Rob Schneider 00:00
Hi, I'm Rob Schneider and I'm Kevin David Thomas, and this is behind the curtain Broadway's living legends. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter at Broadway curtain and make sure to join our Facebook page at behind the curtain Broadway's living legends, and follow us on Instagram at Broadway curtain podcast. Plus you can
Speaker 1 00:16
always listen to all of our episodes, old and new on the Broadway Podcast Network, iTunes and Spotify for
Rob Schneider 00:23
close to 50 years, Today's guest has been lighting up stages and television screens all across the country. It's hard to think of a more perfect leading man than this guest, who has been awarded two Tony's for his work in the musical theater.
Speaker 1 00:36
Those Tony's were for City of Angels and Chicago, but our guests, other incredible credits include, I love my wife whose life is in any way for baboons, adoring the sun primate and democracy, as well as directing the price and the Paul Newman led revival of our town, not to mention Long Day's Journey into Night Antigone, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, plus on screen appearances in The First Wives Club. The Devil Wears Prada, who's the boss, and the fever Chase, just to name a few.
Rob Schneider 01:03
To tell us what it was like to work with such legends as Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Alan may si Coleman, Mary Tyler Moore, Michael Blakemore, Andre De shield, Jo Ann Woodward and so many more. Here is the smoothest, suavest, sexiest singer on Broadway, Mr. James, not and James, how are you today? Hi.
01:20
Good morning, good afternoon,
Rob Schneider 01:23
good morning, good afternoon, good evening. So James, I have to ask, what is it like to direct Paul Newman?
Speaker 2 01:30
Well, it was interesting. The way that came about was I worked with had worked with Joanne in 1984 on a production of The Glass Menagerie, which we did at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and then did it again sometime later at the Long Wharf in New Haven. And on the last night of closing at the Long Wharf, I went in thinking, Well, this has been a wonderful time to work with Joanne and Karen Alan, and I guess it's over. And I walked in and Joanne said, Jimmy, we're going to make a movie of this, and Paul is going to direct the movie. You want to be in it. I was playing the gentleman caller, and so a few months later, we shot it out at Astoria, Coughlin Astoria studios, and Paul directed the movie that we had of the production that we had done a couple of times on the stage. The original director of the stage productions was Nico sakharopoulos, who was the founder and our mentor up at Williamstown. And so I worked with Paul, and that's how we met and got to know each other. He was shocked to learn that I had lived about five minutes down the road from him in Connecticut for at that point, about seven or eight years, and we became very close friends, and so for the next well, until he died 13 years ago, this September, which is hard for me to believe we Joanne and Paul and Pam and I were very close. And we would have dinner a couple of times, maybe every week or every other week at either at their house or our house, or we'd go out to dinner. We we played badminton. He liked to play badminton. We was very good, too, by the way. We played indoors with real feathered shuttlecocks. He we shot a lot of pool together. We went to the races because he was both a race car driver and also an owner of one of the IndyCar teams. Oh Newman Haas racing. And so one night, after 911 Joanne called me up and she said, Hey, Jimmy, you know how I've she was the artistic director at that point for a period of time of the Westport country Playhouse. And she said, You know, I've always wanted to do a production of our town. And I said, Yeah, you've mentioned that before. And she said, Well, I think now, right after 911 would be a really good time for us, from us all, to have a little our town, in our in our lives. And she said, and Paul wants to play the stage manager. And I said, what I've been trying for 20 years. She and I had been trying for 20 years to get him to do something on the stage, and he always just said, no, no, I can't do it. I couldn't remember the lines, she said, but he's serious, and he really wants to do it, and he's already started. She said, I we talked about it, and I had this copy, and I walked out. The room, and I came back a half an hour later, and he had learned the first the first piece, the first narration, and she said, and we wondered if maybe you'd like to direct it. So I said to her, Joanne, this is hard for you to probably for you to believe, but I'm probably the only American actor who has never seen a production of our town. I've never worked on a scene in an acting class from our town, and I've never read it, so I have a copy of it, I think in my library. Why don't I read it tonight and I'll call you tomorrow. And she said, Okay, so I read it that night. I called her and I said, Well, sure, you know, what a delight, What a delightful project to be involved with, and I tried to cast it as much as I could from our town. So we had people who lived in our community or near us.
