In his Broadway debut, Brent Comer (’19) originated the role of eldest brother Darrel Curtis in the Tony award-winning musical The Outsiders.

“It’s a weird, unique life,” said the Frederick, Maryland, native. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Only two months after graduating from JMU, Comer landed his first professional role. While subletting an apartment from another JMU alumnus, Comer joined the ensemble cast of the 2019 Broadway national tour of Les Misérables. It was a moment he later described to The Breeze as the feeling of flying. 

“I got the call in the middle of that restaurant, that I had gotten the job,” Comer was quoted as saying. “I went out on 8th Avenue — I think it was 34th and 8th — and I was screaming in the middle of the street. I stopped traffic, and I started screaming.”

Five years later, Comer would tell Broadway Buzz about a similarly surreal moment after performing with the cast of The Outsiders at the 2024 Tony Awards. 

“We were screaming and hollering, because that was the first Tony Awards performance for almost all of us, in our first Broadway show,” he told the website in December 2024. “What you were seeing was a bunch of people experiencing something very special for the first time. We recognized the privilege of that moment, whether the show won or lost, and we wanted to celebrate it.”

The Outsiders, which won a Tony for best musical, is a coming-of-age story based on S.E. Hinton’s novel of the same name and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film adaptation. Comer plays the eldest of three brothers who takes charge of his family following the sudden death of his parents in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma. It “seems like a thankless role,” Broadway Buzz explains, but Comer portrays Darrel as “the moral center” of his gang of Greasers.

And yet, Comer nearly gave up on acting before ever getting this far. In early 2020, when he was only a few months into his tour with Les Mis, the COVID-19 pandemic brought an abrupt end to the tour and to live theater. Comer moved home to Maryland to ride out the shutdown, eventually taking a sales job at McClintock Distilling in Frederick. Slowly, live theater made its return, but Comer’s search for new roles yielded little success, and he considered calling it quits. He was enjoying his work at the distillery, and he wasn’t sure what the future of live theater might look like. But then his agent called with an audition for the world premiere of a musical based on a best-selling novel, and Comer gave his theater dreams one final shot.

The Outsiders made its world premiere on the national stage at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California. From February to April 2023, Comer played Paul, a rich member of the Socs gang (short for Socials) and understudied as Darrel for Broadway regular Ryan Vasquez. The show prepared for its move to Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, and when Vasquez left to star in The Notebook on Broadway, Comer made a bid for the leading role.

His audition process involved several months of workshopping the role before he was hired. “I was sort of trying the character on for size,” he recalled. Casting for the show in general “was a very long process,” he said, but “I’m glad that I went through it.”

Comer first caught the acting bug in high school after he mistakenly signed up for a musical theater elective thinking it was a newscasting class. “It was a wild mistake,” he said. But he stuck with acting, performing as the Baker in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods in the Catoctin Mountain Players’ inaugural production. Two years later, he performed with the Maryland Ensemble Theatre as Prince Eric in an original adaptation of The Little Mermaid and as Melchior in the Catoctin Mountain Players’ production of Spring Awakening.

But it was while pursuing a degree in Musical Theatre at JMU that Comer became serious about performing. JMU was “the place that lit a fire under me,” he said. It made him “a very hungry, ambitious actor.”

Among his favorite memories was performing in a 2018 production of Into the Woods at the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts, this time as the Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince in what a reviewer from The Breeze called “a standout vocal performance.”

Comer is also proud of roles he played in the student-written show Still Alive and his first nonmusical play, The Pillowman. “I liked the challenge of doing a straight play, of not having any music to prop yourself on and diving into really beefy text,” he said. “I think that’s a great challenge as an actor.”

Additionally, he said JMU helped him test his limits as an actor. “The program gives you all the tools to make yourself the artist you can be,” he said. “You can make the program whatever you want for yourself, and that’s the best kind of program I think there is.”

Though he admits dancing isn’t among his strengths, Comer said his studies played a significant part in helping him land his leading role in The Outsiders. “It’s a very physical show, and I think JMU prepared me for that.”

In Comer’s fourth year at Madison, professor and musical theatre coordinator Kate Arecchi connected him with The LINK Program — an intensive workshop that included master classes for singers, dancers, and actors, and provided chances to meet choreographers, casting directors, and other industry experts. “It was an opportunity for me to be seen by agents and such,” he said. “And to get an idea of what tools I needed beyond my college education to be successful.”

Accepted into the first of six cohort groups, Comer later secured professional representation through a musical showcase that JMU offered at Manhattan-based The Growing Studio International. Then, after graduation, he moved to New York City. “I was eager to get there,” he said. “I wanted to take all the things I had learned, [and] I certainly did my best.”

Now living in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, Comer expects his role as Darrel to continue until next spring — or until the musical stops selling seats. Beyond that, he said, “I’m auditioning for things, and I’m open to new opportunities.”

“The dream was just to be a working actor,” he said. “If you can do that, you’re in good shape.”