By KEVIN NANCE
Staff Writer (The Tessessean)
Chuck Wagner was playing monsters from the start.
From his sophomore year at Gallatin High School, where he played Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, to leading roles on Broadway (Beauty and the Beast, Les Misérables) and on national tours (Jekyll & Hyde), Wagner has been accustomed to the limelight, often in monstrous, or at least monster-size, roles.
It's ironic, then, that the first part to bring him home to Middle Tennessee in years — as a Douglas MacArthur-like general in the national tour of Kiss Me, Kate, which opens Tuesday as part of Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Broadway Series — is a cameo, albeit a memorable one.
''It's about the smallest role I've ever played,'' Wagner said in an interview from a Kate tour stop in Los Angeles. ''In a sense, of course, it's bigger than life, even though it's a small role, because MacArthur was such a great hero. Besides, it's true what they say: There are no small parts, only small actors.''
No one could accuse Wagner of being small in any sense. He's a rugged 6 feet 4 inches and 250 pounds, with what Kate star Rex Smith calls ''shoulders that fill up a doorway.''
Wagner allows that he's ''just a big old corn-fed man, which works well for the stage because I can be seen from a distance. It was particularly useful when I was playing the Beast, because of the scale when I was opposite Belle. I think I'm still the biggest Beast ever on Broadway.''
Wagner's voice is as massive as he is. It's a magisterial baritone in the mode of Robert Goulet (opposite whom Wagner played Lancelot in a Houston production of Camelot), full of rumbling low notes and impressive highs. And his vocal range is unusually wide; he may be one of the few performers who has sung Inspector Javert in Les Miz but also hopes to sing the tenor role of Jean Valjean someday.
''He can do anything he wants to do,'' says his mother, JoAnn McCoy of Carthage, Tenn. ''He can certainly sing anything he wants to sing, if he gets the chance.''
He'll almost certainly get the chance, in part because he and his voice are as sturdy and reliable as a Maytag washer.
''I very rarely get sick, and I have a really strong and resilient voice,'' he said. ''I can sing a lot and get up and sing some more. I'm still waiting for that big break, but I'm on the path.''
If he has yet to become a household name, Wagner's versatility has earned him a substantial following. He has built a loyal fan base of ''Chuckies,'' devotées of his Jekyll & Hyde tour and his Broadway stint in Les Miz.
Wagner's Javert was ''both commanding and terrifying,'' fan Shari Perkins writes on her Web site. ''Every time he appeared, I leaned so far forward in my seat that I nearly fell into the orchestra pit. I felt like he was delivering all his songs to me. When the end of his suicide soliloquy came and he leapt from the bridge, I felt myself tumbling into the Seine with him.''
Capitalizing on his newly consolidated renown, the singer has released his own self-titled album with songs from various roles he's played, including Rapunzel's prince in the original Broadway cast of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods.
Even though he gets to do precious little singing in Kiss Me, Kate, Wagner still makes himself heard. In Los Angeles, at the end of the first performance of Kate after the events of Sept. 11, the cast gathered on the stage for a rendition of God Bless America.
''I could hear Chuck's voice rising above everyone else's,'' Smith says. ''It sent chills down my back.''
'I can sing!'
Some people find their life's calling at a very early age, and Chuck Wagner is one of them.
When he was in the fourth grade, he made his theatrical debut as Captain Hook in a school production called Adventures in Storybook Land.
''We went to Nashville and got him a hook and an eye patch and a long-tailed coat, the whole thing,'' McCoy says. ''He thought that was just divine. And from then on, we knew that that was what he was going to do.''
Wagner still remembers his lyrics:
I am Captain Hook, yo ho
A brave and haughty sailor
Many men I've sent below
Beware, beware this sailor!
His big break, however, came when he was 14. His drama teacher, Juliette ''Jerry'' Guthrie, cast him in My Fair Lady.
''I was kind of holding my breath because he was my son, but 10 minutes into the show, it was like he was no longer connected to me in any way — I was just caught up in the show,'' McCoy says. ''He was just so marvelous, I couldn't believe it.''