Speaker 2 05:53
Jane Atkinson, who was a wonderful actress, Jane Curtin, who lived up the road, up on Route Seven Up. Route seven ways Frank converse, one of my favorite actors, and I had worked with him in the price as well, Jeff, Jeff Alan, and then we cast the rest of it, a lot of the extras. And there's a huge it's a huge company, mostly from our community. Some of them were professionals, some of them weren't, but worked in theater, and I remember going to going out to rehearsal one day, and I turned to my wife, and at 10 o'clock as I was running out the door, and I said, just want to go on record here, saying this is the most fun I've ever had going to work. It was really wonderful. Yeah, and Paul. Paul hadn't been on the stage in 36 or so years, and he's naturally a shy person. There are lots of pictures you probably have seen of him with one or two pairs of glasses hanging off his face in one direction or another. And yeah, he always use those, really, to hide behind, yeah, so I said to joy, and I said, I think we need to rehearse on a stage, on a real in a theater, because I don't think it's going to help him at all to be, you know, in a room with a tape on the floor. He needs to get the feeling of being up on the stage and delivering this out. So there's a beautiful little theater called the white barn theater in Wilton. I think it's in Wilton, Connecticut, a very old, legendary theater, and we rehearse there every day. And my job, I've kidded about this, but it's true, Paul would spend his whole time he had these little, you know, grandfatherly glasses that he wore, and he'd spend his whole time kind of like this, talking, and then he'd kind of look up at the audience, and what it was was Basically shyness and a real kind of discomfort. And so I, you know, I'm an I'm his friend, and so I want to miss him. You know, you're hiding behind your glasses an awful lot, and it would be awfully nice if you'd share some of what you have to say with the audience. And he looked at me, yeah, I know, he said, but I'm just like, I said, Can I help you? What's the problem? He said, I guess I'm just afraid that I'm going to make eye contact with somebody in the audience, and I'm afraid that'll flip me out, you know, screw me up. So I said to him, Well, I understand that, you know? I mean, I think we, all, all of us, have some awareness of that, all of us who are actors, and because he's the stage manager and is narrating the story, telling us the story, it's all delivered to the audience, he breaks the fourth wall, and that was the part that was giving them trouble. So I said, you know, when we get into the Playhouse, it has a balcony, and there's a facade around, you know, in front of the balcony, it's over the audience's head, but if you just look out at that, it will look to them as if you're looking and at the house and at the people. So he said, Oh, that, yeah, maybe that'll work. And gradually, and I mean gradually, and as we've started to play and as we moved into the theater, he at least had the had had the experience of standing on a stage and looking out over the audience or the heads of and that's pretty much how he did it, if you look we shot it, you know, for television, right, right? And I happened to see it recently, and it's really, really just a wonderful, wonderful show. And I. It. And his is a wonderful performance, and it gets better and better and stronger and stronger as the play goes on. And I have to say, He's better on camera than he was on the stage. For some reason, he just feels comfortable with that thing most actors, you turn the you turn the camera on him. And we all kind of free, you know, but no, he was just, he understood it. He felt really, really comfortable there. And if you see it, I recommend, I recommend people see it, because it's a wonderful piece of writing. Yeah, Thornton Wilder did. And the production, our production, I thought was really handsome, and he was terrific. Was a delight, great. It's a lovely production
Rob Schneider 10:47
for our listeners. We'll make sure to post a link where you can find the movie. So, James, when did you first fall in love with theater? When did you
Speaker 2 10:54
first fall in love with the arts? I was one of those kids who always acted as a kid. I remember we had a Cub Scout Troop, and we used to do little, you know, playlists and skits and stuff at the, at the, whatever they were, the monthly meetings. And I remember playing King Arthur pulling the sword out of the rock, you know. And I'm, what are Cub Scouts? Eight, 910, something like that. So I guess I was doing stuff like that when I was a kid and I sang, but I didn't identify it. Didn't identify myself that way, because I was playing sports and I played, I actually was recruited to play soccer and baseball in college. Oh, wow. So I played all through school, and I played soccer, basketball and baseball, and then in high school, I was singing in the choir, and they our choir director in my junior year offered me the lead role In South Pacific for the spring musical. And these musicals were a big deal in high school, so I went to my soccer, I mean, my baseball coach, and I said to him, Mr. Lauer has wants me to play the lead in Emile de Beck and 16 year old in South Pacific. He says, Jimmy, that's wonderful. This coach was a kind of a beloved character, football, wrestling and baseball coach, and he actually did have a nose that went like that, and had been broken a lot of times, and he was a very tough guy and but he thought that was really something special. He said, Well, you have to do that. And I said, Yeah, but I want to play baseball. He says, Well, let me talk to Bill Lauer. So Bob McKee went talked to Bill Laur, and they decided that they would let me do both. Somehow they would share me. What that literally meant was I would go to rehearsal after school and leave. Have to leave rehearsal early, which would make Mr. Lauer unhappy, and then I get to baseball practice late, which made Mr. McKee unhappy, but, but I did it, and they made it happen. And the next year they did it again, and I played Billy Bigelow in carousel. You just don't. Kids just aren't lucky enough to have two guys.
Speaker 1 13:26
Happen that just does not because usually you have to pick one or the other. That's what I mean. Most of us
Speaker 2 13:30
had to do well these days, you know, for the last 10 or 20 years, with these traveling teams, they make children who are at the age of six or seven before they know where their talents lie, right, choose whether they're going to play baseball or soccer. You can't do both, right? Because you have to play that sport in both fall and spring. And I think it's, I think it's
Speaker 1 13:51
we did it all. I agree, yeah, yeah, incredible that you were able to do both and also cut your teeth on some pretty good parts along the way. I mean, so that must have definitely lit a fire to go this direction. I mean, because you went, you went to Brown, and what was your major when you went to undergrad?
