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[0:12] Andrew Child: Hi, I'm Andrew Child, and welcome to Fifty Key Stage Musicals, the podcast, a companion piece to the Routledge Press publication Fifty Key Stage Musicals, which is available for purchase by going to Routledge.com or clicking the link below in today's show description.

[0:30] Andrew Child: Today's episode focuses on chapter 34, The Phantom of the Opera.

[0:35] Andrew Child: And with us today is author of that chapter, Susan B. Russell.

[0:41] Andrew Child: Susan B. Russell is an associate professor in the School of Theatre at the Pennsylvania State University in State College, PA, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate literature criticism, musical theater history, and playwriting.

[0:56] Andrew Child: She received her PhD in Theatre Studies from Florida State University's School of Theatre in 2007, her Master of Arts degree from Florida State University in 2003, and her BA in Theatre from St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, North Carolina, in 1979.

[1:15] Andrew Child: She experienced a 25-year career as a professional actor on and off Broadway, and her plays have been produced by Emerging Artists Theatre, Lincoln Center, and Penn State University.

[1:28] Andrew Child: Dr. Russell is co-founder and co-director of the Center for Pedagogy in Arts and Design, which is a unique place where information and the arts collaborate in extraordinary ways.

[1:41] Andrew Child: Susan, I'm so excited to chat with you today.

[1:44] Susan B. Russell: I was so excited, Andrew, that I said good morning during my own intro.

[1:49] Andrew Child: Well, there we go.

[1:50] Susan B. Russell: There we go. It gives us a sense that you're here, you're alive.

[1:54] Susan B. Russell: Um I am, I am, and that's what my entire career has been based on. Um, thinking about liveness, thinking about how the human being in time, place, and space translates to theater.

[2:12] Andrew Child: So can you start us off for listeners who maybe haven't read your chapter yet? What is your relationship with the musical in question, The Phantom of the Opera?

[2:24] Susan B. Russell: Well, I love that question, Andrew. My relationship with The Phantom of the Opera is ever unfolding. One of my key mentors intellectually is a man named Bruce Curl. In the early part of this century, he wrote a book called Unfinished Business, in which he, as a musical theater historian, talks about how musical theater is so unique because it is never finished. It is an unfinished process. It is about as human as you can possibly get. Because when you add dance and music and movement and thought and idea and a human body inside this rigorous engagement, it is something that will never be finished.

[3:21] Susan B. Russell: So when you ask me about my relationship with The Phantom of the Opera, my relationship is that I'm a human being. And so as I get older, at 64, I'm very contemplative now about my relationship with Phantom. When I joined the company at 40, that relationship was based on someone who had been in the regional circuit as a professional actor for 20 years. And so when I entered The Phantom of the Opera, it was a different environment. My relationship with that piece of extraordinary musical theater history became very complicated because I was a living human being inside a piece of history. And when you negotiate history with liveness, you as an actor have an interesting assignment.

[4:28] Susan B. Russell: So I had been in a work environment in the regional circuit, going from show to show, two months here, two months there, two months in Arizona at the ATC company, two months in Florida at another company doing different shows. My relationship with the pieces I was doing was much shorter, much more intense. Oh well, Lord, here we go into the theory, the unending now. So what is my relationship with The Phantom of the Opera? Before I entered the show, I was a fan. Now that I am, you know, at the end of my academic career, having looked at my relationship for many, many years, I'm a bigger fan.

[5:35] Susan B. Russell: Wow. But that does not mean that I don't question. It does not mean that I don't look at this piece of theater like a diamond and constantly turn it to see its different facets. That doesn't mean I don't look at my experience, which was unique as all human experiences are. It doesn't mean that I don't question the practices of producers and directors who want to freeze something that in my worldview is unfinished. So what's interesting, Andrew, is that my relationship to Phantom two years ago when I wrote this chapter, after COVID, my relationship is entirely different.

