Shades of Hugh: Martin Guerre’s Panaro
Reflects on a Spectrum of Roles
In 1560, the court of Toulouse in southern France actually conducted a trial to
determine the identity of the villager known as Martin Guerre. After uncounted
scholarly dissertations, novels, plays, movies, operas, and musicals later, the
latest sleuth trying to fathom “Who is Martin Guerre?” is Hugh Panaro. He has
the title role in the latest wersion of the Schonberg/Boublil musical based on
the French legend.
Schonberg and Boublil took this concept of a musical to Cameron Mackintosh, who
produced their mega-hits, Les Miserables and Miss Saigon. After
nearly a decade, with three different versions in three major productions, they
put the latest version in the hands of Panaro as Guerre, Stephen Buntrock as
Arnaud du Thil (who claims to be Guerre) and Erin Dilly as the woman who marries
one but comes to love the other. But it wasn’t supposed to be that way. When
they first put Panaro and Buntrock together, Buntrock had already been cast as
Martin Guerre and Panaro was auditioning for Arnaud du Thil.
Panaro recalls the audition with a sense of excitement approaching wonder. He
says that as soon as he and Buntrock began to sing together, “the blend was
instantaneous and marvelous.” Sounding for all the world like one who just took
a final exam and knows he “aced it,” Panaro says, “we could feel it the second
we started to sing. Stephen’s voice does something to mine and my voice does
something to his and it is indescribable.” He says he couldn’t believe it when
“they came up to me afterwards and started saying something about no being right
for the part and how they had made a mistake. I couldn’t believe what I was
hearing. Then it penetrated. They weren’t saying ‘no.’ They were saying that
maybe I should be Martin and Stephen should switch over to Arnaud. We came back
the next day and I sang all the Martin parts. Again there was that blend and
they hired me that day!”
And so began a search for the identity of the subject of a musical about
identity. How did Panaro go about finding out who this Martin Guerre was? He
hadn’t seen the movies or read the books. In fact, he says he knew very little
about the project. But he didn’t start any independent research. Instead, he
read the script. “I’ve always believed that we have to look to the text. After
all, we serve the author here. That is our job. So I sat down with
[co-lyricist] Stephen Clark and we discussed any questions I had. Sometimes
he’d tell me what they [Clark, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg] felt
was behind a particular detail, but sometimes he’d simply say, ‘I don’t know –
fill it in with what makes sense to you.’”
As an example, he cites the lyric “Look, I’m Martin Guerre/Father I’m brave/And
from your grave/You’ll keep me strong. Yes I’m Martin Guerre/For they will
learn/When I return/That I belong.” “All the script tells us is that I’m a
14-year-old kid being raised by my uncle. The audience never needs to know what
happened to my folks but I needed to on order to make that lyric work for me.
So, for me, I filled it in with having been loved and secure in the earlier
years. I don’t know how my father died but I am sure I don’t feel abandoned or
rejected. That’s enough.”
All this is for Hugh Panaro to answer the question, “Who is Martin Guerre?” Now
we wanted to ask the corollary question: “Who is Hugh Panaro?”
Philadelphia born and bred, Panaro is a man of many roles who has an infectious
enthusiasm for what he does. On Broadway, Panaro has been Marius in Les
Miserables, Gaylord Ravenal in Show Boat, Julian in Jule Styne’s
ill-fated musical The Red Shoes, both Raoul and the Phantom in The
Phantom of the Opera, and Buddy in Side Show. When he talks
of any of these, it is with an obvious delight over what the process of bringing
a character to life can be. But his recollections are not a sanitized version
of history. He remembers the pain of projects and approaches that didn’t work
out as well as he hoped. It just doesn’t seem to diminish his relish for each
effort.
There is a sense of excitement in his voice when he talks of the process of
making a part his own, even if it is a part originated by another actor. “You
just can’t go out there in front of all those people if you haven’t figured out
how to make it yours,” he says, adding, “it doesn’t have to be in the big stuff
and it doesn’t have to be new blocking. But it has to feel like you – not a
pretend version of whoever name first.”
In the 15 years since his mom and dad helped him pack the trunk of his car the
day after he graduated from Temple University, he has been almost continuously
employed at the task of creating characters on stage.
