This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Ken Davenport: Hey guys, September is here. That means there's a ton of new Broadway shows about to open. Everybody wants to know what the New York Times thinks, so make sure you download the app. Did he like it? The didhelikeit.com app. Be the first to know if the New York Times liked the show or not. You get push notifications. Great for opening night parties. Download the Diddy Like It.com app today. I wanna be a producer with a hit show on Broadway. I wanna be a producer.

[0:30] Ken Davenport: Hey everybody, we're back here at the Producer's Perspective podcast. Our guest this week is none other than three-time Tony nominee, Rick Elice. Welcome, Rick.

[0:39] Rick Elice: Hi, Ken. It's great to be here.

[0:41] Ken Davenport: Rick is the author of the book and lyrics to the terrific Peter and the Starcatcher, as well as the book to The Addams Family, and most notably wrote the book to the mega hit Jersey Boys, which will be closing this January after over a 10-year run and multiple productions.

[0:56] Rick Elice: More than 11.

[0:57] Ken Davenport: More than 11-year run. In Showbiz Math, that's 12 years, you know.

[1:01] Rick Elice: More than 11 is 12. So actually, we're celebrating the bar mitzvah next week, and it'll be 20 years by the time January rolls around.

[1:09] Ken Davenport: Already he has me laughing. He was having me cracking up before we pressed record. I was like, make sure you do this when we press record. So already don't oversell, Ken. Rick, yes, you've got a very interesting path to becoming a super successful book writer on Broadway. This is why I wanted you here because you've done so many diverse things. Tell me, let's start at the beginning. Where did the love of theater come from with you? Where did you get bit by the bug?

[1:32] Rick Elice: Well, uh, if you must know, at the age of three, I was taken to a matinee of My Fair Lady playing over here at the Mark Hellinger Theater, now the Times Square Church. Beautiful theater for those of us old enough to remember it. Um, which I don't, but I remember three moments from My Fair Lady, but mostly what I remember because I've heard it a lot since then is my mother took me and my brother on a Saturday. My brother was six, I was three. Uh, she said it was the first time in three years that I had shut my mouth. So she decided she was going to start taking me to the theater on a regular basis because it was kind of a holiday for her. I um I suspected it's that I was fascinated, too fascinated to complain about anything.

And we sat all the way up in the nosebleeds, you know. I remember the theater ceiling sort of brushing my hair as I was plopped on top of five coats piled up. I can't imagine how irritated the other customers were that a three-year-old was sitting there. But actually, uh by all accounts, which is to say my mother's account, I was very well behaved. And um that's the advantage of growing up in New York, the son of parents who courted going to the theater. Remember that going to the theater in those days was cheaper than going to the movies because you know, it was like 50 cents to sit up there or something like that.

[2:46] Rick Elice: 90 cents. You know, I remember when Fiddler on the Roof closed in 1971. You could still buy tickets to Fiddler on the Roof then at the Broadway Theater. It had been at several theaters, but it closed at the Broadway Theater, and tickets, there were still tickets on sale for 90 cents, 1971. So you're three years old.

[3:04] Rick Elice: I'm three years old. Oh, sorry, I forgot. This is an interview. I was caught up in uh Julie Andrews at a spotlight. I uh uh so uh I became a theater fan because I was raised that way. Uh and then you know, about the age of 10 or so, I was more interested in playing on the street with friends and sort of fell out of it, and then I encountered theater again when I was 14. Came to, it was a rainy Saturday, didn't want to go to a movie. A friend of mine said, let's go to see a show. It was uh Lauren Bacall in Applause and couldn't get in. Or I think it was maybe it was Arlene Dahl by then, because it was late. I know it was after 19, it had to be after April 1971, I'll tell you why in a second. But we couldn't get into uh Applause.

So we went up to the Winter Garden Theater where a show called uh Follies had opened on April 4th, 1971. And I was very leery because this was a show. By now I was older. I you know, I was uh I I wasn't quite uh, you know, I was 15 or something like that. And um my folks had been to see that, and uh my my father had said, No, that's a show you're not gonna go to see because it's not appropriate for you. So I I was leery of going, but you know, I was also a teenager, so it was the forbidden thing, and uh we went in and uh we got uh standing room tickets for five dollars and uh stood and watched the show, and it changed my life, Ken. I mean, I didn't know that that I didn't know that things like that could be done in the theater.

I didn't know what they were, I didn't understand the Pirandello antecedents, I didn't understand the midlife crisis aspect of the of the of the story, but I understood in some way that was you know very emotional and very, very powerful what Michael Bennett and Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim seemed to be doing, and it was uh, you know, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I immediately fell to my knees and thanked God for the day I was born, and then promptly went and got a ticket to Company, uh which had been created by the same people the year before, and I didn't get it at all. Another, you know, and also a show about marriage. I didn't really understand it. So instead, what I did was uh having noticed that there were two dollar obstructed view seats at the Winter Garden for Follies, uh which was had been a policy of uh Hal Prince's in those uh shows in the 70s, uh Company, Follies, Little Night Music.

Two dollar obstructed view seats. Now, and it and in 1971 and 1972, two bucks was cheaper than a movie. So on Saturdays, when it rained, I would go to the Winter Garden Theater and watch this show over and over and over again.

