"Coram Boy" has everything you might ask for in a Broadway spectacle.
It's an epic melodrama set in 18th-century England, with operatic helpings of brutality, yearning and love. It features unspeakable crimes (revealed with heartbreaking flair), a flying angel, a cleverly simulated underwater sequence, and a man in a white wig conducting an orchestra of seven and choir of 20 singing George Frideric Handel.
The only thing missing from "Coram Boy," which cost more than $5 million to mount, is an actual boy. Actresses are cast in all the boy parts in the play, now at the Imperial Theater.
"Maybe if I was a bloke I wouldn't have done that," said "Coram Boy" director Melly Still, who also staged its 2005 premiere at Britain's National Theater. "I wanted to work with an ensemble. All the actors would play a multitude of parts. That rather precluded using teenage boys."
Newcomer Xanthe ("ZAN-thee") Elbrick, a lithe and cerebral 28-year-old who grew up in Ipswich, England, and upstate New York and studied at the New School for Drama in Manhattan, plays the two lead boys.
In Act 1, she's Alexander Ashbrook, a serious-minded teenager who loves to sing and yearns to compose. She plays Alexander as stiff and self-conscious, with an upper-class accent and dour mien. His chief problem is that his lordly father (David Andrew MacDonald) is dismissive of his musical ambitions and insists he prepare to take over the family estate in Gloucestershire as soon as his voice changes.
Alexander's voice breaks while he's singing. In a memorable sequence on the show's revolving stage, an adult actor, Wayne Wilcox, takes over the part from Elbrick in midsong.
In Act 2, Elbrick plays 8-year-old Aaron, who lives in an orphanage and who, like Alexander, is nuts about music. As Aaron, unlike Alexander, Elbrick is free and loose, jumping and playing.
"One has everything, one has nothing," Elbrick said of the two boys in an interview at the Times Square office of the show's press agent. "And the one who has everything is completely dissatisfied, and the one who has nothing is completely satisfied."
She said the 8-year-old is easier to inhabit, in part because she can play an 18th-century 8-year-old by mimicking a contemporary child.
But 15-year-olds are different. She can't walk New York's streets to research a 1750 teen.
"Today's 15-year-old is so in\fluenced by pop culture, it's impossible to use that as a case study for this role," she said. "That was a huge challenge."
Uzo Aduba plays Aaron's young sidekick in Act 2, an orphan named Toby. A Boston native, Aduba said she focused on Toby's circumstances, not his sex.
"I don't think girls and boys experience things differently," she said. "I found it more freeing to concentrate on Toby's life experiences: Being an orphan. Growing up without a mother. No roots."
The scariest aspect of "Coram Boy," Elbrick said, comes at the end of the show. The entire company sings the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's "Messiah."
"That's the first time I get nervous," she said. "We're just human beings singing a piece. It's an overwhelming thing."