Interview: Telly Leung & Gaby Gamache Talk ENSEMBLE World Premiere Documentary

On March 11, Broadway On Demand will stream the world premiere documentary Ensemble, a behind the scenes look at the lives of ensemble members in the Broadway community, filmed in March 2021 on the one year anniversary of the Broadway shutdown.

See as Broadway's often unsung heroes come together to dance, discuss, reflect and examine the year in our lives where everything changed, and examine how Broadway can move forward stronger and better.

Ensemble features Cameron Adams (Mrs. Doubtfire), Aaron J. Albano (Hamilton), Stephanie Bissonnette (Mean Girls), Gaby Gamache (Aladdin), Karla Puno Garcia (Hamilton), David Guzman (Newsies), Jacob Guzman (West Side Story), Sasha Hutchings (Oklahoma), James T. Lane (Ain't Too Proud Tour), Iris Menas (Anybodys in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story), Khori Michelle Petinaud (Moulin Rouge), Emilio Ramos (The King & I) and Megan Sikora (Holiday Inn). Ensemble is directed by Pierre Marais (Aladdin), moderated by Mo Brady (The Ensemblist) and choreographed by Karla Puno Garcia.

Ensemble is conceived by Aaron J. Albano and Mo Brady. It is executive produced by Drew Desky & Dane Levens, Drew & Dane Productions; Matthew Woolf, Woolf Productions LLC; Elliott and Cathy Masie, Masie Productions. It is produced by Aaron J. Albano, Mo Brady, Telly Leung and Joey Monda.

BroadwayWorld spoke with Ensemble producer Telly Leung, and Broadway performer Gaby Gamache (Aladdin), about the importance of the film, the changes they see in the industry, and more.

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Telly, let me start with you. You are producer on this film, how did Ensemble come together? Whose idea was it to capture this moment on film, and how did you become involved?

Telly: I became involved because my friend Aaron Albano- who is an ensemblist himself, he called me up and he said, "Listen, my friend Mo Brady and I have this idea to gather thirteen diverse, multigenerational dancers together to have a dance class, and then have a roundtable discussion about what it means to be in the ensemble. The good, bad, the ugly." We also felt like it was the time to do it, during the most uncertain time of the pandemic. So we wanted to do it on the one-year anniversary of the Broadway Shutdown of March 2020.

We filmed this evening together with these thirteen dancers in March of 2021 at Open Jar studios, and we wanted to capture a time capsule of this time of uncertainty. This is before vaccines, this is before Broadway had a return date, there was still so much unknown about the virus and about where the world was going to go after this. New York was a ghost town. But I think in that time we said, "Maybe this is a good time for us to gather and touch base with one another. And as Broadway will inevitably come back, what do we learn from this time and from our experiences that can make Broadway a little better, and smarter, and kinder?"

The hardest part about producing a documentary is you don't know what you're going to get. All we knew is that we had thirteen dancers, we had this moment in time that we wanted to capture, and we knew that we wanted to capture honest and authentic conversation. We had no idea where the conversation was going to go, nor did we want to curate it because we knew that would feel fake and reality TV-ish. We just wanted to let them speak. And I felt strongly about doing the project. My first three Broadway shows, I was in the ensemble, I was an understudy, I covered. So, it's an experience that is near and dear to my heart. I felt passionately about preserving these stories.

Gaby can you tell me about your involvement in the film? How did you become involved, and what was your experience like?

Gaby: I think Mo reached out to me to ask if I wanted to be in the film, gave a little blurb about what it would be. Kind of like Telly said, it was like, "We're going to talk about the last year. We're just going to let the cameras roll and chat and take a dance class." So, I felt pretty nervous [laughs]. I was like, a year without really dancing full out, very nervous about the body. But, the dance class part of it all was so fulfilling and sweet. It was the first time I'd been inside with more than three people in a year, so it was very fulfilling to dance again. And then we dove right in. We chatted, and it was very emotional. Leading up it was uncertain, like, "What are we going to talk about? What's going to make me cry? What direction is this going to go?" And I think at the end of it, it was just like, "Well, we're thirteen people with thirteen different opinions, and thirteen different experiences and ways that we move through the world." So, it was pretty wild.