When Panaro drove into New York, he didn’t know how hard it was supposed to be
to find work in the field he wanted to pursue. After all, he’s been almost
constantly employed since he turned 13 on the dinner theatre circuit. With
plays as well as such stalwarts like The Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie,
and My Fair Lady, he had worked eight shows and four masses a week; he
was the organist at his family church from the fifth grade until he graduated
college with a degree in music. Liturgical music blended with Rodgers, Strouse,
and Loewe, but he found it easy, since from the age of five or six he could sit
down at a piano and play any music he heard. He must have been a very
industrious young man as well – he held down a job walking the neighbor’s dog
“Blackie” all those years.
Maybe his naiveté protected him: on the first business day in New York, Panaro
had a job. It wasn’t exactly Broadway. It wasn’t even Equity. It was a
half-scripted, half-improvisational role in an interactive musical about
immigrants, performed on a boat running back and forth to the Statue of
Liberty. “Half of it was doing the script, but the other half was interacting
with the passengers, in costume, and keeping in character. I became Jacob Elsir
from Germany. The hardest part was dealing with passengers who broke into
German. I’d put on my thickest possible accent and say ‘Here it is important we
speak in English.’ Most of the time I got away with it.”
Panaro continued to benefit from not knowing how impossible it was to break into
show business in New York and what aspiring actors were supposed to do. He saw
that a dinner theatre in Connecticut was going to do Chicago. Have
performed the role of Mary Sunshine in Philadelphia more than once, he wanted a
chance at the part. He found the casting director’s name in the phone book and
called him at home over the weekend. The casting director tried to brush him
off when he found out he didn’t have an agent or belong to Actors’ Equity.
Panaro remembers, “I said something incredibly dumb like ‘if you don’t see me,
it will be the biggest mistake you ever made’ and, I don’t know, he must have
been intrigued because he penciled me in. I got the part and that’s how I got
my Equity card.”
Job followed job, and he eventually got an agent. That agent got him an
audition for the first national tour of Les Miserables, which was then
being formed. He got the job and opened the tour in Boston, and continuing the
run in Washington and his home town of Philadelphia. Then he was transferred
into the Broadway company. But was it just a process of replicating a role
created by another, or was it creating his own Marius? “I was a different stage
presence than the Broadway Marius. It was the youth thing, I think. I was 10
years younger and [projected] a totally different artistic temperament. I felt
I was creating the role. Some of the things I did were natural for me and have
come to be a part of the show even when they might not fit others. [For
example,] I just naturally fell over the revolving trellis to get into Cosette’s
yard. That piece of business has been kept in and I’m sure future Marius’
wonder just why they are doing that. Some probably hind having to do it breaks
whatever it is they are trying to do at that point. But it’s what Hugh did.”
Later, he auditioned for director Harold Prince as a replacement Raoul in The
Phantom of the Opera. Panaro had been told that Prince had seen him in Les
Miserables and was unimpressed with his singing. “After all, Les Mis has a
more ‘pop’ sound than Phantom. I guess he didn’t think that my voice was right
for it. When I got a chance to audition, I asked everyone how to do it.
Everyone said ‘just sing loud.’ So I didn’t try to do any acting, and
performance stuff – I just sang as loud as I could. I was hired that day.”
He performed by night while rehearsing by day with the stage manager and dance
captain. “I wasn’t Steve Barton [the original Broadway Raoul], but they were
trying to get me to do all the stuff Steve did. When Hal came in he hated what
he saw. He called me over and said, ‘Do you remember what you did at you
audition? Well, that’s why I hired you and that’s what I want you to do!’ From
that moment on, I was free to make it mine, not just do what Steve had done.”
In 1993, Panaro had his first opportunity to create a role from scratch for a
Broadway musical. Jule Styne was working with Marsha Norman on a musical based
on the 1948 ballet-protégé-becomes-a-star movie The Red Shoes and Panaro
was cast as Julian Crastor, the ballerina’s composer/lover. Panaro had seen the
movie but, again, says he looked to the text and to what the author and the
director were trying to do to form his role. “The movie was the source but it
wasn’t the substance of what they were trying to do,” he says. He remembers the
work with the original director, Susan Schulman, as amazingly focused, but she
was replaced by Stanley Donen. Panaro says it became a nightmare. He don’t go
into details because, “well, as Mom always says, ‘If you can’t say anything
nice…’ I stayed with it because I wanted an opening night, I wanted a cast
album, I wanted all that is supposed to come with it. But by opening night we
already knew we were closing and there wasn’t an album and …oh well.” The
Red Shoes closed after a three-day run preceded by six weeks of previews at
the Gershwin Theatre.
