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2011 LONDON THEATRE DIARY - PART TWO

2011-03-09T11:24:00.000-08:00

TUESDAY – FEBRUARY 1ST – DAY SEVEN

So far so good. We’ve yet to see any duds. More importantly, Julieanne and I are getting much needed rest. We’ve eagerly awaited this trip quite some time; since 2010, a year of disasters and distractions, prevented us from getting away. Last January started off with Julieanne all but totalling her Prius in the snow. My mother passed away in October, after a month or so of hospice care, which had me driving up to Northern Kentucky/Cincy at least once a week. My siblings and I still deal with estate matters and preparing the house for sale. Then Julieanne’s mom died at Thanksgiving; followed by her brother having heart bypass surgery the week after. All quite draining. London, so long delayed, is a welcomed luxury.

Today I chose to walk to The Royal Court to collect our tickets for THE HERETIC which we see next week. Naturally, it rained. But only a drizzle of minor nuisance. Not having done this perambulation in years, I foolishly embarked without a map or consulting one. Once past Buckingham Palace, I ducked into Victoria Station and referred to a tour book in a shop there. My sense of direction confirmed, I continued…slowed by my aching knees and calves. Was this just being out-of-shape or was I starting to get my mother’s arthritis?

As I neared Sloane Square, the peaceful poshness of the neighbourhood took my mind off my pains. One sees why the well-heeled dwell here -- quiet streets with lovely green squares and well-appointed homes – just the opposite of the West End’s surging pulse. Still having been ensconced in the heart of St. James and Westminster since my first visit, I’ve always preferred it. I love being able to walk out your door and have all you need no more than a 15-20 minute stroll away – shops, theatres, movies, green space, groceries, whatever.

It is somewhat ironic that The Royal Court, with its reputation for producing Angry-Young-Man/ Rebel/ Common-man theatre should be located in such a high-tone square with both Tiffany and Cartier among its exclusive shops.

I got our tickets and strolled back to Victoria Street in about 15 minutes. Uninterrupted this is probably a 45 minute walk from our flat, but it’ll be unlikely that we’ll attempt it.

I enjoyed Victoria Street, my old stomping grounds from my Sherlock Holmes days, after they moved me from The Dukes to a great high-rise flat on Buckingham Gate. From it, I could see St. James Park and watch the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. A favourite memory was listening to the hooves of the police horses clip-clopping along the cobblestones late at night. All my old touchstones were still there…The Army-Navy Department Store, the Sainsbury Grocery, and the Albert pub. My route led me out in the square by Westminster Abbey and Parliament, past the Churchill Statue, and up Whitehall and home.

Because of the weather…and my throbbing legs and feet…I stuck close to our flat until theatre time – GREENLAND and press night. The National was hopping with live music in the foyer, crowded bars, and, roped off in a secluded corner, someone’s first-night private party.

As Julieanne and I headed for a pre-show browse in the bookshop, she heard an abrupt, strangulated “ooo-eerrr-ahhh” behind her. It was me…drooling and grunting in inarticulate awe.

The reason: Sir Richard Eyre, once artistic director of the National, press through the crowd toward us. Movie stars rarely set me agog and gaping. But theatre greatness reduces me to a gushing, dribbling fan. As Sir Richard passed us, I desperately searched for something to say, but my brain became an abyss of blankness. Although I could tell he saw me and realized he had been recognized, the moment (probably much to his relief) was over before I could conjure anything half-intelligent that didn’t sound like a blithering ninny.

Richard Eyre

Of course, the instant he was gone, I realized what I should have said. “Why do we do it, Paul?”

This phrase was a mantra for me and my pal, Rick St. Peter, when he was Artistic Director for Actors Guild and we both struggled to get the theatre over the hump and make it an Equity status Small Professional Theatre (I won’t rant here about all the forces that undermined that noble but vain endeavour). In Eyre’s book of theatre diaries when head of the National, NATIONAL SERVICE, he relates a story Paul Scofield told him. Scofield was confronted by a man on a train. “You’re Paul Scofield, aren’t you?” “Yes,” Scofield warily confessed. Man: “I’m a bit of an actor myself. Scofield: “Oh…really?” Man: “Yes.” PAUSE. Man: “Why do we do it, Paul?”

I fell out of bed laughing the first time I read this. Whenever Rick and I slammed up against the amateur mindset or just the travails of theatre, one or the other or, both in unison, would sigh: “Why do we do it, Paul?”

While Julieanne meandered through the bookstore, I went back to search for Sir Richard to drop my bon mot on him to see if it would have the desired effect. Alas, he had disappeared into the ethers.

A few moments later, however, I encountered the Guardian critic, Michael Billington…at least this gent resembled Billington’s photo that always appears along side his reviews.

Before GREENLAND started, they had pre-show “talkeoke” in the foyer. This consisted of an irritating fellow on a blaring microphone, trying to stir up audience participation about climate change -- the topic of GREENLAND. I was inclined to mutter something about noise pollution. And was it a tad ironic that the audience, going into a play about climate change, clutched plastic water bottles and drink cups in their paws?

GREENLAND, like all National shows, is expertly mounted and produced. For what it was, it was entertaining without being too didactic or preachy, but I don’t know if this piece written by four playwrights ever coalesced into cohesive whole. It was done without an intermission and mercifully short, which helped. The animatronic polar bear was the highlight of the evening.

I was struck by the difference in audibility and pronunciation between the generations of actors. The older, more experienced actors I never had trouble hearing or understanding. Not so, the younger ones. Lack of projection and articulation I’ve come to expect in the training of young actors in the States; I’m surprised to encounter it here. I thought speaking the speech, “trippingly on the tongue” was still emphasized.

The show ended with a blizzard of paper falling from the stage grid and being blown into the audience by huge fans. Julieanne picked up some of the scraps…pages of old scripts. Rejected ones, I assume. I’d sure hate to be the cleaning crew who has tidy up the auditorium every day. They must recycle it every night….one certainly hope so.

So GREENLAND was enjoyable, but I doubt it will be storming into the West End. I’ll be curious to see the reviews. Back in the lobby, “talkeoke” was gearing up again. The poor interviewer seemed to be having a hard time flogging up any enthusiasm or potential participants from the emerging audience. We certainly weren’t going to play and took off for home.

That night I called St. Peter to regale him with my Richard Eyre close encounter. Rick, now getting his doctorate in theatre at Texas Tech, quizzed me on the Hall shows and relayed all the accolades he was getting for his direction of THE WEIR and, in general, from his professors and colleagues . Good. He deserves it. He was treated shabbily during his term with Actors Guild and, with him, probably left the last hope for professional adult theatre in Lexington in my lifetime (we have a very good professional children’s theatre).

WEDNESDAY – FEBRUARY 2nd – DAY EIGHT

Speaking of Eyre, today we went to a matinee of the FLEA IN HER EAR he directed for The Old Vic. We lazed about the house until time to amble over to the South Bank. Arriving early at the Old Vic, we walked the half-block down The Cut to the Young Vic on the chance there might available tickets for VERNON GOD LITTLE. Lo and behold, there were…they were separate seats…one a few rows in front of the other for tonight’s performance. We took ‘em. Again, since the show is in previews, the price was great.

We had our usual front row center Dress Circle seats for FLEA IN HER EAR. The translation was the John Mortimer version that had been used in the early days of the National and was the same one that Julieanne and I did a zillion years ago at the University of Kentucky when she played my wife Raymonde and I did the dual role of Chandebise/Poche. We thought we were pretty hot stuff at the time and memory has only magnified our magnificence.

Ah, the folly of youth…This production put us to shame. What an absolute delight! Tom Hollander headed an exquisite ensemble. Having done so much farce in dinner theatre, I’m an absolute sucker for it, admiring the great skill and timing it takes to make it flow and keep the laughs peppering along and building. The cast was just brilliant.

After the performance, we dashed over the Thames for a quick nap (we’re old…we need our naps) before venturing back to The Young Vic for VERNON GOD LITTLE. Our seats, though separate, were both excellent. I’ve been here twice before (Moliere’s MISANTHROPE with Ken Stott and TIS PITY’S SHE’S A WHORE with Jude Law and Eve Best.) Its stage configuration is delightful different every time I come.

The play, based on a novel, was bizarre and funny. Julieanne and I both were thinking, unbeknownst to each other, how the piece was right up the alley of our young friend, Eric Seale, the current Artistic Director of Actors Guild. He would love this play. I was privileged to see Eve Best make her impressive debut here, and tonight the young man playing Vernon, Joseph Drake, made an equally impressive professional debut.

We were very happy with our day’s double-header. This is shaping up to be a very good theatre trip. Not counting Sunday, the only day we don’t have anything booked is the upcoming Saturday.

THURSDAY- FEBRUARY 3rd – DAY NINE

I woke early, in the midst of the screwiest dream. I was performing LEAR, directed by Rick St. Peter, and with some stalwart actors I have met in my last few years since I returned to occasional acting…Adam Luckey, Jack Parrish (Jack and I played Polonius and Claudius respectively to Adam’s Hamlet in Rick’s production) and Scott Wichman (who played Tartuffe to my Orgon in my own adaptation/translation of TARTUFFE, which Rick also directed). Scotty was playing the Fool, Adam was Edmund, and Jack either Kent or Gloucester. All damned good casting…with the possible exception of me as Lear, a role in which I’ve never seen myself. It was one of those dreams where I did not know my lines but, unlike the anxiety that usually accompanies such a predicament, I seemed blithely unconcerned.

HAMLET with Adam Luckey and me, directed by Rick St. Peter. This photo appeared in American Theatre.

All my dreams here have been oddly vivid and sleep, generally, has been more deep and restful. Maybe it’s no pets in bed. I’ve probably been sleep-deprived since 1976 when Hotspur, my first dog, crawled into my bed…but what are you going to do? You are the critters’ pack. I can’t deny them.

The day was clear until CLYBOURNE PARK tonight at Wyndhams, a ten minute walk from the flat. I went a-booking, back up to Skoob above Russell Square. I picked up IRONHAND, another John Arden, a translation of a Goethe play, GOTZ VON BERLICHINGEN, about a medieval robber-knight that appealed to my theatrical archeological taste for the obscure, forgotten, and rarely done. I also found a pristine first in dust jacket of MUST YOU GO?, Antonia Fraser’s memoir of her life with Harold Pinter. I had actually intended to buy this new for 20pds. Got it for half that.

From Skoob, I ventured over to Sam French on Fitzroy, found nothing. I also came up empty in Cecil Court, where I stopped by to see David Drummond, now open. As much as I love sleuthing the stacks of old bookstores, I’m realizing it’s much easier to just purchase this stuff on the internet and not worry about cramming heavy tomes into suitcases. Of course, the hunt always brings discoveries one would never be aware of, like the Arden stuff. But so much that I intend to buy, I could probably do online.

Stopping to get some grub, I tried to pay for it with a twenty pound note that had been taken out of circulation. It had been folded in my wallet since my ’09 trip. I was informed any bank would change it for me.

My legs, knees, and soles of my feet were feeling much, much better. Tingling with tightness, but no pain or aching anymore. So I guess it was just being out of shape and not arthritis or something more dire. I doubt I’ll be flopping over in some mews or pitching off the embankment into Thames from a heart-attack. There’s also been a positive change in my waistline. I’ve easily lost a pants size. I can slip the damn things off with out unbuttoning them.

CLYBOURNE PARK in the lovely Wyndhams Theatre was another winner! This Royal Court transfer by American playwright Bruce Norris won The Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play last year. Another brilliant ensemble with impeccable American accents and incredible timing had me weeping with laughter. Very funny and smart.

FRIDAY – FEBRUARY 4TH – DAY TEN

This morning I exchanged my bum 20pd note at a bank on the Strand. Then it was off to Regent Street and Hamley’s. Once the greatest toy store in the world, it’s now like any Toys Are Us at any mall and I found nothing to delight on any of its five floors. They used to have wonderful section of the metal, hand-painted soldiers…Romans right up to modern warfare. (a hobby that has oft tempted me). Now it’s all the same plastic crap and movie tie-ins you find anywhere.

From Hamley’s, I ducked down Carnaby Street and the narrow by-ways of Soho, stopping at the Vintage Magazine Shop, trying to find a back-issue of EMPIRE magazine which had interviewed me for an article on Conan and Robert E. Howard films. Though I’ve seen the interview (where I discussed the disaster that was KULL), I missed the magazine when it hit the newsstand last year. The shop didn’t have a copy of it.

That afternoon Julieanne and I went to a platform discussion with three of the actors in TWELFTH NIGHT -- Amanda Drew as Olivia, Simon Paisley Day as Malvolio, and David Ryall as Feste. This was fun and informative. When the floor was opened for questions, I asked, that given Peter Hall’s very distinctive ideas about the play expressed in the programme notes, whether he had imposed a concept on the cast or tried to steer them in a specific way. Apparently none of them had read the programme notes and said that the whole process had been very collaborative. Julieanne complimented Amanda Drew on her vocal qualities which greatly pleased her, as apparently some critic had carped about her voice.

After the platform, Drew and Julieanne did the show biz lovey embrace and animatedly talked for awhile. She kept asking Julieanne’s advice about what she could do with her wig, which she didn’t like…as if Julieanne’s opinion was going to sway the NT’s hair and wig department.

We returned to the flat for a brief respite before toddling back to the NT for Ayckbourn’s SEASON’S GREETINGS at the Lyttleton, starring Catherine Tate. The show is a tight ensemble piece, droll and expertly done. Ayckbourn, while hysterically funny, also has dark undercurrents running through his work. I recently read an assessment of Ayckbourn by Harold Pinter who apparently loved his work: “What a good-natured man! He loves his characters. No one is totally derided.” I agree with this. His meticulously-designed clockwork plotting and stage business, often working in simultaneous counterpoint is a marvel to watch. The puppet-show given by one of the characters is guffaw-inducing.

As usual, we swung through the NT bookshop on the way out. I bought a book on Michael Gambon…The Great Gambon, as Ralph Richardson dubbed him…a series of interviews with Mel Gussow over a period of years. I stayed up late devouring it.

SATURDAY – FEBRUARY 5th – DAY ELEVEN

We both slept late and didn’t rumble out of the flat, except for an around-the-corner foray for newspapers until afternoon. Our destination was down the South Bank toward The Globe Theatre. Though nothing was playing there, I like to pay homage and visit the gift shop. I picked up a small card and copies of a magazine entitled, AROUND THE GLOBE, published under the auspices of the theatre, dealing with it and matters Shakespearean. We also tried out the camera on the new phone, snapping shots all along the way. Coming back via the Wobbly Bridge (which doesn’t wobble since it’s been retrofitted), we returned along the north side of the embankment. We debated going up to the Barbican and getting tix for the Guildhall production of DEAR BRUTUS, but figured that the trek there, going home, and then returning that night was simply too much of a project. So the evening would be sans theatre tonight.

Pogue at the Globe

We both posed for photos at Cleopatra’s Needle and then rambled through Victoria Embankment Gardens behind Villiers, reading its interesting history as a main pier where one caught the water taxi to cross the Thames in olden times.

The queen of my heart posing with the Queen of the Nile.

We made another excursion that night into St. James Square and environs, ending up at the back-door of the Picadilly Waterstones. Books were bought. Never having found a shop with a signed Pratchett of I SHALL WEAR MIDNIGHT, I bought it here. In my ’09 London Theatre Diary, I had suggested that someone should put out a guide book about all the blue historical plaques decorating various buildings all over the city. Well, someone had -- at a price of forty pds and weighing about the same. I figured this hefty tome was not one I could tote home. It looks like an internet buy.

Seven o’clock found us passing the Jermyn Street Theatre where the Rattigan rarity, LESS THAN KIND was playing. At Julieanne’s insistence, we went in on the unlikely chance that there had been some returns. And there were…two separates again. One seat supposedly had a restricted view…not really the case, a slight lean forward made visible the otherwise obscured stage corner. The other return was in the front row. Julieanne insisted I take this seat, as the one who was particularly intrigued by this play (my theatrical archeology again). The restricted view was a ten pd ticket; the other 18pd, which would go into the pocket of the man who had initially bought it.

The theatre is the size of an Equity-waiver theatre…I counted 75 seats. My feet were all but in the living room set. The man whose extra ticket I bought arrived with his party and cheerily said, “Thanks for the money.” “Thanks for the seat.” I replied.

Both play and actors were a delight. Michael Simkins I had seen in DONKEY’S YEARS a couple trips back and in the terrific Simon Gray play, THE OLD MASTERS. Sara Crowe had been very funny in British TV comedy, HAGGARD, that I had on DVD.

The play’s history was interesting. Initially submitted to the Lunts, Alfred kept making “adjustments” and requesting rewrites, so that by the end of the rehearsal period, the play had been completely re-written and entitled LOVE IN IDLENESS. Critically deemed poor stuff, the Lunts’ presence made it a hit on both sides of the Atlantic nonetheless. This was the first production of the original, free of the Lunt “improvements”.

We both enjoyed it. Our luck has certainly held. We’ve now gotten all my first choices. Three more to go and we will have seen thirteen plays in all. That may be a record for us.

At home, we popped the bubbly our flight attendant had bestowed upon us on the trip over and I once again stayed up to the wee hours, reveling in the Gambon book. They spoke of a moment I remembered vividly in the play CRESSIDA. In it, Gambon is a Jacobean actor, training boy actors. At one point, a gauche young actor declaims a speech with all the expected stock gestures to terrible effect. Gambon then does the same speech with the same gestures (but much more fluidly in speech and gesture) and it is magic. It was one of the most brilliant acting lessons I ever saw, not only in the context of the play, but also outside it. I’m glad to hear others speak of this to know it is not just some exaggeratedly coloured memory of my own. I really did see what I saw.

SUNDAY - FEBRUARY 6th – DAY ELEVEN

Another late-stirring morning with the Sunday papers and their supplements. I read a front-page article in the Daily Mail ranting about some highly-paid BBC nabob in charge of an office/staff relocation to Manchester who, though British, actually lives in Midway, Kentucky, with pictures of the house. The Mail was fuming over the money the BBC was supposedly wasting. I just wondered why anyone would prefer Midway, a one-street town divided by railroad tracks (it’s one town over from Georgetown where we live), to London. Horses, apparently.

We rolled out at two and found Trafalgar overflowing with Chinese New Year celebrants, watching native dances and music performed on a temporary stage at the base of Nelson’s column. We edged around the periphery, but could only see what was happening on one of the giant TV screens erected in select areas.

We pushed through to The Mall, headed to The Dukes for our traditional “last Sunday drink”. The bar didn’t open till four, so we trooped down to St. James’ Park. We dallied along the lake, feeding Julieanne’s stash of hazelnuts to the squirrels that scurry up bold as brass and snatch them from your fingers. We also doled out nuts to little kids who realized nuts were a far better temptation than the bread with which they fed the ducks.

Julieanne had learned her squirrel-feeding techniques from a master -- an old gent she met every year in the park and who called all the squirrels “Suesies”. Julieanne had assumed the mantle now and she must star in the vacation snaps of many foreign tourists who click away with their cameras while she and her squirrel pals do their dog and pony.

Julieanne learning squirrel-feeding frm the master on an earlier trip.

Moseying into St. James, we browsed the posh men’s shops, many that deal solely in expensive toiletries and grooming kits. How much will one pay for a shaving mug and brush? Who even still uses them? Gazing in some windows is like staring into the 19th Century. Yet most of the shops have been here for decades (if not longer) and seem to thrive in this very exclusive patch of real estate.

The Dukes bar was vacant when we arrived, quite to our liking. We sat at our favourite table that looks out on the secluded courtyard entrance and chatted with our genial Italian bartender (all the bartenders we’ve ever had here are Italian…and genial). Since The Dukes is known for its martinis, I decided to have my first one ever. This is probably odd, given that the martini was my father’s preferred nightly cocktail. But I’ve never been much of a spirits drinker (usually some vodka concoction). In fact, I’m not much of a drinker at all and when I do indulge, it is usually wine. I can’t say I found the taste thrilling, but the kick was potent. Julieanne stuck to her Glenlivet and after two drinks apiece (61pds), we both weaved out a bit wozzled. I’ve not been that light-headed in sometime. These days, booze mostly makes me sleepy.

Martini-virgin loses his cherry...or would that be an olive?

In this slightly inebriated state, we navigated our way home with a stop at a Tesco Metro on Jermyn Street for supplies. Once ensconced in the flat, Julieanne drifted to sleep after dinner, despite it being only 8:00. I read newspapers, watched a WALLENDAR episode on telly, then immersed myself once more in the Gambon book. He’s very much my kind of actor…mostly self-taught through instinct and common sense; learning by example and watching others. Though I had my theory and whatnot in college, my real training ground was old black and white movies, studying the British greats, watching theatre, and just working onstage with people better and more experienced. Oh, what can be learned from the wings! Gambon is also witty and humble. I feel lucky to have seen him live onstage three times: SKYLIGHT, THE CARETAKER, and CRESSIDA.

MONDAY – FEBRUARY 7th– DAY TWELVE

On our way to the Covent Garden antique market this morning, Julieanne told me she didn’t want to go home, that I could just leave her behind. I told her fine, but she’d have to fend for herself, I couldn’t support the lifestyle. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll just sell the Big Issue.” This cracked me up. The Big Issue is a magazine, written by professional journalists, but sold by homeless people as way to earn income and help reintegrate them into society. A nobly laudable endeavour, but still amusing when it conjures up an image of my wife in a silly-looking wooly cap, bundled in blankets at the end of some bridge (probably with a scruffy-looking dog by her side), hawking in cockney, "Big Issue, Gov, 'Elp the 'omeless!"
The Market was a bore. We split up and I returned home, stopping again at a place on Villiers that I discovered last week, Herman Ze German, which sells authentic and delicious German sausages. This time I got their fat-free fries as well. Good stuff.

Herman Ze German Sausages

When the missus returned, we struck out for the National and another platform discussion on Twelfth Night…this time with Simon Callow, Flinty Williams, and Charles Edwards. All three were very witty. I asked Edwards about a moment in the play where, as Aguecheek, he leaned against an out-of-perspective piece of scenery meant to represent a cluster of buildings in the background. It had made me laugh, but I had wondered if it had been directed. I gathered not, given his vague, cryptic response: “I don’t do that anymore.” This was Flinty Williams' first Shakespeare; surprising, given the amount of Bard both her father, Michael Williams, and her mother, Judi Dench, have performed.

It was also interesting to learn that director Peter Hall demands that everyone know their lines from first rehearsal. Simon Callow mentioned that he had actually caught Hall, the Shakespeare expert, get a line wrong…and then Hall changed it because he preferred his version.

After the platform, as Callow signed his memoir for me (I had bought a signed one, but I wanted it personally inscribed), we asked what line had Hall got wrong. In rehearsal, Callow said, “Approach, Sir Andrew.” Hall corrected him: “ ‘Approach, Sir Andrew, approach.’ There’s another approach.” It turns out there wasn’t and Callow had spoken the line correctly. But Sir Peter liked it his way better and changed Shakespeare. The line now had two “approaches”.

That night it was back to the NT to see FRANKENSTEIN. Julieanne stopped by the artists entrance to leave a note for Amanda Drew, then it was up to the Olivier lobby.

This being only the second preview of the show, we had no clue which actor would be playing what role tonight. Benedict Cumberbatch or Johnny Lee Miller alternate the roles of Frankenstein and the Creature. While we waited for the house to open, Danny Boyle…the director…popped in and out of the lobby several times.
Entering the theatre, we were met with a strange, upright cloth disc on stage. This womb-like thing soon began to pulsate with life. As the play began, it pulsated even more until from its folds emerged…The Creature, stark naked, flopping and jerking around as it came to life and slowly, awkwardly mastered its body and limbs. This probably took fifteen minutes before the Creature unsteadily scrabbled to his feet. Benedict Cumberbatch, almost unrecognizable in his make-up, was playing the creature tonight and this opening moment was mesmerizingly brilliant.

It remained the most arresting moment of the play. Though the audience seemed to love the play, it was still rough. Hopefully, it will jell during previews. Its strengths were its two leads, particularly Cumberbatch. I think Frankenstein’s role is somewhat diminished, in that we stay with the Creature through almost the first half of the play before Victor Frankenstein and his story pick up.

As usual, production values and stage effects were impressive, but scene changes were still rocky and jarring and took you out of the piece. At one moment, revolve trouble stopped the show cold (but one expects this at a preview). More problematic was that, once past the two leads, most of the supporting cast was one of the weakest I’ve seen on the Olivier stage. Nor am I sure it’s Nick Dear’s strongest script. But it was still an impressive show and, as things tighten, I hope it will get stronger and my quibbles disappear. NT LIVE will be broadcasting it, so I’ll have a chance to see how it’s evolved and maybe get to see the role reversal as well.

The show ran with no intermission. So getting out early, we went down to The Young Vic and bought the script of VERNON GOD LITTLE for Eric Seale. As a script in a book shop, it’s 9pds; as a programme/script at the Young Vic, it’s 3pds. Go figure.

TUESDAY – FEBRUARY 8th – DAY THIRTEEN

This morning I walked to the Embankment Tube Station at the end of the block to check the tube to Sloane Square for the Royal Court tonight. It turns out to be an 8-10 minute ride. Once Julieanne was stirring, we bustled over to the NT to make our final book purchases. I bought plays: After The Dance by Rattigan; Habit of Art by Bennett, the Frankenstein script; Clybourne Park, The Knowledge (getting good reviews at the Bush); and The Painter which just opened with Toby Jones playing Turner. We also picked up some DVDs, since we have a small screen all-region DVD player (often the small cheap ones cut corners by not installing the regional technology…It seems to me everyone would sell lots more DVDs if all DVD players did this). The DVDS were an RSC Miss Julie with a young Helen Mirren; The Making of the War Horse; and a psychoanalytic study of Iago from a series called Shakespeare’s Characters on the Couch (this one Julieanne wanted) featuring the great Simon Russell Beale

It was a beautiful, brilliant sunny day. After lunching together at Herman Ze German, we parted company. Julieanne off to St. James for a rendezvous with her squirrels and I up Charing Cross Road to pick up any tome I might have missed. Other than another play, Bedlam, which had played at the Globe last summer, I returned empty-handed.

It was a quick and easy tube ride to Sloane Square that night and the station is right next door to the Royal Court (In fact, you could occasionally hear the trains rattling underground during the performance) . Some day, I must exploit the tube more than I do, but I’m usually located within walking distance of my haunts. And I enjoy walking in the city. Arriving early, we window-shopped in the posh shops.

The Royal Court shares the same young vibe that the Almeida and the Young Vic have…different kind of energy. Rick St. Peter recommended the book shop, but I found it small and so crowded I really couldn’t browse it. The theatre itself is stunning. Leather seats!

THE HERETIC was also stunning. Again, a fine ensemble cast headed by Juliet Stephenson and spectacular performance by a young actor, Johnny Flynn. The only thing that marred it was a group of American students in front of us. At one point, one girl’s phone vibrator went off and she pulled the bloody thing out to scan a text message. All their phones came out at the interval. All this obsessing over being connected and not connecting at all to the moment. Apres moi, le deluge.

But maybe “le deluge” is already here. In one of the most legendary theatres in the world, these young Philistines would rather be squinting at a two-inch square of light. I blame their teacher/chaperones who were present and apparently incapable of imparting any sense of etiquette, good manners, or sense of wonder to them about how privileged and lucky they were to be seeing theatre in London. Of course, one chaperone, in his twenties, seemed more interested in trying to be a part of “the gang” and not being an example to his charges.

Nonetheless, it was still a great experience. This was my first time in the Royal Court and I don’t know why it took so long. Once home, we began to do a little preliminary packing.

WEDNESDAY – FEBRUARY 9th – DAY FOURTEEN

It’s our last full day here. Julieanne spent the morning at Westminster, lighting some candles for some friends who have had recent bouts with cancer. I got cash needed for the cab to the airport and incidentals, and did more packing.

Julieanne and I had one last lunch at Herman Ze German, because I had filled up my stamp card and we were entitled to a free Bratwurst. Man, they were good.

Our last show was a matinee up off Leicester Square at the Garrick Theatre. It was a revival of a J.B. Priestly comedy, WHEN ARE MARRIED. It starred a host of apparently venerable and beloved actors, but the only one I knew was Maureen Lipman. But they were all skilled troupers and everyone got their moment to shine. The Garrick is another theatre that I have never been in. Like at the Royal Court, one could hear the trains running under the theatre (in and out of the Leicester Square Station).

After the matinee, we almost finished packing before going down to the lobby to have coffee with the family of a young hearing-impaired girl Julieanne had befriended at the hotel computer. Very nice people…Australian…world travelers.

Then it was back to the room for the final packing. I am known as Master Packer in our house and my mosaic designs of book placement in our luggage for best protection and weight distribution were things of beauty.

At about eight, we did our ritual last night walkabout. Over the Jubilee Bridge and down the South Bank, up past the London Eye (still haven’t gone up in it.), over Westminster Bridge, past Boadicea’s Statue on the right, The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben on the left, then a leisurely amble along Whitehall. Halfway up Whitehall, Big Ben bonged nine.

Reaching Trafalgar, we zipped through the Tesco Express for a last supper. After dinner, we totted up our expenses for customs declaration. As usual, we’d have nothing to declare and would be way under the dollar limit of goods allowed. Each person is allowed $800 bucks. Together we barely had half that and books don’t count in that financial commutation. Since books are always our biggest expense (my only one), we had next to nothing. The single most expensive item was a bottle of perfume that Julieanne can’t get in the states anymore.
We went to bed early…

THURSDAY – FEBRUARY 10 – DAY FIFTEEN

…and I slept badly, as I always do the day before leaving-taking. I was up at six and quickly showered and dressed. As we packed our last items, things started to go awry. Julieanne, cramming toiletries and cosmetics into an already overstuffed piece of luggage, busted the zipper on one of our bags. Though we couldn’t fix it so it would lock and be secure, we got it zipped after a fashion so that it was closed and then we put a locking luggage strap around it. A determined thief could still get in it.

The hotel had arranged for a cab to pick us up. I usually just go out on the street and hail one. The problem with arranged cabs is you begin to fret if they’re late…and I’ve never had a problem hailing one in the morning.
The cabbie arrived on time, but it turned out to be a mini-cab, not a black cab. I have always heard such horror stories about mini-cabs that I utterly distrust them. So I dismissed this guy and hailed a black cab. Just as well I did. Traffic was the worst it’s ever been due to roadwork (the impending Olympics would be my guess). Fortunately, my black cab driver, armed with “the knowledge”, skillfully evaded the delays with a detour through a part of Kensington that I had never been through. He also got us there at 9 for an 11:40 flight.

Once arrived, everything was hunky-dory. We found a place in the terminal that wraps damaged luggage in plastic for seven pds. This plastic shroud secured our unlocked bag. Soon luggage was checked; bodies through detectors; belts, boots, and belongings were back where they belonged; and we were in the BA lounge, enjoying an array of beverages, breakfast goodies, and British papers.

BA’s business class is even more luxurious than American’s. Seats were like little secluded pods of privacy. The attentive crew quickly plied us with 3-4 glasses of champagne, nuts, newspapers, and moist cloth towels in rapid succession. They kept topping off the bubbly. My God, what goes on in first class—orgies?

This was all fabulous until the food arrived -- the stereotype of what you always hear about British cooking (but isn’t really true). My steak was tough and overdone. I cut myself off the champagne, as I was already developing a conk, and stuck with water the rest of the trip. I transformed my seat and ottoman (you heard that right – ottoman) into a full length bed and went to sleep. I didn’t even open up my Bose headphones and only looked at the TV screen to check the flight progress after I woke up. As we were somewhere over Canada, I must have slept five or six hours. I was out until about tea-time.
“Tea” was an offering of bizarre British sandwiches…one ham and piccalilli I believe it was called; the other some inedible cheese that tasted like paste with cucumber slices in it (never been a fan of cucs). All up and down Villiers Street, I can find an array of delicious British sandwiches, but not in luxury class on an airplane. Despite the food, I found the flight grand. Julieanne was suffering from a headache (probably too much champagne).

Landing in Chicago, we reclaimed our luggage, got through customs, and then to the AA Baggage re-route without a hitch. It was just as easy catching the tram to the next terminal, going through the detectors again, and finding our boarding gate for our flight to Cincy. Julieanne got a cola for a caffeine jolt to ease her headache.
The flight home on the American Eagle puddle-hopper was fun, because the plane never got so high, you couldn’t see the landscape. Lots of snow stretching out to the horizon, glistening in the sunset.

We arrived in Cincy at dusk. By the time we gathered our luggage and helped a rather confused Frenchwoman find her meeting party, it was dark. Though cold, there was little snow here and, unlike last time, we didn’t have to dig our car out from under a mountain of ice in the long term parking lot. We were home in an hour, dragged the suitcases inside, opened only a couple to gets some books, checked our emails, and then to sleep in our own bed.

One hates leaving, but once you’ve left, you’re just anxious to get home.

FRIDAY – FEBRUARY 11th – DAY SIXTEEN

We were up early, ate an obscenely huge breakfast at the local Crackerbarrel, then into Lexington to Pets Suites to pick up the critters. As usual, Nigel was overwhelmed to see us, Mosby was initially sulky and punishing, but subdued, and the first in the door when we got home.

I think it may have been one of our best trips. 13 plays in 15 days plus the two platforms. I saw everything on my top priority list -- a terrific mix of new, old, and classic. And London is still simply the greatest city in the world. I’m glad to be home, but give me a week or two and I’ll be longing to go back.

