This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Robert W. Schneider: Will everyone here kindly step to the rear and let a winner lead the way? Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt gave the world the longest-running musical in history, The Fantasticks, and blazed a trail that we now call Off-Broadway. Their works were daring, experimental, and theatrical, all being inspired in some way by Thornton Wilder's ideas in his play Our Town. So, if Jones and Schmidt admired Our Town so much, why not make a musical out of it? And boy, oh boy, did they ever. They ended up creating one of the best scores of the 1980s, and unequivocally, their best score, period. And no one will ever get to hear it. See, what happened was...well, you'll have to stick around and listen.

[0:57] Robert W. Schneider: Welcome back to another episode of Broadway Bound, the musicals that never came to Broadway. And if you like this show, please head over to robwschneider.com, click AMTA, and make a tax-deductible donation so this show can continue on. Maybe if I have enough money, I can try to buy the rights back to Grover's Corners. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt gave the world The Fantasticks. Um, I do, I do. One ten in the shade. They were more revolutionary, I think, than people give them credit for. Because they wanted to create a very unique, specific, different kind of theatre. One that actually was very inspired by Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. That's where our story starts today. Thornton Wilder was one of America's most optimistic playwrights, in my opinion.

In the first part of the 20th century, he was a stark contrast to the Sturm and Drang of Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman. In his life, Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzer Prizes, and his works were wonderful, like the Merchant of Yonkers, which became Hello Dolly. Even when they seemed pessimistic, like the post-apocalyptic The Skin of Our Teeth, there was always a tinge of hope, and if there is one thing musical theatre loves, it's hope. And twinks. Hope and twinks. Well, Wilder had an intriguing idea in the 1930s, a play about two small-town families in New England united by the marriage of their children, George and Emily, and how the families deal with the death of Emily not long after the marriage.

Its first act, called Daily Life, would follow their families and their community citizens. The second act, Love and Marriage, their union, and then the third, Death and Eternity, would take us to life in the great beyond, where Emily will spend eternity with others from the town who have pre-deceased her, everything taking place in the third act in a cemetery. The play would be called Our Town, emphasizing community. What was Wilder trying to accomplish? Let him tell you. Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village, or as a speculation about the condition of life after death. It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our life. I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimension of time and place.

The recurrent words in this play, few have noticed it, are hundreds, thousands, and millions. To emphasize these small events, Wilder had a brilliant conceit. The show would be done without scenery, props, costumes. It would be on an empty stage, and a narrator, whom he called the stage manager, would weave in and out of the scenes and offer commentary. It would be meta, before meta was a thing, brecked with a heart. Why, Mr. Wilder? Each individual assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner. And here the method of staging finds its justification. In the first two acts, there are at least a few chairs and tables. But when Emily revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birthday, the very chairs and table are gone.

Our claim, our hope, our despair is in the mind, not in things, not in scenery. Moliere said that for the theater all he needed was a platform and a passion or two. The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us. Our Town opened in 1938, and it was a revolution. It won a Pulitzer Prize, Edward Albee called it the greatest American play ever written, and it's never gone out of fashion, becoming a staple of high schools, colleges, community theaters, and it was on Broadway as recent as last season, under the direction of Kenny Leon. The role of the stage manager has been taken on by people as varied and different as Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, Helen Hunt, Spalding Gray, Jim Parsons, Paul Newman, and Frank Sinatra.

Despite its turn-of-the-last-century settings, it'll never disappear, as the core of the show is about our own humanity. But could it also sing? Well, in the early days of television, the channels needed content, unique content, different than movies and theater, and NBC's Producers Theater, led by Broadway producer Leland Hayward, had an idea. Why not do a 90-minute live color musical adaptation of Our Town? He put together composer Jimmy Van Heusen and lyricist Sami Khan to craft the score, and got a cast including Ava Marie Saint as Emily, I'll tell you why in a second, I'm laughing, James Dean as George, and as the stage manager, the chairman of the board, Frank Sinatra. At the last second, James Dean dropped out, and was replaced by a new young actor named Paul Newman, I'll tell you why I'm laughing.

