Michael Kantor: So Max Bialystok says, I’ve been a lying, double-crossing, two-faced, backstabbing, despicable crook but I had no choice. I was a Broadway producer. Is that the truth about Broadway produ…
Mel Brooks: More or less, more or less they’re all, they’re are all knaves and scoundrels and some of them are delicious, wonderful scoundrel like the late great David Merrick and some of them were just scoundrels who will say oh, oh did you write the book? Oh, there was supposed to be 2% for you but I’ve got to call my account and I’ll get back to you Thursday, you know what I mean, but they’re a lovable lot. I like I put I I particularly like the guys that are producing the producers. Each and every one of them is a delightful person. I’ll name a few if you need them, but you don’t need them.
Michael Kantor: I got a question about them coming up. What does it take to mount a show on Broadway? It’s not sort of like Mickey and Judy anymore, is it?
Mel Brooks: Yeah, you mean, finding a barn, and, well, you know, it depends on the show. The producers is a pretty big, complicated musical comedy, and especially the springtime for Hitler number, you know with girls dressed in these gorgeous William Ivey Long insane costumes, you now. Beer on their boobs and beer steins and pretzels and one girl has a sausage on her head. So they need a big, old-fashioned, Ziegfeld staircase, pretty girls like a melody kind of staircase. And they come down, they walk down the staircase to the tune of Springtime for Hitler sung beautifully by a Heldon Denner. Gorgeous, young, blonde Nazi. I mean, it’s all very nice.
Michael Kantor: But generically, I mean you’ve made movies, you’ve done different, written a book and so on. Making a Broadway show is like what? I mean it’s collaborating, it’s a huge enterprise.
Mel Brooks: I think it’s the most difficult and the most thrilling endeavor that a writer can get involved in. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing your vision actually come to life on a stage and when you have somebody like Susan Stroman staging it. You know, usually directors don’t know what the hell they’re doing. The writer has a picture in his head every time he writes a character, he sees the character, every time, he writes the line, he sees where the characters are standing. But the director has to find his way. And most directors don’t know shit from Shinola. They really don’t. And, you know, that’s why they become directors. Because they can’t sing, they can’ dance, they cant’ write, so what the help? They might as well be a director. Who says, I think we could do that a little faster. Yes, that’s like, but once in a while, you run into a genius like Susan Stroman, who actually helps you shape the characters, shape the book, shape the story, and then. Does something to the material that actually makes it rise instead of fight it, you know. So she’s one of the few true geniuses. I worked with another guy called Josh Logan when I did a show called All American, and he really had a wonderful sense of what is needed on that stage and what would satisfy the deepest needs of the audience. Those guys don’t come along every day.
Michael Kantor: How many producers were there on the producers? Why did it take an avalanche of Jews to produce the show?
Mel Brooks: I don’t know, you know, that’s a very good question. I decided to make the producer symbiotic. Everybody who produced the show would have some function, not just raise money, because I don’t think it was such a big deal, you know we needed 10 million, and I knew I could probably get the money. But, so Richard Frankel and his, and Tom Vertel, those guys were hired because Richard Frankel is probably the best general manager. Somebody’s got to manage the whole thing, physically. It’s got coordinate with the scenic designers and get the scenery moved in and work with the costumes and rent a theater, the right theater, bring lights in, pay dancers, organize. There’s no better general managers in the world than the Richard Frankel organization. And besides, when he saw the run-through, we had a little table reading on April 9th, in the year 2000, I think. It could have been 2000. We opened in 2001, so I don’t know. But I think it was April 9, 2000, and it was snowing outside. We had a lot of producers, we asked a lot of producers to come in. And they all came in, and during the intermission, the first guy that I said, you can produce it, was a guy who runs the Jujamcyn theaters. Do you know who I’m talking about? Rocco Landesman, right, good for you. Rocco’s the best, and he understands, he’s erudite, he’s a theater lover. Knows all there is to know about theater, and is very helpful in terms of his take on what’s right or wrong. During intermission of this run-through, he ran over to the store with me and said, you want the St. James Theater? We said, yes, the St James, the theater that showed Oklahoma, Hello Dolly, a legendary theater on 44th Street, just a few doors up from Sardis, which is one of the lyrics I have in the show. So anyway, we said, okay, Rocco, you’re one of producers. And then Richard Frankel had written me a letter telling me how much he loved the movie of the producers and how much his kids loved it, and he would be honored. And I met him during that same reading, and I