ELYSA GARDNER: Welcome to Stage Door Sessions by Broadway Direct. In this podcast, we have in-depth conversations with Broadway’s brightest, bringing you what’s new, what’s noteworthy, and what’s coming next to a stage near you. I’m your host, Elysa Gardner, and this spring, we will be speaking with some of the artists whose talents are standing out at a very busy time in a very busy Broadway season. But before our conversation with each week’s guest this season we will be kicking off every episode with a look at what’s new on Broadway each week with Broadway Direct’s own Paul Art Smith who is here with me today, hi Paul, how are you?
PAUL ART SMITH: Hi, doing well, I’m trying to stay cool because it’s finally, you know, really heating up in New York. I feel like it went from zero to a hundred. Not in degrees, but, you know.
ELYSA GARDNER: Oh yeah, summer is here and it was a hot news week as well. Lot of stuff going on.
PAUL ART SMITH: Yeah, I thought we’d get some bad news out of the way. Closing announcements are never easy to make and this week unfortunately there was another one. Bad Cinderella will close on Broadway June 4 at the Imperial Theatre. This is the new musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber and it will shutter after 33 preview performances and 85 regular performances. With this closing and with the recent closing of Phantom of the Opera, this will mark the end of an era, in a sense, this will be the first time since 1979 without an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical running on Broadway. So, after June 4, that historic streak ends.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, 43 years it said in Variety, and as you mentioned he’s had shows on that have been hits, well pre-dating that of course with Joseph and Jesus Christ Superstar, but there was Evita, CATS, Starlight Express, School of Rock, Sunset Boulevard. It’s going to be strange to have a Broadway without Andrew Lloyd Webber, however, mixed feelings about some of his shows. Certainly, it’s been a rough, rough year for him, from a personal standpoint, and with two shows closing on Broadway, I’m certainly wishing him the best right now and I’m sure he’ll be pulling something out of his hat at some point, he never seems to stop writing.
PAUL ART SMITH: Yeah, I’m sure he won’t be gone for long. There’ll probably be a revival or something of one of his works back, but yeah also, these closing announcements are never easy and sending love to that cast. Just want to also shout out Carolee Carmello and Grace McLean who are definitely two standouts in that show and we had them on an episode of Stage Door Sessions just very recently so go ahead and give that conversation a listen. But yeah, definitely two standouts of that show.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, yeah, definitely. They were great on the podcast and they are great in the show and will be I guess for another few weeks.
PAUL ART SMITH: Yeah, and we’ll always be looking for their next project. Moving on to some happier news, get ready Succession fans because Kendall Roy himself is heading to Broadway. I’m talking, of course, about actor Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy on the Emmy Award-winning series. He will return to Broadway early next year in the classic play An Enemy of the People. This new Broadway production will be directed by Sam Gold, and feature a new adaptation by Amy Herzog, who’s currently represented on Broadway in A Doll’s House, with that being a new adaptation by her as well.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, yeah this is cool because I love Ibsen and I love Succession.
PAUL ART SMITH: Yeah, me too.
ELYSA GARDNER: I’m obsessed with that show, I was saying to my husband last Sunday night, What are we going to do after there’s only two more episodes. It can’t end these people are part of my life now. And he’s wonderful on the show and he’s gotten a lot of press, not just for being wonderful on the show, but also because he had this very intense approach to acting. You know, I believe he worked with Daniel Day-Lewis maybe as an assistant and has a kind of method-like approach which will be interesting to see how he brings this to this role. He’s playing Dr. Thomas Stockmann who I guess you could draw some parallels with Kendall. Stockmann doesn’t take his family’s money so that’s a big difference –
PAUL ART SMITH: Big difference.
ELYSA GARDNER: But it’s definitely a role that requires a lot of intensity and it’ll be a great thing to see him on Broadway, I think for the first time since he made his debut which was 2008 in a production of A Man for All Seasons. So this’ll be great.
PAUL ART SMITH: Yeah, it’ll be great to have him back on stage. I mean, yeah, that was so long ago now and he had such acclaim since, you know, particularly for Succession and yeah that intensity you mentioned, that’s just going to serve a Broadway audience well. I think it’s going to be quite the experience. Yeah, it’ll be great to have him on stage. I mean we have Arian on Broadway now, he’s in A Doll’s House, his character’s name is escaping me on Succession, but he was also Tony-nominated this year and we actually got a chance to speak with him at the Meet the Nominees ceremony and we asked him about which Succession character he’d like to see take on Broadway in the show and he suggested that Cousin Greg do Noises Off on Broadway, so maybe that’ll be in a spin-off series from Succession, Cousin Greg taking on Broadway.
