STEVE CUDEN INTERVIEWS TONY AWARD-WINNING BROADWAY PRODUCER JAMIE DEROY

ANNOUNCER:

This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire, so join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden:

Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the steel city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. StoryBeat episodes are available at storybeat.net and on all major podcast apps and platforms. If you like this episode, please take a moment to leave us a rating or review. And please, won’t you describe to StoryBeat wherever you listen to podcast. My guest today, Jamie deRoy, is a show business tour de force. Not only is Jamie a prolific Tony Award winning producer on Broadway and beyond, she’s also a cabaret, stage, film and TV performer, a recording artist and producer and humanitarian. Jamie started out as a singer, opening for many comics including Norm Crosby, Robert Klein and Joan Rivers. She morphed into a musical comedy performer and the talk show host of Cabaret Beat and then Jamie deRoy and Friends, which has been on the air for 30 years.

She’s produced 10 CDs, appeared on TV and in many films, most notably, Good Fellows; Raging Bull, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Alice, Spider-Man and Knight Rider. In 1995, she produced her first Off Broadway show and has been co-producing on and off Broadway ever since. Jamie’s 55 plus Broadway productions have been nominated for more than 30 Tony Awards, of which she’s won seven, for the Ferryman, Angels in America, The Band’s Visit, Once On This Island, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, and The Norman Conquests. Jamie’s also won numerous Drama Desk, Outer Critic Circle, Broadway World Audience Choice, Drama League, MAC, Backstage Bistro and Telly Awards.

As of this recording Jamie is currently nominated for four Tony Awards for this abbreviated 2019, 2020 Broadway season, for best musical for Tina – The Tina Turner Musical, for best play revival for Frankie and Johnny; and for best play, for both The Inheritance and Slave Play. A few of Jamie’s other Broadway credits include Network, that starred one of my favorite StoryBeat guests, Bryan Cranston, Company, To Kill A Mockingbird, Three Tall Women, Latin History for Morons, The Play That Goes Wrong, Bright Star, American Psycho, China Doll with Al Pacino, Fiddler on the Roof, The Adams Family, Ragtime, Blithe Spirit with Angela Lansbury, Thurgood and many more.

Jamie’s more than 40 Off-Broadway productions include The Confession of Lily Dare, Pride and Prejudice, Othello: The Remix. Not That Jewish and The Lion. Among Jamie’s stage appearances are The Threepenny Opera with Rene Auberjonois and The Drunkard, with a musical director named Barry Manilow. So for all those exceptional reasons and many, many more, I’m deeply honored to welcome fellow Allderdice High School alum, the native Pittsburgh powerhouse, better known as Jamie deRoy to StoryBeat today. Jamie, welcome to the show.

Jamie deRoy:

Well, thank you. And everybody of course from Pittsburgh knew me as Jamie Gruber.

Steve Cuden:

Jamie Gruber. Well, but you’re now known as Jamie deRoy, that’s for sure. All right, so let’s go back to the beginning. When did all of this passion for theater begin, when you were a small child?

Jamie deRoy:

Oh yeah.

Steve Cuden:

Did it come from your mom? Where did it come from?

Jamie deRoy:

I don’t think it came from my mother, but I don’t know where it came from. I just remember when I was quite young, I would be in every little school, wherever I was in school, and dancing school. I remember my aunt giving me a little pink pinot set, which was a little pink nightgown. There was a little pink robe that went over it and it had ruffles on the top, and my mother took it and put all of these rhinestones and sequins little appliques and stuff. She decorated it because I had gotten a role in the Princess and the Pea. I can’t even remember where it was, but it must have been like a dancing school, something, like a little recital. She dressed up my little pinot set and I loved it of course. I was pretty little. It just snowballed from there. I mean, anything that I could get into in Pittsburgh that had anything to do with performing or dancing or whatever, I did.

Steve Cuden:

Well, curiously enough, the high school musical in Allderdice, was Once Upon a Mattress.

Jamie deRoy:

Oh, that’s pretty funny. Well, I remember when my brother was … It must have been graduating from the Linden grade school-

Steve Cuden:

Grade school, sure.

Jamie deRoy:

… that he played the Mad Hatter in the Alice and Wonderland show they were doing, so I got cast as one of the little dancers. I got to dress up and everything. It was always fun. I mean, maybe it was the dress up that sort of encouraged me. I’m not 100% sure.

Steve Cuden:

But you were attracted to the glamor of it and the lights and the glitz and all that. That was all very interesting.

Jamie deRoy:

Oh, totally. And then, somehow … Well, I kind of know how … there was a friend of my parents by the name of Jimmy Winokur. He was contacting all his friends I guess, and roughly the year was roughly 1954, a little bit before, because I think it opened in 1954. He raised money for Harold Prince for The Pajama Game.

Steve Cuden:

Really?

Jamie deRoy:

So my father and most of his friends put in about $1,000 into The Pajama Game, and later on, it was probably in maybe ’55 or so, he took me to New York, both my parents took me to New York, to see Pajama Game. Harold Prince arranged that we could go backstage, so I met Janis Page and John Raitt and Eddie Foy, Jr. It was just like, “Oh my God.” I was already smitten with the theater, but that was really the theater. That was Broadway. That was it. And I knew-

Steve Cuden:

That was the true limelight. That was the big deal.

Jamie deRoy:

Oh, my God, that was the creme de le creme. I mean, what we had was community theater and I was already wanting to do this. But then when you see the real thing, and you see Broadway singers and dancers, and in those days, there was a dance chorus and a singing chorus. Now you have to do both. But in those days, they were almost separated. But anyway, just to go backstage, which, it’s enough to be in front of seeing them on stage, but then to go backstage and see it from the other side and meet the real stars, I mean, there was no going back at that time. My parents knew that there was no changing my mind after that.

Steve Cuden:

Well, the same for me. As soon as that, whatever this thing is, this theater bug got into my blood system, that was it. It’s never gone away. It’s always been in there.

Jamie deRoy:

It’s amazing. It’s something that you can’t put your finger on. It’s very hard to explain it and it’s even harder to explain now that we are missing all this theater, this live theater that nobody can experience. Because experiencing it on Zoom doesn’t begin to describe the feeling that you have if you’re sitting in the theater among other people watching a show.

Steve Cuden:

Not at all. Not at all. It’s a totally different experience on a screen than it is live with humans and the smells of the crowd and everything else. There’s just no substitute for it. I think once it is in your system, and you can’t get it out of your system, it’s what you must do. I think most everybody that I know who’s been involved in the theater for their career and their lives, that’s the same for them as well. They can’t wash it out.

Jamie deRoy:

And even if somebody later on changes a career path, it never leaves them.

Steve Cuden:

Correct.

Jamie deRoy:

I truly believe that maybe they saw, “Hey, I really have to make a living that I can depend on.” The biggest problem with being an actor, is that you have to depend on a lot of other people wanting you for that role. The director could want you, but then somebody else nixes you or whatever. I mean, it takes so many people to make that final decision. When I came to New York and I started … I mean, my first show was The Drunkard, my first actual show. But I went to that audition, because it was on my way to a dinner date. I hate to admit that. But I read Backstage in Showbiz and all that and I saw about this audition for The Drunkard at the 13th Street Theater, and I was like, “Oh, well I have to go to the Village anyway, to meet my fiend for dinner, I might as well go a little early and stop and audition for this.” Never thinking that I could actually end up with a job and that’s what happened.

Steve Cuden:

You’re saying it was an audition of convenience?

Jamie deRoy:

Totally. I mean, I have a feeling that if that audition had been Uptown, I might not have gone. I could be very lazy in those days. So yeah, it was on my way. It was 13th Street is kind of at the top of the Village, and I had to go to Greenwich Village, it was really literally on the way and I stopped in there. No one was more surprised than myself when I got the job. That is how I met Barry Manilow, way back then, because he was our musical director. He played the show Off-Broadway and he did all the incidental musical for the show Off-Broadway and on the road. Then when I came back from the road and I went back to the Off-Broadway production, which was only at that point, I think, playing on weekends. So it was great for me, because it freed me up for the rest of the time, but I still got to be performing.

Jamie deRoy:

But I had a relationship with Barry, and when I started with working with him as my musical director, just working on stuff, we didn’t even know what we were working on specifically. We were just working on songs and just stuff. One day I walked into a rehearsal, he was living in the Village at the time, and I think maybe East, a little bit East. It was definitely not West Village. Anyway, I walk into a rehearsal, and he’s sitting there with Adrienne Arzt, who became later Adrienne Arzt Anderson. But Adrienne Arzt, I knew from college, from Carnegie Tech, which is now CMU.

Jamie deRoy:

I didn’t know they knew each other, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is so cool you know each other.” She said, “Can we ask you a favor?” I’m like, “Sure, what?” She said, “Do you mind if you start a little bit late? We would love to play you a song with just wrote.” I said, “Okay.” And they played me Could It Be Magic? I mean, I just sat there with my mouth open, like, “Oh my God, this is so fantastic.” And you know, Barry playing the piano and then singing, I melted. It was just incredible. In those days, if I was looking to be a manager, I would have signed him on the spot.

Steve Cuden:

Well, you would have done very well, had you done so.

Jamie deRoy:

I definitely would have done very well. Better than I’m doing on my own.

Steve Cuden:

I’m curious, I want to stick with Pittsburgh for half a second before we move on to New York, and that is this, your mom is a very highly regarded and very well-known artist, sculptor, painter, photographer, Aaronel deRoy Gruber. I’m just curious, growing up in a house that was filled with art and an artist, did living with her influence who you became? Did she give you any kind of pointers as to how to be in the arts?

Jamie deRoy:

Well, no. And I don’t think she particularly knew how to be in the end of the arts that I wanted to be in. But what happened was that when she was young, her early days, and probably early days of marriage too, she took a job, I think, at one point of being a window dresser. I think her mother talked her out of art school in those early days. She went to Margaret Morrison at CMU. My younger brother was quite young. I was still at Linden, and she went back to art school. Her mothering, for me it didn’t matter because I was getting a little older, but my brother was pretty young. But I loved to watch her success. The teacher was Sam Rosenberg, and the first painting that she did was bought by a restaurant called, not The Edge. The Edge was something else. They bought this painting and it was one of her earliest paintings. She started winning awards right off the bat and everything. So, it was just a very interesting time to watch her success.

Jamie deRoy:

I remember being taken out of school. I was at Linden, just for the afternoon, but just to be driven to her art studio, because it was a photo shot for one of the Pittsburgh papers doing an article on her. It was my younger brother and myself. I don’t know where my older brother was, because he was probably in high school. He went to Allderdice too. But maybe he just couldn’t get out, or he was a big tennis player, maybe he had a game. I can’t remember why he wasn’t taken with us to her studio, because it was just me and Terry. But, I just relished in her success always. But she learned, I guess, early on, even though that she was told that you can’t go to art school, that she kept pursuing her dream even through her marriage and even though she never really maybe came out and said, “Don’t ever listen to people if they say no,” I learned it from her by just picking it up. Because she’d been told no, and she still did it.

Steve Cuden:

And I would imagine that has held you in great stead throughout a career in show business which is filled with the word no.

Jamie deRoy:

Totally.

Steve Cuden:

So, you have to be able to see past the negatives in order to get anything accomplished, because rarely is it just a green light all the way.

Jamie deRoy:

Well, exactly. The thing is, that in so many instances told you can’t do that. I had a friend that was a headhunter for, at the time, Ashley-Famous Agency. No, I’m sorry, he wasn’t a headhunter for them. He was a headhunter for the person who owned it. Why do I think the name was Steve Ross? But it wasn’t Steve Ross, the Steve Ross that I know today. But he owned a limousine company. So my friend was the headhunter and he said to me, “I could probably get you an audition for Ashley-Famous.” So I was sent to Ashley-Famous, I believe by a man by the name of … It wasn’t Steve Ross who later died.

Steve Cuden:

Used to be at Warner Bros., that Steve Ross? Is that the one you mean?

Jamie deRoy:

Yeah, they owned funeral parlors and limousines. So then he figured out that the limousines weren’t busy at night, because the funerals weren’t at night. Then he took all those limousines and he put them to work at night. I mean, he was a genius. He really was.

Steve Cuden:

I think that is Steve Ross from Warner Bros.

Jamie deRoy:

Is it the same person?

Steve Cuden:

I think that’s the same guy.

Jamie deRoy:

He bought this Ashley-Famous, it became ICM, International Creative Management. I got an audition for them, but I wanted to audition for Broadway, but they wouldn’t see me for theater, only for nightclubs. I was pretty naive, I was like, “Well, I just want to audition as a singer, so what do I care where I sing?” It did lead me in a direction I wasn’t maybe totally meant to be in, but it was still fun. I still would have preferred to have gone the Broadway route. I wish they would have seen me for Broadway, but they said, “Oh, they have no room in the Broadway roster. But there’s room in nightclubs.” So I audition, I’m taken into this office and this guy opens a newspaper and he’s pointing to all these clubs in the Catskills, The Nevele, the Fallsview, the Concord. I mean, there were zillions of them up there, and they all advertised at the time.

Jamie deRoy:

He said, “We want to put you to work in the Catskills. I’m going to start you off in New Jersey, just to try you act out. Then I’m booking you into The Living Room.” Which was a really, really great night club on 2nd Avenue and 49th Street, at the time. I knew it, because I went to it. I would see Arthur Prysock there and Felicia Sanders. You didn’t even have to know who was playing that night, you just went. You knew you were going to see somebody great. So anyway, he said, “How many charts do you have?” For how big of an orchestra. I knew what charts were. I knew I didn’t have them. But I knew that I could get them. So, I said, “Well, how many do I need?” He said, “Well, we like for eight.” Then he said, “We can always build on that from there. You can always add more from there.” It might be a trio, it might be five, it might be seven, it might be eight. I said, “Okay.”

Jamie deRoy:

I left that meeting, I went home, because we didn’t have cell phones to call anybody immediately in those days, and I called Barry Manilow and I told him what happened, and I said, “I need charts.” And he said, “No problem. All these songs we’ve been working on, we’re going to put them into an act for you and I’m going to make arrangements and we’re going to get you an act.” So he called his friend Bill English to help with doing some of the arrangements and the copying and whatnot, so that I could have charts that I could get to work as soon as possible.

Steve Cuden:

Wow. I imagine there are not too many people in the world who can say that their early arrangements and charts were made by Barry Manilow, of all people. That’s pretty astonishing.

Jamie deRoy:

Well, I look back at one of the songs that I used to do, the Days of the Waltz, which became later for me a parody, my French parody, but it had three verses and each one went up a half a step, which he really did so much in his career with so many of his songs.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, a lot of his songs. They modulate up that third and it always works brilliantly. So even though you were pushed down this road toward cabaret, what was stopping you from going down the Broadway route? What prevented you from doing that?

Jamie deRoy:

Well one, I didn’t have the agent to get me in those auditions.

Steve Cuden:

I see.

Jamie deRoy:

I really didn’t like open calls. I went on a few, but they were horrible. I mean, because it’s what they referred to in those days as cattle calls. But also, the nightclub business kept me so busy, that it was almost hard to branch off.

Steve Cuden:

You obviously started to develop a reputation for being a cabaret performer, so were you working the circuit?

Jamie deRoy:

Well, it was a different circuit then. We didn’t think of anything as a cabaret. We thought of everything as a nightclub.

Steve Cuden:

Nightclub, sure.

Jamie deRoy:

And all the nightclubs that I played, I got paid. I mean, when the cabaret business came into the way we know it today, they started doing more of working for the door or a percentage of the door, even worse. But all these little cabarets had not started to open yet.

Steve Cuden:

Was the Holiday House, which was a Pittsburgh nightclub institution, was that around at that time?

Jamie deRoy:

Oh, it was definitely around at that time. And that was a big nightclub.

Steve Cuden:

Did you work the Holiday House?

Jamie deRoy:

That was a major nightclub.

Steve Cuden:

Sure it was.

Jamie deRoy:

I never played the Holiday House, but I went to the Holiday House a lot and saw many, many acts.

Steve Cuden:

I’ll tell you a quick sad story. Very weird sidebar. When I was about five years old, my parents took me and my brother to see the Three Stooges at the Holiday House. I got in line. They put me in a suit and tie and the whole nine yards. They got us in line. They bought an album that they had put out, the Three Stooges, and I got the autographs of all Three Stooges on this album, and my mother later threw it away.

Jamie deRoy:

You’re kidding.

Steve Cuden:

Unh-uh, I’m not kidding.

Jamie deRoy:

Oh my God.

Steve Cuden:

To her way of thinking it was a big waste of time, the Three Stooges.

Jamie deRoy:

So that’s a shame.

Steve Cuden:

It is a shame. But it’s a true story. It was like I got to meet the Three Stooges when I was a little boy, at the Holiday House.

Jamie deRoy:

Anybody would have wanted to meet the Three Stooges, little or grown.

Steve Cuden:

Of course. All right, so how did your cabaret life, your nightclub life, how did that eventually lead you toward producing things, or did it not? Were they disconnected or were they connected in some way?

Jamie deRoy:

I think everything in my life and probably in most people’s lives is connected and you don’t realize it maybe at the time. But, I mean, so I started doing all these nightclubs and working in the mountains and going around the country opening for comics. I was not allowed to be funny. I was what in those days they called a girl singer opening for a comedian. And there were very few women comedians in those days. Very, very few.

Steve Cuden:

Would you have done comedy if they would have let you? Would you have had a comedy act?

Jamie deRoy:

Well, I mean, there were times that I ended up saying something funny. I didn’t think of myself as a comedian. But I’d get in trouble for saying something funny, because somebody basically said something from the audience and I answered them and it was funny. I wasn’t standing up there telling jokes. I just did a line that people laughed at that was a quick retort, and I literally got in trouble for it. I ended up getting married and divorced, in about a four year time frame, I guess at the time. My husband at the time was very jealous and it was just easier to not work, than to work and go through his jealous rages.

Steve Cuden:

Interesting.

Jamie deRoy:

So when I got divorced, after a while, I was like, “This is ridiculous.” I actually had run into Barry Manilow at … Well, I didn’t run into him. I guess I did run into him. I went down to buy my husband a present in a snow storm, and it was in the East 20s where Barry was living at the time. He was right next to an antique shop and I knew that he was next to an antique shop, because of all my rehearsals with him were next to the antique shop. I went to get my husband this present that I had my eye on for him and the shop was closed because of the snow storm.

Jamie deRoy:

But Barry, was getting ready to do Carnegie Hall with Bette Midler. She gave him three or four songs in the middle of the show, so she could change her clothes. He said to me, “If you want to come, it’s sold out but, you just go back stage, my manger will walk you in. You may have to stand, if you can’t find a seat. If there’s a seat take it, but you may have to stand in the back of Carnegie Hall, but at least you get to see the show, and I’m doing three songs.” One of which, by the way was Could It Be Magic, which he had premiered for me.

Steve Cuden:

Yes, indeed.

Jamie deRoy:

So, I was like, “Of course I’d like to be there.” I’m so excited that I got home and the first thing I say is, “Oh my God, I ran into Barry Manilow and he invited me to his concert with Bette Midler and we can go. We might have to stand,” all of us. It just started the biggest fight. He accused me of having an affair with Barry. I mean, it just was ridiculous, which was the beginning of, well one of the many things that said to me, “I have to get out of this marriage.” But at the time, I was like, “Well, you know what, if you don’t want to go, your partner’s wife was on the subway when I came home and I told her and she wants to go. So you don’t have to go with me. I’m taking her. Fuck you.” So anyway I went. Of course, it was just a magical, magical evening.

Steve Cuden:

I bet. I bet.

Jamie deRoy:

Oh my God. And to walk backstage at Carnegie Hall was even more exciting than if we had had tickets and walked in the front door.

Steve Cuden:

This was as Bette Midler was starting to explode correct?

