Sam Tutty arrived in New York in early October, unaware he was in for a rather rude weather awakening.
“It’s the coldest I’ve ever felt in my entire life,” the English actor says.
Tutty, the star of “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York),” has been surviving the New York winter with a team of humidifiers — and warmed by rave reviews for his Broadway debut. The West Sussex native stars as Dougal in the two-person show, which arrived on Broadway after runs off-West End, on the West End and in Cambridge, Mass. Finally, the New York-set show made its way to Broadway in November, at the Longacre.
The charmingly titled “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” follows Dougal, who flies to the city to attend his estranged father’s wedding. He is greeted at the airport by Robin, a native New Yorker who is the bride’s sister.
Tutty, 27, has starred as Dougal since the show’s off-West End run, in 2023.
“It was meant to be a six-week gig in a lovely theater called The Kiln in North London, in Kilburn,” he recalls. “And it just continuously blossomed and evolved into eventually what we know it to be today.”
He first learned of the musical in a “very boring way,” via an email to his agents. Immediately the challenge of doing a two-hander grabbed him.
“There was literally never going to be another person on stage other than Dougal and/or Robin. And I think that the notion of that was sort of quite alien to me,” Tutty says. “I really wanted to just dive into the harsh reality of that. And the fact that it’s really hard to understand the humor on the page, I was really interested to see where I was going to hypothetically pitch it and where it was going to go and end up.”
Christian Pitts and Sam Tutty in “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” at the Longacre Theatre.
Matthew Murphy/Courtesy of Two Strangers
Things don’t go as planned for Dougal pretty much from the moment he arrives in New York, and Tutty’s performance has the audience rooting for him through every song and scene.
“It’s just unashamed energy of him being himself,” he says of his character. “The thing I love about the show the most is that it’s just two people, two flawed human beings that you could pass on the street every day. And so to play that, just to play the stillness in a human and to play the stillness in a flawed character is really, really fun. To be still and to not have to become a particular nuance or specific character that everybody knows, like my choices are my own, that’s really exciting.”
Tutty first found himself drawn to theater while at school, when he realized he was both getting good grades in drama “and having a lot of fun with it.”
“And then I realized, ‘oh, this could be a job,’” he adds. He then began the process of auditioning, a demoralizing journey for many but one that proved to him that theater really was “something I wanted to commit my life to. And fortunately the industry thought the same.”
“Two Strangers” is decidedly a very New York play, and Tutty has felt the difference in performing for New York audiences after years in other cities.
“We did an open dress where we had a few invited guests come in who have had either familiar New York experiences or are themselves New Yorkers inherently, and they really made me realize that there are so many more jokes written into the text than even I knew. Any other audience that was seeing it, either they’re not really from New York or they don’t understand the humor of that joke. And it was really, really fun to uncover the final layer of this show,” he says. “This show feels like it belongs where it is now, which is home.”
