By Harry Haun
19 Nov 2004

And of course Michael Cumpsty previously served The Two Michaels as a third of the Copenhagen triumvirate constantly on stage returning intellectual serves with Philip Bosco and a Tony-winning Blair Brown. In Democracy, he again is allowed very little time off-stage, glowering off to the side as the East German operative to whom Guillaume tells his tale of infiltrating Brandt's camp. "I wasn't excited about being on stage the whole show. I was afraid it might end up being really tedious, but actually I find it extremely involving. I love being there. I love watching it all form. Because it is in a way such a fragmented role, I think it would be more difficult to play if I wasn't there all the time—if I didn't feel like I was part of the engine that was driving the play."

As the two-faced but oddly not unappealing Guillaume, Richard Thomas is a long way from Walton Mountain, and that's fine with him. His career since television has covered the waterfront. "I usually play something I don't usually play," he says. "It's not about getting people to root for you—but I do think an interesting thing does happen to the audience in relationship to Guillaume because I think his humanity comes through as he becomes more connected to Brandt and goes through his own crisis of faith in what he's doing."

Richard Masur, who plays the power-broker who brings Guillaume aboard, was last on Broadway in 1973 in another Americanized English opus, The Changing Room, which took place in a soccer locker room. This is practically the first time you have seen his upper lip since. "Michael Blakemore asked me to shave my mustache," he says of The New Look. "I said, `You sure?' I had a lovely white mustache. I thought it would be perfectly acceptable, but he said not. He let Julian [Gamble] keep his mustache, but the rest of us—Richard [Thomas] took a beard off, Terry Beaver took his mustache off."

At least Blakemore kept the American accents and has no apology for that. "It was a play about Germans, after all, and there's no reason Germans should speak with an English accent. It's equally likely that they would have an American accent. Although I was devoted to the English cast, and they were very, very good, I felt that if we cast it with Americans it would resonate with the American public in terms of their own politics—not that West German politics are very similar to American politics, because they're not: West German politics at that time were coalition politics and America doesn't have coalitions. But, nevertheless, the particular types that emerge in politics would be far more recognizable to an American audience if they were played by Americans."