AI transcript
(dramatic music)
When I first moved to New York City years ago,
I went to a lot of Broadway shows.
My girlfriend was an actress,
a lot of our friends were actors,
and we would scrounge tickets for cheap,
or more often we would second act the shows.
That’s when you just walk in the theater at intermission
and find an empty seat.
It’s harder to do that these days.
And then in my first real journalism job at New York Magazine,
I wrote about the theater a good bit,
and I was suddenly invited to become a voter
for the Tony Awards.
I thought this was an honor of some kind.
It turned out to be more of a punishment
because a Tony voter is supposed to see every show
that’s nominated for any category,
which means you see a lot of theater
that just isn’t very good.
I don’t mean to be cruel.
I know that everyone involved works really hard,
but making a great piece of theater,
great piece of anything, takes more than hard work.
It takes talent and luck and endurance,
and something that feels like alchemy.
Anyway, after seeing 20 or 30 Broadway shows a year,
many of them mediocre at best,
I pretty much gave up on it.
I also stopped following the business side of theater,
which I had found fascinating and weird.
But I moved on.
It just felt like in a world
of rapidly expanding entertainment options,
Broadway had been left behind.
Meanwhile, the tickets kept getting more expensive.
These days, the average Broadway ticket costs over $125.
The average household income
of a Broadway ticket buyer today is over $270,000.
This steep inflation was actually predicted
back in 1965 by a pair of economists,
William Baumol and William Bowen.
They published a paper called On the Performing Arts,
The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems.
Even back then, they saw that when an industry
is not able to use new technologies to raise productivity,
which is what most industries do,
then prices would spike
since the cost of labor continues to rise.
This phenomenon came to be called Baumol’s cost disease.
Today, it helps explain why sectors like healthcare
and education have also seen massive inflation.
There may be a lot of new technology in those fields,
but it doesn’t change the basic fact
that they require a lot of real people
spending a lot of time doing or making a thing,
and real people are expensive.
Can you think of an industry more vulnerable
to this cost disease than live theater?
For starters, you can’t scale it.
It takes dozens of people, sometimes hundreds,
working very hard for many hours every day
so that you and I can plop ourselves in a seat
and watch something that is essentially handmade,
and that’s not counting the thousands of hours
and dollars spent creating the show in the first place.
Writers, directors, producers, musicians,
lighting and costume and scenic designers,
then there are the staged readings and workshops,
rehearsals, sometimes fistfights.
But if all the elements line up,
the talent, the luck, the endurance, the alchemy,
it can also be something spectacular
and unique every single time.
A while back, we got an email from a listener.
We had just put out a series on the airline industry,
and this listener suggested something similar
on the theater industry.
So we started looking into it.
We did a bunch of interviews,
feeling around for a center of gravity, a hypothesis.
One obvious working title came to mind.
Is theater dead?
Or maybe this time is theater really dead?
Because the demise of theater has been predicted
for decades, if not longer.
It is, after all, one of our oldest art forms,
going back to at least the ancient Greeks.
It’s more than 2,500 years ago.
And who says everything has to last forever?
Maybe live theater had just outlived its time.
During those early interviews we did,
it became clear that the economics of theater
are still fascinating and weird.
For those of us in New York,
Broadway is just the visible tip of the iceberg.
Beneath it are many hundreds of professional,
not-for-profit theaters,
regionals and repertoires and university programs
and others, and their economics have become dire.
Even before the COVID shutdown, which hit them hard,
a lot of the nonprofits were in financial trouble.
Part of the problem is that they’ve always relied
on philanthropic donations,
and most younger donors just aren’t that interested
in the theater.
But this is a big problem for the commercial theater too,
for Broadway, because the nonprofits are the farm system
for Broadway shows.
Of the 26 new plays or musicals
that opened on Broadway this season,
23 of them came up through the farm system,
most in the U.S. and a few in the U.K.
As we were trying to figure out
how to make a radio series about all this,
I started going to see shows again, quite a few,
in New York and London and a couple other places.
I am sorry to report that once again,
most of them weren’t great.
I’d still get excited every time the lights went down
and you’d feel your heart beating faster.
What am I about to see?
Where will it take me?
Because there is a thing that can only happen in theater,
and I kept looking for it for something
that didn’t feel like it was trying to be a concert
or a sitcom or a theme park ride.
I went to see a musical version of Back to the Future.
The highlight was, toward the end,
the DeLorean flying out over the audience.
I didn’t actually see this happen
because I left at intermission,
but maybe someone else second acted the show
and got to see it from my seat.
I hope so.
I recognize everyone has their own taste.
I’m not trying to yuck anyone else’s yum.
I was just looking for something
that could only happen in a dark room
with real people on stage doing and saying things
that you won’t see or hear anywhere else,
or at least not as intensely and intelligently.
I guess I was looking for a jolt.
And finally, I found it.
And the person responsible for creating it
feels the way I do.
– I wanna feel electricity
and I wanna feel alive in a new way.
I wanna feel something unpeeling or unfolding
in a very surprising way when I go to the theater.
– His name is David Ajmi.
He’s been writing plays for many years.
This one, it’s called Stereophonic.
It took 11 years.
Stereophonic is about a rock band
in the 1970s recording an album.
It’s a show about music, but it’s not a musical.
It’s got the feel of a documentary,
but it’s more intimate and more interesting.
It might not seem theatrical, but it is.
It’s just not performative
in the way that so much theater is these days.
Anyway, I loved it.
And I wanted to tell you about it.
And I wanted to hear from the people who made it.
So we are still working on that series
about the economics of the theater industry.
That’ll come out later this year, I hope.
But Stereophonic is having a moment right now.
It is nominated for more Tony Awards
in any play in history.
It’s the show that rock stars are going to see
on their nights off.
So today on Freakonomics Radio,
the first of a two-part series, trust me, it’s worth it,
to find out how the alchemy happened.
We will hear from the creators.
– We’ve been told throughout this show
to have a bit of hostility to the audience.
– It’s not a very fashionable play.
It doesn’t have to do with identity politics.
– It’s about nothing and it’s about everything.
It’s about being in a room with creative people,
making something or at least trying to make something great.
– And we’ll hear from the producers.
– If you follow a formula for Broadway,
what I’ve found is the biggest successes on Broadway
tend to break that formula, and this is one of those.
– How to break a formula, break some hearts,
and in this case, break the bank.
The unlikely success of Stereophonic
and what it may say about the future of live theater,
starting now.
(upbeat music)
(clock ticking)
– This is Freakonomics Radio,
the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything
with your host, Stephen Dubner.
(audience cheering)
– Going to see a piece of live theater
takes time, effort, and money.
Sometimes a lot of money.
You could watch thousands of movies on Netflix
for the cost of one Broadway ticket.
So what does theater have going for it?
What does it still do that nothing else can?
Here again is the playwright, David Ajmi.
– It is live and the audience becomes an organism
and they are in collaboration with the actors.
So there’s something about that kind of liturgy,
the ritual of being in a space together,
creating a new thing every single night
because it is totally different every single night
and the energy and the electricity,
what makes something funny or moving one night
can be completely discrepant with what happens the next night.
That kind of knife edged liveness
is something that you only can really get in the theater
and it’s a temporal art form.
It takes place within a compressed amount of time.
There’s a beginning, middle, and end that you can feel
when I was writing my memoir,
I couldn’t get a sense of the shape because it was so big.
There were so many hundreds of pages that I was like,
oh my God, I can’t even get a sense of what this shape is.
In a play, it’s much more skeletal.
You can feel the shape of it.
You can trace the vertebrae of it when you’re writing it.
It’s much easier to wrap your head around it.
– Ajmi grew up in a fairly strange, often dysfunctional,
always loud family of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn.
In his memoir, Lot 6, published in 2020,
he writes about seeing Sweeney Todd
when he was eight years old.
Sweeney Todd is a musical by Stephen Sondheim
about a barber in Victorian England
who, having suffered a great injustice,
gets revenge by slaughtering people in his barber shop
and with the help of his confederate, Mrs. Lovett,
turning them into meat pies.
– That play was about a real outsider, a cultural outsider,
and it was my first time seeing something
where an outsider, an anti-hero,
was presented at the center of something.
The violence of his emotions and the injustice of the world
was being propounded in these crazy songs
and in this wild comedy,
and it was all kind of cross-hatched together.
That was very thrilling for me,
and it was showing me something about my psyche
that I didn’t have the language for,
’cause I was too young to know how to speak about my life,
but he became like an avatar for me.
He scared me, and he scared me because he was in me already.
– You mean Sweeney, not Sondheim.
– Sweeney, and probably Sondheim,
’cause I think Sweeney is a part of Sondheim.
I think all artists have that part to them,
the exile, the outsider, the person who doesn’t fit in
that nobody understands and needs to be seen
and needs to get revenge and needs all these things.
So I was very taken by that show,
but I couldn’t understand it, and I have a language for it,
and it was almost like I was knocked upside my head,
and I like theater that creates that experience
for the audience.
– Sweeney Todd was recently revived on Broadway
with Josh Groban playing Sweeney for a time
beside the endlessly entertaining Annaly Ashford
as Mrs. Love It.
And there’s another Sondheim revival on Broadway right now,
merrily we roll along,
which, like David Ajmi’s Stereophonic,
may win some Tony Awards.
But Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021,
is more of a theater person’s theater person.
He did win many awards, and some of his shows,
like Company and Into the Woods,
did have long Broadway runs,
but you have to go back to West Side Story and Gypsy
to find a time when Sondheim was considered mainstream.
When you look at the shows that make it to Broadway today,
especially the musicals,
most of them are targeted at tourists
who want a fun and familiar piece of entertainment.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that,
but people like Sondheim and now David Ajmi
have always offered something different,
something more original, more off-kilter
than the blander entertainments in the Hollywood adaptations.
But why isn’t there more of that?
– There’s no funding for it,
and people are discouraged to do it
because they wanna be produced,
so they think they have to make their work producible,
so they’re chasing trends,
and the artistic directors are trying to appease their boards,
and they’re trying to bring subscribers in,
and everyone wants something a little middle-brow
’cause it’s easier to digest.
– What Ajmi is talking about here
are the nonprofit theaters that feed Broadway.
The theater is in places like Seattle and Chicago,
La Jolla and Hartford.
– A writer really has to risk being a splinter.
Someone who comes in and disrupts,
and you are not going to make money doing that, probably.
– Well, you might.
– Now I can.
– But like, this is lightning striking.
This is a rare occurrence.
– It is, and this play,
I didn’t try to do this to be commercial or anything like that.
I made it the same way I make everything else,
but it has music in it,
and I’m working with a brilliant composer
and people like music,
so it kind of abuts being a Broadway musical,
even though it has nothing to do with that.
– The brilliant composer he’s talking about
is Will Butler from Arcade Fire,
the Canadian band who’ve made some very good records
over the past couple of decades.
His brother, Win Butler, is the frontman.
He was recently accused of sexual misconduct
and bullying.
By then, Will Butler had already quit the band.
Some of the music he wrote for Stereophonic
sounds like Arcade Fire.
It is dark and bright at the same time somehow.
It is traditional in some key ways, but also modernist.
But the band that Stereophonic really reminds you of
is Fleetwood Mac.
The demographics are identical.
There is a British husband and wife
who were in the midst of breaking up
as were Christine and John McVeigh
when Fleetwood Mac recorded their blockbuster record rumors.
There is an American couple,
very much like Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks,
who are also in the middle of breaking up.
Their names are Peter and Diana in the play.
If you’re looking for further Fleetwood Mac parallels,
both Lindsay Buckingham and the Peter character
happen to have a brother who swims in the Olympics.
And the fifth member of the Stereophonic band
is a drummer who is also British, as was Mick Fleetwood.
The entire play, more than three hours long,
happens inside a recording studio.
The band is making their second record.
They’re first at a slow start, but now it is caught fire
and they are turning into big rock stars.
Although that’s all happening outside the studio.
We feel it, but we never see it.
We also feel the sudden pressure of huge expectations.
There are also two recording engineers in the play.
So seven people hermetically sealed on this stage
of fishbowl of ambition and talent
and exhaustion and frustration.
It is both thrilling and painful
to so thoroughly eavesdrop on them.
David Ajmi is in his early fifties
and he had written several plays before this one,
but Stereophonic will end up being more commercially successful
than the rest of them put together, maybe times 10.
I asked him where the inspiration
for Stereophonic came from.
He said it was from listening
to a Led Zeppelin recording one day.
– I was on a plane ride and I was going to a conference,
a theater conference and I was listening to In-Flight Radio
and that song, “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,”
which is the cover they did, came on.
– That song was written in the 1950s
by the folk singer Ann Burdon.
It was first recorded by Joan Baez
before Led Zeppelin covered it.
– My brother, when I was a really little kid,
my brother’s much older than me.
He used to play that over and over on his guitar
when he was teaching himself how to play guitar.
So I knew that song just from those chords,
but then I started listening to the vocals
and it’s just so crazy and so volatile
and so emotionally intense.
♪ I’ve got the power ♪
There’s something about it was just so transfixing to me.
♪ I’ve got the power ♪
– And I just imagined the studio.
I was trying to visualize it
’cause you’re trapped on a plane, what are you gonna do?
It activates the imagination and then I sort of went,
“Oh, wait a minute, what if that’s the set for a play?”
