Raul Esparza

I miss theater, and I'm likely to go on missing it. Having once lived for a period of years in Chicago, I know what it is to inhabit a great theater town; but I shall never live in a larger city again, and I seem to have developed this disinclination to travel (no doubt partly related to the depression and anxiety I suffer from, but that's a story for another day). Even the theater that is accessible to me here in Wisconsin, either during the summer -- the Peninsula Players and Door Shakespeare in Door County, the American Players Theatre in Spring Green -- or in Milwaukee, requires a little overnighting that is unappealing to me right now. Perhaps that will change, but for the present I will be living without any play-going.

I still enjoy reading about theater, though, and I catch wind of what I'm missing -- which, let's face it, would always be plenty no matter what. Even if you're in Chicago, you're not also in New York and London. A name that has been cropping up for some years now in my reading is Raul Esparza, a New York-based leading man with many musicals under his belt. Thanks to YouTube, I am able to sample his work, and it is impressive. Probably his best-known role to date is as Bobby in Stephen Sondheim's Company, directed by John Doyle in the same singers-doubling-as-instrumentalists style of Doyle's production of Sweeney Todd.

Esparza has said that for a musical theater actor of this era, playing in Sondheim is like playing in Shakespeare; and that would be my comparison too. So, unsurprisingly, he has done other Sondheim parts: George in Sunday in the Park with George and Charlie Kringas in Merrily We Roll Along (a role created by Lonny Price). Despite its troubled stage history, Merrily is hands down my favorite Sondheim score; and this Esparza rendition of the show-stopping "Franklin Shepherd Inc." is a knock-out:



He is also terrific in the "Being Alive" finale of his celebrated Company performance. The entire show was captured for television and released on DVD -- into the Netflix queue!