A Conversation with Billy Bustamante

Here We Are's associate choreographer

As Here We Are draws to a close in London, it was a real pleasure to sit down with the show’s associate choreographer, Billy Bustamante. A multi-hyphenate artist whose work spans choreography, directing, acting, and photography, Billy is also the founder of Broadway Barkada, a community for Filipino American theater artists. In our conversation, we explored the evolution of Here We Are between its two productions, the lessons he’s drawn from working on Sondheim’s last work, and his own journey as an artist committed to nurturing potential in others. Our conversation begins below:

It’s such a pleasure to be talking. I’d love to start with Here We Are, and your role within that brilliant team.

The way I slot into Here We Are is in the role of the associate choreographer. The amazing Sam Pinkleton was choreographing the show. He brought me on board as his associate, which in the industry can mean a lot of different things. Ultimately, an associate is there to be a support system, a collaborative partner, and an extension of the choreographer. It was not only a thrilling process, but a really thrilling partnership to work alongside Sam and help uplift and execute his vision.

There was definitely more unknown than there was known when I came on board. Also, given the monumental nature of the project itself, being onboarded came with a necessary amount of ambiguity. I remember Sam reaching out to me. I was choreographing a show in D.C. at the time, and he was directing a show in San Francisco. We were on opposite coasts, but we got together on a Zoom. He said, “I have something to ask you, and I can’t say anything else about it.”

Sam and I had worked together previously, but in a choreographer-performer capacity. I performed in a show called Soft Power that Sam was a choreographer for. We got to know each other there, and I got to witness firsthand the brilliance that Sam brings into a room. So even not really knowing what this project was, I knew that I wanted to be involved. And then eventually, as the curtain was raised and I realized that this was Here We Are, I don’t think I’ve ever said an easier or more exclamatory yes.

Many people reading this will have had the opportunity to see Here We Are now, either in New York or in London. Very few people will have seen it in both cities. Now it’s nearing the end of its run in London, I’d love to learn more about how the show has changed.

I love talking about this question, knowing that I’ll never truly be able to answer it. When you reinvestigate any piece of theatre, there are always certain things that are meant to be… I don’t want to say forgotten, but released about what went before. There are some very concrete ways in which the show has changed. It has transferred from a thrust configuration to a proscenium configuration, and I do think that allowed us to find a more exciting consensus on how the show should be viewed and how the show should be experienced. Being able to curate a more universal experience for the audience was exciting for the choreographic side of the house.

There were some script tweaks and trims, and I like to call it essentializing and crystallizing what we found before. I feel like all of the deliciousness of what the show became in its original version got crystallized and a little sharper and clearer in this version. That, to me, is another big gift of being able to revisit something.

The other big thing for me, and I know Sam would agree with this, is being able to pull from a new set of actors’ ingredients. I think this show lives or dies by the core six, this group of six friends, and their ability to claim the spotlight when it’s their turn, and to be able to exist in a really consummate ensemble at the drop of a hat. So it was thrilling to work with every cast member, these six icons on the stage and screen, all of whom can carry their own show. To see them really enthusiastically come together in support of the ensemble and each other and the piece in general, knowing that that’s what this piece calls for, was a really exciting thing. It allowed for us choreographically to really pull from what they had to offer and meet what existed, and make that deeper.

Do any particular choices or moments stand out to you from a choreographic perspective with this London cast?

I’ll preface what I’m about to say by stating that this is not necessarily a show that “dances” in the way that many people would expect a dance show to look. There are no high kicks, there are no triple pirouettes, there are no leaps, there’s no dancing ensemble. But I think this show, especially in the first act, really lives or dies by a razor-sharp precision of physical vocabulary.

At first glance, this feels like a show that’s filled with pedestrian vocabulary. There are literally people walking around the stage all throughout the entire first act. But that really opened the door to collaborating with each actor to find their version of how these characters spoke to the world, and how they moved through the world. I think that was a primary goal of the choreography department: using these movement sequences to teach the audience about who these people were as individuals, and how they interacted with each other in various combinations.

A specific example of that would be Martha Plimpton teaching us how her version of Claudia walked, based on how hungry she got and how tired she got. I think that was a thrilling set of ingredients for us to mix into our choreographic stew. And I remember looking at Jane [Krakowski] in rehearsal, and remembering images of her dangling upside down in a piece of fabric, or being dragged across the stage by Gavin Creel in a split, and the amazing feats of physical comedy and dance that she is capable of. She was able to bring that same investment, that same richness and that same commitment to the way she walks downstage, and the way she turns stage right. It was really thrilling thing to see.

You saw Here We Are from its birth, and now it’s about to close in London. Do you have any reflections on what this show means as a whole, and maybe too on what it might inspire in your own work in the future?

The first thing that comes to mind is our first day of rehearsal in New York, actually. Our amazing director, Joe Mantello, as table work began, acknowledged the immense pressure and the immense expectation that comes with doing Sondheim’s last work. He was able to really prioritize what the goal was, and really clarify why we were all in the room. I’m paraphrasing this, but he said something along the lines of, “We are here to provide a punctuation at the end of a great legacy. Everything else is icing.”

