Interview: Andrew Lippa of LIPPA @ 60: A BIRTHDAY BENEFIT FOR THEATREWORKS at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

When Broadway composer Andrew Lippa was contemplating how to mark his upcoming milestone birthday, he knew he wanted to celebrate by giving back to the theater community. The only question was how best to do that. Then he hit on the idea of doing a benefit concert for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, the company he considers his “home theater,” and pitched it to TheatreWorks Artistic Director Giovanna Sardelli who readily agreed. So – on Monday, December 16th he will be performing Lippa @ 60: A Birthday Benefit for TheatreWorks. This one-night-only gala concert for the Tony-winning company promises to be a fun evening full of surprises and musical guests.

Lippa is a Tony-nominated composer, lyricist, book writer, performer and producer who first became known to TheatreWorks audiences 20 years ago with the company’s world premiere production of his musical adaptation of A Little Princess.  He subsequently developed several musicals as part of TheatreWorks’ New Works Festivals, including The Man in the Ceiling, Jerry Christmas and Asphalt Beach, and personally appeared on TheatreWorks' main stage in his musical revue, The Life of the Party. 

Lippa is probably best known as the composer of The Addams Family, for which he received a Tony nomination for Best Original Score, and which has been the world’s most frequently produced musical for a number of years now. Other prominent credits include Broadway’s You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Big Fish, and off-Broadway’s The Wild Party and John & Jen. For the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, he wrote and starred alongside Laura Benanti in the theatrical oratorio I Am Harvey Milk in San Francisco and subsequently performed the work at Lincoln Center in New York and Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Lippa has also served for over a decade as the president of the board of The Dramatists Guild Foundation.

I spoke with him by phone earlier this week from his home in Columbus, Ohio (he also maintains a residence in Manhattan). We talked about why it was important to him to give back to the theater company that has helped him develop so many of his works and took a bit of a stroll down memory lane, including deep dives into how he wrote the song for Kristin Chenoweth that jump-started her career and how he got hired to appear onstage with Patti LuPone in her Broadway concert show. In conversation, Lippa is crisp and erudite, funny and easily approachable, and can unexpectedly tug at your heartstrings. Come to think of it, that is also an apt description of his music. The following has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.  

How did this Lippa @ 60 benefit concert for TheatreWorks come about?

I’ll be 60 on the 22nd of December and was contemplating “What’s a fun way to celebrate my 60th birthday?” and it dawned on me that it would be really great to do some kind of fundraiser. I serve as the president of the board of the Dramatists Guild Foundation and have been in that role for 11 years, and I love philanthropic work that I get to do in the theater, and I thought, “Wow, TheatreWorks has been really my home theater. I’ve developed more shows and done more productions there than anywhere else.” It felt like the best birthday gift I could get is to give a birthday gift and raise a little bit of money for TheatreWorks. So - I suggested it to Gio Sardelli and she thought it was a great idea.

Once you got the idea, how did you go about choosing the repertoire for the evening?

That’s really hard, to be honest. Maybe it’s turning 60, but I had occasion to look back on the past few years and since September 2020 I’ve written over 70 songs. That includes giant sequences in musicals and it also includes two of the musicals I’m working on that I’m writing the book for as well. I have seven new projects in development, which is just absurd, but part of that is just the pandemic.

So as those productions are starting to come to life, I was looking through them and thinking about what new material I would like to share. One of them is a Christmas movie that is very close to a green light getting shot, and I thought it’s the perfect time of year. So we’re gonna do a few songs from the movie and a few songs from a couple other aborning projects, and then I’ll do a few old favorites and stuff that the audience might have seen before.  

Is the Christmas movie anything you can talk about yet?

I’m very tight-lipped about upcoming stuff, only because the schedules always go longer than you would hope, and so by the time [they come out], you talked about them 5 years ago and people are like “That old thing?!” I can say it’s a wonderful project that I’ve been involved with from the very first pitch that a producer brought to me and screenwriter David Stern. It’s called “The Totally Awesome Christmas Story” and is about a group of teenagers who get snowed in, in a mall in suburban Chicago and spend Christmas Eve experiencing a Christmas miracle. It’s a joyful Christmas story about young people.

Speaking of young people, I was surprised to learn that you were actually born in England, and came to the U.S. when you were a child. Was that a difficult transition?

