Uninhibited, yes, but under control

SIX months ago, Norbert Leo Butz was arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike on suspicion of driving with an expired license and failing to pay a parking ticket. As the actor was handcuffed and placed against the hood of his car, he tried to tell the officer that he was on his way to perform in the Broadway musical “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” “Dude, I’ve got to get to my show!” he pleaded.

“And you know what the cop said?” the 39-year-old actor recalled somewhat sheepishly last week as the tour of “DRS” was poised to open at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre. “ ‘I’m sure you’re very good at what you do, but I’m also good at what I do, so it would behoove you to shut up.’ And this is the thing: I was arrested at 10 minutes to 2, released on my own recognizance and still made my matinee at 3. I’m not disciplined enough to renew my license and I will get arrested, but I’m disciplined to make it to the theater in time.”

That inimitable blend of chaos and rigor will be on display when “DRS” opens at the Pantages this week, with Butz re-creating his Tony Award-winning portrayal of Freddy Benson, the “so deliciously low, so horribly dirty” con man who’s an over-caffeinated, simian Eliza to the debonair Henry Higgins of swindler Lawrence Jameson. Based on the 1988 Michael Caine-Steve Martin film about a couple of scam artists working the same mark on the French Riviera, the musical, with a book by Jeffrey Lane and a score by David Yazbek (“The Full Monty”), opened 17 months ago on Broadway, where it is still running. The show received mostly positive reviews and unanimous raves for Butz, then known largely for being the one saving grace in Harry Connick Jr.’s poorly received musical, “Thou Shalt Not.”

Clive Barnes, writing about “DRS” in the New York Post, cautioned that the scene-stealing Butz should be added to W.C. Fields’ classic caveat to never act with children or dogs, and Ben Brantley in the New York Times wrote that the “criminally talented” actor totally dominated the stage with “a vocal and comic power that jolts an audience to attention.” It was a classic star-making performance after a Tony-nominated turn in 2001 as a lively ghost in “Thou Shalt Not” and roles as the emcee in the touring production of “Cabaret” and in the off-Broadway musical “The Last Five Years.”

Having worked his comic mayhem as Freddy opposite John Lithgow and later Jonathan Pryce, Butz is now teamed with Tom Hewitt (“Dracula”), who, judging by the dress rehearsal in Seattle, brings a silver fox elegance to Lawrence, in a show accented by a new opening number, “The Only Game in Town,” written by Yazbek for the touring production.

Hewitt says that acting with Butz has been both an exuberant and daunting experience. “It’s scary because you get the sense with Norbert that anything can happen out on that stage -- and does,” Hewitt says with a laugh. “Yet while it may seem spontaneous, there are very exacting rhythms that make the chemistry work.”

Describing himself as “restless and kinetic” -- “bored” is too strong a word, he says -- Butz is always eager to find new aspects to his character. At the same time, he insists, “I’ve invented nothing” -- every bit of business stems from the blueprint laid down by Lane and Yazbek, from Freddy’s mooning of the audience (a relatively new detail) to his floor-rolling fight with a piece of jerky.

“It has to be rooted in reality. The stakes have to be sky high for these two guys or it isn’t funny,” Butz says, acknowledging that he is relying on director Jack O’Brien now more than ever to bring into check any temptation to play to an audience. Getting those laughs is “like heroin, like crystal meth,” he says, “but, frankly, I’m brand new at this. Before I got this part I hadn’t done comedy since Moliere in college.”

O’Brien, the artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre who has won Tonys for both a musical (“Hairspray”) and a drama (Lincoln Center’s revival of “Henry IV”), says he would love to see Butz as Iago, and, in fact, he tried to cast him in his new production of Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” but was undone by scheduling. “Norbert’s fearless -- he’ll try anything,” O’Brien says. “This is a comedy, but there are scenes between Tom and Norbert that are positively Strindbergian. Norbert can tap into Freddy’s wild side but also his feelings of vulnerability and insecurity.”

Indeed Butz is friendly yet not ingratiating as he sits in his spacious dressing room at the Paramount, mindful of the clock because he’s due to pick up his girlfriend at the airport in an hour. (He’s amicably divorced from his wife, Sydney, with whom he shares custody of daughters Clara, 8, and Maggie, 6). On the coffee table is a copy of Eric Metaxas’ “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (but Were Afraid to Ask),” a book Freddy wouldn’t be caught dead with unless it was part of a con. It is part of Butz’s spiritual journey that bears little relation to the Catholicism of his youth as the seventh of 11 children -- eight boys, three girls -- born to Elaine and Norbert Butz, a St. Louis insurance salesman.

