In the cards

Steve Braddock bets on Guys and Dolls

by Steve Vineberg

When Steve Braddock resigned as artistic director of New England Theatre Company in the spring, Worcester lost one of its most talented and prolific theatrical resources -- an actor, director, and educator who's made enormous contributions to local theater over the past decade. But now he's back -- temporarily, at least -- as the director of Worcester Forum's production of Guys and Dolls, opening Tuesday.

Braddock, who turns 39 this summer, moved to Worcester in 1987 when his wife, a genetic counselor, landed a job in the area. Within a year of their arrival he'd become attached to the then-vibrant Worcester Children's Theatre as an artist-in-residence, performing in such productions as Step on a Crack, The Wind in the Willows, and The Ice Wolf and teaching workshops while doing as much freelance acting as he could. His association with WCT lasted seven years -- almost until the company's unhappy demise two years ago -- and included a couple of directing gigs. It was the first of several relationships Braddock forged in the theatrical and educational community during his 11 busy years in Worcester.

His second connection was with Burncoat School, the only local middle and high school equipped with a full-scale drama program. Braddock taught part-time at the middle school for two years and full-time at the high school for three, offering a variety of theater courses and writing, directing, and producing shows that toured to elementary schools. He also directed a number of large-scale musicals at Burncoat -- Barnum, The Wiz, West Side Story. But his first directing assignment was Grease -- a show that, he admits with some reluctance, he's staged three times in different venues. Grease, the senior class show at Holy Cross in 1989, was looking for a director; Forum's artistic director, Brian Tivnan, who'd met Braddock when Forum and WCT shared the Performing Arts School space downtown, recommended him for the job, and it sparked a happy decade of staging shows in academic settings -- at Grafton High School, Worcester Academy, Newton North Summer Institute, and Burncoat. Most of his non-professional directing has been at Grafton High, where he staged a show every year between 1989 and 1997, aiming high: he brought Shakespeare and Molière onto the production schedule, as well as secondary-school perennials like The Crucible and The Diary of Anne Frank and musicals like Godspell and Anything Goes.

My own knowledge of Braddock's work is pretty much restricted to the work he did with New England Theatre Company (though I did see him play Praed -- charmingly -- in Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession at Foothills last year). One of the first shows I reviewed for the Worcester Phoenix was NETC's Lettice and Lovage, and Braddock was hilarious in the too-small role of Bardolph. By that time he'd been performing locally for half a dozen years, not only at WCT and NETC -- where he'd appeared in one of his favorite roles, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, as well as in A Man for All Seasons and Woman in Mind -- but also in Forum's versions of All My Sons and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As an actor, Braddock is quick-witted and light-footed, with a relaxed command of verse -- he was a standout as Macduff in NETC's Macbeth -- and a gift for making high comic style look astonishingly easy. In his own production of The Merry Wives of Windsor (also at NETC), he played three small parts, uncredited, when he was unable to cast them, and made each one distinctively funny. Directors seldom get away with acting in their own shows, and Braddock is quick to point out that it was never his intention to do so when he went into rehearsal for Merry Wives. But he's such a modest performer that he managed to pull it off -- to offer his own acting contributions as a reflection of an ensemble spirit rather than as an opportunity to put himself on stage. Even in principal roles, Braddock is a generous performer with a buried ego. It's a large part of his charm.

Braddock grew up in Medford, New Jersey, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and attended Colorado College, originally as an English major and then switching to psychology. He came to theater relatively late, when the instructor of an acting class he'd enrolled in encouraged him to continue. He ended up spending his last year and a half in college doing theater almost exclusively and graduating with a BA in Fine Arts. Colorado College was also where he met his wife, Bonnie, who was a year behind him. He hung around until she graduated, waiting tables, tending bar, honing his auditioning skills, and applying to grad schools. USC is where he ended up -- "the smartest thing I ever did," he claims -- while Bonnie continued her own education at UCLA. He speaks glowingly of the instruction he received at USC: he must be the only actor I've ever spoken to who, when you ask him to name the performers who've most inspired him, immediately mentions his teachers. Yet for three years following USC, he didn't act at all; his longest-running gig was managing a stereo-video store. It was Bonnie who coaxed him back into theater when they moved back to the East Coast. "She told me, `You have to do something else because you're going dead behind the eyes,'" Braddock remembers. "Now I can't imagine doing anything that isn't connected to the theater."

Braddock and his family -- which includes two sons, Ethan and Seth, ages 6 and 4 -- now live in Syracuse, New York, another move precipitated by Bonnie's work. At first he continued to work here, teaching classes part-time at Anna Maria College while holding down a full-time position as Assistant Director of Education for Boston's Huntington Theatre Company. It was a job he loved, and if it hadn't been for the increasingly less-attractive distance from his family, he says, "I would have stayed. It's a wonderful department. I have yet to see another theater -- and there may be few in the country -- with as large a series of programs as the Huntington has." Of his boss, Donna Glick, he asserts, "She really showed me the value of theater as an educational component, an educational tool, an element in the day-to-day curriculum of students. Whereas I had always been a theater teacher and had tried to use what I taught my students on a larger scale, Donna really offered me an opportunity to get theater to a much broader spectrum of students -- to show them that what they get from theater has wider implications in their lives." He's about to get the opportunity to apply what he learned in his year at the Huntington: he's just landed a job as Director of Education -- a department of one -- at Syracuse Stage, the city's only professional house.

Ending the difficult commute meant, of course, that Braddock had to taper off his association with NETC, where he'd succeeded Virginia Byrne as artistic director in 1996. (Ken Happe took over for Braddock a few months ago.) It was at NETC that he got the chance to try new conceptual approaches to classics -- he set Ibsen's A Doll's House in the American Midwest in the '50s and Merry Wives, memorably, in the '20s -- as well as to mount Paula Vogel's surrealist play The Baltimore Waltz.

The Guys and Dolls Braddock is staging for Forum is an extension of the company's Theatreworks experiment, training young performers from Worcester's neighborhoods and mixing them up with Equity actors in a major outdoor musical production. (The playing space is once again East Park on Shrewsbury Street.) Last summer the program culminated in West Side Story, and some of the members of that cast are back in Guys and Dolls, along with new recruits. There are about two dozen of these young people; Braddock praises their "rampant energy," their talent, their communal spirit. Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls is one of the most beloved of all American musicals and one of the most frequently performed, but professional productions tend to be cast mostly with middle-aged actors; it should be a kick to see a more youthful ensemble portraying Damon Runyon's crapshooters and Salvation Army types. The pros in the cast include a few familiar faces, like Ellen O'Neall Waite, the terrific actress who played Lady Macbeth at NETC in 1994 and has been performing locally for many years. Sarah Brown, the ingenue, will be played by Masiel Reyes, who understudied both Maria and Anita in West Side Story and recently gave a high-voltage performance as in Worcester County Light Opera's A Chorus Line. The cast also includes Candice Rose and Jack Celli as Miss Adelaide and Nathan Detroit, Fabio Polanco as high-rolling Sky Masterson, and Paul Stickney in the scene-stealing role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson.

The assignment to helm a show that's emerged from months of workshop training seems like an ideal one for Steve Braddock, who's as fervently committed an educator as he is a showman. And the combination -- Braddock, a classic musical, a stage full of electrically charged young urban performers -- makes Guys and Dolls the summer's most eagerly anticipated local theatrical event.