Add a news item : Tom Wopat Official Website : Search There are now 45 items in our newsboard. 1 2 3 4 5 >>> Viewing items 1 to 10. THE LEADING MEN: Wopat added by Tom Nondorf, playbill.com url A couple Tony nominees run the Leading Men gauntlet this month: A Catered Affair's Tom Wopat, the most introspective taxi driver since Robert De Niro.... Father of the Bride I always think it must be a nice thing when a character shares the same name as the actor in that role. Your castmates never have to worry about accidentally calling you by your real name onstage. Tom Wopat shares more than a name with Tom Hurley, the working-class cabbie and reluctant wedding subsidizer in A Catered Affair. Wopat relates to his namesake by recalling the Wisconsin dairy farmers of his youth, men he says worked 'from light to light and sometimes beyond that to just keep food on the table for the family.' Channeling that ethos and mixing in a heavy dose of world-weariness — one would swear there is a rain cloud following him around the stage —makes Tom's Tom an extremely captivating character to watch and a great foil for Faith Prince's Aggie. Question: How are you enjoying being a part of A Catered Affair? Tom Wopat: The story itself is a great story I've always likened to the O. Henry story, 'The Gift of The Magi.' In my view, this story has that kind of symmetry and payoff. It's bittersweet. It's a beautiful piece, but not as much fun to do as some of the other musicals I've done over the years like Oklahoma! or City of Angels or 42nd Street. It's very satisfying. The thing that's interesting about it is the way that it seems to affect people. There's a pretty large percentage of the audience that really gets it and identifies with the humanity of the play. Q: How do you mean, 'not as much fun' — because it is a more difficult role? Wopat: 'Difficult' is not really the word as much as it's emotionally exhausting, since I'm not a good enough actor to act the last scene without kind of 'going there.' And I go fairly deep into the emotion of the situation and the frustration of the character. It's kind of painful on a nightly basis — that's basically what I'm talking about. There is a depth of emotion and anxiety that pretty much all the actors in this show get to at one point or another. Q: So there is plenty of tapping into reality up there? Wopat: I think that's the strength of the play and the musical itself. It's real people. They are not going to break into a dance, but they will sing about what they are doing. And the music I think is very beautiful and integral, and integrated, actually, into the action. I think it's one of the best examples of how to bring a song out of the action and go back into the action from the song. I think that combination of John Bucchino's music and John Doyle's direction has really achieved that kind of melding of the two things. Q: Because your character is emotionally distant through much of the show, you spend a lot of quiet time on stage while Harvey Fierstein or Faith are going off. Was that challenging? Wopat: Yeah, that was really hard for me because I am a fairly vocal guy to begin with. I have started to be a little more reticent as I get a little older. I recognize the class of worker this guy is and also that older generation saddled with the inability to really discuss emotion and address situations that arise because of a lack of communication. That's what this play is really about. Q: It definitely is a musical that allows the players to really act. Wopat: Well, I've done plenty of musicals where you feel you almost have to apologize for the book. And this is not one of those. I think this book is totally amazing, and both Paddy Chayefsky's whole concept originally, and what Gore Vidal did to it, and also Harvey's contribution is fairly amazing. I've been kind of astonished on a weekly basis at the depth and insight in the lines. There is just a wealth of knowledge and subtlety to the dialogue. Q: So far, your stage work has been more brash and open characters. Was it a cool change to play a more inward-looking guy? Wopat: Yeah, that's kind of been a conscious decision. I'm getting a little long in the tooth to do the Curleys and some of the more traditional leading men roles in musicals. I've been playing dads these days. I think that it's interesting to be able to have a little more breadth to the character. I think this performance is informed by what I was doing when I was doing Glengarry Glen Ross [in 2005], which was an amazing production. Q: How happy were you when you first encountered your big number, 'I Stayed'? Wopat: [Laughs.] You know what? I was all ready to turn the part down until I got to the song, and then I got to the song and I said, 