Colin Campbell 22 September 1998 Atlanta Journal and Constitution

London - Shuler Hensley, the 6-foot, 3-inch, 250-pound Marietta boy who is making a splash on the London stage, seems a little shy about saying what he dreams of doing next. He's 31 and trained in opera, met his English/yoga teacher wife in New York, spent a year or so in Hamburg starring in a German production of "The Phantom of the Opera" and has astounded critics and audiences with his performance of the villainous Jud Fry in a superb revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!," a show being toasted on both sides of the Atlantic.

"In an English theater debut audiences will be talking about for years," Matt Wolf wrote in Variety, "Hensley plays every moment of Jud's 'crawlin' and festerin' existence as if his life depended on it, which, of course, it does." The world is seemingly at his feet, yet here sits Hensley during a recent interview saying he wants to go home to Marietta. What? How could he possibly further his career on the musical stage so far from London and New York?

Finally, the Westminster and University of Georgia graduate confesses that he wants to move into movies and TV. He wants to act more, sing less, and he thinks home base matters less for a film actor than for a performer on the musical stage. He sees himself playing intricate bad guys, like his hero Anthony Hopkins in "The Silence of the Lambs" --- or indeed like Hensley's own dark portrayal of Jud in "Oklahoma!" at the Royal National Theatre, the concrete complex that looms across the Thames from London's old West End theaters.

"I find I am more interested in the villain-type roles because they can be so much more complex than just the villain," Hensley says. "I don't think anybody sees them as evil per se. They show how close we are to one another. It's an untapped area of art. And I think, physically, I'm not going to play the hero."

Love gone twisted. The psycho with a crush. It's what Hensley has done with Jud without making the character pretentious or the musical comedy a downer --- no easy feat. He's a brute, to be sure, an unwashed loner with a collection of dirty pictures, and when he drags Laurey across the stage (she wriggles like a fish), the scene hints of rape without wrecking the show's essential lightness. He helps give the piece depth. And when he takes his curtain call with the others, all smiles, the crowd goes wild.

Hensley is still young enough to seem quite cheerful and grateful for his good fortune and in love with the comradeship of the London stage. He sits calmly in a drab office with a low concrete ceiling one recent evening before the 7:15 curtain. The world outdoors is windy and still brilliantly sunlit, and a glimpse of St. Paul's across the choppy Thames is reminiscent of a Constable painting. Yet here's this big, young Georgian, dressed in scruffy denim, with a scraggly beard and his hair a Jud Fry mess, ready to leave the Thames behind for the Chattahoochee.

"I do want to come back to the States," Hensley says. "That's definitely where I want to be. I consider myself to be from Atlanta, from Marietta, that's my home. And that's where I want to be our center point, where we work from."

Hensley, who has pierced ears and a ring on one thumb, grew up at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain. His family has been Southern for generations. The name Shuler is a German surname on his mother's side. His father, Sam Hensley, is an engineer and former politician. His mother, Iris Hensley, is artistic director of the Georgia Ballet Ensemble. "I actually danced as a child with my mom," he says, laughing. "There were very few boys who would dance."

Hensley went to the private Westminster Schools, Class of '85, where he played baseball, football and basketball. He has an older brother, 37, a writer, and an older sister, 32, an actress. Both live in Atlanta. "My dad was the only one not in the arts," he says. At the University of Georgia, Hensley got involved in drama first, then the musical side, choirs, ensembles.

"Once I found the singing, I knew I wanted to do voice, so I transferred after two years to the Manhattan School of Music." He finished the four-year course there in three years, then went on to study opera at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he stayed until 1993, leaving with a master's degree.

He has performed in New York, Boston and Philadelphia in English, German and Italian. In the summer of 1996, after the Atlanta Olympics, he and wife Paula went to Hamburg for "Phantom" for 109 performances. Now they share an apartment in London's Soho.

"She's the very centered one," he says of his wife, whom he met while she was bartending in Manhattan. "She ends up finding work in every place we go." "We started talking about dancing," Paula says, recalling when they met. "Then he started taking my yoga classes, my aerobics."

Hensley's friends among the cast include Hugh Jackman, who plays Curly, and Josefina Gabrielle, who plays Laurey. "It's almost like an improvisation," Hensley says of the best nights. "Lines are said differently, or certain other things are going on. It's just fabulous when that happens." But he adds: "We're always having a good time. The choreography, the orchestra behind us --- and you feel it with the audience. It's almost like you see it for the first time."

"He's extraordinary," Jackman, an ebullient Australian, says of Hensley. "He could walk into any opera company in the world. He's got an amazing range. He's a big man and uses all of it."

Hensley, in turn, admires the London theater scene. More so than New York. "Here they do millions of plays and they make very little money from them. It's a throwback. People here do it for the sake of the art, not for the sake of the dollar."

Will Hensley stay with the show, which closes Oct. 3 at the National, when it moves, as expected, to the West End and maybe Broadway? He isn't sure he wants to commit himself to six more months of performances. And he's getting nibbles about film roles.

"The experience of doing this show has deepened my resolve," he says, shifting from cheerful to serious again. "The most important thing about my profession is finding the truth, finding the reality of these shows."

Others hope Hensley and his Jud come to America. "We're all hoping it ("Oklahoma!") comes back to this side of the Atlantic," Iris Hensley says from her Marietta dance company. "I think they are all still having a wonderful time doing it. I've seen it three times and I'm planning to go back as soon as I can."

Speaking again of North Georgia, Hensley says, "That area is soothing and healthy for us. I wouldn't want to raise a family in New York. And it's getting to the point where you can have an established career and live in Atlanta."

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