From Danson to Denzel
A fangirl reflects on 40 years of interviews in the arts community
“This is just like coming home to me. I feel so comfortable here, and it’s like seeing old friends and reconnecting from when we were filming here.”
Denzel Washington
It’s been more than 40 years since I arrived from New York City to seek adventures with the oldest newspaper west of the Alleghenies.
I became the first woman in sports at the PG in 1980, mere days after the Miracle on Ice. The guys who did paste-up — yes, paste up — still marked Features pages “WOMENS,” and called them things like “Jams & Jellies.”
After spending most of the ‘90s as an editor, a return to writing brought me back to the people who make the magic happen. As Tony-winner Renee Elise Goldsberry, the “Hamilton” star who got her start at CMU and Pittsburgh CLO, said, “The love of the arts in Pittsburgh. Well!” No argument here.
As I leave the Post-Gazette after this week, at a time when the arts, and live performance in particular, are in the midst of reinventing and restoring their essential roles in our lives, I feel that it’s time to do some reflecting and reinventing of my own.
“Live your truth” — isn’t that what you always say, Billy Porter? I never took for granted the responsibility of covering Pittsburgh’s arts community, and I was privileged for the life-altering experiences it afforded me.
Writing for the Post-Gazette, I have learned to “Walk Like a Man” with the touring cast of “Jersey Boys” (I wasn’t very good; I blame nerves) and fangirled with comic book illustrator Alex Ross at his Warhol Museum exhibition. Favorite moments have included George Takei sharing his happy days living in Pittsburgh (who knew?) and watching quietly as composer Stephen Flaherty coached then CMU drama students John Clay III and Arica Jackson on the “Ragtime” duet “Wheels of a Dream. Both have gone on to Broadway.
So many voices echo from events and interviews past. Here are just a few from four decades on the beat:
• Mel Brooks, 94, was touting the musical “Young Frankenstein” in 2010. The tour was coming to the Benedum Center, which had been the debut venue for the tour of “The Producers.” “I was certainly there,” he said by phone, “and Pittsburgh was very good to us. And there are three rivers; it’s a little scary. One river is enough for any city.”
• Director-producer Hal Prince was not keen on “Phantom of the Opera” heading into high schools or Hollywood names on Broadway marquees: “You’re talking to a guy who’s been around for close to 60 years, who really wants people to make theater their life’s work, [people who] so appreciate a success that they want to stay with it. Ethel Merman would stay with a show for years and tour with it. So would Mary Martin, the great stars. They recognized the value of that success and nurtured it.”
• William Shatner, now 89, chatting last year, before his Steel City Con appearance: What’s the craziest place you’ve ever been recognized? “An American television program wanted me to go out to near Iran, to photograph a black panther at night. And we’re sitting in a little tin hut on the Caspian Sea having chicken shawarma, and waaay in the back of this tin hut, by the kitchen, on a tiny black-and-white set, ‘Star Trek’ is playing. And the waiters
were dressed up, for some reason, in those big Russian black bear hats. … can you picture this big furry hat and the red tunic? The waiters were like in shabby Russian uniforms, and the guy leaned over and pointed at me and said, ‘Captain Kirk,’ in a Russian accent. And I fell into the chicken.” Still gives me chills
• Neil Gaiman wielding words like a paintbrush, on genre labels such as horror-fantasy writer: “I think partly that’s just how my head goes. If you put me and John Grisham and Stephen King in front of a deserted boathouse by a lake, Grisham would write about a brave young lawyer who was fleeing the mob and who would hide in that boathouse, and Stephen King would write about the thing in the lake that came out of the lake and ate the people in the boathouse, and I would write about how the boathouse got up on chicken legs and walked away into the woods. That’s just who we are and that’s what we write.”
• At the New York press premiere of “The Hobbit,” with the core cast seated on a dais, I asked a question about Peter Jackson’s “franchise,” and Sir Ian McKellen cried out, “These films are not a franchise!,” as if that was the most horrible thing one could call the “Lord of the Rings” movies. Later, interviewing the film’s Thorin Oakenshield, Richard Armitage, he looked up “franchise” to see why it had so riled his costar. Since it is to acquire or license the rights to a property (such as Tolkien’s books) in order to sell a product, we decided his point was that I had negated Jackson’s achievements. What I remember is: Gandalf yelled at me!
• Denzel Washington, visiting the August Wilson House, to bestow millions to rebuilding the playwright’s childhood home as a Hill District community hub: “I love August Wilson. He touches my soul in a way that no one else ever has,” the actor said. “This is just like coming home to me. I feel so comfortable here, and it’s like seeing old friends and reconnecting from when we were filming here. And so I thank you in advance for keeping him alive.”
