NEW YORK (AP) — Richard Thomas has not one but two big shoes to fill when he goes out on the road this summer in a celebrated one-man show.
The Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee is portraying the great American writer Mark Twain in a play written and performed for decades by the late Hal Holbrook.
Thomas immediately accepted the offer to star in the 90-minute “Mark Twain Tonight!” that tours more than a dozen states this summer and fall before wondering what he'd gotten himself into.
“I walked down to the street and I said, ‘Are you crazy? What are you out of your mind?’” he says, laughing. “I had to grapple with who’s the bigger fool — the man who says, ‘Yes, I’ll do it’ or the man that says, ‘No, I won’t’?”
Holbrook portrayed the popular novelist and humorist for more than a half century starting in 1954, making over 2,300 performances to a collective audience of more than 2 million. He and Thomas were fond of each other and would see each other's work.
The show mixes Twain's speeches and passages from his books and letters to offer a multidimensional look at an American icon, who toured the U.S. with appearances.
“I’m going to feel very much like I’m not only following in Hal’s footsteps, but in Twain’s as well,” says Thomas, who began his career as John-Boy Walton on TV's “The Waltons” and became a Broadway mainstay.
Thomas jokes that Holbrook had 50 years to settle into the role and he has only a year or so. “I have the advantage on him that he started when he was 30 and he was pretending to be an old man. I’m 74 so I’m right there. That’s the one area where I’m up on him.”
The new tour kicks off this week in Hartford, Connecticut — appropriately enough, one of the places Twain lived — and then goes to Maryland, Iowa, Arkansas, North Carolina, Kansas, Tennessee, New York, New Jersey, Utah, California, Arizona, Alabama, Utah and Florida by Christmastime. Then in 2026 — the 60th anniversary of the Broadway premiere — it goes to Texas, Colorado, Wisconsin and Ohio.
“It’s time for Twain, you know? I mean, it's always time for Twain, always. He’s always relevant because he’s utterly and completely us, with warts and all,” says Thomas.
The actor will travel with a stage manager and a trunk with his costumes, but all the other elements will be sourced locally by the venues — like desks and chairs, giving each show local touches.
“There’s something about doing a show for people in their own community, in their theater that they support, that they raise money for. They’re not coming to you as tourists. You’re coming to them.”
Thomas has done a one-man show before — “A Distant Country Called Youth” using Tennessee Williams letters — but that allowed him to read from the script on stage. Here he has no such help.
“One of the keys is to balance the light and the shadow, how funny, how outrageous, the polemic and the darkness and the light. You want that balanced beautifully,” he says.
Other actors — notably Val Kilmer and Jerry Hardin — have devised one-man shows about the creator of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, who still manages to fascinate. A new biography of Twain by Ron Chernow came out this year, which Thomas is churning through.
Thomas sees Twain as representing America perfectly: “He just lets it all hang out there. He’s mean-spirited; he’s generous. He’s bigoted; he is progressive. He hates money; he wants to be the richest man in America. All of these fabulous contradictions are on display.”
Thomas has lately become a road rat, touring in “Twelve Angry Men” from 2006-08, “The Humans” in 2018 and starring as Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” from 2022-24.
Orin Wolf, CEO of tour producer NETworks Presentations, got to watch Thomas on the road in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and says having him step into Twain will strengthen the theater community across the country
“It’s so rare nowadays to have a true star of the road,” Wolf says, calling Thomas “a breed of actor and artist that they rarely make anymore.”
“I’m delighted to be supporting him and delighted that he’s chosen to do this because I think this is something he could also take on for hopefully many years,” he adds.
After Twain, Thomas will next be seen on Broadway this spring opposite Renée Elise Goldsberry and Marylouise Burke in David Lindsay-Abaire’s new comedy, “The Balusters.”
But first there's the eloquence and wry humor in a show about Twain that reveals he was often a frustrated optimist when it came to America.
“I think it reflects right now a lot of our frustration with how things are going,” says Thomas. “Will things ever be better and can things ever better? Or are we just doomed to just be this species that is going to constantly eat its own tail and are we ever going to move forward?”
FILE - Richard Thomas appears at the 2017 Tony Awards Meet the Nominees press day on May 3, 2017, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)
