Leslie Bricusse

"Leslie is musical royalty. He comes from what I think of as the golden years of music. Being around him and listening to his stories is all the entertainment anyone could ever need. His career has been long and brilliant and shows no signs of stopping. I hope he never stops. I just feel lucky that because of him, I got to be part of that golden era in my own small way."

So many adjectives came to mind when we thought about how to introduce Leslie Bricusse in this edition of THE VOICE. After sitting down and speaking with him, the first words that came to mind would describe Leslie as "a charming, humble, immensely talented gentlemen." He most graciously took the time to speak with us as he vacationed in France. He spoke about his work on JEKYLL & HYDE and some of the highlights of his long and enduring career. We hope you'll enjoy getting to know Leslie Bricusse…

VOICE: We want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us tonight.

LESLIE: You're welcome! How is Linda?

VOICE: She's doing wonderfully.

LESLIE: Would you give her my love when you talk to her?

VOICE: We certainly will. It's a very exciting time for her.

LESLIE: What's going on with her? What's she up to?

VOICE: Linda recently finished working on a new album of pop/country music, so she's very busy and she's very excited. She's getting ready to go on the road with the show, and she will be performing this music for the first time at the North Salem Golf Club in North Salem, New York on March 22nd. We'll be in attendance and we're very excited as well. Linda is even playing guitar in the band!

LESLIE: That all sounds wonderful!

VOICE: In the last issue of THE VOICE, we did a piece on Linda's GREATEST HITS CD that was released last spring by Barnes & Noble. There were quite a few pieces from JEKYLL & HYDE on that CD, so naturally we thought it would be interesting to speak with you because you were a huge part of that show. With that said, we'd like to start with the first time you heard Linda sing.

LESLIE: The first time I ever heard Linda sing was when she was on Star Search. I think that was in '88. I remember it was fascinating because she kept coming back every Saturday. It was not a program I normally watched, but it was so fascinating what happened with her that I used to watch it. She did brilliantly on that show, and, obviously, I became aware of her voice at that time.

VOICE: How did you become involved with JEKYLL & HYDE?

LESLIE: A gentleman by the name of Hillard Elkins, most people call him "Hilly," had produced a couple of my shows in the past, and I had known him for many years. He called me one day and said, "I want you to meet this young composer," and he brought Frank Wildhorn to my house in Beverly Hills. We met and Frank left me this little audiotape. I was going to Mexico the next day and took it with me… thought no more about it for a few days… then suddenly saw it sitting on my dressing table and played it. I immediately thought, "This is different… this is unusual." So I got back to him. He'd been writing the show with someone else from his days at USC. The music was terrific, but the lyrics needed work. It was just some songs, and they didn't work lyrically. So we started again and rewrote it from1988 to 1989.

VOICE: Did you know Linda when you were in the process of writing JEKYLL & HYDE?

Leslie and his wife, Evie Bricusse

LESLIE: No. Frank and I, without knowing each other, had both spotted her on Star Search, and I thought, "That's a remarkable voice." As a composer, he was trying to put a show together and he did something about it after he heard Linda's performances. And when he told me about this girl, I immediately knew who he was talking about. By the time we had written the show, Linda had become our leading lady.

VOICE: Can you speak about some of the challenges that were involved in producing JEKYLL & HYDE?

LESLIE: Well, the writing was not the hard part. There are certain collaborations where the songs just flow, and Frank and I luckily have that. He is very easy to write with, but when I write on my own, I do words and music at the same time. With a collaborator, I like the composer to go first. I like to follow what they do, rather than the other way around. So since there were already some very good melodies in place, a lot more came out once I had started writing. Once I had written the first half dozen songs, we got more ideas for where I could take the book. The show had to go to new places where it hadn't gone before. So we needed a number of new songs. And the writing of the score, as I say, was easy. What was difficult was the progress of the show. We first performed it in Houston at The Alley Theatre in 1990, and then it was a long struggle. We had to wait a long time until we got the people together who could take it on and get it finally to Broadway. There was a Houston group called Pace Theatricals, and they were very much involved in it. And then there were the Neiderlanders and the bright young man there, Nick Scandalios, who stayed involved all the way through and indeed became a good friend. I'm very fond of Nick… he's a lovely guy and he was one of the other elements. Together, we went on an endless national tour, which did very well, and finally it found its way to Broadway

VOICE: It must have been an ever-evolving creative process.

