© Rebecca Paller Reprinted from Opera News published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild August 2002 Vol. 67 No. 2 Used with permission

Shuler Hensley is "a Jud Fry worth rooting for" - so one critic described Hensley's portrayal of musical theater's most misunderstood guy. The baritone is the standout performer in the hit Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, and his simmering rendition of "Lonely Room" - a near-operatic anthem - is the unexpected focal point of the evening.

The secret of this Jud's success is that Hensley, thirty-five, sees the character not as a psychopathic villain but as "someone from the wrong side of the tracks who wants what we all want ---- to belong, to be loved, to be as good as everyone else."

The Marietta, Georgia, native gets his brawn from his father (an all-American football player) and his grace from his mother (a ballet dancer). He joined the Atlanta Boys Choir as a kid yet also excelled in sports ---- and won a baseball scholarship to the University of Georgia. But after attending a recital by Jessye Norman ("I was transported by her voice," he recalls) and being cast as Judge Turpin in a college production of Sweeney Todd, he changed his game plan, leaving Georgia after his sophomore year to study voice at the Manhattan School of Music with Beverley Peck Johnson.

"I was worried that if I took lessons with a baritone, I was going to try to recreate his sound," he says. Hensley went on to attain a master's degree in performance at the Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Marlena Malas and singing "all the big baritone things" ---- Don Giovanni, Marcello, Escamillo, Onegin.

But he was aching to do musical theater, and in 1996 Hensley took on the title role in The Phantom of the Opera in Hamburg for a year. Afterward he and his wife, Paula DeRosa, en route to the U.S., stopped off to visit her family in England, where he saw an audition notice in a trade paper for a new production of Oklahoma! at the Royal National Theatre. Hensley "clicked with everyone" at his first audition for the show, and now ---- after winning Olivier and Tony Awards for his Jud ---- it would seem that more musicals are in his future.

Yet he continues to take voice lessons, from Bruce Kolb, and three opera roles intrigue him: Iago, Tarquinius (Rape of Lucretia) and Nick Shadow (Rake's Progress). Who knows? One day he may simply slither over the fence that separates the Great White Way from Lincoln Center ---- and show us that these sinister characters are worth rooting for, too.

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