I'm a huge fan of something, it's called Skip E. Lowe Looks at Hollywood, and Skip E. Lowe was a talk show host, it's Jiminy Glick, if you know the character Jiminy Glick, Jiminy Glick was based off of Skip E. Lowe, and in one of my favorite episodes of Skip E. Lowe, they sent him out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame just to talk to the stars, like literally talk to the stars that are on the sidewalk, but he's obviously very old and very confused, and he keeps wanting to talk about Anna Marie Saint and Gary Krant in the wonderful film North of Northwest, so I'm so sorry, every time I see Ava Marie Saint, I think Anna Marie Saint. On Saturday, on Saturday, Saturday, on September 19th, 1955, audiences were introduced to Our Town the Musical, and more importantly, it introduced the world to this song.

Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage, this, I tell you, brother, you can't have one without the other, love and marriage, love and marriage. Now, Wilder was not the biggest fan of this program, and so this musical was never adapted for the stage. Time marches on, Wilder continued to write and eventually passed away in 1975, respected and revered. And as he was gay and unmarried, Wilder's estate had to be looked over by someone, and that person would be his devoted sister Isabel, who was, well, more on Isabel later, because we should look at two people whom Wilder never met, but whose entire outlook on theater was crafted by him, two young Texans who wanted to write musicals, and their names were Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt.

[7:48] Robert W. Schneider: Schmidt was the composer, Jones the lyricist and book writer, and they met at the University of Texas and began writing together. Now, before they hooked up as collaborators, Jones had worked on a musical with a man called John Donald Robb on an adaptation of Rostand's The Romancers. But they set that story in the Old West, they called it Joy Comes to Dead Horse, and it debuted in 1956 at the University of New Mexico. But Jones felt something wasn't right with it, and maybe Schmidt would like to work with him to fix it, using the simplicity of Our Town and its stage manager conceit as a guiding force. Jones and Schmidt began crafting their show, now called The Fantastics, using practically nothing to tell their story, just like Our Town.

It would only have eight characters, no scenery, just a piano and a harp, and the audience would have to use their imagination to fill in their blanks while a man by the name of El Gallo led us on this journey. But this musical they're creating is too small for Broadway. How could you justify putting this small show alongside West Side Story, The Music Man, My Fair Lady and the like? Well, luckily, only a few years earlier, the Three Penny Opera proved that you could do small musicals in an amazing land called Off-Broadway, small theaters usually located down in the village, and they could get away with more experimental work. On May 3, 1960, The Fantastics, which was so clearly inspired by Our Town's ideas, opened at the very intimate Sullivan Street Theater and received mixed reviews.

It seemed like it was going to close, but its producer believed in it, and he kept The Fantastics running until January 13, 2002, racking up 17,162 performances. Smart of the producer, because investors on this show got a 24,000% return on their investment. This little show that could was a sensation despite the dismissal of their score and book by many critics, and soon Broadway producers came courting their team. Their most traditional Broadway show was an adaptation of N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker, called 110 in the Shade, which opened on Broadway in 1963, but it wasn't really as conventional as others might think. I think people sort of think of Jones and Schmidt as, oh yeah, they kind of were just in the mode of Rodgers and Hammerstein, not very unique. That's not necessarily true. Here's Tom Jones talking a little bit about the process of creating 110 in the Shade.

[10:23] Tom Jones: First of all, we looked for a signature, a something that would give us an overall sense of structure or form. The answer, we felt, was in the sun. The story is about drought. Drought is about sun. We decided to take the idea of the one-day time frame mentioned in the stage directions of the play and actually use that day to follow the progress of the sun as it interacts with the story. We would begin the show with the rising of the sun. Then we would follow it throughout the course of the first act, as it got higher and hotter, ending the act as Lizzie, standing on a bare stage in a white dress against the flaming red colors of a western sunset, sings some sort of song about being an old maid.

Act two would then take place during the softer and more romantic nighttime. This was our basic structural vision. It is the exact opposite of the fantastics, by the way, which states in the program. Act one takes place in the moonlight. Act two takes place in the sun. Now, this sort of imagery was predating how Prince would do in his musicals and was slowly beginning to bring a special artistry to musicals that had not really been seen before. I always think of Jones and Schmidt as like the European film directors, like Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini, who were taking conventional cinema and adding a tone to it not really seen before. I like to use these analogies on dates, and this is probably why I'm still single and go to bed and cry at night.

