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[0:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello and welcome to The Drama Book Show.

[0:20] David Rigano: My name is David Rigano.

[0:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And today we are talking about Broadway Melody.

[0:25] David Rigano: Yes.

[0:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: This is a novel by Jack Viertel.

[0:29] David Rigano: You know, it's interesting. When it arrived here, I just assumed it was a history book.

[0:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, yeah.

[0:36] David Rigano: And so it wasn't until the event was getting planned I was like, oh whoa, this is a novel.

[0:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But Jack Viertel does have history books on our shelf.

[0:45] David Rigano: And so immediately I thought this was a history of Broadway Melody, which in its own way is a really cool idea too.

[0:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But no, it is fiction. It is a novel and it's set backstage at a Broadway show.

[0:57] David Rigano: It's a kind of like love triangle. I don't want to give too much away.

[1:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's a kind of like backstage love triangle.

[1:04] David Rigano: I love that. It feels like it should be a musical.

[1:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I think so. Apparently, you and I are not the only ones who think so.

[1:11] David Rigano: Really?

[1:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He talked about, and we'll let him say more, how but like people had asked him if he was ever going to adapt it into a musical.

[1:19] David Rigano: And if I remember correctly, he said something like, I'm not going to, but someone else can do it if they want to.

[1:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so I was like, great, me.

[1:25] David Rigano: Nice.

[1:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:26] David Rigano: Sometimes Colin Dibbs.

[1:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, sometimes it takes that. Like there's projects that I have done that are because I've asked.

[1:31] David Rigano: Yeah.

[1:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Holy cows was because I asked.

[1:34] David Rigano: Facing East.

[1:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Well, neither of us, we got brought into it.

[1:38] David Rigano: Yeah, the ask was the ask happened.

[1:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:40] David Rigano: But it's that. It's not everyone, I think when they're writing a novel thinks about is this it's not as much of a logical.

[1:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:47] David Rigano: To as like a movie to or a play that oh, this could jump to the stage as a musical.

[1:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Novel doesn't always have that.

[1:53] David Rigano: Though this one, oh, definitely feels a little obvious because more so this than I'm sure it's not what Greg Win Maguire was thinking when he wrote Wicked.

[2:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You know what you're saying.

[2:01] David Rigano: Yeah, yeah.

[2:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But I did, however, because I watch a lot of video essays on YouTube, and obviously there's been a lot of discourse around Wicked right now.

[2:14] David Rigano: And I was watching one, Matt Baum.

[2:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love Matt Baum's channel.

[2:19] David Rigano: He wrote a book called Hi Honey, I'm Homo.

[2:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He does oh, yeah, I've seen that.

[2:23] David Rigano: He does a his channel is all about gay pop culture in media, and he started out specifically talking about sitcoms, and his book is about gay plots and all of the history of queerness in sitcoms.

[2:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And his book is called Hi Honey, I'm Homo. And if he or anyone who knows him is listening to this, I would love for him to do an event here because I just love his content.

[2:49] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But I was watching, I was watching him talking about the like the history, the queerness of all of Oz leading up to Wicked.

[2:58] David Rigano: And Gregory McGuire was talking about when there were early drafts of for non-musical movies at Universal that he really was not liking the direction that they were going in.

[3:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And he was like, I'm a gay man, I've always loved Broadway. And when none of these screenplays were right, I was like, maybe it should be a musical.

[3:18] David Rigano: That is astounding.

[3:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[3:20] David Rigano: But apparently, obviously Universal had the rights already.

[3:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And when Steven Schwartz went to Universal after he tracked down who has the rights and who do I have to get them from, yeah, and tried to convince them, said, put a pause on your movie and let me do the musical.

[3:34] David Rigano: And then if the musical's a hit, make a movie of the musical.

[3:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And if the musical isn't a hit, then go ahead and make the movie that you were gonna make anyway.

[3:40] David Rigano: And 20 years later, we finally got that movie.

[3:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But apparently they said to him, you have to talk, you have to get the go-ahead from Gregory McGuire, who immediately was like the writer of Pippin wants to do a musical of my show.

[3:58] David Rigano: Oh my god.

[3:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's incredible.

[4:00] David Rigano: I and that's also just the journey that that that has had.

[4:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I remember being like 20 something, listening to Wicked in my car, and like making all of my friends listen to it.

[4:11] David Rigano: Oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing I have ever heard.

[4:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I remember seeing Adina Menzel sing The Wizard and I at Broadway on Broadway.

[4:22] David Rigano: Oh, very cool.

[4:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, because Broadway on Broadway was always in September, and they always probably like just a month before they opened.

[4:32] David Rigano: So they were in rehearsals, and it was this like big blockbuster that was coming up, and she sang The Wizard and I, and we all lost our minds.

[4:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, that's crazy.

[4:44] David Rigano: I remember watching on YouTube, and it was it was for good.

[4:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh wow with Jenilee Green and Megan Hilty.

[4:52] David Rigano: Oh my god.

[4:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I didn't realize that Jenna played Alphabet.

[4:57] David Rigano: Yeah, she's been an old.

[4:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I know she was she started out as a Nessa Rose.

[5:01] David Rigano: And Nessa, I think Alphabet understudy, and then I know that she's okay.

[5:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That makes sense.

[5:04] David Rigano: That makes sense.

[5:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because there's video of her singing Define Gravity, and I was just like, oh my gosh.

[5:10] David Rigano: Okay.

[5:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's so funny when you know, now, 22 years later, the discussion comes up.

[5:17] David Rigano: I'm constantly hear people saying, oh, who who were your first Glinda and Alphabah?

[5:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I'm like, my first, and so far, my only Glinda and Alphabah were Kristen Chenoweth and Adina Menzel.

[5:33] David Rigano: Because I saw it less than a year after it. I saw it in spring of 2004.

[5:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh wow.

[5:37] David Rigano: I love Broadway.

[5:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I and I it's amazing because I was a zygote at the time.

[5:46] David Rigano: We've talked about Broadway forever.

[5:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes, we should let Jack talk about Broadway.

[5:50] David Rigano: Let's do that.

[5:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Help me in welcoming to The Drama Bookshop, Jack Viertel and Ted Chapin.

[6:06] Ted Chapin: Welcome.

[6:07] Jack Viertel: I'm honored to be here.

[6:08] Ted Chapin: I guess to start with the truth, I've known Jack I think for 35 years.

[6:13] Jack Viertel: I think Frank Rich introduced us.

[6:14] Ted Chapin: He did.

[6:15] Jack Viertel: And I know it was before Encores started, because it was my idea to have him part of the advisory committee at Encores when there was such a thing as an advisory committee of Encores.

[6:26] Ted Chapin: And he was a brilliant member of it.

[6:28] Jack Viertel: And then when the time came for a new artistic director, it was the right person to take over after two and a half previous artistic directors.

[6:37] Ted Chapin: And so I love the statistic of 65 shows there.

[6:41] Jack Viertel: And the theater, 65 anything is impressive.

[6:47] Ted Chapin: We're gonna start, we're here to talk about the book.

[6:49] Jack Viertel: We're gonna I'm gonna start by asking Jack to read a little bit of it.

[6:52] Ted Chapin: But I just for those of you, first of all, for those of you who have not read it, you're in for a treat.

[6:56] Jack Viertel: It is unique.

[6:58] Ted Chapin: But I was thinking today, what is this book? What's the genre of this book?

[7:02] Jack Viertel: And I came up with the phrase it's a memoir-esque novel.

[7:06] Ted Chapin: Because it is a novel, but it's filled with I think probably as much of your memoir as we're ever gonna get, perhaps?

[7:14] Jack Viertel: Oh, I think so. I don't think anyone wants to read an actual memoir about me.

[7:18] Ted Chapin: But anyway, do you want to start by reading?

[7:20] Jack Viertel: Yeah, I'll just kick off the this, but we're reading the very first very few pages only because they've set up the story in a way.

[7:27] Ted Chapin: And I don't have my own copy of the book, so I'm using this one.

[7:30] Jack Viertel: Um it'll take me one moment to get there.

[7:34] Ted Chapin: You can get one here, I think they have to be a good one.

[7:36] Jack Viertel: Yes, I've been told.

[7:37] Ted Chapin: So here it is.

[7:41] Jack Viertel: This is not the Broadway I remembered.

[7:44] As he turned the corner of 44th Street and looked up at the huge illuminated coke sign, he realized he had said it aloud.

[7:51] He hadn't said it to anyone in particular, he just said it.

[7:54] This was beginning to occur with some frequency.

[7:56] Four months short of his 90th birthday, Zachary Harris, born Itzok Horowitz, and still called Ike, but that's another story, was beginning to let his thoughts escape from his mouth for no reason.

[8:08] He was coming to understand that certain things just happened to you.

[8:11] You weren't supposed to control them anymore.

[8:13] It was too late.

[8:14] It bothered him.

[8:15] It shook his confidence, and especially on this morning, when he feared he might be called upon to handle a crisis.

[8:21] Moments before, he'd had a call in his cell from Aurora Shelton, with whom he had been in love for over half a century.

[8:27] Her husband had apparently left his bedroom at the Actors' Fund home in Englewood early that morning and had not been heard from since.

[8:35] Vincent Donnelly was not known to be much good at following rules or doing things by the book, but this was the first time he had ever run away.

[8:42] His condition was perilous, and no one knew where he had gone or how he might have found the money for transportation to wherever it was he thought he was going.

[8:50] Ike promised Aurora he would check in with her as soon as he got done at the winter garden and not to worry.

[8:56] This would be okay, he said, though why anyone should be comforted by such talk, he had no idea.

[9:01] He pulled his coat around himself, a small man in an old parka, and began to trudge north toward the winter garden, where he had once held down the first trumpet chair in the pit orchestra of West Side Story.

[9:13] That was in 1957, a long time ago.

[9:16] Everything from those days was gone.

[9:18] The Hawaii Kai restaurant once nestled in the basement with the entrance under the theater's marquee was gone.

[9:24] Colony Records across Broadway and a block down was gone.

[9:28] Bond clothing store where he had purchased his first Broadway pit tuxedo had become a restaurant, and now the restaurant was gone too and moved to the other side of Broadway.

[9:37] Even the Coke sign had once said Coca-Cola with a picture of a real glass bottle.

[9:41] No more.

[9:42] Now the signs morphed from one advertisement to another right before his eyes, each of them a gigantic LED video screen.

[9:50] One moment it was promoting a soft drink, and the next a new cable series starring people that Ike had never bothered to learn about.

[9:57] The first time he had seen the new signs, he thought he was hallucinating, and he began to hyperventilate.

[10:02] But now they were just a regular feature of the district, as Neon had once been, and multicolored bulb signs before that.

[10:09] It was 2016, and he assumed that time would continue to march on with him and soon enough without him.

[10:15] What bothered him, though, was that he could still see it all then and now, like a double exposure.

[10:20] Double exposure, he said aloud.

[10:22] Even Kodak film was gone, and maybe his eyes were going to it, cursing him with double and sometimes triple vision, but he himself was not gone, not quite.

[10:31] Back when he left his final big band gig to take his first job in a Broadway pit, it was considered mediocre employment.

[10:38] The great musicians played in the last of the big bands, and if they insisted on staying home in New York, as he had decided to do, they aimed for one of the television orchestras.

[10:47] NBC had one, CBS had one, the record companies had them.

[10:51] House orchestras, RCA, Columbia, those were the good jobs.

[10:55] Steady jobs with new material to master every week.

[10:58] The New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, the best and most prestigious of all, were generally out of reach except for subbing for a sick or missing player.

[11:06] Broadway was a glamorous place for an audience, but in the hierarchy that the players believed in, the pit band was a third rate gig.

[11:14] The same score eight times a week.

[11:16] If you were lucky, the show ran and you got paid, but the tunes began to drive you crazy.

[11:20] Besides, there were no guarantees that the show would run and nobody could see you.

[11:24] He hadn't started with West Side Story, but with a semi-turkey called The Vamp in late 1955.

[11:31] That was the job he could get after he had subbed for a while at Plain and Fancy.

[11:36] The trouble really started in 1960.

[11:38] It was while playing for the out-of-town triad of a disaster called Nowhere to Go But Up on a wintry half empty night in Philly, that he began to believe that with the aid of a Harmon Mute, he could make a sound that would melt the coldest of hearts and that could change lives forever.

[11:54] This, as it turned out, sometime later, was a risky thing to believe, even if you never told anyone about it.

[12:01] It was a thing that if you really believed it, it could nearly kill you.

[12:05] The show ran only a week and a day on Broadway, but the damage had lasted 57 years.

[12:12] And I think you'll stop there.

[12:19] Jack Viertel: That is a good sort of example of what this book is because you hear some of those names in theaters and shows the three there or three people you don't know. So I what I want to ask is where did you come up with the idea for this novel? After I wrote The Secret Life of the American Musical, which was successful, my editor and my agent said to me, What do you want to write next? Do you want to write a celebrity biography? Do you want to write a history of the musical theater? And I thought, I don't really want to do any of those things. I don't want to do the research, I don't want to do the work, I'm not that kind of person, I'm very lazy. But what I do want to do is tell a story. And the story I want to tell, I don't know what that story is, but the story I want to tell is about all of the things that happened on Broadway over a long period of time.

And I should say my father had a play produced on Broadway that he wrote in 1937, ran all of two weeks at what is now the Richard Rogers Theater. My grandfather built two Broadway theaters and briefly owned and produced at one of them. So I grew up with a ton of stories about the theater. And then I lived through a lot of the theater because I started going, I started for the very first time I went to see Peter Pan at the Winter Garden Theater, which, if you read the book, you'll see it's clearly a favorite building of mine. But really started going on my own in 1962, which is a long time ago. And I saw everything in 1962 and 1963. I was growing up in Stanford, Connecticut. I would take the train in, see a matinee, get home in time for dinner, and you can't believe the dreck that I suffered through.

Much of which I love, absolutely love. Most of it completely forgotten. So I had this idea of what I wanted to do, but I didn't know what the story would be. And the first hint of what it would be was when I made a man named Red Press, who you never knew very well. Red Press was a reed player, clarinet and saxophone mainly, and a musical theater contractor, which means he's the contractor is the person who hires the orchestra, works with the music director on who the best players for this show would be, deals with the union and paperwork and all of that. And Red, when I met him, was playing saxophone and clarinet in the Encore's Orchestra. And he was probably about 80. And he stopped playing when he was about 85, maybe, but he continued to contract.

And he lived to be 99. And on the day he died, he had four shows running on Broadway. And I thought, and he was a great character, not a wild and zany character, just a great person, interesting person, who told me lots and lots about his early life playing with big bands. He was in the original pit band of Gypsy in 1957. And I thought this is a great character. Now I have a character I'd really like to write about. What I don't have is a story. But then, more or less simultaneously, there was a young soprano in the Encores ensemble. She wasn't in every show, but she was in many shows. And at one particular rehearsal, she said to me, This is gonna be my last Encores. And I said, Really? Why?

And she said, I'm moving to Germany to get married. And I said, Really? Why? And she said, I was doing an English language production of Canada the Opera in Germany, a tour. And one night, the spotlight operator came to my dressing room and he said, I've been following you with my spotlight for the last however many performances there have been, and I've fallen madly in love with you, and I want to marry you. And she said, Maybe we should get to know each other a little bit. And they did, and she said, and I fell in love with him, and I'm moving to Germany to marry him. So I thought, well, that's now I have a story, right? I have two men and a woman. I have one who operates from underneath the stage, I have one who operates from 40 feet above the stage, and I have a woman who's on the stage. And this will be a fun story to tell if I tell it from the time that they're young people until they're old people. So that's what I chose to do, and that's a very long answer to your short question.

[16:14] Ted Chapin: Part of what I love about that is that it's so theatrical. It's so about the theater in so many different ways. As I was reading it, there were things that I did not know, but they would be familiar at stores, and as you in your introduction that you read, post billboards and how they change and all that kind of stuff. So when you decided to write it, what got you into it at the beginning?

[16:53] Jack Viertel: I wanted to tell that story. I wanted to tell, and I think you may have been the first person to say this to me when you read the book. I wanted to tell a story about people who made theater who weren't stars, who weren't the people that the audience thinks about when they go to the theater. Not the actors, not the author, not the director, but the people who were up above your head running the spotlight or in the pit playing the trumpet. In this case, I changed him from a saxophone player to a trumpet player. And all of that felt like the atmosphere of Broadway that I grew up with. My one of my earliest memories, practically the only memory I have of Peter Pan, I was almost six years old, and we were in the very front row.

Double AA103, I think, was at intermission looking down into the pit and seeing all of these brass instruments and that made the noise that I was listening to, and being completely compelled by that sight. And so it was all about that. It was about what is the theater really made of, and how do these people who I want to tell this story about interact with the whole history of it and the feeling of it and all of that.

[17:55] Ted Chapin: Why did you change Red from a reed player to a trumpet player?

[17:58] Jack Viertel: For a very simple and specific reason. No one has ever asked me that. There was a trumpet player many years ago who a jazz trumpet player who had fallen into disrepute or just had stopped recording and it's disappeared. And someone, I think it was Ralph Gleason or some, one of the jazz sort of experts went to him, who's by now a reasonably old man, and said, I want to record you again. And he said, Well, you want to record me again, you've got to get me instead of teeth. Because my teeth fell out. And you can't play the trumpet if you don't have any teeth because you got the mouthpiece up against your teeth. And I thought, okay, so that's a good, that's a better story than what happened to Red, which was that his eyesight was not as good as it was at one time, and he had to stop playing because he couldn't read the music as quickly as he used to, and this felt more dramatic.

So I made him a trumpet player. Also, I took trumpet in the eighth grade very badly. It's all connected. Part of what I asked. The question is I do remember making an encore, a recording of an encore show where I had to say to Rob Fisher, I don't think Red can do this. I don't think making an album of this show, I don't think he's can still has his chops as a cool clarinet player. So that was that felt familiar.

[19:11] Ted Chapin: Yeah, it's sad and familiar, but it also is the passage of time is what happens. And I have to say, I'm gonna hop around here. There's so much in this book that has is so knowing about things that happened in the past that and how they lead to today. I want you to talk about Ethel Waters and how her appearance in this book and first of all, how you deal with her and why she's there.

[19:38] Jack Viertel: It was semi-accidental, excuse me. I wrote a chapter about this young woman who turns out to be one of the three protagonists who gets jolted by music because her mother puts her on top of a Magnavox console record player while she's playing Ethel Waters singing Taking a Chance on Love, which is from Cabin in the Sky. And I don't know why I chose that. I just did. I love that recording. And then little by little I realized that Ethel Waters could be a sort of touchstone for this woman as she grows up and her fantasies about who Ethel Waters is or might be. And I have to say, Member of the Wedding, which is one of my wife's favorite stories and favorite movies, and one of mine, Ethel Waters, did on Broadway and then committed to film.

It wasn't until very late in the writing process that I thought she has to actually meet Ethel Waters toward the end of this book. And Ethel Waters has to be not at all who she imagined Ethel Waters would be. And I have to give some props to August Wilson, who wrote all those wonderful plays with wonderful characters, with wonderful dialogue, some of which I basically stole for this chapter. But Ethel Waters was a figure on Broadway, a black woman on Broadway, in Vaudeville originally, but then on Broadway, who was limited to what black theater was in the era that she lived in. And I much I felt very strongly about writing about some of those limitations. The limitations of being gay but not out, the limitations of being black but marginalized, because we simply didn't have integrated choruses of dancers in those early days. All those things were part of the actual history and part of the history that really fascinated me. And by the time she's in the book, she's in LA at the end of her life.

[21:26] Ted Chapin: Yes.

[21:26] Jack Viertel: Ethel Waters ended her life singing for the Billy Graham, whatever that religious movement was called. But I discovered an episode of her on YouTube, which you could all watch if you in which she's featured in an episode of Route 66. And so I was able to have her in the book, completely fictionally, I made it all up, talk about what that experience was like from my own point of view. And also there was a the original recording of Taking a Chance on Love is Ethel Waters with Max Meth and the Martin Beck Theater Orchestra. And I thought that was an interesting thing for this character to discover. What was the Martin Beck? What was the Martin Beck Theater Orchestra? Who was Max Meth? All of those things fascinated her and moved drew her inexorably toward Broadway.

I then made one really nasty comment about Max Meth. I have no idea whether Max Meth was a nice person or not a nice person, but I think he's been dead a very long time. So the character could say, yeah, I made a record with Max Meth, that bastard. But the Martin Beck Theater Orchestra, and all of those things were so evocative to me. Martin Beck is now the Al Hirschfeld, but it's still there. And there's still a theater orchestra there.

[22:39] Ted Chapin: I think part of why you and I get along well is when I read that, it reminded me when I started Rogers and the Hammerstein, there was a guy named Ted Fetter who was doing a scrapbook project. And older man did just do Muttering by Day. And one time he told me the story that he actually wrote the lyrics for a song called Fooling Around with Love with Vernon Duke. And he said Vernon Duke called one day this time writing the show and I'd love to mess around with that lyric a little bit, because I don't think fooling around with love isn't quite correct. So Ted told the story of when Cabinet's guy opened out of town. He went to the out-of-town newspaper stand here to just see how the show did out of town.

It's like one after hit show taking a chance on the hit song, taking a chance on love. Hit song, best song in the show, taking a chance on love. So the day he died, he was perfectly happy to have the lyrically written to make it a hit. It's originally Ted Fetter's cleric. Fooling around with love. Yeah, okay. But now I've learned something completely different. And now I have to write it in a book. Yes, I do. Because I do I think that there's so much knowledge about the Broadway that you grew up with, which is very similar. You saw known to go it up. I saw Bravo Giovanni. It's you know, the same uh the same thing.

[23:43] Jack Viertel: I saw Brava Giovanni. Yeah, but it wasn't at the Winter Garden, so now it was in the broader. But also, you two make there's a lot of interesting points that they can make. One of the things I'm going to talk about is theaters. Because in your telling the story of what makes the underbelly of Broadway, there are a whole bunch of Broadway theaters, and they're very different. And obviously the Winter Garden has the place in your art. It started life not as a theater, and it's very wide. But what are your some of your favorite theaters and what are some of your least favorite theaters?

[24:11] Jack Viertel: I have to say begin by saying I don't like any of the newer theaters.

[24:28] Jack Viertel: But I have different kinds of affection for the different theaters. I worked for Ju Jampson for many years, and so we had the St. James and the Beck, which became the Hirschfeld, and the Ritz, which I also never went to as a kid, but which became the Walter Kerr, and the Virginia, which became ultimately the August Wilson. But when I was growing up, and when you were growing up, was the Guild, right? When the Thurberg Carnival was there. I was the Anton, was the Antaplayer. It was originally the Guild. And some I like better than others, but I think more than that, some I think are more certain shows feel more at home in those theaters than they would in other theaters. There's something about the size of the dimensions of the show, the size and dimensions of the theater, the way it's the way it embraces a show and an audience, and some which were in such disarray during our younger years.

They all looked more or less like the Lyceum does now. And the Lyceum is one of the last theaters that needs a really good restoration. But it was just fun to be in each one of them and see what had played there before, who were the ghosts in that building. And some I think I liked because I felt sorry for them. Like theaters like the Court, nothing who had ever played at the Court. But things that I liked played at the Court. And the Belasco, those theaters east of Broadway, which we used to call them, those were the bad theaters. And the reason they were the bad theaters, there were two reasons. One was they had two balconies and it was hard to sell the second balcony. And the other was there was no foot traffic over there.

So if Hello Dolly was sold out, you were unlikely to walk all the way over to the Belasco to see what was pregnant. Of course, now no one buys a ticket because there's foot traffic, so it's all nonsense. But at one time it probably had some reality to it. I don't know. I love walking into the buildings. And in your Ju Jampson days or other what did you ever work on a show where you thought this is in the wrong theater? If this were in a different theater, it would be better. Or it would be more, it would be better received.

[26:27] Ted Chapin: That's a good question. I don't think I have an answer to it. What do you think? Were there shows where you thought, oh, yeah, it should be someplace else? Of course, they've had to blast through an orchestra pit for On Your Toes in the Virginia, but that's another kind of thing. Before my time.

[26:39] Jack Viertel: When you broke this book, I what fascinated me is that you you start, obviously, every story starts somewhere and ends somewhere. But as I was reading it, I thought, how did you decide to go over here? And how did you then bring this thing from the past? Did you do it chronologically, or do you do is there a board in your house that a lot of pieces of paper that you would no, and it's funny because when I did Sloky Joe's Cafe, excuse me, at After Midnight and other kinds of shows that don't have plots, there was always a board. There were file cards. You moved the file cards around and told, look, with this one I just started. And when I did look at what was going on in certain eras. I knew I wanted to write about the destruction of the Morasco and the Helen Hayes, the original Helen Hayes.

I knew I wanted to write a lot about the AIDS crisis, which I lived through as a straight person. And so that was a very a really awful shocking period of life. And particularly so on Broadway, but everywhere, all across the world. But I got to those things through the years, and then I thought I had to think, how do my characters interact with these historical events? And sometimes it took a little while to figure out like how do they? But yeah, I tried not to go wrong.

[27:50] Ted Chapin: No, you didn't did you then go back and say, wait a minute, I forgot that in this part of the story, I should flash back to that.

[27:57] Jack Viertel: Oh yeah, definitely. Rewriting is for me as much fun as the writing, if not more fun than the right. But the other thing that I did was I got to a point about I don't know, two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through the book, where I really did feel I've got to pull this thing together, and I don't know what, I don't quite know what to do. And I remembered something that Wendy Wasserstein had said. I was at a dinner with Wendy Wasserstein and Dan Sullivan when they were developing The Heidi Chronicles. This was a lot of years ago. And she said, sometimes if you're stuck toward the end, just look at the beginning. Most of what you need is actually already there in the beginning. So Ethel Waters was there in the beginning, and various other things I don't want to give away too much, that re-appear were there at the beginning.

And then the end of the first chapter, I thought was the last time we were going to ever visit that moment. But then I realized, no, there's actually 20% of this book that happens after that moment, and so we have to go back to that moment and go forward from there. And gee, it was fun.

[28:59] Ted Chapin: There you take very real people like Jerry Herman, Joe Leighton, and Joe Pat, and you put them in this book, but not in specific places where they actually were. What fun did you have doing that? Or were they based on half truths?

[29:19] Jack Viertel: They're based on half truth, and in some cases no truth. I thought of that when I read about a show out of town that Jerry Herman was coming to write two songs for, and Joe Leighton was coming to save the show. And I thought, yeah, Jerry Herman wrote Dear World, he wrote the whole score, but Joe Leighton came in and saved it in Boston. So I didn't know yes, but no. I it's funny that there's a little inside joke there, which I guess I can reveal, and I won't it won't ruin the book for anybody for whom I haven't already ruined it. Which is Jerry Herman comes out of town to write two songs or three songs for this show that's in trouble. For the leading character. For the leading character, because the producer of the show, who's loosely based on somebody who I won't name, believes not very appreciated at the beginning, right?

Correct. Low-level charges. Because the producer believes that the only way to make this show a hit is to actually make this woman a star. And that she can carry it as a vehicle. So Jerry Herman comes in and he writes these songs. And one of them is a second act opener that's a soft shoe. And I was amusing myself because, of course, one of the songs that was written out of town in Jerry Herman's greatest hit Hello Dolly is a soft shoe at the beginning of the second army called Elegance. But Jerry Herman didn't write it. Bob Merrill wrote it. So it was really a switcheroo. Okay, so I'm gonna have Jerry Herman come in and save the moment that Bob Merrill actually saved for him in a local. But it was purely for my own amusement.

It's nice to smile while you're writing this one. It's also I thought that there's a board game to be made from this book. What's true? What's made up? What's half true? What's half made up? That was great.

[30:58] Ted Chapin: Yes. Here's something that's half made up and half true. I really did see Nowhere to Go But Up at the Winter Garden in November of 1962. In the book, it happens in 1960. You know, not good. You're not here, thank you. The composer of that show was a man named Sal Burkowitz. As far as I can tell, his only Broadway credits were that he wrote the dance music for The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and he wrote Nowhere to Go But Up. And I conceived of this character as a sort of obnoxious, self-important little man, about five foot six, who never shuts up and is really no fun to be with. And for some reason, the main character takes down. They were in the army together and he appreciates the bald obnoxiousness of this character and how funny he is.

And I named the character Sal Berkowitz, who wrote Nowhere to Go But Up. And I had him writing Nowhere to Go But Up. And then just before I finished, I thought maybe I should look up Salberg and nothing. And I discovered an obituary of Sal Burkowitz that said, beloved father, beloved grandfather. He spent his career, he wrote a Broadway show, but he spent his career teaching at Queen's College or Brooklyn College, one of them, teaching music theory and harmony, and leaves behind these lovely children. And I thought, I can't call this guy Solitude. He may have kids that they'd be insulted and you're getting hurt, and maybe they'd even sue. I don't know. So I changed his name to Sid Lubowitz, which I thought was a pretty close. Anyone who wanted to figure it out could figure it out. But so that there's one of your cards for the board game.

[32:39] Ted Chapin: I love it. Clearly, you as a kid, and it's funny because when I was reading it, I realized I did the big difference between us is he grew up in Stanford. I grew up on Lexington Avenue. So where he would take the train in, I would take this up with. But it's the same thing. We would come down here and when, oh, remember when the airline ticket, the airline half-price tickets, you could get half-price tickets up. I think I still had my Eastern Airlines card that's number 000425. I would see it. But obviously, you had an affection for that broad. Flops or not. You had a great affection for what that Broadway is and it comes across in this book. Then your career got very much to be part of Broadway with your finger on the pulse. As you were writing the book, how did your feeling about what Broadway was and then has become influence the story?

[33:28] Jack Viertel: I wanted to tell, I wanted people to be able to see what Broadway was in those days when shows still went out of town and came in and were disastrous or were successful. And the romance of that has never left me. I miss it terribly. I would love to. The one show that I did that way, shortly after I got to Joe Jampson, was Grand Hotel. Grand Hotel was one of the last shows to play a traditional try-out engagement at the Colonial in Boston. The day after it opened, Tommy Toon insisted that they fire all the writers. He called Maury Essen and Peter Stone. They came up. There was a Flowers Today, Lawyers Tomorrow experience. And I thought this is, I'm just blessed to be part of one of these kind of legendary situations.

I never really thought the show would work by the time they got done with all this, and it did pretty well. And we even did it at Encores. Very well. That was a terrible moment for me when we produced the show at Encores that I had been involved in originally. I felt very old. But I really wanted to celebrate that experience and also chronicle the decline of Times Square during that time, the kind of disastrous bottom, the rebirth, which was due in part to Disney, and then the kind of revamping of the whole area so that it's now more of a Midwestern mall and what Times Square was in the old days. And of course, in my parents' and grandparents' days, it was actually a glamorous place. People wore top hats and top coats to go to the theater and got dressed up in heels and jewelry, and you could go see a show at eight o'clock, and then you could go to the rooftop of the New Amsterdam, whatever it was, what was called, I think it was rooftop.

Was the rooftop and see the midnight frolics, and then you could go home and sleep till 11 o'clock in the morning. So I wanted to celebrate all of that, but I also wanted to say, and then this happened. And what happened was a big change in the audience, a big influx of tourists into the audience, a big change in what was being produced because it was being produced for the audience. But the theater is always produced for the audience, the commercial theater. So it just was a shift. I wanted to chronicle without getting very didactic about it. And I loved working at Juju Jampson. I love producing those shows. The early ones like Grand Hotel were the vestiges of the theater that I grew up with.

And then there was a new model where shows did productions at the La Jolla Playhouse and the Old Globe, and then would close for six months while they revamped them, and then would have a workshop, and all of that was completely unknown to me in 1963 and four. But it's the only way things were done. And now it's all turning again, as you can see, and Juju Hampson has disappeared and been replaced by the ambassador theater group, and it's never going to stop changing and growing. But those were those that was the part of the journey that I was interested in.

[36:19] Ted Chapin: I do remember seeing you the afternoon of the opening of Grand Hotel, and I say, How is it? And your comment to me was I think we might get away with it. Which we barely did. I think it turned like a seven percent profit, which five percent profit. I know that that you have said that the Broadway that you grew up in was certainly had very much in mind the tired businessman, the good time.

[36:43] Jack Viertel: Let's just kick back our heels and go and have a rolling good time how to succeed.

[36:47] Ted Chapin: Yeah, and then I wouldn't necessarily say it was because of Stephen Sondheim, but certainly Stephen Sondheim indicates a change in the rules that you could that went for Broadway. You could expand what the ideas of the shows were, you could it didn't have to be that. Talk about how you think that has influenced your Ju Jampson years, for example, the Broadway of today.

[37:11] Jack Viertel: I think the Ju Jampson years story was interesting in a way, I hope that well, people aren't, but when we first got to Ju Jampson in the fall of '87, we were interviewed, Rocco Landisman was my boss, and I were interviewed by Jeremy Gerard, who at the time was the theater news guy at the New York Times. And I remember Rocco saying, it was like a life lesson for me. He said, "Is the bottom line the only line? Can we do what we want to do and still survive if we don't always make money? Is making money not the only way we have to think about this?" And we had talked about the fact that Schubert and Niederlander, which were much bigger than Ju Jampson and much more powerful, had all of the relationships with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh and Tom Stoppard and Peter Shaffer and Trevor Nunn.

And so if we were gonna fill our theaters, this was at a time when many theaters were empty. I know it's a complete mystery to most people today, but they were just sitting there empty. We would have to fill them with what we could fill them with, which was largely American work. We wanted to do American work, and we wanted to do it in part because we didn't have any choice, but in part because we thought this was a very underserved group of artists, and particularly non-white artists, and so we really set out to do that, and we were quite successful at it. And it was very different from what I had grown up with, which was by and large, with the exception of A Raisin in the Sun, a series of well-meaning, in some cases excellent productions that did involve non-white people and that ran six weeks despite their good reviews.

And it really changed. There really were ways to market these shows, if not to real financial success, at least to very respectable runs and conversion into movies and that kind of thing. So it was a very different kind of theater. And the musicals, by and large, were not tried out in the traditional way. And then toward the end of that period of time, what happened that I think I find really astonishing, and it's interesting that you refer to the tired businessman's musical because it's all about this, is that there began to be musicals that in my era and in your era would have been plays, right? No one would have done Dear Evan Hansen as a musical, they would have done it as a play. No one would have done Fun Home as a musical, it would have been a play.

Next to Normal would have been a play. And as a result, or simultaneously at least, all these regional theaters that once would never do a musical are doing musicals. And so the development of new work, I think because audiences like musicals, and because musicals, because they lift off from reality in their own unique way, are different from what you can see on television or even at the movies. We're in a completely different world, and it's not a bad one necessarily. And even though I would say that the book tends a little bit towards the older period.

[40:08] Ted Chapin: Yeah, but before we open for some questions, I have to ask you about the show that the sort of penultimate show of the book, which is Follies.

[40:16] Jack Viertel: Yeah, I remember Follies. I didn't put it in the book either. Ted wrote the definitive book about Follies in case any of you wonder. But I love the way it plays a role in this book, and I think in an interview you said it was your favorite musical. It's not the best musical, but it's your favorite musical.

[40:33] Ted Chapin: I don't think it's the most perfect musical. It is my favorite musical. And I really wanted to write about it for a whole lot of reasons, one of which was just that it was my favorite musical. But yeah, that musical really, I think for a lot of people who had either liked Company or not liked it that much, or had dismissed Anyone Can Whistle pretty quickly, Follies was because it celebrated. And on both the good side and the bad side, and I do remember, I don't know how many people remember this, probably not that many, but New York Magazine used to run a feature in which was like the Johnny Carson feature where they would give you the answer. Readers had to write in the question. What was the question? One week the answer was, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." And the winning question was, "How do you like Follies?" But you know, the show has survived to become an icon. And you were there in Boston.

[41:27] Jack Viertel: And you were coming out. And I was there watching the show in Boston. I didn't know you were there. I want to say hello. It's funny because the first time I met Frank Rich, I was head of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and he was writing a piece for the Times on Sondheim and Hammerstein and the relationship. And so I don't know who put us together. He was a big deal, clearly. So we had lunch, and you sat down and said hello. And I said, "Oh, by the way, I just want you to know I was a gopher on the original production of Follies, and I remember when your review in Harvard Crimson was published." And he looked at me and he said, "You were a gopher on the original production of Follies?" And I said, "Yes, I was."

He said, "How many performances did Alexis Smith cut?" Could I? And suddenly we were not posh people at meeting that we were like total Bobby's maidens. I didn't have the answer to that question. I didn't look back at my notes, and I did have the answer, but it took a while. But I do remember that Walter Bobby, who was the one artistic director of Encores!, was interviewed by one of the gay magazines, I forget which one.

[42:26] Ted Chapin: You were head of the advisory committee.

[42:27] Jack Viertel: I was on the advisory committee. And they asked him what it's like being around head of artistic director of Encores!, and he said, "I'm surrounded by straight show queens."

[42:43] Ted Chapin: You make about Paul as being the three-generational thing, and that's one of the that it appeals, depending on where it hits you, where you are in that. And those of us who are in our youth around it at the beginning thought those young kids were great. Yeah, they were so idealistic, and their older selves were so terrible. And then the next time we saw it, we were the older selves. And then the time after that we saw it, we were as old Heidi singing operetta songs. It's terrible. What happens if you live long enough? But it does make the shows lightly different.

[43:16] Ted Chapin: All right. Can we open it up for guests? Does anybody have dying to ask questions of the author of this remarkable book? Or this author of a remarkable book. We're here for this.

[43:26] Audience Member: I have questions.

[43:27] Audience Member: Okay. Not necessarily for the artistic sake, but purely for nostalgia's sake. Do you have a favorite decade on Broadway?

[43:38] Jack Viertel: Oh, what an interesting question. In the '60s, I think. Because I was a kid in the '60s, and so my sense of nostalgia to some degree depends on a level of self-deception that you come to not only accept but fall in love with. I think it was discovering all those shows in the '60s. I saw A Family Affair twice.

[43:59] Audience Member: Impressive.

[44:00] Jack Viertel: Because not only was it Shelley Berman, who I loved from his comedy records, but it was at the Billy Rose Theater on 41st Street, which is now the Nederlander. How often do you get a chance to go into that theater? It was, I don't know. The '60s, I would say.

[44:19] Ted Chapin: Yeah, I would do that. Get Company in there, and then it's no contest. But it's also what's all in this book to me is such a love and effect, a knowing knowledge of an era that the framework still exists. And the idea that the people who go into a Broadway theater, and of course, the story being a love triangle of somebody who's underneath the pit, not being able to see anything except his earth, the music and the conductor, and somebody who's up in the fly flies, not I love the point you make. The only person in a theater that does not get cued by the stage manager. Although that he can listen to the stage manager getting all the other cues to the stuff like that. Your follow spot, when it's on, I don't know if you today you turn it on yourself or if it's turned on for you.

But the fact that the triangle is three people who really don't have any connection, but have all the connection in the world. They make shows together. The show doesn't happen without each of them doing what they're supposed to do.

