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[0:01] David Rigano: Welcome back to the Drama Book Show! Podcast. I'm your host, David Rigano. This week, we're bringing you a live conversation recorded at the Drama Book Shop, featuring acclaimed playwright and performer Tom Dugan. For more than 40 years, Tom has built an international reputation for his deeply-researched historical plays, including Frederick Douglass, In the Shadow of Slavery, Robert E. Lee, Shades of Grey, Tevye in New York, and Wiesenthal. In this special event, celebrating the publication of Wiesenthal, Tom sits down with actor and director Mel Johnson to discuss the origins of the play, the extraordinary life of Simon Wiesenthal, the challenges of creating and performing one-person shows, and the responsibility of bringing history to the stage. Along the way, Tom shares stories from his career and performs excerpts from the play itself. Here's Tom Dugan and Mel Johnson, Jr., live at the Drama Book Shop. Please put your hands together and give a warm welcome to Mel Johnson, Jr.

[1:28] Mel Johnson Jr.: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let me trip over here and sit down. So, I want to thank you all for coming this evening, and braving the rain for this wonderful celebration here, to celebrate the publishing of Tom's play, Wiesenthal. Now, Tom and I are really old and dear friends. We met doing a play in Los Angeles called The Unified Field, and from that moment on, we became fast friends. And his first play that he wrote was about himself, called Oscar to Oscar, a great play he asked me to direct it. And it was wonderful, but no one particularly knew who Tom was at that time, so he decided to do some research and came up with his second play about Robert E. Lee, and he asked me to write that also. And that was a really wonderful piece that we've done all over the country. Then after that, Tom said to me, I'm thinking about writing a play about Frederick Douglass. I said, oh Tom, are you planning on doing that in Blackface? And Tom goes, no, I'm writing it for you. I said, me? One person show? I don't mind directing them, but anyway, he wrote it, we did it, he directed it, and it was wonderful, and I'm still doing it now around the country when I can, and one of these days, hopefully, I'll do it here. So instead of rambling about the introduction I'm about to do for Tom, I said, Tom, you're a great writer, write your own introduction, and I'll read it. So I'm going to do that right now. Tom is a celebrated playwright and actor whose work has earned acclaim across the globe, with a career spanning over 40 years. He's been honored with numerous awards and nominations, including the New York Promodence, the New York Outer Critics Circle, and the Los Angeles Ovation Award, among others. His meticulously researched historical one-man plays have captivated audiences in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Israel, India, Australia, Italy, Scotland, and the Caribbean. Wiesenthal, hailed as a heartbreaking and beautiful piece by the New York Times, explores the life of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Produced off-Broadway by Daryl Roth and featured on PBS's Theatre Close-Up, this play has made a significant impact, and we're excited to see it make its London debut at the King's Head Theatre with Christopher Gibbs in the lead role. Now in addition to Wiesenthal, Tom's impressive body of work includes other one-man acclaimed plays such as Tell Him It's Jackie, Tevye in New York, Robert E. Lee, Shades of Grey, The Ghosts of Mary Lincoln, and one of my favorites, Frederick Douglass in the Shadow of Slavery. His latest project, the New Jersey Trilogy, features the dark comedies of Cemetery Club, Irish Goodbye, and Hank and Otto. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming on this warm and windy evening, Tom Dugan.

