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)

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Chita Rivera is a living legend. It was just announced that the 85-year-old superstar will be awarded a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement at this June’s ceremony in New York. And no wonder. She originated the roles of “Anita” in West Side Story, “Rose Grant” in Bye Bye Birdie, “Velma Kelly” in Chicago, the “Spider Woman” and “Aurora” in Kiss of the Spider Woman and was most recently on Broadway as “Claire Zachannassian” in The Visit. To date she has two Tony Awards and 8 other Tony nominations. So what do you ask someone who has probably been interviewed more times than just about anyone else in the world?  I wasn’t sure either, so here goes…

In Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway Diary Volume 3, he quotes you as saying about him, “You’ve really got it, don’t you? Every fucking word you say is funny?” What makes him so funny and how does that humor influence the conversations you have with him in these shows?

I can guarantee I did not say the F word. I can guarantee that’s Seth! But it sounds better if you stick that in. I love when it comes back to me and my face twists. He does. He absolutely can’t help himself. He’s so funny and he’s so smart and he’s so interested that I think he’s sometimes more interested in people’s careers than they are. He describes situations and shows and he’s been in many an orchestra pit and he knows what it’s like to hear it and play it. He’s a great musician. I defy anyone to be as funny. He’s so -effing funny. (Yes, she really said -effing instead of dropping the F-bomb.)

In an interview prior to your 54 Below engagement in March, you said you get bored talking about yourself. How does your relationship with Seth make those conversations not boring for you?

Because he does things in an easy and jovial way so that I can enjoy it. When he tells a story or reminds me of something he’s not so serious. It’s a drag when you take yourself really terribly serious. It’s in the past now. I don’t live in the past, but I’m grateful for the past. Seth has a way of spinning things and making them fresh. I enjoy it. He celebrates it.

When I spoke to Seth about his book, I asked him which shows he would like to go back in time to see. He immediately said Funny Girl to see Barbra Streisand and West Side Story to see you as “Anita.”

He’s never said that to me before. That’s wild. That’s a good thing you told me, because I’m going to ask him what’s the thing about Anita. Of course West Side Story itself, the whole doggone piece is extraordinary and still is. It blows my mind that the story in West Side Story is still very…it’s still a serious problem. We even have more problems on top of it with what’s been happening with the ladies and all of that. The prejudices are just blowing my mind. It doesn’t seem as though people really understand what it is when they say they want us all to be equal. You really do have to care for a human being for who they are. That’s called love, affection, understanding. It blows my mind and makes me angry.

This appearance with Seth is tied to the celebrations surrounding the centenary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth. What’s the one thing you think people should know about him that perhaps they overlook?

I think pretty much people appreciate he was an amazing teacher, forgetting about the God-given gift. He was the sweetest and warmest and most loving. This was man who really understood appreciating the difference between people and genders. He treated everybody the same and he had a great sense of humor. To see him conduct, from our point-of-view, the Quintet [in West Side Story] is just to drop dead. He pulled it out of us using his own energy and his own physical body. So much so he fell through the chair. He was pulling and tugging and making sounds and he suddenly disappeared and went right through  the chair. It was pretty funny.

I recently spoke with Tommy Tune with whom you sometimes tour. He quoted you as saying “nobody told me to stop.” Can you imagine yourself not dancing or singing or entertaining?

Oh gosh no. Because it’s a language to me. It’s a way to relate to each other. It’s a way to express myself. It’s just a part of my DNA. I can probably say more in a dance than I can with words. That’s probably stupid to say. If I had the words, I’d have to move my body to express it all. Without music, without dance, I can’t survive. I really can’t imagine it. I say to my audience during “Sweet Happy Life,” I tell them to move their body any way you want and let it go. Then I say to them, “How does it feel when your spirit says hello to your body.” When it does it turns to dance.

In Part 2 we continue our conversation with the legendary Chita Rivera and show some rare rehearsal footage from the original production of Chicago. To see part two of this interview, please go here.

Photo Credit: Laura Marie Duncan

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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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The Tony Award experience is a lofty one…particulalry when you win one. Jessie Mueller won her Tony Award for her portrayal of Carole King in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. That was Mueller’s fourth Broadway show and her second Tony nomination.

She had previously been nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical for her turn as Melinda Wells in the 2011 revival of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

She’s received two additional Tony Award nominations for her performances as Jenna in the musical Waitress and as Julie Jordan in the 2018 revival of Carousel. Most recently she appeared on Broadway in the play The Minutes by Tracy Letts. Not bad for someone who got their start singing The Wiggly Worm in a school production.

When Mueller takes to the stage of The Wallis in Beverly Hills on June 16th and The Smith Center in Las Vegas on June 17th with Seth Rudetsky, she’ll have plenty to talk about and to sing. I spoke with Mueller last week about various aspects of her career, new musicals on the horizon and finding a way to accept all that she’s accomplished. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview (which does include some singing), please go to our YouTube channel.

17 years ago when you were playing Lady Mortimer in Henry IV, a character that doesn’t have any printed lines. A character that only sings in Welsh that nobody can understand. What were your thoughts then about what your career might be from that moment and how much does your career look like what you expected or hoped it might be? 

That was 17 years ago. I’m still stuck on that. So I was only four. [She laughs.] I mean, it’s incredible. That is wild. 17 years. That is so fun that you brought that up. My experience of that show, I remember, because I got to do it at Chicago Shakespeare Theater in Chicago. And then we got to do it at the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] in Stratford-upon-Avon. They were doing a festival of the whole [Shakespeare] canon and our show was chosen to represent the Henry IVs. 

