IN GREAT COMPANY

At 35, Raul Esparza is no Broadway newcomer. He’s already garnered a handful of nominations and awards for his work in five Broadway productions over the last six years, including a Tony nomination (Broadway’s equivalent of the Oscars) for his 2004 turn as Best Featured Actor in the musical Taboo.
And yet, this performance in Company is poised to be Esparza’s biggest break yet. Because of the inherent size limitations of a live theater audience, not many Broadway stars achieve the level of name recognition and acclaim given to far lesser Hollywood actors. But Esparza is getting noticed. Entertainment Weekly has been keeping track of his career and Elle magazine spotlighted him as a star to watch —an occasion that found him in his first ever fashion photo shoot. “I felt a little goofy,” he confesses.
Esparza’s success in musical theater can be traced back to his youth, when he realized he’d never make a very good guitar player. Raised in Miami in a household where his parents would sing and dance to old records from Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil and Spain, Esparza had a love of music from an early age. When his mother balked at buying a piano over fears that it would clash with the rest of their home’s décor, he purchased an old flea market guitar and started taking classical guitar lessons. His maternal grandmother taught him old Cuban songs so that he could serenade her with the music she remembered from her youth on the island. “My guitar teacher quickly became much more interested in my singing than my guitar playing,” he says.
Back then, Esparza would never have predicted he would end up singing show tunes. His musical loves were rock ‘n’ roll and Cuban music. “To sing a song in Spanish taps into the deepest part of who I am,” he says. “As my first language, it instantly hits emotions that are so much deeper and easier to access in Spanish than in English.”
As a teenager, Esparza once saw a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, a musical about a maniacal and homicidal barber. “It sounded unlike anything I had ever heard before,” he says. “It had incredible intelligence and anger and beauty. That’s when I started to think that perhaps [musical theater] is something that I would be interested in doing.”
He never thought it possible then, but this winter he began starring in one of Sondheim’s most beloved shows,
Company. The show will be helmed by none other than director John Doyle, who won critical acclaim last year for his Broadway production of Sweeney Todd.
Like many Cuban Americans, Esparza’s life has been colored by the history of his parents’ homeland. His mother left the island when she was 14. “Her side of the family lives and dies in nostalgia,” says Esparza. “They told us gorgeous stories that create a longing for a place we’ve never been. ...When I play certain songs or eat great Cuban food, I am instantly living in those memories.”
His paternal grandfather, on the other hand, had worked closely with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, but ended up defecting to the CIA later in the 1960s. By the end of that decade, Esparza’s father, uncle and grandmother had to escape the island. “They wouldn’t join the Communist Party and became very frightened at the lack of options,” he says. “My father had been kicked out of the university, and they felt that the state had become a cult of personality, a totalitarian state. That was not what they had believed the revolution was about, so for them Cuba became all about the politics and the betrayal of the dream they had.”
Fast forward to 1999. Eight years after he left Miami to study acting and work in theater in Chicago, Esparza was offered a leading role in a national touring production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Evita. He was offered the role of Che Guevara, who serves as a key character and narrator in the show.
“My mother said that I would play that role over her dead body—but then she came to see it 14 times,” says Esparza. He dealt with the situation by taking the role and making it his own. “I could not be like any other actor playing Che. I had to throw my weight around and make him just as dangerous as Evita [Perón]. As a Cuban actor, I could not play him as a hero. At the start of the play, the audience believes in him 100 percent, but by the end he becomes so fanatical that you question whether you should have trusted him in the first place.”
For now, Esparza is looking forward to a role in Company, where the characters are more concerned about relationships than revolution. “For me, the play is entirely about taking a leap of faith,” he says. “It says that love is hard ... that we get lonely, that relationships fail, but that we have to love anyway, to make a choice to live. Despite knowing all the problems in the world, I am going to jump in and be a part of it. Ultimately, I like that message.”