Speaker 2 14:10
Well, I applied, I applied in pre med. And so I went off to school, thinking I was going to be, you know, a pre med student. And I got there in the fall, and I was on the freshman soccer I'd been recruited to play soccer, soccer and baseball, so I was playing freshman soccer, and I had a couple of friends who had gone to Brown from my high school who were ahead of me a year or two, and they looked at me and they said, There's no way you can do both of these things. You can't be a pre med student because you have labs and stuff in the afternoons and go to soccer practice and go to games and stuff like, you know, and so I said, Well, what do I What do I do? He said, they said, just play soccer. And if you want to be a doctor, things are starting to change now, and it's becoming a more liberal. Uh, they're being they're being more liberal about taking students with an AB degree instead of a BS degree. And maybe if you still want to do it in your junior or senior year, you can take a couple of science courses and maybe get into a medical school. So that was the end of my medical career, and I didn't know where I belonged. I didn't know what to do. I wound up as an English major, but I actually was a political science, history and economics student that's called International Relations, and I did that for a year or two, and finally, in November of my junior year in school, I was on my way to the library to study for an exam the next day, and I remembered that a friend of mine, a girl who went to Pembroke then now it's all brown, had told me that there was something going on in The theater that night and that I should stop by, and I have to tell you, I've never been in the theater there, so I think probably to keep from having to go to the library to study for the exam, I said, Oh yeah, I got to go to the theater. And I walked by, walked in, and they were auditioning for a show, and I saw her, and I sat down next to her, and we were talking, and the director said, Okay, who's next? And she guys, she literally did this. So he said, Come on, get up here and sing a song. And I go, No, no, no, I'm not here to audition. And he said, Don't be stumped. Be shy. Have you filled out a bio? And I went what he said here, he gave me a card and pencil. He says, write down what you've done. So I haven't done anything. I've done a couple of high school shows. He said, All right, write those down. So I wrote down south pacific and carousel, and in the summer after my freshman year in college, at home, they had done a production in the summer of Annie Get Your Gun, and I'd done Frank Butler as well. So I said, Okay, this is what I've done. He said, Okay, we'll sing one of these songs. And I said, I don't have any music. He said, You don't need music. This guy can play anything from any of those shows. So I got up and sang the girl that I marry. And he said, okay, here, here's a scene. Go take it outside for 10 minutes and come back. And so 10 minutes later, I came back, and he got up on the stage, and he had me read the scene, and he said, Okay, come here. And he said, everybody, take five. He said, you've obviously been on the stage before. What are you a freshman? And I said, No, I'm a junior. And he said, Well, where the hell have you been? I said, I've been playing soccer and baseball. And he literally said, Ah, one of those. And I said, yeah, yeah. So you said, Look, I'd like you to I'd like to cast you in the show, and I'd like you to play a part in there. And I said, Well, you know, we're in the NCAA tournament. It was November, and I said, we played till we lose, so I couldn't possibly do both at the you know, if you're in rehearsal. He said, No, you're right. You couldn't do both. He said, So when soccer is over, will you come see me? So I said, Sure. And off I went. And I didn't think about it. That was November, December, January. Went home for Christmas, came back. I'm looking around for a course to take that will satisfy an arts requirement for graduation. And I'm I'm not an art I'm not a graphic artist. I can't I have no talent in that, and I thought maybe drama would satisfy it. So I went to find him. His name was Jim Barnhill. He's now 96 years old, and he still lives in toilets. Wow. And maybe he's older than that. And I went to his office and knocked on his door. It was in the English department, because they didn't even have a theater department in those days. And he opened the door and he said, Ah, Jim, come on in, sit down. So we sat down and opposite each other in these two big armchairs. And this is what happened. He said to me,
Speaker 2 19:11
you know, if you wanted to do this, I think you could. And I said, You mean, you mean for real? And he said, Yeah. And I said, but I see, I just sang you a song and read a two page scene. How can you tell? But he said, because I've been doing this for 40 years, and I, you know. And I said, Well, how do I get there from here? He said, You take my class. It's a scene study class like you'd have at the Actor's Studio or the Neighborhood Playhouse. And when you graduate in a year and a half, you go to Yale Drama School. And I said, just like that. And he goes, just like that. So the next week, I started taking his class, which meant the. Three hours every afternoon, four days a week, which is a lot of time. And he said to me, okay, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go up to Pembroke and find a girl named Gail Landers. And I want you and Gail to do a scene from desire under the ELMS Abby and even it was a love scene. So I went up to Pembroke, and I rang the bell, and I found this. I asked for the dormitory. I asked for Gayle Landers. I didn't know who she was. And down came this willowy blonde. She was a senior. I was a junior, and I said, I'm Jim Naughton. Jim Barnhill told me I should call you. And she went, Oh yes, yes, we're going to do desire into the ELMS together. And I said, yeah, yeah. And we did. We rehearsed it, and we went in and we did a reading of it, and then he told us what to do, and we went out and we rehearsed it for a week or two, and we went back and presented it, and I looked like I came right off. I just had walked right off the soccer field. And it was 1966 and everybody in the theater was identified, identifiable by the way they looked. Everybody was very artsy. And, you know, long I looked like a big square, but I walked, I we did our scene, and it was good, and they liked it. And all of a sudden I was accepted by this very, you know, the in crowd in the clicky group in the theater. And so I he didn't tell me at the time, but I found out later that in order to get into Yale, you had to audition. So a year later, I prepared two pieces. One of them was a Paul Newman piece, chance Wayne from Sweet Bird of Youth. And then there was a Shakespeare film, a modern Peace Center. I can't remember what exactly it was. I think it was something from Henry the sixth, which I had never done. But anyway, I auditioned, and I got in. And so I went to Yale in September of 1967 about five months before the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and I wrote to my draft board in Hartford, Connecticut, and said, This is where I'll be. And I sent him a copy of my acceptance and a copy of the scholarship that they had given me, and we'll see, you know. And and I was there two days, I kind of went with, like, Well, we'll see how this goes, you know, right? Yeah, and I was there two days and I went, Oh, finally I found where I belonged. Oh, that's great. So that's, that's how it happened. That's incredible.
22:54
Wow, serendipitous. I mean, like,
Rob Schneider 22:57
what are some of the biggest lessons that you took out of your your training that you still implement today, or you still use today.
