BLAKE AND BORLE: BLONDE BUZZ
Ever wonder what a cast does during the time between the last night of its show's out-of-town run and the first night on Broadway? Well, we caught up Richard H. Blake and Christian Borle, who in the midst of a two-week Legally Blonde hiatus, are mostly happy to have a little time to hang out at their respective homes before getting back on the Legal case. The B and B boys will be vying for the heart of Miss Elle Woods (Laura Bell Bundy) with Blake as cad Warner Huntington III and Borle as empathetic Emmett Richmond. If you haven't seen the movie and those character names and actors don't give away who wins Elle's heart, I'm not going to spoil it for you here. Suffice it to say, our two leading men are playing characters at odds with one another, much as they did in the national tour of Footloose in 1999 where they first met. Word is, the old friends have a lot of fun being at odds backstage as well. Though they mostly gushed about each other to me, Blake says of their battles, Borle "generally wins because he's wittier than I, but I don't ever give up. I'm a scrapper."

RICHARD H. BLAKE
Question: What do people do with their time in between San Francisco and New York?
Richard Blake: Sleep. [Laughs.] No, I think people have chosen to do many different things. Some people I know are taking vacations to Hawaii, things like that. I wanted to come home and sit in my house, and kind of rest up. I haven't gotten the chance to relax in a while because I went straight from The Wedding Singer, did double duty rehearsing Legally Blonde during the day and doing Wedding Singer at night, straight into doing Legally Blonde, and I haven't really had a chance to kick back and sit on my couch. So that's the road I took. Plus my wife works, so she doesn't have the luxury of taking vacations on the same schedule as I do.

Q: How do you feel about how the show went in San Francisco?
Blake: It's an interesting thing — we have to keep our heads on straight. They're a great theatre town. You just never know how things are going to be perceived when you get to New York where there's many other shows playing at the same time. We still have a lot of things that we have to keep working on and making better day by day. But I'm definitely, definitely excited. It was a joy to wake up the day after opening and go "Thank God, they like us, they really like us!"

Q: So you were going to leave The Wedding Singer even if it was a smash?
Blake: I was going to leave regardless, yeah. For me I really wanted to work with the people involved with [Legally Blonde]. I did Hairspray for [Legally Blonde director] Jerry Mitchell, which is kind of how I got this. But I wasn't part of the original cast. I came in and replaced Matt Morrison as Link Larkin. And I got to work with [Mitchell] a very small amount, and in that small amount I decided that I really did want to work with him on a creative basis starting from the get-go and be part of the original where I really got a chance to soak up some stuff. That was always my intention, to leave and to work with these composers and Jerry, so that was the plan all along, and I'm happy I did.

Q: You've said that if people have seen a "jerk boyfriend" on Broadway in recent years, chances are you've played him. Does that concern you?
Blake: Oh no. Actually, I've run the gamut. I've played the good guy, the guy you feel sorry for, and the bad guy. I enjoy playing the bad guy. . . I mean, I'm certainly not playing some serial killer or anything — I'm just playing, you know, the jerk — so for me the fun thing about playing these roles is you're playing basically these jerks who let down everybody, but you have to play them with heart, and that's actually the fun, challenging part, trying to find humanity in them. Like this character Warner for instance. He's naïve to the fact that he's a jerk. There's really very little malicious intent in what he does. He just does it without conscious thought of other people, so, yes, he's a jerk, but at the same time he's just kind of in his own little world of arrogance and being very self involved. When you play it like that, that's when you start to have fun with it.

Q: No fear of being typecast?
Blake: I know a lot of people are probably going to disagree with me on this one, but for myself I don't mind being typecast as long as it keeps me working. If that's what it takes! Sure, every now and then you're going to be like, "I would love to play that character," but I don't mind people going, "Hey, we need somebody to play the jerk boyfriend in this. Who do we get? I know, Richard Blake." If that's what pops into your mind, then by all means, thank you.

Q: You were nine when you did your first Broadway show, Teddy and Alice in 1986. Did you always know that acting was the life for you?
Blake: I did actually. I don't really know if I remember this so much, but my parents told me that when I was just barely talking that I'd say, "I want to go to "Ew Nork" and make "macercials." I couldn't even say it right, and I'd stand in front of the TV and aspire to be on it. So when I got started, I started out as a dancer and entered a dance competition where an agent saw me and asked me to go out for a show, and I got it, and I never looked back. I had a blast on my very first show, and I'm still having a blast now. So until that ends . . . I'm going to stick it out.

