Broadway Drumming 101 - The Podcast

Touring drummer Marc McDuff (The Wizard of Oz, Legally Blonde, The Cher Show national tours) joins Clayton Craddock on Broadway Bound and Beyond, Episode #111.
Marc grew up in a Vermont town of 1,200, studied at the University of Montana, moved to Seattle with no job and no contacts, and got his first national tour through a music director he had worked with in college. He talks about the cold email that landed Legally Blonde, playing 20 minutes in total darkness in Scranton, touring China and Saudi Arabia, avoiding drumming injuries, and why saying yes to every small gig builds the relationships that lead to touring work.
Chapters
* 00:01:33 Meet Marc McDuff, and his Seattle Mariners memories
* 00:04:21 Memphis in Seattle, and the Super Bowl finish I missed for places
* 00:09:27 Growing up in a Vermont town of 1,200
* 00:10:05 A hippie drummer dad and a kit in the basement
* 00:15:01 Skater days and a broken shoulder before college auditions
* 00:21:17 Auditioning for Berklee, and why he chose Montana
* 00:25:13 Seattle, regional theater, and the call for The Wizard of Oz tour
* 00:26:54 Touring China, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain
* 00:30:25 The stretch of the Great Wall tourists never see
* 00:34:45 Brooklyn, COVID, and the cold email that landed Legally Blonde
* 00:37:14 Two years on The Cher Show tour
* 00:38:40 The night the light blew in Scranton
* 00:40:54 How he stayed fresh playing the same show for years
* 00:42:38 Drumming injuries, technique, and Achilles rehab
* 00:46:04 What nobody tells you about touring
* 00:49:13 The one thing college drummers should start doing now
* 00:51:31 Marc's top five drummers
* 00:56:29 What's next for Marc
The Trust Economy, a live masterclass with Clayton Craddock, is Thursday, October 29 at 5 PM ET / 2 PM PT. Save your seat: https://book.stripe.com/dRmcN51rza2CeXy8YS3Je03
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When I landed my first Broadway chair on Memphis, one name kept coming up: Michael Keller. He has contracted more than 100 Broadway shows, including The Lion King, Wicked, The Book of Mormon, and Hamilton. Before that, he was a drummer from Queens wheeling his kit through Manhattan.
The Beatles got him started. He was subbing off-Broadway at 19, played his first Broadway show, Promises, Promises, in 1970, toured with Dionne Warwick, and spent 15 years as Marvin Hamlisch’s drummer and conductor. Hamlisch opened the door to contracting, and the 1994 Barbra Streisand tour changed everything. Nobody mentored him. He figured it out himself.
What I love most about this conversation is how simple his hiring philosophy is: “I want a great player who can get along with people.” That’s the whole list. He also explains why your job changes once a show opens. Most of the audience is seeing it for the first time, so your job becomes keeping it fresh and consistent every night.
His advice for breaking in: sub first, be persistent, ask to sit in the pit, never say no, and find every chance to be heard. A great resume won’t get you hired. Your playing will.
He also tells the story of hearing Steve Gadd for the first time and choosing inspiration over quitting. Every musician faces that choice eventually.
Michael’s message is the heart of what I teach: talent gets you noticed, trust gets you hired. Join me live for The Trust Economy masterclass on October 29 at 5 PM Eastern.
👉 Save your seat here
About Clayton Craddock
Clayton Craddock has spent 26 years in musical theater, most recently as the drummer for Cats: The Jellicle Ball at the Broadhurst Theatre. Now based in Las Vegas, he is the founder of Broadway Bound and Beyond, host of the Broadway Drumming 101 podcast, and author of Broadway Bound and Beyond: A Musician’s Guide to Building a Theater Career. He teaches musicians the career skills nobody teaches them.
His Broadway credits include Memphis, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, Ain’t Too Proud, and Cats: The Jellicle Ball. He has also played tick, tick…BOOM! and The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical, and subbed on Rent, Motown, Evita, Avenue Q, and the Hadestown tour.
He has appeared on The View, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, and the Tony Awards, and has performed with Chuck Berry, Ben E. King, Kristin Chenoweth, and Norm Lewis.
www.claytoncraddock.com



