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[0:17] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process.

[0:30] David Armstrong: My guest today is Jack Viertel, who joins us to talk about his delightful new novel, Broadway Melody. This is part of what seems to be a fascinating current wave of novels that explore the history of Broadway through a combination of fictional characters and real-life Broadway figures.

[0:47] David Armstrong: Jack Viertel began his theatrical career as a drama critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and then worked for two years as a dramaturg at the Mark Taper Forum. This all led to the heart of his career, which was the three decades he spent as the creative director and senior vice president of Jujamcin Theaters, where he oversaw the production of 50 Broadway plays and musicals.

[1:09] David Armstrong: Somehow simultaneously during that, he spent two decades as the artistic director of the New York City Center Encores! series, where he produced 65 musical revivals. Perhaps most notably, he was the creative force behind a string of blockbuster Broadway musicals, including Smokey Joe's Café, Dear Evan Hanson, and Hairspray.

[1:31] David Armstrong: He also taught musical theater at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Secret Life of the American Musical. As always, Broadway Nation is made possible in part through the generous support of our patron club members, including our longtime producer level members, Paula and Steve Reynolds.

[1:52] David Armstrong: If you would like to help support the creation of this podcast, I'll have information at the end of the episode about how you too can become a patron. Here we go. Welcome, Jack Viertel.

[2:02] David Armstrong: It's so wonderful to have you today on Broadway Nation to talk about your new novel Broadway Melody.

[2:09] Jack Viertel: Thank you. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Be part of the Broadway Nation.

[2:12] David Armstrong: I'm thrilled to have you. You have had such an illustrious career as a theater critic, as a producer and dramaturg of some of the biggest hit shows in modern Broadway history, and as the artistic director of the Encores! series. But somehow, in the middle of all that, you found the time to write one of the best nonfiction books about musical theater, The Secret Life of the American Musical. But as far as I know, this is your first novel. Exactly how did that come about? What inspired you to get into the fiction game?

[2:42] Jack Viertel: Well, it is my first novel, if you don't count the one I wrote as an undergraduate at college, which thank God no one ever published. When I finished The Secret Life of the American Musical, which is really a book about musical theater structure, hopefully an amusing one and not a didactic one, but nonetheless, it is a genuine nonfiction. I realized my editors and publishers said, you know, well, write another book, write another book. As they began to give me suggestions, I began to think, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do a celebrity biography, I don't want to do this. I realized as a nonfiction writer, I probably had said everything I really wanted to say. But I do love the process of writing.

I started out professional life as a theater critic. Getting my hands on a keyboard is something that really gives me pleasure. And so I thought, well, then you'll have to tell a story. That's your only other option. It evolved from an aversion to writing another nonfiction book and became kind of an obsession about how to tell a story that is a romantic story, but that also covers several eras of Times Square and Broadway and the incidents that happened there and the fall and rise and fall and rise of the theater district, the theater, and everything that's around it. And so it really evolved from there.

[3:47] David Armstrong: Well, you have so much actual Broadway history folded into the story. First of all, it's incredibly appropriate for this podcast because it is a book about Broadway history, even though it's a fictional novel. What is the exact time period that the book spans?

[4:01] Jack Viertel: Well, it's a little hard for me to say because I do try to catch up on how each of the three main characters got where they got. They all sort of arrive on Broadway in about 1960, but we learn about their childhood, their youth, all the things that drove them here. And I think one of the things I was trying to do in writing that part of the story, which is the early part of the story, is kind of explore something I've observed for many, many years about people, including myself to some degree, which is people on Broadway, people who work on Broadway, not just actors and writers and designers, but people who run the lighting and people who are dressers and all of that, are so often people who escape to Broadway.

They come from somewhere that they have to get out of for one reason or another. And they land on Broadway because it's a very polyglot community. It's very welcoming. There's a tremendous number of gay people. There are lots of people who have had parental issues that they've tried to escape from or brought up in strictly religious cultures that they had to escape from. And not that everybody has to escape from all of these cultures, but some people do, and they say, I've got to get out. I've got to get out and find a place where I can just be me. And the theater actually provides that in some way or other. So I wanted to tell all that history as well. So we really do learn about these characters to some degree from the 1920s and 30s on. But that's the early part, and now the story really starts is kind of in nineteen sixty.

[5:19] David Armstrong: If I'm correct, I think the first show that gets mentioned in detail is Pal Joey. And the last show, the last real actual production that gets talked about is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which is probably not the show that will go down in Broadway history, but gives you a chance to talk about some of those changes in the industry and in Times Square and in the theater business, as you were just mentioning a minute ago. And interestingly enough, I think the final show you talked about is a fictional revival of Follies. I won't give away much more than that. But yeah. You dedicate the book to Seymour Red Press. And that is a name that's appeared in hundreds of playbills, but probably and he had an incredible career on Broadway, but most people will not know who that is. Who was Seymour Red Press?

[6:03] Jack Viertel: Red Press, I didn't even realize his name was Seymour until many years after I met him. He was just universally known as Red, was a reed player, saxophone, flute, and clarinet player who had come out of the big band era and landed on Broadway in the pit of Gypsy, the original production of Gypsy. And when I met him, he was still actively playing for those three instruments in the Encores! Orchestra in, well, I got there in 2000, 2001 was my first season, I think. And he kept going. He finally stopped playing at a certain point. He was the orchestra manager, basically, or the contractor, which is a job definition that most people don't know who are just fans of Broadway. He was the man who worked with the music director to choose the musicians for each show, to deal with the union, to deal with all the paperwork of hiring a musician and following rules and all that kind of stuff.

