 Thank you so much for coming tonight. My name is Tara Stratton, as probably most of you know, I'm the Director of Education and Outreach here at The Guild. I am very excited to present this fifth in our new series of DG Conservatory seminars geared to our musical theater writers. As always, if you have suggestions about who you would like to see or hear from, please feel free to email me and let me know. I will just be in a plug that you can tell why we love us, our most requested person. She says that's a little... I do not say that to everybody, you can check the archive video. Let me remind you to please turn off your cell phones or your pagers or anything that makes noise, John Wyman. If you have a question, we'll have questions at the end of John's talk. If you have a question, please make sure you state it loud enough so our online viewers will be able to hear it as well. I hope you all picked up a program. There's some room there for you to take notes if you want. I am very excited to introduce our panelists. Not only is he wonderful, the breadist, and there's no bio on your program. I apologize, but you probably already know that he has worked with Stephen Sondheim on three of the best musicals yet, really. Pacific Overtures, Assassins, and the Roadshow. We also worked with Susan Stroman on Contact. He worked with Michael Corey and Scott Frankel on Happiness and also on a couple of little shows with Maltby and Shire, Take Flight and Big. He also is written for Sesame Street and has 145 Emmys, thanks to that. And my favorite thing is he was president of the Drama to Skill from 1999 to 2009, which is when I got to know him not only as a wonderful talented writer, but as a great person. So I'm very, very proud and honored to introduce you, John Wyman. I have some notes, not so much to remind myself what I want to say, but to remind myself what I wrote. Terry has just listed it for me, so I should give him a hand. How many people have written books for musicals? You know, what I mostly want to talk about tonight are the three musicals that I've obviously, and I want to use them as examples to talk about what seems to me to be the fundamental book writer's task, which is structure, form and structure. You know, there are a couple of things I'll refer to and sort of get them out of the way because I'm going to touch on them later, but that's really where I want to go with this. And I will try and get through this sort of blow hard part relatively expeditiously, because I'd love to answer questions, which I think is usually the best part of these events. You know, just to state the obvious at the beginning because it remains a matter of mystery to many people. I mean, the number of people who don't know what a musical book is is extraordinary. I mean, I have been involved in professional theater projects where, when I said I wrote the book, somebody said, you wrote the book the show was based on as opposed to one of the elements of the presentation on stage. So, I mean, just so you know, from my point of view, the book is everything that happens between the moment the curtain goes up at the top of the show and the curtain comes down at the end if there's a curtain. A lot of that obviously in musical gets expressed in song. It should. But that doesn't mean that it is not part of the musical book. There are still people who think that, you know, that the dialogue between songs is what the book is about. And I mean, we all know that there are books with very little talking that have extraordinary books like Sweeney Todd. There are musicals with enormously successful books that are sung through. There are books with a lot of talking with great books like 1776. The point is that, I mean, the book is the play part of which is expressed musically. I remember ten years ago I got nominated for a Tony Award for Best Book for Musical for Contact, and somebody casually came up and said, I really got away with that and won that. And that was a difficult moment for me when I had to explain what it actually was. Anyway, as I said, let me just touch quickly on a handful of elements that seem to be central to how a good book gets written. And I'll move on, as I said, to what I really want to talk about, which is structure. You know, there are still people who think that writing a book is like writing a play but with songs added. That's not true. You know, one of the first things that obviously everybody has to tackle is the creation of a tone and a language which works in a musical but which would not work in a play. I mean, I've often said to people, if you pick a good scene out of a good play and put it down in a good musical, people will wonder why people were talking that way. And in fact, the reverse is true. If you take a good scene out of a good musical and put it down in a play, people are going to ask the same question. A large part of the task of book writing is to create a language which enables people to sing but which at the same time seems as realistic when it's coming out of people's mouths as Willie Lawman talks in Death of a Sailor. And it's a skill that can be developed, but it's tricky. And I guess, you know, to me the past master of this stuff who's writing today is LaPine. The books to, in other words, the books to Sonny the Park with George, they're all sort of perfect examples of the stuff that I'm talking about. In other words, James created a language for those characters which I become accustomed to and it sounds like people having a conversation, but it's not. And the same is true of Sonny the Park with George. It's one of the reasons why, you know, there's people favored period pieces for musicals because it enabled people to talk in a way which sounded like it came from elsewhere because it was France in the 16th century or someplace else. And it didn't have to sound the way people sound when they're chatting. So, you know, that's one of the things which obviously distinguishes book writing from play writing. Economy, it seems to me, is another essential one. I mean, somebody once said to me early on when I started to do this, I said, you really have to learn to make your point. I said, make your point and move on. Make your point and move on. There is no luxury in writing musical books to slide off into the kind of digressions that sometimes drive a play and make it powerful. Every word has to be necessary and sufficient. And the trick is to deliver economically what needs to be delivered without it sticking out like a sore thumb and seeming like it's exposition. And finally, clarity. I mean, you know, again, which is all these things in a way are references to the same skill. It's delivering information which is economical, which has its own sound, allows people to sing, and there's a clarity which an audience requires when they're being confronted with all the different elements that make up a musical. There's music, there's dances, and, you know, we all know the score won't work if the audience is lost. There are plenty of shows that worked well that didn't have particularly good scores but had strong books. It's very hard to think of a show with a strong score and a weak book. The book is just the foundation of everything. Okay, but as I said, what I really want to talk about is what seems to be the essential book writer's task, which is the creation of structure, essentially the creation of the framework that supports everything that makes the musical. You know, the notion that form follows content is a cliche, remembering. It seems to me that once you are clear on what you really want to write about, you're then in a position to devise the most effective way to design a show that will deliver that content, and I'll get to this a little bit and use myself as an example. Until you are clear about the content, until you are clear about the story that you want to tell, it's impossible to design the show that's going to tell that story. I'm going to use the form and structure interchangeably, which isn't exactly fair, and you can call me on it later, but it's fair enough, it seems to me, for the purposes of what I want to discuss. So it's like, what's the story you want to tell? What's the content? What's the most effective form in which to tell it? I am going to talk about the three shows I wrote with Steve. One has quite a conventional narrative structure. One started out with an extremely unconventional narrative structure, but in ways which I've revised the book over the years, the structure in the show's very exotic has become more conventional. And one has a structure which is all its own, it's really not like anything else, and which was driven entirely by content, and the structure itself reinforces the impact of the content. So I'll get to that at the end, that's It's the piece I'm proudest of, and it's not just because I'm pleased with the totality of the piece, but because I feel as though it's the best example of what I'm talking about. You know, the show's Assassin's. There are a lot of different ways one could have taken those eight people and told their story, but the structure which Steve and I developed, it seems to me, totally reinforces the impact of the piece, and I'll explain why when I get to it. So let me start with Pacific Overtures. Pacific Overtures presented a particular problem from a book writing point of view. It was written in 1976, and what people knew about Japan in 1976 was essentially nothing. They knew Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Sushi someplace in Manhattan, but if you could it was only one or two high-end places that the Japanese went to. So although we were telling what, when it's boiled down to its basics, was a sort of a fairly conventional narrative story about two men who were confronted with a crisis and who react to it in different ways, we had to explain the context of the piece as we went along. I mean, if you were writing a musical about the Civil War, two brothers separated on the Civil War, you don't have to tell the audience that there was a country called the United States and that in the South they had a plantation economy and that evolved slavery and that you don't have to bring that into it. Pacific Overtures nobody brought anything into the theater with them. So from a book writing point of view, the task was not only to design the story and deliver that story. As I said, what happened in the country when Commodore Perry arrived but what happened in the country was seen through the eyes of two men whose lives were affected by it. But we had to provide the historical context in which the story would make sense. And, you know, again, notice that the form follows content. There were, we devised really two solutions to that problem. One flowed largely from Hal Prince and from his desires the director to use Japanese theatrical techniques on stage to create a kind of a hybrid of western musical theater techniques and primarily Kabuki which is very vivid and kind of like musicals in a lot of ways. But Kabuki had certain conventions including, most importantly, a kind of narrator, a figure who was called a reciter who would sit at the side of the stage. And occasionally in our case Pacific Overtures he would move in and out of the action but that enabled me to deliver information which would otherwise have been very difficult to deliver to the audience directly out of that character's mouth. He could just make statements. He could tell people where they were and what they needed to know. And absent that device orienting the audience could have been extremely complicated. It was complicated anyway. But that was huge help. And narrators, book writers use narrators from time to time. They're most useful or it seems to me they're what's the word I want? I was going to say forgivable. That's not the word I want. The narrator in End of the Woods, for example, becomes an integral part of what Steve and James were doing. The fact that the narrator is cast out in the middle of the second act is an important part of what the story's about. He's not just somebody like the narrator in a play like Side Man or Dancing in Luna Sooths. It's kind of a memory play. This is the way it was. He's there for a reason, a narrative reason. And given the way we used the reciter you know because he was so exotic it seemed to me that that was, as I said, both necessary and useful. The other thing that's interesting about the book it seems to me from a book writing point of view is that in part because Japan was so alien to people at the time but also because it seemed as though it would support the central narrative I decided, you know, conversations with Hal and Steve that the core story involving the main characters would be I'm going to call it decorated although that's not really a useful word it would be surrounded by a kind of kaleidoscopic snapshots of Japanese life, Japanese reactions to the American arrival typically involving characters who had never seen before and were never going to see again and that this would generate a kind of a collage of Japanese culture and Japanese life and the hope, the expectation was that this would provide kind of cultural information and colorful information that would help the audience get comfortable with the show and help them focus on the narrative so the show we wound up opening on Broadway had a lot of that I'm going to talk about it for a minute the show begins with the reciter telling people where they are there's an opening number which essentially describes the world of the piece and Steve was brilliant in terms of what the number delivers and sort of what you need to know about Japan the Americans are arriving we meet the two main characters we're kind of with them so you have to about halfway through the first act and then the first of these I'll argue the first of these kind of snapshot scenes occurred which in this case was a number called Kusantum of Tea which is about the Shogun's mother poisoning the Shogun because he's too weak to deal with the Americans arguably we're still writing the main story there but also arguably we're not the incident the event was irrelevant and it took people out of the story of these two characters and then we put them back into the story of the two characters but it's as if they had kind of a vacation from it and then a little further into the act there were three of these kind of snapshot scenes in a row one was a number Lovin' Kenagawa which is kind of interrupts the story of these main characters group of prostitutes come down to the sea shore to try to attract the attention of the Americans again, characters we've never seen before were never to seem against he wrote a funny song although he still doesn't think it's as funny as he wanted it to be they disappear that scene was then followed by a scene in which the Americans and the Japanese exchanged gifts sort of the point of the scene to the extent that there was one that certainly seemed so at the time was that the Japanese had sort of a small collection of delicate boxes and stuff like that the Americans had stuff that you would buy at a hardware store they had coils of copper wire and they had a telegraph machine and they had a locomotive this was all accurate, it was all historically accurate and stuff the Americans bought was hilarious so that happened and that was then followed by another scene with a character we'd never seen before and we'd never see again Samurai whose job it was to prepare the Japanese defenses and one of the things that he did was to stretch screens across the top of the cliffs overlooking the American ships this actually happened as well and his expectation was that the Americans would assume that there was a vast army hidden behind the screens but that's not what happened the Americans were amused at this you know these parlor curtains that the Japanese found out so he was pissed off and he stalked offstage then we sort of went back to the story in the middle of the second act when the story of these two guys was kind of tumbling forward there was another scene which involved the introduction described essentially how the rickshaw was introduced to Japan there's at least one school of thought that was actually invented in the United States and introduced to Japan after Perry's arrival and the story stopped everybody watched that and then the story resumed and very quickly we got to the point where crisis was created and we were then tumbling into the climax one of the things that became clear when watching the show on Broadway is that people had trouble hanging on to or becoming engaged what was the central story of the piece which was the story of these two men how one became more westernized one became more traditionally Japanese and eventually at the end they they fight one has become westernized kills the other one and that's really where the story was going and the whole history of what was happening in Japan was riding on their shoulders so the show was revived off Broadway in the 80s and Steve and I took a look at I mean it wasn't on his feet yet I said I want to pull some of these scenes and Steve was he really felt that the balance between this central story and these other