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

[0:23] Mo Brede: While there hasn't been an official declaration about the New York theater season ending, the Broadway League has extended its shutdown through June 7th, which is typically known as the end of the season before the Tony Awards. So I wanted to take the opportunity to take stock of the theatrical season so far and highlight some of the best ensemble moments, features, and casts that we saw on Broadway this year. Joining me in the conversation is David Gordon. He is on the staff at TheaterMania and is also the president of the Outer Critics Circle. He spoke to me earlier this year for an episode about Best Ensemble Awards, and so I was thrilled to have him back to talk about his favorite ensembles of the season. Here's our conversation.

[1:24] Mo Brede: Hi, would you introduce yourself and tell me where you're calling from today?

[1:28] David Gordon: Hi, I'm David Gordon. I'm senior features reporter at TheaterMania.com and president of the Outer Critics Circle. Coming to you live from my apartment in Astoria, Queens.

[1:36] Mo Brede: And I'm so excited that you are joining me today. We spoke to you earlier this season when we were talking about the Outer Critics Circle and Ensemble Awards, and as you were leaving the studio you said, I'd love to come back, and I was like, I would love to have you back. So this I think is such a perfect opportunity because we get to talk about ensembles, we get to celebrate them, and you have seen so many ensembles in the last year, I'm sure.

[2:03] David Gordon: I've seen, yeah, I've seen basically everything through when the theater shut down. We're going to talk about ensemble characters, vocals, dancing. We're going to hit off-Broadway, but before we do, I thought it would be good for us to sort of clarify what we're talking about, when the shows were running, and then what shows are we going to include in our conversations about ensembles. Looking at the Broadway season, I'm going to say May 30th, which is when Frankie and Johnny and the Clear Daloon opened. If we're being nitpicky about it, we should go through Girl from the North Country, which opened on March 5th. We are talking about all the way back to May, through anything that was performing that we caught in the spring theater season. Okay.

[2:47] Mo Brede: I think that the sort of traditional musicals that we are looking at are Moulin Rouge, Tina, Jagged Little Pill, West Side Story, Girl from the North Country, and Six. I think there is an opportunity to talk about other things, right? Do we talk about the Lightning Thief, which is a musical? There's an opportunity to sort of extend past what we might consider a traditional ensemble in this conversation.

[3:15] David Gordon: Totally. It's funny, I would actually group in Lightning Thief with the traditional musicals, because I do think there are ensemble roles in it. Could be loosely defined as the group, even though there's no, you know, traditional like group number. I absolutely think you need to include Freestyle Love Supreme, and particularly David Byrne's American Utopia in this conversation. Because both shows really redefine what an ensemble could be, I think.

[3:42] Mo Brede: The first category that I asked you to come with are incredible ensemble characters of the season. David, who stood out to you as being just a fantastically memorable ensemble moment?

[3:49] David Gordon: The four lead can-can dancers in Moulin Rouge, for instance.

[3:55] Mo Brede: Oh, yes, of course. You are talking about Jacqueline B. Arnold, Holly James, Jay Maddus, and of course, Robin Hurter in Moulin Rouge.

[4:03] David Gordon: Got it. They stick out to me far and wide, because even though they're not principal characters, the four of them are such an integral function of defining the quote-unquote Moulin Rouge atmosphere, the atmosphere of the place, not the show. They open the show, they close the show, they are ever present throughout. Yes, a-a-a ensemble, but also four very unique characters within that mini ensemble, I would say.

[4:35] David Gordon: Jagged Little Pill has a lot of principal characters, and then...

[4:39] Mo Brede: Everybody in the ensemble in Jagged Little Pill has a presence, if you know what I mean.

[4:45] David Gordon: They might not have speaking roles, but between their costuming, their makeup, their hair design, they are all individual figures in the show. And that, to me, is worth noting, too, because when there are group numbers in Jagged Little Pill, you can't look away from it. It's like, and you don't even know where to look, you don't know who to focus on. And that, to me, is the hallmark of distinctive performances, when you're looking, when one person catches your attention, and then you see someone else out of the corner of your eye, and your eye goes to them, and you see that they're doing something completely within the world of the piece, but different personally, on a personal level. Like, it's like it has individualized choreography, almost. Those ensemble members all are so specific, and it's hard to really know if they're playing characters or if they're playing themselves, a lot of times, being storytellers.

[5:37] David Gordon: They are called a chorus in that show, which is a term we don't use very often in Broadway anymore, but definitely feels like it hearkens back, in this instance, to a Greek chorus, right? Any specific actors stand out to you, beyond the four, I guess, I call them the Lady M's?

[5:56] Mo Brede: You know, Girl from the North Country is a show that's filled with actors that you recognize, and yet they all fit seamlessly into a different kind of ensemble. It's not really a singing, dancing ensemble. It's just an ensemble of actors, and they're all either singing in unison or playing their own instruments, what have you. I have a couple. One is from The Lightning Thief, Ryan Knowles, who played a variety, who was the professor, right? He was the centaur. He was so fantastically specific in all of these wildly different ensemble features.