said… Here’s the two guys. We needed a theater. We got Rocco Landersman. We needed the general manager. We got Richard Frankel. We needed road company. We needed somebody who could book the road and we had a guy called Scott Zeiger who worked for Clear Channels. Clear Channels bought SFX which owned Pace. I know it’s complicated. But SFX was a brilliant organization that presented most of the live entertainment in America, in various outdoor and big theater venues. And they were the best. I had been summering, as Jews want to do, in Southampton. And I ran into this guy, Robert Silliman. And I found out that Bob Sillaman had owned SFX just recently and sold it to Clear Channels. So after I hired I asked Bob to come to the reading, because he knew a lot about theater and he was just an ordinary, an extraordinarily bright person. And his wife, Laura Baudo, who’s a great poet, has great taste too. So between Laura and Bob, I knew I’d get a real take on the show. And I said to Silliman, you want in? You want to be a producer? He said, why are you making me a producer. I said, because you ran SFX and you sold it to Clear Channel, so you’ll keep an eye on them. You’ll know. You’ll know if they’re cheating us. And you’ll know, you know, you’ll note the venues actually. You’ll vet the venues. So we got, we got Silliman. And we went down the list and we got two guys from Chicago. A guy by the name of Jim Stern and his partner, Doug Meyer. And Jim Stern, I met at the rehearsals of some other show and I just took a great liking to him. And Jim Stern, at the moment… Is going to produce my son Max Brooks’s movie. It’s not a movie. Max has to write it. It’s a book. It’s called The Zombie Survival Guide. He wrote a book, just in case there are zombies, if you’re living in Pittsburgh and there’s a zombie sighting in Pittsburgh, you go, you buy the book and it tells you how to deal with these zombies. So Max wrote this book. Stern loved the book, and said, there’s a movie here, and grabbed Max up. Anyway, but this is in retrospect, but it’s Stern’s, Jim Stern’s perspicacity that engaged me. So, we got these five guys, basically, who were… Came up with $2 million a piece. The only one who really was like Bialystok was Richard Frankel’s organization because they literally had 200 little old ladies. I don’t know if they were bedding them down. I don’t know. You know, I think he’s a happily married man. But, you know, but he had, when I say little old lady, I mean dentists and doctors somewhere in Scarsdale. And he had a, they were so excited about it. I think you ran an auction, did he tell you? Well, he ran an auction. So that maybe he had 400 clients and 200 of them had to get into for 10 grand apiece or something to raise the 2 million. But he is the real Max Bialystok. He goes out and he says, rings the bell and says, hello, it’s Bialystok. I’m in the lobby. Can I come up? And then he gets 10,000 bucks or whatever. So anyway, that is how the producers came to be.
Michael Kantor: Question, how much of your own money do you…
Mel Brooks: Never, the two cardinal rules of being a Broadway producer is one, never put your own money in the show. And two, never, put your money in the shows. So Nathan did that beautifully.
Michael Kantor: What do you think’s the key, you know, musical comedy, what’s the key to the successful musical comedy?
Mel Brooks: What’s the key to the successful musical comedy? There is no key. It’s all hubris, it’s all luck, it all starts with a great idea. You’ve got to have a good idea. Anything, whether it’s a book, a play. What’s it about? What’s it all about? And you work back from some primitive need in human persons. The basic need is probably, basic need, is either food or sex or something like that, but in order to eat well and have really good sex with somebody very beautiful, you’d need some money. So money, let’s boil it down to money. Money is always a good, basic plot device, and in the producers, it’s Bialystok’s greed. And Bloom’s stardust that make the whole thing work. Bialystok wants to make a lot of money. He wants to get his name back. He’s been a flop for quite a while. He wants his name to get back on that marquee. And Bloom just wants to be part of the theater. It’s a dream, a dream come true. And that’s basically the ingredients. And then The next great step up, plot step, is how to make that money. Bloom, an accountant, has a little academic accounting theory. You know you can make more money with a flop than you count with a hit. You can, how? You say that, but you don’t say, how. Well, you raise more money than you need, but you must make sure that what you’re raising the money for is got to fail. It definitely has to be a failure. So instead of raising a million dollars to put something on, you can raise $10 million, put on a million dollar flop, take $9 million, and go to Rio. But it must be a flop. So, the next big step. What? First, there’s a little step in between how to get inveigel Leo Bloom, who’s an honest, sweet, innocent, to get him on your side. Well, he’s insulted by his boss at Whitehall and Marx, and he decides to join Bialystok in his nefarious insanity. They read day and night, looking for the worst play ever written. That’s the next big step. They’ll never find it. One of the cutest lines I wrote in it was Bialystok