This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:04] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, this is Tonya Pinkins, and you're listening to my podcast, You Can't SAY THAT, where you hear coffee bubbling in the background for my next guest, whom I met, gosh, it's gotta be like 16 years ago, backstage at a theater.

[0:20] Tonya Pinkins: He had a hot little young guy with him at the time, who I'm sure has gone by the wayside. Look, I saw the face of the city. I was myself a hot young guy.

[0:30] Tonya Pinkins: You were indeed, but you were with another hot young guy, a show that he says that he is obsessed with, Caroline or Change, which is coming back to Broadway right now. And he is the national dance and theater editor for Time Out magazine, and he is also the president of the New York Drama Critic Circle.

[0:48] Adam Feldman: That is correct.

[0:48] Tonya Pinkins: And so my guest is did you guess already?

[0:52] Adam Feldman: Adam Feldman.

[0:54] Tonya Pinkins: No one guessed.

[0:55] Adam Feldman: No one guessed.

[0:56] Tonya Pinkins: But that's okay. So I don't think I remembered, I may have known because I'm sure we had this conversation when I met you, that you're from Canada.

[1:04] Adam Feldman: I am, I'm from Montreal.

[1:05] Tonya Pinkins: Uh Jupard Franca?

[1:07] Adam Feldman: Uh Francet.

[1:09] Tonya Pinkins: Uh not as well as once I did. It's funny, because I grew up in the English speaking minority of Montreal.

[1:16] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[1:16] Adam Feldman: So I was already sort of a minority within a minority within a minority.

[1:20] Tonya Pinkins: And tell me what those minorities are.

[1:21] Adam Feldman: Oh, well, okay. If you want to go even deeper in that, I grew up gay within the Jewish community, within the English speaking community, within the French speaking community, within the larger English community of North America.

[1:35] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[1:36] Adam Feldman: So I do feel like that those concentric circles leading to my identity have given me, even though I think I present very much as a kind of regular cis white guy in his 40s, I think that I do have a little bit, a touch of knowledge about outsiderness, which is helpful.

[1:59] Adam Feldman: I mean, I am an immigrant, I'm not an immigrant from a disadvantaged country, but I do know what it's like to be in that position in some way.

[2:08] Tonya Pinkins: And how do you get to stay in this country?

[2:10] Adam Feldman: I had a series of visas and now I have a resident. I'm not I have a green card.

[2:14] Tonya Pinkins: Does that mean you're subject to the new denaturalization policy that the Justice Department just made?

[2:19] Adam Feldman: I don't think so.

[2:20] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[2:21] Adam Feldman: I mean, I'm not sure exactly what that is, but I'm in the middle of applying now for my naturalization for my whatever that's called.

[2:29] Adam Feldman: I'm to become an American citizen.

[2:30] Tonya Pinkins: A naturalized citizen. So you're gonna learn all the things that real people who have were born in America don't know. You're gonna know more about America than people who were born here don't anymore.

[2:37] Adam Feldman: I think I always have. I was one of those kids. Like I knew all I could name you all hundred senators when I was a teenager. You know, I was one of those kids. And so I'm not worried about the civics test part of it.

[2:49] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, I'm just worried a little bit about the timing, because this government, as you know, is so capricious and so unstable, and you never know what strange crazy laws they may throw out at any given moment.

[3:02] Adam Feldman: That's real. And so that does make me nervous. And it's one reason that I'm gonna be putting this application in now. I've been putting it off for a little bit. But I do want to try to stabilize that as much as I can.

[3:13] Tonya Pinkins: And why do you want to become a citizen at this moment under this administration? I mean, to me, like Americans are trying to go to Canada. Like, why are you trying to get an American citizenship?

[3:22] Adam Feldman: I think I still have family in Canada. If it ever came to that, I think I would be able to go back to Canada.

[3:27] Tonya Pinkins: So we don't make you give it up?

[3:28] Adam Feldman: I'm not sure about that, but I don't think so.

[3:30] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, so rather I don't think Canada makes me give it up.

[3:34] Adam Feldman: My citizenship. But even if they did, I have parents there, I have a sister and her family there. You know, I would be able to go back to Canada in some capacity, I feel confident.

[3:42] Tonya Pinkins: And does Canada give you the UK?

[3:44] Adam Feldman: No.

[3:45] Tonya Pinkins: Oh, okay.

[3:46] Adam Feldman: No, no, but I mean, but I love living in New York. I love living in the United States, especially in New York.

