"Coram Boy" recently opened on Broadway after a successful run in London. Based on Jamila Gavin's much-loved book "Coram Boy" is set in 18th-century England, where two orphans get a second chance in life at a home for deserted children. One has been rescued from an African slave ship. The other is the abandoned son of the heir to a great estate.Laura Heisler is making her Broadway debut in "Coram Boy." Off-Broadway she has appeared in "The Given," "The Mistakes Madeline Made," and "Everything Will Be Different."

Cristin Milioti appeared on Broadway in "The Lieutenant of Inishmore." In New York she's appeared in "Humbuggery" and "History of Tears."

For tickets and more info on "Coram Boy" click here.

 

 

Broadway Bullet Interview: Laura Heisler and Cristin Milioti of Coram Boy

 

 

BROADWAY BULLET: A lot of people are knowingly taking a chance on the play Coram Boy which is a play with a cast of thousands, a choir, and a lot of special effects.  It's based on the 2000 English novel by Jamila Gavin; and we have two of the actors from Coram Boy with us today, we've got Cristin Milioti and Laura Heisler with us.  How are you guys going?

CRISTIN MILIOTI: Hi.

LAURA HEISLER: Hello.

BB: For our astute listeners might recognize you, Laura, from when you were on here before with The Given and now I am pleased to say that you are making your Broadway debut since then.

LAURA: That's right, yeah, that's right.

BB: So I guess tell us a little bit about Coram Boy.  It's a fascinating play... and you both play guys.

CRISTIN: At one point I play a little girl, we play brother and sister. 

LAURA: We play brother and sister, I play an eight year old boy and she plays my

BOTH: Five year old sister.

LAURA: And those are our primary roles.  And then my character gets shipped off to boarding school and doesn't come back in Act II, but Cristin's character does actually age to about thirteen.

CRISTIN: I blossom into a nice young woman, yes.

LAURA: But then throughout the play we're also playing all kinds of young boys and young girls.

CRISTIN: And I play a man at one point.

LAURA: That's right.

CRISTIN: A grown man. 

LAURA: The shortest man at the ball.

CRISTIN: It's funny.

LAURA: There's a principle cast of twenty actors, not including the choir, which is twenty other actors.  So there's forty people in all, and then there's a seven piece orchestra, I think.  And all of us in the principle ensemble, everyone has a primary role – or sometimes two primary roles – and then everybody at any given moment is also called on to play the ocean, or a tree in the forest.

CRISTIN: Or a mule, or a gargoyle.

LAURA: Or a choir boy, or an orphan girl.

CRISTIN: It switches so quickly back and forth and we get changed, actually mostly for the first act we get changed onstage.

LAURA: Right, kind of theatrical.

CRISTIN: In this choreographed way.  And then the second act is more frantic quick changes backstage.

LAURA: But it's wonderful because it means that everyone is onstage pretty much the entire time, and you have the experience of watching the story itself, and then you also have the sort of meta theatrical experience of watching forty actors create a piece in front of you and show you the tools that they're using to create it.  It's not meant; when four actors become a mule they have they're carrying a wheel or saddlebags on them.  But otherwise it's their body and their voices that's creating the mule.  And there's even in art terms a perspective, because one of the wheels is smaller to show visually perspective, if you look at it from the side, as you look at it from the audience.  It's really beautiful and really innovative and inventive and I think the raw theatricality of it is something you don't often get to see, certainly in a commercial Broadway production.  It's all in the same show too, because there's no running off and on for extended periods of time, we're all very much in the same world, with the choir, with the cast.  She [Melly Still - Director] sort of has melded these two worlds together with one functioning meaning.

CRISTIN: Right and she wants to show how the actor transforms from playing this role to this role to this role to this role to this role, crossing gender, crossing age, crossing species, crossing sometimes even object into human or animal form.  And that's really exciting I think. 

BB: Well it definitely has a very big symbolic grandeurs theatricality about it, then especially when you add in the twenty person choir from above in the rafters, it really is a unique theatrical experience. 

LAURA: Oh yeah, it's really sweeping.

BB: And I really have got to applaud whoever thought of doing this because they can't have been thinking that this was going to make money.  The weekly running cost of this has to be enormous for a play, even though it's got tons of music.

LAURA: From what Melly told us, I think the producers are quite aware of what and enormous financial venture this is or risk.  But they saw it in London and just loved it so much that they wanted to bring it over here.

CRISTIN: They felt that it had to be seen and hopefully it introduces another theatrical theme in a commercial venue.

LAURA: And who knows, it could be the next Cats.

CRISTIN: Yeah, you never know.  People have said it can't be done before and so far word of mouth has been so amazing that we're hoping that'll just keep filling the seats which it seems to be doing.

BB: I definitely am hoping that this can find its place, because it is such a risk.

LAURA: Well it was a huge hit in London, and it was such a big hit that it came back, was brought back for a second season.  So it has run two years.

CRISTIN: Two years now.

LAURA: Well not continuously through the year, but it has run two seasons, in London to sold out houses.  And for now I think we are all getting calls and emails from friends saying "I loved it and I just sent out an email to everyone on my list that they have to come see this because it is special."

CRISTIN: Yeah, there's been a great response, definitely.

BB: Well I noticed it had a hyphen in it that you don't usually see, given its theatricality of it, given that the director of it probably designed the show too.

BOTH: Yeah.

LAURA: Oh my god, she is so hands on, I mean everything, every little detail is within her and her co designer Ti Green, and they're such on the same wavelength.  I think because we do have the benefit of them having done it before, it sort of went along with, it's still very much the American cast show, I mean we're not just mimicking what was done in London at all, she gave us leeway.  But I think since they had both worked on it before, they're so on the same page with each other that it's pretty incredible.

