Harelik's girlfriend, Spencer Kayden, just finished a long run on Broadway as Little Sally in "Urinetown." He says he won't feel less fulfilled if his own name never appears in a Broadway Playbill; as for the nice notices he gets on other New York stages -- Robert Brustein in the New Republic found him "deliciously depraved" as Oxford -- Harelik says they don't mean more to him than the approval he's gotten over the past 20 years playing frequently at South Coast, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Old Globe and the Mark Taper Forum. There's as much provincialism in the nation's largest city, Harelik thinks, as in his old hometown, population 2,977, where he still pays annual family visits.
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Think panache, not Pinocchio
Mark Harelik brings layers to Cyrano that would have been difficult for him 20 years ago. Too bad Broadway's missing out.
If Cyrano lives and dies embodying panache, Harelik says only part-jokingly that his own life has been fueled by arrogance. That, he says, is what sent him across the arts quad at the University of Texas at Austin after he washed out as a freshman classical piano student, deciding to take up acting on the strength of two high school roles and minimal other exposure to drama.
"It was complete arrogance. The same thing that propels me now. It's just that now I can encase my arrogance in a shell of nice-sounding philosophy."
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