This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African-Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode Sondheim, Prince, and Paul Gemignani. This is the second part of my recent conversation with author Margaret Hall, the remarkable young theater historian whose new book is titled Gemignani – Life and Lessons from Broadway and Beyond. If you missed part one of our conversation, you may want to catch up on that episode before listening to this one. Margaret spent much of the pandemic interviewing Paul Gemignani, who is without a doubt one of the most significant figures in the history of the modern musical.

Beginning as a replacement conductor with the original production of Follies in 1971, Gemignani served as the music director for more than 40 Broadway musicals, including Sweeney Todd, Evita, Sunday in the Park with George, On the 20th Century, and Into the Woods, to name only a few. Margaret's book takes us behind the scenes of those acclaimed productions and illuminates the crucial role that music directors play in the creation, development, and success of a Broadway musical. Paul Gemignani's incredible talent and theatrical know-how made him the first-choice music director and indispensable collaborator of both Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince. And as you will hear, after Sondheim and Prince ended their creative partnership and went their separate ways, Paul Gemignani was often pulled back and forth and caught in the middle between these two great artists and their various projects.

As we ended the previous episode, the legendary music director Hal Hastings had unexpectedly died, and Paul Gemignani was suddenly drafted to replace him as the music director of A Little Night Music, the brand-new Prince-Sondheim musical that had just opened. Here we go!

[2:09] Margaret Hall: And they ask him to sort of, hey, you got two days, we need you to learn the entire score of A Little Night Music and take it over, because we know that you are the person that if Hal Hastings had to pick his successor, it's you. And what's funny, Paul thinks that he's just sort of saving the day, and that it's only going to be A Little Night Music. But if you look at the notes from the meeting and telegrams and things, yes, they're asking him to take over A Little Night Music, but they're from the jump asking him to be the new Hal Hastings, and to be the new music director du jour for the Prince office, is really what they're asking him. This is just the show they have that he needs to immediately jump into. But it's very funny to me how he assumed he was just, oh, I'll just do a favor because you just need some help, and I can do that, sure.

[3:02] David Armstrong: And you got to obviously go through the correspondence from the Prince office to look at how this was being discussed at the time.

[3:07] Margaret Hall: Yes, I was very lucky to look at all sorts of things that were hidden in the Ruth Mitchell papers and things like that.

[3:11] David Armstrong: She's somebody who I think I want to do an episode about at some point. Somebody who obviously had a tremendous influence on Broadway and nobody ever talks about.

[3:16] Margaret Hall: I adore Ruthie. There's not enough out there publicly for me to do a full biography of her, but one day I will do a monograph because she's incredibly important. There is no Hal Prince without Ruth Mitchell. And Hal would have been the first person to tell you that.

[3:27] David Armstrong: That's a story I'm eager for you to tell.

[3:29] Margaret Hall: I'd love to hear that you want to do an episode on her because that's very exciting to hear. We'll put that on our list. And during this time, this is really where he starts a relationship with Sondheim. Obviously, he's been around Follies. He was in the room. Follies is where he started his relationship with Michael Bennett. So clearly people have noticed him. People warm to him very quickly. Paul's one of those personalities that it's just pleasant to be around. And especially when you're making a new musical. It is truly a miracle that a musical ever gets made because it is such a pit of stress and everyone's doubts and sort of stuff that we all carry around. And then you've got Paul, who's just happy to be there and happy to be making art with you.

And if it doesn't work, okay, it's not the end of the world. And so people love to be around him in a new show because you'll have someone having a panic attack in the corner. And then Paul's just like talking to whoever his pianist is in the rehearsals about like, hey, have you heard XXY jazz album sort of situation? Yes, he knows when to be serious. And he demands the best of you. But he's also going to be your best friend if you let him. And he's almost part therapist for a lot of people. I cannot tell you the number of people I interviewed who were just like, Paul was the first person I talked to when I went on my first date with the man who became my husband. Or he found out that I was pregnant before my parents did and stuff like that.

He's just got this teddy bear energy where you can just trust the sort of scary parts of life with him and he makes them feel less scary. And when you're working on a musical, which is a very scary experience, that's a really good person to have around.

[5:04] David Armstrong: Absolutely. So what's this first intense interaction with Sondheim?

