Lyrics & Lyricists celebrates Alan & Marilyn Bergman – and the way they were

“The Way We Were.” “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” “The Windmills of Your Mind.” The American songbook is filled with the exquisite love songs of Alan and Marilyn Bergman, made unforgettable through the voices of Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Sting, and countless others. The 2025-26 Lyrics & Lyricists Season closes with the all-new celebration of their life and work together, Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman (Jun 6-8), featuring a starry cast led by Broadway favorites Ann Hampton Callaway and Billy Stritch. We sat down with Ann, Billy, and show co-writer Dick Scanlan to talk about what makes the Bergmans’ songs so sublime, what made their personal and creative partnership so extraordinary, the intimate way they liked to write, and more in this valentine of a Lyrics & Lyricists show.

For those who know and love the songs, but may not be familiar with their creators, tell us about Alan and Marilyn Bergman and what made them one of the most celebrated lyric-writing teams in all of music.

Dick Scanlan: The Bergmans were wildly gifted songwriters and exceedingly disciplined craftspeople, who were able to put into the most beautiful words their experience of what it is to be in a relationship with another human. They shared a very intimate and very successful personal and professional relationship for over six decades, and they put their wisdom into their songs. They wrote almost exclusively about love, while themselves being madly in love.

What are some of the qualities that make their lyrics so exceptional?

Dick: There’s not a word out of place. Song after song, their lyrics are as good as it gets. The Bergmans had something to say, and they were able to say it incomparably well. And they weren’t show-offs. They wanted you to come away from their songs taking in maturity, and insight, and morality – they didn’t need you to come away feeling dazzled. So, they wouldn’t choose the flashiest rhyme. But they chose the perfect rhyme.

Ann Hampton Callaway: When you’re singing a Bergman song, you’re enveloped in a dream world they’ve created – an airtight space of a perfect moment. Their songs are so sensual. It’s not just that they tell beautiful stories that are well-crafted and emotive, it’s also how the words sound when they’re sung. Alan and Marilyn thought a lot about that. For a singer, voicing each perfectly chosen word – it’s almost like you’re creating a lover out of the song. It’s one of the reasons Barbra Streisand recorded 65 of their songs. And, of course, the songs are very sensuous for the listener too.

Ann, you came to know and spend time with the Bergmans. Can you share some of what you observed – in their work, their marriage, their creative process?

I was fortunate to have many visits with Alan and Marilyn in their home in LA. They were very loving and supportive and even sort of parental. It’s easy to see why Barbra Streisand would think of them as her godparents. Alan and Marilyn were such different people, yet they belonged together so naturally. They had one of the most profound marriages I have ever seen. And it was their mission in their work to capture every face of the gorgeous, messy, magical thing we call love.

Alan told me how they liked to write: on the sofa in their room on the second floor. Marilyn would be sitting at the corner of the sofa, Alan would have his head in her lap, and they would both have their notebooks. Isn’t that wonderful? We’re hoping to find a photograph.

Music is filled with composer-lyricist writing teams. The Bergmans were a two-lyricist team. How does that make their collaboration all the more remarkable?

Dick: Here you had two people writing lyrics – two brains at work on the same thing. And only one word can “win” per note. There are always going to be two ideas for every choice – sometimes more than two. That’s something that could be stressful even with someone you’re not married to! But when it’s your life partner … well, there’s no filter with someone you’re married to. And whatever else is going on in the rest of your lives is in the room with you. So all of that makes the quality of their work together an astonishing thing.

They were so completely supportive of each other. I really believe that by the time they had finished a lyric, they had no idea who had written what. The relationship was the oyster, and the words were the pearls. And without the two of them working together, there wouldn’t be those words.

The Bergmans had many collaborators. Tell us about some of the composers they wrote with and what that reveals about them.

Billy Stritch: First, they had excellent taste: Michel Legrand, Dave Grusin, Johnny Mandel, Marvin Hamlisch … it was top-tier talent. And they were people the Bergmans enjoyed working with. They had a wonderful collaboration with Michel Legrand, Marvin and Marilyn were very close – he was almost like a son to her. And they collaborated with singers. Barbra Streisand wasn’t a writing collaborator, but she surely had input – certainly where Yentl was concerned.

