Michael Kantor: Is there a development of the book show in the 30s, or how are the shows reflecting the time?
Peter Stone: Well, the book show, as we know it now, never really happened until Oscar Hammerstein refined it, invented it, refined it. But there were themes. There were theme shows. And they had to do with political positions. And the country was in a terrible position at the time, economically. The depression was very, very widespread and very serious. And politically, the country, especially the intelligentsia, we’re looking for some. Political solution to the problem. Roosevelt was dealing with it in Washington, but there was a great deal of ultra-liberal thought among the, in the theater as there usually is. They’re usually to the left of society where the ideas are. And there were with the blitz scenes and the, and of course the group theater was going on over there with Odets and that sort of, all of that sort found its way. Into theater, Yip Harburg, shows like We the People and Meet the People, and Jay Gourney and all the composers of that time. That was the time of Brother Can You Spare a Dime, which is a remarkable song and very touching and very moving, but it’s very typical and typifies the time, the concern, the political concern. These were men who had just, who had come back from the war, the first war, they were, there were selling apples. There were soup kitchens. It was a bad time. Now, of course, on Broadway, there was still, tickets were expensive, have always been expensive. People say, oh, well, they’ve gotten out of hand. They’re about the same. If you start reflecting inflation and everything, tickets are about the the same, When I first came to New York, I couldn’t afford it. Theater tickets, I would stand during the intermission and mingle and I only saw second acts. And now that I can afford it, I only see first acts. Anyway, the fact is that that time was very political and there was a great deal of social comment going on with the songs and what was the book. I mean, you look at something like, like, The Blitzstein, they were almost operas, and those shows, Cradle of Rock and so forth, and they were interesting. But the musical still was governed by the four basic, five basic, great, great songwriters, the teams, except for Cole Porter, who was his own team. You, I mean, between the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Jerry Kern. And Dietz and Schwartz, they were writing just great, great songs, and they dominated. And those musicals of the time went on, and I think they were very successful all during the 20s, but also in the 30s.
Michael Kantor: What were the Rodgers and Hart shows really?
Peter Stone: Well, they were book shows, but they were, the books were, I mean they were having a good time on a weekend in Connecticut. I mean that’s a book. You know, they where usually about wealthy people who, and then some interloper who came in, who, into it. And they had great fun about the classes, between the lower classes, there were the middle classes in the upper glass and so forth. Because they were very, especially Cole Porter, they were terribly sophisticated songs. And they had that kind of, they did those kinds of stories. Funny Face, which has been, the score has been used for many things, a film, and then the show that I did, My One and Only, really had nothing to do with Funny Face. It just had the songs. Because the real Funny Face which I found later after I’d already done My One And Only. Is about a house party for the weekend someplace. It’s really as frivolous as it could be, amusing. They wrote good jokes and good dialog. Woodhouse and Bolton were fabulous. And Fields was very, very good. But what book writers did in those days was basically glue. Their job was to create glue between the songs. And which was not always that easy because they would write unfettered by. Sense by any sense of plot or any sense of character development, they would just write songs. And it was up to the book writer to string them together somehow. Verses were written to do that actually. Verses had two duties to do. They don’t do them much anymore, but every song had a verse and one of the jobs was to connect the song to the show. And they did that in a verse. And the other thing that a verse does, which book writers appreciate. And it changes the level from prose to poetry. The verse elevates it out of prose into the place where the song will live. And it doesn’t, it would be very jarring to start singing without some preparation. So when a song doesn’t have a verse, the book writer really has to create what’s called a lead-in. And the lead- in really does that job. It lifts or. Elevates the language a little bit so that you don’t get upset when there’s suddenly rhyming. But the fact is that those master songwriters were, it was just a miracle that they were all together at the same time. I mean, Berlin I left out. I may have left out Berlin. Who was, again, like Porter, did both jobs. And was they were all. Giants, giants that likes never to be seen again and, you know. Well, I think Herb Fields was, he came from a remarkable family because his sister and his brother were all, or his brother’s wife, however it turned out, were all terribly, terribly good in the musical theater. Dorothy was a remarkably lyricist, but also quite a good book writer. And he, basically Herb Field. Did these things, these books, this glue between songs. But not only for Roger’s not, he did it also later for Cole Porter and he seemed to have a great sense of how these songs could be fit together. It was almost as if he was doing some sort of puzzle and had to make these songs belong to the same show and that’s what he was expert at.
