Sunday, May 02, 1999
Taking bows on Broadway
Two former CCM students realize their dreams as stars of major musicals
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
“I love it! I LOVE IT!” Matt Bogart, Houston, Ohio, native and University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music grad ('94), is perched on a Broadway catbird seat.
He's already starred in his Jockeys in a billboard high over Times Square and been through the swinging door of leading men in Miss Saigon, but in late April he achieved what every singing, dancing hopeful aspires to.
Last week he opened in the new Broadway show The Civil War and has the stage to himself for the lamenting ballad “Tell My Father.” Mr. Bogart is the only person who has sung the song for two years of workshops, road tryouts and on the cast double CD.
“This is what I dreamed of,” he says. “Originating a role in a new Broadway show.” Forevermore, he says happily, “I'm the "Tell My Father' guy.”
Mr. Bogart isn't lonely in New York. There are graduates of School for Creative and Performing Arts and CCM alums (a lot of times both) in Ragtime, Cabaret, Annie Get Your Gun, Miss Saigon, Les Miserables.
Kirsten Wyatt (CCM '97), one-half of I Do! I Do! last summer at Downtown Theatre Classics, understudies both women's roles in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. During the winter's near-epidemic flu season, she saw a lot of stage time. Cincinnati native and Sunset Boulevard veteran Ron Bohmer might be the next Scarlet Pimpernel.
Cincinnati connections to New York musical stages aren't anything new. There's Lee Roy Reams, Faith Prince, brothers Jim and Bob Walton. Stephen Flaherty, composer of Ragtime, is a CCM grad.
This season there are more familiar faces than ever shining across the footlights and two of them, Mr. Bogart and Alton White, have leads in major Broadway musicals.
When it's time for curtain calls at Ragtime, the final bows are taken by Mr. White, graduate of Frederick Douglass Elementary, Peoples Middle School and one-time SCPA prom king and yearbook Most Likely to Succeed.
He plays tragic hero Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Ragtime to standing ovations. When it's time to take his bow, Mr. White comes from offstage, “I turn the corner, I start down the walkway, it's like floating,” he says. “Wow.”
In the bowels of the beautiful new Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Mr. White has the star dressing room, complete with couch, family pictures (a lot of them of mom Marietta, who visits him everywhere he goes) and some of his favorite art work on the walls (bright tropical-colored prints by artist Jonathan Greene). He's in this for the long run, he grins, so he might as well feel at home.
Early on he resisted the urge to try a life in the theater. He looked at what he saw on stage, he looked at himself. “I'm black,” he says bluntly. “I didn't see a lot of hope there.”
So Mr. White dutifully went off to Ohio University to major in business administration. “That lasted three weeks,” he laughs. He had been singing at the Cascade Cabaret to pay for school. “I called to get my job back even before I called my parents.”
His road took him to CCM for a couple of years, then to Chicago for a few more where he picked up the tour of Dreamgirls. When the show toured through Cincinnati “it was one of the biggest weeks of my life.”
The tour ended, he went back to Chicago and started the round of auditions again, worked as a waiter, found a home at Chicago's famed dinner theater, the Marriott Lincolnshire. He landed an audition for Miss Saigon on Broadway and flew to New York for the tryout during Lincolnshire's two-day turn-around between A Chorus Line and South Pacific.
“I believe everyone gets a chance to do their thing, but you have to want it badly enough,” Mr. White says.
He wanted it badly enough. He got the ensemble job in Saigon and got serious about his career. “I worked. Talented people always work. A career has to be crafted.”
So when he was offered the understudy role in Ragtime, he politely declined. “I thought, I can't do that anymore.”
He joined the company of Tommy and left when he realized, “This job should go to someone who wants it.” Two weeks later he was in Smokey Joe's Cafe.
Then Ragtime called and offered him the lead in the national tour.
That tour culminated in the kind of backstage drama that you think only happens in the movies. Last December, “We were on the road, and the company manager said, "You're going to Broadway.' I stood up and screamed.”
