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[0:00] Kevin David Thomas: Hey listeners, Kevin and I need your help. Yes, we need your help. Please, please, please. We need your stars. We need your reviews, you guys, on iTunes so we can start to climb those iTunes rating charts. It's simple. Open iTunes, click on the iTunes store, search for BEHIND THE CURTAIN BROADWAY'S LIVING LEGENDS. Then click on Ratings and Reviews. Under the Customer Reviews, click Write a Review. Then let us know what you think, from one to five stars. If you need some help, think of one star being Carol Channing and Paul Lynn in The Road Company of the last five years, and five stars being free front row tickets to Hamilton. Although, when you think about it, I actually would give five stars to The Road Company of Carol Channing and Paul Lynn in the last five years, because I think that would be awesome.

I would love to hear, could I hear Moving Too Fast as Paul? That's the one I really want. She's a Shakespeare goddess. Been through Erika Schwartz and Danica Weiss and the Handelman twins. So, there you go. You can also leave a comment if you like. That's it. That's it. Send us your reviews. Please. Thank you. And now, part two of our interview with Martin Charnin.

[1:10] Martin Charnin: Fryer and Carr were the producers of Hotspot. I had met them, we both knew them quite well. The two guys who wrote the book were Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, the guys who had just written How to Succeed, who were both very bitter. And they were bitter because Abe Burroughs got a Pulitzer Prize and they didn't. And they had collaborated with Abe on the material. And I understood that bitterness. Anyway, we met them. And every session that we had, 20 minutes at the beginning of every collaborative session was, that son of a bitch and blah, blah, blah. And you'd go on and on and on. And those mothers at the Pulitzer Committee or whatever. So, you'd go through that and then you'd get to work.

But I understood it because it's a pretty major thing to have had happen. Anyway, the thing is, they were the book writers. The idea that we had come up with was, funnily enough, my idea. I found, and again, rooted in a real truth, a girl, the Peace Corps was a big deal at the time. A girl had written a postcard, a girl in the Peace Corps had written a postcard from whatever country she had been assigned to, back to her parents saying, this is the worst country I have ever been in. I can't believe the disease. I can't get a clean drink of water. I mean, it was a really awful card written back to her parents telling about how awful and the people who are working. She was really dumping on absolutely everything.

And it made the paper. It was in the New York Times. And I read it and I went to Mary and I said, you know, this would make a really great musical if somebody found the card like the Times did. And we told her story and we invented this whole musical about a fictional country that this Peace Corps girl goes to and ultimately falls in love with the American ambassador or envoy or whatever the hell he was then. And how she saves the country from communism. This is a musical about communism because there was an insurrection and they were trying to take over the country. And we wrote some really funny, funny, funny songs. And Mary wrote some exquisite melodies for it. And we did not know at the time that the auditions began for the role that Morton da Costa, who was the director, had in his mind, along with Friar and Carr, decided who was going to play the role of this girl.

And so we went on a kind of a hunt for who it was pure deception because he had Judy Holliday in mind for this entire thing from the very beginning. Judy also was nobody knew this either. She was very sick at the time. It was only about four months after we closed that she passed away. But under any circumstances, we went on this pretense of hiring, of auditioning other people. And Mary and I went downtown and saw in a cabaret a show called An Evening with Harry Stoones. And it had in it a young girl named Barbra Streisand. And Mary and I just went nuts and said, there she is. That's our Delcy Hopwinder. That was the name of the character in Hotspot. And we called her manager. We found out who her manager was, Marty Ehrlichman, who stayed with her for forever and may still be her manager.

I don't know. And we called him and said, we're serious. We're not just a couple of fly-by-night people. And we had credentials. We want to have Barbra come in and audition. And Barbra came up to Mary's house and we taught her three songs and two scenes. And we went on the stage of the Majestic Theater with her as an audition, to do her audition. She came on and she was breathtakingly funny and an unbelievable singer, as you can well imagine, early Barbra. And she finished her audition and Da Costa said, thank you. And then there was this silence. And she said, Barbra said, am I done? And Da Costa said, yes, thank you. And that was it. And she walked off stage, out into the street. And we were just gobsmacked, as you can probably imagine.

