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| Jim Norton as Finian McLonergan. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Being led backstage to the nether recesses of the St. James Theater is akin to surveying the closest thing to a cathedral on Broadway. For it was there in 1944 that my parents, sister and I sat in the last row balcony of this fabled theater to see the original Oklahoma!
So here I am 65 years later, about to interview a man who was six when R & H’s masterpiece opened, but is now a master of stagecraft at age 71. Jim Norton, perhaps the greatest of living Irish actors, was two nights away from opening night of a revival of Finian’s Rainbow in which he plays the title role.
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| Jim Norton rests easy in his dressing room easy chair, 20 minutes before curtain.
Photo: Hal Drucker |
Unfailingly warm and outgoing, he was gracious enough to have scheduled our meeting despite a “hard week” with a voice problem. He apologizes for having to go through a last minute run-through of a sequence of the play which he promised would take only five minutes and it did. While waiting for him in a typically cramped dressing room that had the virtue of being strategically situated on the ground floor (a relief to me who eschews climbing stairs), I notice a book on his dressing table about Judy Garland and producer Mervyn LeRoy of The Wizard of Oz, whose principal writer and lyricist was E. Y. Yip Harburg. This is the very man who did Finian’sRainbow in tandem with composer Burton Lane. Jews both, they penned a script about Irish mythology, blended in with a liberal dosage of satire, and ebullient song and dance, in what perhaps was the first time in Broadway history that African-Americans and whites shared the stage as equal participants.
The original Broadway production opened on January 10, 1947 at the 46th Street Theater, where it ran for 725 performances, one of which, at age 16, I had the joy of seeing. The libretto was clearly ahead of its time in challenging the deeply-held racial prejudices, not only of the Deep South, but throughout American society. Coincidentally it was the same year Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in a game I was privileged to witness at Ebbets Field. It was just a year before Senator Strom Thurmond waged a racially-fueled, independent run for the White House as part of the States-Rights Democratic Party. It was seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against segregation in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education. And it was the final year in which Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi spread his invective in the senate. Bilboism became the pejorative for white supremacy and was lampooned in Finian’s Rainbow by the character of julep-sipping Senator Rawkins.
That original Finian’s was choreographed by Michael Kidd who created and acted in one of my favorite movie musicals, Always Fair Weather. Finian’s had a cast that showcased as love interests: Ella Logan as Sharon McLonergan and Donald Richards as Woody Mahoney, and the then unknown David Wayne as Og the Leprechaun. Wayne won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. The famed dancer Anita Alvarez played Woody’s sister, Susan the Silent. Albert Sharpe portrayed Sharon’s father Finian.
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| Norton and Cheyenne Jackson as Wood Mahoney. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Until this present revival I had seen Finian's Rainbow re-surface two previous times. In 1955 I saw a mounting at City Center, a production, that had Merv Griffen in his pre-billionaire days, as Woody and one of the most talented musical comedy stars of any era, Helen Gallagher as Sharon. In 2004 the Irish Repertory Theatre staged a charming minimalist production. The unremarkable 1968 film version had Tommy Steele as Og, Petula Clark as Susan and a well-past-his-prime Fred Astaire as Finian. Having Francis Ford Coppola as a director of a musical was akin to having Woody Allen direct War and Peace. [Full Disclosure] My daughter Maggie at age 12 played Sharon in a memorable (for my wife and me) production at Camp Roosevelt.
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| Norton as Jack with Brendan Coyle as Brendan in Conor McPherson’s The Weir. "Jack's all things to all men. He's strange because he's so self-guarded - like an emotional onion who, in the course of the play, gets unpeeled.” |
I first noticed Jim Norton on stage in 1999 in a production of The Weir by the young playwright Conor McPherson, about which Norton was quoted as saying in Broadway Buzz: “When I received the script of The Weir, I thought I would die if I didn't play the part of Jack, the oldest of four drinking buddies who take turns telling stories at their favorite bar. Everything I knew about acting, and the little I knew about life, was encapsulated in this part. Even though the play is set in a small Irish village, it has a universality that reaches out to everybody. I played Jack for nearly two years, in London, Dublin, Toronto and Brussels, and then the dream came through for me, which was to play it on Broadway.”
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| Norton as Joe (right) with Brian D’Arcy James as Dermot (left) and John Gallagher, Jr. as Kevin; three Dubliners in Conor McPherson’s Port Authority. Photo: Doug Hamilton. |
During this time, McPherson sent him the script of Port Authority in which three characters are summoned to the stage by God to give an account of their emotional lives. Norton played alongside Brian d'Arcy James and John Gallagher Jr. which was directed by McPherson himself in a superb Atlantic Theater production.
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Norton as Richard with Conleth Hill as Ivan in Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer.”
Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Norton won a Tony last year in McPherson’s The Seafarer, in which he created the demanding central role of Richard Harkin, a blind (literally) drunk who entertains an unusual group of poker players, including the Devil himself, on the night before Christmas. “Coincidentally Conor and I are both Dubliners, from working class backgrounds.”
