This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:06] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast. Your backstage pass to intimate conversations with stars, creators, and industry leaders on Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond. I'm Gordon Cox.

[0:19] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to the actor and director Jason Alexander. He's best known, of course, for the nine seasons he spent playing George Costanza on Seinfeld. But he's also a Tony-winning stage performer who got his start in the theater and has regularly returned to stage work throughout his career. Now he's got a new theater gig that just opened on Broadway. It's called The Cottage, the new comedy by Sandy Rustin that brings a contemporary perspective to the classic setup of a throwback sex comedy. Alexander directs The Cottage with a cast that includes Will and Grace star Eric McCormick, Saturday Night Live alum Alex Moffitt, and stage favorites like Laura Bell Bundy and Lily Cooper. Now Alexander is in the virtual studio with me to tell us about the music in stage comedies, directing on stage while striking on screen, and when and where we might be seeing him play Tevye in the near future. Hey Jason, thanks for joining me.

[1:13] Jason Alexander: Thanks, Gordon.

[1:15] Gordon Cox: So I saw I was just saying to you that I saw The Cottage a couple days ago, had a great time, and I figured we should start with, before we talk about The Cottage, I felt like we should talk about the fact that it is easy to forget that you have been a theater guy all your life, in part because the role you are most associated with is, you know, the one that gets you stopped in the street, the one George Costanza, of course, but you've been a theater guy all your life. You were in the original cast of Merrily We Roll Along. Like that doesn't, you don't get more theater cred than that. And you've been doing it, you never really went away. Like you did all your work in Hollywood and you're always, you do a lot of stage work in LA and you do work here as well. What keeps you coming back to it?

[2:01] Jason Alexander: Um, as you say, I never really left it. It, um, I grew up in New Jersey. My fantasies when I thought, oh, maybe I'd like to do this for real, were all about trying to get over the river and work in New York and get on these stages. There was no, I, I, when I, you know, was in the bathroom with my little toothbrush, accepting my award, it was always the Tony, it wasn't anything else. So I, I, there's something about what first drew me to the theater, and it's true that this exists hopefully in everything you do, but it wasn't the thrill of the spotlight, it wasn't the applause, it wasn't that kind of recognition. I was a pretty lonely kid. I didn't have my thing, and so I also didn't have my community.

And I was pulled into my first sort of teen theater production when I moved to Livingston, New Jersey, and the first kids that picked me up out of nowhere were the theater kids. And I went to a first rehearsal and suddenly there was community. There were a bunch of people who seemed to get me and had similar likes and dislikes, and that's what kept me there. That's why I thought I would like to be around people like this for as long as I can. There is community throughout our business, for sure, but there is something about the immediacy of the real audience and a group of artists, both on stage, backstage, behind the scenes creative artists, who create that magic trick that has to happen spontaneously in the moment.

That community has always resonated with me more than any other. And if I'm not with it for any amount of time, I just crave it. So it has always been about theater. It will always be about people who get together to tell stories in real time. And the change is just am I on stage with them or am I sort of standing back in the wings and conducting a little bit?

[4:10] Gordon Cox: Yeah, yeah. Is it a thing that you have had to consciously make time for as your career progresses? Is it difficult to carve out sort of the blocks of time that you need to work on a show?

[4:22] Jason Alexander: Um, yes and no. I mean, there were times when I knew exactly how much of a hiatus I would have from pre-planned work and I could slip something in if I needed to. The real challenge was always, and I, we have a couple people in our show who are dealing with this right now. I don't know how you do theater and be a parent at the same time because those schedules are not, they don't overlap very well. You're always going out the door when your kid is coming in the door. So I made a conscious decision with my wife, particularly when Seinfeld ended, about whether or not I was going to come back to New York to do theater, which I knew would be a commitment of eight a week for six months to a year at a time.