[5:08] Margaret Hall: Yes. So they're at a bar about 30 minutes before Paul is supposed to go on for A Little Night Music for the first time. Yes. He's had two days to learn this score. He's not really slept. A thing about Paul is Paul memorizes his scores because it's deeply important to him that he has his eyes on his performers and not in the book. He has to have eyes everywhere. And so in two days he memorizes this score, which is a task and a half. He does have it in front of him just in case he loses his place, but he is endeavoring to have it memorized. And Steve asks him to meet him at this bar. Paul goes even though he kind of doesn't want to because he's like, I'm not going to do the show drunk. That sounds like a very bad idea.

But Steve sort of cajoles him into sharing a drink with him. They have a very sort of casual chat and Steve says something that I find incredibly affecting when Paul asks him if he has any advice because Paul is sort of asking him off the cuff being like, oh, like, is there something I should keep an eye out for? Is there like a tricky measure that I might not know is always like weird. But instead of giving sort of practical advice in that way, Steve takes a long sip of his drink and looks at Paul and just says, just do what you do. And that really sums up their working relationship for the rest of Steve's life. Steve just trusted Paul that Paul knew what to do and just let Paul do what he's going to do.

Don't get in the way of that. And part of what made their partnership so magic is the space that they gave each other. Paul didn't treat Steve sort of as like this saint. If something wasn't working, he'd tell Steve like, hey, we need to fix this. There's some people who would really bend over backwards to never question anything Steve ever did. Steve was a genius, but he was also a human being. And like, sometimes we accidentally write an eighth note when we mean a sixteenth and stuff like that. It just happens. And Paul was not afraid to sort of ask about that or question things, question keys, that sort of thing. And in the same way, Steve did not micromanage Paul. If Paul said someone couldn't sing it that way, then they couldn't sing it.

If Paul said, oh, we need to change this key. Okay, I guess we're changing the key because he wouldn't bring it to me if we didn't need to. And that freedom he gave Paul made it so that the pit orchestra on the Sondheim shows that Paul created is like its own living, breathing organism where the music becomes its own character in a very real way because the pit becomes unified around Paul like a single performer. And that's really hard to do. And it becomes one of Paul's real calling cards, both on the Sondheim shows and the non-Sondheim shows where he becomes known that if you're bringing Paul Gemignani on, you're listening to him. You're not going to second guess him. You're not going to sit here and needle him on every little choice.

He's a painter and you have to let him paint. Obviously, he succeeds on this first night and Sondheim is there watching him, as I'm sure everyone is. But he then conducts the show for the rest of its run through the national tour of A Little Night Music. And the film as well has to work with Elizabeth Taylor to try to help her. Lots of great Liz stories.

[8:09] Margaret Hall: Isn't it rich? Isn't it queer? Losing my timing this late in my career. And where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns. Well, maybe next year.

[8:57] David Armstrong: So he's now jumped to a new position, which is basically one of the leading conductors, music directors on Broadway. He's sort of solidified that through what happened to Hal Hastings. Then obviously he's in demand for things. And a lot of it comes like everything in this business from who you know, who you have relationships with. And one of those relationships leads directly to working with Leonard Bernstein.

[9:26] Margaret Hall: It does. Yes. And that was something that was very special for Paul because Leonard Bernstein was one of his musician idols. He'd grown up seeing those broadcasts that Bernstein used to do sort of like conducting and classical music 101. I think they were for PBS or something of that equivalent. Paul had grown up for PBS, actually. But yeah, it was actually on network television. They had to invent PBS later to do what network television wouldn't do anymore. And now we've got to find some alternative to PBS. PBS is getting too bogged down with Antiques Roadshow reruns.

[10:00] David Armstrong: Exactly. So he grew up watching Leonard Bernstein on the famous television shows that he did. Spent a lot of time sort of analyzing them. That's how he sort of taught himself how to be a conductor when he wasn't actually up in the band room. And he first meets Lenny through Hal Prince because Hal Prince is doing his production of Candide. And the conductor who had been attached drops out for interesting reasons, but it results in Hal being like, hey, here's another Hail Mary pass. I need you here. And so Paul again thinks, oh, I'm just doing another favor for a friend. I'm just the person he calls when no one else is picking up the phone. Sure. And so he goes to do Candide and he meets Leonard Bernstein and the two of them get together so quickly. It's kind of magical. Have you ever had those experiences where you meet someone and it immediately feels like your old friends?

