Interview: Thom Sesma Is Grateful for the Gift and Magic of Dead Outlaw on Broadway

A consummate character actor who is always a delight to watch, when Thom Sesma is in a show, you know you’re in good hands.

On Broadway, he’s brought life to some of musical theater’s most vivid antagonists — Scar in The Lion King, the Engineer in Miss Saigon, Thomas Andrews in Titanic. Off-Broadway and regionally, his credits are an unparalleled assortment of Shakespeare, Sondheim (Sweeney Todd at the Barrow Street pie shop; Pacific Overtures), and countless others, each marked by his precision, intensity, and emotional clarity.

Now, with Dead Outlaw — the acclaimed new Americana-tinged musical from David Yazbek, Itamar Moses, and Erik Della Penna — Sesma is becoming an overnight sensation decades in the making. His show-stopping number, “Up in the Stars,” earned him an Outer Critics Circle Award in the show’s original Audible Theater run at the Minetta Lane, and he’s delivering the same knockout right now in the show’s Broadway transfer to the Longacre.

We caught up with Sesma to talk about the strange magic of Dead Outlaw, the joy of working with a team that prioritized truth, and what it means to be reaching a new creative peak at this point in his life.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Given the weirdness of Dead Outlaw‘s subject matter, I have to imagine that you probably didn’t know how the show was going to land.
I have to be honest with you. Because the piece is so unusual, so out-of-the-box, none of us really knew what it was. We loved working on it. We loved showing up every day. It was one of those processes where people would come to rehearsal when they weren’t called because they wanted to see David Cromer and Itamar Moses and David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna figure it out.

I’ve done original shows before where everyone’s intent seems to be, “How do I make this so it’ll be a hit and run a long time?” These four creatives just wanted to figure out the piece itself, how it spoke to them, and how it spoke the story in the best way possible. It was very refreshing to be reminded on a daily basis to let go of expectations. Creatives always pay lip service to being in the moment, but I’ve never experienced a creative team that was so in the moment, just trying to unfold this thing and get the truth of what the story was telling them.

But none of us really knew what it was. We just loved showing up every day. We knew that it was good, we just didn’t know that it would connect.

At what point did you realize, like, “Oh, this is resonating?”
The very first preview. A couple of hours before our first paid performance, I was sitting next to Jonathan Whitton, the general manager for Audible Theater and an old friend of mine. We had been though a couple other shows before that were very troubled. And I said to Jonathan, “I love doing this, but is it any good?” And he looked at me and he said, “Yeah. This is it.” And he was absolutely right.

The moment it started, something happened. I say this a lot: good theater doesn’t happen on stage or in the audience. It happens somewhere in the air, in the middle. You could feel that kind of electric buzz five minutes into the show. That discovery that we were connecting with the audience on a level that you don’t get to experience that often is something I would pay to relive.

Were you shocked by how well your big number, “Up in the Stars,” landed? 
I am still shocked. It’s absolutely mystifying to me. If anyone else knew, they kept it from me, which is probably a good thing. The whole thing is a mystery, how it connects, how it unfolds. I try not to think about it because I’m just trying to be of service. I know I have a task ahead of me every night, and that task is to do that song.

Having said that, I’m very, very pleased as to how it goes over. Nobody should have that much fat on their plate.

What is it like coming back to this show a year later? Are expectations higher now given the acclaim and the awards?
Expectations are always much higher, but I think it’s incumbent upon actors or any creative people, when they revisit a work, to let go of the expectation that it’ll be like it was before. Making it like it was before is the challenge. You have all that history; you have the end product in your mind; you have all the things that came from the end product, like the awards and adulation. You have to approach it with kid gloves and start from square one. You have to treat it like it’s a new thing. You have to have fresh eyes.

You’re one of those journeyman character actors. There are seasons where I see you in show after show.
I know what you mean. Somebody described me a couple years ago as an “Off-Broadway mainstay,” and now my wife teases me about it. “Hey, off-Broadway mainstay! Your coffee’s ready!”

So, you’ve been around the block. What does it mean for you, at this point in your life and career, to receive the kind of attention you’re getting for Dead Outlaw?
Really lovely. I’m incredibly grateful. I don’t minimize the value of any of that. What do they say? It’s an honor just to be nominated? It’s an honor just to be a part of this. I wake up in the morning and I remind myself that right now, at my age, after all these years, I have the career that I wanted when I started out, when all of this was just a vague, unspecific ambition. It isn’t awards, it isn’t attention. It’s the ability to work and create and have the appreciation of the people I admire and respect, and to be able to meet them in the middle and create something new.

More than anything else, that’s what I ever wanted. I didn’t really get into this to get famous. I got into this to do exactly what I’m doing, to be able to get a piece of material like “Up to the Stars” in Dead Outlaw and, on a nightly basis, to figure out how that works for me as an actor and how that works in the context of the play. I’m grateful for it. My gratitude knows no bounds.