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[0:29] Lauren Van Hemert: Hi, everybody. I'm Lauren Van Hemert, and this is Beltline to Broadway, where we talk about the theater from inside the Beltline in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I am, to the bright lights of Broadway and beyond. I need to ask you all to do me a favor and click on that subscribe button so you don't miss any of my candid conversations and interviews with Broadway insiders and theater makers across the globe.

[1:12] Lauren Van Hemert: So here we are, over a year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and our theaters have shut down. I've said it before, but the theater is my sanctuary, and I'm really mourning the loss of sitting in the dark with a group of strangers experiencing something memorable and even transformative. That is the impact of live performance, and there's nothing like it. Mike Anthony, like so many of you, knows exactly what I'm talking about. For 14 years and right up until the shutdown, he worked as a bartender at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where Hamilton is scheduled to reopen later this year. He's written a book about his experiences, Life at Hamilton, and tells me that he's seen firsthand just how cathartic the theater can be. Here's our conversation. So just to kind of give people a little bit of background, you have worked at the Richard Rodgers Theater at the bar for a long time. How did you get the gig?

[2:29] Mike Anthony: I took the job. You know, I had moved to New York to be an actor, and I had done a play. I did Twelfth Night with a small company in the city, and as it turned out, most of the people in the show worked for a company called Sandbar Concessions that provides the bar services for the Nederlander theaters on Broadway. So now we have nine theaters on Broadway. And at that time, I had been temping, doing just kind of soul-sucking, you know, stuffing envelopes all day in like windowless rooms type of work. And at the end of that run, they said, hey, would you like to try bartending with us in a theater? And I was like, are you kidding? Yes. Oh, my God. Even though I had never bartended before in my life.

So I took that job, you know, thinking that it would be this perfect short-term way to make money until my acting career took off to the places I was sure it was going. Yes, 14 years later, I'm still working at that bar. And that's not a sad thing. As you note, I'm blessed to do what I do.

[3:41] Mike Anthony: A few months ago, I had a paranormal investigator with me on this program. And we were talking about haunted theaters. And she mentioned that the Richard Rodgers Theater is said to be haunted. You have spent 14 years of your life there. So give us a scoop. Is it haunted?

[4:00] Mike Anthony: I've heard from many people that it's haunted. I have never personally had an experience there. But maybe just a couple of months before we got closed down, a guy that I work with, his name is Joseph, he was closing down the theater one night. So he's the last person left. Literally, he's alone in the Richard Rodgers Theater all by himself. He's coming off stage. All of the lights have been turned off. He just turned off the lights backstage. So there's just the ghost light left on stage, right? He comes down into the house. He's on the left side of the house. And from the middle of the orchestra seats, a scream happens. According to Joseph, a blood-curdling scream happens. And which obviously, you know, he's this big tough dude.

But not in that moment. I mean, he ran, he like ran out. He quickly shined his light. There's no one there. He's totally alone. And he ran out of the theater. And there are a lot of people who've had less frightening stories than that. You know, Rosie, who is another friend of mine who works there, she is often there cleaning up the theater after hours. And she has seen what she thinks is a woman, I believe, walking up in the back of the orchestra, kind of back and forth. And she appears to be a friendly spirit. So Rosie just acknowledges her, and then goes back to her duties and tries not to get involved. But yeah, there are a lot of stories of things going on in theaters. You know, so much passion, so much life has happened in theaters. It'd be a good place to hang out, I should think.

[5:48] Mike Anthony: Talk to me about those early days at the Richard Rodgers Theater, watching rehearsals for In the Heights with the cup guy. You know, In the Heights hadn't opened yet. It was the day before the first preview. And so I was just behind the bar cleaning, cleaning the bar. And this guy comes up and he asks me if we have any of the show cups because we had just started doing the souvenir cups with the show's logo. And I was like, yeah, we don't have them yet. We'll have them soon. You know, do you work here? And he said, yeah, I'm with the show. And I was like, okay, sure. Yeah, then. So I'm thinking he must be a stagehand or something. So I asked him to come back in a few weeks when we have the cups.

And then that night, I walked into the theater to watch the run through, the last run through of the show. And the lights come up, and there's the guy, the cup guy under the spotlight. And, you know, so I picked up a playbill. And that's how I learned that Lin-Manuel Miranda is not only in the show, he wrote the show, he conceived it, and that he's a genius. You know, that's what I very quickly learned, that he is an actual legitimate genius.

