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[0:01] Alan Seales: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another all-new episode of The Theatre Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Seales. And if you're used to the normal once-a-week release schedule, you might have noticed that I've been releasing two, sometimes three episodes a week for the last two months or so. This Tony season is so friggin' busy, and there is so much enormous talent onstage right now that I just couldn't say no to these opportunities. So thanks for bearing with me. Our guest for this episode, Rick Elice, fits right into that category of greatness. He wrote the script for Water for Elephants, currently one of the best musical Tony-nominated shows, and it nabbed him a nomination, making his fourth personal nomination.

So if I had to summarize Rick in one word, I'd say cerebral. Just getting him going on one topic begins to peel back all the layers of his thought process, exposing how truly unique he is. And he mentions the name Roger a few times, who, for context, is his late husband of over 30 years, and mentions how grief-stricken he was when the love of his life was gone, a feeling he was then able to channel into the writing process for Water for Elephants, which, in his words, saved him. So yes, I hope you find this story as touching as I do. Everyone, please enjoy this episode now with playwright and former creative director to the stars, Rick Elice. Today's guest is an author, a playwright, an actor, a teacher, an entrepreneur who has been involved in the Broadway scene in one form or another since, I think, 1979.

1603, actually. 1603. Born in Brad, Manhattanite, he saw his first show when he was three, and it was, well, all downhill from there. In 1982, he became the creative director of Serino Coyne, one of the top theatrical agencies in New York, and then became a creative consultant for the Walt Disney Studio from '99 to 2008. His first Broadway credit as book writer, aka playwright, was Jersey Boys, which opened in 2005, led him to write the stories, the books, for the Broadway shows of The Addams Family, Peter and the Starcatcher, The Cher Show, and now Water for Elephants, which just nabbed him his fourth Tony nomination. He's writing the books for The Princess Bride musical, Smash musical, and even more. Rick Elice, welcome to The Theatre Podcast.

[2:32] Rick Elice: I can't believe that's all about me. Suddenly, I feel like I'm not the only person I've never heard of on this Zoom.

[2:38] Alan Seales: Well, let's go back to 1603, when you first got into theatre. So, you were born in Manhattan, obviously, and then you saw Sound of Music, I think, was the first thing you saw?

[2:52] Rick Elice: No, believe it or not, it was My Fair Lady. It was about the same time as Sound of Music, but My Fair Lady ran for many years in its original incarnation. I think it started in 1956 or 1957, but anyway, a few years after that, I saw it at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, now the Times Square Church. My mom took my brother and me to the theatre on a rainy Saturday afternoon because, believe it or not, theatre tickets were cheaper in those days than a babysitter. My brother was very misbehaved because he was older and, I guess, didn't like having to sit quietly in the dark. She said, for me, it was the first time in my three years on this planet that I had actually sat with my mouth shut for more than 30 seconds. So, she kept on taking me because she enjoyed the quiet, I think. The quiet of theatre.

[3:57] Alan Seales: So, do you just have the other brother or do you have more siblings?

[4:01] Rick Elice: It's just me and my brother. He's the good son. He's a doctor and has been for many, many years, and I'm the black hat of the family.

[4:06] Alan Seales: I mean, you seem like you've done okay for yourself. I want to get into the whole, like, what a creative consultant is, what a creative director does, but I was reading a little fun fact, you got fired from your first show as an actor.

[4:26] Rick Elice: I got fired from my first Broadway show as an actor. I mean, I had been doing theatre for a few years before that, principally at Yale Repertory Theatre because I went to the Yale Drama School, now called the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, but it was the Yale Drama School back in that other century. I came to New York and got cast in the show and then was fired from it. It was very traumatic and embarrassing and all those things. I had a brand new agent who dropped me and I didn't really know what I was going to do. Then luckily, I was hired to go up to the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., where I was a charter member for two years. Bob Brustein, who had been the dean of Yale Drama School and the artistic director at Yale Repertory Theatre, was starting this new theatre, which is still there, called the American Repertory Theatre, ART, and up I went to Cambridge.

There was a brilliant avant-garde director there named Peter Sellers, not the actor Peter Sellers, but the director Peter Sellers, who took a shine to me and he cast me in things. He also got me this gig as a teaching fellow, first at Lowell House at Harvard and then at Adams House, where I was able to direct plays as fundraisers for the houses and things. I had free room and board, and I taught the sociology of public opinion once a week. I was able, therefore, to bank my salary at the ART, compile a nest egg, so that when I came back home to New York two years later, I came back with a little bit of money so I could rent an apartment and try again to make it here in New York, which happened to be my hometown.

I just wanted to come home. Then I started doing plays in New York and did a stint on a soap opera and things like that. Then I was doing a musical down at the Public Theatre for Joe Papp, written by this crazy, talented Canadian genius called Des Mackenuff. It's a musical about the Red Baron called The Death of Von Richthofen as Witnessed from Earth. At opening night at the Public Theatre for this musical, I found myself online for the goulash, standing next to somebody and started chatting. He said shortly after we started, oh, you seem like a funny guy. I run the ad agency for Joe Papp and the Public Theatre, and I need some funny headlines. My partner is away for the summer, and she does all the funny headlines and writes the commercials.

Do you think you could do that? I said, I'm an actor. I don't do headlines. I should say that at the time, I was being paid $149 a week plus an extra $20 because I was the dance captain of this musical as well. But even $169, less than 10% for my agent and after taxes, even in the summer of 1982, it was really hard to survive on that. When he said, oh, well, that's too bad because I was going to pay you $100, I went, $100? For $100, I'll grow another arm if you want. So I went up to his office the following Monday and discovered that I had a facility for writing headlines. He gave me an assignment to do, and at the end of the day, I went to get my $100, and he said, I like what you're doing.

Could you come back tomorrow? I thought, well, he's paying me $100. I should go back tomorrow, and that happened Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. On Friday, I finally said, listen, it's very nice here. Everybody that works for you seems like a very nice person, but I have to be free during the day for auditions and things like that. The play that I'm in that we thought was going to move to Broadway, it's not moving to Broadway, so I've got to find my next job. He said, oh, well, that's too bad, but anyway, here's a check. He gave me a check for $500. He meant $100 a day. He gave me a check for $500. It was like getting a check for a million dollars. $500 was a month's rent and then some. I said, of course, if you need me next week, I'd be happy to come back.

He said, oh, well, my partner is coming back, so I think this is probably it. Then in the middle of the next week, I got a call from his partner, the legendary Nancy Coyne, who said, my partner says I should meet you and we should have a cup of coffee. Do you want to come up to the office? I went up and we immediately bonded as kindred spirits, which was very special. She said, I see what you did. I like what you did. We don't need somebody full time, but I can give you two days a week maybe. That means you wouldn't have to be a waiter or something like that until you get an acting job. I said, oh, okay, fair enough. That's how I started in advertising. A month later, I was sitting in meetings with Mike Nichols and Joe Papp.

I'd been in three or four plays for him by then, and he had no idea who I was, but suddenly, he's asking me my opinion in a conference room. People that I thought, oh, these people will hire me as an actor eventually. I thought, okay, I'll do this for a while. Then it turned out to be very seductive. I learned a whole trade. I learned how to make commercials. I learned how to write for radio. I learned how to storyboard for television. I learned how to direct commercials. I learned how to be a studio guy and record and do radio plays, which is what a good radio commercial should be. Suddenly, I was cutting movie trailers. I thought, all right, I'll go back to acting when I'm 30 and I'm old enough to be considered for the parts I really want to play.

I just stayed there because I fell in love with somebody who lived in another country, and so I decided it was a good thing to be earning a living that enabled me to travel on the weekends to a faraway land and live my life. I stayed for many years, almost 20 years.

[11:19] Rick Elice: What, '82 to '99? You were officially the creative director at Serino Coyne, right?

[11:25] Alan Seales: A long time. Then one of my clients at the Walt Disney Company called me one day when I was having a bad day in advertising and said, "Would you like to come and work at the studio as whatever you'd like? Think of a 10-point plan and fax it to me." That's how long ago it was, and I just made up an imaginary job that I thought would be wonderful, which was to take everything that I'd learned over the years at the ad agency in terms of writing, directing, producing, and being a creative diplomat without portfolio. He hired me as the creative director for the studio, reporting to the chairman of the studio, the chairman of the company, and the heads of the divisions, not being part of the hierarchy but being a consultant.

I thought that would be a great thing to do. It also meant that I wasn't working as I had in advertising all those years, 24 hours a day because advertising is a deadline-oriented business. In 2003, after I'd been there just a handful of years, a client of mine from my ad days called and said he had the rights to the Four Seasons music, and did I think it would make a good musical. I said, "I love Vivaldi, but do you really think there's a whole show there?" He said, "Not Vivaldi, you asshole. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons." The guy with the high voice, I didn't know anything about Frankie Valli except I remembered a couple of the songs, and he started listing the songs. I went, "Oh, wow.

That's quite a list of songs, but what's the idea?" They said, "Mamma Mia!" had just opened, and it was a great big hit. It was what they were suddenly calling this thing called a jukebox musical, which they did not mean as a compliment. What Mamma Mia! did was they took a famous bunch of songs, a great song list from ABBA, and retrofitted a story around those songs, and he said, "We could do the same thing with the songs of the Four Seasons." I said, "But why would you want to do the same thing that somebody else just did?" He said, "Would you have lunch at least with Frankie Valli and the principal songwriter of the group, Bob Gaudio?"

[13:41] Rick Elice: I said, “Sure, because in show business, as you know, Alan, there’s this great tradition of never turning down a free lunch.” So, I grabbed my poker buddy, the legendary Oscar-winning screenwriter, Marshall Brickman, to whom I had run up something of a large poker debt. “Hey, Marsh, want to write a musical with me?” He said, “I’ve never written a musical.” I said, “Neither have I, but let’s go and meet these guys and maybe there’s something there. We’re not going to get paid anyway, so maybe we’ll have a good time.” We went to a restaurant on West 46th Street. We were sitting with the great Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, who had written all those amazing songs. While we were waiting for the calamari to arrive, we said, “So, what was it like being you growing up in Jersey?”

They started telling us these anecdotes that were really interesting. This was when The Sopranos was a very successful and popular television show on HBO. The Sopranos was everywhere in our culture, and there they were talking about growing up and being importuned by mob bosses and gangsters. It just seemed like we were both leaning forward like the way you do when you’re in an audience being told a really good story. At one point, we said, “This is crazy. We know your songs, but how come we’ve never heard any of this?” They said, “Well, we’ve never told this story.” So you thought, “Well, okay, this is a true story. It’s also a good story, and now you’re telling us that it was sort of an untold story?

How come we don’t know this?” They said, “We were never written about because we didn’t have long hair. We didn’t have exotic accents like the British invasion groups. We were just from the other side of the river, and it’s sort of the joke state in New Jersey. They were never written about because nobody thought that they would sell magazines.” So there we were. We looked at each other and said, “Maybe this is the thing we should be writing.” So we said, “Did you ever think about that? Did you ever think about telling your story?” They said, “Well, we don’t want it to be guys and dolls. We don’t want it to be cartoonish.” We said, “Well, we’ll write some stuff for you, and we’ll show you.” Anyway, they liked what we did, but who would direct it?

I said, “Well, it just so happens there’s this guy that I know from this Red Baron musical, and I had done the advertising for the other things that Des had done on Broadway.” I said, “I remember Des was sort of a rocker at heart, and he also happens to at that time was the artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse out west, and it’s great to find a director who’s also an artistic director at a theater because then he can say, ‘I want to give you a slot, and we can get the show on.’” And sure enough, we called Des, and he said, “I love the Four Seasons. The very first record album I ever had as a kid growing up north of Toronto was Sherry and 11 Other Hits, so it seemed to be meant to be.”

You know, he said he would do it. He said, “Write it.” We auditioned actors before we had even finished writing it, and the first time we heard it was in a rehearsal room at La Jolla Playhouse, and the show opened out there, and people liked it, and it came to New York and was successful, and as a result, I kept getting asked to write shows. It was never anything that I particularly had in mind, Alan, I assure you, but that’s it. That’s why I’m talking to you tonight.

[17:22] Alan Seales: I was going to go back a little bit because you had not written anything. You weren’t a writer, I guess. Well, okay.

[17:31] Rick Elice: I’ve been writing advertising material, 30-second commercials for television, 60-second commercials for radio. The longest thing I had written was a play that was done in the West End in London in the mid-1980s, and I’ve always loved the theater, but I never dreamed that I would actually write theater pieces because that just seemed to be what the grown-ups did, and I’ve never really thought of myself as a grown-up. I’m just sort of a theater kid, so I had this opportunity, and because it was successful, I got asked to do it again and again and again, and I just kept saying yes because I thought, well, this is sort of a nice way to live my life. You just keep saying yes, and I’m just kind of getting the impression that you don’t set out these goals, but you never turn down a free lunch, and you’re at this point now where you’re like, well, I guess I’ll just do that, and I guess I’ll just do that, and look at all the things that I’ve done because I was asked to, and you’ve just been successful in every free lunch you’ve taken, you know, metaphorically here.

[18:42] Rick Elice: Well, I mean, it sounds nice when you say that. I’ve only thought of myself really as kind of a pinball in my life, and I head down toward the flipper, and somebody else hits the button, and I get flipped back up into the thing, and I go ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, and then I’ve done something else. Time for a quick commercial break. Hang on a second.

[19:08] Alan Seales: Welcome back to the episode. And when you’re doing creative direction, being a creative director and a creative consultant and all that, what actually does that entail? Like, what was your day-to-day? Was it like an internal director that sort of was approving final copy and advertisements and projects that other people were doing in the company? Or like, walk me through what you were doing on that side of the career path.

[19:34] Rick Elice: Well, as a creative director at an ad agency, I suppose it will vary to some degree from ad agency to ad agency depending on the scope of the shop and also the scope of the clientele and the products involved. But the ad agency that I worked at, Serino Coyne, it’s an entertainment advertising agency, so we specialized in products with no shelf life, specifically theater seats, beds in hotels, the odd airline, things that needed to be sold every day over and over and over again as opposed to a can of Coke that if you don’t buy it today, it can sit on the shelf and you can buy it next week and that’s fine. So it’s a different sort of advertising ethos to selling something that has shelf life as opposed to selling something that has no shelf life that you have to sell over and over and over again every day.

I suppose in a word, the difference is urgency because if you don’t sell those theater tickets every day, the show’s going to close. It was theater-related, which of course was the grand passion of my life, certainly my professional life, and I loved the theater and always have. I saw my job essentially as doing everything I could to help shows run longer because tonight maybe the next Jerome Robbins or the next Lin-Manuel Miranda or the next Lynn Nottage or the next Tony Kushner will come to see a play and go, “Oh my god, that’s what I want to do,” and for the sake of those people who will grow up to be the great landmark people, those of us who try to keep those shows going as long as possible would work like hell to keep those shows going.

The great thing that Nancy Coyne told me was the difference between having an idea and doing an activity. An activity is laying out an ad, but the idea is what’s actually in there. What’s the content? How do you figure out the one thing to say that would get somebody to say, “I’m going to pick that one over all the other ones,” or “I’m going to go to that tonight?” It was a great challenge and a fun assignment, and I had a blast for a lot of years doing that. Also, it was very nice being the captain of a team. This all just was a happenstance conversation with Matthew Serino in a line, and you impressed him with the conversation. He was like, “Yeah, here’s a hundred bucks.” He was a smart-mouthed actor, and he said, “It just so happened that Nancy Coyne was away for a few weeks,” and he was hard up for a funny headline for Annie.

[22:21] Alan Seales: That’s insane. Have you ever credited him with this? Have you ever gone back and been like, “Dude…”

[22:26] Rick Elice: I always tell the story. The only reason I didn’t mention Matthew’s name specifically is that he recently passed away, and I don’t think it’s my place to talk about people who are no longer with us. I certainly have no problem talking about Nancy Coyne because she still is very much with us. That’s all. Matthew discovered me.

[22:51] Alan Seales: That’s insane, and I know Serino Coyne’s been around. They’re one of the most well-respected agencies in the city that I’ve ever… and great people to work with, too.

[22:58] Rick Elice: A great group of people.

[23:00] Alan Seales: Yeah, and you’re right. They’re a group of people that always seem to be enjoying what they do, very happy and very creative. It’s fascinating to me how, literally, this chance encounter just cracked open this talent and this passion and this love inside you that you had no clue was there, because you’re like, “I want to be an actor. I want to go do this whole thing.” Because you got to be at Cornell in ’76. You said you got the MFA at Yale Drama in ’79. You were in it for acting, and then all of a sudden, you’ve become this incredibly successful writer, but the big question is, did you pay back your poker debt?

[24:20] Rick Elice: I see you’ve been doing your research, so congratulations. I would say, although I have an aversion to the word “flop,” I would say certainly it was hated by the critics. It did run for more than 700 performances on Broadway, which is almost two years, which is I think probably not anyone’s definition of a flop. That may be yours, but forgive me if I contradict you, but I suppose on the basis of it having paid off, which is I guess the objective definition of a hit is a show that recoups its initial capitalization, “The Addams Family” was not on the basis of its Broadway run, but I believe that it is in profit now because for the last eight years, as Andrew Lippa will tell you, it is I think the number one most licensed title in North America.

Jerome Robbins famously said, “You’re never done working on a show. You just run out of time.” When a Broadway show runs out of time these days, it’s about a week before you open and they do what’s called “freezing the show,” which is beyond this point, we will not make any changes because the critics are about to come, so we’re going to freeze the show and let the actors get used to performing this version of the show, no more new material, so that by the time the critics come, they’ve played in and they feel comfortable with what they’re doing and the critics can come in and evaluate it. I can’t imagine anybody ever saying, “That’s it. I’m done.” They just say, “No, that’s it. We’re out of time.”

The producers of “The Addams Family” said, “We know we’re out of time for New York, but when we do the national tour, instead of rehearsing the Broadway script, why don’t you guys make all the changes that you didn’t get to make and do the rewrite that you didn’t have time to do, and we’ll do that version of the show for the national tour.” Because they gave us the wherewithal to do that and not just recreate the thing that had opened on Broadway, but to create another version of the show, we were able to do the thing that we ran out of time for, for Broadway, and the national tour went out and became a much more successful version of the story that we had hatched for “The Addams Family.” It’s that version of the show that’s so popular and that is still so popular all these many years later.

