Zina Goldrich
Interview Highlights
A great long-term theatre collaboration is like a marriage. It takes work, but it’s worth it.
Zina is passionate about writing music that is rooted in classic musical theatre and has a fresh, modern sound.
If you don’t ask, you won’t get it. Good things come your way when you just ask.
Having a goal or destination is great to inspire you along your way, but it’s all about enjoying the journey.
Content Warning: Breast cancer
Find Zina Online:
Website: https://www.zinagoldrich.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zinagoldrich
Zina’s Current/Upcoming Work:
Make Your Own Party at 54 Below
Tuesday, March 15, 2022 7PM
The songs of Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich
“The arts are meant to give you some kind of awakening inside, to move you, to make you think about something.”
Bio
ZINA GOLDRICH (she/her) is an award-winning composer, conductor, musical director, and performing artist. Her romantic comedy and theatre songs have been sung around the world by Broadway stars including Audra McDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Megan Hilty, Sierra Boggess and Alan Cumming. She won the 2009 Fred Ebb Award for excellence in songwriting with longtime collaborator, Marcy Heisler. Their musical, Ever After, enjoyed a sold-out run and was the first production on the brand new Coca Cola Stage at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. Current projects include a new musical, Yay, People Yay! with multi-Emmy Award winning writer, David Javerbaum and Hollywood Romance with Emmy Award winning bookwriters Gabrielle Allan and Jen Crittenden. Other Goldrich and Heisler collaborations include Dear Edwina (Drama Desk Nomination-Best Music) and Junie B. Jones (Lucille Lortel Nomination) which ran successfully Off-Broadway, as well as Goodspeed’s The Great American Mousical, directed by Julie Andrews. Ms. Goldrich was a staff songwriter for Walt Disney Feature Animation. On television, she has composed for ABC’s The Middle, Wonderpets, Johnny and the Sprites, Pooh’s Learning Adventures and Peg + Cat, on PBS. As a performing artist, she has taken part in numerous Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center appearances and has been featured in the Chicago Humanities Festival, Juste Pour Rire Comedy Festival, and others. She is the recipient of the ASCAP Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award, the Harry Warren Award, a Larson grant, Seldes-Kanin fellowship and was an Artist-In-Residence at Second Stage. She has played keyboards on Broadway for Avenue Q, Bombay Dreams, Oklahoma! and Titanic, where she also conducted. She studied with legendary Oscar winner Jerry Goldsmith and is a proud graduate of the University of Southern California (USC) Scoring for Motion Picture and Television program. Ms. Goldrich has taught master classes at NYU, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon as well as many universities. She also vocal coaches privately.
Meet Zina
Hayley: We’re here with phenomenally talented legend Zina Goldrich! Zina, please introduce yourself, share your pronouns and what you do in theatre!
Zina: Thank you for having me! I’m Zina Goldrich (she/her). I’m a musical theatre composer, music director, vocal arranger, pit musician, you name it – whatever I can do musically, I do! Jack of all trades - hopefully a master of some.
Hayley: Master of all, Zina! Can you tell us how you got into the theatrical world?
Zina: I started music very young. My first music class was when I was three, I started piano at five. I came from a musical household – my dad, other than being a doctor, was a musician. He played with the Mel Lewis and Thad Jones Big Band at the Village Vanguard for years, and they were the preeminent big band of the 70s. There was always music in the house, I loved to play, I loved to sing. When I was thirteen, we moved to Los Angeles, and my high school was very arts-based. While I was in high school, I started writing songs. When I got to college, I became a music major and then came to New York and started in the BMI workshop.
I always loved theatre, and I wasn’t sure what part of it I would do. I thought maybe I would sing and act. When I got to New York, I went to my first cattle call. There were about 75 people in the room, they were typing people out – and I looked around that room and thought to myself, “I’m reasonably sure that I can sing better than most of the people in this room. I’m an average actress, an average dancer. I don’t like those odds.” But I realized that day, I do write songs pretty well, I’m feeling that groove. It’s kinda young to look at your life and think, “Yeah, I shouldn’t be doing this,” but I’m so glad that happened because I was able to change my focus right then and there to writing music. I met a lot of colleagues at the BMI workshop, and that’s how my journey began.
