BWW Exclusive: Preview of INSIDE ACT: HOW TEN ACTORS MADE IT AND HOW YOU CAN TOO- with Gary Beach!

Why do some actors make it and others don't? Ken Womble sets out to find the answer to this question, one that has fascinated and tormented him for years, in his new book, INSIDE ACT: How Ten Actors Made it and How You Can Too (Hansen Publishing Group, 373 pages, $24.99). To celebrate the release, BroadwayWorld will be featuring chapter previews from the new book. Today, hear from Gary Beach!

INSIDE ACT: How Ten Actors Made it and How You Can Too identifies what sets successful actors apart. For Womble it's about the inner choices, the inside acts of working actors acts that have propelled them to thriving careers in one of the most competitive professions on the planet.

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GARY BEACH

Gary Beach has had a long and varied career on the Broadway stage, as well as film and television.

He was nominated for the 2005 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance as Albin in the revival of La Cage aux Folles. Mr. Beach received the 2001 Tony Award as well as the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for his performance as Roger De Bris in Mel Brooks' The Producers. He created the role of Lumiere on Broadway in Disney's Beauty and the Beast (Tony nomination). Other Broadway credits include Annie, Doonesbury, The Moony Shapiro Songbook, Sweet Adeline (Encores!), Something's Afoot and 1776. National tours: Legends! starring Mary Martin and Carol Channing. Regional: Closer Than Ever (LA premiere) Lend Me a Tenor, She Loves Me (Comet Award), Of Thee I Sing (Helen Hayes nomination). Television includes: Kennedy Center Honors honoring Carol Burnett and Mel Brooks, Recording The Producers, Queer as Folk, Murder She Wrote and Cheers.

I Just Love It

[The following is an excerpt from the Richard Portnow chapter in Ken Womble's INSIDE ACT: How Ten Actors Made It-And How You Can Too. It is available as a paperback and as an ebook. The entire Robert Clohessy chapter is available as a separate ebook.]

Ken Womble: Tell me how you got offered the role of Roger De Bris, the flamboyant director in The Producers.

Gary Beach: Well, this is how it happened. I was living in LA and it was early in 2000 and my agent got a call and Vinny Liff [The Producers' casting director], who had kept me working for years basically, wanted to know if I would come to New York. They were doing a reading, Nathan [Lane] was going to be doing it, he's the only name I knew really, and would I like come and do Roger De Bris?

And I had, as a young man, been a big fan of the movie. And I knew exactly who Roger De Bris was and I thought, "You know, in a musical that could be really fun." And I asked my agent, "Does he still make his first entrance in an evening gown?" And my agent said, "Yes he does-but get this-he ends up playing Adolf Hitler in Springtime for Hitler." And I thought, "Oh my God, an evening gown in the first act and Adolf Hitler in the second. It's never going to get any better than this." [Laughs]

KW: [Laughs] How many actors have had that opportunity?

GB: I know, and so I said, "Oh I'd love to. Just tell them to call me and we'll arrange the flight." And my agent said, "Well that's just it. They want you to fly yourself in and can you stay with a friend?"

KW: Oh my goodness.

GB: That's exactly what I thought. Maybe a little harsher. [Laughs] And I said, "I can't talk right now. I'll have to call you back." I hung up the phone and I was literally sitting on the couch shaking and then, out of nowhere, came this epiphany: "Why the hell else did you play a candlestick for 1,700 performances so you could afford to do this?" So I called my agent back and I said, "Sure, I'll do it." And they sent me the script. And I loved it. We could've gone into rehearsal that day, that's how ready the script was.

And so I went to New York. And Glen Kelly [the show's musical supervisor] and I are at the piano and he's teaching me this piece of music that happens in the middle of Springtime for Hitler. It's called "Heil Myself" and it's sung by Hitler. And Mel Brooks is standing there, you know, just listening, and I start singing it and Mel says to me, "Are you doing Judy?"

KW: Judy Garland?

GB: Yeah. I said, "Yeah," because I hadn't planned on it.

KW: It just came up?

GB: Yeah! It was the mannerisms and stuff like that, you know. It's not like I sing like Judy Garland, and so he said, "I love it!" And I said, "Oh God, I do too!" And Glen, who is a genius, said, "Oh my God! Go get Stroman," [Susan Stroman, the show's director]. And the four of us just start talking. And then I finally came up with the thing, I could sit on the edge of the stage. Well, the four of us start giggling like children. There was this guy, [laughs] the worst director in Broadway history, who was going to be sitting on the edge of the stage living his dream in front of the audience.

Well, we did it at the reading. Of course there was no stage and we were all in folding chairs with music stands and everybody on Broadway wanted to be there that day. And one of the people there was Robin Wagner, who they had asked to design the set. And he told me when it came time for me to do "Heil Myself" I just stood up from my folding chair and walked to the center of the room and just looked at the audience. And they screamed with laughter because they knew exactly what I was doing. And Robin said to me a couple years later, "I knew you won the Tony that day when you just stood up and walked to the center of the room and stared at us!"

So I get back to where I'm staying, at a friend's house that night, and the phone rings. It's for me. It's a girl who was stage managing the reading, and she said, "Mel wants to know how much your ticket was."

[Later] Vinny Liff called me and he says, "Roger De Bris please." I said, "Who is this?" He said, "Vinny Liff. You're it."

KW: How did you feel?

GB: Oh, I felt the earth shift.

KW: That's a wonderful story. And then, of course, you went on and won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a musical for The Producers. Was there a sense of validation for your Tony win?

