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[0:03] David Armstrong: Welcome to Broadway Nation, the podcast that explores the remarkable history of the Broadway musical with a particular focus on the immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artist who invented it.

[0:15] David Armstrong: If they ask me, I could write a book.

[0:21] David Armstrong: I'm David Armstrong, and I have a big announcement, and I've asked my buddy and friend and colleague and Broadway Nation's favorite guest host, Albert Evans, to join us today to turn the tables on me and ask me the questions today rather than me be the interviewer.

[0:37] David Armstrong: Welcome, Albert.

[0:38] Albert Evans: Thank you so much for joining us.

[0:39] David Armstrong: Thank you, David.

[0:40] Albert Evans: I can't wait. What is this big announcement?

[0:42] Albert Evans: Did you win the Irish sweepstakes?

[0:44] Albert Evans: Do they even still have that? What's going on?

[0:46] David Armstrong: I don't know. That used to be the topic of a lot of stuff for that?

[0:50] David Armstrong: That shows how ancient the two of us are.

[0:52] David Armstrong: We remember television shows that revolved around the Irish sweepstakes.

[0:56] David Armstrong: But I will cut to the chase. The big announcement I have is that I have a book coming out.

[1:02] David Armstrong: It will be released in July of this year, 2025. And it's a project that I've been working on for some time. So of course, it's really exciting to see it finally come to fruition.

[1:12] David Armstrong: The book is called Broadway Nation, which may be familiar to some people. And the subtitle will be similar to what you've heard before, too. I'll give you the full title, Broadway Nation: HOW IMMIGRANT JEWISH, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical.

[1:27] David Armstrong: It's coming out on July 24th, 2025 from Metheun Drama, which is an imprint of Bloomsbury. So it's a wonderful publishing company with a hundred years of history of publishing not only plays, but also books about drama, books about theater, books about musical theater.

[1:47] David Armstrong: And it's been my great pleasure to have many of the authors of books published by Metheun Drama/Bloomsbury on this podcast. And listeners to the show will have heard dozens of them by now.

[1:57] Albert Evans: Yeah, it's a very familiar imprint to people who read theater books.

[2:01] David Armstrong: Exactly. So I could not be happier to have a major publisher like Bloomsbury behind this book and to have instigated it really.

[2:08] Albert Evans: Great. And of course, I have known about this since you started writing it, but I can't wait to see it actually in print. By the way, the dust jacket looks fantastic.

[2:17] Albert Evans: The art on the dust jacket is really inviting. It's gonna make it fly off the shelves, I'm sure.

[2:23] David Armstrong: We can only hope. Thank you so much. And I'll just note, I'll give you the details at the end of the episode, but it is on pre-sale right now, not only on Amazon and every other book site, but at a discount at the Bloomsbury website. I'll give you all the prices and the details at the end.

[2:38] Albert Evans: How did you come to write? Had you always had this in mind when you started the podcast, or did you, after a while of doing the podcast, did you say, hey, I should write a book? How did this come about?

[2:49] David Armstrong: Well, it probably starts with when I started teaching at the University of Washington a course called The Broadway Musical, how immigrant Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical. That was in 2019, and that led to the podcast because in 2020 we were going into the pandemic, and I realized I was gonna have to teach the course online.

[3:11] David Armstrong: And I already had the podcast in the back of my head because I thought my lectures would be great to take some of this material and turn it into very accessible podcast-friendly episodes.

[3:22] David Armstrong: So that was something I had already started working on with you. You remember we spent a summer figuring out how to make a podcast.

[3:29] Albert Evans: Absolutely, yeah.

[3:30] David Armstrong: Part of the impetus behind it was thinking I can then use these podcasts when I can't teach in person. I knew I was gonna have to teach the course remotely. And that worked out really well.

[3:42] David Armstrong: And basically the podcast and the remote version of my UW course started at the same time, and that was in 2020. Then two years ago, in 2023, I was approached by Domo Hanlin, who is my publisher at Bloomsbury Metheun Drama. He knew about the podcast. He knew about the course I was teaching.

[4:03] David Armstrong: As we said before, I'd had a number of authors of books he had published on my podcast. So that's where the relationship started. And he wondered if I would be interested in writing a book about this subject because they publish a lot of textbooks, and they felt there was a need for a book that would address the history of the Broadway musical in a very inclusive way.

[4:25] David Armstrong: And of course, I was thrilled to hear from him. And that's when I started doing the book proposal in January of 2023. So almost exactly two years ago, this process started.

[4:37] Albert Evans: And I believe you used the podcasts in your actual live teaching.

[4:42] David Armstrong: Yes. Even after the pandemic, I've continued to use the podcast as part of the assignment in lieu of a textbook. In a sense, basically the material has been road-tested to see how students respond to it, what they do respond to it and what they don't, and how to present it to them.

[4:58] David Armstrong: Because I think probably your typical college student has practically no historical memory of the history of the Broadway musical. It's finding a way to present it to them to find out what really resonates with them and what they're baffled by.

[5:11] Albert Evans: I'm sure there are many things that they're just completely puzzled by.

[5:15] David Armstrong: And that was part of what appealed to the publishers that this book would be inspired by, based on evolved from a course that had been taught multiple years, multiple times. And they're marketing it actually as a textbook.

[5:30] David Armstrong: If you go on the website, it'll say textbook. But as you can imagine, and as listeners of this podcast know, and as anybody who's been in my class, the book is very well researched, very academic in its content, but not in its approach, not in its language.

[5:45] David Armstrong: I tend to be somebody who shies away from academic speak. So I worked very hard to make this as accessible as it possibly can for the general reader. And in fact, the publishers may be marketing it as a textbook, but I'm marketing it as a new history of the Broadway musical for fans of the Broadway musical, much like the podcast.

[6:05] Albert Evans: Yeah, and I think that shows in just the prose that you've written. It doesn't sound like stuff the academic prose. It sounds like someone who really knows their stuff who's explaining it in terms anyone could understand.

[6:17] Albert Evans: You don't have to be a scholar. This is not just some dusty tome that you have to force yourself to read. It's very entertaining.

[6:24] David Armstrong: And I frankly, I wrote it like the books that I like to read. They're great books about the history of the Broadway musical, either very specific parts of it or more comprehensive versions of it. And I'm most interested in those kinds of books.

[6:38] David Armstrong: When we were younger, let's say, there weren't a lot of books like this. There were maybe three or four that every musical theater buff had, but there wasn't really a large either market or interest in books about the history of the musical theater.

[6:52] David Armstrong: So we really clung to the ones that we liked and read them over and over. And I think this could be one of those. Part of it is because musical theater was not taken very seriously by academics at that point or by critics either.

[7:06] David Armstrong: It now has become a subject that is studied at universities, which of course then gives it more weight and gives it more importance and provides a reason for a book like this to exist.

[7:17] Albert Evans: Yeah, when we were growing up, and these terms are still used. There was musical theater and legitimate theater.

[7:24] Albert Evans: I never quite understood what musical theater wasn't legitimate theater, but it was like a snobby. Well, that's just entertainment. It's not Eugene O'Neill.

[7:32] David Armstrong: And I actually learned something just recently, because that was always my belief too. But I realized that's an evolution that is true when we were young. But prior to that, if you go way back, the difference between legitimate theater was the difference between vaudeville and reviews and a story.

[7:50] David Armstrong: So I think musicals were included originally in legitimate theater when there was still vaudeville around. But then once vaudeville died out, the separation then became between musicals and straight plays.

[8:04] Albert Evans: Wow.

[8:04] David Armstrong: Yeah, I always took umbrage at that. What do you mean legitimate theater? Well, I'm hoping this book will even further legitimize the Broadway musical.

[8:13] David Armstrong: So getting back to the book, what exactly does it cover? What are your parameters?

[8:18] David Armstrong: So I think maybe, as I said, this is a full history of the Broadway musical from its origins up to today, with a special focus on how the Broadway musical was created almost entirely by people who were marginalized from mainstream society, immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artists, including a much larger percentage of women than is generally acknowledged.

[8:43] David Armstrong: So the goal of this book and what I was tasked with was to create a comprehensive history that also included a lot of the people who often get left out or aren't centered in the narrative. And so that in a sense explains the term Broadway Nation.

[9:00] Albert Evans: Absolutely.

[9:01] David Armstrong: And part of it, and again, I've touched on this on the podcast, certainly at times, is that one of the most interesting facts about the Broadway musical and about show business, which is this new industry that forms at the turn of the century. There really was no show business before that, is it was for centuries, forever, basically, singers, dancers, actors, musicians of any kind were not generally accepted into polite society.

