Jeff Spevak

@jeffspevak1

The bouquet of black roses delivered to the ringmaster’s hotel room was certainly a hint that something was amiss. “That wasn’t a good thing at all,” Andrés Forero admits. Nor was the bomb threat called in to the hotel. Who was behind all of this? No one knew who for sure, but it likely had something to do with the complicated love triangle unfolding beneath the Big Top. “The music director was in love with the ringmaster and the ringmaster was in love with the lighting director,” Forero says.

Nevertheless, the show went on. A three-ring circus in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The band, including Forero and his drum kit, was balanced on rickety wood bleachers. “We saw the lighting director lurking about, with a microphone in his hand,” Forero says. “Then he jumps into the ring and starts beating the ringmaster over the head with it. Then the music director jumped over my cymbals to get into it. I saw this huge foot grazing my ear. He looked like an Olympic athlete. He was going over to protect his lover. I think he broke his leg when he landed, and he wobbled over to the fight.”

Forero played on with one hand, taking over conducting the band with the other. “Three guys are beating the heck out of each other while all these kids are watching,” Forero says. “They turned the spotlight on the band because it was the only thing working.”

That was Circus America, Forero’s first real music gig. Was this what it was going to be for this new graduate of Penfield High School, class of ’92? Three-ring brawls?

'Hamilton' and Tony Awards give theater geeks a dream

No, it would get better. Amazingly so, beyond Forero’s promotion to circus band musical director after his heroics that night in Wilkes-Barre. In the years since, Forero’s drums have driven high-profile musicals. He’s played on the kids’ television show The Electric Company. He’ll be featured on the rock band Phish’s next album.

Less than three months ago, he performed at the White House. “It was a very poignant moment,” Forero says. “Regardless of your political agenda, it’s an honor to be in such an important place. I can’t talk about it without being emotional about it.”

It was his current Broadway gig, his biggest role to date, that earned an audience with the president of the United States: Forero is the drummer in Broadway’s hottest ticket, and one of the most-groundbreaking musicals ever, Hamilton. A Pulitzer Prize winner for drama nominated in a record-breaking 16 categories at Sunday’s Tony Awards. Last week, the Hamilton soundtrack, on which Forero plays, went platinum, eclipsing 1 million units sold.

► 'Hamilton' raises ticket prices, doubles lottery seats

“I couldn’t have dreamed this up as a kid,” he says.

Realistically, no one could have dreamed back then of something like Hamilton, with its raps, hip-hop beats and Hispanic and black actors portraying the white men — some of whom were slave owners — who founded this country. It’s an 18th-century period piece that, in its racial reach, looks like 21st-century America.

“What’s written is genius in my opinion. It’s wonderful,” Forero says. “Today’s social climate really sort of feeds back and forth off of the story of the show. The way the characters are portrayed, it’s like looking through a different window of what the possibilities could be.”

Possibilities that include Forero, who grew up in what is very much 21st-century America as well: His parents were immigrants from Colombia, a broken family too poor to buy drums for their musical son.

Forero ascended to the heights of Broadway from the pit — that’s the dark hole in the front of the stage where the musicians sit. His first gig was a favor for a friend desperate for someone to substitute for him for a couple of weeks as the drummer on Jelly’s Last Jam, the musical featuring dancers Gregory Hines and Savion Glover. Then came In the Heights, an urban-themed Broadway hit, the first created by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda.

And as Miranda was readying Hamilton for the stage, he and musical director Alex Lacamoire asked Forero to play the drums in it as well. “I’d never heard the music. I didn’t know much about it, except it was about Alexander Hamilton,” Forero says. “But I told him a long time ago if he called, I’d do anything he asked.”

They sent him what’s known as “the book,” the detailed musical score that accompanies each instrument in the production.

“I was doing eight shows a week with The Book of Mormon, then from midnight to 6 or 7 I’d go into a studio and learn whatever it was they have given me,” Forero says. “New notes, or the actual book. I did that religiously, 16-hour days without exception. I never worked that hard in my life. I never prepared that hard for anything.”

