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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
The next time around, they had broken up. Tim was working on Chess, and Andrew wanted to do Phantom of the Opera. I was sitting in a restaurant, and he was sitting at the next table with Sarah Brightman, to whom he was then married, and he said, "Come over and have coffee," and he said, "I am thinking of Phantom of the Opera as a musical. What do you think?," and I said, "It is the perfect time for a romantic musical. Perfect. There hasn't been a romantic musical in years, and that's what I would like to see." That's often a criterion. I very often do what I wish I could see when I went to the theater. So it is sort of make your own theater really, and I signed on immediately, and we spent the next two years working on it. I spent a lot of flights back and forth to London. The scenery itself took nine flights there, and about three for (designer) Maria Bjornson. It needed to take an audience where an audience probably could not remember being, but it needed to take them back to being me, seeing Orson Welles at the age of eight in Julius Caesar. You needed to go in there and say, "I've just lost all my problems," all the years of patina that have developed, and crust, and just be in this other world, and insofar as it does that, it seems to have succeeded in its objective.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
I was always interested in newspapers. I can't remember a time when I wasn't. I believe that comes from the fact that my father -- who worked with his back and his hands, as well as his heart, but he was basically a laborer, and who had not finished high school -- considered newspapers as the poor man's university, and he was an avid reader of newspapers, along with my Uncle John, who is now deceased, but my father's younger brother. And they would read the newspapers and then argue, debate, discuss way into the night such things as the rise of Nazism, Hitler's Mein Kampf, the book that Hitler wrote. They discussed world affairs, national affairs. They had almost a knock-down, drag-out fight over whether Franklin Roosevelt should run for a third term. I remember that very well. So I was interested in newspapers because my father, I think, was interested in newspapers. And my mother read as well, but my father really devoured newspapers.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
One summer -- I can't remember my age but I couldn't have been more than seven or eight -- at the local park -- we called her "the lady in the park." Looking back on it, she was a social worker hired by the city, and she was just "the lady at the park." She came around and talked to you and tried to find out what you were interested in. The lady in the park talked to me one day about books. She read me something out of a children's book and then asked me if I'd like to go to the library. Now at that age, and that time, at that place, she may as well have been talking about Xanadu. I don't think I'd heard of a library, although my parents had books somehow or another, but I said, "Well yes. I'd like to go to the library." And she organized a little trip for two or three of us to the Heights Library on Heights Boulevard, which was indeed a magic place, and that was lucky for me. I loved it. It was obvious to the lady in the park that I loved it and she took me back there a number of times that summer, and near the end of the summer asked me if I would like to go to the main library downtown. And we took the 8th Street shuttle bus up Heights Boulevard to Washington Avenue and then transferred to the big bus and went to the main library. Such a place I had never seen. It seemed a kind of combination castle out of King Arthur's time and about as close as a child could imagine heaven to be. I remember we checked out Paul Bunyan. I had a library card by this time from the Houston Heights Library and I was allowed to check out one book from the main library and I checked out Paul Bunyan. Looking back on it, it was a decisive time for me, because it really turned me on to books and a lifetime of reading.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
There was a kind of recession on and I had a very hard time finding a job. In answer to your question, you know, when did I know broadcasting was going to be the way, I interviewed for a lot of jobs when I came out of the Marines and got none, and I was beginning to get desperate. You know, I was working odd jobs to keep my head above water. I got what -- looking back on it -- amounted to a tryout with the Houston Chronicle. This was the big thing. The Chronicle was the biggest newspaper. And here I was within spitting distance of the dream at the Chronicle, but the Chronicle owned a radio station, a big 50,000 watt radio station. Looking back on it, they quickly figured out -- I think partly because I was such a poor speller -- that I wasn't going to be a newsroom star at the Houston Chronicle. But I had worked at the radio station in Huntsville for three years so I went to work, if you will, at the Chronicle's radio station. And when I got to the radio station -- this was not my dream job, it was just -- it was a full-time job, full-time work. A guy named Bob Hart was the news director there, and he gave me a break. He put me on and I loved it from the second I got into it. I mean, this was a real reporting job! I covered city hall, police beat, local courts. It was real reporting. Real beat reporting.
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Lloyd Richards
Tony Award-Winning Director
Lloyd Richards: It's all special. They were all very special experiences, even the ones that didn't work. It's like saying which of your children do you love the most? Sometimes you have a special feeling for things that didn't work. It's like a child with a deformity, a child that doesn't quite make it. He is not loved less, he is sometimes even loved more, because you felt you didn't do enough for him. So, they all stand out. And I don't try and differentiate between them. People ask me which is my favorite play. Which is your favorite August Wilson play? I have no favorites. They are all my favorites. My work is my favorite.
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Lloyd Richards
Tony Award-Winning Director
Lloyd Richards: Now, that's why I'm in the theater. To take those lives, to reveal them. Not just those lives, any life. And that's what's important about theater, or should be. It does reflect the lives of a totality of a community that exists out there, and does speak to the totality of that community. Not all at once, but through its own particularness, which is what Raisin did. Other people were able to find themselves in it. I remember when we first did Fences at Yale Rep. My promotional manager, a wonderful woman, she had come to see a run-through, and she sat with me afterwards. She said, "Do you know, I looked at the play, and I looked at that role that James Earl Jones is playing, and I said, you know, that's the man down the street. I know him, that's the man down the street." A little further into the play, she said, "No that's not the man down the street, that's my brother." And a little further, "No, not my brother, that's my father." At the end of the play, she said, "I said to myself, no, that's not my father, that's me." And it's that kind of universality, that stems from particularity, that makes a work of value and reach out beyond itself. Not by trying to reach out beyond itself, but by reaching deeper into itself, to its own truth. And that's what's wonderful about theater for me.
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Lloyd Richards
Tony Award-Winning Director
Lloyd Richards: After three years of it, when I should have gone to law school, I ended up not going to law school and determining that I would have a life in the theater. I had to decide at that point what security was, what it meant. Was security property? Was security money in the bank? Or was security getting up in the morning and not counting the hours? Having a life, not a job. The theater was something that seemed to satisfy my life-need. I was not concerned about, would I make it, would I not make it, would I be successful, would I not be successful. The opportunity to function in that area was something that compelled me and I ended up in the theater.
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