This Broadway Tenor Chose the Prophet Joseph Over Phantom of the Opera (with Dallyn Vail Bayles)

The phone call came right as rehearsals were about to start. On the line was New York, offering a spot on the national tour of Phantom of the Opera. For a Broadway tenor, that is the call you wait your whole career to get. Any performer would say yes. He said no.

The performer was Dallyn Vail Bayles, and the thing he chose instead was a pageant in Nauvoo, Illinois, where he would play the Prophet Joseph Smith. Today he is a recording artist and an assistant professor of theater at Southern Virginia University. That decision, and others like it, tell you more about him than any resume could.

In a recent episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Dallyn to trace the faith behind a career that began in a town of 800 people and reached Carnegie Hall. It is a story about talent, but mostly it is a story about what he was willing to give up.

A Small Town and a Big Stage

Dallyn grew up in Green River, Utah, a town of about 800 people. His graduating class was 14 students. There was a high school musical, but only because of one gifted music and drama teacher, Jessica Jenkins, who took him to see the Les Mis touring company in Salt Lake City when he was in ninth grade. He calls it a turning point.

Sitting in that theater, he realized two things at once. People could do this for a living, and stories told well could lift an audience the way that night had lifted him. He wanted to sing and act in a way that built people up and let them feel the Spirit of God. That desire, more than ambition, is what he says set his course.

The road out of Green River ran through BYU, a mission, marriage to his wife Rachel, and a long stretch of wondering if performing was really what the Lord wanted for him. The answer, when it came, arrived soon after he and Rachel married and prayed about it together. Both felt he should pursue it. From then on, they made those calls as a team.

The Apostle on the Set

While filming the Joseph Smith movie, in which he played Hyrum Smith, Dallyn had an experience that reset how he thought about his gifts. He recalls an apostle coming onto the set, gathering the cast, and opening with a line no actor wants to hear. You do not have the talent to tell this story.

Then, Dallyn says, the apostle finished the thought. None of us do. The story of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ is too great for any performer to carry on skill alone, so the work has to rely on the Lord. For Dallyn, that landed as more than a note on acting. It became a way of understanding every role.

What mattered was not whether he could deliver a great performance. It was whether an audience could see, in his eyes and his bearing, that he actually believed. A mentor named David Warner had told him something similar years earlier: that his real talent was his soul, and that he should be able to preach a sermon as well as he could sing.

The Tour He Turned Down

That framework was tested when the Phantom of the Opera tour called right as the Nauvoo Pageant was about to begin. On paper it was no contest. A national tour is a career move. A pageant is not the kind of credit you put on a resume. Dallyn wanted to serve, prayed hard, and felt the Lord hand the choice back to him: what do you want to do?

He chose the pageant. He called some very confused casting directors in New York and told them he was staying. And the experience turned out to be one of the great blessings of his life. He and Rachel played Joseph and Emma, a married couple portraying a married couple who had carried each other through more than most people ever face.

The timing mattered in a way he did not expect. A strained season had come between him and Rachel, and three summers of telling Joseph and Emma's story together healed it. He came away certain that Joseph was a prophet, that Emma was essential to what Joseph accomplished, and that no one is meant to walk the covenant path alone.

An Abrahamic Sacrifice

The hardest choice came later, in New York. The Phantom tour had kept Dallyn on the road for weeks at a time, and the next round of work would pull him away from his young family for months. He had a newborn he wanted to know. He describes praying about it and hearing the Lord decline to spell out an answer, instead asking what he was going to do.

He and Rachel decided to leave a home they loved in New Jersey and move back to Utah, where he began teaching seminary. He calls it an Abrahamic sacrifice, a giving up of the career he had fought for. It felt, at the time, like he was ending the very thing he had worked his whole life to build.

What he could not see was the door about to open. Not long after, an opportunity came to take part in the most sacred work of his life as a performer, and he says nothing could have prepared him for it better than the years he spent teaching the gospel every morning. The blessing came because of the sacrifice, not in spite of it.

Why He Still Believes

Near the end of their conversation, Nathan asks the question the show is named for. After Broadway, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Tabernacle Choir, why does Dallyn believe? He does not reach for any of it. He borrows the words of Peter instead. To whom shall I go?

The Savior, he says, holds the words of eternal life. He is the one who has stayed with Dallyn, granted mercy he did not deserve, and never once left him. There is nowhere else to go, and no reason to want to. That is the same conviction that made a small pageant worth more than a national tour.

It is why, after a life of applause, the thing he most wants to hear is a different sentence entirely: well done, thou good and faithful servant. Home, for Dallyn, is not a stage. It is the presence of God, with his wife and family beside him, and he is trying to live now in a way that prepares him for it.

Key Takeaways

Dallyn's story is really about a series of choices most people never have to make so publicly. When we offer our talents back to God, he does more with them than we could alone, because the gift was always meant to point past us to him. Sacrificing a worldly win for a covenant can feel like loss in the moment, yet it often turns out to be the door to something better. Faith gets refined in the tension between what we want and what we have promised, and that pull is not a sign of weak faith but the place faith grows. A companion who seeks the Spirit can steady us when the world pulls hard, so the covenant we share becomes strength neither of us carries alone. And obedience still counts when the blessing we hoped for never arrives, because we stay with the Lord for who he is, not for what we receive.

Thank you for reading this week's blog post inspired by the Why We Believe show. If you are interested in more stories like this, you can check out our other blog posts and episodes at WhyWeBelieve.com.

Follow the Why We Believe Show: Website: WhyWeBelieve.com | YouTube: @WhyWeBelieveShow | LinkedIn: @Why-We-Believe-Show | Instagram: @WhyWeBelievePodcast

Follow Nathan Gwilliam: LinkedIn: @NathanGwilliam

Follow Dallyn Vail Bayles: Website: dvbayles.com | Instagram: @dallynvailbayles