[6:29] Andrew Child: Really? How so?

[6:30] Susan B. Russell: Yes. Yes. I just said a whole lot of words, Andrew. So I know that that's a little startling. So um, so how is it different?

[6:44] Susan B. Russell: Well, what's beautiful about this is that you are doing a podcast, which is a live moment with me that will be captured and replayed in people's, in students' or historians' personal environments, but it's going to freeze me right now. Right now, my clock says 10:10 on March 4th, 2022.

[7:08] Andrew Child: Right.

[7:09] Susan B. Russell: Well, this is a moment for you and me that's happening live in a technological space. And so that this space of technology, as an instructor, I've been teaching on Zoom for two years.

[7:23] Andrew Child: Okay.

[7:24] Susan B. Russell: So my relationship with technology has changed. And so that has required that I look at Phantom, which to me is, and here comes my narrative listeners, that Phantom was, although there are human beings on stage, it could not be contained in live theater, because as an actor, I was asked to replicate the past.

[7:57] Andrew Child: Okay.

[7:57] Susan B. Russell: So does that make me a participant in live theater? What was live about Phantom was that I was standing on the stage and my heart was beating, my eyes were staring at 1600 people, and the words I was saying had been written 30 years prior. I mean, what was live? My body was live. What was I asked to do as an actor? At that time, I was asked to replicate award-winning performances from the past. So when I arrived there, it was my biggest dream. My biggest dream was to be in Phantom. And I did everything to make that dream happen, including challenge the fear of a 40-year-old woman showing up in New York City and saying, "Hi, here I am. I have no agent, I have no manager."

[9:01] Susan B. Russell: Wow. But I want to do this. And what's live about Phantom are the artists and how they are received inside the piece, because moment after moment, the relationships with my fellow actors and my directors. I remember the kindness of David Lye, who is still the conductor of Phantom, his kindness, his embrace of me as a human being, which almost was counterintuitive to what the show was asking me to do.

[9:45] Andrew Child: Really?

[9:46] Susan B. Russell: Yeah, yeah, because they wanted me to replace a missing actor. And I know that sounds weird, but this is how theories and how thoughts and how ideas are forwarded. My mission as an artist intellectual is to reinvigorate the worth and value of the human being on stage. This is all about what I privilege as an intellectual. I privilege the living human being doing The Phantom of the Opera. And that's hard when you're a producer.

[10:35] Andrew Child: Right.

[10:36] Susan B. Russell: Because you don't want me, you want a stable, predictable, repeatable piece of perfection. So I'm curious with all the work you've done, all the thought you've put into this, and your ideas for the future of theater and what's next. Can those coexist with this business model of the mega musical, of The Phantom of the Opera, of Wicked, of Les Misérables, of whatever that's still running? Can those two ideas exist hand in hand?

[11:16] Susan B. Russell: Absolutely, they can. I'm just gonna say that because what it will take to change anything. I mean, I stare at the world, I stare at The Phantom of the Opera as a cultural imprint of the worth and the value of the living actor. I really do. A piece of theater is an opportunity to catch a culture in a moment when it's creating itself. That The Phantom of the Opera in 1987 is an opportunity to stare at us as a people. You and I don't know how clearer to say that, that every single thing about Phantom is who we are, and who, but it's also who we were, and every single change you see being made in Phantom since COVID, the beautiful negotiation with equity, diversity, and inclusion, the beautiful entrée of a different visual representation of who gets to stand on that stage, who gets to sing Christine, who gets to play the Phantom, these negotiations of diversity that now are appearing on the stages of the Majestic Theatre, these are statements about who we are now.

