Track-by-Track Breakdown: Adam Gwon Tells Us How Theatre Heals in All the World's a Stage

Hello, Playbill universe! I’m delighted to share this track-by-track commentary on the All the World’s a Stage original cast recording, just released and available wherever you stream your music (listen here).

The cast and music team from our premiere at Keen Company last spring reunited in October to record the album at Power Station Studios, with the wonderful label Joy Machine Records. We were so lucky to be joined by music legend Neal Avron, who led the charge alongside myself, Michelle Noh, and music director Andrea Grody as co-producers to bring this album from the studio to your ears.

All the World’s a Stage takes place in 1996 and tells the story of Ricky (Matt Rodin), a gay high school teacher who knows what part he has to play in his rural Pennsylvania town. That is, until an offbeat student, Sam (Eliza Pagelle) enlists his help to win the 1996 State Thespian Competition. The prize? A scholarship, and her ticket out. When Sam’s monologue puts them in the crosshairs of a local church, Ricky finds his job under threat and is caught between his friendship with school secretary Dede (Elizabeth Stanley) and his romance with bookstore owner Michael (Jon-Michael Reese). Ricky is determined to preserve his carefully constructed life and get Sam the future she desperately needs—but the only way to rescue Sam may be to risk it all and show her she’s not alone.

I’m extra delighted to be writing this commentary because of an unspoken truth in the theatre world: not every new musical is guaranteed to get a cast recording. I’m grateful to the brilliant team whose belief in this piece never flagged, and who worked tirelessly so we can share this album with you now!

READ: In Keen Company's All the World's a Stage, Big Emotions Come From Small Moments

1. “Overture”

I was enamored with having an Overture, because an overture feels like its own little love letter to the theatre. And it means you’ve got tunes that are melodic enough for the instrumental treatment! I wrote a much longer version—like, a full-on Gypsy-esque extravaganza—that everyone went gaga for when I played it in rehearsal. Well…everyone except for Michael Starobin, our orchestrator. He loved the medley, but cautioned that with our small band it’d be a challenge for it to live up to my grand, Bernstein-at-the-podium dreams. “I’ll do it if you want…” he said, in true Starobin fashion. But of course, he was right, and matching the concept of the overture to our players let us start with a bang and a shimmer and still set the right tone for the show. Like the Gypsy overture, though, it does establish the evening’s main musical theme—the figure of descending fourths that drives the second half of the track. More on that later…

2. “Saturday Night in a Small Auditorium”

This song is all about that rare, magical moment when you see a show and feel like it is speaking directly and only to you. My most vivid experience of this was seeing the first preview of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation when it premiered at Playwrights Horizons. There’s a moment at the end of the play where, over the course of a very slow light cue, you realize that time is passing, and a character has grown up right before your eyes. I remember watching this and feeling completely arrested, like I’d been transported to this space where the only things that existed were me and this play. When I was dropped back into the real world, I felt so much more connected to the universe, and to my fellow humans. This song starts in a plain-spoken way—mundane descriptions of an auditorium, lilting in folky 3/4 time—but as it builds to Ricky’s transportive moment, the chords get more complex, and the meter stretches into 4/4, as if the universe is opening up and time itself slows down. I’m not sure what initially inspired the unusual use of second-person narration here, but it stuck. It makes the audience feel like an intimate part of the action, while at the same time painting Ricky as an outsider in his community (something I think music and musicals can do so well).

3. “Pieces, Together”

I wanted to capture an experience that feels familiar to me as a queer person: the mental calculus that happens when you meet someone, or enter a new environment, and have to suss out how much of yourself is safe to share. In life, this is a split-second, instinctual analysis. But the beauty of musical theatre songs is they can zoom in and reveal the minutiae inside a character’s head! Importantly, I wanted the music of this song to be fun. This isn’t something Ricky has shame about, it’s just how life is (true now and even more true in a small town in 1996). Through the boppy pop groove, Ricky makes a game out of it, even delights in the way he strategizes and constructs his persona. (The fun Matt Rodin has with this is palpable—check out the Playbill exclusive making-of video for an even bigger sense of it!) This is Ricky’s “I Want” song, of course, but it also sets up his status quo: a carefully calibrated way of living that each of the other characters is about to complicate, big time.

4. “Typecast”

Before we made the album, if you’d asked me which tracks would be my favorite listens, I don’t know if “Typecast” would have made the top 5—but this has low-key become one of my faves, thanks to Eliza Pagelle’s pitch-perfect performance and the infectious energy of Michael’s orchestrations. This is the song that introduces us to Sam. I’m fascinated by teenagers who carry themselves with swagger but at the same time are obviously still figuring out who they are. I was trying to capture that here—right away, there’s a confidence to the groove, but little things are off-kilter, unsteady: Sam’s vocal immediately shifts the chords away from the tonic of the key; every now and then her phrases extend the meter by an odd beat. In the first draft of the show, we met Sam through a different number—an extended sequence that followed her through a day at school and landed her in detention, where “Typecast” takes place. My brilliant friend Kate Wetherhead came to that first reading and said, “I don’t think you need that number—meeting Sam in detention tells us everything we need to know about her.” Pro-tip: if you’re writing a musical, invite your brilliant friends to your readings to give you notes!

