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[0:00] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's theater podcast. Your backstage pass to revealing conversations with stars, creators, and industry leaders. On Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond. I'm Gordon Cox. On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to the composer Jeanine Tesori. She's a two-time Tony winner for Kimberly Akimbo and Fun Home, and she's also the composer of shows including Carolina Change, Violet, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Shrek. I'm talking to her now about a busy time for her. Just as the national tour of Kimberly Akimbo launches in Denver September 14th, she's also gearing up to premiere a brand new work this month. And this one isn't a musical, but an opera. It's her Metropolitan Opera debut with Grounded, based on the play by George Brant about a hotshot Air Force pilot who gets pregnant and reassigned to Las Vegas, where she operates a combat drone from half a world away.

The Met production is directed by fellow theater regular Michael Mayer, and it premieres September 23rd. It'll also get a worldwide broadcast on radio, online, and in cinemas through the Met Live in HD program. Now, Tesori is in the virtual studio with me to talk opera versus musicals, picking the right story to adapt, and what it's like to compose for an orchestra of 80 musicians. Hey Jeanine, thanks for joining me. Pleasure to see you.

[1:27] Jeanine Tesori: Yeah. So we're talking now during your break in the middle of a rehearsal day at the Metropolitan Opera.

[1:33] Gordon Cox: Yes. The process right now, is it looking any different from the process for a musical?

[1:38] Jeanine Tesori: I will say that one of the differences is the order of everything. I mean, I make changes up until they literally take the quill out of my hand. I make changes. But I will say, we checked it in June. We'll go back onto the stage. The orchestration, I handed that in April 1st, and the parts are in on May 1st. So that is all set. So the changes that are made are editing and cutting. And within the structure of what has been happening, we've made a lot of changes. So it continues on. So I will say that it's a combination of working inside a limit, and also working with a full palette, because we have an orchestra of about 80, and a cast of about 60. So when you want to have a sound that you hear, an all-skate sound, you can do that. And then the limits come in that the changes that you make eventually are within the structure that you made months ago.

[2:58] Gordon Cox: Okay. Yeah. And this is not your first opera, but this is your debut at the Metropolitan Opera. Can you tell us?

[3:02] Jeanine Tesori: This is my fourth opera, my debut here. Yeah. And tell us a little bit about sort of how it came about.

[3:08] Jeanine Tesori: Actually, Peter Gilb commissioned this, an opera from me a long time ago, and it took me a while to find the right piece, because the source material is so important. That's true for musicals and operas. You just live with them for a long time, because it's a marriage of source material. And you're going to be looking at it, and investigating it, and asking it what it needs. It's almost like a kid. And I think any work takes about 8 to 10 years for me. And that's from the minute you decide to do something, not from the minute you start writing, for me, at least.

[4:39] Gordon Cox: Right. And so 8 to 10 years this time?

[4:44] Jeanine Tesori: Yeah. I saw Grounded at the studio in DC. I think it was 2014.

[4:50] Gordon Cox: Okay. So that was before Anne Hathaway, the one that a lot of people will know that play from, Anne Hathaway was in it at the Public, yeah?

[4:57] Jeanine Tesori: Yeah. The production I saw at DC was really everything to me, the information that I see. I loved both productions, but the one that really I found a lot of inspiration from was the first one that I saw.

[5:29] Gordon Cox: And so what was it about this piece that called to you specifically for an opera, as opposed to, for instance, a musical?

[5:33] Jeanine Tesori: For me, there was this idea that, first of all, the challenge. God, it's so many fronts. I'm going to try to be as smart as I can. I'm in the midst of working on it. So it's also, my brain is sort of like, when I was a kid, there was a cartoon character named El Cabang. And that's what I feel like, El Cabang. First of all, the main character is someone I wanted to understand more. I felt like there was a community that wasn't heard from in the, it's a one-woman show. And I thought, well, if we can expand this, it's really going deeper, not inventing anything. It's about the population that she's in the context of, about the military world. It's about the world of the family. It's about the internal world for her, what she says in scenes versus what she's thinking. And to me, that's where a lot of dramatic work happens.

[6:40] Gordon Cox: Is there a version of this that could be a musical? What defines it as an opera for you?

