John Tartaglia
How is Beauty and the Beast going?
It's good! I've been here since the end of November, and I just now feel like I'm getting into the swing of it. It's weird to walk into a show that's been around this long. And it's such a huge show, with moving set pieces. I'm surprised I don't get knocked over half the time.
We haven't seen you on the boards in New York for a year and a half. Did you miss it, or did you need a rest after Avenue Q?
I think after you do a show like Avenue Q, where you originate a role and you're with it for so long, it's particularly rough. You don't get a break. So I was ready to take one when the time came, but after three or four months of going back to normal life, I was like, "OK…I really miss it now." [Laughs] This was a wonderful chance to come back to Broadway and do a role that I really wanted to do.
So Lumiere was a part you'd thought about doing?
Absolutely. I actually told a friend of mine in Las Vegas when I did Avenue Q out there that one of the roles I'd love to do was Lumiere. But I never thought I would, because at the time, most Lumieres were older. That changed when [All My Children's] Jacob Young came in to play it. He looks even younger than I do!
Were you nervous about anything?
What about the challenge of dancing in that costume?
The candelabras are very heavy, right?
Did your relationship with Disney help you land the role?
Your career path must have gotten easier since your Best Actor Tony nomination for Avenue Q.
There's a kid connection in a lot of the work we've seen you do. Is that a conscious career decision?
In other words, there's a place for Disney's big, fluffy
But there's something to be said for going out on a high note.
Are you still filming Johnny and the Sprites for the Disney Channel while you're in the show?
Congratulations!
For your Avenue Q fans who are a little too old to have caught it, what's the show about?
It sounds adorable! Has it been well-received?
As an openly gay man, did promoting open-mindedness play specifically into your concept for the show?
Do you worry about being pigeonholed as a children's entertainer?
You mentioned kids earlier. Do you see yourself becoming a father?
See John Tartaglia in Disney's Beauty and the Beast at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.
It's such a fun role. I get to do everything: I get to be silly and do the song-and-dance stuff and the steal-the-show number, "Be Our Guest," but I also get to be part of the story. This character is very meaty in the sense that he's the life of the castle, he's optimistic and he keeps everyone going. That's also who I am.
My biggest fear was that because the show has been here 13 years and is such a well-oiled machine, I wouldn't be free to make things my own. What's been wonderful is that everyone has been so welcoming and so loving in [adjusting] their performances to match what I'm doing. Also, when you originate a role, you have more time to discover who that character is. No one can say, "Oh, that's not how this person did it." I mean, [original Beauty and the Beast star] Gary Beach is someone I completely idolize. And the characters are based on a movie that people have such fond memories of, and they want to see a version of that live on stage. So I really tried to be careful. I'm doing a tribute to Jerry Orbach, and giving it that kind of sound, but it's not exactly that.
Everyone always asks, "Oh my god. Is it impossible with those candles?" I remember watching the show and having a false sense of what it would be like.
For me they're really not. Maybe because of my puppeteering work, that doesn't bother me as much. What bothers me more is how constricting the costume is. You have a jumpsuit on, which is nice and flexible, but you also have this chest plate, which makes it really hard to breathe. So at the end, when I finally transform, I'm like, "Oh, thank god." My whole body feels lighter than air. It's definitely the most physical thing I've ever done. Avenue Q was hard emotionally and vocally and stamina-wise because I never left the stage, and here I have more breaks, but "Be Our Guest" is nothing but eleven and a half minutes of cardio. If I can sing at the same time, it's a miracle.
Ironically, no. Everyone says, "Was it because of Johnny and the Sprites?" The funny thing is that both sides had no idea. It was a nice plus, I think, but I had let it be known that I wanted to play the role and they approached me. People have this illusion that when you work on Broadway or you, quote unquote, "become a Broadway star," you don't ever have to audition again, which is totally not true. And auditioning is my least favorite thing about the work, so to have someone say, "Would you want to play this role?" was nice. I mean, I had to be seen for it and I had to sing, but it was nice!
It's been easier in the sense that people know my work, so when there's a new project, they think of me, which is wonderful. The harder thing is that sometimes people have a memory of you in Avenue Q, or whatever show they've seen you in, and they think that that's what you're going to bring in the door—and sometimes a new role doesn't call for that or you're having a bad day. Now I feel this pressure to, like, always be…unbelievable! [Laughs.] No one can do that all the time, and I certainly can't. But it's nice to walk in the room and feel like people are glad to see you. I'm not one of those people who stepped off the bus and became a star. I went through the ranks. I've been here since I was 18, so I went to all the open calls and I did my Theaterworks tour and all of those things. It really made me appreciate this [success]. I look back and think, '"How do actors survive that?"
You know that book The Secret, the one that says if you have good thoughts, that's what you get back? By nature, I am a very optimistic, light-hearted, fanciful person. I really love make-believe. Disney movies are, like, my favorite things in the world, I love going to theme parks, and of course, I worked on Sesame Street for 10 years. That's why this kind of work has come to me, because I don't have to go in a "method room" for five hours to find my character. It's something that I just kind of know. I was watching television the other day, thinking, I want to do a dark, drama show—something like CSI that people would never expect out of me [laughs]. Maybe someday I will, but in the meantime I'm loving what I'm doing. I think that there's so much negativity and seriousness in the world, it's nice when you can get away and just laugh and have a good time. That's what Broadway does best. And there's nothing more addictive than the sound of an audience laughing. It's totally crack for me.
musicals.