Oh, I have no idea. I was 17 months old when we moved to Windsor, Canada and then I was just under 3 when we came to suburban Detroit. I had an English accent when I was a toddler, but by the time I started kindergarten I think that was all gone. My mother is 93 and very healthy thank God, and has an English accent, and my father had an English accent. I grew up with a peculiar combination of British and Jewish and midwestern upbringing, whatever that is, but it was all terrific. I’m still a British citizen as well as an American citizen, and I feel a kind of British kinship. I love England and visiting Leeds, which is where a good portion of my family is, and some in London.

Some people might not know that you’re actually quite a talented singer and actor in your own right, not one of those composers who just sits at the piano and sort of croaks through their repertoire. Did you originally set out to be a musical theater performer?

Yes, I did. I started playing piano rather late, I was in eighth grade, and then I discovered musicals in 10th grade and was in productions of our school musicals and by the time I went to the University of Michigan I was a voice major, studying classical singing. That first year of school I thought I was going to be a classical singer and I found that it just wasn’t completely satisfying to me.

When did you realize you wanted to be a composer?

I discovered writing at the end of my freshman year and started writing songs in musicals, and that has proven over time to be more satisfying to me than performing. Whenever I was given the choice between one or the other, I would pick the writing.

And I’ve always still performed. I played Harvey Milk in the premiere production of I Am Harvey Milk in San Francisco in 2013, I did it at Lincoln Center in 2014, and also in Los Angeles and Seattle, and I was in the follow-up in 2018, Unbreakable. I’ve enjoyed singing my own material, but I think I’ve given up "the dream" of being a performer anymore. [laughs] It’s very tiring, to be honest with you.

As you well know, The Addams Family has been the most frequently produced musical in high schools across America for many years now.

It has held an uncanny record, that is true!

When you were writing it, was that even a goal that you had in mind, for high schools to someday perform it?

Not even a whisper of a thought at the time. I said “yes” to writing that musical when I was asked by the producer, and it was among the most straightforward projects I was ever involved in. I’ve had a few where somebody just said, “Hey, do you want to do this?” and I’m like, “Yeah, sure.” But most times it’s something that I want to do, or that I create and then try to get other people to do.

In the case of The Addams Family, the producer Stuart Oken had the rights to turn those characters into a Broadway musical and Marshall Brickman (bless his memory) and Rick Elice were already on board as the book writers. Stuart said, “Do you want to write the score?” And I said, “Who’s writing the book?” And he said, “Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice.” And I said, “Sign me up.” That was enough reason for me to want to get involved.

I loved The Addams Family characters, I had always known them both through The New Yorker single-panel comics and the television show. I immediately said “yes” because it really did plug into my gothic sensibility, my humor, my dark side, but I never for a second thought about high schools or what might happen after Broadway.

It’s been quite a wonderful story because it wasn’t the most embraced show by the critics in 2010, and in 2020 during the pandemic there was a wonderful interview-style article in The New York Times that I participated in about how we reworked the show when it went on tour and how that version was the show that got licensed and had become the most produced musical in the world and continues to be. And nobody expected that, least of all me!

So I have to ask - what musicals did you do in high school?

The first one, I was cast as a “Steam Heat” Boy in The Pajama Game, and then in 11th grade I was El Gallo in The Fantasticks. In my senior year, we did two obscure shows. One was Down in the Valley, which is a Kurt Weill one-act and then some even more obscure thing where I’ve never heard of the writers and don’t even remember the title.

You have so many interesting gigs on your resume, like I didn’t realize that you were the Associate Conductor for Patti LuPone on Broadway.

I was! In 1995, yeah.

I remember seeing that show on a Saturday night and having such a great time I went back for the very next performance on a Monday.

Then you saw me onstage playing a keyboard … if you weren’t looking at Patti, which you should have been looking at her a hundred percent of the time. [laughs]

As an up-and-comer at the time, what was that gig like?

Oh, it was remarkable. Scott Wittman was the director of that show, and for the audition I went and met Patti and Scott wherever he was living at the time. It was summer, the hottest week of the year, and I was very formal when I was young so I wanted to wear “proper shoes and trousers.” It was a hundred-degree day so I showed up at this audition completely soaked in sweat, and Scott was like “Omigoodness, do you need anything?” And I’m like “A glass of water, maybe?”

