The MCR Interview:
Tennessean Andrew Martin Maguire on Life as a Jersey Boy
The Jersey Boys 20th Anniversary Tour is coming to Nashville, and we at MCR were delighted to get to speak with cast member Andrew Martin Maguire, who is not only an experienced performer and the alternate for the lead role of Frankie Valli, but also a Tennessean hailing from Williamson County.
Grace Krenz (GK): Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us! It’s not everyday that we get to speak with a local for our Broadway at TPAC coverage. I think I saw you in a production of Pippin like ten years ago.
Andrew Martin Maguire (AM): Thank you for having me. I am a local, yeah, I grew up in Franklin. We moved down there when I was about two. That’s home. And yes, I was in our high school production of Pippin: I was Pippin.
GK: You were great! Have you performed at TPAC before?
AM: Thank you!I haven’t performed at TPAC before. This will be my first time, which will be very exciting, kind of surreal. Because I grew up going to see shows there. My earliest memory of the theatrical experience was when we saw Peter Pan there, and I think it was one of the tours when Cathy Rigby was playing Peter still. I was about six or seven. Being back there to perform is going to be really cool. My parents have become subscription members for the past few years, and so whenever I’m home and there’s a show in town, they’ll give me one of their tickets, and I get to go see a show. So I’ve seen many, many more shows since Peter Pan at TPAC. So I’m very excited.
GK: I’m assuming they have tickets to the show and they’ll be getting to see you on stage.
AM: Yes, I’ve got two guaranteed performances for the week as Frankie, Saturday matinee and Sunday evening. So yeah, they’ve got their tickets already, and friends and family from out of town are coming in. It’ll be a big party.
GK: You’re listed as the alternate for Frankie Valli. Can you explain what exactly that is, and how it is different than an understudy?
AM: Yeah, sure. Without getting too technical, it depends on the roles. This role, Frankie Valli, he’s the lead of the show. He’s in probably 95% of the show, so he doesn’t get a lot of time offstage. There’s a lot of singing involved, which can be really taxing for anybody doing the show eight times a week. So in order to make sure the show can be put up as best as possible every night and every matinee, they want to make sure that there’s somebody that can perform every time. Throughout the 20 years of its existence, they’ve figured out a good way to make that happen, and that ends up being to have someone, they call the alternate. Usually that involves a few shows a week, that they’ll have to spread the workload, if that makes sense. Make sure that nobody’s getting too vocally tired throughout the week.
It differs from an understudy in that there are shows throughout the week that they’re scheduled to go on, if that makes sense. Whereas an understudy is someone who would go on in the event that the person that normally plays the role calls out sick, or takes a personal day, or something like that. Depending on the show and the role, there are some discrepancies on what they call these different tracks. So there are some other terms, like a standby, that might be similar, but slightly different, depending on the show. But yeah, that’s just the title that the company and the producers have decided to bestow upon me.
GK: That’s cool. So do you typically have the same schedule week by week or does it vary?
AM: Yeah, there is some variation on any national tour, depending on the venues, the different markets, and the travel days. With this particular tour, there’s a lot of week-long sit-downs: we’re in Nashville for a whole week, then we go down to New Orleans for a whole week. But after that week, we travel around Louisiana and have a few one night stops. So weeks like that are a little bit different where we’ll have maybe six shows that week, and there won’t be any two-show days. Our week in Nashville, we’ll have seven shows, I think, with a two-show day. In Chicago, we’ll have two full weeks with eight shows a week, so that’s more of a typical Broadway schedule where you have eight shows a week with two, two-show days, and four days with only one show.
GK: Is there a specific skill set you find yourself needing to develop as an alternate, as opposed to other roles in a production?
AM: Definitely. One of the biggest struggles is simply the fact that you’re not performing every show. So that comes with its challenges, where you have to retain that information in other ways, whereas if you’re doing it every night, it sort of happens naturally, it becomes part of your subconscious. It’s transferred to your long term memory that way. Whereas I only have the opportunity to do the track two times a week, and sometimes there can be four or five, maybe six days in between those shows. So that involves sitting in the dressing room while the show’s going on, mentally tracking the show, rehearsal on your own, touch ups and running certain numbers and choreography on your own time. But after a while, it gets to the point where you might not have to do as much of that, and it does become second nature. It just might take a bit longer than it would if you were doing the show eight times a week. Yeah. So that’s the skill that I think is different than that an alternate would have, rather than the full time role. And I also am covering a few of the ensemble tracks, they do consider me a swing as well, which means that in a show I cover multiple different ensemble tracks. So I cover a few of the ensemble men tracks in this show, which comes with its own set of ways to sort of retain all that information as well.
GK: So you have to compartmentalize your familiarity with the entire production.
