Macht sat down with Fordham Magazine to discuss the bawdy production and his whirlwind experience as the show transformed from little-known downtown play to Broadway smash hit.

How did you get involved with the production?

I literally just auditioned. It wasn’t supposed to be this big show. It was supposed to be six weeks off-Broadway, so it was a pretty low-key audition. I was like, “Well, that went fine,” and I didn’t expect to hear about it ever again. Then I lucked out and I got it.

I had actually been in a TV show called At Home with Amy Sedaris, and Cole Escola was in the same episode, but we never met each other. I remember watching it andCole would pop up, and I’d be like, “That person’s funny. If only I could be that funny.” And I still feel that way, because they’re the funniest person that I’ve ever seen. So it is a full-circle thing to be working with them on this.

Can you describe your role in the show and how you approached it?

My character is Mary’s husband’s assistant. Cole plays Mary Todd Lincoln, so you can figure out who Mary’s husband is. I am the assistant, sort of his bag boy. 

How I approach the role is to take it as truly seriously as possible. So, the play is  pure farce. But to allow Cole and the others to be the funniest, I have to pretend I’m in an HBO miniseries about Lincoln, and not this übersilly play. That’s the approach—like, this guy’s life is on the line.

The subject matter is fairly edgy.

What’s actually so fun about the show is, while it is edgy—we’re making fun of the president, we’re making fun of these revered political figures from American history—the jokes are actually like Three Stooges jokes. So it’s both very subversive but also strangely comforting because it’s a style of comedy that is so ingrained in all of us just from watching any sitcom ever.

Your show has become a bit of a phenomenon. Have you had a favorite moment?

The one that’s the most amazing is, we had only been open off-Broadway for a week, and Steven Spielberg, Sally Field, and Tony Kushner all came as a little trio. That was truly surreal. Even Cole was starstruck, and we were all just like, “This is so amazing.” And I was just thinking to myself, imagining Sally Field, Tony Kushner, and Steven Spielberg—I guess they still have an active group text from filming the movie Lincoln—and they’re like, “Should we go see this silly show?” And they all said yes. That’s so cute to me. 

Any other favorite people you’ve met backstage?

Melissa McCarthy came and was so unbelievably effusive in her praise. She did a classic Melissa McCarthy thing and she literally knelt down before Cole and bowed to them. It was just so funny and you could just tell how much [McCarthy] was touched by it.

Earlier this year, Frank DiLella talked about the multigenerational Fordham posse that exists on Broadway. What has your experience been like as one of the newest members?

I do feel the Fordham presence on Broadway, and the New York theater scene at large. I’m in a fantasy football league with [2017 Fordham grad] Celina Lam, [an associate company manager with Wagner Johnson Productions, co-led by 2002 Fordham grad John Johnson] and I walk by her show The Roommate every night to go home, so I see her all the time. It’s amazing how much stuff Fordham people are producing and acting in and writing. Most of my collaborator friends who I do workshops and things with are still people I met at Fordham. It makes me very proud.

You’ve gone on to grad school, worked in film and TV. Do you feel like your Fordham experience laid a path for the things you’ve done since?

I learned how to act at Fordham. I always had a natural liking of acting, but I had no idea really what I was doing until I came to Fordham. What Fordham was so good at is there’s opportunities to act in front of people constantly. If you don’t get cast on the main stage, you do the studio shows, or you are in class. You just get the reps in. Like an athlete, you just get better by doing it. That’s what allows you to jump in quickly when you get an audition, or when you get a part. That’s the gift of going to a theater school like Fordham.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Franco Giacomarra, FCLC ’19.

We asked DiLella, a 2006 Fordham graduate who’s also an adjunct professor at the University, for his top summer Broadway picks. He threw in an off-Broadway recommendation and even gave us an insider’s peek at what’s coming this fall.

Merrily We Roll Along

Photo by Matthew Murphy

The critically acclaimed Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along—once an infamous flop—is now the winner of four Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical. Merrily centers around the turbulent journey of three friends: Franklin, Charley, and Mary—played by Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez. Groff and Radcliffe took home the Tony Awards for Best Actor in a Musical and Best Featured Actor in a Musical, respectively, for their performances.

Hell’s Kitchen

Photo by Chelcie Pary

The Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen is loosely based on her experience of growing up in Manhattan, and features her famous tunes like “Empire State of Mind” and “If I Ain’t Got You.” The show stars Broadway regulars Brandon Victor Dixon and Shoshana Bean, alongside newcomer Maleah Joi Moon. Moon is making her professional debut as the Keys-inspired character, Ali, and recently took home the Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical.

Oh, Mary!