[3:53] Tonya Pinkins: And New York, to some extent, as you know, is not really the United States.

[3:57] Adam Feldman: It's not America.

[3:58] Tonya Pinkins: It's not America. It's a very international cosmopolitan city.

[4:03] Adam Feldman: And so for that matter, in its way was Montreal. Montreal had the difference of being, first of all, much smaller, and second of all, mostly French. And so it was like a European cosmopolitan city in the middle of North America.

[4:17] Adam Feldman: But that was great to grow up in. I mean, I feel so lucky in retrospect. I go back and visit sometimes, I still have family there, and what a great city Montreal is.

[4:27] Tonya Pinkins: It's the funniest thing because every we're so close to it here, and nobody thinks about it because Americans, God bless us, really that like the map stops outside the map of the United States.

[4:39] Adam Feldman: I used to play this game with people that I they would be like, where are you from? And I'd say, well, why don't you guess? And they would we would eventually land in the Northeast, and they would name every state, and they would be like, they would be taking a test in their heads. They'd be like, Do I remember all the Northeastern states? Yes, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and they'd finally get they'd go through all the states, and then they would be baffled. They'd be like, I've named everywhere. And you just want to say, No, in fact, in the whole second largest country in the world, right on top of that. Um, you know, I I

[5:11] Adam Feldman: And I grew up an hour away from the Vermont border. I mean, I grew up when I was growing up, Bernie Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

[5:19] Tonya Pinkins: Oh.

[5:20] Adam Feldman: So I've known Bernie Sanders. I mean, not personally, but like I've known of Bernie Sanders for a long time.

[5:24] Tonya Pinkins: So you're saying that the politics of Vermont was leaning over into Montreal?

[5:29] Adam Feldman: Well, we would that not the politics, but the television of Vermont. Because we had Canadian television, but we also had cable TV and the American channels that would come in were from Vermont.

[5:43] Adam Feldman: And from upstate New York. And so we would that's what that you know, I would get all my news filtered through local Vermont television.

[5:50] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[5:51] Adam Feldman: Which was interesting. And Vermont is, you know, a lovely state and full of lovely people. It's an unusual state in this country.

[5:59] Tonya Pinkins: It's really strange.

[6:00] Adam Feldman: And it had a crazy switcheroo politically.

[6:04] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[6:05] Adam Feldman: Because it's mostly rural.

[6:07] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[6:07] Adam Feldman: And it's also it used to be part of this kind of North Eastern Republican bloc. It voted the most solidly Republican of any state until Bill Clinton. It had the most solidly Republican voting record.

[6:21] Adam Feldman: But that's because Republican meant something completely different. And all these Southern states had the most solidly Democratic record.

[6:26] Tonya Pinkins: Right.

[6:27] Adam Feldman: We forget that Lincoln was a Republican, and that's why blacks were traditionally Republicans. And that's why people in the South refused to vote Republican for a hundred years after the Civil War. They were not forgiven it.

[6:35] Tonya Pinkins: And then when they couldn't vote for Democrats anymore because the Democrats were passing civil rights stuff, they made their own split-off party. They had the Dixiecrats. You had Strom Thurman running for president on a splinter Democratic Party, basically.

[6:49] Adam Feldman: Right.

[6:49] Tonya Pinkins: Because you were quite educated.

[6:51] Adam Feldman: I'm not ace.

[6:53] Adam Feldman: I'm not ace the city's test. But anyway, the thing, Montreal is really just this amazing gift and opportunity that is so close to people here, and people just don't think about it. It's only 45 minutes away on an airplane. The exchange rate is great, it's great food, there's great people, it's a really sexy town.

[7:13] Tonya Pinkins: Montreal Tourism Board, right?

[7:15] Adam Feldman: That's right. I should be compensated for this.

[7:17] Tonya Pinkins: And so you're when are you moving back?

[7:19] Adam Feldman: I'm not, I don't currently have any plans to move back. But I've lived in New York my entire adult life.

[7:24] Tonya Pinkins: I feel very much like an when do you start that you were an adult?

[7:28] Adam Feldman: I was starting after college.

[7:31] Tonya Pinkins: So I should qualify that. But I think that college is sort of like a limbo zone between child and but Caroline was like 16 years ago, and I thought you were kind of new.

[7:41] Adam Feldman: That was my first year at Time Out back then.

[7:43] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, but you weren't new to America.

