Aaron Lazar: Grammy Nominee for His Album “Impossible Dream”

I’ve seen Broadway star Aaron Lazar in a number of musicals: The Light in the Piazza, A Little Night Music and The Last Ship are just three of them. He always makes a lasting impression whether he’s on stage in a musical or doing his cabaret act (which is when I first interviewed him over seven years ago.)

Lazar is a Grammy nominee this year for his album Impossible Dream. The title has multiple layers of significance. As a student at the University of Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music he appeared in a production of the musical Man of La Mancha. Cervantes’ story inspired the musical which had its world premiere in 1965 at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and The Impossible Dream is the show’s best-known song.

It also refers to what might seem like an impossible dream: receiving a diagnosis of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and working to be one of a very few people who have been able to reverse the disease and overcome it. Less than 70 patients have had that happen and Lazar, who received his diagnosis several years ago, plans to be one of them.

The album finds Lazar performing duets with other Broadway stars including Kate Baldwin, Josh Groban, Neil Patrick Harris, Norm Lewis, Leslie Odom Jr., Kelli O’Hara and more. The album culminates in an all-star performance of The Impossible Dream. You can watch the video HERE. [Check back next week for my interview with O’Hara.]

Lazar was scheduled to perform in Pasadena Playhouse’s concerts of the Stephen Sondheim/James Goldman musical Follies. The tragic fires in Southern California forced the cancellation of those concerts. Lazar and I got together to talk about his album, his health and the inspirational message he has for people from all walks of life.

What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview with Aaron Lazar, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: When you played the role of Shriner in the Pittsburgh Civic Light opera production of Bye Bye Birdie, did the career you wanted and the career you’ve accomplished, seem to be an impossible dream for your 23-year-old self?

It was all just a dream, right? You believe in yourself. You go for it. It’s like my kid who wants to be in the NBA. You know, I wanted to be a Broadway star. We all have impossible dreams. I just think it’s interesting as we get older and we become much more rational, sensible, logical, practical adults, all of a sudden our impossible dreams are out of reach. Why? So somehow I’ve been dreaming up pretty big dreams and making them come true. It’s a way more fun way to live life than I’d been living it for at least the last decade.

Possibility is better than the assumption that there are no possibilities, isn’t it? 

Yeah. Unfortunately when a doctor gives you their opinion, a diagnosis, which is a first opinion because then you go get a second opinion and they tell you that there’s no possibilities. I’m like, sorry, man. That’s just not the way I see life. So I’m going to figure out and find my way to possibilities. And it’s been the journey of a lifetime. Just in a couple of years I feel like I’ve lived many lives, but I’ve found my life to be infinitely more possible than it’s ever been.

You’ve mentioned before in interviews for this album how important performing The Impossible Dream was for you when you performed it at the University of Cincinnati College’s Conservatory of Music in the musical Man of La Mancha. How has your relationship with the song evolved in the 24 years since that particular experience?

I was playing Don Quixote in that musical. We did a dress rehearsal. I think there was a janitor in the back. I’m all dressed up and I’m amazing. So I do The Impossible Dream and the janitor just keeps mopping in the back. Doesn’t stop. Nothing. And I get really freaked out. I call the head of the program down to the stage and tell him the number doesn’t work. I think we need to cut it. He’s like, “You want to cut The Impossible Dream?” I was like, “Yes.” He said, “No, you’re an idiot.” And he just walked away. Of course, it stopped the show.

Then I didn’t sing that song. I didn’t touch it. I wanted to audition for the Broadway revival that Brian Stokes Mitchell got, but [I] was too young. I literally didn’t sing it again until I was in New York almost two years ago now. Another year went by before we started making an album. I had been traveling the country not just singing The Impossible Dream wherever I could, but I created a motivational speaking platform and called it The Impossible Dream. Talk about the full circle of being a kid and having an impossible dream and living it. And then having a new impossible dream to beat ALS which became an awakening; a dream to heal all of me. It all came through that song. 

You told the Arizona Daily Star about the album last fall, “It felt like a bunch of friends getting together to do what we do, which is pour our hearts and passion into things and take risks.” There’s this wonderful thing that most people don’t get to experience which is the kind of love and support that you’ve been shown. That outpouring of affection is the kind of thing that mostly happens when we’re already gone. What does it meant to you to have all these people who can pour their hearts and passion into something do that because you ask them to be a part of your impossible dream?

It means everything. A doctor tells you have ALS. What’s your life like? I was like, I’m going to figure out a way. To have the love and support… First of all, I didn’t speak about it publicly for a year and a half. It’s only been a year since I spoke about it publicly. 

Over the almost four years that I’ve been living with it, I’ve learned a lot about life. I’ve learned that we create our lives and that if you think your life’s going to change and then you’ll change, you’ve got it backwards. It’s when you change, your life will change. I took it upon myself to heal my body. I’ve got to figure out a way to heal the rest of me: my mind, my soul, my emotions. And in doing that, I’ve changed. I’m a different person. My life changing dramatically over the last year is a reflection of that. Even if you don’t think you have that, you have way more than you may even realize. The love in your life shows up when you take a risk.

