Supervising Jersey Boys
Musical Production Supervisor, Richard Hester, Talks Pioneering an International Position
In March of 2021, I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, soon-to-be college graduate from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), who was eager to know about any and all theatrical career opportunities. In my theatre department, I heard whispers about jet-setting from one continent to another maintaining hit shows in a mysterious field called production supervision. Like any strategic member of Generation Z, I turned to Google for more information.
Unfortunately, my query stumped the world’s favorite search engine. Apparently, production supervisors are so unique that limited information exists about what these incredibly talented people do. I was determined to find out more about these unsung heroes who are credited with keeping worldwide musicals consistent. After all, they ensure the shows we love remain the way remember, despite who is in them and where they might be playing.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the privilege of sitting down with the international production supervisor of the critically acclaimed musical Jersey Boys (2005) by Bob Gaudio, Bob Crewe, Marshall Brickman, and Rick Elice.
Cue Richard Hester.
This exceptional artist is not only a successful supervisor for several other popular theatrical productions including Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (2018) and Matters of the Heart (2000). He is also a widely recognized stage manager for groundbreaking shows like The Karate Kid: The Musical (2022), Bernadette Peters: A Special Concert for Broadway Barks Because Broadway Cares (2009), Gypsy (2003), Sweet Smell of Success (2002), and Annie Get Your Gun (1999). Likewise, he’s a followed blogger on Posts from the Upper West Side (2020), and the highly praised author of Hold, Please: Stage Managing A Pandemic (2022).
After revisiting our Zoom interview over a year later, I wanted to transcribe and share the details of his profession, especially when situated against the backdrop of a pandemic.
SHELBY HELENE BECKER: How exactly did you become a production supervisor?
RICHARD HESTER: The weird thing about production supervision is that it isn’t a job. I mean it doesn’t actually exist. There’s no template for it. It’s not covered by a union, we [production supervisors] create what the job actually is. From show to show, it’s different what that job ends up being. The job only comes into play when you get on a show that’s a big enough hit that it starts spawning other companies.
We’ve started preliminary work on a new musical that’s based on the movie The Karate Kid (1984). It’s a beautiful little show. We’ve done a workshop of it and we’re going to do a couple more workshops this year, but I’m going to be the production stage manager. At some point down the line, if the show is successful and gets one more company, I would probably help set that up and then go back to being the stage manager of the Broadway company. If it starts spawning shows internationally or in other places around the country, then I’d likely become the production supervisor.
In Jersey Boys, there was originally an associate director and an assistant director. Bill Fennelly was the associate when we were in La Jolla and Holly-Anne Ruggiero was the assistant. After we closed in La Jolla, Bill either got a job or was looking for a job to be a director on his own. So, Des [McAnuff] hired Broadway director, Alex Timbers. Holly-Anne sort of became associate director and I was the production stage manager. After the show opened, we started a national tour, which Holly-Anne (more or less) directed and I (more or less) teched. What would happen is we would put the show together, get it up to a point where we got to tech, and then as we got through it, Des—the real director—would come in for final touches.
Right after we did the national tour, I was supposed to go back to the Broadway company, but the producers came to me and said, “We’re about to do a company in London and Las Vegas. So, it’s not fair to the Broadway company to keep taking you in and out. We’re going to put you on a regular salary, and you’re just going to do these shows as they come up.” That was what happened for fifteen years. We had to do London and Las Vegas at exactly the same time because they were still building the theatre in Las Vegas.
SHB: How?!
HESTER: The Producers had never worked with a production supervisor before and they didn’t know what they did. Holly-Anne, at some point early on, left. Under English directors (including Canadians and Australians), stage managers just tech and associate directors take care of the companies, the casts, the actors giving notes etc. There are two people doing that job. In the United States, for the most part, the production stage manager does both things. They know the show. That’s what I was used to.
So, we hired another associate director named West Hyler. West took over the direction, but that took a year. At that time, I was maintaining the show in New York.