[5:41] Rick Elice: And then the following year was A Little Night Music, and somehow or other, the same friend that I had seen Follies with, and this girl that I was kind of desperately pursuing for I figured out what those things that we figure out when we're older than 16, or when I was older than 16, managed to finagle somehow three seats to opening night of uh A Little Night Music at the Schubert. And the first act ended a weekend in the country. It was, you know, spectacular. I thought it was going to explode, and then I realized it was just my bladder that was going to explode, and the and the and the bathrooms at the Schubert were all the way, all the way, all the way, all the way down from where we were sitting, which is all the way, all the way, all the way, all the way up.

So I went tearing down the stairs and smashed into a man in a green velvet tuxedo, and his glasses went flying, and he turned around to pick up his glasses, put them on top of his head, and it and I realized that I had run into Harold Prince, that he was actually a real, a real guy, you know, a guy who was flesh and blood. Because to me, you know, you know, growing up in New York again, there were certain names, certain bold-faced names, Harold Prince, Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green, Stephen Sondheim, Michael Bennett, that above that theater crowd, not the literary crowd, that was another crowd, but I, you know, to think that this person was actually real was so thrilling for me that uh the theater then became the be-all and end-all to me.

Not supported at that time by my parents who wanted me to be a nice Jewish boy who went to medical school failing that, at least law school. You want to act, act in a courtroom, my mother used to say. She used to clip articles out of a newspaper about how many actors were unemployed, anything she could think of to discourage me. And with that enthusiastic support, I went away to college at 17 and uh tried to put it out of my mind, but um did plays up there kind of on the sly, didn't want my folks to know that I was wasting time in the arts.

[7:36] Rick Elice: And then rather improbably, my third year at Cornell, there was a terrible, terrible winter, and I was living on a farm. It was so far off the beaten path, it was actually an RFD address. And uh I was commuting 30 minutes into campus every day, and the winter was so brutal and there was so much snow that there were weeks at a time where I was stuck on this farm. I would I would uh and and I thought I've gotta get out of here. I gotta get, I gotta get out of, I gotta get out of this farmland. I need some concrete, I need to get back to a city, I don't care what city is. So I applied against credible odds to the uh Yale School of Drama, and I was accepted. So I called my folks because of course I was going to need their support in order to go.

And I told them that I'd been accepted to Yale School of Drama, and like that, in the way that loving parents can turn on a dime, they became wildly enthusiastic supporters of my of my of my theater dream, which was to be an actor, and I went off uh as the youngest person in the history of Yale School of Drama, and I believe I may still be the youngest person to have gotten a master's degree, uh which I got in uh in uh 1979. And on the day that I got my degree, I was offered a job in two Broadway shows. Because the the great thing about Yale is you know, you train and train, and train and train, you do a million million shows, and your last year there, you are given more featured roles in Yale at Yale Rep, which works in tandem with uh with the drama school, and at the end of your last year, your third year, presented with your equity card.

And uh, and if you're lucky and you get some good parts that last year, agents are always coming up, and you can you know maybe attract some representation, uh which I had done, and and there was a show that we were developing up at Yale called the 1940s Radio Hour, and then there was also a show called Sweeney Todd that uh had opened uh on uh I believe it was uh March the 4th, 1979, and uh uh which was just weeks before my graduation, and Victor Garber for some reason was leaving the show after a few months. Chris Gronendahl, who was in the ensemble was being promoted to the Antony track, and they were looking for a replacement for the Chris Gronendahl track, which was ensemble and understudying Antony.

And I went in and sang for Joanna Merlin and then for Paul Gemnani and then for Stephen Sondheim and Joanna Merlin called and said, We you know, we're thinking of offering this to you. And only minutes before had had uh the people from the 1940s Radio Hour show that had been developed up at Yale that we don't uh we'd all been auditioning for a lot, uh had called to say, Um, you've you've been offered uh the role that you created at Yale, we've been offered to recreate it for um for New York, and and uh my new agent said, Well, you should take you know, you should do a create something new rather than go in ensemble. I I was really torn because the idea of being in a Sondheim show felt like sort of you know winning the lottery to me in a million different ways, but I ill-fatedly made the uh choice to go with the new show, and then after a few weeks of uh just on the on the verge of uh previews, got uh fired.

And having been fired, I no longer had any visible means of support. Had an apartment right there in that brown building, a tiny studio apartment, and my agent uh dropped me because he said, you know, you got fired, you must be a pain in the ass. And I was, you know, kind of you know, unhappy, couldn't get auditions. So I took a job with a friend of mine who had been whom I had known from the time we were five years old, grew up together, got in Fred Nathan, and uh he was a Broadway press agent, and he had he had gotten a jump. He'd left college after one year and uh started work at Soldiers Roskin Friedman, and then opened his own shop, and he said, I'll pay you $75 a week to write pitch letters for me and maybe some body copy for souvenir brochures and stuff I'm working on.

And he kind of saved my life. You know, that $75 a week was what I lived on until I got a gig at the Westside Arts for a short while, did a uh spent uh some time employed downstairs uh at uh Studio 54. Steve Rubel had been my tennis counselor at Sleepaway Camp. So I I uh bumped into him one day and he said, Uh, do I know you? You look a little familiar. And I said, Well, you knew me when I was seven. You were my tennis counselor, and he he you know, looked me up and down like uh sort of the way a great big cat looks at a wildebeest and said, Would you like to come to uh would you like to be a busboy? So I started that, and then American Repertory Theater uh offered me uh a season up at Cambridge, the the first season.

