A Conversation with Jennifer Ashley Tepper
On her new book, Women Writing Musicals
I’m so happy to share this conversation with Jennifer Ashley Tepper—historian, author, producer, and Creative and Programming Director at 54 Below. Her new book, Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy That the History Books Left Out, is released on November 19. It was wonderful speaking with Jennifer about some of these remarkable women, her various roles at the heart of the New York theatre community, and the future of the art form itself. I learned so much from this conversation, which begins below:
It’s so good to meet you, and I’m excited that we’re talking just ahead of the release of your book, Women Writing Musicals. I was struck by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s words about this book; he writes that you are “putting the women back in the narrative where they belong, and highlighting generations of unsung innovators and theatre makers that have shaped the musicals we love.” (And I loved his lyrical nod to Hamilton there too). Was that your impulse with this project from the very beginning?
I was really inspired to write the book during the deep COVID pandemic days. When we were all isolated in our own homes, I started thinking about something that a lot of people were contemplating, which is how can I turn this time into something positive? Is there a project I’ve always wanted to work on? Something that I could do while sitting alone, counting canned goods, and hoping for the best for everyone’s health?
Something that came up a lot when writing my first book series, The Untold Stories of Broadway—of which there are four volumes published, and there’ll be two more before I’m done with the series—was women in theatre who had been marginalized, who had not gotten the number of jobs that they might have deserved in certain eras, who overcame great adversity to write musicals or direct musicals or manage theaters. And I became really excited by the idea of specifically writing a book about female musical theatre writers, because there’s never been a book about that before. Musical theatre writing is the bravest, most incredible undertaking, no matter your gender. So many of the stories that I know about writers, whether they had one Broadway show or whether they were career-long Broadway writers, deserve to be told and deserve a place in the history books.
And specifically, there are so many women who wrote fascinating musicals, who had immense success in theatre, who changed the art form in certain ways, and they really are left out of the narrative in a lot of the “history books,” by which I mean classes about theatre history, actual history books, and the timeline as we generally know it about the evolution of Broadway. So I set out to write something that definitely does put women back in the narrative about the history of musical theatre writing.
Lin was so generous to give a quote about the book, and that he referenced Hamilton was wonderful, because, honestly, I’m always inspired by work that strives to change and challenge the viewer’s idea of what the story is and goes, “Oh, you might have not realized that person was in the background having an important effect on the story,” or, “Here’s Eliza and here’s how she affected the narrative of American history.” Many people didn’t think about that until Hamilton. And there are a lot of shows and books like that, that I really admire, that say, “Hey, there’s something that you didn’t see, and we’re going to tell you about it.”
You survey just over 300 women in this book, and I’m fascinated by how you went about balancing including all you might have wanted to write about each person, while also offering this grand sweep that includes so many different voices and stories. Was it as simple as setting yourself a word limit for each woman, or was your approach more flexible?
It’s a great question. I tried to focus largely on theatre projects on Broadway and off Broadway. So if someone was a musical theatre writer and also did a ton of work in film and TV, that might be mentioned, but it’s not given a ton of space. I focused on theatre. I tried to write about each person in ratio to the amount of projects and to the effect that they had on the writing art form.
For example, I thought it was important to include a few women who worked as conceivers but are generally some of the greatest directors in musical theatre, like Susan Stroman, Vinnette Carroll. These women also conceived certain musicals, so in some worlds they might not be considered musical theatre “writers,” but I thought that their impact was important to consider as conceivers. But because of that, they might get less space in the book than someone who wrote book, music, and lyrics for musicals.
It was a challenge. Sometimes there were people that I became so fascinated by that I fell down a research rabbit hole where I wanted to write 40 pages about them. I had to say, “Okay, based on what I’m planning for this book, this has to be about three pages.” I knew that the book couldn’t be published if it was thousands of pages long, so I did have to work on that throughout.
