Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd, Soul Sand.

Jo Reed: That's Harriet Walter's Brutus in the Donmar Warehouse production of Julius Caesar, which was broadcast on public television on Great Performances. And this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed.

For over 40 years the award-winning public television series, Great Performances, has brought, well, great performances into American homes from drama to dance to opera to musical theater and so much more. The series made and makes the performing arts accessible to everyone. I've been watching it my entire life. I remember rolling on the floor with laughter at the Royal Family by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber—a play I had never even heard of before I saw it on Great Performances. That series introduced many of us to the various performing arts. It's the longest running performing arts anthology on television, and at its helm for much of that time is executive producer David Horn. During his 39 years with the series, Horn has gotten two Peabody Awards and has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy more than 25 times, winning five.

He's also responsible for historic livestreams of Broadway plays, like the revival of She Loves Me, Noël Coward's Present Laughter, and Paula Vogel's Indecent, among many others. He's returned Shakespeare to public television with King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth starring Ian McKellan, David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, respectively. He's the guy behind the lavish productions of Shakespeare's "history" plays, with actors like Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston—the list is quite long. And now, it's Julius Caesar. Horn has also produced musical performances with singers from Plàcido Domingo to Tony Bennett, and I'm really just scratching the surface of what he does. Interestingly though, it's not as though David Horne started out longing for a career in television. He had his sights on something quite different. He came to New York to play Jazz.

David Horn: That and a dime will get you a cup of coffee. I played the saxophone. I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston and I was a composition major. So I was studying 20th century orchestral but my real desire and my drive to get to New York City, because I'm originally from Florida, was jazz—and jazz is very difficult. It's very hard to make a living, hard to make money. So I was playing on Jangles and doing weddings and stuff like that and I started as a temporary employee at WNET, also known as Channel 13 in New York, and I got in there because I also played the piano, and I know it's a lost art, but I could type a hundred words a minute. So I was at the valuable temp employee. So I got into Channel 13, and they just kept giving me other jobs, and I ended up in the performance area at Great Performances under Jac Venza, and 40 years later I'm still here.

Jo Reed: Well you heard me describe Great Performances sort of broadly in the beginning. I really am interested in the way you would describe it.

David Horn: Great Performances is the only prime time showcase for a diverse array of performing arts. I mean, we make it our mission to give you everything, not only what the regional arts organizations like San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera, or Los Angeles Symphony, Cleveland may be doing, arts organizations in New York—but we try to do the American Songbook, people like Tony Bennett. Um we also are committed to doing dance, the great American dance companies, opera. We're not only the home of regional operas, but we are the home of the Metropolitan Opera on Great Performances. And we try to find the best performances in the international scene and over the last several years. We've done a lot of theater—music theater, dramatic theater

Jo Reed: That's casting a wide net over practically all of the performing arts. So was it that way from the beginning, or did you expand as you went along, adding artistic disciplines over the years?

David Horn: It really started through drama. There was something back in the 60s and early 70s called Theater in America and there was a small series called Music in America, and this is where the NEA comes in. The 70s, particularly around 1973, saw the beginning of the dance boom in this country, and the NEA stepped up with a very large grant so we could create Great Performances as long as we included dance in it, and American dance companies. So Great Performances came primarily classical Opera and dance and drama.

Jo Reed: Now tell me why for you, this mission is important enough that you've been with it for four decades. I mean, you've basically devoted most of your professional life to this. Why is bringing the performing arts so important to you?

David Horn: Well I grew up in Florida. I actually grew up in Cape Canaveral. My father was part of the space program. And, I really loved music and you had no access. The closest place at that time, and we're talking a long time ago unfortunately, was Orlando, and Orlando is a pretty small town at that point in time. So, it was a rare occasion that you could see a well-known performing artist, and in any discipline. And over the years, we've gotten a lot of letters or we've—I've worked on shows with performers, and they're appreciative because their first exposure to a ballet, opera, classical music, whatever, was on Great Performances and it led them into a career. So that's my mission, because you rarely see performance on the commercial networks unless it's an award show has become the only format to be able to give somebody something commercial-free, an entire musical, an entire opera, entire performance, bringing new artists to their attention. It's just, it's a lot of fun. I mean, it's a challenge 'cause we are a nonprofit and funding is not only a challenge for us, but it's a—it's a challenge for many of the individuals and arts organizations across the country 'cause there's only so much money to go around.

