EVEN by Broadway standards, Michael Cerveris has had it sweet – a Tony, a tour with Pete Townshend, a backstage visit from Johnny Depp.
But when all’s said and sung, he’s just as happy to stop singing now and then.
“I have to say, I don’t miss the monklike, monastic existence you end up having when you’re doing musicals, because of the vocal demands,” he said the other day, between performances of “Cymbeline.”
He unwrapped a lozenge. “Though this is pretty demanding, too!”
Well, maybe not as demanding as last spring, when the 47-year-old did “Lear” at night and rehearsed “LoveMusik” by day.
For a shortish, bullet-headed bald guy who lives with his dog, his dance card’s pretty full.
“He’s the best leading man a girl could ask for,” sighs Martha Plimpton, who plays his beloved in “Cymbeline.”
“I knew he was smart, but I had no idea how funny he was!”
The man who told Playbill – with a straight face – that his parents named him Moon Unit was steeped in the classics. His parents (pianist dad, modern-dancer mom) met at Juilliard, and thought nothing of hauling their three kids six hours each way to hear pianist Vladimir Horowitz in concert.
He even studied violin, but “it wasn’t cool in fourth grade,” so he switched to guitar – something that came in handy for “Tommy.” But even that took a while in coming.
Straight from college (Yale, but he’s too polite to say so), he came to New York to act. Instead, he waited tables and underwent “endless auditions” for Marius in “Les Miz.”
“Every time they were doing another touring company or the 120th replacement, I’d get called in,” Cerveris says. “I’d get kind of close, and then they’d choose a real singer.”
At last, he left for the West Coast – where he landed the lead in Broadway-bound “The Who’s Tommy” with the band’s blessing.
Townshend personally took him under his wing.
“He said, ‘I can’t teach you how to act, but I can show you what it feels to be a rock star,’ ” Cerveris says.
That was nearly 15 years ago. Playing the Pinball Wizard demanded a wig, and Cerveris, who was weathering his own personal recession, started shaving his head. He’s been shaving it ever since. (“I used to think I was the biggest hair actor in the world,” jokes the pixie-cut Plimpton, “but he might be my rival!”)
“I figured I’d grow it back when ‘Tommy’ was done, but who knows what would grow back at this point?” Cerveris says, shrugging. “Now it’s my signature look, I suppose.”
He was playing a shaven, very scary Sweeney Todd on Broadway when Depp – then rumored to be making the film version – knocked on the stage door and asked to say hello.
“That caused a mini-riot,” Cerveris says, “especially as the women in the company dolled up suddenly . . .
“It happened to be the night Adam Duritz, a friend of mine from Counting Crows, and Laurence Fishburne were there. So I had, like, the flashiest dressing room on Broadway. For an evening, anyway.”