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[0:06] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast, your backstage pass to revealing conversations with stars, creators, and industry leaders.

[0:15] Gordon Cox: On Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond.

[0:18] Gordon Cox: I'm Gordon Cox. This is a first here on Stagecraft, because on this episode, we're getting spiritual with the Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot.

[0:26] Gordon Cox: It's a new deck of tarot cards created using the images of Al Hirschfeld, the legendary theater caricaturist with an instantly identifiable style.

[0:35] Gordon Cox: Each card casts a famous figure from the theater world in the role of a traditional tarot card.

[0:41] Gordon Cox: Think Jean Valjean from Les Miserables on the tarot card Justice, or Romeo and Juliet on the card for the lovers.

[0:48] Gordon Cox: Sometimes real life icons show up too, like Steven Sondheim as the King of Cups, or the influential late producer Joseph Papp on The Two of Coins.

[0:57] Gordon Cox: The Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot is the work of Emily McGill, who describes herself as a recovering Broadway publicist turned Ivy League Witch.

[1:06] Gordon Cox: She worked in collaboration with the Al Hirschfeld Foundation to create the deck and its accompanying guidebook, which is gearing up for release on September 3rd.

[1:14] Gordon Cox: Now Emily is in the virtual studio with me to talk about the spirituality of theater, the creation of the deck, and how theater fans might use it, and to give you a taste of the deck in action when she does a short reading for me.

[1:26] Gordon Cox: Hey Emily, thanks for joining me.

[1:28] Emily McGill: Oh my gosh, Gordon, thank you so much for having me.

[1:31] Gordon Cox: Okay, so first of all, let's start out by having you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do, and how you use tools like tarot cards in your work.

[1:40] Emily McGill: Sure, yeah. So I will oftentimes say I'm a recovering Broadway publicist.

[1:45] Emily McGill: I spent 15 years working on shows like Billy Elliott, Memphis, um, other Tony Award winning best shows like A Raisin in the Sun with Denzel Washington.

[1:56] Emily McGill: I've worked on Lying King and Aladdin at Disney with George Decay and uh Andrew Lloyd Weber, Tavi Gevinson and Kieran Colkett.

[2:05] Emily McGill: I mean, I've really run the gamut as far as the Broadway PR thing goes.

[2:09] Emily McGill: And I went back to school during the pandemic and got my master's from Columbia University at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute.

[2:18] Emily McGill: And so I got my degree in what I call spiritual psychology.

[2:22] Emily McGill: And back when I was actually working on A Raisin in the Sun, right after that closed, my grandma passed away.

[2:28] Emily McGill: And that led me to therapy for the first time.

[2:31] Emily McGill: And my therapist really welcomed me back to my spirituality, which is something that I had lost.

[2:37] Emily McGill: I found it in the theater, I thought, but then the theater became work.

[2:40] Emily McGill: And so it all sort of shifted.

[2:43] Emily McGill: And she really helped me find my way back.

[2:46] Emily McGill: And tarot cards were a huge part of that process for me.

[2:50] Emily McGill: If I didn't know what direction I wanted to go or I needed some clarity around something during a session, we would pull a card.

[2:56] Emily McGill: And so that really inspired me to create my own practice.

[3:01] Emily McGill: And I started reading for other people during the pandemic.

[3:04] Emily McGill: And when I went back to school, I decided I really wanted to focus on tarot as an effective tool for self-reflection.

[3:12] Emily McGill: And so that's actually what I did my thesis on at Columbia.

[3:15] Emily McGill: And I, the data is amazing.

[3:17] Emily McGill: It showed after one 30 minute tarot reading with me that 100% of my respondents had more clarity, more direction.

[3:24] Emily McGill: On a one to 10 scale, they were averaging a 7.7.

[3:28] Emily McGill: So it felt like it was a really valuable tool.

[3:32] Emily McGill: Um, but for a theater lover like me, I wanted a Broadway-themed deck.

[3:37] Emily McGill: Okay. And I, you know, I started searching around on the internet, and there are a few people, you know, making their own on Etsy and things like that.

[3:45] Emily McGill: And John Cameron Mitchell had one on his Junction City Mercantile site, which was then no longer in print.

[3:52] Emily McGill: So I started thinking about how I would sort of marry these two loves of mine, the tarot, as a sort of more of a psychological tool versus a divination tool.