“I guess I am a seeker in that way. I’m absolutely convinced of his or her existence, but the church itself never did it for me,” he says. “I dig God, but I’m uncomfortable speaking about my faith, so I’ll just leave it at that.”

Though the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church was not attractive, the theater of it certainly was. Butz was an altar boy and lector at daily Mass, notwithstanding his shyness. “In old family movies, all my brothers are in front mugging and I’m in the background peeking out,” he recalls.

An early trauma occurred when, at age 8, Butz auditioned with his brothers for a local production of “The King and I.” Everyone but little Norbert got a part. “I was really, really upset. I felt this tremendous sense of injustice,” he says. “I wanted to be in this show so bad, and I knew they didn’t want it nearly as bad as I did. That stayed with me a long, long time.” No doubt, his Tony triumph decades later provided some vindication. “Isn’t that pathetic?” he says, sardonically. “My entire career has been about getting even with that high school theater director.”

Standing out and getting attention in a family of 11 can be tough, but Butz managed to do that by alternating bad boy behavior (“I did some really, really stupid things,” he says with chagrin) with stints in high school and local productions. After receiving an undergraduate degree from the rigorous acting conservatory at Webster University in St. Louis, he followed a girlfriend to Omaha. After their breakup, he headed east to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where his four-year stint got him involved in the classics and earned him a master’s degree. “I was crazy for Shakespeare,” he says. “I wanted to get my mouth around those magnificent words and do those plays.”

Musicals and more

HIS intent to become a dramatic actor was sidelined, however, when he arrived in New York in 1996 and was quickly cast in “Rent,” graduating to the role of Roger before being snatched by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall to head the road production of “Cabaret.” Other musical roles followed in quick succession, including the original Fiyero in the smash hit “Wicked.” “Musicals were never part of the game plan,” he says. “I hated musicals, what I thought of as this ‘fake, singing, dancing world.’ But I quickly realized after ‘Rent’ and ‘Cabaret’ that it’s only fake if you let it be fake. They felt like great plays with music and just as dimensional.”

Adding to those dimensions is a rubber-limbed virtuosity that brought the actor Theater Development Fund’s prestigious Fred Astaire Award as best male dancer for “DRS,” even though he has never taken a dance lesson. Since, as a child, he saw James Cagney in “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Butz yearned to move as fluidly, though he was too embarrassed to take a dance class, much less put on a pair of tights for fear of what people would say. Instead, he picked up his moves playing lead guitar in a rock band and going to clubs.

“I think with my body,” he says. “I have to let my body explore a role before my mind does. I have never been able to sit down and memorize lines; I’m hopeless until I know what I’m doing physically with the character.” That may account in part for the honesty and uninhibited nature of Butz’s work. “I think it’s impossible for the human body to lie; it cannot hide behind anything. That’s the difference between the theater and all the other mediums: The story is told through the live human body.”

Nonetheless, Butz is assaying all the different media. A CBS-TV deal, developed by Joe Roth, never materialized, but the actor has been cast in his first major film role: “Dan in Real Life,” a comedy about a loud, chaotic family written and directed by Peter Hedges (“Pieces of April”) and co-starring Steve Carell and Dane Cook. “It reminded me of my family,” says Butz, “good-hearted and loving, but under the surface of all those rituals there are demons lurking. It’s funny and sort of sad.”

Not that Butz plans to abandon the theater soon. He hopes to realize a lifelong ambition to play “Hamlet” and other classic roles, a dream galvanized during an 18-month stay in London when he was an undergraduate. In addition to being inspired by the likes of Judi Dench, Michael Gambon and Antony Sher, he says, he studied, hung out, went to pubs -- and got arrested. “For fighting in a bar,” he recalls. “Look, this is all making me sound like Russell Crowe or early Johnny Depp, which I’m not. I just have bad luck sometimes. It was with this crazy Australian friend of mine. Granted we’d had too much to drink, but we weren’t even fighting -- we were staging this fake fight, screaming and shouting. I don’t think anyone even threw a punch. I almost got deported.”

With a laugh, he adds, “This is the part of me that is like Freddy: I’m incredibly impulsive. I tend to jump in and not think about the consequences. I pay later.”

*

‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’

Where: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays,

1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Aug. 27

Price: $25 to $80

Contact: (213) 365-3500, www.BroadwayLA.org