But his true love was playing. And he played until his mid-eighties, I would say, and then finally it got to the point where actually his chops were still in shape, but his eyes started to go. And he couldn't sight read the way he used to sight read. So he finds and he recognized that, so he finally stopped. But he stuck around and was a contractor until the day he died. I think the day he died, he had four shows running on Broadway. He was ninety-nine years old. And I developed a friendship with him because of Encores!, and he had great stories to tell about the many hits and flops that he had played. He was something of an associate of Jule Styne and played in all of his shows. Not all, but most of his shows.

He had been in catastrophes and he had been in triumph. For him, it was just like, what's the next job? And he had this very matter-of-fact attitude. And I thought I'm gonna write a story about the history of Broadway. This is a guy who'd been through the history of Broadway. And so there's a protagonist for you, there's a hero. But I didn't have a story yet. All I had was one character.

[7:40] Jack Viertel: So you adapted him into the character of Ike, who is one of the three central characters, I guess, in your book.

[7:46] Jack Viertel: Yeah. With his permission.

[7:48] Jack Viertel: With his permission, yes. And how much of Ike's story is based very closely on Red's story?

[7:54] Jack Viertel: Relatively little. The early parts of it which involved his life in the army and where he learned how to put together a band for the first time. And his life as a big band player come from an unpublished and never intended to be published memoir that he wrote for his children and grandchildren about his early years vagabonding around the country. Once he reached Broadway, I started making up everything left and right. And in terms of who he was being brought up, well, I didn't really make it up. I stole it. It's a very loosely stolen version of the film director, Preston Sturges' youth, where his mother took him to Europe and tried to present herself and him as very, very important socialized, you know, Americans. Probably most of what I wrote in the book has very little to do with anything that actually happened to Preston Sturges, but that idea came from reading a biography of him.

[8:40] David Armstrong: That's so interesting. Always fascinating to get inside the inspirations for writers that, of course, come from a million different places, and then get completely transformed by your imagination.

[8:51] Jack Viertel: That character Ike is at the center of the novel with two other characters. In fact, this love triangle that stretches over decades is the main event of the book. Tell us a little bit about those three central characters and this unusual relationship that they're involved in.

[9:06] Jack Viertel: Well, Ike Harris, who's the contractor, I think I've sort of talked about where he came from and how he ended up on Broadway.

[9:13] Jack Viertel: And you've transformed him into a trumpet player in the novel.

[9:16] Jack Viertel: I did. I transformed him into a trumpet player. Part because, and again, the thing about this novel and probably many, many novels, is a lot of stuff is just stolen from things you heard or things you remember. It all gets mushed together, especially if you have as limited an imagination as I do. You just steal from every place. I remember the story of a jazz trumpet player who had to stop finally because he lost his teeth. He couldn't hold the mouthpiece against his lips because he had no teeth behind them. I thought, well, that's a tragedy. That's an interesting tragedy that's very specific and easy to describe, as opposed to someone who either begins to lose his eyesight or has macular degeneration or begins to lose his ability to hold a reed.

So yeah, I mean he became a trumpet player. And also the trumpet is an instrument that everybody associates with Broadway more easily than someone who plays three different reeds. So yes, he became a trumpet player. Also, I became a trumpet player in the eighth grade. I was a terrible trumpet player for two years. So I understood a little bit about how the instrument worked, and that made it a little easier to write about. I don't know how a saxophone works to this day.

[10:13] Jack Viertel: Aurora Shelton, who is the young woman, later an old woman, well, later a middle-aged woman, and then even still later an old woman, is an entirely made-up character. But based on a number of actors, actresses, I guess you used to be able to say, who I knew over the years, who I worked with over the years, who had this very difficult upbringing, came to Broadway, felt they had to sing, that there was nothing in their life that meant anything to them except singing, and then, in a sense, succumbed to some of the curses that they grew up with. In this case, she had an alcoholic mother and she goes through her own battles with alcohol. A lot of that stuff came from people I know and people I know who have gone through things like that in their childhood.

But I also wanted to tell with her the story of a young woman who is so determined to do what she wants to do that she ends up at age almost 18 on the road with a crappy territory band in the Midwest just because she's gonna get out and she's gotta get out and she's gotta do what she's gotta do. And that kind of determination is so often what makes an actor succeed. They have to, they just have to do it. And so I wanted her to be a very strong woman and not a dainty woman, very beautiful, and she's pursued by a lot of people, but she's tougher than they are.

[11:25] Jack Viertel: Absolutely. And the third character who is a spotlight operator, he operates a follow spot originally on the road and then on Broadway, and then becomes a powerful person in the stagehands union, is not really based on anyone. It was based on the idea of the fact that I spent a lot of time talking to the head electrician at the St. James Theater, who was a spotlight operator and then became sort of a crew head about what a spotlight operator does. And he said to me, this was a crucial thing he said to me, he said, "Spotlight operator is the only person on the crew who does not take cues from the stage manager." The spotlight operator's cues are not written into the script. He just knows he or she, I think they were all he back in those days, and they still be.

[12:05] Jack Viertel: He just knows that his job is to follow a particular character. He's got a free hand with this lamp that swings around. Now, today almost everything is automated, and you know, spotlight operators are fewer and further between. But in those days, if you ran a follow spot, you were in the show in a sense. You were part of it. And one of the things I was thinking about in writing the book was there is, of course, a performer at the center of it who's an actress, but I wanted to write a book that did tell about all of the people who really make Broadway shows happen every night. People you never see, the musicians, the stage hands, the spot operator, and there are many others. I had that idea in my mind from the beginning.

