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[0:00] Mo Brady: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome, I'm Mo Brady.

[0:22] Mo Brady: Replacing an original company member in a Broadway show is a feat for any performer. But being the first person to replace in a show comes with a set of joys and challenges all its own, ones that only get magnified when the show is a huge success, like last season's Tony Award-winning musical Hadestown. Anthony Chatmon II was deemed that honor when he joined the company earlier this fall, replacing actor Ahmaud Simmons as a member of the show's ensemble. He shared with us what that experience has been like for him, as well as how it differed from his Broadway debut as a standby on last season's Be More Chill. Here's our conversation.

[0:56] Mo Brady: Hi. Hey, what's up? Would you introduce yourself and tell us what neighborhood of New York City you live in?

[1:19] Anthony Chatmon II: My name is Anthony Chatmon II, and I live in Hamilton Heights.

[1:25] Mo Brady: Who do you play in Hadestown?

[1:27] Anthony Chatmon II: I'm worker number four, and I cover Orpheus and Hermes.

[1:33] Mo Brady: When was the first time you heard about Hadestown?

[1:38] Anthony Chatmon II: I remember just little bits of it last year, just hearing about this cool underground-type musical. I didn't know about it off-Broadway. I knew that there was some sort of workers kind of deal, and I heard just fates and little words like that. I had no clue what it was, what the music was.

[1:56] Mo Brady: When was your first audition for it?

[1:58] Anthony Chatmon II: My first audition was in July. I was doing Be More Chill, and we had gotten maybe our closing notice about a month before. So I had recently worked with Rachel Chavkin in a lab of Lempicka. So a few of my castmates from the lab were in this production, and I had heard that there was someone leaving. Then the dance captain had reached out, and he was like, hey, you know someone's leaving. You know that Ahmad is leaving, and you should try to get your agents to come in. And so once he kind of reached out, and I'd already heard it before, I reached out to my agents, and I was like, hey, let's make sure I get in. Let's figure this out.

[2:33] Mo Brady: What was the audition process like?

[2:35] Anthony Chatmon II: The hardest thing in my life. It was so hard. I had gotten information that this worker would cover Orpheus and Hermes, so I knew I needed to bring in and play my guitar, which I have a limited experience with, and I've been playing guitar for about 10 years, but never as needing to do it live in a show. I sort of just wrote my own material with it, and I had used it before in audition settings, but not as extensive as what's needed. I had gotten material for that. It was so many pages of sheet music, and at that point, the album hadn't come out yet. So you had the New York Theater Workshop album, but that really wasn't what was happening now in the Broadway company, and so a lot of that had changed.

So I didn't have a lot of help really getting myself to what I needed, and there were so many pages of sheet music. At the end, I think I had 45 pages of sheet music between the workers' stuff and the Orpheus stuff and the Hermes stuff. On the day of the audition, my first audition, I had six appointments that day. It was the longest audition day I've ever had in my life. I had had to change so many appointment times around. Things were coming in. There was a lot of callbacks, and it was a very exciting day, but it was very stressful. And then I went in for my dance call for Hadestown. I finished that. They made a cut, and they asked the people to stay, that they would sing, and they would have a bunch of groups that went all the way until 6 p.m. And so at that point, Hadestown was the final audition of that day, and that's when I had to play my guitar and do all the workers' material and the Orpheus material.

So my brain was pretty fried because I had so many sides in my head, just so, so, so, so much work. And I was like, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm just going to have to... I'm going to walk in, and if they like what they like, would like what they see, then that's just going to be what it is. And I remember hearing some people doing some stuff that I didn't... maybe I read the audition packet wrong, and I was like, oh. I walked in, I was like, sorry guys, I'm not sure I was supposed to do this. And they were like, oh, oh, don't worry about it. And the music director, Liam Robinson, got up, and he was like, just repeat after me. And he kept doing all the workers' lines, and I just repeated what I heard.

And then we played a little bit of the guitar for... I had to do one of the epics for them. And as I was leaving, he had... and I told him, I play guitar, I'm not the best. I know that there's a guitar teacher on the show, and I sort of had expressed that, and I was like, I can learn, I can do what I need, but at this moment, I don't know that I'm going to show the best thing. So then when I was leaving, Liam goes, Anthony, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but what is it that... what kind of music do you play on the guitar? And I was like, well, anything Jason Mraz style. I'm really good with great strumming patterns, and I do play and I accompany myself, and that's what I can do. And he was like, well, I don't want to put you on the spot, but can you do something now?

