Trevor Nunn: He said he’d set to music some poems by T.S. Eliot, some children’s verse, or Paulson’s book of practical cats, which I happened to know because I’d studied Eliot as part of a literature course at university and knew his serious verse inside out and had often thought that. Elements of these verses for children that provided insights into the serious poetry and I suppose vice versa. So I felt in fairly familiar territory and Andrew said I’ve got these ten settings and I’ve go some recordings of them because we did them at a summer the festival that he ran. And would you think of ways in which they might become a stage show? And my first reaction was to think small. I thought probably the answer was that it would need to be a sort of Fitzrovian event, you know, the sort of Fitzroy Square intellectuals, and that it would be… Sort of quite black time, gradually these witty human beings would take on the characters of these various cats. And when I discussed this with Andrew, he was absolutely appalled and he said, no, no you misunderstand, I’m talking about a big show, I don’t want to So they were beautiful settings, very, very inventive musically, but they were in no particular order. And so encouraged by Andrew to think big and to think inventively, I began to see that some of the poems were to do with Jellicles and that could be something that could provide an environment for a story, and that certain characters could have… A function in the tribe of the Jellicles. There’s a poem about a cat called Old Deuteronomy and I thought he could be the leader. There is a poem by a cat named Macavity and I thought he would be in some way a sort of Lucifer figure, somebody who wanted to have control over this tribe and that there should be sort of rules and regulations and that it should be their sort of solstice meeting. It should be the thing that we somehow imagine in cat mythology that they all get together and yell in the middle of the night and it’s because they’re at some sort of cat’s choir or cat’s meeting. So that was the first simple notion. When I started to talk to John Napier, the designer, I said, I suppose the set needs to have some sort of reference to a wasteland as a kind of… A little in-joke for Elliott aficionados, and that this wasteland has got to provide all the material that we need to be able to create the show. This was fairly soon after we’d done Nicholas Nickelby, which was a sort of story theater, actors creating their own. Scenery and making scenes happen through the inventive use of props that were lying around. So we tried to apply some of that technique and it was John Napier who said best of all would be a rubbish dump, rubbish tip, and it was John who had the wonderful notion that everything on the rubbish tip should be capped scale. I mean, should be hugely much bigger than anything that we’re accustomed to. So, you know, something that is perfectly ordinary to us, a cornflakes packet, would be vast and therefore take on a completely different significance and one would look at its design differently and its construction differently because… We’re now at cat scale looking at a corn place packet or, you know, as it eventually transpired, a discarded gas oven or a discarded record player with old 78s and so on. So I mean, all of those objects became fascinating. Once we’d gone that far with an environment and with the sense of a structure and an order, we were quite a long way down the track and then the most wonderful thing. Happened. Andrew phoned me and said he’d just been contacted by Elliot’s widow, Valerie Elliot, who said she had found a fragment, 12 lines, typed by Elliot and little notes scribbled underneath that he’d decided not to include this poem in the published book of cats because it was too sad for children. And she said… Shall I send it round? And this is possibly pure gold. It’s possibly fool’s gold. And the little fragment duly arrived. I realized after I’d studied it a couple times that it wasn’t a fragment. It was a complete poem. It was called Grizabella, the Glamor Cat. And introduced something that was not any part of the project up until then. It introduced the idea of mortality, of desperation, of grief, of a life going wrong. So that where all of the material seemed to have a sort of brightness and optimism and fun that would be appropriate to children, there was this other strand. And I remember calling Andrew and saying, I think… I think the most important thing has just happened, you know, we’ve got a completely different dimension and therefore it was very obvious that Corizabella had to be the cat who’d become the pariah who was outside the tribe and who needed acceptance, who was in search of forgiveness in some way, and that therefore, in this… Annual competition of which feline was going to be chosen for a restored life, another one of the nine lives, Grisabella was clearly the neediest of all and that the notoriously self-centered. Cats could then be instructed by their wonderful leader, old Deuteronomy, to discover that mercy and forgiveness was the most important thing. So we had a, suddenly there was a completely different dimension.
Interviewer: Why was Cameron McIntosh the right producer for this show? Tell me the sort of comic he was before, but this is in 1984. I’d met.
