This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Alan Seales: Welcome back to the Theatre Podcast. Intimate personal conversations with the industry's biggest names. I'm your host, Alan Seales, and this episode is with a fellow North Carolinian, Robert Hartwell. He's got several Broadway credits, including Hello, Dolly!, Dreamgirls, Memphis, a handful of additional ones, but at the height, the height of his Broadway success, he decides to start teaching in the midst of all of this. And he formed what is now known as the Broadway Collective, which you all need to go check out at bwaycollective.com. Even before the pandemic, they were set up to do online virtual classes for dancing and singing and everything that you can do acting, of course, to get onto the Broadway stage, and has just found his love, found his calling in teaching and educating.

And side note, North Carolina Theatre, which is also where I got my first professional gig way back in the day, has now hired him as an associate artist for the upcoming 21-22 season. So I'm super happy that he's going home to his roots there to help out with the new talent that hopefully will make its way to Broadway in the next couple of years. Make sure to find me online on Instagram and Twitter. Leave a rating and a review wherever you're listening. Share with your friends. And now, everybody, please enjoy this episode with Robert Hartwell.

[1:36] Alan Seales: My guest today is best known as a performer in five iconic Broadway shows, including Hello, Dolly! with Bette Midler, Dreamgirls, Memphis, and more. At the height of his Broadway success, he realized that although he loved performing, his true passion was teaching the arts. This led him to create the Broadway Collective, where he and his team of performing arts professionals train the next generation of Broadway stars. His business has also been able to employ over 200 performers who are out of work due to the Broadway shutdown as mentors and coaches, assistants, etc. And for their virtual workshops and other online programming, this has been invaluable to the Broadway community during an extremely tough time for performers struggling to pay their bills. So, Robert Hartwell, welcome to the Theatre Podcast.

[2:30] Robert Hartwell: Alan, that is so kind. Thank you so much for having me. And also, I love that you are a fellow North Carolina native as well.

[2:40] Alan Seales: Oh, you weren't supposed to know that. I was going to spring that on you later.

[2:43] Robert Hartwell: Oh, I'm sorry. I hope I didn't throw this off. It's ruined now.

[2:48] Alan Seales: No, no, no. I was actually going to say, because I know that you started partnering with North Carolina Theatre in Raleigh, which is where I had my first professional job in a show directed by a young Casey Nicholaw before he had come up. He was in his up-and-coming stage with assistant director Casey Hutchins.

[3:08] Robert Hartwell: Wow.

[3:09] Alan Seales: The Caseys, they got me my first gig. So, I guess, obviously, we're going to talk about the Broadway Collective, which is your current gig, for lack of a better term. But since we're already talking about North Carolina Theatre and your connections there, let's just start with that.

[3:27] Robert Hartwell: I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. And that's so funny. My first professional show was also at North Carolina Theatre. It was a huge role, Alan. I was in Fagin's Gang in Oliver. And you would have thought that it was my Tony Award winning performance moment. But I think I was maybe like 12 years old, but I had never been paid to do what I loved to do. So, that was just huge for me as a kid. And I think it was also huge for my family, for my parents and my aunts and my uncles to see that this thing that got me labeled a sissy or got me labeled all of these other things was putting money into my pocket and our family's pocket. So, it was a huge shifting for our family and the mentality around the power of the arts and what it could do for a person.

[4:32] Robert Hartwell: So I have always loved, obviously, being from Raleigh. And Eric Woodall, his mom actually is part of a dance troupe that rehearses at the studio that I grew up at, at North Carolina Dance Institute. And she told me when I was a teenager, I was probably 16, 17 years old. She's like, when you move to New York City, you have to meet my son. And I say it all the time, when someone says that to you, you're like, okay. She's like, he's a casting director, but you're like, okay, all right, cool, cool, cool. But soon, obviously, I went to college and realized, oh my God, her son is Eric Woodall of Tara Rubin Casting. And oh my goodness. So, moving to New York and finally getting the opportunity to meet Eric was just incredible.

