This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:22] Dan Tracy: Guess what we're talking about this week?

[0:24] Joe Carroll: Wow, you're so dreamy, Dan Tracy.

[0:26] Dan Tracy: You're dreamy.

[0:27] Joe Carroll: That was great.

[0:28] Dan Tracy: I wish I could play the guitar like you.

[0:30] Joe Carroll: You can't.

[0:31] Dan Tracy: Welcome to Guys Who Like Musicals.

[0:32] Joe Carroll: Welcome to Guys Who Like Musicals.

[0:33] Dan Tracy: We're talking about the saddest musical of all time.

[0:38] Joe Carroll: The greatest sad cry your frickin' eyes out.

[0:42] Dan Tracy: Uh, movie to musical.

[0:45] Joe Carroll: The best movie musical that has ever been made into a Broadway musical.

[0:49] Dan Tracy: That's a hot take.

[0:49] Joe Carroll: That's definitely a hot take.

[0:50] Dan Tracy: But by far, I'm gonna defend it.

[0:53] Joe Carroll: I'm gonna defend it.

[0:54] Dan Tracy: Top 25 today, but you might also agree with me.

[0:57] Joe Carroll: So best romantic films of all time.

[0:59] Dan Tracy: Yep, yep.

[1:00] Joe Carroll: Unbelievable.

[1:01] Dan Tracy: According to people, not just me.

[1:03] Joe Carroll: Totally celebrating things you can watch right now.

[1:05] Dan Tracy: Watch the original Once movie.

[1:08] Joe Carroll: Um, Dan and I both watched it this morning.

[1:11] Dan Tracy: Uh, I'm not crying, you're crying.

[1:14] Joe Carroll: Um, it is just as good as it's ever been.

[1:20] Dan Tracy: I love it.

[1:21] Joe Carroll: I'm, I'm, I'm, I love it so much.

[1:23] Dan Tracy: I'm so glad you texted me earlier in the week.

[1:25] Joe Carroll: You're like, what are we doing on the podcast this week?

[1:26] Dan Tracy: And I was like, I don't know.

[1:28] Joe Carroll: And you're like, if you could do one show, if you could do one thing, what do you want to do?

[1:31] Dan Tracy: And I was like, well, Once, obviously.

[1:33] Joe Carroll: And you're like, let's go.

[1:35] Dan Tracy: Let's go.

[1:35] Joe Carroll: Here we are.

[1:36] Dan Tracy: So an actor is saying his lines, and then out of nowhere, he just starts singing.

[1:52] ♪ Musical number: "Don't Cry for Me" — performed by Joe Carroll ♪

[2:05] Dan Tracy: Talk to me about your experience with this.

[2:09] Joe Carroll: Like, how do you, how did you come across this movie?

[2:12] Dan Tracy: What's your, like, when did you first see it?

[2:14] Joe Carroll: Or when did you first know about it?

[2:16] Dan Tracy: I remember, I remember the song "Falling Slowly" crossing my, like, you know, sphere of my life when I was in high school.

[2:27] Joe Carroll: Okay.

[2:28] Dan Tracy: Yep.

[2:28] Joe Carroll: I forget how.

[2:30] Dan Tracy: I'm gonna guess a girl.

[2:31] Joe Carroll: That just was like how I learned about music at that age, which is so sad.

[2:35] Dan Tracy: Like I was either listening to Rent and Wicked on repeat or Spring Awakening.

[2:38] Joe Carroll: Yeah, yeah.

[2:39] Dan Tracy: Or it was like, you know, Dashboard Confessional or something from some girl.

[2:44] Joe Carroll: Dad, you were a Dashboard Confessional guy?

[2:47] Dan Tracy: Oh, yeah.

[2:47] Joe Carroll: Definitely like a Dashboard idiot.

[2:50] Dan Tracy: Like I know, but I was such a Dashboard Confessional guy for like some really dark years of high school.

[2:58] Joe Carroll: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2:59] Dan Tracy: You know?

[3:00] Joe Carroll: Um, that's funny.

[3:01] Dan Tracy: That's why I talked about that.

[3:02] Joe Carroll: That's why I only sing with straight tone.

[3:04] Dan Tracy: Like I was just totally warped into a musical style.

[3:07] Joe Carroll: Um, that's amazing.

[3:09] Dan Tracy: But honestly, my first engagement with this show was seeing you in it.

[3:17] Joe Carroll: Ah.

[3:18] Dan Tracy: I hadn't seen the movie.

[3:19] Joe Carroll: Wow.

[3:20] Dan Tracy: Oh, you hadn't seen the movie?

[3:21] Joe Carroll: No, dude.

[3:22] Dan Tracy: Oh, okay.

[3:23] Joe Carroll: There I am seeing my best friend in his Broadway debut.

[3:27] Dan Tracy: And I'm pretty sure you snuck me in like from the house manager.

[3:32] Joe Carroll: Oh, did you on for the drummer?

[3:34] Dan Tracy: Yep.

[3:34] Joe Carroll: Yep.

[3:35] Dan Tracy: Yep.

[3:35] Joe Carroll: Um, that was a very cool night.

[3:38] Dan Tracy: It's basically the role you played in Bandstand.

[3:40] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[3:40] Dan Tracy: No, it's the same role.

[3:41] Joe Carroll: It's the same role.

[3:43] Dan Tracy: Yeah, Svetch in Once is... Bandstand is actually the sequel, the prequel to where Svetch the drummer was, uh, you know, before in another lifetime, he was Johnny Simpson in Bandstand.

[3:55] Joe Carroll: Yeah, that's exactly right.

[3:56] Dan Tracy: Um, yeah, that was very cool.

[3:58] Joe Carroll: And this is the thing that doesn't happen anymore, and I'm not even getting the guy in trouble because he retired, but the world's greatest house manager, uh, would sneak people in for that show in particular because it was so sold out that like my friends and family couldn't come see it, and like, you know, you couldn't always get tickets for it when I first joined the show, and so, um, he would sneak people in and they could stand at the back or whatever.

[4:20] Dan Tracy: Yeah, yeah.

[4:20] Joe Carroll: And then you came to see with your mom, didn't you?

[4:23] Dan Tracy: I came with my mom when Ben was on with Kristen.

[4:26] Joe Carroll: Nice.

[4:26] Dan Tracy: I saw Arthur Darvill and Steve and Kristen.

[4:32] Joe Carroll: And I mean, I saw it four times.

[4:35] Dan Tracy: Wow, I never didn't cry.

[4:37] Joe Carroll: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[4:37] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[4:38] Joe Carroll: Yep.

[4:39] Dan Tracy: Yeah, that's kind of what this thing does.

[4:41] Joe Carroll: Um, I actually, this is really, this is, well, um, we've talked about it a lot on the pod, but it was my Broadway debut.

[4:48] Dan Tracy: Um, I came into the show in, uh, uh, August, uh, early September after they had won the Tony for Best Musical, and, uh, they added very few weeks after your summer gig after graduation.

[5:04] Joe Carroll: Yeah, I graduated from college in spring in April of 2012, and I started in this show on like, you know, September of 2012, which is completely insane, um, and unbelievably serendipitous.

[5:18] Dan Tracy: I've been obsessed with this since the movie came out.

[5:21] Joe Carroll: I saw the movie in theaters.

[5:23] Dan Tracy: Um, I just, I remember when they won the Academy Award for Best Song.

[5:29] Joe Carroll: I remember watching that speech.

[5:30] Dan Tracy: I remember them getting kind of kicked off the stage, sort of.

[5:33] Joe Carroll: They like got cut, their speech got cut short.

[5:36] Dan Tracy: Um, I remember all of that and being like, what, you know, kind of what, what's gonna happen with this movie because I remembered loving it, but it's so small and it's so like, you know, who, you know, is it gonna actually catch fire?

[5:48] Joe Carroll: Ends up, I mean, we'll talk about all this, but it ends up making, you know, a lot of money.

[5:53] Dan Tracy: Twenty million dollars at least.

[5:55] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[5:55] Dan Tracy: Um, and so, and Alex remembers, and I don't really, I don't remember this, but freshman year of college, Alex remembers us watching this together in the early days of flirting, and I'm like, well, let's go watch this like super, you know, this movie that I love that's like super sad and about like, you know, but like that is you guys, yeah.

[6:15] Joe Carroll: Like when I'm watching that, I'm like, oh, that's like Joe and Alex.

[6:17] Dan Tracy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[6:18] Joe Carroll: So in your own way.

[6:19] Dan Tracy: You know, you guys could make your own story.

[6:21] Joe Carroll: Yeah, yeah.

[6:22] Dan Tracy: Um, so we watch it and she remembers me turning to her and saying, I, they need to make this a musical.

[6:28] Joe Carroll: This would be a great stage musical.

[6:30] Dan Tracy: Wow.

[6:31] Joe Carroll: Um, I don't remember that, and I don't know if I had the foresight at that time, but I then flash, you know, flash forward three years or whatever, and, um, one of our friends, friend of the pod, Stephanie Styles, her dad was a producer on Once.