And I just immediately knew
that I was gonna write this play and I thought,
“But how am I gonna write this play?
“It’s not so interesting.
“They’re just gonna record an album, what is it?”
And so I just sort of let myself not know
for a really long time how I was gonna do it,
but I just knew sometimes you just kind of know.
– I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard anybody
have the genesis of a great piece of art
come from in-flight radio.
– Welcome to me.
– From that day until today is about how many years?
– That was 11 years ago.
– Were you working on it during that time
or did you just let it germinate for a while in your mind?
– I let it germinate for a while.
I was doing other things.
I was supposed to write my book.
I was late with my book and I had another project
that I was commissioned to do.
And so I was doing this like on the side.
And the way that I decided to make it was,
I just decided to invite a director to come on
and invite my composer and invite the music director
and invite a team.
Before I had a word on page, I just said,
“Would you guys all just commit to doing this with me?”
It became almost like this weird totemic force,
this kind of weird–
– Well, you formed a band.
– I formed a band and we are a band.
It feels like it.
– Had you been in a band before?
– Never ever.
I knew I wanted to work with Arcade Fire
from the first time I heard the funeral album.
And then when I thought about this project
and just the feeling of the music that I wanted,
I just thought of them.
So I had a friend who knew the creative director
of Arcade Fire, so we reached out to Arcade Fire
and Will was the only one who came back
and said, “I’ll meet with you.”
– Where was he living then?
– He was living in Montreal right before that,
but he’d just moved to New York.
So it was kind of perfect timing.
We met and we talked about like Herman Melville
and Moby Dick for a really long time.
Will’s a polymath and so he’s not a normal rocker.
He’s really smart, really smart.
He knows about everything.
And so I just was like, “This guy’s cool
and he’s a unicorn.”
I could tell right away he’s adaptable.
He can do different kinds of things.
And I said, “This isn’t gonna be the kind of thing
where you come in with a song and then we put the song on.
Like we have to go through iterations.
It has to be right for this play.
It has to fit exactly into what I’m doing.
Are you open to that?”
And he said, “Absolutely.”
He was super cool about it.
And so he agreed to do it in 2014.
And then I don’t think it was until 2018
that I had a draft that I could show him.
And we read it together.
Will played some parts.
I played parts Daniel and my music director.
Yeah, my director and the music director.
We all kind of read it together a couple of times.
And then he went home and he read it.
And then he like built out songs in character.
– Did he build out many of the songs
right in that first round of writing
or did it come slowly?
– No, he had a couple and then a few that we didn’t use.
And it went on like that for a while.
Like Masquerade didn’t have a bridge.
And I was like, “Dude, that song needs a bridge.
Can we do this and that?”
I’d say I want it to be a little more heterogeneous.
I don’t want it to just have one feeling to it.
I want it to switch and turn more.
And I would like dramaturg the songs.
He let me do it ’cause he was cool like that.
And when he didn’t want to,
he wouldn’t and say, “Okay, I’ll shut up.”
♪ I might take you to the Masquerade ♪
♪ Soul is sold on the money paid ♪
– I was researching this play by, I mean, I read books,
but I also watched a ton of documentaries.
– What were some of the docs
and what were some of the bands that you watched and liked?
– So many.
– I mean, I’m guessing there was a Fleetwood Mac doc.
– There were definitely Fleetwood Mac docs.
They have one, I think it’s from when they were making Tusk
that has a lot of great, very private feeling stuff in it.
The Metallica documentary, some kind of monster.
There was something about this documentary style
and feeling that I myself was watching eavesdropping
on these people in this very private recording process
because nobody gets led into these studios.
So the fact that I was watching them
and hearing these Soto Votre conversations
and seeing these private moments.
– Yeah, but here’s what I like about your show more
than those docs, which I also like,
but when you are a musician in a studio
and there’s a camera, you know, it’s there.
You may act as if it’s not
and you might forget about it once in a while,
but generally you will behave in a way that burnishes
in your mind your reputation at that moment
because you understand you’re being observed.
So it might look like real life, but it’s not really.
Whereas in your fictional version,
it feels more like nonfiction
because you don’t have those constraints.
It feels like we’re eavesdropping for real.
Well, thank you for saying that.
That’s a real compliment to us.
Whether it’s an illusion or not,
that was what was so seductive to me
about those documentaries.
And so when I was composing the play
and I wanted to use a different style
and realism for me as a style,
I started to sort of borrow from that.
And that’s why there’s so much overlapping dialogue
in that first scene.
I really wanted people to understand like,
no, you’re not gonna get it all.
This is not for you.
You have to lean in from the beginning
and know you’re gonna miss stuff
because you’re eavesdropping.
So that creates the kind of lattice work
through which you peek in and watch the play
from the very first scene.
That was very deliberately constructed.
– Can you check to see if the mic pre is on?
– My head is like a brick.
– It’s on?
– Grab some aspirin.
– You don’t need an aspirin.
I need to get like one hour of sleep.
This is insane.
Did you sleep through that?
– Look at my eyes.
– Oh, their blood shot.
– So I used to play music and record music.
And of many things I love about your play,
one is simply how well the playing of music is rendered.
It just feels real and thrilling and painful
and all those things you feel when you’re in a band.
But I also loved how well you rendered the recording process,
which is a totally different animal.
So can you talk about how you got to that?
– So much of it was me faking stuff early on.
I would look at things in documentaries
and they’d say these phrases and I go,
“Ooh, that sounds cool.”
And I’d write it down.
Just every time a phrase sounded like something cool
that I would believe sounded like a real production thing,
I would write it down.
– Like your snare is rattling a little bit.
– Well, yeah, and that I got,
I knew I wanted to be a problem with the drum.
And I didn’t know what kind of problem
would happen with the drum.
So I said to my sound guy, Brian Rumory, who’s brilliant,
what kind of problem would happen
that would cause this drummer to melt down?
And what would he do to fix it?
And then how could that go wrong?
I wanted to construct a scene where he goes down a black hole
as so Ryan really talked me through it for about an hour.
That’s how I did that scene.
– Now the snares are ringing again.
– I didn’t hear it that time.
Did you hear it?
– No.
– I didn’t hear it that time.
– I wanted to fix it and it keeps making everything worse.
You know, I wish we hadn’t touched it.
I really do.
I really do.
I wish we just left it alone.
– Sorry, man.
– A drum is a piece of wood.
It’s ephemeral.
You can’t keep changing things.
Now we’ve changed everything and I can’t change it back.
– Stereophonic is about a band.
And it’s about a band early on in its career
that’s finding fame.
They all happen to love each other
and have relationships with one another.
I’m Sonia Friedman and I’m a theater producer.
– Friedman, based in London, is one of the most prolific
theatrical producers in recent history.
At the moment, she has more than a dozen shows
in production on the West End in London,
as well as on Broadway and in several other countries.
Her shows have won more than 60 Olivier Awards in Britain
and as of this recording, 39 Tony Awards.
I asked Friedman why she’d been attracted to Stereophonic.
– We watched them through the course of the making of
an album which will end up being a great album
for the ages, but they don’t know that at the time.
Watch them battle through creativity,
trying to find their own individual voices,
but also be as one and crash through their relationships
and see them just battling through.
And the thing is that what David the author and Daniel,
the director have done is they’ve been incredibly bold
with this show because there’s this rule in New York.
You know, there’s this rule in New York.
You can’t have shows running over a particular length of time
and you know, it’s got to have stars in it.
If you follow a formula for Broadway,
actually what I’ve found is the biggest successes
on Broadway tend to break that formula.
And this is one of those.
It has to run at three hours plus because you have to get
this sense of this album taking forever to make.
And you never, ever, ever feel the length.
You want to be with this group forever.
And of course, the music is sublime
and they’re really brilliant with the way they tease the music.
They don’t give it to you easily.
You have to wait, you have to wait.
But there’s this moment of absolute ecstasy
when, you know, 45, 50 minutes in, you hear it and you go,
“Oh God, that’s what they’re making.”
Oh wow.
♪ Never wakes you in the morning ♪
♪ Whatever keeps you up at night ♪
And it sort of begins to make sense as to why this group
who seem at each other’s throats,
and then they get in the room together and they make magic.
And that’s art. That’s art.
The band in Stereophonic is never named.
The actors do have a pet name for the band,
but I promised not to tell.
They are led by Peter, who writes, sings, plays guitar,
and winds up imposing his will on everyone else.
We hear about Peter before we see him.
Here are Simon, the drummer, and Diana, who writes and sings.
She’s also Peter’s girlfriend.
– The last album took three weeks.
So this can’t take more than another two, three weeks tops.
We can make it two more weeks.
– Peter said last night he was ready to snap,
and he wanted to confront Reg and I said, “No,
don’t escalate things.”
– It was good you did that.
– “And now you have to do your part.”
– All of the characters are interesting
and at least occasionally charming,
except for Peter, who doesn’t do charm.
– He’s got a very, very difficult role,
because how I see him, that’s maybe because I’m a producer,
I see him trying desperately to wrestle this group
and keep this group together, and he has a vision,
and maybe he’s got such a strong vision
that he’s not seeing what’s going on around him.
– Peter is one of the lead vocalists in the band.
He’s the lead guitarist of the band
and becomes the producer of the album as the show goes on.
I’m Tom Fasinka and I’m an actor.
– How would you describe the Peter character emotionally?
– He’s a control freak, but there’s reasons why.
He’s a guy that is a survivor in a lot of aspects.
I won’t go into all the backstory of his father
and all that stuff, ’cause I think that’s sort of for me.
– Some of it’s in the writing.
– Some of it’s in the writing,
but I think the emotional landscape is for me.
I think he’s been taught a certain amount of savagery.
He’s had to develop a work ethic that can be harmful
to himself and to others, but can also produce great results.
– What does it feel like to play this character?
Forget about the endurance requirements of a three hour show.
I mean, you’re on stage, everyone’s on stage a lot,
but what’s the experience feel like?
– This show has been an incredible experience
and a challenging one in the fact
that my character is not the most palatable person in the room.
So, you know, I’ve been heckled.
There’s loud groans of disapproval.
I always used to say that,
oh, I’m an actor who doesn’t care if he’s liked or not.
That’s not what an artist cares about.
But I think deep down, as human beings,
we all care if we’re liked even a little bit.
So I think the universe brought this play into my life
to sort of be like, yeah, prove it.
– What’s a line in Stereophonic that you know
that every night you say it,
you’re going to become the objective scorn?
– No, she asks me, can I speak with you privately?
Can I say no?
And before that, I say,
then don’t get in your own head, be a professional.
So those are two guaranteed groans from the audience.
– I think you romanticize who you are a little bit.
You’re looking out for yourself just as much as I do.
You’re very ambitious.
– I am not ambitious.
Don’t sling mud at me.
– You want to use me to arrange a song,
but then when I’m telling you it’s too long
or to cut something, you have no interest.
And then you take it as criticism.
Then don’t ask me to arrange a song.
– Because you can be very aggressive, Peter.
– How am I?
– I don’t like to be forced.
Okay?
He says some pretty out of pocket stuff.
I’m Sarah Pigeon, I’m an actor
and I’m currently in Stereophonic playing Diana.
He also says, if I don’t force you to have a baby,
then it’s never going to happen.
It’s like, oh, you don’t say that.
– Is it hard for you as a female actor in 2024
to get into that mode in 1976 and 1977
where those things were said by a man
and not respond the way you might want to respond in 2024?
– Yeah, I think that was one of the more difficult hurdles
that I had to get over.
I was judging Diana a lot at the beginning
for staying in this relationship.
And I was bringing my 2024 self to it.
Like a guy just should not talk to you that way.
And how have you stayed in it for this long?
But she doesn’t know what feminism is.
She doesn’t know who Gloria Steinem is.
She knows she has these feelings.
It’s a time in I think rock history
where there’s no one to look to for direction and guidance.
I don’t think that there’s this feeling
that she can go off on her own.
I don’t even think it crosses her mind
until she’s offered a solo album.
I think her understanding of her artistry
and songwriting is so tied to Peter’s orchestration of it
and his editing and his advice.
– Here is David Ajmi again,
talking about the Peter character.
– That character is very similar to me in a lot of ways.
He’s very damaged and that’s a lot of my damage.
It’s all kind of this weird cross-hatching,
but in the end it’s a self portrait.
And I think all great art has to be that.
You have to put skin in the game.
You can’t just write about those people over there.
They have to be inside of you in some way for it to really work.
– What I love about Peter,
even though he’s sort of odious sometimes,
is that he sets the bar really high
and that pisses everyone off,
but they’re also grateful for it in the end.
How much of that is you?
– That’s me, it’s all me.
– Remind me not to collaborate with you.
– I just maintain and I’ve said it over and over
to the cast ’cause I’m a big staunch defender of Peter,
even though I know he’s got a lot of problems.
Peter’s biggest flaw is that he has no bedside manner.
He doesn’t understand how to be politic
about offering his criticism and he has bad timing.
If he just could be more gracious and more kind of tricky
about how to deliver these criticisms
and he could lie better, but he’s not a liar.
He’s really, really blunt.
And it’s part of an ethos that makes him great,
even though it’s really annoying
and it’s hard to work with somebody
who doesn’t attend in a sensitive way to your feelings.
When this process is so, everything is so charged
and heightened, you need to be sensitive to people.
You can’t just deliver these like sledgehammer criticisms,
but he’s right a lot of the time.
