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[0:01] Doug Baker: Welcome to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theatre Group podcast.

[0:07] Doug Baker: I'm Doug Baker, Center Theatre Group's Producing Director, and I'll be your guest host for this episode.

[0:15] Doug Baker: Through my role at the organization, I work closely with Artistic Director Michael Ritchie to bring productions to our three theaters, the Amundsen Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, and Kirk Douglas Theatre.

[0:30] Doug Baker: Our guest on this episode of 30 to Curtain is James Lapine, who is the writer and director of Falsettos, which is on stage at the Amundsen Theatre April 16 through May 19, 2019.

[0:48] Doug Baker: James is a multiple Tony Award-winning writer and director, having helped create such Broadway classic musicals as Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Passion, and the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

[1:10] Doug Baker: He is a longtime collaborator with composers Stephen Sondheim and William Finn. Simply put, James Lapine is a Broadway legend, and we're honored to have him here at Center Theatre Group to discuss his Tony-nominated revival of Falsettos and the musical's intriguing history.

[1:34] Doug Baker: I hope you enjoy the conversation, and we look forward to seeing you at the theater. We're thrilled to have James Lapine back with Center Theatre Group with Falsettos.

[1:46] Doug Baker: We first brought this important work to Los Angeles audiences in 1994 at the Doolittle Theatre. In fact, we were the Amundsen at the Doolittle in those days.

[1:58] Doug Baker: James, I thought it might be fun for us to think back to that production just for a moment before we talk about some other things, and just run through some of our memories of that production.

[2:10] Doug Baker: My recollection of that production is with your support and guidance, CTG was able to reassemble the original cast. And we had, as I recall, pretty much the entire original cast, including the amazing Michael Rupert, Stephen Bogardus, Chip Zine, Barbara Walsh, Heather McRae, and Carolee Carmelo. What are some of your memories, recollections of that production?

[2:42] James Lapine: Well, in about 1978, Bill Finn and I were both working at Playwrights Horizons, which was a burgeoning off-Broadway theater, before off-Broadway had really exploded the way it has now. And I was a bit of a neophyte at the time. I did my first play ever there called Table Settings, and he did a one-act musical called In Trousers, with a character named Marvin at the center. And Andre Bishop, who ran the theater, introduced us and suggested that we work together.

[3:19] James Lapine: And Bill had been noodling around with a sequel to In Trousers, which was originally called Four Jews in a Room Bitching. And he asked me if I would direct it, having really only done about two or three plays in my whole life and never having done a musical. Of course, I said yes. And we started, as in those days, it was so different. There was a little 90-seat theater they had upstairs. And Andre just said, well, I'll give you a month to develop your show and a month to put it on.

[3:58] James Lapine: And so we started really basically with just about four songs and four characters. And I was the one who suggested that he introduce the child, the bar mitzvah boy, Jason, into the proceedings. And basically, I helped develop the storyline with Bill. And we worked closely together and took those four songs and worked outward from there and created what's essentially now the first act of Falsettos. And that was called, as I mentioned, March of the Falsettos. And fortunately, it was a wonderful success and moved to a couple of theaters and had a lovely life. Even had a tour, as I recall.

[4:44] James Lapine: Yeah, I think we were in L.A. at the Doolittle just March of the Falsettos. Right. And in those days, it was the Huntington Hartford. It hadn't been named the Doolittle yet. Jimmy Doolittle was running the theater. It wasn't until later that it became the Doolittle. By the way, is it still in existence, the theater?

[5:06] Doug Baker: It is. It is now the Ricardo Montalban theater and is run by an organization known as Nosotros.

[5:16] James Lapine: Oh, excellent. It's wonderful how theater is really growing and continuing to grow in L.A. We were in our very early, almost 30. I think we were about late 20s, about that time. And we worked with Michael Rupert, Chip Zine, and Stephen Bogardus at the time.

[5:38] James Lapine: And as the 80s hit us, particularly the AIDS crisis, several years later, Bill and I started thinking, well, what happened to these people? And we then at the end of the 70s started working on what became Falsetto Lander, a sequel to March of the Falsettos. We regrouped and got the same players together again. And the show is actually only set two years later than the original. So we didn't want to put it in the AIDS crisis in the middle of it. We did it just at that moment when it was coming into people's consciousness.

