This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Kevin David Thomas: Sit down, John. Sit down, John. For God's sake, John, sit down.

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[0:37] Robert W. Schneider: Hi, I'm Rob Schneider.

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[0:54] Robert W. Schneider: Today's guest changed the landscape of the American musical theater. His works are daring, innovative, entertaining, and they continue to influence generation after generation with their wit and their wisdom. With his frequent collaborator, composer Harvey Schmidt, today's guest gave us such musicals as 110 in the Shade, I Do, I Do, Fantasticks, Celebration, Colette, Philemon, Roadside, and Grover's Corners. With other collaborators looking forward, we've got Harold and Maude, The Game of Love, and La Tempesta. I cannot wait to talk about those. To tell us what it was like to work with such legends as Robert Preston, Mary Martin, Gower Champion, and Diana Rigg, and of course, Mr. David Merrick. Here is one of the most prolific artists working in the American musical theater today, Mr. Tom Jones.

[1:37] Tom Jones: Hello, hello.

[1:40] Kevin David Thomas: I will start talking about David Merrick.

[1:42] Tom Jones: Please, we love that.

[1:43] Tom Jones: Two nights ago, I went to an event put on by a group called Dancers Over 40, and it's something I never thought I would do in my life. It was something honoring David Merrick, so I brought in a little vinegar into the sweetness and the light there. So, I want to tell my favorite David Merrick jokes, if I may.

[2:06] Kevin David Thomas: Yes, please.

[2:06] Tom Jones: So, this takes place in recent times. David Merrick's office was above the Sardi building, the top floor, which was the sixth, and you took the elevator up, and then David Merrick had a big office all in red, and a big desk, and a big chair, but it was the only chair in there. So, when you had a meeting, a production meeting, everybody had to stand except David. It was like sitting there like Donald Trump. But anyway, so in this story, somebody recently takes the elevator up and opens the door, and they go in, and they say, excuse me, I have an appointment with David Merrick, and it's important. And the people look at him, David Merrick? David Merrick hasn't been here for 20 years. He's dead.

And he says, oh, that's right. I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. He leaves. He comes back the very next day, same time. He said, look, it's really important that I have this appointment with David Merrick. And the guy said, you were here yesterday. Didn't you hear what I said? Something wrong with you? David Merrick is dead. David Merrick is dead. The guy said, oh, that's right. You told me that. I'm sorry. He leaves. He doesn't appear for another two or three weeks. And he comes back, and he says, I demand to see David Merrick. This is really important. And the guy loses it. He says, are you crazy? He said, are you deaf? What's wrong with you? Didn't you hear me? What I've told you before? David Merrick is dead.

David Merrick is dead. David Merrick is dead. And the guy says, I know. I'd just like to hear you say it. So that guy could have been me. But on the other hand, on the other side of the, I hate to give David Merrick credit, but he deserves a lot, actually. And for one thing, he had a great sense of humor, which, for example, Hitler didn't have. And but David Merrick, I learned at this event the other night, produced 88 shows on Broadway. Nobody has ever done that before, and nobody will ever do that again.

[4:11] Kevin David Thomas: No.

[4:12] Tom Jones: And one thing, two things, three things you have to say about him is he got the shows on.

[4:19] Kevin David Thomas: Yes.

[4:19] Tom Jones: You didn't have to do endless backers auditions. You already had a record deal set up. You've got yourself a good theater lined up. He had wonderful people who worked for him. And you have to think, you know, despite all the shturm and drang and sometimes gratuitous cruelty, maybe it was better than having 45 producers and doing 12 years of development and readings. You know what I mean?

[4:48] Kevin David Thomas: Yeah.

[4:49] Tom Jones: If he liked it, he said he would do it, and he did it the next season.

[4:52] Kevin David Thomas: That's right.

[4:53] Tom Jones: We could use somebody like that right now.

[4:56] Kevin David Thomas: We agree.

[4:56] Tom Jones: That's a really good point.

[4:57] Kevin David Thomas: We agree.

[4:58] Tom Jones: So we're going to start right at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

[5:01] Tom Jones: I was born, as they say on Roadside, in the panhandle of Texas in 1928, followed immediately by the stock market crash, followed by the depression, followed by the Dust Bowl. So my earliest memories are like out of Grapes of Wrath, really, with the skies turning black and mother having to wet towels and put them around my sister and my face so we could breathe, you know? And so when I was six years old, we moved to central Texas, which is still west, central west, which is, you know, by standards up here, it's still kind of dry and whatever. But where we were coming from looked like heaven on earth. And that's where I grew up and went to school and to high school and then distinguished myself in this small Texas ranch town by being really peculiar, you know?

I wore a sailor straw hat to class at high school. I wore a bow tie. I carried a cane, not for leaning on, but a little, you know, like a light cane, a bamboo cane, like for twirling. Like Song and Dance. And I smoked a pipe and I signed all of my school papers, T. Collins Jones Esquire.

[6:29] Kevin David Thomas: What inspired you to be so peculiar? You just created it?

[6:31] Tom Jones: I mean, it's like...

[6:33] Tom Jones: I, well, I didn't fit anyway. And I just, and I saw too many movies, you know? I think in my mind, I was Donald O'Connor because he was making a lot of, at that time, Republic Pictures, which was very much a B studio, was turning out a lot of movies with Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan trying to match Mickey and Judy and their successes at MGM. So I had all of that in my mind. And I just, you know, we didn't have any, the only sport we had was football and there was no baseball, there was no gym, no basketball, no track. No, you can fill in the blanks. We didn't have it. And I didn't fit there. And I just, you know, people were tolerant of me. I will say that. The other students, I'm surprised I didn't get stomped.

But they were kind of used to, they were used to me like armadillos or things, you know? Anyway, so then I went from there to the University of Texas at Austin. And I couldn't believe it. There were other people like me. And as I wrote, I've been working off and on, on an autobiography called Trying to Remember. And when I got to Austin and the drama department, everybody was T. Collins Jones Esquire. So, and then I was there, undergraduate degree and graduate degree in directing. Started off wanting to be an actor and then found out that there was such a thing as a director who could just say, oh, let's do it again, please. And I thought, well, that beats acting.

[8:24] Kevin David Thomas: That's nice.

[8:24] Tom Jones: That's more fun, yeah.

[8:25] Tom Jones: That's more fun. So I had a great teacher. I had a lot of great teachers, but one who was a great influence upon me named B. Iden Payne. And so who was a great expert on Shakespeare and had a fabulous career starting off in Britain when he was 14 years old in a touring Shakespeare company, you know? And then becoming a director and doing such things as, he was head of the Stratford Theatre in England for a while. He started the first modern repertory theatre at the Manchester Rep. When he came to the States, he gave John Barrymore his first serious role in the theatre in Goldsworthy's Justice. Not bad. Gave Helen Hayes her first kind of important role when she was 14. And then he went out, started teaching, and he started the first drama department in the United States at Carnegie Tech.

And then with a lot of his students, he helped them go out and start theatres. One of them was Angus Bulmer, who helped start a theatre in Oregon, the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. Another of his students, with Payne as director, started the Old Globe in San Diego.

[9:35] Kevin David Thomas: God, yes.

[9:36] Tom Jones: And yadda, yadda, yadda.

[9:38] Kevin David Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[9:39] Tom Jones: Anyway, so I dreamed of being a director, and I had no intention of being a writer, and certainly not of musicals. We didn't have any. In the six years I was there, we did lots of plays. Wonderful plays. Extraordinary. And good productions. But we never did, even though we did a lot. In the main theatre, we did like five big productions. In the smaller, in effect, off-Broadway theatre, we did like 12 productions every year. And in class, every Friday, we would do two hours of scenes where actors, directors write. But they never, ever did a musical the whole six years I was there. It was like frowned on. And also, the music department and the theatre department hated each other.

[10:24] Kevin David Thomas: Classic.

[10:24] Tom Jones: As often happens.

[10:25] Kevin David Thomas: Always, yes.

[10:26] Tom Jones: And so, in my graduate, the second part, I had two years in graduate school. In the second part, I was given a chance to direct the annual college musical, which wasn't done by the drama department. It was sponsored by some sorority, some journalistic sorority. And it was like a traditional thing in the big theatre. And students submitted scripts and songs. And they were just terrible. I thought, oh my god, I can't direct this. This is terrible. And it was like, by the time I got this, it was supposed to open the first week in January 1951. And so, this was already like October 1950. So, there was this art student who was very clever and who played the piano by ear. And I'd heard some of his stuff.

So, named Harvey Schmidt. And I got together with him. And I said, do you want to write a musical with me? I'll share the royalties, such as they are. And he said, sure. So, we wrote a musical in that time. And then, I directed it. And Harvey was the musical director and the entire orchestra.

[11:41] Kevin David Thomas: And what was it called?

[11:43] Tom Jones: It had a traditional same title every year. It had started off as a review in the late 30s, I guess. Oh, wow. And it was called Time Staggers On. At that time, the big newsreel thing was Time Marches On. So, it was called that. Even though, in our case, it was very much a book musical. And that CD, that double CD of Hidden Treasures, there are a couple of songs from that first production, sung at the time, recorded at the time in 1951.

[12:17] Kevin David Thomas: Yeah.

[12:18] Tom Jones: So, very quickly for our listeners, and we're going to be posting this for you. There is a new album. It's a two-disc set called Jones and Schmidt, Hidden Treasures, 1951 to 2001. And this is from the Songwriter Showcase Series. And we'll put a link out so you can purchase a copy. But you're saying it's on here.

[12:33] Tom Jones: Yes, it's the first thing on there.

[12:34] Kevin David Thomas: Amazing.

[12:35] Tom Jones: The first two things.

[12:35] Kevin David Thomas: The first collaboration together.

[12:37] Tom Jones: Yeah, yeah. And if you listen, actually, we didn't... I certainly, I think Harvey knew a lot more about musicals than I did, because I had no interest in them whatsoever. But Harvey had grown up dazzled by the movie musicals, you know?

[12:55] Kevin David Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

[12:56] Tom Jones: Yeah. And so, they're actually pretty good. They're actually pretty good. And Harvey's work is more than pretty good, you know? And so, it was a huge hit. I mean, so much so that our friends from college feel that we've been going downhill ever since.

[13:16] Kevin David Thomas: There's always a friend like that.

[13:25] Tom Jones: I'd been working on a 200-seat auditorium. It was the big thing. And three performances on a weekend, and they sold out instantly. And then they sold out standing room, and then they put the chairs in the aisles and sold out the aisles, and then they opened the windows of the side of the auditorium so people could gather outside to listen to see if they can hear anything, or tell the other people what was happening in there. And so then it was over. I was older than Harvey, so I was drafted first into the Korean War. And then he was drafted a year later, and we were both in two different army camps. And we didn't really intend to go on and be, but something about that experience, I mean, the success of it, certainly, and the fun of it.

[14:16] Robert W. Schneider: Of being a soldier?

[14:18] Tom Jones: No, of writing a musical.

[14:20] Robert W. Schneider: Oh, oh, sorry.

[14:21] Tom Jones: No, the fun of being a soldier was considerably diminished. And it was hot in a way that they aren't really that much. It's like, maybe they still are. But it's like the experience, what was happening with this on stage, the audience, was like a conflagration. And I thought, jeez, is that, yeah, it haunted me. And so we started writing songs long distance mail when we were in the army.

[14:49] Robert W. Schneider: How did you do that?

[14:51] Tom Jones: I was, at that time, all lyrics first, because we didn't know you could do it a different way. So I would mail them to Harvey, and near Harvey's camp, there was a place with a 78 record thing, and he would get his friends. And Harvey got a cushy job, lucky him. Well, actually, I got an interesting job, too, in the army. But he was in charge of, for one, he was such a great artist. But in the army, your battalion can get a little ribbon for this, and it's big, let me tell you, for the commandant of your unit. Oh, man, that's what it's all about. Forget about shooting anybody. It's getting those little ribbons. And so Harvey would paint all the signs, and he would paint them. You've seen his. He would paint them, and then do paintings and drawings and things.

And on all the officers' helmets, he would do designs. So they canceled his papers to go to Korea and put him in the thing running the movies and painting the signs. And he had a piano there. So he would write, anyway.

[16:01] Robert W. Schneider: So he could send you then, he would send you a record of this?

[16:04] Tom Jones: Yeah, a 78. Wow. And anyway, then we, eventually, I got more and more into it, particularly when I came to New York and tried to be a director, and nobody wanted me.

[16:23] Robert W. Schneider: What year was that? When do you remember what year that was?

[16:25] Tom Jones: I came on January 1st, 1954. Okay. Somewhere along the line, I realized something that I kind of sensed for a long time. I knew I loved Shakespeare, and I loved Thornton Wilder. And there were linkages there. And I realized that the theater at that time, totally different now, but at that time, the theater was totally dominated by realistic perception, by prosceniums with a curtain. You go down, the curtain goes up, there's a supposed reality in there. And then people all just talk to each other, and nobody admits that you were in a theater, for goodness sake. But I found myself drawn to this presentational thing that begins the experience by acknowledging that with the audience, here we are, we're in a theater, and together, we're going to take this thing that is unreal, and we're going to, together, jointly, creatively, turn it into reality.

And that became the goal of my life. And then by doing that, you could also then have a kind of like artificial, in quotes, language, like Shakespeare. So Harvey came to New York, I came first, because I got out first.

[17:53] Robert W. Schneider: Was that the first time you had been to New York, January 1st, 1954?

[17:56] Tom Jones: No, because I was in Baltimore, and I used to come up on weekends and hang out with friends. What was your first Broadway... Did you see a Broadway show at all? I mean, did you ever...

[18:06] Tom Jones: Well, the first Broadway show, when I was still in college, my family came up for, I think, three days, and I saw four Broadway shows, because they had 30 matinees at that time. And the most vivid of them was the original Streetcar Named Desire, with Brando and Molden and the original cast.

[18:31] Robert W. Schneider: So you got to see the original Streetcar Named Desire?

[18:37] Tom Jones: I did. Was it as amazing as everybody says?

[18:39] Tom Jones: It was amazing. And it was so funny, too. I mean, Brando was frightening and everything, and dynamic, but he was screamingly funny. So Harvey came up, and Harvey was trained, and his intention was to be, and he was, a commercial artist. Well, he was so brilliant that within two weeks of the time he arrived here, he was like... He had... Look Magazine published a series of his paintings, and then he got book covers, and this and that. And then he was hired by NBC, because they were just starting color television. And he started doing all these graphics for The Cross. These were all live productions, like the live Peter Pan, and there was a live Titanic, all out of the Brooklyn studio out there with tanks of water.

But then Harvey, and there was constant battles about billing right up to the end. So Harvey was like doing his painting, but right up to the screening time, they were preparing, he was like redoing names and moving, as the lawyers dictated. Anyway, he was hugely successful. But we continued then to write some songs, write review songs for like Julius Monk and whatever. A bunch of those are on there too. Great. Jane Cannell doing a fabulous...

[20:09] Robert W. Schneider: We love Jane Cannell.

[20:11] Tom Jones: The Race of the Lex Express. And then Harvey and I doing a song that was done there, Mr. Off-Broadway, you know that song, probably. And then some songs that were first done there, oh. And then later done on television with Kay Ballard singing at really top notch, and Kenny Nelson singing songs about loneliness in New York. Anyway, so we worked on this. In college, Mr. Payne had a very obscure play by Edmund Rostand, who wrote Cyrano. But his first play when he was 24 was called Les Romanesques. And there was a British translation done by a woman writing under a man's pseudonym called The Fantastics with a CKS. And we used to do a period play production as I was a director. There was a scene we always did from that.

And I remembered and thought, well, it might make a musical. So we tried for several years off and on to make it into a Broadway Rodgers and Hammerstein type musical. That didn't work. And then two things happened. Harvey was still having an incredible career. You can't believe the assignments that he got as an artist. In fact, eventually he kept doing all these things. Even as his career began to take off, we got our first Broadway show, 110 in the Shade. And he had already been signed and had his vaccinations and everything to go on a lion hunt with the Shah of Iran and do paintings for Sports Illustrated. But it had to, turns out it was the same week exactly as the first week of rehearsal for 110 in the Shade. So Harvey made a big decision and he stopped doing commercial art and concentrated on the musicals and then did a lot of art continuously for our shows and everything.

[22:27] Robert W. Schneider: So before we went on the air, we were talking a little bit about new musicals now go through 10 to 20 years of what feels like developmental reading hell where you're always in the studio and people are telling you what's working, what's not working. And then you get to the point where you... How was a musical produced back when you first started? Take for example, 110 in the Shade.

[22:50] Tom Jones: Well, before that was the Fantastics, which we did as a one act at Barnard College in a summer theater that Millie Dunnick ran one summer. And people saw that and offered to produce it off Broadway. And we picked Lori Noto and we did endless backers auditions, six months of backers to raise $15,000. Wow. Which seems not like a lot now, but back then was quite a bit of money. I mean, well, even then it wasn't that much really. And what happened in backers audition then? You would go in, there'd be a bunch of people. Sometimes there'd be a bunch of people. Sometimes there'd be two people or four and once somebody left their mother there and they were going to the theater and so they left the mother and we entertained their mother while they went off.

What happened is you'd do it, usually Harvey and I and Susie Watson had been at Barnard, but then she got hired for the original company of Bye Bye Birdie. So she wasn't available. And we kept going on and on and we couldn't raise that money. And then Lori had to sell part of his producer share things to get some larger chunks. And then we hired a whole cast and did a couple of readings at the Sullivan Street Playhouse to get a feeling of what it would really be like there. And then that's where they got the final money, just barely. And those people, I don't remember, but it's like for a $50 investment and a lot of them were $50 investments. It's like charity in a way and people, our friends felt sorry for us. And a $50 investment would have, I don't know, I think 40,000 return or something like that.

[24:41] Robert W. Schneider: Unbelievable. Yeah.

[24:42] Tom Jones: That's a pretty good, smart investment.

[24:45] Robert W. Schneider: I wish I had the money to invest in it.

[24:48] Tom Jones: Were you ever thinking about directing it yourself or was Word Baker a part of it from the beginning?

[24:53] Tom Jones: I had, off and on in my career, I've had these urges, hot flashes where I think I can direct again, but it hasn't worked out satisfactorily, except once. We did it once and sort of a few times. But I probably would have pursued that. But Harvey took off, I was going to say, for a year from his very lucrative artwork to see, and he decided that if nothing came of the musical, that he would stop doing music. It's just the opposite of what really happened. And so we still had this big, it was called, if you can believe this, Joy Comes to Dead Horse. That was the name of the show.

[25:39] Robert W. Schneider: Joy Comes to Dead Horse.