And in the play, you see how he’s right.
And it drives everybody crazy that he’s right,
but I don’t judge my characters.
I think Peter is sexist because he grew up
in a sexist culture and it was 1976.
I don’t think he’s a bad guy.
I think he’s living in a kind of weird soup of the time.
It was sort of a tight wire act
because I really don’t want people to turn against Peter.
They do, no matter what I do.
I mean, they do and they don’t like him, but I love him.
– Were you tempted to rewrite to make him
a little bit more likable at least in moments?
– No, Tom Pysenko who plays Peter is really adamant
that we stay true to the character.
He is a hardcore man.
I just love that guy because it comes from an ethical spine.
He’s like, my job is not to make you love him.
My job is to show you who this person is
and to show him in as much dimensionality as I can.
And he does that beautifully.
– I love that he said I have an ethical spine
because I think I do as an artist.
Like I have strong artistic values and I don’t care
’cause it’s not me.
I don’t know if it’s like because we live in the age
of social media or we live in the age of reality television,
people just assume that, oh, well,
you must be like your character and it gets to you.
Off-Broadway, someone was like, I hated you or I hate you.
And I was like, you hate me?
That’s insane.
It’s not my job to make people like Peter.
It’s my job to make people see Peter
and be in the room with him, which a lot of people don’t like.
And maybe it’s because I’m a bit of a contrarian
or I’m a bit of like a, I don’t know.
I don’t even know what the right word is,
rebel or something.
But part of me loves it, part of me loves it
because it’s like you are throwing all your manners
out the window as an audience member to jeer at me.
I’m triggering something in you that’s real.
– We’ve been told throughout this show
to have a bit of hostility to the audience.
– By whom? Your director?
– Our director, yeah, Daniel Ockett.
There’s a lot of laughs in the show
and there’s moments and beats and pauses
and there’s a lot of musicality outside of the music
just in David’s writing.
The hostility is in the sense of not allowing
the audience’s reaction to throw us off
the rhythm and tempo that we’re exploring in the show.
– Coming up after the break,
how did that rhythm and tempo, those beats and pauses
turn into such a big hit?
I’m Stephen Dubner.
This is Freakin’omics Radio.
We’ll be right back.
(upbeat music)
– David Ajmi was originally given a commission
to write Stereophonic by two nonprofit theater companies,
second stage in New York
and center theater group in Los Angeles.
– It was a co-commission from the two of them.
So they paid me for the commission,
but I mean over the course of 10 years,
if you divided what I got paid,
it’s, you know, you get more working at McDonald’s.
– Would you get paid for the commission?
– I think I got something like 30 grand.
– What did you do with all that money over those 10 years?
– I survived.
I mean, I paid my credit card bills.
This is what you have to do.
– It does strike me that committing to a life
in the theater, as you did pretty early,
and as many people still do,
is essentially a commitment to poverty and struggle as well.
– Oh yeah.
– I mean, what’s happening now with you is an anomaly
and it’s a great break and I’m so, so happy for you.
But can you just talk about,
not only for all the other writers,
but the performers and everybody else
that goes into making these things that, you know,
we just show up and sit down in the seat.
Can you just talk about what that kind of commitment
is like to a life like that?
– Thank you for asking that question.
Look, I was able to write this play
because I had patrons essentially.
There were two architects, very wonderful,
well-known architects living in the Hollywood Hills,
who had a floor of their home and I hooked up with them
and they let me live in that floor.
I lived there for about seven years,
gratis, and I did a little bit of TV work,
but basically not that much.
That’s how this play was written
because of their generosity.
– There are people who argue
that the government should just support the arts more.
They argue there’s a compelling rationale for that,
et cetera, and many other countries,
especially in Europe, do that.
What’s your position there?
– Yes, I absolutely agree with that.
I think it’s obscene that we don’t fund our artists.
It’s the hallmark of a civilized society.
Paula Vogel told me that in 1975,
she got a grant from the NEA,
which at that point funded individual artists
before Trent Lott and the moral majority
got involved in the ’90s.
And she got $25,000,
which was enough to live on for a year at that point,
and she was able to kickstart her career.
I was fortunate ’cause I ended up getting private grants.
Like I was at one point locked in a job
as a paralegal in “30 Rock,”
and I was working all day and I had no time to write.
I was like, “I’m never gonna be able to be a writer.”
I don’t know how to eat cattle living.
And I got this miraculous call
saying that I won a grant for $25,000 in 2003, I think it was.
And I thought, “Well, I can really make this last
if I move to Germany.”
So I moved to Berlin.
I lived in Prince Lauerberg,
which is a gorgeous neighborhood.
It’s like the West Village.
My rent was $200 a month.
That’s how I generated the beginning
of my body of work that made my name.
– Ajmi wrote plays that ran off-Broadway
at regional theaters, at the Royal Court Theater in London.
It was a relatively successful career for a playwright.
So what was his thinking before writing “Stereophonic”?
– Ironically, I was sort of planning
to quit plays altogether.
I had a very bad collaboration,
actually a really torturous collaboration.
I made no money from the production
and I was so beaten up.
I thought, “I’m not gonna do this anymore.”
– What was that, if you don’t mind me asking?
– That was a play that went sideways.
I’m not gonna talk about too much,
but it was a play about the composer, Oskar Levant.
So it was another play about music,
but a very different kind of play.
– And the producers were regular, standard,
Broadway commercial producers who liked your stuff?
– Yes, but they came with an actor attached.
We talked a little bit and I came up with this idea
and thought, “Oh, what about Oskar Levant?”
Then I said, “Okay, I’ll write this play.”
But you know, they had deadlines,
all you have to do by this time and stuff.
It was a little more stringent
because it was a commercial theater apparatus.
– So this was a commercial production
from the outset, correct?
– Yes.
– What kind of house or theater
would it have gone into initially if it had worked out?
– Broadway.
– Straight to Broadway?
– Yeah.
– I mean, that almost never happens, does it?
– When Broadway producers commission you
and there’s a star attached, then yeah, you can do it.
– I see.
So it was really about the star here?
– Yeah.
– Because then you’re guaranteed whatever,
24 weeks of box office.
– Exactly.
– Otherwise, you’re guaranteed like nothing.
– Yeah, exactly.
If there’s no star attached, you’re not gonna do this.
– Okay, so when that fell apart
and you were thinking about quitting the theater,
were you willing to go back to your paralegal career?
– No, I was gonna do TV.
That’s why I moved to LA.
And then they sucked me back in
’cause I got this commission for the Broadway people
and then I got a grant.
It was a three year grant from the Mellon Foundation.
And they said, well, you have to write a play
as part of the grant.
And I thought, okay, well, I’ll do it,
but I’ll do like a one act play.
And I thought that’s what this play was gonna be.
My one act short little throw away play.
– And instead it’s like three hours and 15 minutes.
– It just grew and grew.
– You have no self control, do you?
– No, but you know, as I started researching it,
I realized, oh, I can never leave the theater.
The play became about me wanting to leave the theater
and knowing I couldn’t ever leave it.
Babe, I’m gonna leave you.
– So, Edgeby didn’t quit.
He kept grinding away on Stereophonic
thanks to a free place to live
and a commission from those two nonprofit theaters.
– During COVID, everything just fell apart.
And we went through various iterations
of potential commercial producers,
but then they all fell apart.
And then my agent sent it to all these
nonprofit theaters in New York
and everyone said they didn’t wanna do it.
– Is that because it was tainted
from the falling apart or no?
– I don’t think so.
You know, it’s not a very fashionable play.
It doesn’t have to do with identity politics.
It wasn’t really of the moment at all.
It takes place in 1976.
It doesn’t have a particular agenda.
And so I think they were like,
well, why would we do this?
And it’s expansive and who cares?
– And long.
– Yeah, and it’s long and maybe they didn’t even read it.
I don’t know who knows why.
And I knew Adam Greenfield,
the Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons for decades
because he produced my first play in Seattle a long time ago.
So I said, can we go back to Adam?
We’d gone to him initially like a year or two before
and he said, no, no, I have too many plays backed up
because of COVID.
I can’t think about this.
But when we came back to him, he said, listen,
this is really expensive.
Tell us what you feel you need to produce this properly
’cause this is gonna be a big production.
And my director and I said, this is how I think
we need to do this.
We’re gonna need a soundproof booth
and we’re gonna need a functioning recording studio
where we’re gonna probably need music lessons
for the actors and we’re gonna need more rehearsal time.
And he said, okay, if I can get the money, I will do it.
And a few months later, he called back and said,
okay, I have the money, let’s do it.
– How much was it?
– It definitely cost over a million.
– Wow, for Off-Broadway, that’s a lot.
– Ours is the second most expensive thing they’ve ever done.
And they had to sort of rejigger the season
to accommodate the play.
But that’s how much he believed in it.
– Here again is Tom Pesinka, who would be cast as Peter.
– There are many workshops
and some of our casts had been part of those.
I was not part of any of the workshops.
I just got a cold audition to audition
to play Reg and Grover.
– Reg is the bass player, Grover is the main engineer,
correct?
– Yes, and then I got called into the room for a callback,
an in-person callback for the entire team.
Apparently, I sucked the air out of the room.
This like legendary audition that I can barely remember.
– Meaning you brought something to Peter
that is similar to what Peter is now?
– Yes, when you’re doing it, you don’t know.
And I felt like it was great.
I definitely embraced the connections
between myself and Peter in a way that I don’t know
if I had ever done in an audition.
So I could feel that for sure.
You never know if it’s gonna make an impact
or you never know if like the stone cold faces behind the…
I mean, I do remember David Ajmi nodding furiously.
So I was like, okay, well, maybe that is good.
But other than that, no.
Then I got some messages from my reps being like,
they want you, you were the best actor in the room,
but you need to play guitar way better.
I played sort of garbage guitar
and I had to really up my game.
Then they put me in guitar lessons twice a week
for two months and I had to send them video updates every week.
And then I was down in DC with my girlfriend.
She was doing a show at the studio theater.
I thought it was done.
I thought, you know, they were ready to make a decision.
And then my manager called me and said,
they want one more tape.
And I almost jumped off the balcony in frustration.
And then I went to a guitar center
’cause I didn’t have a guitar with me.
I bought a guitar.
I was gonna return it.
And then I got the part.
That guitar now is in my dressing room
with the Golden Theater.
I think so many actors are like frustrated rock stars.
Like they want to be a rock star.
I knew I did because rock stars have their own character
and you’re adored.
And I think it taps into that thing when you’re little
and you do the first play and you hear that applause
and like you get addicted to it.
In order to have a career,
you have to sort of get past that at some point.
Being in a band and making music
and creating something live every night
is so incredible.
It’s like a mainline into your veins of just like artistry.
It can be also really nerve wracking.
Just like, oh, what if I mess up
or what if I sing the wrong line?
The first month, most of the rehearsal day
was just making the music
and learning how to play the music.
I think the direct results
and I think you see it in the play
is like we know each other as an acting company
so much better than probably any acting company
because we have to rely on each other
and we have to trust each other
that like the songs are gonna sound good.
It’s a build.
♪ I feel it once again ♪
♪ I feel it once again ♪
– Here is Sarah Pigeon again, who plays Diana.
– Off Broadway, the fights were not as equal.
We’re coming up on like nine,
maybe 10 months of knowing each other.
We know each other better
so there’s this sort of push and pull
that feels more reflective of an actual relationship.
There is a certain amount of intimacy and trust
and knowing of each other
that was different from when we started in August.
We were sort of playing at this idea
of like having been in a relationship
with someone for nine years.
Like, well, I haven’t known Thomas Inka for nine years.
– Familiarity goes two ways.
Familiarity is like lovely,
but you can hurt someone more.
– Right, you know how to hurt them.
– You know how to push their buttons.
You know how to like unravel the thread
like Diana says in the play.
I mean, they would never say it,
but like I know Sarah and Juliana were pissed with me
certain times when like I got the harmonies wrong
or like when I was so nervous playing masquerade
that I would like drop out of the song.
Juliana would have to pick up the slack.
We never talked about it,
but like, you know, I get it, I get it.
And same way for me, like when they were getting on me
about the harmonies, I was pissed off,
but like it’s all love, you know?
It’s like, it is.
I mean, it’s so cliche, but it’s like, it is family.
It’s family.
– So at the non-profit off-Broadway theater
Playwrights Horizons, the band was coming together.
During previews of the play, Word of Mouth started to build.
Would stereophonic become one of the rare shows
that make it through the non-profit farm system
and onto Broadway?
Here is David Ajmi again.
– We talked to a bunch of commercial producers,
but it never fully congealed.
Either I was having misgivings or they had misgivings
or they wanted to make changes or whatever.
And then there was another commercial producer
that was at one point attached at Playwrights Horizons,
but then in the middle of the audition process,
that fell apart.
– And then the show opened at Playwrights Horizons
and the reviews were very enthusiastic.
– And then they all started coming.
Like one commercial producer would talk to another
and then they slowly started.
I had no idea how this all worked
’cause I had never done anything commercially before.
I thought it would be like,
the different commercial producers come
and then you interviewed them.
You know, like, why should I let you commercially produces?
But instead it was more like they formed a cartel
and then some got kicked out and some congealed.
And then we met the leader of the cartel.
– The cartel actually had a few leaders.
After the break, we hear from two of them.
I’m Stephen Dubner.
This is Freakonomics Radio.
