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Two years after making his acting debut in the miniseries Once Upon a Time… But Not Anymore, Sebastián Yatra is taking a leap to Broadway, where he will close out 2024 starring in the musical Chicago. The Colombian star will spend four weeks playing the charmingly corrupt lawyer Billy Flynn, from Monday, Nov. 25 to Sunday, Dec. 22.
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“It’s news that I’ve been eager to share for a long time,” Yatra tells Billboard Español on Wednesday (Sep. 4) from Medellín. “This is not only big for me but for Colombia, big for Latinos to keep doing these kinds of things.”
Set in the 1920s, Chicago —the longest-running American musical on Broadway after almost three decades— is a scathing satire of how show business and the media make celebrities out of criminals. With a book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse, music by John Kander and lyrics by Ebb, it includes killer songs like “All That Jazz,” “Cell Block Tango” and “Mr. Cellophane”.
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The role of Billy Flynn — famously played by Richard Gere in the 2002 film adaptation — will receive the Latin treatment from Yatra, who hopes to bring some of his contemporary and tropical flair.
“Latinos have something special even when we are speaking English, there is a lot of love within us, a lot of passion,” says the singer-songwriter, known for No. 1 hits on the Billboard Latin Airplay chart like “Tacones Rojos,” “Un Año” with Reik and “Robarte un Beso” with Carlos Vives. “I think I can offer a perspective from someone who is living in 2024 at almost 30, how he sees that world, also knowing that I could have perfectly been a lawyer and could be that person standing there. Thank God Billy and I don’t share the same values, because that would be messed up!” he adds with a laugh.
Over the years, Chicago has invited various Latin stars to join the musical for brief seasons. The list includes Colombian actress Sofia Vergara, who in 2009 played Matron “Mama” Morton, and Mexican singer and actor Jaime Camil, who in 2016 portrayed Billy Flynn.
Yatra says that he received the invitation to join the cast about six months ago via email, and, although he was very surprised, he did not hesitate to accept this new challenge immediately.
“Many times you get a proposal like this and it’s easy to get scared and say, ‘Oh no, I’m not an actor, better leave it for another time, in a couple of years’. But opportunities come when they come in life and if you don’t dare to take them, you don’t know if they’ll come again,” he says, adding that now, “it’s the right moment” as he is just starting working on his fourth studio album, whose first single, “Los Domingos,” was released last week.
The artist, who said he was fascinated 12 years ago when he saw Ricky Martin performing as Che in the Broadway musical Evita, has already received the endorsement of his Puerto Rican friend and colleague, who commented on Wednesday on Yatra’s Instagram post about his foray into the theater Mecca of New York: “That’s it 🙌 We will be there, little brother. Absolutely. Congratulations.”
Currently preparing remotely, learning his lines and taking acting classes, Yatra is due to arrive in New York City to start in-person rehearsals a month prior to his debut. It’s an experience he is really looking forward to.
“Living in New York in December, with the snow, doing Broadway, is something I really want to live very much in the present, enjoy it, learn from it,” he said. “There are a million things to learn from all these people — the actors, the crew, the directors, the production. It’s impeccable. I was watching the play in New York City recently and it really runs like clockwork, so being able to adjust to become one more piece of that clock is going to be beautiful.”
Chicago is presented at the Ambassador Theatre (219 W. 49th St.) For more information and to purchase tickets, visit www.ChicagoTheMusical.com.
A month after The Outsiders: A New Musical took home four Tony Awards, including best musical, the original Broadway cast recording of the show hits No. 1 on Billboard’s Cast Albums chart. The set jumps 10-1 on the July 27-dated list, following the album’s CD release. The album had previously been available to purchase only […]
Broadway fans will soon have to bid “auf wiedersehen” to Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin when they depart from the Tony Award-winning musical Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. But soon after, they’ll be saying “willkommen, bienvenue, welcome” to a new set of Broadway stars. On Wednesday (July 24), the production announced that pop singer […]
Cats: The Jellicle Ball is a new stage production that reimagines Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats within the world of Harlem ballroom. It sounds like a whimsical lark on paper, a novel concept that might wear thin fast – but in practice, it’s actually kind of genius. Think salty ice cream – sounds weird but try it once and you’re an instant convert.
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Cats is a cultural touchstone that could use a win these days. The original Broadway production was a (litter) box office smash; Cats ran 18 years and still reigns as the fifth-longest-running Broadway show ever. The 2019 live-action film, however, did not land on its feet: critics scorned it, audiences avoided it and longtime haters licked their lips.
Which is why Cats: The Jellicle Ball – co-directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch; choreographed by Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles – is nothing short of a small miracle for a musical property that has burned through a few of its nine lives. Not only is it delighting the faithful, but it’s also bringing in new fans as it plays to sold-out crowds at new Manhattan venue PAC NYC.
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Lloyd Webber’s playful, hummable score is mostly unchanged, but the milieu of the musical has become the fertile, fresh and fierce world of ballroom culture (if that means nothing to you, watch the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning or TV series Pose stat). Ball culture — which has been forged over the decades by queer people of color — gives the often-scattershot narrative of Cats a throughline and (perhaps more importantly) provides each character with that elusive “why.” Why are they performing? Why are they vying for attention? Why are they in friendly competition? Because that’s what ball divas do, darling. And since many of the cast members hail from that world, the runway walks (and death drops) in this staging are the real deal.
Connecting Lloyd Webber’s Cats to ball culture also teases out the beautiful, bittersweet heart of the musical: one generation facing its irrelevance while another begins to experience the joys and jabs of life for the first time. “Everybody wants to leave something behind them, some impression, some mark on the world,” says drag performer Dorian Corey in Paris Is Burning. “[But when you’re older] you think you left a mark on the world if you just get through it and a few people remember your name.” It’s not hard to imagine “Memory” playing in the background of that scene.
That cross-generational connection has played out behind-the-scenes of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, too, thanks in part to two LGBTQ legends – Tony winner André De Shields and ball icon Junior Labeija – being part of the cast. “On a break [during rehearsals], you would see multiple people sometimes sitting around the feet of Junior and listening to him pontificate on stories of what was going on back when,” Levingston tells Billboard of having a “pillar of ballroom” in the theatrical space. “The [performers], especially those who are younger, are eager to hear [that queer history].”
During a recent phone call with Billboard, Levingston tells us about sinking his claws into Cats as a child, working with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s estate on this production and what he hopes is next for Cats: The Jellicle Ball.
Shelby Griswold, Xavier Reyes, Emma Sofia, Baby, Teddy Wilson Jr, and Primo in rehearsal for CATS: “The Jellicle Ball”.
Marc J. Franklin
What was your first exposure to Cats, the musical?
When I was a kid, like kindergarten or first grade, I would go to this daycare center after school, and they would put on the Barney movie. I was a big Barney kid — love Barney. And one of the trailers in the Barney movie was the 1998 recording of Cats [the stage musical]. At that age, I was not aware of my queerness; I was not aware of any of the reasons why I might be odd or different. And I didn’t have a strong vocabulary for theater, obviously, at all. I just saw this trailer and I didn’t really know the difference between what they were doing and what happens in a regular movie, but I felt things. Some things that were like, “These are exciting feelings that I have felt before” and some things I was like, “Ooh, I don’t even know if I’m supposed to feel this — what is this feeling?” I think that was the queer-coded-ness of the original production. This was around a time when Blockbuster was a thing, and so my single mother [and I] were at Blockbuster. I saw the two cat eyes from the box, and I was like, “I want to watch that! That’s the thing they play on the Barney movie!” And my mom, of course, was like, “You don’t know what that is. You don’t want to watch that.” And this is Blockbuster, so you actually have to watch the thing.
Right. It’s not like streaming, you can watch five minutes and then switch to something else.
Exactly. So I was like, “No, I promise, I’m gonna watch this.” So she got it for me. When she put it in, I sat inches away from the television and watched all two and a half hours of it without moving. Without asking for food, asking for water, using the restroom, I just stayed there. My mom was like, “we may have a situation.” I watched it every day for like two years and knew way too much about it as material. Then as I got older and learned more about theater and chose it as a profession, I think there’s this moment where you kind of diverge away from the things that you were attracted to as a kid. So then when the opportunity came to co-direct this, it was intersecting with a feeling that I was having of [being] a little paranoid to lose the things that activated me as a child. Even before I knew how we could make this work, I knew it spoke to a part of me that I felt like the larger industry wasn’t interested in. So the first big “yes” was about being able to play with that young person.
And what was your first exposure to ball culture?
It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I went to a ball for the first time. I definitely wouldn’t say that I was someone who was in the community — I was not. But in the way that a lot of young queer people, especially of color, intersect with ball culture, there are these points of intersection. Like a lot of people, my first time understanding it from a historical context was watching Paris Is Burning. I probably saw that when I was in college and had the same reaction that a lot of people have nowadays when they watch it — understanding how everything in pop culture that we say and do can be stemmed back to something that a queer person of color created.
It’s unreal how every quote from that movie has become part of culture. How did you approach the challenge of making sure this play felt authentic to ball culture?
The whole team is very much a mix of people who have worked in theater and people who work in ballroom. From the very beginning to me, I was like, “Oh, this is the event, this is what it is, it is about this culture clash specifically.” Both of our choreographers come from ballroom and are icons and legends within that community. We knew very, very early on that the cast had to be made up of people who came from ballroom and musical theater. So casting was really, really difficult. You’ve seen the show, and hopefully, there isn’t this drastic demarcation between people who are in musical theater and people who are in ballroom. Maybe you can tell a little bit, but the hope is that those two worlds are coming together to create this whole other new energy of expression that feels whole and complete. So a big shout out to how relentless our casting directors were to keeping our feet to the fire in terms of when sh-t got hard, never giving upon the thing that was the integrity of the piece: making sure that we’re always centering ballroom and doing it in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the material of Cats.
Zhailon Levingston, Bill Rauch, and the company in rehearsal for CATS: “The Jellicle Ball”.
Marc J. Franklin
When you were giving feedback to the actors, did more of the notes have to do with acting or with ballroom?
