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Versatility is a relative term. Read just about any singer's bio and their press will tell you how versatile he or she is. In the case of American bass-baritone Timothy Nolen, however, the term assumes its exact meaning, for even within the standard repertory Nolen's dramatic and stylistic range is extraordinary. After a debut as Mozart's Guglielmo in Così fan tutte, Nolen went on with great success to leading roles in Rossini, Donizetti, and Puccini, all on a road to Strauss and Wagner with a bit of Verdi and a fair amount of operetta along the way. He has sung with virtually every major opera company in America as well as in the European houses of Nice, Cologne, Zurich, and Palermo to name only a few. Nolen's sphere of creative possession also extends beyond the opera house to the legitimate theater, television, and the Broadway stage, with leading roles in The Phantom of the Opera, Cyrano and Grind, for which he received a Drama Desk nomination. He has received particular acclaim for his portrayal of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and in recent seasons has delivered a chilling portrait of Sweeney's nemesis, the evil Judge Turpin, a performance preserved on DVD. It is in the field of American opera however that Nolen has perhaps made his most unique contribution, and fans revere him as a bit of an icon of the genre. Beyond performances of such works as Floyd's Of Mice and Men and Blitzstein's Regina, Nolen has created leading roles in Floyd's Willy Stark (telecast from the Kennedy Center on PBS' Great Performances), Bernstein's A Quiet Place, and Bolcom's A View from the Bridge and McTeague.

USOPERAWEB caught up with the singer between performances of Sweeney Todd at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Chatting with Timothy Nolen is about as down-home and comfortable as the cowboy hat he wore to the interview, a bit of apparel reflective of his rural Texas childhood. Brushing aside compliments about his creative range, ("I'm older than dirt-hang around long enough you get to do absolutely everything") Nolen tells us about his early years. "I was born in west Texas and raised in east Texas. Daddy moved around a lot because we were poor as church mice. I didn't know it though, I had a great childhood. I got to be every boy's dream. I was a cowboy and I am still. Daddy worked in the oil fields and we had a little horse ranch and raised horses, chinchillas, pit bulls, anything to make a buck. Lived in a shotgun shack most of my childhood-cold running water, but that was it. My dad was the most amazing man you can imagine, my mother too, a real frontier woman about five feet tall. Daddy had joined the army in WWI as a kid because he knew it was the only chance he would have to see anything beyond Texas. He was a terrific mechanic and he was with the 26th Esquadrilles with Eddie Rickenbacker and all those boys. His pilot taught him to fly and when his pilot was too drunk, he flew five sorties before he got caught and got sent back to the trenches. He was caught in a gas attack and injured his lungs. He smoked four packs of Luckys a day and consequently died of emphysema at 54. I'm mad at him for that. I loved that man; we had the best time together. The way I found out he flew was because there was this guy in town named Buster who built an airplane from plans he sent away for. That was big news in a town of 400 people. Daddy said 'You want to go flying?' and I said 'Yeah' thinking I was going to go up with Buster. But Daddy flew that plane around that cow pasture. As a seven-year-old, I was sorely impressed. But that was Daddy.

"My mother sang in church and so did I from the time I was little. My sister had a voice too. Daddy couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but he would take me to the roadhouses and they sang there. He'd say to my mother, 'The little man and I are going to go have some coffee with the boys.' Then he'd whisper to me, 'Now this is just between us men' and we'd get in the car and sneak over to Palm Isle past the county line. Daddy would let me order the drinks and I would yell, 'Hey Toots,' to the waitress. I'd have a coke with a cherry on top. I got to sing with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys! They were playing there once and I walked up to Bob Wills and he looked down at me and said 'What can I do for you partner?' and I said 'I can sing San Antonio Rose' and I did, in E flat. Later I sang at rodeos and I rode a little saddle bronc in the rodeo too."

So how does a small town Texas boy go from singing "San Antonio Rose" at a roadhouse to the world of international opera? "I was too skinny to play football and in Texas if you don't play football, you have to play in the marching band. So I took up the trumpet and I was pretty good. I started to play jazz and decided I was going to be a jazz trumpet player. I went to school freshman year as a brass major. Daddy had died and we moved to New Jersey. At my first voice lesson-because even the brass majors had to take voice-after I sang for the teacher he looked at me for a minute then he pulled out Figaro's aria from Barbiere [The Barber of Seville] and had me sing it. I asked him 'Is there any more of that?' He said 'There certainly is' and next thing you know I was singing in the school productions. After I graduated I taught school for a couple of years then went back for my Master's at the Manhattan School of Music in opera theater. I was recommended to the San Francisco Opera and auditioned for them and, by God, they gave me a job!

