This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:20] Bryan Plovsky: Hello, and welcome to the official Broadwaysted podcast where we're drunk on theater. I'm your host, Bryan Plovsky in Just Our Luck. The Lion has got no teeth. The road don't make you young, so I shouldn't be surprised. But it's easy to go anywhere on another train. But in our ode to an elephant, you can be a funny angel or a squeaky wheel. What do you do when you've got nothing? Well, you go home. Joining us today are the usual silver stars, including Kevin Wild Jigger.

[0:51] Kevin Wild: Oh, I'm very wild. Thank you, Bryan.

[0:53] Bryan Plovsky: Of course, of course. Kimberly, our grand spec game master and unofficial babysitter for the hour.

[0:57] Kimberly: Hello.

[0:58] Bryan Plovsky: Beautiful. And with us today is a writer whose work you're 100% familiar with. He's created the backbone to Jersey Boys, The Addams Family, The Cher Show, My Very Own British Invasion, and now on Broadway, Water for Elephants. He's also responsible for the perfect Peter on the Star Catcher stage adaptation. Let's give a big Broadwaysted welcome to Friend of the Show.

[1:22] Rick Elice: Oh, thank you. Thank you. That was very, very nice. I had no idea who you were talking about for the longest time.

[1:26] Bryan Plovsky: Yeah, no, it's very, very cunning the way you integrated all the titles of the musical numbers to Water for Elephants.

[1:35] Rick Elice: None of which I had anything to do with.

[1:37] Bryan Plovsky: Yeah, I know, I know, I know. But still appreciated by me. I thought, geez, this sounds so familiar. You know, why does it sound so familiar?

[1:47] Rick Elice: Very, very well done. I've heard that title in the fire, isn't right.

[1:50] Bryan Plovsky: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's wonderful. I mean, your career is pretty incredible. Like, just the number and the show specific that I mentioned. I'm just like, whenever people talk about excellent books of musicals, Jersey Boys always comes up. And I guess like starting with there, like, where did you start putting in some in terms of helping to put that together, what the collaboration was like, like how much direction were you given? Like I guess I that's a very open, wide up question, but like I'm just curious like where that even started because it's a spectacular narrative woven into the songs.

[2:33] Rick Elice: It is a really good example of something I like to say if anybody ever asks me and then continues to listen as I answer the question. That if I can do it, anybody can, which I really believe, you know. I mean, I'm very lucky to be doing this thing that I love, but I certainly never intended as a kid to gee, say gee, when I grow up, I want to be a book writer for Broadway shows. You know, it never occurred to me. I've just sort of been a pinball in my own life, careening from career to career, I think is the way the master put it in a song. But I'm only, you wouldn't know it to look at me, but I'm only about 20 years old as a writer, as a real writer, I should say, because I spent a lot of time doing writing, but as a creative director at an advertising agency.

So the things that I wrote were 10 seconds or 15 seconds or 30 seconds or 60 seconds long. For me, a big spree was writing a movie trailer, which would be three minutes, you know. But that was my limit. And I stopped doing that in at the onset of my midlife crisis. I stopped doing that because I had in the course of my strange life done the advertising for the Broadway production of The Lion King.

[3:59] Rick Elice: I knew the people at Disney because in the 80s I had a little side hustle as a trailer cutter. And so I cut a lot of trailers for those movies in the early regime of Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg when they were making movies as they said for a price, with stars either on the way down or on the way up. You know, Rick Dreyfuss of Bette Midler and you know Tom Hanks on the way up, though you know, some people on the way down, but they were able to make movies inexpensively and put out four or five of those a year and make a nice tidy profit at the same time as they were experiencing their animation feature animation renaissance that began with I guess Little Mermaid and then continued to flourish under the leadership of Peter Schneider and Tom Schumacher.

Peter Schneider's name will come back because of course he's one of the lead producers on Water for Elephants. But I got to know Peter and Tom as when they were assigned by Michael Eisner to not just run feature animation but to take over their nascent theater development division. They had on Broadway at the time, Beauty and the Beast. And then they hired and developed Lion King with Julie Taymor. Julie Taymor was somebody that I knew because I had done the advertising on a bunch of her stuff that was down at the public theater when Joe Papp was still running the public theater and Lincoln Center for Juan D'Arien. So when I read that she was going to be doing The Lion King, I thought, well, that's sort of an interesting idea. And so I went out to Minneapolis to check it out and thought, oh, oh I see this is something very, very different. And I gotta go after this account.

[5:59] Rick Elice: So my boss and mentor Nancy Coyne and I pitched Disney, meaning Peter Schneider and Tom Schumacher on doing the advertising for The Lion King when it came to New York in the fall of 1997. And I had be so and that relationship flourished and as a result around the summer of 1999, I was offered a chance to leave advertising and go out to Burbank and work at the studio as a creative consultant, and I didn't know what that meant. So and they said, they being the people who were running the company and the studio whom I had become pals with over that period of time, said, just fax us. This is how long ago it was, fax is a 10-point plan of what your dream job would be. And so I just made up a 10-point plan.

I think I'm not even sure I came up with 10. I think maybe it was just an eight-point plan. Yeah, because you know, if I was really, really smart, I would have had a dozen, but you know. No, but we also I'm will be so efficient, this is only an eight-point plan. I you know, just basically these are the things I learned how to do when I detoured into the career in advertising in 1982, and I stayed and stayed and stayed and got better and better and better, and you know, got to hang out with people who were the great theater makers and filmmakers of that period of time. And so you know, maybe I could do this, maybe I could do that, sort of a diplomat without portfolio kind of position. And they'd never had one of those before. And so I and they agreed. So I found myself packing a bag and going out to Burbank.

[7:54] Rick Elice: And it was only because I was in Burbank and not doing this sort of 24-hour deadline-oriented advertising agency job that when the phone rang and a former client of mine called and said, this was shortly after Mamma Mia opened on Broadway, which coincided with the coining of the rather inaccurate jukebox musical pejorative. Accurate because jukebox musicals predate jukeboxes, which I think around 1937 they came in. But you know, just over here at the Music Box Theater, that theater was built by Irving Berlin specifically to house the what he called the music box reviews, which were shows designed to re-popularize songs that he'd written for shows that had closed, and he just wanted to sell more sheet music, which is how he made his money in 1920, and so he built in 1924 the music box theater.

And before that, the Ziegfeld Follies would do the same thing, you know, take the popular songs of the day, put them on stage in a different context. So the whole idea of jukebox musicals, it's been around for yeah.

[9:05] Rick Elice: Yeah. However, Mamma Mia just opened or had opened, you know, a year or two before and was obviously successful. And I got a call from a former client and he said, I've got the rights to the Four Seasons music. And I said, as I'm sure any of you would have, I love Vivaldi, but do you think there's a whole show in it? This guy's reaction was somewhat less jocular than yours. And he said, No, not Vivaldi, you idiot. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. And I went, oh, you mean like the guy with the high voice? And he started rattling off the song titles. And I thought, oh, well, you know, I actually know all those songs. But what I don't get it, you know. He said, Well, we could do a Mamma Mia with these songs, and I said, But somebody already did that.

You know, it's called Mamma Mia. Because I've been always been sort of spiky about, you know, why don't you just do the same thing that somebody else just did? But because I was no longer working in a 24-hour-a-day deadline-oriented business, I had the time to agree to a lunch with Frankie Valli, the front man of the Frankie Valli in the Four Seasons, and Bob Gaudio, the principal songwriter of the group. And one thing we all know, all of us in show businesses, you never turn down an opportunity for a free lunch.

[10:37] Rick Elice: And you know, so I thought, all right, I'll meet with these guys and what's the lunch. And you know, so of course it was, you know, an Italian restaurant on 46th Street, and I roped in a friend of mine, the legendary Oscar-winning screenwriter, Marshall Brickman, to whom I had some reasonably sized debt in poker losses. And I said, You want to write a musical with me? And if we do, you know, like we'll wipe the slate clean. And he said, Well, I've never written a Broadway musical, and I said, Neither have I. But they're not gonna pay us to do it anyway. So I mean, if we do it, maybe we'll have a good time, and we'll if we waste our time, we'll only have wasted our own time, and you know, it'll be something, you know.

[11:18] Rick Elice: So we both agreed to this luncheon. I think Marshall now says it was a luncheon he always expected to cancel at the last minute. But forgot all about it until it was like 15 minutes beforehand. So it was too, oh shit. Well, I'm gonna have to go have lunch with these two guys. He's a little bit of a musical snob, I think, in terms of American pop classics like the Four Seasons catalog. He's more of a, you know, more of a folk-inflected, you know, very actually very, very achieved guitarist, banjo player. In fact, it's Marshall Brickman and his college roommate who play the record of dueling banjos from the film of Deliverance, which is a very famous piece of banjo music, and for which Marshall Brickman, Oscar-winning screenwriter, has a gold record for that playing on that house.

[12:10] Rick Elice: Really? Yeah. So, you know, but so the idea of like the two and a half minute pop songs, you know, he was much more of a Woody Guthrie Pete Seeger kind of Dylan. And um, but he came anyway to the luncheon, and we there we were in the back of a darker Italian restaurant, and you know, sitting with these two guys, very dapper guys, and having no idea what to talk about. And um, you know, we ordered, and then while we were waiting for the calamari to arrive, you know, just by way of making conversation, I may have said, so what what what was it like being you? You know, growing up in Jersey. Because I was born here, born in Manhattan born and bred individual. Marshall was not, but Marshall has spent his adult life living in New York and having a family and growing up in New York.