2011-02-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

2011 LONDON THEATRE DIARY

TUESDAY-WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25th-26th ,2011 -The Looong First Day

Our flight, not scheduled to leave Cincinnati until 8pm, allowed an unhurried morning. My fretting about weather seemed groundless, though a possibly of rain threatened. We got Nigel, the silly bugger, and Mosby, the Grey Ghost, safely ensconced in Pet Suites (for the uninformed: Nigel is a Yorkie, Mosby a cat, Pet Suites a kennel) with little fuss, though both suspected with that unerring sixth sense that something was up. But Nigel is always up for a ride and Mosby has learned that resistance is futile and merely sulks with deep guttural growls. Once they were tucked away, we returned home to leisurely finish packing and bathing for the journey.

Mosby the Grey Ghost

Nigel the Silly Bugger

We drove to Cincy about four-thirty, got there in an hour, left the car in long-term parking, and hopped the tram to the terminal. A red cap whizzed our four bags up to check-in, Julieanne toting her own carry-on and me, lugging my briefcase. I joshed with the desk attendant about being plenty early for my flight. She said, better to be early and comfortable (always my philosophy). I replied I wouldn’t be truly comfortable until I was sipping champagne in American’s Admiral Club in Chicago. And even then I wouldn’t be truly, truly comfortable until I was sipping champagne in business class on the way to London. Connecting flights always make me nervous and I always leave plenty of time for delays. Julieanne has valiantly learned to tolerate my edginess until we are actually up in the plane London-bound at which point I relax, knowing the only thing that can stop us at that point is entirely beyond my ability to control or prepare for.

I was momentarily shocked when I saw the additional fees for each piece of checked luggage. But then I realized one of the perks of an expensive business class ticket was not paying this ridiculous baggage fee. Though truth told, the tickets weren’t expensive. The credit card that logs miles on American had racked up enough to get two round-trip business tickets for two coach fares. We’d be flying American out and returning, their sister airline, British Air. It’s odd to be paying less for business class than when traveling premium economy (I refuse to fly coach overseas), but that is the nature of upgrades.

Unfortunately, our connecting flight from Cincy to Chicago was not business class, but one of those cramped American Eagle puddle-hoppers. No champagne here, but mercifully short…less than an hour. I cannot conceive of how obese America manages to squeeze into the narrow seats of this air craft, let alone buckle the seat belt.

Though I’ve never seen anything of Chicago except its airport, I find it has a very cosmopolitan vibe with which I jibe. Naturally, it probably seemed more cosmopolitan because I was sitting in the Business/First Class lounge and not in the main terminal mingling with the hoi-polloi traveling steerage. But even in the lap of indulgence, one could not totally forget one was part of the shrinking middle class because Julieanne and I imbibed our complimentary glass of champagne while watching Obama’s State of the Union speech on the TV. Fortunately, we left the dreary state of American politics and its economy behind us for the next two weeks as the 10:30 departure time arrived and we walked to our gate, and entered into…

…Luxuryland! American’s revamped Business Class wasn’t a total shock, as I had scoped out all the improvements on the net. I was particularly pleased with a seat that fully reclined…on a slight incline no less, perfect for my acid reflux, which would no doubt be agitated as I fully intended to swill more champagne. Our gracious flight crew, being of a similar mind, had the bubbly flowing with flooding generosity before take-off. The perfect way to start a trip Julieanne and I both badly needed after a crummy 2010.

As seasoned travelers, Julieanne and I know full well the effects of drinking and dehydration (which drinking will facilitate) when flying and we’re pretty good about it these days unlike when we first started out and downed any free alcohol proffered and gobbled any food plopped in front of us, as well as blearily but compulsively watching the panoply of movies and entertainment. Our goal these days is to try and sleep as much as possible and get in rhythm with the destination time zone as soon as possible.

But still…It’s business class! You have to indulge in a few perks. My strategy is always to drink early and switch to water around meal time. This is precisely what I did; had several glasses of pre-dinner champers and munched my cup of warm nuts, switched to water with dinner (a steak of some sort, as I recall), watched RED (some Bruce Willis-Morgan Freeman-John Malkovich-Helen Mirren action silliness which is just right for in-flight viewing – lots of mayhem and macho strutting, no real demands on one’s concentration, and impossible to lose the simple strands of the plot), went to the loo (another business class perk – no sharing the john with the masses), then reclined my seat into a bed and conked out for the count. I didn’t even read either of the books I brought -- Dashiell Hammett’s NIGHTMARE TOWN and a Thomas Burnett Swann fantasy. I think I’ve brought these books on this jaunt before, primarily because they are slender paperbacks and barely take any room in my briefcase, which I keep as empty as possible in order to cram it as full as possible with books I’ll buy….which are my only indulgence besides theatre tickets.

I slept better than I ever slept on a flight, rising right before breakfast. I commented to our amiable flight attendant that this was the most luxurious flight I think I’d ever taken. Somehow I could tell by Julieanne’s smirk as she almost spewed her orange juice in suppressed laughter that this had not come out as intended. She later confirmed that she thought I came off as a “gosh-golly” rube on his first big flight rather someone who was comparing this experience with all the myriad other business/ first-class flights he’d taken. Whatever. The attendant apparently appreciated the compliment and, marking us as the champagne guzzlers, asked us if we’d like to take a bottle of bubbly with us as memento. Twist our arms. She duly brought us a lovely wrapped bottle.

Heathrow was drizzly when we landed at around noon of the 26th, Collecting our crap and shooting through customs, I got cab-and-cash-for-the-week money from the hole-in-the-wall (automatic teller) and picked up my indispensable TIME OUT, while Julieanne availed herself of a business/first-class reception room. I followed her up and, after dousing my face with water, had a glass of tomato juice and a croissant.

The cab ride in, the only feasible way for us to travel with four bags and two carry-ons, was pleasant as always, but the price, once about thirty pds and tip (10% is the going rate…though I’m usually a bit more generous), is now about sixty pds and tip. But I mustn’t be the old fogey grumbling about the past. Given that we’ve been doing this since ’94, escalation is natural. Still one of these days, we must get our baggage down to a manageable level and take the Heathrow Express into Picadilly. But even then, the idea of toting baggage through the crowded streets of London doesn’t appeal. Part of the reason they’re so crowded is people totting baggage…little wheelie carts or backpacks.

Despite my tightwad sticker shock at the price of our flat at the Citadines because I keep forgetting about the VAT (value added tax), I was happy to find it ready and waiting. Its layout was slightly different than before, but we quickly unpacked and, as Julieanne was getting crabby, it was obviously time for her post-flight nap. That is the ritual, she sleeps; I go out and try to stay bright-eyed and bushy-tailed until London bedtime. I asked if I scored tickets for Sir Peter Hall’s TWELFTH NIGHT, might she be up for a show later. The quasi-surly/sleepy answer was noncommittal. No show tonight.

The reason I asked was because I haven’t come to London this under-booked in a long time. Before Shaftesbury Avenue became like Broadway, filled with clapped-out, tourist-trap, juke-box, been-playing-too-long musicals…which hog the theatres for long runs and make them unavailable for more legitimate fair (I come to London…for English theatre, not shit I don’t want to see even in America…Michael Jackson’s THRILLER or STOMP I don’t consider theatre), I used to book almost any show on the day of. No longer. For several years, I’ve had our theatre agenda plotted out, tix bought and paid-for. Unfortunately, the entire trip was planned around three shows -- Derek Jacobi’s LEAR, Sir Peter Hall’s production of TWELFTH NIGHT, and Danny Boyle’s FRANKENSTEIN starring Benedict Cumberbatch (the star of the new updated SHERLOCK). Though I booked before any of these shows had opened, I only got tix for FRANKENSTEIN. Both LEAR and TWELFTH NIGHT were already sold out.

This is not necessarily a reason for despair. We’ve always managed to stand in line at the National and Donmar (where TWELFTH NIGHT & LEAR are playing respectively) and get day-of tickets, sometimes even returns. Last time over, when we couldn’t get tix for WAR HORSE or THE PITMEN PAINTERS, my old colleague Deanna Dunagan was reviving her Tony-Award performance at the National in AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY and, since we were also coming to see her…she got us great house seats for both.

Deanna Dunagan and me at The Globe of the Great Southwest, 1974

This time, since I had no idea when we might be able to finagle tickets for either LEAR or TWELFTH NIGHT, I had only booked six shows, keeping a lot of dates open. I can only hope this strategy doesn’t backfire and everything else becomes a hard ticket.

So knowing I wouldn’t be able to get any LEAR tickets this late in the day, I shot over the Jubilee Bridge a half-block from our flat and trotted down to the National ten minutes away on the South Bank to see what might be had for TWELFTH NIGHT on any night. Nothing, as it turned out. I picked up my tickets for FRANKENSTEIN and the Ayckbourn revival of SEASON’S GREETINGS with Catherine Tate, and then spun through the theatre’s bookshop. I scoped out its vast array of selections to see what I would be buying in the days ahead…and, of course, bought several things right away -- notably Simon Callow’s bio, a book on British panto as well as some panto plays (holiday pantos intrigue me, even though I’ve never seen one), and three plays, ANNE BOLELYN by Howard Brenton and POSH by Laura Wade, both plays I had read about it, and THE BIG FELLAH by Richard Bean, whose HERETIC we’d see next week at the Royal Court. I also picked up a programme for Rory Kinnear’s HAMLET which we had seen through the NT LIVE’s series of broadcast plays transmitted to theatres all over the world.

I returned with my swag to the flat. Julieanne was half-sleep with the telly on. I played a little remote roulette to find out the hotel had added a few channels – mostly unwatchable ones, foreign language, European sports, and lots of music video…and lost others – particularly DAVE TV. It was a channel that ran repeats of comedy quiz shows with the likes of Stephen Fry, Paul Merton, and lots of other witty British folk. It provided my post-theatre nightcap. I shall miss it.

Dead tired, but unable to sleep, I strolled up the corner to Trafalgar and the Strand and browsed through the Waterstones bookshop. The problem with connecting flights, even with brilliant sleeping accommodations this time out, all the driving to the airport, flying one place, then disembarking, waiting for another flight, and going again wears you down. When we lived in LA, even though the flight was always about 10-11 hrs, you got on and that was that. No wear and tear and worry (Well…with me, there's always worry, but in the LA days, a lot less.).

Upon my return, Julieanne was having trouble with the bed (the bed is a fold-out sofa in our little studio). It kept sagging. No wonder. Half the support straps on her side were unhooked and dangling. There was no way to repair it. A call to the front desk brought Housekeeping who confirmed there was no way to repair it. Another call to the front desk to request another room. This took awhile…The Citadines is French. Time moves differently for the French. But finally, we secured another room higher up with a better view and a more workable layout like we had had before. The bed still had some quirks. We both rolled toward the middle of it. We easily fixed this with the extra pillows we'd filched from our previous room by placing them lengthwise under the mattress on the springs which leveled everything out.

Our quarters now satisfactorily secured and Julieanne somewhat awake, we trotted off to the Covent Garden Tesco grocery to fill our tiny fridge with provisions. This was a tide-over shop; I getting my savoury eggs (they had no Scotch eggs) and some Indian microwave for dinner, Julieanne getting her culinary oddities, and a few staples. We then wended our way home for a late dinner and sleep.

But not before one more mishap. Julieanne’s Waterpick blew out the electricity. Victor, the Latvian porter (I've yet to find any native Britisher who works at the Citadines), with a subtle hint from me, finally realized it wasn’t a fuse, but a circuit-breaker, went to the box, and flicked it back on. Then it was lights out via a proper switch, bed, and blessed sleep.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 27th - DAY TWO

Slept late and didn’t get to the Donmar till after nine, which left little hope of snaring day tickets for Jacobi’s KING LEAR, which was my intention. The box-office had yet to open, but a dozen people were already cued up. Since only ten tickets were held back, I was about to press on and try my luck with 12TH NIGHT at the National. But someone mentioned that it was matinee day and they held back ten tix for each show. I got in cue.

Waiting for day tickets, the camaraderie in the cue is usually delightful. Like-minded souls shiver in foul weather at an ungodly hour because you all love great theatre. In front of me was a lady from Scotland and a drama student; behind me a woman from New York living in London and another drama student. The conversations were all about theatre…what was playing, what was good, what not worth the ticket. The New Yorker did not have kind things to say about TWELFTH NIGHT, but then she did keep pronouncing Derek Jacobi’s name with a long O. She also told me that COUNTRY GIRL starring Martin Shaw had closed early because it was playing to half houses. I had inquired about it because I hadn’t seen it listed in the TIME OUT. Marty had played Henry Baskerville in my HOUND OF BASKERVILLES…the filming of which had been the reason for my first trip to London back in ’82. I had almost booked the play in advance, but didn’t, because I knew it would’ve been running awhile and figured it would be an easy ticket to get. Just as well.

The box-office didn’t open till ten-thirty, but they opened the lobby at ten allowing the early arrivals to line up inside and keep warm. The line snaking behind me kept getting longer, but I was in good position and felt confident. I ended up with two very good seats for the evening performance in the dress circle for a mere fifteen pds each.

I stopped by home to inform Julieanne, still rumbling about the flat, and then dashed to the South Bank and the National to inquire about returns for TWELFTH NIGHT. Fortune continued to favour me. They had just added restricted viewing seats for ten pds each and I got these for Friday evening, which was open on my calendar. Checking the seating chart, I figured ours seats couldn’t be any worse than the full-price ones I had had for MRS. AFFLECK the last time I was here and these were at least closer to the stage. (Check out the 2009 theatre diary blog). But when the Cottesloe is in a rectangular configuration, the stage is proscenium, and one is on the sides, one is twisting one’s neck to see anyway. But, hey, they were tickets to a sold-out production with a fine cast and fine director. I was just glad to get ‘em.

Best of all, with these two plays secured, I could book the rest of my calendar. Leaving the National, I strolled to the Old Vic to collect our tickets for Richard Eyre’s FLEA IN HER EAR.

It was bloody cold, so I scurried home via Villiers Street behind the Citadines to pick up some lunch. I opted for a Madras lamb with rice dish that looked quite appetizing and turned out to be scaldingly spicy.

Satisfied with my good day’s work in snagging the two most difficult tickets in town, I lulled around the flat the rest of the afternoon, watching antiquing and property shows on the tube and cat-napping.

That night as we strolled to the Donmar (maybe fifteen minutes away) past Trafalgar along our old haunts in Upper St. Martin’s (where we used to rent a cozy flat, now far too expensive), we were amazed at all the changes – new shops, restaurants…in Seven Dials, The Mountbatten Hotel was shrouded in scaffolding undergoing major renovation. Several of my cue companions were at the performance…said hello to the Scottish lady in the bar and the New Yorker had seats right next to ours…not a thrilling prospect for my wife, as the woman frequently punctuated the proceedings with a barking cough. Another couple who had been behind us in line had only managed to get standing room, but right before the play started, an usher tagged them and took them down to two empty seats right on the front row. The Donmar is an intimate stage and Derek Jacobi would be spewing spittle on them. Lucky sods.

LEAR, despite its rep, has never been a favourite of mine, but this clear, moving production finally revealed its towering greatness to me for the first time. What a performance! I’ve been lucky to see Jacobi onstage about five times. I particularly admired his Prospero…angry and unforgiving despite all his talk of forgiveness. But his Lear is the finest I’ve ever seen him. The entire cast was strong (the sole exception perhaps Cordelia), and Shakespeare is a genius. All the plot parallels played between Lear and his family and Glouchester and his brood were finely etched. The delivery of the speeches was brilliant. His “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” curse on Goneril was chilling. And rather than howling “blow, winds, and crack your cheeks” out on the heath, the speech became a haunted whisper as if you were crawling into his mad, tormented mind. Wonderful turnabout. His “let me be not mad” laments were pitiful and wrenching. His act iv, sc. vi railing about women, “There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit” was a bitter, bawdy scathing condemnation. It was somewhere in here that Julieanne and I both thought we heard the word “cunt’, but a cursory examination of the scene doesn’t reveal it nor any approximate word from which it can be twisted. But the speech itself was a shocking, riveting moment as Jacobi spewed Lear’s bile. He made you laugh aghast, then utterly horrified you a second later.

Derek Jacobi as Lear

Both Goneril and Regan did not, thankfully, come off as merely harridans, but had their legitimate issues and grew logically into their ultimate villainy. Goneril, Gina McKee, was very familiar and a glance at the programme told me why. She had been the wheelchair-bound friend of Hugh Grant in NOTTING HILL. From that character to Goneril, quite a change of pace. The production also had a memorable Kent and Ron Cook, a long favourite of mine (VASSA, JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK) played a lovely fool.

Even the ringing cell phone during LEAR’s death scene could not diminish this touching, powerful production and performance. Julieanne was blubbering at the end. It was a momentous start to our two week orgy of theatre. We swung by the Covent Garden Tesco on the way home for some more groceries, then a late dinner and bed

FRIDAY – JANUARY 28th – DAY THREE

Today was ticket collection day. I went back to the National to pick up the tickets for the two platform 12th NIGHT discussions that I had neglected to do the other day. Then it was back across the bridge to the Haymarket to pick up our matinee tickets for Peter Hall’s production of THE RIVALS for Saturday. Next I was off to the Garrick to pick up tix for J. B. Priestly’s WHEN WE ARE MARRIED, a matinee which we’re seeing on our last day here. I then went up to the Wyndhams to purchase tickets for CLYBOURNE PARK, a Royal Court West End transfer and winner of The Evening Standard Best Play Award.

I also tried to get tickets for a well-reviewed production of an obscure, never-performed Rattigan play, LESS THAN KIND at the Jermyn Street Theatre, but they had nothing, not even a waiting list. It is a tiny theatre, about the size of an LA Equity-waiver theatre, and I was told the only chance of seeing the production would be to just show up on the night and hope for a return. Not likely. From Jermyn Street, I hopped up to Picadilly and whirled through both the giant Waterstones bookshop there and venerable Hatchard’s. You would never think the book trade and publishing were in the dire straits they’re supposedly in by the vast array of books to be found in these two stores…I could go blind just reading the history books and historical fiction (which seems to be booming over here). Waterstones, a chain, has a variety of titles you would never find in Barnes and Noble or Borders in the states. I suppose it says something about the literacy of the respective countries.

Despite the tempting titles on offer, I eschew purchasing any and made my way over to Cecil Court, still an oasis of used bookshops. They have managed to holdback the erosion of their trade (and London’s character) that has happened in Charing Cross Road, where landlords…greedy for higher rents…have ousted the book-dealers in favour of coffee shops and American food franchises. Still I was shocked to find the shop of my favourite dealer, Nigel Williams, chained up with ominous official notices on the window. My other standby, David Drummond’s theatrical book and memorabilia shop was also closed, but apparently for vacation and would open next week.

I went into Goldsboro, who deals in historical fiction, determined of purpose. I have collected all the books in Bernard Cornwell’s series about Alfred the Great, except for the first one, which I’ve not been able to find anywhere (except in paperback and I wanted hardbound). So I have not been able to start to read the series. I held off getting one via mail order through my many dealers, because I’d knew I’d becoming here. They had a hardback first, pristine, and signed. 70pds. I bought it. They also had a signed Lindsey Davis, one of her Falco mysteries I didn’t have for a more reasonable 18pds, which I also bought. Davies has also written a couple others I don’t have. Nor did Goldsboro, so I’ll have to go to the internet for them. These are the times I miss living in LA and my chache of dealers there who would have these books or I would see them at the book fairs. One doesn’t find these in Kentucky shops.

From the dealer at Goldsboro, I found that Nigel Williams had died, which was why his shop was all locked up. Goldsboro would be moving into it and Quinto, another used shop that used to be in the Bloomsbury district, would be moving into Goldsboro’s space. So at least, Cecil Court will remain rife with bookshops for the time being…though a Hamburger joint had moved in at the end of the court. No one seemed to know what would be happening to Williams’ impressive stock.

I returned to the flat, picking up a late lunch via one of the many food shops in Villiers Street, a bacon/chicken sub, along with the always delicious McCoy’s flame-grilled steak crisps (tater chips to us Ammurricans). My diet is already going to Hell here. I had pretty much weaned myself off Coca-Cola in the last several months, only imbibing one on rare occasions. Here I’m gulping it down by the liter. I’m counting on my extensive walks around the city to counter my foul eating habits. I also picked up the Evening Standard which is now free. A vendor told me they make their profit on advertising exclusively now.

I don’t know whether it’s the credit crunch and arts crunch, I’ve notice a less than attentive tone at the National these days. I always used to have friendly chats with book shop clerks, but there seem to be fewer working and, although diligently helpful, they seem much more harried and less relaxed.

Though Julieanne and I were at the Cottesloe for TWELFTH NIGHT in gobs of time and lingered about the lobby, there seemed to be no ushers in attendance and the doors of the theatre stayed closed. Lounging on the dress circle balcony, we thought the house hadn’t opened when suddenly we’re hearing the three-minute call. No ushers by the doors to point out which one we had to go through. So we went through the wrong one and then had to rush back out through the lobby to enter the other side of the theatre to get to our seats.

And they were, as announced, restricted view. Chairs had been placed on a riser above the main seats and about a fourth of stage right, where we were seated, was cut off. This was made more frustrating in that they were two seats below us that were empty, but a suddenly-appeared usher warned the two girls seated next to us off them, implying that those seat-holders might appear. Julieanne, seated on the aisle, stood up through most of the first act, to get a better view. Fortunately, I found that the staging complemented stage left and center, I so missed very little of what was happening down below. And the actors did their best to play to the nosebleed section, so I did see faces, not tops of heads, and certainly enjoyed the view of Olivia’s cleavage.

As Peter Hall is something of a god to me, I really wanted to enjoy this show, despite its mixed reviews. And much of it I did enjoy, but much of it never really took off. He has made it a chamber piece, stressed its melancholy…neither of which I had a problem with. The verse-speaking, as expected, was stunningly clear and impeccable. The clowns in particular – Toby Belch (Simon Callow); Maria (Flinty Williams…Judi Dench’s daughter), and Andrew Augecheek (Charles Edwards) were quite wonderful. I liked Orsino and Olivia. Feste played by a wonderful actor, David Ryall, was simply dour and strange and couldn’t sing. Malvolio was played by Simon Paisley Day, who had us in stitches our last time here when we saw him playing the brother in ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE. His Malvolio was nice but slightly subdued.

My biggest complaint was the languid pace and Sir Peter’s daughter, Rebecca Hall, an actress I have enjoyed on film. Unfortunately, I found her Viola a bit bland. I never got any sense of anxiety about her predicament and her gestures seemed to be limited to flapping-penguin arms. Maybe it was an intentional choice, but I could never quite figure out whether the gauchness was the actress or character. In any event, I had hope the production would be better.

After the first act, the two girls sitting next to us left, as did a couple below us. The other bodies that were to fill the other empty chairs below never showed. Julieanne went to the usher and asked if we could fill the vacated seats. The usher replied, “You may do what you wish. Just remember, those seats are paid for, Madam.” Huh??? Yes, and the people who paid for them couldn’t bother to show up. And the theatre has a sign that says no one will be seated after the show begins. We moved down into the seats.

Reading Hall’s notes about the play and, particular Feste, I understood and appreciated a little better perhaps what Hall was going for. I’m just not sure how successful it was. Oddly enough, as much as I adore Hall as a director and agree with so much of his Shakespeare theory, I think the two Shakespeares of his I’ve seen have been my least-enjoyed of his work. We saw a production of MEASURE FOR MEASURE he did at the Taper in LA where Julieanne wanted to walk out, but I was intrigued enough to stay and recall that Richard Thomas had a moment as Angelo were he prostrated himself flat on the ground at Isabella’s feet that made the whole show worthwile for me. Still Hall has wowed me with productions of AMADEUS, AN IDEAL HUSBAND (in which Marty Shaw played Lord Goring as Oscar Wilde), and WASTE (riveting) among others. And I was anticipating his RIVALS at the Haymarket tomorrow.

SATURDAY – JANUARY 29 – DAY FOUR

THE RIVALS kept Peter Hall firmly planted upon the pedestal which I place him. The matinee at my favourite West End theatre, THE HAYMARKET, couldn’t have been more splendid. The cast was headed by two stalwarts, Peter Bowles and Penelope Keith, perhaps best known in America for the TV comedy they did together, TO THE MANOR BORN. Bowles we have seen several times on stage (often under the direction of Hall…SCHOOL FOR WIVES and ROYAL FAMILY) and always delights. I particularly liked the Simon Gray he did a few years back, THE OLD MASTERS, and his Gary Essendine in Coward’s PRESENT LAUGHTER. Keith, whose TV performances I’ve always enjoyed, we’ve caught twice onstage in two disappointing Cowards. I felt she was miscast in STAR QUALITY, not written by Coward but adapted from a short story of his…badly. Her other Coward turn was as Madame Arcati in BLITHE SPIRIT. She was fine, though I found the production wanting. But I’ve since seen another production of the BLITHE SPIRIT as well as a television version from the 50’s, starring The Master himself, and I’ve decided it’s just not Coward at his best. Except for the truncated version, the productions I’ve seen lasted (with intermission) three hours…too long for a comedy. It ain’t PRIVATE LIVES, HAY FEVER, or PRESENT LAUGHTER.

Ms. Keith, however, as Mrs. Malaprop was in top form as was Bowles as Sir Anthony Absolute. And Hall surrounded them with an excellent supporting cast…notably Tam Williams as Jack Absolute, Keiron Self as Bob Acres, and Robyn Addison as Lydia Languish. That Ms. Addison was making her professional stage debut made her droll performance all the more impressive. We chortled and heartily laughed all the way through it. I’ve always been fond of the play and this was the best production I’ve seen of it.

Penelope Keith & Peter Bowles

Afterwards, we strolled behind Picadilly through St. James Square and went over to The Dukes Hotel for a drink. The Dukes is where I stayed my first month here in’82 when I was filming my Sherlock Holmes movies. It has become our ritual to have a quiet drink in The Duke’s bar, usually on our last Sunday afternoon here. We probably should have saved said ritual till then. Unlike our usual quiet, relaxing respite, the bar was jam-packed and noisy. Nor could we get our usual table at the window. I don’t know whether it has become discovered as a fashionable watering hole or it was simply the fact that it was Saturday night and people were meeting for drinks before going out to dinner or on the town. We had one drink and were on our way.

We went home via Picadilly, stopping briefly in Fortnum and Mason to peruse the food hall. Julieanne bought some bags of Christmas hazelnuts that were on sale for 2pds each for her squirrels in St. James Park. After a quick stop at Waterstones, we strolled through Leicester Square. The entire green section of the Square is boarded up and inaccessible. There seems to be a lot of this around town; I’m assuming renovations for the 2012 Olympics. God, how will that inflate prices? Trafalgar, which had been cordoned off by the police earlier for some student protest (I assume over tuition fees again), was now open and we could cut right through it on our way back to the flat. We made one last pit-stop to pick up groceries at the Trafalgar Tesco Express, then home for dinner, and an early night.

SUNDAY – JANUARY 30th – DAY FIVE

No theatre today. We slept late. I finally roused to fetch Sunday papers from the small 24-hour convenience store around the corner. We lulled about till one, lost in the luxury of the weekend papers and their profusion of magazine supplements. Finally getting off our duffs, we mounted an expedition down the Strand and a little north of St. Paul’s to The London Museum. This is a favourite museum and we hadn’t been to it for several years. We stayed right up to closing time. I spent far too much time in the Prehistoric and Roman eras and wish I had spent more in the 19th and 20th Century sections. How Britain bravely “muddled’ through the war years is always fascinating. Even more so were the eras of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s…My life is now ancient history. Some of clothes, records, and other items on display, Julieanne and I owned or wore…or worse, remember as though it was yesterday.

It was a lovely walk home, although my left leg, knee, and hip were aching. Julieanne has always had a longer stride than I have had and it was tough keeping up with her. The soles of my feet were also throbbing. I don’t know whether it is the lack of exercise, old age, my orthodics, or I need a hip replacement, but I used to walk much more extensively than this and it never bothered me. Nonetheless, I managed to hobble home, get in some comfy sweats, and spend a cozy night in with the papers and the telly.

MONDAY – JANUARY 31st – DAY SIXTH

After Sunday off, I returned to the theatre fray, determined to fill the remaining holes in our theatre schedule. I had nothing booked for tonight or tomorrow. Julieanne wanted to see THE WAR HORSE again. We had been dazzled by it at The National the last time and she had loved it so much she hung around the theatre and lived in the back pocket of the ticketing agent until a return came in, so she could see it again. It had now transferred to the New London Theatre in the West End.

My memory of the play and production was such I wasn’t sure I wanted to revisit the play so soon, but I dutifully went off via Covent Garden (The New was just north of the Royal Opera House), stopping to check out antiques day in the market. This is mostly bric-a-brac, silver, and jewelry. I haven’t found anything of interest there for years and today was no different. The New had two nice, predictably expensive seats on the right side of the stalls at the back. It was the last row on that side, row N, consisting of just two seats…one on the aisle, of course. Perfect, no one next to us, no one hacking or crumpling candy wrappers behind us.

Having accomplished this mission, I traveled once more through Covent Garden over Waterloo Bridge with its always inspiring double-sided view – St. Paul’s one direction, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, and the London Eye the other. (Even more impressive at night when everything is lit up) – and went down The Cut to try my luck getitng tickets for VERNON GOD LITTLE, previewing at the Young Vic. Came up empty. I did pick up a flyer for DEAR BRUTUS, playing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which I thought might be an interesting possibility -- a student play at one of the main theatrical training grounds.

Night view from Waterloo Bridge toward Big Ben

On my way back, I stopped at the National and made a decision. GREENLAND, NT’s climate change concoction of collaboration between four different prominent playwrights, had just not really been enticing me. I was holding back, waiting for some sort of critical assessment. But, as it was still in previews, there had been none. Since I was striking out with some of these other things I wanted to see, I thought what the Hell, The National always delivers. Time spent at The National has never really disappointed and was always worth the ticket. Even on those rare occasions when I wasn’t thrilled with the play, the production was usually top-notch. I got tickets for Tuesday night, which as it turned out was press night…so already it had turned into an event, who knows who might be there. I read all the major London critics. This could be fun. They were also doing something call talkeoke which was a discussion after the show about the issue of climate change. Best of all, the tickets, very nicely located in the Lyttleton’s dress circle, were only 20pds each. I felt good about my decision, my loyalty to The National, and once home, Julieanne agreed. She was also very happy about the War Horse tickets.
I spent the rest of the day a-booking, wandering up to Bloomsbury at what’s fast becoming my favourite bookshop there, SKOOB(yeah, books spelt backwards). They have a particularly great theatre section. I hadn’t gotten much past the “A’s” before I had a handful of John Arden books –three plays he had done in collaboration with on Margetta D’Arcy, his wife at the time. One was a long three-part epic on the Arthurian myths, called THE ISLAND OF THE MIGHTY. THE HERO RISES UP is about Horatio Nelson and THE ROYAL PARDON is about a company of strolling players. I also picked up a Christopher Fry play about Henry II called CURTMANTLE. I checked to see if they had any of the Terry Pratchett Discworld novels I’m missing in hardback, but they didn’t.

On my return, I hit Forbidden Planet to see what was new in the fantasy realm. All they had was Pratchett’s latest, I SHALL WEAR MIDNIGHT. Since they didn’t have autographed copies, I held off on this. I then did the rounds of my usual used book shops on Charing Cross, but found nothing intriguing. I’m just not buying like I used to any more (time to start reading 5,000-6,000 tomes I already have) and most of what I buy when here is theatre.

The library

THE WAR HORSE, as I expected…or feared…did not hold me in its thrall as before. Everything was competent, the puppetry suitably amazing, a perfectly pleasant evening, but it could not diminish nor live up to the memory of my initial experience with it. Too soon, too soon for me to see this again. It was interesting being in the New Theatre again though. The last time was in ’82 when I went to see Brian Blessed, part of my HOUND cast, playing Old Deuteronomy in CATS.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_(musical).

Brian Blessed in my Hound of the Baskervilles

(END OF PART ONE: Still to come: Will Pogue get in to see all the plays he wants? Plus close encounters with Richard Eyre, Danny Boyle, Simon Callow, and Michael Billington. Stayed to tuned for Part Two, coming soon!)

Letter To A Novice Screenwriter

2010-07-07T08:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know it's been awhile since I've scribbled here. I was in the throes of a script deadline, taught a screenwriting class, and then...life just seemed to get in the way of my life for awhile. Anyway, I've decided to ease back into the saddle by posting something I had previously written elsewhere which, though it pertains specifically to screenwriting, applies to pretty much any kind of fiction writing.

While cleaning out my documents file the other day, I ran across an old letter I had written, critiquing a young aspiring screenwriter's work . Now before I get inundated with requests from people asking me to read their scripts, let me state very firmly: I DON'T! I WON"T!

The only time I do read anything by aspiring writers is if I am in a classroom situation, which happens occasionally when I'm a guest lecturer or teaching a limited time course. And then the rules of submission are very firm. I read the required classwork....usually short scripts of not more than ten or fifteen pages. I don't read epic feature screenplays that students have been slaving over for years.

I used to try to "give back" and read lots of amateur scripts in my day. But most scripts I read weren't worth the time and their authors really didn't want any criticism...merely empty pats on the back...and then for me to inflict it on my agent, so convinced they were that I would realize it was a work of genius. I'm sure elsewhere on this site, I've expressed my philosophy about breaking into the drama game. "If you can be discouraged, you should be." I am a harsh and unforgiving judge who doesn't grade on a curve for beginners. Of the scripts I've read over the years, only one did I ever admire enough to pass on to my agent at the time... and he never read it. So much for my clout.

