Carl Dean is a busy performer the next few weeks. First up is “God of Carnage,” Yasmina Reza’s acclaimed play, at South City Theatre Feb. 14-22. Then, he takes to the Homewood Theatre stage on March 7 for his cabaret show, “Reflections, Ruminations, Ramifications, and the Rest of It.” Here, Dean talks about both shows, as well as a career that has made him one of Birmingham’s most popular performers.
Tell me a little about yourself.
I’ll be 51 this month. I’m an Army brat – born in Florida, lived there and Alaska and New York, before moving to Alabama in 11th grade. Moved to NYC after college and then ended up back in Birmingham to raise my kids. I founded Magic City Actors Theatre in the mid-2000s with Leah Faulkner and brought eight seasons of shows to the stage at the Virginia Samford Theatre with that company. I’ve been a theater artist for longer than I want to say, and I am currently the director of the Jefferson County Academy of Theatre and Dance. I’m a single dad and have two amazing kids, Caroline and Ryder, who are both incredibly awesome humans.
What’s your first memory of being on stage?
9th grade, in upstate New York, I played a bunch of classic musical theater leads in a revue called “Bits of Broadway,” and that is what really got me excited and turned on about being a performer. When I moved to Alabama, I was fortunate to work with Flowers Center for the Performing Arts in Ozark. I played Tony in “West Side Story” my junior year, and Don Lockwood (the Gene Kelly role) in “Singin’ in the Rain” as a senior. It was that show that got the attention of James Hatcher, founder of Birmingham Summerfest, who came to Ozark to see the show and hired me out of high school to join the Summerfest ensemble, and that is what ultimately brought me to Birmingham.
What’s your favorite role you’ve played or show you’ve been in?
Favorite musical role was Stacee Jaxx in “Rock of Ages” at the VST. Favorite role in a play was John Proctor in “The Crucible” with Theatre Downtown. Favorite show I’ve ever directed and choreographed was “Jesus Christ Superstar,” starring Lucas Pepke and Nick Burroughs. Those shows definitely stand out in my heart as high points in my artistic journey.
Who is your favorite composer?
Stephen Sondheim, Jason Robert Brown, and Prince.
Who is your favorite playwright?
August Wilson, Eric Bogosian, David Mamet.
Do you have a favorite show?
“West Side Story.” I think it’s the most perfectly constructed musical ever.
Do you have a favorite song from a show?
“No One is Alone” from “Into the Woods.”
What’s a performance (on stage or screen) that sticks out to you as an audience member?
Seeing and meeting the original Broadway cast of “Hamilton” with my kids, and all of them being so super kind and gracious with Caroline and Ryder. I had met Lin before through the original production of “Bring it On,” but watching my kids in awe of those artists and interacting with them was purely magical. Getting to see the OBC of “Into the Woods,” along with Stephen Sondheim, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, talking about the show and singing all the hits. It was the first father’s day I hadn’t spent with my kids, and it was a massively emotional experience that I’ll never forget, and it made it extra special when I got to direct both of my kids in that show years later.
What is a role you wish you will or could have played?
Edward Bloom in “Big Fish,” Hades in “Hadestown” and Sweeney Todd.
Any great advice you’ve been given by a director or anyone else about being on stage?
My views of performing have been shaped by a lot of influences, but some of the best insight I’ve gotten can be summed up like this: It’s all pretend, but if you don’t believe it, no one will. Be honest, say the words the playwright has written, and everything else will fall in place. It sounds overly simplistic, but when you’re 4 years old pretending to be Superman, no one has to give you notes on being more believable, because the world hasn’t stomped on your imagination yet and made you afraid of looking silly. Be bold, be brave, be vulnerable and make choices. That’s what it’s about.
Do you have any pre-performance rituals?
I like to have my dressing room prep area set up just so. It helps me get into the groove preshow: my steamer, throat coat tea, Thayer’s slippery elm lozenges, Ricola cough drops and salt and vinegar Pringles! I like to take time alone before I go on and focus on what I’m about to do, trying to bring the energy of the day and what I can take from it into the show, and shedding the parts of the day that pull my emotions into areas that I want to leave behind at the stage door. I do push-ups and warm up my voice with lots of weird noises and yawps!
Tell me about a time something went wrong on stage.