[10:47] Margaret Hall: Absolutely. That was Paul and Lenny. They immediately shared a language. And Lenny loved Paul's conducting style because sort of like Steve, people had begun at this point in Bernstein's career to approach him with a preciousness. And he hated that. He's like, no, conduct this with wild abandon and with your soul in your hands. And Paul did that. And Paul was like, if I'm in the moment and I feel like, no, we got to hold this note for another half a second, we're doing it. Even if, oh, Leonard Bernstein never did that when he conducted it, that doesn't mean shit. I'm the one conducting it right now. And that means that I am the person who is breathing life into this. And Lenny really, really enjoyed that about Paul.

And they both shared a very dry wit and a dry sense of humor. They were both very big fans of the kind of joke that like they tell it and then you realize that they were making a joke 30 minutes later on your car ride home. Both very good at that. And they ended up working together sort of loosely on little things here and there. But they struck up quite a friendship during Candide. Lenny liked to call Paul Jim of the Sea for Gemignani because Paul has a love of sailing, which Lenny found charming. Then on the next show, he's back with Sondheim. And again, he takes another step because so far he hasn't worked on a show from the beginning.

[11:59] Margaret Hall: Yes. Follies he did, but he was the percussionist on that show. Yeah, it's a very different sort of responsibility. Now he is going to be the music director in addition to the conductor of the show. And that show is not an easy one. It's Pacific Overtures.

[13:30] Margaret Hall: Truly, it's like if you're gonna start with any show, of course it's Pacific Overtures. Arguably the most difficult score in the Sondheim canon. Pacific Overtures is a beast. Sondheim really was showing off when he composed Pacific Overtures because traditional eastern musical motifs are almost entirely opposite western musical motifs. They have a different scale, they have a different notation form, they value rhythm over harmony. It's like if you have only spoken English for your entire life and then suddenly you're set down with Aramaic. Aramaic is a beautiful language, but if you don't speak it, it's gonna take you a bit to figure out what's going on. And Paul basically has two months to teach it to himself to do Pacific Overtures. And he does a good job with it.

[14:12] David Armstrong: So what are some of the things he's asked to do or has to do, or figures out he needs to do in order to put this score together? Obviously, Sondheim comes to you with a lot on the page. He's not somebody who's coming in with lead sheets, which there are many great composers who do start with that. But even so, there's a tremendous amount of work that Paul has to do in order to take this from what Sondheim brings to him to something that then can be taught to the cast and to the orchestra, and can go on the stage.

[14:42] Margaret Hall: Absolutely, and this is really where his personnel skills come in. Because you don't have to just be a great musician to be a great music director. You have to be great with people. And his ability to find the right person for the right job is critical on all shows, but especially on Pacific Overtures. And the people he had in that pit orchestra are what made the show. Specifically people like Genji Ito, who was the percussionist that he found, who was a Japanese traditional percussionist, and who was able to sort of sit with the music and be like, "Nope, I wouldn't play it like this." And then he'd show Paul, "No, I would do it like this." And that's what would end up being orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick.

[15:18] Margaret Hall: Paul was in every single casting session for Pacific Overtures. He was the one who made the call of, first off, can this person sing it? But not only can they sing it, can they sing it in a way that is both authentic and honest while also serving like 50 different purposes? You look at someone like Alvin Ng, who has to be able to sing the song "Chrysanthemum Tea," which is not written at this point. But if you're casting Pacific Overtures, if you're casting the Alvin Ng track, "Chrysanthemum Tea" is a very difficult, very specifically notated song. And you have to have a very high tenor for it in the way that it was originally cast. So not only does he have to be able to do that track, he also needs to play the American Admiral in "Please Hello" and be able to sing basically a parody Sousa march, and then also sing one of the lead harmonies on "There is No Other Way," this beautiful, mournful, haunting, almost siren-esque ballad.

