This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African-Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode A Novel Approach To Broadway History. My guest is author Laura Frankos, whose delightful and entertaining new book is titled Broadway Revival, and it's subtitled What If Gershwin Had Lived? Even though this is the first work of fiction that I've featured on this podcast, as you will hear, Broadway Revival is filled with fascinating and meticulously researched Broadway history. One of the greatest joys of this novel is that it allows all of us the opportunity to go back in time and experience the legendary Broadway musicals of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, at least vicariously through the eyes of the story's protagonist, David Greenbaum.

Other central characters include George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Vincent Eumanns, Kurt Weill, Richard Rodgers, and Larry Hart. And, in fact, an alternate subtitle for the book could have been The Time Traveler's Boyfriend, Larry Hart. Laura is also the author of the Broadway Musical Quiz Book, the mystery novel St. Oswald's Niche, numerous stories in fantasy, mystery, and science fiction magazines, and she also contributed a chapter to the recent book 50 Key Stage Musicals. Here we go. Welcome, Laura Frankos. It's so great to have you here on Broadway Nation to talk about your novel, Broadway Revival.

[1:53] Laura Frankos: I am very thrilled to be here. I had a great time reading this book, and I think all Broadway fans will enjoy it. It's certainly something very unusual, and I've never had an author of a work of fiction on here before, but this one seems really appropriate for the Broadway Nation audience.

[2:11] David Armstrong: Well, that's certainly my hope. I do think that the people who listen to your podcast are my target audience. There isn't a whole lot of overlap between science fiction and theater, but those are both two of my passions, and that's how I ended up here. So let's connect those dots. What is the story that you've written?

[2:27] Laura Frankos: The story of Broadway Revival is that of David Greenbaum. He is a young actor-songwriter in the 2070s. He's just getting his career started with some decent roles on Broadway, and his husband has just died from the latest designer drug craze. He's depressed, so he decides he couldn't make a difference in Ramon's life, but he can hijack his brother's time machine, go back to the 1930s with modern medicine, and make a difference in the lives of a number of Broadway greats that we lost, first and foremost being George Gershwin, whom we lost at the age of 38 to a brain tumor. What happens if you go back? I mean, we're working on drugs for treating tumors right now. Hopefully by the 2070s, we'll have even better ones.

David goes back, insinuates himself into the golden age of Broadway, and starts to get to know the fantastic talents that lived back then, finds himself in amongst them, and attempts to see if he can divert fate. On the other hand, his brother, who was part of an international consortium that controls time travel primarily as research tools, he works for Yale University and is a time traveler through their auspices. His specialty is labor history. He decides this is not a good thing, that my brother has hijacked the time machine, and who knows what damage he's doing back there. And what ends up happening is they discover that as David is making considerable changes back in 1934 New York, it's starting to have ripples, and there are starting to be alternate timelines developing.

We have kind of parallel stories going on in the novel with David making his way in the mid-century New York Broadway scene, and his brother trying to chase after him and see if he can find him, because they don't know what his agenda is. They don't know what he's doing back there, just that things are changing. And so it's a bit of a cat and mouse game there.

[4:14] David Armstrong: So in writing this book, you had to do several incredible feats of imagining. You had to imagine what life is like 50 years in the future, and then you had to imagine what it would be like to time travel back to the 1930s, something we talk about on this podcast all the time, because everyone has their time travel musicals that they can't wait for the time machine to be invented to go back and be at the opening night of Girl Crazy, which is actually probably the top of my time travel desires. And you do that in this book. Talk about living your vicarious fantasies through this character, because I assume that was part of the appeal in writing.

[4:52] Laura Frankos: Oh yes, that was one of the delicious bits of fun, imagining not just seeing those classic shows through my protagonist's eyes, but then coming up with the ones that end up happening because he's been meddling in the lives of these songwriters. Just to make sure the audience understands, the songwriters live much longer than they lived in the world that we know. So they write shows that we don't know about, and you had to create those shows, at least in your head. And it's quite fun to hear you talk about what songs were in them, what other people got to work on them. Give us a couple examples of that, like what does Gershwin get to do that he didn't get to do in real life?