Being able to work on this in New York, get some distance from it, and then come back to it again here in London felt to me personally as the ability to keep writing my love letter to Stephen Sondheim. His work is the work that has remained the most constant throughout my entire theatre-making career. As a performer, the first professional show I did was West Side Story. I’ve done Pacific Overtures over and over again, and I even got to do Anyone Can Whistle. How many people can say that? So to come to this show, to investigate a score that’s completely new but contains all these little Easter eggs of his work, really felt like being in conversation creatively with Steve, which was a beautiful thing.

In terms of the run now coming to a close, I get existential about these types of things. I think the gift of doing live theatre is knowing that things will end. Things must end. There’s a quote from the Bishop’s speech in Act II, where he says, “Be here, until we’re not.” It’s a reminder for me to be present, and to be fully grateful and active in the moment that I am in. Being able to spend two months in London working on this work was a huge gift. And I think his lesson to me as an artist is to be present and participatory in that time—to not be caught up in the past or future, but to be where I was.

When I was working on the show in New York, and as we were figuring out what the piece was, I remember talking to a lot of people who were not in the room but who were die-hard Sondheim fans. They kept asking, “What’s it like? Oh, my gosh! How’s the music? How’s it gonna be?” And you could see in their eyes, which reflected something in my heart, that they wanted this to be a Stephen Sondheim piece with a “Move On,” with a “Children Will Listen,” with a Witch’s rap. They wanted every iconic thing that have become core memories of how we tether ourselves to Stephen’s work, almost like a greatest hits.

And I can’t speak to his motives personally, but I love that this piece, in a way that Stephen has always done, was unconcerned about living up to anyone’s expectations. I think that’s another lesson that I’m taking with me in my own theatre-making practice. I needed a reminder that if you do what’s true to yourself as an artist, and you understand expectations, but concern yourself less with them, the great work might arise.

That’s so beautifully expressed. Your own artistic practice is so varied. Anyone who visits your website will see that you’ve got an acting resume, a directing resume, we’re here now talking about your choreographic work, and you have a photography studio as well. Do these all feel like different expressions of the same creative impulse, or is there actually pleasure in completely switching from one mode to another?

That’s an excellent question. I would call myself seasoned now: I’m squarely in my forties. But I remember being a young theatre artist in my early twenties, with all of these same interests that I am now exercising as part of my career, and recognizing that I was a multi-hyphenate before “multi-hyphenate” was a thing. And I can look back now and identify that it arose from a deep desire to be a citizen of this art form, but knowing that the industry didn’t always have a place for me, as a queer person of color. I knew that if I wanted to be present, to quite literally be physically in these rooms, I needed to find multiple ways to get into them.

The first ten years of my career was me bouncing back and forth between performing in something, assisting a director, directing and choreographing my own tiny thing on the side for no money, photographing things that I would never be considered for, or photographing actors that I would never otherwise run in the same circles with. And there were about ten years where I really felt a kind of immense shame about needing to do all of these things. It took a little growth and some guidance from mentors that brought me to a turning point. I realized that the moment I stopped trying to silo these different parts of my artistry, but to actually bring them together, I had so much more clarity of purpose.

I am on this planet to nurture the potential of others. And sometimes that means the best way I can nurture potential is leading a room, being a citizen of a performing company, uplifting someone else’s vision that I believe in. And sometimes that involves teaching someone or photographing someone or giving them that stepping stone to get them further in their career. If I can be in a room and nurture potential in a way that is in alignment with my values and my vision, I’m happy to be in that room.

I’ve found that now, post-pandemic, that usually means existing in positions of artistic leadership. I find myself perhaps less excited to perform now, and I feel more valuable, and like I can have a greater impact in how the room and the industry is run, by existing in positions of leadership.

And that leads us nicely to Broadway Barkada, your group for Filipino American theatre artists. Anecdotally, I’ve been so struck by just how much love there is for Sondheim—and for musical theatre in general—in the Philippines. I’d love your perspective on that phenomenon, and on how healthy you feel the picture is for Filipino artists working in theatre today.

As a Filipino American, I think the relationship between America and the Philippines is so intertwined historically that it’s important to acknowledge that American culture and Filipino culture are connected. Musical theatre is in many ways an American art form. And Filipinos are inherently musical, and inherently beautifully free with their emotional communication. All the things that make musical theatre great intersect with things that make Filipinos great. So in that way, it feels like a really logical fit that Filipinos exist in musical theatre in a uniquely positive way.

With that said, I think we’re at an exciting moment where the conversation around representation is just so rapidly evolving and shifting that it gives opportunities for these great cultural moments like Into the Woods in the Philippines. There’s a really exciting production of Rent that’s happening in the Philippines, that my friend Victor Lirio is directing. It provides the fertile soil for those types of things to happen.

We started Broadway Barkada in 2009 because 12 Filipinos were in a small Off-Broadway musical, and we wanted to keep hanging out. It has grown organically, and quite exponentially, into a community of almost 200 Filipino American theatre artists stretching across the country. I think one of the things that makes the organization and the community special is that we’ve created a place of community where there could have been competition. We are all still in the same audition rooms together, up for the same opportunities.

And I think one of the biggest gifts that the Barkada has helped foster is the sense that we can all uplift and encourage each other rather than feeling the need to compete. To me, that’s been a very special thing, and I think that is another thing that is inherently Filipino. The spirit of coming together to move forward as a collective is very Filipino.