It was a pretty fascinating balance of the things. The longer we developed the piece, the more we learned what can never be sacrificed in either one of those worlds and what is up for negotiation. People from the cast had the autonomy and the freedom to raise their hand and be like, “Okay, so connect what you just said back to ballroom. Where’s that in ballroom?” It wasn’t from a place of criticalness, it was a place of “that’s how I enter this space.” So every acting choice, or dramaturgical choice or staging choice had to be both about our interpretation of the poetry of Cats and also about ballroom itself. What’s been exciting is to watch people come multiple times to the show and get something new every time or something deeper every time. I don’t know if it makes more or less sense of Cats — because I think how people define that is different — but what I do think it does is excavates the poetry for today’s audience in a way that has many more entry points to it, other than “I’m watching a literal cat tell me this thought.”
Speaking of literal cats, how early in the process was the decision made that the actors would not be dressed as actual felines?
It was pretty immediate. My co-director, Bill Rauch, he talks about how even before this project, the inspiration for him was this image of an older queer man singing “Memory” at a gay bar. So that was the pop. And then very quickly, what we learned is that it wasn’t in a gay bar, it was in a ball. And it’s not just a runway, that’s a catwalk. They’re not literal cats, but they’re people who walk cat-egories. And there’s something fun about that kind of wordplay, to use “cat” as the kind of slang term in the way that it was used in the 20th century – “look at that cat over there, that’s a cool cat.” That that’s already in the lexicon. So it’s just about bringing all of those things into play. And then also the fact that so much of ballroom vocabulary centers the feline, centers the cat and centers other words that suggest the cat, if you know what I mean.
[laughs] How did you approach the music?
The thing that took us the longest time to negotiate was “how does the music fit into this world?” The music started as our first organizing principle around the adaption — we just assumed that you have to change all of this music. The happy accident that we learned through development is that by doing that, you don’t actually interpret what is really the script in Cats, which is the orchestrations. If we get rid of everything, I don’t actually know what Andrew Lloyd Webber was trying to say in the first place. But that is an idea that I can only articulate in hindsight. What that really looked like in process was having a dance lab, a choreo lab with the choreographers, and the challenge being, “what would happen if we put this vogue and ballroom vocabulary onto this orchestration without touching any of it?” And what happened pretty quickly is that it sparked joy. The choreographers had joy in discovery of this physical language being able to be married to this music in a way that actually didn’t take away from the authenticity of the movement. If anything, it helped us listen to the score better.
I wanted to touch on what you mentioned about queer elders, since the cast includes undeniable legends in both the theater and ballroom communities. Were they helping instill a sense of queer history, queer continuity, during rehearsals?
All the time. We are so lucky to have the legend that is André De Shields, this pillar of theater, and then the legend that is Junior Labeija, this pillar of ballroom, as fountains of resources in the room. The space became a space where at any moment if Junior needed to stop us and give us more nuanced context, or challenge something that was going on, [he would]. [He would] remind us that he has 50 years of ballroom, as he puts it. All of that we used, and I think all of that plays into his connection to Gus. The way his role is played in the show is someone that all the cats, especially those who are younger, are eager to hear from, to learn from, to see, and we didn’t really have to fake a lot of that, because that’s what was happening in the rehearsal all the time. On a break and you would see multiple people sometimes sitting around the feet of Junior and listening to him pontificate on stories of what was going on back when.
There’s really no way of doing ballroom without the audience being an active participant, which isn’t the norm for theater. This certainly wasn’t an issue when I saw it, but have you had any audiences who were a little more reticent to get involved?
From the first dress rehearsal it was a rowdy, enthusiastic audience. We don’t really have quiet audiences. What I’ve started to tell people is it feels much more like you’re going to a sporting event than you’re going to their typical piece of theatre. And that’s cool. I think that theater should be an event. We had no clue how audiences would respond even up until first dress rehearsal. And for about five or six performances, almost our entire preview process, I didn’t trust them. I just didn’t know that would sustain, so it’s been fascinating to see now, after weeks of being open, that that is just what happens in this room for this show. And I think it’s because there are so many different types of people it’s calling together and it’s touching them and gagging them in different ways. The ballroom community feels so seen because of how many ballroom folks we have in the show and their status within the community. It is multigenerational. We have people who’ve just started their own house. [Robert “Silk” Mason], the actor who plays Mr. Mistoffelees, is now the founding mother of the House of Silk, [so they’re] at the beginning of that journey, and you have someone like Junior and everyone in between. Obviously, we will always wish to have more representation than not, but I think that what we have heard from folks within ballroom is that it’s so rare that there’s any level of real authenticity with ballroom in popular culture. [Pop culture] takes from the community and wears it as opposed to making something new with the community. And I have been really pleasantly surprised by the fact that it’s not just the ballroom elements that they’re pleased with. It’s the power of the singing voices, it’s the music. We had a guest judge who was a ballroom legend and mother who was sitting at the judge’s table mouthing words to “The Rum Tum Tugger.” And I was like, “oh, yeah, this musical was once the longest running musical in history, parts of it have found their way into everyone probably in some way.” I think people from ballroom are really shocked about watching ballroom elements but with the rigor of people actually singing at the same time. That’s like, “What? What is going on?” And then I think people who are used to musicals are watching this material that they learned get completely reimagined. And they’re like, “What? How are they doing a drop and singing at the same time?” Those two general broad constituencies are meeting each other at the intersection of wonder. And then there’s all of these other people in between: there’s old people, young people, Black people, white people, gay people, straight people, people who love Cats, people who abhor Cats and people who have no clue what Cats or ballroom is. And somehow all of those people are finding a way to be together.
