Veteran Actor Terrence Currier Takes the Stage at Creative Cauldron

Don't miss actor Terrence Currier at Creative Cauldron this Saturday. His cabaret performance, Tumble Down Dreams: A Life in the Theater, will include musical influences from throughout his prolific career in theater. Currier is a veteran of over 150 stage roles including more than 80 productions at Arena Stage.

Learn more about Saturday's performance in this Q&A with Currier.

What inspired you to create Tumble Down Dreams: A Life in the Theater?

Tumble Down Dreams is the title of a song I collaborated on with E.G Snyder, a dear friend who passed away several year ago. We were always talking about doing an evening of our songs.

My cabaret performance is an anecdotal meander through my long trip with dance, drama, drollery and a bit of doggerel. I hope above all that the audience will be entertained and get some sense of the vagaries and vicissitudes of a life in the theater, a profession in which at any given time 80 percent of the members of Actors’ Equity, the actors union, are unemployed. 

Is this your first time working with the Cauldron? What has that experience been like?

I learned about its existence when I was invited to attend a gathering of performers entitled The FOURTH Wall. What a pleasant surprise to find that Laura Connors Hull, a former Arena Stage executive, was at the helm. We talked. Would I like to do something there? Hence Tumble Down Dreams.

Your performance will include songs spanning your prolific career. How did you choose which songs to include in Tumble Down Dreams? Does each song have special meaning to you as a performer?

Several of the songs are my own compositions. The choice of songs is an eclectic mix of old standards and seldom heard show tunes from shows I've been in. It's been fun. No stress. I hope the show is fun for me and my gifted music director and accompanist Eli Staples, who has a few surprises up his sleeve. He swings.

When did you decide that you wanted to be an actor? How would you describe your artistic journey over the years?

My love for performing started early. My brother and I appeared in my father's act when I was five years old doing a little song and dance number. I guess I fell in love with the sound of applause. While I was a student at Harvard I participated in a number of plays, but never had any formal training in the craft of acting as Harvard did not consider acting an intellectual pursuit. Nonetheless, I learned as I went along, by observation and experience as well as reading the necessary elements of various methods.

After graduation from college, I became a resident actor at Boston's Charles Playhouse where I began to learn the craft of acting. Ten years later, after a year in New York as half of a folk singing act with fellow actor Charles Keating, I was cast in Our Town in Washington's Arena Stage. The folk act went by the boards.

I was invited to stay at Arena for the season and spent the next 22 years as a resident actor at Arena. When word of the dissolution of the resident company started to circulate, I began auditioning for Broadway shows and landed Annie 2. In 1994, I was cast in the Broadway revival of Damn Yankees starring Victor Garber and Beebe Neuwirth. A year into the run, Jerry Lewis took over the Garber role. It ran for another year. Recently, I appeared in Follies at the Kennedy Center but was not able to move to Broadway with it due to my wife's poor health. It's been quite a trip.

What do you love most about performing in the Washington metropolitan area?

When I came to D.C. in 1972, it was a bit of a cultural backwater with only a handful of professional theaters. Now there are some 80 theaters within the Wash-Balt area. You can almost make a living here as an actor. The actor pool is small and rich in talent.

Click here for more information about Terrence Currier.

Saturday, Sept. 24, 8 p.m.; $20
410 South Maple Ave.; (571) 239-5288