IN CONVERSATION WITH COREY MACH

interview by JANA LETONJA

For Corey Mach, Broadway has always been as much about creating opportunities as stepping into them. A seasoned performer whose credits include Merrily We Roll Along, Kinky Boots, Hands on a Hardbody and Godspell, he is now making his principal Broadway debut as William Shakespeare in the hit musical & Juliet, following his acclaimed run in the role on its First National Tour. But his creative life extends well beyond performing. As the founder and producer of Broadway Sings, the concert series he conceived backstage as an understudy in 2012, Corey has built a platform that reimagines the music of artists from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift to Lady Gaga and Adele through Broadway voices and live orchestration. Performer, producer and entrepreneur, he represents a generation of theatre artists increasingly creating their own stages rather than simply waiting to be cast on them.

photography by YELLOW BELLY

After performing Shakespeare across North America with & Juliet, what does it mean to now make your principal Broadway debut in the role?
One of the biggest goals of any professional actor is to be part of a piece with Broadway ambitions and then actually be there when those ambitions become real. So much of my career has hinged on that possibility of moving up, a tour like Wicked fifteen years ago, where I kept hoping I'd be moved out of the ensemble or over to the Broadway company. The timing never once lined up. So after a year of playing this iconic character across North America, being asked to bring him to a New York audience is something I will never treat casually.

You've already lived with this character for some time. Has returning to Shakespeare on Broadway allowed you to discover anything new about him?
One big difference between Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim Theater and most of the touring houses is that on Broadway, the actors are physically much closer to the audience. In most musicals that wouldn't really matter, but since William Shakespeare works as a kind of narrator and breaks the fourth wall constantly, I can now actually take in individual faces throughout the show. I can even have an individual give-and-take with certain people I’m able to point out throughout. It has made my Broadway version of him far more dependent on what the audience thinks of him, which makes him sadder than how I've been accustomed to playing him. He uses individual audience members to assist in reassuring himself that he's on the right path.

& Juliet playfully rewrites one of the most famous stories in literary history. What do you love about the way the show challenges Shakespeare's original narrative?
I love the way the show approaches the very-2026-coded theme of cancel culture. When does a story stop belonging to the person who wrote it? Are we allowed to change the stories of authors who may not have had the best intentions? Who decides? When do we let someone rewrite their worst decision instead of holding it against them forever? & Juliet lets Shakespeare be wrong and then lets him fix it, which feels like the more generous version of that conversation, and it's a blast to play the role at the center of it.

Underneath the spectacle are ideas about identity, agency and rewriting your own story. Which of those themes resonates most personally with you?
It's interesting. While those are the themes of the play, Juliet is the one who gains identity, agency and authorship. Shakespeare is actually the obstacle to all three, and his arc is losing them on purpose. I suppose rewriting my own story resonates most. In 2012, I created the concert series Broadway Sings, which is that very idea as a business model. We take a pop star's catalogue that already exists and that everyone thinks they know, and reframe it so it means something different in a Broadway performer's voice. That is exactly what Anne is asking William to do in the very first scene. The skeleton isn't new, but the end result is.

photography by YELLOW BELLY

How does performing a role on tour compare with bringing that same character to a Broadway audience night after night?
The & Juliet tour came ten years after my previous tour. By that time, I had a thriving business, a husband, a dog, and a new beach house in Long Island. Saying yes to the role was easy, walking away from that life was not. On tour I was doing the show I loved at the cost of everything else, and now I get to do the same show and still sleep in my own bed. That changes something in your body. On the road, you are always slightly in transit, always slightly a guest. Here, I'm home, and I think the performance settles differently because of it.

You've been part of productions including Merrily We Roll Along, Kinky Boots and Godspell. Which experience most fundamentally changed you as a performer?
Godspell. It was my Broadway debut, the first production in NYC in over three decades, and I had an enormous task ahead of me. I was the standby for five lead roles in a show staged in the round, so I had to snap very quickly into a professional and organized mindset that my twenty-three-year-old brain never had to find before. It was also my first time understudying famous actors, which comes with its own particular difficulty. You get thrown on at a moment's notice into a role the audience came expecting to see someone they love play. Talk about an ego check.

Broadway careers are often defined as much by uncertainty as success. What have the years between jobs, auditions and opportunities taught you about resilience?
I've supported myself entirely through this industry since I arrived, and I don't think of that as a matter of luck, I think of it as a series of choices. Some of those choices were about which opportunities to chase, and just as many were about what to build when there were no opportunities to chase at all. There were seasons where a steady wage working as a bartender might have been the sensible move, and I understand why people take those jobs. I just kept betting that the next thing would come from something I made rather than something I was offered, and I think I have the temperament to create those opportunities for myself.

