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[0:00] Ken Davenport: I wanna be a producer with a hit show on Broadway.

[0:07] Ken Davenport: I wanna be a producer.

[0:10] Ken Davenport: You're listening to the Producers Perspective Podcast.

[0:13] Ken Davenport: This week the show is sponsored by Hand to God, the most Tony nominated new American play on Broadway.

[0:18] Ken Davenport: The New York Times calls Hand to God flat out hilarious and a true tour de force.

[0:23] Ken Davenport: And the Huffington Post raves, it's the best play of the season.

[0:25] Ken Davenport: For tickets, visit Telecharge.com and now on with the podcast.

[0:30] Ken Davenport: Hello, everyone.

[0:31] Ken Davenport: Welcome back to the Producers Perspective Podcast.

[0:34] Ken Davenport: I am Ken Davenport, and boy oh boy, do I have a good one for you today?

[0:39] Ken Davenport: Usually I record my podcast with my guests sitting just a few feet away from me, but I'm recording this podcast via Skype because my guest is thousands of miles away from me across an ocean in jolly old England.

[0:52] Ken Davenport: And that guest is none other than the Academy Award winning, Golden Globe Award winning, Tony Award winning, and Grammy Award winning lyricist Sir Timothy Rice.

[1:02] Ken Davenport: Welcome, Tim.

[1:04] Tim Rice: Thank you, Ken.

[1:05] Ken Davenport: Usually at this point in the podcast, I'd list some of the shows that my guest has been associated with.

[1:11] Ken Davenport: But in Tim's case, I thought it'd be fun to just list some of the lyrics of the shows that he's written.

[1:17] Ken Davenport: Like, oh, I don't know, Don't Cry for Me, Argentina, What's the Buzz, Tell Me What's Happening?

[1:23] Ken Davenport: I Can Show You The World.

[1:24] Ken Davenport: I mean, these are some of the most iconic and identifiable lyrics in the canon of musical theater history.

[1:29] Ken Davenport: We're talking shows like Joseph, Evita, Chess, all the Disney stuff, Aladdin, Lion King, etc.

[1:35] Ken Davenport: Tim has got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

[1:37] Ken Davenport: He's in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

[1:39] Ken Davenport: And yes, you heard me correctly.

[1:41] Ken Davenport: He is Sir Timothy Rice because he was knighted by Helen Mirren.

[1:45] Ken Davenport: Okay.

[1:46] Ken Davenport: He was actually knighted by Queen Elizabeth the Second, but you get the audience joke.

[1:50] Ken Davenport: So, Tim, as a young lad, did you dream about being a lyricist?

[1:56] Ken Davenport: How did this all happen?

[1:58] Tim Rice: I don't think I ever thought about writing songs as a career until I was doing it.

[2:06] Tim Rice: And it came about by accident.

[2:08] Tim Rice: I was trying to sell a tape of myself singing in a desperate attempt to become a pop singer in the swinging sixties.

[2:16] Tim Rice: And nobody liked the voice.

[2:19] Tim Rice: But in order to sell my obviously not very good voice, I wrote one or two songs, tunes as well as words.

[2:27] Tim Rice: And to my amazement, one record company liked one of the songs, and they recorded it with one of their groups.

[2:33] Tim Rice: It wasn't a hit, but it made me think maybe I should stick to songwriting rather than trying to be a singer.

[2:38] Tim Rice: And then through doing that, through writing pop songs, I met Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was doing a similar sort of thing, but he was trying to write for the theatre.

[2:48] Tim Rice: And he was 17, I was twenty, I think, or nineteen or twenty.

[2:53] Tim Rice: And we were two struggling songwriters, each needing the other half because I was better at the words and he was better at the music.

[3:01] Ken Davenport: And what was the first thing you wrote together?

[3:04] Tim Rice: Well, it was a musical based on the life of Dr. Thomas Bernardo, who was a Victorian philanthropist, very well known in England, setting up the Bernardo's homes.

[3:14] Tim Rice: He may well be known in America as well, I'm not sure.

[3:17] Tim Rice: But he was a do-gooder in Victorian times, and set up this huge empire.