My collegue and acquaintance, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Josh Olson, recently wrote internet sensation of an article, emphatically entitled I Will NOT READ YOUR FUCKING SCRIPT, which brilliantly and succinctly enumerated the reasons why most professionals screenwriters don't want to open this Pandora's box and why it is an exercise in futility for them. Predictably, Josh's article was praised by the pros and met with loathing, outrage, and indignation by most newbies. Nonetheless, it was dead-on accurate.

Another reason, I don't go there is because all my representives sternly advise against it. In this lawsuit-happy society, any time a blockbuster movie starts racking up millions on its opening weekend, all sorts of strange denizens lurking in the dark Hollywood peripherary creep out of its shadows, claiming someone stole their idea and they want a piece of the action. Hence, I never want to be in a situation where I write something and some idiot claims that I had read his script eons ago and swiped his million dollar idea.

Finally, I don't want to read scripts because the first thing any writer in any profession has to acquire is an ability to objectively assess his work. I have a mantra that drives most newbies and wanna-bes up the wall. It is this: "A professional knows when he's done good work." This simple notion perplexes many a novice as if it were a baffling mystery, but it seems pretty obvious to me that one should be able to read his script, read acknowledged successful scripts, and see how their own efforts stack up against the latter. Sadly, as anyone who's ever watched an episode of American Idol knows, a vast multitude of the populace do not have an inner bullshit detector and are incapable of judging their own talent and skills against others.

So too, many beginning screenwriters think it more valuable to solicit the opinions of their writers group, their best friend, or grandma rather than pragmatically cultivate their own ruthless and unremitting critical eye. So if they are incapable of critiquing their own script, it is foolhardy for me to try. If you have to be told what to think about your own work, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.

Upon rare occasion, under much duress and against my better judgment, I do cave to obligation or friendship, always with the caveat that I will be brutal. The hopeful victim of this reluctant favour granted by me must then submit a copy of the script upon which I will render my critique, scrawling my notes and comments in the margins about specifics on the page as I encounter them.

The particular critique (the script notes you will not be seeing) and subsequent letter below came about when I was asked by the then-theatre department chair of my college alma mater to read a promising young student's script. I did...and relived all the reasons why I hate doing this.

However, I diligently performed my task and think I gave the young author some pretty sound advice. I present it here, slightly amended with any and all references to the person's identity and work deleted, because despite the script's very specific problems, it was also an excellent example of what I find wrong with most young writers' scripts. The letter contains many of the tips and lessons that I constantly harp on any time I teach or guest-lecture. So without anymore ado:

A LETTER TO A NOVICE SREENWRITER

Dear Novice,

I have read your screenplay. As warned, I’ve gauged it by professional standards. No grading on the curve for youth, innocence, or beginner status. As you will see by the notes scrawled in the margins, I do not mince words. You may find some of it brutal…occasionally, I suspect, even acerbic. But contained within the comments I trust you’ll find valuable screenwriting tips. I hope so…or what’s the point? But no gentle cheerleading bolstering. My failing is to be unflinchingly candid.

First, positive stuff. You have a facility for dialogue. Witty and sharp. Unfortunately, all too often it is not employed in the service of the script or the characters, but in showing us how clever the author is. All your characters speak with one voice…your voice, I suspect…and often betray character and plot for the sake of a bon mot. Dialogue that does not serve either character or plot (or even serves plot at the expense of character), regardless of how facile and clever, will fall flat because it is not honest. A long time ago, one Edward Greer, a guest director from New York, came to the university to direct us in FLEA IN HER EAR (in which I played the lead). Among the gems of wisdom I took away from him was: “It has to be real to be funny.” I’ve been fortunate to work with many talented comic actors since that time, from Shelley Berman to Martha Raye, and have heard variations of this truism repeated over and over.

In an age where dialogue is too often dismissed, I like screenplays with good talk. You hear all the time film is a visual medium. I disagree. It is a dramatic medium. And words are a part of that medium. But repartee is not enough to sustain good drama. You like your talk so much that you allow your characters to ramble long past the point or dramatic impact of the scene. Generally, all your scenes should start later and end earlier. Too often you start off in a flaccid fashion with someone entering a room and a page or more of introductions and hellos and how-are-yous take place. And then long after the real scene is over you feel obligated to end it with inconsequential good-byes and leave-takings…five or six lines of extra dialogue just to stick in one more joke.

You told me you liked film because it gave you more freedom; yet your scenes stifle in claustrophobic offices, apartment buildings, restaurants, and some of your most important scenes take place over the phone.

Conversely, be careful of “shoe-leather” scenes…people ambling down hallways, in and out of buildings, walking here and there, unless the plot is actually moving forward during these actions or by what is being said during these actions. But then this goes for any scene...it should always be informing character or plot. Too often your scenes are pointless badinage. Save your wit for a purpose, not to just show off.

You need to find the heart of each scene. Enter your scenes in the middle and end them once the dramatic point or impact of the scene has been achieved. Don’t linger around to fire off a couple more choice zingers. You must learn to kill some of your darlings. We don’t need ten laughs when five will do. Five will be funnier than the ten, because those five will also be moving your plot along and we won’t be tediously hanging around long after the scene is over, just to snap off a few yucks. Learn restraint; learn to pick and choose.

Concerning your wit, I strongly urge you (and have throughout my script notes) to save it for your story. The supposedly witty “asides” in your descriptive passages serve no dramatic function and irritate most readers I know (including me). You are telling a story. Stay contained within the story. Don’t jump outside it with author comments on the action or cutesy smirks that distract the reader from the narrative flow. Not only are they needless grandstanding, their excision will save you lots of pages, which should be a concern of yours. But mostly, we don’t care how witty the author is, only how witty the story is…that’s where the author’s wit will shine.

Your characters are more problematic. While all characters an author creates are usually facets of himself, all your characters come off as the SAME facet of yourself. They all speak in the same snappy, witty way that, for the most part, the lines could be interchangeable…any character could speak them.

It is a case where the lines are given more importance than the context in which they are said. You have a secretary you describe as shy, but she comes off spewing sarcastic quips with the aplomb of Eve Arden. Your two leads are so much alike and so simpatico, we know long before they ever meet they are destined to be together. But even the supporting characters all come off as members of the Alquonquin Roundtable…unless it is a character like the father who is labouriously and self-consciously eccentric to no dramatic point that I could fathom. Each character must have his own style and individual way of speaking.

Also characters’ motives often seem hopelessly muddled, confused, and occasionally trite. It’s as though you are trying to shoehorn them into an already cobbled plot whether they fit it or not. The plot doesn’t evolve because of who they are, but they evolve (against who and what they should be) to serve the plot. They seem to have no real life outside of what the author needs them to do or say at any specific time within the story.

Your antagonist is a straw one who never at any time constitutes a real obstacle or threat to our heroes. She is just there to be knocked down all too easily and dumped on by almost everyone in the story with really vicious verbal barbs. I never felt her actions deserved the abuse heaped on her, particularly since she was so ineffective as an antagonist. I almost felt sorry for her and felt the good guys really piled on with shocking cruelty.

And I suppose this means I’m drifting into plot -- of which there is not a lot. I kept asking myself (and you’ll see the notes) what is this story about? I assumed it was a romantic comedy and while I could predict the rather trivial beats of the story all the way through, there were no real surprises, twists, variations on the well-worn theme, and never any real dramatic conflict. We are even deprived of the tried-and-true formula of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. In your version, boy meets girl and they drift idyllically along from triumph to triumph, overcoming every easy obstacle to the boy gets girl part without breaking much of a sweat.

Where is the dramatic conflict? Everything gets knocked over like nine-pins. Nothing stops this juggernaut of witty romance. There are no real setbacks. The plots by the antagonist, the counter-plots by protagonists never amount to much and two or three seem to happen either off-stage or become so quickly resolved we wonder what all the set-up was for and all the fuss was about? There’s never any risk or daring or concern how these things will play out. They usually have played out before we know it. Instead of seeing their romance being tested and thwarted and evolving through what should be various plot machinations, you subdivide your story. You have all those walking, talking scenes of romance. Then you return to the threadbare plot. YOU MUST LEARN TO MAKE SCENES DO MORE THAN ONE THING! Layer them! Instead of having them fall in love and then dealing with the plot. Have them fall in love WHILE they’re dealing with the plot.

And sometimes you miss entirely where your scene is. One prime example: when your hero talks the guy into arm-wrestling. You stay focused on the heroine watching the hero convince the guy from afar so that we hear nothing of the conversation. Here is this charmer who is supposed to be glib and smart and witty and we don’t get to hear how he convinces the guy to arm-wrestle him. That’s a cop-out. Don’t built up your character as a guy who can do this stuff and not pay it off. And again, those dreary phone call scenes. There were far too many scenes of supposedly dramatic conflict, where the two characters aren’t even present in the room together, but talking on the phone!

Sadly, no one is changed by the plot. Every character remains static and not much different than when they started out. There are no epiphanies or lessons learned here. No one grows. What is theme of this story? It’s got to be more than two like-minded zanies find each other (and they aren’t really that zany). Again, what is this story about? And I don't mean just plot.

I was concerned when I realized this story had a show-biz background. It seems endemic with young filmmakers. They love to conjure up some idealized dream-story of young, sensitive iconoclasts triumphing in their artistic endeavours. They write autobiographical fantasies. I’m not sure that this doesn’t fall under that category.

Now we all write on themes about which we’re passionate. Some even say a writer keeps writing the same story over and over again. All my stories seem to be about men trying to maintain their idealism, passion, and humanity in a cesspool of a world. I say all my movies are about the movie business. So I guess mine are autobiographical fantasies too.

But aside from one or two, none of them are actually about the movie business or screenwriters…They are about scientists and murderers, knights and dragons, Vikings, barbarians, haunted houses, detectives, swashbucklers. My advice to the author of this script is: Get over yourself!

Or at least your idealized self.

Go a little further afield from home. You’ll find no matter what you write, your passions and obsessions will fill the page anyway. You’ll write about yourself regardless. You can’t help it. What other point-of-view do you have to distill things through? But just don’t make it so damned obvious. And don’t make it a thinly veiled wish fulfillment story. The trouble with most young writers writing about the film business? They have never really seen it from the inside to know anything about it. So it all comes off as a rather naïve, inaccurate exercise.

If some of my comments in the margins seem to get impatient or sarcastic the further along I get into the script, it’s because I was watching something initially promising unravel and was also a bit vexed, because I quite simply think you should know better.

Because of your enviable adroitness with dialogue you have allowed yourself to get lazy in the other aspects of dramatic construction. Without finely developed characters and a well-wrought plot, your clever dialogue serves no useful purpose. Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Billy Wilder, Paddy Chafesky could all turn a phrase and also knew how to write multi-dimensional individual characters and a sustaining story that was about something.

You’ll also find notes simply about format and style. You thankfully don’t burden your script with too much technical jargon which always interrupts narrative flow, but you do some format/transitions that are pretty much unnecessary…like “Cut To”. William Goldman is the only writer I know who still uses this. But then he is William Goldman and you are not. He can do anything he wants. As for you, I advise against it. With the exception of an occasional close-up or dissolve, all you really need any more are your INT. or EXT. scene sluglines…and I, as a writer, would get rid of these if I could think of a way to do it.

I always prefer to err on the side of literary prose rather than technical stage directions. You have to get your initial audience past the read before anyone begins to think of performance. And you have to paint word pictures for people who…let’s be honest…often can’t visualize very well. Better to carry them through with prose style than to confuse them with technical crap that jars the mood and disrupts the narrative flow you’re trying to create.

You’ll also find a few stylistic, literary tricks that save space, clean up your sentences, and give them some drive and pop. Things like avoiding “is ___ing” words…is running, is going, is hitting. Runs, goes, hits. Cleaner, clearer, got some punch and force.

Some film recommendations in this area of romantic-comedy (many of which I suspect you have already seen):

Anything by Preston Sturges
Anything by Billy Wilder
Holiday
Philadelphia Story
The Thin Man
Theodora Goes Wild
Midnight
No Time For Comedy (has a show biz background)
Shop Around the Corner
The Awful Truth
Hope & Crosby Road Pictures aren’t bad for this zany thing you’re going for.

It’s apparent you seen enough Looney Tunes.

Finally, I hope you can find your cover letter underneath the morass of notes I scribbled all over it. I critiqued and dissected this savagely because any cover letter you send accompanying a script or query letter you send about submitting script is the first bit of writing by which you will be judged. If it doesn’t pass muster, they may get no further and pitch your script into the trash.

I realize you were sending a letter to someone you had actually met, but even so, it is too casual, too unfocused, and off-point. You spend far too much time trying to explain a script that should be self-explanatory and influencing the reader as to how he is supposed to think about it, which can be rather off-putting and insulting. And then it tips to the other extreme, being too Uriah Heep unctuously effusive. Thanking me four times in a half page letter comes off a smidge desperate.

Letters such as these should be direct, simple, and unhesitant. This is your work. If you’re sending it out, you should have confidence in its quality. If you’re wrong, you’ll find out quick enough. Its submission shouldn’t come attached with a bunch of caveats about its subtlety, humour, tone, or whether the reader can grasp your intention. It should be as concise as “Per our conversation, here is my script…” its title, a sentence or two describing it, one thank you, and maybe a hope that they enjoy it and your signature. No lily gilding. Let the script live or die on its own merits.

And don’t use your typewriter. It looks sloppy and untidy and, in this day and age, a computer just does it better. Not a great way to make a first impression.

Finally, I’m sending you a couple of my scripts under separate cover so you can see how I do it. But…and this is a big but…not everybody does it the same way. You’ll find your screenwriting style will evolve and you’ll find your own way of doing it.

I will keep a copy of your marked script so I can refer back to it, if you wish to email me about any specifics or questions you may have on my comments. And remember they are only one man’s opinion. Though I think there are definite right and wrong ways to approach this craft, artistic endeavour is never an exact, objective science. Hopefully, you’ll find much of this useful.

A website you might find useful:http://www.wordplayer.com/ They have particularly good message forums where pros like myself frequently drop in with advice.

Best,

Chuck Pogue

PURSUING ONE'S PASSION

2009-10-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

My wife, Julieanne, and I, moving back to Lexington in December of 2005, immediately became immersed (one might say, “enmeshed”) with Actors Guild of Lexington (Oh, THAT name! Horrible pretentious name for a theatre.), the local theatre that was striving to become the first fully professional Equity adult theatre in the city.

If you’ve kept up with my blog, you know that, having been denied its funding allocation for the season, the theatre staggers to keep afloat…even alive. Early this summer, because of serious philosophical differences with the new board president and what threatened to be an untenable working relationship with her, I resigned from the board.

My resignation was quickly followed by the Artistic Director’s, my wife’s as Education Director, and other board members over time. A few days ago, the Managing Director resigned to take advantage of a theatrical opportunity abroad. I fear that the theatre will not remain on a professional track and ultimately return to being yet another amateur theatre in a community awash with amateur theatre.

At an appropriate point, I’ll have more to say about the systematic chipping away at a theatre that was doing some exciting work, had great potential, and was the only real hope for professional theatre in Lexington. There is probably plenty of blame to go around, from both within and without, that has led to its teetering in its current precarious position.

But in all the many discussions about the theatre’s problems, professional theatre, and the state of Lexington theatre in general, that have occurred in the newspaper, online, and just in personal chats, I keep hearing this phrase from a lot of local theatre folk about “pursuing one’s passion.” In light of the fact that many of these practitioners are not attempting to pursue a professional career, have never attempted to pursue a career, and some are even disdainful of it, I wonder if we have the same definition of “passion.”

I always thought that to “pursue one’s passion” meant that you had to pursue it, well...passionately.

Far be it for me to question or doubt anyone else’s passion and I’m sure one can pursue a passion not in a professional context. But “Passion” to me means more than just affection, love, enjoying a diversion.

Passion has always had for me the aura of obsession and compulsion. It conjures up words like “hunger” and “driven”. You eat, think, sleep, live passion. It possesses you. It consumes you. A passion for theatre is not something you dabble in during your off-hours, something you do after work for three hours from seven to ten at rehearsal (or, God forgive, as it is often referred to here, “play practice”).

To “pursue” means “to go after”, “to give chase”, “to try and capture”. I think to some people, the idea of pursuit has the same equivalent of reaching from the couch to the coffee table to pick up a bag of chips. If it’s easy, if it’s fun, if it doesn’t take too much effort; if the gold ring’s within reach, they’ll grasp.

But “pursuing one’s passion” is about reaching beyond your gasp; indulging in it when isn’t fun or easy. It takes a lot of effort and sometimes, no matter how passionate you are, especially in the theatre business, you never snatch the gold ring. Passion is the mistress you woo whether the door is invitingly open or slammed shut in your face.

I liken it to the explorers of old, daring to set out on an endless sea with only the horizon in view. They may drown in that sea and they’ll never reach the horizon, but their belief in themselves and their commitment to their passion, might bring wondrous discoveries.

Pursuing a passion is not a hobby or avocation. It’s not even a job or a career. It’s a way of life. I'm not sure I even adovcate passion. It can make for an emotionally exhaustive existence. Nor am I sure passion is something one can find. It may find you. It may even be a condition of birth -- there are passionate people and then there are those who function quite well imbued with rational equilibrium...maybe function better. But I'll let biologists debate that.

I recently spent a pleasant, stimulating evening with Rick St. Peter, erstwhile Artistic Director of Actors Guild, and Bo List, a talented director with local roots. The conversation carromed all over the theatrical map…sometimes amusing, sometimes serious, and hopefully somewhat intellectually gratifying. At the end of the night, Bo said, “How nice to have conversation about theatre culture and not just theatre.”

What he meant by that was that it was not just about immediate, individual personal theatrical concerns…what shows are going up, who got cast, the latest gossip…but about theatre in general, theatre as an aesthetic, as an idea.

That’s part of having a passion for theatre or drama…being driven to understand its legacy, its history, its place in a world context. Passion fuels curiosity. And curiosity is a necessary component of Passion. Sometimes the curiosity I see with those professing a passion for it extends no further than wondering whether they’ll get cast in a show.

Necessary components of Passion other than curiosity? I have a stone vase next to my bathroom sink that my wife, Julieanne, gave me at the opening of one of my movies. On the vase is carved the word “create”. Several smaller stones adorn the bottom of the vase, each emblazoned with its own carved word, these are “love”, “”courage”, “risk”, and “passion”.

And while each of these words inform the word “create”, I think all four of the others inform the word, “passion”. I’m sure some can create without passion. I don’t believe I could. One of the things I always tell writing students when I guest-lecture is that “I always write to my passion”…which simply means I must find something in the material to get passionate about.

The very few occasions when I was lured to a gig by an obscenely lucrative pay-cheque rather than my initial excitement for the material have been disasters. On such instances, I’d eventually find a way into the material that stirred my passion…but it usually didn’t stir anyone else’s (You never saw JAGGED EDGE II, did you? I wrote one.) and the compensation wasn’t worth the torturous time I spent summoning up my passion. That’s why there’s been “very few” such occasions.

But what about “love”, “courage”, and “risk”? I’m pretty sure one cannot be passionate about something if you don’t love it. Now it may not always be a happy love affair -- running through spring fields and tender spooning under a smiling silver moon. Sometimes it’s more Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights, violent embraces mingled with anguish, recrimination, and torment. One’s love affair with passion can be Byronically unhealthy.

Again, whenever I teach or lecture, I impress this aspect on my listeners. “If you can be a happy, whole human being doing anything else, go do it. This is a sickness, sometimes it’s a Grand Sickness, but a sickness nonetheless.” I do this, because I know nothing else…and more importantly, I don’t want to do anything else. My passion has overwhelmed me.

Recently, my pal, actor Larry Drake, and I were joking that if we…who have spent our adult lives pursuing our passion…had to find real work, we’d only be fit for Wal-Mart Greeters…we have no other useful skills. All has been sacrificed on the altar of Theatre (and Theatre with a capital “T”, for me, means any dramatic story-telling endeavour).

(me & two-time Emmy winner Larry Drake)

And that’s where “courage” and “risk” come in. You have to have enough courage (or resiliant innocence) to take the risks you need to pursue your Passion. I was speaking to some high school English classes at my alma mater, Highlands High, in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, a few weeks ago and the inevitable questions of how hard is it to go about pursuing a theatrical/ film career came up. The answer I gave is the same for any career you pursue or any “passion” you have: “How badly do you want it and what are you willing to sacrifice for it?”

A very talented, young friend of mine here who I believe does have a passion for theatre, confessed that it would eventually probably kill him: “I’ll never have a house, a wife, or kids…”

I understand and sympathize with this kind of single-mindedness. I've lived with it. I didn't have a house or a new car until my mid-thirties, after I had made several films. I wasn’t married until I was 37. My social life was dependent on my work status. If I was working in theatre I had one; otherwise I was coming home from pay-the-rent jobs, working another 6-8 hours “pursuing my passion”…writing, reading, working up audition material -- whatever it took to take the next step closer to the dream.

I knew my profession would be in the Creative Arts once I got passed the “I wanna be a fireman-cowboy” stage of childhood ambition. It probably unconsciously became my passion when I was making up stories playing with my toy soldiers, reading Tarzan under the covers with a flashlight, writing copious bad fiction, watching twelve to twenty movies a week on TV (before cable, Video, and DVD). I was always preparing for my ambition and when it consciously evolved into my passion, I stopped having cop-out college majors like journalism and telecommunications and became a full-fledged theatre arts major. I took no minor, I disdained any back-up plan. I was either going to succeed…or fail spectacularly.

And all through college, I continued to pursue my passion. After graduation, I spent one more year in Lexington building up a stake to get out of Lexington, getting a few more plays under my belt, and waiting to see if anything was going to happen with the 1930’s musical I had written with Roger Leasor, OH ME, OH MY (A Musical Idyll) which was stirring some interest. Despite it supposedly winning some contest in New York, we never heard from the promoters or producers again, but it was an experience worth having.

That Spring, at 23, I went to SETC, auditioned, got a gig…got two actually…I took the cheaper of the two (50 bucks a week and a room) because it was Shakespeare (the other was an outdoor drama) and was further away – The Globe of the Great Southwest in Odessa, Texas. The rest as they say is history. I never looked back and never came back (except for visits) until thirty-two years later…going wherever I had to go to pursue my passion.

(Tony winner Deanna Dunagan (Best Actress, AUGUST:OSAGE COUNTY) and me in our salad days at the Globe of the Great Southwest.)

To this day, I have no real hobbies or interests outside my profession. Pretty much everything I do informs my passion. I can’t read a book without wondering whether it will make a play or a film.

I’m not regaling you with this as an example of the way things must be done. God knows, there is no formula in this business. There are many ways to pursue one’s Passion. The point is: I pursued it!

I try to impress this on my young talented, passionate friend who has bared his breast to the sacrifical knife of the Theatre Goddess (why do I think it a woman?): If you’re this committed and willing to sacrifice to the point of abjuring all else, go where you can truly pursue your passion and the sacrifice might pay off. Don’t remain immobile in a small pond where your talent struggles to thrive and grow and your passion can too easily become insular and impotent…where you’re not likely to make a living at it and you’ll become bitter and frustrated, dreaming about what you might have accomplished if you’d only taken a chance. Don’t let your passion sour to sad regret. True, you might have the courage to take the risk to finally pursue it hell-bent-for-leather and still end up bitter and frustrated, but at least you’ll have tried! At least you’ll know. There is no disgrace in failure; only in never having tried. And the small pond will always be there.

The courage to risk is the biggest failing of most people’s passion. They are simply afraid to go out and test their talent, challenge themselves in an environment where the bar is high and the stakes are real. The fall may be greater, but the rewards are also greater.

I’ve known many extremely talented people who didn't have a passion for the business and chose to pursue other passions. Though I might bemoan unused talent, it’s frustrating for my passion, not theirs, and I have to just leave that alone. But it is infuriating to see people…remarkably talented people…who call Theatre their great passion and then don’t really pursue it full throttle.

Maybe I’m just being a hard-assed stickler for semantics. Surely, there is no crime done by those who want to pursue what one friend of mine calls, “non-neurotic theatre” (Though I’m not sure this is accurate, I’ve seen more divas and gleaming stilettos behind the arras in community theatre than ever I did in professional theatre). I may not call it passion, but if they want to call it that, there’s no great injustice being done anyone…except to those for whom it is a passion unpursued. But that is an injustice they do themselves.

Word Baker, the director of the original FANTASTICKS, once said to a group of young actors, me being one: “Every actor has to think he’s going to be a star.” He’s right. Like chasing the horizon, you may never get there, but you’ll travel further than those who never move. Unlike my friends with talent who chose to pursue other passions and use other talents, those folk who dream of being in the Game, have genuine talent, but don’t make the effort, don't dream big enough. It’s as if they’re waiting for it to come to them.

That just doesn’t happen. And the dream alone is never enough. Talent is never enough. Even passion is not enough, it has to be pursued. As my old theatre mentor Charles Dickens used to say: “Ninety percent of talent is knowing what do to with it.”

Or as writer/director Paul Schrader once put it: “Why should we open the doors for young talent? The people who knock down the doors are more interesting.” And that’s because the people who knock them down are more passionate. They may not even be as talented as others, but they’re more passionate. And that gives them the advantage. They’re the hungry ones who want to be there, in the thick of it. They’re the ones truly pursuing their passion!

IN MEMORIAM - JACK PARRISH

Jack Parrish as Polonius

Actor and friend Jack Parrish died of cancer last week. Jack had both directed and acted at Actors Guild. I was fortunate to be in two shows with him. THE UNDERPANTS was the AGL acting debut for both of us. Jack had taken the small role of the King at the end of the play as a favour to Rick St. Peter and, in his three minutes of stage time, killed and got uproarious laughs to sweep us to curtain.

We shared more stage time in Hamlet, I as Claudius, he doubling as a marvelous Polonius and funny Gravedigger. I did a rehearsal/show blog for the theatre at the time. Here’s a few snippets I wrote about Jack:

Oct. 7, 2007 – …I was pacing in the upstairs lobby outside the rehearsal room, declaiming. Jack Parrish, doing double-duty as Polonius and the Grave-Digger (both quite amusing) and our most experienced Shakespearen, stormed by me on his way outside for a smoke, script clenched in fist, mumbling iambic pentameter. “I’m too old for this shit,” he growled at me, as he went by. "It isn’t fun anymore.” Jack is younger than me.

Oct. 29, 2007 – Our company is amiable, easy, and very professional. Jack Parrish, a delight to act with and to just watch act, has also become good company backstage. Being roughly the same age, we share common experiences and concerns about theatre. Our conversations range from how to make Lexington…a city with certainly the right demographic and population…a professional theatre town (naturally, a concern for us…both being Equity) to just old war stories. Jack actually mentioned a dinner theatre he had played in Manassas, Virginia…and I went, “My God! My play WHODUNNIT,DARLING?...had a successful run there.”…He and I are probably the only two in the cast old enough to remember dinner theatre’s glory days and steamboat rounds of roast beef. For all their faults and bad plays, dinner theatres were in their own unique way wonderful things and kept a lot of actors employed at the time.

(My dinner theatre mystery written with Larry Drake. Poster art by Eric Johnson)

Nov.12, 2007 – Last week…Jack Parrish gave the rest of us a little seminar in the interaction between actor and audience. During his scene with Gertrude and me where Polonius speaks of Hamlet’s madness and his disaffected love for Ophelia, the audience was lapping up Jack’s performance. Every word, every gesture evoked ripples of laughter and , quite rightly, Jack continued to build and adjust his performance to the audience’s feedback, to where he was evoking guffaws out of them. It was a sight to behold and brilliantly done. After we came off stage, Jack thanked both Gertie and me for our indulgence in letting him “milk” it. I told him that it was his scene after all, the stage was his and he should “milk it till it was cottage cheese”, if he could. Gertrude and I were only there to throw in an occasional line to remind people he was talking to someone. There was no reason for us to try and compete with him or get in the way of him working the house. And work it he did. An awesome little turn; he had them eating out of his hand.

PUBLISHED

Southern Theatre Magazine has a feature every issue called “400 Words”. It’s my four hundred words for the Fall 2009 issue, entitled “Let’s NOT Give The Audience What It Wants”. I’ll probably slapped it up here in the future, but you can find it online by hitting the highlighted link.

MEDIA CHECK

POGUE’S BEEN WATCHING…A lot of live theatre…

BEGUILED AGAIN…at Actors Guild…lots of great Rodgers & Hart songs

33 VARIATIONS…at The Ensemble Theatre in Cincinnati…Terrific production in a great little theatre. This is going to be a regular destination for us. Also saw their SEAFARER earlier this year which was swell. Next seeing our pal, Brian Isaac Phillips in DEAD MAN’S CELL PHONE. I also went to their reading of THE LARAMIE PROJECT…TEN YEARS AFTER, commemorating the anniversary of Matthew Shephard’s murder.

SLEUTH…at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park…Still one of my favourite venues. Strange to watch this play, knowing all the tricks and plot points, but quite well done on an stylish set.

LION IN WINTER…at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company…Again, a play I’m so familiar with, it’s strange to re-visit. Once I shook off the indeliable memory of O’Toole and Hepburn, I quite enjoyed the ensemble’s take on the piece.

I’ve also been seeing a lot of theatre on DVD…

CONDUCT UNBECOMING…this is the film version of the British Raj mystery play by Barry England…I’ve been a fan of the play for years, but hadn’t seen the movie in some time. Though they throw some exterior shots in it, it remains essentially stage-bound…which is perfectly fine with me…and has a great cast: Michael York, Stacey Keach, Chris Plummer, Susannah York, Richard Attenborough, and Trevor Howard. The plot is actually a tad shaky, but slick playing carries you through and lets you forgive some of the dubious details. I’m a sucker for any of this “For Queen and Empire” stuff anyway. Michael York, who I’ve met and know slightly (we once discussed doing a film of Gore Vidal’s JULIAN, about the Emporer who tried to reinstate the pagan gods after Rome had gone Christian. He was also slated do to a reading of my play THE EBONY APE at Stratford, Ct. Doug Sills ended up doing it and doing it grandly) does a nice commentary.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER…A production directed by Judi Dench, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. Very nice.

SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER…a dvd of a live production that I saw at the National Theatre a few years back, done in collaboration with the Out of Joint Theatre Company and directed by Max Stafford-Clark. I enjoyed it live and I enjoyed it here.

SECRET SERVICE…a stylish production of William Gillette’s classic melodrama, starring a young John Lithgow and Meryl Streep. Also Marybeth Hurt, Charles Kimbrough, and a very young and thin Jeffrey Jones.

SINGING DETECTIVE….never a play, of course. And while it has its moments, it doesn’t hold a candle to the original Dennis Potter miniseries that starred Michael Gambon…The Great Gambon.

POGUE’S LISTENING TO:

TWO FOR THE SEESAW…Andre Previn’s jazz score to the movie starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.

HOAGY CARMICHAEL, Stardust And Much More…the sub-title pretty much says all.

THE UNBELIEVEABLE TRUTH…comedy/quiz show hosted by witty David Mitchell, playing out its current season on BBC 4

POGUE’S READING…

UNSEEN ACADEMICALS…Terry Pratchett’s latest entertaining entry from Discworld. The wizards from Unseen University play football.

THE SECOND HANDSHAKE…Will Fowler’s amusing memoir of his famous writer father Gene Fowler and all his equally famous friends…John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, John Decker, Jack Dempsey, etc.

Sorry, I was away for such a long-time. So what’s new with you? Any thoughts about my latest spewings…?

WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR TRAINING? (OR: IS THE HEAD MIC YOU'RE WEARING AFFECTING YOUR MENTAL ABILITY TO WRITE A PROPER PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMME BIO?)

2009-08-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I took some swipes at audiences’ ever-increasing ignorance of the proper theatre etiquette, their abuse of the standing ovation, and their propensity to applaud scene breaks and changes. Now it’s the performers’ turn in the barrel.

I suppose I sound like most old codgers railing against the diminishing standards of one thing or another and how it was better in my day. Well, sorry -- it was!

The source of my irritation this time round? Actors whose voices can no longer hit the back wall of a theatre without electronic aid and who are incapable of writing a bloody professional bio.

Back in 1980, I worked the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in a Sherlock Holmes play, THE CRUCIFER OF BLOOD, with Charlton Heston as Holmes and Jeremy Brett as Watson (and he was just as brilliant as Watson as he was later as Holmes). The Ahmanson is a barn. About two thousand seats. Not an intimate space compared to, say, the neighbouring Mark Taper Forum in the same complex which has only 750 seats.

When I played the Ahmanson, there were strategically placed support mics hanging from the grid and discreetly positioned on the apron, as I recall…mostly there to enhance stage dead spots and give a slight boost to the sound of the natural voice.

But none of the actors wore a body mic of any kind! Let me repeat that. NONE OF THE ACTORS WORE A BODY MIC OF ANY KIND!

More importantly, none of them NEEDED a mic. They had all been trained to project. They all knew how to support their voices, project, and hit the back wall of theatre and the upper reaches of the furthermost balcony. If one had not learned this simple skill, their likelihood of a career in the theatre was probably dicey. In my time, the ability was regarded as a minimal requirement to be an employable actor.

