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Will Butler’s first meeting with playwright David Adjmi was fairly open-ended: a friend had told Butler that Adjmi — a fan of Arcade Fire, the band Butler was in at the time — was working on a play about a band and that Butler could “write the music or just consult or whatever.”
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But from their first sit-down at a diner near New York’s theatre district, Adjmi’s vision was “instantly recognizable” to Butler: “Like, oh, it’s a demo — it’s like a transcendental thing that they can never recapture. You have things falling apart because the headphones sound bad, you have people yelling at each other over music but it’s because of how their dad treated them,” he recalls with a laugh.
A decade after Butler first sent his song demos to Adjmi, their collaboration, Stereophonic, is the most Tony-nominated production not just of 2024, but of all time. A true musical-play hybrid, Stereophonic immerses the audience in a fictional band’s recording process in 1976, as they make the pivotal album that will launch them to superstardom. Snippets of takes along with stunning full songs punctuate the band’s alternately hilarious and gutting drama in and outside the booth, playing out over around three intimate hours. Incredibly, the actors who sing and play their own instruments as a very credible rock band onstage were at best proficient before Stereophonic rehearsals began.
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Will Butler
Nina Westervelt
Though the fictional band and narrative have drawn comparisons to Fleetwood Mac and its storied process of making its classic 1977 Rumours album, Stereophonic (which was just extended through January 5, 2025 at the Golden Theatre) never feels like a retread of rock history. That’s a testament to Adjmi’s writing and the cast’s talent and chemistry — but also in large part to Butler’s songs, which blend a genuine ‘70s rock sound with his own unique sensibility into songs that sound like anything but pastiche. (The original cast album, including songs both in the show and heard only partially in it, is out now on Sony Masterworks Broadway.)
Butler, who parted ways with Arcade Fire in late 2021 and now performs in Will Butler + Sister Squares, is himself up for two Tony Awards on June 16 — for best original score and best orchestrations — and is finding fertile new creative ground (and demand for his composing skills) in the theater world. He spoke to Billboard about the singular “jigsaw puzzle” of Stereophonic and creating a believable band onstage.
Did David give you any specific guidelines for what he wanted the music in Stereophonic to be like — or did you have total free rein to write some songs and see how they turned out?
Total free rein. And then once the script existed, it was like… a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with 200 pieces missing [Laughs], and figuring out fitting those pieces in. There were a number of songs, like this one on the album called “In Your Arms,” that David really loved and that felt like the band, but didn’t make sense in any of the scenes. We’re showing these moments of music — and they all have to have a purpose, they all have to emerge from the characters at the right time and in the right way, and it still has to feel a little bit mystical.
The cast of Stereophonic
Julieta Cervantes
Your music is so evocative of great bands of the ‘70s yet never feels like it’s copying that style; it really feels timeless. How did you arrive at that kind of balance?
I mean, I kind of lucked into not really knowing the great rock and great pop groups of that period of the ‘70s. Like, I just didn’t really know Tom Petty besides the hits, I didn’t really know Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, early Bruce Springsteen — I didn’t really know all these touchstones for David. But I knew the stuff around it and I knew where it was leading. Like, Bruce Springsteen wasn’t listening to Bruce Springsteen; Bruce Springsteen grew up listening to ‘50s groups and then in the ‘70s he was going to Suicide shows in like, tiny basement clubs in New York. And I was like, “Oh, well, I know ‘50s girl groups, and I know Wall of Sound and I know Suicide. So instead of copying Bruce Springsteen, why don’t I just pretend like I’m Bruce Springsteen, and listen to Suicide, and listen to girl groups and like, see what happens?” [Laughs.]
That’s crazy! “Masquerade” especially feels like it could be a perfect Fleetwood Mac song…
I get it, because there’s this speed up in the second half, but I was kind of just ripping off an Arcade Fire move. Like, I thought people were gonna call me out for ripping off Arcade Fire.
Even with the direct influences being so loose, were there certain sonic elements that you wanted all the songs to share?
I knew I wanted really tight, beautiful harmonies, especially for [singer] Diana and [singer and guitarist] Peter. When you hear two people in harmony you’re like, “Oh, this is why they’re together, this is why this is compelling.” And then when you add a third voice to it you realize why they’re a band just intrinsically. There’s so many different kinds of ‘70s harmony — there’s the Eagles, The Byrds, Richard and Linda Hamilton, Fleetwood Mac — but they all have this beautiful harmony, particularly if you’re in California [where Stereophonic takes place]. And then Peter is a guitar player, so there had to be some guitar riffs in the show.
