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[0:00] Mason Bray: So we have Telly Leung and Joey Monda, who are the talented producers of the amazing new documentary Ensemble, which is streaming on Broadway on Demand. Telly was on Broadway with Aladdin, Allegiance, Godspell, and so many more. And you might know Joey because he was a producer on Hadestown, Mrs. Doubtfire, Slave Play, and a few others. So I'm so excited to have them both here to talk about their amazing documentary and dive into their careers. Hi guys.

[0:28] Telly Leung: Hey Mason.

[0:28] Joey Monda: Thanks for taking the time to chat.

[0:30] Telly Leung: Good morning.

[0:31] Mason Bray: How are you, Mason?

[0:32] Mason Bray: I'm doing fine. So excited to talk. If you guys want to start out, what was your path to theater in general? And then we'll get into the documentary later. Joey, I'll let you start.

[0:42] Joey Monda: Um okay. Uh so in theater in general, oh Lord. Uh, like many theater kids, I'm sure, uh, I had terrible ADD as a child and had no affinity for sports and athletics. And so my parents were desperate for a release for such energy. And so somehow they thought to put me into theater because I love to sing along and memorize all the Disney movies, and thought I was Mary Martin if uh in Peter Pan in my living room all the time. And so that just stuck when I was about five or six. They got me involved in community theater, and uh I was able to make a lot of great friends and everything, and so I ended up majoring in uh musical theater at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio for college, and then moved to New York and realized that I could get to Broadway uh heck of a lot faster working on this side of the table than doing the route that Telly did. Uh, and it stuck, and I'm very fortunate and love what I get to do every day. There's the 30,000 foot answer.

[1:38] Telly Leung: Well, I uh you had Mary Martin, and I think me as a five-year-old, I had Julie Andrews because every during the holidays it was always they would always show uh Sound of Music and Mary Poppins on TV. So I think my in was Julie Andrews. And I think another sort of moment that sort of hooked me in was uh PBS when I saw the telecast of Into the Woods filmed live at the Martin Beck Theater, which is now the Al Hirschfeld Theater. And this happened when I was eight, and it was during a pledge drive on PBS. So, you know, they kept showing it over and over again, this episode of Great Performances and at intermission, they would do a pledge drive, and I remember, and I'm dating myself here, grabbing my VHS tape, setting it on SLP so that it could record four to six hours of content.

And um, I wore out that tape. I wore it out because I would watch Into the Woods over and over again. So for me it was Julie Andrews and probably Bernadette Peters as the witch that got me in. Um, but I will also say that I started doing it for fun in high school. And I went to a math and science high school, so this was definitely not what I was supposed to be doing by any means. You know, I think my parents had high aspirations for me to go to Harvard, become a doctor and um and and or lawyer or an engineer or something like that. And I was definitely on the path to do that, but I definitely also needed to have friends and a life and a community outside of just academics at my math and science high school.

So doing high school musicals is sort of what got me in. And I think I got not only hooked to the performing part, but I got hooked to the friendships that I made doing theater and the bonds that I made doing theater that are lifelong. I think in fact I'm still chasing that as a professional now, that I just I just like making things with people I like, and it's an excuse to hang out. Um, and then at the end of it, you make something really great. Uh so it was in high school that that somebody told me, hey, you know, you could do this as a job. Like there, you can actually get a degree in this. So my on the behest of my acting teacher at Carnegie at um at uh Stuyvesant, which is the Math and Science High School, she said, Why don't you apply to Carnegie Mellon?

It's a great acting school. In fact, it's one of the oldest degrees in acting, in performance in the country. I knew nothing about the school. And also, again, I'm gonna date myself, but back in those days, uh you couldn't like Google the college. There was no website. You know, I went to college in 1998. There was no internet. So all I had to go by was my acting teacher saying Carnegie Mellon's a great school. They sent me a brochure, and we also had the giant Princeton Review college books where the top 500 colleges, each college was a page, and there were stats of, you know, this is how what your SAT scores need to look like. This is where the college is at. You're in a city or a or a country or the suburbs.

Here are some famous alumni that you might know. I mean, so that's all I had to go by. I didn't even visit the school until I got in. And then I realized, oh my gosh, this is the Hogwarts of theater. I love it. So that was my in.

[4:53] Mason Bray: Yeah. And I could not imagine not having Google. Um, so can you guys just give a quick synopsis of what your documentary is about?

[5:06] Telly Leung: Sure. Uh so uh one of our friends from Allegiance, you know, Joey and I had worked on Allegiance together, uh, Aaron Albano, he and his friend Mo Brady, who has a wonderful podcast called The Ensemblist that he's run for many years that celebrates ensemble members and sort of those unsung heroes who are performers uh that we don't hear about all the time in press releases and Playbill.com and all of that. Uh they had this idea during the lockdown. You know, March of 2020 was an unprecedented time for all artists for our entire industry. We've never experienced a shutdown like that. Well, in March of 2021, what Aaron and Mo wanted to do was gather 13 ensemble members into a room for a dance class, probably the first time some of these dancers have danced in almost a year, and then gather them for a socially distanced conversation about COVID, about everything we've gone through, about the industry, how the industry has changed.

In many ways, they were inspired by A Chorus Line. Aaron was in the Chorus Line revival on Broadway, and they said, listen, uh, uh it's been all over 50 years since we've had a conversation about the ensemble, what it means to be a dancer. And what it means to be an ensemble member has changed so much. And now keep this in mind. This is March of 2021. This is post-George Floyd, everything that happened the summer of 2020. We are still in the middle of a pandemic. We are having all of these sort of difficult but necessary conversations about racial and social justice and representation in the theater. And and not only that, there was no, there was no Broadway is back date at this time. And in fact, none of our participants at this time in March of 2021 were vaccinated.

So there wasn't that nobody that we had to sit in a socially distant circle. We had to even make sure that we had to even find a place that was willing to even have a masked dance class. So, because of this, we said, you know what, we really do need to gather these people together and and sort of capture this moment as a time capsule of what has happened to us, not only as an industry and as a community, but what has happened to us as the world. And make sure that we capture this so that future generations to come can learn the lessons that we've learned, sort of sort of see us at our most vulnerable and uncertain, and hopefully get some inspiration and strength and knowledge from that. So that's what you're seeing in Ensemble.

You're seeing sort of a moment in time, a time capsule of and and you know, for Joey and I as producers, we knew that this was a fleeting moment, that this was gonna be gone. The minute we were gonna have vaccines, the minute we were Broadway was gonna have a date where we came back. There was gonna be a movement to get back to quote unquote business as usual, and we might not have these conversations again. So for us, we we we just said, let's get these dancers together, let's have them dance, let's get them liquored up a little and have them talk for four to five hours in a dance studio, and then we sent them home and we said, why don't you also do some at-home testimonials to say all the things you probably didn't get to say in that circle together? And we just kept the cameras rolling, and we had no idea what we were gonna get, you know.

[8:11] Joey Monda: Yeah.

[8:11] Telly Leung: So that was part of it, part of the fun too was going, I don't know what people are gonna say. Are people gonna break down crying? Are people gonna have very heated discussions about everything that that's happened in our world? Uh we have no we had no idea. And but uh, what I do do think we got is something very authentic.

[8:27] Joey Monda: Did you have anything to add to that, Joey?

[8:30] Joey Monda: No, Telly got it all. It's almost like he and I coordinate our answers on things like this. Well, we were so I mean, uh, and in some ways we were just so Joey and I, you know, have produced other things together, and we've even produced things in a pandemic together. So we already had experience meeting that challenge. Um, but we felt so passionately we immediately the both of us were like, oh, we have to do this. We must capture this. And we were united in sort of the reason why. I think it also goes, Telly, to kind of both of us had a commonality in our in the first question of how we got into theater, which was, you know, captured theater, whether it was Into the Woods or with me for Mary Martin and Peter Pan.

And so that was also kind of this moment, and it's also been a passion project of how can we be capturing all of these different elements of theater, whether it's the actual Broadway musical or how the show gets to Broadway and all of these different uh steps and parts of the business, so that the little Joey's and the little Telly's, wherever they are in the world, uh, can also have an end to this uh industry and this art form that we all love so much. And also realizing that it's not as glamorous as that it might become on face value, that this idea that it is a business, it's there's a reason why we call it show business, and doing eight shows a week is really taxing on your body, on your mental health.

And those are all of these conversations that we're having, both as industries, as artists, and I think that the opportunity to capture this in such a unique, authentic and vulnerable way uh was really interesting, also just because it was some it's uh it's a documentary, it's a content that I would have loved growing up. And I think that there's a lot of other people uh and Broadway lovers that will do the same.

[10:10] Telly Leung: I will also brag on Joey a little bit. During the the most vulnerable and uncertain times of the lockdown, Joey started this wonderful thing on Zoom called a called the I'll Brain Trust. It was like a Broadway producing brain trust. And not many people know this, but basically, Joey gathered young producers together to go, we're at a time where our industry is at this pivotal moment of do we survive, do we not? Is theater dead? And when it comes back, how do we want it to come back? And I think this documentary in some ways is an extension of that because both of us as young producers, well, we we definitely want to be the next generation of people putting out theater and creating content and telling stories, but we also know that significant changes have to happen as far as whose stories get told, who is behind the table.

Transparency as far as how theater gets funded and made, you know, uh so that people sort of know this is why unions do what they do, this is why producers do what they do, this is you know, uh so that we can all sort of be part of that conversation. There's a moment in our documentary where these 13 dancers gather together and they all admit very vulnerably do you know what a producer does? We have no idea what a producer does. We have no idea how this works because for all of their careers, what they focused on was the craft, the art, the dancing. They didn't, they weren't focused on the other side of it, which is how the mechanics of the business is run. Well, all of a sudden, there's an event that shuts down our entire industry, and we're all forced to sort of know that, right?

So, in in some ways, I think Joey and I want Ensemble to be a continuation of these great conversations that he sort of curated on Zoom, part of this brain trust, and have them be conversations that happen now after people watch the documentary, that people keep talking about this, so that we become better producers for the next generation. You know, that's the only way Joey and I get better as well as theater makers is by hearing from the folks who have to do it, right?

[12:05] Mason Bray: That's beautiful. So answering the big question what is the job of a producer from your perspective?

[12:13] Joey Monda: Ooh. I like Telly go first.

[12:14] Telly Leung: I'll let Joey go first because I, you know, Joe Joey wears a producer hat more often than I do.

[12:20] Joey Monda: Um, being a producer is uh filling any void in the job pipeline that somebody else hasn't hired to do is essentially what being a producer is. So it's everything from having the idea of what story you want to tell, finding the right people to tell that story, raising the money and creating the room and the environment for that story to be told and thrive, and then all of the work to make sure that there are people to hear and receive that story. Because at the end of the day, you can create the most beautiful and best art possible, but what's it really doing if nobody's there to see it? And so I think at the most basic level of being a producer, it's finding stories, it's creating an environment for them to thrive and to be told in their most interesting and exciting ways, and then finding and eliciting the audiences to see and engage with that story.

[13:13] Telly Leung: I will piggyback on everything Joey just said, and I agree with all of it. And I will also say that because of that, because that is what a producer does, that anybody can be a producer. Anyone with the desire to tell a story, and anybody with sort of the passion to do it is a producer. Uh I will be the first to admit I am I usually wear an actor hat. And there's many things about producing that I don't know. And part of what I have to do as a young producer is call my friend Joey, who does this all the time and go, wait, I have a question about this.

[13:45] Telly Leung: I don't know how to do this. I want to do this. This is my idea of how to do this, but it's really anybody can be a producer. You don't all you have to do is ask about the things you don't know. And I really think a producer is somebody who brings it really brings people together at the end of the day. You know, a producer is the one that goes, "Hey, this is there's this great idea. We need help in this department. I know a great, you know, lighting designer that would be perfect for this. I know a great director that would be really great for this, and that director is connected to other designers and other artists. You know who needs to be the lead actor in this? This person. This particular casting director has a great eye for the kind of story that we're trying to tell. Let's bring that person on board." And eventually, it's really the person that sort of builds the room, whether it be a physical room or a virtual room these days, to make art happen.

[14:38] Telly Leung: And I think that's one of the unique things about ensemble is in coming out of COVID, one of the evolutions of people in our business, regardless of if they're actors or designers or stagehands or producers, is the necessity for all of us to start wearing different hats and being multi-hyphenists and starting to tell our stories in different ways. And so in the same way that Aaron and Mo, you know, who came from different backgrounds, Mo also used to be a performer as well. And you know, they came up with this idea and they brought on Kelly and I on to help produce this and then in the same way our brilliant director Pierre, who is our director of photography, he shot, edited all of this and directed it, he's also a performer in Aladdin.

And I think it speaks to as the industry and musical theater moves forward, all of us have to start being open to telling, wearing different hats and looking at theater and looking at what we do from all of these different perspectives and lenses because that's only going to create a more holistic and exciting industry and art is that if we all know how to do this from different ways and have different perspectives that we bring to the table.

[15:52] Telly Leung: Yeah, that's amazing. And I want folks to know that when they watch the film that we had what, three or four cameras? Three of four cameras there, Joey, that night.

[16:00] Joey Monda: Three.

[16:00] Telly Leung: Three cameras there that night and we had some drone shots as well. All of our camera guys are also ensemblists. All of our camera folks that shot the thing. So this really is something that is made for us and by us in a lot of ways. And again, ensemble folks that are wearing different hats than they're used to, you know, as Joey said during a shutdown, thank goodness for those other hats, right? Or we wouldn't survive. We wouldn't A, eat or be able to express ourselves.

[16:31] Mason Bray: That's awesome. Joey, you touched on transparency and you talked in depth with my friend Martina Cunha on his podcast, but I wanted to see what do you think those of us working in the industry can do to reform and uplift people instead of how it's going now.

[16:46] Joey Monda: Oh, that's a really interesting question, Mason. I mean, obviously when you're talking about systemic change, it kind of requires every single person that is a part of the system to be active in, I'll use the word dismantling, but so dismantling that system or evolving that. And so I think, you know, transparency, Telly and I've had so many conversations and I've had so many conversations with other producers and other people about how I really think that transparency is the biggest thing that we can all agree on and have to bring to the table as we move forward. There's this, you know, an inherent sense of us versus them in a lot of the conversations that we're having, whether it's producers and talent or whether it's talent and the different unions with each other.

And I think at the end of the day, that sense of distrust is bred because of a lack of transparency and a lack of us being able to all get into the room or sit at a table together and say, "Here is what I'm trying to accomplish, and here are all of the obstacles that I'm facing," and really talking through a lot of that. And it's not easy. It's not easy. It's not the way that any of us are programmed. It's not the way that the business has operated, but it is definitely the first and the biggest step that I think we can take as we all are looking to create an equitable playing field for an industry and art form, a world that has done so much to disenfranchise so many people.

[16:48] Joey Monda: And so I think when we're talking about diversity and equity, it's not only racial, it's not only gender, it's bringing in, it's not only able bodies, it's bringing in people from different economic backgrounds, it's bringing in people from different, like we've been talking about different fields, whether they are a performer and everything. And I think that this transparency and just being able to have somebody that like Kelly can call on me and ask, making sure that we all are making ourselves those experts and those open experts for anybody to call on us on our field of expertise is really important.

[18:52] Joey Monda: Yeah. To me, I think that there is this idea, and for sure, this is an idea that is rooted in capitalism that there is only so much room at the table, that like at some point, like there's only so much room at the table and the food's gonna run out, right? And like I have to say, in the world of theater and as far as making art and telling stories, there it's in for the supply of stories and who can be a producer and who should be telling. I think that that's infinite. I think there's room at the table for everyone, right? Like, not every show is gonna be a Broadway show, not every show is gonna be a commercial show, but for sure, we have to make sure we should make an effort to make sure that artistically everybody gets a seat at that table, right?

And that to me, I think that's the idea of that moving forward is necessary as we sort of think about what representation looks like, not just on stage, because I feel like we've sort of been doing that. There's a movement to get diversity on the stage, what we can see that, but I think now it's important to go, okay, but how does this organization run, right? Who are the people on the design team? And also understand that like the more people at the table, actually, it's not that there's less to be had for everyone. It's actually, it actually makes the meal better.

[20:08] Telly Leung: Yeah. It's like, you know, when you sit in a dinner table and everybody's from the same background, everybody's the same age, everybody's the same, everything, everybody does the same job. Like it's a pretty boring conversation. You bring somebody into that dinner table who has a completely different perspective than you, you probably leave that dinner learning something about yourself, about that person, about the world. And isn't that really what theater should do? That we should all gather and leave knowing something different about ourselves and the world, right? So I say, I don't know, bring somebody you've never met before to dinner, I guess would be the analogy.

[20:40] Joey Monda: And I think also, you know, I want to shout out because there are a lot of people that are having these conversations. There are a lot of groups and a lot of amazing producers that are looking at how to pull, you know, get rid of the opaqueness around producing. And so, like, there's these groups called theater producers of color. There's the group called the industry standard group. There's a whole bunch of different organizations that I would really encourage anybody who's just interested in learning more about producing that can take these like intro. And there's also a group of women that, a group called the Business of Broadway that also like these are just one-on-one conversations and like introductions so that everybody can have a better sense of understanding and we can really pull apart what is being a producer and how can more people do it, because that is certainly there's still a huge barrier to entry because inherently on Broadway, when we're talking about producing, or even when we're talking about producing this documentary, it's about raising money.

It's like that's a huge part of being a producer in commercial capitalism theater. And so I think having these other great entry points for people to be able to access, I highly recommend people being able to do that because that's something that I didn't have and would have made it a lot more accessible. And I think that that's a really exciting trend in our industry, and there's other people doing really amazing and exciting work as well.

