Tony Award winner Roger Bart (You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown) is no stranger to doing musicals at the Hollywood Bowl. In 2012 he re-created his role as Carmen Ghia in Mel Brooks’ The Producers. Now he’s back performing the role of Rooster in Michael Arden’s production of Annie. There are three performances this weekend beginning Friday.
Of course, there is a huge difference between these two experiences for Bart. He already knew the role in The Producers. This is his first time in Annie and there are only two weeks to get the show up and running.
“Correct,” he says by phone. “It is exciting. I often like to work that fast. You have to make quick decisions, you don’t have a lot of time. What’s hard is some of the dance steps. I’ll be in the adjacent room down the hall working on my steps. That’s the most daunting thing.”
Bart has a rather extensive Broadway career. He made his Broadway debut as a replacement Tom Sawyer in Big River. He was Harlequin in Triumph of Love. Snoopy was the role for which he won his Tony Award. After The Producers he appeared as Xanthias in The Frogs and then played the role of Dr. Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein.
Annie was never a show he had a chance to perform. But he finds this too good to pass up. “I do love playing comic villains. It’s really one of my favorite things to do and he’s a wonderful one. Another thing I found really appealing was Ana Gasteyer [who is playing Miss Hannigan.] We were on a Seth Rudetsky Playbill cruise once and she was so funny and nice. And most especially Michael Arden because I saw his production of Spring Awakening and it was one of the most stunning theatre experiences.”
For the uninitiated, Annie is based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. As the show opens she is desperate to escape Miss Hannigan and the awful orphanage she lives in with six other girls. She wants to find her parents and when an opportunity to spend part of Christmas with millionaire Daddy Warbucks (David Alan Grier) presents itself, she asks for his help in finding her parents. Hannigan and her brother, Rooster, want to take advantage of Warbucks themselves, but their motives are far less pure.
Doing a show at the Hollywood Bowl allows for two types of performances. There’s the one that is seen by those closest to the stage and the other that is captured on the video screens. Bart recently asked a friend of his for advice on calibrating his performance for both.
“Kevin Chamberlin is a close friend and was in three shows here,” Bart reveals. “He said, ‘They have cameras.’ I said, ‘What do you do, Kev? Do you modify as if you’re on live television or do you do theatre acting?’ He said, ‘I just do what I do.’ I just feel the same way. The bottom line is if you are authentic, and you can be hammy and authentic, it’s really no different, you have nothing to worry about.”
Bart, who is 55, finds himself working with a much younger director, Michael Arden (35) and choreographer, Eamon Foley (mid-20s) on Annie. “I love working with younger people and I think it’s fantastic and it is a little unnerving with myself and a lot of my friends that are the senior members of the company. I feel I just blinked and here I am. I’m playing a judge now on TV (Good Trouble). What happened to my prosecutor years? It is shocking a little bit, but I don’t feel like one of the oldest guys on the inside and I don’t see myself that way.”
When we spoke it was before the news that his co-star from The Producers, Gary Beach, had passed away. He did, however, discuss how much fun they had revisiting their roles in that musical when it played at the Hollywood Bowl.
“It was so much fun. I think Gary and I were lucky that we could maybe get away with doing these roles that we originated on Broadway for about a 20-year span. We can still get away with being Carmen Ghia and Roger De Bris. Some time had passed in between the time we had done it together. It was just so much fun to revisit the show. The only drawback that made me laugh was I was costumed in an all-black cat suit with a monocle. Because we didn’t have the complete old set we had a lot of black drops. That meant my all-black outfit blended in so much. For a moment or two I thought I was doing movement shots. That was hard!”
But whatever the challenges, Bart will always have a passion for live performance.
“I love the purity of being in front of all those people with such a great show and part. I find that it is exhilarating and keeps you sharp. I don’t have to do it necessarily, but I do love working and standing on a stage and having that experience with the audience. As I get older two things are happening: through the richness of our lives we become more complicated and more interesting people. And the second thing is through learning how to act more and more as you get older, the more you get out of your own way. You stop working so hard and trust a little more. That’s been my experience. As much as I love to amuse the camera crew, I love this. Particularly at this time in my life that I have the ability and richness of my life to bring to the character.”