This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Patrick Oliver Jones: Life doesn't always go the way we want it to go. As this podcast so often reminds us, there are many reasons why we don't make it, either for a short period or for longer stretches of time. In fact, at the beginning of this year, I had to pull out of a dream show that I had been cast in due to vocal issues. Then, a short time later, I'm scrolling through Instagram and I see a workshop of a musical that I had taken part in a year earlier. Come to find out, while they had kept most of the cast, they did replace a few people, and I was one of them. It was a one-to-gut punch to my own confidence, making me doubt myself and whether I had the physical health and even talent to ever really have the career I wanted. For the first guest of this season, I'm talking with a writer who was part of a musical and its beginning stages, but was eventually replaced right before it began to take off and become the hugely iconic Jekyll and Hyde musical we all know.

[1:06] Steve Cuden: I'm Steve Cuden, and I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I currently live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, though I did spend close to 40 years away from this great city of ours. I currently have just finished adjuncting at Point Park University, where I retired from full-time teaching three years ago. And what I am now is I'm back to being a freelance writer, consultant, producer, would like to direct a little more than I've done. And then I also spend a lot of time on a podcast that I do called Storybeat with Steve Cuden. In fact, Steve's first foray into writing was with another unknown composer and writer in the early 1980s, Frank Wildhorn. And in part one of our conversation, Steve opens up about their personal and professional relationship in ways that he has not done so before publicly.

Steve and I actually met last year when he reached out to me via email after listening to an episode of my other podcast, Closing Night, which focuses on theater history. I had done a deep dive on Frank Wildhorn and the 2013 Broadway revival of Jekyll and Hyde. And in it, I actually mentioned the beginning stages of the show and Steve's original contribution to that musical. So he wrote me an email to not only compliment me on the podcast as a whole, but also point out that it's one of the very few times in which the true origins of the show are covered or discussed at all. He went on to write, quote, the fact that you not only gave me credit several times while actually pronouncing my name correctly was a great joy to hear.

This simply does not happen with any frequency. I truly deeply appreciate you doing the research and giving the show's early history a bit of coverage and recognition. Well, that began a series of emails back and forth that eventually led me to invite him onto this podcast to share his side of the story, a side of the story that Frank Wildhorn himself doesn't really talk about in his own interviews.

[3:27] Steve Cuden: I didn't know what I was doing. I again, this is me falling into things. I didn't understand what was going on behind the scenes. And so from that perspective, if this were to happen today, things would have turned out very different.

[3:45] Patrick Oliver Jones: Welcome and thank you for joining me for the first episode of season eight here on Why I'll Never Make It, an award-winning theater podcast hosted by yours truly, Patrick Oliver Jones, an actor and singer for more than 30 years. Every week you'll hear fellow creatives as they bring us three stories from their own life of personal struggles and professional hardships, as well as their answers to the final five questions that offer lessons we can all learn from. Subscribers will get additional audition stories as well as early access to the episodes. The website is whyillnevermakeit.com, where you can subscribe, donate, and learn more about this podcast. Again, that's whyillnevermakeit.com.

[4:42] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, welcome, Steve. It is such a pleasure to meet you. We've been corresponding for a while now, so it's great to have you on the podcast and getting a chance to talk to you today.

[4:52] Steve Cuden: Oh, it's my great pleasure and privilege to be here with you.

[4:56] Patrick Oliver Jones: Now, certainly one thing that you and I share in common is that we both have our own podcast. We talk to creatives, we bring them on, we pummel them with questions and try to get as much as we can out of them. What was it that led you into podcasting? It seems like everyone got into it, but what specifically led you into it?

[5:12] Steve Cuden: Well, that was just one of those weird quirks of fate in my particular life. I've had many of them where, you know, I'm not looking for something and something comes my way. While working at Point Park University in 2017, I believe it was, it might have been 2016, they opened a new facility there called the Center for Media Innovation. And they had within it a brand new TV studio, a brand new radio studio, a photographic studio, and classrooms. And the person that ran the facility put out a call to all the professors in the school, would anyone like to do a podcast? Well, I didn't know whether I wanted to do a podcast or not. And I thought about it. And the only time I'd ever interviewed anybody, because obviously you can do podcasts in all kinds of different ways.

You can do storytelling, you can do fact-based things. There's lots of different ways to do it. But my keen interest would have been in telling stories or how to be in the entertainment industry, that kind of thing. The only interview experience I'd ever had is about six months to a year prior to that, by great good fortune, Brian Cranston had been in Pittsburgh shooting the movie Last Flag Flying. And a good friend of mine named Javier Grajeta, who I'd gone to school with, Javier, who plays Juan Bolsa in both Breaking Bad and in Better Call Saul, used to be Brian Cranston's roommate. And so I called Javier and I said, Do you think Brian would come over to school and talk to people? And he said, I don't know, I'll ask him.

And about 20 minutes later, he texts me back and says he's happy to do it. So I got Brian Cranston to come over to Point Park and I interviewed him live in front of about 250 people, mostly students and some faculty. And I got a taste for it right then and there. So when the call came out from the Center for Media Innovation, I thought, what can I do? And then I thought and I thought and I thought, and I'm the one only professor, I think, who raised their hand and said, okay, I'll do a podcast. And then, well, how am I going to do anything? Well, by that time I had written two books, one called Beating Broadway and Beating Hollywood, both on how to write, how to create scripts or libretto, et cetera.