[6:31] David Gordon: I was hoping you would say him. I keep calling him the horseman, the centaur.

[6:35] Mo Brede: Clear. I think when you have an ensemble character, or a variety of ensemble characters that you're bouncing back and forth between, the specificity is so important, right? The audience has to immediately be able to know, oh, this is someone who you played three characters ago, versus this is someone who you played four characters ago, and he just really was so clear. I always knew who he was playing, and then on top of that, you're right, he was just fucking funny. From American Utopia, which is far and away my favorite show of the season, the two lead dancers in American Utopia, and I'm pulling up their names just to make sure that I have them, Chris Giarmo and Tendayi Kumba, and they are the two lead dancers that were basically right behind David Byrne through the entire show. They weren't playing characters. It's a concert, but their work was so distinct and so clear and so unique that you just couldn't take your eyes off them.

[7:42] Mo Brede: So let's move on and let's talk about vocals. Who in ensemble roles this season really stood out to you, just brought the house down with a vocal moment for you?

[8:05] David Gordon: Vocally as a group, I think the cast of Tina really knocked it out of the park.

[8:09] David Gordon: Yeah, you felt like you were watching a rock concert through the entire time. I think vocally, the ensembles of Tina and Girl from the North Country, for completely different reasons. Girl from the North Country is a soulful, deeply felt group, and you could tell that the music has emotional resonance for everybody on stage. Jeanette Bayerdell does a gospel encore—I'm blanking on what song it is right now at the very end of the show—that just blows the roof off the place. So if we're picking one person, she would be it for me.

[8:40] David Gordon: I want to give some love to Antonio Cipriano.

[8:45] Mo Brede: Oh, I love him. He's adorable.

[8:46] David Gordon: Yeah, who plays Phoenix in Jagged Little Pill. That's the lead character's on-again, off-again boyfriend? On-again, always boyfriend?

[8:56] Mo Brede: Would-be boyfriend.

[8:57] David Gordon: He is an incredible vocalist and has a lot of music in that show. It actually feels strange to me that he is in the ensemble because I think it is such a strong feature.

[9:06] David Gordon: Yeah, my hunch is that because he's so young and this is his Broadway debut, if someone with a bit more street cred at the time may have been playing the role, they probably could have got to the principal bump. But for whatever reason, Antonio is on an ensemble contract, does have a lot of ensemble moments in the show and do it in addition to this featured role. But he has such a great voice, just like the kind of voice that you want to turn into a bath and then get into and just feel the warm honey vocals surround you. It's fantastic.

[9:52] **David Gordon**: Let's talk about dancing. I mean, honestly, when people think about ensembles, they often think about dancing before anything else. And we got to see some great dance on Broadway this year. What ensembles or specific performers stood out to you?

[10:06] **David Gordon**: Hands down for me, the cast of *West Side Story* wins this one. They're doing new choreography. It's not the Jerome Robbins choreography that everybody knows. It's choreography by Anna-Theresa de Keersmaeker. It's this very acrobatic, very... It's the complete opposite of what you think of *West Side Story*. It's very primal. It's completely in tune with Ivo van Hove's... the primal nature of his production, where you know bad things are going to happen from the first minute in the show. There's no question about that. Work that you would expect to see on a modern dance stage, not Broadway. It's a lot of outstretched limbs. It's a lot of kicking. It's a lot of... I've been calling them windmill arms.

It's a lot of... it's a lot of combative, argumentative choreography. And half the time they're doing it in the rain on a wet stage. The fact that they're able to do it night after night safely eight times a week is a testament to the work that they do to prepare for it. In general, I felt like there were many elements of the show that made the material feel so much more dangerous to me. Cutting it down to one act, the doing away of the Jerome Robbins choreography, the taking out of some of the language of like kiddo and dancing around in the rain. I was like, please don't break anything. Please don't break anything. The thing to me that is most indicative of Ivo van Hove's direction, and I feel like the people listening to this will have probably seen at least one Ivo van Hove production, but in the shirtless dance scenes in the rain, there's a videographer who's also shirtless with his video camera recording the fights.

I would love to give a shout out to one specific *West Side Story* cast member, Ricky Ubeda, who is an amazing dancer. I mean, he's such a doll, such a champion of this community, and in an ensemble of performers that are doing incredible movement, Ricky just like stood out. Maybe it was his placement on the stage, maybe it was the fact that I know who he is, but he moves like nobody else moves. It's this strange, not strange, it's this incredible dichotomy of kind of throwing limbs around, but they're always landing somewhere very specific. It's like I could never move like that.

