 more of playing to get to Fairfax? What was I doing? Well, we have gospel auditions going on in New York. So it's going to happen. Well, we'll see. At least there'll be actors who can be out of work if we doesn't have that kind of guess. And yeah, I don't know. Just stuff, meetings, and dealing with opera publishing and a bunch of stuff. And then today, a good thing was that myself and Ralph Savage and David Foe, who are the hands of business affairs for the Guild, went over and met with the people from the copyright office to talk about some questions that we have. And I kind of had expected that meeting to be a little chilly with us sort of complaining and then being defensive. And it was exactly the opposite. They were fantastic. And there were some new people there that I thought were terrific. And we realized we're all on the same side. And we want to be both protecting writers and also making things easier for writers. And they seemed at least as dedicated to trying to achieve that as we are. So that was very good. So that's what I was doing immediately before this. That's amazing. In addition to churning out amazing things that entertain and delight us, he's also our biggest ambassador and advocate as playwrights. You head up the council. You're constantly out there doing things like this for us. And so please show your gratitude. Thank you for everything that we have been trying quite consciously at the Guild to do over the last few years especially. And I give a lot of credit for this to Gary Garrison is to become much more of a national organization and to be able to be there for people around the country. Writers and playwrights, composers and lyricists around the country who are writing theater, really to become the organization that speaks for you, that defends you, that when you have questions about things, you have someone to ask about it. When you need some legal advice, there's someone you can ask about when you need to know how things work or you need a defender, that there's a place to go, et cetera. And the Guild has always been, I think, a terrific organization. But it has been in the past somewhat New York-centric. And this is something that we've all been really striving, I think, assiduously to correct, maybe, is that that's the correct word. And that's why I'm really glad to be here. I'm glad to see so many people from so many different locations. And we will continue to strive to be there for you and be of service to you. And just try and help you in every way to do what you're trying to do, which is to write theater. So talk a little bit about Godspell, one of my five favorite Stephen Schwartz musicals. What's it like to revisit it after all these years? I mean, you wrote it when you were what, seven? Well, the truth is that Godspell, I didn't really write it at all in the sense that Godspell was the brainchild of its original conceiver and director, John Michael Teblak. And I actually came into the process somewhat belatedly. And the show was quite well formed by the time I became involved with it. And in addition to adding the music, just how we structured it a little bit, basically having seen what John Michael had done, I sort of jumped on board the ship. The nice thing for me about Godspell and a couple of other shows of mine is that every time you see it, it's different. Because it's designed to be, within its framework, to be created by the company putting it on. So the actors and the director get together. And sometimes there are very interesting concepts. And sometimes they're loud. There are concepts that may not work quite so well. But it's always interesting to me to see because, as I say, it's always going to be different. And that will be true if this revival does indeed come together. That will be true of this as well. I don't really know what it's going to be, but we'll get a bunch of good people together and see what happens. OK. What can you tell us that nobody else knows, including the readers of Playbill.com? Give us an exclusive. Oh, gosh. Who's directing? Oh, I said, did they not know that? I don't know. I don't know that. The director was a guy named Danny Goldstein who did a production at Papermill a few years ago that I saw that I liked very much. And it's going to be at Circle in the Square. Ken Davenport, who produced Alter Boys, is producing. And Charlie Alderman, who's a terrific musical director, who just came off of Next to Normal, is being musical director. And it will have all new arrangements, working with a terrific ranger named Michael Holland, who's done a lot of work with my son Scott, which is basically a pop guy. And yeah, I can't tell you anything about the cast, because I don't know who it is yet. So are you going back and revisiting the material at all? Yeah, there's a little bit of, I did one new tiny little musical thing to sort of bridge the song Learn Your Lessons Well, which has always been in two parts. And it's been reconceived anyway. And there was this little thing in the middle that I just, that I musicalized, so that would be fun. And actually one of the actors that we're talking to potentially to play the lead has been asking about a new song. And he has an interesting idea. So if he wants to do it, then I might write something new for him. Wow. If he doesn't, probably not. So we have a second session tomorrow where Stephen's going to be sitting at the piano. And you will not want to miss it. Miss everything else tomorrow. Be here. I promise you. Well, we're going to talk about musical theater structure and sort of some things that I've learned along the way. And it's just a bunch of