ShowbizU: No One Called Ahead Author Paul Gordon & 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. You are really one of those Renaissance people that likes to be involved in all aspects of it. How do you find the inspiration that you find all over these years to create?

You know, I love creativity. I love writing. I've always loved writing. And sometimes other people's work inspires me. You know, when I was younger, you know, the Beatles inspired me. When I got a little older, Stephen— yes, thank you. Stephen Sondheim inspired me. When I was 19, I heard A Little Night Music for the first time. Literally changed my life. And when I hear the work of great artists, it inspires me to to do my work. So I think that's where it comes from.

And at 19, you started off as a musician, you listened to Sondheim, you also wrote pop music for a while.

Yes, yes I did.

How did you get into that world?

Well, you know, I grew up— I feel very fortunate. I grew up in an era of pop music where I thought pop music was brilliant. It was the Beach Boys, it was the Beatles, it was Bob Dylan, it was Motown, it was Carole King, it was Burt Bacharach. All those amazing music writers, you know, they were so melodic that that's really where I got that from. So I was writing pop music, but honestly, when I was 10, I wanted to be a drummer, and my parents wouldn't let me, but they said a great lie. They said, if you learn piano for a year, we'll buy you a drum set, which they later admitted was a lie. I was fired by my piano teacher for being unmusical. And then my dad did something amazing. He bought a guitar. He took a few lessons himself, taught me chords, but didn't teach me any songs. I'm 10 years old. All I want to do is be Paul McCartney, but I didn't know how to play any of those songs, so I started to make up my own. And that's literally how I started writing. And I think because I started so young and I was so committed to writing, that I just developed my craft that way on my own, and I've just been doing it so long that I think I just got better as I learned how to do it and took chances.

What do you find is your muse? What sparks these ideas to tell these stories that you tell?

I'm interested in telling stories that uplift people, that don't depress them. The world is depressing. Life can be depressing and overwhelming. I want to create stories to the world that informs and lifts. And that's what I'm attracted to.

Well, you now want to amplify that by putting it out all over the world.

Yes.

And creating all kinds of versions, everything from stage to digital. Talk about your— that whole process of sharing in this new age of technology that allows you to amplify the stories you tell.

I've always been grateful as a writer and a musician that technology has always given me a tool to go further and to take my creativity deeper. And so I've done that as a writer over the years with various music tools. But now as we enter the 21st century and I've made my career and my living doing theater, I wanted to be part of bringing theater into the 21st century using the technology that's available. Obviously, in today's world, streaming is the new medium that we are all focused on, and I know that you're a big believer in this too, as I am, but I want to be in a position where I can create work that is fair to everyone, including the artists that are creating the work. We're in an industry that's tough. It's tough to make a profit in the theater world, but I think the 21st century gives us an opportunity to change the rules that have governed theater for so long that have not served the community, that serve a few people but don't serve the community as a whole. And I want to be part of a new movement in theater that serves the entire community, serves the investors that put their money into the piece and gives them more of an opportunity to get their money back, and the artists that contribute to the piece. I'm often asked Well, why should an artist have the same level of risk as an investor or producer? And I say, well, that artist has spent, depending on their age, 10 to 15 to 20 years on their craft, the rejections they've gotten over the years, the struggles they've had, and they're contributing to this project that we're working on. We think they're the right fit for this project. So why can't they win? Why can't they win forever? As we all know in our theater industry, even Broadway actors, successful Broadway actors, when they're done with their Broadway show might have to go and get another job. And I think we're at a point in the development of our industry where we can have a say where the pendulum swings, and I want to be part of that.

When you look at the breadth of your work over the years and the types of stories that you tell, You can do everything from a classic piece of literature like a Jane Austen piece to a rock piece to what we're talking about right now and the current one we're working on, No One Called Ahead.

Yes.

Tell us a little bit about the inspiration for No One Called Ahead.

