THE FRIDAY SIX: Q&As with Your Favorite Broadway Stars- Bryce Pinkham!

Welcome to THE FRIDAY SIX: Q&As With Your Favorite Broadway Stars. Want to know what hooked them to a career in the theater? Their dream roles? Their Broadway crushes? Read on!

In this next edition, we caught up with Bryce Pinkham, who is starring as 'Carl Bruner' in GHOST THE MUSCIAL- currently playing at the Lunt Fontanne Theatre!

I saw the tours of Les Miserables, Phantom and Rent in San Francisco when I was a kid, but the first show I saw on Broadway was Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out.  

I do a little juggling to music.  Some nights I use it to harness nervous energy, other nights I use it to get myself moving and energized to do the show.

In college, I was playing Valere in La Bete by David Hirson.  There is a play-within-the-play that Valere narrates entirely on his own in rhyming couplets.  One of my lines ended in a pun, and anyone who knows me knows that I have a lamentable proclivity for using puns in my everyday life.  At one particular show, I saw friends in the audience and when I said the pun in the script we had sort of a wink-wink moment together.  While I greatly enjoyed making my friends laugh even more in that particular moment, I suddenly realized that I had left the play altogether, and when I tried searching for my next lines, my brain went numb.  Because I was the only one who had any lines, no one could really cover for me, and because the lines were all rhymed, I couldn't really make them up.  I started to improv as though the character had lost the lines, mumbling to myself and walking about the stage.  Then, I went back and said some of the previous lines, including the aforementioned and now abhorrent pun.  Still nothing.  Finally I just broke character and crouched down on the floor, put my head in my hands and continued to search for the line.  Then I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.  It was the ensemble silently acting out the next few moments of the play-within-the-play.  They were literally physicalizing my next line for me (apparently something they had been doing since the moment the fiasco began.) Thanks to their quick thinking and generosity I found the line and we went on.  All told the episode probably lasted thirty seconds, but to me it felt like I was up there for five minutes with nothing to say.  Needless to say, my lesson was learned.  I don't look for friends in the audience anymore, and I believe firmly in ensemble building.  

I'd like to be a father who can support his family.  That's honestly more important to me than anything.  I'd play the roles nobody else wants if I could guarantee a nice life for some little ones.  That said, every actor has to dream in order to keep himself going at times and since we're on the subject, I too have some dream roles.  At the top of my performer's bucket list is the goal of embodying one of the great  physical comedians: Chaplin, Keaton, or Lloyd.  I'm really drawn to that sort of work, and I would love to learn from imitating the greats.   

Who is your Broadway crush?

I have a crush on the entire cast of One Man Two Guvnors. Comic virtuosity and British accents? So hot.  

Where can people stalk you on the web (twitter/fb etc.)?

I'm not really into being "stalked" but I do enjoy having real live human conversations with people at the stage door.  I know, soooo 20th century.  

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