Michael Kantor: What do people come to the musical theater for?
Peter Stone: Well, I think the musical theater accomplished something very important to this country’s, to its theatrical development. And that’s basically this, since, to get academic about it for a second, since the great social revolutions of the late 18th century and all through the 19th century, the Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov years, so forth, People would drama became real realism Naturalism, it was called, entered. That is, the audience became eavesdroppers. A fourth wall was missing, and they were watching reality. The ashtrays were real. The books and the shows were real, the dialog was real, but it appeared to be, obviously it wasn’t. And naturalism killed off the conventions of the theater, soliloquies aside, speaking poetry, all the great conventions of theater up to that time. We’re done away with. And it was very hard to bring it back because the audiences lost their ear for it, lost their experience of it. The musical started to supply that. And the musical supplied, first of all, poetry in the term, in the lyric. Soliloquies, you could stand on stage alone or even with people and sing. I mean, it’s not an accident that probably the best piece of musical material ever written is called soliloquy. You could do asides in a musical, people talking that other people didn’t hear. The sets were not real. The orchestra was sitting there in the pit. You were aware of the theatricality of what you were doing. And it wasn’t until the theater, the absurd for the rest of the world came along, Beckett and the rest of them, to sort of destroy realism. People got bored with realism. They went as far as they could go, but it’s all they had. And they suffered it. And then suddenly the musical in this country came along and destroyed that dependence. On realism, and so the musical really is pure theater, the way Aristotle defined it. Aristotle is the only critic, I’m sure that some of your guests will forgive me, who are critics, but the only critique that ever really mattered to the enrichment of theater was Aristotle, and he said there are not, realism involved three properties. Character and theme, but Aristotle listed six. There was also poetry, movement, dance if you wish, and spectacle. You have to look at what the musical has been to realize what it is the people get from it. I believe, I’m in no means, this is not universally believed, but I believe that the musical is an optimistic form. That is to say it depends. Demands an optimistic ending. It would be an opera with a down ending, and the endings are, you know, even someone says King and I, the sad case where the king dies, but it’s not. It’s very, very classic, and it’s the young king. The young king steps forward and goes out to meet the thing, and he’s very optimistic. Even when Maury Estin and I did Titanic, everyone says, you know isn’t, you know 2300 people or whatever it is, die. Not really, because it’s a story of heroism, of sacrifice, of courage beyond, you know, and we talked about the survivors really more than those who didn’t. It’s a storey of survival in the midst of this absolute, horonomous, Bosch-like landscape. But I believe it’s happy thing. And I think the musicals, one of the problems with something like. Pal Joey, which has never really been successful. It’s absolutely adored by people because the songs, it’s the last Rodgers and Hart score. The songs are wonderful. The book is interesting. But the book wasn’t really a big hit. It was a play once. It wasn’t. And as musical, revived several times because you don’t like anybody. The problem is, and I think rooting for somebody is part of the optimism. I think you must have that. The theater need not. But I think the musical must. Otherwise, it becomes something else. And I think that the trouble with Pal Joey and musicals that are dark is that the audience somehow doesn’t feel fulfilled by what they’re there for because the music and their spectacle there. And I’d think the music is something that catches you up in the joy of it all. And I don’t mean by joy necessarily comedy, and I don’t necessarily mean whooping and hollering. But the, in the, in the wonderful enthusiasm of it. Oscar invented the musical book. He invented it himself. I mean, there were people who played with it and people who did it without realizing what they were doing so much. Oscar literally invented it. And it started to take form in Showboat. Didn’t really, it wasn’t a two act form. Each act was sort of independent of each other. But they dealt with real problems and real people. And then when he got finally to Oklahoma… He was dealing with a book that was quite difficult. Greenfield and the Lilacs had some very difficult things in it. He didn’t touch them very deeply, the poor Judd aspect of it, the Judd Fry aspect. It was very dark and very strange, and there are other things that are, but he made the score follow the book instead of, it had always been the other way around. The book had been following the score around. Somewhat like The Elephant Keeper and cleaning up after it to make it a show. Suddenly along came