Interview: Itamar Moses of AN AMERICAN TAIL THE MUSICAL at CHILDREN'S THEATRE COMPANY Adapts the Beloved Animated Film for the Stage

It is welcome news for musical theatre lovers of all ages that Tony-winning playwright Itamar Moses has a new show about to receive its world premiere in Minneapolis. Beginning April 25th, Children's Theatre Company is presenting An American Tail the Musical based on the beloved 1986 animated film. This new musical features book and lyrics by Moses (The Band's Visit, Boardwalk Empire) and music and lyrics by Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler (Diary of a Wimpy Kid the Musical, The Secret of My Success).

In An American Tail the Musical, an army of cats forces young Fievel Mousekewitz and his family to escape from Russia by boat. After a storm at sea separates them, Fievel arrives alone in the vast city of New York, where he encounters friends and foes as he clings to his dreams of a better life and reuniting with his family. The original film is a Jewish immigration story, and this new musical stage adaptation aims to represent more of the immigrant communities present in New York City in the 19th century, and also dives more deeply into the Mousekewitz family's Jewish heritage.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Moses by phone last week while the Brooklyn-based playwright was in town for final rehearsals. Moses had been building quite a substantial career for himself as a playwright and screenwriter when his work on the 10-time Tony-winning hit musical The Band's Visit raised his profile considerably. We talked about his affection for An American Tail as a child, his approach in adapting it for the stage, his delight in the puzzle of writing lyrics and what Tony night was really like for him. We also took a deep dive into his thoughts on the craft of musical book writing and why it's sometimes misunderstood. And - he teased a new musical he's working on that will reunite him with The Band's Visit composer, David Yazbek. Moses is one of those people who is just naturally fun and interesting to talk to, and I got the impression he's one of the lucky ones who truly loves what he does. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How did this stage adaptation of An American Tail come about and how did you become involved?

It was the brainchild of Peter Brosius and the staff at Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. They approached Universal and Amblin and acquired the rights to do a stage adaptation with the insight that the story belonged onstage and also that now was a good time to do it. CTC contacted me directly and said they wanted to do a stage version of An American Tail, and would I be interested in working on it? So I was lucky enough to be someone they wanted to hire.

How familiar were you with the animated film before signing on?

Quite familiar. I'm of the generation that it was one of the big films of my childhood. I was 9 years old when it came out so that's almost exactly the right age for whatever you would consider the target audience. I remember seeing it, I remember watching it on VHS in school, I remember the iconic sort of image of Fievel and his hat. I probably hadn't seen the movie since I was a kid, but I could have still sung the chorus of "There Are No Cats in America" 35 years later, however long it had been. [laughs]

The film of course already had a few songs, including the smash hit "Somewhere Out There." Are those being incorporated into the stage version?

The movie has I think a total of four songs, which is not really enough for a full stage musical so we knew going in we were going to have to write more. We ended up keeping three of the four, which was more than I necessarily expected, but even so we wrote eight or ninge new songs to fill out the score.

This obviously isn't your first musical. Is it your first time writing lyrics?

It's the second time. I co-wrote lyrics on my first musical, a satire of reality TV called Nobody Loves You, that Gaby Alter and I wrote. It premiered at The Old Globe in San Diego and then it was at 2nd Stage Off-Broadway, and there's a chance we might be bringing it back soon. It's been about 10 years, so it's revival time. [laughs] But in any case, Gaby and I co-wrote the lyrics on that show and we've also co-written lyrics on a couple of one-off songs. So I've done it, and I love doing it. And Alan Schmuckler and Michael Mahler who are the composing team for An American Tail were amenable to the three of us working on lyrics together and that's been really, really fun.

Do you view book writing and lyric writing as different skillsets? I imagine they both involve economy of language.

That's true, they do have that in common. They are different skillsets in a couple of ways, though. Book writing is a lot like playwrighting, but like you said, with a certain amount of extra economy. And an awareness that what you're essentially doing is creating the structure, the foundation, the scaffolding - whatever metaphor you want to use - that the story hangs on and that will lift and activate the songs. A good metaphor I've heard is that songs in a musical are like individual pearls and the book writer's job is to get them all to hang next to one another on the string.

Lyric writing does involve economy but actually much, much more. I don't know how other people approach it, but for me there's something incredibly satisfying about the puzzle of it. It really is like solving a crossword puzzle, but where part of the process is the ability to change the shape of the puzzle. There's something about knowing what you're trying to get across with the song, and literally how many syllables you have to do it in and where those syllables have to rhyme, that takes up a really satisfying amount of brain space. I can lose myself in lyric writing to a degree that even other kinds of writing don't completely engross me at that level. It'll feel like time has been flying when I look up and two hours has gone by while I've worked on these two verses. It really is like doing an incredibly fun kind of math.

Sometimes in my writing I have to adhere to a word count and I find that challenging enough. I can't imagine a syllable count!

Yeah, it's challenging. But one of the things that is so difficult about writing is the sense that there is no "right" answer. You can feel when something's wrong and you can feel when something's right in a general sense, but it's not math, it's not two plus two equals four. The formal constraints of lyric writing are so extreme that it actually gives you what feels like an enormous amount of freedom where you can just feel it click into place and you know it's right. There's something really nice about it, actually.

Writing books for musicals seems to me such an under-appreciated artform or skillset. If a musical has trouble, they always seem to blame it on the book writer, right? Does that ever bug you?

No, because it's not the only thing I do. I think if all I did professionally was book writing for musicals and my whole identity was wrapped up in it then I might be more sensitive or particular about people respecting book writing. But my identity is much more tied up with my sense of myself as a playwright, first of all, and also I do staff writing for television and I've written pilots and I write screenplays.

But what's interesting is that question you just asked, I get asked a lot. People say, "Book writers don't get enough respect." Which is a weird inverse way of feeling like you are being given respect. Whereas I've never had an interviewer say, "Book writing is the unimportant part of musicals." Right? [laughs] So I wonder if the truism that book writing is under-appreciated has become so widely known that it's kind of inverse appreciated now.

If you're interested in understanding more deeply why when a musical doesn't work it feels like the problem is with the book because the songs are lovely and the music is so good, I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is I think lack of respect for book writing is more problematic inside the industry, in how decisions are made about putting teams together for musicals. This happens for composers, too.

Musicals are an incredibly hard form, and as with anything you get better the more you do it. You gain more experience and you learn things. And more often than not when I see teams being put together, especially for famous titles that are being adapted, whoever is making those decisions seems addicted to - for some reason - placing people in every role who've never done it before. It'll be like "Oh, this super-famous rock star who's never written a musical before is gonna write the score. And this incredibly famous person who's never directed a musical before is gonna direct. And this person who's maybe a great writer in some other medium is gonna be the book writer." Or - the director's gonna do the book themselves. So I think if there's a lack of respect, it's in discounting all these wonderful people who have lots of experience writing books for musicals.

To me, putting together a winning recipe for making a good musical isn't that complicated. Get really good people who know what they're doing and want to work together, and then get out of their way. And that weirdly seems like the last resort that those producers would choose. It's so strange.

I think that how songs work in musicals is very mysterious and tricky and not widely understood. The great David Yazbek, who I was lucky enough to work with on The Band's Visit, is someone who really, really understands what a song in a musical has to do. That makes the book writer's job much easier because you're sort of handing the baton over and then it's handed back to you with some important step being taken in the story or change having happened for the character. So you're in really great hands in terms of the forward momentum of the piece through the songs.

When that's not happening, when a composer doesn't know how to do that, the song may be beautiful, and it seems like the problem is the book, but it actually may not be. There's only so much you can do as a book writer when the songs aren't doing their job dramaturgically. They may be doing a wonderful job in terms of melody and cleverness of rhymes and how amazing that singer is in doing that riff, but none of that actually is the deepest job of a song in a musical.

I'm not letting all book writers off the hook saying it's never the book writer's fault. I'm just saying that no matter what the problem is in a musical, it will look like it's the book writer's fault.

