How Ali Louis Bourzgui of ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Became Broadway’s Breakout Star

The Who’s Tommy on Broadway ends with a “huge burst of energy,” both from the performers and also radiating right back at them from ecstatic-seeming audiences, Ali Louis Bourzgui said.

The 24-year-old actor—playing the title character, making his critically acclaimed Broadway debut—told The Daily Beast that after every show he leaves the stage, then cools down in his dressing room for around 15 minutes, shedding that night’s performance energies. After this, there is no chauffeured car home for theater’s breakout star of the season. Bourzgui (his name is pronounced “Ah-lee Lewis Borski”) tucks his tumbling mop of curly hair (“My identifier!”) under a baseball cap, puts on a mask, and heads, extremely anonymously, into the night. On his subway ride home to East Harlem he listens to music.

“I don’t mind it,” Bourzgui, a graduate of Ithaca College B.F.A. Musical Theatre program, said. “I don’t think of myself as any higher than anyone else. And I like the hustle and bustle of New York, that collective feeling of being part of a group of people doing their passions, working really hard at what we do. We’re all sharing it. Everyone’s going home at night, burnt out, but collectively, we have that feeling of ‘We all worked hard today.’ Being around that at the end of every day means I never feel alone in my feelings, that we’re all feeling this way.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.