[9:30] David Armstrong: They were one step away from vagabonds and prostitutes. And so this industry is emerging that the nice people want to go to, they wouldn't dream of being in it themselves. So it was this open door, this void that could be filled by immigrants, by Jewish people, by African Americans, and especially by queer people.

[9:52] David Armstrong: No one else would be in this industry. So if you had the talents to fulfill it, it was a place that you could make a mark, find something to do, which you wouldn't find in any other kind of enterprise that might be going on. And that has continued.

[10:04] David Armstrong: I often say it's invented by this group of marginalized people and sustained by them. They continue to be the people right up to today who are at the center of this industry. Nowhere else, almost no other industry has been so inclusive of so many different kinds of people.

[10:24] David Armstrong: Theater, especially the musical theater, was a safe haven for these various marginalized kinds of groups.

[10:31] Albert Evans: And as a result, they became important contributors to it. How is your book structured? I gather it's not a strict chronology, but it deals with topics one by one, or does it do both at once? How does that happen?

[10:44] David Armstrong: I would say it's largely chronological, but not entirely chronological. There are five main sections to the book. Four of them trace the history of the Broadway musical. Maybe a little cornerly, but it seemed to work for me. I divide them into acts. There's Act One, Act Two, Act Three, Act Four, and Act Five. One is about what I call the Genesis period. And that's the period roughly from 1890 to the end of World War I. That is where the musical is forming and inventing itself and being invented. Then Act Two is what I call the Silver Age, and fans of the podcast have heard me talk about that before. And that includes the 1920s and 30s up to the opening of Oklahoma in 1943. And then Act II is what I have determined is the golden age of Broadway, which, as I define it, goes from the opening of Oklahoma to the opening night of Hair. And then Act 4 is the modern era, which goes from the opening night of Hair to today. Now, of course, those divisions are somewhat arbitrary.

[11:49] What's interesting and somewhat surprising to me, because I looked around to see what other people were doing. And in the field of musical theater history, there are remarkably few agreed upon names or dates to define the various time periods in the history of Broadway. Almost everybody will refer to the golden age of Broadway, but the opinions will vary widely regarding exactly when that was, or even if it ever occurred. So I felt a need to define it, at least for my purposes. I'm not necessarily saying this is the only way to view that, but they're the ones that made the most sense to me because I feel like at each point something new happens to change the nature of the Broadway musical. And for me, that was the most important aspect of it. How does the musical itself evolve and what are the big turning points in its story?

[12:42] There's also an overture and a prologue, which set up the book and deal with the precursors to the Broadway musical. What came before it, what kind of musical theater was out there, especially the kind of musical theater that was drawn on very purposely by the original inventors of the Broadway musical. And then the final section, which is really my favorite section, Act Five, is covering the principal themes of the Broadway musical. Again, a topic that listeners to the podcast may be familiar with, but I've had the chance to expand on that and really delve in with a great deal of hopefully insight and detail.

[13:21] Albert Evans: And in that section, do you go back and revisit some of the shows that you've talked about already in saying this theme really was strongly in the world?

[13:29] David Armstrong: Absolutely. The final section of the book refers back to almost every other section of the book and tries to weave together a lot of the elements that we've already touched on. I will say that there's one other part of the book, there's sort of an intermission section. You can trace how the musical theater is an art form that's been handed down from one person to the next over a century or more now. And I use one thread of that as the centerpiece of the book. And it's the very direct legacy chain from Otto Harbach to Oscar Hammerstein II to Stephen Sondheim to Lin-Manuel Miranda. And again, I've touched on that in the podcast, and I had a chance now to expand and really flesh that out with even more detail. So it's not just influence, but it's direct mentoring from one person to another. They actually work together, learn from the older generation. It's a period of apprenticeship.

[14:24] Albert Evans: Absolutely. It's like a medieval craft.

[14:26] David Armstrong: Yeah. Being handed down. And I think it's part of the power of the musical, this direct connection. And I see the history of the Broadway musical as being this continuum where one show leads to the next, one artist leads to the next, and on right up to today. So tracing that back is to me very important and fascinating.

[14:47] Albert Evans: Yeah, not much discussed. There's been a lot of talk about Hammerstein and Sondheim, just because they're still in popular memory and because Sondheim is Sondheim.

