A decade ago, Tony Award-winning performer Brian Stokes Mitchell was asked to help out The Actors Fund, the national social service provider to theater professionals. Fast forward ten years and now he is chairman of the fund’s board of directors.
So he is busy raising money for the fund with a series of five benefit concerts at major regional theaters across the nation. That select group includes the Maltz Jupiter, where his mellow baritone can be heard caressing some of his favorite show tunes this Sunday evening.
Why the Maltz?
“The Maltz is one of those regional mainstays,” says Mitchell, 56, best known for Broadway appearances in Ragtime and the revivals of Kiss Me, Kate and Man of La Mancha. “We’ve kind of had a dialogue going on back and forth between us for quite some time, so it just seemed like a natural place for us to go. And there’s nothing like being in Florida in January when you live in New York.”
His musical menu will reflect his latest album, Simply Broadway, newly released by the CD Baby label. As Mitchell explains, it “was inspired by one of my favorite albums by Tony Bennett and (pianist) Bill Evans, done around 1975. It was just the two of them in a studio. They recorded a number of songs from the Great American Songbook that were standards. And I thought, ‘I want to take this idea and do it with theater songs.’”
So Mitchell and his longtime musical director/pianist Tedd Firth improvised their way through a dozen or so songs from Broadway’s classic age, ranging from 1940 to 1980. “I would come in with a concept or an idea and then he would take it and fly with it, and then we’d build on that and back and forth,” says Mitchell.
“What I did when I chose these particular songs, I was programming not only an album but a show as well. How it starts, what happens in the middle, how it ends and the overall feeling that it leaves with an audience,” he says. “The concert deviates a bit from what I ended up with on the album, but the arc is the same.”
Certainly Mitchell, expects to open with “Feeling Good” from the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd, by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse. He calls the number “a statement of what I want the audience to feel like as they leave this concert. I had an idea that I wanted it to have kind of an impressionistic vibe about it and be different. I give each song a fresh new approach that is still respectful of the original material.
“Arrangement-wise, ‘Feeling Good’ is a little bit unusual, so it kind of sets up in people’s minds — subconsciously or not — ‘Hey, this isn’t going to be your usual Broadway kind of concert. It’s going to be creative and artful and fun and a little quirky and interesting and unpredictable. But it‘s going to feel really good, so fasten your seat belts.’ That’s the reason for starting with that song.”
Other Broadway standards on the album, likely to be heard in the Maltz concert, include South Pacific’s “Some Enchanted Evening,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” from Fiddler on the Roof, Man of La Mancha’s “The Impossible Dream” and Company’s “Sorry/Grateful.”
“What I love about the album is it gives me the opportunity to play these different characters, and play them as if I were doing them on Broadway,” says Mitchell. “When you’re doing an album and a concert, you get to choose the songs and the characters you love that really speak to you. You come in with an idea, but then it becomes alive. It’s like giving birth to something. And just like giving birth to a kid, you never know what you’re going to get and sometimes he becomes something else, something unexpected and fun and wonderful that you had no idea about.”
A standout on the album is Carousel’s “Soliloquy,” which makes one think that maybe Mitchell is auditioning to play carnival barker Billy Bigelow. He chuckles at the suggestion. “Well, I think I’m past my prime for Billy. That’s why it’s fun to do these in a concert, because I can become that character.
“I would love to do Tevye. That’s a character that I’m the right age for. I’m the right vocal type and everything. Sweeney Todd? I did it in Washington, D.C.,” at the Kennedy Center, “but have never done on Broadway. I love that character as well. These are characters that do speak to me personally, characters with a bit of a dark side to them.”
That would include Ragtime’s Coalhouse Walker, the piano player-turned-terrorist, a role he originated on Broadway in 1998. Because of the show’s cast size and musical complexity, it has since gravitated to the realm of opera companies, where Mitchell hopes to play the part again.
“That role is still the most magical role that I’ve ever done,” he says. “We all had a sense when we were doing that that we were a part of something really unusual and wonderful. It was like this was one of the reasons we were put on the planet at this time, to all get together and do that particular show. If the (Metropolitan Opera) did that, for instance, I would love to do that there. One of the things that I’ve always want to do is an opera, and that’s a nice kind of a way to do it.”
After these Actors Fund concerts, Mitchell finds himself at a career crossroad. “I’m actually talking to somebody right now about doing a show. There’s two different (Broadway) projects that I’m talking about. But it’s feast or famine in my industry. I’ve also done a television plot as well, just about three weeks ago. It’s a really terrific pilot. I can’t say too much about it, but I get to play the president of the United States. Man, it hardly gets better than that.”
Even if the pilot gets picked up, Mitchell feels certain he will eventually return to the theater. “Fortunately and unfortunately, one of the realities of Broadway is television stars and movie stars have a much better chance of doing the shows that they want to do and the roles that they want to do, because they have a greater recognizability quotient,” he says.
He is what The New York Times called Broadway’s “Last Leading Man.”
It is a title that he proudly, if ruefully, accepts. “My thought when I got that was, “Yeah, I’m ‘the last leading man’ until the next one comes along,’” Mitchell says. “But I do realize, particularly now as time’s gone by, that kind of leading man that I’m playing, you don’t see them very often. The theater has changed and the kinds of roles have changed, so I think maybe they were on to something. I got a chance to be a part of a wonderful Broadway era and (play) a Broadway type that people don’t get an opportunity to do so often anymore.”
At the moment, though, Mitchell is thinking about an off-Broadway concert. Way off-Broadway, in Jupiter.
“I really look at a concert as performance art. What I want my audience to feel and to get when they leave the theater is that they’ve been to a theatrical experience that works on a lot of levels,” he says. “I believe when you come out of that experience — like a good theatrical production — you should come out transformed, feeling better than you did when you walked in.”
BRIAN STOKES MITCHELL IN CONCERT, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road. Sunday, Jan. 5 at 8 p.m.Tickets from $50. Call: (561) 575-2223.