EVENINGS OUT
Hewitt has trodden stages from a ghost town to NYC
by Doreen Cudnik
Maybe he looks familiar from his appearances in television commercials or his stints on NBC's Fraiser or Fox's George Carlin Show, but actor Tom Hewitt might be best known to the gay community for his portrayal of Steve, the HIV-positive love interest of Jeffrey in the original off-Broadway cast of the popular Paul Rudnick play. Hewitt is in Cleveland for his part in Great Lakes Theater Festival's The School for Scandal, which opened at the Ohio Theatre October 12.
The show is co-produced by the Theatre Festival and the National Actors Theatre, of which veteran actor Tony Randall is artistic
Tom Hewitt
director. Randall has a role in the production, as the aging Sir Peter Teazle, whose new young wife, Lady Teazle, drives him to distraction with her pursuits of high fashion, wild spending sprees, gossip and scandal.
The play is being done in cooperation with the Acting Company, the only professional theater of its kind in America, providing young and talented American actors of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds with an opportunity to develop their craft further by touring in a repertory of classic and contemporary plays.
These cooperative efforts are not unusual, Hewitt said, mainly due to cutbacks in funding for the arts. "It's kind of a new trend that's happening a lot in American theatre, Hewitt said. "There is much more financial stability if two or more companies produce a show together."
Hewitt said he is thrilled to be working with Tony Randall, an actor he describes as "brilliant."
"He's a doll!" Hewitt said of the Emmy Award-winning actor, perhaps best remembered for his role as Felix Unger on the hit television series The Odd Couple.
"The funniest thing about him is that he tells the best stories," Hewitt said. "He's been around the theatre a long time, and through his work in television, radio, film, and on stage, he's done it all. And he's one of those people who is really good at remembering and telling really fabulous stories. He's a very smart actor and a remarkable man... and here I am working with him!
Hewitt was raised in Missoula, Montana, not far from the Idaho border, and not exactly the theatre district. "We didn't really have a drama department where I was growing up, but we did a lot of summer stock," he said.
"In high school during the summer, I worked in a restored ghost town near Yellowstone Park, and we did legitimate turn-of-the-century theatre. The acting style was very big and broad but you had to be realistic at the same time," Hewitt recalled. “I was also with a company called "Shakespeare in the Parks," and we toured these little, small communities around the area doing Shakespeare plays. When these towns were too small to have hotels, we would stay in
people's homes and they would feed us. It was great, we were like this nomadic band of actors. And over the years, these people saw, I would say, all of the Shakespeare comedies and a lot of other classical plays, so they were an educated audience. Growing up, I felt sort of disadvantaged-like some horrible cosmic mistake had been made that I was being raised in a small town-but in hindsight it was really kind of great. I had a lot of opportunities."
Hewitt eventually headed east to the Big Apple, landing a role in the Broadway production of The Sisters Rosensweig and the national tour of Gigi. He recently spent a year in Los Angeles, doing some film and television work and making connections with the west coast movers and shakers. "I like to think of myself as 'bi-coastal,' Hewitt laughed. "I went to L.A. to become a famous television and movie star-like every bag boy at Ralph's—so of course I spent a year pretty much unemployed."
The phenomenal success of Jeffrey came as a surprise to Hewitt. The thing that drew him to the play, Hewitt said, was that it was "completely and unapologetically gay," and "just hysterically funny." Interestingly, in the original version of the script, the character Steve was not HIV-positive, and AIDS was much more in the periphery of the plot line.
"When I was called back to read the revised script," Hewitt recalled, "I thought, 'Geez, there goes any chance at humor at all,' and 'Boy this is going to be really tough.' But it turned out to be this big, huge smash hitwho knew? We had no idea! I, and I think the rest of the cast would agree, thought that the demographic appeal of the play was going to be too small for the play to have any mass appeal, but of course, we were wrong, and the rest is history."
In an ironic twist, Hewitt almost missed out on the part because he was perceived to be straight. "The artistic director didn't feel comfortable casting what he thought was a heterosexual actor in a gay role. He assumed that I was straight, so I had to camp it up quite a bit!" Hewitt laughed.
Hewitt also recalled the time when Jeffrey was about to move to a bigger theater, and he had to make an important career choice. "I was in another play at the time that was going to Los Angeles, so I had to make the choice of going to L.A. with that play, or moving to the bigger theatre with Jeffrey--and I chose to go with Jeffrey. My agent took me out into the hall and said, "Tom, I'm afraid that you're going to be known as a gay actor." And I said, "But I am a gay actor!" I mean, I open the newspaper now and see that I could get a job... all of a sudden we're marketable!”
As an openly gay actor, Hewitt is pleased about the increase in gay visibility on television and the movies, although he thinks we still have a long way to go. "I think it's a big step forward, although it's somehow 'safe' to see action heroes playing drag queens. I mean, we know that that's the guy from Dirty Dancing and that's Wesley Snipes-and they're just putting on parts."
As for accuracy and diversity in casting, Hewitt thinks that things are getting better. "I see an opening up of whole new pools of talent that were once cut off. For instance, Asian actors playing Europeans, and the New York Shakespeare Festival— which is notorious for non-traditional casting-casting black actors in traditionally white roles and so on. We're looking for specificity and accuracy in casting, yet broadening our horizons and our pool of talent at the same time."
Hewitt can be seen in The School for Scandal on October 12-28 at the Ohio Theatre in Cleveland's Playhouse Square. Charge tickets at 216-241-6000 or 800-766-6048. The show will travel to New York in November for an engagement on Broadway. And what's next for Hewitt?
"I'm just getting on that skyrocket to stardom... wherever it leads," he says with a twinkle in his eye.
OCTOBER 13, 1995 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
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