Broadway Baby

With a body of work that includes more than 200 TV shows, in addition to his work in film, commercials, and theater, actor Loren Lester ’83 gets recognized fairly often—even if people don’t know exactly who he is.

A lot of people recognize him from his appearances on The Facts of Life and Gilmore Girls—“So many people have seen the reruns many times.” Larry David fans might remember Lester from “The Black Swan” episode from season 7 of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Then there are the legions of Batman devotees who know his voice as Dick Grayson’s alter egos, Robin and Nightwing, dating back to Batman: The Animated Series (1992). They might even recognize him as an irate passenger in the movie Red Eye (2005), an airplane thriller directed by horror auteur Wes Craven starring Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams.

In the four decades since he graduated from Oxy, Lester’s career has gone in many directions. “For about 15 years, I almost did exclusively voiceover,” he says. “Then for a number of years, I did mostly on-camera commercials. When I got into my 40s, I did mostly TV guest appearances playing doctors, lawyers, and other white-collar roles. And now, theater is where my life is.”

Last spring, Lester made his Broadway debut in the revised and reimagined Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, starring Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin as the Emcee and Sally Bowles, respectively. It’s been a circuitous path to the Great White Way for the journeyman actor and the fulfillment of a dream that dates back even before his days as a theater major at Occidental.

“It’s incredible that this is happening at my age,” Lester says from his home in New York City, where he and his actress wife, Kelly, moved in 2018. “I am now what I thought I would be 40 years ago, but I’m not looking back and saying, ‘Oh, I wish it had been sooner.’ I think it's happening exactly the time it’s supposed to.”

Lester is a native Angeleno and third-generation thespian. His maternal grandfather was an actor in Europe, and his father was a theater actor during the 1940s and ’50s. (“I never got to see him onstage. But he’s always onstage with me,” Lester wrote on Instagram last year.) “My father died when I was 15, but he got to see me onstage in middle school, where it all started thanks to a wonderful teacher who was running the drama department,” he recalls. “The moment I started doing plays there, I was hooked.”

As a theater major at Oxy, Lester participated for four years with Occidental Summer Theater. Professor and Summer Theater co-founder Omar Paxson ’48 “was a legend,” Lester says. “It was a thrill to spend my years there studying  directing, playwriting, and acting with him. Every summer was just an ebullient several months, putting on five different shows in a short amount of time. It was like professional summer stock, and the only thing even close to that in L.A.

“You might be running the smoke machine in Brigadoon one night and playing the lead in something else the next. No matter what you did in the company, you were just so excited to be a part of it,” he continues. “I was the patter-song character in three Gilbert and Sullivan shows—that’s probably the thing I enjoyed most—but I also was in other wonderful productions such as Pygmalion where I played Doolittle. Summer Theater was really my training, because after I had done all those seasons with all those different genres of theater, I thought, ‘I can do anything now.’”

Before all that, Lester booked two film roles in a row soon after he arrived at Oxy with the Class of 1982. “The first one [Swap Meet] you don’t need to know about,” he says. But the second was Rock ’n’ Roll High School (1979), a Roger Corman production featuring the Ramones. “I'm one of the two evil hall monitors, Fritz Hansel and Fritz Gretel, who work for the principal,” Loren says. “We wear these militaristic uniforms and scream ‘Body search!’ as we run down the hall trying to catch the freshmen doing something wrong. If you go back and watch the film, look for the guy with all the curly hair.”

Lester spent about three weeks on the shoot—Corman “was famous for doing very, very low-budget films in a very short period of time,” he says. In addition to his film work, he was rehearsing for a play at night on campus. “By the time that was all over,” he admits, “I didn't think I could do justice to my studies that year.” Lester took a leave of absence and returned to Oxy the next fall, graduating as a member of the Class of ’83.

After a number of small roles in TV and local theater, Lester got his first big break onstage in an Actors’ Equity production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, directed by and starring Charlton Heston. The show opened at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles and subsequently went to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “That was in 1986,” Lester says, “and again, I thought, ‘Well, this is what I'm going to be doing. My theater career is taking off.’ But soon it was back to L.A.”

Several years later, Lester landed what until now may be his best-known role, sight unseen. Following the massive success of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) starring Michael Keaton, Warner Bros. gave the go-ahead to a new cartoon adaptation for Fox Kids Network. A lifelong Batman fan, Lester played Robin in 30 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, and when The New Batman Adventures premiered on the WB in 1997, Lester voiced Nightwing in eight additional episodes.

“Since then we’ve done some video games and made-for-TV movies,” Lester says—Batman and Mr. Freeze: SubZero (1998) is a personal favorite—and most recently he reprised his role as Nightwing in Batman and Harley Quinn (2017), produced for the home video market. There were talks of reviving the original series before Kevin Conroy—whom many fans consider to be the definitive voice of Batman—died in November 2022.

Does Lester think he’s given his last performance as Robin or Nightwing? “I hope not,” he says. “I go to a lot of Comic-Cons and sign autographs, and the fans that I meet all want me to do Nightwing again.  I have no idea if that will happen, but I have the same voice and would be there immediately for sure.” (For a modest fee, Lester will record a custom video on Cameo: “One of the things I do is sing ‘Happy Birthday’ as Dick Grayson,” he says with a laugh. ‘That’s fun.”

