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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
Jerry insisted and insisted and insisted on that opening number being larger, and engulfing a huge audience that wasn't Jewish, that didn't know about shtetls and so on. And over and over again, they'd talk about it, and then finally, one day somebody used the word "tradition," and he said, "That's it! Write about tradition. That, everybody has." So the show has been as great a success in Tokyo as it was on Broadway and anywhere there is tradition. Well, where isn't there tradition? Actually, unfortunately, there is less tradition today -- and that is a terrible loss culturally to all of us -- than there used to be, but that time, tradition was just international. Every country held on to that tradition, and the show succeeded because of it.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
George Furth had written a bunch of plays, and Steve said to me, "I have a friend name George Furth who has written a bunch of one act plays for Kim Stanley to star in. When you read them, it doesn't seem to be happening, though she is very interested." So I read seven plays, and I said, "Well, you know, all I could see reading them -- he writes great, Steve -- but all I could see was Kim Stanley running to make costume and wig changes and makeup changes. It just exhausted me. That's as far as my imagination would take me, but I'll tell you what, it's a musical." And he said, "It is?" and he called George and we met in my office, and I said, "Yes, guys. It's a musical," and they went and struggled, and Steve brilliantly figured out how to write a score for a show that did not move the show along, where the songs were not internal to the scenes, preserving George Furth's unique writing and at the same time amplifying the relationships between scenes, interrupting a scene, and doing a number and so on. It's a very uniquely contrived and brilliant score, and I felt comfortable in the birthday parties, which were dark. It all started with a birthday, ended with a birthday, and they reappeared. They're right up my alley. That's something that got added to the show. The show bubbles a lot of the time, but there is a dark spine somewhere there.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
It was a realistic show about a bunch of people who go to a theater and get very drunk and start to fight with props that were on the walls from an old musical. It eluded me. So what happened was we added ghosts, we added other people. We added alter egos for everybody in the cast, and a terrific sense of mystery -- À la recherche du temps perdu. We wanted to put something gauzy and melancholy on that stage, while telling the story of lost dreams and so on, and the guys did brilliantly. Then, of course, the apotheosis, the big moment in the thing, was when the four leading characters -- and the four leading characters in their youth -- all converged on stage, circled each other, screamed at each other, and that erupted in a Follies section, a real Ziegfeld Follies section.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
Harold Prince: Sweeney was very much Steve's show. I didn't get it. I got it as I went along. It's about revenge, and I don't think I am a vengeful guy. I don't think I feel revenge. I recognize its existence. The idea of it drains me, you know. It hurts my energy level. So it's about revenge, but I got into it, and I got into it because it's very possible I imposed something on it. No one else who has done it since has ever done that. I wanted it to have some social significance, and I realized the story takes place during the beginning of the Industrial Age in England, and that all of these people -- obviously, it turns to cannibalism -- some of them don't even know that they're inadvertently cannibals, but basically, I thought they are all sharing one thing. They never breathe clean air. They never see sunlight. From the day they're born to the day they die, they're victims. So I said to Eugene Lee, "Let's do it in a factory, and let's put a glass roof on it that makes it claustrophobic, and let's tell all of these people that they are in the same spot really as the two leading characters in the play, that they're all victims of the industrial age." This is a time when kids were on the assembly line for 14 hours a day doing piecework and so on, and that pulled the whole show together for me. Oddly enough, it has never been done (that way) since. There certainly are detractors who think, "Why did he bother?" but I bothered because it made it possible for me to direct it, and I did a good job.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
Dan Rather: I've always known how lucky I am and how blessed I am in that I knew very early on what I wanted to do. I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to be a reporter. I repeat for emphasis, at that time and place being a reporter meant being a newspaper person. Why this is I've never quite known, but as far back as I can remember in the mists of my childhood, when somebody asked me what I wanted to be, I always said, "I want to be a reporter. I want to work for a newspaper." And when we played those children's games where some people wanted to be a pilot, a butcher, an Indian chief, I always said, you know, "I want to be a newspaper person. I want to be a reporter." I think that's because of my father's passion for newspapers and the fact that newspapers were such a part of our family life.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
My mother was extremely determined that I would go to college, and when I got old enough to understand it, she was very rational about why, and she had it right. You know, "Look, in your father's time and your grandfather's time going to college was not an important thing, but in your time it's going to be a really important thing. And besides that, if --" and this is almost word for word -- "If you go to college and you make it, then your brother is very likely to be able to go, and he's going to make it, and if he does then your sister will." Now she had this all figured out in her head, and there's no doubt in my mind if it had not been for her, I wouldn't have gone to college. I might not have finished high school. Although I would say in high school the critical thing was football, that if I hadn't made it in football, I probably would have been gone from high school maybe in the eleventh grade, possibly as early as the tenth. But I wanted to play football so badly and I was beginning to see I just might make it. That, plus my mother's determination, kept me in high school.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
Dan Rather: Curiosity and love of the story. What makes a reporter is being curious, wanting to know what's going on, wanting to know how things work, how they really work as opposed to how they may appear to work. You have to be curious to be a good reporter. And I think you have to have a love of stories and story telling. That's one reason why I think an early introduction to books and making yourself a lifetime reader is essential to being a good reporter.
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Lloyd Richards
Tony Award-Winning Director
Lloyd Richards: I remember studying Shakespeare as a young person in school, and I remember an assignment to memorize a soliloquy, which I did. I was asked to stand up in front of the class and do it. I did it and I found myself saying beautiful words, phrases, thoughts that I agreed with, and I found myself expressing myself through someone else's words. There were people there and they responded; a connection was made. And I guess there was a connection made in me, that I felt something, or received something in that. That was deeply satisfying.
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