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St. Pete Catalyst: What\u2019s a practical use for having two Tonys? Do you automatically get better restaurant seating?<\/p>\n
Norbert Leo Butz: Yes, it can do that, a little bit. [Laughter] As for practical use, I suppose, they make good bookends. They look pretty cool.<\/p>\n
And for a short while after you get a sort of honor like that, it ups your cache in the industry a little bit. But even that doesn\u2019t last. It\u2019s such a mercurial business. They\u2019re mostly talking points.<\/p>\n
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Is this what happens? \u201cLet\u2019s bump this guy to the top of the audition list, because he\u2019s Norbert Leo Butz and he has two Tonys\u201d? Or do you still have to go out and \u201cprove yourself\u201d every time?<\/p>\n
Less so, I would say, in theater. In theater I don\u2019t really audition. Just because, like I said, I\u2019ve been around a long time, people know my work, they know what I can bring. I tend to work with people who know my work, or we\u2019ve wanted to work together on something.<\/p>\n
But for sure in film and television work, everyone has to put themselves out there for those. These days, those roles are so few and far between that everyone\u2019s trying to get a piece of the pie.<\/p>\n
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Why do both? Is that just the way your DNA is configured?<\/p>\n
I guess there\u2019s a couple reasons for that. A diverse portfolio is always the best way to go, just from an economic standpoint: The more things you can do, the more you get to work.<\/p>\n
And for me \u2026 I think my parents had an ADHD kid before everyone was diagnosing it. And I like new challenges. I like to switch things up. I like to work in different mediums, to keep myself on the front foot, as it were. I\u2019m always looking for the next new challenging thing to do.<\/p>\n
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Does that also include the singer\/songwriter stuff you do? You don\u2019t HAVE to do that; it sounds to me like you WANT to do that.<\/p>\n
For sure! As a kid, music was my first real love. I grew up singing in church, and I just fell in love with the pop\/rock music that was happening in the \u201880s and \u201890s. Post-punk rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, and a lot of influences.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re right, I don\u2019t have to do that. I make music for myself. If I release it, I release it. I\u2019ve been sitting on a record that I\u2019m practically finished with now for a couple years. I\u2019m just not ready to release it; it\u2019s sort of \u201cThese are mine, these are mine!\u201d<\/p>\n
I do think it\u2019s important, though, and it does kind of feed my other work. Performing artists or creative artists or whatever, should always have something they\u2019re making that\u2019s just for them. We\u2019re constantly selling our wares, we\u2019re constantly putting ourselves out there into this short attention span market, and you can grow cynical with it. You can forget the reasons that you did it in the first place. Making my own music always keeps me honest.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk about the show you\u2019re bringing here.<\/p>\n
I travel with an incredible music director, brilliant piano player named Andy Roninson. I play some acoustic guitar. I also play a little piano; we switch instruments a little bit. We\u2019re kind of a two-man band.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an intimate evening; you know, I\u2019ve done 11 Broadway shows now, and I\u2019ve done a lot of new musicals, some of which are iconic shows now. I do songs that people might know me for, from those shows, but I also do very left-of-center covers. And throughout, I tell stories. I tell some of the backstage stories. I spill the tea, as it were, on the creation of some of these shows.<\/p>\n
I joke in the show that only somebody with a name as awkward as mine, from South St. Louis, Missouri, could have gotten to work with the composers I\u2019ve worked with, and have the career that I\u2019ve had.<\/p>\n
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Well, you brought it up. Did you ever think of changing your name? It doesn\u2019t exactly fall off the tongue.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t! In college, I had a couple teachers who said \u201cHey, you might want to think about that \u2026\u201d I\u2019ve always been a very stubborn person. I\u2019m named after my dad and my two grandfathers, my grandfather was a German immigrant. I always thought it would hurt their feelings.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m very close to my family, and I always thought it would be like a betrayal of something integral to me, or to them.<\/p>\n
But I have to say, I never thought I\u2019d be in a position where anybody would say my name.<\/p>\n
I remember I got my first Tony nomination, and they read my name out loud at Radio City Music Hall, and I thought \u2018God damn, I should\u2019ve changed that name!\u201d<\/p>\n
And by then, it was already too late.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Dirty-Rotten-Scoundrels-Norbert-Leo-Butz-John-Lithgow-1024x714.jpg\")
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2004: Norbert Leo Butz, left, and John Lithgow in \u201cDirty Rotten Scoundrels\u201d at the Old Globe Theatre. Publicity photo.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He has two Tony Awards, as Best Actor in a Musical, for his work on Broadway. Just nine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-203497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}