elements was sort of part of what we've created and I said well I know it's part of what we've created but it's the audience we're losing the audience and so for that production I pulled out the gift giving scene and pulled out the rickshaw scene and I think something else as well the sort of snapshot scenes that had songs in them weren't going any place because Steve was not about to write a new song and the songs were good but it was an enormous help and it was a lesson to me at the time that you can really be you can be a little too smart sometimes for your own good because what we had was what I had as the book writer was an idea which in theory was really smart but which in practice was not and if we had had more time with the show before it opened on Broadway we might have made the decision we made seven years later and pulled some of this stuff then but we were dealing with a show that was so exotic for most audiences it was hard to tell that they were connecting to them what they weren't it was an interesting line at that show oh but you know one last word on clarity because again this is as I said this is a show where we had to we had to deliver the we had to educate the audience it's their own work we had to deliver the context in which the story was taking place while we were telling the story and there were things that I fixed little fixes here and there all the way along to try and cement the audience to that central story and to make sure they had the information that they needed there's a I'm sure you're all familiar with it there's a scene in the second act which is arguably one of these sort of snapshot scenes three sailors have come ashore they see a very pretty girl they sing pretty lady they think she's a prostitute they offer her money her father appears and kills them this provokes a crisis as these events did in Japan and the next event was the reciter at the side of the stage is there's a lot of screaming and the bodies are dragged off and the reciter stood and said the tokaido the royal road from Edo to Kyoto as they travel to the emperor's court Kayama Yuzaemon reports to the shogun on the murder of the British sailors Abe are you sure the indemnity was properly delivered? Kayama my lord I gave it to the English ambassador to myself and he was satisfied with the money, yes my lord but he insisted that he received the emperor's apology in Queen Victoria in three days time this all seemed abundantly clear to me but I could tell from watching the audience that they just have this very clear scene although it's not writing on the story of these two men and then all of a sudden somebody stands up and says the tokaido hello this is a word they've never heard before it's hard for them to catch up with the information in this exchange of dialogue so for the off-broadway production I added this same same pretty lady soldiers killed but then the reciter stands and said the murder of these English sailors is no isolated incident in Yokohama a French diplomat is set upon by samurai and cut to pieces and also got two German merchants are dragged from their club and disemboweled foreign powers rage and thunder threatening to invade if the attacks continue what is to be done what could Lord Abe do caught between the westerners and the rebellious samurai who would expel them the country trembles on the brink of anarchy the tokaido the royal road from Edo to Kyoto so it was it was a matter of being sensitive to what people the audience needed and as a book writer nobody will tell you more than the audience will and you'll sense it sometimes sensing it's not so great but you will and you can be stubborn I can I name names? No a friend of mine a friend of mine who used to be the artistic director at one of New York's three major private theaters was doing a show with a director a director and the first 15 minutes it was clear he said from the first 15 to 20 minutes the audience was totally confused by the piece and he went out to have drinks with the director afterwards and said the audience was confused and the directors avoiding gender the directors said oh yeah so and he said well it's hard for them to catch up with it and she said well that's not my problem he said well don't you want that she said no this is the way I would so you can assume that position but I would describe that position as bullshit you know the theater is a communal experience it's not a painting it's not a novel I mean people have to there's a transaction between the audience and the authors and if the authors are not giving a smart audience what it needs then you gotta you gotta write that basically the second show I'm going to talk about is not in Chronologs of Lord but I want to talk a little bit about Roadshow you know Roadshow of all these three shows Roadshow is the one which certainly has from a book writer's point of view it has the most most people consider the most conventional book it opens with Addison Meissner on his deathbed he dies his brother appears the two of them play a scene together in which they become more and more annoyed at each other until they begin to have a fight the fight becomes childish their mother tells them to pull themselves together and stop and now we've now flashback to them as kids at their father's deathbed and the show then tracks really a chronological order what happens between the two of them until we come back to the end when Addison is back in his deathbed he dies again his brother Wilson appears they play a last scene and we're out there's nothing there's nothing about the structure of the piece which either undermines or particularly enhances the content and I must say Steve and I were entirely satisfied after extremely long periods of time with the piece we wound up with with Roadshow at the public directed by John Doyle and Doyle did it again at the Chocolate Factory in London where we tweaked a little bit more and it was like okay good but unlike since I don't know that Steve and I were ever entirely on the same page in terms of what the theme and point in other words the content of the story was why we were writing the show we were close but there was never a real identity until there was Steve had been very involved with these characters Wilson and my son for years and years and he asked me have you ever heard of him? I said no he said you want to read a book about him I said sure I read it I was very interested in two brothers but I was particularly interested in the period of time in American history within which they operated because they seemed to me to be these vivid examples of Americans behaving badly during a period of time when Americans really behaved badly now but so the balance between the sort of personal and the political was something I think we should never quite sorted out and as a result the cliche formfiler's content whether there would have been another way to organize the story a way which might have had more impact I don't know and it's not like there's something in the back of my head but we never because we could never quite get entirely clear between us on what we wanted the audience to get from the show the next step of figuring out well what's the do we make it a circus, do we tell it backwards, do we make it all midgets do we never as a book writer I never got to that place and it was only when we had our first meeting Oscar used this that the public was hugely helpful and sort of when you got the script and saying seriously think about this but when Doyle, we had a meeting with Doyle who had done Steve's shows and John who was wonderful, John we had a meeting with him he said well tell me if I'm wrong I think you're writing about America aren't you and I said yes and I didn't rewrite much of anything Steve wrote a new song when we were in previous a wonderful song but what John on that one it was very useful to have a third voice clarifying for us what we were writing about and as soon as he just sort of snapped into place and everything was fine it all went from there but I've always wondered as the book writer what imaginative leap I might have made if we both knew exactly what we wanted and I don't know that it would have been any different from what we wound up with but you wonder and we certainly could probably save a whole lot of time in Chicago and elsewhere you know there used to be I went out of town with Pacific Overtures in the old fashion way people used to go out of town that was sort of the end of it to Boston and I can't remember where I went after that but you know it was that standard thing we went out and checked into a hotel and again