“I was very surprised. I almost thought it might have been a clerical error. Do you have the right number?” Those were the first thoughts writer Winnie Holzman had when The Actors Fund reached out to her with the news that she would be this year’s recipient of the Julie Harris Award for Lifetime Achievement. The award is being given out at Sunday’s annual Los Angeles Tony Award’s Viewing Party.
Holzman is best known as the writer of the book for the musical Wicked. She was the creator and producer of My So-Called Life, writer and producer of Once and Again and Roadies. When she accepts the award at Sunday’s event she will be accompanied by her husband, actor Paul Dooley (Breaking Away, Sixteen Candles.)
Previous recipients of the Julie Harris Award include Chita Rivera, Liza Minnelli, James Earl Jones, Jason Alexander, Rita Moreno, Lauren Bacall and many others.
“If you look at who won previous years,” Holzman says, “it’s one of these things is not like the others. They were interested in honoring a writer for the first time and they wanted it to be me. What can you say? I’m really touched.”
There aren’t too many people who can claim to have written the book for a musical that two years ago had grossed over one billion dollars on Broadway alone. Which means the show and its success has been analyzed over and over again.
“Some of it does reflect our goals because in the very beginning [composer] Stephen Schwartz and I were so inspired by by [novelist] Gregory Maguire’s premise that somebody could be painted as a villain, that that person was really completely misunderstood. That premise had such power for Stephen and me. Gregory’s book was always political in nature. It’s a political book. We were never unaware that it had within it the power to make a political statement. But I don’t think we leaned into that. What we leaned into, very consciously, was the relationship between the two young women.”
Anytime a project is wildly successful, other opportunities open up. But they aren’t always the one’s Holzman was looking for.
“I got offered a few witch projects after Wicked,” she says followed by a big laugh. “That was just a no-brainer. I just knew I was going to do something that was going to stretch me and be different from what I had done before. I love being surprising even to myself. I definitely love a challenge. Even Wicked was a huge challenge. The last time I had written a musical [Birds of Paradise – off-Broadway 1987] it had not been received well critically. I was getting back on a horse that had thrown me. Thank God I was given that opportunity. I can’t ever stop being grateful too Stephen.”
Holzman also credits producers Marc Platt and David Stone for helping Wicked become the show it is today. But fears that a lack of bold producers is part of the challenge Broadway faces in staying relevant.
“I think there are a lot of great producers on Broadway. But I think risk-taking is part of moving things forward. It’s not by doing what is expected or what is the safest thing. Financial concerns of Broadway are not something I’m an expert on, but we have to take responsibility as a community to nurture young talent. This has to include New York and Broadway. All the rest of the theatres across the country take their cue from what’s happening on Broadway. Taking risks is what pushes things forward. Do you think Lin-Manuel Miranda was going, ‘I know what will make me a lot of money! A rap musical about Alexander Hamilton.’ He was reaching deep and responding to his own heart and having an instinct and his own artistic intuition. We need to be mindful that younger people, who have something to say, need to have their chance.”
Before Roadies ended its run on Showtime, Holzman said in an interview that was going to be her opportunity to concentrate on a new play once the series was over. When asked for an update she didn’t reveal much about its status, but did talk about a more immediate priority.
“I can’t really talk about it, but there is something happening and I’m rewriting it. Plays are a process as is everything. The other thing I’m concentrating on is the Wicked movie which is the forefront of my world. The movie is very important to us. I’ve been devoted to it the past year-and-a-half. We’ve been working with Stephen Daldry and it is moving forward. These things take time.”
When a project like Wicked occupies so much of one’s public identity and time, I asked Holzman if she ever felt like her character of Angela in My So-Called Life who bemoaned in episode 5 about acne, “it had become the focus of everything. It was all I could feel, all I could think about. It blotted out the rest of my face, rest of my life. Like the zit had become…the truth about me.”
“Oh of course. One of the things I just think about often is nothing protects us from being human. No amount of success, no amount of money, no amount of anything on a material level changes the fact we are human. And with our being human comes a lot of fears, a lot of heartache and heartbreak. And sometimes the conviction that we are not good enough. Not only am I not immune from those feelings, I just know them all too well. I think what helps is what we’re doing on Sunday and what I’m doing when I’m writing: the effort to reach out to others and to be there for others. I want to be there for others the way people have been there for me. It’s so simple. I think a lot of people begin to realize that this is the way to live. You discover it and it becomes clear. We all need each other.”