Briones is starring in the East West Players new production of Pacific Overtures. The show also features Gedde Watanabe, Scott Keiji Takeda, Brian Kim McCormick, Adam Kaokept and Kerry K. Carnahan. Tim Dang directs.

Stephen Sondheim said his musical was, “The most bizarre and unusual musical ever to be seen in a commercial setting.” His certainly untraditional show, which opened on Broadway in early 1976, tells the story of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s arrival in Japan in the mid-19th century and how his efforts to open up the isolationist country are experienced – through the eyes of the Japanese.

Charles McNulty, writing in the Los Angeles Times, raved about East West Players’ revival saying, “The new revival of Pacific Overtures may be the most impressive production I’ve seen anywhere all year.”

The path to get there was one filled with questions for Briones that didn’t always possess easy answers. This was amongst the many things I learned in my interview with Briones. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: We know that many of Sondheim’s musicals were not always well-received when they were originally produced, but that time and audiences have caught up to those shows. Do you think time has caught up with Pacific Overtures? Are audiences maybe more open now to what this show is than they have been at any other point?

I think so. When they mounted this show in 2004 it didn’t last very long on Broadway. I think it’s still hard for the general audience members to to appreciate something that they think they won’t get or won’t relate to because…This might be controversial, but it’s all Asian. The King and I has that really main character that is Caucasian. Pacific Overtures, Sondheim and Weidman, they wrote something that they wanted. I think they thought they were trying to be true to the culture. The music is beautiful, but it’s really something different. Even to me, I go, what is the meaning of this? I understand it better now, but I have questions.

I read in an interview you and Gedde did with Pasadena Weekly that your first reaction was one that a lot of people have; that you didn’t fully understand it and that there were a lot of questions. Having worked on it now for as long as you have prior to opening, have you been able to sort out a lot of those questions? Do you understand more about what this show is doing, what it’s saying and how your character, The Reciter, plays a role in that?

I’ve reached that. In my career if I don’t really understand something, I try to understand it the way I would and believe it and stick to that so that I can I can grab on to my reality. I think that’s what I did right now. My understanding of it is maybe different from the original idea of Sondheim and Weidman. But I’m sticking to that because I think my understanding of it is something beautiful, kind of universal.

I would assume that, like many actors, you’re intrigued by the things that scare you. How much did being part of Pacific Overtures scare you?

Petrified! Especially the way Tim wants to do this. He wanted to be true to the original vision of Sondheim and Hal Prince, which is Kabuki. And I’m not Japanese. And Kabuki, they’ve been studying this since they were children. So it’s something set and there’s truth in how they do it. I told Tim this. I don’t want to do something generic because I might offend people. But he said, you know, just find yourself. Find whatever is true with a hint of that. I think we found a happy medium there. 

You were born in the Philippines. There is a lot of dialog going on about whether people have to have lived-in experiences to play a character. I understand that intellectually, but practically, aren’t we negating what actors do? 

That was one of the things that I been struggling with, especially when opportunities opened up for Asian actors. We kind of limited ourselves after that because they’ve been saying Japanese stories should be told by Japanese people and Chinese stories and Korean stories should be… And I get that because the opportunities are so few and that they wanted it to be done properly. I get that. But if it is in English, I think that should not be the case. We’re not speaking Japanese. We’re not speaking Cantonese or Korean. It’s in English. And we can bring in our own experiences because all experiences are relatable. They happen to everyone in China and in Japan and in Timbuktu. They’re all the same. It’s human experience and we all have that and it should be valued.

What discoveries did you make about this story and your journey to get to opening night and about the character of The Reciter? 

That’s a good question. I’ve discovered about how to tell a story of an experience that happened a long time ago. And making it entertaining. But at the same time valuing the journeys of each character. And telling stories of so many characters. I asked Tim, why am I telling this story? What is the purpose of this? And then he said, Yeah, that’s a good question. Who do you think is telling this story? Are you Japan? Are you the emperor? Because the emperor back then was a one-year-old baby. He goes on to add that this story is about change and how the changes got to certain people. It got violent. It was funny. It was scary. And all of those things are helpful information to get to the finale of the storytelling.

That makes me think of Someone in a Tree, which is different perspectives on the same story being told simultaneously. Sondheim said that was his favorite song he ever composed. What about that song resonates most with you?

I saw an interview or something that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote that one of the inspirations for In the Room Where it Happens [from Hamilton] was Someone in a Tree. There is always a a bystander looking and observing and they have an opinion of what happening. Which is so interesting because that’s why there are so many versions in history. Who is a witness to your history? Even if they don’t have a firsthand account, it’s going to be out there. It’s going to be told. That’s why I love the power of storytelling.

If we if we look back on the history of East West Players, Stephen Sondheim and Pacific Overtures are inextricably linked throughout its history because East West Players was founded by Mako, who originated the role you’re playing in the original production of Pacific Overtures. I know that Sondheim invested in East West Players and multiple productions of Sondheim’s have been done there. What do you think it means to the company, and what does it mean to you, to be bringing a new production of this musical that is so intricately tied to the history of East West Players? 

That even though Sondheim is not here, he still has a very loud voice. That he is still making things happen from where he is. He wants this because I read that he was not really satisfied with everything. It’s an unfinished symphony. I think maybe he wants us to discover it and make it better. This is what I found out about him. He is not precious with this work. Gedde [who appeared in the original production of Pacific Overtures] had stories he was telling us. He is open to two things. If you want to cut that scene short, cut that scene if you want to. You want more of that? Sure, I’ll write some more of that. He will never be satisfied with his work because nothing is perfect. Art is never perfect and he embodied that.

In the last song in Pacific Overtures, “Next,” the outsider says “There was a time when foreigners were not welcome here, but that was long ago.” In light of the elections this week in America, where anti-immigrant sentiment was a huge part in motivating people to vote for one candidate over another, what power does Next have in the show that may be different than it would have had if the election gone differently?

To me, it’s very hopeful. It came from the people who historically went, No, don’t! We’re fine here. Don’t. Don’t bring that. But because of the forceful and kind of violent interaction from the West, you can’t really stop progress. You can’t stop betterment. You can harness it, you can manipulate it. You can, you know, make it better. But it’s going to come. That is why I think even though a lot of people are heartbroken, it will get better. In Pacific Overtures, they made it Japan. It was given to them. Violently. But they brushed themselves up and started all over again. And they made it better. We can make this better. We can learn something from this. We can overcome this because we are resourceful and we know ourselves. We know what we can do. If only we think a a community, as a country, together as one, we can accomplish anything and we can be better than before.

Pacific Overtures runs at East West Players through December 1st. For tickets and more information, please go here.

To watch the full conversation with Jon Jon Briones, please go here.

Main Photo: Jon Jon Briones on Pacific Overtures (Photo by Teolindo/Courtesy East West Players)

The post Jon Jon Briones Recites His Passion for “Pacific Overtures” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

This is my interview with Gavin when he was touring in Into the Woods. Thank you Gavin for your time, your artistry and your generosity. You will truly be missed.

Whether that’s intrinsically a part of the characters he’s playing or just who he is as an actor, Ceel is easily one of the most likable people in musicals today. Take his performance as The Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods. Even though The Wolf is menacing (in a dandy sort of way) and the Prince is “raised to be charming, not sincere,” Creel is sincerely charming and, when the role calls for it, charmingly sincere.

Into the Woods is finishing its mini-tour of ten cities with a final stop in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre. The show runs June 27th – July 30th. Creel, who played the part on Broadway, is joined by many of the production’s Broadway cast including Sebastian Arcelus, Stephanie J. Block, Katy Geraghty, Montego Glover, Kennedy Kanagawa and Nancy Opel.

I recently spoke with Creel who was in San Francisco for the penultimate stop of Into the Woods. In our conversation we talked about Stephen Sondheim, why the cast took this show on the road and about his own show, Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice, which will have its world premiere in November at MCC Theater in New York. Los Angeles audiences can get a preview of that show when Creel performs at The Hotel Cafe in Hollywood on July 24th.

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

Q: In 2003 you were in Stephen Sondheim’s Bounce [later renamed Road Show] in Chicago and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. What did you learn from that experience of working on Sondheim’s material that perhaps informs the work you’re now bringing to Into the Woods? 

What comes to mind is that I watched the greatest, at that time, living musical theater composer and arguably the greatest living producer director of our musical theater time: Hal Prince. I watched them in the mud. I got to watch them trying to make the lotus blossom. And if I’m honest, it wasn’t successful. Obviously it wasn’t commercially successful, but it was bumpy. 

I did this very foolish innocently enough thing of deciding that they must come out of the womb formed. These ideas must just be hatched in brilliance. And I was like, Oh yeah, this moment isn’t really that great. Sondheim can write something that’s really not that great. And then Sondheim goes, “This is really not that great. How do I make this great or I can do this here and do this, and then watch it become something that went to the next level.” To see that in front of you is very humbling and an encouraging and freeing experience. 

