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THE LEADING MEN: Evans, Morton and Minchin
By Tom Nondorf
03 Mar 2008
Q: What music shaped you in your early days?
Morton: My mother and father divorced when I was very, very young, so it was always me and my mom. I don't know if she was morbidly depressed or what, but she used to play the Carpenters all the time, and that affected me. I would put the vinyl albums on, and Karen Carpenter was kind of my singing teacher when I was about five, six, seven years old. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was getting practice. I'd practice breathing like she did.
Q: What do you feel made Karen Carpenter so amazing?
Morton: Her voice is timeless and completely touching. I went to visit a friend of mine up in Vermont last week, and he was talking about being in an airport a couple months ago in a crowded, crazy airport bar. It was one of those rush-hour times, and the bar was filled with people, and on the TV was an old live shot of Karen singing "We've Only Just Begun." And the 25 people at the bar and everyone at the nearest tables, everyone at once stopped talking and watched at least 35-40 seconds of her singing the song and went back to what they were doing. It was like this strange pause to stop and listen to Karen, and I think that really sums up what Karen did to people.
Q: Will you be doing any Carpenters songs in this show?
Morton: I'm doing a song that I know because Karen sang it, but it's not actually a Carpenters song. Sammy Fain's "I Can Dream Can't I?" from a 1938 musical called Right This Way. It's been done by the Andrews Sisters and the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra and Tommy Dorsey, but the only time I ever heard it was on a vinyl album, sung by Karen Carpenter. I didn't want to take one of the obvious ones, "Close to You," or any of those. I wanted to do something that kept itself within the period that I wanted to play with in the show but also that had connected me to Karen, so this song was perfect.
Q: You've been pretty well-traveled in the States.
Morton: It's the one thing I do when I am not working in New York, which there have been swaths of time. I made an album — I can't believe it was almost two years ago. I do a lot of traveling. I do gigs at high schools in Peoria; the University of Utah; all over Vermont; Birmingham, Alabama; Georgia. I love this country. And with music, it's great. It's easier to take a small band and tour a few small theatres in Alabama than it is to take Taboo on tour. You really connect to people. I love being an actor — it's another part of who I am, but there's nothing better than taking a small band out, playing small, little gigs to 40 people in tiny little pubs or whatever. I'm truly meeting people and truly sharing music with them, and I hope they enjoy it, and I love going out and traveling. Although, these days I feel a little guilty because I use the car a lot, and I still have a fuel-engine car. I'm desperate to get a hybrid so I can feel slightly less bad about myself.
[Euan Morton's Here and Now opens March 4 at The Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room Cabaret, 59 West 44th Street; call (212) 419-9331 for information and reservations.]
Now That You Minchin It…
Haven't heard of Tim Minchin? Well, look him up on youtube, and see the gaggle of daffy numbers he has concocted and had great success with in his native Australia and in England. Minchin is a mixed bag of piano virtuosity, mock pomposity, theatricality and silly comedy. Such songs as "Inflatable You," "Peace Anthem for Palestine" and "Canvas Bags" have had people in stitches at venues like the Royal Albert Hall, and now he is ready for import to the New World. New World Stages, that is, where he will set-up shop March 3-April 12.
Question: Are you stoked about your first major American gig?
Tim Minchin: I am, really. It's scary as hell — in a good way. It's scary in a way that I've been scared before, and when you're that sort of scared, things usually go pretty well because it means you're taking a risk. It's not a crazy risk because I'd visited [the States] in November and got the feeling that there was a much bigger market for my sort of thing, so I'm not taking a stab in the dark, but there's no doubt it's an ambitious run for someone who no one really knows apart from some clippings about festival success.
Q: Do you worry about whether your humor will translate to U.S. audiences? Is that a valid concern?
Minchin: I think it absolutely is, for all comedians crossing into other cultural paradigms. I grew up in Australia; obviously I'm Australian and lived there until very recently, and when I came to the U.K. for the first time in 2005, it made so little difference to the way audiences responded, that I started realizing that I, through sheer dumb luck, had created a style of show that is not very parochial. It's very universal in that my obsessions are about sex and death and God and stuff like that rather than the minutiae of everyday suburban Australian life.
Q: People love to pigeonhole and classify, and you are not easily classifiable.
Minchin: Thanks. That's a great thing to be, unless you come into a place where if you can't be classified, they'll just ignore you. I do call myself a musician and actor and that sort of thing, and I am, but in terms of my solo comedy act, it's a bit different from a lot of the stuff that's going on. But at the same time, the heritage of what I do goes all the way back to music hall and comes through all the old blokes: Tom Lehrer, Victor Borge and all that, even though they are not really influences on me. I was never a musical comedy fan. The fact is, I'm a cabaret act, and what better place to be doing cabaret than New York? So, hopefully, I'm in a genre that's familiar enough that people aren't freaked out by it.
Q: You've been on stage in shows like Amadeus and Jesus Christ Superstar. What came first to you in your life, the music, the comedy or the acting?
Minchin: Certainly not the comedy. I never dreamt I'd become a comedian. I don't know about you, but the whole idea scared the hell out of me until I was doing it accidentally. I still struggle with the label, "comedian," because I can't believe that's what I'm doing, but I do understand that is the genre I'm in. Not because I don't want to, just because it seems sort of weird. I started doing comedy about four years ago. Really I was composing, writing music for theatre.
Q: You have a song called "The Dark Side," about a guy who can't have hits because his songs are too happy. Do you think the era of novelty pop hits will ever return?
Minchin: I don't know. There's a grey area, isn't there? Pop music is actually quite ironic these days. I hope it is, [laughs] otherwise it is seriously terrible.
[Minchin plays The New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, from March 3-April 12; call (212) 239-6200 or visit www.telecharge.com for tickets.]
Hither and Yon
Last month in this space I gave a shout out to Jason S. Little, performing as his alter ego, Tits Fisher, at the Zipper Factory. Somehow I accidentally sainted the man by adding an extra "t," and thus creating a brand new alter ego that Little has embraced wholeheartedly, Jason St. Little. Well, the Saint came marching in and absolutely killed the audience at the Feb. 28 Zipper show. It's not every artist who could pull off a transition from AC/DC's "Back in Black" to Al Jolson's "Swanee." Or have medleys of Weill-Brecht and the Smiths. Plus, anybody who does a song from "Bugsy Malone" is going to win me over automatically. Excellent backing by Kitten's Kiss… Last Five Years fans, if you haven't seen the news, Jason Robert Brown and Lauren Kennedy will be performing a concert version of the show at Birdland on March 17 and 18 at 7 PM. Go to www.birdlandjazz.com for details…Clark Warren returns to the Metropolitan Room (34 West 22nd Street) on March 6 with his show Better Than Anything; call (212) 206-0440 for info… P.S., March is Cabaret Month, so check out marchiscabaretmonth.com, and get out and see some stuff. More I cannot wish you. Until next time.
Tom Nondorf can be reached at tnondorf@playbill.com.
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