Mason Alexander Park is MUCH ADO In Her Broadway Debut

After building a career that has taken them from musical theatre to television, the West End and everything in between, Mason Alexander Park will make her Broadway debut as Margaret in Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing at the Winter Garden Theatre.

The milestone follows an eclectic run of roles for Park, whose stage credits include The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing with The Jamie Lloyd Company at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Oh, Mary! at London’s Trafalgar Theatre, Cabaret, I Am My Own Wife and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. On screen, they have appeared in The Sandman, Quantum Leap, Cowboy Bebop, iCarly and the film National Anthem. Their London performance as Margaret also earned nominations for the 2026 Ian Charleson Award and WhatsOnStage Award for Best Supporting Performer in a Play.

For Park, the milestone comes with a production and a company of artists that she already knows intimately. Having originated this version of Margaret during the show’s London run, she now arrives on Broadway in a role that she and Lloyd transformed into something of an emcee for the evening, using music to help drive the production’s joyful chaos. And while Park once imagined making their Broadway debut in a “big old splashy musical,” she never expected Shakespeare to be what finally brought her there.

You're making your Broadway debut! Growing up, was Broadway the goal for you? How are you feeling?

Yeah, Broadway was always one of the dreams. I've wanted to do it ever since I was younger and first realized that it was even a thing or an avenue that I could travel down. My life has taken so many different twists and turns. I've gone away from the theater and then gone back to it over the years. When I went to school, I studied musical theater in particular, so I think I always imagined I'd eventually make my Broadway debut doing a big old splashy musical. And it's quite funny getting to do it doing Shakespeare, which is something I did not ever expect or think that I would do in my lifetime. But yeah, it's really exciting, and I'm really looking forward to it.

I am feeling really excited and very grateful to get to say that I'm having my Broadway debut with this show and with these people in particular. It was an incredible experience doing it in the West End and getting to make so many friends working on this show. So the fact that we're all coming over and crossing the pond, and as this sort of token American, I think it's really quite fun that I get to show everybody all the old haunts that I used to go to and frequent when I was in New York.

And, you get to make your debut in the Winter Garden Theatre! 

Mason Alexander Park: Exactly! I thought about it in regards to the dressing rooms. I was like, "Oh, I'm going to have to fight Tom Hiddleston for Barbra Streisand's dressing room, aren't I?"

There's a bathtub in there.

Exactly. He's going to win. Or Hayley. I don't know which one. He might actually step down and let Hayley deservedly take the bathtub.

Well, it would be gallant of him, but I wouldn't blame him for fighting for Barbra Streisand's bathtub.

We'll see!

Music is a big part of your role in this production. What is the musical component for Margaret, and what does it add to her character for you?

Well, music is such a big part of the texture of the play as it stands. When you read the script, there are so many beautiful descriptions of music, and there are many songs within the play. The element of musicality is just baked into the original script to begin with. It's so present and so there.

When Jamie and I were working on The Tempest, which was a play that we did together as part of the same season of Shakespeare shows that he did at Theatre Royal Drury Lane in the West End last year, he was beginning to come up with his ideas for what his version of Much Ado would look like. He immediately came to a bunch of very specific songs from my childhood and from his life that were very popular in the noughties and in the '90s. I think it's completely fleshed out this really exciting party atmosphere. That really helps set the tone for what is to be expected of the play because, essentially, it's a group of friends that are celebrating love and kind of going on a bender. It's full of these really, really amazing musical moments that I'm very lucky I was given the opportunity to bring to life onstage.

Read our review of the 2025 West End production of Much Ado About Nothing here.

Margaret has a more expanded presence in Jamie Lloyd's interpretation. How did you and Jamie Lloyd build this version of her, and what was that process like?

We took aspects of what's already there with Margaret and added in this kind of musicality, and almost made her an emcee for the evening, in order to help keep the energy and the chaos of the party nature of the play on an elevated level that would help fill the space. We were doing it in a 2,400-seat theater, so if music is going to be an element of it, you want it to fill a venue of that size.

That was a big thing that really sold me. He was like, "I want to come up with some really fun songs that you would do at a drunk karaoke night. Let's start there, and we'll just experiment with how we can find music that really elevates the story and what's happening within it." We just played games for a couple of weeks in rehearsals, Jamie and I, where he would literally hand me lyrics to a song that I vaguely knew while we were in rehearsal, and he would have the track already loaded up. He would just say, "Can you sing this?" And I was like, "I don't know, but I guess we'll find out." A lot of building this version of Margaret was trial and error with Jamie and me, just seeing how she could preside over the events of the evening and help craft this exciting musical experience.

For someone who might not think Shakespeare is for them, what is it about this production that might surprise them?

I think I was one of those people. I don't necessarily know that I was really turned off by it, but I think that it felt, in many ways, kind of inaccessible to me...With this production in particular, I think that everyone can just expect it to be incredibly fun. It is a boisterous, colorful, vibrant production, and it is so, so fun to watch.

I felt like we were doing a rock concert every single night, the sort of reaction that it received [in London]...It felt like the applause went on for 10 minutes. It was unlike anything I've experienced. I think we all looked at each other bewildered, like, this is for this play that's hundreds and hundreds of years old, that surely so many of the people in this audience have seen a production or two or three of by this point. And yet they were experiencing it as if it were something new and something that they had never seen before. That was just incredibly special.

So, for anyone who might feel that Shakespeare's not their thing, or that they've seen or read it and didn't quite get it, I would absolutely give this production a chance because I do believe that it is singular and unique and has this incredible appeal to people who may or may not find Shakespeare to naturally be the right fit for them.

Shakespeare has a long history of playing with gender. Do you feel like theater today is embracing that same kind of freedom?

You can kind of feel us as a modern society, in some ways, swing back into that. I've found in the last few years that people are being far more playful with gender in theatre in particular, more so than we were a decade ago, for better or worse in many ways. It's exciting to think about how the origins of theater and the playfulness of the amount of different roles that a singular actor could take on within their lifetime was so expansive. I think we are hopefully getting to a place where actors are looked at in a similar way, where we are incredibly expansive vessels for multiple kinds of storytelling.

I just want to be able to play everything from villains to heroes to lovers to boring people. I'm really lucky that, so far, I've been able to keep myself from being stuck in one lane. I've gotten to do everything from comedy to drama to musical theater to television to sci-fi and fantasy. It's been such a vibrant, playful experience that I've had with acting, and that isn't true for a lot of people...I wish that upon as many actors in this business as possible, but especially my fellow trans siblings who want to get into this business. I wish nothing more than variety on their career, because that is the reason people want to return to the stage again and again, or return to TV again and again. It's to play different people, not to recreate the same experience or the same type amongst different projects so long as you live, just to make a buck.

Much Ado About Nothing will open on Broadway on November 19 at the Winter Garden Theatre.

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner (West End, 2025)