At home in Chicago, Heather Headley cleared the room — no husband or children allowed. She had a show tune to record, and she knew it would get emotional.
She kicked off her shoes. Then she got down to the business of singing somebody else’s song.
“I’ve always told people, songs are like dresses for me,” Headley, a Tony Award winner for “Aida,” said later by phone. “I see one in somebody’s closet, and I want to try it on.”
That’s what she and her cast mates get to do in this year’s thrice-delayed “Miscast,” a benefit for the Off Broadway company MCC Theater. Since 2001, the show has been a goofy-glamorous hot ticket on the theater calendar, matching up Broadway stars with roles they would never be cast to play.
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Raúl Esparza pairing up for Anita and Maria’s “A Boy Like That” from “West Side Story”? They did, in 2014. Jennifer Holliday belting “I Am What I Am” from “La Cage Aux Folles”? She did, three years ago. Katrina Lenk singing “If I Were a Rich Man” from “Fiddler on the Roof”? She fiddled her way through it in 2018.
Originally scheduled to be performed in April at the Hammerstein Ballroom, this year’s “Miscast” has gone virtual, streaming for free on Sunday, Sept. 13, on MCC’s YouTube channel. The boldface lineup includes, among others, Joshua Henry, Adrienne Warren, Norbert Leo Butz, Phillipa Soo, Leslie Odom Jr. and Beanie Feldstein.
At the coronavirus shutdown’s six-month mark, the show is an unmistakable product of this strange and anguished interlude. (“Broadway Backwards,” a popular annual revue with a similar concept, canceled back in March.) Like its four-piece band, the performers are scattered across the country, and some had the cultural mood in mind as they prepared for this prerecorded “Miscast.”
“I think in years to come,” Headley said, “there’ll be an asterisk next to it — and a beautiful one.
“It should be an asterisk and maybe an exclamation point and some dashes and stuff,” she added, and laughed, “because it is born out of a virus and unrest and everything that’s happening this year. And I do hope that it will bring joy, and a balm.”
I will tell you right now that I have seen Headley’s performance, and it is a stunner. But I will also tell you that I have been sworn to secrecy about what the song is and which Broadway musical it’s from.
The same goes for the rest of the program — the sort of condition that a journalist agrees to only when the element of surprise is one of a show’s main pleasures. As is customary for “Miscast,” even the performers don’t know what the numbers other than their own will be. So we won’t spoil that here.
Playing to the moment
On the August day when Bernie Telsey — one of MCC’s three artistic directors and the founder of the casting powerhouse Telsey + Company — taped his scripted remarks for “Miscast,” he stood on one of the organization’s stages in Hell’s Kitchen.
Telsey had barely been at the theater since the final rehearsal studio run-through of Jocelyn Bioh’s “Nollywood Dreams,” on March 12, just before everything stopped. The play’s set was still onstage.
For MCC, Telsey said in an interview, clinging to what he called “the habit of ‘Miscast’” isn’t only about the vital donations it might raise. It’s also about enjoying for a while, through the busyness of planning and Zoom rehearsals, “the illusion, or the hope, that things are normal” at a time when they are absolutely not.
Scott Galina, who produces “Miscast” with Telsey, said the current conversation in the industry about which roles are open to whom is a good thing. For years, he and Telsey had songs for the character Bobby, in “Company,” on their list of material for women. Then came the gender-swapped production.
“And in two seconds, those are not miscast anymore,” he said. “That’s great. That’s what it should be, in the service of theater. What happens when a different person sings this song?”
This year’s “Miscast” leads with lightheartedness. For anyone who has watched YouTube videos of performances from previous years — like Jonathan Groff and a team of dancers tapping their way through “Anything Goes” (2.2 million views and counting) — the 2020 version is recognizable.
Galina said the tone will be just different enough to feel connected to the present.
The challenge, as he sees it, is to make something akin to a musical comedy online, “but not a show that people watch and say, ‘Were they not reading the news?’ And how do you give people hope and joy, and celebrate what ‘Miscast’ is — and, more broadly, what theater does for people — and also play to the moment?”
‘This feeling is not going to last forever’
The solution, it seems, is partly in the choice of songs, and partly in the intensity that some performers bring to their interpretations in this volatile season.
Joshua Henry, a three-time Tony nominee, has been in two previous “Miscast” galas, performing a respectful “Natural Woman” (from “Beautiful”) and a cheeky, all-male “Cell Block Tango” (from “Chicago”).
This year, he swapped out the number he had picked to do in April, replacing it — shortly after George Floyd was killed — with an emphatically uplifting anthem from another famous musical. (I can’t tell you the one he decided against, either; he might perform it next year.)
At times in recent months, Henry has found himself uncertain and in tears.
“As an artist I’m missing things,” he said. “As a Black man I’m feeling a lot of things.”
So he was soothed, momentarily, by the sanguine spirit of the song.
“I think I needed it,” he said. “It’s about sitting in a really crummy, crappy place and having the hope — the understanding, eventually — that this crummy place, this feeling is not going to last forever.”
Giving it a soulfulness that he said is as natural to him as breathing, he recorded the song at home on the couch with his guitar. Putting that “Miscast” performance into the world in a video, which like the others will stay on YouTube after the gala, he wants in particular to reach young, Black recent graduates of theater programs, “because they’re feeling things doubly” right now: the lack of employment in their chosen field and also the devaluing of Black lives.
Mis-performing for the first time
Like Headley, Phillipa Soo had long wanted to be in “Miscast,” but the scheduling never worked until this year, when so many schedules imploded.
“I do miss the ability,” she said, “to celebrate it in the room with a bunch of people.”
In a normal “Miscast,” the performers would all be onstage together, watching one another as the audience watched them.
Her co-star Norbert Leo Butz, a two-time Tony winner, has been in four previous “Miscast” shows. For this incarnation, he has fully embraced the music-video aesthetic. In an online rehearsal on a sweltering afternoon, candles flickered in the background as he stood in his living room in South Orange, N.J., a guitar slung across his chest.
His wife, the actor Michelle Federer, used a smartphone to record him in a folk-rock interpretation of his chosen song, while Telsey watched over Zoom, requesting camera angles and a touch of home redecoration.
With the air conditioning off for sound reasons, Butz joked about sweating like Iggy Pop, and wished Oliver Stone could take charge of the shoot, which had gotten more complex than expected.
“You come face to face with your limited tech abilities, man,” he said. “It’s very humbling.”
Casting is ‘political’
One central element of “Miscast” has the potential to be fraught, particularly when identity politics and representation are under urgent discussion in the theater and beyond.
The show always pushes boundaries of age, race and gender, and Telsey said part of the point is to shake up preconceptions — even as entertainment is the primary goal. There is no agenda to it, he emphasized, other than fun.
Yet as Soo put it: “Casting inherently is always kind of political.”
Adrienne Warren, who was starring in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” when Broadway shut down, learned that lesson early. She was only 10 when she got the title role in a local Virginia production of “Annie,” and some people objected because she was Black.
The upbeat, classic show tune that she chose at Telsey’s suggestion for “Miscast” is no mismatch for her high-wattage talent, and at 33 she is arguably not too young for it. Warren noted, though, that “a woman that looks like me wouldn’t necessarily be seen as a first choice in casting” the role in the show it comes from.
Its overwhelmingly white casting history isn’t the reason, though, that she considers it political for her to sing the song in this “very, very dark time.”
“This song brings me a lot of joy,” she said, “and right now Black joy is a political act. Me choosing to perform right now is a statement, because I didn’t want to sing for a minute.”
Asked when that ended, she said: “Oof. It’s still kind of happening.” Had she been on the fence about doing “Miscast”? “Yep,” she answered, instantly.
“The first people we go to when something goes wrong in our world are our artists,” Warren said. “We go to them and say, ‘Make us feel better.’ And I wasn’t feeling good. So many of us weren’t feeling quite ourselves.”
Still, she is encouraged by the shift in consciousness that she sees taking place, and the conversations happening around race and identity. While she plans to hold the theater world accountable for its systemic issues, she said she is hopeful that when it comes back, casting agencies, too, will be “looking at things in a different way, widening their lenses.”
A song for brighter days
Headley, in Chicago, was still in what she called “complete lockdown” when she recorded her “Miscast” number, and she had plenty of emotional fodder — the coronavirus, “what was going on in the streets,” the place the song holds in her history. She sang it barefoot, “toes gripping the earth.”
She had never touched the song before except in her dressing room, singing along as a co-star performed it onstage. When Telsey suggested it, she felt her stomach churn, thinking it could be a brilliant idea, or a really, really bad one.
In her hands, it becomes a depth-plumbing journey, rising out of desolation with the assurance of brighter days — a message that she said she needs pumped into her “like air” when she wakes up in the morning in 2020.
She imagines an essential worker getting home, stripping off their mask, putting their feet up, finding pleasure and maybe a moment of peace in a video she shot herself.
“I’m just going to bring my house to your house,” Headley said. “You can sit with no shoes, and I’ll sit with no shoes, and we’ll have a little ‘Miscast’ party.”
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