Just in case someone may not be aware of it, I'm filling my weekends in March playing Judge Taylor in To Kill a Mockingbird at the Little Theatre Off Broadway in Grove City, Ohio. Last night (Saturday) was the first sell-out for the run, though obviously we hope it won't be the last. There's nothing quite like a full house to bring out the best in an actor.
This is, perhaps, even more important when you're doing comedy, but having a full theatre helps a lot with drama, too. With a comedy, a full house means that people are more likely to laugh at even the weaker bits. There may be nothing in life more frustrating than trying to play comedy to a tiny audience spread out all over the theatre. Laughter is contagious, but so is silence. People are strangely afraid to laugh at something when they're afraid no one else will get the joke.
I can remember seeing Blazing Saddles in a small theatre in a tiny North Carolina town and being the only guy in the place who was laughing when the Indians started speaking Yiddish. The laughs tend to be very short in that sort of situation, and I'm still not sure if the general silence was because no one else picked up on the lost tribes mythology involved, or I was just the only one in the place who even recognized the language. Well, I laughed at Governor LePetomaine's name, too, and I was also probably the only one there who connected it with the celebrated French fartiste.
I'm having a good time doing this play. The part isn't particularly taxing. The Judge has a two line walk-on early in the play, and then a somewhat more substantial role during the trial scenes. Mostly, though, he spends quite a bit of time sitting around the men's dressing room--there's no room under the stage for a proper green room--either waiting to go on, or waiting for the curtain calls. There's also an LTOB tradition of the actors going out and standing under the marquee to greet the audience after the show. Let me tell you something, having people tell you nice things about your acting is certainly nice, but I can't say a lot for the idea of standing around in 28 degree temperatures in a seersucker suit.
The show runs weekends through March 24, at 8:00 pm on Friday and Saturday, and 3:00 pm on Sunday.
Meanwhile, I'm working on something else, possibly for this summer. I'm not going to say too much about the thing, because it's still dependent on things like securing the rights to the three short plays that make up the first half of the evening, finding a place to do it, and raising the money to put it on. On the To Do list, those would be items two, one, and three. You need the place before you can get the rights (because you need to know how many seats are in the theatre), and you probably shouldn't start trying to raise the money until you have both of the others, because if you can't get the place or the rights you won't need the money. I don't think we're looking at too much in any case.
Probably more than I'm going to have to give my dentist later this month to replace a crown, but I'm hardly looking at a $4-million Broadway budget, either. I wonder how many Kickstarter contributors there are around central Ohio. Enough, I hope, because tickets are probably going to be the only premium available, unless I throw in a DVD of the second half of the show. The second half is either all public domain material, or I wrote it myself and control the rights anyway, so there's no problem with filming that. Of course, the first half is probably what they'd want to see, and filming that would likely be another story entirely. A few seconds for the TV spots, maybe, but not likely the whole thing.
The second half of the evening, which is so far struggling along under the rather sad title of The Currently Untitled Show Featuring J.T. McDaniel, is a typical one-man show requiring four actors (including me), a piano player, and a narrator. The last two sex doesn't matter, so they could be men, women, or one of each. The first four mentioned have to be men. Me because I am, and in the scene in question will be playing the Duke of Gloucester (later King Richard III), and the other three the Duke of Clarence, Brakenbury, and a Guard. We'll actually be doing only the first scene. I also plan to throw in one of Hamlet's soliloquies, the one from the second act, not the third act one that everyone does, including, it appears, Klingon generals. There's also a William McGonagall poem, which I must say is truly horrible and has the same sort of appeal so many of us find in the movies of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Perhaps I should throw in something by Robert Service to balance that. I also plan to do a reading--well, a memorized reading--of one of my creepier short stories, and sing something. Probably classical. I used to aspire to a career as an opera singer, and even with my rather more restricted range today I can still manage as long as I select carefully.
Oh, wouldn't I just love to take the whole thing to New York? I don't think I'll be moving the show into the Majestic anytime soon--presuming Phantom of the Opera ever moves out--but there might be some little 100 seat off-Broadway house where you could run a modest show for a while. Well, it has to make it in Ohio first, doesn't it? And even if it does, can you go to New York, produce your own show, and sign yourself to an Equity contract? Getting that card is one of my current goals, after screwing around for far too many years doing stuff that, really, has mostly fallen into the second and third tier career choices when it comes to doing what I enjoy the most. That would be standing on a stage in front of an audience and playing a good part. Being the star is nice, but that hasn't happened much. Okay, it's happened once, and that was less than a year ago. Hell, I played Doc in West Side Story when I was 22. When you get a 22-year-old baritone from the Cleveland suburbs playing a 60-year-old Jewish pharmacist from Hell's Kitchen, you might tend to conclude that nature has decreed you to be a character actor and not a romantic lead.
The time not acting wasn't all wasted, of course. I did get three pretty great kids out of those years, and I obviously wouldn't have if I'd spent them in New York. Not the same kids, anyway.
Well, that's no longer a factor, is it? I don't expect to have any more, unless they come as part of a package deal. And how likely is that? I haven't had a date in this century and I'm not sure I remember how to ask.
Did anyone ever mention that a lot of actors are ridiculously shy once they're off stage? Fear of rejection? Something like that.
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