[5:07] Tom Dugan: Holy crap. Sorry, I said holy crap was my first thing. My oldest friend happens to be here, White House. Great to see you, and Ron Dulse and Lynn Dulse. Wonderful to see. I haven't seen some of these people in a very long time. All right, thanks for coming, and let's just start with some questions and let's see what happens there. Tom, the first thing that comes to mind with you is what inspired a young Irish Catholic boy to write a play about one of the great heroes of the Jewish faith of the 20th century. Okay, it all started. I was watching a movie with my parents in Windhill Park, New Jersey, and I was lying behind my parents on the couch, and we were watching a movie called Battleground, starring Van Johnson, James Whitmore, and Ricardo Montalbán. It was about the Battle of the Bulge, and I was enjoying it. My father liked to watch World War II movies, so I was watching, and my mother turned to me and said, your dad did this, and I said, Dad, you were in a movie? No, but I was in the Battle of the Bulge, and that was my beginning of learning what my father's place was in history. My father was a decorated World War II veteran, and he received the Bronze Battlestar and the Purple Heart. He was in the 83rd Infantry, and they liberated a camp called Langenstein, and so I grew up with a lot of information about World War II, and he also, as I said, he had the Purple Heart, and so he had shrapnel he carried in his hip all of his life, and every once in a while, I said, Dad, can I feel the shrapnel? All right, I feel the shrapnel, and I remember I was feeling it was sharp and very hard, and I said, boy, Dad, you must hate Germans, and his answer surprised me. He said, oh, no, I don't. He says, half of my family's German. I don't judge people by what group they belong to. I judge them by how they behave. Now, as an eight-year-old, that didn't make a lot of sense to me, so I just put it away as one of those things I'd learn about later on in life. Years later, I'm a one-man show kind of guy, and I'm always doing research, and Simon Wiesenthal passed away, and I was reading his obituary, and in it, they talked about his rejection of collective guilt. The rejection of collective guilt was very important to him, and that's the concept of if your sister robs a bank, you're not culpable for the act. If you, oh, hi. If your mother murders somebody, you don't go to jail. It was very important that the entire German race was not blamed for the Holocaust, and it answered the question for me that I'd had for a long time, and I also had a lot of questions about World War II and how something like the Holocaust could have possibly happened. Even though I had a lot of education about it, I still had a lot of questions, and I never asked the questions because I thought I should know this already, so I never asked, and I stayed in ignorance, and then I thought to myself, I bet there's a lot of other people out there who have those same questions who were embarrassed to ask, so let's write a play that answers all of those questions for people who are curious and empathetic towards the story, and that is exactly what I did, and it's been one of the greatest journeys of my life. I've traveled all across the United States, North America, the Caribbean. I have performed the role more than a thousand times, and I thought if I cracked open the book and started reading you passages, I would see I'm a little disingenuous because I think by now I've got it memorized, so if you don't mind, I'm going to do a performance.

[9:15] Mel Johnson Jr.: I have a lovely idea, Tom.

[9:17] Tom Dugan: Terrific.

[9:17] Mel Johnson Jr.: Since you know it, and it's just going to do a little something for us. If I move this back, is it going to screw things up?

[9:24] Tom Dugan: No.

[9:24] Mel Johnson Jr.: Let me just move it over towards you. All right. This is probably a five-minute piece. Just give me a second here.

[9:49] Tom Dugan: Everything you hear today will be oversimplified. Today you will hear Simon Wiesenthal's greatest hits. I am born in a poor church in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and married. I have a daughter, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They mean everything to me, but they have no interest to you. Of interest alone is my life in rejection to Nazism. I have survived the Holocaust, and I have tried to preserve the memory of those who did not. Now, here is how all of this will go. I will tell you some things that have happened in my lifetime, but there will be trouble. You will not be able to comprehend these things. These things will be beyond your power of imagination, so I will try harder and wave my arms around. That is what people do when their heads are not enough. The stories of my clients, the simple ones, they'll be the story of the bookkeeper, the story of the chicken farmer, the auto mechanic, the policeman. It is not my goal today to produce tears. If this is what you want, you should go home and watch soap operas. What I wish to produce is knowledge of the horror and awareness of the danger. And so, where do we begin? Shame. We will begin with shame. Shame is the most dangerous force in all human life. It is poison. Whenever people feel empty, unworthy, they will fill themselves with anything. Today, this is what makes a young man strap a bomb to their cell. After they are... I forgot my lines. After they defeated World War I. Yeah, what? After they defeated World War I, the German people were poor. Thank you. Thank you. After they defeated World War I, the German people were poor, empty, ashamed. Put yourself in their place. Your child cries from hunger. You have nothing to give them. So what do you do? Anything you can. I once saw a homeless man bearing a sign. I will do any job. And I thought, aha! This is where it starts. Perhaps you know whom I speak. Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party or the Nazis. You entered the German people's shame and dropped it right in the lap of the most popular scapegoat in history, the Jews. Whenever the majority is whipped up against the minority, it is the Jews who are eventually crucified. Good news, ladies and gentlemen. Forget your shame. You are blameless. The enemy are those treacherous Jews. If we get rid of the Jews, if we get rid of our shame, if we get rid of our shame, if we get rid of our shame, if we get rid of our shame, if we get rid of our shame, if we get rid of our shame, how could any intelligent person buy that load of manure? Remember your hungry child? Hitler puts bread in her mouth. Hitler gives you a job building a superhighway. Now instead of shame, you feel pride. What is always left out of the history lessons is how charismatic Hitler was. He was an amazing public speaker. He was an amazing public speaker. He was an amazing public speaker. He was an amazing public speaker. He was an amazing public speaker. He was fascinating. He was mesmerizing. You could feel heat when looking into his eyes. The German people, chairmen of straight, filled with pride, holding up their children, no longer crying from hunger, now they're crying from happiness. But this is heresy. What if silent beasts don't speak this way about Hitler? If we do not honestly try to understand how it happened then, it will happen now. It will happen now.

