Along with Broadway exposure, the triple-threat talent (he acts, sings and dances) can now officially claim to be separated by just one degree from Kevin Bacon.
The new Broadway production of Footloose opened a couple of weeks ago, and Jeremy Kushnier has already accidentally said "eh" onstage. He's not sure if anyone noticed, but he almost punched himself when he heard the word come out of his mouth. Kushnier is a 23-year-old actor from Winnipeg who last month became Canada's newest contribution to the American pop culture machine. Although New York loves a fresh face, especially from an exotic place such as Manitoba, Kushnier knows the key to survival is assimilation, and that distinguishing and possibly alienating linguistic idiosyncrasies are best left in the wings.
So, right after his unfortunate slip of the tongue, sitting in the back of the New York theatre district hangout, Barrymore's, Kushnier pounces on the opportunity to share stories with another Canadian about the odd ways that nationality can make one an object of curiosity. "I did an interview a few weeks ago and the journalist said, 'You're in America now, it must be so strange for you,'" recalled Kushnier. "I said, 'Well, sure, there are a few minor cultural differences. But only, like, our Thanksgiving is on a different day and we wear our underwear on the outside of our clothes' -- that kind of thing. I really think he believed me."
Kushnier plays head games with the thicker members of the press because he hasn't been around long enough to know it could backfire. He still has a bit of the starry-eyed naif about him, as though he can't quite believe in his own good fortune.
There's good reason for that: the Footloose producers almost sent him back to Canada without even letting him audition. Back in the summer of 1997, his agent had called and told him to get to New York in the next 24 hours. Kushnier, who'd been living in Toronto for four years, hadn't worked in eight months, but managed to scrape together enough cash for a bus ticket. After a 12-hour ride, he arrived early the next morning at Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal and headed north to the Times Square Marriott Marquis, where he ducked into the public washroom and tried to freshen up with a "sink-shower." What Kushnier didn't know was that the Footloose producers had already called his agent and tried to cancel the audition. New faces are nice, but they didn't want to deal with the hassles that come along with hiring foreign performers: sponsoring work visas and vouching for their credit-worthiness with suspicious landlords. Kushnier showed up for the audition anyway; within 36 hours he had the part.
"We always said this role would be impossible to cast," said Barry Moss, the casting director of Footloose. "We had made up our minds that we'd be happy if we could find somebody who could sing and act, and we'd fake the dancing. When Jeremy turned out to be a brilliant dancer, it was like he came from heaven. He's a triple threat, which is very rare."
Kushnier plays Ren McCormack, Kevin Bacon's role in the 1984 film that turned into something of a teen phenomenon despite (or perhaps because of) its hokey storyline. For those not up on mid-'80s trivia, Ren is a young man from Chicago who moves south with his mother to the heartland town of Bomont, where a local ordinance bans dancing. Seems a few years before, four kids on their way home from a dance drove off a bridge; one was the son of the local minister, and the implacable reverend is behind the dance ban. But darned if Ren doesn't fall for the preacher's comely daughter, who's just dying to dance with the new boy in town.
With songs sung by Kenny Loggins, Denise Williams and Bonnie Tyler, the movie was one of the biggest hits in an era when film soundtracks studded with hit singles (Flashdance, The Big Chill, St. Elmo's Fire) were just beginning to get saturation play. The soundtracks helped to propel the films to higher box office grosses, which then helped to sell more soundtracks -- synergy '80s style. In the squeeze-every-drop '90s, synergy apparently translates a different way: take a middle-of-the-road mid-'80s relic of dubious artistic merit, turn it into a Broadway show, then issue a 15th anniversary "collector's edition" re-release of the original soundtrack.
If Footloose is going to make a profit on its $6.5-million (US) investment, the show needs to break away from the recent mediocre track record of most films that end up on stage. The Lion King, Ragtime, 42nd Street and Beauty and the Beast managed to bring in audiences, but adaptations of Carrie, Big, Sunset Boulevard, Victor/Victoria, Meet Me in St. Louis, High Society, The Goodbye Girl and many others failed miserably.
Even more problematic for Kushnier and the producers of Footloose, the Broadway landscape changed significantly when Rent burst on to the scene in early 1996 and set a new, edgier standard for the stage. After the gritty reality of the pierced navels, lesbians and AIDS cases in that show, some people think Footloose is simply too cotton-candy to fly.
But Kushnier does think that Footloose can carve out an audience. "I think this is a great show for kids to aspire to. Rent is also a great show and it's very exciting, but the [downtown New York] village ghetto isn't an environment that a lot of these kids coming from, you know, Ohio, can really relate to." Footloose has also borrowed a bit of Rent's edginess. Kushnier's hairstyle -- peroxide crown on top, pencil-thin sideburns extending halfway down his boyish cheeks -- was left over from his stint as the understudy for the two male leads in the Canadian production of Rent.
The Variety critic, along with other reviewers, has weighed in on Footloose with decidedly lukewarm praise; TV reviewers have been kinder, but The New York Times said the show is "limp" and "rudderless." Still, most of them adore Kushnier. The Washington Post called him "a kinetic, live-wire dancer with a sexy, comic stage presence and a star." Associated Press reported that "he sings and dances with a natural, almost athletic grace. It's a terrific debut."
Sitting in Barrymore's, poking at a chicken caesar a couple of hours before showtime, Kushnier waves away the bad reviews. "I make it a habit of not reading the reviews. I don't really care," he says. Kushnier may be young, but he's already got the patter down. Stars of well-reviewed shows love to talk about what the critics said; performers in shows that are trashed always say the critics don't matter.
But maybe Kushnier honestly doesn't care. Maybe he's just having too much fun. At a party the night before, he says, "People kept saying, 'There are two guys following you around' and I had to say, 'I know, they're my bodyguards.' Every so often I'd just run across the room to try to lose them."
Bodyguards were a first for him, as was a visit to New York's high-fashion temple, Barneys, with the show's costume designer to select outfits for Footloose. "It was like a scene out of Pretty Woman, one of the most amazing days of my life. We just sat there and people brought me coffee and salmon and iced tea, and they brought me these beautiful clothes to try on, with prices that boggled my mind."
He has also been meeting the usual quotient of celebs, de rigueur for a new face in New York. First Kenny Loggins ("It was very exciting. No, really!"), then Christian Slater. In a few days, Kevin Bacon himself, the original Ren, is coming to see the show. "I haven't told anyone this yet, but I'm actually going to build a little shrine to him in my dressing room," Kushnier says. "Pictures, maybe some candles. Just to scare him a little bit."
He is actually a huge Bacon fan, an obsession that started at the age of nine when he saw Footloose for the first time. "At that age, you're so ready to have heroes and icons -- before the teenage years, when you're too cool for anybody," he says. "I went out and got the soundtrack and wore it out, tried to dance like Kevin Bacon. But then I found out that he didn't do the dancing. I was just destroyed."
Kushnier has the slightly manic air of someone who knows he's here for a good time, if not necessarily a long time. He remembers all too clearly the days spent temping at Wood Gundy in Toronto, moving piles of paper from one side of the desk to the other. He's still trying to forget his time as an extra on film sets, when he was treated like cattle for a few bucks an hour. That's why he seems like he's trying to gobble everything dropped in front of him before someone takes away his plate.
"Look, it's a business," he says. "Show. Business. [Producers] are friends when you're working with them, but when the next show comes along they've got a whole new set of new friends."
Then he smiles with a faint cynicism. "I'm very aware that this kind of position that I'm in is fleeting and I'm going to take it for all that it's worth," he says. "I'm going to milk it like the dairy cow that it is."
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