We celebrated with the “Stereophonic” team after their triumphant and “terrifying” Tony Awards night

The Tony Awards are preparing to broadcast the last award of the evening (Best Musical, awarded to The foreigners), but the champagne is already flowing freely at PJ Clarke’s, across from Lincoln Center, where the ceremony is taking place. The restaurant is organizing a party for Stereophonicthis season’s new animated piece that follows a band from the 70s (it’s definitely not Fleetwood Mac) as they work on a new album while on the cusp of great fame as breakups, hard parties and power struggles threaten to put an end to it all. The show garnered 13 nominations this year, surpassing Slave playThe record for the most nominated play in Tony Awards history. But unlike Slave playwhich didn’t win any statues, they ended up winning five trophies, including best piece.

Will Butler, the former member of Arcade Fire who wrote the play’s original songs, is already ensconced at Clarke’s, raising a martini glass while the cast and crew behind The foreigners takes the stage to accept his award. Butler lost in his categories (Best Score and Best Orchestrations with musical director Justin Craig, respectively) but he’s riding high in the series’ whirlwind final months.

“It was good, then I was tired, then it was weird, then it was good,” he said later that night. “Then I ate a little and now I feel really good.”

The show is the culmination of 11 years of work by him, director Daniel Aukin (who won the best director award) and playwright David Adjmi (winner of the best play trophy). “It was very familiar,” Butler says of the type of “chemistry” that drew him to the team. “Arcade Fire was a very collaborative band. My current group is very collaborative. It’s deeply collaborative. Everyone who works on it is a writer and editor in a beautiful way.

As Butler sits down to talk about his evening, his father returns to congratulate him again before preparing to leave. The entire cast and crew are surrounded by delighted friends and family who are even more excited than the shocked winners and nominees.

Editor’s Choice

During his acceptance speech for Best Play, a very nervous and excited Adjmi joked that the beta blocker his agent gave him before the show wasn’t working. When he arrives at the party, I ask him if it’s been triggered yet, to which he responds emphatically, “No!” »

“I thought I was going to have to be hospitalized on that scene,” he continues. “As I was walking up the stairs, I said to my manager, ‘I can’t do this.’ I want to return to my place. It was terrifying!

From Stereophonic opened in April, it’s been one shocker after another – a slew of rave reviews and sold-out houses have allowed the show to extend its run into January (for now). Even the soundtrack has taken off: it currently has more monthly listeners on Spotify than the winner of best revival of a musical. Merry we ride.

“As soon as I get used to something new, everything opens up again,” Adjmi reflects. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, what’s my reality now?’ It’s both the show itself growing, but also the audience and critics reacting to it in a way that, to me, is really over the top. People come back 10 times. There’s this hypnotic effect it has on people.

Adjmi attributes this to the type of word-of-mouth the show began to generate off-Broadway, at Playwrights Horizon, where die-hard theater fans and local New Yorkers filled the much smaller theater each night. But even then, it wasn’t yet clear that such a new and risky concept of a show where the audience watched the drama unfold behind the soundboard of a recording studio.

Related

“For the first preview, I sat in a critic’s seat. We played for 20 minutes and I just started crying a little bit because the audience was laughing,” recalls Ryan Rumery, who won the award tonight for best sound design of a play for Stereophonic. He was thrilled that the audience immediately understood what he was trying to do with this show. “And I was like, ‘Okay, this set design is going to work.’ Then the music started to come in and I was like, “We can do this.” »

Will Brill, who won Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play over Jim Parsons, Corey Stoll and two of his Stereophonic Castmates, float into the downstairs dining room at PJ Clarke’s. With his trophy in hand and wearing a long sleeveless tunic over his pants, Brill’s elbows are grabbed by everyone passing by. For him, Stereophonic is a testimony of patience.

“This show is a real lesson in the fact that you can’t plan because David Adjmi and I met in a café 10 years ago, and he had written seven pages of this play and he said to me : ‘I think you’re going to be in this room performing one day,’ he recalls. “And then I ran into him three years later in a coffee shop in Los Angeles and he was so manic and writing his memoirs, and I was like, ‘Oh, we’re never going to do this play.’ And now I win a Tony for it.

Brill plays Reg, a founding member of the anonymous group at the center of the plot. He’s the troubled, drug-addicted, alcoholic bassist whose wife and bandmate Holly (Juliana Canfield) is ready to leave him for good. At the end of the show and the making of the album, Reg becomes sober again, finds serenity and falls in love with someone else. The arc is massive – but Brill plays it with humor, grace and empathy.

“I feel very lucky to play him. He’s such an adorable entity,” Brill says. “Shows like this make me wonder if I have the physical, mental and emotional capacity for this life. David asked so much of us, and we all love it and wouldn’t hesitate to do it.

Now that the nerve-wracking nature of Tony’s season is behind them, the cast and crew have other things to focus on — like a summer tour by Butler’s band, Will Butler + Sister Squares, where they plan to play some songs from the series. He and Adjmi also plan to write a rock opera together in the near future. Adjmi admits, however, that he hasn’t been able to think about his other writings for three months. Lately, he has received calls from executives regarding adaptation Stereophonic in a film or television series.

“I entertain them,” he said, adding that nothing has yet been signed or confirmed. There’s nothing to reveal at the moment other than their growing audience’s thirst to be more immersed in the world of Stereophonic will eventually be satisfied. “I think it could definitely work. I know I should put it in a new petri dish and let it grow because it is designed to be a very theatrical experience. I am excited about this challenge. This could be exciting in another medium. Beyond nascent plans to write a rock opera with Butler, Adjmi has a two-part play to finish developing for the Public Theater.

PJ Clarke’s is just the team’s first save of the evening. They will make an appearance at the Carlyle, where a party hosted by the head of their advertising company O&M hosts the annual party. It’s a deliciously star-studded event that culminates in the evening with endless fries and bottles of Moët.

Near the entrance to Madison, Appropriate Contestant Sarah Paulson chats with Billy Porter. Near Bemelman’s bar, Eddie Redmayne grabs a slider from a tray while the lounge singers perform his opening number from Cabaret. The crowd gathers in a ballroom before the second floor opens with an omelet station and a DJ playing remixes of Lauryn Hill and Janet Jackson.

Tendency

Butler is one of the first members of the team to hit the crowded stage. When the show’s two female stars, Tony nominees Sarah Pidgeon and Juliana Canfield, arrive around 2 a.m., they are immediately drawn into photo ops with other nominees, like Hell’s KitchenThis is Shoshana Bean. It doesn’t take long for Brill to hold court before small crowds in the room he enters, soaking up the congratulations. Eli Gelb, who plays the group’s sound engineer, arrives around 3 a.m., himself causing a little photographic commotion near the entrance to Bemelman’s.

On stage, Adjmi was keen to emphasize the importance of recruiting people who weren’t already Broadway celebrities for this type of role. But from the looks of it, the cast and crew behind Stereophonic have already become the biggest stars in the room.