[12:43] Susan B. Russell: And oh my gosh, Andrew, all you have to do to change a culture is ask the culture to change its mind, to open its perception, to actually create a space where something new can happen. And even though your audience, I love that we say the audience of this podcast, the listener, the witnesser, you are unique in the world. And all you have to do to beautifully negotiate that uniqueness in a world that wants you to be the same is insist on your uniqueness. Now, if something like The Phantom does not have room in a mega musical, which is run by a corporate model, which asks for consistent replication of perfection, if something like that does not open itself to the possibility that a living human on that stage might have something new to offer a role, then that piece of theater is being trapped in amber.

[14:09] Susan B. Russell: My perfect imitation, it's not representation, it was imitation of an award-winning performance from 1987. I mean, that's not me. That was my ability as an actor to replace another actor. These are complicated thoughts, y'all. I'm not gonna say that this is easy, but it's something that the new generation of actor must think about. If you must, all you actors and audiences out there, think about this and humans and humans. Phantom is not asking anything of an actor that our culture doesn't ask of us as well, Andrew.

[14:59] Andrew Child: I'm curious. There was a documentary that came out about Hal Prince a couple years ago, um, shortly after his passing, I believe.

[15:08] Susan B. Russell: Yes, and it really goes into depth with how involved he still was up till the end of his life with the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. Do you think was he driving to sort of fossilize something as it existed on day one?

[15:30] Susan B. Russell: I love that you ask A about him, B, use the word fossilized. Well, you mentioned Amber already, so I figured we'll just make a little leap. Riff with me, Andrew. There we go. First, I must sing the praises that before Hal Prince, there was never a Hal Prince. How many how many how many musicals, 22 earth changing musicals, uh, before his line of thinking, before his ideas, we had never seen anything like this. The world had never seen how Prince actually, and how Prince and Mr. Prince worked with me on both my master's thesis and my dissertation. He was in his office, are the whoever has his beautiful um papers. There'll be copies of my master's thesis in there because I interviewed with him.

He was fascinated by this. The interior mind of Hal Prince. What was interesting in my thesis, he told me, he said, we never expected Phantom to uh go over a year to last a year. He said we were running in place with the show, trying to get it from London to New York, and we never thought it would last a year over a year. And so what happened with him is that he bore witness to how something he made actually hooked into the zeitgeist into the mind of the culture.

[17:11] Susan B. Russell: And here's the beauty over and over and over. And that's also the uh hard part. Who are we as a population when we want to take a representation from not just 1987, but from the 19th century, and we want to see that over and over and over and over. This is a question that we must ask ourselves. Does that mean I want Phantom the clothes? Absolutely not. I have, I mean, some of my besties are still in it now. And shout out to them. Y'all are awesome. Y'all are the beating heart of Phantom and do not forget it. And if you forget it, you text me and I'll remind you of your worth and value. I will remind you. But my job as an intellectual is to stir the pot. My job as an artist is to constantly shake the foundations of the known so that those who come after me might explore the unknown.

[18:32] Andrew Child: Or do you think there's a lot of people who are happy to go out there and do a replication?

[18:39] Susan B. Russell: First off, um, first off, before Phantom of the Opera, well, with Chorus Line and with um, I'm trying to think of a, I think Chorus Line ran seven years. Cats, the mega musical, the long running musical is a gift to an actor because I will tell you what 40 years old, and I had been an actor for 25 years. I never expected that I would make a living wage. And yet I did, you know, I never expected. I mean, here's the beauty of Phantom. Those people who had long-term contracts put kids through college, had food on their tables, were able to live and work and raise a family in New York City, which for an actor is impossible. It's impossible for a human, it's impossible. For an actor, it's less possible.

When I teach students here and they say, I want to be a star on Broadway, I say, well, those jobs are taken. What else can you do? Those jobs are taken. There's about 500 of them. When I left, there was about 500 acting jobs in New York City. The when I left the now hear me, I'm in, I left the business in 2002. The statistic in actors equity was that only 2% of all union actors at any given moment were working.

[20:14] Susan B. Russell: Wow. That was my world. So the miracle of Phantom of the Opera for me, I had never had a I had bought a house in Florida, which was crazy. How did I do that? Um, but I had well, Florida used to be an there used to be about 23 or 24 equity houses in Florida.

