On a Tuesday night in early September, I made my way to the Walter Kerr Theatre in Times Square, where the hit musical Hadestown premiered in 2019, and has remained for 2,000-odd performances. Though not a Wicked, or Lion King, or Mamma Mia, Hadestown has a consistent and devoted fan base that skews toward the theatrically literate—an encouraging anomaly in this otherwise trying moment for musicals. Its high-concept appeal is likely due to its subject matter, a take on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice set against the backdrop of a 1940’s New Orleans honky tonk.
The energy on this particular Tuesday evening performance, however, was something else entirely. It was more like the energy you’d expect at a One Direction concert 15 years ago, or indeed at the Oasis revival tour, happening that same night across the Hudson River at MetLife Stadium: febrile, nervous, young, sweaty. Jack Wolfe, theater’s new it-boy, was making his Broadway debut and his fans had descended on Times Square, sold out the house, paid for the expensive orchestra seats, and uncapped their markers for ease of Playbill signing at the stage door.
“Let it be known, I do not consider myself a rock star or anywhere close to that,” Wolfe, who grew up between Wakefield, Yorkshire, and the Welsh coast, told me exactly one week earlier. He was ensconced in a quiet corner booth at the Lambs Club, just a stone’s throw from the theater where he would be taking on the role of Orpheus in a few days’ time. It was a defining moment for Wolfe, but also for Hadestown, which was seeing its entire lead cast turn over at once for the first time since its premiere in 2019. (That year, it won six Tony awards, including best new musical.)
The 29-year-old Wolfe is arguably the highest-profile addition to the cast in the production’s seven-year history, which may be why he was invited to give his creative input to Orpheus’s costume. “They were like, ‘Are you a short-sleeve Orpheus, or a long sleeve, you know, with a T-shirt?’” he tells me. He is a long-sleeved Orpheus: “I feel like he has his sleeves over his hands.”
Wolfe has been buffeted to Broadway on the winds of a series of career moves that have shot him out of a double-barreled cannon into the public eye. First there was his turn as Wylan in the Netflix series Shadow and Bone, itself an adaptation of the hit fantasy novels by Leigh Bardugo. His character in that show was Gen-Z romantasy catnip: a wide-eyed and winsome demolitions expert in a steampunk fictional universe, embroiled in a queer love affair with the series hero.
Wolfe also appeared as Moritz in the 2024 anniversary concert of Spring Awakening on the West End—the only lead who did not appear in the original cast. However, it was his perfectly-timed run as Gabe in the wildly successful West End production of Next to Normal, which earned him—and the show—a whole new base of diehard theater fans who took to the Internet to spread his gospel.
Next to Normal, on paper, couldn’t be further from the Netflix teen romance genre. It’s a dark and complicated musical about Diana, a woman whose struggle with bipolar disorder and the loss of her infant son affects her marriage to her husband, Dan, and their daughter.
“What I love about Next to Normal is it doesn’t say it’s going to be easy. It’s really messy, and the recovery process of anything is filled with hurdles and roadblocks,” says Wolfe, who plays Gabe, the son who appears—we learn in the first act’s famous twist—as a figment of his mother’s imagination. He remains omnipresent during the show as the family’s petulant and sinister id. “I wanted to play Gabe, knowing that Gabe is going to be interpreted as a metaphor,” says Wolfe. “But as an actor, I had to play him as a person. For me, it’s a battle to be noticed, to be seen.”
Wolfe’s Gabe is radically different from the 2008 version, originated by a hunky and occasionally topless Aaron Tveit (currently starring opposite Lea Michele in Chess, a few blocks away). Instead, Wolfe’s Gabe is a moist-eyed, Gen-Z soft boy in a hoodie, writhing and rocking and beseeching and careening about the stage, commanding two hours of spell-binding and difficult theater.
Difficult for the audience, but equally challenging, it would seem, for Wolfe, who had been plucked from the relative obscurity of regional U.K. theater. “I’ve never had to sing like that before,” he says. “I’ve never had to sing at that pitch. I’ve never had to sing with that quality.” I asked Wolfe about the emotional toll it took to go that deep and dark night after night. “At the end of the show every night, we would all run off into the green room, and all just hug it out with each other in this big circle. I think we all really did go to places, but I tried to make sure that it was never my own therapy. I can bring experiences to the role, but I have to leave myself behind.”
Wolfe’s Next to Normal run won him a Critics Circle Theater award and saw him nominated for an Olivier for best supporting actor in a musical. But when PBS bought the distribution rights, it only added fuel to the fire. Reddit threads, filmed reactions, and bootleg fan edits sprang up across TikTok and Instagram. “I don’t consider myself to have fans,” Wolfe contends. “And maybe this is a self-preservation thing, but I like to think, Next to Normal has a really strong fan base, and a lot of that fan base is going to come see Hadestown.” The same is true for the Shadow and Bone books. “I like to consider that they’re fans of all of those projects, and that’s so cool, because I’m a fan of those projects too, and we’re the same,” he says.
I ask Wolfe if he’s managed to make some friends this side of the pond, to which he responds as any budding member of the Broadway firmament might: “I’ve been taken under the wing by some really cool people, hanging out a lot with [the actress] Jinkx Monsoon, and Alan Cumming. For me it’s like, Mum and Dad, you come to the best foster paradigm ever,” he says.
But don’t for a moment think that the wide-eyed Welshman is getting jaded about his rise. “The fact that I get to come to Broadway and do Hadestown, which is a show that in my adult life, hit me the same way that [Spring Awakening and Next to Normal] have … is amazing. The past couple of projects I’ve done, especially in theater, they’ve been like dream collecting for me.”
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