GB: I can't say yes. I mean I had a feeling I was going to win. Because by the time you get to the Tony Awards you've gone through two other awards; they call it the Triple Crown. The Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Tony Award, and I had won everything up to then. So it wasn't a sense of validation. There is a sense of arrival in that I do belong here in this group. But for me, don't forget, I wasn't twenty-eight. You know, I was fifty-something. And I think it made a huge difference. But that show-if you want to talk about magic-hardly a day passed by in that first year that wasn't just like, "Oh my God!" It was incredible.

Experiencing 9/11 through doing that show was an incredible thing, too. Tuesday night was cancelled, Wednesday night we went back to work. According to the story, [Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani actually called Rocco Landesman, who was main line producer of our show at the time, and said, "Can you get the show back up for tomorrow night?" And Rocco said, "Sure, absolutely." Giuliani knew that one thing he had to do was try to look like we're going back to normalcy. And so Broadway was open. I took the subway to work that night and I came out on Duffy Square, which is right there at the Palace Theatre, and there was no one in line. There was no one walking around. I got to 45th Street, which is a busy theatre street, looked down. There was no one in front of any theatre. I walked through Shubert Alley, turned the corner to 44th Street, looked down at the St. James and the streets were filled with people.

KW: For your show.

GB: Absolutely filled with people, and the street, not the sidewalk. And it became obvious that there were going to be a lot of cancelled seats because tourists couldn't fly into the city. So you had a lot of people that went there to buy these cancelled seats.

And the audience that night was the most ferocious I think we had ever faced. They laughed like their lives depended on it. Rocco actually caught me coming into the stage door and said, "You have the hardest job of all tonight." I said, "I happen to think I have the easiest job." And I was right. When I rose up out of that floor as Adolf Hitler, it wasn't lost on anybody.

Marcia Milgrom Dodge: Director

Ken Womble: You mentioned it taking so long to finally get a show to Broadway. I think Gary's career parallels yours in that he had been working for over twenty years before he got his first Tony nomination.

Marcia Milgrom Dodge: You know, that's what Gary and I probably have in common. We felt that we were doing really good work and then to be acknowledged in New York City is just affirmation. There's a community here that is so remarkably inviting, and people like Denzel Washington and Hugh Jackman and Tom Hanks and all the other stars that come to perform on Broadway feel it.

And when you've done it and you're an adult, there's a certain maturity about you and a certain calm and confidence. I felt very confident when I came to New York; I was more than ready.

Gary had worked twenty years, I had worked thirty years before I made my Broadway debut, and Gary and I had worked in regional theatre together. The first thing we did together was Of Thee I Sing which was done at Arena Stage in Clinton's first term. He played Wintergreen, looking a lot like Ronald Reagan. We gave him orange makeup and coiffed his hair and it was really funny.

And then a couple years later we did a revival of Closer Than Ever and then he got Beauty and the Beast. When Gary got that, he was like a kid in a candy store.

KW: And he told me that with his Tony nomination for Beauty and the Beast he felt a sense of arrival, and the role was the first of some wonderful work he got. Was his nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Musical a turning point for him?

MMD: Absolutely. I mean, getting a Tony nomination, particularly for an actor, is a really cachet-raising event. And the ones that win the award tend to reap a few more benefits.

So, I think that it was just a great big, door-opening welcome from the Broadway community to say, "This is where you belong. So let's spend the next twenty years doing shows here."

Steven Unger: Agent

KW: In 2000 Gary was up for the role of Roger De Bris in The Producers and he told me the story of singing the song "Heil Myself" for Mel Brooks and then Brooks asking him if he was "doing Judy," meaning Judy Garland. And he said he was. And to me this seems like an extremely creative moment in an audition. What kind of feedback did you get from The Producers creative team?

SU: The feedback was, "He was amazing and we're going to Broadway." I mean it was one of those showbiz stories. It was very quick. It wasn't like, "We'll know something in a couple of weeks." Sometimes you do a reading and you wait three years for it to happen. I think everybody who was lucky enough to be in that room sensed that this was so special we've got to do this now.

I mean sometimes it's that magic that happens and it's a role and an actor and they just mesh and you just go, "Wow! Who else could play this part?" So many times people do readings and then they go, "Okay, we really love you, but we have to look for a star, or we have to look for a TV person, blah, blah, blah." And you go, "Wait a minute. You've got the person who is making this work for you." And it's frustrating. But they were like, "We're going and we want Gary." And those are the nicest words anybody can hear.

KW: That's a real vote of confidence.

SU: Absolutely!

KW: We talked about Beauty and the Beast bringing him to a higher level as a Tony nominee. Did The Producers take him to another level?

SU: Oh yes. I mean, first of all, Broadway hadn't seen anything like The Producers in I don't know how long, a show that won twelve Tony Awards. You couldn't get a ticket for a year. And also it was happening at a time where shows weren't selling out, so all of a sudden we had this phenomenon, and he was right in the middle of it. And so that was pretty amazing, and I think it showed him in a very different way than Lumiere or anything else. So here he is in a dress and sitting at the end of the stage singing a tribute to Hitler. And it was a love fest with the show and with the role.

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Ken Womble interviews actors Debra Monk, Eric Ladin, Krysta Rodriguez, Tony Yazbeck, James Earl, Gary Beach, John Tartaglia, Robert Clohessy, Jose Llana and Richard Portnow about their inside acts, the important choices of their acting careers. The interviews explore the intriguing journeys that have led these actors to successful careers, and to Tony, Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards, the most prestigious acting awards in theater and television.

Actor interviews are followed by interviews with two of each actor's success team, the agents, managers, directors and coaches who know them well. Womble then identifies the actor's most frequently used actions, skills and beliefs the keys to each actor's success.

INSIDE ACT is available as a paperback and as an ebook. Each actor chapter is also available as individual ebooks. Click here to purchase now!