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[0:00] Paul Lazarus: Hi, this is Paul Lazarus. In the 1980s, I produced and hosted a radio series called Anything Goes, a celebration of the American musical theater. Now, the Broadway Podcast Network is bringing back these shows. Today, part two of a three-part look at the career of Broadway composer-lyricist Maury Yeston. Yeston is perhaps best known for his remarkable score for Nine, the musical version of Fellini's famous movie, Eight and a Half. This program was originally broadcast in 1982.

[0:40] Maury Yeston: Have there been a lot of songs cut along the way? Not a lot, no. Mostly additions. It's very rarely that one has written an awful song, and it's simply terrible and we can't use it. It's always, I think, in the professional theater that the song is not apt. Very often, it's the very best work that you do that's your enemy and that has to go, and it's often very difficult for writers to cut it because you fall in love with your work. Two fascinating cases in Nine were the two songs originally written for the mistress, Carla. The first one was called Let It Be Love, in which she calls him up on the phone and says, I wish you would finally tell me that you absolutely love me. And the second was a song called Belongings, in which Guido explains to her in the second act, what do you want me to do with my wife and my belongings?

I have to go back to her. I can't stay with you. And again, this is an absolutely wonderful suggestion from an inspiring director. Tommy Tune said to me, this woman is so marvelously intelligent and urbane and she's just like the wife who was just like the actress, and don't you think you could rethink how you've written this role and make her different? She should call him up while he's with his wife or while he's with his producer and try to turn him on with a dirty phone call. And three days later, I said, I have something to play for you. I had written A Call From The Vatican. He said, yeah, that's right.

[2:23] Maury Yeston: Guido. Pronto. Signor Contini. Telephone. Go ahead. Guido. I was blazing around my bedroom when an idea occurred to me. I thought you might be wondering about Guido. Who's not wearing any clothes? I'm not, my darling, so brave to kiss your toes. I'm not, your mama dear is blowing into your ear. So you get it loud and clear. I need you to squeeze me here and here and here. Is something wrong? I'm not sure yet. It's about my film. It's from the Vatican. Go ahead, Monsignor. Chiku, chiku, chiku. I've got you for playing for water, but not due to you. So hot. You're gonna scream and scream and vibrate like a stream. I'm looking. You're funny, but little brown. Pinch your cheeks till you say ow. And I can hardly wait to show you how. But this will have to be enough. Enough for now. Guido. I love you, Guido.

[5:47] Paul Lazarus: Anita Morris performing A Call From The Vatican from the score to Nine. You're listening to Anything Goes with guest Maury Yeston. Maury spoke about the audition process in which the 21 extremely talented women were cast for the Company of Nine.

[6:04] Maury Yeston: The women were absolutely marvelous. We asked them to be prepared to sing not only their audition song, but a song in a foreign language. Because we are a European piece and we wanted to make sure that they had that potential. And some of the songs in European languages were hysterically funny. Somebody came in and sang a song called Siffler en Travaillant, which is whistle while you work.

[6:29] Paul Lazarus: So she had translated it or that was it?

[6:31] Maury Yeston: Yes, she had translated. That was Elena Warren Zachary, who plays one of the Germans. Oh, wonderful. And of course, people come in and they knock you off your chair. Liliane Montevecchi arrived on our stage on her way back to Paris, I guess, from Hollywood. And she said, hello, I've just come from Hollywood. I went there to give them a chance to make me a star, but they did not want to. So I am here. I am looking for a job. Any job will do, even some small role, as long as I am on the stage for five minutes alone. And I don't know who it was. It may have been Tommy Tune. It may have been Arthur Kopit. Somebody said, couldn't she be the producer? She's so electric and she talks so wonderfully.

And we said, all right, after all, the producer is a non-singing role and it didn't even matter how she sang. And we didn't hear her sing. And we offered her the role of the producer. And when I heard her sing one note, I knew that she was as much as we have left of that which we love dearly in Maurice Chevalier and so very wonderful in her own right.

[7:46] Paul Lazarus: You wrote Follies Bergère for her?

[7:47] Maury Yeston: Oh, absolutely. Follies Bergère is something that happened on a tablecloth of, it's true, of the Century Café. I was sitting there and thinking about the scene. I said, well, gee, why? She's a French producer. Why shouldn't she say, continue? You know, I thought she was going to make a musical movie, you know, make me something like Follies Bergère, give me singing. And I wrote Follies Bergère.

[8:11] Maury Yeston: The cinema today is in a crisis. Directors are so existentialist. Their movies are not where they're at trans prices. If no one sings a love song when they're kissed. Continue, I want a musical. Love cannot be love without the singing. A string, a clarinet, a saxophone. Take a lesson from this old Parisian and the finest entertainment she has known.