And my kids were young enough, and we were blessed by having residuals coming in that I didn't need that paycheck. So that's why I got involved with theater in LA and I started to step out of the acting role and into other roles. I was an artistic director and I was a director because I could get all the juice out of the fruit, but I didn't have to commit the same amount of time. But it's always important. If I don't do live performing for three or four or five months, I worry about the muscle just getting slack and I start to miss it. And so you carve it out. And the truth is people are so sweet, slash delusional when they go, how do you pick your roles? How do you do? I go, I don't pick anything.

If somebody offers me something, there's a pretty good chance I'm gonna take it. So in between, you never know. You never, like my friend Lonnie Price and I are talking about doing a production together, a Fiddler in Los Angeles like in 2024, and we go, there's probably a half a dozen things that could derail this, but let's shoot for it because it's just something we've always wanted to do.

[6:17] Gordon Cox: So you carve out the time.

[6:19] Jason Alexander: And Lonnie would direct and you would star.

[6:21] Gordon Cox: That's the thing.

[6:22] Jason Alexander: That's the idea, yeah. Unless he wants to come up and be my Muddle at the oldest Muddle in the history of the...

[6:23] Gordon Cox: Yeah, yeah. You actually answered my next question, which was when and why you started to get into directing. Was directing on Broadway something that you always kind of wanted to do, or is this a newer thing?

[6:39] Jason Alexander: Boy, yeah, if it was, it was in the deep recesses of my head. I, when I was going to college at Boston University as an actor, I had several professors who went, "You sure you don't want to direct?" because I always tended to look at projects from sort of a big picture perspective. A lot of my professors would say the best actors really have blinders on. They only see the project through the eyes of their character. I was never that kind of an actor. I always was looking at it in a bigger way. I started directing when I was in high school because there were opportunities and it was fun to do. I have come to enjoy it in some ways more than acting most of the time because, you know, admittedly most of the acting jobs that I've been offered in the last 20 years have a little bit of a similarity.

They're all almost always some variation of George or some outlandish character who is, you know, delusional and ill-behaved. It's not that I don't appreciate those offers or even the doing of those roles. I only have so many variations of that in me, so I hate to do the same thing twice. So the directing thing has just become more compelling to me, the opportunity to engage from the beginning with the writer, with the designers, with the actors, with the whole process of, to me, it's like doing a puzzle or solving a mystery. How are we gonna do this? How are we gonna cut a path? The actor does it from a very narrow perspective and the director does it from a broader perspective. So having done this since I was 14 years old and coming up on 50 years of doing it, having more to play with, having more to be engaged with is just more stimulating to me right now, except that, you know, if anybody listens to this and goes, "I have a role for him," then by all means bring it on. But in the meantime, it is more the directing.

[8:54] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And tell us about how you got involved in The Cottage. It's a play that's been done all around the country before this. When and how did you become aware of it?

[9:03] Jason Alexander: So I've never seen a production of it. I am aware that several have been done, and in fact, Jennifer Werner, who's my associate director, directed one of those productions and has been a huge asset because I would always turn to her and go, "Did you solve this moment?" I, for a very brief time, was shopping for a directing agent, and I was chatting with an agency that represented Sandy, and they handed me a bunch of plays that did not have a director attached, and I read The Cottage and I laughed out loud when I was reading it, which, and I'm not an easy laugh. And I said, "This really doesn't have anybody attached?" And so Sandy and I met, and it was really, that was it. She said, "Oh my god, I love your sense of humor."

I said, "I love your play," we got on beautifully, and we just decided to try and do this together. So we arranged a couple of readings at various places over a few years. None of them bit. And then there was COVID. And during COVID, I think Sandy made a relationship with Victoria Lang and Ryan Bagner from Broadway and Beyond. They became the producers for it, and it was then it was just theater hunting. I have several projects that are theater hunting. This one was got lucky. There was suddenly a slot in a theater that was pretty perfect for it. But it is nobody came looking for me. And I wouldn't have known how to find this, but somebody made a little love match, and it just took.

