Interview: HOW DOES THE SHOW GO ON? Disney's Tom Schumacher Tells Us in a Great New Book

Thomas Schumacher, President, Disney Theatrical Productions, has written a new book, HOW DOES THE SHOW GO ON? an INTRODUCTION TO THE THEATER (Disney Editions). Designed to give kids a backstage look, the book, written with author Jeff Kurtti, explores the world behind the scenes, in a fun and educational way. I sat down with Tom to discuss this great new book, that is unique and up until now to my knowledge has no comparable predecessor.

Before we get to the story of the book, let's start at the beginning of your story - Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Glendale California, but I was raised in San Mateo, California, just south of San Francisco.  I'm a fourth generation Californian and my family is primarily from the San Francisco Bay area.

And what were the first shows that you ever saw out there?

I didn't see a professional play until I was in the seventh grade.  I had seen schools plays, but the first professional play that I ever saw was You Can't Take it With You, at A.C.T. (American Conservatory Theatre) in San Francisco with a fantastic cast, including Mary Wickes.  Debbie May was also in it, and all these fantastic people that I grew up watching perform theatre at A.C.T.  So I was doing high school plays, community plays, schools plays, and for my sixteenth birthday my parents gave me a season subscription to A.C.T. The day after my sixteenth birthday I drove the family station wagon into San Francisco, which is kind of shocking that anyone would do that today, but I just gotten me driver's license and went to a production of The House of Bernada Alba with my friend and we watched the show.  The theatre has been in me always. I've always loved it and the whole idea of "theatrics "and the idea of everything that's inside the book came from that stuff.

As a kid, I had a disguise kit, which is a makeup kit.  I had a drawer full of wigs and a costume box and as a small child I was obsessed with all that. 

The day Bobby Kennedy was shot, I was up early that morning, because I was featured in and staging a production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin for my fourth grade school assembly, that was 1968.

How did you learn about theatre growing up?  Where did you go to learn all the things that you are now presenting for the younger generation, with this book?

Well you learn a lot of it through osmosis.  By the time I was in junior high, in San Mateo, I was volunteering at a community center and, while I was doing plays in school and things in the community center, they were actually teaching us.  I was thirteen years old, and I was on a twenty foot ladder with a crescent wrench in my hand, with a rope tied onto my belt loop, because we're not allowed to go up a ladder with a crescent wrench that wasn't tied off to you, so you couldn't drop it, for safety reasons.

I was up focusing Lycian and Fresnel stage lighting and I was taught how to focus a light, so I had to run a light board.  By the time I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, I was being taught "theatre tech" by one woman who's actually in the book. Her name is Marion Heyworth, who ran a theatre production for this set at the community center and where I grew up was an area that had kind of a diverse population - some really advantaged and some not.

There was a lot of funding for the arts in those days. In our community centers, they all had light boards and sound boards, and they had lighting instruments.  I learned how to do all that.  I learned how to make a (stage) flat, how to build scenery, how to run props. So I was in shows and I was crewing shows. When I was fifteen and a half years old, I started directing a children's theatre company for the city of San Mateo in their parks and recreation department.  I was directing kids that were 10-15 years old and I was only six months older than the age cutoff.  But most of the kids were under thirteen and so I was just a little bit older than they were and their parents were never told this.  I was working legally, I had a work permit and stuff, and I did that. I did six shows in the city of San Mateo - young shows for young people.

What kind of shows?

I did all sorts of things. I remember that I put on and didn't even pay the rights for My Client Curley by the great Norman Corwin. I just got it out of a book and thought I could do it.

They might come looking for you now, after reading this interview…

That's all right, they should, because I didn't do the right thing. I did license a lot of other things though.  I licensed, from Samuel French, their production of Winnie the Pooh.  I licensed a production of Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner,  which I did.  I did an original production of The Wizard of Oz that a teacher of mine had adapted.  I also wrote one of the plays, because I couldn't find something that fit all the kids.  

It was an amazing opportunity because I was directing and essentially producing.  I had a budget, we built scenery.  The kids auditioned for this program.  If they got in, they had to pay a fee to participate in.  The fee went to the city which gave me the money and I had a theatre and I got to do these little plays. 

Have you written any plays since then?

I've written a few since then, because I took playwriting at UCLA.  When you're working on animation stuff you're inventing dialog all the time.  But no, I haven't written any full plays since then… My big starring play was about a radio station, a student radio marathon, and they locked themselves in and they're going to broadcast for twenty-four hours without sleeping, and then they find out, when the whole thing is over, that they had lost power and no one had heard a thing they'd said.  Wah! wah!  It's kind of a clever idea for a fifteen year old.

