Special Reports

Richard Maltby Jr. and John Weidman Share Memories of Creating Big the Musical

Look back on the show as it returns to New York courtesy of York Theatre Company.

Daniel Jenkins as Josh and Crista Moore as Susan in the original Broadway production of Big the Musical.
Daniel Jenkins as Josh and Crista Moore as Susan in the original Broadway production of Big the Musical.

This fall, off-Broadway's York Theatre Company revives four musicals not seen in New York since their premieres: Big, A Time for Singing, Saturday Night, and My Favorite Year — as part of its annual Musicals in Mufti series of script-in-hand concert readings of relatively unseen shows. TheaterMania asked members of each original creative team to provide anecdotes from their time spent working on these shows. We begin with Big, which runs October 11-12 and 15-19.


Richard Maltby, Jr.
Richard Maltby Jr.
(© David Gordon)

Richard Maltby Jr., composer:

Being out of town with a musical is generally acknowledged to be a surreal experience, but nothing quite matched being in Detroit with Big. The Fisher Theatre adjoins a hotel where all of the cast and staff lived during the run, and where us authors spent most of our time. You can be out of town with a musical in Detroit and never see daylight. So one morning, after a grueling early work session writing something new, David Shire and I went to breakfast, and the elevator door opened to reveal a sorceress in a black cloak with planets on it and a pointy hat. Oh dear. "Bad sign," we thought. But we got on. The elevator went to the next floor and the door opened to a barefoot giant, hooded, dressed all in burlap that had numbers all over it. Behind him was some kind of evil-looking elf. They smiled and said something ambiguous like "Good morning," and got on. The next time the door opened, a magus got on, ancient-looking, craggy-faced, all-knowing. Inside the elevator, we looked at these crazies. They looked back at us ominously, as if to say, "Don't you know that song you are writing sucks?"

The lobby, when we finally reached it, was as warm with wizards, crones, imps, and voodoo witch doctors. It turns out Big was sharing the hotel with a "Witches and Warlocks" convention. For the next week, every time John, David, and I would return from the theater, usually with some horrific rewriting assignment facing us, we would be met by a coven of some sort, who seemed ready to lure us to a bonfire and sing "Double, double, cauldron bubble/Second act, that scene's in trouble!"

We wanted to ask God what he meant by sending all these Wiccans, exorcists, enchantresses, devils, necromancers, hags, and pagans in touch with the occult. Wasn't it a bit of overkill? Couldn't you just send a nice voice of advice to one of us in a dream? Or was this your way of warning us that we were going to open in New York the night before Rent did? Who can tell? We couldn't read the meaning of these portents, if they were portents, and it's hard to know what we would have done if we had. It's hard to find eye of newt in Detroit. Looking back on it, I realize that everyone out of town with a musical feels like one of The Walking Dead. We should have felt comforted to know that we weren't alone.


John Weidman
John Weidman
(© David Gordon)

John Weidman, book writer:

When the curtain came down on the opening-night performance of Big, my wife and I, along with my two kids, squeezed into the back seat of a taxi cab to ride from the theater to the opening-night party. The taxi turned north on Sixth Avenue and almost immediately became involved in an accident involving three other cabs.

The drivers of the four cabs — as it happened, one from the Middle East, one from Eastern Europe, one from Africa, and one from the Caribbean — poured out of their vehicles and, as they began a heated, unproductive argument over who was responsible for what, I surveyed the damage to my family.

Thankfully, it seemed to be minimal. We had all been thrown around a little — none of us was wearing a seat belt; the last time anybody in the Weidman family would take a cab ride without buckling up — and in due course an ambulance arrived and took us all to Roosevelt Hospital.

As is true of most shows, out-of-town tryouts for Big had been difficult and often stressful, and as I sat in my tuxedo holding a towel to a cut on the inside of my lower lip, I remember thinking that it seemed both completely appropriate and completely unfair that I should be spending opening night in an emergency room.

At which point I looked up and saw Mike Ockrent, our buoyant, indefatigable director, burst through the doors to the ER waving a newspaper — and as a doctor began stitching me up, Mike read me Vincent Canby’s rave review in The New York Times.

Art isn’t easy, but it does have its moments.


John Weidman (left) and Richard Maltby, Jr. (right) with new Big stars John Tartaglia (second from left) and Kerry Butler (second from right), as well as new director Michael Undine and lyricist David Shire (center)
John Weidman (left) and Richard Maltby Jr. (right) with new Big stars John Tartaglia (second from left) and Kerry Butler (second from right), as well as new director Michael Unger (third from left) and lyricist David Shire.
(© Alexander Kaufman)

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