[4:03] Emily McGill: Yeah. And then of course, I've been a theater kid since I was, you know, 12 years old or younger, even really.

[4:10] Emily McGill: So um, so yeah, this was a really beautiful opportunity to sort of marry these things.

[4:15] Emily McGill: And now I help people who have what you know they think or they're told by society's measures are very successful lives.

[4:25] Emily McGill: You know, they have great families or great friends, great jobs, they've done amazing things in their lives, but they still sort of feel like something is missing.

[4:34] Emily McGill: And so we utilize tarot as one tool among many others, including uh strength-based positive psychology practices and a lot of other things that I was able to learn about during my time at Columbia.

[4:49] Emily McGill: Um, and we bring that all together to help people really tap into their power through their spirituality.

[4:55] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Had you thought about the spiritual uh dimension of theater previous to that?

[5:02] Gordon Cox: Had theater had a, yeah, can you tell us a little bit about how they overlap?

[5:06] Emily McGill: Yes. Uh so back when I was working as a Broadway publicist, which is how we first met, we should say.

[5:11] Emily McGill: Yes, yes, of course. You've been a wonderful collaborator in the theater coverage space for so many years.

[5:19] Emily McGill: Um, but I specifically remember actually, this is wild because this is the Hirschfeld Broadway tarot.

[5:24] Emily McGill: Right. The Hirschfeld Theater has always been one of my favorites.

[5:28] Emily McGill: Um I love, yes, that the mezzanine level has all of those Hirschfeld prints.

[5:33] Gordon Cox: This is the Broadway Theater, we should say, where uh Moulin Rouge is playing right now.

[5:37] Emily McGill: Yes, currently the home of Moulin Rouge.

[5:39] Emily McGill: And when I was working on ELF the musical the second time around, it came back to Broadway.

[5:45] Emily McGill: Um, I specifically remember because it was in that theater.

[5:49] Emily McGill: I would like rather than having an intern run a posting notice over to the board if we were gonna have something happening in the building, I would go myself because to me walking into an empty theater felt the way most people experience walking into an empty church or synagogue or mosque or temple.

[6:09] Emily McGill: Like it really felt like a spiritual experience for me.

[6:13] Emily McGill: Um, to the point that during those days of ELF, I and many other shows as well.

[6:18] Emily McGill: Sometimes I would like just stop at the theater on my way back from grabbing lunch just to walk across this empty stage where it was just me and the ghost light and the doorman in the building.

[6:29] Emily McGill: You know, there's something that was like really sacred for me in that.

[6:33] Emily McGill: And I think that theater is also one of the oldest forms of gathering.

[6:38] Emily McGill: We used to gather around a fire and tell stories that would literally save our lives, you know.

[6:43] Emily McGill: It's like don't go over there because that's where Pete got eaten by the lion, and you don't want to be like Pete, right?

[6:50] Emily McGill: Like whatever the thing was, um, like storytelling really was how we saved our lives and our communities sort of grew and evolved.

[6:59] Emily McGill: And you know, we can we've seen that storytelling continue to evolve and grow over time.

[7:05] Emily McGill: Um, but it really is a fundamental human shared experience.

[7:09] Emily McGill: So to me, there's nothing quite like being in the dark with a thousand strangers.

[7:13] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[7:14] Emily McGill: Just getting to experience a story.

[7:16] Gordon Cox: And so, how did you connect as you were thinking about trying to create this uh Hirschfeld or this Broadway deck?

[7:22] Gordon Cox: How did you find your way to the Hirschfeld Foundation as an idea to kind of unify the imagery on the deck?

[7:29] Emily McGill: Yes, it was a bit of a winding road.

[7:32] Emily McGill: The idea of the deck first came to me um in December of 2020.

[7:37] Emily McGill: And in the beginning of 2021, I started working on it with uh dramaturg Jenna Clark Embry, who is now over at Lincoln Center theater doing amazing work.

[7:46] Emily McGill: Um and her daughter was about to be born, and she, you know, we were all sort of still sitting at home during the pandemic.

[7:52] Emily McGill: And so we would meet weekly and just talk about tarot and Broadway and shows and how you know we would see the archetypes in the theater aligning with the archetypes in the tarot.

[8:04] Emily McGill: And we started what I had lovingly come to call casting sessions.

[8:08] Emily McGill: And so we would talk about, you know, my favorite example is I'm talking about someone who really listens to their intuition, like deeply knows what right from wrong means for them personally, has uh the backbone to follow what they believe is right or wrong and not necessarily um worrying about the consequences or knowing that they'll deal with the consequences when the consequences come.

