Broadway Reunion

Story by Chris Francis '13

More than a decade after last performing together at IWU, Bry Parham ’07 and Tony Lopez ’08 are reuniting on Broadway.

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When Tony Lopez ‘08 first came to IWU, he was scared of Bry Parham ‘07.

“I had been watching you slay, get every lead role and work outside of school. You were the one working professionally in big things with big names who had been on Broadway.” Tony said to Bry in a joint interview for this article. “I had been admiring you, and I was intimidated by you!”

Bry rolled her eyes with playfully exasperated skepticism. If Tony had felt overshadowed by Bry’s talent and success at the University, he didn’t show it, and Bry was equally impressed with him. “I appreciated underclassmen, but I was obsessed with Tony because he was so good,” she said. 

As their mutual admiration suggests, the two of them were among the most talented theater students of their generation at IWU.

When Bry took the stage, “you paid attention. You just knew it was going to be good.” said Associate Professor and Director of the School of Theatre Arts Jean Kerr. “She was a very strong and inventive mover, which is critical in creating a character with distinct physicality.”

“I was given an amazing treat from Bryonha when she learned how fabulous the acoustics were in the lobby bathroom” in the McPherson theater, said Kelly Ullom, IWU’s retired theatre operations specialist. “She would go in there to do a little rehearsing and would sing ‘like no one was watching.’”

"Tony was always ready to ask the next question and find out more about whatever was being explored,” Kerr said. “He was always seeking alternate approaches, how else can this character tell their story?” 

Kerr remembered a particularly creative moment during one of the first complete-set rehearsals of 2007’s Scrooge “We were about to take a 10-minute break when Tony ran onto the stage saying, ‘Hey, Tom (Quinn, associate professor of theatre arts) and Jean — we have an idea for the end of the act. Can we show you?’ He ran off and, seconds later, we see him apparently fly across the set upstage of the street scene building cutouts. He had spied a rolling A-frame ladder and got his friends to push him across the stage as Father Christmas took him by the hand to fly across London! Genius!”

As rising stars at Illinois Wesleyan, Bry and Tony only performed together twice at the McPherson Hall Theatre, first in a 2005 production of Urinetown and second in Alison’s House

in 2007. Now in 2024, their careers are converging again to perform together in Broadway’s Our Town.

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After leaving IWU, Bry quickly lived up to everyone’s expectations and her own potential. After two years of regional performances, she went to an open call audition in Washington, D.C. for a production of Ragtime, and she was confident. “I knew I booked it in the room,” she remembers, and she was right. Six months later, the show was transferred to Broadway itself.

“Once they know who you are, you get a million auditions, because the casting directors see how you work and know where you can fit in,” Bry explained. She quickly became a known Broadway vocalist performing in musicals like Prince of Broadway and After Midnight with Dulé Hill (The West Wing, Psych). Practically every high-profile performing arts venue in New York City has heard Bry’s voice, including the 92nd St. Y, New York City Center, the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

Tony had a similarly promising start. After graduating, he joined a national tour of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, after which he moved to New York City. “Things didn’t go up from there,” he said. “I was a bald 23-year-old with a prosthetic leg. There wasn’t really a market for me, especially in 2010.”

After he first began a full career in acting, “I decided to give it a break,” but the break didn't last long. He found work doing commercials and other parts, including his recurring role as Bruce on the Netflix comedy series Survival of the Thickest, while working as a marketing consultant. He has also been in short films and national commercials including a Smartwater ad in which he performed alongside Zendaya. In fact, Ullom recently got another treat when she “was shopping in Target and, on the wall in the health and beauty section, there was a man's face covered in shaving cream. I was certain that I knew that face,” and she learned she was right when Tony confirmed one of his latest advertising gigs.

