Signature Theatre’s Matthew Gardiner was determined to cast an actual jazz pianist in the lead role of his company’s 2016 production of Jelly’s Last Jam.
“Everybody thought I was crazy,” recalls Gardiner, 39, the theater’s associate artistic director at the time. “Everybody was like, ‘You’re never gonna find somebody.’ ”
The role of jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton, he explains, is usually played by a tap dancer. It has been ever since 1992, when the original Broadway part was created around the talents of late actor and dancer Gregory Hines.
Gardiner stumbled upon a video of D.C.-based jazz pianist Mark G. Meadows and asked him to audition for the part. Meadows declined, indicating he was busy recording an album and touring with his band. Plus, he wasn’t an actor, singer or tap dancer.
Unfazed, Gardiner appealed to mutual friends to convince Meadows to reconsider. An elbow-twisting campaign ensued, and a few months later, Signature’s six-week run of the Tony Award-winning musical—billed as a “sizzling memoir of pride, lust and a past denied”—launched Meadows’ musical theater career.
“After Jelly’s, my life changed,” says Meadows, 34, now living in New York City and serving as associate music director for the Broadway debut of The Outsiders, which opens in April. He’s also director of cabarets at Signature, and travels back to Arlington every month for rehearsals in season.
“I have trapped him in the world of musical theater,” Gardiner jokes. “Mark is the best. He’s a wonderful, musical genius.”
Meadows was born in D.C.’s Fort Totten neighborhood. His mother, Rosa Reeder, is a retired schoolteacher, and his father, Gabriel B. Meadows, is a gospel and jazz vocalist. His parents divorced when he was 5, after which he spent the school year living with his father in Richardson, Texas, and summers in the DMV.
“To be honest, I was forced into music,” Meadows says. “My dad had a rule. He would always say, ‘You can sit here, and you can practice for a half hour, or you can cry for a half hour—but either way, your butt’s going to be on the piano bench for a half hour a day.’ ”
Meadows didn’t love playing music at first, but he was good at it. When he was 5, his dad lied about his age to get him in with a prestigious piano teacher who only worked with kids 6 and older.
“My dad had a rule. He would always say, ‘You can sit here, and you can practice for a half hour, or you can cry for a half hour—but either way, your butt’s going to be on the piano bench for a half hour a day.’ ”
As an 8-year-old, he remembers visiting a white-tablecloth restaurant in San Francisco where his father knew the piano player. When the pianist went on break, his dad nudged him to play a song. The restaurant fell silent.
“When I was done, the entire place erupted with applause,” he says. “I had all these women coming up, bringing me $20 bills for this three-minute thing that my fingers did. Seeing the impact [music] could have on people made me realize how powerful this art form was.”
Meadows went on to study with Norah Jones’ piano teacher, Julie Bonk, attending the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, whose alumni also include Erykah Badu and Edie Brickell. “I still wasn’t sure whether or not I loved music,” he says. “It was almost like a chore that I had to do.”
In 2007, he headed to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, majoring in psychology with the goal of going to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist. He picked up a double major in jazz piano at the university’s Peabody Institute, but he still thought of music as little more than a side hustle.
“I grew up seeing the most amazing piano players who could barely drive their hoopty back home because they were just so poor,” he explains. “Making it as a musician is really tough. I had this fear that, as good as I could be, I still wouldn’t be able to provide [for] and support a family.”
His mindset finally started to shift when he graduated from Johns Hopkins in the spring of 2011 and was offered a graduate assistantship to earn a master’s degree at the Peabody. “It was basically a free ride to grad school to play music.”
Two years later, he had a graduate degree and a band—Mark G. Meadows & The Movement—and was playing regular gigs almost every night.
He met Claire Keane, an interior designer, while playing piano at the D.C. jazz club HR-57 (now closed). During a break, “they were playing, ‘L-O-V-E,’ the Nat King Cole tune, and I asked her if she wanted to dance,” he says. “We danced the night away. We are still having dance parties.”
Meadows proposed in November 2017 at D.C.’s Heurich House Museum, during a performance by the student vocal a capella jazz group the Mellow Tones, which he directed. The students sang, “Will you marry me?” as he got down on one knee.
He and Keane wed one year later at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where Meadows was a teacher. Today they have a son, Aiden, who is nearly 3.
Looking back on the behind-the-scenes maneuvers that led to his breakout role as Jelly Roll Morton, he marvels at the chain of events that unfolded. The woman who books talent at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts called him to ask if it was true that he had turned down an audition at Signature. She asked what he wanted to do with his career. He said he wanted, among other things, to play at Dizzy’s Club, which hosts jazz music at Lincoln Center.
“She said, ‘If you audition, I’ll give you a week at Dizzy’s,’ ” Meadows recalls. “Long story short, I did the impossible. I learned an entire script as a lead role, I learned all the piano parts by heart, I sang all the songs, I learned how to act. I did probably one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to do on a main stage in front of 200 people every single night.”
Playing Jelly Roll Morton—a visionary pianist, bandleader and famously egocentric composer who rose to fame during the Jazz Age—changed the trajectory of his creative life. “Since then, I’ve been immersed in the musical theater community. Everything is new, everything’s a discovery. I enjoy the fearlessness that it requires,” says Meadows, who has since served as music director for Signature productions of Ain’t Misbehavin’ (for which he also played keys) and The Color Purple.
When Gardiner stepped into the role of artistic director in 2021, he created a new position—director of cabarets—and hired Meadows to fill it.
“It’s my favorite place to work,” Meadows says. “It’s a community. They really, really actually care about the artists and the arts. Matthew Gardiner is always pushing the boundaries, always challenging whoever he works with to create something new—and he welcomes newness. To me, doing anything that is expected is boring. I want to create new works, and that seems to be the motto. Signature is reimagining what theater is.”
“To me, doing anything that is expected is boring. I want to create new works. That seems to be the motto [at Signature].”
Case in point: The cabaret series. The musical revues are offered at a lower price point than other productions and feature familiar songs in the American canon, from Motown hits and jazz standards by Ella Fitzgerald to the pop tunes of Burt Bacharach. The shows have become an entry point for theater fans who never knew they were theater fans.
“They get here,” Gardiner says, “and they’re introduced to the miraculous talents of people like Mark.”
The cabarets are fun collaborations, adds powerhouse soprano Nova Y. Payton, who has known Meadows since childhood (they grew up in the same D.C. neighborhood and attended the same church). Her Signature credits also include starring roles in Jelly’s Last Jam, Ain’t Misbehavin’ and The Color Purple.
“With the band [Mark] put together, it’s almost like a party,” Payton says. “It’s a reimagined version of the songs we have grown up with.”
You could say Meadows has many of the same outsize talents as the real Jelly Roll Morton—minus the ego.
“I really enjoy collaborating and I really enjoy making other people shine,” he says. “We find a little more magic in all of them.”
Wendy Kantor kicked off her new year’s resolution to see more live theater by chaperoning a third-grade trip to the Kennedy Center in January. She can’t wait to see more musicals at Signature Theatre.