Photo by Emilio Madrid

Comic genius Cole Escola, widely known for playing characters in television shows like Search Party and Big Mouth, is now tackling Mary Todd Lincoln in the new play Oh, Mary! It’s opening on Broadway in July after a sold-out off-Broadway run. In the show, written by Escola and directed by Sam Pinkleton, Mary Todd Lincoln will do anything to fulfill her one big dream. The production features an ensemble cast, including Fordham Theatre grad Tony Macht, FCLC ’17.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball

Photo by Evan Zimmerman

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats is now playing off-Broadway at the Perelman Performing Arts Center like you’ve never seen it before. In this new, immersive restaging of the 1982 Broadway mega-musical, audiences are welcomed into the Jellicle Ball, which is inspired by the ballroom culture that burst onto the queer, gay, and trans scene in New York City more than five decades ago. Cats: The Jellicle Ball stars Tony Award-winner André De Shields as Old Deuteronomy; ballroom icon Chasity Moore, who goes by “Tempress,” as Grizabella; and Hamilton alum Sydney James Harcourt as Rum Tum Tugger.

A Look Ahead at Broadway’s Fall Lineup

Sunset Boulevard

Photo by Marc Brenner

Nicole Sherzinger’s acclaimed performance as film diva Norma Desmond is making its way across the pond from London’s West End. Sunset Boulevard arrives on Broadway this October in a stripped-down, minimalistic version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber classic. The show features direction by British sensation Jamie Lloyd, known for his radical reimaginings.

Gypsy

Photo by Allison Michael Orenstein

One of Broadway’s greatest works and greatest performers join forces this fall when Audra McDonald stars in Gypsy at the historic Majestic Theatre. Widely considered one of the best musicals of all time, Gypsy is the story of how far a determined stage mom will go to turn her daughter into a star. The show features a legendary creative team with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by the late Stephen Sondheim.

Reopening: The Broadway Revival debuted in early 2022 as part of PBS’ Great Performances series, with DiLella as host and executive producer.

It was another high point in his nearly two-decade career as an entertainment journalist, one that began with an internship at Spectrum News NY1 when he was a Fordham student. Today, he’s best known as the host of On Stage, NY1’s acclaimed weekly theater show. His numerous celebrity interviews and in-depth reporting have endeared him to artists and fans alike, and earned him 11 New York Emmy Awards.

Since 2013, he’s also been sharing his knowledge and experience with students. He teaches a course, Theater Journalism, at the University’s Lincoln Center campus, and has been mentoring a new generation of Fordham-educated Broadway professionals.

He sat down with Fordham Magazine just before the Tony Awards to reflect on his career path and share one of his most memorable celebrity stories.

You are a huge cheerleader for all things Fordham. What initially drew you here?
Fordham was my first choice. I grew up in Philadelphia, and both my parents went to Saint Joseph’s University, which is the Jesuit university there. So we were very familiar with Jesuit, liberal arts education—the idea of coming to college and exploring, and truly having this university journey of figuring out what you want to be and what you want to do.

And at Fordham, you marry that with the greatest city in the world, New York City, which has always felt like my home away from home—and has now been my home for 20-plus years. It doesn’t get better than Fordham.

You achieved great success by blending your passion for theater with a new one that you found here. What kind of mentorship did you receive?
I came into Fordham thinking that I was going to pursue acting, but I took an intro to communications course, and my professor, Lewis Freeman, polled the class: “How many of you have thought about being a reporter?” I remember raising my hand. I grew up loving shows like Dateline NBC and 20/20.

He said, “If you are lucky enough, get yourself an internship at Spectrum News New York 1—you can explore and learn what it takes to be in the business and they have an amazing internship program.” That summer, I applied. I was also up for a role in a professional production of Hair in Brooklyn. And I kind of told myself, “Whatever is meant to be is meant to be.” I got NY1 and never looked back.

Photo courtesy of Frank DiLella

You came here with dreams of breaking into the theater world, and now you’re such an integral part of it. What is it like to be part of the Fordham community on Broadway?
We’re called the “Fordham Posse.” When it’s revealed to someone that you went to Fordham, it’s like, “Oh, we’re part of the same family.”

I think of John Johnson, who is a celebrated theater producer who graduated in 2002, the year I started, but would always come back—again, this family mentality. He’s someone I definitely looked up to. Van Hughes, who has gone on to be in various Broadway shows, was part of my crew. Taylor Schilling from Orange is the New Black. Kelley Curran was my close friend. Paul Wontorek too—he’s the editor-in-chief for Broadway.com, and we are very much working colleagues. There is definitely a lot of Fordham love to go around.

