See Broadway Star Michael Cerveris’ Country Video ‘Pony Girl’
Although Broadway star Michael Cerveris may be familiar to many for his fierce portrayals of Sondheim killers — John Wilkes Booth in Assassins and Sweeney Todd in the 2005 role of that musical — he has a long history with rock & roll, starting with David Bowie. “I loved Robert Plant, but I couldn’t sing like him,” Cerveris explains. “When Bowie came around, it was the first time I heard a baritone singing rock music that I could keep up with.” He later sang “Young Americans” for his audition that landed him in his breakout role in The Who’s Tommy in 1993, which was how he learned a few secrets about how to be a rock star from Pete Townshend.
“He invited me over to London and said, ‘I want to take you around to places where we played our first gigs and the guys I grew up around,'” Cerveris says. “Then he told me, ‘I can’t teach you how to act, but I can show you how to be a rock star.’ The secret was largely that you have the right to stand on stage and sing. I think he smartly recognized that it would be paralyzing to try to stand up there and fill Roger’s shoes. But that was the gift he gave me: that I had the right to be there as much as anybody did.”
Cerveris, who released his second solo album earlier this year, has used that knowledge to inhabit a variety of roles since. He later took over as Hedwig for John Cameron Mitchell during its original Off-Broadway run and then played guitar with Bob Mould when he went on tour in the Nineties. “I met Bob because I was doing Tommy and I took Pete Townshend to see Bob play,” Cerveris explains. “Later Bob came in and listened to my band and we did a Mission of Burma cover. He invited me to listen to mixes of the new record, which was The Last Dog and Pony Show record, and I later innocently asked if he was going to tour it. I just wanted to know if I could get tickets, but he said, ‘You know, rhythm guitar and backing vocals is open if you want to do it.’ I was like, ‘OK!’ It was a while before I realized he wasn’t kidding, it was an actual invitation.”
Along with his current Tony Award-winning role as as Bruce Bechdel in Fun Home, Broadway’s reigning Best Musical, Cerveris continues to make music with his country band, Loose Cattle. So it seemed like a natural fit to have those two worlds overlap with the song “Pony Girl.” Fans of the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel may recall that Bruce sings a short lullaby to young Alison when the family is on a trip to New York City. “I assumed it was some old folk lullaby and I said something like that one day, and Lisa [Kron] said, ‘Oh no, we wrote it.’ I asked to hear the whole thing and it sort of sounded like a country waltz to me, so I gave it my band. I think I forgot to tell them where the origin of it was, and it’s a sweet song, so they thought it was an old country classic.” The band decided to record it and release it as a vinyl 45, and the video features the young actors from the musical.