somebody told me when you go out of town when you get to your hotel room write down write down on a piece of paper what the show is about and stick it to the mirror in the bathroom because you will forget believe me in the hysteria of trying to fix this and fix that and I bring it up now because until we got in a room with Doyle I think if Steve and I had gone into separate bathrooms and stuck separate posts on two separate mirrors they would not have said the same thing whereas with assassins once we hit a certain point it could have been like we could have done a nightclub act with telepathy I see someone writing and it's hard to make that happen but you really as a book writer you have to I will interrupt myself for one minute before I go into assassins to also say this about book writing I mean I particularly given the way musicals are created now it seems to me without you know my my label or my title or my job just to be the book writer all the artistic creative I'm talking about the book writer, the composer, the lyricist are all book writers in the sense that really to produce a satisfying work all those voices have to be in a room together and have to talk until they're embarrassed about the fact that they're still talking and not writing and come to a real agreement as to what it is they are now all going to put down on paper and at that point the book writer now with the capital B he goes away and writes the book while the composer and the lyricist with capital C and capital L go away and do their part but if you're writing the same show you're screwed and if you're dealing with trivial material maybe it doesn't make any difference but if you're dealing with musical that's got some kind of muscle to it and some kind of theme, some kind of point it's just essential and and when those three book writers are in the room together it could be two you have to be honest with each other and if you can't find common ground you're better off not going forward because it's the likelihood of discovering it afterwards is slim on that cheerful note let me talk about Assassin's a little bit Assassin's is the most satisfying writing experience I've ever had in the theater and for a couple of reasons one because I was writing about something I really cared about I was 17 years old and Kennedy was killed and I went to DC and stood on the sidewalk and it never made sense to me all the conspiracy theories I thought that that kind of grief and that kind of pain I didn't think about it a lot but I couldn't figure it out and then suddenly when I started to talk about this I thought oh that's what I'm writing about I'm writing about who killed John F. Kennedy but it also is a writing experience I really was able to get Steve to do what I just described I mean we sat in a room and we talked and we talked and we came at this material from all kinds of different directions until we reached the point where we knew what we wanted to write about Steve went away and wrote an opening number and I basically wrote the show and then he caught up with the rest of it from a it's I won't say it's puzzling it was more like it the show again from the point of view of the book the show is still is often described as if it were kind of a review as if it wasn't so much written as routine like you could take these it's a bunch of people and there's a scene here and a scene there and a song there and you kind of move them around and it would you'd wind up with a kind of a different mix but it would still all be there and in fact the show has an almost teutonic structure which is beneath the surface because it doesn't have a conventional narrative but the impact of the show it seems to me rides to a large extent on the degree to which I was able as the book writer to create that kind of structure for it I've had this conversation with a lot of people and I still go don't call it a review I mean it I'll take you through it in a couple of ways because I'm proud of it basically I mean let's talk about the group scene how many people know the show the the first time the first group scene in the show is the opening number which takes place at the shooting now everybody's got the right from different historical periods wander in let me back up for one minute to sort of prepare for this when Steve and I wrote the show the conventional wisdom about these people was that the reassuring conventional wisdom was that they had nothing to do with each other and that they had nothing to do with the rest of us that they were like traffic accidents it was as if the president had been struck by lightning there was nothing to be learned from these individual freaks and certainly nothing to be learned by looking at them as a group if you put them together you just see a sideshow you wouldn't see anything you wouldn't see an act and when Steve and I first started talking about this I said well if we do put them together let's talk and see if something emerges that we think is something valuable to write about and we talked and we found that thing and then back to the group scenes then the structural issue became what's the best way to deliver what we want the audience to understand so the first scene as I said observing what people conventional wisdom was about these people the assassins wander into the shooting gallery and one individual they don't even seem to acknowledge each other's presence they're not interested in each other they've got to do with each other they've each got their own thing and they're equipped with weapons and then Booth who's in a category of his own kills Lincoln who's killed himself they come back to the second group scene which is a lot of ways the first conventionally we thought it was the first book scene but the assassins have remained together now and it kind of they're not assassins yet in a kind of limbo a kind of saloon like limbo and again each one is really totally involved in his or her own thing Hinckley's writing a letter to Jody Foster Zangara's stomach is upsetting him Sarah J. Moore is trying to find something in her purse nobody is really dealing with anybody else or is interested in anybody else who's you know, can't shut up and has gone through life accosting people and he's sort of working the room but nobody is connecting to anybody else in any way that matters the next time these assassins come together as a group is we're not deeply down into the show each of them has made each of them has made an attempt to kill a president some have succeeded they come back together with them still not connecting one to the other they reiterate their grievances and the reasons why they set out to kill the president but that blends into something else which is, I mean it was a brilliant number another national anthem over the course of the number it's as if they begin to notice each other and begin to recognize something similar that they haven't seen in anybody else before as if they're kind of getting glimmers of looking in a mirror so that by the end of the number they've begun to see themselves as a group with a kind of, with a common grievance and that atomized bound greed view of them as isolated individuals has given way to something else and they've become a kind of a team and that team goes off to the Texas School Book Depository recruits another member and is able to mostly through Booth but by the end of the scene they all participate and is able to in a very articulate way to explain to Lee Harvey Oswald why he wants to join this particular band of brothers and sisters and then Oswald kills Kennedy and there's a final sort of post-coil for all of them which is still angry but it's also kind of weary and but they're a group we have taken them from the way they were generally perceived as individuals we've put them together and we've said something about about violence in this country and why people attack authority figures particularly the president the just to be a last thing about the book and about the structure of the book which as I said is often viewed as a review in between the books scene I described where they're all kind of sitting around and limbo not paying much attention to each other and the moment where in another national anthem they actually come together as a group each of them cycles through a similar experience experiences are not entirely identical because that would become predictable and not interesting but each of them in a variety of odd ways rubs up against another one or another two of them somebody provokes somebody else the provocation becomes significant enough so that that person that sets