was that he would read the newspaper,” Cody said, though Foster interrupts that it was the free hotel copy of USA Today, not the Wall Street Journal or anything. “At the pool, I would go down and lay next to his chair in a thong—and I won.”

Calling himself someone who’s always been “clueless” about matters of the heart, Foster didn’t really catch on to her advances at first. Eventually, he realized what her true motives were. When it was time for their first date, they didn’t want the rest of the company to know, and both called in sick for the same performance.

“We were so dumb because we went out to dinner and on the way back, the bus was coming back from the theatre and everyone saw us all dressed up and together,” Cody said. “The secret didn’t last very long.”

Dating on tour included dinners (the couple still has the cork from their very-first meal together!), hand-in-hand walks through the new cities they visited and one memorable

Opposite page: Kyle Selig and Erika Henningsen in Mean Girls. Photo by Joan Marcus This page, left: Hunter Foster and Jen Cody in costume for Cats.

Photo courtesy Jen Cody This page, right: Jen Cody and Hunter Foster on their wedding day.

Photo courtesy Jen Cody

gondola ride in Banff, Canada. “Every date was like a really cool date,” Cody said. “There were no boring ‘just go to a movie’ dates.”

After living together for four years, the couple planned a trip to Paris and Foster planned on asking Cody to marry him. “I booked a boat trip on the Seine and was going to propose as we were going through Paris,” Foster said. “It was 37 degrees out, so we couldn’t go outside on the boat.”

That led to Cody wanting to go back to the hotel, which involved a metro, cab ride and finally a walk over a bridge, The Pont du Carrousel. “I was freezing, and I didn’t un-

derstand why we weren’t going to the hotel,” Cody recounted. “I was complaining and complaining.”

But Foster finally just took out the ring and asked her, and the rest is history. They’ve been married since 1998. Both believe that being a theatre couple has helped the relationship thrive. “The theatre is a different breed of people and I don’t know if I could have ever married someone who wasn’t in some way connected to the theatre,” Foster said. “We understand each other in a way that others can’t.

We’re emotional creatures, we have an artistic sensibility, and that draws us together.”

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INTERMISSION The Cats’ Meow Terrence Mann met his wife, Charlotte d’Amboise, during the original production of Cats on Broadway in 1984. He also played Rum Tum Tugger, while she was coming on board as the new Cassandra.

“We had heard that Charlotte d’Amboise was coming in and I knew the name because I knew who [her father, legendary ballet dancer] Jacques d’Amboise was,” Mann said.

“When Charlotte came in, she had a cast on her arm when she came to watch for the first

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time. I came down the stairs after the show that night and she just looked adorable and beautiful and I said, ‘hi,’ and she just said, ‘hi,’ and looked away and totally chilled me out.”

Fast forward a week and d’A mboise returned for rehearsal and Mann couldn’t take his eyes off her dancing. “That night, while doing the show, I sat in the wing to watch her do the Ball, and she kicked it up another level of performance and dynamics and just blew everyone off the stage with her dancing,” Mann said. “I said to myself, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be that talented, but maybe I can date it.’ ” It was then he started “making his moves,” which included walking her home from the show until he finally asked her out on a real date. While dating, since the Tugger would often run off stage, Mann would crawl into one of the escape pipes and pull her in and they would make out during the length of the number—which sometimes played havoc with the Cats makeup.

But the relationship didn’t continue when the show ended. It wasn’t until 1989 when Mann replaced Jason Alexander in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway when he and d’Amboise decided to make a serious run at something.

They were married in 1996, and the secret to staying together so long, Mann says, is that they like each other as much as they love one another.

“When you like some-

one’s company and you like to be around them, seeing them first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, and all the things they represent, that’s really important,” he said. “It can be a rollercoaster, but definitely worth the ride.”

All That Love Cupid was definitely in the Broadhurst Theatre in 1999, as the original production of Fosse resulted in five weddings!

One of those was between dancers Elizabeth Parkinson and Scott Wise, both previously of the Joffrey Ballet, who knew of one another through friends but hadn’t really spent time together before being cast in the show.

Their first date involved martinis and it was a slow build towards marriage. “During the workshops, we just started hanging out, and one thing led to another, and we got married in 1999,” Parkinson said. “Neither of us at the time were really looking for a relationship. Truly, we were friends first and then became partners in crime and life.”

Other married couples that came out of Fosse were performers Lainie Sakakura and Alex Sanchez; performer Mark Reis and dresser Phil Dominguez; performer Dede LaBarre and stagehand Brent Oakley; and performers Marc Calamia and Lynne (Morrissey) Calamia.

“When doing a Broadway show, the process just brings everybody together and you form life-long friendships, and that sometimes means lifelong relationships,” Parkinson said. “The creative process is very intense and just draws people close together, and sometimes you are lucky enough to find your forever person.”

Today, the couple runs a performing arts school together and Parkinson works for Connecticut Western State University teaching in their musical theatre program, with the couple directing and choreographing the school’s musicals together.

Love All Around It’s not uncommon for actors to meet and date while doing a show, and there are hordes of example of couples who are now married,

engaged or dating from recent productions.

For example, Andrew Rannells and Tuc Watkins, who played lovers Larry and Hank in the revival of The Boys in the Band in 2018, met—and flirted— while doing the play, started dating near the end of the run and are still happily together today.

Similarly, Erika Henningsen and Kyle Selig, whose characters Cady and Aaron were attracted to each other in Mean Girls, saw that attraction carry over off-stage, and after a few years of dating, announced their engagement this summer.

But you don’t need to be in love on stage to fall for someone. In fact, when Brandon Uranowitz and Zachary Prince started their “showmance” while doing the 2011 jukebox musical, Baby It’s You!, Prince served as his now longtime boyfriend’s understudy.

Other Broadway couples include Anthony Ramos and Jasmine Cephas Jones, who have been together six years after meeting while doing Hamilton; Nick Adams and Kyle Brown, who met in 2010 during Priscilla Queen of the Desert; and then there’s six-time Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald and Will Swenson, two Broadway veterans who met and fell in love during the 2007 Broadway revival of 110 in the Shade and have been married since 2012.

Together Forever Married for 21 years, Broadway stars Andy Karl and Orfeh met during the 2000 run of Saturday Night Fever, when he came in as a replacement for Joey and she was playing Annette. The two had a mutual friend who knew that they would enjoy meeting.

