S1E2: Lynne Shankel
In this episode, Hayley and Amy speak with composer, orchestrator, lyricist, and music supervisor Lynne Shankel about her new musical Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls, the importance of making theatre for social change, and the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated space. Scroll down for episode notes and transcript!
Episode Notes
Guest: Lynne Shankel
Hosts: Hayley Goldenberg and Amy Andrews
Music: Chloe Geller
Episode Resources:
Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls (2022 Richard Rodgers Award winner) at the National Alliance of Musical Theatre (NAMT) conference October 20-21
Life After at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago (June-July 2022)
White Girl in Danger at Second Stage in New York (opens March 2023)
Allegiance (opens in London January 2023)
Guest Bio
Lynne Shankel - composer, orchestrator, lyricist, and music supervisor - was the first woman to solely orchestrate a new musical on Broadway, Allegiance. She was music director and arranger for the Broadway production of Crybaby and resident music supervisor for the Tony Award-winning revival of Company, for which she conducted the Grammy-nominated cast album.
Other credits as orchestrator and arranger: Altar Boyz, The Extraordinary Ordinary, Annie Live on NBC, Chasing the Song, Life After, Snow Child, Breathe, and many others. Lynne was also music director for the acclaimed 2019 Kennedy Center production of Tommy. As a composer, Lynne's works include Bare the Musical, Red Velvet, HoT, and Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls.
Lynne is also the composer and lyricist of Postcard American Town. Lynne received the 2021 ASCAP Lucille and Jack Yellen Award. Her album, Bare Naked, is out on Yellow Sound Label. Lynne also teaches musical theater composition at the University of Michigan.
Find Lynne Online:
Website: lynneshankel.com
Follow Lynne on Facebook and Instagram
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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 explore the experiences of women and nonbinary people in the theatre industry.
Hayley: On the pod, we interview people from different backgrounds with varying levels of industry experience and professional roles.
Amy: Our goal is to build community, identify the unique benefits that women and nonbinary folks bring to theatrical spaces, and pool our collective wisdom to break down the barriers we continue to face.
(Music)
Amy: On today's episode, we talk with Lynne Shankel - composer, orchestrator, lyricist, and music supervisor. Lynne was the first woman to solely orchestrate a new musical on Broadway, that was the show Allegiance. She was also music director and arranger for the Broadway production of Crybaby and resident music supervisor for the Tony Award-winning revival of Company, for which she conducted the Grammy-nominated cast album.
Lynne's other credits as orchestrator and arranger include Altar Boyz, The Extraordinary Ordinary, Annie Live on NBC, Chasing the Song, Life After, Snow Child, Breathe, and many other shows. Lynne was also the music director for the acclaimed Kennedy Center production of Tommy in 2019. As a composer, Lynne's works include Bare the Musical, Red Velvet, HoT, and Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls, which we talk about a lot in this episode.
Lynne is also the composer and lyricist of Postcard American Town. Lynne received the 2021 ASCAP Lucille and Jack Yellen Award. Her album, Bare Naked, is out on Yellow Sound Label, and Lynne also teaches musical theater composition at the University of Michigan.
Hayley: We are here with the multitalented and fabulous Lynne Shankel. Lynne, could you please introduce yourself, share your pronouns, and tell us a little bit about what you do in theatre.
Lynne: Hi, everybody. I'm Lynne Shankel. I use she/her pronouns. I have done many things in the theatre throughout my career. I have been a music director, a music supervisor - more recently, arranger, orchestrator, composer, lyricist.
Hayley: Amazing. How did you come to find theatre and your creative work, Lynne?
Lynne: I have loved theatre since I was a teenager. I had a group of friends in high school and we were all musical theatre geeks. We would drive around after school listening to the original cast recording of Into the Woods over and over and over again.
I sang in choir. I played piano in jazz band, you know, I was doing like all the things. And I was in little itty bitty bit parts in musicals when I was in high school. But when I was 16, our orchestra conductor at my high school was conducting a summer community theatre production of A Chorus Line, and she asked me if I would be interested in playing piano in the pit for A Chorus Line. And I ended up playing rehearsals with the cast as well, and the guy who was the vocal director for the show ended up having a bunch of conflicts. And so I just by default ended up filling in for the music director as, you know, this 16 year old kid. And I was like, oh my God, I love this. This is amazing. It's what I wanted to do.