And I thought I'll do a show. I'll keep the theme of beat or beating, because it's about beats, storytelling beats. I thought I'll keep that theme and I'll do something called Storybeat, and I will talk to people about their creative process because that fascinated me and still does. Why do you do this? How do you do this? Like just like we're talking about right now. And so I started to gather up information and I booked my first guest, which was my dear friend Wendy Peaney, who created the long-running 40 plus year graphic novel series called ElfQuest. And she came on the show, and then I started to line up more friends, and I found my way into just being an interviewer without having a clue, no training, didn't not train on the equipment, didn't know how to cut anything, didn't know audio, didn't know anything. I mean, I was as green as you can get. But here we are seven years later, and I just finished my 281st episode. So I feel like I just passed the 300 mark just a few episodes ago.

[8:34] Patrick Oliver Jones: Yeah, listening to some of those first interviews. I had a co-host that first season, but once it became just me, yeah, it's a little daunting to come up with these questions, to come up with what are you going to talk about? You're trying to listen and think at the same time. And so you're trying to have a conversation, but at the same time, you're trying to sound authoritative and ask these really important questions. It really is the trick to it, I think, is the questions. The key to being a really good teacher, I believe, and many others do too, is not so much what you're telling students, but the questions you're asking them so that they think. And that is part of the process of the podcast.

I did, I don't know if you do this or not in your podcast, but early on, I had a conversation with Andy Conti, in fact, because he had been a at that point a very long time reporter, and he said to me something that I just didn't even occur to me. He said to me, You do have sort of your own normal set of questions that you ask, don't you? And I thought, What? You mean I could have a set of questions? And so if you listen to enough of my podcasts, you'll realize I do focus on certain areas over and over and over again because those are the ones that I think are important and interest me the most. And so there are certain questions that come up every single week in different forms. They don't necessarily come up as the exact same wording, but they are sort of covering the same area.

So I found that to be very useful that I could have a long list of questions that I use repeatedly. And sometimes I get to them in a show, and many times I don't. But I've got about a hundred questions typically.

[10:16] Patrick Oliver Jones: Wow. I spend a lot of time massaging those questions so that they fit the guests. But the areas of the questions remain similar.

[10:23] Steve Cuden: Exactly, exactly. Well, getting to story number one, we'll dive into the questions that I have prepared for you. We actually met because my other podcast, Closing Night, a theater history podcast focused on Jekyll and Hyde and its origin story and obviously Frank Wildhorn, but then I discovered your name, a name I was not familiar with, and discovered your early association with the musical. And I'm so grateful that you wanted to come on and talk about this because I don't think a lot of people know Steve Cuden or that name. So it's great to get to talk to you. When it comes to Frank Wildhorn, how did the two of you meet and get to know each other?

[11:05] Steve Cuden: So when I graduated from college, which was the University of Southern California, I graduated in January of 1978. And within a few months, I had done a bunch of lighting design while I was still a student at USC. And while I was there, I had become friendly with the tech director of the whole theater school, which was a guy named Jack Pelton. And Jack knew that I had an interest in lighting, and I was, you know, gainfully unemployed, as most students are when they come out of school. And he said, Would you like to be the master electrician for the theater department? I said, Well, that's interesting. And it was a job, it was labor. It paid something, which was good. And so for the next two years, I was the master electrician in the drama department at USC.

And part of my responsibilities were to install or put up the lighting of every show that went through three different theaters there. And also frequently, if they had a larger kind of performance or a more important kind of performance, they would ask me to operate the computerized lighting board because I was pretty good at it. And so in the at the end of 1978, going into 1979, there was this young man, he was I guess 18 or 19 years old, that came to USC as a student in either history or philosophy. I'm still never sure what it was, but he was a composer. And he went and had a meeting with the person that ran the drama department, which was a guy named Rick Toskin. And Rick took him and introduced him to the man who was the artistic director of the program, someone many will be familiar with, John Houseman.

This is the great dean of the American theaters, now at USC, sort of overseeing the artistic end of the program. And this young man named Frank Wildhorn convinced John Houseman to produce at the largest expense they'd ever had in the history of that department up to that point, a show that Frank had written when he was 17, 18 years old, whatever, called Christopher. And it was a show that when you listen to it, the beginnings of Frank Wildhorn and what his abilities are as a composer were all there. The storytelling was not. It was a very young person's show. And it starred Chuck Wagner, who was at USC at the time, Chuck, who eventually went on and did over 1,500 performances, The Beast on Broadway, and he was in Les Misérables.

And he's been all over the world with his ability to sing like no one else. And also a woman named Madeline Smith, and Madeline went on to star in All of Me and Funny Farm and all kinds of different movies.

[13:59] Steve Cuden: She was an urban cowboy. And they had me operate the board. And after opening night, from then on, the next two weeks worth of performances, Frank Wildhorn would come up into the booth, which was up high above the stage and watch the show with me. And I would sit there and rip the show apart and tell him how bad it was.

[14:21] Patrick Oliver Jones: To his face?

[14:22] Steve Cuden: To his face. He was a 19-year-old kid, but he had a really good sense of humor about it. And I would rip things because I would say things that were funny. It wasn't like I was just being mean spirited. I was saying things that were cutting and sarcastic. And he would laugh and laugh and laugh. And we got to talking and we would talk every night for the next couple of weeks. And he finally said to me, "Is this what you want to do? You want to be in lighting design the rest of your life?" I said, "No, I really want to be a writer and a director." And he said, "Well, what have you written?" Well, there was a class at USC called Experimental Theater, and I had written for it, which by the way, they didn't produce, but I had written and submitted to Experimental Theater a show called Aesop over Easy that was seven of Aesop's fables in rhymed verse.

