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[0:01] Des McAnuff: Last week you heard from theater director Des McAnuff as he shared his experiences with three of his biggest shows, Tommy, Jersey Boys, and Big River. Well, now Des is back to talk about his composition efforts as well as share more lessons he's learned from the director's chair by answering the final five questions in this bonus episode of Why I'll Never Make It.

[0:41] Patrick Oliver Jones: So the first question is, what do you remember most about your first professional show?

[0:46] Des McAnuff: You know, it's hard to say what my first professional show was because I started when I was very young. I wrote when I was in high school, I was writing music, composing music. I'd been involved in Hair when it came to Toronto, did not get into the first company, was supposed to get into the touring company that we made it to the final cut. And as I was working on the music and I was playing advance, everybody my age plays guitar and you know, I was in a band, and I thought, you know, I can actually do this. I write songs. So I went to my theater teacher, I went to a very big high school, 3,000 students, and said, you know, if I do, I'm gonna write a musical. And they wanted to do Maine the next year's school show.

And I said, would you consider doing my musical instead of Maine? And he said, sure, absolutely, not believing for a minute that I would do it. And I went off, and that summer I wrote 25 songs and wrote the script and showed up the first day of school and said, I have the musical. And whoa. And he sat down with his fabulous wife. They're both gone. She was the head of the English department and the music teacher, Bill Fowler, this fellow's name was John Wilcox, and they listened to the music. I played all the songs, they took the script away, gave it to the vice principal, and they agreed to produce the show. That in a way gave birth to my first, I guess you could call it professional show. Hair had been at the Royal Alex Theater when we did my show, Urbania, at the Poor Alex Theater, which was much, much smaller than the Royal Alex.

But I think that would be my first, I would consider that my first professional show. And I have lots of memories, but one memory that I'm very fond of was driving downtown from Scarborough where I grew up, every day with my buddies to rehearse our show at the Poor Alex. And I remembered that my friend maybe foolishly had bought a convertible, which he could ill afford. And I remember those trips going down with the radio blasting and thinking, oh my God, we're doing our own show. And what a thrill that was.

[3:16] Patrick Oliver Jones: Yeah, that sounds very exciting. Can I ask one other thing about that?

[3:19] Des McAnuff: Just Urja Carita, who was the critic for the Toronto Star, was a brilliant man and who I got to know. And we lost him when he was too young. He was a brilliant critic. He reviewed the show. I don't think he was terribly generous, but he did give me quite a good review for the music, which I composed. And when he described the score, he said, sometimes reminiscent of the Who's Tommy. And it's because I'd used the suspended fourth chord that Pete uses as a light motif in Tommy. So I'd been able to say to Pete, you know, Pete, I've been robbing you since I was 18 years old. And so it's funny how things come around.

[4:04] Patrick Oliver Jones: Yes, things find a way of meeting and joining together, that's for sure. Well, number two, how would you say the industry has changed since you first started?

[4:13] Des McAnuff: Well, it's good that you talked about the musicals that you've chosen. You know, when I came to America and New York City in the later part of the 1970s, it was very unusual for any musical to embrace anything other than the kind of traditional Broadway score. Now, there are obvious exceptions, and everybody listening to this that loves the theater is thinking that right away. Of course, there were exceptions. You know, you would get jazz and you'd get bluesy shows occasionally, but electric shows, not so much. Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar had relatively short runs, but they were very important. But, you know, Broadway was about really its own traditions. And one of my, I suppose, missions as a young, somewhat rebellious director, I wanted the glory of all of the genres of American theater to get represented on Broadway, whether it was Dixieland or Cajun or Bebop, whether it was rhythm and blues or rock and roll.

I thought there were so many wonderful different types of music, all of which deserved to have a forum on Broadway. And that all of them, I thought, were candidates for storytelling, that it wasn't just the musical. Now there are, you know, I think Steven Sondheim elevated that form to high art. For the most part, that hasn't been true of I think traditional Broadway scores. So I think the thing that's changed now is if you look at the new shows that are opening, there's a much broader spectrum of musical forms that now exist on Broadway. And I think that's a really good thing. You know, the theater is slow to change. You can't stick a camera on something and have it up for the nightly news.

It takes a long time to develop a show, particularly a musical, which is like Spock on Star Trek and on three-dimensional chess. It just has so many layers. And so, you know, it requires patience. And you always have to be patient with the theater. It's not going to change overnight. But when I look back over the last, say, 40 years, I think it has changed quite remarkably.

[6:44] Patrick Oliver Jones: And number three, what would you say success or making it means to you?

[6:49] Des McAnuff: You know, I think that the most important thing is feeling a sense of accomplishment over the quality of the art. I haven't lost sight of that. You know, I don't think I'm somebody that's capable of taking on something if I don't believe in it. Something can be relatively far afield from me. You know, I've done Shakespeare's Scottish play three times. I've directed three productions of it. And I'm a long way away from Scotland a thousand years ago. First of all, I think you know, I don't even speak the language that they spoke, and about 420 years away from Shakespeare's play too. You know, I think it's humbling to get to enter these new worlds and kind of possess them and learn from them. So anyway, I'm, you know, I try not, I've tried not to ever lose track of that.

If you're lucky to have popular success, you have to be aware of the danger that that presents too. And I'll tell you what that is. Once if you follow your heart and you do work you believe in, and you know, you have hopefully some sort of vision for that, most of the time you're gonna probably remain unfashionable. But a moment may well come when suddenly you're in fashion. And once you get past that moment, you have to decide whether, you know, what's important to you. Is it important to stay in fashion? In which case you have to start listening to trends and paying attention to what's going on. Or do you want to continue to do what you started out to do, which is to follow your heart and your head? And I don't think I've got a lot of choice.

[8:43] Des McAnuff: I mean, there are people that, God bless them, that really can follow fashion and do it quite brilliantly. See it in music, you know, people that can just abandon what they've been doing and reinvent themselves. Um, I do, I have, I just seem to have to follow my own art. And uh, Jersey Boys is a great example. People say, well, you know, Jersey Boys, I say, if I could do it again, I would. You know, what makes it a big hit? I don't know. Is it a combination of the matya and, you know, particular kind of rock and roll and, you know, blue-collar story, and uh, is it, it's about friendships and, you know, group. It could be a bowling team, I guess, if the bowlers play music. But you know, but I couldn't do it again if I wanted to. I couldn't find it. It's just, it's not in me to do that. I gotta move on to the next journey.

[9:41] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, speaking of journeys, number four, describe a personal lesson that has taken you a while to learn, or one that you are still working on to this day.

[9:50] Des McAnuff: I think one of the things that I have discovered over time is that I'm responsible as a director for the atmosphere in the room. It's a collaborative art form, you know, it's very much about partnerships. Uh, Tommy's a great example. It's entirely about partnerships. And whether you're in the design studio working with the designers or you're at your, you know, uh, iPad working on the script or whatever you're doing, it's always going to involve partnerships with your associates, with the actors. And you're responsible, I think, for the kind of time that everybody has. I think when I was young, it was mostly about me. And that probably had to do with my own insecurity, which is not an excuse.

We're all insecure, so it's not an excuse for bad behavior. When everybody says, well, he's just, you know, insecure. I go, I'm insecure too. But I, you know, I try not to behave like a monster. Uh, I just heard a story about a young director who's, uh, gotten some accomplishment, has some heat. And I just heard what kind of a terrible person this character is, just how they terrorized everybody. And I was thinking, you know, if they survive this, because they're clearly talented, they will hopefully jettison that kind of poison and move on to something else. So I think what I've really learned is I've learned to really respect my partners. I want everybody to feel safe. I don't think you can do great work in the theater if you feel terrified or you're nervous about what's going to happen to you if you make a mistake.