[5:27] Laura Frankos: Okay, well, since he died in our world at the age of 38, there were any number of projects that right then he was working on. And so that was my leaping off point, as with the other songwriters whose lives are extended in Broadway Revival. I took projects that he was working on, like one called Lice of Lammy, that was from Lynne Riggs' work. There were other things later on, because I took Ira's views into consideration too, because I figured George would continue to work closely with his brother. They end up doing Around the World in 80 Days, which was a longtime favorite novel of Ira's. Those were kind of my leaping off points. But then I got to thinking, okay, well, what about other things that came out after, in our world, Gershwin's death that he would have now been seeing?

And the one I immediately glommed onto was Young Man with a Horn. Which was a novel. We know that it's a movie, but I actually didn't know it was a big hit novel at the time. Yes, that's a novel by Dorothy Baker with a tragic jazz-playing trumpeter. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is perfect for if Gershwin had seen this novel, as when he saw the novel Porgy, he'd immediately think, this needs musical treatment. And so I went with that, and then had great fun trying to decide who was going to be cast in that, and picking out things like Burgess Meredith and so playing the lead in that one, and contemplating who else could go into it. It was a great delight.

[6:44] Laura Frankos: And of course, you get to use your protagonist to encourage Gershwin to go in these directions. And of course, he knows the entire history, at least as far as we know it, of the Broadway musical, and then some. So he encourages these writers to maybe go in an advanced direction beyond what they might have done on their own.

[7:00] Laura Frankos: Yes, definitely. The go-to money-raising method for time travelers is if you know the results of sporting events, you can bet on the sporting events because you know the outcome, and you can make a fortune that way. Well, here's my protagonist, what does he know? He knows theater history. So he's immediately sitting down and going, okay, I'm going to invest in The Man Who Came to Dinner. I'm going to back Anything Goes, because I know these are going to be hits and they're going to keep giving me solid income for as long as shows that I'm familiar with keep being produced. Because one of the issues I had to deal with was to decide exactly how much of a ripple effect he was going to have. The longer David Greenbaum is hanging around in mid-century Broadway, he's making changes there.

And so I'll have to go, okay, if Vivian Seagal is in our world, close, close friend of Laurence Hart's, she's playing in the revised version of Connecticut Yankee. Well, if I have her playing in a Laurence Hart show that wasn't written in our world, what does that do? I kind of worried at times because I'd sit there and I'd be looking at maps of New York and theaters and going, so-and-so is in this show. And if I take them out of this show, and I have them in a fictional show of my own, you know, what does that do with that? Eventually, it got to the point where I thought, okay, I can't do too much of this or this novel is going to end up as long as Les Miserables. I mean, Victor Hugo's, not the Broadway version.

Either way, it's long. I found that fascinating. Obviously, it was a puzzle that you had to figure out, even just in terms of what theaters would be occupied when shows that maybe were flops become hits or vice versa.

[9:01] ♪ Musical number: "Without A Song" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[9:28] David Armstrong: Let's talk about the songwriters that your protagonist affects, besides Gershwin, which I assume was the major inspiration for this, because everybody imagines what else would Gershwin have written. Who else does he interact with and create longevity for that we didn't get to have?

[9:44] Laura Frankos: Well, his first target is Vincent Eumanns. Vincent Eumanns, best known to audiences today as the composer of T for Two from No, No, Nanette and Flying Down to Rio, the film with Fred and Ginger. He died of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is incredibly easy to cure. Now we're developing superbugs with tuberculosis, which are harder. But back in 1934, it was just standard tuberculosis, but they didn't have a cure for it. People who had it, who had bad lungs, they would try to find mountain air and hope that that would cure them. And so in 1934, my hero, who has researched all of his targets to a fairly well, knows perfectly well that Vincent Eumanns is going to be hanging around, taking in the mountain air and trying to hope his tuberculosis improves in Colorado.

And he trucks off there and manages to finagle an invitation. And that's his first target. He tries to find a way, how can he get his antibiotics from 2079 into Vincent Eumanns in 1934? And then what happens after that?

