'Tenor's' Anthony LaPaglia is in good voice

After his long-running series "Without a Trace" was abruptly canceled by CBS last year, it seemed as if Anthony LaPaglia had also disappeared. He even contemplated retiring from acting, especially so he could spend more time with his daughter, Bridget. But when the Australian-born actor was offered the role of a larger-than-life opera singer in the revival of the farce "Lend Me a Tenor," directed by his pal Stanley Tucci, LaPaglia couldn't say no.

Newsday's Daniel Bubbeo recently spoke with LaPaglia, 51, at the Mercer Hotel in Soho about the high and low notes of doing "Tenor," which opens Sunday.

Doing farce, I know sometimes things can go wrong. What's the biggest mistake that's gone on during the show?

Oh, the big mistake was that I thought Stanley had made a big mistake in asking me to do it. . . . Seven years of television, while it was a great experience, was a different animal. You learn enough to take care of yourself, you have to. A different director every week. There's no consistency, so you become a bit director-proof. . . . Even though I know Stanley and I trust him, he would say to me, "Do it this way. I know it doesn't feel right to you, but trust me, it will work." And I had trouble with the trust factor. . . . Finally it got to the point where I was so exhausted and distraught at not getting through that I was either going to graciously leave the show so they could get someone who could really do it, or I was just going to dig in and give over to it.

What finally convinced you to stick with it?

The truth is that I have a 7-year-old daughter, and she's never really seen me do anything. She's so excited about coming to opening night. I had this thought that if I don't pull my act together, this would be the first time that I actually let my daughter down in a big way. There was something in that that made me go on, plus so much support from Stanley and the producers. They knew I was struggling, and they really stuck by me, and kept saying, "You'll get it. You'll get it."

Well, I didn't notice any struggle.

The second I got it, I looked back and thought I don't know what the problem was. And since that day, it's just been an absolutely joyous experience. I can't wait to go to work. . . . Once I got a handle on the genre, I don't think I've ever had more fun, ever.

In your bio in the Playbill, you had a line that said something like "Thanks to Stanley Tucci, you always said you'd ruin my career." What's the story behind that?

I said "I came out of retirement, because Stanley had always threatened to ruin my career, so I thought I'd give him the opportunity." It's just a joke. Years ago, after Stanley and I met on "Slaves of New York," we would walk into casting rooms for jobs, and we'd see each other there, and both of us would think the same thing, we'd go "Oh --, it's going to be him or me." It usually turned out that way. He'd get it or I'd get it, and it was kind of a running gag. And he'd say he'd ruin my career, and I would tell him "I'm doing a good job all by myself."

Your character is larger than life. Did you have some relative or someone you knew from your Italian background who you used as an influence?

Well my dad is from Italy, and his two brothers, so I grew up around this stuff. It's a conglomerate of my dad and my uncles and various other characters from the family and outside the family that I grew up around. I did not want to deliver the stereotypical Italian. I tried to infuse him with a bit more than that, because the Italians of that generation, they were so hard to read sometimes, but at the base of it, they're very generous. There's a moment in the play where Tito [his character] says to Justin [Bartha]'s character "sing," and he listens to it, and he's not really knocked out, but he genuinely likes the kid and wants to help him and he grows to really like the young man, and that's an element of being with Italians that I've known.

You do a little bit of vocalizing in the show, but do you actually sing?

Oh yeah. I'm not really a singer, but the reason I haven't been doing that much singing in the previews is that I got very sick. I lost my voice, and it's only in the last couple of days that it's come back full strength. The intention has always been to sing as much of that piece as possible. I had some kind of weird throat virus that virtually shut down my vocal cords for a while. . . . In order to get through the whole play, it wasn't worth throwing out my voice in a song, and that's what had been happening. Fortunately, a very good doctor came to the rescue and my voice is now full strength, so I'll try and belt it out a little bit more.

The part of the show that looked like it must be hardest to do is that rewind of the whole play in about a minute at the end. How hard was that to learn?

[Laughs.] It took a few goes to get it right, but now that we're doing it, we've actually got it down so well that we have time to do more things. So we've started adding a little bit to make it more complicated. Like it needs to be more complicated. It's a nice tag to the play. Just when you think it's over, you get two more minutes of insanity.

Do you miss doing "Without a Trace"?

No.

Were you happy they canceled it?

I wasn't happy with the way they did it and I wasn't happy that they canceled it, but I always knew it had to end. It ran seven years, and not a lot of shows last seven years. By year five, once you're there you're on the back nine, so you're kind of waiting for it anyway. You know there's an end to it. It may come up in six or seven. I think it could have gone on another two years, and I would have been quite happy to do it. But acting's only part of my life. I have a family, I have other things I'm interested in. When it ended, it was over. I don't really live in the past. It was a good experience, I enjoyed it, but I don't think I've woken up one day and missed not doing it. I have a tendency to move on pretty quickly.

Is it true you own part of a soccer club?

Two [one in Australia, one in L.A.].

Do you still play soccer?

I play all the time. I do play in appropriate leagues for my age. I play in one league that's not appropriate because it's basically over 30, but I do it because it's more competitive. I used to play professionally when I was younger, so I like to still try and mix it up a little. With the team in L.A. [that I own], I've always played goal keeper, and when I'm there I coach the goal keepers on the team.

Do you still get to Australia for the games?

If I hadn't been doing this play, I would have been there watching the drama of them winning the championship by a point. I was there earlier in the year when they were midtable and fighting their way up. . . . The boys are coming out next week, they do a yearly trip to Vegas and they'll be coming into New York.

When you're acting, you can't always hear your Australian accent. But hearing you speak, I can definitely get a trace of it. Did you try to lose the accent?

When I first got here in '82, it wasn't like it is now. It wasn't fashionable to be Australian. It was just the opposite. To get American parts, I learned very quickly that I had to lie about where I was from because every time I said I was from Australia, it didn't matter how good my American accent was, they felt they could hear it. And going into an audition, if they found out I was Australian, it would also promote a 20-minute discussion about Australia which would distract me. So I went into one audition, and they asked "Where are you from?" and I said "Brooklyn," and they said "OK, read," so I stuck with it. It was easier. At one point I really immersed myself in an American accent because I felt like at that time I had to to maintain some kind of consistency. As I've gotten older, it's become easier for me to flip in and out of it. So now I've got kind of a hybrid. I'm not concerned about it anymore.

How long does it take to get in and out of the black Otello makeup?

It takes a good 20 minutes to get into that, and that's really rushing. And they use a paintbrush. It's like painting a barn, literally a big paintbrush. And then there's the costume, which is really quite elaborate. I never considered myself an actor that would ever show up in a play in tights, but it really is fun and exciting.

How do you think your daughter will react when she sees you as Otello?

She'll love it. She's been a bit perplexed about what I do. She came to the set of "Without a Trace" three times, and I thought that's not a good place for kids. When she was younger, she thought this was the place where you got bagels, because we had bagels from crafts service. So she would say to me, "Dad, can I come to your place where you get bagels?" She actually thought that my business was soccer for a long time, and it wasn't until recently at school that kids started to tell her what I did. She said, "Somebody said that you're on TV?" I said, "Sometimes." I explained my profession, I'm an actor. I was so proud of myself for managing to keep it from her for so many years.