Speaker 2 23:03
I think people who go to drama school come out with probably sort of a love, hate relationship with the whole experience. That's at best because, because they all, I think, have in common, the philosophy that what we're going to do is we're going to break down your bad habits. Then we're going to create, you know, and they're pretty good at tearing you down and breaking up whatever, you know, spine you have, and they're not very good at giving you anything to replace it, yeah, make it better. At least that was my experience. But it is a cauldron, and you're in there with, you know, maybe 20 or 25 other people in your class. And there were three classes. There were, it was a three year program, yeah. So there were people in there that, you know, were very talented and who were ahead of you, and then as you got older, they were, they were behind you, but Jill, Ikenberry and Henry Winkler were in my class. Ken Howard was a year ahead of me. Although he didn't stay, he went and got a job on Broadway pretty soon, I think it was 1776 It was sort of a who's who in the American theater, working in the Yale Rep at that time, Jules, fifers, we bombed in New Haven. All the actors in that company were just they were. It was who's who in American theater. And so it was. It was a fascinating period. And it was 1967, 6869 and 70. And God knows, if you remember what the culture wars were like, you know, at that time, yeah, college student and yeah, and to be in, well, when I went to college in in 1963 it was kind of like going to college in 1953 and I got out of new hay. Or I got out of the drama school in 70 and then I worked in the company for a year 71 so between 1963 and 1971 there couldn't have been greater changes in everything. Yeah, and I was, and I was, I was in college and in graduate school during that period of time. I mean, Bobby Seales was, was, you know, on trial in New Haven, Connecticut, at that time, the black hole, yeah? William Sloan coffin was the chaplain at Yale. So it was, it was a fascinating period of time. Eddie Tom, yeah, to be, to be a young person, to be an artist,
Rob Schneider 25:39
yeah, yeah, when you got finished at Yale, did you go directly to New York to begin auditioning? Or what was the post graduation life like? Well, I
Speaker 2 25:48
was, I was a I was married, and I was a parent by that time. Wow, I got married in in while I was in the graduate school, while I was in the drama school, and I got and we had my son, Greg, at that right away. I was lucky, because two of us out of our class were hired into the Yale Rep right Henry and I, and so I had, I had a real job. I was, I was made a full equity member. I wasn't, I wasn't a journeyman someplace working for $60 a week, you know, which I couldn't have done a kid. I mean, a wife, and you got a wife and a kid, of course. You know, the rent we were paying in those days was like 110 bucks a month for a nice two bedroom apartment, you know, around the corner from the university and, you know, in a house. So I worked in the company for that summer and the next winter, and in March, February, March, I was, I was in, I was in a, one of the worst productions of the Scottish play that's ever been done.
26:58
Wait, why? Why? Why? Why was it so bad?
Speaker 2 27:01
It was terrible. It was just awful. It was we all knew it was bad, and Clive Barnes wrote a scathing review of it. And didn't hurt it. Didn't hurt us. It. He handed it all right to the director, who was Robert brewstein, who had been the producer, and between you and me was not a very gifted director, to put it mildly. And I got a call from I had made. I had made, I had been cast pretty well that year, and I'd gotten some a lot of agents had called. And there was a one agent who, and I had a friend who was in the business, who would say, No, no, not him, not him, not him. And then I said, Well, I got a call from a guy named Milton Goldman at IFA, and they went, that's the one. Oh. Milton Goldman also handled Richard Burton and Liz Taylor and people. He was a big time agent, and so I had an agent, and he called me, said, there's going to be a production in New York starring Robert Ryan and Geraldine Fitzgerald and Stacy Keach of Long Day's Journey into Night, directed by Alan Brown, who was the artistic director of the long war in New Haven. And they're looking to cast somebody for as Edmond. Anyway, I got the job, and I left the worst production of the Scottish play on Saturday night and went to the first day of rehearsal on Monday morning in New York in Long Day's Journey, which was kind of like starting at the top in New York. So we moved while I was doing Long Days Journey, we moved to to Stanford to cut the commute in half, and I had a daughter. So I had another child, and then so things started happening. It was like, you know, life was really good.
Speaker 1 28:55
Did you ever have to have a survival job? I mean, because, you know, I am. I'm 40, and I have my first son, who's now a year old. I can't imagine being in my 20s, having two kids and going into the arts. Was it, you know, did you was there? Yeah, was that an issue? I mean, did you have to,
Speaker 2 29:10
like, Well, every summer when I while I was in college and in graduate school, I used to drive trucks for allied Van Lines. Oh, yeah, and move furniture. I started out just being a fucking college kid, you know, yeah, lugging. But they were always short of drivers, because summertime is the moving season, so they would promote a few of us, and they made me a driver. And so I was actually loading and driving, you know, trailer trucks and and I kept doing it because it was, it was the best money I could make. And I, you know, you worked your ass off, but you made, you made enough money so you could go, keep keep going. I never, I never waited on table. I never had after I started. Working after I graduated from, right? We started work two weeks later, and I've been working lucky enough to be my god, yeah,
Rob Schneider 30:10
so when you were starting out and you're and there's, you know, there's Geraldine Page, and then Geraldine, Fitzgerald and Robert Ryan, did you ever have like, a pinch me moment? Did you realize that you were getting another education in some way, seeing it like in the trenches with these geniuses.
Speaker 2 30:26
Well, I was very much aware of how wonderful they were, yeah, but, you know, it's funny. But you know, I guess I just, I just, we were doing the work. Yeah, so I was lucky. I knew I was lucky, and I was very happy to be doing the work. Yeah, and, and, you know, you I loved them all, and they, they really accepted me. So it wasn't as if I didn't I, you know?
Rob Schneider 31:02
Yeah, no, that makes and what is your process? So when, when you get a role, you decide to do a role, how do you begin to create your character? Is it instinctual in rehearsal, a lot of prep work? How do you like to work?
Speaker 2 31:17
Um, I think I'm a pretty intuitive actor. Yeah, that's a funny story. We were working in the 80s. I spent a lot of time in a lot of summers in Williamstown, yeah, and I did several plays with Austin Pendleton directing, and also when he was acting sometimes, but I was doing a production of Tennessee Williams play, the title of which is just run right out of my head, not one of his best known plays. But oh, view Caray. Oh, okay, but it's a wonderful play. I was playing this character named Ty McCool, who was a strip show Barker in in New Orleans, you know, and finds up, winds up having this tremendous, tremendous love relationship with a woman who who has cancer, and Marsha Mason played that part. And we had, we're having a wonderful time. It was just, it was really, really terrific material to work on. And so Austin was the director, and he was also teaching some of the interns and the apprentices, the apprentices and I came into rehearse one day, and he looked at me and he said, Jimmy. He said, Here's your you didn't take your script home last night. I had this play, you know, I had, I think it was a French's, you know, bucare like you. You didn't bother to take this home last night, you know. Oh, I was wondering where it was. He said, Yeah, you left it here. He said, and I have to say that when the kids who were just in this using this room for the class that they just left you basically undermined and destroyed everything that they've been being taught for the past two and a half months. I said, How did I do that? They said, Well, if you look at your at your script, there is not a word written in or a mark written in the script. Nothing is highlighted. There are no notes, there's nothing. There's no stage. There's nothing in this script, like a brand new script on it is your name?
