Fourteen years ago this summer, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Robert Lopez thought his career might be over before it had started.
The first public reading of “Avenue Q,” the musical he’d created with Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty, had gone very badly. So, in his cabin on the restful, bucolic grounds of the famous theater writers’ retreat, he pulled an all-nighter.
“I took it apart,” he recalled in a phone chat last week. “I put it back together.” And he was happy to find that someone else staying at the O’Neill that summer was eager to help him: a lyricist friend named Kristen Anderson.
“Bobby’s whole life was depending on that reading,” she recalls in the same phone conversation. “And I was like, ‘I know what we have to do.’ It was our first big collaboration.”
Not only did a restructured “Avenue Q” go on to win a Tony Award for best musical, Robert and Kristen went on to collaborate on the songs for “Frozen” (including the ubiquitous “Let It Go”), several other Disney projects and the musical “Up Here.”
Oh, and two daughters. “It was that night, after that reading, that I knew I would marry Kristen,” the composer says. She reveals that she sensed it, too, and fully expected him to propose at one of the “Avenue Q” readings, where “it would be this great theater love story moment. But he didn’t.” The couple married in 2003.
Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez are being honored July 23 at the O’Neill’s 2016 Summer Gala, held in the center’s Sunken Garden. They are also featured performers at the event, which also features Patti Murin (from Broadway’s “Lysistrata Jones” and Goodspeed Musicals’ “Holiday Inn”), “Avenue Q” puppet designer Rick Lyon, Hamden-born UConn alum Jennifer Barnhart (from the original Broadway cast of “Avenue Q”), Andrew Rannells (the original Elder Price in “Book of Mormon,” currently on Broadway in “Hamilton”) and Betsy Wolfe (Broadway’s “Bullets Over Broadway,” off-Broadway’s “The Last Five Years”). Murin and Wolfe will reportedly play Anna and Elsa, respectively, in the forthcoming stage adaptation of “Frozen.”
Anderson-Lopez says that she and her husband work together pretty much the same way they did back at that seminal moonlit “Avenue Q” confab. “Bobby comes to me for big-picture stuff. He’s very good with the details.” Lopez adds that “We talk a lot. Sometimes you get completely swamped in your own show. It’s good to hear from someone who’s outside of it.”
“If you’d told us at that ‘Avenue Q’ reading,” Lopez says, “that we’d be back there doing a concert of our work together…”
The O’Neill was not just an important place for the couple when they were beginning their careers; they continue to use it as a valuable resource. Anderson-Lopez has work-shopped her current project, the a cappella musical “In Transit,” there. “Avenue Q” turns not to have been her only experience completely restructuring a show in a matter of hours. Anderson-Lopez has popularized the use of an ecstatic Dickensian phrase to describe that transformative process: “The ghosts have done it all in one night.”
Conducive To Collaboration
To demonstrate their enduring admiration for the O’Neill and a half-century of dedication to the development of new works for American theater, the Lopezes had a new grand piano installed in one of the workspaces.
“At the O’Neill, you’re completely protected,” Lopez says. “You’re there to work on your show. If you want to try the one-act version of your two-act musical, they encourage that. The audience is not a friendly audience where it’s all friends and family, yet it’s also not one that will tear your show apart.”
The composer (whose notable credits without his wife include “Book of Mormon”) also waxes eloquent about the “the feng shui of the grounds, the expanse of the lawn.”
They praise the leadership of Paulette Haupt, director of the National Music Theater Conference at the O’Neill. “She’s really embraced the offbeat and the quirky,” Lopez says. Anderson-Lopez adds that “when I said I had this a cappella musical, everybody else said, ‘What?!’ and she said, ‘Sounds cool’.”
“Avenue Q” became one of the most famous quirky projects to come out of the O’Neill. “The O’Neill Center is no stranger to puppets,” Lopez clarifies — it holds the annual National Puppetry Conference every summer in addition to National Music Theater Conference, National Playwrights Conference, Cabaret & Performance Conference and National Critics Institute.
“It’s the kind of artistic retreat that doesn’t exist in this day and age,” Anderson-Lopez says. “It’s basically the equivalent of summer camp, with collaborators on hand 24 hours a day.”
It’s conducive to their other collaborations as well. “Any time we stay there longer than five days, I end up getting pregnant,” Anderson-Lopez says. [“Next to Normal” and “If/Then” composer] Tom Kitt and his wife have the same problem.”
THE EUGENE O’NEILL THEATER CENTER’S “Summer Gala — Celebrating the Music of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez,” with performances by Lopez and Anderson-Lopez, Patti Murin, Rick Lyon, Jennifer Barnhart, Andrew Rannells and Betsy Wolfe, will be Saturday, July 23, in the Sunken Garden space on the center’s grounds at 305 Great Neck Road, Waterford. Cocktails are at 6 p.m., followed by dinner catered by Ivy’s Homemade and the concert. Elegant attire required. Tickets range from $250 for a “Patron” seat to $10,000 for a 10-seat “Sponsor Table.” Information: 860-443-5378, ext. 285. theoneill.org.
