(upbeat music) ♪ Yeah, the simple things in life ♪ ♪ Oh, I got a funny feeling ♪ ♪ When she walked in the room ♪ ♪ Yeah, as I recalled it ended ♪ (DRUMS MIMICKING HEARTBEAT) (STAMMERING) ♪ As I recalled it ended ♪ (DRUMS SLOWING) (SILENCE) (QUIETLY) It ended.

- My guest is Eric Gutman.

Actor, Singer, Writer, and the star of a one man show, which is now a public television special titled "From Broadway to Obscurity."

Welcome to Lifestyles.

- Thank you, happy to be here.

- Acting and performing are just a part of who you are.

It's part of your DNA from your time as Toto in second grade to Grease in high school and middle school, and then onto the university, and playing in bands.

Tell me why this is who you are, and this is the profession for you?

- (sighs) I mean, as young as I can remember, this is all I wanted to do, truly.

And thankfully, I had a very nice support system with my family that encouraged it from literally, the time I was in second grade and wearing a full head-to-toe fur costume in the Wizard of Oz, crawling around on my hands and knees.

It has just been cemented in me for as long as I can remember.

You know, I do a lot of masterclasses and teaching with the high school and college kids.

And I say to them, we don't do this because we want to, we do this because we have to.

It's just a part of us that it's a breath of air for me.

And to be able to tell my story with PBS has been just an absolute dream.

You know, I've been doing it live for years now, in theaters across the country.

And now, I'm thankfully with the beautiful work that Detroit Public Television did in producing and filming this along with Detroit Public Theater here in Detroit area.

Now it gets to go out hopefully to the rest of the country and other wonderful people, hopefully get to watch it and see where my journey has started.

- Well, I've had the privilege to watch it.

I've watched it a couple of times actually.

So I wanna talk a little bit about the show from Broadway to Obscurity.

I have a few things and a few notes from the show that we're gonna talk about.

And one of them is if you will share your love for the musical "Cats."

- This is gonna be a very short interview then because I have absolutely no love for the musical, Cats.

I could write a show based on just my disdain of that terrible, terrible musical.

I don't get it.

Are they magical cats?

I mean, we know that they are certainly Jellicle Cats because they sing about being jellicle for the first 17 minutes of the show.

The word jellicle is literally said 77 times in one song, are they huge cats or just the set pieces built to scale?

How did that show run for 18 years on Broadway?

How funny that you bring that up first?

I love that.

- So I have to say when I watched that, I went to see Cats in New York on Broadway and fell asleep.

So when you said that, I thought, Oh my gosh, I don't feel 'cause I love Broadway shows.

I love the theater.

- And so do I.

Love it.

- I love musicals.

- Yes - But snoozer.

(chuckling) - But Cats?

- Okay.

So something else I have to bring out from the show is Mandy Patinkin is also mentioned in this play and does he know it?

- Oh no, I doubt he knows it.

I mean, listen, I did years and years, and years with Forbidden Broadway, off-Broadway and on tour.

And Mandy was, I mean, knew about Forbidden Broadway very much.

I mean, Sunday in the Park with George cast album and the Evita cast album.

And I mean, I've been listening to him since I was in junior high.

And I mean, I just love that man.

And I love his voice, and I had a knack of impersonating him.

And so I felt I needed to put it in the show in my section where I talk about Forbidden Broadway.

(solo piano music) ♪ My name is Mandy ♪ ♪ Mandy Patinkin ♪ ♪ And I've been thinking ♪ ♪ I might ♪ ♪ Be known more as a male chanteuse ♪ - Let's talk about Forbidden Broadway.

First, share with our viewers and listeners, what Forbidden Broadway is.

And then I wanna ask you about some of the experiences that you had when you performed it with some of the people in your audience.

So share what Forbidden Broadway is.

- Sure, so Forbidden Broadway is a show written by a man named Gerard Alessandrini.

He wrote it in the early to mid '80s and it's a parody musical on all of, at the time, the Broadway shows that are played.

So you're making fun of Disney shows and Les Mis, and Phantom, and Chita Rivera, and Mandy Patinkin, and Bernadette Peters.

I mean, it's lovingly spoofed, you know?

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, of course.

But yeah, I was with Forbidden Broadway and the sister show, Forbidden Hollywood from six days out of college, I got cast in my first professional show and I was with them for close to 20 years on off-Broadway and with the tour, and it was incredible.

- Wow.

Yeah, so let's talk... And this is from the show from Broadway to Obscurity, you mentioned this, there's a bit in there about this and share some of the people that might've been in the audience when you perform Forbidden Broadway.

I'm talking about the celebrities that would have seen themselves.

