Tag: Palm Beach Dramaworks

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Acting

Sir

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.

J. Barry Lewis in director mode

Click here for trailer.

Come and see it! Tickets here.

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.

Courtesy of WestPalmBeach.com
Categories
Acting

The Dresser

Guess where Palm Beach Dramaworks is located.

Palm Beach.

Actually West Palm Beach in the great state of Florida. The Sunshine State as it’s known.

Image by Freepik www.freepik.com

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.

Palmbeachdramaworks.org for tickets Dec 18th thru Jan 5th

Categories
Acting

It’s Been An Interesting Summer

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.

Categories
Acting

The Real Reason I Never Read Reviews

… Until the show is over.

Commonly, the reasons given are… because it makes you self-conscious, because it messes with your confidence, because you shouldn’t believe your own publicity, and so on along those lines.

I believe I have the reviewer story to end them all. And even though this happened more than three decades ago, the memory is still painful. Here is the story:

It was my third job as a professional. I was cast as Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, adapted from Charles Dickens’s novel. We were to open at the Birmingham Rep in the UK, play for a month, and then transfer to The Old Vic in London for the Christmas season.

Herbert Pocket is one of Dickens’s more agreeable creations; gentle, sensitive, but also energetic and enthusiastic. In the mid-20th century black and white film a young Alec Guinness plays him to a young John Mills as Pip.

I was young. A young actor full of that same energy and enthusiasm as Herbert Pocket, and thrilled to have scored this gig. It was directed by a complicated man who projected his inner darkness upon his actors in a way I have rarely seen since.

This man, the director, who had also adapted this version of Great Expectations, was a fine exponent of the 101 ways a director can destroy an actor in the rehearsal room. From me, he demanded an instant performance. This happens when the director has little or no regard for process and is consumed with insecurity about what the final result will be.

If there was a positive in the episode it was where I began to assemble the director-proof kit that every actor should have in their back pocket. You only need it sometimes, but when you do, you better know where it is.

Somehow I managed to give the performance that the director seemed to want by day three of rehearsals. Fine, you might think. Not so. Why not? Because, and this is crucial, because I did not know how I did it.

To begin with it all went well. Herbert Pocket and I seemed made for each other and our scenes were funny and audiences liked them. Then, during the pre-London run and for reasons known only to himself, the director began to fire the actors at random at the rate of one a week. This quickly transformed a large happy company into a large unhappy company riven with suspicion and paranoia.

Then there came a day, as can so easily happen in comedy, when for no visible reason my stuff wasn’t funny and the scenes played like a lead balloon.

Some laughs are mercurial. They come, they go. If a laugh checks out during the run of a show, the best thing to do is relax. Gently experiment with nuances of delivery and focus, make sure you are playing the scene, not the comedy, and carry on. Did I do that?

No. I tried to make the scenes funny again. The harder I tried the less funny they were.

Meanwhile I had been in correspondence on another project with one of the critics on the London Times.

When we opened in London, the critic came to see the show. By this time the show, which had begun with promise, had become a lumbering Dickensian juggernaut, too long, too slow, performed by a company that knew it was involved in a disaster.

So the critic from the Times saw the show, which he loathed (with good reason). The review was one of the more scathing ever written and he singled me out for special condemnation. When I read it the next morning, hoping against all the probability that it would be positive, it was like a sledgehammer to my confidence, and I nearly gave up acting on the spot. That was bad enough but …

But here’s the thing; the critic from the Times saw the show, phoned in his copy, went home, and died in his sleep that night.

I wished the man no ill, but it did cross my mind to think, “If he was gonna die, why couldn’t he have died three hours earlier?”

And that, is the real reason I never read reviews.

And does that apply when the reviews are good?

You bet. There’s no surer way to mess up a performance than if you believe it when people tell you how good you are. “When Colin McPhillamy shakes the tea-pot, opens the sardines, and dances a jig on a pogo-stick, there is a delicate sunrise of joy that casts a gossamer spell over the stage.” – Oh yeah? And the odds are a hundred to one against Colin McPhillamy ever getting the moment right again.

So right now, I’m in a hit. And there are some great reviews – how do I know that? Because people say things like, “Hey, what about those great reviews?” And I say, “Don’t tell me!”

I have not read them, and will not until after we close, but if you’re interested go here

And while I’m at it let me give a shout out to the amazing design team we had on this one; Franne Lee for costumes, Paul Black for lighting, Victor Becker for the set, and Steve Shapiro for sound. I should have mentioned them in previous posts about this play. Their work both singly and collectively was outstandingly exquisite. You can say I said so.

But what ever you do – don’t tell me!

Categories
Acting

… And Then You Open

In 3000 years of theatre no one has yet come up with a better way. There’s a fortune to be made when they do.

You rehearse. You rehearse some more, then you technically rehearse and you drink too much coffee. Then you have a production week complete with long days, previews, coffee, tweaks, adjustments, new ideas, things you should have thought of before, oh, and coffee.

And then in an unholy melange of caffeine, nerves, uncertainty, mid hysteria, anticipation and fatigue … you open.

We opened last night. Come and see us if you’re nearby!