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[0:00] Nella Vera: Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the fabulous 54 Below. Before we get started this evening, just a polite reminder, please take this moment to silence your cell phones and also there's no flash photography, please. Welcome to the 54 Below podcast. I'm Nella Vera, the club's director of marketing. Our guests today are two-time Tony Award nominee Kate Baldwin, who is known for her roles in the classic musicals Hello, Dolly!, Big Fish, and Finian’s Rainbow, and Broadway and television star Aaron Lazar, who's had memorable roles in shows such as The Light in the Piazza, The Last Ship, and on TV in Fox’s Filthy Rich. Fresh from their critically acclaimed run in The Bridges of Madison County at the Axelrod Performing Arts Center in New Jersey, Kate and Aaron will perform songs from Bridges, reprising their turns as Francesca and Robert, while exploring other favorite roles from shows past, present, and future.

Joining Kate and Aaron at 54 Below are groundbreaking maestro Luke Frazier and eight members of The American Pops Orchestra, which will make them one of the biggest ensembles to ever grace the stage at 54 Below. Kate and Aaron, welcome to our podcast.

[1:09] Kate Baldwin: Thank you for having us.

[1:11] Aaron Lazar: It's a pleasure to be here.

[1:12] Nella Vera: So welcome back. How does it feel to be back with a duo show? I know you both have done individual shows before. So what's different about this?

[1:20] Kate Baldwin: I've never done a duet show.

[1:24] Aaron Lazar: Not at 54 Below. My husband Graham and I have done duet shows around the country, usually at theaters where we worked, but it's super fun because Aaron and I get to work together, you know, every 10 years. That's sort of been our trajectory. We started it in 2002 with a production of Harmony, which actually just enjoyed a very successful run off-Broadway, directed by Warren Carlyle. And then we worked together 10 years later on an out-of-town production of Giant with Michael John LaChiusa's piece. And then we worked together 10 years later, which was this year, doing Bridges in Madison County. And we kind of just said, you know what? We like working together. Why wait another 10 years? Let's think of some songs we want to sing right now and hopefully cast ourselves in future productions. Through the show, you'll see our wish list for how we'd like to be considered in the future.

[2:13] Aaron Lazar: Do we like working together? Or is it really like, man, we worked together and I gotta wait 10 years before I work with Baldwin again? That was just that was a lot.

[2:20] Nella Vera: This is the first time hearing of that, Aaron. Do you need a breather? Am I rushing you?

[2:26] Aaron Lazar: No, no, it could be rushing. And no, I'm of course kidding. But yeah, we did Bridges a couple months ago, and I was like, Kate, it's too fun working with you. Let's keep going, let's do something. What can we do?

[2:37] Kate Baldwin: She's like, Well, I'm gonna go literally kick ass in the Karate Kid musical. But right after that, I've got some time and I'm like, let's do a show.

[2:47] Nella Vera: Fantastic. So you met doing Harmony. Is that how you met? Or had you known each other before?

[2:51] Aaron Lazar: I think you were fresh from school, weren't you?

[2:53] Kate Baldwin: I was pretty fresh.

[2:55] Aaron Lazar: I was super fresh. I was fresh out of school, and Barry Manilow and Bruce were looking for a bass, you know, about the comedian harmonists for like the world's first boy band. And I was like, a bass. I was like, wait a second. I did not think basses were employable as male voice parts on Broadway, but I sang bass in all my high school choirs and acapella groups and stuff, and so I stopped warming up and started smoking a lot of cigarettes.

[3:23] Kate Baldwin: And we lowered the voice.

[3:24] Aaron Lazar: No, I didn't smoke, I would never do it. I'm not one of the cigarettes. Can you smoke in a role?

[3:30] Kate Baldwin: I can't do it. I can't even smoke any cigarettes. It like goes across my cords and then I cough. I can't sing.

[3:36] Aaron Lazar: Yeah, no, I can't do any of that. I mean, I can drink a gin and tonic after every show and still, you know, sing the next day, but I can't.

[3:42] Kate Baldwin: Like the true Irish lass that you are.

[3:45] Aaron Lazar: That's me. I was just in Ireland last month, and first of all, I've never seen so many redheaded women in my life. And also the amount of alcohol consumed by everybody around me was insane. And both stereotypes are true of me.

[4:02] Nella Vera: Speaking of, you know, the score, The Bridges of Madison County has one of the most beautiful scores ever written. I mean, just stunning. Were you familiar with the show before doing this production?

[4:14] Kate Baldwin: I saw it. I think I saw the closing night performance. I said, Hey Kelly, when I saw the show, you stepped forward afterwards and you addressed the audience and you said something beautiful. I can't remember what it was, but you said something really lovely.

[4:31] Aaron Lazar: She said, Oh, I think I only did that for the final show.

[4:33] Kate Baldwin: And so I think that's what I saw, the very last performance. But after that, I never really studied it or considered it as part of my things that I would like to do or would be considered for. And then this opportunity came up, and Hunter Foster was slated to direct, and he called me and said, Would you like to do this? And I thought, you know, coming out of a pandemic where I'm just gonna say speak for myself, where I re-examined my love of musical theater, and I thought about roles that I'd like to do and chances to take and sort of got really excited about this production.

[5:07] Aaron Lazar: Similar to Kate, I saw it on Broadway, don't remember when. I thought it was just the most amazing score. And then I was asked to sing "It All Fades Away" at a dear friend of mine's wedding. And I remember being like, Yeah, I would love I can't wait, let me sing this song, and then I started to trying to sing it was like, oh my god I can't sing this song, it's very hard. And from that moment on, I sang it anyway, you know did okay but then I was like listen I really want to sing the score someday so when the opportunity to play Robert came up and then I was like okay this is great this is an opportunity for me to get the voice back to tip-top shape and then you know work with Kate and Hunter and Keith and it's just awesome.

[5:51] Nella Vera: So what were the challenges of singing the score? Or were you just in tip-top shape and it was fine for the whole run?

[5:58] Aaron Lazar: No, I got into what I would call tip-top shape. I mean I got there but it took like all of rehearsal it took like a month on my own before and then all of rehearsal which was all of what two weeks and then like the first week of the run to get the show in my voice. There's just a mu for me the way my voice works like I know there are people like Christine Ebersole I remember seeing her and Michael Feinstein at 54 Below and going back to talk to Christine after and being like oh my god, you know you sound like you are 20 years old. It's amazing.

[6:29] Kate Baldwin: She's like yep I know and I never even have to warm up ever. Never have to never never have had to and never have to and I was like oh my.

[6:32] Aaron Lazar: And Kate did you find it also challenging singing?

[6:34] Kate Baldwin: Oh my god it's so intimidating are you kidding me? It's one of the great soprano roles first of all soprano roles are few and far between in modern musical theater. I'm gonna say modern musical theater just you know hopefully meaning anything past nineteen sixty because you know the soprano voice has sort of fallen out of fashion and everyone wants to hear a mixer or a belter and I would consider myself a mixer, never a belter, but I started off, you know, in my voice training as a legit soprano.

[7:06] Aaron Lazar: And so actually, right before the pandemic, I was working on a show at Encores that was called Love Life, and Vicki Clark is the director. And the role in Love Life was a legit soprano. And I went to Vicki and I said, I don't know how I'm gonna sing this anymore. I haven't sung this way in such a long, long time. And she and I did a few lessons just out of the grace and goodness of her heart and soul. She said, Listen, you sing differently now than you did when you started, you know, when you were in college 20 years ago, 25 years ago now. So should treat yourself differently too. Don't try and make a sound the same way you did then. Obviously, there are certain things that you always have to do, like breathe, but where you let it live in your body can be a different place.

You don't have to work. What she was trying to tell me is I didn't have to work so hard to create the kind of sound and just sort of release and let it go and let it happen, which was kind of an incredible thing to then carry over into working on a role coming out of a pandemic, just kind of letting it go.

[8:07] Aaron Lazar: And whereas I think I spent most of the pandemic in the fetal position on the floor, worried about everything, all of it, you know. And so this show and being with my pal Aaron and having the loving guidance of Hunter, and we have to talk about Keith Levinson too, who knows the score so well, was such a wonderful way to come back because it just felt so easy and comfortable and like oh god, this is all what I've always wanted to do is play a part like this, do work like this. And I just was so grateful the entire time and just you know had to like stop crying. I didn't want to, you know, cry through it because as my voice teacher in college always said, you can either cry or sing, you can't do both.

[8:48] Aaron Lazar: And that's exactly how she talked. She never needed to warm up either because her voice was like that.

[8:53] Kate Baldwin: No, it's amazing. Well, I love hearing her impression. You did you talked about her during our run because that's exactly right. How do you sing that Jason Robert Brown score and be emotional and cry? And then Jason's wife, Georgia Stitt, came to see the show. She's your good buddy, Kate. And I remember saying to her, like, it's just so great to like sink my teeth into this score. And she's like, Yeah, Jason really wrote these parts so that actors kind of had to give everything they've got in order to sing them. Like they're not easy.