[6:47] Dan Tracy: So Stephanie's at school with us, and I was coming to New York to audition for the non-equity tour of American Idiot.

[6:54] Joe Carroll: Yes.

[6:55] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[6:56] Joe Carroll: Sporting your eyeliner.

[6:57] Dan Tracy: I'm sporting my eyeliner.

[6:58] Joe Carroll: I was the only one wearing eyeliner and like actual like a Dead Kennedys shirt at the, uh, audition for first.

[7:03] Dan Tracy: Oh, sure.

[7:04] Joe Carroll: They, you know, they, um, they loved me, they didn't cast me, but that's okay.

[7:08] Dan Tracy: Um, but then, uh, I went to go see it and, and Stephanie helped with tickets because it had been sold out.

[7:14] Joe Carroll: And, uh, I just was like, this is a perfect musical.

[7:19] Dan Tracy: I cried like a maniac.

[7:21] Joe Carroll: I was overwhelmed as a kid who was an actor musician seeing it done to perfection, seeing actor musicians being actor musicians to perfection was just, it was, uh, it blew me away.

[7:33] Dan Tracy: And I remember looking in the program and seeing that Ben Hope was the understudy and he had to play drums and guitar and bass and piano, and I had played all those instruments, and I remember saying to myself, if that guy leaves for some reason, I'm gonna take his job, and that will be my Broadway debut.

[7:50] Joe Carroll: And then cut to August, they're looking for a standby for Steve and a standby for Kristen because they had, you know, they'd won the Tony Award, it was a big hit.

[7:59] Dan Tracy: They needed, um, full-time standbys now.

[8:02] Joe Carroll: You know, Kristen Milioti was shooting The Wolf of Wall Street at the time, you know, like just basically on a rocket to being a full-fledged movie star.

[8:10] Dan Tracy: So Laura Dreyfus got cast as the standby for Kristen Milioti, and going through the process, I was up for the guy standby.

[8:19] Joe Carroll: They, we got down to the end and they were like, you know, you're too young for that role, but we've decided to promote Ben Hope to be the guy standby, and now we need a swing.

[8:30] Dan Tracy: We need a, or you know, an understudy, you know, somebody to cover four roles and to cover like ten instruments.

[8:35] Joe Carroll: And so I, and I was like, it was like the moment I had been waiting for in my life, and they said, well, you know, do you actually play the mandolin and the bass and the ukulele and all this stuff?

[8:46] Dan Tracy: And I said yes, and I went in and played.

[8:48] Joe Carroll: But you were lying.

[8:49] Dan Tracy: I was lying about the banjo.

[8:50] Joe Carroll: I, they asked if I played the banjo, and I lied.

[8:52] Dan Tracy: I said yes, and I didn't have to play the banjo in my final callback, thank God.

[8:57] Joe Carroll: But I, I lied.

[8:58] Dan Tracy: I was like, yeah, I'll figure it out.

[8:59] Joe Carroll: Um, then, uh, I started, um, I went to my final callback, was playing through the score, um, the whole score on drums, guitar, bass, ukulele, mandolin, and piano, and I booked the show a couple days later.

[9:15] Joe Carroll: Wait, so they're like, okay, from the top of "Falling Slowly" on the drums.

[9:20] Dan Tracy: That's not a good example, but like from the top of "When Your Mind's Made Up" from the drums, and then you had to play it on bass.

[9:25] Joe Carroll: And then really, like just, yeah, literally, yeah, yeah.

[9:28] Dan Tracy: So I had to, it was like there was only drums on a couple of songs.

[9:32] Joe Carroll: Like you just said, like, uh, "When Your Mind's Made Up" is the drum song.

[9:35] Dan Tracy: So it was like start playing, play "When Your Mind's Made Up" on drums, then play it on bass, play it on guitar.

[9:41] Joe Carroll: Wow.

[9:42] Dan Tracy: And then we went around and there was like, okay, now we're gonna play the most difficult piano part, which was during, um, it's during "Sleeping," it's this little piano riff during "Sleeping."

[9:50] Joe Carroll: And so we played "Sleeping" on piano.

[9:52] Dan Tracy: And then there was only a group of you, no, it's just me by myself.

[9:57] Joe Carroll: And then there's one other guy who was up for it, and then, you know, play the hardest ukulele track, which was on "Gold," and so play that, play that on mandolin.

[10:07] Dan Tracy: And so once you, once you play "Falling Slowly" and, you know, finger-picking "Falling Slowly" by yourself, and, uh, you know, some of the other difficult guitar stuff, uh, uh, uh, "When Your Mind's Made Up" on guitar, they kind of were like, oh, okay, you, if you can do those two things, then you can, you can play "Gold," you know.

[10:28] Joe Carroll: I'm sure you know how to play "Gold."

[10:30] Dan Tracy: That's pretty, you know, that's pretty, uh, easy, and you know, it's just a different tuning and all this stuff.

[10:33] Joe Carroll: Anyway, so that was the whole story, and then I did the show for 11 months, and we'll talk more about all of this stuff.

[10:40] Dan Tracy: But it was the most amazing and sort of heart-wrenching experience at the same time.

[10:46] Joe Carroll: It was just a remarkable experience and a lot of stories, and it's all about what happens when your dreams come true, man.

[10:53] Dan Tracy: Exactly.

[10:54] Joe Carroll: Let's not talk about the TV show that we're writing.

[10:56] Dan Tracy: But, um, so we're so excited to talk about this today because you can watch this movie, and the movie is still, it's just remarkable what, like, what somebody can do.

[11:07] Joe Carroll: This movie was made for a hundred thousand dollars.

[11:09] Dan Tracy: We can just, we'll talk about 116,000 pounds.

[11:12] Joe Carroll: It was, and it was 75% financed by the Irish Film Board, which is crazy to think.

[11:19] Dan Tracy: Because that doesn't happen today.

[11:20] Joe Carroll: When you look at it now, you're like, oh, you could have made this, like, it looks like it was shot on a, like a home video camera, which it was, but the DP was like the director of photography of the Gladiator movie.

[11:31] Dan Tracy: Like the guy knows what he's doing, he just shot it handheld, so it felt like a home movie, which is cool.

[11:36] Joe Carroll: Yes.

[11:37] Dan Tracy: Um, all natural lighting.

[11:38] Joe Carroll: They used all of, like, friends and acquaintances' apartments.

[11:41] Dan Tracy: The most expensive part of the movie was the crane shot at the end.

[11:45] Joe Carroll: I was gonna ask you that because the crane shot, I was watching it and I was like, this is a Dan question because that's clearly a crane shot.

[11:52] Dan Tracy: And I'm like, this, this is the only time there's been anything flashy in the whole movie.

[11:58] Joe Carroll: Yep.

[11:58] Dan Tracy: You know, no artificial light, no, like, nothing.

[12:00] Joe Carroll: Yeah, just, that's the first time.

[12:03] Dan Tracy: Um, there's a lot of, like, interesting movie stuff.

[12:06] Joe Carroll: I have some of that in here, but, um, I think this, yeah.

[12:10] Dan Tracy: Well, no, I was just gonna say if you wanted to focus on the movie first or talk about the musical first, or if we just kind of want to...

[12:16] Joe Carroll: And then when we talk about the development of the musical, we can talk about the movie.

[12:19] Dan Tracy: All right, great.

[12:19] Joe Carroll: So we'll talk about the musical, um, which is my favorite musical of all time.

[12:24] Dan Tracy: So yes.

[12:25] Joe Carroll: So the title actually, uh, refers to how John Carney, uh, who's the director of the movie, was the writer of the movie, yeah.

[12:33] Dan Tracy: And the writer of the movie, he was a bassist, and he thought of all of these talented artists and musicians that he worked with, who always used to say something like, once this happens, once I get this, then I can blah blah blah.

[12:48] Joe Carroll: And they were like basically putting off anything that could happen in their life because they were waiting for something else to happen before they would allow themselves to live their dreams, and that's where the title comes from, which I thought was interesting.

[12:58] Dan Tracy: Um, jumping into the show.

[13:00] Joe Carroll: I really like that.

[13:01] Dan Tracy: The musical began performances at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on the 28th of February, 2012, and opened on the 18th of March.

[13:12] Joe Carroll: It played 1,167 performances before it closed.

[13:18] Dan Tracy: The show was nominated for 11 Tony Awards.

[13:21] Joe Carroll: It won eight, including Best Musical, and it also won the Drama League Award that season.

[13:26] Dan Tracy: They won the Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Book, Best Actor.

[13:32] Joe Carroll: Steve Kazee took down Jeremy Jordan.

[13:35] Dan Tracy: Kristen Milioti lost to Audra McDonald.

[13:38] Joe Carroll: And she talks about that.

[13:39] Dan Tracy: I remember her saying, uh, you know, like, hey, do you think, like, did you think you were gonna win?

[13:45] Joe Carroll: You know, like there's that thing with Tony Awards, like, oh, did you think you were gonna win?

[13:47] Dan Tracy: And she was like, she was like, no, like Audra was, it was gonna be Audra.

[13:51] Joe Carroll: And she, Krista said that she got drunk before the, like, or during the Tony.