[10:45] Laura Frankos: And Vincent Eumanns in your novel goes on to write several shows that we didn't get to actually see. Yes. Which is fascinating. And who else?

[10:50] Laura Frankos: I am a huge Kurt Weill fan. And Kurt Weill had, in the 1940s, this incredible stretch where he did six different shows in essentially six different subgenres and was working on Huckleberry Finn when he had a heart attack and died at the age of 50. This is a terrible tragedy because he was that productive just in that decade. How much further could he have gone? I'm infuriated when I read music critics who dismiss Weill's Broadway output as somehow inferior to what he did in Europe before he had to run from the Nazis and ended up in America. His Broadway output was genius. I started thinking, how can we prevent a guy who has high blood pressure, is a heart attack risk? How can my hero keep him alive?

Well, that took a little bit more finagling. That was one of the issues that I spent talking with my own doctor. I had to do a considerable amount of medical research for that. I don't presume that my plans are entirely foolproof. I'm sure there are probably some scientists out there who can knock holes in it. But hey, you know, it's fiction.

[12:00] Laura Frankos: Exactly. Then, David, your protagonist, becomes the producer of that Huckleberry Finn. Yes. Which opens on Broadway and becomes a big hit. And who else? He doesn't stop there.

[12:06] Laura Frankos: Well, okay. All Broadway buffs know what happened to Cole Porter when he went for a horseback ride one day in Long Island. He deliberately picked a very balky, feisty horse, which he shouldn't have done. Well, what are you going to do about that, David Greenbaum, time traveler? Is there a way to prevent Cole Porter from getting on that horse? And he figures out a way, which changes Cole Porter's life. And I thought this was really fascinating to see the unexpected consequences of this. It does increase Cole Porter's life, but it causes other things to happen. He gets divorced from his wife, which didn't happen in real life, which makes sense because, as you say in the book, he was on the verge of divorce before he had the accident.

And that sort of turned things around with his relationship with Linda. But then, I don't want to give away all the secrets of the book, but he doesn't end up writing some shows that we know he did write because of what David has done in trying to help Cole Porter. Broadway Revival is what is known in the science fiction field as an alternate history. And in fact, I am incredibly proud to state that it was a finalist for the 2021 Sidewise Award, which is given for Best Alternate History. It didn't win, but yes, indeed, it is an extreme honor to be nominated. What happens in an alternate history is you take an event or someone's life and make changes in it, and then you extrapolate. And so I had to sit there and look at every action that David Greenbaum did.

[13:35] Laura Frankos: In the 1930s and onward, and then extrapolate the changes. Which is wonderful from a story standpoint, because it puts him into real dilemmas about whether what he's doing is having the consequences that he thought it was going to, and what is he giving to the world, but what is he also depriving the world of by doing this? And the closest relationship he has is with another of the most famous songwriters of all time. That was, I think, the most difficult thing in the entire writing of Broadway Revival was trying to get into the troubled genius mind that was Larry Hart. A complex man, a troubled man, a wonderful man, one who had a very difficult life. And that was the single hardest thing. And what made it so difficult?

Well, there were a number of challenges. I'm a middle-aged straight woman. Larry Hart was a gay songwriter, gay lyricist, librettist. There's that challenge. And I'm fairly mentally stable, I think. I'm not an alcoholic. I felt that was a kind of mindset that was hard to get into. That was a challenge that I spent the longest on, trying to get Larry Hart right.

[14:45] David Armstrong: Was there a research problem there as well? Because in my own research, it seems to me that what we've been told about him is often highly colored by the people who got to tell the story.

[14:53] Laura Frankos: Oh, well, that's the case all the time. I'm a historian by training. I passed my doctoral exams at UCLA in ancient history and then ended up, instead of writing my dissertation, having three kids and writing my first novel. I never finished it. But I do know how to do research. You have to delve into absolutely everything that's there. The research for Broadway Revival took years. My library is enormous. I basically wallowed in everything there was about the mid-century Broadway scene, especially all of the figures that were there and reading absolutely everything that they said in contemporary times, not just people looking back and saying things, oh yeah, Larry Hart was like this, blah, blah, blah. But what quips and stuff were coming up in the newspapers and magazines of that era.

