The Broadway veteran remembers one moment that made the whole audience laugh
NEED TO KNOW
- Taye Diggs has one Broadway moment that sticks in his head from when he was in Wicked with then-wife Idina Menzel
- Diggs stepped in to play Fiyero in the beloved musical in December 2003 opposite Menzel’s Elphaba
- The actor spoke with PEOPLE about the moment at the opening night of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
The audience may have long forgotten, but there’s one stage mistake that sticks out in Taye Diggs’ mind.
At the opening night of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at The Barrymore Theatre in New York City on April 25, Diggs shares with PEOPLE one of his most “memorable moments” from his time on the Broadway stage.
“I was doing Wicked with my then-wife Idina [Menzel], and I was playing the Scarecrow and there was this moment when I’m supposed to swing out on stage and I’m supposed to throw the broomstick to Idina and I threw the broomstick and it almost went offstage,” Diggs recalls.
He tells PEOPLE that the blunder stunned Menzel — and the audience.
“Everybody laughed. I will never forget that,” he adds. “I was so excited to be in the show with my then wife and be the cool guy that comes swinging out. I threw the broom.”
Diggs got his start on Broadway as part of the ensemble in the 1994 revival of Carousel. Two years later, he got his breakout role as Benjamin Coffin III in the original production of Rent, which opened up doors for him to enter the world of television and film.
He temporarily joined the cast of Wicked in December 2003 as Fiyero alongside Menzel, who played Elphaba. The original cast also featured Kristin Chenoweth (Glinda), Joel Grey (The Wizard), Carole Shelley (Madame Morrible), Michelle Federer (Nessarose), Christopher Fitzgerald (Boq), William Youmans (Doctor Dillamond) and Norbert Leo Butz, who played Fiyero but had to briefly step away due to a back injury, passing the role to Diggs.
Diggs and Menzel were married from 2003 to 2014, and the pair share a son, Walker.
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While no stranger to the stage, Diggs recently told PEOPLE that when he returned to Broadway after a 10-year hiatus to play The Duke of Monroth in Moulin Rouge! The Musical, he was “way more scared than I thought I would be,” since “Broadway was where I got my start.”
“There’s nothing like being in front of a live audience, but it had been over 10 years since I’d been on stage, so I did not take into account the fear and the terror that I would go through,” he admits. “But once I was obviously well rehearsed and once you get out there, there’s no turning back, then I was able to appreciate why I’m there in the first place.”
“That love for theater, there’s nothing like it,” he continues. “I’d like to do more. I’m just gonna remember how scared I was that time to be prepared.”
