S3E10: Anna K. Jacobs
In this episode, Hayley and Amy talk with composer, lyricist, book writer, and educator Anna K. Jacobs about her musical Teeth (currently at Playwrights Horizons!), cycles of creativity, increasing accessibility through education, prioritizing health for artists, and more. Scroll down for episode notes and transcript!
Episode Notes
Hosts: Hayley Goldenberg and Amy Andrews
Guest: Anna K. Jacobs
Music: Chloe Geller
Episode Resources:
New York Youth Symphony Musical Theater Songwriting Program
A Slight Change of Plans with Dr. Maya Shankar
Guest Bio:
Anna K. Jacobs (she/her) is a Jonathan Larson and Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award-winning composer, lyricist, book writer, and educator. Her stage musicals include TEETH (Playwrights Horizons; co-book/ lyrics by Michael R. Jackson), POP! (Yale Rep, Pittsburgh City Theatre, Studio Theatre; book/lyrics by Maggie-Kate Coleman), ANYTOWN (George Street Playhouse; book by Jim Jack), HARMONY, KANSAS (Diversionary Theatre; book/lyrics by Bill Nelson), ECHO (Musical Theatre Factory), and STELLA AND THE MOON MAN (Sydney Theatre Company/Theatre of Image; with Richard Tulloch & Adrian Kelly). She also contributed music and lyrics to the multi-composer works WITNESSES (California Center for the Arts) and LETTERS TO THE PRESIDENT (Goodspeed Musicals), and penned the screenplay for THE REAL GEMMA JORDAN (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), which she is now adapting into a stage musical with composer-lyricist Rob Rokicki. Current projects also include the new musical A HOUSE WITHOUT WINDOWS (Grove Entertainment), with a book by Anna Ziegler, and a new stage musical adaptation of MOANA for Disney Cruise Line, featuring a score by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Foa'i.
Find Anna Online:
Website: www.annakjacobs.com
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Episode Transcript
Music)
Hayley: Hello, beautiful people, and welcome to the Women & Theatre Podcast! We're your hosts, Hayley Goldenberg…
Amy: …and Amy Andrews. Grab a cup of coffee and join us as we talk to people in the theatre industry about their experiences with womanhood.
Hayley: On the pod, we interview people with different gender identities, from different backgrounds, with varying levels of industry experience and professional roles.
Amy: Our goal is to build community and pool our collective wisdom to break down the barriers we continue to face.
(Music)
Amy: In today’s episode, we speak with Anna K. Jacobs, a Jonathan Larson and Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award-winning composer, lyricist, book writer, and educator. Her stage musicals include TEETH (Playwrights Horizons), POP! (Yale Rep, Pittsburgh City Theatre, Studio Theatre), ANYTOWN (George Street Playhouse), HARMONY, KANSAS (Diversionary Theatre), ECHO (Musical Theatre Factory), and STELLA AND THE MOON MAN (Sydney Theatre Company/Theatre of Image). Anna also contributed music and lyrics to the multi-composer works, WITNESSES (California Center for the Arts) and LETTERS TO THE PRESIDENT (Goodspeed Musicals), and she penned the screenplay for THE REAL GEMMA JORDAN (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), which she is now adapting into a stage musical with composer-lyricist Rob Rokicki. Current projects also include the new musical, A HOUSE WITHOUT WINDOWS (with Grove Entertainment), with a book by Anna Ziegler, and a new stage musical adaptation of MOANA for Disney Cruise Line, featuring a score by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Foa'i.
Hayley: Hello, beautiful people! We are here today with the brilliant Anna K. Jacobs. Anna, would you mind introducing yourself, sharing your pronouns, and telling us a little bit about what you do in theatrical spaces?
Anna: Sure. Hi, Amy and hi, Hayley. My pronouns are she/her. I am a musical theatre composer, lyricist, and book writer. And also an educator.
Hayley: Anna, can you tell us how you found musical theatre and what you do now?