And then the spotlight operator somehow became an important idea. And I've told this story a little bit before. The real romantic idea for the book came from an actual situation. And the actual situation was that there was a young woman named, well, I won't give her name here. She was a really lovely young woman who was in the ensemble at Encore. Not in every show, but in many shows, Young Soprano. One of them, she said to me, "This is gonna be my last Encores." And I said, "Why?" And so she said, "I'm moving to Germany to get married." And I thought, well, that's lovely. I mean, we'll miss you, but that's a good reason at least. And she said, "I was playing the lead in a German production of Phantom of the Opera.

And the spotlight operator who followed me around as I moved across the stage, followed me around all night, fell in love with me." And he fell in love with me without talking to me. He fell in love with me just by shining a light on me. And finally, he could work up the courage to come to my dressing room and tell me that he was in love with me and he wanted me to marry him. And I thought, well, that's a really good romantic tale. And I don't have one. Here I have Ike Harris, the trumpet player who lives through decades of Broadway history, and I want to write a novel, but I don't have what else. So I thought, well, if both of these men have reasons to be in love with this woman that are not typical, one of them is under the stage at the pit playing and listening to her, and the other is 50 feet above the stage with a light watching her, then that's a triangle.

And that's the book. I thought that was very captivating and very intimate. Both of those situations, they're having an intimate communion with one another, even though they're entirely separated. It's very sexy in a certain way. And intimate in a way that only could happen in the theater.

[14:08] David Armstrong: Absolutely. It's the way our business works and our art works. And so the intimacy is unique to the theater. I also think one of the things I was most captivated by in the novel was what you find in this novel is not what you expect initially to encounter in a Broadway novel. I thought that was really great.

[14:24] Jack Viertel: That's a good thing, I think. Totally. Because we were getting these perspectives that we know are there, but we don't often encounter in this kind of thing. As having run a follow spot in my youth, I'll tell people this all the time when I talk to students that the best way to learn to be a director is to run a follow spot. You are actively involved in a show, but you get to watch it throughout the whole performance, especially in terms of staging, just understanding where people are on the stage and what is effective.

[14:53] David Armstrong: That's fascinating.

[14:54] Jack Viertel: Yeah, it was great. I wrote down a sentence from your book when I is first becoming a follow spot operator. I think it's on Carousel, a touring company of Carousel, and you wrote, "He was no longer watching Carousel, he was in Carousel."

[15:07] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[15:07] Jack Viertel: There are several other very important characters in the story. I'd love to hear more about what inspired them. Probably first and foremost is Aurora's musical mentor, Marius Hueller.

[15:19] David Armstrong: How do I say his QI?

[15:22] Jack Viertel: Well, it's pronounced Hugh Weiler because I had a music teacher in school named Hugh Weiler. His name was John Hugh Weiler, who was nothing at all like the person in the novel, but I just decided to kind of get my hat to the name. His unusual name. One of the things I knew I wanted to write about and was fascinated by and touched by, having lived through the AIDS crisis in my career on Broadway and having lost so many people and watched while people I didn't even know but admired from afar disappeared, particularly before the drug cocktails were created. It was like the early part of the pandemic, in a way, and that there was no vaccine. And so people would just get sick and die. I wasn't used to this idea that I was probably in my late 30s when this all started to happen, that people all around me just got sick and died.

So I knew that it was important to represent that tragedy and also more intimately the people who were potentially involved in that tragedy as a straight man. I sort of got a get out of jail free card and felt very guilty about it. And the other thing is I knew actually from my wife's family growing up, she grew up in the Midwest, that there were lots and lots of gay people and gay couples who lived peaceably because they lived completely in secret in communities that would never have tolerated them had they been out in any way. And they lived their whole lives there. I put Marius Hughweiler and his partner, long before gay marriage, in a town in Kansas where she escapes to learn how to sing because he was her music teacher when she was a little kid, and she moves around and around and around because her father's in the military.

And that character just grew as I was writing into something more important. Initially, it was just like I needed to represent those many people, both men and women, who were living a closeted life without feeling particularly threatened. They'd figured it out. They'd given up an enormous amount, but they'd figured out how to survive. And then he grew as a character as things went on. And sometimes that happens, I think, when you're writing. I mean, I can't speak as an experienced novelist who's done this a thousand times. It's the first time I ever did it. But he just kept knocking on the door, you know. I remember once when I was working with August Wilson on a play, he said this character walked in and sat, I forget exactly what the line was, said something completely surprising.

He said, "I had no idea. I wrote he enters, I had no idea he was gonna say this." He just started talking. And I wrote it down and it sort of changed the direction of the whole play. And that's kind of what happened with Marius Hughweiler, is he turned out to be no lot more than a music teacher. It turns into a very moving story thread.

[17:39] David Armstrong: I found that to be probably the most moving aspect of the novel. I don't want to give away where it goes, but there are several scenes there that are very, very touching.

[17:47] Jack Viertel: Well, thank you. Talk about Charlie Votary. I guess first thing I'll ask you, is there some relationship either? You don't talk about it in the novel, but at least in your mind to Will Votary.

[17:56] David Armstrong: Is there an echo there of...

[17:56] Jack Viertel: I named Charlie Votary after Will Votary. Will Votary was a black music arranger in the very early era of Broadway in the teens and twenties. He wrote the orchestrations and arrangements for Shuffle Along, which was a Hubie Blake musical, though that's how I came across him. And many of the Ziegfeld follies, right?

[18:13] David Armstrong: And many of the Ziegfeld follies.

[18:15] Jack Viertel: I was just fascinated. And I know that he was thought of as someone by white people who was like, "How does he get to be this educated about this stuff?" I mean, white people generally speaking just didn't believe black people could do things like that. So, in a sense, I wanted to pay tribute to him and used his name. But basically, that character is based on a man named Luther Henderson, who was a black orchestrator and arranger in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

[18:37] David Armstrong: One of the greatest of all time, yeah.

[18:39] Jack Viertel: Yes, and who I met and got became friendly with because he worked on Jelly's Last Jam, which was a show that I was part of. And he was sort of a legend and a hero to the people around him. He was a very tough guy. He once threw me out of a rehearsal room. Years later, many years later, when we remet, I said, "You know, you once threw me out of a rehearsal room. Do you remember that?" And he said, "No, but I'm not surprised. I've thrown a lot of people out of rehearsal rooms." He was a great character and also a great arranger. He was a very proud man and yet a very kind man at the same time. It's in the book, actually. There was a dispute about some arrangement or other that he had done, and the producer wanted him to redo it or whatever.

And he said, "You know, this is the arrangement for this song, and you don't have to play it. Nobody ever has to play it. I've written lots of arrangements that no one's ever played. I can just take it and go home. That's fine." That's the kind of guy he was. He believed in what he was doing. He was a really, really top-to-dite arranger. Broadway shows that had nothing to do with race. He orchestrated Do Re Mi, the Phil Silver's vehicle, and you know, other Broadway shows.

[19:34] David Armstrong: I thought that was the case. I thought it was Luther Henderson, but one of the fun parts of this book is trying to figure out who you're referencing and who you might do along the way. It's great fun in terms of that. Tell us about Antoine Berger, if I'm pronouncing it correctly.

[19:48] Jack Viertel: He's a producer, sort of a low, low-end producer. Antoine Berger is not really based on one character. He has characteristics of several different producers I worked with and producers I knew but didn't work with, and in some cases, producers whose shows I reviewed in Los Angeles back when I was a critic. I wanted to create a man of tremendous kind of fake elegance and pretension, who's actually sort of a swamp dweller. In the case of Antoine Berger, he eventually does produce a Broadway hit that matters. In the case of these other producers, they mostly didn't. But there were a lot of people who took out lowbrow tours, very cheap tours, and were very savvy about the business end of that. You know, they knew how to make money without delivering a lot of quality.

And that's the business they were in. They were sort of bottom feeders. He became an amalgam of a bunch of those different people, none of whose names I'm going to mention in this podcast. There were quite a few of them in those days. And then when I was a critic, I also had to write feature pieces for the paper. Occasionally I'd get to interview one because his production of some low-rent version of some revival was coming to town. They were often very enjoyable, fascinating characters, as long as you didn't have to do business with them.

[20:53] David Armstrong: And tell us about the black dancer CeC Austin.

[20:56] Jack Viertel: CeC Austin is not really based on anyone. CeC Austin is a black dancer who is rarely cast because she's black in the 1960s world of Broadway, where choruses tended to be white, unless you were doing a black show. And so she takes an administrative job with Ike Harris in his office and then has a terrible accident in the one show she's cast in. And the terrible accident actually is based on a real incident that had nothing whatsoever to do with Broadway or theater. It was an accident that happened in the case of the real accident, it was a fatal accident, although it's not in the book, that happened to someone who stayed up all night having sex with someone and then went out and did something dangerous the next day and died.

I sort of adapted that idea into a whole different set of circumstances and activities and everything else. But that moment stayed with me because it was so painful. It was a relationship that was just getting started and that was ended by the fact that it was getting started. And that's where that character came from. And she was really not based on a specific dancer or anything like that. There were dancers in particular in Jelly's Last Jam that I both admired and had huge crushes on. Nothing ever came of any of these crushes, needless to say, but I loved watching them. So she just popped into my head.

[22:02] David Armstrong: And are there other characters that, as you sort of said, with August Wilson came in and took over the two, particularly enjoyed creating?

[22:09] Jack Viertel: Well, there's a whole early plot surrounding the spotlight operator when he's a kid, involving his invention of a light that solves a particular problem, a heat problem. The sort of comic outcome of that involves a bartender and his wife and his brother-in-law, who's a completely unemployable attorney who's trying to get a patent for this thing. That's all just totally made up and sort of wove its own web. I just let them talk to each other and they said things. And then you bring them back later in the book, which is interesting.

[22:37] David Armstrong: Yeah, very captivating characters. That was one of the things that I really did not expect was that by writing these early sections of the book, including about Marius Hughweiler, who is this music teacher to Aurora Shelton when she's in, I don't know, sixth, seventh grade, and this business about the spotlight operator's invention when he's 14, 15 years old, that the adults in those situations were waiting for me when I got to the second half of the book. I just had to grab at them when the time came. And I was not expecting that to happen at all. That's one of the great pleasures of writing, I think, is that, and I remember Wendy Wasserstein saying this to me long, long ago. We never produced one of her plays, but we came close to producing the Heidi Chronicles. When you can't figure out where to go next as a writer, look at what you've already written. It's probably already there. And that turned out to be a huge piece of good advice.

[23:25] David Armstrong: Did you write the book in sequence? Did you start at the beginning and not know where you're going? Did you plot it out? What was your system for this?

[23:33] Jack Viertel: I think I had a beginning and an end. I'm trying to think if I actually wrote the end before I wrote much, but I don't think so. I think I knew where it would end, and I knew I had to get there. And then I just started writing. I had the three characters. Okay, I've got to tell the reader who these three people are. Then they can begin to interact with each other. I allowed myself the leisure of doing that, doing them one by one. And then when they crash into each other, then the structural problems and challenges begin, and I had to deal with that. But you knew the ending, and that is a giant help in structuring something if you know where you're going.

[24:04] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[24:04] Jack Viertel: Which most people don't. I knew I had to get to a certain moment. That moment has never, never changed really. When you get there, it's so clear that this is where the book has been heading the whole time.

[24:13] Jack Viertel: Yeah, which is great.

[24:14] David Armstrong: At least I knew that much.

[24:15] Jack Viertel: Another major character is the Winter Garden Theater itself. Why the Winter Garden? What was about that? And of course, you worked for Jujamcin for all those years, so you were sort of going out of your lane there with this.

[24:27] David Armstrong: Out of my territory.

[24:29] Jack Viertel: Exactly. My mother and father and my grandmother, Daisy, took me to see Mary Martin and Peter Pan at the Winter Garden. I was just short of my sixth birthday, and it ruined my life, basically. I mean, it was from that moment on, there was nothing else I wanted to do. And I remember certain things about it. I remember we sat in that front row, off to the side, like A one and three or whatever. I remember it looking into the pit and seeing all of that brass and just being completely pull-axed by that before the show even started. And I then found myself at the Winter Garden for various things that meant something to me. There's a show in the book called Nowhere to Go But Up, which actually premiered in 1962, although I took the liberty of putting it back to nineteen sixty so that all of the plot of a book would make sense.

I saw that show. It did indeed run a week. It was one of the first shows I ever bought a ticket to myself. I remember weekly going up to the box office as a twelve or thirteen year old and buying a ticket to the matinee of the closing Saturday, which was only a week after the opening Saturday. And the show, which was not a good show, left a big impression on me for a number of reasons. Every time I walk into the Winter Garden Theater, I cry a little, either literally or figuratively, because it is the place where I started in a way. And it is to me the most beautiful theater. It's actually a theater full of bad sight lines, particularly if you're in the mezzanine, but it just has always meant more to me than any other theater.

[25:47] David Armstrong: That's amazing. And it's the home of the Ziegfeld Follies as well, right?

[25:50] Jack Viertel: It's where the Ziegfeld Follies often was.

[25:52] David Armstrong: Right.

[25:53] Jack Viertel: And Follies. And Follies, which was a completely transformative show for me. A lot of the big transformations for me have happened at that theater. I have very, very, very sentimental feelings about these buildings. Almost all of them. Weirdly, I'm working on a musical now called The Outsiders that's opening next week, which is at the Jacobs Theater, which was the Royale when I was growing up. And I've spent a lot of time in the theater because we're rehearsing and we're performing everything. It's one of the very few theaters on Broadway that I have absolutely no feeling about, one way or the other. It just doesn't mean anything to me. Next door at the Plymouth, which is now the Schoenfeld, that I have strong, strong feelings about, positive feelings about. I don't know, the Royale never meant anything to me. It's a sort of stupid thing. I don't know why one would mean more than another, but they do.

[26:34] David Armstrong: So interesting. I mean, I wonder if it's because Greece occupied it for so long.

[26:38] Jack Viertel: Could be. From my experience, because I came to New York around 1980. You just never went to that theater because Greece was there.

[26:45] David Armstrong: Right, yes. I think that may be true. And it was somewhat tragic to me that from the moment Cats opened to the moment Mamma Mia closed, there was no reason to go to the Winter Garden. I mean, I went twice to see each show, but then the Winter Garden was like someone had taken the Winter Garden away.

[26:58] Jack Viertel: Exactly. You play fast and loose with history sometimes, as you just said, and we know where to go but up with one of those places, which as I was reading it. And in the book, you have several musicals that you've invented, which we'll talk about in a minute, which is always fun. We got to that, and I thought, well, wait, no, that's a real show. I know that name. And the music for that show in real life was written by someone named Saul Berkowitz, but in your book, yeah, the music is written by Sid Lipowitz. Just talk a little bit about how you use that show to your own devices in the book.

[27:27] Jack Viertel: Well, it's the show that Aurora Sheldon makes her Broadway debut in. It's a show where Ike Harris is playing the trumpet in the pit. The spotlight is being operated by Vincent Donnelly, so it's where everything happened on that show. I wanted it to be an insignificant show. I didn't want this to happen at West Side Story or My Fair Lady. It was an insignificant show. It was a show I remembered, so that helped. I did have to move it two years back from where it was. In the first draft of the novel, I used Saul Berkowitz's real name. And then after I'd written the novel and read it once, I thought, you know, he's a very difficult character. He's an annoying, I hope entertainingly annoying character.

And I thought, I have no idea who Saul Berkowitz was. He may have children or grandchildren who are not going to want to see a portrait of their ancestor that's so completely inaccurate. He was probably the nicest guy in the world. So I just changed his name, but I didn't change it much. Interestingly, or maybe not interestingly, but I'll say it anyway. I went to a lot of people who should have known him. I mean, he did dance arrangements for the Unsinkable Molly Brown at the same time that John Cander was doing dance arrangements. And I said to John Cander, "You remember this guy at all?" He said, "Absolutely not. I couldn't tell you who he is." The name does not ring a bell. And Stephen Sondheim said the same thing, and other people said the same thing.

The real Saul Berkowitz, it turns out, left Nowhere to Go But Up and went and did get a job at City College of Queens, I guess, or one of the city college campuses teaching music and music harmony and music theory, and spent the rest of his life there. And I finally found an obituary for him. And he did indeed spend his whole further career as a teacher. You can find little exercises by him on YouTube, piano exercises that he wrote. He brushed against Broadway and brushed out again as a real person. Sid Lipowitz, who also never really writes another Broadway show, is a little bit based on Jule Styne, who was a tough, he was a guy who just shouted a lot and made a lot of pronouncements and thought very well of himself.

