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.