I told Norton my wife and I just returned from our first trip to Ireland, where I was enchanted with Dublin, especially the National Gallery and the Writers’ Museum with original writings from Sean O’Casey, J. M. Synge, Shaw, Yeats, Behan and others.
The other place that attracted us was the Isle of Aran, the most westerly location of the country, a ferry ride from the mainland.
“Next stop, Boston. Directly across the ‘pond,’” Norton said cheerfully.
“Extraordinary place. Glorified by William Butler Yeats and in Robert Flaherty’s movie, Man of Aran.”
I was struck with the fact that all the signs and speech on Aran were in gaelic, or as the Irish prefer to say, “in Irish.”
Can you speak gaelic?
“Oh sure, when I was a kid it was compulsory to learn Irish. It’s good to have that language when you have a situation to speak a language nobody else knows. Irish accents in the west are a truly lovely sound, elegaic.
“My father was a manager of a grocery store in Dublin. He opened one of the first delicatessens there. Not at all theatrical, he nonetheless had a basso profundo voice. He was a big man. Not like me and he was a racing cyclist. My mother was very artistic, played the violin. My sister and I got into theater at a very early age. She runs a successful theater school in Dublin. Betty Ann Norton Theater School. There’s 48 years experience there in teaching voice, speech, mime, communications and acting in a wide range of courses for children, teens and adults. Patrons for the school are Michael Gambon, David Kelly and me.
“When I was a kid my mother took me to the Abbey Theater and I saw all of the O’Casey plays. I liked Yeats, Synge. Nowadays, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I think there’s no one to touch Conor McPherson. He’s younger than my children. I cannot believe that a man as young can know so much about the human condition .”
Do you recall your first live appearance on a stage?
“I started very young. I had a pretty good singing voice, I was a boy soprano. They used to have concerts on Sunday nights at a Catholic school at a place called Harold’s Cross in Dublin. For some reason I was asked when I was 8 or 9 to perform 10 Green Bottles hanging on a wall; if one of the bottles should accidentally fall, 9 green bottles hanging on a wall.”
That sounds like our 99 bottles of beer on a wall, I suggested.
“Exactly. Well, I couldn’t count, so the song went on for about a half an hour. I didn’t know why the audience found it so amusing to see this kid standing on a chair with a microphone, blowing every line. But in doing so, I kind of inadvertently discovered some ability for comedy.
“That was the beginning. Because of my singing, I worked on Irish radio when I was about 10. Then they did a radio series and they needed a young kid to play the boy. It ran a half hour and I did that for five or six years. Radio drama was huge in Ireland then just as it was in America, of course. And then one day I woke up sounding like Paul Robeson and that was the end of that.
“Radio being so big, they had a permanent repertory company that I joined when I was 19. I stayed there five years doing everything: reading the symphony concerts, reading the sports reports, plays, documentaries. It was a wonderful training ground. Television started in earnest in ’62 or so. I still love radio. And I love doing the James Joyce audio books.”
I noticed in your bio, that in 1971 you appeared in Sam Peckinpah’s movie “Straw Dogs” with Dustin Hoffman. What about movies you saw when you were a kid?
“I was a big fan of Alec Guinness. He was my kind of actor. He approached the parts from inside, while Olivier always approached it on the outside. Kind Hearts and Coronets? Oh, yeah. I’ve seen that so many times.
“I went to the movies a lot and was also a big fan of Donald O’Connor.” At this point, Norton, in a nasal twang, sang Make ‘em Laugh the big O’Connor number from Singin’ in the Rain.”
I suggested that Make ‘em Laugh and Be a Clown were note to note, almost identical.
“I seem to recall having seen a freckle-faced kid whose name began with Butch. I said to myself Oh! Kids can be in movies.”
I think you mean Jackie Butch Jenkins who appeared with Mickey Rooney in Saroyan’s The Human Comedy for MGM in 1943.
“Yes, the very same! Every Saturday we went to the awfully smelly cinemas. Like you, we had double features, serials and cartoons. I used to go to the Queen’s Theater for live, variety acts. And then there would be a movie. And of course all the Disney films that I remember so well. The first movie I ever saw was Pinocchio. I remember going with my friend Maurice Troy. We had the money. It was a rainy day. We queued for about 45 minutes and when we arrived, it was too late for kids without an accompanying parent. We went home in tears. My mother was busy baking. I remember so well her slapping the flour off her hands and without a word, putting her coat on. She walked us back to the cinema and took us upstairs. It was the first time I remember being upstairs in a cinema. It was magical, magical. And I never looked back, that’s all I’ve ever done, being in this business.”
All? What do you do in your spare time. Do you follow hurling? ( I told him that every TV in Dublin was tuned into the hurling championship when we were there).