So I'm a charter member of the ART. Went up there and played a bunch of roles. Peter Sellers, the brilliant uh avant-garde director, took a shine to me, got me a gig at Adam's House at Harvard as a teaching fellow, um, which was free room and board if I taught a class. So I would direct shows at Adam's House, and I saved all the money that I was making at the rep because I had free room and board. And was there for two years and then came back home to New York off of a play that I was doing with Lee Brewer, the avant-garde directing genius, another avant-garde directing genius, Mabu Mines uh artistic director and creator, I guess. And he was doing a Shakespeare in the Park production of uh The Tempest with 12 aerials, and he asked me if I would be one of them. And Raúl Juliá was Prospero. It was a you know a very starry group of people. The only person I'd never heard of in that entire cast was me.

[13:09] Rick Elice: And it was kind of a famously disastrous production, but it was the first show that I did for Joe Papp, and then did four more, was choreographing a show, uh choreographing a show at the Astra Place Theater, a Randy Newman jukebox musical before that term was coined, uh, directed by Joan McClin Silver, the great uh film director, the uh music director and the orchestrator, the orchestrator, a gentleman by the name of Michael Starabin, um, had been uh engaged across the street at the public for a new show written by this crazy genius from Canada who had written a show about the Red Baron called The Death of Von Richthoven as Witnessed from Earth.

[13:51] Rick Elice: The list of star David Bowie as the in as the Red Baron, Baron von Rick Togen, and I went and auditioned for Des Mack Enoff, who wrote the book, Music and Lyrics, and was directing it. And uh Jennifer Muller was doing the choreography. It was going to be a hot little hit that was built to move. I was, you know, up to that point, certainly the most expensive show that Joe had ever done at the public. And we played at the Newman Theater in the same stage where Chorus Line started and many other wonderful shows. And we were all, we, you know, we were, it was very, very exciting to work on it. Frank Rich begged to differ. And uh so uh on opening night, it you know, we we had this kind of we screeched to a halt uh because the New York Times Review.

But also on opening night, I I met the uh the guy who ran the ad agency that did the advertising for public theater and for Joe. And uh he thought that I was amusing. It must have been the blicker. You know, Joe had the Joe always saved the bar and the food for the actors first. Anyone who's listening who remembers the great Joe Papp knows that one of the nice things that he did for his shows was to hold off the the audiences on opening night. Uh no one was allowed to get to the food before the actors got it, and that was true, of course, also for the bar. So I may have been amusing. I can't I can't recall. But uh he thought I was funny enough and said to me, Do you think you could write some funny headlines for me?

My uh my partner and creative director is away for the summer, and I need some funny headlines. And I said, No, I can't write funny headlines. I've never written anything in my life. He said, I'll pay you a hundred dollars. Now, you understand that my salary for the death of Andrich Toven's Witness from Earth was 149 a week. For an extra 20, I was the dance captain for the company. But so $100 was you know enough for me to say, maybe I can write funny headlines. Maybe uh who know who knows?

[15:48] Rick Elice: And on August 23rd, 1982, I walked from my little one-room garret on 57th Street down Broadway towards 45th Street, where the offices of an agency called Sereno Coin and Napy were. And I passed by the Wintergarden Theater, which for me was a hallowed space because of my folly's history. And the box office had just opened for a show called Cats. Same day. The original cats, not the one that just opened now. The original cats. And uh, and when I got to the office, I got some assignments, and he seemed to be pleased. And he said, Why don't you come back the next day? And I thought, well, he's paying me 100 bucks. I guess I should come back the next day. And that happened until Friday. If on Friday, I went in and said, Look, Maddie, I it's great.

I love everybody here. There were about 11 people who worked in the office in those days, a small little shop. And he uh I said, but I I can't I just can't keep coming every day. I I you know, our show is moving, I got an audition for new stuff. I I'm looking for a job, I need to, you know. And he said, Well, okay, and he gave me a check for $500. He made $100 a day, Ken. I mean, I practically fainted. And I thought, this is uh this is great. This is this is amazing. This is like 1980. This was 1982, the summer of 1982, and I felt pretty good. I thought this is a like a means of visible support. You know, I I can actually eat something besides tuna. I've been subsisting on, and not even white meat tuna, Ken.

I wasn't submissive on the subsisting on really on the cat food tuna, you know, the brown, that brown stuff that you don't you really don't want, you know, chicken to the sea, not Bumblebee. You know, I'm I'm a terrible bumblebee snob. I had to reduce myself to, you know, Charlie, star kissed, oh horrible. But I thought, well, I can I might be able to, you know, maybe I can get a hamburger. And a week later, the gig was over anyway, because his partner who had been away was coming back, a woman named Nancy Coyne, and I thought, well, that's the end of that deal. And uh a few days or you know, a bit uh certainly not not long after she returned and I was out. I got a call from her, and she said, uh, my partner says we should meet.

Why don't you come up and we'll have a chat? And we met and we clicked and in that kind of kindred spirit kind of way, and she said, I don't have a position for you, but I'll I'll hire you as a part-timer, and um and you can spend a couple of days, which seemed to be kind of perfect. And uh, you know, a month later I I was offered a full-time job.

[18:19] Ken Davenport: And how long did you stay at Sereno Coin?

[18:22] Rick Elice: I stayed until July 1st, 1999, which was um 17 years. 17 years and give everyone out there, because I you know, I gave this introduction about you being the super successful book writer, which of course you are, but people don't know some of the what your fingers have been on, the types of shows. We're not gonna just talk about what my fingers have been on. This is the end of the dirty. This is show business, man. It's hard to it would be a shorter list to say where my fingers haven't been.