SHB: Were you strictly production stage managing before Holly-Anne left?
HESTER: I was strictly PSMing and setting up these companies. Right away, Des came in and saw the Broadway show. Holly-Anne left literally after about six months of the run. So, we’re now a year in and Des said, “Who’s maintaining this?” He had been so busy working on other projects, he was like, “Oh my god. There’s no assistant director here.”
I said, “I’ve been doing it.”
“You’ve been doing a good job. Keep doing it.”
If that hadn’t happened, I’m not sure I ever would have been allowed to work with the actors in the way that I ended up working with them. There was a lot of luck in creating my job.
When we hired West, he directed the actors and I set them up. After that, I would then travel from city to city every six weeks or so and note the actors. I was allowed to note them at that point. West would go off and do some other projects. I was still under contract full-time, so my job was to then maintain all these different companies—maintain the actors as well as the technical end of it.
Every six weeks or so, I’d be in Toronto, London, Las Vegas, or whatever and I would just keep circling around all these companies. There were so many, it was truly a full-time job. I would wake up and have no idea what city I was in. I would go, “Oh, yes! Chicago!”
SHB: West was the resident director for just about every company then. Is that true?
HESTER: He was the resident director for every company at that point. When we did the South African company (which was the last one West directed) it was weird. It was a South African cast. We rehearsed them in Johannesburg, but then we teched and opened the show in Singapore at Marina Bay Sands. We teched and opened the South African cast in the Singapore theatre, ran there for about three months, and then we moved that company back to Johannesburg where they finally performed in South Africa. Then, in Cape Town.
Sixteen Americans had to be flown to Singapore to tech and open the show. In travel alone, it cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars. After we opened it, there was this whole discussion about how we do this cheaper. I thought, “We can do this with six people. I can direct and tech the next one with the associate choreographer, the associate lighting designer, the associate sound designer, the wardrobe supervisor, and the music supervisor.” I went to Des and presented this idea.
“Well, who’s going to direct it?”
“I will.”
“Can you?”
“I think I can.”
“Okay, well you’ve earned a shot. Have at it!”
The first production we did with this new group was in Utrecht, Holland. I had to put my money where my mouth was and direct the entire company. The songs were in English, but the script was in Dutch. Luckily, I could direct in English because everyone understood English. I found that I knew the show so well by that point (we’d done so many companies of it), I could tell if they [the actors] were in the right place emotionally. Acting is acting, whether you’re speaking gibberish or speaking English. I could tell what was going on. It was incredibly nerve-racking for about two or three days and then it was like, “Oh, I got this. I can do this.”
I directed the show and everybody was very appreciative and liked it. So, I directed every company since then.
SHB: What happened to West?
HESTER: West wanted his own career. He never wanted to be stuck as the associate director. Rather than hiring another resident director, I said, “I can do that job too.” I worked out a deal with the producers where I got a base salary, regardless of where I was or what I was doing, even if I was doing nothing. Throughout most of that time, I was on a Broadway Equity contract as a stage manager (just not listed as one), which was great because I got health insurance, pension, welfare, etc. Then, I got an additional payment for each company that I was working on.
Now with Jersey Boys, all the companies are much smaller. There’s an Off-Broadway company, there’s a national tour, and there’s an installation on the Norwegian Cruise Line. I’m in charge of those three. They’ve all worked exactly the same. We originally started out with The Four Seasons, plus six (Broadway) or seven (first national tour) guys, who played all the other parts. When we moved to Off-Broadway and the current national tour, we had to cut down. The associate choreographer [Danny Austin] and I figured out how to do the show with only four other guys, besides The Four Seasons.
SHB: That’s a tight cast!
HESTER: It was a tight cast, but we were also in a very tight space. There really wasn’t room for more people than that, nor was it cost-effective to hire that many people. Then, the real choreographer and director came in and gave their approval for it.
