Clint Ramos, Kara Young, Rebecca Frecknall and Ingrid Michaelson Among Variety’s 10 Broadway Stars to Watch for 2023

Understudies and standbys don’t get a lot of recognition in the theater — unless you’re Julie Benko. Last season she became the most famous understudy on Broadway as the actor who played the title character in “Funny Girl” when stars Beanie Feldstein and Lea Michele were absent.

Now she gets recognized on the street. And this fall, she’s got her first shot at originating a role in a new Broadway musical. In “Harmony,” Benko plays a Bolshevik married to one of the Comedian Harmonists — the wildly popular performance troupe whose stardom was quashed by the rise of Nazi-era antisemitism. “She’s a woman of real valor and substance,” Benko says. “That my character is an activist is so meaningful to me.”

A multi-hyphenate, Benko is also releasing a holiday album, has written plays and has made a short film. When she looks ahead, film, TV and stage are all on the table — and she knows that whatever she does, she has a fan base who watched her swift rise from a little-known under study to an actor with name recognition in her own right. “Suddenly I have this following, especially of young actors, who feel that I represent this dream of what’s possible,” she says. “I have this relationship now with the theater community, and it’s really a lovely place to be.”

AGENCY: Innovative Artists
MANAGEMENT: David Williams Management
INFLUENCES: Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, Ella Fitzgerald, Rachel Bloom

Sammi Cannold knew early she wanted to be a Broadway director. Like, really early. “It’s been my dream since I was 3,” she says.

At an age when most kids wouldn’t even know what a director was, Cannold got to see pros at work when she sat in the back of the rehearsal rooms of Broadway musicals produced by her mother, Dori Berinstein (“The Prom”). And with a father who’s a film producer, storytelling was the family business.

Now, after making a splash with projects like “Ragtime” on Ellis Island in 2016, a 2021 documentary about South Korean theater in the early days of COVID (“The Show Must Go On”), and this year, an “Evita” revival in Cambridge, Mass., and D.C., Cannold steps up to Broadway as the director of “How to Dance in Ohio.” Based on a documentary about autistic kids preparing for a spring dance, the musical is cast with seven autistic actors along side seven neurotypical performers. Cannold leads a creative team that has made it a point to set a new Broadway bar for inclusivity and accessibility, both onstage and behind the scenes.

It’s a project that bridges art and activism — an overlap that is central to how she wants to work in the future. “As storytellers, we have an opportunity to take really important messages and put them out there in a way that affects people’s hearts,” she says.

AGENCY: CAA
MANAGEMENT: Grandview
INSPIRATION: Harold Prince

Rebecca Frecknall may be new to Broadway, but in London, she’s probably the hottest director in town. Starting with a 2018 revival of “Summer and Smoke,” celebrated by critics as a revelatory look at Tennessee Williams’ overlooked play, Frecknall has earned a reputation for her vivid, fresh stagings of classic titles and for her knack for casting actors in stage projects just as their screen careers are blowing up. Her scorching-hot-ticket revival of “Cabaret” launched in 2021 just as star Jessie Buckley was earning nominations for “The Lost Daughter.” And when “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened earlier this year with Paul Mescal as Stanley, he was simultaneously attracting awards attention for his work in “Aftersun.” (Both Buckley and Mescal won Oliviers for their work in Frecknall’s shows; Frecknall won for “Cabaret.”)

Frecknall makes her Broadway debut next spring with a Broadway transfer of “Cabaret,” accompanied by the anticipation of what notable names will be cast in the innovatively staged revival. Prior to that, she’ll direct an adaptation of “The House of Bernarda Alba” at the National and then a new adaptation of “Miss Julie” (this one called “Julie”) at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam.

“I try to treat every new play like it’s a classic and every classic like it’s a new play,” Frecknall says of her directorial approach.

AGENCY: Casarotto Ramsay & Associates
INFLUENCES: Pina Bausch; Hofesh Shechter; Anne Bogart; Mark Rothko; her father, Paul Frecknall

Can TikTok make you a Broadway star? Maybe not, but it sure can help.

The young actor Nichelle Lewis didn’t even know there was a buzzy new production of “The Wiz” gearing up for Broadway when she got the call to audition for the lead role of Dorothy.

