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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.

[0:16] Mo Brady: So we're off! Thank you for coming along on my mission to discover how to celebrate, recognize, and award great theater ensembles. As I shared in the first episode of this miniseries, I started this journey wondering why there's not a Tony Award for Best Ensemble. But the more I thought about what such an award would recognize, the less convinced I became that it was possible to quantify what makes theater ensembles so great.

[0:52] Mo Brady: What I've realized is that I can't answer this question on my own. While I like to think of myself as an expert about what makes a great theatrical ensemble, I can't wrap my head around how to celebrate one. So over the next weeks and months, I'm reaching out to those who can help me explore this idea. From press to theatrical leaders to educators, I want to reach across the gamut for creative ways to recognize theatrical ensembles. I figured, speaking to a member of the press was as good a place to start as any. Since theater press are often the tastemakers for audiences at large, they have experience watching and adjudicating what makes theater excellent. If the press attend shows in order to convey their expertise about excellent performances, scores, direction, and sound design, they could also distill what makes an excellent ensemble, right?

In my esteem, there was no better press member to have this initial discussion with than Jack Smart. Not only does he work for Backstage, the premier resource for actors in the entertainment industry, his title there is Awards Editor. His job is literally about awards. So I was lucky enough to speak to him on the topics of what makes a great theater ensemble and how they can be recognized with awards. Here's our conversation.

[2:15] Mo Brady: The Broadway News!

[2:21] Mo Brady: Would you introduce yourself? Tell us your position and where you're calling from today.

[2:29] Jack Smart: I'm based on the West Coast. I'm in L.A. because of my job. So I am Jack Smart. I am the Awards Editor at Backstage, which is the actor's trade publication, the number one resource for actors and talent seekers. And being the Awards Editor for the past four years now means I cover all things Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, and SAG Awards. Not so much Tonys recently. Not so much theater. Not so much theater. And I did move from, as Mo knows, I moved from New York to L.A. not that long before the pandemic. The idea that theater has been dark for a year is really wild to me and really sad.

[3:06] Mo Brady: So you are someone who thinks about theater, not only in terms of enjoying it and not only being a critic, but sort of what makes things great. Putting your ensemble focus on, what do you feel like makes a great theater ensemble?

[3:22] Jack Smart: A great theater ensemble to me, this goes for film and TV as well, I think, is it's just any group of any acting that is greater than the sum of its parts. There's lots of definitions of great acting, but ultimately it's establishing what the individual circumstances of character, the who, what, when, or why. But for great ensemble acting, it's all of that and more because it's all of that plus the dynamics and the relationships between those characters. And I think, again, especially for theater, it's also about establishing the world, the world of the play, as we like to say. So much of an ensemble's responsibility is to kind of create a united front and really listen to each other. The level of cohesion is much higher than, for example, in film and TV.

I mean, I kind of want to put my interview hat on and ask you the same question, because first of all, do you consider a musical ensemble definition to be different from a straight play ensemble definition? Because I kind of do think of them as having a slightly different skill set.

[4:20] Mo Brady: I think it's not about skill sets, because you can also think about something like Come From Away, which is singing and acting, and you can think about 42nd Street. You can think about A Chorus Line, which is not technically an ensemble. The structure I put over it is collaborative storytelling. When people are working together to tell a story, they are working as an ensemble. However, when we talk about an ensemble in the contemporary theater vernacular, we are often talking about the dancers, right? So the skill set of an ensemble may be tap dancing or operating a giant King Kong puppet. But what those things are doing are they're individual artists working with other individual artists to take an audience on a journey. That's what I would say an ensemble is. I'm not sure if everyone agrees, or if that's the easiest explanation. As a theatergoer, can you remember specific shows where the ensemble made a distinct impact for you?