Jamie deRoy:

Yeah, I mean, it was before ’75. Bette was really taking off. I mean, what had happened also was that when I played The Living Room. He had an act at that time called Barry and Jeanie. And he had just played The Living Room. He said, “I need a rest, so I’m just going to put you with another piano player. I’m going to do all the charts and everything, but you play the gig with this guy Joel Mofsenson, who I played with. Then he got busier and busier with Bette. So Bette was really on her way to super-stardom and she was just great. Now I had gone to see Bette at a place called Hillies, way before she ever got Carnegie Hall, because my agent was asked to come and see her. And thought she was great but didn’t know what to do with her. I thought she was amazing, but I wasn’t an agent or a manager. You know what I mean?

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Jamie deRoy:

So luckily she had a lot of very smart people, and she was very smart, around her, guiding her and I think they did a good job.

Steve Cuden:

I’d say they did a fairly good job. Yeah. All right, I want to turn our attention to producing, which is what your forte is. At least it has been for quite some time. People generally, I think, don’t think of producers as being creative types. They think of them as being more money and technical and so on. But being a producer is a very creative enterprise, is it not?

Jamie deRoy:

Well, it is, but to be honest, most of the kind of stuff that I get involved with, or I’m asked to be involved with, the other people are handling more of the creative than I am, because I came on board … I mean the first thing I did produce was the Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged.) My producing partner Jeffry Richards, who I met when I moved into this new apartment, which is not so new anymore. But he invited me to see this one night show at Alice Tully Hall, Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) from London. It was by the Reduced Shakespeare Company. I went, I loved it. The next day, I got a call, “How’d you like it?”

Jamie deRoy:

I thought he just sent me because he knew I had a good sense of humor and I was a good laugher. I said, “I loved it.” He said, “How would you like to produce it?” And I said, “What does that take?” And he said, “You’d have to raise money.” I said, “Jeffry, I’ve never raised money.” Now he had never raised money either, by the way. He was a very well-known press agent. He got his friend Richard Gross and myself and the three of us raised money for Shakespeare (Abridged.) That was my very, very first outing. I probably had more creative input in that than anything and I still didn’t have that much creative input, because it was done in London and it came over with the guys who did it in London. They replaced themselves and it kept running in London.

Jamie deRoy:

But when you get involved in a Broadway production, now as a co-producer, you can go to meetings and you can put your two cents in, whether they listen to you or not is a whole other story. But you learn a lot, so it’s great for people that are looking to do other things on their own down the line. But I always say to people, if you’re looking to get involved in producing on Broadway, you have to either start small and be the big-wig, so that you’re the creative force, on a smaller project. Do not start on Broadway. That’s suicide.

Steve Cuden:

Well sure.

Jamie deRoy:

So you start small in a big role on a small project, or you start in a small role in a big project. And you take on being a co-producer and raising the money and sitting in on the meetings, so that you listen and learn. To me that’s the best way. But lately, I haven’t really wanted to take on that major, major role of being the lead producer. I do it in that sense of my own cabaret shows because they’re all variety shows and yes, I am the creative force on all my Jamie deRoy and Friends variety shows and all my TV shows. But for the Broadway and Off-Broadway projects, for the most part, I don’t have that much say. I have recommended people to take over a role and they got the role. I can’t put them in the role, but I was responsible for helping somebody get a replacement role in The Play That Goes Wrong.

Jamie deRoy:

So there’re little things that you can do, but that’s not the major creative. Those are the people that really get involved years and years before. I would have loved to have been in that role in a show that my friends Barry Kleinbort and Joseph Thalken wrote called Was. Had it moved, had it kept on the trajectory that it was, and the show was called Was, but it was really on a great trajectory. They did act one for Lincoln Center, and Danny Burstein was in it. They loved it so much that they said, “Go back and finish it and we will present both acts.”

Jamie deRoy:

Then I think when it came back the second time, with both acts, I think it was Howard McGillin in that role of Frank L. Baum, and it was really, it was based on a book that the stories took place 100 years apart. Frank L. Baum writing about the Wizard of Oz, but really about what happened to her years later and she ends up in an institution. And then 100 years down the line, where somebody is dying of AIDS and is sort of researching this whole story. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful piece with some gorgeous songs. The song Time is from there. And a lot of people have recorded Time. Polly Bergen sang it in her nightclub act. Howard McGillin recorded it. Rebecca Luca recorded it for me. I think Thomas Hampton recorded it. So many people have recorded this song. It’s very special. But it’s somewhat of a dark musical, so it’s a harder thing to get off the ground.

Steve Cuden:

Hard sell, because people-

Jamie deRoy:

But that was one that I was willing to go on the line for.

Steve Cuden:

So I just want to be clear. You tend to get involved later in a show’s progression, not in the early development stages?

Jamie deRoy:

For now, yes.

Steve Cuden:

Gotcha.

Jamie deRoy:

And if somebody comes to me early on, I will try to help them to places where they can help develop it or a producer that can help develop it. Sometimes they just ask me for some ideas for casting, whatever. But I don’t have the time at the moment, and haven’t to get totally emersed in all of that. I would have hated to have been a lead producer this season with all that happened with the pandemic.

Steve Cuden:

Oh horrible.

Jamie deRoy:

The one thing you must really realize about being a lead producer, you have a huge liability. There’s so much responsibility that comes along with it was a devastating year. I mean, I was involved with a lot of projects that were either in previews or running and doing really well. This was probably, if the pandemic hadn’t happened, it was maybe one of my best years ever. Certainly for me, one of the most exciting. Then everything just came to a big halt.

Steve Cuden:

Crashing halt. There’s no question. Things do come your way, one way or another, and either you’re a conduit for people to move in other directions, or you help them as things have progressed to get it over the finish line. I’m just curious, what is it about stories that attract you. What is it that you’re attracted to? What are you thinking when something comes your way? Are you purely looking for how it will work out financially, or are you considering the art part of it, or what do you consider when you’re looking at new work? What makes a show attractive to you?

Jamie deRoy:

Well, I would say both. But I remember when I was asked about getting involved with Thurgood, which I didn’t get to see Westport Country Playhouse, with James Earl Jones, but he left the project to do another project and they ended up with Laurence Fishburne. I was told by the lead producer, of which there was only really this one person, that it was a project that you had to do out of love, because we’d be very lucky if we could get 50% of our money back. So, knowing that, I can’t go to an investor and say, “Hey, you want to get involved in a Broadway project that if you’re lucky you’ll get half your money back?” I couldn’t do that. But I can do it myself with my own money, because I believe in it. And I believed in Thurgood, because it was a one-person show.

Jamie deRoy:

I mean, Laurence Fishburne is amazing on his own and a just incredible actor. But it was a story that needed to be told about Thurgood Marshall, who became the first black Supreme Court Justice. I wanted to make sure that people got to see that. It also ended up getting taped and shown on HBO, which was even more exciting. We ended up getting 60% of our money back, so I did 10% better than I thought. But I just did not want to ask an investor.

