BWW Interview - Lyricist Glenn Slater Talks GALAVANT CD Set Release, BEATSVILLE & More
By: Melanie Votaw May. 14, 2017
Currently playing its first run in Sarasota, Florida at Asolo Repertory Theatre is Slater's beatnik jazz musical BEATSVILLE, for which he wrote the book in collaboration with his wife, Wendy Wilf, who wrote the music and lyrics. Another recent project has been the Disney Channel's animated TV series TANGLED: BEFORE EVER AFTER.
Friday, Slater spoke with BWW about the much-anticipated release of the full music CD set from GALAVANT, the CD signing for A BRONX TALE, BEATSVILLE, and what it's really like to write for musical theater.
Today is your CD signing for A BRONX TALE. This is like a reunion, isn't it?
It is. We see the BRONX TALE people all the time, but it's always nice to get together with them. The show is doing so well, and they're so happy performing it. It's usually just a big love fest when we all get together.
Is it fun to meet the fans?
It is. On the writing side, you don't usually get to do that so much. So it's always nice to see the people who we wrote the show for and to get to hear from them what they liked, what they got excited about, and what was memorable to them.
And you've got two shows doing well on Broadway!
Yes, they just announced that SCHOOL OF ROCK recouped finally. So it's now an official hit, and it's doing well in London, too. So it's a good position to be in. I can't complain.
I guess not! Now, with GALAVANT, I read that they're just releasing the unreleased collection digitally today but not the full CD set yet?
Yeah, there's been some confusion that we're in the middle of sorting out. They've released what's being called "The Unreleased Collection," which is the songs that got left out of the season 1 release and the season 2 release. It's about 20 tracks. But that was meant to be a side issue for people who had already bought those first two [seasons]. The main event was supposed to be that they were releasing the season 1 and season 2 complete CD set today. Somehow, that announcement and rollout got boxed, and I know it's getting remedied right now.
But it's going to be available digitally on iTunes and on Amazon. And I believe there's going to be an on-demand physical pressing of a CD with a booklet. So I'm sure they'll have an announcement out about that as soon as possible, hopefully later today. But yes, we finally got everything from GALAVANT out on CD. This is everything that made it into the TV show. Some of the tracks are longer than what were on the TV show because in some cases, things had to be trimmed for time. And there are also a couple of demos that got either cut or censored. That would just be Alan [Mencken] doing the vocals with his synth demos just for the fans - just a nice taste of what could have been.
Yeah, we're all really curious about what didn't get past the censors, of course. There's something titillating about that. I remember you telling me last year that your "writing engine" got faster when you worked on GALAVANT. I'm curious if that ability for speed has stayed with you.
It has. I think so much of the speediness with which you write has to just do with the quantity of which you write. Once you've written a lot of songs, what happens is that you start making decisions faster. You start understanding much sooner what's going to work and what's not going to work, what traces will lead somewhere fruitful, and what traces are going to lead down dead ends. You start understanding the characters more. So just the amount of time that you spend thinking gets shortened because so many of your responses become gut level, intuitive choices rather than thought-through choices.
And I've definitely found, particularly with working with Alan - we had done a lot before GALAVANT, but those two really intense periods where we were churning out 30-odd songs in just a handful of months really got our composer-lyricist shorthand working in an extremely fine-tuned manner. What we've found since then is that the almost telepathic connection that composers and lyricists have has become just sharper and quicker.
I know [GALAVANT creator] DAN FOGELMAN is pretty busy being a TV sensation right now with THIS IS US, but has there been any movement toward bringing GALAVANT to Broadway?
It's something we constantly talk about, and there are some rights issues that have to be smoothed out. It's definitely something that Alan and I want to do. We were just talking about it this week again. So there's nothing new to report there yet, but it's definitely something that we hope to move on to sometime soon. Whether or not it's directly to Broadway, I don't know, but definitely a stage version in some form.
Well, it seems that a lot of shows are getting life outside of Broadway these days.
Yeah, musical theater is having a huge renaissance right now. There are so many talented people writing. So much room has opened up in the realm of what can be written, what audiences will accept, what they'll embrace. So it just feels like there's enormous room for all different kinds of things. Some version of GALAVANT - there's definitely room for that. So we're hoping to make that happen.
And TANGLED is a possibility [on stage] as well, right? FROZEN is top of mind for Disney at the moment, but...
TANGLED, as you probably know, we just started airing an animated series on the Disney Channel, which Alan and I are also doing the songs for and which we're really excited about. And the A-stage version of TANGLED launched last year on the Disney cruise ship. As far as a larger-scale stage version of TANGLED, that's not our decision. That's up to Disney Theatricals, which has its own agenda and schedule. I know that it's something they're thinking about, but I'm not sure what the timeline for that is.
But it's getting a life beyond the initial feature film.