How would you compare the process of working on a musical with Stephen Sondheim to working on one of his most successful musicals, arguably his most successful musical, without him any longer?

It was sad, I have to say. James Lapine, on the first day of rehearsal, we all circled up and everybody and there was a space next to him. He said, “It’s odd to me that there’s a space. I feel like Steve made a space for himself. This is a bittersweet moment because we’re all here to lift this beautiful piece up and I’m honored that you’re doing this piece that I wrote with Steve, and Steve would be standing next to me.”

This is sounds woo woo, but I think Steve was guiding us from the other side. I still feel a presence. It’s a rock concert response to our show in a way that James is like, I don’t understand what’s happening. It’s crazy. I think that is definitely a testament to the show being so beloved for almost 40 years. But I also think we were guided. I think there was a spirit on the other side. The best spirit of all going, “I’m going to help.” It got into all of our hearts. 

When I saw the show at the St. James in New York in December it looked to me like everybody was having the time of their lives, which is not easy to do as an actor. How much of it is the fact that you are all genuinely having a good time?

It is really hard to fake joy in that way. Even if you’re doing a really good job of it, the audience can sniff it out. I’m personally having the time of my life. I did not expect to be a part of this. I was going to go watch my best friend Sara [Bareilles who was the original Baker’s Wife] in the concert at City Center. And then [director] Lear deBessonet called me and was like, “Hey, would you ever consider coming in?” The first time my ego was like, I don’t want to play that part. I want to be the baker. And then I thought about it. Let’s just do the job. I need the health insurance. I’ll have a good time. I’ll get to hang out with Sara again. We had such a good time doing Waitress for that small amount of time together [in 2019]. Here I am, over a year later, still getting to tell the story across the country. We are literally still having fun and I can’t believe this leg of it is going to be done in six weeks. It’s nuts. We’re very sad to let it go. 

Many of you who appeared in this production on Broadway have come together to continue telling this story. That is very rare these days for so many cast members to take a show on the road. Why do you think the mold was broken for Into the Woods? 

I think the world has changed since what we went through. The pandemic changed me. Certainly I can speak for myself of just really appreciating what you have in a new way. I just don’t think we were ready to let it go. What a gift! This just dropped in my lap. Personally, I could save money. I could work. I could see the country. I could take a breath from everything that we’ve been through. I think that story sort of whispered through the building. Gavin’s going to go and hey, you think about going on? Let me tell you why I’m going. When does this ever happen? We could actually all go together. Our show was definitely closing [in New York] because New York, New York needed a theater. We had to close, but we didn’t feel ready to be finished. 

I think one of the one of the main things that Sondheim wanted to get across with this particular work, and he said so in an interview around the time of the release of the film, was that the message of Into the Woods is about community responsibility. There’s obviously a sense of community within Broadway. There’s a sense of community within this company. Do you think that this musical offers any insight into how we perhaps can better serve ourselves by coming together as a community in our regular lives? 

Yes. I think it’s two parts, to be honest. The whole thing starts with “I wish, more than anything.” If we can acknowledge that everybody wants something for themselves then we can see the shared community in that fact. How wonderful it would be if we could help each other get what each other wants. And this musical lays that out so beautifully.

The other I was going to say is when you said that about community, no one is alone. On the surface it seems like it means I’m with you. But also I’m with you in helping you get what you want. We can work together to help you achieve your dreams. There’s always a force outside of you that’s greater than you, that is against you in some way. The giant isn’t bad. “Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what’s right. You decide what’s good.” The giant is just trying to do what they can to survive. We can see the community in that statement, which is what I think the show really illuminates. It means more than just you’re not alone, as in you don’t have to be sad and lonely. It means you’re not alone in your desires, your dreams, your wishes, your hopes. I’ve got them, too. So let’s both dream together.

You’ve been working on Confessions of a Museum Novice for a while and you’ve been performing it a concert version off and on in different places. How has the work evolved since you first started sharing this with the world? 

It continues to evolve. Originally I was invited to have a meeting with Limor Tomer and Erin Flannery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who run the Live Art series. They said, would you like to come to the Met? We’ll give you a membership card at the museum. Look around. And when you find a piece of art or pieces, anything that you’re inspired by within the building, let us know and we’ll help you produce a show for one night at the Met. I’d never been there. I was an imposter syndrome times a million. I’m not a huge fine art person. Museums tend to overwhelm me, but I went for it. 

We ended up doing it in October of 2021 with a fully masked audience for two shows and it was electric. I have to turn this into a musical. I have to expand this a bit, too. I still play Gavin Creel. It’s still about a man who’s having a sort of a midlife meltdown who for some reason called the Metropolitan Museum of Art to try to figure his life out by walking through and figuring out what’s going on. It’s about love and life and art and loneliness and ultimately forgiveness and love again.

What we’re going to do in L.A. is we’re going to do the first 45 minutes of the show to give people a taste. And then we’re going to do some covers, theater and pop covers to give people some stuff they know.

Let’s go back 17 years ago to when your album GoodTimeNation came out. You have a song on there about what Might Still Happen. What has you most optimistic about what might still happen to you personally and professionally?

I wrote that as a kid 20 years ago on the roof of my studio apartment; 250 square feet. Some of the hardest and happiest times I’ve had. One of the best lessons of living in New York in 250 square feet is you have everything you need in that much space. Anything past that is icing. I have a two bedroom apartment, thank God now, but I could live in 200 square feet if you made me. I might sell it all and just chill. My buddy Robbie Roth, who I made my first two records with, we would crawl up to the roof illegally because the fire door didn’t shut. We would sit up there, put a blanket down and pick around with melodies. That song is ultimately about heartbreak, but it’s hope.

It was a call to my future self. It makes me emotional to think about the idea of being a young person and feeling really sad but saying there’s good stuff coming, keep going. You can’t know the future, so just sit in the present. Just be. Get yourself a beer, get a friend, get a guitar, get on the roof, look out over the city. There’s possibility everywhere.

Not to bring it back to Into the Woods, but I was really broken before the pandemic, through the pandemic and after. It was just a terrible time in my life. Into the Woods was like this beautiful life raft that not only buoyed me out of storm, but it continued to lift me and set me down on solid ground. I will never forget this time that I’ve had and I just hope that we pack the house at the Ahmanson because I want to go out with a bang.

To see the full interview with Gavin Creel, please go here.

Main Photo: Gavin Creel in the Broadway production of Into the Woods (Photo by Matthew Murphy and Ryan Zimmerman for MurphyMade/Courtesy Center Theatre Group)

The post REST IN PEACE: Gavin Creel: “It’s Really Hard to Fake Joy” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

A Strange Loop has opened at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles where it will play through June 30th. If you haven’t seen A Strange Loop, the musical is about a Black, gay usher (named Usher) working at The Lion King, who writes a musical about a Black, gay usher, working at The Lion King…of course, that’s the easy description.

Jackson did not rest on his laurels. His musical White Girl in Danger ran off-Broadway last spring. His new musical, Teeth, written with Anna K. Jacobs, opened at Playwrights Horizon earlier this year and is transferring to New World Stages this fall.

With A Strange Loop coming to Los Angeles, I knew it would be a challenge to be one of those people asking Jackson questions. I saw the show in New York and loved it, but there were things I wanted to know. Thankfully Jackson agreed to the interview you are about to read.

Of course, what follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. But you can watch the full conversation on the Cultural Attaché YouTube channel.

Q: What has this musical that you’ve given the world taught you over the course of your five year journey, which I know is a much longer journey because you had been working on it for 20 years?

It taught me that persistence is key and that we, as human beings, have a lot more in common than we have not in common. That’s been an interesting sort of lesson to learn each time I encounter the piece out in the world.

While in New York I strongly encouraged a straight couple and their teenage daughter to see A Strange Loop. I wasn’t fully sure how they would respond. They all came out of it loving it because they saw themselves in Usher. Is that the response you hoped for when writing the show?

The show is about a character who is exploring very explicitly his own internal makeup. I feel that when people watch it, they can’t help but do that for themselves. So it’s an exploration of the self. He is a fat, Black gay man. That’s the makeup that he has to work with. That’s not what everybody else’s makeup is necessarily, but they all have whatever their makeup is. 

Why do you think the show has resonated the way it has?

I think because the show is very open and very truthful and honest – sort of to its fault lines. It says things out loud that most people don’t really talk about openly, except maybe with an intimate friend or therapist. I think that it gives people permission to wade into certain territory that they wouldn’t ordinarily do in mixed company. 

And yet they all end up on their feet at the end of the show.

I think Usher’s journey is a really interesting one where he’s so miserable for so much of it and yet, by the end of it, there’s a brief but amazing moment of self-acceptance. I think that’s a cool change to watch. 

You’ve regularly been asked about how autobiographical this show is and I love your response that it’s emotionally autobiographical. Do you think people finally understand that you are not Usher and Usher is not you?