out to kill or attempt to kill the president after the attempt that character disappears on the show they really disappear from the stage good productions like Joe Mantello's they retreat upstage and they watch but they're no longer part of the action until the group is ready to come together and if you look at the construction of the book as I said between essentially between Lincoln's assassination and before we go to Texas I very deliberately built a sequence of events which was what I just described and I guess the fact that people don't see it is actually a plus because you don't want the stitches to show something like this but I think they experience because I think if they didn't experience it they didn't experience the show would not have any impact and for some people it doesn't I'm describing a show some people don't like and some people do like I really like it but that's me but in that sense again I can't get a better example of form following contents Steve and I then I'll shut up but I think we started with this view of who these people were and how separate and individual they were and then the structure which broke that idea down by letting them make contact with each other until they discovered that oh you know what I'm not an isolated individual he feels like me she feels like I do I feel better because I'm not alone and that makes me powerful because I'm powerful I'm going to go do something about it and it's appalling but it's and I don't ever expect to write a better musical book than that I guess there's one last thing I will say about it because this also is an element of I touched on it earlier but tone which is wrapped up with language and wrapped up with economy and wrapped up with all the other things I talked about earlier creating the right proper tone for a musical theater piece can be very tricky it seems to me because it is it starts with the book writer but the book writer can't control I mean it has a lot to do obviously with there's other language in the piece there's lyrics, there's music, there's dance there's everything else but I also do feel it is part of the book writer's job to identify and establish what the tone of the piece should be and that that tone really nine times out of ten or more that tone should be consistent from beginning to end people need to feel that they're that they've entered a particular world and they can't be jarred out of it I bring this up now because in assassins we made it deliberate particularly in the book scenes I made a deliberate decision to do exactly the opposite of that to change tones abruptly the scene in which Shogash encounters Emma Goldman is a very straightforward naturalistic scene which I think works well you know later in the show squeaky from Sarah Jane Moore attempt haplessly to assassinate Jerry Ford in what felt to me deliberately like a sort of Saturday night live sketch and I wasn't just trying to be a wise guy one of the things that was difficult about this material one of the challenges we used to use the word problem now we say challenge the challenges with this material was what is the audience bringing into the theater with them and our said stuff back to sort of the Pacific Oaks thing because these are historical material but the only thing they're bringing in is John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald which are 1990s so we were much closer to the Kennedy assassination than than we are now and most people given the age of most people who subscribed to Player Arts Horizons even then most people lived through the Kennedy assassination we wanted to immediately knock them off balance not just to prove we could do it but we felt that we needed to disorient them in a sense for two reasons one the smaller reason in a sense they would forget that Lee Harvey Oswald the one person they knew most about was not on stage at the beginning and that it would be shocking when he appeared and that worked and it was even at Player Arts Horizons where the critics hated the show and some of the audience but there would be gasps when suddenly the people realized oh shit I forgot I forgot that we're going to Texas now but the other reason to knock them off balance was and again this is a book writing chore was as I said there was no point in writing a musical that would say it's bad to shoot the president why waste people's time for two hours although there were critics who wondered why that wasn't what the show had to say but it was the book needed to be designed in a way that would keep startling the audience so that they would have to catch up with what was happening next but they wouldn't have time to sit in their own thoughts about where the show had been they would have to catch up with the way in which it was barreling forward and changing tones like that seemed like a really really useful way to do it and that's also why there's certainly the funniest show I've ever written which is kind of ironic but that was also a deliberate decision not to be a smartass let's be funny about killing the president but the audience just needs to be knocked off where they were when they came in and every decision that I made I had that in the back of my mind and sometimes that's a good idea and sometimes it's not a good idea it depends what you're dealing with but you know those are the kinds of book writing issues that I wrestle with with these three shows it's a help to wrestle with them with Steve Sahnheim in the room let's face it I think they and I'll stop there because I feel like they well I won't quite stop you know I did a show and I think we'll probably do it again a show called Take Flight with Richard Mulvey David Shire and it was a show that they had worked on and Richard had written the book basically they worked on it for a while but they wanted somebody else to come and work with them and I like them and I didn't want to do it but then okay yeah, so let's do it and what they had done what Richard had done was to take the Charles Lindbergh story whatever the story is in this context and the story of the Wright brothers and the story of Amelia Earhart and put them on stage together and the stories were fragmented so that you sort of would jump from one to the other they never overlapped or intersected in any way so they were proceeding down parallel paths and it's like I had one beware of smart ideas I had one smart idea when we were talking before I said I was going to work on it I said you know there has to be a reason why these stories are on stage together and I said most people think it was a triumph when Lindbergh landed and a disaster when Amelia Earhart disappeared but Lindbergh's life was over when he landed it was a disaster the only time he was really happy was when he was in the air and I got to believe on one level the only time Amelia Earhart was happy was when she was in the air so I think there's a scene where she tells Lindbergh don't land I'm not going to you shouldn't either he does and she dissipates so all of a sudden we ran through it but I sort of fooled myself into thinking that I had a book writer's idea why these three stories were on stage at the same time but I never actually could figure it out except that they all had airplanes in them and you know and there's some really wonderful material in the show we did it at the McCarter in Jersey is that in Jersey why do people always go like that but I'm cycling back to the fact that there's some great songs but the book isn't right and it's because in that case despite all the wisdom I've dispensed tonight I was starting with a form and trying to work from the form back to the content that could work maybe but it's really hard and don't do it you know and we may still figure out something that nits these three stories together so that at the end again point of view of the book never mind what the score sounds like you go oh for this evening to succeed as a piece of theater these three stories had to be on stage at the same time it was essential that they be on stage at the same time and if it doesn't feel that way then it's then you know the book doesn't work and that's sort of where we're at that's all I'm going to say about that okay I mean that's my speech I would be happy to answer any questions about any of this and not just about the shows I talked about I mean but any of them asked by contact any of the others yeah I just and how the language of a book wouldn't seem out of place in the play is it possible to give an example of that um the um as I said you know the musicals where you can see it working best are musicals which are set