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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice.

[0:01] Tim Rice: Welcome to my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud.

[0:04] Tim Rice: This is episode 9.

[0:15] Tim Rice: I had a pretty good response to my last podcast, Get Onto My Cloud No. 8, which featured my musical with Elton John, Aida, which ran on Broadway for four and a half years from the year 2000.

[0:28] Tim Rice: I was always going to do another chat about this show as it's one of my favorites, and had originally thought about doing so in a few podcasts' time.

[0:36] Tim Rice: However, a number of requests for a little more Aida songs and info, a number getting dangerously close to double figures in the past few days, has persuaded me to talk a little more about the show straight away.

[0:48] Tim Rice: If you missed Podcast 8, Aida Part 1, it won't, I hope, stop you being gripped by podcast 9, Aida Part 2, but you can always knit back and listen to 8.

[0:58] Tim Rice: It's still there, as I trust all the shows are.

[1:01] Tim Rice: When the show had its first tryout in Atlanta, Georgia, it was not even called Aida, even though that was the obvious title.

[1:09] Tim Rice: I guess we were concerned lest people confused it with Verdi's masterpiece.

[1:13] Tim Rice: But as Verdi had long since joined Monty Python's celebrated parrot and gone to meet his maker, as his work was a century out of copyright, and as anyone buying a ticket expecting a 19th-century grand opera and getting us would not really have a case for a refund.

[1:28] Tim Rice: We were probably oversensitive in calling it Elaborate Lives, and in slightly smaller print, The Legend of Aida.

[1:36] Tim Rice: Elaborate Lives is the title of one of the major songs in our show, and has sometimes been a solo for the character Aida, and then other times a duet for Aida and Radames, as alterations to the piece took place in its early days.

[1:50] Tim Rice: In the Broadway version, it was a duet and the first declaration of love between Aida and Radames.

[1:57] Tim Rice: Here is the Broadway cast recording.

[1:59] ♪ Musical number: "Elaborate Lives" — performed by Adam Pascal and Heather Headley ♪

[6:18] Tim Rice: Adam came on board for our second major tryout in Chicago, completing a terrific trio of leads with Heather and Sherie Rene Scott.

[6:27] Tim Rice: When we moved to the Windy City, we had ditched Elaborate Lives as a title, and it was now simply called Aida.

[6:35] Tim Rice: Somebody else who joined the production in Chicago was the distinguished playwright David Henry Hwang, whose best-known play is probably M Butterfly, for which David became the first Asian American to win a Tony Award.

[6:46] Tim Rice: I'm very glad to say that David is still with the team as we get our act together for the post-COVID return of Aida, to be directed by Broadway's original Nehebka, Shelley Williams.

[7:00] Tim Rice: Two previous directors, Robert Jess Roth and Robert Foles, who guided us through some fairly turbulent times all those years ago.

[7:08] Tim Rice: We opened at the Palace Theatre in New York on the 23rd of March 2000, and frankly, we were not overwhelmed with rave reviews.

[7:15] Tim Rice: In fact, some of them were, to put it mildly, aggressively unpleasant.

[7:19] Tim Rice: Not all, I hasten to add, and most of the vitriol was aimed at the work rather than at the outstanding cast.

[7:25] Tim Rice: I was pretty used to this from way back.

[7:27] Tim Rice: My first venture onto Broadway with Jesus Christ Superstar had been received with an outbreak of indifference by the critics, and the score was not even nominated for a Tony.

[7:36] Tim Rice: A few years later, Aida had been slaughtered even more thoroughly by the perceptive critical establishment, although, come awards time, we picked up a bunch of Tonys and various other goodies.

[7:47] Tim Rice: When Tony Time came around in the year 2000, Aida was not even nominated in the best musical category, although the show had five nominations for individual awards, for scenic design, costumes, lighting, best actress in a musical, and to my surprise, Elton and me for Best Score.

[8:06] Tim Rice: All the same, I felt it was safe to assume the score had no hope of winning if the show itself didn't even get a nod.

[8:12] Tim Rice: Even though award ceremonies back then were often quite fun, I was quite happy to accept a chum's invitation to go on a millennium cruise, appropriately, mainly around Verdi's home patch, Italy, even though it clashed with the Tony Awards ceremony.

[8:27] Tim Rice: Nobody would miss me.

[8:28] Tim Rice: Elton didn't go to the Tonys either, nor sad to say, was he on the cruise.

[8:33] Tim Rice: I'm not sure why he didn't go to the Tonys, but he was almost certainly performing somewhere, otherwise he could have come on the cruise.

[8:38] Tim Rice: I remember calling my PA Eileen from a landline in Venice, mobiles were mercifully quite rare in 2000, to check on important matters back home, such as the health of the dog and whether my cricket blazer was back from the cleaners.

[8:52] Tim Rice: Once I'd been updated on all the vital news from the home front, I was about to hang up when Eileen told me, Oh, by the way, you won a Tony for Aida last night.

[9:00] Tim Rice: This is quite a surprise, partly because by then I'd clean forgotten that the Tonys were even happening while I was away.

