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[0:00] Mo Brady: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm Mo Brady.

[0:16] Mo Brady: This week, I got to speak to one of my favorite people in the theater industry. Historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper wrote the book on the history of Broadway theaters. In fact, she's written four of them. Her fourth volume of The Untold Stories of Broadway comes out this week. She joined me recently to talk about why choosing a theater is as important as casting your leading lady, to talk through some of her favorite stories from the book, and about how writing a book in a pandemic, when the art form that she's writing about is on pause. Here's our conversation.

[1:13] Mo Brady: Hi, would you introduce yourself and tell us what neighborhood of New York City you're calling from?

[1:20] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Hi, Mo, I'm so happy to talk to you. Jennifer Ashley Tepper here, author of The Untold Stories of Broadway book series calling you from Midtown Manhattan in the middle of the pandemic.

[1:30] Mo Brady: And you are the author of The Untold Stories of Broadway, which has its fourth volume out now.

[1:37] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: My fourth volume. Yeah, it's been so exciting because I actually haven't had a volume come out in five years. So it's been a while.

[1:43] Mo Brady: Were you able to pick up this project then because of the pandemic and we had space for that creativity?

[1:50] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Exactly. You know, it's been one of the silver linings for me in that I always intended there to be six volumes so I could get to all of the Broadway theaters. And after the third volume, we just had a long break because of other projects I was busy with. So as soon as I had a little bit more time starting last year, I started diving back into the stories again and figuring out the fourth volume. So this almost this entire fourth volume was written during quarantine in the pandemic. So I think it's relevant in certain ways to our time because it was what I had on my mind when I was writing it.

[2:17] Mo Brady: Now, one of the ways that I think your work and the Ensemblist allied is that we are very interested in theater history. We love making connections in our art forms past that help us understand its presence. I really think of you like as an excavator or as an archaeologist for the theater. Is that how you identify?

[2:36] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yes, I have the same weird metaphor where I'll be like, oh, I'm spelunking in this cave, but the cave is like, you know, the history of this obscure 1940 musical. Yeah, you know, it's something I thought about a lot with this book, because very sadly, we've lost 13 interviewees since I first started writing this. And I started writing the book in 2013. So having the stories of people who passed away since then has really made me feel like, oh, I'm reminded that these stories and theater itself is passed on from person to person, which is like, obviously, such a big part of what we're missing during this time. And if we don't talk to people, if we don't get their stories, if we don't hear them, and like, you know, spend time with them, those disappear. It's so much been driven home to me during this book. It's more of a legacy project in some ways now because of that, that treasuring things and discovering them while we can.

[3:20] Mo Brady: How do you do that? I mean, you're good at that. But obviously, you must have created a skill set to get great stories out of theater artists. What do you think about when you're sitting down to do an interview with someone?

[3:33] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: To tell you the truth, whenever it's someone who I'm so excited to sit down with, it's like, I'll do all this research, and I'll come up with all these questions. And then I'll think I know everything about this person. I've been a nerd for this person since I was like, 10. And the interviews go best when I throw it out. It's kind of like the audition rule for actors, I guess, where it's like, yes, you should really prepare, but then you should just forget all of it. And I find that the best times that I've had, and the most successful I've been as an interviewer, I don't know if you found this as well, or when I do all the work, but then I really try to forget about it.

[4:03] Mo Brady: Right, you're finding corners in those caves that you weren't expecting to find.

[4:10] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Totally. And just functioning as like the 10-year-old fan or a 13-year-old fan or whatever it is. And just kind of capitalizing on that and forgetting the like, this is going to have to be a book and there's pressure to come up with like the exact right story in this period of time. Yeah, it's very much like an archaeologist with a limited amount of time to find that fossil.

[4:29] Mo Brady: So one great quote in the book is a quote that Thomas Schumacher attributes to Cameron McIntosh, to legends in our industry that you should cast your theater like you cast your leading lady. I never really thought about this. What does that mean to you?

[4:44] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: The intersection of real estate and art is such a huge part of what these books are about. In talking about specific theaters, it's a lot about the shows that are really good fits that might not be a good fit. What makes something a hit? How much of it is the theater? Working as a historian, I've thought so much about, you know, the elements of a theater that contribute to a show's success, whether it's the location of the theater, the shape of the theater, the state of the theater, you know, how many seats are in the orchestra versus the balcony. There's so many things that people might not think about right away that can really intersect with what a show is and what a production is and the production's budget and size.

[5:16] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Really funny that that quote is attributed to Cameron McIntosh because something I think about a lot with him is that Phantom of the Opera almost didn't go into the Majestic. It almost went to the Martin Beck for several reasons, artistic and financial and all of that. And if it had, that's hundreds of millions of dollars less money that that show would have made over the decades that it's been on Broadway because of the theater being smaller. I remember being so blown away by the idea that if a musical opened at the Richard Rogers, it was eight times more likely to win the Tony for Best Musical than if it opened at the Nederlander. There's all these statistics you can pull where you go, oh, the theater is a huge part of the show's success and journey, and sometimes it's out of one's hands and magic gets made, and other times it's something you can pick, and that can also have a huge effect on a show's success.

