For many Austinites, their first taste of a Broadway show doesn’t involve walking up Seventh Avenue from Times Square. It’s catching a touring performance at the Bass Concert Hall, and for Ashley Brooke Monroe it was the night as a small child that she saw the visiting New York production of The Phantom of the Opera. “It was the first big national tour I saw at Bass, and I saw it multiple times,” she recalled. She admitted to falling asleep the first couple of times the tour came to town, “and I remember feeling very grown when I didn’t fall asleep and have to be carried to the car.”
That night triggered a love of theatre that blossomed into a fascination with directing that began in high school, sent her to college for a fine arts degree, and saw her move in 2009 to Brooklyn to begin a rising backstage career. Now she gets to give that same thrill the Phantom gave her to some future theatre lover at the Bass in her current role as resident director for the touring production of Hamilton. If her life was a script, you’d call that a callback. “It’s pretty surreal,” she said, “especially since it’s such a formative part of growing up in Austin, and my love of theatre.”
“[Phantom of the Opera was the first big national tour I saw at Bass, and I saw it multiple times. … I remember feeling very grown when I didn’t fall asleep and have to be carried to the car.” – Ashley Brooke Monroe, resident director for the Angelica tour of Hamilton
There’ve been a lot of returns and revisits recently for Monroe. She joined Hamilton before the pandemic, and then spent 17 months off the road. Yet in the midst of this she was able to return to her alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, to spend two semesters as a full-time visiting professor. “I got to teach the same directing classes that I took when I went there, and much like coming to the Bass Concert Hall it felt very surreal. ‘How am I old enough for this to be happening?'” However, when word came in May that the show was coming back, she spent the summer “relearning the show, which took a lot of time because it’s very complicated, and there’re a lot of musical numbers, and I try to have everything memorized for every moment.”
Pre-Hamilton, she’d directed a mixture of straight plays (Julius Caesar, Orlando) and musicals, including the 2017 world premiere of the Texas-set Great Depression-era prison romp The Goree All-Girl String Band. She explained, “I like the musicals that feel rooted in real characters. … They have an emotional impact because of the music. I think it’s reaching the audience in a deeper way. Not that plays can’t do that, but musicals have the advantage of that outlet, and how effective it is in stirring human emotions.”
And few shows in recent years have stirred audience emotions like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Grammy, Pulitzer, and Tony award-winning musical adaptation of Ron Chernow’s 2004 political biography, Alexander Hamilton. For Monroe, there’s no single reason why a rap retelling of the story of the Founding Fathers has become such a cultural touchstone, but she attributes its status in part to that story, which she described as America’s origin story. “There’s an innate interest in how we came to be here today,” she said. Then add in the revolutionary nature of the show, its confluence of movement, music, and a density of language and ideas. “What Lin-Manuel Miranda and the original creative team did with that source material was so surprising. … It’s just as exciting to see it today as when I saw it on Broadway with the original company, [and] I’ve seen it hundreds of times.”
Watching Hamilton is a huge part of what she does in her unusual role. Even in the world of huge touring productions, Hamilton is unique in having a full-time resident director. In other mobile iterations of Broadway shows, she explained, “usually there’s an associate director, or the original director, who come in and check in.” However, Monroe travels with the company full time. “Basically,” she explained, “my job is to maintain the artistic integrity of production.” Partly, that involves sitting in the audience, taking notes, and giving feedback to the principals. “Sometimes doing a show many, many times, it begins to migrate in subtle ways, so bringing it back into the exact intention of every moment – whether that’s how they’re standing or how they’re playing a line – but then it’s also keeping it fresh for the many hundreds of the performances that our company will do.”
Even if she’s a constant, the troupe is not. Actors drop in and out, and at any one point in time there are three to five new cast members gearing up to join the tour. That means “juggling new people who’re coming in the family, [so] I’ll be doing Aaron Burr rehearsals Tuesday, I’ll be working with the new Peggy and Maria Wednesday, putting in a Lafayette/Jefferson on Thursday.” That’s just the leads; then there are the understudies, who take on a massive workload. Each covers four or five roles, and each part is about six weeks of rehearsals, “so for many months they’ll be in rehearsal, going into the show for the things they know, and then continuing to add on new characters until they’ve learned all of their tracks.” Plus, sometimes she’s integrating the universal swings, the pinch hitters based out of New York and sent to cover a part when necessary. “They have to learn the show anew at each place, because it evolves slightly.”
She’s not alone in keeping the crew on model, and that’s where another part of musical theatre that she loves comes in: collaboration. She has a particularly close working relationship with dance supervisor Greer Gisy and music director Patrick Fanning, becoming “a three-headed dog – or monster, depending how you’d like to describe us. I love the challenge and additional joy of collaborating with those two roles and making a thing together. So it’s not just ‘I want to you stand here’ and so you stand here, but how do we all – including the performers – find the best version of the story as a unit.”
Note: In all this complexity, this is just a touring production of Hamilton. Not the touring production. In total, there are eight Hamiltons around the globe: the original Broadway show, the new L.A. expansion, London’s West End, Australia, the delayed German translation scheduled to open in Hamburg in 2022, and three touring shows in North America. There’s Phillip, the And Peggy Company, and Monroe’s troupe, known as Angelica. Angelica is the original touring company, but this isn’t about reading a set of instructions dispatched from New York and having actors merely mimic the Broadway version. Monroe explained, “The original creative team, as they’ve said, each new production that opens, they’ve learned something.”
That sums up the tension and potential of a touring production. People want to see the Broadway show, but live theatre is organic. Each actor, each stage, each auditorium changes the performance. Put simply: Bass Hall is not the Richard Rogers Theatre. She praised the technical crew for setting up at each new venue “so it’s like we’ve lived here forever,” but that’s onstage. Each room is different, with new sight lines, new follow spot positions, a thousand little factors that can only be accounted for once the cast is onstage, and Monroe and her team can see how the show looks, and what changes need to be made to make it look the same. For example, during the recent Dallas run, “I raised Hamilton up a few stairs because the audience is low and couldn’t see him at this moment when they needed to see him.”
Those kinds of changes are about adapting to the venue. However, like any long-running show, the core of Hamilton has altered over time, and the pandemic gave many reopening shows a chance to reappraise and reconsider the staging. Hamilton is no exception, and those familiar with the show will notice a new approach to Act II opener “What’d I Miss,” in which Thomas Jefferson returns mid-Revolution. This came from a creative summit, where all the resident directors and dance supervisors met in New York with the original creative team. Monroe spoke fondly of the gathering: “Because we’re all working independently but simultaneously on the exact same show it was a really nice chance to put our heads together.” The inspiration came from within the company about Jefferson’s role in the story, and especially how it depicts his attitude to slavery. The new version was first integrated into Angelica, then it was taken back to Broadway, tweaked, implemented into the Philip iteration, tweaked again, and while the Angelica company was in Dallas recently the lead creative team traveled from New York “to give us the newer new version, and it will continue to be updated, and we’ll all eventually be doing versions of the same thing.”
That newer new version is what Monroe is bringing home, and even after touring huge venues across the country, there’s still a surreal thrill for Monroe of working on the stage that shaped her passion and career. “This one feels so personal,” she said. “I’m going to want to pinch myself.”
Broadway in Austin presents Hamilton
Through Dec. 19 (shows Tue.-Sat., 8pm; Sun., 7pm; plus 1pm weekend matinees)
Bass Concert Hall, 2530 Robert Dedman
texasperformingarts.org
This article appears in December 10 • 2021.
