Comment on this story What: Chicago When: Knoxville Civic Auditorium Where: April 30 & May 1, 8 p.m., May 1 & 2, 2 p.m. May 2, 7 p.m. Cost: $20-$58, plus tax and $2 facilities fee, available at Tickets Unlimited outlets or 656-4444.

Good ol’ boy Tom Wopat strides across decades with ease

by Paige M. Travis

Tom Wopat is an experienced, well-respected actor. He’s been pursuing the dramatic and musical arts since he was a 12-year-old kid in Wisconsin. Since moving to New York City in 1977, he’s been was nominated for a Tony Award for his role in Annie Get Your Gun, and performed in Broadway productions of Guys and Dolls, 42nd Street, City of Angels and I Love My Wife. He founded a country-rock band called the North Hollywood All-Stars, and in 2000 he lent his smooth voice to an album of standards called In the Still of the Night and has another disc planned—a compilation of songs by Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen—for later this year.

But all I can think when I’m preparing to interview Tom Wopat about his upcoming Knoxville appearance in the touring production of Chicago is: I’m going to talk to Luke Duke. Suddenly, I’m in third grade again, grasping tightly my Dukes of Hazzard folder that contains drawings of the General Lee in various stages of ramping across the dirt roads of Kentucky, away from those hapless sheriff’s deputies Roscoe and Cletus. Luke Duke is going to call me on Thursday morning.

Part of being a professional journalist is the ability to put away these personal matters and bring forth only that knowledge which is necessary and valuable to an interview. Wopat, a professional himself, is forthcoming with information about his role as the sleazy and strangely compelling lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago. He hasn’t seen the film version starring Richard Gere that won a load of Academy Awards, but he’s heard about it. The stage version, he informs me, is very stripped down compared to the lushly imagined cinematic rendition.

“This is a show that really lends itself to touring,” he says. “We don’t have any sets. The band is onstage. We work around them. It’s a real kind of vaudeville thing.”

The spare sets allow the performers to shine like coveted baubles in the story of fame, greed, murder and sex. Wopat’s character Billy Flynn is a lawyer to the stars in corrupt 1930s Chicago. His star client is locally famous nightclub diva Velma Kelly who is already in the slammer for killing her sister. But she’s soon replaced in the public’s and media’s fancy by Roxie Hart, a sweet-faced murderess and wannabe star who wants to win her freedom and steal the spotlight from Velma.

Flynn may be a creep, but at least he’s up front about his motivations, Wopat says.

“He’s totally selfish, but he comes out with it right out at the beginning: ‘I do this perfectly for the money. I don’t care about you or sex. I don’t care what else is going on. You do what I tell you, and we’ll get you off.’ In some ways he’s the most honest character in the play.”

Wopat joined this cast of Chicago in January while the tour was already in progress. His co-stars are Bianca MarroquÍn who made her Broadway debut as Roxie in the summer of 2003, and Reva Rice, who got her Bob Fosse dance education from the Tony-winning Broadway production of Fosse for which she received two Helen Hayes Award nominations. When he’s “the new guy,” Wopat uses some shorthand to make his entrance before giving the character a complete backstory.

“I make a joke that I play two characters: one urban, one rural. He’s my urban guy,” he says. “As a replacement, my first job is to fit in, to provide the service that’s needed from my fellow characters—be a leading man,” says Wopat. “Once I get comfortable, then I start to look inside where the guy might’ve come from.” In the actor’s estimation, Flynn might be the “son of Irish immigrants who’s bootstrapped himself up from the bottom. He really works his system. He’s figured out the way to work the media and it works.” And in that sense he’s a pretty savvy guy—not always likeable, but definitely admirable for his ability to capture the public’s attention with a courtroom drama that plays out on the cover of the daily papers. In that way, Chicago is an even more contemporary story than it was during its original Broadway run from 1975 to 1977. That could explain why the revival production has played to audiences almost three times as long as the first time around.

“It’s much more topical than it was then,” Wopat reasons. “That wasn’t long after the Nixon trial. Now you’ve got Martha Stewart, Kobe Bryant, Jayson Williams... You have all these celebrity trials. It’s very current, very applicable.”

Mere days after performing in Knoxville, Wopat will take his character to the Big Apple to join the Broadway cast of Chicago. The Great White Way is familiar terrain for the actor who has been acknowledged by the theater community.

“I look forward to it,” he says. “Broadway’s a blast. It’s the real deal. It confers a certain legitimacy to what you’re doing.”

Returning to Broadway will allow the actor some time at home in New Jersey with a troublesome pear tree, and some tomatoes and roses.

“You’ve got to mulch them,” he says of the roses in my yard that I admit not knowing what to do with. “And fertilize them.”

Luke Duke just told me to mulch my roses.

Ultimately, I was too chicken to ask Tom Wopat about Luke Duke and that classic television show so fondly connected to my youth. Doubtless audience members will go to Chicago with that character in mind, the smarter brunette Duke cousin to the rash blond Bo Duke (whose actor John Schneider now plays Superman’s dad on Smallville, but that’s a mind-boggling trivia conversation for another day). But my guess is that they’ll leave the show, eyes and ears full of the company’s razzle-dazzle, thinking of Wopat as Billy Flynn.

April 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 18 © 2004 Metro Pulse