We’ll be right back.
(upbeat music)
– John Johnson is one of the lead producers on Stereophonic
and he has produced many other shows on and off Broadway
over more than a decade.
Along with his business partner, Sue Wagner,
he is half of Wagner Johnson Productions.
They act as both producer and general manager.
This hybrid business model is common in London
and used to be common on Broadway
but is much less so today.
Let’s start with this.
What does a producer do?
– So the pure producer side is from, you know,
conception of the show,
either commissioning a writer to write a play or musical
or getting the rights to a play or musical to revive
all the way to assembling the creative team around that,
to the raising of the money,
to the marketing of the show, to securing a building.
That is the job of the producer.
If each Broadway show and each off Broadway show
is essentially an individual small business,
they are the CEO of said small business.
– Okay, and what does the general manager do?
– The GM is the person that does the contracts,
does the budgeting, does the day-to-day operations,
hires the staff surrounding the show.
And the producer is involved in that and advises on that,
again, using the small business kind of analogy,
both the CFO and a COO sort of combination.
– So how did John Johnson become co-CEO, CFO
and COO of Stereophonic?
– Remember, when the show premiered off Broadway
at Playwrights Horizons,
it had no commercial producers attached.
– Sue went the first week of previews
and absolutely lost her mind,
called me and said, you have to go see this play.
– Did you lose your mind too?
– I went after it opened.
So I go after my partner sets the bar a certain level high,
then the reviews come out and the reviews are transcendent
and it sets another level high and I went
and it cleared both those bars.
– What month and year are we talking about now?
– We’re talking November, 2023.
– Okay, so the COVID shutdown was over by now
and business was returning to Broadway,
but the overall numbers were still way down
and costs had risen a ton during COVID.
And from what I understand,
all the theaters were already full, yeah?
– At the time, there were no buildings available on Broadway.
There was another show that was not announced for the Golden,
but everyone kind of knew like,
“Oh, that’s what’s going into the Golden in the spring.”
– The John Golden Theater is one of the smallest on Broadway
with roughly 770 seats.
It is owned by the Schubert organization,
the biggest landlord on Broadway.
Their CEO is named Bob Wankle.
There is a famous old saying about Broadway economics.
You can’t make a living, but you can make a killing.
What’s that mean?
Most people in the theater work very hard
for relatively low pay.
If, however, you are involved in creating a hit,
something that plays for years and lives on
in touring companies, maybe a film, you will make millions,
but that’s rare.
The best way to make a killing is to be a landlord.
The Broadway business is, to a large degree,
a real estate business with a handful of owners
controlling the vast majority of theater space.
– We had gotten the show on the radar
of the Schubert organization.
We had heard there was the potential
of the Golden being available.
And at the time, Bob Wankle had given it to Sonya Friedman,
who’s a legendary producer in London,
as well as in New York.
I was in London and I went to Sonya and I said,
“Are you going to do this other play at the Golden?”
And she said, “I can’t fit it in the Golden.
I need it to go somewhere else.”
And I said, “Well, we want to do it for Stereophonic.”
And she said, “Well, I need to do it with you.”
And at the time, she was opening Stranger Things
on the West End.
She had not been in New York in weeks.
And I said, “Well, you haven’t seen the play yet.”
She said, “I don’t care.
Everyone I know who’s seen has loved it.
I need to be a part of it.”
– That is a first for me.
I have never been involved with a show before
that I pitched myself heavily to produce
that I hadn’t actually seen.
I’d read it, but I was in London when it opened
and I couldn’t get there.
– And by early December, we stood on stage
and told the cast that we were moving it to Broadway.
– What was that like?
– It was incredible.
I mean, for six out of seven of them
to find out they were going to make their Broadway debut
was amazing.
This is a playbook that we’ve run before.
Here’s the hot play of the fall
and we’re gonna take that momentum from the fall,
find a building for it in the spring
and run the awards playbook
as well as the prestige playbook
to have it catch on with a newer and larger audience.
– Tell me a little bit about your investors on this show
and the capitalization of the show on Broadway,
how it compares to other things you’ve done.
– It was demand unlike anything that we’ve seen
post-pandemic in terms of folks wanting to get in.
– Meaning it had to turn people away?
– Yeah, we absolutely to turn people away.
– What was the minimum investment you accepted?
– 25,000.
– I mean, traditionally that’s really small.
Producers didn’t used to do that kind of thing very much,
did they?
– Yeah, and there were some people who wrote
$150,000 checks or more
and then there were others who would bundle $25,000 units
to come up with a larger.
But again, our capitalization
because we were taking the production from playwrights
was capitalized at 4.8 million.
We spent less than that.
You wanna build in a certain amount of reserve
because we didn’t know how I was gonna sell at the beginning.
We were lucky enough to break even
in those first couple of weeks,
but having a little bit of a cover if it had not
was something we wanted to build in.
– Here’s a line from the New York Times review
when it opened on Broadway.
The play is a staggering achievement
and already feels like a must see American classic.
Where were you when you read this?
Who were you with and how did it make you feel?
– I was with Greg Noble and Sonia Friedman
in the press room at our opening night party.
The review came out, we opened it,
we read that first paragraph and we all looked at each other
and said, “Wow.”
– So let me just ask you now several weeks
into this run that is very successful
and looks to be even more successful,
especially if you win a boatload of Tonys.
Do you wish in a perfect world
you would put it into a bigger theater than the Golden?
– No.
– Because why not?
– Because it’s the perfect fit.
It has this way of wrapping its arms around a play
and making it intimate.
As with all shows, plays and musicals,
finding the right fit of building
and sometimes you don’t get a choice,
but this is where the timing worked out in this way
because it could have easily been,
“Oh, well, we don’t have the Golden or the Booth available,
“but we have this 1,100 seat theater available
“with a second balcony.”
And I don’t know necessarily
if it would have had the same reaction.
– On Broadway, as elsewhere,
awards drive ticket sales
and Stereophonic is nominated for 13 Tony Awards.
It can’t possibly win that many
since some categories contain multiple Stereophonic nominees.
Tom Pesinka, for instance,
is nominated for Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Play
along with two other male actors in Stereophonic.
Will Brill, who plays Reg, the band’s bassist,
and Eli Gelb, who plays the recording engineer Grover.
I asked Pesinka what it’s like
to compete in the same category against his castmates.
– It’s awesome.
I’m like a super competitive person
and super ambitious person.
That’s why I think I can play Peter
’cause I definitely have had many years of therapy
that have brought me to this place,
but deep down in my heart, I just wanna win.
The morning of the nominations,
I got a text from Will Brill that said, “Man you.”
And that’s how I found out.
– Man you, like the football club?
– No, like it’s you, man.
– Oh, I see, okay.
– Yeah, and then I called him and then I called Eli
because like so many shows are like it’s an ensemble piece
but like our show really is.
If someone is not at their best every night,
the show can so easily fall apart.
Everyone is so dedicated.
It’s funny that like I auditioned for those two roles
and I know for a fact why I didn’t get those roles
because those guys are perfect
and I’m perfect for mine.
– Would I like to win a Tony for sure?
And I keep joking that I’m gonna like
break their legs or whatever.
But ultimately like, God, this is my Broadway debut
in this play with this part and I got a Tony nomination.
All right, whatever.
– You’re saying like whatever,
like you don’t even need to win it, you’re saying?
– No, no, no, I want to win it.
I’m telling you, I wanna win it.
But if I don’t win it, it’s like, again, it’s cake.
– Okay, so Tom, you are 36 years old.
You’ve been at this for a while.
This is your first time on Broadway
and you find yourself in the kind of hit
that happens quite rarely.
Are you worried about, you know, what comes after?
– I’m not worried, I’m more excited.
And I don’t even think I know how much
it’s opened the door to certain things.
The morning of the Tony nominations,
I was sitting with my girlfriend and I was like,
okay, like a certain era of struggle for me is over.
And that feels liberating.
It was like a good 10 years of eating crap.
I’m not worried about the next job
in the same way that I was.
– How struggling was the struggle?
– It feels worse than it was.
I’d been working pretty consistently.
I’m very ambitious and like I wanna do the big stuff.
My therapist said after I called her on Tony morning,
she was like, did you think this would happen?
I said, no.
And then she was like, yeah, you did.
Like, you were confused for so many years
as to like, you knew that you were great
and you knew that inside of you,
you had something to offer,
but like people weren’t recognizing it.
And so that frustration, I think,
was more of the struggle than like getting a job.
– Sarah Pigeon is also nominated for a Tony Award
in the same category as her castmate, Juliana Canfield.
I asked Pigeon what it’s like to compete
against her onstage bandmate and real life friend.
– I’m just really excited to see everybody dressed up.
It’s like theater prom.
I sort of feel like we’ve all just won already.
I remember taking the stage combat class
and like, it doesn’t matter how good you are
at doing a fake punch.
If your partner doesn’t sell it,
it’s like we’ve created this sort of spire web
to hold each other up and support this piece
that we all believe in so much.
And theater people are amazing
because they spend like hours every single day
in dark theaters playing make-believe.
Figuring out how to make most sense and be so magical
and be thrilling and exciting and true.
– Are you a little surprised
at this relatively late stage in our civilization
with so many modes of performing and entertaining,
most of which are, you know,
electronic or digital in some way now.
Are you surprised that this old fashioned,
hand-made theatrical thing still exists
as intensely as it does?
– I think that, you know, people like something real.
It’s like a home-cooked meal.
Sure, you can go and get, you know,
penne pasta with vodka sauce in the freezer section,
the Ralph’s, but like,
if somebody makes you homemade penne pasta,
it’s gonna taste better and you’re gonna wanna eat it.
And then also with theater,
and in particular with this show,
it all happens in front of you
if this were to be a movie one day.
I would be curious to see how do they make,
I think what’s so thrilling about this
is that you see it all happen in real time
and the music’s all live and you see the mess-ups
watching someone do like a high-wire act of theater.
They walk on stage and there’s nothing but the set
and their body and their scene partner.
And you can’t call cut and you can’t do it over
is what’s so thrilling.
It’s like one of the oldest art forms in the world,
just storytelling.
And I think there’s a reason that it’s lasted so long.
I don’t think people go to see a robot theater performance
maybe once, but I feel like it’ll close
like six weeks after opening.
– And I went back to David Ajmi, the playwright.
Without him, none of this other stuff exists.
I asked Ajmi if he wins the Tony for best play,
what kind of speech she would give.
– Or they just told me about this the other day.
My publicist said I had to do it.
– You hadn’t thought about it
until your publicist told you?
– No, because I’ve never done anything like this before.
I don’t usually get these kind of prizes
where you sit in the audience
and then they call your name or they don’t call it.
– Let’s assume that you’re drafting
the beginning of an idea right now
for your Tony acceptance speech, should you win.
And maybe that’s terrible luck to even think about it,
but if you’re willing to engage, what do you wanna say?
– Well, Sue said, our producer said something like,
I mean, we were talking about this the other day
and I was like, Sue, let’s not have this conversation.
But she said, you should not thank a lot of people.
You should more say some personal thing.
I can extemporize without going too crazy.
So maybe I would extemporize on stage
and just say what was inside of me.
That’s what I like seeing.
I wanna see someone talk about something
that’s real to them in the moment.
I mean, in the theater, everyone struggles so hard
to get to where they are.
It’s such a hard job.
It’s a really weird job.
– And there’s just something so moving
about theater artists getting together
and celebrating each other,
not in the spirit of competition,
but just like, look at us.
Like we’re all doing this
and somehow we’re surviving.
How are we doing it?
So that’s sort of maybe the spirit of which,
if I’m lucky enough to be up there,
I would say something like that.
– That was pretty good to see.
I told you I could do it.
♪ I’m gonna see you when I get there ♪
♪ I’ll see you when I get there ♪
– The Tony Awards are on Sunday, June 16th.
How many will Stereophonic win?
We’ll let you know next week on part two.
Also, what will the success of Stereophonic mean
for the future of an industry that’s been dying forever?
– I think the reason why,
especially a lot of young people
are coming to the theater in 2024 is that we forget
because I think we have collective PTSD,
but we were locked in our houses for three and a half years.
And I think people want to be around each other.
That’s next time on the show.
Until then, take care of yourself.
And if you can, someone else too.
(upbeat music)
Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
You can find our entire archive on any podcast app
also at freakonomics.com,
where we publish transcripts and show notes.
This episode was produced by Alina Coleman.
Our staff also includes Augusta Chapman,
Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne,
Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen,
Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Julie Kanfer,
Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy,
Neil Coruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas,
Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski.
Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by The Hitchhikers.
Our composer is Luis Guerra.
Additional music in this episode by Will Butler,
Justin Craig, and the cast of Stereophonic.
As always, thanks for listening.
– Oh, thanks, you gave me some tissues.
(blows raspberry)
– Mm, glad we got that on tape, though.
(laughs)
– I hope you can cut that out.
(upbeat music)
– The Freakonomics Radio Network,
the hidden side of everything.
(upbeat music)
Stitcher.
(upbeat music)
you
When I first moved to New York City years ago,
I went to a lot of Broadway shows.
My girlfriend was an actress,
a lot of our friends were actors,
and we would scrounge tickets for cheap,
or more often we would second act the shows.
That’s when you just walk in the theater at intermission
and find an empty seat.
It’s harder to do that these days.