Trevor Nunn: Yes, I’d met Cameron a couple of times before that and I’d known that he was passionate about music theater to the exclusion of all else and that he’d been involved in some touring productions, the production of Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell. And I was reintroduced to Cameron as the producer of the project. And clearly, there was a burgeoning friendship between Cameron and Andrew, and a shared enthusiasm. Andrew is completely consumed by… Music theater. Well, he’s also consumed in a different way by Victorian architecture and Victorian painting, 19th century painting. He’s a great scholar and a great expert, but he’s like a different person when he’s in that mode. But largely, Andrew is somebody who, uh… Eats and sleeps and lives and breathes music theater. He follows what’s going on, absolutely, all developments everywhere. And he’s endlessly composing, he’s endless creating materials, endlessly looking for fresh inspiration. And I think he discovered in Cameron, somebody who was not an artist, but somebody who had the same. Passions and who probably could match him in terms of just the knowledge of the history of music theater. So I think they had thrilling conversations late into the night and therefore Andrew asked him to be the producer of this project and Cameron did it superbly and after the show opened, demonstrated… His real unique genius, I mean, of course, he’s gifted in many, many ways, but the unique genius was the marketing and further development of the show once it had become a success and then, you know, he placed it in productions all over the globe in ways that had never happened before. It’s very difficult to explain how it is that Cameron has this insight into developing a project. But, of course, he did it with Katz. He did it fast with the opera. Did it with Les Miserables. And not for want of trying, he almost did it with Martin Gaia. I mean, you know, tried very, very, very hard to give a future life to that show. And of course to Miss Saigon. Yes, I think he believes in different audiences needing to be sold the product in a way that seems to be individual and personal and to some extent indigenous to them. And he just puts a huge amount of effort into the… Into the circumstances of a production happening in a different country, huge amount of preparation, huge amount advertising and editorial advertising effort and a sort of willingness to be generous with or concerned in order to get some return out of that. But his detailed methods, of course, none of us are allowed to see, still less to comment on.
Interviewer: Does it have something to do with the shows themselves? I mean, some people would say that his shows rely on sort of a spectacle to tell a story. Can you comment on maybe the power of the spectacle to a story?
Trevor Nunn: Well, many people said at the time when Cats opened that the reason for its success was that it was a spectacular, a design spectacular. It was very, very inventively designed, of that there is no doubt. But actually, the design was like an extraordinary installation around the fringes. Of the stage environment at the stage was bare for 95% of the evening. I mean, the one thing that happened in Cats was the old autobus tire taking off and becoming a magic element. Chitty-chitty-bang-bang, eat your heart out. It was extraordinary when that first happened and nobody had seen hydraulics of that kind or theater magic where it wasn’t immediately explicable about how the tire was floating way up above the heads of the audience and people were riding on it and so on. So that did become a great talking point, but actually. Most of the show was bare and spare, wonderfully costumed, albeit sensuously costumed with figure-hugging clothing.
Interviewer: But the spectacle that some people dismiss, you know, Julie Taymor is like, spectacle is a great way to tell a story. What’s the effect it has on an audience? Why is it a good thing?