[11:39] Robert W. Schneider: Now, the reviews for 110 in the Shade were strong, except the New York Times, who always saw Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt as less than. But that bad review from the Times, which had so much power at this moment in history, and the overshadowing of a show like Hello, Dolly! that season just sort of left 110 in the Shade in the wings. Their next show was more daring, even though it doesn't feel like it is, an off-Broadway musical on a Broadway stage. The source material would be a 1951 play called The Four Poster about a married couple and their life from wedding night to the selling of their home. It was a great hit for Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronin, with its two characters in a bedroom, that's the set, that's the idea.

It won the Tony Award for Best Play. Now, this was the 1960s, the land of sets, colors, costumes, large characters, and even larger ensembles. But once again, The Four Poster is a two-person show with one set. But this was the show that David Merrick wanted to musicalize, and he wanted Gower Champion to direct it, and he wanted it to star the music man's Robert Preston and Peter Pan's Mary Martin, Harold Hill and Nellie Forbush together. And Merrick wanted Jones and Schmidt on the score, but Mary Martin wasn't too enthused with the team, and she passed. It's not going to be the first time with her, as she also passed on a TV adaptation of 110 and the Shade earlier on. But Mary changed her mind, and they opened I Do, I Do, a two-person musical on Broadway in 1966.

The actors changed in front of the audience, they played their own instruments, and proved to Broadway that sometimes bigger isn't better. I Do, I Do got great reviews. Well, Gower Champion did, and Mary Martin did, and Robert Preston did, but once again, the times looked down on the writers. The show did well, and it became a staple of community theaters, and it's always fun to see married couples play the roles. And I just want to veer for a second and tell you a personal anecdote about the wonderful Tom Jones. I am lucky enough to work over at 54 Below, and my first show that I did there, sort of a trial run to see if I could do the job or not, was a concert version of I Do, I Do. And Tom was actively involved with it, and did a beautiful job, and gave his blessing to include a gay couple in the show.

And he was just absolutely wonderful, and our cast was amazing. It was people like Beth Leavel, and Robin Hurter, Patrick Page, Paige Davis, Bob Cuccioli, Chip Zine, and I'm going to forget people, I apologize. But the most touching moment of the evening was when Tom and Rita Gardner, who was the original girl in the Fantastics, came out and sang the last song together about leaving the house after 50 years of marriage.

[14:34] Robert W. Schneider: Out of my career, I owe it to Tom, so I just wanted to mention that. Now, despite their brilliance, the phone was not ringing off the hook. And they opted to do work that pleased them, which is kind of nice. They weren't taking on projects just to keep their names out there. They were more selective about what they were doing. And this is how they created a thing called Portfolio. Tom Jones.

[14:58] Robert W. Schneider: In 1967, Harvey and I had, I do, I do, running on Broadway with Mary Martin and Robert Preston and the Fantasticks running off Broadway and being produced by literally thousands of theaters around the world. We had money, so we decided to find a space and open a theater workshop where we could attempt to create original musicals in new and previously untried forms. Our motives were not particularly noble, to expand the horizons of the American musical, etc., but simply to find a place where we could do our best and most exciting work. The Fantastics had broken almost every rule of the musical theater of the time, and it had proven, to our amazement, to be an astounding success. So, to misquote a lyric from the wonderful and underappreciated Flora, we are not Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rodgers and Hammerstein are Rodgers and Hammerstein are Rodgers and Hammerstein. We wanted to find a home for our particular dreams and talents.

[15:49] Robert W. Schneider: The Portfolio on 47th and 8th had one mission. Original musicals, not based on plays or movies or books. Can you imagine a place like that today? It would be a spirit Halloween within a minute. Their first show was Celebration, a fable about the illusions of life and the harsh realities, and it moved to Broadway in 1969 and got nice reviews, with most critics saying this should be off-Broadway. Then came Philemon in 1975 about a Roman clown impersonating a Christian leader and slowly turning into the man he was impersonating, and, surprise, this show got really good reviews. A first for these men, which pisses me off because their music and lyrics fit the characters, fit the moment, and move the show the way that they should. People dismiss the score to I Do, I Do as simple and not very revealing, but that's the story, and I actually think I Do, I Do tells you more about relationships and marriages than a lot of other pessimistic or cynical musicals.

