October 24th, 2006
Back in 1954, Hal Holbrook began the concept of the modern “solo show” in performing Mark Twain, Tonight!. Though records of solo performances date back to the early 1700s (for practical purposes), it wasn’t until his show that later performers like Spalding Gray, Robert Morse and Garrison Keillor (among MANY others) had achieved widespread popularity. Anyone who has ever performed in or seen a solo show knows that Hal Holbrook is the proverbial Godfather of the medium.
So imagine my excitement when Hal Holbrook came around to the Bay Area with his show Mark Twain, Tonight!. I’d never seen this show (I saw the PBS version on TV about 20+ years ago) so it was great timing to check it out for inspiration for my own solo show now in the works. Hal is older now than Mark Twain is in the show (where for many years, he was far younger) and it was a spot-on job of creating this eccentric character. He created nuances that were spellbinding to watch, though the jokes were dated (the same ones for many years!). He did a great re-enactment of a scene from Huckleberry Finn.
After the show, we got to meet him. I asked him what the best advice he could give a young actor in preparation for doing his own solo show would be. Click here to hear the advice he gave me. He also was surprised at how much my wife looks like his wife’s sister…who lives in San Anselmo. 
I think the best thing about his presentation was exactly what he talks about: the presentation style. He speaks directly to the audience most of the time, probably finding the eyes of each and every single audience member throughout the 2-hour show. This is something that Charlie Varon & I were toying around with in the early stages. I don’t think I was totally sold on the idea of eliminating the “fourth wall” (the theatrical term for the imaginary wall between the actor and audience) and the best results of the experimentation seemed to be to break the fourth wall as the narrator character, but not any of the others. This allows the narrator to be “one of them” (an audience member of sorts, watching the same action they are and commenting on it). But makes it more difficult, in my opinion, to “swap” characters between the narrator and anyone else. It’s effective and it works, but now, after seeing Hal do it, it works much smoother and nicer when all the characters break the fourth wall. Each character can have his/her own individual connection with the audience, which is a richer experience for them.
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October 21st, 2006
Darn Dickens! The deeper I go into the Christmas Carol text, the more irregularities I find.
When Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge to expect the three ghosts, he says:
“Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls One. Expect the
second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next
night when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate.”
But in the next stave, when the Ghost of Christmas Past appears, Scrooge says:
“Twelve? It was past two when I went to bed. Why, it isn’t
possible that I can have slept through a whole day and far into
another night? It isn’t possible that anything has happened to the
sun, and this is twelve at noon. “
The next two ghosts arrive “on time”..but this one was apparently a bit early…
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October 19th, 2006
Still jetlagged a bit from my recent trip to London so it’s hard to get back into my lines. I saw a few shows there and met some old friends. One of the most inspirational parts was my visit to the Dickens house.
Charles Dickens lived for a while in this 4-story home (in fact, it’s the only house left standing that he lived in) and now it’s a museum. It was a thrill to check out all the places where he worked and found for inspiration. The best of which was his desk when he himself worked as a clerk, which was also the same style Scrooge & Cratchit had in A Christmas Carol. There’s a photo of me standing next to it in the press section of the website. Just holding on to that desk made me feel all crotchity and cranky like Scrooge.
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October 19th, 2006
I just had my first session with dialect coach Lynne Soffer today. I thought that my English accent was further along than it was. Geez, what a mess.
We started with a good foundation of Standard British, which most of the mid-to-upper class people will speak. Then we’ll degrade into the lower classes and more street lingo. Lynne is great (she was the dialect coach on Nicholas Nickleby at Cal Shakes last summer) and she’s very enthusiastic about what she does. She’s very sensitive to her students/actors. It’s encouraging to hear when I’m doing something correct, but I don’t want to hear it because she’s “sugar coating” it when she feels like I need it. I need to get it “straight” from people like her (who know their stuff) so I can be a better actor, not go through the process with my ego intact. I told the same thing to Julian… I expect a vigorous and productive discussion (even to the point of a debate) on various points through the process. It’s not just debate for the sake of debate, but challenging our ideas and concepts in order to really make it the best it can be.
I’ve got my iPod and I’ll be listening to our session over and over to work on my problem areas. It’s going to be really difficult in the beginning but it will come with time.
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October 19th, 2006
Over the summer of 2006, I’d spoken to actor/director George Maguire about the project and he expressed an interest in directing the show. He’d performed in the show and directed it countless times so we talked further about it. It seemed it was going to work out, but George turns 60 in December and he’d planned a trip to Europe to celebrate, which he wasn’t into rearranging for this show (understandably so).