I know the run recently got extended into August. Do you have a sense of what might happen with it down the road? Might you film it or even tour it?
What I will say it that we on the creative team want more audiences to be able to have access to material. And you know, personally, I always want actors to have jobs. I feel proud of the work and want to keep sharing it and I want to keep actors employed. But ultimately, it’s up to Andrew Lloyd Webber. And luckily, we worked very closely with his estate on this adaption. And I think that’s important for people to know. Everyone in his estate has seen the show, given us feedback about the show, worked with us on tricky moments that we were trying to figure out musically within the show. His daughter has seen the show twice. Once he comes to see the show, it will be ultimately up to him in terms of where he thinks it should go next. [Ed. note: two days after this interview, Lloyd Webber attended Cats: The Jellicle Ball.]
Andrew Lloyd Weber speaks backstage with the cast of CATS: “The Jellicle Ball” on July 10, 2024.
Andy Henderson
What was the feedback you got from the estate, in terms of things they thought weren’t quite working?
One of the things they gave us really good, detailed touch notes on is even though all of our characters are people and not cats, they validated the kind of fun in the costume design of still seeing elements of the feline. That felt important to them. And I think ultimately, it’s successful in the show. Probably the biggest collaborative effort between the estate and us was once we committed to mostly working with the original score, we then had to figure out what is there to do about the ballroom beats, which are so essential. You can’t come to something called a ball and hear nothing of a ballroom beat. We have a ballroom DJ on the team and the consensus that came together is ultimately the reason why the show is working. When the score is happening, it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, but there could be beats inserted in between the score in moments of actual competition on the runway. That’s all we needed in order for people to be like, “yeah, I get it, I get the world, I get this authenticity.” And it helped establish the fact that this whole night isn’t exclusively about competition. There are other emotions, other nuances, other feelings. This is ballroom culture, not a documentary about a ball. There are things that are happening off the runway that are supported better with music that isn’t just the ballroom beats that one might be used to. It just creates a richer sonic landscape to put all of these emotions that people are feeling in a place that makes sense.
What was one of the hardest things to hammer out in this production?
If I’m talking about story points, it was probably the reimagining of Macavity. A super iconic role that took a long time to figure out. With Macavity we knew early on, after a while of developing but still towards the beginning of the process, that we wanted to reimagine him. We just knew it didn’t make sense for him to be a villain in the space. So who would Macavity be a villain to? Probably the cops would make him a villain, probably stealing sh-t and that was aligned with history in ballroom. And then how to make that make sense without changing any of the material. That just took a long time to develop and was also very collaborative with the actor [Antwayn Hopper]. A lot of these choices were very collaborative with the actors. The integrity of process is always the hardest thing.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I would say a selfish hope is that no matter where the show goes next — if it goes somewhere next — it would be amazing to be able to record a cast album of it. I feel so much [for] those kids that are so far away from Broadway or New York and need something to hold on to that connects them to the thing that is giving them life when they’re at home in Oklahoma or Louisiana or Nebraska or wherever they are. I was that kid. And to hear these Black and brown artists [of the] cis and trans and queer experience being past your expectation of what certain voices should be able to do with a score that is extremely difficult and athletic – while also infused with contemporary touches of ballroom — that would just be an amazing thing to be able to hold on to.
Elton John songs? For a musical? Groundbreaking. Vanessa Williams is really giving fans a glimpse into the pop icon’s new tunes for her new musical based on The Devil Wears Prada.
During her appearance on the Wednesday (July 10) episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show, the “Save the Best for Last” singer shared some details about working with the pop legend for the show, which began its off-West End run in Plymouth, England, on July 6.
“I am honored because I grew up listening to Elton John on my little transistor radio on my windowsill with my two antennae, listening to ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and [‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’],” she said. “That’s my childhood! So, to be able to work with him and have him write new songs that I get the chance to sing for him is pretty epic.”
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In the show, Williams plays the titular role of Miranda Priestly, the icy, high-powered editor-in-chief at the fashion magazine Runway. In discussing her performance in the show, the actress gave Clarkson and her audience a tease of one of the show’s pivotal numbers.
“The script is very much based on the movie, so you see all the aspects of that, but it’s amplified by the music. So, for instance, in the second act they’re doing their fashion show and everyone thinks [Miranda] is on the outs,” she explained, before launching into an a capella rendition of the song. “‘You think that I can’t see you/ Smugly sitting there with glee/ Eager for the ending you’ve been waiting years to see/ Today, she’s getting ousted/ Yet her final hour’s nigh/ ‘Miranda’s reign has run its course’/ That’s what you think? Oh my.’”
Williams also shared that thanks to John’s musical sensibilities, the songs immediately lend themselves to broader cultural appeal. “This music takes the transition from the words and brings it to musical theater — but it’s also pop, too, because that’s Elton’s background,” she said. “So, there’s going to be remixes on the radio from The Devil Wears Prada, because he know what works in both genres.”
Check out the clip of Williams’ interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show below:
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Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo are hoping their stage musical, Invincible, will prove to be just that as they continue to work on it — amidst several other projects the couple has going, both together and separately.
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The production, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet built around the pair’s songs from Benatar’s albums, debuted to mixed reviews during late 2022 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Calif. — not long after Benatar and Giraldo were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now they’re planning to bring it to New York this fall — not in performance, but to make what they say will be significant changes before bringing it back to the boards.
“The place we’re at right now is about tearing it to shreds and starting over,” Benatar tells Billboard. “We have the liberty to do that because we haven’t gone to even off-Broadway or anything like that. So we’re tearing it apart, doing a similar show but with a lot of different elements to it.”
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Giraldo predicts that the next incarnation of Invincible — which includes such Benatar favorites as “Hell Is For Children,” “Love Is a Battlefield,” “Heartbreaker,” “We Belong” and, of course, the title song — will be “different and the same at the same time. It will take it in a little different direction, maybe go back to the very beginning. I think we got too far in the weeds with it and it started getting a little messy. So maybe we’ll be going back to breaking the rules a little bit, trying to be brave.”
Benatar says the greatest lesson came in the way the duo’s songs were adapted within the original version of the show. “The goal for the production we did was to do a hybrid of taking our music and reinventing it into a more theatrical form,” she explains. “Some of the songs didn’t really work like that. Some of them can be augmented; ‘We Live For Love,’ for example, ‘We Belong,’ things like that work well in a theatrical form. But we learned that some of the arrangements that are on the original (recordings) are very exciting and actually work better (in the musical) if we keep them closer to the original. That was kind of a surprise, and a big lesson to learn. But that’s something you can’t learn until you put it in front of human beings to see it.”
Neither is discouraged by the need to reboot, however. “It was a learning experience for us,” Giraldo acknowledges. “We made mistakes. We learned great things along the way. It’s a different kind of (endeavor) to be sure.” Benatar, meanwhile, affirms that “it’s been exciting. It’s been fun. You just keep evolving ’til we get to the place we feel like it’s time to put it out there.” They’re not saying when that might be, but she has a where in mind — Cleveland, which is Giraldo’s hometown.
“We love it there,” Benatar says. “It’s a home kind of thing, as good as New York to us as a family place. It’s always fun to go there; the audiences are amazing, really receptive. So that’s possibly the first place to open in this (next) form.”
The revived Invincible is just one project Benatar and Giraldo – who return to the road Saturday, July 6, In Atlantic City with dates booked through mid-August — have targeted for the near future.
Next year will also see the release of a children’s book the two are writing and composing companion songs for. They’re keeping details, including the title and publication date, under wraps for now, but it’s inspired by the relationships they have with their three grandchildren, two girls and a boy. “It’s about everything we do and everything they do…and it’s about music,” Benatar says. “It’s sweet.”
On his own, meanwhile, Giraldo is continuing work on two long-gestating endeavors — a memoir and an all-star holiday album he’s been working on with some of his musical friends. He’s also recording an album with former Benatar band drummer Myron Grombacher, a friends from his early days in Cleveland and in Rick Derringer’s band. The guitarist says the two plan to reconvene after he and Benatar tour this summer, working as just the two of them, but they’re open “to have some guest people on board” if it feels appropriate. “We’ve got about 21 songs,” Giraldo reports. “We were childhood friends, so this is what we do — just make music, have a great time playing and do the best you can.”
It’s been a minute since Benatar and Giraldo have released new music of their own as well. Their last full album was Go in 2003, while there have been some one-off singles and soundtrack contributions between 2015-2020 — most recently “Together.” They also joined Dolly Parton for her version of “Heartbreaker” from last year’s Rockstar album.
“That’s a possibility, if the time feels right,” Giraldo says. “It’s not like we don’t have a lot of material. We do have a lot of songs. Here’s the deal…the best records, I believe, are done in 29 days; you just get in there, do it and get done. You have to be able to block that time out so your primary focus is on that recording. That is the most difficult part. As you get older…it’s hard to find that block.”
Benatar, however, sounds ready for it. “We have about 125 songs around, waiting to be recorded,” she says, laughing as she adds, “If you can get my husband in there to do it, please be my guest.”
When Will Brill got home after winning his first Tony award, he was a little, well….spooked. “I was in bed and somebody texted me like, ‘How are you feeling?’” Brill recalls. “And I was suddenly hit with like, There’s a Tony in this house. It can’t be seen. It is lurking! So weird.”
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A week after winning best featured actor in a play for his performance in Stereophonic, Brill admits it still “feels a little weird.” His portrayal of Reg – the hilarious, endearing, and often frighteningly coke-and-booze-addled bass player in Stereophonic’s fictional 1970s rock band on the verge of mega stardom – made Brill the only cast member from the most-Tony-nominated-ever play to bring home hardware. But on Tony night, Brill made sure to give his full cast its due: in his delightfully off-the-cuff acceptance speech, he asked all his castmates to stand up for an ovation (he also, memorably, thanked his therapist).
