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[0:00] Bob Martin: Hi, this is Bob Martin, and you're listening to Outrageous Fortune, the kind of official Slings and Arrows podcast.

[0:10] Bob Martin: Did you ever find a TV show so wondrous yet so odd? Each episode deserves an ode, and so you start up on cast. Slings and Arrows is a show airing 20 years ago about actors and the plays that they'd perform. It had ghosts, it had betrayal. Once they all got put in jail, it had Hamlet and Old King Lear in the storm. And we talk about it here. Come on, Duckies, gather near. For the gossip will be nothing less than scorching. We'll fill up countless stages with all men's seven ages. No need to get the Shakespeare. It's only bloody Shakespeare. So welcome to Outrageous Fortune.

[0:59] Bob Martin: Welcome to Outrageous Fortune. Hello, Duckies. Welcome to the first episode of Outrageous Fortune. We're very excited to share this first episode with you. As you'll hear from the interview, Bob Martin was an important key in this podcast coming to fruition, and we are continuously grateful for his support. Although Bob Martin needs no introduction to most theater geeks, we are providing one for our new friends. Bob Martin is a writer and actor, and one of three co-creators and writers of the acclaimed television show Slings and Arrows. As the librettist of The Drowsy Chaperone, where he played the man in chair, he received the 2006 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for Best Book of a Musical. His other theater credits include Books for the Prom, Elf, and The Sting, as well as creating and starring in Michael, Tuesdays and Thursdays for television.

[2:05] Bob Martin: Okay. Well, can you tell us a little bit about what you were working on before you got involved in this project and how you came to be a part of the team?

[2:15] Bob Martin: Um, I was at Second City for a long time, and then I was working on Don McKeller's TV show Twitch City with him. Um, I'm guessing that's when I first worked with Neve Fitchman. Um, and he brought me into Slings and Arrows, which was being developed by Susan Cohen and Mark McKinney, and had been for a couple of years with the CBC. Um, but I had had a lot of TV writing experience more than either of them, actually. Uh, because Susan was mainly theater, and Mark has his own, you know, six hugely successful career, but of a very specific trajectory. And I had been working on Made in Canada and a bunch of other TV shows. Um, so I was used to sort of writing series television. Um, and yeah, I was sort of brought into it when it was still at the treatment stage.

I believe there was one script, but it was at that time more of kind of a murder mystery. And Mark and Susan and I started, I know murder mystery, huh? Well, there was a death in the first episode. So Mark and Susan and I really started focusing on and crafting what we wanted the show to be, and we hit it off. I'd never met them. Um, and we really hit it off. They've become very, very close friends. We're still working on stuff together after all these years. Um, and we just spent, man, I don't know, a couple of years in Susan Cohen's kitchen. Um, around her kitchen table, just talking about all the crap in our lives and talking about and breaking down the story for the series.

[4:01] Bob Martin: And have you talked to Susan yet?

[4:03] Bob Martin: We have.

[4:05] Bob Martin: Okay. Okay, great. Yeah, she's such a wonderful person, and I'm sure remembers everything in more detail than I did. And she would be able to tell you, of course, about the origin of it before I joined with Tekka Crosby and all of that. Uh, but yeah, I came in a little bit later in the process, but before anything had been made.

[4:28] Bob Martin: And what were your kind of initial feelings? I'm gonna be a little bit hesitant because I'm waiting for the thing. But um, what was initially kind of your attraction to it? What lit up in the project for you that made you excited about working on it?

[4:45] Bob Martin: Well, of course, the subject matter. I love the theater. Um, it's, you know, ironically, it became my life completely after Slings and Arrows. In fact, when we were shooting the third season, um, I was doing Drowsy Chaperone in Los Angeles, and that kind of changed my life entirely, and I became, I'm only working in the theater now, although I still dabble in television, but I went from being a TV writer, actor, showrunner, right to being book writer of musicals. Like in a weird way, kind of overnight. But theater really became my life, and I've always loved the theater. I've always loved live performance and always loved the stage and um, the backstage politics and everything that, uh, that's something that Susan, Mark, and I share in common that we all find that whole community so interesting and the dynamic so interesting.

And the kind of personalities that choose to go into that world and what they sacrifice and what they think of as important, uh, all of that. Um, we’re fascinated with that. Um, and we are those people. Um, also it was just a sprawling story, uh, with the template of these great plays, um, lots of really compelling characters. Um, but really what attracts me to projects in general are my collaborators, and I just love these guys, and so work, you know, every day was a pleasure. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's a combination of all those things, but I mean ultimately it was really about Mark and Susan. I hope they say the same thing, but it was about wanting to work with those guys.

[6:37] Bob Martin: Right.

[6:43] Bob Martin: I can assure you Susan had similar sentiments, so don't worry.

[6:47] Bob Martin: Oh good, good, good. Because that would be really awkward if that were not the case.

[6:53] Bob Martin: Let's try to stir up some drama between a long simmering collaboration. Um, can you talk a little bit? I mean, this is kind of me like thinking of writing and um about that collaborative process. Uh, I know like coming from improv and musicals are so collaborative, but how do you engender some sort of community where good things can happen and people maybe aren't unhappy or is misery a key part of your process and like making other people unhappy? How do you kind of find that or create that environment?

[7:28] Bob Martin: Um, yeah, it's interesting. Um, well, I mean, we spent I would say just as much time talking about our own lives and everything we were dealing with in our lives as we did the story itself. So we put so much of that material, personal material into the show. So the writing process becomes a kind of therapy. And it always has been for me with everything I've worked on. Everything has a little bit of me, even, you know, even Elf the musical has some of me in it. Uh, it's a way of processing crap in your life. Um, very much in the spirit of Slings and Arrows actually. Uh, there's, you know, the lines between personal and professional are blurred in the arts. Um, so we never wanted to have an antagonistic atmosphere in the writer's room or on set or anything.

