BWW Interviews: Stephen Flaherty on ANASTASIA, ONCE ON THIS ISLAND, RAGTIME and More!

Stage Entertainment Spain has recently announced ANASTASIA in Madrid in a great press event, including Stephen Flaherty. BroadwayWorld had the chance to speak with the composer about this show, his career on Broadway, his creative process with Lynn Ahrens (lyricist of ANASTASIA) and much more!

BroadwayWorld: What thrills you most about bringing ANASTASIA to Spain?

Stephen Flaherty: It's really exciting for us, it's a surprise to us. Stage Entertainment people, who were the producers on Broadway. We assumed that it would be like London or something and that's apparently in the cards, but we all loved to have the next incarnation, the European premiere in Madrid. We thought it was an exciting idea, unexpected and the good news is, in my limited amount of Spanish, the songs sound beautiful in this language. There's a passion to the songs and to the people here, you know, so the actors really understood the characters.

At first, when you write for a character, you start casting the actors for that role and you goes from the abstract idea to write for that actor as the character, writing for their voices and you tailor the material for these actors. Which is exciting, but then, the challenge is after that you have to find a whole New Group of people, Spanish actors, who can do it. And these group is so wildly talented and perfect for the parts. Our director, Darko Tresnjak, says "the Spanish people understand these characters more than the American ones, the story, and what it is for politics to change the country, and how you need to adapt, and everything in the story." He was thrilled. I was not able to come for auditions, I watched the finalists on video, and so did my collaborators back in the States, and everybody was terrific, so we are so looking forward to meeting the cast in person and all the principals were at the press meeting, it was exciting.

Jana, who is playing Anya, is so unbelievably gifted, and it's a really tricky part to cast. Because this character is coming from sort of shattered existence, she's trying to find who she is, you really need a vulnerable character in the actress. She also has the strength that is necessary for the arc of the character, because she has to become a leader in act 2. Also along the way she has to be funny and physical and real, and she has all of those qualities. Frankly, I don't think you can teach vulnerability to an actor, we've seen that in auditions in the States, either do they have the quality or you can't cast that person. She has all of it, and it's been a pleasure to work with her for two days for the press meeting, cos I got to know her and work with her on a one on one situation, work through the songs, come up with different approaches and working with our musical director here in Madrid, who is terrific. That's been really great.

So we did two songs at the event, 'Once Upon a December' and 'Journey To The Past', and they both were great, there was a enthusiasm in the room, and it was wonderful. My only regret is that she was unable to do the new song that we wrote for the character that happens really early in the show...

BWW: In My Dreams!

SF: Yes! Because we heard her singing on tape and she sang it so beautifully, and I think from all the new songs it's my favorite.

BWW: Mine is My Petersburg, sung by Derek Klena

SF: Boy, he really can sing it! That's something I can't do myself. I can do 80% of the song OK, but the ending have to be this climax, and a celebration of the city. In order to do it correctly you have to do it vocally, to show that joy and love for the city, and it was so exciting, because your fear is you won't be able to find the people who can do that. I've seen that on other shows, where you're lucky if you find one person who can do that role, and only one who can do that role, and you pray they all say yes, or you can't do the show. There's no other option.

We were really lucky to have this cast for Madrid, the city is going be thrilled to hear them doing this roles.

BWW: Curiously there's a similar background to Christy and Jana, they both played SPRING AWAKENING and there's a youth in them. Do you think that sums to the character?

SF: Both of them are very strong independent women, but they have this sense of, I hate use the word 'wonder', but they have that sense of wonder about the world that is not manufactured, it's genuine and real. They both have it. Yes, they both were in the cast of Spring Awakening, and they both loved singing that music too so we're lucky we found both of them.

Christy is also a songwriter, you have to mention it, she writes her own music and lyrics, and she actually, by the time we met her, before we cast her, she was considering herself a singer-songwriter first, and the acting came second. That really helped us because she understood how ideas lay on a musical line, it feel spontaneous, not that you're an actress who memorized the songs, and you're singing the song, it's like you're living the moment. It naturally has to feel like it comes from the dialogue that happens to be sung.

BWW: Like Musical Theatre should feels like...

SF: Exactly! That's what we strive for. You're not aware you're changing from speaking to singing, it should feels easy. If we do that successfully and create that illusion for the audience, we've done our job well.

