ROUNDABOUT BLOG

Education dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with The Robber Bridegroom composer Robert Waldman and lyricist and librettist Alfred Uhry about working with Frank Loesser when they first arrived in New York, careers and the process of developing the show together.

Alfred Uhry

Ted Sod: Where were you born and educated? When did you decide to write for the theatre?

Alfred Uhry: I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. And my only connection to the theatre was because my mother loved it and she took me to movies. And, eventually, she thought maybe I’d be interested in shows. I don’t remember not wanting to write. I would write little stories and things, and I had a teacher in grammar school, Mrs. Harrison, who worked part time for The Atlanta Journal, which was one of the big newspapers, and she loved writing and she encouraged me to write.

Robert Waldman: I was born in the absolute middle of Brooklyn, New York: Crown Heights, near Ebbets Field. It was a middle-class, second-generation Jewish neighborhood. It wasn't a religious area at that time. It was filled with a generation of Jews who wanted to be American. It was the kind of area where intellect wasn't a dirty word. But it was kind of rowdy. If our gang had seen all the movies in our neighborhood, we would think nothing of going to the Brooklyn Museum, walking through and looking at the art. In my home, there was always a love of art and music. My father, who came from Argentina, played the fiddle. My mother worked in a scenic design house on Broadway. We went to a lot of theatre, lots of musicals. Because I had a sinus condition as a child, I would have to go to this horrible doctor who I hated, and after the doctor visits, my mother would take me to see musicals on Broadway.

Robert Waldman

TS: Did you study composition or piano?

RW: I started formal piano lessons when I was 10. From age four to 10, I'd sit under the piano while my older brother and sister had their piano lessons. Later, when I got the family piano, I opened the bench and found this little spiral-bound book from when I was four or five and already composing things. There were notes with no stems and no bar lines. I studied piano until I went to Brown University when I was eighteen. Then after Brown I went to grad school at Juilliard.

TS: Can we talk about when you met each other?

AU: Robert and I met in college, at Brown, and he was a year ahead of me.

RW: Brown had a student led organization called Brownbrokers, which was an open competition for original musicals written by students. Winners would get $100, and a production of the show would be put on for the university. During my sophomore year I won working with two seniors. The next year, those collaborators had graduated so Alfred and I started to work together.

AU: I came to New York after I graduated, and Bob and I were signed up by Frank Loesser, who was one of the greatest songwriters that ever was, I think. He wrote Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and really wonderful shows.

TS: The Most Happy Fella is one of my favorites.

AU: They were all extraordinary. He had a publishing company, and he signed Bob and me up to write songs, and part of the deal was, we would go to see him every month or so with a bunch of songs and he would critique them. It was like a master class in writing, and I’ve used his criteria ever since.

TS: Will you share some of that with us? What was his criterion?

AU: His main criterion was that every syllable you write is important. Be prepared to defend every syllable and make it clear, not stupid. Say what you mean to say. It’s like telling someone who plays golf to keep their eye on the ball, but it’s that simple. I’ve tried to do that throughout my writing career. I think the reason my plays are so short is because when I began writing, I was writing mostly librettos to musicals, and we were taught to leave room for songs, so, after that, I always left room for songs.

RW: Loesser took us under his wing and was a wonderful mentor. He was a good listener and never beat around the bush. He would say “You've got to write more football notes!” We'd leave and say to each other, “What the heck did he mean by football notes?” We had to learn his language. He would never say, “No, that's not going to work.” Instead he would say, “It should be more "Melancholy Baby."” He was absolutely brilliant, but you always had to interpret what he was saying. And he was tough on us and made us tough on ourselves.

TS: The first musical I'm aware of that you wrote together after Brown was based on Steinbeck's East of Eden. Is that right?

RW: Right. Here's Where I Belong was the first show we wrote out of school. We loved the movie adaptation of East of Eden. We thought Rodgers and Hammerstein had acquired the rights to East of Eden and that would be the end of our effort. We were about to abandon the project, but Frank Loesser said, “Don't, don't, don't! We'll set up a date and you'll play the songs for Steinbeck!” We went over to Frank's house and into the living room and there's Frank, his wife Jo, and Steinbeck and his wife all laughing and reminiscing about their lives out in California. Then they said “Go on, Guys, play some songs.” We played half a dozen songs, and Steinbeck turned, with tears in his eyes, and said, “It's yours.”

TS: Was there a show after Here's Where I Belong that you worked on before you wrote The Robber Bridegroom?

RW: We were writing a musical about liberalism in that time period, and Bert Shevelove was going to direct. We started trying to raise money. There was a big dip in the economy, and it never was done. We asked ourselves, “Now, what are we going to do?” Alfred kept pushing this novella by Eudora Welty, The Robber Bridegroom, at me, and I kept pushing it back. It's ironic how things fall into place.