You’ve interviewed just about every famous actor that has come through Broadway over your time at NY1. Do you have a favorite story?
I got to know Elaine Stritch very well. She had a residency at the Café Carlyle for years, and like clockwork, every spring I would sit down with her. Towards the end of her life, I got a call saying, “Elaine would like to speak to you to do a story.” I went to her residence, and she couldn’t sit up, so she said to me, “Frank, get in bed with me. Just talk to me about my life.”

Now, this is a woman who was very close to Judy Garland. She went on a date with JFK. She was close friends with Ethel Merman. To me, she is what we think of when we think of legends of Broadway, absolute legends of entertainment. I mean, the stories that she had, I’ll never forget that. We had so much fun. We had so many laughs.

There’s a clip of Hugh Jackman ending an interview with you saying, “Thanks Frank, you’re the best.” How does it feel to be such a trusted figure among these incredible artists?
Having access and trust with these artists—for them to open up to me and feel comfortable opening up for me—that is a true gift. And that’s one of my favorite things about this job. I’m so grateful to get to be with these people to tell the stories.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Franco Giacomarra, FCLC ’19.

Related Story: What to See on Broadway This Summer
Frank DiLella shares his recommendations—from the latest Tony winners to the next big hits.

Beyond her own projects—including Callaloo, a children’s book and media brand that got the attention of PBS Kids—she’s been making her mark on Broadway as a co-producer of shows such as The Wiz and the Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen, for which she and her fellow producers were nominated for a 2024 Tony Award.

Tell me about how you got into acting and how you found your way to Fordham.
I grew up in D.C. My mom is from Trinidad, and my dad is African American. At home, the arts and storytelling were celebrated. I studied musical theater in high school at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and the dream was to come to New York and be on Broadway.

What intrigued me about Fordham was the fact that you could double major. I was interested in so many different things that I didn’t want to just go to an acting conservatory. I was very invested in the Fordham Theatre program itself and how the University could help me grow.

Did your thinking about your career change during college?
I wasn’t coming out of Fordham saying, “I want to own my own business.” I wanted to be an actor. For about a year after graduating, I auditioned and hustled, and I found that I wanted to do other things. Fordham taught me a lot with my extracurricular involvement. I was part of the Black student club, and a lot of the skills that I was learning—building out events, budgeting, marketing events, bringing an audience together, cross-collaboration with other student clubs—those were all skills that taught me how to produce.

Tell me about your production company, Sepia Works. What has the trajectory been like?
The growth has been incredible. The company started with my one-woman play Girls! Girls? Girls., which took me out to LA and I started doing more film and TV work. My second piece, Callaloo, started off as a play but then turned into a book series and a show with puppetry. Then these bigger companies—Sesame Street, PBS Kids—started calling. And because I was creating my own stories and my own narratives, I had more power in the room.

Why did you decide to start the Canady Foundation for the Arts?
I realized that Callaloo was impacting young people, and we needed more support in the nonprofit space to serve children with literacy and early child development work. The foundation has also grown exponentially since 2015. We now have a staff, we have ongoing programming. We serve young people from 3 all the way to 18. Partnership and collaboration have been such a huge part of the growth.

What does your average day look like?
Every day is different, and I love that. But my days are made up of routine: I get up, I get my daughter to school, I work out in the morning, and then I try to schedule something. I have to have some type of structure. Being a mom also has forced me to prioritize and to know that at a certain time, I have to stop working. I can’t work the way that I worked in my 20s.

How do you balance not only the work but those parts of your identity—thinking like both an artist and an entrepreneur?
Honestly, it’s very hard. And it took me a long time to figure out my workflow and my balance. I would say at this point in my life, I have an amazing team that can manage a lot of the business stuff for me, but in the early stages, I did everything. And I think that makes the best leaders. You have to be able to have a grasp of every role, and be able to roll your sleeves up and do the work. And I think you also just have to carve out time to rest and to focus on your craft.

At times when I get overwhelmed, I like to step back and take time for gratitude and acknowledge that there’s creativity in everything that is going on in the room, whether it’s the business side or the actual creative side. That’s what makes it fun.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

But just as important was a gut feeling.

“There was this moment when I visited Fordham after I had gotten accepted, and I was going down the escalator” in the Lowenstein Center, Liu says. “There was the ‘New York is my campus, Fordham is my school’ sign, and I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, okay, I think I can spend four years here.’ It was very clear to me that this was the place I belonged.”

Liu not only got the dance training that prepared her for her current role in the national touring production of Funny Girl, but she became an orientation leader on campus—in part to help students find their own “escalator moment.”  

“I loved the fact that everything was in its own little radius,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I feel like there’s a little community for me here. Even if I am in this huge city where there’s a million things to do, I know I have this little pocket.’ I wanted other people to have that experience.”

Finding Structure—and a Spiritual Connection—Through Art

Growing up in San Francisco, Liu knew she wanted to attend college in New York City.

“For me, it felt like a mecca,” Liu says. “This is where art is. This is where art flourishes. This is where art is appreciated. This is where we feel like we can be fully who we are and not have to hide anything, and just be allowed to be in community with the people who are the best at this in the world. There’s just really no other place like it.”

As she settled into the BFA program, she decided to pursue a minor in business administration “to have skills to bring to the table if I own a small business or help someone else with their business,” she says. And the first-year course Faith and Critical Reasoning was a formative one for her.

“Seeing how people create structure in their lives around religion almost reminded me of how I create structure in my life around art,” she says. “Regardless of what religion it is, it all comes down to the same thing: wanting to feel alive, wanting to feel appreciated, wanting to feel love, wanting to give love. I think that is my philosophy around art as well. It’s just sharing human experience.”

Since graduating from Fordham in 2019, she’s been sharing that experience with audiences as a dancer, actress, and model at places like the J Chen Project dance company, on Apple TV’s Dickinson, and as a cast member of Cabaret at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House. Now, she’s bringing her talents across the United States on the Funny Girl national tour, a yearlong job that began last August and will take her through this summer—and that has brought her to some new favorite cities, like Des Moines and Memphis, and to San Francisco for a hometown run. She says the Funny Girl tour feels like a culmination of what she’s been building toward. “I remember just crying, being like, ‘Okay, everything that I’ve been working toward and wanting and manifesting is finally coming to fruition,’” she says of finding out she landed a role in the tap-heavy musical. “It feels like a step in the right direction toward the rest of my goals.”

Creating Community on Campus

While dance and academic studies keep BFA students plenty busy, Liu also wanted to get more involved on the Fordham campus outside the classroom. She gave campus tours for prospective students, was an orientation leader, and served on the Senior Week Committee, which planned events and celebrations for her class’s upcoming final year—from a boat cruise and Dave & Buster’s night to information sessions on housing and personal finance workshops.

“It was community building and preparing yourself to be an adult and spending time with friends,” Liu says of her experience on the Senior Week Committee. “I just wanted to take advantage of all the opportunities that I had to connect with people and create relationships that were not solely focused on dance.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Sharing my art and being accessible to people who feel like I can be of help to them.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Two: It’s not all about you, and everything happens for a reason.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
Oh, that’s such a hard question! I have to say Sheep Meadow in Central Park. It’s a little cheesy and basic, but it’s real. New York is my favorite place in the world. Once you leave New York, you’re like, ‘Oh, thank God I left,’ but then you’re like two, three days out and you’re like, ‘Wait, now I miss it!’”

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. I did my senior choreography thesis based on it. It’s this somewhat fictional, somewhat based-on-fact short story collection. He theorizes how Einstein was imagining how time moves. It is so much about questioning reality and questioning your perspective on things. That’s been a basis for how I take things in and how I see the world, for sure.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I loved Dean Milton Javier Bravo, who taught Faith and Critical Reasoning. I appreciated that he didn’t just see me as a student, he saw me as a human. He was like, “Okay, you’re on your own journey and this is my class, but what you bring to the class is more important than you just showing up and sitting here.” He was always trying to get everyone else involved in the class. On the Ailey side, the one who’s closest to my heart is one of my ballet teachers, Caridad Martinez. She’s a former Cuban ballerina, incredible technician. I loved her class so much. It was always the hardest class. I would make sure in my schedule that I could get into her classes, because she knew the way I worked. She was able to push me and be like, “Kathy, is that really your best? I don’t think you’re giving me your best today. I know you can do better than this.” I hope she knows that she’s been a big influence.

“Obviously she pioneered the way for a lot of women,” McCann’s longtime friend and associate Kristen Luciana told the Daily News. “But Liz was so much more than a great female Broadway producer. She was a great Broadway producer—full stop.”

McCann rose to prominence as one half of McCann & Nugent Productions, a company she formed with Nelle Nugent in 1976. Together they produced a string of critically acclaimed hits including Amadeus (1981), Dracula (1977), and The Elephant Man (1979).

“The theater is a male-oriented world,” McCann told The New York Times Magazine in 1981. “And, sure, we’re women. I just don’t think of producing as being a problem for a woman. I think, essentially, the theater is desperate for success and product and ideas. Therefore, I don’t think anybody cares as much where those things come from as they think they care.”

