Three CFA Alums Nominated for Theater’s Highest Honor

Moritz von Stuelpnagel (CFA’00) (from left), Brad Oscar (CFA’86), and Craig Lucas (CFA’73) are nominated for 2015 Tony Awards, which will be given out on Sunday night. Von Stuelpnagel photo by Dave Thomas Brown. Oscar photo by Matthew Murphy. Lucas photo by Peter Bellamy

One is a well-known playwright and screenwriter. Another is a veteran stage actor who has appeared in a string of successful musicals. And the third is a Broadway novice, making his directorial debut on the Great White Way. Each has been nominated this year for Broadway’s highest honor, the Tony Award (winners will be announced Sunday night), and each is an alum of the College of Fine Arts.

They are Craig Lucas (CFA’73), the author of such plays as Prelude to a Kiss, Blue Window, and The Dying Gaul, nominated this year for best book of a musical for the big hit An American in Paris, based on the popular 1951 movie; Brad Oscar (CFA’86), whose role as a soothsayer in the antic Something Rotten! has scored him a nod in the best performance by an actor in a featured musical category; and off-Broadway veteran Moritz von Stuelpnagel (CFA’00), nominated for best direction of a play for his first Broadway effort, Hand to God, a dark comedy featuring a demonic sock puppet.

For von Stuelpnagel, who at one point had planned a career in visual arts, the Tony nomination is a turning point. Until two months ago, the director was largely unknown. “It’s not so long ago we were doing this play on 11th Avenue at the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST), a tiny 80-seat venue,” he says. “We somehow found our way to Times Square and the historic 800-seat Booth Theatre, and now this. It seems too storybook to be real.”

Hand to God has had a long gestation. After a successful reading, the play was staged at EST during the 2011–2012 season as a last-minute replacement when another show dropped out. Von Stuelpnagel says he had only two weeks to rehearse the show, plus three previews. “The actors would ask in rehearsal what was on stage in each scene, and there were times I had to respond that I didn’t know, but that I was meeting with our set designer after rehearsal to sort it out. That’s how fast and furiously we put it together.”

Based on strong word of mouth, the play—written by Robert Askins—was later produced at the MCC Theater, again with von Stuelpnagel directing, before transferring to Broadway in April. In the play, young teenager Jason, grieving the recent loss of his father, is persuaded by his mother to join the puppet ministry of their local church. Jason’s puppet, named Tyrone, quickly begins exhibiting demonic tendencies and the result is chaos. Critics hailed the play, with Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press writing that “it’s like nothing else on Broadway,” and Adam Feldman of Time Out New York calling it “the freshest and funniest Broadway comedy in years.”

The director says he was immediately attracted to Hand to God, which has been nominated for five Tonys, because it’s a comedy with a “profoundly emotional underbelly. Grief, rage, lust, all lie very close to the surface,” he says. “All these complicated things that we sometimes find it simpler to ignore than address. And then, one by one, the play slowly unleashes them. It’s powerfully cathartic and yet frighteningly dangerous.”

Von Stuelpnagel likens his job as director to being “a psychoanalyst and football coach in one”—it’s his responsibility, he says, “to identify the sparks that set a play in motion and see them carried out fully.” As a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, he was interested in graphic design, but found it lonely to be behind a computer all day. He transferred to BU sophomore year, a decision he calls “one of the best I ever made,” and he returned to theater, which he had first fallen in love with in high school.

“BU empowered me with a challenging curriculum that helped me find my voice,” he says. “I got a healthy background in what theater could be and how I might find my place within it. BU fostered a sense of community that demonstrated what collaboration truly feels like.” The artistic director of Studio 42, a theater company dedicated to producing “unproducible plays,” von Stuelpnagel is scheduled this fall to direct Mike Lew’s Tiger Style! about second generation immigrant kids weathering “tiger style” parenting for the Alliance Theatre of Atlanta, and Nick Jones’ Important Hats of the Twentieth Century, which he describes as a “loop farce about rival fashion designers in the 1930s,” at Manhattan Theatre Club in association with Studio 42 in November.

Von Stuelpnagel says that winning a Tony would be an honor “I can’t yet fathom,” but that the nomination itself is already a win of sorts. “It’s validation that there is room in the American theater for the kind of work I love most.”

Watch a scene from Hand to God here.

Brad Oscar is one of those rare actors who has worked continuously on Broadway and in regional theater since launching his career in 1990. His first Tony nomination came in 2001 for his performance as Franz Liebkind in the smash stage adaptation of Mel Brooks’ The Producers, and he is nominated again this year for his role as Thomas, the soothsayer nephew of Nostradamus, in Something Rotten! the hilarious story of two Renaissance-era sibling playwrights consistently overshadowed by one William Shakespeare. Determined to find success, they seek out the soothsayer to find out what will be the next big thing in theater, and thus trump the Bard. Thomas predicts it will be musical comedy and suggests the brothers come up with the first musical. That sets in motion a breathless lampoon of both the Bard and the Broadway musical, replete with puns, double entendres, and a cast of characters that includes a Shylock, a Portia, and a mashup of Hamlet and The Sound of Music.

“I have rarely had as much fun with the entire process, from rehearsal through tech and into performances,” Oscar says. He has played in such Broadway musicals as Jekyll & Hyde, Spamalot, The Addams Family, and Big Fish. “It’s so gratifying to hear that laughter nightly—how can we not be having fun, too? Plus, it’s a wonderful company of such pros.”

The actor has what is arguably the show’s biggest number, a first-act showstopper called “A Musical,” which foresees what musicals will turn out to be. The song is full of sly nods to shows of the future that will feature street gangs (West Side Story), sailors wearing hats in the South Pacific (South Pacific), and yes, a line of high-kicking dancers (Chorus Line).

“It’s really a pleasure to do the number nightly, it plays so well,” says Oscar, who has won rave reviews for his performance. “It’s exhilarating, every performance.”

The 50-year-old Oscar grew up outside of Washington, D.C., and says that he’s wanted to be an actor “ever since I can remember.” As a child, he would put on shows in the family basement or backyard. It helped that his parents are both big theater fans and brought him to see live theater at an early age. He says his time at BU “introduced me to the many possibilities about what it means to be an actor, how to work and create and explore life.”

“What we do is so subjective, and there were teachers and ideas that I really embraced and understood, and others not so much. But it was a pretty comprehensive experience and is part of the foundation of my process as an actor,” says Oscar.

Watch Brad Oscar performing in Something Rotten! here.

Playwright Craig Lucas began his career as an actor, performing in the chorus of such Broadway musicals as Shenandoah, On the Twentieth Century (now having a starry revival on Broadway), and Rex before turning his attention to writing. He earned a Tony nomination in 1990 for his drama Prelude to a Kiss, and another nomination in 2005 for best book of a musical for The Light in the Piazza. He also directed the film version of his play The Dying Gaul, and wrote the screenplay for Longtime Companion, one of the first films to tackle the AIDS epidemic.

Few shows this season have earned the accolades that An American in Paris has. It has been nominated for 11 Tonys besides best book of a musical for Lucas—more than any other 2014–15 production. Critics have singled out his adaptation of the Vincente Minnelli–Alan Jay Lerner film. Charles Isherwood notes in his New York Times review that Lucas’ book “amplifies the movie’s thin story line, mostly to witty and vivifying effect.” And from Marilyn Stasio in Variety: “What really makes the show feel fresh is the context in which Lucas has reconceived it, keeping in mind that reworking any beloved musical or movie can land you in a sand trap.” She commends Lucas for “deepening and darkening the material so it now seems genuinely relevant for our own war-torn age.”

It is still the tale of an American World War II vet struggling to realize his dream of becoming an artist in postwar Paris—but with one important distinction. The original film was set not in the immediate aftermath of the city’s liberation from the Nazis, but in 1951. Lucas has moved the time frame to just after war’s end, in 1945. Doing so, he says, “radically increased the need for love and passion and experience and sex and meaning for the characters.” At the time the movie was released, “it was most likely too soon for survivors of the war to be facing the trauma caused by the Nazi occupation.” He says that it was the desire of the Broadway show’s creative team and director and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon “to delve into the particulars in ways the original creators might not have been able to fully exploit at the time, with the war so fresh in people’s minds.”

The playwright says he had no apprehensions about adapting the film for the stage, because he knew it was going to be different, and also because, while “a lot of people said they loved the movie, when I would ask them about it, I found out that very few people actually remembered very much about the picture.”

Asked whether it’s more challenging to write a play from scratch or to adapt material from a previous source, Lucas says, “It’s harder to make stuff up, frankly. When you have a wonderful piece of writing like Elizabeth Spencer’s novella The Light in the Piazza or Jane Smiley’s novella The Age of Grief, which I adapted into the movie The Secret Lives of Dentists, inventing characters is not the primary task, though obviously there is some of that.” But he acknowledges that adapting does bring its own challenges. “Translating something that lives in one art form into something that lives in another is difficult in other ways: you are taking a structure made of bricks and tearing it apart and making a new one out of wood that has to function as the original appeared to function.”

Even with his decades of experience working on Broadway, Lucas says, An American in Paris has proven to be especially noteworthy. “Working with Christopher Wheeldon has been one of the most supremely rewarding and happiest experiences I’ve had.”

As a BU undergrad, Lucas studied both creative writing and theater. When he showed poet Anne Sexton—who was taking a course at BU from Robert Lowell at the time—his plays, she gave him some invaluable advice. “She told me not to go to graduate school,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You’re not the kind of person who will benefit from that environment; you’re much too stubborn and idiosyncratic, and you have to find your own way and make the rest of the world follow your path.’ And that was spot-on.”

Lucas was writing even back when he was acting on Broadway, although at the time, he says, “I didn’t have the self-knowledge you need, the inner juice rather, to exploit.

“You have to have a point of view and some kind of deep connection and relationship with your unconscious to be able to write, and so I used those years of singing in Broadway musicals to do the reading and exploring and living that was critically necessary to become first and foremost a functioning adult….Slowly I began to see or sense some kind of inner being that I could connect to, a person who could make choices and who might possibly begin to have something worth expressing….People develop on different wavelengths and in different time frames, and I have been a very late and slow bloomer.”

View scenes from An American in Paris here.

The Tony Awards ceremony will be broadcast on CBS this Sunday, June 7, at 8 p.m. EDT.