McCarter Literary Manager Carrie Hughes recently conducted an interview with Ellen Fitzhugh, lyricist for Herringbone. Here are some excerpts of their conversation:
CH: How did you get involved with Herringbone?
EF: I’d just moved to New York from Los Angeles and met up with Skip, whom I’d known from the L. A. BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. He said he’d been offered a one-man play for musicalizing and asked if I’d be interested in reading it to see if I wanted to write the lyrics.
CH: What were your first impressions of the piece?
EF: As I was reading Tom’s play, I recognized almost immediately that it was like nothing else in theater. I’d stop reading intermittently and pace around, mumbling to myself, “Nobody else gets to do this… nobody… nobody but me gets to do this….”
CH: As a lyricist, how do you collaborate with the book writer (and composer) on creating characters?
EF: The Herringbone characters were already created, but to weave them through an adventure which would now be told in song as well as book has required innumerable hours… weeks… years?… of intense discussion, role-playing, insistence, compromise, faltering, discovery, moodiness, congratulations and just about every conceivable kind of creative interaction.
Herringbone wasn’t unique in being developed through this sort of collaborative heaven/hell, but it was unique in that each creative participant seemed “possessed” by the desire to come up with something even more theatrically outrageous than any of the rest of the crew could imagine.
Initially, these sessions often involved not only Tom, Skip and me, but our original director and choreographer, Ben Levit and Ted Pappas, respectively. Soon, our actor, David Rounds, was a contributing force, as well. That’s a lot of “Yeah, well wait’ll ya hear THIS idea!” going on, and from quite diverse perspectives.
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