Harrison Gets Wicked in Broadway Debut
Posted by Andrew Gans on playbill.com; June 22, 2004.

Wicked welcomes "Queer as Folk" star Randy Harrison to the land of Oz


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Through July 25, Harrison can be seen as munchkin Boq, the role created on Broadway by Christopher Fitzgerald, who will return to the part after a stint at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Though Wicked marks Harrison's Broadway debut, the openly gay actor is no stranger to the musical theatre.

A graduate of the University of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music, Harrison has appeared in productions of Grease, Anything Goes and West Side Story and received his Equity card after a production of 1776 at the St. Louis Muny Theatre. Harrison admits, however, that he has purposefully avoided musicals for the past few years. "I was doing so many musicals I got sort of frustrated with [them] and wanted to do something different," Harrison said a week before his Wicked debut. "By the time I graduated [from the Conservatory of Music], I was like, 'I gotta do something different for awhile' because I didn't want to be trapped in musical theatre. But now it's been five years since I've done a musical, and I'm really excited to go back."

Wicked marks Harrison's third New York stage outing. Having made his Off-Broadway debut in the MCC production of A Letter from Ethel Kennedy, he was also a part of Sophie Rand's dark comedy Deviant at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. Replacing an actor in a big Broadway musical, however, poses its own set of challenges. Unlike the four-to-six-week rehearsal period that actors enjoy before a show opens, replacement actors have comparatively little time to shape their performance. "I think I'll go in having had about six or seven rehearsals [plus] watching the show a lot," said Harrison. "It's plenty of time to learn it, though, at least for this part. I know where I stand and where I go and when I say what I say, but I'll never really have the opportunity to work with the people I'm going to be onstage with until I'm onstage with them."

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