[3:27] Tim Rice: I mean, it was an empire, it's an empire now, but he founded Dr. Bernardo's Homes for Orphaned Children, which was a good thing to do, and we wrote this musical based on his life, and it was really very influenced by Oliver, the great Lionel Bart musical, and it was set in London in the 19th century, and it had the aristocrats and the street urchins and the prostitutes with hearts of gold and everything.

[3:52] Tim Rice: It was a bit too like Oliver.

[3:54] Tim Rice: But it was the first thing we had a go at, and it taught us we could write together, even though it also taught us we shouldn't copy quite so blatantly.

[4:02] Ken Davenport: And what was the do you remember the first lyric that you wrote?

[4:08] Tim Rice: Yeah.

[4:09] Tim Rice: What was it?

[4:10] Tim Rice: Great.

[4:10] Tim Rice: I was gonna.

[4:25] Tim Rice: And the first two lines I wrote to any tune of Andrew's was by this auctioneer, who's a very minor character in the show.

[4:33] Tim Rice: And he sings, Here I have a lovely parrot, sound in wind and limb.

[4:37] Tim Rice: I can guarantee that there is nothing wrong with him.

[4:41] Tim Rice: So the funny lyrics I found easier.

[4:44] Tim Rice: I'm not saying necessarily that was a breakthrough in musical theatre, but that particular song called Going Going Gone was actually quite funny.

[4:53] Tim Rice: But some of the ballads, some of the love songs I wasn't so hot on at that time.

[4:59] Ken Davenport: And tell me about the first big success you had, or the moment when you and Andrew were like, Oh, oh, we're on to something here.

[5:08] Tim Rice: This is gonna be well, it was strange because we had an agent and we were working on this musical with Bernardo.

[5:08] Tim Rice: And we really thought it was good enough to make it onto the stage, and certainly one or two things that are worse had made it onto the stage, but it really wasn't all that good, and I think if it had got on, it would have been a bit of a disaster and perhaps might have set us back.

[5:32] Tim Rice: As it was, it didn't get on, and we'd made a demo disc of it, and the reason, I mean the great benefit that Dr. Bernardo gave us this musical was that a lot that a few friends heard this demo disc.

[5:47] Tim Rice: And the reason we got going was one of our friends is a schoolmaster, and he said, While you're waiting for your Dr. Bernardo musical to go to Broadway and the West End and all that, which obviously it will any minute, while you're waiting, would you like to write something for my kids' end-of-term school concert?

[6:03] Tim Rice: And he asked us to write something for his children, and it was to be performed once in front of parents, and the only carrot, the only lure we had, the only incentive really, apart from the fun of doing something, was that it might appeal to educational music publishers, and it could become something that schools would do.

[6:23] Tim Rice: And the piece we wrote was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and we did it at the school concert, and it was a huge success, and it was done again because it was so popular with the kids, and we realized that perhaps we'd done something slightly original as opposed to the attempts to copy Lionel Bart.

[6:44] Tim Rice: And it took some time to get professionals interested in it, but we had a very good review by sheer luck in a major London newspaper because what we didn't know is one of the little boys in the choir, his father was the music critic of the Sunday Times, and he reviewed without being asked to, we didn't even know he was there.

[7:05] Tim Rice: He reviewed one of the school concerts we did and said, This is absolutely wonderful, and watch out for these two guys.

[7:11] Tim Rice: And as a result of that, we got ourselves a proper manager who backed us financially.

[7:15] Tim Rice: And then we sat down with three years in effect to make it because we had three years guaranteed pay from our agent, stroke manager David Land.

[7:25] Tim Rice: And the first thing we did was Jesus Christ Superstar.

[7:29] Ken Davenport: It's amazing.

[7:30] Ken Davenport: I hear so many people struggling so much to get critics to see their shows that you didn't even know he was there and he helped launch your career.

[7:40] Ken Davenport: I love it.

[7:41] Tim Rice: Well, we didn't even try and get critics because it was a school concert.

[7:45] Tim Rice: What we tried to do was to get educational music publishers along to see Joseph.

[7:50] Tim Rice: And they didn't turn up.

[7:51] Tim Rice: But as soon as it was the review in the Sunday Times, they were ringing up saying, Oh, can we can we hear this piece?