I went to the University of Michigan and I studied piano performance there. That's what I got my degree in, but I spent as much time music directing shows, conducting shows, student productions, whatever, I spent as much time doing that as I did working on my degree.
But I knew that's what I wanted to do, you know, at that point. And that was what I first did when I got out of college, I was playing for anything I could get my hands on, playing for classes, playing for auditions, music directing whatever I could get my hands on. That's how I got started.
(music)
Amy: So Lynne, I know that you have some really exciting stuff going on this year with one of your shows. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Lynne: I'm in the middle of writing three shows right now, and one of the shows is called Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls, and I wrote the music for it and Sara Cooper wrote the words. And that show won the Richard Rodgers Award this year, which we were just ecstatic about.
This was still very much in the height of COVID, and we were a couple of months away from going up to the Goodspeed Festival of New Works for another piece that we're writing together called HoT. And we were getting ready to go up there and start rehearsals, and all I could think of was that she was gonna tell me that it was canceled because of COVID.
And then the phone rang and she said it so fast. She said, “We won the Richard Rodgers.” “What did you say, Sara?” “We won the Richard Rodgers!” and I just, I started bawling. I couldn't believe it. So I was super, super excited. It was amazing to go to the fancy ceremony at the Academy of Arts and Letters in Harlem, it was so very cool.
That same show, Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls, was one of the winners of NAMT this year. So the show will be featured at the National Alliance of Musical Theatre conference in New York this fall. Super exciting because theatres from all over the country come, theatres from New York come. And I think this is gonna be a super big one because it's the first time that the festival has been in person in three years. And so they're expecting a really large turnout, and we are so delighted to be one of the eight shows chosen. We are so very, very excited.
Hayley: Huge congratulations on that, Lynne.
Amy: Can you tell us a little bit about the show? We were talking about it before the interview, and we were both like, oh my God, this is so cool. It's like something that we would aspire to write.
Lynne: Yeah. It's a fascinating piece, I think it's a fascinating piece. It is about the women who worked at the U.S. Radium Corporation in the 1920s who were knowingly poisoned by radium by the company. And it's about the way that these women fought back.
It's interesting, Sara came to me with this idea after we had finished writing HoT. Our other show HoT is a contemporary feminist adaptation of Helen of Troy - get it? H-O-T - HoT. Anyway, we were just finishing up our first draft of HoT, and Sara came to me with this idea. And she had found out about it through clickbait. There was this clickbait story about these women, she clicked on it and she was just like, what the hell is this? And then went deeper and deeper finding out more and more about it. And as Sara would say, she kind of vomited out this draft in like three weeks.
Some of it made sense, some of it didn't. She was like, “It just kind of fell out of me and I just kept writing and kept writing.” And she sent it to me and she's like, “I wonder if maybe this is our next thing.” And I read it and I was like, Oh my god, yes, we have to do this. And interestingly, she was with some family right after she had finished this vomit draft. And she was telling her uncle about what she was writing, and he said, “You know, your great-aunt worked in one of those factories.” And she was like, “What??”
So I guess I should explain for anybody who doesn't know - in the early 1920s, radium became kind of a fad in the United States. During World War I, they used radium to paint the faces of watches so that the soldiers could see in the dark cuz it glowed. So they could see the time in the dark so they could, you know, coordinate missions or coordinate whatever they were doing. And then post-World War I, it became kind of a fad that exploded throughout the country. There was - you could buy a radium watch, there were radium cosmetics, you could take a radium bath. It kind of was like the Botox of its time, you know, it was thought to have these properties that would keep you youthful, that would keep away wrinkles, that would, you know, keep aging at bay.
And the women who worked at the U.S. Radium Corporation painted the faces onto watches with radium. And the way that they were taught to do that was: You dip the brush in the paint. You lick the brush so you could get a fine tip, so that you could do the fine work of painting all the numbers. And so they continually were ingesting radium.
And I think when they started, they didn't know that radium was poisonous. But radium poisoning is actually very, very slow. So it was years before these women started to show signs that there was something wrong and they just became sick. And when I say sick, I mean like their bones were degenerating, and - this is a true story. One of the women went to the dentist with jaw pain. She went to the dentist and during the examination, her jaw bone fell out of her face into his hand because it disintegrated.
And the women obviously started to realize that something was wrong. They thought that it was probably - you know, could this have something to do with what we do here at this factory? And the U.S. Radium Corporation did an internal investigation and said no, there's nothing wrong. And there was a second investigation where the women did demand to bring in outside investigators from Harvard. And they did find that things were horribly wrong with these women, but the company rewrote the report and hid the results.
So it was a very long time before these women found any justice. And they formed a class action lawsuit, which was put off again and again and again, because the folks on the other side knew that the women were dying and so they put it off. But eventually they did win. And it is the basis of some of the first regulations for health in the workplace in the United States.
So it was a very, very big deal. But the women did die because of the radium poisoning, but it was an important case. And interestingly, along the way, doctors who examined these women said on their death certificates - the cause of death was listed as syphilis. Instead of saying what it was, which was radium poisoning, instead of that, it was slut shaming.
Hayley: Wonderful things.
Lynne: Yeah. Awesome. So the whole piece is just a giant can of worms, you know? And I love it. We wrote it for an all female-identifying cast. And so female-identifying people play all of the parts, men and women. Kind of a reverse Shakespeare and that's the same - our Helen of Troy show is built the same way. So they're kind of sister pieces.
Hayley: Wow.
Lynne: It's fascinating. So if you're interested in checking it out, we'll be in NAMT in October. And the festival is October 20th and 21st in New York City.
Amy: Amazing.
Hayley: Lynne, could we talk a little bit about your creative mission? Like, do you have something that you feel like guides you forward?
Lynne: You know, at this point in my life, I'm very interested first in the writing end of things. I do most of my work as a composer, composer/lyricist, you know, or an orchestrator. And the pieces that I'm really drawn to - I do a lot of work that's about women and about women's rights and about equality - and equality in all forms. At this point in my life, I'm not so interested in, like, fluff pieces. I wanna make a difference and I want to be investing my time in shows that I feel make a difference in the world and, you know, shed light on social wrongs especially. So that's where I focus my time.
Amy: I love that. I think that Hayley and I both approach our theatre writing in the same way. So you're in good company.
Lynne: That's awesome.
Amy: Yay! Let's change the world.
(music)
Amy: Let's shift gears a little bit, Lynne, ‘cause I want to talk to you about your experiences of womanhood. What does womanhood mean to you and how do you see it fitting into your identity?
Lynne: Wow. That's a big question. I think that what is important and interesting right now - we've talked a lot, especially in the last few years, about different points of view and different points of view in theatre. And I think that women do bring a different voice and a different point of view.
I've been working in this industry in New York for almost 30 years, and it's gone through a lot of changes during that time. But there are things that still to this day remain the same. Like when I was younger, like when I was in my twenties, I remember one time going into a rehearsal on a Broadway show. I was a rehearsal pianist and I taught vocal tracks. And I went to meet with a new cast member to teach him, you know, his vocal track. And I showed up and he was like, “Oh, you’re Lynne. I assumed you were a man.” And I was like, well, nope.
Hayley: No, I am not.
Lynne: Nope, I'm not. Now there are actually quite a few female conductors, it's not really such an anomaly. There's still more men than women, but like the 90s, the early 2000s, like there weren't a lot of us. And for me, stepping on the podium every time was about proving myself, because my knowledge and my right to be there was innately questioned in a way where if I had the exact same set of skills and I showed up and I was a guy, that wouldn't happen. It would be immediately assumed that I did know what I was doing, and things wouldn't be questioned.
I remember one time, this was like at a major out-of-town, like in the early-mid-2000s, I guess. We were in an orchestra rehearsal. We were actually in the pit in the theatre. So we'd moved into the theatre and, you know, we were doing some changes and fixing some stuff and, you know, I'm conducting and I'm hearing people talk in the reeds and brass section to my left. And this one guy, he was like, he's like, “I think what she wants is - look, well, I think what she wants is…” You know, and I was like, “Excuse me, I'll tell you exactly what she wants.”
Amy: Good for you.
Hayley: So bizarre.
Lynne: It's so bizarre. And I found, when I got into like my 40s and I started orchestrating more, the same stuff, you know. Especially as an orchestrator, because female orchestrators are still very, very few and far between in the theatre.