And I said, "I'd written that." And he said, "Let me see it." So I gave him a copy of Aesop over Easy, and he came back the next day and he said, "You're a lyricist." I said, "I am." He said, "Yeah, you're a lyricist."

[15:26] Patrick Oliver Jones: So yeah, I mean, because not many people write in verse, that's for sure.

[15:30] Steve Cuden: Right. So what made you want to write in verse as opposed to being a more contemporary playwright?

[15:36] Steve Cuden: Fun. I don't know that many people would say coming up with verses and rhyming would be fun, but it certainly is like a puzzle putting it together. I don't think you'll find too many. Well, I shouldn't say that, but I don't think you'll find too many poets, lyricists, people that work with words in rhymed form or even not in rhymed form, that will tell you I do this because I hate it. They tell you they do it because it's fun to do. And so we started working together because he thought that I could write lyrics, which was nothing that I had thought about doing at all. And once we started working together, we started talking about, well, what can we do with this? Because he had a dream to be in the theater, and I was clearly already in the theater.

I had a degree in the theater, yeah, and I wanted to be a writer, and I love musicals. It wasn't like I didn't know musicals; I knew them quite well. And so we started thinking about what we could write together as a show, and we took a page out of Andrew Lloyd Webber's book where he had produced, I believe it was Jesus Christ Superstar as a double album early on before it was ever on stage, and they used that as a springboard to get them into, you know, he and Tim Rice into the theater. And so we decided to write a double album based on the life of Julius Caesar called The High and Mighty Caesar.

[17:00] Patrick Oliver Jones: Was it Frank's idea to do that?

[17:01] Steve Cuden: It was. And so did you ever actually produce an album of any of these musicals you created?

[17:08] Steve Cuden: Okay, no, we produced a demo recording of it with Frank playing the piano and Chuck Wagner and a young man named Joey Burns, the only two voices singing everything in a studio, but just a demo, just so that we had a recording of it. And in fact, I still have that recording. And it was not good. It will never see the light of day.

[17:30] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, I mean, you know, you have to get the kinks out, so to speak.

[17:34] Steve Cuden: I had no idea what I was doing at all. This is, by the way, is a theme in my whole life. I go into lots of things and I have no idea what I'm doing. I just want to do them. I go do them until I either fail and walk away, or I do them until I become good at them, one of the two. And so we started working together. He was already writing pop songs. He had a variety of different people he was working with who were sort of well entrenched in the pop music business. And Frank is a very good salesman, and he can sell himself to all kinds of different people. And so he was able to work his way into eventually getting a deal with Chrysalis Records for pop music. And so that was funding his ability to think about writing theater, which, as you well know, is not exactly the normal pathway to riches unless you just get stupid lucky.

[18:31] Patrick Oliver Jones: Right, unless you write the next Wicked or Phantom of the Opera or one of those, yeah. And how many of those get written every year? You know, not many. So of the shows that get produced on Broadway every year that succeed that actually make their money back, you know, there were probably a thousand or more that were written that didn't get anywhere.

[18:58] Steve Cuden: You and Frank wrote not only that Julius Caesar musical, but then you also did another one about the Russian Emperor Nicholas II.

[19:06] Steve Cuden: Nicholas and Alexander.

[19:07] Patrick Oliver Jones: Right. And then there was another one about Rudolph, the last crown prince of the city.

[19:12] Steve Cuden: So Rudolph has actually had a life.

[19:15] Patrick Oliver Jones: Right, right. It's actually had a life, but these were some of your early works that you and Frank worked on. That's cool. And each of them are about rulers. They're about people in the, you know, historical figures. What was the fascination around these subjects?

[19:28] Steve Cuden: So here's the key to anyone out there that thinks to themselves, how am I going to do something that has something, some grit to it, some bite to it? We just went to the public domain. So we just looked for ideas that were in the public domain, and that way we didn't have to pay anybody or go through lawyers to obtain rights or any of that stuff that many people have to do, because we knew the overwhelming majority of musicals that have been produced, certainly the memorable popular ones, come from some underlying source. And so there are always going to be rights issues involved. Well, we were two young guys that, you know, I didn't have any money, that's for sure. Frank had maybe a little bit more than me, but not much.

And he was a history buff. So we started talking, well, what's in history that would be interesting to do, not having any idea whether it would have commercial availability or not. But so we also did, yes, the show on Nicholas and Alexander was called The Last Czar, and Rudolph was based on the famous son of the last emperor of the Habsburg Empire, was Rudolph. And it was a murder mystery, basically, because he had been married off, like they all were. They were all arranged marriages back in those days, and he was in love with a young woman, and his father, you know, didn't approve, and he allegedly wound up killing her at his hunting lodge at Meirling. It's the famous story of Meyerling, where he allegedly killed her and then committed suicide.

But there are many people if you go and do the research on Rudolph, it's quite interesting. There are many different versions of what people say happened, that he actually fled the country and wound up in South America as a cattle farmer. And there are all these stories about what happened. So we did that. Well, when Frank and I broke up, Rudolph was only partially finished. And so he eventually finished it with Nan Knighton and then later Jack Murphy. And the other thing about these historical dramas is that the story is also written. I mean, yes, you have these various theories about what happened to Rudolph, but overall their life story is there. Well, it's there; it's already written. You just have to kind of formulate it into a more dramatic narrative. That's the key to why so many musicals succeed when they do, is that the public is already somewhat familiar with the story.