When you launched Broadway Sings in 2012, did you imagine it becoming the year-round New York institution it is today?
Not really. Broadway Sings was born out of boredom and creative frustration, and I funded it out of my own pocket. It only happened because I was feeling stifled and took a major risk, and fifteen years later it has paid off in every way possible. I wish more actors understood that they have the capability within themselves, and living in New York, the resources, to start their own work. So many performers sit around waiting for someone to hand them a chance and then complain about the lack of opportunity. Whatever I imagined at the time, it was nowhere near the breadth of what it is now.

The series takes artists such as Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Adele and reimagines their work through Broadway performers and live orchestration. What makes a pop song particularly exciting to reinterpret theatrically?
There are two answers to this, actually. The most exciting song to reinterpret for a Broadway performer is one that tells a story. Broadway actors are some of the best in the world at exactly that, taking pre-existing material written by a pro and not just singing it beautifully, but acting it beautifully. Some of the most beautiful arrangements we've created have been story songs with a long, glorious arc of emotion running through them.

The other opportunity is the opposite, a song that's more of a blank slate. That might surprise people, because you'd assume the bigger, more ambitious song gives you more to work with. We've found it's the reverse. Something like Bohemian Rhapsody is very hard to rearrange, because every creative and sonic decision has already been made for you. The genre shifts are built into the song. But a simple, somewhat bare song like Imagine or Respect has room to take it somewhere new, and the arrangement gets to supply an architecture the song never had.

Has producing changed the way you understand performers, and perhaps the way you want to be treated when you're the actor in the room?
Absolutely. I've learned to treat the people who work for me the way I'd want to be treated at my acting jobs. Speaking to people with kindness, letting them solve problems without getting in the way, helping out when needed, being on time, knowing to whom, and when, to express comments or complains. These are all important qualities in a leader.

As streaming and social media reshape how audiences discover music and performers, how do you think Broadway can evolve without losing what makes live theatre unique?
There have been some real innovators lately who have expanded what live theatre can do, and questioned whether there are other ways to produce in this medium than the standard ones we’ve been used to for decades. Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner's Masquerade, which puts you inside the Paris Opera House rather than in a seat facing it. Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch's Cats: The Jellicle Ball, an epic and wholly original reimagining that found something that was already sitting inside a show everyone thought they knew. Felix Barrett's Paranormal Activity, which brings a film franchise to Broadway as genuine, out-of-the-box horror. Broadway can only evolve with these kinds of minds, who take enormous risks and aren't afraid to fail.

Fashion and transformation are such important parts of Broadway, particularly in a visually exuberant show like & Juliet. How does costume affect the way you inhabit Shakespeare?
One of the most brilliant things about & Juliet across the board - the dialogue, the set design, the movement - is the juxtaposition of the Shakespearean with the contemporary. That dichotomy is most present, and, I think, most thrilling, in the costume design. Although the story is set around the year 1600, straight period clothes would not be appropriate for a show set to the pop hits of the 90s and 2000s. My costume has a mix of both eras. Yes, I'm wearing a blouse with a ruffled collar, gold jewelry, a gorgeous of-the-era doublet, and often a ridiculous feathered carriage driver's hat. But the look is also imbued with pops of this century - skinny jeans, hi-tops, a waffle tee, and simpler touches like my contemporary haircut, beard stubble, purposeful clothing rips, and rolled sleeves.

There is one iconic portrait of what historians believe to be William Shakespeare, and in it he wears a single gold earring in his left ear. When I began the tour, I checked in with our director, Luke Sheppard, to see whether I might keep my own left gold earring for the role. We both agreed it was a perfect little homage to Shakes.

With your Broadway career and entrepreneurial work now converging, what is the next ambition that feels almost too big, but that you want to pursue anyway?
I'd love to explore what it might look like to produce Broadway Sings concerts in a Broadway theatre. So many of those houses sit dark at certain points in the year, so might a theatre owner consider putting in a show that costs a fraction of the roughly $20 million it now takes to capitalize a new Broadway musical? Could a night out on Broadway mean seeing your favorite Broadway performers sing the hits of your favorite pop star, backed by a full orchestra? Does a Broadway show need to involve a storyline? Or could it be a 90-minute night out at the theater hearing epic music? We've spent fifteen years proving the audience is there. The question is whether the real estate can be, too.

photography by SHELBY GRISWOLD