Brad-of-All-Trades

He started in the late 1980s singing opera and classical music, but many of his recent successes have been as an actor of rare sensitivity. His current role, as the title character in the Children’s Theatre Company’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which opens November 8, is the newest line on his resumé. Other recent performances include the title roles in Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s Mefistofele and Nautilus Music–Theater’s Man of La Mancha, a lead vocalist in Carmina Burana with the Minnesota Dance Theatre, and an acclaimed solo performance this past summer in I Am My Own Wife at the Jungle Theater, which earned him an Ivey Award. But Greenwald is self-effacing about his accomplishments. “It’s about being a journeyman, being a craftsman,” he says. “For us pluggers, you have to be smart.”

The irony is that, as a youth, a performing career wasn’t on Greenwald’s radar. He had acted in summer musicals in his hometown of Fairmont, Minnesota, but after spending his senior year as an exchange student in Germany, he entered the University of Minnesota and majored in German, intent on teaching high school. Even though classical music wasn’t part of his upbringing, he says he attended the U of M because he wanted to play baritone horn in the Gopher marching band, which he did for two years.

On a whim his sophomore year, he took voice lessons and began working with Vern Sutton and his Opera Workshop, where he performed from 1985 to 1989. “He was very bright and so eager to learn everything,” Sutton says. “He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but he was interested in all types of experiences.”

When Greenwald was hired to play a small role in the Minnesota Opera’s 1989 tour of Madame Butterfly, he took a quarter off from school and never looked back.

Despite frequently playing comprimario roles with the Minnesota Opera, performing lead roles with North Star Opera, and working extensively with Ex Machina, an original-instruments Baroque opera company, Greenwald experienced lean times in the early 1990s. “I lived from giglet to giglet,” he says. “The only way I stayed employed as a performer, other than luck, was mastering the music vocabularies of early music and opera, music theater, and concert music. It was impressed upon me pretty early [by Sutton and other colleagues] that just having a voice was not enough. You could not apply one part of the voice to all styles. For instance, you use the technique of straight tome for early music, using vibrato only for color. Whereas the full legato sound of opera stresses vibrato.”

Greenwald is the youngest of five children, but since his closest sibling is twelve years older, he essentially grew up as an only child. His father died when he was nine, and his mother worked two jobs to keep food on the table. “We were very poor, and I spent a lot of my childhood alone. But it taught me to be independent and self-sufficient,” he says, crediting his mother for his strong work ethic.

His early performing days were less about making art than about making a living performing, so Greenwald auditioned for anything and everything. “I would lie about having a skill in order to get a gig and then quickly learn it,” he says. “When the Minnesota Opera asked if I had the French to do the spoken dialogue in Carmen, I said, ‘Sure!’” He listened to recordings to phonetically translate and memorize the Carmen dialogue and was ready when rehearsals started several weeks later.

“Same way when I was asked if I could do an Elvis impersonation at an audition for a Chanhassen Dinner Theatres show. I quickly figured out how to do one.” He’d become a master of mimicry.

Greenwald may claim his willingness to scramble and take risks as a matter of professional survival, but CTC artistic director Peter Brosius sees it as a hallmark of Greenwald’s career. “With each piece, you’re watching not only an extension of his range, but increased nuance and emotional connection,” says Brosius. “His range keeps growing without sacrificing a core emotional truth.”

Whether for professional survival or the thrill of a challenge, or both, Greenwald continued to broaden his scope as an actor with CTC productions of 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins in the 1990s and Snow Queen and Wizard of Oz in 2002 and 2003. Since the CTC productions were musicals, Greenwald credits his vocal abilities for getting him cast. “I came in with a strong trained voice,” he says. “That was my trump card to get a part. That was my skill.”

But, says Sutton, “Bradley was always a very intuitive actor. He never needed much direction—guidance but not direction.”

In 1994, Greenwald’s skills were challenged and stretched in new ways when he was cast in Jeune Lune’s production of Don Juan Giovanni, a conflation of Molière’s play and Mozart’s opera. Jeune Lune artistic director Dominique Serrand, recalling Greenwald’s introduction to his company’s unique style of creating theater, says, “He was terrified to be in a group of people who improvise. But he was very game. That is his greatest quality, his playfulness.”

