Before he was cast in Finian’s Rainbow, Devin Richards didn’t know anything about the show, which was groundbreaking for its pro-equality message and racially integrated chorus in 1947 but has been seldom revived since then. Richards knows groundbreaking, though. In 2002, at a regional theater in upstate New York, he costarred in a multiracial production of The Sound of Music as Captain Von Trapp, the would-be Nazi officer based on a real-life Austrian. He believes he’s the only black ever to play the part.
Two years ago, at Massachusetts’ North Shore Music Theatre, Richards had another role well-suited to his rich bass baritone but usually given to white men: Javert in Les Misérables. Norm Lewis had portrayed Javert in the 2006 Broadway revival, but Richards is very proud to say, “I beat Brian Stokes Mitchell. I got to do it before he did it at the Hollywood Bowl.”
In perhaps the whitest of the white roles, Richards was “Black Frasier” in a spoofy show-within-a-show on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock in 2006. Richards’ 11 Broadway musicals include several nontraditionally cast shows, including Carousel and 110 in the Shade (both starring his good friend Audra McDonald). In his last Broadway appearance before Finian’s, he was an 18th-century French revolutionary in A Tale of Two Cities.
This season, four new Broadway productions—Finian’s Rainbow, Memphis, Ragtime and Fela!—feature ensembles full of black characters, not just tokens. But Richards rejects the idea that this is theater for the age of Obama. Availability of minority chorus roles “goes in cycles,” he says. “I don’t think it has to do with the current political events.” To him, what matters is performing in a cast with many black performers: “A lot of us from this show are usually what we call ‘the one.’ I was ‘the black guy’ in Tale; I’m working with the black guy who was in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and the black guy who was in Curtains. We never get to work together, so the idea that we all get to see each other every day and work together, and I’m not doing a ‘black show’ to work with them, is the most meaningful part of this.”
Richards has received the Gypsy Robe, which is awarded on opening night to the ensemble member with the most Broadway credits, three times: Jesus Christ Superstar, 110 in the Shade and A Tale of Two Cities. But it’s two other shows that remain most special to him. One was 1997-98’s The Life, the Cy Coleman-scored musical about denizens of 1970s-era Times Square, where he was standby for the roles of pimps Memphis (Chuck Cooper) and Fleetwood (Kevin Ramsay). “It was wonderful because I went to school for acting, not for dancing, and there’s just a lot of acting in that,” says Richards. “Pimps and whores—they were still on 10th Avenue then—used to come watch it, and they were like, ‘Wow, you guys really, really got it.’” His other favorite was his Broadway follow-up to The Life: Smokey Joe’s Cafe, which he did in London and on the U.S. tour prior to New York. “I had a blast with that,” he remarks. “The audiences were fun, the music was fun. It was just a joyous show. I saw it five times before I ever did it.” Smokey Joe’s Cafe has “been my bread-and-butter show when not working on Broadway,” Richards points out. “Not easy [for regional theaters] to find a guy with a nonoperatic low C.”
Later in the Broadway run of Smokey Joe’s, Richards got to work with pop stars who were brought in as guest artists, among them Gladys Knight, Rick Springfield, Lou Rawls, Gloria Gaynor, Joan Jett, Lesley Gore and Tony Orlando. “I was always compared to Lou Rawls because I had a deep voice,” says Richards. “To meet him and actually hear him was amazing: the way that he could phrase something, and the amplitude of his voice, because his voice could bounce all the way to the back with no microphone. And then he was such a good guy—like, ‘Call home, call your mom, so I can talk to her.’”
