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Cleveland native reprises Tom Collins role in tour playing through Sunday at Playhouse Square
By Mary Beth Breckenridge
Beacon Journal staff writer
POSTED: 07:18 a.m. EST, Jan 08, 2009
Performing in Rent has had special meaning to Michael McElroy on a number of levels.
It's given him an opportunity to play an extraordinary character. It's allowed him to be part of a powerful story. It's exposed him to the passions of the show's ardent fans.
And now it's given him the chance to share his talents with audiences in his hometown.
McElroy, a Shaker Heights High School graduate, is reprising his role as Tom Collins in the new national tour of Rent. The tour is making its first stop in Cleveland and features two of the leads from the original Broadway production, Adam Pascal as Roger Davis and Anthony Rapp as Mark Cohen.
The show is being staged through Sunday at the Palace Theatre in Playhouse Square.
Rent follows a year in the lives of eight bohemian friends in New York's East Village, who struggle to make livings and lives amid addictions, poverty, difficult relationships and the AIDS epidemic. McElroy plays one of those friends, a former philosophy professor who finds love with a drag queen and fellow AIDS sufferer named Angel.
McElroy portrayed Collins on Broadway for almost three years starting in 1997, and returned to the show from 2007 until its closing a year later.
Being in the show twice was ''just a great bookend,'' he said in a phone interview. It exposed him in the early years to the mania of ''Renthead'' fans, and later it allowed him to appreciate the story anew through the lens of life experience.
The role, McElroy said, is both emotionally potent and dramatically rewarding. Audiences get to follow his character's relationship with Angel through its entire course, the only relationship that's portrayed from beginning to end. And he noted that the character of Collins is a complex and unusual one: a brilliant, radical, African-American man.
''There are not many characters that come along like this'' for young black actors, he said.
Part of the emotion of being in Rent comes from one of the central themes, AIDS. It's a disease that touched McElroy deeply in his early years in New York and led him to one of his other great passions, leading a gospel choir of Broadway performers.
Just after graduating from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, McElroy arrived in New York in 1990 at the height of the AIDS epidemic there. He watched previously healthy people waste away and die, including his friend and fellow actor Nephi Jay Wimmer. ''That really changed something for me,'' he said.
The theater community responded with the creation of the charitable effort Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and McElroy was asked to perform in a couple of fundraisers. Gospel music had always been a source of solace for him, he said, so that's what he chose to sing.
The first two years, he performed solos. But the third year, he decided to bring in 10 friends.
''It was an amazing success,'' he recalled. People were hungry for something spiritual but not judgmental, he said, and gospel music gave them comfort and peace. ''It carries its own truth and its own power that can't really be touched by other people's agendas.''
Out of that experience grew Broadway Inspirational Voices, a volunteer gospel choir that now numbers about 50 members. They're current or past Broadway performers, but not all were raised in the gospel tradition. Instead, the choir is made up of people from various racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds and has even included non-Christians such as Jews and Buddhists.
The group performs benefit concerts and sings at various events throughout the year, and its Christmas album, Great Joy: A Gospel Christmas, was nominated for a Grammy.
''It's a huge commitment'' for the members, who rehearse weekly when they're preparing for a show, McElroy said. But for people who make their living by performing, the choir provides an opportunity to use their talents for a greater purpose.
''It kind of re-energizes people,'' he said.
McElroy knows the energizing force of gospel music well. Growing up, he sang in the choir at Harvest Missionary Baptist Church in Cleveland, where his grandfather and later his stepfather were ministers and his grandmother was the choir director.
Church was central to his life. So was music. His mother and grandmother both played piano, he said, and his mother would take him to see the touring productions that came through Cleveland.
He was an active child, he said, but when he'd go to a musical, he wouldn't move. ''It spoke to me on a level I still don't completely understand,'' he said.
When he moved from Cleveland to Shaker Heights in the fourth grade, he discovered new opportunities to get involved in music and theater. His teachers, particularly at the high school, ''really cultivated my love of theater and music to another level.''
Performing in Cleveland gives him a chance to reconnect, he said. When he performed here in 2004 in the touring production of Big River, the musical for which he received a Tony nomination, he found playing for a hometown crowd exciting, he said. As Rent prepared to open, he was looking forward to an influx of old friends and groups from his church and high school who were planning to come to the show.
After spending so many hours in the audience as a kid, ''it's great to be on the other side,'' he said.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com.
Details
• Musical: Rent
• When: 7:30 Thursday and Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
• Where: Palace Theatre, Playhouse Square, 1501 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.
• Tickets: $10-$55.
• Information: 216-241-6000 or http://www.playhousesquare.org.
