The Cast of Broadway Hit ‘Stereophonic’ Are Having the Ride of Their Lives

The new play Stereophonic, writer David Adjmi’s talky, three-hour drama about a Fleetwood Mac–esque band recording a Rumours-esque album in the mid-1970s, is one of the breakout hits of the Broadway season. After an extended run off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, the show, directed by Daniel Aukin, transferred to the Golden Theatre on its way to 13 Tony nominations, more than any other play in history. That tally is so high partly because Stereophonic is the rare play to snag nominations for its music, songs written by former Arcade Fire member Will Butler that we hear—one in full, the others in snippets—as the band grinds away at making what is likely going to be a seismic album.

Stereophonic’s awards success is also due to its electric performers, most of whom are making their Broadway debut—and five of whom are nominated in the featured-actor categories. Sarah Pidgeon (nominated) plays talented but insecure lead singer and tambourinist Diana. Tom Pecinka (nominated) is her difficult and demanding partner in life and music, Peter. Juliana Canfield (nominated) is wise and sensitive British vocalist-keyboardist Holly; Chris Stack is lovable drummer Simon; Will Brill (nominated) is sozzled bassist Reg. In the studio’s control room are engineers Grover (Eli Gelb, nominated) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler).

The cast members work in mesmerizing harmony, staging something of disarming naturalism and, ultimately, deep resonance. Wanting to see how this group of actors, this merry band, function together in real life, Vanity Fair recently sat down with the ensemble to discuss their singular show, how they approached it in its early stages, and how it’s evolved in its transition to the big stage of Broadway.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Vanity Fair: This show incorporates so much intricate dialogue and music. It’s a real feat. How did you rehearse it?

Sarah Pidgeon: The first three or four weeks, it was four hours of band rehearsal. We got really solid on the music at a certain point, and then it’s just continuing to work together as a band.

Tom Pecinka: Were we solid?

Pidgeon: Yeah, yeah, you’re right, you’re right. I think I’m overselling this.

Peckina: I think we thought we knew what we were doing.

Pidgeon: You should have heard us in August. What was so helpful to this process was that the music was baked into the scenes—

Chris Stack: Diegetic.

Pidgeon: Yes, diegetic sound. That acting process, apart from learning the music, was very much married to the songs we were playing. Once we got our heads around the songs, it was quite typical as to any other scene work process. And then once we got tech, that was a whole different element.

Juliana Canfield: In a weird way, having the music took my mind off the enormity of the play that we had to get under our belts. It helped me put the project in balance or perspective. This play, without the music, feels like a very tall, tough mountain to climb. In a strange way, the music defused some of the worries I had about doing the script the justice.

Some of you had previous experience with the instruments you have to play in the show, right?

Canfield: I took [piano] lessons until I was in the sixth grade. In my memory of it, I played until I was 18, which is what I told the creative team when they asked me about my experience. I very confidently told them I played until I was 18. And then I was telling my mom about the audition and she corrected me.

Pecinka: I always say I played “garbage guitar,” like chord-y. I’ve always been a singer, and I got tired of looking up YouTube karaoke videos to sing along with in my house. So I learned chords on guitar and plateaued very quickly. In my house, that’s fine. But once I got into callbacks, they put me in guitar lessons twice a week.

Will Brill: I workshopped this play back in 2016, and after the second workshop I did, Daniel Aukin called me and asked me if I wanted to keep doing workshops, knowing I would be replaced eventually with a real bass player. Because he knew that I didn’t play bass. I said, “I can learn.” And then I was not asked to return until 2023. At the reading, Daniel asked if I had been learning, and I told him of course I had been, which was a lie, obviously. I went and had four lessons in a week and a half with a buddy who plays bass, and then went and had a session with Will Butler and trusted that it would work. When I received the offer, it said, “We’re thrilled to offer Will Brill the role of Reg* in Stereophonic.” And then at the bottom of the page, the asterisk said, “Pending music session with Will Butler.”

Stack: I’ve played drums since middle school and was in a phenomenal band in high school.

Pidgeon: What was your band name?

Stack: Vertical Smile. And then I was in another chart-topper in college. And then I just recreationally played with friends here. Similarly to Will, there was an audition for a workshop in 2019, and I hadn’t played in a while. I booked a bunch of time to refamiliarize myself with the kit and to learn the songs. I love playing drums, and the fact that something this good came up and I was kind of caught flat-footed, having not been doing something that I loved for so long, was really ridiculous.

When did it feel like you’d really nailed the music?

Brill: I feel like I’m still hitting moments where I’m like, Oh, now the music is great. [Music director] Justin Craig came to yesterday’s matinee and came back at intermission and said, “That’s the best you guys have ever played ‘Seven Roads.’ That’s the best it has ever been.” And I feel that. When we are really syncing, it’s a really intense feeling.

Pecinka: I think, especially with “Masquerade,” I needed to step away from the play and be in my house and play it over and over again. There’s a lot of anxiety, playing music live in front of an audience for the first time. That’s a whole thing you have to learn about.

Brill: There’s a layer that is really fun: the ability to be your character playing music as opposed to being yourself playing music. For me, “Drive” is by far the most difficult moment in the show, because I’m wasted and playing the most difficult bass line in the show. That’s a really satisfying layer.

When you were putting the show together, was the Fleetwood Mac of it all ever part of the conversation?

Brill: It was fully not. I think it was pointedly not.

Pecinka: I’ll go to the stage door, and someone will say, “You did a great Lindsey Buckingham.” And I’m like, I don’t know what he talks like. I did watch some in the studio of them working, but that was more to see a band working in the ’70s in the studio. The biggest touchstone for me was the Beatles documentary.

