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04/12/2018 12:01 AMThere’s something about David Lutken that makes him fill some might big American shoes—or cowboy boots—as comfortably as a pair of familiar slippers.
Maybe it’s his easy-going charm and plain speech. Maybe it’s his modesty, his heritage, his directness. Of course, his smooth baritone is mighty pleasant on the ears, too.
Lutken played legendary singer Woody Guthrie for years in theaters across the country with the musical biography Woody Sez, which was presented at Hartford’s TheaterWorks and Westport Country Playhouse.
Now, this time in Connecticut he’ll be playing Will Rogers in Goodspeed Musical’s production of The Will Rogers Follies at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam. The show, which begins previews on Friday, April 13, plays through June 21.
“Both Woody and Will—both from Oklahoma—are probably chagrined to know that they are being played on stage by a guy from Texas,” says Lutken in a call from his sister’s Louisiana farm where he was visiting.
The Rogers role is one he knows well. Lutken performed as Will Rogers during the original Broadway run. The top-tier, talent-filled show—with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, book by Peter Stone, and staging by Tommy Tune—opened in Broadway in 1991 and played nearly 2 ½ years. Lutken was the understudy for Larry Gatlin (of the country group The Gatlin Brothers) who succeeded Keith Carradine in the title role.
Lutken says though Rogers died a generation before he was born, he was well aware of the vaudeville, stage, and motion picture performer, cowboy, humorist, and newspaper columnist who delighted and gently bedeviled those in power with his folkish ways. (Rogers died in a plane crash in 1935 at the age of 55.)
Lutken says he grew up in a part of the country where the Will Rogers name was honored everywhere—on airports, schools, and coliseums—so it was hard not to be aware of him for decades after his death.
“My father actually saw Will Rogers when he was a little boy,” says Lutken. “My grandfather took him to hear him talk once and he still had a little souvenir lasso that my grandfather bought for my dad, and that I used to fiddle around with, too, when I was a kid.”
And like Rogers, Lutken grew up knowing the Western way of life.
“I worked as a cowboy in Texas for many years on the farm when I was a teenager, when I could still fall off a horse and not get hurt too bad,” he says. “But I do come from some of the same background, just from a bit of a modern sense rather than the wide-open frontier.”
Both Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie represent “a lot of the best of America and the American ethos that’s been around for a couple hundred years, but which are undergoing some new forces and influences. But that’s always been the case,” he says. “If Will Rogers was alive today, he’d be having a field day with everything that’s going on—but he always did.”
There’s a speech quoting Rogers’s original words in the show that still gets to him.
“He said, ‘I don’t imagine there’s any millionaire in America who doesn’t owe some part of what he has to every homeless person in America, because you won’t get money without taking it away from someone else.’
“He goes on to talk about how America is a liberal country, which means we are a generous and open-handed one,” Lutken says. “It’s a speech that’s wonderful for his time—and for our time, too.”
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.
The Will Rogers Follies runs at the Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main Street, East Haddam, from Friday, April 13, through June 21 For more information and tickets, visit www.goodspeed.org.