I’m not sure where and when all this microphoning of actors began. I suspect it started in the musical theatre, however. And probably as early as the 60’s. During a Fantastick Evening, a celebration of the songs of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, at the Pasadena Playhouse a few years back, Jones told a anecdote about their production of 110 IN THE SHADE, where producer David Merrick wanted terrific actress Inga Swenson, playing Lizzie, to wear a microphone. Swenson flat out refused, telling Merrick, “If the audience can’t hear me, then you can mike me, but I want to control my own performance!”

Brave words and a great lesson for any actor. “I want to control my own performance.”

But as mics have become more pervasive…first in musicals, now more and more in straight shows…do actors control as much of their performances as they once did? We’ve all heard body mics scrunch under clothing or pick up belches or tummy rumblings. We’ve all heard how they can often make a voice hollow, tinny, and false. We’ve all heard the balance of sound often get thrown out of whack or elicit the occasional ear-splitting whine or malfunction to the point where it’s not functioning at all. We’ve all seen little nub-ends of mics sticking out of wigs and tell-tale cords snaking down the backs of costumes.

Of course, these little distractions to our willing suspension of disbelief have now been abandoned altogether for the dreaded visible head mic that loops around an actor’s ear and slashes across his jaw, utterly destroying any illusion of reality anymore. Who thought this bright idea an improvement? It’s the single worst introduction into the theatre ever. It is always there assaulting you and violating any sense of belief, time, or atmosphere the play is trying to create. It is the Anti-Christ of theatre performance.

I once saw a musical done with head mics in a hundred seat theatre where you could walk from the front to the back in less than ten steps. If it had been any more intimate, the audience would have been sitting in the actors’ laps. Now, granted, it was a student production, but I don’t care. I could stand on that stage and talk in a normal voice and be heard in every seat in the house. Hell, I could whisper and be heard in every seat. How lazy do your actors have to be? And, since it is a school production, shouldn’t we be teaching students basic disciplines like projection and vocal production? How to breathe and speak so you can be heard distinctly?

The local summer Shakespeare festival has also succumbed to head-mics. To hear Shakespeare’s language and poetry filtered through electronic devices is bad enough, but to see the intrusive, ugly head mics twined around Anthony and Cleopatra’s profiles or Falstaff’s jowls defies good taste. Of course, the venue it is done in…a large field…doesn’t at all serve Shakespeare, the actor, or the audience anyway, but here’s a clue: If your actors can’t hit the back wall with their natural voice or because there is no back wall, then your venue’s too big!

I’ve seen plenty of outdoor Shakespeare where the size and shape of venue is controlled and contained…notably the Southbank’s Globe…but also in parks and outdoor theatres that accommodate the actor and the performance and where the actors didn’t need mics…headsets or otherwise…to be heard and where the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief was not challenged or nose-thumbed.

If singers or some theatres really must have mics, can we go back to those hidden in hairpieces and that occasionally rustle under clothing. But, please, let’s at least abolish the horrid head mic. It’s just too Vegas and what happens in Vegas must stay in Vegas.

Oddly enough, the wife and I came across a natural amphitheatre in our perambulations the other day where one, speaking in a normal voice while standing down in the flat performance area, could be heard by one at the back of the rise. We’re not telling anyone about this discovery, but keeping it to ourselves, plotting a performance of some kind there some day…

I realize there is a prevalent philosophy in America that everything must not only make a profit, but must make a HUGE profit, so we want to pack as many bodies as we can into something approximating an airplane hanger…or The Louisiana Purchase. But that kind of greed is rather self-defeating where theatre is concerned.

I really think, in future, performance spaces must be designed with performance in mind, not maximum capacity…it will certainly serve the audience better as well as the properly-trained actor who has mastered the simple tricks of projection and can easily hit the back wall without sacrificing the nuance of his performance.

And while we are training our young and upcoming actors to project, can we also teach them how to write a professional programme bio?

The facts found in programme bios are beginning to resemble the self-absorbed indulgences of a Facebook or Myspace page. They are far too disclosive and intimate, giving an audience member reading such confessional paragraphs far more information than they need or want.

Here’s a tip for actors writing your bios. If I’m in the audience, it’s unlikely that I’m your personal friend. It’s unlikely that I am one of the eight hundred of your nearest, dearest bosom confreres on your social networking site. I’m not coming over for dinner, I’m not preparing your taxes, I’m not arresting you. I don’t need to know your personal information. I just want to know what you’ve done. Tell me your credits. Maybe I’ve seen you in a film or TV show or even on stage before. That’s all I want to know about you.

I’m tired of actors writing bios that sound more like acceptance speeches for awards they haven’t won. Save your Tony/Oscar/Emmy speech for when you actually win that Tony/Oscar/Emmy. Or worse, they use their bio as a platform to brown-nose and suck-up to the directors and producers who’ve cast them, in hopes of future gigs.

You know what I mean: “Arnold is so honoured and humbled to share the stage with this talented cast and crew and to be working with such a distinguished director as Joe Blow in this historic theatre. He wants to thank his lovely wife/life-partner/children/mother/father/pets/God for their love and support and dedicates his performance to his wife/life-partner/children/mother/father/pets/God.”

If you were good enough to get cast, don’t go publicly currying favour with those who cast you. Be grateful on your own time. Otherwise, it smacks of desperation. A professional shouldn’t go Uriah Heeping around for being talented enough to get hired. I’m sure you weren’t cast out of any altruistic sentiments of charity or pity.

And what is this whole thing about dedicating one’s performance? What if one’s performance is lousy or critically-lambasted? What kind of honour is that dedication bestowing on the recipient? And are we talking about every performance or just one specific one? The ones where you missed entrances, or fluffed lines, or daydreamed about getting Chinese food after the show?

I’m convinced a lot of actors invoke their wife and children in their bios just to let the audience know that, despite being in the theatre, they are a card-carrying heterosexuals. And, vice versa, those who dedicate their performance to their same-sex partner want to proudly proclaim their gayness. All I care about is whether you can act or not, not who you sleep with.

If your partner is someone of note or in the business I don’t mind a simple, “Arnold lives in Brooklyn with his wife, a stage designer, and their three children.” But please do avoid cutesy crap like: “But Arnold’s proudest production is little Megan, his two-year old daughter with his wife, Mary Louise.” Great, you’re fertile! But you’re not there to spread your seed on the stage. Puh-leeze, don’t make me want to slap you before ever make your first entrance.

The less I know personally about an actor, the less baggage I bring to the role he is performing. He more easily assimilates the character for me. If I’m thinking, “gee, he plays a straight guy pretty good for a gay guy or he plays a gay guy pretty good for a straight guy”, I’m being taken out of the play.

Be a professional, give me your credits. If you’re young and don’t have a lot of credits yet, then your bio should be short. Don’t pad it with gibberish. Don’t inflict your personal life and views on me. The only way I want to know you is as an actor.

My favourite bio of all time is the one Diana Rigg wrote for the National Theatre production of HUMBLE BOY a few years back in which she co-starred with Simon Russell Beale and long time colleague, Denis Quilley. Here it is: “Diana Rigg has been around a very long time and this is the sixth time she has coupled with Denis Quilley.”

POGUE GOES TO PULPFEST 2009

2009-08-02T16:39:00.000-07:00

(Weird Tales Conan cover by Margaret Brundage)

For the uninitiated, an explanation of Pulps. Pulps were fiction magazines published from the earliest part of the 20th century till about the mid-sixties...so called because of the cheap, rough paper they were printed on. They covered a wide array of genres – romance, mystery, thriller, adventure, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror. They bore such names as BLUEBOOK, ALL-STORY WEEKLY, AMAZING STORIES, BLACK MASK, WEIRD TALES, ADVENTURE, MAGIC CARPET, SPICY DETECTIVE. They were usually disdained by the slicks (the more toney magazines like Saturday Evening Post, published on finer grade paper) and their fiction not thought of as great literature (writers were paid by the word).

But, in fact, they were immensely popular and the launching pad for many a fine writer and popular novelist such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rafael Sabatini, Cornell Woolrich, even Tennessee Williams.

I don’t really collect Pulps….despite their obvious attractions -- great yarns and wonderfully evocative illustrated covers. But between my lack of storage space, my lack of time to read their wonderful contents, and pragmatic concerns like their fragile condition and brittle paper, I’ve only ever just cracked the lid of this Pandora’s Box and reached in to pull out a few desired treasures before slamming it firmly back down lest temptation get the better of me.

Whatever forays I have ever made into Pulp collecting have been because I collect authors. So occasionally if I’ve found a Burroughs tale in Amazing Stories or a reprint of a Rider Haggard novel in Famous Fantastic Mysteries or an excerpt of a Talbot Mundy serial in Adventure and the price is right, I’ll make the leap. Once fifteen years ago, at a book fair in California, a dealer sold all his Weird Tales for ten and fifteen bucks. For that ridiculously low bargain price, I managed to pick up several issues containing Conan stories by Robert E. Howard and Jules De Grandin tales by Seabury Quinn; and, perhaps more importantly, adorned with the provocative cover paintings of Margaret Brundage (below).

Anyway, I love exploring the world and a chance to gaze into its wonders for a weekend appealed to me. I also knew there would be book dealers, movie posters, artwork, and other such peripheral wares that I occasionally dabble in on display.

After having been based for years in Dayton, Ohio, the venue moved to Columbus this year…but it was still roughly only a three hour drive from my old Kentucky home. I tried to entice pal, Roger Leasor in going up with me and making it a collecting- guy’s weekend, as he has more than a passing interest in this stuff as well. And, though enticed he was, work kept him pinned down.

So I soloed it with my usual off-the-cuff planning…which meant a couple hours on the internet, printing off maps of the Hotel and surrounding hotels and a few bookstores that piqued my interest and might require visitation, should the Pulpfest turn out a dud. I didn’t even make a reservation anywhere, though I priced a couple of places. Also having lived in Columbus when I was a wee sprig of a twig of a lad until midway through the second grade (the earliest memories I consciously retain are from my days there), I mulled a vague idea about visiting the old haunts.

Thus armed, I started out a little after noon on Friday, figuring to get there before rush hour. Though rain had been predicted, I encountered none and had sunshine all the way. As I crossed the Kentucky border and tooled up Interstate 71 through Cincinnati, I realized I had forgotten all my printed internet maps. This was hardly dire, because I had studied the info carefully the previous night and knew that, if I stayed on 71 north of Columbus, the Ramada Inn venue was right off the freeway. I even remembered the street.

Nonetheless, I figured I’d better purchase a map just to confirm my memory and to locate those other bookshops. After another hour driving through non-descript scenery at a sedate 65mph…the speed limit in Ohio…I stopped on the outskirts of the oddly named Washington Courthouse. I had forgotten how rural Ohio is…really nothing between Cincy and Columbus but farmland. Which made it even more odd, when going into a travel center to pick up my map, I noticed down the road, THE LION’S DEN, an adult sex shop—apparently part of a rather large franchise in Ohio. Guess those farmers no longer have rendezvous with their sheep.

Anyway, the map confirmed my memory and I arrived in Columbus without incident, found the Ramada Inn where Pulpfest was located and booked myself a room across the street at something called the American Best Value Inn.

I enjoy luxury as well as the next fellow, but when traveling alone, I can occasionally rough it – which for me means no mint on my pillow. Since I knew I’d only be in the room to sleep, my only requirements were a bathroom and a bed and both be clean. While the furniture was knocked about a bit, it met my requirements and, with my AAA discount, only cost me 47 dollars. I called The Lovely Wife to inform her I had arrived and of my thrifty room rate to which her only reply was, “I hope you didn’t get one of those places where bed-bugs are running rampant.” I assured her I hadn’t…but, of course, now that she had planted the idea, it made me suspicious of any little itch I had and probably made me imagine far more than I actually had. I mean it wasn’t glamourous -- no hair dryer, six channels on the TV (one WAS HBO) -- but it was hardly the Bates Motel…or if it was, I wasn’t in room one and my tits weren’t as lush as Janet Leigh’s.

Divesting myself of such speculation for the nonce, I strolled over to the Ramada to get the skinny on the Dealer Room -- the primary reason I had come. They were just closing it up for the night and wouldn’t open until ten tomorrow…which was fine with me and had been anticipated. I had plan to spring for my $15 dollar day pass on Saturday when I’d have all day to browse, if necessary. But I had wanted to scope out everything and see if anyone I possibly knew was hanging around. Collecting is a small world.

Since there was no one, I took off to find a Half-Price Books nearby. Enroute, I came across two better used bookstores -- the good old musty kind of shops that bespeak of forgotten treasures. Alas, it was near closing time for both, so I had to sleuth the stacks against the clock. But I swept up a few goodies -- collection of plays by Bjornstjerne Bjornson who I believe was an inspiration to and a rival of Ibsen’s, a play (originally a radio play) of Tom Stoppard’s I’ve never heard of called ALBERT’S BRIDGE, a nice hardbound copy in dj of SOLDIERS, a controversial play be Rolf Hochhuth that was banned by the Lord Chamberlain in Britain, and a Classics Illustrated adaptation of KING OF THE KHYBER RIFLES, which it turned out I already had, but for the three bucks it cost, why not another? In fact, all the books were a bargain and very cheap.

(not the comic, the novel with dj by Joseph Clement Coll)

After this delightful detour, I located the Half-Price Books which was a bit of a let-down, compared to others. I remember Half-Price before it became a nationwide chain -- one store in Dallas on McKinny Avenue around the corner from where I lived. The store in Dallas (no longer on McKinny) is still a impressive and certainly the crown in the chain, but even it has lost the charm of the original, where I spent many happy hours.

I left Half-Price empty-handed, ate dinner at a Chinese Buffet, returned to my minimalist hotel room, watched Bill Maher, turned out the lights, imagined bed-bugs and had my nodding off disrupted by about five trains (the hotel abutted the tracks), but finally drifted off to a sound sleep.

I awoke too early on Saturday, checked out, ate breakfast at the Ramada buffet, then took a drive to kill time until ten. I scraped the idea of visiting my old neighbourhood, as it was off the beaten path and I suspected that after over fifty years nothing looked the same or remained anyway. Nor do I confess any overwhelming nostalgia for the place.

Returning to the Ramada, I purchased my day pass and entered into wonderland. It was like the California Book Fairs of old before they became affairs where the same old tired stuff was trotted out, usually grotesquely overpriced, only for dealers to buy off other dealers, nothing for the general punter.

Here we had wonderful, fresh-in-its-antiquity stuff to look at. Now maybe it was not so for everyone, but I was a Pulpfest virgin and most of this was stuff I had never seen or hadn’t seen in years.

At one of the first booths I stopped at, I was recognized by my name tag…by one Bill Maynard, author of the new estate-authorized Fu Manchu pastiche. He knew me by my Conan/Kull script (not the disastrous movie made from it) and was a fan. We had a nice chat about our mutual work, our mutual interests, and mutual friends. I bought his book and he graciously inscribed it, “To Charles Edward Pogue, an inspiration and kindred spirit, Best Wishes, William Maynard”.

(Fu Manchu rendered by the great illustrator Joseph Clement Coll)

As I said, the world of collecting is small, I…or rather…my name was recognized a few more times, which was very flattering; I also met some folks who knew pal Harlan Ellison and got to introduce myself to Otto Penzler who was the special guest. Penzler was the consultant on my Sherlock Holmes films back in the eighties when he was handling the Conan Doyle estate. He is also something of an icon in the mystery fiction world as a publisher, editor, scholar, and owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York. We discussed the films, the difficulty of the Conan Doyle estate, mutual pals, and the dwindling of the used and independent bookseller. A few years ago, he said there were about 300 mystery specialty bookstores, now there are about a dozen, if that.

I think it’s one of the reasons I came; I don’t know how many more years this sort of cultural diversion has to thrive. I looked around the room at the greying heads, mostly male, and wondered where the new blood was coming from…or if there was going to be any? I kept seeing my father’s generation, but then realized most of these folks were my age, ten years either side…and, man, was that scary! I don’t see myself as that old. But then I don’t characterize myself with the few younger folk that attended either…most of that geeky variety you envision dissecting the minutia of every STAR TREK episode, the type of guy to whom you want to say, “Get a life!” I somehow…very snottily, no doubt…assume I am more well-rounded than the very folk I am jostling out of the way to get a closer look at some obscure 1933 edition of WEIRD TALES.

But I sometimes feel like a monk in the Dark Ages holding and protecting all the sacred texts and knowledge from the hands of the uncomprehending infidel until the Renaissance. Overheard: "Yeah, but can they make a kindle smell like a musty old pulp magazine?"

Actually, as much as I would have loved to have plopped down and spent the day going through various boxes of plastic-sealed pulps, I pretty much stuck to books. There are several specialty publishers, like Black Dog Books and Girasol collectables that are printing up rare and, in some cases, never collected pulp materials by a lot of my favourite authors. I picked up THE SKULL OF SHIRZADAD MIR by Harold Lamb and IN A RIGHTEOUS CAUSE by Talbot Mundy in handsome quality paperback editions by Black Dog. I also paid a buck for a little magazine called SCREEN FACTS, half of which featured an article on the 1935 movie SHE and the other half on Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors, a favourite from THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN. Oddly enough, it is autographed by her. I suspect it’s authentic because there is also an autographed inscription in the same pen, but different hand by the editor of the magazine.

Speaking of SHE, I saw a poster of the 1935 movie for $130 and figured I had to have it …but, as the dealer brought it over for my closer inspection, I realized I had missed a zero – it was $1300. Probably well worth it, linen-backed too. I was also tempted by a more reasonably-priced small poster of Kirk Douglas’ THE VIKINGS. But I already have three variant editions of this poster on the wall of my TV room…An American, an Italian, and a Polish. So I passed.

It is amazing how much of this merchandise has increased in value over the years have increased in value. I saw some WEIRD TALES and SHADOWS going for $300 or more. There were also plenty of reasonably priced pulps…I saw several ADVENTURES going for 20-25 bucks with stories and serials by authors I collect like Mundy and Sabatini. But, frankly, I just don’t have the room or the inclination to jump at this stuff…besides which, I usually have it in book form.

(a pulp I do own)

Finally my eyes blurred and crossed at all this overwhelming stimuli and I staggered out at about one in the afternoon, hitting the road for an uneventful trip home.

POGUE’S MEDIA CHECK

POGUE’S WATCHING:

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1939) …Charles Laughton gives one of his greatest performances with a terrific ensemble cast (Edmond O’Brien in a romantic lead before he got paunchy a few short years later) in the best version of the story. A wonderful film with lots of layers, about the Dark Ages stumbling into the Rennaisance.

ENGAGED…W.S. Gilbert’s (of “& Sullivan” fame) play that was a precursor to Wilde’s IMPORTANCE OF BEINNG EARNEST. Amusingly and ably performed by the tight ensemble of The Cincinnati Shakespeare Company.

PLATONOV…a BBC televised Chekov play with Rex Harrison, Sian Phillips, and Clive Revill. This was an early play of Chekov, which, if uncut, would run six hours. This one ran a sensible two. Michael Frayn did a translation of it called WILD HONEY which played quite successfully with Ian McKellen back in the eighties, which I saw at the Ahmanson in LA.

POGUE’S READING:

THE TERROR OF FU MANCHU…William Maynard’s Sax Rohmer pastiche. Just started it, but so far he seems to have captured the style and essence of the original novels.

THE WEEK…the best news weekly around. We finally renewed our subscription.

POGUE’S LISTENING TO:

AL HIBBLER…and his unique vocal stylings…

LA THEATREWORKS…radio versions of classical and contemporary plays. In the last couple of weeks have listened to ORSON’S SHADOW and LA BETE.

THE TRYANNY OF THE STANDING OVATION (or THE HARDY BOYS & THE CURSE OF THE CRUMPLING CANDY WRAPPER)

2009-07-23T19:52:00.000-07:00

Last week on my Facebook page (Yes, I finally succumbed and have found it to be the addictive, totally entertaining, time-wasting amusement I long suspected it was), I bespoke of my puzzlement and not a little irritation of being at the theatre and watching the audience applaud the scene breaks and blackouts. A dear friend of mine, who also attended a performance of the same show where I witnessed this curious phenomenon, accused me of being “the applause police” and said she now knew what folks meant when they said they had been “Pogued”…an allusion, I assume, to my oft-acerbic, jaundiced-eyed critiques of those things that exacerbate my curmudgeonly impatience.

Sorry, I have no remorse. I have already been pretty much chased out of movie theatres these days, because people insist on bringing their living room manners with them and have an utter inability to detach themselves for a couple of hours from all the latest technical gee-gaws and whirl-a-gigs.

If they are not nattering with audible intrusiveness to their neighbour in the next seat, they are nattering to someone on their cell phone…or texting or checking emails. Those “lovely people out there in the dark” that Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in SUNSET BOULEVARD extolled are, frankly, not so lovely anymore and “out there in the dark” ain’t so dark what with the little invasive patches of light from beeping, bleeping, clicky-clacky, tippy-tapping cell phones.

It’s just easier to watch a movie on DVD on the 52 inch flat screen at home in my underwear. I don’t need the big screen experience, the three dollar drinks, and the five dollar popcorn…But mostly I don’t need the distracting communal experience where people are blithely indifferent to the consideration of others and are incapable of focusing on a single experience without attention-deficit multi-tasking.

Given all this, I don’t know why I expect the experience of attending live theatre to retain any vestige of gracious living, good manners, and more civilized behaviour, but I naively do. Nor do I seem alone in this futile expectation. Over the last few months and weeks, I have encountered several newspaper columns, internet articles, and blogs that have been discussing, debating, and bemoaning the alarming increase of “Were you raised in barn?” manners that intrude on and diminish the theatre-going experience.

I confess a considerable amount of these discussions…though hardly all…stem from British sources, where the theatre is a more viable and entrenched part of one’s cultural life, and where these unhealthy audience habits are seen to be immigrating from America. They probably are.

We are, after all, the culture of not only self-absorption to point of total unawareness of others, but also the culture of hyberbole and over-sell, often praising things far beyond their merits where the mediocre is considered good, the good great, the great…usually ignored, because it is not understood by an audience weaned on the pablum of TV. I’m not sure we understand the difference between good and bad anymore. It seems that if one just shows up for the gig anymore that is enough of a commitment to lavish over-abundant praise upon them.

These articles recently came to a terrific culmination in the London Times with critic Benedict Nightingale’s THE 15 GOLDEN RULES OF THEATRE ETIQUETTE( as of this writing, still online). I found them to be pretty good rules…and given the comments to the article, many other disgruntled, frustrated theatre-goers thought so too. Applauding during scene breaks and blackouts was not on Mr. Nightingale’s list of Do’s and Don’t’s (though one of the responders to the article invoked it). I think its omission was only because this habit has not quite made its way across the Atlantic yet and insidiously infiltrated its way into the British audience. It only rears its head with the occasional uninitiated American tourist.

I’m not quite sure when this habit of applauding every scene break began. I actually became conscious of it (though I’m sure I had experienced it before) when I was at a university play. The audience was mostly students. I think I dismissed it…perhaps, unfairly… to inexperience, figuring most of them probably didn't attend all that much live theatre and that some were just over-enthusiatically supporting their pals on stage and others, unsure of proper procedure, followed suit.

But this was not the case the other night. Now, granted, it also wasn’t your typical theatre venue. It was one of those outdoor summer affairs. Blankets, picnic baskets, wine. And its laid-back environment also probably attracts a lot of folk who are not your typical theatre-goer. There’s plenty of chatting, cell phone use, and just inattentiveness that has become somewhat de rigeur for outdoor summer fare…though I’ve yet see it at the Old Globe in San Diego or the Globe in London.

But here every time a troupe of actors trotted off at the end of a scene or the lights dimmed, applause filled the night. It was often sporadic and tentative applause which makes me believe it was more often spurred on by various claques or the mere uncertainty of the proper etiquette.

But, you may ask, why is it improper to show your appreciation of the actors in this fashion? After all, who’s to say whether it’s right or wrong? Unless someone in authority is going to tell you to be quiet or pitch you out of the theatre for creating a disturbance, isn't any response fair game?

So why does it bug me? It’s like applauding after every movement of a symphony instead of at the end of it. And Lord knows, this insidious practice abounds too…I’ve seen it happen at the Hollywood Bowl (And I can remember an Italian producer who drunkenly sang along with Pavarotti there too..but that's another story).

We’re so anxious to show our appreciation or our misguided notion that “we really are hip and get it” that we applaud before the complete performance is over. This is not necessarily an encouraging sign to a serious artist, as it bespeaks more ignorance than true appreciation of the artist’s skills. I remember a story where one esteemed soloist walked off after the audience applauded the first movement.

Why? I suppose because there is a mood, a spell that an artist is trying to create -- a level of concentration and immersion that one hopes envelopes both artist and audience in the same enchantment. Indiscriminate, over-enthusiastic, out-of-proportion, and often as-yet-unearned and undeserved applause can break that spell, dissolve the enchantment, disrupt the concentration.

Yes, we’ve all experienced that moment when a performer has had a particularly splashy, flashy stage turn that overwhelms an audience with such uncontainable exuberance, they must show their irrepressible approbation with a round of honest exit applause. Nothing wrong in that.

But the scene break/blackout applause always seems to me like a bunch of trained seals; as though someone has turned on the studio audience “Applause” sign, generating an unthinking Pavlovian response. It is born not so much out of genuine enthusiasm for what is transpiring onstage but is rather merely the mechanics of an automaton.

It’s all a bit naff (to use Mr. Nightingale's term), disrupts narrative flow and adds minutes to the evening that neither the actor nor the audience needs. And anything that takes me out of the story, distracts or disengages me from the performance, I find inappropriate. Applauding at the wrong time is like laughing at the wrong time…like laughing at the set-up instead of the punchline or at a tragic moment. It’s just as intrusive as someone narrating the plot to their inattentive companion or rustling candy wrappers or texting or taking pictures on their cell.

Now part of the burden falls on the playwright and the director to keep the action of the play flowing, devoid of lulls where an audience feels obligated to fill a scene change or time lapse with applause.

But, please, applaud at the act breaks and the curtain. Applauding every frigging scene break or blackout is simply applauding unfinished work. The performance isn’t over. “So far so good” is not a reason to applaud! Applauding at the Act Break, when everything actually stops, is the perfect place for a progress report of approval to let the actors on stage know you think they’re doing well enough that you’ll be back after the interval.

And despite what is said about actors’ overblown egos, the truly good ones are usually objective enough to be able to assess how they’re doing on any given night and they know when applause is warranted; when the audience is sincerely returning fair measure for the work being done and when it is disproportionate. You’re not fooling the ones who know their trade.

I devoutly hope this habit does not become as pervasive as the empty standing ovation which has long been stripped of any its special meaning. A standing O should be a cathartic response for a truly transcendent theatre experience and a rare event, not a commonplace reward for the actors just because they showed up for the gig. Once again, the pros know…although I do recall a friend who was mortified to be in a show where the largely amateur cast was furious that they were not receiving a nightly standing ovation which they misguidedly thought their automatic due. Naturally, they blamed the “ignorant” audience for this oversight.

Such attitudes, I suppose, are generated once again by a TV/sporting event culture where to ratchet up the stakes, game show contestants are encouraged to pee themselves with excitement, in-house audiences are egged on to holler, hoot, and stamp their feet every time a potential American Idol changes key or goes up another octave, and where the more extravagant, rowdy, and vocal our behaviour in the stadium the better to root on the home team.

But the theatre isn’t TV, baseball, or your kid’s soccer game. And, if your kid’s in the play, trust me, he doesn’t want you cheerleading every time he enters or filming his performance on your cell phone…or if he does, he is a hopeless, hapless dilettante who has no respect for the discipline of the theatre.

Sadly, the obligatory standing ovation, regardless of the performance’s merits, seems to be another American aberration. In England, one sees it only on rare and arguably deserving occasions. In Rick McKay’s excellent documentary, BROADWAY: THE GOLDEN AGE, Stephen Sondheim posits an interesting theory on the overdose of standing ovations these days.

He suggests that it has its origins in the cost of the tickets, plus dinner, plus parking, plus babysitter. To justify and reconcile such an extravagant theatre night on the town, theatre-goers must perceive whatever they saw as an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime experience (and, for some out-of-town tourists, it may well be). In other words to assuage the pocketbook and conscience, the evening…whether it was or not…was well worth it, by God, and it’s getting a response well worth it – a standing ovation!

It’s as valid a theory as any and one can see how it might trickle down from the big cities to the smaller theatre venues. That doesn’t make it right. I mean if I’m not standing for Ian McKellen or Judi Dench (and I have and haven’t for both...despite the fact I've enjoyed them in everything I've seen),the odds of me seeing something so breathlessly brilliant out here in the sticks that would prompt me to instaneously leap to my feet are few and far between – not that it hasn’t happened.

But the more likely scenario is what happened to me and the wife awhile back in a local community theatre. The play itself, frankly, was not great. Though several admirable actors whose work we’ve enjoyed were in the production, neither it nor they could overcome the material and it was hardly anyone’s finest hour. The whole evening was a bit of a slog.

Nonetheless, true to form, at the end of the evening, first the die-hard adherents of the theatre leapt to their feet, followed by the lemmings or those unsure of what proper, polite appreciation was…finally, leaving only Julieanne and I planted in our seats, determined not to surrender to the tyranny of this undeserved standing ovation. We steadfastly did not want to give a mediocre production more than its due. But the bloody audience would not sit down, the cast kept milking the applause, and we kept being stabbed by the icy, outraged stares around us. I finally muttered to Julieanne, “We’d better stand or we won't leave here alive.”

And so we did...bullied by another form of “applause police.” It was just easier than being interrogated as to why we didn’t like the show or why we didn’t stand. If one came up to you after and gushed, “Didn’t you just love it?”, you could just nod with tepid politeness without feeling compelled to ramble off a long impassioned, intellectual dissertation about one’s devotion and dedication to the theatre they neither wanted to hear nor, in all likelihood, had the patience to grasp. After all, it’s my passion... not theirs. The professional versus the layman.

But even if most audiences are of the laymen variety, it should not excuse them from civility and courteous behaviour for both the performers working onstage and their fellow audience members. But while it’s easy to build an agreeable consensus that crinkling candy wrappers, chattering, cell phones, and snoring are all no-nos, a debate on the propriety of applause…generally thought a good thing… is a dicey go. After all, if a little applause is a good thing, isn’t a whole lot more even better? Yes, I can only say, but…only when it’s appropriate!

How many of Benedict Nightingale’s 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette do you agree with? Are there any audience habits not mentioned that annoy you either as a performer or an audience member?

POGUE’S MEDIA CHECK

POGUE’S WATCHING…

BEAU GESTE…the 1939 classic film of P.C. Wren’s classic adventure romance of the French Foreign Legion and brotherly devotion on TCM.

POGUE’S READING…

Still wending my way through the volume of Cornell Woolrich short stories, NIGHTWEBS. Some nifty little tales.

POGUE’S LISTENING TO:

A cache of some 13 CDs containing film scores and obscure musicals released on my pal Bruce Kimmel’s KRITZERLAND label. Among them, THE TWISTED NERVE by Bernard Herrmann, with a great whistling theme that Quentin Tarantino lifted and used in KILL BILL; RASHOMON by Laurence Rosenthal; GOD’S LITTLE ACRE by Elmer Bernstein; ILLYA DARLING, a musical based on NEVER ON A SUNDAY; SHOW GIRL with Carol Channing; and HOUSE OF FLOWERS by Truman Capote and Harold Arlen.

Any media gems you care to share?

POTPOURRI

2009-07-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

NOT BONDING

I watched the latest James Bond entry, Quantum of Solace, last week (a stupid title). As much as I like Daniel Craig, this may be the worst Bond film ever. First of all, the plot is almost indecipherable (and I’m very good at following convoluted plots)…very much dependent on knowing too many details from the last one.

If you’re going to be a sequel and can’t succinctly recap in less than five or ten minutes the info the viewer (and one who might not have seen the previous film) needs to know and integrate it easily into the flow of the narrative, then don’t do a sequel.

Even a sequel should work as a stand-alone film and not carry over a bunch of crap from the last one that has no dramatic impact because, if we saw it, we all saw it a year and a half ago, and can’t remember the details. I still haven’t been able to get through the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie because it is so rife with plot points, characters, and details from the first two I don’t remember. I’m going to have to watch them in a marathon screening sometime.

Which I suppose is what studios want you to do--go out and buy those DVDS. All this started with THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, it seems…probably the best of the Star Wars movies...except for its cliffhanger ending which deeply disappointed me at the time. But at least George Lucas did not overwhelm us with so much info that we couldn’t hold the elemental strands of the plot until the next film. It was pretty basic…princess in jeopardy, Hans Solo in a form of suspended animation, and hints that Luke Skywalker has interesting parentage.

I know when I wrote PSYCHO III, the biggest challenge for me was to have a stand-alone movie…one that, even if a viewer had not seen the previous two, he could still understand what was going on in this one and enjoy it on its own merits. This required some deft use of flashbacks culled from the first two movies and some hopefully quirky dialogue and scenes that had dramatic impact and did not stand out like deadly exposition.

But back to Quantum of Solace. Not only do they not satisfactorily clear up the dangling threads from the last film for the viewer, characters appear and disappear so fast without any kind of establishment or development (Were they in the last film? Who are they? Where did they come from? Why should we like them, hate them, fear them?), I don’t really know who they are or what I should be feeling about them. Even Judi Dench is boring.

