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[0:00] Justin Levine: Hi, I'm Justin Levine, and you are listening to The Theatre Podcast with Alan Seales.

[0:04] Alan Seales: Happy whatever day it is today, everyone. Welcome back to The Theatre Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Seales, and our episode today is with Justin Levine, an actor, a musical theatre book writer, composer, lyricist, orchestrator, and arranger. This episode, of course, is still part of the Outsiders podcast takeover currently in effect, so make sure to scroll back in the podcast feed and check out past episodes with many other Tony-nominated peeps from the show, and also make sure to follow the podcast if you aren't already to get the rest of the takeover that's going to be released in the next series of episodes. So Justin told his story about how he started writing music as a job, and it kind of blew me away.

The guy basically plays instruments and makes entire orchestral arrangements playing by ear. It's insane. Of course, he exposes more of the creative juice that went into the creation of The Outsiders, a topic I honestly could talk about for days simply because I just love to know how things are made. So don't forget to find me online on all the socials, and now everyone, please enjoy this episode with Justin Levine.

[1:33] Alan Seales: Today's guest is a theatre book writer, lyricist, music supervisor, and orchestral arranger. Say that five times fast. Orchestral, orchestral, orchestral. Orchestral arranger with Broadway credits that include Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Moulin Rouge!, and Here Lies Love. Additional credits include creating original music for Shakespeare in the Park’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, arranging vocals for Vevo x Lorde - Melodrama, music directing Love's Labour's Lost, music directing The Robber Bridegroom at the Roundabout Theatre, and music directing Murder Ballad at MTC and Union Square Theatre. He is now the co-book writer, co-lyricist, music supervisor, and orchestral arranger for The Outsiders. Now on Broadway, Justin Levine. Welcome to The Theatre Podcast. Man, got to get through that intro. Sorry about that.

[2:13] Justin Levine: Don't be sorry.

[2:21] Alan Seales: Oh, dude. I just thought it was really interesting how much love and murder you have on your resume.

[2:26] Justin Levine: There's a lot. Lots of love and murder directing. I mean, you know, it's just those are the jobs that come to me, I guess.

[2:31] Alan Seales: Well, three out of your four Broadway credits are with just Alex Timbers, which of course, maybe he's got the secret love for love and murder.

[2:44] Justin Levine: Yeah, we should get him on this and figure out what's going on.

[2:48] Alan Seales: Alex is a shy guy. He does not like interviews. I'm sure you know. I'm sure you know that.

[2:55] Justin Levine: I do know.

[2:55] Alan Seales: Or maybe he's just a quiet guy. Well, then let's start there. Okay, we'll go back to the very beginning. So where did you grow up and what really got you into performing in music?

[3:05] Justin Levine: So I grew up on Long Island in a town called Northport, which is actually also the hometown of Patti LuPone and Edie Falco. And I started out performing as an actor. You know, as most theatre artists, I think, you know, we end up doing that. And that's kind of our way into it. And so I started by just doing the school plays and musicals. And, you know, the program that we had was a great program, but we also, you know, built sets and, you know, painted flats. And often, you know, just we're doing, you know, crew and we were doing our, like we would do the fall plays and stuff. And so that was how I started. And then music was always a part of my life. And I come from a very musical family. But I don't think I ever really thought of music as what would be my living or my career path. I think I saw myself more as somebody who would be writing and performing.

[4:14] Alan Seales: So you knew you always wanted to write though, like to write music or just write like book?

[4:20] Justin Levine: I would write music for fun. But I would say for the most part...

[4:25] Alan Seales: At what age? At what age were you just going out be like, I'm bored, I'm gonna write music?

[4:29] Justin Levine: I probably started doing that around middle school or, yeah, middle school and high school. But I, you know, I grew up, I'm a lot older than my siblings. And so I mostly grew up as an only child. And so you kind of have to keep yourself occupied. And so I would, you know, come up with ideas for plays and movies and things. And I, but I loved to perform. So that was really where, I think where, you know, that was my entrance into it. And I grew up watching all the classic musical movies. And growing up on Long Island, we, you know, my family, we would come into the city all the time and see Broadway shows, plays and musicals.

[5:13] Alan Seales: Do you remember your first show you ever saw?

