This is the second in a two part interview with Broadway actor Tony Chiroldes. In Part I we talked about his debut on Broadway in Paul Simon’s The Capeman. In Part II we talk about his work afterward, including his years performing on Broadway and around the world in Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-Award-winning musical In The Heights.

So after Capeman…

I’m performing in lots of different ways, mostly in voiceovers. Video games, audio books, commercials, animated stuff, a little bit of everything. When I decided to move to New York, I was like, I’m going to do theater! And voiceover stuff, I’ll do that on the side. Well, no. Theater’s been the icing on the cake.

But I love voiceovers, I get a kick out of it. And now I do it from home.

You can do it all from home?

You can do a lot of it from home. I have this standing closet that we call Narnia. The doors open up, I put a heavy wool blanket over them, clip it, I have my little booth and my microphone and there you go. I’ve done books form there, national campaigns.

One of my longest jobs was for HBO Sports in Spanish. Sports, me! I’m the most sports challenged people in the whole world. It’s really tricky, there’s all this jargon, they had to create a glossary of terms—tight end in Spanish, you can’t just say it literally.

For you, what’s the key to thinking about voiceover work? It seems like such a different world than stage acting.

Oh God absolutely. The acting is happening in your head and in your voice. It’s about really engaging with the words. It’s not about sounding pretty: There are times where you do, like as an announcer on an awards shot. But sometimes it’s just sounding like Joe on the street who’s getting interviewed. I love it. It’s all in the imagination.

When you’re doing a character, are you shown what they look like?

Sometimes. In video games I’ve had the luxury of seeing an image or a drawing. It sometimes helps. Sometimes it doesn’t. There was one character I did for a video game years ago, Pepe Espantoso, who’s a disc jockey in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I had in my head what he sounded like the moment I read the script.

Years later, I did another video game with motion capture. I wore like a helmet with a camera and lights. You didn’t have the dots. What they’re grabbing is your mouth expressions, so that they can animate that.

But those projects, man, they take time. And they’re so top secret. You sign NDAs, you can’t talk about it at all. I did a game that I thought was going to be some guerilla warfare thing. It ended up being cowboys and Indians. They even fooled me!

You’re a disc jockey in a video game about criminals and they’re like, “Don’t you tell anyone about this or else”?

Yeah. Until it’s out you can’t say anything. It’s millions of millions of dollars being invested.

But once you get down to the people who are working on them, it’s a lot of fun. You think, Oh God, this is going to be so tense. No, no. It’s video games! We’re not saving the world’s problems with a sci-fi adventure into the world of Avatar or whatever.

Each one of these brings me joy because somebody’s on the other side listening. I do ESL tapes, too. I’m recording for somebody’s who learning either Spanish or English. They used to have cassettes where people sat in a language labs and it’s like Maria está en la escuela. But they’ve become a lot more fun in their situations.

This is fascinating. Does it ever get sketch comedy-esque?

There have been situations that are funny. We can sometimes turn an old couple discussing into where they’re going to do for dinner into a little tense marriage moment. “I thought we were going to order pizza.” “No, I’d like Chinese tonight!”

We have good times. If you can’t have fun why do it?

Tony Chiroldes in one of his many funny commercials.

So how does In The Heights come about?

I was doing a Latino-themed show in Washington, D.C. at Arena Stage back in 2004 called Señor Discretion Himself. It was a show that Frank Loesser was working on prior to his passing, one of the last things he worked on. And it had been going around. A lot of people had been doing readings of it. He had read a story in Playboy Magazine written by Bud Schulberg of On the Waterfront, set in this mythical Mexican town, where the town drunk is the hero of the story, and there’s a miracle and all this stuff.

He started writing this musical with Mexican themes in it. And [after his death] Jo Loesser, Frank’s widow, wanted to bring it out. So she, director Charles Randolph-Wright, and the boys from Culture Clash, the comedy troupe from the West Coast, they reworked it and pulled material from stuff that was in the trunk that could work in and made a musical out of it, and this was premiered at Arena Stage in 2004. It was a big Latino cast.

So we come back from Washington, D.C., and Doreen Montalvo, who was the first person ever to walk into the basement of the Drama Book Shop to audition for In The Heights, says to me, Hey, do you want come see the reading of the first act of this thing that I’ve been doing on and off? (She played all the women characters in that show. She was in the ensemble off-Broadway and on Broadway, all those years.)

I said Yeah, what is it? She said, It’s a hip hop music written by this kid from uptown. I was like, Okay?

I went, and I see this guy with this little guayabera shirt, he’s like a kid. And I think, He wrote this? And of course there were people I know in the reading. And by the time they got to the hair salon song, I said, This is really good, and I want in on it.

No Me Diga, from the 2021 film adaptation of In The Heights

Fast forward to many years later. They’ve been working on it, they’re workshopping it, they did it at the O’Neill, and they’re going to do off-Broadway. And I audition. I was seen many times for it. Many, many times. I remember going to one of these combined auditions that off- and off- off-Broadway theaters here in New York do. I had never done one of those. But I put together my packet, and I went there. And I didn’t get it. I got cast in this other thing that was a showcase.

Every day, on the way to this showcase, which was not doing very well—there weren’t that many people in the audience, I would have to go past the theater where In The Heights was playing. And I’d hear all the cheers and I’d think, I wish I had been in it.

I saw it four times. I thought, This is moving to Broadway. And I kept running into people who would say, Aren’t you going to do In The Heights? You should be in In the Heights. You’d be great as the father. There was a lot in my head. Here’s this show that I would love to be in, but don’t get your hopes up too much, because the flip side is a bummer. So try to keep your wits about you.

Between off-Broadway and Broadway there were open calls. So I went, and I got called again and again and again, until one day I was in and out of the room trying out singing material for the father and the Piragua guy. And I got cast in the ensemble. The call from the show came December 17^th, 2007. It was the best Christmas present anyone could imagine.

I was three years doing the ensemble.

So you were with it from its beginning on Broadway?

From the beginning, original Broadway cast. And I closed as the Piragua guy. I did him on and off for three years, and I did Kevin, also on and off.

Tony Chiroldes as Kevin in the 2025 Broadway Sacramento production of In The Heights.

After the fact, I’ve done ten productions of In the Heights where I played Kevin. The 10^th was in Puerto Rico in 2021. It was the first production with a whole Boricua cast. And interestingly it was going to be in a 2000-seat theater.

Whoa, that’s big.

Because of the [health] protocols of how many people you were allowed to fit into a space, it kept changing. The producers decided to put it on in a concert arena that they reduced in size to create that space, but of course with extra seats so you could have people spread out. It was the first musical ever staged at this arena where they do concerts, monster trucks and Disney on Ice, but reduced to the size of a theater with a proscenium and everything. It was really cool the way they did it.

You had maybe 6,000 seats.

Oh wow.

We did nine performances. It was this hybrid concert/ theater piece—it wasn’t a concert, it was the show, but in this humongous space. And people went bonkers.

But along with that, here come the hot dog vendors during the show walking up and down the aisles. It was an experience. *laughs*

The 2021 Puerto Rican production of In The Heights.

In The Heights sounds like a very different experience than The Capeman right from the jump, in that they had done it successfully off-Broadway already. How much additional rehearsal was done when it came to Broadway?

It was rehearsed from scratch, except everybody knew the material and they were reviewing it and fine tuning it. Also, there were changes.

What was it like joining the cast?

It was scary, in the sense that you’re one of the five new people coming into the neighborhood, so there’s that element of fellow actors who were not friends back then not knowing me and wondering who’s this Tony that’s coming in, while fellow actors who were in the show and knew me said Oh my God, Tony, wait ‘til you meet him!

So you had that Who’s this guy? Who’s the new kid on the block? Is he going to be nice, are we going to like him? And then you come in with your baggage and your sense of humor, and people get it or not. So there’s that dynamic.

It was a lot of work, too. Knowing since the beginning that I was going to be understudying these two parts, I came in rearing to go with wanting to learn those things. And then I realized, no, that doesn’t happen until after. So I focused on what I needed to focus on, which was my track, all the things I did in the ensemble. And thank goodness that I learned what I learned doing The Capeman, that I could say Okay, I can do this much here in this moment that I may have a solo line, but the rest of the time the focus is over there. I’m in the neighborhood. Andréa Burns called me Mr. Specificity. She said, Every single moment you have, you see this character. The guy sitting up there reading a newspaper, there’s a story that’s happening with that person. And if you happen to look up there you see Oh, that’s the guy with the newspaper, he’s not just sitting there like a piece of furniture.

And talk about emotions. Every day.

How so?

There was that road again that was paved not only by my parents and my aunt and my cousin, who were also in the business, but all the people that came before us. José Ferrer, Raúl Julia, Chita, Rita. The people who were there that made it so that this kid Lin-Manuel Miranda could say, I’m going to write a musical. And there it went.

Chita Rivera and Tony Chiroldes.

A lot of emotions, and a lot to learn also. And it’s a job. You wake up and the first thing in the morning you check to make sure your voice is there.

I know it’s billed as a hip hop musical, but Heights had lots of different kinds of music in it, even moreso than Hamilton.

Yes, and Hamilton from the get go is faster than In The Heights. In The Heights starts slow—Lights up on Washington Heights up at the break of day. Then in Act II when you have the “Hundreds of Stories” song with the grandmother, there’s the rat-tat-tat that Hamilton starts with. He laid the groundwork for Hamilton with this other stuff. He could move to Hamilton and people are attuned to it. It’s like going to Shakespeare; you know this is what we’re going to get.

Did you have a favorite number to perform?

I’ve always enjoyed the ending, that reprise of all the themes for different people in the show. You hear the bolero singing Para siempre, para siempre. Then Usnvai starts rapping Lights up, blackout’s gone, and it builds. Suddenly you start hearing the girls singing the hydrants are open, the Piragua guy sings Piragua, Piragua, Kevin says Good morning, Camila sings Para siempre, and it all builds to Vanessa going It won’t be long now. Then it breaks again into a slow-mo dance.

It’s the snapshots of the life that is typical of the neighborhood. This is what happens, people go and people come. It wraps it all up in a nice little bow.

In the film finale, Tony Chiroldes stands next to his partner Peter Brown (in the blue shirt) and Michael Mann (in the green).

We live in a post-world Hamilton world in which Lin-Manuel is a giant. Back when you’re doing In The Heights, was there a sense of him as that?

He’s so humble. What you see is what you get. When you see him in interviews, that goofiness, that’s him. It’s like Fred Rogers, same thing, what you saw is what you get. He’s energetic and a lot of things are going on in that head. I wish I had the 24 hours he has to do all the stuff he does in a day.

There were glimmers, glimpses. One time he’s rapping the opening number and somebody was taking pictures from the audience. And he improv’d a line—it was something like, “I’m going to test you later” and he changed the line to “I’m going to take it later,” meaning the phone, and he kept on going. It was like, Whoa. Someone [in the cast] said, Did he just tell someone in the audience I’m going to take your phone? That’s the magic of Lin.

It’s interesting: You do Capeman, a story that in some ways is a standard (white) story about people of color—it has gangs, violence, horror, redemption. Then twenty years later you’re in a story written by a Puerto Rican man and instead of being about the worst possible days or choices of a person’s life, it’s about community.

It’s a snapshot, yeah. It’s not the typical story. The show has no guns, no knives, no killings. It’s so anti-everybody’s image of Latinos in general. These are hardworking people.

It’s a story of my people. My father left Cuba and fought hard to give us an education. And it’s a story of everybody.

I feel like these were at the time two of the only Puerto Rican or Latino stories to have ever been on Broadway. Does that sound right?

You had Latino themed pieces like Zoot Suit, which came from California and played on Broadway. That’s very Chicano. There’s West Side Story.

Performing In The Heights, did it feel like you’re in a historic play?

When you’re in it, you’re not thinking like that. People will tell you that, but the moment you think I’m doing something that’s historic, it gets weird. We started noticing, this is touching people. Kids are coming to the stage door, and they’re identifying. They’re seeing themselves there. That means something.

Lin said closing night—there’s going to be some kid in Wyoming playing Usnavi. And people will know who we were, Boriqua, Dominican, Cuban, Mexican.

Tell me about the Tonys.

My cousin who came to see the show week two, she said, stick around. This is going to run. And it did, for three years.

There was no way of knowing what would come. But I will say this: When we were on Broadway I thought this is getting many nominations. And when we got to the awards I thought, we’re definitely going to win choreography. I knew. If Andy Blankenbuehler doesn’t win choreography, this is a crock.

And as the stages went on, I had this feeling, we’re getting this.

The cast of In The Heights performs at the 2008 Tony Awards.

A few of us were up in the rafters, and a friend of mine, Bill Cannon, arranged it so that he could swap seats with me as the show grew closer to the end so that I could be down closer to the orchestra, and if they announced that we won I could haul ass on stage with everybody else. It was very sweet.

What was it like being on stage after you won?

It happens so fast. It’s like, “You won. Good night everybody!”

And then you look out and it’s like, Damn, we’re in Radio City. It was unbelievable.

For opening night, a fellow actor Blanca Camacho who was a swing in the show all three years had given us flags of the countries that we were from. I saved that; I had it on my dressing table. And I brought it. So there was a little Puerto Rican flag waving in the back.

It’s so appropriate to have it up there.

I had to.

Cast and creative team celebrate their Tony win. Chiroldes holds the Puerto Rican flag off to the right.

What was it like performing after you won?

After we won the Tony, one of the producers had a meeting with us, and he said, Now is when the real work begins. People who had come to see the show were already the fans. Now people are going to want you to show me why did you win. Don’t lean on the award. Don’t take it for granted.

So it got harder. And I’ll tell you this, our creative team would watch the show and we’d get notes. They were very on it. We’d have pick up rehearsals, we had understudy rehearsals, we had rehearsals where they came in and cleaned us up. Otherwise things get sloppy. Some people start doing extra things or not doing enough or not showing up. It’s like okay, let’s fine tune this.

That’s a blessing. We opened and closed a very tight show.

Did a lot of people stick around for the whole run?

I would say half the cast maybe was there the whole time, I think.

And, there were about 4 or 5 of us that were there every night. You’d have to be in the hospital to not be there. The show is magical. It’s just a celebration.

In the Heights’ actors Tony Chiroldes and David Baida getting their Donna on before a show.

What was it like to perform this show in places where Latin cultures aren’t so familiar or broadly accepted?

I was getting on an Uber in one city, and the guy asks what are you doing at the theater, and I said, we’re doing a show called In The Heights, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, he wrote Hamilton. There’s that reference point.—before he was the guy who wrote In The Heights, now he’s the guy who wrote Hamilton. And the Uber driver asks, What’s it about? I said, well it’s a celebration of culture and diversity in a neighborhood in upper Manhattan.

Pause.

Yeah, he says, I guess diversity’s cool just as long as you keep it under control.

That Uber did not get a tip.

So you’re really teaching by example.

In the show, we’re presenting our people, us Latinos or that mix of Latinos in Washington Heights. We’re presenting who we are. This is us. Understand us. Understand that we go through the same things, we work and we work hard and we’re all immigrants. We’re no different, except for, say, what we cook, the spices we use or the songs we sing.

And I think we meet halfway as a collective experience of theater. The audience realizes that we have kids, too, kids that cause trouble or go to college and never come back or whatever. It’s the same. So we’re saying this is us and also this is you, who live wherever they do.

For you, what are the next Puerto Rican or Latino stories to tell today? What are the stories you want to see or be a part of?

Oh wow. I think it’s like the song says, “Hundreds of Stories.”

The next stories are being told. Look at Buena Vista Social Club.

Sure. Also Real Women Have Curves last year. That was fantastic.

A new one that’s coming is the Gloria Estefan musical Basura, which means trash. It’s the true story of these kids who made music making instruments out of stuff they found in a junkyard. It’s on now in Atlanta, if It hasn’t happened already.

It’s bold to title your show trash. But I’m sure it’s not trashy at all.

There are other up and comers. Florencia Cuenca played the older sister in Real Women. Her husband Jaime Lozano is a composer. He will have something coming out soon.

I personally would love to see more queer Latino stories.

There’s a beautiful musical that a young man, Miguel Rosa-Lopez, wrote in Puerto Rico called Cuatro. It was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture. It’s set at an airport, all these stories are woven in and out. There’s a song that I sang at a cabaret show in Puerto Rico called “Ellipsis,” and oh man it’s one of those ballads that make you cry in the middle of the street. It’s not a belting number, it’s really just a story about how something is unfinished. How can you put the final period on something that’s still unresolved? It’s a love story that has remained unresolved.

Do you think we could ever have a show on Broadway that is entirely Spanish language?

Listen, opera uses subtitles. So why not?

For me the most amazing part of the Bad Bunny halftime show is that when I look back on it I remember myself understanding it all, but in fact most of it was in Spanish. Maybe we don’t even need subtitles.

Look at Buena Vista. The songs are in Spanish, and they don’t tell you what the songs are about. You go on feeling. It’s beautiful. It’s songs I grew up with, so believe me, I cry every time.

Any final thoughts about In the Heights?

Nothing compares to that experience. The days when I’m blue, some people conjure an image of sitting on a beach. I conjure an image of having a number that ended in that audience going WHAM. Wow.

It looks so far away now, but by the same token it was the other day.

Tony Chiroldes as Kevin in the 2019 Portland Center Stage production of In the Heights.

Thanks to Tony Chiroldes for all the time we spent talking, and also for all of the amazing photos.

After we originally finished this interview, I realized I hadn’t asked Tony what his favorite scene to perform was, as I had in Capeman. After I reached back out and he told me about the finale, I went looking online for a clip of that moment. I intended to find a clip of Tony performing, but instead I stumbled onto a 2018 high school production from Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And it seemed to capture exactly what Lin-Manuel Miranda had hoped on closing night. Young people all over the country have discovered In The Heights, and seen their own lives within it.

New York City Center is doing a two week revival of In the Heights next fall. If you’re in the city, check it out.

In the years following the release of Paul Simon’s 1986 album Graceland, I waited for each new album from Simon like a kid waiting for the next issue of a comic book. Though each was totally different and a glimpse into a culture that I knew nothing about, they shared a vitality that spoke to me.

When Songs from the Capeman was released in 1997, I was stunned to discover Simon bringing his ongoing exploration of sonic cultures to a musical theater format. The songs were so sticky and specific, conjuring such clear ideas of the characters and the story, it seemed the rare show that couldn’t possibly fail.

If only that were true. Almost from the moment it was announced as a workshop in 1987, The Capeman faced scrutiny and hostility. Everyone was eager to see what a Paul Simon musical might offer. And yet, Simon showed an unfortunate tendency to dismiss the business. In an article in the Baltimore Sun he talked about how Broadway had “ended up in a weird cul de sac — probably because it was never energized by rock and roll.” The trouble with musical theater, he said, is that “it’s all descended either from the musical theater from its heyday in the ’40s and ’50s, or it’s the English variant that Andrew Lloyd Webber popularized.”

Someone who starts their work on Broadway by knocking both the art form and by extension the community of people creating it had better be able to put up the goods themselves. And as so many gifted songwriters have discovered over the years, the capacity to write great tunes is not enough. You must have the characters, the performers, the creative team, and above all the story.

The drama that Simon wanted to explore was certainly rich in characters and conflict—Puerto Rican kid Salvador Agron comes to New York, gets caught up in a gang called the Vampires, murders two kids in a Hell’s Kitchen park who he mistakenly thinks were a part of a rival gang, and undergoes a decades-long journey of contrition and redemption. But these were all also real people, who had suffered, and the real-life events that had happened just blocks from the theater. The young Agron was still remembered for how completely unphased he had been by what he had done. At the time of his arrest he told reporters that he killed the boys “because I felt like it.”

Simon and book writer Derek Walcott took a challenging approach to the material, as well, having three different actors portraying Agron, two of them often on stage at the same time, and having the show be almost entirely sung through. At the same time, Simon cast many performers who had never performed in a Broadway show before, some who weren’t previously actors at all.

The production went through four directors during the workshop process alone. When it finally came to Broadway the producers had to keep delaying its opening because the show just wasn’t working. It closed two months after it opened.

I was far from New York as of all that happened. And the gorgeous songs of the concept album that Simon had released have never left me. So when I first met actor Tony Chiroldes, and he told me had performed in both The Capeman and In the Heights, I wanted to know everything.

Tony Chiroldes today(This and all photos courtesy of Chiroldes.)

Chiroldes had been an actor in Puerto Rico before coming to New York. “Never in my life did I plan on being in a Broadway show,” he admitted. “My parents were in the business. My father was a Cuban singer, my mom was a redheaded actress, and no, I’m not little Ricky,” he said, laughing.

He wasn’t kidding about his background. “Really, my father was a singer from Cuba and he actually produced television in Puerto Rico, and my mother was actually the mistress of ceremonies of his variety show, back when variety shows were done. This was the ‘50s, ‘60s, early ‘70s. But I never wanted to do that, I wanted to work behind the cameras on film. And here I am now, a full-time performer for 40 years.”

Over the course of a morning, Tony and I talked about his experiences doing Capeman and In the Heights. In this first part of our conversation, we talk about Capeman, a show which was foundational to Chiroldes’ career as an actor.

I first found The Capeman through Paul Simon’s concept album. It’s only now as I’m relistening to the cast album that I’m realizing just how much music there was in the show. There are so many songs!

It was quite the experience. On and off it was a year of work for me. The workshop was three months long. And then rehearsals for the production began like, in August, we were going to start previews in December to open January, and then that got pushed, we opened end of January and ran until the end of March.

How did you first get connected to the show?

I’ve always been drawn to Latino themed projects, even after I moved to New York, not only for the obvious reasons but also because I think things have evolved so that a lot of stories are being told that are more true to the Latino people and experience. So I heard about the show, everybody and their grandma was auditioning for it.

Had you already been in New York for a while?

I ‘d been in New York since 1993, full time since 1995. My career began in Puerto Rico back in ‘85, and I’d always wanted to try New York.

[In November of 1985, Chiroldes originated the role of Mickey Marcus in the Spanish-speaking premiere of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in San Juan.]

By the time I came it was really necessary. I was in the middle of a deep depression and I needed to recharge. It’s funny, people leave New York to recharge. I came to New York to recharge.

That’s wild, I did something very similar.

And I was here just to heal, nothing else but heal. Lo and behold two weeks after getting here I was already doing a show with one of the Latino theater companies. So maybe it was meant to be.

I don’t know how I ended up auditioning for the show. No agent booked me the audition; I was freelancing. I think I went to an open call or something. Or maybe somebody found me? To be honest, I can’t remember. But I booked the show on my own, which is great—it paid off my college loans!

Do you remember what the auditions were like?

Oh yeah. I remember that first audition was just casting from Bernie Telsey Casting and director Susana Tubert. She was there for the first two auditions, but then she was not with the project by the time the project started. We went through five directors (which is a whole other story).

The second time was with Paul Simon and Derek Walcott and a lot of people from the producing team. That was a little overwhelming. I walked out of there and realized, Wow, I just sang for “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” Paul Simon, “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” Paul Simon.

Then the last call, they asked me to sing an aguinaldo, which is a Christmas song.

Like ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’?

More like “Silent Night”, but it’s a party song, a celebratory song. And it has a certain rhyme scheme.

An example of an aguinaldo.

There was an aguinaldo in the show that I had to learn to sing for that audition. And Paul got up and we sang it together.

What?!

Paul had his guitar and he taught me this song and we sang it together. I was 20something and living on 16^th Street. I thought, If nothing else I have a story to share.

Had you tried out for other Broadway shows?

Maybe regional theater, but not for Broadway, no.

It was your first time auditioning for a Broadway show, and it’s a Paul Simon show, and you booked it completely on your own.

Yeah. It’s crazy. And a lot of people tried out for it.

Michelle Rios (Aurea Agron), Paul Simon, and Tony Chiroldes

I’m sure. Was there a really specific role you went in for in the beginning?

I remember reading the song assigned for Salvador Agron, the older Salvador Agron. But I was ensemble the whole time, which was great. At one point I was playing between 11 and 14 different characters throughout the show. I had the best time changing in and out of costumes, and every character was completely different.

One of the casting people saw the show and told me, I didn’t realize it was you in the church scene. You looked completely different! You were a chameleon. I was like, Well good!

Tony Chiroldes as The Reporter in Capeman.

It seemed like the show dealt with a ton of scrutiny way before previews. Things Simon had said, the choices he made, the way he did things.

Everybody made sure that whatever decisions were made were always made through Paul. He was very honest about it—this was a pet project of his, he wanted to put this together, and this was not going to be your typical musical.

He knew his stuff, too. He didn’t just put Latin rhythms to make it Latino. He really did his work.

I wondered about that. Even acknowledging his huge talent, the idea of a white American guy saying “I’m going to write a show about Puerto Ricans” seems dubious today.

It’s bold to do that, but he had done other concept albums where he dove really respectfully into the music of those places. It’s a testament to the man’s brain and creativity that he did this.

In the process everybody eventually ran into the realization that there is a structure and a way that a musical runs—it’s from 8 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., it has a certain structure. There are certain parameters. Something as simple as a button—A lot of the songs just kind of faded, like an album. But you can’t fade out a song on stage. You have a button. These things started coming into the equation.

Boy oh boy, there was a lot of attention. And there was people’s expectations versus what they got. You’re going into a musical, you think it’s going to be all Latino dancing, what we see now with shows like In the Heights and On Your Feet, even the Bad Bunny halftime show. And it wasn’t. It was a very dark story. How do you put into a musical a story of redemption about a crime that happened blocks away? I walk past that playground every other day.

Tony Chiroldes with the Vampires: (L-R) Renoly Santiago (Tony Hernandez), Julio Monge (Carlos Apache), Lugo (Babu Charlie Cruz)

Also, the story was very episodic, and you have two people playing the same role. At some point in the second act they put up video footage of the real person, which was another shock. That’s not the kid I’m seeing onstage. All of that they came into play.

It was a difficult show to pull off in many ways. It’s not West Side Story.

But we were dealt a bad card in that everything that happened with that show was grounds for headlines in some of the local papers. “There’s trouble brewing in The Capeman.” Every show goes through its growth spurts and phases and problems.

And usually you deal with all that in private.

Yes, and this was very, very out there. It seemed like they had it in for us. You couldn’t sneeze without a headline.

I also have a feeling that it had been a while since a show closed because of a bad review. It was not that people set out to close The Capeman with a bad review. But there were a lot of shows around us that had gotten mixed reviews, and they were still running. But somehow that was not for us.

People have the right to their opinion, if they weren’t feeling it or didn’t enjoy it. But I remember walking into the Drama Bookshop during Capeman. Someone who worked there said to me—and loud of course, because some people need to make themselves heard, “Give me all the dish on The Capeman, I hear it’s terrible.”

What am I going to say, “Yes, it sucks?” No, I’m not. Even if I felt that—which I didn’t. I just thought Hey, we’re doing our thing. Nobody sets out to do a bad show (except in The Producers ha ha). Nobody sets out to put on a flop. And everybody thought it was going to do alright. We were thrilled to be in it. And not all of us were Broadway performers. They brought together an amazing group of singers and musicians who were strictly from the music world—Ruben Blades; Ednita Nazario, who is one of Puerto Rico’s foremost pop singers; Marc [Anthony]—I mean, Hello! Sara Ramirez went on to do Grey’s Anatomy. The band, the musicians that they pulled together for that orchestra were the best of the best.

The people who did go see it enjoyed it. People still talk about it. That show opened doors. Lin-Manuel saw it. He was a kid and he has memories of it.

Ruben Blades (Salvador Agron) and Tony Chiroldes

What was the workshop and rehearsal process like?

We were working our asses off. There were changes all the time. I auditioned for one director. Then when we did the workshop it was Eric Simonson from Steppenwolf. Halfway through that he was let go and Derek Walcott directed for a day. Then Mark Morris, who was choreographing, became the director. It’s with him that we went into the rehearsal process for the show a year or 10 months later.

Three months for a workshop seems like a long time. Did it include blocking the show?

The workshop was really working through the music and how everything was going to be assembled. It was a lot of table work and sitting with Paul and learning the music. It was very different from the regular kind of show where you sit for the first week or two and you’re learning all of the music, then you get up on your feet and you start blocking it, staging it.

This kind of floated in and out of the space. And sometimes we were all there to watch the rehearsal of someone else’s scene, a two-person scene. And we were like, okay, we’re sitting here watching.

As in, This is not normally how this works?

Yeah. But we were working. And it was really interesting. Everyone’s style was different. For example, Eric Simonson was very much about creating this ensemble-driven piece, because there is a lot of ensemble in that show in almost every scene. And so he and Mark Morris were creating this organic movement that wasn’t 5-6-7-8 step here-step here-kick-ball-change. It wasn’t Go to number 5, then move to 8 and exit. It was free flowing, experimental for lack of a better word.

And again, some people had no stage experience, so there was all of that learning curve.

Would Paul have been involved with all of that, as well?

No, he was mostly the music and his take on what we were doing with the material. Again, it was a big experiment in that here were a lot of people involved that had not done theater or musical theater. So how do you get all these minds on the same lane, the same track?

Tony Chiroldes with director/choreographer Mark Morris

Did the workshop end with a set of performances?

I don’t know that we ever did a full run of it. I can’t recall. (It’s been a while.) We might have done numbers, but not all of the numbers, because it was mostly sung. If anything it was more of a concert setting in the rehearsal space.

Then we went into rehearsal and when the opening got pushed they brought in Jerry Zaks and Joey McKneely to doctor the show. They got it up to the point where numbers had a beginning, middle, and an end, it was not fade out but had the buttons, the little structural changes that made it more of a musical-musical.

I remember reading that during previews, you’d be performing the show each night, while each day you’d be taking on big changes?

Huge changes. It was very intense, and scary. We were all worried, When does the hatchet fall? When do I get fired?

And Jerry has a very particular way of directing. I learned a ton from him, about where the focus of the scene needs to be. I remember I was chomping at the bit. And it was like, No, this scene is not about you. I mean, I wasn’t told this, but I learned through osmosis—Stand still and listen to the people, the focus is here.

Jerry had very specific things he wanted to work on, because that was all he could do in the span of three weeks. And he put a stamp on the show. Even though there was some scenes he was going to leave untouched, everything went through that process.

It was long days. We had been rehearsing since September, and now it’s January, and things were happening, scenes were being cut.

People have no notion of what it’s like to be in a preview period where there are huge changes happening. I ended up in the hospital with what I what I thought was something serious. It was an anxiety attack.

I couldn’t do the show that night. At the time there was a totally new number that was being worked on that was integrated into Act II. I think it was titled “Escape from Peekskill.” That number was only done that night. It had been worked on, it got put in, it went in the show that night, and out the next day.

That’s a lot to deal with for everybody—crew, and stage management and performers. Yeah.

By the time we were opening people were also starting to get sick. There was a performance where the female lead was ill and had to step out of the show and then came back. The audience must have been like, What is going on? On a regular show that’s off putting. Imagine a show that’s brand new.

It was intense, but you know what, it was a great learning curve. I think it prepared me for a lot.

I also got to appreciate what I had done and gone through in Puerto Rico. Because in Puerto Rico sketch comedy, you get the pages right before you go on camera. I used to hate that. I’d say, Why do we do things this way over here? Well, when you’re in a preview process, it’s pretty much the same. It’s like, Here, learn this, you’re going to do it tonight, boom boom boom, get it on, get it on.

Once you started to perform it in front of an audience, what did it feel like?

Oh God. It was a big sense of pride. Because you’re seeing all these brown faces, 99% of the cast was Latino and singing in English and Spanish, and the names were being pronounced the correct way. And we weren’t singing “Olé” at the end of the song.

There was a moment that the stage became this Puerto Rican flag that was just so overpowering. And the audiences were reacting. The audiences we had wanted to be there, and they loved it. We closed to full houses. We never had half a house.

I remember meeting a family of four outside the stage door that were in polo shirts, trembling. We had one of the most brutal winters. But they got on the plane from Puerto Rico that morning to come see The Capeman because they heard it was closing and then wanted to see Ednita. Could they say hello? Puerto Ricans will come. They will get on a plane and travel to see a show, especially with other Latinos in it.

And I said, Come on in. There’s no way you’re going to leave New York without saying hello to these people when you stood in the cold after seeing the show. There were special things like that.

We had talkbacks with students, and there was one talkback that was fascinating. The guy who understudied for Ruben and Marc, José Joaquín García, asked the students how many of you have a relative who has been in jail? And a lot of these kids raise their arms. They saw themselves on stage. There’s that element of ‘sad but true.’ They saw both the good and the not so of our culture depicted on stage.

I’m trying to think of what else… The scenery was outstanding. That set [by Bob Crowley] was just out of this world. It was the only Tony nomination. I think the show could have gotten a couple more.

Were there specific numbers that ended up meaning a lot to you personally?

There was a number that opened Act II, “Time is an Ocean of Endless Tears.” The set was this whole pattern, the tables of the prison on stage looked like a mirror from above.

Clips from the 1998 Broadway production of The Capeman

In that number I did all these funny bits during rehearsal, and they got put in. But by the time the show opened all those little bits got cut, because they weren’t necessary for the number and the show. All I did was push this table downstage center and sit there frozen for the entire number.

