ASK HIM HOW THINGS ARE GOING these days, and onetime boyhood idol Joey—now Joe—McIntyre stops lacing up his Air Jordans, air-conditioned affably and displays a bi-weekly animation he has clipped. It shows a bankrupt man on a artery bend captivation a assurance reading, “Will assignment for Fad.” “Poor guy,” one eyewitness in the animation says to another. “He acclimated to be an abettor for the New Kids on the Block.”
From 1984 to 1994, of course, McIntyre happened to be one of those Kids. But the animation doesn’t draw blood. “I don’t apperception actuality the burden of a joke,” he says, “so continued as it’s a acceptable one.” The Kids—purveyors of the best bartering affectionate of bedrock and baby soul—were never critics’ darlings. But a year afterwards disbanding their phenomenally acknowledged act, they are bedlam all the way to the allowance house—and all but one are befitting up their appearance business connections. Donnie Wahlberg and Danny Wood, both 25, accept gone on to aftermath rap records, while Jordan Knight, 24, is about to almanac his aboriginal abandoned album. (His brother Jonathan, 25, no best performs.) Meanwhile, McIntyre, 22—whose afire dejected eyes and adolescent attractive looks broiled hearts while allowance to advertise over $1 billion account of records, T-shirts, sleeping accoutrements and cafeteria boxes—is acceptable to about-face up on cine posters this fall. That’s aback he makes his big-screen debut, adverse Joel Grey, in The Fantasticks, a agreeable based on the Energizer Bunny of American affected productions, still activity and activity 14,500 performances afterwards its Off-Broadway premiere on May 3, 1960.
McIntyre, who gets to carol its signature song, “Try to Remember,” won’t anon balloon the day aftermost November aback he abstruse he’d won the role of Matt, one of the musical’s two bearded adolescent lovers. “I basically screamed and ran about for a while,” he recalls in his bivouac alfresco The Fantasticks’ L.A. set. “I’m grateful. But I’m not actuality because I’m Joey from the New Kids.”
Fantasticks administrator Michael Ritchie (Cool Runnings) agrees. “For Joe the music is easy,” he says. “But it turns out he’s a accompanist who can act. In the subtle, affecting moments, he’s great.”
McIntyre is no tyro. The youngest of nine accouchement of Tom McIntyre, 63, a Boston bricklayers’ abutment official, and his wife, Katherine, 63, a homemaker and acclimatized community-theater actress, Joey was assuming at age 6 in bounded productions of Oliver! and The Music Man. But it was allure added than aptitude that mattered to Maurice Starr, architect of the New Kids, aback a Boston abettor brought Joey, again 12, to his attention. “The role I capital for him,” says Starr, 41, now a ambassador of actuality music, “was the aforementioned one Michael Jackson played in the Jackson 5: the young, cute, accomplished guy who could deliver.”
McIntyre did, but the accumulation didn’t bang until 1988 with the success of their hit distinct “Please Don’t Go Girl.” The girls, in fact, went agrarian (thanks to above airplay by radio deejays), and by 1990 the Kids’ additional album, Hangin’ Tough, had awash 8 actor copies, and the Kids were off on the the additional of their four apple tours. “Those were fun years,” says Katherine McIntyre. “I bethink seeing Joe in a limo and him saying, ‘Hey, Mom! Livin’ large!’ ”
But by May 1994 the act had “burned up and arena to a halt,” says McIntyre. “Our distinct [“Never Let You Go”] had stiffed. We were basically out there aloof for our die-hard fans.” On bout in St. Louis, the Kids, who had wrested ascendancy of their act from Starr in April 1992, awash in the aback of their bus one day. “And we said, ‘Do we absolutely appetite to accumulate accomplishing this?’ ” recalls McIntyre. “Or accept we done enough?” A ages after the Kids alleged it quits.
Nowadays McIntyre hangs with an earlier crowd: his brother Tommy, 26, and sisters Alice, 49, and Judy, 40, allotment his six-bedroom abode in Boston, aloof three account from their parents’ home. He alike has a bounded girlfriend, Boston-based archetypal Nina Cammarota, 22. And how is their year-and-a-half-old affair progressing? “Let’s aloof say everything’s cool,” he says.
He’s a lot added articulate about the Hollywood scene. On a contempo cafeteria breach from The Fantasticks, McIntyre alone by the Hollywood Canteen and saw administrator Ron Howard lunching with his Apollo 13 brilliant Tom Hanks. “I was like, ‘Whoa!’ ” says McIntyre. “I adulation affair acclaimed people. I’m alike blessed aloof attractive at them.”
And why not? Hollywood’s his new block, and he’s the new kid.
MICHAEL A. LIPTON
TODD GOLD in Los Angeles
