Not the Norm

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This article was published 30/07/2011 (5201 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

George Wendt has made peace with Winnipeg.

The Chicago-born actor and long-time puckhead held a grudge against the city after the Winnipeg Jets lured Bobby Hull away from Wendt’s beloved Chicago Blackhawks with a million-dollar contract in 1972.

“But now that you’ve given us Jonathan Toews and a Stanley Cup, and you’ve got your own team, all is forgiven,” Wendt says, adding he never actually despised the city or its people.

“It wasn’t hatred. It was hurt. Imagine if Babe Ruth got stolen from the Yankees. That’s how it was.”

It’s a good thing Toews and the Blackhawks won the Cup in 2010 or this could have been an awkward summer for Wendt and the city.

The performer, best known as the wise-cracking, beer-guzzling Norm Peterson on the television series Cheers, is in town for six weeks to appear in the Rainbow Stage production of the John Waters’ musical Hairspray, running Aug. 4-21 under the dome in Kildonan Park.

Wendt will play the cross-dressing role of Edna Turnblad, the plus-sized mother of the show’s teenage star Tracy Turnblad (Montreal’s Stephanie Pitsiladis), a singing/dancing/civil rights crusader with a heart of gold and a bountiful bouffant.

Getting dolled up in a dress and makeup is becoming a regular occurrence for the 62-year-old Wendt. He first slipped on Edna’s garish housecoat for a 2007-08 Broadway run and wore it again last year at the Charlottetown Festival. Rainbow Stage purchased the festival’s production and Wendt came with it.

“It’s one of the best roles you can imagine,” he says. “I worship musical theatre. I don’t sing or dance, but I’m old and fat and there’s not really a whole lot of roles you can participate in musical theatre when you have my background.

“(This is a) role where it doesn’t really matter how well you move or sing as long as you can bring the love for your daughter and husband out. That’s the main requirement for Edna. There’s hilarious dialogue as well, but you don’t play that: you play the love and wonderment going on for the ’60s. I lived through it as a youngster, but now I get to live through it like my mother.”

In person and on the phone Wendt is as laid-back and low key as Norm was on Cheers, but put him in a lady’s clothing and he turns into a song-and-dance man, even though he admits he doesn’t have much of a singing voice and his range is limited.

Fortunately, the bar was set low for him by original Broadway’s original Edna, Tony-winning actor Harvey Fierstein, whose croaky rasp Wendt imitated. Think of a chain-smoking frog — that’s apparently what Fierstein sounded like.

“Singing, I’m dead last among the cast; dancing, I’m kind of at the top of the heap. Dance has always been my life. Le Dance, I call it,” he says with a laugh.

Wendt might be joking about his fancy footwork, but he isn’t some newcomer when it comes to theatre. He started out onstage in Chicago and was a member of famed comedy troupe The Second City, which produced the likes of John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey and Bill Murray, to name a few.

He moved to Los Angeles prior to landing the role on Cheers in 1982 and has remained there ever since.

The city, not the bar.

“Theatre is by far the most fun way to work for actors,” he says. “I’ll speak for myself: it’s the most fun for me. You get a full run at the whole piece and the audience completes the circle. You’re sharing one space in one time with anywhere from a dozen people to 1,000. It’s quite rewarding.

“On Cheers I was lucky because we had the live studio audience. It’s was like a 22-minute, one-act play once a week and we really were playing for the audience. We were too ignorant to play for the cameras, we were theatre veterans most of us.”

Theatre has made up much of Wendt’s recent work including a stint on Broadway in Elf, as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple in Kansas City and as a university dean in Re-Animator: the Musical, based on the H.P. Lovecraft story, currently running in Los Angeles.

He’s also shot a new pilot for Spike TV, playing a father to one of the three main characters.

Wendt would take another role on television, but if something doesn’t come along, he’s not worried — he’s got a pretty busy schedule already and seems to be at the top of the list when it comes to casting Edna in Hairspray.

“I’m really flattered that people are interested in giving me a call to see if I’m available to do it,” he says. “I’m happy enough to oblige, assuming I’m available. It’s a fantastic role.”

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca