Pre-Show Ponders: Interview with Matthew Scott
The phenomenon of a crisis and rebirth at age 33 is known at the Jesus Year. For Matthew Scott’s father, this meant writing a letter to his four young sons about everything from communication to relationships to spirituality. The letters were found after his death when Scott was 13-years-old. The letters became Scott’s guide for life as he grew up and navigated his own life, including fatherhood, relationships, his career, and mental health struggles. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Scott began compiling these letters from his father into a production, intermixed with songs and stories about both his and his father’s life. The end result was a production called The Jesus Year: A Letter From my Dad.
Scott’s other credits include a successful Broadway career in productions such as Jersey Boys, Sondheim on Sondheim, and An American in Paris.
Note: Interview contains strong language that may be inappropriate for young readers
Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background.
Scott performing at 54 Below in New York City
Matthew Scott: So I grew up in New Jersey, the youngest of four boys, which kind of plays into what the show is about. I grew up just outside of the city and was constantly in and out of New York seeing performers and shows. At some point in the process, there was a lightbulb moment, and my parents were like “We think he might want to do this” and began nurturing that. I started taking voice lessons as a kid, but I was kind of odd in the sense that I loved older cabaret singers. I was like 13 years old at the Oak Room at the Algonquin and Cafe Carlyle, seeing people like Barbara Cook and Rosemary Clooney. So really where I started was just love and affinity for cabaret and performers like that. And then high school was when my desire to do theater got cemented. I come from a very athletic family and everyone played sports. So my freshman year of high school, I was playing sports and not doing the musical, which was something that, up until that point, I really enjoyed doing. I remember sitting there and just watching the show. From that point on, I started doing theater and started doing the shows more consistently.
I had fantastic teachers all my life, and I had a teacher who pointed me in the direction of colleges and helped me figure out what that process looked like because I knew nothing about it. It’s ironic now because I actually teach at two universities and I've run multiple college programs. I used to be the Director of Education for a not-for-profit organization. So it's sort of now become more of my bread and butter. I teach at NewYork University and the Manhattan School of Music, but at the time, I knew nothing about it. I knew nothing about pursuing a career in the arts or pursuing an education in the arts. The teacher pointed me in the direction of Carnegie Mellon, and I got in, which was crazy, because it’s an insanely competitive school to get into. All of these schools nowadays – I mean, I went to school over 20 years ago when I entered into that college program – all of those schools nowadays are virtually impossible to get into. So the reputations that they have today are that they’re very difficult. But yeah, I got into CMU and I went there and I met my wife there. We started dating when I was a senior and she was a freshman. We remained together and we've been together for over 20 years. We’ve been married for 14 years and we have two kids and we’re building this life together here in New York. We're both performers.
Scott in Legally Blonde
I got out of college and I started working. I made my Broadway debut in Jersey Boys. I did that for a couple of years on and off – I went in and out of the show a couple of times – and then I went into a handful of other shows like Sondheim on Sondheim. I did An American in Paris – my wife and I actually did that show together on tour. At some point, I was being approached about doing cabaret work. I had people coming to see me and they were like “You should do a show, you should put something together.” I never really bit because I had grown up seeing all these great cabaret artists with these wonderful point of views telling these wonderful stories. When everything had been presented to me, it was like “Come do a concert. You can do an evening of Cole Porter or you can do an evening of Rodgers and Hammerstein.” And I was like “But why? Why would I do that?” And they're like “I don't know, because people would come and hear it.” That didn't excite me. And then I had this idea that I've been sitting on for years – to do my own show – and I finally started writing it, and that's what's been kicking around for the past two years now. It was eventually developed into an album that was produced by PS Classics, and it's what we're bringing to Raleigh.
Can you walk me through a timeline of your career?
