With his long-running hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother saying "sayonara," and his starring role in the Broadway musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch now in previews at the Belasco Theatre, Neil Patrick Harris continues to prove that he not only can do anything, but most likely will. The 40-year-old web hero of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog said that for Hedwig he's had to "put himself out there"–outside his comfort zone, that is–to play the East German transgender diva in John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask's glam-rock musical.
"I am simultaneously ecstatic and terrified to be stepping into Hedwig's heels," he said last year when the production, its first on Broadway, was announced.
But Harris's roof-raising song-and-dance opener during the 2013 Tony Awards telecast (video below) proved that the former Doogie Howser child star can do pretty much everything–since on that occasion he did it all in one number.
Sitcom fame aside, the typing masses have spoken and the verdict is that when people think of NPH right now, they think The Great White Way. As I write this, the number one suggested Google search phrase for him is "neil patrick harris broadway."
In fact, most of Harris's stage work has been in musicals: the Emcee in Cabaret, Tobias Ragg in Sweeney Todd, the Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald in Stephen Sondheim's Assassins. But not all of it: He also played opposite Anne Heche in the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning Proof.
During the original Off Broadway run of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the late 1990s, John Cameron Mitchell himself took on the role, followed by Michael Cerveris, Donavan Leitch and even Ally Sheedy. Who better, in the age of Kinky Boots and Heathers: The Musical, than a veteran of two Smurfs movies and three Harold and Kumar flicks to take this tragic, bigger-than-life diva role to its biggest stage yet?
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