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[0:00] Mo Brady: You're listening to Let's Talk About Auditions, a new miniseries from The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome, I'm Mo Brady.

[0:34] Mo Brady: Welcome to a new miniseries from The Ensemblist, where we sit down with folks on the other side of the casting table to ask them about what they're really looking for in a Broadway ensemble. As performers, we hear time and again that the folks casting shows want auditioners to succeed. But what does that success actually look like?

[0:53] Mo Brady: Spencer Liff began his Broadway career as a dancer, performing in the original companies of Big, The Wedding Singer, and Cry-Baby. But for the last ten years, Liff has worked on the other side of the table, creating staging for both stage and screen. He's an Emmy nominee for his work on So You Think You Can Dance, where he has been a resident choreographer for a decade. Back on Broadway, he's created the staging for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Spring Awakening, Falsettos, and Head Over Heels. I was recently able to speak to him on a short trip to New York, where he was here casting a new workshop of Reefer Madness. Here's our conversation.

[1:28] Mo Brady: You introduce yourself, and I guess tell us your Broadway choreography credits?

[1:49] Spencer Liff: Alright. My name is Spencer Liff, and I have choreographed four shows on Broadway, starting with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and then the revival of Spring Awakening, the Deaf West version, that was in sign language. And then I did the revival of Falsettos. And then my first original Broadway show as a choreographer was Head Over Heels this season.

[2:09] Mo Brady: And you're in New York right now casting?

[2:11] Spencer Liff: I am in New York at this very moment, in the middle of casting Reefer Madness, the new relaunched 20th anniversary production of Reefer Madness. We are doing a production this fall in a workshop, like a good proper workshop under that new contract that was just sort of fought for and agreed upon. And we're doing that this summer.

[2:31] Mo Brady: The first Broadway ensemble you ever cast was Spring Awakening. Then your next big Broadway ensemble, I mean, big is relative, but Head Over Heels, right? And that's eight people?

[2:41] Spencer Liff: Head Over Heels was truly my first time to cast and craft, you know, a Broadway ensemble of dancers, triple threats, start from scratch. And, you know, I'd been with the show when we were just doing readings up at Vassar. And then I got to really prove myself as a choreographer and make my mark on what I thought the show could be with our workshop that we did now, I guess, three years ago. That was my moment to show Michael Mayer and show the producers why the show needed to dance, how it could dance, and why they needed to let me cast like true rock star dancers. You know, when the show was at Oregon Shake, it had a different life with a different creative team entirely, and they scrapped that and started over.

And the show really didn't move. It was a singer show. And I knew instantly when reading it on the page that the dance could offer so much in terms of landscape and world shaping, and that ensemble could add so much fabulousness to the heart of that show. And so I fought really hard, and I killed myself finding really great dancers.

[3:42] Mo Brady: What does fought really hard look like?

[3:46] Spencer Liff: Having an ensemble is, when you're at the casting table, you have to throw a stake down and say, I need this. I need these people. And it is a polite battle between the music director, the director, the choreographer. In those early stages, they said, let's not worry about covering yet. We'll just give you these eight people. Tom Kitt graciously said, I learned what I needed to from the last reading we did at Vassar. He said, why don't you learn what you need to in the workshop and cast the dancers that you want? And that was incredibly kind of him because he said, I know what I need to know. We don't have to have the best voices in the world, but why don't you have some killer dancers? We ended up with people that really could do both, but his willingness to let me do that allowed me to create what the dance was in that show in those four weeks.

And then the producers, the directors, they couldn't imagine the show without the dancing like that. It wasn't like we were going to take a step backwards to then add voices and covers, etc. It just meant that we then really had to find people for the production that could do all those things. And we saw 600 plus dancers for those eight tracks and then two swing tracks. Carnahan cast it. He's a great office there. And they stuck with me call after call after call until we found what we needed.

[5:07] Mo Brady: And what did you need?

[5:10] Spencer Liff: We needed these like unicorns that could kick their face and dance and not only like a Broadway style dancing. I was like doing voguing and pop and locking and, you know, tutting and triple pirouettes and kick your face to dance like that with this very queer aesthetic and this unique personality. Then you had to sing this insanely hard rock score. The singing was not easy in that show. And then all of our ensemble had to cover people like Bonnie Milligan and Taylor and Sosha. These are not easy roles. They have to act on Shakespeare text. They have to sing this incredibly hard show. And we knew that they'd have to be going on. There wasn't a singer ensemble that was there to cover those people. It had to be the eight dancers. And so we kept pushing and we kept trying and we found incredible swing dance captains that covered the leads as well. And the very last piece was this girl named Amber Artelino.

[6:07] Mo Brady: She's been on the podcast recently.

[6:09] Spencer Liff: So Amber, you might hate this story because I after seeing 600 dancers, I needed one last tall leggy girl who could sing her face off and cover. I kept asking her to come in and she could never come in. And there was a girl already cast, Samantha Plino, and they had been in Hamilton, Chicago together. And Samantha kept like saying, there's this girl that's like great. She would fit it. She'd be great. Samantha went to Chicago and like taught her the audition combo and they did it in like the gym of their building they lived in in Chicago and she sent in the tape and I'm like, damn, this girl is good. But she just couldn't get in the room ever for any of our calls. And we did the very last call, you know, 15 auditions later just for this one last girl spot that had to sort of tick all these boxes.

And at the end of the day, the girl wasn't in the room. And I said, you know what? There's this girl who sent in a tape and we opened it up on the laptop and we watched it the whole team and the whole team went, okay, hire that girl. So after seeing 600 people and some of these poor dancers came in so many times, the girl who never actually came in the room, got the job. Sometimes it works like that. And she came in and she was hands down like, you know, one of everybody's favorites. Everybody who saw the show was like that girl in the yellow tights with the legs. I'm like, yeah, I hired her off a tape.

[7:24] Mo Brady: How many of the eight were part of that workshop you did?

[7:29] Spencer Liff: Probably two. And it wasn't because we didn't want a lot of our workshop people back. They were just all really talented and booked. You know, Demarius went into Mean Girls. Nina La Farga was in the original and she went off into Frozen. Jenny LaRoche went off into Donna Summer. Like they all got shows because we were about a year from our workshop. We didn't have a theater. We didn't have a space. We were like, had this great workshop and then we're in that pile of shows waiting for the, will we get a theater? And by the time it happened, a whole year had passed and, you know, people go. Some of my favorites were Ari Groover was one of the original dancers and she was a huge inspiration to me.

She had been a student of mine in Broadway Dreams. I'd known her since she was 17. She walked in the room and just instantly like grabbed everyone. She was the one Michael Mayer said to me, you can hire anyone you want, but you have to hire that girl. And I like secretly was like, OK, like I freaking love her. I've known her forever. Happy to hire that girl for you, Michael.

[8:28] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[8:55] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[9:18] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[9:48] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[10:11] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[10:31] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[11:00] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[11:20] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[11:49] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[12:19] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[12:48] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[13:13] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[13:42] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[14:12] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[14:41] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[15:11] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[15:38] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist & Broadway Podcast Network is a production of The Ensemblist.com, headquartered at The Ensemblist.com.

[16:09] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Spencer Liff for sharing his stories with us this week.

[16:13] Mo Brady: You can learn more about him and how to connect with him online by visiting our website, theensemblist.com.

[16:18] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Mo Brady.

[16:21] Mo Brady: You can help others find out about The Ensemblist by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

[16:26] Mo Brady: Super easy to do, guys, and it really does mean a lot.

[16:29] Mo Brady: You can also follow us on Instagram to see the latest posts on our website, where we are sharing the stories of talented artists working in Broadway ensembles.

[16:33] Mo Brady: Thanks for listening.

[16:37] Mo Brady: Until next time.