This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Hi, this is Jennifer Ashley Tepper, and you're listening to The Theatre Podcast with Alan Seales.

[0:11] Alan Seales: Welcome back, theatre lovers! I'm Alan Seales, and today I am thrilled to bring you an all-new episode and fascinating conversation with Broadway historian, producer, and author Jennifer Ashley Tepper. If you've ever been curious about the untold stories of Broadway, Jennifer is the ultimate authority. She even has a book by the exact same name, with her incredible work as the programming director at 54 Below, curating over 7,000 performances, and as the author of the Untold Stories of Broadway series. She's shaping how we understand and celebrate the legacy of musical theatre. And now in this episode, we actually dive into her latest book, Women Writing Musicals, the legacy that history books left out.

And it's a groundbreaking exploration of female characters in theatre spanning from the 18th century to today, and just the origins of Broadway as we know it. We also discuss the fascinating challenges of preserving Broadway history, including why some of the shows survive in a cultural memory, while others just vanish without a trace. Jennifer shares her passion for uncovering forgotten musicals and her thoughts on how Broadway can evolve and better support diverse voices and, you know, untold stories. So grab your playbill and get ready for an inspiring deep dive into the history and future of Broadway. And don't forget to follow me on social media, and check out this episode on Spotify, where you can even find the video version of this interview now. So let's get to it!

[1:34] Alan Seales: Here you go, one, two, three. Today's guest is an acclaimed theatre historian, author, and producer. She has served as the creative and programming director at 54 Below for the past decade, where she has curated over 7,000 shows. Tepper is the author of the best-selling Untold Stories of Broadway book series and podcast, and the upcoming Women Writing Musicals, the legacy that the history books left out. The first book dedicated to female musical theatre writers. She has conceived and directed the Jonathan Larson Project, with additional producing credits including Be More Chill, Broadway Bounty Hunter, and Love and Hate Nation. She has also worked on Broadway shows like Title of Show and Godspell, and her projects all over the place have been featured by major outlets, including the New York Times and Theater Mania. I could go on, but let's get into it. Jennifer Ashley Tepper, wow! Welcome to The Theatre Podcast.

[2:27] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Thank you for that introduction. I'm going to go ahead of you everywhere you go and just announce you that way.

[2:35] Alan Seales: You're great at it. I appreciate it.

[2:38] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: We are presenting Jennifer Ashley Tepper, theatre historian, author, and producer. Thank y'all.

[2:45] Alan Seales: I love an old-timey introduction, too. That was perfect.

[2:48] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Well, wait, why's it got to be old-timey?

[2:50] Alan Seales: I felt like that was an old-timey voice. I felt like I was getting announced at the old Madison Square Garden.

[2:56] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: That's what Disney ships do. You ever take it to Disney Cruise, where you walk on and they announce your name?

[3:00] Alan Seales: Yeah, and I feel like they dig that old-timey fashion thing.

[3:04] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, well, we just did one. It's like, welcome, the Seals family. They should have someone from the Frozen motif, that world of like, welcome, the Seals.

[3:14] Alan Seales: They're basically introducing everyone at their own bat mitzvah into the ballroom.

[3:19] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Which, you know, I appreciate it, but it's unnecessary.

[3:24] Alan Seales: Anywho, I've known you in the community for a long time, and I know people that know of you as this amazing encyclopedia of every single Broadway historical fact that you can think of, and I want to kind of go there, because where did your brain get built for history, specifically Broadway history? Where did this even begin?

[3:49] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I love being a human Broadway encyclopedia. I joke around that I have no other knowledge in my brain. I don't remember the streets in my hometown. I couldn't tell you what I ate for dinner, but ask me what played the Belasco in 1971. I got you. You know what's interesting? I've been thinking about it a bit lately with this book, because my new book, Women Writing Musicals, is like an encyclopedia of all these shows that you know, and then all these shows that you don't know. My family was never in theater. Everyone in my family works in medicine, but my dad has the exact kind of brain that I have, where if you listen to the radio with my dad, he'll be like, I heard this song for the first time at camp, and I was sitting next to this person on the swing, and then it hit three on the Billboard chart, and I'm like, Dad, I got this from you, even though my father's a doctor.

You know, it's definitely like in the family, that kind of historian brain, but I was really obsessed with musical theater from afar growing up in South Florida, and I think because I was growing up not near New York, I had to teach myself about it from afar, so I memorized, you know, a lot of musical theater liner notes for cast albums and read every theater book I could get my hands on and really started thinking like, oh, The Imperial, that's where Pippin and Fiddler were, and it made me interested in like the physical history of Broadway. It made me kind of become this encyclopedia before I ever even moved to New York, and I was always so excited to share musicals that I learned with my friends.

You know, other people really wanted to perform, and I wanted to go like, hey, have you guys heard of Bat Boy? So that historian hat, it was partially, you know, my dad's encyclopedic brain. It was partially just like growing up in love with musicals from afar.

[5:23] Alan Seales: Wow. Okay, so it's a skill, a memory skill that you're just focusing on this love that you've got, so it sounds like your dad should have been a musician, not a doctor.