stuff. I'll say this again tomorrow. I realized as I was sort of making this list of different things to think about, as one is working on a musical, that there is virtually everything I'm going to say I can think of many exceptions, successful exceptions, including in my own work. But I'll say them anyway. And we can answer some questions and so on. So yeah, we'll be talking specifically about structuring musical theater and things to think about in terms of when you're writing a musical. That's going to be great. A friend of mine who hates everything wrote a Facebook page posting about having the most wonderful evening at the opera. And I think you have a little something to do with that. Tell us about your first major foray. How many people know that Stephen wrote the great opera called Say Answer on a Wet Afternoon? Oh, thank you, guys. How many people saw it? God, wow. OK. Very dark, wasn't it? It was so nice to be able to really go to a dark place. A couple of people I remember, it premiered out in California in Santa Barbara. A couple of people talked to me afterwards and they were sort of upset by what happened. Just said, well, it's opera, bad things happen a lot. It was a very extremely steep learning curve for me. I learned a ton about legitimate voices and writing for them, which is quite different actually than writing for pop or theater voices. Pop voices and theater voices, you guys know who are composers or work with musical theater actors, tends to be a certain range. And they kind of go to the top of their range and that's it. And legit voices, particularly sopranos and tenors, have this little section called the Basagio, which is a couple of notes where they're not very happy sitting. And then they go up above that and they're happy again. So just learning about that and vocal placement, and it was very, very technical, which I quite enjoyed. And also doing orchestrations, because for musical theater, one tends not to do one's own orchestrations unless it's a little band like God's Felm. But if you're dealing with a pit orchestra, just the way musical theater gets created, there's no real time, even if you could orchestrate it to do it. And then opera, of course, that's part of the job. So I spent a year sitting in front of a computer with a civilians program orchestrating and my eyes crossing and just learned a whole bunch. I don't know if I'll ever put it into practice again, but it was very, very interesting. And I worked with Bill Brone, when you're David Brone, who was my orchestrator on Wicked. And he just very graciously spent a year with me, basically being an orchestration mentor. Was it hard to turn off the compulsive brain when you were in orchestration mode? Well, no, because it's part of the same thing. And also it was conceived to be, I sort of had the orchestration in mind as I was writing anyway. No, and that's the thing. I feel that writing for opera, the part of the job, as I say, is to conceive it orchestrally, which is different, frankly, than I write for musical theater. And basically, it's basically pianistic. I'm basically working from a keyboard. And ultimately it does get orchestrated, but I always think it's pretty clear that it all got, it all started on the piano pretty much. Occasionally a couple of guitar things, you get there, but mostly it's very keyboard oriented. Are you a guitar player too? I used to be a guitar player. And now I'm so lazy that now you can play guitar on keyboards and make it sound like that. So as long as you know how it works, you can kind of do that. But when I was a kid I was a guitar player as well. Was that your first instrument? No, no, no. Okay. Yeah, but I played classical guitar as well in high school and kind of folk guitar and blues guitar. Yeah. Oh, wow. Now I can't make a bar chord anymore, so. What you made, we all know he wrote a little show called Quick and, but what I was surprised to find out that you were really the catalyst for making this all happen. And I think that's an interesting story if you wouldn't mind. Sherry. No, no, I don't mind at all. I mean, yeah, what happened was that in an extremely manned, random way, I was, it was a social occasion. Basically I was on the snorkeling trip with friends. And on the boat on the way back from puddling around in Malikini, a friend of mine, the folk singer Hollinear, just making casual conversations said, I'm reading this really interesting book and it's called Wicked and it's by this guy named Gregory McGuire. And basically it's the odd story from the Wicked, which is point of view. And every time I say that I get goosebumps you can't see it now because I don't have a jacket. And I just thought that it was the best idea I had ever heard in my life. And that it was, it was so me. So many things about it were right for what I like to do. And I was out in California at the time doing movies and not really thinking much about doing theater again. And then I heard that idea. I just thought that I really had to do that if I could get a chance. So then I got back to Los Angeles the next day and I called my lawyer and I said, okay, there's this book out there called Wicked and it's been out for a while. So somebody has the rights. So can you find out who has the rights? And I'm gonna go get the book and see. But I think I have to do this if I can. And then I got very, very lucky because it turned out that the rights were held by Universal Pictures. And Mark Platt was the head of Universal at the time. And I sort of worked my way up the food chain having various meetings with Underlings until I could get a meeting with Mark. And I knew they were in the process of trying to adapt it as a non-musical movie. There was a first year after the screenplay was done. They had given their notes. They paid for it, paid quite a lot for it. They were waiting for the second draft to come back. And I got a meeting with Mark and I went in there knowing that I was gonna try and talk him out of that. So with great trepidation, I walked into the office and when I walked in, he sang corner of the sky to me. Oh, it turned out that he had been in Pippin' in college. I mean, really, as studio executive in Hollywood, you imagine if it had been Warner Brothers, they would never have been a show. So I was just really, really got lucky. Yeah, and I basically talked to Mark and said, look, I know you're doing this, trying to do this as a movie. I don't really think it's gonna work as a movie. These are the reasons I don't think it's gonna work. I think it needs to be a musical and in fact, I think it needs to be a stage musical. These are the reasons I feel that and I really think I know how to do this and I really wanna do it, so please give me the chance. It's not as if he said immediately, why are you right? Of course, my boy. But over time, eventually he came around. Yeah, that's so great. But you still had a pitch a little bit, right? Didn't you have to do a song or two and sort of sell them on the idea? No, actually. No? Basically what happened was he started developing it on parallel tracks. He said, well, we'll see. They got the second draft in from the screenplay and he still had some reservations and he gave some notes. In the meantime, when I asked Whitney Holtzman to work with me on it and she and I started working out an outline and meeting with Mark and then just gradually the movie fell away. Yeah, relatively early in the process, I'd done some songs and kind of pitched them to Universal. And I suppose at any point, Universal could have dropped out. And but the deal was frankly, and this is actually useful for us to talk about as writers. I didn't wanna be wasting my time, obviously, if I was writing. So the deal was that as long as Universal was willing to back the movie, they have the rights to do that. But if they, of course, first of all, let me back up. First of all, I had to go to the writer of the underlying rights, Gregory Maguire. That was the most important thing. And tell him what I had in mind and basically get the rights to do it. So that's the first thing. If you're adapting something that is based on something else, if it's a derivative work of their underlying rights, get the rights. Sometimes you will have to do some spec work. You will have to write a song or two or three or an outline or something. But I just know of so many sad, sad stories of people who've done full adaptations and very good ones. I know of one in particular, a terrific adaptation that was in my ASCAP workshop by a composer lyricist team that have gone on to be quite well known. And they've worked on it for two years and everybody was very enthusiastic about it and they had producers and they finally went to the guy who wrote the movie and he wouldn't give them the rights because he just didn't want it to be musical and that was the end of that. So don't do that, get the rights. And then having done that, as I said, the deal was that the universal decided to back out. By this point the movie had kind of gone away. Then they could. But if they did, then the rights to continue went to Mark who would produce it. And if Mark backed out, then the rights came to me. So that it could, at least I'd have the chance to try to move it forward even if they went away. But they were amazing. They were wonderfully supportive all the way through and they never went away, so. Lucky for us. Yeah, so me. So that was the best idea you've ever heard for a musical, what's the worst? Oh gosh. And was it yours? Well actually, I mean what I want to say is that the worst idea I've ever heard for a musical is 1776, which is one of my favorite musicals. So it means the point being that somebody else can have an idea that you hear it and you just think that's really a bad idea. A musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a bunch of guys in silly costumes where you know the ending, what a bad idea. But then what happens is somebody was passionate about it. Someone had a vision and had a way to do it that made it wonderful, which in a way I think demonstrates that it's really, I don't think it really is that there are good ideas and bad ideas, it's that there's an idea that sparks you and that you have a vision for, that you care about. I really feel that somebody has to really be passionate about a musical. I mean a play of course goes without saying because it's an individual and you wouldn't be writing it if you weren't passionate enough about it to do the silly thing of writing a play. But a musical which can be more collaborative and people can get brought in on it, I still feel like there needs to be one, at least one person who germinated it, who really cares about it. Recently I won't name it, but I saw a musical, one of this year's Crop of Musicals on Broadway and it's really well done. And but I just couldn't care about it at all and I just knew that everybody working on it really didn't give a damn. It was just an assignment and you could feel it even though they did their work extremely confidently and it was all very well designed and staged and written just because you could sense the lack of passion. How do you find somebody who shares your passion? Because I know we've had exchanges where we try to hook up playwrights with