Da Butz charms Broadway—and brings home a Tony Award
By Jim Nicholson
When Norbert Leo Butz—whose less-than-euphonic name has been the bane of his career—rose to accept the 2005 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, he blurted, “I want to thank God, because there’s no way someone with my name from South St. Louis should be standing here at Radio City holding one of these without divine intervention.”
Following in the wake of the alliteratively named Kevin Kline, Butz is the second native St. Louisan ever to win a Tony for Best Actor in a Musical (or any other acting category, for that matter). Teamed with John Lithgow in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, he plays a French Riviera con man. He’s been making the difficult seem easy in eight performances a week at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre—but the venue still comes as a shock.
“I never in a million years thought I would be doing Broadway—or even musicals,” says Butz, recalling his years at Bishop DuBourg High School and Webster University. “I wanted to be seen as an actor—you know, a capital-A Actor. Now I know that musical comedy takes major acting chops.”
Butz “devours the scenery,” as one critic put it, delivering one of the most physical (and funniest) performances in years. “Farce is hard!” wails the actor, adding that Dirty Rotten Scoundrels “is desperate comedy. [Director] Jack O’Brien calls our show a blood sport.”
And Butz survives how? “I do about three hours of physical therapy a week, plus massage and yoga and a gym workout,” he says. “It’s grueling work, but you forget about all that when you feel the energy from the audience. The great thing about doing comedy at this point in our country’s history is that people have plenty to feel anxiety over, but when you get 1,800 perfect strangers in a theater generally losing it and laughing together, it creates a very powerful energy. I find it healing.”
Butz credits director/choreographer Susan Stroman, with whom he worked in an earlier Tony-nominated performance, for “making me look like I actually knew how to dance, which is no small feat.” Modesty must come naturally, because Butz just received a TDF/Astaire Award for Best Male Dancer this season in a Broadway show. Of course, he had the help of another Webster grad, choreographer Jerry Mitchell.
For his performance in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Butz also received the Drama Desk and Outer Critics’ Circle awards for Outstanding Actor in a Musical.
“I am grateful and amazed when anybody asks me to do anything,” he says, “because this is a business where a lot of people don’t get to go do a job they love all that often. When it’s clicking, it’s the best drug in the world. You have to use all of yourself, the whole shebang—and that’s fulfilling to me.”
