17 Things About Rob McClure, so You Can Never Again Say You Know Nothing About Him

You know what’s slightly weird to us? That every single article about Rob McClure, the star of Chaplin on Broadway, gets really into the fact that he’s a relative unknown. It’s like we’ve all slid down a bizarro universe wormhole where no one realizes that this is Broadway, and in some neighborhoods of America and planet Earth, little girls don’t exactly have posters of Cheyenne Jackson pinned next to those dweebs from One Direction. Besides, even here in New York, the importance of being known is sort of relative. Until he pole danced atop a riser in New Balance sneakers, you looked at headshots of Aaron Tveit and thought, “Who the hell is that guy and why is he not Gavin Creel?”

Bottom line: Now we’re going to tell you some stuff about brown-eyed, Jersey-born, cute-as-a-button Rob McClure, so we can all move on. Maybe then we’ll all be forced to learn some even more important things about him – like his favorite color, and his favorite mid-to-late-nineties pop song — which we will definitely ask him about if we ever get the chance.

• He lives in Philly, not NYC, where he and his wife own — and are currently renovating — a house.
• He was in Avenue Q on tour and on Broadway, but he got his first glowing New York City reviews in a 2011 Encores! staging of a Frank Loesser obscurity called Where’s Charley? Charles Isherwood swooned his face off.
• He’s from New Milford, New Jersey
• He’s 5’7″.
• He’s mostly untrained.
• He played the lead in Chaplin at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2010, when the show was called Limelight.
• He had six callbacks for the role.
• He’s married to actress Maggie Lakis, who was also in the touring company of Avenue Q. As an aside, we sort of love the description of her audition for Stephen Oremus, which was captured in the New York Times in 2007.
• Even though he and Maggie were in Avenue Q together, they actually met in a regional production of Grease in 2005. She played Frenchie and he played Doody. (Aaw!) He proposed on stage after a tour performance of Avenue Q where she went on as Kate Monster.
• He has two sisters. His dad is a stock trader and his mom is a recruiter in the medical industry.
• In high school, he considered playing professional golf as a career.
• He’s 30.
• When he was in high school, he wrote a musical called The Bagel Factory about his job, which was working in a place called The Bagel Factory.
• As a senior in high school, he won the Paper Mill Playhouse’s Rising Star award, which he once described as winning, “a high school Tony Award.”
• He used to audition for shows with “This Is the Moment” from Jekyll & Hyde. As one does.
• He was the last actor to play Princeton in Avenue Q on Broadway. Before he was cast in that show, he had no previous professional experience as a puppeteer.
• You can follow him on the Twitter.