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[0:00] Mo Brady: Welcome to Way Down Hadestown, a miniseries from The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm Mo Brady.

[0:15] Mo Brady: Hey, listeners, welcome back. We made it all the way through the Ensemble of Hadestown. Here's our fifth and final interview for this series, and it's with Timothy Hughes. Timothy made his Broadway debut in Chaplin in 2012. However, he's probably most well-known for his performances in The Greatest Showman, the film, and Frozen, where he originated the role of Pabbie. He's also made quite a stir on social media this year for being the six-foot-six, six-foot-seven, we'll find out, the very tall ensemble member in Hadestown. Here's our conversation.

[1:03] Mo Brady: Hi, Tim.

[1:04] Timothy Hughes: Hi.

[1:05] Mo Brady: Would you introduce yourself and tell us what neighborhood of New York City you live in?

[1:25] Timothy Hughes: Yeah, I'm Timothy Hughes. I live on the Upper West Side.

[1:27] Mo Brady: And you play Worker Number Five.

[1:29] Timothy Hughes: Worker Five, yes.

[1:30] Mo Brady: Who is Worker Number Five?

[1:32] Timothy Hughes: I mean, yes, I have like a full backstory that I've had to come up with.

[1:37] Mo Brady: We have infinite time. So we are ready.

[1:41] Timothy Hughes: Oh, my God. I don't know if I'm going to share all of that information.

[1:45] Mo Brady: No, no, no. Whatever's fine.

[1:47] Timothy Hughes: But yeah, for sure. I mean, you have to. It's one of those, the show has like all those different worlds. You have to wear a lot of different hats. So like the challenge is to not overly specify certain things so that you are, my idea of who I am in the show is a little bit malleable depending on what part of the show we're in.

[2:06] Mo Brady: That makes sense.

[2:07] Timothy Hughes: Yeah.

[2:08] Mo Brady: So for part of the show, are you Tim?

[2:09] Timothy Hughes: No, no. I'm never playing myself. Like myself just doesn't fit into the context of that show. But there are certain parts where it's more me than other times.

[2:21] Mo Brady: Are you looking at like kind of two characters then? Like a low and above character?

[2:27] Timothy Hughes: Yeah. The interesting thing is like in the Greek mythology of it all, they talk about in the underworld being shades of your former self. Like when you go down to hell, the dead version of you is kind of void of a lot of that personality and a lot of that self-awareness. Like I can play as the same character, but the character in the underworld doesn't really have the awareness of what he was. Do you know what I mean? It's a difficult thing to articulate.

[2:54] Mo Brady: Well, you guys are playing so many different kinds of shades.

[2:58] Timothy Hughes: I've attempted to make it the same character who has gone down to the underground, even though the timeline of it is a little bit more confusing. But just to lose that sense of who I was in that above ground and then kind of nearing the end of the plot to try to bring back elements of, oh, I remember these aspects of myself that I was also playing earlier in the show.

[3:23] Mo Brady: We know that workers one through five are the vocal lines.

[3:26] Timothy Hughes: Yes.

[3:27] Mo Brady: So you're the bass.

[3:28] Timothy Hughes: The lowest, yeah.

[3:29] Mo Brady: Is this really low for you? Is it normal low?

[3:31] Timothy Hughes: Not normal low. I mean, it's not normal low for I don't think anybody, even in a bass track in another Broadway show. It's just a very low bass track. Historically, I've not really sung the bass track ever. I don't know how it really happened. I think because of my height, people want me to sing lower. But naturally, my actual vocal range is probably higher. Voice teachers have always asked me to work on the higher end, because that's where it naturally sits when I'm singing. But then the expectation of this industry is always to sing lower. I think because I had that one really low note in Frozen in the beginning when I was doing, and it opened up this lower register that I was like, oh, I totally have this.

They never tested it in an audition. When I saw the sheet music, I was like, do I even have that note? And then I think from there, I've just been able to, because I had to sing very low every night, I kind of figured it out and have developed that lower register. And then this track came along and I was like, oh, I can do this.

[4:34] Mo Brady: So when was the first time you heard about Hadestown?