[5:32] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: He's a great singer. He says he's not, but he is, but you know, another thing that really encouraged it was I was really lucky to be the assistant director on the musical Title of Show, and that was like the dream of dreams. When I graduated from NYU, my first professional job was working at the Lyceum on Broadway, running around after these heroes of mine who created this original musical, and Jeff Bowen, who wrote the music and lyrics for Title of Show and I, would specifically obsess about other musicals that had played the Lyceum, and we would collect bootlegs of Broadway musicals that didn't get cast recordings, and we would just really get into, the whole cast would, but especially Jeff, the minutia of these musicals that weren't, you know, widely known, and that and a number of other things that I've done throughout my career, like the Underappreciated Musical Concert Series, if it only even runs a minute, really have inspired me more and more all the time to make people know more about the musicals they might not know.

[6:24] Alan Seales: Why is that, though? I mean, what is it about it that where you're like, oh, so-and-so is playing, like, I just saw Maybe Happy Ending last night at the Belasco, and I was like, I remember that Goodnight Oscar was there, because that was the last thing I was on. But, like, to go back and say, oh, what else was here? Why is that, why does that stick? Why do you, why do you focus in on that?

[6:48] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: A few reasons. I think the physical places themselves are magical. I think our Broadway houses have always been so inspiring to me, because it's just inherently exciting to know that, you know, you're sitting watching Hamilton, and you're in a place where someone once watched Damn Yankees. Like, that's so exciting to me, the physical history. But it's also a sense of, once you are in musical theater, whether you're a kid reading about it in Florida, or making musicals yourself, wherever you're making them, you realize just how much goes into it. And that just as much goes into it from the writers, from the actors, from everyone involved, for something that becomes Phantom of the Opera, as for something that becomes, you know, a show that runs a short period of time.

And it's just the amount of love that goes into these shows is worth celebrating. And a lot of times, I think also growing up from learning the shows from cast albums, it was never for me about whether I saw them on Broadway or not, obviously, it was not about how long they ran. So I would fall in love with these shows and then learn like, oh, not a lot of people know this one, but it's so good. Or, you know, this didn't run for very long, but this song is like the best song I've ever heard. And so the excitement around, oh, like, there's all of these corners of this that really inspire me that other people might not know, but they would love if they knew them was always baked in from the beginning.

[8:00] Alan Seales: What to you makes a perfect show?

[8:03] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I actually, I really don't think there is such a thing. And I've had a lot of, like, great intellectual conversations with friends about this over the years. And it kind of, like it coalesced in this quote that Nick Blamire, my pal Nick and I say all the time of there's no such thing as good and bad musicals. There's musicals you love and musicals someone else loves. And I really do believe that, like, there's a reason that I never wanted to be a critic. I have so much respect for theater journalists and critics. But for me, I love and this goes into like my philosophy of programming 54 Below, it goes into how I write my books. Like, I don't love every musical in existence, but there's so many songs and writers and shows that I'm like, that's not my favorite way.

I know someone else who would really be excited about that. I think that all the time. I see shows all the time where I'm like, oh, I like this. I didn't like that. Oh, my God, this person would love that. And I think that's what makes musicals beautiful is like, we're all looking at it from different eyes and different perspectives. And I love being surprised. I never I try these days to never watch B-roll before I see a show because I want to walk in and be like that 12 year old who was being exposed to Godspell for the first time, you know. And so I think there's something so delightful about the fact that there's just different shows for different people and something that, you know, was a flop might be someone's favorite musical. You know, you never know what you're going to love until you see it.

[9:23] Alan Seales: Well, I think this kind of speaks to a little bit of the what I want to call it, economic disparity of what's going on in Broadway, because the people who could afford all of these massively expensive tickets are not necessarily the people who are going to love these stories. Because look at something like Be More Chill, right, which you were directly involved with. And Joe Iconis is a great friend of yours. And that came to Broadway because of the demand, the streaming and the demand that younger people had. And then when it came to Broadway, it didn't do so well, because I think it was the wrong people were buying tickets.

[9:52] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I think it's a very complex mechanism. And the fact that Broadway is the centerpiece of theater has always been the case. And it's not a bad thing. But there are all these other ways for shows to live on. And when I was writing my book, there are so many musicals that either do really well in licensing have tons of school productions, but might not have done amazingly in New York, or really have the potential to do amazingly in school productions. One of the musicals I was thinking about this today, there's this musical called Leader of the Pack that I'm obsessed with. And it's basically the first jukebox musical. It was nominated for Best Musical in '86. And it really before we had Mamma Mia, before we had Beautiful and Jersey Boys, it told the life story of Ellie Greenwich through her songs.

And her songs are like, Be My Baby, Do Our Ditty, like Chapel of Love, all these incredible 1960s pop hits. And she starred in it. And it's this musical with like tons of great parts for women. It's a story about a female writer. So it was interesting to focus on in my book. And Beats, who wrote the book was one of the first female writers on Saturday Night Live. And she also created Square Pegs. She has this like fascinating TV career as well as theater writer career. And so that, you know, is one of so many musicals in my book where I went, oh, you know, this does okay in licensing, it technically didn't do well on Broadway, it could do even better in licensing if more people knew about it.

And there were so many musicals like that, that have had extraordinary post Broadway lives. But they wouldn't have had any post Broadway life if they weren't on Broadway at some point. The fact that for shows to be done at this high school in Ohio, it has to have been on Broadway, it creates, you know, branding for the show that you can't get anywhere else. So it's sort of like a pro and a con of it all.

[11:28] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: And definitely a lot of musicals that were in my book, I thought about what you're talking about with. I mean, I famously use The Addams Family, which is, I think, considered a relative flop on Broadway. But now it was what the still the most licensed high school production ever.

[11:44] Alan Seales: Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing is, like, a lot of times musicals will make back their money in touring or in licensing or in stocking amateur, it's not just like, when you close on Broadway, you've lost 80% of your investment, and that's it, or, you know, whatever it is, there is future life for these shows beyond Broadway. And the national tours, too, and even international. And strangely, though, I've been involved with the production side of The Wiz. And to see that this is the first time I've seen this.

[14:13] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Lion King, Aladdin. Again, nothing against any of those shows, but they're names that people are already familiar with. So, what can the city do? What can the league as a general union work together to do to get the word out to tourists before they ever show up? Or, like, why can't we do the pre-Broadway runs to get costs down? I think that there's a lot of complicated stuff at play here. So, one of the things is that, first of all, like, off-Broadway is thriving, which is so exciting. There's a number of ways that, like, off-Broadway has been revitalized by producers, by shows. One of the unfortunate things that I think about is, like, we're so dependent on real estate in New York. And right now, all of these off-Broadway theaters, especially larger ones, have been lost because, you know, it's more exciting and financially sound to build an apartment building.

So, we don't have as many spaces as we used to have just at the time where there might be off-Broadway musicals that could kind of do what you're talking about and have a footprint off-Broadway that might be more appropriate for them and then gain brand recognizability from that. So, there's that piece of the puzzle. There's also the fact that, like, we can't ever, like, get away from the fact, like, we live in this world of capitalism that we all are aware of on a daily basis. Our arts are not subsidized by the government, especially not now, in a way that we all might wish that they could be. But it sort of happened, like, it hit my brain in new ways while I was writing my book, right? Because women in the workforce really goes alongside, like, women writing Broadway musicals and there's, you can't, like, divorce the two, right?

So, it's, like, women are expected to do this and this in American society and that might have to do with in the 20s or in the 70s or in the 2000s how they're getting hired to work on Broadway. And in an honestly parallel way, you kind of can't divorce the fact that, like, we're all living in this, you know, higher costs for everything from real estate to vendors to, you know, salaries. Like, all of these costs that have expanded that have increased Broadway ticket prices. You can't, you know, kind of get away from that in the Broadway of it all. The difficult thing also to reckon with is that most of our, like, greatest Broadway musicals that are, like, the landmark shows that become these huge money-making hits are the unexpected, oh, this came in and it was, had no chance of succeeding and then it succeeded of the season.

Like, when you look at going back, you know, the past 20 years, so many of the hits came from off-Broadway, were original IP, were no stars. You know, basically it's like people say you can sink or swim on Broadway, but there's nothing in between. And sometimes that does end up being true, where a lot of times the biggest hit musical of the season is the show that people go, wait, that musical is about what? And then the second and third financially most sound ones are IP or, you know, but it's not this predictable, like, you know, playing ground. So a lot of the time the best thing for an original musical and, you know, maybe Happy Ending is one example, but there's so many, but the best financial decision even is to take that big swing for Broadway, because if you take the medium swing for off-Broadway, you have no chance of becoming that musical of that season.

And off-Broadway, you just have a smaller footprint for licensing, for schools that want to do the show for the future life. So I do also really admire a number of producers who are, you know, trying hard to think about unconventional spaces, about unconventional roads to Broadway, about, you know, streaming and about, like, pro shots and about regional theaters, and there's a lot of things at play here, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, until the government really, it's all of those Broadway organizations do a lot of work, but at the end of the day, it's the funding that would have to come from even higher up than them, that I just honestly don't mean to be pessimistic, but in our current state, like, I don't see it coming from New York City, I don't see it coming from the United States, it's coming from us, and so it's really just up to humans, and honestly, a lot of great work is happening because of that, but it's not as clear as, like, oh, these, like, lesser-known shows should all end up in a different box than Broadway, because, again, like, a lot of those times, that becomes Come From Away, that becomes Kimberley and Kimbo, that becomes Next to Normal, and a lot of times, when those shows don't get to Broadway, they disappear.

You know, a big part of fascination for me, also, that, you know, intersects with my book, is the shows that didn't get cast albums, that basically, it's like they never existed, and I say, like, if a tree falls in the forest and you didn't make a cast recording, it didn't fall, because, like, I became so fascinated writing my book with these shows that, like, there were musicals that were produced by Joe Papp at the public theater that had big cachet, that were, like, fascinating moments in the 1960s and 70s, and they're gone, you know, they don't exist, and then there's other ones that exist and only get productions now, and have had New York City revivals, kind of all because of their cast recordings, so a lot of that is, you know, it's just all related, it's all related to that money, and the bottom line is, like, sometimes the best way to invest in a show is Broadway, even though it's a long shot. Don't go anywhere, we'll be right back after this break.

[19:10] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Welcome back to the episode. Wow, when did the New York Public Library start documenting everything? It's a good question. So, the New York Public Library, I believe the answer is the late 80s, I want to say, but it, as you know, and as all of us who work in theater know, it costs so much money to do that New York Public Library shoot, so, like, I've heard multiple times where shows have been, like, well, we can run another week, or we can make our pro shot for the New York Public Library, like, it costs money, and it also, you know, it's in the library, and there are pros and cons of this. I cannot say enough about the people that work at the library, I think they're geniuses and heroes, and they're dealing with a lot of, like, red tape when it comes to those kinds of recordings, where, you know, for good reason, we shouldn't be stealing intellectual property, you know, they're not available online, and it's not, it's not as simple as just access, it's also about paying artists what they're worth, so to have a cast recording that everybody can consume from home, and the kid in Ohio can hear, and then, you know, do at their community theater, it's different from the historic resources that we have at the library, and we really need both, but at the same time, I think getting something recorded at the library doesn't necessarily translate to, like, licensing, because it's, like, that, you know, archival document.

Is there an opportunity here for us to start a side business, a non-profit side business that is solely responsible for raising money to make pro shots for every show on Broadway and Off-Broadway? It's a great idea, I mean, it's a great idea, I think, like, one of the things I worry about in our current moment, too, is, like, theater is so dependent on these non-profit, like, non-profits have to raise as much money as for-profits do, and in this moment, it's like, I don't know, I would hope that people would want to give their money to something like that, but there's a lot going on in the world that I know people understandably want to give their money to right now. Yeah, well, yes, very understandably, and, you know, we can just acknowledge that, and, all right, so, obviously, you've got this book, you've got this love for history, and, I mean, your projects are always looking at shining light on untold stories, no pun intended, diverse voices, sharing stories of past trailblazers that, as we've been talking about, have gotten, have been forgotten, and so, like, your book is an exploration of overlooked history of the female writers and musical theater, and it spans from the 18th century to present day, right, so, like, when you were approaching this topic, where did you get the idea for this, and then how did you decide to break it down, because every chapter is, like, a different era.

[23:29] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, so, it is such an undersung topic, right, there's never been a book about women who've written musicals, and at the same time, you know, there are over 300 women in the book, and a lot of the women in the book, I think people will have heard of, you know, you could pick up the book and go, oh, I want to read about Dolly Parton or Sara Bareilles, and these musicals written by women that we might know from another field, as, like, pop songwriters, also, like, there are well-known Broadway, if you are a Broadway fan or expert, there's Betty Comden, there's Mary Rogers, there's these women that, you know, have had long careers in theater that you might have seen in a theater history book, but the overall history of, like, women writing musicals, and there being 300 plus women that, most of whom we don't know, was really fascinating to me.

I first got the idea writing my Untold Stories of Broadway books because there were so many female musical theater writers that I interviewed that sparked this idea in my head of what about a full story, like, timeline of all of these female musical theater writers, and then it was during the early days of the pandemic that I really thought, I'm gonna sit down and write this book. It was partially that meme slash trend that went around at the time, where people were like, well, why aren't you taking advantage of this time, like, learn the language that you always wanted to learn, write the book you always wanted to write, and people were like, no, we're all, you know, struggling in isolation, don't make anyone write anything, but I was like, I could do that, I could write the book I always wanted to write, and it was, like, the background of me starting to write this book and research all of these women was COVID.

It was like, we were sitting alone in our apartments, and I would wake up in the morning and be like, oh, I'm gonna spend today with, like, the women of the 1930s, and I would put on, like, a cast album on my record player from, like, you know, one of the women who've written musicals, one of their shows, and I would just dive into the research, and it was kind of how I kept myself sane during a lot of the, like, COVID isolation. It, you know, that's when it took root. I was so excited when I discovered how many women there were to write about, and I will say I didn't write the book in order, so the women from the 1700s I really came to last, because, you know, the general consensus is that musical theater, as we know it, sort of started to evolve in the late 1800s. There's The Black Crook, which is considered by some people to be the first musical, and really musicals were not what they are now until even the 20th century when we get into, like, the development of how we think of musicals books now and all of that, but the fact is that there were women who were writing shows for the stage that had songs in them when New York City was being settled by, like, colonial settlers, and I became really fascinated by this idea of, like, since the moment New York came to be the New York that we know now, women were writing musicals for the stage, even if we didn't think of them that way, so there is this, like, early chapter that it's so fascinating to me, and it's by far the chapter that.

[24:27] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: It was hardest to find research on, oh, here's like the first professional theater in New York and here's a woman who wrote the first libretto in New York City history that was, you know, a female writer. That was so exciting to me. And yet at the same time, it's like there's a lot still to be discovered there that I couldn't, you know, come up with because the research is thin. And then each chapter, it goes decade by decade after that. And it takes you through like, you know, you can definitely pick up the book and go like, oh, I'm interested in what women were writing during World War Two, or I love the musical Once Upon a Mattress, I want to read about that. Or you can, you know, check it out chronologically.

[25:01] Alan Seales: Oh, wow. Is there an index at the back where you can like search for the shows?

[25:05] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah. So I did an index of people sometimes ask why I started writing the book in 2020. And here we are in 2024. And one of the reasons is honestly, like the book has over 600 sources. I researched this, I researched it so much. And I did an index of musicals, an index, like a complete index of everything. So you can look at like, you know, opening night by opening night, which musicals were written by women. There's a lot of it's it's encyclopedic for sure.

[25:32] Alan Seales: That's super cool. Well, tell Lin Manuel, perhaps you've heard of him. He left this bit out of Hamilton that at the same time the country is being founded, there are also women writing librettos.

[25:45] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: He gave me the most thoughtful and generous endorsement quote. He read some of my book and like he wrote about the book putting women back into the narrative. And I was so moved by that. I love I love that man so much.

[25:56] Alan Seales: Yeah, yeah, it seems like it's a good group of people. And I think fellow writers, fellow producers, like it's all the same struggle. You all understand, you understand each other and what's going on. And you're all there to make art, right? Because it's, you know, I don't think you get into making art to make money, you get into art to make art. And if you make money, that's a happy byproduct, but it's super hard.

[26:18] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: And that I mean, that's definitely it relates to the conversation you and I were having earlier about like, why would we do this musical and the money of it all. But at the end of the day, it's like people want to get the work out there if the work deserves to be heard. And throughout history, like, you know, there's so few musicals that become Hamilton, but there's so many other shows out there that like are the glory and dream of the writer who created them that deserve to be known.

[26:42] Alan Seales: Yeah, what are the trends that you've seen? I guess throughout the time throughout the decades now, because I feel like what vaudeville sort of turned into what we sort of we know now is musical theater, right? But what existed prior to that? And where did he do you even like have the reference where vaudeville came from?

[27:02] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, so there's a lot of different trends that one of the things I think is so fascinating about the women writing musicals timeline is it is like parallel to the whole development of Broadway. So you see women start to contribute like, hey, one song to this review, and one song to that review, because reviews were just collections of songs that were sort of, you know, a latter development of the vaudeville stage, which was variety acts and tons of different acts on one bill. So you start to see like, you know, women are writing children's musicals, because children's musicals are becoming more popular, or women are writing jukebox musicals, or, you know, women are adapting movies, and the way that the trends of Broadway kind of intersect with how women are writing musicals was really interesting to me.

Um, you know, there's a lot of forms of entertainment that as America was, you know, being founded and developed, you know, turned into musical theater, people say that musical theater is one of the only purely American art forms. I think the other ones are jazz and comic books, which I kind of love. And it's, it's musical theater. There's a reason it's so American, you know, there are British and other, you know, nationalities of artists who contributed to the development, certainly, but the way that Broadway came about, because of, as you said, like vaudeville, variety acts, because of operetta, because of all of these different art forms that coalesced, um, is American. And the Black Crook, the apocryphal story about the first musical, the Black Crook in the 1860s, is that a ballet troupe and a dramatic troupe both booked the same theater.

So they had to combine their shows. And that's like, generally understood to be not entirely true now, but it is around the time when musical started to develop. And again, it's like, it's, you can't divorce it from American history. A lot of the way that Broadway became popular was post civil war. Um, the railroads had been developed, people could travel and be transported more easily. And that led to more tours and the tours wanted to stay direct from New York. And the way they said it was direct from Broadway and people could come to New York and that turned New York into more of a tourist center. So it's all like tied up into American history, the history of transport. Um, you know, we're definitely part of that great American melting pot of all these things developing at once.

I feel like I'm going to get TED talk right now. I'm glad as I drink my La Croix. But yeah, there's so much you don't think about it. It just occurred to me right at one point, somebody had to sit down and say, okay, let's try this idea. Nobody's ever done it before. We're going to get a beat and then we're going to put a bunch of people on stage that are pretending to be strangers, but they're all going to know the same choreography at the exact same time. Let's try this idea. Oh, it works. Now we've invented a musical.

[29:41] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Well, I think it's like a thing that really touches me all the time. When I, when I think about the isolation of the pandemic, when I think about how we're all of course addicted to our screens, you get to a theater and even if there's new technology, even if there are screens involved, whatever, essentially you're in a room listening to a story being told by people, which is exactly what people were doing in the 1700s. It's what people were doing in the 200s. There's something so indelible and inescapable about theater. There was this program during the pandemic that I watched that I was obsessed with Station Eleven, the TV show, and then I was also obsessed with the book. It's kind of a post-apocalyptic society where people come back to theater.

You know, there's the play Mr. Burns. There's all of these like ways that in our brains, when the world ends, we come back to telling stories in a room and theater is important even when the world is over. So something to keep in mind.

[30:37] Alan Seales: Yeah, we as a species evolved by telling stories, language and stories, and before we had language, we had pictures. So yeah, that is how we come together and that's how we learn from our past is stories and making sure that we're teaching future generations what berries to eat and what berries not to eat, what Yetis are safe and what Sasquatch is or not, right? So it's all very important and tied together, but that's so cool. I love kind of the mind-blowingness of tying everything together to make this perfect storm with the transportation boom, with the founding of the country, with like all the things you had mentioned to bring together this seemingly, gosh, I mean, I want to say sort of forgotten industry right now, especially with everything going on larger in the country and especially the world. There's so much that we can attribute to who we are as a nation and a world to musical theater, the arts in general, but specifically Broadway.

[31:33] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Totally, and it's so important to employ that history in order to constructively solve problems and think about exciting new theater to make today. One of the things I think about a lot is like there's not, we have the sense now that like women are part of the workforce, like obviously there's so many problems in society with women and hiring practices or inequality, but overall we think like, oh, there are women who work. That wasn't always the case, and there's this straight line to like, you know, it's not like there's just one day where we're like, okay, now women are equal and they protested and now they do all of these things. It's, we're on a straight line with history where when I started the years that I started writing this book, it was like, yeah, women are expected to stay at home.

They're expected to raise families. Not saying that any of this was ever not problematic, but it was a societal construct for so long that the women who broke through that and who did write musicals, they, you know, there were all of these ways that they kind of found their way in the door that change over the years as it changed in America. You know, I didn't write a book about like the hiring practices of women in the workforce, but it does consistently intersect with that. And there's no day where it's like, okay, now things are better. It's just always like three steps forward, two steps back, three steps forward, two steps back throughout all of history. And I think looking at the ways that women overcame that and the things that they did, I didn't want to write a book also that was like, here's all the crappy things that happened and they overcame them.

Like I wanted a lot of the book to be about the specific work that they made and the accomplishments and the triumphs, but it does, again, like it, it kind of is juxtaposed at the same time with, as women are getting more opportunities, it's three steps forward, two steps back all the time.

[33:11] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: The book gets into cultural and societal norms too, because they, as you were just talking about, things changed as it goes forward and back, it's not a linear line. And so the way that women felt they were perceived, how their works were received, affected how much they were writing and what they were writing, right?

[33:28] Alan Seales: Absolutely. And there's so much in the book that I found really essential to include, that was the way women were written about problematically in the press, whether it was like journalists commenting on their physical appearance, whether it was, you know, the implication that like a woman could only write a certain kind of musical. And another part of this is like the bottom line is writing musicals is hard. There are so many challenges, no matter what your identity is, there are so many obstacles, no matter who you are writing a musical, being a woman just adds like another layer on top of that. So to have these shows that you're like, oh, well, this didn't run for very long, maybe it was because she was a woman.

No, it's not that, like, certainly, I think that there are cases where women were pigeonholed, or where they didn't get a fair shake, or they were written about in a certain way that was unfair because of their gender. But it's also just like an overall thing that it is very hard to succeed in musical theater as a musical theater writer. There are some really good examples. There was one article where a woman named Nitra Sharfman, who she is one of the writers of the shortest running Best Musical nominee ever, which is this musical called The Lieutenant, which really soon after the Vietnam War, this was like a protest musical in 1975, that was about a massacre in Vietnam, really like great musical, well reviewed, nominated for Best Musical.

And in the New York Times profile with the writers of that show, one of the other male writers said, I thought I would collaborate with her on this musical because she seemed to be a good source of home-cooked meals. And you're going, okay, like, this was an okay thing to print in 1975, I guess, or, you know, it wasn't an okay thing to print. But I definitely preface it in the introduction of my book with, like, I included a number of problematic, racist, misogynist, you know, otherwise troubling quotes, because the way that people were written about affects how they're perceived, it affects their careers. And, you know, we can't ignore it, we can't ignore it, all of that, if we want to move forward from it.

And there are ways that in 30 years, we'll think, you know, people were writing problematically today. So being able to have that foresight and looking at things, and going, oh, it's not just that, like, that's a bad thing to say about a woman, it's that it like undermines her as a writer in a way that certainly could have affected her career. And it's, you know, there are ways that people just expected it back then, like that maybe wasn't even an odd thing for a woman to hear.

[36:00] Alan Seales: I'm processing this, because I'm just trying to think you couldn't you couldn't get away with any of that anymore, thankfully, at least at least here in New York, we definitely that that could be true. But in my time, like working in theater, which like, you know, since professional theater since 2008, like, I've seen definitely I've seen women's bodies commented on in New York reviews, like, all of that, it's, it certainly happens less, I would say it happens less. But again, like, we're not divorced from that time. So it's like how to be mindful of how you can not like something without tying it to the writer's identity and in a way that's filled with assumptions.

[36:41] Alan Seales: Welcome back to the episode. Did you run across anybody who, later on it came to light, or maybe it was even rumored that a woman was writing under a male presenting pen name, just to get a little bit of attention?

[36:52] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: There are a few. In the early 20th century, there's a few women who chose to write under a male pseudonym. There's also a number of women who, I talk about this in the book, sometimes the way that a woman writes under a male name is a little bit different. Sometimes the way that a woman got a seat at the table was because her husband or her brother or her father were in the business, and a lot of times because they were a writer. And so sometimes women sort of started out as these behind-the-scenes backseat writers, and then they came into their own and actually were credited. Other times they took on a male pseudonym, but they didn't write under a male name.