I think my biggest job, aside from, uh, you know, I have the job of performance and storytelling. As director, those are my main jobs. I'm responsible for performance, I'm responsible for telling a story. That's true in film, too. Um, I've heard Scorsese say that at one point. But I think that in order to get the performance part of it, you've got to recognize that those actors are your partners. You're not bossing them into a performance. You're going on a journey together. They're your companions. And one of your big jobs is to make sure that they feel safe. Uh, even if they're being immature, you know, even if they're, uh, maybe behaving monstrously, your job is ultimately to make them feel safe. And that I think is a profound difference from the way I thought about my work, uh, in my 20s, let's say.

[12:40] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, last question here. What's the most useful advice that you have received and how have you applied it?

[12:47] Des McAnuff: That's happily very easy. Uh, when I went to drama school, um, I went to a fabulous, uh, drama school called the Rarson Theater Department of Toronto and had a spectacular teacher named Basia Hunter. Oh my God, it was great. And we were, you know, we wanted to meet everybody. So we would, we had, I forgive the phrase, we didn't have a pot to piss in. My roommates and I, they were in the class too. But we would figure out a way to make dinner. And we'd scrounge our and we'd invite one of our teachers or a visiting professor. Like we had so many like celebrities at this horrible little apartment that I wouldn't even walk into now if I could help it. And um, so that was a great, uh, experience.

And they used to have guest speakers. You know, it was only the second year that the department existed. And I had wonderful people like John Candy and all kinds of people that were in part of the Toronto Theater scene. And one of them was a guy named, uh, Bill Glasgow, who ran the theater in Toronto, which is still there called the Tarragon, wonderful theater. And, uh, he did theater that was different than the stuff I was kind of interested in, much more kind of psychological realism, uh, a derogatory character. That would have been Kitchen Sink, but he was a fantastic director and a very wise man. And so he was talking to, I would have been, I don't know what I was, 19, 20, very young. And when we asked him for advice, he said the most important thing you can do as a theater artist is to find your people.

It's not about necessarily, you know, you come to a program because Bastia Hunt or David Harris, I had these great teachers. But the real reason you're going there is to find your peers. So that was the most valuable thing I think I managed to learn as a young artist. And I apply it to this day, I continue to, if someone's foolish enough to ask me for advice, that's often the only advice I'll give them.

[15:16] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, it makes sense because, uh, everything you've talked about has either dealt with someone guiding, leading you, teaching you, or then you passing that on, that teaching those lessons to someone else.

[15:28] Des McAnuff: Yeah, if you think about it, uh, we spoke about Shakespeare's, I find it very hard to talk about the theater without Shakespeare. But if at Shakespeare's time, let's go back to, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, you know, perhaps 1605, 1606, the years that he was writing The Scottish Play and King Lear and going on to write The Tempest. If there was a 60-year-old teacher who had a 20-year-old student that in turn became a 60-year-old teacher and had a 20-year-old student, we're only 10 steps away from Shakespeare. You know, this is so much about passing on the skills you've acquired and the knowledge that you have to someone else. That is key to what we do. And that is our lifeline. That is the continuum of the theater. And it's so important, I think, to respect the importance of that.

[16:27] Patrick Oliver Jones: That's wonderful. Well, thank you, Des. This has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much for sharing all of your stories and experiences.

[16:33] Des McAnuff: And thank you so much for the wonderful and thoughtful questions. I appreciate how well prepared you are and the fact that you know the Michael Grife, the Tour of Big River, that's pretty impressive.

[16:44] Patrick Oliver Jones: Thank you.

[16:49] Patrick Oliver Jones: Thank you so much for joining Why I'll Never Make It. And don't forget, you can become a subscriber and get bonus conversations by going to whyillnevermakeit.com and click subscribe or just look for the link in the show notes. Be sure to join me next time as we talk more about why I'll never make it.