33:34
Yeah, well, busted. I guess that's true. And what I would say about that is
Speaker 2 33:43
I had that's not always the way it's been. There have been times when I've spent a lot of time writing stuff, notes and certainly stage directions, but there are other times when I guess I didn't feel the need to do that. Yeah, you know, one of our teachers at Yale was Bobby The the bobby Lewis, whom you guys probably know, yeah, director and teacher, and he had a system, and it was all about the system, and you had to write all this stuff down. And he had, like, eight different parts that you had to, you know, and you had to be able to articulate what the mood and the thing and the spine and the whatchamacallit were, which, you know, that was good. And I remember doing a scene in his class, and it went pretty well. And he said to me afterwards, he said, That was very good, James. I said, thank you as we were walking out, and he said, I guess there was an emotional moment in the scene. And he said, Did you do a personalization of that, or were you just working off the material? I said, Well, no, I just was working off the material, Bobby, just imagining what it would be like to be in that situation. Oh, okay, he didn't like it because it wasn't his deal. Yeah, the whole point is, when you need it, it's there, and you know how to do it, yeah, but you don't need it, and you can just work off, you know, it's fine, yeah? The situation then, good, yeah. That doesn't always work
Rob Schneider 35:35
that way. No, it's no, no, no, no. Now, what do you look for out of a director? What to you is the ideal actor, director relationship, and you've been a director yourself, so
Speaker 2 35:44
yeah, well, I think, you know, ideally, I like, I like direction. I like a conversation with a director. I want him to tell me, am I going in the right direction here, or do you need more in that direction. Basically, I think I ideally, you know, he's, he's an he's my editor. Yeah, if I can have that kind of relationship with him and he, I need to know if it's good. Tell me it's good. If it's not good, tell me what. Which direction do I need to go? Do you need more of this color, or do you need to? Is that too much of that color? You know what I mean? Yeah. And I also realized that I have always been an actor who works from the inside out. There are some people who work really from the outside in. I know how to do that, and I've had to a couple of times, for example, doing a production of a restoration comedy, you know, I needed to, but, you know, trying to figure out what it is that, I mean, this is cliche, but what you're trying to figure out is what's motivating this behavior. Yeah, why is this character saying it this this way? Why is he choosing these words? And obviously, you can learn a lot. You get to know a lot. You can figure out a lot from the words that he chooses. Why doesn't he say it this way? Well, I guess because the guy's an asshole, yeah, and he wants to be a real prick, so maybe that's the reason he talks like this. Or on the other hand, as Bobby Lewis used to say, you know, if the action the intention is to get the job right, yeah, if the intention is to get the job right, then you're going to go in and behave a certain way, right? If the intention is to try to intimidate somebody, because you want to make them feel bad, then that's going to inform the way in which you do it, yeah, but I think it's interesting. I've always found, you know, really that kind of stuff, really fascinating. And I think that I as a director, I love, I mean, that's fascinating, really interesting stuff too. And I didn't know if I'd be any good when I was a younger actor. And then finally, I got started, I had a chance to do it, and I discovered that I loved it, and I I loved talking to actors and telling them what I think of what they're doing and how to get where they want to go, and finding the words you know to do that. For example, in our town, I cast this young actress named Maggie Lacey to play. What's it? Emily, right? Emily, Emily, yeah, yeah. George and Emily, yeah. And, you know, everybody works very hard for two and a half hours in that play. And then they basically hand it off to the gal who plays Emily, and she's got to bring it on home, yeah, and that's a huge responsibility for that actress. And I didn't, I didn't say it to her that way, but I knew that that's what was happening. And so in order, in order to try to make that work, I remember talking to her about this extraordinary thing that happens at the end of that play, where she gets to go back for one day. She's, she's, she's up in heaven, she's dead. She's talking to the other people, you know. And she gets this gift to go back and see her mom and dad on one day, on her 12th birthday. And so I just remember at the time saying this phrase to Maggie, who was a wonderful actress to work with, and who I think did a wonderful job. And I said to her, Maggie. It this phrase that we hear on the radio, the wonder of it all.
Speaker 2 40:06
Well, this is what this is about. You can't imagine it. Can't be big enough. You don't have to worry about being too big. You don't have to worry about going too far, because it's just an insane, unimaginable thing that occurs when you go back and you see your mother and and how young she looked, and how beautiful she was, and how that makes you feel. And we all have parents. Most of us loved one, at least one of our parents. Most of us, most of our the luckiest, lucky ones. Of us love them both. And to be able to, if I could, if I could go back and spend a few minutes with my mother or father, just imagine what that would be like. I mean, and so I would talk to her about about it like this, and her performance grew and grew and grew over the course of the rehearsals until and there's this wonderful line that Thornton Wilder wrote when she goes back and she says to the stage manager. Does anyone ever realize? She said that, you know that they just go on and they couldn't see me. They they just, they don't have any idea. Do they about how precious life is? And the stage manager says no saints and poets, maybe they do some, you know, yeah, so to spend your time, your your life, your work, working on moments like that? Yeah. Is very, very, very rewarding.
Speaker 3 42:10
Hello, this is Patty Tavis, not the young one. No, I'm 122 years old, right? But the boys at behind the curtain asked me to ask you for some money, because, let's face it, I'm quite musical, and I was a Broadway baby. So head over to patreon.com that's P, A, T, R, E, o n.com and set up a monthly donation, or get your sister Bobby to do it, or some assistant, and I would not say no to a pack of smokes. Thank you.