[15:36] David Armstrong: I think that's crucial because although he clearly was a very troubled guy, what we hear Richard Rogers say about him and some of his other contemporaries, I think, doesn't necessarily tell the story of his personality. I think you show us a different side of Larry Hart in your book to a great extent. And I always look at that quote that Oscar Hammerstein said, he always remembers him being happy and smiling and laughing and being joyous, which doesn't jive with so many other things that we've been told about him.

[16:05] Laura Frankos: I think there very definitely was a public persona and then a private one. You have this man who spent his entire life living with his mother and was devastated when she died in early 1943, and in fact slept in the same room with his brother until his brother Teddy got married just a few years before that, sometime in the late 30s. So her loss was just shocking to him. And then one of the other things that happens in real time is he's at this terrible stage. He's seeing his longtime partner Richard Rogers having the biggest success ever with Oklahoma. And while he still had projects and things going on, he was very much alone. And his rather corrupt lawyer accountant forced him to get a new apartment farther away from the theater district. I think all of that really contributed to the spiral that marked the end of his days in 1943. And my protagonist knows this too, and is going to do everything in his power to try to stop it.

[17:05] David Armstrong: Which is really interesting, because obviously your protagonist knows everything you know, which puts him in a position to not only analyze these people, but assist them. And Larry Hart was alone, but in your book he's not alone because your protagonist actually becomes Larry Hart's lover, which I thought was one of the most surprising aspects of the book. I was a little like, what? What happened here? Talk a little bit about that plot development. Did you know that going into it?

[17:28] Laura Frankos: For first of all, I have to know, do you think I pulled it off?

[17:30] David Armstrong: Oh, you totally pulled it off.

[17:31] Laura Frankos: Okay, thank you.

[17:34] David Armstrong: You totally pulled it off, but it is a challenging, Larry Hart is a challenging person to fall in love with.

[17:39] Laura Frankos: Yes. For so many reasons. I think a lot of what happens is sheer proximity. David Greenbaum sees how to keep Larry Hart from spiraling out. The way he does is to be on the scene with him as often as he can to deflect the various dark episodes as much as he can. And the more you're around someone, the more the opportunities are to get close. And I just sort of saw that happening and tried to convey it.

[18:36] ♪ Musical number: "Don't Go Away" — performed by Laura Frankos ♪

[19:04] David Armstrong: Let's talk about this research because I do think one of the joys for me in reading this book was the level of detail that you're able to go into both about these specific characters, just while we're talking about Larry Hart, the details you provide us about the other people in his circle, including his mother, his brother, his accountant, the sort of infamous Doc Bender. Again, I always wonder how much of what we've been told about Doc Bender is colored by homophobia and other things, you know, people who didn't like what he was doing and probably none of us would like what he was doing. But because we're hearing about it from Richard Rogers, did that make him more of a villain in what we've been told than what he was in reality? So I'm interested in just how you did the research on those minor characters, which are obviously even harder to research than somebody like Larry Hart, and then what you decided about them.

[19:47] Laura Frankos: I basically read everything. I read everything that I possibly could get my hands on. Writing down quips that Larry and his brother Teddy and his sister-in-law Dorothy said, for example, about their longtime housekeeper, Big Mary Campbell. I had reams of Big Mary Campbell anecdotes that I could have used. The trick is, with any amount of research, it's like an iceberg. You want to just let the top 10% show and not the 90% that you've done underneath. For all of these people, Bender included, there's 90% research that's tucked away in my notebooks. Post-it notes everywhere.

[20:24] David Armstrong: Big Mary is another very vibrant character that you create with just a few tiny little scenes that she's in, but we get a sense of really getting to know Larry Hart through these people that are around him.

[20:35] Laura Frankos: Thank you. Other people that I was really interested in that I didn't know anything about were Joe Gould, who is a major presence in your book.

[20:43] David Armstrong: Yes. And that's a real person, I'm assuming.

[20:45] Laura Frankos: Oh, Joe Gould is definitely real. In fact, I highly recommend to you checking out Joseph Mitchell's essays that were written about him that appeared in The New Yorker, and they made a very good film of Joe Gould's life during Ian Holm a few years ago called Joe Gould's Secret. Excellent film. I do recommend it.

[21:00] David Armstrong: Never heard of it. I will check it out.

[21:01] Laura Frankos: Joe Gould was an odd fellow. He was highly educated. He had graduated from Harvard, and he was a fixture in 1930s and 40s Greenwich Village. He was known as the little bohemian, the little professor. He wrote poetry. He drank lots. He probably had some mental illness. He claimed he could talk to seagulls. He fed seagulls. He fed pigeons. He just was an incredibly colorful character. Here I have to tell all of Broadway Nation that I have been to New York exactly once in my life. That was 2007. My daughter and I went to New York. She was graduating from high school. We toured. I took photographs of many old theaters. I do not know New York the way New Yorkers know New York, so I had to do a ton of New York homework.

And I decided right from the get-go that I wanted my protagonist from 2079 to be in a rather historic New York section of the city, and I picked Greenwich Village and was fixating on certain old buildings there that I hoped would still be around by the 2070s. I do thank the various conservation groups in the Greenwich Village area for their excellent research materials. They gave me all sorts of information that I could study the history of these buildings going back to the times that I wanted to start putting characters into them, and I kept all that in the back of my head. I wanted to put him there in a historic area so that then when he goes back to 1934, he picks the same area. And if I have him wandering around in 1934 Greenwich Village, who is he going to run into but this odd fellow? And so I kept having Joe Gould turn up, and being just a little bit off, he somehow senses that David Greenbaum is a little bit off.

[23:04] David Armstrong: Yeah, he's a little Cassandra there, in a way. He sort of sees something, which is interesting and fascinating, and also a threat, in a way. Creates some tension for you.

[23:09] Laura Frankos: Yes, authors are constantly wanting to find ways that they can complicate their characters' lives. One of the earliest things that I came up with, I'm not going to reveal, is a major devastating plot point. I had that early, early on. I said, okay, I'm going to do this to this guy.

[23:21] David Armstrong: Well, you did it well. Another character I'll ask you about is Lewis Kessler, somebody I never heard of. Tell us about Lewis Kessler.

[23:26] Laura Frankos: Lewis Kessler became Ethel Merman's personal pianist and worked as a rehearsal pianist for Broadway shows. He was redheaded. He was flamboyantly gay. He threw outrageous drag parties. Where I end up bringing him into play is one of those cases where my hero is concerned because his first major gig, he manages to get himself named a rehearsal pianist for Anything Goes, which was great fun to do because I had him there with Ethel Merman and all. He's invited to keep working on Porter and Merman shows, and he decides, no, he doesn't want to do that because he knows, I think it's for Red, Hot and Blue, that that's where Lew Kessler and Cole Porter and Ethel Merman all first start getting together.

[24:50] ♪ Musical number: "Red, Hot and Blue" — performed by Lewis Kessler ♪

[25:55] Laura Frankos: Kessler is just one of those characters that turned up in the tons of research that I did. He's a fixture of 30s Broadway, and he worked really closely with Merman for years, decades. And I think you say Cole Porter depended on him for transpositions and sort of musical talent that Cole Porter either didn't have or didn't want to take the time to do.

[26:13] David Armstrong: Yes. Very interesting.

[26:15] Laura Frankos: I've no desire to hear black dance from Hilda Deer. She waves a pretty spear, but she's not Red, Hot and Blue.

[26:28] David Armstrong: You also obviously really researched the world of New York during the 1930s and the 40s and the 50s, but especially you spend a great deal of time during the 30s and all the theatrical hangouts and the bars and the restaurants. What are the places that you have your protagonist go and hang out?

[26:45] Laura Frankos: Oh, heavens. The Barn in Greenwich Village.

[26:48] David Armstrong: Yeah, the Village Barn. What is that?

[26:50] Laura Frankos: This was a place that had old-time country-type trappings. Like hay bales sitting around them.

[26:56] David Armstrong: Yes, exactly.