Beauty and the Beast was criticized for being a direct movie adaptation, but the truth of the matter is that's what it should be! It's a fairy tale. OK, every once in a while you look around and you go, "I'm dancing with forks; what am I doing?" but it's wonderful, because there's nothing else like that. Yes, you could be really artsy and strip it down to four black walls that represent the castle, but why not be able to go and live in this other world? And I think that's why people come. People don't go to Disney World to sit in a spa for a week and do psychotherapy courses. They go because they want to ride on Peter Pan's Flight and Space Mountain. And I think that's what this show does beautifully. I watch it every night: You see these fathers, these big, burly guys, and I'm sure they're thinking, "What am I doing here?" By the end of the show, they're teary-eyed and standing and clapping. It's wonderful to see people just forget their lives for a couple of hours.
I'm a little upset. Beauty and the Beast is a lot of children's first Broadway show. It's got this kind of innocence to it, and I think it really is a show that has everything for kids in it. It opened two years before I got to New York City, so it's always been here, and it's been sad to think about it not being here anymore. I wish it was sticking around, because there are still nights when we're sold out. We're getting standing ovations and the audience reacts crazily every night.
Absolutely. That's kind of how I felt about leaving Avenue Q. It's better to go out when you're still going strong than if people are like, "That's tired." The hardest thing has been that this cast loves the show and works their butts off and truly gives their all. I'm proud to be able to tell my kids that I was a part of the original production of Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. I think that it's going out on a strong note, and even better is the fact that another wonderful score—The Little Mermaid— is coming in here. So if something has to replace it, I'm glad that's what's replacing it.
We finished shooting the first season at the end of November and we started airing in January. Just last week we got picked up for a second season.
Thank you! So we'll start shooting that in the summer. I'm hoping it all works out so I can stay with the show until it closes.
I play Johnny, a singer and songwriter who moves to his uncle's house, where in the backyard there's a secret entrance to this other world, Grotto's Grove, where these characters called the Sprites live. Humans have stopped believing in magic—we've become a cynical world—so all the magic in the world has started to grow its pockets, or groves, as we call them on the show. The whole show about me as a human learning about the Sprites as another species; the message we're trying to get across is tolerance and mutual understanding and learning about each other. And on top of all that, we have wonderful music written by Stephen Schwartz and Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker and Bobby Lopez and many others.
The nicest compliment I've gotten is that it's a family show. Even though it's for preschoolers, it's so rich that we have a lot of families watching. We live in a world right now where there are not a lot of great role models for kids. There's not a lot of optimism in the world, and I think that the more we can show basic things about getting along with each other…it sounds simple but it's so important. Kids don't have political agendas. They are not on mind-altering drugs—and by that, I mean they don't have anything that's preventing them from making really pure choices or being open-minded to the world. It would be nice to help this next generation look at each other more positively than we are doing right now.
Well, I never thought, "I'm going to create a show that promotes tolerance like that," because I think there are other appropriate places for that. I'm less worried about being a positive role model as a gay person than making sure there's no negative stereotypes of any sort. There are so many subtle things I grew up with on children's television that I look back and think, "Ooh. That was not such a great thing to see." For me, it was more important to produce a show that was about treating anyone, regardless of their sexuality or color or race or religion or whatever, equally. Again, I'm not a preachy person, so one of the things on the show that I'm really proud of is we never say, "Hey kids, you should do this!" They're stories, and if you decipher that message? Great. If you don't decipher it now, but when you're eight years old you go, "Oh! That's what they were talking about," that's even better. It's just about putting a positive message out there about life. Our American culture right now is so much about violence and humiliating each other on television, it's really needed.
You know, I'm lucky because I've never felt that. I know there are a lot of actors who work in children's entertainment who are like, "Oh my god. I'm going to kill myself. This is too cute." I really, genuinely love that. What happens is that I get to do something like the "My First Time" benefit or other things like that where I get to remind myself of that [other] side. That's why Avenue Q was so much fun, because we all did completely inappropriate kinds of things between takes at Sesame Street. Avenue Q was a fun opportunity to make a career of that. But you have to realize it's really a privilege to create entertainment for everybody.
I don't have any aspirations to be Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt and have that kind of super-super-stardom. I would just like to work steadily and challenge myself. I'm not a person who can do one thing for the rest of my life and be completely happy. If I get pigeonholed, I get pigeonholed. When I do my dark, one-hour miniseries on Lifetime, you'll know! [Laughs.]
You know, I do. I need to wait a while, because I'm so hectic right now. I would be a horrible parent at the moment! [Laughs.] But it's certainly not something I've closed my mind to. I was talking to a friend the other day about that, and she made a wild comment. She said, "You're millions of kids' dad right now." I hadn't realized that, but it's kind of true. I have all these kids who look to me as a big brother or dad, and that's a wonderful thing. It's a privilege to be able to affect someone like that.