Jo Reed: Well what's always been so impressive about Great Performances is the quality of the work that you produce. It is unbelievable—the standard you set is so high.

David Horn: I have to attribute that to Jac Venza who was the creator, initial executive producer, because Jack had come from CBS and when he—when he came into public television when it was National Educational Television in the 60s, he said, you have to treat the artist the way a network would treat a Judy Garland show. You have to give them, you know, the highest quality production standards. You can't dismiss them. You have to let them participate. A lot of the way in with certain artists or certain productions, certain pieces, is to—to convince people how important a record is, and so that record has to be very high quality. You know, one of the greatest achievements that we have is we have practically every Balanchine ballet blocked and supervised for the camera by Mr. Balanchine himself. You know, there—we brought in the studio we said, how would you alter these re-imagine these for, for television? And that's just a, you know, a tremendous resource.

Jo Reed: And of course technology—HD cameras—I mean, that can only improve the quality of the production.

David Horn: We used to always say at Great Performances that television of performances is a secondary experience, and I think that's still true today, but now, with the "Live HD" from our Metropolitan Opera productions, the experience of not being in the theater has gotten a lot closer for the quality of the audio and the quality of the—quality of the picture, you know, the technology has been one of the most important changes. It's made some areas of what we do more inexpensive, actually, while other areas obviously have continued to grow in expense.

Jo Reed: Well, the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD that plays in theaters—and I know Great Performances will show those productions as well—what a blessing that is! I mean, for many reasons, not the least of which, Opera is so expensive to actually go to the theater, and people still would love to see it but they don't have $150 a seat.

David Horn: Metropolitan Opera used to tour, and that was a big deal. They haven't toured for many years. So this has really filled the void. I mean you might argue that in New York City, the live and cinema, because of its cost it's—possibly cannibalize the audience a bit. Things like my 92 year old mother-in-law who was a—you know she was a patron at the Met, she had front row dress circle tickets. The acoustics are the best in the house, and it just became a lot easier for her, you know and her aides to go to the uh, the live and Cinema HD things. So, you know there, there are trade-offs but most places in this country don't have an opera. There was an article in the Times the other day about how many opera companies there were and in Germany there was like 80-something, and 39 in the United States.

Jo Reed: Great Performances has also presented full-on Broadway plays like Gypsy and She Loves Me. What's the mechanics of broadcasting plays? Do they come in for a special performance in the theater? How does—how does that work?

David Horn: Yeah, people—people do it in different ways. First. You have to pursue the grand rights to the property, and every show can be, you know, more complicated than the next, so once you secure the property, then you have to figure out how you're going to—you're going to fund it. There are very few things that we have the resources to just write a check for. So, oftentimes, a musical needs something like a digital cinema release. That's one way to raise money, digital streaming. I directed the first livestream on Broadway, which is She Loves Me. We let it stream first but it ended up on public television therefore reducing our costs. We have some standard rates now with the various unions, and a musical there are many, but you know, actors and stuff, over-scaled actors—they have to be negotiated. So once we figure out the business plan for, you know—I'll just put myself and my experience as the director—my process is I go see the show, I'm figuring out which camera angles are going to work best for the actual production I'm shooting, I then take a single camera wide shot of the production, and then I do my homework with a script. I put all my own blocking into it—how people move around—it's great, Broadway actors, professionals. They do it exactly the same every night. They turn on the same word every night, so they make it easy for you. So I uh script—usually in a two-and-a-half-hour musical I script about 1500 shots. Other than that, the—probably the biggest change we make in the lighting, because you have to re-balance lighting for television, and we usually have maybe one or two rehearsals where we're actually taping the show, and then we can go out live or, or we tape a show and then we—we uh remix the audio and do editing to fix any mistakes we might have had or to enhance it, and this is the way all the Metropolitan operas are done and most theatrical coverage that you would see across the country.

Jo Reed: Is directing particularly gratifying to you?

David Horn: Yeah, I really love it. It's, you know, it's a lot of hard work, but you get to make decisions, you get to interpret something. You—you just give it a different point of view. I try to work a lot with the person that stages it. Oftentimes they don't want to participate at all 'cause it's foreign to them, other times they like to, particularly if we're not going live, they like to screen and—and make suggestions. I find it a lot of fun. I mean I do this with orchestral shows. I just did The Bernstein Centennial up in Tanglewood, and that's a whole different set of logistics 'cause you're interpreting a musical score with musicians, and you're not doing so much of a stage play.

Jo Reed: Speaking of stage play, what about the play that's streaming now on the Great Performances webpage at pbs.org—Julius Caesar with an all-female cast? What's—what's the backstory of it coming to Great Performances?

David Horn: Well, I had seen it at St. Anne's, which is like kind of a sister theater to Donmar Warehouse here in Brooklyn—a really wonderful space. They just recently did the Oklahoma the stripped-down Oklahoma that's coming to Broadway, so they do experimental things—and, this Julius Caesar was part of a trilogy with Henry IV and, and Tempest. I was really attracted to it when Kate Pakenham, who was then running Donmar Warehouse, came to visit me with Phyllida Lloyd, who is the director. Phyllida Lloyd does a lot of Shakespeare but Phyllida Lloyd also directed the Mamma Mia films, she's directed The Tina Turner Musical that's now in, in England. So she's somebody that crosses over.

Jo Reed: What was the appeal of Julius Caesar for you?

David Horn: Well, Julius Caesar appealed to me because in schools across the country, they tend to teach Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth. Even if they still teach those—so the thing that was the turn-on for me was that it's a new form. It's staged in a women's prison, the whole idea that Julius Caesar is about shifting alliances, you know, it's about survival, overthrowing authority—the whole concept I thought worked really well, but what they did at the Donmar is they invested a lot of money in educational outreach, and I want to plug that you can go on PBS Learning link and see a lot of this. So, I think this kind of diverse shot in a more contemporary fashion—version of Julius Caesar, just—there might be a couple kids in high school class that might take a different look at Shakespeare, and that's a win for me.

Jo Reed: Well, before we go into a further conversation about Shakespeare, which I very much want to do, I'm curious about your decision to premiere Julius Caesar on public television and then stream it for a month. I know there can be a lot of tension between streaming and broadcasting, and I'm curious how you reconcile that?

David Horn: Well streaming is just—I look at it as just a way—a different way to distribute our shows. Like everybody else, we don't want to get caught behind the digital revolution. But I tend to think our basic broadcast audience is older. The streaming audience tends to skew younger. So the place we're going to grow, and grow audiences for public television, is certainly going to be in the streaming area. So, you know, I've been doing this so long, every new technology—DVDs, cultural cable channels that came and went—you know, it's a new business and the performing arts are run by a lot of unions, and everybody was terrified of streaming. Now most of the arts organizations like the New York Philharmonic are giving it away—just figuring out a way, that's the way that they're gonna survive. So, our primary and our largest audience certainly is the broadcast, but we throw a lot of money in this thing. You can't find enough time and the regular schedule to run enough repeats, like we used to do in the old days, so streaming's the next best thing. On public television, we used to stream for the right term of the program and now we stream for a month, because then, as a membership incentive, public television has started something called "Passport," where if you become a member of the station, you have access to the whole library of programs that are currently in rights on public television, and some things that they acquire just for Passports. So, you know, it's new day. We're—we're also trying to figure out how we can expand with social media. I mean, we have long-form programs, we have programs with a lot of rights issues. So, we have to be very clever about how we create programming that would be primarily viewed on the phone. For, you know, six to eight minutes they would go in tandem with our broadcast.

​Jo Reed: I was going to ask you that because we're in such a short-attention-span world and with Great Performances that's commitment of an evening. He's my evenings and breaking through can be challenging and thinking of ways to break through.

David Horn: Well, I think one of the—Jo, one of the ways that important for us, is as OTT grows and more people cut cable and pay attention to broadcast and broadcast schedule, I think it'll work to our advantage because if you just flip on the channel and you're in the middle of a three-hour musical that we're doing, or Shakespeare play you're not going to tend to watch it. But if you can sit down, and like you do with Netflix click on and go, “Oh there's Julius Caesar,” I'm going to watch that. You watch it at your leisure. So I think that that is a growth area and you know, a lot of our viewers that use passport, it's challenging for them because they have to figure out if they're not directly doing on the computer, how to make it work on a smart TV. I'm more positive about that and I think you would be the perfect audience for us and you know, we grow it into more of an OTT service that you can sit down and look through the menu of Great Performances and pick one.

Jo Reed: Believe me, the times when I was living in New York and just cursing the train because I was going to miss the first 20 minutes of Great Performances—and, and then I mean this was even before you could videotape it—you missed it, that was it, until maybe it'll rerun over the summer.

David Horn: That's true

Jo Reed: Now, tell me about your decision to do more Shakespeare. What was your thinking?

David Horn: Drama on public television is a big challenge. A lot of public television series suffered from being anthology series, where it's a different type of show every week—you’re not coming back for the next episode of Stranger Things or some other multi-part drama. So, you know with us it's an opera, it’s a ballet, it's a musical, it's Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, who knows from week to week. So, American drama basically disappeared from public television public television was primarily became known for British drama, and why is that? Because we could acquire it for a lot less money. So for the thing that I was not seeing on any other service was Shakespeare. And I thought that Shakespeare was the perfect thing for—for us to do in Great Performances because we could do it as plays from the stage. We could do it as films. Or are we could do it as hybrids which we've done, and I thought it's hard to have an educational Outreach component to everything that we do, but I thought Shakespeare was perfect for us to be able to develop more—more Outreach. So the first thing, when I made this decision to bring this back in the gray performances was King Lear with Ian McKellen that played out at BAM and that was a case of a Stage production that was taken into a studio and shot the way a soap opera would be shot. And did you direct that? No, I did not direct that—Trevor Nunn himself. It was his production. He directed it. And then Hamlet, with David Tennant, it was again Greg Doran RSC and that was a stage play. I said, “Can we be more cinematic?” So it was all done on a single location, but allowing you different spaces, but you could shoot it more inexpensively than you would do a feature film because the actors were all rehearsed, and the actors were all used to reading a lot of pages in one time, where film does couple pages a day. And then, I was able to get BBC to come in on that particular show and then when I fully find the financing myself was Macbeth with Patrick Stewart. It was both on Broadway and at BAM—and that was kind of a funny story, because it was set up for me to meet Patrick Stewart to say, you know, I want to make this then I wanted to do a live, what we call a capture, from the stage. And I went back to see him and he started cursing me and saying, “I know what, I know who you are. I know what you want. I don't give a damn about television. I only care about the 500 people here tonight,” because I was trying to say, “Gee don't you want your performance on record? Don't you want people in 20 years to look back and see the whole Patrick Stewart thing?” Well, you know, I kind of went with my hat in my hand, but then he—he had a role in the Hamlet. And he saw that you could take a stage play and do it not as a five million dollar film. This more as a one and a half million dollar film and he then agreed to do it. So we shot it completely on location in Sherwood Forest, of all places in England. It's that sort of got the ball rolling. So while I like and I do live captures from the stage. I still felt to be successful with the Shakespeare with the younger audience, we needed a full feature film treatment.

Jo Reed: And that's exactly what you delivered with The Hollow Crown, which are Shakespeare's history plays, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V—and you have a who's who’s of great classical actors in these?

David Horn: Yes. The Richard II was Ben Whishaw, Jeremy Irons was Henry IV, and Tom Hiddleston was Henry V. So, I thought they were tremendously successful as films we did a sequel, The Wars of the Roses, which of course—a continuation of the history that plays with Henry VI Part 1 and 2, and the finale was Benedict Cumberbatch and Richard III. And all this new film-style recording led up to where I am now with Julius Caesar, which is—states the way it was as a play but shot more like a film, so it's a nice hybrid of both styles.

Jo Reed: I was really impressed with the way Julius Caesar was shot—I mean that was very unexpected. Great Performances also produces programs that focus on a single artist and give the viewer, not a biography, but really an in-depth look at that person's career—and you've looked at the careers of people like George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Harold Prince and the great Chita Rivera—and you were the director.

David Horn: That's true. One of my favorites, was Chita Rivera. Chita’s still out there doing it. She’s still out there doing a show, so my approach was, here's somebody that's still singing and dancing in advanced age. suffered that horrendous accident taxi accident that robbed her of a few performance years, and nobody thought she'd dance again. And, you know, the spine for that show was I said, “Let's just shoot your show and we'll use that as,” because she talks in the shows as well too, “as a way to get in and out of your history.” And fortunately, Chita grew up in the era, The Ed Sullivan Shows and The Maurice Chevalier Show. All these television shows that would always have these Broadway performers on, so there are tremendous resources of clips of her when she was, when she was young. So we try to focus on the performance aspect and illuminating what an artist really does

Jo Reed: You've worked with Tony Bennett quite a bit—who is an NEA Jazz Master, by the way.

