INTERVIEW: Will Brill’s journey from Cambodia to Broadway’s ‘Oklahoma!’
Photo: Oklahoma! stars Tony winner Ali Stroker and Will Brill. Photo courtesy of Little Fang Photo / Provided by O&M DKC with permission.
Will Brill, an accomplished actor who is a frequent presence on New York stages, thought he might have some time to relax and enjoy his honeymoon last year in Cambodia. But then the call came from the creative team of Oklahoma!, a new revival of the classic musical that had originated as a Bard Summerscape Production, played St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and was headed for Broadway.
Brill was called and asked to audition for the part of Ali Hakim, a peddler who has descended upon a small Oklahoma town and taken a liking to Ado Annie (Ali Stroker, who would go on to win a Tony Award for her portrayal).
“It was the old audition process, and it was a production that I had been loosely aware of since the production in 2014-15 at Bard,” Brill said in a recent phone interview. “I’ve kind of been spending time back and forth between New York and L.A., so I didn’t get to see that production. But I did get to see it when it was at St. Ann’s with no sort of inkling that I would be a part of it until I got asked to audition for it while I was on my honeymoon in Cambodia, which was a really exciting and weird prospect because I’ve never been in a musical professionally before. What was very special about this audition was that I asked if they would wait for me to get back from my honeymoon, and they acquiesced and were super-kind and affable all the way through the process until I was cast in it.”
Brill knew that the production, directed by the visionary Daniel Fish, was an unconventional staging that won over critics but challenged audiences. Gone was the usual interpretation of a big, bright musical. Instead, Fish and company focus on the dark themes of the show, including violence in the American Midwest. Still, there are moments of great joy at the Circle in the Square, where Oklahoma! is playing an extended run, but there are also sequences of biting commentary and unique interpretive flair. For starters, the lights in the entire theater stay on for most of the show, and the stage and audience area are bedecked in plywood, with some guests sitting at tables frequented by the performers.
“I was lucky enough to see it at St. Ann’s just because I had heard so many frankly divisive things about it,” Brill said. “It made me really excited to go see it myself, and I felt complicated about it when I saw it and then couldn’t stop thinking about it and felt impacted by it. And, of course, the reviews were glowing after St. Ann’s. It got such good notices that I did feel a certain amount of pressure going into rehearsals to rise to the occasion, but like I said, Daniel and the rest of the creative team and the entire cast were super-welcoming and positive and reassuring. That made for a pretty breezy and very loving rehearsal process.”
His character of Ali Hakim is a tough one because he’s the outsider in this community, and his desires are questioned and scrutinized by the local townspeople.
“I think Ali Hakim is complicated, and I think he is doing the best that he knows how to do for himself,” the actor said. “I think he steps on a lot of people to get where he wants to be and has little appreciation for the needs of others, and I think that he is willing to go really far to ensure his own safety. And I think that speaks to a certain kind of tribal Americanism, like a capitalist Americanism. I think he’s certainly representative of the individual doing whatever it takes to climb to the top. … While those are things that I would kind of eschew in my own life and personality, I would say that what I find in myself in him is his sense of humor and his reticence to engage in violence. He’s a complicated guy, and he’s very much an outsider, too. He comes into a community. Whether it’s his fault or the community’s fault, he very much does not fit with the community that he finds himself in.”
Fish, whose direction certainly helped the production win the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival, gave the actors freedom to find their own characters. Because of this, Brill said working with the maestro was a positive experience.
“A lot of [the characterization] I was given the room to discover,” said Brill, who has appeared on Broadway in You Can’t Take It With You and Act One. “Daniel is a really interesting director in that he does not spend a lot of time asking you to explain how you arrived at the truths that you’re bringing to your character. All that he asks is that you mean what you say in the moment that you find yourself in. As long as the actor is being truthful, he is not demanding about how you got there and why you got there. That said, he loves a good joke, and he loves a good stage picture. I found him in the room to be very warm and very welcoming and was super-understanding of my predicament coming into a process where everyone else already had a run under their belt. He was really accommodating to me about that.”
The intimacy with the audience at Oklahoma! is unusual on Broadway. Because of the relatively small theater, and the lights being on for long stretches, the actors are almost forced to mingle with the crowd. Even during intermission, the guests are invited on the stage for some homemade chili. This has all led to a reconfiguring of expectations for the cast.
“I think it affects all of us differently,” Brill said. “There are some members of the cast for whom it’s really important that they don’t let the audience change their performance or move them out of their sphere of what they’re doing. For me, it’s like gasoline. When I see somebody who is engaged, that is really electrifying and arousing. It makes me turn on a little bit more.”
He added: “I mean, last night, there were two people in the audience who seemed bored out of their minds for the first 30 minutes of the show, and as soon as they started to turn, as soon as they started laughing in spite of themselves, it really gave me butterflies and made me want to turn on more and more and more. I love being that close to an audience. I think it’s the reason to do theater. When I hear stories about the plays that they did in the Restoration period in England, and the way the performers fully would interact with the audience, the way they would turn out to them and reprimand them for behaving badly or invite them out to dinner after the show during a performance, that kind of stuff really makes my heart sing. I think it’s so fun.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Oklahoma!, featuring Will Brill, is now playing Broadway’s Circle in the Square. Click here for more information and tickets.