[6:25] James Lapine: And that production went very well, was very well received, had also an independent run of its own. And then eventually Hartford Stage, it was always our hope and intention of putting the two together. And Hartford Stage did that with a completely new production by Graziella Daniele. And renamed Falsettos. And it did so well. And we, a Broadway producer, came along and it was a very difficult decision. But Bill decided to ultimately go back to the original team to mount it on Broadway. And that's the 1994 production.

[7:11] James Lapine: And then I would say about three years ago I was at a benefit at the Public Theater. And I happened to be sitting next to a theater owner, Jordan Roth, who owns Stuart Jampson Theaters. I had never met him and we were making small talk as one does. And I just casually asked him, what's on your bucket list? You know, what do you really, really want to produce? And he just said, funny, you should ask Falsettos. I said, OK, I'm in. Let's do it.

[7:42] James Lapine: And he can join with Lincoln Center Theater because before we would do it with them, we had to say, you know, we really owe it to Andre Bishop who got the whole ball rolling and produced those first two shows. When he was a playwright. Of course, having run Lincoln Center Theater Company for many, many years. Right. And they wanted to be involved. So Jordan and Lincoln Center produced it on Broadway. And here we are in Los Angeles. And that's when I saw it and expressed our interest to have it returned to Los Angeles.

[8:19] Doug Baker: You know, I was checking dates, James. And in fact, it was not just 25 years ago that the production played Amundsen and the Doolittle, but 25 years ago this month.

[8:33] Doug Baker: Wow. We are, I think, literally two weeks away from it being precisely 25 years. So we can refer to this as our 25th anniversary production. Makes me feel old, but I'm happy that I can be here.

[8:46] James Lapine: You look very well.

[8:47] Doug Baker: Well, thank you.

[8:49] James Lapine: Podcasts do me justice. You don't have to look at me. You know, it's sort of interesting, though. It was a bit of a crapshoot because we weren't sure just how it would play. Sadly, one of the reasons I wanted to do it was I was a 23-year-old assistant who had graduated from NYU and theater. And I took her to see The Normal Heart, which was being revived on Broadway. And at intermission, she just looked at me and said, well, I kind of know about the AIDS epidemic, but was it really like this? And I thought, oh, boy, you know.

[9:26] James Lapine: That's powerful. That's a reason to do these shows, to remind people of what we went through and what existed. And it's part of our history. But we weren't sure how this one was going to play. And it was just kind of a thrill because we had certain people who were coming back to see it who had seen it originally, people who brought their kids back because they wanted them to see it, and a whole new generation of people who knew nothing about it and, frankly, nothing about the era.

[9:59] James Lapine: And it doesn't really matter. Oddly enough, it feels so contemporary. And the HIV part of it is actually kind of a small part. It's really a story about people struggling to figure out who they are and their sexual identity and how they fit into the world and how you raise a kid and what you teach your children and how you grow, et cetera.

[10:25] Douglas C. Baker: Maybe the most heartening thing of all about reviving the show. I was struck when I saw the preview last evening by in particular the song that the character Trina sings just before the march of the falsettos number where she's singing about the men in the world and how much control men have in the world. I'm not remembering the lyric exactly. You could help us with that. But that struck me as a song, a thought, a comment so current for what we're going through.

[11:05] James Lapine: Totally. She is the only female in the first act and she very much represented a kind of woman back which existed in the 70s. Women I knew and grew up with who ended up getting married very young and having children and not really being part of the feminist movement and until the feminist movement took hold and questioning their lives and their relationship with men and the mothers that raised them to be subservient to men and to not have careers of their own and whatnot. So that song is so potent today to listen to and hasn't really lost its power.

[11:51] Douglas C. Baker: Very much so. I'd like to go back to what you mentioned earlier regarding how you came to the theater. Am I correct that you were trained as a graphic designer and worked as a graphic designer for the early part of your career?

[12:06] James Lapine: Correct. In fact, I got my MFA at CalArts and actually with more of a concentration in photography which was what I hoped to make as a career but I also took many, several graphic design courses because it interested me and I also love art and left California to go back to New York and have the usual odd jobs and was doing freelance photography work and I really didn't enjoy freelancing as a photographer. Actually, I found it extremely stressful because this was pre-digital era, ladies and gentlemen, and when you were on assignment, you know, to go out and take a photo of whatever and bring it right over to New York Magazine or Village Voice where I was working, you didn't know what you had.

