by Simi Horowitz
TheaterWeek Magazine, August 17, 1992
When the casting team invited Harry Groener to fly -- at the producer's expense -- across country to audition for Crazy For You, he knew he was a serious contender. As the lanky 40-year-old actor/singer/dancer tells it, show business is indeed a byzantine world of codes. The trick is being able to read them.
"If the casting people say, 'We'd like you to read for a part, but we can't pay for your trip'-- that's interest, sort of. But if they say, 'We'll pay for the flight'-- that's another ball game," says Groener.
After two readings, he landed the lead part of Bobby, the sincere (tap-dancing, singing) New York banker's son who goes out west to foreclose on a theatre, falls in love with its star and decides to save the theatre. The smash Gershwin show won the 1992 Tony award for Best Musical.
Although Groener is no household name -- producer Roger Horchow did not want to cast stars -- he is well versed in intricacies of showbiz on both coasts. For the past 16 years, Groener has worked fairly steadily in regional theater, TV, and on Broadway. In addition to recieving a Tony nomination this year for his star turn in Crazy For You he earned two other Tony nominations for for his performances as Munkustrap in Cats ('83) and as Will Parker in Oklahoma! ('79)
Groener, however, is best known to TV audiences as the lovelorn nerdy Ralph in the now defunct hit NBC comedy series Dear John with Judd Hirsch.
Groener has guest-starred on Matlock, Quantum Leap, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Remington Steele, and St. Elsewhere, among others.
His film career, he admits sheepishly, is, well, limited. He played Dr. Campbell in the Robert Redford movie Brubaker in 1979. Abruptly, Groener goes into a kind of Jackie Mason routine, cadences, rhythms, and all. "Everyone knows I will never do another movie. I don't do movies. I audition for them. Everyone says the auditions are terrific. Fabulous...goodbye."
On stage, Groener is frequently compared to a young James Stewart -- gung-ho determination and wide-eyed innocence. Off-stage, he is equally likeable, but unlike the mumbling, unsure Jimmy Stewart persona with which he is identified, Groener is very animated, articulate, and eager to share his opinions of a range of topics.
On New York vs. L.A: "I've done more straight plays than musicals. But in New York, I'm known as the guy who does musicals and that's what I get cast in. In L.A., I'm known as an actor. There's an irony here. The impression of L.A. is that it's tinsel town, glitzy, not the place for serious theatre. But that's where I did Billy Bishop Goes To War by John Gary and Eric Peterson at the Old Globe and Joshua Sobel's Ghetto at the Mark Taper."
On regional theatre: "If I could make a living at it, that's where I'd like to work. The roles are good and so are the audiences. They're more sophisticated in Louisville, San Diego, and Seattle than they are in New York. In San Diego, audiences have seen the entire Shakespeare canon. How many New York theatregoers can say that? In Louisville -- particularly during the Humana festival -- the audience is very much a part of the process. After each play, they fill out questionnaires about the production. Where does that happen in New York?"
On commercial theatre: "Frequently, they'll get a film star to play a lead because that'll generate an audience. But it's a catch-22 situation. They get the star and then it doesn't work and then they say the play isn't good enough or the character isn't written right. And it's not true. The casting is the problem."
I meet with Groener in his dressing room in the Shubert. It's small -- most unexpected for the show's star -- and homey. Groener has covered the walls with dozens of greetings that he has recieved from his wife, actress Dawn Didawick, over the course of their 14-year marriage. These are cards she has sent him to mark his appearances at different theatres across the country.
In the corner of the room, half a dozen ribbons dangle from ceiling to floor. These, Groener explains, are what he wraps the cards in following each theatrical stint to transport them to the next dressing room. There are several vases containing dried flowers: also souveniers from his wife who gives him, he reports, a fresh flower every week.
Groener is a romantic male and makes it clear that his feelings for Dawn are very much like that of his character Bobby for Polly. "The acting challenges in playing Bobby are not overwhelming," Groener acknowledges. "We have a lot in common. He's very excited about what he wants to do -- be a song and dance man. He's in love with the theater. So am I. And he's in love with a wonderful woman. And so am I... The real acting challenge every night is in maintaining my concentration and not getting so relaxed that I forget how to fall down a flight of stairs without hurting myself."