[9:20] Aaron Lazar: And for me, it was I don't know. Some people can just wake up in the morning and sing a score like that. But I, as you know, roles that I've played on Broadway went from sort of a lot of songs and singing through a show, whether it's Piazza or Les Mis, to, you know, you're doing Evan Hansen, you sing one song, other than some ensemble stuff. And so keeping the voice in a place where you can sing a score like Bridges eight times a week or whatever, that was one of the fun challenges of taking on the job. And so I'm grateful that I got there.

[9:53] Kate Baldwin: And Kate made it look easy, right? Which is why I was, you know, sarcastically shaking my head.

[9:58] Aaron Lazar: It's like being an athlete, you gotta get in training.

[10:00] Kate Baldwin: Yeah, absolutely. And just to be very clear, I started working on the score three months before we went into rehearsal because I knew that I needed to arrive, you know, day one, knowing my stuff, and not have to worry about learning it at that point. I know so many people who saw it, and of course, I was away most of this month and was so heartbroken because the story, it's I think you know, I read this book when I was very young and I loved it, but I think being this age, that story is, you know, so resonant, and I think coming out of a pandemic, even more so this story about you gotta grab life, and it's so emotional. And everybody that saw it, of course, is my age and took the train out to New Jersey, and they were like raving about it, and you know, we're so excited that your show's coming back. But I do think that it has such a powerful story for this time. I don't know if you felt that at all when you were doing it, but you know, kind of carpe diem.

[10:58] Aaron Lazar: Yeah, I had a friend come and say it really highlighted the idea of the transformational power of love, how love can transform a person from being, you know, in Robert's case, a hermit and a loner into somebody who is connected to the world. And in Francesca's case, a person who was disconnected from her past, from her roots, from her childhood, her family, and her sense of cultural self, for lack of a better way to put it, and to be seen and heard and understood in a way that she had missed for you know 30 years. So yeah, the transformational power of love was a huge one. And I think we all transformed throughout the pandemic, right? We had a couple of different opportunities to think about who we are, where we're going, and what we want our lives to look like. I know I certainly did that investigation.

[11:46] Kate Baldwin: I think so many actors and so many of us who are artists and artist adjacent do that as well, you know, when we think about what the future should be, could be, and how to be a part of the changes that need to happen that need to come to light.

[12:02] Nella Vera: I know you're probably gonna talk about this in your show, but is there another show that you would both love to do together?

[12:08] Aaron Lazar: There's a few.

[12:21] Kate Baldwin: She's like, Yeah, actually, I'm at the end of that.

[12:24] Nella Vera: Amazing.

[12:25] Nella Vera: What other one, Kate?

[12:26] Kate Baldwin: Yeah, I think we should do Follies at some point too.

[12:28] Aaron Lazar: That's not as hilarious.

[12:30] Kate Baldwin: That's more of a sad kind of thing. I remember seeing Follies when I was in high school because my boyfriend at the time ran the spotlight for the community theater production of Follies. I was like, ooh, a Sondheim show. Great. I'll come and sit up in the spotlight with you and watch the show. And I was like, first of all, how come there aren't any dance numbers? Or like not enough dance numbers? Finally, what are all these old people crying about? What's the big deal? And then the revival happened on Broadway with Bernadette and Ron Rains and Danny Burstein and Jen Maxwell, all of whom I just love and adore. And Graham and I went to go see it and we turned together at intermission. I was like, I know why the old people were crying now. I get it. I get it.

[13:12] Aaron Lazar: Well, you still have a few years before you can do that. So, you know, we'll find some other shows to do, and then in about 20 or 30 years, you all can do Follies.

[13:25] Kate Baldwin: That's what I love about a Sondheim show. Is like, you know, you look at the characters that he's written for, and there's always one that could apply to where you are in your life, and that's on my list for sure.

[13:35] Nella Vera: So I'm gonna ask a question for our musical theater nerds that are listening, which by the way, this is 54 Below. Sopranos never go out of style here. So, you know, that's just even more appreciated. We talked about Bridges having one of the most beautiful scores of all time, but Aaron, one of your earlier shows had a score that is just as beautiful and iconic, right? You did Light in the Piazza. Do you remember that experience? Because I remember seeing you on posters around my neighborhood here in Lincoln Center, and how was that?

