BWW Interviews: Curt Dale Clark Tackles Triple Roles at MSMT

The dark, handsome man with twinkling blue eyes and classically chiseled features who sits opposite me at the Maine State Music Theatre has the look of a leading man. However, at this moment he is wearing his hat as the company's newly minted Artistic Consultant.

Nonetheless, I am not wrong in my initial impression. Curt Dale Clark is, indeed, a leading man - a prominent actor who has tread the boards in major theatres across the country starring in roles such as Javert (LES MISERABLES), The Phantom (Phantom of the Opera), Don Lockwood (Singing in the Rain), and Joe Gillis (Sunset Boulevard). He is also the playwright and lyricist of a number of musical fairy tales, for which his longtime collaborator, Marc Robin has written the music. But this is the first juncture in a career that has spanned twenty-four years that Clark has had the opportunity to combine his creative and acting talents with his skills as a theatre administrator.

Clark, who grew on in the Midwest and attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne, actually took a degree in sales and marketing there, after beginning as a theatre major. Though he loved musical theatre, his single semester in the college's theatre department did little to capture his interest. "I hated it," he explains, "because it was more of a straight drama program, and as a freshman you were not allowed to act. You were taught stagecraft, costumes." As a farm kid, I already knew what a hammer was," he adds with a smile.

But the stage's siren song continued to call to him. When Clark was graduated, he went directly to Chicago, where he was hired to play Elke Sommer's young lover at The Drury Lane. He tells an amusing story about his introduction to the famous femme fatale. The director, Jack Bunch, gave the somewhat intimidated and nervous young Clark this direction, "When Elke comes in, you grab her by the hips; you pull her in to you, and you give her this big kiss." Clark says he agreed, and then recounts: "She comes in says her line, and I timidly grab her hips and bring her in a little, and give her a little kiss. Jack screams, 'NO NO, not like that!' He grabs my shoulders and shoves me to the side; he grabs her by the hips, pulls her in, and gives her this huge kiss. She backs away and says, 'If you looked like that, but moved like this that would be perfect!'"

Clark says that despite his inexperience, he had no trouble getting cast in numerous shows because "I was a boy who could dance. I had vocal training as well, but I soon realized I was lacking in acting skills." Clark set about to remedy that by "constantly taking classes in acting and musical theatre techniques" in places like Chicago's Old Town School. He remembers one class with a teacher he particularly disliked and who, he felt, returned his disdain. He recalls a session where she yelled at him to sing the song he had prepared as if he were singing it to someone he hated. "I told her, 'Fine, I'll sing it to you then!'" Nonplussed, she agreed, and when he had finished, she praised the result. Laughing, Clark says, I'll probably use her for motivation in Les Misérables."

Clark is alluding to the role of Inspector Javert, which he will reprise with MSMT this summer. Like the Phantom, this is one of his signature characterizations and he is eloquent and enthusiastic in describing the challenges of the role.

"Javert is one of the lucky characters in play because so many people do connect with him because they see him as trying to do the right thing, whether they agree with him or not. Javert is basically a good man trying to uphold what society expects of him, as the representative of the law." He is driven by [his quest for] perfection to the point of madness. When he realizes that his whole life he has hunted a man (Valjean), who is quite possibly a better person than he, this is a bitter pill for Javert to swallow and leads to his suicide."

Asked about the vocal rewards of the part, Clark, who has a lustrously rich baritone, calls the role a "godsend" in musical terms, citing the character's show-stopping moments such as his confrontation with Valjean at Fantine's deathbed, Stars and the inspector's thrilling suicide, which "requires so much pathos and emotion to make the audience believe he is really jumping."

Asked about the influence he thinks the 2012 Tom Hooper film will have on this summer's audiences, he opines that "I think he movie will have a positive effect. People can compare and contrast the two versions." And he feels that movie musicals of recent years such as Chicago and Les Misérables have done a great deal to repopularize the Broadway musical. Like so many stage veterans, however, he notes that while there was so much hype about Hooper's actors singing live, "we [stage actors] do that every night, eight times a week, and if we mess up something, we don't get to go back and do it over."

Maine State Music Theatre's production which opens on June 26 and runs until July 13, 2013, has totally new sets and costumes and new direction by Marc Robin, whose redemptive vision of the play, Clark says, "focuses on the hope and passion of the piece."

Working with Robin is particularly satisfying to Clark because they have a long history of collaboration at theatres like The Drury Lane in Chicago, The Fulton in Lancaster, PA, and the Jupiter Theatre in Florida, as well as at MSMT. He and Robin have now written fourteen musical fairytales, among them Cinderella, (which MSMT will present on August 19), Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Snow White. The idea came to them in Chicago when they realized they were paying huge royalties for "chopped up versions of regular scripts," and Clark and Robin felt sure they could come up with something more compelling. Clark says the secret to their retelling of these well-known tales is that they write scripts that are "closer to source material, and we try to "think like a teacher. For example in our Snow White, all the dwarfs are historical characters like Freud, Caruso, and Martin Luther King," who sings his I have a dream speech. Over the years Clark and Robin have retained the royalty rights to all the shows, though they do not charge not-for-profit companies like MSMT any licensing fees. There have been main stage productions such as their Treasure Island which played to sold-out houses in Chicago.

When the curtain goes up on Dreamgirls, the first main stage production of MSMT's 2013 season, Curt Dale Clark will get to see the fruits of his labors as the company's Artistic Consultant. When longtime Executive Director Steve Peterson departed this past spring, Clark who had spent seven prior seasons with MSMT as an actor, was tapped to handle such vital functions as casting, creative consulting on productions, and working with the rest of the company's staff to coordinate the myriad of tasks that go into producing four main stage shows, two children's theatre events, and two special concerts in just under fourteen weeks. The company, which has less than forty hours to rehearse the next show while the prior one is on the boards, relies on teamwork, precision, and rock solid organization to achieve its consistently high level of production.

Clark jokes that he is not stranger to that kind of organizational regimen. "My initials are CDC, but everyone here is already calling me OCDC. I like things just so," he remarks as he shows me his color-coded date book which helps him juggle his multiple roles. "I've even scheduled some sleep in there," he notes with a wink.

For someone with less energy and experience, this triple casting might seem overwhelming, but Curt Dale Clark appears to be thriving in his new venture. He says he will likely play one role a summer here and "dabble at other theatres, but I won't be doing eight shows a week, fifty-two weeks a year anymore. I guess it's time [to cut back on stage performances". But a little less acting, dancing, and singing will only make time for other kinds of theatrical work. "I am hoping to stay here at MSMT. I love the idea of actually using my administrative skills to help guide this place."

Photos Courtesy of Maine State Music Theatre