It's probably more than what most are doing at fifteen...

Then I went to theatre school, I went to UCLA and studied theatre.  I graduated from UCLA and instantly began to work for UCLA's theatre department for that first summer.  Then one day, while I was working there, I got a phone call.  The payphone backstage rang at the final strike of the last show I was doing for UCLA's resident theatre company, a professional theatre company.  I answered the phone and it was a call from the Mark Taper Forum, offering me a job for two weeks to be a driver, and that's how I started at the Taper. I worked there for five years and from the Taper I did the Olympics Art Festival and all that stuff, but I also shared an office with my now virtual sibling Peter Schneider.

That's how Peter and I met, and that's how the Disney thing happened.  Everything… the whole reason we met is because I answered a payphone.  Five guys were asked if they would drive, it was to drive Joseph Chaikin, founder of The Open Theatre, now deceased. But Joseph and Sam Sheppard had written a play called Tongues: Savage Love, a one man piece and someone had to drive Joe and everyone kept saying no and I said yes, and that's how I met Gordon Davidson.

And now there aren't any payphones anywhere…

Now, there are no payphones anywhere, so who's going to get a chance like that?  

I've spoken many times to college students and I've done commencement speeches and I always say that I'm producing on Broadway because I answered a payphone and I said "yes." I was offered a reasonably menial job and the call came from a student who'd graduated two years before me.  I always say, "Who are you going to call and who's going to call you?  Because they're probably in this room right now."  

In my bio in the book, I list my theatre jobs and non-theatre jobs.  I applied for all the non-theatre jobs, but my jobs in theatre and film, have happened because of someone who called me.  I've never gotten a job applied for other than food service and retail essentially.

So, who called who to put together this book?

It was my idea. I wanted to write the book that I wanted as a kid.  When I was a kid, like in 1972, I really remember distinctly subscribing to Theatre Crafts Magazine and The New Yorker. That's the only place I knew I could learn about New York theatre and, of course, there was no Internet. There was no nothing then. I had some theatre books I would check out from the library and I just wanted to know more.  

I would walk through a store in San Francisco where they sold exotic fabrics and stuff for costumes downstairs and then upstairs they sold dance supplies and makeup and I would just walk through it dreaming. It was wonderful to just in a room with that stuff, because I knew that it was part of the potion that made theatre and I was always fascinated with all of it…

Reading the book and your bio, it seems like you've worked in nearly every theatre-related job as well?

I've done everything in the theatre.  I've been an usher, I've worked in a box office.  Pretty much every job in a theatre. I've been a prop man, an electrician, a carpenter, I've run sound, I've run a light board, I've hung lights, I've built scenery.  I've, of course been an actor and a director.  I've kind of done everything in the theatre in one way or another and wanted to write about it. I wrote the book with Jeff Kurtti, who I've known since 1984. He was also a staffer on the Olympics, and he was our PA when we did the LA Festival in '87.  Then he went on to write a number of books, a couple with me at Feature Animation and he's written a lot of books about Disney.  

I said to Jeff that I really wanted to do this book, and I pitched him the idea, and then he pitched the idea of Becker and Mayer to me, the idea of an artifact book. He gave me some samples of that, and then the two of us went to Wendy Lefkon (Editorial Director) and said "here's our idea," and she said "yes," and then we started.

How long ago was this?

Yesterday and a hundred years, I can't remember which.

How did you go through picking out which topics to cover and which topics not to cover, and then breaking the book down?

The original idea for the book, which we didn't, do was to open it and this would be the front of a theatre, and you would be looking at the front of the front stuff, and then the book would turn over, and that you'd go in the stage door and you'd be looking and then they would meet in the middle with a big foldout of a curtain.  It was a fun organizing principle and it gave me the fundamental idea of how to break it up by moving from the front of the house to the back of the house.  But as an actual marketing thing, it's terrible to have a book with two covers because no one knows which book is which.  So, we abandoned that idea, but I still had the organizing principle of moving from the front door in, and that kind of helped shape it.  Then I also thought I should write it from, fundamentally if you walked in the stage door, or if you walked in the front door, what would you see...and how would you understand if you were a child and you'd never been in a theatre before?  

I'm a mentor in Wendy Wasserstein's brilliant Open Doors Program, and I took eight high school students to see The Lion King yesterday, and six of them had never been to a play before, let alone a Broadway play.  But imagine, they were very savvy, 'cause they're seventeen, eighteen years old.  So they can comprehend all this and try to wrangle it in.  But if you're nine years old, the idea of what is… I mean I know it seems simplistic, but when I say what is a ticket?  What does a ticket tell you?  What's an aisle, what's a row, what's a seat, what's orchestra, what's balcony, what's mezzanine?  What's a box seat?  How would you ever know what that was, if someone didn't tell you?  So I wrote the book from the position of not knowing and from the position of creating a base of knowledge. 

