Interview: Meet the Seven Breakout Stars of Stereophonic on Broadway

Want to see lighting in a bottle? Go to the Golden Theatre, where David Adjmi’s sprawling drama Stereophonic has taken up residence after a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons. Epic in length (three hours and 15 minutes) and scope (it follows a year in the life of a rock band as they record their new album), Stereophonic is one of those plays that people have been talking about for months, thanks to its infectious music (provided by Will Butler of Arcade Fire) and tight seven-member ensemble.

All but one actor in Daniel Aukin’s production are making their Broadway debuts. That’s Will Brill, last seen in Daniel Fish’s sexy Oklahoma! as Ali Hakim. The six others — Andrew R. Butler, Juliana Canfield, Eli Gelb, Tom Pecinka, Sarah Pidgeon, and Chris Stack — have long stage and screen resumes, but this is their first time on the main stem. That they’re doing it in this play, which they all recognize is special, is icing on the cake.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tell me your first reactions when you read Stereophonic.
Chris Stack (Simon): I wish I could say it was an offer and I just had to say yes, but I told David [Adjmi] that I had this kind of desperate glee. I wanted to do it so badly. I identified with Simon so deeply on so many levels that if I didn’t get it, I would probably not only not be able to come see it, but I would probably have to get a job out of town. I auditioned and it took a couple of months to hear anything back, so I was on pins and needles.

I’m glad it worked out.
Chris: Yeah, me too. You don’t even know the half of it.

Sarah Pidgeon (Diana): It was just one of those projects that you don’t really stop thinking about. It’s so exciting, just the thought of getting the chance to put it on its feet and cure it outside of your own brain and heart. I’m so grateful that it came my way.

Will Brill (Reg): I read this play for the first time with Andrew [R. Butler] in early 2016. I was also unattached from it at some point when it became clear to the creatives that I didn’t play bass. I was so enamored of the play and wanted so badly to be seen for it again that I went and bought a bass intending to learn the riffs, and then return the bass to Guitar Center, and then the world shut down so I couldn’t. But yeah, it was a long, long obsession after the first time reading it.

Andrew R. Butler (Charlie): On the page, the way that David use line breaks in his writing gives the text an almost sort of poetic-looking layout, but also knowing that it is hyper-realism, is a really interesting tension. Knowing that it’s two spaces, and it’s a band, and understanding that this has to be a functioning recording studio on stage, the first time that I read it, I was like “Wow, I’m obsessed with this. This is so cool.” It’s so what I’m interested in as an artist, how songs can be a form of character development and storytelling within a narrative. But the production demands are so massive. I was like “This is such a fun workshop. Too bad nobody will ever produce this thing.”

Will: I remember, back in the day, being like “They’re actually going to write music for this? That would be such a bad idea. The show functions so perfectly, how could the music do anything but disappoint?” And then the music came in so amazing.

Eli Gelb (Grover): There’s so much thematic resonance between the lyrics and music Will [Butler] wrote, and the play which David wrote, and they work closely together. Even the way the music functions in certain scenes. When there’s a line “Oh, it sounds like a polka,” Will has made the baseline sound like a polka. The degree of their collaboration is so clear. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. And the music is also incredibly listenable and timeless, but also of the 1970s.

What were your individual skillsets when you came into this project? For instance, Eli, Andrew, did you know how to man a sound board going in?
Eli: I definitely had to learn the logic behind those various operations, and how to at least look like we’re doing the job. But it would be impossible for us to learn about it to the degree that these guys learned to play the actual music. They’re doing the thing, and we’re pretending to do the thing.

Andrew: I’m not an engineer, but I play one on Broadway. These guys can really go play a concert.

I was going to say, besides Will, who has experience actually playing their instruments in real life?
Juliana Canfield [Holly]: I took piano lessons until the sixth grade and I was very reluctant to go back. I think that was a sticking point for me. I really dragged my feet on revealing my level of musical experience. I thought if they knew how little I played or sung, I won’t get the part. I had never played in front of anybody other than my piano teacher my whole life until we got into the rehearsal room. It gave stage fright a whole new meaning.

Tom Pecinka [Peter]: I played basic guitar for about five years. I’d been a singer my whole life and I got tired of looking on YouTube for karaoke to sing in my apartment, so I learned 12-15 chords and plateaued very quickly. They put me in guitar lessons twice a week and that continued all the way through rehearsals at Playwrights, and then I picked up the lessons about a month before we started this. But I hadn’t played like I play in the show.

Chris: Tell him about the asshole teacher.

Tom: Oh, yeah. When they sent me the riff for “Masquerade,” I had never played a riff on the guitar in my life and I almost said I can’t do it. It was just a video of the riff and there were no tabs, nothing. I called my brother who played the guitar and I was like “Could you tab this out?” And he was like “no, but my friend can.” And his friend gave me what I found out to be a terrible tab. I live in Connecticut, so I went to this random guitar store and met with this dude and paid for a lesson, and he was like “You won’t be able to do this.” But I’m a person who, if someone tells me I can’t do something, I try to prove it wrong.

Was the chemistry there right away?
Sarah: What we were able to accomplish at Playwrights was so incredible. It was a feat in and of itself to get the play on its feet. But coming back to it, and we’ve talked about this a lot, plays at this idea of friendship and relationships and having time away. Coming back, there is trust and inherent intimacy between these relationships because we know each other. We’re not strangers playing at the idea of closeness. The closeness is there. 

Tom: If anything is elevated from off-Broadway to Broadway, it’s trust and familiarity. You have to believe these people have played Madison Square Garden together and live in a house together. The beautiful thing about this version, for me, is that it’s much more believable inside of it.

Juliana: The understudies were in all the rehearsals for this iteration of the play, and there was a time during lunch where I pulled a piece of lint off Will’s beard, and [understudy] Ben Anderson was like “That’s the fifth time I’ve seen one of you go up to someone else and tuck in a tag or fix someone’s hair.” The intimacy is so authentic at this point.

Will: I don’t usually have lint or food in my beard, but if I do, it’s just yummies for later.

Obviously, there are allusions to Fleetwood Mac and other bands in the script. What kind of research did you do? Were there specific people you modeled your performances on?
Will: I won’t speak for everyone, but I felt like I had too much to swim through just figuring out who Reg was than to have to put him in history or align him with other artists of the time. I was like “Fuck that. I truly just have to figure out who this weirdo is.”

Tom: I looked at so many people just to be like “I’m playing a rock star in the seventies. What was that like?” I watched a lot of documentaries and live footage. I wanted to make sure my voice didn’t sound contemporary. I wanted it to sound like me, but Peter. Billy Joel was a huge one for me, because that was the music I grew up listening to, so that was a jumping off point vocally, even though I don’t think Peter sounds like him at all.

Juliana: I will say, there were two things that Will Butler brought in that I found really helpful in terms of being a band. The other week, he played the Joy Division song “Atmosphere” and he was like “Think about this when you’re playing this moment in a song.” Another was a video of Arcade Fire playing Coachella and these rock stars losing their minds doing the most insane things in front of a crowd. Seeing Will, knowing Will, and then seeing a video of him climbing the scaffolding with his guitar in front of a rabid crowd was so helpful.

Eli: They are still human beings, with all the flaws and hardships that come along with that. The circumstances can be different when you have a lot of money or power or fame, but one of the things in the play that is so beautiful is that it really gets the humanity and existential experience, which is not specific to rock stars. It’s an interesting frame for a universal story.