[14:08] Aaron Lazar: Yeah. Well, first of all, isn't everyone listening right now a musical theater nerd? I hope so. How many CDs did you have of Broadway musicals when you were 20? Because I had like the books. Like books. 300. Too many. Yeah, do I remember it? Nah. Kind of. I wish somebody would remind. Yeah, no, it was not a big deal. No big deal. Yeah, I remember it too well, right? It's like one of those shows that it's one of the greatest things I've ever been a part of. And so it haunts you too because you're like, will I ever do something that good again? Like I really want to. It was just it was formative for me. The funny story about it was that I had auditioned for it a couple years prior when it was going out of town originally.

Because it went it started out of town, I think in Chicago and then went to Seattle and then came in, and I remember auditioning for it, and I was told that I was too old for it originally, and then three years later got cast in it, so that was funny.

[15:08] Kate Baldwin: That's crazy.

[15:10] Aaron Lazar: Yeah, I just it's one of the first times in my professional career where I felt like I could lose myself in a role and that you know this is sort of what I'm meant to be doing with my life, and I kind of had known that inside myself, but had never had the opportunity to sort of live it until Piazza. So it was just a big turning point for me. It helped establish me as someone Broadway could rely on. And yeah, I made incredible friendships.

[15:36] Kate Baldwin: I remember going to see you in it. I remember like making the trip to go like see you in it and Katie Rose Clark.

[15:44] Nella Vera: Well, you've both done so many musicals, and some of them didn't, you know, go to Broadway. Is there a show that you really regret that wasn't seen by more people?

[15:55] Kate Baldwin: You know, yeah. I mean, I loved everything that I've ever worked on. And I love it when people, you know, I'm at the stage door for something like Hello, Dolly!, which had a nice healthy run or something like that, and they say, you know, I loved seeing you in John and Jen, which was a tiny two-person show that we did off Broadway back in 2014. Just me and Connor Ryan playing siblings and also playing mother and son in the second act. It's a wild show that way. And you know, it was so tiny, we didn't even wear microphones. It was just piano and cello accompanying us, and just the two of us doing make believe on stage pretty much the entire time. But when somebody says, I know that recording, or I've I saw the show and it spoke to me, or I brought my son or my brother, or I called my mom afterwards.

That's when I go, Oh, it did, you know, the people that it did reach, it made an impact on them. But yeah, yeah. I wish I wish that had had a longer run. I wish Superhero at Second Stage had had a longer life because that was something I cared about deeply too. It was a Tom Kitt musical, John Logan musical from 2019 that had a really cool idea. I don't know if you got to see it, but I thought the idea behind it was cool and Bryce Pinkham was just fabulous. And this young man, Kyle MacArthur, who played my son again with a son. I always have sons.

[17:16] Aaron Lazar: Oh yeah. I loved Jen and John. I didn't see Superhero, but I did love Jen and John. It was so cute and wonderful and touching and sad and everything.

[17:26] Nella Vera: How about you, Aaron? Do you have a show that you wish had gotten more exposure?

[17:31] Aaron Lazar: I didn't continue with Giant from Dallas on to the public, but I loved doing it. I mean, I just thought it had everything, and that sticks out as something that, you know, a role I would love to play again, and I wish more people could have seen it.

[17:43] Nella Vera: That was on my list for both of you, actually, because I actually saw it in Dallas because I was working at the public. I was the marketing director at the public when Giant started, but I ended up leaving halfway through the run. And I saw it in both places, and I just thought this is wonderful. And then, you know, as life in the theater is, you just don't know what's gonna move on and what doesn't, and what producers and they're planning things, what they decide, and it was just um it was truly beautiful. It was so fun seeing it in Dallas, though, because you know, they're like their own country in Texas, and the audiences were so different there.

[18:19] Aaron Lazar: Well, for sure. I mean, a group of New Yorkers coming to Texas to do a show about Texas. I mean, my cousin's from Austin. He was like, wait a minute, you're gonna come here and teach us about ourselves? I don't think so. So it was very much like I still remember Grife coming, Michael Grife coming backstage at intermission during our first preview error, and I don't know if he knocked on your door, but he knocked on mine. Intermission. He's like, Hi, how are you doing? I was like, Are you here to give me a pep talk? Because no one's responding to anything that we do. He's like, Maybe I was like, I know, I'm there, I can feel it. They're not buying what we're selling, and it's okay. I get it. It's okay.

[19:00] Kate Baldwin: I don't remember that.