In a book about women who are left out of history books, I really felt like it was important to include as many women as possible, as opposed to having longer excerpts about each woman that’s included. There are a little over 300 women in the book, and I thought just the volume of women that I could include was a really essential part—and so I always kept that in mind.
Are there women whose stories you had absolutely no idea about when you started writing this book, and who you’re now fascinated by?
Yeah! Absolutely. There were so many. Honestly, there are a lot of women in the book who I’ve always admired, and some of those women are career-long Broadway writers. Betty Comden, Carolyn Leigh, Lynn Ahrens, these incredible writers that have had a huge effect, and that a lot of us who love Broadway know. And then a lot of the women in the book, even ones who did have success during their era, are women whose names we just don’t hear. The first women to write a Broadway musical as an all-female writing team did so in 1922, and the average theatre fan or aficionado doesn’t know any of their names. A lot of these firsts were worth noting.
And there are a lot of women in the book who became notable for some other reason and then also wrote a Broadway musical. There was an Olympic tennis champion, Marion Farquhar, who also wrote a Broadway musical. There’s a woman named Maria Grever, who I became really obsessed with because she was the most successful female composer to come out of Mexico during a certain era. A lot of people know her popular songs, but she wrote this fascinating Broadway musical that incorporated Mexican and Spanish culture and did not run for very long on Broadway—which a lot of musicals don’t, but because it wasn't recorded, we have no memory of that in the collective Broadway consciousness.
Especially in the early 20th century, especially in the era before cast recordings, before musicals became as permanent as they are today, I was so excited just to put these names on paper and have people rediscover who they were. Anne Caldwell was a great one. She’s someone who in the early 20th century wrote over 20 Broadway shows, and a lot of them were a success—and we don’t remember her name. Part of that is because sometimes when writers of any gender wrote in that earlier era, their shows are seen as too dated to revive, so then we don’t see their shows revived, and we don’t remember their songs or their names.
Examining these women and their timeline throughout Broadway history functions as a microcosm of all Broadway history. That became really fascinating to me as I was writing the book. Each chapter is a different decade, and you see what women are working on. And it does represent where Broadway is going as a whole, whether it’s that we see a lot of women working on comedic reviews, or we see a lot of women working on jukebox musicals, or whatever it is.
It shows you the whole history of Broadway. I like to think that anyone could pick up my book and just turn to a random page and be like, “I’m going to read about the history of this woman.” But I do think that people will get even more out of it if they have some general Broadway history knowledge, because then you put this book on top of it and you’re like, “Wait, I learned all about the history of how concept musicals evolved in the ‘70s—and Company and A Chorus Line, two of my favorite musicals—but I didn’t learn about all these women who were writing concept musicals in the ‘70s.” So it functions as a supplemental but really essential learning for the general history of Broadway and how it’s taught.
That’s fascinating. And with our Sondheim-loving readers in mind, are there any stories that you found intersected in intriguing ways with his life and career?
Yeah, definitely. The most prominent one is probably Mary Rodgers, who of course was such close personal friends with Sondheim throughout both of their lives. She, of course, has a major spot in my book. She is such an important figure in the history of musical theatre writing. Not only did she write Once Upon a Mattress, which is one of the most licensed and beloved shows in amateur theaters to this day—and is currently running on Broadway—but she is someone who did a lot of important work separate from Once Upon a Mattress, some of which we don’t remember as much and which I was excited to research and write about. A lot of women in the book wrote during a certain period in their lives, whether it was, “I wrote Broadway musicals, and then I got married and society expected me not to write Broadway musicals anymore,” or, “I wrote Broadway musicals under my husband’s name.”
