For Kevin Csolak, a Child Actor Who Danced His Way to Justin Timberlake's Super Bowl, Gypsy Was an Answered Prayer

Age: 29

Hometown: Flemington, New Jersey

Current role: Kevin Csolak (pronounced SO-lack) plays Tulsa in George C. Wolfe's revival of Gypsy, starring Audra McDonald. 

Credits: Csolak made his Broadway debut in 2006 as a Little Who in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He returned to Broadway in the 2018 musical Mean Girls and featured in both Ivo van Hove's 2020 Broadway revival of West Side Story (A-Rab) and Steven Spielberg's 2021 film remake of West Side Story (Diesel). 

May We Entertain You?
As the youngest of three boys, Kevin was the last of the Csolak brothers to join his mother’s performance studio—The Star Maker School in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. “It was my daycare center, basically,” says Csolak. “When I first came into consciousness, I feel like I was already in the dance studio.” Meanwhile at home, Csolak’s father, a band teacher of over 40 years, could regularly be heard drumming in the basement. His mother tells him he was four when he “formally demanded” to take class at the school, which also offered voice and acting lessons. “I was always just around it,” he says. “It never felt like a conscious decision of, ‘This is what I want to do.’ It's just like, ‘This is just what happens in life.’ It wasn't until I went to school and the kids start poking at you for things that I was like, ‘Oh, this is different.’” He intuitively learned how to compartmentalize his creativity. “I was living two separate lives for a while as a kid. I think it was a safety net because I didn't want to be othered,” he says. “Not everyone sings dances and jumps around and throws on leotards. But I loved it. I loved it from the moment I could remember.”

Dancing Through Life
Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, the Nicholas Brothers: “I would watch their films over and over again,” says Csolak, listing off a few of the dancers he grew up admiring. At the time, dance competitions defined Csolak’s relationship to the stage. But when he thinks of his early influences, his mind also goes to the dance studio’s soundtrack of show tunes. “I didn't realize that these songs that my mom was playing and choreographing to were from shows. I thought that they were just songs that I loved.” Wicked (Broadway’s most potent gateway drug) is what eventually made all the pieces come together. Sitting in the audience at his very first show, he realized, "It's not just in the studio. We can do that.” After Act I, he picked up his jacket to go when his brother delivered the happy news that they had a whole second act to go. “I remember having to go to the bathroom and being like, ‘Nope, I'm going to stay right here.’” He had eyes on the thing he wanted and spent intermission absorbed by the notion, “I think I can grab that.”

Kindred Spirits in Whoville
At nine, Kevin tagged along to his 14-year-old brother Kurt’s meeting with a child management firm. “When we got there, they looked at me and they're like, ‘What about him?’” Kevin’s answer: “If Kurt’s doing it, definitely I’m going to do it.” Life changed immediately. “I blinked and I was in the city three or four times a week auditioning.” By 10 he’d booked two episodes on the soap opera As the World Turns and was making his Broadway debut as a young Who in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! To a fearless child, it was just another stage. “I think I didn't really understand the Broadway of it all,” he says now. What he did grasp quickly was the sense of community. “I think there was an aspect of meeting all those kids that were me from different walks of life all coming together. We all loved this thing. It was my first time being surrounded by that.” His mother, meanwhile, was by his side, driving him to every audition and affirming how far he could take the talent she saw in him. She also made sure the desire to do it was his, and his alone. “She was kind of my own Momma Rose,” says Csolak, stressing, “—but in the best way.”

Hail Mary
After a year of college at Pace University, Csolak moved to Los Angeles and fell in with hip-hop dancer Ivan Koumaev and Marty Kudelka, Justin Timberlake’s choreographer. “One of the things I dreamed of was [working] with Justin Timberlake,” says Csolak. “I latched onto that style. I loved it.” Around the same time, he found himself inside Casey Nicholaw’s musical theater universe, participating in workshops for The Prom and eventually booking the Broadway iteration of Mean Girls. Rehearsals for the show were set to start in February 2018—his first time back on Broadway since his childhood stint in Whoville.

In December 2017, with Mean Girls already on the calendar, he got a call from Kudelka: “Hey, we're doing the Super Bowl with Justin Timberlake. Would you want to do it?” Csolak said yes on the spot, only to find out later that Super Bowl LII, set to be played at the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, was the night before the first day of rehearsal for Mean Girls in New York City. He asked Nicholaw for a 24-hour grace period, but the director insisted he be there on the first day. “I pretty much did the Super Bowl, ran to the hotel, ran to the plane, didn't sleep, got in at 7AM and went right to rehearsal.” Nicholaw endearingly brought him a pillow so he could sleep during 10-minute breaks. “But I almost didn’t sleep,” he says, still wired from the “out-of-body experience” of the night before. “It was a dream come true. It felt like if I was going to jump, I wouldn't come back down. I would just levitate up into the sky.”

Breeze It, Buzz It, Easy Does It
“I feel like this experience with Gypsy has had me looking back,” says Csolak. Eight shows a week, he performs Camille A. Brown’s reinterpretation of Jerome Robbins’ choreography for Tulsa’s signature dance number “All I Need Is the Girl” (every Gypsy revival prior to this one has reproduced Robbins’ original steps). It kicks up memories of his time with West Side Story—a defining era of his life when Ivo van Hove’s modernized Broadway revival (cut short by the pandemic) intersected with Steven Spielberg’s remake of the classic 1961 film. In the latter, New York City Ballet alum Justin Peck resculpted the spirit of Robbins’ original work with an extra dash of menace. But in the former, contemporary choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s tore it down to the studs: "It was one of the first times professionally that someone was like, 'Here's some paint. Now go paint a canvas and show me what you would do with this.'" As for Csolak's take on canon Robbins choreography, that’s only been seen by his studio walls. “How can you not watch the original West Side and be like, I'm going to go try to do all of that?” He compares the feeling of being absorbed by Robbins’ movement to the one he had as an awestruck child at Wicked. “I think that's what Broadway really is,” he says. “It's like taking your heart out of your chest and throwing it into the audience and up into the air and hoping that it floats.”

Tulsa '67
Csolak was singing “All I Need Is the Girl” in Gypsy audition rooms by day and performing in Broadway’s The Outsiders by night. “I passed the Majestic stage door every day for about four-and-a-half months when I was auditioning,” he remembers—the Jacobs Theatre tauntingly abutting the Majestic. He’s familiar with the torture of an extended audition process, “But this one just felt different,” he says. “I was walking by, and right before you go into the Jacobs stage door, there's a big red arrow that's pointing into the Majestic. I made sure no one was behind me and I put my hand on it and I kind of said a little prayer in that moment.” Csolak had a week of shows left at The Outsiders when he found out that he booked Gypsy. He kept the news close to the chest, keeping it from his fellow Greasers and Socs. But for that week, “Singing the word ‘Tulsa’ over and over again at The Outsiders was very weird.”

Small and Funny and Fine
“Tulsa is the kind of person who you don’t look too closely at—but then all of a sudden you get to see him live in his dream and live in that imagination,” says Csolak. “It’s a very, very close parallel to where I am with my career. I think it allows me to really step into the Broadway space and live with my full artistic self and let it soar.” Tulsa is his first featured role on Broadway, and the milestone is indelibly linked to his mother. “I owe so much,” he says, thinking of all the studio time and car rides to auditions. “She was a performer when she was younger too, but didn't get a chance to really do it too much professionally. A lot of what this show means to me is a love letter to her.” He also gets to share this time on Broadway with his brother Kurt, a dancer in The Great Gatsby, and girlfriend Solea Pfeiffer, who stars as Satine in Moulin Rouge! (the pair met at a Mean Girls party the day before the Broadway shutdown). “I think it's the moments where I'm meeting [Solea] or Kurt for dinner and then I'm like, ‘Alright, see you later!’ and we go to our respective shows. It feels just like such a moment that I'm going to look back on for the rest of my life.”