Oscar and the fact that they were doing his first few literary works that had been adapted to the stage, but suddenly the story took over. And the songs had to, had to enlighten the story. Oscar got stronger and stronger as he went along. I think his best book for me is King and I. I mean, Carousel is a wonderful book, but King and I is a superb book. It’s funny. It’s touching. It’s important. It’s a very, very good musical book. And not at all like Anna and the King As I Am, which was the source material. Yes, it had the plot. It had the characters. But he created this, and it’s extremely deft and talented. Carousel was better than Oklahoma book wise. King and I Better. South Pacific was interesting as a book, very interesting. It wasn’t as meaningful as the others, but it was very lyrical and it touched the war and it touch loss and it touches a lot of things that musicals had never done before. He just turned the whole thing around and the score suddenly started following the book. He also had to figure out what to do with the ballad in the first act. In all shows they did the ballads in the act. We prized it in the second act, sold a lot of sheet music. But the fact is that a ballad can’t be sung until the characters know each other. The love affair they’ve just met. You can’t sing undying love to someone you just met, it wouldn’t be, they did in the old days. So he invented something that I’ve called the conditional And he started, the first one I know about, that I may have done it before, was in Showboat, only make believe. Just make believe we’re in love. Then comes Oklahoma. People will say we’re love. We’re not, but people will say, we’re loved. And then Carousel comes along, if I loved you. Well, I don’t yet, or I don’t but if I love you, right? And this continues all the way through. Here’s some enchanted evening. You will, it’s all in future. It’s all, or in conditional. And so you could have a wonderful ballad in the first act. That’s just Oscar. That was Oscar’s invention and brilliance was to do that.
Michael Kantor: Just tell me about, you work with Rogers, and-
Peter Stone: I worked with Dick Rogers twice and it was a great experience because half the time I was just asking him about things I’ve always wanted to know because he was another generation. For instance, I was absolutely just amazed by the fact that the Dick Rogers of Larry Hart had so little to do with the Dick Rodgers of Oscar Hammerstein in terms of the music, the sound of the the music. The style of the music, and the music was so different. And I asked him, I said, why are the styles so different? Just because he was a new lyricist. He said, it’s easy to explain. With Larry Hart, I wrote the score, the music and then Larry fit a lyric to it. But with Oscar, he wrote the lyric and I had to fill a melody to the lyric. And so they were totally, they arrived from different places. And the beat was different. The meter, not just the meter, but everything was different having written to follow rather than to lead. Book writing is not the same as play writing. They’re obviously connected. But there are certain things that must be either developed or learned in order to write a book. And one of them is the most important thing, is to tell two hours of story in one hour. So there’s, I came along at a time when Frank Lesser, I worked with Fuhr and Martin. And it happened at that time. There was Abe Burroughs, and George Kaufman, and for me, most specifically Cole Porter, but most specifically Frank Lesser. And when I was offered a chance to do my first musical, I went to Lesser, and I said, how do I, how, what, why? And he could articulate everything. I said where does a song go? And he would say, well, when a character gets to a point where he can’t express himself in normal language, It has to use an interjection. That’s where the song goes. I said, and that’s why there’s so many good songs that begin with interjections. Oh, what a beautiful morning. When a character comes to a point where all you can say is, gosh, golly, gee, or something stronger, at that moment he becomes inarticulate with prose and has to move into a more emotional and a more interesting, into lyric, into rhyme and so forth. But Frank knew about all of this, and Frank was, could explain, and this thing about one hour, You have to tell in an hour. A two-hour story because a musical is a two hour thing, but the score doesn’t really help your story. It’s not supposed to. It fills in emotional moments. It fills comedy moments. It fills all sorts of things, but it doesn’t tell the story. In later years now, there are more musicals that do have the score advancing the story, but not really. Not as much time as it takes. A song lasts, if a song lasts four minutes. It might do 20 seconds of story. So you have to be very, very economical and terse about it. The other thing you can’t do is fight the lyrics, fight the songs. You can’t tell the song before they sing the song. Now, that involves a certain ego adjustment. And the best way to solve it, every say, do you write the book first and then the score? Do they write the score first and the book? Neither one of those works.