And um, you know, when you do that, sometimes perhaps you're a bit of a snob about Jersey, you know, and you think of Jersey as like you know, that state over there, it smells bad. You're talking to two Jersey people here. I own my my my shitty Jersey prejudice, which I no longer have, obviously. But at that time, I confess that I was sitting there with my sort of overindulged, overanalyzed, overeducated New York snobness, snobbiness, thinking, what's it like over there? What was it like growing up in New Jersey?

[13:39] Rick Elice: Yeah. And um, and then they started to tell us. And I was sitting back as I am now, and as they told us, I started to lean forward, and you know, and suddenly they delivered the food, and it was like, wait, oh, there's food? Oh, right, we're in a restaurant. I mean, I had totally gotten lost in the story, and I turned next to my turned to look at my friend who's you know, cynical New Yorker, been there, done that kind of New Yorker. And he too was leaning forward, and I looked at him and he looked at me, and you know, we said silently to each other something along the lines of you know this is a good story. You know, look at us, we're responding like an audience would respond in the theater.

So, like, oh keep talking, guys. And so we suddenly became journalists that day, and we started interviewing them, and they kept talking and telling us anecdotes. They would contradict each other, they would agree with each other, then they would tell the same story, but it was somehow a little bit different, and we would just keep asking and asking, and we were there for hours and hours and hours.

[14:42] Rick Elice: And um at the end of which uh we suggested that um rather than do a Mamma Mia gag again, which for the purposes of your listeners, um I might uh uh add that you know, was a um a uh a story, a made-up story, um uh uh sort of inspired by a boulevard comedy from the 50s called Dear Charles, um uh retrofitted to a song list of uh uh Abba's greatest hits.

[15:13] Rick Elice: And um and we said, uh, suppose you did this, suppose you we told this story instead, this the your story. And um and they were um protective of it because they had explored that possibility, they explained to us in uh TV land with uh unsuccessfully and uh and unsatisfactorily as far as they were concerned, because they said uh, you know, they kept coming back and it kept sounding like guys and dolls.

[15:42] Bryan Plovsky: Oh, yeah.

[15:43] Rick Elice: And you know, and and and we didn't we don't want we don't want to be cartoon characters like the guys and dolls, the Damon Runyan characters, you know, because it's our lives, you know, and we, you know, they weren't it, you know, it didn't wasn't all that funny at times, yeah. So we said, well, we okay, well, we'll good note taken, and uh we'll we'll try not to do that. And they said, well, you know, so you can be like write some stuff and we'll see. And uh, you know, Marshall is of an Oscar winning screen, he doesn't do a lot of spec writing. Yeah, but I because um I did wasn't a writer, I said, uh, oh well, okay. And so we left and we talked, Marshall and I talked, and we sketched out some scenes, and then we kept going and we sent those things to them, and they liked them, and they said, Um, okay, well, so why don't you write this? And we'll do this.

[16:31] Kevin Wild: Were you sketching the scenes with the songs that you like selected that would fit there, or did you just specifically write just the scenes?

[16:39] Rick Elice: We we we wrote them in and around the songs, uh, you know, the the earliest from from the very earliest uh work sessions. Um what we wanted to do was use the songs um to function the way they would in a film soundtrack, um, you know, that uh they would accompany the story. And um because it's a story of people who made records, um, the records would have some meaning at the beginning, and then over the course of a two-act evening, the songs would then sort of be um somewhat more cleverly selected than purely chronological so that they could uh assume the mantle of a book song. Um if uh if we could figure out a way to do that.

[17:37] Rick Elice: And um, you know, so we sat down, they because they recorded a lot of songs and they had a lot of top 40 songs, many, many more than you could have in a show and um and they had their favorites and we had our favorites and and um uh we also had an a notion that uh we would tell the story in terms of because they're called the four seasons and you know but sometimes you it's idiotic to look a gift horse in the mouth so so okay it's the four seasons when there are also four seasons in nature and and therefore we could tell the story in using the idea of the four seasons and the idea of these four guys in a a way that would um uh imply a structure because so you know uh uh because I uh I did had never written a show but I had done the advertising on 320 musicals and um and that's a lot of musicals and also a lot of plays and I've been going to the theater all my life and here's a list of all 300 just as just as you know what you learn from watching them so many and over and over and over again up close because you're you know you're trying to figure out a good way to get people to come market yeah um is you begin to see patterns you begin to see things that seem to work you begin to see things that don't work you begin to understand that there is no really to under really understand that there's no formula because if there was a formula then everyone would follow it and every show would be successful.

[19:02] Rick Elice: So what is it that makes something successful and compelling and the answer is always story and the answer is in the theater is always um story character and and structure. And that the puzzle of that um is very appealing to me, even though as a writer I had no experience in putting something like that together. But but having ideas is something that had become my profession at the Ed agency, even though even though I'd been having ideas, you know, since I, you know, I'd seen El Grande de Coca-Cola.

[19:35] Bryan Plovsky: Very good.

[19:37] Rick Elice: So and uh and Marshall, of course, is is like that too. Um so we just started talking a lot, and they were and they liked what we did, and because they didn't know the Broadway landscape, they said, Well, what do we do now? And and I said, Well, the all the producers are formerly my clients. So I'll chop this around, um, which was hilarious. I mean, that would be like that would be like a four-year Netflix series. Um, all this, you know, and they and the soundtrack is just the slamming of doors.

[20:08] Kevin Wild: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[20:09] Rick Elice: Um, everyone, everyone thought it was a ridiculous idea. Condense it into two and a half hours. No, no, no. Why? Oh, just just the why. Frankie that and that was as far as I would usually get. You know, why no one, no one understood it. And including Marshall, actually, to begin with, and the the way I roped him in wasn't by listening to the songs. He said, Yeah, I get it, I get it. The songs are hooky. He obviously, Gaudio, he, um, has the gift of the hook, clearly.

[20:39] Bryan Plovsky: Yeah, yeah.

[20:40] Rick Elice: Um, and that you, you know, you can't sneeze at that, or you can, but you know, then you just be a sneezing person. Um the the um but there was a film um that I was obsessed with in 1979. I was in graduate school, and I was in a play at Yale Rep with Christopher Walken, the wild duck. And um, as one does when one is performing in the wild duck, on the night off, you'd go to see a movie. Well, there was a movie playing down the road that Chris Walken was in, called The Deer Hunter.

[21:08] Bryan Plovsky: Oh, sure.

[21:09] Rick Elice: And the other people in the Deer Hunter had all were were people who had gone through Yale Drama School where I was presently a student, including Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep. And Meryl Streep, of course, name even in 1979 was spoken of in very, very hushed terms. We all went to see on a Monday night this movie called The Deer Hunter. And in the middle of the movie, um what is probab is certainly one of the great um Frankie Valley Four Seasons records called Can't Take My Eyes Off You. And it's not that it's in the movie, it's that the scene in the movie is a guy singing the song at a wedding.

[21:49] Rick Elice: Um Joe Grafazi, a great actor. Um he's like on the the house band at the at the wedding, and he's you know singing rather you know badly um amateurishly. And when he gets to the Stan Kenton trombone um riff into the chorus, everybody um in the wedding, and so all these Pittsburgh steel workers, blue-collar Pittsburgh Steelworker wedding, and they're all about to ship out to Vietnam. This is a blue-collar story, the deer hunter. And they all stop dancing and they all start singing along, first with the trombones, and then they get, you know, I love you, baby. And everybody knows the words to this song.

[22:36] Rick Elice: And I, you know, this this being 2000 and late 2003, um, I pulled up the movie on, you know, uh YouTube. VHS, maybe I think. And um, and I made Marshall watch this scene because he's a movie guy, right? And so I wanted to get under his skin, his cinema skin. And I said, look at this look at these people these are the guys these are the guys who never ever come to the theater if we you know I'm thinking because I've never written a show so I'm just thinking like a marketer which is what I didn't yeah totally if we could get like guys like this to come to see a show I mean we'd be identifying a niche for theatergoers that's never ever been achieved no whole new market and so he and but I said but mostly look look how the song resonates with these guys you know and then suddenly was a one of several revelations this one particularly being okay so you know they were competitive with the um uh with the Beatles and the other British invasion bands when they started coming when their records started being played here the the two bands that two American bands that were competitive were the Beach Boys West Coast band and the Four Seasons East Coast band and they were the ones who were charting who managed to keep charting with after the Beatles and the Stones and the Kinks and the Who were taking over the charts and this revelation came uh as uh we were talking about the Lennon McCartney songs for example and it's like well wait a minute those songs those songs the Beatles songs like you look at the Ed Sullivan clips of the girls screaming their heads off you know it's like okay their fans were girls because they wrote songs about love for girls and we called up Gaudio and said who like when you were playing gigs when you were first getting started, what who was there? Who would be and he said it was mostly guys who looked like us.

[24:38] Kevin Wild: Really?

[24:38] Rick Elice: And oh, well, because like they didn't write songs about love for girls, they wrote songs about girls for guys. How many suddenly, and there on the list was like all these four season songs with the girls' names or the title. They wrote about girls and guys bought the records. And that's why that scene lands so powerfully in the movie. Like, course, of course, those guys knew those songs because that's who the songs are really written for. Our fans, he said, look just like we did. Yeah. And that was the that was such a big moment for us. I mean, first of all, it's when Marshall said, I'm in. I totally because I I really like the idea of music having that effect, because of course that's that's exactly what he was into as a folk musician was the effect it would have on the people who would come to hear him.

[25:29] Kimberly: Yeah, these like macho guys that were like, that's how I feel sometimes.