Will Butler (center) in the studio during the recording of Stereophonic‘s original cast recording.
Andy Henderson
How involved were you in the casting process?
I was there for the whole ride. And wow, I truly hated being behind the table and judging them — what a horrible thing for a musician to do. We wanted to cast people that were expert musicians and amazing actors and were right for the roles, but I was very cavalier about the musician aspect — where I was like, anyone can be in a band, we don’t need technical wizards, they just need to be musical and have some sort of charisma and it’ll work out. We did know we needed a drummer, we knew we couldn’t teach drums in a short amount of time. But everyone else we just wanted to have a baseline [level of ability]. They needed to have the right personality, to be able to learn music, and they needed to be able to dance a little bit. And it was a little heavier lift than I thought, but in the end my naïve self was right.Another part of it is that [actors] Tom [Pecinka] and Juliana [Canfield] and Sarah [Pidgeon] are just such beautiful singers — they sang so well together day one, like unmannered, beautiful, idiosyncratic and they blended perfectly. That was incredibly moving. When they were just running through the songs, there was such deep emotion there that I was like, okay, we’ll be fine.
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In theater, it can be so obvious when someone is fake-playing an instrument — and these actors aren’t just proficient players, they totally embody what someone playing their instrument would be like. What was it like to witness them evolving like that?It was really wild. Sarah Pidgeon, who doesn’t play an instrument — I mean, she plays a tambourine, she plays it great — but even standing at a microphone took her about eight weeks to feel. It was really interesting to watch someone learn how to stand at a microphone in a way that just feels natural. It feels like she’s supposed to be there and supposed to be singing. Tom Pecinka didn’t have a ton of guitar, but when he first put on a guitar in the audition room, I was like, “Oh, I actually can’t tell if he’s a good guitar player or a bad guitar player.” He looks the part, and his physicality was so natural.
A lot of it is also really great directing, the building of the band and the orchestrations. We spent a lot of time in practice rooms, me and Justin Craig, the music director, building a vibe as much as anything else. I had [the cast] open for a show of mine in the fall, and I think the physicality of playing one club show kind of gave them a sense of how powerful they were.
We hear many little snippets of songs before we hear full versions, and we don’t hear full versions of all of them. How did you and David decide how that would play out?
Honestly, we didn’t talk about it that much, because it just felt so naturally right to both of us. It just felt to me like the process of making a record — someone plays a demo off a cassette, and you go work on it, and things fall apart, and finally you start to lose your mind and you’re cutting things that are good, and then you’re dong the final details and everyone’s losing their minds. The arc of the play honestly just felt so accurate to my life.
Some songs in the show, like “Bright,” we hear multiple different versions of as they’re being worked on. How did that writing process — creating partial songs — work?
The hard thing is just writing a really good song. When I was working on Everything Now with Arcade Fire, Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk was producing it, and he’s like a philosopher. He was saying how a great song can support infinite cover versions; like, a truly great song, the production is not the thing. And there’s nothing wrong with the production being the thing — but if it’s a great song, you can produce it 1000 different ways and you can have 100 different cover versions, and they all speak in some sense. So I was like, “Okay, I’ve just got to write this song, and if it’s good enough, then we can do it 100 different ways and it’ll be compelling.”
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Having had this experience, are you interested in doing more theater work?
Yeah, me and David Adjmi are working on a more traditional musical, or I guess more of a rock opera or something. It’s early days, but it would be silly for us not to do something else — and I think it’d be really fun to make it. And I’m good friends with Lucas Hnath, who is such a brilliant playwright — we’ll slowly work on a couple things.
One of my own takeaways from the play was how, as a fan, it can be easy to romanticize and mythologize the internal drama of a famous band — but really, a band is made up of humans who are dealing with very human-sized joys and tragedies. As someone who has been in a much-adored big band and has probably had that projected on them as well, what is it like seeing how Stereophonic plays out?
I think there’s a folk sense that relationships predate art, where it’s like, “Oh, they had this stormy relationship, and they wrote a song about it.” And the play is really showing that it’s all just one mess — if you’re creating, if you’re collaborating with someone, the relationship is the art and you’re making it with the person and it’s just a human mess. It’s all fundamentally emerging from the same place, and oftentimes, that place is quite broken. I appreciate just how true [the show] feels. It just shows the tangled web of trying to make art with with four of your friends, which is really powerful.