[37:25] There are a number of women in the book also. One is Sylvia Fine, who the great artist Danny Kaye, who, you know, is many, there's many movie appearances you can watch of Danny Kaye today. He was like a major star of his time, and she was really the muscle behind him, wrote a lot of his materials, and she was a great writer. There's a lot of women who kind of took a backseat or were given a backseat as writers to make their husbands or their brothers or their fathers stars. So there's some of that, and then there's some pseudonyms.

[38:09] What's the Danny Kaye, I forget what it is, the court jester, where he's like, you put the pestle in the vestibule for the brew that is true. I forget what that quote is. I used to watch the court jester a lot when I was little.

[38:19] Alan Seales: Yeah, I mean, a legend.

[38:21] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, well, it's interesting to know that maybe that was all written by a woman. That's really cool to think about.

[38:28] Alan Seales: Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that you go in the book like oh I didn't know a woman wrote that like repeatedly. There's a woman named Anne Ronell who she was the first woman to ever write music and lyrics for a full Broadway score. Like how many people even know her name and again full Broadway score first woman, and she wrote Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf like sometimes I had to give people like, and that was the first hit song from a Disney movie. And she also wrote the first, the first song to play over film credits like the first film credit theme song. There is a lot of like women who intersect with Broadway and then also have interesting like film or TV moments too.

[39:05] Alan Seales: I don't think I've ever seen a movie where there wasn't music on top of film credits.

[39:10] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I thought that too. So many of the facts given to me in this book I gave myself two resources I was like if there's two separate authentic resources that, you know, confirm this that I'm going with it, because the truth is that some of the reason these women are left out of history books is like, there's just not enough like not enough people wrote about them not enough people chronicled these accomplishments and so I don't. I will admit like if someone said like oh 2% of the facts in this book are wrong. I would rather have that be the case than have the book not get written because some of it was difficult to backtrack when there weren't a lot of resources.

[39:44] Alan Seales: Well, what did you decide to leave out what is there stuff that you that you wanted to put in that you just couldn't verify to your level of comfortability?

[39:52] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: The only women, I mean there's 300 plus women in the book so I erred on the side of inclusion for sure, but the women that are left out who maybe did have a Broadway or off Broadway credit are really because there wasn't enough information. If it was up to me this would be in 1000 page book but of course I didn't want it to be because I wanted people to read it. There were certainly times where I edited a section to be half its length because I was really fascinated by a specific woman's story but it just is you know you can't give everyone as much space as you want to. The audio book had to be shorter than the physical book so there are a number of women that are in the physical book that are not in the audio book which is ironic for you know a book about women left out of history books, but I honestly think of it as like the fact that we didn't didn't have to cut them there's there in that that hard copy of the book that you can pick up so that was definitely a challenge for me.

[40:42] I'm someone who likes to have like a lot of caffeine and and be really like on it when I'm writing, but I took a page from Stephen Sondheim's book of like having a glass of wine while I was going like oh I have to cut this woman from the audio book oh god I have to cut her. That was definitely a glass of wine editing session or two.

[40:58] Alan Seales: So you wrote this during COVID all on your own and it took, did it take you like it's 2024 now the end of 2024 is a recording but it didn't take you the full four years to write but I know some people have written books like cookbooks in three months or have written full novels in a year, like beginning to end. And when you were like okay this is done I'm locking this picture, like how long did that take?

[41:17] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: You know, it took a long time I would say at the beginning of 2021 the book was 80% done, and there was still a lot of like editing and indexing and fact checking to do, but like within the one year mark it was 80% finished. And then it was a process of because I set out to write this book all by myself. It was not interview based on like every other book I've ever written it was not, you know, there weren't other people working on it in any capacity, other than like me reaching through time to hear interviews with women that they had given in the 1930s or whatever. So it was really just me and then I started on the process of like book agents selling the book, the editing process and that it took the remainder of the three years, I, I turned in my final draft of this book during the 24 hours when I went out of town to see Death Becomes Her, which the co composer and lyric co lyricist of that musical is one of my favorite female musical theater writers of today Julia Madison so it was like so serendipitous to me that I started this like alone like you know, in COVID.

And then I was like out of town for a pre Broadway tryout of a musical co written by one of my favorite women. It felt very good to have it come full circle when I turned it in with that, but the book itself actually ends with women who made their debuts on or off Broadway before 2019. So a number of women that like are some of the most prominent women in the field today are in the book like Shana Taub, you know, Lynn Ahrens all of these women, but at the same time it because the cutoff is 2019 and now we're in 2024 like there's so many women that have made Broadway or off Broadway debut since then that would be exciting to celebrate if we ever do like a follow up chapter.

[42:51] Alan Seales: I was gonna say that there needs to be like a part two or an audiobook bonus or something, or, you know, maybe we can continue to do a little podcast action you can do some, some history read into the podcast mic.