- Oh, of course.

Yeah.

I mean, gosh, Chita Rivera, for sure.

I know that she was there one of the nights, I believe some of the cast of Spring Awakening was there, one of the nights.

So Jonathan Groff and Lea Michele, but the biggest, I mean the God of all Gods in musical theater, I performed for Stephen Sondheim who sat in the fourth row center and I, about three or four numbers into the show, I stood on the stage, and in front of Sondheim, I had to impersonate Stephen Sondheim.

And it was an out of body experience and we got to meet him afterwards.

And he had known Gerard for years, decades.

He would give Gerard notes, you know, this is how, this is the lyric you should use to make fun of my show even more.

He loved Forbidden.

And he stood there and he chatted with us for a while and he shook our hands.

And I never wanted to wash my hand after that.

I mean, it's just to meet that man, it was amazing.

I was very saddened a few weeks back when he passed, but how lucky am I that I got to meet him, and how lucky were we all that we got to, we still have all of his beautiful work for years to come.

- And to perform in front of him, how... - To perform in front of him.

- How exciting.

When did you come up with the idea to do this one man show?

And how long did the project take from the time you started thinking of it, started writing it, to when it was recorded from Detroit Public Television?

- Certainly, so.

A theater reached out to me, The Berman Center For The Performing Arts in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

They reached out to me after my run in Jersey Boys in New York was over.

And it was a good friend of mine, she was the marketing director, managing director, I should say.

And she said, "Why don't you come and do a cabaret?"

And I said, "That'd be fun."

She said, "Talk about your time with Jersey Boys and sing some songs."

And I started putting it together and I realized as I was putting it together, that I'm really, really bored with cabarets.

Where you just stand on the stage and just, these are my favorite songs, and it's very indulgent.

Not that my show is not, it is me for 75 minutes, but there's no through line, there's no center.

It's just, here are the songs, here are some stories.

And as I was figuring that out, I realized that I did have a story to tell, and there was a book that I could write for this show.

And I asked if I could do a one man show instead of just a cabaret.

And they were extremely generous with their time and said, "Absolutely take the time you need."

And so nine months and about 14 drafts later, we have what we have now.

A good friend of mine from undergrad, I hired him on as my director and collaborator, Brian Sage.

And he was very instrumental in the work and got an old friend from college, and high school to be my music director, and we kind of took off, and like I said, I believe we debuted the show in January of 2014, and we're still doing it now.

And it's so wonderful.

- Yeah, so describe the show a little bit, that it is your life and it's you on, as you just mentioned for 75 minutes or, you know, the public television special has probably been cut down for an hour so that it fits, and that I think it's a couple of people in the back playing the drums or a guitar, or a few things.

So describe it for us.

- Yeah.

I have a four piece band, piano, guitar, bass, and drums.

I've been playing with a lot of the same guys for many years, they're wonderful.

And it's me for, well, for the public television version, I believe it's about 59 minutes, but in the live version, it's 72 minutes.

And it tells my story of mostly about my time with the Broadway, National Tour, and Chicago companies of Jersey Boys, but the story is my time leading up to it and why I left it, and kinda puts a nice little bow on it with about 27 songs.

- Is it really 27 songs?

- Oh, 27 songs, yup.

- You know that to be true, okay.

- Oh, I sure do.

- So you've mentioned Jersey Boys a couple of times.

So I wanna talk about that, but first I want to talk about the audition for Jersey Boys.

And then later your callback when you would perform or get on stage in front of Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio.

- Yeah.

So, well, I mean, the initial audition was, it was in New York.

My first audition was in Chicago, an open call.

It was the music director and a casting associate, and it was very loose, very easy.

They were super nice.

I did my initial audition and sang a song.

And then they said, "Well, you could play about nine different parts in the show.

So we need a few minutes to figure out what you're doing for the callback tomorrow."

And a few minutes later, they hand me like a phone book full of scripts and music to learn for the next morning.

And I came in and again, worked with them, workshop with them.

And I thought that was it because I had auditioned a million times for a million shows, and that's kind of how it works.

And sure enough, a week later, they called me to come out to New York for the final callback, and I did.

And I walked into the callback room and everybody looked exactly like me.

They were all 5'6" to 5'10", dark brown hair, you know?

Yeah.

It was a room full of, it was like a carnival room, with like a hundred different mirrors, just everywhere I looked, everybody looked like me.

And then I got into the final callback room.

Listen, I wish my final callback was on a stage because I would have been so separate from the producers, but it was a small room, smaller than my office.

And on the other side of the table were all of them lead producers, Tony Award winning director, choreographer, music director, and Frankie Valli, and Bob Gaudio are sitting right there in front of me.