And she was really good. But she was Barbra. I mean, Barbra has never been anything but Barbra. There's been no dramatic change. There's been age, yes, whatever, but, you know, an occasional wrinkle here or there. But Barbra has not changed. Barbra now is, in my opinion, as good as Barbra then. And she was waiting on the corner outside the stage door. And I raced out and I said, I apologize for the behavior of my collaborators, but please, please don't go anywhere. And she was chewing on a peach. And she had a peach pit in her mouth. And she took the peach pit out and she threw it in the waste paper basket, the basket on the side of the street. And she said, no, that's okay. Goodbye. See you.

And she and Marty left. That was it. I went back into the theater and at the top of my lungs, stood in the middle of the stage and screamed, you are making the biggest mistake of your life. And Acosta just said, well, nobody will believe that anybody could fall in love with that face or kiss her. And whether or not that was accurate, he said that. But the reason he said it was because Judy Holliday was, excuse me, was already contracted. And Judy Holliday meant money in the till at the box office. She was a big star, yeah. Barbra was an absolute nobody except inside the community. Julie knew about her. We found out subsequently Julie Stein knew about her and everybody knew about her. And Julie ultimately about, I don't know, a week later signed her to do Funny Girl.

[8:32] Kevin David Thomas: Oh, wow. Wow. I mean, that's wild.

[8:36] Martin Charnin: Yeah. So that's Hotspot.

[8:40] Kevin David Thomas: Yeah, that's Hotspot. But we ended up using a couple of good songs from Hotspot. And there's never been a recording of it. Is that correct?

[8:51] Martin Charnin: There have been a couple of songs recorded. Margaret Whiting did a wonderful recording of a song called Hey Love that is on an album that I did many, many, many years later. Recently, Ted Chapin over at R&H found the script and sent it to me. And I've looked at it. It's very young and very dumb. And, you know, and it will never be done at Encores! I promise you. But there are some good songs and they're published. They're published at EH Morris. Well, now it's MPL. But they're around and they're out. You can get them.

[9:41] Kevin David Thomas: Great. Great, great, great. Well, we encourage all of our listeners to pick those up. Maybe a concert at some point of the music only.

[9:49] Martin Charnin: Well, they're all in all of them, in all of the Mary Roger tributes or concert stuff that she's done, there are only two or three songs included in. And a lot of cabaret people have picked up one song that we wrote for a drunken member of the Peace Corps. It was introduced by Mary Louise Wilson. A song called I Think the World of You, in which we just do spoonerisms. And so she sings the whole song is called I Winked the Thirld of You. So it's getting rid of the first consonant. And the whole song becomes a muddle of words. Oh, God, I've forgotten it. Anyway, it's a funny song.

[10:40] Kevin David Thomas: Oh, fantastic. I'm going to look that up, too.

[10:42] Martin Charnin: Go ahead.

[10:42] Kevin David Thomas: No, at the risk of losing like half the audience asking you this, because not a lot of people know about Zenda.

[10:50] Martin Charnin: No, hardly. I got a telephone call from my publisher, who was an investor in it, and said they need help. Will you get on a plane and go to California? This is a musical that starred Alfred Drake.

[11:09] Martin Charnin: Alfred Drake. A young Cheetah Rivera was in it, who you'd worked with in West Side Story.

[11:13] Kevin David Thomas: I have an LP of it.

[11:15] Martin Charnin: Do you really? But it's like a soundboard recording. But it was commercial. I mean, they released it. Ed Lester was the producer.

[11:24] Kevin David Thomas: Who did Kismet.

[11:25] Martin Charnin: Right, Song of Norway. And he was out there in California. And I have interviews with Ed Lester, newspaper interviews, in which he says he was gun shy. And he regretted the fact that he never brought Zenda in, because it had done wonderfully great business. It was a return to Broadway for Alfred Drake, and it was Cheetah, really her next job, I think, close to it. If not, I mean, West Side was 58, 57, 58. And this was 63. So it was five years. I don't know if she'd done anything between those two.

[12:12] Martin Charnin: And music by Vernon Duke.

