Sierra Boggess performed “A Little Bit Less Than” from the Broadway production of It Shoulda Been You (Festival 2009) for The New York Times’ In Performance series.
Watch Lisa Howard sing “Jenny’s Blues” from It Shoulda Been You (Festival 2009) at last night’s Tony Awards.
The incredibly busy New York awards season is underway, and the hard work of many NAMT members and alumni has been recognized in this full season of musical theatre. Congratulations to all!
“I went to three weddings in a very short period of time that spring,” Anselmi says, recalling 2003, when she was scrambling for show ideas to present in the second year of The BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. “I was taken back to what happened at one of the weddings: a friend of mine hooked up with somebody in the bathroom, and the guy on my right side at the table, I wished that he had married the bride.”
In 2009, Lisa Howard played Jenny in It Shoulda Been You for the first time at NAMT’s 21st Annual Festival of New Musicals. She spoke with The New York Times about the role as It Shoulda Been You began previews on Broadway this week.
The Broadway-bound cast of It Shoulda Been You (including several members of its 2009 Festival of New Musicals presentation cast) has a gorgeous photo shoot in Vanity Fair previewing the show and its wedding attire designed by William Ivey Long.
So was this transition to directing a long-held artistic desire that Mr. Pierce has waited years to fulfill? “No,” he said unequivocally in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “Exactly the opposite. People have told me for many years that I should direct. Even back when I was doing ‘Frasier,’ the camera people on ‘Frasier’ would say, ‘Oh, you should really direct.’ And I’ve never wanted to until now.”
What made the difference, Mr. Pierce said, was the musical itself, which features a book and lyrics by Brian Hargrove and music by Barbara Anselmi, and which he said he had been a fan of in various incarnations. (“It Shoulda Been You” made its New York City debut in 2009 at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals.)
Mr. Pierce said he also responded to the musical’s philosophy on parenthood, which, he said, “is similar to what I’ve come to learn about directing, that you hope for the best and you embrace the unexpected, and ultimately you let people find their own way.”