INTERVIEW: Gordon Greenberg checks back in to ‘Holiday Inn’
Photo: Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn stars Nicholas Rodriguez and Ann Harada. Photo courtesy of Jerry Dalia / Provided by Richard Hillman PR with permission.
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, the Christmas-infused celebration of a memorable American songbook, wowed audiences a few years ago on Broadway, and now it’s back in the tri-state area with a remounting at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. Featuring many classic Berlin songs, including “Cheek to Cheek” and “White Christmas,” the candy-cane-coated musical is the brainchild of Gordon Greenberg, director and co-book writer with Chad Hodge.
Performances are now running through Dec. 30 in New Jersey.
Paper Mill Playhouse has been involved from the project’s infancy, Greenberg said in a recent phone interview. “We did the first ever workshop in New York about four years ago,” he said. “Laura Benanti played the lead. She’s a Paper Mill alum and a dear friend of the project, and [producing artistic director Mark S. Hoebee and associate artistic director Patrick Parker] were there in the audience. So from the beginning, I said, ‘This is going to be a perfect show for you,’ and they agreed. We had considered at one point starting it there before New York, but paths just seemed to work out the way they do. So once it landed on Broadway, they immediately said, ‘We want to do it next,’ and I couldn’t be more thrilled to come back to Paper Mill with this show.”
Greenberg is an accomplished creator in the theatrical world. Besides helming Holiday Inn on Broadway, he was also responsible for an acclaimed West End revival of Guys and Dolls, the Old Globe’s The Heart of Rock & Roll and Barnum at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, long other productions.
Holiday Inn is one of his most successful shows, and he is excited to see it across the river from New York City in New Jersey.
“The interesting thing is I approach the show anew every time and only as a last resort go back to ‘what did we do last time,'” he said. “It can still be improved upon, and this cast, I will say, in many ways makes great strides and delivers altogether new qualities of warmth and kindness and spirit and heart that I am incredibly delighted by.”
The cast at the Paper Mill includes Paige Faure (Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella), Jordan Gelber (Sunday in the Park With George), Ann Harada (Avenue Q) and Jeff Kready (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder). They will be singing Berlin’s songs, including “Easter Parade” and “Steppin’ Out With My Baby,” and also giving life to Greenberg and Hodge’s book.
For Greenberg, the process of writing that book was an interesting one.
“You start with an outline like anything else and have to build the frame of a new house,” Greenberg said. “It’s like you’re sketching up the plans, so that is really the longest and painstaking process because you’re a structural engineer. Particularly in a musical, the book is what holds it all together, and if it’s really good, it’s invisible. And you’ll notice on any new musical, the book always gets beat up because it’s so easy to pull that apart, but really all you’re seeing is the tiny bits of what’s exposed. The bulk of your work as a book writer is creating a framework for a musical that will take the audience on a journey, that will be a satisfying narrative structure and that will leave places for music to do its job.”
Greenberg and Hodge spent the better part of a year working on Holiday Inn. Sometimes their work was accomplished in remote locations because Hodge was shooting a TV show in Vancouver, and Greenberg was busy in London’s West End.
“We kind of would just meet up wherever we could and spend a few days and brainstorm and throw index cards around and dig through old songs,” he said. “I would write a scene or two. [Hodge] would rewrite them and send them back to me with another one. Then I would rewrite his and send them back to him. For every draft, it was kind of advancing two more drafts because you had two pairs of eyes looking at it.”
Although Holiday Inn is based on a Universal movie, the source material serves as simple inspiration and not strict dogma. Greenberg and company did not feel boxed in by the iconic Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire film; they wanted their adaptation of that timeless classic to be similar but not a scene-for-scene remake.
“We wanted to be true to the spirit and the feel of the original and what people would remember from that film more than the literal film itself,” he said. “There’s so much in it that with time is no longer resonant and also a lot of it that doesn’t translate to the stage, so really when you’re looking at any film, you’re looking for the DNA of it and then trying to translate that into a whole new medium and figure out what’s a theatrical way of putting that on stage.”
And now that inspiration is playing in New Jersey for a special holiday engagement, a perfect time of year to experience Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn.
“I love working at Paper Mill,” Greenberg said. “This is my, I don’t know, seventh show there, so I am thrilled to come back and to be a Paper Mill family member. I’m enormously fond of Mark and Patrick and their friends and collaborators. It feels wonderful to make this show again amongst such kind and talented people.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, directed by Gordon Greenberg, is now playing at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. Performances run through Dec. 30. Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Book by Greenberg and Chad Hodge. Music direction by Shawn Gough. Choregraphy by Denis Jones. Starring Paige Faure, Jordan Gelber, Ann Harada, Jeff Kready, Hayley Podschun, Nicholas Rodriguez, Jian Harrell and Aidan Alberto. Click here for more information and tickets.