Telly: Gaby is my castmate from Aladdin, we actually started at Aladdin on the same exact day. I was really happy that she was in the film, and her honest confessional is one of my favorites, she sits down with iris [menas] and she just goes, "Welp, I haven't danced in a year!" And iris is like, "I guess we're going right in!" Right into the vulnerable, insecurity parts of "What does it mean to not dance for a year? I don't think I've stretched my legs or done a battement in God knows how long." So, I really appreciate everyone, including Gaby, being so vulnerable about where they were at that time.

With all that being said, what can viewers really expect to see with Ensemble?

Telly: The goal of this, for me as a producer is a). Capturing this moment in time, whatever that was, and b). Making sure that generations from now, theatre students, people that love this, understood what we went through. Not only this unprecedented shutdown for our industry, this existential crisis for dancers that had no place to dance and no way to make a living. This is March of 2021. This is after the summer of 2020. This is after all of those huge questions and conversations about racial and social justice.

So, it's a microcosm of what we all went through as a theatre community, but it's a macrocosm of what we are all going through. Because in this unprecedented pandemic time, all of the systems that we relied upon in 2019 fell apart. So it's about these thirteen people going, "What do we do when this all falls apart? What are we left with? I'm an artist, this is how I put my energy into the world, how do I do that now?" So, I'm hoping that future generations will watch this and learn from it, and also understand the tenacity and the strength of these thirteen people, and how they had to find themselves in a void of the thing that they did day in and day out, every day until March of 2020.

How have you both seen the industry actively change as you initially came out of quarantine and now as you continue working in this industry?

Gaby: Well, it's a very clinical feeling to be in a show right now. At least the show I'm in. Well, I'm on injury right now, I did get injured back in November being the show. But it's very clinical with the tests and the safety procedures, and all of those things have to be in place. It's sort of feeling like... missing the spontaneity, missing being able to pop into someone's dressing room and just chat for a while, take your masks off. That's not really accessible, it's not really possible right now. So for the short time that I was back with the show, kind of transactional in a way. Still getting used to it. Still getting used to the newness of what that means right now.

And that really is changing day to day, I would say. There's a necessity to be with the moment as it is, and not take 'we're back' as the final landing place. Things change every day. There are adjustments that have to be made on Saturday that weren't there on Friday. It's a place where you have to practice the patience, because something could blow up the very next day, and you have to roll with what the moment is calling for.

Telly: For me, I didn't go back into a show. I wasn't in a show during the shutdown of 2020, so I didn't have a show to go back to. In the two years of that shutdown though, I found my strength in other ways, whether that was teaching, or producing, or amplifying projects and stories that my friends believed in. So, for me, ever since Broadway's been back, it's not back for me. That's not what I've been doing. But I've also found really fulfilling opportunities doing other things, whether that's teaching, or directing, or producing, and that's been really great too. I went, "You know what? If I can do that during a pandemic, if I can do that where we had to test everybody, and there were no vaccines, and we had to sit everybody in a six-feet-apart circle, and figure out where we were going to put cameras, and still successfully make something we are proud of with a beginning, middle, and end, and a story that I think will touch people, I can certainly do it when the world opens back up again, right?

So, in some ways, I'm a little bit also thankful for that time, to be able to ask myself the really tough questions of, "Who am I as an artist? Who am I as a citizen? How do I walk through the world?" It was a good time to reflect on that. And hopefully, people that watch the film can realize, "Right, these thirteen, fourteen, people are sitting here having these reflections, having this moment to pause, and ask each other tough questions. We can do that every day to ourselves. We can take that minute of pause for ourselves. If ever it feels we are on a hamster wheel, we can stop the wheel whenever we want to ask, 'am I doing the thing that I should be doing? Is this really my purpose? Is this why I've been put on this earth? Is this the kind of art I want to be making? Is this the kind of story I want to be sharing?'" So, I think it was good for me, in some ways.