And it's impossible not to love Jule Styne's music and Jule Styne's shows. But that personality, and he and Red knew each other very well because Red played in all the pits for Subway Circle Sleeping and Gypsy and all those shows. And so Red had a lot of stories about Jule, which I took and handed off to Sid Lipowitz.

[29:25] David Armstrong: Fascinating.

[29:51] Jack Viertel: I'm here in Croppets Blow again. All aglow again, taking a chance on love. Here I slide again. About to take that ride again. Taking a chance on love.

[30:15] David Armstrong: And there are a number of actual Broadway and show business figures that enter into the story. Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Steve Allen, Jerry Herman, Joe Layton, Joe Patt. And even Ethel Waters, the great Ethel Waters, who starts as sort of a very, very off-stage character, then quite surprisingly, I thought enters into the story specifically, and you give her a very remarkable monologue when Aurora Shelton encounters her.

[30:41] Jack Viertel: Yeah, Aurora Shelton, after she has this terrible flop, and her career on Broadway seems to be going nowhere, and kind of her dream is broken. She goes to Los Angeles to try to get work, the movies or television, or just something that isn't theater. And I realized that Ethel Waters lived in Pasadena during those years when I declared that Aurora Shelton was in Los Angeles, even though she's not a real person. And I thought, well, she's been obsessed with Ethel Waters all her life since she was a little girl. Shouldn't she meet Ethel Waters somehow? So I googled Ethel Waters to see what there was in the way of what you could see of Ethel Waters in her later years. And she was indeed on an episode of Route 66.

The events that she describes in her encounter with Aurora are absolutely directly what happens in that episode of Route 66. She'd gotten very large and she couldn't really move around much on screen in a way that was pleasant to watch or convincing. And so they put her in places and turned the camera on, and she spoke her own lines. It's an interesting episode because it also features a jazz band of quite notable jazz players at the end of it. I thought, well, the one scene I don't want to write is the scene where she goes to this mentor who she's thought about her whole life but never met. And the mentor is a kindly black woman who gives her a piece of good advice and sends her out into the world feeling better about herself.

And so I wrote the opposite. But not that Ethel Waters is a mean person, but she's a self-interested person who's at the end of her life and not happy about it. And she says to Aurora, some version of, you know, you've got to be as tough as I was. She says, "You shouldn't have recorded that terrible song you recorded. You gotta know how to throw a fit." It was helpful, I'll admit, that I had worked with August Wilson so many times and spent so much time reading his monologues and commenting on them and having him ask questions about them and whatever, because after Jujamcin, we did six of the ten plays that August wrote. So yeah, was that a little bit of either a tip of the hat or perhaps a stolen moment from August?

Yes. Well, you know what they always say is amateurs borrow and professionals steal. So that's hope. Yes. And of course, as John Fehey famously said, if you're gonna steal, steal from obscure sources.

[32:40] David Armstrong: Exactly. As I sort of mentioned earlier, one of the delights of the book is that it's filled with all this wonderful period trivia, inside jokes, Easter eggs, and a lot of very sharp telling details. I'm gonna read through a list of these and maybe just respond briefly to some of these, some of them very obscure details, like Papina the Wonder Drink.

[32:54] Jack Viertel: Papina the Wonder Drink is a real product. One of the things I did while I was writing the book was constantly scanning photography of Times Square in different eras, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s. What I remember, the sort of thing that almost never changed, although it moved across the street at one point, is the big ad for Camel cigarettes with the man with the smoke coming out of his real steam, I guess is what it was, but coming out of his mouth. But there was a picture of this little joint that's a Papina the Wonder Drink. It was not clear to me, but and I think I looked up Papina on Google and couldn't find it or whatever. So I invented it as the forerunner of Orange Julius because Papina clearly sounded like it had papaya or pineapple or you know, and Orange Julius was sort of the same thing in a way.

So yes, I wanted to just be able to flag certain details that made it feel like specific things always make things feel realer than general descriptions. So I tried to find some specifics, even if I had to make up what they were. They had names.

[33:54] David Armstrong: And was LeBlanc's ticket agency a real place?

[33:57] Jack Viertel: Yes, definitely was. My parents had told me about getting discount tickets at Gray's Drugstore, which was sort of where the New York Times, not the current New York Times building, but where the Times Square, the one that they dropped the ball on New Year's Eve. And so I wanted to write about how you got tickets at Gray's Drugstore. And LeBlanc was the ticket agency that was selling the tickets. But it turned out they weren't at Gray's Drugstore in the era that I was writing about. So I had to figure out where they were and deal with that. But yes, they were one of the first discount ticket agencies. And the shows would just send over tickets. You know, in those days, million years before tickets were printed on a computer, you had blocks of tickets.

They were actually cardboard tickets, and they sat in the box office until somebody bought them or until the box office treasurer stole them. And so they would just take a pack of tickets, wrap in a rubber band and send it over to LeBlanc's because it sure wasn't going to sell at full price.

[34:40] David Armstrong: And McHale's Bar, which I remember going to, that lasted well into the eighties.

[34:45] Jack Viertel: I don't know how when it was. Maybe even the nineties.

[34:47] David Armstrong: In the 90s, yeah.

[34:48] Jack Viertel: Yeah. As a theatrical hangout. It was a big stage hand hangout. Very generous but mediocre cheeseburgers. You also have Aurora at one point rehearsing in the Anderson Yiddish Theater on Second Avenue.