[7:57] Tim Rice: We know we'd like to publish it.

[7:59] Tim Rice: So we were very lucky.

[8:00] Tim Rice: But if we just, even if we'd asked the critics of the Sunday Times and, you know, other music critics, I doubt whether they would have come along to a school concert.

[8:10] Ken Davenport: And that first musical you wrote, did anything ever happen to it, or did you both put it on the shelf?

[8:15] Tim Rice: It, some of the tunes found their way into other shows.

[8:19] Tim Rice: The tunes, I think, looking back on it were stronger than the music, but even the tunes, Andrew would admit this, were a bit derivative in style, not, you know, melodically, but in style, they were very much sort of mishmash of Richard Rogers and Lionel Bart, which is a pretty good mishmash to have.

[8:35] Tim Rice: And we did it again, we did it again, we did it for the first time at a small festival Andrew gave at his home in 2005, which was 40 years after it was written, and the British actor Stephen Fry acted as a narrator, and I was in it, I was the auctioneer singing about parrots, and we had a good West End cast, and we did it as a bit tongue in cheek, and the audience loved it, and it's now available.

[9:05] Tim Rice: You can get it on an album.

[9:07] Tim Rice: It came out as a double CD and it's got a funny sort of running through commentary stroke narration, in which half the narration is about how the show was never quite finished, and the other half was about the actual plot of the show.

[9:22] Tim Rice: So it's an entertaining album.

[9:23] Tim Rice: I would warmly recommend it.

[9:24] Tim Rice: It's called The Likes of Us, and you can probably dig it up on Amazon.

[9:27] Tim Rice: I smell it, and it has been done in a few schools since. One or two schools have done it, and I've been to see one, you know, the odd production in a school, and actually it works, it's quite fun.

[9:39] Ken Davenport: I smell a revival coming soon.

[9:41] Tim Rice: I don't think it's good enough to go to the West End.

[9:44] Tim Rice: I thought that in 1966, but I don't think it now.

[9:47] Ken Davenport: Tell me a little bit about your process for writing lyrics.

[9:50] Ken Davenport: I mean, we hear all these things about some people, music first, lyrics first.

[9:54] Ken Davenport: What's your process when, oh, I have to write a song for, oh, I don't know, Mary Magdalene at this moment in her life?

[10:01] Tim Rice: Well, the first step is to get the story right.

[10:06] Tim Rice: The story is the key to any musical.

[10:08] Tim Rice: I believe that very strongly.

[10:10] Tim Rice: It's even more important than the score.

[10:12] Tim Rice: And really, we chose with both Joseph and Superstar, we chose very good stories, which we didn't basically write.

[10:20] Tim Rice: We had to reconstruct them, but they were wonderful stories.

[10:24] Tim Rice: And therefore, you had to get the detail of the scene as well.

[10:29] Tim Rice: You've got to make sure that you know what the character has to say before you start writing a word, and even before we start writing a note of the music.

[10:37] Tim Rice: So the modus operandi for most of the shows I've worked on has been get the story right, get the scene right, know who's in the scene and what they have to say, then the composer does a tune, knowing what the tune has to convey, and then I write the lyrics to the tune.

[10:53] Tim Rice: That's more or less the way that's always gone, except with Elton, who famously likes the lyrics first.

[10:59] Tim Rice: So, but again, with the Lion King, which is the first time I worked on a major thing with Elton, the key thing was to get the story correct, and that took a long time because there was a new story, and I was working on the story with the script writers, and I would then submit lyrics to Elton, and then a tune would come back.

[11:19] Tim Rice: But it was always the story has to be the key.

[11:21] Ken Davenport: So most of the time you're actually last.

[11:24] Tim Rice: Lyrics are last.

[11:25] Ken Davenport: Yeah.

[11:26] Tim Rice: So for a while you're the only, I was the only person in the world who'd heard Don't Cry for Me Argentina, briefly.

[11:31] Tim Rice: Then I took it to Andrew, he was the second person to hear it.

[11:33] Tim Rice: But of course, with Elton, if I send Elton the lyric, he's the first person to hear the finished song, and then he sends me a CD or an MP3 or whatever, in those days, it was probably a cassette.