And did they ever. Karl says he was just blown away by her talent and was tonguetied upon first saying hello, while Orfeh

shares that meeting him was like “angels coming down from heaven playing their harps” and she could see only him.

Their first date came quickly, with Karl taking her to see the movie, American Psycho, knowing from their talks that she was a horror buff. Orfeh interjects that the movie was really The Exorcist, but Karl stands by his memory of the date.

“When you take someone to a horror movie on the first date, you can generally get to know what the expectations are,” he said. “She was really cool and everyone liked her, and luckily, she liked me. I think we’re both pretty darn sweet people when it comes down to it.”

Since Orfeh was a native New Yorker, their dates involved all the secret spots and best places to go around the city, which Karl found to be very exciting. All along, no one in their show knew they were together.

“We were pretty stealth about it,” Karl said.

“The Broadway community can be very much like high school. Certainly, Orfeh beats to her own drum and I was happy that we kept it under wraps. Six months later we were engaged and it surprised a lot of people.”

The couple have since shared the Broadway stage several times, including playing the flirtatious Paulette and Kyle in Legally Blonde

and most recently as Edward and Kit in Pretty Woman. Knowing what it’s like to be part of the theatre scene is a big plus in their longlasting relationship.

“All the schedules, the highs and lows, it works out really well when two people understand what the vibe is,” Karl said. “I’m not sure anyone else would understand except another actor. So, for me, it makes complete sense that two actors would date and marry each other.

It’s certainly worked out for us.”

Opposite page: Elizabeth Parkinson and Scott Wise with their son. Photo by Steve Vacariello This page: Andy Karl and Orfeh.

Photo courtesy Orfeh

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INTERMISSION

Sportin’ Life Contrary to Cliché, Theatre and Sports Are Not Always at Odds

BY PETER FILCHIA

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W

hen you think of it, baseball and musicals have a few things in common.

Both have runs.

Well, not Home Sweet Homer, the musical version of The Odyssey—yes, that Odyssey—that ran one performance.

Both have hits.

Especially The Phantom of the Opera, which has run considerably longer than one performance.

Both have errors.

I’ve seen plenty in my life—including In My Life, the 2005 musical about Tourette’s Syndrome and unfortunate growths (“There’s a little rumor someone’s got a tumor”) that featured a dance with skeletons.

Of course, when we think of baseball and musicals, what immediately comes to mind is Damn Yankees, about middle-aged Joe Boyd, the long-suffering fan of the hapless Washington Senators. (They became the equally hapless Texas Rangers, one of only six teams to have never played in a World Series.)

We first meet Joe singing, “ You’re blind, ump! You’re blind, ump! You must be out of your mind, ump!” to his TV set. Yes, in 1955, Instant Replay was still years away; now the questioned matter is solved in a matter of minutes.

(And almost all of the time—almost—the umpire is proved right.)

A Rhyme for “See” Many plot synopses of Damn Yankees state that ol’ Joe sells his soul to the Devil to become young superstar outfielder Joe Hardy. Not quite—he leases it with an option to renew. However, Ruth Sherwood in Wonderful Town won’t go that far. She’s a fan, although she doesn’t say if she roots for the Cleveland Indians or the Cincinnati Reds; we presume she roots for one of them, for she hails from Ohio.

In “One Hundred Easy Ways,” Ruth imagines attending a ball game with a first (and last) date who predicts, “The next man up at bat will bunt, you’ll see.”

Ruth snarls, “Bunt?! Are you nuts? With one out, two men on base, and a left-handed batter coming up, he’ll walk right into a triple

play, just like it happened in the fifth game of the World Series in 1923.”

Lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green lied with that line. Yes, there was a triple play made in the fifth game of the World Series. However, it wasn’t in 1923, but 1920, when Bill Wambsganss of the Cleveland Indians made an unassisted one against Brooklyn.

Comden and Green claimed 1923 because they needed a rhyme for “see.”

“Three” fit nicely. We can only imagine how many times they endeavored to find a rhyme for twenty.

(Plenty.)

Bat a Thousand You may not consider Rose in Gypsy as a baseball fan, but circumstantial evidence says that she is. No, we never see her watching a game where someone steals second base as easily as she steals silverware from Chinese restaurants. Yet in her two big arias, she references the sport.

“Everything’s Coming up Roses,” which ends Act One, has her tell Louise, “Now’s your inning.” In “Rose’s Turn,” which almost ends Act II, she reflects on her relationship with her two daughters: “They take bows, and you’re battin’ zero,” before deciding “Starting now, I bat a thousand.”

Opposite page: The male ensemble of Lysistrata Jones (2011), Left to right: Ato Blankston-Wood, Alex Wyse, Josh Segarra, Alexander Aguilar and Teddy Toye. Photo by Joan Marcus This page, left to right: Anthony Rosenthal, Betsy Wolfe, Tracie Thoms, Christian Borle, Stephanie J. Block, Brandon Uranowitz and Andrew Rannells in the 2016 revival of Falsettos. Photo by Joan Marcus

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INTERMISSION Baseball fans aren’t seen to good advantage in Ragtime, where the fans yell “What a Game!” and interrupt their epithets only to spit. Such activities delight little Edgar but shock Father (although not as much as he’s shocked by what’s going on at home, what with Sarah and Coalhouse Walker III living there).

Someone who wishes that baseball didn’t exist is that good man, Charlie Brown. Alas, when you’re a boy, participation is expected.

So, he’s up at bat in a most crucial situation with a “T-E-A-M” that believes it can be “the best team in the very Little League this year.”

If you know anything about Charlie (and who doesn’t?), you can easily guess whether he comes through in Clark Gesner’s spirited march.

Remember Sandy Koufax Another non-fan is Marvin in Falsettos. “I hate baseball,” he bluntly states as he and everyone else watch “Jewish boys who cannot play baseball play baseball.”

Marvin’s disinterest leaves the field open for his boyfriend Whizzer to coach Marvin’s son Jason. “Remember Sandy Koufax,” he said, referencing the Los Angeles Dodgers’ most dominant pitcher who struck out nearly 2,400 batters in a mere 11 seasons from 1955 to 1966.