We always wanted it to be a sort of communal thing. Um, when you're dealing with something this big, I mean 18 one-hour episodes, that's a lot of feature films worth of story and character and everything. So much of it, so much of the anxiety that might be associated with a project like that comes from the size of the, and so if you organize, if you outline in great detail, and you just chip away at the project a scene at a time with a real plan of action in mind, then it can be fun.

[9:18] Bob Martin: I have to say this Mark is a very special guy to have in a writer's room because I've never met a writer before who likes to read his material as much as Mark does. So he will read through everything, jumping from character to character, putting on these voices and acting it all out, and it's just so much fun. And he's, you know, he's so creative that way. I think too that we all brought something different. I guess I'm sort of rambling here a bit, but it's all coming back to me through the fog. We all brought a different set of different skill set to the project. Um, Susan, of course, had the most experience specifically at Stratford, but just in the theater in general, and she's very much an academic and an actress and very well researched, very smart, um, you know, as well as an excellent writer and actress.

And Mark has a gift for character, so he would see storylines in terms of character, he would begin with character. Um, and I think I brought a sense of structure and the mechanics of storytelling and dialogue and comedy to the piece. So we all had a slightly different palette, it was all complimentary, I think. And it wasn't like all smooth sailing for sure, but um, but it was, you know, we wouldn't still be friends if it was really awful.

[10:58] Bob Martin: Right. I'm curious about the writing process since you said it started out as a murder mystery. I'm a little obsessed with murder mysteries, but I'm curious when you all did the outline for like what it became, how did you like restructure the thing and like how much of it changed or were you able to keep from the original in the newest in the outlines that you know we see now as the show?

[11:28] Bob Martin: Yeah, it was, um, I guess probably Susan would remember more clearly. First of all, we didn't expect to have three seasons in the beginning, although we had sort of planned for it, um, in a very rough way. We had this idea about, and it was Susan's idea, I believe, about youth, middle age, and old age as represented by Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, and that those would be the three season arc of the series if we had the chance to do three, but we went forward thinking we only had one. And the going into shooting that first season was incredibly chaotic because the CBC pulled out at the last minute and the producer had to cobble together a coalition of three other networks, um, was it Movie Central, Movie Channel, and Showcase, which he did in an elevator.

It was an amazing accomplishment, but we lost a sort of our budget as a result of this. Um, so everything we wrote with budget in mind, so everything we had written we had to sort of compress and that meant eliminating some elements and some storylines, making them less important. Um, but that all happened right when we were going to production. W uh, if your question really is about how it sort of evolved from a murder mystery into what it was, well, when I say murder mystery, there was still that element of the Hamlet reflected in the storyline, and it still took place backstage at a large not-for-profit. But we talked for a while about being way more overtly satirical and sort of more playfully lovingly critical of Stratford.

The series was called for a long time Saint Ratford. I don't know if you know that. It was, I've always heard that as like a joke of people talking about Stratford. Like I remembered like talking in bars about, oh, I have my audition for St. Ratford or something like that. Um, at any point it was for a long time, and we were never completely satisfied with that, but it was the title and it was, but we, you know, again that was one of the changes that we were, we didn't want it to simply be a satire.

[14:03] Bob Martin: So we dialed back a lot of those elements, and it became more of a general statement about how we create art. As the characters started to emerge, that really affected what the show became, particularly for me, the relationship between Jeffrey and Oliver, which I kind of think of as a representation of how the artist's mind works, where you argue with your id in a way. The rational and irrational sides of your personality fight it out. That became, oh wow, like that was really kind of, you know, when I talk about this series, by the way, it's so when I've been involved in big things before too, when something is so big, you can't really claim anything in the show. There are so many people working, and there's so much that happens sort of magically.

When I watch a sequence on YouTube or something from Slings and Arrows, I just can't believe we did it. It seems like the show was doing it, and we were sort of shepherding it along, but it was sort of happening because of so many great people involved. The job of the writer is to sort of get out of the way of the piece, you know, don't try to impose yourself on it, but just try and let the piece show itself to you. So Slings, I think, is successful because eventually we were able to get out of the way, and it just became this thing that I think is really complicated and flawed and beautiful and moving at times.

[15:55] Bob Martin: Yeah, I mean, I agree. To add a question with that, you were talking earlier about the whole conversation between Jeffrey and Oliver. Sometimes, I mean, Jess and I are both writers, and sometimes I'll have a character talk to me, which is a little, you know, sometimes it makes you think you're a little crazy. I'm really feeling like Jeffrey today because I feel like this character's telling me what it wants me to do next. But also, it's influenced by people in your life who you've met along your journey as a creative. We were curious, were there any people that sort of were in any of these characters that you were writing? I know for Susan there were some, but I'm curious about you, if there were any.

[16:54] Bob Martin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, we get asked this question a lot. There are definitely these characters like Darren Nichols and, to a certain extent, Jeffrey and yes, Oliver, are kind of at times specific references to specific people. It's funny, I mean, after the fact, I met Baz Luhrmann at this thing, and he was hilariously like Darren Nichols. It was shocking. I wasn't the only one; I was with Neve, I believe, or maybe I was with Don when I made it. Yeah, I was with Don McKellar, and we were like, it's Darren Nichols. But yeah, I mean, there were specific, I mean, obviously Steven was doing a bit of a Richard Manette impersonation to a certain extent. But again, these characters were very, very romanticized as well.

I kind of feel there's a lot of me in Jeffrey. I'm gonna claim that. Mark and Susan may dispute it, but I don't know. I think if I were a mad director, I would want to be like him. It's about stripping away everything, getting to the essence of performance and design and everything like that, just stripping it all away. I kind of feel that way too. But that's not to say that Jeffrey is in any way based on me, but again, as I said before, we put so much more stuff, our own personal point of view and our experiences into the characters.