'Sheeeeooot. I'm gonna have to do this.' I think it has the potential, if we get a run out of this show, to be a real audition song, and I think it's kind of a cross between the soliloquy from Carousel and 'Rose's Turn' from Gypsy. It's a real epiphany, and those don't happen very often in musicals, and they don't happen very often in plays. It's one of those things where all of a sudden, something clicks in this guy, and he's gotta say what he's gotta say, and the musical comes to a screeching halt, and it's really a challenge, but it's also extremely exciting. At the beginning, I feel like I have the power to take the audience wherever I want to take them. I have their complete attention at the beginning of that song. Probably once a week, I will finish, and you can just hear all of the air being sucked out of the room as I walk off. It's pretty amazing. Q: Are you able to enjoy some of Faith's memorable reactions after your song? Wopat: I saw it in rehearsal. This show was intense to watch in rehearsal as anything I've ever done. And I can't say enough about Doyle. It's a unique acting experience working with John Doyle, and it was a total joy. And I would challenge you to find anybody as good as that. He's an amazing guy, he's got an amazing approach, and it's hard to overstate, and I don't want to gush, but I love all the creative people on the show, and I have an intense respect for John Doyle. Harvey, I had never worked with him before. I've never been in Harvey's circle, and he's engendered a great deal of good will on Broadway, and he's been an amazing force for a long time, and sometimes those guys get a little iconoclastic, a little hard-wired into the way they want things done. But I must admit that Harvey is very sensible, and I can't emphasize enough how smart he is, and what a great writer he is. It's an inspiration to be around guys like him and Bucchino. Q: And congratulations on the Tony nomination, your second. Wopat: Thanks. It was bittersweet in the sense that I'd hoped to get some recognition for this part, but I really hoped that the show would be recognized — that was actually a more important thing to me. I may sound like I am trying to make myself sound like a saint or something, but it's absolutely true. I think that this piece should be seen by as many people as possible, so I was a little upset that they did not recognize the show and did not recognize the book, which was as good a book as I've ever been involved with of a musical. Having said that, I'm really, really honored and pleased that I was nominated and also that Faith and [orchestrator] Jonathan Tunick were. They've been recognized as geniuses before. That's no big surprise, but again, we're just looking at the fact that we want the show to run. It's not that we are desperate to be the Best Musical of the year or anything like that, but you want to get the recognition you need to sell tickets and put butts in the seats. We're really hoping that people who see this show are going to go out and spread by word of mouth how good it is. Q: How far do you feel you've come on Broadway since your debut as a replacement in I Love My Wife in the late seventies? Wopat: I wanted to be John Raitt or Heather Mac Rae's dad. Those are the guys I wanted to be. [Laughs.] I've had pretty good luck. I've got no complaints. I've been able to do a lot of really terrific shows and work with a number of amazing actors: Bernadette Peters, Faith Prince, and the list goes on. The television stuff that I've done has been a lot of fun. Making records has been a gas. I've got another record I'm going to make this summer that's coming out in the fall. My whole career, I pretty much was just working with what I had. You know, it's kind of nice starting to see if there are some real acting chops under all that cowboy stuff! 03 June 2008 Review - A Catered Affair added by Michael Daly of broadwayworld.com url Wopat is just superb in the role, his gruff, disinterested demeanor hiding a nearly-beaten man whose personal tragedy has brought him to the edge of modest success, only to risk losing it by succumbing to his wife's desires. 04/29/08 Review - A Catered Affair added by Anne Marie Welsh - Union-Tribune Theatre Critic Like everything else about the rewarding new musical “A Catered Affair,” the emotional climax comes as a surprise. Actor Tom Wopat kindles this amazing aria “I Stayed” with sparks of anger and hurt that burst into the pure flame of self-revelation. ……his song has become the psychological pivot point. The power of that moment is as unexpected as it is heartrending. 