[5:20] Justin Levine: So we haven't quite figured out exactly which is the first one. But some of the early productions I saw were the original production of Into the Woods, Once on this Island. What else? Cats, of course. I saw, I mean, yeah, Les Mis, Phantom, you know, all those shows from the, you know, late 80s, early 90s.

[5:40] Alan Seales: Yeah. The British Invasion. Yeah. Late 80s. You're right. That's the exact time. And then, you know, Rent came in in the early, in the 90s. And it helped to end that.

[5:49] Justin Levine: So in middle school, you're writing music. And I would assume that you had some sort of knowledge of music theory. And you said you come from a musical family. So am I correct in assuming that, like, you were taking lessons with instruments? Or what were you doing at this point?

[6:04] Justin Levine: No, actually. So from the time I was about three years old, I loved to go up to the piano in our house and play. And so both my parents studied. My dad had more of a background in jazz. My mom was classically trained. She was a bit of a child prodigy in her day. And interestingly enough, I was never... My mom was actually, was a piano teacher for about 25 years. But I never took lessons with her because, I mean, think about it. It would be like if your mom was a therapist or a doctor, you're not necessarily gonna go there. And we tried, but my mom actually, I think she took the smart... She had a smart take on it, which was, she could see that I loved it and enjoyed it and wanted to play around, that I was figuring things out. And so she wanted to let it be fun. And that's what she did. And so as a result...

[7:03] Alan Seales: That was smart.

[7:04] Justin Levine: Yeah, I ended up... But what's interesting is I'm not really much of a reader musically, and I play by ear. So it's interesting that I wound up doing what I do, but I don't have any real formal background in music. I did, when I was in high school, take a music comp course, and it was a teacher, Mr. Doyle, who actually said to me, I know that you'll already know a lot of the things that we'll talk about in class, but I think it might be useful for you to put names to things, and understand why those things are the way that they are. I also had a great choir teacher, and so I learned how to sight-read vocal lines and things like that. And also, we sang really challenging music. And so I was definitely learning music that way. But as far as studying theory, I never really had that background.

[8:06] Alan Seales: I'm dumbfounded and blown away that you fell into this career that you are in, just by learning to play basically by ear. That's insane.

[8:15] Justin Levine: I'm dumbfounded by it, too. So the first show that Alex and I did together, Bloody Bloody, I remember always thinking, oh, what a cool thing. This is one of those rare opportunities where because of music, I'm able to also be an actor in a show and a performer. And so I sort of thought of music directing as a night job, and that it was this thing that I was going to do that would get my foot in the door, and then pursue acting. And what's so interesting about it to me is that when I look back on it, I clearly wasn't very motivated to be an actor. I feel like actors have to have so much discipline, and so much self-motivation. And I find that stuff really challenging. And that I wasn't getting myself headshots, and I wasn't working on material.

I wasn't reading backstage and trying to fit. Something clearly subconsciously was telling me that that wasn't what I actually wanted to do. But I think, like many of us, when we start out, and we go to, even when I think about it in college, I mean, I went to Tisch School of the Arts, and I was at Playwrights, and I did the classical program. I spent a year studying Shakespeare and acting classical text. But the truth of the matter is, all of that, I would say, informs the way that I work more than anything. And that my teacher in college, Louis Sheeter, who created and ran the classical program at NYU, his style of rehearsal is probably my greatest influence in terms of how I've worked with performers.

[10:08] Alan Seales: So do you still have a part of you that wants to continue acting? Or are you truly into the music path now, the music creation?

[10:16] Justin Levine: Consciously, no. I don't feel the bug. I do love making music and performing music. And I do think that if the right thing were there, I would definitely love to do it again. But I mean, it's been so long. And actually, Alex gave me my last acting job, my last equity contract, which was, we did Love's Labour's Lost at the Delacorte in Shakespeare in the Park, and I played Moth in that production. And in that production, I was also the music director, and I was also orchestrating it with Michael Friedman. And I was confused all the time, because I was wearing so many hats.

[11:00] Alan Seales: Wow. I still can't imagine. Well, okay, so you're learning your lines, and you've got to dive into the work and learn the script and the blocking and blah, blah, blah. And then you're also creating the music. And I'm still trying to physically picture the process of orchestrating, because doesn't an orchestra score, it's super tall with 18 lines for every instrument and all of this?