When we did the Norwegian Cruise Line, we had to cut out the intermission and a half-hour or more of material so that the show was contained within a two-hour period. I did the initial cut and went to the music supervisor [Ron Melrose] asking, “How do we make this work?” because the whole show was underscored. We tried to not cut songs. Ron and I did all of the cuts, put it all together, and then we performed the show for Des to get his notes and approval. Then, Danny and I staged it on the ship to look like Jersey Boys, minus the stuff that was cut out.
Des remained busy throughout all of the fifteen years. He didn’t have time to do this stuff. Sergio Trujillo, the choreographer, was doing Memphis (2011), Ain’t Too Proud (2019), etc. He was busy too. It was a happy confluence of events that led me to my job. I never would have been allowed to do everything that I did on Jersey Boys if all of those things didn’t happen at the same time.
SHB: It does sound serendipitous.
HESTER: Very serendipitous, but I was also aware enough of what was going on to take advantage of that serendipity. I tried to do something similar when I was the PSM on the national tour of Wicked (2005). I tried to position myself there and it didn’t work.
In the thirty or forty years they’d been operating, they [the producers] had never had a hit as big as Jersey Boys and they didn’t really know what they were doing. At one point, the general manager and I were sitting in the front row teching somewhere. There was some problem, and the production carpenter came up to me and said, “This just happened. What should we do?”
“Why don’t we do what we did in Chicago? Then, at the end of it we can switch over to what we did on the second national,” I said.
“Oh, yeah! That makes sense.”
The general manager added, “Good! I just saw what I’m paying money for. I just saw why this is a good idea.”
Within the head carpenter and me was a library of information about this show and how to solve problems. What might have stopped the show for two solid days, we worked around in seconds. We’d had the experience of having stuff like that happen before.
In London, we hire a local resident director to take care of the show because I can’t be over there all the time. In fact, as the show went on, I was over there less and less. I started out being in London every six weeks and I ended up being there maybe twice a year. So, the resident director really had to know what they were doing. When there were problems, the resident director only had the experience of what he had seen and the London productions. Whereas, I could come in and say, “Well we did this in Vegas, and we did this on Broadway, so do that. This thing over here can be fixed the way we fixed it in Singapore.”
SHB: At what point were you officially promoted to production supervisor? When did you pass over the reins to other resident directors, since you can’t be everywhere at once?
HESTER: The second I didn’t go back to the Broadway company, I became production supervisor. Even when I wasn’t directing them, I was still a production supervisor. There are plenty of production supervisors who only supervise the technical end of a production. Sometimes, there is a negotiation that has to happen over the title itself. I wanted the title. I mean, I really wanted that to be my title. Sometimes the production supervisor on a show is the technical supervisor. So, I was lucky enough that the technical supervisor for Jersey Boys called himself that. The title was up for grabs to negotiate. Now there’d been times overseas where their technical supervisor is called the production supervisor, so they have called me the associate director. I’ve been billed in some companies as the associate director and others as the production supervisor.
SHB: Are you still very active in directing these companies?
HESTER: Oh, yes. The three companies that are out now, I directed. The ship, the tour, and Off-Broadway. Des McAnuff gets credit as the real director, but Des has never ever seen the tour. It’s been out for four or five years now—this version of the tour. He’s never laid eyes on it. What’s happened over these fifteen years is that he trusts me enough to where he doesn’t feel like he needs to [see it]. He’ll say, “Is it good?”
“This part of it is good. This part could use some adjustments, but I don’t know how to adjust it.”
He’ll then come in. I have enough ego to where I’m proud of what I’ve done, but not so much ego that whatever I do and whatever I fix [I know] it’s still Des’s production. I’m still working for him. I’ve never gotten “official credit” for any of it. I have made money in my negotiations with the producers directly (not based on any union requirement). Even resident directors aren’t really covered by SDC or by Actors’ Equity.