It was just a magical experience for me personally. I remember feeling like I was starting to be treated like a real adult actor, because there were some folks in the cast that I knew because my parents are actors in Chicago. I’d seen them doing shows growing up, but I felt like everyone was treating me like a peer. I wasn’t the little kid of the actors, friends or whatever. 

I remember that really being a moment for me about thinking maybe I’m really doing this. But as far as what was in my mind of where my career might go, nowhere near what has occurred. I don’t think I could have imagined it. I don’t think I had that kind of scope. My model had sort of been a career in Chicago, which is what I was after. I wanted to be a working actor. Sometimes life takes you in different directions. It certainly did for me.

I know that Into the Woods has been published as your favorite Sondheim show. You’ve played Cinderella in that show. You played Mary Flynn in Merrily We Roll Along and Anne Egerman in A Little Night Music. You’ve done three Sondheim shows, but you have yet to do one on Broadway. Given that Into The Woods was just on Broadway, it’s unlikely that opportunity will present itself any time in the near future. So is there another Sondheim show that you would like to do on Broadway?

I feel like the music from Passion was going through my head the other day, but honestly, that’s not a show I know super well. Maybe I’ll have to wait until Into the Woods rolls around again. Maybe I could “witch” this time around. And then I could play Jack’s mother. That’s the thing about that show, you could just sort of cycle through all the roles. I don’t know. It’s very ironic that Sweeney is happening now. That’s one I’d like to do at some point.

Your career, for the most part in terms of musicals, has been revivals, re-imaginings of shows. Obviously Beautiful is a jukebox musical. But in terms of new musicals, with the exception of Waitress, most of your work in new musicals has been with recordings. You have the recording of My Heart Says Go that’s out right now. Upcoming is the recording for Diary of a Wimpy Kid. What do these recordings tell us about what your passion is for doing new work in addition to doing the work you’ve done already?

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for new stuff just because I guess I find it so exciting. I mean, it also can be infuriating when you’re working on it in the room. Yes, Beautiful was a jukebox. So you had the music already written. We knew that was golden. Working on something like Waitress was so exciting because it was a story that had been conceived, of course, from the film by Adrienne Shelly. But the music was original, so it had never been staged before. It was an adaption.

There’s just something exciting about being in that incubator, being in the process of trying to figure out what’s working, what might not be working. But that’s also the part that can be infuriating is you don’t know. Do we trust what we’ve got? Have we just not cracked it yet? Or is it that we’ve tried everything? I find that stuff exciting depending on who you’re working with. I’ve gotten to work with very generous people that are very open to what you bring to it. There’s that openness about bringing yourself and your perspective and I think it’s a real privilege to originate a role and put your stamp on it.

It’s not often that that an actor gets to revisit a role. Eleven years ago you first stepped into the shoes of Miss Adelaide in a production of Guys and Dolls. You got to do it again at the Kennedy Center last fall. How did your professional and life experiences inform who Miss Adelaide is more recently than who she was when you performed that role 11 years ago?

It’s funny because the process is so quick for the Broadway series at the Kennedy Center. So I think in all honesty I was relying a lot on what do I remember. What is in my muscle memory of who this gal is? But sure, I’m older now, I have more life experience. I’ve been in the business for a while. I’ve been an entertainer for a while. Miss Adelaide has been an entertainer and she takes pride in that.

Half the fun, too, is getting in the room with all the new people. This is how this changes this. This is who this Adelaide is because of James [Monroe Iglehart] being my Nathan and all this stuff. So that’s half the fun of it. But it was a joy to revisit it. I wasn’t sure I would ever get the chance to revisit it again.

Honestly, I felt like I was a little young the first time. But I was like, I’m game. Let’s do it. It was my buddy Matt Raftery who was directing that production in Chicago. I went in for Sarah initially. Then he was like, “Would you like to take a stab at Adelaide? Would you go look at the sides and come back?” I was like, sure. I just always wanted to be the character actress with the fun costumes and the big funny songs. I loved doing it again.

It’s been 14 years since Guys and Dolls has been on Broadway. So you know what the math says. It could be time for a revival. 

There was a lot of chatter after we did it in in D.C. We were so glad that it was so well received. And Philipa [Soo], Steven [Pasquale], James and I, we were totally game. We would explore this, but rights were tied up in the [Nic] Hytner production in London which I’ve heard incredible things about. It has just been so well received, so I don’t know what would happen. I don’t know if they’d bring that over here. I know that it might be a challenge just because of the space and with their immersive production which seems so cool. But if the opportunity came around again, I would totally float that idea, especially if I could do it with those three. We just had a ball. 

Most people associate with musicals, but you also got to do Tracy Letts’s play The Minutes. Is it a challenge for you to be seen as somebody who can act as well as somebody who can sing?

That the perception from the outside that hey, I can act too? That sort of thing?

When you come out singing the songs a lot of audience members, I would guess, don’t necessarily think that was also a great acting performance.

Because you’re supposed to make it look easy. It’s not. There’s a difference between someone who can sing and has a great instrument, which is amazing, but someone who’s also a communicator. Then you have those people who have both who have the glorious instrument and the communication tool. I feel like Hugh Jackman says it a lot. It’s the idea of in some ways it’s almost harder to act in a musical sometimes because you have to make it seem believable that you’re breaking into song. You have these very heightened experiences, which is why the characters are breaking into song. I think actors, especially musical theater actors who appear in musicals, don’t get the credence sometimes they deserve for the acting that they’re doing.

