In his first professional stage role, Burke Moses “wore orange spandex, danced around and sweated. A lot.” He was a 20ish song-and-dance man in a revue titled Dance, Dance, Dance at Six Flags Over Mid-America in Eureka, Mo.
“It was the hardest job I ever had and the best learning experience I ever had,” says Moses, who may wear lederhosen or military dress as Captain von Trapp in Theater of the Stars’ The Sound of Music, but certainly not spandex.
This is his third time he’ll blow the bosun’s whistle as the bristly, detached ex-navy captain raising seven enthusiastic children in Salzburg, Austria, on the eve of World War II. He first played the role for Theatre of the Stars in 2003 and, more recently, did a yearlong run at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. The Captain is not an easy nut to crack, Moses, now 45, says.
“He is pretty much a stiff and you have to show him grow,” the actor told BroadwayWorld.com near the end of the 2009-10 Toronto run. “He really changes more than anyone in the show. . . . The famous scene where he sings ‘The Sound of Music’ to the children and they have their little reunion and hug, is particularly challenging.”
He describes von Trapp as “a man suffering from great loss,” saying “he lives with a cloud over his head and he can’t see out of it. Finally color comes back into his life in the form of this … nun.”
The Captain also is “a damn fine baritone,” says the actor, ever unwilling to pass up a punch line.
Moses was born in New York and grew up in Evanston, Ill., outside Chicago (Cubs then, Yankees now). He attended college at Carnegie Mellon University, a well-known theater school in Pittsburgh. At some point in his post-theme-park life, he found himself in Boston at a talent search for the Franco Zeffirelli movie Endless Love. Two weeks later he was at the Minskoff Theater in New York, auditioning for Leonard Bernstein, who was reviving West Side Story. He wasn’t hired either time but soon found himself in a guest role on TV’s “Spenser for Hire” — playing a fitness trainer killed upside down in gravity boots. He’s been a working actor — never a waiter, gofer or delivery boy — ever since.
Moses may look familiar from his TV work, which has included the daytime dramas “Loving,” “One Life to Live” and “As the World Turns,” and he has couple of commercials in rotation (Autotrader.com is one), but he’s a Broadway boy at heart.
The “damn fine baritone” created the comically obtuse Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, earning a Theatre World Award and Drama Desk nomination, and he’s often the go-to guy when an original leading man leaves a Broadway cast (often proving the better performer). He’s done Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls and Fred Graham in Kiss Me, Kate. He’s also sung with the New York City Opera, emoted with the New York Shakespeare Festival and did a dandy Lil’ Abner when the 1956 musical was staged for New York’s popular and prestigious Encores! concert series.
In addition to spending this summer in the shadow of TOTS’ “Austrian alps,” Moses will be in Sacramento doing Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and in Boston helping develop a new musical titled Johnny Baseball. He plays Babe Ruth (“I slick down my hair and don’t worry about the nose”) in the show, that blames the Red Sox’ storied World Series curse on its history of racism, not on its sale of Ruth to the Yankees.
Moses’ Sound of Music history doesn’t stretch much past 2003. He remembers the 1965 movie only vaguely and says he’s never seen the show onstage. His experience is a lifetime removed from that of his TOTS boss, producer Christopher B. Manos, who first saw the show in 1959, about a month after Mary Martin found her favorite things at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Manos didn’t particularly care for it.
That has changed.
“It reaches all ages,” Manos says now. “I don’t think I know of another piece that does that.”
With Manos at the helm, the 57-year-old TOTS has staged The Sound of Music nine times, beginning in 1964 and picking up this summer. He’s not alone in his evolving appreciation.
“There is a timeliness to The Sound of Music that continues to amaze me,” says Ted Chapin, president and executive director of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization in New York. “Coming as it did at the very end of the R&H collaboration, it is in many ways a musical recapitulation of their career — almost old-fashioned in its modernity, it just tells a deeply satisfying story with an extraordinary collection of songs. I am not sure that Mr. Rodgers or Mr. Hammerstein would have predicted the worldwide phenomenon they created, but I bet they would be pleased.”
Manos, ever the salesman, also is pleased that it keeps bringing in the crowds.
“It’s a wonderful thing to take your daughter or son to, or your grandkids,” he says. “And hopefully, once we’ve got them in the theater, we’ve got them for life.”
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Kathy Janich is an Atlanta theater artist and freelance writer. After years in daily newspapers, she’s found a joyous second career as an artistic associate at Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre, www.synchrotheatre.com.
