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Acting Plays Theatre

Lots of Prime Ministers: One Queen.

Reading this post you’d be forgiven for thinking the play I’m working on is called, ‘Churchill’ … actually it’s called ‘The Audience’.

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Here is a diary excerpt:

October 4th 2016.

It’s the first day of rehearsal at The Maltz Theatre, Jupiter, Florida. We, the cast, arrived yesterday, Most of us from out of town. Just shy of three hours on the plane from New York. I was in a window seat with a young mother and a one-year-old baby in her arms next to me. The baby was as good as gold except he did persistently kick me in the ribs, presumably unintentionally. I pretended not to notice and when the mother apologized I pretended not to mind. I was returning to British mode (from expat mode). We British would rather suffer in dignified silence than inconvenience a stranger. I used the time to go over my lines as Sir Winston Churchill.

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One scene only. Where he encounters the young Queen Elizabeth II. The scene is the occasion of their first private audience together with she as monarch of the United kingdom and Dominions. It took place in 1954. Sir Winston was then 78 years old.

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For research I visited the Cabinet War Rooms in London, and I’ve watched in no particular order Robert Hardy, Albert Finney, Timothy Spall, Brendon Gleeson and Michael Gambon as Churchill. Oh, and the great man himself of course in all the available speeches.

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All very fine actors, none of them actually impersonate the great man, but all of them copy some of his vocal characteristics, the well known rhythms and cadences, Gambon uses the lightest touch. Finney is my favorite for character.

th-4On the morning of the first day of rehearsals we have the meet and greet. As ever, it is astonishing how many people a theatre employs. The Maltz is a theatre under speed. By which I mean they put up plays and musicals in two and a half weeks, run them for 17 performances and that’s it. Get in; get out. I like it.
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The Audience is a big play and by far the biggest challenge falls to Karen MacDonald who is playing the Queen and is onstage the entire show with some astonishingly quick costume changes as she moves from Elizabeth R in her 8os to her 20s to her 60s and back and forth in this non-linear telling of the story of Britain’s Prime Ministers and their constitutionally un-mandated, but constitutionally effective weekly meetings with the monarch.

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Photo by Alicia Donelan Karen MacDonald as Queen Elizabeth II

We read through the text and you can feel confidence in the room as everyone, without saying so, agrees that it’s a fine cast and that the play has indeed been well-cast and with a bit of luck we’ll have a fine production. Of course this is the first time we’ve heard each other read and at this point none of us can do more than sketch an indication of where our performances might arrive. But everybody approves of everybody, everybody hopes everybody will come up with more, and everybody understands that on day one everybody is both confident and insecure. We all know that many things can go wrong in a rehearsal period. It’s a bit of a miracle that anything ever gets produced anywhere. But it’s a good start and baring acts of God we should have an excellent production on our hands.

In the afternoon we begin to pick the play apart and an amusing discussion follows on the cultural, social and political differences between our two great nations. Lou Jacob is directing and he seems to know more about British Constitution than I do. Hardly surprising, because no-one can really claim to be an expert, least of all anyone from Britain. Why so? Because there isn’t one. A British Constitution that is. At least not one that anyone has written down.

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Photo by Alicia Donelan with Peter Simon Hilton, Colin McPhillamy, Henny Russell, Karen MacDonald, Rod McLachlan, Skye Allysa Friedman, Mark Dold, Paul DeBoy, Peter Galman

Oddly, well it seems odd given the themes of the play, tonight is the U.S. vice-presidential debate. Getting back to the digs from rehearsal I turn on the telly. One of the cable news anchors is interviewing a couple of talking heads, “Is he gonna go offense or defense tonight?” the anchor asks. Before the talking head can answer, the anchor asks two other questions, answers the first question, then answers it again with a contradiction and then opines that it shouldn’t be left too long before one of the candidates “throws the first punch”. Then, in a further melange of sporting metaphors he announces a commercial break and we cut to a picture perfect family having a barbecue amid gently rolling hills and a mellow voice-over artist is telling us to soothing, mildly optimistic music, that spingo-dingo-mingo is not right for everyone and that side effects can include halitosis, bankruptcy and allergy to popular culture. I deploy the only sanction I can and turn the telly off, taking note that five years ago I could still have played the Dad in the commercial, now I’m the right age for the foxy Grandpa. Time flies in entertainment. Still it’s fun to be back in Florida.

Assorted production pix & trailer here

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Photo by Alicia Donelan Mark Dold, Gabriel Zenone, Karen MacDonald

And then there was a hurricane …

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Photo by Peter Simon Hilton. Colin McPhillamy as Winston Churchill
Categories
Acting It Shoulda Been You Living on Love Plays Renee Fleming Theatre theatre criticism Writing

An Alternative to the New York Times

Renee Fleming in Living on Love
Renee Fleming in Living on Love

For sheer missing the point, today’s review of Living on Love in The New York Times leads the field.

The point is: it’s Renée Fleming!

The other point is: it’s a farce …

While one cannot fault from a technical point of view some of what is said in the columns of The New York Times’s theatre pages, one could wish that the historical fact-checking was saved for a Master’s Thesis.

One could wish too, for more simple pleasure taken in the act of going to the theatre. More willingness to laugh. A little less requirement that plays offered to the chubby-fingered Infanta of critical taste conform quite so strictly to a Malvolio personal world-view.

I offer here a different take:

In another delicious sweetmeat that is this Broadway season’s theme of frivolous confectionary, Renée Fleming, the great opera diva, is letting her hair down to great effect.

Joe Di Pietro’s update on Garson Kanin’s unfinished play Peccadillo, renamed here Living on Love, plays on farcical tradition going back to Moliere.

Whatever gaps there may be in Ms. Fleming’s acting technique are more than compensated by her ability to time a laugh, and when she sings a fragment of classic opera a gossamer enchantment holds the audience suspended — how could it not? Ms. Fleming’s vocal achievement, experienced here playfully out of context, gives us a teasing insight into the limits of what is possible in the human voice.

Generously supported by a cast of stage veterans, Ms. Fleming’s unique visitation from the refined world of opera, and the fact that she is not a Broadway actress — nor indeed to make the play work should she be — means that the best joke of the evening is the one that transcends the script. Simply put: this is a great star of one genre having a holiday in another.

*       *       *

In Peter Brook’s influential book on theatre, The Empty Space, he tells a story about a show his company put up at their theatre in Paris that received damning reviews. The show was a true flop and they played to almost empty houses. The public stayed away in droves.

An empty theatre
An empty theatre

The company announced three free performances. Such was the lure of free tickets that the police were called in to manage the crowds The houses were packed.

At the end of the third show, the directress of the theatre came onto the stage and addressed the audience. “Is there anyone here,” she asked, “who could not afford the price of a ticket?”

One person put his hand up.

“And the rest of you, why did you have to wait to be let in for free?”

“It had a bad Press!”

A pause, while the directress held for silence. Then she asked another question.

“Do you believe what you read in the Press?”

*      *      *

When the RSC premiered its extraordinary version of Nicholas Nickleby, a show that played for years and toured the world, British critic Sir Bernard Levin panned it. Such was the public response that he returned to view the show a second time, and had the humilty to revise his initial assessment in print.

*      *      *

These days influence in public opinion-making is shifting from mainstream media to the blogosphere, to twitter and so forth. The positive in these changes is the lessening of influence of the mightier media organs. In my native London, influential theatre criticism is spread across half a dozen newspapers, but here in New York The Times still holds undisputed sway.

I reference another recent baffling – let me say that again – BAFFLING review in The Times of that delicious soufflé currently running on Broadway It Shoulda Been You. This show is an exquisitely layered riff on wedding forms. Anyone who’s ever been involved in a wedding will recognize how even the best intended of them can descend into mayhem.