[11:20] Justin Levine: Absolutely. So yes. And I've been orchestrator on a number of shows. And really, the way I break it down for people is, so there's orchestrating and there's arranging, right? Arranging is largely the initial work I did, let's say on Moulin Rouge, where it was building a score out of pop songs.

[11:49] Justin Levine: You're figuring out which verse, or line, or lyric you're going to place where, and how you're going to string it all together. So, what are you going to thank for the Elephant Love Medley? There you go. Well, I like to thank Baz, and Anton, and everybody else, and Marius for the Elephant Love Medley, but my version of it was an arrangement, right? And then the orchestration process was figuring out which instruments play what, right? And so, uh, John and Zach from Jamestown Revival, you know, they do that with their band, when they're like, hey, yeah, I want it to be half-time here, and I want it to go to this, and, you know, it's collaborative. And, you know, most shows that I orchestrate, I am not the only credited orchestrator on, because I know that this is a collaborative process, and the same is true on The Outsiders.

You know, I'm working with Matt Hinkley, our music director, and he's been in the trenches with me for years now, and we have, you know, we have additional arrangements by credits going to a number of our band members as well, because of those contributions as well. So, when it comes to how do you go from being somebody who can't read music to a score that you hand to a band, it's been different on every show. In the past, I've done it where it's in the room with the band, and I'm building on the band. And with Moulin Rouge! in particular, the initial process was I went into the studio with Matt Stein, and he engineered all these sessions where we built demos. And so, I played most of the instruments, either via MIDI for the horns and the strings, but then I played a lot of guitar for these demos.

I played bass, I played, you know, piano, organ. Sometimes I play a little mandolin, you know, a banjo, other things, but that basically, we would build demos. And then, in the case of Moulin Rouge!, I really wanted the strings and the horns to have the integrity that they had in the film. But also, I loved the idea of the chaos of it. And so, I thought, what better show than to have a big team? And so, that was Katie Kresick really focusing on the strings, and Charlie Rosen really focusing on the horns, and Matt focusing on a lot of the Ableton programming and electronic side. So, it really was this beautiful, you know, combination of very different artists making something together. And I saw myself, when I hired everybody, I said to them, you know, think of me as the team captain or as the quarterback.

And, you know, I'm going to call the plays, and I'm going to start this off with this, but I want everybody to feel like they can bring themselves to it. And that's how I like to do it. I think largely because I work on a lot of genre-driven musicals.

[14:51] Alan Seales: Okay, so many questions I have around that, because I didn't even realize that it was sort of separated. There's like the horn department, and the strings department, and the organ and piano, and then I'm sure...

[14:57] Justin Levine: That was sort of how we set it up, because Charlie is a brilliant horn arranger, and Katie is a gorgeous violin player, and also just understands those instruments. And Katie and I have worked together for a long time. We've done a lot of pop gigs together, and she had said to me once that she was subbing on a show, a Broadway show, and that she could tell that whoever did the string arrangements didn't play the strings, right? And that they were clearly like a piano player's idea of what the strings should do. And so when she said that to me, I thought, I remember, I wasn't even working on Moulin Rouge! at the time, but I thought to myself, if I ever do a show that requires a lot of strings, I'm going to call her.

And so, you know, there are numbers in Moulin Rouge! where the string parts are what I had initially set out, and she helped translate them to those instruments. And then other times, there are things where you listen to it, and you're like, that is Katie Cressick's brilliance. And the same goes for Charlie, and a lot of it is about cultivating a truly collaborative process. And I think, on The Outsiders, you know, I've been working on this music with Jamestown for a really long time. Hinckley joined us as the music director, and he was inside of all that. But because he is both a great musician and also has an incredible ear and knowledge of theory and how to represent that on the page, a lot of times he would sit with me, thank goodness, and would say, okay, what do you want here?

And so, I would literally sing it out loud, or I would play it. And, you know, I've been told, I don't know if this is a fact, but I've been told that Danny Elfman often composes and orchestrates like that when he does film scores. You know, I think it's about just surrounding yourself with people who believe in what you're doing, and have that knowledge that I don't have and are able to help translate that.