sort of elsewhere um fairy tale characters in a way which James could invent and you buy it because it's not going to be the way you and I talk and I actually remember seeing Sunday in the Park with George at the National uh when it was first done in London and having a drink afterwards with a guy who played George he was an Australian actor he was really good on stage and um and he said I guess the show kind of just opened up a little client and I said I got and I think he wanted me to like support him and he said I said to James I said why can't I use contractions I said why do I have to speak you know it just doesn't sound and James said no no it's really it has to be that way it has to be that way and uh you know his I think his hope was that I would go yeah why can't you use contractions I said no because I said you know it sounds it makes the language sound like elsewhere and it and that's the only thing it doesn't matter that it's France it doesn't it just sounds like elsewhere you know and um uh I mean there there are you know musicals we're now seeing musicals that tell contemporary stories with contemporary characters they seem to work best when they have what are essentially rock scores as opposed to something you recognize as more traditional theater score because I think you can go from a dialogue that sounds more like me talking to you right now uh into you know the score to next to normal uh then you can into the score to uh Oklahoma um but it's it's you know it's the main thing is to it doesn't mean you can't write um a musical that takes place you know in New York and do that you just have to you have to be aware of it that's all you know I think that's really what that's really what the task is then you'll if you're aware of it you figure it out hi John um I have three questions one for musical network thematically related um with assassins the the order that it's in now was it always that order or did you play around what did did you try other things the order it's in now is it we did a reading of playwrights horizons um before I had written fully written the last scene and it had two or three other scenes in it that didn't belong there that I took out but otherwise the order of the scenes has been exactly what it is now from the first draft were you ever tempted to play with them um when when um we did a reading uh when Joe Mantello Joe was the perfect director for it Steve and I found that over the years in New York we would get approached by directors who wanted to do the show and by the third meeting it was clear and Steve and I despite having had to shake it out of us by the critics always felt that we had written exactly what we wanted to write you know I guess therapy helps sometimes um um and um you know so we said to Joe what are you because in the third meeting while it didn't work it's failure my friends didn't like it and you know you gotta tear it apart put it back together it's like I won't forget it Joe said no I just want to do what you wrote but in the first reading he said would you mind if I tried something you wanted to move something somewhere else and I said no go ahead let's see how it sounds and then we just put it back the way it was I mean it just wasn't a good idea with um Civic Overture when it was brought back at the roundabout did you do any additional rewriting for that? I did some cutting the production at the roundabout was disappointing only because it was Steve and I for very different reasons were in Tokyo at the same time he was receiving the Japanese Nobel Prize and I was like looking for work so we happen to be there that when the first Japanese production of Pacific Overtures was going up at the new National Theatre and um so we went to we went to see it with some trepidation and uh it was it was brilliant it was done in Japanese and by a director who was really interested in Japanese directors and um uh I mean it was extraordinary it had the ideas in it scenic ideas but everything about it had nothing to do with what the production brought with it and um that production in Japanese with superdidals was picked up and came to the New York the Link Center Festival and it was great and you know Todd Hames got excited and wanted to do it at the roundabout and so it was Amon came and did it and it was sort of that production but it didn't really fit into studio 54 and so everybody was kind of slightly bummed but it was something I was sat in the audience and I thought you know if this is too long there was a the boat scene was too long so I cut a page out of it it was that kind of tweaking and trimming but nothing major and finally about it's all about rewriting about the process from wise guys to bounce to roadshow can you talk about some of the things you tried along the way that didn't work? um um the big thing was that um when Sam Eddie directed the workshop production that was not a happy experience for anybody but how Prince who hadn't worked with Steve forever was excited about it and so Steve and I were a little shell shocked, went to work with Hal and um Hal's enthusiasm drove some choices that in retrospect felt wrong I mean we created a new character who sort of became a pivot point around when the brothers operated and you know the part was played by Michelle Paugh and so it was like the best thing in the show I mean the brothers were also I mean Richard Kine played Addison Howard Gilm played Wilson the actors as well but um when that sort of ran out of gas in Washington where it got reviewed by the New Yorkers it was pleasant about it but that's all it was we sort of went back and thought and that's really how it got to Oscar and Oscar said you have to take this material more seriously and we took the woman out she didn't belong there and really tightened in on the brothers and on the relationship between the two of them and we made it um uglier and more honest because it was uglier I think and and we were about what the audience was supposed to take away from it which wasn't exactly a sunny good time in working with lyricist are you involved in the process of deciding when and where a song comes in well yes I mean you know I've got to go back to what I said earlier before anybody writes anything it's hugely important for everybody to talk talk talk until there's about what everybody's going to write about and inevitably that process produces a sense of what's going to be a some idea of where a story points likely to be a song and where it isn't do you find that you enrich certain things that make it easier for others to write a song? you know look it's you know things like this when I get you know discouraged I remind myself of this when I'm peeing you know I told when we were working on assassins I said to Steve I'm going to write a monologue for Leon Chulgage in which he talks about his gun like it was a shoe or you know a frying pan any other product of this of the capitalist factory system which was killing him and killing the other people like him and I started and he said that's a that's going to be a song he said just give me rough notes so I gave him rough notes then it expanded into this thing the gun song and you know and then later on for another national anthem we knew what the moment was I hadn't actually written a scene he said if you got anything that you cut from the last scene I said I don't think so let me look and I there was a page I had written in which one of these assassins says we're the other national anthem we're the one I said oh here let's help and boy did it ever but that's a two-way street Steve and I would pass material back and forth and because we were writing the same show it felt like we were writing with one pen it was a really comfortable it doesn't mean we didn't disagree but it was a very comfortable process you came to write lyrics yourself no the first show I wrote Steve's song I wrote the lyrics and I thought why don't I just not do that I'm interested in getting your feedback what you do when you said you talk something you talk something you talk something including some kind of consensus is meant i.e. content is achieved then you go off and work now how do you what happens when you come back together again tell me a little bit about that so I'm thinking about everyone off they're in the room but that they're off and all other elements in life happen and then well it depends how long how much work gets done before you get back together it's probably in most cases everybody's comfortable with what you've settled on then you're going to do work I'll write a couple of scenes somebody write a song I like