reads something and says, Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover he was transformed into a giant cockroach. Too good. And, you know, those in the audience who know it’s Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is fine if they don’t. The word cockroach gets us through that moment. And then finally, Bloom says let’s give up and Bialystok finds springtime for Hitler. A gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden. So there’s the beginning. And then things fall into order very quickly. You know, you got this lousy play, well you need a lousie director. So you find this insane, crazy guy. Roger Debray, who greets them in a dress. His excuses that they’re going to the choreographer’s ball that night. And they always, there was wind says, says Carmen Guia, his assistant, his common law assistant and roommate. And Debrays replies, I don’t think we’re going to win tonight. I’m supposed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, but I think I look more like the Chrysler building. Made a dress for him that looks exactly like the Chrysler building. So, I mean, that works. So you got the, you know, you got that scene. Now, but I left out one important step. You got the play, but you got to get the playwright to sign to give it to you. So they go to a roof somewhere at 61 Jane Street. And on the roof is a neo-Nazi playwright who raises pigeons. There’s a lot of pigeon shit on his helmet. But he won’t let them sign unless they do. Sing and dance Hitler’s favorite song, the Guten Tag Hopklop. So they’ve got to do that. Then they won’t let them sign unless they take the Siegfried oath. What’s that? It’s a pledge to Adolf Elizabeth Hitler. Elizabeth, yes, that happens to be his middle name. He was descended from a long line of English queens. Okay, they take their Siegfrid oath. They get the play. They get Roger Debris, the worst director who ever lived. Then they’ve got to raise the money. Strictly Bialystok’s sexual prowess. He does that. He knocks off all these little old ladies in New York. You know, they can’t wait. They’re more, actually, they’re more protean in their need for sex than Bialystok. I mean, these little ladies, they could go. They’re goers, I’ve got to tell you. So anyway, that’s the story of it. Now, what you need… Is a denouement, what you need is an incredible plot twist. Who would think in a billion, billion years that the audience would take springtime for Hitler to their hearts. And they love it because it’s so insane, so over the top, so bizarre, so silly. And it’s a hit. And so they sent to prison, but I stole a great thing. From Bertolt Brecht and. I think it’s Three Penny Opera, they’re going to hang Mack the Knife, and somebody runs in and says, no, you’re free, and they say, why? I said, well, it’s a musical comedy, you know, let’s, yeah, so I love that. So I did a kind of variation on Brecht, you now, on Three Penny opera. And somebody runs in and says, because of your… Making the prisoners so happy, you know, the warden is giving you a pardon. It’s a dirtier line than that, but I don’t say it. So those are all the steps. You got all the, you know, you got many, many steps.
Michael Kantor: So tell me about Max Bialystok, where did that character come from?
Mel Brooks: I can’t tell you the guy’s name. I did work for a Max Bialystok. He had an office on 48th Street with a big half-moon window. It was a typical Broadway producer’s office. And he had many little one-sheets cards of the many flops that he had produced. I don’t think he ever had a hit. And I was his assistant. And, uh… I came in one day a little too early and he was asleep on the couch in his shorts. He had his coffee being made, and he literally lived in the office. I used that in the movie of the producers, and slightly in the show we see a line with his underwear. And he used to studiously, assiduously make fierce love to 85-year-old ladies on his old, weather-beaten leather couch. And I know he’d say, Mel, go out and get me a white owl. That’s a cigar that he liked. He couldn’t afford it. They were a nickel. And couldn’t afford much more than a white owl. And that was a clue, anyway, to get a white owl was to leave the office for 41 minutes. So that was enough time to do the ladies and. Proper again, you know. So I used to give him 41 minutes. He never gave the ladies more than 22 minutes, he was a busy guy. You watch the adventures of somebody who wants something that is fantastic and attains it. It’s so wonderful. I want to live in that world. I want it to be as close to it as possible. I never even, I would have done it for nothing. Greed didn’t enter into it. There was no, it was never a question of money. I would rather have worked for this, this Bialystok guy for nothing than go back to. Being a shipping clerk in the garment center for Abilene Blouse and Dress Company on 7th Avenue. Abilene Blouse& Dress company. So I said to the boss, I said, Mr. Schiffman, that’s such an exotic name. I was about 14. I said Abilene, it conjures up pictures of long orange steers in Texas and the big trail. He said, what are you talking about? Abilene. I have a daughter, Abbie. I have daughter, Lena. Abilene. That’s me. It was just, so that was all, again, all my fantasies, you know, coming, crashing down into Jewish reality.
