 Hi, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Let me just apologize right off the back for Pete. Unfortunately, the building will not let us control the air conditioning. So this is, I'm sorry to say what it's going to be like. I am going to leave the lights in the back off to try to keep it cooler and we'll leave this door open. I will have to close the outer door. But if you could keep the noise down, that would be great. And don't worry, just hold your breath for an hour and a half. Also, please turn off your cell phones right now. No pictures on Twitter, no Facebook during the event. Please, please. You will have the opportunity to ask questions at your hands. When you do ask questions, I ask that you please stand up and speak very clearly. So, Lynn, Sheldon can hear you and also so our internet audience can hear the question because they might want to ask that question too. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Terry Stratton, Director of Education. Now I'm here at the Guild and can I just say thank you so much. I hope my mom is watching. I just want to thank you all for your wonderful support for these DG Academy seminars that I've been studying up the last few years. And as always, if you have combinations of fabulous people that you would like to see, feel free to email me and I will do my best to try to schedule everybody you want to see. Our drama skilled counsel are happy to step in and help when they're available. You just need to let me know who you'd like to see. So, without further ado, let me just say that not only are these two of the most wonderful musical theorists ever, but they are also two of the nicest people on the planet. I love them dearly and I describe them in Phoenix as tonight's event is going to be like a big warm theater hug. I hope you all enjoy. I'm just going to throw out a little question to get them started then they will converse amongst themselves and again we'll start with the questions in about an hour. So my question, my very question that I want to know is what was the first show you ever saw? Oh, well the first show that I ever saw. I'm trying to remember the year. I think it was probably in 1966 or 7 maybe. And I had never seen a show. I was in college. My family had a background of artistic endeavors. I was given art lessons. I was given dance lessons. None of which, you know, I was in school before. We went to concerts but we never went to shows. And so by the time I got to college I'd never seen a show. And I had a boyfriend who thought that I might enjoy a musical because I was constantly writing songs. And so he wrote me down to New York from Syracuse University. I'm going to tell this slightly wrong way. We went out to dinner at Mama Leone where we were still around and they brought a huge, about this big matter of appetizer things, olives and carrots sticks and cauliflower and salami. And it was free. It came with the dinner and we thought it was the only point to eat the whole thing. So we did. We ate the whole thing. And then we passed out from about 6 o'clock to about 7.30 in some hotel lobby somewhere. We just were so saturated with it. And we ended up at a show called Fiddler on the Boot. I had no idea what it was about. I had no idea what I was going to see. I had no idea whether or not I would last through the performance awake. And all I can tell you is it was Harriet Goss or Gose. And that middler playing the eldest daughter. And I began to wake up from my food and just stew her to this miraculous thing on a stage. I was just God-smacked, as they say, at this story that was being told that people dancing and singing and communicating. And it was really the first time, not only that I'd ever seen a musical, much less a Broadway musical, but it was the first time that it occurred to me that stories could be told in songs. And so I had no idea who wrote it. I didn't know anything about anything. But it was the first inkling that I had that there was something I was really, really interested in. And always many years later, I just have to say I'm so thrilled and honored to be sitting there with my grandchildren. I can't believe that. We were not. I was from Chicago. My family was not interested in the theater. And we had a good 45-minute drive from the loop anyway. But when I was drafted into the Army, my two best friends thought the nice going away present would be to take me to a loop professional show. And we understood that there was a big hit show from New York playing there. So they bought tickets and we went to see it. And it was called Mary Had a Little. It was dreadful. And then we later found out that the show that had been a hit in New York was John Love's Mary and they thought that's what they were buying tickets for. And Mary Had a Little. That was the first show I saw. We were that innocent. For this afternoon, I thought what might make an interesting program was if we went kind of for as much time as we have, step by step through our careers and what we learned that we might give some value to you. So, Lynn, why don't you start. What drew you to writing lyrics in the first place? You know, it's such a hard question to answer because I have a little recording of myself when I was four, setting lyrics to the melody of Frosty the Snowman. So I think I was a little mini lyricist when I was four. And I wrote songs all through my school, all through college. I learned to play the guitar. Music and lyrics? Music and lyrics, both, just like you. And when I first came to New York, I got a job in an advertising agency and they happened, just so happened to be producing a children's show called Schoolhouse Rock, which has ended up being quite famous. And I was a secretary at the time and I would bring my guitar into work to amuse myself on my lunch hours, although my husband always says it was to, you know, just show off, but I wasn't. And they asked me if I'd like to write a song. And I did. And one thing led to another. And I wrote a lot of songs for that series, to the point where I thought I could be a professional songwriter. I don't need a 95 job, necessarily. And so I was sort of brave enough to try it, freelance. And, you know, one thing led to another. I started doing television shows, writing for Captain Campbell Rue and writing for shows that I had produced myself and created and sold to the networks. And it took me a long time to get to theatrical writing. And I had always been working as a self-contained entity. And I ended up deciding to try to go to the BMI workshop. BMI Music with Your Workshop, which is a student, my partner, Steve Flario, says it's a dating service for composers and lyricists. And that's where we had our first date, so to speak, and began writing together in 1983. But I know that you, studying music, you got your degree in music from Northwestern, right? And did the Wong Lu show here, right? Which is a big deal at Northwestern. But, you know, you keep, forgive me for telling your history, but you came to New York to write for the theater. And what made you so bold after having been a dance band violinist and all the things you did? Well, I started writing poetry, both my sister and I used to write poetry because that's what my mother did. Every bar mitzvah, every anniversary she would celebrate with a little poem. So we wrote poetry. And when I was in high school, and I had a couple of my poems published, somebody introduced me to a student who was a year ahead of me, who was interested in theater, which was something new to me. His sister was an actress in the little theater movement. So we began to write together. And we began to write song parodies. And eventually we tried our hand at a couple of songs, special material kinds of things. This was all brand new to me, although I had seen, my uncle was a performer, and he was in several amateur Gilton Sullivan companies. And I had seen Gilton Sullivan, and I was very impressed by the pattern songs particularly. And I loved pop music from the radio. But I didn't know theater at all. At any rate, I was drafted and I kept writing songs in the army and performing them at USO functions. And I discovered that even though I wasn't sure whether the songs were really good, they were honest accounts of my experiences in the army. And consequently, the audiences understood them and really relished them, which was a good lesson to learn. And I wish I had always obeyed by instinct to do that, to be honest. I haven't always done that. At any rate, by the time I got out of the army, I wanted to continue playing the violin. But I also wanted to continue to write songs. And I heard I knew about Northwestern and the WAMU show there. So I went to Northwestern and I kept writing for the WAMU show. But the life changing experience for me came from a classmate, Charlotte Lubotsky, who you would know as Charlotte Ray. Charlotte, around 1948 or so, during the Christmas vacation, she had come to New York. And when she came back, she sent me out, she had an LP in her hand and