[20:41] Andrew Child: Oh wow.

[20:41] Susan B. Russell: Yeah, I know. Look at you. This was, I lived for a long time. I went to FSU, and then I ended up living in West Palm Beach in Daytona. Uh, there was a huge musical theater called Seaside Music Theater, which every summer spent millions of dollars doing five shows in rep. This used to be the landscape of professional theater in America. They used to be regional houses everywhere, small houses everywhere that were employing actors. I was actually a working actor for 10 years in Florida and never went to New York. Went to New York at 40 because I wanted to see if I could get if I could play in that environment.

[21:24] Andrew Child: And was Phantom a drawing force for you? Was that a show you had an interest in?

[21:29] Susan B. Russell: Oh, y'all. I had another y'all, I'm from North Carolina. Um, I had a big poster of Phantom in my house in Florida. Wow. And I would just stare at it, manifesting. Live your dream. That's partly what my chapter is is that I do not want anyone going into the field of theater to enter into situations where you sacrifice the self. And that's different than giving the self. Sacrificing the self for a corporate model of replication. More than anything, I want an actor to go to New York City and get a long-term contract in a show and make a good living and see what that feels like. And the moment you wake up in the morning, which happened to me when I was 45, and I woke up and I went, oh, what's happening to me? I'm just getting up. And this is the reality. I was doing the same show eight times a week, six days a week, 50 weeks a year for five years.

[22:46] Andrew Child: Wow.

[22:47] Susan B. Russell: Five years. And I have to tell you that having been raised in the regional circuit, I was used to something else. So people that go from big Broadway show to Broadway show, long-term run. Well, there aren't many long-term shows anymore. But um we must investigate, though, what this does to the actor, to the artist.

[23:14] Andrew Child: And what do you feel like it did for you?

[23:19] Susan B. Russell: It stifled me. It broke my heart. It um made me feel that I was not valued, but my skill set to replicate something else. Because these systems, and if you're interested in reading more about this, you can get my thesis on uh, you know, you go Susan Russell, the you know, court is called the corporate actor, and I forward this notion of how I ceased to be an artist and became a worker, a line worker on a factory assembly line, assembling the product of Phantom of the Opera. Now, did my colleagues ever make me feel that way? Never did my um did my bosses make me feel that way, or nobody makes you feel anything. I was aware of the T. Nobody said to me, You are a Fordist, like you're building a Ford model team.

Nobody said that to me because we were trying to do what our job was, Andrew. It was my job, and I took the job and I signed the contract, but what I saw after 9 11, what I witnessed was the corporate mentality that was in charge of my artistry. And uh the post-9-11 uh negotiations with the three unions about us coming back to work, it was such an eye-opening experience that that's when I decided that I had had enough. But uh the reality was is that I was not the valued player. The show was the valued player. So you do what you do to keep the doors open and the people coming in.

[25:25] Susan B. Russell: Now I must, before we move forward from this, actually um say that Phantom is the result of a domino of expectation that when you buy a CD of Santa of Phantom, you buy a film of Phantom, you go to Broadway, and the audience itself expects what the CD sounds like, expects what the movie actor looks like. Emily Rawson in the movie, you know, you have to look like um all of a sudden I forgot about I forgot who was the first Christian. Uh Sarah Brightman.

[26:11] Andrew Child: Sarah, thank you.

[26:12] Susan B. Russell: God bless you, Sarah Brightman. Sure thing. God bless you, Andrew Lloyd Weber. My goodness. God bless you all. Talk about bravery. Um people who lean out into the world and try to offer pieces of art. So Emily Rosson had to, to a certain extent, look like Sarah Brightman because we expected her to look like that. Patrick Wilson had to look like Steve Barton because we expect it. So is this all on the producers? Absolutely not. Is it all on the actors? Absolutely not. It's on audience expectation.