Stack: I brought it up on a phone call, and David said, “I’m agnostic.” A part of the beauty of the parallels that people pick up is that the largeness of the band and the task before them registers with everybody, because everybody knows those people, even though this isn’t them. People are like, “This is that kind of band.” But this is not a biopic; this is not a Behind the Music.

Brill: Well, it is, but it’s a Behind the Music of David. It’s like a memoir of David Adjmi, like all of us are a different part of his brain and his life story. The story is really about David.

Stack: I mean, it’s barely even about a band.

The dialogue in the play is so natural. I’d imagine it’s a lot of effort to seem that effortless?

Canfield: Every inch of it is scored. I love it. It feels like having a corset, in that I feel so supported by the structure of the play. I feel like I can spread out and imaginatively expand within a container that’s very physically and sonically precise.

Andrew R. Butler: It’s amazingly rigorous, what everyone is doing in the show. What’s really hard is pairing the rigor with relaxation. It’s threading a needle—the harder you try to do it, the harder it gets. It took a lot of repetition. A lot of sitting with Daniel and David and getting it into our bones. You know, it’s a lot like playing an instrument, in that your body really has to learn it and then eventually you hit that place where you’re not thinking about it, where you’re just doing it and can be inside of it.

Brill: It’s like the Matrix, right? Watching the bullets go by. But something that was said a lot in the rehearsal studio was, this is not realism. This is heightened. This extreme realism, a thing that is off—it’s something faster.

With everyone so carefully calibrated, how much fluctuation is there between any given performances?

Pidgeon: It changes a lot depending on the audience. Depending on how vocal they are, they can feel like the eighth cast member. Also, considering all the technical elements in this show, things have gone wrong multiple times.

What kind of things have gone wrong?

Pidgeon: Drums have broken down, things have fallen apart, instruments haven’t been plugged in, a backing track hasn’t come on.

Brill: The lights went out on the piano.

Pidgeon: So they actually did go out on stage?

Eli Gelb: They fully faded down!

Brill: And then one spotlight was on.

Gelb: It was really trippy.

Stack: Like Tinkerbell flew around. When things go wildly wrong, it’s something that nobody notices because [the play] is about the difficulty of creation. When the drums fall apart, yeah, that’s a difficulty of creation.

You’ve all been doing the show for a while now. Do you feel comfortable doing it at this point, despite some of you balancing accents, instruments, singing, and acting?

Canfield: In the fall, even with the extreme luxury of seven weeks of rehearsal, building the show felt like an impossible, abstract task. We didn’t know what it was going to look like, what the shape was going to be. There were all of these elements, and it felt like juggling 300 balls in the air and spinning some plates and riding a unicycle. But now all the pieces are baked into my understanding of the show and how I move through it.

Pidgeon: I’m still understanding it every night. Sometimes I say a line and I’m like, Oh my God, that’s how I’m supposed to say that line. I’ve been saying it wrong how many times?

Gelb: There’s just so much curiosity that this cast comes to the table with. You have to have confidence in yourself at all times to be not married to what your original understanding was. From moment to moment, your partner can show you a new meaning of the scene, and then you feel comfortable stepping into the unknown with that scene, with your partner.

Brill: This is the longest run that many of us have done of a play. What is cool about that is that there is a sweet spot where you know it so well that you start feeling like you’re back in rehearsal and there just happens to be 800 more people there. The thing is really living. I’m experiencing that a lot at the Golden. We’re in the thing right now; it’s starting to really crackle and change.

What has the shift to Broadway meant? Are the audiences noticeably different?

Canfield: The audience definitely feels bigger. I can feel it in a couple moments. I can feel it in the humor of the play. The laughs are louder and longer. And then I also feel it in some of the moments of quiet. I didn’t think that this would happen, but multiplying the silence by four really has an impact. Feeling that room in pregnant pause with us onstage has a weight to it that I didn’t really expect.

Pecinka: What I like about playing it at the Golden is that it’s still an intimate house, but I don’t really see the audience.

Pidgeon: I noticed them so much more at Playwrights.

Brill: Every person in the house at Playwrights! And you can’t see 90% of them at the Golden.

Pecinka: I sort of love that, because it is such an insular experience, performing this play. To believe that I’m alone with Diana in the studio at night just makes me feel safer. I never feel like I’m performing for them. Daniel always says, “Have, like, 3% hostility toward the audience.” Sometimes, playing Peter, I have to have upwards of 75%, because sometimes they have so much hostility toward me. That’s a navigation that is a lot easier on Broadway, in a bigger house. Because I can just decide to be like, “You’re at my party, I’m not at yours.”

Gelb: There are a lot of moments in the play that are just incredible musical experiences. When they slow down the song “Bright,” it’s such an incredible moment. And the audience always wants to clap, and most of the time they do. It’s a moment that fully warrants applause. And yet, dramatically, that moment sings best if it’s silent. There’s only so much we can do if the audience wants to clap.

Brill: Sometimes you try to cut them off and they will not be silenced.

There’s a real poignancy at the end of the show, something existential in what it’s saying about art and the difficulty of making things. How do you think doing the show has changed your outlook on your own creativity?

Stack: It makes you want to pick your projects very carefully, because what could follow this? When things work, it’s so beautiful that it makes it difficult to imagine doing anything else. To do another play after this? What fucking play am I gonna do?

Brill: This is far and away, hands down the most emotionally difficult play I’ve ever worked on. There are parts of me that are asking the same question that a lot of these characters ask. “Is this worth it? This is so hard. Is it actually worth it to make art?” Eventually, you have to be like, You will never know until you start working on it. By the time you start working on it, it’s a part of you and you have to see it through. Which I don’t see myself giving up on. I don’t think any of us could if we wanted to.