In fact, the physical demands of playing Bobby are exhausting. Groener is on stage in virtually every scene-- singing, tapping, doing pratfalls -- and when he's not on stage, he's changing costumes.
"When I first started working on this role last summer, at the end of each rehearsal," Groener admits, "I was like the old man Tim Conway plays." On his feet, Groener is imitating a debilitated, hunkered-over shuffling centenarian. "I could barely get into bed at night."
But Groener has gotten into the swing of it and learned how to pace himself. Warmups-- pushups, situps, and some tapping-- start two hours before showtime. In the middle of the day, he has a "carbo-loadup-- usually of pasta." All day, he consumes packets of E-MER-GEN-C (health food store vitamins and proteins that he mixes with water) and throughout the close to three hour performance he's drinking glasses and glasses of Gatorade -- off stage, of course.
Although Groener wears three hats in the show, he insists he thinks of himself primarily as an actor. Singing, he suggests, may be his weakest point. He has had little formal vocal training, "outside of acting classes which really do teach how to use your voice." And the fact is, his lack of singing classes has stood in the way of very little. Groener points proudly to Stephen Sondheim casting him as Mandy Patinkin's replacement as Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George."Obviously, Sondheim wanted me to hit the right notes. But he said, 'If you can't, just act them.'"
Groener insists that musical actors have to be able to do everything in order to be employable -- "Years ago, musicals were conceived with three companies in mind: actors, singers, and dancers"-- but Crazy for You has as added element.
"There's an old sensibility here in terms of the comedy, the vaudeville, the schtick. We're not trained for that. The closest thing we get in acting school is commedia. There's still the feeling in this country that the only real acting is acting from the gut."
Groener emphasizes he is not advocating superficial acting in musicals. On the contrary, he believes an actor has to be just as truthful in musicals as in Chekhov, but the parameters are different. Crazy For You, Groener says, combines traditional and contemporary elements. "It's a throwback, but in a new way."
To get into the spirit of the show every night, Groener and co-performer Bruce Adler, who plays Zangler, a deranged Central European impresario, have a nightly ritual. Groener points to a number of joke books on a shelf-- the jokes cover the field from doctors to divorce to religion and they're predominantly of the Henny Youngman variety, eliciting real groaners. Pun intended.
Opening a book and running his fingers up and down the page at random, Groener imitates Adler's on-stage hybird accent: "'Stup!'...And that the joke I read. If it's really good it spreads all over the company and everyone is telling it."
Born in Augsberg, Germany, Groener and his family emigrated to San Francisco when Harry was two years old. Although Groener's father worked his entire life as a mail clerk, "If he had had his druthers, he would have been in show business," Groener recalls wistfully. In Germany, Groener Sr. had in fact been a concert pianist, a tap dancer, and a composer. Indeed, he wrote several operas, one of which -- Angel of Paris -- actually got to the rehearsal stage in Berlin, but was closed down under pressure from the Catholic Church because it was deemed blasphemous. Luck never seemed to be in his father's corner, Groener suggests. That same opera found an interested producer in San Francisco; shortly before the production was to get underway, the producer died of a heart attack.
But Groener Sr.'s interest in the performing arts and his wife's -- her aspiration was to be an opera singer -- was not lost on their son.
By the time he was 12, he was studying tap and jazz, and shortly thereafter he was enrolled in ballet classes, mostly because of his mother's urgings. "She said, 'If you really want to be good, you're going to have to take ballet.' But I didn't think it was cool. I felt so dorky." Groener changed his mind, however, when he was invited to perform in The Nutcracker and got to tour. "Ballet became my life."
The turning point for Groener came when he saw West Side Story and commited himself to a career in musical theatre. He majored in drama at a number of West Coast universities -- including City College of San Francisco, San Francisco State, and the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts at Alan Hancock College -- and earned his B.F.A. in theater from the University of Washington in Seattle. He launched his career at the Actors Theatre of Louisville where he met his wife-to-be, Dawn Didawick.
Over his 16 year career, a high point for Groener was playing the Nazi officer in Ghetto. Asked if the role caused any feelings of conflict -- or even a tinge of defensiveness -- because he himself is German-born, Groener makes the point that while he has no connection to the German past, he feels compelled to do everything he can to help prevent Nazis or their disciples from achieving power again. And one way to do that, he explains, is to show the belly of the beast, not by dramatizing Nazi cruelty, but on the contrary, by "showing them to be likeable, funny, and seductive. That's scary. And that's what gets an audience to start thinking."
For an actor, of course, the Nazi role in Ghetto-- as in playing any despicable character -- poses special challenges. "Actors are taught that we must love the characters we play. I've never been convinced of that. I feel we must understand them, but not love them." He adds that he was able to put an emotional handle on the Nazi character by believing that "the man doesn't fully recognize what he is doing, although a part of his unconscious must know it is evil."
On the other hand, Groener's feelings about his three-year-stint with the TV sitcom Dear John was a mixed bag. "In the beginning it was a high point. Then it became a medium point." He laughs. "Look, you hope that the executives you're working with are as creative as you, or at least open to hearing your ideas." Groener pauses. "After the first year, they didn't want to hear anything from me. 'Just play it the way we wrote it,' they'd say."
"They wanted Ralph to be the same, week in and week out. But the real danger point came when the lines they were giving Ralph were interchangeable with punchlines coming from the mouths of any of the characters."
Groener underscores his view that what was happening here was a reflection of network brass attitudes, not that of the writers or directors. "Ratings were slipping, in part because we were being moved around from time slot to time slot," Groener continues. "And who gets what time slot has to do, again, with power. If the networks are particularly enthusiastic about one show, they'll bump another somewhere else."
After three years with the show -- it lasted for four years -- Groener was unceremoniously dismissed, an episode he recounts with thinly veiled bitterness, even while he insists "it wasn't personal, and the way I was treated was thoughtlessness-- bad manners -- not malevolence. There was no feeling, 'Let's get Harry'."
Yet having said that, he comments, "If they didn't want me, that's fine. But there are ways of doing it. No one called me. No one said anything to me. First I heard about it was through my agent, who had been notifed. I've talked to other people in the industry and it's not done this way. That bothers me. And what makes it even worse is that no one claims responsibility for deciding to get rid of me." He laughs. "For all intents and purposes, I should still be there."
Despite the lingering bad taste, Groener claims he'd love to do another TV series, "only this time I'd like to play the lead." He would especially enjoy appearing in a Steven Bochco (L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues) production. "At least he's trying to move through some new doors."
Working in L.A. has a distinctly different flavor on many levels that working in New York; not the least of which, Groener says, is how one lands a part and on what basis.
For starters, true to the cliche, he suggests, a lot of business in L.A. is conducted on the party circuit, at restaurant dinners and at hotel functions of one sort or another. "There's some of that in New York, but I was aware of much more of it in L.A. You're sitting around a table and suddenly a producer you've never worked with or even know says, 'Harry, I've never thought about you. Why don't you come into my office on Monday?' Yes, many actors do get parts just that way.
"I have a somewhat cynical view of L.A.," Groener says. "I think talent is almost unimportant. That's not to say there aren't some wonderful actors-- Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman. But what's most important in Hollywood is whether you're right. So even before you've said one line, they've decided if you're right or wrong for the part. And this has nothing to do with your experience, your craft, or even if you're an adequate actor."
Groener makes the startling observation that this phenomenon is not all bad. In fact, he suggests, it creates the totally equal playing field, a virtually unknown occurrence in the performing arts. "Everyone has the same chance...at least for lesser roles."
After a moment, he reluctantly admits with a chortle that now that he's the lead in a mega-smash Broadway musical, he might not be that accepting about the idea of being cast almost by a roll of the dice.
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