Anna: Sure. So I grew up in Sydney, Australia. I don't know what it's like down there now, because I've lived over here, I think almost 20 years, but when I was growing up in Sydney, there was not a huge new musical theatre scene. But I loved music and I loved composing. And so I pursued a classical pathway. And I was writing a lot of choral music and song cycles, and I was making string quartet arrangements for people and pop albums. And I clearly loved popular music and I loved theatre. I just didn't really understand that you could combine all those passions into a profession.
After I graduated from doing a bachelor of music, I worked a few years in Sydney. I had a voice studio, and I was arranging, and a mentor of mine, who is American, suggested that I try to pursue graduate school in the United States. I think he could see me sort of floundering and not knowing what my next step should be. And so I applied to a few graduate programs over here. And the one that I really jived with was at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
Hayley: I bet Indiana was so different from Australia in every way.
Anna: In every way! I was so confused the whole time, but also it was possibly one of the best years of my life. It was such a fabulous induction into living in America. I was collaborating with a bunch of the opera singers in the opera program. And one of them, a singer named Daniel Shirley, had a friend who is J. Navarro, who went to the NYU musical theatre writing program. And he was like, “Clearly you want to be writing musicals.”
And so, he connected me with J., and we spoke on the phone, and J. told me about the program and I applied. And it [the application] was like, “Set this Edna St. Vincent Millay poem to music” and “Take a scene from your favorite play and write a song for one of the characters.” And like, just the activities alone were so fun and so exciting for me. And I loved the fact that I was being challenged to write music and lyrics and that I was writing for characters and story.
And I kind of just knew while making my application for this program that this is where I wanted to be. And I got accepted. So I left Indiana, moved to New York, and my two years in the program were life changing. I met so many collaborators there, mentors William Finn and Michael John Lachuisa, and many others as well.
And my thesis project was a musical that I wrote with Maggie-Kate Coleman called Pop, and Pop ended up being accepted into a program that no longer exists sadly, but it was called the Yale Institute for Musical Theatre. It was sort of like the O'Neill development program, but it was targeted toward younger, more emerging writers. And so we did that. And then Yale Repertory Theatre asked to program the musical in their season. I think this was back in 2009, so like, we'd written it, and the next year we got this incredible full-scale production with the most amazing cast.
Hayley: What a great opportunity, oh my gosh.
Amy: That's so cool. And right out of school. That's so fantastic.
Anna: Right out of school. Yeah. And that sort of launched me into the field. And now I've been at it for 15 years. It's been really cool to watch the cycles of my creativity. There are some years where what I'm doing is more visible and I have productions. There are some years where I'm just knuckling down and writing and developing. I've maintained a career as an educator throughout that whole period of time in order to support myself financially. And so, yeah, I've just been working it out as I go.
Amy: That's so good.
Hayley: Well, speaking of visible years Anna, this is a really big one. You've got Teeth playing at Playwrights Horizons right now. Can you talk a little bit about that project, how it came to be, and what it means to you?
Anna: Absolutely. So Michael R. Jackson, who people know as the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize award-winning creator of A Strange Loop and White Girl in Danger...Michael went to NYU but was three cycles ahead of me. When I was a student, Michael would come back after hours to use the practice rooms, and we really enjoyed one another. We would hang out, we would eat pommes frites together, we would talk about music together. He came up and saw Pop at Yale rep during a snowstorm, I would go to all of his cabarets at the Beechman, we were just sort of each other's friends and fans.
In 2009, Michael contacted me and said that there was this movie that he was interested in adapting, and would I like to watch it with him and consider collaborating with him on it? And it was the movie Teeth, which in its own right has this incredible cult following. It's about a young teenage girl with vagina dentata. If you don't know what that is, you can Google it. And it's a horror comedy. And also kind of a superheroine story.
It definitely would not have been something that I would have thought about adapting on my own, but when I watched it with Michael, and I considered Michael's voice, which is so bold, so brave, so dynamic, and I considered the huge scale of the movie and how dramatic it is and funny and scary it is, I was like, "Oh, I can totally see how my music could serve this project." So I was like, “Okay, what the heck?” And we have been working on it consistently for 15 years with the support of Mitchell Lichtenstein, the movie's writer and director.