I actually do go to the acting first, which is funny when I’m working on something; when I’m learning something. Or as you spoke of earlier, working on something new. I have to remind myself you can’t act it yet. You don’t know it. You have to learn it. You have to do the technical stuff first of learning it and then you can do the acting work because then it’s in your body. Then you can really get inside of it to deliver. Then go back and fix the technical things and all of that again and kind of go back and forth between those processes.

One of the things I love most about your collaboration with Seth Rudetsky is the social impact component of it. You did What the World Needs Now after the pulse shooting in Orlando. You were involved with him with the Concerts for America. What do you feel is your role as an artist in helping to bring about social impact and social change?

If I’m going to be honest, I’m still figuring that out; coming to terms with the idea that I might have a platform that people might be listening to. So if that is the case, I might as well use it for good. I think I’m starting to crystallize this idea more. I really appreciate people like Seth and his husband, James Wesley, because they are doers. I feel like I’m a helper. I like to help. I like to be of service, but I’m not necessarily the first person who’s going to say I will lead the charge. I try to come in and do my thing and do what I can to help.

You did an interview with Patrick Healy of the New York Times just after winning the Tony Award for Beautiful. You said, “I thought I’d get wrapped up in all the wrong things” of your move to New York from Chicago. You continued to say, “Now look what’s happened. It feels like a wonderful accident.” I love that expression: wonderful accident. Nine years later, does your career still feel like a wonderful accident? Is there perhaps something more complex going on?

I think so. I don’t think it matters how quote unquote, successful you are, whatever the heck that means. It’s hard on your heart. It’s personal. Even when it’s not personal it is personal because the work is personal. You bring yourself. That’s the job. You’re supposed to feel and think and move and act and talk in front of strangers sometimes as someone else, sometimes as yourself, and hopefully create an exchange of meaning and maybe memory and maybe a spiritual flow and all these things. That is hard.

But I think it’s not an accident. I’m working on owning my achievements and I’m proud of them. But the moment you hook into that and give that too much meaning you are often very quickly reminded that it doesn’t hold in a storm. It’s this constant evaluation of what I put importance on and not diminishing an accomplishment or achievement or how hard I have worked. But acknowledging that it’s not the most important thing. God has been so good about where I’ve been led and who I’ve been led to and the opportunities that have been put in front of me. But also I’ve worked my ass off with the gifts I’ve been given.

I think also at that time in my life I was really trying to figure out where I fit in the whole scheme of things. I mean, I still am. What is humble? What is self-deprecating? Where are those lines? How do you stay true to yourself, who you are and what you believe in, but also have the grace and humility to just keep it real.

To watch the full interview with Jessie Mueller, please go here.

Main Photo: Jessie Mueller (Photo by Jacqueline Harris for The Interval/Courtesy The Wallis)

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Halston appeared on the sequel to Sex in the City that launched this year called And Just Like That.

In June she was awarded the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award which is given to someone in the theater community who has devoted a lot of time and resources to humanitarian, social service or charitable organizations. For Halston it is the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation. Her husband, Ralph Howard, died from the disease in 2018 after having been diagnosed with it ten years earlier. Halston founded Broadway Belts as an annual fundraiser for the organization in 2010.

During the pandemic she launched a live-streamed show, Virtual Halston, that, as she reveals in this interview, she had to be persuaded to do.

On Monday she will return to her second home, Birdland in New York City, to perform a new show entitled De-classified! For those who aren’t in New York, the show will be live-streamed. The performance takes place at 7:00 PM ET/4:00 PM PT.

Earlier this week I spoke via Zoom with Halston about her career, Declassified and her outlook on the future. You can find the full interview on our YouTube channel and frankly, no edited version of that conversation will ever be as entertaining as it is to watch the sublime Julie Halston. We had a great time talking and I know you will, too.

Nonetheless, what follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

What do you think the young girl who participated in the senior follies at Holy Family High School would have to say about the career that you’ve had so far?

That is so crazy that you bring that up because, literally, I was out on Long Island this past weekend for a high school reunion. Oh, yeah. It was a lot. I honestly would say to her to stop being fearful and trust your instincts. It took me a long time to trust my instincts. There were a number of decisions that I made in life that were not good. Hindsight tells us that. But one of the times I trusted my instincts was when I saw Charles Busch in his one-man show called Alone with a Cast of Thousands. I was so blown away I decided to get on his train.

Clearly it was not for money. We were doing these shows in a crack dean. Let’s really be real here, but my instinct told me to do this. I went to Hofstra University out on Long Island. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had instincts. I had thoughts. I didn’t have a sort of formalized training. I certainly probably could never have gotten into a place like Juilliard. I was very unfocused. When I saw Charles Busch I realized that I was also a bit of an outlier. I was a funny woman, but I didn’t know how to get myself into a position to launch. It was really Charles who said I’m going to write for you and I’m going to help launch you. And he did.

If you were to go back in time to that first performance of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which was at the Limbo Lounge, what stands out to you most about that night? Here’s a play that he’s written and you’re in it. You had no idea that that was the beginning of what it became, right? 

I had no idea. But I will tell you this and this is really all the truth. This is not part of the myth of our company. I was rehearsing with the company because he had put together a company right before he met me and I was the newest member. I didn’t understand the style at that point and I was really not doing very well in rehearsal. Again, here’s my instinct. I turned to the company one night. I remember this very well. I said, “Look, guys, I know in rehearsal I really stink. You put me on that stage in a wig in front of 60 gay men and I am going to glow!” And that is exactly what happened. I’m not joking. I got on that stage and somehow I was transformed. As Charles said, that stage lit up. That’s when the company said you have to make her a permanent member and you have to write for her.