We’re almost the only people in the building, not under a union contract. As we move forward, this is going to change. There’s going to be an attempt, I think, to figure out exactly what the production supervisor’s job is and come up with some sort of base pay. The production supervisor of An American in Paris (2015) [Dontee Kiehn]called me and asked, “How do I do this? I’m about to be the production supervisor.” Matt DiCarlo, who is now the production supervisor of Beetlejuice (2019) called me and said, “What do I ask for? How do I do it?” I was coached by Peter Lawrence. I then took what Peter told me, adjusted it, and did something different for Jersey Boys. So when those guys call me and ask, “What should I do?” I give them what I did, but I always try and emphasize that their circumstances are not going to be the same as mine. Dontee, who’s a supervisor of An American in Paris, is a dancer more than she is a stage manager, but it’s a dance musical. I don’t know that Dontee can do the technical end of the supervision at all. I don’t know that she has that skill set.
I’m weirdly in a position of being able to do the acting and technical parts. Most other supervisors that I know are doing one or the other. Basically, they’re either associate directing or they’re technical supervising. My job is very weirdly doing both.
Also, Phantom of the Opera (1986), does not move the associates overseas. There’s a British person, who does the British and Australian companies (originally), and an American person, who does Canada, the United States, and Mexico. They have multiple supervisors on multiple continents. Whereas, I’m still the only supervisor of Jersey Boys on all continents. We’ve done Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. I’ve been the supervisor for all of them.
SHB: What does a typical day look like for you? What hard and soft skills do you find yourself using often?
HESTER: These days, I spend a lot of my time in casting. Because of maritime law, everybody in the company: cast, crew, musicians, everybody, has to be fully replaced every six months. The weird thing about Norwegian Cruise Line is that they don’t have to be American. You can cast internationally because the shows happen in international waters. So, someone who is an American member of Actors’ Equity can be cast as easily as somebody from Thailand. It doesn’t make any difference.
Day to day, my schedule is radically different. I am, however, very busy. Some days, I’ll spend the entire day casting in New York for Norwegian Cruise Line from about 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. I will then have to go and watch the Off-Broadway company to give notes. Some days, I’ll just be casting. The week before we closed down, we were casting Norwegian Cruise Line in London. We were casting by day, and I was going to see shows at night.
A year ago today, I got back from my last trip to London for casting. We were in the process this week, a year ago, doing four days of casting in New York. The first four days of the week were casting for Norwegian Cruise Line. Then with a completely different casting team on the fifth day, we were scheduled to do auditions to replace a single actor in the Off-Broadway company. There was a casting associate, who coordinated the casting for Norwegian Cruise Line, and a completely different one who has done all of the American companies of Jersey Boys. Then, we had a British casting agent who did London, an Australian one who did Australia, a Dutch one who did Holland, etc. I just happened to end up, the fifteen years of my run with Jersey Boys thus far, with a full two weeks of casting.
We were touring the show and having trouble with our automation, so I was about to go out for the installation of a whole new system on part of the show. It would need to be reprogrammed to match the speeds and look of the other ones. Because it was different machinery, stuff was going to move differently and they couldn’t just replicate it. They needed my eye to come in and say, “Make that faster,” even though it wasn’t as fast the last time. It’ll look better if it goes faster with this new machinery. My job is always to try and make it look like Jersey Boys. Danny and I always feel like we’ve been successful if no one notices. If people stay in the story, [we succeeded].
What does my day look like? It’s radically different. There are times when I am on a cruise ship in the Bahamas, there are times when I’m in a dingy little rehearsal studio listening to people sing fifty songs, and there are times when I’m teching in an audience. It’s just completely different—all over the place.
SHB: Is it challenging to be constantly problem-solving?
HESTER: The longest I’d ever run the same show, as a stage manager, was two years. I was on the road with Phantom for two years, I did Annie Get Your Gun and Gypsy on Broadway for just under two years, etc. By the time all of those were done, I was ready to go. After about eighteen months, I start thinking, “Okay, I need to get out of here. The most I can last is another six months.”
