Billy Elliot is all about precocious talent—the title character as well as all the real young boys and girls in the cast. Ensemble member Kevin Bernard, on the other hand, was more of a late bloomer. Though he’s been involved in the performing arts since childhood and has worked steadily in theater most of his adult life, it took him 10 years of living and auditioning in New York to land a Broadway show.
“It always felt like I was getting close,” Bernard says of his years of fruitless Broadway auditions. “I seemed to make it to the end of a lot of stuff; I just never closed anything. I started looking around and going, ‘What the heck—what’s holding me back? What do I not have?’”
Yet once he broke through, he broke through but good. In the seven years since Bernard made his Broadway debut in Trevor Nunn’s Oklahoma revival, he’s been in three more Broadway shows, filmed scenes in three major motion pictures and had several principal roles in regional productions. And even after so many years in the business and all the shows he’s done, he’s found a unique experience in Billy Elliot.
“I’ve never seen a creative crew like this,” Bernard says. “They were on a never-ending quest to make the perfect show. The rehearsal process was so incredible and so demanding of us, psychologically and emotionally and physically. And we spent a lot more time in this theater than I ever have during tech. Tech is always killer—10- or 12-hour days—but normally when you hit previews the hours back off a little. But we were here all day every day through the six weeks of previews.”
On October 13, two weeks into previews, Bernard’s wife, dancer/actress Heather McFadden, gave birth to their son, Henderson. So he was going through the intense schedule on little sleep. And had to attend Billy’s opening night party without his wife (who did go to the performance that evening). When I interviewed him three weeks after opening, he told me: “Yesterday I came to the theater feeling kinda okay. I got almost four hours [of sleep] in a row!”
Being in a show full of kids when he’s just become a father for the second time has also made Billy special for Bernard, 41. “I look at all the kids and think of my children growing up at each of those stages,” he says. “They’re all super-talented and considerate and passionate about theater, but they don’t seem to be really over-the-top theater kids. They all seem like you could just plop ’em down in a playground at any moment and they’d be just as happy as being on stage, which is what I think makes their performances so refreshing. They just look and behave like ‘normal’ kids, and it’s a testament to the creative team for nurturing that in them.”
As for the miners—rather than the minors—in Billy Elliot, Bernard plays one of them in several scenes. In the big Act 1 number “Solidarity” and other scenes between miners and strike-busting police, he’s a policeman. And when Billy and his best friend Michael burst into song and dance while rifling through a closet full of women’s clothes, Bernard is inside one of the giant “dancing dress” costumes (the one with slouchy socks instead of stockings) that join them in “Expressing Yourself.”
Not unlike Billy Elliot himself, Bernard first performed professionally on stage in a ballet at age 11, when he played Peter in a regional tour of the ballet Peter and the Wolf produced by Theatre for Young Audiences. Growing up in Houston, Bernard was taken to Theatre Under the Stars and the Alley by his theater-loving parents. He attended the private Kinkaid School, which had a strong arts curriculum, and then in his public high school was active in the drama club (and captain of the soccer team).
As an adult, Kevin’s favorite show has been A Wonderful Life, the Sheldon Harnick/Joe Raposo musicalization of It’s a Wonderful Life, in which he starred as George Bailey at Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke, Va., in 2005. “I finished that production and said, ‘I could walk away from theater and be happy,’ because it was the most fulfilling work I had done on stage,” says Bernard, whose daughter, Billie, was born two months before Wonderful opened. “You could say it was because it was the lead, but it also was the nature of that role. To do that arc of that guy’s story was so fulfilling, just because he’s a father struggling to provide for his family and trying to do the right thing. To take that journey night after night emotionally was massive.”
Bernard was on Broadway the last two seasons in Curtains. Earlier, he’d been a swing in Thoroughly Modern Millie, which he joined after Oklahoma closed (Millie had bested Oklahoma for best choreography at the ’02 Tony Awards). Between Millie and Curtains, Bernard performed off-Broadway in Lone Star Love, which received Best Musical nominations from the Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for its 2004-05 run on Theatre Row. Bernard had also been in the show—a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor—when it was staged at Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater Festival in fall 2001, as well as the workshops and readings where it was developed. He was even in the cast that was assembled for a Broadway bow circa 1999—until star Jim Belushi quit to launch his TV sitcom According to Jim. “That was supposed to be my Broadway debut,” Bernard says, “but they pulled the plug on it about two weeks before rehearsals.” (He was not in Lone Star when it prepped for another eventually aborted Broadway run last season.)
It would have been very fitting for Bernard, a Texas native and University of Houston grad, to make his Broadway debut in a show set in and named for his home state. Instead, it happened with a Texas neighbor. Oklahoma has “been a very big part of my life,” Bernard says. “It was the first professional job I booked out of New York.” That was for a 1991 production at the Jupiter Theatre in Florida, where he played Will Parker. And “it was the job where I met my wife.” That was on a European tour in 1992, where he again was Will and McFadden was Dream Laurey.
He and McFadden—who made her Broadway debut in the 1994 revival of Carousel and has played Meg Giry in Phantom of the Opera—married in 1997, and have worked together on tours of Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, a Lincoln Center Lab production called Black Water and a 2000 Fringe Festival show, Babes and Dudes. Regionally, Bernard costarred as Billy in Anything Goes at Maryland’s Olney Theatre Center in 2006 and portrayed guitar-playing brother Caleb in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House in 2005.