BWW: There's a lot of anticipation for the show from our readers on BroadwayWorld Spain. What was the response like from the audience on Broadway?

SF: Well, it's funny because Lynn and I who wrote the songs for the film, which was 20 years ago, it was a while ago! (laughs) We underestimated the fervent love that the fans of the film have for the songs and the characters. So we changed a lot of the story, and cut some characters, we added a new one, who is very important for the love triangle in the story. We were not interested in just taking the animated film and slap again up on the stage. We wanted really to create something new.

BWW Not just an animated movie translated to the stage...

SF: I don't want to mention other shows that've done that... (laughs) We really wanted to develop into a new Broadway musical, and doing that halfway through we were aware of these fans, and we didn't want to basically alienate them and have them say "Why have you taken my favorite character from all time?"

What we found actually very early on previews on the out-of-town try-out which was in Hartford Connecticut, the fans came out and there were real audience members too, civilians, but the fans were there and thrilled with what we did. A lot of what we found was that the people who grew up with these songs, at 10, are now in their 30s with kids of their own. And I think that the musical matured, and it's now a grown up musical. It's not just for little kids, there's no singing Albano bats ...

BWW: Thanks for that!

SF: But it's definitely a more mature deep emotional musical and it seems that people who liked the original loves it now and that's good to know, because they were clocking every little moment, you could feel it in the audience. The fact that the songs that we did keep from the movie to the stage piece, the thing that we did change a lot was the context, I don't want to say we re-purposed but we changed the context in which a lot of the numbers were sung and we developed them into bigger sequences, bigger ideas.

So a song like 'Journey to the past' which in the film is her songs, she sings it in her maybe first 10 minutes of the movie and we felt that for the stage piece she hand't really earned that moment to be able to sing that song. So we actually went to the other film, which is the Ingrid Bergman one, and the character of Anya in that picture is more damaged because she's been through more drama, she's dealing with her own memory, she's having flashbacks if you will, she has come to terms to who she is and who she's not. And that's so interesting to us and we thought "We should that incarnation in the story". So 'In My Dreams', which is her first song, is about her remembering fragments memories and she's not sure if she's making them up or they're real, she remembers about Paris, things that have played a part in her youth, she knows for some reason that she has to get there but she's not sure why and how. All of that stuff is great and I said to Darko, our director, "It's like a Hitchcock thriller, it's a psychological thriller"

BWW: Sounds a lot like Marnie...

SF: Yes! Very much like Marnie! So we're creating this new version we tapped into psychological thriller, we made it much more of a journey and adventure story, and we said to Darko "this show should not have a black out in act 1". It needs to somehow keep going, from one scene proposed to the next that sweeps into the train station and then there's vocals back there as the train starts going into the next scene, and then they jump off they train, we cut away to the officers in Leningrad" and he loved that idea, that became a challenge for him too, into the develop how he could stage that with no blocking out, with no set coming down and actors coming from the side. He started developing a visual language for the production that really excited us. It involves a lot of projections, it never ends, it sweeps from one place to the other. Have you seen it?

BWW: Yes, I've seen the videos and it's very dynamic...

SF: Sure! And also, though technically it's a period piece set in Russia in act 1 and Paris in the 20s in act 2, we didn't wanted to feel that it was stuck in time. There are elements of pop music that were in the picture, so we knew there had to be historical elements, but we need contemporary elements, and it had to speak to the contemporary audience. You shouldn't go like "This is a history lesson of what went on Russia."

So instead of that, we have a very modern look, of course it has period qualities, period customs, but the look of the set, the videos, it had to have very contemporary and very cutting edges. Early on the process I said it had to have the look of COAST OF UTOPIA and not Rodgers and Hammerstein's CINDERELLA. The director totally understood it, and ran with it, the projection designer Aaron Rhyne created this beautiful magical world these characters have to live in.

We were so excited because we couldn't fully understand, we were discussing in meetings, but we couldn't really experience what it was like to see it in theatre. So we got to see how the video interfaced with the lightning interfaced with set design and the costume design. It actually felt very contemporary, like a multimedia piece.