[14:56] David Armstrong: And he talked about it so much.

[14:58] Albert Evans: Yeah, he definitely gave a huge amount of credit to Oscar, but he didn't want to write like Oscar, but Oscar taught him how to write. He said, "Don't imitate me, but this is how you build a musical." And I think that would be an interesting topic for another book is to explore other legacy chains that have happened over time. This one is very direct and fairly well documented. So it was easy to focus on, but it's not the only one by that by any means. And I touch on a couple others in the book as well. And it covers the whole practical almost the entire history of the Broadway musical is contained within those four individuals.

[15:36] David Armstrong: Yeah. In their careers, from Otto Harbach, whose first show is back in the teens, I believe, to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who's, you know, working on another show now.

[15:46] Albert Evans: What was the old thing about how many connections of what's his name?

[15:50] David Armstrong: Oh, Kevin Bacon.

[15:52] Albert Evans: Six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

[15:54] David Armstrong: This is like four degrees of Otto Harbach or four degrees of Lin-Manuel Miranda. It's right there, the whole history of the Broadway musical in these four people.

[16:03] So that's in the center of the book. Because it is a writer's medium, I think it's important to focus on that. A lot of times we divide the Silver Age and the Golden Age by commercial success. You know, it's like Oklahoma was such a success that everyone tried to write the next Oklahoma. This is how we're gonna write a show now. But it was only because it made so much money. If it hadn't made money, they would have continued writing, you know, too many girls.

[16:28] Albert Evans: Absolutely.

[16:29] David Armstrong: And one of the sections that's entirely new to this book has never been in a podcast. I don't teach it in my course, but it's a chapter that I became fascinated with and obsessed with is this transition period, it's about 18 months between the opening night of Oklahoma and the opening night of Carousel. So between the first two Rogers and Hammerstein shows, we think the golden age has started, but actually it's this fascinating period of the ongoing influence of the Silver Age Lucy Goosey musical comedies, plus other people who are sort of on a similar wavelength to Rogers and Hammerstein, like Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins, and especially Yip Harburg, are introducing things in this period which are very influential that to some degree get forgotten about once Rogers and Hammerstein cement the deal.

[17:23] I feel like once Carousel opens, it was clear that there was no other way to write a show that the public was going to be drawn to. You now had to do it in this new way. But during that period between those two shows, that was, and in fact, the night after Oklahoma opens, the latest edition of the Ziegfeld Follies opens and turns out to be a big hit.

[17:46] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[17:47] David Armstrong: Which I just found really interesting. The most successful edition of the Ziegfeld Follies ever opens the night after Oklahoma. So it's a really interesting, mixed up period of where the musical is really trying to wrestle with itself.

[18:01] Albert Evans: That sounds great that the musical play hadn't really completely taken over.

[18:06] David Armstrong: Yeah, absolutely. And even the Comden and Green shows have an element of review in them of just let's just have a song about this for the fun of it.

[18:14] Albert Evans: Absolutely.

[18:15] David Armstrong: But they figured out how to reinvent the musical comedy for the golden age. And that's one of the topics I didn't also is that we still have musical comedies, but they now have to follow the rules of the musical play to a great extent. One thing I talk about is I think there's a line in the book about in order for this new way of making musicals as demonstrated by Oklahoma to become the new fashion, the new way to do it, people had to see it. And you couldn't get tickets to Oklahoma. Only so many people could see that show each night during that period to understand what this new thing was. Now, of course, the cast album and the tours and all that stuff would, you know, eventually cement it. But I thought that was interesting. So the podcasts were in a sense a source for the book. They've been an inspiration for the book, but the book covers a much vaster field of what is a musical.

[19:09] Albert Evans: Exactly.

[19:10] David Armstrong: If they should ask me, I could write a book.

[19:16] Albert Evans: Don't go away. David and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[19:21] David Armstrong: The way you look, I could write a preface on how we so in your research, what surprised you?

[19:35] Albert Evans: What was really, oh, I didn't know that, but I'm gonna dig deep into this.