[24:42] Rick Elice: Yes, I did.

[24:45] Alan Seales: I mean, yeah, so let’s see. You worked on more than 300 Broadway shows at Serino, Serino Coyne, from “Chorus Line” to “Lion King,” “Disney,” let’s see, “Jersey Boys.” That’s insane, and then you get to work with Marshall Brickman again, and then up-and-comer Andrew Lippa for “The Addams Family.” Kind of walk me through “The Addams Family” timeline, because “Jersey Boys,” “Out of the Gate,” was a success, won all these awards, etc. “Addams Family” was not. Considered a flop on Broadway, now one of the most successfully, most produced regional and licensed shows.

[26:55] Alan Seales: When you’re writing and you’re creating a show, and specifically something like Water for Elephants now, are you writing it with any sort of marketing potential in mind, or are you literally just concentrating on the content? You want to make a good story first, and then after it’s frozen, it opens, and then are you involved with the marketing at all? Are you pitching ideas to marketing, or are you just like, “Nope, I’m out. I left that job behind. Now I’m in a different role. I’m staying in my lane.”

[27:23] Rick Elice: Nobody has ever asked me that question before, so I mention that because you're obviously very good at your job. Story, story, story. If you're writing for the theatre or for any film or TV or novel, story, story, story is always the thing. Everything falls into line if you get a great story. If you invent a great story, if you have a great story, nothing matters but the story. The characters, of course, within that story ought to be compelling characters that the audience cares about. So, story, character. I suppose if I were being absolutely honest, and since it's only the two of us talking, I'll risk being absolutely honest. I also think, gee, if I were in the audience, what would I really like to have happen now?

What would give me a goosebump experience? What would make the hair stand up on the back of my neck? What would make me want to run out of the theatre and call ten friends and say, I'm taking you back to see this thing because I wanted to share this with you because it made me happy or it touched my heart or it made me think differently about something that I thought I was absolutely right about, made me reevaluate. All those things that the theatre does are why I keep going. I do consider that, but I think story, character, and what would I like to see if I were in the audience. By see, I mean what would I like to happen next and then what? It's always the best question to ask in the theatre, and because of that, what happened next?

If you do what I do and you keep asking yourself that question, even if it means getting up from your little chair and your little laptop and taking a walk around the block and figuring out better and then what, that's what I do. Bringing it back to Water for Elephants, which is the show that I'm on, we all know what it's like to jump a train in our lives, to take a risk in order to find some place to belong somewhere, to be part of something, something bigger than ourselves. I'm talking about being part of a group, and it might be a football team or a cheerleading squad or a poker night or a think tank or a garage band or the greasers and the outsiders or even a circus troupe. It might even be the people who come to the theatre on any given night.

These groups become like second families to us, and I think sometimes their bonds are stronger than they are with our real families, and sometimes we take them for granted and screw them up, and sometimes they're as dysfunctional as our real families, but the bonds are like iron, like they are with our real families, sometimes even stronger than they are with our real families. You know, Water for Elephants, for example, tells the story of a particular group, this circus troupe in 1931. It couldn't be further from who I am and what I do and the people that I know, but because I have been through my version of that and because I'm a thinking and feeling person, it's hard not to be touched by those eternal issues of wanting to belong and wanting to achieve, wanting to be respected, wanting to find home.

The last line of Jersey Boys is, "Chasing the music, trying to get home." That was 18 years ago, and now I'm still writing about the feeling of home in the case of Water for Elephants, you know, for this fellow named Jacob Jankowski, who as a young man experiences great loss and 50 years later as an old man experiences great loss again and finds a way, by being part of something larger than himself, to find a way to put one foot in front of the other again. You know, I wasn't writing about loss when Marshall and I were writing Jersey Boys, but certainly we were writing about belonging. Now, you know, I'm a widowed guy and I've had my heart broken, and I know what it's like to try to navigate the dissonance of grief on a moment-by-moment basis—I forget daily, but on a minute-to-minute basis.

It's really, really hard, the hardest thing I've ever done, because you're carrying this bag of bricks and there's nobody to hand it off to, but then, of course, as a writer, in the course of leaning into that whilst writing Water for Elephants, I thought, there is somebody that you can share this bag of bricks with. It's all the people who understand because they've been through it, too. That was my goal with Water for Elephants, which, you know, on the surface seems to be a circus story, but for me, it's a story of somebody saying to the audience, yeah, I know. I know being a survivor is really, really hard. Look at what I'm doing, and maybe that's something that you might try. Well, I think everybody at one point or another has either wanted to, if not literally, run away with the circus, you know, run away, right?

The circus being a metaphor or a parallel to something else in their life or someone else in their life, but, you know, there's a lot of fear of adulting, and even as you said, like, at the beginning of the interview, you're like, you still feel like a kid. You don't feel like the man that you appear on the outside. I look in the mirror and see a 43-year-old guy, but I forget I'm 43 until I look in the mirror. I'm like, yeah, I'm a 25-year-old. I do whatever I want, and I look in the mirror. I'm like, oh, shit. No, it's true. Let me tell you, you know, I'm 20 years older than you, and I also forget. The trick for me is I've long ago turned all the mirrors to the wall, so I never even notice myself passing by because otherwise it's just depressing because all it does is remind me that I'm not the kid that I feel like.

Time for a quick commercial break. Hang on a second. Welcome back to the episode. Do you channel that into your writing? Writing Water for Elephants now in 2024, right? I don't know when you started writing it, but it opened here in 2024. Obviously, The Cher Show opened in 2018, which was the Broadway show you did previous to Water for Elephants. So, to me, Cher Show is telling a story of somebody we all know, as was Jersey Boys, the story of Frankie Valli, even though they're both people we know, but they're not necessarily stories you know. Water for Elephants is already a story we know with characters that we may not. So, was that process, how was that process different for you? And then actually, now that your husband's passed, you've got this grief now that you're carrying with you, and Water for Elephants is sort of about running away and wanting to deal with grief.

Did all this play together to produce what we're seeing? Well, just in terms of the chronology, Peter Schneider and Jen Costello, the producers of Water for Elephants, I think came to me with the novel because of Peter and the Starcatcher, which was a novel that I adapted for as a play. Which, by the way, is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite plays I've ever seen. Oh, well, thanks. That's really sweet. But because I had just adapted something and it was successful and people liked it, I was asked to look at this novel and see if I wanted to adapt this time as a musical. Well, I had read the novel about 20 years ago, like 2006 maybe when it came out. I was in a book club and read the novel and talked about it with my book club mates.

I remembered it 10 years later when Peter and Jen called me and said, would you be interested in this? They were thinking, oh, well, this is a guy who has adapted a novel, and so maybe he'll adapt this novel and he seems to know what to do. But Roger had just died, and I really didn't even know. I was sort of sitting here like Miss Havisham with cobwebs growing. I just had a very, very rough time. He was a great person. We were together for almost 35 years. It was very traumatic. I was a kid when we got together. I had no idea how to navigate the world as an individual person. I'd always been part of a couple. I didn't even know what colors I liked. Roger was a great guy and a great artist. He knew how to do everything.

All I knew how to do was be a worker. He was an artist. I was very much at sea and very disillusioned with life. When I looked at the novel this time with that swirling around me, of course, I saw the novel differently. I said, I think this is how I'm going to stress the story or this is how I'm going to figure out what to include, what to exclude, what to emphasize, and what to conflate. You can't do a whole novel on stage because the show would be 12 hours long. Nobody reads a novel in one sitting, but the theater is a one-sitting experience. How can you do it without doing all of it? What is your organizing principle that informs what you exclude, what you include, what you telescope and conflate, and all of that?

How do you write it in such a way that everything that you write as the book writer is really delivering you into a musical moment because the music in a musical is the engine that drives the story, not scenes. It's the music. That's why it's a musical. The writing process is fundamentally different from writing a play to writing a musical because the text, once you actually have figured out the structure and the concept and all of these principles of inclusion and exclusion, you must also figure out how to step away. This sounds fancy and therefore probably affected, but I don't mean it to sound affected. I'm really trying to be scrupulously honest. Writing the book of a musical requires you to write with real humility because what you're doing is essentially setting up a series of songs, and so you get out of the way of the story as the book writer of the musical, whereas as a playwright, of course, you have to deliver the story.

You can't hand it off to a composer or, in the case of Peter and the Water for Elephants, seven songwriters, the seven guys of Pigpen Theatre Company. I thought it'll be different because I suggested writing it with the Pigpen guys, and the producers said okay, but a writer's room environment is not your typical environment for writing a show, and I thought that would also help me in the way that I was feeling by just putting myself into a group to get out of my head and to get out of my solitude and to feel, as I mentioned before, part of something bigger than myself, and Pigpen helped me do that, which was great as we wrote the show. Then, of course, Jessica Stone joined us. She's so smart and funny, and she figured out all the coding of the show and how to crack the codes of the puppetry and the circus art and put it all together.