[25:41] Tom Jones: A winner, if ever there was. And it was set in two ranches. It was like a spoof of Romeo and Juliet, based on the same story, but set in two ranches in the southwest, at Labranzini. There was a Tybalt character from Romeo and Juliet, who was a half-breed Indian. Oh, shit, I mean, it was really a mess. And finally, we were about to give up, and Word Baker, who we had known at college, and was a director and friend, got the job directing three original one-acts at the Summer Theater in Barnard, because he was friends with Mildred Dunnock. And he said, he's persuaded her to let one of them be a musical. He said, if you can take that thing you've been working on for all these years and turn it into a one-act in three weeks, I'll give you a production three weeks after that.

[26:34] Tom Jones: My God. That's how he became director. And we just threw out everything, threw up everything, disgorged, except, I think we already had, try to remember, we held on to that. And we held on.

[26:51] ⚠ About 13 minutes of audio could not be automatically transcribed.

[40:48] Tom Jones: I go to New York very often, and I don't go to shows, and I don't socialize, and my joy is writing. So I write every day, seven days a week, but it may be different times. Generally speaking, late morning, early afternoon, but it can sometimes happen at night too, and whatever. And I'm blessed in that at a time when senescence, is that the right word? When my senescence creeps, I've been fortunate, I think, to do my best work in the past two or three years. When my wife got so sick, and it was a very devastating illness, I felt like I was working on La Tempesta. I felt like Prospero in a way. I go there, and in a wobbly world where I couldn't control anything, suddenly when I sat down at my thing with my little magic wand of a pencil or wand of a computer, I could create a world for me to live in, that I could survive in. So that was an incentive more than I'd ever had before.

[42:03] Kevin David Thomas: And that, you feel, makes the writing richer?

[42:05] Tom Jones: Yeah, it makes me expose myself to writing more. It's like I need it now in a way I didn't before. How did I Do, I Do come into your orbit?

[42:17] Tom Jones: Well, Gower had loved The Fantasticks, and he always wanted to do something with us, and of course we wanted to do something with him. But after Hello, Dolly!, he optioned a book by the Bimmelmans called The Street Where the Heart Lies. Not a very good book. But again, it's that sort of whimsical, one can mistake, Fantasticks is cursed with a certain amount of whimsy, but I've been whittling away at that in recent years. I've done some great rewrites on The Fantasticks, and the last week, in its 54th year, the last week they let me do one last major change down at the theater, and finally something that had been bothering me for 50 years. And I thought, thank God, now it's solved, and somebody doing it in the future won't have to face this problem.

[43:12] Kevin David Thomas: What was it? I'm so curious.

[43:14] Tom Jones: It's a number called Round and Round, and it's just not clear what's happening, and it puts too much of a demand on the, particularly the actress, who has to like. So after a few people figured it out, that must have been a great moment.

[43:30] Tom Jones: It was a wonderful thing, and to see that it actually worked.

[43:34] Kevin David Thomas: Yes, totally.

[43:36] Tom Jones: So champion. Harvey had rented a house, a villa, an incredible villa in Italy, in the Porta Santo Stefano, on the Monte Gentario. Well, the next villa was the Queen of the Netherlands had her villa next door. No big deal. This incredible house built, overhanging the Turanian Sea with marble floor and 15-foot-high windows on three sides, and a concert grand Lübner piano, Harvey banging the shit out of it. I mean, you know, like in that marble thing. I think that's why I have a hearing problem now. But anyway, we got a call from Gower saying, let's forget about Street where the Heart Lies. We'd already written four or five numbers, which we kept the music and used them in the Philharmon. The music's wonderful music. And so we said, what about a musical version of the four poster? And that's how we got started on it. And we said, let us see if we can break it apart.

[44:42] Tom Jones: And because the four poster is all, it's very non-presentational. Yeah. It's like an episode of this age. Then you close the curtain and they do a makeup change, the costume change, the audience sits out there waiting, you know. And then in five minutes they open it up and it's the next, and yada, yada, yada. So we devised a way that we would go from these, to musicalize the scenes, but in between to do little oleo or vulgar type things about marriage in between, often as they're changing costume or makeup or whatever, you know. So that we would have, it's between the two things. In A Hundred Tenths of a Shade, we had tried deliberately to do a musical in the R&H form, you know. And in this one, we're between the two things. Part of it is like an R&H form, but part of it is like our experiment with presentational theater. So it was like, it was a transitional phase.

[45:43] Kevin David Thomas: And that was a conscious artistic choice.

[45:45] Tom Jones: Yes. It wasn't discovering in the rehearsal.

[45:47] Kevin David Thomas: Oh, no, no, no, absolutely. And were Robert Preston and Mary Martin the only two people you had in mind for this project?

