Ben Allen H. Winters is a playwright, librettist, and novelist. His work for the theater has been produced Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regionally and internationally. Among many other shows, he wrote the book for two shows at Vital Theatre Company, A (TOOTH) FAIRY TALE and UNCLE PIRATE, and book and lyrics for THE MIDNIGHT RIDE OF PAUL REVERE (Theatreworks USA); all three shows have been licensed by Samuel French. Ben is the author of two parody novels, ANDROID KARENINA and the New York Times best-selling SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS. His next book is a novel for young adults called THE SECRET LIFE OF MS. FINKLEMAN, to be published by HarperCollins in fall of 2010. He is a member of the BMI Lehman-Engel Musical Theater Workshop, and a past Fellow of the Dramatists Guild. Ben lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Diana and their two awesome kids, but they're all about to move to Boston.

Check out Ben’s plays,
available from Samuel French

A (Tooth) Fairy Tale
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

Q & A with Ben H. Winters

Q: You’ve worked with a number of different composers for your stage musicals, including Rick Hip-Flores (A (TOOTH) FAIRY TALE), Stephen Sislen (THE MIDNIGHT RIDE OF PAUL REVERE), and Drew Fornarola (UNCLE PIRATE). Do you approach each partnership differently? Or has a specific method of working emerged?

You've got to approach every collaboration, and every show, differently. Not only did all three projects have different composers, all three came from different inspirations: PAUL from history, PIRATE from an underlying property, and TOOTH from my and Rick's very silly imagination. Both Rick and Drew are composer/lyricists who, once the overall structure of the show has been hashed out, retreat into their genius caves and return with raw hunks of songy brilliance to be carefully combined with the libretto I've been laboring over.

My most intense collaborations, on PAUL and other projects, have been with Stephen Sislen, who has a strong hand in the shaping of the lyrics and libretto, even when he's primarily the composer (although he did write some lyrics for PAUL, including the best number in the show, where King George III escapes the burdens of his high office by imagining himself as a kitty).

Q: While it’s by no means the only form in which you write, what has drawn you to children’s musicals?

With due respect to adults, children are just better than us. They suspend their disbelief more readily, they pay closer attention, they laugh louder and clap harder, and their cell phones don't ring during the denouement.

Q: You are also a very successful collaborator in the realm of novels, with your popular SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS (written with Jane Austen), and the more recent ANDROID KARENINA (written with Leo Tolstoy), any projects on the horizon that might bring your talent for combining classic novels and science fiction to the stage?

Some theater folk I know have salivated over the prospect of an ANDROID KARENINA stage musical, but the budget would be through the roof: it’s 541 pages of robots, space travel, and cossacks with laser guns. Plus, do we really buy a singing robot? But the truth is, I love musical theater for the same reasons I love these so-called mash-up novels I’ve done: the heightened sensibility, the spirit of anything-can-happen, the situating of real, emotionally complicated characters in odd and delightful fantasy lands.

Q: What inspires you to take on a new project?

I feel like as soon as I answer that question for myself, I’ll be shutting off a million universes of potential projects that have not yet occurred to me. One thing about inspiration, it comes from the damnedest places.

Q: When and/or how did you know that you wanted to create musicals?

Actually, not until I started doing it. I grew up playing in bands, writing songs with my guitar in my basement, and sort of stumbled into musicals in my mid-20s. At age 15, I was listening to Fugazi and the Replacements, not the Oklahoma cast recording.

Then I worked primarily in musical theater for a while, though I’ve been working mostly in fiction for the last year or so; no doubt I’ll be back to theater before long. I think a writer's sensibility, his aesthetic and sense of humor and voice, is more important than what genre he happens to work in. As it happens, I write theater and books, but I sort of think, if I were writing poems or television shows, my particular spirit (whatever it is) would come across in those poems or television shows.

Q: Have you ever come across a production that made you see one of your musicals in a new or unexpected way?

The first time I saw PAUL REVERE in front of a giant auditorium full of real children—I think it was at Town Hall, here in New York—blew my mind. There were jokes in there, real gems as far as I was concerned, there got very little response from the kids; but then there were little plot things I never thought twice about while writing, that are apparently hugely exciting to a nine-year-old. And it brought tears to my eyes, and has every time since, to watch those kids lean forward in their seats, totally entranced, as Paul makes his daring ride in the last ten minutes of our show, and Steve’s music is thrumming along and the Minutemen are singing my lyrics. Those kids are so into it—they really want that guy to warn his countrymen of the British advance. I'm more proud of those ten minutes than anything else I’ve done.

(Photo courtesy of the author)