[12:14] Kevin David Thomas: Vernon Duke. And that was great. He was a wonderful collaborator. But there were three lyric writers on that show. There were three people. And what happened was that when we, Vernon and I began to collaborate, Vernon wrote all the music. There were just three lyric writers. When Vernon and I began to collaborate and turned in all of these songs, Lester began to throw out all of the other guys' work. And we ended up writing about 11 after the job was only really to rewrite a couple for Alfred.

[12:48] Kevin David Thomas: Oh, wow. Wow, interesting.

[12:50] Martin Charnin: So there are a lot of Vernon Duke songs out there.

[12:54] Kevin David Thomas: And Vernon Duke, Mary Rogers, Richard Rogers, Charles Strauss, is it safe to say that your relationship and the way a song is created changes depending on the person that you're working with and the person you're collaborating with?

[13:09] Martin Charnin: Absolutely. There's no question about it. It depends. I mean, for example, on Charles Strauss, I've only written one, two shows with Charles, two shows with Dick, two shows with Mary. I also wrote an amazing score with Harold Arlen of a show that never got produced. And we wrote 55 songs together.

[13:36] Kevin David Thomas: What was that musical very quickly?

[13:38] Martin Charnin: It was called Softly.

[13:40] Kevin David Thomas: Softly.

[13:40] Martin Charnin: Yeah, it was wonderful. My wife sings a couple of songs in the nightclub.

[13:47] Kevin David Thomas: Arlen Chardon songs? I want that album.

[13:51] Martin Charnin: Well, actually, Bill Rudman, you know Bill Rudman?

[13:54] Kevin David Thomas: Very well. He's a good friend of mine.

[13:55] Martin Charnin: Well, Bill is trying to get me to put that whole stuff together. We should tell our listeners very quickly that Martin's wife is with us. And Martin's wife, you know her quite well. Shelly Birch, probably best known to all of our musical theater listeners out there as Claudia in Nine. Claudia in Nine. So every time you listen to Unusual Way, that is...

[14:19] Martin Charnin: You're welcome. You're welcome, everyone.

[14:22] Kevin David Thomas: That is the wonderful Shelly Birch. And she's with us today as well.

[14:25] Martin Charnin: There's a sweet story attached to Arlen. He and I had the same publisher, Buddy Morris, E. H. Morris, great guy. I'm still with that firm.

[14:40] Martin Charnin: And Harold would come up to the office, and I knew him a little bit. And one afternoon, I just wrote on a piece of paper, I could be good for you. And I tore it off and slipped it into his pocket. And we started to work because I really meant I could. He wasn't writing with anybody at the time. I think he had just finished the revival of House of Flowers with Truman. I don't remember, anyway. But we began to write. Hugh Wheeler was the book writer on the show. St. Subert, the producer. It was a wonderful show, but we never could solve the book. And every time we would rewrite, every time Hugh would rewrite a scene, Harold would not want to rewrite the song that we had written for the scene. He wanted to write a new song.

So we ended up writing all of these songs. We have two and a half scores. And in a nutshell, what was the plot of Softly? Unfortunately, it was too much like Madame Butterfly. It took place in Japan right after the war. The army of occupation, an American colonel falls in love with a Japanese girl, and he's married, and it ends tragically. And anyway, it didn't work. It ended up, as I said, being too close to Puccini. And Hugh could never lick it. So we abandoned it.

[16:16] Martin Charnin: What was it like writing for Danny Kaye? Impossible. I can sum up the whole Danny Kaye experience in two sentences. When asked, what's the best thing that ever happened to you on 2x2? And I would say hiring Danny Kaye. And then the next question is, what is the worst thing that ever happened to you hiring on 2x2? And the answer is exactly the same. Hiring Danny Kaye. He was naughty. I mean, I'm being gentle. We talked to Joan Copeland a little bit. I mean, and she had, she was so sweet, but she had some interesting stories, experiences on stage. Yeah, he was impossible to his fellow actors, to us. He was rude and disrespectful of the material. Even though the show is, I still think, wonderful and worthy, really worthy of being reproduced.