I was playing Rum Tum Tugger in Birmingham Summerfest’s production of “Cats.” We had taken the show on the road to a large venue in Tuscaloosa. My big number was supposed to end with me leaping to the hood of a car that was in the junkyard set. Well, I was moving full speed, slipped and slammed across the hood like a piece of roadkill. It was super loud, and I was literally sprawled across the hood. I sort of just crawled up the rest of the hood and finally made it back to a standing position, raising my hands up in what I hoped looked like an appropriate rock star stance, even though I was in pain and couldn’t breathe. I asked a friend in the house if he’d seen it happen and he said, “No, I looked down right before it happened, but I was all the way in the balcony and I still heard the loud bang, and when I looked up it looked like you’d just been hit by the car!”
Tell me something people might be surprised to know about you.
I was a skate-shop sponsored, competitive skateboarder in my teen years. I have been skating since I was around 10 years old, and still skate hardcore. I love riding bowls and vert ramps, and Citywalk skatepark is one of my favorite places to be! I was the first broken bone in the park when it opened two summers ago. I was skating in the massive amoeba bowl and came in fakie (backward), but slid out and slammed hard, breaking my wrist in the process. I have two screws in my left leg, a cadaver tendon in my left shoulder and a metal plate and screws in my right wrist, all from skateboarding. But I will never stop. That and riding my two Harley Davidson motorcycles are some of my favorite ways to unwind and fuel my need for speed and adrenaline!
What kind of music do you listen to when you’re not performing?
I love ‘90s hip hop, classic rock and funk. My all-time favorites are Tupac, Prince, MJ, Elvis and Sinatra, but my current groove mood is Teddy Swims, Lake Street Dive and the Black Pumas.
Let’s talk about “God of Carnage.” It’s a pretty heavy-duty play – something that people may not expect you to be in. Can you talk about the play and why you wanted to do it?
Yasmina Reza’s play is a brutally unflinching look at the human condition and how we mask our true selves at times to maintain decorum and appear as “good people.” The reality is, though, that inside most folks is another side: savagery and fierceness ready to explode when met with the proper provocation. Humans can very quickly devolve from courteous to violent when the conditions change and the pressure mounts, and this play examines that in a very real way. It’s a massive acting challenge, in that it is only a four-person play, two couples (who are also couples in real life, which is its own adventure) who almost never leave the stage and who present four very distinct personality types and modes of communicating/breaking down. I had read the play in the past and seen the film version, and when presented with the opportunity to play Alan, especially alongside my love, Jennifer Spiegelman, I leapt at the chance. These past couple years have truly been about me finding challenges that push me to do new and scary things, and to step out of my comfort zone…. about trying to decide what kind of stories I want to tell and what projects I feel a need to be involved in these days. It began with “The Crucible” last year, and my first solo cabaret, “Carl Dean Bares All,” at C.A.T. Both of those performance opportunities were exhilarating and terrifying and forced me to dig into places that I hadn’t really had to dig before as an actor, and I grew from the fear, the risk and
the catharsis of it all, especially as I was beginning to question life, the universe and my place in it, now that my kids are grown and doing their own thing. “God of Carnage” came along at a perfect time for me to continue pushing myself and to examine other parts of myself. Alan is a tough role, and he’s not always a very nice person. Playing him, though, lets me hold a mirror up to parts of my relationships, actions and life patterns, and to dissect them on stage in “relative safety.” I can’t say that I necessarily “like” Alan, but then again, I guess I don’t really like myself all the time either. This show feels a little like staring down those things and coming to grips with them to a degree, as we examine the universality of the carnage we create as humans when engaging with one another on a daily basis.
What about the cast and director?
The cast is terrific. Being real life couples, our chemistry with our significant others in the play feels very honest, almost scarily so at times, lol. Jennifer Spiegelman is phenomenal in the role of Annette, and she is an absolute blast to watch perform and to perform with! I got the chance to be on stage with her for the first time in “The Crucible,” and that was dope, but getting to literally tear up the boards together in these scenes is a thrill every time. She’s an amazing actress, and such a great scene (and life) partner! Paul Boyer and Lori Mercer play the Novaks, and they are such fun to play with. Paul brings a brutish, yet hysterical edge to the role of Paul, and it is so cool to watch the mask of congeniality melt away during his performance. Lori’s transition as Veronica from having it “all together” and utter poise to being wildly out of control and aggressive is such fun to experience and will be absolutely identifiable to audiences. Getting to find the groove with them in this super funny but crushingly brutal dark comedy has been a wonderful collaboration and experience. Our director, Pat Yates, is a dear friend who I worked with many times staging shows at Mountain Brook High School, but it was my first time to be directed by her, and it’s been super fun. She always encouraged us to explore and discover and never let us lose sight of finding the moments when our characters let their guard down and we see the savagery inside their rational and more controlled exteriors.