[11:46] Ken Davenport: So let's back up a little bit because there's just an interesting moment there.

[11:50] Ken Davenport: You said you were the first person or the only person in the world to ever hear Don't Cry for Me Argentina, because you're last.

[11:56] Tim Rice: So those songs come, the story comes, the tune comes, you write the lyrics, "Don't Cry for Me Argentina," you sit down and you sing it, I assume.

[11:56] Ken Davenport: You sing.

[12:05] Tim Rice: Well, I sing it to myself. Um obviously that's quite a difficult song to sing, and also I'm the wrong sex for it.

[12:11] Tim Rice: Um, although actually quite a few blokes have had a go at it. Um yes, I mean the point is it's just an interesting thought that whenever I've written the lyrics to a song to a tune, briefly I'm the only person in the world who's heard the finished song.

[12:27] Tim Rice: Now, a lot of the finished songs aren't very good, and often I'm the only person who hears the finished song. But with something like "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" or "A Whole New World," I was very briefly the only person who heard the finished song. So it's quite exciting, I suppose.

[12:44] Ken Davenport: And did you know when you've hit it out of the park like that?

[12:47] Tim Rice: When? Not really. I think you know when something works artistically, but whether or not it will work commercially is in the lap of the gods. We never for one minute thought that "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" would be a hit song outside the concept of the show.

[13:04] Tim Rice: It was written as a scene in the show; it was not written as a single. And I think if we had tried to write a hit single for that scene, it wouldn't have been half as good. But we wrote a song which was really a political statement, and furthermore, an insincere political statement.

[13:19] Tim Rice: It was almost meant to be a string of clichés put together with a beautiful tune. It's rather like politicians. You know, they try and make what they say sound fantastic, but actually, if you analyze what they're saying, it's bollocks, usually.

[13:35] Ken Davenport: Fascinating. Now I often say that a success of a writer is not only the writing itself, but also choosing what projects to write. And early on in your career, how did you pick the shows? With Andrew, what was your process for like this show versus this one or these ideas?

[13:53] Tim Rice: Well, the idea is very, very important, obviously. And when I met Andrew, he was already beginning work on the Bernardo story, so that was one I bought into quite happily. Although in retrospect, I don't think it was a particularly good idea because it didn't immediately have a brand image, as we say these days.

[14:12] Tim Rice: And I think a show has much, much more chance of success if people know something about it before, whether it's based on a film, whether it's based on a hit record, or whether it's about a famous person. So to that extent, the story of Joseph and the story of Jesus were pretty good choices.

[14:29] Tim Rice: They were great stories. Why we chose them, I don't know. Joseph really we were commissioned by a schoolmaster, and we decided to go for something that would have appeal that wouldn't date, that maybe other schools would do eventually, and that led us to the history or Bible, the Bible, and that was my favorite Bible story as a kid.

[14:52] Tim Rice: And "Superstar," I was always fascinated by the character of Judas Iscariot, and originally the piece was really meant to be more about Judas than Jesus, but in fact, it's about Jesus but seen through the eyes of Judas.

[14:52] Tim Rice: Eva Perón, I just heard the story, her life story or a little bit of it on a radio program. And I didn't really know very much about her, but I thought, wow, this is a very interesting character. I'd heard about her; I knew she was Argentine, I knew she was dead, but I didn't know much more, and it was the fact that I was so intrigued by this radio program about somebody I didn't know much about.

[15:16] Tim Rice: I thought, well, maybe this is a good idea for a show, and it turned out to be the Disney ideas on the whole of them were there. I mean, that was part of Disney, so it was their choices.

[15:39] Ken Davenport: But I'm happy to be a hired hand occasionally. So tell me about that difference that, you know, obviously you've worked for a lot of independent producers at the beginning of your career, and even in, but then you've started obviously working for big giant corporate behemoths like Disney. What's the difference?

[15:55] Tim Rice: Well, it's an enormous difference in the fact that if it's your baby from the start, like if you came up with the idea, and if you can keep control of it before you bring in too many producers and directors and all that, then you have much more control, as we did with "Superstar" and "Joseph" and "Evita" in particular, because it was our baby, each of them we were working on, and nobody was that interested in telling us how to do it because nobody thought they'd be hits.

