Robert DeNiro / Wireimage.com
Barry Weissler Exclusive:
Day 2
By Barry Weissler, Bobby’s Rolls
Tue Jan 15, 2008
Another thing I have learned is that people rarely become successful alone. It often happens in groups. Monet, Manet, and Renoir were all friends. They sat in cafes together dreaming, drinking absinthe, discussing and passionately arguing the details of composition or of how to paint light.
At first I decided to become an actor. I studied with Stella Alder. My parents were furious. They cut me off. They couldn’t understand that someone could consider the theater as a career, much less their only son. I suffered over this, but it only made me more determined.
In those days, Robert DeNiro was in school with me. He and I practiced scenes and ran lines together. If it wasn’t for Bobby, who knows what would have happened. When my parents cut me off, Bobby kept me alive. He befriended me, and every morning he bought me a coffee and buttered roll. That was my daily bread and I lived on that for a time.
But, that was also what I loved about the theater, the community. The sense of support, and feeling of being in it together. Theater people get each other. Every actor and director knows well, that slump that hits them after a show closes. It’s like a small death. The characters and their worlds simply vanish without a trace. That is why so many of us, even in the most difficult times, simply cannot stop. The only balm for the wound is the question, “What’s next?”
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 1997 Tony Awards® including Best Musical Revival, as well as countless other awards in the U.S. and abroad.