AM: Definitely, and it gets to a point where you know pretty much everything that’s going on, on-stage and off-stage at any given moment, because all these roles do so many different things at different times, with scene changes, costume changes, choreography, vocal lines, and everything. Luckily I’ve had a few years with this material. I’ve done Jersey Boys in a few different capacities throughout the years, so I’m very familiar with the show. Which was helpful going into rehearsals, knowing that I would have to know four different tracks, including Frankie Valli, the lead. It made it a bit easier knowing that I was already familiar with some of the material. You really do have to compartmentalize because the ensemble tracks might be pretty different throughout the whole show. There are some moments that are very similar, like in a scene transition where these two ensemble men that I cover are involved in this transition, where they both are pushing a table, but one is pushing it this way, the other is pushing it that way. One takes a chair off this way, the other takes a chair off that way. It can be a bit confusing, but Google Spreadsheet is my friend. I make sure I have all the information down and review it at my leisure.
GK: That’s really cool. You said you’ve performed in Jersey Boys in several different capacities before. Were these different productions or different roles?
AM: Both, yeah. So I started my very first time doing Jersey Boys. I was playing Frankie Valli at the Mac-Haydn Theater in Chatham, New York. It’s about a couple hours train ride from New York City. That was a regional theater up there. And then after that, I joined the Las Vegas Company of Jersey Boys, which was licensed by the same company who licensed this production. I joined the production at Paper Mill Playhouse, which is a pretty well-known regional theater in New Jersey. I was a swing in that production, and I got to go on for Frankie twice during that show, which was very cool, very surreal. Then I joined the ship, the Jersey Boys on the Norwegian Bliss, playing Frankie Valli as well. And that was, again, licensed by the same company that has licensed this tour. So that is to say, it’s the same production that was on Broadway, all those years ago, 20 years ago, when it first opened, with the original direction by Des McAnuff, and the choreography by Sergio, all that same stuff. And that’s exactly what this tour is as well. It’s sort of a remount of that original production on tour.
GK: You have a surprising amount of familiarity and history with Jersey Boys. What gets you so successfully into different productions of the show?
AM: I think it stems from a love for this music. I didn’t really grow up listening to the Four Seasons very often, but I think we’re all familiar with a few of their bigger hits, like “Beggin’” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and “Working My Way Back to You.” I was definitely familiar with some of those bigger hits, but it wasn’t until high school where I actually connected those songs to the band The Four Seasons and Frankie Valli. That was around the time when Jersey Boys was very, very popular, still running on Broadway. My high school choir teacher put together a Jersey Boys medley that we sang in choir. That was the moment where I was like, all these songs that I’ve known in the back of my head and could sing and tap along to are from this show, and by this band, which sparked my love for it. And then I went to college for music theater, so I knew that this show might have a place in my future at some point. I’m a short guy, and Frankie Valli is a short guy as well. So I knew I could maybe play this role in the future. And so I started really listening to their music and becoming a fan, doing everything I could to maybe get here one day, and here I am. It’s pretty cool.
GK: That is really cool. How do you get from Williamson County to Broadway on tour?
AM: It all started in high school with choir and I joined theater in high school as well. That really kicked it off for me, it really sparked my love for performing and theater, in particular, telling stories on stage. And so I considered going to school for it, and I knew I wanted to focus mostly on the music aspect, because I had grown up taking piano and violin, and singing all the time. I knew that music was the emphasis I wanted to have. I found Oklahoma City University had a great music program and I liked how they focused a lot on those aspects of the profession. They offered me a good scholarship, and so I made a decision to move about a 10 hour drive from home and go to school at OCU. Some of their notable alumni are Kristin Chenoweth and Kelli O’Hara. We like to name drop. Four years of school there in Oklahoma City, and then I graduated in 2020, right when the pandemic hit. I finished my senior year online, and I moved back home to Tennessee, and spent about a year and a half living at home again. Just kind of saving up money, because I knew I wanted to move to New York eventually. I got a couple jobs and saved up some money there before finally moving to New York in 2021.
And that’s when I started just auditioning, things were slowly starting to come back to life and open up again, and a lot of self-tapes were happening instead of in-person auditions, but I had a day job and a place to live in New York. Finally, I booked my first cruise contract, which was with Royal Caribbean, playing Doody in Grease on that ship there. From then on I had a few months here and there, half a year where I wasn’t performing, and just auditioning and stuff, but I’ve always been able to have some sort of performing gig lined up, which has been great. Those months where nothing’s really on the docket, it can be a bit draining, when your full-time job is basically auditioning and getting a lot of no’s, but that’s the gig sometimes.
GK: You’ve auditioned for Jersey Boys multiple times. Was there any difference between auditions for the different productions?
