THE FRIDAY SIX: Q&As with Your Favorite Broadway Stars- NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812's Nick Choksi

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 week's edition, we caught up with Nick Choksi, who is starring as 'Dolokhov' in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812- currently playing at Kazino (259 West 45th Street).

What is the first Broadway show you ever saw?

Unless you count Phantom of the Opera, which came to The Fox theater in St. Louis every year (my home town), and the fact that we went every year for at last 3 years, my first two Broadway shows were Rent and Titanic. We were on a family trip to New York to look at colleges and my brother and I each got to pick one show. I picked Rent because all the kids in Speech and Debate were singing it at the tournaments, and my younger brother picked Titanic because he recognized the title. Rent was awesome, even though I was afraid my parents would be shocked by it. Titanic was surprisingly cool. I got both albums and played them till they broke.

Coffee is a must, vocal warmups, hmm...OH! I do a warm up I learned in grad school, in which I do a tongue twister ("Grip Top Sock" for those playing at home) while holding the tip of my tongue (usually with a little tissue or paper towel), it's good for warming up the tongue tip, get that diction nice and crispy. No matter how many times I do it, someone always thinks I've hurt myself. Sometimes they even hand me an accident report.

I was doing Once Upon A Mattress in undergrad (I was playing Sir Harry), and I watched from the wings as my friend Nicole Blicher (Winnifred) went up at the very beginning of Happily Ever After. Poor girl started with the wrong verse and couldn't get back, and so remained silent while the band played on and on and on. She tried to come back in with a bit of choreography, but it was the wrong bit, so she just sat there on stage looking miserable for a while, then went off stage, hoping the music would end, but it didn't, so she came back out and just looked at the audience till the song was done. She hit her button and went off stage and cried. My scene was next. We wiped away our tears of empathy and laughter and hit that scene hard.

Dad.

This is off-Broadway...but only for now...Stephanie Marie Wright Thompson. Don't know her? You should. Check out her award-winning, radical theater company The Mad Ones.

I stink at twitter, but I just got one: @nickchoksi, and I'm putting a band together for a show I'm writing, which includes some Broadway babies, like Damon Daunno and recent Tony Winner Gabriel Ebert. You can follow us @ThoseLostBoys5.