Whizzer’s wise to mention him, for Koufax took Judaism most seriously; he refused to pitch Game One of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.

In those days, baseball was known as The National Pastime. But that time has passed, and football now can claim the title. However, musicals about football were more plentiful in the era when it ranked second to baseball: Leave It to Jane in 1917, Good News in 1927, Too Many Girls in 1939 and High Button Shoes in 1947. Even All American in 1962 (with music by Charles Strouse, lyrics

by Lee Adams, a book by no less than Mel Brooks and starring Ray Bolger of Scarecrow fame), was just a little too early. Football really didn’t supplant baseball until the late ’60s when The Super Bowl was conceived.

(That Carol Channing sang “When the Saints Go Marching In” during halftime at

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Super Bowl IV in 1970 is obviously another reason for the game’s popularity.)

Yet the sport shows up in a Pulitzer Prizewinner: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Finch gets on boss J.B. Biggley’s good side by pretending to be a fellow graduate of “Grand Old Ivy.” Both sing in praise of the “Groundhogs! Groundhogs!”

It’s a good song to play every Groundhog Day, especially if you tire of listening to Groundhog Day. She Likes Basketball True, as late as 1979, a musical had the Texas A&M Aggies emerge victorious on the gridiron. When they sang, however, they expressed less interest in their win than in their post-game activities at The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

“She likes basketball!” Chuck Baxter sings with joy when co-worker Fran Kubelik gives him her “promises, promises” to meet him for a Knicks game. The musical was based on the 1960 Oscar-winning film The Apartment

where Chuck secures tickets to a very different event: The Music Man. However, bookwriter Neil Simon, composer Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David must have felt that having Chuck sing “She likes musicals!” would be too self-referential to Broadway.

In 2011, Lysistrata Jones centered on college basketball. Athens University hasn’t won a single game for 30 years, so cheerleader Lysistrata tells her teammates a surefire way to get the guys to win: stop having sex with them.

We never meet the cheerleaders’ parents, but they must have thought that this is the best plan that they’d heard in years.

This past July, The International Olympic Committee named cheerleading a sport. Thus, we include Bring It On, which could be described as “All About Eve Goes to High School.” The nearly identically named Eva is just as Machiavellian as the former Gertrude Slescynski. Whether it was Amanda Green or Lin-Manuel Miranda who thought of having Eva sing “I’ll

have the trophy in my hands and all you’ll have is friends,” the lyric itself was worthy of its own trophy.

Then there’s Chess, which The International Olympic Committee deemed a sport (the game, not the show) in 1999. Decades earlier, Sports Illustrated thought it more than just a board game. Victories by champions Bobby Fischer in 1972 and Lisa Lane in 2018 actually became cover stories (which, granted, didn’t sell as well as the annual Swimsuit Issue).

London appreciated Chess; Broadway didn’t. Perhaps that’s why Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Beautiful Game didn’t cross the Atlantic. Its subject is soccer, wildly popular throughout Europe but not nearly as much here in the States.

Yet an American song from Carousel has become a worldwide soccer theme. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was first adopted by The Liverpool Football Club—soccer is called football there—and a Scottish team oxymoronically called Celtic soon began play-

ing it at games. So did teams from Germany, Holland, Japan and other countries from oceans to shining oceans.

How did it happen? What’s the use of wond’rin?

133 Pounds of Confidence Soccer fans occasionally break into fights, so they may have liked Broadway’s 1964 boxing musical Golden Boy. Strouse and Adams wrote “Yes, I Can” for star Sammy Davis, Jr. to acknowledge the title of his memoir.

The song was cut, perhaps because Davis sang about his “133 pounds of confidence.”

That’s a good weight in terms of courage, but it doesn’t mean much in the fight game. Stories about boxers tend to concern heavyweight championships; 133 pounds defines a boxer as literally lightweight. Compare Davis to the behemoth boxers in The Wild Party both Off-Broadway (Raymond Jaramillo McLeod) and on Broadway (Marc Kudisch). No contest.

And hockey? Some have attempted musi-

cals on the subject, but nothing much has come of them. We’ll have to settle for games in which Winnipeg plays San Jose.

Those have the Jets battling the Sharks.

Opposite page: Ronn Carroll and Matthew Broderick perform “Grand Old Ivy” in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1995).

Photo by Joan Marcus This page: The ensemble of Bring It On: The Musical (2012). Photo by Joan Marcus

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WHO’S WHO

Adam Pascal

The Rock Star Who Came to Theatre and Stayed

BY KEITH LORIA

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Adam Pascal in the current national tour of Pretty Woman: The Musical.

Photo by Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade

H

aving spent the past 25 years appearing on Broadway stages and in theatres around the country—half his life!—Adam Pascal has come to grips with what once would have been a sad reality—“My days of wanting to be the front man for a rock band are over!” he said.

That declaration was hard for the 50-year-old to admit, considering becoming a rock star was all he aspired to in his younger days. Pascal began playing in bands when he was as young as 12. He remembers playing at the now-defunct Rumrunner club in Oyster Bay, NY, at just 13.

“Being out there with a band is not something that I have any real interest in now,” he said. “Writing original music is not something that has been at the forefront of my career for a while and as my career has progressed, the desire to write songs has waned. I don’t see myself back with a band…however, if Stone Temple Pilots called me up and said they needed a singer, I would do that in a heartbeat.”

Without You That realization was not the only life change Pascal has made recently. During the pandemic, he and his wife of 22 years decided to split, and the oldest of his two sons went off to college. So, Pascal found himself alone for the first time in decades. He also retreated from Los Angeles back to Long Island where he grew up and started making plans for the future.

“That added a whole other level of unpleasantness with dealing with the pandemic, but I just tried to get by day to day and figuring out what I could do to make any kind of money and the skills I could use to pivot during this time,” he explained. “I started doing a lot more teaching, I did a ton of Cameo shout-outs, and I tried to do as much as I could remotely.”

What he didn’t do was obsess about trying to be creative or maintain a level of artistic expression. Pascal wasn’t interested in writing a “COVID album” and doesn’t really want to hear anyone else’s either, because he really just wants to erase this time period from his memory.

Acting Through Song Teaching has been a blessing for him. He started his “acting through song” classes at UCLA and he’s been doing master classes and original coaching over the last couple of years. “I love teaching,” Pascal said. “It’s actually given me a bit of a directing bug and I would like to think that directing something on stage is sometimes in my future.”

