Joshua Henry Does Whatever It

Takes, in ‘Carousel’ and as a

Father
By Laura Collins-Hughes May 10, 2018

For Joshua Henry, the Tony-nominated star of “Carousel,” playing the flawed Billy Bigelow is an opportunity to
expand younger black actorsʼ notion of what they can hope to do onstage.Jesse Dittmar for The New York Times

Samson Peter Henry, his parents’ first child, made his debut on the cusp of
spring, at around 9 o’clock one morning this March. For his mother, Cathryn
Henry, a postpartum nurse at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, it was a kind
of Have Your Child at Work situation.

For his father, the three-time Tony Award-nominated actor Joshua Henry —
most recently for his lead performance as Billy Bigelow in Jack O’Brien’s
revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” — Samson’s birth had the
advantage of exquisite timing.

“We were in the middle of previews, and like a good boy he came on the day
off,” Mr. Henry, 33, said over lunch at a diner on the Upper West Side, near
his apartment. He’d logged only three and a half, maybe four hours of sleep
the night before, but he was energetic anyway. When he realized it had been
exactly a month since his son was born, he high-fived the reporter across the
table.

It’s a bounteous time for Mr. Henry, who is toppling a boundary as the first
black actor to star as Billy Bigelow on Broadway. Billy is Mr. Henry’s highest-
profile stage role so far, while becoming a father is, he said, the biggest
moment of his life. What’s strange, and powerfully serendipitous, is how
perfectly that intersects with the biggest moment in Billy’s life, when he
learns of his impending fatherhood.

“My boy, Bill,” Billy exults, envisioning a son in his famous song “Soliloquy.”
When Mr. Henry performs that solo now — in what Ben Brantley, in his New
York Times review, called “a heaven-rumbling voice” — he summons
thoughts of his boy, Samson: his face, his strong little body, even his cry. Like
Billy, he is awed and invigorated by what he owes to this tiny person in his
life. In both men, actor and character, something has changed.
When Mr. Henry (seen here with Jessie Mueller, who plays his wife in “Carousel”) sings the famous song
“Soliloquy,” he summons thoughts of his newborn son, Samson.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

If, when he was 15, Mr. Henry had been given a glimpse of his future — the
Broadway debut at 23 in “In the Heights”; his first Tony nomination, at 26,
for “The Scottsboro Boys”; a second three years later, for “Violet” — it would
have seemed foreign to him. The youngest of three children of Jamaican
immigrants, who attended a small Christian school north of Miami where his
father taught math, he’d always been musical. But he’d never seen
professional theater and had no idea it could be a career.

“I had fully intended to work at an accounting firm like my mom,” he said.

Then came an intervention that Mr. Henry credits with everything good that
came after. When he was 16, his choir teacher, Birgit Fioravante, urged him to
audition for the school production of “The Music Man.” He ended up playing
the male lead, Harold Hill.
“Afterward, she took me aside and she was crying,” Mr. Henry said. “She was
like, ‘You can do this for a living.’ And I was like, ‘Do what?’”

In an interview, Ms. Fioravante said that she’d worried about encouraging a

student to follow a path where the odds against success are so steep. “I’d
never done it before,” she said, “and I haven’t done it since.”

For a year, she gave Mr. Henry free private voice lessons at her house. She
prepared him for his audition at the University of Miami, where he was
admitted into the musical theater program and met his wife, who lived across
the hall. More recently, Ms. Fioravante helped to train him vocally for
“Carousel.”

Mr. Henry in a school photo from Florida Bible Christian School in 2001, when he was 17. Right, his planner.

At college, he knew within a week that theater was something he could do for
life. From 11:30 p.m. to 3 a.m., alone in a college studio, he would devote his
nights to what he calls “Josh obsession time,” honing his skills.

“I would just be there with the mirrors,” he said, “and I would play cast album
after cast album after cast album after cast album. And I would start to learn
the directors, the music directors, what musical theater was — how it was
constructed, how a show was made. While I was listening to music, I was
practicing dance.”

He was also studying the careers of black musical theater actors like Michael
McElroy, Taye Diggs, Norm Lewis and Brian Stokes Mitchell. “I was like, if
there’s a template for me out there, I have to know exactly what that is,” he
said.

Yet even as he searched for that template, he didn’t want to be limited to roles
written for black men. And while he willed himself to believe that he would
perform on Broadway within three years of graduation — a goal he wrote
down in a planner he still keeps on his desk — he wasn’t sure that the theater,
an overwhelmingly white industry, would welcome him.
But his timing, coinciding with the emergence of Lin-Manuel Miranda,
turned out to be impeccable.

In the fall of 2006, Mr. Henry drove a Penske truck from Florida to New York
and moved into a basement apartment in Washington Heights. Within weeks,
he was cast in the original ensemble of Mr. Miranda and Quiara Alegría
Hudes’s breakthrough Off Broadway musical “In the Heights.”

The show was “from a world I was from, from a vocabulary musically that was
all about hip-hop, R&B, salsa and reggaeton,” Mr. Henry said, recalling the
production’s first read-through, when the musical director Alex Lacamoire
sat at a piano and sang “96,000,” surrounded by a company of Latino and
black actors.

The actor sings a number from “The Scottsboro Boys,” for which he received his first Tony Award nomination, in
2011.Zach Wise/The New York Times

“I was having flashbacks of the nights at 3 in the morning, trying to find

myself and my craft and wondering if there was a — not knowing if there was
a — hoping,” Mr. Henry said, hitting that word hard, “that there was a place
for me in this business. I lost it. I was crying so much in that read-through. A
lot of us were.”

