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[0:00] Jackson Klein: The Ensemblist is brought to you in part by our Patreon members, including Phoebe Stewart, Christian Ranke, Cat Hicks, Stephen Bell, Patrick Brady, Emily Clenn, Cheryl Hodges-Selden, Ty Williams, Christopher Gurr, Joey Soji, Linda Lee, and Cullen Elijah. You can join them in supporting The Ensemblist for as little as $5 a month. Find out how at patreon.com slash the Ensemblist. You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome, I'm Jackson Klein.

[0:37] Jackson Klein: Welcome back to our re-release of Season 4 of The Ensemblist, Broadway at Every Stage. In this series, co-creators Mo Brady and Nika Graf Lanzarone sat down with six seasoned Broadway actors to dive into their decades-long careers. They discussed getting started in theater, the ups and downs of show business, and the longevity of their careers. This week, we're sharing our conversation with Kevin Carolan.

[1:18] Jackson Klein: Perhaps best known for his performance in Newsies, Kevin's many credits include Dirty Blonde, The Ritz, and the Chicago National Tour. At the time of the coronavirus shutdown, Kevin was playing Claude in the national tour of Come From Away. In this episode, Kevin chats all about his career, from summer stock to regional theater, pre-Broadway tryouts, tours, Broadway, and beyond. Enjoy.

[1:44] Kevin Carolan: That morning, I'm in my car. The kids cross Airport Boulevard to get to school, and that time of day, people are in a little bit of a rush to get to work and stuff. So, normally, I sit... I'm Kevin Carolan. I live in Linden, New Jersey. I graduated from Montclair State University in 1990. I was there during a very big grant for the arts program. It was like 6.5 million dollars. So during the time I was an undergrad, we had visitors like Tony Randall come in, and they just threw money all over the place. There was that big British invasion in my junior, senior year with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Les Mis and everything else claiming its throne was crazy for you. And it opened not long before I graduated. To me, it was like a really nice marker of what I was hoping was going to be the next few years in New York on Broadway. And it was. I just wasn't really a part of it yet.

[2:34] Kevin Carolan: Right out of college, I booked some summer stock in Montclair and then booked mostly New Jersey non-union theater, working at the Forum Theater in Metuchen and Neal's New Yorker in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. Really, the scramble was just to try and continue working and or to become an equity actor. And that was only about two years after I graduated. I was able to get my first equity contract and a theater for young audiences contract with the Pushcart Players of Verona, New Jersey, which is still there producing great theater for kids and young audiences. I was also trying to break into any kind of television film. I was in the season premiere of the second season of Law & Order as a non-union extra, as a cameraman.

It was the first and only non-union film job I did because I thought it was ridiculously hard to keep that camera on my shoulder for as many hours at a funeral as was necessary. Getting paid was nice, but really what was looming large was getting an agent. I felt like I would really break through to a different level. I always kind of saw it as like climbing boxes that just kept getting smaller and smaller. Graduating school and getting some work on my own and then the possibility of somebody who would be looking for work for me was very attractive.

[3:40] Kevin Carolan: The very first agent that I had worked with on a freelance basis was Ginger Dietschy. I remember being early for my appointment and I got a little grief because I was early. I said, I'm very sorry, but I thought that you could really never be too early for an appointment. I felt like the clouds kind of parted and she saw that she was talking to somebody who wasn't just going to cower and she was like a hard-edged cigarette hanging out of her soul kind of a person. Equity Card got it in 1992 and worked with the Pushcart Players as a stage manager, as an actor for about two years with that contract, which was great.

[4:21] Kevin Carolan: I went to go see Bill Irwin and David Shiner in Full Moon on Broadway. The band that was playing with them was the Red Clay Ramblers and the Ramblers were the writers of the music for Kudzu. Kudzu is a musical. It was originally a cartoon written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist named Doug Marlette. When I saw Full Moon, I was kind of wearing a loud shirt. David Shiner does a bit that he brought from Cirque du Soleil where he picks people out of the audience to do something. It's almost like he's the director of a silent film that's being shot. I was chosen to be the jealous husband. Thankfully, David Shiner speaks to you the entire time under his breath and just gives you wonderful direction.