I sat down in the kitchen and Patti came in to see me and she goes, “Are you okay, doll?” They were interviewing a few other potential music directors and so then they excused that other person and I came in and she said, “Let’s do ‘There Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens’.” The night before, I had sat with her recording of the show she had done in LA that was basically the show that she was doing on Broadway. By ear I would just pick out all the feels in all the songs and get the tempos down, and so that one was for me very easy to play, and easy to stay with her.

They were very intrigued and wanted to know more so then she said, “Let’s do ‘I’m a Stranger Here Myself’.” which is all chromatic and very moody. Before we started that song - I was so young and silly - I turned to her and grabbed her hand and said, “We don’t have to do a second song if you don’t want to. I can just tell my friends tonight at dinner that I got to play a song for you, and honestly that’s enough.”

She just went sorta like, “Oh, pshaw!” and looked at me like “Who is this kid from the farm?!” So I did “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and absolutely nailed it, and then they really got interested in me. They had a lot of questions for me and then she’s like “Let’s do ‘Meadowlark.’ I feel like singing!” And so we do “Meadowlark” and I do it from memory because I knew it very well, and by the time I got to the end of that I thought “Oh, I’ve nailed this gig!”

The next night, I went to see a wonderful performer named Phillip Officer at the Oak Room in the Algonquin. The wonderful and late Dick Gallagher was his music director and at the end of the night, Phillip introduced him and said “And Dick got a great call today. He’s going to be the music director for Patti LuPone’s concert show on Broadway this fall!” So my friend Don leans in towards me clapping and  says, “Way to find out!”

Two days later, Scott Wittman called me on a Monday morning and said, “We love you, and Patti loved you, but we have a long relationship with Dick Gallagher and Dick is going to be Patti’s music director. Would you be the associate music director and vocal cover for the tenors in the 4-man backup singing group that are part of her show?” And I said, “Yes, when do I start?” It was my first Broadway show, and it was fabulous.

I first became aware of you as a composer through the new songs you wrote for the revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I’m fascinated with “My New Philosophy,” the song you wrote for Kristin Chenoweth that was a major factor in her winning the Tony that year. It’s not an obvious showstopper in that it’s not a soaring ballad or a rousing anthem, and yet in performance it absolutely kills. How did you come up with such an unusual song?

In 1998, when we were pulling that show together, the director Michael Mayer had met with Charles Schulz and been given permission to go through the entirety of Schulz’s catalog, most of which existed after the original You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown had been created. The second woman, the woman who wasn’t Lucy, in the original You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was just a sort of amalgam character who didn’t really exist in the strip, and so Michael wanted it to be Sally, Charlie Brown’s sister.

He found 4 or 5 of the “My New Philosophy” strips where Charlie Brown would say something and Sally would say, “Oh, yeah? That’s what you think!” And then he’d say, “What?” And then she’d say, “That’s my new philosophy!” and then he’d have an exclamation point over his head and that would be the four panels. He gave them to me and said, “I think this is a new song, and we want Kristin Chenoweth to be in the show.” I knew Kristie because she had been in our development production of The Wild Party the year prior at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. I already knew Kristie and I’d written “Two of a Kind” from Wild Party for her, so I knew how to write for her strengths. I remember thinking there was one of the strips where Lucy had the rant that she has at the end of the song – you know “Help me! Help me!” etc. And I thought, well, that’s the end. Sally’s gonna get interrupted and say, “Clearly, all philosophies aren’t for all people.” And then sing, “And that’s my new philosophy!”

So I knew the song was called “My New Philosophy” and I sat down and wrote it, it took me a couple of days maybe. I remember we did it in rehearsal and it was one of those things where you could see the faces on the poor rest of the cast, like you could see them all go “Oh, she’s going to get all the applause.” And the first performance at the Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois, it was the second song of Act II and when she sang “And that’s my new philosophy” and hit the piece of paper that was in her hand, she just stood there and the audience went crazy for 45 seconds. Michael Mayer and I looked at each other and it was like, “OK, well, there it is!”

And it only got crazier after that. Somehow, it was just the perfect actor with the right piece of material. I always say that the best things happen like that where I provide 50% of it and the actor provides 50% of it and we together create something that neither of us could have done on our own. That was the first time that ever happened to me where I saw that kind of magic, and everybody knew it. It was so amazing, and of course her career took off after that.