Cast of It Shoulda Been You
Cast of It Shoulda Been You

Punning on mad mothers, frantic fathers, brides beset and a semi-prescient wedding planner holding it all together, punctuated by fabulous show stopping numbers, witty dancing, a show with a tiered wedding-cake construction, with piquant pace, it’s delicious to the last twist.

*      *      *

It is a truism held amongst actors that many, perhaps most, critics are practitioners manqué. The occupational hazard of being a critic is that one will come to despise that which one is paid to critique.

If you are in New York, do see these faintly-praised-in-the-Times shows if you can. And feel free to tell me which of us, Mr. Brantley with his readership of millions, or C. McPhillamy niche blogger, comes closer to pleasure in his assessment.

Sir Toby had it right: “Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

Categories
Acting Plays Writing

In My Craft …

Whenever I attend an award ceremony, and let me tell you the frequency is running at once a year since this time last year, I think of the following poem:

It works best if you can image a rich, insistent Welsh baritone. Richard Burton maybe, Sir Harry Secombe perhaps …

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art

Or maybe the author himself, Dylan Thomas.

Dylan Thomas

And he would have known all about it, having finally moved off the mortal coil aged 39 after taking in an immoderate number of whiskeys down at The White Horse Tavern in New York City.

Sort of thing Rylance might recite when called to the podium … maybe?

Categories
Acting Plays Theatre

Alan Howard: The Bandido

Years ago, when my two sons were somewhere in the middle of a long boyhood, inspired by their demands for bedtime stories, I came up with a character called The Bandido.

The Bandido in his blue period
The Bandido in his blue period

He was derived from Alan Howard.

The Bandido was a charming, elusive baddie. To begin with he had equal baddie status with Dr. Dreadful, and Elfis (a fusion of Elvis Presley and an elf). Sometimes these three bad guys would work together creating havoc around the place, and sometimes they worked alone. The Sherrif always fixed it by the time sleep came. The Sherrif was assisted by two plucky boys, who were the lead characters in the stories, called Tom and Nate. Tom and Nate lived in a cottage that was kitted out with magical weaponry. They were pretty outstandingly good at saving the day these two boys, Tom and Nate, and their real-life counterparts, unknown to themselves, gave joy to all the grown ups who loved them.

The story was an open-ended serial, and over the years progressed to adventures in space with a galactic baddie called The Blob; to a heist with a Chinaman on a Junk who sold fish ‘n chips in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; to the The Sultan of Ombo-Gombo who was the richest man in the universe. Supporting parts were played by bit-part actors in roles like: Plooki, Power Pig, Awesome Ostrich, and Copper who was a flying horse.

As with most soaps, the plots were fairly standard. Baddies doing some bad stuff—global hazard—Sherrif-outfoxed calls on plucky lads—lads deploy cunning strategies—exhibit courage, strength and speed—world saved from catastrophe.

The Bandido first made his appearance as a solo, but then teamed up with Dr. Dreadful and Elfis whom he met while in gaol. For a while they were a dastardly trio, but over time The Bandido emerged as lead villain.

If you’ve ever told a bedtime story to children made from whole cloth (aka making it up as you go), you’ll know that even if you you’ve sketched out the outline there will come moments when you have absolutely no idea of what happens next. It was in one of these moments that The Bandido made his debut.

Working on the idea that when you don’t know what you’re doing, about the only thing to do is to act as if you do, I took a deep breath and heard myself say:

‘Oh no! You don’t catch The Bandido as easily as all thaaaaaat!’

It was a voice I knew well.

I was in a play with Alan Howard at the time. I played an eccentric Russian Orthodox Archbishop, and I had one scene with Alan, who was playing a maniacal Russian General. This was a play called Flight, adapted from the Bulgakov novel, at The National Theatre in London. Part of my job was also to understudy Alan Howard.