[45:53] Tom Jones: They were the people we had in mind. But Robert turned it down. Mary was doubtful, and then we did some more rewrites back. It even flew back over and played it again. And then she said, yes, yes, yes. But Preston said, no, no, no, and over and over and over. He had just done a play, The Lion and Winter, with Rosemary Harris. And she got all the notices, and he got really slighted and put down. And he said, you know, they're tired of me on the street. I need to lay off for a while. And he said, you know, I can just see that flaming Agnes. Mary's going to really stop a show. Anyway, finally he agreed to do it.

[46:33] Kevin David Thomas: Do you want to ask about your favorite show?

[46:34] Tom Jones: Celebration.

[46:35] Kevin David Thomas: Yeah, I love Celebration.

[46:36] Tom Jones: Oh, yeah.

[46:37] Kevin David Thomas: Oh, yeah.

[46:38] Tom Jones: And had you started your, you had like an off-Broadway space, or not even just, you had a theater collective, or I don't know what you.

[46:44] Tom Jones: Yeah, tell us about that.

[46:45] Tom Jones: Yes, well, we had this, you know, we had I Do I Do running on Broadway. And we had the Fantastics running seemingly endlessly off-Broadway. And we always had a dream of like creating a theater. So with the skill of our ex-roommate, Robert L. Gold, who was just kind of brilliant, he found us a building on 47th Street between 8th and 9th. And we rented the whole building. It had been a chapel for immigrant weddings, the early part of the 20th century. So it had two areas with like 20-foot high rooms. And on the first one, we made a theater. And Harvey designed a great all-purpose stage and painted the theater raw umber, his favorite color. And, excuse me, and then we did, we got very artsy-fartsy, I'll have to say, you know, like people did at that time.

We would have a group of artists, we'd do experiments with masks. And we got a woman named Serena who came and teach belly dancing to the women and the men. And we had Harvey Burgess who was with the Ringling Brothers, Bornham and Bailey, to teach juggling and clown falls and things like that. And then Harvey and I banged out an original story.

[48:20] Tom Jones: I banged out an original story.

[48:22] Kevin David Thomas: Yeah, based on the experimentation that was going on?

[48:25] Tom Jones: No, no, it was our goal to combine what Peter Brook called the holy theater, the theater of myth and ritual, with the theater of the streets. The theater of clowns and belly dancers and fart jokes. And so then we set out to do that. And we didn't know, we were really, you know, we were really stupid, but sometimes, some of it was like a divine stupidity. But we did things in a very stupid way sometimes, and I think we wasted a lot of time. But on the other hand, we went places that if we had been smarter we wouldn't have gone, and they were more interesting sometimes. But we started searching from the Golden Bough books and Joseph Campbell, and searching back. And the earliest thing I could find of a dramatic thing was a Sumerian ritual legend, for the Sumerian New Year, in which the old year, an old man fights a young boy over the favors of a girl, reproduction.

And we decided to take that and set it in a sort of Tim Burton city, in modern times as of then, with a narrator, Potemkin, who's like an ex-priest, ex-magician in tent shows, bigger con man. And then the young boy, who's like a very naive, like a flower child, but an extremist, and the old man, who's corrupt, but probably my favorite character. We did it at a workshop, and it was like hugely successful, and people were throwing money at us. We had never had a flop.

[50:46] Kevin David Thomas: Right.

[50:47] Tom Jones: Yeah. That was about to change. Thank God. Thank God. At that point, I was turning into a real schmuck, because of all that success, and money, and middle age, and I needed what I got, a little shock to the system, and it made me a better writer, ultimately, and a better person.

[51:19] Kevin David Thomas: We'd be remiss not to ask you, before we talk about all the exciting upcoming projects you have, Grover's Corners has one of the greatest scores that no one has ever really heard.

[51:28] Tom Jones: I know.

[51:29] Kevin David Thomas: It just breaks my heart.

[51:30] Tom Jones: It breaks a lot of us.

[51:32] Kevin David Thomas: It breaks a lot of our hearts. Tell us a little bit about why we've not seen Grover's Corners up until this point.

[51:39] Tom Jones: When we did it originally, we tried it out in Chicago, and two mixed but positive notices, but then it was the first thing ever done by the National Alliance of Music Theatres. They were going to take this, and this was going to be the launch pad for a way for them to produce things on their own, and not be screwed over by Cameron McIntyre. And just for our listeners, very quickly, if you're not familiar, this is a musical version of Our Town.

[52:08] Tom Jones: Yes. So they wanted to set up the tour, and we couldn't find any men to be the stage man. We needed to have a star, and the men we wanted were either dead, most of them, or they were out playing golf and didn't want to go tour around. They were already past that. So we interested Mary, Mary Martin, and she was a little reluctant, and she loved the material, but she'd never been in a show where it wasn't about her. You know what I mean? Where she's on the sideline, and we say, like all these great people have played the stage manager, and it's a great starring part. Oh, yeah. But she had to kind of accustom herself to the fact that this was – because in her heart of hearts, she wanted to be Emily, you know.

