Cary Grant and Gene Kelly have been there. So have Carol Burnett, Angela Lansbury, Ethel Merman and Debbie Reynolds. Not to mention Jennifer Holliday, and Ben Vereen, and Joel Grey, and Bernadette Peters.
The Muny has lured plenty of stars to St. Louis, some who grace the theater’s massive stage in Forest Park as established talents, others who begin long careers there. But perhaps more notably, after spending the summer sweating through breakneck rehearsals, those stars decide to come back.
As the Muny accepts its regional theater Tony Award on Sunday, I asked several Broadway actors, including some of this year’s Tony nominees, about what drew them, often more than once, to St. Louis. Their interviews have been edited and condensed.
Danny Burstein
Burstein, a Tony nominee this year for his role in “Gypsy,” has been in 11 shows at the Muny, starting the summer he was 19.
The Muny’s executive producer Ed Greenberg was actually my teacher at Queens College. Ed took me under his wing and became a great mentor and a dear, dear friend. And when I was 19 he said, “Why don’t you come out for the summer?” It was my first Equity contract.
It was unlike any place I’d ever been on earth. I’ll never forget the first time we walked out for our first show. The booms opened up and it looked like we were in a sports arena. It wasn’t dark yet, so we could see the audience staring right back at us, thousands and thousands of people. It was quite spectacular.
I remember doing “Peter Pan” with Cathy Rigby, and one of the roles I played was Nana, the dog. I had this huge dog outfit on, and at one point, when it was 103 degrees at night, I had to get offstage and take off the head. I just sat there, when I should’ve been onstage, trying to cool off. And then I put my head back on and went back out.
One of the other shows was “Shenandoah” with John Cullum. I would sit in the wings and watch him do his soliloquies every night, learn as much as I could from him: his honesty, the way he dug his feet into the ground like tree trunks. It taught me so much about professionalism and real acting, and the responsibility that it took to lead a show.
Heather Headley
Headley, who had stepped away from U.S. stages for more than a decade, returned in 2015 as the Witch in “Into the Woods” at the Muny.
There are some things that they call you for in our careers and no matter what it is, you say yes. You want to hit Carnegie, you want to hit Royal Albert Hall, Broadway, the West End, the Muny. It’s one of those things. The first time I stood on the stage and looked out, I remember thinking, “There’s no way they’re going to fill it up.” And every night, 11,000 people showed up.
The crew members at the Muny are of a caliber that’s different from anything. One show is onstage, and those guys are in the back building the next set — a huge set, because that stage is a monster of a stage.
The audience expects a Broadway-caliber show. They don’t know that it’s been two weeks in a rehearsal room. I think many of them think we were rehearsing for months, because that’s the kind of show that the Muny puts up.
Jeb Brown
Brown, a Tony nominee this year for his role in “Dead Outlaw,” performed in roughly a dozen shows at the Muny over nearly 20 years.
There are certain Muny rules. You have to move when you talk; otherwise people 10,000 seats back don’t know who’s talking. There’s a lot of gesticulating, no such thing as the park-and-bark. Not a lot of subtlety, but there’s something sort of beautiful about that, something ancient.
One of my favorites was “Aida,” which we had done on Broadway, and then a bunch of us from Broadway came to do it there. This is the Elton John one, of course, but it happens that “Aida,” the opera, had been the thing that opened the Muny [in 1917]. It played so beautifully outside, because the whole thing takes place in a world where you’re singing to the heavens. It was transporting.
If it rained, they’d hold you for a while to try to get something going. But when it’d start to rain, all the string players would pack up their instruments, because those were easily damaged. So suddenly you’d have half an orchestra for a little while, and finally when it rained hard enough, they’d put a halt to it. But there was a point at which you lost all your strings.
Jessica Vosk
Vosk has starred in Muny productions for the past three summers, including “Chess” and “Waitress.”
It’s the fastest and most furious process you can possibly have. And because rehearsal is outdoors, you kind of acclimate yourself. Once you’re in the show proper and it’s nighttime, even if it’s 80-something degrees, it feels like a vacation. There’s a reason there are no matinees.
There is a bond with the cast you’re in, but also the other casts who are there to cheer you on — you all overlap. You don’t necessarily get that on Broadway because we’re all working at the same time on the same days.
The Muny has an education platform as well; you have kids in the show with you. To know you’re inspiring kids who want to do this thing makes you want to pull up as a performer and say, “What can I learn from these kids?”
Doing “Waitress” last year, I was singing “She Used to Be Mine,” and I remember stepping out onstage the first night — it was a full moon, and there was a shooting star. All of these things align to make you feel like you’re in the right place at the right time. I had just lost my dad, and I remember thinking, “That’s a sign from my dad.”
And during “Chess,” I wound up meeting a St. Louis native who I’m about to become engaged to. So now I’m sort of a St. Louis gal.
Patti Murin
This summer, in her sixth show at the Muny, Murin will star as Anna in “Frozen,” reprising the role she originated on Broadway.
It’s been five years since I did “Frozen” on Broadway, and since then I’ve had two girls. My husband’s from St. Louis; he got his Equity card at the Muny. This felt like the right thing.
You can’t really beat the epic scope of the place. People go hours before the show starts. They do picnics. So when you come in, you walk past all of these people who are there already. It feels like doing theater at summer camp. It’s just that you’re doing it with actual Broadway legends.
One of the things they’re most proud of is the free seats. That is the first speech that Mike [Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director] makes on the first rehearsal of every single show: We’re doing this for them. We get to be part of this community for a very brief period of time, but what we’re doing is so important because it’s important for them.
When I was there three years ago for “Legally Blonde,” there were such massive storms in St. Louis that the Muny was completely flooded and we had to cancel our second performance. The orchestra pit was in three or four feet of water. They cleaned it all up; we made some adjustments. And then a few days later — sheets of rain again. They pick themselves up and dust themselves off and fix it, and they make it better. Because they know it’s important.
Nancy Coleman is a senior staff editor.
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