Michael Kantor: So one thing we can’t overestimate under what happened.
Peter Stone: Overestimate.
Michael Kantor: Take it away.
Peter Stone: The importance of the opening number of a musical. It has to, Lesser was very, very adamant about that. And he said the opening has to tell the audience where they are, why they are and who they’re going to and what the evening’s going to be. So in other words, share your level with the audience is basically the level you’re on, share it with them. Fugue for Tin Horns, which opened Guys and Dolls, has got to be one of the great, great opening numbers. It opened up the world. Of Damon Runyon for that show. Told you where you were going to be all night. One of the great stories was that Jerry Robbins was one of the other great geniuses of the theater, not a creative genius in the sense that he wrote material or composed material, but he could shape and form it. He was called out of town because, funny thing happened on the way to the forum, was in some kind of trouble in Boston, wherever it was. And one of the reasons for it is that it was living on a level that the audience had not seen really in very, very long time. And that is farce, broad farce. It’s a farce musical, very, very hard to do. It’s as hard to a farcest musical as it is to do suspense musical because music interferes with farce the same way it interferes with suspense to stop and sing a song in other words and it was a brilliant show and terribly funny and they wrote a one and Larry Gelbart and Bert Shavlov wrote a remarkably funny script but the audience couldn’t get with it they didn’t know what what is this reality is it what is it Robin said you I gotta tell him what it is. And Steve, on the road, wrote Comedy Tonight. And it comes out ahead of the show. The curtain’s not up yet. And it’s comes out, and he sings a song called Comedy Tonight, and it demonstrates the farthest level of the shows they’re going to see. And the minute that song went into that show, the whole show worked. And so it cannot be underestimated. The importance of that. I mean, you look at Kiss Me Kate, we opened in Venice. I mean it gives you Shakespeare and the level of what you’re going to do to Shakespeare, both. And it tells you where you’re living. The best example of a show of mine, when the composer of 1776 came and said I want you to, and he, the whole thing sounded very, very dull. And odd, and not musical, and terrible. And I avoided making any, even listening to it for a long time. And finally, I got kind of pushed into an office where the composer, Sherman Edwards, sat down to play the score that he had written so far. And it was, he didn’t, he played, he was a nice piano player. He was a history teacher who sometimes, an itinerant musician, he accompanied singers. And he sang terribly, gruff, raspy voice. And he sat down at the piano and started to go, sit down John, sit down, John, for God’s sake. And the minute you heard that, you knew what the whole show was. You knew the level that you were writing on and everybody who came in, the director, the designers, the actors, everybody knew that show from the level set in that opening number. It was amazing. I don’t know, it was instinctive with him because he wasn’t, he had no musical theater experience to speak of. It’s just that he wrote this song, and you knew immediately that John, John Adams was John, and sit down John. We only treated them as gods, cardboard characters with legends and chopping down cherry trees and flying kites with strings on them, and keys on them. And it’s suddenly this very affectionate familiarity, and yet not altogether flattering. But very reverent, it wasn’t reverential. And you knew it all from the opening number and it was terrific.
Michael Kantor: What happens in the broad sense in the 60s when you start working, that the Broadway show which has voiced popular sentiment for, whatever, 40, 50 years, all of a sudden with cultural changes, it’s sort of struggling to find its way, isn’t it?