Absolutely. Those characters are so great. There's a world there that's such a fun world to be in. It's amazing, I think, what they're doing with the animated series as far as expanding that world, adding new characters.
Now, let's talk about BEATSVILLE because I know that's really close to your heart. How did it do at Asolo Rep? It sounds like it did really well.
It did fantastic. It's the first step for that show. This was the first production. We had an amazing cast, amazing creative team. Director Bill Berry from The 5th Avenue [Theatre] in Seattle. JoAnn Hunter choreographing, who also did SCHOOL OF ROCK with me, who is absolutely brilliant. An amazing set by David Gallo. Fantastic costumes by David Woolard. Music direction by Kat Sherrell, also from The 5th Avenue, who has done a magnificent job. Great orchestrations by Steve Orich, who won the Tony for JERSEY BOYS. So it's an amazing team.
We all went down there with a script and a score which we've done workshops of and readings of, but had never done a full production. What we discovered once we got it on its feet in front of an audience was that there were some things that were working fantastically well and some things that needed to be re-thought. In particular, our ending wasn't working for us. We only had six previews before opening, and after our third preview, we looked at what was on stage and said, "We can do better than this." And the entire creative team went into a huddle on our day off, and we rewrote literally, I think, 70 pages of the script. Massive rewrites of lyrics. Complete revamping of choreography. Several characters expanded. We did this overnight.
Our cast learned it literally in two days, put in all those changes. A Herculean effort. I've never seen anything like it before. And we only really managed to do one run-through of the entire show before critics came on opening night. So it was one of those astonishing efforts that, happily for us, paid off because we went from a show that didn't feel like it was clicking to a show that's now really clicking in all of the important ways.
What we put in was the rough draft of what we eventually want to do, so there are definitely things that aren't 100% what we need them to be. But the path forward now is so clear, and the fact that it's working as well as it is even in this quickly sketched-in form is hugely exciting to us because we have so many ideas of how to go in and now color in the rest of it for the next production.
Gosh, that makes me want to bite my nails just hearing about it. So now the show is going to The 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle?
Not this season coming up but the season after. So we've got a nice amount of time to make the changes we need to do, and there may be an intermediate step in the middle. We're not sure yet. We're looking into some possibilities, but there will definitely be a next production.
You had written the book of a musical for THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, but this is the first time you ever had a book produced, right?
Yes. I did the libretto for LOVE NEVER DIES, so I'm officially the book writer on that. But that was based on a synopsis that Ben Elton had written, so it wasn't my story. And as with most Andrew Lloyd Webber shows, there's not a lot of spoken dialogue. There are just a handful of spoken lines. Most of it is more like an opera libretto.
When you're watching a show that you've written the book for, as opposed to having written the lyrics, is it a different experience for you?
Oh, it's absolutely a different experience. So much of writing the book for a musical is about the architecture, about the structure. You're listening if individual lines are landing, if the jokes are working, if the information is being gotten to the audience in a way that they can process and prepare for the next plot point. But most of what you're looking at as a book writer is whether the overall structure is working. Or is everything happening at the right pace? Is everything happening in that inevitable, unfolding way? Are the surprises landing where the surprises should land?
So unlike when you're just doing the music or the lyrics - when you're listening "OK, did that song work? Now, I can relax until the next song" - as the book writer, it's a 24/7 vigilance as far as what's working, what's not working, what do I need to change, what do I not need to change. And the changes that you're looking to make are global - the big ones that affect the entirety of the show.
I'm very lucky on this show because music and lyrics were written by Wendy Wilf who's a fantastic composer and a brilliant lyricist and who is also my wife. We had met at the BMI musical theater workshop back in the early 90s and were very interested in each other's work before we got together as a couple because our sensibilities are so similar. We both like comedy. We both like things that are bright, primary-colored, fun shows. We both like shows that are warm and sort of celebratory. So knowing that your collaborator has such a similar sensibility and that over the 25 years that we've known each other has just gotten more and more in sync, it gives you as a book writer a lot of security.
As somebody who often writes lyrics, being able to hand that responsibility off to someone that you implicitly trust and who you know is going to do a brilliant job, and to be able to say, "OK, on this one, I don't have to worry about rhyming, I don't have to worry about what words are going to be on what notes." All the really hard stuff, I get to let somebody else do. And, again, she just hit it out of the park. So it's been very gratifying for me to be a part of that.
Would you like to write more books for musicals?
Yes. I think every lyricist has a certain thing that they do particularly well. Some are particularly clever. Some are very good at ballads and stirring the heartstrings. I think my particular strength is dramaturgy, and it's something that I've been able to bring to every project I've been on, which is just a sense of how to make the songs work within the dramatic structure and how to work with the book writer to make that dramatic structure support the songs. It's, I think, something that Alan Mencken in particular values. I know that most of the projects he brings me in on are the ones where he's looking for somebody to support the dramaturgy of a piece that might be difficult to adapt. And it's something that I really enjoy doing.