Q:Do you remember much about The Prince of Central Park?
Blake: I can remember a lot about that; it was a very big part of my life. It was the first time I ever really starred. I was the youngest person — I still am the youngest person to have their name above the title. It was a huge deal for me, very short-lived, but at the time I had worked on it for like two years, and it was actually very special to me. And I was, what, 13 years old, something like that, and working with some extremely talented people. Joanne Worley was wonderful. The show started when we did the workshops and the out-of-towns with Nanette Fabray, who I learned so much from. Made some dear connections, friendships that I still have today from that show. It was deep, you know? It was a lot of hard work. I wish that it had turned out better than it did. I got a poster at Joe Allen's, so it's all good.

Q: Was the short run a lot to handle for such a young kid?
Blake: I was very disappointed. I had put so much into it, even at a young age, I knew what was at stake and what I was part of. I wished it had gone on longer. I fortunately closed the show and got a job the next week in another show, and that helped because I moved on, which was the best thing for me at that time. At the time I chose to do The Prince of Central Park over doing "The Mickey Mouse Club" on the Disney Channel. I had both offers on the table, and I wanted to star on Broadway. My parents were like, "Really?" And who knows? Maybe I would be in 'N Sync today if I didn't. Looking back, even with the hardships of being a five-show run, I'm glad I have a five-show run in my repertoire. It keeps you humble, it keeps you knowing that what we do is a very volatile thing, but that is one of the things that is exciting about it.

Q: What can you say about your Legally Blonde rival, Christian Borle?
Blake: I love Christian dearly. I worked with him on the project I met my wife on, Footloose.We actually had the same relationship (as in Legally). He was the good guy in the show, I was the bad guy in the show. I think he is one of the most talented musical theatre actors. He can do anything, but he has a real intelligence that he brings to his style of acting. He is good at letting go and trying things. I tend to fall into getting a character and sort of doing that and trying to come up with the truth and this and that. He's willing to just try a whole new take every day. I admire those very few actors who have the ability to do that well. He does. Our relationship backstage is we pick on each other constantly, so this is going to hurt, but honestly, in this business I think he has an incredibly bright future. I actually feel like I learn from watching him. Hopefully, we'll have plenty of time to keep our banter alive.

CHRISTIAN BORLE
Question: What do you do with your time between the Golden Gate Theatre and the Palace?
Christian Borle: We're very lucky to have a hiatus. The experience of being out of town with Legally Blonde was such a crucible, and it happened so fast. Now that we're back and I'm sitting at home thinking about it, it went by in the blink of an eye. It was intense, so I haven't even had a chance to breathe. I know intellectually that I have two weeks off to do absolutely nothing, but some small part of me is still kind of antsy to get back to work.

Q: Are you feeling pretty good about how the show went out west?
Borle: It was encouraging. I am proud of the show, and the show is really fun to perform. There's not one scene that I dread stepping out onstage to do. I had heard before we left that San Francisco was a really tough crowd. Somebody gave me advice going out there to not gauge the reaction of the show based on the San Francisco audiences because they are notoriously curmudgeonly, and we found them to be very warm, and I think there's something about the Legally Blonde story. The show itself is kind of like Elle Woods, the character. I think people are skeptical at first, and they end up being hopefully won over by the pure good-natured charm of it all. And they were clapping and gasping and hissing. Things happen, and I'm not going to give anything away, but if you've seen the movie, you know some of the things that people do that border on being despicable. And there were like 15 to 20 people hissing at the time. I've never heard that before. It was amazing. I hope that that continues, but I think that New York is obviously going to be very different.

Q: What did you draw on for your character of Emmett?
Borle: I obviously couldn't draw on Luke Wilson's looks and charisma from the movie, so we tried to approach it from a different point of view. More than anything else I think the Emmett character is the biggest departure from the movie. I think they recognized that they needed to flesh it out and make it a little more of an actual character. Because they do a lot in the movie with Luke Wilson being very charming and looking at Reese Witherspoon adoringly, and on film you can really get away with that. I think that the writers realized that there needed to be more in the actual text for Emmett. So it went through a phase of being a really self-deprecating character, and we kind of slowly moved away from that into a more grounded, real character.

Q: You've identified yourself as a "social recluse." Is there some of that in Emmett?
Borle: There is, there is. I think Emmett is a bit of an outsider and is so focused on the task at hand that he kind of sacrifices a bit of the social niceties. I don't know, I always like to err on the side of being quiet and staying out of everybody's business. It's safer that way because we're all opinionated, aren't we?

Q: How has the show evolved up to this point?
Borle: There were several phases out of town that we went through. Jerry Mitchell wanted to start the first preview with the show that we left the rehearsal studio with, so there weren't a lot of changes between the time that we left New York and the first time we did it in front of an audience, which was exciting because it let us settle in and see what it was that we had. Then it all just kind of turned upside down, and they made pretty big, sweeping changes before opening, and once it opened they were encouraged by the reviews, which on the whole were very nice. I didn't read them, but I got the general tone from people. And then we just started making lots of very small changes, which all are adding up to a better show. I think there are still some changes to come. We're going to get back in the rehearsal room and just keep clarifying it and [laughs] cutting it down.