"I was at San Francisco when Kurt Herbert Adler was the boss and I sang just about everything. I loved that old man. Everybody says he was so terrifying but he wasn't, he was a pussycat, at least to me. I was in Western Opera Theater too, the touring company. I did 200 performances of Bohème, as Marcello, Schaurnard, Alcindoro, or Colline. I actually sang Rodolfo once when the tenor was sick, skipping a couple of notes here and there. I could probably have sung Musetta or Mimi, I was doing everything else. Then I sang Pelléas [in Pelléas and Melisande] in Rouen, for my European debut. I sang that role for about fifteen years. And the rest is history."

You have been celebrated for an acting ability well beyond that of the average opera singer. Were there any particular influences in the development of your dramatic instincts? "People ask me where I studied acting, if I went to the Actor's Studio. I just watched movies! When I was a kid I wanted to be a screen actor, not an opera singer. But like my Daddy said, life is like a football. It isn't round, it will bounce funny on you. And it has. I wanted to be a screen villain like Basil Rathbone who was, and is, my hero. Those classy British villains from the movies were fascinating to me-Victor Jory too, with that incredible voice. A touchstone in opera was Geraint Evans; I just love him. But my absolute idol was Renato Capecchi and Paolo Montarsolo was a close second. Capecchi was a theatrical mentor for me in the opera world. In fact when I was in San Francisco at one point I was debating whether to stay in opera or go to Broadway-I never dreamed then that I would get to do both-and I was watching the [Jean-Pierre] Ponnelle production of Cenerentola. The cast was a dream team, Teresa Berganza, Capecchi, Luigi Alva. I thought, my God, if this is what opera can be this is what I want to do. It was simply brilliant. Capecchi was just amazing, he taught me so many little tricks. We wrote to each other for years. I had not heard from him for a while and when we were rehearsing A View from the Bridge here in Chicago a couple of years ago and over a martini one night, Kim Josephson said 'Isn't it sad about Renato Capecchi.' That was how I heard he had died and I burst into tears right there. And cowboys don't cry, you know."

You are one of a small handful of major artists who have been associated with American opera throughout your career. Was that by design or opportunity? "Hey, I get off the bus and they tell me what to do and I do it. I don't even remember what the first American opera I did was; it appears that I've been doing them all along. The milestone piece was Carlisle Floyd's Willie Stark. That work has been done only a few times and has left the repertoire, which I think is a sin and a shame. It is typical Carlisle with his wonderful "angular" writing for the voice. Yet at the same time it has some of the most beautiful, most melodic and harmonious stuff in any of the repertoire. The end of the first act, the whole 'Come back Willie, come back home, I've lost you away' is just pure Americana right out of the back woods, sweet, soft-just magnificent. Carlisle's work has never been as popular as it deserves to be. Susannah is about the only thing that gets done to any great extent. Of Mice and Men is starting to be done more and I am glad of that because that is another fine work, just a great piece. I did George quite a bit. George has this incredibly moving aria, 'You bet it's gonna be different,' he says, 'you bet there will be something else besides bucking grain, we have to have something, we have to have a home.' Oh my God, it's so stirring. Then at the end of the piece when George shoots Lennie, after the whole 'tell me about the rabbits' thing-shattering. George only has one line to sing after that, and thank God, because I had tears streaming down my face every night. I can feel a lump in my throat right now just talking about it. But this is what is so wonderful about American opera. It's our story, in our language. American opera also tends to be much more theatrically based than most traditional opera. And I am a theater person.

"I also love to sing in the language of the audience. People get outraged at doing opera in anything other than the original language, or at least they do here. They don't so much in Europe. In this country it was largely due to people like the Astors and Vanderbilts and all the others who built the original Met-the snob appeal. I love singing in French in France, and in Italian for an Italian audience. I have sung Cenerentola and Barbiere in German for the Germans. With American opera I can sing to our audiences in our own language. I love for people to understand what I am singing without surtitles. I am not a big fan of them. I think they are wonderful for an audience when they don't know the language. But it can be disconcerting for a performer to look out at all these faces going up and down, up and down.

"I must tell you a story about my wife, speaking of surtitles. She is not a huge opera fan, but she is very loyal and when I was singing my first Die Meistersinger in Nice she wanted to come and support me. I told her she didn't have to, it was 5 1/2 hours long. She said 'No, I want to come.' Later she confessed she came because she thought she would be okay as long as there were surtitles. What she didn't figure was that in Nice the surtitles are in French and she doesn't speak French! Oh, we laughed and laughed!"