You had to run into the darkroom, you had to process it, hope it worked out. So, I kind of segued over into graphic design because to keep my photography kind of pure, I really had hoped to be a fine art photographer and that's when I began doing more graphic design work which oddly enough led me in a peculiar way to the theater because I was hired by Yale University School of Drama to design their magazine which was called Yale Theater. I won't bore you with how that happened but it was just a freelance job. But by doing that, Bob Brewstein who ran the dean of the school loved what I had done with the magazine and created a full-time position for me at Yale. So, I left New York and went to work at the university and taught a class in advertising design for the students in the theater who were studying management basically.

Bob Brewstein did something interesting in the month of January. He asked everyone in the school to take two weeks or something hiatus to do something outside of their area of expertise. So, the actors had to build the sets, professors involved as well were writing plays or it was a I thought kind of a brilliant way to get people out of their comfort zone and feel what it's like to be on the other side of what they're doing. And my graphic design students said you should direct a play because my interest in theater at that point was very, very downtown, Artie, Robert Wilson, Richard Forman which was not in vogue at the Yale School of Drama so they found that very interesting. So, I said well if you find me a play I'll direct it and one of the students found a play called Photograph.

Well, of course, the title immediately got me and it was by Gertrude Stein and it was a five-act play but it was only three pages long. Goodness, so I thought well this will be interesting and we did it as a theme and variation meaning that we did it about I don't know eight times over and over and over again in very different ways. One of which was my fascination with the painting Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat. So, that was one of my eight inspirations as a visual to do this play. And the woman who produced it was actually a stage manager and she said you should do it in New York and I said well I don't know how to do it in New York and also we don't have any money. And a close friend of mine was doing her dissertation for a PhD on Jasper Johns and she said well you know Jasper Johns loves Gertrude Stein so like a yo-yo I wrote him a letter.

I said I got this play about Gertrude Stein and they sent me 2,500 bucks. So, we went to a loft in New York and another friend of mine I knew mostly people in the art world so can I help and I said well you know I have no idea how you get people to review a show. So, she just literally picked up the phone and called the lead critic of the New York Times and sweet-talked him into coming and seeing the show and he came and saw the show and gave it a half-page rave review in the New York Times and ironically suddenly I had a career in the theater. So, while all these other poor people were paying all that money at Yale to learn how to direct I went and directed something without any experience at all. So, it's kind of an interesting story.

[17:06] Douglas C. Baker: Absolutely an interesting story. Let's talk a little bit more about Bill Finn please. You've worked with Bill on a number of other projects.

[17:12] James Lapine: Yes. Take us through some of those please. Well, we kind of parted after March of the Falsettos and came back together again I think for Falsettoland and I'm so old now I can't keep track of what came when. We worked on a show called Muscle which I quite loved. It was about an intellectual who became a bodybuilder Sam Fussell. It's based on his non-fiction book and I was so fascinated with that the mind-body thing and so we worked on that musical. It's interesting because I remember as we were preparing it talking to my mother-in-law about it and she went bodybuilders. I couldn't come. I find that really distasteful and I thought maybe that's not such a good thing. Anyway, we tried it out in Chicago.

Unfortunately, it didn't really fly but it was a lot of fun and let's see what else have we done. Did a new brain come next? A new brain was something that I came into. Bill was working on it with Graziella and Andre Bishop was producing it and he said, you know, to Bill you really need a book writer in here. So, I joined that production and I did not direct it and I helped them create it and write it and I did get to direct it myself at Encores! a couple of years ago and it's a terrific show. That happened oddly enough a week after Bill won two Tony Awards and Bill's a very eccentric fellow and we all used to just kind of discount his eccentricities as just being part of it but it turned out he had a serious brain injury and a week later he was in the hospital after the Tony Awards having major surgery and consequently he wrote this show A New Brain about his experience and it's a wonderful show, really, really great.

And we also did 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, another one I didn't come in initially on but was being tried out in a summer theater and Bill asked me to come and I took it over as a book writer, excuse me, as a director, not a book writer. Rachel Schenken did the book and we had a great success with that and so Bill and I and we did Little Miss Sunshine together which was my, having said I'm never going to turn a movie into a musical, I turned a movie into a musical so there you have it. But we're great friends and I've been very, very lucky working with him and Stephen Sondheim almost exclusively because it's unusual to write a musical with only two people doing it. Usually you have often a book writer, a lyricist, a composer, you know, before you know it you're sitting in a room with four people trying to put a show together and it's really terrific when it's just two of you. It makes it much, much easier and you can keep your vision of what you're doing clear because you have fewer opinions being thrown your way.