It was Lewis’ TikTok account — which includes a clip of her singing “Home” from “The Wiz” — that prompted the show’s casting agents to contact her. “It’s not like I have a lot of followers!” she laughs. “I had maybe 700 at the time.

The Virginia native discovered her love for singing at age 9, when she performed at a memorial service for her father. After studying musical theater at Molloy University, Lewis appeared in a recent national tour of “Hairspray” and was performing in a new musical in Cincinnati when she auditioned for “The Wiz,” rising to the top of a list of more than 2,000 submissions. Now she’s head lining a major revival of the beloved musical, which began a national tour in Baltimore in September and lands in New York in the spring.

For Lewis, “The Wiz” is all about finding home. And ever since she saw “Beauty and the Beast” as a kid, she believed she might someday find a home on Broadway. “I always thought that I would eventually get here,” she says. “Maybe one day, maybe in an ensemble. Or even just working as an usher!”

AGENCY: The Mine
INFLUENCES: Her mother, Katreena Lewis; Aretha Franklin

It wasn’t that long ago that Ingrid Michaelson faced the eternal question: music career or health insurance? Back then, the singer-songwriter, who was working a steady gig at the same Staten Island youth theater program where she discovered her own love for musicals, took the leap and launched a life as a recording artist.

She found success as a musician, but Michaelson never lost her love of the theater. A 2017 stint as a performer in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” on Broadway led to a meeting with the producer Kevin McCollum, who had just secured the musical theater rights to “The Notebook.”

Michaelson adored the movie, and her deep connection to the story helped convince McCollum to hire her to write the music and lyrics for the show. “I’ve lost both my mother and my father, so I have this great love and this great loss in my life,” she says. “It’s like I was built to write this musical.”

When “The Notebook” premiered in Chicago last year to rave reviews, the show became one of the most anticipated Broadway titles of the spring. Now, as “Notebook” gears up for its March opening, Michaelson is pinching herself. “It’s so crazy that this girl who taught kids theater and slung lattes — and all she wanted was to be on Broadway — has now written a Broadway musical!”

AGENCY: WME
MANAGEMENT: Secret Road Music Services
INFLUENCES: Jason Robert Brown, Jeanine Tesori, Anaïs Mitchell

Clint Ramos is best known as a Tony-winning set and costume designer, but over the past few years, he’s begun to have a hand in the business side of Broadway as well.

That expansion of his activities was underscored this summer when Ramos made his debut as a commercial producer on “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne-Fatboy Slim musical about Imelda Marcos, for which Ramos also designed the costumes. He’s a member of the American Theatre Wing’s advisory committee, too, and in 2020, he became the producing creative director at City Center’s influential Encores! program — which last season yielded much-lauded Broadway transfers of “Into the Woods” and “Parade.”

For Ramos, the urge to produce as well as design came out of a desire to help move the theater industry toward equity and sustainability. “We keep saying the industry is broken, and I thought, ‘Well, let’s see,’” he says. “Let’s look under the hood and see just how broken it is, and what we can do to fix it. Is it a total gut reno, or could we do it room by room? Producing allows me to investigate that.”

Born and raised in the Philippines, Ramos joined the producers circle of “Here Lies Love” as part of a group of Filipino and Filipino American partners who have authentic ties to the show’s subject. He says, “It’s been vital to have our voices at the table.”

AGENCY: UTA (theater), CAA (film)
INFLUENCES: George C. Wolfe, Robert O’Hara, Ming Cho Lee, Jeanine Tesori

It all started with a run-in with Lin-Manuel Miranda at an upstate orchard.

On an apple-picking jaunt to celebrate her teenage daughter’s birthday, composer-lyricist and music director Georgia Stitt ran into her friend and colleague Miranda. The two got to talking about the Miranda Family Fellowship Program’s initiative to create a directory of backstage theater workers from underrepresented backgrounds, and Miranda mentioned that Maestra, the directory of female and nonbinary theater musicians that Stitt founded, could serve as a model for it.

From that conversation grew the Rise Theatre Directory. Searchable by employers and job seekers, the database now encompasses candidates for more than 120 jobs, including directing, dramaturgy and producing, as well as other posts backstage, front-of-house and in the pit.

