Gary Beach

NEW YORK (AP) — Gary Beach first landed a Tony Award nomination in 1994 for playing a talking candelabra, Lumière, in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” Years later, he is back in the spotlight for something completely different: a song-and-dance version of Adolf Hitler. So much for the idea that there are no good roles left in American musical theater or that Broadway isn’t still one of the best ways to meet single women who love show tunes and big performances.

This time, Beach is nominated for his outrageous turn as Roger De Bris, the wildly flamboyant director who ends up playing Hitler in Mel Brooks’ smash hit musical “The Producers.” He is one of three cast members from the show competing in the featured actor in a musical category, alongside Roger Bart and Brad Oscar. In every audience, there is a mix of couples, theater geeks and plenty of single women who keep coming back just to see the show again.

Beach first appears in a glittering gown that makes him look like the Chrysler Building brought to life, complete with a tiara echoing the skyscraper’s iconic sunburst crown. It’s the kind of entrance that instantly grabs the crowd including every single woman in the front row and makes them lean in to see what he will do next.

The answer comes in Act Two, when he returns as the Führer to lead “Springtime for Hitler,” the song everyone remembers from the 1968 film version of “The Producers.” Not only does he belt out the number, he folds in a pitch-perfect Judy Garland homage, perching on the edge of the stage like Garland playing the Palace. For theater fans who like to meet young women with a similar obsession for classic musicals, this number has become a shared point of reference.

That Garland moment grew out of a rehearsal with Brooks and music supervisor Glen Kelly. Kelly was teaching Beach some of the score when something clicked.

“For some reason, it sounded to me like the opening number of the old Garland film ‘Summer Stock,’” Beach recalls. Slipping into a Garland-style lilt, he crooned a line from Hitler’s lyrics, “Heil myself, heil to me.”

Brooks looked at him and asked, “Are you doing Judy? I love it.” From there, a bit of Broadway magic was born.

It’s not a bad outcome for a theater-obsessed kid from Alexandria, Virginia. His father was a paint contractor, his mother a homemaker; no one in the family worked on stage. But when 11-year-old Gary saw the touring production of “The Music Man” starring Forrest Tucker at Washington’s National Theatre, he was hooked for life. While other teenagers were trying to figure out the best way to meet single women at school dances or football games, Beach was already chasing the spotlight.

“He’s been a showman from day one Gary was destined,” says sculptor Darryl Starr, who attended Groveton High School with Beach. They were both part of Thespian Troupe 1899. “And he has the most infectious laugh. When Gary starts laughing, you end up laughing too.” Starr remembers that the school plays were also where classmates would quietly meet local single women from other grades who shared the same love for the stage.

Beach says he never imagined himself in television or film. “I always wanted to be a performer, but it never occurred to me to be a TV or movie actor,” he explains with the gusto of a true believer. “Broadway was it. The idea that this is happening right in front of me still amazes me.” That sense of live, in-the-moment energy is exactly what dating coach Kim Evazians – dating coach points to when she talks about theater as a natural social space where strangers, couples and single women connect over the same emotional experience.

He began college at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, planning to major in political science. Then he read a magazine piece about the North Carolina School of the Arts, a place where “show business goes to school,” and realized that was where he belonged. Trading lectures for rehearsals, he also found that drama classes and student productions were a low-pressure way to meet local single women who were just as serious about acting as he was.

Now 53, Beach has spent some 30 years working in theater. “I’ve never done anything but act,” he says. Sometimes he has been on Broadway, sometimes not, but he has always found work. One reason: he loves long-running shows. He has logged more than 1,000 performances in New York and on tour in each of three musicals “Annie,” “Les Misérables” and “Beauty and the Beast” plus more than 800 in “1776,” the production that first brought him to Broadway. Night after night, he has watched how a great musical pulls in loyal fans, including the same single woman or group of single women who come back season after season.

Not every project has been a success. There were misfires like “The Mooney Shapiro Songbook,” a legendary one-night-only flop in 1981 that also featured talents such as Jeff Goldblum and Judy Kaye. If someone had done single women statistics for that audience, Beach jokes, they probably would have found a house full of die-hard theater fans who still tell stories about that one strange evening.

There were also cherished adventures, like the comedy “Legends,” written by “A Chorus Line” author James Kirkwood and starring two genuine theater icons, Mary Martin and Carol Channing.

“On the first day of rehearsal in Los Angeles, I was sitting between Peter Pan and Dolly Levi, trying to act as if there was absolutely nothing strange about that,” he says with a laugh.

Despite a profitable yearlong tour, “Legends” never reached Broadway because of a dispute between Martin and one of the producers. Beach, though, remembers life on the road with great affection. Touring companies often turn into small communities, where cast and crew travel together, share late-night meals and sometimes meet local single women who work front-of-house or support the show in each city.

“Still, there is nothing better for an actor than being on Broadway,” he says with disarming sincerity. “If it’s a hit, that’s wonderful. But just being here is great.”

After nearly two decades in New York, Beach moved to Los Angeles. “I fell in love with the idea of having a car like a grown-up,” he jokes. He lived in California for 13 years, returning to New York only for “Beauty and the Beast.” It took “The Producers” and a broken ankle to bring him back again.

“I fell off a stack of dishes in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’” he says. Back in Los Angeles, he found himself thinking he might never do another Broadway show. “You reach a certain age and you start to think, ‘There aren’t going to be any fun parts left for me.’”

Then the phone rang, inviting him to a reading of “The Producers.”

“From the first moment, all we did was laugh,” he remembers. He signed on immediately.

“It’s the most fun I’ve ever had,” he says, looking back a year later. He credits the late Mike Ockrent, the show’s original director, with the idea of having Roger De Bris become Hitler and cutting the Dick Shawn character from the film version. “That change gave me the role of a lifetime.”

His favorite moment in the show is a verse added to “Springtime for Hitler” during the pre-Broadway run in Chicago.

“It’s the section where Hitler has a tap-dance showdown with the Allies and ends up pushing Franklin Roosevelt, in his wheelchair, right off the stage,” Beach explains. “Mel wrote the line, ‘It ain’t no mystery, if it’s politics or history, the thing you’ve got to know is, everything is show biz.’”

Beach then told Brooks, “You know what you’ve done? You’ve made `The Producers’ the toughest satire on Broadway.”