[16:27] Tim Rice: And one of the best ways to avoid interference is to be unsuccessful, or at least to be waiting for success. Once you become successful, and this is weird, it's a paradox that I've often been baffled by, that the longer I go on in my career, and I've done all right, you know, I've had quite a few successes, the more people tell me how to do my job.

[16:47] Tim Rice: And when you're working with a big company like Disney and it's their bat and ball, frankly, you have to go along with it. But in the end, you can usually prevail.

[16:56] Tim Rice: I mean, I remember "Can You Feel the Love Tonight." I had so many people trying to rewrite that one. And in the film of "Evita," there were people trying to change things all the time, and you just say, well, hang on, it's worked so far. Why do you need to alter it?

[17:09] Tim Rice: Um, but you've got to have a bit of confidence and occasionally fight changes, but sometimes people are right. You have to get the other possibility, the ghastly possibility that you might not be the only person who's right.

[17:20] Tim Rice: But it's much more satisfying, I think, in a way, to run your own shooting match. But of course, you haven't got that protective shield or that sort of financial cushion if things go wrong, if you're bearing the brunt of it yourself.

[17:38] Tim Rice: The more successful you get, the more people tell you how to do your job.

[17:42] Ken Davenport: I love that. Absolutely, that's so true.

[17:44] Tim Rice: Well, you see, the thing is people don't think you'll be successful. I mean, I think even after "Superstar," people thought we were one-hit wonders, or two-hit wonders if you count "Joseph," which was coming up on the rails at that point.

[17:56] Tim Rice: Um, so nobody really thought. I mean, when we said we were doing a thing on Eva Perón, nobody said, right, guys, here's a theatre, let's get going. They just let us get on with it.

[18:06] Tim Rice: And we did the album in England of the entire piece with the socking great orchestra and singers and everything, and we did what we wanted. We didn't have to worry about a director or producer or anything.

[18:17] Tim Rice: When the album was a big hit in England and "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" was a big hit song, then we got other people on board. But it was difficult for them to make too many changes because the record had been so successful without them.

[18:31] Tim Rice: I mean, there were some changes made for the stage of "Evita" because, well, I mean, and I think correctly, but just one or two songs were changed.

[18:40] Tim Rice: But "Superstar" was unchanged from the original album. But you know, everything else I've done to a great extent has been mucked around with by others, and sometimes profitably.

[18:53] Ken Davenport: One of the things I love about looking at all of the shows that you've done is you've worked with such a variety of composers from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Alan Menken to Björn Ulvaeus to Elton John.

[19:04] Tim Rice: Yeah.

[19:05] Ken Davenport: Which one's your favorite? Tell us now.

[19:09] Tim Rice: I have a soft spot for the guy who wrote my very first song, the tune for that, me. Oh, they're all great; they're all different. I mean, you've got to, you can only work with people that you admire.

[19:21] Tim Rice: You know, it doesn't mean to say that you automatically like everything they do, and they won't like everything you do, but you've got to work with somebody who you think is pretty good at their job, or else it ain't gonna happen.

[19:32] Tim Rice: But I shall leave a letter to be opened 50 years after my death. So you might just be around, and I would say actually the one I liked working with best of all, the one with the greatest talent was there.

[19:37] Ken Davenport: Young composers and lyricists that you admire today? Is there people that you look at and go like, boy, that's something?

[19:55] Tim Rice: Well, I've always had a lot of heroes, but as with most people, my heroes tend to be older than myself. Not that many people who are older than myself around these days, but the people I admired obviously when I started out in the serious one of the musical theater fields, the obvious ones like Alan Jay Lerner and Lerner and Loewe, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bernstein, all this lot, and Sammy Cahn, and in the pop world, people like Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Chuck Berry, you know, great lyricists, Bob Dylan, of course.

[20:31] Tim Rice: I mean, but your question was probably more interesting. Who do I like coming up now? I'm not sure.

