ShowbizU: Composer- Bill Sherman & Tim Kashani

What do you get when you have a Broadway professional and a camera crew?

Long story short, you get a lot of cool info when you get Showbiz U Luminaries. This week we talked to Tony, Emmy, and Grammy Award-winning orchestrator and composer Bill Sherman of In the Heights and Sesame Street fame, who shares with us his stories and inspirations.

So we're gonna— we're just gonna start really simple and How did you get to this couch?

This couch? Got off the train. No, I grew up on Long Island. I was a musician. I played the saxophone. That was my thing when I was a kid. And I went to college at Wesleyan University, and I was going along just fine as a musician there for a while. This girl was directing Once on This Island, and her boyfriend was the music director, and her boyfriend then cheated on her, so she needed a new music director, so she hired me. I had no experience music directing anything, so I said, sure. Later on, I wound up hiring her then-boyfriend to play bass in the band for the thing, so that was kind of awkward. And I music directed Once on This Island at Wesleyan University. After Once on This Island, Lin Miranda, whose girlfriend was producing Once on This Island, he came up to me right after the first show and he said, "I don't know you and you don't know me, but we're going to work together for a really long time." We moved back to Manhattan and some other folks at Wesleyan decided that they wanted to form a production company. They wanted to produce In the Heights. So between 2002 and 2006, we put on readings of In the Heights and people came and people liked it and it went off-Broadway, it went to Broadway. That was a very crazy time. I got a job through that working at the Electric Company for PBS and then went on to work at Sesame Street, which is where I'm at now.

What was it like the first time you sat behind the table and you heard performers come in with your music, whether as a composer or any aspect? And you went, wow, somebody is singing what was once in here. Sure.

I wrote this song for Sesame Street called What I Am. It was this big tune for them, and it was What I Am, and it was sung by Will.i.am. And that was the first, like, major, um, like, pop icon person I had ever dealt with. And I was super in love with it and had, like, a bridge and this whole thing. And I sent it to him, and he totally reworked it in the sense that he took out my bridge, which I love, and, uh, and, and, and sort of took the tune and made it into something. And I had heard later that he's like a super picky, you know, crazy human being. And eventually he came to the studio and we were talking and he was like, I really like this song. And I think that was like the first time when you sort of have someone who's not a peer or colleague, but someone who writes and works in the business and who's like a big deal. He was like, this is a great song. And I was like, oh, I guess I'm doing something right. That's pretty cool, you know. I've had other experiences like that. Working at Sesame Street gets me a lot of access to pretty big names and stuff. So working with those people and sort of seeing how they'll take your tune and develop it into something else, and/or just seeing it verbatim as you wrote it, it's interesting to see who does what and who really embraces it, who doesn't.

You won a little statue for, for an accomplishment that you've done. Was that just insanely surreal when that happened?

Totally unexpected. I mean, like, think about it now, I don't— I remember going to the Tonys and having like a really bad headache that day, like the whole day. And my wife was always like, what's wrong with you? And I was like, we're going to the Tonys. And my mom was there and my mother-in-law was there. We're all going to the Tonys. And I had this terrible headache. And the funny part about the, um, Creative Awards, as you know, they happen the hour before the show starts. So you're there and no one really else is there. And so, and so it starts and the orchestration award is the first thing given out. So you see, you're like, "Hi, how are you? Haha." You sit down in your seat and all of a sudden it's like, "And the award for—" And you're like, "Oh God, what's just happening? Ah, the Tonys!" And it's at Radio City Music Hall and you're like, your mind is blowing up. And then you win and then I blacked out from then until I came back around and sat in my seat. I mean, the 3 major awards I was nominated for, I won. And now of course there's an expectation that I'm just supposed to win all awards all the time. And everybody just thinks that it's no problem that because I have 3 of them, there's an inevitability that I'm going to win an Oscar at some point. You know, it's just going to come to me and hand itself to me. What film can we get you on?

What should I be writing right now? Any film you want.

I will score your film. I mean, apparently there's like— I got to go somewhere. I got to score a film at some point, which, you know, is one of the craziest things there is, that there's like 5 guys that score films.

Can you give us some of your inspirations?

I take inspiration from like smaller things, like my kids and stuff like that. Like that, that's inspirational to me. I feel like when you get in this world, everybody's trying to do the same thing. So if they— we all sort of inspire each other. Because if every Broadway composer out there is asked to write a song about something, they're all going to write a different song. And that in itself I feel like is inspirational. Like, it's this one thing, but we're all creatively making this other thing. And the other thing about Broadway is everybody, like you said, is super— it's Broadway. It's this part of New York. And the community is so supportive of each other and yet not supportive at the same time. But it's a weird competition that has tons of camaraderie with it. And at the end of the day, we all know how long it's taken to get here and how much how hard work it is. And if there's one thing we share in common, it's that. It's like the Broadway people are the most persevering, honest, like genuine, hardworking folks that there are. I mean, why else would you do this? Theater in the last little bit has undergone an interesting thing from sort of like this Stephen Sondheim era to like the Jonathan Larson Rent era to like American Idiot being on Broadway to Memphis being on Broadway to shows that are— have current like music of today in them. There's this evolution that's happening, and to be part of an evolution in the same way being part of an art, like a visual art revolution, or music, you know, from the Beatles to today, like being part of that thing is cool, you know, and being close enough to it that you can affect it, like that's even cooler because you can be part of history. You can be part of something that when you get to the top, this is the top, and like, and then you you have the ability to do, to affect other things and to put new sounds and new ideas out into the world. Like, where else do you get to do that? I look really serious like I'm doing something important.