[6:44] Jeanine Tesori: For me, I don't hear book scenes. And it's, you know, it's funny. I go from maybe impulse, and maybe it's years later that I'll understand why it was the way it was. I think the military world is so filled with rhythm. It's so filled with cadence. It's filled with agreement. So much of the theater of war has to do with, you know, bagpipes. They're a very frightening sound alone. You get a hundred of them without being able to see them. And they're very scary. You know, the drum call, the cadence about keeping people literally together, the agreement of what to do at the same time, to me is about choral work. So I really heard that. And so that's, for me, also just a completely sung world. And part of it is there's such an epic nature of a woman and her desire to explore her hunger for protecting the country, the way that patriotism works, and the way that it's used to work against us of so much that I've heard in interviews and spoken to vets who are, it's this idea of just do what is ordered.

And it's not about thinking or considering, it's about making something happen. Those who order the levers to be pulled, and those who pull the levers, or levers, however you would say it. And I was really interested in that. And the parallels between those people who are in charge, the leader of an orchestra, and the people who play in the orchestra. They have to come in on a certain beat at a certain time. There's an agreement there. And the world just works that way, that you can't all do anything you want to at any time, that would be entropy or anarchy and chaos. And agreement, as we saw on January 6th, can be really scary. If everybody decides to do one thing, one destructive thing at the same time, it's frightening.

[8:07] Gordon Cox: Yeah. So in general then, you mentioned the idea of imagining it sung through in the musicality of the world, and you mentioned the epicness of the story. Are those in general the differences that distinguish for you a piece that's right for opera versus a piece that's right for musical theater?

[8:18] Jeanine Tesori: It's such a hard question, because for me it's not something I find easily verbalized. There's just a feeling that what would work. And then there's that feeling, like would Caroline or Change be in an opera house? Probably not, because I don't know if it would. Operas by nature, a lot of them, grand operas, are very different than chamber operas. I think Caroline or Change is a folk opera in some ways, but it's still a chamber work. It's not meant to be heard in a 3,000, 5,000-seat house, I think. I've never experienced it. And yet, when I was running off center at Encores!, I was amazed by what would work. That's 2,300 seats, and we did so much small theater there, and the idea filled the house.

So I don't even know. There seems to be a fluidity sometimes in what rules, what makes one an opera, one a musical. I think historically the muscle of music has made the opera work, but for me, I really look at the text and the story no matter what. So perhaps it's changing. I think I write a hybrid form. Sopra? I don't know.

[9:50] Gordon Cox: Are you, do you find yourself composing in a different way or to a different scale, as you're imagining? Because this music is obviously going to play in grand opera houses, right, as opposed to a chamber opera. How can you characterize what that does to the music that you're creating for this show?

[10:07] Jeanine Tesori: I think the thing that's so beautiful about working at this scale is that

[10:17] Jeanine Tesori: There is, and the scary thing is the lack of limit. So, if you want 50 people singing, there is a certain unbelievable thrill, and it's an opera for lower voices and mezzo and soprano. And it is how I felt when I entered music, that I heard male voices everywhere, and a couple of female voices, what I would define as guides, Talia Leone, Linda Twine, the idea of Trudy Rittman, who I never met, these women, and in a kind of sea of lower voices. And it's wonderful to be able to, at this scale, present something that's so visceral. To have a dedicated timp player, to have three snares at the same time, because the world is a noisy, epic place. The world can be a chamber place, but in theater, almost everything now is chamber, or chamber in its nature.

12 pieces, 14 pieces, 24 if you're lucky. This is 80, which means just the string section alone is unlike anything. The responses that I have hearing it, I'm so moved by it, just the sheer number of people, and that you can't get anywhere else.

[11:47] Jeanine Tesori: Yeah. And you're working with the playwright, George Brandt, on the libretto. He's writing the libretto, and you're composing the music. How is that collaboration similar and or different to, say, a collaboration with David Lindsay-Abaire, who you wrote Shrek and Kimberly Akimbo with? You know, each piece is so different. And I really, I always say this about pieces that they're like children. And when you say, how do you raise a child? Well, it depends on the child, right? And eventually a work, I think, tells you what it needs. And if this work was telling us that it shouldn't be an opera, it would have told us that, and that would have been a very disheartening thing to learn. But I think there's a certain thing that, like a kid needs, it needs food, it needs shelter, it needs to be safe.