[13:59] Dan Tracy: So she's sitting in her seat, like buzzed, and she's like, if I would have had to get up and give a best, like a speech in that moment, I was so convinced that I wasn't gonna win that I like had champagne, like at the bar, which is just like the greatest thing.

[14:11] Joe Carroll: That's amazing ever.

[14:13] Joe Carroll: Um and Steve also beat out like it was Norm Lewis and Jeremy Jordan who he beat out for that too.

[14:17] Dan Tracy: So it's like he had to take on a legend too.

[14:19] Joe Carroll: Totally.

[14:20] Dan Tracy: Um John Tiffany won for best direction of a musical.

[14:23] Joe Carroll: Um Martin Lowe won for orchestrations.

[14:26] Dan Tracy: These orchestrations are fire, just bonkers.

[14:30] Joe Carroll: Yeah, yeah.

[14:30] Dan Tracy: He was also the music director of the show as well.

[14:32] Joe Carroll: Oh, okay, cool.

[14:33] Dan Tracy: Yeah, which doesn't always happen.

[14:34] Joe Carroll: That's not always like a thing, but he sometimes they're separate.

[14:36] Dan Tracy: Right.

[14:37] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[14:37] Dan Tracy: Um, they won Bob Crowley won for best scenic design.

[14:41] Joe Carroll: Uh Natasha Katz won best lighting design, and Clive Goodwin won for best sound design.

[14:46] Dan Tracy: Bob Crowley and Natasha Katz end up working with John Tiffany on Glass Menagerie, and we'll talk more about some of their careers as we get going.

[14:52] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[14:53] Dan Tracy: Um obviously the show was a critical success.

[14:58] Joe Carroll: If we're still here talking about it as epic as it was, I thought what was interesting is that like when Ben Brantley saw it for the first time off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop, he kind of was like, it's a little plastic, it's a little saccharine, you know.

[15:14] Dan Tracy: But the music kind of brought out like the complexity of who these people were.

[15:19] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[15:19] Dan Tracy: The quote rough-edged, sweet and sad ambivalence that we seldom see in American musicals.

[15:26] Joe Carroll: He then, when he comes back to see the show on opening night on Broadway, he's like, they fixed it.

[15:32] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[15:33] Joe Carroll: Right, right, right, right, right, right.

[15:34] Dan Tracy: Right.

[15:35] Joe Carroll: He says, Um, yeah, last time I saw it, it was a little too sweet, too conventionally sentimental.

[15:40] Dan Tracy: But on Broadway, uh it's essentially the same production.

[15:44] Joe Carroll: It feels vital and surprising as the early spring that has crept up on Manhattan that year.

[15:51] Dan Tracy: He thought it was wonderful and awesome.

[15:52] Joe Carroll: And well, we actually just for two seconds, um, just this this morning, because we're recording us on Thursday, uh, Ben Brantley announced that he is stepping down as the chief reviewer of the New York Times.

[16:04] Dan Tracy: Hot news.

[16:07] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[16:07] Dan Tracy: So you'll you'll we're gonna talk about that next week on Tuesday's news pod because we'll have a lot of thoughts about that.

[16:16] Joe Carroll: But um, yeah, I I love that because it's also what people say about the movie.

[16:20] Dan Tracy: I mean, like the movie was without these songs being this perfect, yeah, the the story could be saccharine.

[16:28] Joe Carroll: It could be it could be like just too sweet, you know.

[16:31] Dan Tracy: Um because it's so it's uh and I want to talk about this later, but the movie, it's like shot like a documentary, it's shot like slice of life.

[16:39] Joe Carroll: They want you to feel like you're there and like it's not put on, it's not fake, it's real.

[16:45] Dan Tracy: These are non-actors, so even more than like just how it's written, you have this kind of like improvised feeling, right?

[16:53] Joe Carroll: But without the music, you're like, what happens?

[16:56] Dan Tracy: Yeah, it's like kind of a double edged sword.

[16:58] Joe Carroll: And I think what what's so genius about the musical is that they m musicalized it and they took the form that they had, they made it into a Broadway musical, they added humor, they added a better, like they constructed the arc in a better way, deeper, deeper characters, yeah, deeper character, you know, uh supporting characters all around.

[17:17] Dan Tracy: Uh, you know, the best of for me, it's the best of you know, being able to see it.

[17:22] Joe Carroll: And uh, you know, if anybody hasn't seen it, it would for me it was the best of like, you know, 10 actors in chairs.

[17:28] Dan Tracy: Like there was not there was not a lot of costumes, there was no, there was no pyrotechnics, it was just chairs, excellent lighting, re excellent sound design, really good beautiful staging and choreography.

[17:39] Joe Carroll: You know, like it was just simple.

[17:40] Dan Tracy: It was a very simple show.

[17:42] Joe Carroll: Um, and we'll talk about this in a second when we get to like what else was running at that time, but it was just like, you know, it's that versus Newsies, basically.

[17:49] Dan Tracy: Right.

[17:51] Joe Carroll: So it's it's the, you know, historically at that time, it's a lot of the same players you still see today.

[18:04] Dan Tracy: Until very recently.

[18:05] Joe Carroll: Then what opened this that season, the uh Leslie Odam Jr. in Leap of Faith.

[18:09] Dan Tracy: Right.

[18:10] Joe Carroll: Uh Nice Work If You Can Get It.

[18:13] Dan Tracy: And uh Newsies, as Joe said.

[18:16] Joe Carroll: And obviously, Newsies was the whole the whole thing about Newsies was sort of a surprise, and they kind of never thought it would run as long as it did, but then it became the standout hit that everyone loved, and they were going head to head, and and obviously Once wins, and I think I think rightfully so.

[18:33] Dan Tracy: Like I'm a huge Newsies guy.

[18:35] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[18:35] Dan Tracy: But um, well, there was a lot of go ahead.

[18:38] Joe Carroll: Yeah, you were gonna say, yeah, I'm a big Newsies guy, but I think like when we talk about elevating the form, yeah, Newsies was Newsies felt a bit too much like a dance concert because we were kind of stopping the story to watch these tricks.

[18:52] Dan Tracy: Right.

[18:52] Joe Carroll: And Once wasn't pulling any tricks.

[18:54] Dan Tracy: Right.

[18:54] Joe Carroll: And and at this time, I think the Tony voters were like very into that kind of idea.

[18:58] Dan Tracy: You know, like Gentleman's Guide wins.

[19:00] Joe Carroll: Right.

[19:01] Dan Tracy: Right.

[19:01] Joe Carroll: You know, the next year it's like people are very committed to like what kind of show this is.

[19:06] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[19:07] Joe Carroll: And so Newsies just loses out to that.

[19:09] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[19:09] Joe Carroll: And I was thinking too that, you know, Newsies was Disney theatrical, you know, which is kind of sometimes the big bad wolf of Broadway.

[19:19] Dan Tracy: Some, you know, where they have all the money in the world and they can kind of do whatever they want to do, or so s or so people think, you know, having worked for them, you know, I'm like, that that's true, kind of, but not true, you know what I mean?

[19:31] Joe Carroll: Like, yeah, this was this was a very this was produced by major players.

[19:35] Dan Tracy: Like there was no world where Once was just like, oh, this little show that could, and like they don't think it's gonna be successful.

[19:40] Joe Carroll: Like, this is like, you know, an unbelievably vetted and seasoned group that was putting this together.

[19:47] Dan Tracy: So like they knew that they were coming for they were coming for the, you know, going for gold or whatever.

[19:52] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[19:53] Dan Tracy: But it was cool that it was like, you know, no I I totally agree with you.

[19:57] Joe Carroll: I think that Once elevated the art form and and you know, Newsies was great for a lot of reasons, but I think that that that that Tony race just like was right for me.

[20:07] Dan Tracy: Like that year, it was just like, yes, the show that should win won.

[20:11] Joe Carroll: And also Once probably needed, I mean, we said this all the time that like it ran for three years, and it probably wouldn't have if it if it had not won the Tony Award.

[20:21] Dan Tracy: Right.

[20:21] Joe Carroll: And News still.

[20:23] Dan Tracy: Exactly.

[20:24] Joe Carroll: Because Newsies then was fine, they ran for a long time, a bunch of national tours, whatever, you know, and and I think that Once may have gotten missed because it was so simple and quiet.

[20:35] Dan Tracy: When we talk about the development of the show, obviously we know that Once is uh Once the musical is based on the 2007 uh movie written and directed by John Carney.

[20:45] Joe Carroll: It stars Glen Hansard's and do you know how to say her name?

[20:48] Dan Tracy: Marketa Iglova.

[20:50] Joe Carroll: Awesome, thank you.

[20:51] Dan Tracy: Yeah, who are two struggling musicians in Dublin.

[20:54] Joe Carroll: The two were actually in a band together called Swell Season, and they composed and performed the original songs, which I think is like why it's so good.

[21:06] Dan Tracy: Yeah, it's all happens there.

[21:07] Joe Carroll: It's there's no dub, there's no lip dub.

