What a thrill it was to meet Nan and talk to her. She was so generous in sharing her stories about Pimpernel - how it came to be and how it made history by being so totally and successfully redesigned during its run. It was all so fascinating that I didn't want to leave anything out, so this interview will be presented in two parts.

NR: Can you tell me a little bit about your background?

NK: I grew up in Baltimore. In fact I lived there straight from age one to age eighteen and then I went off to college.

NR: When did you decide to write?

NK: I never made a decision. It just was always there. There was no choice about it whatsoever. I basically taught myself how to write because I had an older brother and I would be very jealous that he would come home from school with workbooks and all kinds of exciting sheets and things and little books and I really got jealous, that I just sat down with a little child's dictionary that would have a picture of a cat and the word C-A-T. I still have, because my mother saved them, stories and poems I started writing when I was about five and a half or six. I just always did it. There was never any moment when I thought, "Do I want to be a writer?" I remember by the time I was ten or eleven, my uncle gave me a book that had been written in England by a little ten year old girl and it was this phenomenon in England, and I remember immediately feeling the pressure of "Oh, God, I haven't written a book yet." There must have been something in me even then that was thinking maybe that's what I'm going to be. But, it was just what I always did. It was just always there.

NR: Was that your major in college? I believe you went to Harvard.

NK: First I went to Sarah Lawrence. I went there for three years. I actually have my diploma from Sarah Lawrence, but I got married right after my junior year at Sarah Lawrence to a Harvard medical student so I did a transfer to Harvard and finished my senior year up there as a special student and then came back to graduate and get my diploma from Sarah Lawrence.

My area of concentration was writing and theater. It was really theater more than writing in college. I took writing courses, but my obsession, my huge love by then had become theater, and primarily acting actually. I did a lot of acting through high school and all through college and then I wrote a one-act play in my freshman year. The drama department really liked it and they asked me if I wanted to put it on and direct it myself, so that was the first time I ever had a play done. That was the fall of my sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence. I wrote and directed and just had a ball. It was so intoxicating and it continued. I acted, directed and wrote all through Sarah Lawrence. I knew I wanted to be in theater but I wasn't really sure how it was going to end up. Then I got married and finished at Harvard. I did a little acting at Harvard, but not as much. I was in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

NR: So, I guess you sing too.

NK: Yeah, I had a really nice singing voice back then. I don't have it anymore but I used to then. After I graduated I taught school for a year. I taught English and ran a drama department in a girls' school in Massachusetts. Then I went to graduate school and by that time I knew that I was going to go toward writing and not acting because I had done some auditions for things and I hated the audition process. I hated being on this end too by the way.

NR: Really?

NK: When I say "hated" I don't mean that I don't have fun while I'm doing it, because I do. Auditions are really fun especially when you're having a good day and you've seen one great audition after another, but they're also extraordinarily sad from my side of the table when you have to dismiss people. It's a horrible feeling and everybody kept telling me in the beginning, "Oh, you'll get used to it." I have never gotten used to it and I don't think I'll ever get used to it. It's just so awful to know that somebody's come in and they may have spent all week preparing, memorizing scenes and songs, and they're all dressed up and even some of the seasoned professionals are shaking. Typically there's a process where you communicate while they're singing, you communicate among one another whether you want to go on to hear them read or not. If you don't - if the music immediately does a "thumbs down" or you immediately know the look of the person is wrong, then as soon as they finish their song, you say, "Thank you very much" and they smile and you smile, and they have to gather their things and take the walk across the stage. I always want to just leap up and hug them and say, "But you were wonderful!" I remember at one audition, somebody was leaving and I said, "Thanks so much. It was great. It really was" and somebody turned to me afterwards and said, "Why are you saying that? We're dismissing him." I said, "Because I just feel so bad for them."

On the other side of it, being the auditioner back when I was in my early 20's, I just decided this was not a life that I was going to embrace. There was an improvisational theater group in Boston that I actually had callback after callback for and I thought I was going to make it and I didn't. I think it was at that point that I finally decided not to do that.

NR: How did you get from college to starting the show in 1989?