Steve Cuden:

And you don’t need to give me any actual numbers, I’m just curious, what would you say the percentage of shows that get put up, and not just yours, but all Broadway shows, that actually make their money back? What is the percentage of that?

Jamie deRoy:

I don’t know exactly what the percentage is, but unfortunately it’s not a high percentage.

Steve Cuden:

No.

Jamie deRoy:

But there’s an expression, you can’t make a living, but you can make a killing on Broadway.

Steve Cuden:

Yes, absolutely.

Jamie deRoy:

There are shows that just make so much money and run year after year after year after year, not that I’ve been in so many of those, but there are, and everybody’s always hoping for that. It’s a funny business. If you get your money back, when you’ve invested on Broadway, you feel like you’re a winner. Then the minute you go into profit, it’s like, “Oh my God, we’re in profit.” But then there’re those shows that are paying a fortune. If you were lucky enough to be an investor in Phantom of the Opera or Mama Mia, or Off-Broadway shows, Stomp, Blue Man Group, those kind of things. I mean, there’s just a lot of really great shows out there that have made tons of money.

Steve Cuden:

Hamilton.

Jamie deRoy:

Well, Hamilton, being probably the most recent of the blockbusters. Oh, Wicked, which didn’t even get great reviews, but a huge money maker.

Steve Cuden:

Huge.

Jamie deRoy:

So we’re always hoping for those kinds of successes. There’re certain things you can look at and you say, “Okay, maybe it’s not the most artistic show, but because it has so much appeal to the general audience and the tourist audience, that it should make money.” I had a couple of those going this year, which were like TINA – The Tina Turner Musical and Ain’t Too Proud, which was the story of the Temptations. I mean, these were real crowd pleasers. And Company was in previews, which didn’t even get to open before the pandemic and that’s a crowd pleaser. Now there are other shows that I got involved with. I got involved with Slave Play and Hangman and the Inheritance, all great plays. Did any of them have a shot at making a ton of money? Maybe if they could get licensed all over the country, yes. But on Broadway, probably not.

Steve Cuden:

They’re not really going to be touring shows.

Jamie deRoy:

And Inheritance, it was two parts and each part was very long, so that was a deterrent. And yet, it was the most moving play I’ve probably ever seen, particularly part one.

Steve Cuden:

Really? Most plays do not wind up in a bus and truck situation. That’s a secondary licensing situation that makes them money.

Jamie deRoy:

Exactly. In the old days, stars would play on Broadway and then they would tour the play on the road. But they don’t do that anymore.

Steve Cuden:

Right, it’s all musicals that’s on the road, right?

Jamie deRoy:

Right. For the most part. I mean, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike that won the Tony Award, the year that it was on, that had a zillion licenses to just do it wherever. A show, which was not a Broadway show, but it was an Off-Broadway show, which I wasn’t involved with, but I saw it early on and I saw it with Peter Riegert and Bruce McGill. We sat there and think, “Well, this would be a great thing to produce.” But none of us were producers at the time. Because it was four guys, you didn’t have to be a star, you just learned the songs and the harmony and anybody could do it. Luckily they got a great producer to do it and it got licenses everywhere and it was a huge money maker.

Steve Cuden:

All right, so what then, and this is a kind of an open ended and hard question to answer for most people, what is it about material that makes something good? What makes a good story good for you? What do you see sometimes and you go, “I have to get involved in this?” How does that work?

Jamie deRoy:

Well everything is different, because there’s no one show. I mean, Coram Boy was quite serious, it had come from London. I knew about it. They sang, at the end of it, they had a 30 piece choir that sang the Alleluia chorus. It was so moving, but it was a tough story. The Inheritance was an epic and very, very moving.

Steve Cuden:

So it’s got to hit you in the gut, doesn’t it? It’s got to be something that just really speaks to you some way.

Jamie deRoy:

Yeah, I mean, Slave Play was, I had already done one Jeremy O. Harris play called Daddy, with Alan Cumming. So I knew he was a real up and coming playwright. He’s nominated this year for a Tony Award for his play. Listen, if he doesn’t win this year, he’s going to win. He’s got quite a career ahead of him. He’s a young mover and shaker. The day I met him at the meet and greet for Daddy, he was larger than life, dressed in a crazy Gucci outfit that had been given to him by Gucci. I mean, I think he was one of these trend setters before we even knew what any of these influencers were. Influencers today, probably mean as much as a good review.

Steve Cuden:

Well, that’s our social media of influences. Influencers are sort of powerhouses now.

Jamie deRoy:

Right.

Steve Cuden:

What would you say is the most important thing that you do as a producer or important things? What is it that you have to focus on and concentrate on that’s a huge part of what you do in terms of, is it the raising of money? Is it holding hands? I mean, what are the most important things that you have to do?

Jamie deRoy:

Well, the raising of the money is the first thing that you have to do-

Steve Cuden:

And critical.

Jamie deRoy:

… because you’re not going to get your co-producer title unless you can come up with whatever it is that they’ve set out for you to fulfill. Every production is different. You can’t just say, “Oh, it takes this much money.” Because a play will have one thing, a musical will have another thing. The next season a play could have less, have more. Musical, less, more. I mean, some producers don’t want any co-producers. They’re some producers that don’t want to give out co-producer credits. The thing with co-producer credits is, it’s almost like a little pyramid scheme, because those co-producers are getting all their friends to go see the productions, because they have a vested interest in it and they have a love of it that nobody else can relay but them, and it really does help sales.

Jamie deRoy:

But look, Hamilton had three main producers. They didn’t have any co-producers. They didn’t need that. There are some plays that need it and some that don’t. It’s just something that I don’t exactly know when it happened, but they kind of started bringing on larger investors, let’s say, and giving them a co-producer title. I don’t know if it started with woman in white or way before that. I know in Say Goodnight, Gracie, there was an amount that if you came up with that amount, you would get this co-producer title.

Steve Cuden:

That was the Frank Gorshin?

Jamie deRoy:

Frank Gorshin played George Burns. Now I went to see that very early on. My friend Rupert Holmes, who usually writes musicals and writes great songs, in addition to musicals, he wrote the play and I said to him, “God, I wish I could be a producer on this.” He goes, “I didn’t ask you there for that reason. I never would do that to a friend. I just wanted you to see it.” I said, “You don’t understand, I loved it. I wished I could be a producer.” So I ended up as an associate producer on that project. But, I loved that play. Loved it.

Steve Cuden:

Would you say that the multiple producers that have happened over time on Broadway, where there were many producers on shows, do you think that that’s an influence of Hollywood, or is it just purely a financial problem?

