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"FacebookPinterest\n\n1. Get the right team on the field.\n\n They say casting is 90-percent of directing. It might be 93-percent. If Vince Lombardi and his wife, Marie, are going to be two of your leads, you had better find the right actors. We did. Vince is played by Dan Lauria (yes, Fred Savage's dad on The Wonder Years). And Marie is played by Judith Light (whom you will recognize from Ugly Betty and Who's the Boss). Dan and Judith have been friends for years, since they did the soap opera One Life to Live together\u2014so the history, and the affection, between Vince and Marie onstage is the real thing.\n\n2. Find the right source\u2014and take a small bite.\n\n If you are going to do a piece based on the life of a real person, especially if that person is an iconic figure, you better make sure the source material is definitive. Our play, written by Eric Simonson, is based on the masterful Lombardi biography When Pride Still Mattered, by David Maraniss. But the play focuses only on one week in Vince's life, in 1965. Since our play is only 95 minutes, you have to be realistic about how much can be crammed into a night of theater. By focusing on this single week, it actually afforded us more creative freedom, because we didn't have to spend time on the basic biographical stuff\u2014born here, raised here. We just jumped right in. Lesson: pick your battles, hit your spots.\n\n3. No singing, no dancing. \n\n Like Mark Sanchez, I love a good musical. But let's face it: no one wants to hear Vince Lombardi sing. Pouring a drink at home after a game, barking at his players on the field during practice, delivering one of his famous speeches? Yes, please! Belting out a tune about how lonely he is? I think I'll pass, thanks. We knew it was essential to have Dan Lauria deliver some of Lombardi's more memorable speeches in our show\u2014and yes, the power sweep speech is in there!\u2014but I promise you, dear potential audience member: they are spoken, not sung.\n\n4. Give yourself a home-field advantage.\n\n Lombardi is being performed at the Circle in the Square Theater, which is the only Broadway theater that is in the round, so the audience surrounds the stage. It effortlessly evokes the sense of watching a game at a football stadium (only smaller). We wanted to put people in the right mood, and at the Circle in the Square, no matter where you sit, you'll feel like you have an all-access pass. So get ready to see the spit fly!\n\n5. Know your audience.\n\n It's a fair question to wonder whether theater audiences really want to see a play set in the world of football. Same goes for the reverse: Do sports fans want to come to a Broadway show? But the audiences aren't nearly as different as they might seem. Theater fans save old tickets and playbills; sports fans save old tickets and bobblehead dolls. At their core, the two breeds of fans are after the same thing: good stories and a communal experience. Our show invites all comers, and it delivers for Broadway first-timers and veteran theatergoers.\n\n6. Get the details right.\n\n Remember those football movies where the teams had fake names and the logos on the helmets resembled NFL teams but were just a few degrees off? I'm a big football fan (go Skins) and that stuff always bothered me. Same for football-themed video games: back in the day, if I was playing a certain football video game as the 1988 team from \"Los Angeles\" and number \"34\" was breaking tackles, come on, its Bo Jackson. Not being able to come out and say it because of rights issues was a huge annoyance. I was determined not to do that with Lombardi. It's a play about the Packers, so it had to be the Packers. I got the chance thanks to the tireless efforts of our producers Fran Kirmser and Tony Ponturo, who brought the NFL on board as a producing partner. The arrangement gave us excellent access: from footballs signed by Pete Rozelle to period-specific uniforms\u2014everything you see in the play is the real deal. We also had access to the archives at NFL Films, which includes video, music and sound effects. So when you hear someone hitting the sled in our show, the sound is an actual clip from Packers practice in 1965. And just wait until you see the lobby of the theater, which the NFL has turned into an elegant tribute to the Packers. Come early, and bring your cameras.\n\n7. Make the pilgrimage. \n\n To get a play about Vince Lombardi completely right, we knew we had to breathe that Wisconsin air. The Packers were kind enough to host us and give us a glimpse of some crucial places in Lombardi's life. We toured the practice fields and got the stadium tour of Lambeau Field, we visited the Packer Hall of Fame, and we even got to spend a few hours in the house that the Lombardi's lived in for most of their time in Green Bay. We met plenty of folks who knew Coach and Marie, we heard terrific stories and insights, here's what we came away with: Lombardi may have died decades ago, but it's remarkable how present he still is, to this day, up there in Titletown, USA.\n\n8. Do not drop the ball.\n\n Metaphorically, of course. But also literally: during our research trip to Green Bay, we got to try out the turf at Lambeau, and someone told me to go long for a pass. Only one thing to do: Go. Get. It."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/lombardi-play-thomas-kail>