[21:55] Steve Cuden: So I have a theory that's based on lots of people saying something similar. And I've had many people disagree with my theory. And but that is that the underlying story enables a first-time audience to have some familiarity with the material when they have to work their way through hearing music and lyrics for the first time that frequently people don't get the lyrics on a first hear-through. They can't understand all the words. They don't get it, or it's too loud and they don't, whatever it is. Yes, you have a story that actually makes it easier to write because it exists, but also I think it helps the audience. So it's a twofold thing. And what was it like working with Frank? What was your relationship like as writing partners?

[22:43] Steve Cuden: So we were not just writing partners, but we became best friends. And when we weren't writing, which was often, we were hanging out together. So I was at Frank's house, I don't know, six days a week. And we worked very closely. In fact, Jekyll and Hyde was first conceived and written in an apartment in Westwood, California near UCLA, and he had a little tiny upright spinet in a corner of his bedroom, and that's where we started to conceive Jekyll and Hyde. Now, Frank tells a different story, which is not the story that I know. Frank likes to say that he came up with this idea while he was at USC and that nothing happened to it. He's been reported in many interviews, and that nothing happened until he met Leslie Bricusse in 1988.

And so that sort of takes away all of the eight and a half, nine years that I worked on it, and through two different versions, keeping just one song, and that was "Murder, Murder," which exists in the show to this day. And it was, you know, conceiving that once and then letting it go away because we did a demo recording of that too with Chuck Wagner in a studio with three other voices, four voices, and Frank on the piano. And it just lay fallow after we did that because it was not a good pass. And it was six years later, so 1980 is when we started working on Jekyll and Hyde, and six years later we started working on the second version of it, which ultimately became the underlying version of what we now know as Jekyll and Hyde the musical.

[24:36] Steve Cuden: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one and the same on opposite sides, took a town on a terrible ride. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a curious tale I have to tell. A good intentions gone straight to hell. And with that 1988 version, the one that almost came to Broadway, I'm curious what were the initial steps? How did you both, or one of you get in touch with Broadway producers and theaters in order for it to start that path?

[25:07] Steve Cuden: So the initial version of Jekyll and Hyde fascinated a man named Howard Stark. Howard was at one time the VP of ABC Dunhill Records. And he took an interest in it, and he's the one that paid to have the demo made. And he brought in a variety of people to listen to it, and you know, nobody was buying it. And so that's when why it went away. We only did it because we were interested in gothic horror and only because Sweeney Todd had been out two years before. Sweeney Todd was a new show back then. So we decided that this was we wanted to focus on this because we thought, okay, well, this will be entertaining, if nothing else, and it will be bloody and gothic and fun to do. So again, there's that word fun. I think if you're not having fun doing it, there's something really wrong.

[26:08] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, yeah, and Jekyll and Hyde, it's such an outlandish story, and you have this central character who's actually two characters, and just the transformation that goes there. So, I mean, you have a lot of drama already part of the story. Most people think they know the story of Jekyll and Hyde that Stevenson wrote. Most people think they know it. They think they've read it in high school or they've read it at some point. And what I have discovered over time is the majority of people that think they know that story have never read it. If you read the novella, it's a short book, it's only about a hundred pages long. It's in three sections, or three and a half sections. It's from John Utterson, who was related to, I believe Sir Danvers Carew in the book, and that he was somehow related as a friend to Jekyll.

It was from Hasty Lanyon, who was a fellow doctor like Jekyll, and then there was Jekyll's version of what happens. There's only a mention on a page of a woman and it's a maid, and there's a little girl in the story, but there's no romance. There's no plot. It's plotless. Nothing actually really happens in a normal storytelling way. It was the first time in the history of literature that I'm aware of in which the notion of this split personality or bipolar personality or whatever it is was ever discussed. The underlying stuff that Freud was also doing at the same time in the 1880s, Freudian theory was only happening at the exact same time that Stevenson was writing Jekyll and Hyde. So we had to concoct a story out of not much. There's no plot to hang your hat on. And most Broadway musicals, at least up to that time, and I think to a large extent to this day, most of them have some kind of a romantic love story in them.

[27:55] Steve Cuden: Not all musicals, but a pretty significant number of them.

[27:58] Patrick Oliver Jones: And so how are we going to do that?

[28:00] Steve Cuden: Well, like you said, you've got one man who's actually two, and you then concoct the two women.

[28:09] Steve Cuden: In that case, the two that I created were Lisa and Lucy. Lisa stayed Lisa all the way through the 1995 double album with Anthony Warlow and Carolie Carmelo and Linda Edder. Uh, and then by the time it got to Broadway, Lisa got turned into Emma. So, so we had to we had to create that. There was nothing there. Uh, and some people will say, have said to me over time, well, you're just using what's in the movies that were out. And the truth is, I hadn't seen the movies. So I think that what we did was reminiscent of that, but I think it's the natural way to go if you're trying to make a store, a love story in the middle of this other problem, the problem that he has where he's tried the chemical on himself and he's turned himself into Hyde. Uh, and he can't get out of it. He's trapped, and so it's a it's a perfect story to have this love triangle, right?