MS: I was either 24 or 25 when I made my Broadway debut in Jersey Boys, which was a big deal, being from New Jersey. It was the biggest hit on Broadway at the time. I was a swing in the original company, and that means that I essentially stood offstage in the dressing room, waiting to be called on to go on at any time. I understudied and covered nine roles in the show. I think at the time, that may have been more than any other swing, so I did go on all the time. I played Frankie Valli, I played two of the other Four Seasons hundreds of times, and all the other roles in the show, so I was “on” in that show all the time. I did that for a year and a half and then I left and did another show called The Catered Affair, which was written by Harvey Feirstein and had a really great cast. That show closed and I was asked to come back into Jersey Boys, which I did for another six months, this time onstage and in a role. And then I spent years creating roles in regional theaters and Off-Broadway and working with really amazing people and building up my resume. I was going from being a 25, 26, 27 year old kid in the ensemble on Broadway to then playing lead roles and creating new roles.
Shortly thereafter, a show called Sondheim on Sondheim was happening on Broadway. We knew it was going to be a retrospective of Stephen Sondheim's work, directed and conceived by his collaborator James Lapine, who wrote Into the Woods and Passion and Sunday in the Park with George – so heroes of mine. It was going to be a small cast of eight singers – four men and four women – and there was a one role available for a young male tenor. I went in and I auditioned and I got called back and I didn't hear anything, and I was certain I didn't get it. And then one day out of the blue, I found out I was going to be in a brand new musical with James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim and Barbara Cook – who, you know, I was the weird 14-year-old at her show in the Cafe Carlyle – and Vanessa Williams and Norm Lewis. I did that show and it was pretty transformative. It was the first time I got to record a cast album – actually by the same label that ended up recording my solo album 15 years later.
Scott in An American in Paris
From there, more work in regional theater. I took over for Brandon Uranowitz, who was the Tony nominee for An American in Paris. I took over once he left that show, and I closed that show on Broadway, and I took it on tour shortly thereafter around 2016. I was doing a play on the West End in London, a little two person play that I was brought over to do. Right before the pandemic, like right before, I had done a play called Grand Horizons, which was nominated for a Tony Award. I went back to standing by, which I had not done in years, because up to that point, I had been doing roles and creating roles, but mostly in musicals. So the opportunity for a brand new play that was being directed by Leigh Silverman and starring Jane Alexander – who was a four time Academy Award nominee – and James Cromwell, who's also a multiple Academy Award nominee, the opportunity to stand by in the show was a no brainer to me, even though it wasn't the work that I wanted to do. I wanted to be on stage creating roles. This was a new play, and it was different, so I did that.
And then the pandemic happened and we all kind of just hit pause and went to live with our families. During that time, my wife and I got pregnant with our first son. We came home – we had a home birth in our apartment in New York City. Sometime later, we went back, and this is all mid pandemic, so we're just home and living our lives as a family because there's no work. Nothing's happening. That's when I started writing the show and kind of refining it, and I did the first very first version of it back then. And then 10 months ago, we had our second baby boy, also born in homebirth in our apartment, and in that time, I've gotten to do the show multiple times and build up a following and bring it to several places around the country and record the album, which I'm really, really proud of.
You mentioned doing the tour of An American in Paris. I actually reviewed the show when it came to Washington DC. I pulled up the article, and your name is in it!
Scott (second from right) in Sondheim on Sondheim
MS: Amazing! That's so funny. So as you can see then, my wife was also in the show. I played Adam, the guy who narrates the show and plays the piano and has the limp who gets the funny lines. My wife played Milo, who was the wealthy heiress, and we had no interaction. We sang one duet onstage, which was perfect.
Looping back to your Jersey Boys experience, can you talk about the process of learning nine different tracks? That’s a lot of roles to keep straight and have to snap in and out of.
MS: It's honestly as simple as this: when you're young, you can do crazy shit. When you get older – and I said this to my students today, and I say this all the time to them – I talked to them about starting to build good habits when you're young when your brain is fertile and can latch onto them. The analogy I give is this: no 65 year old person who has never worked out a day in their life wakes up at 6am one morning and goes “I think I'll go to the gym.” They just don't do it – that's not how people are made. But when you're young, and you can process information, you have the ability to go “I'm going to start taking care of myself. I'm going to start meditating. I'm going to start cooking more for myself. I'm gonna start making more time for my friends.” When you're young and you can process that, you do those things, and then they become implemented in your life. Over time, you just start doing these things so that when you turn 65, going to the gym at 6am or running a few miles a couple of times a week isn't a big deal because you've been doing it since you're 20.