[16:45] Robert W. Schneider: Same year, 1975, was a musical they wrote called The Bone Room, a musical about male menopause, and that's as exciting as it sounds, at least to the critics. Then it seemed that they might come back to Broadway, after a very, very long absence. The Avengers' Diana Rigg was interested in doing a musical about the life of French author Colette, who wrote Gigi, among other things. The show would open in Seattle in 1982, then off to Broadway, but two issues. One, critics felt the show was too intimate for Broadway and had been blown up to make it look like a Broadway show. Two, Colette's works were more interesting than Colette herself, which is a shame, because the score is actually quite lovely. Here's Diana Rigg singing a song from Colette.

[17:35] ♪ Musical number: "The Door is Open" — performed by Diana Rigg ♪

[20:07] Robert W. Schneider: So, it's now the 1980s, and Broadway is about to be dominated by the Brits. Evita and Cats are giving us spectacles, the new musicals are based on films like 42nd Street and Nine, and Broadway seems to be regressing, as if the imagination of people like Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt isn't welcomed in this new fantastical world, no pun intended. Keep them down at the Sullivan Street, where simple tourists can grab the simplicity of their shows. That's not for Tom and Harvey, Broadway. It seemed the rest of their careers would be retooling their works from the 70s and trying to get those right, but one day, in early 1983, a phone call changed all of that. Peter Newfield was a general manager, along with his partner R. Tyler Gatchell Jr. Peter was a pretty big player in the industry, having represented shows like Jesus Christ Superstar, Annie, Sweeney Todd, Evita, and the list goes on and on. Peter loved Our Town, and he always wanted to make a musical of it, but there was something standing in the way.

[21:01] Robert W. Schneider: He needed the permission of Isabel Wilder. Remember her thorn sister? She would have to sign off on someone taking her brother's work and making it sing. Why? He even turned down Rodgers and Hammerstein, who wanted to take a crack at it. Thornton Wilder did. It works brilliantly without singing, and Thornton hated the Sinatra TV thing. It plays perfect. Why are you going to mess with it? Well, not one to be discouraged. Peter met Isabel for tea, and she listened, and she agreed, actually, on one condition. She would give Peter the rights for two years, and two years only. So, work fast. Who? Who would understand the world of Thornton Wilder in musical terms? Well, what about the men who basically had taken every great thing about Our Town and put it into their musical that was so good it was now the longest-running show in American theater history? Would Jones and Schmidt want to tackle Our Town, the musical?

[21:58] Tom Jones: I was stunned. I knew that for years everyone, including Rodgers and Hammerstein, had tried to get the rights. But Thornton Wilder had been unhappy with the TV version in which Frank Sinatra played the stage manager, and he hadn't wanted to do it as a musical. At that point, I didn't want us to be known as the people who ruined Our Town. But the chance proved irresistible. All people want to do is revive Fantasticks and I Do, I Do, instead of taking a risk on us. So, Jones and Schmidt locked themselves in Jones's Connecticut house. They moved the action of Our Town from the beginning of the 1900s to between the two World Wars. They wrote a few songs, gave them to Neufeld, who loved them, and it seemed like all systems were a go. In January of 1984, theater journalist Harry Hahn broke the news that Our Town, the musical, would be the next Jones and Schmidt show.

[22:48] Robert W. Schneider: This show is so perfect for Jones and Schmidt. Just think about the material for a second. Last time Wilder played a musical adaptation, it was Hello, Dolly!, which was a massive, massive success. But one of the cool things is Jones and Schmidt kind of slapped on the wrist of, oh, this is too intimate, your story is too intimate, you're too intimate, and Our Town is a show that has proved that intimacy can work on a big Broadway stage. This just seems like the perfect combination. Now, to make sure that all was well, a six-week workshop would be held at Westbeth on Bank Street down in the village starting in January of 1985, and that would be culminating in private performances to get some backers in March of 1985, and then it would just open on Broadway in May of 1985, ideally at the Music Box, and the show would now be called Grover's Corners, which is the town that the show takes place in.