I’d been doing Jersey Boys since 2004. It’s been sixteen years (seventeen, really, with a year off). The only reason why is because the work is different every single day. I never could have been a stage manager for seventeen years.
SHB: As production supervisor, how do you feel about working with all of the different PSMs?
HESTER: They’re different all over the world and so are the rules. In the beginning, we try to make everybody do what we do. I insisted on being in the discussion of who the PSM was, but it wasn’t until about four years into London that I realized it didn’t matter who the PSM was. All of the scheduling is done by the company manager and all of the artistic maintenance is done by the resident director. The stage manager only takes care of the show technically. The company manager will schedule understudy rehearsals, which is usually the stage manager’s job. I realized that it actually doesn’t matter who the stage manager is. South Africa has about six stage managers on every show, but all of them also do set changes. On Broadway, you’re not allowed to do that. In South Africa, the line between stage manager and crew is extremely blurry. There is somebody who is in charge, but the resident director is taking care of the cast. The stage manager is just taking care of the crew, really.
I realized that I need forty-two hours of everybody in costume on stage to tech and open the show, including run-throughs. I said, “I don’t care when your breaks are, how long the days are, I need forty-two hours of everybody in clothes, so tell me how many days that is.” In the United States, we can do that in nine days. In Australia, it took us fourteen days to get everybody working and not on break.
In each company, I would train whoever it was that was going to look over the actors. In the United States, it would be the stage manager. In other countries, it was almost always the resident director. We never hired a resident director in the United States or North America. Problems come up every day that need solving, and somebody has to be able to do it. I had to get each of these people up to speed.
Now, I can actually hand somebody a list of Plan B’s. This is how you do a show without automation, this is how you do a show when this is broken, this is how you do a show when that is broken, etc. We’ve come up with almost all of it. I can literally hand over a reference tool that’s a book for how to get out of problems. When something new happens, which it invariably does, then it can be added to the survival guide.
SHB: What was the training process like for resident directors in other countries? Did they shadow you?
HESTER: We would go over a couple of months beforehand, like in South Africa, and do auditions. That’s when I met the resident director there. He sat in on auditions with me. Interestingly enough, I did the auditions, but West Hyler did the direction when we came back a couple of months later.
The resident director of the UK Tour, which I directed, sat in on all of the auditions with me. Plus, London was still running. Even though the tour was different from London, she could get familiar enough with the show and how it worked by watching London.
SHB: I know you were also the production supervisor of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical and Matters of the Heart. How have those experiences been similar or different when compared to Jersey Boys?
HESTER: Summer is the same director, choreographer, music director—basically the same team. Originally, Jersey Boys was starting to slow down, so I stage-managed the workshop of Summer thinking I would then go to La Jolla with it as the stage manager. As Jersey Boys was filtering away, I would then start working on Summer. After the workshop of Summer, we got five new productions of Jersey Boys. Completely accidental. I mean, none of them were planned. Norwegian Cruise Line just came in. Suddenly, I got extremely busy with Jersey Boys again.
I had just enough time, in the beginning, to get it up and running in La Jolla before I had to go and get on the ship to dry tech Jersey Boys there. The ship was built in a place called Eemshaven, which is in the northern part of Holland—almost near the German border on the North Sea. It was literally being built, so we had to tech on the ship as they finished building it. I was supposed to finish up Summer and go and dry tech that.
Well, Summer turned out to be monumentally complicated. Des said, “You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here.”
“But, I have to dry tech on the ship,” I said.
“Danny will have to do it.”
So, Danny had to dry tech and I had to talk him through what things looked like. I extended my stay in La Jolla until Summer opened. The stage manager took over and I went back [to Norwegian Cruise Line]. Then, we opened in New York and the exact same thing happened. I was told, “You have to come back and tech this in New York. Then, you can go back to Jersey Boys.”
