Tim Murray has a lot of love for Sandusky.
“I still am a very big proponent for the city, so much so that I feel like a lot of my friends in LA and New York make fun of me, like, ‘No one loves their hometown as much as you do – it’s creepy,” says Murray, a Los Angeles-based touring comedian who graduated from Sandusky High School in 2006. “And I’m like, ‘Well, you guys just don’t get it.’ … I try to describe Put-in-Bay and Cedar Point, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah. We’ve heard this before.’”
Murray laughs as he says this, as he does at many points during a roughly 20-minute phone interview from New York City before he was to head to Scotland for a week
to perform his comedy-musical show “Tim Murray Is Witches” as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (He’s visiting the Big Apple for a few days because his actor-husband, Michael Bullard, has been called back to perform in the Broadway production of Disney’s “Aladdin,” something that happens from time to time when the show needs a fill-in talent for a stretch.)
While Murray says Sandusky was an “amazing place to grow up,” he says in the same breath that “I couldn’t live there now.”
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Courtesy of Tim MurrayMurray with parents John and SusanHe had his share of challenges as a closeted gay child, dating to his pre-high school years at the since-closed Sts. Peter & Paul School.
“I was the only boy in the entire class that wasn’t on the football team,” he says of a later year at the Catholic school. “When they had a football game, they got to wear, like, button-up white shirts and a tie, and I had to just wear the regular old uniform. And I just remember feeling like such a freak being the only boy in the entire grade that was not playing football.”
Things got somewhat better at Sandusky High.
“Even though I wasn’t able to actually fully be myself, they had the choir, and I became friends with the band kids – like, the arts were cool, and there was a drama club,” he says. “I always felt like Sandusky High allowed me to kind of blossom and be more like myself because … there were the emo kids and, like, a bunch of different types of outfits, different-colored hair. And it was sort of like, ‘OK, there are enough people here that we can kind of all do our own thing.
“I became class president at Sandusky High, and I remember thinking, OK, this is only happening because, like, you’re allowed to be – even though I wasn’t openly gay, I was still kind of goofy and, you know trying to be a comedian and being my own self.”
The roots of Murray’s “comedian” side are easy to trace.
“I come from a large family of Irish people who just embellish and make shit up, really, at every dinner table,” he says. “The vibe was always, like, ‘You’d better learn how to tell a story if you want to talk to this group of loud, loud people.’ You’d have to figure out what your point of view is, and you’d better have something interesting to say.
“If you ever, like, held court in the family, you’d better hope it ended on a laugh. You know, find a way to make everybody laugh – that was kind of always part of our culture.”
Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that his parents, John and Susan, were supportive when it came to him pursuing a career in show business.
“They’re the absolute best,” Murray says. “They just really encouraged me to do whatever I wanted me to do.”
However, he originally intended to study journalism in college.
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Courtesy of Tim MurrayMurray performs a stand-up set on stage.“And I got into the University of Miami (Florida) for theater,” he says. “And I always say I think I checked the wrong box or something on the application.”
The program had a good reputation, he says, so he decided he would stick with it for a year and then reassess.
“At the end of the year, I auditioned for the acting conservatory program, and I got into that,” he says. “I was like, ‘OK, no turning back now, and so then I (went) whole hog into theater – musical theater.”
After college, at age 30, after making a go of it in New York, he decided to move to LA and, finally, face his fears by giving stand-up comedy a shot.
And, yeah, he says, it’s as tough as they say.
“Oh, it’s hell,” he laughs. “It’s hell on Earth.
“Yeah, it’s horrible,” he continues. “It’s, like, the absolute worst thing in the world. But also, on the flip side, it’s the best. When it goes well, there really is no better adrenaline rush. And when it goes poorly, there really is no worse feeling.”
Murray says he changes his act based on the situation and the audience; he could be playing in New York to folks who were handed a flyer in Times Square to come to a club that night for a free show or to people who came specifically to see him perform on tour, who these days would get the “Witches” show.
Inspired in part by his love of the megahit musical “Wicked,” which is soon to be a two-part movie event, “Witches” is a blend of comedy and music – including original songs – that creatively addresses his journey as a gay man. (He came out during his freshman year at UM, he says.)
Early on as a stand-up, he says, he shied away from his musical background, wanting to prove he could be funny in a traditional sense.
“And then I was like, ‘Wait, why am I not just combining all these things and doing something really special and really unique?’ And that’s how ‘Witches’ was born,” he says. “I really wanted to do something that was kind of incorporating all parts of me, so I sing in it, and it’s a little part drag. It’s a little bit improv. It’s a little bit crowd work.
It’s a lot of stand-up.”
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Courtesy of Tim MurrayMurray with his mother SusanHe says he probably will do something a bit more traditional when he performs for the first time as a professional at the yet-to-reopen Sandusky State Theatre – a venue he raves about and says is nicer than a Broadway house – late this year or in early 2025.
“When I come back to Sandusky, it’s a very different crowd,” Murray says. “A lot of people knew me from growing up, so some of my more crass material doesn’t play as well there.”
Also at a date to be determined, Murray will be seen by a national television audience in the sketch-comedy series “Wish You Were Queer.” He’s not at liberty to discuss it yet, but
it was the subject of a Variety piece.
Murray also got a bit of exposure in an unusual way when The New York Times published a feature about his romance and subsequent marriage with Bullard.
That’s not something that happens to everybody.
“I know – so random,” he says. “I was making these TikTok videos – just comedy videos about having a gay wedding, and the writer, Jenny Block, reached out to me on Instagram saying she found the TikTik videos. … At first I thought it was a joke. … I was like, ‘This isn’t real.’”
A video interview with her convinced the couple this was, in fact, real, and
“Discovering ‘This Was a Forever Romance’” was published earlier this year.
That’s a long way to come for a guy who years ago in Sandusky couldn’t tell everyone everything about himself.
He sees that society in general has come a long way, too. When he isn’t on the road, he teaches improv comedy in rehabilitation centers and mental health facilities, where some of the folks he encounters are young and openly trans, gay, nonbinary, etc.
“It’s just fascinating,” he says. “It’s cool to see them feel like they can just show up to class as themselves.”
And, he says, that Sandusky has been the site of multiple Pride parades in the years since he lived there “blows my mind.”
Through his art – and teaching – he’ll continue to do his part to be part of a dialogue about what it was like to be someone like him.
“There’s a full conversation in America right now about whether adult people should be openly gay around underage people,” Murray says. “And it’s just so important to me to show up as myself because I know that had my teachers been openly gay and talked about their husbands or, if they’re lesbians, talking their wives, in a way that all my straight teachers did, I would have felt so much safer to be myself, which is the whole point.”