After he did that show, which transferred to Broadway in early 2008,

“couldn’t nobody tell me anything about where I’m supposed to be,” he said.

It means something to him, then, to play a classic role like Billy Bigelow.
Billy, though, is a dark-hearted carnival barker who beats his wife. Mr. Henry
is so gentle-spirited that the director George C. Wolfe, who worked with him
on “Shuffle Along,” remarks on the rare sweetness he exudes, while the
composer Jeanine Tesori, who worked with him on “Violet,” mentions his
“radical kindness.” He didn’t have many ways, aside from fatherhood, to
connect with Billy.

To Mr. Henry, playing this deeply flawed man in a show with a famously
glorious score is “an opportunity to leave a bigger mark than just the notes
and the scenes” — to expand younger black actors’ notion of what they can
hope to do onstage. He was cautious, though, when the producer Scott Rudin
floated the idea of the role. In a musical that’s controversial for its seeming
indifference to domestic violence, casting a black actor ran the risk of
demonizing black men.

“My first question to him, when he approached me about it,” Mr. Henry said,
“was ‘How are you looking at this cast? Are you trying to use the fact that I am
an African-American man to tell the story?’ That wasn’t his thought. He was
like, ‘I want to get the best people to tell the story.’”

Nearly all of Mr. Henryʼs Broadway roles until “Carousel” were written to be performed by men of color, often in
stories about black culture — most recently “Shuffle Along,” which co-starred Brandon Victor Dixon.Sara
Krulwich/The New York Times

That is largely how his casting has been received, though Hilton Als, the most
prominent black critic in the American theater, found another dimension in
it. He argued approvingly in The New Yorker that the production — which has
a white Julie Jordan, played by the Tony winner Jessie Mueller — offers a
rare instance of colorblind casting in which thought has been given to a black
character’s presence in a largely white world.

Aside from his ensemble role in Green Day’s “American Idiot” in 2010, all of
Mr. Henry’s Broadway roles until “Carousel” were written to be performed by
men of color, often in stories about black culture — most recently “Shuffle
Along,” in 2016, about the first black musical. After that, he spent 15 months
playing Aaron Burr in “Hamilton,” in Chicago and then on tour, in San
Francisco and Los Angeles.

He was playing Burr last summer when he and his wife found out she was
pregnant. Suddenly “Dear Theodosia,” Burr’s tender pledge to his little girl,
became a song that Mr. Henry was singing to his unborn child. A couple of
times — on the lyric “I’ll do whatever it takes, I’ll make a million mistakes, I’ll
make the world safe and sound for you” — his voice cracked with emotion
onstage.

Early in the run of “Carousel,” he’d been singing to his unborn boy, too,
tapping into his own anticipation to portray Billy’s in “Soliloquy.” As
Samson’s due date approached, Mr. Henry’s castmates teased him, saying
he’d never be able to sing it the same way again. The first time he had to
perform it as a father, the day after the baby’s birth, he didn’t know how he
would.

“I’d only gotten like two hours’ sleep,” he said. “You want to let go in the
character, you want to let go emotionally, but I was concerned that if I did
that, I would feel the actual feelings that I’m feeling in my —”

He broke off, paused a long moment, misted up, exhaled. “Um. And if I felt all
those things, I still had to sing the song, this seven-and-a-half-minute
mammoth of a song. There are certain technical things you have to do to just
get through it. I don’t even remember that show. I thought I would.”

Ms. Mueller does. She gathered with some other actors to watch “Soliloquy”
from the wings that night.

“Because it was a moment, you know?” she said. “I was thinking about him a
lot, because I knew he has the most on his shoulders in this play. I was so
surprised by how calm he seemed.”

Mr. O’Brien, their Tony-winning director, remembers, too. The change he

saw in Mr. Henry’s “Soliloquy” was so profound that it altered the structure of
the production. In the first weeks of previews, Mr. O’Brien recalled, he had
often been moved “but not stunned” by what struck him as a concert-perfect,
too-safe performance of the song.

“The weekend that the baby was born, it was like a dam burst inside him,”
Mr. O’Brien said. “I didn’t say anything about it. He just started to relate, I
think, to the depth of his own feelings, and wow. You know, there’s another
scene in Act 1 as written, and we decided we were idiots to do it, because he
was hitting the high point in the show, and what did you want to see after
that? Nothing.”

So in this “Carousel,” that’s when the first-act curtain falls, with the
company’s festive departure for the clambake cut from the show.

In Samson’s life, of course, the curtain has only just risen. And his father —
brimming with plans as usual, including for a funk and soul album of mostly
original songs that he hopes to drop in September — feels the effect this small
person is having.

Mr. Henry had always been an ace at compartmentalizing, filing away for
later anything he didn’t want to think about right then, keeping the personal
firmly separate from the professional.

Samson, apparently, doesn’t play by those rules.

“It’s so weird,” Mr. Henry said. “He is rounding my edges a little bit. He’s
making me see this is all one thing.”

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the history of the role
of Billy Bigelow. Joshua Henry is not the first black actor to play Billy
Bigelow in “Carousel” on Broadway; he is the first to star in the role. In the
1994 revival, Duane Boutté, an understudy, played the role for one
performance.