[17:35] Margaret Hall: And finding performers with that ability to leap between Eastern and Western musical styles, who were of authentic Asian descent, who could handle the acting requirements and the physical requirements, was rough. And it was Paul's job alongside Joanna Merlin, the casting director, to really uncover these incredible talents who had just not been given the opportunity to show how massively talented they were in the American theater industry up to that point. And so that really, I think, was the biggest sort of learning curve with Pacific Overtures, is learning Eastern musical notation, but then also learning how important it is to get the right people in the room. Because Pacific Overtures is a masterwork, but if it had had the wrong cast and the wrong pit, it wouldn't have mattered.

[18:18] David Armstrong: How did Paul, on this show and on others, interact between Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick, who is the orchestrator for the show, and has a similar relationship in a way I think that Paul does with Sondheim, that he is someone who is allowed to do what he does with a lot of trust and leeway?

[18:37] Margaret Hall: Yes, the phrase "do what you do" is definitely applicable to Tunick. But the main difference with the two of them with Steve is that Paul was in the room every day, and an orchestrator typically isn't. They're home writing, they've got to be writing the orchestration, they've got to be locked in their room furiously figuring out where all the puzzle pieces go. So there's a different sort of hands-on level there. But Tunick is a genius, and anyone who's ever worked with him will tell you that immediately. It's sort of one of those situations where it doesn't matter sort of who the man is, if he can do that, who cares? But thankfully Tunick and Paul worked together quite well. They had a decent working relationship, and they both trusted each other and had a respect for each other as musicians.

So that if Paul changed something in Tunick's orchestration, Tunick wasn't going to attack him for that. And if Tunick orchestrated something that made it particularly difficult on Paul, Paul would be like, "Okay, well he decided it needed to sound that way, so I'm just going to have a really rough two measures here and that's okay." It's sort of like being assigned on a group project with someone. The project always goes better if everyone's carrying their full weight. And sometimes there are shows where the music director can sort of cover up a failing on the orchestrator's part, or an orchestrator can sort of patch up sins on a composer's part and stuff like that. What was so great about the music department on the Sondheim shows is that no one was covering for each other. Everyone was at the top of their game, so no one was having to expend energy fixing anything. It could all be going forward instead of backward.

[20:01] David Armstrong: They just got to build on each other's work.

[20:03] Margaret Hall: Yes, and for Tunick especially, the way that Tunick learned to orchestrate for Pacific Overtures I think is a really underappreciated achievement of his. His best orchestration is Sweeney Todd, which is an absolute sort of masterwork. If you read music at all, just reading through those charts, it's like poetry, really. But Pacific Overtures is also a real feat because again, it's not just Steve taking on this challenge, it's every single member of that music department. And the fact that Tunick jumped in headfirst with Steve and came out relatively unscathed, that is a testament to his ability to learn on his feet.

[20:41] David Armstrong: Your book is filled with amazing quotes from everybody in the business—performers, writers, directors, stars.

[20:49] Margaret Hall: It forces me to include so many things that people would tell me in interviews because there's a lot of people who they know Paul's work, but they don't know Paul. And we were of the mind that if you won't take my word for it, and you won't take Paul's word for it, here are all of these people who the second I reached out to them, we had a meeting, immediately. Do you know how hard it is for a normal person to get a meeting with Meryl Streep? Less than 24-hour turnaround because of Paul. Because of Paul and because of her respect and love and admiration for him.

[21:26] David Armstrong: Right, the experience she had working with him.

[21:29] Margaret Hall: And I was very intentional in including these quotes. It's almost like character references where it's like if you need this to be spelled out for you plainly why this person is important, here are all of these people you already consider to be important telling you how important he is to them. So perhaps the greatest character reference for Paul is Mr. Sondheim who said, "He's always my first choice. He's almost everyone's first choice."

[21:51] David Armstrong: Oh yeah.

[21:52] Margaret Hall: Why? Why was Paul Gemignani everyone's first choice? Because he is someone who lives in that magical place between sort of stark reality and magic. And when you have him in that room, he can bridge that divide. There is something that happens when Paul is standing there with his baton. The room goes silent, and it's like there's an electricity underneath the skin of every single person in proximity to him. He inspires the best work out of everyone around him, not out of fear, but out of love. He engenders this incredible devotion to what you're doing. For a composer like Sondheim, that's what they want. They want the work and the time that they have put into these shows to be appreciated. And you cannot stand in front of Paul Gemignani and not appreciate every single millisecond of the experience.

