Written By: Lonny Price

"Linda Kline, my collaborator, had these songs ... actually years before that, Ira Weitzman had sent me a bunch of Ed Kleban's songs on some tapes which I really loved and didn't know what to do with... So, I went over to Linda's apartment and listened to the songs and fell in love with them again and got very excited about the idea of putting them on the stage. The conventional wisdom, of course, was to do a revue, but I actually don't like and/or understand revues, it's just not a form that I admire particularly. Though I admire people who do them well, I don't understand why they work, so I felt I was the wrong guy. I like book songs, I like songs that are about characters. So, I said what about a book show, and she said great, she was very excited about it.

As we got into the material, it occurred to us that Ed's material was so idiosyncratic, so specific, so urban, it had a unified voice. You couldn't do this kind of show with Stephen Sondheim's music, for instance, because PACIFIC OVERTURES does not sound like COMPANY which doesn't sound like NIGHT MUSIC, I mean, he's so chameleon-like, and Ed really was a very specific kind of guy. I never met Ed. And Linda, I think wisely, wanted somebody to work on the material who had never met him. She wanted a fresh voice, someone who would freshly respond to his material. So, essentially, that's how it came about and we did six years of readings at Musical Theatre Works and it was terrible for a long time and my best friends told me to abandon it, and no one liked it, and then, finally, it just sort of took shape and we did yet another reading, the Manhattan Theatre Club and they liked it, and Marty Bell came, and rest, as they say, you know. That's how it all happened.

What I hate about the British shows is they seem as though an audience's involvement is not necessary. They're like these big machines that start, and I always think the building could fall down and they would still go on. That they're very machine-like, they're like these steamrollers, they're very powerful and they're very loud, they're very mechanized ... What I wanted to create was a show where Sara [Ramirez, the original Broadway Felicia] could stop the show. That there were laughs that would change the timing. That there would be a kind of flow that the audience's participation was important, that you weren't just watching it as a bystander. You were part of the night by their reaction to it. A lot of these shows, I find, are very like a wall in that, I could cough or throw up or laugh or not laugh, and it would come in. I think the stage managers must get it in at the same time each night, because there's no kind of life in them in that way, and I believe in theatre where, if it's going to be live, I want it to be influenced. The show is also built very definitely on everyone having a moment. Everybody in that show had a moment to shine, where it was their ten minutes, and I felt really strong about coming from the factor that there would be no bad part in the show. And I worked really hard on that. I think part of that—maybe why it changed so much—is that people are hotter one night or not, or the audience liked this guy more than they liked this guy. I very much wanted it not to be mechanical, and I had a great company of actors who never phoned it in, I just never felt anyone walked through that show ever.

[On how the show translates to audiences not part of the New York theatre culture] That's what's interesting. I think really well. The audiences there are enormously responsive. We got a lousy review in the L.A. Times. They sent the dance critic so that was upsetting. But the Hollywood Reporter was great, and Variety was great, and the radios were all great. It's only theatre people who seem to feel it's inside. People on the outside seem to find it universal. It's a weird position to be in. You think, "Well, the people they're worried about are fine with it, why doesn't everybody just be fine with it?" I actually think the show has much more universality than some people think. I'll tell you, people are very moved by it, it seems to me, wherever we play. When we were playing downstairs here in 70-seat theater, a year and a half ago for seventy people, they were crying. I don't know ... It's a show that seems to speak a lot of kinds of people, so I don't think it's inside.

The Ambassador [where the show played on Broadway] has a particular problem in that it's very wide, and when you don't have a spectacle ... I loved the way it looked there, but I come from a world where ... I saw COMPANY when I was a kid, and it was eight or ten people or whatever it was on a single unit set. I don't go to the theatre for spectacle, I go for relationships and material and good songs and stuff, I'm in that minority. What I like just doesn't exist much anymore. I am hoping that A CLASS ACT will bring about a renaissance in that kind of show."