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This week’s podcast guest is Tanner Schut, and he is currently out on tour with The Book of Mormon. When we recorded, Tanner was actually on a layoff. The tour was sitting in Toronto dealing with a musicians’ union situation, so the whole band got a few weeks off before picking back up.
Tanner joined Book of Mormon mid run, which is its own story. The drummer before him left to rejoin Blue Man Group, and Tanner got the call after a chain of connections that started with an audition for the Water for Elephants tour that didn’t even work out. He made an impression anyway, and when the Book of Mormon music director went looking for a drummer, his name got passed along.
He grew up in Corvallis, Oregon until he was eleven, then finished growing up in Boise, Idaho. He picked up drums in middle school, almost by accident, and by his teenage years he’d fallen hard for the studio legends: Steve Gadd, Peter Erskine, Vinnie Colaiuta, Roger Hawkins, Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Steve Jordan, Steve Smith, Steve Ferrone. You can hear all of that in his playing, honestly. I told him as much before we even started recording.
Tanner went to the University of Idaho, where he bounced between social work, music, and eventually landed on a journalism and broadcasting degree, which he crammed into two and a half years. From there he spent three years working on cruise ships, mostly in house orchestras backing production shows and guest entertainers, before making his way to New York and subletting a spot in Bed-Stuy. That’s also where our paths first crossed. He found this podcast during his last cruise ship contract and started listening to figure out how the New York music scene actually worked.
What we got into
This was a genuinely great conversation, and it went in directions I didn’t expect:
* The Water for Elephants audition that didn’t land him the gig, but landed him the one that mattered more
* How he talked his way onto his first cruise ship job with an audition tape most people would call excessive: fifty five different styles, chopped together into one continuous take
* What a real week on a cruise ship actually looks like, and how close he got to burning out after a nine month contract
* The honest version of what it takes to break into the cruise ship world, agencies and all
* What he’d do differently moving to New York, after watching his savings disappear faster than he ever expected
* The strange, small-world way a family connection led him to another drummer in New York before he’d even unpacked
Tanner stood up for the entire interview because he couldn’t sit still, which somehow felt like the most fitting way to talk to a touring drummer. Nobody in this business sits still for long, and this conversation is proof of that.


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Joel “Jay-Ray” Anderson is a drummer that was recently touring with The Wiz.
I caught up with him mid-tour. We talked about growing up in a musical family in Fort Lauderdale, learning drums from YouTube and his oldest brother, coming up through the Dillard High School drumline, studying music at Broward College and Florida Memorial University, landing his first tour (Pretty Woman) the week after graduation, and transitioning to The Wiz through a network built one relationship at a time. We got into gospel drumming history, drumline battles, a month spent touring Japan, and why networking, not just chops, is what actually opens doors.
Jay-Ray comes from a house full of musicians. His father plays guitar and sings; his oldest brother plays drums and keys; another brother sings, plays drums, and plays saxophone; and a third brother plays bass, guitar, and keys while producing. Jay-Ray’s own introduction to the drums came at six years old, when his oldest brother sat him down in front of a kit for the first time. By twelve, he had his own Sonor drum set, a gift from that same brother, and was already teaching himself by copying drumming videos on YouTube.
Jay-Ray attended Dillard Center for the Arts, where he played in two jazz bands, marched snare in the wind orchestra and drumline, and got pulled onto snare drum as a freshman after impressing section leader Javon with a string of paradiddles. He talks about the discipline instilled by band directors Christopher Dorsey and Dr. Sheldon McClain, learning traditional grip for the first time, and the intensity of real drumline battles.
Jay-Ray studied at Broward College (Associate’s in Music Performance) before transferring to Florida Memorial University for his bachelor’s degree, where he played under percussion director Taurus Lovely, a 25-year Broadway touring veteran (including Tina Turner: The Musical) who would later become the person who got Jay-Ray his first tour. Jay-Ray’s first trip to New York came in 2018, when Dillard’s jazz band won the Essentially Ellington competition at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the same trip where he first saw a Broadway show, Ain’t Too Proud.
The day after Jay-Ray graduated from Florida Memorial in May 2023, Taurus Lovely called with an audition opportunity for the Pretty Woman national tour. Jay-Ray recorded four songs from the show, landed the gig, and was in rehearsals in Syracuse, New York within months. He talks candidly about the learning curve of running click tracks and Ableton on the road, getting walked through the system by original drummer Kevin Maynard, and the parts of touring nobody warns you about, like setting up and breaking down your own kit on travel days. Over roughly two years with the show, he toured extensively across the U.S. and spent a month performing in Japan (Shinjuku, Tachikawa, Kyoto, and Osaka).
Jay-Ray’s move to The Wiz came through his network: Sammy Merandino and Quentin “Q” Robinson recommended him, and MD Michael Aarons brought him in. Jay-Ray left Pretty Woman in Wichita and, within a week, was in New York starting rehearsals, spending his off-hours studying original drummer Trevor Holder’s book and comparing the Broadway cast recording to the touring arrangement. He also shares how he first met Q Robinson years earlier, showing up at Hamilton’s closing show in Fort Lauderdale just to introduce himself.
Asked what he’d tell a high school or college drummer chasing a career like his, Jay-Ray’s answer is simple: networking. Every opportunity in his career, from Pretty Woman to The Wiz to this very podcast episode, traces back to a relationship someone else made on his behalf.
Where to Find Jay-Ray
* Instagram & TikTok: @jay.ray04
* Facebook: Joel Anderson
* Email: joel.r.anderson04@gmail.com
Resources
* Free: How to Land a Broadway Gig Roadmap — subscribe to Broadway Drumming 101 (free or paid) and grab it at broadwayboundbook.com/roadmap
* The Broadway Sub Playbook ($7.99) — available at signaturebrandworks.com
* Broadway Drumming 101 merch (backpacks, tees, hats, mugs, and more) — signaturebrandworks.com
* Broadway Bound and Beyond: A Musician’s Guide to Building a Theater Career by Clayton Craddock — out now
Clayton Craddock was most recently the drummer for Cats: The Jellicle Ball on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre. He is also the founder of Broadway Drumming 101 and the author of Broadway Bound and Beyond: A Musician’s Guide to Building a Theater Career.
His Broadway credits include Memphis, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, Ain’t Too Proud, and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, with additional credits spanning tick, tick…BOOM!, The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical, and subbing on Rent, Motown, Evita, Avenue Q, and the Hadestown tour.
Clayton has appeared on The View, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, and the Tony Awards. He has performed with artists ranging from Chuck Berry and Ben E. King to Kristin Chenoweth and Norm Lewis.
www.claytoncraddock.com