To this day, I’m terrible in rehearsal. Terrible. It takes me a long time to find what I’m going to do. But so much of what I do depends on the audience giving me back. Comedy, the creative process, is put together by the audience and the performer.

I saw an interview that Charles gave in 2009 to D.C. Theatre Scene and he described the two of you not as Will and Grace, but more like Lucy and Viv. Do you agree with him?

Yes. We just actually just recently re-read his play A Lady in Question. Generally the character he plays is someone who’s very beautiful, very talented and very vain and usually has a fatal flaw. Which is kind of like Lucy. It’s like, come on, we’re just going to get into showbiz. And Viv is the one who says, what are you crazy, Lucy? You don’t know what you’re doing. You know Ricky is going to kill you. And that is the character that I generally play. Like Kitty the Countess to Borgia in A Lady in Question. I’m the one who says you’re nuts. We got to get out of Nazi Germany and we got to get out of here and she has to be taught a lesson. 

Because Charles has performed with lots of incredible people. We were very lucky that somehow we had a chemistry that just took off from the stage. And people really loved seeing us together and. It has not gone away. All these years later, it has not gone away. 

Nor apparently has the desire to see you at Birdland. 

It’s crazy! Call the fire department!

This show, De-classified!, is going to offer your perspective on where we are in the world today. Given the last two-and-a-half/pushing three years, do you think we’ve learned anything?

No, that’s the problem. This will be the first time appearing on that stage in three years. So it’s very special. I don’t know if we’ve really learned a lot. I hope that what we’ve learned is to be kinder to people. I don’t know. There’s been a lot of loss the last three years and in many different ways. I just hope that we can ultimately be a little kinder.

Of course, being kind doesn’t always make good comedy. You know if we’re going to talk, we have to get a little dishy. That’s what comedy can be – a little dishy. So I have a variety of topics that I’m am going to address. One of them is a nude beach that I ended up at recently. I can’t even. I can’t. I mean, really, I can’t. I did not expect this. I was fully clothed. But as I said to the man I was with why is it that people who should not even be nude in a shower insist on going to a nude beach? It’s like you just can’t believe it. So I’m going to be addressing that.

I’ll be addressing the pandemic. I always tell a story about my late mom. I will also be addressing the fact that I have started dating after my late husband passed away. Of course that always engenders opinions. I am also going to be addressing Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. Because it’s a topic. One of the other topics is Meghan Markle. I’m going to be addressing a lot of things that have been in the news lately. And I always do a reading of a wedding announcement either from the New York Times or Vogue Magazine. And I have one that I think is going to really inspire people.

One thing that got me through the pandemic was Virtual Halston. I loved it. I’ve always been a big believer that the idea of a salon is something that is sorely missing and is something that I think society could really enjoy. I felt like those episodes were a salon. The only challenge for me is they were at 5:00 in the afternoon in New York so that means I was having a martini at 2:00.

I remember a girlfriend of mine calling me at like 11 in the morning and saying, I think it’s too early to open a bottle of wine. I was like that might be too early. I loved every episode and I loved all my guests. You just learn so much about creative people, which is exactly what you’re doing right now. I learned so much about friends of mine that I’ve known for years, but I learned even more. We had so many fun tales and funny stories. Oh my goodness. Of course, I always loved reading Joan Crawford because Joan Crawford is my Bible.

What did doing Virtual Halston do for you? How did that help you through that challenging time? 

I don’t mean to get emotional, but my husband passed away in 2018 and then in 2019, I did Tootsie on Broadway. That really, really saved my life. When you become a widow, it’s like a whole half of you just dies, you know? It’s just terrible. It’s just awful. As I said to a friend, you wear this cloak of grief, but it doesn’t offer any protection.

But then Tootsie was over and suddenly we were in lockdown. That’s when it really hit me that I was alone because I’m such a social person. I live in midtown in New York City. I’m always able to see friends. Everything is very convenient in New York City. I have a great community around me. We really could not see each other during those early days. I think my widowhood became very pronounced during the pandemic.

It was really Jim Caruso and Ruby Locknar who said, Julie, if anyone should have a talk show where you yack about stories and you have friends on it should be you. He asked me three times before I said yes. I have to say it was something to look forward to every week. I did all my research during the week, so it gave me an outlet because in the beginning we really didn’t go out. Everything was shuttered. It really gave me a focus. It was a way for me to connect.

In 2015 you wrote a story for Sandi Klein’s Conversations with Creative Women which was about how aging sucks. You’ve got De-classified! coming up. Virtual Halston was a success. You got the Tony. You did Tootsie. It seems to me, Julie, like you are trying to flip a bird to F. Scott Fitzgerald and prove to him that there are second acts in American life.

Well, it’s very interesting that you say that because I feel that there are third and fourth acts quite frankly. Unless you’ve decided to either retire or just say enough is enough. I really believe that you can keep going and constantly be reinventing. I have no plans to slow down in any way, shape or form. I will say botox helps. I’m not going to deny it. I embrace it. I’m in an industry [where] age is not your friend. Too bad. I’m going to work anyway. I think it’s really important, particularly for women, to just say, oh no, I’m not letting you stop me.

I want to ask you about something that you said in your Tony Award acceptance speech. You said that from the age of nine your dream was to be in the theater. You’ve certainly more than accomplished that. What are your dreams today? 

