Christian Anderson

Currently: Playing Dick, a shy, music-obsessed record store employee in the new Broadway musical High Fidelity. "Dick is a quiet, soulful, caring guy who kind of lives the romanticism of the music that's in his head," the soft-spoken actor says of his character. "He spends so much time in his headphones, but he's ready to come out of his cocoon!"

Hometown: Anderson was raised in Madison, Connecticut, with an actor father and a director mother, so it's no surprise he began dabbling in regional theater at a young age. After two weeks in Boston University's acting program, he dropped out—"I couldn't afford it, so I just stopped"—then waited for his big break...and waited tables.

Cheri/Baby: Anderson's first big gig came in '97 as ensemble player Gordon in the first national tour of Rent. He stayed with Jonathan Larson's Tony-winning rock tuner for three years, jumping from role to role: "I was Gordon and then I became Mark and then I went to Broadway as Mark and then went back on the road and became Roger…and then Gordon again," he recites without taking a breath. He met his wife, actress Cheri Smith, in the show—the pair adorably went on many times together as lovers Roger and Mimi—and moved to Los Angeles post-tour only to get back to waiting. "I did two commercials, was in Wit at the Geffen Playhouse, waited tables for a while…again…then finally got the Full Monty tour." Anderson and Smith didn't waste time when he landed the lead role of Jerry Lukowski. "I got the job and we were like, 'Woo hoo! OK, we can afford a baby. Let's have one!'" he says. Enter daughter Ruby, now a toddler, whom Anderson proudly points out in the lone photo on his dressing room mirror.

Thank Q: For his next Broadway outing, Anderson learned puppetry to bring porn-loving Trekkie Monster and grungy Nicky to life in Avenue Q, replacing original cast member Rick Lyon. "I've been a Muppets fan since I was a little kid," he says, "so that was so much fun." When he heard that the producers of Q and Rent were working on a musical version of High Fidelity, his ears pricked up: "I immediately thought, 'Maybe they've got something in it for me!'" Curiously, the lanky actor was asked to prepare a Motown song to audition for loud-mouthed Barry, the role played by Jack Black in the film version. "I sang, 'Heard it Through the Grapevine,' and I blew it," he recalls. "I had a terrible audition. I think it was [director] Walter [Bobbie] who said, 'Why don't you take a look at the Dick stuff and come back in five minutes?' I went out into the hall, and when I came back it just clicked."

Uncharted Territory: After years as a reliable replacement actor, Anderson discovered that creating a role in a brand new musical presents a different set of challenges. "Everything I've ever been in before has been like, 'OK, you stand here and then you walk over here.' So this [experience in High Fidelity] was hard to figure out at first. I just kind of stood there wondering, 'Where do I go?'" he says with a laugh. "Walter had to prod me a little bit, then I kind of fell into it. It's scary, of course, because you don't know what's going to happen with the show, but it's exciting to come up with something completely new."

Hitting a High Note: Though he enjoys eliciting "awws" from the audience with his shy-guy-meets-girl story arc in High Fidelity, Anderson says it's the music that draws him most to the show. "Dick tends to sing a lot of the sad stuff, and I love sad music, like Elliott Smith and Nick Drake." The Amanda Green/Tom Kitt score draws from nearly every imaginable musical genre, from country to heavy metal, Anderson points out. "It's all about this guy Rob, who owns a record store, right?" he explains. "All he thinks about is records. If you took all the records in Rob's shop and threw them on the ground, then picked them up and arranged them in a way that they applied to his story, that's our show!"