Peter Stone: Well, it was lucky in some senses because a couple of landmark shows came along. Between 43 when Oklahoma happened and the middle 50s, there were a lot of crossover shows. Irving Rolin was not able to give up necessarily the irrelevant song, a good song he wrote. He wasn’t able to get that up and you had to figure out how to use it. And the same thing happened in other shows of that period. But by the 50s, middle 50s suddenly it hit its stride and then you were very lucky. You suddenly got shows, I mean My Fair Lady, that was, that just set up the American musical theater for the next 30 years. It was such a perfect show in every way. Because one, they were smart enough to use the play. They used a great deal of the play and the ending they said which wasn’t they changed the play, but it wasn’t really. It was what they had done on the film when they made the film with Wendell Hill and Leslie Howard. They used that, that had that ending. And it was perfect because the romance had to be fulfilled and being a musical and it was. But that show did more to establish firmly the form than anything else and then you had guys and dolls at the same period. Totally different show, the other end of the spectrum, but every bit as carefully, and you worked your way into West Side Story, which was a dance, basically the first dance musical, there had been great choreography, what Agnes DeMille created in Oklahoma, and in the subsequent shows that she did with Rodgers and Hammerstein, and what Jerry Robbins was able to put together all the way up through Fiddler. But West Side Story was a dance show and it was really, regardless of the story, it was told as much in dance as any musical really with a book. There have been a lot of dance shows like Fosse and something which are reviews more than anything else. But that’s probably the best example of a musical following all the rules of a music and fulfilling all the points of a musical, but told in dance.
Michael Kantor: Can sort of sense that there’s this moment in the 60s that you are working through in which Broadway has to re-examine like.
Peter Stone: Broadway didn’t have to come to the social revolution until the very end of the 60s, until hair. Up until hair, there were a couple of British, I mean, you know, I don’t know the exact order of everything, but I think they came a little later, stuff like the magical dream coat or whatever it was called. And, but hair was really the cutoff line between the newer generation. Aldering, you mentioned such shows as Dolly and Fiddler. These are shows, by the way, and it may be a good time to take a moment to discuss it, that were in terrible trouble out of town. Dolly got hideous reviews in Detroit. Fiddlers was in desperate trouble in Washington. And yet, these are classic American shows. What was it? It’s the out of town process. And the out-of-town process is so important to a musical that it again cannot be, you can’t even begin to think about a show that doesn’t go out of time. Today, shows don’t go out of the town, well, now I think they’re starting to again because they realize what terrible danger it is to open Colden, New York in two. One of the reasons is that the New York audience is not all that favorably disposed to your success. Not the audience that comes to previews. And previews supplant the out of town process when there is no out of time. The reason out of the town is falling out of favor or fell out of a favor was the sheer ludicrous expense of it all. It’s just amazingly expensive and you come in with a great. But if… Producers would look at out of town the same way they look at sets, sets are expensive too. But you’ve got to do it. You know, it’s like saying, well, we save money so we won’t have out of the town, we won’t t have sets either. But you’ ve got to it. And out of time is where shows are, because musicals are reassembled. The order of scenes are changed. I’ve always said that individual audience members are always wrong when they tell you about your show. But collectively, they’re always right. And to say, oh well, they didn’t understand us in Detroit. If it doesn’t work in Detroit, it isn’t going to work in New York. And the audiences tell you, collectively, they yawn, they get up and leave. You could, I’ve had shows where you could get trampled to death if you stood in the center aisle near the end of the play. And they let you know. And you find out that you’re too long. In other words… The 11 o’clock number, it’s now the 1030 number, but it used to be called the 11 o clock number, doesn’t work. And that’s your big song. That’s Rose’s turn. That’s all the big song, that big number, and it didn’t work You have to know what it is, maybe, that’s not working. It may not be the song. It may be the fact that you’re doing it at 11.30 instead of 11. And the audience has passed their bedtime. And they’re just not up on it. Might be that the song that came before may have been similar or may have taken some of the wind out of the sails. It might be that it’s the wrong song.
Michael Kantor: How do you think Irving Berlin felt when Roger then Hammerstein, who pioneered this musical play, asked him to do Annie Get Your Gun?