I mean, six feet away from me.

It was absolutely, it was mind boggling.

I mean, Frankie Valli for goodness sakes.

- So you would go on to perform what I think I said was over 1200 performances in Jersey Boys.

And tell me a little bit about that time and being on stage.

And with those lovers of that music.

- It was great, you know?

It was not to pigeonhole people, certainly, but it's rare to see in the audience when you're on stage and looking out to see so many men in the audience, who are truly enthralled to be there.

It's rare.

And this is a really, it's a musical for everybody.

I truly believe that.

And listen, man, I mean, I performed for over a million people between Broadway and Chicago, and the national tour.

And it never got boring, even on those like Wednesday matinees where you just, you're dragging, man.

Wednesday matinees were a drag sometimes, but you get out there for that opening number and that audience would just erupt, and there's no feeling like it.

There's no feeling like walking past a line of people to the box office and excusing yourself, so you can go into the stage door for the theater that they're about to go see that show.

It's a feeling, it's been many years since I've walked through the August Wilson stage door.

And I can still remember how that feels, I really can.

- So I saw the show, obviously, a different company, but I saw the show in Las Vegas and I took my daughter and son-in-law who weren't my- She's always been my daughter, but my son-in-law wasn't my son-in-law at that time, she was 21.

And we went to see the show, and they don't know who Frankie Valli is.

And they loved the show.

And my son-in-law... - How any songs did they realize that they knew that songs are, right?

- They did know.

Exactly.

Exactly.

- Everybody.

- And my son-in-law is one of those gentlemen that will go because his girlfriend or now his wife, is asking him to go and he likes it, okay.

But the performance in the show, he was sold on theater.

So I wanna ask you about what it feels like for you, when you take that non-theater goer believer or non-theater goer having to be there because his wife is dragging him to the theater lover because they hear that music and it changes it.

And I know you saw a few of them over the years.

- Oh, so many of them over the years, so many of them over the years, you know what I...

If I may, there's something I like even more about the theater now, is now I have young daughters, Sydney and Riley, they're 11 and almost 13.

And now, especially over the last four or five years, it's about now taking them to the theater and sharing my love of musical theater and the stage.

And watching them watch the show through their eyes, and to see, it click for them as well.

You know, I took on for Christmas, we all went to go see West Side Story in the movies because it was one of the first musicals that I saw.

I remember my dad and I watching it in the family room when I was young.

And my littlest was just, her eyes were just glued to the screen.

My oldest thought it was a little too violent, but that's okay.

(chuckling) But it's just really amazing to see shows transcend generations.

And that's what we would get sometimes at the show, you would get a grandfather and his son, and now his son, you get three, four generations all in the same row together, all enjoying that.

You can't get that with every show, you just can't.

And this transcended gender and race, and generation, and I love that about this show.

- Okay.

So the show that you've written and starred in, and have taken on the road over the years, why did you walk away?

- Well, gosh, I don't wanna give away the ending, right?

- Fair enough.

If you don't that's okay.

- You know what, I've realized through this show, when I first wrote the show, my biggest worry, my biggest concern was that people wouldn't be able to relate to it.

It's just like a cabaret, there's a guy on stage, singing a song and why, and who cares?

And as I've done this all over the place, people come to me and they say, "I can relate."

I have a family member that who used to perform, or I have young kids, or I mean, there's so many different things that people connect to in my show, which I feel very fortunate about.

And I think that's why the show has had legs, is just people just, they connect to it in their own way.

And you know, I just hope that audiences will understand that sometimes making a hard choice is the right choice.

And that's kind of how the end of my show plays out.

We'll find out why.

- We'll leave it at that.

So I also wanna talk to you about "Under the Streetlamp."

Under the Streetlamp has been seen on public television.

In fact, I think Michael... - Ingersoll.

- Yes.

I interviewed him.

He and one of the other guys, this is the first group, I think that started Under the Streetlamp have been in our KVCR Studio when it was a pledge show, and it was playing.

And it did really well because people love, again, the same similar music, love the sound.

But tell me about your time with Under the Streetlamp.

- Under the Streetlamp was a fantastic four years.

I took over for Michael when he decided that he needed a break and he wanted to do some producing and it was myself and Sean Wiley, who's one of the original guys.

And I mean, since I had started with them, people have come and they've gone, and they left, and they've come back.

That's the nice thing about Streetlamp is it's kind of this fraternity now, you know?

Chris Jones left for a while and now he's back doing some shows.

And I left during the pandemic and I went to go see them when they were in Adrian, Michigan, over the holidays.

