GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Ben Thompson of 'American Idiot'

Let's scan the reviews of American Idiot for some words used to describe the characters: "sullen," "furious," "aimless," "disaffected." Now let's hear from cast member Ben Thompson: "I feel very lucky. I love what I do. I've worked really hard, and it's nice when hard work pays off." Huh? Where's the misery, the alienation? "I've had a great year," Ben says. "I made my Broadway debut, I got to sing on the Grammys, I got to sing on the Tonys, I'm getting married. It's a great year!"

Yes, all that angst and anger on stage at the St. James Theatre—"a 90-minute car wreck emotionally, physically, mentally," Ben calls it—is conveyed by young people who are actually happy. Ebullient even, in the case of Ben Thompson. After six years in New York and repeated callbacks for such hits as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, Thompson made it into a Broadway show. A show co-created by idols of his, no less.

"I've known every word of this album for a very, very long time," he says of American Idiot, Green Day's blockbuster 2005 Grammy winner that inspired the stage musical. "I remember the first time I heard 'Holiday.' I was driving home and was totally rocking out to it. It's one of those songs that just makes you want to move. I [thought to myself], 'Oh, man, I gotta buy this album.'"

As an adolescent in Tulsa, Okla., Thompson had discovered Green Day with their 1994 breakthrough album, Dookie. "When Dookie came out, it was the first album I bought with my own money, and the first album I really dug into rock & roll with," he says. "I feel so lucky that I've gotten to make my debut doing a show to Green Day's music—a band that I've always looked up to and always been a fan of." And now he's gotten to rock out to "Holiday" before a national TV audience: It's the number the American Idiot cast performed when they appeared on David Letterman this spring.

In addition to his ensemble track in American Idiot, Thompson understudies Tunny, the slacker-turned-soldier played by Stark Sands. He also covers Joshua Henry as the "Favorite Son" featured performer. When Thompson first tried out for the American Idiot workshop, it was referred to solely as "untitled punk rock project," though people were encouraged to perform a Green Day song for their audition (Thompson opted for something by Maroon 5 instead). Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong and his Green Day bandmates showed up during the workshop to meet the cast. "You want to be professional, but when a rock star like that walks in, the room kind of comes to a stop," says Thompson. "We were all like, 'Stay focused, stay focused...'" When he had the chance to speak personally with Armstrong, "I told him, 'You have no idea how many times you and I pissed my mom off together!'"

Of Armstrong's collaboration with director Michael Mayer to create the musical, Thompson notes: "From the very beginning, the creative team worked together seamlessly. You'd think on a project like this, it would be so easy for egos to get in the way, or Green Day very easily could have been like: 'Yeah, here's our stuff—go.' They've been hands-on from the beginning, and so generous and gracious. They've become part of all our lives now beyond just the show." Green Day brought the American Idiot cast with them to the Jan. 31 Grammy Awards in L.A. to perform "21 Guns," and hosted the cast at one of their California concerts while American Idiot was playing at Berkeley Rep last fall. "Billie Joe, in stature, he's not the tallest guy," says Thompson, "but I've never seen a bigger performer in my entire life. The way he can command a stage, it's like he flips a switch. He's down-to-earth but this big personality. You learn a lot watching performers like that."

American Idiot has proved extremely gratifying to Thompson for reasons other than getting chummy with rock gods. "We're exposing Green Day fans to musical theater, and theater in general, and we're exposing musical theater fans to Green Day," he explains. "We get this incredible mix of people—people you would never get in the same room together and think that they would get along or agree on something—and yet every night after watching us for 90 minutes, they're all clapping together. I've heard numerous people say, 'This is my first Broadway show.' How cool is it that I get to be a part of someone's life like that, to turn that spark on in somebody?"

Thompson had a similar experience when he spent a year on the first national tour of High School Musical in 2007-08. The show drew a lot of youngsters who'd been hooked on the TV movie and were attending live theater for the first time. "The great thing is we got these kids who'd never been to a show before, and they're getting into theater now," he says.

