I guess you could say that Ron Bohmer received good news and bad news last spring. The good news was that he was finally going to get the chance to play Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel and the bad news was that by playing Percy, he was going to step into a role that very likely would be identified with his predecessor for many years to come. A less daring actor might have considered that too difficult of a challenge, but Ron accepted it with aplomb and made the role his own.

I interviewed Ron in between shows on a Saturday. His ever-present dog, Griffin, was with him, and we were later joined by his girlfriend, actress Sandra Joseph.

NR: I understand you grew up in Ohio.

RB: Cincinnati.

NR: Can you tell me something about growing up there?

RB: I could never live in Cincinnati because it's a little too conservative for my tastes, but the heart and soul of the people there are wonderful. I love it. The great thing for me was it was a wonderful, safe environment for me to develop as a kid who wanted to be a performer, who wanted to eventually become an artist, and just have a safe place to do it. I was very lucky to have parents that supported me in it. I had a teacher there named Jack Louiso. I started taking dance from him when I was six and continued with him all the way through high school. He was one of the best influences on me. He was one of the first people that ever made me sing. We would do these dance recitals and one year he just said, "OK, you're going to sing this year."

NR: How old were you?

RB: I must have been eight or nine the first time I sang. I think I sang, "I'm Late" from Alice in Wonderland. You know (singing) - "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date." All the girls were dressed as the White Rabbit and I was dressed as the Mad Hatter. I had this giant hat on my head and you know what they wear at dance recitals. I had this ridiculous shiny, satin costume. I was not happy about it so I had this scowl on my face while I sang. It was not the most inspiring debut. (laughing) I don't think anyone who saw that thought, "Oh, a star is born."

NR: Did that give you any idea that you wanted to do this?

RB: Totally. When I was a kid, the dancing thing was always a little weird to me, and the live stuff initially was really freaky to me. I got really nervous being in front of a live audience, initially. But, what I began to realize about it is that once you relax and accept it, and don't try to do everything that you've planned but allow yourself some freedom out there, the spontaneity of it is wonderful, and that was the thrill for me. That made me think, "Hmm, let's see what happens when I do this, and let's see what happens when I do that." That made it fun. I always thought I would do TV or something like that, but then I got bit by the "audience bug."

NR: Did you know going into college what you wanted to be?

RB: Pretty much. I went to a performing arts high school in Cincinnati. I went to The School for the Creative and Performing Arts. It was wonderful. It was one of the best things that could have happened to me. All of a sudden I wasn't a freak anymore. I was going to these classes. I was taking drama in school, I was taking dance in school. People weren't making fun of me because I wore tights to ballet class - I was wearing them AT SCHOOL for ballet class. It was wonderful.

NR: You did Enjolras on Broadway and then you did the BIG leads on the tours. What's better? Being a big lead on a tour, or being a small part just to be on Broadway?

RB: (laughing) The best is being a big lead on Broadway!

NR: (laughing) I know, but that's not what I asked you!

RB: It's an interesting thing about touring. The dynamic for me is just the quality of the audience. The way I mean that is on the road, you get a very pure audience. You get people who come in. Either they're season ticket holders, or they bought their tickets fresh and the reason they're coming is because they just want to be entertained. They don't have any criteria. If they're interested in theater, they do it peripherally. They're not professional. So, they're just there to have a good time and you get a much more honest response, which I think we did with this show when we were in Atlanta and the other two cities. The New York audience, particularly for us the first two weeks, is a critical audience. It's an audience that says, "Show me. I'm going to review you. As an actor who's come to see the show, I'm going to see why I'm not in it. Why are you better than me?" So you get that kind of energy. There's a lot to prove. It's a little tougher.

I think there's a lot more safety in a small role on Broadway. It's not all of you hanging out there taking a risk. If it's a great role you can enjoy it a little bit more. But, (laughing) this is really better. I like risk. I must like risk to take over this role from Douglas (Sills). For me the challenge is always just how high can you make the stakes. To carry the weight of a show, to me, is always much more interesting.

NR: You did three Andrew Lloyd Webber shows, and now you're doing one by Frank Wildhorn. Can you compare the two experiences?