[17:06] Alan Seales: Where does the decision come in to actually give someone credit for this sort of thing? Because, for example, you know, your actors, when you're putting a show together, when they're originating a role, there are so many of the actors' movements and natural lines or flubs or things that, like, they try something and it works, and then the director says, keep it. And then it makes its way in, right. But they don't get writer credit for all that stuff.

[17:32] Justin Levine: I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about this. What I will say is that, for me, it usually feels pretty clear when you've gone from a place of a natural collaborative process where the best idea wins over into the line of authorship of whatever domain you're referring to. But I also think it's a matter of, so for example, in some cases, including Moulin Rouge, there are people who contributed in my mind, who I would not say orchestrated the show, but their work influenced the orchestrations to the extent that I gave them equity in the orchestration. So they're not credited as an orchestrator, but I gave them equity because I think of it almost in the way that you think about a startup, right. So if you worked at Google way back in the day, and let's say you were an office manager, you weren't, they weren't able to pay you an adequate wage, and so you were given stock options.

To me, it's about sweat equity more than it is about authorship. And I think it's different on every show, because at the end of the day, to me, it's important that if I'm working with somebody, it's not so much that I'm saying, I want all of your ideas. I just want us to be able to work in a way in which people are going to feel free to express themselves and be comfortable with a yay or a nay without it feeling like someone's going to steal something from them.

[19:05] Alan Seales: Time for a quick commercial break. Hang on a second.

[19:10] Justin Levine: Welcome back to the episode. You see it happen from time to time where people have this conversation. I know it happened on Hamilton. And to me, it's less about whether or not Lynn wrote those words. Lynn wrote those words, right? And Lynn wrote those melodies. But, you know, I think about those beautiful relationships that Lynn himself has cultivated, be it with Alex, I think of Alex Lacamoire as a great example of that. That is a collaborator, you know, of the highest order. And so, for me, it's something that is assessed every time I work on something, but that I am somebody who wants the people around me not to just simply feel like it's my way or the highway. What I always say when I invite people into that process is, I'm the team captain, and therefore, my eye on the vision of it will ultimately be not just a tiebreaker, but will be the sort of North Star of what we're doing. But that's also why I try to surround myself with people that I admire and people whose taste I admire.

[20:19] Alan Seales: Do you have a point when there's too much of your collaborators that are taking away from your North Star? And then even still, when you're working on a project and originating and building like this, especially something as well known as The Outsiders, Danya, is it fair to say she's the ultimate captain of the biggest ship because she's the director or the producer beyond that, but like from the creative team building?

[20:43] Justin Levine: Yes, I would say Danya is definitely our captain. And what I love about Danya is that she has a vision, and it's a vision that we all believed in. And so, but Danya is the ultimate collaborator, and somebody who does want to hear from everybody and wants to really think everything through. So, when we got to freezing the show, the way I felt about it was somewhat different than I often feel when we freeze a show, where I thought, we left everything on the field. From the time we did La Jolla and actually saw what the show looked like, and how an audience responded to it, to the time we got to New York. I think about all that space between, she didn't let anybody take a break, you know? And I loved it, and I was there for it, because she was in the trenches with us the minute she jumped into the project.

And so, yes, I think that what I really respect about Danya is that in addition to being such a bold and fearless creator, she also believes in the best idea winning, and also leans on her collaborators. And in the case of The Outsiders, you know, she leaned on me a lot as somebody who works primarily in musical theater. But she was the best student of the art form I've ever seen. I mean, she literally went to see every single musical she possibly could, from the minute she got that job. And of course, also has a background in it herself, and comes from a pretty brilliant family of creators of, you know, certainly one very successful piece of musical theater we can think of.

[22:39] Alan Seales: Oh, Lion King, Julie Taymor. Yeah, Danya's Julie's niece, for those who didn't know.

[22:45] Justin Levine: Yeah.

[22:46] Alan Seales: So it's interesting to me how she encouraged everybody to... Actually, well, let me back up, because the one question didn't get answered. When is it too much to... When somebody's trying to pull in too much of themself to pull the project away from your North Star, and then, you know, when do you realize that your North Star maybe isn't aligning with Danya's or another creative's, and again?