Zina’s Creative Work and Collaboration
Amy: Can you tell us about what you are working on creatively right now?
Zina: Marcy [Heisler] and I have a show at 54 Below coming up on March 15th at 7:00pm. It has been two years since we’ve really performed. So we’re working on that! We just did some rewrites on “Ever After,” and we had a reading of that where we discovered some new things…and we’re starting on some new projects that I can’t talk about yet. But we’re testing out new waters and working with some people who I’ve wanted to work with, so that’s always great.
Hayley: Can you tell us about your collaboration with Marcy?
Zina: Sure! It’s funny, we weren’t in the BMI workshop together. When I left the workshop, I was writing lyrics on my own, I was a one-stop shop. I had been working at Disney in Feature Animation and I came back to visit the workshop, and Pat Cook, who runs the program there, asked me if I knew Marcy…I believe the first thing I said was, “I like your dress!” and she said, “I like your dress!” I’m fairly certain this was not the first conversation between Rodgers and Hammerstein. I’m not sure I would have met any other collaborator that way, but that’s what happened!
For the next few days, we spent a lot of time together, blabbing away, talking, walking, eating, and it was super fun. We just connected as great friends. She was writing with somebody else, and I was doing the USC film scoring program at the time. At a certain point, she was talking about leaving the collaboration she was in, and I loved her work, so I said, “We should write a song together.”
It’s sort of like when you meet your spouse. You just know. It’s easy. We both immediately recognized that we had a combined aesthetic. Not just a similar one, a combined one, that fit together immediately. In the workshop, I had written with lots of people and wrote nice songs…but it was never as easy. I looked at the lyric, set it, and boom! We knew right from then that we had something to say together. We started writing, and eventually I moved back to New York and we started performing our songs.
We used the cabaret space as a theatre space. We started doing evenings at Don’t Tell Mama, just like we’re doing now at 54 Below, and that’s how we started sharing our songs. Actors started to hear that it was a good place to find cool audition material. Not to date ourselves, but this was before Youtube and just on the cusp of the internet.
We really like writing together, and we’re still great friends. When you’ve written together for over 25 years, it’s like a marriage. We work at it. It takes work, but it’s worth it. We love each other, and we have a good time writing.
Zina’s Creative Mission
Hayley: I want to ask you about your creative mission, Zina.
Zina: The kind of music I would like to write, I think of it as neoclassic. I love classic musical theatre. I love something that feels like a song – hook-driven, melodic kind of stuff that you can’t get out of your head. I just want to haunt people. But that’s not my mission. (laughs) I want it to be as classic as something from the Golden Age but that falls completely comfortably and in a fresh way on a modern ear. That is my creative mission.
Amy: I love how specific and aesthetically driven that is.
Zina: It’s the way I’ve always written. I grew up listening to the Great American Songbook. My folks would take me to musicals growing up. And also Hollywood musicals, so Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, I was surrounded by that stuff. I aim for simple but not simplistic. Simple and elegant. But again, we’ve grown and changed over the years, so I want the music to be appropriate for our time, as opposed to a throwback to another time.
It’s funny, because I never thought I had this specific mission, but the more I wrote the more I realized what it is. People know when they hear our music. We don’t sound like Jason Robert Brown – whose stuff I am in love with, I love his work – we don’t sound like Lynn and Steve, like Maury Yeston, or like any of the wonderful young writers that are out there. We sound like us! I’m just hoping that it is something that people still want to hear.
Hayley: I would say so!
Amy: We’re a little biased, but it’s also called classic for a reason – it never goes out of style.
Zina: Think of it like a little black dress - always looks good, always appropriate. There are always ways to make it fresh and fabulous. But it’s still a little black dress when it comes down to it.
Mentorship Experiences
Amy: Zina, could you tell us about influential mentors you’ve had in your life?
