Front & Center

To have a major part in a critically acclaimed, smashingly successful Broadway musical is Nirvana for a stage performer. Lisa Howard has achieved that exalted level with her role of former spelling bee champ/hostess Rona Lisa Peretti in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The icing on the cake for Howard is that, in her spare time, she’s playing not one but two plum roles in Silence! The Musical, the runaway hit of the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival.

“It’s just wrong!” says the actress of Silence!, a parody of a certain big-screen thriller that starred Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. “The characters take it very seriously, but it’s a musical of The Silence of the Lambs — so, of course, it’s very inappropriate and hilarious. The show has been in development for a while; the website has a following. When I first got faxed the sides, I was like, ‘Na-uh, no way!’ I couldn’t believe it. Just from the song titles, I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ ” (Those titles include “Put the Fucking Lotion in the Basket,” “Are You About a Size 14?” and others that we’re going to refrain from listing here.)

An over-the-top parody of a movie about serial killers, Silence!
is packed with envelope-pushing material. But, says Howard, “I’m not offended by it at all. It’s funny! I can’t watch the movie now, because I just laugh at it.” Howard plays Catherine Martin, “the girl that gets kidnapped and put in the well” by the very sick Jaime Gumb, a.k.a. “Buffalo Bill.” She’s a stitch in that part but she really gets to show off her opera-quality voice during one of the sequences in which she plays Catherine’s mother, a U.S. senator: “My big song is Senator Martin making her plea on television, ‘My daughter is Catherine.’ She’s pleading with Buffalo Bill not to hurt her girl. As Catherine, I do a lot of screaming in the well. I also play a lamb. The show has a chorus of lambs.” (Naturally!)

All performances of Silence! are sold out, partly due to audience familiarity with the film but also because a first-rate cast has been assembled by director/choreographer Christopher Gattelli and musical director/co-producer Brian J. Nash. “Jenn Harris is brilliant as Clarice Starling, and Paul Kandel is hilarious as Hannibal Lecter,” Howard beams. “Plus we have Stephen Bienskie as Buffalo Bill, Harry Bouvy as Dr. Chilton, and Deidre Goodwin as Ardelia. They’re all great.”

Thanks to the varied performance schedule of Fringe shows, Howard is appearing in Silence! without having to take a week or two off from her regular job. “I told the Silence! people that I would only be willing to miss one performance of Spelling Bee,” she says. “They talked to the Fringe people and worked it out. Actually, I’m missing two performances, because I’m also taking a personal day off. But those are the only times I’ll be out.”

One can certainly understand why she’s loath to absent herself from Spelling Bee, one of the most delightful shows on Broadway. “The audience over the summer becomes more touristy,” says Howard. “Sometimes, it takes them a while to warm up; other times, they’re just whooping and hollering from the get-go. People have been bringing young kids, and we’ve been thinking that some of the jokes must be going over their heads, but they still seem to love the show.” As for the well publicized gimmick of several audience members being chosen before each performance to come up on stage and compete in the bee, “It’s a lot of fun. And it’s great to have audience participation in a long run, because the show’s different every night. It really keeps us on our toes.”

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Ask musical theater buffs to name some performers whose extraordinary talents have perhaps not yet been fully recognized by the public at large and it’s likely that Norm Lewis’s name will pop up. Lewis has been seen on Broadway in Side Show, in which he made a strong impression as Jake, as well as in Miss Saigon, The Who’s Tommy, Chicago, The Wild Party, and Amour. Outside of NYC, he has scored big-time as Nick in Baby at the Paper Mill Playhouse; in the title role of Sweeney Todd at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia; as Bobby in Company at the Helen Hayes Theatre in Nyack, NY; and as Coalhouse Walker in the North Carolina Theatre production of Ragtime. Now he’s been given the golden opportunity to show off his sexy stage presence, his wonderful sense of humor, and his rich, creamy baritone as Valentine in the high-profile revival of the Galt MacDermot-John Guare-Mel Shapiro musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.

The original production of the show famously (or infamously!) won the Tony Award for Best Musical over Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in 1972 but, since then, Two Gentlemen has fallen into obscurity. In fact, Lewis says, “I’d never even heard of it. I knew of the Shakespeare play, but not the musical. [Director] Kathleen Marshall called and asked if I was interested in doing it, and I said, ‘Well, yeah…?’ with a big question mark. I’d always wanted to do something in the park but I’m not necessarily the most Shakespeare-experienced actor in the world, so I didn’t know what would be the right project for me. Then I got a script and listened to the music, and I said, ‘Absolutely!’ ”

Whatever the relative merits of Follies and Two Gents, the latter does feature a terrific Galt MacDermot score. There’s a nice bit of synergy in that one of Lewis’s most memorable performances in New York was his powerful rendition of “Flesh Failures” in the 2004 Actors’ Fund of America benefit concert of MacDermot’s Hair. “He was around for rehearsals,” Lewis says of the composer, “and I had actually worked with him years ago in a workshop of a show called Sun.”

As for Side Show: Though that musical only tallied 91 performances (and 31 previews) on Broadway, it retains a loyal fan base. Says Lewis, “What I remember most about it are the people who were involved — Henry Krieger and Bill Russell and everyone else. The cast was amazing, and the piece itself is so magical. It was a tragedy that it didn’t last longer than it did; it had some flaws that people would probably point out but, overall, it was a great show. Because it’s become such a cult hit, I think it would do very well if it were revived.”

Two Gentlemen began performances last week. The press opening is set for August 28, and the buzz is that the show may elevate Lewis’s career to a whole new level. “We’re having a good time,” he says. “I’ve been friends with Kathleen Marshall for years but we’ve never worked together until now. The cast is amazing: Rosario Dawson, Renée Elise Goldsberry, David Costabile, John Cariani, and Oscar Isaacs, this new guy who just graduated from Juilliard. I think the show’s going to introduce Shakespeare to a whole new generation.”

Does Lewis have any post-Verona plans that he can talk about? “I’ve got a couple of concerts that I’ll be doing,” he says vaguely. “I also run my own company, called TreasuresForYourHome.com. And I have a real estate company called LewisNoteInvestors.com that basically deals in private mortgages. You can put that in your article!”

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One of the fizziest, jazziest musical numbers to be heard on Broadway in years is a home run for Sherie Rene Scott in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. “It’s a blast,” says Scott of the song in question, “Here I Am,” which she sings upon her first entrance in the show as “soap queen” Christine Colgate. “When I first heard it, I thought it was funny and I knew that it basically encapsulated the traditional Broadway character introductory number in terms of its composition. Rather than trying to introduce the character in any manipulative way, it just lays it all out: ‘Here I Am.’ I love its lack of pretentiousness. It’s an old-time musical number with a big-note finish, all fun and games until I really have to deliver at the end.”

Known for her performances Off-Broadway in The Last 5 Years and Debbie Does Dallas, and on Broadway in Aida and The Who’s Tommy, Scott has taken the role of Christine and run with it. (She received a 2005 Tony Award nomination for her efforts.) Is it as much of a party on stage with John Lithgow, Norbert Leo Butz, Joanna Gleason, Sara Gettelfinger, Gregory Jbara, and the rest of the cast as it seems to be? “It’s work in the sense that we really care about what we do,” Scott replies, “but yes, it is a party. Norbert and I are friends, and John is just the most naughty, lovely, wonderful person. Usually, familiarity breeds at least some form of contempt, but we’re just having more and more fun as the run continues. We’ve all done enough shows to know that experiences like this one are few and far between.”

The Last 5 Years — the poignant Jason Robert Brown musical in which Scott co-starred with Butz — had an all-too-short run in New York but is produced frequently around the country, and the cast album is very popular. Says Scott, “When [Dirty Rotten Scoundrels] opened, Norbert and I would leave through the stage door and there’d be huge numbers of Last 5 Years fans waiting for us to sign CDs, programs, and vocal selections. There aren’t as many now, but at least a few are there after every performance. Norbert and I knew when we were doing the show that it was special, but we also knew that it probably wouldn’t last because of September 11 and also because it was a little ahead of its time.”

A far different sort of entertainment was Debbie Does Dallas, which spoofed the hit porno movie of the same title. Did Scott gain a special group of fans for that show? “I was really worried that they would be gray-haired guys in trenchcoats, but no; they were just regular musical theater fans. The show was really more of a feminist statement than anything else. If any weirdos came during previews, I think they spread the word that it wasn’t what they expected!”

Scott will remain with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels through the beginning of next year, and she has two other projects to look forward to: “I’ll be doing John Guare’s Landscape of the Body for the Signature Theatre Company [Off-Broadway] in the spring, and I’m also writing a performance piece with Dick Scanlan — kind of a Laurie Anderson meets Bette Midler thing. It’s semi-autobiographical!”