[25:33] Rick Elice: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. And so we um you know, so eventually uh uh the Dodgers, the producers, um of uh the ultimate producers, eventual producers of Jersey Boys, because they said yes, um, said yes. Um by the time we were we went to the Dodgers, we were no longer pitching a story or any of the anecdotes that Bob and Frankie had told us. We were just pitching the idea that they sold 125 million records to 18-year-old to 25-year-old males, principally males, who by 2003, 2004, were right in the sweet spot of the age of people who mostly buy theater tickets.

[26:14] Rick Elice: Yeah, but not the gender of people who mostly buy theater tickets. We said, like, there's like this possibly untapped niche. Yeah. And if we get Dez Mack enough to direct it, I had known Des had directed me in something when I was still acting, you know, long ago in the early 80s. And um, and then I had done the advertising for his productions that came to New York when he took over as artistic director at La Jolla Playhouse. Those including um Big River in 1985 and uh um uh his revival of how to succeed in 1995, um some plays that he directed, and um, and especially in 1992, his first Broadway iteration of Tommy, which is now playing at the Needle and the Theater, um, directed again by Dez Makinoff, and um and co-written by Dez Makinoff. Um Des was running the La Jolla Playhouse, Artistic Director of the La Jolla Playhouse.

[27:07] Rick Elice: Well, and I remember from the show that I did with him, which was about the Red Baron that Joe Papp produced, um, a very daring sort of show that it I'm sure if it opened now would be a huge success. Um, but it wasn't in 1982. Yeah, it wasn't. We all thought it was going to be, but Frank Rich had a different opinion. Um but he, in the course of working on that, uh, you know, being in that company and getting to know him, I got to know also that he was sort of a rocker at heart, you know. So I thought, well, you know, he's got a theater, he's a rocker at heart. Um we called him and said, uh, so there's this four Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons. He said, oh my God, you know, the first record when I was growing up as a kid in Toronto was Sherry and 11 other hits, a Four Seasons album.

[27:59] Rick Elice: There you go. We went, okay. Um, it's meant to be, he said, I have a slot. I just, a show just dropped out next summer. This was like November. He said, Um, I have a slot in August. Uh, do you think you could have the show written by April? Because we, you know, we'd have to get it designed and cast and all that. So we said, because we'd never done it before, sure. And we and we we, you know, we we started writing and and we met with Des, and by April we had, you know, uh something of a script. And uh and we had auditions, and hardly anybody showed up because the actors felt the same way that the producers, the, you know, the rank and file producers felt it's like, why would any this is like the dumbest thing, this is like the dumbest idea in the world.

[28:47] Rick Elice: And so um uh we had a continual auditions on the West Coast. Uh and um uh the first time we heard the uh we wrote speeches for the characters um the of the four seasons. Specifically four auditions. Specifically for auditions because as a former actor, it always bugs me when you know you're but you're given a side and you're playing a scene with somebody, you know, who's working for the casting office. Yeah, and you know, and you always feel a little bit like a dick. I don't know, Frankie, what do you think? Exactly. So I thought, you know, what would be what what would I like? I'd like a like a speech that I could dig my sink my teeth into. So we wrote four speeches for the four characters of the four seasons, and um, and we enjoyed the auditions so much when we finally had some people show up to audition them uh for them that we we thought, oh well, you know, look we're gonna put those in at the at the end of the show.

[29:44] Rick Elice: We're gonna keep it. We're gonna make that the we're gonna that's how we're gonna get out. We're gonna do um uh they were sort of like what the titles do at the end of American Graffiti.

[29:54] Kevin Wild: Yeah, uh-huh.

[29:55] Rick Elice: And so we thought, oh, okay, well, this is like this is a lot of things. Sounds good. Sounds good. It's like I know what happened to this character, and I know what didn't happen, and everything gets sort of resolved and tied up.

[30:05] Kevin Wild: Yeah.

[30:06] Rick Elice: Okay, so that's how we'll do that. Now I'm gonna be able to do that. But the very first time, the very first time we heard the play was the first day of rehearsal in a basement in uh in uh La Jolla.

[30:15] Kevin Wild: Oh damn in August.

[30:17] Rick Elice: And uh, and you know, that was the first time we met most of the cast because Des had hired the actors mostly out of California because we couldn't find people in New York. And the few that we found um and offered parts to were all get it all got other jobs anyway. And we went and um uh Frankie and Bob were, I think at that point keeping a what's called um arm's length. I guess if for the sake of plausible deniability, which is you know, like if this really sucks, we didn't have anything to do with it. And um they weren't around they they weren't around a lot until we started, until we started previews. They never saw a run through, in other words, in the rehearsal room. And that's an important part of the story because I think if they had, they might have said, oh well, you can't do that, you can't do that, and you can't do that.

We didn't do that. Yeah, we did that. That's not what really happened, and you changed the chronology, and that's you know, this happened first, and like this it's not it's it's not factual. But instead they saw it. They saw it in the midst of an audience in La Jolla that was going nuts for the show. And so they loved it. And they said, Well, there's like, why did you do that? Like, that's not really that's not, but you know, it kind of um it landed with them when when we said, yeah, but we're not telling a document, this isn't a documentary, this is a theater piece. So we so we've yes, we've taken some license because it's our job to tell the best possible story and to serve up your music in a different way in a way that sort of marries the high culture of the theater with the pop culture of their songs and so um you know and they had nothing but tickets uh when we started out there there were because there it wasn't a title anyone ever heard of the the four seasons was an east coast band it wasn't like this is Beach Boys territory we had no recognizable um name actors playing any of the parts there was no reason why anybody would go and after two or three performances we saw started seeing people again coming back with different people and you know and then Bob and Frankie were there every night and so people would start mobbing them and things like um we you know we sat there every night with our pads you know ready to take notes and everything ready to take notes and when um and when we opened out there said you know I think this is one of the times where we sort of got it right so uh put your pads away and um and they played out there became very successful out there and um and then the assignment was to try to get a theater here.

[31:37] Kevin Wild: Did you tweak did you tweak a lot of it from west coast to east coast?

[31:37] Rick Elice: Hardly anything at all. We changed we changed uh the order of a couple of scenes in act two um but that's it.

[31:37] Kevin Wild: Wow that's it do you do you feel like you created the blueprint for the contemporary bio musical.

[33:22] Rick Elice: Well, I you'd be better off asking someone else that question. But um I think that what the success of Jersey Boys led to was uh you know a uh a uh what's now sort of a catalog of musical biographies. I mean, of course it wasn't the first musical biography, but it was the but it was the first of this particular type. Like we're the artists, here this is the music that we made. You've heard the you know the music, but you don't understand the context within which these this music was created. And so the mu the the show, the musical gives you a context for songs that you haven't had before this point. Like, oh, I know, oh, that's the song I used to make out to, or that's the song we used to go bowling to. Those are all personal contexts, but the shared context, the socializing influence of the show, a foul you know, presented to a thousand people in the dark every night is oh, not what was happening to me when those songs came out, but what was happening to the group.

[34:19] Kevin Wild: Yeah, yes.

[34:20] Rick Elice: And then the great alchemy that Des achieved in the production was that the audience sort of cast themselves as the various audiences in the show. So they became really invested in the success of the group. Yeah, and they forgot, I think even though they know that the group is very successful in their mind.

[34:37] Kevin Wild: Yes, but I mean somehow and uh magically this is the wonderful alchemy of the theater, the you know, the suspension of disbelief.

[34:44] Rick Elice: Yeah, but I think people really forgot that they were watching four actors, and they really thought that oh, they were John Lloyd Young was Frankie Valley, and Dan Rikert was Bob Gaudio, and Christian Hopp was Tommy DeVito, and and uh and uh uh oh my God. Um and Bobby um oh uh oh, this is so embarrassing because I was just uh looking at a Facebook photo. Spencer, Bobby Spencer.

[35:06] Kevin Wild: Yes, um Bobby Spencer was Nick Massey.

[35:09] Rick Elice: Yeah, this is what happens when you get to be old. Um I apologize, Bobby. Um but the audience really, you know, would wait for them in stage door and treat them like they were a rock band.

[35:21] Kevin Wild: Oh, yeah.

[35:21] Rick Elice: They were huge deal. It was thrilling for them. Still is, you know, they still they're still going out, you know.

[35:29] Kevin Wild: Yeah.

[35:29] Rick Elice: Um I mean, they enjoyed it, it was a it was a fun ride, you know. Um uh and and I think because it was successful, people started contacting, I'm sure Des and certainly me and Marshall and saying, you know, I've got a good story, and here's my song and all that.

[35:45] Kevin Wild: Yeah.

[35:45] Rick Elice: And you know, and and a lot of that stuff is has uh happened. It's not interesting to me to do the same thing twice. I broke that rule um with another show that I did, but only because I thought I had a really good idea. And um, and then uh over the course of you know the time that it took uh not counting Jersey Boys, which happened very, very quickly.

[36:08] Kevin Wild: Yeah.

[36:08] Rick Elice: Um sometimes over the time that it takes to get things on, people start getting nervous and they lose their, you know, their they lose a little bit of their bottle, you know, and they they um and well maybe we should just do it a little bit less weird or a little bit uh more um predictably. Um and um and eventually uh when there's a hundred people's jobs on the line, instead of saying, well, fuck it, I I can't I can't be involved anymore, thank you very much. Um you sometimes stay, one sometimes stays on a project even though it's no longer the very much like the thing that you want to do. And of course, generally speaking, we all of us, you know, who make shows want to do something great. And uh nobody sets out to make a shitty show. But sometimes the shows turn out to be, you know, less than great. And uh it's never the intention, but you know, sometimes that happens, and uh you know that's what I get for breaking my rule, I think.