[5:32] Jack Smart: Yes, back in ye olde days of seeing theater. I have a little bit of a list here. Looking at this question, the first one that came to mind was The Humans. And it speaks to what you were just saying about this idea of like, if the definition of an ensemble is any group of people that is coming together, regardless of whether they're singing, dancing, using their bodies and their voices, all of which applies to straight play as well. The Humans was what, six characters? It's six actors. I like the idea of an ensemble being no leads or all leads. I think often about the question of category placement. I'm always thinking about awards, and sometimes I'm thinking about category fraud, which we could get into.

But if a cast feels like they're all supporting, which also that means either giving equal weight, whether that's stage time or sort of like dramatic weight, like in the plot in the story, that meets my definition of an ensemble. So I think of The Humans, I think of it as a great ensemble, because it was six people who were so tight knit in a way that each of them can pull focus in a way that's never seen stealing in a way that's never pulling focus from or detracting from the story or their co-stars. In the same vein, a lot of straight plays that are comedies, I think of especially like old farces, A Noise Is Off, or like Blithe Spirit, those require a great, fine-tuned ensemble, where if you have one person in those shows who's out to like steal the spotlight, it's not gonna work.

For the Oscar Wildes, for the Noel Cowards, I could list any single one of those as an example of specific ensembles that talk about like making an impact. But the other one I thought of, of course, is Hamilton, and any show directed by Rachel Chavkin, like Hadestown or Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Talk about using your instrument and your song and dance to like create a world and to create dynamics and everything. But those shows do such a beautiful job of having a lead character who's on their journey and who's making their decisions, but not in a vacuum. And the ensemble is there to establish these characters are doing things in response to other events. I think of the hurricane in Hamilton.

What would Hamilton be without an ensemble? It'd be Hamilton on stage alone explaining what he's doing in the hurricane scene, and the audience being like, why did you make this decision? And what effect is it going to have? Whereas when you have an ensemble there to provide the context of the world is happening, the world is literally happening around him. A big part of that show is the point that yes, the founding fathers made individual decisions that affect all of our lives. But they did it within the tapestry of like the collective of America.

[8:03] Mo Brady: I mean, yes, that's what makes a great theatrical ensemble, in your opinion. You haven't talked about dance. Do you feel like dance is a lesser ensemble? No use? Okay, so how do you sort of put those ideas together that we're talking about? When we say ensemble? Often we're talking about dancers. And yet, yeah, when we're talking about great ensembles, you're talking about singers and actors. Sure, I love the idea of Come From Away, which is of course another, it's another show that meets the definition. But if you're a performer who's using your body and your voice, I think your voice is included in your body. And so a show like Come From Away, I think of the ensemble of Shuffle Along gets to the definition of like, yes, I consider a person who is on stage, mostly doing the dancing and mostly using their instrument in a way that's like I'm here to be a triple threat.

I think of that as being a great ensemble. And I have so much respect for people who do that. I just think the definition of great ensemble that needs to be in service of the story. And for great musicals like Shuffle Along, or Hamilton, the choreography and the execution of that choreography is in service to the story. It is in fact part of the story. And if you took it away, I don't know what Hamilton would look like with just the leads monologuing. That's not exciting. And it undermines the show. It's a different thing.

[9:32] Jack Smart: Yeah, it would be a series of solos or duets, it wouldn't feel as much of a cohesive and it also wouldn't be as dazzling. It probably just wouldn't be as entertaining. So you work for Backstage. You are the awards editor. So do you write reviews? Do you review ensembles? Are you more looking at it from an editorial standpoint?

[9:45] Jack Smart: I guess, most of my work at Backstage has not involved reviews. Like I wrote theater reviews back in like my blogging days when I would just try to see as many shows as possible and just work the writing muscle of writing about them. And of course, I remember touching on ensembles as part of any theater production wrote about because that's part of the show. But yeah, my work at Backstage, of course, is gravitated more towards film and TV. As I mentioned, I moved to LA to cover film and TV stuff. And in particular, the SAG Awards, the SAG Awards, of course, have an ensemble award. The closest thing we do to reviews is to write in these features about what makes a contender a contender. And so that does often involve like we started a couple years ago writing these six or 700 word essentially reviews of why an ensemble is a great ensemble.