He had never left the stage, though. For 13 years he kept playing roles in productions in New York City, all of which Bry and their other IWU friends who had made it to the city would attend. He performed in off-Broadway and regional productions, including those of Othello with Daniel Craig, David Oyelowo and Rachel Brosnahan, and of Three Sisters with Oscar Isaac and Greta Gerwig, while also landing parts in film and TV productions like Broad City, Homeland and New Amsterdam. His first Broadway performance was as Sir Dinadan in 2023's production of Camelot.

“The job is auditioning,” Bry said. When you’re an actor in a given market, each audition isn’t just for the part you’re trying for, but for every part you try for in the future. “You have to perfect your audition so that people understand how you work, and then 15 years later you can be an ‘overnight’ success.”

This is the process that got Bry and Tony cast in the same play, not quite overnight, but in less than a week.

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“Well, Jim Carnahan loves you,” Tony said to Bry in our interview.

“He loves me,” Bry confirmed, playfully flipping back her hair and batting her eyelashes.

Carnahan is a career casting director in Hollywood, television and Broadway, nominated for an Emmy for his casting work on the FOX TV comedy Glee and winning dozens of other awards. Bry had been cast by him for years, while Tony had only been professionally introduced to Carnahan once when he auditioned for the part of Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter musical. When Bry and Tony learned that he would be the casting director for the upcoming Broadway production of Our Town, both sensed it was a chance for another breakthrough.

In Bry’s case, it would be a chance to expand from musical theater into classical drama. 

On the Monday of that week in spring 2024, Tony saw Bry post on social media that she was auditioning for her first Broadway play. “I was like, ‘Is it Our Town?’” Tony asked, confirming that she was auditioning with Carnahan the day before he was scheduled. On Tuesday, Tony auditioned, and by Wednesday he was offered the part.

“I thought, ‘Well, Tony already knows, so I’m probably not going to get it,’” Bry said, until she was offered her part on Friday. Neither had been asked to come in for a callback.

“That’s unheard of,” Tony said. “There are basically only celebrities playing the lead roles, and then the other actors are very established New York actors. Bry and I are understudying the biggest roles in the show.” Bry is understudying Katie Holmes playing Mrs. Webb, and Tony is understudying Jim Parsons playing the character of the stage manager. “To do that without a callback is so crazy.”

“Did you ever think that we would be on Broadway together?” Tony asked Bry in amazement as she shook her head in response. “And it all happened in days.”

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Our Town carries special meaning for Tony; it’s one of his favorite plays and the most personally meaningful one he has performed in before.

“I always thought that, if I could play the stage manager, that would be the pinnacle of my career, and I’m about to do it on Broadway,” he said.

As for Bry, “It totally passed me by, so when I got the part, I was like, ‘Well, I guess I gotta read this play,’ and, oof, it’s dark.’” Tony and Bry’s husband, New York playwright David Goldsmith, were ready to prime her appreciation of the classic.

“It’s such beautiful medicine for our time,” Tony said. “It’s about how our time on this earth is so, so brief, and we waste it. I’m a naturally anxious person, and it’s about how we waste our time on anxieties and fears and tiny little things that keep us from loving people like we should. And then it all goes away. It critically, but gently, pulls apart the constraints that keep us really small and scared and disconnected.”

“My husband is tearing up just hearing you say that,” Bry said.

“The critique is concentrated into the character of the choir director. Everyone’s talking about his ‘troubles’ saying ‘some people just aren’t made for small town life,’” Tony said. “As a gay person with a disability who grew up in a small town, I really relate to that character.” But Thornton Wilder, the playwright, places a similar critique in a straight young woman who dies in childbirth.

“Why is Wilder giving that to those two characters? Because they don’t fit in,” Tony said. “It’s not just the gay guy; it’s the straight girl who’s too smart and sensitive. There are a lot of sad, profound critiques in there that are full of love.”

As the two talked about performing this play together with giddy passion, Bry made an obvious prediction: “It’s going to be like college again.”

The Broadway production of Our Town begins on Sept. 17 at the Barrymore Theatre.