[37:02] Kevin Wild: Do you think the success of Jersey Boys a lot of it comes from the fact that you had that marketing background and you kind of knew how to sell it internally?

[37:14] Rick Elice: Well, that's an interesting question, and I I think that you know them there may be some slight um uh validity to your question, but I think what really what um my being one of the writers resulted in was um a show that could be um produced at a price. You know, it was not a 20 million dollar musical. And um it was not a show also that was so expensive to run. It was not a it was not a show that needed a million dollars a week to break even. So um, and and I and that was certainly very, very deliberate of uh uh in my mind um as we were writing it, um, because I was writing it with a movie guy who would, you know, who would sometimes just type something. It's very easy to type, you know, an aircraft carrier pulls up and and you know, and seven seventy-five sailors come on.

Well, you can't actually do that in the theater. And um so what we delivered, uh, you know, under Des um supervision, of course, because he also was working at a regional theater where it, you know, you have a certain amount of resources and you have a certain amount of resources unavailable to you.

[38:25] Kevin Wild: Yes.

[38:25] Rick Elice: So we we we made a show that we felt could run a long time without having to be a sellout.

[38:33] Kevin Wild: Yeah.

[38:34] Rick Elice: And um, and I and I I I think I think that was I think my background was helpful in that.

[38:39] Kevin Wild: Yeah.

[38:39] Rick Elice: You know, or else you know where else uh we uh don't have to fill the seats?

[38:44] Bryan Plovsky: Where Brian?

[38:45] Kevin Wild: Tuesdays in the corner with Kevin.

[38:50] Kimberly: Kevin's corner.

[38:51] Kevin Wild: Welcome to Kevin's Corner. It's my part of the show where I can do whatever I want. And um, which why it's the best part of the show. And so uh today we are going to uh go into a the world of Kevin's 23 and me. Um so what we're going to do is uh I can't believe I don't know you guys. I'm really I'm just like I'm having so much fun.

[39:17] Rick Elice: Can you tell from my short answers?

[39:19] Kevin Wild: Oh, this is gonna be super fun though. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you I'm gonna uh read off a lyric for you from a musical, and inside the lyric is a reference to something that is like pop culture or like some person in history or something that most I would I would guesstimate that most musical theater fans may know the lyrics to this song, but may not be able to identify what that reference actually is. Like you know, when you uh in the Lane Stitch's one woman show when she talked about how she didn't really know what a piece of Maulers was, like she thought it was like cheesecake down the block or whatever. So we're gonna see if you actually know what some of these references actually are.

[39:58] Rick Elice: You know what a piece of maulers is.

[40:00] Kevin Wild: Can we just leave it at that? I don't want to appear as a stupider than I've already appeared.

[40:05] Rick Elice: Okay, so the first one is um this is from the song Life Story from the musical Closer Than Ever by Malpe and Shire. And she sings, so off he went with his hair of bronze to find a life like Khalil Gabron's. I got my rest from the drugs he did, he got his quest, I got the kid. So Khalil Jimmy, I think it's I think it's Gibron, actually.

[40:28] Kevin Wild: Oh, is it Shabron?

[40:29] Rick Elice: Khalil Gibron. There's a reading from him at the wedding.

[40:32] Kevin Wild: Thank you. So do you know the Jim.

[40:34] Rick Elice: Yes, of course.

[40:35] Kevin Wild: Didn't you do a reading at your wedding?

[40:36] Rick Elice: I did not.

[40:37] Kevin Wild: Oh, I don't. Okay, never mind.

[40:38] Rick Elice: That would be embarrassing. Khalil Gibron do a reading at your wedding.

[40:41] Kevin Wild: That would have been a real good get, you know.

[40:44] Rick Elice: So do you know who Khalil Gibron is?

[40:46] Kevin Wild: Well, he wrote a very thin volume called, I believe, The Prophet.

[40:50] Rick Elice: There it is.

[40:52] Kevin Wild: So he was a Lebanese American writer, poet, and visual artist, considered a pro a philosopher, although he himself rejected the channel. And Kat Stevens would be playing in the background.

[41:14] Rick Elice: So you know, so it's like, thank God you asked me a question that I knew the answer to, but it's only because it's like an age-appropriate question.

[41:23] Kevin Wild: You know, I called my I had to call my mother and ask her because I didn't, I love that song, but I was finally like, I don't know what this is, and she keeps talking about him.

[41:31] Kimberly: And don't Google when you could call your mother.

[41:33] Kevin Wild: Well, yeah.

[41:34] Kimberly: There's so many things that I'm like, I'm just gonna.

[41:35] Rick Elice: Now there's a song title.

[41:37] Kevin Wild: Yeah, amen to that.

[41:40] Kevin Wild: Okay, here is the the next one is um from the Miller's son from A Little Night Music. And the lyric is it's a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension.

[41:56] Rick Elice: Oh, alliteration.

[41:57] Kevin Wild: Do you know what the word paunch and pouch are referring to?

[42:03] Rick Elice: Well, not only, well, sure, but um, but also there's a um, there's a uh I mean it I I'm not sure when it was on, but it's Diane Sawyer.

[42:16] Kevin Wild: Yes, where she asks him about that.

[42:18] Rick Elice: She asks him specifically about this lyric.

[42:21] Kevin Wild: That's where I got this one.

[42:22] Rick Elice: That's what's the inspiration of that.

[42:23] Kevin Wild: Oh yeah.

[42:24] Rick Elice: So the um, you know, uh this song, the Miller's son, of course, is uh is uh a triptych, right? There's the there's the the you can marry the the the worker, you can marry the you can marry the businessman, or you can marry the Prince of Wales. But really it's a survivor song. It's a it's it's a little night music's version of I'm still here, essentially. I'm going to, I'm gonna, by golly, I'm gonna live a full life, she sings. I you know, there's a lot I'll have lived, but I'll not have been dead when I die, is the is the final um uh idea of that lyric, right? Live your life while you're alive. Um, in contrast to all these um other these fancy characters who were you know so corseted that they can't live their life while they're alive. And so there she is, you know, in that idea of the you know salt of the earth character. Um uh the pinch and the paunch and the pension. Uh well, the punch, of course, is what I have here.

[43:28] Kevin Wild: I'm trying to deal with that is correct.

[43:31] Rick Elice: It's it's a it's a larger protruding abdomen. Oh, the paunch. Um, and uh the pouch is uh the uh you know an early version of the of the man purse, I suppose, where you would, you know, it's but it's uh it's uh and it's an image of of uh like purse, an image of uh uh uh material uh wealth, which is what she's you know, she's specifically what she's referring to in that part of the song, somebody who has been alive long enough. It's sort of like you know, in Shakespeare's Seven of Ages of Man speech, you know, and you start with the baby crying, and then you are the young man and then the soldier and then the judge, and there's a wonderful line in that uh in that uh monologue of Jakewee's and as you like it, um, of uh you know, his his uh his stockings a world too wide for his shrunk shank, which is the idea of you reach your um uh uh zenith as a physical entity at a certain age.

[44:39] Rick Elice: And then as you get older, you start getting smaller and smaller and smaller again until at the end of your life, there you are again, like an infant at the beginning. Well, you don't you can't really hear, you can't really see, you can't really, you know, you know, you're shitting yourself. So that and that's the that's the awful circle of life or the extraordinary circle of life that we all of us live. And at some point, what she's referring to there is the person at the zenith, right? So I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm larded with success. I you can see it in my in my stomach, you can see it in my pockets, are you know, lined with money, and look how well I'm doing, and um uh uh, and uh and then of course she references um you know the pinch, of course, like being grabbed onto the table, and um and all of that stuff, and then the pension, which implies, even just in the course of that alliterative phrase that you read, suddenly pension, which means, oh, he's now he's past it.

So you get the idea of like it's some sort of lechy guy who's like grabbing her, but by the time she's you know still looking around for love, he's gonna be too old to supply it, and she'll move on to the next person, which might be according to the song, The Prince of Wales. I'm obsessed with that. I also found this like interesting like dramaturgical argument over if uh the pouch is supposed to be like material wealth and money, or if they're saying like how like the pouch, like a marsupial's pouch, like for carrying children. So if it's supposed to be like where you have like your you've uh reached that point of age where you have like stuff and children, so it's all like the baggage of stuff.

So people were fighting about if it meant kids or not, but there was the argument was because of the context of who she's talking about. She's talking about the man, not like the woman. So it's really interesting that you did that. From the pinch and the punt, that she's not the one giving the pinches. That's that was literally what the other person said. The context is showing she's talking about the man's arc, not the female arc, and she's not saying that the man has like the children attached to it. Well, because she's also singing it, you know, she's like on the ground. I mean, you guys didn't. I I you know, sorry, my whole life is just a series of sidebars now. So you invited me, tell me to shut up if you want me to show up.

[46:59] Kevin Wild: This is great. You know, the show opened on February. Uh February 26, 1973, at the Schubert Theater. In those days, I was in high school. Um, I it was very, very it was a month before the Sondheim tribute on stage at the Schubert Theater on the set of A Little Night Music. And this musical was opening after Follies came and sort of, you know, is the musical that exploded my mind. Um, and uh and the next show was A Little Night Music, and I had to, I had to, I had to, I had to see this thing. And in those days, believe it or not, it was a Sunday night. You could go to the box office if you lived in Manhattan, it wasn't very hard to do, just over here on 44th Street at the Schubert Theater, and um and go up to the window and say, um, can I can I get a couple of tickets for the for the show tonight?