Zina: I assisted Maury Yeston for many years. I was in his class at BMI, and I knew he had a show coming up at Manhattan Theatre Club. I came up to him after class – I was terrified, my heart was in my throat – but I said, “I hear you have a show coming up in the fall, and I just wanted to say if you need any help, I would love to be of help to you.” He looked very surprised, and he said, “Okay, I will bring in some of the score. I want you to learn a couple pieces and come play it for me.” And I was like, YEAH! So I went home, practiced and learned, came back in, and I played the songs for him. And that’s how I got it. My mother always taught me, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” I live by it.
But that’s how I did it. Everything good that’s ever come my way that’s been a little unreachable is because I actually just asked. You’d be surprised how many people are scared to put themselves out there and ask. So I assisted Maury for many years, and he got me into the room. I got to play in the pit on Grand Hotel, and that was my first Broadway show. It was great - if he had a pitch, I was in the room. He introduced me to all of these people - I got to meet Tommy Tune, I was so excited! I learned a lot by watching and listening. I would listen to how he would underscore things – he stretched it out here and there, he did this, he did that – and I picked up little tricks along the way. I think that’s largely responsible for how I’ve gotten to some of the places I’ve gotten to so far on my journey. I don’t feel like I’ve arrived yet, I’m still moving along.
Hayley: As someone who’s always looked up to you, it’s humbling to know that you are still going –
Zina: Absolutely, we all have goals. Listen, I’m very proud of some of the things I’ve been able to accomplish. I’m not being falsely humble. Yes, I’m extremely proud, but I still have things in my heart that I’m working toward. I think having a destination is a great place to inspire you along the way, but it’s really about all of the things you are doing on the way to that place. By the time you get there, you are gonna want to be somewhere else. You just keep on going no matter how old you get. If I get complacent and start thinking, “Oh, I’ve arrived,” I don’t think I’d be happy.
Amy: Right, that would be so boring!
Zina: I’m goal-driven that way. I think it’s important in life. They can be smaller, attainable goals that lead you to that big goal. I’ve had the pleasure of performing on Broadway, and I’ve had some of my work on Broadway, but I haven't had one of my complete shows on Broadway. We’ve been off-Broadway, we’ve been in large regional theatres, but I still have that goal for myself. So, I’m working hard to make that happen!
Hayley: Yet is the word!
Amy: Yes, and then when you’re on Broadway, you’ll have another large goal that’s even grander.
Zina: World domination! (laughs)
Thoughts on Womanhood
Amy: Let’s talk about womanhood. Zina, can you tell us about what being a woman means to you and how it fits into your larger identity?
Zina: First of all, I love being a woman, I love having children, I love being feminine. When I was a kid dreaming of musical theatre…they say if you can see it, you can be it; there just weren’t any women on Broadway. Even Cryer and Ford, who did unbelievable things for opening up doors for us, they were off-Broadway. When I was assisting Maury, there were some lyricists but there were no composers. There were few women who had gotten there during my journey to adulthood. But my parents never altered my dream or hedged a bet for me just because I was a girl. They said if you put your mind to it, you can do it. As a composer, I was raised like a boy, and what I mean is, I came into the business not thinking that there was any reason why I couldn’t achieve my goals.
My mom is a huge inspiration to me. She was an early feminist. When we were kids, she read The Feminine Mystique. My dad came home one day, and she was sitting on the edge of the bed and crying, and she said, “Did you know I have rights?” No one had ever said this to her. She was raised in a household where the sun rose and set over her brother, and he was smart and wonderful, but you know what, my mom was smart and wonderful too! She told me a story recently - she had come home from camp, and my grandmother had redone her room. In the room, there was this vanity, and she looked around and she was like, “I don’t have a desk. I have a vanity, I don’t have a desk.” So when she read that seminal book, it gave voice to a lot of things she was already thinking.
When I was in college, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a bilateral mastectomy, and the doctors were talking through reconstruction options and said that breast implants were the way to go. Well, she had nothing but problems with them, and they were really bad for her health. She wrote an article for Ms. Magazine about her experience with implants, and she started getting all of these letters from women about how it had happened to them too! So all of a sudden, she became a voice for women questioning the safety and efficacy of breast implants.