said, Sheldon, you have to listen to this. So I listened to it. It was Phinean's Rainbow. And by the time I got finished here, I thought, oh my God, what Yip Harvard is doing, what he's saying are important things, but they're done so playfully that you have to listen. And just this year, the word magic was so appealing, I thought this is what I wanted to do. And God was good to me. I thought he had cursed me but he was being good. I developed a problem where I couldn't play the violin, which made many people happy. Not me. And I thought, okay, I can't play the violin, so what am I going to do? I'll go to New York and I will take all my savings bombs that I had gotten in the Army and what little I had made as a violinist. And I thought I will go to New York and see if I can be a lyricist. Thank God, Charlotte had already come, so I had a connection there. Also, when I was in the Army, I was at Robbinsfield, Georgia, and they lost my records. And for 93 days, nobody knew who I was. They had sent somebody else overseas thinking it was me. And on our base, there was a volunteer special service unit, which was run by a man who'd been a theatrical agent in real life. We became friends. And he said, assuming that we lived through this, if you ever come to New York and you need an agent, look me up. So I did. And he became my agent. His wife was the choreographer for Jackie Gleason, Drew Taylor, so that helped. At any rate, then it was, once I got here, then it was just networking, networking, networking. And Charlotte got a job at the Village Vanguard. I'd written a song for her. And she had, through a friend, she invited Yip Harvard down to see her. So I got to eat Yip. And I asked if I could play for him. And I got a pianist. I went to his apartment. And I did mostly what I did was college material. But he was very encouraging. And he gave me two wonderful bits of advice. The first one, he listened to what I was writing and he said, your introductions are usually throwaways musically. You want to get, it seems like you want to get to the chorus where you can do your good music. You could never throw that away. Because people, if they hit the song a second time, they're not going to laugh if it's a comedy song because they know the jokes. What will keep the song alive is music. So every note you write has to be as good as you can possibly write. Don't throw anything away. And the other thing he said was, he said in his experience, there were more capable theater composers than there were theater lyricists. So that I could facilitate my career by writing with other composers. And I did. I met a number of them. Oh, so and the first step, I wrote review material, but I really wanted to write a book show. And I got a call one day from somebody who had heard some of my review songs. He was, his father was wealthy and he had money and he had gotten the rights to a book. I was very hungry to do a show. It was about the used car business. It was a terrible experience. Among other things, he had a very nervous way of playing the piano when he wrote something. He would hit a chord and it was as though the keyboard were red hot because then he would hit another chord in the drawers. And between his piano playing and the fact that I got to detest the book, I thought, how do I get out of this without giving my advance back? And happily the book writer called a meeting one day and said this is not working. We should give it up and we give. And the lesson that I learned from that was never do any musical, never commit yourself to something that you don't love because you're going to go through agony and usually it takes a long time. Well, I would have sort of a similar lesson way back when when Steve and I first started to write because the lesson that I learned was never commit yourself to a musical that you love that you don't have the rights to. That's the second part of this. That's a very important lesson. Yeah, because we wrote a musical called The Gazzle based on the movie. And we loved it and just thought it was the greatest thing. And we presented it here at the drama discount. I believe for you, Sheldon, way back when. You did. Peter Stone and this panel of luminaries and we presented The Gazzle. And we had nothing to say because it was perfect. It was fine. Nothing to say. And we never were able to secure the rights. And so the lesson, and then the next show that we did, we tried to do an original show which was the second part of that particular lesson which was, they're really hard. And when you're just starting out, it might be better to do an adaptation. Because the second show we had the rights because it was original, it was called The Antler. We were working with an unknown book writer in George Sewell. And we mushed around with this idea for at least a year and a half and could not make it jail. So we had an unproduced musical that we didn't have the rights to. And we had an unproduced musical that we couldn't find the story to. And finally, I looked at Stephen and said, you know what? I'm just going to adapt something. I'm going to write the book. I'll write the lyrics. You'll write the story. And we'll at least finish it and it will be producible if anybody wants to produce it. Because we will have a story. We will have the rights. We'll just write it. So we wrote a kind of fractured fairy tale version of The Embers in the Clothes. And we ended up getting it produced by The Air Works USA, which in the small world apartment was founded by your brother, your wonderful brother Jay, who was such a gracious and wonderful guy and gave us our first show. Which was pretty amazing. And Jay did a wonderful thing. When actors, young actors would come into audition for these shows, he was just a soul of grace really to them. And they would sing about eight bars. And he'd go, thank you, that tells us I think we need to know. And they'd turn and go, it was so sweet. But so anyway, those were, you know, those early lessons of the big mistakes you make, don't work on something or you have the rights, you know. It's amazing how many people plunge into an adaptation without having the rights. That's a note you have to give over and over and over. Or do it one time again. I got into that situation accidentally. Some years ago I was invited to China make musical out of It's a Wonderful Life, which I started to work on with Joe Raposo. And after about a year we had enough to do a reading. It was an invited audience. And there was a note in the Times to the effect that we were having this reading of our musical version of It's a Wonderful Life. Suddenly we get a note from a film company saying, now remember, you don't have the film rights. And I said, okay, we didn't want them. But I asked my lawyer at that point, I said, I thought this was in the public domain. So would you find out about the film rights? Well, what he found out was that there was a typo in the contract that had been prepared by the Washington law firm. And that one word changed the whole meaning of the contract, and it turned out we did not have the rights. And from that day to this, we are still trying to find out how to get the rights. So it can be very tricky. But at any rate, I said, I had to read your contract. I said, I need Ralph Savage. So for me, the next step in my career, I had various reviews. By the way, the first two successful review songs I had, and this is important to know, I started writing them not with the idea of putting them into review. I started writing both of them because I felt very strongly about something that had happened and I wanted to express myself and chose to express myself in song. One of them I had been in Boston. My first wife was in a show there and while I was there, I was reading in the papers how the church was trying, various churches were trying to suppress a new book about sex education. And when I learned the facts, it just made me furious. So I wrote a song called The Boston Begin. So I just tried to have a few lyrics here. Which was about a girl who can't, she gets picked up by a bar and she's very attracted to the guy and he's attracted to her. But they are not able to consummate the romance because they never had the books to read. So I felt very strongly about that. And the other song was from reading the paper every night and just very much like today, just reading a page and going, oi, getting worse. And finally I thought, oh, that could make a nice song with oi throughout. So I wrote a song called The Merry Little Minuet which was a bit rioting in Africa and then I discovered that oi was better as a whistle. And those two songs The Boston Begin was in New Faces of 1952 The Merry Little Minuet was in another review and what I should have learned there was always to write from that sense of intense involvement. Because that's the way the best songs came out. And I did, I had to type the lyrics out or parts of the lyrics of those two songs because I loved them so much. Oddly, The Merry Little Minuet, I've been singing since I was in