Reg Rogers Didn't Know the Lore of Merrily We Roll Along Until He Helped Make it a Broadway Hit

“Listen to that! Will you listen to that?” Reg Rogers gleefully cries in one of the most joyous moments of Merrily We Roll Along. As Broadway producer Joe Josephson, he’s reacting to the opening-night applause for the “palpable hit” that catapults Franklin Shepard and Charley Kringas, dazzlingly played by Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe, to stardom.

After a theatrical career of almost 30 years, Rogers is enjoying being part of a real-life hit in his second-ever Broadway musical. (He sparred with Santino Fontana five years ago as director Ron Carlisle in Tootsie.) This sneakily charismatic actor adds spice to any scene, whether he’s playing an eccentric Russian ballet teacher in the 2014 revival of You Can’t Take It With You or a murderous drug lord on TV’s The Blacklist. The fact that Rogers was not previously a Sondheim superfan may be the key to his sympathetic portrayal of Joe, a man betrayed by his actress wife, Gussie, and Franklin, the young composer whose career is launched on that blissful opening night.

You’re in the season’s biggest hit. What’s it like to feel that level of excitement from the audience?

It’s amazing. When Jonathan, Dan and Lindsay [Mendez] come out for the curtain call, it’s straight-up screaming, which I’ve never experienced. I did The Iceman Cometh with Denzel Washington; they don’t scream like that for Denzel, but of course that’s a different fan base. And to look up into the top balcony of the theater and see every seat filled? It’s absolutely terrific.

Did you realize right away that these three stars were going to have great chemistry?

Oh yes, I noticed it the first day. I had worked with Dan before at the Public Theater in a play called Privacy and I realized then what a delight he is. He loves to work and he’s game for anything. I didn’t know Jonathan or Lindsay, but there is an alchemy between the three of them. They egg each other on in a perfect way, so when they are together on stage, it’s special.

Their performances challenged the previous notion that Franklin, Mary and Charley are selfish, rather unpleasant people.

That’s right. But I didn’t know anything about this play when we started. I don’t follow musicals in general, but when I read this, I thought, “That’s a part I could play well if they let me do it.” The singing, even though it’s Sondheim, is not particularly complicated for my character. I wanted [this cast’s] voices to be the voices in my head, so I tried not to listen to anything before we started. All I knew about the show was that it didn’t really do well. I didn’t realize it closed in a week!

And now you get to deliver the ultimate Sondheim “in joke” when you complain to Franklin, “There’s not a tune you can hum.”

There was a time when I was playing with that line a little bit and they said, “No, no, no, no, this is important. This was the note Sondheim got all the time when he was starting out, and it has to be delivered exactly like he wrote it.”

It must have been a treat to be directed by Maria Friedman, who has such a deep understanding of the show both as an actress [who played Mary in London in 1992] and director.

It’s been great from the very beginning at my audition. I have a specific sense of humor that can come off as flip, but Maria laughed and laughed and laughed. I felt then that I would love to be in the room with her, and we figured out a lot of stuff together. For example, in the song “Now You Know,” when they’re sending Franklin off on the cruise, Joe has a line, “So you find a new gal.” While working on that scene, we figured out that Joe already knows Franklin is with Gussie.

You were almost 30 when you got out of Yale Drama School in 1993. Did you know right away that you wanted to make a life in the theater?

When I got out of Yale, yes. My major at the time of leaving to go to Yale was sculpture, which is not much of a major. Because there’s not a lot of money in it. [laughs] I always fiddled around with theater, and I had a professor who said, “You need to go to grad school and do this as a profession.” Luckily, it worked out.

Do you still sculpt?

I do, with my kid [11-year-old Rowan, his son with actress Susannah Rogers]. We have days when we sit and make little sculptures with this modeling compound and bake them in the oven. They’re all over the house.

The second time you were on Broadway, you got a Tony nomination [in the 1996 revival of Philip Barry’s Holiday]. Did that jumpstart your career?

I guess it did. When I got out of school, I thought I was going to play the heavy, but things started moving more in the direction of comedy, and then I had to struggle a bit to get back to drama. When [Broadway] shut down for the pandemic, I thought, “What’s going to happen?” Then I got a call from The Blacklist and became the villain for a season, which was terrific.

Do people recognize you from that?

Some people do. Some people recognize me from Friends. [Rogers played Joey’s director in a 1997 episode.] It’s odd, because it will be a 15-year-old girl [who says something], and I’m like, “You weren’t even born when I did that.”

Is there a reason you haven’t done more musicals? What do you enjoy most about them?

Vocally, my window is not enormous, although I feel confident [as a singer]. I sang and played lead guitar in a rock band in high school. There’s an excitement in musicals, which probably has to do with the ensemble—kids who have been musical theater fans since they were even littler kids. They’re gung-ho in a way you don’t experience in a play. When we did Tootsie out of town in Chicago, the ensemble, who were all young and super fit, would go out every night. I’d be like, “I’m going too!” until I realized I’m too old to do that anymore.

You’ve built a versatile stage career, from comedy to drama and now musicals. Has it progressed the way you expected?

You can always wish for more, but people keep calling me, and that’s great. I’m supporting a family, and who would have expected that? I thought I would work in regional theater and get a job as an office temp to pay the bills. To be on Broadway still feels amazing. If I’m meeting somebody after the show at Cafe Un Deux Trois, I’ll walk down the quiet street and look back at all the lights and think, “This is really something.”