Dalton Alumni Conversation Returns to the Martin Theater with Daniel Goldfarb P'28 and David Lindsay-Abaire

On stage, Daniel Goldfarb P'28 (television writer/producer, screenwriter, playwright, librettist, educator, creator of HBO Max's Julia and writer/producer on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) was joined by his friend David Lindsay-Abaire (Pulitzer-prize winning playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, and librettist, and 2023 Tony nominee for his Broadway play Kimberly Akimbo).

Daniel, who grew up in Toronto, and David, who's from South Boston, both began writing plays in high school. They met at Juilliard in 1996 and said that the program was structured so that students felt like they were part of a writers' group. They'd critique each others' plays and were able to workshop their plays with actors. After graduation, feeling a little lost without the structure of the program, they decided to form a writers' group meeting in their living rooms — creating a safe environment to provide feedback on pilots and screenplays.

David said that finding a suitable subject matter for a musical and making it is really challenging. His Broadway musical Kimberly Akimbo started as a play. Working with his friend the award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori, he explained the long process of writing a musical involves numerous workshops and rewrites until eventually arriving at the final version. 

Daniel worked in theater for 15 years before getting into television. He said that playwriting is all on your shoulders and realized that he preferred being in the company of others in the television writing room. His experience as a playwright gave him the tools to work with actors and other creative people. He discovered that working on the TV show Julia doesn't seem that different from playwriting to him where small stories are told on a human scale, and, stylistically both The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Julia are theatrical. But the biggest difference between theater and television is the time-lapse. With playwriting, it's very immediate and you feel very exposed with reviews immediately after opening night. Also, television also has a more extensive reach. 

The evening's conversation was a rare treat – providing a behind-the-scenes perspective on playwriting, the arduous process of creating a musical and bringing it to Broadway, and the demands of creating successful television programs.