By Tom Nondorf
Question: Lots going on for you lately. Has it been hectic?
Q: I caught your recital at Zankel Hall, which had some unique touches with graphics and modern dance added to the mix.
Q: Having been known primarily for opera, is Camelot in any way a relief, something a little lighter?
Q: Of course, Robert Goulet made his career in the role. Musical theatre mavens are somewhat more accepting of change than opera lovers, but are you ready for comparisons?
Q: Has working on Camelot seemed foreign to an opera guy?
Q: I heard it from the other side last month, from Richard Kind and Dan Reichard, who were going from lighter musicals to Candide.
Q: You mentioned John Charles Thomas, who could do pop, religious, show music... Is your goal to be sort of a modern version of him?
[Camelot will play Avery Fisher Hall May 7-8 at 7:30 PM, May 9 at 8 PM and May 10 at 2 and 8 PM. Tickets for Camelot, priced $65-$225, are available by visiting www.nyphil.org or by calling (212) 875-5656.]
Hither and Yon
Tom Nondorf can be reached at tnondorf@playbill.com
01 May 2008
Camelot Gets Its Gunn
Nathan Gunn photo by Bill Phelps
Read about opera sensation Nathan Gunn on the internet, and you are as liable to read about his washboard abs as his dynamic baritone. His casting as larger- and louder-than-life Lancelot in the NY Philharmonic's upcoming production of Camelot seems a no-brainer. Alas, potential Gueneveres, Gunn has already found his queen, his pianist wife Julie, who accompanied him at a recent recital at Carnegie's Zankel Hall. The couple has five kids ranging in age from 6 to 13, and Nathan was recently able to elicit a huge cheer from them over the phone when he announced that yes, they would be getting a dog. You'll be able to see what cheers Gunn elicits from an audience yourself, as the star-studded Camelot will be televised on PBS' "Live From Lincoln Center" series on May 8.
Nathan Gunn: You could say that, pretty hectic. But good! The projects I've been doing have all been really enjoyable. Mostly it's a matter of finding the time to make sure everything is prepared and ready to go. The recital at Zankel was great. I just got back from Boston where I debuted a piece by John Harbison, his Fifth Symphony, which is going to become a standard. It is absolutely terrific.
Gunn: Yeah, there are a couple things I'd like to fix because it's a whole new way of doing a recital. I might add more to the program notes about what I'm trying to do. So often, tradition gets in the way of communicating. Moving [recital convention] into the twenty-first century and having all those senses drawn into what's happening onstage can really take us out of the crazy modern world and into an artistic one for a little while.
Gunn: It is little bit lighter, but especially the old musicals like Camelot or Show Boat or Oklahoma! or Carousel… Things like that were written at a time when there wasn't such a divide between the American classical singers and vaudeville and all that stuff and musical theatre. You could get someone like John Charles Thomas, who was one of the great American baritones ever, who would do both, and I've always wanted to do some musicals, and it seems like now I'm getting more of a chance. Lancelot is a beautiful sing [laughs]. He gets great tunes. I was talking to [director] Lonny Price last week about how the stories of The Pearl Fishers, the Bizet opera, and Camelot are not that different. A king feels like he has been betrayed, and he has to choose. It's a love triangle. The men feel like they love the same woman, and they also love each other. The story is heavy in some ways, and has a lot of humor as well.
Gunn: I'd never seen the show. Ever. So I'm coming at this new. We're playing with the idea of giving Lancelot a little French accent that I think I'm going to make a little bit thicker at the beginning, and after he's there at Camelot for a few years, it starts to diminish a bit. Mostly because I think "C'est Moi" is hilarious if you think of the guy as actually being French. It's so French! With a bit of an accent, it's very funny. I don't know if anybody's ever done it like that or not. We might scrap the idea if it becomes too ridiculous [laughs]. The fights are going to be great, too. That's another fun aspect to it all.
Gunn: I'm pretty good at focusing on my job and what I'm meant to do. The way I try to get around that sort of thing is really by serving the piece. I focus on the words and try to bring what I have to bring. I'm very much okay with understanding that some people are going to want what I bring to a role and some people are not. You can't compromise what you choose to do and try to please everybody or you get a very generic performance. I won't do it like Robert Goulet, and that's okay. It's much like the recital [at Zankel]. There are some very conservative individuals who don't want to see things change. That makes them very uncomfortable. I can't satisfy those people, so I won't even try. With Lancelot, it'll be my interpretation, and hopefully it will be unique and still acceptable to die-hard musical theatre fans.
Gunn: What's really fun is that it is such a different process with musical theatre. We focus primarily on the book and the text and the dialogue, and in the world of opera it is almost flip-flopped — you focus almost entirely on the music, and the dialogue is given much less time.
Gunn: [Laughs.] That's right. In the world of opera, I forget that we use Italian so often just to describe musical terms. We'll say, "Here we'll have a ritardando at that point, and a slow crescendo here," and I was talking about the first song with Lonny, and I realized afterwards that I'm not sure if he knew what I was talking about at all [laughs]. So it's amusing and fun, but I'll enjoy.
Gunn: He's certainly a big influence. Also, my teacher was one. My teacher was old when I met him. His career was when radio was king — he primarily worked in Chicago and would sing on the "Carnation Breakfast Hour" and then go over to Orchestra Hall and do Haydn's "Creation" or something like that. It was really important to him that you be understood when you sing and that you sing in your own language a lot. So with him as a model, and people like Thomas, he did a lot of new music. A lot of what he sang at recital was written for him — an all-out complete approach to making music. There are some voices I just love. Bing Crosby was a beautiful singer. Guys like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, where they have this sense of rhythm and ability to tell a story that I've always admired. Robert Merrill, there was some recording of him that I heard at the very beginning and I thought, "My God, I didn't know people make such beautiful sounds!"
Great piece on Playbill.com by Sheryl Flatow on Marni Nixon. Marni can also be heard soloing on fifties records by one of my favorite vocal ensembles, The Voices of Walter Schumann. Schumann is famous for creating the "Dragnet" theme and composing the music for the film "The Night of the Hunter," but if you ever get hold of those "Voices" LPs, ooh, that's gorgeous stuff… The Milk Can Theatre Company's The 5 Borough Plays features a musical among its five shorts dedicated to each of New York's components. Mike Steinmetz, Robert Tann and Chris Yonan are the men in 1600 Feet, a tuneful romantic battle dedicated to Brooklyn. Manhattan gets Bethany Larsen's Hot Corn Girls featuring monologue champ extraordinaire, Katie Northlich. The plays run May 3-18 at the Michael Weller Theatre, 311 West 43rd Street. Check out www.milkcantheatre.org for more info… What Seth Rudetsky modestly didn't mention in his column is just how nicely he and Brad Oscar transmogrified into the new Hope and Crosby at Jim Caruso's star-studded (Hello Lucy Arnaz! Hello Doug Wilson from "Trading Spaces"!) Cast Party last week. Not sure who would be Hope and who would be Crosby, but the story behind Stephen Cole and David Krane's The Road to Qatar is too outlandish not to make a great musical. Check out www.castpartynyc.com for more about Caruso's Birdland events… Cole, by the way, also co-wrote the bio of Ms. Nixon ("I Could Have Sung All Night") and the book for the Off-Broadway musical The Night of the Hunter. Sometimes it all just comes full circle. The spirit of Walter Schumann must be looking out for me. Until next time, enjoy the lusty month of May!
THE LEADING MEN: Gaines and Gunn
Q: Beautiful sing, indeed. Lancelot gets to balance the comic arrogance of "C'est Moi" with the beautiful ballad "If Ever I Would Leave You."