And I have to say, he's always been the kindest, most respectful person to me as an actor, going into his room. And when he reached out to me probably about two years ago to direct, and actually, he reached out to me to choreograph Memphis. And I said to him, I said, thank you so much for this opportunity. I said, but you are going to get the best production when you have me direct and choreograph it. And he was like, well, that was not what I thought you were going to say. I was like, okay. I was like, well, that's what I'm saying. And I think this is going to be really awesome. So, he came back, he had a few other people to interview. I mean, he came back and he offered me the director and choreographic position.

And we just had the best time from casting the show to doing the pre-production with the designers and the administrative staff at North Carolina Theatre. And we just made this really incredible friendship to bloom, but also this incredible working relationship. And we, after Memphis, it actually didn't happen because of the pandemic. We were, the Monday that we closed, we were getting ready to move actually into the theater for Tech Week. But after I got back to New York, he and I just continued conversations of ways that we could begin to expand the possibilities at NCT. And it just kind of organically showed the both of us that, hey, there's something really special that's happening between us for this theater.

And when he presented this artistic associate position to me, I was so honored. But it was an absolute yes, because it combines all of the things that I love most, which are marketing and education, but also directing and choreographing and all of the artistic stuff that goes in with that. So I'm really excited.

[7:31] Alan Seales: That's so cool. Yeah, I lived in Raleigh. I went to college at NC State and lived in Raleigh solidly eight years and then off and on. That was always my home base until I moved to New York. So I've done several shows at NC Theatre, NCT, and yeah, that always has a fond place in my heart. So it's so nice when, I guess now that I'm on the other side of the looking glass, what am I trying to say? Is when, remember that first gig you had, when you had your huge role, like I was in the ensemble of My Fair Lady. I was Cockney guy, flower seller number three, right? That was my gig. That was my Tony role. And I looked at all of these actors. I learned so much, these major, like they had their equity cards.

They auditioned, they came from New York. They were everything. And I love, I remember that enthusiasm that I had. And I'm looking at it from the other side now. That's like, I'm in New York and I'm creating the opportunities and I'm helping educate people and bring this knowledge to these young students and these young people and helping them learn how to become better performers. I just remember that enthusiasm that I had when I was 21, 22, right out of college. And I was like, I'm performing with equity members. I'm the shit.

[9:03] Robert Hartwell: Oh, totally. Yes.

[9:05] Alan Seales: You know?

[9:06] Robert Hartwell: What's so wild, Alan, is when we were getting ready to, the equity company was getting ready to go from New York to North Carolina. I said to them, I said, I know you all know this. And I think because I'm from Raleigh and because I got my start at NCT, I felt a deeper conviction about directing and choreographing this show. And so I said to the equity company, I said, when you're there, you have to know that there are 16 year olds that are in this cast, that they have never seen someone with an equity card before. And we have to be the example for them. We have to show them what work ethic looks like. We have to show them what kindness looks like in the rehearsal room. So it was just really cool to see the NC natives looking up to those people. It's just special. It's something that you don't always get the opportunity to have. And I think that's what's so special about what they're doing at NC Theatre.

[10:11] Alan Seales: Yeah, I totally agree. And for some people who love the arts, who love performing, and either for whatever reason just have never done it full time, this gives them the opportunity to get in. They're on stage. They're on stage with people who have been on Broadway stages. And that is an indescribable feeling that I feel like everyone has to experience at some point. You know what I mean?

[10:39] Robert Hartwell: Absolutely. I could not agree more.

[10:46] Alan Seales: So bringing it to the Broadway Collective, tell us what that is. And then where did it come from?

[10:55] Robert Hartwell: The Broadway Collective is a musical theatre training academy. So we get the opportunity to, before COVID, obviously work with students in person. But we opened in 2016, in January of 2016. So we just started the celebration of our fifth birthday. So I've been saying since January 24th.

[11:18] Robert Hartwell: I have a kid in kindergarten now. I have a K-5 year old. I feel like I'm like, oh wow, he's going to go to first grade really soon. So we're celebrating five years, but what's really, I'm just going to say it, what has been a blessing is that we opened the company and immediately went into online education back in 2016. So our hope was to always be able to, regardless of student zip codes, for them to be able to be connected to Broadway performers in New York City as their coaches and mentors. So when the pandemic hit, it really, it honestly, it hit my heart in a different way because I know that so many of our friends that own companies in the same musical theatre educational space, they had never worked on Zoom before.

