 Wicked, which is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary on Broadway in October. But I thought this would be interesting, since most of you are creators and writers, to go back in time to more than a decade ago as to how that monumental success began. I will just start off by saying that I know that Stephen Schwartz was on this beautiful beach with several friends, and one of them was reading a book, and Stephen asked, what are you reading? And she said it's a book called Wicked. It's the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West. And I will let Stephen take the story from that point on. Yeah, that's close. In 1996, I was spending most of my time in Los Angeles. I was doing animated features. I was very happy doing that and had decided that I was having a much better time and being much better treated than working in New York, particularly on Broadway, and that I wasn't going to do theater anymore. And towards the end of 1996, I went on a brief sort of weekend vacation with some friends of mine who were working in Hawaii, and we went on a snorkeling trip in Maui, so a boat on the way back, one of these friends, the folk singer Holly Neer, said, making idle conversation, oh, I'm reading this really interesting book. It's by this guy named Gregory Maguire, and it's a book called Wicked, and it's sort of the Oz story from the Wicked Witch's point of view. And it happened again. Every time I say that sentence, sort of the hair is on my body, stand up. I just thought that was one of the best ideas I'd ever heard and so right for me in so many ways. And so the next day when I flew back to Los Angeles, I called my lawyer and I said, okay, there is this book called Wicked, and somebody has the rights because it's been out for a while. And I think I need to do this, so I'm going to go out and get the book. And you need to find out who has the rights. And then a whole and very elaborate journey then commenced. It turned out, and I'm telling you all of this because as writers, the sort of how you actually get to do something is often something that I'm asked. It turned out that the rights were held by Demi Moore's production company, which had a deal with Universal. And that they were in the process of adapting it as a movie. There was a screenplay being written by Linda Wolverton, who I happen to know from Disney and who I think is a really good writer. Non-musical though. Non-musical. And they were on the second draft of the screenplay. And so I tracked down, I got a meeting with Suzanne Todd, who was running Demi Moore's company at the time, and with Linda and tried to talk them into considering doing it as a musical. They were not interested in doing that. And then I sort of worked my way up the food chain and eventually got a meeting with the gentleman who was then running Universal Pictures, whose name was Mark Platt. And I had very little hope prior to this meeting because of the attitude, particularly at that time of movie studios towards musicals, because why would they do that? Because you can't really make too much money. I see Carol Hall sitting there, who was one of the only people I cited her movie as a reason why they should consider doing a musical, a Broadway musical. Anyway, I walked into Mark Platt's office, and before the meeting commenced, he sang Corner of the Sky to me. Because it turned out that he had been in Pippin in college. So I consider this a good sign. And basically made a pitch to Mark saying, look, I know that you're doing this as a movie. I don't think it's going to work as a movie. Here are the reasons I don't think it will work. I think it needs to be a musical and therefore a stage musical. And I really want to do this and think I kind of know how. So please think about this. And then there was a very discouraging year that followed where it looked as if that was not going to happen and then maybe they would pursue it on parallel tracks. And basically when I left the office, Mark gave me a folder of all the movies that Universal had ever produced to see if there was anything else in there that I might like doing as a musical. And then I started to despair and I started to make lists of other villains that might maybe make the center of a musical and there was Iago and there was the Wicked Queen from Snow White and everything. And none of them really seemed to have the same excitement as The Wicked Witch. And then finally I got a call from Mark saying that he had thought about it and he had come to feel that the arguments I made were compelling. And it turned out that in fact Linda Wolverton was not interested in pursuing it in this way. Yay. Yay. And so I started to think about whom I might want to work with. And then very fortuitously, a producer at Disney had whom both Winnie and I knew, Jim Pentecost, who was the producer of Pocahontas, had lunch for us at Disney where the two of us met to talk about this project that Jim pitched. I can't even remember what it was, because all we did was talk about Wicked. But when we had that wonderful lunch, that important lunch, you were in your middle of your despair. You hadn't gotten the right yet? No, because what happened, it was just a weird moment where you brought up, like if only we could think of a good idea to do for an animated... Oh, like Wicked. Like Wicked. And I was like, oh my God, you know that book? And then I heard the tale of, you know, that you had not been able to get the rights to that. So I remember very well because then months later, you called me and said, I sit down because I think we... I've gotten the rights so I think you might want to read the book now. Because I had never read the book. I had literally seen the cover of the book and thought it was so arresting that I bought the book. And I too had done a right search. This is weird. This is, you know, we didn't really know each other then. But when I heard that it was being already made and that someone had already started a screenplay, first of all, I didn't have the insight Steven had that it should be a musical on Broadway. I didn't understand that then. I was just looking into it as a screenwriter, actually. When I heard they already had a screenwriter, they already started. I