[20:37] Tim Rice: I mean, it sounds rather sort of ungracious of me, but you do get some very interesting shows, but there haven't been all that many hit songs from some of the shows lately, even if the show's great.

[20:51] Tim Rice: Um, there's some shows I really want to see that have just opened on Broadway, which I'm gonna see in the next couple of months or so. And there've been wonderful shows I've enjoyed enormously, like "Book of Mormon" or "The Producers," very funny shows, but they're not really, they're sort of brilliant evenings out, great, great comedies, but, and they are of course good musicals, but they're not musicals in the sense of the stuff that Andrew and I wrote, I think.

[21:16] Ken Davenport: And you know, I mean, they may be better for all I can say, but it's difficult to, I mean I'm from a tradition where the score often has to play an integral part.

[21:30] Ken Davenport: Do you have a favorite lyric of your own?

[21:34] Tim Rice: Well, it's difficult. I've certainly got quite a few I wish I hadn't written.

[21:38] Ken Davenport: Um, but what's your least favorite then? Let's start with that. You want to tell everyone.

[21:42] Tim Rice: Well, there's really terrible lyrics in, well in "Superstar," when there's this one quite funny one in "Superstar" where he sings, um, one of the lepers sings, "See my tongue, I can hardly talk," which logically, if you think about it, should be "talking," and that line usually went to somebody who only had that one line in the show.

[22:05] Tim Rice: So he or she would really belt that line beautifully, like Plácido Domingo at his peak. And I think that's not really logical, is it? "See my tongue, I can hardly talk."

[22:17] Tim Rice: Well, actually, you're talking rather well. What's your problem? So that's a pretty bad line.

[22:22] Tim Rice: Um, and I think we changed it to "See his tongue, he can hardly talk," so it was a bloke talking about his mate.

[22:28] Tim Rice: Um, and there are one or two bad rhymes, which I wouldn't do now in "Joseph" and "Superstar," you know, rhyming "time" with "mine," or even in "Heaven on Their Minds," one of my favorite songs.

[22:40] Tim Rice: It ends up, "All your father was a blind too much heaven on their minds." That, that's not very good.

[22:47] Tim Rice: But in rock music, which "Superstar" is rock, people forget that. If it isn't a divisional album, it's definitely a rock album.

[22:53] Tim Rice: Um, if you accurate rhyming isn't always essential, but I think in musical theatre it is. So some of those early rhymes I'm a bit nervous about.

[23:04] Tim Rice: But I was asked this question, your favorite lyric the other day on the radio in England, and I came up with one of the ones I like recently is, um, Scar in "The Lion King," who, um, his song isn't remembered as well as some of the others, but he has a great couplet.

[23:20] Tim Rice: I always like, "A shining new era is tiptoeing nearer." I just rather like that.

[23:26] Ken Davenport: I agree, that's a good one.

[23:28] Ken Davenport: If I was very quiet there, listeners, it was because I was suppressing my laughter at that. That is a very serious.

[23:35] Ken Davenport: That is a fantastic comment on your least favorite lyric, quote unquote.

[23:41] Tim Rice: Uh, so I was telling someone that I was doing this podcast with you, and they said, oh, you've gotta tell him that I ask him about "Chess."

[23:51] Ken Davenport: Ask him about Chess because I think I've got an idea on how it can work, how it can work. I mean, Chess is one of those great musicals that's so admired by so many, including me, but for some reason has never quite achieved the commercial success. Is there a why do you think that is?

[24:08] Tim Rice: Well, it's like it's a complicated story, and the perceived wisdom is that the story is no good and the songs are great. I don't think—I mean, I would say this, wouldn't I? But I think the story actually is complex. But one of the problems is a lot of the wonderful music that Benny Andersson came up with orchestrally and chorally, it's very hard to hear the words because you've got choir singing, you know, you've got often a lot of key plot things sung by big choirs. There's a wonderful sequence where all the great chess champions of all time have their names and dates called out, and it sounds beautiful, but nobody knows really what's happening. And the opening song, the opening big song, a song called "Merano," and another key song called "The Story of Chess."