NK: I went to graduate school and that was when I really started writing seriously as opposed to having a lot of fun with it. I got my Masters in creative writing. Boston University is one of the few places that offers an M.A. in creative writing and that was why I went there. It was such an exciting writing program. I studied with John Barth and Anne Sexton - prose writing with Barth and poetry writing with Sexton. Both of them were at the peaks of their careers at the time. It was very, very exciting and I learned so much from them. I'm very ambivalent about writing classes and writing workshops because I think a lot of people walk in thinking that there's a formula they can learn as to how to write and I think that's garbage. You're in the process of trying to find your own voice. But, what's great about groups of writers is having that constant feedback and living within those rhythms and I really did learn so much. My writing got a lot better. It was a terrific experience and by the time I had my Masters degree, I knew I wanted to write. I think I actually thought at that point that I was either going to be a poet or a novelist. Pretty quickly I dropped the novelist thing out because I realized I didn't have the patience to rewrite a novel. First drafting a novel is one thing, but sitting down to redraft a novel is just like climbing this huge mountain. I thought I would just do poetry and I actually went through a long period of submitting poems, and then I got a job. My first husband and I had moved to Maryland and I got a job with the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting, for a nationally broadcast PBS show called Consumer Survival Kit. It was very exciting. I was 25 or something. It was extraordinarily exciting to get a job as a professional writer, making a salary. It was nothing, but to me it was incredible. I was making $10,000 a year and I felt that was amazing. It was a consumer show that took a different topic every week, like real estate or dentistry, any topic you could think of and presented a half hour show that tried to give the consumer information about the topic but to do it in a variety show format so that it was fun. We did skits and dramatic sketches and songs, anything you wanted to do. There were four writers on the show and every writer was assigned every fourth show. They gave me a lot of free rein so I just had a ball. That was when I did my first songs. I had written song lyrics for fun in school but that was when I did my first songs that were produced.

NR: Did someone else do the music?

NK: Yeah. I think the first song I ever had done was for a show on weight control. I did everything from going down to Johns Hopkins Hospital and interviewing their weight control clinics so that there were documentary segments on the show to a skit that was a take-off on a French movie with a guy jogging through a little village and I wrote a song called "Come Jog With Me." It was like a French, (singing) "Come jog with me, lose a little fat, cherie." And it was so much fun, going out on the film shoot and I was in seventh heaven. So, pretty much from then on in, every show I wrote I put a song in. I always had at least one comic sketch in it too because the other thing I loved to do most was funny stuff. They were great. They let me have fun with it. I did that for two years and probably would have stayed there a lot longer but my marriage had broken up and I was dating my current husband, John, who lived in New York, and who had to be in New York because he's an entertainment lawyer. If I was going to be with him, I really had to go to New York. I had always loved New York anyway, and to me the whole thing just made sense that this was the time that I would shift my life to New York. That's why I left the television station. I was sad to go though because I really had fun.

NR: So, how did you meet Frank Wildhorn?

NK: I met Frank in 1989. Basically, Jimmy Nederlander was going to produce a musical of The Scarlet Pimpernel and he had hired Frank to do the music and Arthur Kopit to do the book and Mike Ockrent to direct, and they didn't have a lyricist. Frank heard about me and I talked to him on the phone. He said, "Don't send me anything on paper. I only want to hear tapes of things you've done." Now, what I had in the way of tapes of things I had done at that point was pathetic. I didn't have anything. I had a song that was done in the Radio City Christmas Show but I knew that wasn't going to do it for me. I had some really bad quality tapes from an experimental musical I had been working on about pregnancy and I knew that wasn't going to do it for me. So, I took a risk. It was one of the first times I really took a professional risk and I just sat down and wrote some lyrics on spec for Pimpernel, and read the book because I had never read it before. I wrote one funny lyric and one love ballad and sent those to him, and he really loved them, thank God.

NR: Were they anything that still exist?

NK: They still exist somewhere. They're in my files somewhere.

NR: But, they're not in the show now?

NK: No. One was called "Cloak and Dagger" and it was about the guys disguising themselves and I don't even remember what the other was called. No, neither of them went into the show but he really liked them enough that he called me back and said, "I want to meet you." We met and we hit it off right away so that he gave me two pieces of music. Frank only writes music first. I can't give him a lyric. He never works that way. I've worked with other composers who work lyric first, so that I can write a whole show, book and lyrics and give it to them, and they can set it to music, but Frank works the other way. He gave me the "Madame Guillotine" music and he gave me the music to a song that ended up being on the concept album but never went any further than that, called "There Never Was a Time."

NR: I love that song. I wanted it to go in the new version, and I'm not alone.

NK: I just hate it. I hate it so much.

NR: (laughs) Then I guess that explains why it's not in the show.

NK: I always felt it was corny and I always thought it was not Frank's strongest work and certainly not my strongest work. I wrote up the lyrics for these two and in particular, he loved my "Madame Guillotine" lyric, which was very much as it is today although I've changed things over the years, but it was pretty similar to the version that's in the show now. And then there was a period of MONTHS of him trying to persuade the producers to take a chance on an unknown, which was what I was. I had done little things. I had co-written a screenplay for a movie that got made and produced but never got released in this country. I had done some work at Radio City Music Hall and I had my television work, but I really didn't have any substantial theater credits. I'd had a couple showcases only as a playwright. Frank said "They want me to work with somebody else, so in the meantime, let's you and I start on another show." So, he and I started working on another show called Vienna which we have yet to do. We started working furiously around the clock on that and then in October - I had met him in May so this was all taking place over that period. In October, he called me and said "You have the job as the lyricist." I was thrilled. It was wonderful.

NR: I'm sure. Then, how did you get the book?

NK: We went through a series of book writers. For one reason or another it would never work out. For example, Arthur Kopit was certainly there for a long time but had a certain parting of the ways with the producers and left after about eight months or so, by which time Frank and I had already done a demo tape. We were just zooming along. And then we had a series of book writers, most of whom only went so far as doing a treatment or an outline or something like that, and there would always be a problem. The project kind of came to a crashing halt. By this time we had actually done the concept album. That was in 1991. We recorded that down in Miami and it was a real oddity because we had no book writer, we had no book, we had no show but we had these songs. So, the project just kept floating on. About every four months we'd get a call from the Nederlander offices saying, "Well, we're going to all have dinner and meet this new potential director or this new potential book writer" and it would just never work out.

In the summer of '93, one weekend I was totally pulling my hair out and I said, "I'm just going to do this." Nobody asked me to do it and nobody knew I was doing it. I just sat down with a couple of yellow pads and literally over the course of a weekend, I wrote this book. I think part of the reason I did it so fast was because I'd been living with these characters in my head and the songs for so many years now that it just all came flowing out. I wrote it and I thought it was pretty good. I did a little bit of rewriting, typed it up, and showed it to two people, my husband and to Frank. They both really liked it and they had one or two suggestions. I did a few changes in the computer and then we had this draft by the fall of '93 and we switched producers because our option with those producers had run out. Suddenly Pierre Cossette was interested. Kathy Raitt, who had been working with Jimmy Nederlander was also a friend of Pierre Cossette's. She had seen the new script and she had a copy of the album. She gave the script to Pierre and he loved it. Then he listened to the album and he loved that. The next thing you know I was having lunch with Pierre Cossette and he was saying, "I want to do this thing." It still took a year and a half after that to really get the ball rolling. Finally it became clear that we were really going to do this and we started doing little workshops. My dear friend Nick Corley came in to direct. He wasn't my dear friend then, I didn't know him, but he's become one of my closest friends. He directed several of these workshops and we had really good response. Then in February of '97 I got a call from Kathy Raitt saying, "We have the Minskoff Theatre." Then I was panic-stricken for three weeks. It was like going underground. It was like hibernating for three weeks because it was...I guess it was terror. For three weeks I was just paralyzed at the realization that this thing was really going to happen. Then, from then on in, I was too busy to even think about it and I got more and more excited.

NR: How difficult was it to take a turn of the century novel and make it into something that a modern audience would enjoy?

NK: I loved that challenge and I think working with Frank made that a very natural process too. You must remember with each song that I wrote I was given the music first, so I was always adapting my lyrics to a kind of twentieth century sensibility, and trying to make sure that they also stayed applicable at least in one dimension to France and England in 1794.

NR: You had to cut some characters, like Sir Andrew and Suzanne. Also, Marguerite and Chauvelin are not lovers in the book.

NK: I changed an enormous amount. The book is really told from Marguerite's point of view. Although I wanted to keep her as extremely central, I wanted to tell it more from Percy's point of view. The book is often very passive and I wanted it to be much more active. I wanted to see these guys doing a rescue. I wanted to see how Percy becomes the Pimpernel.

NR: That's true. That's not really in there.

NK: No, the book begins and he's already the Pimpernel and he's already in this estranged marriage and I just felt like, "Let's let people see. Why do they get estranged? What goes wrong? How does he become the Pimpernel?" To me it made sense that his disillusionment with her would be something that would catapult him into it. The "Chauvelin decision" - it's in the book. I really think if Baroness Orczy was writing that novel today she would have made the same choice I did, because every time Chauvelin in the book is with Marguerite, all the language is very sensual every time the two of them are together. So, for me it was a small leap to say that they had been lovers.

Then I also wanted it to be funnier than the book because to me the book had its wonderful witty moments, but it always stayed within certain very staid parameters and I felt that it had marvelous opportunities to be funny - to show these guys exaggerating themselves into fops and to really take that Prince of Wales character and to have some fun with him. Also, I just love writing comedy. I don't think there was any way that I could have done it without making it funny. It just came naturally.

NR: I'm very glad you did! I love the funny parts. I think that's what makes us come back.