high school but I thought it was written, I was told by Tom Lehrer. And of course, now I know it wasn't. But they're both such fabulous songs you can Google them easily and there are people on YouTube singing them. Oh, yes, yeah, they're singing but these lyrics, I mean this is The Boston Begin It's not a crime in a proper town but it's set to this it's hilarious. It's so contradictory and wonderful. It was a magical night with romance everywhere. There was something in the air there always is. And, you know, we went to the Kaz Bomb, that's an Irish bar there. The underground hideout of the D.A.R. Something inside of me said watch your heart met with Ellen. It might be just as well to watch but they're just so deliriously wonderful and political. Here's the other one that I thought for a long time was Tom Lehrer. They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in Spain there's hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain. The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles Italians hate Yugoslavs South Africans hate the Dutch and I don't like them. I met Tom Lehrer and he was performing in Australia and he sent me a copy of the program just to show that he'd given me credit. It's so great and what I love about it too is that, you know, there are plenty of little tribute songs but they're all about characters. You know, they're real. There's a curmudgeon in there you know the guy who doesn't like anything is just pissed off at the world The Buster McGee was sung by Alice Boswell, right? Wonderful. And it's just a sad sack of a woman who apparently was wearing a baggy sweater just telling this love story That was her idea. Our producer had gowned her and this beautiful gown and she said no that's not me, that's not that woman and she borrowed pulled in sweater There you go, I mean It's just so great but that is one of the things I so admire about your work is that there's not a song that you can find that isn't about character if they are so exactly about human beings in all kinds of circumstances it doesn't matter what it is it's just they are real flesh and blood human beings and each song almost feels like self-contained So that's because that leads me to the next step that's because you don't really know the score through the body beautiful at all I should ask you about that because it's about boxing we're working on boxing musicals I had these reviews and Jerry Block had been writing with a band name of a very gifted lyricist named Larry Hollis Center but they have the job to do Mr. Wonderful for Sammy Davis and apparently it was their first big Broadway show and unfortunately apparently Larry Hollis Center froze and was not able to come up with the changes that were needed so successful they split up as a team and Jerry I was told was looking for a new lyricist and his publisher, a man named Tommy Volando teamed us and Tommy accomplished the impossible he got the job for Jerry Block and me and we had never written a song together and he got us the job to do the score for a Broadway show it was called the body beautiful about boxing and although I knew very little and cared very little about boxing and I didn't hate it so I thought ok and this is my entree and when I began to work with Jerry I realized that we were very sympodical we had by the way we had only one huge argument early in our career what we had to learn and this may be important for those of you who have yet to collaborate what we had to learn was that when we made criticisms they were meant to be professional criticisms but both of us were both so thin skin that any criticism just hurt and we began to fight instead of listening to what he was saying and seeing is he right or wrong I thought he's attacking me and I was attacking him and we had this big fight and went home and then on that in a professional relationship criticism is for the good of the peace at any rate I learned a very important lesson we had in our pre-rehearsal period we were having staff meetings and as kind of the new kid on the block who had never written a book to you guys I just listened and they were arguing about what director to hire and a name came up George Schaefer who had done a lot of successful television and had done some theater and our company manager said don't use him that wasn't what it was the company manager said he is so busy he will not be able to get the book and he will study them until two weeks before we go into rehearsal if that and he should have months and to try and spot the weak spots and to give you guys assignments to improve it if you can but they went with George Schaefer he was a lovely talented man and it turned out that when we went on the road all the work we did on the road was the work that should have been done prior to going into rehearsal so by the time we came back to New York it was still with a very flawed show and I learned that lesson and I have months to figure out what he is doing there is something about running out of time you know on every show eventually you run out of time and Kurtman goes up somebody says the show is frozen we are not making any more changes that is the moment when I go into the laser and have a nerve spray every show every show because you run out of time every show is called rehearsal and equity the hours you are given to make changes so anything you are able to do in advance of that even not just months years in advance of it if you can to get the show right is a good thing it is part of what is great but also what is wrong about new writers now producers have learned that they can give them exposure to Kurtman that is the other danger of that kind of development but sure it is good to have some lead time that is the scary story but I have to add you did your first Broadway show without having ever met your collaborator really amazing never having done a Broadway show but yet you did a Broadway show I would not say that you failed but it was not a hit show it ran for something like 60 performances we ran five weeks we would have run six weeks but that was a blizzard but yet you were given a chance to do another Broadway show which wouldn't happen today the other lesson I learned I should have listened to our publisher because he kept telling me based on what he knew of my review work he said Sheldon go into yourself and write from yourself and I didn't always read the lyrics and I was not writing what I felt love was or love could be I was writing what I thought a commercial love song should be and consequently when I go back and look at those lyrics they're not a totally cliche because I had enough intelligence to try and make them fresh but they weren't they were banal and I learned to try and say things that I really believed and that was the next show after Tony and the Pulitzer on his second Broadway show it was really annoying I learned one thing on The Body Beautiful we were talking about this before that you cannot be too careful in writing a lyric we had a title song The Body Beautiful which was sung by the main characters was a boxardist manager and it was his assistant she was our romantic lead our lady and she had a song what she was saying was that she didn't really respond to brawn what she responded to in men were other other qualities and I had written a new verse to go with it I have it right here no more jokes Jerry and I sang it for the company this new quatrain yeah when a man knocks another man down all the customers shout with glee but when a man picks another man he's for me it was a big laugh I thought what are they laughing at a man picks another man I was able to change that a man helps another man but you cannot be too careful when you write lyrics well I've got this page out twice I had to rewrite lyrics one there was a lyric in Fiorello which opened in 1959 and the leading lady had been Marie Fisher had been Fiorello Guardi's secretary and she loved him but she saw him marry someone else waiting so she was going to quit she has a song I'll marry the very next man and I gave her a very sardonic release and in 1959 people bought it and this I'll read it to you as the years went on and as people's consciences got raised the lyric became no longer acceptable and as a matter of fact I went to I think it was the 25th anniversary of the show at a production at Yale and it got to this quatrain and women in the audience booed it's time to change that lyric she said and if he likes me and remember this is supposed to be sardonic and if he likes me who cares how frequently he strikes me I'll fetch his slippers with my arm and a sling just for the privilege of wearing his ring ohhhh and if we were at Yale then the other one was odd because in the apple tree Jerry and I wrote a song for Eve to sing about Adam what makes me love him and I based the song on a paragraph that Mark Twain had written in this brilliant story The Diaries of Adam and Eve if you've never read it please read it it's delicious so I based what I wrote what he wrote as it was this he is a good man but