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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.

[0:15] Mo Brady: I'm Mo Brady. Whenever New York-based actors leave the city to perform, there's a certain amount of bravery that must take place when they walk outside a theater's doors. Although the production may stay the same from city to city, your life outside the theater can change drastically depending on where you are. That challenge is magnified when the cities you're touring are halfway across the world in countries you've never been to before. Ryan Steele has a long history with the Broadway musical An American in Paris. After developing the show in its pre-Broadway workshops, he spent a year traveling on the show's first national tour. After some time back in the city, he signed on for the production's international tour, which took him to China, Taiwan, and France. Ryan came into the studio to talk about the differences in theater audiences around the world, and how An American in Paris became the gift that kept on giving. Here's our conversation.

[1:21] Mo Brady: Hi, Ryan.

[1:22] Ryan Steele: Hi, Mo.

[1:23] Mo Brady: Would you introduce yourself and tell us what neighborhood of New York City you live in?

[1:41] Ryan Steele: Yes. Hi, my name is Ryan Steele, and I currently live in Harlem.

[1:46] Mo Brady: And you've done An American in Paris a lot, right?

[1:49] Ryan Steele: I've done it a lot. I did the workshop set six years ago, and I did the first national tour for a year, and I most recently did the international tour, which took me to China and Taiwan and Paris.

[2:04] Mo Brady: In our business, one way to think about the way that you progress is that Broadway is the pinnacle, and tours are a stepping stone to Broadway. And yet you have not done that trajectory. You were on Broadway for many times, and then did the tour. What made you think, I'm going to leave the city and my house?

[2:24] Ryan Steele: Honestly, the first national tour of An American in Paris was super eye-opening. I moved to New York when I was 18, and I made my Broadway debut. I got very lucky. And that's just what I thought I would do, and that's what I thought felt like a sort of plateau. That's what people think is the pinnacle, and that's what people aim for. And then I did the national tour because that show is so beautiful, and the role is so specific and to what I want to do.

[2:50] Mo Brady: So this was an opportunity to play principal, right?

[2:52] Ryan Steele: Yeah. It was a principal, but also doing the dancing that I've been wanting to do my whole entire life. That's what I trained so hard to do. So yeah, it was an opportunity that I needed to jump on.

[3:02] Mo Brady: Did you feel like it was a role that you wouldn't necessarily get to play in the city? Or was it also just this opportunity to sort of do something you hadn't done before?

[3:11] Ryan Steele: Yeah, it was absolutely something brand new and scary. And maybe it was a little more comforting knowing that I could do that and put myself in that situation without New York City watching me, you know what I mean?

[3:22] Mo Brady: What did you love about playing Jerry?

[3:24] Ryan Steele: Like I said, that dancing is what I wanted to do since I was a kid, and that's what I worked so hard to do. And a lot of times, we're not really given that opportunity to dance like that in a Broadway show. But I just love that everyone's choreography is so specific and so technical and unique.

[3:40] Mo Brady: How long did you tour the States?

[3:42] Ryan Steele: For a year.

[3:43] Mo Brady: Did you have any favorite locations?

[3:44] Ryan Steele: I love Chicago. That was super fun. We were there for three weeks in the summer. Thank God. The California cities were awesome.

[3:50] Mo Brady: What makes a city good to tour?

[3:52] Ryan Steele: Honestly, it's what you make it. I became very good at Airbnbs. I was sort of a ninja.

[3:58] Mo Brady: Yeah, it's who you live with. That's the car that you rent. It's the bars that you find. It's the lunch spots, your favorite coffee shop. It's what you make it. I loved every city. But yeah, I think it's definitely what you make it.

[4:10] Mo Brady: Okay, so you travel on a Monday, you get to your Airbnb. You called yourself an Airbnb ninja. What does that mean? What makes a ninja of Airbnb?

[4:19] Ryan Steele: Sometimes there's not a TV. Things that we don't think about, but happen a lot. I look at the pictures really closely, and I, yeah, sometimes there's not a TV, or sometimes it says no AC, or no Wi-Fi, but yeah, there are specific things that I know that I like in an apartment, and I had to learn to look closely.

[4:36] Mo Brady: So then on Tuesday, what time would you walk into the theater to do a...

[4:41] Ryan Steele: Normally there's a sound check, probably, let's see, if it's a 7 o'clock show, the sound check would happen at maybe 4:30. We'd have a company meeting, talk about the emergency exits, and get to know the theater, all that good stuff, and then have a sound check for half an hour, and then have a little break to go get a bite to eat, come back, warm up, and meet your dresser for the first time, and then boom, show.

