| FROM MARIETTA TO OKLAHOMA! | ||
Shuler Hensley keeps his Olivier Award on the mantel in his apartment on New York's Upper West Side. He's nonchalant about it, as if it's just a little something he brought home from the London run of Oklahoma! in which he played the dejected and misunderstood Jud Fry, the tragic odd-man-out in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Old West love triangle. In fact, Hensley's life has been irrevocably changed by that engagement and the critical accolades showered upon it. Just the other night, for example, he was asked to join Julie Andrews, Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters at a Richard Rodgers centennial gala at the Juilliard School, a glittery affair that was covered a few days later on The New York Times society page, where the 35-year-old Hensley was shown with three-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald. And there's no better indicator that an actor has arrived on the Manhattan theater circuit than a Hirschfeld cartoon. For Hensley, a robust, 6-foot-3 Marietta native and graduate of Atlanta's Westminster Schools, that moment arrived Feb. 24, when a half-page caricature by the legendary Al Hirschfeld ran on the front of the Times' Arts & Leisure section. Looking hefty and hirsute, almost snout-nosed, Hensley's Jud was captured glowering off to one side while Patrick Wilson's Curly flashed an Oklahoma-size grin and Josefina Gabrielle's Laurey rested her head sweetly on her lover Curly's back. As the song goes, "Pore Jud." But for Hensley, life's a picnic. If he is nominated for a Tony, which is a strong possibility, he'll be the second Westminster grad to receive such an honor in as many years (Atlanta native John Ellison Conlee was nominated for the coveted award in 2001 for The Full Monty). Yet Hensley, whose rich, chocolaty baritone and classical training afford him the option of performing in either opera or musical theater, is more inclined to talk about his 19-month-old daughter or play practical jokes than to discuss talent or fame. When a photographer arrives at his parents' Marietta home, Hensley greets him at the door wearing his blacked-out "redneck teeth." "Hi, I'm Shuler's brother, Shyler," he cracks. The son of Sam Hensley, a former Georgia Tech football star and retired civil engineer, and Iris Hensley, artistic director of the Georgia Ballet, the actor has long used his humor to balance his athletic and artistic interests. While his stature and vocal reach are often remarked upon, his dancing skills and comedic instincts have sometimes been overlooked - but not for long. "You haven't lived until you've seen a man that's 6 feet tall do a jete across the floor," says Oklahoma! choreographer Susan Stroman, joking about Hensley's rehearsal shenanigans. Stroman, who directed long-running Broadway hits The Producers and Contact, still remembers the day Hensley auditioned for Oklahoma! in London. "All the sudden this giant American man walked in, and he started to sing, and it just gave me chill bumps. We realized right away that we had the real Jud Fry in front of us." Cameron Mackintosh, the British producer of Oklahoma! has high praise for Hensley, who won the only Olivier Award for acting in a production that garnered a total of four. "I think occasionally in one's life, somebody finds a part that he so totally inhabits that it goes beyond acting. I think all the things that Shuler has in his dramatic and vocal arsenal are so perfect for the role." Playing the fool Frank Boggs, who taught music when Hensley was at Westminster, jokes about the actor's goofy charm. "He can look like an absolute fool, and then he can turn around and play this very convincing leading man. He's a chameleon." With his wavy auburn hair, big dark eyes and dimples, Hensley often looks as if he's trying to hold a deadpan smirk but can't. He may impart his Jud with extraordinary sensitivity and vulnerability, but in real life his grin is of the mule-eating-briers variety. In the vaguest tremble of his nostrils, he can send an onlooker into paroxysms of laughter. In a series of interviews, first at the Blue Ridge Grill in Buckhead over the Christmas holidays and later by telephone from his New York apartment, Hensley is more convincing as a country bumpkin than a city-slicker thespian. At the restaurant, he drinks coffee, orders a cheeseburger and fries and is easily talked into having a glass of port with dessert. "That's very nice Gatorade," he quips. Like Jud, who is put off by his rival Curly's smart-alecky swagger, Hensley is turned off by self-aggrandizement. "I don't find it interesting,'' he says. ''I just find it to be a big waste of time. I could be as big a smart aleck as anyone, but I'd rather make light of things." He credits that trait to his mother. "She was like, 'Don't talk about yourself.' I think that's really impressive, especially coming from someone in the arts. She knew how overbearing that can be." After two years at the University of Georgia, where he studied "international business" (said with sarcasm) on a baseball scholarship, Hensley decided in 1987 that he was more interested in singing. So he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music and eventually got a master's degree at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He met his wife, Paula, a yoga and fitness instructor from England, while she was working as a bartender in New York. They married in 1995, and soon afterward, Hensley landed a gig playing the title character in The Phantom of the Opera in Hamburg, Germany. The language skills from his opera days came in handy: He performed in German. 'Perfect' for role While visiting his wife's family outside London in 1997, he heard that Trevor Nunn, director of the Royal National Theatre, was auditioning for Oklahoma! "I always knew I was perfect for it," Hensley says, "but you never know until the audition. "After the first one, I sort of knew just from working with Trevor that it was a good thing. We were sort of on the same wavelength about what to do. He was just a director that I could really listen to and understand." Nunn's Oklahoma! has been praised for its emphasis on story and character. During the first three weeks of rehearsals, Hensley says, they didn't sing a song. They focused on the original play, Lynn Riggs' Green Grow the Lilacs, and the book. In tossing out the original Agnes de Mille ballets, Stroman decided to let the actors - not professional dancers - appear in Laurey's dream sequence. "I don't think I have ever seen anyone quite as large onstage," choreographer Stroman says of Hensley. "Usually, the bigger the guy, the less dance ability they have. But Shuler is a wonderful dancer. And the thing is, he has great rhythm. It's in his genes, I guess." Says Hensley's mother, Iris: "Back in the Westminster days, before football games, the guys would come over and I would give them a stretch class." She says she loves her son's Jud and his signature song, Lonely Room. "I think he plays it with a certain amount of compassion rather than being so evil. He's really kind of heartbreaking in his feeling that he's so downtrodden." Critics have said the same thing, adding that Hensley's Jud is the most interesting and complicated of the three main characters. "As played by the hulking, Georgia-born Shuler Hensley, 'Pore Jud' is not a stock villain; he's a tortured soul, trapped in ugliness and rage," wrote Chicago Tribune critic Richard Christiansen. Hensley, who has appeared twice in the NBC sitcom Ed and recently starred in Monday Night Mayhem, a TV movie about Howard Cosell and the "Monday Night Football" phenomenon, says he would like to do more TV and film work. As for stage roles, he dreams of playing Iago in Verdi's Otello and the title role in Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. But no matter what Hensley is doing careerwise, he always keeps his eye on his daughter, Skyler. "It's lovely to see him with his little baby girl and see what a sweet daddy he is," Stroman says. Yet being a daddy has its ups and downs. "As an actor or performer, you are always worried about what the next job's going to be,'' Hensley says. ''Yet literally from the day she was born, I have not stopped working. Nor have I really focused on it. But I think because I didn't focus on it, and I'm not concerned with it, things just happen." |
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THE SHULER HENSLEY FILE |
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