Barney Miller's alter ego

In some places, Hal Linden is known for being the singer who's not known for being a singer.

In other places, including places where he's already sung, people still seem surprised that he can do it. But that's still a better problem to have than Abe Vigoda's.

"No matter how many times he appears on television," Linden says, "somebody's going to ask, 'When did Abe Vigoda die?' "

He's still alive, so far. And so is the vocal career of his fellow cop from television's "Barney Miller," who will open the nine-day JCC Stephen Gottlieb Music Festival on Saturday night in West Bloomfield.

Linden, 79, was a Broadway star before he was a sitcom star and a clarinet player before he was a Broadway star. These days he's mostly a golfer, but he'll still sing, act or toot when the opportunity arises.

On the phone from his home along a well-known course near Palm Springs, he says he'll do all three at the Jewish Community Center in a show that's part Broadway, part autobiography, and far enough removed from his days on tour that he's not exactly sure where he'll be.

Typecast by 'Barney Miller'

The JCC, for the record, sits at Maple and Drake roads.

Linden's memories of Metro Detroit revolve more around the Fisher Theatre, where he opened "The Rothschilds" in 1970 before he won a Tony Award for it in New York. That was three years after he passed through with "Illya Darling."

At some point in his travels, he developed refined tastes in ginger ale: "I miss Vernor's. Do they still bottle it there?" And then in 1975, he landed "Barney Miller," which ran for seven years on ABC, won some Emmys, carried on for decades in syndication, and overshadowed everything Linden did before he played the 12th Precinct's sane and steady captain.

Among his detectives on the show was Stan "Wojo" Wojciehowicz, played by Max Gail. Gail's family owned some local office supply stores, and his sister Emily was the shopkeeper in pigtails who encouraged everyone to "Say nice things about Detroit."

"Max is still a wild man," Linden says, the sort of guy who bought a new house and immediately installed an Indian sweat lodge. He's a 66-year-old with his own theater company and a gray beard, and he competes with Linden for graybeard roles.

The agony of auditioning

Auditioning is even less fun than it used to be, Linden says, and not just because there are fewer available roles at his age and lots of guys like Joseph Bologna also reading for them. There's so much money at stake that creative rogues like Danny Arnold, who envisioned, produced and wrote "Barney Miller," no longer control the casting.

"You've got to go in and do a reading in front of about 20 people," he says, "most of whom are recent English majors who've just been hired by the networks." A few actors move on from there to read for another bunch of 20-somethings who've never heard of them, and the winner lands a role in a formulaic comedy.

Either that or the whole project gets scrapped for a low-cost reality show. But Linden isn't complaining -- not about the indignities of Hollywood, and not about the people who think his career began and ended with a long-gone sitcom.

"It's not the American public's job," he says, to remember that oh, yeah, this Linden guy can put across a show tune.

As he points out, he used to play an instrument and then he started playing roles, with the key word in both cases being "play."

"It puts things in perspective," he says, and leaves him -- like Abe Vigoda -- feeling lucky to be around.

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