If you were in the audience at ZACH Theatre for the one-night-only concert “A Little Bit of Broadway, A Whole Lotta Soul,” you already knew what you were getting — unless you didn’t. Kenny Williams and Roderick Sanford are Austin institutions, performers with decades of history on ZACH’s stages. The show made sure you were aware of this repeatedly.
Austin in 2026 is not the Austin of 1991, when Roderick Sanford first took the stage here and never left. The city has roughly tripled in population since then. A significant portion of the people sitting in the theatre on any given night probably arrived from somewhere else, and are still finding their way into the city’s cultural fabric. They’ve not had thirty years to accumulate the inside knowledge the performers seemed to assume was universal. Sanford addressed the crowd with the warmth and familiarity of a man welcoming his oldest friends back to the living room. The problem is that not everyone in the room was an old friend — and on a main stage at Austin’s premier professional theatre, that distinction matters. A concert that reads as a reunion for the initiated and a pop quiz for everyone else is a missed opportunity, no matter how affectionately intended.
Who Are These Men?
The short answer: two of Austin’s most durable musical theatre performers. Kenny Williams grew up in Austin, studied voice at the University of Texas, and spent nearly a decade performing on Broadway in New York City — including roles in Disney’s The Lion King and the world premiere of The Color Purple: The Musical, produced by Oprah Winfrey. National tours of Grease! and Smokey Joe’s Café followed before he returned home to Austin, where he has become a mainstay at ZACH and a solo recording artist. He currently tours internationally as lead singer of the iconic 1950s vocal group The Platters.
Roderick Sanford has been a fixture on Austin stages since 1991, when he arrived after graduating from Southwestern University. His ZACH credits are extensive: Ragtime, Rent, Dreamgirls, Porgy & Bess, and a decade-long run playing Marley and Fezziwig in ZACH’s beloved annual production of A Christmas Carol. He is also a B. Iden Payne Award winner — taking home Outstanding Actor in a Musical for Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues and an Outstanding Ensemble Performance award for Rent. Beyond the stage, he serves as music director and soloist at Unity Church of the Hills, where his gospel roots run deep.
The two have been performing together at ZACH for over three decades. ZACH’s Producing Artistic Director Dave Steakley has called them his artistic collaborators for thirty-plus years. That bond is audible in how they move through a set together — two men who have been trading verses, harmonies, and probably inside jokes since long before most of the audience took their seats.
The program ranged impressively across decades and genres. Nat King Cole. Stevie Wonder. Prince. Lionel Richie. From the soul side, the repertoire landed on familiar territory, the kind of songs that feel less like selections and more like touchstones. The Broadway material — drawn from Rent, Ragtime, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and Dreamgirls — grounded the evening in shows both men know from the inside. They have performed in several of these productions. It showed.
The audience responded with the kind of enthusiasm that only comes when a room recognizes itself in the material. Decades of accumulated affection for these performers, for these songs, for this stage, were all in the room at once. It was, for the ZACH faithful, a reunion as much as a concert. For everyone else, it was a lesson in how quickly you can feel like a tourist in a city you actually live in.
Kenny Williams is simply something to hear. His tenor voice carries a silky ease that recalls the best of the American songbook tradition — warm, controlled, and able to move between registers the way a pianist moves between keys without apparent effort. When Williams was on, the room went quiet in the way that happens when an audience collectively decides to stop doing anything except listen. His Broadway pedigree is not decorative. It is present in every phrase he shapes, every held note, every choice he makes about where to land and where to let go. He is the kind of performer who reminds you why live music exists.
Sanford is a different story, and an honest review requires saying so. His baritone carries genuine warmth, and his connection to the material and to his audience is evident and real. But his pitch wanders more than it should have for a performer of his experience and standing. There were moments where the tuning drifted in ways that were difficult to set aside. His between-song patter, clearly a beloved feature for longtime fans, ran long enough that it occasionally felt more like filling time than building intimacy. The jokes, even the self-deprecating ones about his own talkativeness, landed unevenly. For an audience already inside the circle, this likely felt like exactly what they came for. For newcomers, it was a harder sell.
None of this diminishes what Sanford has built over thirty-plus years in this city. His record speaks for itself, and the audience that has grown up watching him clearly adored him. But a concert review is a record of a single night, and on this one, Williams carried the heavier musical load — while Sanford carried the room, for the room that already knew him.
If you are already part of the ZACH community — if you have watched these two men age gracefully through dozens of productions, if you have the Marley costume memorized and can finish Sanford’s sentences — this concert was made for you, and it delivered everything you wanted. The love in the room was real, and it ran both ways.
Even if you moved to Austin in the last decade which statistically describes a large and growing share of most audiences, the evening still had something worth having: a master class in what Kenny Williams does with a song, and a window into a community that has been building something remarkable on this stage for thirty years. But ZACH is not a private club. The best argument for programming like this is that it brings people in. That works best if the show is designed to meet them at the door rather than assume they’ve been coming since 1994.
Find Kenny Williams & Roderick Sanford
Kenny Williams
Website: kennywilliamssings.com
Instagram: @kennywilliamssings
Live performances: Parker Jazz Club, Jazz Texas, and Eddie V’s in Austin
Roderick Sanford
Facebook: Roderick Sanford
His band The Atlantics: theatlanticsaustin.com
Sunday performances: Unity Church of the Hills
For upcoming ZACH Theatre events: zachtheatre.org