Nicholas Christopher: Tony Nominated for Chess Broadway 2026
Nicholas Christopher: From Bermuda to Juilliard to a Tony Nomination — How Broadway’s Most Versatile Rising Star Became Anatoly
He was born in Bermuda, raised in Boston, trained at Juilliard and the Boston Conservatory, and spent a decade making himself one of Broadway’s most chameleonic performers — from ensemble to understudy to leading man. Now, with his first Tony nomination for the role of his career, Nicholas Christopher is asking audiences to listen to something extraordinary.
Bermuda, Boston, and the Performing Arts Gene
Nicholas Christopher’s story begins on a small island in the North Atlantic Ocean — a British Overseas Territory that has produced, over its long history, an unusual number of distinguished performers given its modest population of approximately 64,000 people. He was born on 16 August 1990 in Bermuda, the son of a Bermudian father and an American mother, and his earliest exposure to the world of performance came directly from his father, Ed Christopher, who is himself an actor, singer, and entertainer — a performer of broad local celebrity in Bermuda’s intimate cultural landscape. His older brother, Jonathan Christopher, is also a professional actor. The performing arts are not merely a career choice in the Christopher household; they are the family business.
“It was great to see my dad’s thirst to make people laugh and make people feel good,” Christopher told The Boston Globe in 2018. It is the kind of origin story that explains both the naturalness of his stage presence — the ease in front of an audience that no training can fully manufacture — and the particular quality of warmth that critics have consistently identified as one of his most distinctive assets.
When Christopher was seven years old, he moved to the United States with his mother, settling in Boston, Massachusetts. It is a city with a rich theatrical and musical culture, and Christopher attended a performing arts school that nurtured the gifts he had brought from Bermuda. His childhood was, by his own account, diverse and full: he played sports, grew up biracial in a city navigating its own complex racial history, and developed the particular quality of curiosity about human experience that informs the best acting. “I feel like I’ve lived a lot of lives — whether it was growing up in Bermuda and then moving to Boston, playing sports, being biracial,” he told Billboard. “There are so many different parts of myself I want to explore.”
That spirit of exploration — the desire not merely to play characters but to inhabit genuinely different kinds of human experience — has been the defining thread of a career that has taken him from reggae legend to Founding Father to opera villain to Soviet chess grandmaster. It begins with the training.
The Training: Boston Conservatory, Juilliard, and the Decision That Changed Everything
Nicholas Christopher’s formal musical and theatrical education proceeded in two stages, at two of the most prestigious institutions in America. The first was the Boston Conservatory at Berklee — one of the leading performing arts colleges in the United States, known for its rigorous conservatory approach to training singers and actors across a wide range of styles and traditions. The Boston Conservatory gave Christopher the technical vocal foundation that has underpinned every subsequent role he has played, across styles as different as Sondheim, ABBA, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
The second stage was the Juilliard School in New York City — one of the most demanding and selective performing arts institutions in the world, from which Christopher earned a BFA in Drama before the lure of professional work proved irresistible. He enrolled in Juilliard’s Drama Division with a full understanding of what the training offered, but in the way that sometimes happens with genuinely exceptional young performers, the professional world came calling before the degree was complete. He left Juilliard when an opportunity arrived that was, quite simply, too significant to pass up.
The opportunity was a role in the national touring cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights — the writer’s first major musical, a vibrant celebration of a Dominican-American community in Washington Heights, New York. Christopher played Benny, the dispatcher for the cab company at the centre of the community, and the production gave him his first professional theatrical experience at a significant national level. It was also his first encounter with the Lin-Manuel Miranda universe — a creative world that would continue to play a central role in his career for the next decade and more.
The Early Career: Rent, Motown, and the First Broadway Steps
After his national tour experience in In the Heights, Christopher began building the Off-Broadway credentials that would eventually support his Broadway debut. His Off-Broadway work during this period included the role of Tom Collins — the HIV-positive philosophy professor and bohemian idealist — in an Off-Broadway revival of Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Collins is one of the most beloved roles in the contemporary musical theatre canon: a character who embodies both the production’s political idealism and its most moving emotional content. Christopher inhabited him for a year before a new opportunity called him away.