[7:45] Adam Feldman: No, I'd been in America for a number of years at that point. I've gone to I went to Harvard, and then I...

[7:52] Adam Feldman: Harvard.

[7:52] Tonya Pinkins: Yes, the Harvard of the East. And what'd you study there?

[7:54] Adam Feldman: I did, I ended up in English literature and language. But it was a it was it was an I had a journey to there because when I was in high school, I was very into politics and I did a lot of debating. I was a national, I was in the top five nationally debating in Canada.

[8:12] Adam Feldman: And that's what I thought I was gonna do. I was gonna be a lawyer, and then I was gonna go into politics, and I went to Harvard in part because they had a really good government program, and I just assumed that is what I was gonna do.

[8:23] Adam Feldman: And so my freshman year I took all these government courses, and I realized I really didn't like government. And I didn't love the people who were in those courses. I found what was it about them you didn't like because I felt this way about law students when I was in law school.

[8:39] Adam Feldman: I don't know, they weren't my kind of people. I was drifting into a more artsy space and I was doing theater on the side.

[8:45] Tonya Pinkins: And at Harvard.

[8:46] Adam Feldman: Clearly, at Harvard, yeah. And they didn't have at that point a theater major there.

[8:52] Tonya Pinkins: They do now.

[8:53] Adam Feldman: But they was ART around them?

[8:54] Tonya Pinkins: It was.

[8:55] Adam Feldman: So it was it was right next door, and we used some of those spaces for student productions, and we had a sort of a teaching relationship a little bit with them. But it wasn't, and Robert Brustein was on the Harvard faculty, but it wasn't there wasn't an academic framework for studying theater as a discipline or as a craft.

[9:11] Adam Feldman: So I found that I was really gravitating toward my electives in my and and I thought, well, maybe I can do I can create my own kind of double major. So I went to the department heads and I said, I'd like to do a double concentration in government and English. And maybe we can find some way to do that. We can talk about like the language of constitutions or something like that, you know? We can find some way to bring these two things together.

[9:37] Adam Feldman: And the English department was super on board with it, and the government department was not budget. They were like, Yeah, you can do a double credit concentration as long as you meet all the requirements for a full government conversation. And I was like, Well, that's not gonna happen.

[9:47] Tonya Pinkins: So what did you do?

[9:49] Adam Feldman: So I moved my this is oh god, this is like the history of my academic career. I sophomore year, I changed concentrations into something called social studies, which is a combination, a more broad-based concentration that involved government, but also involved economics and history and sociology. And it was an all honors concentration, and I didn't like that either. I mean I did a lot of great reading, I got a lot out of it. I don't regret having done that, but again, I really felt like I was the only things I was really looking forward to were my electives that I was doing in English, and so I realized I gotta fix this.

[10:21] Adam Feldman: And so my junior year I switched into honors English, and I met all the I spent the next two years meeting all of my requirements for English while doing theater on the show.

[10:30] Tonya Pinkins: And what place did you do?

[10:31] Adam Feldman: Well, what place was I in? Well, I know you're a singer, so I want to know about the musicals you did at Harvard.

[10:38] Adam Feldman: I did The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

[10:40] Tonya Pinkins: Oh.

[10:40] Adam Feldman: I played Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was great, it's the most fun I've I mean, one of one of the most fun times I've ever had on stage. And I was in an original musical called A House Divided, by students who I wrote it at the time. And I was in a Gilbert and Sullivan rarity called Utopia Limited, that nobody ever does. There's a reason for that. But it was great fun. And I was in the Hasty Pudding for three years, which was the most demanding. The Hasty Pudding it was at that time an all-male theatrical group. It's one of the oldest in the country. It's like 172 years old this year.

[11:20] Adam Feldman: It's a student written and acted musical burlesque. And up until two years ago, it was an all-male cast. It was the last of that. Two years ago they let women in, they decided.

[11:30] Tonya Pinkins: Was there in lawsuit involved?

[11:32] Adam Feldman: No lawsuit, but the times it you know, it was a hard transition because it was the lack I mean, all of those troops, all those colleges used to be all male. And so these these kind of burlesque musical comedy. Men liking to dress up like women because they do.

[11:47] Adam Feldman: And it was funny, it was and it was I mean, it's a fabulous experience. And there were always women in the company, just not in the cast. Um we ran all the backstage. Right, right. They were producing the show. But uh we can't get those jobs in the real world. Well, the feeling was that it was an artistic thing, you know, that this is what the Hasty Pudding was. It was what had always defined the Hasty Pudding. And so it was very resistant to change. But it has now, and I think that's the right decision. Um and they're back and they're actually coming w we're recording this at a time when they are about to visit New York. Hasty Pudding. Yes, because every year. So the pudding was a huge production.