• In 2011, Chris Hemsworth was 27 and still doing phone interviews to promote “Thor.” He had bulked up his 6-foot-3 frame to play the Norse god, and director Kenneth Branagh would tell him not to worry about ripping his costume during action scenes. “Well, even Ken said in post-production they had to use CGI to do some costume-mending.“Hemsworth had high praise for his love interest and “Black Swan” Oscar-winner Natalie Portman. ”They were vastly different roles. [Laughs.] I’m sure she was glad to stop dancing for a while.”
• Not a quote, but a moment for all time: Billy Porter left Broadway to come to his hometown in 2015 and star in the tour of “Kinky Boots.” He was already a Tony winner (and a future Emmy winner for “Pose”) when he sang the
“Cheers” is why I am talking to you today and why in a few hours I will be Dr. Danson. Everything is because of “Cheers.”
Ted Danson
Boots.” He was already a Tony winner (and a future Emmy winner for “Pose”) when he sang the secondact showstopper, “Hold Me in Your Heart.” The hometown Benedum audience gave him an in-show standing ovation the likes of which I have never seen before or since.
• Jeff Goldblum, who came home to West Homestead as a jazz performer in 2019, about discovering he wanted to be an actor when he got the lead in a play at the Chatham Music & Art Camp: “I wrote in the steam from the shower that night, ‘Please, God, let me be an actor.’ ”
• Stephen Chbosky of Upper St. Clair, on the reallife references in his second novel, “Imaginary Friend”: “I talk about the Fort Pitt Tunnel, I talk about the Steelers. … I’m like James Joyce with Dublin. I will always, always write about Pittsburgh.”
• This one came on the ice of the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, as the Penguins celebrated their Stanley Cup victory in 2009. The visitors beat the Red Wings, and the Pens got time to celebrate on the ice, before the media was unleashed. I ran-slid to get a quote from the hero of the game, Max Talbot, who said: “This was as big as it gets; the best day of my life.” That’s it, but deadline made.
• Sigourney Weaver and James Cameron, the main attractions In the “Avatar” media room at San Diego Comic-Con International in July 2009. “I think it is the kind of movie that changes the way movies are made,” Weaver said. Cameron, asked to make a “Titanic”- “Avatar” comparison: “I suppose you can compare their box-office performance. ‘Titanic’ was an anomaly in the sense that it somehow keyed in to global emotions in such a way that it made a ridiculous amount of money.” (“Avatar” and “Titanic” are 2-3 on the all-time list.)
• In the media room where it happened with Hugh Jackman and Co. from “X-Men: The Last Stand,” during New York City round-table interviews. On channeling Wolverine’s “berserker rage,” Jackman said: “I train every morning when I’m doing the role, and really, if you ever saw me in there, you’d be a little frightened and think, “That’s not Hugh.’ I turn up Godsmack or Metallica and I’m screaming and yelling and I’m swearing like there’s no tomorrow and lifting weights as though I’m at that breaking point, because you have to feel he’s at that point, at any point he can snap and go berserk.”
A CMU super 6
• Tony-winner Leslie Odom Jr., “Hamilton’s” Aaron Burr, on finding your space: “Until you have a moment like this, like I am so lucky to be having now, it’s like I saw my friends Josh Gad and Rory O’Malley have [in ‘Book of Mormon’]. A Josh Gad space was made that only he could fill, and he did, and now that space exists — it’s like, ‘What did we ever do without it?’
• Josh Gad, before “Frozen” et al., on being prepared by CMU for his Tonynominated turn in “The Book of Mormon”: “If you can understand the most difficult texts from Shakespeare to Chekhov, then the other stuff comes easily. And that’s the foundation that they give us.”
• Patrick Wilson, who made his directing debut at CMU in “The Full Monty,” the musical that gave him a Tony nomination: “I said, ‘It’s not called “The Half Monty.” I’m sorry. It’s “The Full Monty,” and that’s what we’re doing.”
• Jamie deRoy, seventime Tony-winner from Squirrel Hill, on what a typical day is like for a Broadway producer: “I don’t think I’ve had a typical day in my life.”
• Ted Danson, back at CMU to receive an honorary doctorate, looking back at “Cheers” 25 years after the sitcom’s finale: “‘Cheers’ is why I am talking to you today and why in a few hours I will be Dr. Danson. Everything is because of ‘Cheers.’”
• Rob Marshall, the Oscar-nominated director, on “Mary Poppins Returns”: “I was guided by the idea of sending a message of hope out into the world right now … That is the reason I start the film with a lamp light. It’s about looking for the light in a darker time.”
One more for the road
• Marvin Hamlisch on his legacy of music: “The truth of the matter is as a composer, you hope you’re going to leave something behind, besides the American Express bill. So that makes you feel you’ve succeeded on some level, to at least have some sort of a legacy. I always say, you go into the elevator, you hear your music, you have to be perfectly happy.”