[10:36] Gordon Cox: Yeah. The play is a farce. It's a sort of very consciously sort of throws back to the forms of the old-fashioned farce, which is a very precise form, there's a whole lot of timing. Is that a lot of fun for you to put together on stage with your past?

[10:51] Jason Alexander: Um, it is and it isn't. The thing that I have started to say that I've learned on this is making lightweight things is very heavy lifting. When you're doing another kind of show, all you're thinking about is am I telling a good story? Am I servicing each moment? Are the intentions correct? Are the behaviors correct? When you have to add, is it funny? It's easy to make a good choice, it's hard to make a funny choice. So that is just an added pressure all the time. And you're absolutely right. I tend to call it more of a spoof than a farce because it doesn't quite have this sort of fedo slamming door kind of frenetic action, but there is a music to this kind of comedy, there's a beat to it, and there are, it almost has different movements, and if it were an actual musical, it would be very easy to coordinate everybody because we'd all hear the same beat, we'd all hear the same tones.

When it's a non-musical musical, you have to find a way to get everybody into the same music at the same time. It takes a lot of repetition, it takes a lot of specificity. In many cases, normally what you do in a play is you allow the actors, you have an idea and you set up a certain playground for the actors, and then you let them explore and they find things and you give them feedback and whatnot, and there's a process to it. In this, very often we had to give them choreography and just say you go there when they go there and you do this and you go there. Try it on, try it on, that's how it works. Now fill it in. And you know it's a very, it's a bass acquaintance process of doing things. It's not particularly fun for actors unless they enjoy, we have a lot of musical theater actors so they understand here's the choreography, now make it yours.

And that's what they had to do on this. But it was very exacting. And the other thing that we found in the studio, you know it's funny the first time if you're lucky and then you go, it's never funny again and four weeks in you go boy none of this is, I don't think any of this is funny. And because I quote them all the time, I'm pretty sure it was the comedian Dennis Miller and I just thought it was such a brilliant statement where he said, you know it's called a sense of humor not a science. It's a vague sensibility that this might be amusing to somebody and that's what you're sitting with at the end of the rehearsal period going I think it may be funny or it could just be the biggest goose egg that we've ever laid and you don't know and it was a thrilling surprise when we put it in front of our first audience and they started to laugh and we went oh thank god we haven't gone too far afield.

[13:10] Gordon Cox: What did you learn about the show that first time you saw it in front of an audience? Were there any surprises?

[13:56] Jason Alexander: Oh, there's tons of surprises. There are things that we designed and imagined would be laughs but then there were a whole bunch of things that we didn't know would be laughs that were little subtleties and things that we took for granted as just part of the texture of the play that suddenly there was like a little light shining them and the audience would catch it and they'd react to it.

[14:20] Jason Alexander: Um, what I was thrilled about and remain thrilled about, and it was a big concern for me, I'm actually very touched by the play. I'm touched by the journey of the lead actress, the lead character, and I wasn't sure because the play wasn't written to be quite as lunatic as I have made it. I have added things on top of the play to make it a little more whimsical and a little more fantastical and a little more obviously styled and tropey, and we weren't sure if we added all that stuff onto it and broke the rules of logic and sort of reality, would the realer moments and the real emotions and the journey of that character still play? People have been very responsive to it and have commented on it and been touched by it. So that was a nice surprise that I wasn't sure would be sustained by our production.

[15:21] Gordon Cox: And this is a kind of old-fashioned sex comedy, kind of re-tinkered and reviewed through a contemporary lens, right?

[15:30] Jason Alexander: But it doesn't, it's not like a sex comedy set in modern day. It's very specifically set in England in the 20s. What do you feel like is enlightening about the juxtaposition of the kind of mores of that time of the setting with the contemporary perspective that you and the writer and all the actors bring to it?