[23:43] Robert W. Schneider: If you're a Birdcage fan, listen to when Nathan Lane as the mother says that's where he grew up, Grover's Corners. It's a fictional town. The show would be directed by newcomer David Trainor, who had never done a musical before. It would be choreographed by Marge Champion, and the workshop cast included Baby's Liz Calloway as Emily, Scott Wara as George, John Cunningham as the stage manager, and they knew that that role would be a star role at some point, no offense to John Cunningham, and an ensemble that consisted of, get ready for this, Gary Beach, Ron Carroll, Willie Falk from Miss Saigon, Peg Murray, and ten other actors. The workshop would cost $200,000 or $590,000 today. The show's whole budget would be $2.75 million or $7.9 million today. That's a lot for just a ladder and a couple of tables.

[24:35] Robert W. Schneider: Honestly, the 1984-1985 season desperately needed something like Grover's Corners. It seemed that this season would be one of the worst on record for new musicals. We had The Three Musketeers, Harlem Nocturne, Harrigan and Hart, Leader of the Pack, Grind, and Quilters, which I used to call Queefing Quilters, and they all came and went, only with Big River making a splash. Why did I call it Queefing Quilters, you asked? Well, I'd like to tell you a story very quickly. I always made a joke to my best friend that I loved the musical Quilters. I didn't. I didn't. I'd never even seen Quilters, never heard it. Well, for some reason, she believed me, and for my birthday, she's like, I have a surprise for you, dress nice.

So I put on a suit and tie, thinking we were going to a fancy restaurant or a fancy show, and we literally went to this community theater in the middle of Los Angeles that was playing Quilters. And she was like, but isn't this your favorite show? And I said, I was always joking. So I don't know if you know Quilters. There's a scene where I think a tornado or a hurricane hits everybody, and so all the actresses are lying on stage, and you're supposed to be like, oh, I wonder who died in the tornado and stuff like that. And one of the actresses rolls over, and she queefed. My friend pointed that out before I did, and so we call it queefing Quilters. No offense to this really, really beautiful show about the intricacies of patchwork.

[25:59] Robert W. Schneider: So the only show, as I mentioned, that made a splash, no pun intended, was Big River. Grover's Corners would easily, easily have dominated that season. The season was so bad that the Tonys eliminated best performance by a leading actor in a musical and best performance by a leading actress in a musical and best choreography. I actually think Grover's Corners would have won best musical, best score, and best book, awards that were elusive to Jones and Schmidt. Ironically, Jones did win something, though, on the first day of rehearsal for Grover's Corners. His first son. How cool is that? Happy birthday. A wonderful kid. With incredible confidence, Neufeld knew that money would be like water come rolling in for this particular new musical.

First, it was based on a great property. Two, Neufeld's desire was to wave the flag and show audiences what was still good about America. And three, the score was magnificent. Not only did Jones and Schmidt think it was their best work, it was their best work. They knew Wilder's world. It could sing. Here are the writers with the opening number.

[27:01] ♪ Musical number: "Our Town" — performed by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt ♪

[28:10] Robert W. Schneider: He says the name of this musical is Grover's Corners. It was written by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt based on the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Directed by David Treanor. In it, you will see Liz Calloway, Scott Wara, others too numerous to mention. The place is Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. The time is between the two great wars. Part one shows a day in the life of Our Town. Well, let me show you the way Our Town lies. Our town is an ordinary town in almost every way. This is our doctor's house, Doc Gibbs. There's some scenery for those who think they have to have scenery. Our town is filled with ordinary people, at least that's what they say.

[29:09] Robert W. Schneider: This is Mrs. Gibbs' garden. Corn, peas, beans, hollyhock, heliotrope, you know, the usual.

[29:18] Robert W. Schneider: This is Editor Webb's house. He's the editor of the Grover's Corner Sentinel.

[29:23] Robert W. Schneider: And this is Mrs. Webb's garden. Same as Mrs. Gibbs, only a lot of sunflowers, too.

[29:30] Robert W. Schneider: Right here is a big butternut tree.