I would love him if he abused me or used me ill and as the years went by I discovered that the word abused was no longer acceptable and I had to find a new lyric it's so interesting when time affects shows I just had my first revival which is really scary because you look in America but it wasn't they revived Racton and to see that show in the context of having an African American president was so interesting it wasn't that kind of experience it was just an amazing experience to realize how far at that point we had come and from the turn of the century when the ending of the show was kind of shocking I saw that revival which was brilliant and for some reason it didn't work I was introduced to one of the producers and she said well we took a chance we didn't get stars no dance no advertising and in theater that was slightly too far north and a poster when it was up in Times Square it said Racton at the bottom it said water tanking stuff like that so she said smiling it was unfortunate it was a beautiful production but it was so great to see it again and to do a little work and revision on it and make it even a little richer for us that was exciting in that version the character of Younger Brother had never met a character of Tata in the early incarnation and we added a little scene where their paths cross in Lawrence, Massachusetts so that was an exciting discovery for this new version of the show but it's like you just live and learn don't you in this business and you can almost chart your whole life if you write shows long enough by well and then I learned and I let that husband marry this one but it was the year I did that show the whole relates to your the next big learning thing for me we did a show called Tenderloin we opened in New Haven and it was a rocky opening and afterwards we all had a meeting in George our director was George Abbott we had a meeting in his sweet hotel and George who was the sole of Candor said I had a concept and it doesn't work anybody got any ideas and I thought don't look at me and I realized that up until that time I had done The Body Beautiful I had done Fearow but I had never involved myself with the book I had read the book looking for where the songs went and that was the only thing I knew about the book and now suddenly he's looking around the room about this show and I thought I keep thinking I'm Scarlett O'Hara I will never do this again from now on whatever show I do I will get myself involved and read that book and study that book and look for the week spots so that in advance I will know if something's wrong and maybe have ideas about it it was an extraordinarily important lesson I've never not been involved in the book probably because the first couple of shows we did I wrote before I learned how to do it to a certain extent on our early shows we did a show our first off-border show was called The East Stiff which was a little musical farce based on a novel although the show that we ended up with really has so little relationship to that novel that's surprising for me anyway to go back and read the novel and think wow where did that show come from out of this I would never think it had a lovely life but it was the hardest show to write because not only was I sort of a starting out writer but it was musical farce and farce has to be fast it has to be funny it's like a little mechanical machine that keeps chasing you from behind running to make it as fast and funny as you possibly can and it kept spitting out ballads which was a beautiful ballad to the context of the show because we weren't prepared for it it was a very interesting experience we ended up with one song which actually is one of my favorite songs that we've ever written in that first show it's both times like this and it's about a girl who is in a nightclub and she's all by herself and she wants a dog to be with her company instead of a man and it's a lovely little song and it was the first time in a show that I ever felt that I was a little bit in command of my craft because it was the predictable point in a show where when that song happened everybody was ready for a rest they wanted a ballad they got a ballad but it was a funny ballad and it got a ha ha ha the first time she read it it got a sort of a second time she said it and the last time it got it was so predictable and wonderful to get a consistent audience reaction you know that I thought that was the first time and maybe that I was beginning to understand what I was doing and it then we wrote Once on the Silent which was our first Broadway show it started also in Playwrights Horizons but it moved to Broadway and I really looked for that and I have to say looking back then it is a really well structured like a very tightly told, economically told ever moving, riskily told story that has modern music in it but structurally it's very classic little question how much research do you do and what tools do you use when you're ready well that's an interesting question I was going to ask you the same question so we'll get to that but I've had more research oriented over the years because I was basically a lazy person and I just like to write and to take the time to read a lot but on Once on the Silent I started to learn how to do the search actually and I started looking at a lot of Caribbean folk tales I started looking at art of the Caribbean I started looking at the religion and the culture and the history of Haiti the uprising and all that and a lot of that informed the show and it enriches your work I think and tells you some specifics of the characters lives and how they live and stuff so that was really the first show where I began to do research and I did a lot of research on ragtime I did a lot of biographies of the historical characters and a lot of that at the time and even write down some of the details of mother's clothing what kind of course that she would have worn and stuff and why she would have made her stand for uprising you know all that sort of thing so I come to like research although I do find it a bit of a chore because most of the time I just want to write the songs I just want to get to the songs and get some music and let me set some lyrics but I know that I have to do the research because it will just make it better how about you? I'm the opposite I I hate the notion of having to start writing because I'm so afraid it will come out terrible so I do endless research and finally when I reach a point where I think I can't stall any longer I have to get the work so I use a thesaurus and a writing dictionary those are the tools and depending on what the project is maybe a history that will take me up of the time for instance with Fierell there was a wonderful writer named Bert Chevello one of the writers a funny thing happened on the way to the forum and Bert was very very literate and when he heard that I was doing Fierell he said there's a set of six books that are called Our Times and they're written by a man who had been a newspaper reporter and what they are is an informal history of the United States from 1900 to sometime in the 30s so I bought the series and it was an informal history it didn't talk about the wars and the politics what it talked about was fashions and pop songs and what was in the news so I looked for the period that we were writing about with Fierell and there was a photograph of a man who was on trial and under the photograph was the caption Little Tin Box and when I read the paragraph about it it turned out that during Jimmy Walker's administration although he himself apparently was an honest man he had surrounded himself with corrupt politicians and when they were sued and they were out on the stand and at least one of them said when he was asked where he got all this money he said well my wife is very frugal and she saves a lot of money from making meals at home and she puts every quarter she gets into this little tin box and it happened to mount up to tens of thousands of dollars so that was a very useful piece of research because when we were on the road with Fierell Jerry and I had written a song called what to do till a bootlegger comes and it was a successful song but we had a meeting once and George Abbott said that scene does not propel the show forward we're going to cut that scene we're going to need a new song and he said what I want to do and these hack politicians talking about the next mayoral election and Jimmy Walker's problems and I thought oh my god we can use that for that song oh something else that's useful Jerry Bach and I were Hal Prince and his partner Bobby Griffith had seen the body beautiful I only learned this past year that the reason they went to see it was that Steve Sondheim had seen it and said you should see it because this is a good songwriting team so they went and I met Hal that night and within a year Jerry and I were doing Fierell and one of the songs we had to write four songs on spec he went to about three or four different young teams and gave us all the opportunity to compete