Interview: Maury Yeston Talks DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY Ahead of London Opening

Maury Yeston, the composer and lyricist best known for Nine and Titanic, visited London a few months before the West End opening of his new musical, Death Takes a Holiday, at Charing Cross Theatre. Based on a film (which was based on a play), this story tells of how Death changed his perspective.

Death used to not quite understand why everyone he came to collect was quite so aggrieved to die, until he met a particular woman who allowed him to realise quite what makes life worth clinging to. The side effect of Death's occupation being, though, that he can't collect anyone else while he's so distracted - both Death the person and death the concept take a break.

What sparked your love for musical theatre?

Oh my goodness! You know, that's an easy question. Interestingly, actually way, way back - I think this is a Wikipedia article - I did say that it's very interesting how so many writers of musical theatre, who have attained such heights (and I won't put myself in their category), but so many of them had fathers or grandfathers who were cantors at synagogues, and my grandfather was a cantor at synagogue.

I sort of divined, thinking about my past and thinking about what that experience is that, you know, even if you're a little baby, you're brought in in your grandmother's arms and even as you grow up - then you're two and three and four and five and six - what's going on is you're brought into this gigantic room, and there's a massive number of people there. And they're all wearing unusual costumes, particularly the guy in the front, who's dressed all in this white robe. And then everybody's singing to the top - not just singing, but singing emotionally. And then the guy in the front is singing enormous, operatic solos to everybody else, and he's apparently speaking for them in some way. And it's all terribly important.

It doesn't seem strange to you in the slightest, because you were there when you were six months old, and the next year you were a year and six months, and by the time you're five it's like "OK, we go to the synagogue; we do this once a year" - right? Or every week, or whatever, and so the idea that a huge group of people should be a room and that there should be a person up there, singing his or her heart out to the rafters, doesn't seem unusual at all to you. You know that experience, and I think that's part of it: the willingness to just explode with emotion and music, in front of a bunch of people. And either be well-adjusted enough, or neurotic enough, or crazy enough not to care! Or just not embarrassed to do it.

So I think that was the beginning of it, just to have that as a grounding. And then when I was about 12 years old my parents took me to see the original My Fair Lady, with Rex and Julie, and that was just...I was just blown away! By the words, the design, the two turntables, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews when she was twentysomething. I mean, I was just so smitten. I had already been writing words and I just never stopped; I just started writing musical theatre. I loved it. I did other things - I wrote sonatas, I wrote concertos and cantatas but, deep down, it was really musical theatre that I loved most of all.

Were you a pianist to begin with?

Oh yes, absolutely. I started when I was five - I kind of taught myself. And when I was six I got lessons and then I started writing and composing, and when I was seven, I won a composition contest. I don't think it was a very good composition, but look, I was seven! That's reasonable.

So would you say that your primary passion is for lyrics or for composition?

It's the same to me - you couldn't even separate them. There's always the famous question: "Which comes first, the music or the lyrics?" And Cole Porter famously answered: "The cheque". The truth is, especially in writing musical theatre, it's neither the music nor the lyrics. The thing that you need to discover - the thing that's most exciting - is the premise of the song.

Because you're in a dramatic situation, you know... So-and-so has just taken the car and he's crashed it, and he's cursing and he's angry, and he says, "I've done this and I'm so upset about this and that" - and the woman he's talking to has to tell him that a breast cancer test has been positive. (I'm just making this up!) So look at the situation: and so she tells him. And he's sitting there like a doofus, having complained about the fact that he wrecked the car, and she's just found this out. Now that's a situation.

So here's the question: who sings, and what do they sing? And what do they say - what's the premise of the song? Does he, in his head, kick himself around the block? We hear him just telling himself off? Or does he apologise to her, in music? Or does she not tell him? We know she's found this out, but she won't tell him? But she says it in her head, and maybe that's the first time we hear it. In other words, what's the function of the song? It's part of how we tell the story.

And then there are other things, like this song has to move us; it has to get us to a dramatic place in the story where it wasn't, from the beginning of the song to the end of the song. The great George Abbot, the director, once said there are lots of showstoppers, but not enough show advancers. The song has to push the story forward.

