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[0:01] Robert Bannon: Are you ready? It's The Roundtable with me, Robert Bannon.

[0:08] Robert Bannon: Well, welcome to The Roundtable, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon, and you're listening to us on Broadway World, the Broadway Podcast Network, iHeart, Spotify, wherever artists talk about art.

[0:16] Robert Bannon: Our next guest is somebody whose work and shows and all has been something that I've enjoyed tremendously.

[0:23] Robert Bannon: I will never leave him, as the show might say. I will never, ever.

[0:27] Robert Bannon: He's got a brand new book and a new memoir, and the title itself makes me smile.

[0:31] Robert Bannon: And I want to know about this, this Wild West life and this gay experience to New York City.

[0:38] Robert Bannon: What a journey and a ride. The one and only Bill Russell is here to tell us all about it.

[0:42] Robert Bannon: Welcome to the show.

[0:44] Bill Russell: Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here with you.

[0:47] Robert Bannon: You are, how do you describe your job? What do you describe? If I met you, what do you do, Bill?

[0:54] Bill Russell: I write musicals for the stage, not music. I write the book and lyrics, generally. It's varied sometimes. Sometimes a couple of projects, I've mainly done lyrics. Other times I've collaborated on books. But yes, I've been writing them since college, and I've written 16 full-length musicals, all of which have been produced.

[1:22] Robert Bannon: Which is in and of itself, do you remember a moment where you thought like, holy cow, I'm going to have a show on Broadway, or holy cow, I'm going to get paid for this? That is an accomplishment in and of itself. What was that moment like?

[1:37] Bill Russell: Well, it was a gradual progression, but a big moment for me was my first off-Broadway show called Fortune. It's also right when I met my husband, my now-husband, so that's a very key time for me. And that show actually then was done in Rio de Janeiro, and we went to see it. And that was, writing a musical and then hearing it in Portuguese was really an experience.

[2:12] Robert Bannon: Oh my gosh. And this journey and the stories that you get to tell in this book. Why write a book? What made you say like, there's a book, my life should have a memoir. I'm ready to tell the story.

[2:25] Bill Russell: Well, my best friend in high school, Rita Mayer, had been saying for years that I should write a memoir. Because my story is not your typical, you know, growing up in the New York area and your parents taking you to Broadway shows. It was not that at all. I grew up in what I call cowboy land. I was born in Deadwood, South Dakota, the home of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. And I grew up 12 miles away in Spearfish, South Dakota. And my paternal grandparents were cattle ranchers just over the border in Wyoming. And everybody knew my father as Cowboy Russell. And he was a cowboy. I mean, he rode in rodeos, roping calves, that whole thing. And I felt like a space alien who had been dropped into this hyper macho environment where I just, I didn't relate to anything. It was really, yeah, it was something.

[3:38] Robert Bannon: It's incredible. If you've ever been to the Dakotas, I went once, Bill.

[3:43] Bill Russell: Uh-huh.

[3:46] Bill Russell: Oh, beautiful. It's beautiful.

[3:46] Robert Bannon: It's gorgeous. It is from another world. It's not New York City. It really is the Wild West.

[3:52] Bill Russell: It is stunning. I wouldn't think Tony-nominated writers would come out of there.

[3:58] Bill Russell: Not too many have.

[4:00] Robert Bannon: So where did you discover the love of theater if you were out there in the Dakotas?

[4:05] Bill Russell: Well, my mother was very encouraging along those lines. And she loved movies, and we saw a lot of movies. But oddly enough, my hometown, Spearfish, South Dakota, was the home for decades of the Black Hills Passion Play, which was inspired by the Passion Play in Oberammergau, Germany. But that's only done every 10 years. And Spearfish is 50 miles from Mount Rushmore, so it's a big, that's the biggest tourist draw in that whole area, in the great plains, really. And this was performed in a 5,000-seat outdoor amphitheater. The stage was 3 1⁄2 blocks long. There was an actual hill where Jesus was crucified. And they hired 20 professional actors for the speaking roles, and then there were 200 extras that came from the town.

And I started appearing in that when I was 5 years old, being blessed by Jesus in the Garden of Bethany, and then I worked my way up. I herded 30 sheep across the stage for a while. Then I led a camel. There were 15 camels, 20 Arabian horses that the Roman soldiers rode, a flock of homing pigeons, and it played three nights a week every summer while I was growing up, and it was a huge tourist attraction. People would go to Mount Rushmore in the morning when the light is best and then come to Spearfish Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays to see the Passion play. And, I mean, I was surrounded, I was in dressing rooms with actors putting on beards and turbans and stuff, and it just, I loved it. I loved the whole thing.

[6:10] Robert Bannon: Bill, I know it was a big deal to move up to the camel handler.

[6:18] Bill Russell: It was.

[6:21] Robert Bannon: But to discover theater in that way and be on stage and do this show, there's got to be a wild journey, and I'm sure it's in the book, which comes out this October, everybody. You've got to preorder and get the book. Journey from being there to New York City, and then also an element of discovering who you are and coming out. And it's not a place that I'm sure is the most queer-friendly place in the world.

[6:47] Bill Russell: Oh, no.

[6:50] Bill Russell: For sure not.

[6:52] Robert Bannon: Especially in the 50s.

[6:54] Bill Russell: Yeah, in the 50s. Did you run out of there, or did you, what made you move?

[7:00] Bill Russell: Oh, I wanted to get out. I knew so early on that I was not going to spend my life there. I knew it in my bones. And the first time I was in New York City was when I was 16, on my way to Europe to study French for the summer. And there was a plane strike, and we had to take a train from Chicago. And when I came up out of Penn Station, which was under construction, and it was a nightmare, and I saw the Empire State Building, I was like, okay, I'm home. I just, I could feel it. It just was where I was meant to be. It took me a while to get there, but I did. And, yeah, it's, you know, some people think success is like a straight line up the graph. It's more, from my story, it's more like all around. But, yeah.

[8:00] Robert Bannon: Did you keep a lot of different jobs before you were able to make a living as a writer?

[8:05] Bill Russell: Yes.

[8:06] Robert Bannon: When you moved.

[8:07] Bill Russell: And even when I was having success as a writer, I still needed a support gig. And I happened to be a very fast typist. And that served me so well. I started, well, one of my main sources of support was temping in large law firms in New York City, especially when I learned how to use a word processor. And those operate 24/7. They're doing deals all over the world. And I would go, well, I'm going to London for two months to do my show and they would be like, okay, great. Just call us when you get back. And I had very steady work when I needed it. And that was a great, great gift.

[8:55] Robert Bannon: Wow. What a lifeline.

[8:57] Bill Russell: What a lifeline.

[8:58] Robert Bannon: I know there's kind of like a dues paying world in New York City. You're a new writer. You're putting shows on, you're trying to get it produced. You're trying to find the right people. Do you think back in your story when you have the chance to write this book and really think about it? Was there a moment that changed your professional life, an opportunity of meeting somebody that brought you to the next level that you felt like was the start of what ended up being what it was?

[9:22] Bill Russell: Well, there were several of those, but one of the main ones I have. I've written now five musicals, six musicals with Janet Hood. And we met when we were in college. She was at Oberlin and I was at KU at the time. And we worked at this resort in New Jersey, 60 miles out of New York City who hired music and theater majors because we did shows for the clientele at night. That led to Janet and I writing our first musical together, which was done at KU. We had performance dates before we had written a word or a note of music. We wrote it entirely by mail because she was at Oberlin, I was at KU. And it won a national contest sponsored by BMI for original musicals produced in colleges. And that was a big moment for me.

I really felt that I could have a career in show business, which I definitely desperately wanted. So, yeah, that was a big moment. Then there were, well, then Janet and another Oberlin graduate, Linda Langford, at my urging, became a musical duo. And I managed them and wrote their original lyrics and we did an album. And that got me connected to Jonathan Scherer, who produced my first three off-Broadway musicals. And for that group, that duo was very popular in New England. And we had these summer-long gigs on Cape Cod. And for the second one, we were there all summer in Hyannis at the Sheraton Hyannis, which I called the Grand Motel because it was this big, big motel. And they gave me money to change a conference room into a cabaret.

And they said, though, that, did I know anybody who could open for this duo? Because they sang their asses off. And they could only do, like, two sets a night. And I had done press for an improvised review in Boston called The Proposition. It ran for many years and even ran in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club for a couple of years. And so when she, since they could, they needed an opening act. And the manager said, do you know someone? And I called one of my friends from The Proposition, Suzanne Rand, and she put together a comedy act with John Monteith. In 1978, I brought both acts to New York to this dive on 6th Avenue called Trudy Heller. And it was meant to be the big launch, basically, for Jade and Sarsaparilla.

That's what the duo was called. But it ended up being like a rocket launch for Monteith and Rand. They first appeared at that club in January of 78. And in January of 79, they opened at the Booth Theatre on Broadway in their own show. And I was there. They did a lot of improvisations. And so I, well, their last improv, they would ask for a bunch of suggestions, a location, a fashion, whatever. And then different playwrights, different film directors, and they would do a scene.

[13:19] Bill Russell: And I would say, stop, continue as Tennessee Williams. And they knew it brilliantly. They were just incredible and it happened so fast within that time, a year. Um, and yeah, that was another really big moment for me, my first Broadway credit.

[13:39] Robert Bannon: First Broadway credit, and I'm sure this story is told in detail and incredibly well in the book.

[13:44] Bill Russell: It is told in detail. There's some fun parts of it. Yeah.

[13:48] Robert Bannon: You got to get, you got to get the book. You have to get the book, everybody. If you're a theater lover or you love memoirs or stories or stories even from going from one environment to another coming of age story, this is, this is what it is. So tell me a little bit about Sideshow because Sideshow, the music and the lyric is so incredible. It's been done on Broadway twice, Henry and you, and the, what you've done to get Henry Krieger, everybody. If you saw Dreamgirls, if you've seen Sideshow, you know, his music, what, what, how did you meet? How did it become a story? Whose idea was it? What, tell me the backstory.

[14:23] Bill Russell: Well, Bobby Longbottom, who directed the original production, his boyfriend, this, the idea started in 1985. We were both happened to be in Washington, DC. I was there with Monteith and Rand and he was touring in the national tour of 42nd Street. And he said his boyfriend at the time had seen this terrible movie on television at four in the morning in Chicago called Chained for Life. And it starred these real life Siamese twins is what we called them then. I prefer conjoined, but and they sang and danced and played musical instruments. And he said, I think we should write a musical about them. And I was like, yes, immediately. I mean, I didn't pause for a second. I just thought the idea of two people moving together, singing together was so rich theatrically and metaphorically that I didn't hesitate.

[15:31] Bill Russell: And one of the reasons was because at that point, I was known to frequent a lot of downtown clubs and there were these two guys who would go around clubs like they were attached at the hip and they would do these little routines, these dance routines. And the first time I saw them, they were in a Heidi. A drag, you know, pigtails, lighterhose, and that had always stayed with me. Well, we didn't get to the idea because we were doing Pageant and other things were happening. We didn't get to the idea until seven years later when Pageant was running off Broadway, doing very well. And Bobby said, well, we need to do a new project. How about those twins? And I said, absolutely. He said, who should we ask to write the music?

And I said, I have always wanted to write with Henry Krieger. I mean, his score for Dreamgirls absolutely electrified me. It was just everything I wanted to do in musical theater. So I faxed him through the drama, drama to skilled just to date it. Right. And he called me immediately and said, you wrote one of my favorite songs. And I'm like, why? Because I hadn't had that much recorded at that point. And right at that time, the Boston Conservatory was celebrating their hundred and twenty fifth anniversary with a big gala. They had commissioned Henry to write a song for it. And somebody had given the head of musical theater there a bootleg tape of my show, Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens.

And he had sent Henry the finale for that show, a recording of the finale. It's called Learning to Let Go. And Henry had been playing that song every day for two weeks. And then he got the fax from me. So it really felt like it was just meant to happen. And that's we had our first meeting and that was it.

[17:39] Bill Russell: The rest was history. What a cast. What a show. What a score.

[17:43] Robert Bannon: Yeah. Five and a half years from that meeting until it opened on Broadway. I was going to ask you about Elegies. How did that come to be? And where was the idea of that show for you and for you to write it? I couldn't assume where it is from, but what was your process to write that show?

[18:00] Bill Russell: Well, I had been very familiar with Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, which was written in 1915. It's a series of free verse epitaphs of these characters in this cemetery in Illinois. They're all dead and they're speaking from beyond the grave. And it was adapted for the stage.

[18:25] Bill Russell: What? I don't mean to cut. I laughed. I didn't mean to be disrespectful and laugh. In acting school, going to Meisner training, that is you have to graduate. You need to do a Spoon River and you need to make it your own. And we recorded them as a class. So it made me laugh and took me back. My apologies.

[18:52] Bill Russell: No, that's great. I love when people know it. You know, it really blew the roof off of small town America. And then in 1987, AIDS was encroaching closer and closer into our circle of friends. And we went to Washington for a big protest march and saw the initial unveiling of the NAMES Project quilt, which was so incredible. At that time, it was fifteen hundred panels covering a big part of the Washington Mall. And I came home from that. I'd been wanting to do I write a lot of free verse and I've been wanting to do a bigger project in that. And I thought I could do a Spoon River of AIDS with the quilt being the metaphor that includes everyone like the cemetery did in Spoon River Anthology. And I just started writing these monologues.