Those ideas and what Playbill called McCann’s “taste for serious dramas” undoubtedly gave rise to her relationship with lauded playwright Edward Albee. She produced three of his works: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women, The Play About the Baby, and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, which won the 2002 Tony Award for best play.

“Every once in a while, a playwright will be lucky enough to run into a producer who is crazy—who is willing to take chances, who feels that a producer’s responsibility is to find work you think really should be seen, to whom financial concern is not the main adventure,” Albee said of McCann in 2004. “The main adventure is trying to get plays on.”

Discovering the ‘Magic’ of Broadway

McCann was born in New York City on March 29, 1931, the only child of Patrick and Rebecca McCann, who had immigrated to New York from Scotland. She grew up in Manhattan’s Garment District, not at all far from what would become her second home: the Theater District. Despite this proximity, McCann did not harbor a childhood love of theater. Her father, who worked as a subway motorman, and her mother, a housewife, weren’t “wildly interested in culture,” McCann told the Times.

In fact, she was forced, all but kicking and screaming, to attend a theater production when she was 14 or 15. The show was Cyrano de Bergerac starring José Ferrer. Her cousin had an extra ticket, and McCann’s mother made her go.

“That was it,” McCann shared in a CUNY-TV interview. “It was just magic. From then on, I wanted to see theater. Now, that took some saving up of allowances to … buy a $3 seat, but that just blew me away, that production.”

McCann attended Manhatanville College and, upon graduating in 1952 considered a few options, none of which included a career in the theater. “I could get married, I could become a nun, or I could become a business rep for the telephone company,” she told the Times. “Since neither God nor man seemed determined to take me for his bride, I settled on the telephone company.”

Ultimately though, a chance meeting with a nun at Manhattanville led her to abandon that plan, according to Madeline Felix, FCLC ’08, who worked with McCann as an undergraduate at Fordham. McCann became her mentor, and the two remained close friends until McCann’s passing.

During a series of unpublished oral history interviews, McCann told Felix that “the telephone companies were loaded with Irish Catholic girls from colleges” back then, so, since she didn’t really know what she wanted to do, that “seemed a good bet.”

“Finally, the day came for my interview with the telephone company, and I was rushing to it when a nun on campus stopped me,” McCann told Felix. “I told her I was going to my interview, and she said, ‘Are you actually thinking of working for the telephone company? … That strikes me as a thoroughly boring thing to do.’ … I never went to the interview.”

Instead, thinking of becoming a drama teacher, McCann pursued a master’s degree in English literature at Columbia University.

Fordham Law: A Surprising Theater Level-Up

When McCann graduated from Columbia two years later, she began working as an unpaid intern at Proscenium Productions, based at Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Unsatisfied with the theater gigs she’d secured thus far, McCann believed that if she got a law degree, she could practice theatrical law.

She enrolled at Fordham Law, graduated in 1966, and passed the New York bar exam. After practicing law for about a year, James Nederlander hired her to be managing director of his newly acquired Palace Theater. McCann later joked that Nederlander’s own unrealized dream of becoming a lawyer and his respect for strong, no-nonsense women who reminded him of his mother were both ticks in her favor.

It turned out to be a fateful hire. Nugent worked for Nederlander as well, and in 1976, the two women struck out on their own, forming their now-legendary production company in the old Paramount Building on Broadway. From 1978 to 1982, their productions earned five back-to-back Tony Awards: Dracula, The Elephant Man, Morning’s at Seven, Amadeus, and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. And McCann’s partnerships with other producers earned her four more Tony Awards: for The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Copenhagen, a play about physicists and the development of the atomic bomb; and revivals of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and the musical Hair.

Her latest producing effort, Hangmen, never officially opened. Its previews had just wrapped in early 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a Broadway shutdown that’s only recently been lifted.

Offering the Next Generation a Leg Up

McCann was known for her willingness to nurture up-and-coming talent and mentor students interested in theater—including Fordham alumni John Johnson, FCLC ’02, now a multiple Tony Award-winning producer in his own right; and Frank DiLella, FCLC ’06, host of Spectrum News NY1’s On Stage. Her position as managing producer of the Tony Awards show—and her lasting friendship with Larry Sacharow, former director of the Fordham Theatre program who directed two of McCann’s Albee productions: Three Tall Women and Beckett/Albee—afforded her plenty of opportunity to do so.

In a 2014 interview with Fordham Magazine, Johnson, who began working with McCann when he was an undergraduate and collaborated with her on the 2009 revival of Hair, referred to her as a “third grandmother” who gave him “priceless” career advice during the decade or so he worked with her.

