Broadway Press Day with Ruthie Fierberg
Jun 7, 2026 · 4 min · 5 segments
Tim Jackson made his Broadway debut in 2023 as the choreographer of that year’s revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” Just two years later, Jackson made his Main Stem directorial debut with “Two…
Ruthie FierbergHost
Tim JacksonGuest
The directing feat of this musical, I need you to talk to me about balancing the emotion and the story of it and the math of they've stood in this spot for too long and this suitcase is gonna turn and land here so that when she opens it, it's a radio.
I loved the characters straight away, and I loved the dialogue and the songs, and so I was like, this is gonna be really great, but I think in order to keep people engaged with two people, you need to make sure that the picture's always changing, and that you're thinking of the macro all the time, and so that was the biggest part of my job, really, because once they're in a scene, The material's so electric, it can sort of look after itself, so it's just looking after the flow of the whole piece.
And Sucha Gilmore, who is just the most insanely brilliant designer, has created this playground that's ever-changing, and it sort of, It feels a bit like how I feel New York is as an outsider, where every time you turn a corner, there's a new surprise or there's a new secret.
And it means that we're forever able to just change location in a moment and just keep it on the go.
There's a lot of math
that I hadn't done since school, and actually with Asmeret, who you've just been speaking to, the two of us with the model, and we'd like turn it, and then I would be holding the characters.
I'd be like, turn a bit faster, and then I'd be like, right, measure how many degrees we've gone and over how many seconds, just because we wanted to make sure people were in the right place at the right time.
And so that turntable looks like it's sort of quite casual, but actually it's picking up speed, slowing down.
The directing feat of this musical, I need you to talk to me about balancing the emotion and the story of it and the math of they've stood in this spot for too long and this suitcase is gonna turn and land here so that when she opens it, it's a radio.
I loved the characters straight away, and I loved the dialogue and the songs, and so I was like, this is gonna be really great, but I think in order to keep people engaged with two people, you need to make sure that the picture's always changing, and that you're thinking of the macro all the time, and so that was the biggest part of my job, really, because once they're in a scene, The material's so electric, it can sort of look after itself, so it's just looking after the flow of the whole piece.
And Sucha Gilmore, who is just the most insanely brilliant designer, has created this playground that's ever-changing, and it sort of, It feels a bit like how I feel New York is as an outsider, where every time you turn a corner, there's a new surprise or there's a new secret.
And it means that we're forever able to just change location in a moment and just keep it on the go.
There's a lot of math
that I hadn't done since school, and actually with Asmeret, who you've just been speaking to, the two of us with the model, and we'd like turn it, and then I would be holding the characters.
I'd be like, turn a bit faster, and then I'd be like, right, measure how many degrees we've gone and over how many seconds, just because we wanted to make sure people were in the right place at the right time.
And so that turntable looks like it's sort of quite casual, but actually it's picking up speed, slowing down.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