[8:37] Emily McGill: I'm talking about the high priestess, but I'm also talking about Elphaba.

[8:41] Emily McGill: You know, there's also this essence in her character where she's so driven to do the thing that she believes is right.

[8:47] Emily McGill: And she knows that she's got the intuition, the magic within her.

[8:50] Emily McGill: And she's got literal magic, of course, too, but we all do if we're gonna take, you know, anyway.

[8:55] Emily McGill: Uh, so we've got this sort of we can see these parallels and these mirrors.

[9:01] Emily McGill: And so we had a really fun time sitting down and just talking about what tarot cards align with what characters.

[9:07] Emily McGill: And um, and then she had her daughter, and so we took a little break and I started working on some other things.

[9:14] Emily McGill: I ended up going back to school.

[9:16] Emily McGill: And during my first semester of school, um, an editor from Running Press reached out to me, my fabulous editor Maria, and she said, I saw you have this splash page job about a Broadway tarot deck that's in development, like tell me more.

[9:29] Emily McGill: And we started down the road together.

[9:32] Emily McGill: And one of the earliest things we discovered is that the rights could be a challenge for 78 tarot cards with 78 different characters from a Broadway show, and all of the stakeholders within each of the different Broadway hold the rights, you know, it's it gets very complicated very quickly.

[9:49] Gordon Cox: Yeah, it's quite a sprawling spider web.

[9:52] Emily McGill: And um, I was chatting with another friend in the media who said, Why did you think about something that has a single IP, like Charles Adams or Al Hirschfeld?

[10:02] Emily McGill: And I'd had the idea of Hirschfeld, like, you know, at the very beginning of the process, but I sort of put it away.

[10:08] Emily McGill: It felt a little too out of reach at that point.

[10:11] Emily McGill: But, you know, I thought about what was said to me, and ultimately I reached out to another friend and said, Who do we know that knows someone at the Hirschfeld Foundation?

[10:21] Emily McGill: And uh the response was Julie, duh, because the wonderful Julie Boardman had just opened the Museum of Broadway as its co-founder and started kicked off this special exhibit series with a Hirschfeld exhibit.

[10:33] Gordon Cox: Right.

[10:34] Emily McGill: And she immediately put me in touch with David Leopold, the creative director of the Al Hirschfeld Foundation, and he thought it was such an out there idea that he had to learn more.

[10:45] Emily McGill: And David will be the one to tell you that I was very convincing in my pitch to him.

[10:50] Emily McGill: And from that, he said, you know what, let's meet, let's talk about this.

[10:54] Emily McGill: Let's do it.

[10:55] Gordon Cox: Right.

[10:55] Emily McGill: And we did.

[10:56] Emily McGill: And we would sit at the Algonquin in the lobby at the Algonquin at where there's lots of Hirschfelds around you as well.

[11:03] Emily McGill: If you go in there, you'll see some of his beautiful, beautiful work.

[11:07] Emily McGill: And we started again casting.

[11:11] Emily McGill: And the challenge, the challenge was that most of the characters I had thought about casting prior to that were all within the last, you know, 20 years or so of Broadway history.

[11:22] Emily McGill: So yes, there were of course some classic characters in there, but you know, things like Elphaba or Jenna from Waitress, or you know, there were other characters that I was thinking about.

[11:32] Emily McGill: Um, but Mr. Hirschfeld passed away in 2003, in January of 2003. And so the last thing he drew was Hairspray. Right. So everything from the He never drew Alpha Ba. There is no Alpha Ba. So Alpha Ba is not the high priestess in this deck. Even though she's my favorite example, we do with Joan of Arc instead. Okay. Yeah. Um, you know, listens to her intuition, knows what she knows for right and wrong. Um, but so yeah, so we were able to mine Mr. Hirschfeld's 10,000 images in his archive. Most of them are drawings from shows. We do fudge a few things here or there. We've got, you know, an image that he drew of a mermaid for 17 magazine that we use as Ariel from The Little Mermaid because I love the idea of her in that the casting of her card.

Um, you know, for most of them, they are characters, but we do have some theater luminaries in there as well. We've got, you know, Sondheim and Hal Prince, we've got um Eva La Galen, we've got Joe Capp, we've got Bob Fosse, got Lena Horne. So there are a few where it's the individual represented because their essence also captured the meanings of whatever cards they were assigned.