RB: What I love about both of them is that they really write for singers. They write music that is very singable and that takes advantage of your instrument. It's challenging and takes you to extremes. The guys who wrote Les Miz, Boublil and Schonberg, do not necessarily write for singers. Their stuff is harder to sing because they write strange extremes. They write things that are hard to sing as opposed to things that take you to the better part of your voice, the top of your voice, or the low end of your voice. For me, the difference, at least regarding this role, as opposed to roles that Andrew Lloyd Webber has written, I find Frank's stuff a little bit easier to sing because he defines the voice within a certain number of notes and he stays there. Percy is a true tenor role. He doesn't get down into the basement. He really stays up in that area. As the Phantom, you're singing bass notes, you're singing baritone notes, and you're singing tenor notes, so you're all over the place. Alex in Aspects of Love was like that too - huge extremes, low A's, high B-flats.

NR: How do you get through eight performances of that?

RB: Oh, very carefully. For the first year that I did Aspects, I did eight shows a week and it was a killer. You have to be careful and you have to watch it. You find a way to pace. You think, "This is Wednesday and I have to get to Sunday. This is how much I can give and still give the audience the show that they paid to see." Phantom was harder because the Phantom is a sick, sick man. He's messed up, and in that messed up quality, there is huge angst going on inside of him, so consequently, not just singing but in the interpretation of the role, you're putting your body through intense extremes. There's a lot of screaming, and I found that one really tough to do eight a week. By the end of my run in that I was only doing seven shows a week. It was regular for me to miss one a week.

NR: Before your first audition, how much did you know about this show and about the League? Had you seen it?

RB: I didn't know anything about the League. I had seen the show. I saw version 1 and I remember liking it, thinking it had a lot of things that were just terribly wrong with it, that bothered me, but overall, liking the show. I thought, "Despite some of the stuff that's dreadful, there's really some great stuff going on here." I thought Douglas was wonderful. I liked all three of the principals. I thought they were all great. I liked the essence of the story. I thought that if they could just tie it together somehow, I thought it would be really good. But, I never thought it would run. I never thought I'd get the chance to do it, because I expected it to be a two or three month run. I thought it could never make it because the critics had clobbered it. Despite some good performances, I didn't think it was going to happen.

NR: By the time you got to audition for this it was well into SP2.

RB: I auditioned at least a year and a half after I had seen it. I was auditioning for it in January of `99 when Douglas had said that he was going to leave. I had not seen version 2 yet. I auditioned that day...I remember that audition. I was doing Bed and Sofa in Philadelphia and they called me. They said, "We want you to come audition. Pick up the material." I had never gotten so much material for an audition in my life. They gave me "Prayer," "She Was There," "Into the Fire," and they gave me four scenes. It was the "Into the Fire" scene, the garden spelling scene, the footbridge, and a scene with Armand I think, which I never actually did. I ended up just doing the three scenes. I couldn't believe it. What could you do?

NR: Now that you know the part, you know why.

RB: Yeah, now I see why. There was so much they had to find out. I worked on the scenes, and the songs I just learned as best as I could. I held the music while I sang them. The scenes...I remembered that he creates this fop character. I remembered that the spelling scene was intended to be very funny, but I couldn't remember anything that Douglas had done with it, so I just thought, "How about this? How about that?" Apparently one of the things they liked the most about my audition was that I came up with all this stuff that nobody had ever done before. I did the audition and they were all way impressed. Bobby (Longbottom) said, "Have you seen the show since I took it over?" I said, "No, I haven't" so he said, "Can you come tonight?" I said, "Yeah, I guess so." I had the callback a week later and they offered me the job on the spot. Russell Garrett showed me a dance combination which was the only different thing that we had done. I read the footbridge with Rachel (York) and I finished everything. Bobby said, "We think you're tremendous. We'd love to offer you this part." Nobody's ever done that before. I've never been offered a role on the spot. That sort of happened with Les Miz. Richard Jay-Alexander said, "Are you interested in this?" but he didn't say. "We're going to call you." I was blown away. I went to the Majestic where Sandra, my girlfriend was playing in Phantom, and she said, "How did it go?" She was on stage in the rehearsal and I remember mouthing to her, "I got it!" She was just thrilled. Everybody was beside themselves.

NR: And then you went into a whole roller coaster.