[18:58] Bob Martin: I remember, I mean, the questions right now are sort of encompassing all three, but when we talked to Susan about season three, she mentioned she had like a mentor, and I wondered, that was like Charles. Did you have somebody who was like a Charles figure in your life as well? Not necessarily that wanted to do a last King Lear, but just somebody who you really looked up to that sort of had inspired you, and maybe you thought about that person as you were all working on that season.

[19:43] Bob Martin: I don't think I had a mentor. I mean, I had read many stories about different people, and they were all sort of represented in Charles. So much of Charles was in Bill Hutt's performance, of course, the gravity, the gravitas he brings to everything. When I'm developing character, I think Mark and Susan would agree that sometimes you go to a particularly negative place, especially with comic characters. I do this personally; I'll go to the place of the most prejudice or fear or deeply rooted insecurity, and that becomes really enlarged, and that becomes the character. In a way, Bill was Charles, except we took the worst of that that would be in any actor and brought it to the forefront, all that insecurity, impatience, and arrogance.

Not that he was like that in life, but we all have that within ourselves, and we just sort of exploded that. Susan definitely has a bunch of actual people in her life that were sort of maybe more fully reflected in the characters than they would have been for me. I have a horrible lack of mentors in my life. I don't really, I've never really had that. I learned from everybody I work with. I certainly learned tons from Don McKellar, especially probably, but he's a peer. I haven't really had that many mentors in my life.

[21:44] Bob Martin: Anyway, that's, I mean, I understand. I just got one like last year. That's my first. It's, oh really? Never had one.

[21:58] Bob Martin: That's interesting. I thought it was sort of just me. I guess, you know, if you're taking your own kind of unique path in life, it's really hard to find somebody. When I started the book writing musical thing, I did work with Tom Meehan, who's like one of the most celebrated book writers in Broadway history. He was a bit of a mentor, but again, he felt like a peer. So, I mean, yeah, I don't, I've never really had anybody like that.

[22:26] Bob Martin: Yeah, no, I mean, the mentorship thing is a real thing, and I wonder about that in my career. It's been weird rewatching Slings this time because when it first came out, I was in university and beginning my career and very much in that young actor stage. I haven't watched it so many times when I was that age, and now I feel like I'm in my Macers part of life where I'm out for revenge and I kill the king. It really struck me about the Jeffrey-Oliver relationship, and as much as there were negative things in it, so much of Jeffrey's success—there is a very tangible level of success. He's running a major theater company; he gets to do what he wants to do. He's passing that on to other people, like the Luke Cooper Kirby character in season one.

He does kind of make offers to other actors; I think he does want them to be their best. So that issue of mentorship and who you follow is a real one, and I think there are practical ramifications in your career about it if it happens or it doesn't.

[23:43] Bob Martin: You try to be a mentor, as you say Jeffrey is a mentor. One of my favorite scenes in the entire series is when he's explaining Ophelia's song, you know, childlike singing to Claire. That was a scene that took a ton of research to write, and I thought Paul and Sabrina Gurdovich were amazing in their performance of that dialogue. Sabrina's sort of being humiliated and fighting back the tears, and Paul is just completely committing to what he's talking about. The Ophelia being driven mad by grief, it starts off as this sort of comic thing and then just becomes really kind of profound, and then she basically ignores all the advice afterwards. The thing that I think is most successful about Slings when it's really working is that combination of tone, that juxtaposition of comedy and drama within the same sequence.

[24:58] Bob Martin: I love that scene too. Sorry, just was gonna say that the beauty of it, and then like it's comedy, the beauty, and then comedy slash frustration because you love that moment so much, and then she just doesn't listen or do any of it, and you're like, ah, that's so good.

[25:21] Bob Martin: Yeah, exactly. That combination is my favorite thing, like sad, funny. It's why I love Slings; it's why I love most things that I love have to be a little bit funny, but that groundedness is so important. I'm wondering if you can connect it. I love what you said about trying to find the characters. I would call it the wound, like something dark about them or the bad thing, and matching that with the character. How do you find the right wound with the right person, or what is that process about kind of marrying those things for you, both in terms of character and in terms of beats of structuring a scene? Is there a process, or do you know it when you see it?

[26:15] Bob Martin: I think that whole approach, especially to comedy, began when I was working at Second City. You have to create characters very quickly, and what I found to be really successful in long-form improvisation was making a really strong choice and having a really strong point of view of a character. Because it's a comedy, I would make that strong choice based in weakness or fear because I think it's really relatable for an audience. They start to see themselves; they see the weakness portrayed there and just indulged there, and it's funny. It's very human. Speaking for myself, I sort of started to apply those principles to developing characters as a writer in a longer form situation, really defining characters by their weaknesses more than their strengths.

But again, this is also a comedy-specific thing. There are no heroes in comedy, I always say. Comedy is all about avoidance, whereas drama is all about collision, basically. The mechanisms of avoidance—avoiding dealing with a problem or situation directly—are what make relatable, and all of those mechanisms of avoidance are based in weakness and fear. So that's my little lecture about that.

[28:08] Bob Martin: That's um that's so profound. I've never heard that before. Um I love writing theory and talking about this, and I've never heard that before. I think that's wonderful. Um, comedy is avoidance. I'm trying to like think through and yeah, yeah, yeah. You do it. Play that exercise. Well, I mean, the most obvious versions of something like that are something like Seinfeld. Every episode of Seinfeld is about avoidance. There's some instigating incident, and then they bend over backwards not to simply deal with that incident. Like so not to simply say, no, you misunderstood what I said, or something like that. It's all about you know, ego and avoiding embarrassment and avoiding humiliation and avoiding, you know, confrontation.

