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ELYSA GARDNER: Welcome to Stage Door Sessions, by Broadway Direct. In this podcast, we have in-depth conversations with Broadway’s brightest, bringing you what’s new, what’s noteworthy, and what’s coming next to a stage near you.
I’m your host, Elysa Gardner, and this season we’ll be speaking with some of the artists and insiders who are continuing to help Broadway rebound and thrive after the shutdown. Today I’m lucky to be joined by composer, arranger, and orchestrator Jason Robert Brown and lyricist Amanda Green, the duo that scored the new Broadway musical adaptation of Billy Crystal’s 1992 film Mr. Saturday Night.
Jason is a three-time Tony Award winner and a five-time Drama Desk Award winner whose music AND lyrics—and arrangements and orchestrations—have made him a favorite among musical theater fans and artists alike, as any contemporary cabaret fan could certainly tell you. His celebrated musicals include Parade, The Last Five Years, Songs For A New World, The Bridges of Madison County, Honeymoon in Vegas, and 13, which is coming to Netflix this summer. You may also be familiar with Jason through his work as a singer/songwriter; his latest album, Coming From Inside the House, features guests such as Mr. Saturday Night star Shoshana Bean and an alumna of 13’s original cast named Ariana Grande—perhaps you’ve heard of her.
Amanda is also a lyricist, composer, and performer. She wrote lyrics and co-wrote music for Hands on a Hardbody, for which she earned a Tony Award nomination, co-wrote lyrics for Bring It On, and wrote lyrics for High Fidelity. Her credits also include additions to the book and lyrics of Kiss Me Kate for 2019’s acclaimed Broadway revival, and additional lyrics for both 2015’s revival of On the Twentieth Century and NBC’s “Peter Pan Live.” Amanda is the first woman composer to receive the Frederick Loewe Award from the Dramatists Guild, and the first woman to serve as president of the Guild.
Amanda and Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to Stage Door Sessions.
AMANDA GREEN: Thank you.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: Happy to be here.
ELYSA GARDNER: So I’m starting off by asking all artists, basically how you’ve managed to get through the past two years, cause it’s been a bit of a, a time for all of us. Have you remained healthy and I know you remained active, but what’s it been like?
JASON ROBERT BROWN: I’ll let Amanda take that one first.
AMANDA GREEN: Okay, I have, knock wood, so far managed to remain healthy. You know, like a lot of theater artists, I was severely sidelined and I sort of kept alive by doing, I did some concerts online, I was continuing writing, and, as Jason can also attest, knowing that, Mr. Saturday Night would happen when theater was allowed to happen again was a wonderful thing to, to know, and to, you know, keep my spirits up.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. And you, Jason, were you hit by the bug?
JASON ROBERT BROWN: Well, I mean, I was hit by the bug in a number of different ways, you know, as Amanda knows, and as anyone who works in the theater knows, you know, most of our income is actually based on what happens when people are doing performances. And so since nobody was doing any performances for over a year, that was a pretty big impact on my life. And, it was, it was a weird time. I did the one concert online that, which turned into the album of Coming From Inside The House, and I tried to do some readings and some stuff online and over Zoom, and I found it very frustrating and sort of depressing. And I just really was holding my breath the whole time until we could get to do the thing that we really do, which is to come together and make music. That’s what I do for a living. That’s what I do for a life. And, and it was very hard to do for a number of years, other than with my family, which I’m fortunate everybody in this house sings or plays so that was fun. But I didn’t get sick until, you know, we started rehearsals for, for Mr. Saturday Night. So I was, I was in good shape until then, but because of the vaccines and the boosters, it was all pretty mild at that. I was just, and I’m still just so grateful that we’ve gotten a chance to make music and make theater and have it in front of audiences. It was a long rough ride.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah. And delayed like, like many, many shows. I know that Mr. Saturday Night had its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company last fall, so you were obviously working on it through the pandemic. How did you each become involved? I think it was originally reported that you are on board the spring of 2019, does that sound about right? I’m sure you knew earlier than I did, but…
AMANDA GREEN: [chuckles] It started in 2000 and, I think, 16! Marc Shaiman first told me about the project and brought me in and then Marc Shaiman had to bow out of the project and I came up with, I must say, the genius idea of asking Jason Robert Brown if he would ever collaborate with me and lucky for me and lucky for the project, he said yes. That was in 2017. So we’ve been working on it a long time.
ELYSA GARDNER: Wow.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: Yeah, it was actually 2016 that I, that I got the first call. So it’s been…
AMANDA GREEN: There you go.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: It’s been almost six years from one end of my involvement to the other. And of course, there’s 30 years before either Amanda or I show up in the story.
AMANDA GREEN: [laughter] And that!