And I’m frozen there, and all I could think of was, Wow, I may not be doing a much, I may not be quote unquote acting, but I’m in a Broadway show. There’s that line from Risky Business, “Time of your life, huh, kid?” Sometimes I well up, thinking about that.

And it was what people did before me that got me there. It wasn’t just me up there, it was the legacy of all the other people that came before me that paved the way so that someone like me could be there.

I’ve only done two shows on Broadway. People say “What? Only two?” And I’m like, Yeah. I’m cool with that. It’s really cool.

Both shows are iconic in different ways. And I have to say, I appreciate that you’d share about a show that didn’t do well.

For the longest time I didn’t talk about Capeman, because you don’t shit where you eat. I was an employee of a production, and I’m only one point of view. Everybody’s going to have different points of view as to what went wrong. Also, there’s no smoking gun. There’s no one person. You can’t blame Paul, you can’t blame this director or that director. It was just one of those things. It seemed doomed from the start. I don’t know, it had this kind of curse.

But what’s interesting is, you could sit there afterwards and you’re kind of sad, Oh damn, the one show that I did, which may be the one and only show, didn’t do well. But there’s flops every day. And big people have been in flops. People forget that Chita and Elaine Stritch and all these people did shows that closed out of town, things that never saw the light of day. It’s not just The Capeman, it’s many, many shows. And there are shows that did terrible and have two songs that are now standards. I find that fascinating.

As an opening night gift, Chiroldes gave the entire cast prints of this piece of art which he commissioned from Puerto Rican artist Jaime Suárez.

Maybe every show is a beautiful monster. It’s deformed or misshapen in some way, but it’s also a special thing, and if you focus on what’s ‘off,’ you miss so much.

Absolutely. Every performance, too.

In drama conservatory programs, they rarely teach you the nitty gritty stuff, How you spend an entire day in the theater and then do a show, and then come back, or dealing with the people and they’re dealing with you, all the personalities. Or how when the ship is sinking, some people stick around and some people bail out. Those last three weeks were quite a show behind the show, with people’s reactions. Some people lose their shit, some people take it in stride. It’s human nature. They don’t teach you what that’s going to be like.

I think part of the learning process for me was being in the flop before being in the hit. It was a good learning curve. It paved the way for all the rest of the years that I’ve been doing this.

I’d love to see someone mount it again. It seems to me like there was so much gorgous material in it.

There have been concerts of it since. There was one at BAM when they did a retrospective of Paul’s work in 2008. And they did a production at the Public at the Delacourt back in 2009 where they apparently focused the story more on the mother character Esmeralda, and apparently that went gangbusters. I missed it, I was doing Heights.

I’d like to sing that material again someday. I mean it. And I’m surprised it hasn’t been done in Puerto Rico.

It has not been done in Puerto Rico?

Nope.

How is that possible?

I have no idea. But because of the let’s call it the Lin-Manuel effect, there’s a lot of musical theater talent down there, and there’s a lot of musicals being done the right way.

I’m surprised that it hasn’t been done even as a concert. The musical talent is certainly there, the performing talent.

I may not see it, but I think there will be someday a Capeman that works.

Thanks to Tony Chiroldes for the conversation!

Coming Soon, Part II with Tony Chiroldes: In the Heights.

This is the second part of my interview with Tim Weil, music director and orchestrator on Jonathan Larson’s groundbreaking and award-winning musical Rent. Weil’s memoir about Rent, is out now and it’s dynamite.

Part I can be found here.

You were talking about that experience of watching Stevie Wonder perform, and the incredible, almost mystical level of performance or creation that you witnessed. Do you think part of getting to that place as a musician ends up being about being vulnerable, i.e. allowing yourself to be open enough for that to happen?

It’s about accessibility and vulnerability and finding a place to open your mind and your heart and your spiritual fully. That’s the only way you can enable it. If you’re blocked up anywhere, it ain’t happening. You have to be fully free and available.

At the book launch, [Rent director] Michael Greif said you have a gift for helping performers find performances they don’t necessarily know they have in themselves. In the book, the way that you come at songs with the cast—like developing the “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)” in a way that would allow Jesse to feel that it was his own—seemed so meaningful as an approach to use with actors.

When you’re working with performers, where do you start?

Number one is obviously you meet them where they are. It’s not ‘where I want them to be.’ You have to start in a place where they’re comfortable, because that’s how they’re going to do their best work.

Actors are always under the gun—they’re putting their ass on the line. I have an unbelievable appreciation for that, especially now that I’ve written a book. I said to my wife Randy [Graff, the actress], You’ve made a career of all this? Why?? What’s wrong with you? I had so much anxiety before the book came out.

Tim Weil and Randy Graff

But in terms of singers, because I’ve been doing it for so long and I study people, a lot of it is really logic. Let’s say someone sings with their head titled up. Well, they’re squeezing their vocal chords. So I try to get them back to neutral. Just kind of basic stuff like that, and the value of consonants, how they help you. Your mouth is a big resonant cave. When you hear people like Adam Pascal and Idina sing, they’re lifting their soft palate up to the stars. That tends to open up all the cavities. Some people, I find, are not consonant-heavy enough.

Once they get the feeling of that—and you do it to a point where it feels goofy but then you go, do you see how everything popped into place? And it’s like anything, when it feels right, you just have to recreate that feeling.

So there’s things I notice and I think Oh, I can help them with this or that.

It’s a combination of that and just patience and my own musicianship. It’s like, let’s see how your and my tastes meet up, and see where this can go. And the great thing is, because I’m the music director, between Michael and I we became the arbiters of how far out are we going to let [their performances] go, and how much are we going to keep them reined in. It’s a very delicate process.

We made a little bit of a deal with the devil for this musical, in that we decided we’re going to kind of custom build the show [for different casts]. I’ve custom-built “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)” for two dozen Collins over the years. But that’s the deal we wanted to make, Michael and I. Because it’s the nature of that kind of music, and you can tune into people’s strengths and gifts. That’s why people want to do the show, because within Jonathan’s beautiful score, they can find a way to operate in collaboration.

Queen Esther, who was part of the original touring company of Rent, with Weil

When you’re dealing with performers and musicians, what is the thing that you think that they most need from you as music director?

Patience and respect. You have to honor what they do, what they’ve done, what they bring to the table. They deserve respect, the work they’ve done deserves respect, and the work we’re about to put in together, too. Because they’re making a leap of faith. They’re trusting in me as the music director that I’m going to put them on the good foot and I’m going to help them be their best. That’s my beginning and ending goal of our work together.

Would you say performers and musicians start from a similar place of vulnerability?

Musicians are built in a different way, I think. Performers, because they work in the theater arts and it’s collaborative by nature, tend to be more outward personalities. You have to be that at least professionally.

If you’re a great musician, you can be a total inward personality, because all that matters is how you sound, how you communicate through your instrument.

Both talking to you and reading the book, you seem to have a very ready sense of empathy and understanding of the band and your performers. Would you say empathy is a key trait for a music director?

I don’t think it’s a necessary quality—there are a lot of not very nice people in all areas of the theater. I think with a director, music director, choreographer, the creative team, empathy is a bonus. It’s not necessarily a given.

It comes to me naturally. It’s the caretaker in me. I’ve just always been that kind of person. If you really want to get psychoanalytic about it, I was the youngest child of ACOA parents. So I was caretaking, making everybody laugh, trying to smooth it all out from as far back as I remember. And God bless my father, he got sober toward the end of his life, when my mom got her cancer diagnosis, and he remained sober of the rest of his life. Which is one reason I write about him so fondly in the book. I finally got to know the father that I always knew was my father, but I never knew as a kid.

The Rent band: Steve Mack (bass), Weil, Jeffrey Potter (percussion), Daniel Weiss (keyboard/guitar), Kenny Brescia (guitar).

Tell me about being an orchestrator. What does it take to do that well?

Let me be clear: I’ve orchestrated. But I know some really great orchestrators, and I’m not on their level.

You have to know all the instruments, all their ranges, what sounds good together. But the real orchestrators, they know the sonorities, they know this thing is better in this key or this thing will resonate better between a flute and a clarinet if it’s played like this. It’s a lot of detail work.

To be a great orchestrator you also have to be a little bit of a composer. There’s a lot of compositional work within that orchestration. And yet what’s so magnificent about it is it is still all in support of what is happening vocally. That’s the real gift.

My orchestrator work is mostly rooted in rhythm sections, horn sections, reed sections. The stuff I know because I did a lot of writing for big bands, jazz bands, funk bands, stuff like that. So I kind of come at it from that world.

Have I done a little bit of it in the theater? Yes. But compared to the Danny Troobs, the Jonathan Tunicks, the Michael Starobins of the world—I’m leaving out a lot of great ones, one of the young guns that’s really great is Charlie Rosen—Yeah, I ain’t them. I occupy my own lane, that’s all. Very pop, funk and jazz.

If you were going to talk to someone who wanted to be an orchestrator, what advice would you give them?

Boy, I’m not sure I’m qualified to do that. I would give them advice not as a fellow orchestrator, because again, if they’re minding their P’s and Q’s and studying the real orchestrators, they’ll be way better at it than I ever could be. I’m not being falsely modest here. I can do it, but I’m limited.

You always want to keep the lyrics and the melodies front and center. The composer needs to hear their songs, the composer needs to hear their melodies, the lyricist needs to hear their lyrics. And if the harmonies are a little bit thicker, if it’s a choral number, just practical stuff, the orchestration is going to be a little bit different because you don’t want to be all climbing all over each other and occupying the same musical territory.

Getting back to our earlier thing, maybe it’s just be empathetic and sympathetic to what’s going on in the room. Orchestrators will be invited in and be told, we’re going to perform this number for you, and they will turn on—in the old days it was just a tape recorder but now maybe a video recorder, because things that are happening visually will also have an effect on their orchestration. What they can glean from the piano accompaniment and from what is happening vocally, these are the guideposts that set the parameters for how they’re going to orchestrate that particular number.

So I would just say to any orchestrator, try to have as much facility, as much in your toolkit, so you can be as open and creative and expressive and empathetic to the needs of the show and the creatives.

Jonathan Larson

I’ve spent most of our conversation asking you about you and Rent. But you spend a lot of time in the book talking about creator Jonathan Larson. You really keep him front and center, even after he passed away.

I’m so glad you said that. That was my intention.

I didn’t realize until I read your book just how deeply La Boheme served as an inspiration for Jonathan. There are songs in Rent you talk about where he turns to songs from Boheme and brought them in almost line by line.

“Take Me or Leave Me” was the top of that chart. But “Life Support”, those lines “Will I lose my dignity, will someone care, will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare,” Jonathan actually heard someone say that at a Friends in Deed meeting.

There were characters in the musical that were based on experiences that he didn’t have. But much of the musical was based on things that had happened in his life and around his life.

It’s interesting, in the ‘94 version, he would even quote stuff that his father would say. I became very close with his father, as I say in the book.

Allan and Nan Larson.

It’s very moving actually, listening to you talk about the Larsons.

I love them. Pop was my second father, my father-in-law was my third. I was lucky, I Had three great dads for a time there.

Pop is very old school, and we talked often. Whenever he called, I picked up the phone and when I knew it was him I would go, “Greetings!” He’d go “Salutations!” He had that very old school way of saying hello.

Collins’ first entrance, in the ’94 version, was “Greetings and salutations!” That’s how personal it got. And Mrs. Cohen is absolutely based on Nan. So Jonathan was writing what he knew.

A lot of people ask me, was Jonathan the character of Mark? And I think he saw himself a little bit in Mark, but he has 3 or 4 very close friends who are all filmmakers. So I think it was the sum total of him and these friends that he was very close to. That was my take on it. We never talked about it specifically. Yeah the show was very, very personal to him.

Thank you so much for taking all this time to talk. It’s been so great.

My pleasure. You can tell how much I love talking about the show and all the wonderful people I got to do it with, Jonathan included, obviously.

My thanks again to Tim Weil both for our conversation and his book, Making Rent. Whether you’re familiar with the show or not, it’s a great window into the creative process and the many gifted artists that are involved in putting together a Broadway show.

I read a lot of theater memoirs. Over Christmas I went on a tear, devouring producer Jeffrey Seller’s book Theater Kid; music director/orchestrator David Loud’s Facing the Music; pianist Paul Ford’s tell-all Lord Knows, At Least I Was There; Girl from the North Country actor Todd Almond’s book about the show, Slow Train Coming; and actor Ron Fassler’s book about going to Broadway shows as a kid, Up in the Cheap Seats. And each of them offers their own rich meal of what it is to be connected to the theater.

But for as memoirs as I’ve read, I don’t think that I’ve ever met one quite like Making Rent, music director Tim Weil’s new book about working with Jonathan Larson, Michael Greif, and the cast, crew, and music team to create the groundbreaking musical Rent. First of all, unlike most memoirs, Weil doesn’t foreground his own life. We don’t spend half the book walking with Tim through the early decades of his life before finally reaching Rent. There’s so much story to tell just about the musical, Weil wastes no time getting there.

And while we enter into that story from his point of view, his focus is mostly on everyone else. And I mean everyone—Larson, Greif, the rest of the creative team, and the cast, of course; but not just the cast members everyone name checks today. He talks about the full ensemble. Also, the musicians and Larson’s family. Where most books like this focus on Names, for Weil, every single person that has ever been connected to Rent is just as interesting and important. They’re all a part of the community of artists that he has known and loved.

Tim Weil and Michael Greif at the Strand

At the Strand’s book launch in February, Rent director Michael Greif got choked up talking about Weil. “I’ve had the pleasure of working with lots and lots of music directors,” Greif said, having praised Weil for both the extraordinary range of his knowledge of music and his capacity to help performers attain levels they didn’t know they could. “You’re always the model that I go back to. I talk about you a lot.”

I had the pleasure of speaking to Weil by phone a few weeks ago. We started by talking about Minneapolis, Weil’s hometown.

I spent two years in the Twin Cities, and I feel like Minneapolis is this amazing town that even Midwesterners don’t know about.

It’s kind of America’s best kept secret. The musicians have all been to these really great music schools and they’ve come back home to Minnesota to raise a family. And it’s difficult to make a full time living there as a musician, but they all figured out. I remember just being blown away I did a thing with an orchestra there about how great everybody was. They said to me, Tim, If you go back to New York and you tell people about us and this place, we will come hunt you down. I love that.

People will say I can’t understand how Prince is from Minneapolis, and I think, that’s because you’ve never been to Minneapolis.

All of those killer bands—Hüsker Dü, the Time, Soul Asylum, the Replacements, Prince—it’s insanity.

I’ve read a lot of theater memoirs. Yours is really different than most. You include a lot of people that no one else writes about—not just the stars but the ensemble and the musicians. It’s really special.

I really appreciate that. It’s the nature of Rent. This is exactly how Jonathan wanted it. He wanted either a rock concert wrapped up in a musical or a musical wrapped up in a rock concert. He wanted it all.

But at the same time, this is the brilliance of Michael Greif, who made it very, very clear, that we need to tell all these stories, and they all need to be told with the same degree of dignity and humanity. So yeah, they all matter. Every one of them.

Rent composer Jonathan Larson and director Michael Greif

Also, they’re amazing people. And given Jonathan’s passing, and all the shit we went through, it was all about all of us all the time. And as I write in the book, it wasn’t until we moved to Broadway and the showbiz, nominations and publicity and all that, that the show got divided up. We couldn’t forever be this 15-person, everybody-on-an-equal-footing musical.

But the really interesting thing is, there’s still a Rent thread with all of us on it, the original 15 plus me and a couple of the understudies. It’s been a thread ever since texts, and everybody is on equal footing there. And it’s so great when we get together because we all know where we were, who we were back then—it doesn’t matter if you’re Idina, it doesn’t matter if you’re Daphne, it doesn’t matter if you’re Jesse, it doesn’t matter if you’re Taye. It’s like, We were all there, and we all know what it was.

That’s why it was so great writing the book. These are people that I love and among the most important people that I’ve gone to battle with, ever.

The off-Broadway cast of Rent. (Weil is second from the left in the center row.)

I hadn’t thought about how Jonathan’s passing would have put every single one of you involved in the show in the spotlight in such an intense way.

It galvanizes you in the most unexpected ways. And everybody has to figure out their own journey through it. I don’t know if I said this at the book launch, but I would imagine Idina tells a Rent story in her concert touring. I know Jesse is in touch with a lot of Collins all over the globe.

Really?

Yeah. Jesse is amazing. He’s got reach and breadth.

So I’m sure everybody tells the stories. I hope mine is one of many that come out. They’re all bit younger than I am, and they’re all still working and busy. I had time to write a book after the pandemic.

Was there something that made you want to write it right now?

I don’t think I could write it until now, even though I’ve been away from Broadway forever. And you read the book, you know I flew a little too close to the sun. It all had to blow up and reset itself.

My friend Lonny [Price, the actor and director, who pushed Weil to stay with Rent early on, and decades later to write this book] said Tim, You’re not the typical Broadway m.d., not just because of your skill set. Part of it is your upper Midwestern values. You’re different than all of those guys. You’re just not built the same way.

And I kept going No, man, I’m good. And he kept kind of bothering me. We were seeing True West with Lawrence Fishburne and Sam Rockwell a few years ago, and we had lunch before it. And he said, You’re sure you don’t want to do the book thing? You’ve thought about it?

And look, my career has been really great and rewarding. But theater’s tough. As a musician we don’t get treated as I believe we all should. And I said to Lon, You know what, I’ve got a little bit too much bitterness and resentment. I ain’t interested in writing a book like that, and nobody’s interested in reading a book like that from someone like me.

But I got home and I just kept thinking about it. And it hit me like a lightning bolt: Where’s the one place that didn’t happen, where they took the music seriously, they took the musicians seriously? And it was like Dude: It’s right in front of you.

And I pulled out legal pads and I just started vomiting. And as I went I started studying, just as you would study a new instrument. I fell back into that solitary, repetitive practice— stay at it every day; you’re not spinning gold here, so don’t be afraid to dump, don’t be afraid to cut. That parallel of studying anything as an artist, all of a sudden it started to click in.

It’s fascinating to hear how much of a parallel you found between writing this book and being a musician.

I dropped right into the headspace. I thought, Oh, this is completely familiar. I studied a number of instruments throughout my life, so I just know what that feels like and looks like. And very much in the way that as a composer I have to get a sense of what the big structure of the tune is about, I kind of have to hear it. And this is the approach that I took to writing. If I’m going to write a chapter, I have to know the beginning and the middle and the end.

Within that, what does its shape look like? You get to smaller forms and to bigger forms. It would even be even within a paragraph. Within the context of my voice I still had to figure that out and the grammar and the syntax.

I’ll never forget when I sent my first draft in, which was basically a series of about 32 chronological essays. It was about 300 pages. But it was the vomiting part with the beginnings of structure. My editor sent me back this really great email, with a list of words that need to go away. The last one was “it.” He gave me this list of stuff and then at the end it was “it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it.”

So yeah, that was all part of my education as a first time author. It took me a year and a half to figure out the structure. But yeah it was right there in front of my face the whole time. And had Lonny stopped asking, I never would have written it.

I’m shocked you’re a first time writer. I found the narrative very smooth. Also you made some choices that writers of these kinds of books often don’t. For instance, usually books like this begin with chapters and chapters on how you got here, your childhood etc. You don’t do that.

At first that puzzled me. I thought, Who is this guy talking to me? But I learned very well who you were through Rent. There was a great humility in that decision, a desire to center the show and Jonathan rather than yourself, and it made the book better.

It’s funny you would mention that. I hate writing and talking about myself. It’s a Midwest thing—you start running your mouth and here comes the humility police, knocking at your door. That’s the way I was raised, too, you don’t talk up yourselves.

As we were trying to figure out the book, my editor initially wanted me to write everything, so there was a lot of autobiographical stuff. And I thought, Boy, I do not like this.

This is again where my friend Lonny came in, because he’s such a great director. I said, Lon, you know how much I hate doing this but this is what I’m tasked to do. He said, Just imagine you’re writing about this character Tim in the third person. And the lucky thing is, you happen to know everything about him.

Wasn’t that a great note?

Absolutely.

And here’s the best thing that happened: the head of the company, Julia Abramoff, who’s very very wise, participated in the editing once I got into version 3 or 4.0. And she said to me, I appreciate all the personal, autobiographical stuff in there, but a) it’s a book about Rent; and b) if you’re not a celebrity, nobody cares. And I was like, Thank you Jesus. It set me free, and it set the book free. It helped me restructure in a way that gave it a little bit more layering. Just her saying nobody cares was fantastic.

And still you found a way to tell a very personal and moving story. Once Jonathan dies, there are these moments that pop up from time to time where something great happens for the show—the Tonys; the Pulitzer—and you struggle to feel any joy about it. You don’t pull focus from the ongoing story, it’s just these little blips on the screen. But then in the end when you melt down at the replacement cast who are not giving it their all, we really feel the grief and loss that you’ve been carrying.

I couldn’t believe that was me. And you’re right, as much as I hated myself being that person I think there was a kind of an inevitability about it. It was grief.

I really appreciated that you were willing to share some of the pain and messiness you went through after he died. We all go through shit like that, and it’s really helpful to have someone else talk about their experiences with it.

I told my associate music director, Dan Weiss, who was in the band as well, about writing that part. I asked, Dan, am I remembering this right? He said, That thing didn’t end as [quickly as] you wrote it in the book. You went OFF. And you know what? They fucking deserved it.

The person I gave the hardest time in the book is myself. It’s who I am. And also, I expect of myself what I expect of others, especially when you’re trying to do something hard. Making good musical theater is really hard.

There’s a line in your book that is one of the best descriptions of what it is to be an artist that I’ve ever read. “What we are all trying to do as musicians living on this planet [is] to channel the music gods from a place none of us have seen, from a world we don’t know exists, except we know that it holds some unspeakable truths that we can experience and share only through playing music.” I don’t know what to say except thank you for writing that, because it helped me understand myself better.

I didn’t really get it until I saw Stevie Wonder in person. [Wonder did a recording session which Weil attended for the Rent cast album.] The dude was channeling. This was like some other worldly stuff. Like, it was different.

I did Letterman 3 times over the years. Those musicians in that band, they were channeling. I’ll get moments where I’m channeling, a couple, but those guys, they do it all the fucking time. It’s like all those great dead musicians who I studied coming up. This is what they were doing. And the only way you do it is to live, eat, sleep, and breathe it 24 hours a day. You have to earn that. And all I know about myself is, I’m trying, but I ain’t there. I’ve accepted the fact that I might get there in dribs and drabs. But the Stevie thing, that just blew me away.

Coming Wednesday: Being Vulnerable; Supporting Performers; Remembering Jonathan.

Making Rent is now available at bookstores everywhere.

That moment. You hear people say that as they exit Samuel D. Hunter’s plays, and days later. Often it’s something that happens near the end, a radical alteration in context or character that blows wide our experience of the play. Other times, it snakes in quietly, unnoticed at first. But always, there’s that moment.

For the last few months, London and New York have been getting a helping of that moment in the form of Little Bear Ridge Road, Hunter’s Broadway debut, and Clarkston, his West End debut, which I wouldn’t be surprised to see turn into Hunter’s second Broadway show, after a strong showing in London. The play, which closes at the Trafalgar Theatre today, stars Heartstopper’s Joe Locke and Ruaridh Mollica as employees at a Costco in a rural town of the Pacific Northwest. Locke’s Jake is passing through on his way to see the Pacific Ocean, while Mollica’s Chris has lived around there his whole life and yet never visited the coast.

For me, equal billing on the show, which was directed by Jack Serio, belongs to Obie-Award-winning lighting designer Stacey Derosier. Having painted the fluorescent claustrophobia of a Costco and cold-ember pallor of its parking lot, Derosier creates in the show’s final minutes a moment so completely different and transcendent that experiencing it somehow felt like flying. I’ve found myself thinking for weeks about that moment and what it revealed about not just the characters, but us.

I spoke to Derosier after her return to New York to prepare Meet the Cartozians, which opened earlier this week.

[Note: Lots of spoilers here about the design and the ending of Clarkston. And given that the ending is meant to be a surprise, there aren’t press photos to show. But I Derosier captures those moments beautifully.]

Clarkston Lighting Designer Stacey Derosier

How did you come to the project?

I’d actually worked on a production of Clarkston before. Here in New York at the Rattlestick, I did Lewiston and Clarkston, that’s how I got to know Sam. Jack Serio the director [of the West End production] is a dear friend of mine, he saw it and said you have to send me this play. So I sent it to him and for years he’s been trying to make it work.

In the end it kind of came together really quickly, and he asked would I do the lighting for it again. I love this piece and I loved to sort of dig my heels into it again in a different environment.

So I came into the piece with prior knowledge of having done it before. But my design was slightly different at the Rattlestick. I maintained the sodium vapor because I feel really strongly that that quality and texture of light really works for the piece and also for the idea of interior versus exterior. But we beefed it up for this performance. At the Rattlestick it was super-duper intimate. At the Trafalgar we boosted the emotion and the intensity of those lights.

I had also just worked with Jack and Sam on Grangeville at Signature, so it was a nice little reunion.

Oh wow, I loved that production. The darkness was so lush.

Yes, he starts off the play by saying it’s in a void liminal space. We thought, How do we tell the tale of these two half-brothers engaging with each other for the first time in a while, over zooms and phone calls, before we finally see them in real space together? It was a fun challenge figuring out what the lighting language was.

Paul Sparks and Brian J. Smith in Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville (Signature Theatre, 2025)

So where did you start in terms of thinking through the lighting on Clarkston?
The good thing about it is, we know the places that we’re in. We’ve got Costco, we’ve got parking lots, and the beach. At Rattlestick I did Costco with fluorescents, but here we did it with a heavy, oppressive rig of moving lights which created this oppressive box for the two of them. We really illuminate everything, just top-down lighting. I knew we had to have that, anybody’s who been in a Costco knows you’re in a brightly lit place where you can see everything that you want to buy.

Ruaridh Mollica and Joe Locke in Clarkston (Trafalgar, 2025)

I also knew that even though there are tender moments within Costco, Jake and Chris reveal a lot about each other when they’re outside in the parking lot, enveloped in this sort of orange parking lot glow. As we’ve moved into more an LED-world that is not necessarily true of every parking lot anymore, but the way that a sodium light sort of builds, how it starts off really dim and grows into this bright, expansive envelope for them, it felt right.

So I wanted to preserve the sodium lights from Rattlestick and just kind of beef them up a little bit more. I think at Rattlestick I had like 3 of them. I think I had 10, 11, 12 by the time we froze [at Trafalgar], and some really, really big ones. The crew was like, What?! I said, It’s gonna be great. Don’t worry about it. It’s gonna be great.

And tech of course was wild, because those lights take so long to heat up. In a normal tech process you can hold and go back, but we had to hold for like 10 minutes for the lights to cool off so we could go back into the thing that is actually where we are in the play.

Whoa.

Yeah. And we couldn’t just go from here in this scene, we’d have to go back to scene 2 and do the phone call so we can ramp up and feel what the lighting is. It’s all a game of timing.

Mollica, Sophie Melville, and Locke in a parking lot scene.

At the end of the play, all of that lighting falls away and suddenly we get this outpouring of light from behind the audience signifying the ocean that Jake and Chris are looking out on.

At the Rattlestick we played the idea of the beach within the proscenium of the space. But the Trafalgar was not as immersive as the Rattlestick space. We had some audience onstage that spent most of the show enveloped in sodium vapor light and in the Costco lighting. To include the rest of the audience at the end as this gesture of the ocean was something that was exciting.

We thought, Let’s kill the back row, throw some lights up there, and then when the boys get up and we transition into the ocean, the ocean has been there the entire time. It was exciting to watch the space just fill.

My biggest worry was that audiences would be asking, Are the house lights coming up? But I think the evolution of that transition, going into the blue, and then into a dawn-ish type color, it felt like we are still in the piece. The boys were really worried. They said, “People are going to applaud.” I said, they’re not going to applaud, it’s a different kind of lighting. They’ll know that something else is going on and we’re still in the piece. We have George [Dennis]’s beautiful soundscape happening and other things happening.

I get their fear. It’s such an unexpected choice.

It is. And it’s a different piece of sound texture than you’ve heard in the space. But I thought, as an audience member you’re being held by both of their expressions looking out. They’re going from this really sort of tough moment at the end of scene 10, and watching them move through their emotions, and both of them are so in Jake and Chris. I was like there’s no way [people will clap]. And they never did.

The way that the set, lighting, and sound design come together in that moment is just gorgeous.

It was very exciting to figure out. We were like, How do we do beach? How do we do beach in this world where most everything on stage has been Costco and parking lot? You could have something scenically more robust than having the lights that were doing Costco fly away and the shelf move offstage, but it felt right, the easiest and simplest and most effective answer to just sort of switch directions in a way, to go from them playing on stage to each other and also slightly out, and then create this bigger, bigger, bigger idea, Oh now this is what it feels like to have the vastness of the ocean, and the vastness of possibility. Even though we know where Jake’s illness will take him, and we know that Chris has sort of said goodbye to his mother, but we don’t know what else the future holds for these two.

The lights behind the audience that create the ocean effect, they come up gradually?

Yes, it’s gradual. We have the sort of ballet of the sodiums turning off, slowly bit by bit losing the grayscale and experiencing the boys in sort of full color. And then as they start to remove their shoes and socks to prepare for the beach and lights are flying out, with a big wave crash that George has in the sound design the lights come up behind the audience in a kind of blue, mimicking sky and also giving something else that we have not seen in the space. And then it settles into the amber sort of horizon front light on them as they’re looking out into the ocean.

I also thought, we’re going to use small profile lights, we’re not going to use big movers back there. It’s just going to be soft lights to backlight the audience and then some other lights that are typically strip lights but technically movers where you can adjust their zoom. They start really zoomed out so they flood the entire audience. And then as we settle into the scene they zoom in and really hone in on the boys.

It created such an amazing feeling.

When you were bringing down the sodium vapors toward the end of the scene before the beach and Jake and Chris are in this sort of Pietà moment, am I right that you put a bit of light on the audience sitting on stage directly behind them?

The last sodium to go off was hung facing down and protruding out from the back wall of the theater. So yes, it still cast light onto the audience there. It was sort of the final backdrop, a background of grayscale orange audience, before we go into full scale color with the boys.

That moment really made me very aware of the audience on stage, and also aware of the characters having been in a sense surrounded and watched this whole time. It really accentuates the sense of their isolation, and the coldness of the world.

That was intentional. Most of the house has been looking at the characters with these audience members as a backdrop—a little bit less in the Costco scenes, you can see them a little bit because of bounce and light hitting them, but you really feel them in the parking lot scenes because the light just sort of goes everywhere. And as we slowly lose the grayscale on them, I wanted there to be a moment when we really perceive the fact that Oh, there is that banquette of audience back there. We lose that and we’re finally left alone with Jake and Chris, before they make the decision to go to the ocean.

It reminded me a bit of the way audience functions in Sleep No More, the sense of us as haunting or observing the characters, which deepens our empathy for them.

The final scene with the lights from behind seem to build on that idea of the audience as somehow a part of the world of the story.

That was the goal.

Why did you want that?

It goes back to a little bit of how Jack and I work. I think I’ve done almost every one of Jack’s shows in New York. And he’s always doing shows that are really intimate. They’re in small spaces where you can kind of see everything, the audience is wicked close to the actors, and we’re lighting things with lamps, with candle. Everyone is kind of in the room together.

Noah Robbins and Edmund Donovan in Serio’s 2018 production of Clarkston at Rattlestick Theater.

So part of that decision to have audience on stage is to include them in the intimacy of the plays. It’s sort of the nature of a Sam Hunter piece. They’re so text-driven, and I care so much about the characters. I just want to be able to hear them and hear what they have to say.

And we wanted that experience for every audience member. Not for them to feel on display—the light is shining on your back, so you can see the head of the person in front of you, but you don’t feel like you need to suddenly be involved in the piece. Just to become part of the architecture, the tapestry of the piece felt like an exciting venture.

You’re reminding me, part of what was moving in that moment was becoming aware of the people around me and the fact that we were all sharing in this experience.

Yeah. You’re part of this journey that Jake and Chris have gone on to get to the ocean that we’ve been talking about throughout the entirety of this piece. And it’s like, Great, we’ve made it to the end, we’ve made it to the culmination of both of their stories. We’ve done it.

When Chris says Okay, great we’ve seen it, like I’ve seen it in photos, Jake urges him to just take it in a little bit more. And that’s part of the reason we kept the audience illuminated throughout the end, too.

I feel like that choice to include us reveals to us how we, too, have been trapped under those other lights and reality the whole time without knowing it. It was a very unsettling experience to suddenly discover this brutal banality that we had totally and unconsciously accepted.

Yeah. We’re all penned in this strange world together, with tents and popcorn kernels, just shopping. And then it’s the possibility of being broken out of that reality…

Yeah, that was a fun one.

For us too.

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me about the show. It makes me love it even more.

I’m happy to hear that. Sam Hunter’s plays…I was introduced to them when I did Lewiston and Clarkston at the Rattlestick, and his work continues to be some of my favorite. It’s such a supreme slice of life and also really about the people and relationships and how people interact with each other, which is something I am so interested about in theater. I feel like that’s why we go see plays.

Thanks again to Stacey Derosier for a fantastic conversation. If you’re in New York, you can see more of Derosier’s work right now at Meet the Cartozians.

COMING SOON: THE BEST OF THE BEST

Last week the James Gunn-helmed HBO show Peacemaker delivered the stunning twist that the seemingly perfect dimension Chris (John Cena) has been traveling to is actually a world in which the Nazis won World War II. Fans of the show immediately went back to its iconic opening credits dance number and realized Peacemaker’s very first dance move involved him briefly making a swastika with his arms. And that gesture was repeated later in the number by the three characters from the alternate Earth (known to DC fans as Earth-X).

Peacemaker opening credits choreographer Charissa Barton has been widely celebrated for the work she’s done to make each season’s sequence funny, strange, and unexpectedly heartfelt all at once (and now deeply disturbing as well).

I spoke to Barton earlier this week about her work on the show and last week’s reveal.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Charissa Barton

How has it been seeing people discover what you’d planted in the choreography?

We shot the dance just a shy of a year ago. I don’t know that any of us could be prepared for what we’re looking at now in our world. It’s a sensitive subject.

James did such a brilliant job of telling the story of Peacemaker finding himself in this world where he’s accepted and finally comfortable and he doesn’t have to deal with all of his baggage from the past. He’s accepted in this world, he’s comfortable there, but he’s so wrapped up in his own needs, that he doesn’t see what’s right in front of him.

Similarly in the intro, that moment has been in front of the audience the whole time, and it’s only when it’s pointed out that it’s like, Oh shit!

That’s the case with extreme-anything. You don’t see it if you’re not directly experiencing it. Unless you’re paying attention and listening to people who are saying Hey, this is happening, and it’s been the case for a very long time, you can be so blind.

The first intro was connected in tone to the season and the show. This intro was much more connected to the story. That was my task, and I had to find a way to do that.

So yeah, there it is. It’s been there the whole time.

Peacemaker as a project seems like such a unique job for a choreographer. You need to create something that’s visually affecting, that’s interesting for the dancers, that’s connected to the music. But you’re also establishing characters—oftentimes weeks before we meet them, and you’re hitting tone, theme, even plot points. But everything also needs to be subtle enough not to spoil anything.

How have you gone about doing that?

The process is really kind of messy. There are so many different parts of it. Both seasons I had read all the scripts, so I knew what the season was, the story, who the characters are and what they represent, maybe some of the energy.

So there are the logistics—Who are the people that I am going to be teaching to dance; how experienced are they; who are they as people; how much time with them do I have; all of that stuff.

Then, looking at the song, how do we break it up phrasing-wise in a way that allows us to introduce everybody in a very short amount of time, and make it work musically and make it choreographically.

But then it’s also stepping out of that head space to open up creatively and be playful with it. Physical shapes can take on qualities that represent different feelings, different energy and dynamics. It’s finding those and making them suitable to the different characters or groups of characters, while also making some callbacks this season to the first—like the square shapes and the angles, the very angular arms are not new to this one. In the first one, too, there’s the very square arms. Part of that is just a style choice, but part of it is also making the moves attainable for actors who are not trained dancers.

The decision to make squared arms a significant part of the language of the first season movement proved to be such a great vehicle for creating (and hiding) the Earth-X of it all this season. It’s uncanny.

Puppet arms in the first season’s opening credits.

How did you go about crafting choreography that was achievable?

There was a little bit of guessing, and a little bit of adapting as we went along. But I work with dancers for the early part of the work, and I would say pretty much all of that wound up in the first season. You’re just sort of counting on the fact that the cast are professionals, they’re going to show up and put in the work.

But also, as I’ve said in other interviews, my husband is an actor, and I was able to give him moves in our living room or kitchen and in our studio in one case and see how quickly he could learn it. He was really great about me just testing things out.

Actor Alan Tudyk trying out some of Charissa’s choreography.

I’d also get feedback from him on when something might be too difficult, and then try to find the middle ground, knowing that he represents the average dance ability of actors in my mind. He’s an awesome collaborator. He was very helpful both seasons.

You can see also Barton and Tudyk in action in the Variety video below.

One of the things that has been striking me watching both seasons’ credit sequences is that you never hide the fact that the characters aren’t professional dancers. You left them exposed, in a way. But instead of that making them look silly, it made the whole thing more meaningful. We really see their humanity.

A lot of that has to do with the actors, their willingness to put in the work and be vulnerable with it. There is the option of backing away, hiding behind it all. Nobody wants to look like a bad dancer. But there was a willingness on their part to make a sincere effort.

I wanted to approach both seasons very earnestly. I didn’t want to make just a goofy dance. That’s not who I am. That’s not how I work. I don’t think it would have worked in the show. Goofy for goofy’s sake is not the way, in my opinion.

I wanted them to approach it very earnestly, too. There’s the vulnerability, the potential to looking ridiculous, but doing it anyway. I think it’s that earnest effort that you’re referring to.

We didn’t have a lot of time. The rehearsals with the actors were very, very fast, and we actually didn’t have everybody together in any rehearsal. I think I might have had one rehearsal with two of the actors in it at the same time, but everyone else was one on one. We didn’t even have a dress rehearsal. They were on stage together for the first time dancing together on the shoot.

Whoa.
Yeah. It felt very risky. There were a lot of elements in this where I went, Wow, all of this has to go right.

Now that we’re talking about it, I think there was something also in my willingness to take a risk and trust that things are going to come together that maybe also comes through. I can’t ask all that of them and then put myself in a place where I’m comfortable. I mean, I guess maybe that’s possible, but I wasn’t!

Especially when the first one was very popular, to know that you’re doing a second one, and differently…. It was risky. On the day of the shoot I was like, Wires? I am out of my mind for doing this in this limited time frame that we have! These are actors that might have been on wires before, but not to pirouette, and stay vertical, and do it musically, and to the right timing with movement in between and finding their marks and spinning and all of the things. It was like, I am insane.

But kudos to them for pulling it off. Because it’s also a lot of pressure on them. They all want to deliver, and they all worked really hard.

Knowing what we know now, that sequence with the Earth-Xers is particularly important to the piece. And it required a precision and unity different from the rest.

It was in lock step. Things had to be a certain way, we’ve got to be unified. It takes on a completely different significance.

It’s also amongst the most playful and joyful moments in the piece. You’ve got Blue Dragon bounding happily in the air while the others behind him spin.

Man, all of that is so disturbing now.

I know.

I appreciate your comment about your feeling like you were risking a lot, too. One of the things that I find really bold about both openings is your choice to this big group sequences—including two sequences in the season 2 credits—knowing you were unlikely to achieve everyone hitting every mark.

I think it actually works in the sequences’ favor. It underlines once again that these characters are first and foremost human beings. But as a choreographer that seems like a really brave choice to make.

I love that it’s messy. It’s aiming to get it right, the moves and the musicality, but it’s messy. The effort, the earnestness—there’s something in there that works really well in this context.

It’s interesting, in the first season I don’t think anyone ever interacts with anyone else, or even makes eye contact. They’re all just giving that expressionless stare forward. You created such an incredibly different dynamic in the season two credits with Chris and Harcourt.

One of my favorite moments is when the cast is all in the middle on stage and they do the first unison section, then they kind of pull back, face each other, and run across each other. It’s just chaos. Traffic traffic traffic.

Then suddenly in an instant Harcourt and Peacemaker are alone, and we’re just with them. I just love all the noise and the chaos and BOOM, she’s in a lift.

It comes out of nowhere, and it works really well musically. And I love that we got to do a lift—John did such a good job with that. We did many takes—I mean, a lot of takes. He had to do that lift a lot. Jen [Holland] is pretty light but still, to do anything repeatedly like that is tough. And he did such a good job.

Then at the end of that lift they’re just forehead to forehead, and there’s such stillness.

And then BOOM, we’re back into movement.

James really helped to guide me. In the first couple of drafts I had a little bit of the romance in there, and his main note was that their romance is the heart of the season, so we need to see more of it. So I made it a little more explicit, these two characters and their love relationship, all of the different aspects and dynamics.

I really like that in this one I got to play with that kind of thing, and with a bigger cast and a bigger stage. It was quite a challenge, I have to say.

Given how connected the choreography is to the story, I have to say I’m very, very worried by the way that the number ends. (And episode 7’s ending did not reassure me.)

We’ll seeeee…

*laughs*

Or will we???

It’s not just the fact that they’re a pile of bodies, either. (Okay, it’s mostly that.) Both seasons, you and James make the choice to keep the camera rolling after the number is over. This time around half of them look literally dead, the other half are panting with exhaustion. And Michael Rooker looks like he wants to murder someone.

*laughs*

One thing I love about that pause is there are so many faces to look at it, which is a great choice for something people are going to watch over and over.

Yeah, there’s a lot of detail in the piece that you wouldn’t initially notice. In the beginning when the 11^th Street Kids come out and join Peacemaker, the position of their arms…actually, I’m not going to say what it is, I love for people to find things that mean something to them or solve a story question for them. I like people being able to interpret things in the way that they want to interpret it.

But I will say, for me, there’s something in where their hands sort of tuck in that has a little… um…just take a look.

Hmmm. I will!

I think your choreography invites interpretation. I’ve found myself wondering a lot about what exactly is happening in these sequences: Where are they? Why are they dancing at all, and why (especially in season one) is it in such an oddly expressionless way? When the movement stops and they just stand there, it’s like they’ve been forced to perform all this by someone and now they’re waiting to be told whether they can finally leave. In season two there’s more passion in them, and it feels like they are working their way to some kind of liberation.

But then YOU LEAVE THEM IN A MOUND OF BODIES.

*laughs*

I know. It’s like Oh, shit. The show is about to get interesting!

I don’t know that anyone would have thought that such a weird, wacky project could end up also having a dance sequence that packs so much emotion. It’s amazing work.

Thanks so much. I appreciate that.

Thanks so much to Charissa Barton for our conversation.

Here’s the moment she mentioned as being significant to her.

The 11th Street Kids have their hands up at their sides, making their arms like wings. Could this be an Eagly shout out? He’s the one member of the team not on screen…

What do you think?

Last week Gypsy’s producers announced that show will close August 17th, and Mark Peikert at Time Out has it exactly right—Audra McDonald’s performance is a staggering, must-see piece of work.

It’s not just Audra that is must-see, either. For me, one of the most quietly fascinating aspects of the show is Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer’s lighting design, starting with the way the lights are brought down in the house during the overture.

Recently during an interview about La Cage aux Folles, for which Fisher received one of his many, many Tony nominations, Fisher and I stopped to talk about his and Eisenhauer’s work on the new revival of Gypsy and the 2003 Bernadette Peters production, which they also did.

Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer

Jules, thanks for letting me ask about Gypsy. I’ve been obsessed with the way you and Peggy lit the overture, how you bring down the house lights only gradually while the overture plays. Why did you do that?

Actually a lot of time was spent talking about this. Peggy and I started with what do other shows do. And pretty much most musicals, not just Gypsy, change the color on the curtain. When the overture becomes a ballad, the curtain changes to blue. Then there’s something humorous and it changes to yellow or red. That’s what people do with cues. We wanted to do something different. How can we make this special?

The first idea we had was elaborate cues involving moving lights. Say the curtain was red to start with—then it would change color, but from one side of the stage across to the other, like a wipe in a movie, so you’d actually see the color creeping across the curtain, or moving from each side toward the center. Today you can do things like that which you couldn’t do years ago, because we didn’t have them. There were no moving lights in La Cage—there were standard spotlights, but they couldn’t swing left and right or up and down or change color or project a pattern. Today it’s a push of a button, you can go to 20 different templates, gobos.

Then we threw out the idea of wipes to go from one song to another. As you know, it’s a brilliant overture. It brings tears to my eyes, it’s so good. The arrangements are terrific.

Then we said, What we’re really trying to communicate is the music. What are these songs, these melodies that you instantly know when you hear them? So we decided, let’s let this be about the orchestra. Twice we did actually change the curtain color—you don’t notice it, it’s very subtle—but we decided overall to work with the house lights. We picked moments in the overture where we wanted to emphasize the change in music, so as it went from one song to the next, it got a little darker. There’s so much percussion in the music all through the show, it’s easy to spot the place where the cues should happen.

We’re interested in both when the cue starts and when it ends, too. Even the speed of how to get darker was a factor. It could happen in a bump, half a second, three seconds, five seconds. Those were choices we could make as a design. And the director [George C. Wolfe] was very involved. He would say one night, could you do that after that note?

So he, Peggy and I enjoyed trying to make the house lights do what you might do on a standard curtain.

The Majestic Theatre proscenium before the overture begins.

How many shifts of the light are there over the course of the overture?

I would say there are eight, and the final one is going into the show.

I don’t know if this fits with your conception, but for me bringing down the lights slowly felt like a way of quietly focusing our attention to the stage. At the beginning, the audience is still chattering.

Sure, or they’re still coming into the theater.

But then as the lights come down and down they get quieter and quieter until the curtain rises on Baby June’s audition and they are fully locked in.

Right. One other factor is, we don’t give the conductor applause, which is also unusual. When you get to the last note of the overture there’s applause, but we don’t turn the lights on to the conductor and let him take a bow. He does at the intermission, but on the opening you get to the last note, and the curtain goes up. So you go right into the story from the music. That was a decision.

The change of brightness is also to adapt your eye. It takes about a minute for your eye to truly adjust from seeing a bright scene or being outside to seeing a dark scene. If it doesn’t adapt, you can’t see well, because the eye is still closed. It’s a good reason for the house lights on any show to go down slowly before you see the first scene.

It all fits so well, too, with the staging. I felt like the gradual fade down ends up unexpectedly making us a part of this world which Mama Rose then enters.

It’s not something we thought about, but I think you’re correct.

We’re always looking throughout any use of light to make it original, inventive, something you haven’t seen before. Bernadette’s was totally different—Peggy and I were the only people who had worked on that earlier Gypsy. Often they would turn to us and say, How did you do it then? And often I would say, I don’t remember!

Peggy went to the library at Lincoln Center, just so we knew. We didn’t want to repeat ourselves. It was a chance to do something fresh.

I love the show, as you do. It influenced my working in the theater. When I was in college, I came to New York for a Christmas holiday, and saw Gypsy with Ethel Merman. During the overture I said I would like to work in the theater. I was in the last row in the balcony.

Wow. What were you studying in college?

I was studying theater, but I was also thinking about working in the movie industry. I wasn’t sure what I would do, but I liked movies. But I literally remember the moment when the trumpets blare out “Gimmick”, that’s when I said I want to work in the theater.

When you’re working on a project, do you have a general starting point or approach in terms of how to figure out what the lighting should be?

We don’t have one general approach. We read the script, watch rehearsals, talk about it, talk to the director, talk to the designers, costume and scenic, and by hearing all of them, we form our own attitude toward what the light cues are. Is this show dark? In fact this show is probably a little darker in brightness than others. Audiences today expect more movement because of MTV, concerts are all that way. But we took the attitude that we don’t want it to look like the Grammy Awards or the Tony Awards, with lots of lights winging around.

In fact, you never see a light moving in this version of Gypsy. You don’t see what you’d think of as traditional banks of light moving across the stage. They move sometimes slowly, but I hope you don’t see them. We’re using modern technology, but the audience doesn’t know it. The play takes place in the late ‘20s, early ‘30s. They would not have had moving lights then.

Joy Woods, Audra McDonald, Danny Burstein

Other than the car lights I can’t think of a single moving light that I noticed.

The second scene, after Uncle Jocko, has dozens of light cues. And again, you don’t see many of them. But when Mama Rose walks from the left to the right, the light is going down on the left and coming up on the right in a certain timing, and we follow her around the stage, and you don’t see that. It’s not like a follow spot, which we use in the musical numbers, the numbers that are presentational. If it’s a musical number, even “Rose’s Turn,” it’s not entertainment lighting, it’s emotional. That’s the attitude we took to how we did the show.

Audra McDonald

A slight difference: the Bernadette production, we didn’t want to see any moving lights, that is, we didn’t want you to physically see them. So what we did was, I jokingly called them “costumes”, we made a covering for the moving lights that looked like an old fashioned light. They were made out of plastic, the prop shop, a very good one, made this molded plastic, about an 1/8^th of an inch thick, and it was modeled to look like an old fashioned one, but it has a hinge like a suitcase. It went over the moving light. So yes you saw them moving, but they were these old fashioned-looking lights.

On this version we decided not to see the beams of light. And one reason is, Audra cannot have atmosphere or haze or smoke in the air. She can’t sing with it. If you have smoke or haze, you see the beam of light. Then it looks like the Grammy Awards or the Tonys. In this Gypsy there’s no smoke, there’s no haze, except for one moment. It’s something totally miniscule—as they’re going to California, the car appears, goes comes in, turns left and right, turns upstage, and drives off. When it drives of, a bit of smoke comes out the tailpipe. It lasts for 2 seconds or less. Because she’s facing upstage, she doesn’t even see it, and it’s not going to fill the stage.

When we use haze, and almost every musical on Broadway does, you see the beams of light. They want to, it allows you to do fun compositions. They’re decorative. Or if they’re utilitarian, lighting a person who’s important, you still see the beam of light. You’re stuck with it, because the smoke accentuates it. The beam of light is going through particles of dust.

People respond to moving light. They’re fun. They make a pattern. You don’t get that in this. That’s fine with us, people don’t even notice it’s missing. They don’t think about it. But it does mean the lighting is not seen in the same way as Tony voters would normally see it. You make pictures with moving lights. We don’t make pictures in this Gypsy. We are lighting the performers. We’re not trying to say, Oh isn’t that pretty. Look, every other light is red. We don’t want to call attention to the physical light or the beam of light. We just want to see the actors.

Audra McDonald, Joy Woods

So in the case of the second scene, the lights are changing all the time, but no one sees them. That scene was hard to light.

Hard precisely because you don’t want people to notice what you’re doing?

Yes, and the set is half the size of the stage. In La Cage the scenes were full stage. Any scene was considered the full set of the canvas. Here the scene is 12 feet tall and 15 or 18 feet wide, in a proscenium that’s 35 feet wide and 25 feet high. So there’s a lot of black around it. And we’re conscious of the black because of the composition. That’s as much of a composition as the lit set, the part you’re looking at. And we’re not trying to show you the negative space. It’s there, the light goes through it to hit the actor, but there’s no haze so you don’t see the beam.

Are there moments where you had to light the full canvas?

Yes, “Rose’s Turn”. The ending of the show, she meets her daughter and they walk out. Those are places where we light the back wall. When you light up the back wall, there’s no negative space around the set.

Danny Burstein, Joy Woods, Audra McDonald

Are there other shows you’ve seen lately where you’ve appreciated the lighting?

Maybe Happy Ending had wonderful lighting. It was a very good example of technology being so far ahead and so good. It was accurate, it was precise. I couldn’t figure out how they had time to do that on a Broadway schedule. We’re tech-ing the show in 2 weeks or less or maybe a couple days more, and it’s really hard. Everybody’s working all day long, all the crews and the musicians, so it’s very costly, I understand why they don’t want to spend the money to have more days. But it’s the only way tot get really good work out of it.

Maybe Happy Ending did that beautifully.

There’s that moment at the end with the lighting bugs where you wonder how did they do that.

Yeah. I thought all through the show they did things like that. I loved it. The production physically and stage was so good. I really liked that.

Listening to you, I’m struck by just how late your work begins in the production sequence.

The Cast of Gypsy

Usually the lighting comes in last. They do the set first, the costumes. They can spend three months designing the scenery, but we can’t turn a light on until the scenery’s been built and we’re on stage. Our work is on paper only until we get into the theater, then we start setting the light cues. We bring in kids from schools like NYU to be light walkers, and we say on the microphone, Move to your left two feet, and we work on that light cue, does it look good there? What color should it be?

But that doesn’t start until the first day of tech rehearsal. We can’t see what we had in our minds, and what we had on paper until we have performers in place, a set in place.

The work we do we think of as mainly in the previews. The set doesn’t change in previews. There it is. They spent a million dollars on the set, Done. Whereas we’re just beginning to see how it looks.

Do you usually end up having much interaction with the composer or writer?

Sondheim was the only composer or writer that ever gave me a comment on lightning. I would get a comment from patrons as they were leaving the theater, and it was often about air conditioning or the sound, because I was in the last row on the aisle for every show, and they think that I’m controlling the air conditioning or something.

Steve gave me one note on a show, and I loved it, he was right. It was Assassins. At the very end there’s an organ chord and the characters all shoot off guns. The organ chord fades, it doesn’t cut off. He said, consider this, and he thought it might be that the lights should not black out—which is what most people did, because it seems like an ending. Guns go off and the lights black out. He said, how about if you have them slowly go out, because this is going to happen again.

And we did. Three days worked—two seconds, two and a half seconds, we could control the speed in hundredths of a minute. And it worked beautifully.

Wow. That’s such a key choice to the story of the show.

I didn’t think of it. He did.

Thanks so much to Jules Fisher for taking the time to talk to me. Congratulations to him and Peggy and everyone involved with Gypsy for a great show.

There’s only one more month to see it! Get your tickets now!

Duncan Pflaster is an award-winning New York City playwright and actor, with dozens of plays to his name. Known for his queer absurdist point of view, Pflaster has carved out a unique niche for himself in the New York City theater community.

As New York celebrates Pride, I talked to Pflaster about playfulness as anti-fascist resistance, writing in verse, the importance of male nudity today, and a Godot full of underpants.

How did you first get interested in theater?

My mother was an actress when I was growing up. She spent a lot of time working at the Royal Palm Theatre in Boca Raton, so I l saw a whole bunch of plays there that she was in. And it’s just always been sort of the thing I wanted to do. And I was actor for a really long time.

Were you writing as well during that time?

Not realllly? I knew how plays worked and I’d sort of sketch out some stuff, but I didn’t expect it would ever be performed anywhere. But I was working at this place called Florida Playwrights’ Theatre in Hollywood, Florida as an actor. I was in pretty much every show they did for a while. And there was this bar around the corner called Sneakers where we would all go after every show and just drink and chat. And one guy was like, You know what would be funny is if we did Alice in Wonderland but with drag queens, and made it like Walk on the Wild Side. And I was like, I will write that play!

A year later I had Wilder and Wilder, which was the first play that I officially wrote. We did it as a late night show, then the main stage show got cancelled, so we ended up moving it to the main stage for a couple weeks until we could get up a new show. It was in like ‘95.

What was it like to see your own work on stage?

It was amazing, but I was also in it. The company was very much into Charles Busch and Charles Ludlam plays, and that kind of a wacky We’re doing a late night funny thing, and this was a big epic where everybody was changing costumes every five seconds to play other characters. I played an Andy Warhol caterpillar, a Jackie Curtis Queen of Hearts, and a couple other parts. The part with the Duchess and the Pig in Alice in Wonderland we did as an I Love Lucy episode, and I was Fred in that. It was a whole bunch of mashup of crazy queen drag queen stuff, Alice in Wonderland, and 70’s culture.

It’s amazing to me that your first play already has so much of what you do—it’s playful, it’s anarchic, it’s queer. And it has a great appreciation and awareness of other work.

I have trouble coming up with plots of my own. I recently read Tom Stoppard’s biography and he said pretty much the same thing, that it was “Thank God we finally have a plot.” So yeah, a lot of my work is either inspired by or riffing on other material.

One of my favorites of this kind is The Underpants Godot, in which you have a theater company rehearsing a production an underpants-only production of Waiting for Godot and the Beckett estate shuts it down. How did that play came about?

Cast of the 2015 Secret Theatre production of The Underpants Godot.

I’ve always been a fan of Godot. I saw the most recent revival with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, which was incredible. And I was just sort of daydreaming at intermission, how would I take Waiting for Godot and make it sexier and weirder. I contemplated actually putting on a workshop production of guys in their underwear just taking the text and seeing what could be done. But I thought, Nobody would ever let me do that. What if I wrote a play about somebody doing that?

It’s wild because even though we’re only get moments of Godot per se, it still has that Godot sense of waiting and absurdity. And at the same time it’s a play about a lot of other things, like the state of theater today.

I love Waiting for Godot, I think it’s great, but a lot of it is kind of incomprehensible to modern audiences, because certain references were from decades ago.

Are there certain writers you look to as influences?
I think Tom Stoppard is a big influence on my work. Charles Ludlam and Charles Busch as well. They’re the big ones.

Also, Donald Margulies, who wrote Dinner with Friends, Sight Unseen, Collected Stories, a lot of really great stuff, he’s my favorite well-known contemporary playwright at this point.

What is it about Stoppard that has appealed to you?

I think with Stoppard it’s the playfulness of what you can do in the theater that you can’t do anyplace else. Like in Arcadia, having two scenes from two different era happening in the very same room, that kind of thing.

Do you know Aria da Capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay? It’s an anti-war one act play in verse from the 1940s? It starts out as a commedia dell’arte piece—two commedia dell’arte people are going Oh we’re having a feast la-di-dah, and then a Muse of Tragedy comes in and says It’s time for my play, calls in the actors from his play and says they have to do the tragedy now. They do the tragedy, they die, and then the commedia dell’arte people come back, shove the bodies under the table and keep doing the final circus play on top of it.

When I did it, I had the tragedy characters, who aren’t ready when the Muse shows up, in their street clothes—they came in hoodies, one guy brought in a cup of coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts which he put on the foot table. And then it was left there after they were shoved under.

Stoppard has a table in the middle of Arcadia where people keep leaving things, they are things from both the time periods happening at the same time, and you can just ignore them or have them be part of the thing.

I’m in awe of your productivity.

I am productive, but I also think that I’m a slacker.

In what way?

I don’t work as much as I could. I get writer’s block something awful. But people say I’m more prolific than they are. I’m constantly doing as much theater as I can.

Have you ever read any Discworld?

I’ve only read the first book.

Oh wow. They get better!

There’s one called Weird Sisters, which is his sort of a Shakespearean-inspired one, where there’s this traveling group of players, looked over by Whel, who is a dwarf and the writer of these things. And he keeps getting hit by inspiration and can’t stop. He finds it hard to write because he keeps coming up with new ideas, and I feel like that sometimes.

Like the next idea ends up killing the momentum on what you’re already doing?

Yeah.

Are there things that you find have always been preoccupations in your work?

Pocket Universe, a ten-minute play a scientist who creates a personalized universe for his office crush.

I mean, the gay stuff, a lot of my work is about gay and straight people cohabitating. But other than that, a sense of theatricality, wanting to do plays that can really only be done on a stage. I have written a couple of movies, but when you’re writing a movie, they can just do anything! They can go anywhere! On a stage, I find that Fourth Wall very comforting and helpful for me.

That’s interesting. Your imagination is so massive, it feels like movies could offer you so much opportunity.

It’s too much opportunity. Constriction, they say, is very good for imagination. It’s why I write in verse a lot as well.

Really?

I write in Iambic pentameter. I was recently interviewed on my friend’s podcast about writing verse drama which is called Hamlet to Hamilton, Emily C.A. Snyder. We talked for close to four hours about writing verse specifically for theater and what it means. Nobody teaches it, which is an interesting thing. She is developing in England right now a course on how to teach how to write verse as a dramatic construct, and what writing in verse means for an actor interpreting that.

Emily talks a lot about how the verse is sort of a map for the actor. If you write things in a certain way, if the line is I don’t know why I came here, and then you put four lines which is just blank text, and then continue the line, But I’m glad I came, that means something to the actor. Putting things in a shape makes things more interesting.

So verse might help the actor more than straight prose.

Yes, and putting things in iambic pentameter is more of a formal way of speaking. That’s good when you need some kind of dramatic statement.

In my Greek mythology play Nothing But Thunder [in which a young Dionysius goes with his slave Xanthias to try and rescue his mother Semele from Tarturus], anytime the chorus members came out they spoke in iambic sextameter—should be septameter, I know, but we lie to call it sextameter. The protagonist’s big monologue at the end also started out in iambic sextameter, and then at a certain point I start dropping an iamb every four lines, so it got shorter and shorter and shorter. That was intended to increase the intensity of the monologue as it went along.

How did you get started writing in verse?

I wrote a sequel to Midsummer Night's Dream called The Thyme of the Season. In that the fairies, Oberon and Titania speak in iambic pentameter, the lovers sometimes speak in iambic pentameter, the two little fairies Puck and Pumpkinseed speak in sort of a Dr. Seuss rhythm, and Bottom just speaks in prose. I think that was 2008.

Wow, it sounds like a huge challenge wedding those different rhythms.

And sometimes they rhyme and sometimes they don’t depending on the character and the situation.

Michelle Ramoni and Clara Barton Green in the 2010 production of The Thyme of the Season, co-conceived by Green, in which Titania and Oberon have to find a human soul they can sacrifice to Hell.

So much of your work is really playful and anarchic, but A Touch of Cinema, about a filmmaker under house arrest in a fascist state and trying to sneak a film out, is intensely dramatic.

I listen to this podcast called Linoleum Knife, which is run by two gay bears who are both film critics and are married to each other. They were talking about Jafar Panahi, an Iranian playwright who was taken by the government, placed under house arrest and not allowed to make films. He subsequently made a film and snuck it out of the country in a flash drive in a cake. He’s since gone on to make several other movies, sort of illegally, I just watched his most recent one, No Bears, which is on Criterion.

That was the inspiration. But I decided to fictionalize it and make it more universal.

It feels very of the moment.

It was written just after Trump got elected the first time. My friends at Lafayette did a reading of it a month or so ago and said, Yeah, people need to do this play right now.

That one’s published by Next Stage Press, and I’m hoping more people will do it.

Which others are published by Next Stage?

Harmony Hall and Fourteen Hundred and Sixty Sketches of Your Left Hand.

Poster for a 2023 production of Harmony Hall, about a monk who has lived in exile on an island monastery for 20 years. After a young man with memory loss washes ashore, he begins to question what exactly he’s committed to.

Would you describe your work in general as political?
Yes. Some more than others, but there’s generally some sort of social commentary in there. They’re anti-fascist, generally just trying to have people get along and understand each other, communicate.

Do you think that the style of your work, the Ludlamesque elements of some of your work, the playfulness is itself antifascist?

Oh absolutely. I wrote Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants, my big naked epic Shakespearean fairy tale play, and it was specifically inspired by George Bush.

I find it interesting to think of playfulness as itself a form of resistance.

Art is resistance in a lot of ways.

Your ten-minute play at The Chain recently had two gay men and their drunk straight friend on his birthday. It’s a comedy about how these two gay men think about straight people, but there’s also that line in it about queering the straight spaces, that that’s really the mission statement of the gay characters.

It’s something that’s on the mind of those characters at the moment, but it’s a current concern.

The cast of the 2012 production of The Taint of Equality, or I Want Your Sex, a gay farce about what happens when a gay couple try opening up their relationship.

A lot of your plays have male nudity. Where does that come from?

Well first off I like to see naked guys. And it sells tickets.

But I think the heterosexual male gaze has been such a predominate thing that just having a naked guy on stage by itself is still an act of rebelling. I’ve written a lot of plays where guys get naked, and a couple where girls get naked, too, but mainly that. And gay sex is I think important, and the gay gaze is something to be valued.

I always find it confronting, despite being gay myself. It’s so not the norm, it’s shocking.

Yes, it still is.

It never feels extraneous to the story, either.

No, I have a reputation for always justifying the nudity in my plays.

I think that people in general don’t talk enough about sex, that it’s still something that they feel they have to be quiet and ashamed of, and so putting that on stage I think is important. Sex rules a lot of people’s emotions and what they do, and I think the more air and light we give it, the more people will be happier and can come out of the closet with whatever they’re doing.

You’d think in the modern era that we’re much more liberated, and yet even in a brief moment like in that 10-minute sketch, you see we’re not. It actively undermines the sense of comfort that a lot of theater relies on to draw you in. I always have the sense that you’re doing something more than aiming for a laugh. You’re playing with explosives.

I’m trying.

Are there artists you look to that are good at showing the queer gaze?
A lot of painters, I think. A lot of photographers. The people who did my movies and a couple of others—they’ve changed names several times, but they’re Scorpio Film Releasing—they are working on this thing called Pansyvision [now called Rainbow Film Club], which is a fake gay history of film, which I have one small piece in. They also did this horror film called Before the Night is Over, which takes place in this male brothel run by two women, and it’s a very spooky weird movie. There’s Pink Narcissus, the 1971 movie which also has Charles Ludlam in it.

Charles Ludlam was big about having people take their clothes off, as well, it was part of his aesthetic.

In terms of contemporary playwrights, who do you look to for great queer takes on the universe?

I’ve been following Cole Escola for decades on social media. They’ve just been doing incredible work. I saw them first in a tribute to Jackie Curtis called Jukebox Jackie—it was Cole Escola, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, Bridget Everett, and a man, and the four of them represented different aspects of Jackie Curtis. It was a really fascinating piece. Cole came out and did this song that was just hilarious.

