'On Stage', NY1's weekly theater show aired an interview with Raúl about his current show, 'The Resistible Rise of Arutro Ui'.

You can watch the segment below:

As part of the run of Arturo Ui, Raúl will join director, John Doyle, for a one night only conversation and concert looking back at his illustrious career.

The event, which takes place on Dec 9, will find Esparza performing songs from his previous credits, with music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell offering piano accompaniment.

Tickets (priced from $100-$150) can be purchased from the Classic Stage Company. 

Raúl Esparza's vibrant and diverse characterizations have earned him four Tony nominations in both musicals (Company, Taboo) and dramas (Speed-the-Plow, The Homecoming), while his Off-Broadway work runs the gamut from Jonathan Larson to Shakespeare. A six-year stint playing assistant district attorney Rafael Barba on TV's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit kept him off the boards, but now he's back as the title character in Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at Classic Stage Company. A ruthless, Richard III-style, '30s Chicago gangster obsessed with controlling the cauliflower trade, Ui is the dramatist's stand-in for Hitler in this satirical allegory about Nazi Germany -- though audiences will inevitably think about contemporary world leaders, too. (It's no coincidence that during the last presidential election, there were three revivals of the play running simultaneously in NYC!) Esparza chatted with TDF Stages about reuniting with his Company director John Doyle, how his musical theatre background came in handy with Brecht and why he's definitely not playing Trump.

Frank Rizzo: After the show, I overheard you telling some students about how you first encountered Brecht's plays when you were at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
Raúl Esparza: Brecht was one of those theoretical writers we were exposed to, but he didn't really appeal to me. My response at the time was, 'Oh, this is very cold theatre, very clever theatre.' I wanted to be an actor that swept you away, and I thought Brecht was often swallowed by the theory and the concepts that he introduced at the cost of audience engagement. Also, I was coming from a very specific political background, my family being Cuban immigrants. Growing up in Miami, there was nothing worse than communism, so the concepts of socialism and communism to me felt a little Pollyanna. Since then I've drunk the Kool-Aid, and I can't get over how many layers this play works on and how many colors it can encompass.

Rizzo: You haven't been on a New York stage in three years. Why did you decide to return in this role?
Esparza: Because it has something to say that, unfortunately, always seems to resonate in the world. Secondly, it was to work with John again. The play itself was maybe the third consideration.

Rizzo: How did you find your way into the role, given your earlier feelings about Brecht?
Esparza: That's tied up in the way John works. He lets you figure things out in the rehearsal room. He eases our way by doing scenes over and over and over again. It's almost rote repetition. You're not making decisions, you're not trying to achieve a result. You're just saying the lines again and again and again and that leads to a slow discovery of unexpected things. With John it's a process of eliminating, keeping what is most useful. You start really big and then find yourself pulling it in more and more and more until you find the one version that has the echoes of the other stuff you've played with.
John and I also looked at Francis Bacon's paintings, those tripped-out, screaming faces. There's something so essential about those images, and horrifying at the same time. What John is aiming for is, how do we find that? What is the gesture, what is that one thing that will make an audience go [Esparza lets out a strangled yell]? It doesn't sound like the most fun night in the theatre, but I think it's kind of thrilling.