His Broadway debut came in 2013 when he joined the cast of Motown: The Musical — the jukebox biographical musical about Berry Gordy and the history of the Motown Records label — as a member of the ensemble, understudying and eventually playing Smokey Robinson. It was a relatively modest entry into the Broadway world, in keeping with the patient, ground-up approach that has characterised his career at every stage. Rather than seeking the starring role immediately, Christopher used the ensemble experience to observe, to absorb, and to prepare himself for larger opportunities.
The Motown national tour then gave him the opportunity to step fully into the role of Smokey Robinson — a promotion that rewarded his patient professionalism and his willingness to do the preparatory work thoroughly before claiming the spotlight. The tour established him as a performer capable of handling the demands of a leading character role, and set him up for the next, dramatically larger opportunity that was about to present itself.
The Hamilton Years: From Earliest Development to George Washington and Aaron Burr
Of all the relationships that have shaped Nicholas Christopher’s career, none is more significant than his long association with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. He was among the earliest group of actors Miranda included in the musical’s development process — a fact that speaks to the respect and trust Miranda had for Christopher’s abilities even before the show had fully revealed its extraordinary potential.
After Hamilton opened on Broadway in August 2015, Christopher officially joined the production in 2016 as the understudy for two of the show’s most important roles: George Washington (originally played by Chris Jackson) and Aaron Burr (originally played by Leslie Odom Jr.). The dual understudy assignment was in itself a testament to his range — these are two very different characters requiring very different vocal and dramatic qualities, and the ability to hold both in readiness simultaneously demands a particular kind of disciplined versatility.
In a development that captures the sometimes unpredictable nature of theatrical careers, Christopher had originally been in line to play Burr in the show’s opening Chicago cast — but Miss Saigon came along, and the pull of that new opportunity changed his immediate trajectory. Between the two projects, he took over the role of Washington on Broadway, playing the Founding Father with the dignified, measured authority the role requires. It was the kind of performance that consolidates a reputation rather than creating one: the proof that a performer’s quality is consistent across different conditions and different scales of role.
He would return to Hamilton multiple times over the following decade — playing Washington again in 2019 and in August–October 2024, and reprising his role of Burr in April 2025 for a week covering for Jared Dixon. His deep familiarity with the show’s demands and its musical world gave him, as he has described, a kind of ongoing calibration point: a production he knew so intimately that he could always use it to take the measure of his own development as a performer.
It’s always been my goal to play as many different characters as I can and to challenge myself. I feel like I’ve lived a lot of lives — whether it was growing up in Bermuda and then moving to Boston, playing sports, being biracial. There are so many different parts of myself I want to explore.
Nicholas Christopher, Billboard, May 2026Miss Saigon on Broadway: The Role That Established Him as a Leading Man
The production of Miss Saigon that opened at Broadway’s Broadway Theatre on 23 March 2017 was the musical’s second Broadway revival — following its original 1991 Broadway run and a successful West End revival — and it featured Christopher in the role of John Thomas, the American soldier whose ambivalence about the Vietnam War provides a moral counterpoint to the central love story. Christopher remained in the role for the entirety of the production’s Broadway run, which closed on 14 January 2018.
The production received two Tony Award nominations — for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Actress in a Musical for Eva Noblezada, whose portrayal of Kim was widely acclaimed. For Christopher, the experience of playing a sustained leading role in a major Broadway revival — night after night, through a full run — was the theatrical education that no training programme can fully provide. It confirmed his ability to sustain a character across the emotional demands of a full run, and to maintain the quality and commitment that the role required regardless of whether it was preview week or month eight of the production.
His work in Miss Saigon is also significant for what it taught him about the specific demands of the American musical theatre tradition at its most emotional and politically complex: a tradition that Chess, eight years later, would require him to inhabit at an even deeper level.
Sweeney Todd, Little Shop, and Jelly Roll Morton: The Actor Who Never Stopped Growing
The years between Miss Saigon and Chess were characterised, for Christopher, by a sustained commitment to range and challenge that distinguishes the serious theatrical artist from the merely successful performer. Rather than coasting on his Hamilton and Miss Saigon credentials, he kept seeking out work that would require him to develop in new directions.