And then in my first real journalism job at New York Magazine,
I wrote about the theater a good bit,
and I was suddenly invited to become a voter
for the Tony Awards.
I thought this was an honor of some kind.
It turned out to be more of a punishment
because a Tony voter is supposed to see every show
that’s nominated for any category,
which means you see a lot of theater
that just isn’t very good.
I don’t mean to be cruel.
I know that everyone involved works really hard,
but making a great piece of theater,
great piece of anything, takes more than hard work.
It takes talent and luck and endurance,
and something that feels like alchemy.
Anyway, after seeing 20 or 30 Broadway shows a year,
many of them mediocre at best,
I pretty much gave up on it.
I also stopped following the business side of theater,
which I had found fascinating and weird.
But I moved on.
It just felt like in a world
of rapidly expanding entertainment options,
Broadway had been left behind.
Meanwhile, the tickets kept getting more expensive.
These days, the average Broadway ticket costs over $125.
The average household income
of a Broadway ticket buyer today is over $270,000.
This steep inflation was actually predicted
back in 1965 by a pair of economists,
William Baumol and William Bowen.
They published a paper called On the Performing Arts,
The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems.
Even back then, they saw that when an industry
is not able to use new technologies to raise productivity,
which is what most industries do,
then prices would spike
since the cost of labor continues to rise.
This phenomenon came to be called Baumol’s cost disease.
Today, it helps explain why sectors like healthcare
and education have also seen massive inflation.
There may be a lot of new technology in those fields,
but it doesn’t change the basic fact
that they require a lot of real people
spending a lot of time doing or making a thing,
and real people are expensive.
Can you think of an industry more vulnerable
to this cost disease than live theater?
For starters, you can’t scale it.
It takes dozens of people, sometimes hundreds,
working very hard for many hours every day
so that you and I can plop ourselves in a seat
and watch something that is essentially handmade,
and that’s not counting the thousands of hours
and dollars spent creating the show in the first place.
Writers, directors, producers, musicians,
lighting and costume and scenic designers,
then there are the staged readings and workshops,
rehearsals, sometimes fistfights.
But if all the elements line up,
the talent, the luck, the endurance, the alchemy,
it can also be something spectacular
and unique every single time.
A while back, we got an email from a listener.
We had just put out a series on the airline industry,
and this listener suggested something similar
on the theater industry.
So we started looking into it.
We did a bunch of interviews,
feeling around for a center of gravity, a hypothesis.
One obvious working title came to mind.
Is theater dead?
Or maybe this time is theater really dead?
Because the demise of theater has been predicted
for decades, if not longer.
It is, after all, one of our oldest art forms,
going back to at least the ancient Greeks.
It’s more than 2,500 years ago.
And who says everything has to last forever?
Maybe live theater had just outlived its time.
During those early interviews we did,
it became clear that the economics of theater
are still fascinating and weird.
For those of us in New York,
Broadway is just the visible tip of the iceberg.
Beneath it are many hundreds of professional,
not-for-profit theaters,
regionals and repertoires and university programs
and others, and their economics have become dire.
Even before the COVID shutdown, which hit them hard,
a lot of the nonprofits were in financial trouble.
Part of the problem is that they’ve always relied
on philanthropic donations,
and most younger donors just aren’t that interested
in the theater.
But this is a big problem for the commercial theater too,
for Broadway, because the nonprofits are the farm system
for Broadway shows.
Of the 26 new plays or musicals
that opened on Broadway this season,
23 of them came up through the farm system,
most in the U.S. and a few in the U.K.
As we were trying to figure out
how to make a radio series about all this,
I started going to see shows again, quite a few,
in New York and London and a couple other places.
I am sorry to report that once again,
most of them weren’t great.
I’d still get excited every time the lights went down
and you’d feel your heart beating faster.
What am I about to see?
Where will it take me?
Because there is a thing that can only happen in theater,
and I kept looking for it for something
that didn’t feel like it was trying to be a concert
or a sitcom or a theme park ride.
I went to see a musical version of Back to the Future.
The highlight was, toward the end,
the DeLorean flying out over the audience.
I didn’t actually see this happen
because I left at intermission,
but maybe someone else second acted the show
and got to see it from my seat.
I hope so.
I recognize everyone has their own taste.
I’m not trying to yuck anyone else’s yum.
I was just looking for something
that could only happen in a dark room
with real people on stage doing and saying things
that you won’t see or hear anywhere else,
or at least not as intensely and intelligently.
I guess I was looking for a jolt.
And finally, I found it.
And the person responsible for creating it
feels the way I do.
– I wanna feel electricity
and I wanna feel alive in a new way.
I wanna feel something unpeeling or unfolding
in a very surprising way when I go to the theater.
– His name is David Ajmi.
He’s been writing plays for many years.
This one, it’s called Stereophonic.
It took 11 years.
Stereophonic is about a rock band
in the 1970s recording an album.
It’s a show about music, but it’s not a musical.
It’s got the feel of a documentary,
but it’s more intimate and more interesting.
It might not seem theatrical, but it is.
It’s just not performative
in the way that so much theater is these days.
Anyway, I loved it.
And I wanted to tell you about it.
And I wanted to hear from the people who made it.
So we are still working on that series
about the economics of the theater industry.
That’ll come out later this year, I hope.
But Stereophonic is having a moment right now.
It is nominated for more Tony Awards
in any play in history.
It’s the show that rock stars are going to see
on their nights off.
So today on Freakonomics Radio,
the first of a two-part series, trust me, it’s worth it,
to find out how the alchemy happened.
We will hear from the creators.
– We’ve been told throughout this show
to have a bit of hostility to the audience.
– It’s not a very fashionable play.
It doesn’t have to do with identity politics.
– It’s about nothing and it’s about everything.
It’s about being in a room with creative people,
making something or at least trying to make something great.
– And we’ll hear from the producers.
– If you follow a formula for Broadway,
what I’ve found is the biggest successes on Broadway
tend to break that formula, and this is one of those.
– How to break a formula, break some hearts,
and in this case, break the bank.
The unlikely success of Stereophonic
and what it may say about the future of live theater,
starting now.
(upbeat music)
(clock ticking)
– This is Freakonomics Radio,
the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything
with your host, Stephen Dubner.
(audience cheering)
– Going to see a piece of live theater
takes time, effort, and money.
Sometimes a lot of money.
You could watch thousands of movies on Netflix
for the cost of one Broadway ticket.
So what does theater have going for it?
What does it still do that nothing else can?
Here again is the playwright, David Ajmi.
– It is live and the audience becomes an organism
and they are in collaboration with the actors.
So there’s something about that kind of liturgy,
the ritual of being in a space together,
creating a new thing every single night
because it is totally different every single night
and the energy and the electricity,
what makes something funny or moving one night
can be completely discrepant with what happens the next night.
That kind of knife edged liveness
is something that you only can really get in the theater
and it’s a temporal art form.
It takes place within a compressed amount of time.
There’s a beginning, middle, and end that you can feel
when I was writing my memoir,
I couldn’t get a sense of the shape because it was so big.
There were so many hundreds of pages that I was like,
oh my God, I can’t even get a sense of what this shape is.
In a play, it’s much more skeletal.
You can feel the shape of it.
You can trace the vertebrae of it when you’re writing it.
It’s much easier to wrap your head around it.
– Ajmi grew up in a fairly strange, often dysfunctional,
always loud family of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn.
In his memoir, Lot 6, published in 2020,
he writes about seeing Sweeney Todd
when he was eight years old.
Sweeney Todd is a musical by Stephen Sondheim
about a barber in Victorian England
who, having suffered a great injustice,
gets revenge by slaughtering people in his barber shop
and with the help of his confederate, Mrs. Lovett,
turning them into meat pies.
– That play was about a real outsider, a cultural outsider,
and it was my first time seeing something
where an outsider, an anti-hero,
was presented at the center of something.
The violence of his emotions and the injustice of the world
was being propounded in these crazy songs
and in this wild comedy,
and it was all kind of cross-hatched together.
That was very thrilling for me,
and it was showing me something about my psyche
that I didn’t have the language for,
’cause I was too young to know how to speak about my life,
but he became like an avatar for me.
He scared me, and he scared me because he was in me already.
– You mean Sweeney, not Sondheim.
– Sweeney, and probably Sondheim,
’cause I think Sweeney is a part of Sondheim.
I think all artists have that part to them,
the exile, the outsider, the person who doesn’t fit in
that nobody understands and needs to be seen
and needs to get revenge and needs all these things.
So I was very taken by that show,
but I couldn’t understand it, and I have a language for it,
and it was almost like I was knocked upside my head,
and I like theater that creates that experience
for the audience.
– Sweeney Todd was recently revived on Broadway
with Josh Groban playing Sweeney for a time
beside the endlessly entertaining Annaly Ashford
as Mrs. Love It.
And there’s another Sondheim revival on Broadway right now,
merrily we roll along,
which, like David Ajmi’s Stereophonic,
may win some Tony Awards.
But Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021,
is more of a theater person’s theater person.
He did win many awards, and some of his shows,
like Company and Into the Woods,
did have long Broadway runs,
but you have to go back to West Side Story and Gypsy
to find a time when Sondheim was considered mainstream.
When you look at the shows that make it to Broadway today,
especially the musicals,
most of them are targeted at tourists
who want a fun and familiar piece of entertainment.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that,
but people like Sondheim and now David Ajmi
have always offered something different,
something more original, more off-kilter
than the blander entertainments in the Hollywood adaptations.
But why isn’t there more of that?
– There’s no funding for it,
and people are discouraged to do it
because they wanna be produced,
so they think they have to make their work producible,
so they’re chasing trends,
and the artistic directors are trying to appease their boards,
and they’re trying to bring subscribers in,
and everyone wants something a little middle-brow
’cause it’s easier to digest.
– What Ajmi is talking about here
are the nonprofit theaters that feed Broadway.
The theater is in places like Seattle and Chicago,
La Jolla and Hartford.
– A writer really has to risk being a splinter.
Someone who comes in and disrupts,
and you are not going to make money doing that, probably.
– Well, you might.
– Now I can.
– But like, this is lightning striking.
This is a rare occurrence.
– It is, and this play,
I didn’t try to do this to be commercial or anything like that.
I made it the same way I make everything else,
but it has music in it,
and I’m working with a brilliant composer
and people like music,
so it kind of abuts being a Broadway musical,
even though it has nothing to do with that.
– The brilliant composer he’s talking about
is Will Butler from Arcade Fire,
the Canadian band who’ve made some very good records
over the past couple of decades.
His brother, Win Butler, is the frontman.
He was recently accused of sexual misconduct
and bullying.
By then, Will Butler had already quit the band.
Some of the music he wrote for Stereophonic
sounds like Arcade Fire.
It is dark and bright at the same time somehow.
It is traditional in some key ways, but also modernist.
But the band that Stereophonic really reminds you of
is Fleetwood Mac.
The demographics are identical.
There is a British husband and wife
who were in the midst of breaking up
as were Christine and John McVeigh
when Fleetwood Mac recorded their blockbuster record rumors.
There is an American couple,
very much like Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks,
who are also in the middle of breaking up.
Their names are Peter and Diana in the play.
If you’re looking for further Fleetwood Mac parallels,
both Lindsay Buckingham and the Peter character
happen to have a brother who swims in the Olympics.
And the fifth member of the Stereophonic band
is a drummer who is also British, as was Mick Fleetwood.
The entire play, more than three hours long,
happens inside a recording studio.
The band is making their second record.
They’re first at a slow start, but now it is caught fire
and they are turning into big rock stars.
Although that’s all happening outside the studio.
We feel it, but we never see it.
We also feel the sudden pressure of huge expectations.
There are also two recording engineers in the play.
So seven people hermetically sealed on this stage
of fishbowl of ambition and talent
and exhaustion and frustration.
It is both thrilling and painful
to so thoroughly eavesdrop on them.
David Ajmi is in his early fifties
and he had written several plays before this one,
but Stereophonic will end up being more commercially successful
than the rest of them put together, maybe times 10.
I asked him where the inspiration
for Stereophonic came from.
He said it was from listening
to a Led Zeppelin recording one day.
– I was on a plane ride and I was going to a conference,
a theater conference and I was listening to In-Flight Radio
and that song, “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,”
which is the cover they did, came on.
– That song was written in the 1950s
by the folk singer Ann Burdon.
It was first recorded by Joan Baez
before Led Zeppelin covered it.
– My brother, when I was a really little kid,
my brother’s much older than me.
He used to play that over and over on his guitar
when he was teaching himself how to play guitar.
So I knew that song just from those chords,
but then I started listening to the vocals
and it’s just so crazy and so volatile
and so emotionally intense.
♪ I’ve got the power ♪
There’s something about it was just so transfixing to me.
♪ I’ve got the power ♪
– And I just imagined the studio.
I was trying to visualize it
’cause you’re trapped on a plane, what are you gonna do?
It activates the imagination and then I sort of went,
“Oh, wait a minute, what if that’s the set for a play?”
And I just immediately knew
that I was gonna write this play and I thought,
“But how am I gonna write this play?
“It’s not so interesting.
“They’re just gonna record an album, what is it?”
And so I just sort of let myself not know
for a really long time how I was gonna do it,
but I just knew sometimes you just kind of know.
– I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard anybody
have the genesis of a great piece of art
come from in-flight radio.
– Welcome to me.
– From that day until today is about how many years?
– That was 11 years ago.