[29:33] Robert W. Schneider: I see the skies beginning to show some streaks of light in the east there behind our mountain.

[29:39] Robert W. Schneider: The only lights on in town are in a cottage over by the tracks where a Polish mother just had twins.

[29:46] Robert W. Schneider: And in Joe Kroll's house, where Joe Jr. is getting up to deliver the morning paper.

[29:52] Robert W. Schneider: And in the depot, where Shorty Hawkins is getting ready to flag the 545 for Boston.

[30:02] Robert W. Schneider: So, another day has begun. We see the paper boy get on his bike and begin to spin and sail around the stage as he whistles.

[30:14] Robert W. Schneider: There's Doc Gibbs coming down Main Street now. Coming back from that baby case.

[30:21] Robert W. Schneider: Here's his wife coming downstairs to make breakfast. Mrs. Webb coming to get her breakfast, too.

[30:27] Robert W. Schneider: On the bike there, Joe Kroll Jr. delivering Mr. Webb's Sentinel. Joe Kroll sings.

[30:33] Joe Kroll Jr.: Early in the morning as I'm riding my bike. Sometimes I get frightened before it gets light.

[30:41] Joe Kroll Jr.: I don't know why, but the town seems strange at night.

[30:48] Robert W. Schneider: Morning, Doc. Morning, Joe.

[30:53] Doc Gibbs: Somebody sick?

[30:57] Robert W. Schneider: No, just some twins born over in Polish Town.

[31:02] Robert W. Schneider: Stage manager says Dr. Gibbs died in 1950. New hospital is named after him.

[31:06] Doc Gibbs: How's your knee, Joe?

[31:11] Joe Kroll Jr.: Fine, Doc. I never think about it at all. Only like you said, always tells me when it's gonna rain.

[31:14] Doc Gibbs: What's it telling you today? Is it gonna rain?

[31:16] Joe Kroll Jr.: No, sir.

[31:18] Doc Gibbs: You sure?

[31:20] Joe Kroll Jr.: Yes, sir.

[31:22] Robert W. Schneider: Your knee ever make a mistake?

[31:26] Joe Kroll Jr.: No, sir.

[31:28] Robert W. Schneider: And the women call out. Children, children, time to get up.

[31:33] Robert W. Schneider: George, Rebecca, come and eat your breakfast. Wally, Emily, time to get up.

[31:38] Robert W. Schneider: Time to get up. Seven o'clock.

[31:41] Robert W. Schneider: Here comes Howie Newsome delivering the milk.

[31:45] Howie Newsome: Morning, Doc. Morning, Howie.

[31:49] Robert W. Schneider: Somebody's sick. Parrot twins over to Mrs. Garulowsky's.

[31:52] Howie Newsome: Twins, huh? This town's getting bigger every year.

[31:56] Robert W. Schneider: He reaches Mrs. Gibbs' back door. She's waiting for him.

[31:59] Mrs. Gibbs: Morning, Howie. Morning, Mrs. Gibbs.

[32:00] Robert W. Schneider: Doc is here. Just met him coming down the street.

[32:03] Mrs. Gibbs: Is he? Seems like you're late today.

[32:05] Howie Newsome: Yes, something went wrong with the separator. I don't know what it was.

[32:11] Robert W. Schneider: Children, children, time to get up. George, Rebecca, come and eat your breakfast.

[32:18] Robert W. Schneider: Wally, Emily, time to get up. Wally, Emily, you'll be late for school.

[32:27] Joe Kroll Jr.: When my route is over and I'm back on my bike, everybody's up now, they're having a bite.

[32:38] Joe Kroll Jr.: I see their faces through the windows, I hear their voices from the doorways, and so I know another day's begun.

[32:54] Robert W. Schneider: I want to tell you something about that boy, Joe Kroll, there. He graduated high school head of his class, so he got a scholarship to MIT.

[33:02] Robert W. Schneider: Graduated head of his class there, too. It was all wrote up in the Boston papers at the time. Gonna be a great engineer, Joe was.

[33:10] Robert W. Schneider: Then the war broke out, he was killed in the Marianas. All that education for nothing.