And that goes back to what I was saying at the beginning about it's greater than the sum of its parts. These individual actors who might be individually nominated for awards are great. But what makes the SAG Awards great is that they also recognize that acting is a group sport. A great individual performer is only as great as they can individually be when you factor in chemistry and listening, and again, like establishing a tone in the world of a project. Also echoing what you said earlier, it's not just a collaboration between the actors, actually. The writer and director is just as involved, even the set designer, the costume designer, all of those people are involved in collectively being in service to the story. Again, it's about being in service to the story.

[11:08] Mo Brady: Sure, but wouldn't that make it the best play or the best movie or the best musical and not the best ensemble?

[11:16] Jack Smart: Interesting. I mean, are you playing devil's advocate and saying that there should not be an ensemble award for that reason?

[11:23] Mo Brady: As listeners know, I'm, as perhaps one of our industry's most avid supporters of ensembles, I am not sure if it's possible. And so that's part of the reason I wanted to talk to you. You have this breadth of awards knowledge and where ensembles are being awarded. You talked about the SAGs. SAGs is perhaps the biggest example of an ensemble award the entertainment industry has. Why does it work? How does it work? And why does it work to celebrate the artistry to give an ensemble award?

[12:00] Jack Smart: I mean, it's almost like I want to take a step back and be like, why are awards? What are awards and why did they exist? Looking at something like SAG, even like WGA or DGA or any of these guilds, the purpose of their awards is to celebrate their specific craft and frankly, their specific guild and their people within the guild. So if you're talking about just actors and looking at just film and TV acting, and I've spoken to Cathy Connell, who was a co-creator of the SAG Awards, and she's the executive person of this. And she has said the reason that they featured ensembles is because they recognize that that is so integral to the art of acting. They also did it partly because it didn't exist anywhere else.

It speaks to, again, being in service of the story, the tone, how cohesive under the director were these actors? How much did they play off of each other? If you scroll through the winners of the comedy and drama and the film cast SAG ensemble winners, it's examples of that thing of they're all supporters. They're all leads and all supporters, and there's not as much of a category distinction between them. We could also get into the fact that lead and supporting is like kind of a sham. Even gendered awards is, I think, something worth questioning. And so to collectively go, let's have an award for a group and let's have an award for individuals, that is one way to delineate great acting. And I'm increasingly uncertain whether gendered awards are a useful way of doing that.

And I've long thought that supporting versus lead, especially when it comes to a group of people that are all supporting, again, I don't want to get into category fraud. But you are getting at something of like, who is to decide what level of storytelling is being put on a performer's shoulders. And that does go back to this idea of ensemble and what makes an ensemble an ensemble.

[13:38] Mo Brady: What I'm hearing you say, and perhaps you can sort of delve into this a bit more, is it's two different skill sets. You're talking about acting in service to the greater team and also acting in terms of creating your own distinct individual. The way that you're describing it makes it sound like those are two separate things that are worthy of being celebrated individually of each other.

[14:06] Jack Smart: Yes, they can be bifurcated. They're not totally separate, like there's a Venn diagram. Again, if you...

[14:10] Jack Smart: Just look at the lists of winners. Somebody like Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She has SAG Awards for both ensemble and for individual. And that, to me, is good. That recognizes her talent and the ways that she is good. She is both a brilliant individual performer and a brilliant ensemble performer. She probably could do Veep by herself. It probably wouldn't be as good of a show. If it were a solo monologue, it would be hilarious. And she would earn, still, the individual SAG Award. But that is such an ensemble show, so it is deserving of the SAG Ensemble Awards. I think it's more of a Venn diagram. But, for the purposes of an award show, again, I think it's helpful to delineate. It's funny you mention the SAG Awards as sort of the most major one because I agree.

And I also think the SAG Awards are not a big enough deal. They are not as high-profile as the Golden Globes. I don't know how familiar you are with the Spirit Awards, which are film independence awards for indie films. But they have one prize called the Robert Altman Award. And that is presented to one film every year that recognizes the ensemble cast, director, and casting director. All the questions you sent made me think of casting, too, because I think of it as an underrated art form that doesn't have mainstream awards dedicated to it. If you look at the Ardeos Awards, which are the kind of number one casting awards, you look at those projects and those double as a list of great ensemble actors. What did it take for a casting director to put together not just one actor, a group of actors?

[15:34] Mo Brady: If there was an award for theatrical ensembles on Broadway, what do you think that criteria would be? What would the voters be tasked with adjudicating?

[15:46] Jack Smart: Oh, in terms of eligibility or also in terms of the judging of the quality of the projects? I feel like it's the second because eligibility is you're either saying that it's musicals or you're saying that it's plays or you're saying that it's both. But if I'm a voter sitting in the audience for this award and my job is to figure out if this production has the best ensemble, just like I'm being tasked to decide what the best sound design is and I may not be an expert in sound design, what can I be told or given or understand as the criteria for what makes a good ensemble so that I can help adjudicate which is this the best use of ensemble?

[16:28] Jack Smart: See, that's so interesting because it highlights so many of the points we were just making. Is the criteria then to say, we want to try to award the show that has the most supporting actors that share the dramatic weight and fewer lead characters? Or are we looking at a story that has lead characters and a really solid ensemble of, for example, in a musical, dancers and singers? I think it could be both. If there were an ensemble for a Broadway Ensemble Award for musicals and a Broadway Ensemble for plays, then yes, I think the criteria would be different. But taking them collectively, I think it would go back to like, are you as an audience member convinced that everyone on stage is in service to the story, kind of on the same page?

The great London productions I've seen of Shakespeare and Chekhov, those actors are on the same page. Their cohesion is the first and foremost attribute you would give that production rather than saying the costume design or that individual star, that movie star that was in the leading role or whatever. And I'm not saying a movie star in a leading role type of production wouldn't be worthy of an Ensemble Prize. The other example I thought of was It's Only a Play. Do you remember It's Only a Play?

[17:34] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[17:35] Jack Smart: That was an ensemble. There wasn't really one lead role, but they were all big stars, huge names, huge personalities. And of course, it was this goofy comedy that allowed them to have big personalities. But for the most part, I left that being like, if there were an Ensemble Award for Best Ensemble, I would be giving it to It's Only a Play because of that same thing I mentioned earlier about not stealing focus. If you're Stockard Channing, and you could completely steal any show, even from a Nathan Lane, and you're kind of not, that humility, maybe it comes down to humility. This person could have completely made it all about them, and they were instead aware it's about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Does that work?

[18:12] Mo Brady: Yeah, but you're also describing what makes a great chorus or ensemble. Like that is when I think about a musical, you are imagining everybody working together to tell the story and knowing when it's their time. Humility is a big part of being in a theatrical ensemble or a theatrical chorus because you know, it's not about you.

[18:31] Jack Smart: Definitely. Maybe that's especially true for musicals. Yeah. So I don't know, are we thinking these would be a Broadway Ensemble Musical Award and a Broadway Ensemble Play? My question right now is less about the feasibility of the awards and more the most true way of making them happen and of celebrating something that is not currently celebrated. How do we champion something that isn't championed through other award ceremonies or other award categories in this moment? And it is this cohesion, it is this humility, it is this collaborative storytelling that I said, that is not being celebrated in theater, but is celebrated at the SAG Awards and the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards and is something we're missing from the theatrical award landscape. Would you agree?

