Now It’s Cassidy Brother No. 3’s Turn

One glance at Patrick Cassidy’s famous family tree and anyone would assume the dashing baritone was born to sing. But anyone would be wrong. Compared with Cassidy, born performers are actually latecomers to the limelight; he made his debut in utero.

Along for the ride was his mother, Shirley Jones, who was filming “The Music Man” while six months pregnant. Her blossoming middle was hidden under multiplying bustles so the press wouldn’t discover what the star had waiting in the wings. Jones’ co-star, Robert Preston, was also in the dark, so when he leaned over to kiss her for the cameras and he felt a kick, Preston jumped back in astonishment. “What the heck was that?” he asked.

“That,” announced Jones, “is Patrick Cassidy.”

Fast forward nearly 40 years. The still-astonishing Cassidy is telling his story to a visitor in an empty rehearsal hall across the street from the Ahmanson Theatre, where he’s starring in the maiden national tour of the Elton John-Tim Rice poperetta “Aida,” which arrives here today. “The addendum to the story is that I saw Robert Preston at a benefit many years later,” he says. “I’d never met him, and I walked up to his dressing room and knocked on the door and introduced myself. He stepped back and said, ‘We’ve already met.”’

That puts Preston in fairly select company. Patrick is still known as David and Shaun’s brother, or simply the Stealth Cassidy, despite a solid career largely spanning theater and television. He may not be as well known as his older siblings, but as the still hunky sons of the late actor Jack Cassidy settle into middle age, Patrick seems to be finally taking his turn as the Cassidy with the most promising future as a performer.

During last year’s Broadway run of “Annie Get Your Gun,” which starred Cassidy as Frank Butler, Liz Smith gushed that Patrick is “the sexiest, most charismatic and most talented of the Cassidy boys.” Indeed, his charms, which include six-pack abs he bares every night in “Aida,” were not lost on Disney Theatricals when it came to casting the attractively doomed Egyptian soldier Radames.

“He’s someone we’ve had our eye on for a while to play this role,” says Thomas Schumacher, president of Walt Disney feature animation and Disney Theatrical Productions. “Patrick is a perfect leading man. He possesses a beautiful singing voice, strong acting ability, matinee-idol good looks and an innate stage sense, which comes from years of performing onstage and his incredible pedigree.”

Perhaps even more valuable has been Cassidy’s sheer force of will, which helped him rebound from surgery to remove a node from his vocal cords two years ago even though doctors said he might never sing again. “He couldn’t speak or do anything for six weeks,” Jones says. “Then he started to vocalize slowly, and it was a miracle. He’s singing better than he has ever sung.”

In “Aida,” which won four Tony awards in 2000, Cassidy sings the role of a military captain loved by two women--Amneris, the Egyptian princess played by Kelli Fournier who’s in line for the throne, and Aida, an Egyptian slave who’s really a kidnapped Nubian princess, performed by Simone, the only child of jazz singer Nina Simone. Radames is betrothed to Amneris but in love with Aida, setting events in motion that propel the true lovers toward their deaths.

Cassidy, 39, knew some critics had roasted the Broadway production of “Aida,” but he was enchanted by the show’s spirit. “It has its problems,” he says, “but the essence of it and why people stand for it every night is that it’s about love and that love is everlasting.”

So he took the role despite his initial misgivings about dealing with the corporate entertainment behemoth. Ultimately, he found Disney more open to compromise based on his input than he’d expected. “Every performer and creative person will tell you that they’re not easy to negotiate with,” Cassidy says, “but that’s why they are who they are. We got past that, and here I am, and it’s been a great thing.”

Cassidy envisioned Radames as an idealist forced into a situation that would keep him from his true calling. “He really wants to be the Egyptian Lewis and Clark. He wants to seek out new lands. And through [Aida], the way she puts him in his place and her willingness to stand up for herself, he finds the willingness to stand up for himself.”

All well and good. But then Cassidy and Disney parted ways on the question of coiffure. Cassidy wanted to shave his head for the role.

“I wanted to make him a little edgier,” he says. “They said, ‘Well, Patrick, he’s not Lex Luthor. He’s a leading man.”’

But don’t be misled by Cassidy’s sculptural cheekbones and the Pepsodent smile; that breed of thespian makes him uneasy. “The truth is I was given a 6-foot-2-inch frame, a decent chiseled face,” he says. “I was given the standard by which people in this business call a leading man, but my guts were that of a character guy. I wanted to play the guy that was suffering. I wanted to play the guy with the limp.”

For “Aida,” he settled for playing the guy with the earring. “I said, ‘I don’t want him to just be the average pretty boy, because I don’t think he is that.’ As a result, I got the earring,” he says, stroking a small silver hoop on his left ear. “I pierced it for the part because I thought it would give him just that much more of a modern-day and old-Egyptian edge.”

In return, he shaved the beard he’d grown for “Annie Get Your Gun,” and he cut and colored his gray hair a youthful shade of chestnut.

If he fretted over Radames being shortchanged as just a pretty boy, it’s because that has been his own cross to bear. And while he worries that his looks may rob him of juicier acting challenges, his family has other concerns. Cassidy has yet to break out into stardom, and now that he feels ready to take his shot, they wonder whether the world is still ready for him.