[8:57] Maury Yeston: Follies Bergère. What a showing of color, costume and dancing. Not a moment in life could be more entrancing than an evening used by the Follies Bergère. Follies Bergère. Not a soul in the world would be in despair when he is glancing at the fabulous stage of Follies Bergère. Think of the footlights bright and gleaming. The striptease, the cancan we all adore. Life is too short without dreaming and dreams are what the cinema is for. Follies Bergère. Music and dance are the light. And I say this to the beautiful bouquets when I pass by the Follies Bergère.

[10:13] Maury Yeston: Karen Akers was known primarily as a cabaret singer and not a stage performer. Why was she given the role of Guido's wife, Louisa? All kinds of wonderful reasons. In the audition process, very often people will come in to audition for you and move you surprisingly. Karen, who is beautiful, statuesque, tall, marvelously composed, aristocratic, has herself been educated in Northern Italy and has what might be called a Northern Italian aristocratic bearing, came in to audition for us and she sang a song and destroyed us. She destroyed us with her directness, with her absolute lack of pretense, but her voice was considerably lower than what might be called the tessitura that I had conceived of the wife's role to be.

And so I asked her to come back and I tried various transpositions of the song that the wife would sing and made some alterations. And I was terribly happy with her sincerity, her musical brilliance and her bearing for the part of my colleagues. I think Tommy Tune said it best. She is a wife. There's something about her personal dignity and the way it communicates to an audience on a stage that makes her somehow unassailable. She retains her dignity in spite of the fact that her husband is playing around with two, three, four different women. And she manages a slow burn to anger that lasts almost an hour and a half before she explodes.

[12:13] ♪ Musical number: "My Husband Makes Movies" — performed by Karen Akers ♪

[15:33] Maury Yeston: Thank you very much, Mrs. Contini. Several critics came down on Raul Julia's voice, which I personally think he has a great voice, and what he doesn't sing, he acts through, certainly. Were you at all worried about his singing abilities when you cast him? Not at all, not at all. As a matter of fact, the moment we went into rehearsal, we immediately put Raul in touch with a wonderful musical teacher, vocal coach. His name is Tom Hageman. He's here in New York, and Tom taught Raul how to use his voice in the best possible sense, so that the more he sings, the stronger his voice gets. Singing and acting at the same time is probably one of the most difficult things one can do, and there's always a trade-off.

There's always a kind of a compromise, but in cases of people like Raul, I don't think you have to make that compromise. It could be that the odd critic came on a night when his voice was scratchy. Don't forget that I think that Guido Contini is probably one of the most demanding male roles ever in terms of range and variety and length of song and the number of songs that have to be sung. One of the most demanding male roles in the musical theatre. I couldn't be more pleased with how it's all worked out. I think he sounds wonderful on the record. Very, very strong.

[17:40] Paul Lazarus: Oh, yeah. It's hard to picture anybody else doing it.

[17:45] Maury Yeston: Yes, it is. I thought about who could you have used. He's right. He's right. He's boyish. He's vulnerable. He looks like Mastroianni. He moves beautifully. He's a wonderful actor. He's got passion, spontaneity, and interestingly enough, his accent continually works to his advantage in this role. I respectfully disagree with John Simon, who said it was the wrong accent, that it didn't seem to him like an Italian accent.

[18:14] Paul Lazarus: It's a flavouring, which it adds.

[18:16] Maury Yeston: It's a flavouring, yes. It adds. Tell me about that fabulous new singing ensemble, the Mori Tabernacle Choir.

[18:22] Maury Yeston: The Mori Tabernacle Choir. Well, when you're a little boy, well, when you're alone with your little Tiak, it's difficult sometimes to ask people to conceive of a counterpoint, and very often we conceive musical numbers that require things like countermelody, that require the sound of masked voices, and what with the technology of home taping these days, very often when I do write a number that involves multiple voices, I simply take myself and I sing all the parts myself, and my family calls it the Mori Tabernacle Choir, and you know, to do the Germans at the Spa, I simply sing all the parts of the Germans at the Spa, generally at breakneck speed, four times faster than it will ever appear in any show.

[19:17] Maury Yeston: Renate, take the sheets and the pillowcases from the East Wing and bring them over to the West Wing. And Alfredo, take the blankets to the North Wing and bring them over to the South Wing. And for Christ's sakes, hurry up, they'll be here any minute. Clear the decks, be alert. We'll clear the decks, we'll be alert. Fix your tie, fix your skirt. We'll fix our tie and skirt. Be prepared to change a foreign coin. Deutschmarks, francs, kroner, phoenix, schillings, you all know what to do. We all know what to do. They're on their way, you know who. They're on their way, you know who. Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun. The Germans at the Spa. The Germans at the Spa. They'll soon be arriving here to spend a lost weekend in Shangri-La.