[7:03] Mike Anthony: I wonder what watching him through In the Heights, through Hamilton, watching him work, seeing the evolution of those shows, seeing him perform in both those shows, what did you learn from observing him about the creative process?

[7:24] Mike Anthony: I learned that he is in a league I will never come close to. I learned that, you know, I tell this story in the book. There was this day when during In the Heights, before again, most people knew who Lin was, or that he had, you know, been involved in Freestyle Love Supreme. And the sound system went down just before the curtain was supposed to go up. So, you know, we're now like 15 minutes past curtain time, and the audience is getting restless. And Lin comes out on stage. And he starts to chat with some audience members, you know, just what's your name? Where are you from? You know, what did you have for breakfast today? These little small talk stuff. And then he did that with maybe five or seven people.

He then went on to do this 15-minute rap, improvised rap, using all of that information that he just gathered. And it was extraordinary. I couldn't like my brain was trying to figure out how this was happening, what I was seeing. It was, you know, when I when I say that he's a genius, you know, I really mean that his brain just works in a way that the average brain doesn't. He's able to, in the moment, he can be saying one fantastically funny, creative thing. While back there, his brain is somehow coming up with the next funny and creative thing. That also rhymes with the first thing. Come on, Lin. Rhyme like it's amazing. And the show never went on that night, by the way, the show that they couldn't get the technical issue figured out, but people left feeling like there was this buzz in the audience as they left that night.

So, you know, and another story I tell of getting to watch him up close is, is, is he's he was going over this line, I forget which line it was, but he just there was something about this one line in Hamilton that he wasn't happy with. And he was because they were rehearsing in the lobby that day in front of the bar. And he just said this line over and over again, like different rhythms using slightly different words, slightly different cadence until he hit the until it hit him the way that that he wanted it to. And that was really fascinating to watch. Like I say in the book, it felt like I was watching like Shakespeare, right? Or like, you know, Michael, Michelangelo sculpted David. But the other thing that's important to say about Lin is that, and he says this himself, and Hamilton, the man, Alexander Hamilton, wrote this said this to that what what can come off as genius is often the result of an unbelievable amount of work.

And Lin would work on a couplet, he says, you know, sometimes for weeks for weeks, just two lines, until it became what it ended up becoming being. So the creative process, you know, it looks easy by the end, right? You Hamilton happens, and it just all happens. But it didn't just all happen. That took an unbelievable, almost unfathomable amount of work to make that come together. So yeah, the creative processes is different for every human being. And it can be different for the same person on different days. Excuse me, Lin wrote Dear Theodosia, I believe it was like in a one night, he wrote it the night before he came in the next day, he did it. And Tommy was like, that's it. That's the song, you know, like, like that. So that came like that. So yeah, it was watching him, being able to see him up close. Really a special perspective.

[11:07] Lauren Van Hemert: You tell so many stories in the book about celebrities. So you if you have a favorite celebrity, and they went to Hamilton, Mike probably wrote about them. But my favorite stories in the book are about the people who aren't famous, from the kids to the Make-A-Wish kids to the kids whose dream has been to go to Broadway and see this show. And now they're there. The one story that made me chuckle, Hamilton came here to Raleigh the tour. And my parents, my mother goes to all the shows with me to see and I review shows here. But my dad really doesn't like shows. But he loves history. And he asked me if we could go see Hamilton. So I was like, okay, well, I'll figure out how to get tickets. And we went.

And we couldn't sit together because we couldn't get seats together. So at intermission, I went to him and I said, Dad, how do you like it? And he said, I forgot my hearing aid. I can't hear anything. And you had this 80-year-old man who came to the bar who's told you the same thing. I was rolling on the floor. I was like, that could have been my dad. Do you have a favorite non-celebrity moment that sticks out a person who came to the bar that you just fondly remember?