BWW: It's what happens with HAMILTON because you're seeing a period piece presented to contemporary audience

SF: It was interesting because when I heard that Lin-Manuel, who is a acquaintance of mine, was up to, an story of Alexander Hamilton and he was going to do it to rap music, and using contemporary elements... it's the kind of idea that when you read it on paper you can't fully grasp what he's up to. So when you experience it., you feel this fresh original new kind of theatre.

Same thing with SPRING AWAKENING, if you look at that piece about troubled teens, set in Germany and it deals with suicide, all these topics seem very dark and yet it's a very uplifting emotional show. I took a friend of mine to see it and he said "Ugh, that doesn't sound good!". But then he loved the show, because it has its own identity, it's very fresh and the talent of it.

BWW: Definitely! You wrote new songs for the musical, 15 new songs, and you came back to the material you wrote 20 years ago...

SF: It was the challenge. It was not only you going back to the musical score that you started, but also you're going to an earlier version of yourself and what was going on in your life 20 years ago, let alone these musical choices. But it was so easy, because I knew this music so well, we had researched so much, and tried so many different things, and some made it into the movie and some not. In fact, we didn't use trunk material, or discarded material from the film, although there's this one character who didn't make the cut into the stage version, who is Rasputin, we cut it, but there was a theme he sang I felt it was the chore of the Russian sound and in every version for that character for the film I would always Take That section.

BWW: I love that section, and it went on in 'Stay I Pray You'...

SF: Yes, yes! And Lynn didn't even realize what I was up to, I don't think she realized I was taking elements, but there was something about these several measures of music and I thought "It's going to be the heart of potentially a new song", and it was actually Terrence's idea, of the scene in the train station where the characters are leaving Russia and it's probably the last time they're going to see it. So there's something very moving to him and any type of Russian literature or film or music where they tack about Russia, they call it "Mother Russia", he said "I think there's a strong vocal moment to be had" and we thought we could sing it. We came up with a notion that there would be a character we don't even know, it could be any person in a train station who just starts singing this.

And I got excited with by the idea he would be singing this acapella, and then we would introduce the arrangements. It's just a human voice and bit by bit it's the other people in their minds before they get on the train and then there finally be our three principals singing about what it is for them. With so much current events about immigration, and people being forced to leave their countries, and trying to find better or different lives, in other place, it's so resonant, so actually I think it's the cast's in NY favorite moment in the show to sing.

And the other moment we all love to sing is in Act 2 where the characters all converge...

BWW: In the Quartet!

SF: Yes! At the ballet, every strand of plot of character converges in one place. And that scene in the animated film is also in the Ingrid Bergman film, a scene where the Dowager Empress is looking through the opera glasses, and the woman across the opera box who is Anya, and they're looking at one another. There's no words in any of these versions, it's just reaction shots in the film, they're just close-ups on "What are these characters thinking?" And I said to Terrence "I think it's the song". They're all just thinking what brought they here, what they're hoping, what'll come out of this, and we thought it was sort of bracing idea to take all the themes that these characters are singing, and try to somehow make them coexist, in one sequence and during the ballet, so we thought "what will they be doing?" And we went with the Swan Lake. It could be either a great or a terrible idea! (Laughs)

BWW: But it blends so well with Once Upon A December...

SF: And also parts of 'In My Dreams', and Tchaikowsky, and the Dowager sings part of Close The Door, and they're all singing together. It was just one of those things that just works right from the beginning. And Darko and Peggy Hickey, our choreographer, they came up with the notion of what if we mirror the ballet what emotionally is happening to these three actors, to Anya, to Dimitri and Gleb.

They have these three characters from Swan Lake enacting what emotionally is happening and it's such a favorite moment for the audience too, because it happens in the middle of act 2 right when the plot is heating up, it's a set piece at the ballet, everybody's there, it really feels the audience leaning forward which is a great thing to feel as we nervous writers stay back at the theatre, wandering around with sort of pacing, sweating the T-Shirts and seeing the whole audience leaning forward was very exciting. That's a moment that makes us all happy as a team. It involves costumes, lighting, staging, setting, music, vocals... to be dramatic, the meeting of all these storylines.

BWW: We'll see in Spain, so looking forward to it!

SF: We hope!

BWW: You're living a wild success on Broadway with two shows penned by you and Lynn, ONCE ON THIS ISLAND and ANASTASIA, running at the same time. How does it feel?