[18:52] Ken Davenport: So, what were the subjust give us a handful of some of the shows that you um lent your creative talents to while at Sereno from a marketing and advertising perspective?

[19:00] Rick Elice: Well, I you know, I had the world's greatest teacher, Nancy Coyne, who's very brilliant. Everybody knows her. She's a you know, certainly a living legend by now in those days. You know, it was the number two shop of two shops. It was a larger, more successful shop, and uh, and we were the uh upstarts. And little by little, I you know, I started with started on cats and Annie and Grease and you know um Dream Girls and Evita, not a bad, not a bad pool to be thrown into and by the time I left you know i had i had gone from a chorus line to the lion king and and um about 304 i say about it was exactly 304 shows in between not that i've counted can you understand so how do you go from what i love about your career already so far is like oh there's an actor here they asked me to do this i did this and you did so many of these things unbelievably well having no let's be to be to be scrupulously honest or to appear to at least be attempt to be scrupulously honest I should say it um it was sort of much more like Ben Franklin I did many things reasonably well if I had been great at anything I think I would have been happier you know I always aspired to be great the reason I found it easy to um to leave my acting career such as it was behind was because it was hard to as a kid to understand and to accept the disparity between what I wanted to be which was you know Meryl Streep or Robert De Niro and what I knew I was which was sort of tall geeky looking you know somewhat effeminate you know guy who was always going to play the roommate or the friend the the friend of you know that sort of thing and and you know here in New York it was less opportunity to show my wares that I had acquired at a place like Yale because you know no one was gonna let me play an old guy nobody was gonna let me play the leading man or the swain or the you know the whatever the short cute guy because New York is full of people who are leading men and and you know really handsome and short and cute and all that.

[19:18] Rick Elice: So I you know, I knew that I knew that I was going to be waiting in line behind people who just naturally were the things that I thought I could become through the my craft. And I think that in you know my experience in advertising was like that too. I I I you know, Nancy mentored me. I I seemed to have a facility. I very much enjoyed spending time in studios, and I tried to grow and grow and grow. I I learned how to be an editor, I I learned how to be a copywriter, I learned how to therefore write. I learned I learned how to go into a meeting and sell things. I mean, I I none of which I had ever planned to do, but I suppose that's what makes for an interesting life is is just sort of pinballing around the the universe as it's presented to you and for trying to keep your head above the water.

[19:18] Ken Davenport: So, how do you go from again being an executive and the very successful one at this advertising agency to writing the book for a musical? What gave you the idea that hey, I want to write now, how did this opportunity and it was Jersey Boys? Your first one was Jersey Boys.

[22:02] Rick Elice: Well, I I wrote a play with my husband Roger Reese in 1985 that was done in the West End of London and has played all over the world. He was the he was in Stratford upon Avon one Christmas time when I was over there performing in Hamlet in Love's Labor's Lost, and the repertoire gave him a particular weekend off when we were gonna go for a drive somewhere, but there was a blizzard, and we were trapped in this great big house on a road called Welcome Road in Stratford, which had been the home of uh Trevor Nunn, who was the co-artistic director. And uh he Trevor had had given it to Roger for the year that he was gonna be up there doing Hamlet in Barone, and we were snowed in, and the house had been emptied of furniture and things.

There was no television. There was a kitchen, and in the kitchen was an egg timer. And to pass the time, we wrote a play by setting the egg timer on 10 minutes, and we would try to write a scene in 10 minutes, and then we would swap and we would see, you know, at the end of the weekend we had a draft of a play. And then through the good offices of Roger's friend and frequent collaborator to Tom Stoppard, we were introduced to an agent who who actually got it on in the West End where it played for two and a half years or something crazy like that. And then, you know, so I had had some experience writing things that were something, one thing that was longer than 30 seconds or 60 seconds long, which is the limitation in advertising.

[23:28] Rick Elice: In the spring of 1999, I was having a particularly bad day, and the phone rang, and it was Peter Schneider from uh the Walt Disney Company, who, when I first got to know him, was the president of Disney feature animation. And he and his executive partner, Tom Schumacher, had taken over the theatrical arm of Disney from the guys who had first brought Beauty and the Beast to Broadway in 94. This was in uh and in 1997, they were gearing up to bring The Lion King to New York. And Nancy and I and some other folks at Sereno made a presentation for the for the account, and and they kind of took a shine to us, and I became friendly with them. And a couple of years later, in uh spring of 99, Peter had been elevated to a new position, uh, president of the studio.

Joe Roth was chairman of the studio at the time, and Peter Colton said, I want you to come and work for me. And I said, Is what? And he said, What would you like to do? I said, Uh well, I you know, I don't want to, I can't leave my career here, you know. Uh we just got a really nice apartment, you know. I and you know, I I I don't I can't, I can't go out there. He said, Um, well, why don't you draft a 10-point plan and fax it to me of your dream job? And because I was having a bad day, I did. And he called back a half an hour later and said, Okay, and here's what I'll pay you. And all you have to do is spend 10 days out here a month. And uh as long as you're available to me in New York, and I'll give you, I'll get you an office in New York, and I'll get you an office out here, and you know, and and I want to take advantage of all your skills, and I'm just gonna throw you into rooms and you know, you'll try to make things better.

