Student Blog: Playbills, Selfies and Genuine Kindness

As a 13-year-old musical theater fanatic on her first trip to New York City, I stood at the Winter Garden Theatre stage door on a hot August afternoon in 2019. I waited patiently for close to an hour as Alex Brightman, the lead in Beetlejuice, took time to talk to people in a line that wrapped around the theater. 

When I finally reached him, I said, “Thank you so much for staying out here so long.”
He immediately directed gratitude back to me. 

“Thank you so much for coming to watch me in a show,” Brightman said, before posing for a selfie and making sure I was satisfied with the photo. 

In that moment, this Broadway star I admired became a real person. A kind person. He made me feel as if he had no place he’d rather be. 

I have had enough similar moments in stage-door lines to fill hours of story-telling.

Just this past January, for example, Jane Krakowski told my mom she dropped her glove.

Shortly after playing the lead role in Oh, Mary!, Krakowski greeted people at the stage door of the Lyceum Theatre. With flurries of snow beginning to fall, she signed Playbills and posed for pictures with at least 100 people while graciously thanking them for attending, and then she paused, noticing my mom's pink glove on the ground.

"Oh, I think you may have dropped your glove," she said, with the sweetness and charm of a Disney princess.

It was just a moment, yet it was symbolic of countless interactions I have had with Broadway actors.

If you are looking for examples of kindness, come to Broadway and find a stage door. You will not be disappointed.

Almost the entire cast of The Hills of California greeted stage-door fans when I saw the play in December 2024. A person in line next to me asked Leanne Best, who played Gloria, a question left mysteriously unanswered in the show–a question I, too, had wondered about but would have never thought to actually ask. In that moment, Best happily revealed her own take on the question and how she saw her character’s background. It felt like a gift to be privy to her character interpretation. 

In 2019, I saw Sky Lakota-Lynch perform as Jared in Dear Evan Hansen at The Music Box Theatre. In 2024, I saw him again as Johnny Cade in The Outsiders, right across the street. As he signed my Playbill, I told him I had seen him years earlier in Dear Evan Hansen.

“Oh, wow, really?” he asked, his face enveloped in a grin. He wanted to know when I had seen the show, which began a conversation about my own goals of pursuing musical theater in college. As fans of The Outsiders know, it is a physically demanding, intense show. Lakota-Lynch, however, showed no signs of wanting to head for home. 

I talked with Maryann Plunkett after The Notebook about the beauty of the story. I talked with Zach Bravo of Chicago about preparing to perform as Mary Sunshine in my college's production. I watched April Matthis give a mesmerizing performance as the title role in Toni Stone, only to be left starstruck as she asked me questions about my life and goals.

In short, I have come away from my experiences as a theater fan with a mountain of evidence that the people who make it to Broadway are nice people.

In a world where people often seem to be shouting without end and spewing judgments without regard for our common humanity, I suppose it should not be surprising that the stage door is a place where courtesy and kindness abound. As performers, we are, after all, story-tellers. And how can someone effectively tell another's story without a desire to truly understand the reaches of the human experience? How can this desire not lead to the everyday kindness too often missing in the world?

I do not know if I will ever be lucky enough to perform in NYC, but I am confident I will never stop lining up at Broadway stage doors. To all those performers who have taken time to see and acknowledge me, I thank you.