[23:10] Justin Levine: Well, I don't know that that ever happened in the sense that we, by the time we're all moving forward, we have the same North Star, we might just have different routes as to how we get there. And what I love about that is that we were able to talk about it. And to me, when people say, like, what's the key to collaboration and the key to collaborating in a way where what you're asking doesn't happen is when...

[23:40] Justin Levine: There's emotional safety in the conversation, and I think that emotional safety requires everybody prioritizing the show and that there have been many times where my idea was not the idea we went with because there was a better idea and that it's really about having a healthy ego and trusting yourself and trusting your gut but then also knowing that you're not always seeing it the same way that somebody else is. Some of the best dramaturgical through lines of our show came from our choreographers, right? They come from other sources, but if we all believe in that singular vision, we'll be able to find that more easily. That's something that the Coopermans told me really early on was how much Danya and the rest of the team, and then, you know, we talked a little bit with Adam.

You and Adam were talking to me at the press junket, yeah, just about how everyone is always encouraging each other to go outside your lanes and to give ideas even when it's not your traditional sort of job, right? Like you're not hired to do choreography; the Coopermans aren't hired to do music, but yet everyone's giving each other ideas. Well, I think that, you know, you're not creating choreography for choreographers and you're not creating music for musicians and so on, right? And that actually, the way I have always described this process, particularly with this team, is that this musical is a relay race and that sometimes the baton is going to be handed to book, sometimes it'll be handed to movement, to music, and so on.

It's about us as a group saying in this moment, what is the best way to do that? You know, John, Zack, and Adam and I had a lot of time together where it was just the four of us really going through it and looking at it. When I joined the project, I was already a big fan of Adam's and very quickly a fan of Jamestown. So it was never about what I preferred; it was about what is it asking for here. One of the best ways to know where you're going or what you're doing is to look at other examples of shows and see where, you know, kind of the same territory that you're in.

[26:24] Justin Levine: The music director, Joel Fram, I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of meeting him. He's brilliant, and I worked with his husband, Martin Lowe. We co-orchestrated The Robber Bridegroom together, and Joel once said to me, you know, everybody says that—not everybody, but the conventional wisdom about songs and musicals is that your emotions are so great that you can't help but sing. He was saying that's one version of what music is, that effectively music, just like any other element of a musical, is a metaphor. It is expression in a way that might otherwise not be music. You can go inward; music can be utilized in so many different ways. It's not just about, "Oh my God, I'm so excited, I have to sing a song."

Lindsay Mendez once said to me, because I was working on a musical that she was an actor in through the development of it, she always said the simplest version of it is that when the song is over, are you somewhere else? And that doesn't have to be literal, right? The idea is truly to find the essence of a song in a musical and figure out the best way for it to belong is to figure out if you remove that song, does it just keep going or does that song take us somewhere? Does it help get us further along? With this particular group, I look at John and Zach, and they are songsmiths at heart. One of the things that I said to them, because they had major imposter syndrome at first, was I said the people who wrote the early musicals and then some were the people who were writing pop songs at the time.

Those traditions don't suggest that every song has to be, "I get up, I get in my car, and I go somewhere, and now I land somewhere else." Sometimes living in an emotional state is movement narratively, whether we think it is literally or not.

[28:33] Justin Levine: So you're credited in several different departments here. If we want to keep on that metaphor, was there one thing that was easier to create than another? Like, I was going to say all the book; that seems like the easiest thing to go with, but because it's a known amazing novel, how do you cut it down and make it short enough to keep people's attention? Yeah, book writing is really hard, and that is something that I learned a long time ago when I started writing musicals. I remember when I was doing The Robber Bridegroom, Alfred Urie was around all the time, and he and I were talking about it, and he said it's a completely different job from playwriting. A great playwright can write a great musical, and it can also write a terrible book to a musical.

Somebody that perhaps isn't a successful playwright can write an excellent book. People come from all sorts of different backgrounds. I think Burroughs is one of my favorite examples because he was the king of television for a while, and when he was doing that, he was able to write things like Guys and Dolls. When you think about it that way, book writing, again, just to go back to sort of what Joel was saying about music and songs in musicals, book writing isn't just to tee up a song in my mind. The book is as important as the song is, as important as the movement, as the staging, as the design. It's simply just the relay race.