They had never coached through Zoom. They didn't know all of the tech that goes with it. And to be of hopeful help to some of them was something that I'll never be more grateful for, but truly to then look at our company and say, we had an ease in that moment because there wasn't really, I don't want to say anything new for us to learn. You're constantly learning as a business person and as an educator, but it was a good thing for us because for the first time, people that didn't understand online education finally were forced to understand it because it was how they were learning academically. And then to be able to have a platform where they were also able to get their artistic training, they finally understood it.

So we started to see massive growth at the beginning of the quarantine of the pandemic, simply because moms and dads and all kinds of family structures were like, oh, well, if they can learn how to read and write on Zoom, they can learn how to sing and dance on Zoom as well. So it has been quite an experience, I would say, this past year as it has been for everyone. But I know that something that has absolutely saved us was the fact that we had been doing the online portion of work with students since the beginning in 2016.

[13:45] Alan Seales: As a new business owner, how did you overcome that hump of gaining trust? Because you have to be able to put yourself online and you had the luck slash wherewithal to, like you said, be online first. It's not like you don't have a studio where people have to show up and whatnot. How did you get over that initial, I guess, as a parent, I'm a parent of my own kindergartner and pre-kindergartner, and I'm like, oh, this is a lot of money that I'm going to go pay for my kid who has a short attention span anyway to go sit in front of a tablet again. I guess at that point, it wasn't again, it was just sit in front of a tablet or in front of a screen or something. But I guess you see what I'm saying. How did you build that reputation? Because I'm always curious how small businesses start and then it seems like Broadway Collective has just caught on like wildfire.

[14:45] Robert Hartwell: That's such an incredible question, Alan, and no one has ever asked me that before. So this is going to be very real. I would say the first thing of gaining trust is that you first have to give it to yourself. And we didn't begin to, quote-unquote, have success as a company until I, as the founder, reckoned with my own imposter syndrome, until I truly believed that what we had was game-changing in not only the way that we were training our students, but the fact that we were, as my teachers taught me in college, that we were working on making better humans before we were getting into the singing, the dancing, and the acting. And so once I felt confident that I had something special to offer and that it was heart-centered, but that it was also going to push people and that it wasn't going to be sugar-coated and I didn't need to apologize for pushing people, that's when parents said, oh, I know what you're about.

I see and I understand, then, why this investment is going to be more than I could even hope for. And so I had to get out of my way. And when I got out of my way, our team started to understand the mission in a whole different way. They were able to talk about the programming in a different way. Parents were able to see, oh, okay, I get it. But then, once you start to get people saying yes to your program, if you are actually doing the work of really making a curriculum-based program that has benchmarks, that has metrics, that is making decisions on what you're teaching students to get them to the result that they're hoping to get to, you then get natural testimonials. So because we had a curriculum in place and because we had these benchmarks that we were trying to hit as their coaches, the students just inevitably started to win.

And then you look and you're like, oh my goodness, our kids are getting into Michigan. Our kids are getting into Carnegie Mellon. Our kids are gaining confidence. Our kids are like getting into Interlochen. And it just starts to have this natural momentum simply because, one, you got out of your own way. And two, you commit to doing the work. As much as I'm asking of them, I am absolutely asking of myself. I constantly go back to our mission and reckon with myself if I am living up to being the best leader that I can be for our team. Because if I'm not, then it's going to trickle down to the parents. It's going to trickle down to the students. And it's then going to obviously trickle down to like, are we able to pay payroll on time? And that's pretty important in a business, LOL.

[17:51] Alan Seales: Absolutely. But in gaining trust, it really began with trusting myself and getting out of my own way so that we could get on with what I knew we had the possibility and the capability to do.