Like his fellow Stereophonic cast members, Brill wasn’t an experienced, trained musician before joining the ensemble. But acquiring the skill to convincingly play one onstage (and perform the play’s Tony-nominated score by Will Butler there) was the kind of deep-dive experience Brill has long relished as an actor: His wide-ranging roles have included Dr. Astrov, in the hyper-intimate off-Broadway production of Uncle Vanya that took place in a private New York loft last year, as well as Roy Cohn in Showtime’s miniseries Fellow Travelers, and the peddler Ali Hakim in the 2019 Broadway reimagining of Oklahoma!.
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As Stereophonic continues its run on Broadway through Jan. 5, 2025, Brill spoke to Billboard about adding Reg to that list, as well as about his action-packed Tony night.
Have you started to come to terms with cohabitating with your Tony?Sort of… I mean, people keep like asking, “Where are you going to put it?” I don’t know…. wherever it…looks good? Wherever it fits? Like, I had to put my bike in this one corner because that’s where it fit. I don’t have a lot of art in my house, and now I have this thing I’m like, obligated to display.
You have to put it somewhere unexpected, like the bathroom.
Totally. My idea, which I believe is a step too far, was to put it in the toilet. So it’s really a surprise to anybody who is using the bathroom. I have a buddy who keeps his in the fridge. And I heard that Ian McKellen keeps his many awards on his roof so that they can “rest.” I don’t know what that means, but that’s allegedly what he does.
Before we discuss anything else, I need the story of your ensemble for Tonys night: the pleats, the jewelry… it was a look!
I was working with a stylist, Savannah White, and we had bounced around a lot of ideas of stores and designers and we were largely on the same page: Vivienne Westwood, Thom Browne, Commes des Garcons, and Issey Miyake, who I didn’t really know of until he passed. I just saw an article about him and started Googling him and was really moved by his aesthetic.
So then Savannah came back with the two looks [of Miyake’s] that I wound up wearing. I was like, “Oh my God, this is so unlike anything I’ve seen, and I have to imagine it’s going to be totally unlike what anybody else is going to be wearing.” I wanted to be wearing something that wasn’t following a gender binary, and I feel like Issey’s stuff hangs on any human body beautifully. I felt really lucky that we sort of nailed it. Everything was sort of flowy and weird and off-kilter — and few straight lines except for the pleats themselves. It was really a fun fit.
Will Brill accepts the Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play award for Stereophonic onstage during The 77th Annual Tony Awards at David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on June 16, 2024 in New York City.
Theo Wargo/Getty Images
Your speech was iconic, to say the least. When you thanked your therapist, it became one of the most-memed moments of the night. How did you hear about that?
My PR person came up to me and was like, “The internet loved your speech.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s so nice. I just assumed that it was like, either the internet loves your speech or hates your speech — I had no idea that me shouting out my therapist was going to be any kind of a big deal or that shouting out the rest of my cast, for that matter, was going to be a big deal too. But they both sort of showed up everywhere. I got a really sweet text from my therapist that at first was all caps, “HOLY S–T, YOU WON! F–K YEAH!” And then, two minutes later, “Oh my God Will, this is so sweet,” which really made me happy.
You also gave a shoutout to your bass teacher. What was the process of learning the instrument like for you? You really get the physicality and personality of a bass player down, as well as the technical aspects, which seems uniquely challenging.
It was really important for me to look authentic. I had experience learning an instrument for a [project] before — I learned to play 12 songs on the guitar for this David Chase film Not Fade Away, and that’s actually where I met Robbie Mangano, who was in The Grandmothers of Invention and is an astonishing guitar and bass player. He taught me and Jack Huston how to play guitar for the movie.
But it was a different thing; we really just needed to look like we were playing the songs, which were pre-recorded by essentially the E Street Band. We didn’t actually have to play for sound, we just had to look like we knew what we were doing, and there were all sorts of ways to cut around the fact that we didn’t know what we were doing.
So for this show, I called Robbie to help me learn the bass. But Robbie was also weirdly at the intersection of my life where I started to think about sobriety, which is like another huge part of Reg. I got really drunk at a show of Robbie’s, and he wrote me this two-page letter, where he was like, “I’ve seen too many talented people not have the life that they should because they got caught up with drugs and alcohol, and I really believe in you and I count you as a friend and I hope that that would not be something that happened to you.”
At the time I couldn’t hear it, and I actually wound up not talking to him for several years because I was so embarrassed. Years and years later, I got a divorce and then I got sober and then [Stereophonic] came back around. So by the time I called Robbie to start learning the bass again, I was two years sober and got to tell him that he was a big part of that. And he wound up saying to me, “Wow, that’s crazy. I am recently sober too.” It was really crazy and moving. So he’s been a very special touchstone in my life.
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Great bass players especially seem to have this innate comfort in your own skin. Was that natural for you to achieve or more of a journey?