[30:13] Justin Levine: But to your point, in the case of adapting The Outsiders, you know, I started working on The Outsiders at the same time that I started working on Moulin Rouge, and that was really a fascinating kind of parallel journey I was on because in both cases, I started working on it about eight and a half years ago. Within months of each other, I was lucky enough to develop relationships with Baz Luhrmann and with Essie Hinton and really talk about this stuff with them. In both cases, neither of them wanted to be directly involved in the adaptation process, but what both of them offered were two things. One was to encourage us to have our own vision for it and to say that it is essential that you don't just take what we did and put it on stage.

But then also to understand why those choices were made, not so that you make the same choice, but that whatever choice you make is informed by that initial impulse. It was never lost on me, certainly not in either of those cases, that we were treading on hallowed ground. Moulin Rouge is, I would say, certainly one of the, if not the crown jewel of Baz's brilliance, and I think the same is true for Essie Hinton and The Outsiders. A lot of it was about hearing that first bit of advice from both of them and running in a direction that felt like our impulse. Whenever we ran into those roadblocks, we would go back to the source material. With Adam and myself and with John and Zach, what we often did was go back to the novel and read it.

Sometimes we would just sit around and read passages out loud to each other. A friend of mine actually just told me that they read the novel for the first time after seeing the musical. So the musical was their first intro to The Outsiders, and then upon reading the book, they thought, "Oh my God, they really are honoring the book in how much is included." Be that dialogue, be that just detail, be that lyrics that are direct quotes from the novel, to the extent that even I forget a lot of those because we've just been working on this thing for so long. It's probably been about a year and a half or a year since I've read the book from cover to cover. I still will read, you know, had referenced it a lot.

[33:30] Justin Levine: I don't know that there's an easy job because as much as you might have one thing to do, you're still having to do it with a bunch of other people and do it in a way where everyone is telling the same story. For you, you said book writing is super hard. It does seem super hard. Bringing Jamestown Revival in, you know, Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, their music's awesome. It seems like to me what I was going to guess for The Outsiders was the book writing was the hardest part just because there's so much that you have to condense down to, and then you've got Jamestown Revival, these two guys coming in bringing in a wonderful foundation. You're creating more out of less with the music side, whereas at the book side, you're taking the big and making less from it.

Yeah, I think when you put it that way, that makes sense. But what I will say is I actually think they're equally hard because there are so many tools that you use in pop songwriting and in Americana that don't work as well on stage. A lot of our songs ended up having to be cut down or sections were rewritten, or there would be these long turnarounds. If you listen to a Jamestown record, there are a lot of things where if you imagine that those songs are deeply emotional and contemplative and stirring, but if you imagine an actor in a play or in a musical interpreting that song, there are moments that for a Jamestown record are a superpower because it's this build-up to a release that on stage wouldn't necessarily work as well.

I think the same is true with Adam and Adam's voice. I think being a fan of the Jamestown catalog and sound, but also being a huge fan of Adam's work, for me, the challenge—and it was an exciting challenge—was to figure out a way to preserve the integrity of these voices and my voice as well because, of course, John, Zack, and I wrote all those songs together.

[35:29] Justin Levine: And you know, Adam and I, you know, worked together even before I joined on as book writer. We worked a lot together, even just dramaturgically on the book. But I was always interested in, you know, it's interesting when, I feel like when you talk about musicals, a lot of people say, oh, I don't like musicals, right? And I'll say, well, are you talking—

[35:50] Alan Seales: You're not grumpy enough when you say that.

[35:51] Justin Levine: Yeah, exactly. Well, when people say that, I say, well, are you talking about the form or are you talking about the content? Because I feel like musical theatre, for some reason, is, as far as I can tell, the only form where it's normal to say you don't like the form, right? People can say, like, if I said to you, I don't like movies, you'd be like, what?

[36:20] Alan Seales: Horror movies, action movies?

[36:22] Justin Levine: Just the other night, I was trying to find something to watch, and I was like, wow, there's so much shit out there. And then I was thinking about it, I'm like, but nobody would ever say, I don't like movies, even though of everything I was looking at, I'm like, man, there's so much crap out there, right? Imagine someone's like, I don't like music. Well, that's bizarre. And so, just to apply that same, you know, or rather to apply a different kind of rigor to musicals, because I would say, well, what musicals have you seen? And what's your experience with them? You know, it's a form, it's not content, actually. You know, that's the thing that I think we often conflate. And by the way, I've been guilty of that so many times.

