Ed Blank June 2002 PittsburghLive.com

Western Pennsylvanians can't get enough of "The Bread, My Sweet," a Pittsburgh-made film that premiered here at the 2001 Three Rivers Film Festival last November. It has hardly missed a week being at one local moviehouse or another since beginning a record-breaking six-week engagement at Regent Square on Jan.18, 2002. It has played a couple of engagements at the Harris, Downtown. While it continues its long run at the Denis, Mt. Lebanon, it opened Friday at the Manor, Squirrel Hill

The drama concerns the extended and surrogate family operating a bakery in Pittsburgh's Strip District — the Enrico Biscotti Co. at 2022 Penn Ave., which, not coincidentally, is run by writer-director Melissa Martin's husband, Larry Lagattuta. Audiences here recognize not only nationally known actors such as Rosemary Prinz and Scott Baio but locally based performers such as Bingo O'Malley, Nardi Novak, Philip Winters, Marty Sheets and John Amplas.

But no one can overlook Shuler Hensley as Pino, the oldest of three brothers and the one who is learning-impaired

If Martin and co-producer Adrienne Wehr can find a way to navigate the waters and politics of a Los Angeles engagement and get the film seen by a sufficient number of Motion Picture Academy voters (a Manhattan run would help, too), Hensley could be a major Oscar contender in what is already the Pittsburgh sleeper of the year.

That's a huge if. Only three prints of "The Bread, My Sweet" exist at the moment. The few other cities where the picture has been shown include Philadelphia and Cleveland. Ad campaigns can be more expensive than movies, which is why advertising for foreign and American independent films tends to be minimal. They rely more on reviews and word of mouth

Hensley supplies a momentum of his own. On June 2, he won a Tony Award for his unusually sympathetic portrayal of the often just surly and menacing Jud Fry in "Oklahoma!" at Broadway's Gershwin Theatre.

Martin calls Hensley "a no-maintenance actor who is so outrageously talented and so much fun — an absolute pleasure to work with."

"We had seen him on tape doing Pino's breakdown scene," she says. "He came into Pittsburgh and did it for us again in callbacks, and Adrienne cried. Shuler was such a mess when he finished the scene. He was just so into it that afterwards he just left.

"We had no idea until he got the part and came back here to do it what a lot of fun he is. Even at the wrap party, he pole-danced as a stripper would."

You wouldn't guess from his background

Hensley was born March 6, 1967, in Atlanta and grew up in Marietta, Ga. His mother, Iris, is artistic director of the Georgia Ballet. His father, Sam, is a former Georgia Tech football star, retired civil engineer and former state senator. Shuler Hensley attended the University of Georgia on a baseball scholarship but graduated from the Manhattan School of Music before getting his master's degree from the Curtis Institute of Music.

His background includes musicals — Joe in "The Most Happy Fella" and Judge Turpin in "Sweeney Todd" — and operatic leads in "La Boheme," "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute."

His mother's career, he says, "was the crux of my getting an education in voice and classical training as a foundation. It's what has saved me at least in being able to support a performance and sing properly. People get in such trouble when they're doing eight shows a week."

In show business, one break often folds into another.

Hensley won the title role in "Phantom of the Opera" in Hamburg, Germany. "When that contract was up, my wife Paula and I decided to stop in London to visit her family, and I heard about the production of 'Oklahoma!' that was being mounted there and auditioned." Trevor Nunn was directing, with Susan Stroman choreographing the production.

But an American in a London-originating production? The various actors guilds have constraints.

"My way around the whole thing is that my wife is British," he says, "and I have a working visa there, and I can work there whenever, even though Paula and I met and married here."

At 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds, which he calls "a good linebacker size," Hensley could have gone out for the lead role of Curly, but he gambled on the part of Jud Fry instead.

"I had done Curly when I was younger in Milwaukee, and I did Jud in Boston, and I really was drawn so much more to Jud. I found him more interesting because less is known about him."

A peculiarity of the role is that his two songs occur consecutively and in the same scene — in the filthy smokehouse Jud inhabits: "Pore Jud Is Daid," in which Curly tries to coax him into suicide, and "Lonely Room."

"Jud is more of an acting role. I think it's perfectly constructed for me as an actor. I make two appearances before the smokehouse scene — once just long enough to say 'Hello, yourself' and then to establish that I'm taking Laurey to the box social. It's a nice build into the songs. "A lot of people aren't familiar with 'Lonely Room' because it was left out of the movie. In this version, you get that human side when Jud is alone. He yearns to be loved and held and all that. I think from then on, people are more conflicted in how they feel about Jud."

Two years later, with an almost altogether different cast (except for Josefina Gabrielle as Laurey), Hensley is doing the Nunn-Stroman production on Broadway.

He doesn't know whether Rod Steiger, the movie's Jud, has seen either production, but Howard Keel, who was the original London Curly in the mid-1940s, has.

"Howard has come twice. He came to London and to the New York one. Such a lovely man, and he couldn't have been more complimentary. We sang 'Pore Jud Is Daid' at the dinner table."

Among the things Hensley did between the two "Oklahomas" were to play Javert in Broadway's "Les Misérables," plus some TV and film work including "The Bread, My Sweet," all of which was done in Pittsburgh.

The cast and crew shot it in just 23 working days, Mondays through Saturdays from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., Martin says. "We hit the ground running," Hensley recalls. "I was cast late. Once I auditioned, I got Pino quickly after that. I was known as a theater actor. I was wanting to get more into TV and film. They told me about this, and I was instantly drawn to the character and to Melissa's writing. Pino was a kind of character I hadn't even thought about."

Although the picture wasn't shot in sequence — movies rarely are — Pino's moving breakdown scene did get done near the end. 

"The main issue was how someone would handle that moment when he realizes that (someone) is dying and he hasn't been told."

Did Hensley know he'd nailed it, that it would play for audiences the way he hoped?

"You know what? Instantly. For me as an actor, it's working when what we're doing is real. Is it truthful? I always feel the most rewarding moments are when you discover the truth in what you're doing.

"It was low-budget, and we were all thrown together, and the only thing we had in common was the script, and everyone was drawn to it for their own reasons. But it certainly wasn't the money."

But what if "The Bread, My Sweet" never finds the theatrical exposure it has enjoyed in Pittsburgh?

"Obviously, anything you do, you want it to be appreciated in some form. I had no preconceived notions about it doing even as well as it's done. Obviously, it speaks to so many people. It's really a story of the average person's life. Everyone knows some (character) in that movie.

"It's so incredibly important to everyone else. I would love for it to come to New York. It is that kind of movie that needs to be seen. It just might take time."

Hensley, his wife and their daughter, Skyler Elizabeth, who will turn 2 on July 17, will be in New York at least through late February, when his one-year contract with "Oklahoma!" expires. The fact that the show is playing to 97 percent to 100 percent of weekly capacity increases his exposure.

His distinctive name doesn't hurt, either, but it can cause confusion.

"Shuler was my grandfather's first name and his mother's maiden name — it means 'student' or 'scholar' in German. "Someone on a press junket before the Tony Awards said they saw that 'Oklahoma!' would be here, and the only reason they came was because someone told them Sherman Helmsley (from 'The Jeffersons') was going to be in it. They wanted to know who he was playing."

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