[15:52] Jason Alexander: There's many. First of all, just on the purely feminist side, the crisis that the main character has is that she owns no property, she has no particular rights, her fortunes are completely tied to whatever man she can attach herself to, and she finds herself in this play completely unattached to any man in the play. To understand that or experience that as any kind of an existential crisis is a very different experience from what I hope most women and most people would be experiencing today. The whole, what I always find interesting about period pieces, and particularly British period pieces, are the manners, what is acceptable and what is not. You know, you don't raise your voice. I remember I was learning a very upper-class British accent for a project I was doing, and the dialect teacher said to me, you know, in this class, you don't emphasize the way Americans do with volume.

You know, we don't, you know, Americans get loud. He said, what Brits do is that's not acceptable behavior. So they use pitch and they, um, and I thought, how fascinating that that anger, true grief. Um, there was a wonderful story. Uh, the I was just gonna say, these things are not acceptable. There was a great story that my teacher Larry Moss told me. It may be apocryphal, but um, Lawrence Olivier had written an autobiography in which he talked about the struggles he went through with Vivian Leigh and her manic depression. And when the book came out, his best friend in the world was John Gielgud, and supposedly John Gielgud read the book and said to Olivier, "Larry, I've read your book. I had no idea.

Thank you. Thank you for not putting your problems on me, dragging me into your crap." I mean, that's the British way, right? And it is so not a contemporary thing. Friendships, modern friendships in this country are built on the ability to share your innermost feelings, your problems, your struggles. And our bad behaviors are certainly called out. But you know, it was a different thing. To be, I guess, in a way, what we think of as being canceled today was very much the thing back in the day of I picked up the wrong spoon or I said the wrong thing at the cotillion, and now society has shunned you. It translates very well in that sense. But all of these characters are trapped in behaviors. And in watching the old films and watching the old plays, we tried to translate as many of those gestures into our show and make fun of them as we could.

There's a moment that Laura does that I love where she takes Eric's hand and she's rubbing it all over her face as she's impassionedly, you know, pleading. And there were three or four films of the period where I saw a woman reach out, pull a man's hand away from his body and put her face on it to correct. And I thought, that is just nuts. We gotta do that.

[19:20] Jason Alexander: I'll have more with Jason right after the break.

[19:25] Gordon Cox: Hi, this is Andrew Wallenstein with Variety's Strictly Business Podcast. If you love Variety's podcasts, you're gonna want to try Variety Intelligence Platform, or VIP. It's a digital subscription tier on Variety.com for industry professionals to dig deeper into analysis and data that helps them be smarter about their business. VIP just launched a great new newsletter and offers more special reports than ever. So visit variety.com slash VIP save for a 20% discount.

[20:02] Gordon Cox: And now here's more of my conversation with director and actor Jason Alexander. You were talking about the central character of the show, sort of the character around whom all the folks kind of were bit, and that's played by Laura Bell Bundy. Um, who, how did you tell us about how the cast came together? Did you know any of them before you started working on the show?

[20:21] Jason Alexander: I did know Eric and I did know Laura. Eric has been a friend for 30 years. I directed him in a show back when I was running Reprise. He was a gorgeous El Gallo in The Fantasticks that I played. Um, Eric was maybe attached to another play that I'm supposed to direct. And we had been doing readings of it for years and just hadn't gotten a theater. And I had another actor attached to this, although when we attached that other actor, there was no theater, no time schedule, no nothing. It was just a sort of a letter of intent thing. The slot for this production opened up just before Christmas. There was a cancellation of something else that was supposed to go in. Suddenly there was an opening. And they said, but you have to have at least one marquee name.

And you, they told us on a Monday, and they said, and we need to check by Friday, or we're gonna move on to somebody else. So I called that other actor and I said, "Here's the slot," and he went, "I can't do it. I'm not available." So I didn't have my marquee name. Eric was the right age, the right look, the right type. I knew he was a theater guy, I knew he does comedy. He checked all the boxes, so I called him up and I said, "Okay, look, I know for the last four years we've been concentrated on this other play, but I've got a slot, and I don't know if you, I said, here's the deal, you gotta read it tonight and tell me tomorrow." And you can only do that with a friend. And he read it that night and said, "Yeah, I'll do it."