But worst of all, the action scenes are so choppy and kinetic that you cannot get any sense of perspective or know where you are or just who shot at whom or who threw what punch or who jumped down from where. An example: the film opens with Bond in a black car pursued by villains in a black car. The cars are not clearly delineated. The cutting is so abrupt and jarring, in this herky-jerky, mile-a-minute attention-deficit disorder style that I couldn’t tell who was who half the time. My eye was not allowed to linger on anything for more than a few seconds, if that. So much of the action is in fast cuts and quick close-ups or such obvious CGI that you get no sense of geography or spectacle at all anymore.

And that was what was fun about the fights, chases, and stunts in a Bond movie, there was a sense of spectacle and amazement because, first of all, you knew where you were and had a perspective on everything. And secondly, it didn’t happened at such a frenetic pace that you could still absorb it, take it all in, and enjoy. You could revel in the details. There looked to be some stunning scenery and locales in the movie, but it all went by in such a blur, I really couldn’t say.

In the older Bonds, you also had enough slower-paced scenes where you could actually hear the dialogue, get some exposition, and follow the narrative. I liked my Moneypenny and Q scenes.

I know the younger generation is supposed to be able to assimilate images and info faster, but it’s not a race! It’s a story! Luxuriating in its journey…its nuance, colour, and detail…should be the point. I found this, like so much of today’s film-making, to be assaulting and it just wore me out. Give me time to savour the story…visually, aurally, emotionally, intellectually. It’s a movie; not a carnival thrill ride or a video game. And, frankly, it doesn’t even provide with me any basic visceral thrills. It’s just big, fast, and loud. Maybe I’m a geezer, but I’ll take GOLDFINGER.

AS BUGS BUNNY WOULD SAY, “WHAT A MAROON!”

Sarah Palin reminds me of a certain type I used to be introduced to at Hollywood parties. While they’re talking to you, they’re looking over your shoulder to see if someone more important has come into the room that they should be schmoozing with.

Tip to Mark Sanford: You can’t really say you’re hoping to fall back in love with your wife while, with your next breath, you’re referring to your paramour as your “soul mate”.

Tip to Mark Sanford’s wife: If he’s calling his paramour his “soul mate”; no point in saying you’re trying to forgive him. Throw him out and press on, it’s over.

Sanford’s press conference spewings have been the most bizarre amalgamation of confession, therapy, and locker-room braggadocio I’ve even seen. It’s just not his pants he needs to keep zipped. I somehow can’t quite buy his contrition or his invoking of God and religion when he can’t restrain his own eagerness to enumerate the times he’s “crossed the line” with his romantic dalliances. I’d respect the guy much more if he just owned up to the fact that he’s a randy bugger and he gave up his governorship and went off with his lover.

ALWAYS BEHIND THE CURVE

All technology must now stop until after I’m dead. Most of my scripts have been typed in a Wordperfect macro in an old DOS system (those that weren’t typed on a typewriter). The last time I upgraded everything, my computer guy out in LA had, through some miraculous means, managed to finesse it so that I could not only retain my old DOS files, but also print them up, whenever I needed to produce one of those scripts.

In the meantime, I had already acquired Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter, programmes for script writing. I have been able to transfer most of my macro-DOS scripts and other documents over into Movie Magic…though, of course, much of the style was not recognized and so often dialogue or character indentations and other such nuances are not formatted properly and all of these transferred scripts require tweaking and editing to comply with Movie Magic’s formatting, something I’ve yet to do.

And rather than deal with that onerous task, I’ve just kept printing scripts up from the old DOS system. No can do anymore. A few months back, something went wrong somewhere…and I can no longer print out my old DOS files. My new computer guys hardly even know what DOS is.

Of course, I have hard copies of all these scripts which I can run off at Kinko’s. But this ain’t LA. I don’t know what it costs per page in LA anymore, but when I left, it was still hovering around 2 and a half cents to three cents a page. Kinko’s here in Kentucky is at least 6 or 7 cents a page. Even worse, though they can three-hole punch paper, they don’t sell brads…the fasteners used for three-hole punched paper. I have to special order the one and a half inch brads from a local business supply dealer, if I want to bind my script in the traditional way.

These are the little irritants I'm forced to endure here in Kentucky-- which, unlike LA, is not used to everyone and his brother having a script to print and bind. But even in LA, I had become reliant on printing out scripts on my own laser printer. With most of these epics now trapped in DOS, which I cannot longer access, this has become problematic.

Fortunately, most of the film scripts I don’t really have to run off that often. Where I’ve run into a problem is with my Sherlock Holmes play script, THE EBONY APE. There have been a few requests for it (Rick St. Peter, Actors Guild Artistic Director, is a fan of it and has been touting it to several theatres). The script is a hundred and thirty five pages. That can run into the money if I must rely on Kinko's. I can (and have) transferred the script over into Movie Magic and could just go through the tweaking and re-editing process, but...I don’t like their play format. I prefer Final Draft’s format, similar to the one I use and in which the play is already typed. But I can’t transfer my old DOS script over into Final Draft. So…

…I am laboriously re-typing the entire script into Final Draft’s playwriting programme.

In truth, I really need to bone up on both Movie Magic and Final Draft, because I know there are advantages to both these systems that would make my life easier that I’ve yet to discover. But here’s the other wrinkle: despite how little I’ve used these programmes, they are already fairly old and more advanced versions are already out. I’m always behind the curve on this stuff and will never catch up.

My friend, actor Larry Drake, and I were joking a while back that if we couldn’t ply our trade in the drama game, we would be virtually unemployable, because we have no viable business computer skills (Just updating my acting resume the other day was a chore). At our advanced age and with no marketable skills, the best we could hope for would be to become Walmart greeters.

By the way, any representative from a legitimate theatre who would be interested in either THE EBONY APE or my TARTUFFE adaptation, send along your info and let’s discuss.

JUST CAN'T FACE IT

Speaking of unwanted technology, just as I get into the blogging thing, everybody’s jumping into Facebook with a passion. I keep resisting, knowing I already waste an inordinate amount of time on the internet. But I may have to relent; even every fogey I know is on it these days. And I do see its merits and advantages, just as I fear its time-squandering possibilities on what seems to me mostly trivia.

A pal said he had five different scrabble games going on facebook. Sorry, if I’m going to play Scrabble, I want a card table, the board, and the tiles. Part of the joy of playing Scrabble or any game is the camaraderie, being able to banter and comment while someone is plotting their next move. Face-to-Face contact…it’s what I crave in most of my social activities…which, ironically, is not what “face”book provides.

NO MORE WORD

No more on the LexArts cutting Actors Guild funding allocation for the coming year. But the comments to various articles have been very interesting, as well as bringing up some hitherto unkown issues. Read about it here.

POGUE’S MEDIA CHECK

POGUE’S WATCHING:

A TCM DOCUMENTARY ON THE FILMS OF 1939…largely considered the greatest year for film, an assessment with which I’d agree. After watching the exhausting Quantum of Solace, seeing clips of these meticulously made movies was so relaxing and calming. It was also nice to see film scholars and pals, Rudy Behlmer and F. X. Feeney, two of the best in the business.

1776…This is a 4th of July tradition with Julieanne and me. One of my favourite musicals and amazing history. When you think of these remarkable, brilliant, talented, committed men who formed this country and then think of the George Bushes and Sarah Palins who actually are thought by a third of the populace as qualified leaders, you get sick to your stomach at the intellectual decline of this country.

More CHEYENNE…starring Clint Walker. Warner Brothers, which produced the series, was great at recycling material they owned. I’ve seen several movies in their library re-fashioned into Cheyenne stories…an old Errol Flynn western, ROCKY MOUNTAIN; THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE with Rod Taylor as the Tim Holt character, character actor Edward Andrews as Bogie, which made Clint Walker Walter Huston, I guess; and, perhaps the weirdest of all, Bogart/Bacall’s TO HAVE AND TO HAVE NOT, transplanted to Mexico during the French occupation. Character actors Myron Healy, Robert Wilkie, and Andrew Duggan seem to appear in every other episode.

POGUE’S LISTENING TO:

LOTS OF MOVIE SOUNDTRACKS…as I re-type THE EBONY APE script. I need music sans lyrics.

THE NOW SHOW…on BBC Four Radio. Very funny comedy on the week’s current events with Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt.

POGUE’S READING:

A FRIEND’S LATEST MYSTERY NOVEL…for which I need to supply a dust jacket blurb.

NIGHTWEBS by Cornell Woolrich…short stories by Woolrich. Woolrich’s prose can gather you up and carry you along, despite his plots’ often-wild improbabilities and frequent lapses in logic. His pay-offs don’t always live up to his brilliant set-ups, but, boy, he can grip you and suck you in.

I CAN'T TALK ABOUT IT (Or: What A Difference A Week Makes)

2009-06-22T18:18:00.000-07:00

"Charles Edward Pogue is impeccable in this juicy role."

My return to the stage after 26 years in AGL's THE UNDERPANTS.

POGUE BON MOT

“The heart must bleed, not slobber.”
-Frank Loesser-

I CAN’T TALK ABOUT IT, OKAY? It’s not the appropriate time. Certainly not now. Maybe never.

So what am I talking about that I can’t talk about? If you scroll down to a couple of blogs ago. You’ll see a letter I sent to the Editor of the local paper, The Lexington Herald-Leader, protesting a proposed 10% cut in the city’s contribution to the local Arts Funding League, LexArts. The letter also went to the Mayor, Vice-Mayor, and everyone on the Urban Council. My letter was published in last Sunday’s edition.

I don’t know if my going to bat for LexArts had any influence in swaying the decision, but they didn’t get a funding cut. Then...

...late this last Friday evening, ironies of ironies, we at Actors Guild learned…via a news release…that LexArts was not giving Actors Guild any financial allocation. Zip. Nada. Not a nickel.

So I’m sure folks are rushing here, thinking: Blowhard Pogue has an opinion about everything, he’ll certainly have one about this!

Sorry, I’m keeping my opinions to myself. The AGL Board will absorb this, deal with the matter, and respond. Right now I’m only a reporter. You can find the details here.

Instead, I reproduce here a slightly revised (updated) appeal letter (an earlier draft that had to be winnowed down to one page) that I wrote for Actors Guild last year. If odd bits sound vaguely familiar, it's because I’m a great recycler of what I deem my own well-turned phrases when the need arises.

But it expresses why I believe Actors Guild is a success…a theatre worth supporting and an asset to its community.

After the letter are a lot nice things others have said about our theatre. Even one from far-away Hollywood by LA TIMES reviewer, F. Kathleen Foley, a native Lexingtonian, and, like myself, a recipient of UK’s College of Fine Arts Distinguished Alumni Award.

If you’d care to say a “nice thing” about AGL, feel free to post on my comments page. You also might want to send it along to the paper. The letter:

December, 2008

Dear Friends,

Hello. My name is Charles Edward Pogue. I’m a screenwriter. Maybe you’ve seen some of my movies: THE FLY, DRAGONHEART, DOA, PSYCHO III, HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, among others…

I am also a native Kentuckian…

…My ancestors helped settle the state with Dan’l Boone, they fought at Blue Licks, built cabins at Fort Harrod; I grew up in Northern Kentucky and studied Theatre Arts at UK. Years later, I was awarded the first Distinguished Alumni Award from UK’s College of Fine Arts.

In 2005, after nearly thirty years in Hollywood, I moved home to Kentucky, settling in the Bluegrass and returning to my first love theatre. I was invited to join the board of Actors Guild of Lexington by its Artistic Director, Richard St. Peter. I did so; I have also been privileged to write and act with this innovative theatre company

Under Richard’s vision, I’ve witnessed a wonderful transformation at AGL. The quality of performances became elevated, with our best local actors sharing the stage with artists of regional and national reputation. The palette of plays broadened in scope, embracing both new writing and the great international repertoire of standard and classic plays.

We’ve forged ties with other professional theatres and institutions across the country; giving us a presence nationwide and establishing a strong theatrical networking community not only in the United States with such entities as The Theatre Communications Group and Actors Equity, but also abroad with universities like Rose Bruford College in England. As well as employing established artists, we have nurtured exciting young local talent in the fields of performance, directing, and theatrical design.

To critical acclaim, we initiated Summer Shakespeare at Equus Run Winery—a pastoral setting which restores an intimate simplicity of performance to the Bard and his exquisite language. We created original work locally that has gained wider recognition such as my own adaptation of TARTUFFE which has also been performed in San Francisco and Mr. St. Peter’s dynamic production of HAMLET, featured in AMERICAN THEATRE magazine, which was remounted in North Carolina this January, starring local actor, Adam Luckey. This spring we premiered a commissioned play, LONG TIME TRAVELLING, from the pen of respected Kentucky writer, Silas House. This summer, Mr. St. Peter will direct Brian Hampton’s CHECKING IN, in New York, a play that originated at AGL. Local actress Allie Darden will re-create her original role.

Even before I returned home, I longed to see professional theatre thrive in Central Kentucky. AGL is making this dream a reality.

During my extensive career, I’ve been fortunate to work with renowned artists and enjoy many exciting experiences. None have been more exciting than confronting AGL’s daily challenges as we strive to attain Actors Equity “small professional theatre” status. My enthusiasm is continually charged by the artistic energy and electrifying ideas that crackle in the air of AGL’s ambitions.

I’m impressed by the achievements (often under onerous conditions) that Actors Guild has made in the few short years that I’ve been back and Mr. St. Peter has been here. But AGL’s work is not done.

Every professional theatre struggles for money and support. America’s current fiscally imperiled times have not made those struggles easier. We hear much about city infrastructures, attracting businesses and young professionals and keeping the businesses and young professionals that we already have. But I know of no thriving first-class city that does not also have a thriving professional arts scene. A culturally rich city is an attraction for both visitors and the community.

Actors Guild’s goal is, I think, part of Lexington’s goal: To provide live professional theatre that engages, entertains, and enriches the quality of the life for its citizens; and to be a vibrant artistic presence of which a vibrant city can be proud.

I encourage you to visit us at Actors Guild and see for yourself the work we do and why we have been called Lexington’s “flagship theatre.”. If you’ve been an AGL supporter in the past and, for whatever reason, became disillusioned, I ask you to re-visit us. If you’ve never come to AGL, now is the time. If you are an arts lover, now is also the time to be generous with your support. Attend a performance, become a season pass-card holder, make a significant donation.

The theatre is about Life and Dreams. Come share the Dream that I and others hold for AGL’s future and help give it Life.

Thanks!

Hoping to see you at the theatre in the coming year and for many years to come,

Charles Edward Pogue

WHAT’S BEING SAID ABOUT ACTORS GUILD…

“AGL has grown into the area’s flagship theater…” -Rich Copley, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

“Why more of the press isn’t leaping at the chance to sing the praises of a truly professional actors group is beyond me… -E. Slate Williams, NOUGAT MAGAZINE

“Rick St. Peter, the director of the play, has been incredibly patient with me and given me so much artistic freedom with the play. When he approached me about doing a play for them, he allowed me a blank slate, which is the most important thing you can give to a writer. Everyone at AGL has been incredibly supportive and focused on making the best piece of art we can make.”
-Award-winning Kentucky novelist, Silas House, on working at AGL for the world premiere of his play, LONG-TIME TRAVELLING

WHAT’S BEING SAID ABOUT AGL'S PRODUCTIONS…

THE UNDERPANTS

“In fact, the whole show is a scream…rich with witty lines…I suggest everyone see…Underpants over and over again”. – Candance Chaney, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

“I recently took in the play “The Underpants”…performed by The Actors’ Guild of Lexington. It was remarkable!...The six-person cast was truly amazing…a comparison of local artists vs. traditional traveling productions could be compared to McDonalds and Malone’s. Both make beef. One is local and one is global. Anyone who has sampled both knows which one is better. Both will provide nourishment, but only one tastes gooooodd…go support our guys: Actors Guild of Lexington! I promise you won’t leave hungry. -E. Slate Williams, NOUGAT MAGAZINE

TARTUFFE

“…A FANTASTIC CAST AND A FIRST-RATE ADAPTATION…The infamous ‘table scene’…had the audience in stitches…this ambitious production proves it point… -Candace Chaney, Lexington Herald-Leader

HAMLET

“…A TOUR DE FORCE FOR AGL…What is most alluring about this show is that the cast and crew successfully execute a radical vision with restraint and balance…With its blend of modern elements and ageless themes, it feels like an altogether new kind of theater.”
-Candace Chaney, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

ACTORS GUILD PRESENTS SHAKESPEARE AT EQUUS RUN

“In fact, everything about this debut production seems to indicate a deliberate commitment to getting out of the way and letting Shakespeare be Shakespeare in all its simple elegance. That kind of artistic integrity is laudable and refreshing, but what’s more, it’s definitely worth the drive.”
-Candace Chaney, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

BOSTON MARRIAGE

“AGL’S ‘Boston Marriage’ triumphs in its playwright’s and actresses’ talents…a finely executed comedy that offers something for everyone.” -Candace Chaney, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

ARCADIA

“…this show’s fertile material and top-notch performances provide a memorable evening of entertainment, intellectual acuity, and meaningful romance. So rich is its offerings that you could attend every performance and discover new, wildly sophisticated, almost mind-blowing ideas and implications.” -Candace Chaney, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

MOONLIGHT & MAGNOLIAS

“I saw a production of MOONLIGHT & MAGNOLIAS…in Los Angeles, a few months ago, and I really liked the cast here in Lexington better. And I thought the direction was top-notch.” - F. Kathleen Foley, LOS ANGELES TIMES

THE PILLOWMAN

"Dark tale is stark, well-done, and timely." - Candace Chaney, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

FANTASTICKS

“Actors Guild puts brave new spin on musical standby…The concept is imaginative and benefits from charming performances by new and old local stage favorites.” -Rich Copley, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

BAD DATES

“Comic tour de force” – Candace Chaney, LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

LONG TIME TRAVELING

“ ‘Travelling’ brilliantly captures poetry of Appalachian language, life…Actors Guild is wrapping up its 25th anniversary season in style…” – Candace Chaney, LEXINGTOM HERALD-LEADER

WHAT’S BEING SAID ABOUT OUR ARTISTS

“…keep an eye on Hayley Williams, a soon-to-be rising star whose talent is only eclipsed by her beauty…”

“Director Bo List deserves kudos for his keen-in-the round direction…and sense of comic timing."

“…lighting designer Gip Gibson’s use of contrast between darkened ‘dreamy’ moments and the bright lights of reality is striking.”

“TARTUFFE PERFORMANCES STELLAR”

“Tartuffe, deliciously played by Scott Wichman…packs a powerful hypocrisy-soaked punch…”

“Missy Johnston…balances restrained elegance with a penchant for comic timing.”

“Laura Blake as the saucey, sharp-tongued maid… has a refreshing air of naturalness…that lights up the stage.

“Charles Edward Pogue penned the adaptation of this Moliere classic…Pogue’s language sparkles with color and is ripe with clever crispness, making versatile leaps from theological discourse to the basest of juicy double-entendre. The ensemble cast proves more than up to the task of its delivery…”

“Eric Seale…as the flamboyant Don Armado…, with his thick-as-mud Spanish accent, exaggerated flourishes, absurd swashbuckling mannerisms, and keen sense of timing made him an audience favourite…"

“Director Anthony R. Haigh has assembled a strong, experienced cast that includes many of Lexington’s best talent…”

“Adam Luckey is clearly at home in his role.”

“[Nelson]Fields’ detailed Renaissance costumes function to beautifully evoke period and tone of the play.”

“Director Richard St. Peter’s gutsy move to set this classical play ‘anytime, anywhere’ pays off, largely due to the cohesion of a keenly devised vision and its refreshingly innovative, well-executed presentation.”

“Everyone knew Adam Luckey would be a good Hamlet. Turns out, he is much more than good, he is phenomenal.”

“One delightful surprise of this production is the discovery of Jack Parrish, a professional actor and recent Lexington transplant…More Jack Parrish, please.”

“With multimedia, sound, lighting, set and costume designers, and even a cinematographer, this show’s many technicians deserves kudos that successfully draws audience and actors alike into a spooky, all too real, yet surreal emotional and political landscape.’

“Chris Rose turns in an absurdly satisfying performance.”

“Tim X. Davis relishes in a thick accent as well delivered as the cast’s ensemble comic timing.”

“Gina Scott-Lynaugh is pure mischief and mirth.”

“John B. Lynaugh is equally enchanting, wielding his lines with much panache and wry humour.”

“A nice surprise is newcomer Kevin Greer…”

“Another rare treat is Maureen Gallagher-Kuehler.”

“[Julieanne] Pogue and [Gina] Scott-Lynaugh are in excellent command of the play’s richly stylized language.”

Laura Blake freshly exemplifies sheer charm…her curt appearances inject vital bursts of coarse humor and sympathy.”

“[Julieanne]Pogue seems particularly adept at wielding an arsenal of multisyllabic Latin derivations. One gets the feeling she talks like that all the time. One also got that feeling when she played a heavily accented megalomaniac male artist in last season’s ‘Anton in Show Business’. Both roles are a testament to her talent and flexibility.”

“Director Ave Lawyer and cast deserve praise for a job thoroughly well done.”

“The number of talented cast members are too great to account for individually, but one enjoyable hallmark of this show is its debut of Rebecca Pearcy…refreshingly animate, earnest, and bright…And naturally, she wins the prize for best British accent, seeing as she is, well, British.”

AGL designers David Probus and Tommy Gatton do a lovely job framing Eric Seale’s set design in lighting and sound.”

“[Walter] May, [Charles Edward]Pogue, and [Eric] Johnson, all seasoned, accomplished actors are excellent casting choices…The trio seem at home playing legendary Hollywood figures. Somehow they manage to ground their larger-than-life characters into fascinatingly flawed mortals.”

“Rising star, Cameron Perry,…and local stage favorite, Carmen Geraci,…deliver warm performances.”

“If ever a lighting designer has made a show in this area work, David Probus has a masterpiece with this production.”

“[Rick]St. Peter, along with Eric Seale and Scott Sherman, collaborated to design the set…one of the productions most evocative technical features and artistic triumphs…”

“[Leslie] Beatty’s performance…is a tour de force of smart comedy and veiled pathos delivered with wry panache and plain ol’ ‘chops’.”

“The casting is amazing.”

“Missy Johnston, brilliant.”

Profuse apologies to those many fine artists who have worked for us not mentioned here. I used the reviews and articles I had on hand. Please know that you're appreciated and a valued part of AGL.

WORDS OF THEATRICAL WISDOM

"Any city in America with a thriving downtown

has thriving theatres. Not only does theatre reflect

energy, it inspires the community. We're making

quality of life here."

- Benny Sato Ambush, director, and friend of AGL-

The Ones That Stay With You...

2009-06-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the Independent newspaper in England had an article by Johann Hari, asking whether Tom Stoppard’s play ARCADIA was the greatest play of our age. The article prompted a response by David Jays in the Guardian and, with a new production of the play at the Duke of Yorks Theatre in London (featuring Stoppard’s son in the role of Valentine), ARCADIA seems to be everywhere lately.

I sent the article off to a small coterie of theatre cronies, to whom I always email such items which I think might pique their interest. The most amusing reply I got to the query of whether Arcadia is the greatest play of our age came from David Melville, managing director of The Independent Shakespeare Company in LA (and actor par excellence), “Not the production I was in.”

But barring dicey productions and dealing with the play itself, I would have to say ARCADIA is certainly high on my list as one of most memorable plays I have seen in the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the first decade of the 21st. I’ve been fortunate to see three terrific productions of the play…The West End transfer from the National Theatre at the Haymarket which featured Roger Allam and was directed by Trevor Nunn, a production at the Mark Taper Forum in LA, and our own production at Actors Guild directed by Ave Lawyer.

I’m not a huge fan of “greatest” lists…usually because people have short memories or don’t put much historical perspective in their choices and you end up with “greatest” lists of films or songs or plays that are top-heavy with stuff from more recent years and significant work from earlier days gets short shrift…their impact and importance forsaken for picks that were, not actually better, but merely fresher in the mind.

When I compose lists, I emphasize their personal impact on me and try not to speak for entire generations (you won’t find Star Wars in my top one hundred films…) and stress that my picks are usually “favourites” and have nothing to do with the austere weightiness of greatness.

But the whole question of Arcadia’s place in the pantheon of theatre in the last twenty-five/thirty years…certainly fertile years in my theatre development…got me thinking about what were the most influential plays, for me, written during that time. The ones that impressed me the most and, more importantly, have stayed with me the most…those that got under my skin and still rattle through the brain.

So without, rummaging through my stash of theatre programmes (I think I’ve got them all the way back from my earliest theatre-going days in high school…anyone remember HOSTILE WITNESS with Ray Milland?) and only ransacking my memory…a tool that becomes more deficient as I creep toward decrepitude…I proffer my list of ten plays that have stood out for me from say, 1980 on (written in that period), in no particular order…

1) ARCADIA…would definitely be on the list. Again another brilliant Stoppard melding of intellect and emotion that produces an exquisitely moving play.

2) THE REAL THING…I know some will argue that ARCADIA is Stoppard’s best; some will champion ROCK ‘N’ ROLL. I was tremendously moved by EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR at the National this past January. But THE REAL THING, for me, balances the scales with ARCADIA. I saw the original London production on the third day after it opened with Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal. It’s a wonderful play about love and language and loyalty.

3) AMADEUS…Along with Stoppard, Peter Shaffer is my favourite playwright. Again, a play I saw on my first trip to London in 1982 while I was shooting my Holmes films, HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES & SIGN OF FOUR. Imagine being young and turned loose in London with plenty of per diem pocket change. It was a revelatory time for me.

4) GIFT OF THE GORGON…another Shaffer and what’s interesting about it is that I’ve never seen a production of it. But when I read it in the mid-nineties, I simply said, “This is the best play I’ve read in ten years.” About revenge, the theatre, the death of theatre, the endurance of theatre. And so much more. And, as one might imagine from its title, it's very Greek…an awesome inexorableness about it. Struck a very personal chord with me.

5) THE PIANO LESSON…saw it in LA with Charles Dutton. Every August Wilson play I’ve ever seen I’ve enjoyed immensely. But this is the one that has hit the deepest and lingered the longest.

6) NICHOLAS NICKLEBY…How could one not be overwhelmed by its sheer magnitude of its bravura theatricality. Nine hours and not a moment of boredom.

7) PILLOWMAN…Again, one of those plays that bowled me over when I first read it. Eric Seale’s stunner of a production last season at Actors Guild confirmed to me the play’s power and poetry.

8) AMY’S VIEW…Saw the West End transfer from the National with Judi Dench. David Hare mixing the cultural politics of our time with a love letter to the theatre.

9) MUTABILITIE…by Frank McGuinness. Set in Ireland in the sixteenth century, it involves myth, Shakespeare, Spenser, the Faerie Queene, and so much more. I’m not sure I could even tell you what this play is about, but I found it riveting seeing it in its initial production at the National’s Cottesloe. I’m not sure it’s even had any other productions. A strange, dreamy, poetic play that still haunts me.

10) NOISES OFF…another of those I saw on my first trip to England. I love it for its obvious theatrical connections and because it is a very funny farce. Reminds me of my days in dinner theatre.

Well, I’ve reached my ten and feel it’s only the tip of the ice-berg. I suppose some psychologist could make something out of how many of them have literary, theatrical, artistic underpinings or themes. But on another day, in another mood, that list could shift and change some. And actually I realize all but one of these…PILLOWMAN…are from the twentieth century. Maybe the first ten years of the new century is a list for another day.

So give me your list. What are the most memorably significant plays for you from the last 30 years?

POGUE’S MEDIA CHECK

POGUE’S WATCHING:

INTO THE STORM…the HBO films about Churchill’s war years. A time when we still had politicians and leaders of greatness.

JEZEBEL & THE LETTER…two collaborations of director William Wyler and Bette Davis that played on TCM this weekend. JEZEBEL is sort of their version of GONE WITH THE WIND, a year before it came out. THE LETTER is a terrific Somerset Maugham melodrama. Interesting to watch James Stephenson (who died much too young) and how his subtle playing can undercut Bette Davis’ often overwrought histrionics.

THE TONY AWARDS…I remember when this used to be the classiest awards show on TV. No more. As with far too much TV, they have desperately tried to appeal to that 18-49 year old demographic and junked the show up. This show should either be turned over to PBS or CBS should just acknowledge the Tonys is never going to be a ratings coup and let it be what it needs to be.

The opening number epitomized to me everything that is wrong with Broadway…Bad rock musicals, musicals based on movies, revivals of musicals that have either been revived too often or don't need to be. Rock of Ages is an embarrassment to Broadway and the Tonys, but then, of course, it’s an embarrassment to rock ‘n’ roll too. SHREK? Who needs this? Please, stop the Disneyification of Broadway. Do we really need yet another revival of GUYS & DOLLS which seems like it’s in perennial revival mode…if not Broadway, in the West End. We certainly didn’t need this phlegmatic version. If Broadway wants to revive something, why not FLAHOOLEY or HAZEL FLAGG? Of course, during the Bush years, they missed a chance to revive LI’L ABNER…which would have been a trenchant and timely satire.

And did we really need the numbers of the Road Show companies that looked like high school musicals?

Of course, there were some good things. BILLY ELLIOTT & NEXT TO NORMAL look like interesting musicals. I was pleased with Geoffrey Rush’s win for EXIT THE KING and enjoyed his classy acceptance speech. Always terrific to see the great Frank Langella, even if he’s only presenting and not up for anything. Jerry Herman was a reminder of great old book musicals. Herman has never been a favourite of mine, but I’ll take him over today’s fare and Michael Feinstein singing a few bars of I WON’T SEND ROSES reminded me of what a great song it is…for my money, maybe Herman’s best.

It looked like an fairly interesting season of straight plays which, alas, on a show like this always get short shrift to the musicals. And poor Liza. Poor, poor Liza.

POGUE’S LISTENING TO:

SALAD DAYS…a much-loved British musical from the fifties that is really the silliest bit of tosh.

BEN BAGLEY’S IRVING BERLIN REVISITED…In these composer salutes, the late Mr. Bagley always assembled the most interesting performers and the lesser known songs of the tunesmith; some being little gems, others lesser known for a reason…MR. MONOTONY is not a Berlin high point.

POGUE’S READING:

THE CURSE OF CAIN…by one Theodore J. Nottingham. It purports to be the untold story of John Wilkes Booth even as the author purports to be his descendant. The premise is Booth was not caught, but lived and escaped to Asia. I’m not sure how much I buy into all this…but these kinds of mysteries fascinate me…Who was Jack the Ripper, who killed the Princes in the Tower (I’m a devout Richardian, who believes Richard III was innocent), who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?

EMPEROR & GALILEAN…one of Ibsen’s early history plays. I’ve become quite a fan of these, once I learned of their existence. This happened perusing the exhibits of the now defunct and much lamented Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, where I chanced upon a production photo of Ellen Terry in Ibsen’s VIKINGS AT HELGELAND, directed by her illegitimate son, Gordon Craig. The intriguing title sent me on a hunt for this play and I discovered Mr. Ibsen had been quite busy before such modern classics as A DOLL’S HOUSE and HEDDA GABLER.

EMPEROR & GALILEAN is about the Roman emperor Julian who tried to dispense with Christianity and re-instate the pagan gods. Not that far along in it yet to know how the play holds up, but the subject matter has intrigued me ever since a meeting eons ago with actor Michael York up at his house above Sunset Boulevard where he gave me JULIAN, Gore Vidal’s novel on the same subject to see if it might be something I’d be interested in doing. I was, though I could never figure why he wouldn’t want Vidal to do it. In any event, for reasons I have no memory of…it never came about.

So what’s on your media checklist? Any films, books, or music you want to give thumbs up or down to?

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

2009-06-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

A POGUE BON MOT

“Fear not your enemies for they can only kill you; fear not your friends for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and the betrayers to walk safely on the earth.” -- Edward Yashinsky—

Well, this certainly wasn’t the blog I had intended to write today.

Since I moved back to Kentucky and Lexington, in particular, my perceptions have occasionally been altered as to the area’s embrace of the Arts -- theatre especially -- and hopes have at times been hit with a disappointing dose of reality. Naturally, much of this has to do with my own life and life choices, which have fortunately allowed me the opportunity and wherewithal to experience first-class arts and therefore expectations can be demanding.

But one thing I know is that demographically and financially, Central Kentucky has great potential to support first-class arts organizations. The question is: does it want to? As far as theatre goes, its growth is often by stymied by the theatrical community itself over petty resentments and imagined threats by some who perceive others pursuing their own agenda as interlopers poaching on exclusive turf. Complacency and status quo is often fiercely defended against inevitable change.

But then as some wag once said, “The smaller the stakes, the bigger the battles.” And the small-time internecine...and largely insignificant... squabbles between artists cannot diminish the fact that Central Kentucky’s dark and bloody ground is fertile ground for nurturing a thriving Arts garden. It’s one of the reasons I settled here; there is a chance to cultivate something flourishing, fresh, and nourishing.

That’s why I was dismayed to read in this morning’s paper that the Lexington Fayette Urban County Council has recommended LexArts take a 10-percent cut in the government’s contribution to its annual Campaign for the Arts. Below my letter to the editor of the local paper. I print it here in the event it does not make the paper's editorial cut:

I am appalled at the thinking of Lexington’s city leaders wanting to cut LexArts’ budget. Every week the Herald-Leader has some article about Lexington desperately ruminating on how to attract businesses and the fresh blood of young professionals. The answer is simple. People don’t come to a city to work; they come to a city to live! Vibrant professional quality Arts are an essential part of that living.