[45:18] Jack Viertel: And I also wanted to write about something that I think is really true on Broadway and not what you think of if you are a movie fan, which is here's a woman who wins two Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Musical in two musicals that win Tony Awards for Best Musical, over a long career in which much of which she does nothing. She does flops, she does television episodes. It's as I said in another interview, it's not like she's Robert De Niro, and every year someone gives her 20 million dollars to make a movie. She's just working. And every now and then she gets lucky or she picks the right thing, or sometimes they pick the wrong thing. And Mary Martin did Jenny instead of, I forget what, something she was offered, some big hit that she was offered.

[46:01] Ted Chapin: Yeah.

[46:01] Jack Viertel: My Fair Lady. It was in the '60s and the girl. I don't know. Anyway, people make mistakes.

[46:09] Audience Member: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[46:11] Audience Member: Hi, Jack. I'm so happy to be here.

[46:14] Audience Member: So knowing how long it takes to incubate a show and finance a show and commercialize the show, do you think with the immediacy of being able to record and release music into the world, we'll see more of the concept album coming back where we're releasing music before you are producing and commercializing the show?

[46:33] Jack Viertel: I don't know. And Ted might actually have a better answer than me. I think we will see that to some degree, because music is made in such a different way. Back way back in the day, there were sometimes studio albums of shows, but that just involved gathering a bunch of people and playing a score from a show that was long closed. But I do think we see we now see that as a promotional and popularizing tool, which is not how we used to see the original cast albums. But you're in that business. The concept albums to stage is something that just one of the quirky ways that shows get produced. What I think is interesting is that in the olden days the cast album was the advertisement. You would wait by your local record store in Indiana for the, if you were a show fan, for the cast album to come and you play the cast album, and then when you got to New York, you got to go see that show.

Now you go to see the show, and on the way back instead of getting a t-shirt you buy this, you used to buy a CD. But it's become a promotional item more than a real token of to hold on to forever. But they are there and I a little while ago I thought that the art of making an original cast album I think is lost. It's too easy. They're too easy to make and the quality of the quality of the sound and the quality of the performances on the cast albums as we were growing up, even the flops, they're so magical, they're so theatrical. You can un among one of my lyrics because a lot of cast albums today it's like they're like pop albums. What's the lyric? So anyway, I just had to sort of think Tom Shepherd was probably the last one who really knew how to make albums and not all of his albums, but when he those Sondheim albums, Sweeney Todd and Merrily and the Pathetic overtures are extraordinary.

But again, it was one day in the studio, everybody was there, you knew you had to finish it in that day. Now you can make albums in your living room and the digital, it's funny because I believe that the union rules were that one day, but now I believe that you don't because you paid the cast a week's salary to be on that Sunday in that studio. I gathered now you could do it over a few days.

[48:51] Audience Member: So I bet that's the effect albums we still have our C.

[48:58] Ted Chapin: Yeah hi it's good to see you, Jack. I have a question. I'm so glad you mentioned plays becoming musicals and the transition. And because more plays are now becoming musicals, what do you think is that added something that them becoming a musical can do for the story?

[49:22] Jack Viertel: I think music does all kinds of things for characters and story, and they're not easy to quantify, really. But the easiest one to quantify is that you can come down center stage and sing a soliloquy from Carousel, and the whole world knows exactly how you feel, and you didn't have to like sidle up to a bar and bore a bartender with your story because you were down and singing it. That's all there is to it. But it's more than that. It's that there's a lift into a world into a kind of higher consciousness of what people feel and are feeling, and music makes you feel things that words can't make you feel. And so the opportunities are endless. I think there are probably still stories that don't benefit much from being musicals, but I think almost any story could, if properly handled.

And I'm still surprised when I see certain things that are being made into musicals, and I go, really? You're doing that? But sometimes they're wonderful in the ways that you didn't expect them to be. But there's something about music itself that allows a larger than life, larger than everyday reality to happen. When an audience hears music, something happens to them. It affects a different part of your brain, it affects the whole way you think about time passing in the theater. It's a mysterious art.

[50:42] Jack Viertel: It's funny, it puts me in mind of that. I was driving somewhere recently, and I grabbed the CD, because my car can still take a CD. The pipe dream at Encores that we grabbed, I will say it was that we were it. It was a the Dutch rule at Rodgers and Hammerstein, and they didn't want to spend money for anything, but I convinced them to pay for this to grab the recording live and to make it anyway. It was fun listening to the and what I love listening to things I haven't listened to in a while. And what really struck me was first of all, how great that music is, how great those orchestrations are. John Morris arrangements, who went on to do all the Mel Brooks movies. The music is just great. The lyrics don't do anything other than tell you this isn't not a good musical because they don't know what the story wants to be.

And when they when the songs where it's okay, this is an RH moment, it's about starfish and about tide pools and things. It's like really because it's a story about a place where people don't have anything to do. So they have to make it up anyway. But it's interesting because the music, and I emailed Rob Burman because it's just beautifully conducted and great orchestrations and just done work. I know. I was so glad that we did it. And then in listening to that same album, I think I felt some of this just watching it. When you're in the middle of watching a show that you're the producer of or artistic director of, you'd love it too much. Usually there are certain shows that you can't love too much.

But listening to the album, I thought, this is what's fascinating about this is here are two real geniuses who had five huge blockbuster mortal pits crashing into an embankment. They're just not this isn't gonna work no matter what they're doing, it's not gonna work. And it's fascinating to hear all of that talent and kind of genius expended on this hopeless effort to make this thing work that can't work.

[52:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I listened to that album all day. I was very impressed. I think it's great. So if you could snap your fingers and restore a theater that no longer exists, that's say it was demolished in the last 75 years. What would you add?

[52:54] Jack Viertel: I think the original Helen Hayes, which was not originally called the Helen Hayes, but I remember it being very glamorous, not in great shape, but very glamorous. I think it was a two-balcony house, and I saw four or five shows there before they knocked it down. It was really beautiful. The Morosco, which was I guess across the street or around the corner, was a theater that many important shows played in, but it was always a plain rap theater. So I think I would say the Hayes. But then there are theaters that I was never in from a million years ago, like the Hippodrome. I wonder what the Hippodrome looked like. But I can't really go into that because I have no knowledge of them, but they're legendary and tremendous.

[53:35] Ted Chapin: Did you go to the Ziegfeld?

[53:37] Jack Viertel: Yes, I saw three or four things at the Ziegfeld. See, I got sick. I was gonna go see Anya or one of whatever those one I never saw. I saw there, yes.

[53:43] Ted Chapin: Was that a brilliant theater?

[53:45] Jack Viertel: It was a great theater, it was huge. It felt like a barn in a way. I saw Foxy there, I saw a special, I thought two specialty shows that played limited engagements. One of them was Jack Benny, and I think the leading act was Senior Wences. And one of them I think was Danny Kaye. Anyway, yeah, it was just a going theater in those days, but suddenly it wasn't there.

