The Barnes & Noble event with the cast and creative team of Peter and the Starcatcher was really interesting and really fun, and I’m so glad that my plane landed in time so that I could go. Not only did I buy another copy of the book, but I was able to sit in front of my favorite people and listen to them praise each other and tell some stories about how they built something so beautiful and fun. For instance, did you know that before he was cast, Adam Chanler-Berat, sent Rick Elice the song “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons because he wanted the part so much and the song reminded him of the character? Rick Elice listened to it, five or six times he said, and then rewrote part of the script. “Using information from that song, a lot of that appears in the first time that the boy really speaks, in that really Chekovian moment where he says more than three words in a row, and he suddenly has this big speech where he speaks about what it is like to never be outside a tiny little space that’s boarded up and filthy, where life is just so crappy, that it’s much worse than anything you could really imagine. And it was very much inspired by that thing that [Adam] sent me.”

Here are some more great, funny, inspiring and informative quotes from that discussion with Rick Elice, Adam Chanler-Berat, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Christian Borle, and Ridley Pearson.

“One thing I want to say about Adam is…a lot of people talk about the play now, and they associate this sort of magical quality to it, this sort of intangible, magical thing and I really believe that that is Adam. That is what he brings. As a human being, he is sort of magical. And he brings that to the show. That is something that couldn’t be written. The play totally changed when Adam came on board.”

- Celia

“And then, we played invisible basketball. I guess it’s a test of the imagination, right? I hope it wasn’t just humiliation.”

- Adam, talking about his audition process

Rick: “I never knew you auditioned for La Jolla, but I think I know why you weren’t cast-”

Adam: “It was the invisible basketball.”

“As an actor, the great trap is getting caught up in the excitement of performing, and getting people to laugh that sometimes you forget to rein yourself in. And that is what emails from Roger are for.”

- Christian

“Celia has this extraordinary ability in rehearsal to, just with her eyes, look over to where you’re sitting when something isn’t right. So you just circle that and go, ‘Okay, I’ve got to fix that.’ She never actually says anything, she just does a sidelong glance and you just know.”

- Rick

“There was a small window of time where I didn’t think I’d be able to do Starcatcher on Broadway, and when everything lined up, it was when they got the Brooks Atkinson, the timing kind of shifted a little bit, the clouds parted- when I realized I was going to be able to do it, it was one of the happiest days of my life.”

- Christian

Celia: “There were bunnies…”

Christian: “There were bunnies!”

- describing the magic of their rehearsal space in La Jolla

“And it’s been years of me kind of going up to Rick and saying, “This is great, this is great! But just something like…’ And he’ll always end up coming back with something that is one hundred thousand times better than anything I could ever even come up with.”

- Christian

“This is sort of what it feels like to be in the room… I mean, the generosity that sort of overflows from all of us, we’re all a little bit in love with each other, and we like to talk about it.”

- Adam

Rick: “There was a moment, towards the end of the play where there was a new bit between Stache and Smee. And in this particular case, Stache said something and Smee said something, and Christian said his next line, which was a cynical line. And he said, ‘Did you see that? Did you see that, Smee? Genuine heroic sacrifice.’ That was what I typed. ‘Genuine heroic sacrifice.’ Thinking that Stache would be snarky about it. And Christian read that line in a different way. I’m sitting in the back with my script, making notes and drawing things and looking for Celia’s eyes, and I circled that and I thought, ‘That’s the character, right there.’ It was a completely new idea, that I heard because of the way he said three lines.

Christian: “I remember that so specifically, and what it was, it wasn’t because I had somehow brilliantly realized that that’s what this was, it was because of Adam, and this new thing that Adam was. This Boy. And in the moment, in the room, he did something so astonishingly truthful, because he can only be truthful, that it didn’t make sense to do it any other way. What he did was so obviously lovely, that it actually- I didn’t mean to make that choice, it just happened because of what he did. And I remember being really excited by it, because those moments of alchemy in the theatre, and I called Rick the next day. And he picked up the phone. I was like, ‘Hey, I have to talk to you about something.’ And he just went, ‘I know.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I want to talk to you about a moment.’ And he was like, ‘I got it. Don’t say anything else.’”

Rick: “I was actually in front of the computer rewriting the scene.”