Peter Stone: Well, it’s got a complicated history. He wasn’t the first to ask. Jerome Kern was going to be writing the music with Dorothy Fields, and then Jerome Kern died. And, but Oscar and Dick knew that it was a very good idea for his show, and they went to Irving Berlin. The reaction was strange. First thing Irving said, look, I’m Tin Pan Alley. I don’t know anything about the West, Wild West, and the vernacular. And secondly, I don’t like Ethel Merman. She’s brash and she’s very, I don’t know, I didn’t like her. Now, it’s interesting to note that once he’d done this show with her, they worked together. They were close friends and he came to like her, but he finally was persuaded to do it. Rodgers and Hammerstein were the producers of it, so that was their involvement. And they persuaded Irving to write the score. And Dorothy Fields knew that she was no longer the lyricist because Irving wrote his own lyrics, so she became the book writer. With her brother. And she wrote a very deft book. But one of the problems was that Irving was still writing in the 30s in terms of form, not as, the material was not of the 30’s, but the form was. And he was still including songs that didn’t really have any connection to book very much. And… When it came time, as a result, it’s like Finian’s Rainbow, which was a very big hit. But again, it wasn’t formed correctly to the modern day. It was both enormous hits of their day, but they were never done again. I mean, they were done in 1946 and seven, and then never done it again. Oh, yeah, they’re were done in amateur groups and stock groups and so forth. But they were ever, ever brought back, which is hard, because the. Usually 25 years, these were 50 years before they were, they showed up again. And so the book had to be totally reformed in order for it to go on, to make it look like today’s show, otherwise it would have looked like Nono Nanette. And if you do Nono Nannette, which they did, a revival, they did it tongue and cheek, kind of making fun of it. Well, you don’t want to make fun of an Irving Rilin show, especially an Americana Irving-Rilin Show. So how do you do it? And that became the problem. And it was a very interesting course in how to write a book. I borrowed an idea that I had used in Will Rogers, and that was that we weren’t telling the story. We, the authors and producers and directors, were not telling the stories of Annie Oakley. Rather, it was Buffalo Bill who was telling the story. And that allowed us to be as naive and, quote, corny as the time allowed, because, as the period, I mean, allowed, because Buffalo Bill was not a sophisticated showman. He was not doing a show for today. He was doing a Show in the 1890s. So the show had his stamp on it. And to do that, I enveloped the show. In Buffalo Bill’s, under Buffalo Bill, Big Top. And to do that, we took the one song in the show that tells you where you are and what you are, which was, which was there’s no business like show business, which had been a throwaway song in this show. It had opened with a song that originally opened with something called Colonel Buffalo Bill which was not a, did not help. It was, and followed by a song called I’m a Bad, Bad Man, which also did not have. They’re both wonderful. Constructed songs there in Berlin after all. But they weren’t helping the show. And they also did something else. They delayed Annie’s arrival on the stage. And you want to, because Annie is the star part. You’re going to read her a little earlier. So we just created an envelope for Annie Get Your Gun. Buffalo Bill presents it. And when they present the show and show you how they’re going to do it, they use, there’s no business like show business as that envelope, and when that song ends with the lyric, let’s go on with the show, the show they’re going on with is there and he gets your gun, not ours. And you come back to it at the end. So it had to be restructured. The two most important words to book writing are structure and concept. You must have both. But structure is the most important. And that again, earlier you asked me about the difference between playwriting and book writing. Structure. You can get away without, in the theater, if you’re good enough, Mamet is not a great structuralist, but he’s just, his dialog and his characters are so strong. But in the musical, you must structure, really structure. There are so many diverse elements. There’s score, there’s dance, there is so many elements. You must structure your show, but not only that, you must find a structure, like I just described, and like we did in that. And that structure. The other thing is really important is the way you… The way you assemble it, you must have not just structure, but also concept. And the concept of the show is what I was talking about when I talked about Buffalo Bill telling the story instead of. That concept allows you to tell, somehow you must to have a concept on how to do this show. It’s not just enough to do it. You have to really establish it. And those two things, structure and concept are 90% of book writing.
Michael Kantor: What about when you revive a show?
Peter Stone: I hate the word revival. It sounds like it’s dead, and you’ve somehow given it mouth to mouth resuscitation. No one says we’re going to go see a revival of Aida tonight at the Met, or we’re gonna see a revival of Swan Lake at the Ballet. There, it’s part of the canon. It’s part the, of the, of the of the repertory. It’s a classic show, and it’s going to be, there’s a new production. And I like new production of a classic show or of a successful show or fond memory of. Whatever, but revival makes it does sound like it’s been dead.