composers and somebody's baby isn't always somebody else's baby so have you ever encountered that? Oh sure constantly, yeah absolutely. That's a great question and it's something those of us who are collaborative writers who don't do it all ourselves, who aren't playwrights who go into a room and come out with at least a first draft of a play, that putting together the team to do it is so tricky and yes it's so important and yeah there've been many times where there's been something I wanted to do and there've been writers that I thought Oki or she would be great for this and I've talked to them about it and they just are not interested and they don't see it and sometimes the project goes away because of that. I mean there've been a couple of things where I was really interested in a project and I just couldn't find somebody to work with me on it and then in other cases you keep trying and the second or third person or fourth person or whatever you talk to gets it and says oh yeah I love that idea. I was lucky in the case of Wicked because Winnie who was my first choice was very excited about it as well so that was lucky but that's not always the case. I mean with Pippin I talked to a whole bunch of writers before finally sort of being match made put together with Roger Herson who I didn't, his work I didn't know until it was suggested to me and then he sort of got what I had in mind and then took it a whole place beyond which I could even have seen at the time. So yeah but that's a tricky thing because I think it's a combination of things. You want to find some, first of all you want to find someone who's work you like and who feels to you, if you are the one looking for a collaborator then you want to find someone whose work feels to you like good casting for this piece and not everybody is good casting for everything. I'm certainly not good casting for everything. There are certain things that I do and respond to and certain things that I don't or even if I tried I wouldn't be very good at and that's true of all writers. So I think that's the first thing and then as you say Larry, then you have to be lucky enough that the writer actually responds to the material and thirdly you have to be able to find a shared vision and that's the trickiest thing of all particularly if it's something starting with you because it's never going to be what you had in your head. Frankly it never will be limited to somebody and limited to you have a director anyway. It's not going to be what you had in your head. And that's a good thing but it's a tough thing and learning how or you never really learn how to do this but coming to some realization of where you can give up or what battles to fight or when to be open to an idea that's maybe better than what you had but where you have to draw them on and say no, no, no, no, no, no. If we do that that changes the whole essence of it. That's so tricky and it's a struggle or a challenge. I shouldn't say it's a struggle but it's definitely a challenge on any collaborative project. So the whole issue of collaboration is very complicated. But you wear a lot of different hats when you're collaborating. Sometimes you're writing the music, sometimes you're doing the lyrics. How has that all worked out in the beginning when you sit down for the first time, everybody's in the room? Well usually- Are there rules? Are you talking about process or who's doing what? Well, I guess more conflict resolution than anything. Oh, well, I mean, I've always been pretty fortunate in getting along with my writing collaborators. And part of it is because I feel that collaboration, there's always another solution. So that if you are doing something and your collaborator, assuming that you like and respect your collaborator, and if he or she just doesn't get what you're doing and doesn't like what you're doing, then I feel like, well, you try again and you try and come up with something else and you expect them to do the same. So there really isn't conflict in that way. I mean, I have had occasions, for instance, working with Alan Macon where I've done a lyric or part of a lyric that he hasn't been crazy about. And if I really believe in it, I'll just ask him to live with it for a while. But if he still doesn't like it, I'll change it. I'll tell you a good story about, I told this a bit, so I mean, stop me if you've heard this. So the first song that Alan Macon and I wrote together was Colors of the Limb for Pocahontas. We'd never worked together before, though we had known each other personally and were kind of social friends. And the song was done and Disney was very enthusiastic about it and we were, I think, like two or three days before we were going into the studio to record it. And for animation, once you record something, it's done. It's just so expensive and they start drawing and it's done, so you have to have a right then. And Alan called me, I think, two days before and he said, listen, I know everybody loves this song and I love the song and I think it's terrific clear. I just don't like the ending. It just has been bothering me and bothering me and we don't really know each other that well and so I just haven't said anything but I just have to say something. And I just don't like it. So here's what the last three lines of Colors of the Wind were. She sang, I'm so embarrassed to say this because they're really bad. She sang, for your life's an empty hull, till you get it through your skull, you can pay with all the colors of the wind. And Alan just said, I just don't like that word skull in this song, I don't think it belongs and hull is too fancy. And I