As soon as we walked into the building I could sense something was different. I’d met up with our Director, Lewis Baumander, on the walk to the theatre and we had chatted about how remarkably calm he felt despite all the attention and furor that was fast building up around our production. He said everything was ready and he was chomping at the bit to get started. The first noticeable change was the uniformed Security Guard sitting at a small desk in the tiny vestibule just inside the building’s back door. He was checking off people’s names as they arrived and issuing the security ID tags now required for all subsequent entry into the facility.
Upstairs, the office area, usually buzzing on the first day of rehearsals, was eerily quiet. I opened the door of the walkway to the Rehearsal Hall and was greeted with a dull rumble coming from the room still twenty yards away. The first half hour or so on the first day of rehearsals at MTC was an informal social affair called “Meet The Donut”. It usually comprised the cast and some production folks having a cup of coffee while awaiting the call-to-order and subsequent introductions in a small circle, the Director’s remarks and the design presentations. Depending on the size of the cast there were usually about twenty or twenty-five folks gathered. As I got closer to the Hall the rumble grew louder. I walked in I was stopped in my tracks! There must have been a hundred people (22 being cast members) standing about laughing and talking, animated and very excited! ALL the Secretaries and Assistants from the Admin offices, Accountants, Communications and Fundraising people, ALL the Tech Staff, ALL the Production Heads as well as painters, prop masters and carpenters, custodians, front- of-house and box office staff and even the cast from another production at the theatre, had gathered and were moving about, helping themselves from the urns of coffee and the contents of dozens of boxes from Tim Horton Donuts spread out on long tables! It was overwhelmingly festive!
I took my coat off and was greeted by the friendly faces of folks I’d not seen since the Ouzounian days – the effusive Bob Benson and trickster of an up-stager Stephen Russell – and I introduced myself to a few people I’d not met but knew by sight. I roamed about trying to get the lay of the land and hugged with the large number of locals also in the show. I saw Keanu standing alone, staring down through the large window which over looked the scene shop a floor below. Hesitantly, I walked over and introduced myself, telling him that I was the guy who would be at his disposal whenever he needed to run lines. He seemed pleased with that. I noticed how incredibly shy he was. I could sense him wanting to be invisible, trying, in vain, to abjure the psychic attention laser-focused on him. (“It really IS Keanu Reeves!”) As I moved away after our small chat I was instantly replaced by other folks lining up to welcome him. A few even had the guts to ask for autographs! I felt sorry for him already. This was the beginning of the continuous onslaught that would follow him until he left town two months later!
It took a very long time for the folk ringing the entire room – and the MTC Rehearsal Hall is a very big space – to introduce themselves and tell what their connection was to the show. After the Director’s and designer’s remarks, the room was cleared of all non-essentials and hangers-on and we began the first read-through. It took three hours with no stops, little “acting”, slightly rushed and very low-keyed. No one was trying to impress anyone else but one could feel the usual “sussing-out” bubbling beneath the surface during the reading. The whole of “Hamlet” takes about five hours to perform, but Lewis, out of an awareness of some specific budget constraints and a prairie audience’s mid-winter patience, had cut the play mercilessly, much, I found out a short time later, to Keanu’s chagrin. We would do it again after lunch.
With only an hour break, the foodery of choice was the up-scale-ish Concert Hall cafeteria (Café 100) across the street. Much to our surprise, Keanu accepted the invitation to join a group of us headed over for a quick bite. We got there before him and a group of young girls at a table nearby came bubbling over asking if we were in the Cast of the show and what was “he” like. I told them he wouldn’t be coming over just to get rid of them and they went back to their table. A moment later “he” ambled in, head down and unassuming. He got his food and sat down in the seat we’d saved for him. I could see the girls getting very emotional, tearfully grabbing on to each other and, for the next forty minutes, staring at him but keeping their distance … unlike the middle-aged businessmen sitting a few tables away who, on their way out, came over as a group and surrounded Keanu asking for autographs. He was very gracious and generous in standing as he talked with them and subtly guiding them to an empty table away from us in order to sign their scraps of paper. This was practiced behaviour, this understanding that such intrusions not infringe upon anyone but himself. Rather amazing, I thought.
As we were all leaving, the young girls made their move and dashed over to him. They chatted for a minute and got their autographs. I was bring up the rear and had noticed one of the girls go over to the busboy and get a bag from him. I caught up with her and was told that they had got Keanu’s knife and fork and a half eaten dinner role from his plate. I shook my head and headed back to rehearsal.
The afternoon’s table read was being done full out. People were acting in their chairs and I realized that Keanu was marvelous! He knew the script extremely well and was already giving a defined portrayal with an accuracy, clarity and understanding that was engrossing. He had done a great amount of homework, had made considered choices and, with this deeply-seated passion and energy now fully on display, had tacitly challenged everyone else in the cast to rise to his level.
