Harry Groener -- Articles
Crazy For Harry Groener
by Paula Vitaris
Show Music magazine, winter 1992/93
"It's a minefield out there!" says Harry Groener, star of Crazy For You, the 1992 Tony Award winner for Best Musical.
He's referring to the stage of the Shubert Theatre, where eight times a week as Bobby Child, reluctant Manhattan banker and would-be song and dance man, he's careful to avoid the scenery tracks criss-crossing the floor. But looking down means not seeing threats from the air, and in one performance's first-act finale, an unexpectedly flung wooden pickax landed directly below his left eye. Such a blow would have sent another performer straight to the hospital, but Groener merely applied a Band-Aid during intermission and only left to get stitches after the final curtain. And he was back in place the very next day.
Dedication of this order is not surprising, considering Groener, a familiar figure in regional theatre since the mid-1970's and on Broadway since 1979, is thrilled to be back on stage after spending three years in the TV sitcom Dear John. Returning to New York "can't be anything but great," he says in an interview after a Friday evening performance. "To be able to come back and get the lead in a show like this and have the show be the hit of the season borders on a dream come true. It's amazing, and you go, 'My God, I'm out here in this wonderful piece of work and I'm singing these incredible songs.'"
The "incredible songs" by George and Ira Gershwin, are the raison d'etre of Crazy For You. Based -- loosely -- on the brothers' 1930 hit Girl Crazy, this new show, whose book by Ken Ludwig salutes all those boy-meets-girl, let's-put-on-a-show movie musicals, retains six numbers from Girl Crazy and incorporates songs both classic and lesser knows from other Gershwin shows and film scores. With a lead role calling for an actor/singer/dancer who can convince both as a romantic lead and as a goofy physical comedian,the producers knew it would be a challenge to find a performer that versatile. Their search ended at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Groener was appearing in a revival of Cole Porter's You Never Know during Dear John's 1991 hiatus. "They flew me back to New York, and it's a pretty good sign they're seriously interested when they fly you back and you don't have to pay for your own plane fare," he says, laughing. "On the second day Michael {Ockrent, the director} came up to me and said, 'Well, we'd like you to do this role,' and I said, 'Well, I'd like to do it.' And that was that." Fortunately, he was free to go to New York; although Dear John was renewed, his character was dropped.
Groener feels he's "primarily an actor," noting he's been in many more plays than musicals. He's much more comfortable acting than singing and dancing, he says, and he's as happy doing drama as comedy. Crazy For You, however, is a showcase for his musical comedy skills. Once described by Frank Rich as "a song and dance man of the old school", he gets plenty of opportunity to use his nasal yet pleasantly warm tenor, but it's his dancing and physical comedy abilities that truly shine. Dance is the focus of the show (choreographerSusan Stroman won a 1992 Tony), and Groener proves his dexterity in a diverse group of numbers, from the most exuberant of taps to the balletic "Nice Work If You Can Get It." Anna Kisselgoff in The New York Times describes his style as having a "quicksilver agility and controlled nonchalance." Perhaps in response to his buoyancy and lyrics such as "Shall we dance, and walk on air?" Stroman puts as much space as possible between Groener's feet and that treacherous stage floor; he seems perfectly at ease dancing on top of ascending platforms or on a prop car's roof and siderunner, not to mention climbing the scenery and, with leading lady Jodi Benson, a scaffolding constructed of chairs. The physical comedy consists of all sorts of split-second business involving (to give a few examples) bottles, suitcases, doors, chairs, a wig, and a tumble down a flight of stairs. He even gets to "Slap That Bass" by plucking out a few notes on a double bass. To top it off, he spends a good part of the show impersonating a Hungarian impresario, complete with heavy accent and padding. His finesse earned him a 1992 Tony nomination as lead actor in a musical.
I responded to the opportunity in this role to dance a lot and to the idea of a character assuming a different role, as we in life do," Groener says as he unwinds over a beer from the evening's strenous activity. The lanky redhead, wearing a Crazy For You jacket to which he has pinned a red AIDS ribbon, virtually shows no signs of fatigue. He says that the show "has been a fabulous experience right from the very, very beginning. The feeling it that you're going back to the old movie musicals, but you're not doing a show that's been done. It's a brand-new book and this is an opportunity to create an entirely new kind of show."