Rizzo: Did you turn to any particular political figures for inspiration?
Esparza: I didn't go home and watch footage of Hitler or Trump or read about the Nazis. Sure, there's a way you can go with this play where it's all Trump Trump Trump Trump. But that seemed to me to be the wrong approach to take because it insults the audience's intelligence. People who are coming to this play know what they're in for. I don't think you casually go to see Brecht at CSC. What the play does assume is that the audience is very smart and will pick up the parallels without the cast having to hammer that in. Actually, the most useful thing I did to prepare for this was watch '30s gangster films, namely Public Enemy and Scarface, films Brecht would have seen and that he was riffing on. I can bring in lots of things and John will edit them and I trust him. Creating the big, bold Brechtian strokes is not my issue. It's the play's issue and it's John's. His goal is to present Brecht's vision as simply and as clearly as possible.
Rizzo: What has surprised you about the role?
Esparza: He's turned out to be a very different character than I thought. There's a vulnerability to him that fascinates me and that I didn't expect. The image that comes into my mind instead of Hitler is that of a stray dog that has been hit so much that he will love anyone who gives him kindness. But it becomes perverse and veers into a terrible place because he's fundamentally damaged and ferociously rabid.
Rizzo: Doyle's set design is minimalist yet powerful.
Esparza: John knew he wanted to have something that seemed like a detention center, like things we were seeing in the news where these [undocumented immigrant] families were being kept. He knew he wanted that wall, that fence that acts as a cage that separates the actors from the space and vice versa.
Rizzo: Do you think your experience in musicals came in handy when tackling Brecht?
Esparza: I think musical theatre performers have a leg up on the verse. We're not afraid of heightened language, how to speak on the line, how to breathe with the line. We know how to let rhythm take care of us and we can use one big breath to get one big idea across. Some of the most exciting people doing classical theatre tend to be people who can do musicals.
Rizzo: Many of your roles are in works that might be considered Brechtian in terms of their presentational style: Bobby in Company, Che in Evita, the Emcee in Cabaret. 
Esparza: Company was a very Brechtian production. Hal [Prince], Steve [Sondheim] and George [Furth] created something very strange for a musical, something iconoclastic. The characters don't address the audience but the play is constantly breaking and commenting on itself. Evita was über Brecht and so was Hal's staging with light curtains, negative images, coffins, banners and the audience fully seeing the machinery of theatre.
Rizzo: You've also done Mamet. Does that help with Brecht? Though Mamet's characters are naturalistic there's something heightened about them, too.
Esparza: It's an interesting comparison. I did think a lot about Speed-the-Plow for this. David's writing is bravura, it's like jazz and you're riffing with the other actors and it's about speed and the rush of language. And here there's a very similar pacing and a ferocious level of language.
Rizzo: But in the end, it's about the ideas of the play, no?
Esparza: I think Brecht wants to make an audience think deeply -- and be a little disturbed.

Arturo Ui had it's official opening night last night and the press were quick to follow with reviews. Check out some of the comments below...

The Classic Stage Company have today released several official production stills from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. There were 12 images released in total, 6 of them featuring Raúl .

These photos have been added to our Arturo Ui gallery, where you can also find photos of rehearsals, post show discussions and stage door as well as unofficial stage shots from fans, 

Chicago Shakespeare Theater has today announced that Raúl will lead William Shakespeare's Hamlet, staged by Artistic Director Barbara Gaines in at the Courtyard Theater, Chicago in 2019. 

Raúl takes on the iconic title role of a grief-stricken Prince of Denmark as he attempts to navigate his father's death, betrayal, and relationships torn asunder in one of the great masterworks of Western literature. 

Director, Gaines shared, "It's a joy to be able to create and celebrate Hamlet with Raúl-who was positively born to play this role. His natural charisma, never-ending curiosity, and generosity of spirit will fill our stage with wonder. The prospect of examining this story alongside such an outstanding artist is thrilling."

The show will run from April 17 to June 9, 2019, with further casting to be announced in the coming months. Tickets (priced from $48-$88 are available from the theatre website.

After months of downtime, Raúl's official website is back online with a brand new look. 

This interview originally appeared on TheaterMania on July 25, 2018

With a score by David Bucknam, this musical, based on a Virginia Woolf novel, resurfaces decades after it premiered.

Twenty-eight years ago, two young writers named David Bucknam and Lisa Peterson premiered The Waves, a musical inspired by the Virginia Woolf novel of the same title, at New York Theatre Workshop. It was a brief, warmly received run of 37 performances, and Bucknam earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for his work. He eventually got into teaching; Peterson went on to direct.

Bucknam took his own life at the age of 32 in 1998 under circumstances that Peterson still doesn't fully comprehend. But he left behind a legion of fans, friends, and students, two of whom are the composer-lyricist Adam Gwon, Bucknam's student at NYU, and the actor Raúl Esparza, his student at Playwrights Horizons. All three felt a certain amount of unfinished business, particularly when it came to The Waves, a musical that, for a time, only existed in memory, cassette tapes, and handwritten sheet music.
​
Now, this trio has revisited The Waves to give it the second life they knew it richly deserved. Currently running at New York Stage and Film and Vassar's Powerhouse Theater, it's being developed with Peterson directing, Gwon composing original music, and Esparza starring and providing creative consultation. It's a passion project for all involved.

Tell me the origin story of The Waves, both the original production and this one.
Lisa Peterson: I had read The Waves and thought it felt like a play. I did a 45-minute nonmusical adaptation of it as an intern at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, New York. I met David Bucknam and I cast him in that first version as Bernard, the part Raúl is playing now. David and I became best friends, and he said he wanted to make a musical out of it. At the time, I said it was a bad idea. I was being very strict with us. Everything the characters said had to be in Virginia Woolf's language.
​
He did it anyway, and Robert Moss, who was running the Hangar, heard a concert David gave and programmed it. That must have been 1984 or 1985. Jim Nicola, a friend of Robert Moss, had just taken over New York Theatre Workshop, and he said it and said, "let's do it in New York." It went very well and was received very enthusiastically by critics, but we never made a recording of it, and David and I kind of moved on from there.