No, I don’t understand that at all. I’ll just keep telling them that until I’m dead in the grave and even beyond then. I’ll keep telling them it’s not autobiographical, but that there’s still many people who won’t believe me.

Why do you think that is? Nobody thinks that. Nobody thinks that Stephen Sondheim is Joanne in Company. 

Right? I mean, I think it’s because there is so much about it that is personal. Usher is, you know, a fat Black gay man with a famous name who’s writing a musical. I am a fat Black gay man with a famous name. I never said that it’s not a personal piece or that I didn’t draw from personal experience. I just said it’s not autobiographical because autobiography is a specific genre. It’s a specific form. That’s not what A Strange Loop is. It’s something stranger, frankly. As much as you want to make it be about me, there’s just too many ways in which it isn’t.

If anything, it’s a self portrait. It’s an attempt to capture a kind of experience from the inside. Something that I began when I was about 23 years old. I’m now 43 years old, so I’m literally not the same person. I have a very different life now than I did then.

For the original Broadway production the entire cast was queer-identifying. Is that something that is part of what you want all productions to embrace? 

I just saw a production in Boston which was the first regional production of it that wasn’t affiliated with the Broadway production. Everyone in the production identifies as Black. But there was one cast member who I believe was like a Puerto Rican or something. Everybody in that production was queer. Not everybody in this production is. Not everybody in the London production was queer either. But they all rose to the task of the character, of the spirit of the piece. I’m really excited, as it continues to be produced, for companies to decide for themselves what the spirit of the piece is, how they’re going to do that, and who are the people who they’re going to task with honoring the spirit of the piece.

I’m not going to say that I want there to be like an all-straight A Strange Loop or anything like that. But I will say that I believe in performance. I believe in acting. I believe in the material. I think there’s more flexibility in how and who can do that. I’m interested in how far people can push it before it becomes something else.

You went on as Usher for three performances in January of 2023. What your perspective being on stage watching a Broadway house see your show, particularly when it got to the point where you’re doing AIDS is God’s Punishment? 

It was a really profound and they were powerful performances for me. I went from having lived the life that I drew from in order to write this piece, to having to then perform the piece and direct that outward. I’m the only person in the history of A Strange Loop who looked at clouds from both sides now. I’d seen it from both vantage points. I felt the loop in both directions. I feel very blessed to have had that opportunity to do that.

Getting to AIDS is God’s Punishment, that song has so many meanings to me, in part because of things that have happened in my life that influenced the writing of it. It was an honor for me to step inside of that and get to literally embody it for those performances. 

I don’t know what your perspective was on stage, but I know sitting in the audience when Usher encourages to clap along, I just said, oh no, no, no, there is no way I’m clapping along to this. Did you see people with hesitation? Did you see a divide, people who clap and people who won’t at all?

My favorite part of A Strange Loop is the moment when everyone has to decide what their relationship to the gospel play is. I clap every single time. Every time I see the show, I clapped. It’s my honor to clap. I love it. Some people start and they stop. Some people never start. Some people look around and are angry that other people are clapping. Some people are confused.

But all of those responses are literally what Usher wants. That’s what it feels like to be him. It’s to have conflicted emotions in this sort of musical fantasia. In this hate-filled but beautifully underscored, beautifully sung gospel moment. That’s what it feels like inside of him. He is directing that outward so that people can experience it because he’s been showing you his impression of it the whole time. But until you’re in it, you’ll never know.

There’s a lyric in Tyler Perry Writes Real Life: “I’m into entertainment that is undercover art.” How much does that ideal guide you whether you were creating A Strange Loop or White Girl in Danger or Teeth?

I’m always pushing for entertainment that’s undercover art. That’s the work that I’ve always liked the best. That’s what inspired me. I looked to this as my guiding light and my guiding star as I was honing my craft and learning how to make the work I wanted to make. But that work is not always going to win the box office.

How much do you want to express yourself in a way that is organic and natural to you as opposed to trying to satisfy algorithms or any other formulas that either computers or executives think are the way to make art work? 

I’m often thinking about that, about how I don’t want to sell out. I want to honor my artistry. But it’s getting a lot harder. The economics of theater are so, so, so, so, so difficult. I’m often wondering, what do I do? Because it’s not really in me to sell out. I spent so many years perfecting the thing that I do that I don’t just have this other instinct in my back pocket. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I guess that means I have to continue to push my little Sisyphean boulder up the hill and see if I can get it to the top, or if it will press me on the way down.

I read the tweet that you posted on April 8th in relation to Jerrod Carmichael’s reality show. You wrote, “Every act of content creation is an act of content destruction. Stop wasting our time. We have less of it to spend than we think.” I love the idea that every act of content creation is an act of content destruction.

Joni Mitchell has this lyric on her 1972 song Electricity that goes, “I’m out of touch with the breakdown of this century.” That’s sort of how I feel in the content era. Everybody’s on their phone. There’s a meme for every emotion that you could possibly feel or not feel. There’s this constant pressure to broadcast every aspect of your life. I have been very guilty of this, so I’m not at all above it, but I do think that everything about our lives is so disposable. And I just hate that.

I never thought that everything was so disposable growing up when I was reading books or watching movies or TV. Maybe it is, but I’m resistant to that. I want the art that I try to make, I want it to last. I want it to mean something to people and to be something that you can go back to and that it can resonate with you beyond just the moment that you watch a two second clip of it online or a meme. I don’t want to be a meme. For good or for ill, that’s what I’ve been trying to do all these years.

Langston Hughes is quoted as saying, “Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people, the beauty within themselves.” How has the totality of the experience of A Strange Loop allowed you to accept that you have interpreted your own beauty and how will that inspire you moving forward? 

It’s been a real loop roller coaster ride for me because sometimes I would feel like, wow, what a cool thing I’ve made that has shown, as you say, beauty to the world. But then other times I felt like, oh, God, I made something that’s just a vehicle for narcissism and navel gazing. But then I come back to I made something that is a real vehicle for a lot of Black actors to come together, to tell a story of a person trying to find themselves and somewhat succeeding. That feels like a win. So I can only hope that continues. That there’s a will to continue to tell that story and to find artists who want to tell that story as difficult as it is to tell.

To watch the full interview with Michael R. Jackson, please go here.

Main Photo: Michael R. Jackson (Photo by Zack DeZon/Courtesy Center Theatre Group)

The post Michael R. Jackson Is Not Usher in “A Strange Loop” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

If the last show isn’t as familiar to you as the first five, composer Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly!) considered it his best show. Even though it includes a slew of some of his finest songs, the show has struggled to be successfully produced. The original Broadway production (with Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters) ran for just 66 performances and won none of the eight Tony nominations it had received.

Mack & Mabel, which is centered around silent film director Mack Sennett and silent film star Mabel Normand, is being performed in a concert presentation this weekend at North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre. This All Roads Theatre Company production is being directed and choreographed by Scott Thompson. O’Connor is playing Lottie Ames, a film star who takes Mabel (Jenna Lea Rosen) under her wing. Dermot Mulroney plays Mack. Update: All performances of Mack & Mabel have sold out.

Last week I spoke with O’Connor about the reasons why Mack & Mabel hasn’t been successful, how the show is a throwback to when stars were the stars of the show and if time heals everything O’Connor has gone through in her career. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview with O’Connor, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Jerry Herman said that Mack & Mabel was his favorite of all of his works, but it was sadly his least successful. You were in the 1995 UK production for which you received an Olivier nomination for your performance as Mabel. Why do you think historically this show didn’t find an audience and what did the audiences miss by not seeing it?

We ran for about seven months, maybe a little bit more, which I think is probably the longest run of Mack & Mabel. I think that theater is quite often like fashion. I think it opened around 74, didn’t it? Weren’t we getting things like A Chorus Line and more modern musicals, maybe even Chicago? Those sorts of shows [meaning Mack & Mabel] seemed more like a revival. Whereas the modern shows like A Chorus Line, Godspell and things like that, it was just fashion and theater was changing. I just really believe that sometimes you see six revivals in a row. Suddenly that’s the thing and then suddenly brand new musicals. So I just think maybe the timing wasn’t quite right. 

Mack & Mabel shares something in common with Stephen Sondheim‘s Merrily We Roll Along. They have both been considered shows with many of their composer’s best songs. But until this season’s Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along, the show wasn’t fully embraced. Late in the second act of Mack & Mabel there’s a song, I Promise You a Happy Ending. Mack sings, “If you’ve had a bad beginning, you’ll come out winning in the close.” Do you think Mack & Mabel will ultimately have a happy ending the same way Merrily We Roll Along has?

Possibly. I mean, of all the places to do this show, Los Angeles is probably the right place. Just because of the subject matter, it being about a movie director in a movie studio. If we can’t do it here and for it to be understood and appreciated, then it’s difficult to know. I think it could be a show like those that come around and people go, wait a minute. This is a sensational. An amazing score. It’s been criticized quite a bit over the years, but I have to say Scott is doing a really sensational job of the show now.

Jerry Herman was still with us when you did the 1995 production. Was Jerry Herman around during that production?