In 2021, Pascal performed a series of virtual shows and toured a bit with an acoustic retrospective about his life—appearing weekly at New York City’s famed 54 Below nightclub for a few months. “I play a lot of stuff from the shows I’ve been in and I like to tell stories of things that have happened to me that tie into the song I am about to play,” Pascal said. “It’s a great post-pandemic type of show because venues are looking to have content, and because the show is just me, it’s certainly safe.

I just show up, plug in my guitar and go.”

The show includes songs from most of the Broadway shows of which he’s been a part, with stories about how he became involved in each, and the audition songs he sang for most, including Billy Joel’s “Vienna” for Aida and U2’s “Red Mill Mining Town” in his original audition for Rent.

One Song Glory Most fans know the story about his being cast in the 1996 Tony Award-winning musical, the show that would forever change the direction of his life. Pascal grew up down the street from Idina Menzel and she recommended her long-time friend when they were holding open auditions for Jonathan Larson’s masterpiece.

And Pascal admitted, he almost blew his shot at becoming Roger, a role that would earn him a Tony Award nomination. Having never auditioned for any sort of musical theatre before, he went in, sang, and was asked to learn a song from the show and come back the next day.

This happened to him three more days in a row, and finally, frustrated about the process, he told them that if they didn’t know enough about him by now, he wasn’t coming back for more.

A phone call from Menzel, who was already cast as Maureen, straightened him out. Pascal describes the call as his being “chewed out” and “yelled at” by his friend, who told him the part was as good as his— but he needed to do one more thing.

“Turns out, when I sang, my eyes were closed,” Pascal recalled. “So, they wanted to see me do it with my eyes open, and see if I could act.”

He nailed it, obviously, and became part of one of Broadway’s biggest juggernauts of all time.

Fortune Favors the Brave “I’m so grateful to be part of this thing that people are still inspired by and is still done all over the world, with people singing these songs,” Pascal said. “Am I sick of talking about it? Of course, in the sense that anyone would be sick of talking about the same subject for so long. But I am so fortunate that this subject I do talk about all the time is something so lovely. I’m so grateful to have this as part of my legacy.”

After Rent, Pascal was torn between going back to fronting his band or continuing on a musical theatre track. The Broadway offers kept coming, so that’s the direction he took. First it was Aida, then Cabaret, followed by shows like Memphis, Chicago and Disaster!

“I look for things that I think I can do—I need to know the character is in me somewhere,” Pascal said. “How I determine that is not necessarily the same process. Sometimes, it’s through the music and I’ll just sing it to see if it sounds good; sometimes it’s more a character thing, like with Huey in Memphis, I felt I had that guy in me and that was even before I sang any of the music.”

Sometimes, he admits, he’s wrong. Not with the jobs he’s gotten, but with the ones that he didn’t get where he tried and wasn’t cast. For example, he points to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. “I sing the shit out of that music, and I thought that character was in me, and maybe it is, but

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WHO’S WHO at the time I auditioned, I just couldn’t find her well enough to nail it,” Pascal said. “Sometimes you want something a certain way, and it just isn’t. But then again isn’t that life?”

Having originated both Roger in Rent and Radames in Aida, Pascal said that it’s not important at all for him to be in another new musical; he just wants the security of having a job and to be out on stage performing, and quite frankly, that comes more from taking over a role in a show that’s already successful.

“There’s certainly something artistically exciting about creating a new character and being a template for something that could theoretically go on for a long time, like Rent did, but it’s a lot of pressure,” he said. “I don’t do well with worrying about whether I’m going to get a Tony nomination or if the show is going to succeed. Of course, I would love to win a Tony, but it gives me so much anxiety.”

Hot Stuff Pascal currently stars in the national tour of the Broadway musical adaptation of Pretty Woman, playing rich businessman Edward Lewis, a role he briefly played on Broadway in 2019 during Andy Karl’s vacation. The tour launched in October and the actor is committed to the project for a year.

Based on the hit 1990 romantic comedy that starred Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, Pretty Woman follows a star-crossed meeting between a sex worker and a disillusioned businessman. While the beloved film made a star out of Roberts, some in the theatre community didn’t feel its message really worked for a 21st century audience at the height of the Me-Too Movement and women empowerment.

“The subject matter is tricky and certainly in the times we are living in now and where our culture is, it’s a very delicate tightrope to walk and tell this story in 2021 as it was then when things were not nearly as PC as they are today,” Pascal said. “People know what Pretty Woman is and know what to expect. No one is coming to see the show that doesn’t know the movie. I would hope no one would come to the show and be offended. If it was made today, it would be different, but this is the movie and it’s what people want and it’s what they are getting.”

The musical was co-written by the film’s director, the late Garry Marshall, and screenwriter J.F. Lawton, with music by Grammy winner Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance.

This is Pascal’s third national tour, following successful showings as William Shakespeare in Something Rotten! and of course, the role that made him famous when Rent toured in 2009.

Although in his past experiences on tour, he’s found time to do some solo concerts here and there, he’s not sure that’s in the cards this time around. “Eight shows a week is very taxing on the voice, and this is the lead role, so it’s a lot on my voice, so I’m really going to need those nights off,” he said. “I can’t imagine wanting to do any singing on my days off.”

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Second Act Pascal also is currently recording demos for a prominent Broadway composer on a new musical, and while he can’t reveal details yet, he does hint that the role will allow him to live out those early rock dreams, as the show has something of an Almost Famous vibe, looking at a rock band from the ’70s.

He’d love nothing more for this to come to Broadway one day. But Pascal’s got other roles he’s hoping to take a shot at some day as well. “I’d certainly love to play Jean Valjean and I’m sure it’s in my future at some point; I’ve certainly said it out loud enough,” he said. “I’m interested in exploring all sorts of roles—someone like Max from The Producers, Sweeney Todd or the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. I like roles where people might say, ‘really, he’s doing that?’ and then they come see me and they go, ‘he’s so good in that.’ That excites me.”

Being in a transitional phase in his life, Pascal isn’t quite sure what the next few years will bring, but he is excited about what he considers his “second act” of life.

