The Improv Impresario
Vogue|October 2019
Thomas Kail, the award-winning director behind In the Heights, Hamilton, and an assortment of other productions, returns to his roots in Freestyle Love Supreme.
Adam Green
The Improv Impresario

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, the hubris and pretension of undergraduate student theater leads to something great. Such was the case at Wesleyan University in 1998, when a junior named Thomas Kail got bitten by the theater bug after his friend Anthony Veneziale asked him to perform in an improv version of the German dramatist Heiner Müller’s inscrutable postmodernist play Hamletmachine that, with two African American Ophelias and two white Hamlets, aimed to dissect Race in America. “It was the most ‘Wesleyan’ thing of all time,” Kail says now with a laugh.

This story is from the October 2019 edition of Vogue.

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This story is from the October 2019 edition of Vogue.

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