Michael Kantor: Take us back to seeing your first shows and let’s get off the producers for just a second.
Mel Brooks: Don’t ever get off the producers. Never leave the producers!
Michael Kantor: What was it about, I think, was it Anything Goes? I’ve done a little research. Yes. Tell us about the magic of those times. The comedy.
Mel Brooks: Uh, let’s see. 1935. Was that when you were born? No. I’m talking to a very young person here. In 1935, my Uncle Joe drove a Parmelee cab. It was a big Checker cab, very big cab. And in the front, there was a place with straps where you could actually put your luggage on a big kind of running board. And he was the driver. But in the back, there were folding seats, and there was room for about four people. When a parmily cab came down South 3rd Street in Hooper, where I lived in Wintersburg, and there was no driver, and it appeared to be driving by itself, we knew it was Uncle Joe, because Joe was about four feet three and had to sit on many telephone books. Remember, the telephone was just invented, so you needed many books, there was nobody in the book, many telephone book to get high enough to get to the wheel, and he could just about see over the wheel but we couldn’t see his head. So there was Joe, and Joe told me one day that he knew the doorman at a hotel who he did a favor for. I think it was bootlegging. I’m not sure. I mean, it was something. It was something I didn’t, you know, had something to do with delivering hooch somewhere, even though I think maybe in 35 there was no more prohibition, but they didn’t know that on Broadway. So anyway, Joe was given two tickets. To Cole Porter’s new show, which was Anything Goes. And I was about nine or nine and a half. And he said, how would you like to see a Broadway show? And I said, well, what is it? What’s a Broadway Show? He says, well people sing and dance on the stage and you know. I said oh, it’s like a movie. You know, I only knew movies. I didn’t know what Broadway was. He said, no, it is better. Melvin, it’s thrilling. I’m going to take you to see your first Broadway show, my Uncle Joe. So, he puts me in his cab, in South Third and Hooper. I get in his cab, he says, lay down in the back because I got the flag up. If they see a person in the bag with the flag up we’re both arrested. We can’t, it’s illegal. So, if he doesn’t throw the flag, he leaves the flag up, I’m on the bottom. I can only see from the bottom of the cab. I see- when I began to see girders, I knew we were crossing the Williamsburg Bridge. So I said, that’s good. And then I saw a glimpse of the Chrysler Building. I knew were going uptown. And, you know, things were good. And finally we arrived. I think it was the Alvin Theater. I’m not quite sure what theater it was. I think was the album. I think 54th Street or something like that. I think the Alvin became the Neil Simon, by the way. And great theater. Then you could park. 1935, the street, you park. Fine. There’s no signs. There’s nothing. There were no cars. I mean, you know, you were probably the only car on the block, you see. Right outside the Alvin Theater, parks the cab. We go in. They tear the tickets. We turn left. We go up some stairs. We go around. We go some more stairs. We go round. We go to some more stares. I’m beginning to find heart to breathe. We are in the top of the album. We’re in the last row of the Alvin Theater. They start to play. We sit down. The lights hit a maroon curtain, rich, velvety marooned curtain, and they play an overture. Song after another. Anything goes itself, ba-da-ba-da, ba, ba ba-ba, ba da-da ba da, ba da ba da da ba ba ba. Anything Goes. And then, you’re the top. You’re the Coliseum. You’re at the top, you are the Lou of music. I mean, it’s just one lyric, one song after another, and then, oh, through the night, la-da da. All these Russian Jewish melodies that came from Cole Porter was amazing. Anyway, I loved one, just one song after another. And then, the curtain opened. And there was William Gaxton, and there was Ethel Merman. And they were not, I had no mics. And I was sitting in the last row with Uncle Joe of the balcony. And Ethel started to sing, and I had to hold my, she was very, she had a big voice. Anyway, it was the most thrilling experience of my life. And I said to Joe, yelling from the back of the floor, I’m going to do that one day Uncle Joe, I’m gonna do that. I love that. I’ve never seen anything like that. And he said, okay kid, you can do it, you know. That’s one of the songs in the producers, you could do it. And I did do it and it took me maybe 60 years to get there but I did it. But that’s a true story. That’s the… It’s a great story. And it infected me with the virus of the theater, which has never left my blood.