She's the perfect person to captain this battleship into a very small berth and do it with great heart and great integrity. It sort of saved my life doing this show, even though at the same time, literally, I think the first time we actually presented the first act of Water for Elephants was the day before I left town for the out-of-town tryout for Cher. That's just the way it happens when you're a writer. Things get scheduled on top of each other, and you don't want to be the rate limiting step on any project because it takes so long to get these things on. Everything was sort of crazy in my life because I was sad, and writing about that with Water for Elephants kind of rescued me. That's beautiful. I can see that the way you're describing it, the way you're describing the

[42:03] Rick Elice: Inherited from her, there's a great original narrative, but the character of Marlena in the book is somebody who doesn't express herself a lot. Of course, in the theatre, you've got to figure out another way to have a character than a character that doesn't express herself a lot, especially if you want to get somebody as talented as Izzy McAllister to say, yes, I'll play that part. We had to find ways that were different for Jacob Jankowski and different for August, who is the ringmaster guy, a conflation of two characters in the novel. The owner of the circus and the ringmaster are two different characters in the novel. We conflated them to one character because a triangle is a better geometry for theatre storytelling than a rectangle.

We created the triangle, and people will say, the triangle must be the guy who's the husband, who now we would describe as undiagnosed bipolar, but of course, we didn't have that language in 1931, and the young man who has lost everything who accidentally jumps on a train just to get away. Because it happens to be a circus train, that changes the trajectory of his life, and he finds himself attracted to the star act, the equestrian Marlena, played by Izzy. People might say, oh, so that's the triangle you're talking about, the triangle of Izzy and then Jacob on one side and August on the other side. To some extent, that's true, but there's also the triangle of our title character, the elephant, with Jacob on one side and Marlena on the other side because they are the characters that get to know the elephant the most and through whose eyes we anthropomorphize what's going on with the elephant to the extent that we understand what the elephant must do at the end of our story.

That's another triangle, and then of course, there's the triangle of the Jacob many, many years later and the two people that he's, you know, the present-day circus workers that he's telling his story to and because he happens to be telling it to them and is a super interesting guy, they keep listening. They have no interest in hearing from him at the beginning of the show. They're trying to give him the bum's rush and get him out of there so they can pack up and move on to the next town, and he just snags them in that way that Faulkner writes in one of his stories. Somebody's trying to break it off with someone and he says, I got my foot caught in the door and he gets their feet caught in his door so they can't walk away, and so he keeps on telling that he keeps on going further and further and further down the road of the story of his younger self and Marlena and Rosie the elephant in August and what they go through in that depression era summer of 1931, and it's just so interesting to them and compelling to them that they keep listening and because they keep listening, he keeps telling corny and weird.

He's lonely. He's by himself. He just has somebody to listen. That's right. It's just nice to be listened to, Alan. I got to tell you, you get to a point in your life. I hope maybe you won't ever get to that point, but as you get older in life, you find yourself sometimes thinking, nobody's listening anymore to me.

[45:54] Alan Seales: I have two little kids. I feel that already.

[45:58] Rick Elice: I've done a couple of talkbacks after some Saturday matinees and people stay and come over afterwards and say some version of thank you because I've never worked in the circus, but I sort of feel like very much I totally relate to this guy, so thanks for understanding. I say that because it's really Sarah Gruen who wrote the story. I take no credit for it, but I love that the show gives people that kind of comfort or that feeling of having been heard after a while of thinking, nobody can hear me. Nobody's listening. You said a story like that to music. Music is an international language. You don't need to know the words to have everybody from multiple cultures, multiple walks of life enjoy the same music.

It's a brilliant language of music that can truly bring people together. And again, that's why in one of the greatest cities on the planet, New York City, we have the epicenter, arguably, of theater, which is Broadway, the best of the best, where these stories come, and the world literally comes here to hear these stories. They get to hear War for Elephants.

[47:12] Rick Elice: Well, and you were talking metaphorically too, and I would just say that metaphorically and literally, the story of War for Elephants is told not just with the characters talking to each other or even talking and then singing to each other, but it's also told through the circus arts and the puppetry and the design. Everything is actually in service to the story because it's a memory play, and because it's a memory play, things can be fragmented and abstracted the way our memories are, and it enables us to draw the audience in, I think, in an interactive way. But because you see aerialists flying through the air without wires, without being clipped onto anything, flying through the air the way circus performers do, you realize that literally, because it's happening before your eyes and you gasp when it happens because we're not used to seeing stuff like that in a Broadway theater, it's not just literal.