He came to Leicester to be with us during the rehearsal period. Which you can imagine was absolutely thrilling. There’s nothing quite like having the the actual composer in the room. He just had the biggest grin on his face the entire time he was there. I think he was just so thrilled to be seeing the musical come back to life. Then opening night, in London, he was there and it was everything you could possibly dream up.

This 1995 production had the most major changes in the book.

We had quite a few changes during the rehearsal period. Quite a few went into the show. There was a slight nervousness about how it would be received. I just think it’s best to just tell the truth. You know, the real story. It’s not a happy ending. Mabel Normand had a pretty tragic life at the end and died very young. Their love was never what it probably should have or could have been. So there was a lot of tweaking backwards and forwards and everyone was very nervous.

What do you think your perspective was on Lottie Ames in 1995 and how has it shifted now that you’re taking on this role?

We had a wonderful actress called Kathryn Evans who played the role. She had a voice from heaven and was a wonderful dancer. So my recollection of the role is that it was brilliantly done by her, but also a lovely role. What I like about this female character within the show is that quite often you’ll have two female characters sort of against each other or competing with each other. I think it’s quite interesting in this show that Lottie becomes quite protective and supportive of Mabel. So it’s quite nice to have that sort of dynamic between the characters and it’s interesting. 

I really enjoy playing her now just because I love the show. It’s so strange. Everything’s flooding back in the room. [I’m] getting quite emotional thinking about it because it was such a great time of my life. So I feel blessed that I’m getting to experience it again, but also to play this other role.

Lottie’s second act number is Tap Your Troubles Away. What do you do to get over your troubles?

I’m never happier than I am when I’m at work. When I’m at home I do tend to sing around the house. I’ve got a little miniature poodle and she’ll sing along with me, howl along with me. I live in Queensland, which is like God’s back garden. So I spend a lot of time with lovely friends. But I’d have to say what makes me happiest is when I’m actually working.

You had previously done a concert version of Mack & Mabel in Melbourne in 2001. You also did a concert version of My Favorite Year at 54 Below in 2017. What are the differences for you as an actor in doing a concert performance as opposed to a fully realized production?

I don’t think it’s that different, to be honest with you. I think you approach it in the same way. You still try to find a full-bodied character. Of course, there’s not as much choreography when you do it in that way. But you have to do a lot of the learning in advance. 

You’ve played Cassie in A Chorus Line. You’ve played Phyllis in Follies. Some of the greatest musicals that we’ve ever had came out of the 1970s. Do you think that musicals from that time offer performers and audiences more than perhaps musicals do today? 

Yes I do. I can’t really put my finger on it. When I moved to England in the 80s, I really noticed that star vehicles were not the important issue anymore. It was that the show was becoming the star. Not the roles that you aspire to play. I do think that we got to the end of the 70s and they stopped writing things in that capacity. Which is a shame, because it gave you something to aspire to. I’ve always grown up going, oh my God, I would love to play that part that so-and-so played. So yeah, I think the fashion definitely changed. And the roles, even though they were still important, they weren’t seen in the same capacity anymore.

You mentioned roles that you’d like to play based on who else had played them. What are those roles? 

I did Gypsy and I loved Ethel Merman growing up. When I was a little girl growing up in Australia, I was probably about 11, I’ve got a cassette of me singing Rose’s Turn with Ethel. It’s funny to me because I didn’t want to play Baby June. Obviously I want to play Mama Rose. I just loved the sound. And I remember thinking, that must be what Broadway is, because I didn’t know what Broadway was. I used to listen to the albums and think that sound, that big orchestra, and you could hear the character coming across. I couldn’t see them, but I could tell every emotion. Of course, Angela Lansbury in probably everything. And Chita Rivera, of course, probably my greatest inspiration, because she was also such a magnificent dancer. I did four of her shows: West Side Story, Chicago, The Rink and Kiss of the Spider Woman. The dream is that you get to create a role that somebody else would like to play in the future. 

You also had the distinction of having been in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! as Nini. Which means you got Tango Roxanne as your big on-screen moment. Why do you think Moulin Rouge! resonates with people as strongly as it does?

The music primarily has to be part of it because of the recognition. Everybody feels comfortable when they hear something that they recognize. The experience for me was one of the best of my life. Very unexpected thing that happened, too. I didn’t think at that stage of my life as a dancer, because I was in my late 30s, that I was going to get the call to do something like that. I don’t think we’d seen a musical movie in quite some years. He brought them back into fashion again.

You’ve been doing this for four decades at this point, which means you’ve had good times and bum times and you’ve seen it all. When you look back on your career, does time heal everything that wasn’t so great and offer perspective on those things that were?

Yes, I think so. I remember the George Burns quote, which was that show business is a hideous bitch goddess. And I thought, that’s so true because you love it. It’s very hard work. It can be very disappointing as well. You have to hang in there. You never who’s going to produce what. There’s no plan. You just always have to be ready to be prepared and to be able to go for something. So I think that time does heal everything. Sometimes you have great disappointments. I know over the years you think, gosh, why didn’t I get to do that? And then something else marvelous to come along. So, yes, the unexpected is always a wonderful surprise. This certainly was an unexpected surprise. So may they long continue.

To see the full interview with Caroline O’Connor, please go here.

Main Photo: Caroline O’Connor (Courtesy Caroline O’Connor)

The post Caroline O’Connor Returns to “Mack & Mabel” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the Broadway musical The Lion King would be a monster hit when it opened in 1997. It was also clear that this is a tough show to perform. No one would know that better than Keith Bennett who is the Resident Director of the US Tour.

Bennett appeared on Broadway as Banzai, one of the hyenas in the show. The Lion King begins a 31-performance run at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, CA on February 1st. The show then moves to Omaha, Nebraska; Minneapolis, MN; Dayton, OH and more. [You can find the full itinerary here.] Of course, the show continues on Broadway where The Lion King has amassed over 10,250 performances with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Recently I spoke with Bennett about his work keeping this very precisely designed and choreographed show up to the highest possible standards. We also spoke about the role The Lion King has played in his life, but we started with a conversation about the first Broadway show in which Bennett appeared: Oh Kay! which opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on October 16, 1990 with a cast that included a future Tony Award winner.

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

Q: Before we start talking about The Lion King, I’m specifically thinking of a date October 16th, 1990. And on that date was the very first preview of Oh Kay! At the Richard Rodgers Theater when you were in a company that included Brian Mitchell, who did not go by Stokes at the time, in only his second show. At that point in your career, did you ever foresee into the future that your life and your career would be so entwined with one particular show?

Everything’s so spontaneous. You never know where you’re going to go. They used to call us gypsies. You go from one show to the next show to the next show. [Producer] David Merrick was behind the show, I thought it would run forever. When you’re young, you think that way. [Oh, Kay!, a revival of a Gershwin musical, ran for 77 performances.]

They used to have this event called Waiting in the Wings. They would get an understudy from each Broadway show and they would have a big night where you would perform and that night I did one of the numbers in the show. I understudied the great Stanley Wayne Mathis, who also took over the role of Bonzai on Broadway in [The Lion King]. I was this number called Fidgety Beat. So I went on that night, I did that number and I got an agent. So I wasn’t looking ahead at what’s going to be in the future. 

As somebody who has been on stage in The Lion King, as Bonzai, how exacting is Julie Taymor’s direction? How much does that require of the cast members and how particular is Garth Fagan’s choreography so that every performance hums the way you probably remember it the first time you saw it? 

The thing about them, it’s changed, too. I call it updating the product. It has evolved and keeps evolving. It keeps changing. A lot of it has gone back to the simplicity of telling the story. The same thing with the dance. The truth is when you look at Garth Fagan’s choreography, it’s not much you can change or alter. They mess around with the kick butt dance somewhat. The same thing with the direction. She comes in now and she updates certain things to make moments more clear. 

Do you really have to make moments so clear when a show’s been running for 25 years? Isn’t there a certain clarity that the audience is already getting?

You want to keep it fresh. When a different performer comes in they have a different take on the role. We just had a lighting situation here in Portland. You maybe move something in a different area of the stage ever so slightly. The work itself, it’s changed somewhat. The truth is we changed some of the dialogue around ever so slightly. And the show has been cut down. We cut down the show for Vegas. And they saw that was a means of like, we can try this with the national tour. 

In the first year or two of the show on Broadway, there were tons of stories about injuries. I’m assuming that technology has shifted and changed so that the costuming or the puppetry isn’t as heavy as it might have been when it first started. What does a performer go through, physically, during eight shows a week of The Lion King? 

The Lion King is tough, number one. You’re dancing with ornaments and equipment on your head. There’s probably not one character in the show that gets a break. Everyone wears something that can be constricting in terms of movement. You find you’re in constant mode of exercise and taking ballet classes because it’s tough. 

