The Right Man for the Part

After Michel Bell speaks his first, brief line as Joe in “Show Boat” at the Ahmanson Theatre, an audible buzz arises from the audience. It’s not because of what Bell says; the words are inconsequential. It’s because of how his voice sounds. And this is before he starts singing.

He has “an almost freaky cavernous basso that seems to echo down the ages,” wrote John Lahr in the New Yorker, reviewing this production’s original Toronto company in 1993. Or, to put it in TV terms, Bell makes most other men sound like Steve Urkel.

Soon after that first spoken line in “Show Boat,” Bell sings “Ol’ Man River.” Later, he sings it again. And again. He also sings fragments of it as accent marks on two other occasions. He performs eight shows a week, and he has been doing this now for nearly four years, with only occasional breaks. He’ll keep his rendition rollin’ along here and in other cities at least until September 1998, when his current contract is up.

He’s spending all this time on a song that he tried to avoid when he was first learning how to sing.

Bell, 49, was a 15-year-old high school student in Fresno when the school’s choir director, Dimitri Kostiw, heard him sing and offered him free private lessons at 7 every morning, before the school day began. The first song they worked on together was something by Haydn, but the next one Kostiw pulled out was “Ol’ Man River.”

When Bell took it home and looked at the lyrics, “I didn’t know what the words meant,” he recalled. Dere’s? Dat’s? His father told him these were “a white man’s version of how black folks speak.”

This made Bell uncomfortable enough that he purposely “forgot” to bring the sheet music for “Ol’ Man River” to his lessons, “so we got into Mozart instead.” But finally Kostiw asked the young Bell why he was resisting singing the Kern-Hammerstein classic. After Bell explained that he didn’t understand the lyrics, Kostiw worked on the melody with him before returning to the words. Finally, “I learned it, I sang it. But I didn’t like it until I was in college and learned about Paul Robeson.”

His change of heart toward the song actually began in his hometown church, Carter Memorial A.M.E. (a congregation that also can boast of two-time Tony winner Audra McDonald, currently starring in “Ragtime” in Toronto).

Bell sang “Ol’ Man River” at a church program and was approached afterward by an old man who remarked, “Little Bell boy, you sound like Paul Robeson.” Bell knew nothing about Robeson, who created the role of Joe in “Show Boat” among his many accomplishments. But he quickly did some research, and “through Paul Robeson’s eyes, I learned to appreciate the song.” (Years later, Bell played Robeson in “Artist of Conscience: A Portrait of Paul Robeson” on stage and PBS.)

How does Bell maintain the concentration necessary to keep repeating the song over and over?

“It’s so rich with melody,” he replied. “And you can take the meaning of the text in many directions. At one moment, you’re speaking for your race; at another, you’re speaking for mankind; at another, you’re speaking about the ecological side of it.”

Bell is filled with awe about the real Mississippi River. On a recent promotional trip aboard a Mississippi riverboat, he woke before dawn to see the sun rise over the river “and it was eerie, like the way I imagined it when I sing the song.”

Nonetheless, there are moments when Bell’s mind wanders while he’s singing “the song.” On one occasion, when he should have been singing “Show me dat stream called de river Jordan /Dat’s de ol’ stream that I long to cross,” he found himself singing “Show me that dream called the mis-er-ree-ee / That’s the old dream that I long to have.” As he told the story, he chuckled, imagining how members of the audience must have scratched their heads at that point.

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Bell has gone through transformations in his life more dramatic than his changed feelings about “Ol’ Man River.” The most significant one occurred when he was 8. Until then, he had been deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other. He didn’t realize how much everyone else could hear, for no one had diagnosed his condition. He recalled how his class laughed at him one day when, after reading in a primer about chirping birds, he asked out loud: “How do we know birds chirp if we can’t hear them?”

Finally, a school nurse caught him raising his hand to acknowledge a sound on a hearing test even though there had been no sound. This led to a successful operation, “and my whole world opened up at that moment,” he said.

Later, he decided not to pursue a career in opera--for which he had trained at Chapman University in Orange--but instead to enter the pop music world. “I realized that for a bass, your voice isn’t mature until your 40s. At the same time, on a practical level, I looked at the availability of jobs and the union scale in opera vs. show biz” and opted for the latter. He was a member of the Fifth Dimension from 1976 to 1980.

But he maintained his classical training. Since leaving the Fifth Dimension, he has performed Porgy on a U.S. tour and in Austria, Italy, France, Norway, Japan, Egypt and Eritrea, in eastern Africa. He also has sung in numerous classical concerts and did three earlier stints as Joe in “Show Boat,” including one at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, with Opera Pacific, in 1991.

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Yet nothing has brought him as much attention as the current “Show Boat”--some of it unwelcome. He was in Fresno, preparing to drive to Toronto to begin rehearsals in 1993, when he was called by a Canadian TV station about doing a live interview from Fresno. He agreed--only to learn while on camera that a bitter controversy had erupted in Toronto from community groups who protested what they saw as stereotypes of blacks in “Show Boat.” The other people who were on camera during the same segment were all from the protest groups.

Upon arriving in Toronto, Bell found a tense situation. During previews, the theater was surrounded by police as well as protesters.

“Throughout my career,” Bell said, “I’ve tried to maintain an even keel, to go with the flow”--an appropriate choice of words for someone who sings “Ol’ Man River” three times a night. But the situation in Toronto got him quite “heated” in interviews, he recalls.

He felt the protesters were confusing imagery from Edna Ferber’s novel--some of which is degrading to Joe and other blacks, he said--with the then-still-unseen version director Harold Prince prepared for this production. Prince “worked hard to avoid stereotypes” while also acknowledging the racial barriers that existed during the “Show Boat” era, Bell said.

The Toronto controversy died down soon after the show opened and Prince’s adaptation became better known. Now, Bell’s problem is one of too much routine instead of excessive turmoil. “The musician side of me is being deprived by doing ‘Show Boat’ for so long,” he said. “I can feel it’s not as easy to sing other material.” He tries to keep in shape, vocally, but when he has a chance to sing something different--at a benefit concert, for example--he’s often asked for “Ol’ Man River.”

Still, he’s not complaining. “This is working for a living,” he said. “This is putting my kids through college. There was a time when I did not want to be categorized in any way. But what that probably means is that you haven’t lived long enough to know where you fit in.”

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“SHOW BOAT,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Dates: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 3. Prices: $35-$75. Phone: (213) 628-2772.