And you takes your choice.
I’ve written a moderately long review of Bedlam’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The show is a bit special and the review is here.
If you’d prefer something a little briefer, I offer the next in my occasional series of acting masterclasses.
This one is how to do Ibsen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m-0qUS_zp4
Astrology is a new study with me. In my reading so far I have not found the planet, the sign or the house which deals with the incidence of actors with or without beards getting cast in screen vignettes. But now I know there must be one.
As Ian Fleming wrote in James Bond: “Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”
For backstory see here
Less than 48 hours ago, I was sitting with my younger son in an agreeable hostelry talking about life, art and truth, when a text came in. It was from my agent, Letitia Sideways.
“See attached. Send self taping by first thing tomorrow morning.”
An urgent tone is a given in all potential casting notices, and as a seasoned professional I took it in my stride whilst sipping a libation and looking over the attached script, thinking “I can do this.” So far so good.
But then I saw “NB: Must currently have a BEARD”
My capital letters.
I called Letitia immediately.
“The tragedy is, Letitia, I shaved my beard off yesterday. The other tragedy is, I was born to play this part.”
“Huh.”
“But you know what, I’ll tape it anyway. I’ll do it in the morning.”
“Get it to me by FIRST THING tomorrow morning!” She said briskly, raising the urgency level from national to global, and she rang off.
In three and a half decades it would be absurd not to admit that one has performed heroic feats of drinking in the social side of theatre, but never once have I gone onstage with alcohol inside me — well actually once — when I was in my 20s (way back in the last millennium) a sponsor hosted a dinner before the show (terrible timing), and I drank half a glass of dry white wine.
Never again. The effect was hallucinogenic, the stage seemed to pitch and roll like a ship adrift in heavy seas, and the other actors seemed to speak GROTESQUELY SLOOOOOWLY, their faces gargoyled under the lights. It was horrifying.
There are some actors, some good ones too, with the constitution to work under the influence but I am not one of them, so, as I say, ever since then, stone cold sober whenever performing in any way.
So there I was in the hostelry taking in a leisurely beer, chafing under the irony of the ill-timed shave but spurred by an urgency that was growing in my imagination to interstellar. What was I to do? Well the answer was obvious: continue on to a second beer as though nothing had occurred, but rise early the following morning and do the taping then. Simple, right?
With the turning of the planet 6 a.m. rolled around — and let me note here that Mercury, the planet that rules communication is just coming to the end of one his three annual retrograde periods, you know, one of those times when checks (cheques) get lost in the mail (post) and people say things they don’t mean. Nick and I performed morning ablutions, drank coffee and deployed an iPhone over several takes. The script was a piece of Scottish sketch comedy for, wait for it … Stephen Colbert’s show.
The taping accomplished before the start of the business day and emailed to Letitia, mid morning I retired to bed for a restorative power nap.
Only to be woken by the land line ringing on endless loop, my iphone buzzing and vibrating, and then to see an email from Letitia – ‘They want to book you!”
I answered the land line. It was my wife. “Call Letitia immediately.” She shrilled. Her usual poise quite undone by the, yes you guessed it, urgency.
I called.
“Er,” said Letitia, “Just after I got off the phone with your wife, they called and said that it’s not an offer, they just want to hold you till tomorrow morning.”
This word “hold” is the American equivalent of the British “definite heavy pencil”. What it means is that you the actor should prepare to do the job on the understanding that the job itself can evaporate at any moment.
“Oh,” I said, “So it was an offer, but now it’s not?.”
“Right.” said Letitia.
“Er …?” I said.
But she had rung off.
I maintained an iron control on my imagination as the hours passed.
You’ll notice that I say nothing of the nervous hyper-stimulation and exhaustion that actors undergo whilst in the words of the late great Spalding Gray, “Waiting for the profession to make up it’s so called mind.”
I do not reference the flights of imaginative fancy along the lines of: “Wow, and no beard! What if I had had a beard – they probably would have given me a series.”
I am mute on the forlorn hope that a sensitive, perceptive television executive would interpret the audition as an homage to Jonathan Winters and send a car for me on the spot with a large contract.
I say nothing of this. What I do say is: is it any wonder that actors drink?
Long story short; late in the afternoon the news came through that the whole bit had been cancelled. My services were no longer required. So … the beer, the 6 a.m. rise, the taping, the definite heavy pencil aka the hold, the waiting … it was now as though none of this had ever happened.
The copyright situation will not allow me to share what, in some other strand of the multiverse you might actually have seen on The Late Show. Instead, I offer the brief video below, my own personal masterclass on how to do a Scottish accent. With acknowledgement and apology to that fine long running British TV show, Dr. Finlay’s Casebook.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF31v8bzt9I
When I was fifteen I played Tom in The Glass Menagerie. It was an experience that opened the door on poetic language for me.
When I was sixteen I saw A Streetcar Named Desire in the West End. Claire Bloom played a fragile Blanche, Martin Shaw was a virile Stanley, Joss Ackland a sympathetic Mitch, and Morag Hood a sisterly Stella. Doors on acting — and windows too — opened then.
In the second year of acting training at Central in London, it was American plays. Even though I was playing Harry Brock in Born Yesterday, I was still among those who would revisit Streetcar in empty rehearsal rooms and practice yelling ‘Stella!’, and then, ‘Stella… Steeee… eeee….elllaaaa!’
I heard a story once from Professor Charles McNulty about how, unable to get into a musical next door, he stumbled into the very first preview of The Glass Menagerie in Chicago, starring Laurette Taylor of luminous legend. He spoke of the stunned silence at the end. That first audience was small, but he had been so gripped by the play that he had ended up kneeling between the seats leaning forward, intent on not missing a word.
A student production of Camino Real, directed by Tony Falkingham, was a revelation. A kind of underworld answer to the transcendence of Our Town, or the poetic portraiture of Under Milkwood.
When the National Theatre in London did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I attached my old American friend, Jim Franz, who’d been to college on a sports scholarship, as football consultant to the production. Jim recorded his thoughts and insights on a tape and sent it over. When Ian Charleson as Brick, said “…all summer long we’d pass those long, high balls that couldn’t be intercepted by anything but time…” the speech was transformed.
As we all know the great trio of Menagerie, Streetcar and Cat are foundational in the canon of world 20th century drama.
And now here is Baby Doll at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.
The movie of that name was derived from Williams’s one-act play Twenty Seven Wagons Full of Cotton. The movie starred Karl Malden and Eli Wallach, and Carol Baker in the title role, and is a dark not-so-funny tale of revenge.
Williams returned to the theme and the characters in more than one version including another one-act called, The Long Stay Cut Short or The Unsatisfactory Supper, experimenting with different perspectives on the story.
The production at the McCarter in a new version, developed by artistic director Emily Mann (who also directs) in partnership with French playwright Pierre Laville, elevates the nuance in the story, finds all the Williams elements of passion, desire, desperate tension and latent violence, and is played with pitch-perfect subtlety by its cast.
Full disclosure; Trish Conolly (Three Blanches, a Stella, one Maggie, a Laura, an Amanda, an Alexandra del Lago and an Esmeralda) plays Aunt Rose Comfort inhabiting a storyline that embodies one of Williams’s “… birdlike women without a nest…” —nibbling at — “… the crust of humility…” is a close personal friend of mine, sometime professional colleague, and er yes, also related to me by marriage.
The rest of the cast (who are all new to me, and to none of whom I am related) are: Bob Joy, who plays to the life an uncouth man of the reddest neck, Dylan McDermott who, poised and dangerous as the Sicilian, commands the stage, and Susannah Hoffman, who as Baby Doll gives us magnificent work in a detailed performance that should be seen everywhere.
Brian McCann playing the cameo policeman brings with him the danger of the 1950s Delta. And special mention must be made of the real live chicken who plays ‘Fussy’ in her stage debut.
From the set, which is both substantial and ghostly, to the evocations in the lighting, to the delicate underscoring of the soundscape, to authentic costumes and props which complete a production rare in its unity of accomplishment across all elements, we get as exciting an evening in the theatre as if Williams himself had finished this text yesterday.
I could say more about the acting from the entire cast, but I won’t, beyond that it is about as superb as I’ve seen. But here’s the thing. This play (as with all Williams) would be easy to do badly.
Even the finest actors benefit from inspired direction. Here, the play is impeccably directed. Rhythmically it finds variety, and quicksilver turns, in tone, pace and mood. Good direction leaves clues in standout performances. Great direction is scarcely visible because the ensemble takes precedence. Kudos to Emily Mann.
In the ephemera that is regional theatre who knows what happens to this play after the 11th of October 2015, but if you can get to Princeton before then and get a ticket, do yourself a favor.
http://www.mccarter.org/babydoll/
It’s actually like seeing a new play by Tennessee Williams
I met Theodore Bikel in 2006 when he, a sprightly 81 year old, and that young actress of my acquaintance Trish Conolly, were doing a two-handed play at the Coconut Grove Theatre in Miami. It was a domestic comedy about, among other things, the physical inconveniences of advancing years.
In Trish Theo found an acting partner who could match him on a stage, and I know that he loved working with her. Tamara, to whom he was married until her sudden death in 2012, and I, a bit like a couple of boxing coaches, would watch them rehearsing from the orchestra seats of the theatre. We would exchange whispered comments with each other, commissioning each other to deliver delicate notes to our respective partners. We all four became friends.
Theo died a little over a week ago.
He was a public figure. His C.V. as an actor covers all mediums at the highest and most celebrated levels in the profession; his prolific musicianship in live performances and recordings; his abilities as a linguist — he could sing in 21 languages and spoke five or six fluently; his co-founding of the Newport Folk Festival; his abilities as an autobiographer and as a raconteur; his tireless support of the Israeli cause, and his fearless speaking out against injustice; his 10 year presidency of the American Actors’ Equity Association (during which time he suggested the creation of the Manhattan Plaza). All this and more — including his 2,000 plus performances as Tevye the milkman – all this was just a part of who he was.
I did not meet him as any of the above. I knew him first as a big-framed, big-hearted man, with a persistent, in fact constant, deliciously salty sense of humour.
We last saw him at a screening of “Theodore Bikel: In The Shoes of Sholom Aleichem”. It had been a couple of years. At first I almost didn’t recognise him. He was always a big man with a barrel-chest. His frame had shrunk, and he was in a wheelchair. But then I heard his voice and I knew it was him – that unmistakable tone with its relish for life, still strong and vibrant.
After the screening there was a reception held in Theo’s honor. More than three hundred people were present. All the men wanted to embrace Theo, and all the women to kiss him. Aimee, whom he had married late in his still-vigorous ninth decade of life, enlisted me to help manage the crush. As I guided Theo’s chariot through the crowd, typically, he was telling me a joke that could have been part of a twenty-something’s stand up set.
We dined. Then he sang. We pushed him to the centre of the room in front of the band.
He sang two songs.
We listened, and I was aware that Trish was focussing on Theo, communicating with him silently, in a way that two people who have shared a stage can sometimes do. He was aware of that too, of course – amongst his general awareness of the audience. Such is part of the secret that all performers of quality share.
He sang as he always did with gusto, enthusiasm, and in the second song there was a detail that exactly expressed his brilliance as a performer. It was just a small twist of the head, a flicker of rapture in the smile, and the eyes half closed for a second, him uniting with the spirit of the music and sharing it.
It was an unannounced farewell.
Afterwards, outside, waiting with Aimee for a car to arrive, Trish and I stood by him on the sidewalk. We spoke little. After a delay there was a car at last. I helped him get in and I told him I loved him. After he died, as often happens, it was then that I knew how much.
He was widely loved. When he went, they dimmed the lights on Broadway.
Theo was steeped in the lore and the traditions of his culture, his race, and his faith. He was also man of immense humanity who knew that our only hope for peace on Earth is to also allow others to hold, in peace, other views, faiths, and cultures.
Not to say he wasn’t Jewish.
One time Theo was walking along in Manhattan’s Lower East Side when he was accosted by some evangelical Christians who tried to convert him on the spot. He listened patiently. His response was genius:
“I come from a very old tribe. For five thousand years we’ve been doing business with the Father, and now — you want me to talk to the Son!?”
From time to time I consider alternative careers.
I’m an actor, but equally, some professions that also start with ‘A’ are:
Accountant … Acrobat … Astronaut …
While each of these is appealing in its own way, none quite satisfies in the way my recent discovery can.
Talking Head
Do you ever watch U.S. cable news?
There are some airports where you have no choice while walking through public space. I admit to taking in a few minutes every month, just to see what they’re positing. Usually (well, always), I find the content interchangeable with previous months, and the style from one side to the other strangely similar.
By which I mean; even with the volume turned way down, all the news anchors, using here the word ‘news’ in its loosest possible sense, and nearly all the guests, sound hyper-caffeinated — in a word ‘loud’. And at each end of the horizontal political line, pundits are variously outraged, insulted, appalled at the anti-patriotic activities of the other.
Plus ca change … as we say in Europe.
However …
I offer this segment from Benchmark TV for your consideration
Full disclosure, the producer is an Australian law firm well known to me.
Benchmark offers a unique, niche print and email publication for the legal profession in Australia, and is now producing content in other media which could appeal to a wider audience.
This interview was a lot of fun to do, and it was a welcome experience to exchange thoughts with the expert Catherine McDonald, an advanced practitioner in another line of business. However, the immediate personal consequence is, now I also have to consider …
Advocate … Attorney
And moving through the alphabet …
Barrister …
Meanwhile, maybe the portly chap in the red shirt has a future — opining for the cameras?
Only time will tell, but in this month’s bulletin I put myself forward for the selectors.