Al Pacino / Wireimage
Barry Weissler Exclusive:
Day 15
By Barry Weissler, Constant Self-Education
Mon Feb 4, 2008
I am inspired by the artistic passion of those who never stop learning, those who understand that excellence is not a place at which one arrives, but the way in which one travels. It is an appetite never sated.
Al Pacino is one of our greatest actors. One of his gifts is his passion for learning, his relentless curiosity and his hunger for mastery. When my production of Othello was playing, Christopher Plummer starred as a supreme Iago. Everyone talked about it. But Al Pacino did more than that. Al was there. Several times a week, he would show up in the back of the theater to watch the famed scene that ends Act One. He would stand in the back of the theater, in the dark, just watching, just taking it in.
And that’s how you do it. You watch. You study. You learn. You never stop. You raise the bar higher, every night, every time. The moment you stop, you begin to fade.
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.