RB: Then I went into a crazy roller coaster. Douglas decided to stay and they called to tell me they didn't have a job for me. The hardest part about that...it came at a time when financially, I really needed the job. It was hard to have it disappear, but also, there was no guarantee I was ever going to get to do it again. Nobody knew what was going to happen. The next three months were tough because I had achieved something that I really was excited about, and was looking forward to doing, but it just sort of went into nether land. In the long run, it ended up being the best thing for me I think.

NR: Really? Why is that?

RB: I think it would have been really tough to come into that company replacing Douglas. I think the way that people would have viewed that would have been a very different thing - taking over a role in that sense, where you're just coming in for somebody, as opposed to having the six weeks of rehearsals. I started with a brand new company, with Carolee (Carmello), with Marc (Kudisch), and we really had a chance to make it our own thing.

NR: When you did Phantom, you probably felt that you had Michael Crawford on your shoulder.

RB: Yeah, and Davis Gaines, because I did it out in L.A. and Davis had done it out there for so long. I was held up to all of their ghosts.

NR: That's got to be hard and Douglas is one tough act to follow in this part.

RB: Totally. He took a role... he took a show that was struggling and was not getting along. He found a way to make it come along. He found a way to make people come back again and again to say, "What's he going to do now? What's he going to do next? How is he going to develop in this part?"

NR: Well, the ad libs went away in SP2 but people still came back.

RB: Yeah, they went away with Bobby, but that's the way that Douglas likes to work and in a star performance I have to respect that. He felt he had the right to go down a different path every night with the role, and it worked for him. He's great at that.

NR: But the audiences still came to SP2, so it wasn't only the ad libs that kept people coming.

RB: I think what was good to find out, and what version 3 proved to people, was that although Douglas' quality and his ad libs made it an engaging and a fun show and sort of hooked people, what was achieved by SP2 and consequently SP3 was that the story really is wonderful, and that also was enough to keep people coming in.

NR: How did you approach walking in and expecting people to say, "He's not Douglas"?

RB: They still do. Some people do. I get a mixed bag. We rented The Music Man the other night and he's got this wonderful line where he says, "Well, that's one for and one against." I get that every night. I'll be at the stage door and I'll have a line of people that will say, "It was wonderful. It was brilliant. I've never seen anything that I loved so much." And then I'll get somebody who's a big fan of Douglas' and they'll say, "Good job."

NR: How do you know they're a fan of Douglas?

RB: Oh, you can tell. They have a button or something that says they're in the League.

NR: If you had come in and completely imitated him they would have thought you were very weird. That would have been sad.

RB: It would have been a huge mistake for me to try to imitate Douglas because I can't. I can't do what he did.

NR: Well, you shouldn't.

RB: I knew what I wanted to do with it from the moment I saw it. I did the same thing with Phantom. I read the novel and I thought, "Oh. It's about this. It's not about that." That's what I made it about. This is about a man who is not relishing this character of this fop that he created. He loathes it. It's a disguise that is a huge weight for him to carry. More than anything, he desperately loves his wife and he's destroyed that he believes that she betrayed him. When he finds out that she hasn't, he can do anything. He becomes Superman at that moment because it's all he's ever wanted. He adores her. You know, Percy risked everything just to marry this woman. She's an actress. Let's face it, "actress" was a bad word in that society for years and years. They were whores, they were the worst people. All of his friends told him he was marrying way below his station and she was going to bring a disgrace on his house. But he believes in her and he marries her. What happens is his friends bring proof to him that she's his worst nightmare. He's destroyed by it. Hence, through that, he says, "I'll make amends. I'll do this." That's what drives him, but what a relief when he finds out.

NR: You do that scene (the footbridge) very differently and I really enjoy it. It's a very interesting take.

RB: I also wanted to redo Grappin. I wanted Grappin to be less of a big nose and all this stuff. I wanted him to be something where if Chauvelin REALLY looked, he would say, "Oh, my God. You're Percy Blakeney." I wanted it to be a thinner veil. Bobby and I decided that we wanted Grappin to be as if Percy Blakeney was a coin, and when you turned it over, Grappin would be on the other side. I didn't think it was the Grappin that was in the other version. I thought it was somebody slicker, and somebody a little more dark, and sort of creepy sinister, and that's what we tried to make in this version.