Um so when you're writing something that's more of a hybrid of comedy drama, you can have the characters more aware of these fears and fighting against these fears and weaknesses in a more overt way, more self-aware than a character would be in something like Seinfeld. Um so Jeffrey is always you know, Jeffrey is a very complicated character. He's he's he's full of fear, you know. Um he's always aware of losing his sanity. He's it's like he never he's never quite sure if his just sanity is just sort of slipping away. Um so he's very much aware of his weaknesses and and his strengths kind of get buried by them at times. I think there's a I I'm uh you know, season one, two, and three, they're both they're all uh strong in their own way.

There's something about season two and um Jeffrey's struggle with trying to understand how to stage Macbeth. Uh uh that I really really find kind of compelling and interesting. He doesn't understand why he why he's rejecting Oliver's designs and everything for the longest time. And at one point he says, I understand I see it. I understand it. I just don't like it. And he can't really define why he doesn't why he doesn't like it. And and I guess he comes to his I'm just thinking back now. He comes to his the solution by understanding by humanizing the character of Macbeth and understanding how his actions are are rooted in his own his own fears and insecurities which are all about getting older.

And he's of course that's what he's experiencing those same fears. But I now you see now I've talked myself down down this rabbit hole. I can't remember how I began talking about this. This was all about what uh how characters are created? No probably not what was the question I was asked Yeah like it doesn't matter what you said was so interesting but like the wound of characters and and how that kind of fits into comic structure um and then talking about Jeffrey as a character. Um and uh that's uh pretty um amazing uh insight into the show so thank you that's really cool to hear you say all that about season two.

[31:31] Bob Martin: Well, you know, um uh Ellen is another uh you know great example of that. She she I I I personally was having trouble writing that character until we came we we sort of came across this idea of her passive aggressively apologizing all the time. So there's a so you know I think the first time she does it she's late or something and she says sorry, sorry for caring. And it was just like, oh, that's who Ellen is. She's she's she t she's sort of she's getting older again. She's she um feels threatened by the the younger people in the company. She feels that she's that she's a a great actress, but not being given um the opportunities that she should be. Um she f you know sh she feels her physical beauty is starting to wane and all of this, and she sort of takes control of a situation with this passive aggressive behavior.

Uh you know, she's and she's she's constantly snapping at people. But when when it when the magic starts to happen and when when Jeffrey, you know, gives her the opportunity to um, you know, play. I mean, at one point he suggests Cleopatra and she gets her eyes just widened. She's so excited by the possibility of that. Um, you know, you can see you can see the heart in there that that's that you know, when you you see the moments when all the fear and insecurity and everything's all scraped away and she's really connecting as a performer with the material that she loves and you know, is a f more fulfilled person. So she's she there's another character that's just deeply defined by her insecurities.

[33:15] Bob Martin: That's that's a great that's like a fascinating insight because then it just popped in my head the speech she gives to Rachel McAdams at the end of I mean the end of season one, sort of the beginning of season two where she first like talks her out of leaving and then talks her into leaving.

[33:35] Bob Martin: Yeah. Um yeah that makes absolute sense, yeah.

[33:39] Bob Martin: Yeah, she says, be Juliet, don't play Julia.

[33:42] Bob Martin: Yeah, it's quite it's quite profound, isn't it?

[33:45] Bob Martin: Yeah. Because of course she let you know wrote Jeffrey was a great love and lost he that got all screwed up. Um yeah, yeah, that's a that's a kind of that was a thank you for reminding me about that speech. That was also a uh something that was a really character-defining moment. And then there was Rachel McAdams, man. She was, you know, she her star was just rising, uh and this the um sh she was so great in that first season, and you know, we were like, oh, this person's such a great actress. And then I guess I'm not sure if it was Mean Girls that came out that summer. Um then she her completely changed like she was in just another category and she was not able to continue with the series. So we had to the the series was going to be about her character.

It was going to be all about the per her perspective on you know, beginning her career and eventually becoming more like Ellen. Uh um, but we had to, you know, uh r re rejig the whole thing when we when we lost her. We had to write her out of season two very quickly. I don't know, it's a little side note about her. She but I think it's wonderful, wonderful actress, obviously.

[35:07] Bob Martin: I I mean, I love you know, we I don't know if this is really a question, but just thinking about how you all had to pivot um with the finances changing and then the pivot with Rachel, like you pivoted so beautifully because you're like theater people, you know, like we're you know, it's like what Susan said too. It's just like we're all used to being scrappy and figuring things out, and somebody, you know, has to leave at the last second, or nowadays gets COVID, you know, and so then you're just like trying to figure out what to do next. And um I the the show is I I love that you know, the focusing on the actual um three shows, and you know, I've said this before, like season three is is my favorite, but uh it's specifically my favorite because of the season of life I'm in as I watched it and having had to um bury parents, and so to see the relationship between Jeffrey and Charles is so it was just so beautiful and magical to me, even with Charles's like screaming and all this stuff, like I've been through all of that now, you know, and to watch that to you know and see somebody that you love and look up to go through those those changes. The fact that that was what was the focus of season three and then season two, like Jess and I both joke we're in the macro stage stages of our life now.

[36:44] Bob Martin: Oh yeah. Um, but then you know what you were just talking about about Macbeth being afraid of like his his age and vulnerability, and then like the gentleman who plays Macbeth is it's the same thing, you know. And that's also why Jeffrey and he are having such difficulties because they're really going through the same thing in different ways, but like that's the butting of the heads. Is there they're in the same place?

[37:14] Bob Martin: Yes, exactly. And and you know, with with Bill Hutt, he one of Canada's greatest actors, and hi a lot of the his best work w had never been recorded. Um so this was also he was sick when he was doing season three. And so this was very real for us. And and and uh it was a chance to for us to record his Lear, you know. So there was an there was also another sort of whole thing going on with that season.

[37:46] Bob Martin: Um season three also was a compromise one for me because I had to s I had to leave uh early on to because I was going to LA to to start this other career. So it was uh it was a it was a tough time.