High School Musical was one of Thompson's last projects before he got involved in American Idiot. He was in Wood, an entry in the New York Musical Theatre Festival headlined by Cady Huffman, in fall 2008 but had spent the preceding months—after he left the HSM tour—recuperating from a broken ankle. He sustained the injury when he landed wrong playing basketball backstage while warming up for a High School Musical performance (he was an East High basketball player in the show). Thompson had surgery, in which two pins were inserted in his ankle, and then hobbled around on crutches for a few months.

While on crutches, Thompson proposed to his girlfriend, fellow gypsy Kat Nejat, and they will be married on August 2. Nejat, now playing a Shark girl in West Side Story on Broadway, got a part on the High School Musical tour a week after Thompson returned to NYC to convalesce. They had met on the 2004-05 tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat featuring Jon Secada in the title role, and though Thompson was instantly attracted, he proceeded with caution. "Being a straight man in musical theater," Thompson says, "you're like a Snickers bar in a fat camp. I'd made the mistake of dating within shows before—well, I don't know if you want to call it a mistake, but it's always too much drama. Kat and I were best friends throughout the whole tour, we were setting each other up on dates with other people. But I was always attracted to her, and the day the show closed, I [told her]: 'I'm crazy about you.'

"People always say never date another actor, because it's competitive," Thompson continues. "But I've got the best teammate in the world. She understands me, I understand her. We're the perfect yin and yang." Both Thompson and Nejat are currently performing in their first Broadway shows.

Unfortunately, Thompson's show just changed its performance schedule, replacing the two Sunday shows with Monday night and Wednesday matinee and thereby disrupting his plan to have his coworkers at his wedding, which is on a Monday. (Getting married on Monday also allowed Thompson and Nejat to afford a pricey-on-weekends Southampton venue.) But after being separated by jobs throughout most of their courtship, Thompson and Nejat are used to the scheduling conflicts that can come with a theater life. Though based in NYC since early 2004, Thompson has mostly worked on the road and regionally. He performed in the Deaf West production of Big River at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., for several months in 2005, and has also been seen in Pump Boys and Dinettes at Denver's Country Dinner Playhouse and Smokey Joe's Cafe and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas at the Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma.

From 1999 to 2003, while Thompson was attending Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, he performed in about half a dozen productions at Casa Manana—among them Jekyll & Hyde and The Wizard of Oz (one of his American Idiot castmates, Leslie McDonel, was in both of those shows with him). According to Thompson, that early experience at Casa Manana set him on the right path. "I owe a lot of what I've learned and getting to this point in my career to Joel Ferrell," the Fort Worth theater's former artistic director, says Thompson.

He also feels that attending TCU (where he majored in theater, with a music concentration) rather than one of the musical theater powerhouses was part of that right path. "A lot of people who come to New York from the CCMs [and other] great schools come with agents and with connections, and they've been seen by people and they work right away," he states, "but I wouldn't change my experience at TCU for anything. The teachers were fantastic; I got the true college experience as well as having a similar education to those at a conservatory with the way that the teachers taught. It was a smaller school, and everybody was given the opportunity to really work on it, and not 'Well, this person's the lead in the show again...'"

Growing up in Oklahoma, Thompson was exposed to theater early: His maternal grandparents ran a community theater, Town & Gown, in Stillwater (about 70 miles west of Tulsa). "I remember going there and going through the costume room and putting on big hats and big jackets," says Thompson, who also saw his grandmother act in many plays. He started performing in community theater at age 8, when he played a Lollipop Guild Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz at Theatre Tulsa—the same place where he'd have his first paying gig, in Forever Plaid, as a teenager. Thompson also took classes, along with his three older sisters, at Tulsa's Theatre Arts studio, which eventually formed a performing company, TACT (Theatre Arts Children's Theater). During the summer after his senior year in high school, he played Rolf in TACT's production of The Sound of Music that starred Rebecca Luker as Maria, straight from the same role on Broadway.