And you're fully in the moment with it. He both demands it of you and inspires it of you. And to top it all off, at the end of the day, you leave feeling like a fulfilled human being who has lived to their greatest artistic potential. Not in a way of like, "Oh, I've just run a marathon and I'm so tired," but "Oh, I just ran a marathon and I'm ready to run the next one. Oh, I just did that. I didn't know if I could, and now I'm so excited to do it again because I've learned about the capabilities of what this thing I love and hold so dear can be." He really is the best.

[23:17] Margaret Hall: And another great Sondheim quote, one of the last things Steve ever said to me when we were talking about Paul, like a week before Steve passed away, is I asked him to describe sort of his relationship with Paul in terms of having been friends for 50 years and basically being the two people left standing of their friend group. And Steve was very quiet for a while, as he characteristically is when he's thinking about things, and he just very quietly said, "It's like trying to explain why you fall in love with someone. It just is." Where there isn't necessarily a reason that like you can put on a resume of why Paul is the first choice, you just know that he is. And it's not a question or a decision, it's just a fact.

[24:00] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Broadway Nation will be back right after this quick break.

[24:33] David Armstrong: Hi, this is David Armstrong, and if you're enjoying this episode, I strongly suspect that you will want to read my new book, Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. On sale now wherever books are sold. And I'm very happy to report that the early reviews have been terrific. The esteemed author Jeffrey Bloch says that Broadway Nation is a fascinating, comprehensive, and timely gem of a book that more than lives up to its promise of delivering no less than five books in one. Kudos to David Armstrong. And Tony Award-winning lyricist David Zippel says that David Armstrong's insightful history of the evolution of the Broadway Musical and its creators is captivating and comprehensive.

[25:19] Margaret Hall: Paul is the first choice of Sondheim, and also the first choice of Hal Prince, and now that Hal Prince and Sondheim have gone separate ways, amicably to a great extent, after Merrily We Roll Along, Paul finds himself sort of pulled back and forth between the two of them. Usually it works out, but sometimes it's tension-making. Yeah, he unfortunately becomes sort of the kid on the seesaw for a little bit, where he makes it work for a while, because Paul was very much a workaholic in the 1980s. He'd be the first to tell you he was working a lot. He was able to make it work by going straight from Prince shows to Sondheim shows, and it kind of helped that the Prince office was in a bit of a downturn following Merrily We Roll Along.

Steve took some time away, collected his thoughts, came back with a Pulitzer Prize winner in Sunday in the Park with George. Hal Prince just kind of kept steamrolling ahead. The office has a series of flops that nearly financially bankrupt the office. But kind of works for Paul, because they don't run very long, so he's available in Sondheim. I'm not saying it's a good thing that that happened. Right. And there are some shows from that flop era that I wish had gotten a better shake from people. But it works out that, oh, if Paul's only doing like two months on this show, then Hal Prince will sign off for him to go and do the workshop of this, or, oh, I'm gonna go and see Steve up in Connecticut to do that, and that sort of thing.

But things come to a head on Into the Woods, because Into the Woods happens much quicker than anyone is planning. Sondheim shows typically took around five years to gestate. That was usually how long it took from Steve having the idea to it reaching New York. Into the Woods is less than three years from conception to production, and it's only barely three years. And it happens right at the same time that Hal Prince is doing Rosa. Now the other wrinkle in this is a show called Smile by Marvin Hamlisch. So Paul was never under exclusive contract to the Prince office. It was just sort of understood by everyone in the industry, where it wasn't even like in Paul's contracts. But people knew that, like, oh, if I'm doing a show with Paul and Hal Prince says he needs him, Paul's leaving.

And like, no one's gonna question that, and that's fine. They are a part of each other's artistic family. He takes precedence. No baby. Marvin Hamlisch knew and understood that. And Hal knew that. So when Paul was working on Smile, which was not doing too well as it was either, when Hal called him to be like, okay, well, Rosa's coming. Time to start doing that. Because Rosa had been sort of stop and start for like two years. And it kept almost happening and then not happening. But it finally looked like it was happening. So he called Paul again to get ready to do it. But Paul had thought that Rosa was going to be another hurry up and wait. So when Steve had called him saying, hey, we just suddenly got financing for Into the Woods.