I actually have three dreams. I would love to be back on a stage because I really love being on a stage in front of a live audience. And I love being on a Broadway stage. Broadway is special. It just is. That’s one dream.

I would like to do more TV. Last year I had the great privilege of playing a recurring character on And Just Like That and Gossip Girl. I had so much fun. I finally got so much more comfortable with that milieu. So that would be nice to continue that.

The other is I am on two missions. One is that I want to continue my work with the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation. We have seen growth in the last 12 years that has been so phenomenal. When I joined the organization we had four care networks for pulmonary patients. We have 68 now.

It’s really my life’s work to help patients and caregivers and eventually [find] a cure for this terrible disease.

The other is that one of the things that has happened during COVID is the theater has really kind of crashed and burned a little. Let’s face it, with all the live streaming, with all the content out there, a lot of people I know say, I don’t know if I want to come back to the theater and live theater. It’s a little scary now and it’s too expensive.

I’m also going to make it my mission to continue this incredible live performance tradition of great plays, great new plays and great plays in the classic canon. It’s been going on for thousands of years. I don’t want it to die. It so enriches your life. It’s my church. I do think there are still people in the future that need to go to church and want to go to church and need to go to church. That church is important for our lives as human beings. Not just self-involved, crazy people. I mean, there’s that, too. But to enrich our lives as human beings and to help other human beings. It sounds very noble, but guess what? It is right now.

To see the full interview with Julie Halston, please go here.

Photo: Julie Halston (Courtesy Birdland Jazz Club)

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Our personal favorite nominations are those going to the shows Caroline, Or Change, Company and A Strange Loop in the musicals category. In the plays we’re thrilled to see Dana H., For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf and The Lehman Trilogy amongst the nominees.

We’ve had conversations with many of this year’s nominees and you might want to take another look at what they shared with us. They include:

Simon Russell Beale who is nominated for his performance in The Lehman Trilogy.

“I’m a slightly stocky, middle-aged Englishman with a beard and I’m now pretending to be all sorts of different things just because I say so, rather than with any other help. And that’s quite fun. It’s not about emotional expression or effort. It’s about just keeping the mind focused. If you make a mistake, and I don’t think we’ve ever done a perfect performance actually, but if you make a mistake, you just have to forget it and move very quickly on.”

A side note: Beale is nominated as are his on-stage colleagues Adam Godley and Adrian Lester. Separating one performance from another is a fool’s game. They should have been nominated as a trio in the same way in which the three boys who originated the role of “Billy Elliot” in the musical of the same name were.

Shoshana Bean who is nominated for her performance in the Jason Robert Brown musical Mr. Saturday Night.

“I think that I’m a culmination of all the things I’ve soaked up in my life. I’m very Streisand, there’s Frank Sinatra, Chrissie Hyde, John Mayer, Aretha Franklin…while it may seem original, we’re all using the same ingredients. What matters are your proportions. I go left when people think I’m going right. I don’t look at it as strategic decisions, it’s what I’m lead to do. It’s literally been what felt like it needed to happen.”

Dale Franzen who is a co-producer of nominees Caroline, Or Change and For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.

“I would say I am much more leaning into stories like that that I feel have such a harder time of being told. Let’s be honest, men aren’t telling those stories. They keep telling the stories that they want to see and I think that women have been shortchanged. I want to be part of changing that. That is not to say that if I’m sent something that I feel is really extraordinary and it happens to be written by a man or it’s a male story that doesn’t mean I won’t get involved. But I would say right now what I feel drawn to moving our stories forward.”

Matt Doyle who is nominated for his brilliantly comedic performance in the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company.

“I have a lot of experience in being incredibly anxious over general anxiety disorder and panic disorder. And I know the feeling very well of the surprise and the fear that Jamie experiences during that song. Also the staging is so smart and so brilliant. I think half of what you’re seeing on stage is me turning that kind of delight and excitement and thrill of what I get to do and what the audience gets to see every night into something that is coming off as surprise.”

Deirdre O’Connell who is nominated for her breath-taking performance in Dana H.

“It does feel like there is an infinite number of discoveries to be found. As a ride it’s pretty endless. I feel like it would be interesting to try to do a long run of it. It think you’d have to build breaks into it. the way the fatigue manifests itself is more like it sounds echo-y to me or I’m having a hard time hearing it right now. I could be wrong. It could be easier in terms of the doing it.”

Jayne Houdyshell who is nominated for her performance in the revival of The Music Man.

“I really am a creature of theatre. I came up in the theatre. I chose the life of an actress because of my love of the theatre. It’s always been foremost home for me. I’ve had a few small opportunities to do television and film work. While I appreciate it very much, I don’t feel like the real trajectory of my career is about that or will probably ever be about that. I just am most a home in the theatre.“

To read the full interviews with each artist, please click on the link built into their name.

Once again, congratulations to all 2022 Tony nominees!

Main Photo: Opening Night of “Company” (Photo by Rebecca J. Michelson)

The post Congratulations 2022 Tony Nominees appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Gravitte will be joined by friends of hers who will join for conversation and song. Monday’s guest is composer Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin). On May 9th she’ll be joined by composer Marc Shaiman (Hairspray; Catch Me If You Can) and on September 12th her guest will be Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy; Kinky Boots).

Gravitte finds that all three of her guests have something in common.

“These first three people I’ve asked happened to be all incredibly wealthy, famous Jewish men,” she said during our recent Zoom conversation. “I know them personally. I’ve experienced things with them as as friends and in business and I think that they feel comfortable with me.”