Over the years, Lester estimates he has done more than 100 commercials: “Some of them were shown quite a bit and some of them were one-and-done—they’re all over the map. But I have never played one of those iconic characters, like the Maytag repairman.”

But he has played opposite an advertising icon, working with the ubiquitous Flo (actress Stephanie Courtney) in a 2013 spot for Progressive Insurance. As for the plot of the commercial, Lester says, “I was sitting in front of a fireplace reading and Flo comes down the fireplace to tell me about the insurance and makes a big cloud of dust.”

In between voiceovers, auditions, and TV and ad work, Lester scratched his theater itch performing in and directing dozens of productions in the L.A. equivalent of the off-off-Broadway circuit. “Until about five or six years ago, L.A. had this really vibrant theater community, these little 50- to 99-seat theaters all over the place—close to 100 of them at one point,” he says. “Under Equity rules, we were allowed to perform there. And then they changed the rules five or six years ago. So that really shut down that whole vibrant community. There are still some theaters, but not like it was.”

In 2018, a couple of months after moving to New York City with his wife (“We thought, if we want to do theater, that’s where we need to be”), Lester went on an open casting call for The Band’s Visit—a musical adaptation of the 2007 Israeli film about an Egyptian band of musicians stranded in a small Israeli town. (The show opened on Broadway in November 2017 and ran for 556 performances.) Lester met the casting director, sang a song from Fiddler on the Roof for his audition, and didn’t get the part—on Broadway, at least.

“Once they had decided to close and have a national tour, they called me in again,” Lester says, “and then I got the part.” Director David Cromer cast Lester as the understudy for four roles: as the Egyptian bandleader (the lead), the Israeli father, and two of the Egyptian band members. “I had to learn Arabic lines and learn Hebrew lines and how to speak in English with an Arabic accent versus an Israeli accent. So that was a great challenge.”

The show launched a national tour in June 2019 in Providence, R.I., and played 17 cities before being interrupted by the pandemic in March 2020. The tour resumed in October 2021, making its L.A. premiere at the Dolby Theatre that December. “I went on as the Israeli father, Avrum, and I had almost 200 people come to the show one night from all walks of my life,” Lester says. “There were a bunch of Oxy people, but also people from my high school and even further back than that and actors from all the different mediums I’ve worked in. The experience was quite incredible. I was playing in front of my hometown, for sure.”

By the time The Band’s Visit hung up its instruments in July 2022, it had played in 43 cities to enthusiastic audiences across North America, Lester says. “We went all over the country as well as Canada, and no matter the city or the size of the theater, people really took to the story everywhere. It meant a lot to be part of something like that.”

Lester is once again playing multiple roles in his Broadway debut. Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club opened on April 20, more than seven months after Lester first auditioned for the show. “I made what's called a self-tape, and then I didn't hear anything. Then in September I got a live callback where I got to go in and be in the room, which is very rare these days. They didn't tell me for another five weeks that I got the job—and then they told me that I was not allowed to tell anybody until the whole cast was announced, which wasn't until January. And then we went right into rehearsal in February and opened in April. We’re doing eight shows a week, and it's my entire life right now.”

With Cabaret selling out regularly at the August Wilson Theater, Lester is settling in for a long run. On September 16, singer Adam Lambert and Moana star Auli’i Cravalho are joining the production, succeeding Redmayne and Rankin; they’re signed through March 30. If you’re in the New York area next month, mark your calendars: “I’m onstage for every show but I’m going on in the role of Herr Schultz [a major supporting part] on October 12,” Lester says.

As happy as he is to be on Broadway, Lester swells with pride as he talks about the burgeoning careers of his three daughters with his wife of 36 years, Kelly. Jenny, the eldest, recently completed her master’s degree in classical acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. “She’s excelled in Shakespeare and Ibsen and Chekhov and all those classical things that she wanted to do.” Middle child Lily is a stand-up comedian, working comedy clubs in New York, “and one of the funniest people on the face of the Earth,” her dad says. And youngest daughter Julia was nominated for a Tony Award as featured actress in a musical for her portrayal of Little Red in the 2022 revival of Into the Woods.

“She really transformed that role and made it something that no one had ever seen before,” Lester says. “I went to the show eight or nine times, and on many nights I would wait for her at the stage door and we would go to dinner afterward. When Julia was growing up, I was responsible for making sure that she knew her material and driving her to her auditions. My heart was so full when she said, ‘I want you to be my escort at the Tonys.’ Now when she’s in New York, she meets me at the stage door.”

That begs the question: What's his dream role? “That’s hard to say. I think my dream role has not been written or produced yet. With the new Broadway season coming up and the season after that, there will be all kinds of new shows and new roles. That would be the next dream on my bucket list, to create a new role in a new show.”

He’s in the right place to do it. “The whole theater world comes to audition people in New York,” Lester says. “I knew that if I was going to work anywhere in the country in the theater, I had to be here. All those years we were living in L.A., my wife and I had always dreamed of working at the Old Globe in San Diego, which does all of its casting in New York. And when Kelly got cast in a show at the Old Globe last year, she was here in New York.”

For her Old Globe debut, Kelly played Fräulein Schneider in Cabaret—a part she first performed at the La Mirada Theatre in 2018 and more recently at the Asolo Repertory Theater in Sarasota, Fla., in 2022. Life is a cabaret, indeed: “Is it ironic? Is it fate? Who knows?” Lester says with a laugh. “Cabaret has been very good to us.”