What sort of response has the book garnered so far? It seems like it would fit perfectly into any early theatr education...

I've had many teachers who could come up with the same fundamental thing, which is most of what you teach people they don't know they've learned it until they need it, and then they pull it up and they go "oh, I know what that is."  So always laying knowledge to be used later, and the other one is, "you DON'T know what you like, you like what you KNOW."  That was taught to me by a brilliant man named Paul Tanner, a trombone player.  And Paul was a teacher of mine, and it's the truest thing I've ever been told.  

You don't know what you like, you like what you know.  So the rule of the book is, try to get you to know something, because it will help you like it.  I also knew that a book about the theatre that was about actors or performers was less valuable or interesting than a book in the theatre that was about all the elements of it.  It's not a career guide to the theatre, although if you are a kid who wants to, it's not a bad place to start.

I've sent a couple of hundred copies out to the people who are in the book.  Everybody who's in the book has been sent a book in the last two weeks, and I've heard from probably half of them already and, without exception, these are all theatre professionals, dancers, actors, singers and they all say "This is the book I wish I had when I was a kid."

Therefore I'm achieving my goal, but the other goal is for the person who's a fan, because I grew up doing community theatre, that community theatre experience taught me that people can do it… it's just an avocation, it's just for fun. It's no different if you sing in your church choir or community choir or play in a community orchestra or be in a community. It's great to be united in spirit and do something, and that's important to me.  It's also important to me that because it's an art form that I love and feel at home nowhere more than in a theatre.

And, you're still learning?

Yes! It's fascinating to me to learn about it and to know...and I'm always asking. When I go to Japan and I have gone to the National Kabuki Theatre of Japan, watched the whole piece, and then I've sat in a dressing room, just quietly watching a man get dressed for his first performance in a role.  And I'm fascinated by that, what are the elements? Someone's whispering in my ear, this means this, and that means this, and this makeup means that, I'm interested.  I'm innately curious and I'm innately drawn to sharing what I've picked up from my curiosity. That's why I did it. 

Because I have no gain in it by the way, you'll notice it's like the cheapest book in the history of the world.  Did you notice how cheap it is? That book is $19.95. I wanted the book to be completely accessible, and one of the agreements Wendy (Lefkon) and I made early on, you could make this book and you could make it fifty dollars, and then what kid's going to have it?  Then it's going to be some goofy collectible. I wanted this to be something that you could take and draw on, and I'm a big believer in that.  You know take your crayons and draw in the book and bend over the pages you want to read again and…

I'll do that when I get home... Will it be in the theatres here as well as traditional outlets?

Oh, it will be in our theatres here, it will be in all of our English-speaking territories. Also Barnes and Noble, it's on sale at Amazon.com and Amazon's price is unbelievably low, it's fantastic.

I'm doing some book signing stuff, so by mid December it will sort of be everywhere, you'll get it in the theatre, you'll get it in book stores, get it online through Amazon, so it's pretty available.  I'm trying to figure out a program by which if you liked the book, you could buy one and have it sent to a kid or a library. I think that so many people who look at this book - if you love the theatre, you're natural desire is to get one for a kid.  Chris Boneau (press agent, Boneau/Bryan-Brown) had a fantastic idea about making it possible for the person who likes it to fill out a form and put an address in either of a school or a library or choose from our list in New York, and in one stroke of the pen be able to have a book delivered to the school or a kid.  I'd love to see that happen, because the only reason this book exists is because I want kids to see it, and I'm already planning the second edition of the book, because it has to have THE LITTLE MERMAID in it.

Is there going to be a web component to it as well?

Yeah, we're working on a web component. That's always tricky because of all the controls on that.  It's kind of a little lecture that I have based around the book, mostly for educators.  There's a web thing we're working on and actually there's a second edition of the book that we're playing with, like what to add to it later, a couple of years from now.  And, also there's a follow-up book that Jeff and I have started that's kind of an offshoot of this book.  So if this book lands for you, then that one would, and if I could figure out a web component we'll have that, too, because it feels like it screams for that.  It's just so tricky about taking kids onto the Internet, and I'm so protective of that.

Well thank you again for your time and we're all wishing you the best of luck with your book debut!

To order How Does the Show Go On: An Introduction to the Theater by Thomas Schumacher and Jeff Kurtti, click here.

Photos of Henry Hodges and Tom Schumacher by Joan Marcus