Rob Schneider 42:52
I have to say, one of the things I find so, so fascinating is, you know you particularly with you your versatility, because you know you've done the classics, and there's Antigone and Long Day's Journey into Night, and then musical comedy. I love my wife and City of Angels. And, no, it's funny.
Speaker 2 43:09
I've done a bunch of the tragedies and the melodramas and I've but I've done some big silly comedies too, and I really love them. It's so much fun. There's that element of listening, which you don't have as much in the other in the other genres, but that's what it's all about. You know, we're working on trying to make this moment, bam, explode. We want we know where the laughs are. Working with Nichols in May, was really interesting for that reason. Would you tell our
Rob Schneider 43:43
audience a little bit about about what you worked on them with, because it's so interesting.
Speaker 2 43:47
Yeah, Virginia was Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Mike and Elaine mind, M, I, N, E, D, they really did. Mine, all of the laughter in that, in that show. And so when we got to the third it was a three act play, and it's a long play, yeah, it could be a grind, I think, without the the humor. I mean, it's dark humor, my God, is it dark humor?
44:14
Statistic? Yeah, yeah, but, but
Speaker 2 44:16
it's there. And I think that one of the things that I learned from that experience was when, when, when the third act finally arrived, and it gets very, very, very dark, the audience had something left to give, because they had. They'd been riding along it. They hadn't been harangued with how important or dark this thing was, you know, for the first two acts. So it kind of that was sort of a lesson to me. One of
Rob Schneider 44:53
the great comic directors, at least from the outside, is Gene Sachs, who you got to work with on, I love my wife. Can you tell us a little. About that process.
Speaker 2 45:02
Yeah, Gene was wonderful. I loved him. Years later, like 20 years ago, he was trying to get a production together. We did several readings for producers of bells are ringing with Twiggy and me, oh, wow to she was, she was pretty delightful. She's not a great singer, but she can sing, and she's a real sweetheart. And it would have been, it would have been a lot of fun. And we had a wonderful he put together a wonderful company of character actors in it. And I like Gene very much. In fact, he died about a couple years ago, and I hadn't seen him in a long time, but all of a sudden, out of the blue, I started thinking about him one weekend, and it was the weekend that he died. He was in, he was in his nine, I think was 90 or 92 I talked to his wife, Karen, afterwards, and I said, you know, I read in the paper this morning, Monday morning, that that gene is gone. And I said, and I was thinking of them all weekend, out of the blue, just, you know, I was going to call you to talk to him, right? One of those crazy things, you know, yeah, she's somebody you don't think I'm about him for a while, and then all of a sudden he was right there, and he was out. I think he died. I think he fell going out to get firewood in the wintertime. Well, that was a weird experience. We were actually cast all of us by Joe Layton, who was supposed to direct and choreograph. And about 10 days or two weeks into our rehearsal process, down at the Ukraine over the Ukrainian national Hall down on Second Avenue, where we all smell like cabbage for you know, like we came into rehearsal one day, and the bad news was that Joe had been injured that night before, and we didn't have a director, and he was going to be okay, but he'd been badly injured. The story that we got was that he had been in in someone's loft, or had been on a loft, and the phone rang and he he picked it up and went to lean back and fell off the Oh, off the loft, and had a head injury and was badly injured. So there we were without without a director, and sy Coleman started making phone calls. And one of the calls that he made was to Gene Sachs, who lived in California. He was married to be Arthur, yes, right. And I was sitting next to Psy when he called, and it was, you know, in New York, New York time, and it was early, pretty, really, pretty early out there in California. And size side of the conversation was, hi gene, it's, it's Psy, oh, oh, sorry, B, B had a very deep voice, of course, you know,
48:27
all the time, I'm sure there.
Speaker 2 48:29
Yeah, she sounded like a man. And so gene came in, actually, Tommy Tune came in too. And we all wanted Tommy, oh, we thought he was going to come in and take us over. And it was a very, very difficult period for all of us, because, you know, we were only like 10 days into rehearsal, and all of a sudden we were auditioning what we had for directors, they can come in, and we'd start doing this stuff. But, you know, it's, you're at your most vulnerable 10 days in and to be actually trying to so kind of sort of perform it for people when you're not even off book yet. It was, it was lousy, but Tommy was really sweet and generous, and we all thought he'd be really great. Gene was not that way. He was very tough and very
Speaker 4 49:26
well. I mean, you mean, like, like, cold, or just his way or the highway, or
49:33
he was not accessible to us at
Speaker 1 49:34
first, because it's a small show. I mean, it's only, like, there's four of you the bands on stage. We've talked to John Miller. We've talked, I mean, like, it's,
Speaker 2 49:43
it was really hard. And you know that that old adage about, if Hitler hadn't killed himself, the only fitting thing to would have been to send him out of town with the musical, you know? Yeah, and that was kind of the situation. There was a lot of. Pressure, because we had a lot of stuff on the line already, right? You know, we were in we were in production, we were in rehearsals, and all of a sudden he's trying to, you know, come up to speed with it. So in his while we were in rehearsal, he was not accessible, and I didn't even know if I liked him, but after we got in, got up on the stage, we went, and we started out in Philadelphia, and we played there for two or three weeks. And once we got up on the stage, and he was able to see that we actually had we were actually pretty good. I mean, we were actors who knew what we were doing. Then he was wonderful about giving us notes. And I loved his notes, okay? But I think also he wasn't quite sure what he signed on for, you know, and as as once we were able to get up on the stage and make it our own and not be spoon fed, and he didn't have to spoon feed us. We all started to like each other, and there was a mutual respect, and we had a wonderful time. That's great. It was a tough, tough period, yeah, for everybody, and we all had been cast by Joe, and liked him very much. So it was, yeah, it was a weird, weird situation.
