Taking his bows

When Forrest McClendon was interviewed backstage after winning the 2009 Barrymore Award for best supporting actor in a musical (it was 11th Hour Theatre Company's production of Avenue X), he was asked what he currently was working on. His reply: "I need a gig."

And what a gig he got. Now a nominee for a Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway musical The Scottsboro Boys - Sunday he'll find out how he fared - he hopes to reprise his role in the Philadelphia Theatre Company's production, scheduled for early 2012, so local audiences have a chance to see this knockout performance in a knockout show.

When I reminded him recently of his post-Barrymore reply, he said with delight, "Yes! A Broadway show and a Tony nomination - you don't get gigger than that!"

The Scottsboro Boys was written by the legendary team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret) and directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, winner of five Tony Awards.

It's about a true and terrible historical moment: The real Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers falsely accused and convicted in 1931 of raping two white women (and retried and convicted again and again). They became a cause for Northern liberals.

The Scottsboro Boys is also about the true and terrible racist history of minstrel shows, which traditionally featured white men in blackface. The musical, with breathtaking daring, gives us black actors playing black men who put on blackface to go with their white gloves and spats. The show's satire is as profound as its heartbreak.

The Scottsboro Boys has had a dramatic history of its own, a combination of heartbreak and irony. Developed at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, it moved to the Vineyard Theatre Off-Broadway in New York, then made the big transfer to the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, where it closed 49 performances after it opened.

And then the show received 12 Tony nominations, topped only by The Book of Mormon's 14.

The brevity of the run, despite critical acclaim, indicates that some of the theatergoing public just didn't get it. Or they got it wrong, missing the show's satire. There was even a protest at the Lyceum Theatre organized by the Freedom Party, a black and Latino political group concerned about historical marginalization and racism.

Stroman told Playbill.com that the show's goal was "taking something that was an art form a long time ago and spinning it on its head" to make political and social points. Whether a dozen Tony nominations will change the public mind as the show returns to the Guthrie, then is staged at San Diego's Old Globe and here in Philadelphia, remains to be seen.

West Philly native Colman Domingo is one of four Philadelphians in the cast - and is going head-to-head with McClendon Sunday night for the Tony for best featured actor in a musical. He echoed Stroman's thoughts.

"The fact that it did not gain the audience in a commercial Broadway setting was disappointing," he said, "but hopefully the seal of approval that commercial audiences need for a show with no movie stars will bring the show to other cities."

Domingo added, "I am proud that the Tony nominating committee saw our work as daring, bold, brash, comedic, dark . . . [and] I am so thrilled that Forrest [McClendon] and I are nominated in the same category."

Rodney Hicks, a graduate of Roxborough High School with many stage roles behind him, and Cody Ryan Wise, 14 and an eighth-grade graduate of the Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School, play two of the Scottsboro Boys, but the actor Philadelphia audiences have seen most often is McClendon.

Actor, singer, dancer, McClendon is a lithe and youthful 45, with a wide smile and a voice that moves from confidential purr to raucous laughter. He was a sleek, slightly sinister El Gallo in People's Light & Theatre Company's Fantasticks, an old, streetwise drunk in 11th Hour's Avenue X, and any number of characters in Lantern Theatre's Sizwe Bansi Is Dead. He's done plays by Brecht and Shakespeare, by Suzan-Lori Parks and Wole Soyinka. Whatever he's in, he's one of those actors who rivet the audience's attention.

For evil and viciousness incarnate, The Scottsboro Boys relies on the classic minstrel-show "endmen," Domingo's Mr. Bones and McClendon's Mr. Tambo. McClendon plays a variety of power abusers - black and white - and in a bold stroke (and a delectably dangerous caricature) he also plays the Jewish New York lawyer who comes down South to defend the Scottsboro Boys. Every character gets a different voice, a different accent, a different walk.

McClendon is a master of accents. When he recounts Blanka Zizka's inviting him to perform at the Wilma Theater, he seamlessly adopts her Czech accent. Having played various Africans in various plays, he can replicate the subtle distinctions between the Rwandan, Kenyan, and Nigerian accents that are, he says, for most actors just one generic African accent. As he tells a story, his voice roams startlingly through different ones, depending on who's talking in his narrative.

"I love accents because in order to do them properly - how thick or how thin they are - you have to understand the history. We're not just entertaining people, we're educating them. The only choice is to stand firmly on scholarship. I have to begin in the most authentic place possible."

His ideas about Scottsboro's complex reception reflect a similar approach:

"Black actors in blackface is confusing," he says. "The issue came up when I did the M.C./Street Singer in The Threepenny Opera in blackface at the Wilma. Because blackface is generally associated with Al Jolson, many people don't know its origins, which can be traced not only to slave quarters but African villages.

"In this show," he says, "I actually deconstruct that history with a parody of Jolson doing a parody of someone like Lincoln Perry who is doing a parody of Jolson. But that isn't going to work for some people and I respect that."

As McClendon notes, part of the thrill for him was in knowing "how many performers had paved the way for us to be standing on Broadway. We're empowered black men, in 2010, taking control of something, resurrecting something, and using it to inspire and inform. We all felt very strongly that we were surrounded by those ancestral voices."

McClendon now lives in Lancaster and commutes to both Philadelphia and New York. He's earnest about making a "good life, a home" for himself, which means, among other things, doing uncompromised work - the direct result of no longer feeling the rush and stress of living in New York.

A native of Norwalk, Conn., he has a brother and sister and 18 half-siblings, and all were front and center for Scottsboro's first New York opening night Off-Broadway.

But Philadelphia for him is the ideal spot, and he repeatedly declared his "pledge of allegiance" to the city. Besides his theater work, he teaches at the University of the Arts and Temple University. It was Charlie Gilbert, director of UArts' Ira Brind School of Theatre, who brought him to Philadelphia in the first place, when McClendon answered an ad for a voice teacher in Backstage magazine. "It totally changed my life."

Asked who his date is for the Tony Awards, the "totally and happily single" actor said he hadn't yet decided. And when I suggest that he's bound to get plenty of calls now, he laughed long and loud.