And you know, and you sit up there in the gods, and you know, for I think you know, two dollars or something like that. Hal Prince, of course, was the producer of that show as well. And Hal Prince with Company, Follies, Little Night Music and Um uh Pacific Overtures in 1976, had a two-dollar obstructed view policy at those shows. And sometimes the obstructed view, like at the Winter Garden for Follies, was the box seat. Well, if you were a kid like me, I mean literally a kid, to sit in the box and watch Paul Gemignani, who had taken over for Hal Hastings by then, to um to uh you know, get talk on the phone, like who's he talking on the phone to? Oh my god, he talks on the phone and the lights go out.

Oh look, I can see the tint guy, and oh my god, whatever I couldn't see on the stage. I didn't care because I could watch the audience watching the show for two dollars, which is cheaper than the price of a movie. Yeah, you know, so I as a like a little boy on an allowance, you know, it was like on a rainy Saturday, I was at the goddamn Winter Garden Theater. And and the same thing was true at A Little Night Music. Follies didn't have an intermission. Little Night Music, I learned how to do this thing called second act. Absolutely. But that was later. On the on February 26, 1973, I got um with through no special talent or skill, I I went to the box office and I got a ticket for me and my then um obsession uh young woman.

That's how long ago it was, um, uh to uh to be at the opening night of A Little Night Music. And so on opening night with the you know all this all the fabulous dressing up and everything, and and um uh you know, it was very very exciting, even though we were upstairs, um, to be able to hear that score for the first time, you know. Imagine, if you will, um the a show opening in that strange artsy way of this, you know, people coming out and sort of hitting a note on a sync clavier or you know, a clavicord or whatever it was called, you know, this little thing, this little keyboard on the on the side of the poros, and um and then singing an overture, and then suddenly there's this guy, Len Carey, who's singing this song with all these lyrics coming at you, and then the beautiful little virginal woman sings something else, and then this guy with the cello, the son is like over there singing something else, and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden they they start singing them together.

And you think, oh my god, I can't believe I'm hearing this. I can't believe, I can't believe that happened. I can't believe I didn't know that that was gonna happen. Oh my god. I mean, like the like the waves of pleasure. I mean, I think I maybe blacked out when they started singing the now soon later as a as a sequence. Yes, I couldn't believe my ears. And then at the end of the first act, this sequence of uh a weekend in the country, you know. I mean it's one of my favorite games. And just like you can't hearing hearing it for the first time, you know, like where it's not like, oh, here's that great number that we all love. It's like what what is this? What is this? What is this for? Oh, well, now they're coming in, now they're coming in and they're coming in.

And I mean, it was so, it was just so spectacular. And then, of course, you know, at the end of the play, there's this woman rolling around. It was all done on green, various shades of green carpet. Uh-huh. Sliding panels with painted birch trees. So that you could enter upstage of the panel, and the panel would keep going, and you would stop and then you would be revealed on stage. It was very simple and very, very cunning and brilliant. Boris Aronson, of course. And um, all these different shades of green carpet to imply the Sylvan rolling hills of Sweden. And um, and then rolling, you know, as the panels move, suddenly revealed, tumbling down as if they had just finished making love. The maid and the manservant, Georgie, played by George Lee Andrews, who had a song that had been cut in Boston Silly People.

Um, and you know, and in the afterglow, she gets up, you know, she'd be smoking a cigarette if it were a modern play. And instead of smoking a cigarette, she gets up and she sings this song. But she's not singing it just to the audience, she's singing it to this guy. And I think that's why I I think it's a valid case to be made that she's referring specifically to a male character there because she's singing it to a guy, saying, you know, I know we just screwed, but you know, tomorrow it'll it's gonna be somebody else, dude. You know.

[52:17] Kevin Wild: I have to say that was like the most fascinating answer to it. So that was Kevin's Corner, you did really well. Should we play a game?

[52:25] Rick Elice: Yes.

[52:26] Kevin Wild: Let's play a quick game. I know.

[52:29] Rick Elice: Oh God, it's so good. Um, okay. Goodness, what did I title this game? Oh.

[52:36] Kevin Wild: The public domain.

[52:41] Rick Elice: Um inspired by the Jewel and Gatsby's piece of our age. Uh yes. I have just a pile of some recent additions to the public domain.

[52:50] Kevin Wild: Oh, is Great Gatsby public domain now?

[52:52] Rick Elice: Yeah, that's why I am. Yes. Now I understand. Yeah, it just happened. And then because two different creative teams went, haha.

[53:02] Kevin Wild: Oh, golly.

[53:03] Rick Elice: Tried to scoop it up.

[53:04] Kevin Wild: Can you imagine?

[53:05] Rick Elice: No. Poor F.

[53:07] Kevin Wild: I know.

[53:11] Rick Elice: Oh yeah, what does he think of all this? There's something really interesting to be in mind in like the themes of what Great Gatsby is about. And two like commercial properties waiting until it's free to grab it and make money off of it. Like there's like, you know what I mean? Like the whole idea of Gatsby is just like, it's just very interesting.

[53:30] Kevin Wild: Well, to be fair. I mean, there have been other many other.

[53:34] Rick Elice: But there have been many other Gatsby's before I guess before when it was in public domain. So who, I mean, so who's the estate? Like, yeah, who is it like an heir? Did they have did they have children? Zelda and Scott and I don't know. I watched it. They did have one. Uh show about them. I almost feel like the baby might not have survived. I don't know. I'm not sure. That makes more interesting story. I was making that up. That's what they're up to.

[53:59] Kevin Wild: Okay. Um, so these are some new titles to the public domain that we've got in the last couple of years.

[54:03] Rick Elice: Okay.

[54:03] Kevin Wild: Um, so it's your turn just to pick one of those. Um, and then decide. This is like you've actually given this all this thought.

[54:12] Rick Elice: Yeah.

[54:13] Kevin Wild: I had no idea. I had no idea what I was wandering into. This is thrilling.

[54:17] Rick Elice: Come on in. It's thrilling. Um and then I have my lights of Broadway show cards. So basically, what you can do is sort of pitch to the group what you would do with this new public domain title. And if you want to be inspired, you can pull some people to be attached to your project. Creative team. So we're pitching to an advertising guru to the show. That one first, Kevin, you'll go first.

[54:38] Kevin Wild: Great, perfect. I'll take it.

[54:40] Rick Elice: Okay.

[54:43] Kevin Wild: Oh.

[54:46] Rick Elice: Read aloud.

[54:47] Kevin Wild: Okay, so I have Steamboat Willy.

[54:49] Rick Elice: Speaking of public domain, which is.

[54:51] Kevin Wild: Oh, I get it, public domain.

[54:57] Rick Elice: Sorry, sorry. I'm a little slow. A little slow. It's a side. Obsessed with this.

[55:01] Kevin Wild: Okay. So um, so Steamboat Willy is in public domain. And I think that the way that you would do this without making Disney mad. Um I think that you pitch the show almost like a um basically the plot line is like a 15-minute plot, but you do it multiple times in different time periods.

[55:28] Rick Elice: Hilarious.

[55:28] Kevin Wild: And then like the what actually happens in the plot is slightly different based on what happens in like that time period.

[55:38] Rick Elice: Yes.

[55:39] Kevin Wild: Oh, oh, I like that. Wow. I like that. So yeah, so it would be like it would be like the very simple kind of like like bad guy kidnaps the woman saved by like Steamboat Willy, and then as you move in different time periods, you see how like the like progression of women's rights affects certain things, and like the progression of like the Meet You Movement or different things like that, how it would affect the different stories. Um, and the first two cards I pulled were Heather Headley and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

[56:05] Rick Elice: Bravo.

[56:06] Kevin Wild: And so putting the two of them in like the leads of like Mickey and Minnie respectively, um, I think would be really, really interesting and cool. And I think the design element could be really awesome because you pull in like from black and white to like technicolor to like the like full kind of uh like great, like the uh more interesting kind of like stark color of like reality of today. Those would be incredible projections.

[56:30] Rick Elice: So I'm picturing almost like how like the show a show like contact was so stylized in like different segment sections, it would be kind of like that as you would see it go through a full. So that's how I do Steamboat Willie.

[56:41] Rick Elice: Bravo.

[56:45] Kevin Wild: I mean, you just had to say Heather Hedley and Brian Stokes Mitchell and I would see them in the show together. They were just right on top, like the first two.

[56:54] Rick Elice: I got a house at Pooh Corner.

[56:56] Kevin Wild: Is that Winnie the Pooh?

[56:57] Rick Elice: Yes.

[56:58] Kevin Wild: Okay, I'm just making sure. Are you gonna make the horror movie?

[57:00] Rick Elice: Winnie Blood None Noney.

[57:02] Kevin Wild: The pull of the house on Pooh Corner.

[57:04] Rick Elice: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[57:07] Kevin Wild: Oh my god, that's so good.

[57:09] Rick Elice: Okay, so I'm doing House on Pooh Corner. And uh I pulled Daniel Radcliffe, who we'll be saying this evening, yes, uh, and Donna McKechnie, who maybe she will be there. Um, she's in Wicked, isn't she?

[57:23] Kevin Wild: Is she now?

[57:24] Rick Elice: I think she's playing Madame.

[57:27] Kevin Wild: We won't be seeing her this evening.

[57:28] Rick Elice: But we do have two.

[57:31] Kevin Wild: Look at that.

[57:31] Rick Elice: So uh Daniel Radcliffe and uh Donna McKechnie at the House at Pooh Corner. Um, of course, um this is a uh Toy Story-esque uh uh breakdown.

[57:47] Kevin Wild: Uh they play like Pooh and Piglet as as so it's a meta experience.

[57:54] Rick Elice: Donna McKechnie is playing Piglet.

[57:56] Kevin Wild: Yes.