Performing in Rent has had special meaning to Michael McElroy on a number of levels.
It's given him an opportunity to play an extraordinary character. It's allowed him to be part of a powerful story. It's exposed him to the passions of the show's ardent fans.
And now it's given him the chance to share his talents with audiences in his hometown.
McElroy, a Shaker Heights High School graduate, is reprising his role as Tom Collins in the new national tour of Rent. The tour is making its first stop in Cleveland and features two of the leads from the original Broadway production, Adam Pascal as Roger Davis and Anthony Rapp as Mark Cohen.
The show is being staged through Sunday at the Palace Theatre in Playhouse Square.
Rent follows a year in the lives of eight bohemian friends in New York's East Village, who struggle to make livings and lives amid addictions, poverty, difficult relationships and the AIDS epidemic. McElroy plays one of those friends, a former philosophy professor who finds love with a drag queen and fellow AIDS sufferer named Angel.
McElroy portrayed Collins on Broadway for almost three years starting in 1997, and returned to the show from 2007 until its closing a year later.
Being in the show twice was ''just a great bookend,'' he said in a phone interview. It exposed him in the early years to the mania of ''Renthead'' fans, and later it allowed him to appreciate the story anew through the lens of life experience.
The role, McElroy said, is both emotionally potent and dramatically rewarding. Audiences get to follow his character's relationship with Angel through its entire course, the only relationship that's portrayed from beginning to end. And he noted that the character of Collins is a complex and unusual one: a brilliant, radical, African-American man.
''There are not many characters that come along like this'' for young black actors, he said.
Part of the emotion of being in Rent comes from one of the central themes, AIDS. It's a disease that touched McElroy deeply in his early years in New York and led him to one of his other great passions, leading a gospel choir of Broadway performers.
Just after graduating from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, McElroy arrived in New York in 1990 at the height of the AIDS epidemic there. He watched previously healthy people waste away and die, including his friend and fellow actor Nephi Jay Wimmer. ''That really changed something for me,'' he said.
The theater community responded with the creation of the charitable effort Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and McElroy was asked to perform in a couple of fundraisers. Gospel music had always been a source of solace for him, he said, so that's what he chose to sing.
The first two years, he performed solos. But the third year, he decided to bring in 10 friends.
''It was an amazing success,'' he recalled. People were hungry for something spiritual but not judgmental, he said, and gospel music gave them comfort and peace. ''It carries its own truth and its own power that can't really be touched by other people's agendas.''
Out of that experience grew Broadway Inspirational Voices, a volunteer gospel choir that now numbers about 50 members. They're current or past Broadway performers, but not all were raised in the gospel tradition. Instead, the choir is made up of people from various racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds and has even included non-Christians such as Jews and Buddhists.
The group performs benefit concerts and sings at various events throughout the year, and its Christmas album, Great Joy: A Gospel Christmas, was nominated for a Grammy.
''It's a huge commitment'' for the members, who rehearse weekly when they're preparing for a show, McElroy said. But for people who make their living by performing, the choir provides an opportunity to use their talents for a greater purpose.
''It kind of re-energizes people,'' he said.
McElroy knows the energizing force of gospel music well. Growing up, he sang in the choir at Harvest Missionary Baptist Church in Cleveland, where his grandfather and later his stepfather were ministers and his grandmother was the choir director.
Church was central to his life. So was music. His mother and grandmother both played piano, he said, and his mother would take him to see the touring productions that came through Cleveland.
He was an active child, he said, but when he'd go to a musical, he wouldn't move. ''It spoke to me on a level I still don't completely understand,'' he said.
When he moved from Cleveland to Shaker Heights in the fourth grade, he discovered new opportunities to get involved in music and theater. His teachers, particularly at the high school, ''really cultivated my love of theater and music to another level.''
Performing in Cleveland gives him a chance to reconnect, he said. When he performed here in 2004 in the touring production of Big River, the musical for which he received a Tony nomination, he found playing for a hometown crowd exciting, he said. As Rent prepared to open, he was looking forward to an influx of old friends and groups from his church and high school who were planning to come to the show.
After spending so many hours in the audience as a kid, ''it's great to be on the other side,'' he said.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com.
Details
• Musical: Rent
• When: 7:30 Thursday and Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
• Where: Palace Theatre, Playhouse Square, 1501 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.
• Tickets: $10-$55.
• Information: 216-241-6000 or http://www.playhousesquare.org.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
Hinckley, Oh
Posted 12:48 PM, 01/08/2009
Saw the show on Tuesday, and he was phenomenal. It's really great to see people from the area go on to do wonderful things. :-)
