Shuler Hensley was sitting on the front porch of his family home with his father, Sam, late the other afternoon, his words gliding as easily as the old wooden swing they shared.
It was the younger Hensley’s day off from rehearsals for “ Ghost Brothers of Darkland County,” the long-awaited John Mellencamp and Stephen King musical that premieres this week at the Alliance Theatre, of which Hensley is the star.
In shorts and relaxed, the pair were talking about any number of things: Shuler’s growing-up years spent in this rambling brick home in the shadow of Kennesaw Mountain. His 2002 Tony Award for his iconic portrayal of Jud Fry in the Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” Boyhood afternoons spent fishing on the sparkling lake just yards away. Filming the campy action-horror movie “Van Helsing” in Prague. His wife and two children. His role as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster-child in the Broadway musical “Young Frankenstein.” The Georgia High School Musical Theater Awards that bear his name, the Shuler Hensley Awards.
He and his dad chuckled between highlights. They have a lot more time for that now that Hensley has moved his family back to his dad’s Marietta house. After 25 years playing the stages of London, Hamburg and New York, Hensley hopes he’s come home for good. He’s just tickled that his 7-year-old son now sleeps in the room he grew up in. Hensley won’t stop traveling for work, but at least his family now has a base, the place where he himself was grounded.
“Let me show you something,” Hensley said, and he ambled inside, his head just clearing the door frame. The expectation was that he would emerge with his actual Tony, or even his Olivier Award, Britain’s highest theatrical honor, which he won more than a decade ago, for his portrayal of Jud Fry in the London production of “Oklahoma!” This was, after all, a conversation about a career at its middle.
A couple of minutes later the 45-year-old Hensley stepped back onto the brick porch indeed with one of his proudest achievements: an 8-pound, largemouth bass, in all its taxidermic glory. It glistened like the day Hensley pulled it out of the lake more than 25 years ago. Even in his thick hands it looked massive. Hensley held it like it was precious. Then he launched into a blow-by-blow tale of its catching, complete with his dad swooping in with a net just before it would have thrashed free.
“Patience,” said his 80-year-old father, Sam, a retired engineer and former state lawmaker from west Cobb County. “That’s what fishing taught him. In his business you have to have it, because you have more turn-downs than you have successes.”
“But it does help to have the dad with the net,” Hensley said, and then his full-throated baritone laugh echoed out into a scattering of pines ahead.
Which ultimately is the thing about Shuler Hensley. There’s a balanced quality to him. He knows he’s a respected performer, having achieved the stage’s top honors, and he carries himself with assurance. Yet he spends as much time, if not more, talking about his father being a closet poet, about his late mother’s artistic career in Marietta, as well as the work of his older brother and sister. He has sung across Europe, but he says he feels just as privileged to sing Mellencamp in Atlanta. He doesn’t self-deprecate to put others at ease, but deploys the dry sense of humor he says he inherited from his dad to break the ice. It’s not that the actor is uncomfortable with the fame he has earned, he just seems to have realized that it’s one part of his life, not its entirety.
Asked how he got that way, he attributed it to “a fiber-rich diet.” Pressed, his answer became much more conventional: It was his mom’s fault because she believed nobody liked a braggart, especially not a talented one.
And as much as you might want to suspect that the decency and humility are an act, something about it feels true. They are features that his colleagues said he has managed to weave into the moral fabric of each tormented major character he has portrayed, from an Oklahoma field hand to Frankenstein’s monster to Joe McCandless, the haunted father at the center of “Ghost Brothers.”
“Shuler is a profoundly joyful human being, that’s where his true north is set,” said Susan Booth, director of “Ghost Brothers” and the Alliance’s artistic director. “So rather than playing at something, playing at a character, what you see on stage is someone who is on a journey, who is searching. What he sings is pure truth.”
Big man, big voice
It was one of the final rehearsals of “Ghost Brothers” and Mellencamp, who wrote the lyrics and music for the show, was at the foot of the stage going full-tilt about the vocals on Hensley’s big song of the show, “What Kind of Man am I?” Mellencamp wanted to know why, after 10 minutes of adjusting the sound board and repositioning the actors on stage, was Hensley’s voice still causing feedback on a crucial note of the pivotal, bluesy ballad about the consequences of lies. Music director T Bone Burnett looked on. King, author of the show’s dialogue, had been standing quietly in the Alliance auditorium, which until that moment had been bustling with crew and family members of the principals, including Hensley’s wife, Paula, and their two children, Skyler, 11, and Grayson, 7. Towering on stage, Hensley stood hands on hips, waiting patiently as Mellencamp demanded a reason from what seemed like everyone in the room.
Finally, from the sound crew came the answer: Hensley’s baritone was so powerful in that bar of the song, it essentially overpowered the battery pack of his microphone.
That’s the voice that caught Frank Boggs off guard 30 years ago at an audition for the Westminster School chorus in Atlanta. Boggs can’t remember what song Hensley sang that day during his sophomore year but he recalls clearly its quality.
“This big, huge football player opened his mouth and, good grief, the sound just floored me,” said Boggs, who was director of the school chorus. “It was unusual because he was 15 and he sounded like a man who was 35. He didn’t need a microphone.”
The choral director was also struck by the level of assurance Hensley had on stage. Most people who’ve known Hensley since those early years attribute that presence not to confidence required of him on the football field or on the baseball diamond, but to the rigor his mother, Iris, subjected him to at rehearsals of the Marietta ballet company she founded. It later became the Georgia Ballet.