[53:03] Kevin David Thomas: Sure, sure, sure.

[53:05] Tom Jones: That never changed. But she agreed to do it, and they announced it, and Harvey did a poster, which I think is in that booklet there. Yes, yes. And Mary saw the original poster. She said, my breasts are not that big, so Harvey had to redo it. Okay, okay. And they got booked everywhere. You can – our town, the most produced and beloved American play, Mary Martin and the guys who wrote the Fantastic, that's a sellable for a season ahead. One of those is a sellable.

[53:43] Tom Jones: One day, I was on the set of the season finale of the Chicago Marathon. And then she found out she had cancer. And then we tried to get it on, tried to get Goodspeed to do it and they turned it down. And then we got an offer from the Forge Theater. Frankie Hewitt was running it at that point. And this, this was it. This was the answer. That was the perfect place to do it. It was going to be in the spring when all the high school students were coming to Washington. And then she said, I've decided not to do it. I'm going to do a musical called Kudzu instead. And so she didn't do it. And it lapsed. And then the inheritor of the estate, it went to over the ownership to his nephew, to Thornwild's nephew.

And he didn't want any musicals to be done. He did commission an opera that was done at our town, which is terrible and a terrible idea. That's just the wrong. He's some, well, I don't want to get into a put down thing because he's, he has his reasons and he's a good guy. We lost Harvey not too long ago.

[54:57] Kevin David Thomas: You could have written one show with him and then found another composer and you could have worked with many other composers, but throughout his entire lifetime, you always collaborated with him. What was it about him and his work that made you always want to go back to him?

[55:10] Tom Jones: Well, I liked it. Yeah. And it's just like we understood each other. And we have the same vision, basically, you know. Although many disagreements many times. But, and then I just, I just always so grateful not only did he give up that career, but I was, you know, he was like so successful and I was so poor then. I really, I mean, it's hard to believe to me how poor I was, you know. I mean, that was the point where I can remember eating a meal when all I had was iceberg lettuce and ketchup to put on it. And that was my meal. But Harvey loaned me money to get through that dark time and then I paid him back, but I just, I felt, you know, I felt we were joined together. And also, I didn't, I couldn't, I didn't think I would like anybody as much, you know. I mean, it takes a long time to work out how you work things, you know what I mean.

[56:32] Kevin David Thomas: And now you have got three new projects in the pipeline. How exciting is this?

[56:38] Tom Jones: How exciting is this? The first I am familiar with, so we'd love to talk about it. Harold and Maude, which I think has a gorgeous, gorgeous score.

[56:44] Kevin David Thomas: But you haven't heard the score. Have you?

[56:47] Tom Jones: I've heard some songs.

[56:50] Kevin David Thomas: How long ago?

[56:53] Tom Jones: Oh, a while ago, like maybe two years ago. We've done a lot of good stuff in the past six months.

[56:59] Kevin David Thomas: Oh, even more. So tell us, where are we with Harold and Maude?

[57:02] Tom Jones: We have some possible interest in a theater in New Jersey, a respected theater, but not the paper mill. But I won't say which because we don't have a definite. That is fine. But we have, we did a reading and made a video of it, which I'll send you if you want to see.

[57:20] Kevin David Thomas: I would love to see this.

[57:23] Tom Jones: With Mary Beth, who was just sensational. Mary Beth Peale? She's in New York directing and doing a wonderful job. And like at least three or four songs that you haven't heard. Great. And so I'll be happy to send that. Please. So we're hoping that will happen. But you know, it's really hard for me to get produced at this point because of my age and it's like, you know, it's the wave going this way, you know what I mean? Going up. And also there's just a natural presumption that I'm senile at this point, which I'm not. But I can understand the presumption.

[58:05] Kevin David Thomas: Sure. But I think this interview proves that it's not at all the case. So we're waiting for Harold and Maude. What is The Game of Love?

[58:14] Tom Jones: The Game of Love is something that I love. It gives me such enormous pleasure.

[58:20] Kevin David Thomas: Your face just lit up saying it.

[58:23] Tom Jones: It's based on the plays of Arthur Schnitzler. Do you know Schnitzler?

[58:29] Kevin David Thomas: Yes.

[58:32] Tom Jones: Schnitzler did Regan, Ring Around. A great Viennese-French director did La Ronde, that great film. If you've never seen it. Have you ever seen it?

[58:44] Kevin David Thomas: I have. It's fabulous.

[58:47] Tom Jones: It's absolutely fabulous. What is his name? I can't think of his name. He's wonderful, wonderful. And this is in Vienna at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century. The Love Affairs of Anatole. And I used music by Offenbach and with four additional songs by Nancy Ford. And it was quite fun to write to Offenbach. I'll do one little lyric for you. This is not for Anatole, but from an old fool Baron Diebel. And I can't really sing, but I will plug away at it here. Let me belch first.