[19:23] Jack Smart: I would absolutely agree. I also think, again, comparing it to SAG or comparing it to film acting in general, not to disparage film actors, but cohesion, listening, reacting. In film, you don't have to do that half the time. If you're in a scene with one other person and the camera's on the other person, you're doing a close-up where only your ear is in the shot. I think great actors do stay in the moment and stay in character and give their co-star a lot, but they don't have to. Whereas on stage, that is ramped up to 11. You can't do it over. You don't have multiple takes on the night of, and you have to be in character every moment that you're on stage. I do that thing as an audience member.

I love sometimes following someone who you're not supposed to be following on stage, who's not actually in the visual spotlight. That could be another criteria for an Ensemble Award voter. If you're catching Ensemble members who are clearly not in it, well, then there's your answer. I think a great Ensemble is in character the whole time. Again, that is so much harder. It's tenfold for theater actors than it is for film and TV actors.

[20:21] Jack Smart: One question that has come up in my off-mic discussions about celebrating Ensembles is giving multiple awards to the same person for the same performance. Stockard Channing, and it's only a play. Well, we could celebrate her with the best leading actress in a play, or best supporting actress in a play. She's going to be eligible for two awards. If we're using the SAG awards as a standard for that question, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is eligible for two awards for V. Is that correct?

[20:54] Mo Brady: Yes. It's often the case that a film actor will win both their individual film category and then that film's Ensemble. I don't know. It also gets to this thing I also think about, and I'd love to ask you the same question of, does it come down to are you then able to say, let's just use the Drama Desks as an example, if there were to be a Drama Desk Ensemble Award. Can you then say in your bio or just in conversation with people, just bragging about yourself, would you say, I'm a Drama Desk winner? Or would you say, I'm a Drama Desk Ensemble winner because there would be some kind of stigma do you have to stipulate in your program that you're an Ensemble Drama Desk winner?

[21:26] Jack Smart: I'm of the mindset, I call her SAG Award winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and I don't really get into, but some of her awards are for Ensemble and some are for individual. The cast of Modern Family, I love Modern Family, I'm not bashing them, but they have so many SAG Awards and they have more SAG Awards than Viola Davis does. She's got her individual prizes. Modern Family has four or five because they're Ensemble prizes. Am I distinguishing that when I write about them? Not really. They are SAG Award winners. That is just an objective fact. So if one of the stumbling blocks or one of the challenges against having an Ensemble prize is that it awards too many actors, I mean, is that the argument against it?

Or we don't want Stalker Channing to have two of the same award? She would still just call herself Drama Desk winner Stalker Channing, right? And she could be shouted out in her bio for having the individual prize or both. I don't think it's a big deal to have both. There's so much content out. There's so many performances out there.

[22:21] Jack Smart: I want to go into this Arteos idea because one of the things that the Arteos Awards does is it celebrates casting because nobody else was. Yeah, just kind of true of any award, really. But here we think about Ensembles. Is the best solution an Ensemble Award to celebrate Ensembles because no one else is doing it? Is that the right choice? I'm a Broadway lover. I love my Tony Awards. And so I'm always going to think about theatrical awards from the top down. But one of the things that I've wondered so far in this journey is maybe that's not the right way to celebrate them. But yet I want them to be celebrated in our industry's highest way.

[23:01] Mo Brady: Right, right, right. You don't want the main reason to have an award because it's not there. The point is celebrating.

[23:07] Jack Smart: But celebrating something that isn't being celebrated. Let me pull back and tell me what you think. And I don't think these are mutually exclusive options. One is the Mo Brady's Garage Ensemble Awards, which celebrates something that is not being celebrated, but not in a very esteemable way. Not attached to a big organization or industry. People may not want to put that in their bio. Versus the Tony Awards, which is much harder to achieve and may never happen. And it may not celebrate it in the way that I think it should be celebrated, but it's good because it's the highest prize. Is one better than the other? Which one is better to pursue first? Is it better to have some sort of celebration of this thing that isn't celebrated elsewhere? Or is it not worth it unless it's at its highest level?