[12:31] **David Gordon**: The other dance performance that I'd love to shout out is Heather Lange in *Jagged Little Pill*, who does the dance on the couch. Elizabeth Stanley, she sort of plays like dream MJ or demon MJ, or like she's sort of like a part of her subconscious, I guess. It's a fantastic number. It is an incredible, you know, so much of the sort of taking the familiar catalog of music and putting it in the world of musical theater, a lot of it is done in sort of the way that you might imagine it. You know, "Isn't It Ironic" is set in a classroom, and someone is giving a poetry presentation. They're saying the lyrics to the song, "Isn't It Ironic," and then other characters are like, well, that's not ironic, you know, like, it's sort of the way that you might expect the number.

However, this number with Heather and Elizabeth Stanley is done in this completely different style than anything we've seen before in the show. It feels wildly unique, is really effective. Heather moves her body. She's a mom. She had a hip replacement in the last year. Like she's moving her body in ways that I don't understand. Like, I don't know how that happens. And it is just wildly effective.

[14:14] **David Gordon**: You're not alone. You're uninvited. An unfortunate sight. Must be strangely exciting. I'm going to ask you for your favorite ensemble of the season, and I'm going to make you choose one. But before we do that, I want to know if you want to throw any other ensembles into the mix. Anything non-traditional, anything off-Broadway even?

[14:34] **David Gordon**: As far as plays go, an ensemble that I keep going back to is the cast of *Much Ado About Nothing*, which is a play, not a musical. Kenny Leon's Shakespeare in the Park production, and it was led by Daniel Brooks and Grantham Coleman. And that was just a fantastic group of Shakespearean actors, or at least actors who know how to do Shakespeare and make it understandable, because so often you see Shakespeare productions, they can have famous people in it or not, but they're talking in a language that you don't understand. And I'm so glad this production was recorded by PBS, because it is the perfect introductory Shakespeare production. You knew what every actor was saying, and you knew they understood what they were saying.

So it was wonderfully consumable for someone who had never seen a Shakespeare play before. What else? There's a bunch of stuff off-Broadway, at least, that I can think of. I thought the cast of *Soft Power*, which is a David Henry Huang, Janine Tesori musical, was really, really great. Almost entirely Asian American, which is very rare for theater these days. Yeah, that's the ensemble off-Broadway that really stood out to me as well. It's a lot of, I would say, fan favorites in terms of Asian American ensemble performers. A lot of people who I knew from working uptown, a lot of people who were getting an opportunity to work on a bigger stage, who haven't made their Broadway debuts yet. Such a strong group of storytellers.

I mean, there's a couple of moments, I think at the end of Act One, with all of the guns with the ensemble. And then there's the end of the show moment where the whole entire company is standing at the edge of the stage, looking directly into your eyes. Is it the Newman Theater? This is the space where *A Chorus Line* debuted, where *Hamilton* debuted. It's a very intimate space, and the audience is sort of at a rake. So just like that moment in *Hamilton*, where the timeline in the opening, where they all stand at the edge of the stage, it feels like that. But they stood there and they sang to us for such an uncomfortably long amount of time, pleading the importance of democracy and the goodness of democracy.

It was so effective. Kind of that feeling that you were talking about with *Jagged Little Pill*, where you could look at every person on that stage and see them have a unique perspective on the lyrics, and yet were part of a whole at the same time. A wildly effective ensemble.

[17:23] **David Gordon**: Going back to your question before, for my favorite ensemble of the season, *American Utopia*, hands down. I was going to say, that show's not eligible for any awards because they didn't invite anybody to see it. Nominators, voters. I don't even think they invited Tony nominators or voters to see it. They're so distinctive. They're all wearing gray suits and barefoot, but each one is so completely distinctive. Hopefully everybody listening to this will be able to see the film version when it comes out. It was supposed to be coming out in the fall, I don't know, to coincide with the show's return engagement, but I don't know if it will now, depending on the timeline of everything. What's yours? What's your favorite?

[18:01] **David Gordon**: I'm going to go with *Jagged Little Pill*. There's much about that musical that I like. My favorite musical, as listeners probably know because I talk about it a lot, is *American Idiot*. I just reimagined rock opera of feelings with Tom Kitt orchestrations. It's angry, and it affected me. I love an ensemble where each person feels memorable, but they're all working as a team. That's the kind of ensemble that I would love to see in every musical.

[18:34] **David Gordon**: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, David. I'm glad that you're healthy. I love hearing what someone who is so well-versed in what's going on in theater, but isn't necessarily in the ensemble world like I am, what stands out to them. Thanks for having me.

[18:57] **Moe Brady**: Special thanks to David Gordon for sharing his stories with us today. The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Moe Brady. There are two great ways you can be helping The Ensemblist right now. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and the other one is by becoming a Patreon member, which you can do at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, whether that be on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, or at our home of Broadway Podcast Network at bpn.fm. You can also follow us on Instagram to see the latest information from our website and our podcast feed. Thanks for listening. Until next time.