That also says to me that you had an innate understanding of what Kristin Chenoweth brought to the table. Not just any performer could sing that song and bring down the house, right?

There is something… if you’re lucky you get it once, I’ve gotten it maybe a couple times, certainly with Kristin. If she could write her own songs, she would write the exact song I would write for her, and if I could perform, I would sound like her. We are spiritually, emotionally, comedically, musically linked in some other universe, and we both know it.

I’ve music directed a lot of her big concerts like the first time she played the Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall the first time she did Carnegie Hall, and conducted her with some major symphony orchestras, and when we rehearse together, we never talk. We just do the song and we do it the same way. It’s really hard to describe. It’s just like our instincts match, and so we know what the other one wants and what the other one feels.

It’s really been a wonderful musical and theater partnership for me and we’re in discussion right now, I can’t say what it is, but we’re in discussion about a new project together. And in fact my only gold record is “Evil Like Me,” the song I wrote for her for Disney’s Descendants. So she won a Tony singing my song and I got a gold record with Kristie for writing her that one.

My favorite song of yours is probably “San Francisco” from I Am Harvey Milk, the oratorio you wrote for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. It just so perfectly captures the story of a whole generation of gay men who came to San Francisco and saw the City as their salvation. That’s not really your story, so how were you able to get inside that?

Well, I think it is my story. It’s not specific to San Francisco – for me, it was New York. I couldn’t get out of Michigan fast enough, and that’s not a criticism of Michigan so much as it is just what was waiting for me in New York. I wanted to be part of that bigger pond. You know, John Kander and Fred Ebb were right – if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. When I was making I Am Harvey Milk, what I wanted to do was write a love song, but the love song is to a place, not a person.

I lived in San Francisco for 40 years, and it’s in many ways a mythical city. So many people write about it, and I usually find those things a little false, like the writer didn’t really get what’s so magical about San Francisco. But your song just feels so true to me, like I know the narrator of this song. How did you do that?

Well, that’s an enormous compliment that I will say “thank you” for, but what you just said has nothing to do with me. I have no method, other than to say that whatever it was was because I got to sit with five or six guys from the chorus who had been there from the very beginning, [the chorus’ first public performance] the night when Harvey and George Moscone were assassinated. I got to talk to Anne Kronenberg and Cleve Jones, and I got to see all of the places in and around the Castro and read the books, and all I can say is that, as Noah Himmelstein who directed that originally and I often say, you know that’s Harvey talking to us, that’s not us. And I believe in that.

Since you’ve titled the benefit Lippa @ 60, you’re apparently not one of those people who is shy about revealing their age –

[pauses] I should have said “Lippa at 6 feet!” Oh, heavens! [laughs] I actually am 6 feet.

At this point in your life, what do you find to be the best thing about getting older?

The amount of not giving a [bleep] that happens as you get older. It’s not meant as “I don’t care” – it’s meant as I’ve done a lot of work. So much of my life I was so concerned by what other people thought, and I’ve let go of most of that now, so I think the joy of being 60 is to be accepting love. My husband is remarkable in many, many ways, and for me one of the most remarkable is his understanding of how to love me, and my willingness to be loved.

I just wasn’t a person who accepted love very easily, but I know he loves me and I love him, and that’s all I really need the rest of my life. I’m grateful for my good health and I’m grateful for my creativity, all of the things that sustain me, but I would say the one thing is my willingness to be loved.

I can certainly identify with that. And it amazes me how long it can take to get to that place.

It takes as long as it takes, Jim, for all of us. And if you do get there, it’s just great, the riches that wait for you when you can be at peace. That’s the other word for it, being at peace. And I understand my place in the world and being of service, that’s a big, big deal to me. I’ve spent over a sixth of my life being of service to other writers in the theater, and in some cases lifesaving work, and it’s been the most gratifying work I’ve ever done.  

(all photos by Kevin Berne)

---

Lippa @ 60: A Birthday Benefit for TheatreWorks will perform Monday, December 16, 2024 at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. The festivities will kick off at 6pm with a pre-show party including hors d’oeuvres and a hosted bar, with an appearance by Lippa. The concert will start at 7:30pm, followed by a post-show reception with a toast to Lippa and dessert. Full evening and concert-only tickets are available. For tickets and information, visit TheatreWorks.org or call (877)-662-8978.

To post a comment, you must register and login.