went into this elaborate explanation about how difficult it was to rhyme colors and there were very few things that tripled rhyme and I went on and on and then finally I thought, well, he's my collaborator, I'll just try to come up with something else and I struggled and took out a rhyming dictionary and looked up rhymes for all and I just, nowhere, nowhere. And finally, I just abandoned the triple rhyme and I just thought, well, I can't do it so it'll just, I just won't do it at all. And almost walking into the studio, I did, you can own the earth and still, all you'll own is earth until you can pay with all the colors of the wind. So much better, so much better. And that's because my collaborator just didn't like the other thing but I probably would have been lazy enough to leave it. So that's the point, it's just, is knowing, is listening and being willing to change everything, anything. I mean, John Kerr was the one who said to me, there's always another solution. And so I think that's significant in working with a collaborator and that doesn't mean to be a doormat or just change anything. If you really believe in something, make your case for it, ask your collaborator to live with it for a while because sometimes they grow to like it or sometimes they come to see it from your point of view but in the end, I think you need to be willing to look for another solution. I find that the collaboration between writers and director, that's a more fraught collaboration. There is, I think, inherently built into that, a certain degree of conflict, which I think is actually, as I say, a good thing for the show but it's not always fun while it's happening. But between, because there, sometimes you really have to stand your ground and sometimes you really have to say I really don't like what you're doing there and they get mad at you and you get mad at them. But even there, you really want to try to have as much give and take as you can but collaborating with your fellow writers, I think, it's a cliche to say that it's like a marriage but it kind of is, it's kind of like bringing up the kids and you want to agree on how to do that. So you drink and I'm eating. Yeah, I'm like, I don't have anything to say but I just stop. What to you, while we're on the topic of songwriting, what makes a good musical theater song to you? Well, I'm going to talk about this some more tomorrow. Okay. But no, but I'll say. How about a musical theater moment rather than a song? Here's a good place for a song. Well, that's interesting. That's very instinctive. The choice of where to write what to music lies. I had an interesting conversation a couple of months ago. I was on an opera panel or a panel that was about the difference between musical theater and opera and there were all sorts of, like Adam Gettle was on the panel and John Kander, Lufus Wainwright and basically all glathered on and came to the conclusion that it was just to continue him and there wasn't really a difference in all the stuff. And then after the panel, Oscar Hammerstein's son Andy Hammerstein was there and we were talking because I used the example of the first scene of Carousel and how everything that I had to say about what I thought constituted writing opera was contained in the first scene of Carousel and yet I knew it wasn't an opera and so anything I had to say was pretty invalid, frankly. So anyway, we were talking about that afterwards and he said a really interesting thing. He said, well, isn't it really like the decision in a musical is what to say and the decision in an opera is what not to say which I thought was so smart, I just wish he'd said it in the panel, but that means so, that means- Did she just say it, just take note of it? I did, you know, after a while I'll just pretend I thought of it. Yeah, absolutely. He doesn't know, nobody will tell him that I said that. But the point is that that decision of what to say is really key in terms of storytelling and the degree to which you want to be storytelling because when you sing, it does something interesting to time. It can stretch it so that you take a moment that in dialogue would be 20 seconds and it's now three and a half minutes or it can speed it along and you take something that would take you five scenes to do and you do it in a five minute number and so on. And it focuses attention on something, it announces that this is important, pay attention to this moment from a storytelling point of view because we're bothering to sing about it and all sorts of other things. So that decision of what to sing and what not to sing is very, very key, I think. And as I said, we're gonna talk about it a lot. I'm gonna talk about it at length tomorrow. But having said that, for me, although I'm gonna talk a lot about different rules and things, there really are no rules, it's completely instinctive. And for instance, working on the Disney films, it was the first time that I encountered a process that I find very helpful, structurally, which is storyboarding. If you're doing a musical and by that, I don't mean the storyboarding where you draw little pictures about the camera's gonna do this and the camera's gonna do that, but it's an outline on the bulletin board. And as opposed to having an outline of like, this happens and that happens when you're turning the pages, there's something about seeing it up there that I find very helpful in terms of seeing the structure and the way they did it at Disney, which I think may have been created by Howard Ashman, I don't know, but by the time I got there, they were doing it, was they would take a great big bulletin board and note