When I was 20 and in my 20s, it didn't seem as daunting to me to keep nine roles in my brain because that's what I had to do. I was so in love with what I was doing, I was so in love with the people that I was working with, and the fact that the show was so successful, I was itching to be on stage. So if it’s me and two other understudies, and I want to be called upon to be the person they put on, I'm gonna do my job really, really well. And so I did. Everyone did their jobs really well so it wasn't like a competitive thing. But you just have that fire when you get older. When you turn 42, like I am, even when you saw me doing An American in Paris, you're like “Oh, I think I'd like to play the guy who's funny but who doesn't have to do all the dancing and doesn't have to sing a lot. That sounds like a lot more fun to me.” You know what I mean? So you just kind of shift and your priorities shift and what you want shifts and how you go about getting what you want shifts. But yeah, at the time, I just loved doing the show so much. I was from New Jersey and all my family was coming to see it. At the height of Jersey Boys, every celebrity in the world came and saw that show. So it was very exciting to be onstage knowing that President Clinton was in the audience or Billy Crystal was in the audience or Steve Martin or Tom Hanks. You're just like “I want to be on stage.” Processing that, I was just young and hungry and I had the capacity to do it. It will be very difficult to do now. Really difficult.
Scott in My Fair Lady
What is the rehearsal and learning process for something like that?
MS: That's a good question. Basically, the process is to look at the person coming into the show. You say “Okay, we have to teach them basically the whole show from every perspective. So we're going to start with one part. What's the part that needs coverage the most?” I was hired because they needed a cover for Tommy DeVito. That was their number one priority, getting that up and running for Tommy DeVito, so that if anything happens with Christian Hoff and he has to go out, Matt’s ready to go on. We're going to say that's going to take two to three weeks to teach them that, between all the lines, dialogue, vocals, all that. We’ll teach them other things in the process – we’ll teach them some of the smaller ensemble tracks, we’ll teach them some of the choral vocals – but the focus is going to be just on Tommy DeVito. And then in time, once that's solid, and we do a run through with the cast, and things like that, we'll move on to other parts. And that's how you kind of chomp your way through it because you need to just prepare and you have to start somewhere. It's very different today, when people are going on all the time in the age of COVID and people are going on for roles that they don't even cover. So this might seem like such an obsolete thing when you're hearing all these crazy stories now about people going on for parts that they've never even read or or understudied. But that was my job: come in and start with that track.
I was in the show for less than a week when stage management called me. It was Friday night, and they said “Hey, it's possible that for tomorrow’s matinee, you'll be on for Michael, who plays Joe Pesci because he might be on for Frankie Valli. Someone else is going to be on for this guy, and somebody else is gonna be out for that guy, and we don't have a Joe Pesci. So go home and start to look at it.” Now, I've only been there for a week and I'd not rehearsed any of it professionally with anyone. I went home and I started looking at the script. Inevitably, they called me at 10am and said “You're coming in this morning, be here at 11.” I went in at 11, I had a music rehearsal, I went onto the stage, I had a dance rehearsal – dances that I had never learned. I had a stage manager walk me around and say “These are your spike marks where you deposit this chair in a pitch black transition. This is where you're supposed to be standing with the camera and the camera is live. So if you're not actually framing the actors, it's not going to appear on the screen above their heads. This is your blocking, this is your backstage traffic. Don't run into anyone and kill anyone.” That was at 11am and went to one o’clock. 1:30 was half hour, and two o'clock, I'm doing that track. I made my Broadway debut doing a track I’d never rehearsed. It was so exhilarating. It was so fun, so crazy. I'm one of the first people to come out on stage dancing to the opening of the thing. The music is pumping and I'm jumping up and down.