And I sat on the front row and they pulled me up on stage and I sang some of our Christmas songs, and I mean, they're gonna be my brothers forever, whether I continue to perform or not, but it was a great four years.

I toured all over the country with them, singing truly some of the best music of the '50s, '60s and '70s, and people loved it.

Again, regardless of your age.

- Yeah.

I was gonna say, the same show, all generations can watch it because of the type of music because of the beat and what it's doing, and how it feels.

So again, I think it's multi-generation when I've gone to see them a few times, because it was part of my work here at KVCR, it's the same kinda thing and the audience just loves it when they pour out and when they're pouring in, because they know what to expect.

So it's great music.

Will you do just about anything for a laugh?

- (chuckling) Gosh.

Yeah, probably knowing me.

Yeah, man.

I was relentless on stage in Jersey Boy, in every show that I've done, all the pranks I've pulled, and the things that I've done, I've gotten in trouble a few times, that's for sure.

But it was so well worth it.

- Now, during COVID, obviously, the world took a hit, obviously, anything kinda venue or performances, Broadway, baseball, anything where there's a crowd, took a hit.

You came up with your quarantine tunes.

Tell me about those.

- Yeah.

My Quarantunes, Listen, on March 15th of 2020 I lost all income and all employment, it was gone.

Like, so, so, so many of my unbelievably talented brothers and sisters across the country on stage, people in the arts like yourself, I mean, you know, the arts, we were the first to go and we were the last to come back, which breaks my heart.

But during that time, I just had a lot of free time and idle hands.

I'm not good with idle hands.

So I would started singing some songs with my acoustic and I would post them on social media just for fun.

(acoustic music) ♪ Too alarmin' now ♪ ♪ To talk about ♪ ♪ Take your pictures down ♪ ♪ Shake it out ♪ ♪ Truth or... ♪ - People were so kind and so giving.

And all of a sudden I was getting tips, you know, virtual tips by singing songs.

And then I would do 40 minute concerts and it was wonderful.

And I did, how many songs did I do?

I think over the course of a year, over 70, maybe 72 songs.

And as it kept going, it got bigger and bigger.

It wasn't just me with a guitar, I was doing full video edits.

There's that song "More Than Words" from Extreme.

I think it came out in 1989.

I did a shot by shot remake of that song, of that music video, playing both parts and had to edit it together.

It was a monster, it took me weeks, but I mean, it was just something that I enjoyed and it was something that people enjoyed.

And if I missed a day, sometimes I would get texts from people, "Oh, I was really looking forward to your song at eight o'clock, will you be posting tomorrow?"

And it was nice.

It reminded me of the kindness of people and the power of music.

You know, there were days, there are people were really down as we all were, and they would turn to just a song that I arranged and it brought them a smile.

And that means the world to me, that means the world to me.

- So you have your show.

It's gonna be seen on public television.

It's probably already played in Detroit.

It will be playing here in Southern California.

What do you want to do next?

Do you wanna do something with that?

Are you going back on stage and going out there, when things get a little better, what's your future look like?

- I'll tell you what I would really love to do.

I mean, again, we produced and filmed this really beautiful show for public television.

And my hope truly is just as Under the Streetlamp has taken off on PBS.

Not that I'm comparing my show to Under the Streetlamp, it's completely different.

I hope that my show will find a home in different markets and PBS across the country.

And I hope that I might be able to find some venues and theaters that catch wind of that, and wanna bring my show in because of it, because I would love to continue to tell this story.

It's an important story for me to tell.

And that's what my hope is.

I hope that I can continue to do from Broadway to Obscurity for as long as people would like me to.

- All right, now, we're not gonna tell the ending, as you have suggested.

Talking about your girls, which you mentioned, do they have the performance bug in them or are they gonna go maybe follow in their mother's footsteps?

- Yeah.

I mean, I hope they follow in their mother's footsteps because she was a business major and she's very smart, grounded woman.

- Luckily for you.

- Yeah, luckily very luckily, she's patient too.

Both of my girls danced a lot.

They're beautiful dancers.

My oldest has a really, really lovely voice and I hope that she'll do choir in junior high and high school.

My youngest is really good with instruments.

She could pick up instruments really quickly.

So we'll see what happens with that.

She was doing piano before the pandemic and doing great.

And then, you know, that stopped and now she doesn't even remember the notes on the piano, so we'll have to get back to that, but I don't know, but I'll tell you what, if they decide that they want to, I will hopefully be as supportive as my parents were for me and push them in the right direction.

That's all I can do.

- Nice.

Eric, thank you so much for your time.

I hope the show does well on public television and I wish you all the best.

- Thank you, you as well.

Stay safe.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) ♪ Yeah, the simple things in life ♪