[57:58] Rick Elice: Um, it's it's a meta experience where they are the stuffed, they're not the original Pooh and Piglet. They are, you know, marketed, like purchased by the family, like birthday, whatever, just like you know, your Buzz Lightyears, if you will. Um, and they play them, um, but they think that they're Pooh and Piglet. Um, and uh the the kid who is their like owner is not Christopher Robin, but they think it is. So, like, and and and um like they have the memories of Pooh and Piglet they're there in someone else's house. Absolutely. So they think that they're trapped here and they're not in the hundred-acre woods, so they're trying to get out, they feel like they're trapped in a box. A la um uh Seven Strangers in a room, the the was it the Twilight Zone episode? Uh you know, the toilet episode.

[58:41] Kevin Wild: Uh you know, the toilet episode.

[58:42] Rick Elice: The spoiler alert, the Twilight Zone episode where like we meet like a cowboy at a ballerina, and they're trying to get out of this room, but it turns out just that the kids' toys.

[58:51] Kevin Wild: Oh, yes, there was an episode of Felicity that did that as well.

[58:53] Rick Elice: Oh, okay, sure. So it's it's this like mis, it's this thriller mystery. Little Pirandello, you know, a little no exit.

[59:00] Kevin Wild: Yeah, exactly. Is that Pirandello?

[59:03] Rick Elice: That sounded familiar. Where's that uh uh Camus or Sartre or somebody like that? Anyway, this is that musical.

[59:12] Kevin Wild: I'll call my mom.

[59:13] Rick Elice: Yeah.

[59:15] Kevin Wild: This is that musical.

[59:17] Rick Elice: Um, and uh we're introduced with different characters as well.

[59:23] Rick Elice: Yes. Um so that's House at Pooh Corner, and it ends with them uh jumping out the window, but their um seam gets caught.

[59:37] Kevin Wild: Satra.

[59:38] Rick Elice: And they are they both unravel as they live in the house.

[59:41] Kimberly: Oh god.

[59:42] Rick Elice: House at Pooh Corner.

[59:43] Kevin Wild: That's terrifying.

[59:44] Rick Elice: They both unravel.

[59:45] Kimberly: Yeah.

[59:46] Rick Elice: That's so sad.

[59:47] Kimberly: Oh wow.

[59:48] Rick Elice: You uh that's the house.

[59:50] Kevin Wild: I can't change the house.

[59:51] Rick Elice: No, no, I I listen, uh, you go for it, you know.

[59:53] Kevin Wild: I mean I'm just picturing Daniel Radcliffe and Donna McKechnie from the top of a theater, like rolling down.

[1:00:02] Rick Elice: The set of silks, yeah.

[1:00:04] Kevin Wild: Yeah, 100%.

[1:00:05] Rick Elice: The set is the corner house.

[1:00:06] Kimberly: So you're only watching this whole thing through the windows.

[1:00:11] Rick Elice: And then are you waving?

[1:00:12] Kimberly: You're waving through that.

[1:00:15] Rick Elice: Absolutely.

[1:00:15] Kimberly: So that's House of Pooh Corner.

[1:00:17] Rick Elice: Well done.

[1:00:18] Kimberly: It does not do well.

[1:00:19] Rick Elice: It closes very quickly.

[1:00:23] Kevin Wild: Great, great, great.

[1:00:24] Rick Elice: It really does not have a building at all.

[1:00:30] Kimberly: That's the only reason.

[1:00:31] Rick Elice: We didn't have to buy the rights, so why not?

[1:00:32] Kevin Wild: It worked out.

[1:00:33] Rick Elice: That's it.

[1:00:34] Kimberly: Who'd you like a turn?

[1:00:36] Rick Elice: I'm terrified.

[1:00:37] Kevin Wild: All right, let's see what we have here.

[1:00:41] Rick Elice: Peter Panned the Play.

[1:00:42] Kevin Wild: Well, apparently the book has been in public domain for quite some time, but the play is actually the original, and the play is now in public domain.

[1:00:42] Rick Elice: Oh.

[1:00:42] Kevin Wild: The play is now in public domain.

[1:00:54] Rick Elice: You mean you the so the money doesn't no longer go to the hospital, to the children's hospital.

[1:00:59] Kevin Wild: Oh, true.

[1:01:00] Rick Elice: Because I think that I there's different rules in the UK.

[1:01:02] Kevin Wild: Like it's only in public domain here.

[1:01:04] Rick Elice: Ah, uh-uh-uh.

[1:01:05] Kevin Wild: Oh, interesting.

[1:01:07] Rick Elice: Well, I sort of feel like I should disqualify myself, you know, because of Peter and the Star Catcher, you know.

[1:01:12] Kevin Wild: I just have so many.

[1:01:13] Rick Elice: True, good feeling.

[1:01:14] Kevin Wild: I feel like I've, you know, my answer would be.

[1:01:16] Rick Elice: Which was one of the best adaptations of that story.

[1:01:19] Kevin Wild: I would I would do, I would call it Peter and the Starcatcher, and I would get it on really, really fast because it's already written.

[1:01:25] Rick Elice: And um, and uh uh um yeah, anyway.

[1:01:30] Kevin Wild: If you pull Christian Borrell, then you're gonna be.

[1:01:32] Rick Elice: Do I just randomly pull it or you can look through either or loose rules?

[1:01:37] Kevin Wild: I'll go, I'll go here.

[1:01:38] Rick Elice: I'll just take the top two.

[1:01:40] Kevin Wild: Okay.

[1:01:40] Rick Elice: Schubert Alley and Schubert Alley.

[1:01:44] Kevin Wild: Um and uh Andy Blank and Bueller, my old buddy.

[1:01:50] Rick Elice: Um Andy Blank and Bueller, well, of course, he's gonna um this is the play.

[1:01:58] Kevin Wild: But so what we're gonna do is we're going to get Andy to um choreograph uh the text by um um beating it out rhythmically, uh sort of like a uh uh Philip Glass piece, you know, or a John Cage piece, you know.

[1:02:18] Rick Elice: So there won't be music per se because it's a play, but there will be rhythm.

[1:02:23] Kevin Wild: I think you know, we'll try to do it the way Michael Bennett tried to do the prologue in Follies originally without music, became too hard for people to end and exit because there was no way to you know to to set cues accurately enough.

[1:02:40] Rick Elice: So eventually they added they took a song that had been cut from the score, All Things Bright and Beautiful, and made it into an orchestral piece, and that became the prologue.

[1:02:48] Kevin Wild: Um and that was I think done up in Boston at the Colonial Theater, now called the Colonial Theater.

[1:02:53] Rick Elice: I love that.

[1:02:55] Kevin Wild: Um Peter Pan the play.

[1:02:57] Rick Elice: Um what's my take on it now?

[1:03:00] Kevin Wild: I guess having done Peter and the Starcatcher, which was sort of the connective tissue between this play, written by James Barry in 1903 or four, something like that, and the um and a uh sort of a prequel novel called Peter and the Starcatchers with an S by the wonderful um comedy writer, uh Dave Barry, the brilliant comedy writer, and uh and the um and the great procedural writer named Ridley Pearson, and they wrote Peter and the Star Catchers, and um it was uh it was a successful novel.

[1:03:31] Rick Elice: It wasn't like successful like Harry Potter on that scale, but they sold, you know, hundreds of thousands of copies of it.

[1:03:37] Kevin Wild: And so there was a sequel and a sequel and a sequel, and um uh Peter and the Starcatchers uh was uh whilst I was published by Hyperion Publishing, which is the publishing arm of the Walt Disney Company.

[1:03:51] Rick Elice: So when I was at Disney as the aforementioned um creative consultant, um something that would happen to me on Fridays was over the transom would come scripts to read and um and novels in galley form to read.

[1:04:05] Kevin Wild: And um one of the novels that I read was Peter and the Starcatchers, and uh in galley form.

[1:04:12] Rick Elice: And uh because on uh you read it on the weekends because on Monday, at least in those days, this being, you know, talking about 20 years ago, um uh the studios would bid on these things on Mondays.

[1:04:27] Kevin Wild: And so you had to do what was called the weekend read, and um, and it would work its way up to finally um uh the decision makers uh weekend pile, and then on the Monday you would uh you know, the they would have the weekend to read it, and I would get generally um that the same scripts that the you know that the chairman of the studio was reading that weekend.

[1:04:51] Rick Elice: Um, so that uh, you know, uh just like another voice weighing in.

[1:04:54] Kevin Wild: And I read this novel in galley form, and it opened with some kids in some orphans in a in a um crate, bouncing down a you know, uh uh in a carriage, you know, on the road to the bumpy road to Portsmouth in Victorian England.

[1:05:10] Rick Elice: And it reminded me of it gave me a feeling that any of the subsequent um parts of the novel did not give me, um, which was it reminded me of um uh it had a very Dickensian feel to it.

[1:05:24] Kevin Wild: And um I so on Monday morning I said, listen, I know you guys are thinking about Peter and the Starcatchers as a feature animation property, but why don't you think of it as a theatrical property?

[1:05:36] Rick Elice: And then you could do it in the style of uh Nicholas Nickleby, the Royal Shakespeare Company production that everyone who saw it, you know, remembers from uh, you know, it was here in New York in 1981, um and uh in in London uh uh prior to that.

[1:05:52] Kevin Wild: Uh and it was sort of a especially life-changing event in my life.

[1:05:57] Rick Elice: Um, but um, you know, I said it might be sort of wonderful to do it that way as a theater piece.

[1:06:03] Kevin Wild: The guy who was running feature animation at the time was also the guy who was running the theater division, Tom Schumacher.

[1:06:08] Rick Elice: So he um I think decided to try it as a feature animation anyway, and a couple of years went by, and then they were gonna um the option was renewable or not to be renewed.