[21:09] Dan Tracy: There's no, you know, I the only one that I think they may have done in the studio, like I'm sure that there's a lot of movie tricks that they do, but during when they do my um when your mind's made up in the studio, that looks like they may have done that actually in a studio, you know what I mean?

[21:26] Dan Tracy: But like they're singing falling slowly at the piano in that in that famous shop in Dublin.

[21:31] Joe Carroll: In that famous music shop in Dublin.

[21:33] Dan Tracy: They're they're playing and singing it.

[21:34] Joe Carroll: It looks to me like they actually just do have two cameras going, like two handheld cameras on either side of the piano going at the same time.

[21:42] Dan Tracy: They did it's very just it, and it's so raw and and exactly how it would go if like you were trying to teach somebody a song, like, hey, I wrote this song, like would you just kind of jam with me about it?

[21:54] Joe Carroll: And oh my god, now I'm in love with you.

[21:56] Dan Tracy: Like, you know, like it's just like and he's like so excited.

[21:59] Joe Carroll: Oh man, yeah.

[22:00] Dan Tracy: The acting is so simple.

[22:01] Joe Carroll: Anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[22:02] Dan Tracy: Sorry, you know, just hearing him like get up and play in the beginning, like the fact that these two people like aren't acting, that this is kind of part of them, and you can see them having this kind of like budding romance happening, even though she was really young, which I don't really want to talk about, but yeah, um, they definitely uh have a lot of chemistry, and it's just it's really well done as far as indie films are concerned.

[22:27] Joe Carroll: I think that the the just for my for my money, it's one of the best meet cues of all time.

[22:33] Dan Tracy: Definitely, it's just it's so natural, it's not forced.

[22:38] Joe Carroll: It's this guy busking and playing his songs, and a woman walks by and gives him a dime and gives him a dime, and he says, a dime.

[22:48] Dan Tracy: Yeah, yeah.

[22:48] Joe Carroll: It's like, you know, and she says, What?

[22:50] Dan Tracy: Exactly.

[22:51] Joe Carroll: And and she's selling magazines and he's playing the guitar, and I'm I'm kind of obsessed with that because right now there's this guy outside of my window who plays his trombone on the corner of 116th Street and Frederick Douglass every single day.

[23:05] Dan Tracy: And I'm like, Well, there's your meet cute.

[23:07] Joe Carroll: Like if I was gonna just fall in love with this slightly crazy man who plays when the stones go marching in for eight hours a day, but that's a whole nother story that I knew.

[23:15] Dan Tracy: Um anyway, so back to back to Once definitely you know sick meet you.

[23:19] Joe Carroll: Sick meat cube.

[23:20] Dan Tracy: Once spent years in development with the Irish film board, and uh as we said, the budget was 112,000 euros, which it is like a hundred fifty it was like 150,000 at that time, right?

[23:33] Joe Carroll: Something like that.

[23:33] Dan Tracy: Right, and like this was now 15 years ago, but still not a lot of money.

[23:38] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[23:39] Dan Tracy: Um John, it's it's it said on uh where I was reading about this that John Carney wrote the outline for the film in five minutes.

[23:48] Joe Carroll: I'd heard that, yeah.

[23:50] Dan Tracy: While he was missing his girlfriend who was acting in London, so they say it's sort of loosely based on this idea that like he has someone else somewhere else, and it's like these two kindred spirits who are sort of it's wrong place, wrong time, right person kind of story.

[24:08] Joe Carroll: God, yeah.

[24:09] Dan Tracy: Um, yeah, totally so Carney himself was the former bassist for uh Glen Hansard's's band, The Frames, and had asked his friend to write some stories about what it was like to be a busker, someone who like plays music on the street for money, and asked him to compose some songs for the film, but he'd intended to give the lead to Killian Murphy, who This was crazy.

[24:31] Joe Carroll: I didn't I didn't realize this at all.

[24:33] Dan Tracy: I think it's a good thing.

[24:33] Joe Carroll: From Peaky Blinders and Killian was like a huge um an up and coming actor at the time.

[24:40] Dan Tracy: He was doing plays in the West End.

[24:41] Joe Carroll: He'd worked with uh some of the producers before, and he'd done a movie with uh John Carney.

[24:49] Dan Tracy: Yeah, they'd done a movie together before this happened.

[24:52] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[24:52] Dan Tracy: So uh Killian at that time was kind of like he was doing the Jared Leto thing, he was performing and also in a rock band.

[24:58] Joe Carroll: And so Murphy ends up actually turning the role down because he was uncomfortable acting with the um the non-actor 17-year-old woman who they were working with, and he felt like he couldn't sing it.

[25:13] Dan Tracy: So he pulls out, and then we get Glenn doing it, which I think is like probably the best gift that could have happened because you know, this immediately becomes um the story of some famous actor as opposed to the story of this actual musician.

[25:29] Joe Carroll: You know what I mean?

[25:30] Dan Tracy: Just the feeling of this is so authentic because of who they cast.

[25:33] Joe Carroll: Yeah, I mean it's his songs, you know.

[25:35] Dan Tracy: It's like all of these, it's just it's his songs, and it's he was a busker.

[25:39] Joe Carroll: Like it it it's so funny that it's kind of loosely based on John Carney's life because it's actually Glenn's life, you know, and then he and Marquetta go on to fall in love and spend many years together, and they're not together anymore.

[25:50] Dan Tracy: Marquetta's married to uh and has a family of her own, like kind of you know, they broke up and but like it is Glenn's story, it's their story, right?

[25:58] Joe Carroll: You know, and they did fall in love over the course of this movie.

[26:00] Dan Tracy: I mean a lot of it is improvised, yes, it's just the bus scene and like some of that stuff that lives forever was just like improvised.

[26:07] Joe Carroll: Um also interesting, they shot a lot of the scene.

[26:10] Dan Tracy: You see this style a lot more frequently now, but they used um, you know, kind of just the hidden camera trick where they they'd set the camera up far away with a long lens that can like zoom in really far on the streets of Dublin or wherever, you know, and then they just have non-actors kind of around, and you just play the scene with some uh wireless microphones in the middle of town.

[26:31] Joe Carroll: So in the beginning, when Glenn's uh musician bag with all of his money in gets stolen, which I completely forgot about.

[26:39] Dan Tracy: It's so funny.

[26:40] Joe Carroll: So they play that scene out in public, and somebody comes to defend him and knees the guy in the groin during filming, which isn't in the movie, but like the actor who steals the bag gets like assaulted by some pedestrian who was trying to save it was hilarious.

[26:58] Dan Tracy: Um that's amazing.

[27:00] Joe Carroll: The movie made um.

[27:02] Dan Tracy: Well, just on that too, back in the movie, like when when she is when she's singing um uh if you want me, uh when she when when Glenn says, like, hey, if you want to try like you know, to write some lyrics to this song, and they do that.

[27:13] Joe Carroll: She's walking out listening to her headphones and there are these kids in the background, and the kids are absolutely like, what is going on?

[27:20] Dan Tracy: Am I gonna be in a movie?

[27:21] Joe Carroll: Do I want to and they like follow on their scooters, and then you can kind of see in the background that like a PA or somebody is like, hey, like go away.

[27:29] Dan Tracy: Like don't don't follow.

[27:30] Joe Carroll: This is a great take, and we only have tonight to get it.

[27:33] Dan Tracy: Exactly.

[27:33] Joe Carroll: We shot the whole thing in 17 days, which is really fast.

[27:37] Dan Tracy: So crazy.

[27:38] Joe Carroll: So crazy.

[27:39] Dan Tracy: Yeah, and as of this stat is obviously a little a little old, but as of March 2009, uh, which was about two years after the movie came out, they'd grossed 20 million dollars worldwide.

[27:51] Joe Carroll: So that is a large profit.

[27:54] Dan Tracy: They got my uh they got my 3990.

[27:56] Joe Carroll: They sure did mine too.

[27:57] Dan Tracy: You know, this morning.

[27:58] Joe Carroll: So yeah.

[27:59] Dan Tracy: Um, historical context for the world at the moment.

[28:02] Joe Carroll: I'm gonna focus this kind of on what was going on in the Broadway community uh on October 22nd, several months after the show opened.

[28:11] Dan Tracy: Obviously, Hurricane Sandy comes in and is this record hurricane spanning 900 miles that results in yeah, more than 200 people dying and 70 billion dollars in damage.

[28:26] Dan Tracy: Yeah, and Broadway actually shut down. Um as Sunday night, they shut down the subway system, so they had to cancel some shows because they were worried about people getting back. And then on Monday, the Broadway league said they were gonna have to take some days off. And then by Wednesday night, the subways were running again, and by Thursday, shows were playing.

[28:44] Dan Tracy: And Joe, you were in the show at that time.

[28:46] Joe Carroll: I was, and actually, I was trying to look it up because I thought that one of my earliest Instagram pictures, which is not totally true. I need to like actually find this, but it used to be I had a picture of the first show that we had back after Hurricane Sandy, and we were sold it was like, you know, this was when Once was like we killing, still selling at 102%, you know, standing room only every single show. And the very next show back, you know, we were sold at 20%, 15% or something. There was no people just could not get into the city for the for quite a while. Um, I also remember like I remember that so clearly just being like shacked up in my apartment in Harlem with, you know, RJ Brown and a couple of friends, like just like living through a hurricane.

It was crazy. But then, you know, a couple days off and then Broadway bounces back the way that it will, it'll bounce back from a hurricane, it'll bounce back from a pandemic because people were just they were really excited. That those for those early shows after the hurricane were really emotional because everybody was I mean, the damage was incredible and people had lost homes and the South Street Seaport was still underwater at the time, like the one train wasn't working, all sorts of stuff. It was just crazy.

[29:59] Dan Tracy: Yeah. And thankfully it was really close to the holidays, so people were, you know, they had already purchased tickets and they were.

[30:07] Joe Carroll: Yeah, they're coming for Thanksgiving. And yeah, that's not already made. I think if this had happened sort of in March, then you know, in a time when it was more slow, it could have been a lot harder for some shows to actually make it through this.

[30:18] Dan Tracy: You're right, you're right. Yeah. Broadway sales dropped to less than 14 million that week, and which is like a loss of about six million dollars week over week, which a lot of shows like can't really recover from that, but obviously Once was able to push through because it won the Tony.

[30:33] Joe Carroll: I bet. Um general audience response. I went into Letterboxd to look for some reviews, and none of them were as good as last week.

[30:41] Dan Tracy: Oh, okay.

[30:42] Joe Carroll: There was some gems here from IMDB that you know Steven Spielberg loved the movie. He said that it gave him enough inspiration to last him the rest of the year, and Bob Dylan was a huge fan of the movie, ended up inviting Glen and Marketa to open for him on his tour that same year. So I thought that was interesting, obviously. That's so the show's done very well, and um here we are talking about it still.

[31:10] Dan Tracy: Yeah, I mean, it's I love it. It's my moving on to the creative team. Um show is directed by John Tiffany, who was recruited after the producer who we'll talk about, um purchased the rights to the movie to make into a musical very early on, like 2008.

[31:31] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[31:32] Dan Tracy: So it took a long time to put it together, but they she then saw a production of a show called Black Watch that John Tiffany and Stephen Hoggett were working on at St. Anne's Warehouse and said this was.

[31:45] Joe Carroll: Which they had done at the National, they had done that at the National in London, and then it came over. Um which is very cool. So then I mean, I wonder, and I forget this. This may have been the first musical that John had directed, or at least at this level.

[32:00] Joe Carroll: Once was definitely the first Broadway musical he directed.

[32:03] Dan Tracy: Yeah. Um, I don't know about um other musicals that he was doing in in the UK, but um he then went on to direct Glass Menagerie, uh, which Stephen Hoggett worked on, and Harry Potter as well, which they worked on together.

[32:18] Joe Carroll: Yep.

[32:18] Dan Tracy: So obviously he's left his stamp.

[32:20] Joe Carroll: That production of Glass Menagerie was amazing.

[32:22] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[32:22] Joe Carroll: Um when Celia Keenan Bulger came out of the couch.

[32:27] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[32:28] Joe Carroll: Like, like, what?

[32:30] Dan Tracy: Yeah, anyway, that yeah, yeah. The coolest. Um Stephen Hoggett is uh Stephen Hoggett is a he's ex-British military and he comes from a very athletic background. His shows are known for kind of hyper stylized pedestrian movement. I think like the Once was a very great uh representation of that. He made his Broadway debut choreographing American Idiot.

[32:56] Joe Carroll: So we I got to know him through that, and through his work through that, he also worked on Peter and the Starcatcher, which was the best play this same season. So he kind of like made a big splash um Once and and Starcatcher in the same season. Then he went on to work on Curious Incident, and that staging is unbelievable. So he obviously did uh Rocky and The Last Ship and several other things, eventually goes on to do Harry Potter.

[33:21] Dan Tracy: How would you describe Stephen Hoggett's choreography?

[33:25] Joe Carroll: Uh, I think you nailed it. I think it's pre you it's pedestrian, you know, hyper stylized pedestrian motion. I mean, like, you know, the Once is once is a is a it's just about kind of a like a weekend in the life, you know, almost a week in the life of of people and you know, it's it's bankers, it's shop owners, it's mothers and you know, brothers and sons. You know, it's it's it's not anything that is really stylized. So, like you'd my my favorite movement in the show obviously was was when during during Gold, which you know the Tony Award performance is is is iconic, Steven teaching, you know, how do you dance with a cello? How do you dance? You know, yes, people dance with a guitar, but how does it feel to move with a guitar when like you're playing and then the spirit moves you, you know?

So like that sort of thing, which everybody saw in the Tony Awards, which is which is remarkable. But then the I like this stuff in the in the bank, they're like when there's a good the great scene in the movie where they go to the bank and they ask for a loan, and in the Broadway musical, uh guy sings Say It to Me Now as like an audition for the banker. And in the background of Say It to Me Now is is are these three like you know, what you would almost call tell like bank tellers, you know, uh doing movement. Like what would they be doing in the background while this person is is playing a song in the next room? And it's just it's it's haunting and unbelievable. Um so I I think you hit you hit it on the head as far as how we describe his movement.

[34:56] Dan Tracy: How about Martin Lowe? You want to talk about Martin Lowe?

[34:58] Joe Carroll: Yeah, Martin was the music director and won the uh the Tony for uh best orchestrations, as we mentioned. Uh he also worked on Harry Potter, and he's the MD on Sing Street right now, which is you know, was about to open on Broadway before the pandemic hit. Um Sing Street is also uh John Carney. John Carney film. Um and that one actually feels remarkable. I've just again my mom says I gotta stop saying remarkable. I guess I say it too much on the podcast. So like I got I we get we get notes from our moms. That's like what we we do. Um and so uh I'm not allowed to say remarkable anymore. Um, but I think it's super cool. Um Sing Street feels like a John Carney bio movie because it takes place with like you know, people like this band in the the UK and the 80s loving Duran Duran and like you know, flock of seagulls and shit.

And like so I I felt like and he actually wrote a couple of songs for that movie. So I'm really excited to see Sing Street. I think everybody we could even talk about that movie um on area as well, because we're kind of like turning into a movie, a movie musical podcast because there's no shows to see. Um but Martin Martin was amazing. Sorry, back to Martin Lowe. Um he was the sort of mastermind behind the pre-show, which kind of was a sort of famous um element of Once on Broadway and on tour and you know the stage version where uh the actors would come out um at about 15 minutes to curtains, so at like 645 or 7 o'clock show and play for like almost a half an hour Irish and Czech folk tunes.

And he would mash them up and put you know whiskey in a jar in the middle of you know, Rocky Road with a little, you know, Redhead Mary and like all of these. He'd come up with these crazy ideas. Um, and by the time the show closed, there was almost a hundred show a hundred songs in that pre-show lineup. And what we would do is is before you walked on stage, there'd be a list and it would say, Okay, we're gonna do Rocky Road, and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna do that, we're gonna do these three tonight. Just go out there and play them. And um That's awesome. Everybody pick up an instrument, whatever you want to play. If you want to play guitar, play guitar, if you want to play Cajon, play Cajon.

And then it started to get set, and so then it was like, okay, after you know, two or three days, if somebody's playing Cajon and Ukulele at this moment, that's now what you need to do. Um, and so that was kind of a cool, it was a very cool thing. Um, and we learned a ton of electric coming into that space.

[37:22] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[37:23] Joe Carroll: You know, with the bar open on stage, and you've got the cast there, and you're like, oh, this is a different kind of thing.

[37:29] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[37:30] Joe Carroll: And it made it so compelling when he c when Guy comes out, yeah, you know, and breaks that.

[37:36] Dan Tracy: Yeah. Well, and it's it's from it's it's it's such a great transition because they're just playing music together. They're playing, they're jamming, and then you can't really hear it, but usually somebody on stage will turn to Guy and say, Why don't you play one of yours? You know, they'll play and and then he launches into Leave, and he plays the first half of Leave with the cast, and then the mus and then the lights shift, and all of a sudden he's by himself, you know, with a with a guitar case in front of him, busking. And it chills again. It's like it's just so good.

[38:06] Joe Carroll: It's so so good. So John Carney was the film director, writer. He uh wrote and co-directed a film called On the Edge with that starred Killian Murphy, was the movie I was I was talking to, talking about that ended up being released by Universal Studios. So that was kind of his big break. He'd done some television stuff before that. Then he goes on to direct Once, which you know, they at the time, I don't think they had any clue what Once was going to become, but it ends up getting its world premiere at Sundance, and it wins the World Cinema Audience Award in the dramatic category and goes on to be this phenomenon. He makes a movie in 2013 with Kira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo called Begin Again.

And then in 2016, he wrote and directed Sing Street, which is obviously now coming to Broadway. Right now, Carney's executive producing, writing, and working uh several episodes of the modern love series that Amazon is making based on the Modern Love podcast, which is based on the Modern Love um column in the New York Times.

[39:09] Dan Tracy: Um really good.

[39:10] Joe Carroll: I watched the first couple of those.

[39:11] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[39:12] Joe Carroll: See, they're very they're really really good. Check those out.

[39:14] Dan Tracy: Yeah. If yeah, if you guys haven't watched that. Um seems right up his alley. Clearly, he's into like romance.

[39:19] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[39:20] Dan Tracy: Which I dig, as you know.

[39:21] Joe Carroll: Yes, you texted me when you're dead watching it, and you're like, nothing gets me like unrequited love.

[39:26] Dan Tracy: That's true.

[39:26] Joe Carroll: Which is like that's what we should title it.

[39:28] Dan Tracy: Yes.

[39:29] Joe Carroll: Um I kind of spoke a little bit about uh the producer, her name was uh Barbara Broccoli. Sho she produced uh she purchased the rights to the film in 2007. Uh she was the heir to the Bond franchise, which you wrote here. I didn't realize that.

[39:43] Dan Tracy: She out of that work.

[39:45] Joe Carroll: She is she the the um w uh what's his face, broccoli, uh who who is the producer of all of the Bond movies with the originals, the original Bond movies. Uh she is his daughter, and she and the she and the brother are the producers of all of the Daniel Craig and Pierce Bros. Bond movies. So she's like like huge like A-list movie producer and uh A-list uh uh, you know, um Broadway producer as well.

[40:13] Dan Tracy: Yeah, and she cause yeah, her career is interesting. She produces like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was not a success. And then, you know, later produces Once and now and then Bands Visit and now Sing Street, and obviously, I'm sure she's probably gonna be somebody who makes a lot of really great things on Broadway from now on. But um she's she's totally, totally legit.

[40:37] Dan Tracy: Yeah. Uh lighting, I spoke briefly about Natasha Katz. Uh she's an absolute legend. She's been nominated for 14 Tonies. She's won six Aida, Coast of Utopia Once, Glass Menagerie, American in Paris, Long Day's Journey and Tonight. She's basically always working on a um a show every season. She was the lighting designer for the Sound of Music tour that I did, and watching her paint with light was like magic. I used to just sit in the house and watch them, and Jack would be like, I think we need to feel this. And then she would do something, and it was like she was painting with light. It was amazing. And um Bob Crowley did the sets, and he's been nominated for 21 Tonies and he's won nine. Just absolute legends. Uh what do you have here about the instruments and stuff? I know that this was like a really intense kind of lots of guitars, lots of instruments to take care of. How did that all work?

[41:27] Joe Carroll: Well, it just I thought it was interesting that the there was a full-time Luthier backstage. Um, you know, a guy who knew how to build a say, what's that? Yeah, like a full-time guitar technician, a guy who could basically build a violin from scratch if needed. Well, you know, if need be. So it was cool, little sort of you know, trivia thing or whatever. The iconic guitar that that guy uses um is that black Martin with the scratches on it. Um there were uh there were like six of them. There were three there were three different tunings. So Gold is tuned differently. Say It to Me Now is tuned differently, and then there's standard tuning, which is used for w uh falling slowly and sleeping and a whole bunch of other songs.

Um, but they uh there was a couple of times where that guy, you know, after doing a thousand performances, it only happened twice, but he handed the wrong guitar to the guy at the wrong time. So he would so a couple of times it had only happened twice that I remember he started playing the the gold guitar when he was supposed to be doing Say It to Me Now, and and and it happened with Ben when Ben Hope is on stage a couple times, and you could hear that like he's play the opening chord, and it's right, it's in E major until it's super duper wrong, which is like it was anyways really really silly.

[42:46] Joe Carroll: Literally give me a heart attack, but at least you guys are musicians, so I'm sure you could recover.

[42:50] Dan Tracy: Totally.

[42:50] Joe Carroll: It ended up being all right. He ran off stage and picked up the different one. Got it. Well, there were also these contingency plans. So if somebody broke a string in the middle of a song, like then somebody else would start playing lead on it. Um, and there were all of these, everybody had backup, there were just backup instruments everywhere. It was like it was uh, you know, hog heaven, just like you know, yeah, little little Joe and the running around with all the instruments, being like, What can I play this one? Can I play this one? Yeah. Um, so anyway, um, so I thought that was that was pretty cool. Um, this kind of music-wise. Um casting. Let's do it.

[43:21] Dan Tracy: Um Steve Kazee. Um is that how you say it?

[43:24] Joe Carroll: No, because he Steve's Tony winner, Steve Kazee. Um, which uh yeah, I mean, he was he was a Broadway dude. Um, but what's interesting when you look back at this, it's like he makes his Broadway debut in Spam-a-Lot. Then he goes on to play Billy Starbuck in One Ten in the Shade in this production that Roundabout did that Lonny Price directed. He was playing the lead in that. It doesn't run very long, less than six months. I love One Ten in the Shade. That great score is so good. Somebody's asked for us to cover that here. So we gotta figure out who we can bring on to do that. Great, great. Um, and then years later, uh, you said he's living in LA, he gets a call to come do Once, and now then he's starring in this thing in Winsatoni.

Now he's back in LA. Literally, he he was he loved, he's an LA guy, yeah. Um, uh, but he was he he had uh you know, sort of been doing the Broadway grind at post-Mamma Mia and and this One Ten in the Shade revival that like he was ready for a change and he was like, All right, I'm out of here. Like New York, very sort of Howard Ashman, he like flees to LA. And then you know, Jim Carnahan, the casting director of Once, who also put you in American Idiot. Um, he was like, actually, I think Kazee would be great for this because one of the things that they really wanted was a guy who's at the end of his rope, but also a guy who is has there's like a darkness about guy. There's a darkness that Steve had that that Glenn didn't have.

Glenn was like, even though he was like an sort of at the end of his rope in the movie, Steve was, and I mean this affectionately, he's kind of like a rain cloud. He's kind of like a like a bit of an emotion. Yeah, you sensed that this guy was depressed, kind of he's depressed, and he need he's like at the end of his thing. So they wanted somebody with that heaviness and that darkness. And I remember reading and talking to Steve about this that like he was kind of not gonna come back to New York. And then Carnahan's like, hey, listen, you you gotta come in for this. Tape for this, and then we'll have you out. And and then it you know completely changed his life. And one of the darkest times of I'm sure of his life.

You know, his mother had just passed away, Steve's mom had just passed away, and um, he'd gone through a super public breakup, and then it was like, now you win a Tony Award. Yeah. It's just like, I mean, crazy time, crazy time. But and then he goes back to LA and works on um Shameless and a show called Legend, and he's on he's been doing a lot of TV stuff and doing really well out there.

[45:43] Dan Tracy: Yep, yep. Um Cristin Milioti's interesting too because uh, you know, she's playing Girl. She she done two plays on Broadway at this point. Mm-hmm. Yeah. She was she was not a musical theater. No. Not a musical theater person at all, basically. And I think she's the one who brought back the thing that the cool, like, first of all, she's the coolest person in the room. For sure. Unbelievably nice, like charismatic, and like a sweet person. The perfect casting. Yes. But she's the coolest person in the room. And she's like, yeah, I kind of like to sing too. And I think that she was the one who really made it cool for like, you know, actors who sing, as opposed to like, you know, those of us who are like, oh, we love musicals.

And she's like, yeah, like whatever. Like, I'd rather do Ibsen, but like play the ukulele too. It's like, oh, wait, that's super cool. So anyway. Um, but she was like, she's an actor's actor, unbelievable in the show. Um, and like I mentioned, she was doing the Wolf of Wall Street that fall, um, the fall of 2012 into 2013. Uh, she most recently she was on Fargo. Most recently she plays Patrick Wilson's wife um in season two of Fargo, season three of Fargo, something like that. Um, whichever one it was, I loved that whole series, and it's just coming back. I was just reading um that that series coming back. Great. Um, and she booked the How I Met Your Mother role while we were working on the show, and she was like, I can't talk about like I have to move to California, and I can't tell anybody.

She left. That was why she left um when her contract was up, um, was to be the mom and How I Met Your Mother in what maybe my mother. She's the mother, which may be the most the biggest letdown of a series finale of a sitcom of all time.

[47:28] Joe Carroll: Wow. Did you watch that show?

[47:31] Dan Tracy: Yeah, yeah.

[47:31] Joe Carroll: I just loved that it was her.

[47:33] Dan Tracy: Yeah, I loved it. She's amazing. She can kind of do no wrong in my in my uh in my eyes. But anyway, um, so yeah, she's notable casting changes. Um obviously Joe Carroll as as understudy, but you know, obviously Joe Carroll in his Broadway debut. Um Arthur Darvill as guy was unbelievable because he Steve has the darkness, but Arthur brought the light. This yeah, well, no, he had this like this the screaming thing. Like, yeah, it sounded like it hurt. It like he really he was really going through it vocally, and that's just so exciting to hear from somebody who's just graduated from musical theater school where everyone's trying to be like clean, right? Right, right, right, right. Like optioning, he's just like out there like pouring his soul and his guitar.