[4:36] Timothy Hughes: When I saw the audition. And it was a discussion that I had with my representation about going from a principal to an ensemble and whether or not that was a strategy I wanted to consider. And it definitely was based on the creative team for Hadestown and the buzz that already kind of surrounded it within our community. There's already a lot of people who I respected and admired who had said wonderful things about it off-Broadway. And I was surprised to see that there was a track that was well-suited for me because it had been on my radar and I had not seen anything that I was right for. So the fact that this popped up, I was like, well, where did this come from? Turns out they added these workers later on.

[5:22] Mo Brady: Right. And was the track you went in for, is that onstage ensemble cover of Hades?

[5:29] Timothy Hughes: Hades, yep.

[5:30] Mo Brady: So how long was the audition process for you?

[5:32] Timothy Hughes: It was very quick. I think everybody else's was very long.

[5:36] Mo Brady: It's been varying, but yes. Did you go in before Christmas or after?

[5:41] Timothy Hughes: After.

[5:42] Mo Brady: Oh my gosh.

[5:43] Timothy Hughes: Yes.

[5:44] Mo Brady: Okay, keep going.

[5:45] Timothy Hughes: I went in for two days. It was Monday and Tuesday and then I was done. We danced first and it was a very small room. I think it was a, what do they call it when they like reopen the audition or they are still seeking. They're still seeking. So when this came around, it was still seeking. I was like, oh, they've looked for this before. And I wasn't looking necessarily at the time. But my year was coming up for Frozen and I wanted to shop around a little bit. I knew that it was going to be a very specific group of people. So the first dance call was already a small room. I would say like 15 to 20 guys. And then from there it was cut down quickly after that first dance call to maybe five of us.

And then five of us did a ton of the material. Rachel, our director, wasn't even in the audition room. So Liam, our music director, ran a lot of it and a lot of it was taped. And then the associate director Tamela was there. And I felt really good. I felt like I worked a lot of the material and they threw a lot at me. It actually was probably the hardest audition for testing my musicality and reading of music because things that I was not asked or required to learn, I was singing kind of sight singing in the audition. So I felt good, pretty confident. And I was like, well, these are the people. These are my closest competition. And then that and they were like, well, final calls are later this week or something.

And then at like 10 o'clock that night, I was called back for Tuesday morning. So I came back right away and it was starting with singing this time and there was only one other guy from the day before. So I knew it was him or me, if they were going to hire one of us.

[7:29] Mo Brady: Right, right. Because still seeking, maybe they'll just still seek after you leave.

[7:32] Timothy Hughes: Yeah, yeah. But still seeking also means they're desperate to find somebody because they've already looked. Yeah. So I went through the whole thing again. Actually, I didn't work the Hades material right away. I walked out of the room and I was like, oh, crap. They didn't have me do any of that. And then they call me back in right away. Oh, okay. So then I went back in and I did the Hades material and then we changed and then the last group of people that we danced with was just a combination of all the last puzzle pieces that they needed. People were in for the swing track, Orpheus cover and Hades cover, it seemed. So it was only a group of, and that was it.

[8:11] Mo Brady: And Tuesday, and when does the call come?

[8:13] Timothy Hughes: I think Thursday.

[8:14] Mo Brady: This is your third Broadway show.

[8:16] Timothy Hughes: Yeah.

[8:17] Mo Brady: Three very different kinds of shows. Three very different tracks, I think.

[8:23] Timothy Hughes: For sure.

[8:24] Mo Brady: Which has been the most physically demanding?

[8:27] Timothy Hughes: I think Chaplin was the most physically demanding.

[8:30] Mo Brady: I'll believe that.

[8:31] Timothy Hughes: Yeah.

[8:32] Mo Brady: It was Warren Carlyle, right?

[8:33] Timothy Hughes: Warren Carlyle's choreography.

[8:34] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[8:35] Timothy Hughes: And direction.

[8:36] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[8:37] Timothy Hughes: I lifted every woman in that show. Literally, I think every woman. So it was, and it was just nonstop. His direction was so cinematic. So it just was a seamless transition here and there, and we were wearing a ton of...

[16:39] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Timothy Hughes for sharing his stories with us this week.

[16:43] Mo Brady: You can learn more about him and how to connect with him online by visiting our website, theensemblist.com.

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[17:20] Mo Brady: Thanks for listening. Until next time.