It also is not just a costume. I call it equipment that we wear. Eight shows a week is hard on all those dancers. On Broadway they have a raked stage. So my heart goes out to all those dancers. You have to stay in the gym. You have to train. You have to get your rest. But the honest truth is sometimes that’s not enough. We’ve had a lot of injuries. That’s why we have a lot of people coming in and out and people who have to take time off to let the body heal. It’s a hard show. But that’s what the public likes, seeing the costumes and how big they are.

As resident director, Keith Bennett, you have to make sure the show is consistently good night after night after night. How difficult is it to maintain that level of consistency night after night, week after week, town after town?

I’m blessed to have these trained actors that know where to go on stage at what point, and the script. It’s been easy for me. It’s been easy to maintain. There haven’t been too many issues. Of course, when, I call them the big wigs, come out here, they update and change some things around based on Julie’s vision. But other than that, I’ve been blessed to have these guys stick to the script. 

I’m not the type of director, you know, paint by numbers. When I work with them, I believe if you want to get the best out of your actor, it has to be a collaboration, a coming together. A meeting of the minds when you sit down and you’re working on a certain scene and you tell them, all right, let’s sculpt this. Let’s take this thing and sculpt it and see what happens.

I read an interview that Julie Taymor gave the New York Times in 1997, around the time of the show’s opening on Broadway, and she was talking about the puppetry in particular. She said, “I want to see the rough edges. I don’t want it to be slick.” Doesn’t a long-running show, and a show that’s toured the world as many times as The Lion King has, have to be slick to be as successful as it is?

You have to work against that, because that work machine can stifle the creativity. One has to work against that. I think that’s why she comes back, to keep it fresh and maybe change some things around. Here’s the truth though. Most of these actors have their own interpretation. Which takes away from it being just a mechanical machine performance. They have their own way. It’s still defined, but, you have the human element behind it, which takes away from that thing of being just slick. 

I think the long running successes of a show like The Lion King or Phantom of the Opera or Chicago, is that kind of success good for Broadway? Doesn’t that at a certain level rule out any number of shows that could equally be as worthy as those or any other show that’s on Broadway from getting a chance to be seen? 

Put it this way for the actor it has its financial benefits. 

And for the creators. 

And for the creators, but we know the creators are going to be fine. The thing I like about a long-running show like this, you have dancers who now can establish a financial foundation. We’re in this business. We love doing good work, but we do want to eat at the same time.

I was in a show called High Rollers. We were at the Helen Hayes Theater. We closed in three weeks. We have to be honest. That’s the nature of the business. I guess that’s why when I got The Lion King, I was like, I’m going to milk this cow for as long as I can. In the 80s and the 90s, I paid my dues. That’s the only thing I can say. I do love new works coming to Broadway. There’ve been some incredible shows that only lasted for a year. 

Or lasted much less than that. The hottest ticket in New York right now is the first-ever revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, and the original production in 1981 only ran 16 performances.

And that’s just how it is. I went to a party some years ago.People were like, you get a good government check. That’s what they were saying about The Lion King. They know that show was not going anywhere. I’ve been able to put myself in a different financial situation with my family. I talk to a lot of people they’re like, God, that show has been running a long time. They want to do something different. But for me, the financial benefits outweigh me going for a job. I do hope a lot of shows get more longevity. 

Keith Bennett, you played Richie in A Chorus Line. As you well know, when Paul injures himself late in the show, the question comes up, what do you do when you can’t dance anymore? Clearly, you’ve found an answer for yourself by being involved as long as you have been with The Lion King. But what do you think you’ll do when you can no longer feel the love tonight? When you can no longer wake up in the morning and say I can’t wait to be on this show?

You move on to something else that’s gonna inspire you. You have to do more than one thing. I’ve been able to study acting, singing and dancing. When I left the show on Broadway, my wife and I went back out to LA, and then we moved down to Florida. I got my real estate license.

When you feel that thing is draining from you, that’s when you have to make the decision. Either you try to regroup to find something else that can further involve you in this thing, or you have to say to yourself, I have to move on. The thing with this show directing thing, though, it’s so much to learn. But when that time comes, I just have to make that decision. Trust in God and say, okay, Keith, it’s time for you to go and do something. I’ve done it hundreds of times in my career. What do you do when the show closes? You go and audition for another show.

To see the full interview with Keith Bennett, please go here.

Main Photo: Resident Director Keith Bennett (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

The post Resident Director Keith Bennett Still Feels the Love Tonight… appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Menken has won 8 Academy Awards, 1 Tony Award and 11 Grammy Awards. Fear not, he’s an EGOT with his winning of a Daytime Emmy Award for the song Waiting in the Wings which he co-wrote with Glenn Slater for Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. He’s had a variety of collaborators and by any measure a massively successful career.

He will be celebrating that career this weekend when he gives performances of his show A Whole New World of Alan Menken at the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona on March 31st and The Soraya in Northridge, California on April 2nd.

Recently I spoke with Menken about his career. Rather than focus on the projects everybody knows (many of which are featured in his show), I opted to ask Menken about some of the lesser-known works of this remarkably successful composer (and sometimes lyricist). What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview (which includes him singing part of a beautiful song you’ve probably never before), please go to our YouTube channel.

I want to get your perspective on your work by asking you about a lyric that comes from one of the songs that you wrote. The lyrics go: “In the end, it’s only your voice matters. You never hear it, though, for free. You got to pay dues before you choose to be the man you’re going to be.” Those are David Spencer’s lyrics from The Man You’re Gonna Be from your musical adaptation of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. At what point did you find your voice and become the man who created the work we’ve all grown to love?

I fell in love with music at a very young age. I was kind of just this kid who was a dreamer. I liked to just play at the piano. But I really hated to practice. I just hated schools. I just didn’t like where it was going. All the men in the family are dentists or doctors or whatever. So I would say that voice always lived inside of me. 

When I was in college I went as a pre-med. I just didn’t want to go into the lecture hall. I just said no. I made a right turn and went to the piano practice room and just made music. I didn’t care. I would say my voice was found there. My voice is not my music. My voice is my love of music and my desire to make it in all the different forms. I take my voice from characters, from stories or from myself.

A Whole New World of Alan Menken began its life almost seven years ago in 2016. How has the show evolved?

For the most part, as I perform it, I really go back to the moment when I wrote them. Just the memories of where they came from. People say, “Oh, Disney composer Alan Menken.” I love Disney. I adore Disney. But I said I would like [the show] to be some medium in which it’s my career. Which contains Little Shop of Horrors or, as you said, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz or A Christmas Carol or Sister Act or A Bronx Tale or whatever it is. So it really came from wanting to share.

There’s a whole generation of people for whom you are so closely identified with Disney properties, whether they are on screen or on stage. I happen to be a little bit older than that. My first Disney reference is Robert and Richard Sherman. Is there any way in which they were influential on you or were part of your understanding of the Disney history when you started getting involved with Disney?

Obviously they are a big part of the history. To be honest, I go further back to the Disney films that set my imagination on fire like Fantasia. It was that marriage of classical music and images that just forever had me creating images in relation to music. Nobody was more welcoming to me when I came to Disney than Richard Sherman. Richard and [his wife] Elizabeth were so kind. I’ll never forget that.

Just before I started writing the Disney films the AIDS crisis was just this unbelievably horrifying specter that was killing our friends. By that time Tom [Eyen – Kicks: The Showgirl Musical], passed away. First it was Howard [Ashman – Little Shop of Horrors], then it was Tom. Before that it was Steve Brown [Battle of the Giants].

But leading into this time Anna had been born. [I was] bringing my daughter into this world that is fraught with this nightmare because none of us knew the extent of it or how it could be contained and how it was being treated. I would sit with her on the couch and all the Disney classics had come out on VHS. I was putting in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty or Peter Pan and just sitting with her. Watching them and going this is the ultimate safe space in the world. You just felt it. I felt that from that material.

We are creating the ultimate safe space. We want to be emotionally true and to come from a place of love and redemption and belief in the beauty of life and everything. And so all of that informs, I guess, my approach to Disney.

What stands out to you most about your days at Sesame Street? 

I was making a living. “We have an assignment for you.” Yay! 35 bucks. Yay! I can pay my rent. Literally. Sesame Street was a wonderful, safe space. Howard and I wrote a song which is called The Count’s Lament. “Why I can’t I say ‘w.’ I want to and wish that I could.” Oh, God. Howard’s brilliance. The most special part was being able to write something with Howard for Sesame Street.

I saw an interview you did with Michael Riedel around the time of Sister Act and you said, “I never let go of anything.” What relationship do you have with the works that haven’t been seen as much that maybe will someday have new opportunities? 

Occasionally we would like to nudge them forward if there’s an opportunity. I remember [Music Director/Composer] Lehman Engel always used to say “What’s next?” I will always prefer to just move on to what’s next. I’ve learned that things come back on their own. I didn’t bring back Newsies. Newsies brought itself back. We would see it everywhere. People were just doing the songs from it.

Tom Schumacher [President of Disney Theatrical Group] said, “Look, we should do something. Just a a version for stock or amateur. Just so there’s something because people are cobbling together their own versions of Newsies.” If I sense an opportunity. I go for it.

