In the series for which he’s best known, Scott Bakula’s time-traveler character kept zapping into different times and places out of his own control. Now, after memorable turns on both “Quantum Leap” and UPN’s “Star Trek: Enterprise,” Bakula is set to co-star with Ray Romano and Andre Braugher in what could be another long-running series, “Men of a Certain Age,” which premieres Dec. 7 on TNT.
He spoke with Eric Estrin about driving the “Shenandoah” tour bus, auditioning long-distance and getting beat out for “Moonlighting” by some other guy.
I was doing things on stage from pretty much the fifth grade on, but I grew up in St. Louis -- and it’s not like growing up in a town that’s full of the industry, so I never really considered it an option.
I did theater all the way through high school, and I was doing it in summer in St. Louis when I came home from college. Finally I quit school and I went to New York to try my luck there.
I’d never been to New York. I had a friend in St. Louis, and he was kind of advising me, because he had been to New York. He said, when you get to New York, you’ve got to buy a Backstage, because that’s where they have all the auditions.
He also said there’s a new show opening soon in New York called “Shenandoah,” and there are lots of male singing roles in it, so that might be a good show for me.
So I go to New York on a Wednesday. I think I had saved up $750, and I did that whole thing where I was staying with a friend of a friend. I open the Backstage the day I get there, and lo and behold, on that Friday, there’s a non-union dinner theater audition for “Shenandoah.”
So on Friday evening I was calling my parents saying, I’m gonna be playing the role of Sam, the Gentleman Caller, for a hundred bucks a week, room
and board, in a dinner-theater circuit down in North Carolina.
That was way cool. But even better, there was an agent had come to see our final run-through before we left to go to North Carolina; he said, "Call me when you get back to town." I did, and he became my agent for the next 12 years or so. So that was kind of remarkable.
The next kind of break I got was I auditioned for a TV show called “On Our Own,” which I think lasted for about one season, then I did a couple of little days on a soap here or there, but it didn’t really lead to much. There wasn’t much television being done in New York back then -- for network stuff, you had to audition on video and hope that you got interest in California.