Dick: I’ll add, both Alan and Marilyn had musical training. They both started playing piano when they were very young – they said all Jews raised in Brooklyn played piano! It was part of a Jewish upbringing at the time they grew up. And they would come into Manhattan to attend concerts. The reason Marilyn became a lyricist at all is because she had an accident and broke her shoulder. Her parents had relocated to LA, and Marilyn went there to recuperate. She couldn’t play piano, and a musician friend said, “Why don’t you write some lyrics?” That’s how it all started. She’d been studying to be a concert pianist, so both she and Alan had a solid grasp of the music side of things, which really played a role in their work.

There’s a timelessness to the Bergmans’ songs. “The Windmills of Your Mind” is an example – brilliantly effective in both 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair and the Season 2 finale of Severance in 2025. What do you think it is about their songs that transcends time or era?

Ann: There is simply nothing about their songs or their lyrics that feels dated. If you know the songs, they, of course, carry history and memories. But on their own, each one of them could have been written today. That is something very special.

Three of Broadway’s most glorious stars will be joining you onstage. Please tell us who audiences will be seeing and hearing, and what makes them so right for this show?

Billy: We have a fabulous cast: Ali Stroker (Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!), Brandon Victor Dixon (Hamilton), and Nikki Renée Daniels (Company). They’re all stars from the theater world, they all have incredible chops and incredible taste, and each one of them has the maturity needed when singing lyrics like these.

Dick: All three are also great actors. A Bergman lyric is like a short story, and these are three artists who naturally approach songs in a storytelling way. All three are very, very musical, and in different ways. Brandon fuses musical theater and opera and jazz and R&B, all in one voice, Ali is a wonderful pop-musical theater singer, Nikki is a more classic musical theater singer, and they are each fantastic.

Can you share some of the songs we’ll hear?

Billy: There will be many of the songs the Bergmans are most known for: “The Way We Were,” “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?,” “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” “Nice and Easy,” “How Do You Keep the Music Playing” and many others – plus some that will be wonderful discoveries for the audience.

For each of you: please share the Bergmans’ lyric that means most to you.

Ann: My wife, Kari, and I have “our song,” and it’s the Bergmans’ “On My Way to You.” When you meet your love later in life – after you’d thought you were with the right person before, but you weren’t … or you thought something would develop but it didn’t – and you begin to wonder, “Am I ever going to meet that person,” and then you do … this song has such a profound way of expressing how every single step – every single misstep – has led you to the place you belong.

If I had changed a single day
What went amiss or went astray
I may have never found my way to you
I wouldn’t change a thing that happened
On my way to you

Billy: A song I love is one I’ll be singing in the show, “It Might Be You,” which Alan and Marilyn wrote with Dave Grusin for the film Tootsie:

Something’s telling me it might be you
Yeah, it’s telling me it must be you
And I’m feeling it’ll just be you
All of my life

I just love the vulnerability in that song. It’s about someone with their heart on their sleeve, wanting love to come into their life. It’s such a beautiful expression of that.

Dick: I’m going to go with a lyric I wish I’d written: it’s from “You Must Believe in Spring”:

So in a world of snow
Of things that come and go
Where what you think you know
You can’t be certain of
You must believe in spring and love

That’s real writing.

Beautiful. Finally, what do you hope audiences come away from the show feeling?

Ann: You know how in a musical, when you get to know the characters, and then hear their songs, you care about them more? I think when people learn all that they will about the Bergmans, they will care about these songs even more. And I think they’ll come away with a sense of how beautiful life and love can be.

Here we are, living every day with the most astonishing headlines, but it’s the heartlines we really need to pay attention to. And the Bergmans wrote the heartlines.

EVERY KIND OF LIGHT: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman – Sat, Jun 6 at 5 PM, Sun, Jun 7 at 2 PM, Mon, Jun 8 at 7:30 PM. Tickets and details.

Sunday’s performance is supported by Lynda and Robert Safron / The Edythe Kenner Foundation.