OnlyIntermission: Interview with Broadway Star Josh Davis

Josh Davis is a professional actor, voice-over artist, and producer. Until December of 2019, he performed as Javert in the North American Tour of “Les Misérables,” giving over 800 performances over the course of two and a half years. He was also an original cast member in the 2013 hit Broadway musical “Beautiful: The Carol King Musical,” where he gave over 1,500 performances before leaving in 2017. He grew up in Columbia, Maryland, and found himself back in his parents’ basement when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and raged through New York City. He is an alumni of Temple Isaiah in Howard County, and agreed to perform a virtual concert for the synagogue in July.

Can you talk about your background and how you got into theater?

Sure. I got into theater like I think most people I know got into theater. I started when I was in high school. I sang in choir and took a couple of drama classes in high school, I did the plays and the musicals. But what I didn’t do, unlike most of the people I act with, I did not go to school for acting. I went to school for business and got a business degree. I started professionally acting in 2002 and I graduated in ’97, so for about four ish years, four plus years, I worked in business and advertising and documentary film production. I worked with Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, a couple other TV channels.

Image courtesy of Davis' website

And then shortly after 9/11, I got let go from my job, and in 2002, I started acting, or trying to be an actor and auditioning in Washington DC. I’m from Maryland, so I started in DC, and DC has a great theater community with a lot of really really good theaters down there. I took some classes, and I was pretty intimidated, having not gone to school for it. I just sort of had a natural talent but I never studied. So I worked in DC, I got my equity card in DC through a Tour for Young Audiences through the Kennedy Center. I did a couple of their shows in DC, but what I realized pretty quickly was that if I wanted to be a professional actor and support myself as an actor, I would not really be able to stay in DC.

I had bigger aspirations, so I moved to New York in 2004 to pursue a career in waiting tables! I was very successful! But it did take me a while to be able to actually afford to make a living as an actor. I think part of that is because I was new to the game and I didn’t have a network. When you a school like NYU or another really great acting school, you have a network of people that you come out of school with. Obviously you have a great education, but the networking is probably more important, honestly, as far as being able to get jobs, or at least being able to get auditions. I didn’t have that network, so it was a lot of trial and error, going on a lot of auditions, like cold call auditions, waking up really really early, because I was equity, to go on these massive, equity call auditions where you sit in a room with 200 people and just wait for your 60 seconds.

While I was doing that, I was also taking some classes here and there, and I got into voiceover acting through a series of people that I had met. I started to do some voiceover commercials, and that was helpful, because that pays pretty good. I did a bunch of regional shows throughout the US, and then I was singing as a guest entertainer on cruise ships. I did that for a couple years. I wasn’t living on the cruise ship, but they would fly me and a couple other guys out to do a Broadway show cabaret type thing. That was a lot of fun. I’ve been to maybe 35 or 40 countries, all for about eight hours at a time. We’d come in on a boat and leave the same day. It was a lot of fun. It was crazy fun.

Image courtesy of Davis' website

And then I booked my first Broadway show, which was “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” I booked that in 2013 and that turned out to be a three year job. I did over 1,500 performances with that show, and I was an original company member. I got to create the roles that I played, and that was really my introduction to Broadway and being surrounded by that caliber of actors and those types of people. It was really an incredibly crazy time, and every once in a while, I’d be like “I don’t belong here, why am I here,” because I always kind of felt like I was an outsider.

I had done that for three years – and I had never done anything for three years, let alone do a show for three years –and after a while, I won’t say it becomes old, but you start to want to do other things as an actor. The money’s great, and that’s where they get you. The money is fantastic, but you just want to continue to explore, so I had to leave the show in order to be able to do that. I left and did a couple of regional shows, and then the Les Mis tour when the auditions came around and I auditioned for that. That was in 2017, so I left Beautiful in 2016, did some regional stuff, and then 2017 I booked Les Mis. I went on tour for two and half years with Les Mis. It’s kind of weird to think I’ve only had two major jobs in like five years, which as an actor, you’re like that’s not a lot.