She started Command Trust Network with Kathleen Anneken. It was an information clearing house, so when women had questions, they could call and my mom would send them the information they knew. She testified before Congress, she was on Oprah and Phil Donahue and all the other talk shows of the day. There was a big settlement, and she helped determine how the money would best benefit women. Because there were all of these lawyers, but none of them was a woman who had actually been through that experience.
Hayley: What a badass.
Zina: This is a woman who took a situation that was less than optimal, and not only was she able to turn it around but she was able to help other people by doing it. So I was really proud of her. And I thought, if she can do that, I can do this! I grew up with a strong woman figure in my life. They say, “If you can see it, you can be it.” If you can see a woman standing up and speaking her truth, speaking truth to power, you can do that too. That’s the household I grew up in.
I love being a woman, being a mother, and being a composer. I have to say, I hate when they say ‘female composer.’ I am a composer. They don’t say ‘male composer.’ They are assuming that ‘composer’ means male. When people ask me what I do, I don’t say “I’m a female composer.”
I’m very proud of the stuff that I do. It hasn’t been easy, I’m not gonna lie. When you are thinking about a $15 million musical, I think people often like to go to the people they’ve worked with the most. If women have not traditionally been given those jobs, it’s harder for people to take risks. I’m happy to say if you look at Broadway now, there are quite a few shows written by women. When I see the younger generation, I’m happy to see young women who feel like there is possibility and it’s not a crazy thing to dream.
Hayley: You’ve been a big part of that. You and Marcy have opened those doors for us.
Zina: Thank you for that. Something nice that’s happened is Kate Anderson and Elyssa Samsel, who do the Central Park songs, told us that one of the reasons they knew they could become songwriters is because they heard this song called “Taylor the Latte Boy” and saw two women had written it, and they had never seen that before. It made me feel really great because yes, I have dreams for myself, but I also recognize the value of being part of change and movement. I hope that anything we do makes it easier for the next person.
There’s a wonderful contractor, Kristy Norter. She’s the first woman contractor on Broadway. We’ve played with Kristy for many years, she is an unbelievable musician and a terrific person. Now that I have the option to use a woman contractor, I’m drawn to use someone who knows how to integrate a pit with different genders, people of colour, I think it’s really important. I love seeing a pit full of people from different backgrounds. The music can only be better that way.
How to Improve the Theatre Industry
Hayley: If you could make one change to the theatre industry, what would it be?
Zina: This is a small thing, I’m not thinking global on this. I wish that the standard for demos was to record with just piano and voice. There’s a pressure on young writers – who don’t necessarily have all of the money in the world – to have an almost cast album-quality demo. It takes time away from the writing process, and it’s more of a producing process. I wish that we, as composers, could spend more time on the actual writing.
Amy: That small change could really make the industry much more equitable. It could open doors for a lot more diversity of people to get their shows produced.
Zina: I think so! You shouldn’t have to spend $2,000 per song because you want to get singers and go into a studio. Yes, people can do a lot more on their laptops now, but it still takes time and other skills.
Hayley: And to Amy’s point about the accessibility of it all…we have enough ceilings!
Amy: Amen.
Final Thoughts
Amy: Zina, can you tell us about what you are most proud of in your life?
Zina: I can be general and I can be specific. Specifically, a project that got me excited was doing a song for the Kennedy Center Honors last year during the pandemic. It was produced by David Foster, we had a 50-piece orchestra, it was sung by Kristin Chenoweth with David at the piano. The process of doing it and the producer we worked with were just top notch. That’s the level I want to work at. Nothing was stopping us. That was a career highlight for me.
Generally, I am most proud that I earn a living as a composer. This is what I do with my life. I may take certain jobs that are more for supporting myself, but when I started out, I was working as a temp at Estée Lauder. I don’t have a day job anymore, my job is writing! That’s what I’m most proud of.
Hayley: That’s something big to be proud of!
Amy: Yeah, that’s my dream.
Hayley: Mine too!
Zina: Aside from that, I’m proud of being a mother to my two children. I love being a mom, I really do. And they’re fantastic people. I’m also proud of that part of my life as well.
Hayley: Zina, thank you so much!
Zina: Thank you, what a pleasure! You are two fabulous, beautiful, intelligent women, and I’m really proud of what you’re doing.