Trevor Nunn: As long as there has been theater, there has been spectacle, just as there have been pieces that are bare and spare and linguistic only in their intention. But I mean, if you look at the great age of English drama, the Elizabethans through which Shakespeare emerged, there was an accompanying theater. At that time, the mask theater, which was the equivalent of our music theater. I mean, it was dominated by musical performance and by extraordinary physical effects. That mask theater became so popular that Shakespeare, later on in his career, decided to embrace And in The Winter’s Tale, in Pericles, in Henry VIII and overwhelmingly in The Tempest, he’s writing for a mask theater, he has interludes of dumb show, he says I want spectacular things to happen furthermore. He’s peppering the place with music, songs, I mean songs for which he wrote the lyrics. And the central section of the winter’s tale that we refer to as the pastoral. Has got as many songs per page of text as any musical you’re ever likely to come across. It’s Shakespeare saying, I think it’s thrilling to embrace new forms and to reach out to different possibilities of how stories can be told. I don’t think Shakespeare would had any problem at all. With the development of music theater, nor indeed with the development of spectacular communication, nor indeed with bare and spare communication like the writing of Samuel Beckett. I mean, I think Shakespeare would have said, well, absolutely. I mean that was true in my career, and I’m delighted that it’s. It’s true in subsequent generations. I think it’s a 20th century critical hangup, which has got something to do with intellectual snobbery, though there may be not all to do with that, that makes people who write about the theater feel they have to be sniffy on the subject of pictorial. Communication, great design invention, and indeed sniffy on the subject of communication via popular song, that somehow there’s a notion that things that are too simplistic for their consideration are going on, when very often the case is that the mixture of lyric and melody. Is actually creating communication of great complexity, of psychological complexity, of wonderful shifts of mood and so on. And you can discern that in music theater, in the writing in the 20s and 30s, like in the writings of Cole Porter, you can overwhelmingly discern it in the written of Roger St. Hammondstein, and indeed I would say the other great composer of music theater of the first half of the 20th century, George Gershwin. Gershun in Porgy and Bess writes music of wondrous psychological complexity and perfect aptitude for the communication of that particular narrative, wonderful, idiomatic music that… That means what an audience is getting is complex communication, not simple communication. But, you know, the history of music theater is that Gershwin was rejected by critics, you know. The popular critics said, oh George, just stick to writing the fun Tim and have your tunes, and… The intellectual critics said, well, it’s not an opera at all. It’s just a string of popular tunes that have been strung together. It’s audiences who understand that something particular and special and unique and unrepeatable has happened from Gershwin. But similarly with Rodgers and Hammerstein. And I said, you know, it will go on. It won’t stop just because I say there is an unfortunate… Critical snobbery at times about music theater.
Interviewer: So, Cats was loved by audiences, it was a huge success on Broadway. Why was it such a big success?
Trevor Nunn: I think that a lot of the success had to do with the fact that the show reached across perceived barriers of every kind. First of all, barriers between generations. It was It’s certainly entirely possible for a family of… Young children of their relatively young parents and the grandparents, all to go to the theater together in one great big party and all get something that was completely delightful at the same show without the older ones having to say, oh please release me from this kid show. And then I would say the other set of barriers that it crossed was… Everything to do with racial or ethnic barrier, that because everybody in the cast was playing felines, that there was no possibility of any one role being the province or being under the ownership of a performer from one or other. Racial group. It could be mixed up in any way. The only important thing was that it should be completely mixed up. It should be multiracial. I think there was something, because the show does ask the audience to say, do you understand that cats are very much like you? I mean, there’s a, I’m not saying there’s an sermonizing aspect to the show, but we are all so much better when we are forgiving and merciful. And when. The good side of our natures is foremost, the show says. When the society, the community that’s expressing that is a rainbow community that, you know, and it’s not particularly Christian, it’s with any other kind of religious overtone. It seemed to me that there was something about the show that really could reach out to every kind of audience, and I think so it proved over a much longer period than anybody could have dreamed of. I mean, when we were rehearsing Cats, it was the first commercial project that I’d ever been involved with, and I was hoping and praying that it would last for. Six months and therefore not be a humiliation and sort of maybe get just a little bit of its investment money. There was no thought of it being a show that would survive for much longer than that.
Interviewer: What does it mean to take a show to Broadway? How is Broadway so profound? How is it special?
