Len Cariou brings tribute to Shakespeare to Bay Area.
NEW YORK — Len Cariou, in a T-shirt, is in a rehearsal studio just off Broadway, down a hallway of booming opera singers. From the creaky elevator to the cramped 10th-floor space, it could have been New York from 40 years ago, when Cariou won a Tony for his role as Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber.
As the actor and singer, 78, began a run-through of his “Broadway and the Bard: An Evening of Shakespeare & Song,” he hesitated for a moment. “I can’t stand this mirror here,” he said, eyeing the tall glass in front of him. He grabbed the full-length mirror and placed it behind him, glass to the wall.
So much for vanity when you have a show to prepare. Cariou then took his team — pianist Mark Janas and di-
rector Barry Kleinbort — through the one-man show where autobiography underlies tributes to Shakespeare and musical theater.
Cariou brings the breadth of his legacy to the George & Sonja Vukasin Theatre at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek from June 21 to June 24.
Cariou’s ode to the Bard opens with the first lines of “Twelfth Night”:
“If music be the food of love, play on;
“Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
“The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
Soon Cariou shifts from soliloquy to Sondheim, a song from “Applause,” in which he co-starred with Lauren Bacall. He shifts back and forth from drama to music, to a sonnet — from full-throated to whispery, sometimes grand, sometimes with the informal intimacy of a nightclub act.
Informal or not, the actor is demanding as much of the audience as he is of himself. To minimize reading and shuffling papers, the evening’s programs will only list performer, director and pianist. “We printed a program with just CVs in it. And at the end of the show we hand out a program with all the musical numbers and soliloquies in it, as you’re going out of the theater, because I didn’t want people reading it and saying, ‘I hate that f —ing thing.’ ”
The staged production was Cariou’s idea. “We talked — for five minutes, literally — about doing it as a cabaret piece, and we tried a few things, and then looked at each other and said, “This can’t be a cabaret piece, it’s got to be in the theater,” said Cariou, who had done earlier cabarets with Janas.
Given the source material, “Broadway and the Bard” could have been a marathon. “I knew that I wanted this to be one act, so that limited us,” Cariou said. “When you do cabaret, each set — that’s the parlance in the cabaret world — should be about 16 songs. We ended up with 17 little one-act plays.”
There is a story inside the show — Cariou’s life in the theater, minus his work in film (“Spotlight,” 2015) and television (“Blue Bloods,” now entering its ninth season).
“It’s about a man’s career; it’s all about the many roles in his career that he’s gotten to play,” said director Kleinbort.
In Winnipeg, where Cariou was born, he began singing before he started acting.
“Long before. We had The Len Cariou Trio, we called it — and there were four of us,” he recalled, smiling. “We played a place called Chan’s Moon Room, upstairs in a Chinese restaurant. There were only about four nightclubs in town.
“My mother’s side, the Irish
side of the family, were all musicians — amateur, not professional. They all sang, we had a piano, and music was always in the house. I had four older siblings, and there was a potpourri of music. So I got a well-rounded ear,” he said.
Thanks to his mentor in Winnipeg, a refugee from Budapest named John Hirsch, Cariou got his first acting role, Ensign Pulver in “Mr. Roberts,” the play adapted from Thomas Heggen’s 1946 novel, which was made into a film in 1955. “I had never done a play, and I didn’t know whether I could. I had never seen a play,” Cariou recalled, “but I said, ‘Well, anyway, he’s an ensign. What kind of a role could it be?’
“Then a friend of mine said — ‘Schmuck, Jack Lemmon won an Academy Award playing it.’ ”
With Hirsch’s help, Cariou moved to the Stratford Shakespeare Theater. A year later, Cariou told Hirsch, “That’s what I want to do. I want to do the classics.”
Hirsch’s response was, “You’re taking the high road. But make me a promise that you don’t give up the musicals.” “So I made him a promise,” Cariou said.
By autumn 1969, Cariou would be on Broadway in Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” and then co-star with Bacall in “Applause” in March 1970. He won a Tony in 1979 for the title role in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”
And Cariou can still stop traffic, even in New York. He and his team tell stories of bus drivers and restaurant patrons screaming out, “Hey, Grandpa,” when he crosses their path, recognizing him as the long-time patriarch on “Blue Bloods.”
“Len did a year of ‘Sweeney Todd’ on Broadway, and more people watch one episode of ‘Blue Bloods’ on Friday night than for the entire run of ‘Sweeney Todd,’ ” said Janas.
Asked how he felt about that, Cariou said, “My manager loves it.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” he said, “and the best thing is that it happened in my life at the right time.”