Posted on 08/16/2004 12:33:53 PM PDT by Tax-chick
Cullum Comes Home
By Stephanie Piper
It will be a season of landmarks.
Fall 2004 marks the 30th anniversary of the University of Tennessee’s Clarence Brown Theatre in Knoxville, a state-of-the-art performance facility named for—and heavily endowed by—one of the university’s most prominent alumni.
It will also mark the Clarence Brown stage debut of another prominent alumnus. Actor John Cullum, two-time Tony winner and a proud member of the class of ’52, will open the CBT season in The Dresser. The production will co-star Cullum’s son, J D Cullum, who has acted in such films as Reversal of Fortune, Forever Young, and 61. J D Cullum is a playwright and a member of the Antaeus Company of Los Angeles, and he is co-starring in Stones in His Pockets at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The Dresser will feature Elizabeth Franz, another Tony winner. Directed by Gerald Freedman, the show may head to New York after its Knoxville run.
John Cullum is no stranger to UT theaters. He spent much of his undergraduate and graduate careers performing in one venue or another. In those days, he recalls, theater at the university was a portable feast. “We used to rehearse in a classroom because they didn’t have a rehearsal space or a theater,” he says. “The performances were either at the Bijou or at Tyson Junior High.”
There wasn’t a theater major, either, so Cullum majored in speech and minored in English. He studied under UT legends Paul Soper and Fred Fields. “Despite the space limitations, it was a heady era for the performing arts at UT,” Cullum says.
“We were doing all the major shows from Broadway as soon as they were released,” he recalls. “We did All My Sons, Golden Boy, and The Heiress. I played Biff in Death of a Salesman and was in The Petrified Forest.”
Cullum came to UT to study business administration and “was about to flunk out” when he switched to speech. After a stint in the Army, he returned for an M.B.A., intending to join his father’s business. Though his grad school grade-point average was high, his interests were elsewhere.
“I wanted two years in New York to decide if I wanted to be an actor,” he says. “So I went, and I loved it. It was a very exciting time.”
His first New York roles were in Shakespearean plays, which surprised him. “We never did any Shakespeare at UT,” Cullum says. “But people thought I was a Shakespearean actor even though I wasn’t. It was because I was brought up on the King James Version of the Bible and could read that language fluently. A Southerner can speak that lilting language, that quality of sound that you get in Shakespeare.”
The bard has been good to Cullum throughout his career. During a stint with Joseph Papp’s “Shakespeare in the Park,” he understudied the role of Henry V. “One night I got to go on, and Alan Jay Lerner’s assistant was in the audience. They were looking for an understudy for Richard Burton in Camelot, and later, when I went to audition, they remembered me and I got the part.”
Cullum’s lengthy list of credits includes Tony Awards for Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century. Television audiences know him from Northern Exposure and ER. “It’s been a funny, convoluted kind of journey,” Cullum says of his career. “You can’t really identify me. Whenever I do a straight play, people think I can’t sing anymore. When I do a musical, people think well, he’s not a serious actor. When I do Shakespeare, they wonder where I’ve come from. It’s hard for people to peg me, but it’s been a lot of fun.”
As one who has moved with ease between stage and television work, Cullum notes that “It takes more muscle mentally and physically to do theater. In film, nothing lasts more than a minute. Once in a while, you’ll shoot a scene that lasts three or four minutes, but that’s very unusual. You don’t have to sustain your performance. “Theater requires longer concentration. Theater is storytelling. You tell a story in two hours, and it all has to hold together and make sense.”
His most recent Broadway hit was the musical Urinetown, in which he played villain Caldwell B. Cladwell. “It’s a smart, funny play, as underground as you can get. I did it for two years and it was still fresh as a daisy.” Despite its title, Cullum says, the play was “not at all vulgar. It’s satire, like Jonathan Swift. It used something that got your attention.” The show started in a small theater and soon became the “off-Broadway ticket that was very hard to get,” he says. Eventually, it made the move to Broadway. “Having been in a lot of big musicals, I knew how difficult it is to put one together. I knew Urinetown had the elements of success—it was not a surprise that it became a hit. It should have run for 10 years.” His return to UT has its own “elements of success.” “I’m just as excited about The Dresser as I am about anything I can think of,” Cullum says. “It’s a show I handpicked, and we’re doing it in a facility that’s more modern than most Broadway theaters. It’s my hometown. I’m being directed by Gerald Freedman, who has a tremendous reputation, and I’m getting to work with my son. I can’t think of anything that would be more exciting at this stage of my life than to do this.” The play focuses on the relationship between an aging British actor, Sir, and Norman, his dresser. Sir’s star is fading, and Norman has to coax, cajole, flatter, and sometimes insult him into performing each night. “It’s a difficult play and a risky one,” Cullum says. “It’s set in the Second World War and has an English flavor that’s very charming. J D is well qualified—he’s done Shaw and Shakespeare. It’s a quicksilver role.”
A return to Knoxville is always a homecoming for Cullum, who grew up in Island Home and still has family here. “I’m tied to Knoxville,” he says. “The flaws it has are my flaws. Its strong points are, I hope, my strong points. I’m a Knoxvillian. I’m a Southerner. I’m an East Tennessean.”
Thanks for stopping by! I would think, with your sense of humor, that you were a "Northern Exposure" fan.
R. and I loved "Northern Exposure" partly because a number of the characters seemed to be based on people in Hooterville, whoops, I mean Leonard, Dad's home town. I suppose the lesson is that small-town people are universal!
I wish we could get more stage performances on video. Out in the sticks, you're kind of stuck with high school shows!
Oy! Alaska?! It's so cold you can freeze your tuchas off. I think I'll head to Boston and become a public school teacher.
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