Miles Jacoby ’07: On National Tour

5/3/2013

For the past six months, Miles Jacoby ’07 has performed on the biggest stages across North America—as a Wellesley native turned Jersey Boy. A recent Yale graduate living in New York City, he was cast as Bob Gaudio in the First National Tour of the Broadway hit Jersey Boys and the role has taken him from Vancouver to Boston and back to San Francisco with a half dozen cities in between. Despite his professional success and travels across the country, he is quick to remember his roots on the Rivers stage.

Before his big break in Jersey Boys, Jacoby spent a year in New York acting in off-off-Broadway productions at the Flea Theater, auditioning as much as possible, and learning a few difficult lessons about the sometimes tricky world of casting.

“The first year is tough, but I think it’s about realizing that everything you’re doing helps you move toward your end goal,” Jacoby said. “The biggest lesson I learned in New York is that things do happen for a reason. You have to be very tenacious and you have to push through.”

Propelled by this tenacity, Jacoby connected with a casting director he met in a class, sang for her, and she called him for an audition. The final decision for the role came down to him and a couple of other actors, and in the end, he didn’t get it.

Luckily, the casting director called him back again—this time for a lead role in the Jersey Boys tour. They needed a young, tall, and talented singer to play Four Seasons songwriter Bob Gaudio, and the 23-year-old, 6-foot-4 Jacoby fit the bill perfectly. Weeks later, Jacoby was touring as the rookie cast member in one of the most popular Broadway musicals this decade—singing catchy Four Seasons hits nightly for energized audiences across the country.

During the tour’s stop in Boston, Jacoby took time to visit his alma mater and spoke to current students about his experiences as an actor, including his acting debut on stage at Rivers. When he was in sixth grade, drama advisor Juliet Bailey asked the 11-year-old Jacoby to play “young Pip” in the Upper School’s production of Great Expectations.

“It was my first time ever acting,” said Jacoby, who had already been on stage in several dance performances by that point. “It introduced me to the next step of performing and I remember just falling in love with it. Suddenly I felt like I had this artistic outlet that I wanted to explore.”

As the son of English teacher Jennie Hutton Jacoby, his connection with Rivers began long before his initial days as an actor.

“I grew up here,” Jacoby said. “I remember sitting in the back of my mom’s classroom as a five-year-old, eating Ritz crackers and listening to discussions of The Odyssey and the final chapters of The Great Gatsby. My mom clearly did not expect that I'd remember Gatsby's final moments when I read the novel as her student twelve years later.”

Later, as a Rivers student, Jacoby exceled in both academics and the arts. In between nurturing a love of science, playing drums in the Upper School jazz band, and serving as a student adviser, he found time for starring roles in productions like Footloose, Merchant of Venice, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, among others. He was also the Massachusetts winner of the annual English-Speaking Union National Shakespeare Competition and went on to perform in the national competition in New York City.

“All these different elements and interests fed into my thirst for theater,” he said. “The fact that I was able to learn how to express myself as an artist in a well-rounded sense was really important.”

Throughout Upper School, the prizes he received were as varied as the roles he played. As a junior he was awarded the Harvard Club Prize and the Rensselaer Science Medal. Then, as a senior, in addition to being the graduation speaker and a member of the Cum Laude Society, he walked away with the Faculty, English, Performing Arts, and Science prizes.

While at Yale, Miles performed in over 20 productions and workshops during his four years, and had five mainstage roles including the Wolf/Prince in Into the Woods, Jerry Lukowski in The Full Monty, and Roger Davis in RENT. He served as vice-president on the executive board of the Dramat, the university’s dramatic association, and received one of the school’s top drama awards before graduating cum laude with distinction with a bachelor’s degree in theatre studies.

Clearly, well-rounded is an accurate description of Jacoby’s experiences thus far—his acting career has already taken him from young Pip to music legend Bob Gaudio. At the close of the Jersey Boys tour, he will be back in New York ready to search for his next big role, whatever it may be.

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