Rob Schneider 51:24
Do you remember what you sang for your audition? Did you have a go to song when you were auditioning for musicals? You know,
Speaker 2 51:32
I was the worst auditioner for musicals in the world, and I auditioned for a lot of them. I auditioned maybe four or five times for Greece, the original course, yeah, you would have been. I auditioned a bunch of times for the Robert bride group, Barry Bostwick, I think both of those right. But I also auditioned for Jesus Christ Superstar. And, you know, I never had a pianist, and I don't read music, so I would learn the thing off the record, and then I go in and try to sing it in whatever that key was, which was ridiculous. And I remember going then I was inspired. Now I'm sad, and after all, I tried for three years, seems like 30, you know, and I never was prepared. I would always sing songs that were probably not appropriate or they weren't musical comedy numbers. Remember singing a Chris Christopherson song, take the ribbon from your hair, shake it loose and let it fall, lay it soft against my skin, like the shadows on the wall, songs like that, and then you go, thank you very much. Yeah. Or could you learn something else and come back and sing? You know, I auditioned for a lot of a lot of musicals, and I never did it well, and I always was a wreck going into but I went and auditioned for City of Angels, and I walked into the theater I sang whatever those two songs were. I think one of them might have been I think so. I think Psy had had me down to his office a couple of weeks before that, and had me sing a little of you're nothing without me, yeah. So I sang a couple of songs, and then they wanted me to read. And I I started to read the scene, and I messed it up, and I stopped, and I said, I screwed this thing up. Can I go back and start again? And this big white haired head loomed out of the darkness. It was Michael Blakemore, yeah. And he said, Yes, yes, go back and start again, but you've got the rhythms. You've got the rhythms. So I started again, and I went pretty well, and I got back in the cab and back in the bus and back in the train and back in the car, and I drove into my house in Williamstown about nine o'clock that night, and Pam walked out the door, and this never happens to me. And she said, Jimmy, they called you got the job. Wow. And you know there were, there is a rhythm to that stuff that just one look, and you could tell a Laura Villiers was a handful, maybe two, if you played your cards, right, she had a face. You could hang a dream on a body that made the Venus de Milo look all thumbs and only the floor kept her legs from going on forever. Yeah, that's great. God bless. Larry Gilbert. Larry Gilbert, yeah,
Rob Schneider 54:36
what was that rehearsal process?
Speaker 2 54:38
Like a dream for City of Angels, yeah, it was wonderful, yeah. Blake more is an actor, you know, yeah, and it was very well organized. Very well organized. Psy is a perfectionist. And I, I used to joke, I'd say, you know, Psy is a. Quintessential toon Smith, if you follow Psy walking, if you're walking down, down the sidewalk in New York City and he's walking in front of you, you can actually see notes coming out of his but it was just a wonderful time. The company was very, very talented and and close. We had a wonderful time. Greg and I were very, are still very good friends. I loved Renee Bergeron, and he died last December. And the ladies were, you know, de hoti and and Randy Graf singing, you can always count on me. I mean, that just doesn't get better than that. Yeah, and Kay McClellan was, was wonderful. And a young, very young Rachel York, that's right, boy is she talented. So yeah, we had a wonderful time, and the material was great. And you know what? We just had a little zoom reunion a month or two ago, we got everybody Randy basically set it up, missouli, I call her Missoula and and zipple was on it, and Blakemore was on it. Oh, wow. And the other guys are gone, unfortunately. But what we didn't know was that the producers were ready to pull the plug on it. They didn't get it. They didn't think we were going to be successful, and they couldn't believe it when the Times wrote us a love letter, because they were ready to shut it down at the end of that week, that week, oh, my god, yeah, wow. The sugars The shoe was particularly, yeah, yeah. They did just they didn't get it, yeah. And I have to credit Michael Blakemore for protecting the company from that new we had no idea that that was going on. He was he took all that pressure on his shoulders, and he never let any of us worry about any of that. And the show was so complex physically, you know, white stuff and the and the moving scenes and all that jazz that we couldn't take it out of town. Yeah, it was too complicated. In fact, we were in the Virginia theater then, and you wouldn't have believed what was going on backstage, because the crew had to pull these things off, break them down, fly them get the next thing. There wasn't a lot of room back there, and so it was really kind of a ballet dance for all of us on it, both on and off the stage. But boy, what a delight. It was so much fun walking on the stage every night. You know that music, so good music was what I used to be down in the pit and count off the the orchestra, our conductor, Gordon, would say, okay, Jimmy, hit it. 1234, and I run upstairs and climb on the gurney, and they roll me out, and we had a wonderful time that it just doesn't get much better than that.
Rob Schneider 58:16
Sounds like a party and then a Tony Award to that's like the cherry on top of the Sunday, I can imagine,
Speaker 2 58:23
yeah, the whole it was, there's a total delight. Everything about that was delightful. And we were very, very tight company, really close. We stayed that way. We hung out together, the company and the musicians and the crew, and we all just, we go to Gallagher, Gallagher's every night, or like, three, four nights a week. Yeah, I had a phone in my dressing room. This is before cell phones. Yeah, and time daily was doing gypsy and she we had phones that are in each other's dressing rooms. And we called, What are you doing tonight? Yeah, okay, Bring, bring some guys, Alicia roses, you know, and we'd all go out afterwards a couple nights a week. And we had a softball team. We played. We hung out at Gallagher's until God knows what time every night was really, really a wonderful time.
Rob Schneider 59:17
So incredible the company can have that. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 59:21
Now, by the way, and by the way, Chicago wasn't too shabby a deal either. You know, that was fun.
Speaker 1 59:26
Say that, yeah. I mean, that's and still going to, I mean, yeah, when you, when do you start a show? And then all these years later, you can say, that's the show I started. I mean, yeah.
Speaker 2 59:38
And another of the unknown parts of the Chicago story is I invested in what I invested in.
