Lexington actor brings Broadway breakout role to the big screen. Next up, Hulu series.

If there are downsides to being a Broadway actor, one may be that your friends and loved ones don’t know exactly what you’re doing on a stage hundreds of miles from home. Still, when Colton Ryan comes home to Lexington, he is sometimes reminded he was fortunate to make his Broadway debut in a show that resonates well beyond Manhattan.

“It’s not often that you’re in a show, maybe even on Broadway, that the name rings a bell to, like, my neighbors in 40502,” Ryan says.

But even having done some TV and film since leaving his Broadway debut, Ryan finds neighbors and friends in Lexington will still say, “’What about that one, the one with the ‘Dear, …’ it’s the letter thing,’” Ryan says. “And the fact that they even somewhat knew the name, the fact that show had touched the zeitgeist – It’s just so one-in-a-million with this line of work.”

The “letter thing” is “Dear Evan Hansen,” the blockbuster Broadway show that won six Tony Awards in 2017, including best musical. The story of a painfully shy high school senior who becomes an inadvertent cause célèbre when he is misidentified as the best friend of a boy who commits suicide was revered for its portrayal of mental illness and isolation and showstoppers like “You Will Be Found.”

As of Friday, Ryan’s neighbors, friends, family and anyone else can see Ryan in his career-starting show as the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen” opens nationwide. It actually opens a day earlier in local movie theaters.

To Ryan, it was really important to make the “Evan Hansen” story available to a wider audience. Personally, it was a full-circle event with the show that launched his professional career, and he thinks about a very specific audience coming to see it.

“The fact that a bunch of kids from SCAPA (Lexington’s School for Creative and Performing Arts) might be able to go see this show,” he says, “and for me to just be a small part of that, that means more to me than I can express.”

In the new film version, Ryan plays Connor Murphy, the character who takes his own life. Connor was one of three roles Ryan was signed to cover (understudy), including the title role, in the Broadway production of “Dear Evan Hansen” while he was still a student at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio. He graduated on time, as the University considered the show an internship.

Just a few years earlier, he was a student in SCAPA at Lafayette High School, playing roles such as Jean Valjean in “Les Misérables.”

COVID shuts down Broadway

Ryan had just opened his second Broadway show, “Girl from the North Country,” based on the music of Bob Dylan, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut Broadway down. Like many young adults, Ryan decided to go home.

New York was the epicenter of the pandemic in its early days, with rumors flying around about what would happen next, and Ryan was facing the prospect of being confined to an apartment for weeks on end.

“I was very lucky and privileged to have a place outside of my New York apartment,” Ryan says. “So me and my girlfriend, Adrian, we and our dog, Rumble, we hit the road with gloves and masks on, just stopped one time for gas, and we got there. I thought I’d be staying for two weeks. I brought like four t-shirts.”

He ended up staying for nine months, save for time he spent filming “Evan Hansen,” and now, as he’s in Savannah, Georgia, filming “The Girl from Plainville,” a Hulu series in which he stars opposite Elle Fanning. Ryan has been home briefly since “Dear Evan Hansen,” including two shows with the Lexington Theatre Company, headlining its Concert with the Stars in January 2018 and playing Tony in its production of “West Side Story” in 2019, which was also his final role at Baldwin Wallace before joining the “Evan Hansen” production.

“I haven’t spent a lot of time at home since college,” Ryan says. After college, he notes, “A lot of people go back home for a little bit as they start getting acclimated to the world and start applying for jobs and things. I never got that chance. I didn’t go home a lot during the summers. I was very lucky and got to do summer stock and things like that. So, I felt jilted from my closure with home. And in a lot of good ways, and bad ways, I got it. I got my closure. I regressed to my 21, maybe 17-year-old self a lot of ways, as you probably do when you live back in your bedroom in your mom’s house.

“I fell back into my love affair with my hometown … and it made me realize a lot of things about myself that are more profound to me than anything else.”

When he returns to New York, he says he expects he will look for a house outside of the city, having reconnected with a love of having a yard and some room.

Filming ‘Evan Hansen’

The first thing to call him away from home was the “Evan Hansen” film. He and star Ben Platt, who won a Tony Award for his performance in the show, are the only members of the Broadway cast in the movie.

“I do believe he was a big champion of the reason why I was there,” Ryan says of Platt.

Filming during the pandemic, he says, “ended up being very meta, because the show is so much about feeling alone and feeling isolated, and then, we would be.”

It was just over a year ago, before vaccines, and when not on set, the actors were in their homes, not interacting with each other or allowed to leave. And on set, he says crew was often in so much protective gear it was hard to tell who people were.

This story was originally published September 22, 2021 at 6:00 AM.