So, um, Eric was an easy idea to go to. Um, Laura, I had not, well, we, you know, most people in the theater had seen Laura do Legally Blonde. I knew she was brilliant. Where I got interested in Laura is I knew a lot of her video work. She had a little series called, I think, Critter County or something like that. It was sort of like her own self-produced, self-written Hee-Haw, where she played everybody. And so I knew she did a lot of characters and she was very funny. And we were, you know, just going through our heads about, you know, the theater actresses. At one point I talked to Kelly O'Hara, excuse me, Kelly said, "Yeah, I, you know, it's just not, I don't know that that's my thing." Um, and I finally, I talked to Sandy Rustin, the writer, and I said, "Do you know the work of Laura Bell Bundy?"

And we both went, "I love Laura Bell Bundy." And we called Laura and she read it and she said, "Oh, if you ever get this done, I'd love to do it." So Laura was attached to it for a year or two before we ever got to theater. Everybody else, with the exception of Alex Moffat, Alex was a great idea from our casting director, Laura Stanzik, and I loved him on SNL, and I said, "Oh yeah, that kind of goofball energy would be great." Everybody else's work I kind of knew, but I didn't know them. Lily, I don't know how this happened. Lily came in the door, supposedly reading for Deirdre, the little, you know, described as a wisp of a thing, a mouse. And you know, Lily's nine feet. She's tall. She was a substantial lady, and she came in and she very brilliantly said, "I'm not a Deirdre, but if you're open for this Marjorie thing," and she read Marjorie in the room and we fell in love and cast her.

Nahal, we actually cast off a video audition. He was so wonderful. And Dana came in two times, and I think Deirdre is one of the trickiest roles in the play. And she came in for one session and we worked her again, and she came in for another session, we worked her again, and she was such a great little actress and a charming, lovely person, and worked her butt off just trying to get the role. That we all fell in love with her, and thank God we did, because she's delightful on the planet.

[24:10] Jason Alexander: Yeah, yeah. Um, I have heard it said by many people that the closest thing to a theater experience that you can have in a TV gig is doing a multi-camera comedy filmed in front of a studio audience. Um, I mean, first of all, do you agree with that? Did you find that to be true?

[24:25] Jason Alexander: Absolutely. Uh, in fact, the only thing I had to figure out on Seinfeld because I was relatively new to that format, I couldn't figure out the audience is there, but they're about a hundred feet away. Yeah, they're behind the wall of cameras. And I kept thinking, do I try and play this to a camera? Or do I, and I realized that the cameras were inconsequential to us. We had marks, but you never had to deal with it like it was a single camera thing. So I said clearly this is a live audience thing.

[24:57] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[24:57] Jason Alexander: But they're all watching the monitors. Even though they're a hundred feet from us, they're all watching on their little screens. So I realized what it was was do a performance that I would not be embarrassed about in front of a camera, but vocally send it to the audience because that's what they were reacting to is what they heard more often than what they saw. So, but yeah, it very much a theatrical situation.

[25:21] Gordon Cox: Yeah, and so you've got Eric who has all his experience from Will and Grace and other shows and Alex who, you know, filmed it for a live studio audience for seasons and seasons. Did that, do you find that coming in handy for them in their performance?

[25:34] Jason Alexander: Absolutely. I listen, Eric is a theater guy. He was a theater guy long before he found his television success. Alex, though he hasn't done a ton of theater and this is his Broadway debut, he's a improv and sketch guy, so being up in front of an audience is second nature to him. What was like, as I was referring to before, what was more helpful than all their live experience even in front of cameras was Alex has done musical theater, Eric has done musical theater, Laura, Dana, Lily, Nahal, they've all done musical theater. That was the biggest help. I don't know if I had had actors that didn't understand music if this would have been nearly as easy or successful a process.