[9:06] Tim Rice: Apparently, Aida had won four of the five awards we were up for, including me and Elton for the score.

[9:13] Tim Rice: I was staggered.

[9:14] Tim Rice: Bob Crowley had one for his scenic design, and Natasha Katz for her lighting, not so staggering.

[9:20] Tim Rice: And Heather Headley as best actress in a musical.

[9:23] Tim Rice: If she hadn't won, I'd have been staggered.

[9:26] Tim Rice: The winner of the Best Musical Tony was a show called Contact, a victory that caused controversy about what constitutes a musical, as it was a dance musical with no singing and minimal dialogue, and instead of original music, it used pre-recorded music and songs.

[9:42] Tim Rice: Must get around to seeing it one day.

[9:44] Tim Rice: Elton and I got a little stick for not turning up to the Tony Awards.

[9:49] Tim Rice: I don't think we nominated anyone to accept on our behalf, but whoever it was didn't keep my Tony as I have it safely in my possession, modestly tucked away in a cupboard in Cornwall.

[9:59] Tim Rice: A cupboard with a glass front, I hasten to add.

[10:02] Tim Rice: One of the songs in our Tony Award-winning score, which has been sung by several eminent artists over the years, including fine versions by male singers such as Michael Crawford and Donnie Osmond, is I Know the Truth, sung by Radames' rejected love, Amneris.

[10:18] Tim Rice: I never failed to be enchanted by Sherie Rene Scott's chillingly gentle interpretation.

[10:27] Tim Rice: How have I come to this?

[10:32] Tim Rice: How did I slip and fall?

[10:37] Tim Rice: How did I throw half a lifetime away?

[10:42] Tim Rice: Without any thought at all?

[10:51] Tim Rice: This should have been my time.

[10:56] Tim Rice: It's over, it never began.

[11:03] ♪ Musical number ♪

[13:14] Tim Rice: Oh, I know the truth, and it's me. I know the truth and it should meet I learned it a little too late to the exquisite Sherie Rene Scott. Gosh, we were lucky with our company for Aida, from leads to chorus, from look to book, from organization, the Disney Heavies, to orchestration, Paul Burgave, Guy Babylon, and Steve Margoshius. From choreography, Wayne Cilento to Curtin. After the positive acceptance on Broadway, at least by the public, a national US tour of Aida was set up and played for two years on the road. Then various foreign productions kicked in, starting with a Dutch production in Dutch, in Scheveningen, Holland in late 2001, and subsequently foreign versions surfaced all over the shop.

And as I mentioned in my last podcast, I never got around to enough of them, although an open-air version in Estonia, which was interrupted halfway through by a torrential downpour, is warmly etched in my memory. Some acclaimed and prominent actors have honoured us by participating in the show either on Broadway during the run or on tour, including the magical Idina Menzel as Amneris. And Nina Simone's daughter, called Simone, Tony Braxton and Deborah Cox as Aida. Being a sixties vinyl junkie, actually 50s if I'm honest, but then in the 50s, records were often shellac rather than vinyl. Being a 60s vinyl junkie, I was particularly elated when an actual monkey, Mickey Dolenz, took on the role of Radames' father, Zoser, a conniving political manipulator.

And Mickey did great justice to his song Gleefully Anticipating the Imminent Passing of Pharaoh, another pyramid. Talking of pyramids, I remember when we were previewing in Chicago that Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was running in a theatre just down the road from Aida, another musical set in ancient Egypt. Thanks to me, 1999 must have been a great year for Chicago's pyramid constructors. Although, if they had an annual dinner, I was not invited. So here we are, 20 years on, hoping to get Aida up and running in a major way again. Although it has been continually performed in with respect many minor ways around the globe, ever since we didn't turn up for the Tonys. It has even been done in my home country, where it's been available for amateur licensing since 2011, but only in that capacity.

Apparently, the first officially licensed performance that I know about anyway was in March 2013 by the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society. And I've certainly been aware of other presentations in the UK since then. But it will be a delight for me if we can get a major production into the West End before, frankly, before I'm too old to know whether it's Tuesday or Belgium. I hasten to say I'm feeling good, Nick, right now. I have great confidence in Shelley Williams and her team, which of course includes Disney Theatricals, who've made a pretty solid impact on international musical theatre since Beauty and the Beast kicked it all off for them in 1994. In these ultra-sensitive times, I feel confident that adjustments in Aida to character and plot, which need to be made, will not compromise the basic story of tragic love across forbidden lines.

And of course, I trust that Elton's marvellous music and virtually all the original lyrics will be retained. Although if improvements can be made, they will be. I've just come across a new version of my strongest suit, featured in a 2020 US television series called Katy Keene, so at least that one still passes muster. To finish this second podcast about Aida, here is a song sung by our three marvelous leads, Sherie, Adam, and Heather. The song opens the second act. It sums up, I hope, the thoughts at that moment in the drama of each of the three principals, who are staged apart, separate in their own thoughts, unaware of those of the other two. It's called "A Step Too Far."

[17:53] ♪ Musical number ♪

[21:42] Tim Rice: That was Get Onto My Cloud, Episode Nine, written and presented by Tim Rice and produced by Peter Holtz.