​I started directing a lot, and David started teaching a lot, and then he got mysteriously ill. To this day, I don't really know what happened, but it did affect him psychologically. He took his own life in 1998. After that, Jim Nicola and Raúl and I started talking occasionally about bringing it back to life. We did a reading in 2000 at New York Theatre Workshop and nothing came of that.

Raúl Esparza: I wasn't part of the 2000 reading, but we always came up with the same idea: How are we supposed to do it without David? I had never seen the piece, but I heard a lot of music from it and had tapes that David made through the years of various readings.
​
Last summer, there was a big event honoring André Bishop at Lincoln Center. Afterwards, at the dinner, Bob Moss sat next to me and said, "Bring back The Waves." I called Lisa. We said we have to treat it as though it's a new musical. It is opening up a can of worms to work on a musical when the composer's not around. And we're not interested in "reviving" it.

Lisa: It felt like it needed to be matured. Sidebar: Before Raúl and I started talking about it, Adam Gwon had asked me to direct a workshop of his musical String. That's when I learned about the David connection for you.
​
Adam Gwon: I was studying performance at [NYU's] Tisch [School of the Arts]. David was one of those magical teachers. I had never heard any of his music. We all knew he was a composer, but he was our musical-theater-acting teacher. At the end of that year, there was a memorial service for him that was a concert of his music. Raúl sang in it. They did two songs from The Waves. I was so inspired hearing his work that I started writing that summer. When Lisa invited me on board to bring it back, I jumped at it.

What is it like to come back to this piece and be confronted by the ghosts of your past, sort of like in the story itself?
Lisa: When a song that's great that he wrote comes back to life in front of you, I can feel David in the room. I get flooded with emotions sometimes. But then, on the other hand, I feel like Adam is weaving using the thread that David spun. It's incredible to me to watch it both come back to life and have the ability to change it.

Adam: There is a strange sense, in both a joyful and macabre way, of communing with the dead working on this piece. Exhuming this old music literally from basements and boxes, and trying to refasten it into something that is new and breathing, has been really thrilling, even if it's sort of eerie sometimes.

One of the exciting things we discovered is the timelessness, not only of the Virginia Woolf stuff, but of the music that David wrote. It does have the power to move people and connect to people today, and needs to be heard. We approached this from the beginning as one big experiment, and the takeaway is that it does speak to people.

Raúl: You can actually hear the audience crying from the stage. I haven't done a lot of shows where that happens, where something really true is being put in front of an audience and they recognize themselves.

What I think is most extraordinary about it is the way that the Virginia Woolf material resonates everywhere. She had a way of naming things that seem unnamable, the things that you didn't think could be articulated about life, whether it's girls at a dance figuring out who they're going to be after they graduate from school, or a man coming to terms with the fact that he's not going to be all the things he thought he would be now that he's in his mid-40s.
​
There's the extra emotional weight of recognizing that I'm helping put David's voice out there, which felt like unfinished business to me. He put together an audition book for all of his students. In the back of that book, I had one song from The Waves, "Byron," that I never sang but always kept, always wondering if one day I would do it in a concert or sing it at an audition. And Sunday, during the performance, I became quite emotional, because there I was, singing that song in front of an audience. It really hit me.

This interview originally appeared on WAMC.com on July 18, 2018

​Vassar and New York Stage and Film’s second Main Stage Powerhouse production this summer is “The Waves,” a musical adaptation of the novel by Virginia Woolf. The piece, which features a book by Lisa Peterson and music and lyrics by the late Davick Bucknam, was produced nearly 30 years ago in New York City. The version running at Vassar July 19-29 is directed by Peterson, features additional music and lyrics by Adam Gwon, and employs four time Tony Award nominee Raúl Esparza as creative consultant and actor.

Esparza’s Broadway credits include “Cabaret,” “The Rocky Horror Show,” “Taboo,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” “Company,” “The Homecoming,” “Speed the Plow,” “Arcadia,” and “Leap of Faith.” Television credits include “Pushing Daisies,” “Hannibal,” “The Path,” “BoJack Horseman,” and he recently finished a six-season run as ADA Rafael Barba on “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”
​
Esparza joins us to talk about his work.