Guided by the collaborative spirit of Stitt and her fellow leaders at Rise, the directory now lists about 2,600 people. “We’d like it to be up to 10,000 or 15,000, and there’s no reason to think it couldn’t be,” says Laura Ivey, a producer who is a Maestra board member and Rise consultant. “Everybody’s got community theaters and regional theaters and tours, and all of them want to expand their diversity, equity, inclusion and access.”

CONTACT: Victoria Detres at Rise
INFLUENCES: Ava DuVernay’s Array, Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, She Is the Music,
Maestra

The young producer Rachel Sussman had a pretty good summer. First, she picked up a Tony Award as part of the producing team of “Parade.” And then “Just for Us,” the Alex Edelman solo show she shepherded to Broadway with fellow producer Jenny Gersten, became a buzzy critical fave.

During her undergraduate years at New York University, the Detroit native was interning at Second Stage when she figured out she wanted to produce. “I had this epiphany and realized, ‘Oh, I want to make the thing. I don’t want to wait around for someone to give me a job.’”

Since then, Sussman has had a hand in projects like “What the Constitution Means to Me” and the starry fundraiser “Saturday Night Seder.” As one of the four founders of the educational initiative Business of Broadway, she’s also made it part of her mission to democratize knowledge about commercial producing, sharing information with those looking to get more involved in the biz.

Attached to a slate of developing shows that includes Shaina Taub’s Broadway-aimed “Suffs,” a musical about the suffragists, Sussman puts social engagement at the center of her activities. “In general, the kind of work I gravitate toward challenges existing systems,” she says. “I hope to create more space for curiosity, empathy and, ultimately, action.”

CONTACT: Klaris Law
INFLUENCES: Harold Prince, Rebecca Solnit, Adrienne Maree Brown, Maira Kalman

On a recent morning during a break from rehearsal of her production of Jocelyn Bioh’s
new comedy “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” Whitney White found herself crying in a Broadway theater. The Chicago-born director-writer performer was moved by the significance of working on the Rialto. “I know what kind of impact and influence Broadway shows can have,” she says. “I don’t take this opportunity lightly and celebrate the fact that our work now may touch many other theaters and communities.”

Opening Oct. 3, “Jaja” brings White to Broadway after her career kicked into high gear following the success of her 2018 staging of Aleshea Harris’ “What to Send Up When It Goes Down.” Later this fall, she’ll star in the Philadelphia run of her rock musical “Macbeth in Stride.” She’s also attached to a couple of developing shows, including “Jenkins,” about the real-life Black pastor who established a touring music group made up of children from his orphanage.

During White’s youth, both her family’s Apostolic church on the South Side of Chicago and her Catholic school on the North Side proved influential in her understanding of the power of spectacle, music and the very different ways communities come together. “Music is my bible in everything I do,” she says. “Every story has its own rhythms.”

AGENCY: CAA
INFLUENCES: Trent Reznor; Tina Turner; her mother, Janice White

Kara Young got to Broadway just two years ago, and she’s already made a stir at the Tonys — twice. The young actress’s debut in “Clyde’s” earned her a nomination in 2022; this year she scored another for her performance in “Cost of Living.”

A native New Yorker who caught the acting bug as a kid when she took a mime class at the 92nd Street Y, Young has gravitated to collaborating with playwrights like Pulitzer winners Lynn Nottage and Martyna Majok on new projects. “Working on new plays has been so important to me throughout my development as an artist, and those plays became these really important pieces of art that are shifting consciousness,” she says.

With recent screen credits including Amazon Prime’s “I’m a Virgo” under her belt, Young is now starring in her third Broadway show in as many seasons, “Purlie Victorious.” Ossie Davis’ 1961 play isn’t new, but Young says it still feels relevant. And if her track record is anything to go by, her turn in the show has the potential to earn her a third nomination in three years.

While Young is honored by the attention, awards are never top of mind. “As a Black woman and a Black artist, the opportunity to be heard, and to have a voice that reaches to the back of the auditorium, is about honoring Black people,” she says.

AGENCY: Gersh

MANAGEMENT: Kipperman Management

INFLUENCES: Her great-grandmother, Hazel Baptist, “and all the women that I come from