Canadian actors are shining bright on the Great White Way -- and they're arriving from all directions
NEW YORK - When the nominations for the Tony Awards are announced next spring, it's a racing certainty that one Canadian will make the list for best actor in a musical.
Or two Canadians. Maybe even three.
At the start of this fall, Broadway was anxiously awaiting its next musical hit. Then along came the musical version of the Kevin Bacon movie, Footloose, with an unknown 23-year-old Canadian in the lead role of Ren McCormack.
The august New York Times didn't much care for the show. But it did concede this:
``As Ren, the young outsider who fights the good fight to make dancing legal again, Jeremy Kushnier sings and dances with energy and the promise of an emerging style.��
Footloose is doing very nicely at the Richard Rodgers Theater box office, thank you. Score one for Canada.
Next, it was the turn of Martin Short, the Canadian comic who has built a stellar career on TV and in the movies.
Short, who had made an inauspicious Broadway debut five years ago in The Goodbye Girl, plays eight roles in the Roundabout Theater revival of the 1962 Neil Simon/Cy Coleman musical, Little Me, which opened earlier this month.
The result: Four stars out of four from U.S.A. Today.
``When he�s `on� (and when isn�t he?) during a performance, he gives off a heat that chases away the mortal chills and worries of everyday life,�� said the New York Times.
``Broadway used to be built around such personalities . . .��
Make that two for the Canucks.
But the musical performance of the season may well be that of Brent Carver, who stars as the outsider Leo Frank in Parade, a Livent musical with book by Alfred Uhry and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown.
The show - a searing tale of discrimination and murder set in Georgia - is in early previews at the Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, where it is already moving audiences to tears and cheers.
And Carver is magnificent as the Jewish northerner convicted of murder, reprieved from death row, then hanged by a lynch mob.
Stand by for a Maple Leaf hat-trick.
And these are not the only Canadians skipping along the Great White Way these days.
The Stratford Festival is in the midst of a limited run at the City Center, the same venue that housed a successful visit by the National Ballet of Canada in October.
Stephen Sutcliffe continues to star in the Livent production of Ragtime. Tamara Podemski will take over the key role of Maureen in the New York production of Rent in December. And there are others.
But the stories of Short, Carver and Kushnier neatly illustrate three very different ways of reaching Broadway, perhaps the Mount Everest for musical performers.
The 48-year-old Short took the magic red-carpet route - SCTV, Saturday Night Live, a host of TV specials and Hollywood movies.
But he was a stage performer long before he achieved fame and fortune. And as those who knew him in those days testify, the stage was the place where he could best harness and exploit his explosive energy.
``The reason we are doing Little Me is because of Martin Short,�� director Rob Marshall told the Times.
``Marty is one of those rare individuals who is a true musical-theatre star and he can cross over from film to television to musical theatre effortlessly.��
The 47-year-old Carver, of course, already owns a Tony for his role as Molina in Livent's Kiss Of The Spider Woman, directed by the renowned Hal Prince.
``The minute I heard about Leo Frank, I thought it had to be Brent Carver,�� Prince told Playbill magazine.
``Brent�s such a charismatic, interesting and complex person, on and offstage. I love enigmas - the kind of personality you can�t get a handle on. The danger of it which creates such excitement on stage.
``You�ve got to admire a guy who wins a Tony Award and instead of going to Hollywood, goes home to Canada to play Cyrano de Bergerac.��
That's Carver.
It's not that he's reluctant to perform on Broadway, but Canada is his heart and his home and it's hard to imagine him settling anywhere else.
He is not driven by fame or by money.
He goes with the projects that interest him and follows where they lead him, be it to a 100- or 1,000-seat theatre.
He turned down a role in Ragtime because he didn't think he was right for the part.
Carver moves with consummate grace and skill between musical theatre and drama, classics and the contemporary.
Toronto has seen him in many guises. A new play is the blackly comic High Life and recent credits include headlining roles in the musical revue Jacques Brel and Schiller's Don Carlos and a concert performance of favourite songs.
Kushnier's tale is a classic of a different kind - the rags-to-riches, Broadway-dream-come-true tale.
Born in Winnipeg, he moved to Toronto in the mid-1980s and had a role in the original 1995 Canadian production of Tommy - ``I was the second pinball kid�� - and then joined the Canadian touring production of the musical.
But that gig ended and he worked in fast-food restaurants and as an office temp while trying repeatedly to win a role in the Canadian production of Rent.
Toronto casting agents, Kushnier says, ``didn�t want to see me. I was too `musical theatre,� I had too much experience, I had too much of this, too little of that, whatever.��
By the summer of 1997, he had been out of work for eight months when he got a call from his agent to get himself to New York for an audition the following morning.
He and a friend made some phone calls, scrounged money and jumped on a bus at 7 o'clock that night.
Kushnier arrived `dirty and stinky� for his New York audition, but the 12-hour bus ride had armed him with `one of the strangest energies they�d ever seen�
``It was a 12-hour bus ride at the beginning of the summer,�� Kushnier says,
``The bus wasn�t air-conditioned and was full of little babies and crazy people. So we arrived in mid-town Manhattan at 7 in the morning and basically I had never been to New York before and I�m going, `Oh, my God, wow!�
``We were dirty and stinky so we went to the Marriott Marquis and found the public washrooms there - which were actually very nice, if you ever need them.��
All clean and tidy, with his trademark, curving sideburns neatly trimmed, Kushnier had one of the best auditions of his life.
``I guess I had one of the strangest energies they had ever seen, coming straight off a 12-hour bus ride,�� he says.
``I was just ready to give them 150 per cent.
``I didn�t care then if I got the show, I was so excited about being in New York and auditioning for (director) Walter Bobbie.��
After a second audition the following day, he got the show - a workshop production of Footloose. So it was back to Toronto that afternoon, on another bus.
``I ran for the bus station and got on the bus. I didn�t have time to call anybody - not my mom, my dad, not my agent or anybody.
``So, I thought, at least I�ll be able to tell somebody on the bus this exciting news. And I sit down and two guys sit down beside me. They�re both parolees on their way to Utica.
``I thought, well, maybe I�ll be able talk to them. But when one of them asked me if I spoke Canadian, I figured they probably didn�t care that I was going to be working in the States for the first time.��
Returning to New York, Kushnier workshopped the show during the summer of 1997 but still faced the prospect of being out of work until rehearsals started in earnest for the opening of Footloose.
But he'd been spotted by a member of the creative team for Rent. And after an audition with director Michael Greif, he ended up in the Toronto production after all.
Nothing has quite prepared him for the experience of opening a musical in New York, however.
``It�s all been pretty crazy, pretty whirlwind,�� he says with a shake of the head.
``The whole experience has been amazing.��