“She basically gave me the base of my career in terms of the knowledge that I needed for it, whether it was how to know how to read a box office statement or a wrap report, all the way to how she interacted with artists and creatives … with stagehands and crew members,” Johnson said upon McCann’s passing.

“She essentially shattered the glass ceiling of Broadway,” he added, stressing that McCann and Nugent’s refusal to be “pushed aside” has given every subsequent producer the opportunity “to stand on those shoulders.”

“It’s an incredible, incredible impact,” he said.

A funeral Mass was held for McCann on Monday, September 13, at the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle, across the street from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. A recording of the Mass is available online.

Last fall, Playbill listed Fordham among the colleges most represented on Broadway, so it’s no surprise to find three alumni and one Fordham Theatre faculty member among this year’s Tony Award nominees.

Fordham Theatre alumna Julie White, PCS ’09, is up for best featured actress in a play for her turn in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus. Written by Taylor Mac, Gary is an imagined sequel to Shakespeare’s violent revenge drama. It’s set amid the decline of the Roman Empire and tells the story of the minor characters left with the macabre cleanup work following the gruesome events of Shakespeare’s original.

In her review for Vulture, Sara Holdren praised the “combined zaniness and pathos of [White’s] marvelously feverish performance” as Carol, a midwife who is merely mentioned in Shakespeare’s play, and added that it is “all but impossible to imagine Gary without [her] brilliantly kooky antics.”

White previously won the Tony for best actress in a play in 2007 for The Little Dog Laughed, and she was also nominated for best featured actress in a play in 2015 for Airline Highway.

Meanwhile, Ephraim Sykes, FCLC ’10, has been nominated for best featured actor in a musical for his role as David Ruffin in Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations. New York Times critic Ben Brantley noted Sykes’ “spectacular scissor splits” and “smoking hot” performance as the music legend who sang lead vocals on Temptations hits like “My Girl” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” but who was as personally troubled as he was talented.

“This is the most monstrous role I’ve ever had to take on,” Sykes told Broadway.com. “The award [for me] is when I walk out of the stage door, and I meet somebody that says, ‘What you did really connected to me.’”

A graduate of the Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. in dance program, Sykes has previously been nominated for three Astaire Awards for his roles in Broadway productions, including Hamilton. He has also toured with the Ailey II dance company, and in 2016, he played Seaweed J. Stubbs in NBC’s televised live production of Hairspray!

Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, who joined Fordham Theatre last fall as head of the design and production track, has been nominated for best costume design for his work on the play Torch Song. He won the Tony in that category in 2016 for his work on the play Eclipsed.

Rounding out this year’s list of Fordham nominees is producer John Johnson, FCLC ’02, who got his start on Broadway as an intern for Joey Parnes Productions during his junior year at Fordham Theatre. He has a total of seven Tonys to his credit (among Fordham alumni, that’s second only to his mentor, Elizabeth McCann, LAW ’66, a nine-time Tony Award-winning producer).

This year, Johnson has been nominated twice, as an executive producer of best play nominee Gary and of The Waverly Gallery, which is up for best play revival.

Six additional members of the Fordham family are part of productions that have been nominated for 2019 Tony Awards:

• Siena Zoë Allen, FCLC ’15, associate costume designer, What the Constitution Means to Me
• Kaleigh Bernier, FCLC ’16, assistant stage manager, Be More Chill
• Jessie Bonaventure, FCLC ’15, assistant scenic designer, What the Constitution Means to Me and Hadestown
• Drew King, FCLC ’09, ensemble, Tootsie
• Fordham Theatre student Wayne Mackins, ensemble, The Prom
• Michael Potts, former Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre at Fordham, Mr. Hawkins, The Prom

The 73rd Annual Tony Awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, June 9, at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Dinner and a Show: Fordham’s alumni office hosts theater outings as part of its cultural events series. On May 9, a group of alumni and guests saw Tootsie and heard from Fordham grad and ensemble member Drew King, FCLC ’09, in a special talkback session after the show. Plans are underway for an October outing to see Ain’t Too Proud featuring Tony-nominee Ephraim Sykes, FCLC ’10. Tickets will be available soon via the alumni events calendar.

“I didn’t know, for example, that he had polio,” Levine says. She was also unaware that Alda’s mother exhibited symptoms of mental illness throughout his life and was hospitalized for it when he was about 18. “I spent months working closely with Alan and had no idea of the tragedies that surrounded him and the hardships he had to overcome to have the faith in himself to do this work.”

Similarly, Levine had bonded with the actress Molly Ringwald in a mommy-and-me class when the two were traversing the new frontier of first-time motherhood. But it wasn’t until interviewing her for Little Known Facts that she learned that Ringwald’s father is a blind jazz musician. They spoke about her catapult to stardom in the mid-1980s, with the blockbuster success of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, and about the perils of young fame.

