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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Hair – 1969 Tony Awards

Nominated for Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical, Hair opened on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre and ran for 1,750 performances. The show, directed by Tom O’Horgan, did not win any Tonys. Amongst the original cast members were two of its creators Gerome Ragni and James Rado, Diane Keaton and Paul Jabara. The 2009 revival of the musical won the Tony Award for Best Revival.

Purlie – 1970 Tony Awards

Purlie was nominated for five Tony Awards including Best Musical. Cleavon Little and Melba Moore won Tony Awards for their performances. The show, directed by Philip Rose who co-wrote the book, first opened at the Broadway Theater and later moved to the Winter Garden and the ANTA Playhouse.

Chicago – 1976 Tony Awards

The original production of Kander and Ebb’s musical Chicago was nominated for 11 Tony Awards. It won none of them. Directed by Bob Fosse and starring Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach, the show ran for 936 performances at the 42nd Street Theatre.

A Chorus Line – 1976 Tony Awards

This is the reason Chicago didn’t win any Tony Awards. Michael Bennett’s show, with music and lyrics by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban, was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won nine of them. Its run of 6,137 performances made it the longest running Broadway musical. It is now number six on that list. Ironically, the revival of Chicago, still running in New York, is currently number two on that list with 9,692 performances so far.

The Act – 1978 Tony Awards

This is also a Kander and Ebb musical with the unique distinction of being the only Broadway show directed by Martin Scorsese. The show received six Tony nominations with the only win being for Liza Minnelli. The Act played at the Majestic Theatre and played for 233 performances.

Sweeney Todd – 1979 Tony Awards (though I have no idea who is sitting in as Sweeney)

Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical was nominated for nine Tony Awards. The show won eight of them including Best Musical, Best Actress for Angela Lansbury and Best Actor for Len Cariou. Directed by Harold Prince, Sweeney Todd played at the Uris Theatre (later renamed The Gershwin Theatre) for 557 performances.

Evita – 1980 Tony Awards

Evita, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, was nominated for 11 Tony Awards. The show won seven including Best Musical, Best Actress for Patti LuPone and Best Featured Actor for Mandy Patinkin. Directed by Harold Prince, Evita played at the Broadway Theatre and ran for 1,567 performances.

Dreamgirls – 1982 Tony Awards

Dreamgirls was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won six of them. The show, directed by Michael Bennett, played the Imperial Theatre and ran for 1,521 performances. The Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen musical featured the staggering Tony-winning performance by Jennifer Holliday as “Effie White.”

Cats – 1983 Tony Awards

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won seven including Best Musical. Trevor Nunn directed Cats which played the Winter Garden Theatre. The musical broke A Chorus Line‘s record for longest-running Broadway show with 7,485 performances. Betty Buckley won a Tony Award for her performance as Grizabella who sings the show’s best-known song.

Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur – 1988 Tony Awards

Jerry Herman’s musical Mame opened in 1966 and was nominated for eight Tony Awards. Amongst the three winners were co-stars Angela Lansbury (as Mame Dennis) and Bea Arthur (as Vera Charles). 22 years later they reunited on the 1988 Tony Awards and performed their classic duet from the show. (This was the year The Phantom of the Opera won Best Musical.)

Grand Hotel – 1990 Tony Awards

Grand Hotel was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won five including two for director and choreographer Tommy Tune and one for Michael Jeter as Otto Kringelein. The show opened at the Martin Beck Theatre and later transferred to the Gershwin Theatre. Grand Hotel ran for a total of 1,017 performances

Kiss of the Spider Woman – 1993 Tony Awards

Kander and Ebb won yet another Tony Award for this musical based on Manuel Puig’s novel (which also inspired the Academy Award-winning film.) Kiss of the Spider Woman received 11 Tony nominations winning seven of them including Terrence McNally for Best Book of a Musical and for the performances by Chita Rivera as “Spider Woman/Aurora,” Brent Carver as “Molina” and Anthony Crivello as “Valentin.” The musical, directed by Harold Prince, opened at the Broadhurst Theatre and ran for a total of 904 performances.

Passion – 1994 Tony Awards

The film Passione d’Amore by Ettore Scola was the inspiration for this Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine musical. The musical opened at the Plymouth Theatre near the end of Tony season and ran for only 280 performances. Donna Murphy, Jere Shea and Marin Mazzie starred in Passion. All three were amongst the 10 Tony nominations the show received with Murphy taking the Tony for Best Performance by an Actress. The musical won Best Score, Best Book and also Best Musical.

The Wild Party – 2000 Tony Awards

Composers Michael John LaChiusa and Andrew Lippa wrote musicals called The Wild Party. Both were based on Joseph Moncure March’s poem of the same name and both were produced the same year. LaChiusa’s show, directed by George C. Wolfe, made it to Broadway’s Virginia Theatre where it was nominated for seven Tony Awards. It did not win any and closed after a run of only 68 performances. The cast featured Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin and Eartha Kitt.

Caroline, Or Change – 2004 Tony Awards

Playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and composer Jeanine Tesori teamed up for this 2004 musical (also directed by George C. Wolfe) that received six Tony Award nominations. Anika Noni Rose was the sole winner for her performance as “Emmie Thibodeaux.” Caroline, or Change was scheduled to have a revival this season, but those plans have been postponed until next season. For anyone who saw the show at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre during its brief 136 performance run, Tonya Pinkins‘ performance of “Lot’s Wife” will stand as one of the greatest performances in modern Broadway history.

