Broadway actors who are bracing for final curtain

The New York Times have talked to five act­ors who will be out of work in 2011:

In the theater every clos­ing night stirs up a bevy of feel­ings: sad­ness, ela­tion, relief, anxi­ety. Those and many other emo­tions will be run­ning high across Broad­way soon, as 15 pro­duc­tions — almost half the shows cur­rently play­ing — are sched­uled to go dark by the end of Janu­ary. (Reas­ons for the mass exodus vary; some shows are clos­ing because of sag­ging ticket sales, oth­ers are fin­ish­ing lim­ited engagements.)

For act­ors who have been with their shows for sev­eral years, from work­shops to Broad­way, closing-night tears often sting more sharply. Play­ing the same char­ac­ter eight shows a week will do that to a per­son. Five act­ors spoke about say­ing good­bye to their char­ac­ters and what will hap­pen after the cur­tains come down.

Here is one of the five:

Adam Chanler-Berat

‘Next to Nor­mal’ - Opened on Broad­way, April 15, 2009

Closes Jan. 16, 2011

Like the dys­func­tional fam­ily in the musical “Next to Nor­mal,” Adam Chanler-Berat is going through a griev­ing process.

“It’s like los­ing a friend, like break­ing up with someone,” he said dur­ing an inter­view at the Booth Theater, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical will close in a few weeks, after a lengthy run that sur­prised many Broad­way watch­ers, given the show’s dif­fi­cult sub­ject mat­ter, men­tal illness.

Mr. Chanler-Berat first played Henry, the under­stand­ing stoner boy­friend of the show’s troubled teen­age girl, Nat­alie, in a 2007 work­shop Off Broad­way at the Second Stage Theater; he reprised the role when the show opened there in 2008. He moved with it to Arena Stage in Wash­ing­ton later that year, and again to the Booth when it trans­ferred to Broad­way in 2009. He’s the only cast mem­ber in the Broad­way pro­duc­tion to have been with the show since the start.

He’s already con­sid­er­ing how to ease the pain of clos­ing night.

“I think about how drunk am I going to be,” he said. There won’t be much time for Mr. Chanler-Berat to rest, though. He begins rehears­als next month for the new show “Peter and the Star­catcher” at New York Theater Workshop.

read what the other four have to say via Broad­way Act­ors Who Are Bra­cing for Final Cur­tain — NYTimes.com

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