[14:18] Mel Johnson Jr.: Thank you, Tom.

[14:20] Tom Dugan: Thank you.

[14:22] Mel Johnson Jr.: Thank you. Let me ask you another question.

[14:26] Tom Dugan: Alright.

[14:28] Mel Johnson Jr.: Oh, that's right. Get that over there. So, again, it relates to the first one. How did you prepare for this role? How did you pull it together?

[14:34] Tom Dugan: I wrote this in 2008, 2007, 2008, premiered it in 2009, so with all of the research I did, I had a real head start. But Simon Wiesenthal is a lot different than me. Irish Catholic kid, I was in my mid-40s, so I had to, the first thing I did was I hired a friend of mine, he, I do a lot of dialects, he teaches me all of my dialects, his name is Joel Goldies, and he is responsible for all of the 47 different dialects in Come From Away, that premiered here, of course, on Broadway, and then he's been the dialect coach for many, many tours of that play. And so, we had to decide which dialect to choose. In the 1950s, Simon was almost unintelligible when he spoke English, but he knew that in order to get his message out there, he would have to get better and more intelligible in English, because the American media was going to be his best friends, and it was this, to get the message out. So by the 1990s, he spoke clear enough English that it was going to be intelligible for my production. So that was one thing. Simon Wiesenthal was, he was bald on top, they call it the cul-de-sac hair, and I have hair, so I shaved my head, and I did the cul-de-sac thing, and then I had, I worked out a makeup, my makeup, it took about an hour to put on to make myself look like I'm 90 years old. Now, oddly enough, when I first started doing this, it was, I was in my mid-40s, and so it took me about an hour to get it all on. Now I'm 62 years old, and it takes me about 15 minutes, because I don't have to use so much makeup. And then finally there was a, he was a heavy man, and so I had a fat suit made up that added about 40 pounds to my frame, and in the early days, I had a showcase, I think you've actually played in the theater that I was in, in that general area with Frederick Douglass, but I was doing a showcase in the early days, and it was in the morning, and these theaters would come, and it was in a restaurant in Minneapolis or something, and I had done my 20-minute version, Minneapolis, yay, Minneapolis! My dressing room was the kitchen, so I went into the kitchen to take off my stuff, and it was 9 in the morning, and I'm down to the fat suit, and I'm unzipping the fat suit, and this woman comes in, she's obviously the cook for the restaurant, and she just catches me, just like that, she just looks at me, she says, wish I could do that. And the last piece was, I talked to people who were much, much older than me, and I said I want to do, and this one guy just said, oh, I got your answer. Everyone wants to look cool, all of their life, they want to look cool. Now, when you're 16 years old, that might be a leather jacket and a cigarette hanging out of your mouth. He said, but by the time you're 90, cool is just not falling down in public, and balance is very important. So I have, usually, the set is set up where the set pieces are far away from me than that, and so it's all about balance, and so I'm very careful of how I walk, and then when I steady myself, I add a little jiggle of whatever trend an older man might have, and that's my preparation for Simon.

[18:24] Mel Johnson Jr.: Oh, we have some time, do you have another little piece that you might do for us?

[18:30] Tom Dugan: Yeah, and if I don't remember it, he'll finish it for me. That was prompt. Where's my book there?

[18:58] Tom Dugan: At 8:05 p.m. on the night of May 9, 1960, a balmy middle-aged man got off the bus in Buenos Aires. After a long day's work in the local Mercedes Benz factory, Ricardo Clement was tired, and he looked forward to dealing with his wife and his six-year-old son. But crossing the street, the young man politely asked for a cigarette. When Ricardo reached into his pocket, two other men jumped out. His wife never heard the screams as they sped away. It was such a terrible thing. Why? Why kidnap this average man? He wasn't rich. He paid his bills. He was a good man. He worked with family. But Ricardo Clement was an unremarkable man, apart from the fact that his real name was Adolf Eichmann. In 1942, the Nazi bigwigs agreed that the final solution to the Jewish question was mass murder, and Adolf Eichmann was put in charge. It was Eichmann who, from behind his desk, meticulously worked out the practicalities of how to kill 11 million people. I obsessed over the capture of Adolf Eichmann day and night for 16 years. In Austria, I became known as that nutcase Eichmann of Wiesenthal. My daughter grew up with a father whose obsession with Eichmann seemed more important to him than she was. And now, all of these years later, as I sit in an Israeli courtroom, I'm finally going to see the monster. The creature's own obsession resulted in the dead dog hounding the entire population of Austria. Through the doorways and out from the very pit of hell steps. A bookkeeper. A timid little fellow, but a twitch. A man whose vulnerability was so apparent as it was my need to protect him. A bookkeeper. Where is my monster? Where is the devil and the black books and the snarling dogs? I don't want a bookkeeper. I want my monster. After the incomprehensible bill of indictment was written, the murder of 11 million men, women and children, Eichmann secretly answers, I am not guilty. To say that this was unsatisfying would be the greatest understatement in human history. It was all wrong. This calmness. This normalcy. When the break outside the Israeli courtroom, the sun shines. Children laugh. Train leaves on time. A woman buys shoes. Why buy? Why buy shoes? When there are billions and millions to choose from. One hundred truckloads of shoes. 400,000 phone watches. 319 pounds of wedding rings. This is a list of items collected from Srebrenica, Sobibor and Belsic in just one year. How can you? How can anyone? How can the sun shine? Don't you care? Don't you know who is in that building? How dare you think of other things? Life cannot just simply go on. But life does go on. Most of the people in this city have lost loved ones because of this little bookkeeper. But life does go on. I did not capture Adolf Eichmann. An Israeli did. The agents did. But in order to avoid an international incident with Argentina, the world was not allowed to know that. The third fact was a jigsaw puzzle solved with the cooperation of many different people who didn't even know each other. I am proud to have learned a few pieces. Eichmann's trial in front of an Israeli court in 1961 lasted 14 weeks. He was indicted on 15 criminal charges including crimes against humanity itself. Eichmann explained that he was only obeying the German laws of Adolf Hitler. I believed him when he said he was not anti-Semitic. Eichmann explained that he would have just as easily cast all black candles if he was ordered to. And what's more, if Hitler had instead commanded that Eichmann establish an independent Jewish state in Palestine, he would have done that. The mountain of dead human beings behind him was not due to any hatred or criminal character. Much like 9-11 terrorists, Eichmann was not a sadist or a sociopath. He does not take a criminal mind to commit mass murder. Simply blind obedience to authority. Eichmann was convicted on all counts. His hanging on June 1st, 1962 remains the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel. And so what was the value of the trial of Adolf Eichmann? Revenge? No. Revenge cannot be the goal. It was for me at the beginning, but I soon learned that it was justice not a vengeance that I wanted because look, you cannot hate all day long, just like you cannot eat all day or you get full. The value of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the uncomfortable lesson for humanity was this. If an average man is capable of such terrible things, then so am I. Humanity was forced to look in the mirror.

[25:48] Mel Johnson Jr.: So I've asked a couple of questions. Does anyone else?

[25:52] Audience Member: Yes. My question is for both of you. So when you write something for yourself that's full of that, all those emotions, all of that stuff and you're directing, if you give a director's note, and this is kind of an acting question, is there a time when you're just like, no, I wrote it like this, I have it locked into my head like this, or how do you surrender that to the director? How does that all work?

