Bryan Barbarin bringing big voice to ‘Big River’

Bryan Barbarin will play Jim in New Village Arts’ revival of “Big River.” — Eduardo Contreras

(Eduardo Contreras)

When theater first came calling for Bryan Barbarin, he greeted it with a few tears.

“I was kind of shy, stagewise,” the actor and singer says with a laugh, recalling that time back in fourth grade when his teacher at Mission Valley's Nazareth School tried to coax him to recite one line in the school play.

“I cried for days because I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to mess it up.”

It’s fair to say he got over that. Barbarin has long since been making his voice heard, both in theater and the music world.

And “heard” is definitely the word: If you’ve witnessed Barbarin onstage in one of the two dozen or so shows he has done at Lamb’s Players and other local companies, you won’t soon forget his rich, resonant, rattle-the-house baritone.

Now he brings those powerful pipes and soulful presence to Carlsbad’s New Village Arts Theatre for the first time, as the escaped slave Jim in the musical “Big River.”

The show, based on Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” has some significant history with San Diego. Its 1985 world premiere was directed by then-La Jolla Playhouse artistic chief Des McAnuff, and it became the first in what is now a long line of Playhouse productions to transfer to Broadway.

Barbarin has some history with “Big River,” too: Although he has never appeared in or even seen a production (no professional company has staged it here in years), it was one of the first Broadway cast albums he owned.

“I definitely wore it out,” he says.

And he calls the piece “such a bucket-list item for me” because of its compelling story and Roger Miller’s distinctive Americana score.

“The story of Jim is so heartbreaking,” Barbarin says. “He carries a whole lot of weight with him. His kids and his wife are sold to other people. Jim’s entire goal is freedom, so he can work hard to buy his wife, and then they can work hard to buy their kids back.”

That’s juxtaposed with Huck, who is “this sweet boy — they find common ground. But Huck will never understand what Jim is going through. Huck is just about the adventure.

“Mark Twain makes sure you can hear that. It’s so relevant to what’s going on today. There’s not a lot of understanding going on. There’s too much of people assuming what is right, and not enough of listening to what the actual problems are.”

In that sense, Barbarin adds, Twain was “like Einstein — he kind of got things before everyone else.”

Kristianne Kurner, NVA’s executive artistic director, seconds that assessment.

“This play does look at some really hard parts of our history, and does it in a way that leaves the viewer with some hope,” she says.

“(It explores) that idea of coming together as a community and looking beyond the color of the skin to see what a person is made of.”

To direct “Big River,” Kurner brought aboard Colleen Kollar Smith, a longtime pro as an actor-choreographer at Lamb’s and other companies who is now on staff at San Diego Musical Theatre.

“And as soon as we picked the show, she said, ‘I have to have Bryan,’” Kurner recalls. (Smith helped get Barbarin his first Lamb’s role in a 2008 production of “Hello, Dolly!”)

From the first, Kurner says, Barbarin’s singing “literally had everyone in tears. His voice is just amazing.

“To hear a voice like that in our little 99-seat theater — it’s almost overwhelming, but overwhelming in a beautiful way.”

“Big River” is just one part of what’s shaping up to be a big year for Barbarin. The rising San Diego band he fronts, The Routine, recently was named best rock act at the San Diego Music Awards, and was invited to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, this month.

Barbarin also was a Craig Noel Awards nominee (presented by the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle) this year for his turn as the Tin Man in Lamb’s “Oz.”

He juggles his stage and music careers with gigs as the entertainer “Dr. Zoolittle” at the San Diego Zoo, and as an educator with Cygnet Theatre’s “Storytelling on the Green” in Old Town.

But while he has deep family roots in the New Orleans music scene, with relatives including Little Feat bassist Kenny Gradney (his cousin) and jazz trombonist Lucien Barbarin (his uncle), theater remains an overriding passion.

“It’s the only place I feel at home, man,” Barbarin says.

“It’s a group of people telling a story together. And there’s something so beautiful about that.”