And then eventually, it's like the child learns to speak and tells you, sometimes very inconveniently, what it needs. A piece, to me, is just like that. You bring it into the world, and then suddenly it starts telling you, and the key is to learn how to listen to it. Because there's so much chit-chatter outside, oh, it doesn't work. Oh, this is like, right, I know it doesn't work. The trick is to find out what doesn't work, and how to solve it. And it's not a puzzle to be solved. It's something that needs to be deepened and clarified. And so, they can go downhill, like how Prince used to say, it's such a house of cards. And I found that to be very true. And George is really great, because he does new work.

And it's not like he handed me a libretto, and I went off. It's absolutely not the case. We have worked side by side, making decisions and seeing it out of town, and then going back and doing a page one relook, with a huge revision, from just from what we learned. We only got to see it in front of an audience together once. And where was that? In the WNO, in DC.

[14:00] Jeanine Tesori: How do you describe the sound palette of the piece? What's the worlds you're drawing on in the sounds? Some of the world is taken from what, to me, about the poetry of exploration, about a woman inside what is historically a man's job. So, that's an emotional response to the romanticism that a woman feels when she's exploring. And her first aria is about the sky, not love. And that's the very first time I think I've ever written, certainly, if one of the rare times where the first major singing for a female character is not about love, it's about the world. And she discovers love, and she discovers motherhood. And it grounds her. There's a way that one can see being grounded as punishment. There's one one can see being grounded as safe, as when you ground something from electricity.

And so, all those different things came into play, and all of the cadences of the military in a very classic way that was sort of bent. I use a lot of techniques of bending notes till they come apart, almost like when a cell, mitosis of a cell, when it literally comes apart and becomes two. And so, that's kind of the palette. And then the romantic palette of, honestly, the sky, the fraternity and sorority of teamwork, in this case, the military.

[15:45] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with Jeanine right after the break.

[15:47] Gordon Cox: And now, here's more of my conversation with Jeanine Tesori about her Metropolitan Opera debut, Grounded. Opera's performance schedule is so interesting. It's just so different from, I mean, in the rehearsal schedule, as you were discussing, it's so different from the Broadway schedule. The fact that you were teching, what did you say, in April, is amazing.

[16:12] Jeanine Tesori: We teched in June. I handed in the parts.

[16:14] Gordon Cox: Sorry. Yeah. But it was, I mean, if this were Broadway, you would be in tech right now, right? Or maybe not even, maybe not yet.

[16:23] Jeanine Tesori: No, not yet. That's right.

[16:25] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Yeah. It's much more sort of compressed. How does that affect how you, you've talked a little bit about kind of the, as you think about it creatively, like changing, making changes within the framework you structured back then. But do you find that it has a sort of broader impact on the kind of show you create, or sort of how you end up telling stories?

[16:49] Jeanine Tesori: You know, for me, because it's my fourth one, I've gotten to know the structure, and also opera companies are in rep. And so it's very clear that you're part of a giant flow. And that is great. You're one of maybe sometimes 23 operas. So there's a feeling like, yes, you're up now. And they're up now. And so that, I think, is, you know, the team that creates the schedule here. It's like NASA. It's unbelievable. And you have to flow into, I'm a guest in this house. And I've also learned a great deal from the way that they work. And I hope that I brought in the way that I develop material and think of something is, you know, in oil, it's an oil painting and oil, when you paint with it stays fresh, you can make changes until very late. It's not acrylic that dries quickly, there's a richness to that. And they've been incredibly open and game for that here, which I'm very grateful. So I think it's a real mix.

[18:04] Jeanine Tesori: Yeah. And it'll premiere on September 23. And there are seven additional performances after that through October 19. And then there are other ways to, you know, you'll be able to hear it on the radio for some performances, and there's a cinema cast, but and then it sort of goes into the repertory. And what has been with the other operas you've worked on? What has been your experience of how a show survives them kind of in an opera world, like how it how it sort of endures? And how do you experience it sort of revisiting it every now and then?