Humble beginnings

Where did that work ethic come from? Forero saw it at home every day when he was growing up.

“When the split happened we sort of started over again,” Forero says of when Grace and Jaime Forero’s marriage ended; he figures he was 6 or 7 years old at the time. “We may have been poor in the technical aspect of the word, but we had so much because she worked so hard. We always had what we needed. She worked three or four jobs at the same time.” Now retired, Grace was a live-in nurse for the elderly. “She just built an incredible reputation, she was an incredible woman,” Forero says. “She would go from one client to the next, working 18 hours a day.”

English was the second language in that house, but music was up there pretty high as well. “When my folks were still married, there was always classical music around,” Forero says, remembering how he sat in front of the television, mesmerized by a public television broadcast of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue by Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould. “Bach just resonates with me, although maybe not in the way it did for Glenn Gould,” Forero says. “It was the way he played. He was a very strange individual. He sat very low, and he was a lanky, tall dude. It’s not how you would teach a student how to play piano, but it was how he did it.”

Forero tried to figure out how Gould did it on his father’s Yamaha organ. “By then I had so much in my brain musically, something was bound to happen,” he says. “But it didn’t happen with drums. It was guitar and piano.”

His musically happening brain was also absorbing his parents’ Latin, old soul and R&B favorites: Al Green, The Commodores, Earth, Wind & Fire. Three older brothers brought in albums by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.

“Then Rush,” Forero says. Grace bought her son a plastic portable record player at a garage sale for $3. The only playable album he had for it was Rush’s Permanent Waves. He listened to it relentlessly. “That changed the whole picture,” he says.

Like any kid, Forero pounded on anything at hand. “I probably got a pair of sticks or something like that in school, probably in the third grade,” he says. But once he got to high school, “I think that’s when the drums started.” Perhaps, he says, because there was a dearth of percussionists in the high school jazz band. “I don’t think any of the parents wanted to deal with the drums,” he says.

Ned Corman had known Forero as a middle-school music student. Now retired from Penfield High School, he’d show the kids the real jazz world by bringing in big-name players such as Paquito D’Rivera, Max Roach, Ron Carter and Steve Gadd to play fundraising concerts. “Ned and I had a great relationship, he was a wonderful mentor,” Forero says. “He and his wife, Linda, both provided something for me, coming from a broken home, that I unfortunately couldn’t get.”

A set of drums was one of the things out of reach.

“There was an advertisement for a drum kit for sale posted on the wall next to his office,” Forero says. One of Corman’s former students, Jeff Penney, was selling it. “Ned himself had put it up there. One day he saw me staring at it. He said, ‘One day, you’ll get some drums.’”

That day came quickly. “He knew everything about my life, everything going on, the financial struggles,” Forero says.

“There were all kinds of compelling reasons he deserved support,” Corman says. For one, “He was a really good player for someone his age.”

And another, “Growing up in Penfield, he was a Latino, and Penfield is a very vanilla place.”

“One day a check showed up at our house," Forero says. "When my mom and I saw it, we both agreed we couldn’t accept it. We drove to his house, apologized for not accepting it.

“He said, ‘They’re your drums. You’re gonna have them.’

“He went with me when we picked them up.”

On to Broadway

Graduating from Penfield, and after running away with the circus — “I needed a job to help out my mom” — Forero went to the Manhattan School of Music, got friendly with the drumming legend Roach and played with D’Rivera. Then the musicals started to hit. “I didn’t have a clue about what I was getting myself into,” he says of Jelly’s Last Jam. “I had to join a thing called a union. I had no sense of what a Broadway show paid. You don’t know how to set up something in a pit. It wasn’t perfect right away, believe me, but I worked really hard.”

After In the Heights, Miranda was gold, and the buzz followed Hamilton to its pre-Broadway run in a 230-seat space before anyone had even seen it. "The Public Theater was sold out before it opened," Forero says. "We’re all sort of looking at each other, pinching ourselves."