so I read what they had of the book I looked at the four scenes and one of them was a going away scene Fierell LaGuardia in World War I had enlisted in the brand new American Air Force so there was a going away party for him and they wanted a song that would be service rivalry the Army, the Navy and the Air Force just all an active song making fun of each other so we wrote a song and I did research birds since this was about flyers and after I had every bird you could imagine in that song and when we finished auditioning and Hal's partner Bobby Griffin looked at and there was silence for a long time and then Bobby looked at me he said Sheldon, Oscar Hammerstein had a term for what you just did it's called research poisoning that's what I had too much research you never know where good ideas come from you know I find that I'm working on a show right now similar to a show of Susie Strowman and it's set in the world of ballet and the idea came to me from going to the museum and you know reading a little legend of a particular sculpture and you know you're doing historical research and you see a phrase a little tin box you never know where these things will come from it's pretty amazing on ragtime well on ragtime we had a audition as well and I think there were nine teams or something I don't know who they were I never wanted to know and I still don't know to this day but we you know it was that same kind of thing that sort of where are we going to write and where are we going to get it from and we actually had a treatment that Terence Goodmalley had done for the auditioning for the project he wanted to make sure that E.L. Doctorow would approve and would like his take on it and so we took this treatment and cloned through it for some moments and we had very very little time to write the four songs that we were being asked to write so I took I said I'll take two nerves and you write two pieces of music and then it swung so we wrote four songs very quickly and did demos of them and we ended up getting the job but you know you do learn from these experiences the better or the worse you know where ideas are told from and how to find them I have a wonderful story I have to tell you because I love this story when Jerry Bach and I played the four songs we'd written we went to a house apartment we played the first song which was a strike song the women are striking and everybody loved the song they said that's great and then we did I think the birds song the aviation song we did another song I can't remember what it was I didn't like that and I thought oh my god I'm striking out here and then we did the fourth song which was a 1917 Waltz for that going away party it was supposed to sound like because after the body beautiful we didn't think anybody would hire us again Jerry wrote four waltzes and he said which one do you like and I said I like this one he said good so do I anyway we started to sing the song and I made the mistake of looking at hell when I got to one line which was so uncharacteristic of me it was like a lace valentine parting his sweet sorrow I looked at him and I grinned which was a big mistake we finished the song and Hal said oh come on guys this is a put on this and I thought I struck out I said no no it's not it's meant to be serious and thank god Bobby Griffith his partner who was older than Hal said Hal you don't remember these songs I was alive then he said this is like a remember when this is 1970 they're having this big fight where Hal was saying nobody's going to take it seriously he laughed when he sang it anyway suddenly there's a knock on the door and Hal said don't say anything this is our choreographer this is Pete Gennaro so Pete Gennaro came in and Hal said this is the number that the guys have written for the going away party guys played it so we did I didn't look at anybody I didn't smile and at the end of the song Pete said ah it's 1917 it's Harvey Berlin and Hal looked at me and said I got the job and it's amazing that Stephen Sondheim said go see these guys the show's not good with the guys I promise it's all of that wonderful you know mentoring and people sort of recommending other people and passing it along he came to New England where we were coming Firo out he said however in little tin box you've got a false run I said I have a false run he said yes faith, hope and charity hard won prosperity said they don't rhyme he said you go to your dictionary and I went to my dictionary and I looked and sure enough charity is eh and prosperity is eh and I called Steve and I said in Chicago they rhyme that brings up a a question of rhyme and that comes to the conclusion that whether you indulge yourself with false rhyme or whether you are rigorous and try for true rhymes is a personal choice because the audience doesn't really care about it I'm not sure I agree with you I'm not sure I agree with that because what I mean I tend to we're teaching here at the drama school Steve and I we run a fellow program I see a couple of my babies in the audience and you know we let them do whatever rhymes they want to but oftentimes when an audience is sitting there they're listening to your work if the rhyme is too false they can't process what they're hearing it's not like you can open an album reread it the next night or go back and see what it is you have one shot at it and I always say that it pulls the ear in a not good way I mean I think we're more used to it now with pop music so I have to agree with you if a rhyme is that bad you know there are sort of crazy things to get into that people do quite often I'm not criticizing it for the most part but in my heard parts well for me it's also part of the puzzle of lyric writing I just like to do it properly and perfect rhymes because it's like a crossword puzzle it's trying to figure out those little tricky things that give you up nights with two words and you can't find I've run out of rhymes in the English language it forces you to be inventive it does writing lyrics my own pretty part is the art of substitution because you have an idea and you try and write it and you find you can't find the rhyme to rhyme with something that's set up earlier so you have to say it a different way and constantly you're looking for different ways to say the same thing I also I try to be very strict with myself and that's why recently I wrote something that doesn't rhyme and I agonized over whether I would allow myself to use it no you don't this is a new song there's a project that has to do with patriotic songs and I was given a theme by the orchestrator Larry Hawthorne you told me it was a wonderful theme and I wanted to write a song that reflected what's in the papers today what's going on so I wrote a song and it's called Reason to be thankful and in the first chorus the lyrics are there are lands where tyrants make the law callous men who fiercely cling to power in these lands good people risk their lives as they try to make freedom flow so I had a nice rhyme with power and flower but in the second stanza there are lands around this wounded world troubled lands oppressed by heartless tyrants in these lands few people dare to speak for their safety lies in their silence now that's a false rhyme but the more I thought about this song I thought it works it's I buy it and there was something about this song and about the music that suggested a 19th century anthem in a good sense it was not necessarily totally current and as a matter of fact I agonized a little more when I was getting to the last line I didn't have room to say this is America that I call home so I used tis America that I call home and I thought dare I do that it sounded right so I decided to use it so again these are personal choices thank you when Charles Isher would criticize this man I'm going to say I'm allowed you can tell me a couple other things it's unfortunate that we have two very cruel critics we won't go there we'll go back to other lessons we've learned and she loves me the lesson I learned from that show was that Jerry and I in writing the score had forgotten the first rule of musical theater which is story story what is the story about how do you get where you're going we had indulged ourselves by writing so many songs and when we got to Philadelphia on a pre-broadway tour when they wanted to be able to follow the story and my memory which is probably false is that we cut 45 minutes of music it was probably more like 15 but nevertheless but I learned and in everything I've done since then I've tried to think what is the story and is the song going really to get that story moving forward because when it doesn't it can be in trouble in Fiddler we had a problem in the second act of Fiddler when the people are told they have to leave we had Jerry and I had written a song for the rabbi to sing wouldn't it be nice if the Messiah came and then we had a song when the Messiah comes and it was during our backwards auditions everybody loved it when we got to Detroit and by that time we had taken it away from the