[29:04] Steve Cuden: And that's when because when Frank and I were talking about what shows to write, our next thing after Last Czar, what what are we gonna do next? Well, let's do something gothic and horror. So we looked at Frankenstein, Dracula. We thought about the wolf man, we thought about the mummy, all those we went through. We also uh very seriously talked about this. Is in 1980, doing uh a musical of the Phantom of the Opera. This is seven years before Lloyd Weber. And we thought that'll never work.

[29:38] Steve Cuden: Yeah, as a creator, you have to be able to see it, the vision has to be there, right? And it doesn't matter if and for you and Frank, you just didn't see it.

[29:46] Steve Cuden: We didn't know, no, we didn't see it at all. But we definitely saw as soon as I said Jekyll and Hyde, because it was me that said Jekyll and Hyde, so that's why I'm saying Frank likes to say he came up with the idea at USC. No, he was already out of USC. Uh Jekyll and Hyde uh was my idea. And it was, you know, here's this opportunity to do this love triangle. And he then lit up like a rocket. And he went, okay, that's a story. We can work with that. Because Frank, as if you know anything about Frank Wildhorn's music, he loves a big ballad. He loves power ballads. That's his forte. And he went off. I'm you're gonna think I'm kidding. I'm not gonna, I'm not kidding. I'm not being hyperbolic. He once we decided that was what we were going to do, about 48 hours later, he calls me on the phone and he says, I've got all these songs, come on over.

[30:39] Steve Cuden: And I went, What? We didn't even know what the show was. We just knew it was Jekyll and Hyde. It wasn't, and in those days, it we called it Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the musical. We had that big mouthful. And I went over to his to his uh apartment, and he had he'd written something like 10 or 12 song pieces of music, not no lyrics, pieces of music, these big bold, brash sounding things, which is what he likes to do. And I found that a little intimidating, mainly because I didn't know what the story was, and he was already had songs, which I think is kind of a little bit ass backwards, but that's the way it worked.

[31:20] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, but at the same time, yeah, then there's pressure on you. Now you have these 10 or 12 songs or bits of song. Now you have to create lyrics to them or or write around them. So it presents a double-edged issue, which is if you know what the story is and you write the songs to the story or the music to the story, so that it fits in context with what you're trying to tell, I think that's a little more straightforward and a little easier for the person who's writing the words to figure out okay, here's what the story is, here's what the words will be. Now write music that makes this sing, versus you've written a bunch of music that you don't know where it's going, and we were shoehorning it into a story for better or for worse.

[32:06] Steve Cuden: And so that presents this dilemma for you, the wordsmith. Well, okay, how do I take this music and make it fit to the story? And fortunately, in many cases, it we it just worked. Uh, at least on that pass. And again, that first pass was not a good pass.

[32:25] Patrick Oliver Jones: Now, what was the biggest difference between that first version and the second version years later?

[32:32] Steve Cuden: I would say it was the second version was far more refined. The storytelling was more refined. We took much more time. We wrote that first version really fast. We had that first version, I think in about six to eight weeks, which is which is really fast. And and it showed. And if I go back, I I can pull the old manuscript up and look at it, and I go, Oh, this is it, it had promise, but it was not great. And then the second version that we wrote, we spent eight months, six days a week in his studio. He had a big studio in his house, and with the grand piano with me standing on the end of the grand piano and him playing over and over again what the songs were, uh, creating the the libretto for that show, we took our time.

And the, I think by that time, so from 1980 to 1986, I think he got to be a better writer of music. And I think I got to be a better writer of words, of lyrics, of dialogue, although ultimately it proved to be uh, you know, when we finally got to the end of the day, not enough is correct. That's a good way to say it.

[33:43] Steve Cuden: Uh, but we were better at it. And then what then happened? You asked earlier, how do you get to people? So Howard Stark was the first guy, but then the second guy, who was even way bigger than Howard, is Frank, and I don't know how, because I wasn't privy to it, I don't think at that time. He somehow knew or had been introduced to a man named Milt Oaken. Some people in the music industry will know who Milt was. He's no longer with us, but Milt owned uh a the largest publisher of sheet music, independent publisher of sheet music in the world called Cherry Lane Music Publishing. And they eventually, many, many years later, uh, you know, maybe 10 years ago, maybe more, uh, they were bought out by BMG. But Milt's claim to fame was that he had found John Denver. He was the publisher of Peter Paul and Mary, he was the first publisher of sheet music for the Beatles. And so he was uh a powerful guy in the music industry.

[34:45] Steve Cuden: And Frank knew him. And we went to Milt's house when we had the first half of the first act of Jekyll and Hyde written. Went to his house in Beverly Hills and sat down at his out of tune piano. And Frank and I used to perform the show. He would play the music, and he and I would act it out and sing the songs badly back and forth, because neither of us, we both could carry a tune, but you wouldn't call us singers. And um, we played this the first half of the first act for Milt, and he flipped his wig. He said, Uh, how can I get a stake in this? And he's the one that seeded the first money of what eventually became what people think of as the 1987 demo. And and we he brought in a guy named Harold Thaw, Hal Thaw. Um, he helped uh find us a management company in New York that was going to be the general manager, and that took us off to the races where we wrote and wrote and wrote, and then people said, Well, okay, I guess you need to keep working on it.