[35:01] David Armstrong: Which is an interesting thing. There were all those theaters down there. I don't think I'd heard before that they became a place where shows rehearsed, but that would make a lot of sense if they're sitting down there empty.

[35:10] Jack Viertel: Yes. And I don't remember where I learned that, but I did learn that that was actually a fact. The shows rehearsed there and that it was an unpleasant place to rehearse because when they didn't have a booking, the heat was very erratic. They were pretty down at the heels theaters by then. They had been very successful Yiddish theaters 20, 30 years earlier.

[35:25] David Armstrong: Yeah, during the heyday, yeah. I went there twice to see shows as a kid. So I knew it existed because I had been there. And tell us about the Gaiety Building.

[35:32] Jack Viertel: That was something I had not is that the building that the Gaiety Theater was in?

[35:36] David Armstrong: I think so. When they knocked down the Morasco and the Helen Hayes and the Bijou, and there was a hotel that was knocked down, and there was an office building that was knocked down. And they're never written about. It's always the theaters because the theaters were of historic interest and the other buildings weren't. But they were real. The one that was sort of the black version of the Brill Building, where all of black music publishers who couldn't get into the Brill Building had their offices was in fact that building, and it was in fact knocked down. And it was to me very sad because that's as historic a building as the Brill Building in a way. I mean, there's a huge amount of good music was made and published there, but it's not there anymore.

[36:12] David Armstrong: Something I was completely unaware of, so that was really interesting.

[36:15] Jack Viertel: Can I assume that the reference to a doctor on Park in 73rd is a little Easter egg from A Chorus Line?

[36:21] Jack Viertel: Yes, it is. It is indeed. That was quite fun. You even delve into what I assume was what inspired the Encore series, which was City Center's long history of sort of summer stock on Broadway. You call them cheaply mounted and underrehearsed productions of Broadway shows. Did you get to experience those when you were a kid?

[36:41] Jack Viertel: I did. I saw Guys and Dolls at City Center. I think I saw a production of one of the Rodgers and Hammerstein's at City Center. You know, when I worked at City Center in the conference room, they had framed the flyers from that era. And so you could see the top price was four dollars and ninety-five cents and the balcony was ninety-five cents. And this was at a time when the tickets were between, you know, ten dollars and three dollars on Broadway. So they were really popular prices in the sense that people who couldn't really afford Broadway could afford to see these great shows in very slapdash productions, but nonetheless, they were the shows. And they did them for many years, I think. And then that musical series ran into the early sixties, I guess.

And what happened in real life was that Lincoln Center got built. And Richard Rodgers started the Richard Rodgers Musical Theater at the State Theater, which was much more optimally presented, and the City Center series quietly packed up and went home.

[37:30] Jack Viertel: And when Encores was started, was it part of the thinking we should bring a version of that back or somehow continue this history? Judith Dakin, who had taken over City Center, was in very bad shape financially and was basically a rental house at this point. This was, I guess, in the seventies or early eighties, maybe even late eighties. And so they had the Paul Taylor Dance Company and the Joffrey Ballet, but they didn't produce anything because everything decamped to Lincoln Center. Once Lincoln Center was built, City Ballet, which used to be called City Center Ballet, moved. City Opera, which used to be called City Center Opera, moved. The Broadway series collapsed. And so there was essentially an empty building.

And they started just renting it to whoever would take it. And Judith Dakin was a woman who had been a general manager at BAM, but had had her formative career as a manager in a tenth theater in Cleveland that presented summer stock productions. And she wanted to bring musical theater back to City Center where it had thrived, you know, during the fifties and sixties. And that was the beginning of Encores.

[38:24] Jack Viertel: Throughout the novel, the characters experience the incredible shifts in American culture over the decades, and especially the effect that that had on Broadway. As you talked about even earlier, the demise and the revitalization of Times Square. At one point you describe it as having been subject to a war, an invasion, a salvation, and a ruination. How much of that is your personal take on living through that period and living through the changes?

[38:52] Jack Viertel: Because I lived through most of that too. When I arrived in New York in 1978, 79, it was at that lowest point. You tell people what it was like then today, and they don't believe you. I sometimes talk to students about that. And it's like they can't understand that what we experienced today was not the case at the time. You lived through all that. Talk a little bit about that. How did that be?

[39:14] Jack Viertel: Yeah, I mean, what I didn't live through was the really glamorous period of Times Square, which my parents lived through. And my grandfather actually owned and operated a theater briefly during the Great Depression. It was really glamorous. I mean, men wore top hats to go to the theater and dressed in tuxedos, and you know, women wore their finest dresses and they went out to midnight suppers afterwards and things like that. It was really like being on a grand ocean liner of a sort. And from there it went downhill to the point where when I first started going by myself in the sixties, it was sort of pleasantly seedy. People still dressed to go to the theater. You did not go to the theater without a tie and jacket on.

But it was a little down at the heels. There were lots of places selling pizza for twenty-five cents a slice. And I knew one place on 42nd Street where you could get it for fifteen cents a slice. But you know, it was that. There was a Nathan's on the corner, I just had a clam bar as well as a hot dog stand. And I loved that. I absolutely fell in love with that world and I wanted that world to last forever, but it was on a downward trajectory, which I didn't know. And yes, by the seventies, it was really in rough, rough shape. And there really were big people hanging out in front of the theaters at five o'clock when the matinee let out so that they could rip the necklaces off of the wealthier customers.

And that happened to my wife, so I remember it well. And then it became almost too dangerous to wander through at night unless you had a specific destination that you had to get to. Lots of prostitution, lots of drug use, lots of drug sales, very bad garbage pickup. You know, all the things that really let you know you're in a slump. It's a really bad place. And yet it had all these theaters that were presenting Broadway entertainment. The theaters themselves weren't in terribly good shape. I mean, all the theaters have now been, all except one or two have now been really carefully restored and are beautiful to go into. But then when Disney moved in and the 42nd Street Redevelopment Project got started, and it grew into something else, which is kind of a mall, like a tourist mall.

One of the things that inevitably happened, and I wish it hadn't happened, but it was in fact inevitable, was that the individual stores that define Times Square were replaced by national brands, so that there was Banana Republic where a unique Times Square store would have been, you know, a place where you could buy dance slippers and things like that. The Drama Book Store moved uptown to 52nd Street, now it's down on 39th Street. It's a beautiful, beautiful store nowadays, but it had been its own, like a small town in a way. It supplied its own people with retail that was important to those people. And then suddenly there's an MM store, and there's a, as I said, a Banana Republic and one of the fried chicken chains, and then there were two of the fried chicken chains, and Boris Gumps showed up.

And to me personally, that's very, very sad. Now, to tourists from around the world, it's not sad at all. They are happy to be there and they love it. And I think that's fine. We're very different people. I grew up in a world that disappeared.

[41:49] Jack Viertel: We all understand the dichotomy of that because of course more people will want to come to see a Broadway show now because of where they're coming to. You and your characters experience that loss, I think, quite effectively in the book, and interestingly. As the story moves into the 21st century and the characters move into old age, there's definitely a sort of melancholy aspect that takes over in reaction to not only that, but also I noted a sentence you wrote the entire world of American music had been run over by a revolution driven by electric guitars. Well, that happened. Quite moving to see these characters have to face that and have to deal with that and have to be adult about it. There's no turning back. Do you have any insight into their heads in regard to this subject?

[42:38] Jack Viertel: I think it's a tension in it. There's a sense of nostalgia and a sense of loss and a sense of opportunity if you want to take the opportunity. And the last show that Aurora Shelton does, the last original show she does, is written by a singer-songwriter who's not a Broadway type composer, but is someone whose music she decides she loves, who she commissions to do it basically. She initiates that show.

[42:58] Jack Viertel: Yeah, and she so she initiates it. She hears a song by this singer-songwriter, she doesn't really know who she is, but it's clearly more Joni Mitchell than George Gershwin. She goes out and finds this woman who's playing a small club in Pierremont, New York, and commissions her to write a show based on a story that she wants to turn into a musical. And so she takes the opportunity. And the music probably doesn't sound very much like the music that she grew up singing. It does not sound like The Pajama Game. It does not sound like Ethel Waters. It sounds more like Waitress. It's a different kind of sound. It's not an invalid sound. And I don't think the guitar revolution was an invalid revolution.

It's just something that happened over the years. So they do it. The truth is the real red press upon whom Ike Harris is based, ended up being the contractor on all these rock and roll, you know, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. He was the contractor. He didn't really understand the show very well. He was eighty-five or ninety years old when he did it, but he knew that's where the work was, and he liked the working. And he was obviously still savvy enough to hire the best people to do that show to make sure that the band for that show was fantastic. He liked people who are good at that kind of thing. And I think this was true even of people like George Abbott in there. They were constantly looking for new talent.

They did not fall into the trap of saying, I want to work with the same people over and over and over again. Not that they didn't want to work with those people, but that there were people coming up who were inevitably some of them as just as talented as the people who were already famous. And if you could grab them as they were coming up and help them with your years of experience, you could invent Adler and Ross. You could invent Kander and Ebb. And I think that's something that just doesn't change. You know, Kander and Ebb turned into Pasek and Paul, and Pasek and Paul turned into something else.

[44:32] Jack Viertel: And you played a big role in Pasek and Paul becoming who they were.

[44:35] Jack Viertel: Yes, I guess in a way I did because of Dear Evan Hanson and A Christmas Story. I mean, they were introduced to me. I didn't go find them, but I thought these guys are talented. Maybe it's just because they are Pasek and Paul specifically. But unlike most of the composer-lyricist teams that I've found myself working with over the years, they were like a couple of Irish setters. I mean, they were just all over the room. They were like ten-year-olds in a way. But then when Justin sat down at the piano and the two of them started to sing, they were brilliant. But their energy was a child's energy. Absolutely. I mean, when we first did A Christmas Story at the Fifth Avenue, they were twenty-five years old. We locked them in the basement of the Fifth Avenue Theater to finish the score in time.

[45:12] Jack Viertel: Yeah, that sounds absolutely correct. And they did. This book, I think, will be a delight to anybody who's interested in Broadway. Any final words you want to say to your potential audience out there?

[45:25] Jack Viertel: Yes, only this. I wrote the book out of love for the life that I had experienced on Broadway and the luck that I had had by being allowed to experience that life, which really ran in one way or another from the fifties until now. But what I hope in writing it is that people, not just people like me, but people who are much younger than me will not feel like it's a piece of history they're forced to learn, like you're forced to learn tutor history in high school, that it's actually kind of an enjoyable ride through a place that gets you to the destination that you're now in, and that the enjoyableness of that ride is the reason I wrote the book. It was just to say, you know, you're in a fascinating place that you're lucky to be in. And whether you're an audience member sitting in the theater or whether you're an actor on the stage. It's a blessed place to be able to be.

[46:08] David Armstrong: Thank you, Jack Viertel. It's been fantastic to have you today on Broadway Nation to talk about Broadway Melody.

[46:14] Jack Viertel: Thank you, David. It's been a great, great pleasure.

[46:16] David Armstrong: Mine too.

[46:17] ♪ Musical number: "Broadway Melody" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

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