You'd run for like three or four weeks in Cambridge, uh uh like six times a week, and then you'd go on tour to New York and Bermuda. It took up our entire spring. I mean, wow. It's a huge musical comedy extravaganza with huge cost professionally done costumes and sets. It was like being in an off-Broadway show for, you know, for months. And it was hard to juggle that with writing either academics. But it was uh it was a tremendous experience.

[12:48] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, so I've seen you perform, and you're really quite good. You have a wonderful voice.

[12:52] Adam Feldman: Thank you. So, you know, why did you then come to New York and not become a musical theater performer? Uh that is an interesting question. Um well, I did do a musical after I graduated. Professionally, uh, yes, I did it, I did an equity eligible musical uh in Pennsylvania in Haverford, Pennsylvania, that Scott Schwartz directed. Um and it was uh a musical about Alice in Wonderland about um Lewis Carroll, and I played the half of it was set in in modern then modern England and and uh half of it was set in Wonderland, and I played the Caterpillar. I had a crazy little patter song uh about mathematics or something. Anyway, um it uh it was uh a very good experience, but I moved to New York. I thought I was gonna go to I thought I was gonna spend a year in New York. I wanted to take a year off of college, and I thought I was gonna go and get my PhD. In uh it depended as it turned out. Well, anyway, uh either either in English or in American studies.

[13:52] Tonya Pinkins: To do what?

[13:52] Adam Feldman: To become, I thought at the time, um, an academic. Okay. Uh and uh and I applied to the places I wanted to go and I got into them, and then Where were they? Uh they were Columbia and Yale.

[14:04] Tonya Pinkins: Okay.

[14:04] Adam Feldman: And then I decided I didn't want to do it.

[14:08] Tonya Pinkins: Why?

[14:08] Adam Feldman: Oops. Why didn't you want to do it? I uh I I realized I, you know, I I was I was really enjoying New York. And I was acting, I was doing off Broadway, off off, I was doing off off, off off Broadway stuff. I was doing Shakespeare in the parking lot type stuff, um, downtown. Uh and I was enjoying that. I uh had a job that I was uh uh being paid fairly well for, so I was I was living pretty well for for my age and uh and I enjoyed it and I realized I didn't have the um the real drive to become a uh a full-time academic. I my interest wasn't sustainable.

[14:46] Tonya Pinkins: But you also didn't even have the real drive to become a full-time actor.

[14:51] Adam Feldman: Well, that's true. Uh and that's a different slightly different question. Okay. I I I love performing. I think that I I hit a ceiling. If I'm honest with myself, I think I hit a ceiling in terms of uh how well I can be um present as a as a character. You know, that's a different thing. I think that there's a I I think I top out as an actor.

[15:17] Tonya Pinkins: Um, I don't understand.

[15:18] Adam Feldman: Well, I do. I don't think I can inhabit another person.

[15:21] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, but they're people become stars for being personality.

[15:23] Adam Feldman: Well, no, that's true. And so you could have been a personality.

[15:25] Tonya Pinkins: I could have been, I could have tried to be a personality star.

[15:27] Adam Feldman: But I don't know if I have enough personality for that, number one. Number two, uh there and this is where the immigration thing comes in. Uh I didn't have the right to do it.

[15:33] Tonya Pinkins: What do you mean?

[15:36] Adam Feldman: You didn't have the right to be in an equity play because you couldn't.

[15:38] Adam Feldman: I didn't know, I didn't have a visa for it. Um work-related visas. So uh I could work for free, but uh I couldn't um I couldn't really pursue, and I'm not saying this is what made the difference. There were a lot of different factors, but that was one of the things, you know. I would have had to go back to Canada, and if I had been serious about it, maybe I would have. But what if you'd booked a Broadway show? They could have taken care of your visa problems, right?

[16:00] Adam Feldman: But I wouldn't book a Broadway show. They were not gonna, they wouldn't have booked me on a Broadway show. You'll have to build my way up to that. And uh and so anyway. This is your ideas. This is my, yeah. I could have gone, I could have gone back to I could have gone to Toronto. If I if I had been really serious about it, I would have returned to Canada. Toronto has a terrific uh theater scene.

