Score One For Amanda Green: On Her Tony Nom And Making Billy Crystal Laugh

With the Tony Awards being named for American Theatre Wing co-founder Antoinette Perry, you would kind-of-sort-of assume that in the past 75 years, women would have made their mark on the creative side of musical theater. Not so, says Amanda Green, nominated this year as Best Lyricist for her part in the creation of the score for the hit musical “Mr. Saturday Night,” starring Billy Crystal.

“For every show I’ve been involved in — ‘High Fidelity,’ ‘Bring It On,’ ‘Hands on a Hardbody,’ and now ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ — I’ve been the only woman on the creative team,” Green said in a recent interview. She says it without rancor, but still, as more than a casual observation.

Green is a forerunner for change — she is the first female president of the Dramatists Guild, which fights against copyright infringement and other unfair practices, and she is on the board of The Lillys, named for the writer Lillian Hellman, an outlet to honor the work of women in the American theater, doling out awards and keeping “The Count” (data) on women and their involvement in theatrical enterprises.

But let’s back up a bit, to Green’s upbringing (much of it in East Hampton, with her brother, Adam) as the daughter of Adolph Green and Phyllis Newman. With her father as half of the (Betty) Comden and Green writing team — as in “Singin’ In The Rain,” “On The Town,” “Applause,” and many more — and her mother a Tony-Award winning performer, was there ever another direction that Green considered?

“Never,” she said without hesitation. “It was always what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what my career would look like, or how I would get there, but they were too smart, interesting, and having too much fun for me to want to do anything else but emulate them.”

“Comedy, creativity, were the coins of the realm in our home,” she continued. “Good grades were nice, but a well-placed wisecrack earned you unfettered admiration. Sitting around the dinner table — if you could make them laugh — it was a great night. In some ways, I think I’m still writing to get that laugh around the dinner table.”

And laughs she’s getting with “Mr. Saturday Night.” The show is a musical remake of a not-entirely-successful 1992 film Billy Crystal co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in, where he portrayed a washed-up 73-year-old comedian who gets a second chance, with his career and his family. Crystal, who is now 74 and no longer needs the stage makeup that took hours three decades ago, is playing Buddy Young Jr. on Broadway now, with fellow film cast member David Paymer recreating the role of Buddy’s brother/manager, and a supporting cast which includes Randi Graff as Buddy’s wife, and Shoshanna Bean as his newly-sober but troubled daughter.

The project was in the works for ages before coming to the Nederlander Theater in October of last year, and is up for Tonys in five categories: Best Original Score (Green and Jason Robert Brown), Best Musical, Best Book (Crystal, Babaloo Mandel, Lowell Ganz), Best Actor (Crystal), and Best Featured Actress (Bean).

Songwriting started for Green at the age of 9. “I wrote a parody of my father’s iconic song ‘Just In Time’ — in the form of a note to let him know the toilet had overflowed,” she said.

But writing for Broadway was a circuitous route.

“When I started writing songs, I was writing pop songs. There was a litany of sad songs about unrequited, exquisitely painful love, which was my jam in my 20s,” Green said. “When I met my now-husband in my early 30s, I had no more of those to write. It was also around then I joined the BMI Musical Theater Writing Workshop and realized this is where my artistic heart was.”

“What I love about writing for the theater is that you are writing for specific characters, in a specific time in specific situations. Who they are, how they live, what they need in a given moment, dictates what you write.

“That being said,” she continued, “somehow some of me does seem to make it into each show I write. As in ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ — the heart of the story is this showbiz family and its patriarch, brilliantly portrayed by Billy Crystal. He has a grown daughter struggling to find her own voice and place in the world. The character isn’t exactly me — but there was a lot from my own life, feelings, I could draw on, both for comedy and pathos.”

In a recent article in Playbill magazine, spotlighting this year’s Tony lyricist nominees, writer Lowell Ganz pointed to his favorite Amanda Green lyric in the show, sung by Bean about a man she might like to meet in “There’s A Chance”: “One who isn’t a cheat or a stealer/Or gay or my boss or my dealer.”

“I know her whole past life in two seconds,” said Ganz.

Working with Crystal has been a wonderful experience, said Green. He told her early on that he loved it when Green was in the audience, because of her distinctive laugh. But of course, there’s also work.

“There was a song Jason Robert Brown and I wrote for Billy at the 11th hour, right before we were about to start previews,” she said. “We had another song in that place for five years, but it needed to be funnier. And Billy wanted it to be called ‘I Still Got It.’ So I wrote these lyrics: ‘I still got it/A pair you can’t lift with a crane.’ And Billy said, ‘No. Balls. It has to be balls.’ He wasn’t circumspect about it at all. So those are the lyrics: ‘I still got it/Balls you can’t lift with a crane,’” she said with a laugh.

And getting a laugh out of Crystal himself was a high point.

“We needed an ending to a song, and I went into the other room, and came up with ‘Wanna commit career kamikaze?/Act like that f---ed-up old Ashkenazi’! Billy read it and just lost it, and that meant so much,” she said.

But back to women and creative roles — Green’s latest project, “Female Troubles,” is an original musical comedy she co-conceived pre-pandemic. And it seems even more meaningful in light of the recent Supreme Court murmurings over abortion laws.

“I like to describe it as Jane Austen meets ‘Bridesmaids’ — but about women’s reproductive freedoms,” Green said. “Set in England in the 1800s, but with anachronistic language and contemporary music, it’s deeply funny, trenchant, and all too timely. The current war on women’s health is truly frightening. This is how I can contribute as an artist to fighting back.

The American Theatre Wing’s 75th Annual Tony Awards are at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 12, and will be broadcast on CBS and Paramount+.