[26:47] Andrew Child: Do you think if you had been in the original cast, if you had originated the role, would you have experienced the same sort of burnout, the same sort of exhaustion from replicating something you had done five years ago as a person?

[27:05] Susan B. Russell: Absolutely. Fitting the mold, yeah. Absolutely. Because an actor's primary, I know what you're doing. You're setting me up. The actor's primary function, the artist's function in society is to constantly be in the now. And the now is an unfolding. It is not a repetition of then. And it is not a portend of the next moment. I mean, this is Aristotelian. Dude, I'm a scholar. I'm an antiquity scholar. And Aristotle was trying to figure out what is this thing that is happening. He tried to figure out happening.

[27:42] Susan B. Russell: He tried to figure out now. My job was to be unique, was to be never before seen, was to be unpredictable, because that's why people come to the theater. And in the regional circuit, the things that I had done, I was hired because I was a beautifully known unknown. That you hired me. And when you think of stars, you think about stars from the past, Gertrude Lawrence. I'm going way back to the 40s. Gertrude Lawrence was noted for her, she didn't have the best voice, she didn't have the best acting chops, she couldn't dance, and she would tell you this in any play he wrote from her. She could not, you know, repeat, and she was known for her unknown, spontaneous genius. And if you do not release an artist to the possibility of being spontaneously connected to the gods, then you put a roof.

I mean, the Greeks, there were no tops to the Greek theater, it was the view of Athens and the group view of Greece. When Rome came in, they started putting tops on the theater. And that meant I'm gonna put a top on the actor. You don't go to see perfection, you actually go to the theater to see human beings doing impossible things in impossible ways. And if you make them do possible and probable, you're gonna just get the same old thing. So I this question of what it does to the artist was what my master's thesis was about. And I interviewed actors in the show forever. Oh and what did it, yeah, and what did it do to them? You start playing, and I remember one of the fabulous quotes you start playing ahead, you leave the now, and if you drop a line, I mean, I'm an innovative, I'm a teacher, so that means I live in the improv.

And my career as an actor made me live in the improv because y'all, it's a human event and stuff happens on a stage. But if the same stuff happens on a stage all the time, you strip the improvisation, you strip the live actor of the now, and you put them in repetition of the past. And if you mess up your line, if you drop a word, then that very next performance, you play that mistake over and over and over in your line, and then you are afraid you're going to do that mistake again, and then becomes your enemy.

[31:09] Andrew Child: Of course.

[31:10] Susan B. Russell: Thank you, Andrew. You're such a BT dubshell. This guy is a great interviewer. Oh god. Part of what I am saying, Andrew, is not new because prior to the Rogers and Hammerstein estate, and this is you know the history of something like Oklahoma, Rogers and Hammerstein actually began wanting to freeze their productions. That here is the libretto and the score with all in the libretto, here's the blocking that you do. In the score, here are the sensitivities, here are the dynamics, here are everything. And this is what Oklahoma sounds like, as opposed to what Hugh Jackman would do with Oklahoma, as opposed to what anyone else would do with Oklahoma. Here's what the Rogers and Hammerstein estate, they don't do this anymore.

But they said in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, you want to do Oklahoma, you're gonna do our Oklahoma. So it's about the privileging of the text over the possibilities of the artist. So Carol Channing, well, the first musical I ever saw was Hello Dolly. When Carol Channing came to the Greensboro, North Carolina Coliseum. Wow. And my mom took me, and I was probably, if I'm 64 now, God bless you, Carol Channing. Um, probably I don't know, maybe I was eight or nine. Wow and I sat with my jaw on my toe, because Carol Channing, moment after moment was in the absolute now. Absolutely. And when she, and this is the moment that I remember when she had her arms around the cash register, looking down, talking to her past husband.