Though she’s never appeared on Broadway in a show created by any of these three men, she has had other working relationships with them.

“Stephen and I did concerts before Wicked opened. I was like the first person who sang Defying Gravity,” she revealed. “Of course I did Godspell because I think every human being who’s ever done a show in their life has done either Godspell or Pippin. And Marc Shaiman, when I met him I think he was 17 or 18. We were both really young and he was already playing for Bette Midler because his talent is undeniable. It’s just crazy. He did the orchestrations and arrangements for my first cabaret show. And then Harvey happens to live in my town in Connecticut. We’ve become buddies. I was doing a show at a local theater here and I asked Harvey to come and we sang Do You Love Me from Fiddler [On The Roof]. So we sort of performed together.”

When asked about opportunities she’d like to have with Schwartz, Shaiman and Fierstein, she doesn’t hesitate with her dream roles – one of which is surprising.

“I’d love to be Elphaba. Although when I first took my children they turned to me, I think they were like 10 years old, and said, ‘Mom, you are so perfect for this show. You’d be the perfect Glinda,’ because they think I’m funny. So I’d love to do Elphaba, scream my lungs out and fly. Wouldn’t it be glorious? And with Marc, I’d like to be the lead in Catch Me If You Can. I’d like to sing Live in Living Color. That’s not going to happen. And I think that I’m in the perfect role with Harvey because we’re friends.”

For all of her experiences on concert stages, Broadway (including Zorba and Chicago) and cabaret venues, it was a suggestion years ago from a former late-night talk show host/comedian that inspired Debbie Gravitte Plus One.

“I was opening for Jay Leno years ago in Atlantic City. This was right after I’d won the Tony Award. I had all my dialogue written out. It was so scripted. And he says to me, ‘You know you’re really funny. Why don’t you just talk? Which is why I’m doing this series. I’m very comfortable just talking.”

As Gravitte was when we she told a great story about being in London with lyricist Fred Ebb (Cabaret; Kiss of the Spider Woman) and composer Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly!; Mame).

“I’m trying to breathe basically thinking about how rich these men are and how incredibly famous they are and their bodies of work. This was before Chicago had its second life on Broadway for Fred. Jerry walks away and Fred says to me, ‘God I wish I was as famous as Jerry Herman.’ What is he talking about? He’s Fred Ebb of Kander and Ebb, and I just realize that it’s very relative. It’s just part of life; the grass is always greener.”

For Gravitte, who grew up in West Los Angeles, being around people like her guests or Ebb or Herman wasn’t necessarily what she thought her life would be.

“I don’t think so, but I think I always hoped so. Who knows what you’re thinking as a girl growing up in L.A.? Literally my house overlooked 20th Century Fox. It was really up high on a hill. I could literally see 20th Century Fox; movies, movies, movies, movies. And all I ever wanted to do was Broadway – to be a Broadway star.”

She achieved her dream and is fully aware of how privileged she is to have done so.

“I was doing a concert one time and this woman came up to me. I guess she was of a certain age. She was older and she came up to me weeping. ‘I always wanted to do what you wanted to do.’ Then I’m saying, ‘Well, you can do it. You can still do it. You can sing in the shower.’

“When I am standing on a stage and am fully present and people are gazing back at me with that look of expectation, I absolutely feel like I am the luckiest human on the planet. I get to do what millions of people wish they could do. You know me, I wish I could build bookshelves. We all have things we want to do. I’ve never gone ‘I am an actor. I’m a dancer. I’m a singer.’ I’m an entertainer. I want to entertain people.”

To see and hear the entire delightful conversation with Debbie Gravitte, please go here.

Photo: Debbie Gravitte (photo by Bill Westmoreland/Courtesy of Birdland)

The post Tony Winner Debbie Gravitte Just Wants to Entertain You appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

How many people get reviews like this? In 1981, Frank Rich of the New York Times called her performance, “one of the most powerful theatrical coups to be found in a Broadway musical since Ethel Merman sang ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ at the end of Act I of Gypsy.” 40 years later Jesse Green in the same paper said the best moment of the 2021 Tony Awards was her performance of the same song Rich raved about. So it goes for Tony Award-winner Jennifer Holliday (Dreamgirls) who will be performing on Saturday at The Wallis in Beverly Hills. (She’ll probably be booking a lot more dates after the overwhelming acclaim she received after the Tony Awards.)

If you’ve never seen her perform And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going (which I was lucky enough to see her perform twice at the Shubert Theatre in Century City), take a look here.

Four days before she made mincemeat of the roof of the Winter Garden Theater, Holliday and I spoke by phone. She was in New York for Tony rehearsals. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

When you when you first started out, could you imagine having a career that would go over 40 years? And what does it mean to you that you have. 

No, I couldn’t have imagined it. I really was not trying to be in show business. That was not my goal. I discovered singing in the church choir. My first show was Your Arms Too Short to Box with God because I was just doing that for a little while and then I’d come back home. But I went up to audition when Michael Bennett saw me for Dreamgirls. I was like, oh, OK. Unfortunately I never did get to college. So that’s that’s the only drawback. 

During rehearsals for Dreamgirls, director Michael Bennett gave you videos of Barbra Streisand performing to watch. How much of what you learned during that production has stayed with you and remains part of how you perform today?