[18:11] Robert Hartwell: Thank you for that answer. That is not expected. I was expecting very, like, well, we have to do the advertising. And then we send out newsletters and the very black and white binary answers. I love that there was an internal emotional aspect to that, because that is so what this podcast is about. I love it. I talked to a vocal coach in probably the last episode, depending on when I release this, the vocal coach that came up in conversation. I said, I've always had a baritone. I've never been able to sing tenor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She goes, well, let me stop you right there. Your first problem is yourself, because you're telling yourself right off the bat, you're not a tenor. So of course you're not going to be a tenor.

You're not going to be able to sing that if you tell yourself you can't sing that. So along those lines, you got out of your own way, and it's just exploded. And I think that is such good advice in general, is just trust yourself. And I want to touch on the imposter syndrome, because don't think I forgot that. But I want to ask about the Broadway Collective. What age of kids do you work with? Because I was thinking younger kids, I guess because you said that it's the age of a kindergartner, it's five years old, but then you're saying that you have kids getting into colleges now. So are you mostly only working with older kids, or what's the range?

[19:38] Robert Hartwell: So we work with students from 12 to 25, but the main core of our students are between the ages of 15 to 18.

[19:51] Alan Seales: Have they already got experience, or are some of them coming in fresh without any performance experience before?

[19:55] Robert Hartwell: Oh, that's a good question, Alan. You know what's so funny? Speaking of the universe and just how everything works, when we opened the company, I totally thought, okay, we want to train these hardcore kids who sing, dance, and act. And I was just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not who the universe is ever going to trust me with. So I would definitely... No, not at all. Because at the end of the day, I'm a caretaker. Relationships are huge to me. And so the universe brings us families that need hope. They bring us some... I tell our kids, I can say this here, because I would say it right to their face. A lot of them are beautiful little odd ducks, and they are so special and so unique in their own way.

And I would say a lot of them come with huge holes in their training. And I think because some of them are not 10s across the board in their skills, they get forgotten about in their local training. Or someone just says, yeah, you're not the shiny object. And I think sometimes we get shiny object syndrome that you forget that it's that rare rock that if you buff it up, that's actually the gold right there. So our whole mission is to take these kids who have a passion, because if you don't have a passion for this thing, there's nothing. You're gonna burn out. Find this passion. And then we start to figure out their why. And then we figure out a morning routine that works for them and an evening routine.

And then we start working on the skills. But as you begin to develop these beautiful humans, the work then that you get to then deposit into them, it just, it's like you've tilled the soil and you've really worked the earth. So then once you then start to put in the singing lessons and the dancing lessons and the acting lessons, the crops come. I mean, it's wild. We have kids that have joined us and they have never danced before. And they end up going and getting dance scholarships to college, simply because our program is a 12-month program, right? So if every single week, you are having an assignment and you're turning it in every single...

[22:35] Robert Hartwell: The consistency, there's just a natural momentum and progress that happens simply because someone's holding you accountable to show up for the thing that you say that you want every single week, you know? Um, and so it's just really exciting to see what happens when you just don't run after the shiny object, but you run after like the person that needs you. Yeah, I am so pleasantly surprised. You mentioned a morning routine and evening routine and you're developing a personality or you're crafting this soul inside these performers that don't know how to find it in another way. And no other institution that I have ever heard of or been told about or even participated in has gone down that route.

That is so incredibly unique. Where did that come from? I mean, obviously it came from you as the founder, but where in you did that come out of? I think it came out in not, I think I know it came out in my college training. I went to the University of Michigan and Brent Wagner was the chair of the musical theater department. And when I auditioned for the program, he said something that just hit me that your journey was going to be uniquely and divinely yours, and that it did not matter who was on your right or who was on your left, but it mattered what was in front of you. And so when I got to Michigan, all of the teachers were not concerned about anything other than how are you doing? And I had an incredible, and he's still a mentor.

We're actually speaking tonight. His name is Professor George Surley. He was the first black tenor, speaking of tenors, with the Metropolitan Opera. And he would always say, young man, how are you? And he's just the most distinguished person. And the way that they cared for 18, 19, 20, 21 year old me, it changed how I received information. And now it has changed how I want and hope for young people to receive information. And don't get me wrong, I think it's different. I tell our students and our parents all of the time, we are not the coaches for everyone. This program isn't for everyone because it's countercultural to think that you're going to work on self-care before you work on a 16 bar.

