This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice, and this is episode 65 of my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud.

[0:15] Tim Rice: As I've mentioned on one or two occasions before, one of the questions I'm most often asked, at least by those who have a vague idea who I am, is, "Are you working on anything right now?" Which seems to me to contain the unspoken subtext, obviously not poor bloke, which is, I suppose, not an unreasonable thought, as I haven't had a new blockbuster musical open in the West End or Broadway for quite a while.

[0:40] Tim Rice: However, in some respects, right now I seem to be busier than ever, which in part explains why I haven't posted a new Get Onto My Cloud podcast for a couple of months. Of course, the podcasts themselves, which I began when lockdown started back in the dread year of our Lord 2020, have taken up a fair whack of my time since then.

[1:00] Tim Rice: But from March that year until the beginning of this year, 2022, I didn't really go anywhere. Social events were few and far between, and there was plenty of time to churn out a weekly ramble through past exploits. In the past few months, things have got back to normal, kind of, and work, particularly work that involves travel, has returned with a vengeance.

[1:23] Tim Rice: I don't know whether to be pleased or annoyed by this. In February in 2022, as I revealed, I believe in Podcast 59, I made my first trip abroad for two years when I went to Lisbon, Madeira, and the Canaries on a cruise. This was, of course, a working cruise. For some time now, I've been presenting a greatest hits kind of show on seaborne ships.

[1:46] Tim Rice: It's me plus four excellent singers, two guys and two girls, and a tight band under the control of Maestro Duncan War. In between the numbers, I tell the stories behind the songs and the shows from which they came. The whole thing lasts about 50 minutes to an hour. Unless I get carried away or sidetracked, I don't have a formal script, I don't have any script.

[2:09] Tim Rice: And the magnificent singers get through 15 or so songs, most of which are pretty well known, certainly to the generation that loves cruises. I wasn't sure if I would love cruises, but after my first stint on one of the classy seaborne vessels, I found I did. Especially since the seaborne ships are not massive floating blocks of flats, but more environmentally friendly, classy, but not three-quarters of the size of Hatfield Newtown.

[2:37] Tim Rice: If I'm unable to do my seaborne show in person, the lucky passengers get me on film. The band and singers are still live, but I've recorded all the links between the numbers, and while I've obviously never been on board when that version hits the waves, friends have reported that it worked okay. Whether with a live meal or not, it does have the merit of being short, which reminds me of one particular piece of advice I always give to anyone insane enough to embark upon a career writing musicals.

[3:06] Tim Rice: Keep it short. Every show is ten minutes too long. In fact, everything in life is ten minutes too long. The massive success of the marvelous musical Six is not solely down to the brilliant concept, excellent score, and terrific performances. It only lasts just over an hour. If you want more, see it twice. But I digress.

[3:30] Tim Rice: The trip to the Canaries and Madeira, the latter which houses a museum devoted entirely to Cristiano Ronaldo, a modest tribute to the great Portuguese footballer, kept me away from podcasting for two or three weeks. I didn't get back regularly onto the pod waves on my return, as I was flung immediately into three of my golden oldies, which are all very much alive and kicking.

[3:53] Tim Rice: If you're fortunate enough to have written musicals which have proved successful, there's always a great deal of work to be done on them in the years after their first appearance. New productions, film offers, which usually come to naught, requests for changes, rewrites, interviews, legal entanglements. So I still spend a lot of time with Joseph, Superstar, Evita, and The Lion King.

[4:16] Tim Rice: If you write musicals that are unsuccessful, or not quite as successful as you hoped, there's probably even more to do. Rewrites, a fresh launch, interviews, except it's often you pestering producers and the media rather than the other way around. But if you feel a show hasn't realized its full potential and you really believe in it, then go for it.

[4:37] Tim Rice: Since the world sort of got back to normal, I've been working almost full-time on three of my past shows. Aida, music by Elton, Chess, music by Bjorn and Benny, and From Here to Eternity, music by Stuart Brayson. Here's one of the highlights. One of many highlights, of course, although if everything is a highlight, can anything be a highlight? Anyway, from the original London cast of From Here to Eternity, recorded shortly after it opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre London in 2013.

[5:25] ♪ Musical number: "Ain't Where I Wanna Be Blues" — performed by Robert Lonsdale and Darius Campbell ♪

[7:55] Tim Rice: After Eternity's West End six-month run, Stuart Brayson and I were approached by Brett Smock, who runs a very successful annual drama festival in upstate New York. Brett loved the show and produced and directed it twice in New York and then in Maine at the Ogunquit Theatre. It was well received, and we learnt a good deal about its strengths and failings.

[8:16] Tim Rice: We then had a workshop in New York City, which attracted considerable interest, but no Broadway theater owner came forward, offering us their playhouse for an unlimited run. Or even for a limited run, frankly. But our confidence remained undimmed, and enthusiasm flowed back across the Atlantic, where the young successful producer Katie Lipson, head of Arya Entertainment, agreed to present the new show in London, directed once more by Brett Smock.

[8:42] Tim Rice: Stuart and I have written a couple of new songs, and the book's been tightened, and the storyline made clearer. An excellent cast has been assembled, and we open at the Charing Cross Theatre under the arches in October for a two-month run. Who knows where it will go from there? But I have a great belief in Stuart's talent, in Donald Rice's work on the original book by Bill Oakes, in Brett's conviction and direction, and possibly above all, above all else, in the magnificent story based on one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, From Here to Eternity by James Jones.

[9:17] Tim Rice: The story deals with the lives and loves of GIs in Hawaii shortly before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The film version, starring Burt Lancaster, Deborah Carr, Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, and Donna Reed, directed by Fred Zinnemann, picked up a host of Oscars in 1953. So as you can imagine, From Here to Eternity has been a pretty full-time occupation for me in the last few months.