“I’ll certainly be performing Broadway always, that’s a mainstay of my life now until I can’t sing anymore,” he said. “I never know what direction things are going to go. My whole career has been such a wonderful surprise to me, and I’m open to any and all possibilities.”

Opposite page: Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega in the original Broadway production of Rent (1996).

Photo by Joan Marcus This page, clockwise from the top left: Adam Pascal (center) as William Shakespeare in the Broadway production of Something Rotten! (2015).

Photo by Joan Marcus Heather Headley and Adam Pascal in the original Broadway production of Aida (2000). Photo by Joan Marcus Bottom, left and right: Adam Pascal and Olivia Valli in the current national tour of Pretty Woman: The Musical.

Photos by Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade Adam Pascal as the Emcee in the 1998 revival of Cabaret.

Photo by Joan Marcus

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WHO’S WHO

Chita Rivera

A LONG LIFE IN THE THEATRE Meet 10 Theatre Artists Who Are Still Working Past Age 85

BY FRANK RIZZO PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOAN MARCUS

What keeps theatre people working long after those in other professions retire?

We posed this question to a group of esteemed theatre figures age 85 or above—many very much still active in their various fields. We also asked them to share their thoughts on their longevity in the arts and whatever words of wisdom these artists might have for us. After all, they’ve earned it.

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Chita Rivera: Razzle Dazzle Chita.

With one word a world of Broadway musicals and performances comes alive in the mind’s eye: West Side Story, Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman and so many others since the early 1950s.

Rivera, who turns 90 in 2023, understands clearly why theatre people keep working long after those in other professions retire. “We’re just storytellers, and the storytelling never stops as long as you’re alive.”

The best stories show us who we are, where we’ve been and what we aspire to be, she says. “We’re the reminders and we all need reminding.”

Some life perspective from this pro of pros?

“Surround yourself with those people you enjoy and with whom you share a sense of humor, otherwise you’d be a morbid, old nasty person—which some days I feel I am,” she says with that unmistakable throaty laugh.

She gives special thanks to Bob Fosse, Terrence McNally, John Kander and Fred Ebb. “I was born at a certain time and I was given these guys as friends and great artists and I was given a life. I am very blessed and grateful I had these guys in my life. They formed me, they shaped me and their brilliance rubbed off on me. As John Kander said the other day, ‘You have to remember, Chita, that you gave it life, too,’—and he’s right.”

As for advice for young artists: “I always tell them that eyes are to see, ears are to listen and make sure that what comes out of your mouth you have absolutely thought about it—and apologize if you have to. And, by all means, have a sense of humor.”

Wait, there’s more. Listen.

“Be in the moment you’re in, be in your life and live life to the fullest, making it something wonderful. Try not to miss anything. And be sure what you’re doing is making things better, not worse.”

Lois Smith

Lois Smith: Only Connect When Lois Smith received her Tony Award for The Inheritance a few months back, she ended her acceptance speech with words from E. M. Forster’s “Howard’s End”: “Only connect.”

Smith, who at 90 became the oldest recipient of the honor, has spent seven decades doing that: connecting with great works, fellow artists and especially audiences.

Her Broadway credits go back nearly 70 years to 1953’s Time Out for Ginger, and include Orpheus Descending, The Iceman Cometh, The Grapes of Wrath, Buried Child and the recent The Inheritance. Standout roles in film and TV include East of Eden, Five Easy Pieces, Fatal Attraction, Minority Report, “True Blood” and scores more.

When asked why theatre artists live productive lives decades after others retire, she said, “We really love what we’re doing. It’s as simple as that.”

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WHO’S WHO Well, maybe more than that: “The theatre is extremely people-centered so you’re working closely, collaboratively with interesting people of a like mind, and there’s just no substitute to that.”

She continued, “What we have that other professions might not have is variety. We are starting over many times and each time has its own identity, challenges and families. But it’s not all fun and games. It can be so hard, and yet it is at the same time so refreshing over and over.”

If there is one change over her lifetime in the theatre that troubles her, it’s the shortening of rehearsal time. “There is no substitute for time rehearsing a work—and everyone knows it but pretends they don’t.”

Her advice to young artists: “Enjoy yourselves—and be on time.” She adds advice she was given by her college theatre professor, Dan Harrington, when she was starting out 70 years ago: “Keep your feet on the ground.”

Joanna Merlin

Joanna Merlin: Casting Fate Joanna Merlin made her first screen appearance in 1956 in Cecil B. DeMille's film The Ten Commandments. Five years later, she made her Broadway debut in Becket performing love scenes with Laurence Olivier, and in A Far Country with Kim Stanley. In 1964 she returned to Broadway as a the original Tzeitel during the original run of Fiddler on the Roof.

And then her career got even more interesting.

Producer and director Harold Prince saw a certain quality in her and gave her a new opportunity as casting director for Company. Other shows followed, including Follies, Evita, Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd.

“Basically, he wanted someone who really liked actors,” she said. “I was also a Jewish mother and he thought that would be a wonderful attribute.”

That instinct to nourish actors extends to her roles as faculty member of New York University’s graduate acting program. In 1999, she founded the Michael Chekhov Association, for which she teaches acting workshops and is head of the Michael Chekhov Institute. (As a young actor in Los Angeles, Merlin studied with Chekhov, a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski who referred to him as his most brilliant student.)

She also wrote books on acting and auditioning.

“It was important for me to pass on what I was learning because I was seeing good actors give poor and unprepared auditions so many times. Actors often think the casting director is all-powerful, which is a kind of self-sabotage because it leaves you feeling powerless. They need you as much as you need them, and they hope you’re going to be great. Trust yourself in spite of all the competition. You’re unique. No one can give your audition.

Self-confidence is your lifeline.”

But acting roles still came her way, mostly on film, including that of Miss Olivia Berg, the classical dance teacher in Fame.

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“There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as the relationship between an actor and a live audience,” she said. “Once you feel that intensity you’re hooked for life. It creates a fire in the belly in anticipation of creating that event.”

As far as having a long life in the theatre—and a long life in general: “I think you have to be a perennial student, and to keep listening, keep expanding your horizons, and try to keep moving—if you can still walk. And meditate, too.”

Joel Grey: Winning Hearts, Changing Minds “My love affair with the theatre started when I was nine,” said Joel Grey, of a 1941 production of On Borrowed Time at the Cleveland Playhouse. “I felt part of the company, felt respected and human and that meant so much for me. That stuff gets into your bones and makes you who you are forever.”

