Loose Lips

Second chances can be wonderful. Just ask Peter Gerety, who turned down the role of Donny, a not-too-bright Irishman, in Martin McDonagh‘s The Lieutenant of Inishmore the first time it was offered to him. “It wasn’t for this production; it was some other Off-Broadway company that was going to do it and was basically paying carfare,” he recalls. “I had just finished Never Gonna Dance, where I was doing all this singing and dancing and working with the divine Karen Ziemba, and then I get this crazy script about killing cats. I thought, ‘I’m just too tired for this.’ When I got the script again about a year later for the Atlantic production [which moved to Broadway in May], I even forgot I had read it until my agent reminded me on opening night that I passed on it the first time.”

When Gerety got the role, he decided to do something a tad impulsive: “That night, I bought a ticket to Ireland and spent 10 days in Galway just absorbing the culture. It had a profound effect on me, and not just in perfecting the Irish accent. It was heaven being there, and I want to go back as soon as the play closes.” That said, Gerety is in no rush to leave the show, since he loves his job — albeit with one caveat. “I’m aching like crazy,” he says. “I’m older than the rest of the cast, I’m built like a fire hydrant, and I don’t bend as easily as I should. So I think this is the last play I’m going to do where I get tied up and crawl around on the floor.”

It’s probably also the last play he’ll ever do in which he has to shoe polish a cat. “Actually, it’s a black make-up,” he tells me, “but it stays on my fingers forever. I have a toothrbush that I use to take it off, since it gets into the crevices of my nails.” Rest assured, Gerety didn’t practice this particular bit of stage business on his own cat. “He wouldn’t put up with any of that stuff,” he laughs.

As much as he loves being on stage, Gerety — who has starred in such TV shows as Homicide and The Wire — isn’t turning his back on other work. “I’m filming a small role in the new NBC series Kidnapped; I play Tim Hutton’s estranged father,” he says. “And I’m up for a couple of movie roles. If I have to, I’ll take a performance or two off; the producers are very generous about that and I have a great understudy. But I’m really a bit of a workaholic. To me, there’s nothing better than being on a film set all day and then doing a Broadway show at night.”

MODEL CITIZEN

Many a fashion model talks about how that career was always intended as a stepping stone to acting — but not Patricia Velasquez, who’s playing Julia Cortes, the Bolivian teacher who briefly gets involved with Che Guevara in the LAByrinth Theatre Company’s production of School of the Americas at The Public Theater. “I never wanted to be an actress,” says the Venezuelan-born beauty, “but I changed my mind about trying acting when I got the film script for Le Jaguar (in 1996) and saw that it was being shot in South America. Now, I think I’ve found my home in the theater. I was saying to our director, Mark Wing-Davey, that I must have been very good in another life to be able to do this.”

Velasquez got the role through the standard audition process. “I read the script and fell in love with it, but I had no idea who was going to be involved in the production or I would’ve been overwhelmed,” she says of her collaborators, who include star John Ortiz. “What’s great is that everyone in the cast speaks Spanish, so there’s really a sense that we’re one group. We’re all Americans, but we have our common roots. I’ve never had this kind of opportunity to feel equal with the people I’m working with.”

It’s apropos that Velasquez is playing a teacher, since she has started a school for indigent children in Venezuela through her non-profit Wayuu-Taya Foundation. “The struggle of the South American population and how they have to work so hard for so little, which is a theme of the play, is something I relate to,” she says. “We just got a donation from the American Embassy to build a second school there. I also work with UNESCO whenever they need me; I recently got a letter from the President of the Philippines, asking me to come. It’s hard to do these things while I’m working on other projects, but I hope to be able to do more of both.”

CASTING CALLS
Former Wicked star Jeffrey Kuhn is in the Stageworks’ production of I Am My Own Wife in Hudson, New York; Katrina Lenk, Michael Tisdale, and Tina Benko headline the Bard SummerScape production of Camille; Julian Acosta, Vanessa Aspillaga, and Jeanine Serailles are featured in the Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Lucy and the Conquest; Broadway veterans Janeece Aisha Feeeman, Gail Grate, and Gayle Turner are part of the Westport County Playhouse’s Constant Star; Klea Blackhurst will be seen in The Great American Trailer Park Musical at the Mason Street Warehouse in Saugutuck, Michigan; and George Dvorsky and Jacqueline Piro Donovan will star in the Pittsburgh CLO’s production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

HELL CATS

Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere. This slogan would be endorsed by Cassandra Leigh, the heroine of One Way Ticket to Hell, a new musical now in the third month of its run at Los Angeles’ Lee Strasberg Theater. The show is based loosely on the 1955 film Teenage Devil Dolls. Says composer Robert Cioffi, “When my writing partner Drew Taylor and I were part of the BMI writers workshop, we stumbled on the idea of doing a take-off on those independent exploitation films from the late 1950s. I wasn’t really a big fan of those movies, but I loved the music of the period, and the idea of marrying the sweetness of that kind of music with the unsavory nature of the story appealed to us. The musical deals with a lot of offensive topics, but it’s not meant to be offensive.”

The film is only narrated, so it was up to Cioffi and Taylor to provide all the dialogue and songs. “It’s become more of a tribute to the period than a recreation of the film,” says Cioffi, who is also a professor at New Jersey’s County College of Music. “We wrote the show with Kristen Howe, who plays Cassandra, in mind. She and Drew worked together on the 20th anniversary production of Annie.” Indeed, Howe gets to sing Cioffi’s favorite number in the show: “It’s called ‘The Bitch Slap,’ and it’s this wild dance number when Cassandra finds herself in prison. The audience just loves it.”