Telly, you just went into this a bit, but how different do you feel as artists and as people having gone through the last two years?

Gaby: It's definitely nonlinear, the peaks and the valleys, the waves of whatever personal thing I'm going through at the time. But, I feel like I'm asking a lot more questions, and putting the social justice at the front. I am leading with what's right for the most marginalized, and where do I fit in this puzzle? What's my responsibility as an artist, what's my responsibility as a human being? So, I feel like the last two years have really given, like Telly was saying, time, to interrogate so much, and it kind of feels like it never stops. When Broadway came back, that didn't mean that the questions stopped. That didn't mean that we're back the way it was before. I don't think that it's ever going to feel like it did before. The industry or our personal lives. It just can't. We're still in it. We're still in the pandemic, we're still actively in this trauma response, honestly. We're in process. I feel, in certain ways, grateful as well, for the time away.

I feel inspired by this film in particular to invest in smaller things, invest in what feels good, and I can make my own stuff, I really can, I feel like that is possible. And I think that this time afforded a lot of people that eye opening moment, like, "I don't have to rely on Broadway to give me what I need, and in fact, isn't giving me what I need on an emotional level." The question changes day to day.

Telly: I think what people will walk away with, is that Broadway is a street. Broadway is these 41 theatres, and that's what we think of as Broadway in 2019, early 2020, and when that disappeared, does that mean Broadway has disappeared? No! I would argue that when you watch this documentary, when you watch Ensemble, you're like, "That's Broadway!" Those people sitting in that circle, their talent, their artistry, their perspectives, their storytelling, that's Broadway." Which means, even if the street didn't exist, it's still there because these people exist. I hope that's what people walk away with when they see this.

Gaby: I think that people are feeling more empowered to be vocal about what doesn't feel good and really stand in that power, because as ensemble members it can sometimes feel like, "My voice doesn't matter," or, "No one is going to listen to me, I need an army of people behind me." But you really can just say something, and I've noticed that's kind of across the board. People are like, "Nope, I'm not doing that. We need to figure out another way."

Telly: Because Broadway is the people, and if the people are like, "We can't." That holds weight now. Where, I feel like before the shutdown, we were fitting into the wheel of Broadway. We were like, "Where do we fit in?" And now we're like, "No, we are it. We are Broadway." If I have to be out a couple of days, then I have to be out for a couple of days. And I think that conversation is happening. The idea of the show must go on no matter what... actually, the show didn't go on, right? The show didn't. And then we came back, and then it didn't go on again. We came back and it was start and stop. So, it is about divorcing ourselves from that muscle memory of 2019 of it needing to come back a certain way.

All of us want it to be back, but how do we all come forward together and make it come back in the way that we want it to come back? We can't come back and have learned nothing from the last two years. And hopefully this film is the conversation starter that makes it so that we have these really good open discussions with everybody. Ensemble members, producers, people working backstage, people working in the pit, for everybody to go, "What do we all need as we come back into a world we don't know?"

Ultimately, what do you hope that people who see Ensemble take away from it?

Gaby: I hope they see the multitudes we contain. The difficulties, and how rewarding it can be to be a member of the ensemble. I hope it starts conversations, like Telly was saying. I hope that it gives people a window into where they can disrupt, because that's really important, being able to disrupt these systems. We are Broadway, the people, so I hope that there is inspiration to continue chatting and having these conversations and being really honest.

Telly: It was always my dream of dreams that ten years from now, some theatre student, who loves Broadway as much as Gaby and I do, watches this. And I am sure ten years from now, we're not going to solve all the world's problems of inequity, and the systems that don't work for us, but at the same time, I hope that that student watches this and goes, "They were thinking that ten years ago too! I'm not alone, I'm not by myself. There is somebody in that ensemble that is just like me, and they made it. Not only did they make it, they made it through the toughest time our industry has ever faced. And if they can do it, I can do it." That's what I really hope people watching it will get. The strength of this group of human beings that decided to gather in the middle of a pandemic to dance together, drink a couple glasses of wine, and get real.