Manoel Felciano

Currently: Playing the violin, keyboard and clarinet, not to mention singing and acting the complex role of innocent Tobias Ragg in the dark revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.

Hometown: San Francisco, California. The well-spoken actor was born to a Portuguese father and a Swiss mother, giving him a certain knack for language—French at his bilingual grade school, German with his mother, "English with the rest of the world and Spanish when I'd had a little too much to drink!"—and the life-long curse of a misspelled name. But say it with me now: first name: Mano for short; last name: Felciano not Fel-i-ciano!.

Beautiful Girls:Felciano can't "remember not playing the violin," a skill he's been honing since age five. "Then the piano and bass and guitar and all of those things I learned basically when puberty hit because it became very clear to me that playing the violin was not, like…the way in to getting girls," he laughs.

In Comes Company: Felciano headed east after high school for Yale where he saw his first musical, a production of She Loves Me featuring future Broadway star Melissa Errico. "And the second one I saw—but didn't really see because I was playing violin in the pit for it—was Sweeney Todd," he explains with a smile. "It starred my friend Asa Somers. That was the first musical I ever really fell in love with. It was just so intelligent."

Anyone Can Whistle or Act: "At that point I wasn't an actor at all," Felciano continues. Instead, he moved to New York for a job on Wall Street, playing in rock bands at night to satisfy his artistic urges. When the bank wanted to transfer him to an office in Connecticut, Felciano decided it was time to make a change. "I quit and then— to satisfy all my artsy friends and as a sign of defiance—I shaved my head." While waiting for some inspiration and for his hair to grow back, the boho boy paid the bills with graphic design and consulting work. "Then one night I was in this bar with Melissa," he says coyly, "and a casting director saw her with me and called her up the next day and said, ‘Who's that guy you were with and can he sing?' And so she—being lovely—said, ‘He's awesome!' and then called me and said ‘OK, you have this audition for this new Andrew Lloyd Webber/Hal Prince mega-musical. I was like, ‘I hate musicals. Wah wah wah,' and she said, ‘Shut up, you don't know what you want to do with your life anyway. Just go.'" Despite having not an acting credit to his name, Felciano auditioned for Hal Prince and landed a gig in the American premiere of Whistle Down the Wind.

Merrily We Roll Along: Next came his Broadway debut as a swing in Cabaret, where he added playing the clarinet to his laundry list of musical skills. "The first two people I ever understudied on Broadway were Denis O'Hare and Michael Stuhlbarg, who are, in my opinion, two of the best actors in the country," he says. "But I also knew that I couldn't do what they did. I knew that I was smart and that I had a lot of desire, but I didn't have the tools." He then joined the cast of 2000's flashy Jesus Christ Superstar revival, understudying the plumb role of Judas for a few months, but made the final decision to attend NYU's Graduate Drama program after stepping into the pit during a performance—a slip he relays good-naturedly, if not fondly.

Putting It Together: Though playing both musician and actor in Sweeney may seem like an arduous task, Felciano dove right in, posting his research on mental patients in Victorian England and asylums around the O'Neil Theatre. "I've been playing music for more than three times as long as I've been acting," he explains, "And that's what's really kind of beautiful about this experience for me. I get to combine the earliest way I knew of expressing myself with this adult, new way that I've learned." He's eager to explain director John Doyle's concept using the famous duet between his and Patti Lupone's characters, "Not While I'm Around." "In any production of Sweeney Todd that you will see," he says, "You will hear when she's singing to me, this weird, eerie kind of dissonant countermelody in the music. But in this production, and only in this kind of production, does that actually become an acting choice because I get to play that line on the violin. My friend who came said, ‘It's like there's dialogue there where there normally isn't. It's like she's saying, ‘Nothing's gonna harm you,' and you're saying, ‘Uh uh! Something is–and it's upstairs and it's a mass murderer with a razor!'"

Move On: So how will Felciano ever top Sweeney, an experience that he speaks of so passionately? "That is a very good question," he says. "Basically, now I'm just trying to savor every time that we do it, because I'm in my favorite musical…on Broadway…while Stephen Sondheim is still with us and able to contribute. This is by far the high point of anything I've done."

See Manoel Felciano in Sweeney Todd at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, 230 West 49th Street. Click for tickets and more information.