So if he told me to walk through the door, don't open the door, walk through the door, I walked through the door. Huge laugh. After the show, they invite the people who participate backstage to thank them. Bill could not have been more gracious and lovely. David Shiner was fantastic. When I got to meet the Red Clay Ramblers, they asked if this was what I did for a living. I said, yeah. They said, you're kind of perfect for a show that we're working on called Kudzu. You would be great for this role. Don't get offended. The name of the character is Nasal Tee Lardbottom. I said, no, you're telling me there's a possible role. It doesn't matter what you call him. It was a charming show about a young boy named Kudzu, named after this plant that grows wild in the South that will cover cars in a short time and street signs and small moving children. And it also dealt with a shortage of barbecue sauce that was in the town and all that tied in with Kudzu's looking for his father who has been missing since he was a kid.

[6:03] Kevin Carolan: I participated in three readings. Then it finally got a full production that was done at the Reynolds Theater in North Carolina. It was just ridiculous fun and every incarnation I got to do it with. My wife and I have been together for about 30 years. We met freshman year of undergrad. She knew very well which career I'd chosen and what the life was going to be like. I remember the first time I'd been away was when my daughter was very young and I was doing Kudzu. I remember feeling that I needed about four to five weeks. After that, things got a little nutty. Somebody had to get on a plane and see somebody else at that point. That's gotten a little easier over time and you can stretch that out a little bit especially now when it's so much easier to be in contact with one another through many platforms.

Both my children will constantly tease me about being the absentee father but there is a great deal of love and respect for what I do with them. They are really happy that they were able to see the places in the world where I was because they would visit me just about anywhere that I was able to do the show according to the school year and when they could get out. Both children love the business. Both children want to be employed in the business. Neither one of them want to be an actor which I consider a great victory.

[7:30] Kevin Carolan: The 10th anniversary of Chicago was extraordinary because they asked so many people to be a part of the run of the show. The show opened with Chita Rivera doing all that jazz and she just played Velma for that number and then swapped people out. So Rita Wilson would be Roxy for Funny Honey and then Melanie Griffith would do the Roxy monologue. It was just unbelievable. So they had all the different Amuses. Ernie Sabello was in the beginning with Funny Honey and Kevin Chamberlain had the last scene with Ashley Simpson right towards the end of the show. The rehearsal was even more incredible because everybody's there in street clothes and hugging each other and I am a fly on the wall. When Joel got to do Mr. Cellophane, they had staged it so that all 10 guest Amuses came out with him slowly and then semi-circle. We surrounded him for the final moment. It was like this little ghost chorus and it was unbelievable and it was lovely because

[8:28] Kevin Carolan: When you're familiar with some of the Broadway theaters, there's not a lot of dressing room areas and there were a lot of people involved. So we were across the street at the Crown Plaza, I think, and they were just shepherding people over. So we had this big Amos Billy Flynn room with Gregory Harrison and Huey Lewis and Oba Babatunde and all of the Amoses just all milling about, kibitzing. Newsies came into my life as a regional theater audition at the Paper Mill Playhouse. I remember the auditions. I remember the callbacks. They had given all of the character men all of the character sides, including the DeLancey brothers, which were played by boys in the show. I remember Teddy Roosevelt being the one thing that I could kind of hit pretty hard for myself.

I thought Weasel was another one, so I was definitely investing myself in those two with a lot of work. I had done a little bit of research for Teddy Roosevelt. I'd looked for what movies people played Teddy Roosevelt in. I did find a movie called The Wind and the Lion, which was a movie with Sean Connery and Candace Bergen, however, featured a small supporting role by Brian Keith playing Teddy Roosevelt. I watched a few of the scenes from it, and it was exactly what I was looking for as far as the bombast, the power, the gruff. I was like, okay, great. I'm just going to steal everything I can from that and see where it goes. Thankfully, the book made the job.

[9:45] Kevin Carolan: I would have loved to have been able to return to Newsies after getting a chance to do Jungle Book. I thought that it would work out because even though Jungle Book was a regional production at the Goodman Theatre and at the Huntington Theatre, I had thought that because Disney was involved in some form or fashion, it would be kind of an easy thing to do. That was not the way that it came out. I was cast as Baloo in a brand new production of Jungle Book with Robert Sherman's music and Mary Zimmerman directing, but I was kind of forced to leave a Broadway job to take it. It was a tough decision, and it boiled down to the fact that the possibilities of the Jungle Book being a viable property for Disney as a Broadway show was in my mind, but never at the forefront of the decision.

