Broadway's 'Bandstand' casts Northeast Ohio native Corey Cott as a Cleveland musician reaching for the brass ring (photos, video) (2024)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - On Martin Luther King Day this January, Corey Cott, the kid from Chagrin Falls with a Pepsodent Smile and the soulful good looks of a young Henry Fonda, stood on the stage of the State Theatre in Playhouse Square.

Most theaters are dark on Mondays, and the State is no exception. Cott, in town with co-star Laura Osnes (Ella of "Cinderella") to promote the new Broadway musical "Bandstand," placed his hands on his hips like Yul Brynner in his last turn as the King of Siam in 1984 and peered into the empty house.

He'd agreed to do a photo shoot in the downtown theater district before hopping a plane to New York City, where he lives with wife Meghan, a girl he met singing in a church in Pittsburgh, home of his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University.

In "Bandstand," Cott stars as Donny Novitski, a World War II veteran who plays a mean Steinway. In a delicious coincidence, the musical is largely set in Cleveland, where Cott saw some of his first Broadway shows. A high-stakes radio contest Donny enters with his swing band takes place at the Ohio Theatre.

"How many seats?" Cott asked his guide, a Playhouse Square staffer leading him on a quick, impromptu tour, about the State.

"Thirty-two hundred," she said.

"Oh my gosh," said Cott, the most colorful exclamation he ever utters; "3,200? That's nuts. That's so big."

The Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre where "Bandstand" opens on Wednesday, April 26 - just in time for Tony consideration - seats about a third of that number, topping out at 1,072.

The Nederlander Theatre, where Cott took over the role of rebel paperboy Jack Kelly in "Newsies" months after graduating from college in 2012, is slightly larger, boasting 1,232.

And, with a little engineering, you could fit the biggest Broadway house Cott has ever played - the 1,445-seat Neil Simon, where he broke hearts as Gaston Lachaille opposite Vanessa Hudgens in the 2015 revival of "Gigi" - into the State.

As smart cookies know, it's not the size of the theater but the quality of the part.

And Cott is poised to break big as Donny, a songwriter and piano prodigy from blue-collar Cleveland whose dreams of musical stardom are derailed when duty calls after Pearl Harbor.

"If you would have told me at 18 that by 26, I'd be opening my third Broadway show and originating a role as the lead . . . I probably would've started crying," said Cott. (Cott turned 27 on March 30.)

"It was only eight years ago that I was graduating high school like, 20 miles away."

A young actor on the verge

"It's been pretty damn exciting working with him," said composer Richard Oberacker, who co-wrote the book and lyrics for "Bandstand" with Robert Taylor.

"He loves the craft of acting so much - he loves the preparation, he loves the study, he loves going to the hard places . . . and he's really the age of the character.

"This isn't like some 35-year-old guy who just happens to have a young-looking face. He really is this young guy who, in a lot of ways in his own career, is on the verge of some major superstardom if he plays his cards right."

All eyes will be on the project for its director and choreographer alone: Andy Blankenbuehler, the Tony Award-winning choreographer of "Hamilton." (The Cincinnati-born artist also won a 2008 Tony Award for best choreography for "In the Heights.")

"I had never seen Corey perform, but I had heard so many good things about him," said Blankenbuehler. "I just had a gut feeling that he was going to be our guy.

"As soon as he was in the room, I knew it from the start.I loved his enthusiasm.I loved how aggressive he was with his willingness to try things."

Once the director and his team found out that Cott was "pretty coordinated on the piano," they were sold. Though he took lessons as a kid, Cott spends some three hours a day boning up on his keyboard work.

"One of my biggest regrets is giving it up," he said. He had to shake off a decade of rust to tickle the ivories like Donny.

Just like the cast of triple threats in "Once," Broadway's lo-fi hit about a heartbroken Irish busker, Cott and his fictional bandmates not only act and sing, they play all their own instruments. (They hoof it, too, so technically, they are quadruple threats.)

Oberacker's score is performed by a traditional pit orchestra as well as Donny's band.

"The first time the guys come together to play," said Oberacker, "is every bit as cool as the barricade coming together in 'Les Miz.' It's a sonic and an emotional experience that hits you over the head."

A soldier's story, a Cleveland story

Like so many veterans before and after him, Donny suffers from what we now call Posttraumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. (The condition only earned a designation in the psychiatrist's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 1980.)

To fight off the bad dreams and reignite his passion for music, Donny decides to enter that competition at the Ohio, where contestants must compose and perform an original song to honor the troops. In an inspired move, he forms a swing band made up of other vets. Rounding out the group is chanteuse Julia Trojan, played by Osnes, the widow of one of Donny's buddies lost in combat.

It's no wonder that Cott, at least in his live theater work, has been cast as men and boys from an earlier time.

There's something classic about him, something old-fashioned in the best sense of the word, an aura that promises chivalry, honesty and unfailing politeness. That Disney trusted him, then an unknown college actor, to carry its lucrative hit "Newsies" makes total sense.