Thompson sang in several choirs and performed in plays at Holland Hall, the private academy he attended from sixth grade on. Both the school and his parents supported his involvement in a variety of activities, so he was also football captain (and All-Conference honorable mention) as well as a member of the track, soccer and basketball teams. He's concentrated his talents on theater as an adult, but hasn't stopped developing other skills. He learned to play the guitar for his role in Pump Boys and Dinettes, a show in which all cast members play instruments, and learned sign language while performing in Big River with Deaf West. "Music is such a big part of my life, I can't imagine going through life without the ability to hear or having it taken away from me," he says of working with the company, which employs both deaf and hearing actors. "And the fact is, they were more musical than all of us [who could hear]. They were such beautiful people. I could have done that show forever: been in the ensemble, and been completely happy." Big River—which Thompson had done previously at Casa Manana—was also special because it was one of the first Broadway shows he ever saw, on childhood trips to New York with his family.

When director Joel Ferrell, Thompson's old mentor from Casa Manana, was casting Pump Boys in Denver in 2006, he called Thompson about being in it, assuming he knew how to play guitar. At the time, Thompson was in the midst of an auditioning slump, so he fibbed and said he did. He then ran out and bought a guitar, along with some basic instructions. For three weeks before rehearsals began, "I sat there [practicing] and got blisters on my fingers and cramps in my arms," Thompson says. "My roommates at the time hated me: 'Dude, can you stop playing the guitar for two seconds?'"

Thanks to college employment under Ferrell at Casa Manana, Thompson had arrived in New York with his Equity card. One of his first jobs after moving here took him back to the Midwest, to play Judas/John the Baptist in Godspell at Stage One in Wichita, Kan. The show was directed by Nick Demos, who'd directed him at the Lyric in Oklahoma (and is now a producer of Memphis), and Thompson filled one of the few Equity slots in the mostly non-Equity company. "I was young and dumb and thought I was much better than I was," Thompson says as he begins to tell about an onstage mishap that kept him from ever getting a swelled head even though he'd become a New York-based professional actor. "I'm up on this platform to start singing 'Pre-e-e-pare ye...' at the top of the show, and I made the worst crack I have ever heard. I have never made a sound like this in my life! The whole cast is turned upstage, and all of them start laughing. I have never been so mortified. It's like the moment in my career where it was like: All right, look—you have to be humble. There's no need to ever take anything for granted, because you never know when something like that's going to happen in front of a theater full of people. It was a good lesson to learn: just to be honest and simple and listen."

The phone call last December informing Thompson that he would be making his Broadway debut in American Idiot found him in very simple, honest circumstances. He was in the middle of working a five-class day—"singing to babies"—at Little Maestros, a music program for infants and toddlers, when his agent reached him. He's worked for Little Maestros on and off between acting jobs, and is featured on two of their CDs of music for kiddies, Postcards From My Mind and Word Is on the Playground.

Thompson's duties at American Idiot include assistant dance captain, which he concedes is "hilarious" since he has no serious dance training. "But this show is not very technique-y," he adds. "It's violent, and so hard. We're a cast full of athletes." There's a mandatory warmup an hour before curtain every night, and Thompson is going to physical therapy regularly during American Idiot's run. He also needed specialized training to cover Tunny: The number "Extraordinary Girl" features an aerial dance between Tunny and the nurse he meets in an Army hospital (played by Christina Sajous). Prior to the Berkeley production, Thompson went to Louisville, Ky., for training with the ZFX flying effects company, and to prep for Broadway, he trained in Las Vegas with Flying by Foy. "I was excited," he says. "Because I'm a bigger guy, I'm never in the flying roles. I'm always the one lifting the smaller people."

Thompson has yet to go on as Tunny on Broadway, but he played the role in the first-ever performance of American Idiot—the one that culminated the show's original workshop in October 2008. Matt Caplan had the role of Tunny for the workshop but came down with appendicitis a few days before the performance, and Thompson was asked to step in. Caplan also portrayed Tunny during AI's pre-Broadway tryout at Berkeley Rep, and Thompson went on in the part about half a dozen times during that run, including a performance that was attended by the New York Times.

Photos of Ben, from top: in his headshot; mugging with Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong on Grammy night; as Zeke Baylor (#32) on the High School Musical tour; with his soon-to-be wife, Kat Nejat; top right, in Pump Boys and Dinettes in 2006; with all three members of Green Day, (from left) Billie Joe Armstrong, Tré Cool and Mike Dirnt, during American Idiot's run in Berkeley, Calif.