What do you hope audiences will come away with having seen the play?
I hope it makes them feel better about their own relationships, lol!! We open on Valentine’s Day, so I guarantee that you’ll leave feeling great about whoever you’re on that date with. Seriously, though, the play is challenging, and it forces us to ask the question of whether the person we present to the world is really the truth and just how much masking we do when we engage with each other. I’ve always said that every single human interaction, no matter how brief, leaves both participants better or worse than before it happened, and the challenge in life is to try to always leave folks better for having interacted with you. I hope that people walk away from “Carnage” with a desire to be more honest with themselves, and in doing so, to look in the mirror and see if there is anything that resonated from our four characters that they see in themselves that maybe they’re not the proudest of that they can change. I hope we can make people think about the way they speak with one another, the way they offer support to the ones they love, and the way in which they treat their relationships with openness, vulnerability, and candor. The two couples in this play fell in love, got married, had families and shared wonderful moments with each other as spouses, but we see them now in very dysfunctional places. It shows how easy it can be to let love turn into convenience (or an afterthought), and I hope it inspires folks to reapproach the ones they love with truth, support, encouragement and vulnerability. If the couples in the play did that for each other, they likely wouldn’t be at war with one another by the end of it!”
Now, the cabaret. What are you planning for that night?
Well, it’s kind of an emotional follow-up to my first solo show last year, “Carl Dean Bares All.” In that show I took the audience on a journey through my life by means of a tour of my tattoos. I’ve got a lot of stories and memories immortalized on my body, and as I was putting that show together that became the roadmap for all the stories I wanted to tell about my life, thoughts on love, parenthood and theater. This one, “Reflections, Ruminations, Ramifications, and the Rest of It,” is a collection of my thoughts and the things in my mind that I didn’t fully go into the first go round. It also addresses the ways in which over the course of the last year I have grown, learned, and changed. There are some things that I’ve gotten clarity on, made new realizations about and suffered a few slings and arrows over, and so that’s where my mind is as I am preparing this second solo piece. Neither of these shows was really intended to be repeated, and I am a little too ADD to do that anyway. My mind moves fast and life is too short. Doing the cabarets, and getting them ready, has been sort of therapeutic for me in a way. I’m a theater person, so of course, in this crazy way, the place I’m most comfortable reflecting and facing down some of these realizations is in front of an audience. It’s a bit weird, maybe, but I feel like folks have been listening to me sing and watching me do shows for a lot of years, and as my life has changed drastically over the last two years, I’m more interested in getting out what it is I’ve learned and felt during this long theatrical journey I’ve had. It’s a chance to say what I think, what I feel, what has moved me and changed me, and to express gratitude for those things, while also being vulnerable enough to reflect on accepting the uncertainty of what lies ahead as I am getting older. So, folks will hear some of my favorite songs, they’ll hear a few stories, and they’ll hear my evolving thoughts on life, love, aging, being a dad and what I have felt as I’ve asked myself a whole lotta questions about those topics in the past couple years. So, outside of the song selections, what comes out is gonna be a bit of a surprise to me, too, which is kinda the way I like it. I absolutely have a skeleton and a form in mind of how the show flows, but a “script?” Nah, not so much. It’s just me speaking from the heart and flowing with the energy of the moment. It worked (for the most part) a year ago, and this time, almost a year to the day later (and one more birthday older), some of the things I thought I “knew” have shifted, and so it’s about sharing and talking about things we sort of all experience, even if through a slightly different prism or backdrop.
What’s the difference in prep work for you doing a straight play vs. a musical cabaret?