Backstage, the gentleman to my left was Peter Gregus, who was about to enter on stage with me. The curtain starts to rise and I look at him and go “Hey, I forgot to put my microphone on.” And then the curtain rose and I ducked under it and we started dancing on stage on Broadway. I made my entrance onto a Broadway stage for the first 15 minutes without a microphone. People were scrambling, and in the wings, they were waving their hands while they were whispering “Come over here, come over here.” I had to run off in a transition to do a full quick change and have somebody shove a microphone onto my head. I was beaming. I was smiling so big. I wasn't embarrassed, I wasn't nervous. I was like “This is awesome.” But totally without a microphone! And three days later, on a Wednesday, it happened all again with a totally different track. Come on in at 11am, learn the track, learn the music, learn the choreography, learn the spike marks, learn the backstage traffic, you’re on for the matinee. It was baptism by fire. I had an older actor friend who'd been in like 15 Broadway shows at that point say, because I told him what was happening, he was like “You're going to learn very soon if you're cut out to be a swing. You're gonna learn real soon.” And I called him and I was like “I think I've learned that in fact, I am cut out for this.”
So going in, those roles were mine to be covered, but when I went on for those two shows, I was only there for less than 10 days, so we had not yet touched on the other parts. They were like “You're going to start learning Tommy DeVito, then we'll move on to the other parts.” So the plan was not for me to learn it all at once and be ready at any given moment. The only reason I was on for those parts is because other people were sick and out. So the covers who normally would have been covering them first were already on stage covering other people. But it was a great way to be launched into it and then be like well there's no turning back. Nothing could be as crazy. Nothing will be as scary as this.
Scott (left) in Les Misérables
Of all of the Broadway shows and concerts and events that you've gotten to do, is there any one particular moment or experience that just really stands out?
MS: It's so funny, my wife and I are the same way in that we don't really talk about our stuff too much. We're both one of four. Nobody else in our family is a performer, and I think you kind of learned to stifle your excitement a bit. Not to be whatever, but a lot of people's lives are going to an office, same job, every day for 30 or 40 years. Sometimes I wish that were the case, but we get these different new adventures all the time. But our jobs also come from a lot of rejection and a lot of instability. So it's kind of twofold. We don't brag, because one, we're like “They're not gonna really care.” They're proud of us, and they love us and they come see us in all our things, but they don't know who the hell these people are that we're talking about or why we should be excited that we're in the room with them. And at the same time, when it's slow and when it’s unstable, it’s scary. It's really tough to talk about your work because you're like – we're in the middle of another strike right now –are we going to work again?
But I will say the biggest moment for me was being in Sondheim on Sondheim and being in the room with Sondheim and working with him and talking to him and riding an elevator with him getting notes from him and recording an original cast album. I have photos of him coming into the booth to give me notes. These are things that childhood me only ever dreamt about. Here I am doing this work and he knows my name and is changing lyrics for me, and that's the most surreal thing to have ever happened. I've also been in the room with amazing people – I've worked with Stephen Schwartz and Jason Robert Brown. I've worked with John Kander of Kander and Ebb. Fred passed away before I got to work with him, but I did a huge retrospective as a big concert you can find on PBS called First You Dream: The Music of Kander and Ebb. I did that with Heidi Blickenstaff and Norm Lewis and Kate Baldwin and a 22 piece orchestra. So I've known Kander for years. He’s 95 or 96, and he just opened a new Broadway show a couple of months ago. He's literally the kindest, gentlest man on the face of the planet, and I think, knowing that someone like that exists, who's been around for so long, who was the original rehearsal accompanist for the first production of Gypsy, and then became a Kennedy Center EGOT winning compose is just as the humblest, kindest, gentlest man on the planet. He’s a lovely supporter and has listened to my album and wrote me a gorgeous note. Just knowing stuff like that, I'm just still in shock that any part of that is my life.
What is one thing you cannot live without backstage?
MS: Honestly, just water. I'm just so used to water, water, water. And right now, I have two little boys and the petri dish in my house is just ugh. I have this terrible cold and I’m like “Oh, my God, I'm gonna get through these shows.” It could be anything from lozenges to water. But backstage, I'm pretty basic. I don't ever set up a crazy dressing room; I'm not the guy with a bowl of candy. It's all just need based for me. If it's the dead of winter, I'm probably going to steam and drink hot liquids. It's pretty much like show up, do your job and go home. I know some people basically move into the theater in their dressing room, like basically their second home, which seems like a lot of fun.
Scott in First You Dream: The Music of Kander and Ebb
How did you get involved with Theatre Raleigh?