ELYSA GARDNER: The whole cast has to come to Broadway. I mean J. Smith Cameron who is a great theatre actress, Sarah Snook has to come to Broadway, just to bring them all! Such great actors.
PAUL ART SMITH: And now in cast recording news, of which there was a lot of cast recording news this week, KPOP officially released its original Broadway cast recording so if you missed that in its short run in the fall, you can go ahead and give that a listen, it’s a Tony-nominated score, it’s definitely worth, you know, streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, wherever you get your songs. And also released this week was a first listen to the Sweeney Todd cast recording with the opening number now available to stream. So you can get a little taste of what Josh Groban in that titular role. And lastly, New York, New York announced a cast recording is on the way, officially dropping next month so lots of new music to check out or anticipate adding to your music library so keep an eye out for all of those.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yes, and I’m sure it’s absolutely no coincidence that these are all being released right ahead of the Tony Awards [laughter], but it’s great. Listen, any excuse because these are all – you know, there’s some beautiful singing in all of these shows. KPOP was a lot of fun, I enjoyed the score and the dancing, I mean I’ll miss the dancing and all the showmanship, I guess you can close your eyes and imagine it.
PAUL ART SMITH: Yeah. Yeah, I’m happy that that score is getting recognized in this awards season. And this week on Broadway Direct, we have a new piece with Platinum recording artist JoJo, who is currently starring as Satine in the Tony Award-winning show Moulin Rouge! The Musical. And, as we are in the midst of Tonys season, stay tuned all month long as we give you exclusive content of this year’s nominees. As always you can head to Broadway Direct for the latest coverage and news on Broadway as well as across all of our social platforms @BroadwayDirect.
ELYSA GARDNER: Well thank you so much, Paul, and moving on to Stage Door Sessions, our guests today are very special from one of my favorite Tony nominees, that is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fat Ham. We have the playwright James Ijames and his director Saheem Ali. Fat Ham is now running at the American Airlines Theatre and here’s our conversation.
James’s plays have been produced by numerous high-profile companies, including Steppenwolf, the National Black Theatre, Simpatico Theatre, Wilma Theatre, and the Public, where Fat Ham had its New York premiere to wide acclaim last year not long after winning the Pulitzer. James has won numerous other honors for his plays, among them the Whiting Award, the Terrence McNally New Play Award and two Steinberg Prizes; he’s also won awards as a director and notice for his work as an educator and he’s a founding member of Orbiter 3, Philadelphia’s first playwright producing collective.
Saheem is associate artistic director and resident director at the Public, where he’s received high praise for his innovative interpretations of Shakespeare. And he’s proven equally resourceful with contemporary playwrights, from Anna Deavere Smith to Jocelyn Bioh and Donja Love, in productions at other leading New York companies like Signature and Atlantic and major regional theaters. And Saheem has his own collection of prestigious honors, including the Shubert and Sir John Gielgud Fellowships.
James, Saheem, welcome to Stage Door Sessions; thanks so much for taking time out to join us today.
SAHEEM ALI: Thanks for having us.
JAMES IJAMES: Thank you for having us.
ELYSA GARDNER: So it seems like a dream marriage, pairing you, Saheem, who’s done such forward-thinking work with Shakespeare, with this work of yours, James—which we should say is very loosely based on Hamlet. The Hamlet figure here is Juicy, who is a Black, queer Southern college student with some very heavy family baggage. The family business involves barbecue, and there are parallels with other Shakespearean characters. So maybe tell us just a bit about the play, and how it brought the two of you together.
JAMES IJAMES: Well, as you said the play’s adapted from Hamlet. I first introduced was introduced to Hamlet in college. I did a student-directed production of it and it just stuck with me. And then maybe about eight years ago I started to like think about working with a Shakespeare to to do an adaptation and Hamlet just kept rising to the surface and I wrote it – I wrote the first draft of it pretty quickly and then sort of workshopped it in a few places and like Saheem is one of the people that I – once a play is ready for people to see it, he’s one of the first people I send the play to. One because he has just such an amazing dramaturgical mind about scripts and how plays work and what is theatrical and what’s interesting to watch and also he just like, I don’t know like, I like talking to him about plays and so it’s always nice to sort of get his perspective. And so when I finished this play I sent it to him almost immediately just to get his thoughts on it. And then around that time there was the lockdown, it wasn’t long after that that the world shut down and that we both were sort of sitting with this play that we really loved at our homes.