It was just amazing. And he was I got to meet him because of you. He was such a nice guy. Obviously, Paul Nolan ends up going on to play guy, who's also a friend of the pod. Paul's a legend, and barely even said he wasn't even that comfortable with the guitar when he played it, but I'm sure that was iconic. I didn't get to see him, unfortunately. Um I saw his last performance. He was Carlos, you we were gonna Carlos Valdez of The Flash, our good friend, he came in as Andre. There's I have a good story about that too. But he uh Carlos and I went together to see the very last performance, and Paul was um amazing. He was like I can't even imagine. Yeah, he he just seen he sounded like a dream. I mean, the guys got my favorite musical theater voice ever, and he just you know, him on Say It to Me Now is just one for the record books. So yeah, I gotta find it.

[49:04] Dan Tracy: Um I thought this was funny. This little bullet point that she put in here, Joe's on the Joe's on screen lover, Laura Dreyfuss says, Girl. If you haven't seen Joe's episode of The Politician, you're gonna know a lot more about Joe after you see it. Um and also I love uh Katrina Lenk as as Reza before she was iconic Katrina Lenk. Before she was uh the icon, you know, the icon, uh Tony winner. Um so Carlos Valdez, um, just a quick story about this was fun. So Carlos and I, you know, we've been friends since uh Carlos went to school. Yeah, he was a year older than me. And he uh had gotten off the Jersey Boys national tour and he came back from Jersey Boys and he was like, I'm I think I'm gonna move to Italy and uh be a wolf farmer.

I think I'm gonna like I'm gonna go woofing it in Italy. So he had made all the plans. He's like, I'm gonna move to Italy for a year and I'm just gonna learn how to be an organic farmer. And uh and I was like, Okay, man, well, you've been on the road for the last year, like I really I miss you. Like, is there anything that would get you to stay in New York? And he's like, Well, like I like a Broadway show, but that's probably not gonna happen. That day Will Connolly had put in his notice that he was gonna leave. Um, Will Connolly had told us the the original bass player um in Once had said he was gonna leave. And I said to Carlos, Carlos is a phenomenal musician, the best me one of the best musicians I've ever known.

And pr his primary instrument is bass, and I said, I might have a Broadway show for you. And so I'm like, You gotta call your agent, you gotta tell him this is happening. And then he came over to my apartment and I taught him a bunch of the music, and then he went on to book the show. Wow. So and so his agent, uh his agent Pete, when he sees me still is like, Hey man, I owe you five percent for uh yeah Carlos's for Carlos's Once contract, which is that's amazing. Yeah. And Carlos has obviously gone on to do The Flash and and is you know, I'm curious to see what the next phase of his career is gonna be after that show's over.

[50:57] Dan Tracy: Seriously, seriously. Dream casting.

[50:59] Joe Carroll: Yeah. Um I, yeah, yeah. Uh well, no.

[51:05] Dan Tracy: No, well, what I was gonna, I put on here Joe's guy, L O L's by.

[51:09] Joe Carroll: Uh, but uh Dan's not allowing that. What I really wished was that Glenn would have played it on Broadway. I really wish that Glenn would have done it in the West End or done it on Broadway.

[51:19] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[51:19] Joe Carroll: Um, because it just would have been a American Idiot energy. Totally. He probably exactly like American Idiot, he probably would have been able to do maybe two or three shows a week the way that that dude sings. Like he would have blown his voice out. Like also Glen Hansard's loves his cigarettes and whiskey, and I mean it sounds like you know what I mean. Like he is, he is a party animal and he loves to stay out until four o'clock in the morning talking about his feelings. Um, you know, and which you know, I will do with you, Glenn. And you know, it only we only got to do it twice. But I remember sitting at the bar with Glen Hansard's being like, oh my god, he's talking about his, you know, anyway. That's uh story for another time.

[51:56] Dan Tracy: Anyway, um that so that was mine, or like somebody like Josh Henry, like a real guitar player, you know, any musician. If you put anybody who, you know, you know, even somebody like friggin' Ed Sheeran, if you put it like somebody like who just lives with a guitar in this role, um, and you know, same with same with piano players, somebody like Ingrid Michaelson, yeah, or you know, Sara Bareilles.

[52:18] Joe Carroll: Wow, yeah.

[52:19] Dan Tracy: Like anything like that would be sick.

[52:21] Joe Carroll: Yeah.

[52:22] Dan Tracy: Um, all right, fun part goosebumps, songs we love. Obviously, it is iconic.

[52:29] Joe Carroll: I just think you have to know all of them.

[52:32] Dan Tracy: I mean I love Leave and I love Santa.

[52:36] Joe Carroll: We're gonna name every single song in the show, which is the point.

[52:38] Dan Tracy: Like we talked about the movie works because the songs are so good.

[52:41] Joe Carroll: Yeah, um, so the music is just remote. I'm not allowed to say remarkable. The music is so fucking good.

[52:47] Dan Tracy: Um I think it was cool that they started um you don't really get to hear Leave in the movie. Leave is only played in a snippet in the movie, but that was how the musical opened, which I thought was cool that they sort of flipped how what the meet cute is.

[53:00] Joe Carroll: I actually like that it Say It to Me Now more because he's screaming, Say It to Me Now, and then this woman goes up and says, Hey, what's up? as opposed to him singing Leave. Like would you really which is like, you know, hey, get away from me. Like what you know.

[53:13] Dan Tracy: But it lets you work on stage, yeah.

[53:15] Joe Carroll: It lets her know that he's got this baggage of this like thing that you know, right?

[53:20] Dan Tracy: It's really interesting.

[53:22] Joe Carroll: His I want is like I want a new life. Like I want to put and actually what what makes her her say like start speaking to him in the musical is when he puts the guitar down.

[53:24] Dan Tracy: He puts the guitar down and he walks away, and she's like, Why are you walking away from your guitar?

[53:37] Joe Carroll: And he's like, I'm done. It's not, you know, I don't want to play music anymore. So that's you know, it's different than just like, you know, it works better on stage anyway.

[53:44] Dan Tracy: So um the stakes are higher.

[53:45] Joe Carroll: I think that's the thing about the stage show is that the they're so right.

[53:50] Dan Tracy: What I mean by that is like to make it more important and to make it more final and more suspenseful, because in the movie it's just kind of like pedestrians here we are. You know, here's a slice of life, you know, kind of thing.

[54:03] Joe Carroll: Um, I think that the goosebump test for me in this is basically any time that he goes from like extreme loud to extreme soft, like when it when it builds and builds and builds, yeah, you know, and the Say It to Me, or in um uh, you know, when your mind's made up, and they they play that whole middle section, and he's screaming, and then it just like and then it just cuts.

[54:35] Dan Tracy: If you ever want something, then you'll call it the first time I really learned how to count in 5-4.

[54:49] Joe Carroll: Yeah, that's the first time that 5-4 made sense to me.

[54:52] Dan Tracy: Me too.

[54:52] Joe Carroll: Yeah, so that's the best.

[54:54] Dan Tracy: Um, yeah, the same thing is true with like the Leave build with all of that screaming, which like became the only song I could play on the guitar for several years because I just loved the feeling of that.

[55:06] Joe Carroll: Like, I love me a scream song.

[55:11] Dan Tracy: Let's go on my head.

[55:14] Joe Carroll: You said what you have to know Leave.

[55:51] Joe Carroll: Um the scene with his dad at the end is the thing that breaks me up. Like, I don't know what it is. There's a crowd.

[56:01] Dan Tracy: Uh yeah, there's a lot of history about like my relationship with this show and and like what it meant to me and my family at the time and stuff, and yeah, that scene just does me in.

[56:11] Joe Carroll: Yeah, absolutely.

[56:12] Dan Tracy: And then here's one thing that I just wanted to, this is a spoiler alert. So if you haven't watched the movie, stop listening now.

[56:20] Joe Carroll: Go watch it. It's really good.

[56:22] Dan Tracy: We had a great time.

[57:12] Joe Carroll: So now, if you've made it this far, the ultimate, maybe my number one goosebump moment of all time in movies, period, is the reveal of the piano. At the end, when he buys her the piano. Um on stage, it was unbelievable. Um in the movie, it's it like you you see it coming. I know it's coming, and I start crying earlier because I know it's coming. Um, so that to me is just goosebumps on goosebumps. Um, and just the way that in the Broadway musical, like when you listen to that that falling slowly finale, and you you that's when it's happening in the falling slowly finale. Like they're putting a bow on the piano, and that's the reveal.

[57:55] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[57:58] Joe Carroll: Oh my god I know um and you're like come back he says do you love your husband and she says in check no I love you right right which they don't translate because they want you to be in the position that he's in where you don't know the answer uh like come I I totally forgot about that because on on stage they they do there it's subtitled the check is subtitled yeah and so they they put the I love you so she you know he says how do you say do you still love him in check and then he repeats that to her and then he asks uh and then she so he says do you still love him in check and she says milieu tebe which means I love you and it's it is super titled on stage but it's not in the movie so in the movie he's like what's what does that mean and I remember watching it the first time being like what what is that what does that mean what does that mean right and then like I was watching with my mom she was like that it obviously means I love you I was like okay well I don't know mom okay mom okay I thought it was remarkable I thought it was really fuck you Dan you know pretty production numbers uh yeah the gold it's it's a unique kind of show it's a little different um for that reason the famous one obviously the um the falling slowly that lick at the top of falling slowly at the end of Balling iconic so many people who don't really know this show also know that um that was fun because it was the that is it's very easy to play when no one is watching, but then in on stage, uh the dad says, Go.