You mentioned Duddy Kravitz. It’s a really well-written musical. At the same time it’s complex and it’s got a real darkness to it. Duddy is a conundrum because he is one tough, complicated character. It’s going to take context and an audience that really wants to dig into something that’s got some real guts to it.

There was a musical Howard wanted us to do a following Little Shop on stage. It was based on the movie The Big Street and we couldn’t get the rights at the time. He knew that he had a very finite amount of time. He wasn’t telling me at that moment. So I said, we’ll wait. After he passed away I did get the rights. I worked on that twice. But again, the genre, the story, the complexity of it, the the darkness of it, you have to really handle it in just the right way. I’ve learned not to try to force things. Somehow the time will come. I just am a believer in that.

If you dig deep enough on the internet you can find seven demos from The Honeymooners, which I think are some of the best songs that you wrote in your career. 

Those are my music and lyrics. Before I met Howard I was exclusively composer and lyricist. We never got the rights to do it. I am very proud of that. Someday maybe we’ll get those songs out there again. People occasionally record the songs.

There’s a lot of there’s a lot of material that you’ve written that people don’t know unless they were lucky enough to be in workshops or to be at shows. I love the song Hero from Babe.

We have five songs from from Babe.

You have a song, Daughter of God, that you wrote for Emmylou Harris…

Atina: Evil Queen of the Galaxy. It was written for Divine. That one I am now actively reviving and hopefully getting that on stage.

You have such a wealth of material. It seems to me you probably have at least two two discs worth of material, probably more, that could be recorded so people can experience them. Is that something you would like to see happen? 

Sure I would. My daughter Anna, who is a singer, songwriter and producer living in Nashville, one of the things she’s been discussing with me is she would love to have me open up the archives and either record it myself or get other people to record things. So it’s always a possibility that those things will get out there.

I think one reason I have had the success I’ve had is because I’m never resistant to throwing something out. Never. Generally the best thing will always rise to the surface. I’m just that kind of collaborator. It’s not about me. It’s about being part of something bigger and putting your talent out into that. That’s how you maximize your abilities.

I threw out a song I loved from the movie of Hercules. It’s called Shooting Star. Love that song. And then we wrote Go the Distance. We tossed out a song called We’ll Have Tomorrow from the second act of Little Shop of Horrors. But we didn’t need it. Part of its success is that tightness. I mean there are some shows where I’ve written 14 songs for one moment. Leap of Faith – it’s just like the most ridiculous archive of songs.

The Howard Ashman Archives published a two-part interview with you. I don’t know how long ago this was because there was no date on it. But you were asked about Howard and you said, “But I know honestly that he has remained my collaborator in so many ways in the over 20 years since he’s been gone.” Is that still true for you today? How do you feel his presence in your work today?

Occasionally he’ll just be in a dream where we’re writing together. Sometimes in your subconscious there’s almost an alternate arc of your life that’s happening on a subconscious level. When he passed. First of all, I had vivid dreams. I mean, literally on the moment he passed.

Please watch the clip below to see images of Howard and hear the next part of the story.

And then I went back to sleep and that’s when he had passed. Shortly after he and I met in the dream I said, “Tell me what happens. What happens when you die?” He sort of talked me through what his experience was, which was very interesting. Sometimes in the dream we’re writing something, but he’s saying “You’ve moved on. I can’t keep up with what you’re doing or I don’t want to.” I do have a visceral sense of him in my life. I just think in some ineffable way he’s a part of me. He’s just a really deep part of me.

When I think about the things we would have done. Howard wrote Smile. It was really a wonderful score. But people wanted it to be about a beauty pageant in a nice, light, kind of happy story. And it wasn’t. It was about the dark side of a beauty pageant. I was playing [Disney Fan Club Expo] D23. It was already planned that I was playing it. Marvin Hamlisch, who was Howard’s collaborator on Smile, passed away. I said I really should play Disneyland [a song from that musical]. I knew what Marvin and Howard had written for the basic song, but I wanted to sit with the lyric and kind of play what they had written, but put it in my own voice and my own fingers. I wanted to play this from my heart and it was the first time I had a lyric of Howard’s in front of me since he passed that I hadn’t worked with before. It just blew me apart, the memory of that, because he was just on an absolutely incredible level as a writer.

You said on New York Theater Talk that at various stages when you were growing up you wanted to be Beethoven, then the Beatles and then Bob Dylan. What’s been the most satisfying thing about being Alan Menken instead? 

If I think about being me, to be honest, is that I’ve maintained. I’m the same person I was when I was struggling to write. Janice [his wife] and I are together over 50 years now. I talk to my daughters all the time. I’m dad. I love that. I know this thing… Well, Irving Berlin called it my little knack. I think that was his. My little knack is great. I love having it.

I was working on a new song for this Nancy Drew musical I’m writing and I get lost in them. I want to go someplace I’ve never been before. And I want to take an audience someplace they’ve never been before. I’m blessed that I move on. I think it’s a blessing to move on. Even with my concerts there are times I go, “Wow, I’m up here. I’m reliving the last how many years of my life?” 50 years. 50 years of my life. But I see how much it means to audiences and I kind of go there’s something here that’s special. What am I going to do if I’m not doing this one thing? 

Because of what I’ve done in my life, I don’t really have hobbies. So this is kind of it. I’m going to do this or I’m just going to my feet up and I don’t know what am I going to do. You just love the craft, you breathe it in and then you breathe it out and you leave it to others to define what it is you do.

To watch the full interview with Alan Menken (complete with some singing), please go here.

Photos: Alan Menken (Photo by Shervin Lainz/Courtesy AMP Worldwide)

The post Bo23: Alan Menken & Some Lesser-Known Works appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Sometimes you’re dreams get broken in pieces
But that doesn’t matter at all
Take it from me, there’s still going to be
A summer, a winter, a spring and a fall

For the creators of the Broadway musical – writers David Thompson and Sharon Washington; composers Kander and Ebb and Lin-Manuel Miranda; director/choreographer Susan Stroman – their big-budgeted musical didn’t make it in the city that doesn’t sleep. The show closed after only 110 official performances.

But for fans who loved the musical or the people who never got a chance to see the show, there is the ultimate souvenir to experience: the original Broadway cast recording (OBCR).

As they did for the show itself, orchestrators Sam Davis (who was also the arranger) and Daryl Waters were in the studio with the cast and creators to memorialize the enormous amount of work that went into this show so that their little town blues could melt away and they could all make a brand new start of it. And more importantly, so you could hear the 28 songs and 5 demos.

It’s not unlike how they first became aware of musicals.

“Everything I know about musical theater, and my whole love of shows and show music, all came from albums,” said Davis for whom New York, New York was his twelfth Broadway show. “I would get cast albums as a kid and listen to the songs and love the songs, but not know anything about the plots. So, for instance, I made up my own plot for South Pacific.”

Waters, who grew up in Cleveland, got to see shows, “but certainly not Broadway quality,” he recalled. “Listening to all this glorious music just draws you even that much closer to the whole scene and makes you want to be a part of it. That’s how I ended up here.” It was Waters’ work on Shuffle Along, or, The Making of The Musical Sensation of 1921 and All that Followed, that prompted Davis to bring Waters in for New York, New York.

Davis recalls, “I had never worked with Daryl before this, but Shuffle Along made me think he’d be really great with Stro [Stroman] working with dance. I arranged the whole score of New York, New York, but wasn’t going to orchestrate the whole thing myself because it would be too much work. It was such a stylistic hodgepodge that there were definitely areas that were taking me out of my comfort zone as an orchestrator. So I thought it would be great if we could get someone else to do a lot of the orchestrations and bring their flavor to it. Darryl was the perfect person.”

The hodgepodge that Davis was referring to was the various sources for the songs that made up this musical.

“We have classic Kander and Ebb songs like New York, New York and But The World Goes Round, and then we have lesser known Kander and Ebb classics like Marry Me [from The Rink],” Davis listed. “Then we also had these new songs that Kander was writing with Lin. We had a song from Funny Lady [a 1975 film sequel to Funny Girl – the song is Let’s Hear It For Me]. And the danger would be that they would all sound like they were from different shows – which they are.”

According to Waters, they made it work. “The way that Sam has delivered that thread throughout the show was absolutely incredible to me. When you talk about art, threads are important. All I had to do was layer in my own part. Sometimes I feel like I have to superimpose something on there that wasn’t there. It was all there this show.”

When it came time to go into the studio to make the OBCR, Davis and Waters faced some challenges in recording an album that mirrors the show.

Davis recalls, “The show is such a big dance show and it’s such a visual show. How do you create that? How do you keep the joy of that when you don’t have anything to look at? Mostly that just meant in the way that the songs were performed. We have a big production number in Act Two called the San Juan Supper Club. When you see it in the audience with Susan Stroman’s choreography, it was thrilling. But when we recorded it the way we do it in the show, without the visuals it seemed a little lackluster. So we ended up doing it almost twice the tempo that we do it in the show to create all the excitement that you saw visually. There were lots of little tweaks like that.”