[18:30] Jeanine Tesori: Blue has had many productions, which has been wonderful. And some of them are so I saw one at the ENO that I also really loved. My favorite thing is to go blind and to see what someone else has done with a production and something like Blue can be very small, but it could also, you know, it could take on a community choir of a couple hundred people for the second act scene and do just fine. It could be small in a black box. And I think that that might be hopefully be true eventually for Grounded with the reduced orchestration that you can do it and reduce everything down in that way. It still wears the DNA that it inherited from the source, which is one woman's story told from her point of view, even when she's in scene where it's her, she's the protagonist and the transformation we've just really worked to understand what the transformational quality is of her journey.

[19:38] Jeanine Tesori: What do you consider the biggest challenge of working in opera? Well, it's that there's so many and I'm still learning. I really am learning the form. I still feel like I'm learning the musical form, though. I think for opera, the orchestration, because the voices are unamplified in this, except for there's an offstage group called the Kill Chain, which is you know, five people offstage who are in her headset, literally. So they're not amplified, they're processed because she can't see them. She can only hear them and they're in five different locations and the playing field is leveled only that they're in her headset, along with the static and the information that she is working from. But the orchestration for me to also leave room for the voices and to let the orchestra also have its say, the omniscient orchestra, that is really.

[20:35] Jeanine Tesori: That is really something that I've had to be very careful with so that the conductor is not just balancing all night and keeping his left hand down. It's just to really let them be alive and tell the story and create interesting lines for the players, but also create a dynamic soundscape for the singers and support them and give them pitch information that they need for their notes. So satisfying all of those plates in the air and trying to create something that will hopefully last is definitely challenging.

[21:14] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Did you know a lot? How much was opera a part of your sort of studies of music going into even before, you know, maybe your first opera? What, how much did you, were you aware of opera as a form and how, how much has been, have you learned sort of as you've worked in the medium since?

[21:33] Jeanine Tesori: I've gone, but I wasn't a theater kid either. Right. And I didn't know anything about absolutely anything about theater. And the thing that helped me was all the music that I learned, and I definitely heard some things from musicals, but only the ones that were rhythm based. And so as I learned more about them, I discovered them around 18, 19. That sounds like a year, 18, 19. I'm old and not that old at age 18 or age 19. So I came with a real love for it. And I just like, what is this? And that's how I feel about opera. Opera singers are so astonishing. They're athletes. An NFL player cannot play a game. That's the reason there's Sunday football and Monday night football. They can't do it every day.

It's just, their bodies can't do it. And even the theater people, you know, eight times a week is really grueling. In opera, it's impossible. It's impossible for them to do that. They're astonishing athletes. And so I've really gotten to know and learn even more about the voice and what it can and cannot do, what it can and cannot do after two hours of singing. The way that it operates from the passaggio, everything about the way the chorus works, the way the opera orchestra works. It's really a fantastical world.

[23:05] Gordon Cox: How do you think your work in opera has impacted the work you write for musical theater? What's the carryover there?

[23:10] Jeanine Tesori: I've always been interested in recitative. It's almost in everything in Kimberly. It's the way that Patti sings. For people who don't know, what's recitative?

[23:23] Jeanine Tesori: Recitative is when you're spoken. It's things that are spoken and not in song form. So, you know, if we, if you and I were having coffee, I would say like, you know, give me the sugar, Gordon, that would be recitative. And I've loved playing with it because I think some characters I hear, like Patti and Kimberly, hello, baby, it's me, your mother, that's recitative. She's just, and that is, I took almost the entire monologue from the play. And I said to David, I just hear this in my head. I just assign notes to it because I can hear the way that she's, you know, the damn dream gun. But I just heard it. And so we put it in. That's the same. There's recitative all over Carolina Change, but it is something that I just has been part of my language for a while. So I think that part for me in the opera came rather, I think, naturally to me.

[24:27] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Speaking of Kimberly Akimbo, it is launching a tour in Denver, I believe, on September 14. That's all. You've got Carolee Carbello in the leading cast. How, how are you juggling? That's one of the things you have going on. Tell us, tell us what's all going on in your, in your life these days.

[24:48] Jeanine Tesori: Kimberly Akimbo is touring, which I'm really I'm so happy about because every time that, you know, this, this country is a big place. And because we live in New York, it's as my mentor said, America is not New York. And it's really important that part of the training begins when you see something. And so when people, so many people have come up to me and said, I've been in Shrek, I played Shrek, I was Fiona, I was at this and that, I'm so amazed by how it just gets out there. And so many people, their first experience in the theatre is through a tour. And so I'm, I'm so happy that and grateful that that Kimberly will be touring around the States.