LESLIE: Indeed, never-ending. So from the time we wrote it till the time it got to Broadway, we did three cast albums. The first one was done in London around the time we were in Houston. Then the best one was done in 1994, which was a double album.

VOICE: Ah, yes, with Anthony Warlow.

LESLIE: Anthony Warlow is still the best singer that was ever involved in the project. And then we didn't get to Broadway until 1997, so it was a very long swim.

VOICE: Do you have a favorite song from JEKYLL & HYDE if you had to pick one?

LESLIE: Well it's interesting. "Someone Like You" is not my favorite song. "A New Life" Linda did brilliantly and it stopped the show, but my favorite song that she did was in fact a duet, "In His Eyes." She never did do it as a solo, but I would love to hear her do it that way.

VOICE: That would be spectacular!

LESLIE: Well, it was written so that it could be sung by one person, but we alternated lines with the two women in Henry Jekyll's life, which was theatrically very good. And, of course, the two- voice harmony made it really terrific at the end. But I'd love to hear Linda sing it as a solo. You might tell her that! [All laugh] She should do it as a solo because it is laid out to be done by one person with two points of view. But my favorite piece of singing she did in the entire show was not a song. It was a little piece near the end of Act I before she sings "Someone Like You." It was called "Sympathy, Tenderness." She sang it so beautifully and so sensitively. That was the best thing in the show for me, and it was only 40 seconds long.

VOICE: On her GREATEST HITS CD, there are three songs that you have written. Included among them is "Someone Like You," which a lot of her fans call her signature song.

LESLIE: Yes, it sort of is. That to me was always sort of a pop song as opposed to a theatre song. It already existed when I came on the scene. We redid it and put a new lyric on it, but I never felt it was up to the quality of the other songs because it was trying too hard to be a hit. I don't think songs should ever try to be hits. They should emerge naturally.

VOICE: So, in your opinion, what do you believe is Linda's greatest hit?

LESLIE: Well, I go back to the things she has sung most beautifully, which are the two songs I mentioned from JEKYLL & HYDE. "A New Life" is not structured to be a pop song, but I think if she did "In His Eyes" as a solo, I'd be very interested to see how that came out. Well, all her singing is so beautiful that I love everything she sings. You can't not love them all! But if I had to pick one song I'd love to hear her do as a solo, it would be "In His Eyes." I don't think she needs any help from a second singer.

VOICE: We've heard that you're working on a movie version of JEKYLL & HYDE. How is that coming along?

LESLIE: Well, when I left California, we were having meetings with two groups of producers. There is a company called Mandalay and a very good lady named Cathy Schulman, who produced the movie CRASH that won the Oscar two years ago… and she also produced a lovely movie last year called THE ILLUSIONIST with Edward Norton. She, for Mandalay, got very interested in the JEKYLL & HYDE project and we had a series of meetings. I don't know where it is at the moment. It's a long swim to put those things together too. We have interest from a number of performers to do it, but you need the stars and the director combination to make it work. I was in Europe for a good portion of last year, so I let those things take their own time and if they're meant to happen, they do.

VOICE: You do have so many fans who read Linda's newsletter. What would you like to say to all those Jekkies?

LESLIE: I would like to tell all those Jekkies, "When it opens next year, come and see CYRANO!" [All laugh] All my life I have loved CYRANO DE BERGERAC because it is so lyrical, and it screams to be sung. And so we have now written that. We've got two and a half productions lined up - one will be in Madrid in 2009 and one is set for Japan because JEKYLL & HYDE has been a big success there - it's played five times in Japan so far. And then, hopefully we will produce it this summer in the United States. We're in the middle of all sorts of things at the moment that will determine when and where.

Michael Feinstein and Evie Bricusse

VOICE: You just took care of our current projects question! [All laugh] We'd imagine that's a big one.

LESLIE: Yes, it's one of my current ones. When we did the demos, Linda sang the role of Roxanne. And again, she's fabulously good in it. It's perfect for her.

VOICE: We would imagine having Linda on a demo is every producers dream.

LESLIE: Oh, yes.

VOICE: Linda has been doing a show with Michael Feinstein called "Two For The Road." It's a wonderful show, and in it they perform your song, "Two for the Road."

LESLIE: Yes, I've heard about the show, but unfortunately I haven't seen it. I am hoping to see the show sometime when I'm here in America. As you know by now, I am a big fan of Linda's, and I've known Michael since he was 18 years old. We go way, way back to the Ira Gershwin era, so he's been a friend of mine for 35 years.

