Brad-of-All-Trades

“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.”