Prepping for a straight play, like “The Crucible” or “God of Carnage,” feels a little less emotionally taxing in a way (when it’s going well, at least). There’s the major task of learning a LOT of lines, but once that is finished, and you’re in the process, you grow into the role, and the moments in the play affect you differently depending on a lot of daily variables. There is always something of yourself that you bring to the part, and sometimes “turning off” after the show is tough, especially in powerful emotional pieces like these. But preparing feels a little more mechanical in the nuts and bolts of it all. I have to be able to repeat blocking, lines, moments, night after night, and provide at least some consistency for my fellow performers. With the cabaret shows, I know they will only ever be done once and then never again. It’s about what I am experiencing on a larger and more personal scale. It’s harder to process what exactly I’m going to say, and I find that I just kinda stick to the feelings and memories associated with the song selections, and I don’t pressure myself as much about knowing precisely what’s gonna come out of my mouth to get me from song to song. That leads to great spontaneity and honesty in the moment, but also leaves you the morning after wondering exactly what you said and why you said it to some degree. And that can be a bit difficult to process. But I have a set list and a path, and it’s more like a conversation amongst friends than a “show” that I’m putting on.
Your children are also actors, correct?
They are both terrific performers; each, in fact, won Best Leading Performer awards at the Trumbauer HS Theatre Festival while they were in high school. Caroline spent her whole childhood performing and doing shows with Birmingham Ballet and through STARS at the VST. Ryder did a show in 5th grade, but kinda crept into performing later. I was super lucky and got to direct both my kids, as they both came through my program at JCATD, and one of the most magical times I had (and the only time I got to) was directing both of them in “Into the Woods.” Caroline was the Baker’s wife, and Ryder cruised around as a skateboard punk version of Jack, cause ya know I like to mix things up when I direct, and so our version was set in a sorta warped, current day NYC. That memory, and getting to watch them share the stage together, especially in that particular show, is one I’ll cherish forever.
Is that something you steered them toward or from?
I don’t know if I intentionally did either of those things. I always loved getting to share rehearsal time and theater with the kids when they were young, and I think my theater world definitely rubbed off on them as they grew. I really just let them follow their own hearts, though. Ironically, Caroline, who did theater the whole time growing up, decided not to go into it as a profession and is working at a children’s hospital in Chicago while she is finishing up her psychology degree. Ryder, though, is majoring in theater at UAB and is killing it. He is currently performing in “Assassins” at VST and he’s already booked his next project (can’t tell yet). So, I didn’t really steer them toward or away from the theater as much as stand back and let them choose their own paths. I did have a moment of concern when Ryder told me he wanted to major in theater, and it made me flashback to the moment I told my own dad I wanted to do that, and he was not too thrilled, since theater isn’t the most stable job in the world. It’s definitely a struggle for sure, and there was a moment when I did ask him if he was sure this was what he wanted, and if he was ready for the potential struggle that comes with it. Ultimately, though, I just want them to pursue their dreams, and that is what they’re both doing, so I am really proud. Last year, in my first cabaret, they both performed with me on “No One is Alone,” and it was so amazing to get to do that with them both!
What’s next for you?
To be honest, I’m not sure, and I’m growing to be OK, and even a little excited, with that. I have a couple performance opportunities that I am looking at coming up, but I am also looking at other endeavors that excite me. I am returning to JCATD for my eighth year as the director of the Academy next year, but as for me and theater, and what comes next in the upcoming season and beyond, I really don’t know. I am asking myself what stories I want to tell, who I want to tell them with, and what personal sacrifices I have to make to tell those stories. I have not lost my desire to create and to share, but I have been doing this a long time, and I am definitely evolving in what I “need” to feel fulfilled artistically. So, I’m trying to take it one day at a time, and to listen to my heart, and to enjoy watching Ryder carve his path in the theater community while Caroline makes her way in the medical world. I am in love, and that is beautiful. I am fulfilled in so many ways, and I have had a fantastic career making theater. So, what’s the next challenge? I’m exploring that. My dream is to be on the beach in Mexico or Costa Rica selling coconuts and making music and art. The ocean is the ultimate goal. That’s where all this ends. Watching the waves, remembering all the beautiful moments of creation and enjoying the majesty of the Moon and Mother Ocean. And hopefully, if I’m lucky, I’ll still have the opportunity to touch hearts and make a little magic.
“God of Carnage,” at South City Theatre Feb. 14-22. “Reflections, Ruminations, Ramifications, and the Rest of It,” at Homewood Theatre on March 7.