[22:05] Telly Leung: That's amazing. Now, getting into my last few questions. So I've asked this in every single one of my interviews, and I keep getting fascinating answers. So why not continue? Do you think that your education has pushed you further in your career or your experience working in the field?

[22:20] Joey Monda: Mason, you're full of the interesting questions on a Saturday morning. Um, I'll jump in and say I don't, certainly not one more than the other, but one would not have been possible without the other. Like if I didn't have the education and if I didn't have kind of the foundational elements of my quote training, you know, I like I said, I came from a performing background. My degree is in musical theater performance, but that again we're just telling stories. And so without me having that sense of storytelling and understanding from like the on stage perspective, I certainly don't think my producing work or the stories that compel me as an audience member would be possible or the same without that. So I think that like they've definitely are of equal value if I look back in my experience.

[23:11] Telly Leung: Since I'm the old one on this conversation, and I've been doing this for over 20 years, I definitely have a great respect for my formal education. I went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, like I said, and it's a wonderful place to train, but it's only the beginning of your training. So, you know, if you think that you're gonna go to a school like Carnegie Mellon or Michigan and graduate with one of these prestigious degrees in theater and then be done training, you're wrong. Because guess what? Like the industry will constantly be forcing you to be a student all over again. And I think that if anything, the pandemic has taught all of us that, right? Like as we get locked down at home, I've had to figure out how to be my own lighting designer and green screen operator and, you know, audio engineer.

If I were to do a podcast, I mean, we've all had to do that, you know. And now, you know, for me, this musical theater performer who's gotten a lot of singing and dancing training is now figuring out how to produce, you know. So it's, I always like to say to my students, and I do a fair bit of teaching myself now. I always like to say, hashtag student for life, you know, that you're never quite done learning. You'll always be a student, and that that's the best part, actually, that it's impossible to know it all, and that there's always something to learn in the theater. And isn't that great?

[24:28] Mason Bray: That's fantastic. And you are an amazing audio engineer. You sound amazing.

[24:38] Telly Leung: Um, well, do you guys have any tips for those wanting to get into the industry that you haven't already mentioned of either being a performer or being a producer or anything, since we also have a multi-hyphenate sound engineer, lighting designer, green screen operator?

[24:55] Telly Leung: Um, I'll start and I'll say this that doing ensemble has been such a rewarding experience because it has given Joey and I an opportunity to learn from a group of people that we I think we knew on one level, right? Here's the thing with Broadway Ensemble members, they are amazing. Amazing. What they are able to do with their voices, with their bodies, we marvel at that. And they make it look easy eight times a week. Well, guess what? You get them in a room and you give them a platform and an opportunity to speak about their lives, their industry, the things that they've had to give up in order to do that, and you learn so much about them as artists, as craftspeople, and as human beings, as citizens of the world, what's important to them.

So I to me, I would say if you have the means to do so, and if you have the passion to do so, make sure you are lifting those stories we haven't heard yet. It will be not only rewarding for the person that gets to tell it, it'll be rewarding for the people who get to listen, and it'll be rewarding for people like Joey and I to be able to go, "Here, we're passing the mic to you. Please tell us your story because we want to learn from you."

[26:06] Joey Monda: Yeah, that's beautiful. Did you have anything?

[26:09] Joey Monda: Um, I think to just piggyback on what Telly said, it's also making sure that you're exposing yourself and that you as a person are doing the work to take in as many different types of stories as possible, whether that's making sure you're reading books from a variety of authors, you're seeing plays and musicals, and doing the actual analysis on yourself as an audience member. If creating theater or telling these stories is what you want to do as your livelihood and for your living, really being analytical about it and what are those stories, what moves you? What is interesting and exciting about those stories and those themes for you? And then having a sense of yes and how can I tell more? How can I really create the opportunity for more people to hear the types of stories and the types of theater that really excite me?

[27:00] Telly Leung: Yeah. Well, that's amazing. I'm so excited to see the documentary. And by the time this episode is out, I think it will be out because it comes out the eleventh, correct?

[27:09] Joey Monda: Yeah.

[27:09] Telly Leung: Yeah, Friday, March 11th on Broadway on Demand.

[27:12] Mason Bray: Yes. Um, so I'm so excited to see that. And thank you guys so much for being here.

[27:17] Telly Leung: Thanks, Mason. This was great.

[27:19] Joey Monda: Thanks for having us, Mason.