And I remember even, I would say about like 10 or 15 years ago, I had this moment where I was like, man, I think maybe I don't like musicals. And I'm like, no, I just don't like the ones I've seen recently. And that the things that, you know, I do the music for the Met Gala every year. The first year I did it, Anna Wintour wanted to do this big celebration of Broadway coming back. So she asked me to put together this massive medley. And someone on the team said something to me about, you know, this is a room full of people who like, don't care about musicals. And I said, I'm going to disagree with you on that. I said, you know, when you're growing up, you watch Disney musicals. Those are musicals.

You know, they make movies out of these things. You know, and the same thing I told John and Zach, which is that the pop artists back in the day were the people writing musicals. And I said, I don't know. Seems to me that Jay-Z really likes Annie. I don't know why he would sample Hard Knock Life otherwise. You know, Ariana Grande seems to be a fan of The Sound of Music. Seven Rings, you know, by my count, has billions of streams, right? There are so many great examples of this. And so, you know, a lot of people maybe don't know that Feeling Good is from a musical, right? And like, I've never seen a production of Roar of the Grease Paint Smell of the Crowd, but I love that song. And there are plenty of songs.

You know, I think of things that have permeated our culture. The Wiz, which is now being revived, right? There are so many things where – and also, you know, having worked with David Byrne on Here Lies Love, I remember talking to him about it, too, where he was saying, like, he grew up on The Sound of Music. It's like, well, of course he did. You think people were like – you think his parents were like, hey, we're going to just show you a bunch of weird stuff.

[39:03] Alan Seales: Right.

[39:04] Justin Levine: You know?

[39:05] Alan Seales: Right.

[39:06] Justin Levine: Now, go be weird, you know, and amazing, you know? Go be weird, David. Like, no, these are the things, these are the storytelling devices that we, that many of us have, you know, grown up on.

[39:21] Alan Seales: Time for a quick commercial break. Hang on a second.

[39:25] Justin Levine: Welcome back to the episode. Singing in the Rain, Music Man, and West Side Story, the three VHS tapes I wore out as a kid. And I didn't see them as musicals. I thought they were movies, where people sang. Right?

[39:41] Alan Seales: Absolutely.

[39:42] Justin Levine: And that's what they were to me. And I was like, oh, I want to do more of that. Now I went, and then I went out and got weird. And by the way, these people were weird, too. You know, it's like we've canonized, you know, Stephen Sondheim, but when you think about Merrily, right? Like, or you think about Into the Woods, or you think about Sunday, like any of these, you're like, these were weirdos. These were beautiful, brilliant weirdos who made crazy stuff. Like, when I saw Merrily, I was like, that is so cool that these dudes just were like, you know what? It's going to go backwards. And we're going to figure that out.

[40:20] Alan Seales: Yeah.

[40:21] Justin Levine: And it's so cool to see that, or to see something like Into the Woods, which is like, definitely fueled by something other than You Who. You know?

[40:32] Alan Seales: Yeah. Well, at least Act Two, anyway.

[40:35] Justin Levine: Yeah.

[40:36] Alan Seales: Yeah.

[40:36] Justin Levine: Jeez. You're right. You're absolutely right. And because I do know a lot of the musical theater canon, and I'm not, like, I'm actually a pretty bad musical theater fan when it comes to trivia of musical theater. But when I hear stuff on the radio, pop songs, like now pop songs sample all of that. And yeah, you're absolutely right. I didn't even realize it until now that we hear this stuff all the time. And I'm like, oh, I know what that's from. But because I already knew it, and it was common to me, it never triggered anything else in my mind to go deeper and think about, like, wait a second, Jay-Z likes musicals?

[41:08] Justin Levine: Yeah.

[41:09] Alan Seales: Ariana Grande loves musicals. So I totally agree with you. That's very, very cool. So when you said that to Anna Wintour, was she like, oh, okay, yes. Do what you will.

[41:20] Justin Levine: I mean, she loves theater. She's a major supporter.

[41:23] Alan Seales: I know. She is always at openings.