[26:24] Mel Johnson Jr.: Mal has directed me in four shows. He did not direct this one. But that's okay, it's still a valid question. When we would disagree? That's why he doesn't direct any of my shows anymore. It's very interesting. As an actor, having the playwright on the premises is one thing. Having the playwright be the star of the piece is a whole other thing. One of the questions I was going to ask you is what made you get into this? Because he has progressed as a writer. So early on when I was directing Tom, he was very, he could be very difficult because of what you were talking about, the blinders that he had on. I wasn't going to fight, but I wasn't going to give up because I'm sitting in the audience and I know what works, that's why I'm being the director. When we, and he has some very good ideas but they keep coming. It's about editing, it's about that. So, it is a give and take. There has to be a real healthy respect for one another, a trust that each other knows what they are doing. It was very interesting when I directed Robert E. Lee, we premiered the piece in Richmond, Virginia. The capital of the Confederacy. So we go down and they find out that we're doing Robert E. Lee. Press, reenactors showed up. It's a 1200 seat theater at the Carpenter Center. It's the biggest theater in the city. It's a big city. And so we went to a television interview and they were not giving us questions in advance. And so the interviewer goes to me. So now, what is your goal in directing this piece? Now, of course she left out what is your goal as a black man directing this piece? So she said, what is your goal in directing this piece? And I looked at her and I said, to keep the audience awake. Oh, that! And she laughed and she got it. Because no one questions Steven Spielberg when he directs The Color Purple. Or anybody else that you serve somebody else's culture. It's not a question, it's not even a thought. But for me, to direct Robert E. Lee was monumental. We were backstage and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans came to see the show and they had provided these original Confederate flags. It was a magnificent lobby. Bigger than this whole building. And they had asked if they could decorate. And they did. They had all these original pieces. It was great. But beforehand, they asked permission for it. And it was the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. It was the Long Street Division. And I said, Mel, why don't you go out to the lobby and talk to these people and see what other organizations they belong to. Now when Mel showed up as the director of Robert E. Lee's Shades of Gray, I would have loved to have seen the look on their face. It was quite something. And so when we went into the process of directing, he directing me in a play that he wrote. Frederick Douglass. I was very weary of doing a one man piece. My question to you was what brought you to that? Because it's a lot. It's a lot. It's not only a lot to learn. It's a lot to hold an audience. The piece has to be dramatic. I've seen so many that were just not good that I just didn't want to be a part of it. You're trying to sell scripts, Mel, by the way. No, that's the reason why you're sitting up here. And it's the reason why I did the play. Because I told Tom, I said, you can write it, but I'm going to read it. And if I don't like it, I'm not doing it. He goes, I don't have to. I don't have to. He wrote it and I thought it was magnificent. And still, he was young in his writing, so he overwrote it. And we would have a hard time getting him to change a vuh or an uh or anything. I would say that's the most I've grown. I am much more easy going. I'm less frightened now. When people dig in, it's usually when they're frightened. I was certainly frightened. So it was, now, when I originally did it, it was just the amount of memorization drove me crazy. I was terrified. But now, I'm really, in a regular production, you do eight performances a week. It gets in your bones very quickly. With something like this, we do two, three, four, maybe one year. And then we go up. I do another show. I do another. I come back and do another two or three. It's just now that it's sinking into my bones and I'm not sweating out my costume and the wig is back here after each performance. And so, finally, one of the presenters said, we would like you to do it without an intermission and give it a few minutes. And so I had to start making a few edits. Because I am very respectful of the playwright. When you're doing a new Broadway show, you don't cut this playwright's show. You don't cut Terrence McNally's show. You don't cut John Kander and Freda. They tell you that. And so, I was just as respectful of Tom. As long as that first time we did it was, I still did it. He would say, Tom thought I would go away and as soon as he was out of sight, I cut his play. No. But, so, we have cut it a little, but there were just it was the overwritten parts that he agrees to. So, any other questions?

[32:34] Mel Johnson Jr.: Alright. Can we get to the signing?

[32:40] Audience Member: First, my 87 year old mom, if she wasn't getting her hair done today, sends her love. Is it still red?

[32:46] Mel Johnson Jr.: Yeah, it's sort of.

[32:48] Audience Member: That color is no longer on the spectrum.

[32:52] Mel Johnson Jr.: She tries to keep it red.

[32:54] Audience Member: Please tell her I said hello. Having the benefit of knowing you 58 years, watching you on stage from the first time in Tevye. First time you and I were on the stage in the Christmas play. But, if sitting here now, years later, someone said, what would Tom, Tommy to me, keep doing? I would say, it wouldn't be drama. You had a physical presence on the stage. You sang. You danced. And, the play writing, the different titles and all, they're very dramatic. What brought you to that?

[33:30] Tom Dugan: I was more of a humorous kind of guy, a musical dancing kind of guy. It's a funny thing how it evolved. I would try to write a comedy and it wasn't very good. But, if I wrote a drama, it was often times kind of funny. So, I realized it was a story that was really important. I was able to tell stories and then add an enormous amount of humor to the stories. You didn't get that from these pieces that I did from Wiesenthal. But, the secret to I think the success of the show comes from Simon himself who had an enormous sense of humor because he knew his subject matter was a dark one and he knew how to keep an audience because he kept including humor and charm and all that. And, I capitalized on that. But, I saw you in the audience. I thought it was so funny because here I am a writer and saying all this stuff and when I was in grammar school and to this day, I still can't spell a word but damn. And, people ask me, what's your secret to your writing? And, I said, spell check. And, one of the things that I wanted to know, we're all actives and I met Tom in a musical that we were doing and now with doing Frederick Douglass I am finding the humor, the piece, the connection with the audience. So, it's wonderful. But, what led you to the genre of writing one person shows? What was that about?

