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[0:00] Jackson Klein: The Ensemblist is brought to you in part by our Patreon members, including Cat Hicks, Cheryl Hodges-Seldon, Christian Rehnke, Christopher Gurr, Colin Elijah, and Emily Chen. You can join them in supporting The Ensemblist for as little as $5 a month. Find out how at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome. I'm Jackson Klein.

[0:53] Jackson Klein: Welcome back to our re-release of Season 4 of The Ensemblist, Broadway at Every Stage. In this series, co-creators Mo Brady and Nika Graf Lanzarone sat down with six seasoned Broadway actors to dive into their decades-long careers. They discussed getting started in the theater, the ups and downs of life on the stage, and their longevity in show business. In our final installment of this series, we're sharing our favorite moments from our interview with Bob Stillman. Bob first appeared on Broadway in 1988's Legs Diamond, although his role was cut during the show's 72 previews. Bob has since performed on Broadway in Grand Hotel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Dirty Blonde, Souvenir, Grey Gardens, Act One, It's Only a Play, and Living on Love.

Also a composer and musician, he's written music for both Urban Cowboy and Dirty Blonde. Bob is a Tony Award nominee for his contributions to the score of Urban Cowboy, as well as for his performance in Dirty Blonde. Here's our conversation.

[2:04] Bob Stillman: I am Bob Stillman, and I live on the Upper West Side. I went to Princeton because I fell in love with Princeton. I went there thinking that I would not go into music because to me, music at that point was playing the piano. But then after a couple of years, that was what I loved. So I had the great good fortune to be assigned one of those Princeton composers whose name was J.K. Randall to be my thesis advisor. He said, so what do you think you want to do for your thesis? And I said, well, I don't know. I guess write a 12-tone piece. And he said, uh-huh. Let me ask you something. Why? I said, I don't know. Isn't that what I'm supposed to do? He said, well, let me ask something else. What would you like to do?

And I said, well, these friends of mine are doing a production of an original musical, and they just lost their composer. It was an original adaptation of Liszt's Strada. And he goes, well, now, hey. So I was like the first student at Princeton to write a musical for his senior thesis. And I orchestrated it and conducted it. So it turned out in this weird way, kind of being right where I needed to be, but it was a very circuitous route.

[3:05] Bob Stillman: There was such a thing as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, otherwise known as CETA, which was designed by the federal government to create employment in chronically underemployed professions. In 1978, which was the year I moved in, they expanded it to include the arts. And this friend of mine, he had put together a Jewish theater company at Princeton that was very sort of story theater, put together an application for a grant to create 50 jobs. And the American Jewish Congress picked it up, and it was approved. And he asked me if I would be the singer. He had created a spot for four musicians and a singer because he knew this klezmer band that was very interested in having a secure job for a year.

So I was waiting for that job to start. And all of a sudden that band pulled out. They didn't want to do it. So Stephen came to me and said, would you like to run the music ensemble for this whole thing and put the music thing together? So I ended up being like the leader of this thing. This job ended up lasting two and a half years. And we went all over the city and did, you know, the kind of thing that you do. You sing in schools and nursing homes and stuff. And then when that ended, I started playing the piano in piano bars. It's just fascinating to look back and see the two tracks that I was on for a while, the piano playing and the acting. I got my first equity job at the public theater because some guy who heard me singing in this piano bar submitted me for Liz Suedo's show The Haggadah.

And I was cast as a swing in that. I was covering six people, went on for five of them. And then from there, I just alternated between theater jobs and piano playing jobs until in the 90s, I started getting piano playing acting roles. And that has become now a big thing for me.

[4:52] Bob Stillman: So I had just done the thing at the public theater and I auditioned for the international tour of West Side Story. Now, you have to understand, I had always wanted to be Tony. So I auditioned for the international tour and was cast as cover. And before I had that audition, I had been hired to open a new nightclub in Southampton that was like a piano bar slash nightclub. I would be playing the piano and singing six hours a night, six nights a week. So I took the job. And now I had to go back out to Southampton and I had to tell them that I was leaving. And they were furious. I started on a Monday at 10 a.m. in New York. So the track that I was in was not just covering Tony. He was also in certain parts of certain numbers, one of which was the big prologue.

