Interview: Decades After Ragtime, Blake McIver Ewing and Marcia Mitzman Gaven Reconnect in The Boy From Oz

Blake McIver Ewing was an in-demand child actor, best known for playing Michelle Tanner’s friend Derek in Full House and Waldo in the Little Rascals movie. Marcia Mitzman Gaven was a consistently working Broadway star, playing Svetlana in Chess and earning a Tony nomination as Mrs. Walker in The Who’s Tommy. Their paths crossed for the first time in 1997, when Gaven was cast as Mother in the American premiere of Ragtime at the Shubert Theatre in Los Angeles, and Ewing was hired to play her clairvoyant son, the Little Boy.

Twenty-seven years later, Ewing and Gaven’s paths are crossing once again, this time in Rochester, New York, in The Boy From Oz. Presented by OFC Creations Theatre Center, this is the first time that the Peter Allen bio-musical is being presented in New York since Hugh Jackman set Broadway aflame in 2003. Ewing (who has spent the last several years working behind the scenes) returns to the stage to play Peter Allen, with Gaven (who has largely given up the theater in favor of a voiceover career) as his Judy Garland.

The two performers look at this reunion as a celebration of their shared history. Here’s what they had to say.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Blake, The Boy From Oz is one of those shows where, even 20 years later, everyone still thinks of Hugh Jackman. How do you shake that?
Blake McIver Ewing: That’s been one of the most difficult parts of the process, to reconnect with Peter Allen’s voice and mannerisms and life, and not do a Hugh Jackman.

Marcia Mitzman Gaven: Blake is so fabulous in the role. It’s going to be the Blake Show. Aren’t you on stage pretty much every second?

Blake: Pretty much. I think I’m off stage for three minutes and 40 seconds of the two-and-a-half hours of the show. We timed it with all the quick changes consecutively.

How do you contend with the idea of playing figures that could so easily fall into mimicry?
Marcia: I’m not an impersonator. I said that if they were interested in a full-fledged character and trying to be authentic, that would be something I felt okay about, but not if they were looking for somebody that does Judy Garland. They were 100 percent on board with it.

Blake: We’re telling the story as full-fledged human beings. We’re trying to find the truth of these characters, who were real people. What Marcia’s bringing to the essence of Judy is brilliant. People are going to be stunned by it.

Take me back 20 years to Ragtime in Los Angeles. Blake, you were a child playing Marcia’s —
Marcia: I was a child too, David.

We were all children back then. And Blake had already done Full House and Little Rascals.
Blake: I was this TV brat with one theater credit to my name. I had done only one other Equity contract before Ragtime, which was a little mini-tour of the Will Rogers Follies. I didn’t think there was any chance in hell I would get Ragtime. I was up against every single Chip and Gavroche that had ever been on Broadway or national tour. There were dozens of them.

Marcia: When I met you, Blake, I had no idea that you had even done TV. I thought this was some kid off the street who happened to be brilliant. Blake is the ultimate professional. I wish I could say he blossomed into that, but he always was. He showed up on day one of Ragtime totally unintimidated by the rest of the people. A lot of us had a lot of credits and we were all grownups, and he knew his stuff.

Blake: It’s going to sound hyperbolic, but it’s the absolute God’s honest truth, the experience of Ragtime changed my life. I had been in big movies, big TV shows, and nothing prepared me for walking into a rehearsal hall with Marcia, LaChanze, John Rubenstein, Brian Stokes Mitchell, getting notes from Terrence McNally, Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty, and Frank Galati.

I was like a sponge. Day one, my entire psyche shifted. I was like “Oh, this is what storytelling could be at its most profound level.” And even on the eighth show of the week, or after you’ve done a student matinee on Wednesday, the minute you hear those first three notes, you’re just like “The most important thing on the planet you could possibly be doing is telling that story.”

This process has reminded me of a visceral moment, a core memory that I didn’t even quite realize that I had. There’s a moment in Boy from Oz where Marcia is sitting on a piano bench with me and she starts to sing. It took me right back to a moment towards the beginning of Ragtime where I was tracking in on a bed and she was singing the second half of “Journey On,” and that gorgeous tone fills the room. I was immediately taken back. I was like “This is not one of my crying moments. I’ve just got to keep smiling.” But truly, it was a life-altering experience, and that’s in no small part because of being able to learn from Marcia from the time I was 11 years old.

Marcia: I’ve worked with a bunch of kids in this industry, and some of them I was so impressed with, initially. But it’s very hard to maintain being a genuine kid because you’re in these extreme circumstances. With a lot of the kids that I worked with, the nature of the beast did change who they were pretty quickly.

I didn’t notice that with Blake. He’s a lovely, intelligent, complicated, interesting, kind human being. I don’t know if that’s because you didn’t consistently stay in that world when you were growing up, and I don’t know if that was a conscious decision by him or his parents, but it worked. Now, I’m pushing him to go back to New York. There’s no reason to not be doing this all the time.

What are the keys to your levels of longevity in this business?
Marcia: I had many different kinds of careers. I signed my first Broadway contract at 19 and I just was fortunate not to stop working until I moved out to LA, and then started doing film and television, and did Ragtime. After Ragtime, I had children, so I didn’t really retire, but I switched all my focus to my voiceover career because I really wanted to be with my children growing up. I realized quickly that I could make a lot of money in voiceovers and have a studio in my home. I didn’t even have to leave the house, although for The Simpsons, I had to go to Fox to record.

Now, more than ever, you have to create work in order to keep working. These young people are creating, writing, and figuring out how to not wait for opportunity, but to create opportunity. The basic thing is to be good at your craft, learn everything you can, and then see how that generalizes into other areas of the business.

Blake: That’s the key. It was sort of the same for me after Ragtime, because I fell into adolescence and I still looked too young to play any of the teenagers on TV, because they were all being played by 28-year-olds. I did a ton of voiceover; that’s what kept me going all the way through high school and college, and then I went back to theater behind-the-scenes, producing and directing in LA.

For me, it was consistently being flexible enough to pivot into different areas of my passion, trying to not judge them in comparison to the others. Now, it’s about doing things that scare me, like this show, which is a huge undertaking, and I am not Wolverine. That’s why I said yes; this is not like anything I’ve done before.

Blake, that clip of you doing “You’re a Grand Old Flag” on Full House always seems to surface before July 4. How often do you see it in the wild, and what is your reaction?
Blake: It’s so fun. Between the “Yankee Doodle” episode of Full House, and there was a meme a few years ago that blew up that was some line that I don’t even remember saying: “I love these aggressive women of the ’90s.” It cracks me up.

The Full House fans are lovely and so devoted. I love that people still love it. I love that it brings up nostalgia, because I have those things in my world that are nostalgic for me. They bring my heart joy. The fact that I can do that in some small way for other people, you can’t look at it any other way than just being grateful.

And Marcia, how often do you come across one of your voices in the wild, and how do you react when you hear yourself?
Marcia: I hear myself on film and television stuff all the time. You know what always irks me, though? When I’m listening to Seth Rudetsky on the Broadway [SirusXM] channel, whenever they do Chess, they don’t do my duet with Judy Kuhn, they do the English one, which isn’t Broadway.

Blake: For the record, the definitive version of “I Know Him So Well” is Marcia and Judy. I stand by that. I stand by that to my grave.