A Conversation with Claybourne Elder
On Company, Road Show, The Gilded Age, and the kindness of strangers
It’s a joy to welcome Claybourne Elder to The Sondheim Hub. Claybourne’s path into Sondheim’s world runs from a farming town in Utah and a stranger’s life-changing gift of a Sweeney Todd ticket to creating the role of Hollis in Road Show and redefining Andy in Marianne Elliott’s gender-bent Company. In this conversation, he reflects on the letter from Sondheim that still sits framed on his desk, the theatre-family world of The Gilded Age, and his intimate new album If the Stars Were Mine (out April 3rd). Our conversation begins below:
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It’s so good to meet you. Your album If the Stars Were Mine comes out April 3rd. This is a disc born out of material you’ve been touring with for some time now, right?
Yeah, that’s right. The title of the album is after a lullaby that I sing to my son, that I’ve been singing to him since he was born. I sing a lot of songs that are important to me, some of my favorite songs, but I do them in newly inspired or more intimate ways. And a lot of them do tend to be Sondheim songs, because I’ve done more Sondheim than anything in my professional career.
Many of our readers will know about the extraordinary act of kindness early in your career—being given $200 by a stranger to see Sweeney Todd on Broadway—that changed everything for you. What was your relationship with Sondheim’s work like at that time?
Like many people around my age, the first experience I really had with Broadway was Into the Woods, which my mom taped off of PBS. In fact, she started taping it about 10 minutes into the show, so I didn’t discover the opening until much later. I was like, “What? This is how the show starts?” But I fell in love with Into the Woods right away.
I did Into the Woods in high school, and I started falling in love with all things Sondheim. But one show that I actually wasn’t as familiar with was Sweeney Todd. In Utah, when I was a kid, they weren’t really doing more dark or questionable shows. Nobody was teaching me what Rent was, you know? And Sweeney Todd fell into that category, so I didn’t know much about it.
Broadway, New York, professional theatre—all of it seemed about the farthest thing from where I was at that time, in a farming town in Utah, where I was going to college. But I did buy the cast album of Bounce, with Gavin Creel singing “Talent.” I remember driving to college listening to it, thinking this song is amazing. He’s so amazing.
The man who bought me the ticket to Sweeney Todd didn’t even know I was an actor. What an incredible, miraculous thing to happen. And he had no idea how he changed my life until I was reunited with him almost 20 years later. But I went and saw that production of Sweeney Todd, directed by John Doyle, starring Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone—and the next time so many of those people worked together, I was one of the stars of the show. Road Show, the next iteration of Wise Guys and Bounce, was my first job ever, from an open chorus call. And I was the person singing that song that Gavin Creel had been singing.
It’s such a beautiful story. And the Sweeney production you saw starred not only Michael Cerveris but Alexander Gemignani too—who became the two Mizner brothers in Road Show. Did you share that story with them?
I definitely did. When I got cast in Road Show, I didn’t have an agent, I hadn’t been to a fancy school. I studied in Russia, but I’d studied acting, not musical theatre. Nobody knew who I was, and so Stephen Sondheim took a huge risk on me. Honestly, it speaks more about the director and the casting people at the Public Theater than it does about my talent. It takes somebody who has a lot of confidence in themselves to be like, “No, I trust that this is the person,” you know?
When I got the call from the casting director, I was certain that they meant the understudy. That’s really what I thought they meant, until the first day of rehearsal, when I walked in and picked up a script with my name on it. I remember going up to Sondheim and shaking his hand. I was so terrified, and I just said, “Thank you, thanks, thanks…” And he was like, “You’re gonna be fine.”
I was so nervous in that room. But John Doyle, the director, made it a very level playing field and a very safe environment. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks into the rehearsal process that I actually shared the Sweeney Todd ticket story. I shared it with Anne Nathan, on a break, and she was like, “What? What are you talking about? This is insane!” I remember her taking me practically by the collar and dragging me over into where everybody else was, and she was like, “Everybody stop! You need to hear this story!”
I also remember being really nervous about how high “Talent” was. I went to Steve, and I was like, “Hey, can we take the song down? Would you mind?” He was like, “Why?” I was like, “Well, because I’m nervous about singing it every day. I don’t know that I can do it.” And he was like, “Yeah, sure, fine, whatever, let’s do it.”
So we started rehearsing the show and running it, and without telling anybody except the music director, Sondheim started printing the song off in half-step higher keys and giving it to the music director. So finally, I noticed one day, and I was like, “I’m sorry, can we stop?” And he just laughed from the corner of the room and said, “I knew you could do it!”
He wrote me a letter when the Road Show cast album came out that I have sitting on my desk, framed. It said, “I just heard the first cut of the album. I think you’ll be very proud of yourself. And if you’re not, you should be.”
I always think of that time in my life, and just how grateful I am that any of it took place, because that’s what it takes sometimes. Somebody eventually has to say, “I’m gonna give this person a break,” you know?
And as someone who grew up discovering so many of these shows through cast albums, it must feel pretty special that your voice is part of that recorded lineage.
It’s just wild to me. Just really incredible still. And it’s true—growing up on the other side of the country, I didn’t see a Broadway show until I was well into my twenties. How I experienced them was through those cast albums. That’s how I knew them, and that’s how I learned to sing. So those are more important to me, in some ways, than some of the performances themselves. That’s how the shows live on, you know? Forever.
You created the character of Hollis within Road Show, but, as you mentioned, Gavin Creel had played the role in Bounce. That’s such an interesting position—being part of an ongoing project while also creating something entirely new in its own context. How did you approach that?