I was in a band with my brother and his wife, and now I’m in a band with my own wife and her sister. So I’ve been in bands with these long, deep relationships. I consulted with David a bit on the technical side, but I didn’t tell him what it was like being in a band with family — and because he’s so observant or maybe just that he is a very good playwright, the humanity of it is very accurate to me. And it’s a credit to the humanity of the actors, too, because it’s one thing to read the words and it’s another thing to like, make them happen in real life and put real flesh and bones on it.
This year’s CMA Fest in Nashville launched with music icon Dolly Parton spilling the details on several projects she has in the works — namely, a Broadway musical as well as a hotel.
“It’s true, I’m going to have a hotel right here in Nashville, and a museum too,” Parton told the crowd.
The country icon officially revealed her upcoming Songteller Hotel in Nashville, which will be located on 3rd and Commerce in downtown Nashville. The hotel will also include a Dolly Parton museum that will feature memorabilia from her career and many of her fashionable outfits, including a replica of Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,” which inspired her signature song of the same name.
The name of the hotel takes its name from Parton’s 2020 book Songteller: My Life in Song, written with author-journalist Robert K. Oermann.
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“When we were looking at the property, you know how sometimes you feel you get a little divine sign,” Parton said during the event, which was hosted by Entertainment Tonight‘s Rachel Smith. “We were walking through and it was an empty room. There was a table and of all things, there was the book Songteller and we thought that must be a sign and we thought that would be a good name.”
Parton, of course, is no stranger to launching hotels — the singer, songwriter and business mogul’s Dollywood theme park includes the Dreammore Resort, which opened in 2015, and the Heartsong Lodge and Resort, which opened in 2023.
Parton also announced her upcoming Broadway musical, Hello, I’m Dolly: An Original Musical, set to open in 2026. Parton says she affectionately calls it “a Grand Ole Opera.”
“I tried for years, how to do my life story and make it make sense. I needed to write some original music. I’m hoping you’re gonna laugh and cry,” Parton said.
The musical will trace Parton’s life story from growing up in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee before making her way to Nashville to pursue music. The musical will chronicle her early solo hits, her work with Porter Wagoner and her rise as to becoming an internationally, Country Music Hall of Famer, with 25 No. 1 Billboard Hot Country Songs hits. as well as a multi-faceted artist through her work in movies and television.
The musical will be produced by Parton, Adam Speers (ATG Productions) and Danny Nozell (CTK Enterprises), and takes its name from Parton’s first studio album, which released in 1967. Hello, I’m Dolly will feature a score by Parton that will include some of her biggest hits as well as new songs she has written especially for the musical, and a book by Parton and Maria S. Schlatter.
In addition, Parton revealed the launch of Dolly Wines (which starts with a Dolly 2023 California chardonnay) and the cookbook Good Lookin’ Cookin’, which she created with her sister Rachel. Good Lookin’ Cookin’ releases Sept. 17.
These business ventures expand on Parton’s recent teaming with Duncan Hines to launch a line of cake and muffin mixes, as well as Parton’s recent partnership with Krispy Kreme for the limited-time Dolly Parton Southern Sweets Doughnut Collection.
Parton also recently revealed her upcoming family-oriented album Smoky Mountain DNA–Family, Faith and Fables, out in November.
In the meantime, Parton told Smith that she has no plans to slow down anytime soon.
“Not today,” Parton quipped. “Maybe someday I may have to. I’ve always said if my husband was in ill health and needed me, I would pull back — and the same with my own health. But I kind of dreamed myself into a corner and I need to be responsible for that. I may pull back a little now and then, but not today.”
As he prepares for the Friday (May 31) release of Honeymind — his third studio album (and first on Interscope) — and settles into his just-opened, 18-date run of concerts reopening Broadway‘s iconic Palace Theatre, singer-songwriter and actor Ben Platt recently sat down with Billboard News to discuss creating his new music, the relationships and artists inspiring him now, and his upcoming projects.
The Honeymind creation process occurred in Nashville, during what Platt calls a “point of transition personally and career-wise, reinvestigating my reasons for being an artist, relearning the importance of following passion and doing things that feel authentically fulfilling and not necessarily checking boxes.” It was also a happy time, Platt says, of settling into the comfort of his relationship with his now-fiancée, fellow actor Noah Galvin — and he found himself exploring, through songwriting, “that crossroads between what it feels like to arrive in your real relationship and have a partner who you feel really understands you holistically, and how do you need to work on yourself as a person to be ready for a relationship like that?”
