One more shining moment: Broadway vet Anthony Crivello plays Al McGuire again in new Milwaukee production

Editor's note: The original version of this story appeared in the Journal Sentinel in January 2017. It's been edited and updated with information about a new production of "McGuire" in Milwaukee during July 2022.

After playing Valentin in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and the masked one in "Phantom of the Opera," actor Anthony Crivello is again taking on a character who really dominates the stage.

That would be the late Al McGuire, who coached the Marquette University men's basketball team to a national championship in 1977, scattering colorful (but impossible to parse) quotes in his wake.

In preparing to portray "McGuire" in a new production directed by Edward Morgan that begins July 14 at Next Act Theatre, Broadway veteran Crivello has another advantage: He spent a year as a Marquette University cheerleader with a close-up view of the coach's histrionics and machinations.

Surprisingly, the one-on-one encounter with McGuire that Crivello remembers most vividly came not after a signature victory, but following a loss to Kentucky during the 1975 NCAA tournament.

Walking through a lower level of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, arena after the game, Crivello saw McGuire heading his way. The cheerleader shrugged his shoulders in a what-are-you-gonna-do gesture but was surprised to hear McGuire reply that he knew his team would get beat. "They were just too big," he remembers McGuire saying of the Kentucky squad. "No way we were going to match up against their size."

RELATED: Bernard Toone, member of Marquette's 1977 championship team, dies at 65

Crivello grasped that McGuire was already planning the future moves, including recruiting Jerome Whitehead, his "aircraft carrier," that would put Marquette in position to win a national championship two years later.

Crivello plans to reflect McGuire as a showman, orchestrator and ringleader, the McGuire who made Marquette a hot ticket for the dazzling uniforms his athletes wore as well as the basketball they played while wearing them.

Broadcaster Dick Enberg wrote this one-actor play after speaking at the funeral of McGuire, his former TV partner, in 2001. Cotter Smith premiered the role in 2005 at Marquette University's Helfaer Theatre.

Enberg's celebratory original script hints at McGuire's dark side, the actor said. When Crivello performed "McGuire" in 2017 at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Crivello said he and director Brent Hazelton worked with Enberg to bring more of McGuire's shadow into this production of the play.

Crivello reeled off a series of McGuire statements about his divisive reputation and human frailty, including "nobody's ever had a tapioca feeling about me" and the coach's remark that he had broken all the commandments except the one against murder and would need a deaf priest for his confession.

"We will still paint a picture that is absolutely reverent, that is still an endearing piece, but will show … that he's a human being. What person is perfect?" Crivello said.

Crivello, a Thomas More High School graduate, won a Tony Award for portraying Valentin in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" on Broadway. He also spent six years as the Phantom in Las Vegas.

As an actor portraying McGuire, Crivello said, "I'm less concerned with doing an impersonation and more with trying to grab the essence of who the human being is."

He adopts a New York accent for McGuire, a native of Queens, with a higher-pitched voice than Crivello's natural one. He has studied the coach's cadence and his gestures, including a bringing together of his hands that almost looks like prayer.

Reflecting on McGuire's legacy, Crivello brought up the coach's efforts in launching the fundraiser Al's Run, now known as Briggs & Al's Run & Walk for Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. McGuire's visits to children in the hospital went beyond the PR mission. The coach felt "he was getting a lot out of visiting those kids himself."

Those visits, Crivello mused, were almost "divine intervention" prepping McGuire for the leukemia he faced at the end of his life. Even in the final struggle, the former coach stayed true to himself, Crivello pointed out. When McGuire recruited college athletes, instead of grilling their principals, he sought out school janitors, "because the janitor knows the real truths and knows all the secrets," Crivello said.

When processing his cancer diagnosis, McGuire turned for a second opinion on the process not to another doctor, but to a hospital janitor, Crivello said.

Contact Jim Higgins at jim.higgins@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jhiggy.

If you go

Anthony Crivello performs "McGuire" July 14-31 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. For ticket info, visit nextact.org/shows/mcguire.

Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.

DOWNLOAD THE APP: Get the latest news, sports and more

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Broadway's Anthony Crivello plays Al McGuire again in new local show