MS: Lauren Kennedy Brady, who runs Theater Raleigh, and I worked together in 2003, and then again in 2004, somewhere in there. But we did a couple shows together at The Muny in St. Louis, which is the oldest outdoor theater in the nation – it's over 11,000 seats. So we did a couple shows together and just knew her when she was in New York and working as an actor and running in those same circles. She went home to Raleigh to start the theater company, and she's actually now married to somebody that went to college at CMU. So Charlie Brady and I were in college together. He was a couple years older, and I always loved Charlie – such a great, great guy. So Lauren just reached out. I think she was just starting the series, wanting to bring her Broadway friends in to do stuff and bring a little bit of something different to the area. She saw that I was doing the show and said “You want to come and do it?” It was basically as simple as that.
Tell me about the album and the show you’ll be doing here in Raleigh.
MS: The album is called The Jesus Year: A Letter From My Dad. This is the show that I've been talking about that I wrote in the middle of a pandemic. Most studio albums are just the songs. But this, it's not as much of a concert as it is like a real show, like a play. So the expanded part of that is that we have a lot of the dialogue and narrative on the album listed as tracks, and then that blends into the songs. A lot of songs are interrupted by dialogue, or interspersed with other things, so in order for people to have a full listening experience, we wanted to be able for people to click through and select a certain track, like “Oh, I love ‘You’re My Home’ by Billy Joel, and I want to listen to that.” But if I also want to listen to the setup to that song, which is about meeting my wife in college, and all of what that story entails, I can listen to that track beforehand. I can listen to the whole show so that it flows, or I can go back to it and just listen to songs that I like. So that's the expanded part of it that you wouldn't normally get with a traditional studio album, and that is the show that we're doing. It's about me.
I lost my dad when I was 13 years old, and I’m the youngest of four boys. The simple setup is that about six or eight months after he passed, my mother finally got around to cleaning up some of his personal effects, and she came across a series of letters that he had been writing to his sons that he had not told anyone about. It predated my birth by one year, and then I was added to the top of the list. It begins by him saying “Hi, I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing right now. I have no idea what prompted me, but I'm writing to you. I want to share with you some of the things that I've learned in life because I don't know when I'm going to die, and it's for certain that I'll never get to teach you everything I've ever dreamt of for you.” He then breaks the letter down and categorizes it into little bullet points with things like communication, sex, spirituality, relationships, work, money. He just writes to us over the course of several years, and again, he never told us. Us kids were a little at the time – I was very little – and then he maybe forgot at some point that they existed. Or maybe he always intended that they'd be discovered. They were and that's the foundation of the show – that I had this letter from the time I was 13. I had it with me in the highs and lows of my life. I referenced it and looked at it and read it and reread it again.
One late night I was staring at it, and I was fixated on the date at the very top of the letter. I came to realize that my father began writing it when he was around 33 years old, and at the time that I figured that out, I was also 33 and going through a really tough time. I just couldn't get over the fact that I was experiencing what he was experiencing at the same age. I started to do a little dive, and I came across this phenomenon called The Jesus Year, which is the 33rd year of life when Jesus died. I’m not a deeply religious person, but the 33rd year of life is a time when you’re reborn in some sense, or you go through ego death or you change your ways and you go through a major transitional period. And here I am struggling as a young man, not yet a father, and here my dad is 40 years ago, at that same age writing about “I'm having trouble at work, and sometimes you're going to feel like a failure in life and at work, and sometimes you're going to struggle in your marriage, and you've got to lean into the harder times because those are the times that are going to reveal the best stuff.” It was really wild, and I'm looking at this and realizing how much it's mirroring what I've gone through.