And when I had about 12 of them, I called Janet said, you know, I'd love to have music with this. Would you be willing to write some songs? And she said yes immediately. And it just took off from there. And, you know, the first production was in 1989 in Soho with a cast of 35 and it was incredibly well received. But we thought this show will never happen again because you go to a producer and say, hey, I've got this great show. Oh, tell me about it. Well, it has an enormous cast. It's written in verse and it's about AIDS. And they're like, where do I sign up? Not, you know, but somehow it has it continues to have this life, especially in England. Every drama school there does that show. So people, every actor, so many British actors have it on their resume. It's just crazy. It's really so gratifying.

[20:52] Robert Bannon: Bill, it's because it is gorgeous, like it is gorgeous. The music is gorgeous.

[21:01] Bill Russell: Oh, Janet. Yeah, she's just amazing.

[21:05] Robert Bannon: But don't, her music, but your words like it makes me boohoo cry. It is stunning. The story you tell is stunning. And if you're a theater person who's never heard it before, you love just music in general and storytelling. You need to listen to it. You need to find it, go online and look at people singing the songs from it and telling these stories from it. You know, you've done a lot of work for AIDS and a lot of charity work with Broadway Cares and et cetera through the years. How important and you're very vocal and honest, you know, your life and the stories you write and the queer culture following that has loved your work that you have done.

[21:43] Bill Russell: Well, how important is it to be an advocate besides just being an artist? And how do they go together?

[21:47] Bill Russell: Oh, well, the book really is my journey, both as a writer and as a gay man. And they're intertwined, you know, with a lot of cultural milestones along the way. I mean, I was at Woodstock the final day. I frequented Studio 54. I was involved in gay liberation, all these different things that sort of happened during this lifespan. And but gay liberation was just so important to me because when I was growing up, we never saw any representations of any kind of gay people. It just didn't exist, you know. So when once I came out with a vengeance and it really took me a long time, I was really fighting it because my whole background was just so involved with any of that, you know. But then I really became out all the time and started going back to South Dakota and doing concerts of my songs with local talent performing them and always making a point of, I'm gay.

And, you know, out there, that was pretty heavy. But actually, people have told me in my hometown, you really changed the way people view gay people here. I think we got to thank you that, you know, people who have stood up that were there and have lost friends and family and were unapologetically who they were. You guys doing that makes this 42-year-old little gay boy from New Jersey have the ability to marry his husband. And the representation you've shown and really fighting the fight changed the culture for all of us. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the people who stood at the forefront like you and made art and culture and lived your life out loud.

[23:49] Bill Russell: Right. Well, thank you. It means a great deal to me.

[23:54] Robert Bannon: So who do you hope buys the book? What's your goal? What do you hope after you read the book? What's your message or your dream for the reader who gets to hear it?

[24:02] Bill Russell: Well, I hope, of course, I want the theater nerds and the gay people to, there's a lot there for all of that. But I think, you know, I've shared it with some people and they've all said, this is not your typical theater memoir or gay memoir. I mean, it covers a lot of territory and a lot of, as I said, cultural milestones. So I hope everybody will take a look at it. I mean, I know some people won't like it, but I think it's more than just about theater and being gay. It's a big story, really.

[24:39] Robert Bannon: Absolutely. Well, it's called Still Bill, Gay Adventures from Cowboy Land to Broadway. It comes out on October 27th. And then there's going to be a launch event at the Drama Bookstore on the 29th. So if you want to see that. And people, you got a book here for 16 bucks, really, is what it is. I mean, this is a steal of a deal, that this is a steal of a deal to have this. Go ahead, please.

[25:10] Bill Russell: Well, there's a paperback, a Kindle and an audio book, which I recorded myself.

[25:18] Robert Bannon: And that was fun. You could hear it in his voice, right? In his voice. And all of the behind this, just the stories from Studio 54 alone could be a book, I'm sure.

[25:31] Bill Russell: I'm worried about what you left out of the book. That's the show.

[25:35] Bill Russell: Well, the working title was Sex and Drugs in Musical Theater, and I'll go there.

[25:43] Robert Bannon: See, I hope that this is a brand new, I could see you telling stories and I could see you making theater music reviews and telling the story and people reading this. It just sounds like the perfect one man show. And I hope that people read the book, enjoy it. And I wish you nothing but love and success and continue to make beautiful, incredible art that we love, love.

[26:02] Bill Russell: I gotta go listen to L and G's now. That's what I'm gonna do this afternoon.

[26:07] Robert Bannon: That's what I'm gonna do this afternoon. Thank you for the work. Thank you for what you do.

[26:11] Bill Russell: Thank you for a great interview.

[26:13] Bill Russell: I'm ready to get a copy. I'm digging in. I'm digging in. Thank you for being here.

[26:18] Bill Russell: My show's your show anytime.

[26:20] Bill Russell: All right. Thanks very much, Robert.