Three Dukes making their mark on Broadway

Read more about Colby, Comer and Meadows in the June 2025 edition of the Madison app. 

On the same day Mackenzie Meadows (’20) made her Broadway debut in January 2025, she stepped up as understudy to perform the title role in & Juliet. A reimagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the modern-day jukebox musical considers what might happen if the story doesn’t end in tragedy.

Cast as Juliet’s mother, Lady Capulet, and as ensemble character Nell, Meadows is one of two understudies for the leading role. “It’s exciting,” she said. “Not a lot of people can say that they have been or will ever be on Broadway, and I feel very, very blessed for the opportunity.”

A Richmond, Virginia, native, Meadows loves the musical’s hopeful message for young audience members. “[It] gives them a great example of how to stand up for themselves,” she said. “I think it’s a great show for young women, young little girls of color, to see, because it’s so rare — at least when I was growing up — to see a show being led by a young Black woman who is really taking control of her own narrative. And then on top of that, it has songs that not only a young generation loves and knows, but also [their] parents.”

Among other Dukes who have made it to Broadway are Austin Colby (’11), who plays Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, and Brent Comer (’19), who, in his Broadway debut, originated the role of eldest brother Darrel Curtis in the Tony award-winning musical The Outsiders.

“It’s a weird, unique life,” said Comer, of Frederick, Maryland. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Before the show moved to Broadway, Comer was with The Outsiders national production at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California. An ensemble member, he played Paul and understudied as Darrel for Broadway regular Ryan Vasquez. When Vasquez left to star in The Notebook on Broadway, Comer made a bid for the leading role.

Richmond native Colby played Rolf in The Sound of Music at the Kennedy Center and Prince Hans in the first national production of Disney’s Frozen: The Hit Broadway Musical before making his Broadway debut. He was also part of an off-Broadway production of Jersey Boys. Original to The Great Gatsby’s ensemble, he initially played the butler while serving as understudy for Tom and title character Jay Gatsby.

“It was a very big honor — a big, daunting task,” Colby said. Prolific actor Jeremy Jordan originated the role of Jay Gatsby until passing the baton to seasoned actor Ryan McCartan in January. “They’re just extraordinary talents with big shoes to fill, so it was always an honor to take up the role and give them a break. But definitely intimidating.”

Finding their voices at JMU

Originally, Colby was studying Music Education, with a goal of teaching students like himself to sing, when professor and musical theatre coordinator Kate Arecchi challenged him to consider an acting career.

“I had done a little bit of theater, but I really was a bad actor, so bad,” Colby said. “Kate just really took the time and believed in me, and cast me as Curly in Oklahoma. ... She said, ‘You’re going to graduate and get your teaching degree, and then you’re going to go be an actor. And I was like, ‘Nah, I don’t think so.’ But she was right.”

Meadows also hadn’t planned to prioritize acting until enrolling at JMU. A lifelong dancer, she was pursuing a degree in Musical Theatre, when two pivotal moments cemented her passion for acting.

First was securing the role of Whatsername in the rock musical American Idiot, led by guest director, choreographer and Broadway actress Nancy Anderson. “Before that, I didn’t think of myself as a lead,” Meadows said. “I think because I’ve been told so much that that just wasn’t for me, it really started to be my identity. ... And [Anderson] was like, ‘No, you are all of those things and more.’”

Later, while taking a class required of Theatre majors with Associate Professor Wolf J. Sherrill, Meadows realized a far greater love for acting. “It was supposedly very, very hard ... and most Musical Theatre majors opted out,” Meadows recalled. “It was the hardest material I’d ever worked on at the time as an actor, and it pushed me to my limits as an actor. ... From there, I was just so excited about auditioning for plays at JMU.

Comer caught the acting bug in high school after he mistakenly signed up for a musical theater elective, thinking it was a newscasting class. “It was a wild mistake,” he said. But he stuck with acting, performing with the Catoctin Mountain Players as the Baker in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods and Melchior in Spring Awakening. He also portrayed Prince Eric in an original adaptation of The Little Mermaid at the Maryland Ensemble Theatre.

But it was while pursuing Musical Theatre at JMU that Comer became serious about his craft. JMU was “the place that lit a fire under me,” he said, adding that it made him “a very hungry, ambitious actor.”

Among his favorite memories was a 2018 production of Into the Woods at the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts, this time as the Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince in what a reviewer from The Breeze called “a standout vocal performance.”

JMU helped him test his limits as an actor. “The program gives you all the tools to make yourself the artist you can be,” he said. “You can make the program whatever you want for yourself, and that’s the best kind of program I think there is.”

In Comer’s fourth year at Madison, Arecchi connected him with The LINK Program, an intensive workshop with master classes for singers, dancers and actors that provided chances to meet choreographers, casting directors and other industry experts. “It was an opportunity for me to be seen by agents and such,” he said. “And to get an idea of what tools I needed beyond my college education to be successful.”

Accepted into the first of six cohort groups, Comer later secured professional representation through a musical showcase that JMU offered at Manhattan-based The Growing Studio International.

The following year, Meadows was accepted into LINK and signed with CGF Talent. “You’re working for, like, 12 hours a day with other students, mainly seniors from different colleges,” she said. “We had a showcase at the end of it, and I was lucky enough to have 30-plus meetings with different agencies, which was just super, super shocking. I didn’t see that coming. I was really crossing my fingers, just that one person wanted me.”

Achieving big-city dreams

Only two months after graduating from JMU, Comer landed his first professional role in the ensemble cast of the 2019 Broadway national tour of Les Misérables. But then the COVID-19 pandemic brought an abrupt end to the tour and to live theater, and Comer moved home to Maryland to ride out the shutdown. Slowly, live theater made its return, but Comer’s search for new roles yielded little success. He considered calling it quits until his agent called with an audition for the world premiere of a musical based on a bestselling novel, and Comer gave his theater dreams one final shot.

Now living in Queens, Comer is grateful for the stability that a steady role brings. “The dream was just to be a working actor,” he said. “If you can do that, you’re in good shape.”

Though he doesn’t count dancing among his strengths, Comer said his studies played a significant part in helping him land his leading role in The Outsiders. “It’s a very physical show, and I think JMU prepared me for that.”

Since making her move to Manhattan, Meadows has kept busy performing on stage around the country and touring with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Recently taking to the small screen, she’s appeared in Fantasmas on Max, Elsbeth on CBS, and Season 3 of the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That...

But her “dream role” came in the summer of 2023, when she played Maureen in RENT at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. “RENT is my favorite show of all time,” she said. “It was the first musical I ever saw on stage in Washington, D.C., when I was, I want to say, 9 years old. ... I loved the story; I loved the message, and it’s still my favorite show to this day.”

Though starting his career with an education degree, Colby believes skills like voice anatomy, pedagogy and music theory gave him an edge in theater. “It kind of made me feel ahead of the game in some areas of musical theater,” he said.

For a few years, he performed in regional shows like West Side Story at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, and Smokey Joe’s Café at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., before he made the move to New York. Now living in Washington Heights, Manhattan, Colby recently pivoted to film and TV. He plays Carson in this year’s Hallmark Channel movie Sisterhood, Inc., starring Rachael Leigh Cook and Daniella Monet; Tech Bro in the film Pretty Thing, with Alicia Silverstone; and Shep in the first episode of the Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake, streaming on Peacock in 2026.

“I always say theater kind of rescued me,” Colby said. “It offered me an escape, which I think is a really beautiful thing. And what’s nice is, I think it also offers the same thing to audiences when they come see a show — a bit of an escape.”