My brain was so fried, I couldn't put together anything. And I was like, oh, God. I was like, yeah. And I just sat down, and I started playing some chords, and I just made up a song, just completely made a song up. I couldn't tell you what it was about. I think there was a word, I put the word river in there somewhere, but it felt good. I actually feel pretty comfortable making melodies up, and I feel like it's actually one of my stronger suits. And so I sang this song, and I finished. I said, I don't know what I just sang for you guys, but this was the closest thing I think I can give you to the most authentic version of me, and version of me playing at the guitar, and just free-falling and going for it.

[6:07] Mo Brady: So what happened after that?

[6:09] Anthony Chatmon II: So after that, I got a callback. I was told by the casting director that he really needs to get more off book. He needs to really learn all the notes, and try not to diverge from the notes on the page. So I hired a guy to come to my house and just teach me for two hours, because they also needed to hear the Orpheus and the Hermes material. And he just drilled me, and drilled me, and drilled me on all the notes and all the music. I came back in for a final day, and we danced for about an hour. And then I came back in, and it was at that moment, it was like right before I went in, this calm came over my body. And I was like, oh, I'm going to do this. It was the first time I had felt confident about the material.

It was 15 minutes before I walked in. I had rented a room in that studio to just go over the stuff quickly, and I was like, yeah, I feel it. And never before in moments in the morning leading up to it, I was like, this is going to be terrible. But then I was like, I feel this. And I went into this zone, and I went in and just did it all. And it all just happened the way I would have wanted it to.

[7:18] Mo Brady: And when did the offer come?

[7:19] Anthony Chatmon II: The next day. I got a little bit of an inkling before, like right after the audition. I was doing an understudy rehearsal. I'd be more chill. My agent called me, and they were asking me some final questions. And the next day, she called. She was like, yeah, it's yours. And it was just crazy. I've never left a job. I've never lined up work quite like that in my other gigs.

[7:41] Mo Brady: How does rehearsal replacing in a Broadway show differ from originating? You were part of the process for Be More Chill.

[7:46] Anthony Chatmon II: I think there's two versions. There's just replacing in a show, which I've done before. And then there's just being the first replacement, which is a blessing and a curse all in the same. There's something that the entire company knows that you don't. There's information that everyone sort of heard going into a show that you didn't get. So it's a lot of playing clue or something, like trying to just piece everything that you can together. And everyone heard it one way, and they're sort of trying to help you navigate it in their own way.

[8:22] Mo Brady: Are you talking about plot or setting or backstory?

[8:25] Anthony Chatmon II: I think there's a lot of moments. There can be kind of everything. There's sort of little funny moments on stage that sort of derive and originated from the rehearsal room.

[8:34] Anthony Chatmon II: With this show, not everything is as direct in storyline and is even like where we are, right? If you look at all the band members, none of them are in like one set period of clothing. Everyone's kind of in a sort of hodgepodge of decades. And that's sort of the timelessness of the show. And so to like get concrete answers for this show, it was almost impossible, even from the dance captain to the associate director to the director, I think. But there was a learned experience that I think everyone sort of has being in the original cast and sort of their originality. And obviously, being in an original cast, the company members sort of get to create a bit of the path of the characters in each of the tracks.

And so those get to kind of be yours, as opposed to replacing, you sort of fill in the shoes of someone and you do get to have your own bits. And it morphs over time to who you are, and the things that you want to do. But I would say, as you are first jumping to the show, mainly because people are used to what someone else is doing, and there's not too much room right away to just change and make your own kind of thing. But slowly over time, I've found that people start to take what you want to do and how you want to move on the stage and they kind of take that in and you start to create your own little moments. So that's pretty cool. Did you see the show before you started rehearsals?

[10:01] Anthony Chatmon II: Yeah, I saw the show in previews. I sat in the front row of the mezzanine, perfect place to sit. Yeah, little did I know that three months later, I would be on the stage. I had no clue. What has been surprising about the show itself going from being an audience member to being part of it? Just the hole in the middle of the stage. I really was terrified watching it. And I couldn't believe that actors were on stage with that giant hole in the middle. And there was like fog on the ground. And I was like, they're all gonna fall. This is crazy. They're putting these actors on stage like that. But being on the stage, it is as deep as it looks. But it's quite comforting. Like you can be pretty close to the hole. And I felt pretty comfortable to just do my normal choreography or whatever I had to do around it. Does Worker No. 4 have a name?

[10:50] Anthony Chatmon II: Worker No. 4 doesn't have a name. It kind of lives in sort of me. Worker No. 4 is sort of like a storyteller for me, especially because we start at the top of the show and we are pretty much ourselves. And it's served me to stay-ish in the world of like myself. Are you yourself when you go down to Hadestown?