[35:51] Steve Cuden: Uh, as time goes on, uh, they said it's good enough for us to bring into New York and maybe take to Broadway. This is in 1987. Uh, and they brought in a director, a guy named Andre Arnott, who gave us lots and lots of notes, and we had lots of conversations. And I don't know that it took us to a better place, but it things definitely changed. And by the fall of 87, uh, I was sitting in the promenade theater in New York watching the show being cast. We had a star, it was Terrence Mann, Terry Mann. Uh, Andre Arnott was directing. Uh, and in walked a young woman who had just won Star Search named Linda Edder, and she sang somewhere over the rainbow, a cappella, and every hair on my body stood up. The tone in her voice was unreal. And that's sort of where Frank began his relationship with her.

[36:55] Steve Cuden: Uh, and the problem was we were having that audition about a month after the very famous 1987 stock market crash. And the money was all being funded by a single company out of New Zealand called Qtron. And when we got to January 1st, where the money was supposed to be in place, they had already backed out because they had lost their shirt shirt in the market. And so at that point the show collapsed because people didn't have any confidence in things and they weren't able to work through things and now they didn't have any money and so on. And the show collapsed.

[37:32] Steve Cuden: And uh when the show collapsed, uh I guess it would Frank took it upon himself to go seeking some other way to take the show forward. Because it was around 1988 that he found Leslie Bricas, who would go on to then be with the show. Was this collapse of the Broadway version have anything to do with your departure?

[37:51] Steve Cuden: No, it didn't. No. The the I'll give you the sequence of events. So Frank had a manager at the time, a fairly well-known manager named Hilly Elkins. Hilly Elkins also produced shows on Broadway. He produced The Rothschilds and O'Calcutta and all kinds of different things. Frank and I played the show for Alan Carr in his house in Bel Air, who is best known for having produced Greece. He nodded his head, thanked us, and that was the end of that. We then played the show for Jimmy Niederlander in the lobby of the Pantagious Theater in Hollywood. And it was at that point that uh Niederlander talked to Frank about whether he'd be interested in writing the Scarlet Pimpernell. And then several days later, we played the show for Leslie Brickus in his house in Beverly Hills.

And at that point, and I didn't know it because I was not in the loop, which is one of the problems that I had back then. I was escorted to the door at the end of the performing. And I I Brickus said thank you, shook my hand, out I went, and Frank stayed. And from that day forward, uh I was no longer involved in Jekyll and Hyde, though I didn't know it till a couple of days later when my attorney called and said, uh, this is what's going to go on. Brickus wants to join the show, but he doesn't work with anybody. And so you'll have to step aside. And that was the beginning of my being removed or replaced from Jekyll and Hyde.

[39:23] Patrick Oliver Jones: Interesting. So it seems like it was almost a coup in of some sort.

[39:28] Steve Cuden: Well, you can call it a coup. I've never used that word. I've never even thought of that word. Um I I was definitely usurped.

[39:36] Steve Cuden: Right. I was definitely I I guess I used the word coup because it seemed knowledgeable to possibly Frank, but definitely to Bricus, that there was something else that could happen, and they decided to pull the trigger and make it happen. They made a decision that uh for whatever reason, without ever talking to me about it, that the work that was already there wasn't sufficient to get it to Broadway for real. And so the somewhere with again, without my knowledge, a decision was made prior to my getting to Leslie Bricas's house that they were gonna move forward. What they needed, because we didn't have the whole show recorded anywhere, they needed me to play it for them and you know, perform it so that he could hear it.

But that again, that was with without my knowing what was going on. I was uh you could call me naive, that would be the best way to say it. I was completely wet behind the ears. I didn't know what I was doing. I again, this is me falling into things. Uh back then I had never been uh produced, so I didn't know what that was like. I didn't understand what was going on behind the scenes, and so uh from that perspective, if this were to happen today, things would have turned out very differently.

[40:56] Steve Cuden: While this episode is only the first half of my interview with Steve, subscribers to Why I'll Never Make It already have the full interview in their feeds.

[41:06] Patrick Oliver Jones: To join those subscribers who are supporting this podcast and helping produce future episodes, go to why I'll never make it.com and click subscribe, or just look for the link in the show notes.

[41:19] Patrick Oliver Jones: Another benefit besides early access to full episodes and bonus content is not having to listen to any ads either.

[41:31] Patrick Oliver Jones: How did this changing of the guard, so to speak? How did it affect your friendship and relationship with Frank?

[41:37] Steve Cuden: Killed it.

[41:49] Steve Cuden: He wanted to continue to work on it, and I couldn't see my way to it at that point because he had done me the opposite of a solid and had not involved me in the conversation and had not been a friend and had not been what I thought of as a solid partner at that moment.

[42:08] Steve Cuden: And it's something that I have never practiced that kind of thing where you abandon someone and don't tell them.

[42:18] Steve Cuden: Not in any major relationship I've ever had, that's for sure. And so it was foreign to me. It was difficult to deal with for me.

[42:28] Patrick Oliver Jones: I imagine so. And now you had mentioned that it was a lawyer that called you up and told you that your days with the show were done. I assume then there were legal ramifications that happened after this, because your name was all over everything.

[42:41] Steve Cuden: Sure. Well, Frank and I had a contract, and that contract had to be dealt with. And so, yes, the lawyer that was my lawyer was also Frank's lawyer, which was an issue later on that again, my naivety did not allow me to see. My lack of experience didn't allow me to see it. And yes, there was a good long year of negotiations on and off before I was replaced with a supplemental contract that made Bricus the author of the show and removed me from it.