SF: Well, it's something that wasn't planned obviously, but it's a wonderful convergence of this moment in time. I think the thing I'm most proud of is that these two shows are so wildly different. ANASTASIA is a romance, sort of a modern take on a traditional kind of musical, and ONCE ON THIS ISLAND is this wild thing all on itself. The staging that Michael Arden has come up is in the Circle In The Square, the notion to bring the audience in the circle, the audience is part of the ritual, and he wanted to use a lot of ritualistic theatre things. So just the storytelling circle, there's this one moment where the actors are lighting the candles.

It's very elemental, and they perform the entire show on sand. There's water, there's rain, there's fire and there was something about the elemental quality, the idea of getting an audience a group of actor together, where there's no real division because what's happening in the circle and how everybody's witnessing around that circle. There's something so exciting to us going back to the roots of storytelling which I think was implied in why we did the show originally. But Michael's brought that to the foreground.

Originally it was an unnamed island, sort of an island fable, and that's how it is in the novel in which the piece is based. But Michael really wanted to put it fairly in the world of Haiti, and contemporary. And we thought it was an exciting idea. Those were all very exciting ideas. But there was no plan B! Because there's only one theatre on Broadway that's in the round and it's Circle In The Square. So we said it was there or nothing. Luckily Circle was very interested in it, and happened quickly. For the time we had an early meeting with Michael and our two orchestrators, and our producer Ken Davenport from that moment when we said "OK, let's do the show!"...

BWW: Ken Davenport is an adventurer himself!

SF: He's fearless and he makes it happen! From that moment when we shook hands and said "Let's do this!" to the moment we opened the doors and in comes an audience it's only a year and a half, which is very fast. Where ONCE ON THIS ISLAND is a revival, and we knew it works, there wouldn't be new songs, we would need to tweak and adjust things, but ANASTASIA had it first reading for the stage version in 2011, and there were many steps after that. So you can't plan, you just work on things that excite you, and you never know where it's going to land. That's part of life in theatre, specially in New York where it all comes down to what theaters are available.

BWW: If there are any....

SF: I know! So you just don't know. Actually another show that Lynn and I had written with Susan Stroman

BWW: Of course, LITTLE DANCER...

SF: We premiered it at the Kennedy Center and it was a beautiful production, and we didn't have commercial production attached by that time, but we do it now. So now we've done new writing new songs, we refocused the story between the artist Degas and his muse, who is a young ballerina who inspires this work of art which he just created. We focused more on the two of them, because what we found out in Washington is that they were the people, that was the central story that the audience cared about, and you had a lot of interesting subplots, but the plot they cared about was the couple. So now with the new material we will bring it to Seattle next year, at the 5th Avenue, and if it all goes well... we'll see!

BWW: Seattle is definitely the door to Broadway...

SF: I've never worked there before. I visited it, I have friends in Seattle but I've never gone there to work on a new show. That'll be exciting! But again you know, you gotta go on working on your pieces, and running towards what excites you, but you don't know the timetable. You can't plan to have two shows on Broadway, it just happens.

BWW: Also, I want to ask you about RAGTIME, which is my all-time favorite musical. Thank you for writing Wheels Of A Dream, Make Them Hear You and Your Daddy's Son. That's a piece of art. What can you tell about the process of creating this show and the adventure of it?

SF: Well, speaking about actors who inspire you. You know, we were lucky, it was also our first show with Terrence McNally, and the great novelist E.L.Doctorow, who wrote RAGTIME, he was not pleased with the film adaptation of it, because he wrote it to be a multi-strand story: there's a story of an african-american pianist, a woman who's raising a family on her own because his husband has gone to discover the North Pole, and an immigrant father and his young daughter. And we felt strongly that in the novel they're waited evenly, those three stories, and they should be waited evenly in the same way in the stage piece, but it was not the same way in the film, it was Coalhouse Walker story with everybody on the side.

We loved the language of the novel, and Terrence presented the idea of the characters speaking of themselves in third person for the stage too. So Lynn and I had an audition to get the job, did you know that?

BWW: I knew you had to audition, but there were like 3 of you finalists, right?