“Every time he walks onstage without a shirt and he’s drop-dead gorgeous, it’s probably a detriment in today’s show-biz world,” says Marty Ingels, Cassidy’s stepfather. “These days they have to look like Bruce Willis. Patrick is a throwback to the time when leading men were beautiful and sang.”

To Cassidy’s dismay, the never-shy Ingels has been lobbying reluctant “Tonight Show” producers to book the actor during the L.A. leg of “Aida.” “You can get overlooked, and that’s what I’m afraid will happen to Patrick,” he says. Cassidy insists he enjoys the freedom of navigating the world largely unrecognized, but both Ingels and Jones say he should be more self-promoting. “If you’re going to have a career, you have to push a bit,” Jones says. “My sons are nice, WASPy, mannerly young men.”

Of her brood, Patrick is considered the congenial one, the brother who’s most openhearted and least troubled. As a kid, he could also be the most mischievous. “He was the one who climbed out the window when Shirley said, ‘You’re all grounded,’ and slept with everybody in town,” Ingels says. “I had a big motor home in the back of the house. We knew Patrick was sneaking out and bringing home his Playboy bunnies.”

Cassidy has since settled down to happy domesticity with his ballet-dancer wife Melissa and their sons, Cole, 6, and Jack, 3. They live in a three-bedroom home in Sherman Oaks, not far from his family.

As brother No. 3, Patrick has benefited from the hard lessons of his older siblings’ careers. Half-brother David, 51, and brother Shaun, 43, each had his brief but incandescent moment as a teen idol. By the time Patrick was 18 and entering the business, David had already flamed out and Shaun’s run was nearing its end. Warner Bros. Records was wooing Patrick to be its newest singing Cassidy, but Patrick viewed his brothers’ experiences as cautionary tales. (Younger brother Ryan, 36, skipped performing entirely and became a set decorator. David is reprising his “Partridge Family” hits in Las Vegas, and Shaun, who morphed into a writer-producer for television, is executive producer of the new fall series “The Agency.”)

“I didn’t want to go down that road of being a teen idol,” Patrick says. “I didn’t want to do the record thing, because that distinguishes you as that. Both of my brothers are really talented, but the minute you do that, talent is negated. So the conscious decision was to work in the theater and hopefully reap the benefits of having worked hard at your craft.”

Not immediately, though. In 1982, when Cassidy replaced Robby Benson in a Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” his only training dated to the Beverly Hills High School drama department. He got the job anyway because he was a Cassidy. Which was a good thing and a bad thing.

“I was a complete green, unknowledgeable guy who got lucky and got a job,” he says. “I don’t think I was very good, and that was the problem. When you’re thrown in front of an audience the way I was because of my last name, you’d better know what you’re doing. And I didn’t. Therefore people look at you even harder under a microscope because of who you are, and they judge you very quickly.”

Over the years Cassidy has toiled at his craft, studying with such masters as Stella Adler and Larry Moss. He’s been rewarded with reasonably steady work, shuttling among theater, film and television. “When television didn’t want to talk to me anymore, I could go do a show. I did a musical or a play or I did a regional thing and kept my creative juices flowing. It’s certainly been beneficial in terms of paying the rent. I don’t know if it’s been beneficial in terms of having a specific career.”

He was a regular on the TV series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” and he also made numerous guest appearances, not the least of which was on an episode of “Bay City Blues” opposite the then-unknown Sharon Stone.

The pinnacle of his theater career was a stint originating the role of the balladeer for Stephen Sondheim in the 1991 off-Broadway production of “Assassins.” Cassidy also starred in a national tour of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” from 1999 to 2000. In Southern California, he appeared with Carol Burnett in a 1993 Long Beach Civic Light Opera production of “Company”; portrayed John Wilkes Booth in a 1995 Los Angeles Repertory production of “Assassins”; and played Mac-Heath in a 1998 UCLA Reprise! staging of “The Threepenny Opera.”

On-screen, the high point was the 1990 movie “Longtime Companion,” in which he played Howard, a gay actor cast as a gay character on a soap opera. Cassidy was the first actor to sign on for the early, controversial film about the AIDS epidemic. As his credits have piled up, Cassidy has begun to notice that among the brothers, his eclectic career trajectory most resembles his father’s. And while Jack Cassidy left the troubling legacy of a difficult father, Patrick is now seasoned enough that the parallel pleases him.

“I remember the day I realized it. I was updating my resume, and I thought, ‘I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff.’ We’ve done the same kinds of things. He was known basically for theater and his guest shots on ‘Columbo.’ But he was a journeyman in terms of the business. He had a beautiful singing voice. He was funny, so he got to do sitcoms, a lot of guest-star stuff, and that was his career. The saddest part about that is--more than myself--what he really wanted to be was a movie star. I don’t necessarily have a calling for that. I just want to be a working actor.”

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‘AIDA,’ Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. Dates: Opens today at 4 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Also Nov. 19, 8 p.m.; Dec. 26-27, Jan. 3, 2 p.m.; Dec. 31, 7 p.m. Dark Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Ends Jan. 5. Prices: $25-$75. Phone: (213) 628-2772.