[26:20] Gordon Cox: Right.

[26:21] Jason Alexander: Yeah.

[26:21] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And there's shenanigans in the show, and the shenanigans are exactly the kind of thing that can go wrong, and that actors have to make work in the moment. Has that happened yet in the run?

[26:32] Jason Alexander: Oh, so many times. There is a, I'm giving away a gag, but we have cigarettes come out of many different things. It's very funny. And there is now, I don't know if it was there when you saw it, it's a pretty recent addition. A statue of David.

[26:47] Gordon Cox: Yes.

[26:49] Jason Alexander: I did see that. That must have been new when I saw it. That is very new, and it is a miniature statue of David, and the lighter is actually the penis. And it's a very tiny little lighter, and it's very difficult to operate, and it generally is challenging. And the ad libs around that, you know, from these things always say they're gonna work, they never do, you know, size does matter, you know, it's been everything. We've had lighters have been the bane of everybody's existence. There was one where Eric lights Laura's cigarette with a coffee creamer turned cigarette lighter, and that was always malfunctioning. And it happens when he says that smoking, he finds smoking exhausting, and she says, how so?

Well, he would say, "Well, first of all, this..." We've had things break, we've had things not break, we've had, yeah, they have dealt with every situation. They even, because we've had trims out and additions in during previews, you know, a line gets dropped and they save each other's ass all the time. So yeah, it's been a lot of mishaps, and they're, they're God bless funny people. They find a way to make it work and you get a laugh on it. And they've also broken each other up on stage and they try to hide it, but the audience gets in on it and then you know, that did happen the night I was there. It was very, the thing you walk away with going, I was there when.

[28:19] Jason Alexander: So you mentioned earlier that you as a director kind of added a level, a heightened level of absurdity to the play and sort of comment things in the play that weren't necessarily there.

[28:30] Jason Alexander: Are is that something like the lighters coming out of every possible place? Like, is that the kind of thing you're talking about? Like, tell me more. Actually, that was my clue to potentially do more. Um you know, uh Sandy and I surprised each other because we had different, slightly different ideas of what this play was. I read things like that, and the um the the big uh moment of delivery that Lily has and uh various other little things that were sprinkled throughout the play, and I went, well, that's very spoofy, and that's very spoofy, and that's very spoofy. And then there were, you know, uh lots of writing in between that were funny and witty and smart, but they weren't spoofy. And I thought, that's a really I felt that tone was inconsistent.

And so I started looking for ways based on cinematic tropes and this idea that these characters think of themselves as the platonic ideal of what they represent. Um, you know, how could I augment that and how could I have fun with that to sort of even out the tone of the play? And that's when I started um adding things that just aren't there. I you know, as we were thinking about the cottage itself and its history and who this mama character that is just a painting, but we hear about her all the time. What would if she's this, why are there cigarettes and alcohol everywhere? Why why would this happen? And we started to try and root it in, well, very clearly, Mama liked her cigarettes and her husband didn't like it, so she hid them and she liked her drink and she hid it.

And um I had the idea of she had a dog that she was crazy about, and so when it died, she taxidermied it and made it into a coffee table, you know. Um there were there were things like that all the time. But even um Eric's entrance with his little bath towel, that was something that I went. I think if we can pull this off, the idea that he barely does anything and it works perfectly, almost magically, that will tell the audience what world we're in.

[30:41] Gordon Cox: Yeah, it's like a tone center, right?

[30:42] Jason Alexander: For it is, it is. And so it was things like that that I peppered in throughout the show. And then the other challenge of the show, um, and particularly challenging for m a bunch of the cast, was playing out. Um they I had to try and tell them over and over, you are you are spoofing a style of acting that came from silent movies where actors believed their faces would tell the story, and where there were no microphones. So the only way to hit the back of the theater was to face front and put your voice out there. And you're you're doing that to a comedic extent, and it was very alien for some of them. So the movement, the con there's almost constant movement happening on the play. That was all stuff that we had to figure out and layer on.

