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pointofgeeks · 7 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.pointofgeeks.com/bartlett-tv-show-anthony-veneziale-interview/

EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Veneziale Talks BARTLETT, Freestyle Love Supreme, and the Seeds of HAMILTON

Actor and producer Anthony Veneziale sits down with the Point of Geeks to discuss his new show, Bartlett, his past with Freestyle Love Supreme, diversity in the entertainment industry, the influence of hip-hop, the beginnings of Hamilton, and his work on PBS’ The Electric Company.

Veneziale has appeared in shows such as Sex in the City, SanFranLand, and most notably he’s one of the founders of Freestyle Love Supreme, an interactive stage show that featured future Hamilton stars Lin-Manuel Miranda and Daveed Diggs. The actor’s latest project is the 6-episode streaming series Bartlett, also starring Chrissy Mazzeo (SanFranLand), Don Reed (A Different World), Utkarsh Ambudkar (The Mindy Project), and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton).

Bartlett follows hapless ad executive Roger Newhouse (Anthony Veneziale), whose life has been on a downward trend. Roger must save his career over a course of a day after his business partner and ex-girlfriend has left him high and dry before a life-changing pitch. However, there is another problem…all Roger want to do is make music. The show is a situational comedy, with full musical segments that bring to life Roger’s dreams and imaginations.

We were lucky enough to sit down and chat with Bartlett star Anthony Veneziale about his upcoming show. Check out the trailer and interview below!

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Point of Geeks: Congrats on the new series airing. How does it feel to finally get it on the air, especially considering you are both (lead) actor and an executive?

Anthony Veneziale: Ah man. Are you kidding me? It’s the best feeling! Like when you have been working on something for so long and you can finally say to people, ‘You can see it here.’ There is like nothing better in the entertainment industry than to be able to do that.

PoG: You have a background performing live, with Freestyle Love Supreme. Tell me a little about that part of your life and how you got here.

Anthony Veneziale: I think that almost everything that I do, even to this day, is somehow rooted in a lot of the things that I learned from Freestyle Love Supreme. And that crew is just this crazy, insane, supergroup. Like soon I think that we will get to the point where people will be like, ‘I didn’t realize everyone was in the Wu-Tang Clan.’

The names are just insane. The stuff that we did in the early days, I think, is still very much a part of all of us. So Lin-Manuel Miranda, we used to do – in Freestyle Love Supreme – this game where we would ask the audience for a decade. Any decade throughout time. And then, we would do a rap musical about the decade, for the audience, based off what they asked for. I don’t think that’s a coincidence what came out of that was Chris Jackson’s love of history, him recommending the book to Lin, and then Lin reading Hamilton, and then that being like that was totally natural for us to this point of view around this thing.

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PoG: Going off on a little tangent. What do you think about the state of Hip-Hop? Freestyle has become a lost part of the artform. What happened?

Anthony Veneziale: I think that the prosecution is leading the witness. But I do think it’s easy to say ‘Gosh it isn’t like it used to be.’ And there’s something about “nostalgia” that you can paint the past with. But with that said…

I obviously cut my teeth with 90’s hip-hop… It’s going to be really difficult to top… Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers, A Tribe Called Quest with Midnight Marauders. All of these crazy things. Everything kind of happened right then. A lot of people say that was the pinnacle of hip-hop and now we are kind of on the downside of it. But with that said, I think that there is more choice now. A lot more perspective being brought into hip-hop.

I take a page out of Daveed [Diggs] book, which is hip-hop really came out of disenfranchisement and so while you get some you are getting some of the views that aren’t necessarily the disenfranchised voice, you are getting…it’s getting watered down because there are so many different perspectives and when something cuts through though and grinds on that gear and elevates the whole genre…Let’s use Hamilton for an example. I think hip-hop musicals are going to become much more of the groundbreaking part of hip-hop going forward. Then just releasing a commercially successful song. Because let’s be honest. It’s been commodified. It’s been commercialized. Now people understand they can use it in this way and make money off of it. Just my opinion.

PoG: Kind on that same track. Bartlett seems like the perfect synthesis of your past experiences. You have romantic comedy past, Sex and the City, and of course with Freestyle Love Supreme and the musical bits on the show. How did that come together for you with this project? Were you there from the inception? Because it seems so crafted for your own talents.