In the Frack of the Track section of the prologue, there are these leap frogs. So we did leapfrog after leapfrog after leapfrog. And then at one point I just did a leapfrog and I went over just a little bit too far and landed smack on my elbow. I'm clearly hurt. Go to the doctor. Turns out it's a hairline fracture, which means I can't lift anything. And I had to lift Maria to be the Tony Understudy. So I asked him, I said, well, what about playing the piano? He said, well, you can play the piano if you're careful. I called the people out of this club and I said, can I come back? And they said, yes. I went back out to Southampton, spent two summers playing the piano out there, which was my original instinct because I had never had that kind of a pop piano playing gig that would require that many hours and it would give me that much experience. And the stuff in Dirty Blonde that was the show that I got nominated for, I did these huge stride piano arrangements because I had a running start. So you just never know.

[6:41] Bob Stillman: 1986, we do this six performance workshop of Legs Diamond. I was cast as Peter Allen's younger brother. I had this song called Gentleman Out on a Spree. Unbelievably beautiful song. I mean, if you had sat down to write a song for me and my voice, it was bespoke for me. I got this part. And after two out of the six performances, the song was cut. But I still had another song. It was a major part. I was playing his kid brother. We went into crime together and we sang this big song and dance number. So then cut to a year and a little more later is 1988. And we're now opening on Broadway. Originally, the plot involved a love triangle between me, Christine Andreas and Peter Allen. After two weeks of previews, they wrote Christine out.

So that took out the love triangle thing, but it left the partner in crime plot. The show was supposed to open on December 1st. So what ended up happening was that we ended up extending previews to the point where opening night was now, I think, the 23rd. But on December 1st, there's a knock on my door as I'm getting out of costume and I open it and it's the director and Harvey Fierstein, who was writing the book at that time. The director said, I wanted to tell you myself. And they explained that they wanted to give Peter more chance to talk to the audience and that they were trying a different tack because the show was in trouble and they needed it. And I said, OK, well, I just move. I don't know how I'm going to afford my new rent.

And the director said, oh, no, no, no, no. We have to pay you. You have a run of the play contract. And I went, oh, well, OK. So the show ran through February. And when they closed, they invited me and Christine Andreas to sing the songs that had been cut. And I went and I sang at this party. And at the end of it, Joey Parnes came up to me, who is the general manager, and he said, have you auditioned for Grand Hotel? And I said, no, I've been trying to. He said, I'll get you in. And so that's how I got Grand Hotel. So you just never know.

[8:40] Bob Stillman: I had just done the original Hello Again.

[8:43] Bob Stillman: Swung in that and then I went and did a kids show in Orlando for two seasons, Allegra's Window, which is a Nick Jr. show at the time with puppets. If there's one thing my life has taught me, remember this kids, it's that every time I decide something, it doesn't happen. The stuff that I would have thought would never go anywhere has turned into just glorious stuff. Spider-Woman was just an audition I went to. Howard McGillin was playing Melina. Because they were so busy putting me into the chorus track, they did not have time to rehearse me for Melina. And I was just absolutely on it. And it turned out that the day of my first understudy rehearsal that Howard called in sick. And I went on, never having had to put in or whatever.

And it was just fabulous. That was a great experience. I went on a lot. Howard took a vacation. I went out and I did another season of the kids show. And they liked me enough that they asked me back and tickets weren't selling. It was great. So we were sort of limping along and Howard gave his notice. And I think I was supposed to take over on June 1st or something like that. The day I was supposed to take over the role was the day we closed. So by way of understanding what can happen in this world, that's a good one. I really like making things. And whatever is called for, even if I don't dig it at first, I'm going to try to find a way to see why other people do dig it and figure out this guy's vision who's running this thing and asking me to do this.

How can we make that work? And how can I bring what I do and have it meet this request in a way that makes sense out of it for both me and the person who's asking me to do it? I was nominated for a Tony for Dirty Blonde. There were three people in the cast, Claudia Shearer, who wrote it, Kevin Chamberlain and I, we all were nominated. James Lapine had had an idea to write something about Mae West, something about a man and a woman both dressed up as Mae West kissing, which is the final tableau of the show. And he had seen Claudia Shearer's blown sideways through life and he contacted her. So they started working on this thing together. He called me up and said that he was doing a workshop up on Martha's Vineyard and they needed somebody who could play the piano and do some narration.