There are a lot of ways in which this intersects with gender and society norms. At the time that Mary Rodgers was working in the field, certainly she was impacted not just by society norms, but also by the fact that her father was Richard Rodgers and her best friend was Stephen Sondheim. And this is personal to her, but it’s also reflective of society as a whole, that you see the way that she places herself in the narrative among men. There’s a really fascinating quote about her that goes something like, “In any other world, she might have been a superstar writer, but she belonged to the royal family of Broadway.” It references the Windsor family. And her book, Shy, written with Jesse Green, that I loved so much, and it was such an essential resource. It really is interesting to look at her as a mid-century woman. She wanted to have a family, so what did that mean you could do in terms of a career writing? And obviously, writing musicals is not separate from the American workforce as a whole, and writing musicals is not separate from societal expectations as a whole, so it was interesting to see that reflected in people’s personal stories, which sometimes were personal to them and sometimes really did show a larger picture.
But a lot of the writers in the book certainly intersected with Sondheim. He’s obviously one of the most important figures in theatre history. Lillian Hellman, who was involved with Candide, Carolyn Leigh… There are various women whose work Sondheim stated that he admired, or who worked on some of his shows, who do appear in the book.
I love what you’re saying, because I think sometimes we can feel a bit guilty for not knowing some of these names, for not being familiar with some of this work. Your book feels like a perfect way to dive in with no judgment.
No judgment at all! It’s so interesting, because it’s not anyone’s fault who’s just consuming this information. History tells you one thing, and who’s to say that’s the whole story? One of the things I found really interesting about what we know and what we don’t know—and this is true no matter anyone’s gender—is that a lot of the musicals we know are based on whether there was a cast recording. And whether there’s a cast recording impacts whether it gets licensed, whether high schools are wanting to do it, whether you’re obsessed with it in your bedroom with your friends. But also, did a cast recording that was recorded on LP get moved to cassette? Did the cassette get moved to CD? Did the CD get moved to streaming? And it sounds like such minutiae, but with the way that we consume media as it changes, how many times have you looked on a streaming platform for some musical and you’re like, “Oh, that’s not on the streaming platform”—and so you listen to something else.
One musical theatre writer that I am so obsessed with is Micki Grant, who was the first woman to ever write book, music, and lyrics to a Broadway musical—and she starred in it. It played over a thousand performances, and it was about the Black experience in America. She had an incredibly prolific career otherwise, wrote a lot of incredible musicals, and we don’t remember her like we should. I thought it was so interesting that the cast recording of her show experienced exactly that, where it didn’t go from one medium to another in a way that allowed subsequent generations to learn the show. So often it can have to do with something that seems like a small decision, but one which erases a musical or just diminishes it from the history books.
Another aspect of your work is as a producer, and you also have this role as Creative and Programming Director at 54 Below. With those hats on, do you see this book as playing a role for performers and other artists as they seek out a wider range of repertoire?
One of my main dreams for the book is that performers, directors, theaters—anyone—will discover these women and go, “Oh, I need to Google that,” or, “I need to listen to that person’s show, or find that sheet music, or that cast recording.” And then these women will have their work live on in an additional way other than just being in the book, which is through more folks actually performing it. So yes, absolutely.
One of the great things about 54 Below is that I do get to wear my producer hat and my theatre historian hat at the same time. What I do as the Creative and Programming Director is definitely a form of producing. We present 700 shows a year. A lot of that is budgeting, marketing, negotiating contracts, artistic direction, and creative decisions. A lot of elements that go into producing are what I’ve done at the venue for the past 11 years. So often, it’s about the material. It’s, “Oh, we want to do this musical in concert. How do we make that happen? How do we talk to the estate? How do we find the right director? How do we find someone who's going to play this role?” It’s putting the pieces together.
I’m someone who feels such a responsibility to theatre history, and wants us to be able to present these hit musical reunions and under-appreciated musical reunions—and also new musicals and new artists, and emerging artists and folks that are just writing things today. So we have presented hundreds of new musicals since I started, and also have brought back a lot of older work, some of which people wouldn’t know otherwise. It’s always a great honor to do that.