– Were you working on it during that time
or did you just let it germinate for a while in your mind?
– I let it germinate for a while.
I was doing other things.
I was supposed to write my book.
I was late with my book and I had another project
that I was commissioned to do.
And so I was doing this like on the side.
And the way that I decided to make it was,
I just decided to invite a director to come on
and invite my composer and invite the music director
and invite a team.
Before I had a word on page, I just said,
“Would you guys all just commit to doing this with me?”
It became almost like this weird totemic force,
this kind of weird–
– Well, you formed a band.
– I formed a band and we are a band.
It feels like it.
– Had you been in a band before?
– Never ever.
I knew I wanted to work with Arcade Fire
from the first time I heard the funeral album.
And then when I thought about this project
and just the feeling of the music that I wanted,
I just thought of them.
So I had a friend who knew the creative director
of Arcade Fire, so we reached out to Arcade Fire
and Will was the only one who came back
and said, “I’ll meet with you.”
– Where was he living then?
– He was living in Montreal right before that,
but he’d just moved to New York.
So it was kind of perfect timing.
We met and we talked about like Herman Melville
and Moby Dick for a really long time.
Will’s a polymath and so he’s not a normal rocker.
He’s really smart, really smart.
He knows about everything.
And so I just was like, “This guy’s cool
and he’s a unicorn.”
I could tell right away he’s adaptable.
He can do different kinds of things.
And I said, “This isn’t gonna be the kind of thing
where you come in with a song and then we put the song on.
Like we have to go through iterations.
It has to be right for this play.
It has to fit exactly into what I’m doing.
Are you open to that?”
And he said, “Absolutely.”
He was super cool about it.
And so he agreed to do it in 2014.
And then I don’t think it was until 2018
that I had a draft that I could show him.
And we read it together.
Will played some parts.
I played parts Daniel and my music director.
Yeah, my director and the music director.
We all kind of read it together a couple of times.
And then he went home and he read it.
And then he like built out songs in character.
– Did he build out many of the songs
right in that first round of writing
or did it come slowly?
– No, he had a couple and then a few that we didn’t use.
And it went on like that for a while.
Like Masquerade didn’t have a bridge.
And I was like, “Dude, that song needs a bridge.
Can we do this and that?”
I’d say I want it to be a little more heterogeneous.
I don’t want it to just have one feeling to it.
I want it to switch and turn more.
And I would like dramaturg the songs.
He let me do it ’cause he was cool like that.
And when he didn’t want to,
he wouldn’t and say, “Okay, I’ll shut up.”
♪ I might take you to the Masquerade ♪
♪ Soul is sold on the money paid ♪
– I was researching this play by, I mean, I read books,
but I also watched a ton of documentaries.
– What were some of the docs
and what were some of the bands that you watched and liked?
– So many.
– I mean, I’m guessing there was a Fleetwood Mac doc.
– There were definitely Fleetwood Mac docs.
They have one, I think it’s from when they were making Tusk
that has a lot of great, very private feeling stuff in it.
The Metallica documentary, some kind of monster.
There was something about this documentary style
and feeling that I myself was watching eavesdropping
on these people in this very private recording process
because nobody gets led into these studios.
So the fact that I was watching them
and hearing these Soto Votre conversations
and seeing these private moments.
– Yeah, but here’s what I like about your show more
than those docs, which I also like,
but when you are a musician in a studio
and there’s a camera, you know, it’s there.
You may act as if it’s not
and you might forget about it once in a while,
but generally you will behave in a way that burnishes
in your mind your reputation at that moment
because you understand you’re being observed.
So it might look like real life, but it’s not really.
Whereas in your fictional version,
it feels more like nonfiction
because you don’t have those constraints.
It feels like we’re eavesdropping for real.
Well, thank you for saying that.
That’s a real compliment to us.
Whether it’s an illusion or not,
that was what was so seductive to me
about those documentaries.
And so when I was composing the play
and I wanted to use a different style
and realism for me as a style,
I started to sort of borrow from that.
And that’s why there’s so much overlapping dialogue
in that first scene.
I really wanted people to understand like,
no, you’re not gonna get it all.
This is not for you.
You have to lean in from the beginning
and know you’re gonna miss stuff
because you’re eavesdropping.
So that creates the kind of lattice work
through which you peek in and watch the play
from the very first scene.
That was very deliberately constructed.
– Can you check to see if the mic pre is on?
– My head is like a brick.
– It’s on?
– Grab some aspirin.
– You don’t need an aspirin.
I need to get like one hour of sleep.
This is insane.
Did you sleep through that?
– Look at my eyes.
– Oh, their blood shot.
– So I used to play music and record music.
And of many things I love about your play,
one is simply how well the playing of music is rendered.
It just feels real and thrilling and painful
and all those things you feel when you’re in a band.
But I also loved how well you rendered the recording process,
which is a totally different animal.
So can you talk about how you got to that?
– So much of it was me faking stuff early on.
I would look at things in documentaries
and they’d say these phrases and I go,
“Ooh, that sounds cool.”
And I’d write it down.
Just every time a phrase sounded like something cool
that I would believe sounded like a real production thing,
I would write it down.
– Like your snare is rattling a little bit.
– Well, yeah, and that I got,
I knew I wanted to be a problem with the drum.
And I didn’t know what kind of problem
would happen with the drum.
So I said to my sound guy, Brian Rumory, who’s brilliant,
what kind of problem would happen
that would cause this drummer to melt down?
And what would he do to fix it?
And then how could that go wrong?
I wanted to construct a scene where he goes down a black hole
as so Ryan really talked me through it for about an hour.
That’s how I did that scene.
– Now the snares are ringing again.
– I didn’t hear it that time.
Did you hear it?
– No.
– I didn’t hear it that time.
– I wanted to fix it and it keeps making everything worse.
You know, I wish we hadn’t touched it.
I really do.
I really do.
I wish we just left it alone.
– Sorry, man.
– A drum is a piece of wood.
It’s ephemeral.
You can’t keep changing things.
Now we’ve changed everything and I can’t change it back.
– Stereophonic is about a band.
And it’s about a band early on in its career
that’s finding fame.
They all happen to love each other
and have relationships with one another.
I’m Sonia Friedman and I’m a theater producer.
– Friedman, based in London, is one of the most prolific
theatrical producers in recent history.
At the moment, she has more than a dozen shows
in production on the West End in London,
as well as on Broadway and in several other countries.
Her shows have won more than 60 Olivier Awards in Britain
and as of this recording, 39 Tony Awards.
I asked Friedman why she’d been attracted to Stereophonic.
– We watched them through the course of the making of
an album which will end up being a great album
for the ages, but they don’t know that at the time.
Watch them battle through creativity,
trying to find their own individual voices,
but also be as one and crash through their relationships
and see them just battling through.
And the thing is that what David the author and Daniel,
the director have done is they’ve been incredibly bold
with this show because there’s this rule in New York.
You know, there’s this rule in New York.
You can’t have shows running over a particular length of time
and you know, it’s got to have stars in it.
If you follow a formula for Broadway,
actually what I’ve found is the biggest successes
on Broadway tend to break that formula.
And this is one of those.
It has to run at three hours plus because you have to get
this sense of this album taking forever to make.
And you never, ever, ever feel the length.
You want to be with this group forever.
And of course, the music is sublime
and they’re really brilliant with the way they tease the music.
They don’t give it to you easily.
You have to wait, you have to wait.
But there’s this moment of absolute ecstasy
when, you know, 45, 50 minutes in, you hear it and you go,
“Oh God, that’s what they’re making.”
Oh wow.
♪ Never wakes you in the morning ♪
♪ Whatever keeps you up at night ♪
And it sort of begins to make sense as to why this group
who seem at each other’s throats,
and then they get in the room together and they make magic.
And that’s art. That’s art.
The band in Stereophonic is never named.
The actors do have a pet name for the band,
but I promised not to tell.
They are led by Peter, who writes, sings, plays guitar,
and winds up imposing his will on everyone else.
We hear about Peter before we see him.
Here are Simon, the drummer, and Diana, who writes and sings.
She’s also Peter’s girlfriend.
– The last album took three weeks.
So this can’t take more than another two, three weeks tops.
We can make it two more weeks.
– Peter said last night he was ready to snap,
and he wanted to confront Reg and I said, “No,
don’t escalate things.”
– It was good you did that.
– “And now you have to do your part.”
– All of the characters are interesting
and at least occasionally charming,
except for Peter, who doesn’t do charm.
– He’s got a very, very difficult role,
because how I see him, that’s maybe because I’m a producer,
I see him trying desperately to wrestle this group
and keep this group together, and he has a vision,
and maybe he’s got such a strong vision
that he’s not seeing what’s going on around him.
– Peter is one of the lead vocalists in the band.
He’s the lead guitarist of the band
and becomes the producer of the album as the show goes on.
I’m Tom Fasinka and I’m an actor.
– How would you describe the Peter character emotionally?
– He’s a control freak, but there’s reasons why.
He’s a guy that is a survivor in a lot of aspects.
I won’t go into all the backstory of his father
and all that stuff, ’cause I think that’s sort of for me.
– Some of it’s in the writing.
– Some of it’s in the writing,
but I think the emotional landscape is for me.
I think he’s been taught a certain amount of savagery.
He’s had to develop a work ethic that can be harmful
to himself and to others, but can also produce great results.
– What does it feel like to play this character?
Forget about the endurance requirements of a three hour show.
I mean, you’re on stage, everyone’s on stage a lot,
but what’s the experience feel like?
– This show has been an incredible experience
and a challenging one in the fact
that my character is not the most palatable person in the room.
So, you know, I’ve been heckled.
There’s loud groans of disapproval.
I always used to say that,
oh, I’m an actor who doesn’t care if he’s liked or not.
That’s not what an artist cares about.
But I think deep down, as human beings,
we all care if we’re liked even a little bit.
So I think the universe brought this play into my life
to sort of be like, yeah, prove it.
– What’s a line in Stereophonic that you know
that every night you say it,
you’re going to become the objective scorn?
– No, she asks me, can I speak with you privately?
Can I say no?
And before that, I say,
then don’t get in your own head, be a professional.
So those are two guaranteed groans from the audience.
– I think you romanticize who you are a little bit.
You’re looking out for yourself just as much as I do.
You’re very ambitious.
– I am not ambitious.
Don’t sling mud at me.
– You want to use me to arrange a song,
but then when I’m telling you it’s too long
or to cut something, you have no interest.
And then you take it as criticism.
Then don’t ask me to arrange a song.
– Because you can be very aggressive, Peter.
– How am I?
– I don’t like to be forced.
Okay?
He says some pretty out of pocket stuff.
I’m Sarah Pigeon, I’m an actor
and I’m currently in Stereophonic playing Diana.
He also says, if I don’t force you to have a baby,
then it’s never going to happen.
It’s like, oh, you don’t say that.
– Is it hard for you as a female actor in 2024
to get into that mode in 1976 and 1977
where those things were said by a man
and not respond the way you might want to respond in 2024?
– Yeah, I think that was one of the more difficult hurdles
that I had to get over.
I was judging Diana a lot at the beginning
for staying in this relationship.
And I was bringing my 2024 self to it.
Like a guy just should not talk to you that way.
And how have you stayed in it for this long?
But she doesn’t know what feminism is.
She doesn’t know who Gloria Steinem is.
She knows she has these feelings.
It’s a time in I think rock history
where there’s no one to look to for direction and guidance.
I don’t think that there’s this feeling
that she can go off on her own.
I don’t even think it crosses her mind
until she’s offered a solo album.
I think her understanding of her artistry
and songwriting is so tied to Peter’s orchestration of it
and his editing and his advice.
– Here is David Ajmi again,
talking about the Peter character.
– That character is very similar to me in a lot of ways.
He’s very damaged and that’s a lot of my damage.
It’s all kind of this weird cross-hatching,
but in the end it’s a self portrait.
And I think all great art has to be that.
You have to put skin in the game.
You can’t just write about those people over there.
They have to be inside of you in some way for it to really work.
– What I love about Peter,
even though he’s sort of odious sometimes,
is that he sets the bar really high
and that pisses everyone off,
but they’re also grateful for it in the end.
How much of that is you?
– That’s me, it’s all me.
– Remind me not to collaborate with you.
– I just maintain and I’ve said it over and over
to the cast ’cause I’m a big staunch defender of Peter,
even though I know he’s got a lot of problems.
Peter’s biggest flaw is that he has no bedside manner.
He doesn’t understand how to be politic
about offering his criticism and he has bad timing.
If he just could be more gracious and more kind of tricky
about how to deliver these criticisms
and he could lie better, but he’s not a liar.
He’s really, really blunt.
And it’s part of an ethos that makes him great,
even though it’s really annoying
and it’s hard to work with somebody
who doesn’t attend in a sensitive way to your feelings.
When this process is so, everything is so charged
and heightened, you need to be sensitive to people.
You can’t just deliver these like sledgehammer criticisms,
but he’s right a lot of the time.
And in the play, you see how he’s right.
And it drives everybody crazy that he’s right,
but I don’t judge my characters.
I think Peter is sexist because he grew up
in a sexist culture and it was 1976.
I don’t think he’s a bad guy.
I think he’s living in a kind of weird soup of the time.
It was sort of a tight wire act
because I really don’t want people to turn against Peter.
They do, no matter what I do.
I mean, they do and they don’t like him, but I love him.