His most significant work in this period came with the acclaimed Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2023), directed by Thomas Kail and starring Josh Groban as Sweeney Todd and Annaleigh Ashford as Mrs. Lovett. Christopher was cast as Adolfo Pirelli — the flamboyant Italian barber whose confrontation with Sweeney Todd in the early scenes triggers the play’s central catastrophe — and simultaneously served as understudy for the title role.
Pirelli is a comic villain’s role of considerable bravura: all theatrical swagger and Italian pretension, concealing the vulnerable truth of a man who knows too much about Todd’s past to survive the encounter. Christopher played it with the precise combination of comedy and threat that the role requires, earning consistently warm notices from critics who noted his ability to match the high vocal and dramatic standards set by the two leads. More significantly, when Josh Groban eventually departed the production, Christopher stepped into the title role for a short period — a transition that required him to inhabit one of the most famous and demanding roles in the Sondheim canon, at extremely short notice, in a production playing to full Broadway houses.
“It totally helped me with Anatoly, even the way the sound resonates in my body,” he told Billboard. “I don’t think I’d sung that — the way [Sweeney Todd] sits in my voice — I don’t think I’d sung at that level before, and Sweeney Todd showed me something about how I could use my voice.” It is the kind of precise, technical self-knowledge that marks an actor who understands not just what he is doing but how and why.
In March 2024, while still officially part of the Sweeney Todd company, he took a leave of absence to star as Jelly Roll Morton in New York City Center’s production of Jelly’s Last Jam — the George C. Wolfe musical about the complex, self-mythologising jazz pioneer. Then, in late 2024 and early 2025, he appeared Off-Broadway in two extended engagements of the Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theatre, playing Seymour Krelborn opposite Sherie Rene Scott as Audrey in the first run and Madeline Brewer as Audrey in the second. Each of these productions added a new dimension to an already formidably varied stage résumé, and together they constituted a concentrated period of role development that was clearly, in retrospect, leading toward something significant.
Chess on Broadway: Redeeming a Notorious Flop
Chess has one of the most extraordinary histories of any musical in the Broadway canon. Created by Tim Rice as lyricist and Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA as composers, the musical premiered as a concept album in 1984 — a massive commercial success — before its stage premiere at the Barbican in London and its subsequent West End debut at the Prince Edward Theatre in 1986, where it ran for three years. The American premiere, which arrived on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre in 1988, was a notorious critical and commercial disaster, closing after just 68 performances despite containing a score of exceptional quality.
In the nearly four decades since, Chess has developed one of the most devoted cult followings in musical theatre history — its songs (“One Night in Bangkok,” “Anthem,” “I Know Him So Well,” “Nobody’s Side”) remaining beloved long after the show itself had retreated to regional productions and concert stagings. Countless directors and producers have attempted to crack the show’s structural problems, always recognising that the score is extraordinary and the book is not. The 2026 Broadway revival, featuring a new book by Danny Strong (Emmy winner for Empire) and direction by Tony winner Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening), is the most ambitious attempt yet to finally do justice to the material.
Set against the backdrop of Cold War geopolitics, Chess follows an international chess championship in which the brash American grandmaster Freddie Trumper (Aaron Tveit) faces the composed Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Sergievsky (Nicholas Christopher), while both men become emotionally entangled with the chess strategist Florence Vassy (Lea Michele). The drama escalates as Anatoly defects to the West, only to find that his freedom is complicated by political manipulation, the loyalty he feels toward his Russian wife Svetlana (Hannah Cruz), and the love he has developed for Florence. The emotional and political tensions reach a climax that the show’s famously contested ending attempts — with varying success in different versions — to resolve.
The production opened at the Imperial Theatre on 16 November 2025, following previews from 15 October 2025, and was originally scheduled through May 2026 before being extended twice — first to 13 July, then to 13 September 2026 — in recognition of its considerable commercial success. The production has been celebrated as the most successful staging of Chess in America since its original concept album, and the casting of Christopher alongside Tveit and Michele has been widely credited as central to that success. Lea Michele departed the production on 21 June 2026; a replacement is expected to be announced.