Davis as Javert (Photo Credit: Matt Murphy)

Touring was a whole other different experience because touring is also crazy, and I had my dog with me, so that was a lot. He’s a pit bull, so he needs a lot of attention and exercise. So my experience was a little bit different- I was actually one of the older people on the tour, because I was over 40 and most of the actors were younger than 30. I left Les Mis right at the beginning of December. I had done over 500 performances, 500 or 600 performances, and I left to pursue tv. I was thinking of moving out to LA, and I decided to come back to New York because I have an apartment there. I decided to go back for the spring and just be back in New York and get my life back together after the tour because it’s just a whirlwind when you’re on tour. And then I was going to move out to LA, but I’ve been living in my parents’ basement for the last seven months. I never thought I’d be 40 plus back in my parents’ house, but that’s what happened.

Did you have any affiliation to Temple Isaiah growing up? How did you get involved with the concert you performed?

I was a bar mitzvah there. It was my temple growing up. My brother was also a bar mitzvah there.

Oh awesome! So how did the concert come together?

They reached out to me. I had sung there once with Marshall Cohen, who is the musical director, and he had asked me to come back and do a concert in May. I can’t remember exactly why I couldn’t do it the year before, something with the show I couldn’t get out of. So we decided I would do something this year, and then obviously with covid happening, I told them if there was ever an opportunity to do a virtual concert or something, I’d be happy to do it. It was a lot of fun, especially because, the thing at least about being a theater actor, is that the whole process of doing theater is entirely different than the process of doing tv.

Image courtesy of Davis' website

TV is really fast, like really really fast. If I book a tv show and I’m what’s called a guest star, which is not someone who’s a main character on the show but they come in and they play whatever character that episode, there’s no rehearsal whatsoever. You walk in, there are like a hundred people, they’re all waiting for the director to make decisions, and then it’s like you hope you remember what you did in the audition. They tell you where to go, where they want you to be. Maybe there’s a camera rehearsal, but you’re not rehearsing like you do in theater. The whole process in theater – like in Les Mis, we got there at 10:00, and you leave at 6:00 – is that you’re rehearsing. You’re learning the songs, you’re learning the blocking, you’re figuring out where you’re going to be, talking about character, and all this stuff. And that just doesn’t exist in tv. So I missed the rehearsal process a lot, and having to learn some music and put together this show. I also had to learn the technology to even do that, because I’m not a streamer.

I was going to ask you about the tech of your performance, since you had several elements.

I had most of the equipment because I traveled with my voiceover mic. I have all my voiceover equipment and I have a pretty good camera setup, but I didn’t have a couple of the things, like the mixer. I also just didn’t know the best to do it, and I learned how to stream, basically. I don’t have a YouTube channel or anything like that, since I haven’t really invested in that world. It was a challenging process, learning all the music and figuring out all of the technology because I was doing everything by myself. It was only me in the basement, and I had to set up the lights and the camera and all the music stuff. Sometimes you could even see I was looking down because I was actually mixing it as I was singing.

How did you pick which songs you were going to perform?

I wanted a mixture of a couple of songs people would know, I wanted to have some reference to Judaism in some respect, and then there were a couple that I just wanted to sing just because they were fun to sing. When you’re planning a concert, you have to think about the endurance of your voice. Because I’m a baritone, a lot of the stuff written for baritones in musical theater is really hard, and 45 minutes or an hour of that is a lot. “Singing Standards” and “Fly Me to the Moon” are a little easier on your voice, so those were also something I chose to toss in there. But the Jewish ones were “Fiddler on the Roof” and the “Yentl” song, which I always liked. I was very earnest in the show; I always liked Barbra Streisand. Her voice to me is just incredible and I remember that song for some reason. It’s always stood out to me and I thought it would be funny. The story I told about being stranded on the side of the street was obviously just a story, it was not real, but I think it’s funny to imagine this Jewish boy sitting on the side of the road praying to his dad. I obviously tossed in some of the Les Mis stuff, and the Sondheim stuff is just something I enjoy. I like his stuff- its incredible.

As Javert, Stars is one of the most highly anticipated songs, but how many times do you think you’ve performed it professionally, if you had to guess?

I did the tour, but I’ve been in the show Les Mis four times. I did it twice in 2013 at Pioneer Theatre for regional productions. I understudied Javert the first time, and I played Javert the second time in 2013. And then I did it at Flat Rock that year. I don’t know what happened in 2013, because that was a good year for me- I played Javert twice and then I booked that Broadway show, so it was just huge. But how many times have I performed it? If you figure over 500 performances, plus two plus two, I’ve done it probably a thousand times maybe? I also did a lot of promos where I would sing it, and obviously in rehearsal, I sang it dozens of times. And that’s a performance- when you’re on stage, you’re performing for the director. I guess in real performances, I’d say about 800 maybe. Let’s just say a thousand. A lot.