With all the roles you have created in American opera, are there any you have ever wanted to go back and do differently? "Not really, every time you do them you find something else. I have really loved them all, maybe with the exception of one. I didn't care for [Leonard Bernstein's] A Quiet Place. It was Lenny's autobiography and everybody knew it. Junior, the role that I played was Lenny himself. I had to sing some of the most embarrassing lines I've ever had to do in my whole life. It all felt like masturbating onstage. But, I loved Lenny. He could be a little creepy; in rehearsal he could come up behind you and give you a big tongue kiss. But he was like a little kid, fun to be with and of course that mind was wonderful. He was always jumping up in front of [conductor] John DeMain and conducting. John would yell 'Lenny, sit down!' But once he did take the stick for the end of the rehearsal and it was magic time. I do miss him"

It is unusual for a performer to successfully straddle the world of opera and the Broadway stage as you have done. How did this come to be? "It was all because of Harold Prince. Hal had directed Willie Stark and right after that we did Sweeney Todd together at Houston Grand Opera. During a break in rehearsal, Hal threw a script in my lap and said 'Here, read the part of Doyle and if you want it its yours.' It was the script for Grind. It was my first Broadway show. I was so sad that Grind went down the hopper, it was one of Hal's flops. It was a good story initially, and the music was good. We had me, Stubby Kay, Leilani Jones, and Ben Vereen as Leroy. Leroy was one of the smaller roles, but Ben Vereen was a big star at the time and it became a show about Ben Vereen's Atlantic City Nightclub act. He was terrific, but we lost the focus of the story and a lot of the songs got cut. But I had a great time."

You assumed the title role in the original production of The Phantom of the Opera from Michael Crawford and played it on Broadway for some time. Did you enjoy that experience? "No, I didn't. I went in with the understanding that they would be lowering the keys. I got to the first music rehearsal and they said the keys would not be changed. I said, 'You're crazy, I'm not a tenor, I'm a damn bass-baritone!' They said, 'Oh, you'll be fine.' Well, I wasn't fine, it nearly killed me. I sang in those upper keys, full out, eight times a week. It was so damn much work, I went on every night scared to death I wasn't going to make those A's, and they're not easy A's, they're full out and everyone waits for that note. I crashed and burned more than once, I tell you. We had many a hot discussion over those keys. I pointed out that Mozart and Rossini would change keys for singers, and this wasn't Mozart. Andrew would say, 'Oh you sound lovely dear boy,' and they didn't change. Then, as is going to happen in any long run, the whole company came down with some coughing crud and I got it too. Then they had to drop the keys, but as soon as I got well they went back up again. It wasn't fun. Singing like that in the wrong keys is like singing a full opera eight times a week. It took me a good six months to a year to get the voice back to where it was."

It is impossible not to ask Nolen what he thinks of Andrew Lloyd Weber's music-"you mean how is it doing Puccini?" Nolen's eyes dance with mischief as he references Lloyd Weber's notorious appropriation of whole passages of the Italian composer's work for the Phantom score. "I had not seen the show and Hal and I watched a performance from a little light booth. I listened to the music and in the second act I started to say to him, 'That sure does sound like...,' and he said, 'Yeah, doesn't it!'" Nolen howls with laughter at the memory.

"Every other Broadway show I have done has just been a delight. I loved doing Cyrano. I started as De Guiche then I took over the title role. I did it for about eight months and I didn't get tired at all, because it was in my range. I have been very fortunate with Cyrano, I have done the original Rostand play twice. The dueling is always fascinating. I had studied fencing. It was the Basil Rathbone thing and I had a great time. One of my pet peeves in the opera world is that when opera singers do Broadway repertoire they tend to undervalue the music. They don't respect it. It pisses the living hell out of me to see a Broadway show done in an opera house and the singers don't respect the material."

How about issues of vocal discipline? Opera singers generally require a day or so off between performances, but on Broadway you are singing daily. "You have to be much more careful and you have to take care of yourself. Plenty of moisture, in the wintertime particularly. I use a humidifier the size of a washtub and keep that sucker going 24 hours a day. The inside of my apartment looks likes a hothouse there is so much steam on the windows, but you need to keep that moisture in the air. You can't go out much when you are doing a Broadway show or drink very much when you are singing every day. During that Phantom run I didn't touch a drop of alcohol for over six months."

