Henry Krieger’s Dreamgirls won six Tony Awards as well as the 1982 Grammy Award for Best Original Cast Album. Dreamgirls generated new success as a hit movie musical, winning two Academy Awards and earning Henry a second Grammy for the original song “Love You, I Do.” His most recent Broadway musical, Side Show was nominated for four Tony Awards including Best Score. MTC’s Director of Musical Theatre Clifford Lee Johnson III sat down with Henry to discuss his collaboration with John Patrick Shanley on the new musical Romantic Poetry.

CLJ3: So, Henry Krieger, tell us, if you don’t mind, how you began working with John Patrick Shanley.

HK: My very good friend Ira Pittelman, who produced SPRING AWAKENING, and I and Susan Birkenhead, the lyricist, had a scheme to get the rights to make a musical of MOONSTRUCK the movie. Ira contacted John Patrick Shanley and John, Susan and I had a meeting. This was in 2000 and we proceeded to write that. We have quite a bit of material that we haven’t acted upon yet for various reasons. That’s how I first met John. Then, I would say two years later, he gave me a call and asked me if I would be willing to finish some song ideas that he had started. I figured he wanted to see if we could write together with him writing lyrics, and it sounded like a good idea to me. John himself is a great romantic and a great poet. He traces the trajectories of different people in regular life and how love eludes them and how it takes them by storm and eludes them again, takes them by storm again. So, John and I realized we could write together well and have a good time. I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

CLJ3: Would you consider yourself a romantic?

HK: I’m a romantic realist with flights of great fantasy.

CLJ3: What was the history of ROMANTIC POETRY? You did a couple of readings, is that right?

HK: Yeah, the first thing we did was a benefit for the Labyrinth Theatre Company, and that was fun. It was by the seat of our pants…

CLJ3: I saw it there and I said, “We should do this show.”

HK: I know. We were fortunate that New York Stage and Film took us under their wing up at Vassar. That MTC said “yes, yes, yes” was icing on the cake.

CLJ3: Did you always want to be a writer when you were growing up?

HK: I wanted to be a performer and in my younger days I was a pretty good one.

CLJ3: I’ve heard you sing, so I know you can sing.

HK: I went to a high school that had a theater that was the exact double of the Music Box Theater. It was built by that architect. And my sister and I were lucky. We got to work during the summers to help pay our tuition to a small private school. There were all kinds of people that we met and there was ample opportunity to be in productions like IOLANTHE and the Gilbert and Sullivan shows. It was really fun and I learned a lot of aspects of theater. Even like raising and lowering the curtain. And I’ve been theatrical pretty much every since. The writing thing, the wanting to write songs for shows, just eventually kicked in after I got over wanting to be a rhythm and blues singer.

CLJ3: So, aside from theater music, was rhythm and blues the popular music that you cared about? Because you can clearly hear rock and roll and rhythm and blues and popular music in your theater music as well.

HK: I grew up with rhythm and blues, and it was also during the civil rights efforts. It meant a lot not just that I loved the music, which I did, and the performers, which I did, but it was also a time when people of my age, the original baby boomers, could feel, in our own intimate culture, a commitment to bringing the races together in some manner in our country. It just was a perfect fit for me. And I loved to entertain.

CLJ3: I understand that you worked on the press side of the business for a while, too.

HK: I was a press agent when I was 24. I worked for a wonderful guy named Richard O’Brien, and we represented Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Rodney Dangerfield and Dick Cavett. Then, I started specializing in the African-American recording acts. I took a lot of people out to lunch and kept the conversation where it’s supposed to be. It was a lot of fun.

CLJ3: Did you know Mr. Friedman, for whom our newly christened Samuel J. Friedman Theatre is named? He was further back, is that right?

HK: Yeah. Tom Eyen and the guy who I worked for both worked for a woman named Dorothy Ross before that. So, press agenting, at least in my and Tom Eyen’s experience, was kind of a way to get in to the way things worked in the business you wanted to be in, which in my case was theatre and in his case was theatre.

CLJ3: Everyone knows that you co-wrote DREAMGIRLS and then the movie came out a couple years ago, 25 years after the Broadway production. What was that like going back into it?

HK: It was like getting back on a bike. I wrote new material. I wrote a song called “Patience” with Willie Reale. He’s actually helping me again writing some special material for a new production of DREAMGIRLS, directed by Bobby Longbottom, my friend who I worked with here at MTC on the original SONGS OF THE SIAMESE TWINS, which became SIDESHOW. And he’s redoing it. We’re opening in South Korea this winter. And then it’s gonna go around the United States.

CLJ3: Are you working on any other new projects?

HK: I’m working on a show based on the film and book REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM with Susan Birkenhead writing lyrics and another MTC person, Daniel Goldfarb, writing the book. It’s a very nice story and I love what we’re doing. And Bill Condon redirected SIDESHOW at the Roundabout and we hope to know at the end of this month if there’s a way to get it running.

CLJ3: And you went back and did some more work on that as well.

HK: Oh yeah.

CLJ3: Henry, I think it’s been great that you sat down and talked to us a little bit. So, we’ll leave you with a true or false question, okay?

HK: False.

CLJ3: Perfect! Thank you very much, Henry.

HK: Did you really have a true or false question?

CLJ3: Heck no.