Not all his memories of that first original role are difficult, however. “The
best part of the entire thing was being appreciated by Jule Styne! I wouldn’t
trade that for anything. To sing for Jules Styne and have him kvelling like a
proud grandfather was just the most amazing thing. Some of the others didn’t
seem to know how very special this is. ‘Hello! This is the guy who wrote
Gypsy for crying out loud! He wrote Funny Girl! Hello!’ Now, here
he is putting things in a key that’s comfortable for me!”
Hal Prince shows were to dominate Panaro’s musical career for the next few
years. He had the role of Gaylord Ravenal in Prince’s revival of Show Boat
on Broadway, in London and in Toronto. Again, his emphasis was to be true
to the text and the intentions of its authors and director. “I did Ravenal with
Cloris Leachman and she would ask ‘Did you read the book?’ Sure, I read the
book and it is a wonderful book. But it has nothing to do with the musical that
Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein wrote or the show that Hal Prince created.”
Panaro got a chance to work on another Kern/Hammerstein part when he sang the
role of Tom Martin in the Encores! Concert presentation of Sweet Adeline
at City Center in New York in 1997. In this version, he was working from an
abridged script by Norman Allen under the direction of Eric D. Schaeffer. He
remembers the best advice was simply to hold the book still at low chest level
and keep his face up so he could be both heard and seen. “That version of ‘Some
Girl Is on Your Mind’ [which he sang with Stephen Bogardus, Steven Goldstein and
Patti Cohenour rocked!” he says. “I wanted it recorded!”
He did record some of Kern’s music. His participation in John McGlinn’s Jerome
Kern Treasury album came after the collapse of plans for McGlinn to record the
score of Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life. “Rebecca Luker and I were
doing Phantom of the Opera and she got me involved in the Love Life
project. We were all crushed when it didn’t happen. Treasury was kind of a
consolation prize.”
For Panaro, 1997 was the year of Side Show, the Bill Russell/Henry
Kreiger musical about Siamese twin performers Daisy and Violet Hilton, that
became something of a cult following for its short run at the Richard Rodgers
Theatre. With Side Show, Panaro finally got his first cast album. He
remembers the incredible chemistry and teamwork. Norm Lewis, who sang the role
of Jake, was a friend of long-standing, and Alice Ripley, who played the twin
his character loved, “had something that just blended so well with my own
on-stage persona that it was really special.” They worked under director Robert
Longbottom. “Bobby has got to be the most organized, most together director
I’ve ever known,” he says. “There wasn’t a wasted moment and yet I never had
the feeling I was working under a time constraint. We just always seemed to get
to the end of what we were working on at the time he was scheduled to go on to
something else.”
A factor in the show’s cult status was the network of fans on the Internet who
shared news, comments and rumors throughout its development. Panaro says he
isn’t “a big computer geek” but that the cast became aware of something out of
the ordinary with the fans and their intense interest in the show. “I don’t
know if it was the subject matter, the fascination for the twins, the computer
connection or what, but there was an intensity of interest all the way through.
When they announced the closing, you should have heard the reaction!”
But he has moved on, now spending his days and nights in the search for Martin
Guerre’s identity. The soaring melodies of Schonberg and the lyrics of Boublil
and Clark occupy much of Panaro’s attention; it is a challenging piece for him.
But, he says, “This is the first score I’ve ever had where I’ve liked everything
I get to sing.” About the character he’s building, he says, “Martin Guerre
rocks! He just blows me away emotionally. There’s been absolutely no pressure
to be anyone but me in this role…there’s been a carte blanche to create. But,
then, I believe so strongly in the text. Oh, sure there were Martins before,
but it’s the text we’re working from that we’re working on. You can’t re-create
that. You have to interpret it. It just feels so right when it’s right – and
this is right.”
(ShowMusic Magazine, Spring 2000)
By: Brad Hathaway