to write with people who are as slow as me I worked on something with Aaron's and Flaherty once Lynn and I were talking about something and by the time she got back to the apartment she called me to tell me I said would you just shut up for it would you leave me alone for it but I mean with assassins Pacific Overtures was written a couple of scenes at a time which went back to how it was the center of that whole project so it's a little different but with assassins but by the time Steve had finished writing the long opening number I had sort of written everything except the last scene in Texas so we were ready to have kind of a reading hear what the book sounded like and also to see how the tone of the opening number fit with it I think maybe Steve had written another song I think he had written a ballad of Booth at that point too but it's just you sense it when because I need to let my own imagination tick over I don't want to talk to anybody anymore right now or you know what this would be a really good time to get some feedback because I mean you know working with Steve, Steve is always exposing sort of first drafts of unfinished songs to get some sense from his collaborators is this right, am I on the right track and that often produces something that changes the song or you know in most cases not but it can happen Pacific Overtures the second production or say you were doing it now again and your partner was someone more compliant than Steven or less towering than Steven sometimes and you had complete control would you if you called the shots would you excise all those little snapshot things and try to integrate that into the story of the two men well I did I mean those scenes are no longer in the show none of them if you license the show from MTI you'll get a script that does not have those scenes if there was going to be another major production I would have a conversation with because it seems totally open to this I would have a conversation about which is a song that will never leave the show but it I wonder how the show would play if there was something else other than that number that preceded it came after because it's it stops the show in a good way but also in a way that maybe isn't so good I can't tell it would be no way to know without really seeing how it played in a reading without the song it has to do with structure I have a question about you've been talking a lot about the idea of maintaining clarity and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on maintaining clarity when I understand you want to make sure there's consensus most creative to you from the beginning but as you get further into the process when you've got like three or four drafts behind you possibly still in your head and you're getting opinions not just from your own collaborators and your director but maybe from outside interested parties how do you maintain common order when all around you people are going crazy or when chaos is it's very hard I totally understand what you're describing and it's I think it's harder now than it used to be I mean the directors well I take that back at a certain level directors have been moved in the first position as creators on musicals which I think is almost such a good idea it's very hard to hang on to what's your sense of what's correct is unless you really believe it I mean I was saying about subsequent productions of assassins I mean Steve and I had the refreshing experience of assassins being done immediately after it failed the playwright it didn't fail creatively it did sort of fail creatively there was a problem with the design but Sam Mendes did it at the Donmar and a lot of them everybody loved it so it's like oh okay it's like some rebalance things but it you know we really had to hang on to what we believed in and when we were working on you know it's like how did wise guys that's you know sort of addresses what you're talking about it's like we felt like we weren't quite sure what we were doing and so it's not like we were being bullied into listening to other people it's like we kind of lost our confidence and that's a very very risky place to be and when you are in that place I think you have to try and figure out if you've lost your confidence appropriately meaning there's something I thought I knew about this material but I'm not so sure now that that was right or six people are telling you six different things or six people telling you the same thing and it's wrong for you, you know what I mean so it's just hard it's hard it's reassuring to know that everybody goes for it yeah they do and they go through it it never goes away you can become the most prominent person in this field and it will never goes away you know the saying that musicals are never finished they're only abandoned do you agree with that or I'm curious to know have you ever felt, have you walked away from a project feeling like that's finished I did everything I could possibly do or do you always have a sense of that's where we landed and I that's what it is whenever there's a substantial production of any show that I've written it's like an opportunity to go and tweak things and fiddle with things a little bit and I think that's that's not like oh I ran out of time so it's just like yeah you know what for 25 years nobody's laughed at that joke why don't I take you in assassins for example we really felt we were finished and and we stuck to that despite a lot of loud noise to the contrary production we got it right about was sort of perfect for every element Jules Fischer and Peggy Eisenhower Robert Brill all the design I mean it was great but I wound up staying on stage at Brady's City Music Hall accepting Tony for best provider of the musical and I thought this is crazy this is fucking nuts 1991 I had to wear groucho glasses to leave my apartment fear that people would jump on me and kill me and now everybody's cheering but we really believed that we had finished what we wanted to do we did make one change but not because it was because of a new idea when Sam Mendes was going to do the show in London we met with him at Sam's City it felt like there was a song missing from one of the assassins he wasn't sure what it was and we talked about it and neither of us felt there was anything left for either of the assassins to say but we both we sort of snuck up on that idea we felt that the only real appearance in the show by people who weren't assassins were the bystanders who sing about how they save Roosevelt they're treated as sort of comic characters and we both felt that there should be a moment where where a window is open on the world outside the assassins themselves and the brief that results from these acts is put on stage and I had been to Dallas and I sent Steve there's a lot of video from the sixth floor of the school book it's an amazing exhibit now and that's where something just broke the song that entered the show came from and there's still some people who wanted the show without something just broke but for us it was like that was the one missing piece but there's nothing about the show that I would change now and happiness which is a show we all really liked Susan Strauman directed it and Michael Corian and Scott Frankel wrote the score the critics didn't like what we did that's a show where we also felt we were done with it I think if we did it again there's a song we might revisit and there's one character I would fiddle around with but we felt like we were done when we I'm writing in children's musical now I'm deciding whether or not I should add an narrator and I can imagine that whenever you're in the rewrite process something's not working you always consider adding an narrator a missing piece of narration well, you know, I think that if the narrator is an invention in order to handle exposition that you probably ought to handle it some other way then you should probably feel out the pit of your stomach then it's probably not a good idea the fact that Kabuki Theatre that the elements, the conventions of Kabuki Theatre included this on stage presence on the one hand you could say well you caught a break because there he was on the other hand the way in which he operated made him more than just a machine that delivered information on the other hand if it's a piece for kids where clarity really is crucial then I don't think you should you know avoid using a narrator if there's a really an integrated character as opposed to somebody with a big open story book sitting at the side of the stage in a rocking chair saying once upon a time and then you know just going with that it can