Summer was so ridiculously complicated. I’m so glad I never had to call that show because there were 1,600 light cues. A lot of them were programmed together, so you only had to say go for the first one and then it flashed all over the place. I think the last cue of the evening was 1,695. I mean, it was disco. It was insane. There were elevators going up and down. It was possible to kill someone at any point over the course of the show very easily. It needed me to be in the house running the tech, so that the stage manager could fully concentrate on learning how to call the show. He [Andrew Neal] was a really good technical stage manager. He couldn’t do both though. He literally just couldn’t run the room and tech. It was just too hard.
SHB: What exactly did you do to run the room? What does that mean?
HESTER: He was at the call desk backstage and I was saying, “Okay, everybody hold. We need to go back and redo this again.” I was the one on the god mic saying, “Okay, let’s get back in place and start. Drew, are you ready?” Then, I would turn it over to him and he would start the show. I would call, “Hold, hold, hold, please. That didn’t work. Let’s go back.” I’ve worked with Des enough that he just has to slap me on the back and I know what he means.
As we were going through, I was teching as if I was stage managing. I was writing down the cues and figuring it out, but after a while it was like, “Okay, you’re leaving me in the dust. I’m going to trust that you get all the cues and you can give them to me later.” That’s kind of what I did there.
In amongst all of this, I started touring with Patti LuPone, which was what Matters of the Heart was. I was doing a play at the time that she was in, which was how I got to meet her. After the play finished its run (it was a David Mamet play called The Old Neighborhood [1997]), Patti called me and said, “The person who usually does my concerts isn’t available, could you do a couple of them?”
For about ten years I was touring with Patti in between other jobs or taking a weekend off from some other show, like Annie Get Your Gun or whatever, then going out and doing a concert with Patti. I was kind of her road manager and her stage manager. I would get the contract from her agent, liaise with all the individual concert venues to figure out everything that needed to happen in the rider to get it all set up, get there, do the lighting, set up the stage, call the show, etc. We would travel with her sound guy, who would set it up with me, and her wardrobe person, who would then take care of her dressing room and basically everything else backstage.
When Jersey Boys started, I really couldn’t do it because I was so busy I couldn’t take the time off. Patti needed the attention and I couldn’t give it to her. So, I gave that up and someone else took over, who had a baby last year and couldn’t keep touring. Since Jersey Boys was starting to be less and less, I could take over. I’m now touring with Patti. It’s changed a little bit, so that I’m really only stage-managing her. There’s a mutual friend of ours who’s acting as the company manager and road manager, who sets it up and takes care of her immediate personal needs. All I have to do now is go in. I still liaise with them technically, focus the lights, set up the stage, and take care of it.
Matters of the Heart was one of the concerts that Lincoln Center had us do. I can’t remember what show was playing at the time, but every Monday we’d do Matters of the Heart on that stage. We weren’t a run, really. We did it for about eight weeks over the summer or something like that. I just asked to be called production supervisor because I wanted the credit and because I was not strictly stage managing. There was other stuff on top of it.
Then, I also production supervised a company of West Side Story (2019) in Tokyo.
SHB: Did you experience a language barrier for that show?
HESTER: Everybody was Japanese. I didn’t have to call it. There was a Japanese caller, but I had to tech the whole thing and work out the timings of everything. So, I went over to Tokyo while they were still in rehearsal. I had to dry tech with the producer, who was from Holland and had been involved with Jersey Boys there. The other producer on it was a woman named Kumiko Yoshii. Kumiko is the producer of The Karate Kid musical, which is how I got on that.
I supervised this production of West Side Story and got it up and running. My husband [Michael Mastro] played Glad Hand and was also the associate director of it. He went back a couple of times because we started with an American cast and then, ultimately, replaced them with two Japanese casts. He went over to direct the two Japanese ones alongside a Japanese associate director. As opposed to Holland, where everybody spoke English, nobody spoke English. We had permanent translators who followed us around all over the place. We got to be very good friends with them.