And what’s interesting is the age that I grew up in was very much, “Oh, I’m going to save up my allowance for this cast recording and order it off the internet.” So for me, I’m like, “It’s not hard to find this music by these women.” It’s certainly not as hard as it was 15 years ago. There are libraries, digital libraries, YouTube, so many resources where someone who really wanted to could go, “Oh my God, I’m discovering such and such female writer. I’m reading about Kay Swift in this book. Oh my God, she was the first woman to fully compose a score by herself. I want to listen to that score. Oh, there’s the sheet music.” It’s pretty much as easy as finding George Gershwin sheet music if you put in that effort. The internet is good and bad for so many reasons we could talk about for hours, but it has democratized to a degree the way that people can find material. And there is so much out there that these women that I got to profile in my book have written that is readily available on the internet. I’m really excited for folks to Google all these women after they read about them, and find their actual work and get to listen to it.
Did you always know you wanted to be in this industry? How clear were you growing up about what your role(s) might be within it?
What’s so funny is my job at 54 Below didn’t even exist when I was in college, so I always try to remind myself of that when making any kind of goal or talking to young people, or interns, or anyone starting out on their own journeys. When I was growing up in Florida, I was so obsessed with Broadway from afar. I loved theatre. I loved studying theatre history. I loved becoming obsessed with cast albums. I did love performing at theatre camp and in high school as a kid. And I knew I wasn’t going to be a career performer, but I knew that I wanted to work in theatre, work with underappreciated musicals, work with new musicals, figure out a way to be a professional theatre fan. I went to NYU for dramatic writing, which was really because I loved theatre and writing. I was an odd duck in that department because I didn’t want to be a playwright. I really wanted to be a theatre historian, but theatre historian is not exactly a job. It’s really just a title—and a lot of theatre historians are directors or professors or artistic directors or do something similar to what I do at 54 Below. It’s not like there’s a specific job that you can apply for that reads “theatre historian.”
My books are a good example of that. I pitched them from scratch. I wrote them from scratch. It wasn’t like someone hired me to do it. With so much of what I’ve done, my approach has been don’t ask for permission—just do the thing and see where it leads job-wise. And a lot of the work I’ve done throughout my career, whether it was producing If It Only Even Runs a Minute, which is a concert series that I did that features under-appreciated musicals with Kevin Michael Murphy, or working with Joe Iconis for the past decade, a lot of those things are very unique to themselves and led to other opportunities—but it wasn't something that I could have planned out.
When I graduated college, all I wanted to do was work in a producer’s office. And I was really lucky to work for three years for Ken Davenport. I worked on the Broadway revival of Godspell and a number of other productions. That was my first full-time job in theatre, but at the same time, I was creating and doing a lot of my own stuff. And when 54 Below opened and I entered that sphere as the Creative and Programming Director, I was able to bring a lot of things that I did independently as a theatre historian, as someone who worked in a producer’s office, as someone who produced concerts herself. A lot of those things collided, and it was one of those situations people talk about where the opportunity comes and you have to be ready for it, and you have to have the skills and the history with it. It was just the perfect collision.
You get to see musical theatre function in all sorts of different ways, and I wonder what you perspective is on the current health of Broadway—and where you see the most exciting things happening.
As a theatre historian, I always zoom out. Theatre fans and professionals are so committed and so passionate that in every single era for all of history since the 1700s, theatre people were always like, “Oh, this era is not as good as this era.” Or, “Broadway used to be great, and now it’s this and this and that.” I just remember so many times I’ve bookmarked in my head reading, say, a biography of Richard Rodgers, where people are telling him, “Oh kid, you missed the golden age.” It recurs. And it’s not just the human urge to complain. It’s really because people care so much and they want Broadway to be the best it can be.