One of the reasons I asked you that question is because I saw the latest Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd a couple of weeks ago, and Sondheim's score is brilliant -

Brilliant -

But I knew that going in. What I was really struck by was just how economical and effective the book is.

It's very good. And the advantage they had - and this is why so many musicals are adaptations - is it's based on a play. Someone had worked out the basic structure, basically every beat of that story, before they began working on the musical. And that's a huge, huge leg up.

Getting back to The Band's Visit, one of the things I found most impressive about it was how seamlessly your book meshed with David Yazbek's score. Did it take you a while to develop that kind of relationship with him where things just clicked?

You know, I expected it to take longer because it was the first thing we'd ever worked on together. Our first conversations and meetings ever were about that show, so we didn't have any prior relationship. I think this is a credit to him that despite him having had three musicals on Broadway (I had written a couple, but hadn't had anything move to Broadway), he was immediately very respectful and collaborative and open to my ideas and to the give and take in a way that was really disarming and inspiring. So I think the working relationship was really positive right away.

And then in terms of why the pieces of that musical flow together so well, partly it's because the movie that it's based on is so good. Similarly to Sweeney Todd, where you're adapting something that has a sound structure to begin with, the movie is very nicely structured in a deceptively simple way and we preserved much about that. My first draft I just adapted the movie as if it were a play with no songs, a script that rendered the whole story onstage. And then David and I sat down together with that script and went through it page by page circling all the things we suspected were song moments, and then we sort of built the musical up on the chassis of that script.

Sometimes we were right, like a lot of the things we circled that day ended up being songs in the show. And sometimes we were wrong. We'd go off and try to write a song based on something we'd pinpointed and eventually come back and say, "I don't think there's a song there. It doesn't really spark into anything." And then sometimes, and this is something we learned through readings and workshops over the next couple of years before we did the Off-Broadway production at the Atlantic, we'd miss a moment where the audience is craving a song. Like you're in a musical and you've had a couple of songs and a character says something and you feel the audience lean forward eagerly like "Oh, here comes the next song." And then it doesn't happen, and you didn't even know you'd set one up and then failed to deliver.

You can feel the opposite really clearly, too, in a workshop where a song begins and you can feel the audience lean back because they actually don't want to slow things down the way a song can. They want to just keep moving. That's why those workshops and readings are really valuable if you're willing to listen to that vibe. Less so for an individual comment an individual person has afterwards when like everyone is trying to sound smart. But you can really trust the electricity, or lack thereof, in the vibe in the room while an audience is watching something. You can tell when they're leaning in and when they're leaning back, figuratively speaking.

You won the 2018 Tony for Best Book of a Musical for The Band's Visit. What was that night actually like for you?

First of all, to be nominated for a Tony was incredibly thrilling. You sort of fantasize about that kind of thing when you're starting out, but I'd been working professionally as a playwright since I was maybe 24 and the Tonys happened when I was 40. I'd been lucky enough occasionally to pick up some sort of acknowledgement or award nomination for this or that, but nothing remotely as major as a Tony. So just being nominated and in the month leading up to it getting to go to all the events and hang out with the other nominees, I was like "Well, this is an experience I'm really excited to be having."

On the actual Tony night, the expectation [was not that I was going to win], because I was nominated opposite Tina Fey for Mean Girls. The Band's Visit had obviously gotten some love from the other awards leading up to the Tonys and critics loved it so there was a feeling it was gonna do well in general and that we might even win Best Musical, but my award in particular, I was not the front runner. The expectation was that Tina Fey was gonna win. It's actually why they put the Best Book award on the live broadcast. They don't have room to do all the awards [on live TV] so they sort of pick and choose, and usually Best Book would be during a commercial break or something. The last time they had it on the broadcast was the year Book of Mormon was nominated because they wanted the South Park guys to be on TV accepting the award.