We are going out to California and we are doing it this summer. He had set up with Marvin Hamlisch that he's like, I will get the show open, I will conduct opening night, and then I'm getting on a red eye flight to California to start Into the Woods. The day before opening of Smile, he gets a phone call from Hal Prince being like, hey, we're starting Rosa. And the thing is, if Into the Woods had been in like Connecticut or Boston or something for the tryout, I think Paul would have made it work by the skin of his teeth. But there's no way to be on both coasts at the same time. He can take middle of the night train rides from Boston to New York. That is not going to work from California to New York.

Even if he had a Concorde jet, that wasn't going to happen. And so he was put in this place where he had to pick which show, which ended up kind of representing who was he picking in the quote unquote artistic divorce. Granted, Steve and Hal were amicably divorced, but Paul was still put in this very weird position. He's a grown man. He's over 50 at this point, but he's still sort of like the child of divorced parents where it's like, who am I living with, mom or dad? And it's a hard decision because again, his loyalty is one of his like main drivers and he is both so loyal to Hal and the chances he'd taken on him, but also to their friendship. We don't get into this a ton in the book. I reference it, but he and Hal were good friends.

He went on family vacations with the princes and he knew Hal in that sort of like bone deep way you can know an old friend. And he knew that if he went with Steve, in some ways Hal would never forgive him because it would feel like a betrayal. And Hal was at a place in his life where it felt like everyone was turning his back on him during sort of the failures of the shows that just did not run or everywhere he was looking, he was getting no's. And Paul, again, that sort of warm sunshine burst of a person, Hal's looking to have like, I need you to be my yes. I need you to be my fix. But Paul also knew if he said yes to Hal and he didn't go out to California to do Into the Woods, Steve would see it as an abandonment.

And he'd been working on Into the Woods during all the workshops. This was not just a new job that was coming along. This was something he was invested in. Yeah, and this was a show that he cared about quite deeply. At this point, he himself has a child who's about seven or eight. His own son, Alexander, is like squarely the target audience for Into the Woods. And so that resonates in a way of like, I'm doing a show that I can bring my son to. And like, yes, he sat in the pit occasionally at Sunday in the Park with George, but I don't really know how much a four-year-old was getting out of that. He got a valentine from Bernadette Peters. That's what he got. But in terms of like musical education, Into the Woods was what it was going to be to really open this world to Alexander.

But whichever way he went, Paul knew he was going to deeply and in some ways mortally wound a friend. He had to make a choice. And he always trusted his heart throughout his entire career. That was what guided him where he's like, yeah, something might be the better logical decision, financially the right decision. But if my heart's not in it, I don't want to do it. And so he sat with the two shows and was like, if neither men were involved and I was just looking at the shows, the show that I want to do is Into the Woods. I'm doing Rosa because Hal is doing Rosa. But if Hal wasn't doing Rosa, I probably wouldn't do Rosa. And so he calls Hal and he suggests a man named Louis St. Louis to be the music director who had very recently played on a workshop that Paul had done.

And so Paul was like, this is a very talented person. I'm giving you the person to do the show. I'm not disappearing on you. I'm not leaving you in a clench. Here's your fix. I'm giving it to you, Hal. But as Paul had sort of known before he even opened his mouth, Hal was going to see it as an abandonment. And he shut the door. They were cordial to each other when they'd see each other at events throughout the years. But they went from being like brothers to like acquaintances overnight. And Paul sent letters. Paul tried for years. He tried to patch it up, but it just wasn't happening. And one of my sort of biggest what ifs with this project is if Hal had still been alive when we read this book, I feel in my gut I could have gotten the two of them connected again.

Because when I look at things from both sides, I think Hal truly didn't understand what was going on in Paul's head. And I think if he'd had a chance to have that dialogue, because everyone I've spoken to, there's some people who think like, oh, would he like not have talked to me on the project? No, he would have been the first person to answer the phone. And he probably would have had me over at his house. And we would have talked for like 10 straight hours. And he would have told me anything I would have ever wanted to know. Because Hal was that kind of person. I truly deeply believe both men cared about each other so much. Paul, for certain, cared so deeply about Hal. But the only person who could have taken him from Hal's side was Steve.