[43:03] Alan Seales: All right, so as we wrap up here start to wind down wrap up and wind down, we will play plot in 60 seconds. So, I have a list of 16 popular musicals, and I'm going to put 60 seconds up here on the screen for you, give me a number one through 16 that will correspond to a show on my list, you give me the plot of that show in 60 seconds or less.

[43:27] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Okay, got it got it got it. Three.

[43:29] Alan Seales: All right, three is Aladdin go 60 seconds.

[43:30] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Okay, Aladdin is about a poor man on the streets who is chasing around bread so that he won't go hungry and he's like a street rat, and then he meets this woman who is his dream woman and he doesn't realize that she's a princess. And when he starts to pursue her all of this chaos ensues, and he ends up in this cave where this genie grants him three wishes, and oh god I've seen a lot and recently, his three wishes become to satisfy the princess and to fulfill like her dreams and to pursue her, but at the end of the day, he gives the genie his freedom. And so the princess ends up being the one that has to save the day by kind of choosing him I didn't even use all 60 seconds and I left out a lot of plot lines it has a very good Alan Menken and Howard Ashman and Tim Rice score, and it is playing at the new Amsterdam.

[44:20] Alan Seales: All right, all right, all right. That's funny. One of the things that just so for me during COVID I did. I'll just grab a musical in 15 seconds. And so when that popped up I was expecting 15 seconds in my head I think that sounds like it sees me as bad and then he gets the girl like who knows, I can go. A lot of people are getting under 60 maybe I'll shorten it to 30 I don't know. Well anyway, so that was wonderful. I will go see Aladdin, based on that, and I think that's great. Okay, so three standard closing questions the first one just simply is what motivates you.

[44:52] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Honestly, New York City, and it's really more than ever, when I, when we came out of the pandemic and I like remit our city which is my favorite place in the world. I've become obsessed recently with going to places in New York City I haven't been I've lived here now 20 years, and there are still so many fascinating corners of New York that I'm like, so excited by the first chapter of my book the one that's about the 1700s I started going downtown and, you know, re familiarizing myself with the places where the first theaters in New York where I could tell you the whole history like we talked about like the Richard Rodgers the Imperial, but standing on a street corner and going like, oh my god like this person wrote a musical in 1801 that played here, New York City, always inspiring.

[45:32] Alan Seales: All right, and next question then what would what advice would you give to your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path.

[45:39] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: The number one piece of advice is really find your people and I think find your tribe is something that people say and it's hard to grasp that until you know you know what you're doing, but so much of making theater is making it at any level, even if it's with three friends in a basement, even if it's like you know in your bedroom a live version of something you created and you're, you know, putting it on Tick Tock, it's finding the people that you want to work with and letting that generate the things that you want to make. It's like the number one key to all of this whether you're like a middle schooler or whether you're like a Broadway legend is is your, your core people.

[46:15] Alan Seales: All right, and then last question hardest one I know this is gonna be impossible for you because you know all of them. If you can only see one show for the rest of your life you can see it as many times as you want, what would you see?

[46:27] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Oh my god, I feel like now I should say Aladdin because clearly I have to become more familiar with it. I think the first answer that came to my mind is follies. And I think, you know, follies and merrily are two of my favorite musicals and I feel like you come to them differently at different ages, and same with company it's like the beauty of the work of Sondheim and how Prince that these musicals affect you differently in different ages. So I think that's one of the reasons why like follies would be an okay musical to see for the rest of your life a great musical to see for the rest of your life, because you're thinking about it differently when you're 20 than you do when you're 40 than you do when you're 60.

[47:05] Alan Seales: I didn't think about that that is a really good way to put it, because yeah you're right like yeah company merrily follies these, these, they are spanning a lifetime so they mean different things to you at different times.

[47:17] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I love it. Okay. Um, so everyone check the show notes, I will put the link in there to get both of Jennifer's books, the recent one of course being women writing musicals the previous one being the untold stories of Broadway and where else can we connect with you online.

[47:33] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I'm at Jen ash tap the first three letters of each of my names on all platforms and I'm doing a bunch of fun events about my book most of which are free so one is that the drama bookshop once the Museum of Broadway a number of them will be in 2025 and haven't been announced so at Jen ash tap and then if you want to come to any book events I'll sign your book we can geek out about women writing musicals.

[47:53] Alan Seales: I love that I always when I see you and pop up online I always say Jenna step.

[47:56] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: A lot of people do there's people who think my name is Jenna because it's like Jenna step which I think is funny.

[48:02] Alan Seales: Jenna step and then I, as I was asking earlier I was like, wait a second now I actually get it I was like where's the step come from. Now I should have gone with Jennifer Tepper all those years ago but it's provided some amusement.

[48:17] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Jenna steppers. All right. Um, I am on theater underscore podcast on threads Instagram tick tock I'm on Facebook leave a rating and a review leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify that's the thing they do now thanks to jukebox the ghost for the intro now to music and Jenna step. Thank you so much for all this lovely history lesson I love history I love trivia and seriously you need to give a Broadway Ted talk about this.

[48:42] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Thank you for diving so deep with me I really appreciate that like we got into it in this.

[48:47] Alan Seales: Thank you so much for having me.