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There’s an unlikely connection between Louis Armstrong and Beetlejuice — or at least there is for James Monroe Iglehart, the Tony-winning Broadway star of the new musical “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical.”
Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:
On the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast, Iglehart (“Aladdin”) recalled that as soon as he knew he would be approximating Armstrong’s signature growly voice in “Wonderful World,” he called his friend Alex Brightman — the actor who affected his own husky timbre playing the title character in “Beetlejuice.”
“I said to Alex, ‘Say man, how are you doing that eight shows a week without killing yourself?’” Iglehart said. Brightman, who co-starred with Iglehart in the D.C. premiere of the recent “Spamalot” revival, recommended a vocal coach who could help him out. To keep his voice in shape, Iglehart also regularly does vocal exercises in Armstrong’s highly recognizable rumble: “It’s like weightlifting but for your cords.”
For him, that gravelly tone is “kind of like where you talk when you’re tired,” he said. “When most people want to talk like this, they’re either sick or they’re trying to be sexy, one of the two!” Add to that Armstrong’s distinctive speech rhythms, and suddenly Iglehart sounds like Satchmo.
Even the singing is relatively easy for him, he added — he just can’t push it: “I gotta really ride the microphone so I don’t hurt myself.”
Also on the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Iglehart revealed the backstory behind how and why he signed on as a co-director of “Wonderful World” in addition to headlining the show — and how his experience in “Hamilton” informed his work on the Armstrong musical.
Iglehart had appeared in an early developmental iteration of “Hamilton,” and went on to play Lafayette and Jefferson in the Broadway incarnation. The lessons of that show came back to him in “Wonderful World.”
“One of the things that I fought for, and I actually got, was [inspired by the fact that] Louis Armstrong was one of the only jazz musicians to write an autobiography — two autobiographies, by the way,” Iglehart explained. “So I said to my collaborators: Louis should tell his own story in the show.” Quoting a well-known line from “Hamilton,” he continued, “I kept hearing ‘who lives, who dies, who tells your story,’ and I just couldn’t let it go that Louis had to tell his own story.”
To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.