[16:15] Tonya Pinkins: It sure does.

[16:16] Adam Feldman: And I would have gone there and I would have pursued it there. I would have taken classes, I would have gotten better, and I could have pursued that.

[16:21] Tonya Pinkins: You have a lot of standards for this.

[16:22] Adam Feldman: I do. Well, you know, I'm I'm a critic.

[16:26] Tonya Pinkins: You became a critic. At this point, you're not a critic yet at this point in your life. You're just someone who's got a nice job. You're doing some theater on the side, deciding you don't want to do the PhD as an academic. So, you know, you know, I got my first Broadway show on my Christmas break from college at Carnegie Mellon.

[16:45] Adam Feldman: Well, yeah. So it could have happened for you.

[16:46] Tonya Pinkins: Well, if I were Tonya Pinkins, then I could have done that.

[16:49] Adam Feldman: You're Adam Feldman. I've seen you. You're very talented.

[16:52] Tonya Pinkins: But I'm not Tonya Pinkins. Uh, and there is uh there is a difference between those two things. And I I feel maybe I'm wrong, uh, but I I did feel like uh there was only so far I could go. Um but that but again, if but do you feel that there was some pre- I mean like you were uh clearly a very heady academic? Was there internal pressure because you know actor actors are considered kind of the lowlifes of the world?

[17:16] Adam Feldman: I mean, they are the low lives of the world, but um but you know it's like ha to your parents were your parents gonna be like Harvard, you want to be an actor? What?

[17:23] Tonya Pinkins: Oh no, my parents would have um been supportive. They I I did a lot of acting as a kid, they've always been wonderfully supportive that way. Uh they I mean, I think they ultimately would prefer that I had gone to law school or something like that. At that time, at least that's what they were hoping I would do, because they wanted me to have a more stable fallback position than drifting around New York uh being a dilettante at large. Uh I actually had that printed up on business cards. Uh but I I think uh I I don't regret that time. I I had a really lovely entry into New York. I uh it was a very exciting scene back there at that time. The meat packing district was still marginally the meat packing district before the renovations, and so there were places like Jackie Sixter, this club that I used to go to every Tuesday's, where it was really just like a uh a very exciting, queer but unbelievably creative uh scene. And I met a lot of wonderful people and I had a lot of wonderful experiences. I I don't regret any of that.

[18:29] Adam Feldman: Um there was a time that the when I began to regret it, when I'd been here for a few years, and uh I didn't know what I was gonna do next. I was still in the same job and it was still paying fine, but it wasn't satisfying to me, and I began to think, geez, maybe I should go to law school. And then sort of magically I ended up becoming a critic.

[18:50] Tonya Pinkins: How did that happen?

[18:51] Adam Feldman: Um, how does that magically happen? Well, in my case, I was participating on these online discussion groups about theater.

[18:59] Tonya Pinkins: Like chatrooms?

[18:59] Adam Feldman: Yeah, sort of. It was in the late 90s, and so it was uh it was on um Unix. It was just it was all text-based, you know, it was it was before the fancier versions of them that we have now. But that there was a it was a good group of people who were very passionate about theater, and I got into a lot of heated arguments with people, and I had strong opinions about things. And uh when Show Business Weekly was starting up again, the which was sort of an alternative to backstage, they wanted people to write for them, and someone reached out to me and said, Hey, we like what you've been writing online. Um, would you like to review shows for us? And so I did, and I reviewed shows for them, and and then I started doing it for Broadway.com back when they had reviews, and then a position opened up at Time Out, and they uh asked me to apply for it, and that was in 2003. So I've been there for 16 years.

[19:54] Tonya Pinkins: Wow, that's like Caroline or Change.

[19:57] Adam Feldman: It actually is exactly that because Caroline Caroline was in November of the 100. 2003 at The Public, yeah. Uh yeah, at the public, and that was the first show that uh that I really loved as a critic at Time Out. And it was also one of the first, it was a very good experience, as you will remember. Um it was a good experience of disappointment.

[20:22] Tonya Pinkins: In what way?

[20:26] Adam Feldman: Because well, we can talk about Caroline, please, for as much as you want. But Caroline for me is uh a very, very special, special show. Uh, and uh it's really one of if I had to assemble, and I hate making such lists for myself, but I had to if I had to assemble like a list of the shows that had meant the most to me personally, had changed me most as a person, it is right up there in the top group. Uh, you know, it's in my top five or ten shows of all time. Um, so it's a show, and we could talk about why, etcetera, later if you feel like it, but this is a show that I felt very, very passionately about and that I went about for as much as I could, but a show that did not get all of the critical support that it deserved in some other places.