For his part, says Greenwald, “I felt like road kill on a freeway of Porsches. Their theatrical vocabulary was so much broader than anything I’d seen in musical theater. There was such an abandon to the immediacy of imagination. This was the finishing school of my empirical education.”

Greenwald performed in Jeune Lune’s acclaimed series of Mozart operas and is now a devotee of the company’s style. His diverse experience gives him a sophisticated perspective that he brings to his reflections on their work. “There is an expected convention that a director has to put a concept on an opera, like La Traviata—done with Nazis,” he says. “That seems a little half-assed. We don’t do opera with a concept. We write our own piece collaboratively with the people in the room. It’s a completely new world that the music exists in.”

It was Bain Boehlke at the Jungle who, in 2001, cast Greenwald in his first nonmusical role: Arnold Beckoff in Torch Song Trilogy, the lead in a three-hour play. “I am a risk taker,” Boehlke says, “but I didn’t consider this a chance. I was blown away by his talent and knew he’d be good.”

Boehlke chose correctly again when he cast Greenwald for I Am My Own Wife, a one-man play in which the actor performs more than thirty roles, predominately Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a man who survived, in drag, both the Nazis and the East German Stasi. Greenwald’s was a breathtaking portrayal, most notably for its delicacy. There was no self-consciousness, just a fully committed virtuosic performance. And it should be no surprise that the former German major nailed all the dialects.

The run of the popular Wife was extended, but what made the production a special joy for Greenwald was the rare opportunity to work closely with John Novak, production stage manager at the Jungle and his partner of fifteen years. “Trust was a given,” Greenwald says. “I was very aware of his presence. As it would be when I sing with a piano, it felt like a duet, not a solo performance.”

Despite all his theater work, Greenwald remains committed to performing classical music. Earlier this fall, he sang in a concert with Lyra Baroque Orchestra, and this spring he performs with Vocal-Essence in its festival of William Bolcom works.

Though Greenwald doesn’t have a favorite style of music or type of theater (“They’re all fascinating in some way to me,” he says), he understands the different challenges they present: “In music, the canvas of emotional content is set out for you. With theater, you have to musicalize the text yourself, using the rhythm and the music of the words.

“It’s also a challenge playing a character everyone knows so well,” he says of the Grinch. “You want to leave the audience satisfied, but still make the character your own.” He’s unsure what his personal stamp on the Christmas icon will be, but it’s safe to say his vocal skills will play a part. “It’s a music-heavy show, and there are eleven shows a week with me rarely offstage,” he says. “It demands stamina. That’s where the vocal training comes in.”

“He is one of those extraordinary actors who combines a brilliant voice and an incredible instinct with a wonderful comic sense and sense of character,” says Brosius. “It’s wonderful to watch an artist who doesn’t stop challenging himself, pushing the limits. He never relies on old tricks.”

When Greenwald contemplates his hectic schedule, he is sometimes a little overwhelmed. Together, he and Novak renovated the kitchen in their south Minneapolis house, but the yard is Greenwald’s domain. There is little lawn in the front of the house, the grass replaced by elaborate terraced gardens. “Gardening is my therapy,” he says, proud to point out that “Bradley” is Old English for “broad meadow” and “Greenwald” is German for “green forest.”

“But I need to eat and have a roof over my head, so it’s still a mad scramble to keep working. I tackle, tackle, tackle,” he says. “The fact that I have tried to do my best at every challenge presented is exhausting, but made me a better performer. Still, over the years, I have wearied of challenges, being thrown into something new. But it’s the only way I’ve been able to stay employed.”

Serrand cannot imagine Greenwald ever changing: “He’s so interested in so many things. That’s one of his extraordinary qualities. His curiosity is one of his greatest gifts to us. He makes us more curious ourselves. His curiosity will lead him.”

William Randall Beard is the opera columnist for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.