[12:46] Gordon Cox: And as you're starting to do readings with these cards, you know, they're um not quite out in the world yet, but they are ready to go and they exist in physical form, and you're doing readings with them. What are you learning about how what the lens of theater adds to um your reading and to the interpretations that people are taking away from these cards?

[13:09] Emily McGill: I think it makes the relationship between theater and the tarot makes tarot really accessible for theater lovers. So, you know, oftentimes I think, especially with the proliferation of you know, witch talk and Instagram, and we see a lot of people pulling cards and you know, doing all these readings, um, there's a sense of gatekeeping that happens because of that. But honestly, anyone can read tarot. Like really all you need are some cards and your intuition. A guidebook is helpful because there are intentions, you know, each card does have a certain meaning when it comes to the tarot. There is a really specific structure to it. We've got two parts, the major arcana and the minor arcana. Um arcana meaning part.

The major arcana is like the human soul's evolutionary journey, the hero's journey. So we see that going from you know, the very first sort of stepping out on faith all the way up to enlightenment. And our minor arcana is set up more like a deck of playing cards. We've got four suits, which correspond to our four elements, and then we've got phase through ten. The biggest difference being we have four court cards rather than three. So there's a king, queen, knight, and page. And this structure is seen across tarot decks across the board. So if it doesn't have that, it's oftentimes an oracle deck, and there's a lot more flexibility for an author to create what they want. But I think that the structure of the tarot also helps us with um just an easier understanding. You know, if you have a general sense of there's some there's a framework within that all of this is sort of laying upon, uh, then it sometimes is easier to understand it.

[14:58] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with Emily and the Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot right after the break.

[15:08] Gordon Cox: And now here's the rest of my conversation and a tarot reading with Emily McGill, the creator of the Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot. One of the things that uh struck me about the deck when I first saw it is when I think of tarot cards at least, they're often very colorful because you know, like the iconic kind of Rider-Waite-Smith deck has a lot of bright colors and um, but the Hirschfeld, of course, didn't work in color. He worked in black and white in this calligraphic style of his. And so the cards look like that. Do you and it's like like it seems like a like a visual surprise in the deck um that I feel like might help people think differently about what some of the cards mean and stuff. Do you find that?

[15:49] Emily McGill: You know, it's interesting because Mr. Hirschfeld has a few images that have color in them, but they tend to be from much later in his career, so more in like the 90s and you know those first two years of the 2000s. Um and I knew that, you know, we early in this process, I was talking to my editor about what it would look like and we thought maybe like, you know, a curtain red would appear somewhere or there would be some sort of component of metallic in something. But ultimately, as you said, you know, so much of his work it really is impactful because it's in black and white. You know, he was drawing for all for the New York Times for 75 years, the New Yorker, all these outlets that you know weren't able to print photographs in the newsprint at that point in time.

So they did the artist renderings and the caricatures and the drawings and things like that across the paper. And so it's really sort of a democratized art form. And I think that that is part of what I love about tarot as I was saying, like I'm not here to gatekeep. I really want it to be accessible to everyone and anyone just the way Mr. Hirschfeld's art was you know you pick up a newspaper and you could start counting Nina's. It didn't matter if you know you were in New York or not.

[17:06] Gordon Cox: Right. Uh I was just gonna ask about the Nina's because uh one of the things that Hirschfeld is known for is incorporating his daughter's name into various images and they're hiding in like the folds of a sleeve maybe or in somebody's hair or something like that strands of their hair or something like that. Is there any meaning ascribed to how many Nina's there are in a card?

[17:29] Emily McGill: You know, that's not something that we necessarily focused on was the number of Nina's because a lot of the cards, there are many cards which are the full drawing, and usually those are from his Friday drawings that he did where it was like a single character that was appearing in the times. But sometimes uh we pulled out a specific character or a specific section of a drawing, so we have a really unique detail happening for the cards. And so there's this kind of cool thing in this deck where you're gonna see details and parts of his shelf drawings that you literally won't see anywhere else. You know, the drawing of Kiss of a Spider Woman, for example, you see Brent Carver and Chita Rivera in the center of it, but there's so much happening around them.

You know, there's lots of grid work that's showing the set and things like that. And in the card, you see none of that. We only see the two of them dancing. Yeah. So there are components like that where it was, I think less about the meaning of the Nina's in that, and more how do we really capture the essence of the card meaning with the artwork? And sometimes the character that I wanted to cast didn't align with, you know, the character aligned with the card meaning. But then when we look at the artwork, there was a misalignment. And a great example of that is the Fool, which is the very first card in the tarot in the major arcana zero, the numberless number, and that's the character that goes off on the hero's journey.

They're the one that steps out on faith, and part of why they're a fool is because they trust again and again and again and again. And I always thought, oh, well, that's Pippin, obviously. It's the most, you know, there you can get a more obvious casting than that. Really, like we're watching Pippin go on his hero's journey, we're watching him trust these different people that he is approaching every step of the way, and so that's all happening in real time. Um, but we looked at the drawing and Pippin's on his knees in the drawing of the company. So we weren't able to use that because that doesn't evoke the essence of, you know, and away we go.

[19:38] Gordon Cox: Yeah, that image uh from the in the more traditional tarot is like a person basically stepping off a cliff, right? With a little like bindle stiff, he's got a little knapsack and there's a dog at his feet, and you know, he's like sort of ready to take the leap. And you know, we also And so you've ended up with who did you end up? Actually, the next the next character we went to was Dorothy. And I thought we could either use The Wiz or The Wizard of Oz, either would be a great choice. Um and we can have Toto in there with her. It's perfect. And we were all set to go. And then I mean, we were down to the wire. It was like the final casting we were doing. And somehow or another, I was looking up Candide, and the image of Candide, he's holding that knapsack, the stick with a kerchief tied around it.

And I thought that's the book. I can't not use that image because it aligns so perfectly with the image that Pamela Coleman Smith drew in that Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, which, you know, for a little history nerd like me is the basis of most contemporary tarot decks. The majority of decks that are you see on the market today are inspired by and based upon the work that Pamela Coleman Smith did for Arthur Waite's tarot deck.

[20:53] Gordon Cox: Yeah, those are the we should say if people listening who are maybe unfamiliar with tarot like think of a kind of iconic tarot card that's a good thing. That's probably what they're thinking about image.

[21:04] Emily McGill: Yeah, yeah.

[21:06] Gordon Cox: And so in addition to the deck, there's also a guidebook. What's in the guidebook and how will it help people uh use it?

[21:14] Emily McGill: Uh so we start the guidebook with a little introduction for me. There's some information about how to use the cards, um, what different tarot spreads you can do, some of my favorites, and a spread is really just the positioning of the cards and giving each one an intention. So you know you'll see in here some of my favorite two and three card spreads. For three cards, common things you'll see are like past, present, future, or mind, body, spirit. My favorite is what will help you, what will hinder you and your untapped potential. And then we go into the actual card description. So you'll see the name of the card, the show and the character. If it's a musical, there will be a song title in there.

Right. And you'll see the card image at the bottom will let you know if it is the drawing that it's from because as I said, some of them we sort of fudged a little bit. So you know for Once Upon a Mattress for Princess Winifred, we have a drawing that's actually called Villain and Sleeping Princess. And we photoshopped the villain out of it. So we just have the sleeping princess, but it was not a Once Upon a Mattress drawing, but it's you know a princess snoozing in a bed. So you know we're getting spread at the end of her show in that one. But um so you'll see what the name of the drawing is um and whether it's a detail or the full drawing. And then we have you know just a few short words about you know sort of bold phase words of what the card can mean and then we have a short description of the card itself and then another you know short paragraph around how the character relates to that card meaning.

[22:50] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Um so let's do a let's do a reading. Um a short reading right uh I it is I'm talking to you it is mid-August and it's like the end of one theater season and the beginning of the next it's kind of a little breath before all the craziness happens. And so I wonder if we could do some sort of reading that lets me uh kind of understand where where where I am on this in this sort of pivot point like where I'm coming from where I'm going.

[23:16] Emily McGill: Yes absolutely and that's one of my favorite two cards arrow spreads is where you're coming from and where you're headed. So we can look at you know post coming season yeah I mean it's interesting too because it really used to feel like the Broadway season started in September and now it starts in June. You know we we've had so many shows already open this summer. But yeah the back to school season that Virgo season still very much feels like like getting back to business.

[23:45] Gordon Cox: Yeah like a pivotal time somehow.

[23:48] Emily McGill: Yeah. All right. So I you've heard me shuffling and uh because we're doing this virtually I'm going to flip through the cards and you're gonna tell me when to stop and that's how we'll have them. Ready? So let's see where you're coming from.

[24:03] Emily McGill: Oh we have the 10 of wands oh so our wands are our fire. That's our passion, our drive our creativity, the stuff that lights us up that gets us out of bed. And the 10, we see a lot of cycles in the tarot. You know I said we have that that major arcana human souls evolution in the minor arcana we see Ace through 10, we see page through king we can talk about Ace through King as well. So the 10 can be a culmination and the 10 of wands um in this deck is Grandpa Ben from Broadway bound because this card is all about carrying a load. And it's time to let it down. And I would say that, you know, the Mad Dash of awards season and, you know, what was it? Nine shows opening in five days or or yeah, something like that.

It was like it was like eight, eighteen and twelve days or something. Yeah, it was just a stupid stupid number. And so um, this is saying, you know, that this was maybe a heavy load that is it's gotta be put down. Um the image we see here of Grandpa Ben is, you know, he looks very beat down. He's carrying a suitcase. It looks really heavy from how he's carrying it. He's sort of stooped over, he's got this sort of frown on his face, a furrowed brow. Uh, you know, he really he looks exhausted. And so that it's an opportunity, you know, for you to put down last season. That's what I would that's how I wouldn't read that. How how is this feeling for you?

[25:42] Gordon Cox: Yeah, I mean, that sounds right. It's just going in, thinking about in this little break, you have a uh a chance to think about you know, in addition to looking ahead, you can also look back at oh, I wish I'd done that differently, or oh, I wish that had played out differently, or you can think about whatever things you wish you had maybe done better, or things you didn't get to, or all of that, that they're sort of um there's a you can look at those as failures, but instead you can sort of let them go and like look ahead to the opportunities that are, yeah, exactly. The lessons and then looking ahead with kind of fresh eyes and not being weighed down by like, oh, I missed that, whatever it is.

[26:22] Emily McGill: Yeah, yeah. And this is an opportunity, as you said, to sort of have a fresh start. Um and to dive back into things maybe in a way that that feels better for you.

[26:34] Gordon Cox: Right, right. Don't go like don't go in already exhausted like Uncle Ben from that.

[26:39] Emily McGill: Yeah, yeah. Don't beat yourself up about it either, you know. That uh we have, let's see. Let me see what we what we wrote about Uncle Ben in this guidebook. Nope, it's Grandpa Ben, not Uncle Ben.

[26:53] Gordon Cox: Oh, Grandpa Ben.

[26:53] Emily McGill: That's right. No, Uncle Ben is Uncle Ben is Peter Parker. Sorry. I mean great responsibility.

[26:59] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[27:00] Emily McGill: So uh yes, the the the keywords here are overloaded, dead weight, and letting go. Ah. You know, and the reason I I have been here about Grandpa Ben is that he's comic gold for his grandson, but can't see it and hasn't the faintest idea that Eugene is even paying attention to him, suffering is all around. From aging to not understanding his grandson's sense of humor to confusing politics and parenting, his ornery nature permeates his life. He's the embodiment of suffering.

[27:29] Gordon Cox: Okay.

[27:29] Emily McGill: So let's let some of that go. That's where you're coming from. So let's see right ahead.

[27:35] Emily McGill: Excellent. Oh, we have the chariot.

[27:38] Gordon Cox: Oh.

[27:39] Emily McGill: And so this we have for the chariot, we have Tolehouse, um, Colhouse Walker Jr. from Ragtime.

[27:45] Gordon Cox: From Ragtime, yeah.

[27:47] Emily McGill: Because, you know, he's he rides on the wheels of his dream. And the thing about this car, the chariot is very much about choosing your direction and choosing how you move forward. Um, it is also about travel and expansion. So I would say for everything that you do, it is and also appropriate for the international component of theater and how you're moving forward that expansion. Um, when we pulled this card, it's you know, folks can't see it, but it's upside down, it's what we call a reversal, and there are so many different ways we can read reversals. Um, one of my favorites is through the lens of another major arcana card, the hanged person in this deck, which is Bob Fossey, because it's all about a change of perspective and patience, like divine timing, waiting for the right timing.

And so I would say that this is you know, you moving forward, choosing how you want to go, how you want to expand, but knowing that you don't need to do it at a speedy clip. You can do it, you know, in sprints, you can do it in short bursts, you might you might be expanding just by sitting still sometimes.