“I’d be in my sweaty, muddy, baseball uniform lifting these ballerinas in the air and they’d be looking down at me like, ‘Eewww,’” Hensley said.
His father, a former all-American at Georgia Tech, had hoped his son would follow in his athletic footsteps and accept either the football scholarship he’d been offered from William and Mary, or the baseball scholarship from the University of Georgia. Hensley lasted two years at UGA.
“He came home on break, and I could tell something was on his mind because he’d usually go inside, put his bags down, grab his fishing pole and go straight to the lake,” said his father. “But this time he walked past me and went looking for his mama.”
It was music he loved, not baseball. With their blessing he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music and later got his master’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1993.
“My mom always said, ‘Get a classical training first,’ because with that foundation you can build and do everything.”
His mother’s words proved true. The roles came steadily: regional theater; the lead in “The Phantom of the Opera” in Hamburg, Germany; his proverbial big break in Trevor Nunn’s London revival of “Oklahoma!” — which caused the New York Times to wax on about the “American unknown causing a stir in London.” He’s largely credited with redefining the dark character Jud, one of theater’s arch bad guys. The reprisal of that role years later in New York caused a similar stir, culminating in a 2002 Tony. His mother lived to see it. Just a year later she died from cancer.
Susan Stroman, the Tony Award-winning director and choreographer, cast him in his breakout role and has worked with him since, including on Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” musical.
“His ability to project from underneath all those layers of green paint and latex the necessary humor and pathos of a giant creature who cannot talk (but can tap dance!) is nothing short of astonishing,” Stroman wrote in an email.
Stroman said she was struck by the fearlessness Hensley brought to the role. But there was also something more rooted, a hard-to-define element that guides the actor, particularly when he’s playing a villain.
“Jud, Frankenstein’s monster, Joe McCandless, are all wounded men who are outwardly menacing, but there’s a childlike quality in them that needs to be attended to, so you bring that out,” Hensley said. “I like dealing with the darker side of a character because if you can find their humanity and show sides of them that everyone has, that everyone can relate to, that’s much more unsettling for the audience because they can see a little bit of themselves in that character.”
Storytelling singer
In some ways it’s astonishing that he landed the role of McCandless. Both King and Mellencamp were very specific about how this tale about the death of two bickering brothers and a young woman should be told on stage. They’ve been working on the piece for more than a decade.
In interviews, Mellencamp said he didn’t want someone to sing his songs in a way that smacked of a Broadway stereotype. Hensley auditioned for both him and King.
And when Hensley belted “What Kind of Man am I?” during the rehearsal it was clear that he was classically trained. Yet there was also a goodly amount of Johnny Cash in his voice. It is, after all, a story set in a Mississippi hamlet. Woe and regret are the marrow of Joe McCandless, a man burdened with secrets. Though he has sung opera, Hensley is also a Southerner who used to hearing stories on a porch. He seemed to let that guide him as he revealed Joe’s pain.
Once the battery pack was adjusted, he reared back and his baritone exploded, then withered to a near whisper of shame.
“Stephen and John are storytellers,” Hensley said, “and John’s songs are really porch stories, with very simple truths to them. So in many ways this is like a man with a guitar on a porch.”
Which brings us back to the fish. Hensley was certain the one he caught all those years ago was bigger than the one he’d seen on the set. He vowed to talk to the prop manager about using his as a replacement.
With his father getting older and his family yearning for a little bit of permanency, Hensley moved his wife and kids back to Marietta in January. Paula is a yoga instructor and in just a few months time here has already found clients. Originally from England, she has traveled with him since they met more than 17 years ago in New York.
“My wife never wants to leave,” Hensley said.
In November, he’ll return to New York as one of the cast of “Prince of Broadway,” a musical tribute to Broadway director and producer Harold Prince. But Hensley also hopes to land another role — an artist-in-residence position at a local college campus.
“It’s the most gratifying thing to work with young kids, because they are like sponges,” Hensley said. “And if you take a teen to a good piece of theater, something happens.”
On April 17, Hensley will host the fourth annual Shuler Hensley Awards, also known as the Georgia High School Musical Theater Awards, at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. A red carpet affair produced like a mini Tony Awards, it recognizes the best in musical theater in public and private schools around the state. Winners have gone on to compete for the National High School Musical Theater Awards.
Though he’s in “Ghost Brothers”through mid-May, on some of his nights off Hensley has rehearsed with the kids in advance of the “Shulers.” The morning after the sing-through at the Alliance, he was up early to announce the finalists for each category at WSB-TV.
In rehearsals for the Shulers, he mixes it up with the kids as he would any of his other co-stars. They are dazzled by the fact that he and Hugh Jackman are good friends, a relationship forged more than a decade ago in London when they both starred in “Oklahoma!” Jackman usually sends a congratulatory video to play during the awards ceremonies.
Amid all of this, Hensley can tell which of the kids just want to be famous, which are simply acting out “Glee” and “Smash” from television, and which ones want to be serious, trained contenders. For that last group he offers a bit of advice, not unlike what his mother gave him.
“What are you in it for?” Hensley said. “To be famous? Or because you want an audience? Or because you can’t imagine doing anything else?”
Hensley’s latest
“Ghost Brothers of Darkland County”
Music and lyrics by John Mellencamp; book by Stephen King; music direction by T Bone Burnett; directed by Alliance artistic director Susan Booth
Today through May 13, except Mondays. $45-$85. Alliance Theatre. 1280 Peachtree St. N.E.; 404-733-5000; www.alliancetheatre.org