“I found her story incredibly compelling,” Levine says. “How do you forge your own identity when the world has decided who you will be? She has had to prove herself over and over again, and she’s done it with incredible humor.”

From Acting to Podcasting, a Mid-Career Reinvention

It’s intimate conversations like these with stage and screen artists that are earning Levine’s podcast five-star reviews on iTunes and Podbay. Listeners call the show “hilarious,” “warm,” and “welcoming,” and say that Levine “has a gift for turning an interview into a conversation with an old friend over coffee.”

That’s precisely the vibe Levine was aiming to achieve with the project that materialized serendipitously in 2016. “A friend who had just taken on a podcast business told me that I might be great as a host,” she says. Having no experience in the space, her first inclination was to say no.

“But at the time, I had mindfully decided to say yes to more things,” Levine says. “I am an actor, but doing shows every night is hard on the family,” she adds. (She and her husband, the actor Dominic Fumusa, have two children.) “It was just a weird confluence of moments” that led to an opportunity that has since become a full-time job.

Given her long career in acting and theater—she starred as Lucy in the 1999 Broadway revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and appeared in television shows and films, including The Nanny Diaries, Law and Order, and the memorable Seinfeld episode “The Contest”—interviewing colleagues in the business made perfect sense. Levine points out that the same skill set needed for acting translates easily to hosting a podcast.

“I get quite engaged with all sorts of storytelling,” she says. “As an actor, you are also an investigative reporter,” she explains, noting that she devotes a lot of time to research before each interview. “I want these conversations to unearth new parts of these artists for my listeners as opposed to retreading the same things they’ve heard a hundred times.”

Her first interview subject was long-time friend John Slattery, the actor and director known best for his work in Mad Men. It went so well that Levine says the experience allowed her to give herself the “seal of approval” to move forward on the project. To date, more than 125 artists, including Jason Alexander, Cynthia Nixon, Uma Thurman, Octavia Spencer, Julianne Moore, and Edie Falco, have visited the studio for Levine’s up-close-and-personal-style interviews.

“Almost every one of my guests is a friend, and I still haven’t run out,” she jokes. “Most of my interviews are with friends I’ve collected job by job by job.”

Some guests, such as Tony Award-winning actors Julie White, PCS ’09, and John Benjamin Hickey, FCLC ’85, are friends she met at Fordham. Others are fellow performers she met as a founding member of the Naked Angels theater company, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, and Mary Stuart Masterson.

A Talent for Comedy

Levine’s conversations with her guests are often laced with humor, something that has served her well, she says, not only as a podcast host but throughout her life and acting career. It’s the reason she landed the role of Lucy in the Broadway musical, even though she insisted, when she was called to audition for the part, that she couldn’t sing.

“The director apparently had seen me perform before and felt that I had the essence of what they had in mind for Lucy,” Levine recalls. “They wanted a comedic actress.” The team worked with her on vocal exercises to give her confidence, and the project turned out to be one of the most memorable highlights of her acting career. “It was a stage-door experience that was the most glorious … so pure and beautiful,” Levine says.

Years later, the song Levine sang in the musical, “12 Little Known Facts,” inspired the name of her podcast. “It was the perfect name for what was happening in all of my conversations,” she says.

Fordham and theater weren’t in Levine’s thoughts until she spent a gap year between high school and college in Israel. Before that, her plan was to study advertising.

“Fordham was so enthusiastic and excited that I spent a year in Israel—not only did they give me credits for the courses I took, but they gave me a whole year,” says the New Jersey native. “They understood the life experience and community service were meaningful in my development as a human and my education at the college level.”

Levine adds that there is no better place to learn about theater than in New York City, and that in addition to giving her the chance to perform in and work on several productions as an undergraduate, her Fordham Theatre instructors frequently took her and her classmates to see shows on and off Broadway.

“It was such an exciting time, running around in the city with a group of warm and gifted students,” she says. “It was a tremendous beginning to my life in theater and I’m so grateful.”

—Claire Curry

From Intern to Executive Producer

In recent years, Johnson has emerged as one of Broadway’s most successful producers. He has a five-year winning streak on the line, having won a total of seven Tonys since 2013.

He got his start in the business as an intern for Joey Parnes Productions during his junior year at Fordham, when he helped coordinate the annual Tony Awards show. It was then that he met Fordham alumna and legendary Broadway producer Elizabeth McCann, LAW ’66, who became a mentor to him.