[1:06:20] Kevin Wild: And at that point, um they decided uh to renew it as a possible theatrical venture uh to be done, um, to you know, to sort of be workshopped by um the person who was by then the artistic director of Williamstown Theatre Festival, who happened to be the guy who played Nicholas Nickleby in that production of Nicholas Nickleby.

[1:06:44] Rick Elice: So he asked, and he was the artistic director at Williamstown at the time.

[1:06:50] Kevin Wild: And so he said, Well, it, you know, it might be interesting, but I didn't really have the time to do it myself.

[1:06:55] Rick Elice: But I have young Alex Timbers up here working, developing a musical with Michael Friedman called Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

[1:07:02] Kevin Wild: And I'll ask, I'll ask Alex if he in his spare time and in my spare time together, maybe we could we could take a part of the novel and sort of discreetly show you what we might do with it.

[1:07:15] Rick Elice: Which they did.

[1:07:16] Kevin Wild: And uh we using interns and um no, there was no budget, so they opened a closet in a in a in a room, and in the closet was a bucket and a ladder and some uh rope.

[1:07:29] Rick Elice: So they said, okay, this is what we're gonna use, and this is the section of the action of the story that we'll depict.

[1:07:35] Kevin Wild: And um, and then the all the Disney people can come up and see, you know, oh, like this would be what the play might be like, and um and uh they did, and uh and Disney said, Oh, okay, well, like develop this a little bit more.

[1:07:49] Rick Elice: And they said, Well, you know, the tone of the novel is very, very, it's for a young reader, um, because Dave and Ridley wrote it for they were their families are friends, they were both families were vacationing in Florida, they were at Disney World, and they went to the Peter Pan ride, and they're each of them had a little eight-year-old daughter, and they were bunking together, and they were read they were reading them a little bedtime story, and you know, and one of them said, Daddy, how did Peter Penn learn to fly in the first place?

[1:08:13] Kevin Wild: And so they just started making up a story.

[1:08:15] Rick Elice: And then the families went back to St. Louis and Miami, and they started trading chapters of the, oh, well, let's like keep going.

[1:08:22] Kevin Wild: So they traded chapters through email until they had Peter and the Star Catchers, which was about a group of people, star catchers, who were you know, who were traveling the earth to try to find this substance that had fallen from the sky that could you know transform people or animals or objects into other people or objects, and therefore was very, very dangerous if it if fell if it fell into the wrong hands.

[1:08:45] Kevin Wild: And at the same time, this these this clutch of boys, these orphan boys who are being shipped off to be um servants and ultimately snake food for some tropical king.

[1:08:57] Rick Elice: And those two the two groups um meet and interact, and then there's a villain character, a sort of a proto Captain Hook type character, and there's lots of ship, you know, pirate ships and lots of flying around and battles in the sky and all of that.

[1:09:11] Kevin Wild: And they said, you know, we've got to peril this down and figure out like if there's a play there, who would what who would the characters be in the play.

[1:09:19] Rick Elice: Uh and Disney said, well, we'll give you a hundred dollars to to do that.

[1:09:23] Kevin Wild: So as a friend of the court, um, I got a call from the uh from Roger Reese and Alex Timbers, the two directors, and saying, you know, would you um would you read the novel again, which I had read years before in Galley Form, would you read it again?

[1:09:37] Rick Elice: And then could we talk about how we could tell this as a story?

[1:09:40] Kevin Wild: And you know, because you have to figure out what you're going to include and what you're gonna exclude and all that.

[1:09:44] Rick Elice: So what we did was we we dropped the S from the title and made it a story about this boy and this girl, and you know, who's like a nameless boy at the beginning and a girl named Molly at the beginning, and at the end he's called Peter and she's become a star catcher.

[1:10:01] Kevin Wild: So they uh we had our an organizing principle for the for the narrative.

[1:10:06] Rick Elice: And um, and I thought it would be fun because you know, I'm a geek, to um to write sort of connective tissue between the play that James Barry wrote 100 years ago and the novel that David Ridley wrote a hundred years later, because they didn't really said, oh well, there's like a Tinkerbell, and oh, there's a crocodile.

[1:10:22] Kevin Wild: And they're like, but like what like how did the why does the crocodile make a ticket?

[1:10:26] Rick Elice: All of the provenance of the Peter Pan mythology was sort of unexplained, and I thought it would be fun to do that in a play.

[1:10:33] Kevin Wild: Um, and so uh and and you know, and the do-it-yourself um aesthetic that Roger and Alex had figured out because of what happened to be in that closet.

[1:10:44] Rick Elice: And um, and uh, and so Peter and the Star Catcher was was born.

[1:10:48] Kevin Wild: So if I were to do now Peter Pan as a play, um I would make it about something else in entirely.

[1:10:48] Rick Elice: I would make it about um a cinematographer in in in Hollywood who um who uh is sort of a secretly has a passion for the theater.

[1:11:19] Kevin Wild: And you know, so um every now and then when he wants to do a tracking shot and he wants to uh attract the attention of his cameraman, he will say, hello, doll.

[1:11:32] Rick Elice: And um, and one day um his cinematographer, uh his uh cameraman whose name is Peter, obviously, um, you know, was uh sort of asleep at the switch, and they rehearsed and the actors that they were supposed to do, but he was you know scratching or something like that, and so he said, Peter, pan, Pam.

[1:11:53] Kevin Wild: And um uh and uh Andy Blankenbuhler could figure out a way to do that.

[1:11:59] Rick Elice: Of course, yes, yes, yes.

[1:12:01] Kevin Wild: And um, and then there would be a uh a misleading three sheet in Shubert Alley.

[1:12:11] Rick Elice: Well done.

[1:12:12] Kimberly: Um, that's good.

[1:12:13] Rick Elice: Actually, to go check on my babysitter.

[1:12:14] Kimberly: Oh, yeah, sure.

[1:12:16] Rick Elice: Absolutely.

[1:12:17] Kimberly: Well, this is so while you did that, uh, we're coming to the end of the episode, but I do want to talk about soon.

[1:12:17] Rick Elice: It's okay.

[1:12:17] Kimberly: I do want to talk about um uh Water for Elephants.

[1:12:24] Rick Elice: Water for Elephants.

[1:12:29] Kimberly: I know, it's hard to remember.

[1:12:31] Rick Elice: There's so many shows opening right now.

[1:12:33] Kimberly: Um did you uh I guess what do you want people to leave the theater feeling?

[1:12:39] Rick Elice: Like what was your intention with that with that adaptation?

[1:12:45] Kimberly: Oh, well, you know, that's a really good question.

[1:12:49] Rick Elice: I I in this particular case, uh, the thing that drew me to the um adaptation, um, you know, and it's because of Peter and the Starcatcher that I think I was asked to do this.

[1:13:05] Rick Elice: Um, my old uh boss at uh at uh Disney, uh Peter Schneider, who left Disney and you know, and uh you know went to leave his l lead his life um uh came uh uh gave me a call about uh nine years ago and said I've got the rights to this novel, um Water for Elephants, and it just so happens that I had read it because I was in a book club in the early aughts.

[1:13:31] Kimberly: You read the book.

[1:13:32] Rick Elice: I did, yes, yeah, me too.

[1:13:34] Kimberly: And I, you know, and I enjoyed the novel.

[1:13:35] Rick Elice: I thought it was a good, sort of, you know, juicy period story, you know, had all the had all the good elements of it, the exotica of the circus, of course.

[1:13:46] Rick Elice: And um, and I had just seen um uh a piece by Pig Pen Theater Company called uh they're a theater collective of seven guys, and um uh they did a piece called The Old Man and the Old Moon down at Washington Square at Judge Judson Church basement, and um it was very much like the Peter and the Star Catcher story theater poor theater stuff, which is the type of theater that I love so much.

[1:14:15] Rick Elice: So I um uh you had yeah, she's a speaker. Okay, uh I said I I'd be interested in doing it if I could do it with them. And um, you know, because I by the time I was asked the question, I thought, you know, I'm I'm very young as a writer, but I'm old as a human, and I don't I just don't have that much time left. So if it's gonna take five years at least to work on something and get it on. COVID, you know, hadn't really occurred to any of us yet. Sure. But you know, like if it's gonna take five years, or in this case eight years, you know, how many more do I have to do? So, you know, I want to be able to, I want to be able to do things that are different and not just try to do the same thing over again.

And I thought it would be different to try to write a show. I'd written shows with no composer in the room, I've written shows with a composer and lyricist in the room. I've written shows with another book writer, and I've written shows literally where I was the only person there. And I thought it would be fun to see if you could pull off a writer's room sort of situation for the theater, because it's not really the way theater happens. And I thought, well, that would be interesting. The process would be interesting. And I'm like, I'm into the process. I'm like, I'm into the journey, as they say, more than the destination. Because who knows what the destination is going to be when you first start out.

You think you're gonna you think I'm you know because it's all like a sailboat, it's not like a it's not like a motorboat. So I think I'm over here and I'm gonna sail to you. And I start sailing, but you know, now the wind blows, and suddenly I'm sailing over to you. And so I tack. And now uh, but I've overcorrected, and now suddenly I'm going over here and there's not even anybody over here, and then I think, well, maybe that's not so bad. Maybe, you know, maybe maybe this is a good thing. So that's what making theater is like. You never know really where you're gonna end up.