I swear to you, she looked right at me and winked. Now that for a for an audience member is a live person. I don't want the phantom to start winking at 1,600 people, but just sitting there in the possibility that someone like Carol Channing, when you hear people say, I feel like the show was done for me, that's the now. Do I think that happens on the stage and on in Phantom? Yes, of course. I've seen it happen. But do I think that Phantom sets up that possibility as a public practice? Absolutely not, because they can't risk it. Because if you can connect to 1600 people, which used to be my job in the regional circuit, no matter how big the theater was, it was my job to connect. It was my job. But Phantom asked me to do the show moment after moment. And that's different. That's different. Does that make sense?

[34:16] Andrew Child: Oh, absolutely.

[34:18] Susan B. Russell: Thank you. Do you have thoughts if there are young people listening, students of theater, where should they be directing their attention? Where can they be seeing theater that you think exemplifies from its core? Being the now, being moment to moment.

[34:36] Susan B. Russell: What a great, a great question. Well, I'll tell you, I just saw last night, I went to see the networks production of Waitress here at Penn State. And these are young performers, freshly minted, out of university. And they were performing in a giant, giant Center for Performing Arts here on the Penn State campus. And it was so wonderful because I saw these young actors going. So this is what I say to you go to your local community theaters, go to your local regional houses, go to your networks, non-equity productions, go to your professional productions, because you will never know where you're going to find it. Make sure you know what you're seeing. This is all I'm asking for you to spend moments in deep contemplation about the environment you're in. The bravery, bravery, even on Zoom. What the heck? We did a lot of Zoom performances. And I want you to stare at her in wonder and do not become intoxicated by the set.

[37:08] Andrew Child: Wow.

[37:09] Susan B. Russell: Do you it's intoxication?

[37:13] Andrew Child: It absolutely is.

[37:14] Susan B. Russell: Do you have thoughts? If current producers of Phantom on Broadway are listening, would you have thoughts? How do we make Phantom that?

[37:26] Susan B. Russell: You set them free. You set them free. Oh, my brother. Um when I in my article, I write about that moment when I went on for Carlotta with no rehearsal, no costumes, no wigs, and no, and the most marvelous David Lai had never heard me sing the whole role. Wow. And this is the now, my brother. This and I call you my brother because now I feel we are we are kindred. Um because you're an artist, and so we're we are humans in this moment. And when I appeared, no one had ever seen me before. No one had ever seen me in my makeup, no one had ever seen me in the costumes. Quite literally, what happened was that the entire company, this revelation of someone new walking on the stage in a principal role with no, I mean it was that was total now for everyone, and the whole show turned into this celebration of now, because what I saw in the wings were the ballerinas getting ready to come on, and they were twirling in anticipation.

And I saw the fabulous technicians in the electrics hanging over the second floor with getting ready to bring in the backdrops, but they were looking at me, and they were going. And all of the and I came out to do Carlotta, and I raised my hand, my head, you know, if you know the show, and just tore downstage in a way that no one had ever done because it was me. And David Lai is in the pit staring up at me and the eye contact with me, and I look down at him, and he's like, Oh, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? I would say to a producer and a director, set them free. That night was the most glorious night that I had with my peers, not because I was doing Carlotta, but that we were all in it together. And then afterwards, what happened was that I had to show up the next day, and I had to do the show the way that they wanted me to do it. Okay.

[40:13] Andrew Child: Welcome to Broadway, welcome.

[40:15] Susan B. Russell: Now I'm not saying, do you not do what the director tells you? Do not misunderstand what I'm saying. Because my job was to be Carlotta. My Carlotta was my version, my diamond of Carlotta. But I did all the blocking, I did all the requirements that Hal Prince had of me. You know, you cross there, you do that. But the being, the vibratory human was entirely different. And that changed the show. And that's not what a corporation really wants. Because all of a sudden someone might put, and I go to the Model T, someone might put three headlights on the Model T instead of two and go, that is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. You know, so my job is to do what the director wants me to do, but my job is to also infuse the director's vision with possibility. That's called excitement. Do you think if not, if not for your experiences in Phantom, which obviously seem to have launched a real clear line of thought to absolutely well-founded philosophy.

