INTERVIEW: It’s about time to catch ‘About Time’
Photo: Lynne Wintersteller stars in About Time. Photo courtesy of Julieta Cervantes / Provided by DKC O&M with permission.
NEW YORK — Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire are a musical duo that has found great success over a decades-long career. From Baby to Closer Than Ever, their shows have delighted audiences, bringing tears and laughs to adoring fans who love their smart, witty, heartbreaking words and music.
Now Maltby and Shire are back with About Time, a revue that runs through April 5 at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater near Central Park West in Manhattan. The show is a series of vignettes about life and loss, humor and humility, aging and appreciation, all featuring a stellar cast of theater luminaries, consisting of Allyson Kaye Daniel, Darius de Haas, Daniel Jenkins, Eddie Korbich, Sally Wilfert, Lynne Wintersteller, Ethan Paulini and Nicole Powell.
“It’s kind of magical actually,” Maltby said in a recent Zoom interview. “To be writing a new show at this point in our life and to have the audience go nuts, it is kind of a dream come true. … They’re laughing, and they’re so moved. They come out with tears in their eyes, and they thank me and all that. And I’ve just got to tell you, it feels really good.”
Wintersteller, who plays several characters throughout the evening, has known the songwriting duo for more than four decades. She previously performed in Closer Than Ever and Baby, and she absolutely loves their creative output.
“I just love how they both write,” Wintersteller said. “They write for actresses and actors. To me — if you eat red meat, I don’t — but it’s like filet mignon for an actor where you sink your teeth into the arc of stories. It’s just there. It’s on the page. If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage, so Richard and David have a beautiful way of writing psychologically … how the character feels and all the mixed emotions that are inside of them. For an actress, it’s challenging to play bittersweet, especially the song that I have of ‘No One Will Know,’ about a woman who had an affair and can’t tell anyone. It’s all the mixed emotions inside of her all these years. [She] has a loving marriage and relationship, all healthy and normal, but that little past moment in her life meant something. And she can’t tell anyone. It’s intriguing to approach a song that way.”
“No One Will Know” is a particular highlight of About Time, and Maltby, who wrote the lyrics and directs the production, loves how Wintersteller brings the tune to life.
“It’s almost an instinctual thing will happen where you’ll just go, I don’t know why I relate to this woman, but I do,” she said.
Maltby added: “The one wonderful thing about Lynne and that particular song is she just got it. She just understood this woman immediately.”
Wintersteller added: “And I would say, ‘Do I feel shame?’ Because I would feel shame over having an affair, and then Richard looked at me and said, ‘No.’ Richard is so delightful to work with because not only did he write the words, he also is open to the interpretation of them. So he says, ‘No, not really. This woman, she did enjoy it, but it’s a secret more than a feeling of shame.’ So we would discuss it on those levels.”
Maltby said the process of working with Wintersteller was thrilling; they both agreed that this secret in the character’s life was significant, and that she gathered both joy and pain from the experience.
“I think everybody has some thing that happened in their life that they keep secret, could be something really embarrassing or something really humiliating or something really joyous or something really wonderful that they can’t share with anybody because they can’t,” the songwriter said. “When they depart this world, that story is going to go away, and no one is ever going to know. That’s the sort of thing that life is made up of, things that are contradictory, two things that are true at the same time that contradict each other. You utterly get it. Both sides, the joy and the sense of loss and the complexity of it. It’s something that David and I love to do, which is a complex emotion that nobody has ever expressed in a song before. I don’t think anyone has ever said this in a song.”
For Wintersteller, the challenge of bringing a song like “No One Will Know” to life is to learn the tune internally and then bring it out externally at each performance. For the actor, one technique she uses is to rely on the words on the page and keep repeating them over and over again. Eventually she “gets it.”
“One of the reasons why the audience is moved by the song is because they all know it’s true,” Maltby said. “They know personally that this is a story that they understand. That’s true of basically everything in the show. The audience brings their own life to the stories, and what moves them is not necessarily only what the show is doing but also the connection that they’re making. We’ve got some kind of mystical connection going on with the audience. They are moved in ways that we can’t ever know.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
About Time, by Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire, continues through April 5 at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater in Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
