The Pajama Game: Interview with Director/Choreographer James Beaudry

UB Theatre and Dance Assistant Teaching Professor James Beaudry is the Director and Choreographer of our annual spring musical “The Pajama Game.” We spoke at length about Beaudry’s vast experience as a director and what audiences can look forward to when the show opens for a two-week run at UB Center for the Arts from April 25 – May 4, 2025.

James previously served as Producing Artistic Director for the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre and on the senior staff of New York Stage and Film as Company Manager for their annual Powerhouse Season of new plays and musicals in various stages of development. Prior to that, James served for eight years as Artistic Director of Timber Lake Playhouse in Illinois.  James has directed, choreographed or produced more than 125 productions.

1. From reading your biography, you have extensive experience as a director, choreographer and producer of musicals in many places, including New York, Chicago and Western Illinois, and New Haven, CT. What are some of your stand-out experiences? And how did you get into directing musicals? Was performing ever your focus, or did you always generally prefer direction and production?

I’ve split most of my career between NYC and Chicago. (Nine years in each.) I performed a bit, but I began choreographing musicals in college (both in school and professionally). I went right to grad school for an MFA in Dance, and then I began directing, as well as choreographing.

Within about three years, I choreographed a workshop of a new play with music that transferred to an Off-Broadway run. That project made me eligible to join SDC, the union for professional directors and choreographers. I moved to Chicago when I became Artistic Director of Timber Lake Playhouse, where I’ve staged or produced a whopping 120 productions over 20 years, including favorites like Titanic, Evita, An Inspector Calls, Chicago, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Meal, and Hair.

Chicago (the city) was a wonderful era for me where I was running a company and freelancing all over town at the same time. It was where I learned how to direct musicals in venues as small as an immersive, 60-seat bar/theatre and as large as the 3,600-seat historic Chicago Theatre. In one year, I staged the Chicago premiers of both Heathers The Musical and Murder Ballad. I was nominated for the Jeff Award for Outstanding Direction of a Musical for both projects. This summer, I’ll head back to Illinois to direct a production of Rock of Ages.

2. For those unfamiliar with the full scope of responsibilities of a show Director and Choreographer, how would you describe your role? As you're also an Assistant Teaching Professor for the department, how do these roles cross over? In other words, what amount of 'classroom' time goes towards preparation for the show?

Directors lead a whole team of designers and actors whose job is to create the physical and behavioral world of the story. Individually, a director creates the behavior of characters in collaboration with the actors. At the same time, the director works with designers to make sure all elements move and integrate seamlessly in the space, so the audience experiences a clear and exciting story or theatrical event.

Choreographers are responsible for setting dance or movement to music. Often a choreographer will work with the director to organize changes of scenery and transitions between locations, so that the audience experience and the dynamics of the story aren’t interrupted by pauses while set pieces are changed. I watch everything very carefully, and any time I don’t understand the logical cause-and-effect of one line of dialogue or gesture to the next, I take a note to go back and revisit it. Ultimately, the director’s job is to make every element add up to a clear story.

Each academic year, I direct one production, and that counts as one of my courses. A typical course is 45 classroom hours with students over the semester, and a significant amount of time for preparation and grading outside of class. Directing a musical is about 150 contact hours with students in rehearsal, design and production meetings, in addition to all the creative research and preparation of staging and choreography that’s required outside of that time. So directing AND choreographing a musical like this one is an enormous job, because musical comedies have dialogue, dance, music, scenery (rolling, flying and carried), props (literally hundreds in this case), musicians, costumes, lights and sometimes video projections. Your job is to make sure every artist and element is telling the same story at the same time. And make sure it’s funny!

3. "The Pajama Game" novel ("7 1/2 Cents"), musical and movie all came out in the 1950s. How would you describe the dialogue, songs and choreography? To what degree does the show reflect that period in America, and to what extent is it relevant to contemporary audiences? Will the show be modernized in any way, or is it set in the 1950s like the original production?