[33:20] Robert W. Schneider: Our town is an ordinary town in almost every way.

[33:35] Robert W. Schneider: Our town is filled with ordinary people, at least that's what they say. Everybody does what everybody does in other towns this size.

[33:50] Robert W. Schneider: But if you're really wise, you will realize that our town isn't really ordinary.

[34:02] Robert W. Schneider: No, our town can be quite extraordinary. Our town is the town we live in all our lives.

[34:13] Robert W. Schneider: All our lives. All our lives. All our lives.

[34:32] Robert W. Schneider: And Neufeld knew, he just knew, the Schubert Organization, who owned the Music Box, would invest.

[34:39] Robert W. Schneider: Well, the Schubert's saw it and said everything above. It was wonderful, it was their best work, it was brilliant.

[34:46] Robert W. Schneider: But no one wants to see a musical where everyone ends up dead.

[34:50] Robert W. Schneider: And the Schubert's invested nothing. Don't want to see a musical where everybody ends up dead.

[34:55] Robert W. Schneider: How soon we forget Sweeney Todd, Schubert's. What to do, what to do? Maybe a new director.

[35:00] Robert W. Schneider: David Treanor was out and Richard Mulpey Jr. was in. Maybe a star as the stage manager.

[35:05] Robert W. Schneider: Well, they got one. I love old television and when I found this out, I was so happy.

[35:11] Robert W. Schneider: Conrad Bain of Diff'rent Strokes, he plays Mr. Drummond on Diff'rent Strokes. You know, the Arnold, the patriarch.

[35:18] Robert W. Schneider: He was told, he got a phone call one day, that NBC had canceled Diff'rent Strokes.

[35:24] Robert W. Schneider: And the next day, he signed on to do Grover's Corners as the stage manager.

[35:28] Robert W. Schneider: And then the next day, his phone rang again and it was ABC. They picked up Diff'rent Strokes and he then had to drop out of Grover's Corners.

[35:37] Robert W. Schneider: Who could have replaced him in this? Maybe Nedra Volz or Charlotte Rae.

[35:42] Robert W. Schneider: Oh, it's a place called Our Town. I don't like it. It's cold and it's damp and I don't want to be here.

[35:49] Robert W. Schneider: Not like in Pickwick. Pickwick was one of my favorite shows. Oh, God.

[35:56] Robert W. Schneider: Who's playing George Gibbs? Looks like Nancy McKeon.

[36:00] Robert W. Schneider: Then the show got pushed to the fall of 1985 after another workshop.

[36:05] Robert W. Schneider: And then it was pushed to the spring of 1986 and the rights were done. Expired.

[36:12] Robert W. Schneider: Begging. Pleading. The writers went back to Isabel and they begged for a renewal.

[36:18] Robert W. Schneider: Please renew the rights. She was torn. She felt she should do something with the material, but she didn't want to do the wrong thing.

[36:26] Robert W. Schneider: Maybe this was an omen. It's hard to be the keeper of the flame, especially of somebody as brilliant as Thornton Wilder.

[36:32] Robert W. Schneider: But she yielded and she extended the rights. The score was quite good. She knew that.

[36:38] Robert W. Schneider: As heard here in Emily's I Want song.

[36:42] Emily: I only want someone to love me

[36:51] Emily: To be beside me faithfully

[37:00] Emily: I only need someone to need me

[37:07] Emily: And to want to spend his life with me

[37:16] Emily: I only want someone to want me

[37:24] Emily: To feel that this was meant to be

[37:33] Emily: I only want someone to love me

[37:40] Emily: And to share the good and bad with me

[37:49] Emily: And to share the good and bad with me

[37:55] Robert W. Schneider: Do you, George, take this woman, Emily, to be your wedded wife?

[38:04] Robert W. Schneider: It's a lovely wedding, a lovely wedding. Doesn't she make a lovely bride?

[38:08] George: I do.

[38:10] Robert W. Schneider: Do you, Emily, take this man, George, to be your wedded husband?

[38:15] Emily: I do.

[38:19] Robert W. Schneider: I cry at weddings, I don't know why, but I always, always cry.

[38:23] Emily: I do.