SHB: So much of your job relies on effective communication to ensure everyone knows what’s going on. What’s that like when you have to go through translators?
HESTER: There were times when translators were not being accurate, which my husband experienced. The resident director ultimately got fired because she was trying to undermine him. She would try to translate things differently. It was all a mess.
I did a little bit of that myself because the Japanese have very strange break rules to us [Americans]. They need a twenty-minute break in the middle of something and then a fifteen-minute break in the middle of another. The director insisted that every break be ten minutes—it was a ridiculous waste of time for breaks to be longer than that. Regardless of what everybody in Japan was used to, they had to be ten minutes. The good thing was that he was always late coming back from breaks. On the god mic, I would say, “Ten minutes everybody. This is your ten-minute break.” Then, I’d look at the Japanese stage manager and I would flash my ten fingers two times, which would make him laugh. He’d then get on the god mic in Japanese and give everybody a twenty-minute break.
So, the American cast knew they were getting a twenty-minute break because I told them, “I’m going to say I’m giving you a ten-minute break, but it’s really a twenty-minute break.” The Japanese got their normal twenty-minute break, but if it looked like the director was getting antsy there was a directing assistant I would send over to distract him for the last few minutes. The Japanese were in on this. They all knew exactly what I was doing. We upheld all the Japanese rules. It looked like we were operating in an American way, but we absolutely weren’t.
SHB: He never looked at a clock?!
HESTER: He never did. That was my main job as production supervisor. That’s what happens in a lot of places, especially when you go overseas. I end up being the person that’s between that country and our country. How do we get the work done in the way we need to while operating under someone else’s rules? Every single country has different rules.
They even have different words for things. Our wardrobe supervisor is on the deck every day actually doing some changes. In England, the wardrobe supervisor never goes backstage. They take care of the costumes and never run it. I got to the point where I would ask, “Who does this job and what do you call them?” Sometimes a one-person job in one country would be a three-person job in another, but each of those three people would do parts of other people’s jobs. So, I would then have to create a document where I would say, “This is what person X does over here. If you have this problem, this is the person you need to go to.”
SHB: What’s next for you and Jersey Boys?
HESTER: Jersey Boys is going to open in some form or another. We’re going to open a new company in London when this is all over at a new theatre. I don’t know if I’m going to be involved with it because I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go over there. So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with that. The Norwegian Cruise Line keeps wanting to get it up sooner rather than later, but until the world is vaccinated I don’t see how cruising is going to start again.
In terms of my involvement with Jersey Boys, I don’t really know what the future holds. I’m sure I will be included on some level, but I really can’t tell. This year, we’re going to do more workshops of The Karate Kid musical, which would have me as the production stage manager not necessarily the supervisor. Although Kumiko, the producer, is involving me on a supervisory level. I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions about things and how they are going to work. So, we’ll see. It’s being directed by a Japanese director named Amon Miyamoto, and he is a very big deal in Japan.
It’s going to be very figurative and choreography-heavy with choreographers who are very avant-garde. So as Mr. Miyagi is showing him [Daniel] how to cut the bonsai, this whole line of dancers will be connected to Mr. Miyagi. When he moves his hand back they will all move their hands back. It’s not going to be a literal musical because I think there’s a certain amount of, “Oh god, really? Do we need another musical made out of a movie?” This is going to be a different thing though, I think. It’s going to be very interpretive, which is what excites me about it.
Since our interview, Jersey Boys continues on in 2022 with a US Tour, UK Tour, and London company. As for the supervisor and the Off-Broadway production, “Post 462” from Hester bids a proper farewell when he writes, “I am so proud to have been a part of the journey of Jersey Boys. I am beyond proud of the distance the people whose journey’s I have had a hand in have come.”
The staged production of The Karate Kid, however, is now Broadway-bound! Learn more about the show and how to see it with Hester’s expertise here.