We had a lot of development over the years. We were working with Musical Theatre Factory on the piece. We did the Sundance Lab. And then around 2018, we spent two weeks at the O'Neill and really sort of cracked the DNA of the piece, which led to NAMT the following year. And then from NAMT, it led to us getting involved with our commercial producer and also Playwrights Horizons.
Hayley: Amazing. Anna, can you talk a little bit about your creative mission in your writing and in education as well?
Anna: Accessibility is really important to me. Perhaps part of the reason why it is so important to me is that I came from an artistic world where what I was creating wasn't that accessible initially, and I realized I wanted to communicate with a lot of people. I wanted to make art that created opportunities for discourse, self-reflection, inquiry, and conversation.
The way that I teach as well is through inquiry…through trying to understand a student and what they're trying to accomplish creatively or academically, and then to figure out what are the right questions to ask that person so that they can have more clarity around what they're trying to accomplish and what's the best way to do that.
Amy: Can you talk a bit more about the education that you do? I'd love to hear more about it.
Anna: Yeah, absolutely. Something that I have pushed back against is the desire for people to see the education piece of what I do as just a day job.
Amy: You're clearly so passionate about it.
Anna: I care deeply about it. There's that horrible saying that “Those who can't do, teach.” And I just totally do not believe in that. It's a calling. It fulfills my very extroverted side. Writing is a laborious and often isolating process. To be able to spend a day at home or in a studio writing and then to go to a class at night and interact with students fulfills me. It just does. It also makes me a better practitioner because I'm able to reflect on what I'm doing often in a more clear or articulate way.
When I graduated from NYU, because I was a foreigner, I could only work within fields that were directly related to what my degree was. So that ruled out, like, barista-ing or other types of work. And so I had apprenticed with some teaching artists at the Metropolitan Opera Guild. They were developing some new schools programming around this idea of going into classrooms and teaching students how to make opera, perform opera, and use it as a means to also challenge academic skills like literacy, problem solving, public speaking, collaboration, many, many different types of academic skills, and using source material from the curriculum. And so I was hired as the staff artist consultant to help them develop the program, and I would go out into DOE schools all around the city, going into all these different classrooms and working with different school communities, and I did that for 10 years. It was a wonderful job.
Amy: That's so cool. I am a parent of a school-aged child, and I've just been blown away at the opportunities in New York City schools. My daughter's school did a program with Carnegie Hall, where they're learning about music from these professionals at the top of their game. It's really, it's incredible.
Anna: Once I had my children, the travel of it all just became too much for me to manage. And so I pivoted more to adjuncting. I was an adjunct composition professor for Temple University, for their MFA Musical Theater Collaboration program. I worked with Sam Carner’s program [Musical Creators’ Institute], where I met the two of you. And then I became the artistic director of the New York Youth Symphony’s brand new musical theatre songwriting program. And I did that for five years. That became a new experience for me too, in that I was building the program entirely from the ground up and understanding new things like recruitment and partnership and all these other elements that I hadn’t previously been exposed to.
(Musical transition)
Amy: I'd love to switch gears a little bit and talk about womanhood. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey as a woman and how womanhood has fit into your identity?
Anna: I have had a complicated relationship with my own womanhood. And I've only really started to recognize that more lately. I grew up in an environment that was very progressive. However, it was still a very gendered upbringing, and there were just so many things about my personality that did not fit the mold that was societally expected of me. And I think I like… carried around a lot of tension and shame about that for a long time. I have always been opinionated, vocal, ambitious, serious…I have a goofy side, but I also have a really serious side. It created problems for me.
Hayley: I really relate to your experience.
Anna: Yeah. And then like, what do you do when that's authentically you? What do you do about that when you're just like, pissing people off by virtue of being yourself?
Hayley: Right.
Anna: And I have gentle qualities to my personality as well. I'm a very nurturing person. I'm a mom to two people who are amazing, and I'm the primary parent. I'm a very domestic person, but like, also I had these other facets that were very pronounced, and I couldn't make peace with them. And honestly, my solution was to go harder at them in a way, by pursuing this particular career that has so much to do with individual point of view and self-expression.