Given the physical challenges that ALS forces upon on somebody, how has it impacted the way you sing? Have you had to learn new ways of singing?

I’m seated a lot, right? So I was like, am I going to be able to sing sitting down all the time? I had never really liked doing that, but I got good at that. It’s really the diaphragm muscles – the strength of the diaphragm and the abs – to sustain things and use musculature in a way that connects the airways to the vocal cords. It’s different, but I can still sing.

Should you win the Grammy, how do you perceive that opportunity to spread this message that you have with the album in the form of an acceptance speech? 

I’m the guy who sits there watching these awards shows and I’m so excited when somebody wins. They’ve got one minute to say something to the world. I don’t take that lightly at all. It’s not about, to me, rattling off a list of people’s names. As many people as I have to thank, I couldn’t fit them in in one minute anyway. It’s more about taking one minute to say thank you for listening to this music because here’s the message behind it. Hopefully inspiring people with that message of hope and resilience in the face of adversity and the healing power of music and the healing power of community. I hope I get that chance.

Our interview was originally set up because you were going to be performing the role of Benjamin Stone in concert performances of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies that the Pasadena Playhouse was producing. I’m hoping at some point this will get rescheduled. What were you looking forward to most about bringing your version of Benjamin Stone to life?

Sondheim’s tricky. He’s complicated. It’s adult stuff, you know? I sang Being Alive at Segerstrom [Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa] a year ago in a concert with Betty Buckley. I think I finally understood what that song meant. The first time I sang Being Alive was in a workshop of Sondheim on Sondheim. I was probably 30 years old or something, maybe 31. Stephen Sondheim was sitting in a folding chair one foot away from me. Not intimidating at all.

I had no idea what that song was about. You can sing it well, but to really get it took another 15 years. So with Follies, just an opportunity to play an adult in a Sondheim show. These adults are in these complicated relationships, these failed marriages and complex friendships. To bring a guy to life who is learning that he’s gone through most of his life without loving himself. I had that realization over the last couple of years: to heal I need to turn this back on in a way that I had turned off from personal and professional trauma. So I was looking forward to exploring that and also working with that incredible cast [Rachel Bay Jones, Stephanie J. Block and Derrick Baskin]. Hopefully they’ll find a way to keep it alive.

I was looking forward to you sing The Road You Didn’t Take because I love this idea of a man who is confronting what his life is at a time when he’s not necessarily thinking this is what he’s going to be doing. And particularly the last line, “The Ben I’ll never be, who remembers him?” How does that song resonate with you with everything that you’re going through?

Those are questions that I was just starting to ask myself as I was starting to work on the material and preparing to go into rehearsal. I don’t know the show as well as I do most of Sondheim’s shows. That was another reason I was looking forward to doing it. But my understanding of it is you got a guy who’s singing a song basically saying, It’s fine. You chose the road that you’re on and life’s great, so don’t worry about it. You don’t need to look back. But the irony is he’s realizing I’m looking back and as I look back, I’m having feelings that maybe I chose wrong.

He’s looking at his life and he’s like, I’m a failure. This is worthless. I understand that on a deeply, deeply personal level. I understand what it’s like to blame yourself. To lose the man. To lose belief in yourself. I think that, again, this ties into what we’ve been talking about this whole interview, which is your shot at your dreams is not over. Unfortunately he thinks in that moment that it is.

Given the positivity that you present and the way you’ve spoken about dealing with your own ALS journey, I suppose you’re looking forward to what happens next when you become the next person to reverse ALS.

On a very simple level, I’m looking forward to doing all the things that most people do in life that we take for granted. Just brushing my teeth without having to think about it. Or not spending most of the day in a chair. I’m looking forward to going on walks and buying a dog and getting back into physically participating in life again without being in incredible discomfort and having to live with and navigate tremendous doubt and worry and fear.

But the work to get there has taught me how to get there. Learning how to deal with the mind, learning resilience, learning some of these, I call them secrets of life. That we create our lives. We choose what we want to experience. Either consciously or unconsciously, we create our lives. So getting much more conscious about the life that I want to create and practicing that. I like to say it’s a good thing I’m an actor because I love to rehearse. You’re going to live the life you rehearse, right? What life are you rehearsing? I’m rehearsing the one where this is gone in whatever way I can.

On a big level I’m looking forward to sharing this message with as many people as I can. Right now I travel the country and I speak and it’s hard. Travel is hard. So I can’t do as much of that as I would like. I can’t wait until I can because it’s going to be helping as many people as I can, hopefully. This is the beginning of that.

To watch the full interview with Aaron Lazar, please go HERE.

All photos of Aaron Lazar courtesy of Aaron Lazar.