But they also go to enhance the experience as well for the album. Waters reveals, “Let’s not forget something very major: You try and keep to the minimum number of players because every year it gets more expensive. For the album we had the luxury of actually adding some strings that gave us a much richer sound than you would normally hear.”

During our conversation I mentioned to Waters and Davis that seven years earlier I had interviewed Kander and he mentioned that he hoped that revivals of his shows The Rink and Steel Pier might happen soon. Neither show was a hit, though he was deeply passionate about them.

So if New York, New York gets a revival in the future, what do Davis and Waters think the reason for that revival would be? What discoveries could be made that didn’t engage an audience this year?

Waters responds first, “This is the everyman story – at least for New York City. We all can relate to all these stories. I’m disappointed more people didn’t get a chance to see it this time. Next time, it’s just have to come on in there and take a look at it. Because the storylines are real. The truth is real.”

That truth, that honesty, is also important to Davis.

“What lasts in theater is when pieces have something to say that is honest. If a little time goes by and we forget arguing which plot line we should have cut or which scene didn’t work, people will realize the show really does say something genuine about New York. Every scene, every song and every musical moment expresses all of our collective love and our fantasy about what that means being in New York and arriving in New York from somewhere else. We all put it so fervently into the piece. I just feel like it’s there waiting to be discovered.”

Until then there’s the cast recording. A recording that will last as a permanent document of the show. So what happens in five decades from now when someone first listens to New York, New York? Will they create their own storyline as Davis did? Davis has some ideas.

“One thing that may not be clear 50 years from now, but what I think is so unique now, is how unusual it was for a show like New York, New York to open in 2023 – just a couple of years out of the pandemic and and in a time where everyone is scaling down and so many shows have contemporary pop scores – that we were doing a show with a big budget that had a huge set, fantastic lavish costumes, great choreography and a full orchestra with strings. It’s like a defiant throwback in a way.

“Maybe in 50 years every show will be like that again. But I would love people to know how brave and unusual that was that we did.”

To see my interview with Sam Davis and Daryl Waters, which has plenty of other stories about New York, New York and other shows and collaborators, please go here.

Main Photo: The company of New York, New York (Photo by Paul Kolnik)

The post The “New York, New York” Cast Album Lives On appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

There are multiple musicals that inspired such deep passion within audiences that you would have expected them to be smash successes. Side Show, about conjoined sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton, is one of those shows. The original 1997 production, which earned great reviews and received 4 Tony nominations including Best Musical, closed after 91 performances. The 2014 revival, directed by Bill Condon (the film Dreamgirls), earned 5 Tony nominations including Best Musical and closed after 56 performances. For book writer and lyricist Bill Russell those results didn’t match the passion of the audiences who saw each production.

On Monday, September 25th, Russell will present My Side of the Show at Birdland Jazz Club in New York. He’ll be joined by cast members from the show for an evening of stories and songs.

I got my own stories earlier this week when I spoke with Russell about this musical he wrote with Henry Krieger (Dreamgirls) that still holds a very important place in his heart. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To get even more stories about Side Show, please watch the full interview on our YouTube channel.

Q: How has your relationship to Side Show evolved since you first started working on it to where we are today? How will that influence how you present your memories from this chapter of your career?

It’s certainly been an education in a lot of ways – especially in how musicals get to Broadway. It has been on Broadway twice and it’s been a flop both times now. That’s a very loaded term, but I’m using the definition by Variety, which was considered the showbiz bible for a long time – I’m not sure if it still is. But they define a flop as any production which does not recoup its initial investment. And there are a lot of long-running shows that classify that way.

Jekyll and Hyde ran for four years on Broadway. Never recouped. Thoroughly Modern Millie won the Tony Award for Best Musical and it never recouped. I don’t think Sunset Boulevard did either. But, we live in a capitalist culture and it’s easier to measure success in terms of dollars and cents. But I don’t feel Side Show is a flop because it’s meant so much to so many people.

I looked at Vincent Canby‘s New York Times review of Side Show when it first opened on Broadway and he compared your work as a lyricist to the work of Betty Comden and Adolph Green who had had a production of On the Town going on in Central Park the summer prior to your opening. Since Side show was your first Broadway musical, not your first musical, but your first Broadway musical, what did that comparison mean to you?

Oh, God, it meant the world to me. To be mentioned in their company? I mean, they are just legendary and I loved their work. I met Betty Comden once and I mentioned that I can’t believe somebody would compare me with you. So that was a wonderful, wonderful moment for me. 

Vincent Canby’s review of the show was very, very positive, but most of it was a discourse about conjoined twins and it didn’t really help sell tickets. At that point I was wholly obsessed with that because we weren’t selling as well as the audience reaction seemed to have warranted. Every performance was getting instant standing ovations and people just were loving it. So I had very mixed emotions.

The musical opens with Come Look at the Freaks. It seems like as a society we have evolved into a people where that’s all we do. We just look at the freaks on Instagram, we look at them on Tik-tok, we look at them in every possible aspect of social media. When you wrote the lyrics for that song did you ever think that we, as a society, would embrace being and looking at the freaks as much as we have today?

No, not really. When I was first interviewed about the show in the mid-nineties they would ask, “What attracted you to this subject matter? Because sideshows don’t even exist anymore.” And I said, Are you kidding? They’ve moved to afternoon television because Jerry Springer was featuring conjoined twins regularly and much shorter people than them. I do think there’s just this fascination that is innate. It’s both fascination and repulsion about people who are radically different. But I do believe that we’ve become much more accepting. And now, as you say, we see freaks everywhere. I’m proud to own that world, by the way, because I definitely consider myself one. Certainly I did growing up. It’s a good point that they’re everywhere now.

There was a much more successful show that had the song Let Your Freak Flag Fly – Shrek the Musical. How has being a freak become more accepted if it’s going to be part of a popular musical like Shrek? 

In a way it has, but it still creates a barrier in terms of selling tickets. When the revival came about we thought that change you’re talking about and now is really the time for this. But women buy the most Broadway tickets. Though Side Show is very female-focused, I think when women hear it’s about conjoined twins they think it’s going to be sad and make them uncomfortable and they do not buy tickets. Once they see the show they love it. But getting them in just is a problem. It’s a continual marketing challenge.

You had to have known that when you started it.

When I was first pitched this idea I just was immediately interested. I thought the theatrical possibilities of two actors singing and moving together were great and the metaphorical ramifications were huge. Once I started diving into their story, I was just so fascinated. There was a point when [producer] Manny [Emmanuel] Azenberg, when we were doing readings of the show, came to me and said, “You realize, Bill, that this subject matter has a real ick factor connected with it.” And I was like, Really? I knew this wasn’t exactly standard Broadway fare, but I thought it was just intriguing and it never occurred to me it would be such a hard sell.

You have worked with composers Ronald Melrose, Janet Hood, Albert Evans, Peter Melnick. What sets your collaborations with Henry Krieger apart from all those other collaborators with whom you’ve worked? 

Henry, you know, he’s such a mensch. He’s just a great guy. He, like Irving Berlin and many other well-known composers, does not read music. So that was different. Our first meeting he asked me, “How do you prefer to write – music or lyrics first?” I was like, I go both ways as a lyricist, but oddly enough most of the composers I’ve worked with prefer the lyrics first. That’s far from typical with Henry.

In the morning I’ll work on a lyric, sometimes the whole lyric, but more likely an intro in a verse or a verse and a chorus. I take it down to him. He lives downtown, I live uptown. We will have discussed where it comes in the show, maybe a musical feel, but not always. He doesn’t read it first. He puts it on the piano, sits down, puts his hands on the keyboard, grabs it and looks up, and after a brief pause, starts singing and playing at the same time. I would say that 50% of the time what comes out of his fingers that moment defines what that song will ultimately be. 

As with any musical there are a lot of songs that never see the light of day or maybe are in early versions of the musical and then get taken out. Some of those from this musical were Why Haven’t You Learned Yet?, Side Show, The Choice I Made and more. How painful is it for you as a creator to have to say goodbye to something you put your heart and soul into?

When I started writing songs for musicals and we had to cut something, it was like, Oh, I can’t do that. But anymore it’s nothing to write another song. We frequently would write maybe five songs for the same moment in the show, just always refining it. Then we would cut stuff because the plot changed. It hasn’t been that hard. I will say when it came to the revival and working with Bill Condon, there were a couple songs that were really hard for me to lose, but I totally understood why.

Is there a whole alternate world of Side Show that exists in songs we’ve never heard? 

My husband Bruce put together a CD of songs we wrote and it’s 90 minutes long, and that by no means includes everything. When we first met with Bill Condon he asked for everything we’d written for the original production and he was mentioning songs we didn’t even remember writing. Honestly we’ve written so much stuff. It’s quite a bit of music and some really good stuff. 

