I started transcribing John’s pronouncements verbatim after this unbelievable doozy, just to make sure I heard what I heard.
Stephen Maddock, CEO of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, who manages to insert the word Gesamtkunstwerk into all his conversations, lets the man I love John Wilson have a go at not only Leonard Bernstein, but his excellent wife Felicia with a near antisemitic remark. Above: The entire audio of John’s chat.
My bonny John at 7:55: “The music is of such importance it actually unlocks some of the questions as to what people are meant to be doing and thinking on stage. I’ve done West Side Story a lo’, I’ve done a few complete productions of it and whenever you are unsure of how to turn something dramatically you look in the score and the subito or the hairpin will actually give you the direction of what’s happening on the stage in every bar.”
John honey, there are these things musicals have called books…
And at 5:45: “He was writing these musicals to make some money… Because, you know, he had a wife and she wanted to live in a certain amount of style and he wanted, uh, some kind of security and…between 1943 with Oklahoma and 1965, 68, you have a fifteen-year period [sic] when there was greaaat money to be made on the Broadway stage, and he made no secret about it, you know… He wrote Wonderful Town in three weeks because he wanted to cash in…”
John pet, we will have to have a talk over a bot’le a’Broon one of these days, won’t we?
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