That's why you're that's that's what I want you to do. I want you to try to make things better that we are putting out creatively. And you know, what a what a gift, what a life-saving gift. And because I was having a bad day, I said, okay. And then I had to, you know, swallow really, really hard, and I went into my best friend's office and said, Nancy, I I'm gonna leave. I didn't think I would ever say those words in a sentence. And she very graciously said, Okay, go with you know, you go with my blessing. And on July 1st, I um I left Sereno, and on August 1st, I rode up to the building with the big pointy hat at Walt Disney and and went to see a charcoal test of of a feature animated movie, and then was in a note session talking about that film with the people who were making it, and and I thought, this is I I've just died and gone to heaven.

Because of the nature of that particular work, I had really for the first time the uh since 1982, I had time on my hands because sometimes there was tons and tons of things to do, and sometimes there was just like two or three things to do.

[26:19] Rick Elice: And one day, when I just had two or three things to do, the phone rang, and it was a gentleman who said, uh, who had been a client of mine at the agency, and he said, I'd like to do a musical uh with the four seasons music. And I said, That's a great idea. I love Vivaldi. And he said, No, no, not that Vivaldi, you asshole. You know, the no, the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. And I said, The guy with the high voice, why? And he said, Well, Mama Mia's a great big hit now, and you know, with songs of ABBA, and you know, why little, you know, and I said, But somebody already did that. Why would you want to do that? And he said, just have would you have lunch with Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, the principal songwriter of the Four Seasons?

And I thought, okay, you know, a meal is a meal. And I said, Can I bring a friend? That friend being Marshall Brickman, and one of those boldface names that as a New York kid, I grew up thinking, oh my god, and uh, and years later in the mid-90s, we were introduced by the legendary film director Stanley Donen, and uh Marshall and his wife Nina and Roger and I uh quickly became friends, and we flirted with the idea of maybe doing something. Uh we both assumed it would be a film, you know. Maybe my maybe I could walk one in at Disney, and you know, I and I had tried to do that on a few occasions, been unsuccessful. So I called Marshall and said, Do you want to write a Broadway musical, you know, with me?

And he said, I've never done that. And I said, Neither have I. So we'll just waste each other's time and maybe we'll have some fun. And that's the worst case scenario. And he said, Okay, and so we went together to meet Frankie and Bob, suggested that they uh, you know, after they had spent a lunch telling us about what it was like growing up in New Jersey, what they what their lives were like, you know, you listen to the music and it sounds like one sort of thing. You listen to their lives, and it was a very different sort of thing, and we just started leaning forward like any audience would when they're being told a good story, and we thought, well, shit, we just stepped in it, haven't we? I mean, this is the motherlode.

This is not just a true story, it's a good story. And it's not just a good story, it's an untold story. So we said, okay, give us a crack. And we wrote some stuff and they liked us and then said, now what do we do? And because of my previous life, I said, well, you know, we'll find a producer. Well, who are they? They didn't know, Marshall didn't know. I said, but I know them all, so I'll I'll I'll make up some appointments, we'll go and we'll try to see if anybody's interested. And uh still mad at you for not calling me, but that's a whole other thing. We'll talk about that later. You know, I if fortunately, uh Michael David and Ed Strong and and uh the Dodgers said, Yeah, we're interested, and who would you like to direct it?

And you know, the obvious name, the not just because he had been a Dodger himself, uh not just because I had done the uh worked on the advertising for uh Big River and for Tommy, the musical and revival of how to succeed, and uh even A Walk in the Woods by Lee Blessing, you know, several plays that had been directed by Des McAnuff, who had years and years and years before, 20 years at that point before, 20, you know, 21 years by the time we were having this conversation, was you know, running La Jolla Playhouse in in uh Southern California, and uh I knew that he had always wanted to be a rocker, and I thought maybe there's a crazy chance that he might agree to do this. And it turned out that the very first LP record, which are these large discs that people used to play with needles once upon a time, uh that he owned as a kid growing up in North Toronto was Sherry and 11 other hits by the Four Seasons.

So he he sparked to the idea, which was great. He said to me and Marshall, this was like January of 04. He said, Do you think you could have it written, you know, by May? And never having done it before, we said, sure. And uh he said, because I have a slot in August. And it's uh it's a true thing to say that on August 17th, 2004, we had our first rehearsal, which was also the first read-through of Jersey Boys in the basement at UCSD. And uh we opened in October of 04, and uh the show was an enormous hit for them, and we thought, well, this is wonderful. The first reading was the first rehearsal. Well, it wasn't done. I mean, we we wrote speeches for the auditions just so that the actors would have something to say.

And the few actors who came, because who was going to be in a show about Frankie Valli in the Four Seasons? I mean, it just seemed like such a hare-brained idea. You know, Tara Rubin, the casting director, a brilliant actress, you know, read the read the one scene that we had uh with uh with the actors who came in, and we wrote some speeches so that the actors would have something to audition with, and they seemed to work, so those speeches ended up being the last moment of the show.

[31:13] Ken Davenport: So you obviously sharpened your writing pencil those many years at the advertising agency. It was a bit of a training ground, if you say, or for you tell me, is there is writing writing, or do you feel like you're the book writer you are today because of the years of work at the agency? What about it do they share in common?