Having had a successful career in the Arts and being a board member of Actors Guild of Lexington, I can attest to the value of worthwhile patronage. Six years ago, when Rick St. Peter became artistic director of AGL, he had a mountain of debt and mismanagement to climb.

During his valiant stewardship, the theatre has become what Rich Copley has dubbed “the area’s flagship theater”. It provides quality productions featuring the best local talent alongside outside artists of widespread reputation. The theatre also has established a regional and national profile. It has been featured in American Theatre Magazine. It has originated new work that has been produced and praised elsewhere (including a play of my own).

In my long career, I’ve been blessed with many enriching experiences. Few have been more rewarding than sharing the artistic energy and electrifying ideas that crackle in the air of AGL’s ambitions. But that energy, those ideas, those ambitions, and the great artistic leaps that the theatre has achieved would not have been possible without the critical financial generosity of LexArts and Jim Clark’s guidance. In fact, without LexArts, “the area’s flagship theater” would be just another theatre in this country maintaining a precarious existence…if it still existed at all.

And I’m sure we’re not the only organization in the city dependent on LexArts’ support. But more importantly, the entire city’s quality of life is dependent on the quality of its Arts. They are just as important to a city as its industry and its infrastructure, its sewers and its skyscrapers. If you callously deprive the Arts of crucial funding, you cheat the city and you make it smaller and less livable.

Without thriving Arts, Lexington can never become the first-class city it aspires to be.

Charles Edward Pogue

Now to more light-hearted matters:

POGUE’S MEDIA CHECK

POGUE IS WATCHING:

EDWARD II…a DVD of a 1969 production of Marlowe’s play, starring Ian McKellen. It apparently made ripples in its day…featuring the first kiss between males on British TV. The production is sumptious; stunning costumes and set. And it plays like a house afire. I am amazed at how rapidly the actors can roll out the dialogue with absolute crystal clarity.

PLAYING SHAKESPEARE…or I am about to watch it. The Boxed Set arrived today! This is a series of Shakespeare performance workshops that director John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company conducted with my notable actors from that company…among them Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Michael Pennington, Judi Dench, Jane Lapotaire, Donald Sinden, David Suchet…I’ve been trying to get hold of this since I bought the book several years back and became aware of its existence.

WALLANDER…a Masterpiece Mystery Series on PBS, starring Kenneth Branagh as a Swedish detective, based on a series of novels. Alas, this was the last in the series and I had miseed the earlier ones. Given this one, I’d watch more of ‘em.

POGUE IS LISTENING TO:

HOAGY CARMICHAEL, STARDUST AND MUCH MORE

MY RIFLE, MY PONY, & ME…Songs from western movies and TV shows.

POGUE IS READING:

H. RIDER HAGGARD, A VOICE FROM THE INFINITE…by Peter Berresford Ellis. I picked it up to check some odd fact and ended up reading the whole damned biography. Learned fascinating stuff about the Boer War and WWI.

I feel a strange intimate affinity with this writer, certainly artistically and, in many ways, personally. Part of it has to do with the way man unabashedly would write his unconscious across the page, perhaps…most probably…unknowingly. But he seems to be one of those strange Victorian eccentrics who, while often epitomizing his age, also seems to utterly defy it. In many ways a British Imperialist, yet he had an understanding and sympathy of the native cultures he encountered that was far ahead of his time. Several of his books feature inter-racial romances between European whites and natives. Uusually they end tragically, but even so, in their day they must have been explosive stuff.

It’s one of the reasons KING SOLOMON’S MINES has yet to have had a definitive cinematic version. They always want to graft a romance into the story, so invent a love interest for the protagonist, Henry Curtis. But there is already a poignant and powerful love story between a native girl and one of Curtis’ friends, Good...never in the movies.

It’s the somewhat the same missed focus in any movie adaptation of SHE. Everyone tries to pump up the romantic stakes between the two physically attractive people, She and Leo Vincey. But Leo is a bit of dull, if stalwart, fellow (he comes into his own in the sequel…AYESHA) and the fascinating love story is the intellectual one that takes place between She and old, ugly Horace Holly.

I tried to remedy this in my as-yet-unproduced script of SHE. It is a theme central to much of Haggard’s work…the conflict between physical love and spiritual love (that and the theme of Loss – which my own work has in common with his)…and you really can’t capture the essence of Haggard without addressing and confronting it.

THE BODY OF WORK

2009-05-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

POGUE’S WORDS OF THEATRICAL WISDOM

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem, which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”
-- Tom Stoppard, THE REAL THING--

I think I’m a lazy cuss. I’m the world’s worst procrastinator. I berate myself constantly for not working more regular hours and being more prolific. Though, truth be told, I partly got into the drama game in order not to be chained to a nine-to-five existence (which I've successfully managed to do most of my adult working life), I feel I used to be much more ambitious. I could work sixteen hours non-stop on projects sometime, and even though I can still write on four hours of sleep for extended periods of time or go into all-nighter mode when I’m up against a deadline, I miss the hunger of my youthful drive.

Still I glance over at my office bookshelf and see copies of all my scripts and plays, and think maybe I’m being a little hard on myself. Some thirty-odd manuscripts perch there. My body of work. I haven’t, as some writers or directors do, bound them all in leather and had the titles gold-embossed on the spine, but it still makes a fairly impressive display and comprises a fairly hefty output.

Some of that work has met a kinder fate than other pieces on that shelf. I’m sure the individual experiences of composing each and shepherding them to their ultimate destinies, good or bad, have had a direct effect on how fast my creative juices now flow.

Inevitably after the birth of each piece, there always comes the post-partum depression or, to put it in a sexual context (and both analogies are valid…birth is often the ultimate by-product of sex), “le petite mort” where melancholy ennui and a sense of loss overwhelm one (or from the perspective of most women: where the man farts, rolls over, falls asleep, and won’t indulge in afters-cuddling). How long this drained, adrift feeling lasts and how long it takes to recuperate and get wooed back to work often has to do with how badly beaten up I may have gotten in the Hollywood gristmill.

I frequently say, “I love my work, I hate my job.” My work is filling the blank page. My job is defending that work from all the clamouring paws that want rake their grubby claws across it and claim it in some way.

Of course, some of the work on that shelf never got to the job stage. Of the thirty-odd pieces up there, roughly a third got produced in some form or another, for another third I was paid handsomely and obscenely though the scripts remain unproduced, another third were personal spec projects of mine that have as yet come to fruition (though I still have hopes for many).
Jeffrey Katzenberg once expounded his baseball batting average theory of film to me in my early and frequently frustrating sojourn at Disney in the 80's. It was basically if you got one out of every three projects you worked on made, you were batting .300, which makes you a star in the majors. So if we take the work I did that got made, I guess I’m batting .300. If we add to it the work that I got paid for which also earned me a good living and, through which, I’ve had a long career, I guess I’m batting over .600. Of course, that is a strange way to succeed…paid for work that never reaches its ultimate destination…but I’ve known writers who’ve had very lucrative careers without ever having gotten anything made. Go figure.

People often ask me of all my scripts which is my favourite. This takes one back to birth/sex analogies…because all scripts are like enduring labour or being swept up in a tumultuous love affair. Because of the tumult, a script’s embrace can be agony as much as ecstasy (and my wife could probably sue many a script for alienation of affection). So it's probably better to refer to my scripts as my children. (Of course, children can be both angony and ecstasy, but mixing all these sex/birth references is starting to sound a little incestuous.)

And like children you love each script for its own special qualities. Like a guilty parent, I confess to having favourites and loving some more than others. But like a conscientious parent, I have done the best I can within the perameters I am given and sent that child into the world, saying: “You’re as complete as I know how to make you. I think I’ve done right by you. You’re a good kid, ready to confront the world on your own. I hope you succeed with the values, morals, and merits I’ve nurtured in you.”

I’ve never turned in anything that I didn’t think couldn’t be taken out the next day and shot as is. I don’t believe in first drafts. The “first” draft the studio or a producer usually gets is my fifth or six. If I ever knowingly handed in what I thought an unfinished piece, then I would feel I’ve earned my money dishonestly.

I always tell people you may not like the script personally, but professionally it will always have a logical, well-constructed plot that covers all its bases, have highly actable roles, well-wrought characters and dialogue that will roll off the tongue. I feel I have always delivered that.

Now I’m also reasonable enough to realize that even if I love it, others may not and they may actually have good ideas on how to make it even better that I never thought of.

But at the time I turn it in, I’ve delivered a piece that I feel certainly covers the requirements of good dramaturgy. It will also be something that I’m passionate about, what I wanted to write, and be something I love.

Sometimes when I’ve turned in a script, I’ve been asked by a producer or studio head, “Do you like it?” My response is always somewhat stupefied, “Why would I ever turn in something I didn’t like? If I don’t like it, you’ll never see it. It’s inconceivable to me that people would turn in work that they have doubts about or no confidence in or are not proud of. What’s the point of doing it, if you don’t think you do it well?

And it goes back to that work/job distinction I made earlier. If you don’t believe in the work you’ve produced, when it comes to the job part of defending it, you’re going to have a tough time trying to justify it. It’s hard enough to keep good work intact against the myriad opinions that will assail it; but if you don’t love what you’ve done, you ain’t going last long in the arena.

So? Which of my darlings does Daddy coddle the most. Here’s a confession: Despite that it will probably be my tombstone film, THE FLY ain’t the one dearest to my heart. Part of that is because I wrote THE FLY with Cronenberg (or rather he rewrote me), so it loses some of the personal connection for me, despite an excellent end result that all can be proud of.

But that is talking about it as a film, not a script. I can only deal with scripts, my work, not what happens to it after it leaves my control (A HINT: Never judge a writer by the final film, judge him by his script.). I fear my reputation in town is as a writer who writes terrific scripts that get turned into rather mediocre movies.

THE FLY I will always love because it was my first foray into doing major studio work…but it is like a child of divorce that got taken away from me, so there will always be a disconnect there because I never had the chance to influence it as strongly I would have like to, though I still see much of me in it (The same can be said for DOA...which, at the time, Michael Eisner, then head of Disney, said was the best script he had read in over a year. It is so linked to what was a horrible development process and a film I'm disappointed in, it hurts to revisit it. I've not seen it all the way through since its preview screening.)

DRAGONHEART, despite the disappointment of the film (for me, at least) was a transcendant script, closest to me in all aspects (and subsequently one of the fastest and easiest things I ever wrote), and was a joy to write. I also think I took giant steps as a writer and went to another plane in my style and the way I approach the work. I loved it so much that I ended up writing the novel of it, because I wanted to record that joy that could not get destroyed in the film-making process. The novel was the most fulfilling writing experience I ever had.

(Below: on the Dragonheart set, with pal stunt co-ordinator, Paul Weston, and his right hand man, the late and much missed Johnny Lees. The noose forebodes things to come.)

I enjoyed PSYCHO III for different reasons. To successfully navigate the challenge of the onus of a sequel, a classic, and come up with something fresh and different, to adapt to a specific actor (Tony Perkins) and stylistic choice were all exciting things to do. Believe it or not, this script probably helped my career much more than THE FLY did. It was praised by many PSYCHO aficionados and got me that fateful overall deal at Disney. And in it, I see growth as a writer. I think it’s a better constructed script than my FLY was. Tony so loved the script, he asked to direct it.

My HERCULES mini-series was again a disappointment. Designed as a four-hour mini, it got cut to three and had at the helm a director I felt didn’t really understand the mythological antecedents of the material. But I adored writing it and the finished script, as did everyone at NBC and Hallmark. I poured myself into research, exploring the myths behind the myths (thanks Robert Graves) to produce an original take on the hero that dealt with larger issues of family, duty, atonement, and the tyranny of religion. How much of that translated from the original two-hundred page script to the screen, I don’t know.

Things like my HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES and SIGN OF FOUR, KULL THE CONQUEROR, and PRINCESS OF MARS, despite their individual fates, I love because I got to adapt literary works I love and I think should be exposed to others. And I think in all three, I found my personal passion and was able to blend the voice of the original author and my voice in such a way that they were indiscernible from one another. To create work that was intrinsically Pogueian (?) and yet Doyleian, Burroughsian, or Howardian at the same time is a neat trick. Though I often took liberties with the work, I feel I remained faithful to the spirit of these authors. My Sherlock Holmes films, particularly HOUND, I quite enjoy…HOUND maybe being the most faithful film of any of my scripts. Alas, the dark, moody, visceral prose style of Howard that I tried so hard to imbue KULL THE CONQUEROR with was desecrated in a film that became a rolling juggernaut of illogic and a cartoon. PRINCESS OF MARS will probably never see the light of day, though has a cult status in Burroughs fandom.

PRINCESS remains, along with many other scripts that never became films, among my most beloved…the children you had such hopes for but were untimely struck down by cruel fate before they reached their full promise. Those were:

THE LAST VIKING…a blood and thunder epic that was so much more. Again, diligently researched, historically accurate, and rich, resonant human themes of loss and the passing of age. Those who can adapt, survive; those who cannot, die. But with them goes a vibrancy and a certain life-force to be mourned. And I may mourn this script more than any other.

THE HOUSE OF WAX…sums up my whole philosophy of artistic endeavour and Hollywood horseshit. The age-old battle of art versus commerce. Black comedy or tragedy?

THE MAGIC COTTAGE…this is another one that really hurts the heart. It is an adaptation of a James Herbert novel which might simply be one of the most beautifully crafted pieces of work I’ve ever done and is incredibly moving, smart, and scary. I still treasure a message I got on my phone machine from Herbert: “I think it’s absolutely superb. It’s so close to the book for me, and I was surprised by that because I didn’t know how you could do it. But it’s wonderful and it’s added so much more to it. But the overall reaction is it’s extraordinary. I love it.” But the truth is…it’s radically different than the novel. But that’s part of the gift of that script; it’s very different but remains very true. Don’t ask me how I did it, I don’t know. I think it had to do with a passionate connection to the ideals and themes that spoke to me in the work or at least gave me a platform to find my themes and voice in it.

THIEF OF BAGHDAD…an exhilarating romp of great wit and adventure with an undercurrent of darker themes.

ARISE, DISSEMBLER (AKA DECEIVED)…maybe not the best script I’ve ever written, but probably the most dangerous…people either love it or hate it…and I love that extreme reaction to it, it means I went somewhere real interesting. An executive at TRI-STAR offered this script back to me (which I had been paid for), free and clear, if I would write another script for them. I didn’t take the deal, but in retrospect, I should have.

THE WITCHING HOUR…It’s a good script and a GREAT adaptation of the long, complex novel by Anne Rice. My pal Roger Leasor once met Ms. Rice at a book-signing and mentioned my adaptation. Her reply: “Oh! The one I liked!” She seemed as frustrated by its abandonment as much as I.

BLOOD OF THE GODS…a twenties adventure/mystery in the Talbot Mundy/Sax Rohmer mold. Artist Greg Manchess and I are exploring turning it into a graphic novel.

SATAN’S SORROW…a Southern Gothic Ghost Story set in Kentucky (or as I call it Southern Noir). Several years ago, I tried to set it up as an independent with an untried director. Though the script got raves, no one bit. One producer at Universal told me it was an A+, then was stunned when I told him it was the second film script I ever wrote). It’s ever so loosely based on a Rimsky-Korsakov opera/ballet MLADA. I’m still trying to set it up as an independent, to be filmed in Kentucky. I also may adapt into a play.

My plays are fondly loved children:

WHODUNNIT, DARLING?,.. a frivolous Thin Man pastiche, a play and a film script (unpoduced), both with separate plots, written with Larry Drake.

(Below poster Art by Eric Johnson, who also played the lead)

THE EBONY APE…my original Sherlock Holmes play. I loved directing this piece and seeing all the words and action play out exactly as written…a unique experience after several years of film work and a confirmation that I knew what I was doing.

(Above: Eric Johnson as Sherlock Holmes)

TARTUFFE…A whole new facet of writing for me. Reading four or five translations of a classic foreign language play, assimilating it all, then finding my own way into the play with my own style and own language that reflects and embraces the original. This was an exciting challenge and I want to do more of this.

There are other children…all of whom I love, for different reasons, some perhaps beyond their merits…But they’ve all brought me joy…in their creation, in their nurturing; when I go back and read snatches of them, it’s like watching old family movies…they make me laugh, cry, occasionally wince…I see not only their growth, but my own. And though I’ve grown in different ways and acquired deeper and more refined skills, I think perhaps I’ve lost others…a freshness, an indestructible sense of fervour, a naivete. I’m a more mature and wiser writer, but I don’t know that I’m quite as unihibited a writer. It takes me longer to get where I used to get instinctually. That could just be the business beating me up and me having to push past that “Why kill yourself, they’ll only fuck it up” mentality in order to get to that rarified enchantment of just me and the words and screw the rest of the world.

But I can look back at “the body of work” and feel I’m right to love them all in their own special way. And I can be proud because I always put everything I had to give at the time into the work. I never cheated anyone or gave less; they got all the ability I had.

DISCOURAGING WORDS

During a panel about the future of media, Sony Chief Executive Michael Lynton said that the internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time…They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now.’ And if you don’t give to them for free, they steal it.”

Nora Ephron was even more discouraging: “We’re in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it…Stop it. I dare you.”

POGUE’S WEEKLY MEDIA CHECK

POGUE’S WATCHING:

DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH…a documentary about my pal Harlan Ellison. And it is quintessential Ellison. Witty, warm, abrasive, outspoken, uncompromisingly honest, and moving. I think it is officially released next week.

WESTERNS…this week, in idle moments, I caught two of my favourite westerns that I simply cannot turn away from whenever they’re on:

THE BIG COUNTRY, an epic directed by William Wyler and featuring fine performances by everyone…including Greg Peck, Charlton Heston, Burl Ives, Jean Simmons, Chuck Connors, and Alfonso Bedoya. On a smaller scale…

RAMROD, my favourite western noir…Alex DeToth directs Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, the always wonderful Donald Crisp, and Don DeFore in maybe the best role he ever had. And every night, I watch on the Westerns Channel, the old TV show…

CHEYENNE…This was probably the first night-time TV show I watched religiously. Clint Walker was the favourite television star of my youth. Julieanne insists I have a man-crush on the big lug. I don’t know…it might explain why I notice subtle influences from the show and character that I must’ve personally adopted years ago…like my sartorial preference for two-pocket shirts, worn unbuttoned two buttons down from the collar and the cuffs turned once, not rolled, so that they flare.

POGUE’S LISTENING TO:

Scores to:

THE PRINCE OF FOXES…by Alfred Newman.

MOONFLEET…by Miklos Rozsa.

Also…

STEVE ROSS, Live at the Algonquin

HELEN MERRILL, Dream of You

POGUE’S READING:

LA REQUIEM, THE FORGOTTEN MAN, & CHASING DARKNESS…all by Robert Crais, featuring his LA private detective Elvis Cole. I slightly know Robert through Ellison and WGA. Nice guy. Terrific writer.

PRINCE FRIEDRICH OF HOMBURG…a play from 1811 by Heinrich Von Kliest, a tormented playwright who eventually committed suicide now often equated with the likes of Schiller. I did not find HOMBERG, quite in the same league as DON CARLOS or some of Schiller’s other work.

THE ROSE OF DEATH…supernatural short stories by Julian Hawthorne, so far rather unimpressive.

Happy Birthday to My Lovely Wife, Julieanne! (May 13th!)

2009-05-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety."

Those Who Deserve The Thanks (or The Mentors Who Took The Real Chance On You)

2009-04-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

POGUE'S WORDS OF THEATRICAL WISDOM

“Ninety percent of talent is knowing what to do with it.”
--Charles F. Dickens, UK Theatre Professor & My Mentor—

Remember when Tom Hanks thanked his drama teacher as he accepted his Oscar for PHILADELPHIA? It was a moment I enjoyed, because when I’ve delivered my fantasy Oscar/Tony/Emmy speech in my head (and let’s be honest, any of us in this business…and probably a great many who aren’t…have composed that imaginary speech at one time or another), I always thank the unsung heroes…the folks who gave me a push up the ladder when I was also unsung.

Despite the profusion of no doubt deserving family, actors, directors, producers, and agents one needs to dole out gratitude to, the people usually overlooked in this “I owe you so much” exercise are…well, you can’t really call them “the little people”, because they weren’t!

They were maybe the biggest people in your life…the ones who may not have exerted the greatest influence on you or had the most significant impact on your career, but were a part of …perhaps the inspiration for…those little defining moments when veils lifted for you, connective tissue was provided, or decisions were made that altered your mindset or offered opportunity. The stepping stones or rungs of the ladder that allowed you to ascend to another level, see a greater vision, breathe a rarer air.

Once you’ve reached a certain height, gained a certain reputation, built a credible resume, it’s not that great a risk for the other guy to throw his lot in with you. But what about those who saw you when you were invisible? Who took a chance on you when you no one else would…those mentors who took their time to encourage and nurture your desire and fledging talent when it was still unproven?

My imaginary award speech acknowledges my high school teachers, Sara Hamel and Norman Yonce, who helped broaden my creativity.

(Below: My first starring role...in fact, my first role of any kind. Henry Spoffard III, in a non-musical version of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, directed by Sara Hamel. The lovely young ladies, r to l: Anne Durham, Jane Johnson, Vicki Conners (seated w/book),Cindy Ney, Rebecca Goshorn).

Certainly, college theatre professors Charles Dickens, Mary Stephenson, Wally Briggs, and Ray Smith would be included. Julieanne and I were fortunate to pay back the great debt we both owed to Charles Dickens, by being able to dedicate the UK Theatre Movement Studio to him.

(below: Me, as Claudio; Julieanne, as Isabella in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, directed by Charles Dickens at UK's Guignol Theatre).

Professionally, directors like Charles David McCally, Richard Vath, and Paul Giovanni boldly took a chance on my acting talent and hired me. Charles and Richard repeatedly hired me and kept me gainfully employed.

(Below: Me with Marianne Hammock in COMEDY OF ERRORS, directed by Charles David McCally, at the Globe of the Great Southwest. Marianne was the Courtesan; I played the gyspyish master of ceremonies/leader of a Comedia Dell' arte Troupe presenting the play. Egged on by McCally, I wrote the part myself; how's that for sheer brass...competing with Shakespeare with the some of the silliest doggrel this side of the Southbank? SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY referred to my role as: "The illusion was initiated by the introduction of an unctuous presenter who huckstered the audience in rhymed couplets.")

(Above: The Cast of MOVE OVER, MRS. MARKHAM, directed by Richard Vath for Country Dinner Playhouse in Dallas. That's me in the curly wig.)

Paul took me aside at a callback from an Ahmanson Theatre open call for a play he had written, THE CRUCIFER OF BLOOD. He told me, “Of the 300 people you see at an open call and of the eighty you call back, maybe only a couple a dozen have real talent. I want you to know, you’re one of those. But what even the talented people who come out here with their battered suitcases full of dreams don’t understand is: nobody cares. You have to make them care. I want you to know you made me care and I’m going to do all I can to get you in this show.” He got me into it. I and one another actor were told we were the first two ever hired from an open Equity call at the Ahmanson (Below: Me on the floor, between Charlton Heston & Jeremy Brett).

Jeremy Brett, who starred in the play with Charlton Heston, was another one who “cared”. One of the few true gentlemen I’ve met in the business. I remember once, at a cast party, he suddenly smiled and wagged a knowing his finger at me, “ You have this wonderful imagination that conjures knights and faery castles and dragons and marvelous dreams and you think no one sees it, but…they do!” That great kindness meant a lot to me and was never forgotten. It was just one of many encouraging generosities he showed me during the run of the show and after.

I would also mention Clive Trenchard and Janet Greek, through whose auspices, my writing was seen by my first agent, Melinda Jason, who also took a chance on me. And Melinda introduced me to Sy Weintraub. I couldn’t forget Sy.

I say Melinda introduced me to Sy. Actually, she sent me to meet him. For even though we had never met before, I had been introduced to him some time ago.

Sy, a producer, had just acquired the rights to Sherlock Holmes and was planning to do a series of two-hour films for network TV. I was excited. I had read the stories as a boy and had seen the Basil Rathbone films so many times that the phrase “Hello, what’s this?” was a permanent part of my repertoire.

Sy achieved huge success with Tarzan, doing films in the fifties and sixties and the television show with Ron Ely (Sy certainly knew which literary characters to exploit). This also worked in my favour; for when I had been devouring Doyle, I had also been plowing through Edgar Rice Burroughs. So I was intimately familiar with Sy’s cinematic efforts on the ape-man’s behalf…hence our earlier introduction, unbeknownst to him. But he was impressed by this and seemed eager to take a chance on me, an untried writer with no credits, only a couple of sample scripts and some plays (unproduced ones).

(Below: Me, with Gordon Scott, who was Sy's first cinematic Tarzan. I was signing PRINCESS OF MARS scripts and DRAGONHEART books for the Burroughs' Bibliophiles...of which I'm a proud member...at their annual Dum-Dum in LA.)

But the clincher was Timmy.

In one of Dr. Watson’s accounts of his friend Sherlock Holmes, the great detective exhorts the good doctor to remember “the curious incident of the dog.” It was my own curious incident with the dog that helped me out with Sy --Timmy.

Timmy had played the Bionic Dog in the TV series THE BIONIC WOMAN. A German Shepherd the size of a small Volkswagon, Timmy, now retired from acting, earned his Purina as Sy’s guard dog. And he knew his job. I mean, if left alone in the room with this critter, you made no sudden moves.

Sy considered Timmy an excellent judge of character and had been advised by the trainer never do business with anybody the dog didn’t cotton to. What can I tell ya? The big brute loved me. All over me…licking, nuzzling, sniffing my crotch. Couldn’t shake him: followed me everywhere. I’d definitely made an impression.

And my subsequent work fortunately did not sour the impression. Sy tried me out on a Frankenstein script he had going into production in a few weeks which needed a rewrite – a page-one rewrite. Ten days later, I gave him one. He and I spent another week on it, pumping more action into it without sacrificing what Sy called its “literary” tone.

Alas, the film ultimately fell through, but Sy was impressed enough with my writing that he brought me on to his proposed Sherlock Holmes series. Sy had been having trouble getting scripts that satisfied him, complaining that the American writers gave him recycled “Rockford Files” in gaslight and the British writers gave him “austere” MASTERPIECE THEATRE productions. Somehow, with my adaptation of Doyle’s THE SIGN OF FOUR, I managed to find the requisite blend of action and authentic Holmesian nuance.
(Above: Me, Dame Jean Conan Doyle...A.C. Doyle's last surviving daughter..., actress Cheri Lunghi, Sy Weintraub, and Dame Jean's husband...Sir Jeffrey Something or other on the set of SIGN OF FOUR. She was a very nice lady who quite liked my adaptations.)

If before I had been an aficionado of Holmes, I now became an expert. I re-read the entire canon (the annotated one) and when Sy called me from London to tell me the other script he had been counting on to start the series was dreadful and what could I do, I replied: “I can give you HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES in two weeks.” He had it in twelve days (Oh, I was energetic and hungry back then).
(Above: Ian Richardson as Holmes; Donald Churchill as Watson in HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES)

Two months later, I was in London, the only city in the world I ever wanted to visit, abroad for the first time in my life, the only other American connected to the project besides Sy. He put me up in a flat from where I could watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, gave me a generous per diem, bought me breakfast (and introduced me to the Scotch Egg, the most delectable breakfast food item known to man) and lunch everyday at Shepperton Studios where for the next three months I watched some of England’s finest actors, led by Ian Richardson as Holmes, speak my lines.

Sy didn’t make me rich but he gave me something much more valuable to a writer. Respect and Power. On my first jet-lagged day at the studio, I was going into a meeting with the director of SIGN, who had a few “inspirations” about script changes. Sy told me right before the meeting: “These scripts are where you and I want them and I don’t want to change anything, unless you think it’s right, so listen to the director, but commit to nothing.” What a wonderful cachet to be given going into a creative meeting. The director didn’t get his changes.

On set, actors would come ask me if they could change a line. Sy let everyone on the production know I was the in-house expert on Holmes and any questions should be relayed to me. I was in on every creative meeting. I was in on casting. Sy insisted I grab a pad and pencil and get my butt to rushes every day and take notes. He wanted me in the editing-room. When I protested I knew nothing about editing, he said: “It’s common sense. You’ll learn.” Of the six editing suggestions I made, they used five. Sy expressed his philosophy about producing to me once: “I learn everything I can about every aspect of the business. Then when someone comes up to me and tells me they can’t do something, I say, ‘Oh, yes, you can and here’s how…’ even telling them what lens to use, if I have to.”

He was an old-fashioned producer who refused to abandon either his passion or his power to the encroaching fashion of “the auteur” or “the package”. He was always the boss. He knew the difference between collaboration and capitulation, and he knew, despite the hype of “director’s vision”, that the “vision” came from and belonged to the script and that everyone who signed onto the project was there to serve that vision.

Sy was grooming me to be his point-man in England and write every episode of the series, if I wanted. But there was no series. The Networks just couldn’t wrap sweeps week around deductive reasoning and deerstalker hats. So the films ran rampantly on cable, won some European festivals, were embraced by the disciples of Doyle, and gave me more satisfaction as a writer than I’ve ever had since in this business.

The result is I got two films that actually resemble what I wrote. THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES has been called, “The best version of the Doyle classic to date…This deserved theatrical release but didn’t get it.” It remains my favourite of all my films. And it’s the only one that I still pull out from time-to-time and watch with unqualified joy, never having to flinch at mistakes and lament what might have been (Below: Ron Lacey as Inspector Lestrade in HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES).

Sy used to joke that he’d made me famous and now he couldn’t afford me. But the truth is all he had to do was ask; I’d have found a way to make it work.

Whenever I drove by Sy’s house, I always slowed the car to admire the massive sculpture in his back yard. It was a larger-than-life knight on a massive charger fashioned from some sort of shiny silver metal. One day, I drove by and noticed the knight was gone. I called Sy to find out he had moved, the knight had been sold, and Sy was now exploring the world of internet entertainment. That was Sy…always moving forward, on to the next thing, always ahead of the game.

Then, six months after that phone call, I woke one morning to read his obituary in the paper. He had died of pancreatic cancer in April of 2000.

After that, driving by Sy’s old house, I missed seeing that towering knight shimmering in the sun. It always reminded me of Sy’s chivalrous mentoring when I was just an aspiring talent looking for a chance to prove myself.

Thanks, Sy, for giving me that chance. Thanks for giving me one of the happiest times of my life. Thanks for respecting my talent and the work and spoiling me for every other experience I’ve ever had in the business. Thanks for never lying to me and keeping every promise you ever made to me. When I get beaten down in the development process or a production is going awry or the writer is getting screwed yet again, I remember my time with you and all your kindnesses to me and how collaboration is supposed to work and the memory is sweet.

The ideal you showed me and the example you set gives me the strength to climb back in the trenches each time and fight for what should be rather than what is.

(below: Douglas Hickox, director of HOUND & Sy Weintraub)

***

Okay, you’re clutching your gold statuette, the band is cutting you off, what unsung mentor haven’t you thanked yet?

POGUE’S WEEKLY MEDIA CHECK

POGUE’S WATCHING:

YOU NEVER CAN TELL. From the BBC Boxed George Bernard Shaw DVD Set. Shaw’s is a tremendously witty writer who makes me guffaw. The play is quite wonderful. With Robert Powell and Patrick Magee.

THE FURIES. With Babara Stanwyck and Walter Huston. The title, The Furies, is apt because this strange western is very Greek, also very noir.

POGUE’S LISTENING TO:

THE HAPPY TIME. Original Cast recording of the Kander/Ebb show.

SPOTLIGHT ON…VIC DAMONE. Sinatra said Damone had “the best pipes in the business.” I’m inclined to agree. Very smooth…and great song selection.

POGUE’S READING:

A COLLECTION OF HOWARD BARKER PLAYS. Notably VICTORY, THE CASTLE, and SCENES FROM AN EXECUTION. The last I saw in a terrific production years ago at the Ahmanson in LA with the magnificent Frank Langella and Juliet Stevenson. Barker is a fascinating writer who apparently is much more celebrated elsewhere than in his own home country of Britain. My colleagues at AGL, Artistic Director Rick St. Peter, and Associate Director, Eric Seale, would love this guy…Eric for his anarchistic qualities, Rick for his Brechtian aspects and his language. It is the language certainly that attracts me, which is poetry even when he utilizes what some might consider crude and offensive language. I also love his attraction for what seem to me, “epic themes”. He has an interesting theory of Theatre of Castastrophe..it’s first principle being art is not digestible, “but an irritant in the consciousness, like a grain of sand in an oyster’s gut…” A theatre company was formed…The Wrestling School…primarily to perform his work.

WRITTEN BY MAGAZINE, the magazine of the Writers Guild, which has a terrific interview and article on the brilliant Larry Gelbart, who I’ve been fortunate to meet on several occasions, and other interesting articles about writers of my age and older and how we deal with the “second and third acts” of our lives and careers.

Any weekly media recommendations of your own to make?

SCENE & BE SEEN

Actors Guild of Lexington’s spring fund-raising event, Scene & Be Seen, takes place May 9th, at Spindletop Hall, in Lexington. This year’s theme, The Silver Masquerade, celebrates the theatre’s 25th season. For details: http://www.sceneandbeseen.org/ . Come! Have fun! Donate! Support Theatre! Support this theatre!

You Wonder How these Things Begin...? (Or Pogue Diverges into a Political Diatribe)

2009-04-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder how Nazi Germany happened? How the general, everyday populace, the regular folks, blindly allowed such Evil to insinuate itself until it took over the government?