After that success, Guthrie kept casting him in lead roles in plays and musicals such as Inherit the Wind and Carousel. Along the way, she imparted some important wisdom that would stand him in good stead to this day.
''She taught me to listen, to react and to just play it honestly,'' Wagner recalled. ''That was the best advice, to find the truth in what you're doing.''
After high school, he played summer stock at Jenny Wiley State Park in Kentucky, playing supporting parts in South Pacific, 1776 and Show Boat. After his freshman year at the University of Alabama, he appeared in The Lost Colony, the outdoor historical drama in Manteo, N.C.
After two years in Tuscaloosa, Wagner transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he was quickly cast in a new musical by one of his classmates.
''As I walked up to the callboard in the theater department to sign in on my first day,'' he remembered, ''I passed by an office and overheard someone say, 'We need someone tall who can sing.' ''
The voice belonged to Frank Wildhorn, a USC student who would go on to become the composer of several Broadway musicals including Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Civil War.
Wagner stuck his head in the office. ''I can sing!'' he said, and that was the beginning of a 20-year collaboration with Wildhorn, who cast him in that first show, Christopher! Wagner's voice can be heard on the composer's demos, concept recordings and original cast albums of several of his shows, including Jekyll & Hyde and the most recent one, Dracula.
''I'm there for Frank when he needs me,'' Wagner said. ''But I've also worked with Sondheim and Alan Menken (composer of Beauty and the Beast and several Disney film scores), and it's been great having that variety. I still feel like a kid in a candy store in all these shows.''
Wagner had hoped to appear in J&H on Broadway, but when that show opened on the Great White Way, he was playing the Beast, a part in which he'd appeared for two years in Toronto. When the producers later sought replacements for departing leads in J&H on Broadway, Wagner lost out to performers such as David Hasselhoff.
''I regret that I never got to do it in New York, but frankly, that was their mistake,'' he said. ''But then I did the lead in the national tour, and depending on who you talk to, our tour was the definitive version.''
Once a monster . . .
To date, then, Wagner remains best-known as the horned and hairy Beast, a role that still holds a special place on his résumé.
''The costume freed you from having to worry about what you looked like,'' he recalled. ''I have nothing but fond memories of the Beast, because he goes through such a catharsis. The character goes from being a spoiled brat to learning that the only way to love this beautiful woman is to let her go. It really can be a communal emotional experience.''
McCoy agrees that the Beast suited her son to perfection.
''That was typecasting, because he's always been very Beastie,'' she says with a laugh. ''When he was little, at Halloween he always had to go somewhere and buy some fantastic rubber horrible thing. He always wanted to be a monster of some description.''
He's a familiar kind of monster, a corncob-pipe-chewing general, in Kiss Me, Kate. It's a part that playwright John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation) created for the Broadway revival, replacing a sleepy senator who is engaged to the show's heroine, Lilli Vanessi.
''That makes the show more accessible for a contemporary audience,'' producer Roger Berlind explains. ''In the original version, the hero, Fred (Lilli's arrogant ex-husband and current co-star in the play-within-a-play production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew) had to wake him up and make fun of his sleepiness to make the case to Lilli that this was not the right guy for her.
''John changed the senator to a general, who's even more of an outrageous male chauvinist pig than Fred is, which makes Lilli's decision to come back to Fred more credible. And certainly Chuck does a great job with it.''
Variety agreed, calling Wagner's performance ''nicely overblown.''
''It's as big a part as I can make it,'' Wagner conceded with a laugh. ''But that's MacArthur, who had that sense of grand military pageantry about him. Yes, it's a spoof, but a loving one, not an abusive one. I may only be onstage for 20 minutes, but it's 20 of the finest minutes in America.''
Getting there
Kiss Me, Kate, an Actors' Equity-affiliated touring Broadway production, will play Tuesday through Nov. 11 at Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Jackson Hall. Show times are 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets ($21.50-$65) are available at the TPAC box offices downtown and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, at Ticketmaster outlets, online at www.tpac.org or by calling 255-ARTS (2787).
Tennessean arts writer Kevin Nance can be reached at 259-8238 or by e-mail at knance@tennessean.com.