“Peter Pan” lands at the Fox Theatre from Aug. 7-12.
Brent Barrett may be the hardest-working stage actor you’ve never heard of. Consider his résumé:
• Sharpshooting heartthrob Frank Butler opposite Reba McEntire as Annie Oakley in Broadway’s 1999 Annie Get Your Gun.
• The charming thief Baron Felix Von Gaigern in Tommy Tune’s 1990 Tony Award-nominated Grand Hotel (you may have seen him do “We’ll Take a Glass Together” on the Tony telecast).
• Eel-like lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago opposite the Roxie Harts of Christie Brinkley, Karen Ziemba, Melanie Griffith, Sandy Duncan, Charlotte D’Amboise (and many others).
• And now the dual role of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook in Peter Pan, with Cathy Rigby flying high as the boy who’s just gotta crow.
And that’s an extremely stingy list.
Barrett, a classic Broadway baritone with power, a smooth upper range and a jam-packed schedule, typifies the kind of first-rate, if not first-line, talent found in New York and, when we’re lucky, on the road. These performers too rarely get billing on the marquee and don’t become household names, but when you see them, you know something special has happened.
Barrett has no complaints. He spent the past three years creating the role of the Phantom in Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular, returns regularly to Chicago (he’s played Billy Flynn more than any other actor) and, when not in a show, sings with the Broadway Tenors, a group he helped found and produces. He grabbed his first Broadway job, as Diesel in the 1980 revival of West Side Story, while a senior in the first-ever musical theater class at Carnegie Mellon University.
Critics have called him “dashing” and “suave” with “dreamboat matinee-idol charisma.” He calls his career “a very charmed route.”
“I’ve been fortunate enough to come around at a time when revivals were really in full swing,” says Barrett, 55. “I’ve been able to do a lot of the great roles that were written for men in the American musical theater — King Arthur, Fred Graham/Petruchio, Tony in West Side Story.”
Not bad for a Kansas kid who grew up in a town of 900, knew musicals only because his aunt Alice owned the local movie theater and made his career choice with a single role to his credit: Wild Bill Hickock in his high school’s production of Calamity Jane. The thought — “This is what I want to do” — hit him onstage.
This isn’t his first shooting match with Rigby. They toured in 1993 as Frank and Annie in Annie Get Your Gun. And he’s played Captain Hook before, some 20 years ago, just after Grand Hotel.
He calls the pantalooned pirate “one of the great, fun villains of musical theater.”
As in previous stagings, Barrett has just two scenes as Mr. Darling, spending most of his time onstage as the swiniest swine in the world, aka Mrs. Hook’s little baby boy.
There actually may be more boy than man in the bloody buccaneer. Hook, Barrett says, “is a petulant, spoiled brat. In a way he and Peter are the same. Neither of them want to grow up, and they want their own way all the time. And there comes the conflict.”
Hook is deliciously conflicted. He fancies himself fearless, as the scourge of the sea, but he quakes to the tick-tick-tock of a clock-swallowing crocodile and wants Wendy for a mother.
“There’s a little bit of Peter Pan and Captain Hook in all of us,” Barrett offers.
“A lot of times Hook is played very foppish,” he says, “for the humor, for the jokes. But kids have seen so much these days, we want to get a sense that he is dangerous not just buffoonish.”
He knows it’s working with his first entrance. “The audience claps because the costume is so outrageous,” he says. “Then they boo, and I know we’re OK, that we’re all in it together.”
So don’t let him down, OK?
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Kathy Janich, Encore Atlanta’s managing editor, has been seeing, covering or working in the performing arts for most of her life. Please email: [email protected]