[59:30] Tom Jones: The old man. I don't do things with chains and whips and I don't dress up in lady slips. I absolutely just refuse to indulge myself with boots and shoes. Never wear rubber undergarments. Never play with the beasts of prey. And yet, I have a little weakness in spite of all my meekness, one tiny little weakness. Two young ladies, ooh la la. I just adore et menage a trois. For oh, the things that a man can do every little vice is multiplied by two. It makes you feel like a sheik or shaw when you're the center of your own menage a trois. I don't care much for groups of four. Any more than that I just deplore. My mother always said to me little one, be satisfied with three. That is why I have such an aversion to anything in the least perverse.

And yet, I have a little weakness in spite of all my meekness, one tiny little weakness. Two young ladies, ooh la la. I just adore et menage a trois. For oh, the joys that you can incur when your infatuation is triangular. And oh, the pleasures you can produce when you're the bottom of the right hypotenuse. Isn't that fun?

[1:01:02] Kevin David Thomas: So that's the game of love.

[1:01:05] Tom Jones: That's the game of love, yeah. And then finally, La Tempesta.

[1:01:11] Kevin David Thomas: La Tempesta.

[1:01:14] Tom Jones: Yes, based on The Tempest. But I've taken some great liberties with it. So I'll do two numbers from there.

[1:01:23] Kevin David Thomas: What's the music from?

[1:01:26] Tom Jones: A wonderful composer, Andrew Gerlade. He's a great writer. And the first one is, Prospero comes out at the very beginning in his old tattered robe with his staff, you know, his magic staff. And he looks at the audience and he says, the stage is empty, he says, I draw a magic circle in the sand like this. And there's a kind of primitive drum beat I touch the circle and it turns to light like this. He touches it and there's a kind of Peruvian flute and this shaft of light comes down. It's filled with possibility, a journey of discovery. But only if we both believe that this can be true. For the secret of the magic lies not just in the magician, but also inside you. And he sings, I ask you now on this bare stage to create an enormous storm.

I ask you when I speak of lightning to see it slice the night. One or two passing shadows must you turn into a fleet. And then when the storm is over, I ask for you to come with me and spirit-like to fly through time back to the island which was, is, mine. And most of all, I ask you now to take this empty circle and fill it full of life like this. And he touches it and the lightning begins and the show begins. So most of it is written open line like that rather than A-A-B-A. But there is an A-A-B-A song for his daughter that I like very much. So I'll quote you that. She sings to the young man that she's met, I do not care for magic. Magic makes me sad as if the things you conjure up surpass the things you had.

I don't believe in omens or wishing on a star. I much prefer to place my faith in things the way they are. Some people think a rabbit that emerges from a fancy hat is something quite miraculous to see. A rabbit that is sitting still beside a meadow or a hill is miraculous to me. I do not care for silken scarves that turn into a dove. I don't believe in magic, but I do believe in love. You touch me and I'm changed inside. I do believe in love.

[1:04:04] Kevin David Thomas: That's gorgeous. What a great way to end our time with you. This has been so magical and you are the absolute best and thank you so much for so much you've given us over the years and we cannot wait to see these three shows come to fruition.

[1:04:19] Tom Jones: I hope it will happen. We've had Latin Festa finish for at least two years and we can't get anybody to do it. It's just insane to me. Some of the stuff that I didn't tell you about is so good. It's the best thing I ever did for sure. Andrew's work is spectacular.

[1:04:43] Kevin David Thomas: We will keep talking about it and getting it out there. We will keep putting out the good work. Until next time, everybody. Thank you, Tom.

[1:04:55] Tom Jones: Bye.

[1:04:58] Kevin David Thomas: Today's episode was recorded at Shetler Studios on 244 West 54th Street. Visit Shetler Studios to book your room today and you can be as cool as us. And a big thanks to our sound editor, Daniel Schwartzberg and social media manager, Bethany Ann Solecki. And friends, don't forget, we want more folks to hear these incredible stories and that's where you guys can come in and help us out.

[1:05:22] Yes, in order for people to find out about us, we need lots of ratings on iTunes. The more ratings, the more they'll come up in searches. So head on over to iTunes, click on ratings and reviews, then write a review and leave us 5 stars and make us feel as special as Eliza Doolittle on Eliza Doolittle Day. Or you can leave us 1 star and make us feel as bad as Annie did in that weird production in Boston where Annie dreamed about being adopted and then ended the show back in the orphanage. True story, Rob was there.

[1:06:01] Kevin David Thomas: I saw it. So head on over to iTunes and make us feel more special than we already do. Thank you.

[1:07:01] Tom Jones: Thank you.