Drew Sarich

Drew Sarich is an American performer, born in St . Louis and educated at Boston College, who has made his career very much in Europe. He most notably played the title role in the Disney musical, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but he also appeared in The Who’s Tommy, Hair and Dracula at different destinations across Europe. At the moment, the 32 year old can be found at the Queen’s Theatre on the West End's Shaftesbury Avenue, appearing as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, which he previously played in the epoch-making musical’s recent Broadway revival at the Broadhurst Theatre. Other New York credits include Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris off-Broadway, appearing opposite his French-born wife, Ann Mandrella, who is also the mother of their four-year-old twins, and the ill-fated Lestat, the Elton John musical that began its pre-Broadway journey in San Francisco. Sarich took time one recent Monday afternoon to talk to Broadway.com from his Marylebone flat about his own singular journey, which has taken him from Moscow, as part of Liza Minnelli’s entourage, across Europe to America and back again, landing him for the first time on the West End.

Welcome to London!
Thanks. It’s nice to be here.

Where is home for you these days?
Vienna, as it has been for the last six years. I moved to Berlin in 1999 where I met my wife, Ann, who was playing Roxie in Chicago while I was doing Hunchback. When I finished Hunchback, I got Hair in Vienna and moved into her flat and just never left. We were in New York for two years but now we’re back in Vienna. I’m amazed: life takes you in strange directions.

What about your kids?
They come and go between London and Vienna. They’re bilingual at the moment, which is just amazing—watching kids that can translate on a dime and correct each other; they sort of reflect where we’re living at that particular time.

It’s presumably Hunchback that made possible so international a career.
Yes. I had done the workshop and reading in New York before Europe was even discussed, and then they came to me and said, ‘You can do it in New York, but we’re going to do an out-of-town tryout in Berlin with an all-European cast.’ I said, ‘OK, as long as I can do it in New York, that’s fine,’ and then they called me back a month later and said, 'How about if we give you six German lessons to see if you can fake it?’, so I basically learned the script phonetically and got the gig.

Drew Sarich and Earl Carpenter in Les Miserables

Talk about a cultural baptism by fire.
They gave us a one-to-one literal translation of the script, with the German on one side and English on the other so you could basically see what you were saying. I lucked out in that there were two members of the cast who said, ‘We like you, and we’re glad that you’re here, but we’re never going to speak to you in English, so if you want to speak to us, pay us the respect of trying [German].’ The company was a really great mixed bag: we had Filipinos, Russians, Swedes, Japanese, Germans, Austrians, Brits, Australians—that’s one of the things that made it a beautiful experience for me to be out of college a year and a half or two years and to be in a place with all that history.

Was it frustrating for you that Hunchback didn’t travel to the States?
By that time I had met the woman who was to become my wife, and I have grown to love Europe and feel more at home here than anywhere else. I left Hunchback in late 2000 and it went on for another year and a half but has been seen nowhere else. Every now and then Tom Schumacher [head of Disney Theatricals] will sort of mention that he’s interested in putting it back together somewhere, so every time Disney brings out a new show, I say, "Hey, you’ve got one that works!" [Laughs.]

Still, that show did you no harm.
I was amazed when I was in New York how many people had an idea of who I was because of Hunchback. It was a show that no one had seen but everyone had kind of heard of, and everyone would go, ‘You’re the guy who did that,’ which I liked. No one ever said, ‘hat guy sucked.’

Did you already have a facility for language?
I took Spanish for three years, but the American public school system leaves a lot to be desired as far as foreign language is concerned—and my mom is a French teacher! There’s only so much time that you actually get speaking the language. In the States, you don’t really get a chance to learn to speak the language, whereas Europeans, I feel, really speak it.

Did you travel growing up?
Within the U.S. My first experience going to Europe was as a back-up singer for Liza Minnelli three months out of college. We opened at the Kremlin, and there I was a child of the Cold War in the 1980s and to suddenly be put on a bus and driven from the Kempinski to Red Square to the Kremlin and to step out on to that huge stage was amazing. I was in Moscow, then Portugal and then on to Berlin and Vienna and Switzerland and now to London and back to New York: it’s been an amazing ride.

Do you find now that you’re based on the Continent that there is enough work for an American performer there?
Sure. The greatest lesson I’ve learned living in Vienna is to learn the language and respect the culture enough to say that if I’m going to be a part of this culture and be a contributing force in society here, I have to learn to communicate. Too many British and American performers that go there live in a bubble: they go to an Irish pub or just watch CNN and you sort of want to go, ‘There’s a whole other world out there, man.’ As long as you do that, you can hang on to your nationality and even your patriotism.

You must genuinely feel that the world is, as they say, your oyster.
I’ll go wherever I get to play an interesting part. We are citizens of the world and, as with anyone in this business, you have to be willing to move around a bit. That’s the nature of our business.

And there’s hardly a more international success story than Les Miserables.
I had been to audition for Les Miz a bunch of times before I moved to Europe and then I sort of let it go. I had gotten Hunchback and I guess I figured that Les Miz had been running for so long that at some point I would want to do it but I wasn’t going to put it in my head anymore. Then I got a call to audition for it the day after Lestat opened on Broadway, which is when I got it.

Good timing, no?
Lestat unfortunately lasted a month, and we closed because of you [the critics]! We had two good months in San Francisco and then we put the show in a blender and changed a lot of it, I think for the better, but vampires don’t always fare as well in New York. I could write a thesis as to why I think we didn’t last long.

There’s little danger of Les Miserables in London closing any time soon.
I’ve done so many of the roles by now. In New York, I was playing Grantaire and covering Enjolras and Javert and got an email from [the show's co-director] John Caird saying that it had been brought to his attention that I might have a Valjean in my pipes.

Did you see yourself as a natural Valjean?
I was given such a gift on this show by the people that brought me into the New York revival, because that production took certain liberties anyway. They said, ‘You’re actually not the type that would normally get cast in this, but let’s embrace the difference,’ because I’m 6’2” and 180 pounds and Jean Valjean has always been stocky. Plus, I’m too young for the role.

Clearly you’ve made it work for you.
It’s like those small people that in certain situations can lift a car off a woman caught underneath it. Valjean is that kind of guy; he just happens to have a direct line to God.