Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I have a very special show.

I believe Stephen Sondheim and his collaborator, John Wyden,

to have written a really great trilogy of musicals about America. Those three are Pacific Overtures, Assassins, and now at last in a final form, Roadshow. Roadshow began with a book

about the Meisner brothers called The Legendary Meisner's. It became a musical which worked through

in workshops called Wise Guys, became a musical called Bounce when it was first

recorded, and now it is Roadshow. A recording of Roadshow was recently released on Nonsuch,

P.S. classics. And when I heard it, by the end of the record, I was kind of shivering. Now, this was Los Angeles, so believe

me, it wasn't called out. It was that somehow they'd touched a certain vein about the nightmare

of American optimism, what you might call American perpetual motion.

The idea that it goes on and on and that you can't change it, that not even death brings it to a close.

Now, I'm curious, how did this start? I believe you had read the legendary

Meisner's Steve, and my guests, by the way, are Stephen Sondheim and John Wydenman,

the collaborators, and I'm very, very honored to have them here. Well, I read it when I was 22 years old.

It was a couple of articles in New Yorker magazine.

And then they were expanded by Alva Johnston, who wrote them into a book.

And I read the book, and I thought it would make a terrific musical.

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