The dream of a life on Broadway can seem a million miles away to a theater kid in Colorado. In Erik C. Peterson’s case, it turned out to be a 5,000-mile gap that he closed in 24 hours flat.

Peterson, a 2018 graduate of Grandview High School in Aurora, was one day away from opening “Othello” for the 2022 Flagstaff (Ariz.) Shakespeare Festival when he was summoned to New York to audition for the runaway Broadway hit “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Casting agents wanted to see him in the Big Apple at 10 o’clock the very next morning – which was also opening night back in Arizona.

“So after my character (Roderigo) was killed off in our final preview, I drove to Phoenix to take a redeye flight to Newark (N.J.) to drive to this audition studio,” Peterson said. “I did the audition that morning. Then I drove to JFK Airport. Then I flew back to Phoenix to drive back to Flagstaff.”

He made it back just in time for the blood to start flowing in “Othello.”

“If there was one traffic jam,” he said, “I wouldn’t have gotten cast.”

He was cast, of course. But he was just about the last to find out.

Months later, the Broadway team asked Peterson to hop on for a Zoom session with “Harry Potter” dialect coach Liz Hayes. He thought it was another audition.

“I logged on and she said, ‘Oh, this is not an audition. This is a work session. Have you not spoken to your agent yet this morning? Because we offered you the part.’”

It was, to put it mildly, “incredibly surreal,” said Peterson, whose big Broadway break had come at age 22, just six months after graduating from Webster University in Missouri.

“Liz could tell that I was losing my mind a little bit. So she said, ‘I think we should end early so you can call your parents.’” So, he did. His grandparents, too. Peterson made his Broadway debut as Scorpius Malfoy, the pure-blood British wizard son of Harry’s long-time nemesis, Draco Malfoy, on Nov. 15, 2022.

Peterson spent last Thursday at his high school stomping grounds offering up encouragement and a living example of what is possible for Grandview’s current crop of theater students. It was part of a full day of activities that ended with his induction into the inaugural class of Grandview’s new Hall of Fame.

Peterson was honored alongside volleyball coach Patty Childress, major league baseball pitcher Kevin Gausman, 2021 WNBA Rookie of the Year Michaela Onyenwere and NFL linebacker Eddie Yarbrough. One of these inductees is clearly not like the others – although Peterson was, himself, a pretty mean baseball player in his time.

“When I saw who they were going to put into the school Hall of Fame, I thought, ‘No, no, no. We’ve got to get a performing artist in there, too’ – so I nominated Erik,” said retiring theater chair Brianna Lindahl, who is, herself, a legend in Aurora public education.

“I don’t ever assume any of my kids are going to make it to Broadway because it’s such a hard industry,” she added. “But Erik’s work ethic set him apart. He came in working 110% every moment. You don’t find kids like that very often these days.”

Peterson is a prime example of good things happening to good people. Ask him to tell you the worst thing he ever did in high school, and the wizard can’t even conjure up an invented answer.

“I was a real goody two-shoes,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think I ever even skipped a class.”

That work ethic was instilled in him at an early age by his father, David Peterson, who is yet another very big deal in the Colorado high school theater scene as department chair at nearby Chaparral High School in Parker. Back when Erik was in first grade, David cast him as the teacup Chip in his production of “Beauty and the Beast,” and later as the tiniest rebel of the French Revolution, Gavroche, in “Les Misérables.”

That was 2014, the same year the Denver Center for the Performing Arts launched the annual Bobby G Awards honoring the best in high school theater. Erik was just a seventh-grader when he was named the year’s Rising Star – “which is an award they obviously got right,” Lindahl said.

Peterson was a star from the moment he arrived at Grandview, where he landed big roles every school year, including Buddy in “The Diviners” as a freshman, Colin in “The Secret Garden” as a sophomore, Artie in “Lost in Yonkers” as a junior, and the biggest role of them all – as “Man in Chair” (trust me, that’s a big deal) in “The Drowsy Chaperone.”

Which does beg the question: Why didn’t Erik and his brother, Alex, who graduated from Denver School of the Arts and now works in technical theater at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City, follow their dad to Chaparral, just nine miles from Grandview? 

“My dad knew I wanted to do theater, but he felt like it wouldn’t be smart for me to be the director’s kid at Chaparral,” said Peterson, who also joined his dad for a talk with the theater kids at Chaparral earlier on Thursday. “He felt like it wouldn’t be appropriate if I was there, so I came here and had a wonderful relationship with Ms. Lindahl and everyone here at Grandview.”

Last week was Peterson’s first week off from the eight-show Broadway grind in the past six months. But Peterson gladly spent a day of it answering questions and leading Grandview theater students through helpful workshop exercises.

“I think Erik really believes in the power of educational theater, and he has a great appreciation for how this community positively impacted his trajectory toward where he’s at now,” said Peterson’s girlfriend, actor Eleanor O’Meara.

“It’s important for him to come home and give back to that community. That’s just who he is. I think he really abides by the saying that talent means nothing if you’re a jerk.”

Peterson said the Hall of Fame honor is nice, mostly because his inclusion brings needed attention to the importance of arts education. But he most enjoyed just being back in the room where it all happened for him as a teenager, now encouraging the next wave.

“I think there are a lot of people who don’t think a career in the arts is a feasible thing,” Peterson said, “and I think I’m very lucky to be an example that it totally is. If I can encourage one person who’s in the same shoes that I was then to follow their dreams, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Peterson is among the swelling ranks of Coloradans on Broadway that of late has included Tony Award winners Annaleigh Ashford and Gabriel Ebert, as well as Melissa Benoist, Jenna Bainbridge, Elizabeth Welch, Jason Veasey, Jamie Ann Romero, Beth Malone, Rebecca Eichenberger, Patricia Phillips, Andy Kelso, Aléna Watters, Joshua Franklin-Wolfe and Regan Linton. Angela Reed, who plays Harry’s mom in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” is a graduate of Ponderosa High School.

It doesn’t hurt Peterson’s cool quotient that he’s starring in one of the biggest entertainment franchises in pop-culture history.

For those who might be unfamiliar with the title, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is a play (not a musical) written by Jack Thorne and based on a new story by J.K. Rowling that takes place 20 years after the events of the books. The Broadway production actually opened in 2018 as two full plays playing in repertory. But after the shutdown, it returned in December 2021 as a single, merged play that since has become the highest-grossing play in Broadway history.  

The plot revolves around Harry Potter’s head-strong son, Albus, who befriends Scorpius – son of Harry’s fiercest rival, sparking an epic journey for them all. But while Scorpius hails from the Hogwarts’ House of Slytherin, Peterson was sure to tell the Grandview students that he’s “a proud Gryffindor from way back.”

Senior Nicolas Carmenate, who has definite Broadway aspirations of his own, had a vested interest in just about everything Peterson had to say.

“When Ms. Lindahl told us that one of her students had made it to Broadway and was coming to see us, it immediately kind of affirmed that this is not a ridiculous dream,” Carmenate said. “It doesn’t mean that I am going to ever be in a Broadway show – but it does mean that it’s not impossible.”

What landed most with Carmenate, he said, was Peterson’s advice to lead with decency, and to follow your own path.

“It’s really easy to have a mindset of competition in the arts,” Peterson said. ”But I think that goes entirely against what the arts are about. It’s about connection. It’s about joy. It’s about love. It’s about experimentation. And it’s about exploring what it means to be a human being.”