Cast of Sweet Charity, Tony Awards Telecast, 2005/Wireimage
Barry Weissler Exclusive:
Day 3
By Barry Weissler, Nothing Harder Than High School
Wed Jan 16, 2008
People ask me how Fran and I learned to produce. My answer is always the same. You learn by doing. You learn as you go. Fran and I produced plays for children. We went to Catholic high schools, one after the other, sometimes to as many as eight a day. Can you imagine? A Jewish couple going to convents and monasteries proposing plays to nuns and priests, sometimes with seven or eight appointments a day? We just did what we loved.
We produced Tom Sawyer, Swiss Family Robinson, Shakespeare and Arthur Miller. In retrospect, we couldn’t have invented better training. Can you imagine what it takes to keep a kid interested in Shakespeare? And children don’t lie. They don’t pretend to like things because they think it makes them look good. They are either into it or they are not. Once they’re bored, you’ve lost. There is no way around it. There’s no getting them back.
I remember once we were in a school in New Jersey putting on Shakespeare. This little doll-faced girl came up to me and asked, “What period is this play?” I was so impressed, I was so taken back that I had to search my mind. I said, “16th century?” She replied, “No, silly! I mean is it 3rd period, 4th period or 5th period?” See, Truly a tough crowd.
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.