Cott also hasn't forgotten where he's from. Like so many transplanted talents, he credits Cleveland's investment in the arts and its robust theater scene as a source of inspiration. Proud of his roots, his cellphone number still begins with area code 440.

It doesn't hurt that he has a leading-man jawline and something that looks like a faint cleft in his chin. It's actually a scar that he got after tripping on his first day on the job at Progressive Field one summer hawking 60 pounds of water and pop.

"There was blood and water and soda everywhere," he said. Patched up at an in-house ballpark ER, "I went back out and sold the rest of the game."

It was good practice for the show-must-go-on rigors of Broadway. (And for fatherhood. Cott and wife Meghan are expecting their first child two days after the show opens.)

The speed of his rise to headliner aside, Cott never doubted that he'd make it to the Great White Way. It wasn't arrogance, the last word anyone would use to describe the open, friendly Midwesterner, but surety.

"I remember graduating college and talking to some of my friends and being like, 'Guys, don't you feel like in your gut, we're gonna do it?'

"I think it just comes down to what you want and what you're going to will to happen," Cott said. In short, you need the right kind of drive.

Donny shares his sentiments in "I Got a Theory," a clever, infectious song from "Bandstand."

Ever game, Cott launched into a few verses in the lobby of the Ohio, in a gentle homage to the performers of "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris." The triumphant revue staged in that same, once-crumbling space helped save the theaters lining Euclid Avenue from the wrecking ball in the 1970s.

I GOT A THEORY

WHEN YOU ARE FROM LAKE ERIE

YOU'RE BETTER THAN THE AV'RAGE JOE

THOUGH BURIED IN SNOW

IT'S TIME TO LET THE WHOLE WORLD KNOW

"The acoustics in here are awesome," Cott marveled.

I GOT A THEORY

IT TAKES A PLACE THIS DREARY

TO GIVE A GUY THE RIGHT AMOUNT

OF DRIVE TO SURMOUNT

IT'S TIME TO TELL THE WORLD WE COUNT

Like Cott and Blankenbuehler, Oberacker, a longtime conductor with Cirque du Soleil, is an Ohio native, officially making the show the most Buckeye-licious production of the season.

"I was born and raised in Cincinnati, but both my mother and father were from Cleveland," says Oberacker. "I spent my childhood driving up good old [Interstate] 71 to visit with relatives at least once a month. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are being in Cleveland." Including the pungent smell of industry that began invading his nose at the city limits.

(In a twist a dramaturg would enjoy, Oberacker's dad moved south after landing a job with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he did incineration research to help cut down on air pollution.)

There was just something about the hardscrabble neighborhoods filled with immigrant clans - Italians, Germans, Poles and Russians - Oberacker visited in the 1970s and early '80s that he couldn't forget. It's the reason he argued that the show should take place in his parents' hometown.

Oberacker knows it well enough to understand the self-deprecating pride residents take in their often-maligned city.

THEY GOT THEIR FANCY ACCENTS

ON THE EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN

BUT WE AIN'T MET A VOWEL WE COULDN'T FIND A WAY TO FLATTEN

THE VANDERBILTS MAY SUMMER

AT THE SPA IN SARATOGA

BUT NOTHIN' BEATS THE WATERS OF THE FLAMING CUYAHOGA

Cleveland's multicultural stew represented a larger American experience far from either coast. "There's so much talk about 'the real America' or 'the fly-over zone,' " said Oberacker. "And I was like, 'Let's tell that story - let's tell the story of these people in the heartland of America.' "

Donny, Julia and the band spend the first act and half of the second knocking around Cleveland nightclubs and other environs; Julia works the cosmetics counter at Halle Bros. department store.

". . .There was just a very gritty vibrancy about this working-class, northern Ohio community, and I really wanted to capture that. I'd never seen it in a musical."

A story that braves the dark

Another rarity in musicals is the theme of war trauma. While soldiers and sailors have been featured in golden age classics "On the Town" and "South Pacific," and nostalgic retreads (2009's "Irving Berlin's White Christmas"), none have focused on the "battle fatigue" of World War II veterans.

"Bandstand" is a life-affirming musical that isn't afraid of the dark, a wholly original story suffused with Big Band, brassy, swing-era sound that looks at its characters with contemporary eyes.

The show is a collision of old-school musical conventions - including the trope of a group of hard-luck nobodies who come together to be somebodies - with the psychological realism of "Next to Normal" and "Fun Home."

Its attention to America's warriors has made Cott a passionate ambassador for the show. Though he has never served in the military, his father was in the Air Force, where he flew A-10 bombers. "He's the real Tom Cruise," Cott said.

During a performance in a pre-Broadway run at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse in the fall of 2015, a Marine in the crowd shouted, "Hoorah!"

"We all broke down," said Cott. "We all got off-stage, and we were all weeping. We knew in that moment we had touched someone who had served our country."

Cott's dad saw the show during that same run. At intermission, he sent his son a text.

"I'm in tears," it read. "This is the best tribute you could ever give me."

"Bandstand" is now in previews and opens at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre Wednesday, April 26. For tickets, go to bandstandbroadway.com/tickets/ or call 212-239-6200.