It's metaphorically too. You don't leap into the air without knowing that you will be caught. I don't mean without hoping that you'll be caught. I mean without knowing. You have to know that that person down there or those people down there are going to catch you, and then you can jump. That is what we see happening before our eyes in these great physical acts that are happening in front of us, but of course, it's also exactly what the characters are doing, exactly what Izzy does as Marlena, exactly what Grant Gustin does as Jacob Jankowski. They take these big emotional leaps, these big emotional risks because they know that there's somebody there to catch them, and if that's not what makes life worth living, then I don't know why.

[49:06] Alan Seales: All right. I think that is a lovely place to start wrapping up. The three closing questions I ask everyone, just to wrap the episodes up, the first one simply is what motivates you.

[49:17] Rick Elice: What motivates me to what? You mean just in general what motivates me?

[49:23] Alan Seales: Yeah, to create, to get you up in the morning.

[49:29] Rick Elice: The beauty of the world. I live across the road from Central Park, and in Central Park, there are these little areas that people tend to not know about because they're sort of off the beaten path literally. One of them is Shakespeare's Garden. I'm a big fan of Shakespeare because I lived with someone who knew all of Shakespeare by heart, and Shakespeare understands more about the human condition, I think, than all the religious texts of all the religions in the world. There's a garden area up around the corner and up down a path and up a few steps. It's great to go there and look at something beautiful and understand that that was here before me and it's going to be here after I'm gone. To understand what a speck I am in all of this is what I find motivational in a way. A sense of my own unimportance is always very motivating for me.

[50:29] Alan Seales: I strangely understand that. I know what you mean. Okay, so the next question then, what advice would you give to your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path?

[50:37] Rick Elice: I buy the Guayabera shirt, which has four pockets, because if you buy a shirt that has four pockets, it means you don't always have to have a backpack with you. If you can put something in your pockets, there are ways to carry things with you other than carrying them on your back like a snail.

[50:57] Alan Seales: I love that answer. Okay, now last question, hardest one. If you could only see one show for the rest of your life, but you can see it as many times as you want, what would you say?

[51:05] Rick Elice: Well, I'm going to say two shows. The two sort of, what's the word, the thing that when it's really important, those sort of singular experiences. One would be the original production of Follies, the Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Hal Prince, Michael Bennett musical that was done at the Winter Garden Theater, opened April 4, 1971, and closed 15 months later. Hal Prince was the producer and the co-director with Michael Bennett, who also did the choreography. It had, of course, this sort of Pirandellian idea of past and present. When I was 14, 15 years old, going to see it, I didn't know that that wasn't original to the piece, that there was a guy called Pirandello who had done it, or UNESCO who had done it, or Tarkovsky who had done it, but the technique of past and present existing at one time, the musical numbers, the staging of the musical numbers, that one particular number now known as shorthanded as the mirror number, I think probably the greatest production number I've ever seen in a lifetime of seeing fantastic production numbers.

Let me tell you, there's a great production number in Water for Elephants that is almost the greatest number I've ever seen, but that's because the mirror number is the greatest number I've ever seen. Hal Prince produced the show, and as the producer, he had a $2 obstructed view seat policy, so it was possible for me as a kid to take my allowance at the end of the week, and if it was raining on that Saturday, instead of I couldn't go out and play, I would go to the Winter Garden Theater and I would see this thing. It was like my first fulfillment of repetition disorder because I did not come from a family where there was money to see things more than once, but because of that $2 obstructed view seat policy, I was able to see this thing many times and satisfy my need to look at it from another angle because there was so much going on, and I had to memorize all of it.

Because I can't answer just with one show, I have to say the second example of the thing that changed my life and the only thing that I would see. I guess I would see these two shows in rep on a Saturday on a two-show day would be Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing. Roger created the role of Henry in that original production in London with Felicity Kendall creating the role of Annie, and I think if that play had been less impactful to me, I wouldn't be sitting here now because I wouldn't have ended up with Raj because the play was so great we had something to talk about, and if the play hadn't been so great, we might not have had the conversation that drew me into a 35-year conversation with him.

[54:04] Alan Seales: I have to read this play now. It sounds phenomenal. Thank you. So romantic.

[54:12] Rick Elice: Your knees will hurt.

[54:13] Alan Seales: Thank you. Well, everybody go see Water for Elephants.

[54:18] Rick Elice: Oh, yes. Go, go, go, go, go. Imperial Theatre. Beautiful, beautiful show. Beautiful music. Beautiful story. Beautiful everything, and Rick Elice, thank you so much. I feel like I know you so well now. I can see you on stage and in these characters now.

[54:31] Rick Elice: Oh, Alan, you're very, very kind. Thank you. Thank you so much. I've enjoyed this so much.

[54:37] Alan Seales: Me too, Alan. Have a great night. Take a deep breath, make the world a little colorful.