You said writing songs is easy. You know how many people wish they could say that and mean it.

It’s easy for Henry and me, I have to say. Honestly, I could write lyrics every day. I have a much harder problem with books. I think they’re much harder, at least for me. But I love writing lyrics and you can finish them in a finite bit of time; unlike books, which never are finished. 

I saw an interview that you did with Henry, I think it was from Broadway.com. You mentioned that only one song remain untouched for the 2014 revival. What was that song and why? 

It was the the twins’ first song called Like Everyone Else and it wasn’t intentional that we didn’t didn’t touch it. Some of the changes in the other songs were just minor lyric tweaks or whatever. But it just so happened that song, nothing changed.

There’s one song, as you know, that has turned into an anthem for freaks, for performers, singers, and it’s Who Will Love Me As I Am. It’s a song that that has outlived the show on a certain level. Why do you think that song resonates so much with people and did you have any sense in writing it that this would be become the anthem it has?

That lyric came from a really personal place for me. I grew up in the Black Hills of South Dakota. My grandparents were cattle ranchers over the border in Wyoming. Everybody called my father cowboy because he was one. He broke calves in rodeos. In that hyper-macho environment of cattle and cowboys, hunting and sports and cars, I felt like the biggest freak in the world. So when I started working on this show, I just felt right at home. I understood it.

Some people regard the show as a gay metaphor and I’m fine with that because that was really my entry into the world. But I do feel that limits a bigger metaphor than that. If I’ve learned anything doing this, it’s that I think everyone feels like a freak on some level or at some time in their life; certainly adolescence. So that lyric came from such a personal place, and it was one of the first five songs we wrote for the show. Whenever we would play it, people were so moved by it and so I wasn’t surprised.

Did your father live long enough to hear that song and to see the show?

Unfortunately, no. He died just when we started writing it. 

Do you think there’s going to come a time where Side Show will be loved as it is? 

Oh, I think it is that time. They arrived back with the original. It’s just the people’s perception of what it might be like if they haven’t seen it. That’s the issue. Not from people who see it. At least once or twice a month somebody comes up to me, finally having found out that I wrote the book and lyrics and they just go off about how much the show means to them. How much hearing the album when they were in college; how they just couldn’t stop playing it. I can’t think of anything more gratifying for a writer. It’s more gratifying to me than making millions of dollars from a huge commercial hit.

To see the full interview with Bill Russell about Side Show, please go here.

Main Photo: Bill Russell and Henry Krieger at the opening night of the revival of Side Show (Photo courtesy Birdland Jazz Club)

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Before I offer up my setlist, a reminder of the participants at Everybody Rise!: Skylar Astin, Sierra Boggess, Sutton Foster, Norm Lewis, Patti LuPone and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

Given the title of the show and Ms. LuPone being part of the concert, it’s safe to assume that The Ladies Who Lunch from Company will be performed. A very bold move would be to open the show with that song, but my guess is it will happen much later in the concert.

What roles might each of these actors be perfect for in Sondheim’s musicals? Astin could no doubt sing the role of George in Sunday in the Park with George as he could Bobby in Company, Addison Mizner in Road Show, Toby in Sweeney Todd and more.

Sierra Boggess would make a great Squeaky Fromme in Assassins, Petra in A Little Night Music (though she has played Charlotte in the show); Dot in Sunday in the Park and more.

Foster told Stephen Colbert her dream role is Mama Rose in Gypsy (which only has lyrics by Sondheim), but since LuPone won a Tony Award for that role, I’d be surprised to see Foster tackle anything from that show. Foster has played Nurse Fay Apple in Anyone Can Whistle and The Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods, so those two shows register as distinct possibilities.

Norm Lewis has played the demon barber in Sweeney Todd, Bobby in Company, Protean in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and appeared in Sondheim on Sondheim.

LuPone has appeared in the most Sondheim shows: Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Passion, Sunday in the Park with George, Anyone Can Whistle, Gypsy and Company. But I’d love to see her in Follies.

Brian Stokes Mitchell has a great voice for Sweeney Todd, which he performed at the Kennedy Center in 2002. He could also make a great Giorgio in Passion, Ben in Follies and Fredrik in A Little Night Music.

So here’s my setlist for Everybody Rise! I know this presupposes everyone will want to work as hard as it would take to learn all these songs and that re-arrangements would be required to fit voice types, but this is a show I’d like to see.

ACT ONE:

Opening would be an overture of themes from a multitude of Sondheim’s shows. (I know that’s been done before, as in the clip below, but it never ceases to impress.)

Skylar Astin would follow the overture with Take Me to the World from Evening Primrose.

Boggess would join Astin to perform I am Unworthy of Your Love from Assassins. She would stay on stage to sing Last Midnight from Into the Woods

Immediately afterwards Lewis and Mitchell would sing The Best Thing That Ever Happened from Road Show.

Lewis would perform Epiphany from Sweeney Todd. He would then be joined again by Mitchell and they would do Agony from Into the Woods.

Mitchell would stay on stage to perform Marry Me a Little from Company.

Foster would be next with On the Steps of the Palace from Into the Woods and Could I Leave You? from Follies.

Boggess would sing The Miller’s Son from A Little Night Music.

The first act finale would be Patti and Norm Lewis doing A Little Priest from Sweeney Todd.

ACT TWO of Everybody Rise!

Foster, Astin and Boggess to open Act 2 with Getting Married Today from Company. 

Boggess stays on stage to sing Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music.

LuPone sings Loving You from Passion and I Remember from Evening Primrose.

Lewis sings The Road You Didn’t Take from Follies and Pretty Little Picture from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Astin is next with Finishing the Hat from Sunday in the Park with George and is joined by Sutton Foster for Move On from the same show.

Foster stays on stage to perform Sooner or Later from Dick Tracy.

Mitchell takes to the stage to sing Fear No More from The Frogs followed by Being Alive from Company.

Boggess returns with Not a Day Goes By from Merrily We Roll Along.

The act would close with, what else, The Ladies Who Lunch from Company performed by LuPone.

The encore would find the ensemble doing two songs: Old Friends from Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday from Sunday in the Park with George.

What would you like to hear at Everybody Rise! this weekend?

Main Photo: Stephen Sondheim at opening night party at Sardi’s for the stage production West Side Story (Photo by Friedman-Abeles/Courtesy New York Public Library Archives)

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I was naive/skeptical enough to think this only happened at the Pantages. I imagined they brought in a large group of paid attendees to ramp up the excitement on opening night. Boy was I mistaken.

Recently I had a few days in New York to catch up on some shows: Some Like It Hot; Sweeney Todd; Kimberly Akimbo and Good Night, Oscar. The same boisterous response to the start of each musical (perhaps plays don’t attract either the same audience or the same frenzy) preceded the first downbeat from the conductor to get the musicals started.

This phenomenon forced me to ask a lot of questions. First and foremost was why was this happening. It can’t be just that Sweeney Todd is a known property, because that would negate the same experience at the lesser-known Some Like It Hot. (It, too, is based on a known property, but only known for those for whom I don’t have to detail how and why it would be known.)

The Tony Award-winning Best Musical Kimberly Akimbo audience didn’t achieve the decibel level of the other two shows. Was that the smaller venue or the more quiet nature of the musical? Don’t get me wrong, that audience was passionate, too.

Then it occurred to me. Audiences have been trained to be overly excited at the start of television competition shows that feature live performance such as American Idol; America’s Got Talent and The Voice. Whenever a singer hits a relatively high note, or can sustain it for more than a few seconds, the audience goes crazy. They do it again and again and again for repeated displays of vocal calisthenics. Every time a little bit of talent is on display in a slightly impressive way, the audience is off and running with a level of robust applause that ultimately drowns out the very talent they are celebrating.

Why can’t we let a singer, or a musical, earn our respect? Does everyone believe, much like the speakers used by Spinal Tap, that everything has to go to eleven? And if it starts at eleven, where can it go from there?

Is the very price of seeing one of these shows the motivation for celebrating the fact one could afford to be there? Just as the now guaranteed standing ovation at the end of every show is as much a celebration for having made it all the way to the end as it is a way to acknowledge the talented people on the stage and in the orchestra pit.

What is earned and what is deserved? What is the definition of talent today? Not every show deserves as standing ovation. I’m sure we all have those shows that leave us scratching our heads about what anyone ever saw in them. Nor does every vocal trick require the inevitable ovation that seems to accompany them all.

In Beetlejuice they sing about That Beautiful Sound early in Act II. Perhaps the casts of all these shows think this outpouring of emotion at the start of every performance is the energy boost they need and these ovations are that beautiful sound they covet.

I’ll take my cue from the title of a different song in Act I of Beetlejuice: Ready Set, Not Yet.

What do you think either as an audience member of someone who makes their living in theater? Leave us your thoughts in the comment section.

Main Photo: Britney Coleman, Will Burton, Isabella Esler and Justin Collette in “Beetlejuice” (Photo by Matthew Murphy/Courtesy Broadway in Hollywood)

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