VOICE: We hope you will get to one of their shows in the near future. "Two For The Road" is a beautiful song, and Linda and Michael perform it so well with the most beautiful harmony. A lot of people are hoping they record it.

LESLIE: "Two For The Road" is the very first song I ever wrote with Henry Mancini.

VOICE: Linda and Michael tell a little story before they perform "Two for the Road" about how both of your wives were the inspiration for this song.

LESLIE: Well, a lot of my songs are sort of what we call "Evie songs." My wife's name is Evie. It began all the way back many, many years ago with a show called STOP THE WORLD, I WANT TO GET OFF. Anthony Newley and I wrote that show very quickly because we had a theatre and we didn't have a show, and we wrote the score in eight days.

VOICE: Oh, wow!

LESLIE: I still have the piece of paper that has "What Kind of Fool Am I?" on one side and "Once in a Lifetime" on the other. That's how quickly we wrote it. But because Evie looked after us while we were writing it, we named the heroine Evie in the show and there's a song called "Why Did Someone Nice Like You, Evie?" as opposed to "Someone Like You." I've written a lot of songs about Evie from then till now, and I still do when I want a really good relationship song. For "Two for the Road," interestingly, the screen play for that film was written by my first-ever writing partner, Frederic Raphael, and Hank asked me to write a song with him. It's such a beautiful melody. It was an easy song to write with the melody to guide you through it.

VOICE: It is a beautiful song. As you look back on your career and all that you've accomplished, what would you say was your finest moment?

LESLIE: [Big sigh] I don't know.

VOICE: Is that a difficult question?

LESLIE: Well, I've written over 40 shows and films. I have favorites, but I don't know if there's any such thing as a finest moment. I suppose getting my first Oscar was a pretty good moment. I think great moments come from things that sort of move you. I mean, the first night of STOP THE WORLD was a great moment for me. Another great moment was when I was writing Dr. Doolittle. We were going to do demos of the first songs I had written, and it was a big budget musical. We were recording these on the weekend. I went to the recording session expecting a piano player and a drummer, and I had an 85-piece orchestra for a demo! And it absolutely blew me away! It's those kinds of moments. When Anthony Newley stopped the show with "What Kind of Fool Am I?" the first time, we didn't know it was going to be a big hit and it won the Grammy the next year. We had no idea… you don't know until it happens. And I think the great moments are when they actually happen. That 85-piece orchestra was an amazing moment for me and I've never forgotten it. At the end of it, the orchestration was so good for a song called "After Today" that the musicians put down their instruments and applauded the orchestrator. It was that good.

VOICE: What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to follow in your footsteps as a songwriter?

LESLIE: Well, I would never make comments about song writing in terms of songs because I have hardly ever written individual songs. I usually write songs in the context of a musical play or a musical film. I've done individual songs like "Two for the Road," but I much prefer a story. So if you're going to write a musical, I would say the most important thing is first of all to find the right collaborator, but also more importantly the other collaborator is the story you are telling. In other words, you've got to find a story that you know will make a good musical. For example, CYRANO DE BERGERAC is so wonderfully structured to be musicalized. Certain shows are and other shows aren't, so finding the material, rather than just jumping in and saying let's do this as a musical is important. A score like VICTOR VICTORIA, which Hank and I did, was easy because the songs were all sung by people who were performers in the story. They only sang songs as performers… they never sang anything that was part of the story, just when they were on stage. That's one way to make a thing work. The other way is to find something that is so lyrical like CYRANO that it sings very well. The reason I responded so well to JEKYLL was Frank's musical style, plus I could not believe that no one had ever done a musical of JEKYLL & HYDE because you have this heaven-sent leading role of the man who plays two roles and then the two women who reflect the light and shade of his life. That's a great musical structure. So I would say finding a good collaborator and finding a great subject are the most important things.

VOICE: That foundation seems to be very important.

LESLIE: Oh, yes, because if you haven't got the good stuff going in, it won't work. It's because I've gotten involved with some not-so-good projects as well, that I ended up writing all three elements of a show on my own… book, music, lyrics. Not a great number of people do that. I love collaborating, but I also love collaborating with myself because you don't have to argue with anyone. [Leslie chuckles]

VOICE: Very true. If you start arguing with yourself, it's time to see the doctor! [All laugh] Thank you very much for your time. We know the fans and Linda will be thrilled to read this interview.

LESLIE: Not at all! Give her love from me and from Evie. We haven't seen her for a while, and we love her very much.

VOICE: We will be sure to tell her.