Barry Weissler with Joel Grey during the CABARET revival in 1987.
Barry Weissler Exclusive:
Day 1
By Barry Weissler, The Beginning
Mon Jan 14, 2008
Join us over the next several weeks to read 5 Time Tony Award® winner, Barry Weissler's column on what it takes to make it in show business.
I woke up one morning in the 1960’s totally lost. I was in college. I wanted to be an athlete. I dreamt about bullfighting, about being a matador (not every urban Jewish boys dream.) I wanted a passionate life, an exciting life. I wanted to play football on my college team but I was too light. There was no place for me on the college football team. To top it all off I was nearly failing my freshman year classes. I remember the day well. It was spring break and I was wandering the empty campus in despair. What was I to do with my life?
After a long while, I wandered into a barn-like building I had never been to before. It was the college theater. The students there were rehearsing Measure for Measure. It was a new experience for me. A new feeling. I walked into the warm dimly lit atmosphere. It was home. That moment was the beginning of my education.
Up until that point, school had little meaning. Up until that point, I didn’t see much reason for all the things I was supposed to do. Now I had a context. Seven days a week I was in the school library reading stories and plays. I went from failing all my classes to the top of the Deans list, and to special seminar classes my professors taught in their homes.
I tell this story not because I want you to know how hard I worked or the passion I feel for theater. I tell you this because through life, we are always looking for ourselves. I tell you this because we all need a reason. A mirror. A context. We all need a frame for our story or a stage for our play. I am grateful for that moment in that theater barn. It is context that brings power. That brings meaning to life.
Until tomorrow…
Broadway producers Barry & Fran Weissler are the recipients of five Tony Awards®. Their numerous Broadway credits include acclaimed productions Othello with James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer, My One and Only with Tommy Tune, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Kathleen Turner and Charles Durning, Gypsy with Tyne Daly, and the Tony Award-winning productions of Falsettos and Annie Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters and Reba McEntire, among others. They are currently represented on Broadway – and across the globe -- with the international smash hit Chicago, which earned six 1997Tony Awards® including Best Musical Revival, as well as countless other awards in the U.S. and abroad.