[6:00] Mo Brady: Now, the overarching story of your books is the history of these theaters told through the artists who have inhabited them. There's so many specific gems, but I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about Eileen Casey. She was a name that I had never come across before, and just time and again, I was struck by her specific stories. Who is she?

[6:22] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Oh my God, I'm so glad you asked about her. I've become so obsessed with her. So first of all, All That Jazz is my favorite movie of all time, and she was a Fosse dancer, and she's in All That Jazz, so I knew her from that. And I was interviewing Michonne Peacock, who's an incredible Broadway legend, and for my books one day, and we were at the Cosmic Diner, and Eileen Casey walked by, and Michonne, who, you know, this was the year 2013, Michonne goes, oh my God, Eileen Casey, I did Seesaw with her. And I truly was like, this is the greatest moment of my life, because they did Seesaw together in 1973. And I was like, oh, I don't know her, and that was kind of how I was like, oh, she, maybe I could get introduced to her, interview her.

Eileen Casey was in like 13 Broadway shows. She was in the original run of Hello Dolly, the original run of Mame. She did Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Pippin, and so many shows. And after she like had a career as a theater dancer, and ensembleist, and actor, she transitioned into being a dresser, and she's been a dresser at Phantom for many years, where I got to interview her about both. There's one story she tells in this book that I love about how she did the Dames at Sea TV special, which happened right before she did the Broadway revival of On the Town with Bernadette Peters and Phyllis Newman. And she brought her TV to the Imperial to try to like watch it, because it was the 70s, and they couldn't just like tape it at home, because the circuits are different, blew out the electricity at the Imperial.

[7:41] Mo Brady: Speaking of the Imperial, one of sort of the legendary ensemble shows of all time, Jerome Robbins Broadway. Now, this is a show because it doesn't get produced very often, if at all, is kind of lost to the ether. But yet it had such an impact on Broadway at the time, and really was a celebration of ensembleists. Can you tell us about that show?

[8:04] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Totally. That show was kind of a unicorn, like nothing else. You know, it had 66 cast members recreating all of Jerome Robbins' legendary direction and choreography under his direction. And thinking about the story in the book that is so funny to me of like James Wooley's, where he talks about how Jerome Robbins wouldn't allow for understudy slips in the playbill, he thought they looked messy. So anytime an understudy went on, per equity rules, they had to put it up in the lobby and then also make a verbal announcement, because you have to do two of the three. And so some nights the verbal announcement would be so long, because the show itself was so incredibly detailed that it would be like, this person's understudying this person in the West Side Story section, but they're understudying this person in the Fiddler section. So it would just go on forever. And so they told Paul Gemignani exactly what the last understudy announcement was, so he could immediately bring the...

[9:16] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: One of the great themes of this book that I found was about understudy rehearsals. You know, so often we think about the show itself. And once you're doing a show, you're only in the space when the show is happening, right? But understudy rehearsals are sort of these special moments where the artist is in the building and interacting with it in a different way. Did you have any memorable stories about understudy rehearsals? Yeah, you know, the understudy rehearsal that Bryn O'Malley talks about doing with Santino Fontana during Sunday in the Park with George is so remarkable because she describes, you know, Sunday in the Park with George is such a special show to so many of us. Like, I think it's just one of those top favorites among theater folks that's so meaningful that the two of them, Santino and Bryn, who are so incredible and have led shows many times and are just like fantastic actors, rehearsed at Studio 54, Sunday in the Park with George and never went on.

And the only people that ever saw it were like the other understudies, the stage management team. And she describes how like they would just sob doing that material and that they were so grateful they just got to do it, even though they never got to do it in front of an audience. And it's just this bittersweet thing about Broadway that so often, you know, understudies never get to go on. I've had both experiences, you know, understudies that have like these incredible debuts and it's so exciting to see them in front of an audience and times where the show closes and that person never goes on. So yeah, that's definitely something that in the books I've tried to give people who have not yet worked on Broadway or who are fascinated by it, but you know, haven't, the idea of like these little things that they might not know about like understudy rehearsals.

[10:44] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: One of the other kind of themes throughout the book from an ensemble's perspective are auditions on Broadway stages. This is something we don't get to do anymore. Talk about the history of auditions happening on Broadway stages and why we don't see that happening. You know, this is a question that almost anytime I talk to an actor or interview them that they're like over a certain age, I'll ask. I'll be like, did you ever have a memorable audition on a Broadway stage? Because chances are pretty much every actor in our community that was working in the 70s or earlier has one. A lot of Broadway auditions used to be on Broadway stages and then because of like union rules, it just got too expensive.

It just kind of the way that auditions happen changed and the amount of auditions that have to happen changed. But I think I've heard from a lot of people that it was really helpful, that it was really good to see how a performer would function on a stage, on the actual stage that the show is happening. There's a few great ones in the book. One is Don Scardino talking about auditioning for Pippin and that he went down to the basement of the Imperial Tea before his audition and ended up peeing next to Bob Fosse with like the trademark cigarette dangling from his mouth. Bob Fosse was like, hey kid, you know, good luck with your audition. I hope it's longer than this pee. And just like, who has a story like that?