[41:41] Susan B. Russell: Do you think without Phantom, would you still be performing in rep, performing in regional theater? Or did Phantom launch you to become an academic? Well, what's beautiful about that question is that when I left in 2002, I'm trying, I mean, yes, I was I had aged out of roles that were available to me. I was trapped by a producing machine on Broadway that does not value, except for a few performances, a 45-year-old woman, you know. So the industry itself was making judgments on me all the time. I'll tell you, Andrew, I think that what I saw having spent a year in the company of great artists after 9-11 who actually risked their lives to go into the theaters on September 13th, 2001, amidst bomb threats, amidst uncertain moments.

And yet again, every September 11th, whatever class I'm teaching gets this story of what it was like to be an artist on Broadway after 9-11, because we were charged to bring the life back to this city. And we were charged because so as the lights of Broadway stayed dark, so would New York City look dark to the world. So your frontline workers were your most extraordinary firefighters and police officers and military and nurses and doctors, as well as your artists that went back into the theater to show the world what was possible after the impossible had happened.

[43:48] Susan B. Russell: Did they ever do that on purpose? I do not think so, because my mantra for the world is that people are good. It was the job of production supervisors to keep the machine running because the expense of keeping the doors open of a Broadway musical, and that's our fault too. Because, you know, Spider-Man is the revelation of how much we think Broadway needs to look like to be Broadway. You know, Spider-Man needs to be done in a black box theater for 10 people. That's the great Spider-Man musical. But we expect it now to be $30 million of spectacle. So, you know, would I have gone back? Well, dude, I was tired. And my heart after 9-11, I think the untold story will be to figure out or to do some research on how many artists left the business after 9-11 because we were called to the highest purpose, which is to teach, which is to inspire, which is to show what's possible, Andrew.

And that, my friend, my brother cannot be locked in one show. It becomes the show of Susan Russell, the show of Penn State University, the show of the book that Rob is putting together called 50 Key Broadway Musicals. That's the show, man. You know, I walked into a situation where people valued big data. And my first line to Penn State University is, well, okay, y'all, I'm big data, not this computer, not the gathering of research. And my whole job at Penn State for 16 years has been to infuse the worth and value of the human being in the classroom, teaching and learning.

[45:49] Susan B. Russell: So I'd love to hear more about as co-founder of the Center for Pedagogy in Arts and Design, which is combining information and arts. I'd love to hear about you and your big data. Thank you. Well, I'm the director and the co-founder of the Center for Pedagogy and Arts and Design, which five years ago, Andrew, did not exist. Oh, wow, this was an idea formed by my dean now, Stephen Carpenter, the Dean of the College of Arts and Architecture, my great good friend, he's also my friend, my great good friend Ann Clements, who is now at the highest levels of the university doing faculty engagement and faculty study here at Penn State. And it was an idea we sought we started with what if? What if we could build a place where faculty, staff, administration, students, and community members could form communities based on arts-based teaching and learning?

I use the word base twice. That was bad writing, Susan. So what if lighting, movement, sound, and unlimited possibilities in one space could be built? What if this new hybrid notion that what I know about theater practice and what as an artist and what academics know about discourses? What if we brought this into one room and offered a chemistry instructor unlimited lighting design, unlimited sound design, unlimited movement, unlimited writable walls, movable desks, space? What if you could walk your information? What if you could light your information? What if you could make your information have a sound? How would that affect teaching and learning? So that's our lab, the Teaching and Learning Lab, which was an investment by teaching and learning with technology and the College of Arts and Architecture.