ELYSA GARDNER: So I imagine there was a lot of correspondence online.
JAMES IJAMES: Yeah, and text message, we text a lot. [laughter]
SAHEEM ALI: We do, we text very frequently.
ELYSA GARDNER: James, I read an interview you gave last year where you spoke about your motivation and your mission, really. You said that you were very much preoccupied with legacy and inheritance, and that you write about Black people because you want to be a good steward of the stories and culture and history of Black people. For those who haven’t seen the play yet, talk a little bit about how that manifests itself in Fat Ham.
JAMES IJAMES: Well, it’s it is an all-Black cast set in the South, in in my imagining of it it’s set in North Carolina and I don’t shy away from my distinct experience of being Black growing up in North Carolina. It’s very much on full display. The ways of speaking, the way people dress, the way people take care of each other, you know, all of that stuff is is wrapped up in it. And I wanted to make sure that the characters were not stereotypes, that they weren’t sort of grown out of preconceived ideas of what we think Black people in the South are. That they truly were going to constantly be upending what an audience expects from people like this and I think that’s one of the things that makes the play exciting for people is that you don’t really know what’s coming because these characters often don’t behave the way we expect them to behave. They don’t use the language we expect them to use and there was something about that that felt really Shakespearean like the way the characters speak. There’s a music, there’s a heightenedness to it that I also associate with the way that people in my community that I grew up in spoke, the way they told stories, the way they gossiped, the way they prayed. These are all things that always felt very heightened and stylized to me so it felt very natural to bring those qualities to an adaptation of Hamlet.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, now Saheem you grew up in Nairobi and sort of got bitten by the theater bug I’ve I’ve heard on a trip to London seeing Grease of all things, is that right? Grease was your big exposure.
SAHEEM ALI: Yes. [laughter]
ELYSA GARDNER: And then I think Shakespeare in the Park and particularly its Mobile Unit later made a big impression after you became serious about studying theater in terms of getting you thinking about how to make theater more accessible. Fat Ham deals with a very particular time in a particular culture so how did you incorporate those specifics in a play and a production that speaks to everyone?
SAHEEM ALI: Well for me Shakespeare when done in its original textual form has to feel contemporary and fresh and alive. So I found different ways of doing that by putting it in settings that are contemporary, that are relatable, where the costumes and the objects that they use and the environments that they’re in are in our contemporary world. So Twelfth Night I set it in Miami in South Beach because that’s a place that has like music and and is close to Cuba because in my imagining it was, you know, Viola and Sebastian were coming, were like shipwrecked coming on a boat from Cuba to America. And when I set Merry Wives, I set it in Harlem with an African diaspora community there. So they may have spoken Shakespeare’s text but then they were like like it was with a musicality and an ease that is contemporary because for me, that’s exciting. I don’t want to see Shakespeare done in some kind of like old school traditional version, whatever that means, it’s just always for me so much more alive when it feels like it’s in conversation with something that’s more contemporary. So reading Fat Ham was just extraordinary because James already has that on the page it already like intersects the classical with the contemporary and reverence to like the original but also a deep irreverence and an understanding of like theatrical structure and form but also surprising you in terms of what the tone does. So, it’s like the perfect kind of melting pot of like what it what it means to take a piece of theater that feels fresh and alive today that is borrowing elements and characters from something that’s very old.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, yeah. One of the first reviews I read of Fat Ham described it as a tragedy smothered in a comedy and when I saw it at the Public, something that struck me—aside from how funny and imaginative and insightful it is—was that it must have been challenging to cast but also fun to rehearse. That once you got that team who could juggle that comedy, which is, according to a lot of actors I speak with, the hardest thing to do, to do comedy really well. Juggling that with the kind depth that this play requires, you get that right, you can really dig in and have fun and play. Could you talk a bit about that process? I mean, was it a lot of fun?
SAHEEM ALI: It was fun from the moment that I read the play to the moment that the show froze on Broadway I mean it has been nothing but that and it’s for me like I want a challenge, I love a challenge like if there isn’t any challenge inherently built into the storytelling then I’m not interested because I just have to feel like there’s something about the piece that is fresh and unique and doesn’t follow the tenets of something that I’ve seen before or I’ve read before so. And you know the play is full of such life and vitality and there’s joy baked in. So, at every step of the way, finding the actors conversations with James, the design, rehearsals, auditions, it’s been joyful truly from beginning to end.
JAMES IJAMES: Yeah, it’s been a real joy.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah. How much of your own experience James did you draw on for this play?