The Pajama Game, which centers on labor and satirizes capitalism and right-wing propagandists, has several key features that gave it mass appeal in the 1950s: a timeless, Romeo and Juliet love story between two people on opposite sides of a social conflict, fantastic songs which became top-10 hits, Bob Fosse’s show-stopping choreography, and laugh-out-loud funny characters. Jean-Luc Goddard called the 1957 film adaptation, “The first left-wing operetta,” praising the unlikely hit for its audacity and enthusiastic musical-comedy embrace of workers during the height of the McCarthy era, when the House Un-American Activities Committee and FBI were investigating anyone allegedly connected to the Communist Party. [It was not the first left-wing operetta, but if the hyperbole fits...]

At a time when union membership and manufacturing in the US was at its peak, The Pajama Game became a mainstream Broadway hit. I believe that is because it uses comedy to confront truth and celebrate community in a way that feels playful and safe. That we are producing this show today, in 2025, and it asks us to laugh at narcissistic efficiency experts who can’t actually control their supply chains—well, that is merely a rich coincidence.

4. The original movie from 1957 had choreography by Bob Fosse. Was this one of the first shows he choreographed? When staging this musical in 2025, do you look to the movie or previous versions for any inspiration in the choreography or is it all brand new?

The Pajama Game was Bob Fosse’s first Broadway show as a choreographer, and the Act II opener, “Steam Heat,” is one of his most iconic pieces of choreography. I was fortunate to learn “Steam Heat” from one of Fosse’s last dance captains. I’ve passed that original choreography on to our students. The rest of the choreography in the production is influenced by Fosse’s style and movement vocabulary, emphasizing character quirks integrated with vernacular styles that became mainstream in Vaudeville, Burlesque and Nightclub acts. Dance MFA student Rebekah Bono has contributed to the choreography, as well.

5. From an outside perspective, I feel that the production values on UB Theater and Dance musicals are high, from cast and crew to directors/music direction, costuming, sets, live music, lighting design, especially considering tickets are only $7-$22. What's your feeling? Can you tell us a little about the scope and scale of the work that goes on behind the scenes, which people might not know about?

Our ticket prices are really a great deal, and this show promises to entertain from start to finish. Like anything that humans craft by hand, theatre takes a lot of time and practice, and it is made at significant costs. But the value is bigger than the cost. Music, comedy, and theatrical invention connect us and help us navigate our identities and our communities. The emotional promise I make with audiences is that you will laugh, think, and leave the theatre restored and inspired. I’m a big believer that our theatrical work must stand on its own. Literally thousands of human hours have gone into creating this experience, and while we hope people understand all that, the payoff is for the audience experience at the event, not the effort required for the craft.

6. What do you feel is the most challenging aspect of learning and performing the dialogue, songs, and choreography for our students?

Our students are doing great work with this. The most challenging part has been mastering the craft and consistency required for comedy. Most acting training deals with emotional and behavioral truth, and that human honesty certainly is required here. But comedy often comes from irrational, incongruous, and surprising situations. These are not characters who react to things the way college students in 2025 react to things. Sometimes it means playing the opposite of “what would you do in this situation” or picking a fight over something that seems trivial to a rational person. Having auditioned and hired early career performers for hundreds of shows over two decades, most of them leave college having never learned about comedy. Working on The Pajama Game and this style of comedy has been invaluable to our students’ training as performers to prepare them for the industry.

7. What's the most challenging part about directing a musical, or this one in particular?

The most challenging part of this musical is that the scenes are so well-written, they take a lot more time to stage and refine, because the comedy is so precise. There are a lot of not-great musicals out there, with very short, concise scenes written to launch the story into the next song. Those shows are easy (and sometimes boring) to direct, because they aren’t complex. The level of craft in this script requires that we match it. And that has taken a lot of time and detail.

8. What would be your 'quick pitch' to potential patrons about why they should come to see (and hear) the show?

Pajamas should keep you cozy, relaxed, and feeling good, so you can wake up optimistic and take on the world. So should musical comedies. Let us worry about the labor, the mechanics, the research, the exhaustion, the social significance, and the symbolism of it all. You just get a ticket, show up, laugh, sing and dance along with these loveable weirdos who never give up on themselves and each other.