Because Steve was not just Paul's best friend. He was Paul's artistic soul tethered outside of his body. They shared a spirit in many ways. If he had been forced to cut off Steve, it would have been like cutting off his own conducting arm. And frankly, if that decision had come, he probably would have left the business entirely. He likes to joke that if it had been a choice between Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, he would have quit and become a bus driver. One of the hits that Hal Prince has, though, is a show that Paul works on, which is On the 20th Century with Comden and Green and Cy Coleman. I love that story you tell in the book that he has a brush with someone quite legendary after one of those performances.

They're about a month or so into the run of On the 20th Century, and On the 20th Century, for any listeners who might not be familiar, is a very operatic score. It's very grand in scope, and it's a hard play for the musicians. Cy Coleman had perfect pitch, and he composed like it, which means that good luck with the key changes and the modulations and everything. It's not an easy score. Like, you cannot be thinking about what you're going to have for dinner. You have to be fully there. Paul does the show as normal, and every once in a while, people would come down to the pit to just sort of say hi. Normally, it was musicians who were there to see the show who maybe knew someone in the pit or that sort of thing.

This older gentleman comes sort of shifting down. He's got a very weathered cane. He's stooped. Half of his face is sort of slack. He's clearly older and not in great health. He comes down the long aisleway to get down to the wall of the pit, and he speaks to Paul, and he sort of nods to the musicians and tells Paul, basically, I admire you greatly. With that sort of fervency that Paul is just like, okay, that was more than just a, you did a good job tonight. That was like, you're like communicating something to me, but he cannot place who this person is. He doesn't know like, oh, is this like the dad of a musician I've worked with who like I met at a party and I've forgotten the father's face or something like that?

He's trying to place who this is as he goes walking back up the aisle, and the oldest musician in the pit there, who's about 15 years older than Paul, is just sort of staring at him slack-jawed. Paul's just like, yes, you clearly know something I don't know. And that musician tells him that that was Richard Rogers, who had not been seen in public, by the way, for about two years before that happens, because he had had very debilitating health problems. And while Rogers still was going to shows and things like this, he was being secreted in and out. So the fact that he made a point of staying in the light of all the lights on the auditorium to come down and find Paul and be in front of the musicians, someone was going to recognize him.

And he knew that. That he made a point of coming down being like, I admire you greatly. You are a marvelous conductor. And Paul was bowled over because he loved that South Pacific recording. And the second that that musician said Richard Rogers' name, Paul whipped around, but he was gone. If he had still been there, I fully think Paul would have just sort of hoisted himself out of the pit and run up after him. I fully think that would have happened, but he was gone. And he was dead very shortly after. And where did Paul know his face from? What was the face he was trying to remember? From the back of the South Pacific LP, there's this great photo of Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rogers. And Rogers' eyes are just gleaming.

He's got these jet black brown eyes, which are fully black in the pressing, of course. And his eyes are just so expressive. Those have been sort of the eyes that were calling to Paul when he came down because he's like, okay, this is this older man. His face doesn't quite look right after the stroke. He's had jaw cancer. All of that. But those eyes are the same. And the life in those eyes is the same. And that was really just sort of like a memory you hold with you for the rest of your life. Here's a person Paul never thought he'd have a chance to meet, who wrote what is, I think Paul would be comfortable with me saying this, his favorite score. It's either South Pacific or Kiss Me Kate. They fight, but I'm pretty sure South Pacific wins.

Having that experience where it wasn't just like the, oh, I'd have to like shake Richard Rogers' hand. It was like he made a point when he did not have to. I did not know he was here. No one knew he was here. It wasn't like he sort of expected to come backstage and do the whole thing. He makes a point of coming down and giving like a fervent compliment with energy that it probably cost him a lot to summon because he really is near the end. He's not well. That's like one of those memories that if Paul had like a treasure chest where he could pluck something out and keep it in pristine quality, that would be in there.

[37:26] Margaret Hall: Margaret and I will be back next week with the conclusion of our discussion of the amazing career of Paul Gemignani, including his favorite show, Sweeney Todd. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pals Mox for his help with editing this episode to KVSH 101.9, the voice of beautiful Vashon Island, Washington, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.