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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.

[0:14] Mo Brady: Hey there listeners, it's Saturday, March 14th. I'm podcasting at home again today. And today I am talking to Christopher Henry Young, who is in the San Francisco production of Hamilton that was recently put on hold. We are talking about how he learned that news and what he's doing in San Francisco now that he isn't able to perform. Here's our conversation.

[0:40] Mo Brady: Hi, would you introduce yourself and tell us where you are living right now?

[0:45] Christopher Henry Young: I am Christopher Henry Young. I am currently living in San Francisco. I moved out here because of the job with Hamilton's And Peggy company, which is stationed here in San Francisco.

[0:58] Mo Brady: So what is the status with your sit-down company of Hamilton in San Francisco right now?

[1:03] Christopher Henry Young: So the first thing was a conversation with our theater management. And those conversations started, I want to say, Tuesday was the first time that we'd heard. We had a meeting and it brought, they started meeting with us at half hour because we found out under 24 hours notice so they couldn't call us in any earlier. So we would meet the entire company, both onstage, offstage, crew, band, everywhere in between. And company management was giving us updates on what they knew at the time. So the first thing that we got was that the health crisis had hit, that there were movements happening here in San Francisco. Wednesday morning, we get information that we're meeting at half hour to discuss what was announced that morning.

And it was that gatherings of over a thousand people were now not to happen. We found that out all through the news and we found out at that meeting and in the email that followed before half hour that our company management had only been informed about that at the time that it dropped via the news outlet. So they weren't even given a necessary, necessarily any heads up, which we were all quite shocked at because, you know, I guess the assumption is that the things affecting specific companies would get some sort of, hey, this is happening, but I guess there really wasn't the time if I'm making an assumption about it. So that Wednesday we all meet at half hour before our matinee where they inform us that, and this is our company, the they is our company management, along with Broadway SF's higher ups meet to inform us.

[2:41] Christopher Henry Young: Broadway San Francisco.

[2:42] Christopher Henry Young: Yes, Broadway San Francisco at the Orpheum Theater. And they all meet to tell us that there is this thing going out that the mayor has put a ban on non-essential public gatherings over a thousand people. And our theater is close to 2000 people. And so we weren't sure what that meant because of how it all lined up timing wise. But the news that we had at the moment was that the actual bill paperwork of whatever it is hadn't been signed yet. So we were going to go forth with the matinee and see when that all came about. We then find out at the end of the matinee, they tell us at intermission that we'll be having a second meeting once the show comes down, get out of costume as quickly as you can, come meet on stage.

And so we get there and that's when they inform us that we would be canceling performances for the next two weeks is what we found out on Wednesday. Again, a lot of actors had tons of questions and our company management informed us that they were in contact with both the producers of Hamilton, the other companies, Broadway League was in the conversation, Actors' Equity was in the conversation, and there were phone calls out the wazoo happening all over the place.

[3:55] Mo Brady: Did you have that end date?

[3:56] Christopher Henry Young: Yeah, it was two weeks from Wednesday, which I think actually was going to wind up being like the Wednesday, March 25th or something crazy like that. And that was at the time what we knew. We were like, no shows for two weeks. There was still a possibility that because our company is coming towards the end of a large cast changeover that we would still have certain rehearsals. I think largely because with the whole idea that if we're able to rehearse, that's time that we could be using, continuing to keep our show ready for whenever this is over. And also a lot of us, I think we're banking on that if we're working, we're getting paid because that was the large question. What does this mean? If we'll be paid, how we'll be paid, so on and so forth.

Something specific about our company here in San Francisco is that we're a point of origin company. And for people who don't necessarily understand what that is, it's essentially they make San Francisco your point of origin, which contractually means that you don't aren't necessarily guaranteed per diem. It's kind of similar to being housed in New York. You know, shows in New York don't typically get per diem because that's your point of origin. And so for us out here, the Hamilton producers have given us so much in way of kind of helping live in this very expensive city for so long. But being on a point of origin contract can bring just brings up a mountain of other questions that may not necessarily exist.

