Mr. Nice Guy
Fred Willard takes a role that draws on his sweetness
NEW YORK -- Fred Willard is the nicest man on the planet.
Director Mark Martino, whose production of ''No, No, Nanette" opens tomorrow night at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, doesn't offer this statement as opinion. He's so certain that it's just a fact that he says it again.
''He's the nicest man on the planet."
And that, Martino says, made Willard the ideal choice for the role of Jimmy, the hapless uncle of would-be flapper Nanette. Only if we believe that Jimmy has an almost otherworldly innocence can we swallow the plot of this fizzy 1925 musical, which spins around Bible salesman Jimmy's gullible support of multiple gold diggers and his bumbling, naive attempts to pay them all off before his wife gets the wrong idea.
''It's a very difficult role to cast, because he is the sweet center," Martino says. ''It's a confection, a whirlwind, and if the show is playing well it flies. But in the middle of it, you have to have a very sweet center. Which Fred does. He walks in with that."
Indeed, he walks in with a resume full of goofy-sweet guys. He's known to current TV viewers for his supporting role on ''Everybody Loves Raymond," but older fans still cherish his almost unbelievably clueless Jerry Hubbard, the McMahon-esque sidekick to Martin Mull's priceless small-town 70's talk-show host on the parody ''Fernwood 2Nite" (and its broader follow-up, ''America 2Night"). More recently, movie audiences know him as the almost unbelievably clueless dog-show announcer who doesn't even know anything about dogs in Christopher Guest's mockumentary ''Best in Show." He also appeared in Rob Reiner's ''This Is Spinal Tap," co-written by Guest, and Guest's own ''Waiting for Guffman" -- and both times his character was, yes, almost unbelievably clueless.
But the thing about Willard is that he really does make cluelessness utterly believable. When his characters say something stupid -- and they never don't -- you're absolutely convinced they have no idea how stupid it is. With his wide-open face, affable but deadpan delivery, and ability to cloak impeccable comic timing in an air of imbecility, Willard is a very smart actor who makes audiences laugh by playing very, very dumb.
''That's my favorite kind of comedy, where everyone is very serious, not goofy," Willard says, during a break in the 11th-floor rehearsal studio just off Broadway where the ''Nanette" cast, which also includes Rebecca Luker and George Dvorsky, has had just two weeks to rehearse together. (Don't think the address makes it glamorous, unless you find glamour in orange molded-plastic chairs and scuffed linoleum floors.) ''My favorite humor is stuff that pokes fun at hypocrisy and pretensions and people who take themselves too seriously."
It's a brand of humor that seems to grow naturally in Willard's native Ohio, a background he shares with Mull and with one of his comedic heroes, Jonathan Winters. Now 65, Willard grew up in Shaker Heights, just outside Cleveland.
''My parents were very serious," he says, ''but my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, would see through all hypocrisy. My grandmother would always say, 'What you don't see when you haven't got a gun!' -- good Midwestern humor that cuts right through nonsense."
But Willard also appreciates a faster, more East Coast-urban style; the patter of Brooklyn-born Danny Kaye in ''The Court Jester," he says, is one of his all-time favorite performances. And he came east himself fairly young, first as part of a comedy team that performed on ''The Ed Sullivan Show" and ''The Tonight Show." Alan Arkin directed him in an off-Broadway production of Jules Feiffer's ''Little Murders," and Richard Benjamin in two other plays. After his comedy duo broke up, he was part of the sketch group Ace Trucking Company; he also did a season of improvisational comedy with Chicago's famed Second City troupe.
Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles and into TV and movie work, though he has also continued to appear onstage in California. And the movie work with Guest has felt a lot like the old improv-comedy days: The director doesn't write scripts for his ''documentaries"; he just gives the actors a situation and asks them to run with it.
That, says Willard, was part of the appeal when Guest called him about the part of Ron Albertson, an aspiring actor and a travel agent who has never actually traveled, in the gentle satire of community theater that is ''Waiting for Guffman."
''I said, 'Oh, great, no lines to learn!' And then I got there," Willard says, ''and I said, 'You know, it's all well and good that we don't have to memorize lines, but we do have to come up with lines.' "
The first day of shooting, ''It was, 'OK, action!' And nobody said anything." He laughs. Finally, he says, his character started musing -- cluelessly, of course -- about the library in which the scene took place, ''and that got people going," he says. ''That's the danger, though, especially when you're working with people you admire -- there's a tendency to sit back and say, 'Aren't they funny!' You have to jump in."
He loves improv, he says, but he's delighted to be sticking to the script this time around. ''I'm very much 'Let's do the play as written,' " he says, ''and have that kind of fun."
And he's also delighted that the producers scheduled the rehearsals in New York; he and his wife, Mary Willard, a writer and playwright, came east early so they could catch some new plays. His love of theater goes back to his earlier New York days, when he saw, among other memorable performances, Robert Preston in ''The Music Man."
''I think -- I hope he influenced my acting," Willard says quietly. ''He didn't really act. He was just in the play, moving around, saying those words."
Perhaps it's no coincidence that that's the quality Martino describes in Willard's work. ''To be a really great actor, you have to be simple and honest," the director says. ''And that's what he does: He says the words, and he means them."
Watching a rehearsal, you see it. Willard may be the only actor now living who can say, ''Oh, mercy me!" and not make you think until afterward that it's an odd expression for a grown man to use. He doesn't ham; he doesn't camp; he doesn't wink. And it's that utter sincerity that's funny.
It's also -- and forgive the redundancy -- a sincere kind of sincerity. The cluelessness of his characters may be an act, but their fundamental honesty and sweetness is not. Just listen to him talking about ''No, No, Nanette."
''This is a fun show," Willard says. ''I love old-fashioned things. Nobody dies, there are no drug overdoses, no politics, no Bush-bashing. It won't offend anyone."
Or observe him when he's not in a scene, just watching the other actors perform. When the sweet young things -- Garrett Long as Nanette and Zachary Halley as Tom -- launch into a winsome duet on one of the show's best-known tunes, Willard leans against the wall, gazing at the young lovers as they swirl. His reaction is the exact opposite of the old joke about an actor reading through his script: ''Blah, blah, blah, blah, MY LINE, MY LINE, blah, blah." Willard is entirely, absolutely focused on appreciating his colleagues in their scene.
He smiles to himself. His head nods softly, in time to the music, and you almost think you can hear him tapping along. ''Tea (ta-ta) for two (ta-ta) and two (ta-ta) for tea (ta-ta), Meee for you. . . . "
The sweet little dance twirls to its end, and Willard leads the applause.
No contest. He's the nicest man on the planet.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 