was so depressed I didn't read the book. But a weird little-known fact, and it's just funny, is the book, which the original novel had this green girl with her dark hat, very, very interesting-looking girl with a slightly green face, but it was half-hidden on the cover. And I had that on my bookshelf in my workroom for a long time. It sort of peered out at me. And, you know, literally later I started to think, wow, that's kind of interesting that I had it right prominently displayed on my bookshelf for like two years before I started working on it. Stranger than truth. So now it was 1998, we think, right? Yes. Towards the end of 1998. And we had gotten the go-ahead. And I had met with Gregory Maguire because he had to give his blessing and drove up to where he was staying in Connecticut and walked around with him and told him sort of what my thoughts were. And he did give his blessing. And then we began. And we started by trying to do an outline of the show. What would the basic structure be? And I think I had done something. Well, he had written a preliminary outline. But also, I think it bears mentioning, it's very important, you had a vision from the beginning of the way you wanted the show to begin. The curtain at the end of the first act. And the very end. He had a very strong vision. He'd been thinking about this for a while and is incredibly smart. So what he pitched to me originally was what we have, which is the show would begin with this celebration that is not unlike Ding Dong the Witch is Dead, but it's not that, but it is like that because it's happening in Oz and they're celebrating the death of a witch. The end of the first act is going to be this moment when she first flies on her broomstick. I believe that's what you said. And then the end of the show, although it's changed from how we both originally started to envision it, but the end of the show, I think you said to me immediately, can we say spoilers in here? You knew that you didn't want her to die as in Gregory's book, does she die in the book? It's ambiguous. Obviously in the movie she dies. It's ambiguous in Gregory's book. So he was very clear, this was his vision. So I was really on board with that and was feeling it too. And then, so in other words, we had those three very key structural tent poles that we then started outlining from. Yeah. And there were things, and Winnie, it's so great that she did this. So she brought the first outline that then we did together, which is now dated November of 99. So it took about a year, really just to get to this because the book had so much plot that it was really difficult to figure out what to use and what not to use and what to change and so on. But what I was just glancing at this as we were waiting to begin, and what was really interesting is that even though everything changed, kind of those three things never changed. The specifics of how they were executed and who was involved and who wasn't changed. But that was always the structure, that it began with the celebration of the witch's death, that it then flashed back, that at the end of the show you would come back to that same celebration but see it in a completely different way and learn that a lot of what you thought was true was actually a masquerade and a charade and that there was a lot of stuff going on that you didn't know about and that the end of the first act would be the witch coming into her power and flying for the first time. And there were a couple of other things that we knew. Well, the roommate's thing. Yes. Well, that was in Gregory's book. That was something that spoke to both of us right away, was that the bad witch, the wicked witch and Glenda the good witch had been reluctant roommates at college. And in the book, and we just thought that was hilarious and brilliant. The other thing I should say that I think was really key because it was something that I had not thought of before. When I first envisioned the show before I started talking to Winnie about it, I had seen it as a show kind of like Funny Girl in that there would be one main character and she would drive through the show and that's who you would follow. And then when I started talking with Winnie about it, Winnie had the insight of how important that the relationship was more significant than this one character's journey and that it was more like a Rodgers and Hammerstein show where you had to balance two major characters and the journey they would take together and how their relationship would change would be the center of the show. And then the other thing that I thought was really, you said it at our very first meeting and I never forgot was that you felt it was very important that Elphaba the wicked witch actually do something that was wicked. That it not be that she was just this misunderstood good girl and the others were bad and you simply flipped who was black and who was white but that we wanted it to be very nuanced and so then we looked for an incident, a thing that she would do that was actually wicked and that's where the idea of a relationship between Glinda and Fiero, which is not in the book, they don't have a relationship in the novel and that's where that came from and that therefore Elphaba knowing about that relationship but taking the guy anyway was a betrayal of her best friend. I wanted her to have behaved badly in some ways and obviously we've all behaved badly. Some more badly than others I guess but in other words we've all done things that we know weren't what another person wanted us to do but we couldn't help ourselves or we felt that it was more true, that whole thing about it's more true to lie in a certain moment than it is to... But anyway, yeah. And then I think just to say that something we've said publicly a lot but I'll just say it since we're on the subject is that then another element of the Glinda part rising up had to do with Kristen and from the very beginning when we were very first writing it Steven had said to me, there's this girl named Kristen Chenoweth and I was living in LA and I wasn't really a part of the New York theater scene nor am I still really but I did not really... I knew who Kristen was but I'd never really seen her on stage I don't think. I knew