And so a lot of us, some of whom are brand new to this company, some of whom are fresh out of college, like there's so many levels of what this means for a group of people who are not in their chosen home or their family home state, not necessarily prepared for long term, like most of the country, long term layoffs. And because our business is directly affected by the stipulations on large gatherings, we can't work from home. There's no kind of work from a laptop, FaceTime in your performance kind of scenario. So at the time, yeah, we got that kind of two weeks and that was stressful enough. So to hear that it was kind of pushed to March 30th, which is, you know, a month and a half out is April 30th. Yeah, is what has been changed to now. It was originally March 25th, and now it's April 30th. So that timeline's changing with the new information that's coming out.

[6:17] Mo Brady: What other information do you have?

[6:18] Christopher Henry Young: So we keep getting, you know, emails from the unions about what conversations are happening. So one of the things that came up as a question for a lot of us actors was with the new tax law, a lot of people incorporate. And when you do that, you cannot collect unemployment. For certain shows that are specifically closed, I think some regional theater performances aren't so much postponed as kiboshed and kind of ended in that way. And some off-Broadway shows have closed. Some shows that were about to close on Broadway closed early, like so on and so forth. And so for some of them, they are genuinely like closed, unemployed. They can apply for unemployment. We don't necessarily know the status of our employment, like as a show that wasn't intended to close.

We were going on tour later this year, like this company was moving from San Francisco onwards and upwards. To not really know or understand what our employment status is means that we can't necessarily apply for unemployment because we don't believe ourselves to be unemployed. A part of the difficulty as well is that this happened midweek going into a weekend. And so though I am quite sure that a lot of these conversations are still happening amongst the powers that be, we just have no concept of when that information is going to get to us. We know that, we've been getting information that Actors' Equity is calling on the government for assistance. I would like to think that producers, at the very least, will continue giving us per diems for those of us in tours and out of New York City.

We still have another week's paycheck that we'll receive for the week that just ended. I think one of the concerns is that we just genuinely don't have a lot of information and honestly don't know if there are answers yet.

[8:11] Mo Brady: You'd mentioned it's the weekend. What are you hoping is going to happen on Monday?

[8:15] Christopher Henry Young: I'm hoping that we find out that the producers are going to be able to continue paying us on some scale, bumping us up to a full per diem here while we're in this kind of weird, not performance schedule, being paid rehearsal salary, whatever it is, I hope we're still able to get some sort of salary payment while we're here, especially if the thought is that when this is over, we'll be resuming performing. And so if just on the basis alone of having to retain the information of the job, I hope there is some payment for that. I hope there's no world in which shows are being laid off for this chunk of time. If we were a tour or regional theater contract, a lot of us may have kept our apartments in New York and so we'd be able to fly home.

A lot of us are out here with no one. I mean, I'm fortunate enough to have my fiancée who moved out here with me, but we have a large portion of our company who rely on our company to be family in this home away from home. Moments like these remind me of why I think our community is so special, be it from the Instagram videos and posts of people finding humor and heart in this like really stressful time. I think it's important. The workshop of Aida made this kind of funny spoof on a gospel song about being out of work. Laura Benanti making a call out to young musical theater actors in their kind of high school years to still put out the versions of their high school musicals just to like let that be seen.

I think those moments are really important and just remind the world why the theater community is so important, why expression in art is. And so I hope people remember that and I hope we band together as a community even more so than we already were.

[10:10] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Christopher Young for sharing his stories with us today. The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Mo Brady. You can help others find out about The Ensemblist by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or following us on Spotify. You can also download episodes wherever you listen to podcasts or stream them from Broadway Podcast Network at bpn.fm. There are two great ways that you can support The Ensemblist. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And the second one is becoming one of our Patreon members. You can do that at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. And make sure you're following us on Instagram where we share all this all the time. All right. Thanks for listening. Until next time.