Writing the Lyrics: An Interview with Alison Hubbard

Interviewed by Joseph Whelan

JW: When did you first encounter the novel?

AH:  I first read the novel when I was a kid.  I have two sisters.  One of the things that really resonated was the sister thing.  There’s a closeness but there’s also a tension.  I thought that part of it was fairly real.  The book has such atmosphere.  It is a sepia world of a bygone time, a time of poverty and war, with everyone in the family banding together.  There is the safe world of the March household surrounded by the dangers of the outside world.

JW:  As you revisited the novel in order to work on the show, what changed for you?

AH:   I was into romance as a kid, but my taste tended more toward Laurie than Fritz.  Now I understand Jo’s attraction to Fritz.  In fact, my husband is a bearded professor.

Also, Marmee’s mothering:  she’s the quintessential, unconditionally loving mother who allows her children to go off and get into trouble so that they will learn a lesson on their own.  What mother really has that much patience?  Now, after raising my daughter, I understand how hard it must have been for Marmee to raise those children by herself. 

JW: What is your process with composer Kim Oler?

AH:  Our process is so convoluted that it’s hard to even describe it.  It’s as if you know  there’s a treasure buried in a forest, and you set out to look for it.   You get lost, you blame the other person, you backtrack, but you still know it’s there.  You keep imagining what it can be.  Finally, you get the scent and you find your way to it.  The process is really first getting an inspiration.  Sometimes that means finding a title, but usually it’s more vague than that.  It’s just knowing that there is some kind of emotional mother lode in a particular moment in the script or in the book. 

JW: Any examples come to mind?

AH:  One of the earliest songs was “Hold onto Me.”  Reading that part of the novel, we would weep.  There was something so understated but powerful about the chapter when Beth was dying and Jo couldn’t let her go.  Jo took Beth to the sea shore to try to restore her health.   I drove to Lloyd Neck, an exclusive part of Huntington that’s right on the water.   We don’t live there, and only residents of that part of the town are allowed to loiter.   I pulled the car over to the side of the road, looked out at the water and started to scribble.  I was crying, and had written three or four lines of the first verse leading to the title, when a cop pulled up and told me to move along.  That was that.  But I’d found the scent of the treasure by then.   I went back to Kim and he got it.   I trust Kim to tell me if something is working, and if it’s really working he sits down at the piano, which was what he did.  After we got to the title I wrote more of the lyric.  There is usually a time when I have a lyric more or less roughed out, and the two of us are working side by side. He’s working on the music, and I’m adjusting the lyric at the same time.  It’s always a patchwork, back and forth thing.  But we’re always reaching for that treasure, and finding our way to it, knowing it’s there.  The final stage of writing anything for us is acting it.  We both sing, and we’re really bad actors, but we love to act and sing our songs.  When we sing our songs at the piano we refine them. 

JW: Little Women was first produced by a theatre in Maine.  What was that experience like for you?

AH: It was amazing.  A man named John Wulp called us from Maine and said, “ I want to produce your show.”  We had won the Richard Rodgers Award for our Little Women score, and John Wulp had heard the tape.  He commissioned a new book by Sean Hartley.  Our show was the inaugural production of a beautiful new theatre on North Haven, a small island in the middle of Penobscot Bay.  My husband said was not Off-Broadway, it was off-shore.  The last leg of the trip was by motor boat.  An entire town of New Englanders put on a show about New Englanders.  On our first trip there our “little women” sang “I Will Try.”  It was literally the most moving experience I have ever had as a writer—to hear that song sung by these untrained high school girls, who had such love and understanding and reverence for what we had written. 

JW:  Audience response tends to be quite emotional.

AH: They weep.  Handkerchiefs for the men.

JW: Why?

 AH: It’s about life. That’s really what it is. It’s about family, about war, it’s about marriage, it’s about children, it’s about a writer who has a dream and is out of place in her world but still finds a way to succeed and flourish.