[31:36] Rick Elice: Well, I you know, it's a great question. Uh you know, Nancy said to me once, writing copy is like writing a postcard. You have a very small amount of space and you want to use it in a way that's memorable. And I thought, okay, I'm I can write a good postcard. And that was helpful. She also taught me not to depend on adjectives a lot, which is sort of hilarious in advertising, the world of new and improved and fabulous and record breaking and you know all that stuff. I mean, the advertising is seems to me to be almost all adjectives all the time, uh in that Trumpian way. But Nancy, Nancy is the daughter of a journalist who taught her the value of uh, you know, declarative statements. And so I I was fascinated by that.

Um and somewhere around 1995, or perhaps exactly in 1995, when a play called uh Arcadia was playing at Lincoln Center. And Roger at that time had had created roles in two great Stoppard plays, the real thing, of course, um, Henry and uh and Herner and uh Hapgood uh for Tom. And we went to see Arcadia, and then Tom, Roger and I went over across the street to uh Fiorello and and uh we were having meal, and and Tom said to me, The the you seem to be upset. Didn't you like the play? And I said, No, uh it's it's spectacular, Tom. It's like there's there's proof of God that you could write that. I mean, it's like it's like Mozart writing a symphony. It's I mean, I I I want to kill myself. I'll I and he said, he said, uh I said I'll never be that good.

I started thinking about when I stopped acting. You know, I'll never be that good, I would say, when I went to see the deer hunter, I'll never be that good. I had what's the point of doing it? Who needs one more decent actor? Who needs one more decent copywriter or or a writer of plays? I mean, when you you're talking to Tom Stoppard, and he said, Well, Rick, don't you think that there are writers that I feel that way about? And I said, Yeah, like who? Tolstoy? And he said, Well, yes. He said, Why don't you just write? Stop worrying about whether it's good or great or shit or anything. Just write. If it gives you pleasure, then do it. And the difference between stopping acting and keeping writing was the difference between being 25 and being 40, because I heard it differently.

And I thought, okay, I don't have to foist it on anybody, but it's still something that I could do. And that's why I said to Marshall, well, if we screw it up, we'll just have wasted our own time. But so what? You know?

[34:06] Ken Davenport: Did you find you got second looks from oh, here comes the advertising guy, now he's a book writer, now he's a playwright. How did you deal with that within the was it hard for you to call those producers that you had worked with as an ad guy and been like, hey, by the way, I just wrote a musical? Were you self-conscious in any way about that? And how'd you overcome?

[34:25] Rick Elice: Well, you know, I'm a New Yorker. I I didn't feel particularly self-conscious about it. I thought they don't want to see me, they'll say, no, we can't see you. We're not interested. But but I I always found you'll have to, I mean, there this may not be true. People may just have been being polite, but I thought they were very welcoming to Marshall and me. And even the reception to the show from the very when we finally did get a theater, you know, by you know, we came to New York full of piss and vinegar and and quick succession, three jukebox musicals opened and closed. And so no one was looking to give us a theater because jukebox theaters were the new whipping boy in town. I mean, it was the worst thing that it was worse than you know than the Vietnam War, jukebox musicals.

Never mind that they're as old as Broadway. They're older than jukeboxes, so it's even a misnomer. I don't even refer to Jersey Boys as a jukebox music. I call it a bio musical. I think you guys did something so unique and well, it was not, it's not, you it's not unique either. It just turned out to be an um, it was one of those times in your life in one's life where if you're really, really lucky and the time, which and it's luck is so much a part of it because timing, you know, Des was available. There was a slot to play it in. We were, you know, we got we were able to get the money to do it. The we we managed to get actors who were really, really good to play to play it. Des was working at absolutely the top of his game and did a brilliant, brilliant job.

You know, Marshall Brickman is a brilliant, brilliant writer. The audience reaction was, you know, like the Super Bowl from the very first day we finally did get a theater on uh May 17th, 2005. The call came through that we'd gotten the Virginia Theater on 52nd Street. And we went into rehearsal a year to the day after we started rehearsal in La Jolla, on August 15th, not the 17th, but I think that Monday was still the Monday, was 15th that year because it was uh four was a leap year. You have like the Mary Lou Henner. It's not it's not as old dates. It's not as good as hers. I just remember dates, but we still didn't know what was going to happen, what the reception was going to be because it was such a toxic genre, a little like saying, oh god, not another rectangular painting.

I mean, you know, it it's a little, it's a little, I think, unfair to assume that things are the genreization of theater or film or books or you know, any sort of form of expression art, I think is uh uh it's a it's kind of a kind of a silly way to look at things. You know, there are great war movies and there are war movies that are boring. There are hilarious comedies and there are comedies that don't make you laugh so much. There are, you know, I mean, we've managed, I think, to catch lightning in a bottle at that moment and and the response in New York really also from the very first performance was very gratifying because we had nothing but inventory because the public did not particularly express an interest in advance of going to see Jersey Boys the poor Dodgers must have been pulling their beards out but because they had a lot of inventory they were able to satisfy the demand that started to build up and and oh and it just was it just was a great it was just kind of the right time for that kind of a show I guess and you know and it was and and the pe and people liked it.

[37:33] Ken Davenport: Being a marketing guy an advertising guy who guy whose job it was to sell things now that writing is what you're doing do you how do you find ideas? Do you find yourself, oh this is an idea I like and also I can sell this do you merge the two or how do you come up with ideas for new projects?