Scott in Company
Then some years later, it occurred to me that while these letters were written to me and my brothers, there was universal power and knowledge and healing in them. And if I can make it sing, I could find an entryway to bring people in, but also give them something that maybe was going to help them heal a little bit. My dad was super funny, and I knew that the one rule he'd have was “Don't make it maudlin, don't take it too seriously.” And while I do plenty of that, I really mainly invite the audience in with these great songs that I've handpicked. I tell them these stories about my dad, which ultimately become life lessons. Even though they're stories that are so specific to me, inevitably, I get people coming and sharing their stories with me at the end of the night. I'm realizing that as specific as I get about my life and story, it casts a much wider net. Even though I'm known for doing Broadway stuff, I grew up singing Billy Joel and Paul McCartney and Harry Chapin and Cat Stevens, things like that. So I decided I want to be the show to include songs that I would have been listening to on the radio at the time when I was a kid, or a song that I would have put on a mixtape to impress a girl, or a song that my mom and dad would have been listening to in the 60s when they were dating when they were just 13 years old. So those were the songs I landed on and that made their way into the show. They're so intertwined and naturally float in and out of stories that I often get people saying to me “Did you write those songs?” and I'm like “No, that's Cat Stevens, that's Harry Chapin, that’s Paul McCartney.” I sing Cat Stevens’ “Oh Very Young,” which a lot of people know, but the way it's presented, it's cut up by dialogue and story. I sing Billy Joel’s “You’re My Home” or “Captain Jack,” and the Captain Jack story is broken up by a narrative about my brothers and their struggles with addiction. It's vulnerable for me to do it, but I enjoy that, and I enjoy that people get to see something inside of me. They get an insight into my life, but they're also then seeing how it's mirroring in their own lives and relationships.
Did you have any reservations about being vulnerable and open about so many personal details?
MS: Oh, yeah. I’m an actor – I have no problem being vulnerable when I'm talking about myself. I talk to my students at my colleges about my dealings with anxiety, and I'm like an open book. It's honestly the only way to be. But that's not my family. So my biggest reservation was “Okay, I talk about my brothers and I talk about my mom. I don't say anything disparaging about my mother. I talk about how my mom and dad dated from the time they were 13. But I knew that if they see the show, it’s going to be hard for them. Listening to it is going to be tough for them. I remember, at one point, I was so nervous right before the first time I did it, and my director was like “You have to write a section about your brothers because there's nothing in there.” And I was like “No, I don’t want to. I don't want to deal with that. I don't want to go to that place. We're on good terms.” They were like “Matt, it's a hole. You're talking about your life, and then you don't talk about that.”
I finally called one of my brothers, and I said “Hey, I'm going to do this,” and he was like “Do it.” I said “Mike, I’m going to tell a really rough story about something that happened.” He goes “Matty, I don't remember it, but if you say it happened, it happened,” and he said “Dad would not want you to not tell the truth. He would want you to tell the truth.” So that was like the blessing for that, and actually, he's going to see it for the first time on Tuesday when I do it at 54 Below in New York City. He's gonna see it the very first time, so it's gonna be interesting. But yeah, that was the hardest part. The reservations I had, really, was that this letter was not just written for me or to me. So do I have a right to share it? And ultimately, I thought, yeah, I do, because I withhold a lot of personal stuff that's in it. But I still managed to share quite a bit. I always say to my brothers and to my students “This is my perspective, this is my story. This is my narrative to people.” Me and my brothers could tell you a story about something that happened in our life, and we would not say the same words in the same order in any given sentence. And it wouldn't happen that way – we wouldn't tell the same story the same way because our perspective is different, and the way it affected us, and the way we handled it, and the way it hurt us – you would never come out the same way. So if somebody sees it and they say “Hey, that's not how it happened,” yes it is. That's how it happened to me.
Was that call to your brother the first time your family had heard about the show? Or were they already aware of what you were doing?
MS: I had said that this was going to happen. I think he suspected, but I just was fearful of it because we had gone through a little bit of a rough patch. We were on good terms again, and here I am about to do this thing. I didn't want to be hurtful to him at all, and he said “Man, it’s not going to hurt me.” I don't have a problem embarrassing myself, I don’t even have a problem making myself look like an asshole. I really don't. That's what I do for a living. But they don't. Nobody asked for that. So that was the moment for me.
Scott performing at 54 Below
You mentioned you created this during the pandemic. Can you walk me through the process of putting it together and deciding what stories to tell and what to write?
MS: I actually started writing this when I was 18 years old. I've been writing it for 23 years. I've had the letter in my possession for nearly 30 years. When I was in my senior year of high school, I began really reading it a lot because I was going through a major transition and my father had only passed a few years earlier. I had a humanities class in which the assignment was to write a monologue, and I took these letters and I crafted a monologue. I portrayed my dad, for lack of a better word. My teacher at the time, the same one who was very inspirational to me and helped me get into college and is still a good friend, he was like “What the hell are you doing?” So that was that. And then about 13 years ago, I was working at The O'Neill in Connecticut, which is almost like an artist's compound. You work on new musicals – they're not full productions, but you develop pieces on the ground that are wholly original – and you come to just immerse yourself in the process of creating. I was there as an actor, and I was like “What would it feel like if I wrote something?” I'm here and I have all this time to myself on this beautiful compound by the beach. It was just “I have an idea. What if I put those letters together in some way?”
What I don't talk about in the show, and it's kind of a curveball to throw in, so I'm going to say it like it's a blip. The letters disappeared for 20 years. From the time I was 18 to the time I was 33, they went missing. As soon as I got to college and I was in my freshman dorm, I wanted to read it one day and I couldn't find it. I called all my family members and none of them could find it. I couldn't believe that I was hearing those words, that we'd all misplaced. In that time, my mom had moved out of our childhood home. My oldest brother had moved across the country to San Francisco from New Jersey, and my two other brothers had kind of lost touch with us. None of us had this letter. At that point in my life, 19 years old, I said to myself “I need to recreate this and write down what I remember. I've read it hundreds of times, so that shouldn't be hard.” Well, it was hard. But I did. I started to write down, section by section, what I remembered. I would write it in the margins of a script, or on a cocktail napkin, or in a notepad, or if I was walking down the street and I remembered something, I'd write it on my phone or text myself. And that's how I re-pieced together this narrative, this letter. And in doing so, it made me think of a lot of stories about my dad. So I would throw those in there too – funny little anecdotes of things that he's done, or accomplishments, like the fact that he was going to college on a full baseball scholarship and was drafted by the Mets or the Yankees. I can't remember which one because memories kind of get messed up. So I started to put it together in my brain.
And then at the age of 33 – and this is the part that sounds like I'm making it up – at the age of 33, I’m going through this midlife crisis. I'm having panic attacks and dealing with anxiety for the first time in my life. The letter re-emerges; my brother finds it in his home in San Francisco in a crawl space, in a filing cabinet that he shipped from New Jersey and hadn’t opened in 15 years. And my mother, in the same week, three days apart, discovers it in a filing cabinet in New Jersey. It’s gone missing up into that point, and 6,000 miles away, here it is. I was reunited with that letter at a time when I was going through so much, and that's when I locked in on the date. I went “Oh my god, he was the same age as me when he started writing this.” That's how long this has been spinning in my brain. The first drafts of it are a monologue in my high school classroom, and I started to imagine what it's going to be like if I can piece it back together, and then I've actually reunited with it and I can actually look at it. And now I really have the source material again.
How did your recreated version compare to the original?
MS: I was pretty damn close. I remembered a lot. The first time I showed it to my wife, which I was hesitant to do, she was in tears. She looked at me and she was like “Oh my God, you're him. You’re him.” She's like “Even your handwriting is his handwriting.” And I was just staring at this letter like “Oh my god, that is my handwriting. That is how I write.” Now, that’s not how I wrote when I was 17 or 18, but as a 30 year old man, yeah. That's how I write, that's how I talk. That's how I phrase things. That's how I say things, exactly like that. Is that just nature versus nurture? Is that just who I was destined to be no matter what? Or is that because I spent so much time looking at this thing as a kid that I was affected and impressed upon by it?
Scott in a production of Beaches
How does performing it live differ from the process of recording it for an album and putting it out for release?
MS: I think they're two uniquely different experiences that are both valid and wonderful, and I loved both of them so much. The album is for all time. It's preservation. It's my letter to my own sons. It's my gift to them – 40 years from now, hopefully they'll listen to it and play it for their kids in the same way that my dad wrote this letter for us. The act of preserving it was about that. Going into a studio to record it and all of that is its own beast. It's its own art form. Performing live allows me the ability to respond and react and be with the audience. It allows me the opportunity to joke with them. Now remember, I'm telling a narrative. It is a script, so I can't deviate too much because I have to get to a point. But when I see people responding or laughing, I ad lib a little bit and I have moments. Somebody said to me, and it’s true, that my love language is sarcasm. I think that allows for what my dad would have asked, which is to not take it seriously and to not get maudlin. So my sarcasm and my self-deprecating nature allows me to go to say to you “Don't feel bad. I had a good life, and I had a great dad. That's all good. Yeah, sucked. But like, we're all good.”
