Nick Adams is seeing the U.S.A. in a Wicked way. When the co-star of Broadway's Priscilla Queen of the Desert landed the male lead in the national tour of Wicked, he bought a car �" real Manhattanites don't have cars �" and he drives from city to city while most of his fellow performers are flown or bused to the next tour stop.
"It's been an adventure taking in the country," Adams said from Salt Lake City, the city Wicked is playing before its Aug. 27 arrival at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. And he has company on the road: his boyfriend and fellow cast member Kyle Brown, and their dog Baby. "It's a pretty sweet deal," he said.
There's another sweet piece of the deal. "I don't have to wear high heels," Adams said. "I'm glad I'm now playing a prince instead of a queen" �" referring to the three drag roles he has had on Broadway, in Chicago, La Cage aux Folles, and the aforementioned Priscilla. "While Priscilla was running, most of the auditions I got were for drag queen roles. It was like, is this all I'm ever going to do from now on?"
In Wicked, Adams is playing the studly party-boy Fiyero, a prince from Winkie Country and a new arrival at Shiz University in Oz. He woos and is wooed by the two co-eds who will go on to become good and wicked witches in this prequel to The Wizard of Oz.
Adams first auditioned for Wicked in 2005, before he had actually seen the show, while he was a senior at the Boston Conservatory of Music. It was an open call for the Broadway company, and he flew to New York for the day. He didn't get the job. "It's great the way things work out," Adams said, "because had I done the show then I probably would have been in the ensemble, so it was worth the wait."
Broadway performers can be reluctant to tour because it pulls them out of the New York casting consciousness. "But the timing now was perfect," Adams said of hitting the road. "I was kind of ready to get a little time out of Manhattan after 10 years, and financially it's a great deal."
And in addition to solving the long-distance relationship he had been having with his partner, it will soon offer him a three-month run in Los Angeles to explore its casting world. After all, he'll have a car, an apartment, and a job that mostly requires night work. "Why not?" he said of TV and movie possibilities. "I have absolutely nothing to lose."
Adams, 31, has been a professional actor for 15 years. He had earned his Actors Equity card before he was out of high school and had performed in more than 80 productions at the Erie Playhouse in his Pennsylvania hometown by the time he left for college. After getting a BFA in Boston, he headed straight for New York, and quickly and steadily found work, with six Broadway credits now under his belt.
Photo: Joan Marcus
In the first five of those shows, it was ensemble work, before getting his big break in 2011 playing Adam/Felicia in Priscilla Queen of the Desert. "That show completely changed my life," Adams said. "It opened up my career to so much more than what I had been doing. And I don't know if I'll ever top that experience. The way the crowd reacted, we all felt like rock stars."
As for Wicked, still running on Broadway after 11 years and supporting two national touring companies, Adams can only marvel at its ongoing popularity. "It's crazy," he said. "We've had people who have seen this show like 20 times, and they keep coming back. Any time we have a new understudy go on for one of the witches, there's immediately a video of it online somewhere. I don't know how these people find out about these things, but it's crazy wild."
Adams himself has drawn some Twitter, Internet, and tabloid attention. There's what Wikipedia refers to as "The Turtle Bay Incident," in which Adams and his boyfriend were denied entry at a popular New York nightclub, presumably because they were holding hands. He posted a tweet that became a cause celebre on LGBT blogs that finally landed him an apology from the club. "Oh my God," Adams said. "That's on Wikipedia? That's crazy. I didn't intend it to spark this big thing."
And there was the tabloid tank-top dustup when he was in A Chorus Line and TV celebrity Mario Lopez joined the cast. With his buff body, Adams was rumored to be recostumed in a less revealing top, presumably so as not to overshadow Lopez's own impressive guns. "We've always been very friendly, " Adams said of Lopez, "and I even introduced him to his wife. We laughed about all of that stuff in the tabloids." And the tabloid coverage did help land Adams a job as the signature model for 2xist Underwear.
In fact, if you go to Adams' website and click on his Flickr photo stream, he's shirt-free in many of the images, and you can see why Genre magazine declared that he had "the best bod on Broadway." "I forgot that I have that on there," he said of the photos. "Most of that was from when I did a lot of underwear and fitness modeling, and made good money on top of doing Broadway. It was definitely a tool I used. Now I'm in my early 30s, and I don't do that anymore. As Fiyero, I'm in suits most of the time. It's nice to sing and dance and not take my shirt off."
Wicked will run Aug. 27-Sept. 14 at San Jose's Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are $44-$121.70. Call (800) 982-2787 or go to broadwaysanjose.com.