[1:16:00] Rick Elice: Yeah. So I I'm interested in the process. And then I was widowed. And um, and so everything I thought about my life, and everything I thought about the novel really became filtered through, or everything I thought about the novel became filtered through what I was living through, which is that part of you after 35 years with somebody, and um, you know, which is which was all of my adult life at that point, um, to suddenly in middle age um wake up and be an individual. And I just didn't know how to do it, I wasn't equipped to do it, I didn't want to do it, my heart was broken, um, and I, you know, I just didn't see the point. And so when I reread the novel, I reread it from the from that point of view.

And I saw it as a um, you know, again, like, you know, because I spent those spent the those years out in Hollywood, you you know, you start to become familiar with things, you know, tropes like uh, you know, the hero's journey, the monomyth, coming of age. And I thought, oh Joseph Campbell said. I I thought, you know, what's interesting about the coming of age idea is that we always think of it as a young person, an adolescent, becoming an adult through the challenges of what of the particular story. And I thought of myself. And and still do, because you know, I'm I'm I my heart is still broken, and I'm, you know, I it's you know, it sucks to be um the survivor. It's terrible to, it's terrible to be killed by disease, especially horrible, incurable disease.

But it's it's terrible to be the person who has to watch that happening and then is left behind. And um feeling that so profoundly um then and now, uh, what I thought would be interesting would be um, you know, that's everybody's in that position at one time or another, you know, because every love story, if you want to get morbid about it, is a sad story because unless you both go down in the same plane crash, you know, somebody's gonna go before the other person. And then you're the other person, the one who's left behind, is as the survivor has to figure out a way to um put one foot in front of the other, you know, or else you're fucked.

[1:18:32] Rick Elice: And um, and what if relevance struck me as um a so a sort of a dual coming of age story, the same character as a young person becoming a an adult, and then as an old person again having lost everything, trying to figure out what is the point. And then through the contrivances of the story, having a reason to continue. So I thought, gee, you know, like that, it sort of excited me because I couldn't think of another show that did that. And you know, when that's interesting to me, because you know, I always think like if I were in the audience, what would I what would I what would move me about this? And um, and so uh that gave me a uh head of steam. And it's not true, I mean, uh, it's certainly not true for the director, and it's not true for this for the pig pen guys, and it's not true for the um the designers.

We, you know, what we all did together was was um consciously create a uh something on stage where every element of the um it doesn't sound very um avant-garde to to say in words, but where every element of the presentation would be synced with what the story is about. So there's are there circus events in the well it's set in a circus. So of course there's some circus stuff in there, but it's not circus stuff really per se, because by making it a double coming of age story, it it is so specifically a memory play that it's the memory of the older person, and when you remember something from 50 or 60 years ago, not that you would know that yet, but you know, when you when you look back at your lives, you know, when the you know, when you've got punches and pouches and pensions, you you you'll go, oh, you know, like I'm remembering that day when that old guy, what was his name?

I can't remember, was like yammering on about something, but all I remember was his mouth because he never shut the fuck up. And so, you know, so I he would represent me in that story, but just his mouth. And you can do that in Water for Elephants in such a way that the circus elements are all part of the storytelling. And the puppetry is all part of the storytelling. And the the actors, the casting of the actors, the way the shape of the actors, the what we see of a train, what we don't see, what we see of a tent, what we don't see, how everything that's presented is actually presented as a fragment of something that could really believably be remembered. It also means you're not beholden to the audience to represent everything in a naturalistic way. Because when theater tries to do that, it's never gonna be, you're never gonna have a real elephant for crying out loud because it's just not practical to do that.

[1:21:23] Kevin Wild: Sure.

[1:21:23] Rick Elice: So you can't. I've seen the rockets.

[1:21:28] Kevin Wild: Yeah, yeah.

[1:21:29] Rick Elice: Yeah, but only for a month.

[1:21:31] Kevin Wild: But only for a month.

[1:21:32] Rick Elice: Right, right.

[1:21:33] Kevin Wild: And then they take some out of it because you're the audience suddenly goes, there's a real elephant.

[1:21:38] Rick Elice: It's not what I go to the theater for. I wanna I want to imagine too. I want to play along. That's the interactivity of the theater, right? In a movie, you have to have a real elephant.

[1:21:46] Kevin Wild: Right.

[1:21:47] Rick Elice: Because that that's what movies are, they're literal.

[1:21:49] Kevin Wild: Yes.

[1:21:49] Rick Elice: But you know, they uh but the theater is theatrical and it you can't. You want to see the creative way people are moving. And the idea of the memory play became such a theatrical license. So that was what we were all doing. That's what we were all doing. But what I was doing personally was I was trying to write a world that I could want to live in, really.

[1:22:12] Rick Elice: No, at this point in my life where, you know, most days I wake up and I just feel sad because of because something really shitty happened to me. And then, and then so there's a little speech at the end of the play that the old man gives. It's not, you know, this magnificent music, God knows, and magnificent staging. Jessica Stone is a genius, and she's you know, put made people do work beyond anything they've ever done before. Um, but but there's just these little three lines, and I can say that for me it's the it's the thing that really matters because I didn't write it. I actually found it in Sarah Gruen's novel. And and this is the three lines. The uh the old guy is talking about his his um departed wife, recently departed wife, with you know, that he was married to for more than half a century.

And and he says, I I hate that she's gone, but I'm glad she went first. Being the survivor stinks. And that jumped out at me, and I thought, okay, well, that's good that's gonna be the way I get to speak through this character to the audience every night, and say, like, if you've been through this, you're not alone. Um, I've been through it too. This character's been through it, and um, and uh we have something in common, and and that sort of, you know, um Alan Bennett wrote this wonderful play called The History Boys.

[1:23:38] Kimberly: Oh, yeah.

[1:23:39] Rick Elice: And uh, and there's this wonderful scene, the drummer Hodge, the young boy comes, you know, he's gay and he feels ostracized and marginalized, and uh he's embarrassed, and there's the old teacher who's also gay and also feels marginalized and disenfranchised, and they're talking about this poem, this Thomas Hardy poem called The Drummer Hodge. And and um, in the course of talking about it, he uh he, the professor, says, you know, it's almost it's one of those moments where you feel like this thing that only you could feel, this thing that only had ever occurred to you that no one else could understand was recognized by somebody who wrote it down.

[1:24:19] Rick Elice: Somebody who who may be long dead, but understood exactly what you're thinking. You're the only person who ever experienced it, and it's almost as if their hand reaches out from the page. It's such a beautiful speech. I don't mean to be such a sap, but I find it so moving. You know, hand comes out from the page and grabs you by the arm. And and I thought this is a moment where Water for Elephants could do that too, for people like me, who are sitting there thinking, you know, uh, you know, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow's the end. Yeah, I can't do it anymore. And um, and like this character, maybe they'll maybe they'll um pursue an opportunity and um you know, and and and stick around for a while.

[1:25:03] Kimberly: Okay, everyone see Water for Elephants.

[1:25:06] Rick Elice: Um and then uh we're gonna wrap up here, but you're working on Smash is coming.

[1:25:10] Rick Elice: Smash!

[1:25:11] Kimberly: And you are tasked with the Princess Bride.

[1:25:14] Rick Elice: Yes. Well, it's not a task, it's a great, great thread. And how fun it's a great privilege. Smash, of course, is um, you know, there will be no crying in Smash. There is only laughter. It is a it is a rip-roaring musical comedy. We um we did a we we sort of uh did a uh a lab or you know, something. We we the Susan Strowman is the uh director, choreographer. Uh I'm sorry, the director. She is a director choreographer who's directing the show. Josh Brigas is doing the choreography for the show. Mark Shaman and Scott Whitman are responsible for the score. And Bob Martin, uh the legendary Bob Martin and I are uh are uh you know, came up with this uh scenario, which is sort of a fan fiction based uh very, very, very loosely on um an aspect of the TV show called Smash from a dozen years ago.

Um it is um uh it seemed like a you know perhaps a uh fool's errand. But um we wrote something really, really um uh out there, and uh the producers, Bob Greenblad and Neil Merrin, and uh a filmmaker named Steven Spielberg, um sort of uh uh got into it. And so uh we tried it out um essentially. Instead of going out of town with a full production, um we uh we uh got a great cast together, and uh Stro and uh Josh Bergast uh staged it and choreographed the whole thing, and uh no sets of costumes or lighting or anything like that, just sort of like some lights up, lights out because uh you know, so you can have a blackout at the end.

[1:26:55] Rick Elice: And um uh and we put it on uh we did uh six uh presentations of this uh sort of rehearsed piece um and uh constantly making changes and things like that just to make sure that things were funny um that we had hoped were funny, yeah. And um, and they were, and um, so now we're uh we're gearing up to doing the actual thing cool on uh this coming season. Um and uh you know, with uh Stro uh in charge. She's and she's so great. We are very excited because we are we love the show. I watched the show for the first time after all of the hubbub of the show.

[1:27:35] Kimberly: So I watched it during lockdown for the first time, uh, and just like had the best frickin' time.

[1:27:41] Rick Elice: So I'm very much looking forward to that. And then we have Princess Bride, but that does bring us the end of the episode and when Smash comes you have to come back on and seriously talk about so fast I'm sorry I I I didn't get to I'm sure almost all of your questions I never get to talk to anybody I'm just the writer you know I never get to talk to anybody I think you're our first librettist on the show like lastly um and the last one no uh and I'm very excited and we'll definitely I want I mean full of stories and we want to hear all of them um but that does bring us to the end of our episode thank you so much for joining us go see water for elephants um you can of course follow us at Broadwaisted um on all social media you can follow you can find us wherever you get podcasts so Spotify you can find us also of course on Apple Podcasts rate and review us there five stars please and thank you um thank you so much for joining us we really appreciated this and so many insightful fascinating stories um and uh as we end every episode we raise a glass and we say zoo bum cheers.