[20:37] Douglas C. Baker: I have noticed that you work that way, prefer to work that way.

[20:50] Douglas C. Baker: Just kind of turned out that. Well, let's talk about Mr. Sondheim.

[20:54] James Lapine: Yes, I always love talking about him. How did you meet? And what was that like?

[20:58] James Lapine: Well, interestingly enough, I'm writing a book about that. This isn't also an odd story. I was always fascinated with a book by Nathaniel West called A Cool Million. It's really a novella. And I thought it would be a great musical. And I spoke to a producer who I was working at at the time, and he said, who do you think you could write it? And I said, Randy Newman, because I love Randy Newman, because I didn't really know musical theater people. It was right after Bill and I had worked. And so I came out here to LA and met Randy Newman, who couldn't have been more charming. And he said it was too dark for him. And I thought, whoa, this is dark for Randy Newman. So Stephen Graham, who I was working with as a producer, shared an office with an elder producer, Lewis Allen, and talked to Lewis.

Wonderful producer. Wonderful producer. And Lewis said, what about Steve Sondheim? And Steve had just been coming off of a flop, Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway. And to be honest, I really didn't know much about Stephen Sondheim. I'd only seen one of the shows, which was Sweeney Todd, because I didn't really go to the theater that much. And I said, sure, I've heard of him. I'll meet him. And that's how we were introduced. And ironically, he had seen the three shows I had done. And I think it was just kismet, you know, him coming off of a long-term working relationship with Hal Prince. And I think this offered a different way to go for him. And we met about A Cool Million. And he read it and said, you know, I love it. I forgot that it's Candide. It's basically the story of Candide. And I've already done Candide. But if you want to talk about doing another project, you know, let's keep talking.

[23:04] Douglas C. Baker: And that first musical that you then collaborated on, Sunday in the Park with George.

[23:10] James Lapine: Correct. Yeah. And it all comes together. Here we go. Of the, you know, we worked so differently. And we just get together and we talk. And one day, I brought in a bunch of images. And I said to him, I'm going to put some images out on the floor. And we sat there and talked a little bit about them. I think he was kind of thinking, what is this? And one of the last images was the Le Grand Jatte painting by Seurat. And we talked about it. And I said, you know, look, it looks like a stage set. And the proscenium is the frame of the painting. And, you know, it's interesting aspect. If you notice, people aren't looking at each other, blah, blah. And he said, yeah. And I said, but there's a character missing. And he went, who? And I said, the artist. And he went, oh. And so that's how it started as an idea.

[24:06] Douglas C. Baker: And you continued the relationship, obviously. I mean, Sunday in the Park with George was a huge success for good reason. And you then, I think, next up was Into the Woods.

[24:21] James Lapine: Right, which was out here.

[24:23] Douglas C. Baker: Out here, indeed. Well.

[24:24] James Lapine: Well, later, yes. I was lucky enough at the time that Into the Woods was on Broadway, I was working with the Dodger Productions.

[24:32] Douglas C. Baker: Oh, right.

[24:33] James Lapine: And every now and then I would sub in as the company manager to cover your beautiful production of Into the Woods. That was really one of my great memories of working on Broadway shows.

[24:45] Douglas C. Baker: Oh, wonderful. Yeah.

[24:47] James Lapine: Right. And then in 2002, in fact, Dodger Productions produced the revival, which you directed. And we presented that at the Amundsen Theatre on a pre-Broadway basis.

[25:02] Douglas C. Baker: Yeah, we tried it out here.

[25:04] James Lapine: Yes. And that starred Vanessa Williams.

[25:07] Douglas C. Baker: Correct.

[25:08] James Lapine: And certainly not billed as a star, but now certainly a star, Laura Benanti.

[25:15] Douglas C. Baker: Yes.

[25:15] Douglas C. Baker: With Cinderella, was she not?

[25:16] James Lapine: That's correct. Yeah. It was a nice cast.

[25:18] Douglas C. Baker: Very well.

[25:20] James Lapine: Yeah, and a nice production. You have quite an eye for casts, I will say that.

[25:25] Douglas C. Baker: Thank you. I don't know quite how you...