His Honeymind collaborators include beloved Nashville writers Natalie Hemby and Hillary Lindsey, as well as executive producer Dave Cobb, who worked with Platt at his home studio in Savannah, Ga. Platt praises Cobb’s “barometer for honesty and authenticity … he’s very much no bulls–t. If something feels put-on, or like a bell or whistle, he has no problem being very forthright about that.”
Platt opens up as well about the singular experience of filming the very personal music video for single “Cherry on Top,” in which he enjoys a day out around Los Angeles with Galvin. “I was apprehensive at first — I love to keep some things sacred and private,” he explains. But he ultimately realized that, since song was written specifically about his experience with Galvin, “nothing felt as true as the actual relationship itself that brings that joy about.”
An unabashed fan of pop, Platt also gushes about his own favorite music right now, mentioning perennial favorites Maggie Rogers and Chappell Roan (he’s a vocal longtime fan: “I’ve known she was a superstar the whole time!”). He’s also big on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Kacey Musgraves’ Deeper Well (Musgraves made a surprise appearance at Platt’s opening night at the Palace to duet with him on her “Rainbow”), and Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine (“Ari is one of the greatest pop voices of this generation, and it’s such a sharp, delicious bubblegum album that is like, harkening back to Mariah….it’s always in my head”).
Additionally, Platt shares the inspiration he takes from seeing two of the biggest tours of the past year: Beyoncé’s Renaissance trek and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Swift “shares her own experiences and makes us feel like we’re in her living room … in a way that feels very off the cuff but is clearly very thought out and well-crafted,” he says; Beyoncé is “an unbelievable live singer … and on top of that the level to which she exerts and gives of herself no matter what show she’s doing? You’ve never seen her half-ass a performance in her life!”
Platt will be occupied promoting Honeymind for some time — after his Palace residency, he will embark on a tour of the U.S. and Canada (with album collaborator Brandy Clark supporting) through late July. Meanwhile, he reveals to Billboard that Richard Linklater’s twenty-years-in-the-making film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along — announced in 2019, in which Platt stars alongside close friend Beanie Feldstein and Paul Mescal — is progressing.
Platt says two of “eight or nine” sequences have been filmed with, he adds with a laugh, just “another 16 or so years to go.” Linklater, he says, “puts a lot of emphasis on not looking too far ahead … it becomes too daunting, so I just treat it as this gift of getting to have little checkpoints in my life to check back in with Sondheim, with Paul, and obviously Beanie.” Platt praises Mescal, who makes his major musical onscreen debut in Merrily, as a “gorgeous, kind, amazing actor, beautiful voice — he’s the real deal.”
See what else Platt had to say in the video above.
Few rock albums live as long and varied a life as The Who’s Tommy. Since its release in 1969, guitarist Pete Townshend’s conceptual masterpiece — centered around the story of the titular boy who witnesses a murder, becomes a “deaf, dumb and blind” pinball wizard, then something like a rock star-savior — has been translated into various mediums, including Ken Russell’s wild 1975 film starring the likes of Tina Turner, Elton John and Jack Nicholson.
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But none have persisted quite like The Who’s Tommy, the groundbreaking 1993 stage musical directed by Des McAnuff that brought Townshend’s electrifying music and haunting story to Broadway. It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won five, including best original score for Townshend and best direction for McAnuff.
Three decades later, The Who’s Tommy is back in its first major Broadway revival — a searing production with a cast of standout vocal and acting talent led by 23-year old Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy. If the show still feels incredibly vital, that’s in large part because McAnuff, who returns to direct, and Townshend still are, too. And as they told Billboard in a wide-ranging conversation, this production (a likely contender for best revival of a musical when the 2024 Tony nominations are announced April 30) is anything but the end of their alchemical creative partnership.
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Back before the original Broadway production, what convinced you to turn Tommy into a musical, Pete, and why with Des?
Pete Townshend: You know, The Who were not a particularly financially successful band. We had big hits and Tommy was our biggest, but the money didn’t exactly roll in. I tended to work purely for the art. I had written a bunch of songs, all of which had done pretty well, and one was “I Can See For Miles” which I took a lot of trouble with recording and arranging harmonically. I think still to this day it’s a masterpiece, and I can’t really work out why it isn’t in the shrine of rock history as the best song ever written about anything at all.
So after it [underperformed in the U.K.], I thought, “F–k, what am I going to have to do to get the interest of the public and maintain it and also to harness this incredible machine” which the band was at that time as a performing band. It hit me that I should write a major piece, a collection of good rock songs strung together that will tell a story. At the time, I was absolutely not interested in anything to do with music, theater, movies, anything other than just providing something for my band — something that would last, that we could perform on the stage.