The Germans at the Spa. Descend from German mounts. They come to take the waters with the daughters of Italian count. How we love to have the Germans at the Spa. Carefully avoiding any slight faux pas. For the Germans at the Spa. For the Germans at the Spa. For the Germans. Alles must be perfect. The Germans are coming. The Germans are coming. Roll out the Wiener schnitz. Roll out the Wiener schnitz. They'll soon be arriving. The Spa will be thriving. They'll come, they'll sit, they'll schwitz. They'll come, they'll sit and schwitz. Be sure there's lots of...

[20:27] Maury Yeston: Why did you go to her?

[20:29] Maury Yeston: To see what she was like.

[20:31] Maury Yeston: Each day at St. Sebastian in the classroom we would hear that devils lurked behind every corner.

[20:37] Maury Yeston: If you tried to look, they would disappear.

[20:41] Maury Yeston: The nuns at St. Sebastian tried to teach the facts of life, explaining there are two kinds of women.

[20:47] Maury Yeston: One was a whore.

[20:50] Maury Yeston: One was a wife.

[20:53] Maury Yeston: But the music of the ringing was a different world that opened through our singing.

[20:59] Maury Yeston: When we were singing, Kyrie eleison! Kyrie eleison! Kyrie eleison!

[21:07] Maury Yeston: They rang at dawn.

[21:09] Maury Yeston: They rang at dawn.

[21:10] Maury Yeston: They rang at midnight.

[21:12] Maury Yeston: They rang at midnight.

[21:13] Maury Yeston: Towns were rounded.

[21:15] Maury Yeston: They sounded down the day for all the souls of little boys at St. Sebastian, too young to save.

[21:23] Maury Yeston: Kyrie eleison! Eleison!

[21:28] Maury Yeston: Christe eleison! Eleison!

[21:35] Maury Yeston: It brought such shame on us.

[21:38] Maury Yeston: But Mama, I didn't know.

[21:40] Maury Yeston: For young Jeph, St. Sebastian, country cheese and buttered bread.

[21:46] Maury Yeston: A prayer we never learned, sung in Latin.

[21:51] Maury Yeston: Then a midday nap in a makeshift bed.

[21:56] Maury Yeston: Then the music of the ringing.

[22:01] Maury Yeston: Then the music of our singing.

[22:06] Maury Yeston: When we were singing, Kyrie eleison! Kyrie eleison! Kyrie eleison!

[22:13] Maury Yeston: Kyrie eleison!

[22:17] Maury Yeston: We should have known.

[22:19] Maury Yeston: We should have known.

[22:21] Maury Yeston: They should have warned us.

[22:23] Maury Yeston: They should have warned us.

[22:25] Maury Yeston: At St. Sebastian.

[22:27] Maury Yeston: At St. Sebastian.

[22:29] Maury Yeston: They'd never spare the day.

[22:31] Maury Yeston: They'd never spare the day.

[22:35] Maury Yeston: But in the music of the bells at St. Sebastian, we look for God.

[22:41] Maury Yeston: Kyrie eleison!

[22:55] Maury Yeston: Guido, where are you running to?

[23:11] Maury Yeston: Ralph Julia, leading the company of nine in the bells of St. Sebastian's.

[23:17] Maury Yeston: A song written by my guest today on Anything Goes, Maury Yeston.

[23:23] Maury Yeston: You've been listening to part two of a three-part look at the career of talented composer-lyricist Maury Yeston.

[23:30] Jeff Lunden: Associate producer Jeff Lunden.

[23:33] Jeff Lunden: Anything Goes, backstage with Broadway's best, is produced and hosted by Jeff Lunden.

[23:37] Jeff Lunden: Jeff Lunden.

[23:38] Jeff Lunden: Jeff Lunden.

[23:39] Jeff Lunden: Jeff Lunden.

[23:40] Jeff Lunden: Jeff Lunden.

[23:41] Jeff Lunden: Jeff Lunden.

[23:42] Jeff Lunden: Jeff Lunden.

[23:43] Jeff Lunden: Jeff Lunden.

[23:44] Jeff Lunden: Jeff Lunden.

[23:45] Jeff Lunden: Anything Goes, backstage with Broadway's best, is produced and hosted by Paul Lazarus.

[23:50] Jeff Lunden: For more information, visit anythinggoespl.com.

[23:54] Jeff Lunden: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and follow us.

[23:58] Jeff Lunden: Thanks for listening.

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