Eli Gelb on taking the Tony Award-winning 'Stereophonic' to London

Tony-nominated for his role as a sound tech bluffing his way into a dream gig, Eli Gelb follows Stereophonic to the West End with fresh collaborators, new doubts, and the same love for the process.

When Eli Gelb joined the original cast of the hit play Stereophonic, he felt an impostor syndrome also shared by his character – a sound technician, who lies in order to acquire a job mixing a high-profile record. Now, reprising his Tony Award-nominated performance in the West End, he still doesn’t know what he’s doing. And that’s exactly how he likes it.

“I have had the experience now of being with this play for about a year and a half prior to starting this process, and I had about three months off, and it didn’t feel like enough. The easy thing would be, can we just do it again the same way? And I would never want that. But also, it feels like you’re supposed to know what the hell you’re doing because you’ve done it before. And then the reality is, no, you’re not. Your job right now is actually to not know what you're doing. Again.”

A stage and screen actor who made his Broadway debut Stereophonic, Gelb recalls participating in an early reading after which he was told the role would be recast. “And the funny thing about it was I didn’t disagree. Like, yeah, I didn’t show you because I haven’t found him yet.”

Stereophonic is the hit play by David Adjmi which received a record-breaking number of Tony Award nominations after opening at New York’s Golden Theatre in 2024.

Gelb plays Grover, the ambitious sound engineer who finds himself increasingly overwhelmed by the task of recording an album for a British-American hybrid rock band simultaneously on the precipice of huge success and complete collapse.

Fittingly, the London production, which began performances last month, features a British-American hybrid cast, with a few new faces in the band.

“It’s really cool to have some actors from the UK and some actors from the US. I’m just really enjoying what this new cast is doing with it, and we’re really building it back. The experience that you have as a person sharing space with other people, and experiencing a story or telling a story or doing both at the same time, it feels so deeply fundamental to what it means to be human and alive. That process is, particularly in this play, really thrilling.”

What makes Stereophonic unique is the original music written for the production by Arcade Fire alumnus Will Butler, heard in the play mostly via truncated sections and isolated melodies. Having not had to audition with any of these songs, Gelb was one of the last original company members to finally hear them, but once he did he became an instant fan. “It’s extraordinarily listenable.

The fact that he was able to write songs that sound like they could be hits in the 70s, and also still, they have a modern feel to them. And also lyrically, so rich and so interwoven with the play, there’s a moment where we’re talking about tempos I’d say something like, ‘Now it sounds like a polka’, and then, listening to that track, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, that bassline is fully a polka bassline, you know?’”

When asked about the excitement of getting to perform in London, it’s surprising to hear him immediately delight in what he describes as a “sizable decrease in wages”, for the simple reason that “it has to do a lot with keeping the theatre affordable”.

On the play’s possible West End reception, he muses, “I feel like this is a place that honours theatre a little differently. I think that there’s something in this play that audiences here will really connect to. I like the idea of bringing this play to new audiences and, honestly, I would do it as long as I could.”

Book Stereophonic tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Eli Gelb. (Photo by Scarlet Page). Inset: photos by Marc Brenner

This article first appeared in the June 2025 issue of London Theatre Magazine.