THE LEADING MEN: Blake, Borle and Turner
By Tom Nondorf
ONE GOOD TURNER Gutenberg! The Musical! gets huge mileage out of the many hats its two actors wear, literally and figuratively, as they convey, with hilarious dramatic license, the story of Johannes Gensfielsch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type printing press.
When Christopher Fitzgerald decided to leave the role of Bud at the end of January, he and his co-star Jeremy Shamos (Doug) knew that the continued success of Gutenberg! depended upon finding someone with whom Shamos felt the same level of kinship onstage. Enter David Turner, who had played Jack to Fitzgerald's Charley in Where's Charley? at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He had also done The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) with Shamos in 2001. Fitzgerald and Shamos put in a good word, and Turner was on board.
The Manhattan-born Turner ("I grew up in New Jersey. My mom's obstetrician was in Manhattan, so I was almost born on the GW Bridge.") has made a specialty out of playing Brits, having recently been nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for his role as Sir Robin in the touring company of Spamalot . He made his Broadway debut and understudied Michael Stuhlbarg in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love in 2001, and also flitted about the stage as Winston the angel in 2005's In My Life .
Gutenberg! is his first role in three years where he is not playing a Brit. "It's great being stateside," he jokes.
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Question: Why so many Brits?
David Turner: I guess it's just my bread and butter. Two reasons. One: I look very British, sort of like a British schoolboy, and I have an ear for dialects.
Q: How did that happen? Turner: I'm a musician, I'm a pianist, so I think, like a lot of musicians, you just end up with a love of language, and with a love of language goes a love of sound and a love of learning to make different sounds. I certainly have that.
Q: Did you go see Gutenberg! a lot prior to joining the cast? Turner: I just went once when they were at 59E59, when Jeremy had first broached the subject, I wanted to go and see if it was the kind of thing that I wanted to do. I had just been on the road with Spamalot for a year, and I had this idea in my head that I wanted to come home and do something more staid. I just was craving one of those plays where you walk into someone's living room and you sit on the couch and you chat, rather than quick changes and stuff like that. Gutenberg! , I thought, was not going to be what the doctor ordered. And then I saw it, and I cannot remember the last time I laughed so hard. It tickled my funny bone so much, I mean the writing is ingenious, and I couldn't resist.
Q: When one thinks back to Gutenberg! , it is easy to forget that there are only two people in the show. It manages to be funny in a way that really engages the audience. Turner: It does, and I have great evidence of that. We spend the whole play treating it like a reading, reading stage directions, painting this huge, elaborate, epic picture out of no physical details at all. There's no scenery, there's nothing. And at the end of the show, Gutenberg is in the town square. It's sort of like the 11 o'clock number, you know. Gutenberg does something unexpected, and out of the "mob" that's gathered around Gutenberg, I say, "Everyone gasps." And the whole audience gasps as though it was an instruction to them and not a description of what was happening with the mob of people. I have never encountered something like that in the theatre. They are so absorbed in it, and they're so used to the way the picture is being painted with words and not with the technical production, that they actually participate without even being specifically exhorted to participate.
Q: What did your time in the Williamstown Theatre Festival do for you as an actor? Turner: Williamstown — I know Chris Fitzgerald would feel this way also — I certainly feel that I would not have a career if it weren't for Williamstown and in particular, Jenny Gersten, who now runs Naked Angels, because she used to be the associate artistic director [of Williamstown] when Michael Ritchie was helming it. She was just so kind to me, and her dad is [Lincoln Center Theater executive producer] Bernard Gersten. And when we came back to New York after the summer ended and I was still non-Equity, they were looking for readers at Lincoln Center, and Jenny recommended me to Daniel Swee, so I started working as a reader in the casting office at Lincoln Center, and they cast Wendy Wasserstein's Old Money , and Daniel turned to me and said, "You don't know Latin, do you?" and I said, "Actually yes, I studied Latin for seven years." He said, "That's great because we're casting this Tom Stoppard play, and there's lots of Latin in it, and I want a reader who is not going to stumble over it," so I became the reader for The Invention of Love , and met [director] Jack O'Brien who liked me and brought me in for one of the roles, and that's how I had my Broadway debut. But it all started because of Jenny.