JAMES IJAMES: I mean plot-wise it is pulling almost exclusively from Hamlet. But I would say that like I borrowed ways of speaking turns of phrase that I grew up hearing. You know there might be a touch of like how you know, when I started to come out and I was much older than Juicy is when I started to come out to my family, they didn’t have the right language to talk about it and so they would say things sometimes and I go, “You shouldn’t say that,” but they always really great about it. They would go like, “Oh right, right right, okay, okay, okay, okay, great. I’m going to be great at this.” And they are fabulous now. But no I came out like after – well, that’s not true I did it in waves. I like came out to an aunt very early and then did it in waves. But yeah, like um, that scene where Tedra is talking to Juicy and she says don’t go crazy. That’s not a thing my mother’s ever said to me. But it’s like a thing I could feel from her like I can see this is hard like I can see you struggling and I just need you to hold it together if you can hold it together, you’re going to be okay. And that’s really how my family held me as I figured that out. You know, I didn’t I didn’t have an experience of a family that sort of mistreated me or you know distanced themselves from me. They would just sort of like okay well let’s figure out how we do this. And so, there’s not much of my family but there’s like little turns of phrases and and how people say things, particularly the way people curse, is very similar to the way that it occurs so. [laughter] Saheem knows this.
ELYSA GARDNER: Have family members seen this and have you gotten any sort of feedback in that way?
JAMES IJAMES: Yeah, well so my family is going to see the live production next week so there’ll be here next week to see it. There was a film version at the Wilma during the pandemic that they all saw so they know and they’ve seen my other play, they know what I do. They’re ready for it. [laughter]
ELYSA GARDNER: Well, that’s right that but there have been so many other or there are several other productions of this show. So but this is the next incarnation, the big, you know, the Broadway incarnation which is great. your first outing here. It would not have been a given speaking of that that a work by a young playwright looking at this family could be produced on Broadway even five or ten years ago. Something I ask artists of color that I have been asking over the past few years is are you encouraged by the increase of representation that we’re seeing over the past couple years particularly or do you ever worry that it could be transitory or even performative?
SAHEEM ALI: Yeah I would I would say um I would say it’s It’s a bit of both, I think. It’s a bit of like an acknowledgment of past transgressions and perhaps like an overcorrection that’s knee jerk and so when that happens things are going to perhaps shift in ways that – in ways that are not always right. But then it’s important that that happens because ultimately like there does need to be a correction because there has been a lack of access for artists of color in ways and there are those of us for whom like it is time and that those of us for whom it’s not yet time and I think none of us wants to be thrust in a moment when we’re not ready, you know, because also like we we need to be ready to meet the moment. So I think ultimately it’s a fantastic thing. It’s opportunity, it’s access, and we deserve to fail as well. We deserve to sometimes have an opportunity that maybe we’re not ready for and we’re like okay well now I know a little bit more than I did before and I’m going to roll up my sleeves and do better next time. So, we deserve those opportunities as well and I think that it is ultimately a thing that is positive and perhaps they’re going to be some some fits and starts along the way, but it’s overdue.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, yeah, and James did you want to expand on that in any way?
JAMES IJAMES: Yeah, I guess I mean, well one I want to appreciate you for calling me young. [laughter] I just really do appreciate that because I’m not really.
ELYSA GARDNER: You are young!
JAMES IJAMES: I’m not that young. [laughter] But yes, I mean like I feel young but I am like I’ve been doing this a really long time so and I think that’s a part of the reason why like I see that I haven’t quite heartened because I think about when I got out of grad school and I put, you know, I’m based in Philadelphia, I’ve spent most of my career in Philly and even in Philly was very very slim pickings for someone like me – I said slim pickings, I can’t believe I just said that on a podcast. [laughter]
ELYSA GARDNER: That’s pretty great.