she'd wanted Tony but I didn't really know her. Well when Steven was able to get her to come to an early reading that we did I was so blown away by her enormous gifts that I determined... I mean, we both did I don't mean to say use the I we both felt very strongly it should be her now that's like saying that you sort of buy a Ferrari but you just take it down the driveway and then just bring it back you know, if you have a Ferrari you have to take it for a spin and so then it became very important how is her part gonna arc? What's in it for her? You know, flat out you know, here's a rising star just why does she want to do our part? That's something you know people don't always talk about that but actually Martha Levy I think referred to that last night I was very taken with that moment in her conversation I'm always thinking about that stuff I don't know if that is something that people want to talk about why would an actor want to and motivating and a truly and I don't just mean a star but somebody who's really got a lot going on in that department making sure that you're showing them off not the other way around i.e. they're gonna come in do my show and make it work no, no, no the thinking would need to be I'm gonna write a part that so shows them off and so shows all their colors that they're going to not be able to resist to play it that's more the thinking that I like to be in and then just quickly and then we can start answering questions etc so the way we developed the show then was we once we had an outline that we felt we had gone over and over and over again and now we're starting to go around in circles a little bit and therefore it was time to move forward then we started to write and Winnie for me as a as a songwriter I always like it if the book writer does goes first and gives me a few scenes so I understand the tone and how the characters speak and so on and so forth and Winnie wrote the first couple of scenes and particularly I remember when I got the first draft of the opening from you and there were all these strange words that we came to call Ozisms and that Winnie was inventing a language in a way a way of talking to help separate Oz from from our world and so that was very influential on me I thought well then I have to write lyrics that way too and anyway eventually we got ourselves to a first act and we were working with Mark Platt who became producer of the show and we would keep running things by him and discussing things with him and then finally it got to a point where we felt we needed to hear it read and that was probably about another year down the line I would say and remember the first time we heard it read we only had Act 1 we had an Act 1 that was as long as now and I remember again we had started to go around and around in circles with it and we finally thought we have to hear this read and Mark was very resistant to that idea and he was sort of terrified and I had a conversation about it and so finally I called Mark and I said so we're going to do this reading and if you want to be the producer and pay for it great if not we're doing it you're cordially invited but we're doing it so then of course he said oh well then of course we'll put it together for you and we just invited some actor friends of ours this wasn't the Kristen reading it's just Act 1 it's two hours long or two and a half hours long and I just want to say for all of us that was so key what Steven was he invited I guess you invited about 20 would you say 40? no less than that I think it was less than 20 I think it was about 12 sort of smart friends people he felt were very his smartest friends and I think I had like two friends there I have a lot of friends but I was scared but what he did which was so amazing to me because I've never done something like this before because in other words my thinking and this is why I want to share this with you would be I have to wait till it's done done right but what this did was it catapulted us into a lot more knowledge and into really understanding what we had and what we didn't have yet so after the reading was over this is just the first act he and I sat in the middle of the room me against my will and Steven willingly and just asked people Steven just asked people questions like what didn't you get where did you lose interest and we took notes and that's a real ballsy obviously move but if you can do that with enough privacy so that you don't so that you're not talking to people who are just totally going to lead you astray that you're talking to some trusted people who you think have good taste that can be so that was just galvanizing for us it sort of becomes like a bell curve like there are always outliers who tell you things that are not particularly useful or have their own sort of odd point of view someone just hates monkeys I had someone like that a very very close personal friend who was just like oh those monkeys get rid of them and there was no way we were going to do that but in the middle things start to emerge and one of the people who was there I remember said to me whenever you have those two girls on particularly when they're together in action you're in gold and every other time you're in trouble and so we wrote this little thing that said it's the girls stupid that was our mantra we would show it to each other as we were working and then the other thing that we really learned was that people brought in with them the movie they did not bring Gregory's book even if they'd read the book they didn't really care if we changed it or what we did they did not bring the original Wizard of Oz series even if they had a prized collection of them at home and had read all 170 of them but they all brought the movie and what we realized was we could not contradict the movie any place we had gone too far away the show fell apart so we realized two major things we had to focus on the relationship between the girls and that we had to treat the movie as if it was a documentary that's what really happened that's what really happened just to add to that when you think about that it has to do with the whole idea if you do improv and don't deny someone else's reality if anyone hears the improv person because the audience doesn't like to have their reality denied in other words if you're in an improv and you come out and you start to crack eggs and pretend that you're flipping eggs and somebody says you know why are you whipping a horse and it's been so clear that you were just making eggs it's very unpleasant for the audience and they just zone out it's like well if you're gonna do shit like that why should I pay attention so in other words so it doesn't just apply to the Wizard of Oz although it does so much because this is such a treasured this is a movie that is our national treasure it's a national masterpiece it's our great movie and it's a movie that really spoke to our generation me and Stevens although I think it does continue to speak to generations but we grew up watching this movie at prized moments at home on little TVs that only had five channels it's like it was a very important event to watch the movie together as a family or to be terrified by it or whatever so we did have to be very we brought our own feelings of respect and admiration and adoration I will say for the movie but we also brought that thing that he's just described but all of that I believe is something that speaks to whatever you might be writing in terms of understanding not denying what you care about or what matters to you because often what matters to you is really what matters universally when you're tapping into something that you really care about very very often that's when you're really speaking to a bigger group if you know what I mean Steven and Winnie I'd like to pick up the story it's getting closer to Broadway I know that you insisted that the show open out of town not on Broadway and the production was in San Francisco and I believe you also insisted that after it closed in San Francisco you would have a certain amount of time why did you decide what did you think you needed that was something that I actually we wanted to do a regional production and our director I actually wanted to do a workshop and then regional production and then talk about going out of town and our director Joe Mantello felt that for his purposes to some extent a workshop but particularly a regional production was not valuable because he felt that he needed to get the world and the production and that to just have sort of limited resources was not helpful to him in figuring out how to put the show on the stage so he wanted to start right away with an out of town production and I said to the producers that I would only agree to that if it was not a typical situation where you open out of town and then you kind of shut down for a week while you're transferring to New York and then you go because what I had learned in my experience was you can't actually do really major structural work while the show is running I know in the old days they seem to change shows out of town extensively all the time but for whatever reasons now I've just found you can't do it Well we made some changes out of town You can make limited changes within scenes You can do it's not really cosmetic work it's important work but you can't do big changes because by the time something is then you have to stage it and then it has to be orchestrated and then the computer has to like figure out how to move the set and three weeks have gone by and you can't do it so I just said to the producers if you're going to do this we must close down for I think it was three months I think we had we definitely had July and August because it started at the end of August the rehearsal I think it was three months that we said you have to close the show and let us write and then go back into rehearsal and otherwise we won't do it and so the producers agreed and it cost them one million dollars for that three months because they had to keep everybody on retainer on retainer but it did make the show they will tell you that that was the best million dollars they spent but the point being they were not cavalier about it it was a decision can you mention one thing that you learned from that San Francisco production? well yes we've learned a lot of things from the San Francisco production the major one of the major things that we worked on in the intervening three months was that the character of Elphaba and her relationship with Glinda had gone out of balance that Glinda had to some extent taken over the show and there were aspects of the Elphaba character that were not coming through and so we her intelligence her rebelliousness, her wit and so we spent most of that time working on that character writing new lines for her writing new things for her to sing trying to kick that character back up into balance is that when we wrote the new no no no no no but I did a lot of intro stuff for her that she was not singing it was all how she started out it was virtually that it was very little it was all act one stuff I wrote stuff for her in act two like intros and songs and things to clarify like the intro to for good oh yeah a lot of it had to do with how she started off like getting her off to the right start at least for me, book wise and it had to do with that but then a huge thing that happened in San Francisco was the funeral scene because we had well that was big yeah it's right here so it had to do with how we told our story and we had a huge funeral scene for the goat who was presumed dead and a funeral is stately and long usually so was the scene and it came in the part of the first act where things were starting to get exhausting anyway because we did a long first act and it was before they went to the Emerald City which in a way everyone's waiting for and it was just endless but it's hard to know at the time and of course this is something you all deal with it's just so hard to understand at the time that you don't need something yeah well one of the things that happened was we kept going back to our storyboards and I remember that there were these two cards there was an event that happened with Moribel coming to Elphaba and then there was an event where she came to her again and said you're in the Emerald City and we looked at her and we were like that's the same card there's something is wrong here so we can't be doing both of these you take two things that's why outlining