There's buyer's remorse and survivor's guilt, and you can add to that celebrity chagrin. Randy Harrison tasted some of that when he was cast at age 22 as the giddily adorable Justin Taylor in Showtime's Queer as Folk. Just two years out of college, he became famous in the groundbreaking series as the character dubbed Sunshine by surrogate mother Sharon Gless. He was part of the band of gay buddies going through coming-of-age paces in Pittsburgh, where all roads seemed to lead to the mirror-balled discotheque Babylon. Now Harrison's new Babylon is the Kit Kat Klub, where he holds court as the emcee in the SF-bound tour of Cabaret.
"There was an aspect of guilt of getting this really great job," Harrison said of the QAF gig that began its five-season run in 2000. "I went to theater school, and I grew up respecting people who learned by doing the classics. It's really old school, but that's how I felt getting this big job at 22. I felt that I then had to pay my dues."
And at regional theaters across the country, he played leading roles in such meaty plays as Equus, The Glass Menagerie, Amadeus, Waiting for Godot, Twelfth Night, Mrs. Warren's Profession, and other modestly paying stage roles. "I needed to lay a deeper groundwork for myself as an artist, and Queer as Folk financially put me in a situation where I had freedom making decisions for my artistic career."
When Harrison, now 38, heard that a new tour based on the recent Broadway revival of Cabaret was being cast, he laser-focused on landing the role that Joel Grey had created on Broadway in 1966, and that Alan Cumming brought back to Broadway in 1998 and 2014 in director Sam Mendes' down-and-dirty reimagining of the musical. "I had been definitely more of an ingenue because I was so young-looking, so even though I loved the show, I didn't think very much about playing the role," he said. He definitely didn't want to be the Aryan kid who sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me."
"When I heard they were looking for an emcee for the tour, I suddenly realized, oh my God, I've actually aged into a character actor," Harrison said. "I started working on the material, and even after I auditioned and not knowing if I'd get a callback, I kept rehearsing the numbers. I knew I'd be crushed if I didn't even get a callback."
While the emcee in the original production of Cabaret was a smarmily seductive character painted in sexually ambiguous makeup, the revival with Alan Cumming out-smarmed what Grey had done. What was hinted at for 1966 audiences no longer needed the nudge-nudge, wink-wink treatment. This nightspot of the post-Kaiser, pre-Hitler Berlin represented a decadent society ready to party like it was the last big bash on earth.
While there is a traditional book musical surrounding the cabaret scenes, all of Harrison's are self-contained musical numbers that obliquely comment on the rise on Nazism. Some songs from the original stage show have been eliminated, while songs written for the screen version have been incorporated.
The main crossover character between the inside and outside worlds of the Kit Kat Klub (Andrea Goss in the tour) is a demi-talented chanteuse known as Sally Bowles, who becomes lovers with an English writer with autobiographical ties to Christopher Isherwood, creator of the source material in The Berlin Stories. The character, straight as an arrow in the early Cabaret, is now bisexual.
Harrison was given considerable latitude to find his own take on the emcee, and he arrived at rehearsals "just throwing out ideas left and right." He mainly worked with Cynthia Onrubia, the associate choreographer on the Alan Cumming revivals and now the guiding force for all the numbers staged at the Kit Kat Klub. "She didn't necessarily tell me how to play it, but told me what impact each moment needs to have," Harrison said. "Once I figured out the structure of the show, then I filled it up with as much as I could of myself and ideas and humor and intelligence. This is a role that rewards taking risks, and if you're fully behind it, you can do no wrong."
When we spoke on the phone, the show was on a brief hiatus that gave him a chance for a short vacation along the Mexican Caribbean coast. The tour restarts in Las Vegas before its arrival in San Francisco, but he'll only be playing the first few days of that stop. "Then I'm going to Pride in Toronto to do a sort of Queer as Folk thing for that weekend." He's feeling more comfortable with reidentifying the role that gave him stardom but from which he then wanted to distance himself.
"I was definitely excited to build a career outside of it, but the show was so important for so many people that I can't ignore. Toronto [which stood in for Pittsburgh during filming] is a city I have nothing but affection for." Harrison will also be in San Francisco during its Pride celebrations, and he's excited to be here during the festivities. "I'm like a celebrity grand marshal," he said. "I guess I'll be in a car waving at people, like the queen I am."
He's in negotiations to stay with the show at least through its Toronto run early next year �" another chance to reconnect with his QAF home �" and then it's back to auditions in New York. "I imagine that Cabaret will open some more doors for me on Broadway," he said.
Harrison's desire to become a professional actor dates back to when he saw Sandy Duncan in a touring production of Peter Pan. "Even at 5 years old, I knew the flying wasn't real," he said. "But I was young enough that I really thought the proscenium was a portal into a land where magic happened. That sounds so lame right now, but I was really obsessed."
Cabaret will run June 21-July 17 at the Golden Gate Theatre. Tickets are $50-$212. Call (888) 746-1799 or go to shnsf.com.