Given Nolen's vast theatrical experience, one is curious as to his read on the state of opera production today. "The worst problem is bad directors-maybe worse, mediocre directors. One reason people say opera singers can't act is because nobody requires it of them. There are only a handful of good operatic directors, and they are generally the ones from the Broadway world who make their way into the operatic world. In defense of them it is because nine times out of ten they are trying to find some way to do it differently, to keep the audience interested in the same pieces again and again and again. So time and again you wind up with all this crazy crap you have in the opera world. It's all about the director. Once it was about the singer, then it became about the conductor, like Toscanini and so forth, and now it's about the director. It's all a mistake, because it should be about the show. I do think sometimes opera audiences don't require enough, they don't ask for enough from performances. People go to 'see' a musical and 'hear' an opera. Maybe its because they have had to settle for garbage for so many years, they get used to it and are not demanding enough."

When asked to name his favorite roles, Nolen characteristically chooses two real acting parts, Don Magnifico in La Cenerentola and the title role in Sweeney Todd. "I really think Sweeney is as fine a composition as any opera ever written. It's a perfect role and a perfect show. The character is brilliantly written. When you get the man in the beginning, he is not insane-he is damaged and very angry, but not insane. Then he comes upon the instrument of his destruction, Mrs. Lovett. He manages just by chance to get the Judge into his chair and he is just about to satisfy this itch for revenge that has had him for fifteen years. And the Judge gets away. The epiphany is when he then crosses over into madness. He is now officially insane and he remains that way until at the very end he discovers he has murdered his own wife and the veil is lifted. He is the sacrifice from that moment on. It's the perfect Greek tragedy, really-'He, Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Mad.' It's a perfect role and you get to sing all those wonderful lyrics. [The original Sweeney] Len Cariou was brilliant, just ferocious. You'll love this: Hal Prince told me he was afraid to go up on stage and direct Len, he was so scary. When I saw the show I knew I had to do it and I started a campaign."

It must be interesting going from Sweeney to the Judge. Your performance on the DVD is really creepy. "I love doing the judge, I love doing the bad guy. It seems to be a natural progression, they guy who did Sweeney in London is doing the Judge now too. The Judge's aria is quite difficult, it's an acting piece. You can't have a weak Judge. It's like Figaro-if you don't have a dangerous Count, Figaro's machinations are meaningless. I love working with [conductor] Paul Gemignani too. He's a real 'get off the bus, they tell him what to do and he does it' guy. And just a wonderful conductor. There is never any question as to where the beat is and if you get into trouble he is always right there. I would rather have him in the pit than just about anyone I can think of."

With such an eclectic resume, one wonders what Nolen feels is left for him to accomplish as a performer. "One American opera I have not done is The Ballad of Baby Doe and I would like to. I'd like to have a shot at old Horace-get me a big old handlebar mustache and watch my dust. But I have always thought of myself as an actor who happens to have an operatic voice. I'd probably rather act than sing and the opera roles I love are acting roles. I love to do straight drama and I don't get to do nearly enough of it. The last few years I have been at the Chicago Lyric just about every year-thank you Jesus-and in Sante Fe in the summer-thank you again, Jesus. That has left me six months where I can do a musical or a play and I would like to do a lot more of that. I have done some television (fans of HBO's The Sopranos might have caught his appearance on the show) and I would like to do more of that. My agent is putting together a campaign to have me start directing. I'm tired of mediocre direction. Maybe I won't be any good, but I think I'll be better than a lot of what we have now. I think I can get more out of my colleagues and I think they want that, I think they want to give more and are capable of it." (Nolen's directorial ambitions would appear to be well conceived. Since the completion of this interview he has received excellent notices for his direction of a new play in Dallas and has been engaged to direct a re-creation of the famous Orson Welles radio play The War Of The Worlds for Disney).

Timothy Nolen appears to be a balanced, grounded individual and his lack of pretension is striking. "Oh, I'm sure I can be vain. I still go to the gym. I want to look good on stage, and women don't like ugly men! But you need a balance. Your art is not your life. Things like going to the grocery store-that's your life. My wife and I are thinking of moving somewhere smaller. Maybe New Mexico. There is a lot to be said for living in a small place where you know everybody.

"I'm not done yet. I figure I've got another sixty years to go, I'm going to hang around until I am at least 120. Then maybe they will be able to replace everything and I can start all over again!"

Mark Thomas Ketterson is a freelance writer and psychotherapist in private clinical practice in Chicago.