[12:31] Mike Anthony: All of them. All of my favorite stories are the non-celebrity stories. I mean, the

[12:38] Mike Anthony: The little girl, it was a brother and a sister, and the sister who was the older one was teasing her brother and said, to me, she said, “He started crying as soon as we got in here. He started crying.” And the little boy said, “Yeah, I did. I did start crying and I am not embarrassed about it. My heart is bursting right now.” So we talked for a while and then they leave. And the little girl lets her family get ahead of her and then she comes back to the bar. Her head is barely over the bar and she says to me, “I just want you to know, my heart is actually bursting too.” And then she walks away. It was like the sweetest, you know, the effect that the show has had on especially younger people has been so uplifting to me because, you know, theater struggles and, you know, Broadway is doing great, but theater in general struggles.

There are so many entertainment options and now everyone has a television in their pocket basically and especially, you know, I do regional theater, you know, I do a lot of like Shakespeare at small theaters and the age gets older and older and older and it's really hard to get young people in. So to see young people being so affected, to have their little hearts bursting at a show, at a piece of theater, live theater is really just gives me a lot of hope. Stuff happens at a live theater event that does not happen anywhere else. I mean I really do believe there is something important about people being together in the same physical space, laughing and crying and going through this experience together.

I mean it does something to us I believe as human beings and it's, you know, theater has been happening for as far back as recorded history goes, right? The people have been doing theater and there's got to be an important reason for that. I write in the book a little bit at the end about an experiment done at the City College London where they went to a performance of Dreamgirls in the West End and they were monitoring the electrodermal activity of the audience members and to their astonishment, they have no explanation for this, they found that the people's hearts started to beat coherently. For some reason, during the first act, sitting there experiencing that together caused their hearts to literally beat together.

Then intermission happens and the effect dissipated. The second act goes on and again their hearts start to beat in time and they, you know, science cannot explain that. According to mainstream materialist science, there is no physical connection between human beings and yet theater has that effect. I don't know what that means, but it's got to mean something and I feel like it's important in some way. So yeah, to see live theater thriving in that way, especially with young people, you know, Hamilton has created lifelong theater fans, you know, it's really something special.

[16:34] Mike Anthony: The night that Mike Pence came to see Hamilton, can you talk to me, I mean, you're talking about live theater, how there's nothing like it, can you talk to me about that night Mike Pence came in very soon after the election and the response, did the response and the fallout afterwards surprise you? Yeah, the night that Mike Pence came, it ended up being the most electrifying night of theater by far that I've ever experienced. I mean, I was surprised that he was there, you know, in a sense when we heard he was coming, I was like, well, does Mike Pence, is this like a joke, is someone playing a joke on him? Why? You know, obviously everyone knows that had been an extraordinarily tense presidential run campaign during which the president elects, whose name I will leave out, one of the pillars of his campaign was speaking of immigrants as the other in some way, vilifying immigrants, making people afraid of immigrants, even though this is a country of immigrants, which is what Hamilton is about.

So given that, and everyone knew what Hamilton was, it was surprising that Mike Pence was coming, yeah. The story that I tell in the book, and this is where the book came from, I happened to share a brief few sentences about an interaction that I had with Mike Pence and it went viral. It got shared on Pantsuit Nation, which was a Hillary Clinton Facebook group that had millions of people. So it just went viral, this little post, but yeah, when he came, we were all sort of, everyone that I work with, I won't say everyone, most of the people that I work with are lean to the left and were devastated by the results of the election. I mean, I think it's fair, I think devastated is not an exaggeration, and I think we were grieving.

When I look at it now, I actually feel like there was a grieving process that was going on, and I'm a straight white guy, so what it was like for people who are not straight white men, obviously I can't know. Jeffrey Seller, who's the lead producer of Hamilton, he's on record saying, I think to the Times maybe, that the Hamilton family was reeling after the election. So that's the psychological place that we were in because this is only 10 days later that Mike Pence is there at the front door of Hamilton. So we're still very much in the midst of trying to deal with this. The fact that we had just elected a person who had done and said things that to our minds were an enormous step backwards, I'll put it that way.

And also as you might know, working in theater, I happen to work amongst a large number of people who do not identify as heterosexual. And Mike Pence has very strong views about homosexuality. He sees homosexuality as an abomination, and the day that he came, I happened to be standing between two people who are gay, a man and a woman, and one of them is a good friend of mine. I've known her for many, many years. While the Secret Service was doing the final sweep inside their final checks or whatever, there were like eight of us standing in the lobby and the silence was incredibly uncomfortable because Mike Pence is right here. He's flanked by two Secret Service people. He's right there and he's like trying to find a friendly face.