Trevor Nunn: I’ve often heard American artists say, my real ambition is to go with the show to… Because there are all sorts of stories about the London Theater, about the discerning public, about the kind of response that you can get in London about how it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And of course, the reality is that London Theater is quite a shabby place. District and it’s not greatly glamorous, it’s not particularly salubrious, audiences are capricious and so when I hear the story the other way around when English artists say the dream of my entire life is to go to Broadway. I sometimes smile because there is, of course, something completely mythic about the Great White Way. I mean, mythic because there’s a great tradition because so many wonderful shows have Happened there because so many great stars have played there, but there is also that aspect of Broadway that quite a lot of it is shabby. Quite a lot people beg on the streets as you go into the theater. Audiences can be capricious there just as they can be in London. It’s an absolutely wonderful place to be a success in and an absolutely horrible place to be a failure in. Although the one thing about Broadway is you don’t have to be a failure on Broadway for very long because things just don’t survive when they haven’t worked. They disappear very, very quickly. Yes, there’s a wonderful sense of history about the theater district on Broadway. In both places, in both London and New York, there is also a feeling that somehow theater, architecturally, spatially, hasn’t moved on in the way that it did 150 years ago. All of those theaters were built on the proscenium model. They were all built with an idea, a social idea, that some people would pay anything for very expensive seats and then the lower orders of society would be content with less expensive seats, and a more distant view and so on. That’s the same in both cities. Of course, what’s happened… In a century of theater making is that… Contemporary theater-makers want to use a space much more inventively than the proscenium format will allow them. They want to the space in the round. They want it three-sided. They want different stages and the audience being able to be peripatetic between stages. They would like. Intimacy above all things. They want that sense of real contact with an audience. And then when some people are 150, 200 feet away from the action, it’s the despair of theater makers, because then you have to have massive amplification and you have start doing spectacular things, whereas perhaps you wouldn’t choose to do that if you had more intimate surroundings. So in some ways, The architectural conditions and the failure of theater architecture to advance in the great theater centers is responsible for a degree of stagnation and therefore a lot of the most exciting developments in theater happen in regional theaters where there are more flexible spaces, where there studio spaces. Happens on the Fringe, you know, things begin off Broadway and things begin on the London Fringe because they’re not dictated to spatially in the same way.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about Oklahoma for a minute. What makes it such a great musical? Why is it something that is going to last and endure and people are going to always want to?
Trevor Nunn: Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein were… Great individual writers of music theater before they ever collaborated. They were both involved in legendary popular music theater achievements before they came together. I think the key to it all is the presence of Oscar Hammerstone’s name as the lyricist on showboat, that is to say. Hammerstein had already been part of a revolution in music theater. He’d already contributed to a music theater that could be more serious, more sustained, take on bigger themes. I mean, at the point when Showboat emerged, and probably for the next 10 years, the term a Broadway musical. Meant not only a show that was on Broadway but very likely a show that was about Broadway, I mean, about show people, about putting on a show, about backstage, about stars, about comedians, about singers with, you know, the 42nd Street. Story of, you know, is the show going to get on and is the understudy going to become a star and so on. That was, with a wonderful wit and satire, music was tended to be about uh… Show. With a clone. A show arrived that was about ordinary people, about country people, about working people. Therefore, there was, I think, a different response happened. Instead of audiences feeling, I’m stargazing, I’m watching something glittering. Audiences began to feel, I am recognizing, I identify. Could be happening to me, that has happened to me. I understand those notions. Yes, I’ve been caught up in that dilemma. Now, Hammerstein made it clear to Richard Rogers that if they collaborated they would have to work his way round. That is to say, he would have write the scenes, and out of which would come the lyrics, and then Rogers would have to musicalize them. Rogers, being a genius, was perfectly happy to work that way, just as he’d work the opposite way around, with Hart. But tonally, everything changed, because what Hammerstein was doing was writing character, he was writing narrative, he was written situation. What he had discovered in Richard Rogers was a composer who’d got the daring and the ambition to quote from classical resources, you know, there’s Svorak in his music, there’s Copland in his Music, who was able to musically structure the whole evening, even though… His collaborator was structuring it in terms of language. There was a musical structure, musical architecture. That symbiotic thing between them created, even though Schobert had gone before it, created a new form. And the energy of that coming together of those two wonderful popular artists is something you can still feel. It’s like, you know, it’s like we’re still experiencing the energy of the Big Bang. Um, something… Absolutely vital and unmistakable occurred, and of course their collaboration got increasingly daring. I mean, what I can never get over is how amazing it was that at the end of the Second World War, Rodgers and Hammerstein, great populists, could have been forgiven for saying, we’re going to do a show. That is entirely celebratory, it’s going to insist on victorious America and it’s going to pay tribute to everything that was achieved by our boys in the Second World War, particularly in the Pacific. What they chose to dramatize from James Mitchner’s Tales the South Pacific, were the two stories that most challenged America. That is to say, they were stories that said, why did we fight this war? We thought we were fighting this war because we believe in a free society, a society in which all men are free. So how come we have segregation in our society? How come we some people living half-lives? And the two stories that are the main plot and the subplot of South Pacific are the two Michener stories that deal with those racial issues and ask America the question. Now, I think it’s extraordinary that Rodgers and Hammerstein chose to write in that way. And indeed, the brief song you have to be carefully taught, it’s lacerating and brief. Is it’s a major demonstration from Rodgers and Hammerstein of their belief that musical theater can take on moral issues, can deal with the political, the social, the religious. That they can confront audiences with moral issues as well as providing laughter and entertainment and sentiment and delight, those other strands can be there. So the great revolution was Oklahoma, the confirmation was South Pacific.