[38:02] Bob Martin: Um season one was hell when in production. Hell. And and like talk about n you know, no mentors. I was showrunning, um and I'd never done that before. And every day was uh what are we you know, uh on set shooting stuff, what are we gonna cut now? What are we what are we cutting today? What scenes are we not shooting today because we're we're late? And you so and so you're you're in your mind trying to restructure the series and seeing what can what can we lose? What can we how can we still tell the story and what scenes can we lose and still tell the story? It's like maddening exercise. Super super stressful. Uh and uh that was mainly because of budget and because we were we were really trying to get our footing. Peter Wellington, you know, took as director took on the entire series and it was challenging, especially in the beginning. And and uh it took a while to really find a groove. So it was it was it was rough that first year.

[39:06] Bob Martin: Did you showrun all three seasons or just the first one?

[39:10] Bob Martin: I d I sure I sure ran the first two, and then because I had to leave part way through the third, Susan took over.

[39:16] Bob Martin: Okay. Uh or sort of sh actually I believe Susan was showrunner for the entire series, but I was I was running I was sort of executive story editor, I guess, in the uh in the beginning in script development, and then I wasn't there for much of the shoot, which is a real shame, but I mean it's just the way things worked out.

[39:35] Bob Martin: Yeah.

[39:37] Bob Martin: Oh, what's the here's a irony. Here's an irony, because okay, was the Canadian musical in season three?

[39:45] Bob Martin: Yeah.

[39:46] Bob Martin: It was.

[39:47] Bob Martin: Okay. So so the Canadian musical was written by Greg Morrison, Lisa Lambert. Um, and it w and we per we shot that at the Theatre Passe Muraille b I believe, where Drowsy had been performed after the fringe run by the by the same, you know, created by the same people, including Don McKeller, who was also there when we were shooting, and it w and I and I believe it was when we were there shooting that musical in that theater that we f we got the call that we were going to Broadway with Drowsy Chaperone.

[40:30] Bob Martin: Wow. So it was this like weird intersection of these two worlds. Because the the slings they had just gotten back from Broadway with their with the Macers.

[40:42] Bob Martin: Yeah. And and Jeffrey was like melting down afterwards because he and Richard were not in a great a great spot. But then like that's so yeah, East Hastings.

[40:54] Bob Martin: East Hastings, yeah. I'm curious about did you it was East Hastings was written by Lisa and Greg. Did you have anything to do with the writing of the musical as well of that one?

[41:15] Bob Martin: Yeah.

[41:15] Bob Martin: Yeah, I wrote I worked with Lisa and Greg on all of the music in the series. So the the songs too, the opening and closing numbers in each season. Um I mean that was mainly Lisa and Greg, but I was I've I've you know Lisa's my oldest friend. Uh just like a year, I've known her a year longer than I've known Don McKeller. Uh and uh Lisa and I have always written stuff together, and so we we kinda uh hammered out a lot of the lyrics and working with Greg of uh all the music in the shows.

[41:49] Bob Martin: Besides rent, what were the other inspirations for East Hastings?

[41:54] Bob Martin: Rent was a big one, yeah.

[41:56] Bob Martin: Yes. And we and we kind of don't feel that we really got it right. Like I we we feel East Hastings is not is not perfect. Although somebody years later actually contacted us about about staging East Hastings, and we were like, there is no East Hastings.

[42:19] Bob Martin: That's amazing. But we felt it was too broad, you know, ultimately afterwards we would like her to have had another shot at that one. I think Lisa did an amazing job on the theme songs and every, you know, I had some input, but it was mainly those guys, and I really like the songs. And they wrote another bunch of other little songs that sort of appear throughout the show and some that were not used, and it was really they did a great job. Can you talk about, like, East Hastings the beginning of your illustrious librettist career? Was that kind of your first time doing musicals, or where did your incredible ability to structure musicals come from?

[43:07] Bob Martin: Oh no, no, we had been sort of working on, I did sketch comedy for a long time with Lisa Lambert and Paula Sullivan and Jonathan Crombie. We wrote a lot of music for the shows that we did, and Lisa, working with other people like Brock Simpson and John Mitchell, had written sort of these little pastiche musicals that I participated in in one way or another over the years, and then, you know, Drowsy was written, oh, I can't remember what year now, but it was long before Slings and Arrows. So we were working on Drowsy while we were working on Slings and Arrows. I had been deeply involved in that in some one way or another. But the whole Broadway thing happened very suddenly. So I had some sense of how these things worked, but it really required, after the success of Drowsy on Broadway, I really had to educate myself about Broadway musicals and how they work and how they're structured for a couple of years before I really felt qualified to do the job that I'd already gotten the Tony for. It was very, very strange.

[44:30] Bob Martin: But yeah, I mean, the fact that I'd written a lot in television helped because, again, it was about organization storytelling in multiple episodes of something. So I was used to handling many characters and lots of elements, and what I had to learn is really how to empower the music when you're in storytelling and how to launch songs and how to hand over the best parts of every scene to the composer lyricist. But it's been great, I love it. I guess why was I talking about that? Because, again, that was something to do with lack of mentorship, yeah. You would ask, did I, you know, was East Hastings the first musical? No, it wasn't. We'd been chipping away at things, but we didn't really have anybody exactly who was a mentor for us and learning that particular job.

[45:40] Bob Martin: Jess, I kind of want to ask your failure question because I loved where we went the last time with that. She mentioned, and she's right, in season two especially, but I would even say season three after Broadway's a success, they're still really struggling. So the question was about failure is something that comes up throughout the show. Do you think of the characters as failures, or do you think that they think they are? Or do you think failure is inherent in the theater?

[46:22] Bob Martin: I absolutely think failure is inherent in the theater. Yeah. In all art. But pretty, it's particularly evident in the theater because shows never stop being developed. Like, you write a show for every stage of development, you open the show, and then you continue to write it and recreate it and reinterpret it for forever if you're lucky enough to have multiple stagings of something. I'm still working on the scripts of every show I've written that are being produced, you know, Elf is opening in the West End next month, and I'm making adjustments to that script. It's always being, you know, and I find now going to the theater that all I see are the flaws and mistakes in everything I see. And it's not a bad thing.