I was an English major in college, and that process of taking a story or taking a text - analyzing the structure, analyzing what makes it work, figuring out what the themes are and how they spread through the characters, through the way the plot works - is something I just innately do when I'm presented with a story. So to be able to take those skills and to apply them to actually writing the book as opposed to tangentially doing it through the role as a lyricist is something that I've always wanted to do and always expected to do.
I probably would have done it a lot earlier than this if I hadn't been so busy writing lyrics, which is hugely time-consuming. But now that I've actually had a chance to do it, I'm absolutely looking to do it again. Whether I do that as both a lyricist and a librettist at the same time or, again, work with a separate lyricist and just do the book - either way will be exciting for me. I'm definitely going to do another project with Wendy, which we've already started talking about where, again, I'd just be the book writer, not the lyricist. I've been talking to some other people as well, so hopefully soon this can happen.
Do you find it difficult at all to shift back and forth between these different types of projects that you do - something that's for Disney and then something like GALAVANT that's very irreverent?
When you're in the audience watching things come out, I think you get the sense that it all progresses linearly, where somebody does one project and then, they do the next project. But musicals take forever. Most of them take three, four, five years of work before they get onto the stage. Sometimes even longer. Animated films - back in the hand-drawn days, it was five years from beginning to end. Now, it's more like three, but that's still a long period of time. So you're usually not just doing one at a time. You're usually juggling three or four or five different projects at once. Alan's got usually ten at once. He's a workaholic. [Laughter]
So the back and forth between projects isn't so much "I've just done a comedy, and now I'm doing something serious and dramatic." It's more like, "OK, this afternoon, I have to work on the comedy. Tonight, I have to work on the dramatic thing." You're pulling your head into the different spaces on a daily basis and sometimes, several different times daily. And it definitely takes a high level of mental focus to pull your head out of one and put it into another.
As the lyricist, often what you're doing is not just writing down the words, but you're trying to imagine ... exactly what the set will look like, how the characters are moving on the set, what the actors are going to sound like, how they're going to perform the song. You're trying to envision the entire world and how the words will work within that. It takes a lot of mental energy to conjure up that entire vision.
To then have to pull your head out of that vision and then reconstitute an entire new one in order to plunge your head into that, it's really exhausting.... There are times when you have to do work on, let's say three separate stories in a day. And getting your head into that third one can be a heavy load to lift....
When you're listening to music for pleasure, who or what do you listen to the most?
I'm one of those people who likes to keep up with everything. I spend probably an inordinate amount of my time surfing the web looking for what the new releases are, listening to as many different tracks as I can. Once I've done that, I usually make a compilation of things that have particularly struck my fancy, and usually it's stuff that would fall into, I guess, the indie rock/indie pop place. For instance, this past month, it's been a lot of New Pornographers' new album, the new album by Spoon. I've been listening to some tracks from the new Fleet Foxes album and Gorillaz. Just as a sampling of what is the "now" sound, but not too radio-friendly pop. Usually, I hear those things once just to hear what's there, and then I'll move on. But I do tend to be pretty eclectic in what I listen to. My wife is very immersed in the jazz scene, so we get a lot of that.
One of the things that I found very useful, particularly in working with Alan, who's a very style-driven composer - he likes to know ahead of time, "OK, this project - what is the sound? What's the world that we're in that's going to give this piece a distinct flavor?" Once we're in that world, it's very useful to be able to talk to him with a lot of specificity about the stylistic things that make something fit into that world. One of the things that has united us as a team is that we've both listened to a metric ton of pop and rock music from every era, from the 20s forward. When we sit down to discuss a style, we can both do so with a huge range of past listening and be able to immediately conjure up a specific song or a specific track or a specific singer, or even sometimes specific players on tracks to get a sound that immediately conjures up that era.
For example, when we were working on SISTER ACT, and we decided to set our show in the 70s in Philadelphia, that opened up to us the whole world of Philadelphia soul. To be able to say to Alan, "I want a Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes deal on this," and he'd name a song. I'd say, "Yes, that exactly!" That's a gift that you don't really get with every composer, and Alan can actually nail those styles immediately. So I just listen to everything I possibly can whenever I can.... It's all fuel for the muse.
I'd like to be a fly on the wall sometime when you guys are working.
It's really fun. We were working yesterday on a song for a new project that I can't talk about yet, but the feel that we're in is epic 70s rock. Again, just to be able to bring up a specific track off of an obscure album and have Alan know exactly what I'm talking about is so much fun.
PHOTO CREDITS:
Glenn Slater: Melanie Votaw
A BRONX TALE: CD cover art courtesy of Ghostlight Records
GALAVANT: ABC/Liam Daniel
SCHOOL OF ROCK: Matthew Murphy
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