A great deal of it. First of all, I taught myself how to hold my notes long like she did. Because I don’t have a trained voice and I don’t think she does either. I would be so curious, like, how is she holding that note so long? [Streisand] was the first. I had never seen anybody like her. I never knew who she was. And so a lot of that just stayed with me.

And then I incorporated it. And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going that was not a part of the original kind of feeling of it. And in fact, everybody wanted me to take it out, especially David Geffen with the record company. [He] said “Why you got to hold that note so long. You’ll never get any radio play with that. Nobody’s going to listen to that if it’s soft like that in the middle, you know?” And I was like, well, I don’t know. But Michael Bennett agreed with me, said, “Well, we’re not really talking about records right now. She likes it and I like it.“

Thank God I still have the lilt in my voice and the belt. Even though I don’t sing as high as I used to sing, I still get pretty good pretty much up there.

Other actors who worked with Michael Bennett have talked about how cruel he could be. (See how his collaborator, the late Bob Avian, talked about that cruelty here.) What was your experience and how do you look back on that time with him?

I actually had a different experience with Michael Bennett. I’ll be honest with you. This is the part that I haven’t really discussed at all. The only thing I felt that he was cruel towards me is that he inserted himself as a Svengali. So him being a gay man and me being a young woman kind of made me foolishly believe that he actually loved me. And I thought that was cruel because that was not ever going to be anything like that, but I really was young. I didn’t know, you know what I’m saying? So that’s the only thing. I didn’t see that then and boy did I care back then. 

You did a television interview that I saw from 1981 and you were asked where do you get the pain that you put into your singing voice as it relates to And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going. And you said it was the experience of being on the road and leaving home at eighteen. Forty years later you still maintain that pain in every performance I’ve ever seen. What’s the source of that pain today?

I think that I have suffered greatly with depression, clinical depression, pretty much my entire adult life. And so I think that there is balancing that is there. And, you know, still the loneliness, even after all of these years, you know, of being on the road and traveling and doing all these things. And so to me, it’s still there. So I think that’s kind of in my voice. What I usually try to do now is balance my concerns now with something that speaks of joy and that I can still think of love and all that does, that kind of thing and not be concerned about it.

What I’ve learned now, which I didn’t know, is that there is no time limit or cut off time for growth. You can still grow and mature and change and become the person you want to be and just keep learning.

That growth was apparent in a 2013 interview you did with NPR. You told them your perspective on life was “Don’t try to figure out the ending of the movie. Stay to see it. Don’t don’t try to figure out how to play it because it takes different twists and turns.”

It really does. And especially with show business, it’s so up and down. It’s really a hard business. And sometimes, you know, you just kind of go, “I want to give up, I want to do whatever.” Because you just feel like you’re not making anything in this. So that’s that kind of thing. You got to just stay for the whole movie. It’s a slow movie, but, you’ve got to stay. 

At what at what point did you come to the realization that that was the best way to deal with both the highs and the lows of doing what you do? 

Unfortunately, late in life. Finally I felt like I had found a way to cope with my heartaches and setbacks and disappointments. This is a rough business and people make so many promises that just never come, you know? So you waste a lot of time with a lot of people sometimes who just say they’re going to do things for you. They probably have good intentions, but some things just don’t manifest.

And so when I was turning 50 and I was like, OK, I’m not really anywhere right now and I don’t really know what’s going to become of my career or anything. And I said, but for the first time, I’m not going to be trying to call around and see what’s going to happen or make anything happen. I’m just going to feel this. Things could turn around. That’s when I really felt that I had learned a lot about my own self. I was beginning to learn how to love my own self.

I knew that I had preserved my instrument, my voice…if I could just hold on. A lot of times in show business it is later in life that you get your just reward, you know? And I just ask God. I said, if I could just live long enough to get that third act. So to me, I feel like I’m on the verge of my third act, especially here coming full circle with returning to the Tony Awards to do my number. To feel Effie, Michael Bennett and all of the people. I feel like I’ll they’ll all be with me Sunday, you know? OK, this is going to be your third act and what will be a new beginning. 

For tickets to see Jennifer Holliday at The Wallis in Beverly Hills, please go here.

All photographs of Jennifer Holliday courtesy Jennifer Holliday and The Wallis

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If you’ve been living under a rock and aren’t familiar with this musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda took Ron Chernow’s nearly 1,000 page biography of Alex Hamilton and turned it into a multi-ethnic mix of hip-hop, rock, rap, blues, R&B and traditional Broadway music. It went from the Public Theatre in New York and quickly became a worldwide sensation.

Hamilton was nearing its 2,000th performance on Broadway just prior to the pandemic. The show received 16 Tony Award nominations and won 11 including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Best Direction and Best Choreography. If that wasn’t enough, it also won the Pulitzer Prize.

Heading the Los Angeles cast in the return of Hamilton is Jamael Westman as the title character. He received an Olivier Award nomination for his performance in the London production.

Nicholas Christopher plays Hamilton’s rival, Aaron Burr. Rubén J. Carbajal portrays John Laurens and Hamilton’s son, Philip. Joanna A. Jones (known to local audiences for her many performances as part of For the Record) plays Eliza Hamilton with Taylor Iman Jones as her sister Peggy Schuyler (she also plays Maria Reynolds) and Sabrina Sloan as sister Angelica Schuyler. Carvens Lissaint plays first President George Washington; Simon Longnight is in the dual roles of Marquis De Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson with Wallace Smith as Hercules Mulligan/James Madison. Returning to play King George is Rory O’Malley who performed the role when Hamilton first played Los Angeles.

