David Ledingham got his eyes stabbed out in his first college play, and I was right there beside him.
The play was “Equus” at the University of Colorado, and we shared the title role (OK, we were horses). There we were, clomping our foot-high hooves and yelling “Philco!” with sinister glee until finally surrendering our eyesight to some deranged little freak.
We hit it off, I think, because we were by far the two least ambitious people in the room.
“And I’m still so not ambitious in this career,” Ledingham said on a break from the national touring production of “The Light in the Piazza,” opening Tuesday at the Buell Theatre.
Ledingham is a laid-back Aspen native who would be utterly content tooling around Colorado’s backwoods with his wife and 5-year-old son.
Problem is, people keep hiring him. Most recently in the plum role of Signor Naccarelli, father of a handsome and high-spirited Florentine who falls for an American traveling through Italy.
“So, David,” goes my first hard-hitting question for my former castmate: “I know you have appeared at the National Theatre in London and at the famed Steppenwolf in Chicago and at the Old Globe in San Diego (and blah, blah, blah), but your theatrical highlight had to have come in ‘Equus’ at the University of Colorado.”
“Clearly the highlight,” he said to laughter. “What role did you play again?”
Philco!
Ledingham was more of an artist than an actor in Boulder, before “Equus” pulled him into the daylight.
“I thought about art as a career, but painting alone in a studio for eight hours a day is not my idea of having fun,” he said. “You get real tunnel vision in there. I would walk out, and it would take me an hour to adjust back to the outside world.”
Acting gave Ledingham the opportunity to share ideas with others more directly, and soon he had his B.F.A. in theater. Then, another crossroads.
“After CU, I remember really being on the fence about whether I wanted to become an actor or something else,” he said. Also in the running were cultural anthropology and dentistry, his father’s profession.
“Somebody said to me, ‘Close your eyes and describe what it would be like to be an anthropologist,’ and I imagined going to South America and living there in the dirt with the Yanomamu tribe. As a dentist, I said, ‘I see a mouth, and it’s stinky, and there’s tartar.’
“So then it was, ‘OK, describe what it would be like to be an actor,’ and I said, ‘I’m on an island in the South Pacific filming a movie with a beautiful woman.’ And he said, ‘Well, clearly that’s the choice.”‘
After getting his master’s from the University of California-San Diego, it was off to New York, where Ledingham realized “that being a nature boy from a small town in Colorado, New York was really scary.”
His first big break was a three-year stint as Suede Pruitt on “One Life to Live.”
“I was so not ambitious that three soap operas wanted to screen-test me the first week I got to New York, and I turned them all down,” he said. But Suede sounded interesting. He was a Southern rebel poet – a cross, Ledingham thought, between James Dean and Clint Eastwood. In his memorable first scene, Suede dials radio host Luna Moody after she talks a lovelorn caller off a bridge.
“Our head writer was the Tennessee Williams of daytime, seriously,” Ledingham said. “I gotta quote you this one line. I call up this radio station from this prison and all you see are shadows and this black panther tattooed on my shoulder, and I say, ‘You shoulda told that guy to jump.
“‘Because where I come from, love’s about as scarce as the dew on a trumpet vine on a Carolina morning … And around the next corner is nothing but dreams just lying there with no wheels and love lying flat as a road-killed skunk.’
“Isn’t that great stuff?”
Ledingham went on to much success in the regional theater, especially after training his singing voice. Just before 9/11, he came home to perform in a Harry Chapin musical for Theatre Aspen. His wife was pregnant, and they loved it so much they stayed for nearly four years raising their son and running his mom’s bed-and-breakfast.
Ledingham often appeared for Theatre Aspen and was preparing to star in “Dinner With Friends” last summer when the offer came for “Piazza.”
“I had to think long and hard about accepting,” he said, but “Piazza” was an irresistible opportunity. The six-time Tony- winning musical is a throwback to old-fashioned romanticism written by composer Adam Guettel, grandson of Richard Rodgers. The story, set in 1953, follows young lovers who don’t speak the same language.
“This is so not typical Broadway fare,” Ledingham said. “It’s very deep and rich and evocative. It’s been compared to the romantic elements in ‘West Side Story,’ but the music is so innovative and unbelievably beautiful, I really think it’s in a class all its own.”
When “Piazza” ends, Ledingham returns to Brooklyn, but he believes his family will settle back in Aspen one day.
“I still have a 970 cellphone number, and I’m not ever giving it up,” he said.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“The Light in the Piazza”
MUSICAL | National touring production | Written by Adam Guettel (music) and Craig Lucas (book) | Directed by Bartlett Sher | THROUGH APRIL 8 | At Buell Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex | 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday (plus 2 p.m. April 5) | $10-$65 | 303-893-4100, 866-464-2626, all King Soopers or denvercenter.org; 800-641-1222 outside Denver