[31:34] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And as you've been hard at work on the cottage, which as I'm talking to you is about to open in just a few days' time, um, there have been some pretty major developments in Hollywood lately. Uh, you know, you are of course a member of the Screen Actors Guild, which is on strike along with the writer's guild.

[31:49] Jason Alexander: And the and the writers and the directors go, I'm I'm I'm screwed up.

[31:54] Gordon Cox: Yeah, yeah. What has it been like to experience the early days of I guess particularly the screen actor strike while you're um you know, while you're hard at work on this show?

[32:04] Jason Alexander: Um well, I you know, it's it's uh best of times, worst of times. I feel very blessed to be engaged with something that can continue outside of the strike because it is it is a different it is a different arena than the strike effects. So that is a blessing. But I also feel like I should be out there with my colleagues um because I I so stand beside them. You know, I I'm in the writer's guild for reasons I don't understand. I think I I added two lines to a script one time. But I have what the writers are are fighting for is to me absolutely essential. What our actors are are fighting for is absolutely essential. I do not understand how producers feel that these are unreasonable requests. I I really don't understand, truly don't understand, why the producers feel that if what they want were to go forward, that they themselves wouldn't be jeopardizing their own futures.

They they seem to believe that uh AI is the wave of the future, that they can take an an actor who's paid for half a day as a background extra and scan their face and put them as background extras in every movie they produce from now until the end of time and never pay them again. They believe that they can generate or rewrite or punch up a script using an AI, which is merely taking stuff that other people have written and mashing it together. But they don't see that right now, a kid in his basement can duplicate any filmmat any filmic shot they've ever seen, generate a character that doesn't exist, write a script without having to write a word, and has a global portal with which to put it out.

And these guys think that studios and streamers are gonna be safe 10 years from now. I I think they are cutting their own throats. And we are all in a creative community. Yes, we we come at it from different angles and we have different contributions to make. But if producers are not our colleagues, what are they? And right now they are saying loud and clear, we are not your colleagues. I I think that is a huge mistake. I am working in a play where my producers have been my colleagues, and I appreciate them more than I can say. They have been good friends and great collaborators and real colleagues. I don't know how we get to a point where these issues become so divisive that we have to shut down an industry that was already struggling, and lives are going to be ruined.

I I'm I'm devastated by it, and I have uh I open and then I have a couple days with my family, but then I will be back in LA and I will be on those lines, you know, raising a voice to just try and bring some reality and some um compassion to to the idea that we are all storytellers together. There isn't there is no element that can be disenfranchised and have the thing as a whole survive. So we'll see.

[35:22] Gordon Cox: You've talked uh a lot about some of the theater other future theater projects that you have got kind of irons in the fire going. Um I mean, there is there's Tevia next year on Los Angeles, right?

[35:33] Jason Alexander: Um what can you tell us about like you know the play that you're working on with the other play that you were working on with Eric? Um my friend Peter Tolen, uh, who created Rescue Me and Larry Sanders, yeah. Um Peter wrote an adaptation of the book, uh War of the Roses about that destructive divorce that you know it is one of the funniest, finest, most theatrical plays. I have been attached to it for six years now. Um it is an expensive play because we have to build an absolutely stunning house and destroy it every night, yeah. Um and uh it has a cataclysmic ending. But um, so it's it is a little bit of an expensive project to produce, but people have had such wonderful responses to it in readings. We have just not been able to get a theater owner to say, yes, let's go. Um maybe if cottages is success, that may help it a little bit. Um I uh as an actor, I know I'm supposed to do a new pre play. Um, I think next spring at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

[36:46] Gordon Cox: Oh great.

[36:47] Jason Alexander: Uh a play called Judgment Day that uh I'll always say his name wrong, and I and I love him to death. And in my lifetime, I'll learn to say it. Moritz von Sturpnagel is uh director. That I'm looking forward to. And so there are definitely things on the horizon. And you know, as a result of the cottage, people are starting to say, hey, would you look at my would you look at my would you read my would you take a look? And so who knows where this goes.