They’ve done some amazing movies, short films. They do a Bernadette Peters impersonation, Bernadette Peters getting her taxes done. “What’s your social security number?” “Nine.” “Just nine? Okay?” It’s so good, so funny.

He may be cancelled now, but I think the lead in The English Teacher, Brian Jordan Alvarez, has done a lot of incredible work in promoting gay stuff. And Stephanie Koenig, who’s in that with him, too, wrote and directed A Spy Movie, in which he plays two roles, one of them in drag as a secret agent. It’s just hilarious. They seem to have a nice group of people all together in Los Angeles who are working on funny shit together.

Do you have a white whale, in terms of a topic or a story you want to tell but you haven’t felt ready to do yet?

I have a few plays I’m working on that I’m kind of scared to tackle. One of them is about pedophile vigilantes, and a couple of other things.

What is about those stories scare you?
Just delving into those emotions.

I don’t write a lot of sad plays. All of my plays have some kind of comedy in them, because I’m just sort of naturally funny. I wrote this play called The Tragedy of Dandelion, which was also written entirely in iambic pentameter, and was written for a cast of all female people to play a multitude of genders. But it’s called The Tragedy of Dandelion, I have a jester who’s there to make the jokes. It’s good stuff. And it is sad at the end, there are moments. But I don’t lean into the sad stuff.

We just started rehearsing Bartleby the Barista, which is an adaptation of the Melville’s Barlteby, the Scrivener, and the actor who was reading it sort of got choked up at the end, and I thought, Oh right, this is a sad moment! Oh yeah! I like the actors to have the sad moments that are there, but I try not to lean too much into that. I think that’s probably the thing I shy away from the most.

Do you find writing short plays, like the 10-minute plays you’ve done for The Chain, require a very different skill?

Absolutely. And a lot of people don’t seem to be able to do it all that well.

What that’s the key to making those kinds of plays work, for you?

I think of it like, An atom is one part of a larger thing, but it still contains everything that’s in the larger thing. So trying to suggest as much as you can a larger world out there. But trying to keep to major storytelling beats, start with an opening, move on to development and a big finale or twist, and you’re done. It’s like telling a joke in a lot of ways, you’re setting up setting up setting up and then the punchline! And we’re done. Even if it’s not a funny piece, that’s still the way it works. You’re telling a short story.

I do this thing pretty much monthly called Living Radio where they give us writing conditions on a Wednesday and we have to pick a news story from that day or later to write a 10-minute-or-shorter play. We rehearse on Saturday or Sunday and we put the show up Monday.

Listen to Pflaster’s most recent Living Radio show: Enough with the Pride Already! Geez Louise!, about a jingle writer hired by the gay community to rebrand “pride” in the face of the corporate takeover of the term.

It’s like I was saying, I have trouble coming up with ideas, but if somebody says Hey, write something about this, and you have to do these things in it, that kind of restriction really helps aim me at something.

Are there other things that tend to inspire your work?

If I get pissed off about something, that tends to be a good inspiration.

Some of my plays were also written because I was dissatisfied with another piece of work. My play The Empress of Sex I wrote because I had seen the musical adaptation of Triumph of Love, which is not very good. But it spurred the idea in me of writing a story of someone who was sheltered from the world but decided instead of retreating into a monastic life and only read books decided to only have sex and avoid love entirely.

That was also inspired by Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida, which has a theme of men swearing off love and going to study books. There was a third inspiration, too, and the three of them all coalesced in my mind. I thought, I’m going to make something that works with this theme, but differently.

My play The Douchegirl Play (Better Name Pending)—which is now the full title—was inspired by douchebags in Adam Rapp, David Mamet, Neil LaBute plays, and how they’re always men and the women are getting fucked over. And I decided to do a gender flipped where the women are the assholes. And it was a lot of fun.

When you look at the world of theater today, what do you see?

Since the pandemic a lot of theaters are just doing safer work.

To get more people in the doors, do you think?

Yeah. And to not spend too much on something that might not be long lived. I think that’s probably affecting films as well, but you don’t have to do a film every night.

I love musical theater but there’s not a lot recently that I really want to see.

What kind of musical theater do you tend to like?

Stuff with a point of view, I think. I saw Death Becomes Her, which was very fun, but not really very deep. It seemed like something that it is easy to sell. And I bought into it, it was really fun. I had a good time. But yeah, it’s tough out there. There’s so many jukebox musicals and revisals.

I loved Head Over Heels a while ago, which was the GoGos jukebox musical. It was this amazing story written based on ancient texts of the 14th century but updated with a modern gender bending twist. Bonnie Mulligan, that was her first Broadway thing, she was nominated for a Tony. And it was this beautiful epic 14^th century thing, gigantic costumes and a story about music curing everything. Just lovely stuff… annnnd then we would stop and do a song by the GoGos, which didn’t have to do much with the plot, but they shoe-horned them in there.

But it was such an amazing, beautiful, epic play probably wouldn’t get done if it wasn’t linked to a jukebox musical.

Would you say your writing has expanded or changed how you think about queerness?
I mean, I guess? I’m sort of trying to expand how other people think about queerness with my work. I was raised by a lesbian, my parents got divorced when I was ten. So I know the history, I’ve done the research, I know a lot of stuff that didn’t get taught in schools. I’ve just been soaking in it for all my life, and I feel like I have a perspective on the world that is important to why I write.

I think I’m the only one that’s going to write the plays I’m going to write. And I feel a duty to do that, and to show the world what I’m thinking. There’s a quote from the great Tom Robbins, that—I’m paraphrasing—being an artist is just having an idea and you show it to people so you can let them know this is what it is.

Thanks to Duncan for taking the time during Pride to talk about his work! (And by the way, the Alice in Wonderlandesque-photos of Duncan are courtesy of Erin Soler.)

Coming next week: Legendary lighting designer Jules Fisher on lighting the new production of Gypsy!

Happy Pride, everybody!

Last weekend I saw a production of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Zorba! at the AMT Theater, 354 W. 45th, between 8^th and 9^th (just east of Schmackary’s). I’d never seen the show, and I was expecting basically a Greek Fiddler, Zorba affable and charming like Tevye, in a story with some emotional meat on the bone, but fundamentally joyful.

There is joy to be found in Zorba!, and there is definitely some weighty emotional material. But this frequently dark story about the often mean-spirited people of a small Greek mining town, and a nomad who is a charmer for sure, at times, but also, philandering, manipulative, and sometimes wise, is definitely not Fiddler. Death and loss hang over the show almost from the beginning, and punctuate the second act with moments and songs as compelling and disturbing as anything you might find in Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret. Honestly, I found myself wondering whether I hadn’t just seen their rawest, most experimental, and perhaps finest work.

Like Smile, which I wrote about recently, this haunting production of Zorba! is the work of J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company. Guided by co-founders Jim Jimirro (creator and founding president of the Disney Channel) and Robert W. Schneider (who has spent his life directing and producing theater, including a lot of great shows at 54 Below, and co-hosts the Behind the Curtain: Broadway’s Living Legends podcast), J2 has made a name for itself producing rarely seen Broadway shows. And unlike most off-Broadway companies, it somehow manages to do its two- and three show-seasons in a tight time frame of 4-6 weeks.

2025 marks J2 Spotlight’s 5^th anniversary season. The company is concluding its season over the next two weeks (starting tonight) with Drat! The Cat!, a 1965 Ira Levin and Milton Schafer musical comedy about a female jewel thief and the cop trying to arrest her. It closed after 8 performances, but Stephen Sondheim once praised its lyrics as “expert and charming.”

I spoke to Jimirro and Schneider via Zoom last week about the company and its unique mission to give audiences today “the closest experience” to the original production.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rob, as artistic director do you direct all the shows?

Robert W. Schneider.

Robert Schneider: Usually. There’s been a couple seasons where I haven’t. Our first season I only did one, and our third I didn’t do The Goodbye Girl. But I directed all the rest. I love it.

Smile was great. I don’t know how you had so much happening—and happening so smoothly—on that stage.

RS: Our choreographer Caitlin Belcik is a genius. I don‘t know how she does it, but she does it beautifully.

I’m very lucky. She choreographed the first show we ever did at J2, and then she’s been with us every single season since, except last year, when she was onstage and not choreographing for us, because she’s a brilliant actor as well.

Your productions are back-to-back-to-back. So are you rehearsing multiple things at the same time?

RS: Yeah. For example Smile will rehearse 5-11pm and then in the mornings we’re doing Zorba 11am to 4pm. Then when a Smile performance is running, Drat! The Cat! starts. So 11 to 4 will still be Zorba, but then 5 to 10 will be Drat while Smile is playing here. We call ourselves “Summer Stock in Times Square”, and it feels like it. It’s fun!

Jim Jimirro: I think Rob likes the puzzle of being able to figure out how to do a show that’s supposed to be 30 people and a 30-piece band on a large stage in a small room. He enjoys the challenge.

RS: I do.

On your website, you say you came up with J2 “over omelets and BLTs at the Apple Jack Diner.”

JJ: I’ve been a musical theater aficionado all my life, from the outside. I was never involved, I was involved in television and the movie business in Los Angeles. But I’ve loved musical theater, I’ve loved it all of my life and it’s meant a great deal to me.

When I sold my company, I had in the back of my mind to do something in musical theater, because I’m so passionate about it. Rob was directing a staged reading of The Happy Time at 54 Below. A friend of mine was in it, and I was very impressed. So I invited Rob to lunch. And we didn’t really talk about the project for the first hour and a half. We talked about musicals. What about that song? What about that score? Do you like that? You know how that works with two musical theater buffs, you get together all you want to talk about is musicals.

I think in the last 5 minutes I asked, Do you want to do something?, and we had a handshake. That was toward the end of 2019. We put it together very quickly: We had our first show in the winter.

From the beginning was your idea to revive shows that are rarely seen?

Jim Jimirro

JJ: Yes. For me, it was trying to bring alive these things that I love so much. I saw the original cast of Zorba. I saw the original cast of Sugar, of Do Re Mi. I want other people to be able to see these things, and see what I saw in them.

When we started, we each came up with a list of shows we wanted to do. I think my list was 150, and Rob’s was 175. A lot of them were duplicates, of course, but a lot of them weren’t. So far, up to and including Zorba we’ve done 12, and every one of them has been a joy to revisit. Every one.

Especially in terms of what’s happening today—This is my bias, but I think these shows are so much better than what we have today from a craft point of view. The playwriting is more exacting, the harmonies are more complicated. They’re just better crafted. I’m not saying they’re more artistic. Somebody else can judge that. But I know they’re better.

When you listen to the lyrics that Ashman wrote for Smile, the only tragedy is that they go by so fast, you don’t fully understand the brilliance of them. It’s very, very hard work.

How would you each describe your sensibilities in terms of the kinds of shows that you’re interested in doing?
JJ: I think I’m a discriminatory person, but I don’t think I’m discriminatory when it comes to musical theater. I just love it. Somebody was trying to tell me the other day how Julie Harris wasn’t a very good singer in Skyscraper. And all I could remember was I just loved Skyscraper: I loved the score, I loved that music, I loved her. But that’s me, I’ve always been that way.

RS: I’m the same. You put me in front of a musical and I’m happy. If I could direct every musical that was ever created, I don’t think I’d turn any down.

The only thing that I try to keep in my mind as Jim and I are talking about shows is: Is there something that I’ve heard New York audiences say that they would love to either see for the first time or revisit? That’s usually something that helps guide us. For example on Smile, it was a show I had never seen until I directed it, but I knew it was something that a lot of New York audiences had wanted to see. So that percolates as Jim and I are pitching show ideas back and forth to each other.

What’s been really exciting is now we’re getting people coming to us that are not just from New York but all over the country and the world. I had somebody from Germany fly in because they were a huge Howard Ashman fan and they loved Smile. We have people from all over that are making J2 a destination spot to scratch their theater, which is kind of amazing.

The cast of J2 Spotlight’s Smile.

JJ: I was sitting next to this woman who said she had just flown in the day before from Sydney. She had purchased 18 tickets to go to Broadway shows in advance of the 21 days she was going to be here. Of the 18, J2’s Smile was the first thing she saw.

Now, we’re not exactly famous in Australia. *laughs* So I asked her, how did you find out about Smile? Well Rob does a podcast, and she heard that. So she saw 17 Broadway shows and Smile. It’s amazing.

Do you get people suggesting shows they would love for you would do?

RS: Oh yeah. I don’t think there’s a performance that goes by that someone doesn’t corner Jim over in the lobby and say, hey have you thought about this?

JJ: It’s its own kind of wonderful. These are people who love this stuff just like we do.

RS: I like when people give us recommendations. It’s good to hear what people want to see again. It’s also nice to be validated. If someone says, you should be doing Zorba, and we know that’s been on our list for a while, we know at least one person will come see it! *laughs*

There are a number of companies that focus on bringing back older stuff—City Center Encores; York Theatre; some of the programs you’ve started at 54 Below, Rob. And yet somehow J2 always feels like it has its own special niche.

RS: One of the things that I think is important is that we’re presenting these shows as originally intended by the authors. When we do something we don’t make changes to it unless the authors make a specific request. We do it as purely as possible. We’re not there to reinvent the wheel, we’re not there to rewrite the show. There are other companies that do that, and they do it really well, but that’s not us. Our goal is to give you the closest experience to what you would have seen of Zorba in 1968 when it opened originally. That’s important for us.

JJ: I think that’s a hallmark of what we try to do here. Other people like to reimagine things, and that’s fine. But we prefer calling attention to what happened at that point of time.

That approach makes for some really interesting experiences. In Smile, there’s the big photo reveal at the start of Act II which completely changes the direction and tone of the show. And it’s a really hard turn. I wondered watching it, why isn’t this at the end of Act I?

RS: This is what the author’s original intentions were. And erasing history or trying to act like things didn’t happen, I don’t see the benefits of that. If you are uncomfortable by it, that’s good. It’s good to see how far we’ve come in certain things.

I don’t want to speak for the company and I don’t want to speak for Jim, but I feel the more erasure you do, the more damage is done because then you forget the past. So yeah, that was the author’s intentions, so we’ll do it.

Are there kinds of shows or authors you haven’t tackled until now because you weren’t sure you were ready for, or you wanted time to grow toward?

JJ: I think the answer is probably no. We have done musicals already that were not on that original list, but I don’t think there’s any growth.

One of the problems that we have is that it’s a little more difficult to get the licenses of the things we want to see than it is even across the river. So certain things that we want to do so badly, we keep asking every year hoping that maybe the tide will turn this time. But I wouldn’t say there’s been any evolution at all in what we’re ready to do now versus three or four years ago.

RS: We’ve also been very lucky in that if we’re working on a piece and the authors are still alive, they work hand in hand with us. Which has been really, really lovely.

So when you did Lucky Stiff, were Ahrens & Flaherty have been involved?

The cast of J2 Spotlight’s production of Ahrens & Flaherty’s Lucky Stiff.

RS: Oh, through everything. They were involved on casting. We rehearse 6 days a week; they were probably at 3 rehearsals a week with us. They were at tech. They were at previews. And they really beat the drum for us in terms of marketing and publicity. They called in a lot of favors.

And what’s kind of cool [is], the version that we created at J2 is now the version that they license. So if anybody wants to do Lucky Stiff from now on, they’re going to get the same score and script that we used, based on the changes that the authors made after seeing our production.

That’s great.

RS: I think so too. It’s a big thing we’re proud of. We take care of writers and we take care of the writers’ intentions.

And what’s been really wonderful is the authors who have worked with us have told other authors, They do it purely, they honor the work. And that’s opened the doors to other major writers coming to join the party.

JJ: Stephen Schwartz is another who has been involved with us. We did The Baker’s Wife. And it’s an interesting thing—Stephen had a love for Baker’s Wife and always felt that it was never given its due. (I think the same thing is true of John Kander and Zorba!) And I think he looked at Rob and the creative team as a way to maybe finally get this right. He was very involved with Rob and his team. And at the end, he came to me and said, “Thank you for burnishing my musical.”

Jim and Ajchara Jimirro, Robert W. Schneider and The Baker’s Wife composer Stephen Schwartz.

Also, you can imagine what it’s like for these young talented geniuses that we have on our stage to be getting notes from the likes of Steve Flaherty and John Kander.

So John Kander was involved with Zorba, as well?

RS: He had casting approval, he came to a rehearsal, he watched a run through and I believe he’s coming on Saturday night to see the performance. He’s been wonderful. And also very wonderful about saying, Listen, this is the version of the show that I want to do, this is what I want to include, this is what I don’t want to include. All of the writers who have worked with us, they’ve been wonderful to us, and Mr. Kander is no exception.

In the five years you’ve been doing J2, would you say you’ve had any big discoveries or unexpected surprises?

JJ: We have a tremendous amount of talent in Los Angeles, but I made the decision that I wanted to do this in New York, for two reasons. One, this is ground zero for musical theater. And two, I wanted to go back to the place where I learned to love musical theater. And I think the revelation for me and frankly also a source of melancholy is the depth of amazing young talent in this city. I wasn’t prepared for that.

I’ve learned to love so many of these people, but I also am melancholy, because I know how hard it is. I know how much competition there is. I console myself that we are giving a lot of young wonderful people a lot of work, even if we can’t give work to everyone we’d like to.

RS: I think one of the things that I’ve been happily surprised by is how much of a community of like-minded people there are out there like Jim and I and everybody over at J2, people who want to see these shows. Current Broadway doesn’t really reflect craft, in my opinion, not to diminish any work that people are doing. So the fact there was such a hunger for this, it’s been really, really wonderful to see. I did not know that there was a whole community out there with the same sort of artistic ethos as we have before we started this process.

Was it discovering that community which led you to start adding cabarets and talkbacks—actually, you have a special word for those programs, right?

JJ: We call them “lagniappes” [pronounced LAHN-yaps]. Lagniappe is a Cajun word from Louisiana meaning “extra bonus.” I used to do a lot of work in Louisiana with Chef Paul Prudhomme; that’s how I got to know it.

Rob and I felt that J2 is in a way a celebration of American musical theater. So if we can, we want to do things adjunct to that which enhance that celebration in other ways.

Also, for me as a business man as well as a musical theater lover, I’ve always been lucky enough to work for companies that cared about their customers, that wanted to give people the best possible experience, the best bang for the buck. Disney was that way to a fault. So I come from that point of view. If we can enhance people’s experience, if we can give them more, give them a broader experience for their money—and we try to keep our prices relatively modest compared to New York standards, too, it makes me happy.

You offer such an interesting variety of programs. For Smile, you did a cabaret of the songs Carolyn Leigh wrote before she passed away and Howard came on board, which I don’t think had ever been heard publicly.

You also had people coming in who were involved with the original production of the show, or who could give different kinds of context. It’s a great variety.

How do you come up with these topics?

RS: My good friend Jennifer Ashley Tepper wrote these amazing books called The Untold Stories of Broadway: Tales from the world’s most famous theaters. Jen to me is such a captivating speaker and such a wealth of information. So last season she came in and she did a lecture on the Martin Beck, where Do Re Mi opened, now the Al Hirschfeld, and then she did one on Playwrights Horizons. And we loved her so much we asked her to come back and do it again.

This year we also asked our good friend Ken Bloom, who’s a wonderful historian and great author, to talk.

Rob Schneider and Jennifer Ashley Tepper at 54 Below.

You also have Peter Filichia coming in to talk about the year Zorba! came out.
RS: Peter’s mind works in such an interesting way when it comes to statistics and numbers. You’ll say “1990” and he’ll go Oh yeah, this show opened on this date and this show on this date. And he’s seen all of them. It’s fascinating. So we asked him to come in and just talk about this particular season that Zorba opened. Because I think it’s important also to see, say for a show like Smile, you watch the show and you think This is such a good show, I wonder what was happening on Broadway at the time for it not to work. And Peter fills in those gaps. Smile opened the same year that Les Mis opened, it was the year Starlight Express opened, Me and My Girl opened. I think that’s clearly a main reason why Smile wasn’t as successful the first time. Those types of shows weren’t in vogue any more.

So I think it’s good to offer those kinds of programs to fill in those kinds of educational blanks.

They definitely add a whole other layer of depth to the experience.

RS: One of the things that’s really great about Jim is that he never lets anything grow stagnant. Every season he comes in with another idea, a bigger idea and a better idea, to just make the audience feel like it’s a whole experience. Every year we seem to layer on something we’ve never done before, which is really cool and exciting for the audience.

JJ: This year we added three new things. The music before each show is part of Show Tunes to Hit Tunes. Broadway is one of the three ways that people makes hit records, right—Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. So while we’re playing say, Frank Sinatra singing “All I Need is the Girl” from Gypsy, we’ve got factoids on the screen about the history of Gypsy, and how Sinatra sang it, the Count Basie arrangement. We do four of those before each show. It’s really nice. You learn a little something about the song.

We’ve also two interactive lagniappes. We’re doing Name that Tune Broadway, and Broadway Trivial Pursuit. So the audience gets a chance to play.

We’ll keep trying to come up with things that not only give people a better experience and a richer experience, but enhance our own brand and separate us. Because there’s a lot of stuff going on in New York City!

Do you get positive feedback from the audience on doing these?

JJ: Very much so. We don’t get a majority of people who see the show to stay, but we get a substantial number, and they really appreciate it. And I’m perfectly fine with that. Those people have had an enhanced experience. It’s worthwhile doing for that.

I tip my hat to Rob, too. When you run anything, even a smaller theater company like this, there’s always going to be challenges and problems. That’s life. But it occurred to me when I think about J2, I never worry about the product. Rob always finds a way to make it work on that stage. He’s modest, but I have to say that. You take something as intense and as complicated and as deep as Zorba…it’s a tough show, a powerhouse of a dramatic piece, notwithstanding the amazing score. And I think the power and the essence of what’s contained in that material is really realized by Rob.

One of the things that’s really going to be interesting to me is to hear John’s reaction after he sees it on Saturday. He said to us that he loves Cabaret, he loves Chicago, he loves all his stuff, but he has an especially deep feeling about Zorba. He sent an email to everybody, he said “Zorba! means a great deal to me. And I hope it comes to mean a great deal to you.” It’s really touching to see.

Has he shared what it was about that show that has meant so much to him?

John Kander with the cast and creative team of Zorba!

RS: He did. When he was first approached about the show by Hal Prince, he wondered why they were doing it as a musical, it just doesn’t seem right. It didn’t feel like a musical. But after Hal Prince convinced him that it was going to be about both sides of life, the optimism and the darkness, leaning into the darkness, that’s when he and Fred Ebb really worked hard on it. It was one of those things where you don’t like something at first and then you really grow to love it, and then you wonder how could I ever have existed without it. That’s Zorba for them.

I’m sure I’m not articulating it as beautifully as him, but that’s the sense of it. They had just come off of Cabaret. How much further could they go?

I mentioned this on social media, and I really do believe it: Zorba does not get the appreciation that it deserves. It is a really strong bridge from Cabaret to Company. People talk about the “concept musical” or the “dark musical”, and they’ll list Cabaret, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd. But Hal Prince said if it wasn’t for Zorba!, there wouldn’t be those shows.

They tried a lot of things in the original company that were very experimental, that audiences had never seen before. It really broke a lot of rules. The second act is so dark and pessimistic. And the lead character learns a lesson, but it’s a very tiny lesson. He doesn’t get a big 11 o’clock number where he sings Oh my God I’ve learned this about the world, or I’m going to be more like Zorba. It is dark, it is sad. But it’s about life, and how you have to appreciate the bad things that happen to you in order to really appreciate the good things. I think there’s a tendency in humanity to dismiss the bad things that happen to us. No, you need them. You need them. That was important to John Kander and Fred Ebb, and I think it’s important as we’re presenting this particular production.

He also mentioned, and he’s very open about this, so I don’t feel like I’m telling tales out of school—As the show evolved when it went on tour and then when Anthony Quinn did it in the ‘80s, it kept get softer, and it kept feeling more like a conventional musical, more buoyant and optimistic. And he didn’t like that. Producers kept throwing a lot of money at John Kander and Fred Ebb to sort of look the other way, and he has said it was very easy to take a nice, big paycheck and look at something else. But it’s something he’s really regretted.

I think to him, this is going to be the purest version of the show he’s ever seen. Because it’s what he wants it to be.

Last question: What can you tell me about Drat! the Cat!, which opens today.

JJ: I never saw the show, I don’t anybody who did. But I did get that 1998 studio recording and I fell in love with that score. I’m excited. It’s going to be a fun show.

RS: This thing only ran 8 performances but somehow got a hit tune out of it, Barbra Streisand’s song “He Touched Me.” She was married to Elliot Gould at the time, and Elliot Gould was the star of the show. I think people are going to be surprised that in the show, the song is actually “She Touched Me”, and it’s sung by the male lead.

When we first talking about it, I remember thinking, It only ran 8 performance, it’s probably not going to be a very good script. I was so wrong. I wish we could give the audience a copy of the script to read along, because even the stage directions have laughs in them.

One of the things that excited us is that it is really good material. Why the show is not being produced more is beyond us. I’m hoping that when we do it people will see this is viable, and more productions will sprout up places.

I always say, If you love film, and you’ve never seen Citizen Kane, I can give you the DVD. Or if you’ve never seen the Mona Lisa, great, I can take you to Paris, we can look at it. But a musical’s a different beast. If you read it, you don’t get a sense of its energy. If you listen to it, you don’t get a sense of its energy. You gotta see the whole thing.

So even if people go to see Drat! the Cat! and say, Eh, now I know why it only ran 8 performances—they won’t, but if they did—now you know. You’ve had your own experience of it.

The original Broadway production had like 45 people in it. We’ve reduced it to 6. *laughs* And I think the hope is that they’ll be licensing this version. If you like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, or you like Gentlemen’s Guide, it’s literally in the same vein. And funny, really funny.

I can’t wait to see it.

RS: We’ve been really lucky. A lot of the shows that I think were dismissed the first time, after we’re done with them people go Oh wow, this is a much better show than I thought. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.

Robert L. Freedman is the Tony Award-winning book writer and co-lyricist of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, as well as the Emmy-nominated writer of TV miniseries Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, and many other things.

In February, Freedman came to BroadwayCon and shared insights from his book Notes on the Writing of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, a marvelous look at how he and composer Steven Lutvak developed their hilarious, anarchic musical about a young man in Edwardian England who discovers he is actually the distant relative to a wealthy family of aristocrats, and sets out to murder everyone between him and the inheritance. Adapted from a 1907 novel which had already been adapted into the beloved British film Kind Hearts and Coronets, Gentleman’s Guide did not seem like an obvious Broadway vehicle to many who saw or heard about it during the many years of its development, nor to Freedman and Lutvak either. Freedman’s story of how exactly that happened, and the collaboration between he and Lutvak, director Darko Tresnjak, and actor Jefferson Mays, who plays the 8 members of the D’Ysquith [DIES-quith] family whom lead character Monty Navarro must murder, is a valuable glimpse into the creative process of musical theater.

I spoke to Freedman by phone. Our conversation is edited and condensed for clarity.

What made you want to write Notes on the Writing…?

I got approached by Applause Books. Steven Sater, who wrote the lyrics for Spring Awakening, had written a book [about lyric writing]—same size, same length­—and Applause wanted to do another one.

I wanted it to be two things: A story about Gentleman’s Guide, the writing of it, the making of it; and a structural book about what book writing is in terms of a musical, and how musicals are written. Things that book writers have had to deal with. Because I think book writing is kind of misunderstood.

So it’s a little manual, I guess, and a little memoir.

Using your own experiences on Gentleman’s Guide was a great way into the topic of book writing. It put meat on the bone.

In fact, I found that it had insights into book writing that I had not seen before. Like the idea that choosing a setting that is not exactly the normal world can be really valuable in helping your audience ease into your story.

I just feel that sometimes when shows are completely contemporary, they’re a little harder to like. I mean, sometimes I love them, it’s not that don’t I love shows that are contemporary, I do. But it’s something that’s just personal to me.

Also your idea that your choice of names in a story—whether you’re adapting material as in Gentleman’s Guide or writing something original to you—gives you a sense of ownership of the material and helps establish a tone.

It’s a completely fun part of Gentleman’s Guide. I’m tickled by it to this day even. And it really matters. It does.

And it’s going to be individual [to your] life experience. I remember I was writing something way back when, collaborating on a movie script, with another writer, and I suggested naming a character Vicki. And she said Vicki can’t be the name of the person. Why? Because she knew a Vicki that was a horrible person.

You talk about the importance of picking material you feel a connection with. What was it about the Gentleman source material that spoke to you?

Bryce Pinkham, center, as poor-kid-wanting-to-rise Monty Navarro, and Lisa O’Hare and Lauren Worsham as Sibella Hallward and Phoebe D’Ysquith, the women he loves.

I would say that there were two elements that I first connected with. One was the style, the tone. The novel was written by a man who was part of Oscar Wilde’s circle, and it’s witty.

It’s also a really searing indictment of the aristocracy, the hierarchical level of the way people lived in England at the time (and still, probably), the stark division between the haves and the have-nots. It was an examination of that.

Then the second thing was, I loved the lead character, because he was underestimated at every turn. His charm allowed him to ingratiate himself with people, but he started off in a bad way. He was raised in poverty but he had access to people we would call upper middle class today; he was in love with somebody who wasn’t ever going to marry him because he wasn’t rich and influential enough, important enough; and his mother had been discarded by her wealthy family and scrubbed floors, did people’s laundry for a living. So I just thought he was a compelling character.

I wasn’t looking necessarily to write anything about murders or anything, but Steve had seen this movie Kind Hearts and Coronets which is also based on the novel, and we both just thought it was so droll, so funny. People who have seen Gentleman’s Guide but knew nothing about the movie have sometimes told me that they didn’t think it was as good. Well, it’s a classic. What Casablanca is here, that’s what Kind Hearts is in England. It’s considered one of their top 10 British films of all time. But it was not widely known here.

I love hearing about your process of discovery, how the same source material that created such highbrow wittiness became this enormously inventive, silly piece of musical theater.

Well, we wrote a musical comedy, and that is not what the movie is. It’s definitely a comedy, but it’s not a laugh-out-loud funny movie at all. I love it, but it’s its own thing.

That’s the whole thing about adapting something, you have to find yourself in it and make it your own. You can’t just take a movie or a book or something and put it onstage. People have tried. *laughs*

And they usually fail that way. Because you have to turn it into another entity—not because you want to change what is there, but it just evolves as you work on it.

Can you remember distinct a-ha moments where you and Steve realized your version was actually going to be this anarchic, crazy story.

I think it was gradual. I don’t think it was like, Okay we’re going to make this sillier. It just happened over time.

And it was enhanced by meeting [director] Darko Tresnjak and having him become involved, which I think was around 2009. (We opened in 2013.) He would think of ways to stage some of the things we wrote.

It’s Jefferson Mays also. Darko suggested Jefferson because he’d worked with him, and Jefferson really threw himself into the characters when we did readings, Which we did many, readings and presentations, all kinds of stuff. Jefferson understood the milieu so well and the characters so well. He’s a huge Anglophile, much more than Steven and I. He really knew his stuff.

Jefferson Mays (right), as Asquinth D’Ysquinth, Jr., one of 8 D’Ysquinths he plays in Gentleman’s Guide. (Also pictured, Heather Ayers as Miss Evangeline Barley and Ken Barnett as Monty Navarro, in the Hartford production.)

He’s also just really brave. He literally threw himself into it, I mean he did pratfalls at readings. He was enormously influential; I felt like I had another collaborator, it wasn’t just an actor playing a role. Like, I think when the priest is describing the church and its architecture, he said to me, Give me some more of that. He had fun playing with that. So I would dig up some stuff and give it to him, and he just knew how to do it. That just made it richer and funnier.

Or he did an ad lib one time, the dialogue was, Monty shows him a picture of his late mother, and D’Ysquith Senior says, “Oh she looks very much like the women in the family, and some of the men.” Jefferson added “some of the men.” I wasn’t too proud to not use that. When you have an actor of his caliber, they’re going to bring something to the show.

Another useful insight from the book: When you’re writing a musical you have to think, What can we afford? Can we really have 20 characters? What do we really need? And in the case of Gentleman, your small cast and budget really enabled you to do things in fun, creative ways. Like when the minister is up in the church tower, to signify how windy it is Jefferson throws his scarf around like it’s blowing and then messes up his hair. It’s hilarious and also so clearly tells me what this show is.

Incredible. He did the thing with his hair one day and we all just rolled over, it was so funny.

Sometimes you think Ah if I had more money I could do more, but then it turns out maybe no, if you have less money you can do more.

Yeah. We made a virtue of the fact that we had a small cast and a simple set.

I’ll also give a lot of credit to Darko and Alexander Dodge, the set designer, and of course Linda Cho who designed the costumes. Darko understood, because he’d done it so many times and done it so many times with Alexander, how to get the most with the least.

Everything came together in the right way, is all I can say. I think it made it even more special than it might have been.

In the book you talk about how important it is that the creative team are all on the same page, and the disasters that can happen if you're not all telling the same story.

I wonder, would you have advice for people on how to test for that, how to know if you’re all rowing in the same direction? Because it seems like it can all go off the rails without people necessarily knowing it.

Yeah, and perhaps by the time you realize it [it’s too late].

