MichaelCerverisHere

That's a great question.

And a question I always had, when I was watching X-Files. I was a big X-Files fan, and I always kind of wondered with that, and TWIN PEAKS, and shows like that, if the writers knew from the beginning where they were going to end.

I can say now, on the basis of our FRINGE experience, that they don't seem to. They start out with certain ideas - some of which they shared with me, some of which they didn't share with anybody, I don't think.

And as the show develops, it starts to write itself, I think, in some ways.

And what I thought was most astounding by the final season was the way they were able to look back, over the previous 4 seasons, and give meaning to plot threads and characters and events and sometimes even lines that never had the meaning that they ended up having when they were initially set .

I can remember one in particular - standing on a roof, in Vancouver, saying to Josh Jackson "It must be very difficult, being a father."

And nobody explained to me what that was supposed to mean. Nobody seemed to know exactly what that meant.

And that was like a lot of my dialogue - it was cryptic, and clearly portentous, but not something that anybody seemed to have decided the exact significance of.

So several seasons later, it has real depth in hindsight, because now we know that September / Donald is a father, and his connection to Peter and Walter is - at some level - as a father and a son. So that was something that was really exciting, and amazing to witness, something being written forwards and backwards at the same time.

I don't know HOW they pull it off. And TV is littered with examples of when they don't pull it off. And I"m really proud to have been part of FRINGE, who (I think) did it masterfully. I loved the Donald / Michael reveal plot twist. And I wasn't really party to it too far in advance. I knew that i was going to be in the final season - they had told me from the beginning that September would be an integral part of the core story of the series until the very end - but they weren't very forthcoming with HOW, exactly.

They sort of implied from the beginning that I was going to save the world somehow.

But they didn't really tell me how that was going to happen.

And it wasn't until partway through the season that they even told me that I would be a different version of September, almost a different character, and when Joel Wyman called me to explain what they had in mind, I just thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever heard.

And probably the hardest part of that whole last season was keeping silent about whether I was even returning. It got to the point where I had begun filming the final episodes, but none of those episodes had started to air yet, so fans were waiting for September to come back, and wondering if he DID come back, and I was under strict orders to not reveal that I was coming back at ALL, much less coming back with hair.

And I was getting on the Cathay Pacific Flight to Vancouver, and the ticket agent said "Oh, I'm so excited to see you going back to Vancouver, that must mean September's coming back on FRINGE!"

and I said "You have to immediately forget that you saw me, or some JJ Abrams ninja will find you in the night."

We don't see each other as much as we'd like, or as much as we used to (obviously). But I've seen Anna Torv several times when she's been passing through New York - she came to see FUN HOME when we were at the Public - and Josh Jackson and I tweet each other around hockey season and football season. I've probably seen John Noble the most, as he's been doing plays here in New York, and I've been lucky enough to get to see him in those, and have him come be a guest at mine, and we always look for times to have brunch and drinks when both of us have a minute free.

He was very involved in the process. I had first met him Washington DC, when we did "Passion" at the Kennedy Center for the Sondheim Celebration, and I was essentially in awe of him that whole time, and at some level that's never really gone away. But as I've gotten to be around him more, and know him more, I"m more able to relax and feel like he's a collaborator and friend.

With "Assassins" Sondheim and John Weideman were fine-tuning and reworking the piece, so they were around throughout that process. With SWEENEY TODD, because we were playing the instruments, Steve didn't come in until we were just about finished in the rehearsal room and just about ready to move into the theater, probably for his own safety, because listening to a bunch of actors play his music as musicians would've been excruciating for the first part of the process.

But he fell so in love with the production, and the staging, and the scale of John Doyle's production, that he started coming to every preview, and coming to rehearsals just to enjoy it - and occasionally give us notes. One of my favorite days was a day with just John Doyle, Patti Lupone, me, and Steve, working on the "Little Priest" number. And Steve telling us stories of when he wrote it, and how the ideas came to him, and the crucial insight that the number should be like that moment around 3 AM at the party, when everybody's had enough to drink, that everything is hilarious now - but it's got to be a party full of people as smart as Sondheim characters!

That's the coolest compliment ever.

And yes, I will do that. It would be a great song for fledgling guitarists to do, and I'd be thrilled to think that people were playing it. I'll have to - maybe I'll put it up on my Loose Cattle Facebook page.

It was always difficult to do preparation with FRINGE, partly because we seldom got the scripts more than a few days before shooting again, as they were in a constant state of revision.

And especially with Donald's character, because they were trying to keep such a lid on it, there was not much information. So it wasn't until I got the script that i even knew the information of the particulars of what had happened to Donald.

So it was a kind of quick immersion in imagining what his life had been like. And to be honest, a lot of it happened on the set that day, when I saw Donald's apartment for the first time, and I saw the elements that the prop & art departments had put into Donald's apartment.

The design contributions to FRINGE really can't be overstated, I think. Those departments were so meticulous, and so thoughtful about the things they put in the frame for the fans to look at, because JJ and all the BAD ROBOT people really understand their fans, because they are fans themselves - they know how much those details matter to people.

So I could walk around that apartment, filled with the objects they chose to put there, and I could read back from that who the person was who collected these things. And that, as much as anything, was a window into what Donald's life had been like during the years when Walter was in amber.

I also loved that - if you look around, in a lot of scenes, the art department has set clocks quite often to 4:20. Which I think explains a LOT of the plot of FRINGE, to those in the know.

I guess my favorite song - there's a little trio that starts the second act, and I'm singing the Johanna theme, and that I always loved singing, because it was the one kind of sweet, gentle lullaby-ish kind of moment in the show. I also really loved "Epiphany," which is just massive venting of anything that's ever pissed you off in your whole life - there's room for you to vent it in that song!