John Cullum calls his backward glance over a 60-year career John Cullum: An Accidental Star. Granted, accidents and luck affect anyone’s career, but much more goes into a career as successful as his has been. Determination, grit, and savvy have their vaunted place.
Cullum, now 91 and long removed from his Knoxville, Tennessee birthplace, shows plenty of those traits in the 76-minute retrospective he’s filmed on the Irish Repertory stage before an audience of camera wielders and the like. Now it’s streaming as an Irish Repertory Theatre, Vineyard Theatre, and Goodspeed Musicals production.
Sure, Cullum got lucky on hitting Manhattan in 1956 and meeting a few people with show-biz connections, but it was nerve alone that had him playing roles in Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park a mere six weeks later. This, after never having read a Shakespeare play before preparing for his Henry V (“O, for a muse of fire”) audition.
[Read Bob Verini’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
And so it goes, as the luck-starred, Bard-inured Cullum auditions before Moss Hart, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe for Camelot, and is tapped as a Round Table knight as well as set to make his Broadway musicals bow. He also kicked off a 27-year association with Richard Burton that includes swashbuckling as Laertes in the 1964 modern-dress Hamlet.
Standing by a stool or sitting on it in trousers, an open-necked shirt and vest, Cullum skims through his insistence on landing starring roles in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and Shenandoah while waiting out the initial, eventually unproductive castings of Louis Jordan in the former and Jack Palance and Charles Bronson in the latter.
He recalls the ill-fated We Take the Town, which did not take New York City town despite its boasting Robert Preston as a singing Pancho Villa. Quickly, Cullum gets around to his later assignments in, for instance, The Scottsboro Boys and Urinetown. His wife Emily Frankel had to talk him into doing the latter, the bawdy musical’s lyrics having made little sense to him on a first read.
Energetically chatting about various jobs, Cullum emphasizes for the most part his nailing roles. He does talk generously about working with Burton and Julie Andrews on Camelot and the troubles they all faced getting to the Broadway opening. He recalls the billing squabbles his agents had with Madeline Kahn’s when On the Twentieth Century was gearing up. He mentions how Kahn’s vocal shenanigans alienated her from composer Cy Coleman.
He rarely talks about directors, though it might have been interesting to hear a word, say, on John Gielgud guiding that 1964 Hamlet. Curiously, he never mentions the rumors about the neurotic behavior of Clear Day co-star Barbara Harris. He’s probably being gallant.
Early on, he describes his having to quit the initial Shakespeare in the Park showing on learning of his mother’s death in an automobile accident. His recounting this experience—in a script by David Thompson, as directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart—makes plain that his mother was an especially indelible influence on him. He says it’s important to him that audiences understand as much.
Of course, Cullum sings, with music supervision by Georgia Stitt and music direction by Julie McBride at the piano. It’s probably best to report his voice isn’t what it was. It’s also important to report that his acting is hardly diminished. He opens with the Lerner-Burton Lane “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” and later reprises “Come Back to Me” with gestures he’s earlier said helped him remember the list-song lyric.
He charms his way through a We Take the Town ditty, “I’ve Got a Girl” (Matt Dubey-Harold Karr), that has little impact. On the other hand, his version of “I Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight” from Camelot is top-notch. Calling Charlie Anderson in Shenandoah his favorite role, possibly because it was closest to who he is and was, he sings a medley of the Gary Geld-Peter Udell songs.
It may be then—and with those numbers certainly serviceable in context—it becomes apparent that in the musicals to which Cullum lent his star quality he didn’t often get the opportunity to introduce a song that broke out of the score and into the standards file. His On a Clear Day You Can See Forever solos pretty much stand alone in that category.
About Cullum’s star quality: He always conveyed confidence, strength, authority, forthrightness, decency as well as a hint of playfulness. Those attributes are no accident. He still has them. They’re on happy display here.
John Cullum: An Accidental Star was streamed beginning April 8, 2021 and will remain online through May 6. Information and tickets: vineyardtheatre.org