SF: No, there were over a dozen! The assignment was "Here's Terrence 65-page treatment of RAGTIME", like here's my recipe, how do we do it on stage? Take it away! And we had to create 4 songs, that would represent our vision of what the show would feel like, sound like. I said to Lynn "We shouldn't really present the breath of what the show is going to be, we should show what Coalhouse could sing, the immigrant, Evelyn...", so we wrote 4 songs - the opening number, 'Til We Reach That Day', 'Gliding' and a song for Evelyn Nesbitt who has an affair with Younger Brother, which finally didn't make it in the show, but 3 of the original songs were there.

I think one of the things that excited us was that we knew that the show was going to be produced on a large scale. So we had to show elements that would feel epic, as if you were going to see it in a wide screen, but we would also needed moments in which everything focuses on the characters, very intimate. We counted on our fingers how many days we have to do it, at the time I was working in London, Lynn was in New York, I was producing the album for ONCE ON THIS ISLAND in Abbey Road. We had 11 days to write and to musically arrange and come with the vocal textures, and come up to the recording studio with a group of actors to record the songs.

BWW: And 20 years ago!

SF: Yes, we had energy then

BWW: No, but meaning with no email, no internet...

SF: It didn't exist. We were working on the demos in our lucky studio, which is no longer around, but it was very special for us. One thing that we didn't have was automation, in digital ages you set everything and the flight faders done by computer, but for the RAGTIME demos which is +10-minute long we were all mixing the number in real time, so our engineer was doing 3-4 faders on one side, I was with more on the other side, and then Lynn with other faders, and you get to the 9. Minute, with drops of sweat on your forehead, because you can't mess up, because if you do you have to do it all again (laughs). There was something about the pressure of it, I actually think it was an asset in the writing of it, there's an urgency on the original demos, in the original songs, and I honestly think if they had told us "Take as much time as you need" you wouldn't have felt the urgency and it forced us to do it like in a sprint race, but in the end it's a long distance course. It was very inspiring to us all.

We were very lucky to have Brian Stokes-Mitchell as Coalhouse and Audra McDonald as Sarah, in the very first reading of the show. Audra was very excited about the piece, so she came in and we learnt the music as quickly as possible, we set up the table, and act the piece.

BWW: And her character was mute, she told me in an interview...

SF: She did! (laughs) She had a very small part towards the end of act 1, where she is singing to the president of the US, and it's right before her death. Then she sings half of 'Wheels of a Dream', which is halfway through act 1, that's what we had written. We were looking at Audra, she's sitting there, and we thought "We have to come up with something for her". Otherwise we were crazy!

So she's sitting there and there's something in the quality of her voice that is original, she doesn't sing like anybody else. She has this very lyrical quality, there's a purity of a soprano, and I don't think I would've written the kind of song we did if she hadn't been sitting in that chair. So we knew we wanted to give her a song, but she never speaks in the play, and I said to Lynn "Who is her scene partner? She can't be in a vacuum singing to anybody" and that's when Lynn and I said at the same time: "She's singing to the baby." And then we wrote the song very quickly, like in half of an afternoon.

We said "It has to be a lullaby", she should be singing to this child, she's trying to tell her the story of her father and herself and then she starts revealing things she didn't want to deal with, that she would've never brought to herself, let alone this baby, and the climax is so quite is whenever she says 'Forgive me' to the child. We couldn't see that coming either, it just happened in the session, we got so emotional, but she needed to do that, she needed to ask for forgiveness to the child. That came after8 a long discussion with Terrence and our director Frank Galati. Lynn said "I really find it hard to be with this woman, after having her child and trying to bury him in the ground", we needed to understand why she did it and it all filtered into this song.

It was one of those rare times where we had a song ready really quickly, but I sketched it, just the melody line, chords, but as quickly as we could get it down onto a piece of paper. So we were having the company barbecue that day, and our producer, Garth Drabinsky, very controversial figure of the theatre, came in the room and says "I heard you have a new song, you can't have food until I heard the new song!". So Audra came in, and as you may know, went to Juilliard, and she sight-sings, so we handed her the piece of paper and it was like in those movies where the composer is at the piano and she sang the song and we didn't change a note. She sang as she did it and I felt I was in a movie, how she was singing, and acting, and putting the song across, and that became the song, without changing a note.

In previews, it became clear that the audience again had forgotten why Coalhouse was doing these actions in act 2 because he's doing it and it comes from vengeance, or anger, and the audience had forgotten he was really standing for his love for Sarah, how it broke his heart and we needed to remind them that. So we thought...