It's terribly hard to make out what they're saying. And I've always said the way to make Chess work on stage is to have subtitles or surtitles like they do in opera. And I think that would make a lot of difference. And I think that would work for a lot of shows. I often go to the theatre and see a musical, and I think, "Oh great," but I can't quite make out all the words. And it's easy to assume, because you know the words as you wrote them, or as if it's one of my own shows, it's very easy to assume everybody clearly can hear every lyric, but they can't. It's very hard to catch all the lyrics first time around, unless it's a very clearly sung solo number. So I mean, having said that, I agree that the story of Chess needs to be—the plot needs to be made crystal clear. But I think a lot of that would be cleared up by having the lyrics crystal clear.

[25:40] Ken Davenport: Do you, uh, obviously—I mean your friend, he's welcome to have a go.

[25:44] Tim Rice: Listen, I know he'd love to do it. A lot of people would love to do it. So many people. I mean, I remember going to Lincoln Center to watch the original on video there and just saying, "God, there's gotta be a way, there's gotta be a way."

[25:55] Tim Rice: Yeah, well, it has been successful in some places. It was quite successful in London the first time out; it ran for three years. And it would have run for longer if we hadn't unfortunately had to spend a lot more money on it than we intended because we had to change directors halfway through. So we were kind of paying for two shows for the price of one.

[26:14] Ken Davenport: Speaking of—hang on, one show for the price of two, which is not the way to go. Speaking of the West End and Broadway, what do you see as the big differences between the two?

[26:24] Tim Rice: Well, I think the big difference really for me is the audience. In England, we're much more laid back, and we don't leap up and down and cheer as much as they do on Broadway. Sometimes I think Broadway audiences are almost too enthusiastic. You know, the chap selling the programs gets a standing ovation sometimes. But in England, I think we're often too quiet, and audiences are a little wary of revealing what they think. So I think somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, there's the ideal audience, who are neither too extravagant nor too quiet. So that I think is the main difference. I would have said 15, 20 years ago, that London dancers weren't quite up to the standard of Broadway dancers, and the concept of somebody who can in musicals sing, dance, and act, that was rarer in England when Andrew and I started out, but it's not true now. There are some wonderful performers in England who can match the wonderful performers on Broadway.

[27:33] Ken Davenport: And what would you say to a young 20-year-old who was interested in writing pop songs or musical theater songs now? What kind of advice do you have for the young writers of today?

[27:46] Tim Rice: Well, I don't know too much about the current pop scene. I mean, I try and vaguely keep tabs on it, but it seems to me that pop songs these days, a lot of them are constructed rather than written. So you get nine people taking credit for a song, which seems to me ludicrous, really. And I wouldn't know how to advise people, but I think it's something you can either do or you can't, as far as the theatre is concerned, and a good tune is hard to beat. I mean, you asked me a bit earlier about promising young composers. Well, of course, the one I should have mentioned is the man I've been working with on my most recent show, Stuart Brayson, who I think has a great gift for music and a great gift for melody.

And I think I'm hopeful that From Here to Eternity will make its mark in America and indeed again in Britain. It didn't quite make it first time in London, but I think we made one or two mistakes, which were certainly not in the music. And the music is very strong and powerful. But as to how to give advice to people, I don't know. I mean, you've got to get a—if you're writing, the key thing I would say is get a great story, get an original plot line, and get a story that maybe means something to people. Not necessarily just taking a recent hit movie or something, but taking a story that people can relate to almost before they've seen the show. That’s a help.

[29:15] Ken Davenport: I was just—my next question was to ask you about From Here to Eternity and what you are working on next. So tell us a little bit more about the next steps for that piece.

[29:24] Tim Rice: Well, I'm also at the moment, right now, working on some songs with Alan Menken for the new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast, which is a return to working with my chance at Disney, which is fine. I mean, I'm enjoying that very much. But From Here to Eternity was a musical I wrote with Stuart Brayson, booked by Bill Oaks, and we put it on in London, and it ran for six months, which was frankly not as good as we'd hoped. And there were some great things in it, not least Stuart's music, and a great story, James Jones's wonderful book From Here to Eternity, which became a film with Frank Sinatra and Burt Lancaster, but a long time ago, 1953, the movie. And everybody said to us at the time, particularly Americans who came to see the show, "Well, why haven't you done this in America?"