– Were you tempted to rewrite to make him
a little bit more likable at least in moments?
– No, Tom Pysenko who plays Peter is really adamant
that we stay true to the character.
He is a hardcore man.
I just love that guy because it comes from an ethical spine.
He’s like, my job is not to make you love him.
My job is to show you who this person is
and to show him in as much dimensionality as I can.
And he does that beautifully.
– I love that he said I have an ethical spine
because I think I do as an artist.
Like I have strong artistic values and I don’t care
’cause it’s not me.
I don’t know if it’s like because we live in the age
of social media or we live in the age of reality television,
people just assume that, oh, well,
you must be like your character and it gets to you.
Off-Broadway, someone was like, I hated you or I hate you.
And I was like, you hate me?
That’s insane.
It’s not my job to make people like Peter.
It’s my job to make people see Peter
and be in the room with him, which a lot of people don’t like.
And maybe it’s because I’m a bit of a contrarian
or I’m a bit of like a, I don’t know.
I don’t even know what the right word is,
rebel or something.
But part of me loves it, part of me loves it
because it’s like you are throwing all your manners
out the window as an audience member to jeer at me.
I’m triggering something in you that’s real.
– We’ve been told throughout this show
to have a bit of hostility to the audience.
– By whom? Your director?
– Our director, yeah, Daniel Ockett.
There’s a lot of laughs in the show
and there’s moments and beats and pauses
and there’s a lot of musicality outside of the music
just in David’s writing.
The hostility is in the sense of not allowing
the audience’s reaction to throw us off
the rhythm and tempo that we’re exploring in the show.
– Coming up after the break,
how did that rhythm and tempo, those beats and pauses
turn into such a big hit?
I’m Stephen Dubner.
This is Freakin’omics Radio.
We’ll be right back.
(upbeat music)
– David Ajmi was originally given a commission
to write Stereophonic by two nonprofit theater companies,
second stage in New York
and center theater group in Los Angeles.
– It was a co-commission from the two of them.
So they paid me for the commission,
but I mean over the course of 10 years,
if you divided what I got paid,
it’s, you know, you get more working at McDonald’s.
– Would you get paid for the commission?
– I think I got something like 30 grand.
– What did you do with all that money over those 10 years?
– I survived.
I mean, I paid my credit card bills.
This is what you have to do.
– It does strike me that committing to a life
in the theater, as you did pretty early,
and as many people still do,
is essentially a commitment to poverty and struggle as well.
– Oh yeah.
– I mean, what’s happening now with you is an anomaly
and it’s a great break and I’m so, so happy for you.
But can you just talk about,
not only for all the other writers,
but the performers and everybody else
that goes into making these things that, you know,
we just show up and sit down in the seat.
Can you just talk about what that kind of commitment
is like to a life like that?
– Thank you for asking that question.
Look, I was able to write this play
because I had patrons essentially.
There were two architects, very wonderful,
well-known architects living in the Hollywood Hills,
who had a floor of their home and I hooked up with them
and they let me live in that floor.
I lived there for about seven years,
gratis, and I did a little bit of TV work,
but basically not that much.
That’s how this play was written
because of their generosity.
– There are people who argue
that the government should just support the arts more.
They argue there’s a compelling rationale for that,
et cetera, and many other countries,
especially in Europe, do that.
What’s your position there?
– Yes, I absolutely agree with that.
I think it’s obscene that we don’t fund our artists.
It’s the hallmark of a civilized society.
Paula Vogel told me that in 1975,
she got a grant from the NEA,
which at that point funded individual artists
before Trent Lott and the moral majority
got involved in the ’90s.
And she got $25,000,
which was enough to live on for a year at that point,
and she was able to kickstart her career.
I was fortunate ’cause I ended up getting private grants.
Like I was at one point locked in a job
as a paralegal in “30 Rock,”
and I was working all day and I had no time to write.
I was like, “I’m never gonna be able to be a writer.”
I don’t know how to eat cattle living.
And I got this miraculous call
saying that I won a grant for $25,000 in 2003, I think it was.
And I thought, “Well, I can really make this last
if I move to Germany.”
So I moved to Berlin.
I lived in Prince Lauerberg,
which is a gorgeous neighborhood.
It’s like the West Village.
My rent was $200 a month.
That’s how I generated the beginning
of my body of work that made my name.
– Ajmi wrote plays that ran off-Broadway
at regional theaters, at the Royal Court Theater in London.
It was a relatively successful career for a playwright.
So what was his thinking before writing “Stereophonic”?
– Ironically, I was sort of planning
to quit plays altogether.
I had a very bad collaboration,
actually a really torturous collaboration.
I made no money from the production
and I was so beaten up.
I thought, “I’m not gonna do this anymore.”
– What was that, if you don’t mind me asking?
– That was a play that went sideways.
I’m not gonna talk about too much,
but it was a play about the composer, Oskar Levant.
So it was another play about music,
but a very different kind of play.
– And the producers were regular, standard,
Broadway commercial producers who liked your stuff?
– Yes, but they came with an actor attached.
We talked a little bit and I came up with this idea
and thought, “Oh, what about Oskar Levant?”
Then I said, “Okay, I’ll write this play.”
But you know, they had deadlines,
all you have to do by this time and stuff.
It was a little more stringent
because it was a commercial theater apparatus.
– So this was a commercial production
from the outset, correct?
– Yes.
– What kind of house or theater
would it have gone into initially if it had worked out?
– Broadway.
– Straight to Broadway?
– Yeah.
– I mean, that almost never happens, does it?
– When Broadway producers commission you
and there’s a star attached, then yeah, you can do it.
– I see.
So it was really about the star here?
– Yeah.
– Because then you’re guaranteed whatever,
24 weeks of box office.
– Exactly.
– Otherwise, you’re guaranteed like nothing.
– Yeah, exactly.
If there’s no star attached, you’re not gonna do this.
– Okay, so when that fell apart
and you were thinking about quitting the theater,
were you willing to go back to your paralegal career?
– No, I was gonna do TV.
That’s why I moved to LA.
And then they sucked me back in
’cause I got this commission for the Broadway people
and then I got a grant.
It was a three year grant from the Mellon Foundation.
And they said, well, you have to write a play
as part of the grant.
And I thought, okay, well, I’ll do it,
but I’ll do like a one act play.
And I thought that’s what this play was gonna be.
My one act short little throw away play.
– And instead it’s like three hours and 15 minutes.
– It just grew and grew.
– You have no self control, do you?
– No, but you know, as I started researching it,
I realized, oh, I can never leave the theater.
The play became about me wanting to leave the theater
and knowing I couldn’t ever leave it.
Babe, I’m gonna leave you.
– So, Edgeby didn’t quit.
He kept grinding away on Stereophonic
thanks to a free place to live
and a commission from those two nonprofit theaters.
– During COVID, everything just fell apart.
And we went through various iterations
of potential commercial producers,
but then they all fell apart.
And then my agent sent it to all these
nonprofit theaters in New York
and everyone said they didn’t wanna do it.
– Is that because it was tainted
from the falling apart or no?
– I don’t think so.
You know, it’s not a very fashionable play.
It doesn’t have to do with identity politics.
It wasn’t really of the moment at all.
It takes place in 1976.
It doesn’t have a particular agenda.
And so I think they were like,
well, why would we do this?
And it’s expansive and who cares?
– And long.
– Yeah, and it’s long and maybe they didn’t even read it.
I don’t know who knows why.
And I knew Adam Greenfield,
the Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons for decades
because he produced my first play in Seattle a long time ago.
So I said, can we go back to Adam?
We’d gone to him initially like a year or two before
and he said, no, no, I have too many plays backed up
because of COVID.
I can’t think about this.
But when we came back to him, he said, listen,
this is really expensive.
Tell us what you feel you need to produce this properly
’cause this is gonna be a big production.
And my director and I said, this is how I think
we need to do this.
We’re gonna need a soundproof booth
and we’re gonna need a functioning recording studio
where we’re gonna probably need music lessons
for the actors and we’re gonna need more rehearsal time.
And he said, okay, if I can get the money, I will do it.
And a few months later, he called back and said,
okay, I have the money, let’s do it.
– How much was it?
– It definitely cost over a million.
– Wow, for Off-Broadway, that’s a lot.
– Ours is the second most expensive thing they’ve ever done.
And they had to sort of rejigger the season
to accommodate the play.
But that’s how much he believed in it.
– Here again is Tom Pesinka, who would be cast as Peter.
– There are many workshops
and some of our casts had been part of those.
I was not part of any of the workshops.
I just got a cold audition to audition
to play Reg and Grover.
– Reg is the bass player, Grover is the main engineer,
correct?
– Yes, and then I got called into the room for a callback,
an in-person callback for the entire team.
Apparently, I sucked the air out of the room.
This like legendary audition that I can barely remember.
– Meaning you brought something to Peter
that is similar to what Peter is now?
– Yes, when you’re doing it, you don’t know.
And I felt like it was great.
I definitely embraced the connections
between myself and Peter in a way that I don’t know
if I had ever done in an audition.
So I could feel that for sure.
You never know if it’s gonna make an impact
or you never know if like the stone cold faces behind the…
I mean, I do remember David Ajmi nodding furiously.
So I was like, okay, well, maybe that is good.
But other than that, no.
Then I got some messages from my reps being like,
they want you, you were the best actor in the room,
but you need to play guitar way better.
I played sort of garbage guitar
and I had to really up my game.
Then they put me in guitar lessons twice a week
for two months and I had to send them video updates every week.
And then I was down in DC with my girlfriend.
She was doing a show at the studio theater.
I thought it was done.
I thought, you know, they were ready to make a decision.
And then my manager called me and said,
they want one more tape.
And I almost jumped off the balcony in frustration.
And then I went to a guitar center
’cause I didn’t have a guitar with me.
I bought a guitar.
I was gonna return it.
And then I got the part.
That guitar now is in my dressing room
with the Golden Theater.
I think so many actors are like frustrated rock stars.
Like they want to be a rock star.
I knew I did because rock stars have their own character
and you’re adored.
And I think it taps into that thing when you’re little
and you do the first play and you hear that applause
and like you get addicted to it.
In order to have a career,
you have to sort of get past that at some point.
Being in a band and making music
and creating something live every night
is so incredible.
It’s like a mainline into your veins of just like artistry.
It can be also really nerve wracking.
Just like, oh, what if I mess up
or what if I sing the wrong line?
The first month, most of the rehearsal day
was just making the music
and learning how to play the music.
I think the direct results
and I think you see it in the play
is like we know each other as an acting company
so much better than probably any acting company
because we have to rely on each other
and we have to trust each other
that like the songs are gonna sound good.
It’s a build.
♪ I feel it once again ♪
♪ I feel it once again ♪
– Here is Sarah Pigeon again, who plays Diana.
– Off Broadway, the fights were not as equal.
We’re coming up on like nine,
maybe 10 months of knowing each other.
We know each other better
so there’s this sort of push and pull
that feels more reflective of an actual relationship.
There is a certain amount of intimacy and trust
and knowing of each other
that was different from when we started in August.
We were sort of playing at this idea
of like having been in a relationship
with someone for nine years.
Like, well, I haven’t known Thomas Inka for nine years.
– Familiarity goes two ways.
Familiarity is like lovely,
but you can hurt someone more.
– Right, you know how to hurt them.
– You know how to push their buttons.
You know how to like unravel the thread
like Diana says in the play.
I mean, they would never say it,
but like I know Sarah and Juliana were pissed with me
certain times when like I got the harmonies wrong
or like when I was so nervous playing masquerade
that I would like drop out of the song.
Juliana would have to pick up the slack.
We never talked about it,
but like, you know, I get it, I get it.
And same way for me, like when they were getting on me
about the harmonies, I was pissed off,
but like it’s all love, you know?
It’s like, it is.
I mean, it’s so cliche, but it’s like, it is family.
It’s family.
– So at the non-profit off-Broadway theater
Playwrights Horizons, the band was coming together.
During previews of the play, Word of Mouth started to build.
Would stereophonic become one of the rare shows
that make it through the non-profit farm system
and onto Broadway?
Here is David Ajmi again.
– We talked to a bunch of commercial producers,
but it never fully congealed.
Either I was having misgivings or they had misgivings
or they wanted to make changes or whatever.
And then there was another commercial producer
that was at one point attached at Playwrights Horizons,
but then in the middle of the audition process,
that fell apart.
– And then the show opened at Playwrights Horizons
and the reviews were very enthusiastic.
– And then they all started coming.
Like one commercial producer would talk to another
and then they slowly started.
I had no idea how this all worked
’cause I had never done anything commercially before.
I thought it would be like,
the different commercial producers come
and then you interviewed them.
You know, like, why should I let you commercially produces?
But instead it was more like they formed a cartel
and then some got kicked out and some congealed.
And then we met the leader of the cartel.
– The cartel actually had a few leaders.
After the break, we hear from two of them.
I’m Stephen Dubner.
This is Freakonomics Radio.
We’ll be right back.
(upbeat music)
– John Johnson is one of the lead producers on Stereophonic
and he has produced many other shows on and off Broadway
over more than a decade.
Along with his business partner, Sue Wagner,
he is half of Wagner Johnson Productions.
They act as both producer and general manager.
This hybrid business model is common in London
and used to be common on Broadway
but is much less so today.
Let’s start with this.
What does a producer do?