[37:52] Rick Elice: I've evolved I think I I've learned over because I really only I'm really only you know 12 years old as a writer which is why I'm sitting here in a diaper sucking my thumbs just so you know I'm just you understand I I'm really just just uh a kid as a writer I you know I wanted to I wanted to do a lot of things. Marshall and I wrote a show that Tommy Tune directed that we did out at the Goodman that we dearly loved and had a wonderful time. We did the Addams Family together which we dearly loved and had a wonderful time. It was a challenging time a very very different experience. And and shortly after Adams opened uh someone in the press said to me, you know, you should really only do things that you have feel a real passion about.

And I thought, well, what does that mean? I, you know, I learned to love Frankie Valli in the Four Seasons because I got to know, I got to know the, you know, the two principal seasons as men and as you know artists, but you know, as as people, as three-dimensional people. And uh, you know, I've I found myself feeling a great affection for that process. Certainly fell in love with it, but at the beginning I was as skeptical as anybody else. I I and I I've thought about that a lot. I think it's a little bit like uh anything else in life. You don't have to love everything about it. If you can find something to love about a project, you can write it. If it's if it's something that you that that you are Sue Generous on, you know, it's the story, a great story, and compelling characters is always the thing that makes something successful. So if you feel that a story is great, you will trust that an audience will come the same way.

[39:31] Rick Elice: I can trust if I drop a hammer, it's gonna hit the ground. I don't have to actually look because I understand there's a law of gravity. A law of theater is you write a great story and you have compelling characters, people will find it compelling. It's the nature of storytelling, and theater, of course, is all storytelling. If you're a writer for hire, someone comes to you and says, this is something I'd like you to do, I think then you have to there may be a pitfall because you know, you think, oh, well, maybe this is a this is the sort of thing that could be successful, is probably not a good reason to write something. I have discovered in my vast experience, that's happened to me a couple of times.

Although one of the times that that happened, the thing I was asked to write was an adaptation of a novel called Peter and the Starcatchers. I was asked to write it sort of in an as backwards way because the two people who were directing it, Alex Timbers and Roger Reese, were doing a workshop for Disney, who was thinking of creating for the first time a play and not a musical. And they were working on it up at Williamstown, where Roger was the artistic director of Williamstown Theater Festival, and Alex was there developing Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. And Alex had been the assistant director on Jersey Boys, so I knew him. And Roger and I living together for 20 something years by then, so I knew him.

And what they wanted to do, these two people with vastly different backgrounds and skill sets and directorial points of view, was exactly the sort of thing that appealed to me, which was kind of a do-it-yourself story theater, poor theater kind of production that could take an unwieldy, picaresque novel and present it as a theatrical story. Sort of in the manner of Roger's big breakout success, Nicholas Nickleby with the RSC. And I thought that would be great fun, but I wasn't asked to write the play. They were adapting the novel, they were adapting discrete sections of a novel to show to the folks at Disney and Tom Schumacher, you know, here's what it might be like. But there was no text really.

The novel was written for a young reader, you know, about age eight. They weren't interested in doing a children's piece. They wanted to do a play for adults. So there was really nothing that the actors could say that could be lifted from the novel per se. But they had this notion that they wanted to explore the various forms of narration that one could use in the theater in very much the way that Nicholas Nickleby did. And so Roger asked me to just write something that could be that as sort of a prologue to demonstrate how that would work. So I just did it as a friend of the court. And then after that first workshop, they got the go-ahead to do another workshop here in town. And for that they needed some scenes.

So again, just as a friend of the court, because it was no budget, you understand. I mean, literally, maybe a hundred dollars. That's it. And that went to the church on 86th Street, where we, you know, there was some attic room that we sat and laid around it. You know, it was all just done for love. So I contributed some stuff for the actors to say, and to that presentation came Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, who were the authors of the novel. And Dave Barry, of course, being, you know, one of the great humorists, and Ridley Pearson being somebody who writes science fiction and crime procedural novels, you know, very, very accomplished writers individually and as a team. And they watched this presentation and Dave Barry said, well, who wrote all that stuff that they were saying?

None of that's in the book. And because they liked it, I raised my hand, and they turned to Tom Schumacher and said, well, is he gonna write the play? So, you know, poor Tom was sort of like painted into a corner of saying, yeah, you know, sure, I yes. And then afterwards said, so I guess you're writing the play, you know, go ahead and knock yourself out. But it turned out to be a very happy experience for all of everybody involved. And in fact, for the last two years has been the number two produced play in all of North America, two years running. And who'd have ever thought? I mean, I'm serious, we were like dumpster diving for the set because there was no money. It's an incredible piece of stagecraft, just an incredible piece.

[43:50] Ken Davenport: Now, when you're working on shows now, do you find you want to get involved in the marketing or do you stay away from it?

[43:56] Rick Elice: It's always a temptation to weigh in. But I also remember when I was the person in the conference room presenting, what that felt like. And you know, it's very nice when somebody defers to your expertise. And I think, you know, when I was in advertising, I was good at it. And I think I got to be pretty good at it, and I got to do a lot of things. But that industry has changed enormously in the 16, 17 years since I've since I have not been there. And I think it would be a little, I think it would be egregiously self-indulgent and on the one hand and annoying and stifling on the other, to impose what I think, because I'm just not paying attention in that way to what trends are, what consumers are looking at, what everyone else is doing. You know, I kind of don't focus on it anymore. And I think, you know, my expertise, such as it was, is now, you know, has been very blunted by the years that I've spent not thinking about it.

[44:59] Ken Davenport: Your Tom Stoppard advice to young writers out there or middle-aged writers or old writers or people that want to be writers?