[25:28] James Lapine: You know, first of all, you have to sing Stephen Sondheim's music. So that limits the number of people you have to choose from right off the bat.

[25:34] Douglas C. Baker: Oh, absolutely.

[25:35] James Lapine: Particularly like a Cinderella role, which is a really difficult singing part. So it does make it a little bit easier from the start because you only have X number of people who can actually sing it. And then you moved on to Passion.

[25:51] Douglas C. Baker: Yes.

[25:51] James Lapine: With Stephen.

[25:52] Douglas C. Baker: Right.

[25:53] James Lapine: Very challenging piece.

[25:55] Douglas C. Baker: Yes. Would you talk a bit about that, please?

[25:57] James Lapine: Yeah. The first two shows were regenerated together. And Passion was a movie, Passione di More, by Ettore Scola, which was an Italian film that Steve had seen that he had always wanted to do as a musical. So I watched the movie and I have to say, I was quite sure about it. But of course, discovered that it was based on a Tarchetti novel, which was not translated and we had it translated. And I really was taken by the novel more than the movie. And that's what we began doing. And in fact, initially, it was going to be two one acts. It was going to be Passion and then Muscle. Because they're in an ironic way related, because Passion is about a woman who's anorexic and sickly. And Passion is about a very different kind of guy.

That's another kind of physical. One shrinking and the others enlarging. And Steve, in fact, wrote the first song for Muscle. But Muscle was set in a very contemporary setting. And he just didn't feel that was his skill set musically. I don't. And also, as we worked on Passion, it kept expanding into really becoming a show unto itself. So that's how that happened. But it was an interesting and difficult, there's the J word again, journey to its birth. We didn't try it out of town or anything. In fact, it kind of rushed to Broadway rather quickly. And when we did a workshop of it with our friends and people we knew, everybody was just so excited about it and loved it so much. And of course, the minute we put it on Broadway, it was the complete opposite reception.

People are like, what the hell is this? And so it was a really tough preview period, finding a show that we wanted to do, but that also an audience wanted to see. And it asked a lot of an audience that show because it's about love. And it asked the tough questions about love. And a lot of people, I think, didn't want to really think about that. And it's not an easy thing to think about when you get right down to it. You know, attraction, who we're attracted to, why we're attracted. It almost goes back a little bit to Falsettos in that sense of what is a relationship and what's. So it was curious. It's a 19th century. Yeah, like Sunday. It's around the same time in Italy in the 19th century.

[28:45] Douglas C. Baker: I'd love to see it.

[28:46] James Lapine: Well, it gets revived occasionally in New York. And I'm thinking a little bit here and there. But you haven't gone back to.

[28:54] James Lapine: No, I haven't. I don't know that I would either. I think I'm really tired of going back now. It's thrilling and a wonderful opportunity as it is. In fact, we were going to I was supposed to go to London after this to do Falsettos. And I thought I can't do it anymore. It's just I've done it at my age. I need to be doing new things.

[29:16] Douglas C. Baker: So well, we're very pleased you did the 2016 revival on Broadway.

[29:20] James Lapine: Oh, I am, too. Actually, on this tour, because I am, of course, thrilled that I did it as well. Frankly, I consider it a masterwork. And I mean that quite genuine. I think it's aged really, really well. And it's still so fresh. I mean, structurally and everything about it is kind of like nothing else. It's sort of sui generis in that way as musicals go. And it has I love its forward energy. It kind of just takes you along for the ride. You know, you don't get on the on the car right away. Eventually you get sucked into that, sucked into it. And then it just takes off.

[30:02] Douglas C. Baker: Well, James, thank you so much for talking with us today.

[30:05] James Lapine: Thank you so much for coming to Los Angeles to help us launch our five week engagement of Falsettos. I'm confident our audiences are going to discover the show for those new to it. They will discover it and and be quite taken by it. And for those who are revisiting the show, they will also see the extraordinary work that you've done. I was so encouraged and have been when we did on Broadway, too. How many young people come out for it? And I think musical theater has taken on a life of its own out there. It's wonderful. So thank you for bringing me back and bringing our show back. And, you know, I'm excited for people to see it.

[30:49] Douglas C. Baker: You're very welcome, indeed. You've been listening to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theatre Group podcast. You can find out more about Falsettos, our organization and upcoming productions on our website at centertheatergroup.org.