[24:00] Jack Smart: Yeah, it's sort of like, do we abolish the Constitution or do we rewrite the Constitution? It's like, shout out to Heidi Schreck. Every day, I would love to give a shout out to Heidi Schreck. Thank you. The last show I saw was the LA production of What the Constitution Means to Me. So it's been on my mind a lot just because it's the last theater I saw. Again, what are awards? Especially in this last year of the pandemic, I am asking myself this a lot. What is the point? Awards are fundamentally, they're an opportunity to highlight and promote great art and maybe even curate. I mean, look at the Emmys. There's so much content out there that helps audiences narrow down what they want to watch.

I think idealistically, awards are supposed to be a standard of quality. I mean, let's be real. It's more of like the industry's measure of quality rather than the art form's measure of quality. It's a little bit more commercial rather than artistic excellence. It's both. But I also think the thing about awards, and I love the idea of Mo Brady's Garage Awards, they are also supposed to be, and this is a point I think a lot of people miss, they're supposed to be a ritual. They're supposed to be a tradition. I think it's very helpful that they happen regularly. Look at this past year when the whole awards landscape is all askew and we don't have a Tony's and we're all running around with our heads cut off.

It's important to come together as a community to celebrate, to do that in a ritualized way, the opening of the envelope. These sacred traditions are there for a reason. Yes, we're patting ourselves on the back. That is part of it. But it's also like fundamentally coming together to celebrate and to remind ourselves why we love artistry at its finest. Does that really answer the question of are we supposed to change the existing awards or add our new award? I don't know. I think either format. Or both. We could have both Mo Brady's Awards and an Ensemble Tony Award. And actors who want to put it on their bio, they put it on their bio.

[25:36] Mo Brady: Who adjudicates the Ensemble Awards? Is it a committee of outside voters who are not members of these ensembles? Often I've thought about who's better to adjudicate ensembles than ensemble members themselves, but ensemble members are busy and maybe they're in a show and they...

[25:55] Jack Smart: Yeah, I don't know. That's actually so interesting because it's only theater or maybe it's only Broadway where that's the case, where you would want a voting pool of ensemble members but they would be deemed ineligible. So maybe there would be a workaround where they are adjudicating every show that they're not in.

[26:11] Jack Smart: Or you can only adjudicate if you're not in the show, but then those people have to be unemployed for an entire season to see it. Your instinct about the voting body should involve... If it's about judging acting, it needs to involve actors and it shouldn't involve too high a ratio of non-actors. That's super accurate. The SAG Awards are decided upon by committees of working SAG-AFTRA members that are randomly selected. I don't think they really pay attention to whether or not they're in those shows. I don't know that they're disqualified if they're in a film or TV show. I do agree. You need to have people who have skin in the game. Oscar members are often voting if they haven't worked in filming years. And so they are voting, allegedly, more in their own personal interest than in the interest of the actual rating of excellence because they don't have skin in the game. And I do think it's important to have working actors judging working actors.

[27:03] Mo Brady: What a sprawling conversation we're having.

[27:06] Jack Smart: I know. I hope I wasn't here to provide the one solution and check all the boxes and be like, we solved it. No, because this is probably just asking more questions.

[27:15] Mo Brady: You are my first guest, Jack. And so the point of the conversation has really been to sort of crack open what we need to explore.

[27:25] Jack Smart: If there's more questions at the end of it, maybe that's a good thing.

[27:28] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[27:29] Jack Smart: Yeah.

[27:31] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Jack Smart for sharing his stories with us today.

[27:39] Mo Brady: The Ensemblist was produced today by Jackson Klein and me, Mo Brady. Please rate and review The Ensemblist wherever you listen to podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or at bpn.fm, the home of Broadway Podcast Network.

[27:54] Mo Brady: Our Patreon members have on-demand access to our archive, full conversations with our guests, and early access to episodes. You can join Ty Williams, Christian Rehnke, Emily Chen, and many, many more by supporting us there for between $5 and $20 a month.

[28:11] Mo Brady: That's patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Thanks for listening. Until next time.