Jerad Bortz could’ve just given up. Instead, he turned tragedy into art and charity.
The 41-year-old Latrobe-area native spent 16 years on Broadway in shows such as “Wicked” and “Mamma Mia!” as the ultimate Swiss-Army-knife actor, stepping into just about any role required of him on a given night. His life and career were upended in 2018 when he and his partner, Steven Skeels, were involved in a violent car accident that left Mr. Bortz with permanent spinal cord damage and no sensations or motor functions from the waist down.
It’s taken a lot of time and rehabilitation, both physical and mental, for Mr. Bortz to become as comfortable as can be expected of him with his new circumstances. He was able to go through such an intense adjustment with Mr. Skeels by his side and the constant support of the Broadway community, who rallied around their friend in his greatest time of need.
Mr. Bortz is now at a place where he’s ready to give back to the theater world for all it’s done for him. He enlisted a few of Broadway’s brightest stars to record “THANKFUL: An Album for Jerad Bortz,” released Nov. 27 and featuring original songs written by Mr. Skeels. Proceeds from the album go toward Mr. Bortz’s ongoing medical needs; The Actors Fund, which supports entertainment-industry workers; and Canine Companions for Independence, which trains service dogs and helps provide them for people with disabilities.
“The whole impetus of this album is that it’s so much easier to give than to receive,” Mr. Bortz told the Post-Gazette. “The amount of financial help I received from friends was huge. So the idea of this album was to give back to organizations.”
The album features 22 tracks performed by such Broadway luminaries as Christopher Jackson (“Hamilton”), Alex Brightman (“School of Rock”), Megan Hilty (“Noises Off”), Ben Vereen (“Pippin”), Ali Stroker (“Oklahoma!”) and folks he met during his stint with “Wicked” such as Stephanie J. Block, Shoshana Bean and Norbert Leo Butz, all of whom recorded their tracks for free, according to Mr. Skeels.
As Mr. Bortz put it, the talent involved in “THANKFUL” was “an embarrassment of riches.”
“The Broadway community was there from the word go,” he said. “These people are huge players in the world of entertainment. The fact we were able to get to them all and they were so enthusiastic about it, it was incredibly humbling and touching.”
Mr. Skeels, who met Mr. Bortz in 2001 while doing a three-week Christmas show in Charleston, S.C., echoed that sentiment about the kindness of those Broadway stars: “It really, really did get us through ... some dark nights and weeks and months. Having all these people there for us helped through the really hard moments.”
He said the album is about “hope and love and possibility,” and Mr. Skeels was just glad to be involved in a project like this, “especially when it’s giving back to someone I love so much.”
Both men hope “THANKFUL” will be an unequivocal force for good, especially during a global pandemic that has left anyone involved in live theater scrambling for answers. “Raising this money right now, the Actors Fund needs it more than ever,” Mr. Skeels said.
Acting has been Mr. Bortz’s passion since he was a kid in Western Pennsylvania auditioning for a local production of “Jack and the Beanstalk” or working at theaters in Ligonier and Greensburg. He began acting professionally at 15 with a job at Idlewild amusement park in the Laurel Highlands that had him working six days a week doing eight shows a day.
He credits his parents and childhood in Pennsylvania for instilling in him the kind of work ethic typical of Keystone State residents.
“That’s what live theater is,” Mr. Bortz said. “Unlike movies and TV, theater really is day after day after week after month after year. That sort of blue-collar work really appealed to me. I like working hard.”
Although he wanted to attend Carnegie Mellon University’s prestigious School of Drama, he ended up getting his degree in musical theater from Ithaca College in New York state. After graduating in 2001, he got his first Broadway gig the next summer with “Mamma Mia!” where he acted as an “internal swing,” meaning he was capable of filling nine roles in the ensemble and two of the leads when needed.
That versatility is what helped land him a role with “Wicked” in 2005 doing the same sort of thing with that show’s entire male ensemble. For a time, he had the rare experience of being in “Mamma Mia!” and “Wicked” simultaneously while the former was searching for his replacement. He stayed with the Broadway cast of “Wicked” from 2005 to 2018, with a brief 2007 dalliance in “The Pirate Queen,” a show that closed after only two months.
Then, disaster struck on that drive to his house in the Poconos Mountains — a mere 4 miles from the destination. Mr. Skeels said he suffered some brain bleeding that didn’t require surgery, plus some neck and wrist complications. Mr. Bortz doesn’t remember the accident, but he was told it was a single-car crash that forced his vehicle to flip, fracturing his vertebrae and leaving him wheelchair-bound and with no feeling in his fingers, as well.
“There’s no point where you arrive at [being] fully OK with it,” he said. “It’s a process of mourning the loss of so many things. ... The shock of the loss didn’t really start to trickle in until after I was out of rehab and looking at the world and my new abilities and thinking, ‘How the hell am I going to do this?’”
He’s now at least to the point where he can focus on a project such as “THANKFUL” and all the good he hopes it will do for him and the Broadway community. He was especially heartened by the involvement of Ms. Stroker, who also must use a wheelchair and broke barriers for disabled people on the stage, including with her Tony-winning performance in 2019’s Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!”
“As soon as the accident happened, Ali ... was always available if there was anything she could do to help,” Mr. Bortz said. “... She’s such an amazing force of talent and person. To see her as a representative of what’s possible has been amazing.”
As the title of the album suggests, Mr. Bortz is just thankful that Broadway royalty such as Ms. Stroker didn’t forget about him after his life-changing event, and he sees others continuing to invest time in him as a reflection of the kind of person he always strived to be.
“It’s been a huge lesson for me, that people show up and are doing this for me, as I’ve tried to live my life that way,” he said. “It really feels like a lot of love.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxel222.
First Published: February 28, 2021, 11:30 a.m.