Whip pan forward to 1992: I haven’t performed with The Who for nearly 10 years, I had gone to work with publisher Faber & Faber as a commissioning editor for a pop culture imprint within the company, I was doing some solo work. And I had a cycling accident, fell and broke my wrist, and my surgeon told me I’d never play music again with my right hand, so I thought, well, I’ve got to make a living. As ever, every couple of years the phone would ring and my manager would say “Somebody wants to talk to you about doing a theatrical version of Tommy” — God forgive me, it was ice skating Tommy, it was ballet Tommy, brass band Tommy, there was a reggae Tommy. And I just was not interested in any of it to be honest.
But when Des flew over to New York in late summer or early fall of ’92, I daresay — I don’t want to embarrass Des — that we fell in love. We struck an immediate relationship and I knew we would be friends forever, whether or not we worked together. And that’s where it began. I think Des has been so fantastic to hang on to the integrity of the original story, all of the nuances and some of the bum notes, and I thank him for that. And you know, I’ve done what I can to help out along the way.
Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy in The Who’s Tommy
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
When the original Broadway run ended (and then subsequent tours and productions elsewhere, like the West End), did you feel like a chapter was closed? Or did you have a sense that there might be a reason to revisit it down the line together?
Des McAnuff: It was kind of open ended — there wasn’t a moment where we said, “Okay, well, this is over.” Ultimately what happened is, I was traveling in Costa Rica and saw that Pete had called, and he suggested that we start talking about a film project, whether it was a motion picture or a live capture, he felt that the time had come. And I was very excited by that. We did a screenplay, and as we were doing it, we kind of said, hey, you know, it’s really time to reimagine this [for Broadway].
That was several years ago, and pre-COVID we started working on this in earnest. Nothing is easy, particularly in the theater — or for that matter in rock ‘n’ roll. But this has been remarkably smooth. The great thing about Tommy is while it has evolved, it’s deepened, there are new complexities in the story — themes that are sometimes even paradoxical — but it does remain faithful to what Pete composed.
Were there elements of the original production you wanted to be sure to preserve or pay homage to? Or likewise things you dreamed of doing the first time around that you now had the ability to do — particularly on the technology front?
McAnuff: I think we basically did what we imagined the first time around. I remember the conversations: “The bed’s going to spin here, Tommy’s gonna come flying in here.” Both at La Jolla Playhouse [where Tommy premiered in 1992] and this time around at the Goodman Theater [in Chicago], they were willing to just kind of follow us into hell, so we basically got to do what we wanted.
While the new production is very ambitious, interestingly enough nothing moves on that stage that is not moved by an actor. It really is about a company of actors, storytelling. The first one had a lot of gadgetry and technology and automation, and this certainly is very ambitious, technically, and somewhat of a spectacle. But I would say it has a kind of humanity that breaks through all of that.
Townshend: A number of people who saw the original show in ‘93 have told me they think the storytelling is more solid and clearer somehow this time around. And I don’t think it’s because there’s less distraction, because the stage is still a sleigh ride, a visual feast, an onslaught of image and light and color — and also of shadow, moments when you really feel drawn into the deep pathos of many of the characters. And that was only ever inferred in the original music that I wrote.
Ali Louis Bourzgui and the cast of The Who’s Tommy
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
I think this one exposes the actors in a much bigger way, and it feels to me to be more of a play than it ever was. There’s an incredible empathy for the creatures that we’ve created here, not just to make them real, but to make them solid enough that they spark a real identification with members of the audience. Tommy is about stuff that so many of us in my generation, and the generations that followed right up to today, are all still suffering from — from the trauma of 200 years of war. So everybody in the audience has this deep desire just to have a night out where they can forget their worries and have a good time, but also feel involved in something that is deep and reflects the very reason why they want to get out and get smashed. And of course that is what rock ‘n’ roll was about, and Tommy I believe is doing that now.
You’re in the Nederlander Theater, where Rent began on Broadway in 1996; I think few people realize that Tommy actually preceded Rent! In so many ways Tommy was the parent of the next generation of rock musicals — or, well, attempts at them — that have followed. Why do you think Tommy succeeds as a rock musical, where many others have not?
Townshend: We had a human story to tell. And the way that I realized that is we would get to the end of the show — after the songs about bullying, about drugs, about sexual abuse, about family trauma, about a kid who becomes a messiah in a sense — and it ends with what was perceived to be a prayer: “Listening to you, I get the music.” Why do we need that release at that point in the show? I think it’s because we’ve been taken on a journey where we look at the best and the worst of human nature. It’s not Dostoevsky, but it ain’t far off, the function of it. Actually, I do feel a bit like Dostoevsky.
McAnuff: Very much like Dostoevsky [Laughs.] I think what distinguishes Tommy from many other theatrical enterprises is that it has authenticity. Pete is really one of the reigning princes of rock ‘n’ roll to this day, he is rock ‘n’ roll, he personifies it. And he’s also a very good storyteller, and he’s made a wonderful partner because of that. It’s not just his imagination, but it’s his appreciation of good story points that’s made my job really a delight.
McAnuff (left) and Townshend with the cast of The Who’s Tommy.
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
When we did this 30 years ago, people were still very nervous about electric music. Electric music was something you made fun of in Bye Bye Birdie! It wasn’t legitimate somehow. And that’s totally changed. Now Broadway represents all of the richness of American music in all its different forms. In those days, all you could do was was, quote, “Broadway.” Well, that’s all gone.
In Tommy, there’s very little spoken dialogue — you both seem to have this inherent trust that the songs will communicate the story, that every point doesn’t need to make literal sense or feel totally linear, and that the audience will come along for the ride, which seems like something for more theater makers to internalize…
Townshend: I recently went to see the Sufjan Stevens piece at the [Park Avenue] Armory, Illinoise; I’m glad it’s moving [to Broadway]. I love his music, and I love the show, but the thing that really came across to me was, whether you got the story or not, whether you felt that the story was relevant or not, it was a poetic experience — I felt somehow moved and touched. And, wow, that’s all I want.
Behind Tommy is a performance piece, rooted in the engine of modern performance. If we look at the brilliance and massive success of somebody like Taylor Swift, it’s because she carries her audience with her, and they carry her with them. The essence of the period that Tommy came from, we were experimenting with the function and the importance and the value of the audience just showing up and listening but also contributing. How do you contribute if you’re sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a theater? You contribute in some way which is almost intangible. Yes, you can get up and you can clap along or you can smoke a joint and shout. But there’s something more going on.
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So many artists from the pop world now want to work in musical theater, and many find they prefer it to the commercial music industry. Having spent much of your life interacting with the theater world now, Pete, do you think anything is preferable about it?
Townshend: Working in music theater, you have everything that we have in rock ‘n’ roll, but you also have story. So for me, it’s been like being in a band but with extra cream. All art, all performance is play. It’s so important to play — and that’s how I feel about working in theater or going back and working with Roger Daltrey and what remains of The Who on a tour or producing other artists, as I’ve done largely for folk artists over the past few years. This is where creativity really comes alive. And remember, I’ve done this and the shows have not been successful, too. It’s just about whether or not you’ve actually spent the time in a useful way.
Tommy has had many different iterations since the album came out. Do you think of it as an eternally evolving work, or is each version of it merely a moment in time, without necessarily a “next”?
Townshend: As a songwriter and a storyteller, you create something and then you just let it go. You have to let it fly in each of its incarnations, some of which I’ve found difficult to live with and some of which I’ve enjoyed.
I have to be absolutely honest here: I think I do care about the lasting legacy of my work. I do very much. One of the reasons I’m with my current wife Rachel [Fuller], is that around 1996 The Who were struggling to get back together to help our bass player John Entwistle who was in dire straits financially, he was gonna go to prison for tax evasion. We had to tour to keep him out of jail, basically.
I decided that I wanted all of what I would call my story-based pieces to be put on paper— A Quick One While He’s Away, Rael, Tommy, Quadrophenia, Life House, my solo albums and so on — and I was looking for an orchestrator and found Rachel, and the first thing she orchestrated for me was Quadrophenia. I wanted it to be something that could be performed the way that I wanted it to be performed as a songwriter, without any bells and whistles, without the ideas of other creative people, just to be put up as a piece of music that I had personally rubber stamped.
So the legacy of Tommy is really important to me. At my age now, 79 in May, there are big decisions to make. I can’t jump out on a stage the way that I used to — some of the photographs of me jumping up in the air, it looks like I’m jumping seven feet in the air, I don’t know how it happened. I survived Keith Moon, and the fact is that Keith Moon didn’t survive Keith Moon.
On the other hand, you have to let this stuff go. You have to trust. In Chicago, I realized that time had moved under this piece, and it still worked. That’s all that matters; what you’ve done doesn’t have to be sacrosanct. For God’s sake, what AI might do to creative work might actually be good — who knows?