[43:15] Steve Cuden: And in light of that, of course, I received rights to certain credits and to royalties, etc. So knock wood, the show has been a little on the successful side. For me, as people ask me, I always describe it, it's the true definition for me of bittersweet. It's a bitter experience I went through, which I'm way past, you know. I've had a really good, really good career and a great life.

[43:44] Steve Cuden: But the sweet part is it's paid off handsomely. You know, the show's made more than a billion dollars around the world. It's been translated into something like 30 languages or so. So I can't complain about it anymore. One time it was easy to complain. It's really hard to complain about it. It's been very good to me. It's the biggest, longest, most massive karma in my life for 43 years now, and it's not going away.

[44:15] Steve Cuden: It continues to be performed all over the world and here in America. And so it is a gigantic part of my history that I don't control anymore.

[44:30] Steve Cuden: So somebody once asked me what was it like when I saw the first performance of Jekyll and Hyde.

[44:36] Patrick Oliver Jones: You're taking my question, Steve.

[44:38] Steve Cuden: You're taking my question. I was just gonna ask you that.

[44:40] Steve Cuden: Yes, go ahead. The first time I ever saw a production of the show was in 1996.

[44:47] Patrick Oliver Jones: What year was that?

[44:47] Steve Cuden: It was 1996 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center when it was on the very first ever tour with Robert Cuccioli, Christiane Knoll, and Linda Edder.

[44:58] Steve Cuden: And it was early on in the tour, they came to Orange County. I lived in Southern California at the time, and I went to see the show, and I had been told in advance that none of my words were left.

[45:13] Steve Cuden: And when I saw the show, I was completely floored by how many of my words were left in the show, how much of my story, how many of my characters. It was essentially my show that they had done an edit on that they had revised over and over again to get it to there.

[45:30] Steve Cuden: And they'd done many different things to it. It was not the same exact show that I had left them, but they did not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[45:38] Steve Cuden: So the question that I was once asked was, How did you feel about that when you saw it for the first time? And I equated it to, though I don't have any personal experience with what I'm about to say, I equated it to giving birth to a child, and then the child shows up.

[45:57] Steve Cuden: You don't see that child, the child's taken away from you, and then you see the child at the age of 14 or 15 for the first time. So it was a very strange thing for me because I was completely and utterly connected to this show, and I was absolutely disconnected from what I was watching.

[46:21] Steve Cuden: So it was an out of body experience to see it for the very first time because I didn't know what I was gonna see. I wasn't privy to any of the rehearsals, I wasn't privy to the scripts, I wasn't part of the creative process anymore.

[46:35] Steve Cuden: So it was shocking in many ways, both good and bad, and it was like seeing a grown-up child that you only knew as a baby. Strange, it's strange.

[46:48] Patrick Oliver Jones: And I've seen you have pictures with several of the cast members as it's gone through its various productions over the years. I would assume that you have gotten to know your child a little bit better.

[47:00] Steve Cuden: Obviously, you know, as you said, you're making residuals, but now you know the child a little bit better.

[47:05] Steve Cuden: Well, we're almost 30 years out from it finally having a life, right? Because the very first production of the show was at the Alley Theater in Houston, and I did not see that. I was not invited to that, so I didn't go.

[47:17] Steve Cuden: And they also did a workshop of it in 1992 in New York that I also didn't see. That was apparently a failure. That's the word that I always got back is the 92 workshop was a big fail.

[47:28] Steve Cuden: And you know, I have gotten to know the show quite well. I've seen many productions of it, I've seen it in many different places.

[47:38] Steve Cuden: I've seen really great professional productions of it, and I've seen not so great local little mini productions of it that, you know, they do their very best, and it's fascinating for something that you created at one point so many years ago to then go and see people doing it today.

[48:01] Steve Cuden: And rarely have I ever seen a performance of it where the people in it weren't really into it. They love the music, they love the show.

[48:10] Steve Cuden: Of course, the show has many detractors. Do you know this? The what happened with all the critics? Do you know that whole thing?

[48:16] Patrick Oliver Jones: About the original Broadway production.

[48:18] Steve Cuden: About the Broadway production in 97. Ben Brantley went out of his way, out of his way to create a review that had not a single word in it that they could pull out and put on the marquee.

[48:31] Steve Cuden: So, you know, that's the whole thing about Broadway is they're not looking for their opening weekend, they're looking for 10 years. So they're looking for reviews that give them pull quotes of some kind.

[48:42] Steve Cuden: Even there wasn't even the word Linda Edder, brilliant singer in a bad show. So the word brilliant wasn't even used. He purposely crafted this review that you couldn't use anything from.

[48:56] Steve Cuden: And the show was reviled by most of the critics. I mean, reviled. But the Jekkies, which had been in place since 1990 when it was at the Alley Theater, right? They kept that show afloat for almost four years.

[49:09] Steve Cuden: They would go up and down Broadway saying, You gotta go see that show, you gotta go see that show. And so thank God for the Jekkies.

[49:16] Patrick Oliver Jones: You know, they made it.

[49:17] Steve Cuden: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that has a rabid, rabid following. That's for sure.

[49:21] Patrick Oliver Jones: And with regards to the revival in 2013, did you see it?

[49:24] Steve Cuden: It only lasted a month.

[49:26] Patrick Oliver Jones: I saw and what did you think of that iteration? Because they had done some revisions here and there.