So I went up and did this workshop. It was in no kind of shape. I thought, well, that's not going anywhere. And then I got this call. Well, we're doing it at New York Theatre Workshop. I thought, really? But she had rewritten it. I did all the arrangements. I wrote a song for Mae West's club act and he wanted it to be called the title, Dirty Blonde. It was a thrill. But I watched them chip away at a line here and a line there, maybe cut one scene, maybe reorder a scene, maybe put something ahead of something else. There was this one night when they changed one line. They took three words out. All of a sudden, the whole play resonated. These three words that were gone, it became not just a little entertainment.

It was a play and it was deep and profound. And from there on in, it made perfect sense to me. And again, I wouldn't have bet money on it. I am now looking back on my life and the show that got me a freaking Tony nomination was a show that I was hired to do because I played the piano. Once they hired me to play the piano in it, they realized, oh, he can act and oh, he can play character parts and be funny. And so understand that if I hadn't had the piano thing, that that major event in my life would have never happened. There was a workshop of Urban Cowboy and Chase Mishkin, the producer who had worked on Dirty Blonde, hired me for the workshop to sing as like a pit singer type of thing. They took those people out of the production when it moved.

But then Chase asked me if I would write a song. They needed an opening number. So I said, sure. So I wrote this song and I didn't have to make any revisions. I sent it in and she liked it. And it's the opening number of Urban Cowboy, the musical. And then Urban Cowboy, the musical didn't get any Tony nominations except for Best Score. Technically, I got a Tony nomination for that. But the person who really deserved that was Jeff Blumenkranz. The last time I covered it was in It's Only a Play. I mean, I was covering three major stars, all of whom were very different from one another. I watched Nathan Lane like a hawk every night to just see the mechanics of what he does, because he is a lexicon.

He is the Baryshnikov of comedy. He knows seven different flavors of double takes. So I studied it and it was so good for me, even though, of course, when I went on, I wasn't Nathan, but it was comedy school for me. And that kind of thing where all three of those parts were good parts and you just get the experience of doing the thing. I went on a lot and that joy of being on the stage side of those kind of waves of laughter, it continues your education. I think the theater is in a good place right now. I think that the combination of respect for small theaters and quirky places where things might start, if you look at Great Comet, I think it's an incredibly amazing thing that this year we had both Indecent and Sweat, even though they didn't last, that those two plays were on Broadway.

It's so rare that you get that sense of what it maybe was like back in the golden age of plays when people went and sat in the theater and saw something about their lives. I think that we're now living also in an age where casting is opening up and the diversity in casting is a wonderful thing. And we're living in a golden age of singers who can act, especially women. I mean, it's just unbelievable the acting that goes on from people who are also killing it vocally. Musically speaking, it still takes so long to get a musical up and costs so much money to get a musical up that there's always going to be risk aversion there. There are people who are finding a groove to write about life now in a musical language that people speak because I think there's a language in indie rock right now that is actually very adaptable to musical theater because it's not overpoweringly electric.

And Evan Hansen is a perfect example of that. Those guys speak that language. And to come up with that plot, which to me is so incredibly plausible, and find that cast is... I'm financially secure now, and that changes everything. Like, I know I'm not gonna lose my apartment. I'm teaching here at Manhattan School, and I've gotten all that worked out. So I'm more likely to find that joy and that enthusiasm and that quality of being a student in everything that I do. It's like, okay, yeah, I can do this. I have time to do it. They pay me something. This is good. Let's do it. Part of that wanting to be everything for everybody is that panic that you just need a job. Although I have to tell you that when I got the call to audition to cover Nathan, Matthew, and Murray, I literally said, you've got to be out of your mind.

And I turned it down. And then they called me back and said, just come in for it. And I walked out of the audition and I thought it was the most ridiculous thing. And I saw Al Silver right afterwards. I said, I just haven't auditioned so ludicrous that I think I'm going to get it. But there again, I wasn't trying that hard. I thought, okay, you really want to see me? I'll come in. I was off the hook. Being off the hook is a wonderful thing. You don't have that desperation. The financial stress can distort your emotions in very bad ways. And that's just natural. When you don't get a job that you really wanted, just build in a huge grain of salt to your angst, to your anguish, to your remorse and your self-criticism, because you have no idea whether that job would have been good, whether that show will even get produced.

That has happened to me so many times that that is one thing I no longer care as much about. I believe that life is bigger than that. My purpose is bigger than that. It's still really hard when it happens.