When you're with an audience, and you're next to someone who’s laughing, it gives that audience member permission to laugh. It gives them permission to go “Oh, god, was that uncomfortable? Did he just make a dead dad joke? Oh my god, should I laugh? Oh, well, they're all laughing, and he's laughing.” But if you listen to an album, you might be listening to it by yourself. You might be listening to it in your car. And that experience is going to be just for you and so personal to you because no one else is around, and you don't have to be aware of the fact that you're supposed to respond to react a certain way. So I think when people hear it, what's interesting is, the comments I'm getting back are how moved they are. A high school friend of mine that I haven't talked to in forever wrote to me the other day. He was like “How dare you make me cry on my way to work?” So I think that experience is just different.
Can you talk about getting to perform at 54 Below? It’s become such a coveted venue in New York.
MS: When the venue opened up, my wife and I lived right around the corner from there in our second apartment. And I did Sondheim on Sondheim at Studio 54, which is right above it. That’s the theater we were at. So when the venue opened up, we were like “Really, they're going to open up a nightclub in the basement?” We’ve performed there dozens of times in various concerts and collective nights like ‘The songs of dot dot dot.’ But bringing my own show there for the first time – this performance next week is the second time, like an encore performance – that first performance happened a year ago, and it was insane. It was absolutely insane.You don't think anybody's gonna show up. You’re like “Nobody's coming. Why would they come?” And then all of sudden, there’s people there and you’re like “Oh, God, you're here for me?” It's pretty wild. I didn't know how well the piece would play because I thought of it more as a piece to play in the theater. And it played there like gangbusters, it went over so well. Hence our going back.
How did you start teaching at colleges?
MS: So both my parents were teachers. Not theater arts teachers, but they were teachers. I've always taught. As soon as I got out of college, I was coaching and working for arts training programs and things like that over the summer. I became the Director of Education at a not-for-profit arts organization for a while where I was teaching. And then a friend of mine, who runs the New Studio on Broadway at NYU, which is the musical theater program there, is a man named Kent Gash – he’s a brilliant director and head of the program. He directed me in my senior musical at Carnegie Mellon, and he gave me one of my first jobs out of college, which was playing John in Tick, Tick… Boom! at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. And Kent, after I had done Sondheim on Sondheim, he said “Hey, come in and do four Sondheim classes for the juniors.” I was like “Cool,” and then he called me in every year after that. And then one day he called and said “Hey, I have four classes for you in the spring.” I was like “Okay, cool.” I just assumed four classes like the last time, when I came in and taught a class, and then I came back three more days and taught a single class. He meant “You're going to teach classes a week for the whole year. About a week after that, I got another call from the head of the Manhattan School of Music, who was like “Can you come in and take over a class?” So I got both of these courses offered to me back to back. It was so odd.
I've always loved teaching, and I don't consider it a surrender. I really hate the adage that those who can't do, teach because I think it's so the opposite. I'm here in New York City, I taught a class today here in New York. These kids are here, they're competitive, they're incredible, they're gifted, they're passionate. I'm on the faculty at these schools with really accredited, wonderful professionals. The staff at the Manhattan School of Music, if you count their Tony nominations up, it's insane. The seniors are being taught acting by Boyd Gaines, who is like a four time Tony Award-winning actor for plays and musicals. It's incredible company to be in. So I've never felt it to be like “Oh, I'm giving up,” because I'm not. It actually supplements my life, but it also adds to every other aspect. I'm a better actor because I'm a good teacher, and I'm a better teacher because I'm acting and creating for myself.
Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Scott will perform at Theatre Raleigh as part of the TR in Concert series on September 22, 2023. Tickets can be purchased here.
Feature photo courtesy of Theatre Raleigh