[11:11] Anthony Chatmon II: I am a version of myself. I feel like that's like the Black Mirror version of myself, the person I haven't met yet. So I guess when you are thinking about like getting in the right zone for mentally to like embody a character, you might like need to sort of step out in order to be able to step into this character's shoes. Then if you're just going out, basically being a version of yourself, does that require some sort of different kind of mental prep?

[11:40] Anthony Chatmon II: I don't think it takes a mental prep for me. I think it takes a physical prep for me. My physicality, my mental and emotional state lives within my physicality. And so I definitely have to be physically available for what the show will do. But I think the cool thing about the show is that, as Hermes explains it, it's this like railroad line and we sort of take this journey. And the journey can start at a very neutral me, self. And luckily enough, the show takes me where I need to go. So as long as I'm physically in a physical state, it allows me to like take the mental and emotional journey. And the music is just it's so easy to just sit right into it and it takes you exactly where you need to go.

I'm always surprised. Sometimes I'll be sitting there and I'm like, I can't believe in about an hour I'll be like dirty and in a jumpsuit and underground and like, you know, because I just don't feel like it's going to get there. And then somehow I'm there. And so that's it's kind of really cool how it's sort of maps itself out for that.

[12:41] Anthony Chatmon II: So do you have a preference of this experience being on stage in an ensemble track versus standing by for leading roles?

[12:48] Anthony Chatmon II: Definitely. I do like being on the stage every night. I love crafting eight shows a week. I think there's something there that there's just a learned experience in a sort of stage presence that just grows. And I think that you just grow getting to do something over and over and over. But as far as understudying, it is a little easier. It's definitely easier being offstage because you can truly just watch and rehearse as much as you want while the show is happening. While, you know, there are times now when I'm in the show that I'm trying to watch what Reeve is doing or what Andre is doing. And then I kind of mess up my part because my eyes were on them because I just had a rehearsal earlier that day and I wanted to like check out what they were doing.

And there are times that you get swung out of the show, but it's like one time you get one opportunity to like try to catch everything. So, yeah, as far as understudying it, it's much easier to do it offstage. And I think that that is what's great about standbys.

[13:54] Anthony Chatmon II: What stands out to you more? Is it the experience of being in New York at home on Broadway, or is it the experience of being in an ensemble of a big musical?

[14:06] Anthony Chatmon II: I think it's the experience. For me personally, I don't think Broadway felt any different than the tours. If anything, the tours, I had more room and, you know, and every other week there was something new to look at. And, you know, that kept you sort of eager and excited. Your daily routines and fresh. I definitely think this experience is more so like, yes, like the big touring experience. It's quite a mashup actually of like Book of Mormon and when I toured with Fiasco's Into the Woods. I think it's very close to Fiasco's Into the Woods because of its ensemble, sort of ensemble storytelling experience. The being on stage the whole time, the sort of focus towards what's happening on the stage and everyone's sort of working together to create something.

Whereas Book of Mormon was more of this big production. I came on for my scenes and then I came off the stage and I just kind of was only there when needed. But obviously it was very similar to the ensemble work that I do now or the ensemble dancing that I do on the stage. It's a mashup.

[15:10] Anthony Chatmon II: Yeah, it's a little mashup, but it's not like Be More Chill actually. It's like less, it's at least like Be More Chill than it is the other two shows.

[15:18] Anthony Chatmon II: Do you have a favorite part of the show to perform?

[15:21] Anthony Chatmon II: The number that's never lost on me is "Wait For Me," both of them. When I watched it, when I came to the show to join the company and I was watching, I was always very emotional doing those parts of the show and it just never loses its excitement or tingle. I always sort of know that this is the number that everyone is waiting for. It's just so powerful and I think it's the most beautiful piece of theater on Broadway right now. I think that moment right there is just both of those moments. Just so incredible. But I think one of the more exciting numbers to do is "Living It Up on Top." I love it so much. I think the dancing is so exciting. It's such a party. No matter, even if I'm tired that day, it's just like that song gets me up and going. Yeah, I live for doing that number.

[16:22] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Anthony Chatmon II for sharing his stories with us this week. The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Mo Brady. Please help others find out about The Ensemblist by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. You can also download episodes wherever you get your podcasts, or at theensemblist.com. Follow The Ensemblist on Instagram to see the latest posts from our website, where we share the stories of talented artists working in Broadway ensembles. And if you haven't checked out some of our fellow podcasts in the Broadway Podcast Network, you should check them out at bpn.fm. Thanks for listening, guys. Until next time, and happy holidays.