[41:25] Justin Levine: She's a major supporter. And I'm so grateful that she came to The Outsiders, and she loved it. And it's such an enthusiastic support. She's already sent so many people to it. And when I brought, she was not the one who, she literally hired me to make a bunch of, you know, a medley with a bunch of songs from musicals. And my thought was, oh, how cool would it be if I pulled from all of these sampled and really famous songs that have come out of musicals and have crossed over into pop culture?

[42:02] Alan Seales: Oh, that's so cool. So I guess she went for it.

[42:05] Justin Levine: And it was fantastic. It was so much fun.

[42:09] Alan Seales: Cool. All right. Well, let us start to wind down here. I have a little game that I play now. I put 60 seconds up on the clock. This is plot in 60 seconds. And you give me a number corresponds to a list of popular musicals I have here. And then you have to give me the plot to that musical in 60 seconds. So give me a number between one and 13.

[42:36] Justin Levine: Four.

[42:39] Alan Seales: Book of Mormon, go.

[42:40] Justin Levine: Oh, my God. Okay. How many seconds do I have?

[42:45] Alan Seales: 56.

[42:46] Justin Levine: 56. Okay. So basically, you know, a bunch of white people think that it's their job to go to places where black and brown people live and teach them how to live better by following the way of Mormonism. And in doing so, what they learn is that actually, they're the idiots for going over there, and that all these people actually didn't need their help at all. And if anything, maybe there's something quite problematic about missionary work. And it's also really funny. And I remember something about maggots in someone's scrotum. That's what I've got on that one.

[43:32] Alan Seales: Okay. Nine seconds left on the clock. That was good.

[43:36] Justin Levine: I loved it. That was really fun.

[43:38] Alan Seales: So 51 seconds, and you got that. 51 seconds, and you got me to go see the show.

[43:45] Alan Seales: Okay. Standard closing questions that I use to wrap up every episode. The first one, just very simply, is what motivates you?

[43:50] Justin Levine: What motivates me is the... You mean in life, just what motivates me?

[44:00] Alan Seales: Okay. What motivates me in life is the chance to experience as much life as possible. And I guess what I mean by that is I'm highly motivated to make things that are interesting to me and that excite me, but primarily so that I can then go and see what is out there in this crazy world.

[44:29] Alan Seales: Nice. All right. What advice would you give to your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path?

[44:32] Justin Levine: I would say, follow more of the things that feel good to you. And don't romanticize killing yourself for the sake of success or for work. I would say, prioritize your friends and your family and keep the people who really see you close to you.

[44:53] Alan Seales: Oh, I love that. All right. So the final question is the hardest one. If you could only see one show for the rest of your life, but you can see it as many times as you want, what would you see?

[45:02] Justin Levine: I think it would be Fiddler.

[45:04] Alan Seales: Ooh, why Fiddler?

[45:06] Justin Levine: For a number of reasons. I think it's the perfect musical in the sense that it is set in a time and a place. It's so specific to that place. The music is informed by that and embraces that and celebrates that, as does the book. But also, it is probably, because of its specificity, one of the most universal stories ever told.

[45:31] Alan Seales: I agree. All right. Where can we find you on social media?

[45:35] Justin Levine: I'm on Instagram, Justin Levine, just my name. I think that's it for me on social media.

[45:44] Alan Seales: Go see the 12-time Tony-nominated show, The Outsiders. I cannot say enough good things about the show. It just works. Actually, I meant to tell you this earlier when you brought up that the book relies on the music, relies on the choreography, relies on everything else. I literally walked out of the show saying almost exactly that, saying that it never felt like it was chapter one, a scene, chapter two, a song, chapter three, right? Everything from the beginning to the end was one object. It was a show, a musical, and it traveled together and just worked. I told this to Danya, too, that the way that all of you worked together to produce this, it's so apparent that you all collaborated so well. I couldn't tell where the end of one category, one department stopped and the beginning of the next one started because it all just became one thing. It's so good.

[46:44] Justin Levine: Thank you. That means a lot. Thank you.

[46:48] Alan Seales: Of course. Everybody listening, find me online. I'm on the socials, at Threads, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Leave a rating, leave a review. Wherever you're listening to the podcast now, it helps the podcast grow. Go see The Outsiders, as always. Justin Levine, thank you so much. You've been a pleasure to talk to.

[47:02] Justin Levine: Thank you.