Alex Brightman, the Broadway actor of demons and ghouls, finally plays a human

Alex Brightman

Photo: Super Festivals from Ft. Lauderdale, USA / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 5, 1987 Santa Clara, California, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Union, Here Today
Awards	Broadway.com Audience Choice

“Even in community theater, I was always cast as non-people—demons and creatures,” Alex Brightman told Broadway.com this month, and the professional record since has not argued with that child. He made his name as a ghoul in a striped suit. On Hazbin Hotel he is Sir Pentious, a hissing Victorian snake of an inventor, and also Adam, the First Man, rewritten as the show’s villain. On Helluva Boss he plays a half-robotic clown. Now, eight shows a week at the Nederlander Theatre, he is Josh Skinner in Schmigadoon!, a commitment-shy orthopaedic surgeon who wanders into a town governed by Golden Age musicals and is required, mostly, to be a normal man. “It’s been really satisfying to play a human who acts human,” he said. The question his career is putting to Broadway right now is whether it will let its favourite creature stay human.

He was born in Santa Clara, California, and grew up in neighbouring Saratoga. His father founded Apple’s Worldwide Disabilities Solutions Group; his mother ran a kidney dialysis clinic. He went to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit boys’ school in San Jose, and spent his teenage years on stage with Children’s Musical Theater San Jose before leaving for New York after graduation.

His first Broadway contract, in 2008, was an early lesson in how the business works. He was hired as an ensemble member and understudy for Glory Days, a musical that closed after a single performance, and he never went on. Later that year he made his real debut as Boq, the Munchkin who carries a torch for Glinda in Wicked, and stayed for two years. Then came the jobs a working actor takes: an understudy assignment in Big Fish, Michael Wormwood in Matilda the Musical, guest spots on television.

The break came through a back door. When Andrew Lloyd Webber began developing School of Rock from the 2003 Jack Black film, Brightman was in the workshops reading parts written for children. He ended up with the lead, Dewey Finn, the failed rocker who poses as a substitute teacher. The show opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on 6 December 2015, and the reviews singled him out. In Time Out New York, David Cote called him “the secret weapon and glue holding it all together” and praised “an insanely winning, supernova turn.” It brought his first Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical in 2016. He played his final scheduled performance that November and came back for a short run in April 2017.

Beetlejuice was the role he built from the ground up. He played the title character through three readings and two workshops, through the tryout at the National Theatre in Washington in the autumn of 2018, and into the Winter Garden, where the musical opened on 25 April 2019 and earned him a second Tony nomination. The voice, a sandpaper growl sustained across a whole evening, is produced through ventricular fold phonation, a technique that lets him rasp without shredding his vocal cords. After the pandemic shutdown it reopened at the Marquis Theatre in April 2022 and closed on 8 January 2023 after 679 performances. He had suffered a concussion during a performance weeks earlier and came back for the final shows.

That growl is also the trap. Reviews of Beetlejuice tended to credit him with holding up a show the critics found uneven: in Vulture, Sara Holdren called it fun “thanks in large part to Alex Brightman’s spot-on performance,” while Entertainment Weekly still noted “second act problems.” A performer that useful to a shaky production gets hired for the same thing again. His attempts to step sideways have drawn their own pushback. In The Shark Is Broken in 2023 he played Richard Dreyfuss on the troubled set of Jaws; Dreyfuss saw the play, publicly complained that it made his character the fool and, by Brightman’s account, “let me know that, pretty explicitly.” And when Schmigadoon! premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2025, Rhoda Feng of Vulture praised him but argued that casting a white actor as Josh, a role Keegan-Michael Key played on Apple TV+, had cost the show the television series’ lines about race and left the character thinner. On Broadway the show collected twelve Tony nominations and four wins, including Best Musical. His co-star Sara Chase was nominated. He was not.

The creature work has become a second career with its own audience. Since 2020 he has voiced Fizzarolli, Blitzø’s estranged childhood friend, in Vivienne Medrano’s Helluva Boss, and since the 2024 Prime Video premiere of Hazbin Hotel he has voiced both Sir Pentious and Adam, a double assignment that earned him a 2026 Astra TV Awards nomination. The second season, released in late 2025, followed Pentious after his redemption. On camera he has been a utility player: a forensic scientist in The Blacklist, a supporting part in Billy Crystal’s Here Today, and the Netflix action comedy The Union with Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry. On stage, after The Shark Is Broken, which won him the Broadway.com Audience Choice Award for Favorite Featured Actor in a Play, he spent early 2024 as Sir Lancelot in the Broadway revival of Spamalot.

Schmigadoon! has been his for a long time. He read Josh in a June 2024 workshop, played him at the Kennedy Center from 31 January to 9 February 2025 and brought him to Broadway, where previews began on 4 April 2026 and the official opening followed on 20 April. The original Broadway cast recording was released on 21 August, and the production has extended its run into 2027. He has called the part “as easy as I’m going to get” after Dewey and Beetlejuice, and says it is “the first time I’m singing with my own singing voice.”

He also writes. He is part of the comedy group The (M)orons with Andrew Kober, F. Michael Haynie and Drew Gasparini, and with Gasparini he made The Life and Slimes of Marc Summers, a stage show for the former Double Dare host. The two are developing musical versions of It’s Kind of a Funny Story and The Whipping Boy, with Brightman writing the book, and he is working on a play, Everything Is Fine, with Cynthia Nixon. He married the casting director Jenny Ravitz in Brooklyn in May 2018.

For now, Josh Skinner keeps him at the Nederlander well into next year. Asked which classic role he would want next, he did not pick a monster. “I think I would be a killer Nathan Detroit,” he said, naming the small-time gambler of Guys and Dolls, a man with no supernatural powers at all.

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Tags: actors, Alex Brightman, Beetlejuice, Hazbin Hotel, musical theatre, School of Rock

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