Applications are still open for Arts Camp and Arts Academy. Programs fill quickly—submit your app today!
Grammy Award-winning Broadway performer Sydney James Harcourt set to star in the Interlochen Shakespeare Festival
Harcourt, an original cast member of "Hamilton", will play the title role in "Othello" at the 2022 Interlochen Shakespeare Festival.
Sydney James Harcourt
Sydney James Harcourt in Hamilton
Sydney James Harcourt, a Grammy Award-winning Broadway performer and film and television star, will appear in the title role of Othello at the 2022 Interlochen Shakespeare Festival. Performances are July 1 & 2 and July 8 & 9 at 8 p.m. in the Upton-Morley Pavilion at Interlochen Center for the Arts.
“I’m simply honored and thrilled to be involved,” said Harcourt. “To perform such a magnificent work, with the highly esteemed Interlochen Shakespeare Festival, at the greatest training facility for young artists in the world? It is such stuff, as dreams are made on.”
An original cast member of Hamilton, Harcourt received a Grammy Award for his feature performance on the show’s soundtrack and plays the character Phillip Schuyler, the doctor, and an ensemble member in the show’s Disney+ version. (He went on to play the part of Aaron Burr on Broadway after Leslie Odom Jr’s departure in 2016.) The versatile singer, actor, and dancer also starred on Broadway in American Idiot and The Lion King. Among his many off-Broadway roles, Harcourt played the part of Joe Scott in the critically acclaimed original cast of Bob Dylan’s Girl From the North Country at the Public Theatre, for which he received a Drama Desk nomination. He has also appeared in several popular television series, including Blue Bloods, NCIS, Elementary, Younger, The Good Wife, Law and Order, and Enchanted.
This year sees Sydney starring in Netflix’s highly anticipated original series Castlevania: Nocturne (fall 2022); rapping and singing in the musical animated documentary The Outlaw Ocean (2022)—based on the New York Times bestseller of the same name; and he is the lead actor in the upcoming musical feature film The Mess Inside (2022). Sydney is currently recording an album with fellow Interlochen Arts Academy classmate and multi-platinum songwriter/producer Jonathan Perkins, and is a lead vocalist in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series.
“I am thrilled to have the multitalented Sydney James Harcourt join the Shakespeare Festival to play the title role in Othello! This will be a special opportunity for our audiences to see an incredible performer take on one of Shakespeare's greatest characters,” said William Church, Interlochen Director of Theatre and Artistic Director of the Interlochen Shakespeare Festival. “Sydney brings power and charisma to all of his work on stage—a perfect fit for Othello. He will be joined by a strong cast of Interlochen faculty and alumni to bring this thrilling tragedy to life under the stars in our beautiful outdoor venue.”
Harcourt, a former All State camper and Interlochen Arts Academy graduate, is a frequent guest artist and collaborator at Interlochen. He delivered the commencement address to the Arts Academy class of 2021, and in 2020 he served as a producer and director of ONE, a multidisciplinary work that was performed by Arts Academy students at Miami’s New World Center. He also collaborated with Arts Academy students on an original multidisciplinary work titled Resolve that was performed at New York City’s National Sawdust in 2019.