[19:40] David Armstrong: The topic we were just talking about was one of those surprises. That particular period of time I had never really looked at before. I think most histories jump from Oklahoma to Carousel, which is understandable because that's the shift in the musical is this new idea. But it leaves out some shows that I think were really influential and had a giant impact on the musical, like Bloomer Girl that we just don't think about today. So I was surprised to go back and read the reviews of Bloomer Girl and similar shows, because part of what the book is about is the cultural impact of the Broadway musical. How has this affected America and how has America been reflected back by the Broadway musical? And throughout the book, there will be shows that I think will receive probably more attention than they have in other books, because as I looked into them, they demonstrated to me that they had an importance at the time and an ongoing impact and an ongoing influence for the next 10 years or so or 20 years that we just don't feel anymore, but needs to be acknowledged.

[20:48] David Armstrong: Bloomer Girl, for example, was central to cementing this idea of the musical play, even though we would now look at it as an imperfect musical play, and one we never see or revive. But it was part of the tipping point. As we look for the tipping point of what makes this change, it's one of the key elements in that tipping point. I've always thought it had an unfortunate title because it sounds like a 20s musical, like you know, the Chop Girl musicals, This Girl, That Girl. I mean, it was fine when it came out, but now I think we hear that title and we think it's just a silly girls and gags show. But it wasn't at all. If anything, it was too serious. You know, Civil War ballet by Agnes De Mille.

What's interesting, and I write about this, is it's basically a musical comedy about very serious topics. It's about slavery, it's about women's emancipation. Yip Harberg is also somebody who gets a lot of focus in this book, perhaps more than in other books. And again, his shows tend not to be, they were hits in the day. Bloomer Girl was a giant hit. Finnyan's Rainbow was a giant hit and a very influential show. And there's shows that have dropped off the face. But he, as much as anybody else, probably more than Hammerstein, was trying to introduce very significant important themes. He described his main theme and what Bloomer Girl was about and what Finan's Rainbow was about was the indivisibility of human freedom.

That's the theme of Bloomer Girl, done in a satirical musical comedy to a great extent. And then, as you said, it has serious elements because Agnes DeMille's work on that show introduces this big Civil War ballet, which almost single-handedly pushes the show into musical play territory. Yeah. Even though the rest of the show is mostly a musical comedy. That's a show I would love to see revived, just because I think the themes would be surprising to people, how strongly it's advocating for women's liberation, for civil rights, for all those elements. Again, as Harberg called it, the indivisibility of human freedom. Most people don't think that's what musicals are about, but that is what a lot of musicals are about. And he's one of the people setting that in motion so that musicals continue to be about that and continue to this day to be about that.

[23:10] Albert Evans: So probably the most important question of all is how many pages are there in this book? Could I read it on a weekend or is it panelic reading, or do you have to like sit in your study?

[23:20] David Armstrong: You can read it anywhere you go, but it's a big topic. So of course it had to be a fairly big book. And I now know how many pages it is because I've finally received the galleys back. So there's 367 pages of text and pictures. And then beyond that are the notes and the index. So it's going to be 400 and something. I actually don't know because I'm still in the process of finalizing the index right now. So that will determine the exact number, but just over 400 pages in the book itself, but you only have to read 367 of them. And some of those have pictures, so it's probably a little less that you would read.

[23:56] Albert Evans: Well, the audience for it is going to be people who basically love musical theater. They want to read a lot about it. And they don't want just the usual survey of Show Boat and Oklahoma and Cosme Cade and things they know already. So I think it sounds like a really inviting book. And they'll get that as well, but it also includes more than that. There are a number of histories of the Broadway Musical that I think are terrific. There was a book, I don't know, a decade or so ago by Larry Stempel called Showtime, that I think is a fantastic book.

[24:23] David Armstrong: Oh, yeah. But of course, since his book was written, there's been another 10 or more years of musicals that have happened. And every writer is going to bring their own sort of approach and their own sensibility to it. I've had 40 years of a career in the professional theater. I don't come from the academic world. So a lot of what I know about musical theater comes from this hands-on, immersive practice. I've been involved with, I don't know how what percentage, but a large percentage of the musicals that are talked about in this book. And sometimes they get to talk about them very personally. Certainly the creation of Hairspray, which I was involved in. That was fun to be able to bring my own personal experience at times to this book and then take the sort of academic look as well.

I've always been interested in the history of the Broadway musical from the very beginning and always been a nerd about it and wanted to read everything about it. Even in grade school, I can remember spending recess in the library looking at editions of the New Yorker magazine to read the Broadway column so I could avoid the playground, you know, and find something that I was really interested in. So I've always been fascinated to research the Broadway musical. And I think this book is well researched, but it also comes from a practitioner's point of view, somebody who has been making musical theater for 40 years.