ELYSA GARDNER: Right, had you been fans of the film, had you see it when it first came out?
JASON ROBERT BROWN: I saw it literally when it came out. I was a huge Billy Crystal fan, you know, when I was in college, I mean, I’m still a huge Billy Crystal fan now. But I, I went to see it the minute it came out and I loved it, but I had not seen it since then, and in fact, I still haven’t seen it since then. When they brought me on board here, I said I wanted to be the one person who didn’t know what the movie was supposed to be, because it was very clear that the show had a very different energy than the movie and so I didn’t want to be the person who was like, “well, in the movie, you did this thing.” So I’ve been totally ignorant of it, but I literally have the DVD sitting on my desk right now in front of me and I keep thinking, “well, maybe now I can watch it.”
AMANDA GREEN: [chuckles] Yeah, I did not see it until I knew about the project. I’m also a huge Billy Crystal fan, but it had gone under the radar for me. And it is a movie that has so much genius in it and I was really excited by the approach that everyone was talking about of making a musical comedy about it. And, so I too, it’s like, I have not been religious about watching the movie. I watched it once and, and then I, I was excited because already the book writers, who are fantastic, Babaloo Mandel, Lowell Ganz, and Mr. Crystal himself had, just a fantastic idea for how to open the show and which had nothing to do with the movie and I was like, okay, then, you know, we’re off to the races.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, obviously any composer or lyricist has to serve a very specific set of characters in a story that they’re dealing with, which you already had before you, in a sense. Mr. Saturday Night revolves around a Jewish family, Borscht Belt comedy in its foundations, and, you had the movie’s, as you just said Amanda, original screenwriters, Billy Crystal, along with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, writing the libretto. And yet, clearly, this musical is not just a carbon copy of the movie. The characters and the story have evolved in ways that I really appreciated and enjoyed and found funny as well as moving. One of the show stars, Randy Graff, told me that improvisation was encouraged among the cast. Tell me what the creative process was like for you, doing your separate work.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: I think what, what Amanda and I were charged to do in a lot of ways was to build a musical with people who didn’t know how musicals necessarily work. And so we spent a lot of time both trying to sort of analyze the scenes as they existed and then to try and say in a musical world, we can do this with it, we can make it move in this way, we can make the songs do this job as opposed to just the characters going to sing a song here, and then we’re going to be done, but what does the song do? How does it function? And for these writers who have been TV and movie writers for 40 years and are immensely gifted at that, that was an adjustment for them, that they took on very eagerly, but that, that was continually our role was, “you’ve written this great scene. What do we do to make it a piece of musical theater? How does that work?” And so we would, generally Amanda and I, would come up with, you know, what’s an idea, what does the song want to be? How does it work? What does it mean? And then I would just make a very quick musical idea. I would just bang on the piano…
AMANDA GREEN: Maddeningly quick, may I add. [laughter] Go ahead Jason.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: And I would just, I’d throw a sort of a musical idea at Amanda and I’d say, “see if this generates something” and sometimes we’ve come up with a title together or, you know, like a phrase that might show up and then I’d send her off. The weirdest thing we discovered was, you know, I haven’t written with lyricists very often…
ELYSA GARDNER: Right.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: …and most of them were not alive when I wrote with them. So in this case, what we found out was I could only work on this show if Amanda was actually in the room with me and that Amanda could only write lyrics to this show if she was totally alone. [laughter] So we would get together and I would like bang out seven chords on the piano, I’d be like, “all right, good luck.” And then I’d leave and like three hours later a full song would appear on my desk and then I’d have to go back to work on it.
AMANDA GREEN: But even if we, I, I just, I just had to have a door between Jason and I, otherwise, I got too intimidated…
ELYSA GARDNER: Awh.
AMANDA GREEN: So, even if it was – but yeah, but it worked, it worked really well. I mean, it was a wonderful collaboration. Jason’s so smart and so musical and musical theater just pours out of him so it was a delight.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, yeah. Jason, I know that music and jazz in particular played a formative role in Billy Crystal’s life. As anybody who saw his one-man Broadway show 700 Sundays knows, his father worked with jazz musicians as a label executive, as a promoter, and a producer. Did he have any particular ideas about the direction of the music or the arrangements or orchestrations even? Did he give you any feedback on that?