[29:06] Gordon Cox: Yeah, you don't always have to be moving.

[29:09] Emily McGill: But the other thing about a chariot is it can turn on a dime, you know, the the turning radius of a chariot is pretty tight. So you also have to direct the force that's pulling the chariot.

[29:21] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[29:22] Emily McGill: So it's up to you to choose that direction, but to know that you can change your direction in an instant.

[29:28] Gordon Cox: Yeah, that's interesting. That how's this feeling?

[29:32] Emily McGill: It makes me think particularly of sort of uh a couple of opportunities that I feel like just the timing wasn't right for looking ahead, and I don't think they're gonna happen. And so that's maybe just not the timing for those. And uh can uh uh one can move ahead knowing that other opportunities will happen where the timing is right, and uh yeah, and that sometimes the opportunity that isn't the right timing isn't about that opportunity, but what else it can lead to. You know, like sometimes um when we're traveling, if we you know, we miss a train and we have to take the next one, or you know, we have to sit well the we just missed that subway car closing. You have to wait for the next one. Like sometimes there's a gift in that.

There could be someone on that train that you're not supposed to see, or someone on the next train you are supposed to see. Um there's so many reasons why that we never know the answers to, but that's part of the beauty of human existence. We're not always supposed to.

[30:35] Gordon Cox: Yeah, and being mindful about where you steer yourself. That can be a thing that gets lost, particularly in the like very busy time of uh that sort of fall season, like figuring out uh figuring out what direction you want to go and what what what you want to pursue.

[30:51] Emily McGill: Right. Because, you know, as you know all too well, there's so many different angles that you can approach for any given story. And so whether it is a story that you're doing, you know, as a theater editor or something that you are just enjoying as uh, you know, a theater lover, or it has absolutely nothing to do with the theater, and it's something you know, it could be about like trying a new restaurant. That's the other thing I love about tarot, is they can it can be about these huge sort of existential life questions of you know, big changes, dramatic changes happening in our lives, or feeling like we need dramatic change because perhaps we're feeling stuck. Uh, but it can also be as silly as like, you know, what am I getting for dinner tonight? Or where do I want to go on my next vacation?

[31:36] Gordon Cox: Right, right. Yeah.

[31:37] Emily McGill: Excellent. Well, thank you.

[31:40] Gordon Cox: Yeah. That's exciting. How are you feeling after your tarot reading?

[31:44] Emily McGill: Good. That's fun. I like it. And I like the I like the the theater, the like particularly the ragtime image is I think like a really interesting way to think about the chariot.

[31:55] Emily McGill: Yes, yes. And you know, we see in this image, I mean, obviously folks can't see it now, but this is a detail. So this is you know, the large ragtime drawing. Uh coal houses just in the bottom corner. And I was actually lucky enough to be at the Algonquin yesterday where they have one of these and they were doing some repair work somewhere, so it was leaning against the wall in the room that we were in. And I was able to like see this card next to the big drawing, which is a really cool experience to witness that.

[32:25] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[32:26] Emily McGill: Um, the deck is available on September 3rd.

[32:29] Gordon Cox: Yes, it's available for pre-order now.

[32:31] Emily McGill: Okay, but it comes out on September 3rd, so you won't get your copy in your hands until then. And where should they do that? Where are their uh do you directly?

[32:44] Emily McGill: Um, my publisher Hachette, which is uh, you know, has an imprint called Running Press, which is who is publishing this. Um they have it available on their website. So there's a little books a million, your favorite local bookseller. Um, if they don't have it in stock, you can certainly ask them to to get a copy for you, or you can go ahead online and see if you can get it delivered to your door.

[33:07] Gordon Cox: Great. Well, that uh that is an opportunity for uh folks to pick up a deck to guide them all the way through the next theater season and beyond. Um thanks, Emily. It was great to talk to you.

[33:19] Gordon Cox: That was Emily McGill, the creator of the Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot, which will be released September 3rd. If you enjoyed this conversation here on Stagecraft, I'd really appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. It really does help. Or tell a friend about Stagecraft. Find past episodes and subscribe at all the places you get your pods, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on the Broadway Podcast Network, a great place to find more theater for your ears. Until next episode, find me on Instagram and Twitter at Gordon B. Cox. You can also check out my newsletter about international theater. It's called Jakewees, and it's at Gordoncox.com. Thanks for listening and see you at the theater.