Interview: Monica Saunders-Weinberg of 44 THE MUSICAL at Kirk Douglas Theatre

44 The Musical, is an award-winning comedy produced by Monica Saunders-Weinberg, a devoted philanthropist, international property investor, and film and theatre producer.  44 runs at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City through March 23rd.  Monica Saunders-Weinberg shares her journey producing 44 with BroadwayWorld.

Eli [Bauman, writer, composer, and director of 44] and I worked together in 2019 on a project. I needed somebody to help me with a speech for the largest charity event in Australia.  Day three of us chatting and interacting, I turned to my husband and I'm like, I'm platonically in love with this guy.  He's the funniest, smartest, most articulate human I've ever met.  I was like, who is this person?  We became really close friends, which we still are, kind of in between twins, siblings, best friends, like really, genuinely.

Eli rang me one day and he said, I've got this idea for a musical.  I’m like okay, have you written one before?  No.  Do you know what you're doing?  Not really, but I knew he worked on the Obama campaign.  I was just like, you know what?  I believe in him with all my heart.  I blindly did it.  I was his first call and his last call.  It's been the two of us since the beginning.  I actually first saw it in 2023, and I was like, let me see. I brought a big sort of cluster of different types of people to watch because I was like, I think this is funny, and I think it's smart, but I need to see it through other people's eyes.  I put together an interesting variety of people, and just one of them in particular just grabbed my hand and was like, oh, my God.

The thing that really got me, because I'm Australian, obviously, and America is a thing for me, and I love America, and I feel very connected to America.  But at the end of the show, which I don't want to spoil for you, but when TJ [Wilkins, playing Obama] comes out and he sings America -- my God.  And every single time, at rehearsal, on stage, I get emotional.  Every single time, my hand just goes to my heart, and he looks at me, and I'm just like, oh, I still get it.  There's only one stars and stripes.  It just takes me into this nostalgia because, to be honest, Obama coming into office didn't just affect America.  It affected the globe.  There's only ever going to be one first black American president.  And there's something triumphant and healing and hopeful about that.

I've seen 44 about 70 something times.  I've seen it in rehearsal and it just doesn't stop, like it's the same thing as the first time.  It means so much to me.  The chemistry in this show, the love, the joy on and off the stage. Like when we're touring we all get together and play Uno at night.  One of the things for us as well is that we don't like this distance between audience and stage.  We really want this connectivity and it's genuine. Like you see it after every show, everybody comes out and has some kisses and meets people and none of it is staged, it is really genuine.

I thought it was interesting because Eli has a background in that kind of Saturday Night Live style humor and it's very funny, but there was also something very poignant and hopeful and genuinely moving about it too.

Like that's who he is and that's the note really; he's a genuinely layered, compassionate, empathetic human being, but he's really smart and like really full of heart.  It's not earnest, it's not preachy; it's just having a fun look back at that time and he just nailed it.

Like I don't know the intricacies of American politics; like I had no clue who Ted Cruz was; like absolutely no clue. And I on purpose didn't Google it.  And then I actually thought, I mean without spoiling it as well, at one point there's a rap, green eggs and ham. I don't know how political you know but there's a green eggs and ham reference and I was like how did this lunatic come up with this? This is hysterical. And then Eli was like no, it really happened. I was like it couldn't have really happened. It really happened. [laughs]

And I think politics is actually quite hard to digest because you're only as good as the information you're told; like it depends where you get it from, and how you receive it. And Eli just has such a way of delivering it that makes you go like oh, it's not about one side or the other; it's just telling a story and seeing it from a perspective that's really fun and interesting and easy to digest as well.

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