Interview with Ron Fassler
Jennifer Ashley Tepper is not only a knowledgeable theatre historian, Broadway producer, and director of programming at the 54 Below supper club, but also one of the kindest and hardest working people in show business. Her fifth book, Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy That the History Books Left Out, has just been published by Applause Books. In celebration of this milestone, I had the chance to interview her last week and here are some excerpts from our conversation:
Ron Fassler: Jennifer, congratulations on Women Writing Musicals. What inspired you to write the book?
Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Covid (she laughs). This was the most solo writing endeavor I ever embarked upon. It really was just me in my apartment doing such a deep dive into all these women. When I decided that the premise was going to be female musical theatre writers that have been left out of the history books I thought, “Well, I can’t leave people out of the book because that would be quite a contradiction.” So, one of the things that I did was I literally dug through IBDB (Internet Broadway Data Base) for every single woman that had written a musical. And even if it was for one show I would take note of the name and then do a dive into every newspaper archive I could find and every library archive I could find to see what history was there. So, even though there are three hundred-plus women chronicled in the book, obviously a lot of these women did make more history than others. But in a book like this I wanted to be exhaustive and really include a lot of people.
RF: Well, I would almost call your book a biographical dictionary, inclusive as it is with so many quick bios of people no one’s ever heard of. What’s so entertaining about Women Writing Musicals is that it will be a treat for people to read for a long time. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.
JT: Thank you. I did strive for making the book easy for someone who isn’t as familiar with theatre people as you or I so that they can pick it up and say, “Oh, Dolly Parton wrote a musical. I want to read about that.” Or someone who says, “I’m doing a production of Once Upon a Mattress and I want to learn about Mary Rodgers.” That is very much baked into what the book is and you don’t have to read it all in order to enjoy it. At the same time, you can start at the 1920s if you’re interested in that or you can start at the beginning. I didn’t write the book in order. In fact, I wasn’t even sure until the very end that I was going to include that first chapter on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because obviously the musicals women were writing then were not musicals the way we know them today. And that history is so much more obscure and, honestly, there is just so little information on most of those women that it seemed almost silly to start then. But when I was finishing the book it was the last chapter I wrote because I went, “You know what? These women existed. New York City in the 1700 and 1800s eventually becomes what New York City is today. I mean, they were writing entertainments that have songs in them. So this will be the only place these get chronicled and I want to do that.

RF: You’re digging so far back to a time when there weren’t the kind of chroniclers we have today, which means there is so little written. Who was the revelation? Who did you in a certain sense “discover” and want readers to especially take a look at?
JT: Micki Grant. Who, of course, was the first woman to write the book, lyrics and music for a Broadway musical, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope. And she also starred in it and it was about the Black experience and it ran for over a thousand performances. I found myself really fascinated by her and of course when I was writing the book I wanted it to intersect with all the things we’re thinking about now in terms of underrepresented communities. I wanted there to be women of color in the book more than there could be because there unfortunately are not very many women of color who’ve written musicals that were produced. So, when I got to Micki Grant, I was really absorbed in researching all she accomplished.
RF: I was amazed to discover through your writing that one of the first all-female writing team for a musical goes as far back as 1924. Topsy and Eva, a musical adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin with a book by Catherine Chisholm Cushing and musica and lyrics by its two original stars, Rosetta and Vivan Duncan—the Duncan Sisters, a vaudeville duo.
JT: And no one remembers them at all! There was so little information them. And they were the first ones! It was fascinating to me that no one really noted that.
RF: Yes. As you write in the book, “Of course, this achievement is little remembered today because of the racial stereotypes employed and the problematic use of blackface.” And your mention of Micki Grant . . . I mean, this is not ancient history and she is almost completely forgotten.
JT: Totally. I became really obsessed who has been left not only out the history books, but licensing catalogues and cast albums. There are a lot of things that give musicals and give writers legacy that intersect with whether those writers are remembered. And for Micki Grant, one of the things that I personally experienced that I never forgot was that for years, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope was only available on LP. For years! That’s a loss to generations of theatre majors and theatre goers who can’t access the material. There were so many protest musicals in the 60s and 70s, many written by women, that were performed at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre that went unrecorded. And they were never done again and have been left out of the history books.
RF: The book covers so much ground we’ve barely gotten started here. But in the interest of people’s short attention spans, let’s finish with something memorable. I loved reading about Carolyn Leigh, a truly great lyricist.
JT: Yes, of course. And Mary Rodgers. And you know, a lot of the women’s stories, Leigh and Rodgers especially, intersect with men like Cy Coleman and Stephen Sondheim who were more famous than them. So often there were these feature articles that would say, “No women have ever done what they’re doing before” and it’s not true! My book points out the fifty women who were doing it before them and that’s important. It’s not that there weren’t women around it was more about there being so few people weren’t aware that some were successful. Thank god for women like Carolyn Leigh and Mary Rodgers who really made folks realize that women could do this at all.
Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy That the History Books Left Out is now available from Applause Books in hardcover, Kindle and as an audiobook.