Anthony Veneziale: Haha. It’s one of those chicken and the egg type questions. And that’s me quoting Flight of the Conchords, apologies. So you know Martin Edwards (All The Wrong Places) wrote this a long time ago and showed me a draft of it. It was something that was going to be done in a theater. And when he showed it to me I thought, ‘Oh wow. This about a lot of white dudes feeling sorry for themself.’ Because it was set in an agency and it was mostly about Roger and a whole bunch of other white people who were like ‘My life is so hard. I want something else.’ So I said I wasn’t interested and then they finished doing the play. And it went pretty well and it was a good show. There was some fun stuff in it! But it’s not stuff that I’m drawn to.

Whether it’s Freestyle Love Supreme or The Electric Company which I helped re-launch. Multiple points of view are things that I value in art. It’s what I’m always looking for and so when Chrissy [Mazzeo] suggested to Martin that they open it up and make it into a web series. I said, ‘That sounds interesting. That sounds cool. But can we do this, this, and this. Can we have a lot more people of color in it? Yes it might be Roger’s point of view but it really should be addressing the topic of sexuality in the workplace. In some light way sort of dismantling the patriarchy, because it serves none of us. And how can we do that in way that’s really fun.

So at a certain point I said to Martin. What if we make this about a guy that wants to become a musician, instead of a director or something like that. And I can put a lot of original music in there and I can write an original song. I started taking guitar lessons 3 or 4 years ago and I just got so into it. It felt like I should be using this. It was like a new shiny toy. ‘Let me write songs…please!!! And he was like ‘Okay cool. Let’s see what it’s like.’ We would workshop. Do a lot of improv stuff, work scenes. Chrissy and I would work on stuff that Martin wrote. And Martin was always super collaborative and so was Chrissy, so I think that’s what at the heart what made the project really hum and go.

PoG: As far as the musical segments, how long did it take for you to craft them? How did that process go?

Anthony Veneziale: Love the question. Because it’s one of my favorite things. Which is like…how do you make a song? So luckily with this we kind of knew the segments when would be nicefor a breakout moment. We kind of knew what we were trying to accomplish. And for me, I try to find that “feeling word.” The word that encapsulates what we are trying to say. And this all comes out of my freestyle training. I use that word as the pulse…

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The words itself lead me to the pulse. And then from there I get a rhythm that I play over top of it and kind of let that word dissolve away, but it will give that initial beat. Something needs to be the seed and for me it’s the pulse of that beat. And then I will kind of fiddle around on the guitar and try to find the chords that will help to illuminate that concept. I have a little of music theory in my background, so I kind of understand what I’m trying to accomplish when I put together either the riff of the song or a minor resolution or whatever it might be. And then from there I just let it live for awhile. Like the actual melody and song. And then I will start putting words to it and I will just freestyle. I will just sort of make it up and let it happen. And record a bunch of different versions and whittle down until I get the things that I feel like get to the heart of it.

And then by iteration 10 or 12, I’m ready to share it with Martin or… Oh yeah, Bill Sherman who was also big part of Freestyle Love Supreme and is the musical director for Sesame Street, I share it with him, Joel, and Julien who was our musical director on this, And get their feedback and keep reiterating and til it was there. And then it has to have these visual components to it. And this comes for a little bit from my copywriting days where I would do songs for Nickelodeon or whoever it might have been. And you kind of want to make sure that you leaves these options around the visual, so you can make a reference to a thing but it makes a lot sense when you resolve it with the visual on-screen.

PoG: The show essentially takes place over the course of one day, aside from flashbacks. which is a really fun narrative device. If you are lucky enough for a second season do you plan on using the same type of device where it takes place over a day or week? Have you thought about the second season?

Anthony Veneziale: Great question. From a producer’s standpoint, we would love to have another season, we have been (sort of) talking about it a bunch. And it seems like it would be a year later and it would still take place during a day. But it would be a different character’s point of view. So probably [Maggie’s] point of view. What’s Maggie going through? What is she dealing with a little more? I think in the first season we were really kind of teeing up this concept of ‘hey what if we don’t abide by societal norms about X, Y, and Z?’ And now for season two, it’s what if we don’t abide by the business norms of X, Y, and Z. And even break free further out of the concept of what women’s roles are and what they have traditionally been and how can we shape it to the world that we want to be living in.

PoG: I like how the show’s focus is on the comedy, but it has a social conscious. It touches on issues of gender, workplace romance, race, sexuality, it’s all there…yet it’s not on the surface. How were you able to layer it so deftly into the writing and performances? It seems like a really important time, even if it’s comedy, for it to have a viewpoint on the world.

Anthony Veneziale: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think it has to do with the people who are creating it needing to have a shared vision, that they put on the table and they demand to be included in the medium. I think the “Woke” community need to make whatever they are making in a way that includes as many voices as possible and also opens the table for new voices. That’s a very conscious effort that you have to make around that. And that includes casting, to crewing, to how the story gets created, and that’s something that I’m super proud of on this project. We really kept an eye on and worked really hard and had very high standards for each other. And had people talented and visionary enough to make sure that we met those standards. So Chrissy Mazzeo and Rivkah Beth Medow were really the Atlases that held the globe of Bartlett on their shoulders and created a beautiful set and we had 50-60% women in every department across the crew, in the cast, and in the creation. And that to me is the way you do it!

PoG: Bartlett seems to be speaking to two groups of people generally. Millenials that have been accustomed to a faster pace of different employment opportunities and pursuing their dreams more, due to the state of the world today. And also middle-aged people who are also experiencing workplace changes as well. What do you think that show has to say about both groups?

Anthony Veneziale: That’s really cool. I think that they have so much more in common then they are aware. Ultimately I think Millenials are more impowered by the concept of doing something that they love, opposed to doing something so they can afford to live. And I think that for the other generation I think that they have come to that [same] realization just a touch later. So sometimes there’s even a feeling of resentment towards Millenials. Like, ‘Uh, how did they get so empowered. How are they able to ask for exactly what they want.’ (laughs)

But at the end of the day, for both, that you are doing a thing that when you wake up in the morning you feel like it matters to you. You are doing something that you are willing to go whatever extra mile to get done. And that was really true for us on Bartlett. Because all of us are parents. And all of us have other jobby jobs and performance gigs. And we said, ‘Okay bring the kids to set.’ This is a family gig. We get it. And we would work around that. I would leave set around 3 everyday and go pick my daughter up from school, drop her off at home and come back to do more shooting at night. And if you aren’t able to look in the mirror and say what you do matters [to you] you might want to be able to find the thing that does. And it’s easy to say it and hard to do it and I have tons of empathy.

PoG: You mentioned it in passing. You were involved in the relaunch of The Electric Company on PBS. What can you tell me about that?

Anthony Veneziale: Absolutely. Like most things in my life it came out of the seed of Freestyle Love Supreme. We were doing a off-Broadway run at this beautiful theater called the Ars Nova which is on 54th Street and they just expanded to a new theater down at the Greenwich House, but they will still have the 54th St. theater. We were doing a run there and a friend of the show knew that The Electric Company and some of the people around Sesame Workshop were looking for inspiration around relaunching The Electric Company and this was very early and just throwing some concepts around. And they brought the main creators to our show and afterwards they were like ‘This is what our show is. You doing what you just did up there for Freestyle Love Supreme is exactly the findings that we have around a lot of educational outreach that makes sense for kids to want to learn how to codify language.

So hip-hop, in essence, is this beautiful way to word-chunk. Find chunks of words that have similarities that then make you in your brain say ‘Oh, so these things are like these things.’ And that’s exactly how hip-hop works. And that’s exactly how the human brain that’s developing to learn language actually works. It doesn’t work by memorizing every letter and lining up all the letters. We kind of threw that out the window a long time ago. It’s by codefying. It’s seeing “EE” together and understanding that it sounds like this and “CH” together. And if that isn’t what hip-hop is, right?!? That’s exactly what you are doing, you are grabbing onto those word chunks. And so we started working with them and I had been a teacher for a long time, wo we sort of built out this understanding very early on that this would be the perfect tool to use in this fun way for disenfranchised readers. So kids that don’t see themselves as having the ability or access to reading.

It was super cool. And obviously the original series was a big influence on all of us who were working on it. And we also didn’t want to screw it up. So there was something in the room where we were like ‘this has better be good because the bar is super high.’

PoG: Talk about life coming full circle!

Anthony Veneziale: Totally! Totally!

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Official Synopsis:

Ad man Roger is desperate to quit his job and follow his dream of becoming a full-time musician. But first, he must correct a year’s worth of bad decisions by making up with his bitter ex-partner (and ex-lover), outwitting his manic boss and winning the pitch of a lifetime. This satirical comedy — featuring original songs by Anthony Veneziale — co-stars Utkarsh Ambudkar and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Bartlett is now available on Amazon Prime Video and Vimeo on Demand.

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