Sean Palmer on Jumping from Mermaid Prince to West End Playboy in Crazy For You

Sean Palmer appeared an English National Opera production of On the Town in the spring of 2007, but this season has seen the Nevada-born co-star of Broadway’s The Little Mermaid move on to become a West End leading man. He’s playing Bobby Child, the wealthy New York playboy who dreams of a life treading the boards, in the hit revival of Crazy For You, now at the Novello Theatre following its acclaimed summer run at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park. Broadway.com caught the 38-year-old Palmer backstage one recent lunchtime to find out about life on two continents and the joys of tapping to Gershwin tunes.

What led you from New York to London to star in Crazy For You?
I had come over to audition for Raoul in the replacement cast of Love Never Dies, which I had been going to do on Broadway, and [Crazy For You director] Tim Sheader and I met. I found out the next day that I had gotten the part. I saw this show in New York in 1993, when I was 20, and I just remember it feeling really joyous.

Is it odd being American in the UK company of such a quintessentially American piece?
My family’s from London, so I’ve got British citizenship. I was born in Reno, Nevada, but my mom is English and I’ve been coming here since I was 14. Everyone’s so tremendous in this cast, it never stands out to me that any of the accents are off; nothing like that ever pings to me.

And it’s not as if Crazy For You is the only American musical in town if you want to stay on and do more!
I know; it’s great that American musicals are really popular here. To me, though, and whatever the show, the draw is doing what’s new. There are very few shows I would want to invest time in that are revivals, but this is truly one of my favorites.

Do you think as a triple-threat singer/dancer/actor, you stand out more in London than in New York, where that kind of versatility is more common?
I don’t think I would even have been able to audition for this in New York because people’s perception of you is very different. I’ve been in New York for 18 years, and there are opportunities I would never get that come my way in London, where I am still a new face. I felt increasingly in New York as if I wasn’t being offered the kinds of roles I wanted to play, and I’m not going to wait tables! [Laughs.]

Is that to do with typecasting?
It’s not so much typecasting as a lack of imagination in casting. When I was doing Tony in Saturday Night Fever, I was only going up for Guido-type parts and after Sex and the City [in which Palmer played Marcus, Stanford Blatch’s boyfriend], only gay parts. The cachet in London is that people don’t know me, and that can be a really nice vantage point to have.

What are the acting challenges to playing Bobby Child? It's obvious what the role offers in song-and-dance terms!
I don’t approach Bobby like the song-and-dance man that he is. I look at him as a character who really wants love above all else and doesn’t realize that until it slaps him in the face. It’s as if he has had these immediate goals and then something comes along sideways and knocks him off his path.

It’s sort of a wild coincidence that you were born in Nevada but went to New York, and here’s Bobby, a New Yorker who heads west to Deadrock, Nevada!
All we need is for Bobby to have a trip to London, and it would be perfect! What was fun was that Tim [Sheader] likes to scrutinize a script as if it were Shakespeare, so certain questions would come up for us to put our two cents in, and I certainly did about Nevada!

Was it unsettling opening so exuberant and upbeat a piece of material during the London riots back in August?
It was interesting because I sort of viewed this as a very light piece and not necessarily socially relevant until we were doing it in the face of the riots and singing lines about “politics and taxes and people grinding axes.” All of a sudden, the show had this weight about it, a sincerity, and that had an effect on us as actors. I think that gave it depth and integrity, as if to say that we do need to be happy and we don’t have to live in fear— all those themes are present in the show, and you can blow by them or make them your mantra.

As winter draws in, it must be nice to be performing indoors and not al fresco in Regent’s Park.
I found the park very difficult. Everybody was like, “It’s so charming,” and I did love after the show having some Prosecco under the fairy lights; it gave us a very social atmosphere as actors, but physically speaking with those long entrances and exits, I found it very, very trying.

Not to mention that you no longer have to pray for dry weather.
What I consider bad weather now has totally changed after having performed in the rain in the park; I’ve been toughened by the rain [laughs].

You mentioned the now-aborted Broadway run of Love Never Dies. Had it happened, you would have been reunited with your Little Mermaid co-star Sierra Boggess.
Sierra is basically like my sister; we talk almost every day. There’s not much I have missed on her life, nor she on mine, since The Little Mermaid. I stayed with her here over the period that I was in London auditioning for this.

Do you feel as if you’ve perhaps adjusted better to living here, having a British parent?
Well, I was raised in America, but I always feel like an outsider in the States. My mom being British, I was raised with that sensibility; when I come here, I suppose I navigate life a little bit better. I know the social skills on this side of the pond.

This could potentially be quite a long run for you.
I’ve got a run-of-the-show contract until next July, and I’m really enjoying it. After Little Mermaid, I trained myself into how to get rewards out of a long run. And at age 38, it’s nice to put your feet down somewhere for any length of time, especially having been a gypsy all my life.

After this, will you head back to Broadway?
I was finding New York really slow when I left, and to have a break from that sort of pressure cooker is really nice. I don’t have any “wants” right now; I feel free to explore and to chase my interests—maybe a cabaret show or doing some recording. I don’t have any set objective beyond seeing this through as long as I can.