Whether in musicals or straight theatre, Groener says he knew "when he was very young" that he wanted to be onstage. Born in Germany and brought at age two to the United States by his musical parents, he trained first as a dancer, studying with the San Francisco Conservatory of Ballet, and toured at age 13 in The Nutcracker. By high school as interest in acting took precedence and he went on to obtain a BFA in theatre from the University of Washington in 1976. He also attended the Pacific Conservatory of the Arts, where he performed in musicals and assisted in choreographing them. After college, he began appearing in regional theatre in parts as wide-ranging as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Dickie Wentworth in Girl Crazy the title role in Scapino, and S.S. officer Hans Kittle in Ghetto (a role he particularly enjoyed). In 1977, while choreographing some cheers for a production of Vanities in St. Louis, he met actress Dawn Didawick, whom he married in 1978.
The proverbial overnight Broadway success finally arrived with the 1979 revival of Oklahoma! As Will Parker, Groener lassoed not only chorus members with a lariat during his tap dance to "Kansas City" but critical favor as well. "{Groener} is probably this revival's most unexpected discovery," wrote Walter Kerr in The New York Times "Singing and dancing with highly hayseed enthusiasm, letting the shock of hair on his forehead bounce in erratic counterpoint to his swiftly triggered feet, he is both a fine young clown and a reasonably authentic bronco buster." Echoed John Simon in New York magazine: "A delightful actor, and a hell of a tap dancer."
"It was quite an experience!" Groener recalls. "I had a ball doing Will Parker. It was a great run on tour and a wonderful run {on Broadway}." Oklahoma! brought him his first Tony nomination as well as a Drama Desk nomination, and he won a Theatre World award.
His next appearances in Broadway musicals came in 1981's Oh, Brother! and 1982's Is There Life After High School? Both closed within days of their openings (although they recieved cast recordings), and Groener remembers Oh, Brother! with particular fondness as the show he'd most like to see revived. His second Tony nomination came in 1983 for the role of Munkustrap in the Broadway premiere of Cats. In 1985, he played Harrigan in Harrigan N' Hart (which originated at the Goodspeed Opera House, where Christopher Welles played Harrigan), and after that show closed, he took over the role of Seurat in Sunday In The Park With George.
In 1987, Groener and his wife moved to California, where he quickly won the supporting role of dim-witted, sweet-natured Ralph in Dear John "I don't necessarily prefer television over theatre," Groener says. "But it's a reality. We want to work back here but you just go where the work is. So my wife and I went." Although he has been working in television since 1984, playing everything from Patrick Henry in the CBS miniseries George Washington to a totured telepath in Star Trek: The Next Generation, he has cracked feature films only once, as a young doctor in Brubaker. He'd love to make more, but "I can't get arrested in movies!" he declares. "Don't ask me why."
Groener has no definite plans once his Crazy For You contract is up, although reprising the role of Bobby in the upcoming London production is on his wish list. "I'm doing musicals while I still can," he says. "Like an athelete, your body only lets you dance like this for a very, very short time. I'm lucky that at this point I got this kind of role and I can do this kind of stuff, because I won't be able to after a while." He maintains his physical energy for eight shows a week with vitamins, protien drinks, a lot of rest and "taking care not to go nuts!" He also nourishes his mental energy with audience reaction, saying, "It's a different audience each night. There are always problems to solve. New things happen all the time. That's part of your job, to do the scene as if you'd never done it before. And if you indeed do that, new things will happen, you won't cut yourself off to new things, you'll listen to what someone has to say. If they say it differently, you'll respond differently. And that will lead to different things, so that keeps it alive. The audience, of course, gives you different challenges. If the audience is really responsive, the challenge is to keep them that way. If they aren't really responsive, the challenge is to get them to be that way." In fact, the audience is all-important to Groener, who states he doesn't read reviews of his shows, not only because a
critic's opinion "does affect what you do on stage, whether you want it to or not," but also because "Every single night there are 1000 critics out there who are screaming and yelling and doing this --" he waves his arms-- "and laughing and having a great old time. That's the truth, not what one person thinks. And that's what you go by."
He adds that his purpose as a performer is "about communication. Hopefully you're touching somebody, getting someone to think. With plays particularly, you hope you can touch upon something that someone can think about, or maybe you can change someone's thought about something, but primarily it's about communicating. All of us are in that space for two and a half hours and there's a communion going on between all of us on stage and in the audience and that's important."
That communion certainly existed in the two performances of Crazy For You I saw; in fact, it was hard to tell who enjoyed the show more, the audience or the cast. But this elaborate production couldn't be more different from the play that Groener recalls as one of his favorites. Portraying the title character in Billy Bishop Goes To War in 1982 at San Diego's Old Globe Playhouse was "theatre at its purest," he says. "You have a man on stage just telling a story. He's in a costume and he has another guy playing a piano. Some music. Very few props. But it's basically just one guy, telling this story about his life in World War 1. That's what we are. We're storytellers. You add these things onto it, but theatre at its core is storytelling."
The above article appeared in the Winter 1992/93 issue of Show Music and is reprinted w/o permission.