“Terrifying game isn’t it. Yes, I’ve played it. You see I’m a runner. I took up athletics when I went to Christian Brothers in Dublin. I was very fast, but I was quite small and got kicked around quite a bit. I had so many injuries in those tackles. So I decided , what else can I do? If I was running, would they allow me not to play hurling or gaelic football? So I took up running, and to my amazement I became very good at it and was kind of the school’s champion and all that. Middle distance, 400 meters. No I never ran a marathon, too long, too far. But I’m still essentially a 71-year-old track athlete. We lease an apartment on West 64th right beside the Park (near Lincoln Center), so that’s perfect. It has a pool and gym. In London we live near Battersea Park.”
After all these years of straight drama, how did you finally get to do your first musical?
“What happened is we were doing Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer. It was a great thrill and greater surprise to hear from Jack Viertel whom I knew from way back when he co-produced The Weir. Jack, as you know, is the brains behind Encores. [editor’s note. Encores revives classic musicals and does them economically with spare settings and actors with scripts in hand. On rare occasions, such as with Chicago, a critically acclaimed show later surfaces on Broadway with bountiful sets, costumes and a full complement of musicians.] So Jack came to me one evening after Seafarer and said, ‘Jim, what would you think about playing in Finian’s Rainbow?’ ‘Playing what?’ ‘Well, Finian.’ ‘Are you sure? I’m not a musical performer.’ ‘Yes you are. I’ve seen you move, I’ve heard you sing.’ ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ We had some big rehearsals and five performances. We did it and it was nice. It was well-received by the critics and the next thing I know I’m working in London and I get a call from Jack, now billed as the show’s creative director and co-producer David Richenthal, what do you say about doing this on Broadway? I was actually working in London and I flew here to do it – for the sheer joy, and the terror. So that’s how it happened.”
Did they add to the script your singing and step dancing, both of which were tremendously well accomplished?
“It wasn’t something I planned. I think originally that Finian didn’t sing at all.” I concurred that Albert Sharpe the original, did not do so, according to my recollection. “At the first rehearsal, director and choreographer Warren Carlyle said to me, ‘the first thing I want you to do is a little dance.’ I didn’t know about this. What do I do? So he showed me. And I did it.”
You’re going to do marvelously well, I predicted. (The New York critics bore me out two days later.)
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| Norton and Kate Baldwin as Sharon McLonergan. Photo: Joan Marcus |
“I hope so. I love the show. I first saw it in 1964 at the Gaiety in Dublin. Finian was done by a well known Irish actor Jimmy O’Dea. Milo O’Shea was in the show later. When I heard the score in preparation for Encores, I realized I knew all of the music, having heard it countless times on the radio. All beautiful tunes. Great harmonies and in this show we have such fabulous dancers.”
For his portrayal of Finian, whom he describes as "philosophical, a dreamer, who doesn't understand the principle of investment" - he drew on the character of one of his Uncles. He strived to avoid a stereotypical "stage Irishman." I play Finian, but not as a cardboard cartoon.”
You mean not like Barry Fitzgerald as Father Fitzgibbon in Going My Way?
At which point Norton put on his thickest Fitzgerald-like brogue and said, “Ah Fatha O’Malley, would you sing for me that song me Mitha taught to me? And as I figuratively tucked Fitzgibbon into bed, I crooned Bing Crosby-style, Too Ra Loo Ra Loora.
I told him that three of my grandchildren loved the show.
“That’s good. My grandchildren - Joshua 11, Samantha 6 - arrived today from London. They’re going to see it opening night, which I’m thrilled about They’ve never seen me act. Joshua keeps complaining – I’m always in plays not suitable for kids, which is true. Conor McPherson’s plays are not exactly right for the younger generation. But they are excited. Sammy plays piano. She asked me if they had a grand piano in the orchestra. I asked why and she said I would like to play. She plays piano and guitar. And Joshua goes to his drama classes. But he’s mainly into sports, especially soccer.
“What am I proudest of? Well in addition to my wife Mary, my children and grandchildren, I’m proudest of having had the privilege of playing with so many towering actors, such as the great Albert Finney’s Hamlet in a National Theater production directed by Sir Peter Hall, in which I played Laertes. And I’m certainly proud of being able to spend my life in theater and acting right through age 71.
As he exited the dressing room door with me, Norton recalled, “You know, when I was very young I worked with Peter O’Toole in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, which had a great Irish character actor Jack McGowran and the equally great Siobhán McKenna in the cast. To me that was a huge break-through … to be on the stage.”
How would I sum up Jim Norton based on the 45 minutes I spent with him?
To quote O’Casey’s character Joxer Daly about his best friend Capt. Jack Boyle, once played by Jim Norton, “he’s a darlin’ man, a darlin’ man.”
Click for James Feinberg’s review of Finian’s Rainbow in Grandkid’s Eye View.
For Abby Drucker’s and Lily Feinberg’s Reviews, Click for Grand Times with Your Grandkids, November.
Click for Hal Drucker’s review in Slice of New York.
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