[48:03] Susan B. Russell: So this one-of-a-kind space actually opened last fall, and we have had extraordinary success in bending the possibilities of technology through what artists understand about the universe. And what we're gonna watch is how this bend of possibilities creates innovation and change. Wow. Wow. So you opened last fall, you've been running successfully for we just have just had one fall semester, we had six different discourses, and we're running giant research projects about how someone teaching graphic design in an unlimited space of lighting and sound. And when I say lighting and sound, I want you to imagine your local, I want you to imagine your local roadhouse, which is something like here at Penn State, we have a fabulous lighting, a fabulous place called the Bryce Jordan Center, where the Penn State basketball teams, both the Lady Lions shout out to the Lady Lions and the Penn State Nittany Lions shout out to the Nittany Lions basketball team plays as well as Cirque du Soleil.

We have an entire we have this place that houses art and athletics. We have the same capabilities lighting-wise as that giant roadhouse, and the same capability sound-wise as that giant roadhouse in the 30 by 30 space. We have a dance floor and we have movable desks. What if? And so we're always asking, Andrew, what if? What if a chemistry professor teaches first-year chemistry? And those chemistry students get to dance a future vaccine formula. What if they move in light? And we have student lighting designers that come in and choose the light for their environment for their classes. There is no space like this anywhere, and I mean globally, because TLT and the College of Arts said we want a new space, and we want a space that no one else on the planet has ever explored. And the way they did that was by bringing human beings into the space that have never been there. We value the humans, not the technology. Oh, but we love the technology. Don't take us long.

[50:39] Susan B. Russell: Do you think if you could get the current producers of Phantom of the Opera on Broadway into that space? Oh, is there something you would have in mind that you would want to show them, or is there some group of people you would want them to engage with in that space? Well, what's interesting about that question is that we have the capability to live stream all over the world. So I can get the current producers and directors of Phantom of the Opera in that one space. I could get, I could do that like in a half an hour. I would just have to get the cameras up and get my fabulous right hand in the space. Her name is Stephanie Swindle Thomas. She knows all the technology, and she would say, I can do that, and I can do that 360, and I can do that AVR too.

Shall we bring them in in an immersive? I'm good, yeah. So I could do that. What would I tell them? I would say that this space, which has the highest technology possible that Penn State has to offer. Let me put a human being in the middle of this space and work the technology around this human and have them talk to you about what it's like to be a human in that space. Now take everything you get from that experience and go direct a brand new production, a Phantom of the Opera, for March 5th, 2022. Do a different one every night and see what happens.

[52:22] Andrew Child: Wow. Well, thank you so much for walking me through that. And thank you for everything that you shared today. This has been truly enlightening.

[52:32] Susan B. Russell: Oh, Andrew, this has been an incredible joy. The one thing I want to say to you and to all the producers of the new book is that I want to thank you for opening the space for contemplation. As a teacher, I have said that the main thing, my main job as a teacher is to teach critical thinking, which means can I take a piece of information, be it a formula or be it a news article or be it a post on Facebook? Can I ask a question of it? Can I contemplate that question myself? Can I then take my question and my contemplation into a community and ask that question to other people and listen? Can I then take all of that information and look and see if anybody else is asking the same question? And then can I take all of that experience, which is very human, and make a strategic decision about myself? And no one will ever tell me what to think, how to be, who to be, who is more worthy of something than I am. I will know who I am. And from that place, anything, Andrew Child, is possible.

[54:06] Andrew Child: Wow. Wow. Well, thank you. I want to give a little shout out to the listeners. And if you are enlivened by this chat and have a lot of questions going through your head, I definitely want to point you toward. We got an episode on Hello Dolly, where Leroy Reims talks about his experiences as a replacement. We have an episode on Cats with Stephen Mohannon, who talks about his experiences as a replacement. So I'd love to sort of send you that way. But listeners, thank you for joining us today. And please make sure to purchase a copy of 50 Key Stage Musicals by visiting Routledge.com or by clicking in today's show description. If you want to learn more about The Phantom of the Opera, please also review the links in the below description.