“For the 10 years that I was in an office with her, Liz gave me this really broad perspective about the business,” he told FORDHAM magazine in 2014. “What she taught me, as a theater producer and as a human being, was priceless. She’s like my third grandmother.”

A Return to Roots

If Washington wins next month, it will be his second Tony Award. He won the Tony for Best Leading Actor in 2010 for his role in Fences, a role he reprised in the 2016 film adaptation he directed and co-produced.

In mid-April, he returned to the Lincoln Center campus, where he surprised students and filmed an interview for CBS Sunday Morning.

New York Times critic Ben Brantley has praised Washington’s “center-of-gravity performance” in Eugene O’Neill’s “behemoth barroom tragedy,” The Iceman Cometh. For the Oscar- and Tony-winning star, the role marks a return to his roots. In December 1975, he made his New York stage debut in a Fordham Theatre production of another O’Neill play.

“You know, my first role on stage, when I was a student at Fordham, was in The Emperor Jones,” he recently told the Times. “I’ve always loved O’Neill, and here I am, 40 years later, coming back to him in Iceman.”

Washington and Johnson are not the only ones with Fordham ties among this year’s Tony Award nominees. Christine Jones, who held Fordham’s Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre in 2013, is up for a Tony for Best Scenic Design of a Play for her work on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

The 72nd Annual Tony Awards will be held on June 10 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

The musical comedy series, Rachel Unraveled, started as the passion project of Rachel Ravel and Austin Spero, two theater majors at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who also star in the series. Since its premiere last year, the two earned a Summer Research Grant from Fordham that allowed them to turn their dream into a reality.

With the help of fellow Fordham students and professors, the two wrote, produced, and shot the four episodes about trying to make it as an actor in New York City. Now you can find a new episode of Rachel Unraveled on broadwayworld.com every Wednesday.

Read more about how Rachel Unraveled began.
Watch episodes of Rachel Unraveled.

Watch the trailer below!

This past spring Henderson joined Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, and Viola Davis in the film version of August Wilson’s Fences, set to be released this December. The three starred in the 2010 Broadway production which won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play. He also starred in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Between Riverside and Crazy in 2015. He recently retired as a theater professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a position he has held since 1987.

“As an actor you’re fortunate to have a tough schedule. That means you’re working,” said the veteran actor.

From playing opposite Washington in Fences in 2010 to a recurrent role as a judge on TV’s Law and Order to his role as a White House servant in the film Lincoln, Henderson has transcended the limitations of a single medium. He credits his experience in stage acting, however, with giving him the chops to do so.

“The theater is where acting began, so if you want to study the craft of acting you want to study the history of it,” said Henderson.

Henderson, a native of Kansas, has performed extensively both on and off Broadway. He studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Purdue University, and at the Juilliard School. He also studied with the late director and actor Lloyd Richards, the former dean of the Yale School of Drama.

When Henderson started out, he said that theater was about “consciousness raising” and about “being involved in the process of citizenship.” It’s a stance that he still holds to this day, he said.

“Theater is a great service to the public, to the community, and to society,” he said. “It allows us to commune in our humanness.”

Matthew Maguire, the theatre program’s director, introduced himself to the actor in 2006. At the time Henderson and director Israel Hicks were making the argument that it was time for the great plays of the African-American canon to be considered great American plays, said Maguire.

“It was from him that I got the idea to ask actors to play across ethnic lines in acting class,” said Maguire. “The actors of color have always played Shakespeare and Chekhov, but the white actors never play Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. Now they do, thanks to Stephen.”

Maguire called Henderson a Sensei, a “teacher of teachers,” whose support was key in bringing the Fordham program forward when it came to racial issues in acting. Maguire said he had long ago asked his students to cross ethnic lines by playing roles of other races, which made some students uncomfortable. He said it wasn’t fully understood until Henderson told the students to prepare for the role as they would any other: through a close reading of the text.

“The larger sense of what it is to be a human being pervades his work as a teacher and an actor on the stage. He’s got this amazing balance of affirming students, but there’s no lack of rigor in his approach. As a teacher, he’s tough.”

Henderson said he is not a purist when it comes to teaching, and said he intends to pass on a variety of methods he’s learned over the years. But while he holds various methods of acting in high regard, he said good acting always refers back to the play and the audience.

“The work is text specific,” he said. “You’re examining a piece of dramatic literature, and the artist has to come up with a series of exercises on how to best to serve the play.”

“You start with the rules, but it’s not about the rules; it’s about the exceptions. What is right for you in this moment? It’s not a self-absorbed journey. It’s about the others in the room.

“It certainly isn’t just about entertainment. We may do it for the audience, but it’s always done on the art’s terms.”