Career Highlights
Peter Scolari, who is perhaps best known for his six-year stint on Newhart and co-starring with Tom Hanks in the cross-dressing sitcom Bosom Buddies, also has several stage credits. The quick-witted actor most recently graced the Broadway stage in Hairspray and the revival of Sly Fox, and he has been seen off-Broadway in The Exonerated and Old Man Joseph and his Family. Now Scolari is back off-Broadway playing Bernardo in the new musical Stewart F. Lane's In The Wings at the Promenade Theatre. Here, Scolari waxes rhapsodic about his career highlights—real and imagined.
It's fun to reminisce about different roles I've created over the years, but it's more fun to just make the stories up...
As a child actor, I created the role of Flipper in my bathtub—over and over again. It took a stern letter from the CBS censors to put an end to the splashing. To this day, when I see a ball attached to the end of a pole, I try to bump it with my nose. In a school play, I once channeled Art Linkletter and spoke down to the other children. I still have the microphone and recently thrust it deep into Walter Bobbie's sinus passages. As a college freshman, I interpreted Lear as a dry cleaner and once attempted to martinize Goneril. She came back spotty. I performed Romeo in starchy tights. The cross garters I wore as Malvolio were made from an early spandex which whistled like corduroy when properly lubricated. I was ahead of my time. Despite this fact, I was always late for Sunday brunch, except for the ones held on Saturday.
I worked off-Broadway from 1974 to 1979, pausing only to floss and bathe. Truth be told, I created a number of roles at the Colonnades Theatre for which I have never been forgiven. Under the artistic supervision of the brilliant Michael Lessac and in the watchful eye of the teamster's union, I chewed vast quantities of scenery in such successes as David Morgan's Moliere in Spite of Himself, Louis Philips' The Ballroom in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, and a musical based on the life and times of Ed Koch which catapulted the mayor into early retirement.
In my early days of television, I played an copywriter in an advertising agency who wore women's clothing from the Big and Tall shop stacked atop two pairs of nylons and recurring Joan Crawford hurt-me pumps. I shared this creative privilege with an actor who, when in drag, closely resembled the rear quarters of famed football coach and color commentator John Madden. Lo these many years later, he has shrugged off early rejection and rebuke, managing to keep his head above water in the Malibu Colony, where he regularly uses his two Oscars as props in his backyard puppet show. The more discerning readers among you know that as pitiful an attempt as this last paragraph is at wry satire, it is nearly redeemed by the fact that it is entirely true.
In Canada I made 66 episodes of a TV series based on the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids movies but was eventually asked to give them all back. The original film stock is now being used to wrap chinook salmon deemed imperfect at the factory and sold at cost. I'm nonetheless proud of my work on the show and know that someday the episodes will be rediscovered and written up in Field and Stream.
I returned to the New York stage in the late 1990s—despite public outcry. After two nearly successful appearances at City Center in their Encores! series I was summarily blackballed when it was discovered that I had deviled eggs surreptitiously with Jay Binder...
Undaunted I played Dauntless at the Bucks County Playhouse as a manic depressive and was awarded Pennsylvania's highest acting honor—a deer head with shoes to match and a half empty can of LaBatt's. In a ceremony, both moving and somewhat disgusting, former Broadway producer Stuart Duncan bestowed the honors upon me wearing nothing more than beach sandals and a thong. He later deeply regretted not wearing sunscreen and can now only sit down safely on Wednesday mornings. He is a great man of the theater and most recently the proud mother of twin girls. Good luck to you, Stu, and best to the kids.
Seriously though, as if you'll be trusting me any time soon, I recreated the role of the Chief of Police in last year's Broadway revival of Sly Fox, directed by Arthur Penn, and which starred Richard Dreyfuss. I remember Richard coming over to me one day and fooling around. He was always kidding with me and saying stuff like, "I really don't like you" and "Get off the stage!" and "Has anyone told you this is a comedy"? It's memories like these that make you smile when you're waiting for your unemployment check.
As many of you may already know, I appeared in Hairspray intermittently with both Harvey Fierstein and Michael McKean. Eventually, in the certain knowledge I was going on despite the picketing outside the theater, Jack O'Brien put notes in the program explaining my choices to people from New Jersey who'd not only demanded their money back but had also filed class action suits. I was and continue to be flattered by their unusual diligence in the pursuit of what they think is right.
Come out and see me in Stewart F. Lane's new comedy at the Promenade this month. I can't say that I'll be there for the whole run because there's already been talk of moving me to another show further uptown. Albany, I think. I play Bernardo Bernardi, an actor/writer/director, alleged son of a communist sympathizer from the Hollywood Blacklist era, who wages a campaign to have his father's career ruined posthumously. The play is called In The Wings and that's exactly where I'll be on opening night if they give me the combination to the lock on my dressing room door... Merde!