My friend Christine, who doesn't mind that I use her name, she's in the book and everything, she started weeping. She didn't realize how hard it was going to be to be that close to somebody who has the beliefs that he has. So anyway, the all clear is given and he starts to make his way into the house and he's coming up to us. So Christine is weeping. The guy beside me has his hands folded, his arms folded, and he's looking at the ground. I think Mike Pence thought maybe that I was the best chance he had at finding someone who was likely to be friendly with him, I guess, if not a supporter of his. In that moment, which I write about, it was hard for me. I'm a generally friendly person and I want people to feel good and I want people to be happy.

In that moment, Mike Pence, he's smiling at me and in that moment, he's a human being. We've all done things. We all think things. We all have things about us that we're not proud of, things that we need to work on. That could be what life is all about, here to work out that stuff and Mike Pence has that stuff. It doesn't make him an evil person necessarily and in that moment, all of these things I know about him and how he's affected people that I love through his beliefs because Mike Pence has gone as far as like when he was the governor of Indiana, diverting money from AIDS research into programs that literally try to use electroshock therapy to make people not have feelings for people. They try to shock the gay out of people basically, which science says has concluded it's a ludicrous notion.

It doesn't work. That's the level of his. He doesn't just have these beliefs. It's also really, truly affected people's lives and the number of AIDS cases went up over that time. It's really affected people's lives. In that moment, as he's coming up to me, he's like going to shake my hand and I had my arm folded too and I realized I happened to be wearing the pin. Not long before that, the terrible tragedy at the Pulse nightclub happened. The day of, I think it was the morning or the like the night before the Tony Awards. So Lynn wrote this now famous sonnet, this beautiful sonnet, the most memorable part of which is love is love is love is love is love. Those words were printed on a pin that they'd made for the house staff and I happen to be wearing that.

So as Mike came up to me, instead of shaking his hand, I just pointed to the pin because again she's crying here. In that moment, I literally couldn't shake his hand for her. He looked at it and I don't know if he knew what that meant or what, but he knew that I was not on board. Anyway, then he goes into the house and I ran around the other way because I was very curious to know what the reaction was going to be like from the audience. We'd been asked all night, what's going on? Why is there so much security? Secret service is everywhere, but for obvious reasons, we were not allowed to say who it was that was there. So then when Mike Pence entered, the house lights were still up and suddenly everyone sees him and they realize why there's such heightened security and a couple of people clapped and then that was drowned out in a response of boos and of course the cast knew that he was there obviously.

Right from the beginning of the show, the audience collectively decided that they were going to use their every single response to every line as a rebuke to the president-elect's positions. It was very clear that they were talking to Mike Pence.

[25:47] Mike Anthony: One thing I did take away from the book was this tremendous gratitude that I feel like you have for this theater, this company, this cast. But it was, I also feel like it didn't start out that way. That you're an actor, here are these people up on the stage living your dream every single night. And so at what point do you move from, wow, they're there and I'm here to, you know, maybe it's enough. Like to quote the Eliza song, you know, maybe that would be enough. So at what point do you get to that place of gratitude? I think it happened, you know, over time. I don't know that there was like an aha moment where, like Eureka, I figured this out. Yeah, you know, like I said before, we all have these dreams and hopes.

And life doesn't necessarily go the way that you think it's going to go. And in my case, yeah, I was so close to what I had hoped to be doing. It was right there in front of me every day. But I realized, you know, I had to face the fact that I just don't have it, you know. I don't have the abilities to do what these people that I was watching every day do. My vocal apparatus is not set up to make the kinds of sounds that are not painful for people to listen to. You know, my body does not move in the way it needs to move. And I had to come to terms with that. And of course, you know, that's hard to realize that you might not have what it takes to do whatever you want to do like your mom told you you could do.

But yeah, the most important thing that I learned from this experience, I remember listening one night to, you know, look around, look around. And it struck me one night in particular, you know, how lucky we are to be alive right now. Now, like you said, we've had Make-A-Wish kids come in, right? They're given, you know, they might not survive the medical battle they're going through. And they're given a wish to do whatever they want in the world almost. And they've decided to come to Hamilton. So that was certainly a powerful thing. And we've had multiple Make-A-Wish kids come. So, you know, that'll slap you upside the head, you know, for sure. But look around, look around. I mean, I was at Hamilton every day, which in the middle of all of the chaos happening in the country, it was like this bubble that I was in of hope and creativity and joy and love.