[47:21] Bob Martin: I was talking to this producer who works with Warner Brothers, Mark Kaufman, at an event the other day, and I thought I was the only one, but he started to talk very excitedly about how he loves really, really flawed shows and how they teach him so much, right? And I went, oh my god, I'm exactly the same way. I think you cannot learn anything from success, but you can learn so much from failure. And the truth is that nothing is perfect. I've never seen anything that was even close to perfect. And season two begins with Jeffrey getting that review from the Times that says that one of his productions was perfect, and it just enrages him because it doesn't make any sense to him at all. And, you know, yeah, I feel the same way. I spend all my time when it comes to the theater watching shows and understanding why every choice is made and seeing all the flaws and just really, really reveling in those flaws.

[48:28] Bob Martin: It's really fascinating to me. I mean, I'm really focused on musicals at the moment, so they are their own set of unique challenges, and it's great to see, you know, right now the genre is really evolving in a dramatic way with different voices and a rejection of different sort of tropes and classic models of storytelling in musical theater. So it's great to see all the missteps as people are sort of fumbling to find something new. I find it super, super exciting. I mean, television is a little bit different because you get multiple shots at every moment, and you can really craft it, and ultimately you can hide a lot of flaws because you're editing it all together.

[49:32] Bob Martin: Slings, I always want to say was brilliantly edited by Chris Donaldson, a fantastic editor who worked on all of them. But yeah, so you can do it, you can freeze something in time, and that's it, that it never changes, and yes, it can be flawed, but you can hide so much. But theater is live and constantly changing and constantly reinterpreting it any given night, it's a new animal, it's recreated all over and over again. I find that super exciting. I feel like recently, within the last maybe three or four years, when I hear people talk about something they love, they usually start out by saying the title of the thing, and then they'll say, it's not perfect, but, and I'm like, human beings made it. Why do you think, like, why are we even prefacing something by saying that? It doesn't even make sense to me because why would it be perfect?

[50:29] Bob Martin: You know, like that's not a thing. But I love what you said about failure, and then I was thinking about, like, there's a podcast particularly dedicated to people talking about their failures, and then the other podcast I have is all about Broadway shows that didn't find an audience, and every time we end an episode, we always try to remind our audience, like look at the titans of musical theater that this didn't work out for, but like we revere them. That means you just have to keep going. Like it doesn't mean, oh, I didn't succeed this one time or it didn't make a bunch of money. That doesn't mean it was an artistic failure, right? But that just means like maybe it didn't find its audience, and so like failure is such an interesting thing because it really can depend on, you know, like you said, how you look at it and what you learn from it.

[51:35] Bob Martin: It's also you have to really define what failure is. Right. I mean, you know, Sondheim's shows, like very few of them recouped. They were most of them were sort of what you would, I could argue, were box office failures. There's so much beauty in everything he ever created. How can you possibly talk about him in terms of failure? But, and you know, maybe a better way to say it is choice. I mean, creating this stuff is all about a series of choices, and each choice leads you down a particular road. Some choices have more profound influence over the whole than other choices. And so when I'm watching things, I was like, oh, I see what they did there, they made that choice, probably not the strongest choice, and it leads to all of these other things that result from that one choice.

[52:29] Bob Martin: Yeah, so failure's absolutely got a sort of bad reputation. It's not, it's so completely the fabric of creativity that you can't separate failure from the beauty that you can create. I remember one interview, excuse me, that I saw that Hal Prince gave. He said he would keep saying that about the shows he and Steven did together, you know, that it was a failure. And his wife was like, I wish you would redefine failure. I wish you would redefine that word for yourself and what actually happened to this show. Because she was getting frustrated with him saying that if it, you know, didn't recoup because she was like, that's it wasn't a failure. You know, if the show was beautiful or he was proud of it or it was, you know, powerful, which like everything they did together was.

[53:35] Bob Martin: Including Marily, which we're very excited is coming back to New York. Well, I mean, you know, Slings was arguably a failure by some metrics in Canada. I mean, it didn't have a great, you know, not a lot of people saw it in Canada. It was critically acclaimed in the first season, and then we couldn't get anybody to write about it in the second season. And it wasn't until it was on Sundance Channel in the States that it started to get this cult following. And then it became, we found out it was sort of one of the, in those days when they would sell DVD sets, it was like the highest selling import DVD in the United States one year, you know, and that I still meet a lot of people who have sets of the DVDs and have traded them and stuff like that. All my friends had watched it, and I was like, I don't have one of those. How am I gonna watch it? I wanna watch it? They're hard to get now.

[54:41] Bob Martin: Yes. So yeah, everything I've done has been, you know, like Drowsy wasn't a huge success even though it was by so many measures like a great success. Prom had a really troubled Broadway run, that was the show I did recently, but then, you know, was made into a movie with Meryl Streep and it's playing all over the place now in major ways and changing people's lives and everything like that. So by so many measures, it was a success even though box office speaking in terms of box office it wasn't. So yeah, the very term failure has, you have to really define what you're talking about. I mean, the only failure that interests me is the actual sort of writing part, the, you know, how, as I say, how choices led people down a certain road and what that means and what the show that resulted from those choices and whether it's the strongest possible version of the show and all of that.

[55:56] Bob Martin: You're both talking about failure in such a healthy way and I just have to intervene and be like, how? Especially because Bob, you talked about, you know, your writing of Slings being very personal and, you know, taking from your own life.

[56:14] Bob Martin: And uh, you know, how did you were you always in this place of like failure is okay and I can embrace it, or is there something that helped you get there?

[56:24] Bob Martin: Uh I don't I guess it's always interested me.

