As a critic, he didn't know Jack.

Encores! Director Jack Viertel worked as a theatre critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and other publications in the 1980s before becoming dramaturg of the Mark Taper Forum in 1985. Beginning later that decade, he worked with Jujamcyn Theatres on a string of successful Broadway shows, including The Producers, The Full Monty, Proof, Jelly’s Last Jam and a number of others.

In his popular New York University class, Viertel presents the “code” of the Broadway musical, explaining the placement and purpose of each song within the narrative. I asked Viertel if this formula had been apparent to him during his years as a professional critic. He answered that it had not: Experience as a mere observer, even an unusually alert and insightful one, never revealed to him the “skeleton” that undergirds nearly every successful musical. But once he began to create his own shows, his collaborators inducted him into the lexicon of the profession -- the I Want song, the Conditonal Love Song -- it quickly became obvious, as his names for these types of songs tell us.

Viertel added that he could never return to criticism after working to create musical theatre himself. He’s now too sympathetic to anyone who takes on the problem of making an original musical theatre piece.