► MORE: Where to see 'Hamilton' (and when, in some cases)

And then on to the Richard Rodgers Theatre, "playing like the rock stars we emulate," Forero says. "It's a 1,300-seat auditorium, but sounds like twice that number of people." It's been on Broadway for only 10 months but some estimates see Hamilton as raking in $500,000 in profit each week, and that's before the touring companies hit the road.

Miranda made the cover of Rolling Stone, but Forero's happy he's on the cover of the May edition of Modern Drummer. “That means that something is happening right,” he says. “'This Broadway show that went platinum, and The Roots produced it?' That legitimizes for a kid what we are doing. If that’s all I did in my career, I did something spectacular."

It legitimizes a different way of thinking about the profession for music students, he says. “I think a lot of people have a wrong impression of being a musician. If your boyfriend is a musician, people are asking, are they gonna get a real job? I had to go out and get four other jobs, work the graveyard shift pumping gas, sleep four hours.

“Never in college did anyone ever say to me you could make money and have something called health benefits. All I ever heard was you’ve got to work really hard to be a jazz musician because there are a bunch of guys hungry to play. There was no education about, ‘Hey, you can be a studio musician,’ which I went on to do. I did a lot of television stuff. I feel a responsibility to help a lot of kids understand there’s something else.”

Life hits musicians with the same challenges that it throws at anyone else. After In the Heights, Forero was in a serious car accident; calling for almost four years of intensive physical therapy. He still has issues to this day. But at age 42, he’s got something else. It’s in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife, Jennifer, a dog and three creatively named kids: Miles Clouseau-Copeland Forero, Sabian Alejandro-Aarön Forero and Sophia Alhena-Rose Forero.

Sabian, that’s a brand of cymbals. Clouseau, as in The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau, for Forero’s youthful fascination with actor Peter Sellers.

Going to Broadway means “I’m back at home with my kids, seeing them grow," he says. "Getting to know the newborn daughter I didn’t know at all."

Hamilton is a happening. There’s the pre-show street show outside The Richard Rogers Theatre, where Hamilton cast and crew members create impromptu performances and offer $10 tickets; Alexander Hamilton is on the $10 bill, hence “Ham4Ham,” as they call it. Forero was working the chaotic Ham4Ham crowd when a guy pulled him aside and said he was a big fan of the musical. “He was so sweet,” Forero says. “He said, ‘My name is Trey, this is my wife and this is the rest of my band Phish.’”

Forero was busy — "Lin was waving at me to get over there" — and it hit him later: Trey Anastasio is the lead singer and guitarist of Phish, whose fans are as passionate about the rock band as Hamilton's fans are about the musical. “I have three of their albums, but I didn’t know what they looked like,” Forero says. “That night I sent an email and apologized. He sent one back and said, ‘I’m glad you didn’t know who I was,’ and invited me to play on three tunes on their new album. One was a 15-minute piece with classical percussion. Even though I double majored in college in classical and jazz, it’s been a while for me. Of course, I agreed to do it.”

Out came the cowbells and shakers as well. “We had such a synergy between us, near the end Trey said, ‘There’s only one song you haven’t played on.’”

So Forero’s on every song of the next Phish album.

Call it karma, or networking, or paying it forward. "You know, we’re gonna have to play this stuff live sometime,” Anastasio told Forero. Journey drummer Steve Smith watched the musical from the pit one night; now he and Forero are friends. Actor Michael Chiklis sat in the pit as well, recruiting Forero to play on an album he's releasing later this summer. Rush lead singer Geddy Lee came to a performance and gushed about the drum sound. “I said that was ironic," Forero says, "because Permanent Waves made me want to write music."

Those drums that Corman bought for the kid? They eventually made their way back to Penney, who gave his set to the late Rochester trumpeter Paul Smoker’s son Evan, who gave his set to a promising drummer at School of the Arts.

And Forero? He was inspired by musicians like D’Rivera, Roach, Carter and Gadd coming to the fundraisers at Penfield High School. Next year, Forero's the guest.

JSPEVAK@gannett.com