JASON ROBERT BROWN: I always felt like I could use Billy as a sounding board if I had an idea and I wanted to see how it would be received, but I think it was pretty clear to me from the very outset what the musical world of this show was supposed to be. And I think, you know, I wouldn’t have ever been asked to do the job if Billy didn’t think I was going to do that kind of a show. I mean…
ELYSA GARDNER: Right.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: …to me, this was meant to be a really traditional musical comedy sound, something that had a real brass to it and, you know, just a real swing and a real kick. And, I mean, precisely the sort of work that Amanda’s dad and Betty Comden did with Jule Styne. And that was very much my model throughout was what, you know, what was the sound of golden age musicals in the fifties. And then there’s some stuff that takes place in the nineties, and so how does that sound sort of get pushed into the nineties and build around. So that, I did that and every once in a while, I would say to Billy, “you know, what’s your, what’s your favorite singer from, you know, from 1958” or “who’s your favorite jazz thing?” There’s a Cannonball Adderley album of a Fiddler on the Roof…
ELYSA GARDNER: Ah!
JASON ROBERT BROWN: which is hysterical and really wonderful. And, and Billy would always, he would send me it all the time. He would send me texts with links to songs from that album all the time, because I think that to him was like, that’s the confluence of those worlds, the jazz world, and the Jewish show business world. And that was very much what we were tasked to do.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Amanda, as Jason just mentioned, your parents both worked in show business. Your father was the renowned lyricist and librettist Adolph Green and your mother, the actress and singer Phyllis Newman. The focus in Mr. Saturday Night is not, you know, specifically exactly their world, but did you find it evocative of any of the stories you were told or the people you met while growing up, or of that sort of mid-20th century golden age of entertainment in general?
AMANDA GREEN: I mean, the first thing I did when, you know, my name was brought up to Billy Crystal was send him a photo of me sitting on Milton Berle’s lap when I was a kid, [laughter] just to let him know that I did know this world. And also the, the very much the family dynamic of, you know, the daughter and the parents and having, you know, what, what it’s like to be, it doesn’t mirror my childhood exactly or my relationship with my parents, but I, I grew up with people who were the kids of, you know, and, and I was the kid of, and, and what that dynamic is like, you know, when someone in the house is takes up a lot of room in the house and is, you know, a star or a certainly – you know, so that was something that I felt I had a beat on and a handle on.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah. Did you think about, you know, that’s a very interesting point that you made Jason about some of this, some of this musical being set in the nineties. A lot of it takes place, well certainly there are elements of it that take place decades before that. Did you think about the different eras and the different generations, for that matter, represented in writing music and lyrics?
AMANDA GREEN: Absolutely. I mean, the, the characters all have a specific way of speaking. They have a shared language of sort of sarcasm and direct language, but, you know, the daughter speaks differently than the mom and, and Billy Crystal and, you know, so yes, each character has their own way of expressing themselves.
ELYSA GARDNER: Mhmm.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: Yeah, I mean, and I, I, you know, one of the interesting things to me about writing the show was having to write for septuagenarian actors, having to write for people who were in their seventies, as well as people who are in their twenties and people who are in their forties and that those are very different assignments, you know, you write for the voice very differently. And, you know, in Billy’s case and David Paymer’s case, you’re looking at two people who aren’t trained singers or even experienced singers in any real sense. So what do you do to take care of the to, to build their vocabulary into a musical vocabulary versus what I can do with Shoshana Bean, who obviously can sing anything from the minute she wakes up until probably while she’s still asleep the next night.
ELYSA GARDNER: Right.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: So, the generational element, not just of the characters, but of the actors themselves plays very much into the writing of the score.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Because you are both so multifaceted, did you exchange ideas about music and lyrics? Jason, would you give feedback on lyrics and I’m sure to some extent all composers and lyricists do that, but did you feel particularly sort of empowered to do that, given your past experience to really…
JASON ROBERT BROWN: I mean, I knew from the outset that I didn’t have to do it, which was really great. What I knew I had was this unbelievably gifted collaborator who could do everything. It was a hard adjustment for me not to do it because I’m just used to it. And so I think it took us a while to find out what the rhythm was and what’s the best way to move it forward. But I don’t think we ever had any trouble being able to say to each other, “Hey, what about this? Or, “Hey, what about that?”
AMANDA GREEN: Yeah.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: And we also, you know, were immediately prepared the minute we said it for the other person to say, “no, go away, shut up.” Which you know, was a perfectly logical response.
AMANDA GREEN: [chuckles] Absolutely. There is, in every collaboration, I mean, that’s collaboration, you absolutely weigh in on, you know, that, “does that, that lyrics not feeling right to me,” or “is that what they’d say?” Or “is that music going to be hard to,” you know, I mean, the back and forth happens all the time and between the book, music, and the lyrics, and the direction, and the everything. So, yes.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Speaking of generational differences, I saw audience members of all ages when I caught a matinee of Mr. Saturday Night and I’m wondering if you’ve gotten, I would imagine you have gotten different feedback from people of different ages. I imagine there are people for whom this show stirs a lot of memories, but also people who are just kind of discovering the culture and the storytelling for the first time. Any reactions that have stood out for you?