Interviewer: They created a paradigm for the American musical, and I think that everyone, everything after that sort of gets compared to them in some way. I mean, I think some people, if critics would dismiss as mere spectacle a show like Cats or even Les Mis, it’s because it doesn’t conform to the book musical that they, do you think that’s true?
Trevor Nunn: But of course, uh…
Interviewer: I mean, how do you compare the shows that you did for Broadway with that pair of eyes?
Trevor Nunn: Katz had no intention of conforming to the book music principle. There was also no possibility that it could do so because permission was granted to make a musical work from Eliot’s poetry so long as every word uttered was by T.S. Eliot. Now, a little bit closer to, you know, we were able to… Persuade the executors that we should be able to introduce 12 lines of explanatory material here and two lines there. And indeed, they… They gave us permission to use the lyrics that I wrote to memory. Was deliberately trying to be in an Elliot mode and was dealing with Elliot concerns and had some Elliot vocabulary, but wasn’t written by him. So therefore, in Cats, there had to be an implied narrative. There had to a subtextual narrative, but not anything that would be the principle of… Music book scene escalating once again back into music. However, what Cats did was it purported to be a piece of total theater that it did celebrate language and wit and character, but it also celebrated dance and dance storytelling was very important to it as well as everything that can be celebratory. About dance. What I think became the word of mouth about Cats was that it was a very unusual experience that somehow the action of the show came off the stage and into the auditorium. It involved the audience, it sometimes surrounded the audience. The presence of the audience was acknowledged. It wasn’t storytelling that said we have to ask you to suspend your disbelief that we think you’re not there and we’re going to tell the story to the ether and you’re looking through a keyhole. The cats said, oh, all of you human beings have arrived at our festival and you shouldn’t be here. I suppose we’d better get on with it and try to explain to you what’s happening. And we can instruct you, and we can talk to you, we can appeal to you. We can reject you. We can be hostile. We can seductive. But the presence of the audience was acknowledged throughout. So there was something very different that was happening there, and that of course was developed in a further way with Starlight Express, where… Andrew and his collaborators, me included, were trying to tap into that visceral thing that happens at a sporting event where you don’t know the outcome, where there is violence involved, where is competition, strength of will, physical strength involved. What’s up? Those things that get released into the atmosphere at a sporting event and therefore the racing in Starlight Express and just going again for a completely different physical format with the singers actually singing live to… The accompaniment of live rock and roll musicians while traveling at 40 miles an hour, hurtling down runways, you know, doing spectacular right-angled turns on one in five gradients and so on. I mean, it was all very, very daring and very experiential. In the case of Les Miserables, I think we do connect back. The mainstream of Because although Imser Abla is through written and there are no spoken scenes, there is an intention to have quite complex contact between characters and an extremely complex story is told. I mean, it’s probably the most ambitious storytelling to date in music theater. There are 26 deaths, there are countless different locations that the story happens in. It spans a 17 year period. There are political issues as well as… Central issue to Victor Hugo of a direct appeal about the justice system and the penal system, you know, that there should be a system that is free of prejudice, of prejudgment. There should be system that’s not based on the retributive part of Christianity but on the hands up, how many of us believe there should be a better world, and what are we prepared to do about it?
Interviewer: What do you make of the claim that the Broadway musical is an American art?
Trevor Nunn: I think it is.
Interviewer: I know that you can give an amazing dissertation, but.
Trevor Nunn: I think the claim that the music is an American art form is absolutely correct. I think that’s the history of it, I think thats how that popular expression arrived and I think that other countries and composers from other backgrounds have learned from. The American experience and have contributed to it, but I think it remains enduringly an American form of expression. So yeah, I mean, I don’t think there’s anything to dispute about that.
Interviewer: What qualities does the musical have that are intrinsically American, or what does it say about America?