It was a journey, for sure. But what was cool was, when I was a little kid, I thought I was going to be a magician. I would practice card tricks alone in my room for literally 12 hours a day. I didn’t pursue magic because it was too scary to perform in front of people these things that required incredible dexterity. But when I started learning the bass, it triggered this long dormant part of my brain, which was like the joy of doing something dexterous 1000 times alone in your bedroom and losing sleep over it and trying to perfect this one thing and getting closer and closer. So I really felt like I was practicing magic again.
You and your castmates opened for Will Butler at his own actual album release show just a few weeks after previews for Stereophonic started. What was that like?
It was insane. A lot of people took videos with their phones and sent them to me afterward, and I was so embarrassed at how stiff and terrible I was that I was like, “Okay, you don’t have to just get good at the bass, you have to look amazing, you have to be able to dance and play the bass at the same time.” It still never feels like it’s easy, but it’s cool to have audiences come now and say that it looks like it’s easy, because that’s sort of the goal.
From left: Tom Pecinka, Will Brill and Sarah Pidgeon in Stereophonic.
Julieta Cervantes
Were there particular bass players who were models for your portrayal of Reg?
I definitely watched videos of John McVie playing. Will Butler is the only frontman I can think of off the top of my head who also plays bass, and he is so dance-y in his shows — he’s so free, he’s a true wild man on stage, and he was really a big source of inspiration.
I went to see Muna recently, and the band that opened for them [Nova Twins], it was these two British girls playing kind of hardcore music and dressed up sort of like punk-style Raggedy Ann. The bassist would jump around and run around the stage, and I remember thinking like, “I want to get close to that and I want to have that freedom of movement.” Other than that, learning the instrument was so hard and learning the play was so hard that there was not really a lot of room outside your imagination to do extra research.
This seems like such a lightning in a bottle kind of experience for all of you. Has it in any fundamental ways changed what you want from the work you do going forward?
Yeah, for sure — but I think every role I play, to a certain extent, is a reassessment of what I want to do going forward. The ultimate thing that I love about performing and exploring characters is exploring the different the levels of myself that I don’t know completely or understand and by extrapolation exploring the human condition more and more deeply.
I was just talking about this in therapy today, actually. Like, I’m constantly straddling a line: Am I doing justice to myself and the role that I’m playing by putting in an amount of effort that actually does meaningful excavation for myself and for the people coming? Or should I be resting a little bit more, and can the process be easier and more joyful?
I would say the peddler in Oklahoma! was a more joyful than difficult experience for me; probably A Case For The Existence of God was too and probably Fellow Travelers was a little more joyful than it was difficult. And then Uncle Vanya and this have both really ridden on the cusp of joy and difficulty. They have been the most challenging experiences of my life, but also deeply, deeply gratifying.
Devonté Hynes is well-known as a musical collaborator, songwriter and producer who’s worked with a diverse and ever-expanding group of artists (Solange, Mariah Carey, Harry Styles and Carly Rae Jepsen, to name a few) and a composer for film, television, dance and classical ensembles. Now, Billboard can exclusively reveal that the artist also known as […]
In a community of multitaskers, Shaina Taub is still most likely one of the busiest people on Broadway. Taub wrote the music, lyrics and book for Suffs, her musical bringing the women who fomented the women’s suffrage movement vividly back to life and firmly out of the history books to which they’ve long been relegated; she’s also one of the show’s stars, playing the central role of movement instigator Alice Paul.
At last week’s Tony Awards, Taub took home the prizes for both original score and book of a musical, and gave a moving televised speech calling out some of the pioneering women who paved the way for her – including both fellow composers and one of her lead producers, Sec. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Shaina Taub as Alice Paul in Suffs.
Joan Marcus
Sitting in her dressing room a little over an hour from showtime on a recent night, the 35-year old Taub is clearly still absorbing her wins, though she admits that the ongoing routine of performing onstage each night has helped keep her grounded. “To have the tangible act of doing the show,” she says, “brings me back to reality in a beautiful way.” (The show’s original Broadway cast recording is currently out on Atlantic Records).
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Below, she speaks to Billboard about Suffs’ long road to Broadway (including its run at New York’s Public Theater in spring of 2022), the status of her next project – writing the lyrics for Elton John’s music in the The Devil Wears Prada musical (set to open at London’s Dominion theater in July prior to a West End transfer in October) – and more.
The world of theater often feels like a more progressive one than TV or film — but as you pointed out in your acceptance speech it’s still a fairly small group of women composers who are getting recognition of this level. What’s been your experience?
I’ve been so blessed to have been taught well for so long by so many brilliant women. Elizabeth Swados — who’s a legend of theater, composer, educator — I got to be in her class [at NYU], and she was the first person who pushed me off the cliff to write a song before that was something I thought I could even do. And Jeanine [Tesori] especially is just a titan of composing in our field for any gender. She’s been so generous — she just let me come and play crappy first drafts, and gave me essential devastating feedback, tough love and real-talk in moments when I’ve had questions about the business and about the craft. Georgia Stitt too, who put together Maestra, which is such an amazing community for women and non-binary folks making theater. Kristen Anderson-Lopez has been so kind.