JASON ROBERT BROWN: The best thing I, I heard, was not so much generational as it was cultural. I mean, I, I always say it’s. Mr. Saturday Night is so Jewish it makes Fiddler on the Roof look like The Sound of Music. [laughter] But I, I think, uh, the most exciting thing was that Mykal Kilgore, who is a friend of Shoshana’s and mine, who had done Songs for a New World at Encores! a couple of years ago, came to an early preview and Shoshana said “I’m, I’m so, I’m so moved that you came to the show. That’s so great.” And he said, “What you all come to The Color Purple!” and, I think that was, that was the thing that I really appreciated was this idea that just because it’s a show about Jews in show business, that it doesn’t have to feel like it’s walled off from the rest of the world to come see it and I think Billy is such a, such a warm performer and such a welcoming performer that people over the years have just been drawn into what he does. So it allowed us to both be specific in our writing, but to trust that an audience could take it in with its universality.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah.
AMANDA GREEN: Absolutely. I mean, funny is funny, family dynamics know no age, no race or religion, you know, and I think the different ages, there’s something to latch onto, certainly if you’re an older person and you grew up in that time, it’s going to hit a lot of your pleasure centers. But even if you aren’t, you’re, you’re going to laugh at Billy Crystal, you’re going to relate to family dynamics and, you know, things that everybody faces, you know, in their, in the span of a lifetime.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah. It seemed like everybody working on it had a blast too. I mean, the actors I interviewed told me they did, was it a particularly fun show to work on?
JASON ROBERT BROWN: With Billy and Lowell and Babaloo, I was literally working with the three funniest people I’ve ever been in a room with and got to do it over and over again. So even when everyone was sort of a pain in the ass, which happened, I was among those people, you know, it was still a pain in the ass with really funny people and that helps.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah.
AMANDA GREEN: Absolutely, absolutely. And the cast is fantastic. I mean, they are all top-notch, you know, top of their game and generous and funny, and it’s, it’s a pleasure to be able to work with people that talented.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah. So, listen, I really appreciate your joining us. I don’t want to let you go without giving you a chance to say anything about what you’re working on at the moment cause I know you are both, as I mentioned before, big multitaskers.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: That’s a, that’s an understatement. [laughter] I’m doing, you know, my concerts throughout the year, with my band and, and sort of getting back into the hang of performing, which is very exciting, and writing new stuff. And I have several new shows that I’m in the middle of, but also, I mean, I’ve just been really focusing on, on the movie, for 13 for Netflix, which I’m thrilled about. And it is my hope that next winter, uh, we will be opening a new production of The Connector which is a show that Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman and I have been working on for quite a while, but it looks like we finally have the pieces in place for production. So I’m thrilled to be able to say that.
ELYSA GARDNER: That’s great. Amanda?
AMANDA GREEN: I’ll be jumping into a workshop of this show I’ve been working on for awhile, an original musical comedy called Female Troubles, which is kind of, as we describe it, Jane Austen meets Bridesmaids, but about women’s reproductive freedoms and…
ELYSA GARDNER: Timely! [chuckles]
AMANDA GREEN: Very timely, always timely. Now it’s, you know, five-alarm fire timely. So I, I’m very excited to jump back into that and Scott Ellis is directing. I’m working with Curtis Moore who’s Emmy-nominated for writing songs for Mrs. Maisel and this wonderful writing team named Jen Crittenden and Gabby Allen, who’ve written for Veep and every funny show you’ve heard on TV and have a show now on Fox called Housebroken. So that’s what I’m, that’s what I’m doing next. And, and going to see Jason Robert Brown at 54 Below.
ELYSA GARDNER: Oh right, 54 Below which is celebrating its 10th anniversary, is that right?
AMANDA GREEN: Yep, and didn’t they just get nominated for a Tony, a special..?
JASON ROBERT BROWN: Not nominated, they got a Tony!
AMANDA GREEN: Not nominated, they won a Special Tony Award.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah. Well, that’s, that’s a lot of stuff we can all look forward to. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And, stay safe and healthy.
AMANDA GREEN: You too.
JASON ROBERT BROWN: I will try and do at least one of those things. [laughter] Thanks for having us on!
ELYSA GARDNER: Thank you.
AMANDA GREEN: Thank you.
ELYSA GARDNER: For all things Broadway, and to find tickets to your next show, you can visit BroadwayDirect.com. And f you liked our show, please follow us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. And don’t forget to share and rate Stage Door Sessions so that fellow theater fans can find us. This podcast is produced by Broadway Direct and the Nederlander Organization with Iris Chan, Erin Porvaznik-Wagner, and Paul Art Smith, and hosted and produced by me, Elysa Gardner. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to seeing you again on Broadway.
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