Brian DePalma/Wireimage
Barry Weissler Exclusive:
Day 4
By Barry Weissler, Bobby in Catholic School
Thu Jan 17, 2008
Robert DeNiro was one of the first actors we hired when Fran and I began producing shows for Catholic schools in New Jersey. We hired him for $60 dollars a week and for an extra $10, he helped us carry the sets. That’s what it was like in those days. We were all starting from scratch.
We were doing Chekov’s “The Bear” at a high school in Peapack-Gladstone, New Jersey, when Bobby informs me that he got a part in a Brian DePalma film Greetings. But it conflicts with the show schedule. We were doing two shows a day and had no understudies, so of course we couldn’t lose him. Film? What the hell? He got Brian to shoot the scenes for Greetings around our school show schedule. We were so young then, with no idea what lay in store for all of us.
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.