McAnuff: Somebody once said that musicals don’t get finished, they just get opened. And that’s true — we’re working on this even now. The theater exists, as Bob Dylan said, in the eternal present. I would have thought Tommy was more or less finished in the ‘90s for me, and then here it is. It has new life.
Townshend: In my first week at art college back in 1961, we were being told that computers were going to come within two or three years and they would change the nature of artistic and creative communication and would change the world for the better. And it took 40 years or so for those promised computers to arrive. Now we have Apple producing this great big thing like a television screen that you stick to your head and we’re supposed to be impressed by it? Give me a pill I can take that will help me to experience something more fabulous than looking at a f–king television screen!
I do think if there’s another iteration of Tommy, I probably won’t be here for it, but you could do it [using] these new media formats that are starting to rise up and maybe even be able to make something out of artificial intelligence as just a tool. Anything that makes my life as a creative easier and, incidentally, is fun to play with, I’m in.
The company of The Who’s Tommy.
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
You’ve both spent so much of your creative lives with Tommy but is there another piece from Pete’s catalog that you think deserves more theatrical attention?
Townshend: Well for me, it’s Life House. Songs like “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Pure and Easy,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” those songs all emanated from a sci-fi piece that I wrote called Life House, which had a strong spiritual backbone and a lot of ethical issues are brought up in it. This was meant to be the follow up to Tommy, and it began at the Young Vic theater in 1971, but was really a bit too ambitious, I think, to survive [Ed. note: It’s since been adapted into a graphic novel.] I would love to do something theatrical or some kind of modern production based on that — that would be my dream, I think, right now. It feels like it has potential. I’ve recently shared some of the collateral of that with Des.
McAnuff: I’m digging into the box set, Who’s Next/Life House, and I’m incredibly excited because I think that the music in Who’s Next, as with Tommy, is obviously masterful, brilliant songs that continue to bounce around in my brain all these years later. I also love Quadrophenia — an extraordinary score. But for me it’s Life House next.
Townshend: Give us another five years.
“Ever since Rent, I have made it a priority to originate roles and shine a light on new work,” Idina Menzel tells Billboard. “It takes lots of patience and fortitude, but there is truly nothing as rewarding as seeing your kernel of an idea fully realized with a group of people you love and admire so deeply.”
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The Broadway icon’s latest project in that vein is the new musical Redwood, currently playing at La Jolla Playhouse in California. For Menzel — who plays Jesse, a successful businesswoman, mother and wife who finds herself as a personal crossroads and finds unexpected answers in the forests of Northern California — the show is an especially personal creative endeavor. “The story of a woman at a turning point in her life paralleled with the resilience, wisdom and strength of the redwood tree was one that spoke to me deep in my soul,” Menzel says. “Nature’s power to heal and connect us as human beings is essential in this turbulent world we are living in.”
Idina Menzel backstage during REDWOOD at La Jolla Playhouse.
Courtesy of Idina Menzel
Menzel, who released her latest album Drama Queen in August of last year, isn’t just the star of the production. She co-conceived Redwood with director, writer and co-lyricist Tina Landau (recently of Broadway’s inventive SpongeBob SquarePants musical) over the course of many years, delving deeply into the development of Jesse as a character.
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Menzel and Landau also “knew we wanted to find a new young composer who could bring a fresh take to musical theater” for the show, bringing in Kate Diaz for a score that Menzel describes as having “a beautiful, earthy and soulful quality as well as expansive and cinematic. When I perform Kate’s music, I am able to use all the different colors in my voice. I’m not just shooting for the rafters. I’m expressing myself similarly to how I express myself in my own songwriting.” (Diaz also co-wrote the lyrics with Landau).
While the La Jolla run of Redwood ends March 31, the show has its sights set on Broadway — which certainly seems more likely than not with Menzel and her creative collaborators on board. “We knew we wanted the production to be cutting edge and unconventional,” Menzel says. “We have encouraged one another to dream big, break rules, and not compromise our creative ideas. There’s a deep sense of creative freedom and trust in how we work.”
Here, Menzel exclusively shares with Billboard a live recording of her performing “Great Escape,” recorded during a performance of Redwood.
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Don’t fall down and smack your head on the pavement at this news, but there’s a new Miranda Priestly in town. Vanessa Williams is set to portray Runway‘s intimidating editor in chief in the West End musical of The Devil Wears Prada, the production announced on Monday (Feb. 19). In a video shared to Instagram, […]
Oh, those summer nights. Once upon a time, Taylor Swift starred in a childhood production of Grease, and now, the Danny Zuko to her Sandy Olsson is giving fans a peek at what she looked like onstage. Comedian-actor Tobin Mitnick shared a trio of throwback photos on Instagram Thursday (Feb. 1) featuring Swift dolled up […]
As more and more artists from the pop world add writing a Broadway musical to their career-goal lists, Sara Bareilles stands out as one of the brightest success stories from that group.
