What Drove This Broadway Star During The Pandemic?

Before March 12, 2020, before Covid-19 forced Broadway to shut down, Sharon Wheatley would most likely be blissfully performing in the hit show Come From Away six days a week.

Wheatley is an original cast member of the life-affirming, Tony-winning gem of a musical about the passengers on the 38 planes who were stranded in Gander and the Newfoundland residents who, in addition to food and shelter, offered extreme kindness and much more. Wheatley has played Diane and other characters since Come From Away’s 2015 world premiere in La Jolla. She performed on the Tony Awards. She is on the show’s original cast recording.

Yet in the midst of the pandemic there was no performing in Come From Away which was so embedded in her DNA. Wheatley and her family—which included her youngest child, Wheatley’s new wife, two dogs and two cats and the contents of a storage space—ended up in a 30 foot RV criss crossing around the United States, she knew that she had to write about the experience. “It was just too weird of a story to go untold,” she shares.

Faced with the challenge of safely delivering her child to Southern California, Wheatley and her wife, Broadway stage manager Martha Donaldson became first-time RV users. Along their journey they discovered majestic mountaintops, countless national parks, harrowing highways, adventures of a lifetime and the joy of connecting with themselves and one other in ways they never imagined.

Wheatley’s odyssey is richly chronicled in her new book, Drive: Stories from Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere. “This book is my family legacy,” says Wheatley who has the distinction of being the only actress to appear in Cats, Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. She is also the author of her deeply moving memoir about her childhood and journey to become a performer, ’Til The Fat Girl Sings.

“My parents believed in looking at hard times through a positive lens, calling everything an “adventure.” And as much as it annoyed me as a kid, when the pandemic hit I knew it was time for me to pass this “glass is half full” kind of thinking on to my kids,” she says. “They say necessity is the mother of invention, in this case, necessity was the mother of adventure.”

What an adventure it was. A gifted storyteller, Wheatley offers a feast of delicious experiences. Not only does she recount the family’s wild ride navigating an RV, she also treats the book as a memoir sharing stories about her parents, meeting her wife Martha, the joy of getting cast in Come From Away and coming back to Broadway after the shutdown.

In one poignant passage Wheatley, who at this point in the book is in the RV with her two children, describes her “impulsive” decision to head 90 miles off course in the middle of South Dakota so they could experience the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet. She fittingly calls this chapter “Ma.”

Wheatley, who spent her childhood reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, and then later read Prairie Fires as an adult to further her Little House education, believed this particular stop was self-serving. “As a mom I wanted to do what I thought my kids would enjoy, and they were not passionate about the Little House series, so this decision was a hard one,” she explains. “It felt selfish.”

It wasn’t lost on Wheatley that she was driving her brood in their own modern covered wagon through the prairie grasses. “I was asking them to be bored for a while so I could follow my passion,” shares Wheatley. What she discovered is that her kids were totally taken by the homestead.

“The surprise for all of us was—they loved it,” she adds. “They ran around, caught snakes and played with the barn kittens. They did the laundry and hung it out to dry. We contemplated the pros and cons of a dugout vs a shanty. My younger child drove a horse and buggy all around the grounds, alone!” That experience provided some of the most profound learning for Wheatley. “What I thought was for me became something for us,” said Wheatley. “And we all agreed it was our best day of the trip.”

Jeryl Brunner: Can you talk more about what inspired you to write Drive?

Sharon Wheatley: The entire Broadway industry was shut down for 18 months. To go from working six days a week to doing nothing is hard on a person like me, I needed to do something. Many people in my industry felt the same way, which I realized when my social media feed was full of people recording new songs they’d written, or running playwriting groups. Social media can be an inspiring place.

We are a group of people with a lot of drive. I don’t play guitar or write poetry, but I am pretty good at capturing a moment in time in a book. When my life took a funny turn and I somehow ended up in a 30 foot RV barreling across the country rather than putting on my costume in my dressing room, I knew I had to write about it.

Brunner: You have said that Drive is also a record of what happened in your industry.

Wheatley: My book starts and ends the same way everyone’s did if they were working on Broadway. I chronicle what happened on Broadway as the pandemic loomed and the shows shuttered, and we end with the curtains going back up. What my family did in the middle—while we were waiting for the curtains to go back up on Broadway—was the inspiration for Drive, and my version of a pandemic pivot.

Brunner: During the shutdown what did you miss most about Come From Away?

Wheatley: I missed my castmates. Most of us have been together since 2017. And many of us have been doing the show since 2015. They aren’t just my castmates, they are my chosen family. More than that, I missed having a purpose. Come From Away is more than a show. It’s a kindness movement. Being a part of that is a great feeling. We show 1000 people every night how to be nice to people. I missed having that purpose.

Brunner: What was your process writing Drive?

It’s a funny thing—my day gig—yes, I am calling my Broadway show my day gig—involves an audience that watches me work in real time, and gives me feedback immediately. I sing, they clap.I crack a joke, they laugh. That kind of thing.

I love doing that, too, I love the immediacy of it and the crackle of energy in the air. But my very favorite place to be is alone with my computer and a good cup of coffee. If I have a window with a view and my wife in the other room doing something that makes her happy, well, that is just heaven.