No One Called Ahead was inspired when I took a trip to England to work with one of my co-writers, John Caird, and we were going to work on Daddy Long Legs, a show that we've done together. And John, as well as being an amazing director, is also quite a wonderful classical pianist. And after dinner, after a nice bottle of wine, John likes to go to the living room and play piano for us for hours. And it would be quite a nice thing to do after dinner. And for the first hour one night, I was just listening to him play the piano— Schubert, Bach, Mozart, Schumann. And the second hour, I started to drift a little bit. And then he was playing a piece by Schubert, and I went, "I wonder who the other Schuberts were, that maybe their work was never discovered. Maybe they had a manuscript in an attic." And that literally triggered this idea. I wonder how many great artists throughout history—painters, writers, musicians, poets—didn't get their break or never showed their work to anybody or were just unlucky. And is there another Bach somewhere? Is there another Mozart? And I'm sure that there are. And so that was the impetus of the inspiration of developing this story.

And as an artist, describe that process on what is similar to developing Jane Eyre for Broadway and what's vastly different and what do you like about the differences?

That's a great question. I think they're very similar. They can be very similar in terms of how they're set up. Casting-wise. Obviously, in the streaming world, it's a little bit less of a rehearsal process, but you still want some rehearsal in there. But once— but what's really different, I think, is the control that the creators have on the piece. And as a composer, what I especially loved about Emma and No One Called Ahead is that usually in a Broadway show or an Off-Broadway or regional production, I am giving, as a composer, all of my power over to a very competent and brilliant music director. And in this medium, I do that in the day, but because it's a film, there's post-production, which does not exist in theater. So as a composer, I'm able to go in and post and really examine the music in a much different way and actually make physical contributions. I can actually be a musician on my own shows, which I could never be in the past. My background as a pop music writer and my experience was always creating records and high-caliber demos, which has never been any use to me in my theatrical life, and now it is. With No One Called Ahead, there were tracks that I was able to create myself and really be the primary musician on on some of the tracks. And not only did that feel good for me, but the tracks came out the way I heard them in my head.

And if you think to that whirlwind of 2 weeks filming this project that we worked on, what were some of the joyful surprises that happened on the set when you were looking in post-production that you had never thought about even when you were writing it?

I would say number 1 is how it looked. You know, just being able to look at video village for the first time in Emma, which was my first experience, was just an awakening. It was, oh, this can look fantastic. And in Emma, as you know, we had set dressing. We didn't even have a proper set yet. And no one called ahead. When I looked in the camera for the first time and saw our set and the lighting that you had created, and how everything looked, it was just pure joy. It was, oh, we get to do this. We get to put on a show and we get to film it. And really the aspect that is so powerful for me is that it gets to last forever. We are finally creating something that will have a future life that doesn't disappear. We have— so many of us have created wonderful shows that we have loved regionally, off-Broadway, on-Broadway, that are never seen again once they close. And that's the tragedy. Now, a lot of people in theater say, "Well, that's theater, and that's what we love about it. It's live and it's present." I get that, but we're in the 21st century now, and there's an entire new audience that's just doing this, and we have to reach them too. And this is an opportunity to reach them, and we should and we must if we want to keep live theater going into the 21st century, this is the way we do it.

Lastly, what excites you about our art form in the future?

What really excites me is, is that we can create magic in storytelling, music, character, and in a theater form on film, and be able to share it with the world. Right now, when I do my best work, I'm in a regional facility. I'm in Northern California, I'm in Chicago, I'm in New York, and those audiences all have an opportunity to see it. But now what you and I have done is we've taken that work and we've given people in every country in the world now can see our work, not just people living in that regional zone. When we livestream Daddy Long Legs, in 2015, we got 150,000 views in one night from 65 different countries. We got emails and letters saying, "I live in this part of Africa and I would have no way of seeing what you're doing. I would gladly pay to watch theater." And we knew at that moment that there is an audience for this work and that it can live forever, and that is what excites me.

All right, Paul, thank you very much. Thank you.