Yeah, it was a unique experience in that sense. Something else did exist. And in that particular instance, I remember once I got cast, I was like, “I’m putting this away. I will not look at anything Gavin did. I’m not going to watch it. I’m not going to go try to track down a pirated copy of the show. I knew I needed to make it my own.
Honestly, I just idolized—and still do—Gavin Creel. It would have been so hard for me to try to live up to him. Luckily, this was an all-new production. From Bounce to Road Show, they had rewritten a lot of it, and John Doyle had come on as the director. They were like, “Let’s take a total different turn on this.” So it felt like building something up from the beginning, especially in the sense that John Weidman and Steve were there with us all the time. John was writing and changing, and they were moving things around. I got a degree in dramaturgy, so I love working with playwrights, talking about process and character creation. That is my favorite kind of work to do.
That makes me think of the gender-bent revival of Company, much more recently in your career. You were able to perform numbers that, growing up and listening to the original cast album obsessively, you might never have imagined yourself singing. Did that feel excitingly new too?
Yeah. You know, one of the songs I sing on my album is “Moments in the Woods,” because I love it so much, and I know I’ll never get to sing it in the show. But it’s one of my favorite songs to sing.
Heading into Company, you really had to look at it through the lens of, okay, this was written for a woman. And I have to say, if you had asked me before this, “If you were gonna be in Company and the genders were swapped, who would you want to play?” I would be like, “Andy. Definitely. I would want to be the flight attendant. That’s the most fun.” He’s so weird and fun, and there’s so much that is not there for you to fill in the gaps of.
When they were first auditioning for the U.S. production, they brought everybody in for Bobbie or for Jamie, the gay best friend. That’s who they were looking for first, so I went in for Jamie. And I found out later that when I went in for Jamie, they were like, “That’s the guy who’s gonna play Andy.” Because of what I did with Jamie’s stuff, they were like, “Well, that’s not Jamie, but it’s definitely Andy.”
When I came back in, I remember I had done all this work just to try not to be weird, and to try to take it very seriously. I remember they started laughing, and I was like, “This is serious, this isn’t funny!” And they kept laughing and laughing. That was all really fun to build.
And Marianne Elliott, I would follow her to the ends of the earth. She has the most wonderful way of allowing you to explore and to try things. Like, she just wants you to fall on your face—and I say that in the best way possible. She is not concerned about you trying things that don’t work. And, until we found it, I tried a lot of things that didn’t work.
And thinking back to that formative Sweeney experience, sharing a stage with Patti LuPone in Company must have felt pretty special too…
Yeah. When I was seeing shows that week, it really was my first experience of Broadway. Seeing Patti LuPone was the first time I saw anyone who was in the legend category, you know? She was the most famous person I’d ever seen live and in person. Like, I hadn’t seen anyone like that on the street or in a restaurant either. It was such a huge, huge thing for me. And then I loved getting to know her so much. I just saw her at Carnegie Hall last week. I love her. She’s amazing.
This Christmas, I binged The Gilded Age from start to finish and had such a great time doing so. It’s a show chock-full of wonderful Broadway people, of course. Was there anyone you hadn’t encountered professionally before that you were particularly excited to work with on the show?
Oh my gosh. I mean, it’s hard to even start with one person, because it really is such a stacked theatre cast. And that came from Michael Engler, who was casting it and directing most of the episodes in that first season. He is a theatre person—he studied at Yale—and he knew that theatre people would be able to handle the language of this show. He also knew they’d be able to handle the fact that, in these shows where there are, like, 32 lead characters, you have these little moments to make something, and you have to do a lot of that work on your own.
And so it’s not an accident that it’s a lot of theatre people in this show, because he was like, “That’s who can best do this specific kind of work.”
I’m not cool, and I don’t play it cool. I can’t just be like, “Hey, what’s up, Kelli O’Hara?” I geek out over these people, and now I’m close with many of them. In fact, Kelli loaned me her version of “How Glory Goes,” which I sing on the album. It’s not her version that I sing on the album, but it’s sort of loosely based on her arrangement of it from her album, because I love it so much. It’s a very stripped-down version of it.
All those people have become family. People that I never ended up on set with, too, like people who worked in the servants’ quarters, who I never really had scenes with—like Doug Sills, who I’ve gotten to be very good friends with, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, just from being around each other. All of them.
That’s beautiful. Finally, through City of Strangers, you’re making tickets to performances accessible to theatre-lovers regardless of ability to pay, bringing that random act of kindness full circle. How can people find out more about that work?
They can go to cityofstrangers.org, or follow us on Instagram. And there, they can make donations. We are mostly giving tickets away through other organizations now: we partner with these people who find the people who really want to be there and can’t afford it. And we’re giving away tickets to public school teachers, to unhoused youths, to people who have lived in New York their whole lives but have never had the access or the funds to be able to go see a Broadway show.
Not only are we trying to raise the next generation of theatre lovers, but we’re also trying to give the opportunity to people who are 70 who’ve never seen a show. It’s not by age. It’s not youth tickets. It’s for everybody. If you want to buy a ticket for somebody, we would love for you to buy a ticket for somebody.
To pre-save or order Claybourne’s album If The Stars Were Mine (out April 3), head to https://orcd.co/ifthestarsweremine.
To find out more about City of Strangers, head to cityofstrangers.org.
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I love the idea of a man singing "Moments in the Woods" :)
What a great chat! And what a treat the Gilded Age is for theatre fans!