And it's taken a lot of time for me to get to a place where, you know - now when I come into a rehearsal in New York, I think most people know who I am or they've worked with me before, and so there is like, trust. But it's amazing. Still when I go out of town, people don't know me, it's immediate. You can just see it. I don't know how to describe it besides you can just see it and sense it, that until I get through that first session, like the first three hours of rehearsal, there's not an immediate trust that I know what I'm doing.
Which is kind of sad for someone who's been in this business for 30 years and doing all the things. It's not like I just showed up and somebody said, “Oh, let's give her a job”. You know, it's like a damn long time. So all of that said, you know, I think that women bring different points of view into the theatre.
I was just on this piece Life After, that's written by a female Canadian writer named Britta Johnson. She's an absolute genius. She's the absolute best, and I adore her and I think she's one of the great new voices of the theatre, period. And you know, it was interesting because Life After is a piece that - the cast is eight women and one man. And for the first time, we just did a production at the Goodman in Chicago, and we had an all-female creative team, like core creative team. We'd never had that on the show. And I realized that for me, it was actually my first time working with an all-female core creative team. I was like, holy shit, this has never happened before. This has never happened in my life. Like that's wild.
And I will say that I think that the way women run a room is generally really freaking cool. We're cool-headed and we're logical and we're problem solvers. And there's not a lot of, you know, grandstanding and bullshit. We just, we wanna solve problems and get the job done and, you know, and listen to what folks in the room need and what is going to make the room come alive and for us to be able to share the work in the best way possible. To make the best expression that we can of a new work. I feel that women running a room do that really, really well. And it's not to say that men don't, obviously I've worked with some genius men who I love, but it was just - as a female, it was a very interesting and eye-opening experience to have, and it was amazing and wonderful, and I'm so excited for the next steps on that show.
Hayley: Yeah, it's something we talk about with a lot of interviewees. That their experiences working in these all-women spaces are like the most caring spaces but also the most productive. Because you take the time upfront to acknowledge people's needs and then it just - there are less hiccups along the way. So it's just interesting to hear you speak about that as well.
Lynne: Yeah. And I think some of it is because, you know, I think that we've all had experiences like mine where you're used to being questioned at every step along the way. And part of my natural response to that is - I mean, I'm Type A to begin, I'm a Virgo, I am so Type A - but I think that I tend to be super, super prepared for everything. I'm never gonna walk into a situation underprepared. And I found that everyone in that room was the same and that we were all uber prepared. We were all, you know, at the top of our game and ready to go. And I think that is something that's just been required in my life in a way that maybe it wouldn't have been if I wasn't a woman. But I'm glad for that because it is my personality. That's just, that's who I am. But women get the job done. That's what I'm saying, friends.
Amy: Women get the job done. Women, people of color, anyone in a marginalized group, in a white-male-dominated industry, like of course, we're held to a different standard. So we have to - I mean, we naturally do that because we're fabulous. And also, like, it has been required of us.
Lynne: Exactly. And I think that is - what is so great about the changes that are happening and, like you said, going beyond women, beyond female-identifying to people of color, you know, and people of color being in charge. Having a diverse group of artists come together is so amazing.
The next show that I'm orchestrating, I'm orchestrating Michael R. Jackson's next piece, White Girl in Danger, which is beyond brilliant and I love it so much. But I mean, the group of artists leading the charge on that piece - I mean, Lileana Blain-Cruz is directing, Raja Feather Kelly is choreographing, Rona Siddiqui is the music supervisor, Meg Zervoulis is the music director. The whole team, the entire team is so incredibly diverse, as is the cast. And the subject matter is unbelievably amazing and so important. I'm so excited and I love having the opportunity to be in rooms like that, where different voices are coming forward from the voices that we've classically heard, you know, over the last X many years.
(music)
Hayley: Lynne, have you had any influential mentors that have helped you along your journey that you would like to speak about?
Lynne: Oh my goodness. So many people. One of the first opportunities that I had as a young person working in New York was I had the opportunity to sub in the pit at Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. And Kathy Sommer - she was the associate conductor and she played the keys 1 chair and she took a chance on me. She thought that I had the goods, but I was very green. I was like 23, 24, you know, I'd never really done it before. But she took a chance on me. I learned so much from her, and I learned so much about how to play in an orchestra like that. And also just kind of conducting yourself within this group of people and watching her be someone that was in charge.