There's an album. The album is the best of Danny on his best behavior on that album, more controlled than he was on the stage. And he was mean and vindictive and angry because he didn't get a Tony nomination. And God knows what else was going on with him. But people do sing and occasionally sing a song. I have one wonderful, I wrote a song in that thing for Dick, with Dick, called I Do Not Know a Day I Did Not Love You, which is a really exquisite Rodgers melody and a pretty good lyric. It was a very easy, complicated, but easy lyric to write. And Tony Bennett made a breathtaking recording of it. And to this day, Tony Bennett says it is his favorite song. Last month on Jonathan Schwartz, they had Tony on and that's what he said again.

[18:33] Kevin David Thomas: Really?

[18:33] Martin Charnin: Yeah.

[18:35] Kevin David Thomas: That's great. It's a beautiful melody and a great lyric. This is two by two, by the way, everyone, we're talking about the musical. Will there ever be a revival of two by two?

[18:43] Martin Charnin: Well, we're trying to get encores to do it. I did a workshop of it at the York with Jason Alexander and Tova Felsha. And it was really well received. We did five performances and I had hoped that it would kick somebody into putting up the money for it. But nothing has happened. It's done in a couple of places all over the country. It's a very easy show to do, two sets before the flood and then on the ark. That's it. And eight people. So it's very inexpensive. Everyone knows the story.

[19:28] Martin Charnin: What was the collaboration with Richard Rogers like? Totally different than any other collaboration I'd ever had, mainly because Dick was a very, very isolated, private composer. I would write, I always wrote something first, title or four lines or an entire lyric. I would bring it to him at his Park Avenue apartment. He would look at it, he'd go, and then Dorothy, his wife would appear and say, go have a cup of coffee. And I would. And Dick would say, come back in a half an hour. And I'd come back in a half an hour and he would say, okay, sit down. And I would sit down and he, I mean, that's how it worked. And he would play what he'd written. He was very fast. And then the collaboration, collaborative part of it would really go to work.

I mean, they wouldn't be finished songs, but he would have certainly laid out what was going to happen. And we didn't write a lot of songs together for that show. And it was, I thought a very healthy collaboration, really healthy. And unfortunately, it was a terrifically funny book by Peter Stone. Yeah, really funny book. I, I, you don't like to assign blame, but it was misdirected. It was over-directed. Joe Layton had a weird idea of making the first act, a set about wood. They were in the, in the house was next to all of the trees that had to be cut down to put on the, to make the arc. And so the first act of Two by Two is every actor schlepping a piece of wood from one part of the stage to the other. Anyway, it's, it's a, it's worthy of, the score is worthy of, of, of re-examining. There are a lot of good songs in it.

[21:41] Kevin David Thomas: We agree wholeheartedly. If our listeners have not heard it, please, please, please, get out there. It is one of the best musical theater scores you'll ever hear, period. And speaking of great musical theater scores, I think it's time we get to Annie. I might as well bring it up. After we've talked about Hotspot. Is this the first interview where we talk about Hotspot for 10 minutes and Annie for five minutes? I don't know what, I don't know what to tell you about, anymore to tell anybody about Annie, except, I mean, I've just gone into rehearsal for the 20th time. It is probably one of the most optimistic shows in musical theater. And the song Tomorrow is probably the most optimistic song of the 20th century. So I have to ask you, are you an optimistic person yourself in your own life?

[22:28] Martin Charnin: No, I'm not. No, of course I am. Of course I am. I am, but nevertheless, I am optimistic. And yes, I believe that the sun will come out tomorrow and there is a better day around the corner. And I really firmly believe that every now and again, we all need a kind of tap on the shoulder to say, I know you're in the pits. I know it's awful. I know it's terrible. I agree with you, but wait, take another step. And it informs a lot of why I write and how I write.

[23:10] Kevin David Thomas: You got the rights to Annie in 1970, is that correct?

[23:13] Martin Charnin: Yes.

[23:13] Kevin David Thomas: And then it took, what, about six years?

[23:15] Martin Charnin: Seven years.

[23:16] Kevin David Thomas: Seven years.