It was really sort of there were a few of us, and I remember who it was because I felt so sort of I was really I felt like it was Warren Camps at the time, people who were on the side of the angels and people who weren't getting it. And so I remember it was like it was me, it was John Hoppern, it was uh it was John Laur, and it was Lisa Gardner in USA Today, and uh uh Frank Rich wrote something nice about it, but he wasn't the critic at the time. David Richards, I think, did as well. But I mean, but that's it, and then everyone else was sort of mixed.

[21:39] Tonya Pinkins: Well, you know, the politics behind that was uh uh Kushner and Brantley were having some uh unknown to me, but we did know that they were having some personal testosterone match. And so even before we even went into production, we knew that Brantley was going to kill us and had already decided that the show was not even going to be considerable for a Pulitzer. It's a strange thing. It's a strange thing how that happens. Because you know, we I'm not even saying I don't I can't speak for Ben Brantley. Uh we haven't talked about this, but I think that in general, the no one does this, I don't think on purpose, but there are uh cycles that reputations ride out for critics, and this was about 10 years after Angels in America, and we were at that point in the cycle where people were asking, oh, is Tony Kushner really that great?

You know, they want to tear you down, they build it up and they still praised him so much, and now is it time for a reevaluation? It's not that that I don't think that anyone sits down and says that, but it's just a psychologically there's the there's a feeling of that kind that sets in, and so people, and this was after Homebody Cobble, which uh people had received respectfully, but which was not Angels in America, and so we're at that point where it's like, oh, did we overpraise Tony Kushner as the next big thing? Um, and I don't think they had. Uh, but but nonetheless, there is that there's that weird uh edible thing. Uh and so I think uh there was that, and also But I'm telling you that before the show existed, we knew we were going to get a bad review from the Times. So this is a predisposed thing that was discussed because contractually I got to sit in on all those marketing meets. It's fascinating.

[23:18] Adam Feldman: Well, I mean, also the show itself is um initially challenging in some ways, and I think it's very telling that everywhere it went after New York, it got the reviews that it deserved. And it broke box office records and won the awards that it didn't win in America. Right. But it everyone else got it.

[23:33] Adam Feldman: And for a number of reasons. I mean, they they'd had a chance to sit down with a cast album, get their heads around it, get their ears around it, uh, they had been able to read other people's opinions of it, that put things in perspective for them, maybe that clicked the show in certain ways that they hadn't been able to connect the first. It's hard when you're a critic, and I'm not blaming the people who didn't get it the first time. You're writing about it just a few days after you've seen it, it hasn't all settled in. Um and Caroline in particular poses certain challenges.

[24:02] Tonya Pinkins: Like what?

[24:03] Adam Feldman: Well, because it wasn't written to be a two-act show, for one thing. There's no, it doesn't have a clear two-act structure. It's usually you'd have this crisis at the end of the first act and you'd go out having the audience talking about it. And you know, and that crisis doesn't really happen until a third of the way through the second act. Uh and so what it asks of you as an audience is to trust it. It says, this is set up, this is pulling back the bowstring, and go with it. Just we're going somewhere, trust us, we're going somewhere interesting. And if you do, then you can go somewhere very personally meaningful, and I can attest to that personally. But if you give up on it, if you check out of it, then it's done.

And I think people who didn't know yet, you know, when you're watching it for the first time, you don't have any guideposts. And this is where critics can be useful. If a critic helps set up that trust, can a critic can tell you, this is really great, wait for it. You know?

[25:01] Tonya Pinkins: Well, I remember reading it and going, Oh, they're not doing Aristotelian story structure here. And I was like, okay, but these are brilliant people. It's gonna be cool. And I feel in a certain sense, Wild Party was the beginning of laying the path for these shows that don't follow that traditional 3x structure. People just still weren't quite ready for it. And as George used to say, if you came in to see Caroline and you were like, I am not gonna feel anything, then you had to hate it the whole way.

[25:28] Adam Feldman: Right. Because it i you you couldn't feel one thing and it was gonna take you on a journey you were gonna feel. Right. And it also has these this strange device of her talking to the appliances and and the moon, and it's it has this very more sendak quality. You know, and if you if you enter into that imaginative space, then it's very welcoming. And if you tune out and you say, What is this? Why is she talking to a dryer? Then you're gonna be like, uh, over it. And that is the wrong attitude towards this particular play because the play goes deep and dark places. And you have to be willing to want to inhabit a person who is not usually valued in this world, which is a maid.