Michael Kantor: So in the new production of Annie, Get Your Gun, don’t you have to be wary of a song about say, a topical song at the time that you sort of vernacular about Indians. I mean, give us an illustration about a song which nowadays just wouldn’t be acceptable.
Peter Stone: Annie Get Your Gun also pointed up two other things, and that is the changing mores and the changing posture of the country. Political correctness is somehow now, as everybody said, oh gosh, that’s a terrible thing, political correctness, it’s limiting. And yet, substitute the word insensitivity. It was very tough on Indians, the show. Originally, but we were all tough on Indians. We, I mean, that was part of our culture. We didn’t think about it. It just wasn’t, it was a sensibility we didn’t have at that time. We shot them off of horses and westerns, and we made fun of them with oogam oogaloo, and all the rest of it. And it was sort of a, you know, using, the way we had done with blacks in movies in the 30s, and the step-and-fetch it characters, and the maids, and the mammies, and rest of them. And blackface in, you know, in Jolson’s time. And we wouldn’t do that today. It’s offensive. You could do it, but, you now, and the other thing about any get your gun, besides Indians, It had an ending that was not very satisfying in terms of today’s social values. She gave up everything for her man. She gave her talent. She was better than he was. She gave us her profession, her life, which had to mean something. She gave it all up for to get him to love. And you don’t want to do that today. It’s one of the reasons Lady in the Dark hasn’t been done in all these years. It’s a woman having psychotic incidents. Because she’s running a company instead of being in the kitchen where she belongs. And you don’t want to do that today. It just isn’t, it is no longer the way we think. We have sensibilities that have changed. So if you’re going to do any, get you more importantly to do the feminine thing was even a little more important than the Indian thing, but you just don’t to do that plus the fact that that’s a great example of a song that had to be dragged in by the heels to be in the show in the first place. I’m an Indian too. Came at a very bad point in the book. She just lost her man, and now she’s, she just lost him. He walked out on her, and she has to do a kind of funny little Indian dance with a lot of whooping and a lot dancing around. Very bad time of the show. So I would have taken it out for that, I would’ve recommended taking it out for that reason alone. But it was insensitive. And the ending was also insensitive, and what’s the point? You know, a lot of people said, well, you should have left it. It was a classic and you should’ve left it You know, I mean, I would answer, why? If it’s offensive, why leave it? And it wasn’t offensive when it was written. It was offensive to Indians when it written, but we didn’t listen to that. It might have been offensive to women, but we did not listen to it either.
Michael Kantor: What happened tonight in the late 60s?
Peter Stone: When those three shows, there was a fourth, I don’t remember what it was, but there was up for the Tony’s. It was Promises, Promises. Hare. And 1776. The show that was the traditional show was Promises, Promises. That was what musicals, it was in the direct line of How to Succeed Business and those comedy musicals of the period. Very well done, beautifully assembled. Doc wrote a funny book, really funny book. And we had Bachrach and David had written a very, very good score, well directed, well played. And then on the other side, the exact flip side of that, excuse me, the flip side was Hare. Hare was the first show that allowed the generation gap that had appeared at this point in time when civil protest, not only did civil protest but rock and roll, all and dope. All of it arrived at the same kind of time. The parents didn’t understand the kids. The kids didn’t, were in revolt against their parents. Somehow, at this show, parents went because they wanted to understand their kids. Kids went because the wanted to show their parents what it was, if they cared. And it was a great generation gap filler. It filled that gap very, very well. It was very important, and not just in New York. It was successful all over the country. Very good score. Very well done. Nudity, flower children, all of the things that were just happening. And it was a wonderful show. The establishment of Broadway, didn’t quite know where to put it. Promises was in the total mainstream, promises, promises was in mainstream of musicals of that period. It was glib, it was well, I don’t use glib pejoratively, it was, it well done, well written, well directed, well produced. In 1776, it was like no show ever had been done. Since, none like it since. It fits no category whatsoever. That’s what’s so odd about it. It was a labor of love, but we all were compelled to do it. And I mean, for instance, the rules are you can’t