Michael Kosarin was the music supervisor there. And eventually, I learned to conduct the show and I became one of the conductors on the show, and I would just study Kos. I was like playing and watching how he conducts things and how he commanded the space.
I learned so much from both of them. They're just a couple in a long string. And I think, now I'm kind of on the side where I try to help mentor other people who are coming up. And that's something that's very important to me as well.
Amy: Lynne, could you talk to us a little about how you balance your creative work with the rest of your life? Like us, you wear a million creative hats, how do you balance wearing all of those different hats?
Hayley: Yeah, all the different hyphens.
Lynne: Yeah, it's tricky. Sometimes along the way, in order to focus on things that are more important, you kind of have to leave some things behind. For me, as much as music direction was a big part of my life for a very long time and I conducted lots of shows, it's not something that I do anymore. I still get asked a lot. And I've turned down a lot of fantastic jobs, but I really wanna spend my time and focus my time on writing.
So like at this point, I really only even supervise a show if it's something that I'm also doing a lot of writing on. Like Life After, for example, because I'm the orchestrator/arranger/music supervisor, so I'm wearing lots of hats on that. But you know, you do have to pick and choose. I want so much of my creative time to be spent composing that I'm careful. I really only attach myself to pieces that really mean something to me, and Life After is one of those pieces, White Girl in Danger is one of those pieces that really means something to me. And so I want to do that, and I'm so excited to be orchestrating both of those. But you really can't do everything.
It's tricky because in this business, people like to pigeonhole you and say, oh, she's this, oh, she's this. For me, it became difficult because people were like, oh, she's a music director. And so I kind of had to quit doing that in order for people then to say, oh, she's an arranger/orchestrator, she's a composer. You know, you kind of have to carve out your time carefully.
The work/life balance - always very, very difficult. I am blessed to be married to an awesome guy, my husband, Joe Mowatt, who's fab. And he's a drummer/percussionist, he's also been in this business for a long time. And there's never any discussion about things that I think would be very tricky if I was married to someone who did something else. You know, it's hard to explain, Life After is going to the Goodman, so I'm going to Chicago for six weeks. Joe's like, “Oh, that's awesome. Okay, cool.” And then it's basically just us working out doggy daycare for our two furry children. We don't have human children but we have furry ones and, for us, that was a better personal path.
Hayley: That's what I aspire to.
Amy: The audience wants to know - what kind of furry children?
Lynne: Oh my goodness. We have two dogs. We have Bella, who is an Old English bulldog, and we have Clementine, who is an English bulldog.
Hayley: Clementine, that's such a good name.
Lynne: They're both rescues. And I need to give a plug to Long Island Bulldog Rescue, who we've gotten both of our dogs from.
You know, often in this business, we tend to have to go out of town for stuff and it's hard to be away and I love my house and I'm very happy when I'm at home, I love it so much. But it is tricky, and you have to make sure to carve out time for yourself, and if you have a significant other, it's important to spend time together for those relationships.
But I think it's really hard in this business. Because the thing is, it's not like we work 9-5 and then you go home and you put it away. I never put it away. You know, it's a hard thing for people to understand who aren't in this business. You know, I'm always thinking about what I'm writing next or what I need to get done on what I'm writing or what the next rewrites are, or what's the next step on this project and this project. And so it's a lot of juggling. It's a lot of juggling to make a life in the theatre work and to also have some kind of life/work balance outside of that, it takes a lot of effort.
Hayley: Lynne, what is something that you wish you had known when you first started in the business or that you would tell your younger self?
Lynne: Oh, wow. I think the thing that is most important that I didn't understand when I was in my 20s and into my early 30s - Hal Prince, no matter what show he was working on, when it was opening night on Broadway, he would always schedule a meeting the next morning for whatever next piece he was working on. So no matter what the reviews were, he was going to a meeting for something else the next day. And I think that is a very, very important thing.
And I think how it played out in my life when I was younger - you kind of sometimes end up putting all your eggs in one basket. I've been a part of quite a few well-loved flops, shall we say. You know, good shows that for whatever reason, they just didn't run. They didn't have as much of a life as you wished. And I would say to my younger self, like, you can love all of these things, but don't put your entire self into one project. You need to keep the balls juggling so that there's always different things going on.
I remember one piece in particular, I was quite young and I just - I remember the show closed and I did not wanna get out of bed. I just didn't. And I remember Joe being like, “What is happening here?” I’d gotten so consumed with the one thing, and it was so upsetting when it was over that I just went into a spiral. And it's hard because we love our projects like little children, but I think it's important to have lots of little project children, so that you don't feel like all your dreams are crushed when one thing goes south. There needs to be something else, try to keep different things spinning. And it feeds different parts of your artistic brain, and that's very important.
Hayley: I think a lot of listeners will benefit from hearing that. Because we're such passionate individuals as theatre people. We pour our whole hearts and souls into things, and not everything is gonna be a Hamilton level or whatever of things, and it's not meant to be either and that's okay.
Lynne: And you also just never know. I think that's the other thing that I would say, is don't make your choices based on “I think this is gonna be a hit, so I wanna try to attach myself here.” Theatre is playing roulette. Sometimes, like, the best thing in the world can just come up like craps for no reason, for reasons that you just can't understand or you might never understand. Like - did you guys see the documentary about Merrily We Roll Along?
Hayley: Yes. Oh my gosh.
Lynne: You just see these young people - you know, older folks now looking back at their younger selves, and they're still saying, “It should have been a hit! Like, why wasn't it a hit?” And sometimes you'll never understand and you can never really tell, like, what's gonna -
Even Hamilton. I was doing a show with Tommy Kail, we were doing a revival of Once on This Island at Paper Mill Playhouse, and it was the spring of 2012. And I remember, I was like, “So what are you working on now?” And he was like, “Well, I'm working on this show. It's another show that Lin wrote, and it's about Alexander Hamilton. And it's told through hip-hop, and Chris Jackson is playing George Washington and…” You know, he's telling me all this stuff. There was nothing about it that just screamed like, oh my God. And then I saw it at the Public and was like, blown away, obviously.
But it's just like, you don't know. You just work on what you're passionate about and work with people who you want to make art with. Tommy and Alex and Andy, like, they love making art together and that's what they do. And so I think what is really important is just make art that speaks to you, and make it with the people that you want to spend time with, because you will spend a hell of a lot of time with the people that you make art with, often more time than you spend with your actual family.
It really is about - do what brings you joy instead of what you think will make you big money. Which is hard, because look, we all have to pay the rent or pay the mortgage. So I'm not saying like, just do every job that pays you $50. But sometimes, the things that I've done for a hundred bucks because I wanted to work with so-and-so and make a connection with them - that has always been fruitful. And you never know where things are going to lead. So I think it really is important to balance the things that you need to do for money, obviously, because we all have to live - but with things that you do for your art and because it feeds your soul.
Amy: I think that's great. I think it's so important too. There's been a lot of conversation lately about mental health for people in the performing arts. And I think it's so important for mental health to have that kind of process-based focus where, like, it's not about the outcome, it's about the journey.
Lynne: Exactly. It needs to be about the journey. Like the journey is the thing. That's what I love. Like the creative process is what I love. I mean, I love being in a room with people that I'm working with and tearing something apart to try to find the answer, you know, I mean, rewriting and rewriting, that's what we do. And for me, that's the part that is the most fulfilling.
Amy: Absolutely. I have one final question for you, which is - what are you most proud of in your life and in your work?
Lynne: Oh, wow. Gosh. I'm really proud of the stories that I'm telling and the stories that I've been a part of telling. Pieces like Allegiance. I worked on Allegiance and was the music supervisor and orchestrator/arranger for that piece. That's one that - though it didn't have a long life on Broadway, it has a very long life afterwards and in film. And that story was so important to tell, and I'm so proud to be a part of that. And I'm really proud of the pieces that I'm writing now. And I'm very proud of being in that pioneering group of women of my generation and, you know, hopefully making it possible for younger folks to not have such a tough journey starting out of the gate. I'm really proud to hopefully be a part of opening doors for other women and for folks who are marginalized in different ways. And those are, like I said, also the stories that I wanna tell.
Amy: Oh, I love that.
Hayley: What a way to end an interview. Thank you so much for being with us, Lynne.
Lynne: Thank you so much for having me. This has been such a pleasure.
Amy: And thank you for all of the work that you are doing for women, the storytelling and the creative teams and all of it. It is seen and appreciated.
Lynne: Aw, thank you so much. Thank you both so much.
(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!
