Here, Queer and Singing Out on Broadway: Tarell Alvin McCraney and Jeremy Pope Talk Choir Boy

With rousing gospel songs and a talented cast of newcomers, the acclaimed new play Choir Boy tells of the students in a prep school struggling with the institution’s deep roots in tradition. For playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney—making his Broadway debut with the show—the story was born out of his relationship with his own community of Liberty City in Miami, Florida, which was also the setting of his Oscar-winning film Moonlight.

“When I was in high school, I mostly went to school outside of my community in magnet programs,” McCraney told Broadway.com on the latest episode of Front Row. “There seemed to be a sort of societal push to leave my community, that clearly what I needed wasn’t inside my community, it was outside. How do you be your full self in a community that may not always accept fully who you are? I have no answers for that. And so, whenever I have no answers for a question, I make a play about it!”

Choir Boy introduces audiences to Pharus, a young hero who is, like McCraney, gay and gifted. Blessed with the gift of song, Pharus is ready to take his spot as the leader of the gospel choir of the Charles R. Drew Prep School at the start of the show.

“The mythical school we’ve created centers around the legacy of Negro spirituals,” McCraney explained. “Negro spirituals are some of the greatest treasures in terms of the cosmology of the black experience in this country over the last 500 years. And to be handed that legacy and to hold onto that tradition while also becoming your own self is a pretty hard navigation negotiation. And then we get to introduced to Pharus, a young queer man, who is charged with leading that legacy in this high school. And what does that mean for him? How doe she find his space, his own voice?”

Pharus is played by Broadway newcomer Jeremy Pope, who previously earned raves in the role when the play debuted at Manhattan Theater Club off-Broadway in 2013 (Choir Boy is now running at MTC’s Broadway home at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through March 10).

Pope is a rising star who will be seen again on Broadway later this season as one of the stars of Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations. As a young man growing up in Orlando, he knew he wanted to perform onstage, but saw limited options laid out for him.

“It’s like, maybe one day you’ll be on Broadway,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be in The Lion King or [play] Seaweed in Hairspray.” With precious few leading roles for actors of color on Broadway, and even less LGBTQ characters of color, Pope could have never imagined a meaty role like Pharus would present itself.

“You just don’t seen queer black artists up there as leads, you know?” Pope said. “And someone asked me, ‘Why is that?’ And sometimes we don’t have a good answer for that. It’s a messy answer, so we just try to not talk about it. But here, we have a beautiful story where we go through all the young boys [in the school], but it centers on Pharus and the things that he is striving for. And I just think that is beautiful, honest and truthful.”

The long journey of bringing Choir Boy to Broadway has made McCraney and Pope close—both Florida natives, they are known to hit Universal Studios together when visiting home. Their bond was first evident when at one of Pope’s early auditions for the part, when he was asked to sing a gospel spiritual and chose “Amazing Grace.”

“I finished the song,” he remembered. “And it’s kind of quiet in the room. Tarell says, ‘Can you sing it again but this time, sing it like you are trying to tell people across the water about God’s graces, and you’re trying to bring them to you?’ And something happened in that room. He has a way of speaking to me and then I become the vessel for the language he wants to be put out there.”

One of the great joys of Choir Boy are the scenes in which Pope and his co-stars lift their voices as members of the gospel choir. For the Broadway run, director Trip Cullman enlisted choreographer Camille A. Brown (Once On This Island) to work with the cast. “She wasn’t just throwing steps on us,” Pope explained. “She was like, ‘What do you feel? Show me three moves of grief.’ And that became the choreography. We took ownership of the moves and, just like the spirituals, we feel them. She said, ‘You’re channeling your ancestors. This is in your bloodlines. You are giving respect and dues to that.’ To be able to bridge and connect these spirituals that we know from growing up in the church into the play, and for it to become the dialogue your character needs to get to the next scene, is very powerful.”

McCraney took to the national stage when he won the 2017 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay alongside director Barry Jenkins for Moonlight, which also won Best Picture. A fixture of off-Broadway since his The Brothers Size premiered at the Public Theater in 2007, McCraney is suddenly hot in Hollywood, with his latest TV project David Makes Man debuting on OWN this summer. His favorite memory of his recent rise was an outdoor screening of Oscar night in his childhood home.

“We put up screens and they watched the Oscars in Liberty City,” he remembered. “And then the power went out, and then it came back on and we won. That stuff is thrilling to me because, again, it’s those 12 blocks that I grew up in that are just now even more immortalized by this experience.”

As for Pope, he’s just thrilled to have more McCraney in the world: “When that moment happened, and the world recognized Tarell, I was so thrilled for him. We are grateful for the Oscar, but I’m just excited for whatever is to come for him, and excited that people are tuned into Tarrell Alvin McCraney. He is a special human being and we are grateful to have him.”