Trevor Nunn: Anybody who pontificates about the musical is going to be proved to be wrong in very short order because the history of music theater is so contradictory and you can absolutely guarantee that the future of musical theater will be contradictory. There is of course a limited value to hindsight, you know, that you can see trends and developments. I think that that first great flowering in the late 20s and 1930s had a wonderful contemporaneity. A wonderful sense that everything was up-to-date in a kind of, in a satirical way. The wit and the characterizations all had a satirical application to… Fashionable world and the successful world that was going on in the streets around the theaters. A great exponent, the kind of representative talent of the age, is Cole Porter, I mean astonishingly. And prolifically, gloriously melodic, those two things combined, sort of define the age. His concerns didn’t reach beyond that, though the satire occasionally has bite and the turn phrase has real enduring application. We tend to think of Stephen Sondheim as one of a kind, and I would argue, particularly because of the recent experience of working with Cole Porter’s score, I would argue that Sondheimer’s in a direct line of descent from Cole Porter, and that they would have seen very much eye to eye in terms of the intentions of… Music theater, to what extent music theater entertains, to what extent, music theater has to be about something and have direct, relevant application to a contemporary world. I think that with the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution… The province of music theater became storytelling in a way that could extend towards material normally associated with film or material normally associated the novel with literature. It could expand into ambitious storytelling. Involve an audience could create that suspension of disbelief so that even though there is a heightened form of expression going on on stage, because we all know people don’t have an orchestra playing behind them as they talk and in real life they don’t burst into at moments of great emotion. When those ingredients are introduced carefully and sensitively, an audience can continue to believe in the essential reality of what is being expressed, and therefore… Respond emotionally and therefore can be in floods of tears or can be in a state of absolute joy. Now, when that happens… Music theater is capable of, in a way I think that no other form of theater can match. Unifying the audience. The audience can be as disparate as you like when they come in. They can come from every area of town. They can have rich backgrounds and poor backgrounds. They can be interested or hostile to the event that’s going to happen. But then when music theater works, EVERYBODY coheres into one response, and when you’re in an auditorium and you’re part of that collective joy or that… Those shared tears, something indelible happens to each and every individual in the audience. You’re part of a bigger something and you take away from it your individual part and I would say that what you take away from those great experiences of music theater last… For much longer than what you take away from a movie or what you take away from a television broadcast. Because the living artist has been present on that stage communicating directly to you at the point where you offer your emotional response, then an exchange occurs. And and something endearing can happen. And therefore, an audience can be changed during the course of a music theater event. Now, I don’t just mean changed in their thinking, God, I never thought that before, and now I’ve become, you know, I’ve became a revolutionary because of having seen Les Miserables. No, I, I I don’t mean that at all. But I do mean changed in the sense of, of, Feeling different, feeling more open, feeling that sense of sharing things with others. Your question was, what is particularly American about that? Well, American society yearns to be unified in ways that many of the old European societies still somewhat resist. I mean, people in both old and new Europe talk about… You know, a Euro future of complete freedom and complete equality and complete exchange. But we all know that there are many, many groups within that who are extremely hostile to that idea and that hierarchic ideas may prevail or certainly will continue to be expressed for many years to come. In America, the dream… Is of a unified society, of an equal society. Maybe it’s not achieved, but it’s a shared dream. And I think there’s something about what music theater can do. I think the opera house did it at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, that there was something more inclusive and that the history of opera. In the 20th century is to move towards more and more and more extreme intellectual positions that therefore exclude a huge majority of people who aren’t sufficiently qualified to understand where it’s going. Music theater doesn’t do that. Music theater does want to exclude. It sets out to include. Of course, there are in every age. There are. Enclaves, there are movements within movements where people are quite happy for the art form not to be inclusive, not to massively popular, to speak only to a section of society. But I think the mainstream will go on wanting to be Inclusive The great example of the unified audience I think occurs at the end of Oklahoma. Many individual stories have been told and an unlikely young love story has received fulfillment, but it’s in the context of… A group of ordinary people saying we can make our own judgments about what is good and what is bad and we can create our own better world and we are going to become the state of Oklahoma and of course it becomes representative of we are exemplifying the founding principles of America and therefore there’s a statement about community. About the importance of community and about shared goodness that is made at the climax of that show, that in America sweeps an audience away because whether the audience recognized that intellectually or not, the feeling is that they’re responding to something that is so close to their own identity.
