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A Theatergoer's Notebook
by Harry Haun
Playbill
November, 2001
From Don To Con -- How do you get from A.E. Housman to Harold Hill in a single lifetime, let alone a month of rehearsals? Robert Sean Leonard made that startling transition, and his answer is "Susan Stroman." A week after he won the Tony as the young Housman of the Oxford classics department in "The Invention of Love," she tapped him to make his musical bow as the bogus band prof in "The Music Man."
"It was a cusy audition," Leonard allows, "basically, just me -- to come in and see," but the actor in him convinced Stroman he could carry the baton and voila! -- he's a song-and-dance man. "I still don't think I can really sing," he demurs, despite plausible demonstrations to the contrary. "When you're in a show with Rebecca Luker, it's hard to define yourself as a singer. It's like a math teacher hanging out with Einstein. When I think of singing, I think of what Rebecca does. What I do is acting with a melody in it."
After all, as Professor Hill is always preaching, "Singing is sustained talking" -- and Leonard concurs, "especially in roles like Harold Hill and Hnery Higgins and John Adams, where the parts are really crafted a little more for an actor than a singer."
Still, it amazes him he's in a musical. "I'm like the cat who ate the canary. I walk around with a secret grin on my face all the time. I feel I'm pulling off the biggest con in the world by doing this role. This season, with "Invention" and this, I feel like a real rep actor."
