Bull James is proud to be part of The Last Match.
The Last Match: A Pro Wrestling Rock Musical landed 16 total nominations in this year’s BroadwayWorld New Jersey Regional Awards in 11 different categories. The production features several notable names in wrestling, including Matt Cardona, Afa Anoa’i Jr. & Bull James. Anoa’i and James are the production’s wrestling choreographers, and James recently spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard about what the experience has been like overall.
“The Last Match was one of the coolest experiences in my life. It was really, really awesome,” Bull James said. “At first, because of how wrestling is, you don’t know really what you’re getting into. You hear this guy has an idea. And oh, yeah, ‘we have these Broadway stars that are gonna be on the show.’ We’re like, do you though? When is this real? You don’t believe it until it happens. And then when it happens, you’re like, wow, this is incredible.
“That’s just coming from being jilted by the wrestling business for so long, but yeah, man, everybody was so awesome to work with, from Ramin and Amber and obviously Matt Cardona, who I’ve known for years now. Jeremiah, James, and Rachel, the producers, just all the way down. Every single person involved was an absolute pleasure to work with,” James explained. “Basically, I found myself tasked with training the actors to get through wrestling matches. We’ve had about eight days with them, maybe like an hour, hour and a half a day. So it was a tall order, but we pulled it off.”
The Last Match has hosted four total performances so far, with plans to tour in the future. Asked about where fans might be able to see the show, James mentioned Las Vegas as a possibility.
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“I know that there’s a lot of stuff in the works,” James teased. “I know that one of the hopes was to bring it to Vegas at some point. And I think right now, because the thing is, this whole production blew up way quicker than anybody anticipated. And so now, it’s like, you have all these different people hitting everybody up, and ‘hey, we want to do this, maybe we’ll tour here, maybe we can do this. And so it’s a really good problem to have, but it’s also like, making everybody go, Okay, we gotta put our working boots on and really try to hammer down what we want to do next.’
“We got a bunch of nominations for [BroadwayWorld’s annual Awards], which was really cool. And I’m sure that it’ll kind of disrupt their world if myself and Afa win Best Choreographer. We’re looking forward to kind of flipping them on their heads with that one. But yeah, man, it’s like I said, it’s a great performance. It’s a great show. And that was one of the other things too going into it, we were also kind of there, and that’s just, besides the enduring stuff,” James noted, “we were there to kind of make sure that the business was protected there or at least portrayed in the right way. And just even basic things like terminology and stuff like that because you know that you don’t want wrestling fans to go in there and be like, ‘Oh, they didn’t say this right. Oh, this was off.’ Because we want to stay true to the sport that we love. So yeah, it was a tall order, but like I said, everybody kind of pulled it all together and pulled it off, and for the Broadway people that were skeptical, that’s where it helps having people like Ramin and Amber because they’re so well known in that world. It was really the perfect storm from both sides.”
While there are touring plans, James mentioned the first show was also filmed and it could be released in the future.
Voting is open through December 31 on the BroadwayWorld website; Bull James and Afa Anoa’i Jr. currently hold first place in the Best Choreography of a Play or Musical category with 16% of the total vote.
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