[54:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, in Nevada.

[54:09] Jack Viertel: Yeah. Make a musical of Broadway Melody.

[54:13] Ted Chapin: I don't think you can make a musical of Broadway Melody because it covers so much time. It covers 50 years. But you might make a musical of some piece of it if you were smart enough to figure out which piece. No, me. Anybody wants to option it? I'm here. I'm gonna call my lawyer.

[54:26] Jack Viertel: But you could do a 54 Below evening and hit some of the songs that you talk about.

[54:31] Ted Chapin: We're doing that. We're doing that on November 11th, I think. We're even gonna sing there's a long section in the book, not that long, but long-ish, about how this woman, Aurora Shelton, who's the leading lady, gets a new song written for her in Nowhere to Go, but it's out of town. We decided we would write that song. So I asked Glenn Kelly, who arranged all the music for The Producers and Young Frankenstein and many other shows, and who's a friend, to write me a song called Out of Sight, Out of Mind, which he proceeded to do. So we're gonna that will be a world premiere song. In a six in an early 60s style.

[55:11] Jack Viertel: I would have gotten that wrong in the game because I thought that was a song from The Wheel.

[55:15] Ted Chapin: Actually, no, you're right. It is a song, but it's not a very good song.

[55:17] Jack Viertel: Okay, so I just have the title. That's great. And it was sung by Bert Convy in the original.

[55:23] Ted Chapin: Okay. Who was one of the Cheers?

[55:26] Jack Viertel: And his black denim trousers and motorcycle boots. Is that what did the Cheers do? Something. And then he was in Cabaret, I guess.

[55:38] Ted Chapin: No, he's not a quiz show guy. He was in Skyscraper for God's sake. He's one of us.

[55:47] Jack Viertel: I'm no fan of the lunch.

[55:46] Ted Chapin: Oh no.

[55:47] Jack Viertel: Too deep. Too long a balcony.

[55:53] Ted Chapin: First theater I was ever was in the reverse in there, but then play there.

[55:58] Jack Viertel: Yeah, but it's long. Wasn't that a movie theater or something?

[56:01] Ted Chapin: It's long and it's the long and thin, and yeah, the entrance was like a shoebox. So is the Wilson for that matter.

[56:07] Jack Viertel: But all right, anything else?

[56:12] Ted Chapin: I think that's a good thing. Oh, I was curious. You had mentioned the Martin Beck had its own orchestra.

[56:20] Jack Viertel: Was that just that typical? Ted may know more about this than I did, but I think union rules provided that you had to have an entire orchestra at that time. But you had to have a certain amount of union musicians who belonged to that theater. And I think you could hire around them, depending on what the orchestration called for. But they were committed to that theater. They were just not all of them, but I think you had by the time we got to West Side Story or in the 50s, there were four musicians in every theater who belonged to that theater. And if you did a musical in that theater, you used those four musicians whether you wanted to or not. And there's a story in the book which I think is true, was told to me by reliable people who don't know if it's true for sure, that when Bernstein was writing West Side Story, he went to the Winter Garden to see whatever was playing there.

I forget what it was, and he thought the two union viola players were so terrible that he and his orchestrators gathered together and said, Whatever you do, there's no violas in the score because if there were no violas, then you didn't have to hire those two guys.

[57:28] Ted Chapin: Yeah, no, and it's it. I also know that orchestrators have today have very particular players they would like to use, and sometimes they're not allowed to because somebody else is making that decision. Julie Stein had a trumpet player. I forgot his name, but he was if you listen to Julie Stein's overtures, there's always that moment where the trumpet player gets his little moment, and it's always the same trumpet player.

[57:50] Jack Viertel: Right. God love it. All right. I think that's a fantastic story to close out on. Thank you so much.

[58:04] Ted Chapin: And welcome back from our journey into Broadway with Broadway Melody.

[58:08] Jack Viertel: Yes. The maybe one day soon it'd be a musical. And if any of you out there listening agree after hearing Jack talk about the book that it should be a musical, hands off.

[58:18] Ted Chapin: Yes, you do have dibs on the club.

[58:20] Jack Viertel: I call dibs. That's important.

[58:22] Ted Chapin: It's important. But that's an industry standard calling dibs. That's how I've got all my words by calling dibs.

[58:28] Jack Viertel: That's how Maury Eston got Phantom.

[58:30] Ted Chapin: And Titanic.

[58:31] Jack Viertel: Yes. James Cameron who.

[58:36] Ted Chapin: Anyway, we're gonna be.

[58:37] Jack Viertel: Titanic the Musical opened on Broadway something like eight months before Titanic the Movie opened. Just saying.

[58:43] Ted Chapin: And I am a huge fan of but I do love. I may have done a before PowerPoint. Like back in the day in high school, whatever we use hyper studio, something like that. It was a Mac thing. We had to do some kind of presentation, and mine was on Titanic the Musical.

[59:00] Jack Viertel: Yes.

[59:01] Ted Chapin: Yes. And it wasn't like it wasn't a theater class either. So like they were just gobsmacked with whatever. But it was good enough that they were like, when the teacher said, Does anyone want to see one of these again? They were like, Can we see the Titanic one again? And I was like, all right, so I'll do the Titanic one.

[59:14] Jack Viertel: Nice.

[59:14] Ted Chapin: There you go. Hope you got extra credit for that.

[59:16] Jack Viertel: I did.

[59:17] Ted Chapin: Good. Good. Let's switch gears from Broadway and delve into a general theater and film term.

[59:22] Jack Viertel: Yeah.

[59:23] Ted Chapin: And that is intimacy.

[59:24] Jack Viertel: Yeah.

[59:25] Ted Chapin: And it's I'm so glad that we have this book and the handful of other books that currently exist on staging intimacy, because it is so relatively new in the industry. Truly, unfortunately, that even I only started working here in 2022. For a little while, people would come in and ask about these kind of books, and they didn't exist yet.

[59:59] Jack Viertel: Yeah, there was only like one.

[1:00:01] Ted Chapin: And I yeah, I think at one point we found one and we were like, let's order it, because it's the only one out there. And since then we've had a couple, but let's delve into that.

[1:00:09] Jack Viertel: Yeah.

[1:00:10] Ted Chapin: And our next episode. And we're looking forward to delving into the intimacy coordinators guidebook, specialties for stage and screen. So remember to follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast. Please do subscribe to the Drama Bookshop on Eventbrite so that you'll be alerted anytime we add an event to our calendar. Leave us a comment or rating and help us raise in the ranks of the world of podcasts.

[1:00:35] Jack Viertel: Yes, please do. And remember everything we talk about can be found here at the Drama Bookshop. And so can we. And we will see you at the bookshop.