Jamie deRoy:

I don’t know if it came from Hollywood or it just was an easier or faster way to raise money, because every year, it costs more and more and more money to produce a play on Broadway or a musical. So listen, you look back in 1954 when my father put up $1,000 for Pajama Game, or the next year another $1,000 for Damn Yankees. Those productions, they weren’t that big of a deal to produce. Now everything is in the millions and those millions go up every year. No investor in the early days, ever got a title as a co-producer. They were referred to as angels.

Steve Cuden:

Angels, sure.

Jamie deRoy:

They were almost anonymous, unless somebody decided that they were going to put a paragraph in a program and thanking their angels. But most angels didn’t want their names out there, because they didn’t want everybody hitting on them. I will tell you this, once your name is above the title, or even below the title, whether it’s a co-producer or associate producer, your name’s in a playbill, you can bet that the next person to come along is going to be sending you an invitation to come to a reading or an opportunity to invest.

Steve Cuden:

How many of those do you get a year? How many invitations?

Jamie deRoy:

Many, many, many, many.

Steve Cuden:

Many, many, many. How many plays and librettos do you read a year?

Jamie deRoy:

I prefer to see a reading if I can. The one play that I couldn’t see a reading of, and I had to read it, was Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Motherfucker with the Hat. I read that and laughed out loud. I mean, it was hysterical. But in many cases, when you read a play, it doesn’t necessarily translate to when you’re reading it, until you can see it. I remember reading an A.R. Gurney play called Indian Blood, which I was asked to get involved with at primary stages. I read it and I was like, I don’t know what to make of it. I asked my director friend Barry Kleinbort, he was kind of familiar with it, I think because a mutual friend of ours was in it. He was sort of leaning me towards doing it. I spoke to Casey Childs who ran the theater and said, “What should I do, because I’m not getting it when I read it.” He sort of encouraged me to do it. I’ve done a bunch of Gurney plays with primary stages and I’ve never been disappointed.

Jamie deRoy:

Just because it was Pete Gurney, I thought, “You know what, I’m going to do this anyway.” It was Pete Gurney, it was Primary Stages, it had a really good cast. I went to the invited dress, which is the night before first preview when they allow usually, especially in an Off-Broadway situation, a handful of people into the house. Not like a Broadway invited dress where it’s almost full. Anyway, I went and it was hysterical. They didn’t even use props, everything was pantomime. It was totally hysterical and I sat there and went, “I made the right decision.” Now, I went to the invited dress of Coram Boy, which was a serious play. I sat there in tears. I brought a few friends with me to the dress rehearsal and I turned to the and I said, “I think this possibly could be the most important piece of theater that I may ever be involved with.” It spoke to me so much and affected me so much. Then the reviews came out and you would have thought that we’d committed crimes against humanity.

Jamie deRoy:

And the Inheritance, in the recent things of, things that I think were major important things to be presented, were like Coram Boy, Thurgood and the most recent one Inheritance. I was sitting there at the end of act one, unaware that men were walking down the aisle and onto the stage. But something came over me and people that I had lost to AIDS came right in …. I mean, I almost saw them. It was so, I don’t even know how to describe it. It was so moving. Then I started realizing there were men, it wasn’t figment of my imagination, but my imagination was I put faces to those men. People like Clovis Ruffin or Bob Harrington or the zillions of people that I lost over those years to this horrendous disease.

Jamie deRoy:

I was just crying uncontrollably. I was with a girlfriend, I had Kleenex in my purse. I knew if I was crying that any minute she’d be going and I reached into my purse and handed her Kleenex, because I knew she was going to need it. That production was supposed to wrap up on the Sunday after the pandemic started. It was scheduled to close that day. Of course, it closed the Thursday before. But I mean, every major, I mean Hillary Clinton came, Pete Buttigieg came when he was running. It was such a moving, moving production, that I will never regret being involved with it, because it was so great.

Steve Cuden:

Well, that’s probably the single thing that makes it so very worthwhile for you to do, to do what you do as a producer. So that you can come out with works that do move people in that way, I assume.

Jamie deRoy:

Exactly.

Steve Cuden:

I’m just curious about casting. Clearly shows don’t work without great casting, one way or another. How important is great casting versus star casting, is it critical in some way?

Jamie deRoy:

Wow. It’s almost like it brings a different kind of an audience sometimes, because star casting, they’re coming to see the star and not necessarily the play. But that can be a good thing too. When P. Diddy was in a play on Broadway-

Steve Cuden:

A Raisin in the Sun.

Jamie deRoy:

A Raisin in the Sun, which takes me back to my youth. It brought a whole new audience into the theater. That is a good thing. So sometimes star casting, it brings in an audience. Then if they leave, it’s sometimes harder to replace them, because people are used to the star. In the old days, Broadway made the stars. We didn’t put stars in a role. Janis Paige wasn’t a star when she went into Pajama Game, it made her a star.

Steve Cuden:

Ethel Merman.

Jamie deRoy:

Melba Moore wasn’t a star in Purlie, it made her a star.

Steve Cuden:

Well, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, they weren’t stars before they were stars on Broadway.

Jamie deRoy:

Right. I asked my dad, why did you invest in Pajama Game? Did you read a script or hear the music? “No, but the star for us was George Abbott who was the director.” He had a great reputation.

Steve Cuden:

Exactly. Well, there’s something to be said for great directors too. It’s pretty good to have great directors. Well, all those-

Jamie deRoy:

And a great director was responsible for bringing in all the right people. Casting all the right people and made it so special.

Steve Cuden:

I’ve long said that when a show works extremely well, it’s hard to tell which individual element is the thing that makes it work. But, when a show works poorly, you can sometimes point to exact things that don’t work. You can say the direction is terrible, the acting is terrible or something like that. But when a show really works, it’s hard to see what makes it work, because it’s just working.

Jamie deRoy:

Exactly. Well, I had a kind of day job once where I worked for a press agent. Well I first worked for a producer and then the press agent. But I think we started with the producer in sending out A Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which was the follow-up to A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s second play. That went on the road. We were sending it on the road. It wasn’t really done on Broadway. I don’t know if it was ever done on Broadway. I’m just trying to even remember.

Steve Cuden:

I don’t know.

Jamie deRoy:

But because they wrote sort of a follow-up, except it was a new playwright and everything else. There’s very few things that I’ve done in my … I think I’ve done over 60 Broadway shows that I’m not proud of as a play. But even it was, maybe the play wasn’t the greatest play, a performance was great or the actor was terrific. It was a special thing to just be able to somehow ride your coattails on a star’s coattails.

Steve Cuden:

I’m just curious if you have any sense at all as to what’s going to happen to the theater as we sort of come out of COVID? Is it going to explode at some point, where there’s going to be a ton of theater and you just can’t get to it all, because there’s too much at one time? What do you think is going to happen at the end of this real ugly period we’ve been in?