rabbi we had given it to Zero Mustel to sing Zero sang it and it died and we didn't believe it and so of course the first thing you tell the orchestra conductor take it slower and make the orchestra soft but obviously they're not hearing the lyrics so he made the orchestra play slower and softer and they were hearing the lyrics and it died again in all three previews it was a comic song it was a comic song and we asked people who were coming from New York and we said what did you think of that song they said are you crazy these people are being exiled and you're giving us a comedy song expect us to laugh oh that's pretty stupid so we cut the song Zero yelled he loved the song we cut the song and it's fine and it's another discovery that context is so important what will work and what will not work and being ruthless about it there are two examples I can think of with my own work that are somewhat similar both in the same show in Once on this Island we wrote two songs that we cut and one of them is absolutely beautiful song both come down through the stream which gets done in cabarets now letters from people wanting to reinstate it into the show and we will say absolutely not we love the song but it doesn't belong in the show and the reason is that it happened at a moment just when the main character team was setting off down the road to find her love and she just happens to bump into this little girl who's also up at a tree as she was at the beginning of the show and she sings this beautiful ballad called come down for the tree and the child comes down and she sends the child back and everybody's going get on with it you know it was really a get on with it and the other moment in the show was an 11 o'clock number that we wrote for Tim Moon again called when Daniel married me and it was so palpable because at that point in the show he said Tim Moon I could never marry and then she sings this song called when Daniel married me and the whole audience was so much almost standing and shouting he's not going to marry me so you have to have that beautiful song too and if that was the lesson which is to be ruthless and poor Stephen was so upset because some of the music in when Daniel married me in particular was so gorgeous and he was really mourning the loss of that particular song but you know this is what you have to do to shape the show and to sort of kill your babies as they said and you know I would say no problem you know side by side I already knew which leads to a question that I've always asked how does your collaboration work music first lyrics first do you know what's so funny I had that written down I went in my little index cards because both Sheldon and I were nervous that we wouldn't run out of things to say which was obviously a ridiculous question but one of the questions was I don't want to ask Sheldon which comes first music in here I just have to know with Stephen and me it's a little of everything because often if you work in the same room you improvise so you know whoever comes up with an idea he'll put his fingers on the keys and I'll say that's great that's great and I'll write a little lyric and we sort of improvise once in a while I'll write a lyric first many times I'd encourage him to give me some kind of music first even if it's a vamp or even if it's a little motif or anything because yeah I force him to he doesn't like to but he does and it's great it's very helpful for me because well I think of this Marilyn Birdman said the words around the tips of the notes and I always find that whenever I wrote a beautiful piece of music or even a partial piece or even just a little emotional feel you know through emotions and the music it makes it much much easier for me to write a lyric but I can do it the other way too in ragtime back to the core and you know there are many examples of that but improvise and improvise I can't improvise I've tried I have to be alone and thinking so when Jerry Bach and I started to work we worked in a way that I've never worked with another composer that way Jerry once we both knew what the source material was Jerry would go into his studio and begin to dream up musical numbers and when he had anywhere from 8 to 12 or 14 or more he would send me a tape and this was the way we got the momentum going listen to the tape and he would say I think this one is for the butcher I think this one is for the cycle I think this one I don't know what the hell this is but I like it and those were usually the most interesting ones so that's the way we started and he was very generous because on any tape there might only be two melodies which coincided with ideas that I had that I wanted to write so that's the way it always started and eventually it would get to a point where I had an idea and I thought I don't want to be constrained by music because there may have to be several choruses and I may have to once I get the first chorus then in writing the second chorus I may have to go back and carpenter the first chorus so that it's metrically similar to the second and if there's a third chorus I've got to admit then the same thing will happen and I was very curious when I gave one of these lyrics to Jerry to see whether he was as adept at setting a lyric as he wasn't writing first and I discovered not only was he bad at adept but he was also because Jerry was a good lyricist himself he was very very adept yes Terry five minutes oh wow take my notes that's pretty I mean really he's been fantastic and you know we were so lucky to have taken part in that program and now we are trying to do the same thing with the Joe Augusto Fellows in a way and you know give something back but anyway that's really the last thing that I wanted to say we could chat all day I feel the only other thing I would say is I do musical and it's the only musical current I think that does not contain the effort this is I feel like I'm crude but the way I was brought up was you didn't use that word I was in the army for three years and we were very free with obscenities profanity but when it comes to writing I still use obscenities I made a terrible mistake I did an adaptation of It's a Wonderful Life I think I mentioned and I thought I will make it more contemporary by using a lot of profanity in it and the audience everybody I spoke to begged me not to this movie is practically sacred grit unless you dare do that actually that leads into what my question was and I was actually watching you on TV oh god but which is awesome but I wonder does it do you feel constrained when you're writing from source material trying to set lyrics that come from a pre-existing as opposed to trying to think do you know what I mean do you feel compelled to use lines that people have known about quite the contrary the reason that I will have chosen to try and adapt that work is because I love it and in being true to the author if I can use some of his actual language in fact I hope nobody ever reads Teve's Donors carefully because they will see where most of the lyrics are from the source material is always if you fall in love with it it's your bible and the ragtime is our bible we're working crazily on an adaptation of the movie and when you read the screenplay it is magnificent that's all I can say it is poetry in public street nature it's colloquial it's touching, it's funny and it's very inspiring of it it inspires songs so that it's always a great source material I have a question please I just want to say to Lynn I was on the drama this nominated committee the year that there was the revival ragtime and we all loved it we were all really and if you want to be comfortable using the F word I teach at colleges all you have to do is hang around the college for about 10 minutes and it's all you're going to hear I want to ask a question isn't the drama desk been meeting the conference last summer in June how Hall seemed surprised to find out that a lot of the lyricists and book writers did not necessarily have a composer when they were writing everybody always works together the reality is a lot of us don't necessarily were writing anyway or in my case we worked with a composer that we don't necessarily want to work with again for various reasons so my question is because he's told something about BMI how do people like writing and need to find a composer how do we go about finding a composer considering that a lot of composers also have something in their closet which they are like closet lyricists also so they have their own favorite work to do so what do you suggest finding a composer they can work with well my answer to that would be to network to come to drama skilled events and try and contact other people whose work you admire if you see something in an off-road way theater that you like and you like the particular composer write them a nice note it really is about meeting people and getting to know who's working and who's working for Sympatica where there's the BMI musical theater workshop there's the ASCAP workshop there are all kinds of places where you can see new writers and young writers presenting their work and get a feel for what's happening it's I mean I've had a collaboration for anywhere this is I think our 29th year it's amazing and we're so lucky because it's like a long marriage which I also have you don't have to go looking anymore it's just scary I'm a lucky girl in that respect but I would say to meet as many people go to as many off-road way and off-road as you can and see who's writing and see who you can respond to and try to get in touch with them don't we still have at the Guild meetings where the composers can be done I think we have one in April check your innings later on hi I have three questions from Sheldon and you can answer one or three here I'm curious about your you rewrote the lyric for abused used me ill what was your inspiration or motivation to write that we were just the beginning of the 60s things were starting to change it feels like an old fashioned subject and I'd love if you'd speak a little bit about that and then the third thing this is for me as well where are the Tommy Volandos of today that bringing people together and I think it's really interesting of today that bringing people together we've talked about collaborations I wish I could answer I've heard so much about this legendary guy that was more than a publisher I can't answer the abused lyric what did I do I wrote a different based on the fact that Fiorillo was known as the little flower so the lyric I gave her was when he proposes I'll have him send me tons of roses sweet-scented blossoms I'll enjoy by the hour why should I wait around for one little flower that took the sting out of that tenderline we made a big mistake tenderline was based on a wonderful novel and it's the novel of a young man on the make and in the adventure he meets a minister who's trying to clean up the tenderline the red light district and they use each other but in the book the minister is a relatively small character when we did the show he was made into a major character and we got a star to play him, Murray Sevens so that it was what we discovered on the road was every time we went to the church people lost interest they wanted to go back to the red light district that's where all the fun was and we found that we could not cut Murray Sevens' role down because then it was unbalanced and it was just a mistake recently I was contacted by two very very good writers I've seen work they did on television and I knew about a musical they did in London called Betty Blue Eyes which was supposed to be very good and they said they wanted to write the book and make it more contemporary and so John Wideman speaking for his father who had collaborated on the original book we said go try it and what they came up with was something that made every character so unlikeable the boy, the minister, the girl everybody it was very contemporary but everybody was corrupt and I thought that's not what I want to write as a matter of fact it reminds me that I was once invited to be the lyricist for a musical based on The Pin Man Arthur Lawrence was too direct and Gurney was to do the book and Charles Stoss was to do the music and at one of the early meetings the producers asked Arthur Lawrence they said can you describe this book in a sentence or two and he thought for a minute and he said yes it's about Nick and Nora Charles they're an innocent couple dancing their way through a corrupt world and everybody said that's great and I thought about that and thought that I can't do this show I can write for one corrupt couple I cannot write for a corrupt world I can write for a lot of innocent Nick and Nora Charles so I called Arthur and said I can't do this and the show was a disaster by the way I'm very close to a table reading on a musical comedy about illegal immigration and my plan is to take the chord the table reading make rewrites based on that and then shop that draft to theaters that might take a chance and develop these new comments on the wisdom or quality of my plan it sounds very sensible to me if you have a table reading it's wonderful to have that to refer to it the tricky thing is will there be an audience? it's just a table then you don't get an accurate sense especially if there's comedy in it you have no idea what's happening there but for your own purposes I think it makes great sense to do that so you don't have a reference we get to see if we can do that often when we're working on a show on one show we did our own little reading we just read everything together and taped it and then a few days go by and you listen to it and when you get a little distance from it it will tell you very clearly what is working on it where you're just getting more with your own work you don't even feel those little cues and it will help you to rewrites it sounds like a good idea or maybe you rewrites into the second read if you have professional actors doing it what's their permission to do that because equity could be in regard to false rhymes perfect rhymes Sheldon doesn't bother you that the lyrics kind of wash over you you make much more sense because I feel the rhymes kind of dive the listener into what they think next in musicals today I feel the lyrics kind of wash over you and you don't get a sense of what the author is trying to say what do you feel about that if you don't get a sense of what the author is saying then it's a bad lyric don't listen to Book of Mormon which is the biggest hit ever and you will hear a lot of false rhymes another question for Sheldon there's a lyric in she loves me she goes ha ha ha si in Barbara Cook and she had all the ha ha ha ha in Kandy were you thinking I should have asked I should have asked this years ago sometime did you think of the ha ha in regard to Kandy was that a reference or a name no Jerry that was one of the pieces of music that we had as an instrumental piece he did not intend to have lyrics to it but I listened to it and I thought a mind is hysterical in this scene and that music would lend itself very well to a song about hysteric and if you're hysterical there's got to be a place where you go ha ha ha that makes sense I was writing in character in diseased character is that always clear to you and I guess it's a question for both of you should be in music should be a song or something should be dialogue or is that always clear to you or is there ever an issue it's usually pretty clear although sometimes it's usually pretty clear I've had the experience of setting things in music that particularly fights for some reason or singing things in anger that always end up in the scenes once I've set them I get embarrassed over the top but usually I think it's pretty clear I usually it's pretty clear but again, like in I've written songs where once we get it to rehearsal we see it should have remained a sentence a sentence, yeah sometimes it's just a sentence but you find that out if you don't find that out in rehearsal you find it out in front of an audience we had in Fiddler we had a wonderful song and it was called a fight song and it was a very successful song it ran about four and a half minutes and the audience loved it and one day out of town after the show Jerry Robbins said I want to cut that song we said why, it works he said I know it works but the show is very very long and I can do the same thing in 35 seconds of dance and he said just let me try it it doesn't work we'll go back to the song it's a lovely song as soon as he did the dance we thought he had come back and said everything that had to be said in 35 seconds and that's cool what's the longest from start to finish that show has taken from the idea to getting it out there for me I can answer that fairly easily I think I would have to say which was well let's see Deciro's took about 10 years from the time I found the look until the time it finally got to the stage but a good number of those years was trying to be nice to you it was a good idea and the other one a really long one was the glorious ones which I read the novel in thank you I think I read the novel probably in 1983 worked on it with another collaborator that I was doing some work at the time we went through very many inclinations we never get it to happen dropped it but it was always on my radar and we were looking for a project in the early 90s in 1991-92 and I remember that book and we went back to it and kept writing it and writing it it was the hardest show to write for theater people but it was also about changing theater set in 16th century it was just a complex little nut crack and it took a long time to really feel comfortable with it and to make it happen and then we did it in Pittsburgh and when we brought it to New York it was a long journey so 20 years I would say I feel better all of the Broadway shows that I did there were producers involved so it was like two or three years at the most but there is a it's my novel in the closet I have a song based on a Russian play the play is called Dragons and I've had it done at six