Christopher as Anatoly: The Role, the Preparation, and the Vocal Achievement
The role of Anatoly Sergievsky is one of musical theatre’s great challenges for a dramatic tenor. It requires an actor who can project both intellectual authority and emotional vulnerability — a man whose genius is unquestionable but whose personal choices lead him progressively further from everything he loves. The score demands extraordinary vocal range, including one of the most famous sustained notes in musical theatre: the climactic top note in “Anthem” — a song that has become, across four decades and countless productions, the standard against which any Anatoly is measured.
Christopher prepared for the role with characteristic thoroughness. He told the Broadway News podcast that he did firsthand research into chess and into the Cold War political context of the story, wanting to understand the specific pressures that shaped a Soviet athlete in the 1980s — the particular combination of national pride, ideological constraint, and personal ambition that defines Anatoly’s psychology. He also, as he described to Billboard, drew directly on his experience singing Sweeney Todd: the way that demanding baritonal role had taught him something about resonance and breath support that directly informed how he approached Anatoly’s more tenorial demands.
The “Anthem” itself — the Act One closer in which Anatoly declares his love for Mother Russia in terms of soaring lyrical beauty — became the production’s defining musical moment and the centrepiece of Christopher’s critical reputation. The New York Stage Review described Christopher’s “Anthem” as the finest they had heard: “You’ll never hear a better ‘Anthem,’ the sweeping love-of-country ode that brings down the Act 1 curtain, and the house, than Christopher’s. (Sorry, Josh Groban.)” It is a comparison that places Christopher in the company of one of Broadway’s most celebrated vocal performers, and suggests that his work in Chess represents not merely the peak of his career to date but a genuine contribution to the history of musical theatre performance.
Times Square Chronicles called his performance “quietly devastating and vocally immaculate,” singling out “The Deal” as the production’s emotional centrepiece: “It’s in ‘The Deal’ where he clinches the emotional heart of the show — layering psychological trauma, national disillusionment, and aching personal longing into a single riveting performance. If Broadway is the board, he just took the king.”
What the Critics Said: Review Roundup
The critical response to Chess was mixed about the show itself — the book’s structural challenges persisted even in Danny Strong’s revision — but near-unanimous in its praise for the three leads, with Christopher attracting some of the most enthusiastic individual notices of the season.
Audience response has been consistently ecstatic, with standing ovations becoming a regular feature of the production’s performances throughout its run. Christopher has described the audience connection as one of the most fulfilling aspects of the experience, noting to Deadline that theatergoers have “strongly connected with the musical’s themes of ambition, sacrifice, love, and political tension.” The production’s extension from May to September 2026 reflects the audience enthusiasm that critical mixed reviews alone could not have generated.
Tony Nominated: Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical — First Career Nomination
Nicholas Christopher’s first Tony nomination arrives for his performance as Anatoly Sergievsky in Chess at the Imperial Theatre — the role he describes as the most demanding of his career, and which critics have called vocally immaculate. He is the first Bermudian actor ever to receive a Tony Award nomination.
Full Best Actor in a Musical category nominees:
- Nicholas Christopher — Chess
- Luke Evans — Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show
- Joshua Henry — Ragtime
- Sam Tutty — Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)
- Brandon Uranowitz — Ragtime
A Career in Full: Selected Stage Credits
Makes his professional debut as Benny in the national touring production of Miranda’s breakthrough musical. Leaves Juilliard to take the role — the decision that launches a professional career built on embracing opportunities as they come. His first encounter with the Lin-Manuel Miranda artistic universe.
Plays Tom Collins — one of the most beloved roles in contemporary musical theatre — in an Off-Broadway revival of Jonathan Larson’s landmark musical. Remains in the cast for a year before Miss Saigon calls him to Broadway.
Broadway debut as an ensemble member, understudying and eventually playing Smokey Robinson. Gains invaluable experience observing the Broadway ecosystem before his own opportunities for leading roles arrive. Subsequently promoted to Smokey Robinson on the national tour.
Among the earliest group of actors in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton development. Joins the Broadway company officially in 2016, understudying and playing George Washington, alongside understudying Aaron Burr. Misses the Chicago opening to do Miss Saigon; returns to Washington repeatedly over subsequent years.
Broadway leading role as John Thomas in the second Broadway revival of Boublil and Schönberg’s musical. Plays the full run from March 2017 to January 2018. The production receives Tony nominations for Best Revival and Best Actress for Eva Noblezada.
Stars as Aaron Burr in the Chicago sit-down cast of Hamilton, then returns to Broadway as Washington in 2019. The role he once described as daunting — “He’s such a complex character” — becomes one of his most thoroughly inhabited.
Stars as Adolfo Pirelli and understudies Sweeney Todd in Thomas Kail’s acclaimed revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. Steps into the title role when Groban departs. Wins consistent praise. Records the cast album for Ghostlight Records. The vocal experience directly informs his approach to Chess.
Takes a leave of absence from Sweeney Todd to star as Jelly Roll Morton in the New York City Center Encores! production. The role adds another legendary American musical figure to a growing gallery of complex, historically grounded characters.
Stars as Seymour Krelborn opposite Sherie Rene Scott as Audrey (winter 2024–25) and Madeline Brewer as Audrey (August 2025) in two separate engagements of the Off-Broadway revival. Brings his characteristic combination of warmth, comic timing, and emotional depth to the lovelorn plant shop assistant whose ambitions grow alongside his monstrous responsibility.
Returns as George Washington (Aug–Oct 2024) and Aaron Burr (April 2025, one week covering for Jared Dixon). Ten years of intermittent involvement with the show that shaped his early career reaches its conclusion before the new chapter of Chess begins.
Stars as Anatoly Sergievsky in the first-ever Broadway revival of Chess, alongside Aaron Tveit and Lea Michele. Directed by Michael Mayer, book by Danny Strong. Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical. Production extended twice — now running through 13 September 2026. The first Bermudian actor ever to receive a Tony nomination.
The First Bermudian Tony Nominee: What This Moment Means
There is a particular quality to breakthrough moments that have been long in the making. Nicholas Christopher has been on Broadway since 2013. He has played in the ensemble, understudied leading roles, stepped in at short notice for departing stars, built a national tour career alongside his Broadway work, and sustained a commitment to Off-Broadway development that most actors at his stage of career would have long since set aside. He has been, through all of it, exceptionally good — recognised by his peers, appreciated by his audiences, and consistently praised by critics who noticed a performer of unusual range and reliability. And yet the Tony nomination for Chess is his first, at thirty-five years old, in his thirteenth year of Broadway performance.
It is also a historic moment for the island of Bermuda — whose 64,000 residents have never before had one of their own nominated for the theatre world’s highest honour. As Broadway News noted, Christopher is the first Bermudian actor ever to receive a Tony Award nomination. The significance of that distinction is not merely statistical; it speaks to the particular journey of a performer who grew up on a small island, moved to Boston at seven, trained at institutions that gave him every resource the American performing arts world can offer, and has spent his professional life using those resources in service of the most ambitious and diverse range of roles he could find.
As he told Billboard on the eve of the Tony nominations: “It’s always been my goal to play as many different characters as I can and to challenge myself. I look forward to both surprising myself and surprising audience members with what I do next.” It is a manifesto as much as a statement — the declaration of an artist who understands that the work is never finished, and who approaches the Tony ceremony not as an endpoint but as a waypoint in a career whose most extraordinary chapters may still be ahead.
You’ll never hear a better “Anthem,” the sweeping love-of-country ode that brings down the Act 1 curtain, and the house, than Christopher’s. (Sorry, Josh Groban.) If Broadway is the board, he just took the king.
New York Stage Review & Times Square Chronicles — composite, 2025
Links
La Cage Aux Follies – Memorabilia
Chess the Musical – Memorabilia
Little Shop of Horrors – Memorabilia
Starlight Express – Memorabilia
Dear Evan Hansen – Memorabilia
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying – Memorabilia
Terrence McNally – Memorabilia