can be so important especially in a musical but really in any part of life if you do you understand what you just said like if you're seeing these two things and it's basically a very similar event it's the same beat why aren't they happening together and by the way to some extent then of course it can get too much but to some extent when you take two scenes and make one scene out of them that does the work of all of that well then you have a very dynamic scene because one of the things I personally love is to do that and you can't do that often in your first draft or even in your third draft perhaps when you're teaching yourself the story but in other words when you have a scene where a lot of different things are actually there are a lot of different dynamics actually happening in other words it serves more than one purpose the scene this can be very thrilling you don't want to tip it over into so many things that are happening in one scene that you can barely keep track or something like that but do you agree with this? totally so we wound up deciding that we had to cut this funeral scene there were two little events that happened in it that were easily put into other places and our director was violently opposed to cutting this scene and so was our producer our biggest disagreement we had just a huge huge fight about it and finally after weeks of fighting about this and are saying why do you care so much about this scene? Joe Montello revealed to us that he had this whole plan about Elphaba's costume and when she would wear black that he had worked out with Susan Hilferty and that she the reason she wore black was she showed up at the funeral in her black dress and she had not worn black before that and that's why in the end he really really wanted that scene and Winnie and I just said to him I'm sorry you cannot have a ten page scene a ten minute scene to get the leading character into a black costume no one cares no one is ever going to wonder why she's wearing black put her in black the scene before or something or the scene after but you can't have it and so we finally but boy that was a struggle it's a version of a first draft I mean it's a version of this first draft I think we'll take some questions there's a microphone in the center aisle if you line up right in front of the microphone it's right behind you right behind the center aisle and let's I guess make them as brief as possible yeah I got when did you write Popularity Elphaba in which was that like right early there was always a scene from the first of the girls becoming the the incident where where Glinda starts to feel that she's wronged Elphaba and they become friends and giving Elphaba the hat that's that was in this original outline and so we I think in discussions with Mark Platt Winnie had the idea or Mark had the idea that there should be this sequence that's we called it the Emma sequence after the Jane Austen book where the popular girl makes over the the unpopular girl and so that seemed like a really funny idea and a really good idea for their relationship and so pretty early on I would say like about the sixth or seventh song that I wrote was popular and it really never changed a lot of songs get rewritten or whatever but that really never got rewritten and I remember that I was so happy about the song that I did something that I almost never do which is I sent the lyrics to Mark Platt before when I was going to get to together with him next and play it for him and he read the lyrics and called me and had lots and lots of issues and questions and I don't know about this and I said Mark this is you have to trust me on this this one's going to work what did happen to the song was that when talking about Kristen when they staged it she basically invented a section about teaching how to flip her hair and everything there was a little teeny bit of training that we had written into the song and then it got expanded into this huge, hilarious sequence that Kristen more or less invented hi quick question when you shut down after San Francisco for the three months for the rewrites and people were on retainer did that mean you were able to use them at all could you workshop for yourself with actors or with it was just back to the computer it never really occurred to them now they all went on vacation we just we just we just worked now that you mention it that probably would have been a good idea so you kind of retained them just to retain them well there were certain equity and other things where you had to so essentially though from the San Francisco stage draft to the Broadway stage draft was all on paper until you got it up for rehearsals and then when we got into rehearsal for Broadway we certainly was a change in things every day it's not like but we weren't doing what he was terming the big structural rethinking at that point we've been done in the and this is where it was such a great plan because honestly things were calmer when it was just the two of us working in his studio you know you need a bit of as you all know you need a bit of calm and you're also not being told why technically you this is why you can't change things out of town because you come up with an idea and they're like well we can't make the costume change the set and we can't there are all these reasons that you're stuck with this production that's now screwing up your play and so once you shut the production down then you do these things and then they rethink the production so that was the advantage of being able to do it on paper and how long was the rehearsal period for each of those productions do you remember? I think it was the New York one again I think it was three. It was five weeks the first time the normal rehearsal period and then endless tech and then I think when we went back after the time off it was another three weeks in the rehearsal room yes that sounds right next you talked a little bit about this but I was wondering how because most musicals are when you have the two and it's not just the one character that you're following through most musicals are boy girl centric can you talk a little bit about having both of the leads be female well that was yes an interesting thing about this is six years after the show opened or something this terrific woman named Stacy Wolfe wrote a thing for her college a treatise about Wicked saying that it was a queer version of Rogers and Hammerstein which had never occurred to us and then we just loved this because it was true it was very insightful we basically did a Rogers and Hammerstein relationship like King and I with a French and in the way that the King and I relationship is basically sexless in that it's a love story but it's not a romantic love story that's what this was but we were unaware that that's what we were doing while we were doing it it's more like it just happened and then as it was happening there were other like we were describing we were seeing the feedback that the two women on stage that was the heart of the musical that was the beating heart of the musical we were seeing that it's not like I sat down conceptually going I will write a musical with two women leads that's my goal in life I'm not saying that's a bad goal but that wasn't how it happened it occurred organically seeing what we were seeing and going look at them together it's like it's so fun or it's so touching or whatever it was did you ever think that maybe Glinda was there a moment maybe where like did he follow Glinda did that ever happen did he stop writing Glinda that didn't happen for a while but did you ever consider maybe we're doing this because it's right and what was but you know that's not a bad question because you can be writing something and suddenly say oh I was doing this show but actually that one's more interesting but the the thing that excited me about this show and excited I think Winnie also from the get go was the brilliant genius idea that Gregory had that he was going to take this quintessential villain someone who doesn't even have a name in the original is referred to only by the attribute that she is wicked and make her the center the protagonist of this piece that was a stroke of genius so that was always going to remain the center we have time for two more questions something that's been coming up a bit this weekend and something that I've begun to experience myself as an emerging writer is very often as writers how in some ways how little control we have over our show how the show's developed that we're always at the mercy of can we get the rights and how long do we have to wait for the lawyers negotiator what director can we get and I guess any thoughts on maintaining calm what I'll just term for better word the fog of war the fog and the confusion all the different things I would challenge your assertion about how little control we have over our show I thought you were actually referring to something else which is that the show reveals itself to us sometimes the show controls us which is sort of what Winnie is saying but we as writers it's our show and it's we like to we'll take collaboration ideas and input and help from anywhere we can get it but in the end it's our show and so I think that's what you have to maintain in the fog of war if you're having a fight about the scene that the authors have decided the scene has to go that scene went in the end we said we're the authors and that scene is out of the show the end and that was a huge fight but that's what happened and we were right because we knew we were right that's the point we knew we were right but also I just want to say quickly that you've mentioned getting rights as one of your little nightmares and sometimes it's best if you're having a nightmarish time to stick to things where you don't have to get rights I would encourage that you just happen to mention it but I would say that you don't want to when you are starting out at any age you don't want to have to worry about something like that that's very daunting if it's your heart's passion and you must do it then of course you're going to do it you're going to follow that but you want to go easy on that kind of thing because the truth is you want to be self-generating and that will maybe give you more power can we make the last two very brief we have to vacate this room when you were fighting for the rights of the show what argument did you make that this book needed to be on the stage instead of on the screen I said a few things Mark we all know what Oz looks like and if it doesn't look like Oz in the movie the audience is not going to go for it and you can but on the stage it can be much more stylized secondly I said you've got a leading character with a lot of stuff going on underneath there's a lot of subtext there's a lot that she's not saying how are you going to do that in a movie even with a close up she's going to have a big prosthetic nose she's going to be green how are you going to do that what you need her to do is be able to soliloquize and you can't really do that except with kind of really bad voice over so you need her to sing to give voice to these things going on inside her and that's weird in a movie he needs to start on stage and ultimately he bought those arguments did Gregory Maguire have any involvement past giving his blessing and how did he respond to the eventual production he'd be happy he was wonderful about it I remember the first time he saw the show it was like our fifth reading and we'd been at it for a long time I was so nervous about Gregory coming and the elevator on the way up to the rehearsal room we were doing the reading and I was like we've changed a lot but what he said what he said was I took the Wizard of Oz and I did with it what I wanted and I feel like now you're taking what I did and you're doing with it what you wanted he had some suggestions and some thoughts a couple of which were very helpful to us and we assimilated but he never said I need to do my book in this way well here's to the second decade of working let me actually I just want to finish a comment because I think it's really appropriate because it has to do with adaptation I propose that I think it's very important if you're adapting somebody else's work that you have the right to do what you feel and in fact if the person says you can adapt my novel but I have to approve your first draft or your this or that do not do it turn it down it's not a good idea ok now you can thank us