Interviewer: That’s great. Angela Weber, I just, I sort of, we’re trying to explain why he’s been so successful and what, you know, so if you could just discuss that maybe just through his music, of course, because that’s the key to it, I think.
Trevor Nunn: But Andrew Lloyd Webber is the most prolific and rich melodist of the age. It’s astonishing to me, looking back on the scores of Katz, Starlight Express, Phantom, Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, and now his most recent score, which is going to consumed the woman in white. The outpouring of melodic idea, melody that really sticks that people remember, want to hear again, are caught up by, moved by, the sheer amount of it is extraordinary. Of course… That melodic outpouring is all very much Andrew’s tone of voice. He doesn’t adopt other people’s idioms, and therefore I’ve heard accusations that Andrew suffers from a lack of diversity, certainly not a lack of diversity of subject matter. He’s been tremendously daring in his… In his subject matter, and I think, for example, the idiom that he found in Sunset Boulevard is marvelously coherent. I mean, it completely evokes the age, and I think that’s, well, I think most of Andrew’s scores will live on, but in particular I find something wonderfully structured and coherent about that score. I don’t think that any further explanation of Andrew’s success is necessary beyond realizing that his melodic content and his diversity of subject matter are pretty unique and you You know, what Cole Porter had in mind at all times was… To write entertainment which could end up in the hit parade. Richard Rogers had that ability to write for the particular story that he was doing and have a sense that melodies that he’s doing could end in the hip parade. Andrew has exactly that same ingredient, of course he’s done it repeatedly, over and over and again. And he’s… He’s written tunes that other artists want to record, want to take out of context, want to say, I just want to communicate that. And huge followings of audience want to hear, want to here in different forms. But I don’t think that Andrew can be faulted in any way on the diversity of his subject matter and on his… His willingness to create instrumental music as well, dance music, as in Katz and Stylite Express, music that can be converted into suites and orchestral music. I think there’s no mystery at all about his success.
Interviewer: And Cole Porter, what about his shows, why would you say that it was the quintessential show of the 30s, we’ve heard this from more than one person.
Trevor Nunn: Anything Goes was conceived in mess and muddle with writers walking off the project with something, a ship actually sinking at sea And therefore they had to change the plot completely at the last minute. It was written in order to be a vehicle for three particular artists, so that is to say everything the wrong way around. You would imagine from those beginnings that a show would be created that had no coherence whatsoever. And what was created in spite of those conditions was a masterpiece, a masterpiece that observes the Unities that is immensely witty. Its satire is like a release of energy after the depression. The depression was just coming to an end. And. Prohibition was gone, the depression was giving way to the New Deal and therefore a feeling of some celebration has to occur. Anything Goes, in one way, is a comedy of manners. The distinctive thing about comedy of manner in any nation’s literature is that it says, look at what’s going on, isn’t it all? I mean, that’s the content of the song, anything goes, you know. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking would have been shocking. Now, we are unshockable. It’s monstrous what we get up to. It’s absolutely appalling. It’s disgraceful what we got up to, and don’t we love it? And aren’t we wonderful? It’s that contradiction. So, you know, the fact that he has as a central character an evangelist who who uses vaudeville and sensuality in order to bring people to God. Well, when I first came across it, I thought, satire, I mean, that’s just surely Cole Porter wanting to write a gospel song halfway through the second act. No, there was this woman, Amy Semple Macpherson, and she had a vast following, and she kind of had a vaudevil church. She really did have that influence in the late 20s and the early 30s on American thinking and she was discovered to be at the center of a very strange sexual scandal. I mean, so the satire is very contemporary, very pointed, you know, and of course with the depression coming to an end, it’s also, we’re arriving at an age where you can have Fun with Gangster. During the Depression, gambling had to go underground and alcohol had to go underground, and every other form of black market dealing, it all had to go underground. Therefore you needed protection, therefore gangsters, the great rule of the mobsters and the gangsters during the late 20s and 30s. You’re just coming out into an age where it’s possible for a satirist like Cole Porter to say. We’ll do a show about public enemy number one and public enemy number two and laugh at them. We’ll say how dreadful it is that gangsters are so alluring in our society, that we can have this strange yearning for notoriety as opposed to fame. You know, the very point that Chicago was to make many years later is made by Anything Goes, that we’re sort of, we’re fascinated by notoriety. Isn’t it appalling, but hey. Well, the other strand of Anything Goes is, it’s about a tycoon who’s traveling on the SS American, I mean, couldn’t be a more representative name of this ship of fools that is on the way across the Atlantic. And this tycoon believes that, uh… He can make a fortune by dumping a massive bulk of shares on Wall Street. In the plot, his assistant fails to sell the shares and there is such a revival on Wall Street that he ends up as a zillionaire by keeping his money invested. So actually the plot says the depression is over. It says, look, keep your money in and it’s all going to, it’s all going to burgeon and grow, you know. And the SS America is gonna deliver. So, I mean, it actually is saying something symbolic as well as having a kind of musical feel-good factor and wonderful dance routines and so on. It’s, subtextually, it’s saying the depression is over.