And in a way, that would be the logical place to have opened it because it's an American story about GIs in Hawaii just before Pearl Harbor was attacked. But we were all Brits, and we felt, well, if we go over to America and try to do it there, apart from the logistical problems, it's going to be so easy unless we are absolutely perfect for people to say, "Well, why are these Brits doing this American story?" And I think what we should have done, I mean, in effect, the London production has been the most expensive workshop of all time, for which I hope will rectify—get what was wrong with it right for New York and indeed for America, and we've had offers already, firm offers to tour it to put it on both here in England and in America.

So I think it's good enough to work, providing—and it will be great, it'll be a great show if we can just get the other bits right. And I wish really strongly that we'd opened it out of town in England, that we'd worked out or found out what was wrong with it, but not in the West End. And it's very hard to change things once you open a show on Broadway or in the West End, and you're in the full glare, and you've got to put it on every night, you've got huge costs, you've got a cast that you quite rightly shouldn't muck around with too much, you shouldn't make too many changes for their sake. Once you've opened in the spotlight, it's very hard to change, and I very much wish we'd done something with From Here to Eternity out of town.

And I think if we'd opened it in America straight away and not quite got it right, that would have finished the show. I don't think it could have come back to England. But I do, I'm very genuinely very confident about it. And we've got a—we're doing a reading workshop in New York very soon in June. And I hope from that we'll get some interest, which we probably had, you know, some interest from producers, performers, the team we need. So I'm taking it step by step.

[32:11] Ken Davenport: Okay, and the last question for you today, which is very fitting, because I've been calling this with other people the genie question, and of course, you wrote lyrics to this show. So I want you to imagine that the genie from Aladdin comes down and says, "Tim, you've written some amazing things, and your contributions to the world of musical theatre and motion pictures have been amazing. Therefore, I'm gonna grant you one wish, one wish, and you can change whatever you want about Broadway, the West End, theatre, writing in general, with the snap of a finger, I will change whatever you want. Whatever keeps you up at night or drives you crazy." What would that one thing you'd want your genie to change?

[32:58] Tim Rice: Well, I think it may sound trivial, but I think I would like to have programs in London free, like they are on Broadway. The programs in British theatre, particularly musicals, are an absolute ripoff. You usually can't get a program unless you fork out 10 or 15 quid for a glossy souvenir program. Not many people really want a glossy souvenir program unless it's been a fantastic evening. And I would, next time I do a show in the West End, if there is a next time, I will make sure the programs, a free playbill type program, is included. Because it's such a great relief in New York. You haven't got to—you go into the theater, you're given—I'm all right, the theatre seats are not cheap, but you walk into the theater and you get given a program.

And you haven't got to fork out, try and find your dollar bills. You haven't got to find loose change. And that really makes a big difference for an evening. And while I'm at it, actually, the other thing which I loathe on Broadway and hasn't yet affected London are those hideous cups that you now drink from. I mean, I would rather ban drinking. I don't think people should drink during the show. But if they are going to, they should be allowed to take in a civilized-looking champagne glass. All right, made of plastic, but you've got these things which it's like fork knots trying to get into them. They are, I'm sure they're incredibly unhygienic, and they're hideous things to drink out of. And sipping wine through one of those things is a revolting experience. So London should avoid that, and from New York should be inspired by New York's free programs. That's what my genie would do. Free programs and no more sippy cups, says Sir Timothy Rice.

[34:42] Ken Davenport: Thank you so, so much for being with us today. You know, Tim has actually written an autobiography, which I'm going to include a link to so you can learn much more about his incredibly long and incredibly valuable career for all of us. Thank you again so much, and for all you listeners out there, thank you for tuning in.

[35:02] Tim Rice: Thank you, Ken.

[35:03] Ken Davenport: Pleasure. You've been listening to the Producer's Perspective Podcast, hosted by me, Ken Davenport, with special guest Tim Rice. This episode was sponsored by the Tony-nominated play, Hand to God. New York magazine says Hand to God is irresistible, intelligent, and heartbreaking. It's Broadway's unlikeliest new must-see play. Get tickets to Hand to God at Telecharge.com.