[56:26] Bob Martin: I I don't know. Um first of all, again, it's um what I like when I work with actors, and what I like when I work with writers are people who just uh make choices, right? Can't be the wrong choice, but make a choice and just go there, go show me, you know.

[56:44] Bob Martin: Um so everything I write, I have dozens and dozens of versions of every script I've ever written.

[56:55] Bob Martin: Um slings was in, I can't remember how many, you know, double canary, you know how the pages are colored, and that's the you know how you uh it represents the rewrites.

[57:06] Bob Martin: It was like, you know, every season had just so many rewrites.

[57:10] Bob Martin: And that was before we even shot, before we got to the shooting, I mean that was after we got to the shooting uh script stage.

[57:17] Bob Martin: Before that, there were dozens of versions of every script.

[57:20] Bob Martin: So we were constantly trying stuff.

[57:23] Bob Martin: I've always done that. I was like constantly just write it, stop talking about it, just write it, see where it takes you, um, you know, read it, uh and decide what you like and what you don't like, whether that was the right choice or the wrong choice, and then you know, take another another road, another tack if that didn't if that wasn't satisfying.

[57:43] Bob Martin: But you but so that now that I think about it, you know, that's where failure really enters into the creative process.

[57:51] Bob Martin: Because if you're talking about things in the abstract constantly and not executing them, you'll never know if they're any good.

[57:56] Bob Martin: You have to fail.

[57:57] Bob Martin: You have to do it and see it not work in order to really understand how it can be how it can be stronger.

[58:03] Bob Martin: We would have thought we'd be talking so much about failure.

[58:07] Bob Martin: It's so but it's to your point so important.

[58:11] Bob Martin: I'm obsessed with failure.

[58:12] Bob Martin: I'm also in a failure stage.

[58:15] Bob Martin: Yeah.

[58:17] Bob Martin: Well, you know, we're always in a failure stage though, aren't we?

[58:19] Bob Martin: I mean, you know, I the there I this is also related to the imposter syndrome, the the infamous imposter syndrome, where you're afraid that people will find out that you're faking it.

[58:30] Bob Martin: You don't really know what you're doing.

[58:32] Bob Martin: But I always say I always say, well, I think that's an extremely I think that imposter syndrome thing, what that indicates is real strength of character, right?

[58:42] Bob Martin: Because you're only feeling that when you're putting yourself in a position that is new to you, uh, where you have to learn.

[58:50] Bob Martin: Um you wouldn't experience the imposter syndrome if you were doing the same job the same way every day of your life and never evolving.

[58:59] Bob Martin: So you o you know, when you when you're experiencing that, I think it's a s a really healthy sign uh that you're putting yourself in an uncomfortable situation and and you're going down a new road.

[59:12] Bob Martin: It's a good thing.

[59:14] Bob Martin: I w I was in a um I was in the CTI program, which is sponsored by uh the Broadway League and um TDF I was one day, one night after class, we were at a bar and I looked at the other people in my cohort, like a bunch of them were standing right next to me, and I said, Y'all, I thought I thought everybody, like I thought I was the one who didn't know what I was doing.

[59:40] Bob Martin: Everybody else knew what they were doing.

[59:41] Bob Martin: And we just had like several classes with just like top tier people.

[59:46] Bob Martin: And I said, but it I think it looks like just everybody just doesn't know what they're doing and they're all figuring it out.

[59:53] Bob Martin: And they all looked at me and said, Yes, that's exactly right.

[59:57] Bob Martin: Just well I was like, okay.

[59:59] Bob Martin: So I think that is exactly right.

[1:00:01] Bob Martin: I mean this this um Broadway experience has given me the opportunity to work with these incredible people who like you by every measure are hugely hugely successful.

[1:00:10] Bob Martin: And they're all trying to figure it out.

[1:00:13] Bob Martin: And they're still trying to figure it out.

[1:00:14] Bob Martin: They're calling you know they'll call me and say how is this good?

[1:00:17] Bob Martin: Is this you know like I remember working with Marvin Hamlish on a show and Mar you know I you guys maybe I hope you're not too young we know who Marvin Hamlet the late great Marvin Hamlet you know calling me up.

[1:00:30] Bob Martin: I was on the my the We got it when we used to live in a house in the uh in the beaches in Toronto and I was standing on my deck at the back and the phone rang and it was Marvin Hamlish you know calling me and asking me if this song he was working on was any good and it would just freaked me out.

[1:00:50] Bob Martin: Yeah Marvin I think it's pretty good.

[1:00:54] Bob Martin: You know that and that happens a lot.

[1:00:56] Bob Martin: That happens a lot to me like no matter no matter who uh how successful a person is um they're they're always gonna have these insecurities but but of course it's because they're creating something new right um they're creating every everything they're doing in that moment is new and and you know, also as you you guys haven't experienced this yet, but as you get older, you know, everything changes, right?

[1:01:20] Bob Martin: You just you're you're not as sharp and you're not as you you just skill sets change.

[1:01:26] Bob Martin: Um and so and you start to doubt yourself just because of aging.

[1:01:31] Bob Martin: Uh so that's a whole other thing that you have to factor in.

[1:01:36] Bob Martin: But you got you there's time for that with you guys.

[1:01:39] Bob Martin: You have to worry about that right now.

[1:01:42] Bob Martin: Um I mean I was interested in because I come from writing and performing and like writing stuff for myself to perform and like where that fits in for you and um and then I started thinking like maybe that's why you didn't have a mentor because you're all kind of doing your own thing.

[1:01:57] Bob Martin: I started I've had that thought about myself of like I know it's is a common thing in Canada, especially, but um uh can you and you know we love the character of Terry that you play in uh the corporate workshops then gets to be on the new burbage stage.

[1:02:14] Bob Martin: Um and can you so can you talk a little bit about performing in your own work?

[1:02:19] Bob Martin: Is that something you still want to keep doing?

[1:02:22] Bob Martin: And it's the only way I can get hired.