Interviewer: Great answer, great answer. In pop culture today, the Broadway musical has sort of been sidelined. It used to be pop culture in America, but things have become so atomized, there’s so many choices for entertainment, and it’s so hard to mount a Broadway musical today. There’s so much challenges facing a producer who wants to take a show to Broadway. Why should we care about it? Why should care about the Broadway Musical? What role does it play in our culture, you think? It’s important.
Trevor Nunn: I’m very used to trying to ask the question about why should we continue to care about Shakespeare? Or indeed, why should continue to have subsidized theaters that revive classic plays in an age when people aren’t particularly interested in the past, they’re not particularly interested in revisiting the achievements of previous ages, and so on. And so it’s in that context that… One has to look at the present condition of music theater. I would say is not particularly inspiring. New things are occurring, but they tend to be things that are based on pastiche. Things that are having fun at the expense of previous ages of expression, rather than having the self-confidence to say. This is a piece of new expression with its own idiom and its own vocabulary that doesn’t need to trade off the past. So I don’t think at the moment on either side of the Atlantic there’s much evidence of green shoots coming through. However… In every age of theater, one has got to keep the faith that the green shoots are coming through. George S. Kaufman described the theater as the fabulous invalid. It’s always on its deathbed, according to members of the family. They’re always gathering around saying, well, it can’t be long before we have to. The patient is dead and then suddenly that invalid leaps up and says what’s the problem? I feel absolutely 100% super fighting fit. The theater does that all the time and I believe that the theater will do that in the future. I’m absolutely certain that new forms, new approaches to music theater will emerge. The thing that we are stuck with at the moment, people discovering that they can make a great deal of money out of tribute shows by taking a catalog of somebody’s musical work and sort of piecing them together with elements of a story. I’m sure that more of those will occur and more people who hadn’t been to theaters, who’d only been to rock concerts will be introduced to… Music theater that way. But when the really daring, the really inventive bit of music storytelling occurs, then they will come back to that and will discover that music theater is very much alive and well.
Interviewer: Do you have some adjectives to describe the Broadway musical, sort of describe how its uniqueness perhaps? Maybe at its best, when you’re talking about those incredible moments.
Trevor Nunn: The answer that you’re looking for. The Broadway musical for many years was so dominated by the response of whoever it was who was writing for the New York Times. And if whoever had that job had a kind of broad, welcoming approach, a kind of catholicity of approach, then wonderful, diverse things happened. When it was somebody like Frank Rich, but naming no names. Who had a very narrow view of what he wanted the music theater to be, then very little grew in that garden. It became, we don’t like that, and we don’t like that on this newspaper. It has to be only something that conforms to our notion of what the Broadway musical should be. Now, I think Broadway has got to… Its diversity at all costs. It must never become formulaic. It must never say, well, this kind of show seems to work, so let’s have 20 of this kind of shows. It mustn’t become another area of expression of the huge corporations who will turn something to a format. We’ve discovered that this format will work and will sell to a big public. It’s the diversity, it’s what’s unexpected that turns up on Broadway. It’s that the fringe show like Rent that suddenly shakes it all up and makes us understand that it can be very different or… Or it can be youthfully rebellious in the way that hair was youthfully rebellious. I mean, those two shows are kind of era markers. Diversity, unexpectedness is what must be retained by Broadway, and when that goes, then it will become an era of New York that’s a kind of ossified theme park, and I hope and pray that that will never occur.