Jamie deRoy:

Well, I wish I knew, and when you ask people that I feel like, no more than me, they don’t know either. The only thing that most of us can surmise or guess, they’ve announced the theater can’t open until June 1st. I’m probably a little more pessimistic than that, that it would probably be either late summer, early fall. And who knows if everything will open then, because some of the shows that are very, very dependent on out of towners, the tourist, maybe they’ll come later. I don’t know, I mean, I think that what might happen on Broadway is that not all shows are going to start at 7:00 or 8:00. If you thought it was hard now to remember what your showtime was, because sometimes on a Tuesday and a Thursday, they would have been at 7:00, and some plays did 7:30, and most plays were at 8:00. If you didn’t have your ticket in hand, you had to make a phone call or look something up. Because you could miss the first act, or the first half hour.

Jamie deRoy:

So now, they may stagger the starting times. On 45th Street, there’s three theaters right next to each other. Rather than have all three of those theaters have exactly the same start time, they may stagger them to be 7:00, 7:30, 8:00 and you have to make sure which one you’re going to and what time. That’s what I think, and I don’t know. But I think because they’re trying to lessen the crowds on the street and in front of the theater, listen, who knows how long it’s going to be that when you go to the theater that you might still have to wear a mask. Or that you have to have your temperature taken. That’s going to be a problem if you have a group of four or six and one of the people in the party suddenly has a temperature and they’re not allowed in. I mean, I don’t know how you deal with that.

Steve Cuden:

Anybody that’s ever been to a Broadway show knows that a pretty significant number of shows let out at the exact same time, right around 10:35, 10:40, somewhere in there, and the streets are packed on a Friday night or a Saturday night. So you’re correct, they’re going to have to figure out a way to reduce the flow of traffic on the street. Or they run the risk of sickening-

Jamie deRoy:

So probably look at theaters at what time they should start. Maybe the shorter ones would start a little later so it allows for the three hour plays to start earlier and get out. I don’t know, however they’re going to work it out, it’s going to be something. I hope that we can get back to normal, obviously sooner, rather than later. There is nothing like being in the room. Nothing.

Steve Cuden:

Well, you’re correct, there’s nothing like being in the room. It is a unique and magical experience to go to a live show, and there’s no getting around it. Last couple of questions for you, Jamie. Do you have any particular story or more than one, one would be great, that you can think of in your whole career that was either weird, strange, quirky, offbeat or just plain funny, some kind of a story like that you can share?

Jamie deRoy:

Well, other than the ones I’ve already shared with you. And this has nothing to do with producing or anything. But, had I ever had anything ever worthy of getting on the Tonight Show for, I was told that this was my Johnny Carson story. I was told that by the booker of the Johnny Carson show at the time, because I was living in New York and a friend of my parents’ was going to be in L.A. when I was in L.A.. But at that point, I actually was in L.A. for one … I lived out there for a year. So I was living there, she had called me and said, “I’m coming to L.A. I’m staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, why don’t we meet for a drink.” I’m like, “Great.” I go to the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet her. I get to the door, I’m looking around and I don’t see here. But some people in the corner sort of wave me over.

Jamie deRoy:

Before I went over, I called her on the house phone and I said, “Some people invited me to join their table, so why don’t I just wait for you down there, if you’re running late.” I go to the table and I said, “Do you still want company?” And they’re like, “Sure, join us. Da, da, da.” I’m introduced to all these people that it was kind of an ever moving group. But some of the people in the group that stayed were Marty Erlichman, who was Barbara Streisand’s manager, to this day.

Steve Cuden:

Yes, indeed.

Jamie deRoy:

And Hilly Elkins, who was a producer. My friend came down stairs, she was probably drinking on the plane on her way out to L.A. She’s at the table continuing to drink, getting a little drunk and there were a couple of single guys at the table. She gets on the phone. She’s calling all her single friends in L.A. to try to fix them up, which didn’t really work, but she decides that she’s going to call her friend and complain about the room she was given, that she wants a different room, and she leaves me there. I go to dinner with them. We went to dinner on Sunset and Doheny, whatever restaurant was there at the time, because it’s been so many restaurants that I can’t remember.

Jamie deRoy:

At dinner, there’s a lot of whispering and they said, “Come with us, we’re going for a drink after.” I have no idea where we’re going. I figure we’re going to a club or something. So we go to a home that had a guard with a gun and an iron gate and a lot of cars in the driveway, which was a big driveway. So it could have been some sort of weird private club in the hills of Beverly Hills, I didn’t know L.A. that well. They ring the bell and Sammy Davis, Jr. answers the bell. I’m like, “Oh my God.” At this point, he says, “Come on, come downstairs because I’m going to be on the Tonight Show.” This was when Johnny Carson was still the Tonight Show. We go downstairs with his wife Altovise and we watch him on the Tonight Show. There weren’t a lot of us at this point, but it was still Hilly Elkins and Marty Erlichman and a few other people. We watch him on the Tonight Show, go upstairs after the show and we drink at his bar.

Jamie deRoy:

So now, I mean, I don’t know what time we left there. It was relatively late, but my car was still at the Beverly Hills Hotel, because I hadn’t driven it to the restaurant and from the restaurant we went straight to his house. I had to go back to get my car, so this guy says, “I’m going to take you back.” As I’m getting out of the car, in the driveway at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I said to him, “I cannot thank you enough for this evening. I started off with nothing to do and I end up at Sammy Davis, Jr.’s house. It was one of the best nights of my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He goes, “Well, we loved you, Sammy loved you, but I got to tell you, when we motioned like this, we weren’t motioning to you. We were motioning to the maitre de.” I literally fell out of the car onto the driveway of the hotel. I was like, “holy moly.” And still I ended up at Sammy Davis, Jr.’s and they’re still saying, “Who is this girl and why is she at our table?”

Steve Cuden:

Once again, you were an accidental tourist in the whole thing.

Jamie deRoy:

I totally was.

Steve Cuden:

That’s great.

Jamie deRoy:

That was my tonight story if I ever got a Tonight Show story.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, that was great. Last question, Jamie, do you have a solid piece of advice or a tip that you can lend to those that are starting out and maybe trying to find their way into the industry? Or maybe they’re in a little bit and are hoping to get to that next level.

Jamie deRoy:

Well, I think in every level of the industry, there’re different things that you need to do. If you’re an actor, you’ve got to act. If you can’t get in a Broadway show right away, you get into something. You get into a reading. You get into an Off-Broadway or even an Off-off-Broadway. Or a touring something, or community. You just have to do. And Hal Prince had said to me when I came to him for advice before I ever moved to New York, not that I took it, but he said, “Be a big fish in a little pond. Make a reputation for yourself, so that you’re already making waves so that people want to hire you.” I just was living in Pittsburgh, in my parents’ home, in college, I wanted to get out of the house. I came to New York maybe a little bit too soon, who knows? But you just have to do.

