Like mother, like son...like musical theater?
"I love it!" exclaims Langhorne's Chris Simcox, 19. "It's a passion!"
Move over, Fiddler; it's also a tradition.
The Neshaminy High School class act of 2023 has been named one of two winners of the recently awarded Neshaminy Valley Music Theatre scholarship — Feasterville's marvelous Marlene Moore, also of NHS, was the other recipient — keeping it all in the family in a way Archie Bunker would never have understood: The teen has much in common with his talented mom, besides sharing a first name (she's a Chris, too): She won an NVMT scholarship in the 1980s.
"It's in the gene pool," says the son of both making a splash on stage. "Her reaction? She's pretty excited."
Such drama is nothing new for the Simcox clan, where dad Donald is a painter. If a fiddler on the roof sounds crazy — no? — then another actor inside the Simcox house makes kind of sense. It's such a wonderful tradition kept up by kid Chris — and it hits home.
"Fiddler," he concedes, "is my favorite musical."
And it's all so very elementary.
"I started doing musicals when I was at Pearl S. Buck Elementary School," he said.
Toto, they're not in Neshaminy anymore: In the Levittown school, he triumphed as a champ chimp, portraying a flying monkey in a production of "The Wizard of Oz."
But it "wasn't until I got to Neshaminy High that I really knew that (musical theater) is what I wanted to do with my life. The school theater group showed their dedication to giving quality time and support."
Bravas, says Simcox, go to Kristin Nichols, his music teacher who also co-directs school musicals, and Gina Chiolan, the drama teacher, "who fostered what I wanted to do on stage."
Old men and the scenes? Early on, the young actor knew he had a talent for playing aging characters.
"I have a knack for playing old men," he says of such ageless characters as Mushnik in "The Little Shop of Horrors," the mayor of "The Music Man," Lazar Wolf in "Fiddler on the Roof" and Nostradamus in "Something Rotten!." "I guess I'm just an old soul."
But the local stage — Town and Country Players, Acting Naturally, Arden Theater — isn't the only locale for his heartfelt homage to histrionics. The teen has topnotch professional representation in New York, where he also has starred in productions of "The Last Boy" even as he's about to depart for adulthood.
And New York is perhaps the scene where he awaits his most important role to date, that of rising freshman at New York University, where Simcox starts this fall as a musical theater major, just one of 11 top training national academic institutions where this Langhorne luminary was accepted.
Having an aisle seat to success can be pricey, which is why he is especially grateful to NVMT, where he has also performed, for its tuition assistance.
Simcox yearns to explore the new city canvas of New York — he is also an artist — and, as nice a guy as he appears, has no fear of the reputedly cutthroat business he will one day be part of. Which goes a long way of explaining his attraction "to cuckoo characters" in the nest-like environs of the New York stage.
Anyone in particular? With razor-sharp wit, he cuts to the quick: "I would love to do Sweeney Todd," he declares of the Demon Barber of Fleet ...Street.
Michael Elkin is a playwright, theater critic and novelist who lives in Abington. He writes occasional columns about theater and the arts.
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