The Space Merchants by Frederic Pohl and C M Kornbluth
Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke
Shikasta by Doris Lessing
Quantum Physics for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones
The Constitution of The United States of America
Each of these titles has something to offer in terms of what is happening on the world stage. To me, the first three seem especially prophetic.
Then we enter the wonderful world of sci-fi. The late Dame Doris Lessing says that sci-fi writers are to literature as illegitimate children are to families.
And I put Quantum physics for Dummies in there because I tried to read it when we did Copenhagen ⎯ Chris Oden, Beth Dimon and I ⎯ I struggled through about 4 pages ⎯ but I did get the incredible insight that a particle can also be a wave, and that has been a comfort ever since.
The Constitution is something I’ve dipped into, and am now resolved to read it properly before it’s too late.
As posted elsewhere, I’ve been following Richard Hester’s excellent “Posts from the Upper West Side” for quite some time ⎯ this actor blog doesn’t seem quite the right venue for actor/astrologer narrative, but I think Substack could be. Rather than re-post my first entry here ⎯ well, just click the link if you are interested!
For some time now I’ve been wondering whether to, and if so, how to, combine my twin (I have a Gemini Moon) professional interests, namely astrology and acting.
Image by Betidraws from Pixabay
Well, a lovely opportunity has presented itself, and there’s just no way to say no when the stars line up like this. For the astro-curious transiting Uranus in my 9th, together with progressed Saturn in the 4th were the main players in the deal.
Cutting to the chase, on the 1st and 2nd of March I will join Lindsay Gladstone and Deborah Morgan in presenting a weekend workshop in midtown Manhattan. The theme is Weaving a Better World through the exploration of how storytelling, mythology and the astrology in Shakespeare connect with your personal astrological chart.
If there’s no image here, click the link to download or alternatively go here
Both Deborah and Lindsay are known to me as highly experienced and accomplished astrologers, I have studied with both of them via The Faculty of Astrological Studies in the UK.
I will be exploring the Shakespeare factor in all this. I’ve mentioned before in this blog how reading Priscilla Costello’s book Shakespeare and the Stars has opened the window on this amazing dimension.
Another book I heartily recommend is Elizabeth Winkler’s Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies. Not only is it a well researched informative volume, it is also delightfully subversive when she comes up against the Shakespeare Establishment.
All that aside here is a brief promo video for actors and astrologers alike as well as storytellers, mythologists and anybody who would enjoy an enchanted sprinkle in NYC at the beginning of March 2025!
Please forward this to anyone who might be interested.
To book a spot, email: Heather.Rocco@gmail.com – bring your birth chart to the workshop – if you don’t have one, include your birth details when you email Heather – that is: Date and Location and Time if you know it.
30 years ago I was in a play called The Madness of George III. We toured to the USA and played four venues over 13 weeks.
I was cast as Sir Nigel Hawthorne’s understudy and also had a small part in the show. It was somewhat unthinkable that had Nigel been off, the powers that be would have allowed me to go on, seeing as Nigel (who later played the role in the film, which on Nigel’s suggestion was renamed The Madness of King George so as to avoid any hint of sequels or pequels) was the draw. Well perhaps not exclusively. It was a Royal National Theatre production out of London after all, and Alan Bennet was the playwright. So there were those glamours at work as well.
I watched Nigel’s work closely as I was paid to do, and came to the conclusion that he touched greatness in the role. By which I mean there were moments in the performance of exquisite, heartbreaking delicacy. In a whole year with the company in the UK, in Greece, in Israel and in the USA I never once saw Nigel working at anything less than full force. And I don’t mean just in performance. If a detail needed to be reworked or if somebody had to step in because one of the other actors had come down with food poisoning (that happened), at the put-in rehearsal Nigel was there always giving it 100%.
At the time he was a man in his late 60s, the age I am now. His squash playing days were over because being one who goes for everything, and having reached the time of life when there were issues with his internal organs, he knew it was no longer safe to rampage around a squash court. He saved all that for the stage.
Nigel by temperament was the nearest thing I have ever encountered in my 40 plus years as an actor to the character of ‘Sir’ in The Dresser.
By which I mean: he was a hugely talented actor with a special genius for light comedy; George III was, similarly to ‘Sir’, a Lear-adjacent role; in George III Nigel was tasked with very heavy acting lifting; he had a desperate personal agenda (having twice before been passed over for the film version of roles which he had originated on stage); in offstage interaction with other actors he could by turns be warm, acerbic, demanding, critical, supportive and furious. Over the year that I worked with him my affection grew slowly, but now that I understand something of what he was up against, I would say my respect and gratitude and admiration for him is total.
Our amazing set designed by Anne Mundell
Because just now I happen to be playing ‘Sir’ in The Dresser by Ronald Harwood and we opened to an enthusiastic audience on the eve of the winter solstice.
Director J. Barry Lewis and Denise Cormier (Her Ladyship) workshopping the newly arrived wind machine in rehearsal
There is no way round it, ‘Sir’ is a demanding role. Apart from the vocal variety required and the physical exuberance alternating with strange turns of mind, there is live make-up, costuming and facial hair to be reckoned with. Fortunately it is not a long show, coming in at just about 2 hours including an interval. The two-show days we are required to do are distantly reminiscent of a time long ago when I was touring Toad of Toad Hall and we had to give three performances in one day. I don’t recommend it.
Far left: Dennis Creaghan, Bill Hayes, Denise Cormier, David Hyland, Kelly Gibson, Me. (Photo by Curtis Brown/Courtesy Palm Beach Dramaworks)
The other blessing is an agile and talented supporting cast. The splendid slender Denise Cormier as Her Ladyship
The splendid petite Kelly Gibson (impressive on timpani)
I give the bodily adjectives because the action of the play requires me to lift each of these actresses (separately not simultaneously) in my arms.
The lovely Beth Dimon ⎯ we’ve worked together three times before and I regard her as one of my stage sisters and as I told her the other day, I knew she was a wonderful actress the first moment I saw her on stage back in 2003.
Then there are the lads. Dennis Creaghan has a single scene of comedy gold in this show. If the audience is savvy enough to get the joke they come out humming it. David Hyland makes a fish dip of the quality that makes you exclaim “There’s money to be made here”. Likewise Cliff Goulet makes a telling backstage cameo as a master baker, Gary Cadwallader supplies dramaturgy and an excellently sinister Oxenby, John Campagnuolo gives us a burly knight (the only one of an intended hundred in this depleted troupe).
Top: Dennis, Cliff. Bottom: Dave, Gary, John
And I must make special mention of Bill Hayes. Bill is the producing artistic director of Palm Beach Dramaworks. He played ‘Norman’ in this play 21 years ago (I saw that production in which the late marvelous Hal Johnstone played ‘Sir’) and Bill is now reprising the role for the theatre’s 25th anniversary. The play requires a double act between us and it has been a delight to work closely together, notwithstanding the existential conspiracy of props, hairpieces and costume which seem to fight back from time to time, on this marvelous play which is a love letter to the backstage life of the British theatre of 80 years ago.
Bill in executive mode
I also take time to say kudos to J. Barry Lewis. We have worked together many times. He is an inventive and detailed director, never more so than on this one! He has corralled the actors designers and technicians to create an (though I say it myself) excellent production of The Dresser.
And while I’m handing out roses. Thanks to Palm Beach Dramaworks in general and all who sail in her ⎯ too many people doing a great job to name here, but they know who they are. Suffice to say this production is stage managed with her usual quiet precise efficiency by Suzanne Clement Jones ⎯ and doesn’t it help when someone knows what they are doing!?
Palm Beach Dramaworks – catch the Hamlet reference on the mural
It is remarkable and fabulous to have seen this company develop. When they took residence in Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, the place was full of vacant retail units. Now it is hopping. Restaurants jostle yoga studios, and the street lighting is reminiscent of a Pina colada gone wild.
About six years ago Bill Hayes, the producing artistic director started talking about doing a 20th year anniversary production of The Dresser by Ronald Harwood.
Remember The Dresser? – 1983 film with Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney following huge success in London and New York.
TV film 2015 with Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins.
A love letter to the British backstage in the early years of the Second World War when all the able-bodied had left to fight. – Not for the first time …
“And leave your England, as dead midnight still, Guarded with grandsires, babies and old women …”
Henry V, Act III prologue – Shakespeare.
What with the pandemic interfering, there will now be a 25th year anniversary production, and in a few weeks rehearsals will begin.
That’s Bill Hayes as Norman (The Dresser) placing the crown on the hairy guy (Me) who is getting ready to play King Lear.
The Dresser by Ronald Harwood, opens December 18th 2024 at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Florida
There are parallels between the practice of theatre and the practice of astrology.
“Oh yeah?” I hear you cry. “How does a planet or the stars in the sky correspond to the life of some out of work actor?”
Image courtesy of Unsplash
This is a valid question.
Consider: an actor gets a role. The parameters of the role are defined by the script. The expression of the role is guided, sometimes obstructed, but certainly shaped by a director. Within those limits the actor is free to make choices, to interpret.
My Lear will be different from your Lear. (well, one hopes).
AI generated image courtesy of Pixabay
Consider: We come into incarnation – a fancy way of saying we get born. And the mystery begins. Because: where have we come from?
Plato has it that the natural habitat of each human soul is one of the stars above and that we pass through each of the planetary spheres acquiring the qualities of that particular planet and its placement in the zodiac at that moment. We take on the costume for this incarnation and the script as written in the interplanetary potentials.
And in the play of life, with its exits and entrances, we can choose how we play the part. We don’t have ham it up.
And according to Robert Frost, Wordsworth, and particularly Shakespeare, we have all signed up for a round trip. The mighty seven ages speech from As You Like It exactly describes the progress of a life and the return. But return to what?
J B Priestly’s character Henry Ormonroyd put all of the above a lot more succinctly when he said (in When We Are Married)
“We all come here and we don’t know why. We all go in our turn and we don’t know where…”
Your blogger as Henry Ormonroyd, Guthrie Theatre 2008
My friend and sometime fellow student Maggie once said to me, “When I heard you’d become an astrologer I thought – Oh he’s lost it. … But then later I thought, oh no, he’s fond an angle.”
I have indeed lost it in the pre-Enlightenment mystery of the endless study that is astrology.
As for the angle, yes that too, Maggie was right. Though not in the sense she meant. The angle or rather the angles plural, are the horizons over which the stars rise and fall on a daily basis and which contain the clues to the weird and whacky interplay of pre-destiny and free will.
Still with me?
As part of my research into how to establish an astrological practice, I joined a networking group of holistic practitioners I’m here to tell you there is more woo-woo per square inch in Westchester, N.Y. than is commonly. suspected.
I have met some lovely people. Unsurprisingly perhaps in such a group every member is an empath – it’s almost like being with a bunch of actors.
But the point is I have been exchanging services with these people. I give them an astro reading and they give me – whatever it is they do. For brief accounts and testimonials go here.
And talking of Lear …
I have an up coming gig in West Palm Beach, Florida. I will go there in November to rehearse and then play ‘Sir’ in The Dresser. For those who don’t know the play, ‘Sir’ is a bombastic, self-obsessed old ham of an actor … and for some extraordinary reason they’ve come to me …???
In the manner of the late great Barry Humphries who proclaimed his “first farewell tour”, I’m intending this to be my last one for various reasons.
So if the stars should align, come to West Palm Beach. We open December 18th. Palmbeachdramaworks.org for details.
