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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. I'm Mo Brady.

[0:21] Mo Brady: Come From Away is a show about compassion. About putting others' needs before your own. About looking outside of yourself and thinking of the greater good. It's also a show about a moment before and a moment after. And how community is formed when people from different walks of life are made to empathize with each other due to shared uncomfortable experiences. And while the show takes place in the hours and days after 9/11, there hasn't been a more relatable moment to these themes since the show opened than what we are experiencing right now during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[1:00] Mo Brady: In this podcast episode, host Kerstin Anderson talks with Danny Goldstein, the Associate Director of Come From Away. He was one of the first theatrical practitioners in the world to reopen theatres following the shutdown. He talks with Kerstin about traveling to Melbourne, Australia to reopen the show, how the theatre-making experience was modified to keep people safe, as well as both the joy and trauma he believes theatre-goers will experience as they are allowed to watch live performances once again. Here's their conversation.

[1:33] Daniel Goldstein: Out the airplane window, I can see Manhattan, and there's still smoke. And suddenly I'm afraid all over, getting the others afraid too.

[1:45] Kerstin Anderson: Hi Danny Goldstein.

[1:46] Daniel Goldstein: Hi friend, how are you?

[1:47] Kerstin Anderson: I'm doing all right, how are you?

[1:49] Daniel Goldstein: I'm fine. I'm in the basement of our house in Massachusetts. It is snowing for like the millionth day in a row.

[1:57] Kerstin Anderson: We're here to talk about Come From Away. How did you come to be the Associate Director of Come From Away?

[2:02] Daniel Goldstein: I came to be the Associate Director, it was the summer of 2017. Earlier that year, I had gotten sort of a taste of like what a sort of job job would be, like not just a show and then nothing else. I thought I was gonna get this artistic director job of a theatre director that I won't say, like I really thought I had it. I got excited about having a job job where I would get money and not have to travel so much so that I wasn't away from my family. I have a three-year-old and an eight-year-old. At that time, I had a brand new baby. I didn't get that gig. I was pissed I didn't get it. I really wanted it. I called my agents and I was like, I want a job job. So a little while later, Dye Glazer, one of my agents, called and said, have you heard of Come From Away?

Have you seen it? Chris is looking for a new associate. Are you interested? I knew Chris from Williamstown. I had assisted him on a show at Williamstown when I was an intern there, I think the summer of 2000. And then I'd also assisted him on All Shook Up, the Broadway Elvis musical, All Shook Up. So I spent a lot of time with him that year. You know, it was hard. I really thought like that one would be my last associate job. And I made a really big decision to not do that anymore. But the show felt like my kind of show. I went to see it in June. So simple. There's not much there. It's about good people being good to each other. It's not arch. It's like my vibe over that summer, it took a little while for it to all sort of coalesce and come to place.

But middle to end of July, I started that job. And so I got to know the show really well. But as you can know, if you've seen the show, it's a really complex show. I mean, what's really amazing about it is that it was created by that company of actors over the course of five productions. So the level of detail in it is only stuff that can happen by people who are working on the same show who go like, hey, I need that shirt. And someone will go five minutes earlier. Oh, I have a spot that I can bring it in from stage left. So I'll bring it there and put it on this chair. So much of what is crazy about that show is the level of detail that you don't even notice till you've seen the show five or six times, but also the kind of thing that makes it just impossible to really learn.

So I spent a lot of time learning the show, watching it over and over again. I went up with them that year to Canada to help with the first Toronto production. I worked on the tour version in the summer of 2019 in the States and winter of 2019 in Australia. My wife and kids and I all went to Melbourne for nine weeks to put up the company there. I went over there with Ricky Hines, the associate choreographer. We left a few days before Thanksgiving. We left on the 20th, I believe. Got there on the 22nd. You're met at the airport by people in single file. You immediately get a new mask. You get a temperature check. You're met by people in sort of full PPE, have an interview with a medical professional.

Then you are put by the army onto a bus like army dudes in fatigues. And so then you are on a bus with all these people and you are taken to a hotel. And then you get to the hotel and they put you in a room with your bag. And then you don't leave that room for two weeks. That's it. You're tested on day two.

