A Conversation with Will Blum

We speak to Will Blum about Sunday, Passion, Company, and much more besides

I’m thrilled to share our recent conversation with actor and director Will Blum. Blum’s Broadway credits include Beetlejuice in Beetlejuice, Dewey Finn in School of Rock, Elder Cunningham in The Book of Mormon, and Roger in Grease. Recent Sondheim roles include George in Sunday in the Park with George and David in the US national tour of Company. Blum assisted Lonny Price on his productions of Carousel for the English National Opera and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, starring Audra McDonald. In September, he makes his off-Broadway directorial debut with The Witness Room. Our conversation begins below:

I’d love to start by asking you about the Passion project you’re currently developing…

My biggest goal in life is to eventually direct all of Sondheim’s work. This idea I had for Passion actually came when I was directing in London. I worked with these two incredible, vocally versatile actresses on different projects. Both of them were very beautiful, but with them in mind, I had the idea to have the actresses playing Clara and Fosca switch characters every night, for a variety of reasons. First, for the mental health of the performers. I'm really, really interested in what it takes out of you emotionally, mentally, physically, to play a tragic character eight times a week for a long run. Whenever I come across a friend or peer who exits the stage weeping and then never comes back on stage, I'm like, “Are you okay? What do you do at the end of the night?” And two of them jokingly said, “Vodka.” And I was like, “I know you're not kidding. I know that this is what you have to do to shake this person's tragedy off of you.” 

But there's also this idea of what it means to be beautiful in Passion, in the sense that one is beautiful and the other is not. Playing both parts implies the idea I’m trying to convey. I want to focus on Fosca’s behavior and her desperation. To me, this is what makes someone ugly, regardless of physical appearance. And also, because it's theater, we don't need this physical representation—in the same way I loved Leigh Silverman's Violet, where we just saw Sutton Foster's face and they said, “Well, she has a hatchet wound on her face.” And so the audience said, “Okay, she's got a hatchet wound on her face.” As audience members, we automatically accept this and we move on. That's what's beautiful about theater. If you say something IS, it is—but in a movie she’d have to have the wound. I want to emphasize that beautiful aspect of theater, to take away this idea of adding moles or putting on a fake nose or anything like that. To me, someone’s beauty is more about who they are, and the actions they take. And Fosca’s behavior and actions alone are hideous and frightening, a mole or affectation, I think, undermines what’s really being said. 

But I ended up moving back to the States, and then Covid happened and I sort of let go of the idea, but then I saw that wonderful production of Uncle Vanya here last year. They did it in two locations, but the first location was only 40 seats, and it was a living room. Around town, it was being called the “living room” Uncle Vanya—and it was one of the best theater experiences I've ever had. I studied at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy, and so I love intimate theater. I love environmental spaces. And I remembered this idea about Passion and I just thought, I would want to see Passion like this. And on the audio commentary of the PBS recording, it's this debate that James [Lapine] and Steve would have: the show needs to be intimate, but you can't have an intimate space and a full orchestra. The show wasn't working for the people in the back of the house. Because they couldn’t see, it allowed them to disconnect from this really crazy idea. And the filmed version of it works so well, because you can really see what’s going on, you have to accept that this is what’s being said.

The challenge here is, once I do go about acquiring the rights, then we go to MTI and the estate and say, “How can we make this work in a smaller space and still fulfill these gorgeous original orchestrations? Or do we get new orchestrations? And if that's the case, what do they need to be?”