It was something that very few people had the chance to do, and I was doing it. So that realization, you know, dawned on me. And then I realized, you know, it's been said by religious teachers for thousands of years, right? Zen Buddhists have been saying that the secret to happiness, the key to happiness is being in the moment, just living for right now. And that's what I started to do. I started to really just pay attention to the moment and really taking it in, what was happening. And I started sharing those moments on Facebook at first just to friends and family. And then they got shared, and that happened simply because I was paying attention. There's nothing special about my ability to perceive goodness in the world.

It just turns out there is a lot of goodness in the world. There truly is. There's a lot of stuff we have to work on, of course, obviously. I don't mean to, you know, minimize any of that, but there is also a lot of beauty in this world. And I was starting to pay attention to it and see it and sharing those stories. And the most important lesson, if I had to boil it down for me, is that I learned that though you may not be able to do whatever it is you thought you wanted to do, you can always find new things that light you up. You can always find new things that you do want to do. There isn't just one thing out there necessarily that's going to bring happiness. So you just got to keep looking.

You just got to keep looking until you find the thing that gets you out of bed and turns you on. Toward the end of the book, and this is a very new release because this is one of the few books about theater that goes up to the time of COVID so far that I've read. You do talk about COVID. You compare COVID to a sick day, which I kind of love, and I'm going to leave it at that. I'm going to let you buy the book and see what he says about the sick day and the global impact of this. But you also talk about the day that theaters reopen. It's been said that Hamilton might open in July of this year. What do you imagine that opening night is going to be like? I could cry right now thinking about it.

I can't even imagine what it's going to be like. My instinct is that, unfortunately, I think it'll be probably later in the fall. Opening night had been the most extraordinary night, maybe, or the Mike Pence night. That is going to be superseded by us being together again in a theater. I don't even know that I'm going to be able to handle it. I don't know how the actors will be able to handle it, the emotion of it. It reminds me a little bit of thinking about after 9-11, my girlfriend and I were walking around Times Square, and it was literally a few days later, like three, four days or something, when Broadway opened back up again. But, of course, it was a ghost town. There was no one there.

And producers were literally standing on the sidewalk handing out tickets to people who were walking by, literally handing out free tickets. And we had been walking by Les Mis. So three days after 9-11 or whatever it was, the first night that theater opened up again, we're sitting in the front row with not a big audience, maybe a few hundred people, very small, watching Les Mis. And at the end, they're all standing in the line singing the finale, and they're all weeping up on stage. They're weeping. We're all completely weeping because Les Mis, you know, do you hear the people singing? It all took on this much greater, obviously, meta meaning. And I remember thinking in that night, thinking, you know, as an actor, I don't think I could get through this.

And I feel similar about how it's going to be on the first night back. It's going to be just a party like the likes of which it's hard to imagine, to all be together again like that in that way. And, yeah, I think the important thing that I'm trying to take away from all of this is, you know, as divided as it can seem, especially when we see things like what happened at the Capitol and all of this, I really do honestly believe, though, that that's the exception and that there is much more about being a human being that connects us than that makes us different. You know, we all love our kids in the same way. Right. We all feel love. The important things about being a human are universal and it gets all distorted.

And, you know, you know, things get distorted through the human brain. But if you can get the brain out of it a little bit and go down here more, the core things about being human, we all have. And theater is one of the things that touches here often more so than here. And that's why it brings us together, I think, you know, and why maybe hearts are literally beating in time because there is something it's touching those universal parts of us. The way beyond the divisions that we create and start to believe in so strongly that we literally start carrying guns and storming the Capitol and all of that. You know, that's those are things we've made up in our in our brains largely. The real true stuff is the stuff that connects us.

And that's what theater, I think, touches on. So, yeah, I cannot wait to be back. It's going to be it's going to be an unbelievable experience. Mike Anthony's book Life at Hamilton is available on Amazon. You can find out more about it on Anthony's website. I'll put a link in the episode notes. If you like what you've heard today, please consider subscribing to this podcast. Leave us a review. Follow us on social media and visit us online at www.beltlinetobroadway.org. Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.