When The Producers opened on Broadway, I had the ultimate pleasure to be there for the opening weekend in New York City. And I experienced it with the original cast including the subject of this interview, Brad Oscar, who played Franz Liebkind. For this performance, Oscar received a Tony award nomination. It was a performance I will never forget. When he took over for Nathan Lane as Bialystock, I had the opportunity to interview him for another publication. It was certainly pleasure to be able to catch up with him about his newest project, Barnum, now playing at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Jupiter, Florida through Sunday, January 25th.
Oscar, as I had aforementioned, received a 2001 Tony Award nomination for The Producers as Best Featured Actor in a Musical and went on to play the role of Max Bialystock over 1,200 times on Broadway, on tour, in London and in the Las Vegas production. His other Broadway and New York credits include Spamalot, the original casts of Jekyll & Hyde and Aspects of Love, Gerard Alessandrini's Forbidden Broadway, the Encores! Do Re Mi, as well as Santa in The Radio City Christmas Spectacular in Los Angeles and Branson. At Washington, DC's Arena Stage, he recently starred in The Mystery of Irma Vep, Cabaret and Damn Yankees.
So I caught up with Oscar last week before the official opening and talked Barnum with him.
TJ: Hi Brad. It's been a while since I last saw you. How is Barnum going?
OSCAR: It's going great! It's a very fun role. We just finished putting it back up here in Jupiter. It's a co-production between Asolo Repertory in Sarasota and the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. We finished the first part of our run in Sarasota, then had a week off for the holiday and then made the necessary adaptations and changes for Jupiter, technically and physically, because it is a different space. I think we're finally done rehearsing it and started previews last night. We open up officially tomorrow night.
It is a lot of fun and I am having a great time! It's such a fun show. I had seen it originally on Broadway a couple of times. What is nice about it is that I think a lot of people are not familiar with the show because it doesn't seem to be done that much, by nature of the requirements of the show...with the circus stuff and all that. So, its fun to do the show, especially for the audiences down here and enjoy the traditional kind of musical theatre thing. Audiences have been loving it, which is wonderful.
TJ: When you were in Sarasota, did you visit the Ringling Museum?
OSCAR: Yes. The theatre is right there. It's tied in with FSU. It's right there at the museum and the mansion. It was so exciting to do it there being the sort of unofficial home of the circus. To be able to do some of the research...to be able to go into the museum and see a lot of that stuff was cool.
TJ: I was going to say, how did that help you get into understanding the character and discovering who Barnum was?
OSCAR: You take everything you can, right? You just try to be a sponge like that. I guess what I found most interesting about the process was we all think about Barnum and the circus. But, ironically, the circus came very late in his life, when he joined up with Bailey...actually, about 10 years before he died. There was so much else he did and so many other things that he sort of pioneered. In so many ways, he is the father of advertising, which I didn't realize until I stated to investigate this a little more and read stuff. There's a great A&E biography...they always come in handy. It was very interesting to see what he did over the course of his life before he even joined the circus, if you will. That's what makes the show entertaining and educational, although it's hardly educational. You know what I mean. People can find out who this guy was and what led him to that...what brought him to the point that was a natural extension of what he had done throughout his life with his sideshow attractions, with his menageries...which at that point in we're really just displays of animals.
Then of course, with his advertising...he way he would promote things, the way he would tap into the public consciousness or find a way to intrigue, mystify and excite. Several times in the play, he would say, "I want to give people a glimpse of the miracle." I think the miracle being that state of wonder and disbelief and the joy it brings when we can't necessarily wrap our mind around something because it's so fantastical. And he had a passion to do that...not to swindle, not to cheat, not to hoodwink these people...although he was accused of doing so throughout his life. I think, because of the research I have done on this man, how he treated Tom Thumb and Joyce Heff and these actual people who were his sideshow attractions...he treated them with such respect and such and professionalism. Most of these kinds of people that ended up making a living off that...these freaks, as they were most often referred to...were often treated horribly by their promoters or whoever held their contracts. Barnum had a great respect for these people.