But I think at the moment, when we do look back on this era historically—and it’s hard to know because we’re in it right now—but the post-COVID era of growth for theatre is exciting in a lot of ways. It also has some drawbacks. I think that the urge to diversify in so many ways, from who’s working behind the scenes to who’s working on stage, who’s writing the shows, making that more reflective of society as a whole in all of the ways that Broadway is trying to grow, is so positive and is so exciting. And at the same time, Broadway is not divorced from finances in general, capitalism in general, society in general. The way that costs have skyrocketed and how that’s contributed to which shows can get produced and what shows can run, and who can make what happen, is scary. That side of things has become a more and more terrifying proposition. We’re still getting risky musicals and shows that don’t sound like they would be a hit that are becoming hits. There are always exceptions. There are always thrilling original musicals that somehow break through. I don’t believe that any era for Broadway is all good or all bad. I think there are always a lot of things happening at the same time.
One of the great things is that the theaters are full. As a historian who studied the times during the ‘80s and other eras where half the Broadway theaters were empty, theaters have never been more in demand, so that is a positive thing. You can go see so many different shows. There are options for all kinds of different audiences—but the scary thing is that ticket prices have never needed to be higher based on costs being so much higher. And at this moment where we’re all trying so hard to attain any kind of accessibility, it’s almost impossible because accessibility and capitalism are always fighting with each other. You can’t run a show if it’s not making money, and you can’t make money unless the ticket prices are so high. It’s a broken system in as many ways as the general financial system in America is broken, and Broadway’s always contending with that. But at the same time, there are always producers that are willing to take a risk on something they believe in, that seems like it might be a difficult sell. There are a lot of new musicals opening this season that I’m so excited about, and there’s a lot of great work being created.
I’m so grateful that the Broadway theaters are landmarked, and my books, The Untold Stories of Broadway, are really a lot about the theaters themselves. The history of those theaters being made permanent in New York City, and that we can’t demolish them, makes me so grateful. I think that’s really important, especially in a world where people are needing to build high-rise hotels and apartment buildings. If we didn’t have those landmarkings in place, we might lose Broadway theaters altogether.
I really wish that some of that was in place for our off-Broadway spaces. The fact is that so many of our shows want to be off-Broadway, but those spaces are disappearing more and more because there are more successful financial ventures that can come in. I’m devastated that Second Stage is being demolished at the end of the year. That’s a theater that I’ve worked at, that I’ve gone to for so many years, where shows like Spelling Bee and Next to Normal started, not to mention so many others. I think about the Union Square Theatre, which Murder Ballad and all these other musicals played. These spaces don’t exist, and so then the shows that could go into them don’t exist, and it becomes this perpetuating system. New spaces pop up all the time, and that's great, but some of these off-Broadway houses that we’re losing that are mid-size, that are 300 to 500 seats… If we lose those spaces, we lose the shows. I did a TEDx Broadway talk similar to that, about how real estate affects the art we get. So really, my dream is that we need mid-sized spaces in order that we can still have a certain kind of show.
That’s such a fascinating perspective. I could honestly talk to you all day—but just finally, I’d love to know about any events you might have lined up around the release of this book.
Yeah. I’m going to have a book release event at the Drama Book Shop on November 19th, so I’m super excited about that. It’ll be a book signing, and it’ll be a first release conversation about the book. And then I am planning a bunch of other events too. I’ll be at BroadwayCon doing a panel about the book in February. There’s a bunch of other book events I’m doing that haven’t been announced yet, including a really exciting one during for Women’s History Month in March. If you’re in New York pretty much any month in the next seven months, there will be a book event that I’m lucky to be able to do.
I’m just so excited to talk to human beings who have read about these women and geek out about them with people. It obviously took a long time to research this book and to write this book, but I can’t wait for someone to come up to me and be like, “Actually, my grandmother knew this woman!” Just to have people have any kind of reaction, like, “Oh, I’m inspired by this woman.” “Oh, I learned something else that you might not know.” I’m really psyched to be in a room with people talking about the book.
For more information about Women Writing Musicals, and to pre-order it, simply click here.