[37:15] Gordon Cox: Yeah, you have directed musicals before. Are there musicals that you uh would really love to direct next, or especially on Broadway?

[37:24] Jason Alexander: Um there are, but the one that comes to my mind uh would be unfortunately um and I and I totally understand, and so I hope someone else will do it because I think it's so good. Um I fell in love as a kid with the musical version of Raisin in the Sun Reason. And I think it's a terrific piece with a great score and wonderful roles, and we do know the story works very well. So uh I have always it's boggled my mind that there's never been a significant revival of that show. Um uh I always wanted to direct it, but uh I think that might be inappropriate. So I'm hoping that uh Debbie Allen was in the original production, she might be a great director for it, Kenny Leon, who might I have Central Park right out my window over there.

Kenny Leon's got Hamlet uh over there all summer. Um you know, there are some wonderful people that I think could do a great job of it, and it's it's such wonderful roles for uh, you know, four four or five actors in particular. Um so that's one.

[38:28] Um musicals. There are musicals I love. I mean, I actually um uh I have an idea for a Sweeney Todd that I've always wanted to try and do, but I think that may have to wait for a while. Sure.

[38:40] Jason Alexander: Um you know, um I I did a um I directed a a kind of newly reimagined production of Jason Robert Brown's Last Five Years. Yeah. And I did that at Syracuse Stage, and it was um God bless him for letting me do it the way I imagined. It was really, really successful, and I love that piece. I would love for that to have a life in New York. I'd love that to be seen. Um but other than that, I'm always looking around. I think for me, revivals are, especially if you're talking about New York and Broadway. What's missing? What is happening in the zeitgeist that this piece could speak to? What lens can we observe it through that is worth putting it up again? In the case of Fiddler, you know, um Lonnie and I have actually talked about, let's let's go the other way.

There's been a lot of monkeying with Fiddler in the last few revivals. What about if we give it back its veritas and it its you know its originally intended values and look at it again the way it more or less was intended to be. Um sometimes that has value if something has been played with for a while, uh which is what this current Sweeney Todd does. We've had, you know, actors playing their own instruments, we've had the one downtown with the piano and uh and this one has sort of said, what if we look at it again sort of the way it was intended? So um I you know, I don't know. There's there's many, I'm sure. When I was running reprise, there were so many in my head. But musicals, you know, I have found it's it's really interesting.

Uh nobody loves Neil Simon stuff more than me. But I understand why most of his plays really wouldn't work again right now. They were such a uh um a reflection of the time they were written in. The references are so specific. If you didn't know them, the the humor might be lost. Um I think musicals are like that too. Uh they are there's a timing to them, there's a sensibility. I think having brought parade back now when they did was such a brilliant idea because it's the the rise of of anti-Semitism and and just sort of race hate in general has has been back uh unfortunately. So i it's finding the right thing for the right time, and uh I'd have to rack my brain. But we are talking about a couple of play revivals that could be really fun that I uh since we haven't even approached a rights thing yet, I won't mention but excellent.

But that's that's the other thing is when looking at New York, what isn't it doing that an audience might respond to? What would be fun or exciting or engaging or important or valuable? You know, there's a lot of you spend a lot of money to open a Broadway show, so it it wants to check some of those boxes.

[41:34] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Well, we look forward to seeing your next New York project and to seeing the two projects you've got in the works uh next year already here in your country. Um thanks so much for your time, Jason. It was great to talk to you.

[41:42] Jason Alexander: My pleasure, Gordon. Nice to talk to you.

[41:48] Gordon Cox: That was Jason Alexander, the director of The Cottage, now playing on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater. If you enjoyed this conversation and others we've had here on Stagecraft, I'd be so grateful if you took the time to rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 Twitter at Gordon B. Cox. Thanks for listening and see you at the theater.