But I believe if you do dig into that self-care, I think those notes are going to come out a little more crystal clear than if you're coming to the process exhausted, if you're coming to the process like just feeling heavy. So it brings us some joy and I hope that it does, you know, the students and the parents as well. We're going to take a short break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[26:14] Alan Seales: A bunch of things just clicked in my mind as you were saying that because I've talked to a lot of people, of course, through the podcast and all with their own unique journey and story and training. And the ones who have done a lot of those who have done like classic training in Shakespeare are the ones that get into the rock shows and the comedy shows because they come from a place of such authenticity and such inner improvement, right? That I think a lot, as you were saying, a lot of institutions just focus on how high can you kick or how high can you belt. But what your intention is, who you are underneath that or what you're bringing to the character, it doesn't, musical theater is acting just as much as it is singing too.

So you've got classical trained actors and I think a lot of musical theater programs leave out so much of that inner work that I am so glad that the Broadway Collective is doing because it's just in terms of emotional health and mental health anyway, we need to be talking about it more in general, full stop, but in addition to bring that into your performance and help people become better people, better performers and better understand who they are in order to then better understand who they are portraying on stage. It seems so obvious now that you've said it.

[27:47] Robert Hartwell: You know what, Alan? They will not allow you the opportunity not to talk about it. That's what I love about students today. They are open to the conversation. We weren't talking about mental health when I was their age training, but they are open to the conversations. We actually, my, one of my business coaches, his name is Alex Charth and he had his daughter enrolled in one of our programs and he said to me after a weekend event, maybe about a month ago, that he just had tears in his eyes and I said, oh my gosh, Alex, what's going on? He said, well, you asked all of the students to put their, when they put their name on Zoom to have their pronouns. And he said that there was a teacher in his local community that told students that they were not going to have a conversation on pronouns.

And I just thought, you can't erase people that are trying to play people. Like, it's just, that is nonsensical. So I just think what an opportunity we have, you know, to give them a safe space, give them a supportive space.

[29:15] Alan Seales: So I'm going to bring up the imposter syndrome now that you mentioned about and also tie that into your own Broadway career. You've got five Broadway credits on your resume. You seem to be able to find work in New York very, very well. And then at the same time, you're like, you know, and it's said in the intro, at the height of your career, you decided to go off and start teaching. Like why the shift? And is that related to the imposter syndrome? And if you were to do it again, would you do it all the same way?

[29:49] Robert Hartwell: Ah, Alan. Alan coming through, clutched with the questions, people. I love it. I would start with, one, I started teaching actually when I was still in high school. So both of my parents are educators in their own right. My dad worked in the school system. He actually just retired. And my mom is a coach as well. But when I started teaching in little summer programs here and there, I always loved it. Because my dad is a basketball coach. So I just saw my entire life, Coach Hartwell, just making folks just hustle up and down the court. That was my life. And so I saw that as leadership. I was like, oh, that's what a leader looks like. Hustle, you are a coach. All right, cool, cool, cool. I'm here for that.

So when I moved to New York City after I graduated from University of Michigan, I went on the national tour of Dreamgirls actually. And when I was on the tour, there was another musical theater education company that had reached out to me and said, hey, will you be one of our teachers as you go in doing master classes across the country? I thought, oh my gosh, that'll be so much fun. And so from that experience and then moving back to New York and working for other musical theater organizations, I learned what I enjoyed as a teacher. But then I more so learned what I wanted to change about how we were working with young people, especially in these one-off musical theater master class situations.

[31:42] Robert Hartwell: And so when I was probably, I guess this was when, yeah, so I'm doing Hello, Dolly! And at this point, we had opened the Broadway Collective, but the imposter syndrome came by thinking, if I'm not in a Broadway show, how in the world will anyone trust me to teach their kid about musical theater? Totally forgetting the fact that I had a degree in musical theater. I had two national tour credits and five Broadway credits on my resume. And, but that was like running through my brain of just like, I would be nothing without a Broadway credit. And I realized, I'm like, boo, you have some inner work to do, because if you think that your value is attached to a Broadway show, you are going to have a very hard existence in life when in five to ten years, your body can't physically dance eight shows a week because you're just run down.

What are you going to do then? So when I realized that my value was not attached to a Broadway show, but it was attached to the lessons and the people that had poured into me, and then what I could then hopefully pour into others, that's when it clicked for me, of just like, okay, you got to go do this thing because, and this is literally the hokiest thing that I, oh my God, Alan, you are really getting the truth out of me today. There is, my favorite musical is Hello, Dolly. And when Bette would sing before the parade passes by every night, hand to Bible, it was a spiritual experience for me because I knew that my parade was the Broadway Collective. And I was like, you better go jump into this thing, all in, before this thing passes you by. Because I do believe that there are windows of opportunity that open in your life and the universe is looking for a co-collaborator, a co-conspirator. Will you join them?

[33:52] Robert Hartwell: Will you join that thing? And I had halfway joined it, you know, because I was splitting my time in the morning running the collective and then in the night performing. And literally, the moment that I said, I'm going to move forward, and I'm going to do this thing full time, dreams that I did not even know that I had inside of me started to happen. Within a week, Wayne Bryan at Music Theatre of Wichita and Mark Madama, my professor from the University of Michigan, reached out to me and said, oh, there's a show we want you to choreograph. And I was like, I've always wanted to work regionally as a choreographer. I've always wanted to direct. It was like, things just started to go into motion.

And even at the company, like, oh, the moment I did that, then our numbers started to change. And then we were able to hire employees. And I was like, oh, my gosh, people don't let the parade pass you by. So that was, it was a huge moment. But it started truly, Alan, with saying to myself, like, your worth is not determined by who you are attached to. It is completely determined by how it is that you feel about yourself and what you believe that you can give to this world. And once I was sure of that, we were off.

[34:51] Alan Seales: Wow. That is advice that I think even a lot of current Broadway performers still need to hear and have a hard time accepting. And I'm just curious if, you know, throughout your national tours and your credits, with the big Broadway actors and actresses that you have worked with, and of course, you know, Bette Midler with Hello, Dolly!, do you, looking back at your experiences with them and what you know about them now personally, do you feel like they've sort of adopted or you adopted that mentality based on them? Or they've like, it's just leaders in the Broadway space are just like, my worth is not tied to my show. It's who I am is not in the show that I'm in. Because I look at a Bette Midler, or Kristen Chenoweth, or, you know, Hugh Jackman, whoever it is, right, these big names in theater.

And I feel like they're always just happy with who they are in that moment. And they just happen to get shows littered between their constant happy moments. I may be way off base. I'm wondering if you have experience with that, having worked with them.

[36:40] Robert Hartwell: I think everyone's journey is so unique. But the main difference I've seen between most principals on Broadway and those of us that work in the ensemble on Broadway is there's a huge financial difference in what you're making in the ensemble versus what you're making as a principal. And so when you're in the ensemble, there is this shelf life to you, especially as a dancer, because you cannot consistently keep your batting average for that many years doing eight shows a week, just because of what it truly does to your body. It hurts. You really do it for love. But what I will definitely say is, I think it's a culture that we have fed into in the industry of like, all right, you get that first Broadway show.

And then you're like, all right, well, will I get the second one? Will I get a third one? I got a third one. I'll never get a fourth one. And so it's almost like there's this, I never felt like it was unhealthy, but there's this competition that feels like you're fueling each other onto your next best. At least that's what I felt. But I would say what's different than for our friends that are in principal contracts is that gives them a different level of access to rooms. So a lot of them are in between Broadway shows, they're filming a movie, they're filming commercials, they are doing concerts at symphony halls. And those are things that aren't necessarily on your radar as an ensemble member.

It's definitely things that you aspire to. But it's much easier, I think, for those things to happen for you or to be invited into those rooms when you've had your name above the title versus understudying the person with the name above the title. And they're all valid and they're all very real. But there are realities of just the logistics of how it all works. But I would definitely say as far as watching all of the principals I've had the opportunity to work with, there has been one thing that is consistent, which is kindness and work ethic. They show up. Gavin Creel, he shows up. Bette, she shows up. Kelly, oh, she most definitely shows up. They show up and they're kind to people and they listen. And it's contagious. And so when you see that level of success for them, you completely understand why you see it.

[39:47] Alan Seales: Yeah. There's a lot of common threads throughout so many people that I've talked to. And one of them is that if you are the person that others want to work with the next time, then you will continue. I mean, it seems very obvious when you say it, but don't be the person to get the job now. Be the person that people want to give the next job to because that way you will continue to work and you will continue to make the impressions and people will talk about you and call you in. And then you combine that with other advice that I've all pieced together, which is the job was never yours if you didn't get it. People walk out of auditions and say, oh, I screwed that up. I lost the job. No, the job was never yours.

[40:38] Robert Hartwell: Say that.

[40:40] Alan Seales: Right, right. So as long as you show up, you're nice. You be the person people want to keep calling in for auditions and then just understand that the job is yours when it's yours. You didn't lose a job if you didn't get it because you never had it to begin with. Then I think your mentality overall will improve a lot. I think that is a lovely place for us to shift into the final closing questions that I ask everybody to wrap up these episodes. The first one very simply is what motivates you?

[41:08] Robert Hartwell: My mom.

[41:11] Alan Seales: Yeah, my mom's a huge, huge motivator for me because she's done so much for me and my family and my brother. And I think as you get older, you start to see so many sacrifices that you didn't even realize were being made for you. And you just want to take care of those people then in a different way. So yeah, a huge motivator for me as my mom.

[41:42] Alan Seales: And then what advice would you give to your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path?

[41:49] Robert Hartwell: Oh, goodness. I would say have more fun. I would say have more fun. I took myself pretty, pretty, pretty seriously, I'd say, in high school and in college. And I'm grateful for what it then did for me moving to New York City. But there are definitely some things that I wish that I would have said yes to simply because I was so focused on getting into the school or getting to New York City that I wish that I would have invited more time in for fun. Which is why I now make my kids that we teach at the Broadway Collective find time to like, no, no, no, it's Friday night. Go be with your friends. Please wear your mask and social distance. But like, please be a teenager, you know, like, be a teenager. It's so important.

[42:44] Alan Seales: Oh, I totally agree with that. Okay, last question. Hardest one. If you can only see one show for the rest of your life, but you can see it as many times as you want, what would you see?

[42:53] Robert Hartwell: I would see. I would see Once on this Island over and over and over and over again. Yeah, I really would.

[43:08] Alan Seales: Did you ever get to see Lauren Lott go on as Timone?

[43:15] Robert Hartwell: I did see Lauren Lott go on actually. And Lauren and I did Motown together. Yeah. So to see her like, in that role, it was huge because she was actually one of the Diana covers on the Motown tour. And I mean, it's Lauren, I mean, just a voice of gold, heart of gold. Perfect. And it was actually a night that we had our Broadway collective students there that night. And I opened the playbill and I'm like, Lauren is on! Like it was so special. She was so incredible. She has one of the most beautiful voices, flat out. I don't know what it is. Something about her frequency speaks to me, like the literal frequency of her voice is just perfect for me.

[44:03] Alan Seales: Anyway. So where can we find more about you on social media? Where can we sign up for Broadway Collective classes? Tell us all the places we can find you.

[44:09] Robert Hartwell: You can find me on Instagram at SirRobertTakesPics. Or you can find out more about the Broadway Collective at Bway Collective on IG or bwaycollective.com on the interwebs. You can get more of me at thetheaterpodcast.com. I'm on the IG and the T W I T T E R at theater underscore podcast. Please leave a reading and a review. This has been edited by Matthew Hendershot. Jukebox the Ghost gave us our intro and outro music. And Robert Hartwell gave us the conversation. Thank you.

[44:52] Robert Hartwell: Thank you so much. This has been so much fun.

[44:54] Alan Seales: Thank you, Alan. You're incredible. That was really, really, really delightful. Truly. Take a deep breath, make the world a little colorful.