5. “Dinner”

There’s one song in every show that feels like it comes out of nowhere as an audience favorite—and “Dinner” was that song in All the World’s a Stage! To my writer brain, this song is incredibly functional—a hopefully witty spin on the great tradition of “conditional love songs,” where two characters try to resist the inexorable forces of love drawing them together. Ricky and Michael get a meet-cute, and their romance, in our eyes, is off to the races. Jon-Michael’s performance sparkles with playfulness, and I’m always taken by the way he navigates the soaring swell of the bridge. It’s very me—the music gets lush and lyrical while he’s singing about things as ordinary as pizza and beer. I guess when you write love songs, you reveal the ways into your own heart!

6. “Someone Found the Words”

When I read plays in high school, it felt like magic when a playwright was able to articulate something I was thinking and feeling but didn’t have the words for. Ricky sings about encountering a part of himself that’s named for the first time in a piece of art—and it’s my sly, secret hope that the song does that same thing for the audience listening to it. This song has taken on new resonance for me in our current political moment. All the World’s a Stage was inspired in part by the conversations about LGBTQ teachers and what aspects of their humanity can and cannot be shared in the classroom. Calls for censorship, and the erasure of minority identities and the art that reflects them have only become more blatant since. (As I type this paragraph, there’s a fresh New York Times headline about the Trump administration’s removal of a pride flag and references to trans people from the National Stonewall Monument.) This song became a reminder that art plays a powerful role in affirming our lived experiences, in a world that wants to make us feel like we’re alone.

7. “Saturday Night in a Small Auditorium (reprise)”

This reprise caps the scene of Ricky and Michael’s first date. Originally they had a whole duet here, but people responded so much to their earlier song “Dinner,” that another number developing their relationship felt redundant. The audience was already on board and rooting for their love story. (There’s the power of a conditional love song for ya.) My favorite part is the glorious string line that Michael Starobin wrote while Sam sings about the sky and the clouds and the traffic lights. It traces the contour of the rolling piano part I wrote in such a beautiful way. At one point Michael cut that string line because he felt it competed too much with the lyric. While I deeply appreciate an orchestrator with lyrics on his mind, I forced him to put it back. That string line makes me feel what the lyric is trying to say.

8. “I’m Your Man”

How do you put a big production number into a show with only four actors? You write a song like “I’m Your Man” and pray you have someone like Jon-Michael Reese to pull it off. JM’s performance of this was an athletic display of showmanship that brought down the house every night. I loved the idea of putting a gay ol’ spin on a genre like honky-tonk. JM’s take on that opening “Yee-haw” cracks me up every time and sets the tone perfectly. In the scene before this, Ricky is taken to task by the principal at his school after Sam—unbeknownst to him—finds and performs a monologue from Angels in America. When it becomes clear that being openly gay could cost him his job, Ricky chooses to hide to save his place at the school. “I’m Your Man” is meant to be a vision of a different kind of life, one that Michael embodies with ease. It’s not lost on Ricky that this exuberance happens after-hours at a closed bookstore amongst friends (“It’s a gay speakeasy in here,” he remarks) but it’s also the kind of uninhibited existence that Ricky feels, as a teacher, is impossible—even dangerous.

9. “Other Lives”

“Other Lives” is a song I rescued from another project that died on the vine—something I don’t do very often, because my songs feel so specific to the shows I write them for. But this one found its way in seamlessly, albeit with a totally different context and, of course, a bunch of rewrites. I could wax poetically about how much I love Eliza’s performance (The way she giggles with the string tremolo in the second verse? Come on.) and Michael’s masterful orchestration, but I’m just gonna shut up and let you enjoy them for yourself.

10. “Pieces, Together (reprise)”

I went back and forth on whether to include this track on the album, but landed on YES for two reasons. One, even though listeners unfamiliar with the show might not grasp the specifics, it provides a bit of a story link between “Other Lives” and “The Show Must Go On”—a sense that the vulnerability Sam shares causes Ricky to take action. (In the show, the scene before makes it clear that Sam is wrestling with her own queer identity, and “this life” she finds herself in is one that doesn’t allow for that to exist.) Second, this short piece is actually a crucial development in Ricky’s musical character arc—his mantra from “Pieces, Together” is sung against the central motif of those descending fourths, mow featured as his accompaniment. Hmm, something is shifting… More on this later, I promise!