[59:35] Joe Carroll: The dad says to him, go, son, you know, make your ma proud. It's dead silent, and the actor who's playing Amen has to start that final falling slowly. And if I tell you that, like everybody who's ever played Amon has been like clank clank clank. I you know, like, oh that shit, and then your hands start sweating, and like it's dead dead ass silent, like you know that it's like you know, or you start playing mess it up.

[1:00:00] Dan Tracy: Yeah, yeah, anyway.

[1:00:01] Joe Carroll: So that's genius.

[1:00:02] Dan Tracy: Yeah.

[1:00:02] Joe Carroll: I I couldn't do any of it.

[1:00:04] Dan Tracy: So favorite lyrics.

[1:00:06] Joe Carroll: Um I think that um one of the one of the lyrics that I I thought was really awesome in the movie um is is when he sings sings lies. Lies is one of the songs that isn't that one of my favorite songs that's not actually in the stage show. Um but uh yeah, I I I the little cracks they escalated, and before you know it's too late for making circles and telling lies. I think it's time we give it up and figure out what's stopping us. It's just like a very simple, like we gotta move on, gotta move on, gotta move on, sort of song. I mean, I love gold. I think you know, and I love her so I wouldn't trade her for gold.

[1:00:41] Joe Carroll: And I love her so I wouldn't trade her for go.

[1:00:56] Joe Carroll: I'm walking on Moonbeon. I was born with a silver spoon, and I'm gonna be free. While I'm walking on Moonby staring out to see that was actually not written by Glenn. Uh that was written by Fergus O'Farrell, who was an actor musician, Irish actor musician. Um so yeah, those are those are probably my I mean there's so many all of Falling Slowly is just friggin' perfect.

[1:01:43] Joe Carroll: So it should win the Academy Award for Best Song, which I think it did. Right. It's also a it's it's the matter of like the way that the lyrics fit with the songs and what the songs mean in the context, it's like that perfect kind of old musical theater magic where it's just story and song, and the way that the melodies fit with how the songs work, because you know um even when you read down the lyrics of gold, it doesn't quite have the same magnitude as when you hear the whole thing, right?

[1:02:14] Dan Tracy: Well, especially the choral part, which the dog starts building.

[1:02:45] Joe Carroll: And you better be you and do what you can do. When you're walking on Is there anything better than this choral arrangement of gold?

[1:03:30] Dan Tracy: I don't think so.

[1:03:31] Joe Carroll: Like honestly, gets me every time. I sometimes I just listen to it on repeat just because I need it. Um but also I love leave. I love the idea of leave. I love like I've clearly been a bitter lover at some point, and like this song just really works for me. So um I've definitely had a couple of cry sessions that have ended with me playing that song very loud.

[1:03:57] Joe Carroll: I can't wait forever. And you won't disappoint me. I can do that myself. And I'm glad that you've come. Now if you don't mind, leave.

[1:04:24] Dan Tracy: Like you won't disappoint me. I can do that myself.

[1:04:28] Joe Carroll: That is true.

[1:04:29] Dan Tracy: Yep.

[1:04:30] Joe Carroll: Check never check.

[1:04:32] Dan Tracy: Check, please.

[1:04:33] Joe Carroll: Check, please. We're all done here.

[1:04:35] Dan Tracy: That's great.

[1:04:36] Joe Carroll: That's great. Songs you must know, falling slowly.

[1:04:39] Joe Carroll: Um leave gold. Say it to me now.

[1:04:43] Dan Tracy: Yep, everything from top to bottom.

[1:04:45] Joe Carroll: That's the whole show, right?

[1:04:45] Dan Tracy: Um yeah, that's basically that, you know.

[1:04:47] Joe Carroll: Um and also like the hill, the her the song that she sings about her husband. Um is just also heart-wrenching, and you gotta know it. It's just it's a good cry. You want a good cry, everybody feeling it? We found it.

[1:05:02] Dan Tracy: We found it for you.

[1:05:03] Joe Carroll: We found it for you. Most replayed.

[1:05:05] Joe Carroll: Oh, most replayed for me is probably gold.

[1:05:08] Dan Tracy: Oh, mine's falling slowly.

[1:05:10] Joe Carroll: Um I just I find myself I but I also go through phases.

[1:05:15] Joe Carroll: Um Falling Slowly was one of the first songs I ever learned how to play in the guitar. It's kind of one of those songs that like when it came out, you know, 16 set, you know, 16 years old, learning how to play guitar. A lot of people were that was the first one. That was like our our generation's version of Stairway to Heaven.

[1:05:31] Dan Tracy: Right.

[1:05:32] Joe Carroll: Um, so that one that but gold for gold is just is just unbelievable. I think this is really funny.

[1:05:39] Joe Carroll: I didn't realize this. I didn't know I was gonna do that, but I just did. And then it and then it like caps with a with a punchline. It's it's like you totally need the moment in the show. Aging, how did the themes hold up to the times?

[1:06:31] Dan Tracy: I mean, I think like unrequited love stories are always like a thing that I'm in. You know, the best line in the movie for me is when when they're they're fantasizing about going to London together, and she says, Can I bring my mother? And it's just like it's the best way to say, I have I have so much responsibility, right? There's no way that this is gonna happen.

[1:06:37] Joe Carroll: Right.

[1:06:37] Dan Tracy: Can I bring my mother? It always got a laugh on Broadway, which was really cool.

[1:07:02] Joe Carroll: Right.

[1:07:02] Dan Tracy: Because it's just this moment where you're like, Oh fuck, like God, please go to be together, but no, it's not important.

[1:07:08] Joe Carroll: Uh what age is the best. The low budgetness of it, the lo-fi of it still holds up incredibly well.

[1:07:16] Dan Tracy: Um, and I think that I just yeah, I I feel like it's you know, again, like you said, unrequited love just works, like it's not they need each other. You know, yes, it is the sheep she provides, you know, she is the impetus for him to make a record, but it's a movie about two people who are lost and need each other, you know what I mean?

[1:07:39] Joe Carroll: And then like it just it's to me, I don't know. I I have no I have no qualms with it, you know. I think it's like two people who have a dream, and if these two people were with each other at the right time, they would have gone to chase their dreams together and made something beautiful.

[1:08:01] Dan Tracy: Right.

[1:08:01] Joe Carroll: So when they do meet each other, they're trying to motivate each other to live their dreams, but they've never had that before. It's like a movie about like when you need support from someone and you've never had that before. Um, like when she starts playing the piano and singing during Falling Slowly, and he's just staring at her and doesn't move.

[1:08:25] Dan Tracy: The picture of that is just like that's what the movie's about.

[1:08:28] Joe Carroll: I know, I know. Just like you know, eyes open, mouth agape, just wow.

[1:08:36] Dan Tracy: Good stuff.

[1:08:38] Joe Carroll: Totally.

[1:08:38] Dan Tracy: Totally.

[1:08:39] Joe Carroll: I couldn't even think of something that didn't age well.

[1:08:41] Dan Tracy: I I know, I know.

[1:08:42] Joe Carroll: It's um, I think what didn't age well is that it's not still on Broadway.

[1:08:46] Dan Tracy: Yeah, truly.

[1:08:48] Joe Carroll: Honestly, they probably just couldn't cast that many musicians.

[1:08:52] Dan Tracy: I I I don't know exactly. One of the things that we didn't really talk about was that it was the fastest recouping show in Broadway history.

[1:08:58] Joe Carroll: It recouped its initial investment faster than any show in Broadway history. It recouped its like it was like eight million bucks or ten million bucks or something, and it recouped it in uh less than twenty weeks.

[1:09:07] Dan Tracy: Wow.

[1:09:08] Joe Carroll: Um yeah. Like it was so successful financially, yeah, critically, everything. And and when they closed it, there was I mean, there's always reasons, and producers have reasons, but I remember the cast was like, yo, we're still selling pretty darn well. Making money, and why why close it?

[1:09:27] Dan Tracy: But it's not supposed to live.

[1:09:27] Joe Carroll: Not in, you know, it's not supposed to live forever.

[1:09:29] Dan Tracy: Yeah, somebody told me that shows have to close so that another show can open, and then that's that's Broadway history.

[1:09:36] Joe Carroll: That's how it goes. You gotta leave it.

[1:10:17] Dan Tracy: Cheesy.

[1:10:18] Joe Carroll: Cheesy, but I like it.

[1:10:21] Dan Tracy: You could play the whole song.

[1:10:23] Joe Carroll: I was waiting for you to sing.

[1:10:33] Dan Tracy: Thank you for listening to Guys Who Like Musicals. We are produced by Dan Tracy and Joe Carroll, your hosts. You can find us on Instagram at Guys Who Like Musicals or on Twitter at Musical Guys. For more information about us or our show, please visit our new website at GuysWegmusicals.com. You can find our merch store, our Patreon page, and more. Thanks for listening.