CRISTIN: Yeah, Melly co designed, with Ti, the set and the costumes and she obviously directed it.  And then I think she was on hand to help with the adaptation.  She thinks she was a part of that process so she's kind of the Julie Taymor from Britain.

LAURA: And she's very close with Adrian Sutton too, who did all of the music, the non Handel music.

CRISTIN: The music is really, really glorious.

LAURA: It is glorious.

BB: Now do you sing any of that as part of the boys' choir?

LAURA: Oh yeah we sing constantly.

CRISTIN: We sing everything

LAURA: We had to learn to sing without a vibrato.

CRISTIN: I'm Billy and you're William, which is pretty much one in the same.

LAURA: That's true, we do, we sing as children in a sort of little quartet, we sing as the boys' choir at two different points in the show, and then we sing as the choir throughout.  And then in addition to sort of clear cut songs or numbers there's also just musical accompaniment which is something the audience might be aware of but they'll absorb it as part of the scene, but like at one point we're all playing trees in the forest and it's a really dark scene where babies are being buried.  And we're all called upon to sort of stand and sway and create a kind of atmosphere by all humming different intervals. 

CRISTIN: Yeah.

LAURA: It's not like the audience is going "oh they're singing" but it adds to the atmosphere.  And there's a lot of that sound augmentation as it were.

BB: So now maybe at this point, since you mentioned the babies being buried, I don't think we should give away the whole plot in this thing but it's worthwhile to explain why the play is called Coram Boy.

LAURA: Well there is the legend of the Coram Man who was this man who, it's true actually; it's this man who claimed to take children who were unwanted because having a child out of wedlock was so incredibly taboo and you just weren't allowed, but a lot of times these women didn't have any choice, they were being abused by their caretakers, and he – this man – legend has it, would promise to take these children to the Coram hospital, but instead would either kill them or sell them off into slave labor.  Or, along the way, traveling to sell them off to some awful mill or something they were so malnourished and abused that they would die.  This particular scene is about this man who poses to be this man who would take them to Coram Hospital to give them a better future when in fact he's you know.

CRISTIN: The babies, most of them have died on route and they're being buried in the woods, but one baby is still alive.  It doesn't go really well for that baby, needless to say.

BB: It all unfolds.  I think a lot of universities should be on the lookout for this as a production.  It's got that great big cast that they can use their whole department.

CRISTIN: Sure, that's true.  Well hopefully both things will happen and it will just have all kinds of future lives.  I know that Miramax has bought the.

LAURA: Rights to the film.

CRISTIN: Rights to create a film with it.  That'll probably happen in the next few years so it's kind of all over the place.

LAURA: This is kind of neat.  We started every rehearsal with a forty minute yoga class; cause Melly is just that cool.  And also then following that with a vocal warm up and then there was a lot of improvisation.  I mean the script is the script.  The words didn't change, but there was a lot of improvisation to create the back story and to try to find what the scenes would be.  So it was a really collaborative experience and I think that that adds to the feeling you get when you're watching it that it's a real ensemble.  And that's kind of the best you want to see of I'd like to think, what ensembles can create that nothing else in a theater.  You're not going to see that on a movie, you're not going to see that in a TV show.  Theater in its purest form is watching a group of people tell you a whole story with their bodies.

CRISTIN: And actually too, just going back to Melly's rehearsal process, the first day we came in we had a meet and greet, we did a little yoga, and she was like "Okay we're going to get it up on its feet and improvise the whole show, put your scripts down you've all read it guess what the lines are guess what you're doing."  And we did this incredible three hour improve of people playing peoples consciences.

LAURA: Everybody would just dive in and help create the theme, even if your character wasn't technically in it, and that – again – informs the piece that it is now.

CRISTIN: You know, we would play like the walls of a house, we would play the clocks in the house, I mean everything.  And after seeing that is when she made certain decisions about how we were going to serve this show in different ways.

LAURA: Oh yeah.  They added a lot of stuff, like some of that oral augmentation.  You can kind of use that as a selling point, "There's oral augmentation in our show!"  That's right.

BB: I think they want to see how you turn a giant proscenium stage into a big underwater swimming scene.

CRISTIN: Oh yeah.

LAURA: We do it!

BB: They better not wait because this isn't the type of show you wait around a year for to see what's going on.

CRISTIN: Just you wait, but they should come see it because of the cast. 

BB: I hope so, I hope it does last, I'm just saying they can't take it for granted that it's going to be around, they need to get down and support this show and support this.  If this is what they want to see, time to put your money where your mouth is.

CRISTIN: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah.

BB: Cristin, as a final word, this isn't your Broadway debut, but is this your Broadway debut for

CRISTIN: Performing.  I understudied Alison Pill last year in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and I did get to go on; but this is very different in a completely different show.  I mean that was black comedy by Martin McDonagh where you have a bang bang shoot 'em up show that we used five gallons of stage blood, it was crazy.  And then this, I feel I've been with this from the beginning and it's been an extremely gratifying experience, very different.

LAURA: I think there's nine people, or something like that, in our show making their Broadway debut. 

BB: How is it for you, Laura, is it everything you've expected?

LAURA: It's great, it's awesome, you couldn't ask for a better group of people to make a debut with.

CRISTIN: That's true.  It's a really close group.

LAURA: And nobody takes that for granted, and that's really nice.  There's no ego in the bunch, it's just a great group. 

BB: Well I thank you, Cristin and Laura so much for coming down and you are going to run right over now to perform now.

BOTH: Thank you, we do.

BB: Well thanks so much and have a great evening.

BOTH: Thank you.

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Picture #4 courtesy of the British National Production