A lot has been made this season of me being the second woman to write and star in a musical but the first one is Micki Grant, an incredible artist I sadly never got to meet whose legacy should be given a lot more attention. We’ve always been here, and so many women are my peers on Broadway right now: Rebekah Greer Melocik is a good friend, and her work for How to Dance in Ohio was so gorgeous; Kate Kerrigan with The Great Gatsby, she and I have come up together; Bekah [Brunstetter] and Ingrid [Michaelson] for The Notebook. Anais Mitchell – whose Hadestown I was in off-Broadway — we’re both Vermont girls and she’s such a confidante. Everyone is just so forthcoming; it’s a real sisterhood.
You clearly did work on Suffs between the Public and Broadway runs. How did you come to terms with what needed editing? Was there a moment between the runs of reset for you?
There really wasn’t a lot of a moment of reset. There was no back in the saddle – we kinda stayed in the saddle. I had demos of new ideas for songs from May 2022 that are now in the show on Broadway. I knew that it wasn’t finished, and there’s just that intel you get from a first production that you can’t get in a workshop or reading because the audience tells you everything and they tell you fast. It took a lot of willpower to keep going; I’m so proud of what we did downtown, and we had so much love for the show and also a lot of critique of the show. There were times that got me down, but any sense of feeling down pretty quickly transformed into almost this adrenaline, this sense of being underestimated that put me on fire to be like, we’re gonna finish this show, dammit!
From left: Jenn Colella, Kim Blanck, Shaina Taub, Nikki M James and Ally Bonino at Suffs‘ first preview performance.
Jenny Anderson / @jennyandersonphoto
What kind of changes did you know you had to make?
There were two driving principles to my revision. More humanity, less history: just making sure everything was as character- and emotion-forward as possible, with all the historical detail I fell in love with taking a bit more of a backseat. And then I kind of made a promise to myself that I was gonna spend more time sitting at the piano than the computer, trying to let my impulses be visceral, let me pull from my musical heart first and see where that would lead.
Did you always intend to perform in Suffs?
I always wanted to perform in it. I’ve always performed in my work — I find writing and performing feed each other. But I initially thought I’d play Doris, the young intern type character who documents everything. It sort of felt like the Mark in Rent character and I’ve always wanted to play Mark in a gender-flipped Rent. [Laughs.] But Alice was a difficult nut to crack, finding her inner life. She didn’t leave that much of a paper trail in terms of her emotional life.
And it was also about finding Alice’s sense of humor. I got a great note from our orchestrator, Michael Starobin, who came to see me play at Joe’s Pub early last year and was like, “I wish there as more of that girl in Alice – that self-deprecation and humor.” It was such a great note, and I think it helped me make her come alive.
What has Sec. Clinton been like as a producer?
She’s just been such a cheerleader and a warm, supportive presence — how vocal she’s been in her support of us before reviews, nominations, awards, just her vote of confidence in us and that we could see through this thing we started at the Public, that gave me faith in the dark and hard moments of tech and previews and the “Oh boy, we’re gonna go face the music again [on Broadway], what are people gonna say…” Knowing she believed in us so wholeheartedly that she was willing to attach her name and her legacy to this piece of art, that gave me confidence I needed in really vulnerable moments.
Suffs producers Rachel Sussman, Sec. Clinton, and Jill Furman, and co-producer Morgan Steward.
Jenny Anderson / @jennyandersonphoto
Can we please discuss her amazing Tony night caftan? It was definitely one of the biggest stories of the night…
I loved it. She looked gorgeous as always, and she seemed to me to be so liberated. And to see her be so celebrated by the theater community with that standing ovation — it was great to see her given her due. She’s a theater lover, and beyond just being an enthusiast I think she understands the importance of theater to the public discourse. She gets that it matters beyond just entertainment; it’s a public common good that should be funded, that should be championed, and that’s rare in a leader of her stature. New York theater loves HRC!
Have you been juggling Devil Wears Prada work with all this too? Are there lessons you’ve learned in the editing process for Suffs that you’re finding are applicable there?
I mean, that’s another long and winding road — we’re going through a lot of changes, and it’s exciting. I was actually just texting with the creative team right now! I’ve been working on that show for six years, it’s gone through so many permutations, and yet we keep trying to figure it out. It’s such a fundamentally different experience [from Suffs] in that I’m collaborating so much, writing lyrics for a composer who’s worked lyrics-first for his whole 50-plus-years songwriting career. That’s really strengthened me as a songwriter, to write lyrics first and lyrics only. It’s gotten me excited for my projects after this to be a little more in the music seat, after this lyric-honing time.
It’s crazy with theater, you can never plan these things in advance. I never imagined it would be this insane overlapping season, but luckily we got to do a lot of amazing work last year. Elton and I wrote a few new songs, so it’s on its way.
Once again, the annual Broadway Bares charity burlesque benefit show not only raised temperatures, but also raised a bevy of money for a good cause. Over two sold-out shows on June 23 at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, more than 200 dancers strutted their stuff and helped generate $2,259,134 for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (BC/EFA) – […]