11. “The Show Must Go On”

And here we have the second production number of the show! This, obviously, references the razzle-dazzle of old-school musical theatre numbers—a metaphor for the performance Ricky puts on as his maneuvers between life in and out of school spiral into outright deception. What’s fun about a genre reference like this is there’s a solid foundation to build off in all kinds of musically and dramaturgically interesting ways. See, for instance, the wild journey of chromaticism the band goes on when Dede’s and Michael’s voices enter Ricky’s head, or the unbearably long final note the actors belt until they nearly collapse. Patrick McCollum’s choreography did an amazing job at capturing this idea through the actors’ physicality as well—truly a classic musical theatre number gone bonkers, with Ricky trying his hardest to hold it all together. It was a thrill to watch, I think because it felt satisfying as both an old-school showbiz number, and a commentary undermining that very convention.

12. “Mirrors”

I find it so hard to write anthems. I’m jealous of my friends who can dash off these empowering songs that don’t come across as total cheeseballs. I knew “Mirrors” wanted to be an anthemic moment, and that I had to find my own way into it. Usually this notion of “mirrors” is just about seeing a reflection of ourselves—but haven’t you met people who are so authentic their very presence lets you see yourself more clearly? They themselves are a kind of mirror. It takes courage to be a mirror, and we need more of them. This song went through a bunch of different endings—there was a big show-stopping one, which felt like we were selling it too hard, and a very plain one that felt like a letdown. We found something in the middle by using a gentler vocal arrangement but inserting some tension through those final surprising chords.

13. “I Don’t Ask”

I always knew Dede would have a song called “I Don’t Ask.” It’s a nod to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” mentality of the time, but also—I think prejudices show up in our closest relationships as silence more often than outright hostility or violence. A parent who ignores a part of their child’s life, or a child who fears rejection and bottles everything up. So much is lost in that silence. This song is essentially a prayer, and musically it’s much more open than Ricky’s songs. Dede is a person who looks outward to God for answers; she is searching the spaces within the chords. Ricky’s search, on the other hand, folds inward, notes clustering around themselves more tightly. It was a special joy to build this song on Elizabeth Stanley. She can do anything vocally and is such a curious, insightful actor that I just wanted to support her choices musically as much as I could. One rewrite came from a dinner with one of our producers, Michelle Noh. Originally, the song didn’t have the key change at the end, but Michelle noticed that Elizabeth was essentially playing a key change—this incredible moment of arrival and discovery and anguish in that last chorus. It was a brilliant insight, and I immediately added one in—one that takes a gnarly harmonic path just to modulate up a step! But that was my response to Elizabeth’s performance—a musical portrait of Dede’s “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” as it were.

14. “Part of Me (Part 1)”

This is Ricky’s “11 o’clock number” and has my favorite key change in the show. I’m a little obsessed with how key changes can be used to help tell a story. Is the character causing the key change? Or does it come from outside, forcing the character to respond? The key change at 2:43 tells a very specific story. Ricky’s singing a D sharp and holds onto it as the key modulates and it (technically) becomes an E flat—which is the same note, just in a different harmonic context. To me, Ricky is standing his ground as he holds that D sharp, and when the key shifts underneath his feet, he stays strong. In fact, he forces the world to pivot around him for once—into the key of E flat—rather than the other way around. It’s also the moment Ricky enters uncharted territory, a feeling captured by the fact that before the modulation, we’re in the key of E major, and everything about the dominant B major chord under the word “broken” makes us think we’re going to resolve back to the E major chord. But we actually shift into E flat, which is kind of surprising. But it makes sense for Ricky: by staying true to himself, he’s forced his world into a new and unexpected place.

15. “Part of Me (Part 2)”

Here’s where I make good on my promise to talk more about the show’s central musical motif: that figure of descending fourths. It appears all over the score, from the overture on down. Ricky is a character who keeps certain things unsaid depending on the situation he’s in. It’s his M.O., and also the thing he has to let go. I wanted to find a musical metaphor for this aspect of Ricky’s journey, and it’s this figure of fourths. You hear it a lot, often at crucial moments; it’s a part of Ricky’s musical vocabulary. And yet, it doesn’t have any words to it—until this moment. I hope the words finally reveal what Ricky has wanted to do the whole musical, but hasn’t been able to until now: “I share my joy.”

16. “Finale: Saturday Night in a Small Auditorium”

There’s an Easter egg in this finale for all you Ordinary Days fans: did you catch the name of Dede’s nephew? We never meet him in the show, but we hear a lot about him. And well, now you’ve got an origin story—and a second musical in the “Ordinary Days Theatrical Universe”! Maybe one day there’ll be a third…