And then there's the further issue that self-pity doesn't work, because if you complain, somehow the song doesn't land. But if you do the opposite of complaining - say, that you only have one sick cow, though you have no money and you're living in poverty. So you sing, if I were a rich man, and here's the celebration of wealth! He's exulting in it - he doesn't have it, but he's singing it and that's his spirit. Or Cinderella, alone, the girls have gone to the ball and it's hopeless, but she sings "in my own little corner in my own little chair" - so that's the premise. Once you have a premise, then you can really get the song.

So I think that's the thrill of writing musical theatre, music drama. That's really what I think I do; I think I dramatically musicalise stories, people. And then you create them. The song creates what the person's like. Guido, for example, just wants everything. Actually, he more than wants everything; he knows he can't have it. That's why Freudian psychology doesn't work! Because, you know, you're really messed up, so you go to the psychiatrist and you delve into your past. And then: "Oh I see, I see! I want two things that are mutually exclusive; oh, that's the explanation. No wonder I'm unhappy." But, you know what? You still want it! And that's Guido's song. "I don't care; I still want everything!"

I think everyone can relate when they listen to that

Yeah, like anyone who says "I'm really heavy; I've got to lose weight." And then somebody says, three months later, "You know, you're losing a lot of weight"... "Oh God, I'm too thin. I've got to gain weight!" It just never ends! Or, the very urban person says "I just have to get away; I just have to get away." So they go off to a beach, then "I gotta get back to town; I gotta get back to town!"

You've chosen unusual subjects: maritime disasters, a Fellini film - is that motivated by the desire for a challenge?

I think my subject matter is motivated, really, by love. I mean, I loved that [Fellini] movie when I was 17 years old. I identified with it. As far as Titanic goes, it was the mid 1980s and they found the ship. And I realised, "Oh my god, that's extraordinary - the millennium will be over very soon and that's probably the most emblematic and important story of the whole 100-year period.

The 20th century really started between around 1910, 1912. I mean Picasso and Debussy and Rite of Spring and Schoenberg reinventing Beethoven music. Between painting and literature and "God is dead" and how philosophy changed, and psychology - everything happened so quickly, and in terms of Titanic, that ship went down and the whole Edwardian world of class structure went down with it. And I thought "Wow, that really sings."

And of course, I thought the surprise is that everyone thinks it's a disaster, which it was. However, the people on the ship didn't know it was going to be a disaster, and the ship itself wasn't built to be a disaster. The ship was built from that same aspirational spirit of man and womankind in which we strive to do something magnificent for the good of mankind. Like a vaccine for polio, for example. Why wouldn't the greatest maritime power in the history of the universe, the British Empire, why wouldn't it try or think about the idea that a worthy project would be to build a boat that can't sink? Imagine the safety, to preserve life: a ship that could be its own lifeboat. The problem there is that that kind of hubris ends in disaster.

And as I was thinking about it, right in about 1985, then in the winter of 1986, the space shuttle blew up - and that's a recapitulation of the Titanic, isn't it? It's the same unwarranted faith in in the infallibility of technology. And I thought "I really have to write this." So, what I fell in love with is the subject matter. And I thought "OK, this is a challenge." And it's not obvious that it had a musical form - I had to give it a musical form. And as soon as I realised that at the very beginning of the show, musically, Stoker could kiss his girlfriend goodbye at the dock and say "Fare thee well, my darling - I'll be back in a fortnight." In the audience, we walked in saying "but I know what happens" - and then the first thing that happens: "Oh my god, he doesn't know what's going to happen". And we have to watch what happens to him.

For the whole first act, these people are having the absolute time of their lives. They're dancing; there's ragtime - it's the best time in the world. And then something happens. And then, you would expect that they would sit there in doom and gloom for the second act, but no, that's not the way human psychology works. The way human psychology works is we go immediately into the stages of denial, bargaining, acceptance - and so even though the ship is sinking, we're saying "Well, the ship still has electric light and heat, and I'd much rather stay here then drop 60 feet into a freezing-cold lifeboat.

Even when all the women and children have gone off and there's nothing but the men and the third-class women who're left, they sing a song to each other, the lyric of which is "We'll Meet Tomorrow". Whether they know it's true or not, we do that. And on top of all that, we discover that, just as the ship is a dream - a dream to create something beautiful and for the benefit of mankind, everybody on that ship is living a dream. The third class immigrants going to America for a better life, they truly dream of a better life in America - the Irish immigrants. The second class, created by the same industrial revolution that created the ship, for the first time we have a class that make enough money to take a voyage and imitate the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and rub elbows with them.