It had more to do with Chris Catelli, Mary Zimmerman, Dick Sherman, and Doug Peck, our musical director, who I immediately fell in love with the amazing job that he did at reorchestrating the music and taking the music that we knew from the movie and adding these fantastic Indian instrumentalists. We had a sitar, and we had a Carnatic violin, and tablas, and a vena. I thought there were possibilities, but more than anything else, it was just, I do this because of the roles that I get to play, and Teddy Roosevelt and the Ensemble of Newsies is a fantastic track, but Baloo in the Jungle Book was something you could not not do, and it felt too right.

[11:10] Kevin Carolan: But I do remember that day when I found out I didn't get the leave of absence. It was the day of our one-year anniversary on Broadway. They had called to see if I was interested in the tour of Newsies. Now, the show was still running at the time, and although I didn't have a job at the Broadway company, the possibility of going out on the road with Newsies was very appealing for two reasons. One, I thought that the contract would be a good one, either a production contract or a tiered contract, which I think for a show like Newsies would have been very beneficial, because knowing the popularity of the show, doing it on Broadway, I knew that it would sell really, really well everywhere else. The other thing was I was doing mostly one-weekers and an occasional split week with Chicago, so Newsies was going to be a lot of sit-downs.

We were spending a month in Chicago and a month in Los Angeles and two months in Toronto. That sounded like a great first year. I also really loved seeing the country, and that was something I fell in love with with Chicago. I decided that Newsies was also for me because I was given the chance to cover Pulitzer, which I didn't do in New York. I had no coverage in New York, which was nice, because I didn't have to go to any understudy rehearsals. But the opportunity to cover Pulitzer was really attractive to me, because that's not a role I feel I would be cast in normally. I'm a very nice guy kind of guy, and Pulitzer is anything but. I felt that I leaned a little heavily more on the comic part of Pulitzer than the bombast, but play to your strengths. I think I got about five or six performances during the run, and it was fun to do at rehearsals too, just because it was a different track.

[12:43] Kevin Carolan: Being on the road with Newsies after the first year and a half, we were thinking, there's got to be a third year to this. It's selling very well, and there's still a lot of markets we haven't hit yet. Ultimately, what wound up happening is they wanted to make a digital capture, which is different than an actual film. I think some of it has to do with phrasing and legality, because if it was a movie, then I think some contracts might be different and things like that, based on the difference between SAG and equity, etc. So I think that digital capture is an all-purpose word for them that covers a lot of ground. Originally, we were scheduled to be at the Pantages for a two-week stint. The first week, we did eight shows.

The second week was canceled, but we were rehearsing camera blocking and recording some digital capture for one performance that we did on a Sunday night with a full audience and about nine or eleven cameras, a crane in the front traveling across. It was really extraordinary.

[13:35] Kevin Carolan: And then Disney had brought back some of the original Broadway cast to be in the film, which was really wonderful for the few of us from the Broadway production that were on the road, being able to see these guys again. It was like an old home week, and everybody was treated really well, the people here and the people who weren't able to do the production. They brought in some people, so some people weren't able to be, and some people shifted their tracks. But ultimately, there was a great deal of care and generosity into how they handled that. It's humbling to be a part of something that I felt was a juggernaut like Newsies, and to have a copy of our performance is a testament to the strength of the show, a show that I feel that I think even most people at Disney felt was going to be staged regionally and maybe toured and then licensed. And for it to become a really touching part of a lot of people's lives is very humbling.

[14:29] Kevin Carolan: The fact that when we were playing Newsies at Paper Mill, I met people from Australia and Tokyo that made the trip to a small regional theater in New Jersey means that there's just a very, very wide group of people with great interests, and they will find each other. The Internet has made the Broadway community much bigger, and I think that the success of some shows can be accredited to that, the fan base, which never used to be the case. Theater today, compared to when I graduated in 1990, I don't feel has gotten significantly different. I mean, the musicals are still musical, and the plays are still play, and there is an incredible amount of talent and smart talent. I'm just glad that there aren't schools pumping out older character men right now, or I'd really be in trouble.

[15:18] Kevin Carolan: I define success now, for me, as constantly working, always auditioning. I'm enjoying my success in what I've gotten to do on Broadway, and I'm thirsty for more. And I feel that way about television and film and just about any other platform that I can get involved with. It's a very rich playground, and there are an awful lot of people with incredible talent in parts of this business that I haven't even scratched the surface yet. And I just feel like just keep moving and colliding with different people, and building a really strong circle of co-workers and friends in my business, that's a great deal of success for me.