[23:16] Martin Charnin: To get it to Broadway.

[23:17] Kevin David Thomas: To get it to Broadway, but first over at Goodspeed, correct?

[23:20] Martin Charnin: Right. To Goodspeed in 76.

[23:22] Kevin David Thomas: How did the show change from the Goodspeed production to the New York production? What major changes did you make?

[23:29] Martin Charnin: Well, there were a couple of really significant changes. Two in particular. One was the young lady that we hired to play the part originally was just too, what would the right word be to describe her? Innocent. She was not street smart. She was a lovely singer. I think she's now got a rock band, as a matter of fact. But nevertheless, she was just too sweet. And Annie is not sweet. Annie is spunky and tough and lovable, but tough. The exact opposite of what Shirley Temple would be in the movies. But when that change was made, it was made 10 days into the show, everything changed. And then finally, from a dramaturgical standpoint, the show originally opened with a musical number called Apples that we tossed out, which was a sort of an examination and explanation of the depression.

But the next song that we put there was Hard Knock Life. And when Andrea McArdle took over for the young lady who played the role originally, it became apparent that now that they really liked her and got her, that what our responsibility was, was to give her the song about what her mission is, what she wants. We got to learn that early and first. So maybe, which was the ballad that followed Hard Knock Life in the second scene, was switched. And it was kind of risky because what happened was, it was a lullaby and sung by a little kid sitting on the floor with another, putting another little girl to, comforting her, putting her to sleep. And it worked. And the minute that that, that was the first night that we got a standing ovation.

It was interesting that the two pieces finally fit together. And those were the base. I mean, you would do, we would do a lot of fixing. It was long. We had to excise moments. We were redundant in a couple of places. Songs were maybe switched around. The song that we had originally written for Rooster and Lily and Hannigan wasn't working and we changed that. There were only three songs that we really rewrote from Good Speed to Broadway. But the script basically changed in those directions. The ending was always the ending. New Deal for Christmas was always why, what we were aiming to do. Something was missing was in the first act, in the very first month of our work at Good Speed. And then it became apparent that it belonged somewhere else. So those kinds of changes. But the basic modular pieces of the show were always there. It was a question of putting them in the right order.

[26:55] Kevin David Thomas: What piece of advice would you give directors that are about to direct any of the musical? If you could tell them one thing to remember or to guide them in the right direction themselves, what would it be?

[27:04] Martin Charnin: Basically to honor the time and the place and what it's about. It's one of those iconic musicals, thank God, that does not need to be monkeyed with. And when you do it, you really change it. All of the attempts that were made by either Hollywood or television or whatever, that thought they could change it, make it better, have failed. And they failed quite publicly. I mean, people look at them and they go, well, that ain't Andy. So the last time that I saw it on Broadway, I did not like it at all. I thought it distorted the intention of the piece. And when that happens, the charm goes, the humor goes, the joy goes, the optimism goes. I don't think you have to look for anything in Andy. It's very much on the surface.

You don't have to invest it with an underpinning other than what's there. That's why that book is as good as it is. And that's why her spirit is as good as it is. And that's why it's been around since 1970, when we wrote it, till it was produced and put on at the Kennedy Center.

[28:29] Kevin David Thomas: I've always heard this story. I don't know if it's true that there was a production where it was a dream that Andy dreamed all of this. Is that correct?

[28:39] Martin Charnin: I was made aware of that. It was at Trinity Rep about five years ago, six years ago. And fortunately, Bill Berloni, who is our notorious, lovely dog handler, who has trained every one of our Sandys, was invited to give them the dog. And he brought the dog over and saw the first run-through of it and immediately got on the phone and said to me, you got to get up here as quickly as you possibly can. What they're doing is impossible.

[38:09] Martin Charnin: Did you have something else on your list?

[38:11] Kevin David Thomas: I'm so sorry. You know, I keep running into this musical you wrote that you were nominated for a Tony nomination for the first 1981, the Jackie Robinson musical.

[38:22] Martin Charnin: And as theater history people, I thought I knew most of the shows that have had accolades, but yet we don't know about. I didn't know. David Allen Greer was the star. I found him at Yale Drama School. It was a wonderful musical. Sanctioned by, well, Joel Siegel, who was a wonderful critic here in New York, wanted to write about Jackie. Came to me because I love baseball and had said he wanted to do this musical and I joined him. A young man named Bob Brush wrote the music. A wonderful team of choreographers and set designers, costumes, everything. We got maybe 20 raves and Frank Rich, who did not like it. And in those days, the New York Times really had a kind of power that it may have today to some extent, but not the kind that Frank had then.

And he didn't like it. And his not liking it was what wiped it out. I was on the same year that Dreamgirls and Nine were on. Hello, Jelly. And I was nominated. A lot of things. David was nominated for Tony. I was nominated for directing it. It presents a gigantic problem in terms of it being done. It's because it must have two totally different casts. It has to have a black cast and a white cast in order to have the point of the show made. And that outnumbers the budget everywhere, the budget of any opportunity. It's done infrequently in a lot of places. Colleges can do it when they can field a team of African-American baseball players and white baseball players because that's what the point of it is.

It is a show that has to show the reluctance that the National League and all the baseball and fans had to Jackie's being the first to break the color barrier. There's a great one. There was a wonderful scene at the end of the play. It's when the Dodgers win the pennant. And when the show, which is a blaze of color and contrast between black and white, when I killed all the lights except one light on the backdrop and all you saw were these guys jumping up and down on one another and nobody had any color. It was a grand moment and everybody just wept at the point that was being made. But we don't get it done because it's too expensive.

[41:27] Kevin David Thomas: Wow. Interesting. Well, thank you for that.

[41:29] Martin Charnin: Sure. Now, what's up next for you?

[41:32] Kevin David Thomas: Well, what's up next is, well, a couple things. One is Shelly Nightclub Cabaret Act which is being done at the Metropolitan Room.

[41:41] Martin Charnin: Fantastic.

[41:42] Kevin David Thomas: She'll be there on December...

[41:46] Martin Charnin: 1st and 12th.

[41:47] Kevin David Thomas: 1st and 12th. Excellent. December 1st and 12th, Shelly Birch Metropolitan in New York City. Metropolitan Room. And then I'm doing another musical about Raoul Wallenberg, one of the great unsung...

[42:02] Kevin David Thomas: Which you're directing.

[42:03] Martin Charnin: Yes, I'm only directing it.

[42:05] Kevin David Thomas: Excellent.

[42:06] Martin Charnin: I'm only directing it. Only. I'm directing it. We just did a four-week lab which received splendid, splendid response.

[42:17] Kevin David Thomas: Wonderful.

[42:18] Martin Charnin: And it's about the man who saved a hundred thousand Jewish lives in Hungary in the Second World War.

[42:25] Kevin David Thomas: Wow.

[42:26] Martin Charnin: But nobody really knows anything about him. Whose name isn't taught in schools.

[42:30] Kevin David Thomas: No, no, no.

[42:31] Martin Charnin: Like Schindler or something like that.

[42:33] Kevin David Thomas: No, no, no. Schindler isn't taught in schools, certainly. No, we only know from the movie. But nobody knows about Raoul Wallenberg and it's something that is necessary particularly now in this particular moment in time. So maybe... I mean, it's been around for a while. There have been a couple of workshops and a couple of versions of it. But I finally got it in. Wonderful team of collaborators. Benji Rosenbluth who wrote the score and Lawrence Holtzman and Felicia Needleman who wrote the book and lyrics. And we've worked on it and worked on it for about three years and it takes time.

[43:12] Kevin David Thomas: Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, and this one had to go through a lot of trials and errors in terms of how to tell this story. But it is... it's a stunning story and hopefully... maybe if we're lucky the end of 17 but certainly 18.

[43:34] Kevin David Thomas: Great. I'm glad to hear that. We cannot wait to see it. And thank you so much.

[43:39] Martin Charnin: Thank you both so much.

[43:40] Kevin David Thomas: My pleasure.

[43:41] Martin Charnin: Our pleasure.

[43:42] Kevin David Thomas: Thank you.

[43:43] Martin Charnin: Thanks.