‘I Deserve to Be Here’: Riding His First Professional Gig to Broadway
During his first-ever Broadway curtain call, a teary Jaquel Spivey was overcome with emotion as he and his castmates received a standing ovation.
There had been times when the young star of “A Strange Loop” wasn’t sure he had what it took to play the demanding part. But there he was on the evening of April 14, finally taking his first Broadway bow after a tryout run in Washington, months of rehearsals and a series of Covid-related delays that postponed the start of preview performances by a week.
Reflecting on his performance the next morning, he said, he had an epiphany during one of the last songs. “It almost felt like my moment of realization that I’m worthy to perform for a Broadway audience,” he said. “It just hit me like a ton of bricks: I deserve to be an actor — I deserve to be a leading actor.
I deserve to be here.” When Spivey graduated last May from Point Park University, in Pittsburgh, little did he know that his first professional acting role would be in such a high-profile, Pulitzer Prize-winning work.