And so similarly they expected a speech from Tina Fey, and the voters went a different way. [laughs] So when I won, I was not expecting it. I was expecting a night where my show would do well, and I would get to be happy for and celebrate a bunch of my collaborators. I thought Yazbek would win, I thought Katrina Lenk would win. When I won I was sort of stunned, and also it was early in the night so because I had been kind of the underdog, it felt like a harbinger for how the rest of night was gonna go. Like there was this moment where everyone associated with Band's Visit was kinda like "Oh, I see what's about to happen!" - that we were going to sweep, and we did. We ended up winning ten.

That night was one of those extremely, extremely rare experiences where you feel consciously aware that you're having a once-in-a-lifetime experience while it's happening. I remember thinking to myself "Remember all of this because it is almost certain that nothing quite like this is ever gonna happen to you again." It was pretty great.

Well, for what it's worth, I happened to see both Mean Girls and Band's Visit on the same day and I remember thinking that Tina Fey's book was really great, but yours was even better, so...

Well, that's kind of you. I have no comment. I'm a huge Tina Fey fan.

Getting back to An American Tail, I don't think you're used to writing shows for younger audiences, right?

Yeah, I would say this is the first.

Did that present any special challenges for you?

My initial impulse going in was not to think about the fact that it was a young adult show or for children's theatre, at least partly. I mean, Children's Theatre is the name of where we're doing it so that's impossible [laughs], but I was like "Look, kids are smart and all the best stuff for kids has wit and darkness in it." You don't need to dumb things down for kids, you don't need to make allowances for the fact too much that it's kids in the audience. That was the attitude, almost to a fault I would say, in how I approached the initial draft.

As we've gotten closer to actually opening, I wouldn't say that I've made allowances for the fact that it's for kids so much as just keeping in mind that the things that are true for all audiences are true for kids, but more so. Like it's not as though adult audiences want to be bored or preached at or see things that are super dense, but if anything the bar is higher with kids because they're very honest in their reactions.

The one thing I've been very adamant about is that kids are often smarter and understand more than we give them credit for and want to be told the truth. I think it's adults who want to go to things for escape, maybe because their life is so full of truths and responsibilities and things they have to handle. Kids are being lied to constantly by the adults around them, and so I think the stories they respond to tend to be ones that they instinctively understand have kernels of truth.

And that truth, in this case, is a story about anthropomorphized mice in a tiny version of the city of New York. So it's like a metaphorical truth - it has the truth as a fable. But that's why kids like fairly tales or Aesop. Those stories, even though they're about talking animals or elves or witches in the woods, contain a kind of emotional, psychological truth that kids respond to.

Does the show have ambitions beyond Minneapolis?

I think any musical has ambitions beyond its initial run. I mean, there are outliers where this is not true, when something was especially experimental or unusual, maybe not. But for the most part, you're always hoping there's gonna be some sort of future for your show, and especially for a musical with commercial ambitions.

But this is my fourth musical to premiere and one thing I've learned through doing this is you have to just focus on the stuff right ahead of you. We obviously have our fingers crossed for what the next step might be, but you get there by just saying to yourself, "What is the absolute best version of the show we can do right now, on this stage in Minneapolis?" And then treat it as an end in itself, as if it's the only shot you're going to get at it and let the chips fall where they may. Cause after that, there's a lot outside of your control.

But yeah, we would love to bring it to other cities, to other large regional theatres that have young adult audiences for part of their season, and then obviously we'd love to bring it to the city where it's set, which is New York.

Do you have anything else currently in the pipeline that you can talk about?

Yeah, I have a new play that has been vaguely scheduled to premiere off-Broadway about a year from now. I don't want to say too much yet cause it's not announced and you never know till the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted. And David Yazbek and I, along with another songwriter named Erik Della Penna, are working on a new musical that also might have its first workshops and early productions in the next year or so. It's about a failed outlaw in the old West. And then I'm developing stuff for TV and we'll see if any of that comes to fruition.

Well, it's certainly good news that you're teaming up with Yazbek again.

Yeah, we had a good time so we'd love to do another.

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An American Tail the Musical will play April 25 to June 18, 2023 at Children's Theatre Company's UnitedHealth Group Stage at 2400 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis MN. For tickets and additional information, visit childrenstheatre.org/AmericanTail or call 612.874.0400.

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