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THE LEADING MEN: Burnham, Pierce and Strand
By Tom Nondorf
09 Jan 2008
BOYZ II MAN
Ryan Strand plays in maybe the only boy band still drawing screaming audiences across the country. He played Abe, the lone Jewish member of the Altar Boyz, on the national tour and is now doing the same here in NYC. The lighthearted send-up of boy bands and modern revivalism continues in its soul-saving mission at New World Stages.
Question: I'm curious how it compares doing Altar Boyz here in the city versus out on the national tour. Give us a sense of that.
Ryan Strand: The first major difference is that the houses on tour can be anywhere from 1,500 to 3,300 seats, and then here it's obviously a 350-seat theatre, so it is very different in how you have to perform the show. On tour it's very showy and very big, and here it is much more intimate.
Q: Did you find different attitudes towards the show from audiences as you went around to different parts of the country?
Strand: It was funny because on tour, more so than in New York, we'd have people who actually thought we are a real band, and they'd come up to us and say they thought it was great what we were doing for the church, and we were like, "We're just actors." As far as how people received it, people really loved it just as much as they do here.
Q: What do you feel like you bring to the Abe role.
Strand: At first glance, he's sort of the nice Jewish boy, the one the moms love, and you do have to play that, but I think that I bring sort of an innocence to the role that is needed to get the point across, especially at the end when he has to bring everyone back together. I think it's his innocence that makes the moment more poignant.
Q: Is it difficult that this show has to be played so earnestly, not so much a show where you are winking at the audience?
Strand: Everyone on the creative team calls it the Altar Boyz trap because it is so easy to fall into that wink-wink, nudge-nudge thing instead of playing it completely earnestly, which is what the show has to do. I mean the show is about five guys from the middle of Ohio who are in New York for the first time and just have no clue about so many things about their show…They were raised very sheltered and [have] this very singular purpose, and they really haven't given much outside thought to what their show is about. It's just their show, and they have one purpose, and that's to save souls, and they're going to do it. There's a lot of that childlike quality that they have to bring to it instead of that straight-up comedy aspect.
Q: So you have your own connection to Ohio, is that true?
Strand: I went to college in Ohio at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and surprisingly enough, I miss it a lot. In Cincinnati the joke is that the nickname is "Cinci-nasty," but I miss the city a lot. It's a great place to go to college, and I'm very lucky to have gone to the school that I went to. They call Cincinnati a mini-New York because it has a lot of the good things that New York has and a lot of the bad things that New York has, so it was nice to go there as a second stop on the way to New York from Indiana, where I am originally from.
Q: Your Altar Boy, Abe, is the lyricist for the group. Have you ever tried your hand at songwriting?
Strand: No, actually, I'm the least talented writer you'll ever meet. I was bad in English class, and I have no desire to write or do anything like that. I think I am like Abe in that he tries a little too hard to be cool sometimes and he'll throw stuff in like, "Fo shizzle!" and "Yeah, Dawg!" I do that stuff too, and after I say it, I'm like, "Why did I just say 'Dawg?'" I'm like the whitest Jew-boy you could ever meet.
Q: Were you ever a devotee of boy bands?
Strand: Ohhh yeah. I wanted to be in a boy band. I thought that would be the coolest job ever to be in a boy band. I was actually in a very short-lived boy band that was being put together by a couple of people who had been on the show-choir circuit. I was in show choir when I was in high school, and a bunch of us who had won best soloist awards at different competitions around the Midwest were asked to be in this boy band. [There were] five of us, and we were going to meet at one of the guys' cities because he was in summer stock, and we were going to meet in his city. It all came apart after a couple days because one guy's grandpa died, and he had to leave, and another guy was from that guy's city, so he left too, and then there were only three of us, so it never really worked out, but I was so excited at first. I was like, "I'm going to be huge in a boy band!"
Q: Give me a good wacky backstage story from the road.
Strand: [Laughs.] There's one, but I don't know if you can print it. There's no intermission in this show, so if you have to go to the bathroom, you are out of luck. I had eaten something that wasn't right. It was about three quarters of the way through the show, and I had already been in agony for about 20 minutes at this point. Our swing was on for one of the other characters. We went offstage and I was like, "I can't go back out there. I have to go to the bathroom so bad I'm going to burst." This was at a big theatre in San Francisco, and I had no clue where the bathrooms were, so I'm just running and running, trying to find the bathrooms, all the while hearing the show over the monitors and hearing people picking up my lines. Finally, I came back before my next song, and they had my understudy get dressed, and I came back and he greeted me in my costume and we were like, "Hey!" It was an awkward thing to see. It was a horrible day [laughs].
[Altar Boyz plays New World Stages, 340 W. 50th Street; call (212) 239-6200 for tickets.]
HITHER AND YON
In the mood to travel back in time to some of the borderline psychotic children's programming of your youth? You can troll around on youtube or actually leave your house and check out Cartoon Dump, the live comedy and music show that attempts to capture some of the madness of madcap kiddie shows. Featuring Frank Conniff, who also wrote and produces, and whom you also may remember from TV's "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (MST3K's Joel Hodgson also has been known to appear), the show has had a successful run at the Steve Allen Theatre in L.A., and will be in New York City at Comix (353 W. 14th St.) on Jan. 8, and again on Feb. 19. The L.A. run continues on the fourth Tuesday of every month of 2008. Aside from the live mayhem, the show promises an assemblage of the worst cartoons ever created. "Clutch Cargo" fans look out! Check out www.cartoondump.com for more info…If you do go to youtube, singer-hoofer-actor Jeffry Denman wanted me to let you know he has a follow-up to last year's "Lazy Tuesday" video from the White Christmas tour. Dude's rapping skills have improved. Look it up.
Tom Nondorf can be reached at tnondorf@playbill.com.
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