[26:57] Laura Frankos: They had nightly turtle races. They had a band. Naturally, a lot of these restaurants had bands. It was a very homey, folksy place with good, solid fare. I think one of the best and—

[28:10] David Armstrong: Summing this up for everybody, what do you want people to take away from this book?

[36:12] Laura Frankos: I hope they will enjoy vicariously traveling back in time with my protagonist and seeing the changes and trading banter with Oscar Levant and La Delenia and the like. This is my love letter to Broadway. It's my tribute to the greats that we lost far too soon to sit down and imagine what would have happened had those lives been extended. What treasures could we have? And I tried to come up with them.

[36:45] David Armstrong: And do you have a sequel in mind? Will David be going back in time? Or his niece more likely be going back in time to save Michael Bennett or anybody?

[36:53] Laura Frankos: I do not have a sequel in mind. Bennett would be great. It would be an easy thing to save Jonathan Larson. I mean, I do not have any plans right now. I am still wallowing thoroughly in the 1930s, though. One of the things that I started doing after I finished Broadway Revival was working on a nonfiction survey of the 1935-36 season, both plays and musicals. You have The Luntz doing two shows. You have Corky and Bess. It's a fantastic season. And I started working on that. And the chapter on Rogers and Hart's Jumbo ballooned to over 20,000 words. And I thought, this is telling me something. So right now I'm trying to see if I can do a book just on Jumbo alone. I have some short fiction that I'm sending out. It's science fiction and fantasy, but there's definitely theater links to them. And that's kind of what I'm doing now.

[37:44] David Armstrong: Fantastic. And those will be published in science fiction periodicals?

[37:48] Laura Frankos: Yes.

[37:49] David Armstrong: Well, I hope you will let us know when those are happening. Because I think after reading this book, people will want to absolutely see what else you've been up to and see the other kinds of spinoffs that you're doing.

[37:58] Laura Frankos: I am in another book that appeared earlier this year. And this is, again, Gershwin-related. There is a new book out this spring from Rutledge called 50 Key Stage Musicals, edited by Rob Schneider. I was invited to take part. The editors had already made up their own lists, so do not criticize me if you have quibbles. Why isn't such and such on this list? But I was invited to take my choice of most of them. And my favorite musical of all is Sweeney Todd. And I was tempted to do Sweeney, but there was The Icing. And I said, nope, I got to stay with George and Ira. And so I wrote the chapter on that.

[38:31] David Armstrong: Fantastic. I have not read that book yet.

[38:33] Laura Frankos: Oh, it's a wonderful, wonderful book.

[38:35] David Armstrong: And Rob has also done a podcast.

[38:37] Laura Frankos: He interviews all the authors.

[38:38] David Armstrong: Which is also on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[38:40] Laura Frankos: Yes.

[38:41] David Armstrong: Yeah, I'm hoping to have Rob on the show as well.

[38:43] Laura Frankos: Oh, wonderful.

[38:44] David Armstrong: Thank you so much. It's been delightful to talk with you about Broadway Revival, a really unusual, fascinating, full-of-history read.

[38:53] Laura Frankos: Thank you. Thank you very much. It's been great fun being here.

[38:57] Laura Frankos: It seems we stood and talked like this before.

[39:06] Laura Frankos: We looked at each other in the same way then.

[39:11] Laura Frankos: But I can't remember where or when.

[39:20] David Armstrong: If you enjoyed this podcast, I feel certain that you will also enjoy joining our Broadway Nation Facebook group, where you'll find daily postings of images, videos, articles, and links that relate to and enhance each and every episode. Just Google Broadway Nation Facebook group and join the more than 2,000 other fans of Broadway Nation.

[39:40] David Armstrong: Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pals Mox for his help with editing this episode. To KVSH 101.9, the voice of beautiful Vashon Island, Washington, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[39:57] Laura Frankos: Seems to be happening again.

[40:07] Laura Frankos: And so it seems that we have met before.

[40:16] Laura Frankos: And laughed before.

[40:20] Laura Frankos: And loved before.

[40:25] Laura Frankos: But who knows where or when.