A put-in rehearsal is a full Broadway show, performed once, for almost nobody.
In May, there was a put-in at the Belasco Theatre on West 44th Street for the new cast of Maybe Happy Ending. I know that because there's footage of it on YouTube. Right now.
Meet the Models is a three-part documentary about three actors joining Maybe Happy Ending—a month of rehearsal, a put-in, and one debut, from the subway ride in to the stage door after. It's a rare glimpse into the reality of "uploading" a new cast to an already running show.
Broadway documents its beginnings obsessively. First day of rehearsal, first preview, opening night, the ten-years-later reunion concert. This week we're looking at what happens when a show decides a notoriously un-glamorous part of the process is a story worth telling.
Power on.
The Changeover
Darren Criss played Oliver for the last time on a Sunday in May. Zachary Noah Piser played him for the first time, on Broadway, that next Tuesday.
The apparatus for that changeover is small and well-oiled and works fine. A press release goes out. The outlets pick it up. There's a photo call, and a first-curtain-call bootleg-style iPhone video, and eventually a new Playbill with new headshots in it. (Once upon a time, there was also a slip of paper!!)
All of it is notification.
Because a replacement gets filed under a different heading than an opening. An opening is an event. A replacement is upkeep—the thing you do so the show can keep being the show.
Which means the second cast inherits the audience and not the occasion. The anticipation, the reviews, the party, the whole sense that people were gathered to watch something start—that belongs to whoever was there first.
Unless...
Meet the Models
Three episodes, one month.
Episode one is the first day of rehearsal: Zachary Noah Piser, Savy Jackson, and Cathy Ang, with twenty-eight days to learn a show that won six Tony Awards.
Episode two is the put-in, the first time they wear the costumes and stand in the real light on the real set.
Episode three follows Piser through the day of his Broadway debut in the role.
It lives in the lineage of classic theatre documentaries like Every Little Step and ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway.
Mason Robert Bray created and produced it, with Katharine Quinn executive producing. I asked him what it was for. He wrote:
It feeds the fans that are already hungry to see the behind-the-scenes of the show, and it creates a clear pipeline of discovery for audiences to fall in love with the new cast members.
We wanted to help celebrate the very real accomplishment of joining an already-running show, which doesn’t often get time in the light. We, as a team, are emotionally invested in their success, and want audiences to be too.
Emotional investment in their success. That's a strangely humane strategy sentence. Theatre strategy, most of the time, boils down to one goal: butts-in-seats. This idea, to create audience investment, is a different approach.
By highlighting the humanity of the people making the show, you're speaking first to people's hearts instead of making a sell to their wallets.
Which is what the show does too.
Newer Model
Oliver is a Helperbot-3. Claire is a Helperbot-5.
Their first real scene together is an argument about which of them is better built. She's newer, faster, more advanced, and her battery is failing. He's slower, obsolete on paper, and he will outlast her. They live in a facility for retired HelperBots in Seoul because the people who owned them upgraded.
The show shows us, in some ways, two machines in maintenance. We watch them stumble through the mess of falling in love—with each other, and themselves. Two non-humans having the most human experience there is: discovering they're valuable. One-of-one.
Show people that upkeep and they'll find the person inside it. That's the show's route to the heart.
And it works. The night I saw it, the house was tourists—a night-out crowd, people who picked the robot show. And they were laughing. Big, easy, unguarded laughing. Also sniffling, and going quiet in the right places. Bringing a non-theater audience all the way inside a piece of theater is one of the hardest things in this business to do. A year and a half into the run, a brand-new cast, and that room was all the way in.
The docuseries runs the same route. Open up the Broadway machine, and let an audience fall in love with the people keeping it alive.
Two obsolete machines arguing over which of them is more replaceable. Played by actors this business typically considers replacement parts.
The Occasion
Fun fact: Zach first workshopped this show years ago, back when it was still a maybe—before the Belasco, before the Tonys, before Darren Criss.
Then it went on without him. It happens.
Four years later, he got to walk in the stage door and play the part on Broadway. Twenty-eight days to learn what was years in the making.
That's a pretty compelling story. Thankfully, the team at Maybe Happy Ending realized it too.
But truth be told, countless replacements and stand-bys and understudies are living stories like this all the time. Callbacks and almosts turning into debuts and last-minute swing-ons. Long-running shows are designed to outlive their original casts—a replacement cast succeeding is a major marker of a show's success.
The rare part is treating these turnover moments like the occasions they are. Documenting one is generous and smart marketing in the same breath. The material is everywhere. Somebody just has to decide the story is worth telling.
This team did. They filmed the maintenance because it mattered.
What they made is a very happy ending.
This week in One last thing: what it's actually like to sit in a house and watch one of your closest friends walk into a role he waited years for—and the history he and I share that made it hit even harder.
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Wow! So happy for Zach. Such a great article, Matt.
Thanks so much for this! It made me want to look deeper into MHE, and to watch all three docs mentioned! Any idea if I can stream Show Business somewhere?