David Horn: You know, again, it's like it's like Chita—Tony. When I was going to Berkeley, Tony was up there doing a master class. So it's hard to believe after well over 40 years, that I had the opportunities I've had to work with Tony. I had done a couple shows, and there was a show we ran called Duet. So we're actually two of them, and in one of the Duet shows, we were out at the press tour, out where we speak to a room full of television critics and Tony also performed—where we talking about this show when somebody said, “Which of these young singers do you really like?” And Tony said, “Lady Gaga is incredible. This woman. She has the chops. She has the ability to add be a jazz singer. She knows what she's doing and, lo and behold, a couple years later, we've put together a show with Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett. They did Duets, they each did solo numbers and to see her work out how she was going to perform each number. She did Bewitched then she did a bang-bang, and she had started as a jazz singer and her creative process is something that's really interested. She's a real committed artist. She's done a lot of work with Robert Wilson—performance art pieces around the world and you know, and that's Tony on the nutshell, that he has been in the business so long, that he can see past, you know, all the other kind of things that she was doing and saw the kind of artist and kind of singer that she really was. I think it added a couple of years to his life.

Jo Reed: I was about to say, how is directing that? You were the director of it.

David Horn: How's the director? It was fine. I mean, she made us delay a little bit because of costume changes, but other than that it was fine.

Jo Reed: You also directed Pete Seeger's 90th birthday in Madison Square Garden. I can't even begin to imagine what it was like to manage all those moving parts. Though so grateful that you did it.

David Horn: You know, you have to have a team in the end of the day—the majority of the things I did, was just to call the cameras once I step out of my producing role, but that show wasn't that hard, because everybody wanted to do it. You can ask anybody—you can ask Bruce Springsteen. Sure I'll be there. You know, what do you want? What do you want me to do? You know, there was such joy and love in that in that house and it kind of an extension of that kind of love, I directed a couple of years ago Joan Baez’s 75th birthday. We did here at the Beacon Theater and you could just feel it and they are not only the artist she sings with, but in the audience.

Jo Reed: We do have to wrap up, but you love American Musical Theater because it figures pretty prominently on Great Performances, which I'm very happy about.

David Horn: We always want to do musical theater on Great Performances. It was the most expensive endeavor that we did, so we did very little of it. It's been very hard to do over the years because the Broadway community has never figured out how to use media. They think media will kill them, when in fact, if people especially outside of New York see something on television, it legitimizes it, and then they want to go see it in person. And so for a lot of years we couldn't get the rights to do a musical. So I did a show Razzle-Dazzle: The Music of Kander and Ebb. I did a studio show, where we staged numbers by Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart a tribute to Oscar Hammerstein. We've done a bunch of Stephen Sondheim Musical birthday tributes—it’s kind of opening up a little bit. It's still a challenge. We think it's an art form that should stand right next to all the other things that we do. Our audiences seem to like it a lot of times these days.

Jo Reed: Tell me what are you looking forward to?

David Horn: A vacation?

Jo Reed: Oh, I hear you.

David Horn: I just hope that we can maintain the amount of support that we have to do what we do. Back when I started, Exxon paid for 95% of what we did, and now we may be on one show a year, where we might have a little bit of corporate sponsorship. We rely on foundations’ and individuals’ major gifts now to survive and who are inventing new ways to do business, whether it's Digital Cinema or subscription streaming. It's that way around the world my colleagues in Germany, BBC, France, Italy—their air-time and their budgets have shrunken greatly. You know, we used to have smaller budgets than they do and lot less air time, and now we have more in prime time than a lot of the countries. So, we've hung in there and I hope to continue to hang in there. I just want to continue to do Great Performances.

Jo Reed: Do you still play the sax?

David Horn: That's been a lamp for so long. Nobody would put up with it, if I played the sax, so I play the piano with a headset.

Jo Reed: Well, I want to thank you really for the 40 years that you've given us in Great Performances. It really is a treasure.

David Horn: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you asking me on.

Jo Reed: That was the executive producer of Great Performances, David Horn.Julius Caesar will be streaming until April 26th. You can catch that and other programs. Just go to PBS.org and look for Great Performances. You've been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts, so please do. And if you like us, leave us a rating on Apple, because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.