[5:02] Mo Brady: Now, that's such a dance-heavy show. What's hard about traveling and keeping your body in shape?

[5:08] Ryan Steele: Yeah, it's difficult to go to a new city where you don't know if there's a dance studio that we can take classes at, or a yoga studio that you enjoy. Also, flying on an airplane, if it's three hours, your ankles are swollen, and that affects the way that you warm up the next day, and if you're on a bus for four hours, your body gets really tight and weird. So yeah, it was a challenge to tour with a show like that.

[5:34] Mo Brady: Did you end up taking dance classes and going to yoga studios, or did you do your own bar?

[5:40] Ryan Steele: We normally had a warm-up space set aside for us in the theater, hopefully. Sometimes on Tuesdays it didn't work because the load-in took a long time, and then we had to warm up in a stairwell. But normally, we had a space available to us, and I mostly did my own warm-up, but I also explored yoga studios and gyms and stuff like that, but sometimes you couldn't really rely on those. So yeah, my own warm-up was important to me.

[6:05] Mo Brady: And what are the challenges of picking up your life every three weeks or less?

[6:10] Ryan Steele: One of the biggest challenges was how quickly we need to move into the theater, meet the local crew, learn the traffic of the backstage, soundcheck, all that stuff, and then put on a show an hour later. That was really difficult. And internationally, the local crew, we didn't speak the same language.

[6:27] Mo Brady: So you did An American in Paris for a year on the road, and then you came back. Was the international tour a different contract?

[6:34] Ryan Steele: Yes. When I left the national tour of An American in Paris, I thought I was saying goodbye to it. As far as I knew, there were no plans of an international tour. I wasn't going to be a part. I didn't know anything about what was going to happen. So I received a phone call from our resident director. His name is Sean Kelly. He worked on the show on Broadway, did the national tour, stayed on the national tour after I left. He told me there was a possibility, and he asked my interest. And I was available, and I loved the show. So I said I was down.

[7:02] Mo Brady: Was the offer for all three of those locations?

[7:04] Ryan Steele: Yeah. The offer initially was, my offer was only for the Asia portion of the tour at first, which was three and a half months from May to August.

[7:14] Mo Brady: That's not that long.

[7:16] Ryan Steele: Yeah. And had you been to Asia before?

[7:18] Mo Brady: I had never, no.

[7:20] Ryan Steele: So it was a wild experience. Putting up the show, is it the national tour company? Was it all rehearsed here and then brought over there? Did you rehearse there?

[7:31] Ryan Steele: It was made up mostly of alumni from Broadway, the national tour, and the West End. So most people knew the show. We had a really quick rehearsal process, but yeah, I mean it was quick and fast and furious, but it was all done in China too. So we had to get to know the new country that we were in while learning a show. It was a lot.

[7:50] Mo Brady: Was the rehearsal process basically just like doing a show here in the States?

[7:54] Ryan Steele: Yeah. We had 10 to 6. We had our music rehearsals. We had our warm-ups. We had our dance rehearsals. We had scene work. Yeah. Totally.

[8:02] Mo Brady: What did the rehearsal spaces look like?

[8:03] Ryan Steele: They were beautiful. We rehearsed in Taiwan actually, and gorgeous space. Some of the theaters were out of this world.

[8:07] Mo Brady: Is everyone in the room speaking English?

[8:09] Ryan Steele: We had someone, we had a company manager who spoke both languages and could help us, but they were mostly non-English speaking crew members.

[8:21] Mo Brady: As a cast, we all spoke English. Most of our company managers and general managers and stuff spoke English as well. For the most part, everyone else was non-English speaking.

[8:30] Mo Brady: How does that change the backstage dynamic? What are the barriers that you didn't expect?

[8:34] Ryan Steele: It was really difficult. I got really good at gesturing. It was really difficult. A dresser that you meet five minutes before the show has to do all of these quick changes. It didn't really often go well the first time, so you had to learn how to do a lot on your own and to roll with the punches.

[8:56] Mo Brady: Did you live in hotels, Airbnbs?

[8:59] Ryan Steele: Yeah. We lived in hotels as a company, which was nice. It was really a bonding experience to all live in China for three and a half months together.

[9:10] Mo Brady: You mean like the living together, like a dorm, or like exploring the city?

[9:14] Ryan Steele: We actually had one city where we were all on the same floor, which felt very much like a dorm of the hotel, so that was really fun. Just going through something like that, China was, having been there, I loved what I learned. It was a difficult city to do a show as challenging as An American in Paris in. So thankfully, the company was so wonderful and we relied on each other.