Alan Howard
Alan Howard

Understudying, also known by the more tasteful term of ‘Standing by for …’ or the more elavated one of ‘Cover’ as in ‘I’m covering … so and so’ has it’s challenges but if you can navigate the esoteric ins and outs of it, it can be incredibly useful to the jobbing actor. One feature of the gig, especially at a place like the National, is that as a young actor, you get paid to watch distinctive older actors and learn from them. Alan Howard was distinctive in spades.

You may not know of him, because aside from a few choice film and TV roles, most of his career was on stage. Over decades at the Royal Shakespeare Company, he played many Shakespearean leads, including all the kings (Richard 11 to Richard 111, plus all the Henrys) sometimes two, three, or four simultaneously. You don’t do that year after year without it leaving an indelible imprint on your voice.

He was an actor of charisma and authority. In rehearsal endlessly inventive and in the moment. In performance known for his trademark stances — first of which was, as I’ve said, his voice. When you’ve done Shakespeare in quanitity in big theatres, there’s iron in the voice. A modest man offstage, on stage his vocal flashes were a rollercoaster illumined with random mad swarms of giant fireflies.

Flight was playing in the largest of the National’s three auditoria, the Olivier Theatre, an arena thrust stage modelled after the great Greek amphitheatres. At Delphi and Epidavros theatres were faced with marble, a material which conducts sound and, even outdoors, creates the finest acoustic environment for the human voice in the world.

The Olivier’s steps were cast in concrete, a material which absorbs sound, thus creating a very different kind of acoustic, one which has been frequently worked on with architectural add-ons, and even, to the outrage of classically trained actors, the ocassional use of microphones.

The great 19th century actor McCready wrote of Drury Lane that it was a theatre more suited to semaphore than to subtlety. Alan’s technique was more or less unmatched in living theatre, as a younger man he had given us a specially virile Coriolanus, and his Theseus/Oberon was part of history making, both those performances in the more intimate Aldwych Theatre. But even his unique vocal ability found reaching the back and side walls of the Olivier a challenge.

Alan Howard as Coriolanus
Alan Howard as Coriolanus

So he used a favoured technique and delivered one long battle speech standing on a table. He cut a compelling profile, and I as his understudy did the same when we rehearsed. In one rehearsal I said to the assistant director, who was presiding, ‘Surely I get off this table now?’ (I’d been up there quite a while).

‘No,’ he said, ‘You stay there for a bit.’

So I said, doing my best Alan Howard impersonation, ”It’s the only way to play the Olivier! Standing on a taaaaable, in a cerise follooooooow!!!’.

Unknown to me, the show relay was switched on, so my words were broadcast through the whole backstage.

That night waiting in the darkness of the wings to go on and play my scene with Alan, I felt a familiar presence in an unfamiliar place — usually we entered from opposite sides of the stage. ‘Heard you havin’ a go at me this afternoon,’ whispered the voice that could only belong to one man.

I spun around in the darkness, ‘Oh, Alan! Sincerest form of flattery is imitation!’

‘And yes!’ said Alan, spinning me back, his voice rising in volume as the scene change music came up, ‘it is a long time to stand on a taaaaaable!!!’ With a hearty shove he pushed me onstage, and we played the scene.

Gentleman that he was, he bore no grudge, allowed me to buy him a respectful glass of red wine after the show, and even generously negotiated with the director to give my character, the Archbishop, a few more lines in our scene.

I was grateful for the chance to work with him. He will be remembered throughout the profession as a most accomplished classicist and for other theatrical strengths, but I will always be most grateful for the Bandido, who was a favourite with my kids.

The Bandido with a rare smile
The Bandido with a rare smile

Technically Bandido should be rendered as Bandito, but somehow he never was. The Bandido was a thin, very thin shape-shifter which meant that no gaol could hold him because he could always ooze between the bars. He dressed entirely in black or dark blue and wore a large kind of sombrero. But his most distinctive feature was his voice.

The Great Stage Manager in the sky has called Beginners (UK), Places (USA) for Alan. Wherever he is now he’ll still have a voice to thunder and command.