Michael Kantor: What is it about the comedy in the theater? I mean, did you see the Marx brothers or the, I mean these comedians held the stage in a way that, it’s hard only in shows like the producers do we feel anymore. Musical comedy.
Mel Brooks: Yeah, that’s a good word, musical comedy. There’s a lot of good musicals. I mean, there is Beauty and the Beast, it’s lovely, and there’s Aida, and there is, you know, a little further back. There’s Phantom of the Opera, and then there’s Les Miserables, you know Les Mis. These are wonderful shows, and they’re thrilling, and they transport you. And they’re beautiful. Miss Saigon, they’re gorgeous shows, but they’re not musical comedies. Musical comedies are diamonds. The other shows I talked about may be rubies, may be emeralds, and they may be amethysts, but they are not diamonds. Musical comedy is so hard to do and so hard to get right that when you get a bells are ringing and you get an on the way to the forum, or you get guys and Dolls, maybe the greatest musical comedy. You’re getting a diamond. Because not only are you being touched by some of the emotion, but you’re laughing your head off, and you’re keeping time to the most wonderful music in the world. And there was nothing like, since I saw, you know, anything goes, I knew that it had to be musical comedy. That just a musical would not do. That it had to be truly fall-down funny. And still touching and still beautifully musical with great dances, with girls coming, big gorgeous showgirls with six foot legs coming out of filing cabinets like I want to be a producer like Susan Stroman did in the producers. I mean, I was so thrilled by being part of the show, you know, and now I’m everywhere. I mean I go to New York, I watch the show there. I see Martin Short and Jason Alexander here at the Pantages. And sometimes I go to Chicago or Denver, you know, to see Brad Oscar who’s sensational as Max Bialystok and see Andy Taylor and these guys. And in every show, there are these tall, incredibly beautiful showgirls who can sing and dance and take you to another world. Next question. Who wrote the music to the producers? Well, in the show, Franz Liebkind, obviously.
Michael Kantor: I was thinking of you. What makes a great Broadway tune for you, and what were you trying to do in the producers with? What’s great about Broadway music versus rock music versus, you know what I’m saying? Like, it grabs you somehow.
Mel Brooks: There is nothing like the sound of a pit band in a Broadway theater. It has a magical, uplifting, it makes you happy to the point of wanting to cry. Ever since anything goes and ever since I saw things like the bells are ringing or on the way to the forum and I heard these wonderful scores, but played in a theater rising from a pit, there is a great, thrilling sound. And I knew that I would be happy to have lived and died if I could do one rich score, a whole score, with 20 songs. For a Broadway musical. And I did, when I did The Producers, it was amazing. But before that, I had written High Anxiety for the movie, High Anxiety. Or I wrote Springtime for Hitler for The Producers. And I’d always written little I’m Tired and Blazing Saddles for Lily von Schtupp. I mean, I’d almost every movie I made, I’d write one or two songs. But I never wrote a galaxy. I never a whole bunch of songs that would follow each other And actually move the plot forward and support the characters and thrill the audience like I was thrilled with Anything Goes. So, I mean, not that my score is as good as Cole Porter. I mean I’m, you know, I’m okay. I’m not Cole Porter.” The theater is great. There’s nothing like the theater. The theater transports you. The theaters make believe whether it’s life spirit, thrilling Noel Coward. Or whether it’s somber, beautiful Tennessee Williams plays or Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller fabulous play. They’re wonderful, that’s theater. But a musical is a whole other kettle of fish. The greatest thing that ever happened, anyway ever happened to me. Okay, that is another bite for you. That’s
Michael Kantor: Well, you need these things to help push… You started in 52 as your first show, right? Yeah, Mike? Let’s just go a little quick. I started then, how has it changed?
