INTERVIEW: Wade becomes Wade in ‘Water for Elephants’
Photo: Water for Elephants features, from left, Gabriel Olivera de Paula Costa and Wade McCollum. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by Polk & Co. with permission.
Wade McCollum has been having a theatrical year like no other performer in New York City right now. Earlier, he starred in the off-Broadway premiere of Make Me Gorgeous!, earning critical acclaim and awards attention for his powerhouse portrayal of Kenneth Marlowe, a trailblazer in LGBTQ history. Then he landed the role of Wade in Water for Elephants, a big musical adaptation currently playing the Imperial Theatre on Broadway.
In many ways, McCollum had to be cast as Wade — the character is his namesake, after all. Though it should be mentioned, this villainous role is far from the real McCollum, who recently opened up about his circus-filled journey over the past few months.
“It’s the dreamiest thing ever,” McCollum said about his professional life in 2024. “It’s a superlative moment in my career, for certain, and the past few months have been really a wild roller-coaster ride. I was doing a one-person show across Eighth Avenue while we were rehearsing this, and so awards season thankfully I was nominated for a bundle of awards for that show as well as this show being nominated for a bunch of things, too, not me personally, but the show. So the past few months have just been this crazy juggle of awards shows on Mondays and doing eight shows a week and rehearsing for the part that I cover and performing on the Tonys and having a special rehearsal for those. It’s just been this incredible marathon whirlwind of theatrical treasure.”
When McCollum read the script for this musical, which is based on Sara Gruen’s best-selling book, he was immediately sold on its potential as a theatrical venture. He loved how book writer Rick Elice and PigPen Theatre Co.’s music and lyrics captured the many memories and nuances of an older man looking back at his time in the circus.
“I was immediately sold,” the actor said. “Rick Elice, the book writer, likes to say, ‘This person is in the final chapter of their life, and when one gets to that point, there’s more behind them than there is in front of them.’ So the trend toward nostalgia starts to creep in, and I personally feel allergic to nostalgia and sentiment. But because the action packed into the narrative is this man really searching his memory banks to find resolution, absolution, self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others, it feels really active and very present in the space, rather than just a nostalgia piece. And I think the circus is inherently spectacular, and I love the diegetic aspect of the circus performers. They are playing circus performers in an actual circus doing actual circus stuff in front of us. It’s a really smart choice for a big Broadway musical.”
McCollum, who previously performed on Broadway in Wicked, was fascinated by the rehearsal process. Director Jessica Stone had the circus elements being staged in one space while the scene work played out in another. Then she stitched together the parts into one spectacular fabric.
“It took a while to knit together the really somewhat disparate disciplines of circus art and theater art,” McCollum said. “Though there is an overlap in the Venn diagram of those two disciplines, they are very different by nature and also by necessity, and so we spent a good amount of time working in separate rooms occasionally, working on choreography and the scene work, and then the circus being worked on in the big loft space with the fly space and all of that. And then we would come together, and a large part of our time was spent knitting together. … You can’t really tell at certain points who is a circus performer and who are the musical theater performers, and I love that that line has been really blurred. Our effort paid off.”
McCollum plays the character of Wade (the name choice is purely coincidental), a role that is actually a composite of several people from the book’s narrative. The actor tries not to judge Wade, even though he conducts himself in a less than appreciable manner during the course of the show.
“Wade does some despicable things throughout the course of the play, but my job is to try to understand his humanity and that everybody is doing the best they can with the tools they have at the time,” the actor said. “And this is a person struggling with poverty, and in Atlanta, I really discovered [he had] PTSD from fighting in World War I and seeing some of his own darker or shadowy nature when he was fighting in the war. And he’s really traumatized from what he did, and I think he’s running from that. I think August [Paul Alexander Nolan] has him sort of leveraged, has manipulated him into being a henchman. In playing him, I just try to understand that he’s doing the best he can, and he’s really damaged in a lot of ways and doesn’t have the resources or the tools to navigate out of that damage and make better choices.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Water for Elephants, featuring Wade McCollum, is currently running at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
