One of three big reasons to take in John Cullum: An Accidental Star—the actor’s stroll down Memory Lane, staged and recorded with pianist Julie McBride but sans audience—is to marvel at the remarkable range of this singular performer over a 60+ year career. He won Tonys for playing the rock-ribbed farmer saying ”No” to war in Shenandoah, and with equal conviction, the flamboyant narcissistic impresario (is that redundant, I wonder?) of On the Twentieth Century. He pulled off studly (Laertes in the Burton Hamlet) and fey (Sidney Bruhl in Deathtrap); he was as lovable in 110 in the Shade and the Hal Prince Show Boat as he was loathsome as the villains of Urinetown and The Scottsboro Boys. An actor who can sell a showstopping song, a singer who can galvanize a dramatic scene, the Knoxville native has been, and remains, protean in the best sense of the word.
And look at all those legendary titles, let alone On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and 1776 and August: Osage County and Casa Valentina and Waitress….You think, my God, what a career this man has had, and what stories he must have to tell. What dish!
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Whelllllpppp, as he might say in his native-born folksy twang, if you’re looking for dish, you won’t reap much from John Cullum: An Accidental Star; if directors Lonny Price and Matt Cowart, and librettist David Thompson, agitated for more candor, they lost. As solo reminiscence goes, Elaine Stritch, at liberty with her hair down, Cullum ain’t. Nor even Bea Arthur, sharing her roast lamb recipe and a mean apocryphal story about Pia Zadora.
Some self-deprecation aside, he’s pretty much sunny about life in and out of the theater: quick with kind memories of his co-stars and directors, and above all clearly delighted with the great good fortune of being offered all those wonderful parts. He’s not even bitter about his biggest flops, such as the out-of-town casualty We Take the Town, about which he insists that Robert Preston was perfect casting as Pancho Villa, and it failed simply because the rave road reviews cooled the authors on doing necessary rewrites. That’s why director Alex Segal walked out? Come now, Mr. Cullum, there must have been more flak than that.
No, he merely wants to share career highlights, which as it happens is the second big plus of the evening. One rarely gets the opportunity to check in on a slew of musical memories with the person who originally delivered them. And yet here is the original Charlie Anderson in a medley of his powerful numbers from Shenandoah, along with Oscar Jaffe’s triumphant “I Rise Again” out of Twentieth Century, and even a couple of songs from On a Clear Day, in which he replaced star Louis Jourdan on excruciatingly short notice out of town. (No, he doesn’t tell, or know, the truth about that either.) John Cullum is one of the last remaining veterans of Broadway’s Golden Age, so-called, and he both brings that era back and prompts a longing to relive it.
Are the pipes what they used to be? ‘Course not, he’s 91. But that fact alone is the third, and for me most compelling selling point for this 80-minute streaming event. Reaching back through the years, Cullum performs the tongue-twisting lyrics of “Come Back to Me” with all the urgency with which he summoned back Barbara Harris in ’65. There’s no diminution of tenderness when Anderson sings to his late wife Martha, no dimming of the gleam of defiance in Oscar Jaffe’s eye as he swears vengeance on his enemies. Kudos to the co-producers—Vineyard Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals, Irish Repertory Theatre, and co-conceiver Jeff Berger—for this vivid reminder that a nonagenarian can still have it, and still bring it, and still triumph.
John Cullum: An Accidental Star was streamed beginning April 8, 2021 and will remain online through May 6. Information and tickets: vineyardtheatre.org
