By Kenneth Jones
21 Jan 2013

	Katharine McPhee and new Season Two cast member Jeremy Jordan
	photo by Will Hart/NBC

Take me back to you being a fan of musical theatre. Did you go to Broadway shows as a kid? Did your folks take you?
JS: Yes. I grew up in the city, and my mom was — musicals were sort of her favorite thing in the world. The first show that I was supposed to see was Pirates of Penzance, with Linda Ronstadt on Broadway — not at the Delacorte — and I got mono and couldn't go, and my entire family went without me, and I so upset, and I remember when PBS aired it, I got so excited because it was the one show that I definitely wanted to see. I think Edwin Drood became the first show that I saw — the original. So, yeah, they took me, and I fell madly in love with it. It's actually what I wanted to do, but I knew very quickly that I didn't have the musical acumen to do so, so I kind of went into just sort of writing, and I thought I would want to be a playwright, but then Hollywood beckoned, and unfortunately I accepted.

And you have a degree from Tisch?
JS: I was there for four years. It's a BFA. It's in playwriting. They call it Dramatic Writing, but I was on the playwriting track; I was not on the screenwriting track. I always thought it was strange that they didn't divvy them up, even though within Tisch itself — within the Dramatic Writing program — they are divvied up. You choose which one to follow, but in the end, it is Dramatic Writing.

Where in the city did you grow up?
JS: I grew up on the Upper East Side, which is the "Gossip Girl" side of me. And then ["Smash"] is now the theatre side of me.

Are you a cast-album guy?
JS: Oh, yeah, of course. I have so many bootlegs, which I shouldn't say, actually. But, yeah, collecting cast albums, and kind of knowing all the musicals that I can has been very important for me. I remember I had this incredible theatre teacher at Horace Mann, where I went [to school], whose name is Barry Siebelt, and he was probably the biggest inspiration to me. I remember, actually: he showed the PBS version of Sunday in the Park with George to us when I was 17, and that made me want to be a writer. That's what pushed me into writing, that's what pushed me to apply to Tisch — seeing that show. He was really instrumental to me. I mean, like he was the one who would play me [the cast album of] Bajour — stuff that is in my brain now that I never would have known if it wasn't from him, and it all sort of sprang from there. Now I have, like, 45 days of musical theatre on my computer.

Isn't it amazing to think how our lives would be different if we hadn't encountered certain teachers?
JS: Absolutely. I owe so much to him, but, sadly, he passed away.