[9:42] Tim Rice: As has a musical I wrote with Sir Elton John in 1999, Aida. This show ran for the best part of five years on Broadway at the beginning of the century. And to my delight and amazement, Elton and I won Tonys for the best Broadway score of 2000. This is the tale of war and struggles between Egypt and Nubia some 3,000 years ago, centered around the love affair of the Egyptian soldier Radames and the Nubian princess Aida.

[10:10] Tim Rice: The part of Aida on Broadway was played by the wonderful Heather Headley, who also won a Tony for her contribution to the show. The producers of Aida are Disney Theatricals, who feel the time is right to bring the show to the United Kingdom. It's already played in Europe in countries such as Germany, Holland, and Estonia, as well as in Japan and Korea, and has done pretty well, so it's strange that we've never yet brought it to London.

[10:34] Tim Rice: However, the cunning plan is to do so next year via an out-of-town, so to speak, production in Holland, where last time around it was a big award-winning hit. I've spent a good deal of time in New York this year at a major Aida workshop with a wonderful cast of distinguished and experienced Broadway actors, under the direction of Shelley Williams, who was in the original Aida show as Nehebka. Her dad, James, incidentally, is the drummer and percussionist of the top funk and blues band, the Ohio Players.

[11:06] Tim Rice: Under Shelley's command, we've restructured aspects of the show, both our songs and the script by David Henry Huang. It's unusual for a hit Broadway show, especially one written by two Brits, not to find a home in London's West End. But we hope this will be put to rights in a year or so.

[12:22] Tim Rice: Tell myself that loves an ever-changing situation, passion would have cooled, and all the magic would have died. All I have to do is pretend I never knew him on those very rare occasions when he steals into my hope. Better to have lost him when the ties were barely binding, better the contempt of the family I cannot stop. It's easy, it's easy until I think about him as he was when I last touched him, and how he would have been why to be with him today. Those very rare occasions to let up let keep on calming all ever wanted and I'm throwing it away. It's easy as a lie. But then I see the faces of our feeding people. A father and a son who are letter common. It's a Tavan eyes. We're on the back of creator, forcing us to prove that the hardest things we've done.

So we say, and all our things about him, till the earth wasn't around me. And though I choose to leave him a four and a point of death, and to no denial, no betrayal were at him so in my own eyes, and in the pantheon above it. It's a lie, it's easy. Easy as life from Aida.

[15:45] Tim Rice: Project from my past, which is keeping me busy in the present, is that dazzling problem child chess. This is not the time nor place for me to air my own views about what needs to be done beyond restating my conviction that the structure and interpretation, as per the original 1984 studio album with Elaine Page, Tommy Korberg, and Murray Head, was by far and away the least complex version of the story. One of the problems of using an original fictitious tale as the basis of a musical is that there's no logical reason why the plot cannot be altered, and that rarely means improvement. This is not a difficulty I encountered with Evita or Jesus Christ Superstar. No director or producer suggested that Ava Perron recover from her illness and live to a ripe old age as a popular MP for Buenos Aires South.

No director or producer came up with the idea that Jesus could be reprieved by Pontius Pilate and retired to set up a carpentry business in Jericho. Yet, although my story for chess was inspired by actual events that involved such extraordinary characters as Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, CIA and KGB operatives, and their lives both on and off the chessboard, the story has often been dismissed as literally incredible. The only people who have consistently agreed that the musical is a truly believable portrait of the Queen's Gambit World are actual chess players, grandmasters et al., including Anatoly Karpov, Ray Keene, and Bill Hartston, all of whom helped me with background detail back in the early 80s, before I'd written a word with Benny and Bjorn.

To this day, I probably spend more time on chess than on any other musical. The fan following is intense and considerable, but we clearly have not yet delivered the perfect presentation. Maybe it's impossible, but the songs live on. Chess recently played three sellout nights at the Drury Lane in London in a concert version directed by Nick Winston, and it was ecstatically received by the growing army of chess nuts. There is to be a one-off charity concert of the work in New York City in December, and we have serious positive offers for a Broadway opening sometime in 2023. We could hardly do worse than the first time round. Then we are also in discussions about a movie. A medium which I believe should suit this particular work admirably.

Of course, chess has its faults, but I'm not sure that the right ones are being identified. But I could be wrong. When I'm asked for musical writing advice, I always say, remember that no one knows anything. But if you know you know nothing, then you're ahead of the game.

[18:19] Tim Rice: Here are those two peerless singers, Elaine Page and Tommy Korberg. This is the one situation. Nothing I say will convince him it isn't a trick. A dream on a clear moon midnight. I relax. She smiles. There's something unpleasant going on. So with immaculate timing. Now she can't be working for them. I mean us. She seems so very straightforward. But where is he has to come back? He wanted this meeting. Well, didn't he? Maybe he's scared, just as scared as he was in the game I just couldn't care less. He could go right ahead. Go and wreck his career. I know I've done my best. What if my Russian friend thinks that my plans are more than intimate kind? If I don't say something else soon, here go out in no more to bring up the get to the point, big in the beak.

He ready and waiting. Never mind him. I haven't missed him so far. Maybe it won't help me up to struggle on without his charm button how at once I feel that he can go down. This is the one situation I want it most to have. My dear opponent, I really can't imagine why. So I am not dangerous thing what a shame. You're not dangerous. Who could think that of you? You are so strange. Why can't you be what you ought to be? You should be scheming intriguing too clever by heart. I have to hand it to you. For you manage to make me forget why I ever agreed to this farce. I don't know why I can't think of I would rather do wasting my time on my trans.

[23:11] Tim Rice: That was episode sixty-five of my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud. Written and introduced by me, Tim Rice, and produced by the evergreen Peter Hobbs.