Jordan Donica, Tony Award nominee for ‘Camelot,’ is Broadway’s rising star
NEW YORK — When Jordan Donica was about 9 or 10 years old, his aunt took him to New York City with one mission: to banish the notion of making it on Broadway from his system. Fortunately, this mission failed spectacularly.
“It was raining and I was dancing the streets of Times Square enjoying every second of it. “My aunt had to tell me to slow down,” he recalls, now a happier New Yorker. “What I love most is here, at its peak – the core from which everything explodes.”
With determination and talent, Donica still hasn’t faltered, earning his first Tony Award nomination for playing the handsome, gallant knight Sir Lancelot in a beautiful revival of the classic musical Camelot at the Lincoln Center Theater.
“I’m just grateful and that just makes me want to do the work even more. Really. That was the first thought I had: ‘I’m excited to get back to work,'” he says.
Donica’s story is about a man with a huge voice who moved a lot in his youth but always had Broadway as his North Star. Even in middle school, he told friends that he knew what he wanted to do with his life. His first email address contained the words “Broadway Bound”.
A 2016 graduate of Otterbein University, Donica honed his craft in regional theater, playing Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Weathervane Playhouse in Ohio and was in the ensemble in “South Pacific” at the Utah Shakespeare Festival.
He made his Broadway debut in 2016 as Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera, which came full circle. As a child he had been in the audience at that New York visit and had been fascinated by the Phantom’s abilities. “I thought, ‘I have to learn to use my voice the way a man uses his voice.’ And that’s what I intend to do.”
Donica has had roles in the television series Charmed and Blue Bloods, and has also starred as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the ensembles of the Los Angeles and San Francisco musical Hamilton. He was the originator of the role of Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the Lincoln Center Theater’s 2018 revival of My Fair Lady.
In the lavish, sweeping “Camelot,” he plays a virtuous if selfish knight caught in a love triangle with King Arthur and Guenevere. The story was updated by Aaron Sorkin to focus on the dream of democracy, but Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s songs remain.
Tony Award-winning director Bartlett Sher cast Donica in both My Fair Lady and Camelot, roles that required the actor to be passionate and sweet in the first role and a cheeky, sword-catching dude in the second.
“You have a wonderful artist on your hands who is able to dive into a role and into a world and deliver very different things in each case,” says Sher. “There’s that kind of connection in his body, that connection to his voice, deep intelligence and endless creativity that makes him so special.”
Donica in “Camelot” first appears almost like a righteous angel on stage – she sings “C’est Moi” with the lyrics “Here I stand as pure as a prayer/Incredably clean with virtue to spare” – but ends the musical very human. what he describes as a sobering yet entertaining journey.
“For me, Camelot is America. And we must fight every day to tell the stories of what freedom is and what America is. Because if we don’t talk about it and put it into action, it doesn’t really exist,” he says.
The role is vocally and physically demanding. He had previously gained 15 pounds and expected to sweat much of it off. He recently visited his physiotherapist, who immediately knew that Donica had lost weight because the settings on the table no longer suited him.
Born in Minnesota, Donica spent his first birthday in Chicago, then moved to Tennessee for eight years and then on to Indiana. He looked at kidz bop and TV commercials with children singing – Oscar Mayer hot dogs and Welch’s juice commercials – and wondered if that was a way.
“I remember as a little kid I saw the kids in those commercials and I turned to my mom and said, ‘I could do that.’ Why don’t I?’” he says. “I don’t think she really thought, I’m that serious. But I think I meant it very seriously.”
He joined a community theater in Indianapolis and attended theater camp where there was once a team building trust activity and Donica was the only one willing to commit and fall back into a stranger’s arms.
“I remember the teacher saying, ‘You will get good results here because you trust,'” he recalls. “The theater world is a safe place. I was taught to trust, which means you will get into a dangerous situation.”
The trip to New York was a test for a boy who loved open fields and disliked crowds. His mother didn’t want to dissuade him, just to make sure he really wanted it. Now she has been invited to see him at the Tony Awards.
On June 11, he will compete against Shucked’s Kevin Cahoon and Alex Newell, Kimberly Akimbo’s Justin Cooley and Some Like It Hot’s Kevin Del Aguila for best performance by an actor in a leading role in a musical. ”
Donica, who used to watch old Tony ceremonies on YouTube, still can’t imagine him being there. “I don’t think I really believe it anymore because I never really set out to win a Tony Award or anything like that. As a kid, all I dreamed of was performing with the Tonys.”
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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits