Chatting with the Stars:
Meet Michael McKean
Although Michael McKean
may be best known for his long tenure as Lenny
Kosnowski on "Laverne and Shirley" and his films
including This Is Spinal Tap, this versatile
actor and comedian is a Broadway veteran. His
previous appearances include The Pajama Game,
Hairspray, Accomplice, and a brilliant comic
turn in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming.
McKean recently returned to Broadway to take the
lead role in Superior Donuts by Tracy Letts,
the Tony Award®-winning author of August: Osage
County. He also agreed to host the 2009 version
of Broadway on Broadway®, the free outdoor concert
in Times Square. Ben Pesner chatted with McKean for
the Broadway Fan Club (BroadwayFanClub.com) over
coffee and, yes, donuts at a recent press event
during rehearsals for Superior Donuts.
Ben Pesner: After achieving
so much success in film and TV, you are now a
Broadway regular. You’ve appeared at the Broadway on
Broadway concert before, right?
Michael McKean: Yes, the
first time I was playing Edna Turnblad in
Hairspray. I kept my big red dress on from the
finale. We got up on the stage and did a version of
the ending of the show, the great climax, and I fell
right on my face.
You’re kidding--In front of 50,000 people?
Sure! And I said to myself,
"Mike, you can only go uphill from here." (laughs)
I got myself up, finished the number, and it was
great. The next time I did it I came out on stage
and spouted a lot of nonsense. Broadway on Broadway
is always fun. It’s like a great block party.
Is there a difference
performing in front of 1,100 people in a Broadway
house, versus tens of thousands in Times Square?
You know what? It should be the
same, but you’ve got to go a little bigger. Two
months ago I played to a crowd of 130,000 with my
band, Spinal Tap, at the Glastonbury Festival. We
warmed them up for Bruce Springsteen. It was a
pretty serious rock-and-roll crowd. Anything else
is a click down from that as far as overwhelming
goes. But Broadway has always been very friendly to
me.
I was looking at the donuts
here this afternoon and I didn’t see any crullers.
Could that be a New York thing? Do they have
crullers in Chicago, where Superior Donuts is
set?
They have bismarcks.
What’s a bismarck?
I don’t know, but it’s a kind
of donut that is mentioned in the play. Whatever a
bismarck is, we’re out of them anyway, so you don’t
have to worry about it. This is the independent
donut place, not a chain. That’s one of the points
of the play, really, that the independents and the
eccentrics in the world are the ones you should
listen to. They may take some drawing out, because
they have a tendency to be eccentric and
eccentrically quiet.
The author, Tracy Letts, is
so terrific at drawing characters out, as anyone who
has seen August: Osage County knows.
Yes. I saw an early preview of
August: Osage County. I was rehearsing The
Homecoming at the time, and Jeffrey Richards was
producing both plays. We got an invite to go see
August, and it blew us away. My wife and I went
backstage. We got to meet the whole gang. I am a big
Steppenwolf [Theatre Company] fan. I had seen their
Grapes of Wrath at the Court Theatre in the
early ‘90s, which was a revelation. I’ll watch Lois
Smith read the phonebook. I read about Superior
Donuts and I thought, "This sounds like
something I’d like to see. I hope they bring it to
New York." Shortly after that, while I was still
playing in The Homecoming, my manager calls
and says, "Would you like to read Tracy Letts’s new
play?" I read it and loved it, loved the character,
wanted to do the character. I had a conversation
with Tracy on the phone and it seemed like we were
simpatico. He later told me that he cast the play in
waking moments. He would wake up from a sound sleep
and go, "Kate Buddeke!" At one point he woke up and
said, "Michael McKean!" I’m very happy about that.
When you first spoke to Mr.
Letts about this play, you must have asked him how
in the world to say the name of your character,
Arthur Przybyszewski. Could you give the Broadway
Fan Club members a little pronunciation lesson?
It’s Shu-ber-shef-ski. I know
how to pronounce it, just don’t ask me to spell it.
You and your band, Spinal
Tap, have a huge following. There have been rumors
that you’re working on a Broadway musical with your
wife, Annette O'Toole. Is that true?
Yes. We have been writing it,
serially. The trouble is that we keep getting work.
(laughs) She’s in Washington rehearsing a
play at Arena Stage, and I’m here in New York. But
inch by inch we’re getting it made. We have written
all the songs, but we’ve saddled ourselves with 12
main characters, so we have a lot of servicing to
do. We want the play to not look episodic, we want
it to be a real story. It takes place during the
first half of the 20th century. That’s all I can
tell you. Except that the songs are awfully good.
We want the play to be as good as the songs, so
we’re potchkying.
"Potchkying" - is that a technical term?
I don’t even know what it means
literally. It’s just something Penny Marshall [a.k.a
Laverne DeFazio on "Laverne and Shirley"] used to
say, like, "Before you take my picture let me go
potchky." It means to fix it up.
A lot of people in this cast
are making their Broadway debuts. You’re the veteran
in the acting company. Have they asked for advice?
What do you say?
Get the tomato basil soup over
at Cosi. It’s fast and it’s fabulous. (laughs)
No, seriously, these are all professionals. Some of
them are spending time in New York for the first
time. It’s my home town and it’s like no other city
in the world. But they are from Chicago so they know
what a big city is like. As far as working in a
Broadway house, do you know the scene in Hoosiers
with Gene Hackman? He takes this team of basketball
players from this little high school in the middle
of nowhere and they go to the big state game. It’s
in this enormous place, compared to their little
dumpy gym. The first thing he does is he gets a tape
measure. One of the players stands on the shoulders
of another and measures the distance between the
hoop and the floor, and it’s the same 10 feet that
it is back in Indiana. It’s still the same work,
wherever you are.
* * *
From the Broadway Fan Club
(www.BroadwayFanClub.com).
© 2008 The Broadway League
|
