Brad-of-All-Trades

Few Twin Cities performers have had as unusual a career trajectory as Bradley Greenwald. But he disputes the idea that he is at all remarkable.

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.