[26:08] Tonya Pinkins: This is what I love. This is one of the things that I love about, and I and I don't want to sound naive about it when I talk about or I don't want I guess I will. I I was 20, I was, you know, I I I was I was a younger person. Uh and uh and this may speak to uh to to that, but I uh this is a character, the type of which we almost never see in a musical. Most musicals are about a self-actualizing person. Uh and the world says no, and she says yes, and then the world ends up stepping aside.

[26:43] Adam Feldman: Yes. Uh and there are a few, and then you know, the gypsy is not one of those, and that's one of the reasons that Gypsy is one of the great musicals. Um, this is another one of those. This is a person you never see on stage, or you see them in peripheral roles. Uh, and it's not just because she's a maid, it's because she's mean and unhappy, and she does not change. She is not able to actualize herself and her dreams, you know, like it's the opposite of what a musical usually does.

[27:14] Tonya Pinkins: Yes. So it asks you, but this is the thing. This is why it was so special to me, because I feel like in real life, I meet those people all the time.

[27:22] Adam Feldman: Yes. We're all that person.

[27:24] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, and I'm that person. At some point in our life.

[27:26] Adam Feldman: I'm that person, and everyone is that person, but especially people who are in uh service positions or things, you know, like you'll be at the MTA, you know, at the booth, and you'll be like, why can't you just make my change faster? Why can't you just smile? I'm smiling, can't you be nice? Uh and uh, and it's not like you're wrong, like are they are being mean and so, but also what right do you have to demand that they be happy doing a job that they probably don't love?

[27:55] Tonya Pinkins: Right, you know, right and and it really for me, and I I I know this sounds naive, you know, like I should have known this all along, and I did on some level intellectually know this all along. But on a deep personal level, I feel like this show has helped me be a better person on a daily basis. It's helped me stop myself from judging other people. It's helped me remind myself that other people have lives, and that other people uh who are behaving in certain ways, maybe doing it for reasons that I have no comprehension of. And I'm just to step back and be generous to people, uh you know, and and allow them to be unhappy if that's what where they are.

[28:37] Adam Feldman: Yeah. And don't demand that they pretend to be.

[28:40] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, I mean, that was the gift of the show for me. Is most things that I ever did, uh, people were always asking me to be likable. Can you be likable? And and that is something George Wolf never asked of me. And I think that George Wolf may be the only director who would have done that. And I think because of my willingness to go to that deeply vulnerable, ugly place, everybody recognized themselves in that place. You know, everybody has been that at some point in time. And to me, that's the cathartic part of that show, is that it is, and that's where it's a deeply humane, transformative show for me. And and I and I I hope that anyone who sees it can go into it with that with uh opportunity to experience that.

[29:24] Adam Feldman: I um I I've been watching the ads for the new version that's happening, and I look at it and I'm like, oh no, I think they've turned her into a happy maid. Uh I hope that's not true.

[29:34] Tonya Pinkins: I hope it's not true, too.

[29:35] Adam Feldman: But the ads definitely have the stars and the sun around. Ads are selling it.

[29:39] Tonya Pinkins: The adds are selling the happy maid.

[29:41] Adam Feldman: Well, so it'll be interesting to see. Well, maybe it'll surprise people. The other thing about that show, I'm sorry, I talk about this show so much. I've I mean, I've for people who have listened to me on podcasts before, they will already have heard me talk about Caroline so much, and I apologize to all of my three fans who listened to my podcasts. But I mean, this is this is stuff that because I'm obsessed with this show. I have been for 16 years. And uh, I mean, I saw it six times, five and a half times, the second act at it once, um, on Broadway. Shh. Uh, but uh, I mean, the other thing with this show is that because Tony is a prophet, um, because I mean, I don't mean that in a supernatural way, I just mean he's unusually attuned to vibrations in the culture that other people have not picked up yet because he is so enormously intelligent and sensitive.

[30:26] Tonya Pinkins: And so this show is about economic disparity. This show is about white privilege, this show is about uh taking down Confederate statutes. This is this show is about stuff that was not gonna be in the public discourse in a big way for another 10 years. Yes, and people were not ready for it in 2003, and now they're ready for it, yes, absolutely.