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Waitress — the musical adaptation of Adrienne Shelly’s beloved independent film, featuring music and lyrics by Bareilles — was an unequivocal Broadway hit, running for nearly four years after an opening in April 2016.
That year, Bareilles’ score earned her two Tony nominations (out of a total four for the show), and she went on to perform the lead role of Jenna for three different stints. The production played London’s West End as well as internationally, garnered a Grammy nomination for its original Broadway cast recording, and yielded both a standalone Bareilles album (What’s Inside: Songs From Waitress, released on Epic Records between the show’s off-Broadway and Broadway runs) and a film of the stage show (which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2023).
Sara Bareilles performs during the curtain call for Broadway’s “Waitress” at The Brooks Atkinson Theatre on March 31, 2017 in New York City.
Noam Galai/Getty Images
Now, Bareilles — who’s been warmly embraced by the wider theater community, and racked up another Tony nomination last year for her portrayal of The Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods — is making her return to Broadway.
She’s writing the music and lyrics for The Interestings, an adaptation of the New York Times bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer with a book by Pulitzer- and Tony-nominated playwright Sarah Ruhl.
The plot of Wolitzer’s novel revolves around character Jules Jacobson and her friends from an exclusive childhood arts camp (the titular Interestings, as they call themselves) who grow up to find varying degrees of success and satisfaction or disillusionment with where a creative life has led them.
When it came out in 2013, the Times called it “warm, all-American, and acutely perceptive about the motivations of its characters,” likening it to modern Great American Novels and praising Wolitzer’s “inclusive vision and generous sweep.” With its complex, layered female protagonist and diverse cast of characters, as well as the knotty themes it explores — ranging from what qualifies as success to whether being extraordinary is the only path to it — the book seems rich material for musical adaptation, and it’s easy to see why it appealed to Bareilles, whose Waitress balanced the buoyant with the bittersweet.
The Interestings is being produced by Matt Ross, and is currently in development; additional creative team and production details will be announced in the coming months.
Since its Broadway premiere in 1981, Stephen Sondheim‘s Merrily We Roll Along has been struggling to, well, get back to Broadway. The musical about 20 years of friendship between composer Franklin Shepard, lyricist Charley Kringas and writer Mary Flynn — which unfolds onstage in reverse chronological order, starting when that friendship has dissolved and all […]
The Oak View Group will unveil its Theater Fund during the inaugural gala for the OVG Theater Alliance headlined by Rachel Platten, Jake Wesley Rogers, Lindsay Ell and country a cappella group Home Free at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville on Oct. 11.
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“Part of our mission at OVG is to identify ways we can help our members,” says Joe Giordano, vice president of OVG’s three facilities groups — the Arena Alliance, Stadium and the recently launched Theater Alliance, which debuted in January. The Theater Fund will be operated in collaboration with Music’s Promise as a 501(C)3 that will support Theater Alliance members, many of which operate through or with non-profit entities.
“We will take all the money raised from the fund and divy them up equally between all the foundation non-profits in the Theater Alliance,” Giordano explained, noting that 21 foundations will benefit from the event.
The goal is to help Alliance members rebuild in a challenging post-pandemic environment for arts organizations, which are dealing with decreased attendance, a decline in annual subscriptions, gaps in government support, rising costs and competition with more modern buildings.
While the concert business has bounced back strong from the pandemic, along with Broadway, “fine arts based organizations have indicated to us that they have lost audiences since the pandemic that they will never get back. The revenue piece has been a key component of whats missing for many of these groups.”
Platten told Billboard in a statement, “It’s my honor to give back to the establishments that have been so crucial in hosting the most influential live entertainment in our country.”
In addition to the live performances and a silent auction, attendees at the gala can network with high-level Industry executives, promoters, agents and managers.
Tim Leiweke, chairman and CEO of Oak View Group, said, “The Theater Alliance has enabled Oak View Group to gather the top theaters and performing arts venues in the nation to keep our finger on the pulse of this vibrant and essential corner of our industry. We know that – especially coming out of the pandemic – funding is critical for theaters to thrive and support their communities, and we have droves of talent, promoters, managers and industry leaders who are going to see to it that these venues have access to the resources they need to succeed.”