04/08 Review - A Catered Affair added by Martin Denton -nytheatre.com url ...the show belongs indisputably to Faith Prince and Tom Wopat as Aggie and Tom, who are both not only better than I've ever seen them here but are almost certainly more affecting and compelling than any other performers on stage in a musical in town right now, period. Wopat's Tom is the shadowy presence that a hard-working Dad often is, until things start to boil over and he knows he has to assert himself or he'll fall apart; he rises to this climactic moment of the story and it's electrifying. 04/08 Review - A Catered Affair added by Peter Filichia-The Star Ledger There wouldn’t be much applause for A Catered Affair through its 90 minutes. But that’s apparently the way bookwriter Fierstein and his songwriter John Bucchino wanted it. Take it from someone who’s seen the lion’s share of musicals on Broadway and beyond for nearly the last half-century: There’s never been a show quite like this. It’s not the most exciting show of all time, but it never tries to be. Instead, its approach is so novel and, in its own strange way, daring that it is certainly is one of Broadway's more fascinating musicals. No question that Fierstein and Bucchino clearly saw eye-to-eye and soul-to-soul on how to handle the material. I’ve never seen a show where underscoring music comes in so unobtrusively, and then, some moments later, the person who’s been speaking is suddenly singing, and then, after a while, is often suddenly speaking again, and the number is over. Occasionally, there are buttons and breaks for applause, but most of the time, there is simply underpowered singing that somehow yields a power of its own. It must been seen and heard to be believed -- and savored. A Catered Affair may not make much of a cast album because of the quiet nature of the score, but it certainly works (and work wonders) in the theater...Faith Prince as Aggie is exceptional, as is Tom Wopat as Tom; each is full of world-weariness...Take a look at A Catered Affair. I could feel Wednesday night’s audience really listening... A Catered Affair has its own ability to mesmerize. 04/18/08 AN "AFFAIR" TO REMEMBER, OF MUSICAL NOTE added by Clive Barnes - NY Post - Rating 4 Stars url HUMOR, yes, but humanity? That's rare in a Broadway musical. When it does come along - as it did last night, when "A Catered Affair" opened at the Walter Kerr - hug it to your heart. Under John Doyle's expert, discreet direction, it emerges less like a musical and more like a play with music: lovely, urban chamber music. But you won't come out humming the tunes, or even the scenery. You'll come out humming the characters. Fierstein has captured his 1950’s working-class milieu to perfection. Still, though he's as explosively expansive as ever, he plays second fiddle to Prince and Wopat. They embody the pinch of the chronic struggle not to be poor, to keep just a bit ahead of whatever game it is the world is playing. Grayness is eating their lives, leaving Aggie sullen and Tom defeatedly disinterested. Both reveal themselves in one moment of abandoned truth - Aggie as she watches her daughter try on a wedding gown, and Tom, in their kitchen, trying with a fierce and uncontrollable anger to make sense of a grinding life. These are not musical-comedy stereotypes - these are people. This is no run-of-the-mill Broadway musical - there's no chorus, no dancing. Just evocative music (perfectly orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick) interwoven with spoken dialogue, an authentically devised set by David Gallo and Ann Hould-Ward's brilliantly drab costumes. It's simply a musical with an honest heart, and that's enough. 04/18/08 Review - A Catered Affair added by Ben Brantley - New York Times url Mr. Wopat, as always, is very good, and he delivers Tom’s big anthem of regrets, “I Stayed,” with skillfully subdued force. 04/17/08 Review - A Catered Affair added by David Rooney - Variety url And Wopat is enormously moving as a burdened, uncommunicative man who absorbs his wife's rebukes with only an occasional rumble until her insinuation that there's no love between them causes him to erupt in 'I Stayed.' The show resonates due to its modesty, grace, gentleness and emotional integrity -- qualities not often front and center in musicals. 04/08 Review - A Catered Affair added by The Canadian Press The composer has a marvelous cast...that lack of communication swirls around her grudgingly dutiful helpmate, portrayed by the pitch-perfect Wopat with a growing sense of anger. It finally explodes in a powerful defence of what this man has done with his life in a song called 'I Stayed.' 04/17/08 Review - A Catered Affair added by Bob Verini - Variety url Tom Wopat is a gruff and powerfully dormant presence on the periphery. 04/08 1 2 3 4 5 >>> You can search this newsboard by: Item : - Name : - All : Please type some text: