“We’re starting to feel like a real band in a recording studio, hearing ourselves back and coming up with ideas,” says Christopher Mowod, one of the lead actors in the Broadway show Stereophonic.
The music in the show is written by Will Butler, a multi-instrumentalist and former member of indie rock band Arcade Fire. Butler recently recorded the Stereophonic cast “jamming together in a music studio,” Mowod says, and afterward “sent us a little edited mix” with performance notes.
With rockstar giddiness in his voice, Mowod tells EW over the phone that he woke up with “a huge smile on my face this morning, because it’s just surreal.”
Stereophonic made its Broadway debut in January 2024. Its soundtrack is composed entirely of original music by Butler, who won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work in the film Her.
The Broadway show follows a Fleetwood Mac-esque storyline, as it tracks the rise, superstardom and turmoil of a 1976 half-British and half-American rock band recording their second studio album. As the band creates their music, interpersonal and intimate relationships within the band cause in-fighting and angry (yet passionate) songs. In 2024, it became the most Tony Award-nominated play of all time, with 13 nominations and five wins, including “Best Play.”
Mowod, who plays Reg — aka, the Stereophonic equivalent of Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie — has auditioned nonstop for this dream role since 2019 (when he couldn’t even play the bass).
“If you’re a musician, you will feel so represented in this thing,” says Mowod, who has been the frontman for various bands since attending Julliard. “It will hit too close to home for you.” He says that when he discovered this play, he was living the musician life that playwright David Adjmi had depicted almost to a tee.
Unintentionally matching Reg’s ego, when Mowod auditioned for the first time and was asked if he could play the bass, he responded to the casting director, “The hardest thing about playing the bass is the guilt you feel playing one note while the rest of the band’s playing music.” When he showed back up to perform, “I absolutely choked on the bass.”
He didn’t get the part, and the show’s development shut down for the same reason that every Broadway musical shut down the year after 2019.
Years later when it got up and running in 2024, Mowod watched Stereophonic “on Jimmy Kimmel, and I’ve watched them on Tiny Desk concerts and Kelly Clarkson, and I was just dreaming and watching them win Tony award after Tony Award.” He says “I just really saw myself in it and not doing it was hard.” After auditioning every single time there was a call, he finally got the part in the touring cast in 2025. “It’s like the woman of my dreams that went out with somebody else, and I watched their Instagram stories, and then one day she calls me for coffee,” he says.
Now, he’s finding just how closely life and art are always intertwined.
He says that Reg as a character has “clocked” how “I looked at my previous relationships, the partners I’ve been with, and finding the joy of that.” Playing Reg, he says, has helped him “relive a lot of the moments where I got in my own way through drugs and alcohol, and the moments where I wasn’t my best self because of mental health issues.”
On a larger and more meta scale, he says that because the cast is touring the country playing as a fictional band, “You kind of live the life of the people in the show, and this band we’re playing as they’ve been touring the country.” As a result, the cast is “also experiencing that as we hit city to city, we become more confident in what we’re doing and develop our relationships.”
Though behind-the-scenes has not seen any real life Fleetwood Mac relationship drama, Mowoood says that performing songs of love and hate with other people is an incredibly intimate thing to do. “When you’re in these tight quarters and seeing the vulnerability, seeing the passion, the talent, it’s really hard to not really want to cuddle that person,” he says. “It feels like we’re all in a very committed relationship with each other and inspiring each other.” He continues, saying that, more so than family, the dynamic between the small cast feels “in some ways, married to each other.”
He says that this show will resonate for anyone who appreciates music. When he brought his real-life musician friends to the show, they got to happily relive “trauma from our experiences in recording studios in the 12-hour, 14-hour days you’re doing there.” He says those who aren’t musicians who have watched the show are “blown away” when they see how much goes into producing a single song, nonetheless an album.
As far as the music goes, the cast works closely with Butler to perfect and alter the music whenever necessary. “Butler has all the success in rock and roll, but like he’s dying to be a big theater nerd,” Mowod says. “He loves warming up, and he’s the sweetest man, and he’s made the journey really approachable.” Through this, the music and sound design is as intricate as the characterization and dialogue. “The head of the sound team is live mixing everything,” Mowod says. “When the engineer on stage is mixing, [the real sound engineer] has got to be seeing what his hands are doing with a secret camera, and moving it along with that.”
Mowod describes Stereophonic as a “love letter to the art itself, and in the making of art, and all the things that go into creating a masterpiece,” he says. “The falls and the get-ups and the joy and the pain of it, and how you leave your blood on the floor to have someone else feel recognized and identified in your music.”
Stereophonic is 8 pm Friday, Oct. 17, 2 pm and 8 pm Saturday, Oct. 18, and 1 pm and 6:30 pm, Sunday, Oct. 19, at The Hult Center, 1 Eugene Center. Tickets start at $49 and are available at HultCenter.Org.