[30:49] Adam Feldman: And it's about the next generation, yeah. You know, Caroline is not the protagonist of that show, and there was a version of Lott's wife that existed before we did it at the public that they cut because they said if you did that version, the show had to end. And Tony was committed to the epilogue, which is Emmy.

[31:09] Tonya Pinkins: Well, and I've said this before, but um that's that's what's special, that's something that's very important to me about the show. Because let's imagine that Emmy goes on and becomes a civil rights leader uh of some kind, right? And articles are written about her. They they will say, you know, she's the daughter of a maid, like they say, like the son of a sharecropper, you know. And the implication is that they come from nothing.

[31:30] Adam Feldman: Right.

[31:31] Tonya Pinkins: And the and so, but and but what is that nothing? Who is that nothing? Who has made themselves nothing in order for that narrative, that later narrative to be possible?

[31:40] Adam Feldman: Yes.

[31:41] Tonya Pinkins: So uh this show is about that person, and you never see that person. So I mean, Emmy is there, and it's and she's the better version of her mother. And it's hopeful, but she's the better version of her mother. She's the version that her mother makes possible.

[31:51] Adam Feldman: Right.

[31:52] Tonya Pinkins: Because her mother does not destroy that spirit in her.

[31:55] Adam Feldman: No, but she destroys her own spirit.

[31:57] Tonya Pinkins: Right. And she, and the the killer line for me is take her away because I can't afford her. You know, she take Caroline away. Like Caroline sings this about herself. Caroline, it's an act of self-suicide. But she can't literally kill herself because she has responsibilities.

[32:12] Adam Feldman: Right.

[32:13] Tonya Pinkins: And there's so many people in our world that that is their reality every day. So many people. And her dreams of hooking up with Nat King Cole or anyone else or whatever are never gonna happen.

[32:18] Adam Feldman: Are never gonna happen.

[32:23] Tonya Pinkins: Um, and and this this lot's wife, which is why it's so brutal and so beautiful and so moving, um, is her acceptance of her life.

[32:33] Adam Feldman: Her lot in life.

[32:34] Tonya Pinkins: Her lot in life.

[32:35] Adam Feldman: Yeah.

[32:36] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, she's a pillar of salt. She is the one who can't go on, she's the one who's stuck back in Sodom and Gomorrah. She can't move on with the next people.

[32:46] Adam Feldman: Right.

[32:47] Tonya Pinkins: Right. Um, and that's I think any anyone, I mean, some people have it much harder than other people. That is true. But everyone can understand it on some level. I'm sort of uh I'd love to hear your thoughts about this. I'm very um down on Aristotelian story structure. I think it's a tool of the ruling class to uh give you know us plagues a little joy, like oh, we have a hero's journey and we can survive, but really, most people are not the heroes of their life, and most people are not taking actions that turn their life in another way. Most people are like dodging life and surviving the life that gets thrust upon you, is the heroic act for those who live through their lives.

[33:32] Adam Feldman: Thoughts, Mr. English major from Hall.

[33:36] Adam Feldman: Uh I think that there are different ways that you can experience these stories and different myths serve different purposes. I mean, I don't think all of myths are heroic myths. A lot of them are. If you look at the actual myths, I mean I just saw Medea again, an a modernized version of Medea. Nobody, nobody goes out of Medea saying, Yeah, I should kill my kid. I hope you don't. Um, Medea is, you know, those tragedies, most of them are not, um, they don't, I mean, they're tragedies. They're tragedies. They don't end well. Um, a lot of them are are life lessons. And there's a and the uh if you follow that particular myth a little longer after after what happens with Jason, uh, he ends very badly.

He in in some versions of it, he becomes a drunk and he's wandering the earth and he finds a ruin of the Argo, his old uh ship, and he's killed by a falling branch of the rotting arga. So it's a very, it's a very I like a tragedy. I like a tragedy. It's very dark. Uh so it's not, but that but I do think that the hero's journey things have their role too. You know, not that everyone can make it make their lives that way, but everyone likes to think that they could, maybe in some small way at least. And it's certainly feel good. I'm not against feel good to be a good thing. It can inspire people to to make changes in their lives. Absolutely. Um and so I'm I'm you know, I'm for that. But I don't want everything to be bad.

[35:03] Tonya Pinkins: This is Tonya Pinkins, and you're listening to You Can't SAY THAT. My guest today is Adam Feldman, and we deconstruct Carolina Change, politics, and the Constitution. That was part one. Come back for part two.