[49:31] Steve Cuden: Yeah, as Constantine Maroulas, who starred in it, liked to say it was a revisal, which was an interesting word to use. The answer is I think that they made some errors that then created even more bad feelings in the critical world, and it just wasn't good.

[49:51] Steve Cuden: It was okay. They tried things that I think were brave and interesting to try, but for me they didn't work.

[50:00] Steve Cuden: I will tell you what the biggest, the single biggest issue with the show, and they knew this. I know from talking to people that went to see it, they knew this issue from the first performance of it when it was on, because it went on tour before it ever got to Broadway.

[50:14] Steve Cuden: For whatever reason, because again, I'm not involved, they decided in their wisdom that that show was gonna have a rock and roll style edge to it, and that it was going to be loud, like this is Spinal Tap 11 loud.

[50:33] Steve Cuden: And people were turned off by it. I can tell you, people were turned off by it. That's not what they wanted to hear. They wanted to hear the songs sung like they wanted to hear the song sung, not like it was in the rock and roll show.

[50:46] Steve Cuden: And I think it was a brave choice that didn't work. That's what the main problem to me was.

[50:54] Steve Cuden: I think the performances were great. I think some of the staging was a little not appealing to me, but that's neither here nor there. That shouldn't kill a show.

[51:03] Steve Cuden: I think what killed the show is that they turned the music into something that it wasn't. They also did one thing that I just didn't understand at all, and that is they took "Murder, Murder" and turned it into "Murder," and they took it from an upbeat almost a march into a slow, I guess like a dirge.

[51:29] Steve Cuden: And I didn't understand that choice. That was a tonal choice, and I didn't get it.

[51:32] Steve Cuden: In my opinion, from my experience, because I now have a pretty heavy-duty experience in terms of analyzing shows, having written a book about how to create the stories for shows, you don't want to go into your act two opener in most musicals today with a slow song.

[51:52] Patrick Oliver Jones: Yes, I've been in a few, especially new musicals. There was one I did last year specifically that opened with a very kind of abstract ballad, very, very slow moving, and I think it was just kind of a dreary way to begin act two.

[52:10] Steve Cuden: So you go to a movie, and by the way, movies and musicals share an enormous number of things in common, not movies and plays, movies and musicals in terms of structure and how they lay out.

[52:25] Steve Cuden: When you go to a movie, when you get to your midpoint, which is where most musicals end at the midpoint of the story, they don't let you out of your seat. You move on to the next thing in the movie.

[52:37] Steve Cuden: But when you get to a Broadway musical, you have this thing called intermission, and the show stops, and people get up and they go to the bathroom and they smoke a cigarette and they get a drink, and then they have to come back.

[52:48] Steve Cuden: Well, they leave the space of the show, and in their mind, the show disappears for them for a bit of time. And if it's any good, they are eager to get back to see what happens next.

[53:01] Steve Cuden: That's the whole thing. So you have to leave them at the end of your act one wanting more. What's gonna happen next?

[53:08] Steve Cuden: And if you come back from intermission and you don't what I describe as grab them by the lapels and drag them screaming back into their faces, you have a real chance of losing them.

[53:21] Steve Cuden: And I think that may have in part been what happened in 2013. It just didn't grab the audience back.

[53:29] Patrick Oliver Jones: And that's an issue.

[53:30] Steve Cuden: That's not a technical issue, it's an artistic issue. And then it becomes a commercial issue.

[53:35] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, yeah, it's a narrative. I mean, yeah, you're a writer, you're all about the ebbs and flows of characters and story beats.

[53:43] Steve Cuden: You're all about coming up to a climax, coming up to a resolution, you know, twists and turns. And then so a musical has to do that.

[53:51] Steve Cuden: And it is one of the things that the writers have to take into account that intermission, what that does or does not do for the flow of the story.

[53:59] Patrick Oliver Jones: So that's right.

[54:00] Steve Cuden: They have to take that into consideration.

[54:02] Patrick Oliver Jones: That's right.

[54:02] Steve Cuden: And "Murder, Murder" was a really good act two opener, you know, because "Murder, Murder," da-da-da, bada, bada, bada, right?

[54:10] Steve Cuden: So it had a kind of upbeat feel to it, and it immediately gets your attention, and there was choreography and lighting, and it just drags you back in.

[54:20] Steve Cuden: It pulls you right back in. There's people being killed, and you know, it brings you right back in.

[54:26] Steve Cuden: And so if you slow it way down, it's still there, but it's no longer got that thing that just grabs you by the throat and says, here, pay attention to this.

[54:39] Steve Cuden: And so I do believe that's part of what happened in 2013. I mean, do I know exactly what happened? No, because who does.

[54:51] Patrick Oliver Jones: Stay tuned for the second half of my conversation with Steve Cuden in the next episode.

[54:57] Patrick Oliver Jones: And don't forget you can subscribe to this podcast by going to why I'll never make it.com and click subscribe, or just look for the link in the show notes.

[55:08] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, that about does it for me. I'm your host, Patrick Oliver Jones, in charge of writing, editing, and producing this podcast, which is a production of WINMI Media.

[55:18] Patrick Oliver Jones: Background music used in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions and John Bartmann. And the Jekyll and Hyde song you heard was provided by Steve Cuden.

[55:28] Patrick Oliver Jones: Be sure to join me next time as Steve and I talk more about why I'll never make it.