Don Scardino is the answer. It's fascinating to put auditions also in the story of the books because it's not just the shows that happen at these theaters. Like a lot of times people have memorable experiences at these theaters that we might not know about because it's not IBDB. It's not the show itself. It was an audition or something like that.

[12:11] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: There's a large chunk of the book that is dedicated to the Fallen Five. Will you tell us what the Fallen Five are? So in each volume of Untold Stories of Broadway, there's all the six or seven Broadway theaters that are currently in existence operation, although not literally right now during the pandemic. And then there's one lost Broadway theater. And it took me until volume four to be ready to tackle the Fallen Five, which are the five Broadway theaters that were demolished to build the Marriott Marquis in 1982. The Morosco, the Bijou, the Helen Hayes, the Astor, and the Gaiety. Those five theaters are so fascinating to me. They have held such a fascinating place in Broadway history because having been knocked down in 1982, you know, I never got to see shows in any of them, but we have so many living theatrical folks who do remember them, who worked in them, who were there at the protests, who like tied themselves to the Morosco while the wrecking ball was around the corner and got arrested.

So those theaters are fascinating to me. And it's also so sad because I love the Marquis. So many people that were around for the demolition of the Fallen Five are like, boo, the Marquis, you know. But I love the Marquis. The Marquis is like Millie. The Marquis is Drowsy Chaperone. Like, you know, it's got a special place. But when you walk by and you kind of can picture in your head the photographs of the five Broadway theaters that were there that are just like vanished, it's very sad. So it was fascinating to really dive into those theaters and to kind of discover things I didn't know about them before. Also, you know, the Morosco, Bijou, and Helen Hayes have people that I could interview that had worked there, that had spent time there.

And the Astor and the Gaiety actually had not. Like, they had become movie theaters. They had not been Broadway theaters since like the early part of the century. So talking about excavating, I looked everywhere for people talking about those theaters and really couldn't find much in existing books. And it's like, if we don't talk to people, again, like stories will just get lost.

[13:50] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: Yeah, you're making sure that the Morosco, the Bijou, and the old Helen Hayes don't have that same fate of not being able to have people that remember stories. Now, they're all different. And they're all different sizes and had sort of different reputations, which I love learning about the book. If you were to explore just one of them, if you only got to go into one of them, Jen Tepper, which one would it be? And why? I love this question. I guess this will probably be unsurprising to anyone that really knows me, but I would pick the Bijou, mostly because it's the one people like kind of trash the most. The Bijou was really small. Like, imagine if we had these small Broadway theaters where we could do little Broadway shows and that could work out financially.

The Bijou was underappreciated. It was like chopped up to give more space to adjoining buildings. People who worked there were like, it was so dirty. I mean, it just, and whereas the Morosco and the Helen Hayes get a lot more of like, oh my God, this magnificent house that was, had acoustics and had the sightlines and the Bijou, I just would love to figure out how to love on it a little bit and explore it in my time machine.

[14:54] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: My last question, because I don't want to go over the whole book, because I want people to buy the book and read the book is, you mentioned in the foreword that the destruction of the Fallen Five to build the Marriott Marquis taught you about how the theater industry responds to a crisis. And here we are, we're in the middle of a crisis. Like, what did you learn from excavating those stories that you think is applicable to our industry right now? If I could go back in history and change it, I would make it so we still had those five Broadway theaters. Just because something has like a silver lining or like a good thing comes from it, it doesn't mean like, oh, I'm glad we went through this pandemic.

Or like, I'm glad that those theaters got demolished. But that said, it was kind of surprising to me when I was writing the chapter about the Fallen Five, to really think about how the protests that the theater community galvanized did not mean that those five theaters didn't get demolished. But what it did mean was that all of the other existing theaters were landmarked, both interior and exterior, that weren't previously. Like, the landmarking, when you look at the timeline of the Broadway theaters, all happened, almost all of it, as a result of these five theaters being demolished. So if those theaters hadn't been demolished, something else would have been. There would be some Broadway theater we know really well today that we don't have.

And that has really made me think about this time and the potential positive things that will come out of such a dark, tragic time for our industry. And who knows? You know, I have hoped that we might end up with like some very helpful hybrid contracts that help artists participate in combination, you know, digital and live event streams. Like, there are so many potential things that I think could be positive that come out of this that I definitely started painting a parallel in my head to the fact that it's like, oh, you know, the Nederlander is landmarked because we lost the Bijou. That kind of thing was not lost on me.

[16:41] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Jennifer Ashley Tepper for sharing her stories with us today. You can purchase all four volumes of The Untold Stories of Broadway wherever you purchase good books. The Ensemblist was produced today by Jackson Klein and me, Mo Brady. Please rate and review The Ensemblist wherever you listen to podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or at bpn.fm, the home of Broadway Podcast Network. Our Patreon members have on-demand access to our archive, including full conversations with our guests and early access to episodes. You can join Katie Braverman, Cat Hicks, and many, many more for between $5 and $20 a month at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Thanks for listening. Until next time.