And what about the first class? What now would be the one percenters, they are the rubber barons of the late nineteenth century, but when that ship hits that ice berg and goes down, that whole world goes down. And never again do we have disproportionately women and young men in ridiculous numbers, dying, locked in the hold below while every first class woman gets off the ship. But even then three of the billionaires, Benjamin Guggenheim and two others, went down and got dressed into their formal mourning coats, and stood on deck. And met their fate. Extraordinary story.

So let's talk a little bit about Death Takes a Holiday!

Funnily enough, once we had done Titanic I thought: OK, well I've done this sort of massive, grand, gigantic show: 36 people, orchestra of 26, lots of characters. And I thought what I really want to do now is do a chamber musical. I want it to be the same place, just a family, and I found the original play that created a Fredrick March movie from 1934 called Death Takes a Holiday, a concept by Alberto Casella. It was written in 1927, and it then appeared on Broadway and ultimately became a movie called Meet Joe Black, and I fell in love with it - I thought this is exactly what I want.

It's about love; it's about romance; it's poetic; and it's about a subject matter that we all know and love. It's extraordinarily powerful. One of the reasons, so many plays centring around the figure of Death, appeared in the Twenties, because it's a reaction to, I think, the unprecedented scale of death in World War One, followed immediately by three years of a worldwide pandemic, in which 16 million more people died - so many more than the actual number of people killed in the war. And so, playwrights were fascinated by this and while they were doing that, you know, the entire decade was in flight from that. Bobbed hair! Cocaine, cigarettes, alcohol, jazz, flappers, you know? And I thought this is a fantastic era for a story, and I love this play.

The plot is so simple and there's no religion involved. I mean, Death doesn't kill you, it's not his job - he doesn't make those decisions. His job is just to come collect you when you die; that's his job. He even knows "You know what, I have to be in Stockholm next Thursday, because he is going to blow his brains out", or something like that. And so, he's been doing this for aeons, and during the whole of that time, a question has been gnawing at him for centuries, which is "Why are they so afraid of me? Why do they cling so to life? What's so great about life? I can't know that unless I can experience it." And he keeps on wondering about that.

But when the play starts, there is this beautiful girl with a family name Grazia. She has just been engaged to be married, and she and her fiancée and her whole family are Hispano Suiza, zooming through the alps on their way to villa at the Largo de Garda, and they go into a spin because there is a shadow in the way, and she goes flying out of the car at 60 miles an hour, and lands in the person who came to get her. And for the first time in his existence, aeons, he's never confronted a life force with such extraordinary potency, and he simply cannot, cannot, cannot collect her - he cannot do the job. And he realises, "This is now my chance to find out, what is it?"

So he pushes her back. And everybody in the car - "My god, Grazia, what happened?" And she says "I'm fine!" They go off and he comes to the villa and announces himself to one person only, the dad, the father. And he says "I just wanna answer a question: why is life so precious? What is it? I want to come here - I'll disguise myself as a young guy, a young prince. Just let me stay here for the weekend, and I swear to you, don't tell anybody, and while I'm here, I'm on holiday - I'm not working!" Which means that all over the world, no one can die. People jump off the Eiffel Tower.

And, of course, he falls in love with her. Of course she falls in love with him. And there's other plots that go on, and there are other people there, but it is such a small show and it centres around that middle. And on Sunday night he has to do what he said he'd do, but this means that he has to die, literally, and leave her. And therein he learns what makes life so precious and why we cling to it - because it's love. It's love that makes life worth living. And you know what, if we had all the days in the universe, then we would have a surfeit of love. But the problem is that the basic principle of economics is scarcity and there's just not all the days in the world.

It's what he does that gives life its power and its weakness - that gives love its power and its weakness. But what about her? Because even if he says "Look, I can't kill her" - he can't, which means he's gonna go and she's gonna stay. And so...I really shouldn't tell you the ending! Come see it, come see it - it's so romantic! But it's also universal and it's also fun.

It sounds life-affirming

Yes it is - it's very life-affirming. In the States people came back to see it eight or nine times. We were very touched by that.

Are you coming back over to the UK for the show?

Oh sure, I have to see it and support Thom [Southerland] and Danielle [Tarento]. It'll be our third collaboration. They were a wonderful - we're a wonderful - team. I think they really understand my work and I love their work. Twice now they've had such a good experience, and done so well critically - and I'm so thrilled for them.

Do you find that in your work you draw much on your experience of having lived in Italy?

Oh, not only Italy - England, Cambridge. Italy, France, Germany, Greece. Yes, when I was in university I spent every summer just playing. I would go to a town and I would just play jazz and get a job. I got a job in Athens. I did adore Italy, but - in the same way - I think you'll find that Grand Hotel is a German piece, Titanic is clearly an English piece, Nine is an Italian piece, as is Death Takes A Holiday, but only because that's where it is. But you know what, this version of The Phantom of the Opera that I'd written before Andrew had written his, it's a French piece. It's a love letter to Paris.

So I think that I put a great deal of my experience, and things that I've loved and gotten a great kick out of, into my work. Things that I understand, and certainly the whole Italian complication is fascinating to me, because they're man-boys. Really funny, the cultural critic Dick Cavett had a television show many years ago; he was interviewing Sofia Lauren and he said to her "Do you think that Italian husbands, Italian men consider themselves as being sort of married bachelors?" And she said that they pretend to.

And that was a profound thing that she said. And so, when I was writing Nine I simply asked the question "Why do they think that? Why do these guys think that they're supposed to - where'd that come from? Why do these guys think they have to grow up and be Latin lovers? Who told them they have to be Latin lovers?" Where'd that come from? It's not religious; it's not part of their evolutionary cycle.

Hence Fellini explains those things. And then why do women put up with it? Well, they do, but they don't but they do, but they don't! And where is Catholicism in all of that? And then there's Nine. I'd love to do it here.

Do you think that this production in Charing Cross, rather than the one in Southwark, will shed new light on your work?

Yes! No question of that. The greatest honour in the world is when somebody takes your work and shows you something you didn't even know was there. And Thom does that, he does it wonderfully. Because, you see, the actors have the same scene, but then a director comes along and says "Look here. They'd probably be thinking that and she'd be angry." And suddenly, you have the first time anybody ever did your show that way, and she's angry.

I saw it all the time in Nine, because as you see towards the end of Nine, Luisa sort of comes back, which is very American. But in the Swedish production she stands on one side of the stage and he stands on the other and will they, won't they - that's very sweet, very Scandinavian: tough and maybe they'll kill each other. The French production, at the Folies Bergere, at the end of the show, they're having a chat, and she's sitting on his lap, because, well, you know, she is his mistress after all. It's sort of very French. And the Japanese production, quite, quite unusual: they did it in Korea and it was unique, to say the least. But I really love to see others that make a personal investment in my work and show me things that I didn't know was there. So that's what I really get a kick out of.

Finally, what themes or ideas within the work do you think will resonate with audiences, specifically now?

That's a really, really good question. I write about fathers and sons. I write about parents and children. I write about love and its multifarious, infinite, endless forms. I write as much - not as much as the difference between good and bad, but the difference between good and great. I write about the interaction of men and women. It astonishes me how many times in my life women have come to me and said how is it that your songs plug that unknowable, exquisite, down to the last detail of what women experience? And I have absolutely no idea! I'm just writing.

I think you've got some idea!

No, I don't - I really don't! Why would I know that? But I think there are two things. One, I recognise the fact because it's pointed out to be me by lots of people, that there's certain thread of melancholy that goes through my work, that is sort of always there - and I think that's a kind of balance. I think that's a reality of life, and I also think that one of the things that is part of what I invest in the work is a kind of formalism to it. It might be a fugue or it might be a passacaglia. There's something formal about the way I write - maybe it's the influence of the classical music. But, I think, because of that it renders what I write not old-fashioned but therefore timeless. Because we're 34 years after Nine and somehow it's just as contemporary as it ever was, as will be Titanic.

It makes references without actually being old-fashioned. As T.S. Eliot wrote, every single time an author writes something new on a subject matter, it changes everything written about it for all time going backwards. Which amounts to saying every time somebody sets a character in a play - a new play - out on stage, contemplating killing himself, that changes Hamlet. And what was brilliant about that was that he inverted and he showed us the real meaning of tradition...which is not the repetition of things from the past, but rather the progression and the carrying forward of things from the past. And I think the nature of my music is that I do bring that forward. I think that's part of what I write: lyrics as well as music.

Death Takes a Holiday is at Charing Cross Theatre 16 January-4 March 2017

Read BWW's interview with Thom Southerland here

Photo credit: Avid Ron, Scott Rylander