RVP president, Tinka Ross, suggested longtime RVP director John Brebner. Since John is English and his shows are of the “lighter fare,” I thought Dickens might be a good fit, but wanted to discuss it with him. I sent him an email and followed up with a call about a week or so later. We talked about the show and he seemed like he really wanted to do it but wanted a few days to think about it. About two and a half weeks later, I called John since I hadn’t heard from him after the “few days” he said, and he was surprised I was calling. He’d assumed that when he didn’t call after a few days, I’d just gone and found someone else, which obviously wasn’t the case. He’d “taken another project” in that timeframe and was no longer available. So much for professional courtesy… So long, see ya…
When I was thinking of someone whose opinion I trust, I was racking my brain because I’m so damn picky in my theatre tastes. I couldn’t just ask anyone. I met Julian Lopez-Morillas in the summer of 2005 while performing Knight of the Burning Pestle at Marin Shakespeare. His wealth of information about Shakespeare is endless and after the show ended we met on a one-on-one basis to work on monologues and plays. I’d spoken to Julian about A Christmas Carol back then, but it was still in the embryonic stages so it was just casual conversation. I just did an examination for a Shakeseare Certification at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and Julian helped me immensely to prepare for it.
One morning, my wife said, “Why don’t you just ask Julian if he’d be interested? He has tons of experience, he’s smart, and you respect him & his work…”
Duh.
I should have just asked Julian from the start. I kicked myself a few times. I was a little concerned that his intelligence might make the show a little too “cerebral” for audiences and not enough of the “heart” the story has. But that was just a guess. After a conversation with Julian about the show, he wanted to see the final performance at The Marsh before he made his decision to commit. The night of the performance, he spoke to Charlie Varon about the show and me. Charlie was very positive and supportive about the solo show and its potential. Based on that evening, Julian agreed to do the project. I know my performance wasn’t the best that night, but at least it was progress in the right direction.
It was the best idea I ever had..or at least my wife has had…
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October 19th, 2006
One thing I found interesting while working with Charlie Varon at The Marsh was that he was a Jewish man helping me develop A Christmas Carol. When I remarked on this, he didn’t find it so unusual because of the universality of the Dickens classic. He really likes the story and having one religion or another doesn’t come into play. Naturally, even if you are Jewish in the USA, you could never escape the uber-commercialization of Christmas (or just about any holiday, for that matter) and therefore there’s holiday cheer wherever you go.
One of my lovely actress friends, Karen Leland, is also Jewish and asked me to play Hanukkah Harry at their celebration last December. Having never been to a Hanukkah celebration before, I think I learned more about it that evening that in my life up to that point. I think that the Jewish friends I’ve had in the past just know that I’m not and therefore don’t invite non-Jews to such celebrations. It was really cool for Karen and her husband John to share that with their friends. I met Karen at the grocery store the other day and she asked how the rehearsals were going. Then she said (in her best Michael Myers impersonation), “We’re going to bring all the Jews in Marin to your show!”
Heh..cool.
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October 19th, 2006
I should backtrack a little here to the process of adapting a literary work into a dramatic piece.
In early 2006, I thought it’d be good to get a head start on the adaptation. About a year prior, I’d take a TBA workshop with Bruce Pachtman about promoting a solo show. It was an OK 3-hour discussion with the group throwing out more tips than Bruce himself, but it was helpful in the sense of “psychologically establishing the possible,” which basically means that my idea for a show was not so unattainable…just a lot of hard work.
Bruce worked with Charlie Varon & David Ford at the Marsh in SF, a “breeding ground for new performance,” to develop his show and highly praised their work and guidance. I met a few other people that had taken Charlie’s workshop and were really enthusiastic about it. In discussions with my wife about it, she said “Just do it.” I procrastinated a bit and then she surprised me on my birthday with the gift of a workshop with Charlie.
The workshop was 10 weeks long and Charlie allowed us to work on whatever we wanted. I was a little nervous at first that the format was going to be rigid and the others (about 8 of us) there were primarily there to write and create their own (usually autobiographical) piece. I came in with a script all ready from day one and sort of had a headstart. Charlie was very helpful in defining a basic structure for how a single actor can play many parts at once. The main idea is to create “zones” on the stage and assign each character in a scene to a different area so that once the actor moves into that area, he becomes that character. This becomes more difficult when there’s a quicker dialogue between characters and you don’t want to look like a jackrabbit hopping around the stage so there are additional “tactics” to help. One of these is to develop a “trigger” for each character. This can be a mannerism, a line, a posture, or just about anything that you’ve already associated with a character. That way, when you change between them, you can bring the audience with you for each change and they psychologically “see” all the characters virtually at once. An interesting phenomenon…
The 10 weeks with Charlie culminated in a performance at The Marsh in August 2006. For this we chose the Scrooge & Marley scene to work on, which is a microcosm of the kinds of issues I’d have to grapple with throughout the play. Once these issues were resolved in this scene, it would be easier to resolve the rest. The result of was a 12-minute scene that the audience seemed to like. Most important of all, I “popped my cherry” with the piece and got the first audience out of the way.
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October 18th, 2006
This is the first posting to document my progress as I go through the process of developing, producing and performing my own one-man show. More to come…
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