cards, like four by six cards or three by five cards. And on each three by five card would be the most basic description of the storybeat. Like in Wicked, we had a card that said, Alphabet and Glinda meet at school, they don't like each other, they are forced to be roommates, card. You know, things like that. Just none of the specifics, just the storybeat, what's happening. And then you sort of put it up there and one of the things is if you look at it and with no attention at first as to what's some and what's not. And if you start to look at it, you can see, oh, wait a minute, you know, card five over here and card 18 over here, I see they're the exact same thing. So something's wrong with my structure. So you can sort of see a skeleton and see that things are moving forward, that you're not circling back on yourself or repeating yourself. Then having done that, I found that we would look at these cards and almost immediately, and particularly if I was working with Al and we both be together and we would be like, that's a song, I don't know why. And it would come off, the white card would come off and the same thing that was on the card would be written on a blue card and then a blue card would be put up there. And then after a while, you could sort of again see the shape of how things flowed and if there were too many white cards in a row, that was not good. And if there were like a whole bunch of white cards and then a whole bunch of blue cards, that wasn't good. And you just got a sense of the ebb and flow. I found that very useful, but the point is that I don't know why you would, why we would just look at something and say like, oh well, that moment is a musical moment, but that's instinct, that's instinct. And people would make different choices. I mean, one of the things that was, I always think of this because a very, very successful musical by Stephen Sondheim is a little night music. And people love that show, it has great music. I think there's a huge structural flaw in the show because the leading character, Desiree, I have no idea what she wants for really, really long time. And then finally she sings one of the best songs ever written at the end, but meanwhile, where is she at the beginning? So I keep thinking like, there's a missing song. Somewhere in that first three or four numbers, I need to hear from her more than just part of like this glamorous life song. Obviously, this show seemed to do just fine with that. But if I'm doing that show, instinctively, I wouldn't put a song for her somewhere in there. And who knows if that would have been better, worse or feel predictable or whatever, but my point is that my instinct would be, is different than in this case, you sometimes instinct and it doesn't mean that one is right and one is not. You just follow that. Do you nail down all your structure first and then go with the songwriting or sometimes it's just, I gotta write this song. I know it's gonna work. I try to nail down a structure with the, I try to nail down the structure with the understanding that it's going to change to some extent. Certainly the specifics will change, though oddly enough, the basic structure that you have of writing often doesn't change very much. Because again, it's just, being lazy, I don't want, you wind up writing a bunch of songs that you throw out anyway. So, but give yourself the best shot. Don't be writing a song for a moment that doesn't belong in the show and you write the best song of all time and you can't use it in the show because the moment doesn't work. At least the songs that I'm throwing out, I would say 90% if not 100% of them are being thrown out because the song's not good enough. Not because there's, the structural moment isn't there. So yeah, I wanna try and get as much of a sense of what the structure is as possible before starting to write. But obviously things are gonna be happening as you're working on the piece. You're gonna have musical ideas, you're gonna have ideas for lyrics, ideas for song titles. And so they'll start to accumulate but I do tend to try to hold off writing until I kind of know what the structure is. Now, that being said, I'm gonna say the exact opposite. Sometimes to find out what the show is, you have to write stuff. You have to be willing to write stuff that you're gonna throw out. Because you just, you can't quite envision it. I would think that's very true of playwriting. That more so than musicals. Musicals are so structurally oriented in place, are so much, you know, someone says something to someone and they reply and you're off, you know. But even so, even with musicals, sometimes you just have to do some stuff and after a few months of doing this or whatever, you may have a whole bunch of stuff that that's not working and you're struggling with and then you suddenly say, oh, oh, that's what the show is. Okay, so this all goes and now we start. And that's a perfectly, I think, you know, it's exhausting but it's a perfectly legitimate process but I do try to avoid that. So what happens when you throw them out? Where do they go? Usually they just go away. I mean, there are, you know, there are very, very famous examples of writers who, particularly composers, who have a really good tune and it goes in the trunk, so to speak, and then it shows up again in something else. And I have some trunk songs that were, I have some songs in a couple of things that were music that I had from before. There's a song in Wicked that was basically, although I changed it a bit, but the basic music was a pop song that I'd written, you know, in the 70s and I just always really liked the music and could never come up with a lyric and other people tried to write lyrics for it and could never come up with anything that we liked and then it seemed really appropriate for one moment if we're altered a bit. But mostly what I'm writing is so much for a particular moment and a particular character and a particular event that it just, you know, it doesn't lend itself to recycling. We have time for three really great questions. So unfair. Choose your words wisely. You spoke about the delicacy of collaboration. You've had the benefit of collaborating not just with interesting people, but with stars. Does that change the chemistry of collaborating? Do you have to bend a little more when it's a star director or a star actor? Well, they may, did everybody hear the question back there? Okay, the question was in collaborating with quote, stars, does that sometimes change the temperature of the collaboration? Do you have to bend a little bit more if you're dealing with a star writer or a star director? My experience is, and sort of my opinion is no. Particularly with writers, that if you're collaborating with someone, then it doesn't matter what they've done before or what we'll do in the future. You're dealing with this right now. I mean, when I was very young and I worked with Leonard Bernstein, there was an intimidation factor, but that wasn't his fault, that was my fault. And he did everything in his power to try to help me overcome that. And I think it was largely successful with that. Star directors will bring an attitude in with them and it just makes the situation even more fraught than it already is. But, and again, most of the time people are stars for a reason, particularly writers and directors, much more so I think than actors and television personalities. There are very, very few writers and directors who are famous for being famous. They're usually famous because they've done something worthy of note. And therefore one brings a certain respect in terms of working with them and you wanna hear what they have to say within that context. But yeah, but I think there's a difference between that and being intimidated by someone's reputation, cool. Number two, yes. You were established as writing music and lyrics and then you'd taken on projects when you were only lyricist for a time and you can't strap it in. In that situation, how do you deal with your own music instance, communicate them, do not, how do you create enough space for the opening of your library? Well, the way of working for the latter two was different than the way I worked with Lenny and because I was sort of learning how to collaborate with Lenny and I made several mistakes, I feel from a sort of craft point of view that I wouldn't make now. But with Charles Strauss and with Alan, we almost always work music first. Part of that is out of my own laziness that I just want the other person to go first because then I don't have to think of things as much. So our process tends to be that I try and come up with a title. And even when I'm working on my own, I have come to find it very useful to find a title pretty as fast as I can because it gives me so many parameters. But yeah, so, well, I'll just talk about with Alan. For the most part, he likes me to be there when he's writing, I come in with a title and maybe a couple of lines that usually don't wind up in the song, just something to trigger something and we sit in a room together and we talk about what the event of the song is and sort of the feel of it and he writes at the piano and a lot of times I just sit there and I'm drinking tea and doing the Harper's puzzle or something and he'll be playing away and I'll just go like, oh, that, that's really good. But sometimes he just comes up with something and it's usually not the whole song, it's usually just something. And then I take it home and play it over and over again on the piano and try to internalize it and then try to get the silhouette of the lyrics to function with the silhouette of the music so that if there's a big emotional moment, the lyric has a big emotional word or a big emotional thought and if something's tripping along quickly then, I'm trying to kind of trip along with it. In a way, I feel that the job of the lyric is kind of to stay out of the way of the music and also to define the shape of the music. So yeah, it's, because they tend to take the lead, I think it doesn't crimp their style too much. As I've said before, if there is something musically that I don't like, I'll say something about it or I'll say something like, oh, like the song from Hunchback in Notre Dame out there which was the first song that Alan and I wrote for that. He had the entire music before we even started on the piece because it was something he had been noodling around with Beauty and the Beast because it sounded French and he wound up not using it and we basically took all the music except I asked him to change the title line because the original thing, I can't remember it exactly now but it was kind of like, out there walking in the sun, it was very close together and I just didn't feel it was memorable enough for the title on it and I said, can't you just do a big interval or something? So occasionally I will ask for things like that but again, it's what I was saying with Claiborne if he says, well, I really, this is the way that music should be, you know, I'll be like, well, you know what? It's your music, I've expressed my opinion but in the end you're the composer, so that's it. In the interest of gender parity, can we have a female member of the audience? Aha, yes. In fact, a genuine female.