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Stephen Sondheim
Award-winning Composer and Lyricist
The producer, Cheryl Crawford, dropped out at the last minute. She'd been the putative producer for over a year. But she suddenly got cold feet. And so there we were, knowing that we had to get the show on by September because Lenny was unavailable starting in September. I had urged them to give the show earlier to Hal Prince and his partner, Bobby Griffith, but though they had done two successful shows, Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, Lenny and Jerry and Arthur didn't feel that they were experienced enough. So they preferred Cheryl. When Cheryl dropped out, I called Hal myself, who was out of town with a show called New Girl In Town, which was not going well, and so he was more than anxious to start a new project. However, I had played him the score before and he did not like the show, West Side. But because of that moment, catching him -- vulnerable -- in the last couple of weeks in Boston, and knowing that the minute the show opened in New York he would have something else to work on, it softened him up.
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Wole Soyinka
Nobel Prize for Literature
Wole Soyinka: I began writing, scribbling notes, you know, in prison. But it wasn't actually published until after I'd come out. Writing became a therapy. First of all, it meant I was reconstructing my own existence. It was also an act of defiance. I wasn't supposed to write. I wasn't supposed to have paper, pen, anything, any reading material whatsoever. So this became an exercise in self-preservation, keeping up my spirits. It also, you had to occupy very long hours of the day, you know, not speaking to anyone. And I even -- it wasn't just writing. I evolved all kinds of mental exercises, even went back to those subjects which I said I hated in school, in particular mathematics. I started to try and recover my mathematical formulae by trial and error, and created problems for myself which I solved. You know, anything to keep the mind alive. As I said, it's an exercise in self-preservation. Writing was just part of it.
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Wole Soyinka
Nobel Prize for Literature
I began looking for my notes, the chapters I'd written in prison. Somehow they disappeared for some time. Because I had to smuggle the books out, between whose lines I'd written some things. So getting them back together took a while, and I could not find the documents. And then one day, everything came back, and I began writing Aké: the Years of Childhood. In other words, the project had always been there. I'd always wanted to capture that period. And so I wrote Aké, and the interesting thing was that I later recovered my notes, and almost word for word, the three chapters I'd written when I was in prison tallied with new chapters in Aké. An interesting footnote about the powers of memory. I mean, virtually line by line. Of course, some changes here and there. But it was amazing how the recollection came, total recall, for about three chapters, just like in the notes in Aké.
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