As it was when Hamilton first played the Pantages, there is a digital lottery for tickets for every performance with a limited number of $10 seats. That lottery is in place for this engagement.

If you want to be in the room where Hamilton happens go here. Note: You must be vaccinated and be able to show proof of vaccination to attend this show at the Pantages. Masks are required to be worn at all times (except when eating or drinking.)

Photo of Jamael Westman and the Eliza National Tour cast of Hamilton by Joan Marcus (Courtesy of Broadway in Hollywood)

The post Hamilton Has Returned to Los Angeles appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

For those of us who remember when we first heard of the show or first saw it, it seems inconceivable that it has been a quarter century since the show become a phenomenon and would go on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

It also made stars out of Taye Diggs, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel (in her Broadway debut), Adam Pascal (in his Broadway debut), Anthony Rapp and Daphne Rubin-Vega (in her Broadway debut). Rent ran for over 12 years on Broadway with a total of 5,123 performances.

To celebrate this silver anniversary, New York Theatre Workshop is holding a fundraiser called 25 Years of Rent: Measured In Love. The event will feature a reunion of numerous cast veterans from the many productions of the musical that have taken place.

Those scheduled to perform include: Gilles Chiasson (Steve and others on Broadway), Wilson Jermaine Heredia (originated the role of Angel/Tony Award), Rodney Hicks (Benny on Broadway), Christopher Jackson (Hamilton), Kristen Lee Kelly (Maureeen – Broadway), Tamika Lawrence (Mrs. Jefferson and others in the 2011 off-Broadway revival), Jesse L. Martin (originated the role of Tom Collins), Idina Menzel (originated the role of Maureen), Aiko Nakasone (Alexi Darling on Broadway), Eva Noblezada (Hadestown), Adam Pascal (originated the role of Roger), Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen), Billy Porter (Kinky Boots), Anthony Rapp (originated the role of Mark), Daphne Rubin-Vega (originated the role of Mimi), Ali Stroker (Oklahoma!), Tracie Thoms (Joanne on Broadway), Byron Utley (multiple roles on Broadway for the entire run), and Fredi Walker-Browne (Joanne on Broadway).

New songs from Joe Iconis (Be More Chill), The Lazours, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen) and Rona Siddiqui will also be performed.

Additional participants will include: Sebastian Arcelus (Roger on Broadway), Annaleigh Ashford (Maureen in an off-Broadway revival in 2011), Assistant Director Martha Banta, Adam Chanler-Berat (Mark in the 2011 off-Broadway revival), Linda Chapman, Nicholas Christopher (Collins in the 2011 off-Broadway revival), Set Designer Paul Clay, Wilson Cruz (Angel on Broadway), Brandon Victor Dixon (Hamilton), casting director Wendy Ettinger, producer Stephen Graham, director Michael Greif, Janet Harckham, playwright Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play), Neil Patrick Harris (Mark on tour), Victoria Leacock Hoffman (producer of tick, tick…Boom!, Mariko Kojima, Julie Larson (the composer’s sister), Telly Leung (Angel at the Hollywood Bowl), Kamilah Marshall, producer Kevin McCollum, Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton), Anaïs Mitchell (Hadestown), Shakina Nayfack (Difficult People), NYTW Artistic Director James C. Nicola, playwright Dael Orlandersmith (Until the Flood), Councilmember Carlina Rivera, Jai Rodriguez (Angel on Broadway), producer Jeffrey Seller, director Leigh Silverman (Grand Horizons), Ephraim Sykes (Benny in the 2011 off-Broadway revival), casting director Bernie Telsey, producer Jennifer Ashley Tepper, director Ivo van Hove (West Side Story revival), Tom Viola (Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS), Rent Music Supervisor Tim Weil, Rent Costume Designer Angela Wendt, Rent Choreographer Marlies Yearby and more.

My personal Rent memory surrounds my first time seeing the musical in New York on December 19, 1996. I was in New York with my friend, Matthew Barry. Like everyone I knew, I, too, was fascinated about seeing this musical that was the must-see show on everyone’s list. I didn’t know much about it beyond it depicted the lives of a group of people who lived in the East Village of New York. I also knew that it was inspired by Puccini’s opera, La Bohème. That was it.

Almost the entire original cast was performing that night. The only person out for that performance was Timothy Britten Parker (who played Gordon, the man, Mr. Grey and others). He was attending his sister’s opening night in Once Upon a Mattress (his sister is Sarah Jessica Parker).

By the end of the first act I was, along with majority of theatergoers, convinced that this was a special musical. Then the second act began with the company singing Seasons of Love.

They got to the bridge with the lyrics:

In truths that she learned
Or in times that she cried
In bridges he burned
Or the way that she died

My mother had passed away three months earlier. As you can imagine, I was a mess. All I could think about was mom. I’m sure there were people around me at the Nederlander Theatre who couldn’t understand what was going on with me. I was too caught up in my emotions to care. I somehow managed to pull myself together and enjoy the second act.

After the performance was over, Matt and I left the theatre and it was lightly snowing. It felt like a sign that everything was going to be just fine. Rent, with its own story of love and loss (both on stage and off) had offered one of many forms of catharsis I would rely on to get me through that first year after my mother’s death. To this very day whenever I hear any of Larson’s songs, I always think of my mother.

What are your personal memories and experiences of seeing Rent? Leave a comment on this post.

Tickets for 25 Years of Rent: Measure in Love are $25. The show will be available for streaming through March 6th at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST.

Photo: The cast of Rent at New York Theatre Workshop (Photo by Joan Marcus)

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