[25:47] Albert Evans: So the book's coming out in July, you said?

[25:50] David Armstrong: July 24th.

[25:51] Albert Evans: And are you going to be how how are you actively promoting it? Are you going to do book events and signings and yes?

[26:00] David Armstrong: Yes. In short, yes.

[26:01] Albert Evans: And how does that work? Who actually sets those up? Is that the publisher or is that up to you? Or what how do you do that?

[26:10] David Armstrong: Like a musical, it will be a collaborative effort. The publisher certainly will be involved in that and very helpful in making that happen. But as I understand from talking to other authors, a lot of that falls on the authors themselves to be the motivator behind that. So right now I'm working to create plans for a book tour, maybe two grand a word for it, but for book events, book signings in New York, in Seattle, and hopefully other cities as well, around the time that the book comes out and in the fall just afterwards. It's a little odd time to have the book released in July. It probably means that most of the events will happen in September when we're not in the middle of the summer and everybody's at the beach. I don't have any details on that. Certainly I will be making sure everybody knows the details as those plans come together.

[27:00] Albert Evans: Yeah, I gotta work on my signature. My penmanship is not good.

[27:04] David Armstrong: That'll make it even more authentic. And you said we could order it now.

[27:08] Albert Evans: Yes, if you are so inclined to want to make sure you get this book at the earliest possible moment, you can pre-order it now. That's part of what motivated this podcast is that it has been uploaded to Amazon and to all the book sites everywhere that you might buy a book and on the Bloomsbury site where you will get a discount.

[27:29] Albert Evans: So, what is the approximate cost of these books to the consumer?

[27:33] David Armstrong: I could not be happier that Bloomsbury decided to put the book out in three versions in paperback, hardback, and ebook, which makes it so accessible to people. So the paperback edition is priced at 34.95. Although you can get it for 32.45 if you buy it on Bloomsbury's website. Uh huh. And the hardback edition is priced at $100, which you can get for $90 on the Bloomsbury website. And the ebook is going to be available at $31.45. That's on Bloomsbury. I, of course, will be revisiting this topic as we get closer to the release date of the book.

[28:11] Albert Evans: Great. David, congratulations. This has been a big project. And I've been partly a participant, partly uh on the sidelines watching it. And I'm just amazed that you had the just the energy to do this. Writing a book is a big project, but you really threw yourself into it, and you've been smiling the whole way through. So you must have really enjoyed it.

[28:35] David Armstrong: I do think it is absolutely one of the hardest things I've ever done. The scope of it was not clear to me, never having written a book before. I'm not sure I would advise anybody to start off with a 400-page book.

[28:46] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[28:47] David Armstrong: But now, of course, I couldn't be happier that I persevered through it. It was an enormous challenge, and I like a challenge. So that worked for me, but and there was never any moment where I thought, I'm not gonna make it or I I'm gonna quit. But it took a lot of, and in my acknowledgments, I thank you and my husband and especially close friends and family for putting up with me for two years of working on this book in the middle of family events and celebrations, and also putting up with me auditioning sections of it for all of you. Ad nauseum. And also doing Broadway Nation at the same time, you're keeping up the podcast, because that was like another weekly deadline that you had to honor.

[29:32] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[29:32] David Armstrong: So that was part of the challenge as well. And there were some times where Broadway Nation maybe had a couple more repeat episodes than I would have included otherwise, just to make sure I could get to the next deadline for the book. And of course, the loyal listeners to this podcast have been collaborators in creating this book because again, the idea of the book was tried out and auditioned here on the podcast and inspired by. So thank you to all the listeners of Broadway Nation for helping me get to this point.

[30:02] Albert Evans: Thank you, Albert. It is always a delight to chat with you, and I couldn't be happier to have you help me share this information with the Broadway Nation world.

[30:11] Albert Evans: Well, it's been a lot of fun. Again, congratulations. I'm very proud of you.

[30:16] David Armstrong: Thank you so much.

[30:18] Albert Evans: And the symbol secret of a plug is just to tell them that I love you a lot.

[30:33] David Armstrong: Then the world discovers as my book ends, how to make two lovers.

[30:45] ♪ Musical number ♪