– So the pure producer side is from, you know,
conception of the show,
either commissioning a writer to write a play or musical
or getting the rights to a play or musical to revive
all the way to assembling the creative team around that,
to the raising of the money,
to the marketing of the show, to securing a building.
That is the job of the producer.
If each Broadway show and each off Broadway show
is essentially an individual small business,
they are the CEO of said small business.
– Okay, and what does the general manager do?
– The GM is the person that does the contracts,
does the budgeting, does the day-to-day operations,
hires the staff surrounding the show.
And the producer is involved in that and advises on that,
again, using the small business kind of analogy,
both the CFO and a COO sort of combination.
– So how did John Johnson become co-CEO, CFO
and COO of Stereophonic?
– Remember, when the show premiered off Broadway
at Playwrights Horizons,
it had no commercial producers attached.
– Sue went the first week of previews
and absolutely lost her mind,
called me and said, you have to go see this play.
– Did you lose your mind too?
– I went after it opened.
So I go after my partner sets the bar a certain level high,
then the reviews come out and the reviews are transcendent
and it sets another level high and I went
and it cleared both those bars.
– What month and year are we talking about now?
– We’re talking November, 2023.
– Okay, so the COVID shutdown was over by now
and business was returning to Broadway,
but the overall numbers were still way down
and costs had risen a ton during COVID.
And from what I understand,
all the theaters were already full, yeah?
– At the time, there were no buildings available on Broadway.
There was another show that was not announced for the Golden,
but everyone kind of knew like,
“Oh, that’s what’s going into the Golden in the spring.”
– The John Golden Theater is one of the smallest on Broadway
with roughly 770 seats.
It is owned by the Schubert organization,
the biggest landlord on Broadway.
Their CEO is named Bob Wankle.
There is a famous old saying about Broadway economics.
You can’t make a living, but you can make a killing.
What’s that mean?
Most people in the theater work very hard
for relatively low pay.
If, however, you are involved in creating a hit,
something that plays for years and lives on
in touring companies, maybe a film, you will make millions,
but that’s rare.
The best way to make a killing is to be a landlord.
The Broadway business is, to a large degree,
a real estate business with a handful of owners
controlling the vast majority of theater space.
– We had gotten the show on the radar
of the Schubert organization.
We had heard there was the potential
of the Golden being available.
And at the time, Bob Wankle had given it to Sonya Friedman,
who’s a legendary producer in London,
as well as in New York.
I was in London and I went to Sonya and I said,
“Are you going to do this other play at the Golden?”
And she said, “I can’t fit it in the Golden.
I need it to go somewhere else.”
And I said, “Well, we want to do it for Stereophonic.”
And she said, “Well, I need to do it with you.”
And at the time, she was opening Stranger Things
on the West End.
She had not been in New York in weeks.
And I said, “Well, you haven’t seen the play yet.”
She said, “I don’t care.
Everyone I know who’s seen has loved it.
I need to be a part of it.”
– That is a first for me.
I have never been involved with a show before
that I pitched myself heavily to produce
that I hadn’t actually seen.
I’d read it, but I was in London when it opened
and I couldn’t get there.
– And by early December, we stood on stage
and told the cast that we were moving it to Broadway.
– What was that like?
– It was incredible.
I mean, for six out of seven of them
to find out they were going to make their Broadway debut
was amazing.
This is a playbook that we’ve run before.
Here’s the hot play of the fall
and we’re gonna take that momentum from the fall,
find a building for it in the spring
and run the awards playbook
as well as the prestige playbook
to have it catch on with a newer and larger audience.
– Tell me a little bit about your investors on this show
and the capitalization of the show on Broadway,
how it compares to other things you’ve done.
– It was demand unlike anything that we’ve seen
post-pandemic in terms of folks wanting to get in.
– Meaning it had to turn people away?
– Yeah, we absolutely to turn people away.
– What was the minimum investment you accepted?
– 25,000.
– I mean, traditionally that’s really small.
Producers didn’t used to do that kind of thing very much,
did they?
– Yeah, and there were some people who wrote
$150,000 checks or more
and then there were others who would bundle $25,000 units
to come up with a larger.
But again, our capitalization
because we were taking the production from playwrights
was capitalized at 4.8 million.
We spent less than that.
You wanna build in a certain amount of reserve
because we didn’t know how I was gonna sell at the beginning.
We were lucky enough to break even
in those first couple of weeks,
but having a little bit of a cover if it had not
was something we wanted to build in.
– Here’s a line from the New York Times review
when it opened on Broadway.
The play is a staggering achievement
and already feels like a must see American classic.
Where were you when you read this?
Who were you with and how did it make you feel?
– I was with Greg Noble and Sonia Friedman
in the press room at our opening night party.
The review came out, we opened it,
we read that first paragraph and we all looked at each other
and said, “Wow.”
– So let me just ask you now several weeks
into this run that is very successful
and looks to be even more successful,
especially if you win a boatload of Tonys.
Do you wish in a perfect world
you would put it into a bigger theater than the Golden?
– No.
– Because why not?
– Because it’s the perfect fit.
It has this way of wrapping its arms around a play
and making it intimate.
As with all shows, plays and musicals,
finding the right fit of building
and sometimes you don’t get a choice,
but this is where the timing worked out in this way
because it could have easily been,
“Oh, well, we don’t have the Golden or the Booth available,
“but we have this 1,100 seat theater available
“with a second balcony.”
And I don’t know necessarily
if it would have had the same reaction.
– On Broadway, as elsewhere,
awards drive ticket sales
and Stereophonic is nominated for 13 Tony Awards.
It can’t possibly win that many
since some categories contain multiple Stereophonic nominees.
Tom Pesinka, for instance,
is nominated for Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Play
along with two other male actors in Stereophonic.
Will Brill, who plays Reg, the band’s bassist,
and Eli Gelb, who plays the recording engineer Grover.
I asked Pesinka what it’s like
to compete in the same category against his castmates.
– It’s awesome.
I’m like a super competitive person
and super ambitious person.
That’s why I think I can play Peter
’cause I definitely have had many years of therapy
that have brought me to this place,
but deep down in my heart, I just wanna win.
The morning of the nominations,
I got a text from Will Brill that said, “Man you.”
And that’s how I found out.
– Man you, like the football club?
– No, like it’s you, man.
– Oh, I see, okay.
– Yeah, and then I called him and then I called Eli
because like so many shows are like it’s an ensemble piece
but like our show really is.
If someone is not at their best every night,
the show can so easily fall apart.
Everyone is so dedicated.
It’s funny that like I auditioned for those two roles
and I know for a fact why I didn’t get those roles
because those guys are perfect
and I’m perfect for mine.
– Would I like to win a Tony for sure?
And I keep joking that I’m gonna like
break their legs or whatever.
But ultimately like, God, this is my Broadway debut
in this play with this part and I got a Tony nomination.
All right, whatever.
– You’re saying like whatever,
like you don’t even need to win it, you’re saying?
– No, no, no, I want to win it.
I’m telling you, I wanna win it.
But if I don’t win it, it’s like, again, it’s cake.
– Okay, so Tom, you are 36 years old.
You’ve been at this for a while.
This is your first time on Broadway
and you find yourself in the kind of hit
that happens quite rarely.
Are you worried about, you know, what comes after?
– I’m not worried, I’m more excited.
And I don’t even think I know how much
it’s opened the door to certain things.
The morning of the Tony nominations,
I was sitting with my girlfriend and I was like,
okay, like a certain era of struggle for me is over.
And that feels liberating.
It was like a good 10 years of eating crap.
I’m not worried about the next job
in the same way that I was.
– How struggling was the struggle?
– It feels worse than it was.
I’d been working pretty consistently.
I’m very ambitious and like I wanna do the big stuff.
My therapist said after I called her on Tony morning,
she was like, did you think this would happen?
I said, no.
And then she was like, yeah, you did.
Like, you were confused for so many years
as to like, you knew that you were great
and you knew that inside of you,
you had something to offer,
but like people weren’t recognizing it.
And so that frustration, I think,
was more of the struggle than like getting a job.
– Sarah Pigeon is also nominated for a Tony Award
in the same category as her castmate, Juliana Canfield.
I asked Pigeon what it’s like to compete
against her onstage bandmate and real life friend.
– I’m just really excited to see everybody dressed up.
It’s like theater prom.
I sort of feel like we’ve all just won already.
I remember taking the stage combat class
and like, it doesn’t matter how good you are
at doing a fake punch.
If your partner doesn’t sell it,
it’s like we’ve created this sort of spire web
to hold each other up and support this piece
that we all believe in so much.
And theater people are amazing
because they spend like hours every single day
in dark theaters playing make-believe.
Figuring out how to make most sense and be so magical
and be thrilling and exciting and true.
– Are you a little surprised
at this relatively late stage in our civilization
with so many modes of performing and entertaining,
most of which are, you know,
electronic or digital in some way now.
Are you surprised that this old fashioned,
hand-made theatrical thing still exists
as intensely as it does?
– I think that, you know, people like something real.
It’s like a home-cooked meal.
Sure, you can go and get, you know,
penne pasta with vodka sauce in the freezer section,
the Ralph’s, but like,
if somebody makes you homemade penne pasta,
it’s gonna taste better and you’re gonna wanna eat it.
And then also with theater,
and in particular with this show,
it all happens in front of you
if this were to be a movie one day.
I would be curious to see how do they make,
I think what’s so thrilling about this
is that you see it all happen in real time
and the music’s all live and you see the mess-ups
watching someone do like a high-wire act of theater.
They walk on stage and there’s nothing but the set
and their body and their scene partner.
And you can’t call cut and you can’t do it over
is what’s so thrilling.
It’s like one of the oldest art forms in the world,
just storytelling.
And I think there’s a reason that it’s lasted so long.
I don’t think people go to see a robot theater performance
maybe once, but I feel like it’ll close
like six weeks after opening.
– And I went back to David Ajmi, the playwright.
Without him, none of this other stuff exists.
I asked Ajmi if he wins the Tony for best play,
what kind of speech she would give.
– Or they just told me about this the other day.
My publicist said I had to do it.
– You hadn’t thought about it
until your publicist told you?
– No, because I’ve never done anything like this before.
I don’t usually get these kind of prizes
where you sit in the audience
and then they call your name or they don’t call it.
– Let’s assume that you’re drafting
the beginning of an idea right now
for your Tony acceptance speech, should you win.
And maybe that’s terrible luck to even think about it,
but if you’re willing to engage, what do you wanna say?
– Well, Sue said, our producer said something like,
I mean, we were talking about this the other day
and I was like, Sue, let’s not have this conversation.
But she said, you should not thank a lot of people.
You should more say some personal thing.
I can extemporize without going too crazy.
So maybe I would extemporize on stage
and just say what was inside of me.
That’s what I like seeing.
I wanna see someone talk about something
that’s real to them in the moment.
I mean, in the theater, everyone struggles so hard
to get to where they are.
It’s such a hard job.
It’s a really weird job.
– And there’s just something so moving
about theater artists getting together
and celebrating each other,
not in the spirit of competition,
but just like, look at us.
Like we’re all doing this
and somehow we’re surviving.
How are we doing it?
So that’s sort of maybe the spirit of which,
if I’m lucky enough to be up there,
I would say something like that.
– That was pretty good to see.
I told you I could do it.
♪ I’m gonna see you when I get there ♪
♪ I’ll see you when I get there ♪
– The Tony Awards are on Sunday, June 16th.
How many will Stereophonic win?
We’ll let you know next week on part two.
Also, what will the success of Stereophonic mean
for the future of an industry that’s been dying forever?
– I think the reason why,
especially a lot of young people
are coming to the theater in 2024 is that we forget
because I think we have collective PTSD,
but we were locked in our houses for three and a half years.
And I think people want to be around each other.
That’s next time on the show.
Until then, take care of yourself.
And if you can, someone else too.
(upbeat music)
Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
You can find our entire archive on any podcast app
also at freakonomics.com,
where we publish transcripts and show notes.
This episode was produced by Alina Coleman.
Our staff also includes Augusta Chapman,
Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne,
Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen,
Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Julie Kanfer,
Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy,
Neil Coruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas,
Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski.
Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by The Hitchhikers.
Our composer is Luis Guerra.
Additional music in this episode by Will Butler,
Justin Craig, and the cast of Stereophonic.
As always, thanks for listening.
– Oh, thanks, you gave me some tissues.
(blows raspberry)
– Mm, glad we got that on tape, though.
(laughs)
– I hope you can cut that out.
(upbeat music)
– The Freakonomics Radio Network,
the hidden side of everything.
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Stitcher.
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you
Hit by Covid, runaway costs, and a zillion streams of competition, serious theater is in serious trouble. A new hit play called Stereophonic — the most Tony-nominated play in history — has something to say about that. We speak with the people who make it happen every night. (Part one of a two-part series.)
- SOURCES:
- David Adjmi, author and playwright.
- Sonia Friedman, theater producer and founder of Sonia Friedman Productions.
- John Johnson, theater producer and co-founder of Wagner Johnson Productions.
- Tom Pecinka, actor.
- Sarah Pidgeon, actor.
- RESOURCES:
- Stereophonic, by David Adjmi, Will Butler, and Daniel Aukin (2023).
- Lot Six: A Memoir, by David Adjmi (2020).
- “On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems,” by W. J. Baumol and W. G. Bowen (The American Economic Review, 1965).
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