[9:33] Mo Brady: Wait, what does that mean, it was difficult to do there?

[9:36] Ryan Steele: It's just a very different culture. Theater really isn't, from what I understood, a huge part of their culture, and the way that they watch it is very different than the way that Westerners watch theater and experience it.

[9:47] Mo Brady: Do the audiences sound different or applaud in different ways, react in different ways?

[9:51] Ryan Steele: Jerry, the role of Jerry Mulligan in Leeds does not have alternates, so I was swung out twice a week. I sat out in the audience, one show, and it was sort of the way that we watch a baseball game. We're enjoying it, we're there and we're happy to be there, but there's not the same focus that if we were to watch a Broadway musical, you know what I mean? And there were phones out, and it was not, I didn't feel disrespected, it's not a disrespectful thing, it's just a different way that they watch theater and experience theater. One time, I literally saw a MacBook open. I was on stage and I saw a MacBook in the audience.

[10:26] Mo Brady: That's such a trip. What was one experience outside of the theater that you can't believe that you got to have?

[10:35] Ryan Steele: The Great Wall. We went to the Great Wall, and that was something that I didn't really ever think that I would do, and it wasn't really on my radar. Also, like, America is just such a young country compared to the rest of the world, and to see something like the Great Wall of China was mind-blowing, and I didn't really know how it was going to affect me, but it was super cool. Yeah, that was one of my favorite things that I did.

[10:57] Mo Brady: So the last section I want to ask you about is Paris, right? I think when I found out that American in Paris was going back to Paris, I was like, wow, that's kind of crazy, because this production began in Paris. Its pre-Broadway tryout was at the same theater in Paris?

[11:11] Ryan Steele: Yeah, the Châtelet.

[11:12] Mo Brady: How was that experience different than the national tour experience?

[11:16] Ryan Steele: So special. It was one of the coolest experiences ever, to get to do that show with Leanne Cope, too.

[11:22] Mo Brady: Can we just talk about her for a second?

[11:25] Ryan Steele: This is the original actress, what's her name?

[11:28] Mo Brady: Lise.

[11:29] Ryan Steele: Lise. She originated the part on Broadway. She was nominated for a Tony for it, and like I said, I did the workshop of it in the ensemble, so I got to watch her and Robbie create these roles, and I'm just such a big fan of them. And to do that role with Leanne was mind-blowing. It was so cool to learn from her, and she knows the character better than anyone. She created it.

[11:50] Mo Brady: So to do that in Paris, I mean with the whole company, the whole company is so special, but it was really cool. It was a homecoming of the show, and for her, and to be a part of that, and a small part of her experience, was an honor. Super cool.

[12:02] Ryan Steele: I mean, when you're in a theater, you are just kind of looking, when you're on stage, you're looking out at seats, and you know, there's like three tiers, and there's like dimmed lights. Did it feel like you were performing in Paris? I'm like, I'm wondering like how, like did that, did you have that like sense about it?

[12:16] Ryan Steele: Yeah. So in An American in Paris, at the end, there's a ballet, like the show within a show kind of thing. The ballet is, the backdrop of the theater is the Châtelet, so is, and has always been the Châtelet. So like regardless of what city we're in, the backdrop is Paris. To have the backdrop behind us, and then look out and see the actual Châtelet was so crazy. I've done the show on and off for, like I said, five years, and I've lived, quote unquote, in that world in Paris for so long, but to actually experience it in person was insane. And to go to the places that we mentioned in the script and pick a bench with Leanne that we, like an actual bench on the Seine that we would be doing the Liza scene on was really special.

And it made it feel so, so, I don't know, really special, super cool. It just really was a magical couple months to do that in Paris, to close it out, especially with that group of people. Not all of us, but most of us had done it on Broadway, on the West End, on the National Tour, and it was an encore, you know? It was another opportunity to experience the show that changed so many of our lives, and to do that together and have one final goodbye in Paris was epic. To celebrate the show that we all love so much, to celebrate each other and our experiences with it, it was super cool.

[13:44] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Ryan Steele for sharing his stories this week. The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Mo Brady. The Ensemblist is proud to be a part of Broadway Podcast Network. If you can't get enough of theater conversations directed into your earbuds from us, there are more than 40 other great theater podcasts to listen to. Check us all out at bpn.fm. Also we've joined the world of Patreon, where you can support the work we do here at The Ensemblist for as little as $5 a month. Learn how at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. And if you don't have the cash to donate $5 a month, you can still help us out by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. One more thing, make sure you're following us on Instagram to see the latest posts from our website, where we share the stories of talented artists working in theater ensembles. Thanks for listening, guys. Until next time.