AM: Yes, some of the productions, like this production, in particular, is licensed by the same company that did the Vegas production I was a part of, as well as the ship production. So with this production, I had some prior relationships that I had built, I had worked with some of the creative team that put both of those shows up before. They were very familiar with me, and I was very familiar with them, going into the audition. So that definitely helps. In any profession you make your relationships, and you do a good job, they like you, they like your work, and then that can lead to maybe a promotion in a regular job. In this field, it can lead to another job down the line. All these creative people have other projects they’re working on, or the same project in a different form. And so, yeah, so that definitely helped, having those relationships already built. They know I have a great work ethic, and I care about the work and the show, and they can trust me. All those things played a good part in this particular audition.
As far as the other productions go, that were not related to the licensing, it can be a bit nerve-wracking when you’re going into a fresh room. You don’t know any of the other people. But, for me, at least, I took solace in the fact that I was really familiar with this material, and especially in the callback situations where they’re having you do songs from the show, scenes from the show. I put in the work before and I knew the scenes really well. I had done all the character work, so, in terms of auditioning for Jersey Boys I typically went into those rooms pretty confident, because of the work that I had done before.
I will say whenever I’m auditioning for other shows, there can be a lot more nervousness involved. If you haven’t had the opportunity to work on a show for one, two years, it can be tougher to put in that work and really dive that deep into those characters that you’re being considered for. But in those situations, it really helps just kind of go in as yourself. And typically that’s what the casting directors want to see, is just who you are in the short 30-45 seconds they get to see you. So that’s typically what I try to do in those initial callbacks, or initial audition situations, just singing something that I like, that is in the style of whatever the show is, but mostly something that I like and and really relate to. Something that shows them a little bit about me and my personality.
GK: Would you tell me a little bit about Jersey Boys itself as a show? It’s been out for 20 years and it’s coming back to TPAC for the first time in 8 years.
AM: Yes, it’s the 20th anniversary. Technically, it opened in 2005, so this year it’s 21 years since it opened on Broadway. The show has that “it” factor. It’s the music that gets people in the door and the story is what gets people coming back and makes them lifelong fans. It is just such an interesting story. It’s the first of its kind. Before Jersey Boys there weren’t really many notable musicals about a true story, about a real music group. Now there’s a slew of them about Carole King, The Temptations, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, all of these artists, after Jersey Boys became such a success. There’s a reason for that. People really enjoy these types of shows. That’s what people keep coming back to. This story is about Frankie and Tommy, Nick and Bob, and how they all came together to make all these wonderful songs, then the inevitable breakup, which is just devastating, but makes for a good show.
GK: That’s great. It’s ragweed season in Nashville right now. How do you or any of your friends on tour deal with regional allergies?
AM: I think this is something we’ll probably find out because this is our first week of the tour, and we’re in Syracuse, so it wasn’t too far away from where we were rehearsing in New York. As of now, I don’t know if anybody’s had any issues. I do struggle with some allergy issues throughout the year. I do anticipate maybe a few stuffy nosed moments throughout the year, but I would say a lot of us have these nebulizers that we like to use whenever we get dry or stuffy or anything. It’s sort of like a personal steamer, but it creates smaller particles of water that go directly to your vocal folds. It basically hydrates your voice faster than a steamer would. That’s something we use. We’ve also got what we call our medtree. It’s a big shoe rack, basically, that we put backstage near the prop bin, and it’s got anything you can need. It’s got Advil, Tylenol, Mucinex, all the over-the-counter meds that you could get, cough drops, mints, Band Aid, all those kinds of things. We are well prepared in those situations.
GK: That is very smart. So you’ve just done the first week of the current tour and TPAC is your second stop. That’s exciting. How long are you currently contracted for and how long is the tour projected to continue?
AM: Right now we’ve got dates booked out through August of 2027. And the hope is that we continue on after that. With these tours, our contracts are about a year long. And then after that, depending on if and when they announce more dates, they would revisit those contracts. This is actually my first tour, so I’m also new to a lot of the business side of it. As far as re-signing a contract, I’m not really sure how that would work, but I’m happy to join the team for the year, and see what happens after that. Kind of play it by ear.
That’s a good and bad thing about a tour. It’s a very interesting way to live and you have to be in a very specific place in your life to where it makes sense, you know? Not very many ties, and I was in-between leases, so I don’t have a lease, which is good. So, yeah, it came at a good time, and I think right now, a year is a perfect amount of time, and we’ll see what happens after August next year. But we’re going to some pretty cool places, and I’m really excited to travel the country and see some cities I’ve never been to, travel up the West Coast which is a place I haven’t explored a lot of. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I’m so excited to come to Nashville’s as our second stop on the tour. It’ll be a nice little taste of home before we really get things going.
GK: We wish you the best on the start of your tour! Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, and welcome back to Nashville!
AM: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me!
Andrew Martin Maguire and the rest of the Jersey Boys will be at TPAC’s Jackson Hall September 16-20. See here for tickets and more information.
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A Nashville native and MTSU graduate, Grace Krenz is a reader, a writer, and an arts enthusiast. She lives in Nashville with her husband and two children.
