Interview: Cindy Goldfield of A GRAND NIGHT FOR SINGING Offers a Fresh Take on Rodgers & Hammerstein

The songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein are so deeply ingrained in our culture that it's hard to imagine there was ever a time when they were brand new. Director and choreographer Cindy Goldfield is hoping people will feel a real sense of discovery with 42nd Street Moon's production of the musical revue A Grand Night for Singing. A Tony Award nominee for Best Musical, it features a bevy of classic R&H songs, plus some lesser-known but equally brilliant tunes that audiences may be unfamiliar with. Goldfield is giving them all a fresh take in order to bring out their enduring relevance for contemporary audiences.

I caught up with Goldfield by phone from her home in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco just before in-person rehearsals were about to start. She has enjoyed quite a long and prolific career as an actor, director and choreographer on Bay Area stages. In fact, she is in the cast of Fefu and Her Friends, soon to open at ACT. We talked about her unique take on this show, the various ways in which the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein are so embedded in our collective cultural consciousness, and which shows she would still love to do at 42nd Street Moon in the future. In conversation, Goldfield is naturally warm and engaging and very quick to laugh. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

A musical revue can be a very tricky thing to get right, so that the show feels like a cohesive piece of theater and not just a random set list of songs. How are you approaching this show as its director?

When [Moon Executive Artistic Director] Daniel [Thomas] and [Moon Producing Artistic Director] Daren [A.C. Carollo] asked, "Do you want to direct A Grand Night for Singing?" they were hoping that I would have a fresh take on it, make it relevant to younger audiences and sort of dust off expectations. So with that in mind, I just started listening to the music and letting my brain wander. I tried to let go of any connotations or connections to the shows from which the songs come. And, of course, songs that I wasn't as familiar with were way easier to do that with, like "That's the Way It Happens." But songs like "Surrey with the Fringe on Top," it's really hard not to just see the movie in your mind, or the last 7th grade production you saw with 70 kids onstage. These things are so ingrained in our collective knowledge of what musical theater is.

As I started to just let my brain play, I came up with connections to our modern world, our modern sensibilities that gave a new view of what these songs could be about. For example, "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" ends up being about low-rider culture. The fringe on the surrey becomes the ball-fringe around the visor and then we're into all of these amazing vehicles and the people who are a part of that culture. Or "Shall We Dance," which is one of those numbers that we can hardly get away from a big ball gown and a guy in bare feet, right? But when you drill it down to the lyrics, it was like maybe this is just dorky teenagers, the wallflowers at a dance. Maybe it's as simple as that feeling we've all had when we've made that overture to somebody and don't know what's gonna happen.

The other thing that I've done a little differently is we've added a voice, so there's six voices instead of five, and partly that was because I really wanted a better representation of our community at large reflected onstage. It was just really important to me to include as many facets of our community as possible.

And I was inspired by an old coffee table book that we had when I was growing up in the '70s called The Family of Man. All the hippie parents had it on their coffee table. [laughs] That book has photographers from all over - famous, not famous - and collections of photographs that are evocative of different themes - moms with babies, children screaming, men sitting around a café talking, war, peace, civil rights. So we've paired each of the songs with a collection of black and white photographs and some evocative images. Like the dance thing, it's not just people at the dance, but the shoes of all the kids lined up sitting on the bench, and then a picture of crepe paper, with the hope that it aids the storytelling that the actors are doing.

R&H are so deeply ingrained in our collective cultural consciousness that it's hard to imagine there was a time when their music was new. What was your own introduction to their work?

I always joke that I've never done a Rodgers and Hammerstein. Like I've spent my entire life in the field of musical theater and the only one I've ever done was through 42nd Street Moon, It was Pipe Dream, of all things and I only choreographed, I wasn't even in it.

But just growing up as a kid, we had those albums, and the movies that were made of The King & I and Oklahoma! in particular. I grew up without television. As well as having hippie parents with The Family of Man on the coffee table, we grew up sort of rurally - out by the foothills of Mt. Diablo, and then most of my childhood in Pt. Reyes. We didn't get any service so there wasn't any point in having a television.

So I never saw the Cinderella with Julie Andrews on television, but some of those songs I heard in musical theater class. I had the fortune of seeing it on Broadway a few years back, with Santino Fontana and Laura Osnes, and it was so wonderful and lovely to hear these songs. I was like, "Oh, that's where that comes from! That makes sense!" [laughs] So I would have to say that my original connections with Rodgers and Hammerstein would be like the background music of my childhood, rather than having the experience of "Oh, I did Oklahoma! in third grade." Cause I never did that. I will say that in some ways that has given me a little easier time in separating myself from the music, because I don't have visceral, kinesthetic memory of things. Thinking about it now, I am fairly grateful I had that clean ear.

I grew up watching the Leslie Ann Warren version of Cinderella, and it was a big deal when it aired every year. So when I saw the Broadway production you just mentioned, all these memories came flooding back, including visual images I didn't even know I had.

Yeah, they stick in your head and you don't even realize that they're part of the way you see the world. It reminds me of when you're reading a book and it's about a family's house and you realize you've set it in your childhood, like the physical layout of your childhood house. Everything is in reference or in relation to the images we created when we were kids and heard these songs.

One of the pleasures of this show is the chance to perform some wonderful R&H songs that aren't as well known because they come from shows that weren't so successful. What is your favorite song in this show that might be unfamiliar to most people?

I do really love "That's the Way It Happens." I think that's a really fun story. I also am really loving the arrangements that take songs we do know and then just explodes them with fun, jazzy, scatty harmonies. "Honey Bun" is a perfect example where it turns into "We're all gonna pretend we're brass instruments," or "Kansas City" where it's all the sudden like a Manhattan Transfer song. You almost forget the original connotation because of the arrangement, not even because of anything I'm pairing with it.

Knowing that I was going to be interviewing you this morning, I woke up with the song "A Lovely Night" going through my head again and again, and it just will not leave! So do you have any R&H earworms that are going through your head right now?

Well, last night as I was trying to go to sleep, my brain kept starting the show, and I was like "No, no, no! I can't do the whole show. I have to go to sleep!" [laughs] So I think that I am basically running the show in my head a lot and I get stuck on things like [Goldfield breaks into song] "One two three four five six seven stories high!" [from "Kansas City"] that roll in my head over and over and over.

With Moon it is rare that I come to them and say, "I want to direct this show." Most of the time, they come to me and say, "We want you to do this slot." So oftentimes I'm not super familiar with the show before I direct it, and then in the working on the show I fall deeply in love with the material. This has happened to me over and over again. Most Happy Fella is a perfect example of that, of like "What?! What songs are from that?" And then just falling in love with these damaged, fucked up people [laughs] who are so human in their endeavors. What I love about theater in general is all of these examples of human frailty.

So with this show it's the same thing of [at first] going, "Rodgers and Hammerstein, I know what that is." And then as I've spent a few months with this material, I'm looking forward to getting together finally with this cast to do what I do, which is dig into the human frailty, human imperfections, flaws, whatever we call it, of like how humans are actually human, rather than the airbrushed version we put out on Instagram.

As a longtime Moonie, what is a favorite show of yours that you really wish Moon would program in coming seasons?

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