INTERVIEW: Kyle Selig is making new friends in ‘Old Friends’ on Broadway
Photo: From left, Gavin Lee, Kyle Selig and Jason Pennycooke perform “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by The Press Room with permission.
NEW YORK — At almost every moment in the last 50 years of Broadway history, the work of Stephen Sondheim could be enjoyed in a theater in Midtown Manhattan. Whether it was last season’s Merrily We Roll Along or this season’s Gypsy, the beloved maestro and his many musicals are mainstays of the New York theater scene. Now the Broadway community — specifically the Manhattan Theatre Club — is throwing a celebration of Sondheim’s life and legacy with the new revue Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, produced by Cameron Mackintosh.
Starring Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, Old Friends at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 47th Street stitches together dozens of Sondheim’s musical numbers into a fitting tribute that perfectly showcases the talents of the composer and lyricist. One of the key members of the cast is Kyle Selig, who helps bring life and energy to tunes from West Side Story, Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, Company and more. He’s joined by the likes of Beth Leavel, Gavin Lee and Kate Jennings Grant, among others.
“For me, specifically, I grew up listening to all of this music and grew up wearing out the DVD of Sunday in the Park With George with Bernadette Peters and did Miss Saigon in high school, listening to Lea Salonga,” Selig said in a recent phone interview. “So, for me, it was a very, very easy [yes] because it didn’t really matter what the deal was. It was going to happen, just to be on stage with all those folks singing those songs.”
Selig said there are numerous qualities of Sondheim’s oeuvre that he loves, but as an actor, he really responds to the words that are chosen for each song. He loves that the tunes are character-based, and the performers get to be actors and not just singers on stage.
“We do a lot of jukebox musicals these days, and there’s a place for those, and we love those,” he said. “But to have these words in your mouth and say them as an actor is to me what I got into this to do. … The way that [the show is] structured, I literally get to do three or four of my biggest dream roles ever all in one evening, so it’s a little buffet or sampler platter of what I’ve always wanted my career to be.”
Old Friends offers a combination of various stagings of these songs. There are numbers that mimic the actual musicals where the songs originated, with meat pies for Sweeney Todd and fire escapes for West Side Story, and there are other times that the hard-working cast members take to the center of the stage and offer unadorned renditions of these classic songs, something between a concert and an intimate whisper in one’s ear.
“Am I trying to squeeze in the whole show into this two-minute sequence, or is this supposed to take on a life of its own? The answer is both,” Selig said of the structure. “There are moments where we are really, really hand-delivering what the audience is expecting us to give from these characters, and there are some moments where we’re intentionally taking it in a different way, trying to surprise people who might know the songs already. It’s very fun to adjust those levels on a song-to-song basis.”
Bringing all of this talent together is director Matthew Bourne, known both for this theater work and choreography. He directs the musical with the orchestra upstage in the back of the performers, two staircases heading up and off stage, and movable walls that play various sets throughout the two-hour-and-30-minute evening.
“What a wonderful man,” Selig said of the director. “I’m so pleased to have gotten to work with him. He comes from these beautiful ballets that he puts together with his dance company, so for me, it’s such a joy to work with a director that is so physical because every song takes on a physical life. And, as I said, Sondheim songs are very wordy, and they can lean a little concert-y. Stand at a music stand and say all the words, which is great, but working with him, everything had to be augmented physically.”
One highlight for Selig is when he interprets a number from West Side Story. He ranks that memorable show as the #1 go-to for his audition pieces over the last few years. To bring this song to life on a Broadway stage is a huge accomplishment for the actor.
“To be able to be on Broadway singing this song, specifically with these folks, I’m ticking off bucket-list stuff,” said Selig, who has also performed in Broadway’s Water for Elephants, Mean Girls and The Book of Mormon. “I think for a lot of people that movie [West Side Story] is so formative. Everybody who does musical theater is obsessed with that movie and for good reason. It’s wonderful. These songs taught me how to sing as a musical theater student. These are the songs that you are given. It’s canon. You have to know them, and then when I moved to New York, it just happened that the 2010 production was playing. I saw it. It was one of the first Broadway shows I had seen when I moved here right before I went to college, and yet it’s a production that I’ve never done. … Everybody does it in high school or is in some community production. For whatever reason, that just hasn’t played out, so it does feel a little bit like the white whale.”
Selig’s journey to Broadway began when he was in middle school. He then auditioned for a musical theater program in high school, was accepted and found that the acting bug was a fun addition to his life. But that’s all it was at that point: fun. Later in high school, he decided to take some steps to start building a career. He was accepted into a summer intensive program in New York City and moved to the Big Apple, and that summer he knew he made the right decision.
“I love visiting New York,” he said. “Let me see if I actually like spending time there, and so when I was 16, I think I turned 17 while I was here, I lived in New York for the summer into the fall. And that’s when I became absolutely obsessed with it. I had a teacher who told me, ‘Hey, by the way, you’re quite good at this. You’ll have to work really hard, but if you want to have a career in this, you should pursue it.’ That is the moment I point to where I started taking it very seriously.”
And now he’s living out his dream and singing Sondheim on Broadway.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, featuring Kyle Selig, continues at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through June 29. Click here for more information and tickets.