Take a gander at the debate going on in America right now. People so partisan in their political outlook that they refuse to acknowledge that their leaders made mistakes…or worse, committed crimes. People out there, particularly leaders and pundits of the Republican persuasion, are actually trying to rationalize and justify torture. Torture! There is no question about it. Many of these methods have been outlawed for years! What’s more, every seasoned interrogator will tell you they’re ineffective for eliciting information.

Still nightly the Republican stooges creep out and parrot the same canards spewing from Dick Cheney…hardly a icon of veracity in the world. How much video tape do we have of this man caught in bald-faced lies? When do news organizations just ignore his cynical, self-serving bleatings?

My favourite bit of the torture defense is: “The proof that this works is because we haven’t been attacked again since 9/11.” Sorry, folks, you can’t prove a negative. And if we’re going down the speculative road, try this one: Maybe if Al Gore had been president, he and his staff might have actually read and paid attention to memos entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack the US” and maybe there’d have been no 9/11 and we wouldn’t have been attacked at all.

But haven’t we crossed a line somewhere here? It was bad enough when we all sat idly back and let the Bush/Cheney thugs winnow away the constitution and eviscerate our civil liberties. I don’t recall much outrage from any pundit, either liberal or conservative,…let alone the public…pointing out the hypocrisy of saying we were democratizing the Middle East while at the same time we were trampling democracy here. I didn’t fear the terrorists! I feared our government! The terrorists didn’t have to destroy our way of life when our own leaders were doing precisely that-- by denying us our freedoms and almost gleefully moving us to a dictatorial demographic, where they did what they wanted whether it was legal or not.

Fortunately, our system of government appears to function and when it goes too far into one extreme, it does seem to correct itself…as the last election proved. So maybe we’re not teetering on the abyss of Nazism just yet.

In fact, the Democrats are probably pissing themselves with utter joy at the entrenched stupidity of the Republican Party…which just doesn’t seem to have a clue how to save itself. Trying to justify something as despicable as torture only further marginalizes them.

I suppose defending yet another Bush administration abuse plays to the dim-brained, gun-hugging, “my country, right or wrong, love it or leave it” pseudo-patriots incapable of pondering a complex thought and who march in mindless lock-step (or is it goose-step) to party doctrine without ever questioning it. But does it really play with anyone who has the rudimentary ability to think?

Remember when Nixon’s crimes came to light. I don’t think there were a lot of Republicans who were trying to justify those. Mr. Nixon resigned because everybody, both Dems and Republicans, was bi-partisanly aghast and ready to impeach him.

Yet during Bushie’s reign, things were done that were far, far worse and, despite the fact, that the incompetency of the last eight years helped banish the Republicans to the wilderness, the rank and file remain recalcitrantly loyal. Another reason they are clueless: party loyalty to people and behaviour that has dishonoured your party is not honourable; it only continues to tarnish your party and you! It’s like someone remaining loyal to a relation who is a mass murderer. Real party loyalty is being able to speak truth to the party, not just echo the party line against all logic, and to be able to honestly assess and address the party’s flaws and mistakes.

Granted, Americans have short memories, but the folk now saying torture is a good thing and trying to whitewash the arrogance, crimes, and vileness of the last eight years are the same yahoos who were screaming, “Rule of Law!” when trying to impeach Clinton over his sexual dalliances. Let’s juggle that on the scales for a minute. Which is worse? Lying about an illicit blow job or starting a false and costly war on a litany of lies, undermining the constitution, using outlawed torture methods, and a host of lesser crimes and misconduct? At least nobody died when Clinton lied. Where are those Republican cries for “Rule of Law” now?

But again all this just works to the advantage of the Democrats. The GOP ought to stand for Grumpy Old Poops…largely a lot grey, angry old men clinging not to the ideals of their own generation, but the generations before them…and not realizing that the world has passed them by and they have become irrelevant. A much younger, integrated electorate is moving in…one that doesn’t care about racial divisiveness, ole time bible-thumping religion, or whether gays marry or not. Nor are they stupid enough to believe you when you say black’s white, torture is okay, cut- and- dried laws can be twisted to meaninglessness by clever lawyers, and the constitution and civil liberties can be ignored when convenient.

I confess. I’ve voted Republican in the past…it’s been the looong past, because the Republican Party of today is not one I at all recognize. They used to be the party of less government. Today they want to be in your living-room, bedroom, your church (or your non-church, if you so chose), your library, your computer…even your mind, if they could figure out a way to do it. Frankly, I wish they’d find their way back to the mainstream, the moderate, and the reasonable. I’d like to have a legitimate choice in the voting booth again. But…

...I fear they are bound to blunder about the wilderness on a long arduous trek until they finally get it. As long as they continue to pander to the lowest common denominator of their party, inflame ignorance instead of embracing intelligence, kowtow to the hacks of Faux News, and quake in fear of offending a cretinish clown like Rush Limbaugh, they will keep on awanderin' and the Democrats will have a field day. As long as they remain a party of fatuous flaks and flunkeys who prize party loyalty over common sense and stump for heinous ideals like torture, they will shrivel their base until it includes only mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging slope-heads and extremists of all stripes who are not so much their base as their embarrassment.

***

Well, I warned you in my welcome above that I'd dwell on anything that interested me or irritated me. The above qualifies as "irritated". But end of rant. Back to my less feverish dog and pony in a few days.

Pogue

P.S.- Happy Birthday, Wild Bill Shakespeare!

SLEUTHING THE THEATRE STACKS (or READ ANY GOOD PLAYS LATELY)

2009-04-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

THEATRICAL WORDS OF WISDOM

"Whattya reading?"

"Shakespeare's Comedies."

"Why ain't ya laughing?"

--A fellow serviceman interrogating my mentor, UK Theatre Professor Charles F. Dickens, in their barracks one day on his reading matter.--

***

Of the 5-6,000 books in my house, roughly a third of them are devoted to drama. Naturally, much of my theatre reading is a necessity for my profession. But let me forgo any pretension; I simply find reading about theatre and theatre folk a pure pleasure.

Plays can have all the thrills, chills, and spills of a rip-snorting, page-turning novel and they’re mostly dialogue; no digesting huge paragraphs of descriptive prose, delineating the landscape of some pastoral environment or the murkier landscape of the protagonist’s mind. Plays tend to get right to the grapes. And bios, memoirs, rehearsal journals, and even more analytical tomes are often rife with juicy anecdotes, gossip, and just great raconteurism. We in the theatre love theatre yarns.

So what am I reading? Plays…all the time. Sometimes I knock off four-five in a row. Often I use them as palate-cleansers between weightier matter – thick novels or history. Sometimes it’s purely an immersion in research. As something of theatre archeologist, I’m fascinated by the old, the odd, the obscure, the rarely performed…wanting to ferret out why something once popular has now been forgotten or why something failed. Sometimes such discoveries are illuminating – unveiling something that deserves re-examination. Sometimes one just finds a challenge, something that makes one go: “I’d like to see if this could actually work on stage.”

Ever hear of Stephen Phillips? He was a verse dramatist who wrote plays about historical or mythic figures…NERO, HAROLD, ULYSSES, to name a few…I recently picked up something by Rostand, celebrated Cyrano author, called THE FAR PRINCESS. It’s no Cyrano, but it’s intriquing. The Tony-winning musical, SPRING AWAKENING was based on an early 20th-century German play, THE AWAKENING OF SPRING (or Fruhlingserwachen, if you’re a purist…umlaut over the “u”) by Frank Wedekind…I plucked a Wedekind collection off a dusty shelf in a used bookstore with the alluring title TRAGEDIES OF SEX, also containing EARTH SPIRIT, DAMNATION, and PANDORA’S BOX on which the great silent movie was based, directed by G.B. Pabst and starring Louise Brooks.

When actor Tony Haigh did AGL’s EXITS & ENTRANCES, he quoted from a once-venerable classic of the British stage, HASSAN, by James Elroy Flecker. What a curious piece! Doing a search on an as-yet-unread novel in my book collection I uncovered another piece by the author, Robert Raynolds: a verse drama called BOADICEA. I ordered it over the internet. Its arrival brought some other surprises…the book was autographed and given to a friend by the person to whom the book is dedicated. The dedicatee’s friend apparently knew the author as well; for she had scrawled on the end cover: “This book is written by a little boy I knew years ago in St. Louis.” I love little historical connections like these. Unlike the novel, I have read the play…interesting…

It’s always interesting to discover dramatic forays by novelists I collect. I own two plays by Rafael Sabatini, author of CAPTAIN BLOOD and SCARAMOUCHE. The published play, THE TYRANT, is a sympathetic portrayal of Cesare Borgia and I find possibly performable.

Another, SACRAMENT OF SHAME, is a Xerox of Sabatini’s typescript which wended its way to me from a University archive through a fellow collector (legitimately, I hasten to add). It needs work. Sabatini wrote other produced plays that I’d like to track down, two adaptations of novels…one, SCARAMOUCHE, was a popular vehicle for the English actor-manager John Martin-Harvey. I’ve a programme from this production in the 20’s, but have yet to track down the play.

(John Martin-Harvey Scaramouche programme)

The same is true for a production of BEAU GESTE from the twenties that starred no less than Laurence Olivier, Jack Hawkins, and Madeleine Carroll. The play followed in the wake of the novel’s enormous success, but was a failure on stage. Olivier gave up the role of Stanhope in the stunning JOURNEY’S END to play the title role in this flop. Surveying the scene breakdown in the programme I have, I can get an inkling of why the play failed…one being they seemed to have tossed out the fascinating opening of the book and subsequent successful film versions…the discovery of a desert fortress manned by dead men and the other mysteries that follow hard on its heels. But I suspect this adventure yarn would be nearly impossible to stage effectively. I would love to find a copy of this play which I suspect only exists in manuscript form, if it still exists at all. (Olivier Beau Geste Programme)

Just recently a volume of plays, MAMEENA, by another novelist I collect, Rider Haggard, was published. Two plays are based on popular novels of his; the other an original. The extensive footnotes provided fascinating background and, in one case, production history. The original play TO HELL OR CONNAUGHT deals with Cromwell’s persecution of the Irish and was a piece that Haggard tried to interest Yeats to do at the Abbey Theatre. Suffice it to say, Mr. Yeats was wise to reject the piece and Mr. Haggard’s prodigious talents as a novelist are not reflected in this play.

Another curio is THE JEST by Sem Benelli -- a famous triumph for brothers Lionel and John Barrymore in the 20’s. I procured a Xerox from another Barrymore aficionado, a director pal, who got it from John Barrymore III who had produced a production of the play in LA a few years back. The hand-written cues and notes in the margins as well as the title page information indicates this might well be a Xerox of a production copy from the original Broadway mounting of the play.

Of course, not all my play-reading is restricted to the ancient and obscure. I’m currently making a concerted effort to get through any Stoppard I haven’t read or seen and the same for August Wilson. Other reading has lured me into the “Royal Court/Angry Young Man” period and so I’ve been devouring some John Whiting, John Osborne, John Arden, with Arnold Wesker waiting on the night-table. It’s nice to fill this gap in my education and discover some terrific plays.

Every time I return from London (see London Theatre Blogs below), my suitcase is crammed with recently produced plays there…many very good that never seem to make it to this side of the Pond. And I still take plenty of jaunts into the classics…Elizabethan, Jacobean, Restoration, Ibsen, Shaw, the Greeks. I recently read PERICLES for the first time. A curious play with an interlocutor linking the action and a passive hero, but still rife with enough fascinating moments that my curiosity is peaked to see how one might effectively mount this lesser Shakespearean play.

But let’s get to those juicy, gossipy books of great raconteurism. There’s none better than SIR JOHN GIELGUD: A LIFE IN LETTERS…a collection of Sir John’s epistles from the 1920’s to shortly before his death. Besides a wonderful record of the theatre scene, it is full of Gielgud’s insights into theatre, and his funny, perceptive, and often deliciously catty remarks about other theatre illuminati. Sir John has written several books. To mention a few: ACTING SHAKESPEARE, his experiences with his many productions, both as a director and actor; DISTINGUISHED COMPANY, his memories of several notable actors of the British Stage; and NOTES FROM THE GODS, mini-reviews he scribbled on his programmes from the various plays he saw early in the 20th century.

A more recent raconteur is Sir Peter Hall, the great British director who founded the RSC and ran the National Theatre. PETER HALL’S DIARIES recount when he was appointed successor to Laurence Olivier at the National and shepherded its move to the South Bank. His struggles with Olivier, the board, the directors, the actors, and the egos (his own included) are all diligently recorded.

In sharp counterpoint are THE DIARIES OF KENNETH TYNAN, the great theatre critic and Olivier’s literary manager at the National. Tynan and Hall were not chums and it’s intriguing to see the same incidents perceived entirely differently by two monumental figures involved in the National’s nurturing.

Both these gents, however opposite their views, provide more info than does Olivier in any of his memoirs, most notably his CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR. As an autobiographer, Olivier is often guarded and withholding…at least about himself (Jeremy Brett, early National member and Olivier pal, once told me he asked Olivier how the autobiography was coming. Olivier replied: “I just got to my first wank and I’m bored silly.”) To glean insight into the oft-enigmatic Olivier, rely on the half dozen bios about him than his own autobiographical efforts. Or better yet, read the thumbnail impressions by colleagues found in OLIVIER, edited by Logan Gourlay, or OLIVIER AT WORK, compiled by the Royal National Theatre.

Jeremy Brett & director Paul Giovanni/CRUCIFER OF BLOOD party

Richard Eyre, Hall’s successor at the National, also published his diaries, NATIONAL SERVICE, about his tenure there…another great read. The nice thing about diaries and letters is you can skip around. Seek out an actor or an incident in the index and leap to the appropriate page. They can also be read in small snatches -- perfect for waiting rooms, johns, and commercials on the television. I’ve been dipping into THE LETTERS OF NOEL COWARD and THE NOEL COWARD DIARIES as I soak in the tub.

I read actor bios the same way as I do letters or diaries…rarely chronologically. I started JOHN OSBORNE, THE MANY LIVES OF AN ANGRY YOUNG MAN, by John Heilpern, somewhere around the time Osborne’s play, LOOK BACK IN ANGER, premiered. Osborne’s life was so riveting…his genius and talent for self-destruction… that I went back to the beginning to learn how he developed into such a complex critter.

Another complex fellow was Richard Burton. Melvyn Bragg’s RICH, explores his extraordinary talent and intellect. I’ve always been obsessed by actors like Burton who had great gifts but never fully exploited their potential or, perhaps, more accurately never fulfilled the obligation of possessing such talent. Mercurial, flamboyant, restless giants like Burton, Kean, and Barrymore I find endlessly intriguing

The most famous Barrymore bio is Gene Fowler’s excellent GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE. But JOHN BARRYMORE, SHAKESPEAREAN ACTOR by Michael Morrison dissects Barrymore’s forays into Shakespeare, notably his RICHARD III and his HAMLET when he was at the height of his power. Morrison delves into minute detail of the rehearsals and productions. To read GREAT TIMES, GOOD TIMES by James Kotsilibas-Davis is to discover that Maurice Barrymore…father of John, Ethel, and Lionel…may have been the true genius and tragic figure of the Barrymore clan.

While I hate most theatrical theory (Noel Coward: “I have been gallantly persevering with Stanislaviski’s LIFE IN ART and AN ACTOR PREPARES. Both intolerably turgid and dull and completely devoid of humour”), I love process books where the mounting of a play from planning through rehearsals and into production is examined and explored.
One of the most enjoyable of these is LETTERS TO AN ACTOR by William Redfield, who played Guildenstern in the famous Gielgud/Burton HAMLET. His insights, very definite opinions, and delicious anecdotes are constantly diverting.

The National Theatre has produced a fascinating series of rehearsal diaries of various productions, many of which I was fortunate to see…so reading about how they got to the end result is always illuminating, but even the examinations of those plays I didn’t see are valuable and entertaining. Some of these rehearsal journals include productions of HENRY IV (with Michael “The Great Gambon” Gambon as Falstaff); Simon Russell Beale’s HAMLET; HIS DARK MATERIALS, a production based on Philip Pullman’s famous children’s trilogy; and Peter Hall’s the BACCHAI.

In anticipation of going to a recent local production of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, I re-read Tirzah Lowen’s excellent PETER HALL DIRECTS ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, a rehearsal diary about Hall’s praised 1987 National Theatre production that starred Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins. The observant journal gives us a great glimpse at how Hall guides Dench and Hopkins, two actors at the height of their powers, to their performances of these two middle-aged lovers in their last gasp of passion.

Hall and Trevor Nunn were both trained in a rigid discipline of verse-speaking by George Rylands who learned it from the famous Elizabethan specialist, William Poel. Hall is adamant that the key to great Shakespearean performances lies in understanding how to speak the verse. “Shakespeare tells the actor when to go fast and when to go slow; when to pause, when to come in on cue and when to accent a word,” Hall insists, “His text is full of such clues. He tells the actor when but never why or how. That is up to the actor.” Hall dutifully illuminates his thoughts and gives examples on verse-speaking in his book, SHAKESPEARE’S ADVICE TO THE PLAYERS, one of the most useful books I have when it comes to tackling Shakespeare.

And, speaking of the bard, I’d be remiss not to mention Bernard Grebanier’s THEN CAME EACH ACTOR, that discusses “Shakespearean Actors, Great and Otherwise” from Elizabethan times on. Grebanier can be very opinionated, and often-times even infuriating, about those actors he embraces and those he dismisses, but the book is rich in interesting history and great stories.

All the above-mentioned books and plays can probably be found on Amazon.com or the ABE (in my links to the left).

But enough of my picks. How about some of yours? What theatre books/plays do you find useful, fascinating, entertaining? Any that changed your life, any of my picks you disagree with? Give us your recommendations and tell us why!

***

NEWS FLASH!

In my London Theatre blogs (see March blogs), I mentioned how the book shops that once lined Charing Cross Road are being pushed out by high rents and bad franchise businesses. Now the other great book oasis in London, Cecil Court (see links at left), is being threatened by increased business rates. Read actor/writer Simon Callow's lament on the situation here: http://www.cecilcourt.co.uk/business_rates.php

A Few Of My Favourite Things (Or A Guide to Pogue's Pages' Links)

2009-04-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

Words of Theatrical Wisdom

"Get yourself a light Cordelia."

-- Sir John Gielgud's advice to a fellow actor asking for tips on how to play LEAR. I've also heard the quote attributed to Sir Donald Wolfit.--

***

My morning ritual upon arising is to take Nigel the pup immediately out for his morning ablutions, read the morning paper (the Lexington Herald- Leader) while I eat breakfast, then grab a Diet Coke, retreat to the office and get online and survey my favourite sites. Many of these you see listed over on the left side of this blog.

(Nigel the pup)

Some I visit daily, some several times a day, others two or three times a week. I usually click on them alphabetically...starting with a daily glance at Actors Guild of Lexington's blog to see if any of the staff have posted anything or to read the occasional rehearsal blogs of actors in the latest show. Then it's onto Copious Notes, the daily Arts blog of the Herald-Leader's leading Arts columnist, Rich Copley.

Moving out of the local scene, I visit Haines His Way, my LA pal Bruce Kimmel's very witty, whimsically personal, entertaining blog and message board with a gang of gregarious regulars. Besides being the leading producer of theatre music on CD, Bruce is also an accomplished writer, director, actor, musician, and all-round raconteur. I miss the hilarious meals Bruce and I used to regularly have in the red leather booths at Musso and Frank or Birds (and their tower of onion rings) and this is a great way to keep in touch. Next on the list is Unca Harlan's Art Deco Dining Pavilion to see if Harlan Ellison has dived into the ongoing and oft-spirited debate and discussion on the message board of his site.

The local paper does not satisfy my news jones and, as I prefer my news with a liberal slant, I always check out The Huffington Post. The site also links to several other news sites and columnists, both liberal and conservative, which I often check out, so I usually get a good mix of opinion and perspective.

We Americans can be awfully ethnocentric, so to get an international point-of-view on what's happening in the world and how we are perceived, I go to British Media Online three or four times a week. This link will take me to most of the main London newspapers...The Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Standard, Mail, Independent, Express, and the BBC news sources. Truth be told, I spend most of my time in the Arts pages of these papers, catching up on the London Theatre scene. You'll notice the Guardian is individually linked, as I find their theatre coverage the most comprehensive. There always seems to be something new and different and updated on the site and they also have interesting theatre blogs.

I am unabashed British Theatre-o-phile...so I'm regularly checking the National Theatre and RSC theatre sites. The London Theatre Guide keeps me abreast of any new developments in The West End. Stagework is the most fascinating theatre site about the process of production. Great interviews and videos with artists from every theatre discipline about how the work is put together. You can watch scenes from major London productions rehearsed and then see the final, finished product. I can spend hours here.

Two American theatre sites I keep up with are the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and The Independent Shakespeare Company. I'm a fan of both companies and try to get up to see most of Cincy Shakes' shows. Here I've been able to finally see productions of rare Shakespeare plays like CYMBELINE and TIMON OF ATHENS. Unfortunately, the Independent Shakespeare Company is based in LA. But when we lived there, Julieanne and I looked forward to their productions, particularly their intimate summer Shakespeare in scenic Barnsdall Park. The company focuses on language and performance with minimal costumes and set dressing. Both of these companies maintain regular acting companies, so you get to see lovely ensemble work with actors who have consistently performed together.

In addition to a mess of theatre sites, I also have bookmarked a great many film related sites. I've linked a couple here. WORDPLAY is my favourite screenwriting site...where seasoned veterans, newbies, and wanna-bes all converge. The site is run my good colleagues, Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, writers of the popular Zorro and Pirates of the Caribbean movies as well as SHREK. There are great articles and columns dispensing worthwile advice to anyone pursuing this precarious profession. But the best advice can be culled in the free-wheeling discussion forums where old pros tangle with young bloods and hungry aspirants. I don't visit the forums as much as I once did. At one point in my life, it was something of an addiction...where I spent far too much time. But you can still find my pontifications in the archives and several, you'll find in their "Hall of Fame Posts" Archive. My other movie link listed here is The Miklos Rozsa Society...devoted to simply the greatest film composer ever!

One of the wonders of the internet is that it has freed us from the tyranny of local radio's limited options...which have been reduced to mostly music I don't listen to or talk I don't want to listen to and far too many commercials I don't want to hear. On the internet, I can now find any kind of music I want from New York cabaret to Big Band. The latter I find on a public radio station out of Cincinnati, WMKV. I particularly like the website after 11 or 12 at night when it's just non-stop music featuring terrific thirties and forties bands and singers and the Great American Songbook.

To be able to get BBC Radio is a wonder. I've linked here BBC 4 because I love their comedy and quizzes (which are also comedies). Some of my favourites are: The News Quiz, The Now Show, Just A Minute, Sorry I Haven't A Clue, The Unbelievable Truth. The BBC4 link will take you to their other great stations too -- BBC 7 which features repeats of comedy shows, including classics like The Goon Show, even My Word & My Music; BBC3...arts and culture; and BBC London with entertaining dj's like Danny Baker. The BBC also has a feature called "Listen Again" which allows to you to listen to these shows at any time, accommodating your own individual schedule.

I probably have more book-related sites bookmarked than anything else. I've only listed two...one is my beloved Cecil Court in London where I've spent many happy an hour.

The other one listed here is the most useful one -- THE ABE, or the Advanced Book Exchange. I hesitated listing it. We book collectors are usually very protective of our sources...so consider yourself privileged that I share this with you. If you can't find a used book on the ABE, you probably can't find it. As well as using it to track down hard-to-find books, I also find it handy as a pricing guide.

So any favourite sites you care to recommend?

Odds & Ends (or a Pogue Palate Cleanser)

2009-04-04T07:13:00.000-07:00

WORDS OF THEATRICAL WISDOM

"If you can't write a play without being taught -- don't."

--George Bernard Shaw--

I MISS MUZAK

I was in a restaurant last night eating my solitary meal and realizing how loud and obtrusive the music was. One couldn't call it background music, because it was the type that prohibited conversation (had I a dinner companion) or any sort of contemplative serenity.

I realize that Muzak or what was commonly called "elevator music" was often the butt of a myriad of jokes about its innocuous blandness, but that was the point...it was supposed to be. Sadly, now that it has disappeared from the scene, I miss its soothing, non-instrusive, easily-ignorable, almost somnabulistic tones.

These days I walk into a store and the music is assaultive...usually geared to the younger crowd...lots of American Idol-style bad rock or country-western (or worse, Christian Rock -- just what I want...to be "saved" while I'm eating a hamburger or buying toilet paper)...played at ear-bleeding decibel levels that can't be tuned out and which makes neither shopping or eating a pleasure because all the while I engage in the activity, I must be inflicted with someone's crap taste in music at what they mistakenly deem a suitable volume.

And let us not forget the Madison Ave. Factor. Often interpersed between the music...particularly in your local Wal-Mart or grocery store...are cheery-voiced announcers pitching the latest product or sale item at you. I usually just want to run from the place, screaming. At least Muzak didn't have any commercials.

And it didn't overwhelm you. It was discreet. It didn't get in your way. It didn't force you to pay attention. It wasn't some pitchy wailer bludgeoning your ear-drums with a cacophony of electronic guitars and dubious notes and bludgeoning your intelligence by rhyming "I" with "eye". It's hard to figure out what you want for dinner trapped in a grocery aisle pulsating with both migraine-inducing noise and mind-numbing illiteracy.

Muzak was mostly inoffensive instrumental versions of standards songs from the Great American Songbook that occasionally made you unconsciously whistle or even hum. Okay, the arrangements were often a bit twee...and their sporadic interpretations of popular rock tunes were about as hip as your parents getting up and embarrassing you by doing the Twist or Mashed Potatoes (realizing, of course, for a sizable percentage of my readership, I represent that same decrepit generation as their parents.).

But Muzak was, in its boring fashion, rather calming and relaxing. The worst you could say about it was that it was insidiously insipid...as opposed to what we get today-- the obnoxiously insipid.

I suppose it is all a part of our ever-evolving culture where noise pollution has become de rigeur. Seems we can't be disconnected from anything that might distract us and, Heaven forbid, leave us alone with our own thoughts...we've got to have i-pods going, cell phones ringing, blackberries twittering. The loud, surly voices of Fox News or the excessive commentary of some sporting event blaring on the twenty televisions in the bar. We're determined not to miss a damned thing with all our electronic gadgetry; we just keep missing life going on all around us.

News flash to all those stores that cater to a younger crowd with their cranked-up music selections; it's the 35 and up crowd that still has the most disposable income to spend. More of it might get spent in your place if you reconsider the musical ambience you're creating...remembering its not about your taste -- or the taste of your eighteen year old clerk. Cole Porter as interpreted through the mellow strains of Montovani and his Orchestra or the Melachrino Strings doesn't sound so bad to these aged ears anymore.

AN AGE OF KINGS

My AGE OF KINGS Dvds mentioned in an earlier blog arrived last week and Julieanne and I are working our way through it an hour or so a night. We're through the first of five discs, halfway through Henry IV, part one. The transfer is quite good and clean, considering this is almost fifty years old. And the acting is remarkable, mostly with actors who never reached any prominence or name recognition on this side of the pond. Sean Connery, just two years away from Dr. No and his debut as James Bond, makes a terrific Hotspur and shows a smooth facility with Shakespeare.

I did cheat and take a sneak peek at Paul Daneman's Gloster/Richard III, Gloster's great speech in Henry VI, part III, "Ay, Edward will use women honourably/ Would he were wasted, marrow, bones, and all..." It may be a more defining speech for Richard than his "winter of discontent" soliloquy. I learned an abbreviated version of it off a John Barrymore recording years ago. "Can I do all this and cannot get a crown?/Tut, were it further off, I'lllllllll pluck it down" (That's for Kevin Lane Dearinger...who will get it).

(Paul Daneman as Richard III, Birmingham Rep)

(Barrymore as Richard III)

Daneman does the speech right nicely. Other than his radio performance of Richard, the only other thing I know Daneman from is the movie ZULU as the delirious Sergeant Maxfield in hospital who keeps tormenting the malingering scalawag Hook played by James Booth. Both nice performances in a movie full of nice performances (Michael Caine in his debut, the stalwart Stanley Baker, and the great Nigel Green as colour-sergeant Bourne).

Anyway, this is a bit of trip for me, as I really haven't explored these plays for many years. I'd forgotten what a maudlin, self-pitying windbag Richard II is (although a very poetic one)...no wonder they kill him. I'm particularly looking forward to the Henry VI, part I...as it is the probably the history play I know the least.

ACTORS GUILD OF LEXINGTON

Brian Hampton's CHECKING IN, which had its World Premiere at our own Actors Guild of Lexington will play the Midtown International Theatre Festival in NYC this summer. Our fearless leader, Richard St. Peter, our Artistic Director, will direct the show and local actress, Allie Darden, has been invited to perform the role she played in the original production. This is yet another example and benefit of Rick's efforts to move this theatre to a fully professional dynamic and establish not only a regional, but national awareness of the theatre.

Here's a play that had its beginnings here as did my adaptation/translation of TARTUFFE which has since gone on to have another successful production in San Franscisco garnering good reviews and eliciting more interest at other theatres and with other directors. Our multi-media production of HAMLET was featured in AMERICAN THEATRE magazine and Rick recently re-staged the production (retaining his original Hamlet) in North Carolina at the Temple Theatre. (Below Adam Luckey as Hamlet, me as Claudius in the "now might I do it pat" scene from AGL's Multi-Media HAMLET.)

Rick was the right man for the job at this theatre. The Board at the time wisely chose to bring in someone from the outside with a different and necessary perspective. For though the local theatre community boasts many talented folk, most have their roots in community or educational theatre and none were qualified to spearhead the particular mission which became this theatre's mandate. It required someone who had experience, contacts, and an understanding of the professional regional theatre environment to move the theatre toward that dynamic and expand its profile beyond the local scene. Under Rick's leadership, the theatre has been able to begin to forge a strong network with other professional theatres and institutions across the country...and even abroad.

Sure, the theatre still struggles (what professional theatre doesn't?), we have had our share of mis-steps and growing pains and will probably have more. But the professionalism of the work has certainly increased, with quality performances that feature our best local actors sharing the stage with artists of regional and national rep and work that is getting recognized beyond local borders.

Now if we could just find those angels who would drop generous chunks of change on us.

THE DRAMATIST MAGAZINE

Lots of interesting articles in this month's DRAMATIST MAGAZINE:

1)The second part of Edward Albee's round-table with several prominent New York critics, centering around the demise of newspapers and, with it, the demise of serious Arts journalism and how that can or will affect the support, promotion, and production of serious work in the theatre.

2)Another article about how Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman teach playwriting at Juilliard I found very helpful with my own approach to teaching dramatic writing. I've done a fair amount of short-term instructing and guest-lecturing. But I have always eschewed taking any kind of long-term gig, because I don't really consider myself a teacher nor do I have any sort of proscribed method of teaching or a syllabus or any of those academic underpinings. I sort of teach the same way I learned...via the-seat-of-the-pants school of theatre.

But the article actually confirmed a lot of my approach and my attitude toward how one needs to go about it. They also gave me some ideas to incorporate into what has become my ever-evolving method.

One of my favourite quotes: "Writers who are really gifted need to be careful who they listen to" and "So writers have to be careful about not trying to please, and not assuming that all comments are equally valuable."

I have long avoided Writers Groups as mostly a waste of time...particularly where a bunch of amateur, unproduced writers gather together to read and critique each other's work. Firstly, if you invite someone to be a critic, they will usually go straight for the negative...or, worse, tell you how much they like everything...or, even worse, ignore what you're trying to say and do with the piece and tell you how they would write it.

But mostly, why would I want a bunch of unproduced playwrights advising me how to write? What do they know about it? They're still on the outside looking in. I want advice and criticism from the people who've actually been in the trenches doing it day-t0-day...or from the people who have the power to produce it and make it a reality. I think far too much of that round-robin-I'll-critique-you-if-you-critique-me becomes masturbatory navel-gazing or rah-rah cheerleading to little or no productive purpose.

I think most successful writers are loners who go their own way. I've always found value in Paul Schrader's comment: "Why should we open the doors for young talent? Those who knock the doors down are much more interesting."

I think the most important part of being a writer, after having talent and having something to say (it's not enough to want to write, you have something worth saying), is being able to think critically...to be able to articulate your thoughts and to scrutinize, analyze, and assess your own work objectively and honestly.

This is one of the things I harp on in any class I teach...an artist must have the ability to judge his own work. If you don't, how will you be able to justify it and defend it against all those opinions that will want to take a piece of it? If you can't stand behind it or stand up for it with cohesive intelligent arguments, why are you doing it? It drives a lot of young writers crazy when I bark my mantra: "A professional knows when he's done good work." "But how do you know when you know?" always comes the lament. "When you're a professional, you'll know," I answer, increasing their frustration.

If you need grandma or one of your peers to pat you on the back to give you confidence, then you're probably not focused, determined, or dedicated enough. You have to be the one to know you're good and that your work is good, so that no matter how many times you get knocked down, you get up and keep coming at 'em.

3)Another article in The Dramatist talks about how the Copyright office has pretty much de-bunked and given the death knell to the nonsense of any such thing as director's copyright. They consistently refused Broadway's Urinetown director's attempts to copyright his direction.

Here's some of the directions he tried to copyright:

a)Using red scarves pulled from actors' pockets when they are shot to signify blood.

b)Using the chorus to march and fight in slow motion for comedic purpose.

c)Using blue fabric stretched across the stage to symbolize a river.

