David Pittu: A Prince of a Director

It's rare, if not unprecedented, for an actor to be able to say he's appeared in a pair of shows in a single season that have picked up a total of 14 Tony Award nominations—including one for his performance. That's the kind of special year David Pittu has enjoyed, hopping from Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia to LoveMusik, Harold Prince and Alfred Uhry's new musical retelling of the romance between Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Pittu plays Bertolt Brecht, the famously contrary playwright who collaborated with Weill on The Threepenny Opera and other works. It's a flashy turn for a character actor who has spent 15 years juggling acting, directing, teaching and writing, including collaborating on The Audience, a 2005 Drama Desk Award nominee for Best Musical. As Pittu notes, the past year has been his busiest and most fulfilling yet—and he's now up for the ultimate keepsake, a Tony Award.

As a child in the '70s, I looked to the name Harold Prince as a representation of exactly what I wanted to be a part of someday: vibrant, sophisticated, daring, classy, intelligent theater. The actors he used had personality and character and style to spare, and it all came through in their rich, distinctive, ironic voices on those wonderful cast albums. I am going to the Tony Awards this year as a nominee for my work in a new Harold Prince musical, LoveMusik. If someone had told me this would happen all those years ago, I wouldn't have believed it. Or maybe I would have, since the connection I felt to those shows was so deep.

Hal is incredibly loyal—it's one of the most touching things about him. I met him in 2000, after I had spent all of '99 on the road in Titanic. I had done the tour for practical reasons—I didn't have a great part, but I needed the money—and returned to New York feeling a bit disillusioned about the business; I had made a lot of wonderful friends on the tour, but artistically, I wondered if the powers-that-be would ever believe in me enough to let me carry a show.

Soon, I got a call to audition for the leading role of Leo Frank in the national tour of Parade. "Hal Prince is going to direct the tour," I was told, but I didn't quite believe it. I was terrified to meet him, and I wasn't thrilled about the prospect of going out on the road again so quickly, but I went in, sang and then started to read. Before I finished the scene, he stopped me. "I don't need to hear another word," he said. "You are my favorite kind of actor." That was almost enough for me. Moments after I left, I got a call on my cell phone saying I had the job. On opening night in Atlanta, the city in which the story actually took place, the audience leaped to its feet when Andrea Burns, who played my wife, and I took our bow at the end. We walked off and Hal was standing in the wings in tears. "This is exactly the response I've been waiting for five years with this show." I will never forget that.

In 2005, Hal asked me to be in the very first reading of LoveMusik. He wrote me a note saying, "This show is going to happen, and when it does, wherever you may be, whatever you're doing, you have to play Brecht." That's another wonderful thing about Hal—he's incredibly classy when it comes to correspondence.

Every job I got after that, I kept imagining I would leave if Hal suddenly called. I've been really fortunate lately, doing a lot of great roles in wonderful projects: Pinter's Celebration and The Room at Atlantic, David Hare's Stuff Happens at the Public, and a fabulous Encores! production of Of Thee I Sing. When I was cast in The Coast of Utopia, I called Hal to make sure LoveMusik wouldn't conflict, since he had mentioned the possibility of doing it out of town first. Happily, he had decided to open the show in the spring in New York, so I was able to do both.

Doing Utopia was like going back to school with about 40 wonderful actors and having Tom Stoppard and Jack O'Brien as our teachers. Continuing the school theme, Ethan Hawke actually put together a yearbook for everyone in the cast. For me, a fortuitous connection was discovering a direct line to Brecht from the pre-communistic, anarchic ideas hammered out in The Coast of Utopia. Brecht read the writings of Michael Bakunin, the character Ethan played and, like a lot of the characters in the third play, Brecht was an émigré, first to Scandinavia, then to California and finally back to East Germany. The running dialogue through the trilogy about just what constitutes the ideal personal-political "utopia" is reflected in the life and work of Brecht.

It's intimidating to play a real-life figure, since everyone has ideas of what that person was really like. I've tried to burrow down into the character of Brecht as much as I can and tune out any of the talk surrounding the show. In general, I think people get too concerned about theater buzz and not about theater itself. LoveMusik may not be everyone's cup of tea, but its roots are planted firmly in theater history. It is completely "of the theater," and what Hal is trying to do is just as much ahead of the status quo as all the other shows he's famous for. It's jagged, and adult, and built on a foundation of love. I'm very proud of it, and I adore acting with Michael Cerveris and Donna Murphy, as well as the rest of our excellent company. Doing the show every night is its own reward.

When I remember myself as a child, I am so grateful to my guardian angel—or whoever brought Hal Prince into my life. And with Hal comes Alfred Uhry, who wrote the book for LoveMusik, and Pat Birch, who did the musical staging. I am so grateful as a grown-up to call these people my friends and colleagues.