colleges and I'm still working on it it's about 30 years now and I will continue to work on it until I get it right concerning coming up with the plot how in depth do you like it to be that you dive at first into writing songs well, if it's something, if it's an adaptation of course it's there and you love it and you read to it if it's an original there has to be at least an act the characters have to be developed enough so that you know how they talk and what they're thinking and what they're feeling and what they want otherwise you can't start so at least an act then preferably more than that I tend to agree with that although if you write in your own book if you happen to be doing your own book and it happens to be an original idea what we've done from time to time is we'll outline and we'll know how the show starts how the first act ends how the second act probably starts and how the show will end at the end and a few key points in there and then sometimes we'll write and explore the vocabulary the tone, the musical tone stuff like that and those songs may or may not end up in there but it's kind of a jumpy more point so that's another way so the answer to your question is that in musical theaters there are no rules there's never going something that shouldn't work will work something that shouldn't work doesn't work there are no rules I just want to make you comment I want to thank you both for all the joy of doing what you've done and I have to tell you two of my favorite shows of all time the glorious ones and the matter of no importance I think the matter of no importance is a perfect show and I don't understand why you didn't want one it was in New York what can I say it's a beautiful show we just saw it again in Brooklyn not too long ago the gallery was out there telling me wonderful wonderful small production of it not so small actually and it was wonderful to see it again I realized how much I love it and the wonderful thing about that show you don't know the show not a whole lot of people got to see it because it was that unlimited right at Lincoln Center but it feels like the perfect for some reason we did it with Terence McNally our very dear collaborator and the way the book seems becomes songs with so many books it's so seamless really good I'm just not being in modest I'm just sort of surprised I just want to add to my comment what can one say about you oh I'll tell you I just have to thank you both I think it's amazing what you've accomplished in your career and I think you all should be inspired by it I'm wondering do you read reviews and so why or why not I did a version of the Christmas Carol once and and our screw was Richard Kiley and once we were going to a radio interview we shared a long car ride and he told me how when he did Man at La Mancha the first review was just said why is this this man who can't sing why is he doing a musical to stick to something else and he said he resolved at that point never again to read another review and he never has and I thought good I make the same result and I have read every review okay I can't not and it's gonna be painful I make the same result and I never have I don't read them once in a blue moon my husband who does read my reviews will say you really couldn't read this one or you know this one would you know but usually you know they're just too painful and bad reviews even if you get 29 excellent reviews and one bad review that's the one that goes right into the some more I don't know some part of your brain in a cortex and stays there forever I read the reviews on Lucky Stiff which wasn't a disaster at all they were a few minutes but a lot of good stuff but I remember every bad work they said and paralyzing because the truth of the matter is what can you do then write your shows and have a writer's life and you know count yourself lucky that you do have a writer's life and if you can accomplish that and keep working and not let them drag you down then you're the lucky one I can be outraged on somebody else's behalf when I read a bad review but when they write about me I think maybe they're right yes that's the bad one two more thank you for being here tonight I wanted to ask you about your working relationships I understand you've been in your marriage for a long time both of them are marriages oh yeah what do you do then when you come across a partner at some point in your working relationship you go this guy isn't alcoholic or this person this is not healthy do you have any advice to that I started a project a number of years ago and I thought I need a composer and I was familiar with the show called the Spitfire Grill which has a lovely score and I contacted that particular composer the project was based on the Moliere play by the doctor in spite of himself we started working on it and the first time he played for me I thought oh my goodness he doesn't understand what this show is about a lot of what he did was just wrong and we had long talks and he made a lot of notes and during the course over the course of a year it didn't get any better and I thought I'm going to have to we're going to have to sit down and it's going to be very awkward but I have to tell him this isn't working and then I discovered when he opened his book writer and lyricist was his best friend and he told me that he was still in mourning and unable to write and he withdrew and that's the only time I've had an experience like that I wound up doing the music myself which I love I think I don't want to be in that situation and maybe that's why you're asking I just got divorced at some point it will hit the fan whatever is bothering you whether it's a real marriage or a collaboration there's a problem it will out and by the way that brings up the drama skill has a collaboration it's very flexible so you can kind of make your own but it's wonderfully useful and I found out how useful it was Steven Schwartz called he was involved in arbitration a set designer had come to him with an idea and so they started to work on it and something told Steven he should sign a collaboration agreement and they did and sure enough at a certain point they had a big falling out and they were going their separate ways and it was a matter of how they would share the royalties if this ever got on so it came to an arbitration and thank God for that collaboration agreement because of it we were able to solve the whole problem it didn't need to be but it was I just had my first preschool workshop last summer it was like the best week of my life you get so close to the casino it's so exciting you can't sleep and then you have your reading and it's kind of like the next day you fall off of the cliff how do you deal with that how do you stay emotionally grounded in a career that sometimes feels like it's so much about these ups and downs well because you have a life too and you have to live your life and your writing is it's one of the many wonderful things you can do whatever you have to put it into perspective and also there's such a thing as post-partum depression you can't have that when the show closes abruptly or when it closes inevitably the next day you wake up and you're blue and you're sad and you're empty and what you do and how Prince generally starts a new show the next day there are ways to get along it isn't another you know just keep writing and what you're going to write next we'll go back to work on that project and maybe go to the library or go to a movie and find a new project that you might want to start reading what you said is brilliant you must have a life I remember my first wife was in a show with Shirley Booth and a number of the chorus kids were asking what is it like to be you and she said you have to have a life because you're in the theater for two hours a night the rest of the day you've got something of your life I did a show that was very unsuccessful Rex with Richard Rogers and there were such fights not with Rogers who was a darling but with the other people and when the show closed my response was for the next three months was to go for long walks and have mental arguments with everybody and everybody it was a terribly dark time and eventually because I also have a life eventually it calmed down when I was able to do other things but it was agony for three months you know the truth of the matter is writing for theater being in a show doing anything that anybody does to the show it is kind of a false world I mean we're all pretending we're telling stories we're pretending to be other people and all that stuff and it's very intense and you make what seem like the longest greatest friendships with the people in the world and finally the show closes and you still know them but they're not your friends so much anymore you have your real friends you go out to dinner for 29 years and certainly you do make friends on shows and I have some wonderful friends that I've made in the closer shows but it is a slightly artificial world and you have to understand that I'd like to thank Sheldon