Q: Are you someone who rolls with the changes or do you want everything to be set?
Borle: I certainly only want the show to be better, and it has been very clear how effective these little changes are, and it is exciting. It's a challenge to get out there and find yourself in the middle of a scene and realizing there were four lines cut out. You know, they give you sheets at the beginning of the show with every single change, and we kind of go through rehearsal and run all the changes, but sometimes you have a brain fart, and you're out there flying by the seat of your pants. So it is exhilarating.

Q: How different is this role from some of the more "antic" characters you played in Spamalot?
Borle: It is a slight departure from me falling down on the floor and painting my eyebrows white, and I'm happy about that just for sheer variation. I loved playing all those different crazy characters. There was a moment in college . . . everyone wants to be a leading man. Every young actor wants to be Tony in West Side Story and wants to sing "Anthem" from Chess and wants to be Billy Bigelow, and there's a point when you really just have to look at yourself realistically and say, "Well, I am not the traditional leading-man type, so being a character actor isn't so bad." I really started to embrace the fact that maybe my strength was in playing some of the more off-kilter characters, and that really all came to a head with Spamalot. It was quite the couple of years being around those people and playing those parts, which is why, to me, it's so strange all of a sudden to be the leading man in Legally Blonde, which has its own sort of off-kilter sensibility to it anyway, but it's a nice surprise [for me] at this point.

Q: Word on the street is you are sort of a comic book fiend. True?
Borle: Wednesday is new comic book day, and as soon as I get off the phone with you I'm going to throw on some boots and go down to Midtown Comics. Yes, it's true.

Q: What comic characters do you think would make for good musical theatre?
Borle: I had heard mumblings about Julie Taymor and Bono working on a Spider-Man musical. And I think theatrically speaking, the things you could do with wire-work I suppose would be pretty effective. The humanity of the story — Peter Parker is this young kid going through what he's going through and all of a sudden having this power. Seems like fodder for a musical, doesn't it? Or is that the nerdiest thing I've ever said in my life? You decide.

Q: What was it like a couple years back, becoming a different comic icon, Snoopy, for one night at Symphony Space?
Borle: It was really gratifying. My wife [Sutton Foster] actually produced that for her friend's children's theatre, Pied Piper, uptown, and it was obviously fun to do, and the cast, everyone from Sutton to Hunter to Jen Cody. . . It was just a big family affair to benefit one of Sutton's oldest friend's theatres, so yes it was fun to jump around and shake my butt a little bit.

Q: I've heard raves about your work in William Finn's Elegies. Was that a heavy piece to work on?
Borle: I'll preface it by saying that throughout my entire college experience, William Finn was my kind of go-to composer. Any time we had a vocal class where we had to get up and sing in front of each other, during all my voice lessons, I always came back to William Finn's material, mostly his Falsettos stuff. His music just hits me on a visceral, grounded level. I am a huge fan. And so to all of a sudden find myself in a room with him working on something new, not to mention not only William Finn, but also Michael Rupert, whose voice is burned in my brain from those [Falsettos] recordings. So much of that experience was about finding myself in a room with these heroes of mine so that the actual performance of it was really about trying to do justice to those songs, and even though the tone of the entire evening could get somber, the kind of performance and delivery of it never landed in any kind of depressing place. Also, the whole musical is singing about dead people, yet it has more humor than a lot of comedies out there. He's able to infuse every song with irony and hilarity. I don't know how he can make singing about dead people so funny. It was a beautiful show, and we revisited it at Joe's Pub for one night in December. It's an experience I'll never forget. I'm dying to do another show with Bill Finn.

Q: What can you say about your Legally Blonde rival, Richard Blake?
Borle: [Vaguely sinister laugh.] Richard Blake. Richard and I worked together on the national tour of Footloose, and that seems like a lifetime ago, and to come back together with him in this process and get reacquainted and become friends has been fantastic. I have so much respect for Richard. He has a quality about him that very few people have, which is that he truly understands his strengths and weaknesses as an actor, and I really mean that sincerely. One of the most important things as an actor is to know what you're good at and what you're not good at, and he does it all with such a sense of self-deprecation and openness. I really don't have anything to rib him about. It's just fantastic to work with him again. He's a great guy, and he's great in the show. Just some gentle ribbing perhaps.

[Legally Blonde begins previews at Broadway's Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway, April 3 with an official opening April 29. Tickets are available by calling (212) 307-4100 or by visiting www.ticketmaster.com.]