JAMES IJAMES: Okay, anyway, it’s very narrow choices I had and one of the reasons why I started writing, you know, really sending my work out into the world, I mean I’ve been writing since I was very young, but I could see that there wasn’t someone that was actively trying to write for someone like me. And so that was one of the major reasons why I was like okay well I’m going to see if people respond to this work and so what I’m seeing is like there’s like a whole – my whole generation were all sort of feeling this at that moment and whether you’re a director or an actor or a playwright, whatever you’re doing. And you just started to like shift how you moved through the industry. And I feel like that some of that hard work and that nitty gritty is like coming to fruition now like I do think some of it is performative, I do think that sometimes you know we get to the plate a little before we should. But ultimately like I see so many people who have been like you know in the industry, beating the pavement, trying to figure out, me and Saheem are really great examples of that, like people that are just trying to get someone to say yes to our vision and our dream. And so I look at this moment as like I’ve worked really hard and I get to like breathe a little bit in this moment because I know the thing that we’ve made is like is good and it’s meeting people with a lot of excitement and so I don’t know I look at it a little different because I’ve had many lives in this industry at this point. And so I look at this moment as like yeah I remember when that person was like just starting out or I remember when that person was, you know, really down on themselves about what they do for a living now look at them. You know, I have so many friends that that’s their story and they’re at a really great moment now so some of it feels like you know the end of some hard work on a lot of people’s parts.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, well the show marks your Broadway debut James and I think it’s your second Broadway credit, Saheem, after serving as assistant director to George C. Wolfe on A Free Man of Color some years ago, which is not a bad gig. Broadway Audiences are not a monolith as I was duly reminded by another director recently, but there is never a guarantee that the kind of success Fat Ham had Off-Broadway and in regional productions will translate on Broadway is that something you even think about?
SAHEEM ALI: I think that they will experience something that isn’t a quote-unquote traditional play on Broadway. I think they will be enamored and like sucked into a world that has like vitality and life and joy and I think they’re going to leave like feeling a little pep in their step. So and those are precisely the things that happen at the Public and I think an audience is an audience. So we will get some folks who maybe have never been to the Public and we’ll get some folks who would have gone to the Public if they had been here at the time and I think what we’ve found even in previews is that they are going on the same kind of journey that we had downtown. So the play is reaching and moving folks in a very similar way to what we had before.
JAMES IJAMES: Yeah, I would agree with that I think, and this has also been the experience in previews. It’s felt very similar to that that energy we had down at the Public. So I’m feeling really good about moving into opening again.
ELYSA GARDNER: I’m curious had you had anybody in, either the regional productions or at the Public, who was not familiar with Hamlet? Has anyone brought that up with you or it?
SAHEEM ALI: Oh absolutely, there’ve been plenty of audience members who had either never read Hamlet or never seen Hamlet, we’ve had the whole gamut and that’s the beauty of what James did like he took a story that is in the theater canon but told it in a way that whether you knew Hamlet or not, you were still going to understand who these people were, you were still going to go on the journey, even when they break into Shakespeare text you have enough context to understand what they’re going through and again Shakespeare, it’s poetry but it’s English so there are words there that you will grasp but will understand what you’re going through it really. It really is the sweet spot of experience where if you know Hamlet, you have a great time and if you don’t know a lick of it you will still have a great time.
JAMES IJAMES: Yeah.
ELYSA GARDNER: Yeah, and the writing is so brilliant because you can, you know, the references to Shakespeare in the language are there but they’re not, you know, it’s very much your own language James and the way that is accomplished is one of the great things about the production. I have to ask you both as a way of wrapping up, something kind of silly, but did the critics go overboard on the food metaphors because I have to admit that’s a real weakness of mine as a writer. I did not review this at the Public, but if I had I’m sure I would have had a really hard time restraining myself. Did you get a lot of that between Juicy and the barbecue…
JAMES IJAMES: Yeah, I think I mean I think it’s like a really good – I like it, I think it’s a great shorthand. There’s this great line Tedra says in the play, she says, “Everybody like to eat, baby,” and it’s true [laughter] like you you get people thinking about food they feel home, they feel safe like I was talking to, I was on it in another interview the other day and I was saying that you know food and literature means communion and it means that you’re with people that you can feel safe with that’s why it’s shocking when you like read something like Game of Thrones and you come into contact with like the red wedding, that’s like what you’re not supposed to do that. You’re not supposed to invite people to your house and kill them and so there’s something I think comforting and sort of grounding for people when they they see talk of food or they see people eating. And Juicy is just like I mean come on. It’s right there.
ELYSA GARDNER: It is it is. It’s true, but it it seems it’s It’s nonetheless inventive, I think the whole play is so thank you both so much for joining us and thank you for Fat Ham. It really is a feast, I’m sorry I couldn’t help myself. It truly is, thank you both so much.
JAMES IJAMES: Awesome, thank you.
SAHEEM ALI: Thank you.
ELYSA GARDNER: And for all things Broadway, and to find tickets to your next show, visit BroadwayDirect.com. If you liked our show please follow us on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. And don’t forget to share and rate Stage Door Sessions so that other theater fans can follow us too. This podcast is produced by Broadway Direct and the Nederlander Organization with Iris Chan, Erin Porvaznik-Wagner, and Paul Art Smith, and hosted and produced by me, Elysa Gardner. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to seeing you again on Broadway.