BWW: It was the moment for Sarah Brown Eyes

SF: And that was the last song we wrote for the show, the last complete song. We had worked on little bridges and sections, but that was the last major songs that came along. And again it was one of those Lynn and I in a room working at the piano together, and I told her "You know what? It should be a Ragtime Valentine", it should feel so seductive and fortuitous, full of love and it should sound spontaneous. It should sounds like Ragtime because that's her world she would come and hear it play in a club, it should be a version of that kind of music, and again, Brian Stokes, sight-sings his music, along with Audra, they sang the piece and it just seemed totally right not for the moment but for these characters, for these two particular actors, we didn't change a note, and that was the song.

The funny PS to it, is that our director Frank Galati he is a wonderful director of theatre, of drama, and he's adapted many different novels into theatre pieces, being the most famous example The Grapes of Wrath, he turned it into a stage piece, and he's directed many operas both traditional and also contemporary, but he had never been out of town working on a new musical and the idea of having that song so quickly he told me "You really did that song, is that something you had in your pocket?" And I said "No, it so specific for this moment", and I actually never recicle. This piece has a sound of itself, ONCE ON THIS ISLAND has a sound of itself, ANASTASIA has its own musical world,... and he thought it was just extraordinary that we wouldn't have the song in the morning, and before you went to bed that night it would be in the world. I don't know the answer of that, I just know it's incredibly exciting and it is a little bit mysterious. Why I would want to disect or find out how it comes to being what you want to?

BWW: I think that's what they call talent

SF: Yeah! And you hope you find inspiration, I find it in collaborators, and the actors I work with, and if you cast right, and you have smart actors, they're gonna have thoughts about their characters, if it feels right if their character act this way or the other. Everybody has an opinion: the producers, the audience, the whole team... No one's single opinion is right, but if you hear their thoughts on what works and what doesn't that may make you think re-examine your work. Because there's something that may not be organic, and especially audiences, how they react, or if they're confused, I think all of those things are very valuable.

BWW: Specially because at the end of the day the audience is who you write for

SF: Sometimes people ask me who I write for. Whenever I write I become a character, you know, so I'm writing what the character would feel, or might say, and Lynn approves what they say better than I could. Oh, when we met she was writing music and I was writing lyrics, so we did the whole thing. And of course she has opinion on music and I do on lyrics (laughs).

BWW: That's a team!

SF: That's what you count on. Specially on songs like 'Til we reach that day", that was one of our 4 audition songs. To be expedient we decided we would pick 4 moments very different ones. She would do lyrics first, and I would do music first, and then we would get together and talk about it. In 'Til we reach that day' I knew it had to be a moment of grieve, of public outcry and Coalhouse trying to come to terms with the death of Sarah, which happens really close to the end of act 1.

Lynn said "But it sounds so hopeful", and I said "Well, this is the gospel tradition, this is the kind of song they would sing in a service" it would be something like this. But then again Lynn said "But there's so much anger surrounding this event and we're not addressing this directly, and have to somehow have that as an element in this moment", and I thought "She's absolutely right". And in that moment we get to Coalhouse's mind, Younger Brother, Emma Goldman, Mother... everybody's expressing their outrage for the social fact as a hymn, and there's a ragtime, a really angry ragtime, chromatic vocal line that happens and then builds and builds and go back to the uplifting hymn and more of the anger, and by the end it's a combination of anger and the determination of doing something or we can't go forward. That came from collaboration, you know? We would've had a very nice hymn, and that would've been fine but it would've not been as dynamic.

If you're inspired by the other person in the room or people in the room, you might as well seriously stay at home and be a self contained entity. There are many fantastics writers that do that - look at the wonderful contemporary novelists, or the amazing singer songwriters who write songs about what they're feeling in their own lives, and it's wonderful. But a lot of that process doesn't apply to theatre, specially Musical Theatre which is the most collaborative I think of all the arts.

It's never like here's my score, and bye. I have some friends who do contemporary opera, and I'm so amazed because their process is so different, normally they're handed the libretto, and then they set it, they do their musical expression of what is really a blueprint of the show. And then you them it, and the actors learn the parts. But I guess it's all about the scale and the time involved. Because of the scheduling there's never that kind of back and forth. It's just too expensive and they gotta move forward.