Fela! – 2010 Tony Awards

Fela! electrified audiences when it opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in 2009. The musical was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won three (including Best Choreography by Bill T. Jones). Jim Lewis collaborated with Jones (who also directed) on the book of this musical about legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. The show ran for 463 performances.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch – 2014 Tony Awards

It took 16 years for this Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell musical to finally make it to Broadway. The show began its life off-Broadway at the Jane Street Theatre in 1998. Directed by Michael Mayer and starring Neil Patrick Harris and Lena Hall, the show was nominated for eight Tony Awards. Harris and Hall both won and Hedwig and the Angry Inch was awarded the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical. The show ran for 507 performances at the Belasco Theatre.

The Color Purple – 2016 Tony Awards

Alice Walker’s novel inspired this musical by playwright Marsha Norman and composers/lyricists Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray. This revival, directed by John Doyle, opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre and was nominated for four Tony Awards. It won for Best Revival of a Musical and for Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Celie. The Color Purple ran for 450 performances.

Hamilton – 2016 Tony Awards

Much like A Chorus Line (which also began its life at The Public Theater), Hamilton was the juggernaut at the Tony Awards that couldn’t be beaten. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical was nominated for 16 Tony Awards and won 11 of them. The show, directed by Thomas Kail, is still running at the Richard Rodgers Theatre with 1,919 performances so far.

What makes this performance particular emotional is that the Tony Awards took place just after the mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Given the recent events the cast opted not to use the prop guns that are usually seen in the show.

Those are 18 of my favorite Tony Awards performances. Let me know what your favorites are by posting your thoughts in our comments.

The post My Favorite Tony Award Performances appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Blues in the Night uses primarily blues songs to tell the story of three women (Cason, Bryce Charles and Paulette Ivory) who have one snake of a man in common (Chester Gregory.) Amongst the songs heard in the show are “Wild Women Have the Blues,” “Reckless Blues,” “Lush Life” and “Rough and Ready Man.”

I spoke by phone with Cason about the show, the timeliness of this production and if she’s a lady who sings the blues herself.

Are you a wild woman and do you ever have the blues?

I can be a wild woman within the parameters of the people I feel most comfortable and safe with. And I do have the blues sometimes. I think most women do, people do. I don’t stay in that place very long.

Your character is called “The Lady from the Road.” What can you tell me about these women in the show?

We’re all going through some sort of blues: we’ve been in love, love is gone, love gone wrong, love lost. My particular character has seen better days. She had a nice time traveling around doing what she loves to do. Now she’s in a cheap hotel with these other tenants who come and go. She’s got a lot of memories that are both good and bad.

One of the things that intrigues me about this show is the vast number of songs written by women like Bessie Smith, ida Fox, Ann Ronnell, Leola and Wesley Wilson, Alberta Hunter and more. Do women understand the blues more than men?

That’s a good question. I don’t want to say one knows more or less than the other. I think the blues for a man may be different than blues for a woman. What men have to do in their world as opposed to what we do as women; my blues are different than my husband’s blues. They are blues nonetheless. I could be selfish and say we got more blues. [She then lets out an infectious laugh.] We’re mothers and wives. But men have to go out and make that dollar and take care of the family.

As for the songs, Sheldon has been so smart. He conceived the piece so he knows these women. He knows the music, the period. He’s just really smart and brings so much that is helpful to the actor for our journey.

Does singing this material challenge you in ways that singing other types of music doesn’t?

It takes you to some places that you may not particularly want to go; things you don’t want to think about. The women who were singing the blues back in the day, their lives were very different in so many different ways in terms of segregation and not having the type of celebrity they should have had. For them to sing the blues they were living the blues. I don’t live the blues. My life is pretty peachy. When I think about Bessie Smith and the other women, it was rough. And you can hear it in their singing and how they interpret the songs.

Do you think the timing of a show about female empowerment happening at the same time as the #MeToo movement is a coincidence?

Let’s be honest. Metoo, you can hashtag whatever you want. It’s not new. What makes it new is we have the power of social media, the camera and all the other things. This has been going on longer than you and I were part of this world. I think women are empowered and they have a voice and use it and when we have shows like this we get to use it in an entertaining kind of way. It’s very timely.

You were Jennifer Holliday’s understudy for Dreamgirls. I guess you went on a lot. What’s your best memory of doing that show?

I did. [Her laugh returns for a moment.] Dreamgirls was my first theatrical show and first show on Broadway. I think working with Michael Bennett and Michael Peters and Henry Krieger. We’ve lost a lot of cast members unfortunately. My best memory was to be there with the creators of the show.

Kendrick Lamar wins a Pulitzer. Moonlight wins the Oscar.  Black Panther rules at the box office. Beyoncé towers over everyone at Coachella. As an African-American woman, how do you reconcile those achievements versus the day-to-day struglges like the recent Starbucks situation that others face?

I’m not going to boycott Starbucks. That’s not a Starbucks problem. That’s a woman who made a decision based on fear. I’m mad at her and the police who took the time to entertain her situation. It’s not everybody. It’s just individual people and all these individuals make up a lot of people. People are people are people. There are bad seeds in every ethnicity. I just want you to come 100% as much as you can. Be real, have good character, have integrity. That’s what I’m teaching my child. What matters is how do you make people feel. We’re a society of so much and we lose site of the goodness and the real stuff.

Jimi Hendrix said “Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.” Do you agree with him?

I don’t know. I somewhat agree. It’s easy to feel the blues. It depends on where you are in your life. I think you can play it and I think you can feel it. When you listen to Bessie or Billie Holiday – that is nothing but pure pain coming. That’s the blues. I have to access it because I’m not living that life, but I know how to get it. I can think about things that are happening right now or my ancestors. But I’m not living it. I hate to disagree with Jimi, ‘cause I love Jimi. I would love to have that conversation with him. Who knows, maybe he could sway me. Look at him and his life. He was singing the blues.

Photo Credit for all production photos: Lawrence K. Ho

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