Davis performing "Stars" (Photo Credit: MurphyMade)

How long does the Javert hair and makeup take?

Well there’s about a half hour before the show that you have to be there. So you can come in as early as you want, but I got it down. I wouldn’t put the wig on myself- someone would come in and put the wig on, but the thing about the makeup, at least for Javert, is that it progresses throughout the show. I don’t put anything on in the beginning; I may have chiseled my cheeks a bit, but not much. For the older version of Javert, I think I had 20, 25 minutes between the time I left right after Stars when he walks off stage and when I had to be back. The next time he comes on, he’s older with the black coat, and I think there’s 20 ish minutes I have in between there. The makeup took me about that long because I would really make him look old and raggedy. I used to put a scar on his face until the director told me not to do that anymore. I had this scar that would wander around his face sometimes, depending on how I was feeling. I always liked to do makeup when I was a kid, so that was fun to be able to do that.

Did you have get any special makeup training or did they leave it up to you?

Sometimes what they’ll do is give you something called a makeup plot, which is a piece of paper with an outline of a face. And then the makeup person will end up coloring it in like it’s a face with what they want you to do. But I actually didn’t have that at all. I don’t remember if it just sort of happened, but the makeup person on Broadway shows also usually does the hair, and so she was really busy with Valjean. He was a little needy, and because I liked the makeup stuff, I was like can you just give me the makeup stuff and I’ll just do it myself? So I really created it myself.

It evolved, and the thing about theater is that it evolves, so you have the time to try to do something, and then if it doesn’t work, try to keep expanding. You mentioned how many times I had sung Stars. The first time I sang Stars was very different than the last hundred times I did it. And it was very different throughout the run of show too. There’s something about doing something over and over again that you start to get. You have a certain idea of how you think it should be and think you’ve figured the song out. But then sometimes I’d be on stage in some random city and would just have an epiphany like “oh wait, there’s a different inflection I just did there and that changed something.” It might not have changed something for the audience, but it changes for the performer, which can be fun. As a theater performer doing it over and over, it’s nice to have a little variance. But anyway, long story short. I created the makeup myself. There was this actor who was playing Javert in London – his name is Hayden – he’s also a drag queen. He’s an incredible makeup artist and he did a Javert makeup and I wrote to him. I said “Hey man, your stuff is awesome. Can I sort of model my stuff after yours or can you give me some hints?” He gave me a couple hints about the best way to shade and contour.

Image courtesy of Davis' Instagram account

Did you have a favorite number or scene in the production?

That changed throughout the run. I think the most challenging thing was the bridge scene – the suicide scene. What’s funny though is I’ve never seen it. Actually, I’ve seen it once when the guy who was taking over for me on tour had a chance to run it, but I’d actually never seen it because they would never swing me out of the show. But yeah, it wasn’t so much the technical thing of falling back. Because I had to climb up on the bridge, there’s nothing holding me. I was just standing on the bridge until the magic happens, which I can’t reveal, but that was scary. But it’s also the pacing of that song. I’m the same way as a lot of other actors, but when I started doing it, I had a tendency to push it way too early, way too hard, and in that song, you have to pace yourself and you have to pace the volume and intensity at which you do it. You could blow up in the first 20 bars of the song and then you got nothing left. It’s a very intense song, so it’s important to pace the intensity at which you’re doing it.

The other thing that’s fun is that Javert is only on stage for 24, 22 minutes, just something ridiculous. Even though it’s a three hour show and it feels longer, he’s only on stage for a short period of time. And he’s almost never interacting with anyone on stage. The only person he really interacts with is Valjean, and then he interacts with Enjolras very very briefly. But my favorite part personally was the barricade scene when I come over because all of the cast is there. All of my friends are there and we’re all just having a good time, looking at each other, acting with each other. That’s a lot of fun.

When you are in cities for multiple days or weeks, do you ever have time to be a tourist?

Oh yeah. If you don’t have rehearsals or anything during the day, you have a lot of time to be tourist, and I definitely did. I always tried to get out. I like to do what’s called urban sketching, and so I really had a chance to get out and see the cities and appreciate where I was. It’s really a lot of fun to be on tour.

Where was your favorite place to stop?

I had a couple of favorite places and cities I’d definitely go back to. In no particular order, New Orleans, Kansas City, Austin, Colorado Springs. Mostly it had to do with either art or being able to go mountain biking or hiking or camping.

What was the most challenging part of either the show or being on tour in general?

Davis as Javert (Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman)

From my personal experience, the most challenging was traveling with my dog because he’s a 56 pound pit bull who is active. To be traveling across the country every single week or every other week, having to fly or having to drive, having to figure out where I could walk him, that all proved to be a challenge. He doesn’t get along with other dogs so I can’t take him to a dog park. But because he needs exercise, before we got to the city, I would always go on Google Maps and look up where I was staying and see if there was a grassy area anywhere that I could throw a ball around. Sometimes I was in the dead of a city, and I would just have to rent a car and take him someplace, or find even just a small patch of grass because he likes to jump, even just in front of an office building, and like play jump with him. If I don’t, he gets very grouchy, and he’ll destroy my hotel room. But he’s very good and he definitely learned how to travel. I was very lucky that he did that. So that was personally difficult.

It’s also weird because there’s a saying that once you have a job, people forget you, which is weird. It’s like you’re always auditioning, because your job as an actor is to audition, and then once you get it, people are like great, we’re not thinking about you anymore. That’s fine at the beginning because it’s very exciting, but after two years you just want to keep working. For me, I had to come back and start auditioning again and people were like ok remind me who you are, so it’s hard to be away. I also didn’t really book any voiceovers while I was away, because even though I was traveling with my travel mic, it just is not the same.

You said you left Les Mis in December. What were you doing in between December and March when the pandemic hit?

I went on vacation. I took some time off and I went back to New York, and then I went skiing. I went away for two weeks and went skiing in Colorado, and then I took all of January off, so basically like a month and a half, more or less. I had not been in one place for more than two weeks, so I just wanted to chill out. I went and visited my parents, visited my brother and nephew and niece. When I went back to New York, I was following the news and things started to get a little more crazy. I remember thinking that I was like ok I’m going to stay in New York, I’ll just stay here. I bought a whole bunch of supplies and bought masks and everything, and then by the middle of March, I think it was the weekend on March 17 on St. Patty’s Day, that weekend I ended up coming down. I had already rented a car to come down for my mom’s birthday, so I came down because they were not prepared at all. I came down and I went food shopping for them, and I just realized that I’m not staying in New York. So I drove back up to New York on Sunday, and packed up my car as much as I could. I was just throwing stuff in the car. My roommate was coming back from LA on a plane, and I did not want to see him because he hadn’t prepared. He was at a bachelor party for like a week and he hadn’t done anything, so I left all my supplies and all my food up there for him and I just peaced out. I came down March 17, and in the beginning it was horrible. When you would go food shopping that first week, it was like a movie. There was nothing left. The only meat that was left was corned beef for St. Patty’s Day. Everything else was gone. It was scary.

How would you say theater has been affected since covid, other than the obvious fact that it’s shut down?

I can’t think of any other industry that is completed closed. It’ll definitely come back, it’s just a matter of when. I feel really bad for a lot of the people who just got out of college who just didn’t even have a chance. I was thinking about the ingénues, because you’re only an ingénue for a certain amount of time, and there are definitely people who are phasing out of the ingénue and this would have been their last year that they could have done it, and it’s gone. Once they come back, it’s like ok, you’re not an ingénue anymore.

Can you explain what an ingénue is?

It’s the leading young lady, like the Juliet Capulet or the Christine Daaé of Phantom. And that’s obviously an archetype that’s written a lot. As an actor in theater, you can stretch it a little bit, but there are a lot of actors that I know who might be moving into their mid or late 30s or 40s that look young and can still keep auditioning for those roles as long as you look that role. I used to be the younger guy, but I didn’t get into it until I was older. I always looked a little young – I don’t think I look my age exactly – but I’m definitely not that young buck.

Can you talk a little bit more about your experience on Broadway?

Sure. My experience was kind of crazy. When I auditioned for “Beautiful,” I didn’t really know what it was. Because Beautiful hadn’t really been written yet – they had only done, I think, one or two readings of it – it wasn’t a fully-fledged script or anything. You couldn’t go out and read the script or learn anything about it. So I auditioned not really knowing exactly what it was, and ended up booking it after a couple of auditions. I sent a video in when I was doing Les Mis down at Pioneer Theater in May of 2013, and then three weeks later I got a call about coming in to audition. Usually what they do in theater, at least at the time, they weren’t looking at video. If you came into the room, you were auditioning, but they didn’t find anybody for this specific role.