Jamie deRoy:

And I remember when I was asked to open for Joan Rivers, which already, I’m in the nightclub business. The pay was very, very little and I had to share it with my piano player. But I had a friend that was an APA at the time, Marty Klein, and I told him I was offered this job at the L.A. Improv opening for Joan Rivers, and when I got out to L.A., the actors went on strike, so I couldn’t get any auditions for what I intended to go out there for, which was to be a second banana on some TV show. It couldn’t happen. There was a big strike, and then another strike, and the threat of a third strike. I got this and he said to me, “You know, you’re never going to get discovered staying home.” It doesn’t matter about the money, because even if you got the whole paycheck, it still isn’t a lot of money. So you take it, you do it, you’re seen and one thing leads to another, which of course, it did.

Jamie deRoy:

And it also led to me opening for Joan in New York too, and many other things along the line that snowballed after that. I mean, even my producing was probably helped along the way, because I joined an organization called Manhattan Association of Cabarets and started doing things for them. And I gave birthday parties and had some of my friends entertain and that snowballed into, I decided to do Jamie deRoy and Friends as a show as opposed to just being me on stage for the whole hour, that I was going to bring friends to show their talents and share those friends with my friends, and try to expand everybody’s audience. It’s a whole snowball effect. If you’re wanting to produce or co-produce, work with somebody who’s already doing it at a higher level than you are. If you have to just help somebody raise money, or just work in somebody’s office, there’s more people that have started off as somebody’s assistant, that then went on to have very, very big careers.

Steve Cuden:

Well, I tell you what, that’s huge amounts of just very valuable advice. You just have to go do it, that’s the first thing. That’s really important. Then on top of it, if you don’t make those connections that then turn from one link into another link in this long chain of a career, it will break, you won’t be able to proceed. I think that’s just really terrifically valuable that it is one step leads to the other, and you’ve got to start somewhere and very few people start at the top. You’ve got to just start and go.

Jamie deRoy:

Well, I’ll tell you a great story of I was doing a TV show, probably the one I’m most proudest of called, Back Stage at the Sound of Music. My press agent, Peter Cromarty, at the time, was the press agent for this revival of Sound of Music with Rebecca Luker, it was what is now the Al Hirschfeld Theater, the Martin Beck Theater. He said, “I can get you backstage if you like, if you’d like to do some interviews.” So I had a friend, Rick McKay, this was before he ended up doing Broadway: The Golden Age, which was really morphed from another project that I worked on with him that Broadway: The Golden Age grew out of that.

Jamie deRoy:

Anyway, I asked him as a favor, would he come and film this with me, because it was a bigger approach than anything I’d done for my television shows. We went and we talked to everybody from the crew, to the cast, to the stage hands, to everybody, the child wrangler, the sound guy. A lot of this footage ended up in his movie. But, one of the people that I was interviewing was Rebecca Luker, who was the star. She was playing also with Michael Siberry, but she was the female star. She was in her skull cap, they had just put her microphone on and I always wanted to show that, because nobody understands how these microphones work. In her case it was this teeny little thing that was across the skull cap with a little thing at the top of her forehead, then on top of that the wig went on.

Jamie deRoy:

As she’s telling me all this and we’re filming, this incredible thing with the microphone, I said to her, “What are you going to be doing next?” She said, “Just a little R&R.” I knew that she was going to be leaving because they were bringing Richard Chamberlain into the show. Most producers don’t want to pay two big star’s salaries. I’m sure that they didn’t renew her contract, just because they didn’t want to pay another big salary that they could get someone for less. I said, “Well, who is taking over for you?” And she said, “My understudy.” I said, “Wow, that doesn’t happen too often, who’s your understudy?” She said, “Well, she’s playing a party guest and one of the nuns.” I wished her all the best, we come out of there, I said to Rick, “We’re going to go find this understudy.” It was Laura Benanti. She was in the chorus. She left school to be in the chorus of this show and her career from taking that leading role, replacing it, just skyrocketed from there.

Steve Cuden:

And that’s truly Broadway or Hollywood, whatever you want to call it. Show business, that’s the way it sometimes really works where somebody gets a huge break by being in the right place at the right time.

Jamie deRoy:

Well, Shirley MacLaine, it happened to Shirley MacLaine, where she was ready to hand in her notice. She was ready to hand it to them and they said, “You’re on.” She didn’t even have shoes. They had to spray paint her shoes. Carol Haney, had hurt her ankle or something. So yeah, it does happen, and then she went straight out to Hollywood, right after that one performance.

Steve Cuden:

Well, what’s that old saw that luck favors the prepared mind.

Jamie deRoy:

Exactly.

Steve Cuden:

So if you’re ready to go at that moment, that’s really a big deal, so you have to always be ready to go. Just fantastic advice. Jamie, this has been a spectacular hour plus. I can’t thank you enough for joining me on StoryBeat today to share all these great stories and all this marvelous wisdom. I’m just am truly grateful to you for being with me today.

Jamie deRoy:

Well, thank you. It’s been fun to talk to you. I hope if and when I get back to Pittsburgh, I get to actually see you in person.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, I would love to absolutely meet you in person, that would be fantastic. Let’s do that. Let’s just set that up and make that happen.

Jamie deRoy:

I try to go to the old haunts, most of which are gone.

Steve Cuden:

I know, so you can ride by and wave, but-

Jamie deRoy:

Do you know that I wanted to bring Klondikes to New York? I actually brought a pack of crispy Klondikes and plain Klondikes in dry ice to New York, called up this guy who had brought Sedutto ice cream to New York, he’d put it into the Bitter End Café, and I called him up. I said, “Billy,” … It was like having drugs in my … “I got the Klondikes.” He came over and he tasted them and he said, “This is amazing.” Then I called Bill Islay the next day and said, “I have a partner, we want to bring Klondikes to New York, because they’re my favorite snack.” He goes, “Well, we’ve been thinking of doing this ourselves, so I can’t let you have the franchise.” I was like, “No.”

Steve Cuden:

Well, they eventually went worldwide. You can get Klondikes-

Jamie deRoy:

Now they have all kinds of flavors. There we had two.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah, you had the crispy and the plain. That was it.

Jamie deRoy:

Exactly.

Steve Cuden:

Sure. And chip chopped ham, that was the other thing. Islay’s chip chopped ham.

Jamie deRoy:

Oh, the BBQ ham, it was those … And I hate ham, but I liked that. Don’t explain it, because I can’t but I love chipped ham with the BBQ sauce, and if you try to serve me ham today, I can’t eat it.

Steve Cuden:

Jamie, thank you so much for being on the show.

Jamie deRoy:

Thank you.

Steve Cuden:

So we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you liked this podcast, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening too. Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.