Rather vague, donncha think? And things like red scarves to represent blood and blue fabric to symbolize water seem rather familiar...I don't know how many times I've seen blue fabric to represent water or waves, we used it in a production of THE TEMPEST in Odessa , Texas, back in 1973.

But directors like this and their organization SSDC, that apparently has supported directors' attempts to copyright stuff, create a chilling effect on their own profession. One of the directors the Urinetown director was suing for copyright infringement was also an SSDC member; the theatre, involved in another suit, closed...it was not clear if it was because it had to defend itself against this spurious absurdity.

The result of validating this nonsense would be to inhibit other theatres from doing productions for fear of getting sued. It could also lead to playwrights directing their own plays to keep greedy directors with an absurd sense of auteurism from inhibiting said productions. This would hurt directors who would end up not getting jobs. And it could hurt plays...for all playwrights are not directors. And self-preservation is never the best artistic reason for directing one's own work.

The auteur theory in film is the greatest French farce since Feydeau. Let's not infect the theatre with its false premise.

This past week I and several other area playwrights had a meet and greet breakfast with Ralph Sevush, the Guild's Executive Director of Business Affairs, and Tari Stratton, Director of Education & Outreach, who were in Louisville for the Humana Festival. They had rsvps from nine playwrights, expected possibly twelve, and got five. I was the only one from outside Louisville. We five had a nice and informative time with them, but the small turnout nettled me. I don't understand why people don't take advantage of these opportunities...particularly those who always profess to have such a great love or aspiration toward the profession. As my old theatre mentor at UK, Charles Dickens (yes, his real name), used to say: "Ninety percent of talent is knowing what to do with it."

(Below: UK Theatre Professor, Charles Dickens...my mentor, Julieanne's mentor, and a whole lot of other people's mentor...during a notes session of PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD).

ONE OF THE THINGS I LIKE ABOUT MY LIFE

Harlan Ellison calls me up this afternoon to read me the opening paragraphs of a new story he's working on. First of all, no writer reads his work with more panache than Ellison does; secondly, I'm one of only four people who's heard it. How did I get so lucky? And the opening is a pip. If the rest of the story is as good (and I have no doubt it will be), it's going to be a doozy!

A POGUE BON MOT

"He that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose."

--Anne Bronte--

And how was your week?

(I apologize for the odd spacing of paragraphs in this post. But I've been back a dozen times to correct and edit and save everything. And somehow none of it stays saved. It will take my corrections of typos and the like, but not the spacing. So excuse this Luddite's ignorance about what's going on. If anyone has a clue, please explain it to me. )

Literary Influences (Or what do Dr. Seuss and David Cronenberg have in common?)

2009-03-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

Invariably whenever I teach or guest-lecture at some college, high school, or seminar, I'm always asked what's the best advice I can give to an aspiring writer. It is always one word: "Read." Read anything and everything. Novels, plays, history, newspapers, comic books, instruction manuals, the backs of cereal boxes. Writers are readers.

Reading not only helps expand your knowledge and love of language, it's also where you learn to develop a style, a voice, and hopefully a sense of simple grammatical mechanics that one should have grasped in grade school and high school. Now I don't profess to be the greatest grammarian myself and sometimes my spelling is atrocious, but I'm a fairly diligent proof-reader and able to catch the majority of my mistakes (particularly when I'm turning in professional work), and I had a rather exceptional educational grounding in English. Any failure not to absorb the basic tenets of our Mother Tongue was my own inadequacy, certainly not the fault of my many dedicated teachers and professors.

But those things I might have missed or forgotten are constantly reinforced through my reading. I may no longer remember how to diagram a sentence nor can I recite every grammatical rule, but most of it I just do instinctively because I've picked it up by reading writers who are better than I am. So if I dangle a participle, it's probably intentional...because I read that sentence over and over again and tinkered with it until it made sense to my ear.

The gist of all this is: You can't construct a screenplay until you first learn to construct a sentence. I've read scripts utterly devoid of punctuation and capitalization, mangled by incorrectly spelt words and tortured grammar. I've even gotten scripts unemblazoned with a title or author. It amazes me how many people think they can become film-makers without establishing any rudimentary communication skills. You can't learn to write a screenplay by WATCHING movies...at least not that alone. You have to read. You have to understand the literary craft. Screenplays are drama. Drama is literature.

Once when teaching an eight-week course at the LA Film School, I had a rather arrogant young man who thought he was the next Bily Wilder or Philip Dunne...Well, he probably didn't know who those guys were...let's just say he thought he was the next Shane Black. After reading a script of his that he boasted had been written in a drunk-fuelled all-nighter, I didn't have to de-bunk the myth that works of genius are created in a haze of booze or drugs. His illogical plot predicated on a chain of improbable, if not impossible, coincidences and unmotivated characters debunked that all by itself (Writers also have to be in control; indulgences and excesses have proved the breaking of far more artists than the making.).

But there was something else in his script which couldn't be blamed on his binge. I asked him in class when he was sober to spell the preposition, "through". He spelled it: "threw"; the same way he'd consistently spelled it in his script. It proved to me that he was not only not a proofreader, but he was not much of a reader at all. I suspect I can pick up any book in my library, open it anywhere, and probably encounter the word, "through" within five or six pages or less. It may not be "a", "and", or "the"; but I figure it will appear with some frequency in most texts. (I just went back and checked my own blog. "Through" appears in the third paragraph.) You cannot be a reader and not encounter this word all the time. Its spelling should be ingrained in a reader. A reader should have been picked it up by osmosis, after the third or fourth grade, surely. Writers are readers.

But what kind of a reader does a writer have to be? Ah! That brings up another question I'm often asked: "What were my literary influences?" A much more interesting question that produces a much more complex answer; because while I consider myself a pretty well-read fellow, I've hardly spent my life reading Hemingway, Faulkner, and Proust.

While I've read my share of what could be considered high-tone literature, much of it required when in school and probably most of it exploring theatrical classics, I have much more often gamboled in the fields of popular literature, much of which would even be considered pulp fiction...for which, I make no apologies. Of the thousands of books in this house (5 thou? 6 thou? I don't bother to count 'em), the heart of the collection is fiction...late 19th century to mid-20th century adventure, fantasy, mystery, historical fiction. A goodly part is theatre/film including a wealth of plays. Then there's history/mythology/and general reference.

(The library from different angles)

All of it undoubtedly shaped me as a writer. But what would I consider my seminal influences? Below is the list...that shaped me probably not only as a writer, but as a person too.

LITERARY INFLUENCES:

CARL BARKS...Barks, for years, was the artist and storyteller behind Walt Disney's Comics, who created the elaborate yarns of Scrooge McDuck and his nephews, Donald, Louie, Dewey, and Huey. Gladstone Gander. The Beagle Boys. Ole Scrooge, diving into his money vault like it was a swimming pool. Great fantasy excursions of wonderful wit and adventure.

COMIC BOOKS...in general...a part of my childhood...Archie, Tarzan, Superheroes, Westerns, Mad magazine. In my teens it was the more supernatural black & whites: Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella, with great illustrators and brilliant Frank Frazetta covers. I still have several thousand Silver Age comics that I collected in college -- Conan, The Shadow, Doc Strange, Swamp Thing, Howard the Duck (comic was great; the movie crap).

ENCYCLOPEDIAS...When I and my siblings were very young, my parents made a major investment in our education by laying out for a set of Grolier Encyclopedias, as well as a series of books called Land & Peoples, and a Random House series of All About Books...I've been a reference book guy ever since.

The Grolier's got replaced years later with The Encyclopedia Britannica. Years later, with my first film money earned from writing, I bought my own set of Britannica. I also inherited my grandfather's set of the famous 11th edition Britannica. I have other reference sets: Man, Myth, and Magic; The Encyclopedia of the Animal World; Empires: Their Rise and Fall; Annals of America; the Enchanted World. I have dictionaries of all sorts: Rhyming, Underworld Slang, British-American, Quotations. I can go searching for something specific in some reference volume and find that I've suddenly killed two or three hours, cross-referencing, leaping from one topic to another. These reference books have helped me figure out scenes and plots and character motivation. When I'm doling out that advice to young writers, I always tell them any good writer has three books always close at hand: A comprehensive dictionary; a thesaurus; and Strunk and White's Elements of Style.

DR. SEUSS...I was famous in 2nd and 3rd grade for doing lavish, profusely illustrated book reports on the good Doctor's imaginatively surreal books.

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS...where I became a read-a-holic. Flashlight under the covers. Reading till one in the morning. About the time I acquired glasses. Wonder if my reading habits had anything to do with it? Tarzan was mythic. John Carter made S-F palatable...because it wasn't hardware and spaceships, but really just interplanetary swashbuckling (years later, I wrote the very first Princess of Mars script for Disney of that oft-started, oft-stalled project. Many other scripts have been written after my adaptation, but mine has ascended to something of cult status in the Burroughs circles as the most "Burroughsian" script ever and even in some film circles). Burroughs was not a great prose stylist, but had boundless imagination...he also is directly responsible for both my literary/film ambitions. The books let me to the Tarzan movies and both Tarzan books and movies opened up my world to better writers and better movies.

SAX ROHMER...I learned the art of atmosphere and crackerjack pace. Swirling fog, mysterious figures in the dark. Also the art of anticipation...Fu Manchu was felt long before he ever made an appearance. Talk about building up a "star" entrance. Rohmer doesn't always hold up as well as he used to, his delivery often not as good as his promise, but he can still carry you on pure energy.

H. RIDER HAGGARD...SHE is my favourite novel of all time. And he wrote a ton of other good ones. For all practical purposes, inventor of THE LOST RACE novel. He hits me on a very visceral, primal level. He stirs deep waters. And I find he haunts me long after I've read him and I realize that pleasant little tale I read suddenly has a richer resonance. At times, his work has the pull of the Greeks and the Jacobeans in terms of its sense of somber power often veering into the tragic. GREAT STUFF!

(She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed)

RAFAEL SABATINI...a meticulous writer. I appreciate him more today than when I first read him. His Edwardian or even Victorian floridness can be a bit daunting when you're twelve. It goes down a lot better when you're older. His sense of period and history is quite nice, even if his plots and heroes are sometimes a bit genteel and quaint.

CONAN DOYLE...Sherlock Holmes. Need more be said? Yes, actually. A droll sense of humour and some of his other work is excellent, particularly Brigadier Gerard (see the origins of Flashman here) and the Challenger stuff. Some nice horror too.

ROBERT E. HOWARD...Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane. A visceral, muscular, moody poetic style. Much better writer than most realize.

(Howard's Conan; art by Ken Kelly)

P.C. WREN...wrote BEAU GESTE, among many others. Master of the convuluted plot and a dry sense of British understated humour.

BULLFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY...myths and legends every writer should know.

RAYMOND CHANDLER...taking the detective novel to literature.

DASHIELL HAMMETT...taking the detective novel to literature. On the surface, less poetic than Chandler, but actually very poetic in his own lean, terse way.

S.S. VAN DINE...the locked room puzzles of amateur sleuth Philo Vance. Very good early ones. The last half dozen fall off somewhat. I'm reminded of the Ogden Nash rhyme about Vance's often pompous superiority: "Philo Vance/needs a kick in the pance."

THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE TALKIES...by Daniel Blum. I discovered this book around 10 or 11 and was fascinated by the stills of all these movies in it. Movies I wanted to see and set out to see.

THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN STAGE...by Daniel Blum. Ditto to above.

MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS...Errol Flynn's autobiography, told with lots of panache and truth-stretching embroidery.

GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE...Gene Fowler's great intimate, affectionate biography of his friend, John Barrymore. (at right.)

CHARLES DICKENS...GREAT EXPECTATIONS was one of the best, most fun assignments in High School I ever had. Believe it or not, one of the first pieces of drama I wrote was a musical of this novel.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN...my senior English teacher at Highlands High School in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, Norman Yonce, gave me the best bit of advice anyone ever gave me when he told me, "In the next four years your life is going to change so dramatically, all this sturm and drang of high school will become such small potatoes." He also gave me TEMPLE OF GOLD to read by William Goldman, closely followed by YOUR TURN TO CURTSY, MY TURN TO BOW...I have been a fan of him ever since.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE initially escaped my radar until Bob Denver (yes, Gilligan! At left) gave me a paperback copy of it when we were working in a dinner theatre in Odessa, Texas. Nothing ever spoke to me like this book. I used to hoard used paperback copies of it to pass out to friends, saying,"Here, want to know who I am, what's going on inside of me...here, this book is me." Imagine my joy when in Book City in Burbank, I came across a pristine near-mint copy of this in hardback in dj for three bucks.

ROD MCKUEN...okay, okay, let it all out. Snicker, if you will. But in the late sixties, McKuen was something of a phenomenon...a poet who actually made money...making a big hit not only with his books, but with recorded albums of poetry. Norm Yonce, who introduced me to Goldman, introduced his creative writing class to McKuen with a series of spoken word albums called The Earth, The Sea, The Sky. McKuen poetry backed by music from the Anita Kerr Singers. He also did less embellished poetry albums that were actually better. I remember IN SEARCH OF EROS fondly. In those long-haired hippie days of peace, free love, and indulgent, navel-gazing sensitivity, they were the kind of albums you listened to in the dark, drinking cheap, screw-top wine (often fruit-flavoured) and wallowing in the angst of tortured love...or used as ambience while you tried to get laid.

THE HIGHWAYMAN...by Alfred Noyes. "The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees/The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas/The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor/And the Highwayman came riding-/Riding-Riding-/The Highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door." Unabashed romanticism!

BIG BAND MUSIC...When I was twelve or so, like every kid in America, I thought I could convert my parents to popular music, so I played for my dad a top forty hit by Brook Benton called SHADRACH. My dad listened, smiled and said, "That's not bad. But let me play something for you." He pulled out a 78rpm of Larry Clinton and his Orchestra playing SHADRACH...infintiely cooler than Brook's version (and I still love Brook and his version).

I've been hooked ever since. I raided that 78 record cabinet. From these records, I also discovered Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the wry lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, show tunes, movie tunes, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Skinnay Ennis, Ray Eberle, etc. And I wore the grooves off his Louis Jordan album.

A RADIO SHOW...out of Cincinnati, that every night played a Broadway show album. Here I heard for the first time MAN OF LA MANCHA, ALL AMERICAN (book by Mel Brooks), HAZEL FLAGG, BAKER STREET, and tons of other now-obscure musicals most of you probably never heard of.

MOON RIVER...This was a radio show that played from eleven o'clock to midnight on WLW in Cincy every night, where poetry was read to organ music. It always started out the same way..."Moon River/A lazy stream of dreams/Where vain desires forget themselves/In the loveliness of sleep/Moon River/Enchanted white ribbon/Twined in the hair of night/Where nothing is but sleep/Dream on...Sleep on.../Care will not seek for thee/Float on...Drift on.../Moon River to the sea. Many's the night I fell asleep listening to this show on my little transitor radio with its ear-plug stuck in my ear.

SHAKESPEARE...Encountered him in high school. Really discovered the joy of him onstage, performing him.

JOHN WEBSTER...The Jacobeans' sense of tragedy and Grand Guignol appealled to my darker sensibilities. Film Noir owes a lot to John Webster and his pals. WHITE DEVIL & DUCHESS OF MALFI both great, the latter I was in (at left)...and it has one of my favourite lines of all times..."We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and banded which way please them." I was delighted when I discovered that Stephen Fry has a book entitled THE STARS' TENNIS BALLS.

THE GREEKS...simple, direct, but poetic with inexorable, inevitable climaxes.

CYRANO DE BERGERAC...this play is almost indestructible. Regardless of whether I'm reading it or watching any production of it, I am left in puddles at the end.

A. MERRITT...a strange, lush poetic prose grafted to a rich imagination. Another of those authors who stays with me. It's almost like he writes in some sort of fevre dream.

RICHARD III...a biography by Paul Murray Kendall. History came alive!

PETER SHAFFER...everything he writes. ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN, AMADEUS, EQUUS. THE GIFT OF THE GORGON, may be the best play I've read in the last twenty years.

TOM STOPPARD...Have loved him since ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Again, everything he writes.

LETTERS FROM AN ACTOR...William Redfield's letters to a friend while he was rehearsing and performing in the famous Burton/Gielgud HAMLET of the sixties. Great theatre stories!

1776...the musical. Back in college on a rainy afternoon, I remember sitting with Julieanne and Edd Little (now Edmund August) in Clay Nixon's apartment as he played us the original cast album. It was a glorious revelation. Years later, when I was on the Writers Guild Board, during a meeting with the Screen Actors Guild Board, I got to go up to William Daniels, then SAG president and who had played John Adams in that production of 1776, and tell him about that afternoon and how much it meant to me. As I've gotten older, I try to take advantage of such opportunities much more than I used to. I think people appreciate knowing that they have affected your life positively. And so many performers or writers never know how many lives they touch.

And, of course, my influences continue. Some late in life influences -- my pal HARLAN ELLISON, who I first discovered as an essayist and just plain raconteur before I encountered his brilliant fiction. TERRY PRATCHETT's wacky, wonderful, exquisite-fall-out-of-bed-laughing-out-loud Discworld novels. FREDRIC BROWN...terrific short story writer and novelist, who can lead you right down to the end of the story and surprise you with something you never saw coming but is always so perfectly logical, if not inevitable. HENRY TREECE...his historical novels about Greece and Celtic Britain are bleakly powerful dying falls. Even his children's novels are unrelenting, uncompromising, and mature. Wonderful poetic writer...

I'm sure there are others who I have overlooked...

***

So what writers or books changed your life, altered your perception of the world or yourself, inspired your creative muse? Tell us all about it.

An Age of Kings (or I'm a Happy Man!)

2009-03-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

When I moved back to Kentucky, after nearly thirty years in LA, there were naturally unvoidable adjustments to be made -- some minor, some traumatic. I certainly did not miss the stress, the expense, the traffic (I can get to Cincinnati in an hour...the time it took me to get to Santa Monica from Hollywood...except that Cincy is sixty miles away; Santa Monica was ten). I didn't even miss the perennial lovely weather

(The view from my old backyard)

Mostly what I missed, aside from a cultural perspective shared by those living in a world center such as LA, were friends. It wasn't things...Okay, well, a few things...great used bookshops, several restaurants, theatres, actually having a neighbourhood mechanic that worked out of the gas station where I got my gas less than a mile from my house,...and Amoeba.

Amoeba was a gargantuan new-used CD/DVD/LP airplane hanger of a store with two floors on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood. If they didn't have a CD or a DVD, it probably couldn't be had. For a guy like me, whose taste in both music and film is eclectic, ancient, and obscure, this was Mecca. Here was where I went to unearth Broadway rarities like KEAN or Ben Bagley's Painted Smiles label, singers like Buddy Clark, Glenn Yarbrough, or Gene McDaniels singing A HUNDRED POUNDS OF CLAY and his other half-dozen hits before he faded from the scene of early sixties rock. Here I could find those off-beat films like LORD LOVE A DUCK, A KID FOR TWO FARTHINGS, or the British Restoration comedy series, HAGGARD. Stuff you can't find at your local Blockbuster or Best Buy. Mostly though I bought theatre DVDs at Amoeba. Theatre productions that had been filmed for television. I picked up the old American Film Theatre Series (filmed plays originally shown in theatres for two days and which they claimed at the time would never be shown on TV -- yeah, until someone figured out there was a profit in it); countless plays that appeared on PBS, several Shakespeares.

Moving to Kentucky made me finally have to break down and resort to Amazon.com, which I had resisted for so long because of my aversion to internet shopping. But, hey, that's where the world is going and once I succumbed, what vistas opened! Just go online, fill my electronic shopping cart, and several days later...treasures arrive on my doorstep!. Yesterday, it was the musical version of GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS starring Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark and a book from the National Theatre.

But what it has really been great for is expanding my video theatre collection which must now be nearing two hundred plays.

Amazon helpfully...or not so helpfully, depending on your point-of-view, also makes frequent recommendations...based on what you buy, own, or put on your wish list. This can be a bit overwhelming at times and so I have to go in and winnow away the source material on which they base these selections, as sometimes the connections can be quite tenuous. I mean I'm not really sure why they would recommend a Paul Newman western, THE OUTRAGE because I bought GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS or how they make the jump in thinking that I'd be interested in ELVIS: THE '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL because I bought a bio of Richard Burton (actually the '68 Comeback Special is pretty darn thrilling...I saw it on TV...in 1968! In the Kirwan Towers Dorm at UK. And I have it on video around here somewhere...).

Anyway, the other day they actually gave me a recommendation that made my little heart go pitty-pat. The BBC is finally releasing AN AGE OF KINGS! This was a fifteen-part TV series from 1960 that filmed, in historical chronological order, Shakespeare's plays of Richard II, the 2 parts of Henry IV, Henry V, the 3 parts of Henry VI, and Richard III. Some notable names in the series are Judi Dench, Robert Hardy, Eileen Atkins, and Sean Connery as Hotspur. (Richard III is played by Paul Daneman. I remember a brilliant radio rendition of of Richard III done by Daneman that played on the University of Kentucky radio station when I was in college. Clay Nixon, a friend who worked at the station, gave me a cassette of the production which I periodically played until it disintegrated over the years.).

(Clay Nixon & Me in Ceremony of Innocence at UK)

I have been aware of this awesome televised spectacle ever since the early 70's when I picked up a paperback edition of the series. I remember catching an enticing glimpse of it on BRAVO a few years back, before that network abandoned its Arts programming for the anti-intellectual dross it now vomits out of our TVs, and thinking, "I must video tape this." But I never got my act and its schedule together to do so. I've even emailed the BBC to release it...though I suspect my entreaties had nothing to do with their decision. Still I'm just glad they decided.

It's on pre-order and I await its arrival at the end of the month. The BBC has already done immeasurable service to theatre junkies like me with their boxed sets of SHAW, IBSEN, CHEKOV, COWARD, & WILDE, with productions of plays both well-known and obscure from these playwrights. And their boxed sets of actors like Olivier, Dench, and Mirren allow us to see rarities like ABSOLUTE HELL, THE CHANGELING (the one by Middleton & Rowley; not Eastwood), THE COLLECTION, HINDLE WAKES, THE COUNTRY WIFE. When you think how many other great and classic plays the BBC has televised over the years, one can only hope for more forthcoming treasures. I keep hoping for a boxed set of the late Simon Gray and Harold Pinter, both of whom have had many of their works dramatized for British television. And I've already pre-ordered my DVD of the 1970 production of EDWARD II, starring Ian McKellen.

***

Interesting article in THE WEEK (the best news weekly around, for my money) about how the 35-54 age bracket is the fastest-growing group on FACEBOOK, up 276 % in the last half of 2008. There are those who feel Facebook might actually better serve this age bracket than teens. Peggy Orenstein of the New York Times suggests it one thing networking and re-connecting with old friends when you're middle-aged, another when you've been on social networking sites half your life. College is a place for reinvention and Orenstein questions how youngsters can achieve that "with your 450 closest friends watching?" The article goes on: "Growth depends on introspection, which depends on loneliness. Transformation depends on experimentation, which depends on space." Interesting notion which make you wonder how much privacy we surrender to the internet and if it inhibits personal evolution and broader perspectives.

***

A POGUE BON MOT

"Writing is like pulling teeth...through your penis." -- J.G. Ballard

***

I'm delighted to hear that The Unbelieveable Truth returns to BBC Radio4 tonight. It's one of their highly amusing comedy/quizzes hosted by the witty David Mitchell of the comedy team of Mitchell and Webb.

****

So for what do you yearn to see on DVD?

(GoJoe solved the one movie mystery quote, "I want to enter my house justified." See the comments section of the previous blog for the answer. But no one has gotten the "Love has to stop somewhere short of suicide" quote yet. It's from a 1936 film based on a classic American novel. Feel free to keep guessing or to comment on any of the other blogs. Sometimes folks are reluctant to comment on an old blog, if a new one's been posted, but as long as the topic interests you feel free to respond to any of them, even if four or five newer blogs are up...I'll keep checking 'em.).

Pogue

"Here's Looking At You, Kid!" (Or what are your favourite movie lines?)

2009-03-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

They say that every good writer has directed his script by the time he's written it. And the tough part is we have to do it without junking the script up with technical jargon and camera angles that deflate and disrupt the narrative flow.

My style might be called florid by some, but I think scripts are as much literature as any other kind of creative writing. I don't even refer to myself as a screenwriter, but rather a dramatist. I also believe in the the old adage of: "If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage."

To get it to the next step of becoming a movie, you've got to sweep your reader up in your script, just like a novelist does. You've got to make them see the movie you're seeing and to do that you have to paint pictures with words. It can't just be stage directions. It has to create mood, atmosphere, a sense of time and place, evoke emotions and emotional investment in your characters. Simply: You're telling a story. Tell it so they stay interested.

I've been gratified that the comments I mostly hear about my scripts are that they are "good reads" or "page-turners". And over the years, I developed what I consider a pretty good prose style. Perhaps, the greatest compliment I ever got was when one executive said she was "waiting for my novel." (That came with the novelization of DRAGONHEART...which wasn't one of those 150-page, double-spaced, "we-put-the-screenplay-in-past-tense jobs. It was a real novel...that got to luxuriate in the language, explore scenes and emotions in greater depth, and crawl into different characters' heads as scenes or chapters unfolded from their point-of-view as opposed to a screenplay's omniscient point-of-view. It was my favourite writing experience of all time.).

I also have a pretty good reputation as a constructionist...as many of Arthur Rouse's film students can tell you when I come for my week of guest-teaching at Bluegrass Community and Technical College and dissect...some might say decimate... their pitches and scripts and rail about logic and motivation. Hopefully, on the constructive side, I also often help them find solutions to the many holes I poke in their stories and characters.

But the thing I am most obsessive about...and try to be most protective of... in a screenplay is my dialogue. I expect there are many screenwriters who feel the same way for one simple reason -- it is the only writing of ours the audience ever notices. Few, if any, except those involved with a script's production, ever really get a chance to savour a screenwriter's descriptive prose. And once a script is filmed, if it's working, the audience shouldn't be suspending their willing suspension of disbelief to stop and critically marvel at the nuances of the plotting, they should just be carried away by it. But everybody hears the dialogue.

So I spend hours sometimes crafting the mot juste. Every word of dialogue gets acted out...Does it roll across the tongue and out of the mouth fluidly and fluently? Does it sound right for the character? Are the rhythms there? The proper pace? One misplaced word or wrong word or too many words or not enough words and a joke doesn't land or a line doesn't hit with the proper power or a scene loses its button.

Sometimes the writer can get it exactly right and it can still go wrong. The actor changes a word or two, or paraphrases, or just flat out delivers it wrong. And sometimes the director has a hand in it...decides that three lines are not needed in the scene and it throws the rhythm of the dialogue off or leaves out subtle but crucial information. He misdirects the actor or the stages the scene in such a way the words lose impact. There are tons of ways to screw it up.

Now I'm not a tyrant about it. All lines are not writ in stone and a slight variation is not always going to do any damage. But I have done considerably thinking about the line, so one appreciates those actors and directors who try to be as meticulous as I've been about it. And every so often, an actor or director can improve a line. I'm cool with that; I'm going to get credit for it. I'd just like to be consulted about it...The last time, of course, that happened was on my first films, SIGN OF FOUR & HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, where terrific British actors like Ian Richardson, Denholm Elliott, or Brian Blessed would ask me if they could change a line. ASK! I've never had that kind of respect or power since in the film business. It could be why it remains my favourite experience.

I suppose part of my obsession with dialogue also comes from being an actor. I've never understood actors who desire less dialogue. Give me speeches, droll bon mots, juicy invectives, words to wallow in! I'm one of those strange creatures who has never understood this lament about "talky" films. Some of the greatest films I've ever seen are full of talk! As long as the talk is good; who cares? Study THE MALTESE FALCON sometime. There's almost no action in it. It's mostly Bogie walking into rooms and having interesting conversations with people...scenes where director/screenwriter John Huston kept Dashiell Hammett's "cherce" dialogue intact: "People lose teeth talking like that." "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter." Or when Sam Spade takes Wilmer's guns from him and presents them to Gutman: "Here, a crippled newsie took 'em off 'im, but I made him give 'em back." I could go on; it drives The Lovely Wife crazy that I can quote all the dialogue of this movie along with the actors.

I can quote a lot of dialogue from a lot of movies. It's always dialogue I remember. It's never sets or costumes or lighting or the great stunt or the cool shot. It's probably my literary sensibility; but also because I grew up with movies when movies were also literary. When I see some of these big action extravaganzas with all their Boom and Bang and minimal talk, I sometimes wonder if we've not reverted to silent movies with noise.

Also my formative movie education was before video and DVD, seeing classic 30's and 40's films mostly on a black and white TV, cut up by commercials, with ghosts and shadows on the screen, and sometimes so much static, it was like watching them through a blizzard. So I was held in their thrall by the story...

...and the words:

Flynn and Rathbone sneering over crossed blades: "You've come to Nottingham once too often, my friend." "When this is through, I won't have to come again." Quasimodo on the ramparts of Notre Dame raising Esmeralda above his head, shouting, "Sanctuary! Santuary!" A drunken, nervous bride-to-be Hepburn romancing interloping reporter Stewart: "Put me in your pocket, Mike." The Evil Wazir Jaffar, dismissing the emotions of the Caliph and his Princess: "Do you call the lisping of two children in the Garden love? Love she has yet to learn...and I have yet to teach her." Gunslinger Yul Brynner tersely telling bandito Eli Wallach to "Ride on."

So many others..."Top of the world, ma!" "I'd like to run barefoot through your hair." "Have a spill...No, thanks, just had one." "I know, you know I know. We know Henry knows and Henry knows we know it." "Here's looking at you, kid." And back to THE MALTESE FALCON: "I'm sending you over, sweetheart. You're taking the fall."

Perhaps my two favourite lines of all time come from the pen of Billy Wilder and his writing partner at the time, Charles Brackett. The first from a delightful comedy called MIDNIGHT and spoken by actor, Rex O'Malley, "I used to swallow things as a child. My mother never left me alone in the room with an armchair." I fell on the floor in hysterics the first time I heard this. The other comes from THE MAJOR & THE MINOR where Ginger Rogers, posing as twelve year old at a military academy (Trust me, it works!) becomes the belle of the cadets' ball when she attends their dance with a girls school. As she and one cadet observe the phalanx of young ladies and their teacher, all sporting Veronica Lake hairstyles, the pint-size soldier remarks disgustingly: "We use 'em for women."

I've even found certain memorable dialogue can become life mantras. These two stay with me: "I want to enter my house justified." and "Love has got to stop somewhere short of suicide." Anyone who can guess what movies they're from gets "A Laurel and Hardy handshake."...and that's from a movie too -- BLAZING SADDLES! (We trust you to be honourable and not resort to googling the answers...and The Lovely Wife can't play!)

So it's your turn. Tell me your favourite memorable movie lines.

Odds & Ends

2009-03-16T06:57:00.000-07:00

Last night I got emailed a press release from my buddy, Harlan Ellison, writer extraordinaire and the most courageous one I know. During my time on the WGA board of directors, I was known as "the pit bull of writers' creative rights". But Harlan is the daddy pit bull of them all. Lock him in a room with a bunch of directors and producers, only one man is coming out standing...and it ain't gonna be any director or producer.

Harlan's press release announced that he is suing Paramount Pictures for his share of STAR TREK merchandising. As some of you Trekkies no doubt know, Harlan's Hugo Award andWGA Award-winning episode, CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER, is one of the most famous and beloved episodes ever, having reached iconic status. According to Harlan's suit, Paramount has been exploiting his script with an array of merchandising, from novels based on his teleplay to a talking Christmas ornament, and ain't paid him diddley, as required by the Guild's collective bargaining agreement.

Harlan is also reluctantly suing his own guild of which he has been a member for forty-five years for, as his suit claims, failure to act in his behalf in his claim against Paramount. But he's suing the WGA for only one dollar, court costs, and lawyer's fees.

Writers and Trekkies take note. The issue at the core of this is an important one. Corporate greed and the internet are making it harder every day for all creative artists to maintain control over their intellectual property, copyright, and the monies that rightfully accrue from them. Harlan has been in the vanguard of protecting his rights against internet exploitation, spending considerable time and money, to successfully sue several internet big guns in getting his work removed from sites that have posted them illegally and without permission. Needless to say, the WGA must always remain viligant in enforcing the contractual rights of its members gained through our collecting bargaining agreements with the producers.

In brighter news, I got an email from Deanna Dunagan, frequently invoked in my London Theatre Diary blogs below. She's returned from her triumphant run of AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY at the National Theatre to her toddling town of Chicago only to score a CBS comedy pilot entitled "Big D", a nickname for both Dallas and her character, Donna Dupree. Oddly enough, her initials are also "DD" and she is a native Texan. The series will also feature Chris Parnell, an SNL alum. She shoots the pilot this April in Hollywood. May it go to series, Deanna!

Finally, comedian Steve Martin has agreed to pay for a production of his play PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE, which was banned by the Superindent of an Oregon High School when a parent protested and circulated a petition with 137 signatures on it. Martin believes the play is being unfairly characterize and misrepresented.

AN ADDENDUM EDIT: With regards to this AIG bonus thing, will someone please explain to me how one manages to receive a bonus for failure. I thought one received a bonus when one's performance helped the company to succeed. When the company goes into the dumper, seems to me no one should be getting bonuses...