AU: Being a southern boy, I love the work of Eudora Welty. I found The Robber Bridegroom in a bookstore. I’d never even heard of it; it’s one of her early novellas. I read it and just flipped out over it and immediately thought it would be a great musical. I wrote her a letter and, even though I had yet to establish a name for myself, she wrote back and gave me the rights.

RW: Up until then, the influence of country music was minimal on the public. It was just starting to cross over. We tried doing it satirically, and then after about three months I said to Alfred, “I can't do it like this. Writing satirical music on top of country music? I can't live with this. Let's write real country music.”

TS: The Robber Bridegroom is often called a “bluegrass musical.” Did you have to do any research in order to compose it?

RW: It is much more Appalachian than bluegrass. The score came naturally to me. What country songs sound like was mixed with our understanding of what moves an audience theatrically. I've written music all my life taking in atmosphere. I absorb the color and sound and mix it with my feelings. I believe that you take a deep breath, take it all in, and let it come out as you – the way that you feel. Your fingerprints are always different than anybody else's in the world. The same is true of the way you create. If you have faith in it and dig for your own musical fingerprint, it'll come out in a way that is unique to your sensibility. I always go for my understanding of the truth. It just comes out like me.

Eudora Welty's novella

TS: Can you tell us why this story made such an impression on you?

AU: It’s a delightful story. It was just fun to read. You know, The Robber Bridegroom was originally a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

TS: It's a bit different though in the Brothers Grimm version, correct?

AU: It's very violent, very dark.

TS: As many of them are.

AU: Eudora kept some of that darkness in, but she certainly brightened it up a lot. Her idea was to take that story and set it in America, so instead of having witches and princes and princesses and things like that, she had robbers and go-getters and beautiful girls and wicked stepmothers. She set it in the 1790s, and she has the action happening in Mississippi. It still retains the darker material -- the robbers and murderers getting away with things -- but it’s done with a smile.

TS: Can you give us some insight into how you worked together?

AU: We would meet all the time and talk about the storyline and the characters and we would map it out and I would write things. This was the first libretto I really ever wrote. I was a lyric writer! But I was always much more interested in the script than the lyrics. I became a playwright and stopped writing lyrics after we finished working on The Robber Bridegroom. Gerry Freedman, the original director, is really responsible for so much of the success of The Robber Bridegroom. He kept encouraging me to write more. He’d say, “You can do it, you can do it,” and nobody else had ever encouraged me before.

TS: This was one of the first musicals that underwent a workshop at Musical Theatre Lab under Stuart Ostrow, correct?

RW: Yes. We knew Stu Ostrow when he was the manager of a publishing firm before he became a producer. Stu knew the business was changing. There was a time when you would write a musical and you would go out of town to two or three major cities and sit for a while and fix the show, but it got too expensive. Producers were opting to stay in town, and the authors had a couple of weeks of previews to work on their shows. There was no place to workshop musicals. As far as I know, Stuart created Musical Theatre Lab to be a place where writers could develop their musicals. The first team picked to do a piece was Alfred and me.

TS: What do you look for in a director?

RW: Truth. That's it. Honest truth.

AU: I look for somebody that I can talk to, that really gets me. And, usually, I’ve had very good luck with directors, both in movies and in the theatre. And I like to collaborate with directors, I like to be in the room and watch it happen and do what I can. I don’t know what Alex will do with the show, but I know he gets the humor of it. It’s his baby now. We are not making up a show together. It’s a finished piece -- he and I worked on it this fall and made some adjustments, but it is still The Robber Bridegroom. The main thing that delights me is that finally The Robber Bridegroom is really going to be done by the best people that could possibly be doing it. And that doesn’t always happen. We’ve waited a long time and been very careful about it, and it’s very exciting to have Roundabout, Alex Timbers, Steven Pasquale and the rest of company do it with all their talent and fervor and youth.

Steven Pasquale

TS: Do you have any advice for a young person who might want to write music for the theatre?

RW: Study the really great musicals and what their composers did. Be honest in every aspect of a number. You have to be precise and specific and then maybe the song will work. In musical theatre, I am of the opinion that it's the emotionality of the words and the melody. It's the subtext. Just like in a play, a really fine musical number has subtext, which is as understood by the performers as the accompaniment is.

AU: Write something that turns you on, not something that seems like it’s going to be a hit. It’s usually not a path to success. Write something that speaks to you one way or another; something that you’re willing to get in bed with and stay with for a couple of years.

The Robber Bridegroom begins performances on February 18 at the Laura Pels Theatre. For tickets and information, please visit our website.