Get full access to Broadway Bound and Beyond at www.broadwayboundandbeyond.com/subscribe

The Adam Wolfe Interview — Now on Video
This is the video version of a Broadway Drumming 101 classic, first published back in 2022.
Adam Wolfe made his Broadway debut on Frank Wildhorn’s Wonderland after playing its out-of-town tryout at Houston’s Alley Theatre. From there he built one of the most versatile résumés in the city, subbing on Rent, Evita, Matilda, Cats, Hello Dolly, Anastasia, The Prom, West Side Story, and more, plus chairs on Bandstand, Jerry Springer the Opera, and Clueless the Musical. A classically trained percussionist with serious drum set chops, Adam is the kind of hybrid player who can walk into almost any pit and hold it down.
In this conversation, Adam talks about what it actually took to build that career: the prep, the trust-building, and the versatility that keeps the calls coming.
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If you want the roadmap for building a career like this, grab a copy of Broadway Bound and Beyond. It’s the book I wish I had when I started, and it lays out the actual sequence: how to build the reputation, the relationships, and the readiness that get you in the pit and keep you there. Get it at broadwayboundbook.com.
And if you’re already working toward sub gigs, check out The Broadway Sub Playbook. It’s a short, direct four-week guide covering pit prep, etiquette, and the habits that get you called back. Get it at signaturebrandworks.com.
Watch the full interview, then go get both. Nobody hands you a career in this business. You build it.
Clayton Craddock was most recently the drummer for Cats: The Jellicle Ball on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre. He is also the founder of Broadway Drumming 101 and the author of Broadway Bound and Beyond: A Musician’s Guide to Building a Theater Career.
His Broadway credits include Memphis, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, Ain’t Too Proud, and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, with additional credits spanning tick, tick…BOOM!, The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical, and subbing on Rent, Motown, Evita, Avenue Q, and the Hadestown tour.
Clayton has appeared on The View, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, and the Tony Awards. He has performed with artists ranging from Chuck Berry and Ben E. King to Kristin Chenoweth and Norm Lewis.
www.claytoncraddock.com


Get full access to Broadway Bound and Beyond at www.broadwayboundandbeyond.com/subscribe