[45:06] Rick Elice: Well, you know, I think my story is a good example, not to sound too la-dy-da about it, but you know, look, I mean, I thought I would I all I ever wanted to do is work in the theater, and I can tell you, Ken, I have swept the stage, I've stage managed, I've assistant stage managed in theaters and basements, in churches. I have I've run lights, I've worked lighting boards, I've designed lights, I choreographed, I've acted, I've sung and danced and kicked my little legs on stage. I did advertise all I ever wanted to do was work in the theater, and now I do. All I ever really loved about the day-to-day experience for me was the being able to walk into a stage door and not have the guy at the stage door say, who are you?

What are you doing here? That feeling of belonging. I think, you know, clearly, this is I'm sure something that we all of us share and have in common. This sense of community and sense of family, the non-traditional family of friends, this band of brothers, as Henry V says, you know, whether we're brothers and sisters, but that's what we are. We are a band of people who try to, you know, make people glad that they are alive. I am nothing less than that. I mean, I and that's my so my advice, my Stoppardian advice isn't really about writing. It's about if you want to work in the theater, find a way to do it, and it will be a great love affair for your whole life. Because that's what it's been for me.

[46:39] Ken Davenport: Okay, my last question, which is one of my James Lipton-like questions, it's my genie question. I want you to imagine that the genie from Aladdin comes to see you.

[46:50] Rick Elice: Oh, it's not Barbara Eden.

[46:51] Ken Davenport: It's not, that's not, it's not okay.

[46:54] Rick Elice: I did dream of that genie many times.

[46:57] Ken Davenport: Okay, okay, I got it now. So the genie from Aladdin comes and visits you and says, Rick, I want to thank you for your decades of incredible service to this industry in so many ways. You swept floors, you sold tickets to shows through advertising, and now you've written such amazing pieces, the number two most produced play in North America last year. I want to thank you for all that by granting you one wish. What's the one thing that drives you so crazy about Broadway? That gets you angry, that keeps you up at night, that would have you put your fist through a wall, that you would ask this genie to wish away?

[47:30] Rick Elice: Right now, my answer today is probably different than my answer might have been, you know, a year ago. I think there's a lot of great work out there that people cannot see because there's such a limited amount of real estate. You know, they say never confuse fantasy and reality. It's an old showbiz joke. But the real estate issue is problematic, so I could look at that genie and say, why so blue? No, if I can look at that genie and say, here's my wish. My wish would be to have 50 theaters instead of 40. You know, I'm a kid who grew up in New York. I remember what it was like on Broadway before A Chorus Line opened, before A Chorus Line moved up from the public and opened at the Schubert in July of '75.

And, you know, there's a play Noel Coward wrote called Tonight at 8:30. That the title would have had to have been changed to Tonight at 7:30 in the early 70s because nobody wanted to go to the theater. Nobody wanted to go. It was over, it was done. You could have all the shows that are piling up now to be done, that are waiting, all of them could have opened in 1974 easily. And one shows just being written now could have opened in 1974. A surprising side effect of all the technology that we have now, all of the things that were supposed to cocoon us in our homes and does for so many people. But what that has also done is it's created a, I believe, conscious and unconscious need in the population that is really on a DNA genetic level, a craving for the live event, a craving for connection, for the socializing experience of sitting in the dark with a thousand other people and watching something that you know is not true.

And for those two hours, believing that it absolutely is. And even though it's expensive, and even though it's at the time that they tell us we have to be there, and even though it's at a part of town that's a pain in the ass to get to, people keep coming. Why are they coming? They are coming because they want to in ever increasing numbers. They want to. But people are coming back and back and back, and they are bringing people with them. And we don't have enough real estate because more people want to see theater. And so if I could change something, I would say, let's build a second and third theater over the Booth and over the Schoenfeld and over the Jacobs and over the Golden and over the Schubert and over the Broadhurst and over the Majestic.

Just to pick those theaters. Let's build three tiers of theaters that we can, like we were talking about before we started. You know, if you could jack up the Palace Theater with the thing in the back of my car, if I had a car, I would have a jack. But I mean, if you're gonna jack up a theater for two floors, you could build a second and third theater over those theaters and have those and have 10 extra houses. And they would also be, you know, new, up to code, technically, so that you could do the show, you could do anything in theaters in New York, the same way you could do anything in theaters that are being built now around the country. New spaces where audiences will come and flock and be happy, and where we can have our work seen.

You know, it's called a play for a reason, and it can be brilliant. Tom Stoppard can write 50 more plays, but if there's not some theater for them to appear in, they don't really exist. You know, they're not made to be on the page. They're made to be on a stage in front of an audience, and it would be great. My wish would be that there would be more places here in New York so that more voices, more voices could be heard, more actors and dancers and singers and ushers could usher. You know, the industry is bursting at the seams with product, but we don't have what we have a space. Tom Stoppard's great and all, and I'd love 50 more plays from him, but I'd also love 50 more plays from you on in this. They're coming, they're all sitting on my desk. I'm just waiting for theaters, damn it.

[51:52] Ken Davenport: Well, we'll see what the genie can do about that. Thank you so much for joining us. I also want to say, you know, we mentioned his name several times, but I wanted to say that Roger's, of course, sorely missed by this entire industry and by me every day. Thank you all of you for listening, and we will see you next time. Don't forget to download the Did He Like It app, didhelikeit.com, used by so many high powered Broadway executives, I can't even mention them by name. Oh no, no, producer. Look out, Broadway here I come.