[19:03] Aaron Lazar: No. I also like that when I like that challenge. I'm like, bring it on, man. It was the same thing, you know, with the outside. So if Italian people, real Italians don't believe that I'm an Italian, then I'm not doing my job. So I was like, I will play at Texas that if Tommy Lee Jones was married to Matthew McConaughey and they were sitting right there in the front row, they'd be like, That guy, he is a Texan.

[19:25] Kate Baldwin: You know, I have a funny story about that because my Texas cousin, Bill, who's born and bred Austin, he came to see the show, and he'd only ever seen Finian's Rainbow as well. And I was quizzing him about Giant. And I said, Did it seem authentic to you? Did it seem like we were really Texan? And he had one little quibble. I said, Did the story make sense to you? And he said, Well, it made a hell of a lot more sense in that leprechaun show you did.

[19:51] Aaron Lazar: You're right.

[19:52] Kate Baldwin: That's all that you were brilliant. I remember seeing you in that. That was amazing.

[19:59] Nella Vera: Aaron, you seem to be balancing a career in TV and film with a lot of music gigs. You know, Aspen Music Festival, and you did Love Actually Live, which is I can't believe I was not able to see that because it sounds amazing. You know, you're doing like American Pops concerts for PBS and all of this stuff. And so you're doing TV and film, but you're keep coming back to this stage. Is that something that you're, you know, consciously committed to keep doing, or you're just kind of like going with the flow, or you know, do you want to keep coming back to this stage as often as you are?

[20:32] Aaron Lazar: Yeah, I love it. It's my first love, and I don't think there's anything quite like it, right? You know, a great show with a great group of people on stage live. It just feels like home. I mean, I haven't doing it in a long time. I've been on stage consistently since I'm 15 years old, but I started probably when I was nine. So it's just something that feels like it's part of why I'm on the planet this life. Yeah, I love it. I lived in New York for almost 15 years and then moved to Los Angeles about six years ago, and you know, have been fortunate to do some state, you know, do some theater out here, but there's not obviously there's it's not Broadway. There's not a lot of it. So yeah, I'm back and forth to New York and forward to being back this summer and singing with Kate at 54 Below, and then we'll see.

Um it's just it's just nice that in this post-COVID, if that's what we're calling it world, that the theater's coming back, and hopefully Broadway will be back and better than ever this fall. And yeah, I love it.

[21:26] Nella Vera: Final question. What can audiences expect from your show coming up?

[21:30] Aaron Lazar: Great singing, great songs, full frontal nudity.

[21:37] Kate Baldwin: Whatever sells theater.

[21:38] Aaron Lazar: That's it. We just sold out.

[21:39] Kate Baldwin: Whatever sells tickets.

[21:41] Aaron Lazar: That's right. Uh what if we what if we did that? We're just like, yeah, it's full frontal nudity, and then we just, you know, the day before we're like, actually, we we're not gonna do it, but we had already sold it. Like just let's just sell it out. Let's just give the people what they want. Do you think people would boo us? Do you think it would be?

[21:56] Kate Baldwin: I don't know.

[21:58] Aaron Lazar: I don't know who wants to see us naked.

[22:00] Nella Vera: How did you make the decision to have this incredible band with so many musicians? Usually, you know, we top out around five at 54 Below.

[22:09] Aaron Lazar: Again, for me, it came down to just how many naked bodies do people want to see on stage. So these musicians, these musicians were like, we're willing to do it.

[22:19] Kate Baldwin: Uh Kate is now like, I think I have plans July 19th through the 23rd. I'm not available anymore.

[22:30] Nella Vera: Well, we're so excited to have you. I mean, the amount of public sentiment and you know, messages that we've gotten about your show, and it's pretty incredible, especially from people who saw the run of Bridges in Madison County. So we're very excited to have you again. Thank you so much for joining me. I know we're short on time, so I'm gonna let you both go, but I'm gonna remind everybody that you are playing at Fine Science 54 Below on July 19th through 23rd at 7 p.m. and that they can get tickets at 54below.com. Thank you so much. It's been so much fun to have you on the podcast.

[23:06] Kate Baldwin: Thank you, Nella. We look forward to seeing you then.

[23:09] Aaron Lazar: Yes, I'm gonna stay hydrated and thank you, Nella, and thanks, Kate and everybody. And Kate, we gotta go learn our lyrics now.

[23:16] Nella Vera: Let's do this.

[23:20] Announcer: You've been listening to the 54 Below podcast, part of the Broadway Podcast Network. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.