NK: I can't write anything without...I'm writing a murder mystery right now and I'm literally having to fight these characters to not be funny all the time, because I want it to be scary and funny. That's the kind of thing I love to see. I want that combination, but my first couple of drafts were going perilously close to farce because these characters just kept being farcical. So, I'm reining them back in so that they can still be funny but so that I can still have this tension and suspense. So, yeah, I wanted it to be a lot more funny, a lot more active, and I wanted it to be very sensual and sexy. That decision had a lot to do with Frank and me, because Frank would give me music that was sensual and for me it was very natural to write lyrics that were sensual. Since a lot of that came first, it was very natural when I wrote the book to then go into that territory and to sensualize the story. Also, Marguerite is a very sensual character and one wants to take advantage of that and really let her fly with it.

NR: In the UPN special, The Making of The Scarlet Pimpernel, you talked about how you did the "Creation of Man" like a big jigsaw puzzle. Do you usually write that way or was that just unique for that song?

NK: Comic songs I do. There's a certain kind of song called a "list song," which is certainly very much the way "Creation of Man" started out anyway. It's a song where part of the fun you're having is listing things. In the case of "Creation of Man" it's listing different types of clothing. With a list song or a comic song, what I like to do is to have enormous fun ahead of time compiling these huge lists of different possibilities of things to use, so that I did have, (and I still have. I keep all my work sheets. I still have all these lists), so I had six or seven pages that were nothing but different kinds of fabrics and buttons and frills - you know, every kind of word I could come up with and words to describe clothing, and different types of clothing. Then, once I had all those, I would start looking through and trying to find fun rhymes. Yeah, it's like a jigsaw puzzle, absolutely. You're putting together these pieces, and the moments where you find, "Oh, my God, I can rhyme haberdashery" are just so much fun. I did the same kind of thing with "The Scarlet Pimpernel" song. We've had so many different versions now of the title song, some you don't even know about. I think the workshops had a whole different version with a whole different melody even. But it was the same thing there where I would make lists and lists of every different type of person that they would speculate that the Pimpernel might be. That he might be a hunchback, he might be a cobbler, he might be a baker...and I would have all these pages of lists and things and then I would just sit there and giggle at my desk while I put together different combinations and rhymes and stuff.

I don't do that with the emotion songs. With the emotion songs I listen to the music over and over and over and just start jotting down notes of what it makes me feel, or images or phrases that come into my mind and then just start drafting and drafting, but it comes from a different... the comic songs come from my head and the ballads come from my heart. That's a very different process of writing.

NR: Did Frank hand you a song and say "This is what I want for these characters" Or, "This is the love song" or did he just hand you music and leave it up to you?

NK: After I had written the book I would often go to him with requests as opposed to him giving me a piece of music. "Where's The Girl?" is a very good example. I had on tape zillions of motifs and things that Frank's written over the years that he's never done anything with. He would come over here and he would start playing different things on the piano and I would tape record them. Then he would forget he had written them. After I had written this book, I knew that I wanted a really sensual song for Chauvelin to sing to Marguerite and that I wanted it to have a French sound to it, and before just calling him up and telling him that I wanted that, I decided to go back and listen to these tapes to see if there was anything he'd already written. I found this one melody that was...(Nan sang the opening measures to what we now know as "Where's The Girl?") and I loved it. I thought, "Oh, my God, this is so beautiful. This is so French." So I called him up and said, "Do you remember it?" Well, he didn't at all. He didn't have a clue. So, I said, "I really love it and I'm going to send you a copy of the tape. See if you think you can develop it into a song because I think I want to call it `Where's The Girl?' and I think I want it to be Chauvelin saying to Marguerite, `Where'd you go? You're not the person that I used to know' and kind of tempting her and trying to lure her back in, reminding her the way it used to be and the passion they used to share." He got the tape and he called me back and he said, "Yeah, I love it. I'm going to work on it." Within about a week I had the tape with him having fleshed it out with all the bridge and chorus parts. The first time I put it on, I just started to tremble. I loved it so much and I called him up and woke him up out in California and said, "I just want you to know I'm trembling. I'm sitting here trembling and I cannot wait to start writing it." And I did, and the whole thing was done in about a week.

"Falcon in the Dive" was somewhat similar too, where I found a motif that he had written that I loved. He said, "Well, actually I kind of used that in Jekyll & Hyde, but I can do something similar to that." So, Frank is a very flexible person and he and I, artistically, just work together so smoothly. Particularly, after I had written the book, it was a situation where I would go to him and would say, "I think we need a song here, and I think it needs to be this kind of song" and often I would go to him and say, "And here's a piece of music that you wrote in 1990-whatever that I would like to use." Often, he would say, "OK, we'll give it a whirl." We also have tons of songs that we did that we never used as well. He's enormously flexible.

NR: In the CD liner notes, you talked about Douglas' (Sills) audition. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

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