Davis' artwork of the Stephen Sondheim Theater in New York City

They couldn’t find anyone that could be funny, but also sing the role, because you had to sing “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” with this really low kind of voice. But whoever could sing that just wasn’t funny or didn’t have the comic skills they were looking for. They went through two rounds of auditions, so then they went to the tape, and I ended up getting an audition when they watched it. Then they called me up for a callback- I flew up to New York and ended up doing that audition. I came back and they had me audition on video a couple more times and I got it. So I ended up leaving Les Mis – they were not happy because I ended up leaving like a week early – and I tried to explain to them that this show could be going to Broadway but it wasn’t a guarantee yet.

I ended up going, and that was an incredibly amazing experience. You’re rehearsing in this beautiful rehearsal space up in New York for four weeks ish, and then we went out to San Francisco to do the previews out there. Every day things were changing. You’re getting new pages because they’re giving you new stuff as they’re writing. I think there were like three people who were having their Broadway debuts. Everybody else was like “Broadway? Whatever, I did that,” so you’re trying to be cool, but you’re still like “Oh my god. Jessie Mueller is here?” Jessie wasn’t Jessie Mueller at that point, but she was still Jessie Mueller. (Editor’s Note: Since “Beautiful” made its Broadway debut, Jessie Mueller has gained more notoriety as a Broadway actress, most notably with her leading role as Jenna in the original Broadway cast of “Waitress.”)

It was just a lot of really cool people and everyone was very nice and very excited, and everyone was very into the idea of doing the show. It was a lot of fun. For me, I was not cast in the Broadway show yet. I was cast in the preview, but I hadn’t gotten a Broadway contract yet, and everybody else had. The reason was I sang “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” The show is about four writers, and there were two couples. One of them was Barry and Cynthia, and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” was their biggest hit of the twentieth century. It had the most number of plays on the radio, so they needed to OK it. They needed to look at the person singing it and feel comfortable that they were going to do justice to their song. They came and saw the show before the first preview, and on the night of the first preview, I came into work and the producer was like “Josh, come here I gotta talk to you a second.” He was like “I want you to know that Barry and Cynthia saw your performance last night. You’re going to Broadway.” It was super cool, and I went and called my parents and we cried. It was pretty great.

When you do a Broadway show, and I was very blessed in this capacity, but if you do an exemplary Broadway show, it’s everything you thought it would be. You’re performing a Broadway show, so you’re getting this constant, amazing feedback of audiences that love your show, you’re making a living as an actor – you’re not making crazy money but you can afford to pay your rent and go to the food store, which is great – and you’re working in Times Square, which is great. We had the nicest theater, in my opinion, on Broadway. We had the Sondheim, which is the newer one. Because the show was successful and it was a show about someone who was successful, you’re getting all of these celebrities and famous people coming to see the show, like all of these old musicians, who are just incredible. Every night, they would say something like “Harry Connick Jr. is upstairs.” You could really name any celebrity at the time and they would tell us they want to say hi. So that was a lot of fun, and just meeting people. A lot of my close friends are still from that show.

Was there anyone that you were star struck by, be it movie or Broadway star?

Oh yeah. I got to see “Hamilton” before it opened. I saw a preview of it and I saw Leslie Odom Jr. It was the most amazing performance I had ever seen in my life and it was just inspiring. I had never met him, but I tweeted him that his performance was a three hour master class in musical theater. He wrote back “Thanks man, that means a lot,” so that was really cool. I’ve seen a lot of different performers, and anybody who gets up on stage and performs, you have to at least give them credit for doing that because it’s very difficult, but I love theater. I love going to see the theater and I think it’s such a different experience being onstage that it is offstage. Sometimes on tour, I would come in the front door of the theater because you have to get that experience. You have to remember what it is that you’re doing. When you’re going in the stage door all the time, you kind of forget and your perception of the theater is different. You’re coming in the back door, walking on stage, seeing all the exit signs out in the theater, and then you’re leaving. You’re not getting the theater experience, so occasionally I would come in and just walk in the front door with the audience as they were coming in. They didn’t know who I was, but it was fun to see them and feel that energy.

Obviously right now, no one really knows when theater will be back. Do you have any thoughts or ideas of what theater will look when it is finally able to open back up?

My buddy that I had done “Les Mis” with was in the performance of “Godspell” they did. It got a lot of attention because it was the only big equity show that was actually running, and everyone was wearing masks and behind plexiglass and all that. It was fine, but it wasn’t like real theater. I think if places maybe start opening up, it’ll be limited seating because theater seats are so close together, so that might happen. I haven’t heard a lot, but there have been moves to do some virtual stuff, kind of like what I did. And I’ve been thinking about doing some kind of theater that’s more on tv, but I wish they had recorded “Beautiful” like they had done “Hamilton.” It would have been smart of them to do that and they could have made a gazillion dollars. But again, theater is live, and even watching Hamilton on tv, it’s great but it’s not the same. I can speak from experience that it’s a great show, but the energy is just different. Unfortunately, because of the way theater relies on the interaction between people and the presence of people, it’s going to suffer.

What have you been doing now that you're back in Maryland?

Davis original watercolor painting titled "Sunset on the Island"

I’ve been building a treehouse for my nephew. I go in waves between being very productive and feeling like this is never going to end and being very depressed. I have gotten back to painting a lot. I picked up watercoloring and drawing and sketching while I was on tour, and I’ve expanded that a lot. I really enjoy it, and don’t do it as much as I should, but I really like doing it and I think I’ve found my own style. I also still take classes. I’ve taken a lot of casting director classes – basically auditioning for casting directors, trying to keep myself up to speed and in it. I’ve auditioned for some stuff, and I was shooting a video game before this all went down, so that’s supposed to pick up again next year at some point. They put the suit on you and its CGI, so that was cool. I think it’s just about taking care of yourself, reminding yourself this isn’t going to be forever, trying to keep up with things that are important to you. But it’s not easy, I’m not going to lie.

What would you say have been the best and worst parts of being back where you grew up?

I think the best part has been that I have had a chance to spend this much time with my parents. I’m 45, and at 45, you don’t have a chance to spend that much time with your parents because you’re doing something else. The worst part is that I’ve had a chance to spend this much time with my parents. So yeah, there’s that. When I first got here, I kind of just regressed back to being the high school kid that I was, when there was a lot of arguing and fighting, so that took a little while. You’re like “Let me live my life,” but then you put a pandemic on top of that. The first time I left my house, my god. I had a mask on, I had goggles even, I suited up in the beginning. My mother treated me like I was this beast or a horribly infectious zombie when I came back. You have to go through this whole process of removing everything and going through quarantine because I went back up to New York the other day to clean out my closet. It’s hard because you want to live your life but you have to be careful.

What is your dream role and why?

I would like to play Sweeney Todd at some point. That’s a big role that I’d like to do, but I’d also really like to do some plays. I’m not super well-versed in plays, but creating new characters is a lot of fun, and I’ve done a couple plays and musicals where you get to create new characters, so those were always fun. But it would really have to be something were I got to utilize all my skills. I think I can be pretty funny on stage and I haven’t had a chance to really do that. Playing Javert, he’s, you know, hilarious, and I got a taste of that when I was doing “Beautiful,” but I wasn’t the lead so I’d like to do that.

Do you have a favorite show to watch or listen to?

I don’t really listen to theater much. I probably should. See here’s the thing with me. It’s very different on stage than it is watching stuff. I’m not a huge musical theater buff. I just like to do it. It would be like I don’t like to get surgeries, I just like to perform surgeries. That would be the best way I can say it. I do appreciate them and I will go watch them, but I don’t sit back and go watch them on Zoom or whatever. That’s not really who I am. To me, it’s the technical aspect of performing that I enjoy, but there are shows that I love, like Hedwig (Editor’s Note: “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”). It’s one of my favorite shows and I would love to play that role. So there are some shows that I like a lot. There was a play that I saw that I really liked. It was called “Indecent” with Katrina Lenk, and it was so good. I actually had my parents come up to New York to see it. It’s a play, so plays don’t get a huge amount of attraction, but man, it was just so good. And that’s what theater does. You’re sitting there, and it’s just like oh my god, I just realized what this is about and this is amazing. I had the same experience with “Light in the Piazza.” I went and saw this show and I didn’t know anything about it, and it just blew me away. Everything about it just blew me away. So incredible.

Is there anything you want to add or tell audiences?

Not really, other than that when theater comes back, please support it any way you can.

Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.