Photo by Jess Graye
Brett Ryback as the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's ‘Liberace!’
Brett Ryback as the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's ‘Liberace!’
Liberace was a gay man hiding in plain sight, nudging and winking while maintaining plausible deniability. During most of his life, gay men could be jailed and would be ostracized. And yet, he leveraged his carefully cultivated “is he or isn’t he” persona into stardom, etching 20th century popular culture with his name and flamboyant image.
Writer-director Brent Hazelton’s Liberace! debuted at the Milwaukee Rep in 2010, played there again in 2014 and returns to the stage this month at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre. Milwaukee native and Off Broadway actor Brett Ryback fills the starring role as the pianist with a thousand costumes—decades before Elton John.
“Brett was a student of Jack Wilson,” Hazelton says, referring to the star of Liberace! at both Rep runs. “He saw the show in 2014,” and comes well prepared for the role.
“The focus of Liberace! is on the damage done when we have to hide parts of ourselves from the world, turning ourselves into identity pretzels,” Hazelton says. “Liberace played with notions of gender identity—he joked about it.” And some of those same jokes are incorporated into Liberace!. As much as possible, Hazelton used Liberace’s own words for the performance. “He was an incredibly complex person,” Hazelton adds.
If gender fluidity was prominent in his shows, genre fluidity was essential to his performances. On any given night, Liberace could range from Chopsticks to boogie-woogie, from Chopin to ragtime. Trained as a classical musician, “he found the strictures of a concert pianist too limiting,” Hazelton says. “What he loved most was sharing in a very active way. He was all about the ongoing exchange of fun, joy and love. For him, the music was a vehicle to spread that love.”
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Liberace! touches on telling scenes and songs from the life of the man born Wladziu Valentino Liberace in West Allis. Still a teenager, the gifted musician performed as a symphony soloist, but also entertained at the Red Room, a bar in Downtown Milwaukee’s Plankington Arcade. By the 1950s he was on television and became a Las Vegas mainstay in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He died in 1987, age 67, of complications from HIV/AIDS. Liberace! is a loving portrait.
“It’s a reliving and retelling of how he came to be, the persona he came to be,” Hazelton explains, adding that the implications extend far beyond LGBTQ people, including members of immigrant or minority cultures feeling the need for concealment in mainstream society. “The value of the story is what happens when we can’t be our full selves in the world—and what happens when we try to stop hiding.”
Liberace! runs Nov. 15-Dec. 10 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, For more information, visit milwaukeechambertheatre.org