[38:25] Robert W. Schneider: It's a lovely wedding, the loveliest wedding I believe I ever saw.

[38:31] Emily: I only want someone to love me

[38:39] Emily: To be beside me faithfully

[38:46] Emily: I only need someone to need me

[38:53] Emily: And to want to spend her life with me

[39:02] Robert W. Schneider: The stage manager says, I've married over 200 couples in my day. Do I believe in it? I don't know.

[39:07] Robert W. Schneider: In marries in, millions of them. The cottage, baby carriage, Sunday afternoon drives in the car.

[39:16] Robert W. Schneider: First rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will.

[39:30] Robert W. Schneider: Once in a thousand times, it's interesting.

[39:40] Emily: I only want someone to want me

[39:48] Emily: To feel that this was meant to be

[39:55] Emily: I only want someone to love me

[40:02] Emily: And to share my good and bad with me

[40:10] Emily: It's a lovely wedding, a wonderful wedding. I know that they'll be happy.

[40:18] Emily: And to share the good and bad with me.

[40:45] Robert W. Schneider: Now, the producing rights of the show left Peter Neufeld, and it went to a different organization, a new organization, an organization called the National Alliance of Music Theater Producers.

[41:05] Robert W. Schneider: It was an organization of about 52 theaters and producers from all across the country that would produce new musicals, then tour them around the United States, filling their theaters and sharing the costs.

[41:16] Robert W. Schneider: They would go into regional theaters, Civic Light Operas, Summer Stocks, and ideally then that show would move to Broadway.

[41:23] Robert W. Schneider: It felt like a homegrown American counterattack to the British invasion, like to fill the lack of American musicals coming from Broadway.

[41:30] Robert W. Schneider: In the 1986-87 season, the biggest hits were Me and My Girl, Starlight Express, and Les Mis, and the biggest flops were All Americans, Rags, Honky Tonk Nights, Smile.

[41:41] Robert W. Schneider: Their first musical from the National Alliance of Musical Theater Producers, you probably know it now as NAMT, would be Grover's Corners.

[41:49] Robert W. Schneider: And with all of these different theaters contributing financial resources, that meant they could get top-tier talent for this particular show.

[41:59] Robert W. Schneider: The role they were looking at specifically was the stage manager. They had decided very early on that this was going to be the star role.

[42:05] Robert W. Schneider: And for this, they wanted Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Jimmy Stewart, and they had the money, the bucks, to pay these people to do it.

[42:14] Robert W. Schneider: Whatever they asked for, they would have gotten. Except, none of them wanted to do it.

[42:20] Robert W. Schneider: Why would I want to go on the road for 30 weeks with a show that I don't know, when I could just be lounging by my pool?

[42:26] Robert W. Schneider: In June of 1987, it was announced that Grover's Corners, the new musical that takes America back home, yes, that's the subtitle, the new musical that takes America back home, would open at the arena-styled Marriott's Lincolnshire Theater in Lincolnshire, Illinois, on July 29, 1987.

[42:43] Robert W. Schneider: It would be homegrown. It would be directed by Chicago's Dominic Messimi and cast with Chicago actors.

[42:49] Robert W. Schneider: And as a real thrill, the actors playing George and Emily were actually lovers in real life. So that's kind of cool.

[42:55] Robert W. Schneider: For the stage manager, the star of the show, why that was played by Tom Jones.

[43:02] Robert W. Schneider: Yes, the lyricist and book writer Tom Jones with Harvey Schmidt on the piano. It's kind of cool, but it's not money-inducing.

[43:10] Robert W. Schneider: But this would be a good band-aid until a real star could be found when the show continued on to Houston, Long Beach, Sacramento, San Jose, and Pittsburgh.

[43:20] Robert W. Schneider: They would need to close the show at the Lincolnshire on October 11, 1987. Then they would retool and restage the show so it could fit into proscenium houses.

[43:30] Robert W. Schneider: They also had some really good mileage behind them because the reviews, the reviews for them, it's really wonderful. Here's the Chicago Tribune.

[43:39] Robert W. Schneider: The trouble with the musical, as everybody knows, is the book.

[43:42] ⚠ About 15 minutes of audio could not be automatically transcribed.