Brushing up his Shakespeare

By Joseph Hurley

Irish American Michael Mulheren, a jovial, 43-year-old character actor, is currently playing the bigger and maybe more threatening of the two comic gangsters in the smash hit revival of what is probably Cole Porter’s greatest musical, "Kiss Me, Kate."

Mulheren, when asked about the forces which made him a performer, comes up with an answer not uncommon when actors are confronted with that particular question. "I wanted the attention," he said.

Mulheren is the youngest of six children of a father whose family came from Co. Galway and settled in Harlem, and a mother who was born in the Bronx to people of County Tyrone ancestry.

Mulheren did most of his growing up in Redbank, N.J., and most of his siblings have those blue collar jobs he described as being the destiny of all those cousins and uncles. Except for one of his brothers.

"My brother, John, who’s eight years older than I am, owns a couple of firms on Wall Street, and he’s actually pretty infamous among the Irish. In the late 1980s, every Wall Street firm had an arbitrageur, and John was the second most notorious, with Ivan Boesky being the most famous. My brother is a kind of clown figure in Jim Stewart’s book, ‘Den of Thieves.’"

With a colorful character like that in the family, Mulheren’s wanting to be a performer didn’t come across to his relatives as all that peculiar. "My brother, John, and his wife, encouraged me to become an actor," he said, "on the theory that who cares what you do for a living as long as you’re happy. I said ‘That’s easy for you to say. You were a millionaire by the time you were thirty.’ John said,’I wanted to be a millionaire. That made me happy.’ That made it very clear to me, so I started tending bar and waiting tables, trying to get work as an actor."

That was in 1982. By 1984, Mulheren was an Equity member, and since 1985, he hasn’t had to take a job outside his chosen profession.

Martin Beck Theatre

Every night and every matinee, when Mulheren approaches the 45th Street stage entrance of the Martin Beck Theatre, where "Kiss Me, Kate" is playing to packed houses, he’s confronted with these words painted in bold letters on the bright blue stage door: "Every performer in this extraordinary cast is magical," a quote from a respected TV and radio commentator.

That’s quite a statement to live up to, but it doesn’t hold any terror for Michael Mulheren.

"The last time a producer did anything like that for a show I was in was when I was doing ‘Titanic’ at the Lunt-Fontanne. The producers put up a sign on that stage door that read something like ‘Through this door walks the finest ensemble cast ever.’ It was a quote from the Houston Chronicle, I think, and when we saw it, it was like ‘Wow!’"

In "Titanic," a show that ran for two seasons without ever becoming the hit that "Kiss Me, Kate" is, Mulheren played one of the wealthy men who volunteers to remain with the ship and die.

"We were four American millionaires," he remembered, "and for a while we had a number called ‘Behind Every Fortune,’ based on a quote from Honore’ de Balzac that went "Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime."

I played John Thayer, a rich man from Philadelphia, and the song was an expression of guilt about the way we’d lived our lives. It never worked, and the audience couldn’t have cared less about a quartet of Gilded Age industrialists regretting their personal histories. Everybody loved the number except the audiences."

Mulheren doesn’t have any problems with the one great number he performs in "Kiss Me, Kate." The two gangsters who come to collect the hero’s gambling debts become infatuated with the theater and with the words of William Shakespeare. The result is the comic duet "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," which the grateful actor refers to as "a gift from heaven." The number, since the show premiered in 1948, has remained one of the genuine delights of the American musical theater.

"There isn’t a night that we don’t get a great response," he said. "The oddest thing is to realize that the people are desperately listening to each verse. They want to hear the words and the rhymes, because Porter managed to include the Sonnets, and the names of something like 15 plays. It’s brilliant, and it’s bawdy. It was particularly rude for 1948. It’s an amazing number, and we get away with murder."