Anything Goes · Broadway Podcast Network

Maury Yeston I

January 12, 2026·33 min·2 clips

Paul Lazarus revisits his 1982 interview with Maury Yeston, the composer behind the Tony-winning musical Nine.

This episode is part one of a three-part archival series from the 1982 radio program Anything Goes, hosted by Paul Lazarus and now rebroadcast on the Broadway Podcast Network. The guest is Maury Yeston, Tony Award-winning composer-lyricist of the Broadway musical Nine. Yeston grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was composing music by age six or seven, winning a local melody award at a community center. He played piano four to five hours a day as a child, ran a personal planetarium, and was always playing with rhymes and words. His first exposure to musical theater was seeing My Fair Lady at the Mark Hellinger Theatre at age ten, which he describes as a defining moment. Yeston's orchestral work includes a movement for cellos performed by Yo-Yo Ma with the Norwalk Symphony in 1977. At the time of the interview, he was director of undergraduate studies at Yale University and one of four teachers at the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. Nine was inspired by Federico Fellini's film Eight and a Half, adapted for the American stage by Mario Frati. Yeston began writing the score in 1973 with no collaborators, director, or producers, working in isolation and crafting songs that could carry character and story on their own. The show took nine years to reach Broadway because, as Yeston explains, unknown writers are not handed $2.5 million productions. The connection to director Tommy Tune came through Frati, who slipped a tape of Yeston's music under Tune's door after they met at an Outer Critics Circle dinner. Tune responded enthusiastically and the collaboration began. The show's now-iconic all-female casting — 22 women and one man — was Tune's suggestion during a frustrating casting process in which male candidates consistently fell short. Yeston and book writer Arthur Coppett initially resisted, but Tune argued it would elevate the central character Guido's importance on stage. Yeston had to rethink a score written for mixed chorus and ultimately embraced the challenge of writing for an all-female ensemble. Yeston also wrote incidental music for Carol Churchill's play Cloud Nine, produced by Michael Stewart and directed by Tune. He wrote a song intended to provide emotional closure for the play's second act, which moved both Tune and Stewart to tears. When Churchill heard it at Carnegie Hall's Del Terzo Studios, she rejected the lyric outright, saying simply 'I hate it.' Yeston wrote a replacement, which became the version used in the production. He also describes writing African-influenced music for the play's first act, set in colonial Africa, using a solo alto flute played by Anne Sheedy alongside a bell tree and a kielbasa — a rhythmic instrument, not the sausage. Yeston reflects that incidental music, when done well, should become part of the scenery and go unnoticed by critics, which he accepts as a sign of success. The thematic core of Nine, Yeston explains, is growing up — the tension between wanting mutually exclusive things simultaneously. He drew direct inspiration from observing his own son, who was eight and a half at the time of the interview and would turn nine in December. The show's resolution comes in a song called Getting Tall, written during the 1978 O'Neill workshop, in which Guido's nine-year-old self explains the necessity of compromise. Musical excerpts throughout the episode include the title song performed by Tanya Elg and the original company, the song Guido's Song, and the Cloud Nine pop tune.

As heard by us

A patient look at how Yeston thinks about songs as stagecraft.

Paul Lazarus frames this 1982 broadcast as a portrait of Maury Yeston beyond Nine: Broadway composer-lyricist, pop songwriter, orchestral writer, author, and teacher.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for Yeston thinking aloud about what music does inside a play.

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