In ANASTASIA we did a reading in 2011 and then a workshop in 2012, and all the work was about finding the tone, because you know, there were animated characters in that movie, and we wanted to get rid of them. There were still elements that felt like from the movie, so we had to be very honest in order to get the tone right. That took a while, and luckily our director was artistic director at Hartford Stage, he said "Let's do it in my theatre", and it was great, and we all trained up to Hartford Connecticut, and apparently it was the largest production that had ever been done in the 50-year history of the theater. Good news is that everybody working at that theater was so personally invested in the show and I think a lot of that is because they love Darko as an artist and human being. So collectively there was just this sense of everybody behind the show and you know, making musicals their heart.

After Hartford, we had some time off to see what had worked and what not. We did the last song for the show on the road back to Broadway, it was a song for Gleb, 'Still', it happens towards the end of Act 1, because it was going to be a ballet scene about love and revolution, and we didn't know how to get there. So there was a missing song, where he opens his heart out to the audience and it was about the tension between what he knows is his duty that must carry out, and what he is feeling as a human, and the contradiction between those two ideas.

BWW: Which for me is one of the best things you have added to the piece: conflict.

SF: Thank you! We really needed that. It was Terrence's idea to have a new character, we needed to find a voice for him and we didn't find it until we had already done our out-of-town try out on our way to Broadway. Coming to Broadway we had a new actor Ramin Karimloo, and again it's not writing for that character, that situation, but we were writing for a very particular actor with a very particular kind of voice. His way of expressing is very unique. He changes things from night to night, so my original version of Still has much more rhythm and accompaniment, but it was very much of a straight jacket for him, he needed air and space to discover, room to negotiate all this.

I say to all my fellow composers, first you compose and then you decompose. You have your work and then you take away pieces until you focus on the essence.

BWW: That's what you taught Pasek and Paul when you mentored them

SF: We met them fresh out off college, I think we knew them when they were 22. I have to put in a plug, over New York City we have a program sponsored by the Dramatist Guild Foundation and they support the work of emerging and mid-career composers, lyricists, librettist and playwrights. It's a wonderful program, and half of it is for playwrights and half for music people.

I don't know how it's done in Europe, but in the States until recently you tend to be categorized: the music people are there doing their thing, the playwrights are over here doing their thing. And there are things to be learnt by one another. The idea of how a scene works dramatically, in a play, where the big speech or in an opera the aria, or the big song in a musical... there's something to be learnt from the playwrights and they become fascinated by the idea of music, what you can do that.

BWW: Because it adds a lot to your work!

SF: It does, it really does. Pasek and Paul were junior students, they spent a year with us, as our guests, and towards the end of that year Benj said he had this idea and came up to me of something that happened in his high school in Philadelphia. About how people were changing what the truth was based on a tragedy that happened with one of their fellow students and he said "it's almost like we were behaving in a different way, seduced not even knowing who that person was". And that became of DEAR EVAN HANSEN. That's the personal experience that finally became the musical.

When you see somebody so excited speaking about an idea, even if you can't see what you're gonna do with that, you just have to encourage them, because clearly they're on fire with that idea.

The other show they were working on was DOGFIGHT, which bit by bit ended up Off Broadway.

BWW: And Derek Klena was there too

SF: I know! That's where we met him. Oddly we went to see the show to be supportive not realizing it was the first preview, which is a big no-no for theatergoing people. We knew Lindsay Mendez by that time and she introduced us to Derek, he was so young, right off the boat. He was extraordinary in the show and we remembered him, so when we were developing Anastasia we kept him in mind.

He's great and when we were developing My Petersburg, his big number, which is great because Dimitri doesn't get to sing that much in the film, we don't know much about him, so we were able to go and delve into that. Then we wrote an early version of the song and it felt like a sketch, like a middle section, something that you love and need to leave. We wanted it to be a larger gesture, we wrote it with Derek in mind, and he's such a sport, he's not afraid of anything, he jumps fearlessly into anything you throw to him. I really think all the success of that number is because of Derek's willingness and the spirit of it.

Again, we began writing for that particular voice and I would've not developed a song in that way probably if we had a different actor.

BWW: I really hope you see this succeeding again with the Spanish cast soon on the stage of the Teatro Coliseum. Thank you very much, Stephen!

SF: Thanks a lot!

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