go, if you went six minutes without a song, you were breaking every rule. We went 37 minutes in one scene without a songs. There were only 11 songs in the whole show and no reprises. It broke every rule there was, And yet, there was something. About it. It came also at a very good time. Interesting thing, we had a logo that sold the show. It was an egg with a British flag on the side. And the top of the egg had come off and a little tiny eaglet, a little scrawny looking bird came out with a little American flag at its beak. It was the American flag of the time with the 13th Colony. And that was our logo. And it was very, very, it was funny. It sold the shows very well. We were, the road company went out, went to San Francisco. And we found out we weren’t advanced. We had no advanced sale in San Francisco. We couldn’t understand it. It was doing very well everywhere. The publicity won the Tony. It won the Critics Awards. It won everything. And we’ve found out that the producers out there hadn’t used our logo. They had a screaming eagle. They had really the American eagle diving. It was Vietnam time. And especially San Francisco, but in the country, patriotism as such. Not the feeling of patriotism, but the word and the gestures, were not in favor. Then people saw this as some kind of pro-Vietnam, pro-American pageant. We got rid of it immediately when we heard it. We put the little egg with the little turkey, you know, the little chicken, the little eagle coming out with the British egg. The minute the new logo appeared, the sales took off. So there wasn’t, it wasn’t considered of its time to be pro-America of today. It was pro-American of then. The idea that the first great political revolution, the first successful political revolution in history of which everyone, the French, every other was patterned after. And it was a story of the. Gigantic events that took place because of the men involved. And what, and it just, and frankly, it was the better of the three shows. I mean, I’m not going to lie about it. It was. It’s lasted and it, you know, promises was a wonderful show. It’s not particularly done very much. Hair, they tried to bring it back just recently. But it’s old fashioned. One of the problems about hair is that now look at rent. And next to Rent, which is a show I enjoyed, I enjoyed its energy, I enjoyed it’s staging, I enjoyed the show very much. And Jonathan, the late Jonathan who wrote it. Who had been a student of mine at NYU was a wonderful, wonderfully talented young man. And it’s terrible that he didn’t survive to see his success. But I like that show, but it makes Hare look very old fashioned. Yasha Haifetz thought that Jerome Kern was every bit as melodious as Tchaikovsky. He thought he was a great, great composer of melody, and so were they all. Then something happened. South Pacific opened five songs on the hip parade before they opened. They were released. They were on the radio, the records and so forth. But now, the music, there’s no place for that music to be heard. The only, I mean, I did two shows with Richard Rodgers and the only place, they’re beautiful ballads and they’re in elevators and dentist’s offices. I hear them in Muzak. There’s no, you don’t hear them on the radios. You don’t find them in jukeboxes, you don’t get them anywhere. So those songs, now, in one sense, it’s good for book writers. They don’t have to reprise the ballad in the second act in order to sell the sheet music, because nobody’s buying the song. So they don’t even have to try to write commercial songs. What they have to write now are book songs, and they can be beautiful ballads, but they’ve got to be for the book. But the latest generation, and I don’t know what, who’s influenced them. I know they’re all, they’re, they, they all, feel they’re in Sondheim’s shadow somewhat, and I guess maybe they are, because he’s emerged as such a dominant figure in the musical. But the new generations don’t seem very interested in melody. Now, maybe it’s because there’s no place for melody. I can find five songs in the past 20 years that have come out of a musical, whether it’s, you know, and Send in the Clowns. It didn’t really emerge until long after the show was closed. I mean, after Judy Collins did it and Sinatra picked it up. But, you know, you’ve got a song from Chorus Line, What I Did for Love, and you’ve a song from Phantom, and a song from Annie, Tomorrow, but that’s it. I mean you can’t think of anything more. I mean hum me something from Les Mis. You know, hum me their song. You know hum me a song A lot of the new shows, how many, you know, that, now, Rent is different. I can hear those songs because they’ve been played. You hear them on radio, you hear them on disk, and they’re getting a play, so I can hear them. But the other songs, you’ve got to hear them that night, or by the cast album, and the cast album is no longer a profitable business. So maybe they don’t write melody because there’s no advantage to it. I don’t know.