Rob Schneider 59:48
You're a smart man in the beginning,
Speaker 2 59:52
and so I'm still getting paid. And for you, because I was an original investor, they asked me if I wanted to invest in the road company. I'm. Like, Oh yeah, so the road companies, and then, oh, and we're going to also do it like an English company, oh yeah, I'm in that one too, and that ran for 15 years.
Rob Schneider 1:00:08
Yeah, so smart. Oh my god, that's so smart. I mean, I
Speaker 2 1:00:12
don't, I don't invest in shows I never had before. But that was sort of like, we, you know, we did it at on, course, yeah. So I had the advantage of having heard and seen the way the audience responded to us, and when it came around, I just said, if ever, yeah, there's no such thing as a sure thing, but this is pretty close. When you were doing
Rob Schneider 1:00:37
the rehearsals for encores, did you know in rehearsal, like, Oh, this is this is something special. When did that dawn on you?
Speaker 2 1:00:43
I Our first performance before an audience, that first number, all that jazz started, and at the end of that number, the audience roared. I mean, they roared. You know, that's a sound that you just don't hear very often, yeah. And so that's when I realized, Oh, this is something special. And then they roared after every single number. It wasn't just the first number, it was like, and I always thought at the time that, you know, there'd been so many of these lousy shows with with gimmicks like falling helicopters and chandeliers and all that jazz, and they weren't very distinguished. And then all of a sudden, there was this kind of, we're just right in your face, performers who could really deliver these triple threat actors, singer, dancers, you know. And I thought, I think, I thought that, wow, the audience is just, you know, they, there's, they're dying to see this kind of, they miss it. This is real performing, real, real razzmatazz, you know, yeah. And I, I still think that people are, you know, appreciative of it
Rob Schneider 1:02:05
for that reason. So is there anything on your bucket list in terms of roles or shows that you would still like to check off? I mean, you've done pretty much everything. Have you? Have you ever played the father in Long Day's Journey in tonight?
Speaker 2 1:02:18
That's funny that you should mention that that's what that was always the show, that if someone asked me this question, for this question, I would say, Well, I would like to play the old man. Yeah, I don't know if that's going to happen. I don't know if I want to do it anymore. It's an awful lot of work. Yeah, it's epic. It's epic on the other and if somebody said to me, we're going to do this really, really, really good production, and we'd like you to play the old man. I'd have a hard time saying no, yeah, yeah. The other thing the show I always wanted to direct was West Side Story.
1:02:53
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 1:02:55
Why? Well, I always, I never believed it when I saw, I never saw the original production, but I saw the movie when I was a kid, and it was like, oh, when Tony gets here, Tony's gonna Tony's gonna do it. Tony's gonna be the way he's gonna say. And then Richard bamer shows up. What? And I thought, how cool would it be if that show with that score. You know, if you could actually believe that these guys were, yeah, we're gang members. And, you know, we could cast dancers who can do that,
Rob Schneider 1:03:33
who could look like that. You know, I'm curious, what is a piece of advice that you would give to your your younger self now you've had this amazing career. You're going back though talking to the young man who's at Brown young man at Yale, what would you like them to know that you wished you had known back then before you started your journey? That's a pretty good question.
Speaker 2 1:03:53
It's funny, you know, when I was a young actor, I never wanted to be on Broadway. That wasn't really where I wanted to be, yeah. And I think I've probably, in terms of television shows and series and things, I've turned down more money than I've made because I was, you know, I mean, I was spending, I would spend all year trying to make enough money so I could afford to go to Williamson, yeah, you know, and do stuff like that. I don't know. I don't, I don't know if I'd do anything differently.
Rob Schneider 1:04:29
I mean, the career that you've had, and the versatility and and, you know, you've been able to tell so many wonderful stories and so many different genres. I mean, that's, that's fulfilling. I would assume, I would assume there wouldn't be a lot of changes. Well, no, I
Speaker 2 1:04:45
mean, as I find myself, you know, getting excited about the moment in our town, talking to you about that, or about what was going on in Long Day's Journey, or, you know, the working on the comedy with Mike Alan. And Elaine, yeah, being on stage with her was really, really wonderful. I've said this before. I guess they call us the players, because at our best, it's like we play together. Yeah, you know, it's sort of like dancing. You got to be able, you got to have somebody who can give and take. And you know, you can't have it. You can't be out there being rigid or always leading. You have to, you know what I mean, right? So that's been, really, that's been the fun of it. Yeah, nothing,
Rob Schneider 1:05:35
nothing better. James, this has been such an absolute pleasure. I can't tell you how much we appreciate you taking the time out to talk to us.
Speaker 2 1:05:42
Well, thank you. It should be painting the shit. I have to go back looking
Rob Schneider 1:05:47
for a second coat now. James, thanks so much. Enjoy your day. Good luck painting. Thanks.
Speaker 1 1:05:57
Thank you for listening to today's episode, and a big thanks to the punchy players. Jeff Marquis, who is bringing back Lucy, Betty, Judy and more to shill for us,
Rob Schneider 1:06:05
and a big thanks to our sound editor Daniel Schwartzberg and social media manager Bethany and Solecki.
Speaker 1 1:06:12
Don't forget, we want more folks to hear these incredible stories, and that's where you come in. In order
Rob Schneider 1:06:17
for people to find out about us, we need lots of ratings on iTunes, so head on over to iTunes. Search for behind the curtain Broadway's living legends. Click on our logo, click on ratings and reviews, then write a review and leave us five stars and make us feel as special as Eliza Doolittle on Eliza
Speaker 1 1:06:34
Doolittle day. Or you can leave us just one star, and you can make us feel as baddy, baddie bad as Annie did in that really weird production in Boston, where Annie dreamt that she was being adopted, but then she ended up back where, in the orphanage, right back where she started. Yeah, true story. Rob saw it,
Speaker 5 1:06:50
yes, and it was batty. It was bizarre. I was there. I was
Rob Schneider 1:06:55
Oh good. So head on over to iTunes and make us feel even more special than we already do you.