Q: Looking back through the prism of time, what are your thoughts on In My Life? Turner: I have no regrets. Everyone knew when we started that it was going to be among the most unusual showbiz experiences any of us had ever had, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought, "Is it smart to do something like this, that's so risky and so weird?" And I think I and the other people who did it listened to the part of themselves that said, "Life is no good if you're cautious." And that was the spirit in which I went into it, which was to have this adventure of being in this crazy thing. And we loved each other, and we had a wonderful time, and what ended up happening was the most unexpected outcome of all, which was I had the most creative experience I have ever had in the theatre. I have been in shows that worked better and shows that got better reviews and didn't take the sort of critical drubbing that In My Life did, but in terms of the creative experience, it was so satisfying. Joe Brooks, for all his faults and his single-handed control, his refusal to collaborate on a lot of things that might have benefited from collaboration, he gave the actors a lot of agency that actors don't ordinarily get when millions of dollars are at stake. To try and make things work. In particular, my character had a lot of latitude as a comic foil. The most important charge was, "Don't be boring." And I had a hell of a good time trying not to be boring.
Q: As a composer, who inspires you? Turner: Like everyone, I admire Sondheim, but of my peers, Jeff Blumenkrantz. God he's great. He's an actor and just a wonderful songwriter. He actually had a Tony nomination because he wrote a few of the songs in Urban Cowboy . There's a real cleverness and sincerity. That's the kind of writing I aspire to. I don't think I'm as good as Jeff, but I love his writing. And, add to my list of favorite composers Neil Bartram (The Story of My Life ).
Q: You won the BMI Jerry Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement. What was that for? Turner: I was, at the time, working on a project that I called Payola , which was about the payola scandal in radio in the sixties, but I've sort of let that go, and right now I am actually concentrating on learning filmmaking. I don't want to demean it by saying "I dabble," because I love writing music, but my interests keep evolving, so right now I'm sort of writing less music, but I just finished a short film.
Q: Is that "The Debut" I've heard about? Turner: Yes. I made it on the road with Spamalot . I figured while I was surrounded with these great actors, I might as well take advantage of them, and they were kind enough to participate. So I wrote this story and plotted it out, so we could do a little bit in each city as we traveled, but it would all appear to be one location for the movie. And it just turned out beautifully. And some amazing performances, by the way, by Rick Holmes, who now plays Lancelot on Broadway and Tom Deckman, who now plays Prince Herbert on Broadway. They've even told me that casting directors are asking about seeing this movie because they've heard their performances are so great.
Q: Is making movies what you'd like to do next? Turner: What I want to do is go to school to study documentary filmmaking. That's where my interest is. My other main interest is actually politics. I took a lot of time off in 2004 to work for John Kerry in Ohio. I had songs of mine done at a Manhattan Theatre Club showcase around November 2004, and I had to miss it because I was in Ohio. That gives you a sense of my priorities.
Q: Would you walk away from the stage? Turner: Yeah. I mean ideally, I have some long-running show at night, and I can nurse these other interests. But barring that opportunity, I can certainly see myself taking a hiatus to pursue these other interests. For now, I love it all. The best part is, the Actor's Playhouse, I can see it from my window. I have the shortest commute of any New Yorker.
Q: Doesn't that limit your world a bit, living so close to where you work? Turner: After being on tour for a year, I love my world being limited!
[Gutenberg! The Musical! plays The Actors' Playhouse, 100 Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village. Tickets are available by calling (212) 239-6200 or by visiting www.telecharge.com.]
HITHER AND YON Richard H. Blake 's name is a closely guarded secret. You won't learn from me that we have had not one but two presidents who had it as a surname. . . . I practiced what I preached in February and caught Jeffry Denman 's show at Birdland, and it was all one could hope for: great tap and song, including a duet with Brian D'Arcy James on a combo-platter of Sondheim's "Pretty Women" and "Agony." . . . Next to catch at Birdland is composer Michel Legrand . The multiple Oscar-winning man behind the music for "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and many others will be performing his own songs from March 6-11. . . . The man behind the songs from "The Creature Wasn't Nice" (coming soon on CD, I hope), Bruce Kimmel , has hit the sci-fi musical trail anew, with The Brain from Planet X, cast recording now available via kritzerland.com. It features cabaret and soap star Kevin Spirtas , who is currently working with Kimmel on polishing a new cabaret show. . . . David Gurland 's DGUR Concert Series will be featuring what he calls "boy singers and songwriters from the '70s and '80s" on March 18 at the Laurie Beechman Theater. Eddie Varley and Mike McArdle , brother of Andrea, will be featured.
Tom Nondorf is a publications editor for Playbill Classic Arts. He can be reached by e-mail and tnondorf@playbill.com.
David Turner; Turner in Gutenberg! The Musical!
photo by Joan Marcus