Gentleman started with Steve and me. We had been friends for 20 years before we ever started writing it. We met at the program at NYU. [Freedman and Lutvak were classmates at the Tisch School’s graduate musical theater program.]

Robert L. Freedman with his Gentleman’s Guide writing partner and friend Steven Lutvak.

So we shared a certain outlook and sense of humor. We weren’t the same person, we were very different people actually, but we shared certain things in common. And I think when he came to me with the movie of Kind Hearts, which he himself had been dreaming of doing for years, and he asked me to take a look at it, I think he must have instinctively understood I would get it.

Which I did. And I saw that it could be a musical. I’ve heard people say, Who would look at that movie and think it could be a musical? Well Steve and I both did, enthusiastically. So right there we were on the same page.

That didn’t happen by accident: We really knew each other, we knew each other’s humor. I think that helped.

And Darko understood it from the very beginning, too. From the first meeting we had with him, he understood it. It was very, very clear. We were never at cross-purposes, and so everything the designers did and the actors did just elevated it.

What was it about Darko in that first meeting that showed he got it?

Cast members Jefferson Mays and Bryce Pinkham with Darko Tresnjak (center) on Opening Night.

He was just so delighted by the kind of subversive quality of it. He used to say, I’m not called Darko for nothing. He liked that it was a very dark story told in a very funny way. He got what it was. And this was his first Broadway show, so he had probably already directed 50, 60, 70, plays and a few musicals all over the country. He was a very well-respected regional theater director. And he’d done a lot of Shakespeare, so he knew the vocabulary.

We never had a question of who the characters were. I don’t remember him ever saying, I don’t understand this character. I don’t think so. I don’t remember any conversation like that.

He had a lot of wonderful staging ideas, which I talk about in the book.

You do. And reading them really captures that process of discovery.

And listen, there were things he suggested that I pushed back on, and things he pushed back on that I wanted to do. So we learned how to navigate that. He got some of what he wanted that I was skeptical about, and I got some of what I wanted that he was skeptical about, and it all worked out really well.

Monty (Pinkham) duels Lord Bartholomew D’Ysquith (Mays).

Darko’s inclination was to go for the gruesome, and I was hesitant. I didn’t want it to be a bloody musical. So with the weightlifter, Lord Bartholomew, the barbell was just supposed to break his neck, but Darko wanted it to sever his head. And I said, Darko, I think that goes too far. And he said, You know what, let me have the prop people rig it up, and I’ll just show it to you.

So we sat there, and we’re talking no costumes, no sets, no lights, nothing. And all of a sudden the severed head popped out in such a funny way. Literally it was like CRUNCH and the head just rolled to the side. It wasn’t gruesome, it was hilarious. I couldn’t remember when I’d laughed so hard. And I said great, let’s do it.

The way that idea started was with a different character who was doing Hedda Gabler, she shoots herself offstage. Darko wanted a severed head to roll onto the stage after that. I said, Darko, when you shoot yourself, there’s no severed head. And he had another idea for her, so it worked out great.

But then we come to the bodybuilder and he wants to do the severed head again. Again I was skeptical, but it turned out.

I think one of the genius aspects to the death scenes is that you allow them to have multiple beats. The priest falls and dies in this wildly visual and funny way, and then just lies there. Thinking it’s over, we focus on Monty’s shock. But then out of nowhere this enormous pool of blood stars to emanate from the priest’s body. And that becomes the pattern—each death gets these unexpected extra beats.

I knew there was going to be blood, but it wasn’t really until I saw it done that I realized what it was. And I don’t remember this exactly, but I bet I thought, Oh I wonder if the blood’s too much. But from the very first audience, they went nuts over it.

Absolutely.

It’s one of the biggest laughs in the show, if not the biggest maybe.

You just don’t see it coming.

Yeah. And I love that.

The other thing was, I was very much against vulgarity. I wanted to keep it very Edwardian in that sense. So I was like the vulgarity police. But there are still a few things in there that skirted very closely.

Was this your first time doing lyrics as well as book?

Not. It was my first time doing lyrics for a Broadway show, although when we wrote it—honestly, of course one dreams of going to Broadway, but we would have been thrilled to have a production, period, anywhere. It was a long time coming. But it was a thrill.

I remember being surprised by songs like “Inside Out,” this incredibly sweet and tender song set in the midst of an insane bee attack. To me, it’s like a magic trick to have created such a beautiful moment in the midst of such a preposterous situation.

Lauren Worsham, nominated for a Tony for her work as Phoebe D’Ysquith, sings “Inside Out”.

That was our intention. We had an idea the kind of song that this character would sing, kind of an art song if you will, a highly proper song, beautiful melody and everything, and somewhat poetic and virtuous, all of those things, and then juxtapose it. The song gets silly as the action got silly with Henry being chased by bees. But it was always written with the idea that it would end with him being killed by the bees.

Were there things that helped you in terms of writing lyrics? You’re doing Edwardian language, so you have the challenge of keeping the audience following lyrics that don’t sound familiar and sometimes move really fast, yet you never lost us.

When we got to play in real theaters, Broadway especially, I was very concerned about the sound. I didn’t want people to miss the lyrics. Without a great sound designer like we had, Dan Schreier, I don’t know if people would have heard every word. It was really important to me.

But I had people say the had to see it two or three times before they got everything. But that’s true of almost any show in a way.

Absolutely.

I think Steve and I just wallowed and reveled in the language and being able to do it and to do it amusingly. We used to crack each other up a lot. We would really try to find the wording and the rhymes and everything, we worked really hard on it, but it was fun, because it was funny.

I don’t know what the magic is, except part of it is hard work. And then I guess we had an affinity or I guess you could say a talent for that kind of stuff. Whenever one of us thought a line or a word or whatever, the music wasn’t quite right yet, it could be better, the other would say, Great, let’s keep working on it and see if we can make it better. We were hard on ourselves.

What’s funny is, when we started off we didn’t have a producer, we didn’t have a director, we didn’t have a theater, we didn’t have a commission. *laughs*

We had nothing. We just wrote it for our own enjoyment. Of course we wrote it to be seen by people eventually, I’m not saying that. But we weren’t hired to do it, we weren’t encouraged to do it, we just did it. Because that was what we wanted to do with our lives, essentially. So we just did it.

I guess that’s my biggest piece of advice to anybody. Write what you want to write. I mean, no one would have hired us to write this, because not one would have thought it would make any money.

That's so true.

Actually at some of the readings that we had, the readings used to land really, really well, but people would say Well, it’s really good, but it’s not a Broadway show. That's the thing we heard a few times. “It’s not a Broadway show.” Until it was. *laughs*

Someone had to believe in it. Darko had to believe in it, and [producer] Joey Parnes had to believe in it, and the New York Times had to believe in it.

The cast performs at the 2014 Tonys, where the show won Best Musical, Book, Direction, and Costumes.

It wasn’t off-Broadway first, was it?

No what happened was, after Darko got involved, Darko was the Associate Artistic Director at the Old Globe in San Diego. And while we were doing this together, he got hired to be the artistic director of Hartford Stage in Connecticut. And he decided Well, he loved this show and he’d been working on it with us anyway, so he’s going to put it in his first season.

Wow.

It was going to open the season, but he said, You know what, I want a production of Hedda Gabler right before it. So when the Hedda Gabler joke comes…*laughs*

Are you kidding?

No I am not kidding. He said, In New York, I’m not worried. In Hartford, Connecticut…? It was a great production of Hedda Gabler.

Somebody got the New York Times to come. Which was terrifying, actually, but they loved it. And then we already had planned a co-production with the Old Globe. So after Hartford we went to the Old Globe in San Diego, with a couple of months in between. And once it got to the Old Globe, Broadway producers started being serious, so after the Old Globe we had our Broadway producer. Then it took a few months to get a theater and whatever. It closed in April of 2013 in San Diego and it opened in November of 2013 in New York, which actually I think is kind of a short time. But it was not off-Broadway.

You know how there have been shows that were on Broadway and now they’re doing them off Broadway?

Yes.

Darko said the other day, he thinks Gentleman’s Guide would be a great off-Broadway show, it could run forever.

I absolutely agree.

The conventional wisdom is that you can’t make money off-Broadway. But look at Little Shop. Of course it was a really-known entity by the time this revival happened, they’d had a movie, it was already a classic show. But still…But I think Jersey Boys went off-Broadway and Avenue Q. The Play that Goes Wrong.

There’s a show I saw off-Broadway a couple seasons ago, Dead Outlaw, now coming to Broadway. It has a similar anarchic creativity to Gentleman’s Guide about it.

My wife saw it. She loved it.

Like Gentleman’s Guide, it’s a show where the premise sounds unproduceable.

I’ve heard the premise and I still can’t get it. But when something is well done, it doesn’t really matter. Listen—this is hard to believe now, but when I first heard the premise of Evita, I thought, Really? It’s a musical about the mistress of a dictator from Argentina? Whoever heard of her? I mean, Really? Now Evita is part of the canon. But I thought, What a strange idea for a musical.

Jesus Christ Superstar—what an audacious, unlikely idea for a musical. But we’re used to it now because we live in a world where it’s considered a classic.

Thanks to Robert L. Freedman for a wonderful conversation. Notes on the Writing of A Gentleman’s Guide… is available everywhere. And the musical A Gentleman’s Guide… is available for licensing via Music Theatre International.

When Australian singer/songwriter Emmi finished school at age 16, she found herself in the strange situation of being put off by drama schools because she was too young.

Rather than wait, Emmi began to study independently, and at 17, she was cast as Chava in the Australia-New Zealand tour of Topol’s Fiddler on the Roof. For most of three years she traveled with the show—“I sort of grew up with the cast”—while also appearing in the off seasons on the long-running Australian soap Home and Away and serving as dance captain in The Pajama Game.

Here’s her scenes in Home and Away, in which she serves up some stone cold nastiness as a mean girl ridiculing two leads for starting a help line. (In the first scene she’s the crank caller on the phone.)

While in real life Emmi is anything but a Tina Fey confection, one thing about her work on Home would prove characteristic of her career: She can draw a character of great specificity and realism with incredible brevity. She’s onscreen here for barely a minute, yet it feels like she’s been on the show forever.

After moving to London to act, including as the understudy Narrator in the national tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Emmi started writing songs, and fell so in love with the work she left the theater behind to pursue it.

In 2015, Taylor Swift included Emmi’s second released song, “Sleep On It,” on a playlist of “New Songs that Will Make Your Life More Awesome (I Promise). In an interview Emmi said, “I thought it was a hoax. She misspelt my name in the note and I actually thought: do I change my name at this point?”

A year later, she made news again after she received an email while on holiday from the film director David Yates. Without explaining why, he wondered whether she might compose a song based on some suggested lyrics.

Months later, she was asked to perform the song in motion capture, still without any explanation as to what this was for. It turned out to be a song sung during the Harry Potter spin-off series Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

And it sizzles.

In recent years, Emmi has been working on Players, a passion project of songs from the point of view of different characters from Shakespeare. She’s begun to release some tracks slowly, including the extraordinary first song “The Prologue.”

Recently we got together at a coffee shop in the Village to talk the song and the show, and how singing in the persona of others has liberated her to give voice to herself.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I found the “The Prologue” incredibly visual. I first listened to it on a plane to London and immediately started sketching moments from it.

That’s the biggest compliment that you can pay me.

Really? Why?
The idea of “music that you can see” is my favorite genre. My first entry into music was classical music. I was a weird six-year-old: My parents were listening to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple and all this kind of stuff and I’m like, Tchaikovsky!, with my little Sony Walkman, imagining stories to these classical pieces.

For me music was always escape. If you can see it, then I feel like it’s doing its job.

Would you say that “The Prologue,” as compared to other songs you’ve written, was written specifically for the theater?

It was written as a prologue for a project that I’ve been working on for…six years, I think?, called Players. It’s a collection of songs, each inspired by a different character from the plays of William Shakespeare.

The premise of the project was to use these characters as bounce-off points for pop songs, essentially. It started as just female characters and then it became all the characters, and now, 70-something songs in…

70? 7-0?

At least. If I’m being ruthless I’d cut it down to 34 that I can really stand by. We play a game, Name a Play and a Character, and I’ll play the song. It’s like a jukebox.

Wow.

I didn’t really know what it was when I was making it, but it just started taking on this very visual, dramatic element. And I’m a theater girl at heart, so of course it had 200 voices on it and key changes and strings and orchestrations. It became this larger-than-life thing that was so much bigger than I was in life.

The reason it’s called Players is Shakespeare has that quote, “Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It’s a tale told by idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That “hour on the stage”, if that’s the symbol of a life, then this album is an hour and it’s the experience of being a human. And every song within that hour is a different aspect of it—it’s ambition, it’s revenge, it’s falling in love, it’s falling in love with the wrong person, it’s unrequited love, it’s jealousy, it’s sex, it’s everything you can think of.

So the ice cream seller idea, which I love, is a vision of yourself?

A “walking shadow” in Shakespearean language is in an understudy. A shadow in the theater would have been an understudy who shadows behind, copying the main actor.

When he says life is like a walking shadow, he’s saying life is like the understudy got thrown on. You don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re there to make the show as best you can without truly knowing why you’re there, or maybe not being good enough to handle it. Which is how I feel and how I think most people feel: We have that impostor syndrome in life. No one asked to be here, but we are anyway. So there’s this sort of acceptance that happens in growing up of, Well, I am here. And life’s super short. So am I backstage, am I an extra, am I the villain, am I the kooky best friend? And will I always be there? Or am I going to try on what it feels like to be maybe all of those characters?

My process with this album has been trying on being the Lady Macbeth instead of the Juliet. And when I did, I realized, Oh, I feel more honest, not because I’m going out and killing people, but because I have an ambitious monster that I’ve never taken out for a walk and given 3 minutes to go crazy.

And then you take out the next person, he’s pathetic and romantic, and yeah, that’s also me. We are all these characters. So it’s like I’m experiencing what it’s like to be kings and queens and paupers and villains and spies and soldiers, and all these things. And I want you to, too, because I think we all kind of stick to one role that we’re given. At some point, someone says a word over us and we’re that for the rest of our lives. She’s shy. Okay.

At the end of “The Prologue” you talk about bringing your shadows into the light, into life. Do you see each of the characters in Players as shadow parts of you?

I think so. I think there’s a lot of songs that I wouldn’t have written just as Emmi, because I wouldn’t have wanted my parents to hear them. *laughs*

But then the fact of the matter was I didn’t write for anyone unless I related to them in some way. With Lady Macbeth it was, I will do everything that’s in my power to make this happen, I have this vision of what my life could be and I’m going to do it. And I get that. I don’t get what she does afterwards, but I get that bit. And I get that annoyance of waiting on men to do stuff. It’s like, Yeah, me, too. And suddenly I let this little entitled nasty minx out and I thought, Wow. It felt like I really needed to do that.

Emmi describes “Crown” as her “ambitious monster” Lady Macbeth piece.

I feel like we all need a piece of that, we all need to let our tiger out a little bit and give it a piece of meat and give it a run, and then put back in its cage, so it’s not angry. Because if we don’t let it out for years and then something triggers you and you just let it out, Oh man, you don’t know what that thing is going to do.

There’s an Oscar Wilde quote, “Man is least honest when he speaks in the first person, but give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” Writing these songs, I gave myself permission to try out a lot of things that I’d never allowed myself to be. They taught me that I really can say anything. They gave me the permission to say things that may not be for convenient to the world. They gave me bravery.

Does “The Prologue” come from the point of view of a character, as well?

When I finished with all these characters, I was thinking, Have I really shown myself, revealed myself as I am? Have I ever spoken to the listener as Emmi?

I thought it was important to start the show [with that]. I say “show” loosely—it could be a gig, it could be a concert, it could be a show in terms of theatrical experience. I always imagined I’d be selling ice cream, and then just walk up on stage and start singing this as myself.

I looked through prologues, actually, to see if I could base it on one, and it’s loosely, loosely, loosely based on the Henry V prologue “O for a muse of fire”, except I’m more like, O if only I had fire in myself. Because the idea of doing a show is terrifying to me.

So this was an opportunity for me to say, I’m as scared as you, hi! It’s the only time that I speak as myself. And I wrote it fairly late. I already knew what the body of work sounded like.

Photo by Erica Johnston

It sounds like “The Prologue” ends up being the fruit of your work on Players.

I felt like Okay, I’ve had this experience, and I’ve got this muscle now where I get to be honest, and I’m going to try it out. *clears throat* Here we go.

And it’s terrifying. My stage fright is terrifying. But courage doesn’t exist without fear.

So much of pop culture is aspirational. It’s I’m the greatest, and I’m going to wear this make-up and have these friends, and we’re going to set up this fashion line, and you should look like this, and rah rah rah. And that’s all well and good, but is it useful? I’m scared all the time. And I’d like to believe I’m not that different from the rest of humanity.

Aspirational pop, the Cosmo of music.

As a musician there’s this message you need to lead, and they follow. What is it I could honestly lead? I’m not the kind of girl that a 17-year-old’s going to look at and want to look like. I hope that maybe she looks at me and wants to look more like herself. That’s the maximum of my influence and power there.

If there’s anything I can try out, it’s being scared and doing it anyway. I don’t want a Lady Macbeth song to be the first thing they hear from me and have them go, Well, she’s got it all together then. It becomes interesting if it comes from a little person who’s as scared as you are.

You actually start “The Prologue” with that mic tap and throat clearing, which immediately creates that sense of a real person who feels a little uncertain, maybe doesn’t know exactly what they’re doing. And at the end, you give a sort of “eh” that makes me wonder whether you even liked the song.

I almost certainly didn’t like the song, I can tell you right now. If you could see me alone, you would watch me just judging myself. *laughs*

I’ve always been terrified of having impact, which is a ridiculous thing for an artist to say, but here we are. I used to do this thing, playing at a pub or whatever when I used to gig. I would have created this atmosphere and everyone would be right with me, and there’s this beautiful moment happening, maybe there’s even people crying, and I’d go Plunk! and resolve with this chord and do this stupid little face.

Sort of undermining the moment?

Yeah. It was like, You know that thing I just spent 4 minutes creating? I’m just going to take that away and make this funny. I think it has always been a defensive mechanism. It’s like I’m so sorry if I had power over you. Have it back. I don’t want it.

What’s the fear—that you’re taking away people’s freedom? Or charming them into something they don’t really want?

Someone said to me recently, “In order to be breathtaking you have to be comfortable stealing the air.” I don’t think I was ever comfortable taking the air. It was like I like to win, but only if no one else is inconvenienced about that, and the truth of the matter is there’s no such thing, there’s no such world in which you get to have everything you wanted and everyone still likes you. So you gotta choose. If you’ve got something that could be useful to say, then you can get up there whether you’re ready or not, whether you’re stuttering and without breath and have stage fright or not. Because you only have an hour, so come on now. Life’s too short.

What would be worse is sitting there saying, Ah, I really left that stage empty for this narcissist to walk up there and take it.

They’re always ready.

They are, and they know how to take up space and they know how to be heard. I think in the face of extreme hate you gotta find a way to be extremely loving, and love by default is quiet. It says, No no, after you, I don’t want to affect the molecules in the room, so I’m going to stand back here with my back against the wall.

That’s not working for us anymore. Scared people are going to have start saying some stuff, with shaky voices.

“Why Does My Heart Hate My Guts,” a song inspired by A Midsummer Night Dream’s Helena.

Did you find your own shaky voice and mic tap at the beginning was in a sense both an embrace of your own shakiness, and a kind of act of defiance toward the industry that wants to erase any trace of that?

Can I be honest? I had just left a team when I wrote this song. This was the first song I wrote after breaking away from a team. I decided to do it on my own, because I was constantly being asked the question, Why should people follow you? And because I didn’t have a good answer for that, it was falling apart. And I feel like the song was me coming to terms with why I do this.

It was maybe a little bit of an act of defiance. You don’t think a scared person can do it? Watch this. I’m going to do it anyway.

I find that tracks with the many ways the song surprises, both narratively and structurally. It starts with the almost comical “Please turn off your phones,” but then that becomes this profound invitation not to hide from this experience.

I wanted this to be a voice in the dark, getting the listener into the right state to hear it. And if someone was just experiencing it in headphones—and ironically they would be doing that on their phones; I was aware of that joke—

That’s hilarious.

—Yeah, I was so aware of the stupidity of what I was doing. *laughs*

Wherever you were, if were you in a train or in a car or listening your laptop, I wanted you to feel like Okay, I’m in a theater now, and I’m about to experience this. It’s the same as the Prologue in Henry V: Suspend your disbelief.

Except here it’s “Stop suspending your phones and experience this.”

It really does irk me at concerts. On the one hand, be here. But on the other hand, the artist isn’t seeing faces, they’re just seeing a bunch of lights. And why? So you can experience it later? I don’t know.

I think the reason why I love theater and why I love live anything is the dialogue between the audience and the art. There’s this dialogue of being in a group of people experiencing the same moment at the same time. And how the audience reacts to the stage is affecting what’s on the stage. You’re not just sitting there watching a TV. It’s not going to just happen without you.

You go from that to talking about how you tend to hide yourself. Suddenly you’ve changed your position in the narrative to one of us.

Photo by Darren Skene

That happens a couple times. You sing, “If you want to leave, let my friends show you the door,” which feels aggressive. But then what follows is “But if you’re gonna stay let’s make a deal now to be more.” Again, there’s this sense of you and us together on a journey. The song keeps blossoming in ways you don’t expect.

As you were writing it, were you conscious of those kinds of twists or reversals?

I never know what I’m doing when I’m writing. It just falls out, and I think, I guess I needed to say that.

Musically “The Prologue” does not follow your standard pop formula, either. Each verse is its own little melody.

I’m a pop writer by trade, so the whole verse pre chorus, verse pre chorus, bridge, double chorus, ad libs over the top, Bob’s your uncle, Fanny’s your Aunty’s sister, that’s my home. But I just wanted it to be short. And I think because I knew it was going to be a prologue, I knew it was meant to be a stream of consciousness.

It turned into a much longer song than I intended to, because it turned out I had a lot to say. And I knew it had to grow to introduce the cast, and then I wanted them to all go away at the end, so there was this full arc. They’re just going to leave me on my own again.

It’s funny, though, when you’re on your own again and humming to yourself, there’s none of that initial hesitation. You almost seem unaware of us. You’re just free.

How I saw it in my head, but again, it can be however you see, is that everyone’s there and I’m feeling emboldened by being on the stage with this whole cast of characters that I’ve made up in my brain, and then they maybe disappear or the screen comes down or something happens where they’re gone, but I’m humming along as if they’re still there.

Then I realize I’m on my own with a spotlight and I’m going, Oh shit, you’re seeing me again, and I go “huh.” I’m back to myself and still uncomfortable with it. Which honestly just happened—I remember going Okay I’m done, I’ve finished my take, and “huh.”

I think as well I was feeling like, Gosh, look at that, I was just selling ice cream and we made a song. And did you see those 200 people, and the lights, and the stuff that happened? That was wild, right? And then we’re back to just me and my ice cream, and it’s like, Huh! Anything can happen! And not just for me: If that can happen in my brain in two and a half minutes, let’s see what else we can find out about ourselves. If you start speaking into a microphone, you might start singing with your whole chest. No promises, but you won’t know unless you tap it, check it’s on and start.

Whenever I make a song or recording I’m constantly bamboozled by anything that comes out of my mouth. I’m just like Wow! That’s so cool! I’m like a kid.

At one point you sing “Let’s make a deal now to be more.” Then you give a list of things we should reach to be more than, and the very first thing is “more than our dreams.” So many pop songs are about achieving your dreams.

I think I was able to make this music because I’m lucky enough to have people in my life who have heard me and said, Cool! And what if you thought bigger than that? And I’d be like Wow! *sings a melody* And what if you thought bigger than that? Wow! *sings a melody* And what if you thought bigger than that?

Our dreams are limited by what we have been shown as possible. Or you dream to the limit of what you feel you can without your heart being broken. But what if there is something in store for you that’s so much bigger, like so much bigger than you can even perceive? Sometimes people never get that question, What if you could be more than that? Go on one more step.

The idea that the impossible might be possible is how things get done. No invention has happened because someone was thinking within the realms of what’s happened before, what’s possible according to science to date. You have to be delusionally optimistic that maybe something lies just over there that’s so much better than your tiny little human brain can see.

Emmi with Chaim Topol.

When writing “The Prologue,” did you start with lyrics or music?

I had some chords that I sent to my friend and cowriter/producer Jonathan Stein. I said I know it has to start small and get big, and he sent me back some chords and I wrote to that, and then he built around that.

It started with melody and lyrics almost simultaneously from the beginning, because I knew it needed to be an announcement. I did not expect it turn into Let’s just say everything we’ve ever thought about the world and the universe in one minute.

I love that halfway through we suddenly get a fabulous gospel choirs of yous.

I’m a lonely person *laughs*. I like to have a lot of voices singing the same thing, because it makes me feel a little less alone.

It makes it feel universal to me. And it also make everyone who’s listening feel like they’re also saying those words. I wrote this in 2020. We were in a moment in time when the world was going through a global existential crisis. And there was a sort of sharpening of perspective (so we thought) of what was important. What we were all suffering from at the same time made everything feel for a second evolved somehow.

I’d walked away from a bunch of money to do this project. And I was like, I don’t know how this thing is going to happen, but I have to imagine a universe in which this scared person with no funding can create this thing. I’m going to dream that, and it’d be nicer to dream it with a lot of people.

I notice your lines in the song almost never rhyme.

Really?

Nope. What you do instead is all kinds of consonance, some internal rhyme—

I love an internal rhyme.

—and then lots of slant rhyme. You rhyme “me” with “screen”. You rhyme “pain” and “say”. At the end you’ve got “shine” and “light” and then “shine” and “life”. Even in the resolution you refuse to give us a fulfilled rhyme.

Normally I’m more pedantic about rhymes. Normally I’m the really annoying person who will spend 4 hours on line 2 of verse 3. And everyone’s like It’s fine. You can rhyme “face” with “way.” And I’m like, No!

Did you intentionally resist rhyming here?

No. You’re triggering all kinds of weird responses. I’m like, Oh my God, I could have found the perfect one. *laughs*

Like I said, this one felt like it just fell out. And so many of the things just felt right without me really questioning it. I guess this is what I really sound like when I’m not being too cerebral. I wasn’t filtering, because I really wanted to be raw. The song was just permission to speak.

I love so much that you didn’t even know about the rhyme.

I didn’t! And normally I would have gone over this thing with a fine-toothed comb.

“Night Light,” another song inspired by Lady Macbeth.

Just riffing: Rhyme gives us a way in, but it also makes us feel safe. Maybe you give us just enough rhyme for us to feel interested and comfortable, but you don’t allow us to rest there, or you invite us into the possibility of more than safety. Which is kind of what you’re doing with yourself in the song.

I wish I could take credit. Maybe when you know what you’re saying and what you’re saying is true it’ll just come out the way it needs to.

If it’s a little imperfect, that’s great. Especially now with AI, I think now more than ever that leaving evidence of our humanity in songs, in anything in art generally is going to be worth its weight in gold. Something falls off a table during a recording? Leave that in. You want to sneeze? Do you know what robots can’t do?

There’s that Japanese philosophy wabi-sabi, [which talks about] the beauty of imperfection. A wabi-sabi gallery of pots will have pots that are a little bit misshapen and cracked, and they’ll fill the cracks in with gold. The imperfection is evidence of our humanity, but it also makes us unique.

We all have our unique ways of getting it wrong. And it’s how you get life wrong that is art.

Last question: Have you done Players as a show yet? And if not, are you going to (please)?

I literally spent the day kicking myself, going It’s time, it’s time.

For this project?

Yeah.

I think I’ve taken a little while to catch up with the boldness and bravery of my music. There’s nowhere I feel safer and stronger and more emboldened to be mad than in a studio. I’m a completely different person in a studio than to real life. I think real life means slowly catching up to her.

Yeah, I think I’m meeting my music now. My music was the aspiration and now I’m where she is, and I’m willing to be seen. That is my North Star, actually doing what I said I would do in my music. Anyone can say stuff, but actually getting up there and having the shaky voice, and being like yep, this is the thing.

And selling the ice cream.

And selling the damn ice cream. I won’t even sell it, I’ll give it out for free.

By the way I don’t have to be selling ice cream. It could be albatross.

I want to be ready for it when I do it, which is why I’ve kind of sat on it. I know what it’s done for me, and I want to make it available in case it does anything good for anyone else, but I also wanted to be ready to do it properly.

I tried a show last year to test my new brave self. I sung one song with a friend in New York at Sony Music Hall and didn’t tell anyone. And it wasn’t a perfect performance, but I was buzzing for like 6 days. I felt what it was to not be perfect and to be okay with that and more interested in the effect. Me and the audience had a real dialogue, and it was just a really beautiful moment.

I thought, There it is. So this is okay. You don’t have to be the best vocalist in the world, you don’t have to say the most important thing. We could all die tomorrow, so speak how you can, when you can, because you can, right now.

Opening the set with “The Prologue”, you’re also giving yourself space to name that anxiety. It’s like you’re Evil Knievil and this is your ramp.

I think that’s the thing. Anything you’re afraid of, if you can speak it out, it loses its power. So if my big thing before I walked on stage was going to be I’m terrified, I’m not entertaining enough, or I’m not the kind of person who can hold this room, or sing well or dance well or look right, or be all the things people need me to be, if I say that, then I’m free. Anything comes after that is bonus. And it’s fun.

It’s so interesting that the path to that freer, bigger person is by embracing your vulnerability rather than burying it.

There’s some Game of Thrones quote, I think it’s Tyrion that says it, “Wear your weakness like a badge. No one can hurt you then. No can touch you.”

The bad thing about you, the different thing, the wrong thing, the thing that veers off from what society would deem convenient is probably your most beautiful thing. It’s the thing that sets you apart, makes you that cracked pot with the gold in it, makes you more expensive and exclusive. There’s no one else like you.

There’s so many people in my life where I think You have no idea how beautiful you are, how brilliant you are, how exceptional, kind and good. Just wondrous. I can see that in other people and I want to share that with them.

Thanks so much to Emmi for this in-depth conversation. You can find Emmi’s music, including tracks from Players, on Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, and elsewhere.

This article, which will be published in the spring in the International Trumpet Guild Journal, is published in advance here by special permission of the International Trumpet Guild. Big thanks to ITG Journal editor Peter Wood for allowing me to do so, and also to Glenn Drewes and his many friends for all their help and patience.

The week that Broadway reopened in 2021, I went to see the long-standing revival of Chicago. Somehow the idea of seeing a show that had been around for so long—25 years at the time—felt like the most appropriate way to honor the many, many New York City performers who had struggled through the 18 months that theater was shuttered.

It had been many years since I first saw the show, which made it an absolute delight to watch, each new scene bringing a fresh sense of surprise. And the show’s most striking moment for me was also its most unexpected: During the entr’acte at the start of Act II, a trumpet player stood and delivered the hottest damn take on “Mr. Cellophane” I’ve ever heard. It was so steamy that the actors on stage actually stood and cheered him on. I’d never seen anything like it.

Two years later, I went back to Chicago and it happened all over again—at the start of Act 2, the same trumpet player stood to do this solo. He was an older-looking guy with a shock of thick white hair, and when he blew the cast went wild. It was clearly a mutual thing, too; when he was done he pointed at various cast members, beaming.

Who was this guy, I wondered, and what was going on here?

It turns out, his name is Glenn Drewes, and he’s a New York City legend.

A Long Island Renaissance

I first met Glenn at an Irish bar between shows one Sunday. It was the opening weekend for Vanderpump Rules star Ariana Madix as Roxie, and the audience for the matinee had gone crazy for it. “I used to not like Saturday matinees,” Drewes told me as he sipped a bit of the brown stuff, “but I’m starting to. Today was electric.”

Sitting up close with him, the first thing you notice about Drewes is that he’s got a kind of a glow to him. No matter what we’re talking about, or how dark the bar gets as the sun goes down, there’s a joy that radiates out of Glenn Drewes.

Originally from Brooklyn, Drewes moved to West Babylon, Long Island as a toddler and spent his childhood there. That one decision on the part of his parents might have been the most pivotal of his life. His high school music department was run by a guy who “saw the future coming down the road.” He hired working musicians to teach the kids at night, and a number of those children would go on to become renowned professional musicians, including Drewes and his brother Billy, who plays sax; trumpet player Vince DiMartino; Sal Spicola, who played sax alongside Chuck Berry; and Dennis Wilson, who played trombone with Count Basie. “There was one after another,” Drewes says, “who all came from that little school in a 10-to-12-year period, because this guy had vision.”

Growing up there was music in the Drewes household, too. “Our dad didn’t play piano for a living,” Glenn’s brother Billy explains, “but he could entertain with all of the old songs. He was great, a big influence on both of us.”

Drewes had been playing piano himself for four years when that great music teacher came around to show kids different instruments they could try. Glenn still remembers the moment: “He took his trumpet out and played, and I said, ‘That’s it. That’s what I want to do.’”

Even before he finished high school, Drewes was doing professional gigs. “I was working Friday, Saturday, Sunday, these little bar gigs,” he recalls. “My dad used to drive me because I didn’t have a license.”

It was eye-opening right from the start. One night, he recalls, he walked in for a show and the leader of the band told him the manager wanted to see him. “Am I getting fired?” Drewes wondered. “No, we’re playing an act tonight,” the band leader explained. “And you’re the only one that knows music here.”

Unsure what exactly that meant, Drewes went to the manager’s office. Inside, he recalls, “There’s a beautiful woman sitting on a chair, naked.” At age 16, he was speechless, to say the least. “I would like to have a picture of my face,” he tells me, shaking his head.

“You must be the trumpet player,” the woman told him. “My name is Cassandra. Have you ever played a strip show before?” Learning he hadn’t, Cassandra gave him a lesson that Glenn says he has kept with him to this day.

“Here’s the deal,” she says. “When the lights go down, you start to play. And the more clothes come off, the hotter you get.”

“She taught me the business in like 30 seconds,” Drewes says now of how that one direction helped me understand playing the trumpet.

He’s not kidding, either. Glenn Drewes knows how to turn up the heat. In 1999, he was part of the orchestra for Fosse, the Tony Award-winning review of Bob Fosse’s work. During the last number of the show, there’s an incredible two-minute sequence in which Drewes blows alone center stage as a female dance performs in front of him. With just a few notes he creates a whole world full of fire and mystery through which she struts, kicks and spins. It’s an absolute showstopping moment, visually and musically.

Glenn and dancer Lainie Sakakura doing the number.

That night at the club, Drewes left Cassandra wondering how he could bring what she wanted without a plunger. And so he improvised. He literally went to the bar’s bathroom, grabbed the plunger, washed it off, and played the show with it.

“I play the plunger really great now,” he kids.

Crazy and Great

The College Jazz Ensemble at SUNY-Potsdam, 1971. You can see Glenn in the back row, smiling as he holds his trumpet with his arms crossed.

When Drewes finished high school he did a degree at SUNY-Potsdam, and spent the entire time playing music. “I joined a group out of Syracuse which was a drummer, a girl singer and two of my buddies,” he said. “The drinking age was 18, and there were four universities within ten miles. Every other store front had a bar with live music. We had about 60 arrangements. We played dances, we played jazz gigs, we played rock and roll.”

“I like to say that I got my bachelor’s degree from the school, my master’s from playing with [saxophonist] Gary Keller, who was at school with me, and my PhD from playing with that group.”

After graduation, Drewes got the chance to tour with jazz legends—Lionel Hampton, Woody Herman. He loved life on road. “You’re in hotels, you’re playing music every night, you’re out with a bunch of people.” But after a bunch of years, he also realized if he didn’t get off the road soon, he might never. So he and a pal from the band bought a loft in New York on 23^rd Street and started hustling to find work locally. His longtime friend trombonist Bruce Bonvissuto remembers the era: “We were doing club dates, Greek and Polka type of stuff, Jewish clubs, all sorts of stuff. We were doing whatever we could get our hands on.”

Having that kind of adaptability and energy has always been part of the nature of playing music in New York. “Everybody that I know that’s been successful in New York (except for the symphony players, who just do that), have played in everything from Latin bands to wedding bands to major recording sessions and movie dates,” Bonvissuto says. “I was Julliard-trained, I [initially] made my living playing principal in freelance orchestras, I’ve done a lot of recording work, I’ve done Broadway, I’ve done club dates, I do jazz gigs. I don’t think there’s any place in the world that’s as open as New York is to good musicians just doing all sorts of stuff.”

Drewes recalls how recording jingles was of the great money makers when he first settled into the city. “Every 13 weeks you got a [residual] check” for any aired jingle he played on. “And say Budweiser used the music but changed either the film or the wording of the commercial. Say they changed it six times. You got six checks even 13 weeks.”

“I got in on the tail end, but the guys who did it heavily bought houses,” he says, laughing. “It was crazy and it was great.”

The Big Ears MVP

As we talk, Drewes repeatedly attributes the work he’s gotten to good fortune. “It’s all luck,” he says.

Pretty much none of his colleagues share that point of view on his success. “Glenn is kind of like the Derek Jeter of the music business,” says Bonvissuto, who hired Drewes to join the orchestra for Chicago. “He’s got great energy, he’s extraordinarily versatile. He makes everybody around him better.”

Trombonist and composer Mark Miller, who has played with Drewes for over a decade at Birdland Big Band, agrees. When you’re putting together a big band set, those early solos are so important. “You want to put one of your best people first. If they light the room on fire, it helps us,” he explains. “It gets the juices flowing. And Drewes has been that for many years.”

I saw that for myself at a recent Birdland visit. After an opening number that sets the mood, Birdland leader David DeJesus called for Terry Gibbs’ “Big Bad Bob.” It’s a big swinging number that features first a trombone solo, then Drewes on trumpet. And as soon as Glenn starts playing, pretty then playful then brassy, it’s like the whole room opens up, and we’re all together in the moment, musicians and audience, enjoying the experience. One of the saxophonists starts clapping along. Soon we all are.

Someone on YouTube posted parts of a Birdland show, which includes Drewes on “Big Bad Bob” (at 8:00). The first song of the set also features Brandon Lee, and the last, “Your Smile” (29:33), was written by and features Mark Miller. You can see a characteristic moment of Drewes’ positivity at the end.

At times Drewes’ speed can be dazzling, the notes whirling out of him. But where some jazz soloists can specialize in flights of fancy that are by turns breathtaking or personal, exploratory, Drewes as a performer seems much more interested in being a great host, delivering the best party in town. “It’s not some introspective moment that he’s having with himself,” Miller says. “His sound is big, he’s trying to give everyone a good time. I love that.”

Bonvissuto agrees. “A lot of modern players play what we call ‘outside,’ which is a little hard for a non-musician to get close to or listen to. Glenn plays more traditionally—he’s a very lyrical player. His jazz solos are creative and inventive. He’s got real command over the instrument. It’s enjoyable to listen to.”

When I ask Birdland trumpeter Brandon Lee how he’d describe Drewes’ style, the first word that leaps to his mind is “happy”: “Emotionally, when you hear him play, the way he plays and improvises has a sort of happy quality, this sort of brilliance.” Listening to Drewes, he says, “I imagine it’s like when people would say they’d heard Louis Armstrong live, how different it was from hearing recordings, just how big and loud and very trumpet-y.”

Trumpeter Earl Gardner has been playing with Drewes in various bands and orchestras for over 40 years at this point. He first worked with Drewes in the Mel Lewis Big Band at the Village Vanguard. One night the band unexpectedly found itself a trumpet down between sets; Lewis suggested Gardner call Drewes, whose apartment was nearby.

Drewes came, did the set, and wowed Gardner. “I call him my MVP,” Gardner explains. “He can cover any book on the band. Officially he was a third trumpet—you get to play solos here and there on certain things, but basically you’re playing parts.” But if the second trumpet had to take off, Drewes could step in on the spot and play that book, and the same for the jazz trumpet—“He’s a really good jazz player,” Gardner notes. He could even cover for Gardner in the lead seat, never an easy seat to fill. “The lead trumpet book is an important thing. You’re the voice of the band.”

“Drewes was a luxury,” Gardner said of playing with him at the Vanguard.

Gardner also praised Drewes’ ability to play as part of a section. “It’s not just about playing your part, you have to be listening to what’s around you and fitting in. He can fit in any situation, and he knows all kinds of styles.” Bonvissuto agrees: “He’s got big ears. You put him in a situation that may be not what he’s used to doing, but he just keeps his ears open and adjusts to the style, and the way people around him are playing, and he makes it work.”

“He can do so many things,” says his brother Billy. “He can do Sesame Street, he can play parts, he can do Broadway shows, he can solo behind a singer, he can do a jazz gig. He’s one of those people that’s not pigeonholed.”

The Long Island Music Hall of Fame celebrates internationally famous Long Islanders—Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, Steven Van Zandt, George Gershwin. In 2018, they instituted a new award, “The Hired Gun Award,” for “musical ninjas”—as Hall of Fame co-founder Jim Faith put it—who could be thrown into any situation. The first winners: Billy Joel’s long-time guitarist and Glenn Drewes.  

Drewes receiving his award in 2018.

Charlie Hustle

Drewes and Earl Gardner (to his right) with the Mel Lewis Big Band.

If you ask Drewes himself, the real key to his success has been his “just say yes, just be positive” work ethic. “There’s always an emergency and they call you because they’ve heard your name and they need somebody,” he explains. “And you have that one shot. Don’t go in there like an egomaniac. Just go in nice and do your job.”

It was being ready to say yes that got him working with Gardner. After he’d subbed that one set, Gardner invited him back, but warned him, this was probably not going to be a regular gig. “I told him, ‘Look, I’m going to keep the chair open, because I want to try some different people. In the back of my mind I’m thinking, ‘This guy is working all the time, he’s not going to want to do this.’”

But then the next week when Drewes came back, he sounded great again, and “we were having a great time,” Gardner remembers. “At the end of the gig I said, ‘Can you make next week?’ He said, ”Yeah, sure.’”

“That went on for 10 years,” Gardner reveals, laughing. “I’m serious. He was never officially hired. We had the ten-year anniversary of him being in the band, and I looked at him and I said, ‘Drewes, I guess we’re officially hiring you.’”

In 1988, Mel Lewis took the orchestra to Imatra, Finland. Their last song “Don’t Get Sassy” (which begins at 27:00), features a solo from Drewes (at about 30:00). His brother Billy Drewes is also featured.

“I call him the gig machine,” says Gardner. “There’s not a gig that he’ll turn down.” He recalls a gig Drewes took recently that paid basically nothing and involved a lot of driving. “I asked, ‘Why are doing it? You know you could have said no, you don’t owe anybody. What’s wrong with you?’”

It’s the same with doing Birdland each Friday right before his curtain at Chicago. “He’s blowing his brains out on the other thing, then he comes and does the show, which is a demanding show. I asked, ‘Why are you killing yourself?’“

But the answer is obvious: “He loves it. He just wants to play.”

In 1981, just saying yes would also lead Drewes to one of the most important moments of his life. “Lena Horne was coming to Broadway, and they were going to do it with a rhythm section and two horns,” he explains. “Then they found out that in the theater, they had to use a band.” A friend playing in A Chorus Line got asked to do it, but he didn’t want to leave his show. So Drewes got a phone call at 3 in the morning, asking him if he was free. 

Drewes ended up playing for Horne for a year and a half, and also recorded an album with her years later after getting another last-minute phone call from a friend. “Is that my pal Drewsie?”, she said when she saw him. “I give her a hug and she goes, ‘Come on,’ pulls out a little flask and says, ‘We gotta have one together.’”

“Here I am with Lena Horne, doing that,” he says, marveling at it. “You can’t make this stuff up.”

While he was playing in the orchestra on her show, a friend from high school called, asking if he could get tickets for a friend who was a nurse. Drewes was waiting with the tickets when she arrived, assuming she’d be bringing her boyfriend or husband. Instead she was with a girlfriend. “We start chatting, and I say, ‘You want to have a drink after the show?’” That night, she went home and told her mother, “I just met the man I’m going to marry.” And eventually, she did. “It took her 8 years to get me,” he kids. “But we’re still happily married.”

Glenn and wife Wendy.

DREWWWWEEES

Drewes stands in the back row center in this photo of the Birdland Big Band. Tromobonist Mark Miller, who has also composed a lot of music for the band, stands on the right end.

When I first interviewed Glenn, I had not seen him in play with the Birdland Big Band, which he has been doing every Friday night for almost 20 years at this point.

The first time I went, Drewes was actually away on vacation. But he might as well have been there for as much as he got mentioned by band leader DeJesus. In fact DeJesus had picked out a number of the songs specifically because they were Drewes’ favorites, as a sort of valentine for him. And every time Drewes got mentioned, the band and staff and regulars would call out “Dreeewwes.”

I’ve been back many times since when Glenn is present. The delight that everyone involved with Birdland seems to take in Drewes is always the same. “He’s always cheerful, always positive,” Miller says. “He’s a magnet—he just draws people to him.”

His brother Billy says it’s the same everywhere. “He’s well liked. He has a positive attitude for every situation, and nothing is ever too low. He’ll do all kinds of jobs, and he’s committed. People can count on him.”

Lee notes how much Drewes’ attitude has impacted both the trumpet section at Birdland Big Band and the band. “Other sections can be a little standoffish or competitive,” he explains, which can make it tough, especially when you’re subbing in and already dealing with the anxiety of that. “People haven’t heard you play before, and you kind of have to prove that you can exist in different sections.”

“The moment I feel like I have to try to prove something, immediately I’m in my head, and that means I’m not playing exactly to my potential.”

Meanwhile at Birdland with Drewes and fellow trumpeters John Walsh and Raul Agraz, Lee says, “it’s just a very welcoming, very happy, very loving section. We have a true friendship with each other. And I would say Glenn definitely is the spearhead of the energy that we feel.”

You can see that rapport when the four of them are standing on stage together. They’re always in the back kidding around. And when one of them has a solo, the others stop and turn to face the player, smiling and showing their support. “The whole time I’m playing the solo, they’re just kind of egging me on,” Lee says. “It’s like, ‘YEAH.’”

One night I got to watch Drewes and Lee sharing a solo on the Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass song “My Man Bill.” The number flies like a racehorse charging out of the gate. Drewes and Lee pass the solo back and forth between them, their tempo and shadings perfectly in sync in a dazzling, strutting blur of sound and color.

That warmth that people get from Glenn Drewes extends beyond the bandstand, too. When Lee moved back to New York after five years in North Carolina teaching full time, Drewes reached out to offer him work subbing in on Chicago, and the other Birdland trumpeters followed suit. “A lot of times, people hold those chairs pretty close to their vests,” Lee explains, “usually because they already have a long list of subs, and they can’t bring anybody in. But he’s always encouraged me. I always feel like he and they have my back, the whole time.” As a result of having subbed in on Tina for John Walsh, Lee got on the radar of the show’s contractor. He has since been had chairs of his own on two different Broadway shows.

Andrew Grossbard, who co-leads and directs the Long Island Sound Big Band, first met Drewes as a high school student on Long Island. The great jazz composer and saxophonist George Bouchard ran a program at Nassau Community College which brought in professional musicians, including Drewes. “He was so humble, so forthcoming of information for anybody that wanted to talk,” Grossbard says of Drewes.

Over the years he’d ask Drewes about everything from getting into the music scene or more music theory kinds of questions—“What are you doing on this chord, are you thinking more melody?,” he explains. “The way he improvises, he very much tells a story. He can say more with a couple notes than most can say with a lot more.” And Drewes was game for all of it. “It’s not often that you get somebody of that stature to be forthcoming,” Grossbard notes.” A lot of times they’ll be like, ‘You want to learn this? Study with me. I charge X. Or buy my book.”

“He’s just a tremendous person and musician.”

“I’ve probably played more notes with him over the years than anyone in the business,” Bonvissuto tells me. “It’s one of the highlights of our careers, these friendships that we’ve been able to develop.”

And Gardner, who now plays with them both on Chicago, agrees. “It’s a joy to play with him,” says Gardner. He talks about the “telepathy” they have seemed to share from their very early days playing together. “When I first started doing Chicago, I would close my eyes and not watch the conductor, and just listen to Drewes. And we would be in synch. I don’t think I ever told him that.”

“He knows how I play, and I know how he plays, and together we make one good trumpet player,” Gardner kids.  

Big Bird and the Angels
In conversation Drewes is less interested in talking about his talent than in telling stories—a gift all of his friends mention. On a recent Friday when Drewes was off from Birdland, Lee says his fellow trumpeters kidded that “he’s probably at some function with a whole bunch of big name stars and rich people, and somehow he’s in a corner with five celebrities and he’s the one telling stories.”

And he has so many, and they’re all so entertaining, it’s hard not to want to mention all of them. There’s the time he was tossing a football around on the street between shows on a closed off block of 45^th Street, and a passerby stopped to ask where he’d played college ball. It was Don Shula.

Or there was the time that, while working with the Sesame Street band, which he did for many years— “It was fabulous, we were in a studio up on 57^th Street, 7 guys, and every day was different”—they were got asked to cover “Fly Me to the Moon.” “They had this little character, Slimy the worm,” Drewes explains. “So of course what song were they going to do? ‘Slimey to the Moon’.” The show had the perfect guest for the number: Tony Bennett.

Usually the music director would sing dummy vocals to go with the band’s performance for the performer to listen to. But for this number the engineer insisted that Drewes—who has more than a passing resemblance to Bennett—do the vocals. And his impersonation of Bennett was so spot on, when Bennett heard the track he said, “Who is this guy? He’s pretty good!”

For a time every Sunday at midnight Drewes and a “weird mix” of people—“there was a guy who wrote for Hockey Magazine, there were cops, stage hands, a bunch of musicians”— would play hockey at an indoor rink on the 23^rd floor of a building in Midtown. One night, “This guy comes around and throws me a beautiful pass. I whack it right through the goalie’s leg and score a goal.”

They went back to the bench and the other guy took his helmet off. It was Bob Dylan.

Just as Lee talks about Drewes, Walsh, and Agraz as friends who have looked out for him, Drewes has his own list of angels, “guys that are not with us any more, but they look over my shoulder.” One in particular stands out: Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, a trumpet player known for his work on the muted trumpet, especially for Frank Sinatra. “Just before From Here to Eternity, Sinatra was kind of down and out,” Glenn explains. “He wasn’t as popular as he was. And he decided to do this album, and he told the musicians, ‘If everything goes well, you’ll be with me for the rest of my life.’ And Sweets was the trumpet player.”

The two of them met on a 12-week international tour. “For the first week or so I was afraid to talk to him,” Drewes admits. “But it turns out he was one of the most beautiful people.”

Years later, Drewes was on his way to work when his wife said they have to talk. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she told him. “I’ve been to a priest, I’ve been to a psychiatrist. I went from being a single woman to married with three kids and having a house in like 2 ½ years, and I’m just freaked out.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to be here when you get back,” she said.

But when he got home that night, she was there in the kitchen cooking and humming a tune. “I actually went out to look at the number on the house to make sure I had the right place,” he says, laughing at first. Then suddenly there are tears in his eyes. “I almost start crying every time I tell this.”

“So I walked in,” he tells me, “and I said, ‘Babe, how’s everything?’”

“She goes, ‘Everything’s great. Forget what I said this morning. Everything’s great.’”

What changed, he wondered. “Sweets called.”

At this point it had been years since Drewes had seen Sweets. “Did he want to talk to me?” he asked. “No,” she said. “He just wanted to talk to me.”

Drewes has no idea to this day what Sweets said. But it helped his wife tremendously. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she told him. “Forget it. That’s done. Everything’s cool.”

“And that’s why he’s my angel.”

Harry “Sweets” Edison, taken by Rick Edison, 1988.

All That Jazz

A shot of the Chicago orchestra from some years ago: Drewes is last row, center, Gardner to his left. Bonvissuto is just in front of them.

The current revival of Chicago has been on Broadway for 28 years, and Drewes has been with it for 16 of them. “It’s beautiful. People who come from out of town can get it, and everybody wants to see it.” He clearly loves being in the band. “It’s like Phantom of the Opera, except everybody here likes each other,” he says, chuckling.  

I wondered whether that interaction he has with the actors at the top of Act 2 was in the script. Says Bonvissuto, who has been with the show its entire run on Broadway, “It was suggested that there should be that kind of energy and relationship. But it’s very authentic, too. The cast really appreciates us, and we appreciate them. It’s one of the things that makes the show fun to do, even after all these years.”

Drewes can’t remember exactly how his back and forth he shares with the cast during the entr’acte started. “It happened once, and then it happens every time after that.” And while the heart of that moment is him bringing the heat, followed by Bonvissuto on the trombone, Drewes directs his praise to the actors. “Mike Scirrotto, he’s great. He’s one of the guys over there, busting my chops.”

I wonder what keeps the show interesting to do 8 shows a week for so many years. “What keeps it interesting is trying to play it without messing it up. My goal is to play a perfect show. And that keeps it interesting for me because it’s never happened,” Gardner says, laughing. “And Drewes is the same way. We’ll go, this is going to be the show, we’re going to play it perfectly. And inevitably by the third or fourth tune one of us has messed up and we’ll go okay, we’ll try tomorrow.”

Drewes agrees. “You try never to mail it in. There are days sometimes, you can’t help but not be a 10, but you try to be a 9 and a half. You have a job to do. You don’t want to be there screwing it up. And you’re playing with musicians—you don’t want to get here and suck.”

But for Drewes it seems like ultimately it always goes back to the audience. “They asked Joe DiMaggio,” he tells me, “‘Why do you play it at 10 all the time?’ And he said, ‘Because a lot of people in that crowd have never seen me play before.’”

When you’re talking to Glenn Drewes, his delight in the work is always married to a deep desire to make people feel happy.  

And underneath it all there seems to be in him a constant sense of wonder. “I’ve just been so blessed to sit beside and play with guys that I used to listen to and dream about as a kid,” he tells me. “I’m just the luckiest guy in the world. I really am. It’s not that I’m the best or anything. I’m pretty good what I do, but I’ve just been at the right place, at the right time.”

I’m sure that’s true, to some extent. But after getting to meet Glenn Drewes and talk to others about this talented journeyman who embodies so much of what it is to be a musician in New York City, I think we’re pretty lucky, too.

Thanks again to the International Trumpet Guild and Peter Wood for allowing me to publish this here. And to Glenn Drewes, who answered a card covered in my chicken scratch to do this interview, and then waited so patiently as I put it together.

If you’re interested in learning more about Glenn, you can find some great interviews on YouTube. I love this one he did a couple years ago with a couple other trumpet players. It’s a great conversation about playing the trumpet.

Photo by Matthew Murphy

When the musical adaptation of The Outsiders debuted this spring, it stunned audiences with its heartfelt score, deeply emotional performances and muscular choreography. The rumble in the rain scene alone is one of the most memorable and astonishing moments in modern Broadway history. The show would go on to win four Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Direction, Best Lightning Design, and Best Sound Design.

Equally fascinating is the Tony-nominated set design. While many musicals on Broadway today rely on elaborate sets, sometimes combined with digital effects, AMP Scenography, a design collective featuring for this project the work of Brazilian designer Tatiana Kahvegian, decided on a largely static set whose components—a truck tire, an old car, and a backdrop—could be used in various ways. The car can be an old rust heap that the Greasers fool around in or imagine themselves driving, the sofa which Ponyboy and his brothers and friends sit against in the Curtis living room, or the heart of Ponyboy’s bedroom. The backdrop can be the screen of a drive-in, the exterior wall of someone’s house, the interior wall of a church.

Even as the backdrop defines the parameters of the story, the Greasers’ essential experience as outsiders, AMP and Kahvegian’s set design ends up creating a space in which the characters themselves build their world.

I had the chance to email AMP and Kahvegian about their work on Outsiders and their collective approach.

Thanks so much for agreeing to do this. I’m really intrigued by the idea of a collective design group. How does that work?

Photo by Matthew Murphy

When referring to AMP as a design collective, it highlights our unified approach as a team of multiple designers working together to create the scenography for a stage production. AMP was created by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones with the aim of uplifting emerging and underrepresented designers through equitable collaborations. The Outsiders is AMP’s first design as a collective and Tatiana Kahvegian, a Brazilian designer of Armenian descent, is AMP’s first collaborator. Brett and Christine will collaborate with different featured partners for each AMP project.

Working collectively, like we did, feels like a microcosmos of the collective that is Theater. We believe that our joined voices and efforts surpass the individual contributions of each member. We all were actively involved in every stage of the process from the first conceptual conversations to the opening of the show. As a team, we offered support to each other at various stages, adapting our roles as necessary. Working collectively allows us to immerse ourselves fully in the production and creative process while also accommodating the demands of our personal lives when needed. 

Tatiana, how did you get connected to AMP?

I met Christine and Brett at NYU, where I did my master's degree - they were both my teachers. About two years ago, when they joined the production team of The Outsiders, they reached out to me to invite me to co-design the scenography with them as part of their brand new collective, AMP. It has been such a joy to work together. I feel very honored to be the first designer featured by AMP and hope the collective can serve as a model and inspire new ways of working collaboratively in theater.

What excited you as a collective about The Outsiders?

Photo by Matthew Murphy

It felt special to be part of creating the theatrical version of a story that is dear to so many people and that has had such an impact on teenagers all around the world. From very early on in the project, we knew that [director] Danya Taymor and AMP shared the excitement and desire to create a show that felt immediate, dynamic, physical, vulnerable, and poetically real.

Going in, what did you see as the big challenges? 

One of our challenges was to make sure that we were creating a space that translated the grittiness and rawness of the story, one that felt connected to the novel and like its own complete world to be experienced live. 

Integrating the rain to the set and show was likely the biggest technical challenge.

The Curtis family living room. [Photo by Matthew Murphy]

[The New York Times did a great piece on the rumble in the rain, which includes conversation about the synthetic rubber material AMP used for the floor, which somehow allowed for this elaborately choreographed fight sequence to happen in the rain without becoming dangerous for the actors, and also enabled the gallons of water to drain away.]

What made having a largely static set seem like the right choice? 

Photo by Matthew Murphy

We refer to the design as a “memory playground for lost boys”, as all of these combined places—the drive-in, the playground, the park, the home, the church— reside in Ponyboy’s memory. By confining the entirety of the narrative to a single setting comprised of multiple spaces, we affirm that this story is filtered through Ponyboy’s recollections. 

We were interested in finding elements that would allow our performers to interact kinetically with the environment. The core structure remains the same, but many elements are manipulated by performers to evoke different locations throughout the show (tires, wooden boards, sheets of fabric). 

We use the term “Scenography” to describe more accurately the form or process of scenic design. When considering the physical design of a production we are creating a kinetic space that moves through time, has its own beginning, middle and end, and is deeply entwined with how bodies move through space. We see Scenography as akin to choreography or cinematography. It is the art and practice of designing theatrical space.

I’m fascinated by the backdrop. It serves as so many different things—outside of a house, back wall of a church, movie theater. And other than at the end, it always conveys that sense of the characters being on the outside, even when in fact they’re inside (as in the church).

How did that design idea come about? And how is it that even in moments when the characters are inside something (like the church) they still feel like they're on the outside? 

The idea for the back wall begins with evoking the drive-in, one of the rare locations where both the Greasers and the Socs can coexist. There is a famous drive-in movie theater in Tulsa called the Admiral Twin, that was (and still is) a local hangout for teens, and was the inspiration for the Nightly Double Drive-In depicted in the novel.

Once we had established the main elements in the space: the back of the Drive-In structure, the jungle gym, the car as the Curtis boys’ home, the dirt floor of the playground, then we began to consider how the elements could transform over time to take us through the story. The back wall of the space, for us, is a poetic collage of all of these locations, so simple shifts in lighting can be used to conjure these various places, which constantly shift between indoors and outdoors.

At the end with that golden light streaming in, suddenly it feels like the characters are no longer isolated from the world, but at its center. Clearly the golden light is a big part of that. Were things done to the backdrop, as well? It’s an incredible magic trick to have the same set able to function in such opposite ways. 

At the beginning of the story, the wall represents the known world of Tulsa. As the show progresses boards are removed, and a church window appears. The wall becomes the manifestation of the church and a delivery system for the fire special effects to illustrate the burning of the church in a visceral, elemental way.

Photo by Matthew Murphy

By the end of the story, Ponyboy has glimpsed the other side, and their ideas about family and friendship, love, and loss have been forever altered. Dally rips a hole in the wall, a physical scar that is motivated by his suffering, leaving behind both this destruction and a glimpse of what's beyond. This suffering that motivates the empty spaces allows us to see the sky behind it, and at the very end, the sky feels like it is wrapping around us in gold. 

I adore the car. It definitely conveys the sense of being on the other side of the tracks as part of the outdoor scenes. But then it’s also the heart of Ponyboy’s room, where it creates a more magical feeling. And it's this thing that characters can leap on for action moments or lay on for more intimate ones. There are also moments the Greasers sit in it like it's an actual car, but it has no wheels, which is a perfect metaphor.  It’s just incredibly versatile.

How did you come up with that? 

Photo by Matthew Murphy

An early draft of the script described cars driving on and off stage like they would in the movie version. That was a daunting prospect and Danya at one point suggested there was a way to do the show with no cars. Yet, it’s hard to imagine NO cars in the show. It became clear early on that cars could be used in lateral rather than literal ways. It was important to us that as key symbols of the status and culture of the Greasers and the Soc’s, they be present onstage.

The cars are actual and metaphorical embodiments of the world of each gang. In the spirit of creating a poetic landscape, letting the run-down Greaser car exist as an anchor for the Curtis home, as well as at the center of the Greaser’s world, allowed us to show the contrast with the Soc car which enters shiny and new from a world on the other side of town that the Greasers don’t have access to.

In your work do you often try to see how a piece can function on so many levels?

Here the car has been turned into Ponyboy’s bed. [Photo by Matthew Murphy]

It is always the most fun to invent all the ways space and objects can transform. The Curtis car was generous in its uses! [Book writer] Adam Rapp pointed out that the car also symbolizes the death of their parents who died when a train hit their car and stalled on the train tracks. They are as stuck in their grief, as the car is stalled in the dirt.

Your design work has a great subtlety. The metaphors are there in the set design, but you don’t hit us over the head with them. It’s more like you’re trying to build an overall experience or feeling in us. Why did that feel important for this show?  

Theater is live. Theater is dangerous. We are passionate about creating spaces that engage the audience in imaginatively co-creating the world of the story with the performers. By building key elements like a train or a hospital bed with tires and planks, we acknowledge the theatricality of our shared endeavor to generate live transformative interactions.

We created a set of tools for Taymor and the Kupermans [the choreographers] to use, played with them in the model, and then made sure that these elements were in workshops and rehearsals from the beginning so that they could fully explore their potential. This is a memory play and we experience the story through Ponyboy, through the lens of his feelings. We were more interested in the space conveying and evoking the emotional qualities of the world than the literal facts of the locations. 

Thanks so much to AMP and Tatiana Kahvegian, and congratulations again on a tremendous piece of work.

Coming Soon: Pre-Existing Condition! The set designers of Illinoise! And Cats!

Two years ago City Center ended the 2022 season of its Encores! series with Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “And What Happened Then?” re-envisioning of classic fairy tales. The show is always a crowd-pleaser, but there was something special about Lear deBessonet’s production, a poignancy and a delight that leapt like wildfire into the crowd every night. I’ve never heard an audience cheer like they did after that show.

Among the many outstanding performances from the Woods Encores! star-studded cast—which included Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Neil Patrick Harris as the Baker, Denée Benton as Cinderella, Gavin Creel as the Prince, Julia Lester as Little Red, Ann Harada as Jack’s Mother, Annie Golden as Cinderella’s Mother, David Patrick Kelly as the Mysterious Man, and Kennedy Kanagawa as a showstopping Milky White—two years later the one I can’t stop thinking about is Tony winner Heather Headley’s haunting and often downright scary interpretation of the Witch.

Originated on Broadway in 1987 by Bernadette Peters, the Witch has lived ever after in the immense shadow of her interpretation. New actors have each added their own flavor to the role and found moments of their own, but Peters fundamentally defined who that character is and the comic sensibility with which she should be played. Her performance was so iconic, in fact, I’m not sure anyone imagined it could ever be done radically differently.

Then Heather Headley came to the stage and delivered a version of the Witch that was searing, tormented, and genuinely frightening, all while not breaking the overall feeling or shape of either the character or show. Indeed, her exploration of the Witch was so revelatory, it immediately became definitive itself. A more comic interpretation seems thin now in comparison.

I reached out to Heather early this summer to see if she’d be willing to talk about where that performance came from. Late last month we talked for an hour about her fear of Sondheim, the gifts of doing a role for just a short time, and how the pandemic and arguing with her kids helped her find her Witch.

This interview is edited for length and clarity.

Heather, thank you so much for doing this. Were you someone that had wanted to play the Witch for a long time?

You want the truth? I had no intentions, no wants, nothing to do the Witch.

Between me and you and all the people that read this, I was—was being the operative word—not a huge Sondheim fan. When I was in college I literally ran from him, and then ran from him my entire career. I think it was because Sondheim was just always so complicated. Sondheim is like *sings* E… D… many notes that are all over the place and really complicated…C. That’s him.

I’m a C major chord girl: E D C is how I like it. Flaherty and Ahrens, Tim and Elton, they’re for me. I love that kind of stuff.

And musically, Sondheim is so specific. You cannot play around with it. You can’t fake Sondheim. You can’t go in and be kind of sharp or flat, or be like That wasn’t the note, let me sing around it, because by that point the orchestra has gone and left you.  

People would say, You want to do Sondheim? You can get five million dollars per note. I’d be like Uh, No thanks, I’ll just live on ramen, it’s okay. I literally was, I think, scared of it, of doing it wrong and not understanding it.

So my agent Joe Machota called me a few years ago and said The Muny is doing Into the Woods, and they want you to be the Witch. I was like, Absolutely not. No way.

And there are some things that Joe believes in, and he just won’t take no for an answer. He said, I think it’s a good thing, the Muny’s great. Unless it’s about your children or your schedule, you’re doing it.

So there I was literally studying the music as if I was in school again. And then, like 5 or 6 years later they asked me to do it at City Center Encores!

So no, there was no thought in my mind, Let’s do Sondheim! But [having done it], it’s like when women have babies: You go through it, and the labor is very intense, and you’re like I can’t do that, and then you do, and you’re like, I did that.

And now they won’t stop calling me. I had to sing “Move On,” and I was like, I like this too!

I think it was one of these things, maybe he reached down from Heaven and he was like, It’s time you and I had peace. It’s time you and I came to a kind of a truce.

I like the fact that I came to it at this point in my life. I maybe needed the time, the age and maturity to see it the best way that I could.

Okay Sondheim, you and I are friends. We’re good.

Going into it the first time at the Muny, how did you work through your apprehension?

One of the things I love about Gary Griffin [director of the Muny production] and definitely Lear is that they allowed me to find the Witch, my Witch, on my own.

I think the beauty with the Muny and the Encores! stories is that they’re only for a certain amount of time. So you really can try new things, and kind of go, Well, if they hate it, I’m done in two weeks. My career is fine; by the time they hate me, I’m leaving town. *laughs*

So there’s this part of you that says just go for it, be as exploratory as you can be. Whereas I think sometimes you’re more trepidatious maybe if you know the show has to sit there and then they hate it for nine months.

So Gary and Lear allowed me to find this life that I wanted for her. I’m incredibly grateful for that.

Your take on the Witch is the first version I’ve seen that doesn’t seem informed by Bernadette or her comedic instincts. Your Witch felt like a woman in pain.

Here’s the thing: I get these characters, these women, and you want to play them as well as you can, right? When I got the Witch, I’m thinking, Well, she’s the bad guy. My head kind of went there, that she’s the bad guy.

But as I’m reading it that first time, I found that Sondheim did a pretty interesting thing, in that he told everybody she’s a witch, but he never says, is she a good witch, bad witch, evil witch? Nothing. He just says she’s a witch. Us as an audience, everyone in the show just takes it for granted that she’s a bad witch.

And going through it, I thought to myself, I don’t think she’s done anything wrong. Now is she the best mom? No. Am I the best mom? No. Does she have a little anger problem? Maybe. Do you want to invite her over for dinner? Maybe not. *laughs*

But nobody’s talked to her. The Baker lives next door, and he’s been there for maybe 18 years or more, but for however long he’s lived there, he’s never come over and said, How you doin’? His dad told him she’s a witch. But did you come over here to figure out if I’m a witch? No, you didn’t. I am, but you didn’t. In his eyes, she’s just a bad witch.

I think she’s lonely even before she’s turned into the ugly witch. Because the thing she asks for from the Baker’s Father is the baby. She doesn’t say Come over here and wash my car every day, or Come over here and I will do this to you. She says Give me your baby. I think she’s lonely and she wants to be a mom.

Then I was talking with my kids. The first time [I played the Witch] I’m a mother of 2 kids, the second time, with Lear, I’m a mother of 3. I remember sitting with them and I said, Who’s to blame? Who’s fault is it? And one said, Well, it’s your fault, Mom. You did all of this. One of my sons was actually quite upset. He said, You’re the bad guy. You’re the bad guy!

And I said, No, I’m not! I’m not the bad guy. And they were like, Well, She did this [to Rapunzel’s Prince], and I said, She never plucked the Prince from the tower, he fell because he was climbing up a tower for her daughter, he fell and hurt his eyes. Well, you put her up in a tower, Mom.

Headley with sons/dramaturgs Jordan and John in the New York Times, a year after the MUNY production.

And I remember thinking, just a few years ago I was told by the entire world to lock my children up in a tower, and that I would be ridiculous and stupid if I left them outside. In fact I would be vilified if they came outside, because there was a giant in the land, called Covid. I remember talking to Lear on FaceTime about that. And it just hit me, I’m doing the same thing the Witch does. Hence another reason why I kind of doubled down on Am I the bad guy? No. I’m just protecting my children.

So I think she’s a mom. And I think she’s sad that nobody has come to see her, and she’s desperate because she’s seeing that her child is growing up and asking questions. You know when you start growing up and you’re starting to move away from your mom, she’s not everything you need now. So Rapunzel is trying to fly the coop, and the Witch is like, I need to get myself together. If I get beautiful again, maybe…?

So for me, there was no hilarity about my Witch. There was no funny for her. There was only sadness, desperation, loneliness. I have three days to get myself together, and if you don’t do this for me, I’m done.

So would you say she wants to get herself together because she thinks then Rapunzel will stay, or she thinks then she’ll have more of a chance of connecting with everyone else?

I think both. The first person she goes to after she’s made whole is Rapunzel. She goes to find her and she goes Look, it’s me. Look what I am! That’s interesting. She doesn’t go, Hey, everybody! The first order of business is to find her daughter and say Come on, we can be a family now, see? I’m not that bad, right? And at that point the relationship is severed.

Remember, as the Witch she’s got power, and in her beautiful state she has nothing. She’s ordinary. That was something I also had to think about: Why trade? Because to me when she’s the Witch, there’s a certain amount of confidence as well. There’s a confidence to walk into your neighbor’s house and say, You’re going to do this for me, because I told you so.

Then the opening of the second act she’s like, Oh I’m scared, what was that? *laughs*

I honestly never wondered why she took Rapunzel instead of punishing the Baker’s parents in some other way.

Headley rehearsing part of “Stay with Me” with Shereen Pimentel (Rapunzel) at City Center.

A lot of people say she’s so mean because she took the Baker’ Father’s daughter. And I was trying to see it the other way: Why would you take a child—to be mean? Why would you lock her up in a tower—to be mean? But then you tell her that nobody would love her like you do, and you bring her everything. Why would you do that?

At any point the Witch could have been like, Get out of here, go tell you daddy to come over here, or Every year he’s supposed to bring me $5000 and two cows, or something like that. She never does. She keeps the child.

It just instructed me that she was lonely.

But in order to play it that is way I felt as though I needed—I  always say—every “i” crossed and every “t” dotted. I needed it to make sense to me and to this audience who have seen it a certain way for all of time. Here I was coming to the Encores! for these few weeks to say, What if we twist it a little bit? How does it work if we twist it?

And I was definitely grateful to Lear and to Gary, to say Yeah yeah, let’s go that way. Trust me, if something was wrong, they would say they don’t think that’s the right thing. It solidified my choice for her in that they were coming along with the journey, they were like Yes, yes, we get it.

What you’re saying is making me reconsider other things about the show. In the opening, she and Little Red are the only main characters that aren’t given a home on stage. In Red’s case, it makes sense because she’s traveling. Also her restlessness is part of her story.

But the Witch is left as an outsider, even though she is the Bakers’ next door neighbor and her issues are actually similar to theirs. She wants to be a good parent.

Suddenly the opening set design becomes a representation of the problems we’re going to find here. And it’s all being narrated to us, underlining that this presentation isn’t objective reality, it’s one person or people’s version. Their story.

That’s society, isn’t it? This is what people do in life. You hear, Oh this is the bad neighbor, and you never take time to deal with them. I think so many times in our lives that’s what we do. We just put this thing on people, and we never get to know them. There’s hurt going on right across the street, pain going on right across the street. And somebody who maybe who just wants to talk to you, and you can say hi.

So yes, she’s an outsider, but going through the same things that everybody does. She is one of them. And I think that’s why maybe she can see through all of it.

I think she is one of the better parents there, too. Yes, I locked my child up. But I Heather locked my child up, too. So am I a bad witch? I hope you’d say no.

The Baker's father never shows up to find his child. In the musical at no point does Sondheim say that the dad came looking for his child. I always thought that that was interesting.

Cinderella's dad and stepmom are terrible. The Witch’s mother, not good. But the Witch actually tries.

So yeah, I wanted all of that for her, because I thought that arc would be a little more gratifying for me, to take my Witch on that journey. And I’m so grateful and humbled that people saw that.

There’s a moment in the opening scene where the Witch talks about how she could have turned the Baker’s Father into a stone, a dog, a chair. Usually that line is a big comic moment, but there was nothing funny about your delivery. It felt like you were really considering what you could have done. It was truly menacing.

Do you know, that was a choice of mine. I remember sitting with Lear and saying, Can I try please not to make it as a joke? This is a thought-out moment, I’ve been waiting for 15 years, 16 years to come in here and talk to him, so it’s not funny. I could have turned his father into anything I wanted to and and maybe I should have. If I had I wouldn’t be in this situation. But I didn’t, so here we are.

The other thing is, I don’t know how to talk Bernadette. That diva knows how to make a joke. *laughs* It’s amazing.

I was like, I don’t know how to make a joke out of that, so let’s go the other way.

For just a taste of how scary and furious Headley’s Witch could be, check out this GIF from the MUNY production.

Honestly every photo of her from that production is filled with menace.

Headley’s Witch about to burn Jason Gotay’s Jack and Rob McClure’s Baker to the ground with her eyes.

Do you have a number or moment in the show that’s your favorite?  

This is weird, but I think that whole end when Rapunzel comes in, her death. That was a pivot for me. “Stay with Me” was great, I love “Stay with Me,” but it was just pleading. I think because of everything that we’ve talked about, [the moment of Rapunzel’s death] was Here we go. Let’s see if our work worked. If we did this right, the audience will actually feel sorry for the Witch, they’re going to be on your side here, they’re going to feel that this is really sad.

Before that in the second act there was hilarity. I get to calm down for a little bit and just be Isn’t this fun, there are giants jumping about. But then there was that pivot, and it was Here we go. We’re in. From there out, she’s in a different mode. It’s the loss of child.

Was it harder at all playing the character in Act II, dressed like a “normal person”?

The Witch look was a little harder. Even in Lion King, my features were shown. This, they were going to kind of cover some of the things that I kind of depend on, my eyes and the movement of my face.

When a costume designer says I’m taking a lot of that away, you kind of go into yourself. You really go, What do I have? I remember standing in the mirror with Lear, and there’s this big dress, so you have to really overdo your body. The only things that are out are really your fingers. I remember thinking, Oh, it’s really all in my hands.

I did ask them for uneven shoes, to get my body off-center.

Really? One of your shoes had a bigger heel than the other?

Yes. I didn’t want to fake a limp, because I thought that will come off as fake. So I said I would like one shoe taller than the other. And it did get me off center, it was more authentic. Almost angering, too, because I could not walk properly. That helped a lot.

I think it was good to be covered, because that’s how the Witch is in that first act, covered with the sadness and the depression and the anger and all this stuff. So I think it’s right that she was not able to throw her arms out and show them anything.

You also do so many interesting things with the way that you sing and speak.
I really wanted that first act to be low and gruff. I think for me some of the scariest people are not people that come in and go *hyper cheerful* HI, HOW ARE YOU DOING?—I mean, some of them are scary, too, trust me, because you don’t know where they’re going with that, you’re like Okay, you’re crazy.

There’s a lot of energy there!
Yeah you’ve got too much energy. But there’s also that scary person when they come in and there’s just that low tone, that Before you were here, your father had a child. And it's like they know all the business, they know who I am. You’re in this Hidden Depths mode.

Also, I think sometimes when you’re not well, when you’re sad and depressed, your voice kind of lowers.

For the second act, I wanted her to be chipper, so her voice is higher. It’s like Hi! You remember me? It’s me! But I was like No, we’re going to make that whole first act really low and menacing.

You’re getting all my secrets!

Ha ha ha. I could ask so many more questions! But let me offer just one more. Beyond “Move On” at Ravinia last summer, have you done any more Sondheim since City Center? Or are there other Sondheim roles you’d like to explore?

You know at one point, Chicago Shakespeare, this is years ago, had called me in with Alan Cumming. This was with Gary Griffin again. They had us sit for two days and talk through Sweeney Todd.

And it was the same approach for me. I remember thinking, What would happen if a black woman was in England living in some kind of basement back in that time? Why would she be there? And what would drive her to make pies? Maybe nobody was giving her meat? Maybe I have to kill a few people because no one is giving me anything. So here you go. And why is she in love with this guy?

Schedules didn’t allow for us to put it up, but it was going to be a different take.

I think Sondheim kind of brings out that whole “Why does this look like this?” way. I love the fact that he tells us everything and yet he doesn’t tell us everything. So you can move through his work in different ways and find these different layers to it. That’s why I’ve fallen in love with it.

So yeah, it’ll be interesting if there’s anything else. Imagine this, from the girl who didn’t do Sondheim.

My nanny introduced my children to Sweeney Todd. They are 14, 9, and 5. And the 5-year-old has been going Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd! Sweeney Todd! Sweeney Todd! I’m like, Oh no! *laughs*

Of all the musicals that they would fall in love with…. In the mornings going to school, my son’ll be like Can I play some music?, and then it’s Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd! The demon barber of Fleet Street! And I’m like Nooooo. Come and listen to some of The Lion King. Come here, work with Mommy. And he’s like No.

So that’s a big gotcha for Sondheim. He’s like If I’m not going to get you, I’m going to get your next generation. And he’s got them. He’s in my house. *laughs*

Thank you again so much for agreeing to do this.

It's funny, many times you go back to a role, and you say to yourself, Am I done with you? I think that’s the beauty with Broadway, every night you try to fix or beat what you did before. And there are some times you wake up a year later going, Oh, is that another thought?

I tried to leave everything on the stage with the Witch, but it would be fun to do her again at some point. I’ve kind of locked a little place up for her in case I need to open that Pandora’s Box again.

I remember looking at the audience at City Center, and people had their masks on, because we were still in Covid time. The giant was still outside. And there we were, trying to get through it. It was a great joy to work with Sara and Neil and everyone. I was so proud of them when they went to Broadway and did as well as they did.

I remember when Sara first sang “Moments in the Woods.” That’s when I fell in love with Sondheim, listening to her sing “Moments in the Woods.”  I remember just thinking Aw, come on, that is beautiful.

So it was the best of times, and it was the best of times.

Thanks so much to Heather Headley for sharing her experiences playing the Witch, and to her and her team for not hitting delete when they saw an email from someone who wanted to know if she’d do an interview about a show she did years ago!

You can find Heather so many places, including on Netflix, where the fourth season of her show Sweet Magnolias is coming soon; anywhere you get your music; and cross your fingers, maybe in another Sondheim show sooner than later.

Next up at Theater Wow: My interview with scenic designer Tatiana Kahvegian for her Tony-nominated work on The Outsiders.

And because it helped her love Sondheim, here’s Sara Bareilles doing “Moments in the Woods.”

In a way the thing that most turned my head when I saw Diary of a Wimpy Kid was simply the fact that it defied my expectations of a children’s theater.

You know what I’m talking about: Big bright shows filled with kids singing their hearts out. The performers are given a chance to shine and feel about good themselves, the audience (of children) is delighted. But the storytelling can feel a little simple, maybe even a little patronizing. Dumbed down. You can practically hear the adult creators behind the scenes saying, We gotta remember, this is for kids.

The stage adaptation of one of the most popular contemporary children’s book series is a prime candidate for that kind of a production. And yet, that is not all the show I found myself watching in Minneapolis. The roles were meatier, the story far more emotionally complex, the dancing and acting demanding, and the songs a ton more intricate and fun. You’re just not going to find many traditional “kid shows” referencing Sondheim, Kander & Ebb, Hitchcock, ‘70s TV shows, ‘30s sci-fi and Looney Tunes in a single song.

(For my fellow Sondheim obsessives, after I interviewed Schmuckler and Mahler about “The Fregley Song” I realized there was one melodic phrase that kept recurring kind of underneath the main melody, like an echo, that kept making me think of Sondheim.

It’s kind of lurking throughout the first minute of the song, but then at 50 seconds, right after the punchline of “All his other friends are bugs,” it emerges, Buh buh buh buh buh.

I could not let it go. Where had I heard something like that? Then I found it.

I’m sure there are many, many other children’s theater composers who look to Sondheim for inspiration. But seriously, no one references Bounce. No one.)

ANYWAY—after first seeing Wimpy Kid I did a little digging into Alan & Michael’s background, and discovered that, like original director Rachel Rockwell, they had done a whole bunch of theater involving children, as well as written music and lyrics for films and TV shows.

One of many wonderful examples:

So before our conversation ended, I asked Alan and Michael to talk a bit about writing children’s stories. Tips and traps for other composers and lyricists.

Without further ado…

Michael Mahler

You both have done quite a bit in shows about children, right?

AS: Yes.

How do you do that well? What tips might you offer for composers writing musical theater about children. Or tips and traps?

MM: I think you the the nail on the head when you said Punch up, don’t punch down. In my experience, kid audiences are the best you’ll ever get when it comes to honesty. Because they haven’t learned yet to be polite and enjoy a thing because they paid x number of dollars for it. If they like it they sit there and they like it and if they don’t like it, you know it immediately. As soon as you see them wiggling and not paying attention it’s like Okay, we are not pulling this thread along tightly enough. It sort of tells you immediately where the show is saggy and where you can do better work.

I think that has helped us immeasurably, to have that barometer for our earliest shows.

And—I think Jeff Kinney does this brilliantly, and that’s why his books are so good— it’s about being honest to what [being a kid] felt like.  When we started writing Wimpy Kid, Alan and I talked a lot about what being in middle school felt like, what our experiences were and what the sounds were that we were drawn to then. We talked about being big into Green Day or whatever was that music that felt like Oh this is what it feels like to be in middle school, because everything is new! But everything is terrifying!

Just trying to be truthful to that experience, not sort of parody it or characterize it but actually to kind of put it out there and be brave about that is the best thing that I think you can do as a writer.

I think that’s true of all theater, but I don’t know maybe it’s a bit trickier with children’s theater? But I think it's still kind of the same muscles.

AS: Green Day incidentally is where “the middle of it all, bum, buh dum, bum bum buh dum, bum, buh dum, bum bum buh dum” [in “The Middle of It All”] comes from.

That electric guitar gesture came from early conversations about Man, middle school reminds us of the ‘90s, so let’s write some ‘90s pop.

I totally see that.

AS: And funnily enough, it’s not like the show is a show whose musical vocabulary is ‘90s pop, but that was one of the first songs we wrote, and we were searching for a musically, emotionally honest way in that would delight us. And that felt good at the time and it stuck.

Alan, your thoughts on tips or traps for writing for or about children?

Alan Schmuckler

AS: I would say like with anything else you gotta want to do it. It's got to feel like a story you want to tell.

And then let me answer—I pulled this up while you were asking the question, it’s an article from Howl Round more than decade ago that Steven Dietz wrote that I think about all the time when I think about this. Can I read the beginning of it?

Sure.

AS: It’s called “Theater of the Young, for The Young.”

Let's you and I build the perfect audience for our new play. While we may differ on a few details, I'll bet that our ideal audience would share some of these traits:

They would be Eager—they'd rush to their seats, they'd want to sit up close, they would not want to leave when it was over.

They would be Engaged—leaning forward, hungry for action and image and story and surprise. They would not sit with their arms folded across their chests.

They would be Open—open to experimentation, to newness, to things they have never seen before in a play.

They would be Demanding—they'd bust us when our play got boring or maudlin or vague or preachy or pretentious.

They would be Vocal—they'd hoot at the good jokes and gasp at the surprising stuff. They'd cheer when it was over, and then ask the hardest and truest questions imaginable.

And they would be Committed—they'd likely want to come back the next day and see the play again.

There's a name for this ideal audience. They are called kids. If only we got to write for them. How amazing that would be.

The fact is we don't write for kids. We write for their gatekeepers. Of course we have kids in mind when we write. But we don't write our plays for them. Not directly.

…

He goes on to say,

But let's please admit this: we don't dumb things down for our kids—we dumb things down for us. To mollify our own fears. We don't make upbeat endings or "easy morals" for our kids—we make them for us. To avoid what might be the harder discussion. We don't censor (and please let's drop the euphemisms and use the word) plays for our kids—we censor them for ourselves.

It’s a phenomenal article that talks about to write for an audience that includes young members is just to write good, basically. And this is what Rachel instilled in us, and what we tried in Wimpy Kid, as Mike said and you said, to not punch down. For me, it feels like Oh, this is the best thing I can write, this is the most enjoyable.  I don't want to shut kids out, but I also don’t want to shut adults out.

Somewhere later in that essay Dietz says, I'll paraphrase, All of us are either currently young, formerly young or recently young. And we don’t grow beyond that kid, we like, grow on top of that kid. And that ideal perfect audience that's engaged and eager and demanding and committed, it's a part of all of us, whether we are currently that young wide open age or we’ve stacked our adolescence and our adulthood on top of it. It’s there within all of us.

And to write to that is to delight honestly the greatest number to people.

Writing work that grips, that can grip a lot of people and move a lot of people and delight lot of people, that I think is to write not “kids’ shows” but to write the way, if we’re lucky, that Pixar writes, and the way Disney writes, material that speaks not to a “kid” but to being young, which is something we all know.

I’m thinking of your show as you’re saying that, and it fits perfectly.

As someone who lives in New York, so often I’m considering theater in terms of Broadway. But when I saw Wimpy Kid in Minneapolis, I found myself thinking, I don’t care if this show ever comes to New York, because it’s going to have a long life in a million places.

At the same time, I was thrilled that you released a cast album last Christmas with such great performers (including Kevin!). Is Broadway any part of a future calculus for you guys, or does it not matter?

MM: Speaking for myself, I'm with you, as long as it has a life, as long as people get to see it and enjoy it, I’m good. I think that the Broadway stamp, if you will, can be a blessing or a curse.

If it's good enough to stand on its own merit, God speed, you know? That’s all that we can control anyway. So what will be will be. I just hope it continues to get out there.

AS: I second what Mike said, absolutely.

On opening night in Minneapolis our lead producer Kevin McCollum of Alchemation was there. He turned to me as soon as the curtain came down and was like, We gotta make an album. I’m so happy that it exists.  

Thanks again to Alan Schmuckler, Michael Mahler and Kevin del Aguila for talking to me about Diary of a Wimpy Kid! It was a huge pleasure.

If you missed the prior interviews, here’s the complete set.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book Writer Kevin del Aguila

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Composer/Lyricists Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler Part 1 Part 2

I’ve got some more fun interviews bubbling. Thanks for reading.

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Before we get into the second part of my conversation with Wimpy Kid composing team Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler, which began yesterday with a discussion of the origins of the work, I need to set a scene.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid tells the story of Greg Heffley, a middle school kid who wants to be popular. And over the course of the musical, his attempts go further and further awry, until he’s even alienated his BFF Rowley.

At this point another kid at school, a strange little guy known only as “Fregley,” invites Greg to come hang out at his house. Having really nowhere else to go, Greg agrees.

What follows is a hilariously weird scene and song that I have been obsessed with ever since seeing it performed. You can hear the song below, and you really should listen to it before reading on.

Also, as noted both by Alan and Michael and book writer Kevin del Aguila earlier this week, Wimpy Kid director Rachel Rockwell, the original shining light for this show and many others, sadly died in 2018, while the show was being rewritten.

In March of 2020 it was announced that a new version of the show would be performed, once again at the Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis. The pandemic delayed that production until the summer of 2022.

Michael, Rachel, and Alan during the initial development of Wimpy Kid.

Was that new version of Wimpy Kid in 2022 radically different from the original?

Alan Schmuckler: Define radically.

Were there major changes in structure, story, or song?

AS: The short answer is yes. The slightly more thorough answer is: Zoomed all the way out it was still a musical adaption of Diary of a Wimpy Kid and structurally it was still the story of Greg Heffley and his trials and tribulations, and his friendship with Rowley being one thing, then being challenged, and becoming another thing.

Zoomed further in, but not much further in, there were some big changes. There were a bunch of new songs written. Especially in the second half there were some important structural changes to help clarify the storytelling. There were new orchestrations.

Michael Mahler: We moved the act one finale from Halloween to the winter talent show so that it would feel more like intermission was winter break. Screws were tightened and things were we hoped improved from what we learned from the first production.

But like Alan said, the heart of it was basically the same.

There’s a moment in the second act that changed my whole experience of the show: “The Fregley Song”. We’re deep into the story at this point, and out of the blue, we’re brought into this whole new world, with such a different and weird point of view. We’ve met Fregley before, so this isn’t an introduction, per se, but it is like, all of a sudden, his “I Want” song.

And in addition to the music and lyrics, which I want to talk about, what impressed me is that it fits perfectly with where Greg’s at in his journey; he’s screwed up so badly, he has no one left to hang out with. But at the same time it is its own unique and wonderful little episode, too.

AS: I think we were all really proud of that moment. Marrying the episodic nature of the source material with a satisfying two act musical structure that holds your attention from beginning to end has been one of the important parts of getting it right. It’s something we worked really hard at.

Where did you start in conceiving that song?

Sam Mandell and Huxley Westemeier as Fregley and Greg in the 2022 Minneapolis production.

AS: Let me try to answer that by telling you the brief history of how that song came to be in that spot.

In the first draft, which again, we wrote very quickly, there was another song there called “Tickle Fight” which came from, Okay so the moment is there’s a tickle fight, so the song’s called “Tickle Fight”, and maybe it sounds like this.

It worked alright. But I think it was actually cut before the original Minneapolis production.

MM: That’s right. The original production didn’t have a song for Fregley. Just a scene.

AS: The song was kind of a solid B effort; it was alright, it wasn’t quite landing. And we knew Kevin could write a scene that would work, because Kevin’s the best. So he wrote a scene that accomplished what the moment needed to accomplish. In the original Minneapolis production that scene was there, no song was there, it worked fine, we went on.

Usually you develop a show for years and then you get a production. We kinda got a production and then developed the show for years.

*Mike laughs*

So after that first production, in fact while that first production was running, we went back to the drawing board, knowing that we wanted something that felt different from the rest of the show, that felt weird. I think we’re both always drawn to a kind of Sondheim/Kander & Ebb pastiche kind of thing—something like that always feels familiar and fun and weird and intuitive to the two of us.

So we wrote a first draft of “The Fregley Song” and tried it out with the original Minneapolis cast during their run, during the day before they then went back and did the show that they had rehearsed.

MM: The OG Fregley, this kid named Soren [Thayne Miller], totally killed the song. We were like, Oh, this is good.

So did that song ever go into the original production, or were you just testing it out for later?

AS: Testing it out for later. The rehearsal bandwidth did not exist to change the 2016 production of the show beyond opening night for its run.

Wow.

AS: It was a testament to Peter Brosius and the folks at Children’s Theatre at the time, including first and foremost the cast itself, who were asked essentially to workshop some new material with us concurrently with doing the show that they had rehearsed. They were all game and really kind.

So the fun of the song is the constantly escalating weird and creepy details that we get about Fregley’s world—There are cobwebs on the walls of his house; he has only bugs for friends; and because he doesn’t have sisters he keeps a long blonde wig around.

Did you pull those details from the books?

MM: Some of it is a lift and some of it is our own twisted creation. Really it just came down to us trying to make each other laugh. I think when we’re working together the stuff that we laugh at the hardest stays in the show usually. We knew the character and we knew the kind of extremes he goes to in the books, and the weird things that  Jeff Kinney allowed to be possible, and we just tried to crack each other up.

AS: That’s totally it. A good example of that is “You wanna see my room, or look at my blisters.” I think that is a lift from the book. Lyrically, my brain tends to want to know the back rhyme first and then work backwards. I want to know what it feels like to land at the satisfying rhyme and then look back to see what I have to do to set it up.

But “sisters” rhymes with blisters, [which got to] “I haven’t got sisters, just a long blonde wig.” And the implication of that is hilarious and disturbing, so, great, on we go.

I tend to not like working lyric-sequential like that, it seems a little more exposed and unsure. But when you’re served up something, you kind of find your way to the other side, and that can be its own version of delightful.

Another line that I so admire is the opening: “Would you like to come inside?” It’s the normal thing a nervous kid might ask when he’s having someone over, but then it’s also very much the introduction to so many creepy horror stories, a great set up for what is to come.

Were those dual layers with you from the start?

AS: If memory serves, I think it was, the song has to start somewhere, and it must have made us laugh to even start the song there with that music in that kind of tone.

Again, I get squirrelly to start at the beginning because I never know where to go next. It feels much safer to me and reliable to me to drive toward the middle and then build outward. But I think we probably wrote that near the beginning and it was like, Well, that seems creepy, sure let’s go there and see. 

By the time we get to his bedroom about halfway through the song, it’s hard to imagine how things could possibly get weirder. But then not only are his shelves filled with ventriloquism dolls, the dolls speak and tell Greg to run.

AS: That’s a good example of how shows develop tiny decision by tiny decision. That line with the dolls saying to Greg “Run Greg Run” was Greg saying it to himself up until maybe the most recent production in Minneapolis. Or maybe there was a demo when something decided on a whim to give it to the dolls?

I say this to remind myself when I get discouraged, if there's anything that you’re delighting in, it is highly unlikely that it sprang fully formed from nothingness into What a delightful idea. It probably took a couple of years and a couple of iterations and on a whim someone had an idea that took it from like, B+ to A-. And that can make all the difference.

Were there any ideas that you came up with that actually seemed too disturbing?

MM: Probably. *laughs*

We had a lot of fun with him. He is super excited, but he’s also got these weird archaic formalities, like he wants to introduce his mother. He’s a kid who this has never happened to, and doesn’t really understand like, social cues or what is done. And so being able to play in that and find the juicy bits was really fun.

And I guess we probably were pulling from our own deep-down middle school insecurities and feelings of being an outcast and slightly awkward.

AS: In the midst of all the bananas-ness of that song, the lyric I’m probably most proud of in the whole show is “I get lonely at school ‘cuz nobody likes me,” which he belts at the top of his lungs in the middle of that song and all of a sudden is the most honest thing that anyone says in the show. And it resonates in a BIG way with little middle school Alan and little middle school Mike, too.

It’s not played for pathos, it’s just Fregley-honesty. And I think having him say that, or “Loneliness strikes me, but I shrug no big” and he just kind of moves on, again, it’s not meant to be dramatic, but it is meant to be as honest as the rest of it, and there’s something about that that I think hopefully leavens “I haven’t got sisters, just a long blonde wig.”

MM: Right. He has no artifice. Everything he is saying is just his truth. He’s not doing a thing, he’s not like, setting a trap, he’s literally just speaking his truth and asking for what he wants.

Which is what Greg needs.

MM: Yeah. Greg is constantly gaming and trying to say the right thing or saying the thing that will get him ahead.

AS: Fregley is my favorite character in the show.

Musically there’s so much going on in the song. Early on you can hear Addams Family and Beetlejuice, but also like, the Partridge Family with that keyboard sound?

MM: Yes.

And there’s that muted trumpet, which is almost like a soft-shoe.

AS: Mm-hmm.

And then there are these other sections where the orchestra swells as Greg pours himself out. It’s like he’s suddenly in the spotlight, which feels pretty different musically and yet it all works so well together.

MM: That’s sort of the joy of musicals. It was really gratifying.

I think all of those references you point to were part of the primordial stew of the number. There’s Addams Family, there’s Partridge Family, and there’s, like, “Rose’s Turn.”

“Rose’s Turn,” oh my God, that’s it.

MM: Those are all sort of living in all the little bits and ideas that make up Mike and Alan, and they kind of get squeezed through the Mike-and-Alan filter and turn into our own ideas.

AS: Yes.

In the opening section you have the muted trumpet and that weirdly delicious keyboard. Were there other works or composers you were drawing on for inspiration?  

AS: For me it’s Kander and Ebb and it’s Sondheim and it’s their orchestrators from that work, mixed with kind of the vibraphone? And there’s a lot of old Looney Tunes in there. Who’s the Looney Tunes composer?

MS: Carl Stalling. 

AS: Thank you, Carl Stalling. There’s a lot of Carl Stalling. 

MM: Oh yeah, all over the score.

AS: You know where it comes in really clear, it’s a tiny nothing thing but it really delights me: In the song when Fregley sings “And when I feel blue, there’s not much to do here,” there’s a solo bass clarinet that goes buh buh buh buh buh that feels very Carl Stalling.

The muted trumpets are like, Sondheim doing pastiche, and Kander & Ebb doing themselves.

Ah yeah, there’s a Mr. Cellophane element, isn’t there?

AS: 1000 percent.

MM: Totally. He’s like the Child Cellophane. *laughs*

Not to tell Alan how he wrote, but there’s also little sprinkles of old sci-fi movies.

AS: Oh yes.

MM: It was sort of all the things that tickled us about the moment.

AS: There are a couple of definite horror movie gestures, too. Something interesting is that Mike adores horror movies and I like, physically can’t tolerate them. That contrast probably works in our favors. There are a couple of string stabs--

MM: The Psycho run.

AS: Yes, the Psycho run string stabs. There’s a bunch of horror movie gestures. The effect on Jessie’s vocal when she says “Stay out of the baseMENT” is silly but also meant to be a genuinely scare-you horror movie effect on her voice. And there’s the sound of glass smashing. Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff.

MM: There’s also a little soupçon of Billie Eilish, totally-weird-out-of-place-in-a-music-piece sounds that take your ear to somewhere where you go This is not right, something is amiss.

If I could circle back to one thing: Carl Stalling.

MM: He was the composer for all of the Looney Tunes music. So every Looney Tunes cartoon that ever existed, being orchestrated within an inch of its life to the action on the screen, that’s all him.

It’s funny, this is a tangent, but I have a 6-year-old now, and he’s big into the Looney Tunes. And you don’t really notice it when you’re just watching them as a child and laughing your face off, but oh man, the work it was to literally musicalize every movement on a screen, not only to write it but then to time it out, it’s just amazing what that guy did.

AS: You should check out the album compilation of the recording sessions for Looney Tunes tracks.

One of the recordings from that album.

AS: There was no Pro Tools, there is no multitracking, it’s Carl or Carl’s conductor and all of them on a sound stage with literally a metronome going click click click before they roll to give them the tempo. And they just do it.

And when someone messes us, they go hang on hang on hang on and they back it up and they do it again. It’s wild. So cool.

It’s amazing, in the cartoons the music is so precise and seems so error free that you don’t even notice it.

MM: Exactly. The amount of work that it takes to be unnoticed.

*They laugh*

AS: That’s right.

Tomorrow, in the final part of our conversation, we talk tips and traps in writing compelling work for and with children.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Week: Book Writer Kevin Del Aguila

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Week: Composer/Lyricists Schmuckler and Mahler, Day One

Composers and lyricists Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler have kind of done it all. They met in Chicago at Northwestern, and for more than a decade worked both together and alone on shows in Chicago, winning awards and a lot of praise.

Mahler still lives in Chicago, where he works as an actor, music director and composer/lyricist, while Schmuckler now lives on the East Coast. But they continue to work together and also delight in each other, as I discovered earlier this spring when I interviewed them by phone about doing the music and lyrics for Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Our conversation roamed widely, from the development of the show to a deep dive into one song and more general thoughts about writing shows for and about children, which both have done throughout their careers. And so I’ve split our conversation into three parts, one on each topic.

Today you’ll hear about how they first came to the show. A big part of that conversation ends up being about Rachel Rockwell, the talented and beloved Chicago actress and director who was the show’s guiding light in its first iteration. As book writer Kevin del Aguila mentioned yesterday, Rachel was diagnosed with cancer during the show’s development, and after a period in remission died of cancer as the show was being rewritten and prepared for a second mounting.

Rachel is clearly a major part of why the show is the success that it is, and I’m glad we were able to talk about her as much as we did.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is such a massive series, 18 books so far plus adaptations. And your cast is pretty sprawling. What went into deciding who and what to include?

Alan Schmuckler: When we got the job, Mike and Kevin del Aguila and I were told Hey, check out the first couple books. We were not like, marching-ordered into what to adapt, but we were certainly at the time, as neophytes to the canon, pointed in the right direction.

And I think it became clear to the three of us who the main characters were in Jeff Kinney’s world—Greg and his family and his closest friends and the teacher characters. We also watched the first movie or two, because there have been a bunch of adaptations in a bunch of different mediums.

Michael Mahler: Even since we started there have been new movies and adaptions.

AS: So yeah, I think we drove toward the center and found a world that was right for adaptation.

MM: And I think working with Kevin, it came down to making sure that we were telling a cohesive story. The book is written to be so episodic, little funny comic happenings throughout Greg’s year. In adapting it into a musical we wanted to give it as much of a throughline all the way through as we could.

So that kind of became our guiding star: What do we need to include, and how do we structure this story in a way that has a beginning and a middle and an end that feels satisfying on stage.

I know you’re both composers and lyricists. In terms of this show, how did that process work?

AS: Mike and I have been writing together for more than 20 years at this point. And broadly speaking we’ve spent about half of that time living down the street from each other, and half living a quarter of a country away from each other. Which is to say, through our professional lives together, we’ve come up with a number of very different ways of collaborating, all towards the goal of, you know, Mike and Alan wrote a song, here it is. 

When we started Wimpy Kid, I had moved not long before from Chicago back home to the East Coast where I’m from originally. So when we first started writing it, we tried Hey, why don’t you try writing this song, why don’t I try writing that song. And there’s probably still some traces of that work in the score. But not a lot: Developing this show [became like] what usually happens to the two of us. Songs tend to be built when the two of us are working together, and not putting lyric on top of music or music on top of lyric, but idea on top of idea. Most of the time it’s the two of us starting with no song and then both kind of putzing around until there is a song.  

MM: I think that even the stuff in the show that exists now and started as one of our ideas, we both got our grubby little hands on. And a lot of our favorite stuff we came up together nose to nose. I remember we came up with "Stuck in the Middle" when we were in a work session at Chicago Theater and we were supposed to be working on something else.

We ran off into a corner, grabbed a piano and wrote "Stuck in the Middle."

AS: That’s right.

MM: Or we wrote “Animal Heart” in a two-hour panic before rehearsal started for the first workshop, because we needed something and we knew the cast was coming in. So we just sat at the piano that morning and we were like, What if it’s this?

That song has remained the show basically unchanged since that like, panicked puke sesh in Minneapolis. *laughs*

That’s wild.

AS: By the way, that “Animal Heart” story is also a real credit to Rachel Rockwell [director of the original production at Minneapolis’s Children’s Theatre Company].

We could spend the whole conversation talking about Rachel. We were hired to write the show originally with very very little lead time up to the first production. So Mike and I and Kevin were really scrambling to get a a draft together that a cast could read. And I remember coming to that workshop without this song written for the “Animal Heart” spot, and I remember thinking to myself, It’s a first workshop. Surely we can say Hey everyone there’s going to be a fun song here, etcetera etcetera. And we felt that out with Rachel, and Rachel, in her very Rachel kind-but-firm manner, made it clear that that would not fly, that there must be a song there.

*Mike laughs*

AS: And because of the depth of our admiration for her and our respect for her, once she made it clear to us that that would not fly, the only option available to us was the aforementioned puke session. We really couldn’t let Rachel down. She was setting the bar for us and we had to rise to it. So we panicked and wrote “Animal Heart”.

Was Rachel involved from the very beginning?

MM: Oh yeah, she was the one who brought us on board. She had a relationship with the producer Kevin McCollum and they were working with Minneapolis’s Children’s Theatre Company to bring Wimpy Kid to life. I believe there was another team that was slated to write the book and lyrics and music that didn’t work out, so Rachel said I know these two guys, y’all should meet them. And it was kind of a quick arranged marriage, because we’d never met Kevin before. Rachel brought us all together at a coffee around a breakfast restaurant in Oak Park, Ill. and sort of laid out the trajectory.

We were so excited to work with Rachel, to work at the theater, to work on this property. Yeah she was sort of the founder of the feast of it all.

And how did you know her originally? Or, how did she know you?

MM: Oh God, Rachel was one of the first persons who hired me to work as an actor in Chicago. I think Alan the same. We did children’s theater with her, and we got to be sort of be there on the ground floor as she became the force of nature director that she became. She directed the first show you ever wrote, right Alan?

AS: Yeah, Rachel got me my Equity card when I was still acting. She directed the first musical I ever wrote my own solo music and words to. Rachel was one of the first maybe two or three people in the industry who pointed to me and to Mike and pointed to our work as separate artists and our work as a team and said I trust those guys; I want to work with those guys. I cannot overstate how responsible she is for any success Mike and I have in our lives today.

Wow. I understand why you say we could just talk about her.

AS: I miss her every day. And the hole she has left these many years after she’s passed remains really, really large.

There’s some great interviews with Rachel online. This one, in which we talks about directing The Sound of Music, has great some insights into how she thinks about telling stories that involve children.

Was children’s theater always her thing?

AS: No. In Chicago theater, where Mike is still a shining star, and where I spent my 20s and Rachel started, children’s theater is very much a gateway drug. A lot of actors get their Equity card doing children’s theater. The first show Mike and I ever wrote as a team (he was 22, I was 21) was a children’s theater show. I think a couple of Rachel’s first moments of traction as a director/choreographer were in Chicago doing children’s theater. She’d been an actor; I think she was in the Ragtime national tour.

MM: I think so. She’d done a million things in Chicago, too. She was sort of all over the place. It was her doorway into the directing/choreographing world in that city. This was quite a few years ago, and it still is a boys’ club but it certainly was then, and she had to blaze her own trail.

But she took it seriously. A lot of the material she was given to work on early on wasn’t necessarily great, and she always brought her A game and treated it like theater, not like something lesser, not Oh well this is just something for the kids. She always wanted it to be really good. 

Doing work that was inclusive of children, I think that was part of her mission, in addition to directing incredible adult pieces like Ride the Cyclone or the production of Ragtime that she did in Chicago that was such a huge success.

AS: Oh god that was so good. Her Ragtime was so good.

A scene from Rachel’s production of Ragtime.

MM: It was amazing. They literally expanded Drury Lane Oakbrook Theatre to fit her production.  

All of which is to say, I don’t think she ever treated the two kinds of theater differently. It was like, This is theater and we’re going to do it really well, and we’re going to respect our audience and we’re going to improve the material and work with good people.

Probably my biggest surprise in seeing the show was that it was filled with middle school kids, it’s adapted from a children’s book series, but it does not all feel in tone or challenge for the actors like a children’s theater show. It’s very much punching up, not punching down. (I’m not sure if that’s the right metaphor?)

MM: Yeah, that was all Rachel. And we knew going into it, and Rachel knew too, that we would sort of have to build a Greg. She had just done an amazing job of Billy Elliot and it was the same thing: You find a kid and you know they can do it and then you sort of build them up to it. You like, walk them up the mountain.

She was so good at that. She was so good at working with young actors and as you said, not punching down, not expecting any less of them just because they were young. She set really high bars and helped them to jump over them. It was cool to watch.

The Chicago Tribune described Rachel’s 2015 production of Billy Elliot at Drury Lane (above) as one Chicago finally “could call its own, a fresh, original, intimate staging reflecting the city’s signature deep emotional connection, its understanding of gruff, blue-collar men who still know how to cry, its love of neighborhood community.”

It would go to win Jeff awards both for Rockwell’s choreography and lead actor Nicholas Dantes’ performance, which Tribune writer Chris Jones said “has an implicit sadness that none of the others [that he had seen in New York, London, and the Broadway touring company] so well conveyed. All he does seems to flow from and through his pain.”

In developing the show, then, was it always the goal to cast kids at the characters’ ages?

MM: Yeah, she always had that very clear in her head. It even affected how we wrote the score, because if you’re writing for high school kids, then all the boys’ voices would have changed. And she was like No, we want to have unchanged boy voices, and I think she's right. It really speaks to that weird, particular moment in a human’s development where they’re right on the cusp of GIRLS or BOYS or whatever, and like, not quite all the way there but knocking at the door.

Something about having that unchanged purity in the voice of the lead characters does all of that work for you without having to spend scenes and scenes talking about it. It was really I think a masterstroke.

Tomorrow, we talk about the rewrite of Wimpy Kid and second production in 2022, and dive deep into the writing of one of its new tunes, “The Fregley Song.”

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Week: Kevin Del Aguila

When Some Like It Hot debuted on Broadway in late 2022, the aspect of the show’s that immediately stole people’s hearts was the reimagining of the Jerry character from the beloved Jack Lemmon/Tony Curtis movie as someone for whom wearing women’s clothes unlocks their true self, Daphne.

Key to that journey of discovery is the millionaire Osgood Fielding III, who shows up late in the first act and promptly falls in love with Daphne. Played by Kevin del Aguila, Osgood is by turns eccentric and unexpectedly vulnerable. His song to Daphne, “Fly, Mariposa, Fly” is one of the show’s most emotional moments. And Kevin would go on to be nominated for a supporting actor Tony for his work.

After I saw the show I happened to mention to my nephew Patrick how much I loved it. And he said, “Oh, my friend Kevin is in that! He’s so nice!”

Patrick is himself a professional actor, with credits as the understudy for Young Cary Grant in 2022’s Flying Over Sunset at Lincoln Center, one of Virginia Woolf’s nephews in The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera, and, soon, Alec Baldwin’s grandson in the film Rust. He was also on SNL a few years ago, and he was delightful.

Not long after Patrick did SNL, he got cast to be the lead in a musical adaptation of the beloved children’s books, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, at Minneapolis Children’s Theatre. Composed by Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler, with a book by Kevin del Aguila, it was actually the second time round for the show, having first debuted there in 2016.

The thing that stunned about the show was its complexity. Normally when I hear “children’s theater” I assume I’m going to get something sweet but ultimately kind of simple.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid definitely has a sweetness to it, but this tale of a middle schooler whose drive to be popular ends up undermining his relationships had unexpected emotional depth, as well rich characters, dozens of inventive songs, and challenging production numbers involving over 20 middle school age actors. And the performances were outstanding. Rather than a local children’s theater production, it very much felt like a Broadway show on tour.

Ever since I saw Wimpy Kid, I’ve been wanting to talk to its creators about this jewel of a show. And Schmuckler, Mahler, and del Aguila all very generously agreed to be interviewed.

If you’re not familiar with the show, the producers released an album last Christmas featuring Norbert Leo Butz, Sutton Foster, Jessie Mueller and Kevin del Aguila.

And here’s “The Middle of It All (Part 1)", which introduces Greg and the characters.

Kevin, how did you first get involved with Wimpy Kid? 

In 2015, a producer I was working with called and told me that a Wimpy Kid musical was scheduled to be part of the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company’s 2016 season and they were looking for new writers for it. He asked me to spend the next 24 hours reading as many Wimpy Kid books as I could and immediately put me on a plane to Chicago to meet the director Rachel Rockwell. I had dinner with her, we gabbed about middle school and wimpy-ness, and she introduced me to a couple of composer/lyricists that she knew from working in Chicago theater — Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler. The next day I was told we all had the job and started figuring out how to adapt these books for the stage.

It was definitely an “arranged marriage” between me and these strangers in the creative team. We barely new each other, but we had to write as fast as possible because the production date was looming and there was no time to waste. It could have gone HORRIBLY wrong. Luckily, everybody was talented, sane, and shared a similar sense of humor. Plus, the source material was so fun. The fact that we genuinely liked what we were adapting was a great help. Jeff Kinney [author of the books] came to see a reading of our first draft and loved it. We were so relieved.

The one giant wrinkle was that right before we went into rehearsals, Rachel was diagnosed with cancer. She insisted on continuing to direct and choreograph the show while undergoing chemo treatment. I can’t believe she actually did it. It was incredible to behold. Miraculously, her cancer went into remission after the production opened. She always said that being surrounded by kids and all of the laughter and joy she felt while working on the show was partly responsible.

Sadly, the cancer returned a few years later and we lost her. [More on Rachel, and the amazing work she did on this show and others, tomorrow.]

After a long search for a new director, Jenn Thompson came into our lives. With her fresh perspective, we got to rethink and rewrite parts of the show that we didn’t have time to address in our rush into production before, and we presented the reimagined show back at the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company in 2022. It was strange to see the show back on that same stage again, but after Rachel’s passing and all the darkness of the pandemic, watching an audience and a new cast of kids laugh and delight in the piece again was like a glimmer of hope returning to the world.

There are so many rich characters and stories in the piece. Was it challenging to try and figure out how to serve all of them?

There were characters that we knew fans of the books would expect to see, like Rodrick, Patty Farrell, Fregley, etc. The trick was figuring out how to integrate them in a natural way that propelled Greg's story. Even though the books are very episodic, we were very aware that we wanted the show to have a clear throughline and worked to keep the ancillary characters that pop up tied to Greg’s main goals. Some characters like Greg’s Dad were hard to crack because his relationship to Greg in the books isn’t so clear-cut and doesn’t really play a big part in Greg’s quest for popularity at school. 

I’m very proud of the way we got the Joshie character in the show. [In the books, Joshie is a Europop singer whom Greg’s best friend Rowley worships.] I thought he was such a funny character in the books (and one that sings, so he seemed a natural for the musical). Jeff Kinney said he’s glad he wasn’t involved in development with us initially, because based on his experience while developing the Wimpy Kid films, he was convinced that translating Joshie from the books to the stage would never work. He was thrilled to be wrong!

What's it like being a book writer? How would you describe the collaboration between composer, lyricist and book writer? What got you into it? 

Honestly, it kind of stinks being a book writer. If the show works, nobody really notices your work and praises all of the songs. If a show doesn’t work, they always blame the book. Being a book writer is like being the maker of a jewelry display case. You want your work to be air-tight and attractive, but its sole purpose is to draw all attention to the diamonds inside of it. Nobody says, “What a wonderful display case!” when the diamonds are placed in the perfect context, shining their brightest. 

The collaboration between composer, lyricist, and book writer can be tricky if everyone isn’t on the same page trying to tell the same story. Usually the book writer outlines the story, giving it some kind of structure and suggesting song moments throughout. From there, everybody starts to pitch in so that all departments are in alignment, working toward the same goal.

Usually, everything the book writer does always defers to the lyrics/music since they’re what’s happening at the most emotional points of the story. Whatever the composer/lyricists want to cannibalize from the book is fair game. In our 2016 production, we cut a song written for Fregley because it just wasn’t working and replaced it with a scene that I wrote. It was fine, but we all knew that the section really deserved a song.

For the 2022 production, Alan wrote a totally different song, but based it on the scene I had written, adding his own flourishes and taking it even further. It was an instant hit. Finally, Fregley had a musical moment that fit his character and brought down the house. [NB: It absolutely did. Stay tuned for more on that later this week.]

I stumbled into writing musicals. I was a playwright who was asked to write the book for a show called Altar Boyz that had gone through three book writers who couldn’t make the premise work. Once I was brought on board, I was happily surprised to find that I had a knack for musical structure and a feel for setting songs in dramatic context. The show was an off-Broadway hit that ran for almost five years and put me on the theatrical map. I’ve been writing musicals ever since.

You have so many interesting aspects to your career, each of which seem like they demand a lot. What made this story one that you wanted to tell?  And what was it like for you?

The Wimpy Kid books are genuinely funny. That made working on the show such a delight. We really wanted to capture the sensibility and experience of the books but also wanted to give the story a bit of heart. 

We talked a lot about how every experience seems bigger than life when you’re in middle school, and that’s what we thought could really “sing” when adapting these books into a musical. Middle school is this crazy transitional time of life when you’re thrust into a world of kids growing at different rates, new responsibilities, new social anxieties. You’re coming out of kid-dom and barreling toward teen-hood. It’s the time when you start to realize that the world doesn’t totally revolve around you anymore and you have to think about others. Having Greg realize that becoming best dressed or best dancer in school means nothing if you don’t have a best friend was a great way to dramatize that idea. It’s been so satisfying to watch audiences and fans of the books embrace the show so fully. 

Big thanks to Kevin for agreeing to do this, and to my nephew Patrick, who was kind enough to let me mention that I was his uncle!

Tomorrow: Part One of Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler!

There’s a moment in the tremendous off-Broadway show Dead Outlaw where Elmer McCurdy’s ex-girlfriend Maggie walks from where she’s standing stage right to the band set. She steps up to the mike and sings this unexpectedly beautiful, heartfelt song. And this web of lights hanging from the stage left corner of the net quietly come up and paint her in this gorgeous, tender light. It’s of a pitch-perfect piece with actress Julia Knitel’s performance, a transfiguration of the set that allows us to see what’s inside the heart of this young woman who loved Elmer and then discovered he was a total mystery to her.

Throughout the show there are moments like this where a cast member breaks what you might call the internal fourth wall of the stage—even though they’re on stage, the band most often speaks directly to us and is ignored by the characters, as though it exists in our world rather than theirs. But then suddenly—and delightfully—they’ll break that wall and take over, delivering numbers in radically different styles, from that country ballad to a raging punk number that Elmer delivers to a funny Sinatraesque lounge lizard number from the LA coroner who deals with Elmer’s body. (Actually every actor in the show gets a moment like this, another fabulous part of the show.)

And in each case, the lighting, especially of that stage set—which includes so many more kinds of lights than you realize—ends up being a big part of creating that moment: the brightly-lit brashness and severity of the punk moment; the silky darkness and clean controlled light of the lounge.

There’s lots of other wonderful lighting moments in the show that are not related to the band set. One of my favorite is the choice in Elmer’s first childhood scene to have only him seen in the light; we hear his family, but they exist only in the shadows. It’s a brilliant, innovative way of expressing his isolation and disconnection.

Outlaw’s lightning designer Heather Gilbert has done a lot of incredible work, including most recently her Tony-nominated designs for the show Parade. Like Outlaw set designer Arnulfo Maldonado, who I spoke to yesterday, Heather very kindly agreed to answer some questions about Dead Outlaw’s wonderful lighting.

What most excited you about designing the lighting for Dead Outlaw? What were the challenges?

[Director] David [Cromer] invited me to a workshop last September and I flew to NY, knowing little about the show other than Elmer’s incredible story. I sat in that rehearsal hall, hearing the song “DEAD” for the first time, and I was so excited that I would get to light that music that I basically dancing in my seat. This amazing story, this brilliant music. I get to light country and punk and roots and barbershop—it’s a dream come true.

The challenges, like any show, were dealing inside the parameters of space and time. And lighting someone who is moving through the air on a spinning band platform, 8 feet in the air, was a lot of guessing and hoping.

What was your favorite part of the lighting design? 

The idea for this design was that it is almost a development of technologies from the rock and roll PAR cans of the ‘70s to the incredibly bright LED moving lights of today, with audience blinders and clip lights and all the Christmas lights and all. It was so fun to use everything that my friend Josh at PRG could help me find.  And the way the songs are sometimes band numbers, sometimes book numbers, sometimes the band is singing the thoughts of the characters—it’s all unique and fun to stretch to meet all that Erik [Della Penna] and [David] Yazbek wrote.

Andrew Durand sings Elmer’s raging punk number, the set lights hot and strident.

Were there other projects or designers that were an inspiration for your approach? 

Well, I have to say that visually I was most inspired by Sarah Laux, our costume designer, and Arnulfo Maldonado, our scenic designer, which anyone who has seen the show would understand. They are so talented and specific and nuanced. It was very much a dream team for me with them, and with Bella Curry and Josh Millican on sound. I can’t speak highly enough of this team.

I had many meetings with Arnulfo and David in November, and the way the set emerged from both of their brains was glorious to watch.

Julia Knitel and Andrew Durand dance, the little lights around them like fireflies, adding to the magic.

I could go on and on about the choices you made—having Elmer be the only character lit in the early scenes; the movie hall flicker effect; the swath of light on Elmer’s mummified face in the darkness as 20 years pass. 

Thank you so much—that movie hall flicker was David’s idea, and we were all actually a bit disappointed when we did it in tech. It had very little impact. Then the audience arrived, we saw it on them and we were mesmerized by how it plays across the people in the theater so gorgeously. I mean, in theory I know that light reveals form and we didn’t have those forms until the audience arrives, but it still blew me away that first preview, seeing it from the back of the house.

So many of these ideas are things that came from David—he tells me an idea—"I want Elmer to be lit just by the table"—then I figure out how all of that can work and what that truly looks like, and then we adjust the idea we talked about once we get in the theater to make it stronger.

As for the sole light on Elmer, the way [actor] Andrew Durand uses that light is nothing short of genius. We have the most talented and kindest cast and band, the face of this gorgeous band of weirdos that made this together.

I absolutely love Eddie Cooper who, among his many roles in this, plays our train conductor. In those scenes he swings a red train lantern that actually belonged to my grandfather who worked for the NY Central Railroad and that our props and electrics departments fitted for the play. It makes my heart sing to watch him with it. 

Trent Saunders and Eddie Cooper as the assistant coroner and coroner bathed in a pool of sallow light.

My favorite thing is how the lights on the band set serve to distinguish the different scenes and the moods that go with them. There are clearly a lot more sets and kinds of lights there than you first think—there’s the cluster on the back wall; the net in the corner; the Christmas-like lights that hang along the edge. (Maybe others?) It’s elegant and ingenious. How did you come up with that? 

David, Arnulfo, and I looked at a lot of pictures of venues—from people’s basements to places like CBGB. You can see those venues reflected in the shape of the band platform. And we basically grabbed all the variety of lights we could from those images—the DIY-aspect of creating your lighting, although for us the installation was really done with such thoughtful intention by our amazing intention by our electrics team led by Emily Darone.

So Christmas lights and the net of lights, which is an incandescent net with the LED copper wire fairy lights above it. I love how those work together. And yes, there are so many more. Or at least, most of them are controlled individually so that we could be inspired to say “Okay, we love that green light bulb in the standing lamp, let’s only use that for certain songs”; “The colorful lights are in Oklahoma”; “No stars until Iola”; or more basically “That silhouette look is great, let’s add some more clip lights for the back wall to make it bigger.” We have so many options, and you are seeing ideas of both the tools and when we use them from David, Arnulfo, and me. 

Lead singer and narrator Jeb Brown jams with his band, the lighting warm and playful.

What are the things you most value in a lighting design?

Strong partnerships, actually. My amazing associates—in this case, the amazing Jackie Fox—sharing the dedication to what the vision of the design is and making it work. I like having people who want to talk about the why’s and how’s. You can make an incredible design with 2 clip lights and a flashlight and a power strip. And I have. But you can’t make strong design without people helping make it happen.

From the director and designers to the electricians installing the show to the stage managers and the crew (I could write a sonnet to our crew, I tell you) and the actors--everyone working together on the same team. That’s what you need to make good design and good theatre.

I think you just did write that sonnet, Heather. Thanks so much for sharing it.

Thanks again to Heather and Arnulfo for sharing their insights, and to all the cast and crew for this brilliant, quirky, lovely show. If you haven’t seen Dead Outlaw yet, it’s in its final weekend. I highly recommend it!

In this astonishing overfull jack-in-the-box moment of the 2023-2024 Broadway season, there are also some really exceptional shows happening far from the Great White Way.

Perhaps my favorite is Dead Outlaw, a new musical from David Yazbeck and Erik Della Penna, with book by Itamar Moses (whose other current off-Broadway show The Ally is another fantastic show, and one I will be covering here soon).

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Dead Outlaw tells the true story of Elmer McCurdy, a small time criminal from the turn of the last century, who ended up getting shot to death at age 31 after a failed bank robbery…

…and then his mummified remains became a sideshow entertainment at various sites for much of the next sixty years.

Yeah. It’s wild.

The show, staged at Minetta Lane Theater by director David Cromer (and closing this weekend!) spends its first half telling the sad and sometimes ridiculous story of Elmer McCurdy, and its second following his body as it gets re-purposed by a variety of different people. Usually when a play or movie tries to tell the story of a real person, the worst mistake it can make is to try and include everything. But that choice turns out to be Outlaw’s masterstroke. The more moments of Elmer’s journey that we get, as strange and varied as they are, the more meaningful his story becomes.

Minetta Lane is not a big stage. The set is basically just one free-standing stationary area on which sits a band who sing, play and narrate.

Here’s what we see when we enter:

The vibe is partially bar-stage for a band, part rehearsal-space-in-the-lead-singer’s-basement (with Christmas, tiki, and other lights on it, about which, more tomorrow…).

I knew nothing about the show going in. And the band-area so filled the space, I wasn’t sure whether this would be an actual musical or just a kind of concert. But in fact action happens all around the band area, as well as on top of it, in moments that turn that set piece into a boxcar.

But then suddenly, at a moment when Elmer is drunk and raging, he shoves that band set piece—and it moves. It looks so solid and permanent, that comes as a complete shock.

But then as the show goes on, there are more surprises like this—a number of cast members end up moving that set all the way across the stage, turning it into first the hideout of the gang that Elmer works with for a time (the band play the gang), and then the boxcar again. And while you can’t tell it at first, there are actually different sets of lights on the band stage which get used at different moments to create wonderfully unique moods.

In every respect, really, from story to set and light to character, Dead Outlaw keeps setting up expectations only to pull the rug right out from under us. That is such a feat. We’re all such savvy readers of story these days, it’s very hard to surprise us.

And the fact that Dead Outlaw is able to do that again and again creates a tremendous sense of delight. It’s like the show allows us to be kids again hearing a bedtime story. We don’t know how it’s going to surprise us next, but we know it will. And the anticipation is just wonderful.

Set designer Arnulfo Maldonado is no stranger to playing with expectations. His set design for A Strange Loop involved just a simple back wall of six entrances. But then as the show goes on those entrances get used in so many different ways (and also break apart and move), you almost don’t even see it’s as scene to scene the same set. Maldonado was nominated for a Tony for his work.

I recently did email interviews with Arnulfo and lighting designer Heather Gilbert about their work on the show. We’ll hear from Heather tomorrow. But today, I’m happy to present my interview with Arnulfo, whose work on the show has been nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award (Bravo!)

As you got started on Dead Outlaw, what were the biggest stage design challenges of the project? And what made it an exciting project to consider?

The fairly small but mighty stage of the Minetta Lane Theater was both the biggest stage design challenge as well as the most exciting. A slightly non-traditional space (for what the needs of a musical usually entail) helped me to troubleshoot how to have the show best move given its tight confines. The Minetta Lane has no offstage space outside of the area directly stage right that serves as the space for an A2, large furniture pieces (hi coffin, hi autopsy tables), quick change areas AND a dimmer room, so incorporating other offstage space stage left helped me craft the container for the show. 

Did you always have a sense that the main set piece was going to be the band’s stage, and that it would end up serving so many different purposes, or did that develop? 

We always knew the band was going be very much part of the visual picture given how integral they are to the storytelling, especially Jeb [Brown], who does double duty, both as main narrator and singer. The idea of the boxcar developed out of merging the world of the early 1900s (and train cars) with visuals of punk basement shows/DIY spaces where bands played.

Punk/rock/garage power trio Black Rabbit performing, 2014.

We looked at photos of bands playing in non-traditional performance spaces and how the spaces around them helped energize and inform the rooms they were playing in  — it was important for us to find the right balance of nodding to the authenticity of these spaces and not have anything feel too forced or decorative. 

The band stage has lots of different kinds of lights on it which each get used in different scenes to establish a fresh mood or moment. Were you working hand in hand with the lighting team from the start, or was that a discovery along the way?  

I am always designing with lighting in mind. That’s how my brain works as I begin to visualize the world.  Lighting is integral in all my design work so I try to have early convos with the lighting designer as I’m developing the environment. For DEAD OUTLAW, Heather Gilbert (the incredible lighting designer) and I were in constant communication about the lighting practicals (twinkle lights, festoon lights, etc) and how they helped drive the story, where color is introduced, when to make the space feel like a very intentional rock show and when to carve out the darkness w/ light. Having this boxcar be the central character in the scenic design, it's important that the lighting help telegraph the boxcar's literal and figurative journey. 

Seeing Elmer push the band stage was a laugh out loud surprise. Later the whole set piece moves across the stage, with so many actors and instruments standing on it. How did you make it so easily mobile? 

[Director David] Cromer is a genius — my impulse was to start the show with the boxcar doing an 180 degree spin, revealing the band (it would have started with the boxcar facing upstage). And about halfway thru rehearsals he realized, no let's hold that moment. Let's not reveal all our cards quite yet.

His idea was to wait until we were about 1/4 of the way in, restrain the action so that when the boxcar finally moves it’s motivated by Andrew/Elmer’s freak out punk dance during “KILLED A MAN IN MAINE.” It's such a simple gesture, but up until this point most of the audience thinks the centered boxcar is a static piece with action happening in the outer peripheries; no one has imagined that this massive box is suddenly going to pivot and move.

This begins the boxcar's journey thru the cramped quarters of the Minetta Lane stage. We made sure that each time the boxcar moved it helped propel the action forward. And having the ensemble move the piece became part of the DIY vocabulary inherent in the show: “We are crafting a story for you, let us show you by rearranging the space for you.”

The first time we have the boxcar do a significant pivot, it is helped by a guide that is helping it pivot (under the boxcar). Once it does a full move stage right it's being guided by actors and crew at all four corners of the unit . At this point it's technically a freewheelin' unit..a hefty one, so its fairly easy to navigate given its weight.

Because the band stage seems so clearly at first to be a stationary piece just meant to house them, each new use of it creates a fresh moment of surprise and delight. It reminds me of the way the booths function in A Strange Loop—once again, they look at first glance to be of singular purpose, but as the Thoughts interact with them they become a bus station, bathhouse stalls, etc.

A Strange Loop, 2021.

Are concepts like surprise or a deceptive simplicity important in the way you think about stage design? (Or if not, what are some design concepts that you particularly value?

I go into each show without any preconceived ideas of how the design will function. A lot of the surprises emanate from design convos through out rehearsal, discoveries made in staging etc. I suppose part of the reason my designs contain moments of revelation is because the one thing I do always begin a new show design with is this notion: Nothing is on stage unless it helps push the story forward. It has to have a reason to be there.

Thus my work tends to push itself to either a minimalist approach or the exact opposite, maximalism. In the case of both A STRANGE LOOP and DEAD OUTLAW these designs started simple and minimal and part of their journey is how the sets continue to evolve and then reset back to a version of how they started at the beginning. They skirt the edges of maximalism (which perhaps land it in the world of the absurd) which sometimes translates as a nice set-revelation chuckle. 

Thanks so much, Arnulfo. Congratulations again!

Tomorrow, his partner in crime, Heather Gilbert! [Update: Here’s the link!]

If you’re in New York, you’ve got one more weekend to see it!