[1:02:25] Bob Martin: I mean it literally is almost everything I've done as an actor has been something I've written myself.

[1:02:31] Bob Martin: Um you know, apart from some unfortunate Tim Hortons commercials I did when I was a teenager.

[1:02:39] Bob Martin: Uh almost everything.

[1:02:42] Bob Martin: Um and and I love that.

[1:02:44] Bob Martin: I love the it's I love I I love the I'm a bit of a control freak, and some problem sure that's coming across.

[1:02:52] Bob Martin: Uh and and so I I I love to be able to um control the whole world of it all, and then and then comedy is all about nuance, so it's great to be able to to write that and perform it the way I think it should be.

[1:03:06] Bob Martin: Um my relationship, I think, between writing and performing is that I started to think, and maybe you can relate to this I started to think of writing as an extension of my palette as a performer.

[1:03:22] Bob Martin: So like there's there's only so much I can do as a performer.

[1:03:25] Bob Martin: I'm not I don't have a huge range but I can write characters you know for women uh in particular uh to like it's explore all of this stuff that I couldn't possibly explore and uh and you know uh I can I can write material for better actors than I am and and they can be out there I mean uh I was um with the with the prom which is a project I'm really proud of um we we were working with the just fantastic cast of really talented Broadway performers and uh Brooks as mankiss who plays Barry Glickman in the prom was a guy that I loved writing for because he was just so sort of explosively funny but but there's so much again so much insecurity under the surface and it's just he he plays that so well just sort of giving you glimpses of of how pathetic he is and uh it's it was so much fun sort of writing for that that's that um sort of aggressively sarcastic character who's just hiding his own insecurities um I get huge satisfaction out of good actors doing my stuff um so I think uh I think there was a there was a there was a kind of direct line uh from acting through improvisation really into into writing although I sort of always wrote uh um even when I was a kid uh I was a writing and acting together but um but yeah it was that idea of of of of extending my palate as a performer sort of virtually by writing for stronger actors than me.

[1:03:25] Bob Martin: I um I didn't get to ask this question of Susan and so that we're on you talking about writing work for yourself because she it was like that's what slings and arrows was sort of birthed out of she said this space of where she wasn't getting cast in anything so she was like I'm just gonna write something and so I'm I love it I love it when people just take stuff into their own hands and are like just I'm gonna make my own work.

[1:05:44] Bob Martin: I'm gonna make a space for myself I'm gonna make my own chair at the freaking table you know and and not like wait for somebody to do it because clearly they don't know that I should be here.

[1:06:00] Bob Martin: I know it so I'm gonna make my spot so can you just give like encouraging words to any of the like slings and arrows geeks who might be listening who who need to hear that like there's a space for everyone I feel like the work that you make always shows people that there is space for them.

[1:06:20] Bob Martin: And um and so that to know that like this came out of you making space for yourself is really a beautiful thing.

[1:06:32] Bob Martin: I just want to.

[1:06:32] Bob Martin: Oh no, I totally I completely agree.

[1:06:35] Bob Martin: And and also no one understands your particular voice m better than you do.

[1:06:42] Bob Martin: Um and I I remember when I was in university, I was working as an actor in television, and I rem I remember this was a long time ago and super embarrassing, but you know, there was a lot of sort of nerd humor going on back then in the early 80s.

[1:07:01] Bob Martin: And I remember going into this room for an audition, and everyone in the room was dressed as a nerd, like in a click cliche nerd.

[1:07:09] Bob Martin: And I was like, you know, I had the glasses and everything too, and I was I was just thinking, this is so not me.

[1:07:16] Bob Martin: This is not humor that I appreciate.

[1:07:18] Bob Martin: This is this is not my comic voice.

[1:07:21] Bob Martin: And and and so yeah, I started writing more aggressively, like to sort of say to try and show the world who who I was, that I wasn't just a nerd, that it wasn't it wasn't about that.

[1:07:33] Bob Martin: There was you know, the there was I had another a very I think a very particular comic voice.

[1:07:38] Bob Martin: Um and so yeah, absolutely.

[1:07:40] Bob Martin: Nobody is gonna see it.

[1:07:42] Bob Martin: You have to show people who who you are and what you have to say for sure.

[1:07:47] Bob Martin: Um and and I also found it supremely unsatisfying to be an actor and just wait by the phone.

[1:07:54] Bob Martin: I hated that so much.

[1:07:55] Bob Martin: And that was before you could carry phones with you.

[1:07:58] Bob Martin: It was that long ago.

[1:07:59] Bob Martin: So it's just awful.

[1:08:01] Bob Martin: Um, so that was uh again when I started to really um write my own material, produce, you know, my own material.

[1:08:10] Bob Martin: Um I did a little bit of directing, I want to do more of that.

[1:08:14] Bob Martin: Um but yeah, it was it's so much about control, and we have so limited so much, you know, time is very limited on this earth, and we can't spend it w just waiting.

[1:08:27] Bob Martin: And and we and we it's so easy to be pigeonholed you know based on your resume that people see you only in a certain way but if but if you show them who you are if your resume is filled with examples of who you are then you know you can take some control over how you're perceived so yeah I absolutely absolutely encourage people to create their own work I mean that's such a great way to end um and uh I I feel we've touched on so much this was really really amazing thank you Bob I I don't know how if you know how profound you were being at a lot of times it was really uh a great like I think it's the comedy writing the fifth uh booster masterclass put me in this really sort of groggy profound place well um just thank you so much I mean like this show wouldn't even be happening if you hadn't supported us in the way that you have like from the beginning so we really are so honored that you're here today and we just thank you so much for everything you've contributed just your positivity your excitement about the podcast everything it's been so wonderful so wonderful so thank you thank you I'm so excited that that you know people of another generation are are enjoying this show because the show means so much to us for sure it's it's so much of our blood and gods it's in this show that I I just love that you guys are can can relate to it and are excited by it so I thank you