Mel Brooks: In 1949, I got a job writing the show of shows. Actually, it was called the Admiral Broadway Review, which became the show for Sid Caesar. And I longed desperately for the Broadway stage because I had worked in the mountains with Jews, live theater. You made a mistake, there it was. Once I was an actor, I was about 15. And I was… In a play called Uncle Harry, a strange play. And I was a confessed killer. I was confessing to the district attorney that I had killed my, either my sister or my sister-in-law, I’d killed somebody. So the DA says to me, there, there Harry, take it easy. And he pours some water for me And it gives me the class. And I drop the glass and it breaks on the table and it spills everywhere. Clean off the shards of glass and I walked down to the footlights and I said to the audience, I take off my wig and I say I’m 15. It’s my first play. What do you want? And I knew, got the biggest laugh of my life. I knew I was a comedian. I was not a straight actor. And the director chased me through three or four different hotels wanting to kill me for ruining his play. I became kind of a social director at Grossinger’s, and I played Simon Says with Lou, and I did, and we did five shows a week, and we’d did amateur shows with Milton Berle’s mother, who was very talented. But I loved live theater, and when I was doing the writing, one of the writers of the show of shows, I, you know, with the television audience, and, we had a live audience, but it was always stop and go, always stop and always correcting. What I loved about the theater is there’s no correcting. Get it right. You know, that’s a supreme test. Get it the first time. There are no second times in live theater. So I missed it. And then when I met Ronnie Graham, oh, Eddie Cantor’s daughter, Marilyn, did a musical review called Curtain Going Up. And I wrote a sketch for it called Fathers and Sons, The takeoff of Death of a Salesman. And it was a cute sketch. It was all about a pickpocket who was losing his touch. And he’s very nervous and his son comes home from school and he says, did you steal anything? Did you make trouble? He says, no, no. Give me your report card. He says hey, hey, and he goes off holding his heart and the mother says you’re killing that man. It was insane. It was a satire and then the kid comes in with a violin case. He says my kid is going to be out. Look, he’s got a machine gun. He opens it up. He takes out the violin. He says, where do you put the bullets in? What is this? The kid, Ronnie Graham plays it. It’s a violin. I want to be a musician, a musician. And Paul Lynn, playing his father, grabs the violin, smashes it on the table and says, a music, oh God, what have we done? What have we with this boy? And he leaves and then cops come in with Ronnie Graham and he says, there he is, my father, Harry the Eel. He’s the pickpocket you’ve been looking for. They start to take him off stage and he says, my own son, my own turn me in for a filthy reward. He’s a stool pigeon. He’s going to be all right.” And so it was a terrific ending to the, you know, and Curtain Going Up died in Philadelphia. Leonard Sillman was doing New Faces of 1952 needed a sketch to end his first act in New Faces. And Ronnie Graham saw it and pleaded with him to put it in so they tried it and it worked. So I met Ronnie Graham later. He became one of my best friends in the world. And, uh… I loved it, and I loved every night. I’d go like maybe like a quarter to nine when the first act was going to almost be over. It came down at 9.05. And I would run in just to catch my sketch because I was working for Sid Caesar. And I’d run back because we were working at night too, you know, but I’d say, I got to see my sketch. And I run over to the Royale Theater on 45th Street, just a block away from the producers, the Royale. At connecting alleys, ask somebody about that. It was wonderful with the Majestic and other great theaters. They’re all connected, the Booth, the Royale, all on 45th Street. You used to see actors smoking and fanning themselves on a hot night in the alleys there before they went on again. It was great, it was just the greatest. But I missed theater, and New Faces of 52, I got my first good review, Brooks Atkinson, who gave me some of my worst reviews later. But anyway, he gave me my first good one, so I was grateful to him for that.
Michael Kantor: So what does the Broadway musical represent about us?
Mel Brooks: What does the Broadway musical represent about America? We send our films everywhere. They send us films, and their films are as good as our films. I mean, we have John Ford, they have Fellini. I mean checkmate. What don’t they have that we have? Ah, we the Broadway musical comedy. They don’t know what a musical comedy is, not even in England. They know what musicals are, only recently. But we, America… Starting way back in the 20s and then going on to the great years of Oklahoma and the great Frank Loesser musicals, not to mention Larry Hart and Pal Joey. Look at the musicals. Look at musical comedies. We have exported, they say They say happiness, they say hope, they say esprit de corps, they all the things. They say, we’re tough. They say we can survive. They say were sharp. We’re America. And, you know, it’s the Broadway musical that is the most unique artistic. That distinguishes us from every other country in the world. Nobody can make a musical comedy like Americans. And, you know, ask George M. Cohen, Yankee Doodle Dandy, he’ll tell you. And so I’m very proud to be part of it, even in a small way. That’s all you’re getting.
Michael Kantor: Thank you, thank you. You were a part of it in a huge way.
