INTERVIEW: Spend Wednesdays with Wopat in NYC
Photo: Tom Wopat, star of Broadway, film and TV, will offer intimate Wednesday night concerts at the Beach Café in New York City. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by Fortune Creative with permission.
Tom Wopat, the accomplished actor of Broadway, film and TV, has decided to bring his unique talents to an intimate setting in the Big Apple. He has set up a special residency at the Beach Café on Second Avenue in New York City, and he has been playing everything from Frank Sinatra tunes to Broadway classics.
Wednesdays With Wopat continues Wednesday evenings through Nov. 20. On Nov. 6, ticket buyers will have the chance to hear Wopat sing several songs from his Broadway career, while on Nov. 13, he’ll showcase singer-songwriter ballads. The finale, Nov. 20, will be a mixture of everything from the first four weeks of the residency, including jazz standards (Oct. 23) and Sinatra tunes (Oct. 30).
“I’ve been in probably a dozen musicals on Broadway, so there’s a lot of stuff,” Wopat said in a recent phone interview. “There’s also musicals like Will Rogers [Follies] that I didn’t do on Broadway, but I’ve done a couple of times. So I do the ‘Look Around’ song from that with a guitar. It’s going to be fun. It’ll be a wide range of stuff. We’re actually doing a selection from Hamilton. I do ‘Wait for It,’ the song that Aaron Burr sings in the first act. It comes across really well.”
Although Wopat is going into each evening with a plan, there will probably be a loose and comfortable feeling to the performance. For example, he likes to his keep his musical director, pianist Tedd Firth, on his toes — ditto for drummer Peter Grant and bassist Ed Howard.
“Most of the stuff we have done at one time or another,” said Wopat, who has appeared in everything from TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. “I don’t think there are any surprises in there. I’m thinking of doing ‘The Surrey With the Fringe on Top’ from Oklahoma, and I don’t think he’s done that. But that’s cake. That’s something he can read, and we’ll put our own little spin on it. We did a jazz version of the ‘Soliloquy’ from Carousel, which will be a blast. We did a version of ‘Pretty Women’ from Sweeney Todd. There’s going to be a lot of interesting takes.”
Wopat, who has released 12 albums, could build the entire show from his own Broadway résumé, which is extensive and includes such musicals as Annie Get Your Gun and A Catered Affair (he received Tony nominations for both).
“I’m probably going to start the show acapella with ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business,’ and then we do a little two-fer we stuck together, ‘My Defenses Are Down’ with ‘[They Say It’s] Wonderful,'” he said of Annie Get Your Gun selections. “There are other shows that I’ve had a lot of fun with. I mean, Oklahoma, I thought was written for me. I very much enjoyed it. I’ve done it several times. I did it in New York off-Broadway, and I’ve done it several times in stock. Sweeney I didn’t get to do on Broadway, but boy that’s one of my favorite shows as well. I’ve done it a couple of times. The one that was kind of a dark horse for me, I had no idea that it was was Will Rogers Follies. You can bite off as much as you want to chew in that show. You can do some real tricks and play some harmonica and tell jokes. How bad can it be?”
One Broadway memory is bittersweet for Wopat, and that’s his abbreviated time in A Catered Affair in 2008. He enjoyed the show very much, but the relatively short run didn’t allow the musical to live and breathe on Broadway for too long.
“It felt like it was an adult musical that they weren’t prepared to view that way,” Wopat said. “You could make the case that if you have a musical with Faith Prince and Harvey Fierstein in it, they’re expecting a comedy perhaps, and it was anything but. There’s humorous moments in it, but that’s a really poignant tale that they tell. And that song, ‘I Stayed’ … is just a killer. … That was a really interesting job. It was an acting job, for sure.”
He’ll bring these songs with him to the Beach Café and add in a few rarities as well. It’s a safe bet that nothing’s a safe bet when Wopat is on stage. He has a plan and will see how the night goes. That’s the same spirit that led to the creation of this Wednesday residency.
“The owner and I, we’ve become pretty good friends, and he had me in after he saw me with I think Linda Purl maybe at Birdland,” Wopat remembers. “We basically bonded. He likes what I do. He likes my approach. It’s not cabaret. There’s not really a story that I tell through the evening, but my approach to the music and especially to the eclectic material that I do is something that you don’t see a lot. We do a Joni Mitchell tune. Now we’re doing a John Hiatt tune. This latest record I have [Wopat], there’s some really interesting songs on there. I’m doing a certain number of my own compositions as well, and Dave just thought it would be interesting to try to run and see if we could build something. It’s hard to say. It’s still early, but I’m enjoying the process a great deal. I feel we’ll probably attack it again in the spring.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Wednesdays With Wopat, featuring Tom Wopat, continues Nov. 6, 13 and 20 at the Beach Café in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