Grey, who turns 90 this spring, has seemingly been going full throttle ever since the Roosevelt administration. Best known for originating the role of the Emcee in Cabaret on Broadway and film (earning a Tony Award and an Oscar), he’s also starred in Broadway’s George M!, Chicago, Anything Goes and Wicked (as the Wizard of Oz). In 2018 he earned acclaim for his staging of Fiddler on the Roof Off-Broadway for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.

“I’m stimulated by interesting new things,” said Grey of his ongoing career.

When asked to reflect on his life in the theatre he said, “The overall arc was chaos. It’s not easy to make a living as an actor and it’s not easy to get people to change their minds about what you are and what you do. I was constantly in the business of trying to change people’s minds. I still am.”

He’s acted in film, television, done recordings, written a memoir, been an acclaimed photographer, “but what happens in a theatre is my heart’s desire.”

His advice to others starting out in the business? “Love what you do. Be thrilled by an idea or a notion or something you want to accomplish and don’t let anybody tell you not to do it. And hope for good luck, too, because that’s a big part of it.”

What would he say if he could go back and advise his younger self ? “Oh, he’s so difficult to talk to,” he says laughing. “But I would like him. I liked being him and relishing these exciting things that came to me.”

Grey came full circle recently with his directing of a Zoom reading of On Borrowed Time with Blair Brown, Phillipa Soo, Bebe Neuwirth and Sam Waterston. “Everyone was in their own house so it was quite different,” he said. “But, you know, the play is the thing—and that one changed my life.”

Joel Grey

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Carmen de Lavallade

Carmen de Lavallade: Guiding Light “Curiosity,” said Carmen de Lavallade when asked why theatre artists continue to create, sometimes for decades after the time when people in other professions retire.

In her mid-80s de Lavallade toured with her solo show, As I Remember It, talking about her life as a dancer, actor and teacher—and showing that she still had the right moves.

“Find a person who knows what they’re doing and study them,” she would advise young artists.

“Always look to the best, not to copy them but to see what is it about them.”

A daughter of Creole parents, de Lavallade, now 90, began her professional dance career in the late ’40s and performed her artistry in theatre, film, television and on dance stages. Over the years, she worked with a wide range of legendary artists who knew exactly what they were doing: Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Ezra Pound, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille and Alvin Ailey, just to name a few. Her tip from Josephine Baker who saw Carmen at a curtain call: “You don’t bow long enough.”

When she was in Broadway’s House of Flowers in 1954, she met a handsome, tall (six-foot-six) castmate, Geoffrey Holder, whom she married. Together they were the height of elegance and the epitome of grace. Other New York credits followed: Hot Spot, Josephine Baker, Othello, The House of Bernarda Alba, Three Sisters— and a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire when she was in her early 80s.

In the 1970s de Lavallade became resident artist, choreographer and professor in the early days of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the revitalized School of Drama under Robert Brustein.

One of her students, Meryl Streep, says de Lavallade was not only a teacher of movement and a mentor, but “a light. That expanse of joy, more than any lesson, more than any method, gave us an understanding of what it takes to sustain happiness in an uncertain profession, in an uncertain world.”

De Lavallade admonished young dancers for being on their cell phones all the time by stating, “Put those things down and go hug a tree.” The dancers later sent her a picture of them with their arms around an oak.

“Good,” she wrote back. “Now look up.”

Charles Strouse: Always Tomorrow Composer Charles Strouse regularly sits at the piano at his Manhattan home, a practice he has continued for more than 70 years.

At 93, the composer of Bye Bye Birdie, Applause and Annie, among many others, says it’s a practice ingrained in him by his teachers, idols and mother.

“For me I had wonderful teachers who inspired—and still inspire me—and that’s the truth.”

He credits his work ethic and love of composing to teachers such as Arthur Berger, David Diamond, Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger. “These were my great heroes, people I wanted to emulate, and I wanted to have their success, Lenny [Bernstein], who became a friend, in particular.”

Strouse’s parents were a great force in his life, “Especially my mother, who was very musical and had very strong ambitions for

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Charles Strouse

me. A great part of my life was wanting to make her proud. She gave me a lot of drive and that aspect of her still resides in me very strongly. I loved her very much.”

Strouse continued, “Writing music is in my blood. I’m a hard worker and my heart goes into that every day. I could go [to the piano] right now and write about this interview. It gives me the greatest pleasure to sit down and write a chord or a sequence of notes or something that can turn on a new light for me.”

Strouse says he was emotionally vulnerable to the many ups and downs of the business. “I had no defenses at all,” he said, adding however that he had a good support system including his collaborators and “a wife whom I love and who loves me.”

His advice to young composers: “Keep practicing, keep writing, keep having that drive.”

To that end, he wrote a new song for the December 2021 NBC presentation of “Annie Live!” and even a song earlier that year about what appeared to be the end of the pandemic.

“Writing music is very personal,” he said. “I think if I couldn’t compose I wouldn’t have much of a life.”

Jerry Adler: The Family Business Jerry Adler was born into the business of the theatre, the son of Philip Adler, general manager of The Group Theatre, cousin to Stella and Luther Adler and great nephew to Jacob Adler of the Yiddish theatre.

His first gig goes back to when he was assistant stage manager for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), a job he got thanks to his father’s connections.

“I was a child of nepotism,” he jokes.

Adler, who turns 93 in February, continued to work as a stage manager (including on the original 1956 My Fair Lady), then becoming director and producer in dozens of Broadway shows, working with such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Rex Harrison, Barbara Harris, Hal Holbrook, Richard Burton, Orson Welles, John Gielgud and Noël Coward.

“I have no idea what kept me working all these years,” he said. “I went from show to show to show—56 just on Broadway.

I’ve always had a lucky charm.”

If he could give advice to his younger self ? “Never say no. Do everything. Don’t turn anything down.” And to young directors? “Take risks and go towards any challenge.”

In his mid-60s, Adler became a film, TV and stage actor and is featured in TV’s “Mad About You,” “The Sopranos,” “Rescue Me,” “Transparent,” “The Good Wife” and 2015’s Fish in the Dark on Broadway.

“I never wanted to be an actor. Never Jerry Adler

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WHO’S WHO went to classes or school for it, though I had worked with a lot of big-time directors.” He said whenever he auditioned, he would always think, “When I was behind that desk, what was I looking for?”

He points out that “in the theatre you never retire. The art form is what keeps you alive. You’re learning things every day and that keeps you young. Every project is different.”

He’s currently working on his memoirs. The title? “Next!” “You like the title? You know, like at an audition when they say, ‘Next!’—but this is a hopeful [story]. It’s about whatever happens next, and that’s what makes your life interesting.”

The Adler lineage continues, he points out, with his grandson Joseph Adler, who is a film and television actor (“Grey’s Anatomy”).

John Kander

John Kander: A Quiet Thing “Why would I stop doing something that matters to me?” asked composer John Kander, who turns 95 in March.

Kander began his professional career in 1956 as rehearsal pianist for West Side Story and later as dance arranger for Gypsy.

With lyricist Fred Ebb, Kander created some of Broadway’s most iconic music, from Cabaret, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Chicago (the revival is heading to its 25th year) and the city’s anthem, “New York, New York.” In the years after Ebb’s death in 2004, Kander has brought their works-in-progress (Curtains, The Visit, The Scottsboro Boys) to Broadway. With collaborators such as Susan Stroman, Greg Pierce, Rupert Holmes and David Thompson, he continues to create moving music.

“My generation had a much easier time of it in the business,” he said. “We were the last generation that was allowed to fail and still flourish. Fred and I wrote a musical that was a flop [Flora the Red Menace] and the day after it opened and got bad reviews, we had our meeting with Hal Prince and started working on the next piece and that was Cabaret. I can’t imagine that happening today.

“In terms of dealing with disappointment, you have to sort of stay true to yourself about your work and not letting other people shape how you feel.”

He said, “My only advice I would give anyone who wants to do this for their life is to make sure you love what you’re doing enough to see you through the bad times and never lose the fact that you are a fallible human being—and that’s OK.” One of his earliest musical memories is when his Aunt Rheta placed her hands over his 4-year-old hands at the piano, and together they pressed down on the keys, creating a C-major chord, “the most exquisite sound I had ever heard. I couldn’t believe that my own hand could actually make something so beautiful.

We all have, up until the day we die, moments that are sudden revelations for ourselves and that was certainly one for me.

When it does happen, well, it’s hard to describe.”

A quiet thing?

“It’s a quiet thing is right.”

Of his extraordinary career and life, Kander is characteristically modest. “I think a great deal of what happens to us in every area of our lives—and that includes longevity—is just plain luck.”

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James Rado

James Rado: It Was a Trip Like the musical Hair, its co-creator, James Rado, seems ageless.

Rado, 90, is the co-author with Gerome Ragni of the 1967 “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” but that’s not how his career in the theatre began. After studying acting under Lee Strasberg, Rado made his Broadway debut in 1963 in June Havoc’s Marathon ’33, played the romantic lead in the musical She Loves Me in Boston and originated the role of Richard in the Broadway production of The Lion in Winter.

He and buddy Gerome Ragni were cast in several shows beginning in 1964 and soon began collaborating on a musical that would reflect their passion for the burgeoning experimental theatre movement and the fast-changing counterculture.

Hair premiered Off-Broadway in 1967 and opened on Broadway the following year with Rado in the role of draftee Claude, opposite Ragni as free-spirit Berger.

“I never thought about the future and the show could still be alive today. We were living in the moment in those days. We just wanted to create something sensational for the Broadway stage that was about liberation, consciousness and the hippie movement.”

Rado said the audience then was a mixed one “with very straight people sitting next to hippies.”

The show changed the perception of what a Broadway musical could be and became a cultural sensation, spawning hit singles, global productions and a 1979 film. Hair earned the Tony Award for Best Revival in 2009.

And his advice to young people? “Love your art form, study it and know that you can take it to another level. Life evolves and so does the art form and the sky’s the limit. Just get in the groove, go with the flow and believe.”

As for his life in the theatre: “It was a trip, that’s for sure.”

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WHO’S WHO Mary Louise Wilson

Mary Louise Wilson: Quite the Character “I was not a serious child,” said Mary Louise Wilson. “I just knew I could make people laugh—and I hung on to that.”

Wilson, 90, first made an impression on audiences in 1956 in Julius Monk’s revue at Upstairs at the Downstairs. A theatrical career followed as a replacement during the long run of the 1954 Off-Broadway The Threepenny Opera followed by memorable turns as Comrade Ada in Flora the Red Menace, Kitty in The Royal Family, Tessie Tura in Gypsy, and a Tony Award-nominated performance in the revival of Cabaret.

“From the beginning, I thought of myself as a comedian. But actually, I was capable of more. I realized that later on.”

When she was going through “a period of being offered nothing but bag lady parts,” she created a project for herself, co-writing the play Full Gallop with Mark Hampton and starring as fashion editor Diana Vreeland. “I am more proud of writing that than anything.”

The last few decades have been especially rewarding. She received the 2007 Tony Award for her performance in Grey Gardens, played the lead role in the acclaimed 4,000 Miles, and had a joyous return to funny in the On the Twentieth Century revival.

She advises young artists to have “something else that you love: painting, writing, whatever fulfills you, because there are always periods when you’re not working and those times are tough.”

Of her career, she says she was never interested in being a star. “What appealed to me about theatre was being part of the cast where we were all equals.”

But even in ensembles, there was something special about her. People always noticed. The title of the 2015 documentary about her career comes from a frequent refrain in the reviews for this quintessential character actor—and what she plans to put on her tombstone: “She’s the Best Thing in It.”

If They Could Go Back We asked our artists if they, like Emily in Our Town, could go back to relive a moment from their professional lives, which would it be?

Lois Smith: She said she would choose one of many after-the-show moments in the dressing room with playwright Horton Foote, where they would simply continue to talk about the characters and nuances of a performance long after opening night. “It is a memory that is precious, having that time after the show with Horton.”

Joel Grey: “Standing on the stage at [age] 9 for the curtain call of On Borrowed Time and holding hands with all the actors, taking bows and thinking, ‘This is my family.’”

John Kander: “I would go back to the rehearsal room when we did the last run through of Steel Pier before we moved into the theatre. That’s as happy and fulfilled as any moment I’ve ever had in the theatre. Everybody in the piece was wonderful, we all had done honest, good work and it was very emotional. That afternoon I was really, really happy.”

James Rado: “I know I wouldn’t want to go back to the opening night of Hair on Broadway. That night was a terror because we had, unfortunately, a doctor in the wings with a needle who gave us…let’s say booster shots.”

Chita Rivera: “Fred [Ebb] and John [Kander] gave me a moment in The Visit when I came out [for my first entrance] and there was just this amazing applause. And it went on and on and I almost made a joke of it, kind of looking over my shoulder to see who came in. But I didn’t. I just took it all in and felt so deeply, deeply appreciated. You have to recognize these moments when they happen. Remember, we are all born with an empty canvas and, all of a sudden, you start to live your life and all these colors come in. Maybe by the end of our lives, the painting is fully there and hopefully, it’s a beautiful one.”

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CURTAIN CALL Test your West Side Story Knowledge

BY FRANK RIZZO

You’ve seen various stage versions of West Side Story, watched the original film endlessly, worn out the recordings and feel pretty confident that you could be a charter member in a WSS Gang. But how cool really are you? Following the recent Ivo van Hove Broadway revival of West Side Story and the recently released Steven Spielberg film version, we’ve created a quiz to test your knowledge of this landmark show.

And remember, no internet searches, daddy-o.

1. One of the titles considered for the musical was: — Tony and Maria — East Side Story — Star-Crossed Lovers — Something’s Coming — Punks Gone Wild

9. Which cast member in the film version would go on to lead a major dance company?

— Twyla Tharpe — Arthur Mitchell — Eliot Feld — Jacques d’Amboise — Michael Flatley

2. Which show won the Tony Award for Best Musical the season the original production opened on Broadway?

— West Side Story — The Music Man — Redhead — My Fair Lady — Bells Are Ringing

10. Which television show did not pay homage in some way to West Side Story?

— “Ugly Betty” — “Scrubs” — “In Living Color” — “The Carol Burnett Show” — “Sesame Street”

3. According to Misha Berson’s book on the show, the initial capitalization for the show was: — $350,000 — $680,000 — $925,000 — $1.3 million — $2.1 million

11. Long before the new film version, a Steven Spielberg-produced animated series “Animaniacs” parodied the musical as: — West Side Pigeons — West Side Rats — West Side Warners — West Side Parakeets — West Side Storks

4. One of critic Kenneth Tynan’s reservations about the show was: — There wasn’t enough dialogue — The gangs were too nice — Maria should have killed herself, á la Romeo and Juliet — The lyrics in “I Feel Pretty” are too sophisticated for the character — There wasn’t enough dancing

12. Who was not interested, considered or approached for the role of Tony in the film version?

— Warren Beatty — Marlon Brando — Elvis Presley — Fabian

5. Walter Kerr, reviewing for The New York Herald Tribune, wrote: — “The show is, in general, not well sung.”

— “I do not like intellectual slumming by sophisticates.”

— “It is vulgar, immature, unfeeling.”

— “You’ll be dancing in the streets.”

— “Dancing, yes. Story, no.”

13. According to Stephen Sondheim in his autobiography “Finishing the Hat,” the original concept for the opening of the show— eventually cut— was set…

— Leaving a courthouse — At a diner — In a clubhouse — At a sauna — Among various apartments

6. Which of these was not invented slang for the musical by Arthur Laurents?

— “Frackadatrack” — “Frabbajabba” — “Rigatigatum” — “Crackattacka” — “Moonarooney” 7. Casting for leads in the Broadway version considered everyone below except…

— Warren Beatty — Jerry Orbach — Suzanne Pleshette — Anna Maria Alberghetti 8. Which of these actors in the opening night cast was a future Tony Award winner, but not in a performing category?

— Grover Dale — Martin Charnin — Michael Bennett — Moose Charlap — Snooky Lanson

14. According to an Arthur Laurents interview, various new film adaptations were proposed over the decades, including…

— A Disney version with white and black cats — A foreign version with Israelis and Palestinians — A Muppet version with Miss Piggy as Maria and Kermit as Tony — An indie film set in the South during the Civil Rights era — An updated film version set in Seoul

16. An often-unrecognized figure in the original show was…

— Television producer Mark Goodson, who put up the money needed when the original producer left the project — Peter Gennaro, who choreographed the dances for the Sharks — Roddy McDowall, who first suggested to Jerome Robbins the concept to modernize and musical Romeo and Juliet — A Washington DC critic, who suggested that the song “Like Everybody Else” (for A-rab, Baby John and Anybodys) be cut — All of the above 17. Just days before the out-of-town opening, according to Amanda Vaill’s biography of Jerome Robbins, this happened: — The tag line “An American Tale” was dropped — “Something’s Coming” was written and put in the show — The character of Anybodys was added — The character of Tony’s brother was dropped — The decision was made to have Tony die in the end 18. What follows the line of dialogue “From sperm to worm?”

— “From womb to tomb.”

— “From crib to crypt.”

— “From here to eternity.”

— “From rave to grave.”

— “From gang to grave.”

19. If you had a poster from the show during its Washington DC run, its credits would include…

— Conceived by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents — Lyrics by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim — Choreography by Jerome Robbins and Peter Gennaro — Carol Lawrence’s name is spelled Carole Laurence — Switchblades by Henkel 20. According to Ethan Mordden’s book “Coming Up Roses,” when the West Side Story creators considered killing Maria off, who advised them not to, by saying, “She’s dead already.”

— Harold Bloom — Adolph Green — Oscar Hammerstein II — Richard Rodgers — Carol Lawrence

15. Which song was planned but never materialized in the pre-Broadway production: — The show’s big finale song — A solo song for Doc — A song for Riff and Velma — A number just for the Sharks — All of the above

Answers can be found online at Encoremonthly.com.

ENCOREMONTHLY.COM

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EXIT MUSIC

Company Then and Now Elaine Stritch (right) as Joanne with Dean Jones (Robert) and Charles Braswell (Larry) in the original 1970 Broadway production of Company.

Photo by Friedman-Abeles, New York Public Library Patti LuPone as Joanne in the 2021 Broadway revival of Company. Photo by Brinkhoff-Moegenburg

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