I do have a little internal conflict sometimes around like, “Am I entitled to do this?” “Why would people want to listen to what I have to say?” “Should I be softening my voice somehow?” I just mean purely artistically. And I know that that's very much tangled up in my own complicated relationship with the fact that I am an extremely femme cis woman.
But I also love being a woman. I love my relationships with other women. I have really been enjoying the relationships that I have with other women composer/lyricists and book writers. Like, Masi Asare is a very dear friend, Emily Gardner Xu Hall, my current collaborator on a new musical I'm working on is Anna Ziegler.
I really value my women collaborators, and I'm very proud of my identity and also enjoy talking about how complicated it has been along the way because of my inability to fit into a mold the way that I really wanted to when I was younger.
Amy: Perhaps the molds are too narrow.
Anna: (Laughing) I don't know. What do you think, Amy? I don't know.
Hayley: (Laughing) I'll say it. Yes, they are. I'll just say that. That's how I feel.
Yeah, you put it so beautifully though...It's really complicated. And the societal messaging we get, especially as like, bold, outspoken women…it's a lot to contend with. There's not a lot of space to say your point about, “and I'm nurturing and I'm a mom.” There's not a lot of space for ‘ands’ in our society, period. And especially as women, I think that's something that I keep circling around every time I think about my womanhood too, is…the ‘ands.’ The things that may seem on the surface are in opposition with one another, but actually they sort of serve each other if you dig a little bit deeper.
Anna: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think the purpose of art and being an art maker and wanting to be in community with other art makers is the joy that so many of us have for nuance and complexity and gray area…And so, another reason why I continue to pursue what I do is the community that it's brought me and the fact that I do feel very comfortable in this community, and I do feel like I could be my authentic self in this community. I connect with a lot of other people who, perhaps not because of their gender identity but for other reasons, have had similar identity struggles in the past, and it's what connects us.
Hayley: Yeah. Anna, if you could make one change to the theatre industry, or a few, what would you do?
Anna: Well, that is a great question. I feel like we're in a very transitional place right now. A lot of companies are struggling financially. Programs are folding. It's raising a lot of questions about the place that live theatre has as a form of entertainment and a commodity these days. I don't think we're seeing the end of live theatre by any means.
Hayley: I mean, we got out of the ‘90s, we can get out of this. That's what I keep telling myself.
Anna: Right, exactly.
Hayley: We came out of that, like, it's okay.
Anna: We have seen some of that before. And I know that, especially in New York City, there are other considerations. Like, real estate is so expensive now in Manhattan. How do you even afford to have a physical theatre?
Hayley: Right.
Anna: But how exciting would it be if this opened up more opportunity for a slightly less geographically centralized theatre landscape. And more love and attention were given to theatrical spaces that aren't just in the theatre district or aren't just Broadway or aren't just technically off-Broadway. That's very exciting to me.
And I have a lot of admiration for people who wear multiple hats. And people who self-produce. It's not necessarily a skill that I feel is developed in me. But I think that when I was coming up in my 20s and early 30s, I had this perception that if you self-produced, it was because nobody else wanted to produce you.
And that's so silly. I was actually talking to my friend Marcy yesterday about how, like, the reason Rodgers and Hammerstein did so well financially–
Hayley: It's because they produced it themselves!
Anna: Yeah, they were their own producers, and they had their own licensing company.
Hayley: Yeah, so true.
Anna: They were business people.
Hayley: Yeah.
Amy: And who better to produce your work? Because you know it best.
Anna: Right. I'm still learning about all of that and how to navigate that…but it's something that future me is definitely interested in. I grew up pre-YouTube and content creators and all that sort of stuff, but I am seeing a really incredible generation of creative people who are Gen Z being able to proudly wear the creator/producer hat and think very adventurously about how to get the work put on, and seen, and in front of the right sorts of audiences, and I kind of want to take a leaf out of that book.
Amy: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think it’s so cool, the access to visibility that the internet has opened up for us and that social media has opened up for us. I think it's so cool that people can have that kind of platform for their voices, especially at such a young age. What a cool opportunity to learn about the responsibility that that entails too.
Anna: Yeah, absolutely.
(Musical transition)
Hayley: We talked about future Anna, but I want to ask you about past Anna, baby Anna. If you could give advice to your younger self just starting out in the industry, what is a piece of advice or wisdom that you would give to her?
Anna: My advice would be - don't be in a rush. This profession is not particularly linear. When I had my children, with my first child, I felt so much anxiety around, like, “Am I going to disappear off people's radars? Is my career going to slow down to the point of stalling? What if I'm not constantly creating, what's that going to mean for me? Have I destroyed my chances at making an impact by also wanting to have children?”
It felt so real to me in the moment, even though reflecting back now, I feel silly that I felt that way because the fact is, yeah, it's not a linear trajectory. And sometimes you have a lot going on and sometimes you don't. And that's just the arc of the thing. What is more important is that you're healthy, and that you are giving love and attention to all aspects of yourself so you can be the most expressive version of yourself when you make your art. And that you remain curious, and to be curious, you need to be inputting as much as you're outputting.
Hayley: Yeah.
Anna: Sometimes you need to input more than output.
Hayley: That's so real. We're in such an output-forward business, and if you don't bring that in, how are you going to continue to do it?
Amy: Yeah, and with parenting, I definitely have felt similarly - and still to a certain extent feel similarly - about that balance, because we are in an industry where we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and on each other. “What are you working on now? What are you working on next?” It's always about the next thing. And there's not really a lot of room for like, “I'm figuring out what my next thing is, right now my thing is my children, right now my thing is my family, and other things are maybe on the back burner or simmering or like in some stage of development.” Yeah.
Anna: Mm hmm. That's like a cultural thing as well.
Amy: Oh, totally.
Anna: One of the things I value so much about my upbringing in Australia is that it cultivated in me a really keen sense of work/life balance. It's very different over there. I have found that the questions [people ask you] have less to do with “What are you doing?” than like, “How are you spending your time?” More boundaries around like, where work begins and ends. And I think they’re actually trying to introduce a legal policy right now that can prevent retribution from an employer who doesn't hear back from the employee outside of working hours.
So they do take that balance seriously as a culture. And it's something that I value a lot to this day. And one of the reasons why I'm so grateful for having children as well, because I can't work on the weekends. I'm not sitting at my piano on a Saturday afternoon. Heck no. I'm running around Prospect Park getting muddy.
Hayley: You're in the dirt with your children.
Anna: Yeah. It's enforced that balance as well. And I think that part of why I've had success is because I'm a great collaborator. And I'm a great collaborator because I'm a happy person, quite frankly.
Amy: I just want to highlight that. That's incredible. Yes.
So on a related note, Anna, you're talking about this a bit, but how do you think about balance in your life?
Anna: There's always something that's on the front burner and something that's on the back burner. In all respects. So like, while I was in rehearsal and tech and previews for Teeth, Teeth was on the front burner. I was not doing bedtimes for literally month-long stretches. I wasn't teaching. But starting April 1st, I'm teaching again. So it's about moving priorities around and being fluid about it. And this has been hard for me, but also not planning too far in advance, because you have to be able to kind of switch when you need to.
Hayley: Be flexible.
Anna: Yeah. And with my creative projects, I'm very careful to not have projects in similar stages of development. I am quite compartmentalized. And so I can have a show that's in production, and a show that's in late-stage development, and a show that I'm actively writing a first draft of, and a show that I am conceiving with a collaborator. But as soon as I have a second project where I'm also doing that, my head explodes. So I try to have one thing in one area of a pipeline at a time.
And then I'm just an iCal fanatic, like everything is color-coded, and I know what I am working on each day, and I know when I'm working on it, and I'm very rigorous about how I devote my attention minute-to-minute really, because I can get pulled in so many directions. All it takes is for me to open up my email and then I'm gone. I'm not doing the thing anymore.
Hayley: What's a conversation, Anna, that is not being had in the theatre industry that you think it would be worthy to have?
