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Musical theater star Jake Epstein has found his voice again. In his new one-man show, "A Boy Falls From the Sky," Epstein says he sings his face off, which he adds is "a super healing, joyful, cathartic experience."
Jake Epstein 2022
Running from April 19 to May 29 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, the show consists of a series of personal anecdotes interspersed with songs from Epstein's musicals as well as other program numbers. The material is revealing and often very funny: "War stories in show business," says the 35-year-old actor, who was born and raised in Toronto. "Everybody in the business has that — audition failures and performance disappointments and being ashamed of your character."
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While Epstein wants the show to be fun, it also serves a deeper purpose, helping to rekindle her love of musicals after a few years when the relationship cooled. After performing in two Broadway shows and being very dissatisfied, he returned to Toronto and quit the genre. "I thought, I'm not doing any more musicals," he recalls. "I don't want to talk about them. I don't want to see them. I don't want to listen to them."
The difficulty he felt was the discrepancy between how great things should have been and how things actually felt. “Everyone around me thought I was living my absolute dream,” she says, “but I struggled.
A musical theater fanatic since childhood, he tells the story of his family's annual trips to New York in a minibus, where Epstein and his sister Gabby, now also a performer, sing numbers all the way back. She started her stage career at a young age, and in fact this show is something of a homecoming: she also made her professional debut at the Royal Alexandra Epstein at the age of 11 in the production of Our City.
After playing Craig Manning, a bipolar musician with a complicated love life, on the television series "Degrassi: The Next Generation," Epstein studied at the National Theater School and began to expand into the world of theater. In late 2012, he finally landed his first starring role on Broadway as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Darkness. It was a vocally and physically taxing part that sent him flying in a harness over the stage; hard landings resulted in wrist and ankle injuries.
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"I had this ridiculous routine of wrapping my body in gauze and sports tape and probably taking too many Advils and then covering myself in a Spider-Man suit," he says. "I was literally in pain."
Not to mention the emotional impact. “I knew it was a great honor for me to experience something like this in my life. But it was very unhealthy and I just felt like I was stuck," says the actor, who kept his problems under wraps. "I wanted the narrative to continue that I was a local boy in Toronto who made it to Broadway."
Her career took off even further when she landed a starring role on Broadway the following year, which faced its own challenges. In the film "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical", the singer played her first husband, Jerry Goffen, who was considered a villain by the audience, although King himself asked Epstein not to play him. Still, Epstein says, “I would go down on stage. I just felt like a failure."
His contract in the series "Beautiful" was not renewed after one year, so he was forced to return home and give up musicals. He found his way to the show at a story night organized by his wife, the actor and poet Vanessa Smythe, at the Crowsnest Streetcar Theater in the East End. “I've seen strangers get up on stage and tell really revealing stories from their lives,” he says. "And I fell in love with the story."
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He started building the show around his personal experiences, originally titled I Hate Musicals: The Musical. He reworked the material with director Robert McQueen and renamed it The Boy Falls from the Sky, after the song from the musical Spider-Man, referring to the supposed height of Epstein's career to a rather desperate place. According to Epstein, the show “focuses on the world of bulls—behind the scenes that people don't really know or talk about. Getting that really healed me.”
Recently, in addition to performing "Boy Falls from the Sky" at small venues across Ontario, Epstein has worked in film and television in Los Angeles and New York. Although he doesn't know what the next step in his career will be, the past two years have confirmed to him that Toronto will always be home. “My family is here, my wife is here,” he says. "It's very interesting to go somewhere to work, but I realized that I'm a homebody at heart."
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