The next day the company was called together and told that the tour would abruptly close at the end of the week because of producer Livent's headline-making financial problems. Nobody slept that night. A day later came the proposal from another producer for a last-minute reprieve.
These days, the silky voiced Mr. White is using his free daytime hours to work on a CD. “I want to be this generation's Johnny Mathis.” He expects it to be ready for release later this month. Check his Web site at www.altofitz.com
"Civil War' veteran
Matt Bogart is eldest of what may be a Bogart acting dynasty. Second brother Dan just graduated from CCM's musical theater department and has already moved into his big brother's Upper West Side apartment (down payment courtesy of Miss Saigon) to try his luck in New York.
Waiting in the wings are Dominick, a junior in CCM's drama department, and Kevin, graduating from Houston High School this year.
His younger brothers might take notes on how Mr. Bogart has been building his career.
The summer after graduation he didn't hurry to New York but did summer stock, earning his Equity card in Wichita, Kan., playing Tony in West Side Story. People still talk about his CCM performance in the role as a highlight of the '90s.
He arrived in New York and landed the Miss Saigon tour almost immediately. The problem was it wouldn't start for five months. He tried selling shoes at Elder-Beerman. “That was for the birds.” He went back to Wichita.
As just about anyone will tell you, in show business, it's not getting the first job that's the killer. It's getting the second one.
After the Saigon tour Mr. Bogart moved back to New York and went for 14 months without an acting job. “It was a hard time. There were a lot of auditions, and I'd come close but no dice.
“I think I hadn't grown into my type yet. I was 25, I had a voice to fit a 30-year old. I didn't look the way they wanted me to look.”
Luckily, featured players in Broadway shows need vacations. Mr. Bogart started filling in for Saigon, and in January 1997 what began as an occasional gig became 18 months on Broadway.
Broadway is different from touring in a Broadway show, he says. “It's not different to do the performance. It's the same job, to fulfill a character and present the human condition, but when you're starring on Broadway you get asked to do readings, workshops, new plays.
“I love doing the work, I love meeting the people,” Mr. Bogart says.
Even if it's free work on projects that mostly “don't see the light of day,” readings are highly prized jobs. The actor and his work become known to producers, actors, agents. People think of him for jobs. “You don't have to audition.”
Civil War, with music by Frank Wildhorn (Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel) was one of the “60 or 70” readings Mr. Bogart did during his 18-month Saigon tour of duty.
The show is essentially a pop-song cycle connected by a collection of dramatized writings from the war.
Mr. Bogart was a “good guy, making sure they were taking me along for the ride” even though nobody knew what the stage show, which started out as a concept album, was going to be.
He's been with Civil War through readings, workshops, a concert version in Houston, a new director for a pre-Broadway run in New Haven and previews that changed “daily” in New York since late March.
It opened, as have Mr. Wildhorn's other two current Broadway shows, to resoundingly unenthusiastic reviews. That may not matter. Audiences have listened happily to Mr. Wildhorn's bubble gum tunes and not to the critics.
Its own reward
For Mr. Bogart, opening in a featured role in a Broadway musical is its own reward. Along with a realized dream, the two years with Civil War have been a learning experience.
Originating a role brings the responsibility to present a full characterization. “I'm an adult. I went to school for this. You have to collaborate and you have to stand up for what you think is right. You have to fight one little battle at a time.
“I've gotten most of my little battles won.”
Through the Miss Saigon and Civil War years, Mr. Bogart has been growing into his 30-year-old voice.
Mr. Bogart's career seems launched, even if Broadway show-goers agree with the critics about Civil War and he ends up in a short run.
During the last month, while Civil War has been in previews, Mr. Bogart's phone has been ringing and ringing. There are a lot of shows in development, it seems, in need of a leading man. He isn't talking, but he's thinking.
“I believe in riding the wave you're one. One thing at a time. One day at a time.”
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