Anna: I mean, I wish there were more conversations around health. Whether it's access to proper health insurance or people being able to take care of themselves and their health when they're really, really busy and freelancing and just, like, bouncing from project to project.
Hayley: There's so little support for that when you're in that stage of your career. I'm in it right now, literally juggling so many jobs…
Anna: Yeah. And what do you do if you are a freelancer/contractor, and then you hit a wall? There's no such thing as paid time off.
Hayley: Right.
Anna: Health cannot be valued enough. And if you are wanting to pursue the arts through your whole lifetime, you're going to be old and doing this.
Hayley: Yeah, totally.
Amy: Gotta take care of yourself, and you gotta set up systems early that will sustain.
Hayley: Well, yeah, like, what are you supposed to do, actually? That's true, there's not a lot of conversations about, like, how do you set up for retirement as a freelance artist? What does that look like? Or not even just retirement, but slowing down.
Anna: Exactly. Like, how do you actually set yourself up to be sustainable like that?
And I also feel like failure and success are too narrowly defined in our industry.
Hayley: That's a really good one.
Anna: And what happens when you need to put your energy in places that are not directly related to the pursuit of your chosen art? How do you make it clear that it’s not a failure? I'm really fascinated by stories from people who've done pivots. All types of pivots in their lives, not just career pivots but personal pivots as well. And just sort of taking the stigma away from people being able to change and evolve and shift their areas of focus as they evolve as humans.
Amy: Yeah, I also love that stuff. It's very cool. We have this cultural thing, at least in the United States, where it's like you go through school and you're learning and you're growing and then you like, graduate from college and you're a fully formed adult and you like, get your job and then you stay in that job for your whole life until you retire. It's just so not how the world works, and it's so valuable to continue learning and growing and developing new skills and trying new things. Yeah.
Anna: So yeah, I've been listening to this podcast that I recommend called “A Slight Change of Plans with Maya Shankar.” And it's all about people changing. It's a podcast about change, and sometimes change that is enforced by outside circumstances and sometimes change that is initiated by a person voluntarily, and I find it so fascinating.
Hayley: When you don't have that external validation, how do you find that strength within to know this is right for me? Or be okay with the fact that you could make that choice, and it could be okay for right now but it might not be forever? Yeah, that's a really important thing to think about.
Amy: Yeah it's like, looking at art as a facet of your whole life. Rather than as your whole life.
Anna: Exactly.
Amy: Cool. I want to ask you before we go: What are you most proud of in your life and in your work?
Anna: Oh…I am really proud that I orchestrated a massive life change in order to facilitate my pursuit of this dream, which was relocating to the other side of the world. I did that. I mean, I did that with a huge amount of support. I had the support of my parents, my family, my now-husband was my boyfriend in Australia. But like, we are over here pursuing our professional ambitions with no extended family and two little boys to raise, and it's hard a lot of the time. It's hard work for both of us. And also, it's what's making our lives rich and fulfilling. And I do feel very proud of the resilience and the ambitiousness that has required both of us, actually. Right now, I'm just glad to be living here in Brooklyn and in such close proximity to this field that I care so much about.
Hayley: Yeah.
Amy: That's wonderful.
Hayley: Anna, thank you so much for spending some time with us. We're so grateful that you came on this podcast to chit chat and tell us all about you and provide your wisdom. Could you please tell our listeners where they can find you on the interwebs?
Anna: Yes. I'm on Instagram a lot these days. My Instagram handle is @theannakjacobs and I have a website that I update infrequently, and that's www.annakjacobs.com
Hayley: Amazing. Thank you so much, Anna.
Amy: Thank you so much, Anna. This was a great conversation.
Anna: My pleasure.
(Music)
Hayley: Thank you for listening to the Women & Theatre Podcast. We’re your hosts, Hayley Goldenberg…
Amy: And Amy Andrews. If you like what you heard, subscribe and give us a 5-star review wherever you listen.
Hayley: You can also follow us on social @womenandtheatreproject to make sure you never miss an episode.
Amy: The music for this show is written by talented Women & Theatre community member Chloe Geller.
Hayley: Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time!
Amy: Bye!