[5:08] Daniel Goldstein: So then you were in a hotel room for two weeks.

[5:10] Kerstin Anderson: Yeah. They test you for COVID on day two and day 10. Where I was, I was really lucky. I had a room with a little kitchenette and a balcony and a separate bedroom. It was like cushy. So I could order from the grocery store from Woolies and I could order booze and people could bring us care packages. Our friends who are in the show in Sydney brought us bottles of gin and bottles of wine. And Marika Aubrey, who is Australian, who was in Australia during that time had made like a full Thanksgiving dinner. Then we left. I got to leave the hotel. I had one more night in Sydney because we didn't know when I was going to be released. So we didn't know how to book plane tickets. So I left the next day. So that night I met up with Tony Sheldon and his husband, Tony, and we went to see Frozen the musical in previews in Sydney, which had already opened. And then I flew to Melbourne the next day and we were on our way.

[6:10] Kerstin Anderson: When you finally were released, what did it feel like? Did you have like residual raised shoulders or fear?

[6:19] Daniel Goldstein: No, I had my legs hurt. Like I realized I hadn't walked any reasonable distance in a long time, even though I had been working out, like I had trouble walking by the end of the night. And then Sydney was like, it felt like real life. Like mostly no one was wearing masks when you went into some like inside you wear masks. Yeah. And then I went to Melbourne and we started rehearsals for the show, which was a whole other situation.

[6:41] Kerstin Anderson: What was it like being in a rehearsal room again?

[6:43] Daniel Goldstein: Well, what was crazy is we were rehearsing the show on stage of a giant theater, like one of their bigger houses, like Moulin Rouge is opening at this theater. So we were rehearsing on the stage. So it felt great because it was tons of air around us. It didn't feel like a room, you know, they had come up with all these COVID plans. So you have like a temperature check when you get in this like iPad that like scans your face and takes your temperature and it goes like 36.6 degrees. Daniel Goldstein in his little Australian accent in Celsius, you wear a mask unless you're working. Like the rule is if you're sitting behind the table, you're wearing a mask. But if you're like up and doing stuff, you don't have to wear one.

And you know, it felt a little random in terms of like that kind of stuff. But also there were at this point, zero cases on the ground in the state of Victoria, zero and had been for over a month. It felt sort of okay. Like the stage managers do a lot more wiping down of stuff. And if I was backstage and went into the house, and then I came backstage, I had to like put booties on and change my mask and do all that kind of stuff. So there were some there, you know, they took it very...

[7:53] Daniel Goldstein: There were a lot of precautions. They do stuff where they try to stagger the exits of the audience after shows. We were selling the show at about 85%, which felt pretty full, but there were still a bunch of empty seats. Everyone's supposed to wear their mask the whole time. You could take it down if you had a drink, and everyone always had a drink, so you would see people with their masks at their neck. It also required that I made the theater keep bumping the temperature down farther and farther and farther, because when you have a mask on in a theater, it makes it feel hotter.

[8:24] Kerstin Anderson: Totally. You've got to keep it cold for comedy.

[8:26] Daniel Goldstein: Cold for comedy, yeah. I thought it was too hot during the dress rehearsal, and they didn't laugh as much. Then the first preview was a lot cooler, and they laughed a lot more. There was an amazing video of you. They just said, Danny, will you do a dress rehearsal, the normal director dress rehearsal speech, like, turn off your cell phones. It's a dress rehearsal. We might stop. I thought that I needed to write something for it that acknowledged what the people of Melbourne had done. I'm not sure people in the States quite understand how harsh that lockdown was. It was 200 days. They went into lockdown in March, and essentially, save for a few weeks in June, which is their winter, so they weren't really going out so much anyway, save for a few weeks in June, were in lockdown until late October.

Almost 200 days of harsh, harsh lockdown. They did it, and they didn't complain, and they went for the greater good, and they understood what was at stake. Now, look what they get to do. They get to go to see shows. It felt really important for us, as the Americans coming in, to say, thank you for letting us have our jobs back for a minute. This has been really special, and it's because of you, and so I wrote that speech. It really did make the rounds. The last time I checked, it had, like, tens of thousands of views.

[9:47] Kerstin Anderson: Absolutely. I found it incredibly powerful, and I think many people in our circle really did, to see you, you know, someone we know, on a stage again, in a theatre, with people, talk about the experience. I was scared to watch it. I didn't know if I was going to be emotionally prepared. What did it feel like, just to look out at an audience again?

[10:11] Daniel Goldstein: Well, that was crazy. I mean, the upstage wall of Come From Away, these, like, wood slats. Yeah. And so, the secret is, like, we are always up there before the show, peeking out at everybody, because you can't see us. Nice. So, we're, like, sussing out the audience a little bit up there, and I looked out. I took a picture of it, too, through the slats, which was really cool. Whoa. I think for the first preview, it was really fun to see a full theatre. It was like, during the dress rehearsal, when I was sitting at my tech table, getting ready for the dress, and the theatre crowd murmur that you hear when you're sitting in a theatre, and just people are talking, and it feels like that hum of people who are excited to be someplace. It was really, that was really thrilling. It also felt very normal. Like, nothing had ever happened. Like, I woke up from a really bad dream. It felt, I felt very lucky. I felt honored to be able to represent our show in that way.

[11:05] Daniel Goldstein: When I do table work for that show, I talk a lot about something that Chris emphasizes, which I think is really important, that the show itself is about kindness to strangers during a time of crisis, that it's not just about being kind to each other, but being kind when it's hard to do so, and that that's something that we, as a company, try to practice offstage as well as on, because the show is so collaborative, you couldn't do it without kindness. Like, you couldn't do it without helping people out. Patrina Bromley is a Canadian, but also a Newfoundlander. Awesome. She moves more chairs than anybody else, because if there was ever a time to help, she'd be like, oh, I got it. I can move that chair.

Like, going to the first plane, she moves four chairs, four chairs, and has a costume change, and so, you know, like, you can always sort of see that sense of kindness, and so it felt like our show had been represented by the people of Melbourne, and we wanted to acknowledge that.

[11:57] Kerstin Anderson: That crew of Americans who were there, did you ever need to, like, debrief your experience, or what was that like?

[12:02] Daniel Goldstein: We debriefed the experience for everybody, because everybody was coming out of, you know, I said, look, if you ever need a moment where you're feeling like you're just too close to a person, like, take some space. Like, we will figure it out. We will understand how that is, and I think everyone sort of came at it with their own willingness to engage. It took some people longer than others, and I think, I think that was just part of the process, like, to be able to acknowledge what was happening, that some parts of the show were going to be really hard for people, that, like, there were going to be, there was going to be crying and baseball for a little bit, and, like, eventually that would go away, that that was, like, the part of it that is personal, and not necessarily the part of it that is, you know, part of the acting, and everyone had to have the space to be able to go through that, just as we will when we come together again in April to shoot the Broadway company for the filmed version of it, and, you know, when we put that company back together for, when it's actually on Broadway, when we put the tour back together, like, there is going to be trauma that is, it is necessary to acknowledge, and so I felt often like I was half director, half counselor to acknowledge and take in and hear their trauma. It's traumatic. It is traumatic, and Theatre's Return is going to be traumatic for many, many people, and also then really joyous, hopefully.

[13:38] Kerstin Anderson: Yeah, I fear underestimating the trauma of it. What is your, maybe not advice, but do you have thoughts or feelings about what it will look like in America when theater gets to come back?

[13:48] Daniel Goldstein: You know, my only hope is that the people in charge, the producers, the directors, the choreographers, the music directors, the people who are responsible for making the schedules, understand that the people that they are asking to be vulnerable on stage are not going to be able to for a minute, that their vulnerability has been shattered. It is as though they are victims of a terrorist attack. It is as though they are victims of a mass shooting. It is as though they've lost their entire family in a plane crash. It is traumatic, and people will seem fine for a moment and then lose it. That's got to be okay. I hope all those things, too. Those are the things I hope, yeah, and you know, I hope people will come. I mean, I hope when it's finally safe to do so, people will come.