be useful but like I said it's most useful when the narrator has a real dramatic purpose like end of the woods and then whoops no one's telling this story now what's going to happen considering that book writer is a little bit of a playwright it strikes me that people come to you with projects have you ever initiated something that appeals to you and how forcefully can you negotiate the book writer composer there? and you know I'm happiest when I'm working on something which doesn't feel like an assignment a craft in this assignment which just don't interest me very much I don't think there's anything wrong with this it's not about it's just I don't I'm really only interested in author's pieces which Pacific Orchards I think is and assassins is and rojo for them and which contact was I'm not I'm not very good at adaptations I don't think in part because I mean big was fine but it was David Richard did a lot of good work but it didn't need to exist I feel like the movie was pretty perfect telling of that story why do we need it why does the world need it again but I get approached as much as some other people do because the kind of shows that I've written I'm not time me you know and that's I love time but I mean if you look for somebody to fix your show or that something you know time has a bag of skills that are you know sort of flaws it's nice to do your own work it's nice to be a playwright in the musical theater that's what I mean I'll go again unlike a lot of people entering the musical theater world I mean you had it in your family I was wondering if there was anything you learned about musical theater from your dad that helped you out when you were starting out well the only thing I learned from my father was don't do it my father's ambition for me was that I would stay as far away from writing as possible I felt it was an uncertain profession and that's really how I sort of stumbled into law school and stumbled out with a musical I mean with Japan no although you know I I don't know how old I was I guess 12, 13 I mean I I was around he was a novelist and then all of a sudden he did a show Fiorello which was a huge success it was glamorous and it was good it was exciting and all the kids I went to school wanted me to get them house scenes and then his next couple of shows weren't a success so I did get to see up close that emotional roller coaster is like so here I am anyway you know I would say that you know about the author wanting to be the author I remember reading in the drama The Skilled monthly a reprint a while ago from Alan J. Lerner in which he said that for a long time he and Frederick Loeb banged their head against the wall until I finally did My Fair Lady he said he said 90% of the audience neither knew nor cared anything about Pygmalion or George Bernard Shaw and he said that's when they realized you didn't get any extra credit for an original story and from then on they kind of yeah no it's true and now producers are Broadway producers commercial producers are quite open about the fact that they prefer the opposite that their argument is that I've heard people say this on panels and elsewhere I need something I need a property that's already grand meaning it has to be a title that people recognize because if they recognize it I can raise the money and if they recognize it I can sell tickets and if it's hands on a hard body no one comes and that's really depressing you know it you go back several decades the title the property was not the centerpiece of the enterprise the artists were and that doesn't mean you know I mean Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote and Carousel and then they wrote Pipe Dream it doesn't mean that it all worked out but you know that although I'll say I mean the last thing I'll say is I do think that in terms of I think that the surface I won't say the surface it's hard to get scratched but I think the possibilities in what can be done in the musical theater are sort of limitless given all the tools that are available to create a musical what can be done with those tools is not going to happen in the four blocks around where we're sitting it just ain't you know you can just wave this real estate goodbye but that's okay I was in Hal Prince's office years ago when they were going to tear down the morasco theater and they wanted Hal the phone rang and they wanted him I said what was that about they wanted me to come down to a protest and he said he said the theater moves he said it was on 14th street forever and now it's on 44th street and it'll go someplace else and if you want to write musicals I think that's correct I don't mean that commercial producers are going to move to Jackson Heights but I do mean that there are plenty of places where the new work is welcome it would be nice if it was more welcome the finances the country and the not-for-profit theater made it more welcome but it's still welcome there's places to do good well when we did Pacific Overtures then I'll stop Steve got a lot of trouble there was a piece in the New York Times which was an interview he had done in London before the show opened and he didn't know it was going to appear in the New York Times but in it he said you know a chorus line which opened the same year he said it's one thing to do that under the cover of a not-for-profit theater but the really courageous thing is for a guy like Hal to put something unusual like this on Broadway that didn't help with the reviews very much but now that's the Broadway component of it is largely largely over this has probably been covered but I'll ask it anyway if writing a book is like writing a play why wouldn't you just write a play well I think you wouldn't have to do collaborators I'll give you a very personal and non-generalizable answer to that question I wrote Pacific Overtures as a straight play in the Yale Law School Library and I did it because I could all I needed was a pen and a pad and I was in no haven for collaborators also I didn't know what I was doing I'd never written a play I didn't know how to write music I didn't know how to write anything when the show became musical I discovered two things one that it's thrilling to work with somebody like Steve and somebody like Hal I don't know what my experience would have been if I had been working with more ordinary collaborators I like the process I like the meetings I like talking and then I like the fact that ultimately I've got to go away and sit in a room just like I was a playwright and do my part by myself so I feel like I get both things I'm just wondering why that's it this month there's about a half a dozen Broadway musical shows and I see is there anything that's currently running that you feel works for you? musical? I loved once and I can't think of a musical I've seen since then I just thought once was you know that Steven Hogg and John Tiffany felt like everybody, Bob Crowley felt like the show had been created by one brain that got passed around to each of the participants it just felt like it was perfect I don't know that it's great musical but I mean it's a theatrical experience I thought it was terrific and I'm probably leaving something out that I've seen since then but I can't think of it right now Do you feel that there's a particular structure I mean you gave three plays but they all seem to have a different structure do you feel that any particular structure for musicals do you believe in a preset structure? I don't actually I was leaning on the idea that form has to follow content when you know what you want to write about then you have to figure out what's the most effective form to cast it in I mean if you look at Assassin's is a good example but so are Sonny and Parker George and The Woods I'm not talking about I was on a panel with LePine years ago at the West Side Y and I guess into The Woods one of the other just opened and somebody said you know I just loved the first act and it felt like the show was finished at that point why did he just and he said the whole reason we wrote the goddamn show was to write the second act those shows is also extremely interesting I mean you know they really they round out they sort of complete at the end of the first act which is not what you're supposed to do you're supposed to send the audience off you know wondering of perils of Pauline and they're going to get her off the railroad track and then picking up with essentially a new idea in a new place for the second act that's another example it seems to me of designing a form that delivered what they wanted as authors what they wanted to believe Thank you