[25:38] Gordon Cox: Right. Yeah. And you speaking of Shrek, you and David, this is David Lindsay-Abaire, you're the playwright you worked with on both Shrek and Kimberly Akimbo, did a little work on Shrek. You sort of re-tinkered a little to make some adjustments. What kind of prompted that?

[25:55] Jeanine Tesori: Well, one of the things that we, when we saw all of these high schools doing Shrek, there was something so lovely about this. It didn't have all of those big productions. Some of them actually had very sophisticated productions, but a lot of the junior versions just didn't. And one of the junior, junior versions, the MTI put something where a lot of the ensemble would sing more. And there was a feeling of more ensemble work. And so we just wanted to make something a little bit lighter, a little bit shorter, so that people could have an alternative. And so we really had fun doing that and also updating some of the language as the language catches up. So something that was written years ago, it needs to be re-looked at so that something that might be really harmful to hear, and wasn't harmful to hear 20 years ago, needs to be addressed. So we did all of those things to provide another version.

[27:00] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Yeah. And you've got Grounded coming up. What else is on your plate? What have you got? What's, what's next for you after Grounded?

[27:11] Jeanine Tesori: The Soft Power is in DC. David Henry Huang really wanted to, we both wanted to, but he was really the muscle behind revisiting it. Ethan Hurd at the Signature Theatre said, bring it here. We'll do that. It's a 90-minute version without intermission.

[27:27] Gordon Cox: Oh, interesting.

[27:27] Jeanine Tesori: Yeah. Because it was two acts when we saw it, when New York saw it as a public, yeah. It was two acts and it was filled with ideas. It was so many ideas. It was just like, you know, when you go to the Renaissance Fair, you can get a turkey leg, see jousting and also, you know, park your car. And so there were just all these ideas firing and we wanted to edit so that it could be perhaps clearer and simpler. And I think it's a really successful revision and revisiting of that. And it runs through the 15th and it's a really wonderful cast. Everything happens in September for you.

[28:01] Gordon Cox: That's all. Yeah. And then after that, what, what happens?

[28:13] Jeanine Tesori: Then I, then we look for work. You don't really know. David and I, David Lindsay-Abaire and I are looking at a new project that we will hopefully start working on. I continue to teach. I teach at Yale.

[28:23] Gordon Cox: Yep. My relationship with that school is, I feel very dedicated to students and teaching composition. Teaching composition for me is more about trying to be a smart sounding board and offering ideas. I don't know if you could teach it. It might be unpopular to say, but creating a community of composers who look at dramatic works and really get their dramatic chops along with their skills of composing. That to me is the great challenge.

[28:57] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Great. Well, we will look forward to what's coming next for you and David, and we will look forward to seeing Grounded, which premieres in September. I'm so, I really hope theater people will, a lot of people in my world have said the following, where is the Met? And I think, where is the Met? I mean, do you see the giant fountain? It's way behind that. How do I get tickets? It's very easy to get tickets. Where do I sit? What do I wear? And the beautiful thing to me about that is, you know, I think that everybody should experience things that are not in their lane. You know, you just learn from everything you do. There's much to learn from the repertoire and the new operas coming up. And so I'm hoping that theater people will, will come see this.

[29:42] Gordon Cox: Great. Well, we can't wait to see it. Thanks so much, Jeanine. It was great to talk to you.

[29:46] Jeanine Tesori: You too. It was so great to talk to you always.

[29:48] Gordon Cox: That was Jeanine Tesori, whose new opera Grounded debuts at the Metropolitan Opera September 23rd. It'll also be broadcast live on Metropolitan Opera Radio on Sirius XM and streamed on the Met's website on September 23rd and October 9th. And you'll be able to catch it in cinemas as part of the Met Live in HD program on October 19th. If you enjoyed this conversation here on Stagecraft, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. It really does help. Or tell a friend about Stagecraft. Find past episodes and subscribe at all the places you get your pods, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on the Broadway Podcast Network, a great place to find more theater for your ears. Until next episode, find me on Instagram and Twitter at Gordon B. Cox. You can also check out my newsletter about international theater. It's called JQueez and it's at gordoncox.substack.com. Thanks for listening and see you at the theater!