Categories
Acting Plays Theatre

Our Town Is A Play Like No Other

Alicia Donnelan
Alicia Donnelan

 

Part slice-of-life, part tone-poem, shyly spiritual.

I play the Stage Manager in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production, a role like no other.

Well Paul Newman (whom I once had the privilege of playing for and meeting after the performance), and Spalding Grey, and Helen Hunt and numbers of distinguished others have played that Everyman, the Stage Manager. None of whom I am like. And yet we’re all actors.

And there is Dylan Thomas’s poetic masterpiece written in 1954, Under Milk Wood.

 

 

Do you know that poem by that good man of New England, Robert Frost, Trial by Existence?

Emiley Kiser and Joe Ferrarelli. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
Emiley Kiser and Joe Ferrarelli. Photo: Alicia Donnelan

And from a cliff-top is proclaimed

The gathering of the souls for birth,

The trial by existence named,

The obscuration upon earth.

 

 

 

But For sleight-of-the-eternal in the guise of the everyday, Our Town has it, I think.

 

Emiley Kiser, Joe Ferrarelli and the company. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
Emiley Kiser, Joe Ferrarelli and the company. Photo: Alicia Donnelan

What could be more quotidian than delivering milk or making breakfast or even getting married?

And what more metaphysical than:

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every moment?

– No, the saints and poets maybe. They do some.

 

Memory, Presence, the Ephemera that is theatre, the forward march of time …

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting …” — William Wordsworth

Or … “What’s that unforgettable line?” — Samuel Beckett

The company, opening tableau. Photo: Robin McGee
The company, opening tableau. Photo: Robin McGee

 

Kenneth Kay and Josh Stoughton. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
Kenneth Kay and Josh Stoughton. Photo: Alicia Donnelan

“Some say that the art of the theatre, born for and bound to the moment, must, like a soap bubble or nocturnal meteor, dazzle, then burst to leave no trace. Free yourself from this dark thought! The very fact that your art is a child of fragrance, of the spirit, of a mood, of personality and imagination, and not something of wood or stone, or even a thought fixed in black and white, but a sprite forever swinging free on beauty’s vine, the fact that it lacks tangible form, renders it immune to the gnawing of time’s worm. And that is what life truly means: to live in memory …. to rest in people’s minds free of the mildew and rust of age …. and this lot has been granted to you.” — Henrik Ibsen

 

Dan Leonard, Patti Gardner, Emiley Kiser. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
Dan Leonard, Patti Gardner, Emiley Kiser. Photo: Alicia Donnelan

 

“To live vividly in the memory of others seems to be a great thing. In terms of art, it always seems to me that there is something unique and electric about an artist connecting with an audience in live performance. The memory of these moments get parked in a different part of our mind. People speak of them with real reverence and clarity even many years after the applause has faded. To be remembered like that, in any aspect of life, is probably the nearest we have to time travel.”  Jonathan Pytell — pytell.com

 

 

“We all come here and we don’t know why. We all go in our turn and we don’t know where. And if you’re a bit better off, be thankful. And if you don’t get into trouble and make a fool of yourself, well be thankful for that, because you easily might.” — Henry Ormanroyd in When We Are Married by J B Priestly

The company at the funeral. Photo: Robin McGee
The company at the funeral. Photo: Robin McGee

Kudos to my fellow actors in our production like no other. Cast list here. It has been quite a ride. Company members have come and gone, rehearsals and performances have been fraught with incident. All borne with good humor and grace by that fine collection of human beings, the cast and crew of Our Town. Theatrical companies become families within three days. But in a company of this size we are a community.

The company. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
The company. Photo: Alicia Donnelan

“Backstage was chaos distilled into a very small space.” ― William Alexander, Goblin Secrets

Robin McGee
Robin McGee

Note to self: this is one where the less ACTING the better …

N.A.R. (No Acting Required)

— John Voight …

“The most exciting acting tends to happen in roles you never thought you could play.”

― John Lithgow …

“When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.”

― Stella Adler, The Art of Acting