BWW Interviews: BRYAN FENKART, on Bringing MEMPHIS To Life For Memphis, Nashville and Beyond

There's just something about Memphis that sets it apart from Nashville, something that becomes ingrained in your soul if you spend any time there. Maybe it's Memphis' role as the biggest city in the Mississippi Delta (which is said to start in the lobby of the iconic Peabody Hotel). Maybe it's the city's drawling and sprawling Southern charm, stretching from the nightclubs and dives of Beale Street and moving out Poplar Avenue toward Midtown and the tony neighborhoods of East Memphis and beyond. Maybe it's the Bluff City's culture of art and music, long revered and still appreciated by the disparate personalities that make Memphis one of the most contradictory cities in the South, where the down-at-heels and the well-heeled live side by side, bound together by a hunger for barbecue and biscuits, bourbon and ballads, rhythm and blues.

The changing social mores and challenging political climate of Memphis in the mid-20^th century provide the backdrop for the Tony Award-winning musical Memphis, now on a national tour that wends its way to Nashville this week for an eight-performance run at Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Jackson Hall. With the acclaimed musical's national tour kicking off in the city that gave the show its name (Memphis' historic, and beautifully restored, Orpheum Theatre played host to the company as it readied for its nationwide journey), it makes sense that Nashville audiences would find themselves among the first cities to get a taste of the show that continues to draw rapturous audiences on Broadway.

"From the underground dance clubs of 1950s Memphis  comes a hot new Broadway musical that bursts off the stage with explosive dancing, irresistible songs and a thrilling tale of fame and forbidden love," according to press releases trumpeting the imminent arrival of the company in Music City USA. "Inspired by actual events, Memphis is about a white radio DJ who wants to change the world and a black club singer who is ready for her big break."

Winner of four Tony Awards in 2010, including Best Musical, Memphis features a Tony Award-winning book by Joe DiPietro (I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change) and a Tony-winning original score with music by Bon Jovi founding member David Bryan. Direction is by Tony nominee Christopher Ashley (Xanadu), and choreography is by Sergio Trujillo (Jersey Boys). It is loosely based on the life of celebrated Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips, one of the first white DJs to play music by African-American artists in the 1950s.

Bryan Fenkart, who plays the starring role of DJ Huey Calhoun in the national tour and who made his Broadway debut in Memphis as the Huey stand-by to Tony nominee Chad Kimball, says the experience of mounting Memphis in Memphis is one he'll never forget - and one which affected the entire company in so many ways.

"It was really a kind of magic that happened in Memphis," he contends. "So in many ways, it didn't feel like the tour started until we got to Houston [the tour's second stop]. Memphis had a crazy energy about it that made it that much more electric - and being around people who may have been alive during the times these things were happening made it really special."

But more than simply pulling together a national tour in the city that inspired the musical, the whole experience gave company members a unique sense of time and place that, perhaps, lends further credence to the show itself.

"More than just being at the Orpheum and rehearsing and putting everything together, it was going down to Beale Street and hearing the live music performed by some of the best musicians you'll ever hear - some of the best talent in the world who will never be known outside that street -  is what reallyl was magical," Fenkart explains. "People who are playing their brand of music at 1 a.m. in a club, they're the kind of talent that gets overlooked - that was more eye-opening than anything that we experienced in Memphis."

As a result, with three cities behind them as the company heads to Nashville, "the tour has been great so far, we've had really solid audiences, but we haven't duplicated that experience we had in Memphis yet," he says.

As a veteran of the Broadway company - as are several others in the cast and crew - Fenkart says the national tour has taken on a life of its own, as the show has evolved  over time, which includes the company's three weeks in Memphis (Although, he admits: "I'm still working off the food that I ate in Memphis; I don't think I had a bad meal at all while I was there.").

"It's an evolution," he suggests. "Having the same creative team working with a new cast allows them to smooth over things, so it's a different show now. The Broadway cast is outstanding and now we are able to build on the groundwork they did with the show to make it different. It's a little bit fresher and these people haven't been doing the show as long so it's more energetic."

"A lot of it has to do with if you connect with the music or not," Fenkart suggests. "It's an original show, so it's not like you're going to hear music you love already, so you have to come into it expecting to hear new music written for the show. You go to Jersey Boys, for example, you know you're gonna hear the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but when you come to Memphis, what you hear is some really great music written specifically to tell this story."When you talk to people who have seen Memphis, you find that they either seem to love it or hate it - there's very little gray area in regard to the original music based on the musical history of the not-so-distant past - and that's something Fenkart thinks may have more to do with the fact that it is an original musical as opposed to a so-called "jukebox musical," the likes of which has dominated the Broadway landscape for several seasons now, to mixed effect.

And the story that Memphis tells is unique in the history of Broadway musicals, relating the tale of a "quirky" white DJ who loves "black music" and finds himself falling in love with an African-American  woman named Felecia Farrell, who's a budding star in her own right. As the heavens align to bring the Huey and Felecia together in the still-segregated world of the South, in general, and Memphis' musical haunts, in particular, conflicts and emotions rise to not-so-surprising effect.

Felecia Boswell takes on the role of Felecia Farrell in the national company, and together with Fenkart, the duo has received critical praise and the adoration of a discerning audience. One woman, who saw the show at the Orpheum Theatre, told me, "I thought Chad Kimball and [Tony Award-winning lead actress in a musical] Montego Glover were wonderful when I saw them in New York, but I fell in love with Bryan Fenkart and Felicia Boswell in Memphis. I could see the show every night with them in it."

Fenkart's take on his starring role is frank and straightforward: "Huey Calhoun is a quirky character and some people will fall in love with him or find him annoying. I think he's written as a quirky, alienating character."

But it's obvious that he loves playing the role, given his appreciation of the material he's given to perform each night. "The music is catchy and upbeat - and I admit that I'm biased and I grew up in Jersey, so I love Bon Jovi - but it's nice to have new songs that you leave the theater humming. I think there are some well-written shows that fall short of that because of the music."

Memphis plays TPAC's Andrew Jackson Hall November 15 through November 20, and performance times are as follows: Tuesday through Thursday evenings at 7:30 p.m., Friday evening at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 1  and 6:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the TPAC box office at 505 Deaderick Street (downtown) or the satellite box office in the Mall at Green Hills, located at the mall's concierge desk. Tickets may be ordered online by visiting www.tpac.org or by calling (615) 782-4040.

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