[35:04] Tom Dugan: That was a very practical thing because the funding for the arts is always being cut. You never hear oh, we're in a boom time now. All the money is pouring into the arts. It's never like that. So, theaters are always cutting back and the budgets need to be smaller. And so, I thought it might be a pretty smart idea to be able to and I produce all my shows and they all the, most of the all the cops fit in a little rolly bag and I tell them, you gotta have this, you gotta have that kind of this. And then, it's just stuff you can find in a theater. So, it's very cheap to produce and if you find a subject matter that can key into a certain demographic of the audience, then they sell a ton of stuff, tickets and they make an enormous amount of profit. I do pretty well too, but they do really well. So, it was an effort to try to be as appealing financially to theaters while delivering the highest standards of theater possible. So, it was very practical. And the solo show was the most profitable. It even has more than the two person because you branched out to two people. And you started. The first thing I ever directed Tom in was a two-hander.

[36:10] Mel Johnson Jr.: What was it called?

[36:16] Tom Dugan: Chase of the Trade.

[36:18] Mel Johnson Jr.: Chase of the Trade. Wonderful. Thriller.

[36:20] Tom Dugan: I didn't write that one.

[36:22] Mel Johnson Jr.: No, you didn't write it, but it was William Shatner did it on Broadway. Less than two seconds, but our version was much better.

[36:32] Mel Johnson Jr.: Anything else? Any other questions?

[36:34] Tom Dugan: Let's skip to the book signing then.

[36:36] Mel Johnson Jr.: So that we can do that. And keeping in mind that I still can't spell, even if your name is Tom, you gotta spell it for me.

[36:42] Audience Member: Tom, one more question. I don't know the play, but I know with older people sometimes if they're learning English like he was, to speak well, do you slide into a little bit of reminiscence of the inner monologue of German during the play where he's confused and he can't understand who I am?

[37:04] Tom Dugan: Say it in German?

[37:06] Audience Member: Just words, because I'm not Baruch crazy. I throw in certain phrases that I don't know. Stuff like that. Just to spice it up a bit, but I don't get too deep into it, so I don't get into trouble.

[37:22] Mel Johnson Jr.: Alright. So Tom, we sit here with great pride in our hearts for you, and I want to know if you ever did any musical theater on your way to writing after...

[37:38] Tom Dugan: Lynn was my very first singing coach.

[37:40] Mel Johnson Jr.: Oh.

[37:42] Tom Dugan: And she charged me five bucks an hour.

[37:46] Mel Johnson Jr.: Those were the days.

[37:50] Tom Dugan: Oh, she's up to six, nice.

[37:52] Mel Johnson Jr.: Nice deflation.

[37:54] Tom Dugan: I worked real hard at being a musical theater performer because still, being in a musical is the most fun I've ever had on stage. I met Mel doing a musical, and we became friends. We got along, but he's a very strong singer and done a whole lot of Broadway musicals, and so I never, ever got good at picking up my own harmony, and I didn't know where I was at, so I would gravitate towards Mel and stand next to him, and I'd just sing what he was singing, and he'd say, you know, let's not depart until I'm there. But it was years ago that I had to make a real decision. I was like, wow, I've really got to focus on one thing and get really good at that. And so the musical theater, that was not the thing I was best at, so I went to the drama, the comedy, and the writing. You just need to do one thing well.

[38:46] Mel Johnson Jr.: And he certainly does. Let's hear it one more time. You've been listening to the Drama Book Show Podcast. Our thanks to Tom Dugan and Mel Johnson Jr. for joining us, and to everyone who attended this live event at the Drama Book Shop. Please remember to like, subscribe, leave a comment, follow at Drama Book Show Podcast on Instagram, and please subscribe to the Drama Book Shop on Eventbrite so that you can be alerted when we add new in-person events to our calendar. Up next, we talk to a powerhouse panel of playwrights, authors, producers, and theater historians recorded live at the Drama Book Shop in partnership with the League of Professional Theater Women, moderated by Lynn Godfrey. Together, they dive into the work of preserving and expanding women's stories in American theater and the careers built around that mission. Until next time, thanks for listening, and we'll see you at the Book Shop.