There were more revelations on the second day … and all subsequent days. It was interesting to see him on his feet. There were no long periods of “table work”, that sitting-about-and-talking-till-the-cows-came-home business that I detest. I think he had requested that we be on the floor right away and I could see why. It was an energy thing for him. In blocking sessions he would jump in the air and shake himself, constantly moving and thinking. He had a lot to say about everything going on around him and was totally focused on what was happening with his character in every context. It was marvelous to watch! Robbie (Paterson) and I would talk with him while waiting about and our small-talk always had to do with the play … nothing else, just the play.
That evening, I went back down to the theatre and waited for Keanu to finish a wig fitting. He had told me in the afternoon that he might want to run lines so I was at his disposal. When he came out of the wig room, he said he wanted a bit more time for things to settle in before getting into the lines, so we just sat in the Green Room and talked for a bit. He was finding it a challenge adjusting to the newly adapted script he’d been sent a short time before rehearsals began. He had spent a lot of time learning the entire role and was having a great difficulty remembering where the cuts happened; a deleted word or phrase here and there, whole scenes, parts of scenes, re-ordering of some exchanges … the adjustments were driving him crazy. While he wanted to divest himself of anything extraneous (he had just told the hair folks that the “Jesus wig” they had made for him “wasn’t going to work”), he felt that the play had lost a great deal of the poetry, reducing it to little more than a Victorian Revenge Tragedy. That was something he would have lasting trouble dealing with.
Up to this point in his career, Keanu had established himself as an “off-beat” screen actor. From “Little Buddha” and “Dangerous Liaisons” to “My Own Private Idaho” and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, he was becoming known for taking roles that wouldn’t put him in a particular category. His most recent film, “Speed”, had given him Big Box-Office Star status. As I found out later, he had subsequently turned down “Heat” with Pacino and DiNiro to do “Hamlet”. It was obvious that his professional choices were based in a personal truth he was unwilling to compromise. I gave him great props for that. Integrity!
As we progressed, Keanu seemed to be on top of everything. Our Fight Master was B.H. Barry from England. He was with us for only a week, so the focus switched from the “acting” to the swordplay of the final scene’s duel between ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Laertes’ (Andrew Akman). The Macho poured out all over the place. We were watchers now, physically responding to one character or the other. There were folks who respected Barry’s skill and expertise and there were folks who thought they knew better and subtly tested limits. This sort of surprised me because B.H. Barry was one of the world’s best (Fight Director for The Royal Shakespeare Company) and he knew what he was doing. Most of us were tasked with standing about so our perspectives were slightly skewed; but I could hear small comments emanating from the ranks about how “he should have done this” or “he should have done that” … this despite the fact that what we were watching had been choreographed and worked on to a gnat’s eyebrow down in the lobby earlier in the day. Everyone’s a critic! We trekked on.
During rehearsals I was spending my evenings at Dalnavert Museum doing the seventh year of my readings of “A Christmas Carol”. For some reason this project seemed to perk Keanu’s interest and we got into some insightful conversations over lunch about Dickens and the play-worthiness of his work. The past couple of years had seen audience demand for the readings grow greatly resulting in the Museum adding performances. We had started with one show and were now up to five nights, usually sold out by mid-October. It was somewhat exhausting, rehearsing all day, rushing home for some food then bussing to the venue. The reading was only an hour long so I was usually home by about nine o’clock. But being the center of attention at night was a huge contrast to playing small-existences-that-matter-little during the day. At one point in a Journal entry I wrote: “With only a couple of lines here and there to hold on to, there seems little point in it all. I find myself thinking that I’m beyond doing these one-liners anymore. It might seem egotistical to think I’m above doing small parts, but, truth be told, there is nothing challenging or rewarding about being set dressing, even if it is for Keanu Reeves! I’m a stranger in my own land in this production.”
I found myself being added to more and more scenes as a warm body and tried to come up with ways of getting out of them. One legitimate excuse had to do with costume changes. As I finished up as a “watcher” in one scene, I had literally 12 seconds to change into one of my “name” characters in the next. This occurred frequently over the course of the play and I pointed out the problem to Lewis; he usually responded with “I’ll take care of it”. He never did and, in run-throughs, would discover that the reason I’d not made it on stage to deliver my lines was because I was still changing. Twelve seconds go by extremely fast even with numerous dressers desperately pulling and tugging off one set of leggings and laces and putting on another. I kept my mouth shut until it became obvious that it wasn’t working. Thankfully, I was taken out of a number of crowd scenes as a result.
The first full run-through lasted almost four hours with intermission. That did not bode well!
We headed into a break for the Holidays and before we left, Keanu asked if we could work on lines during the couple of days surrounding Christmas. He arrived at 2:00 on Christmas Eve Day. There were moments when I had to shake myself at the sight of Keanu Reeves sitting on my living room couch in front of the fireplace sipping grapefruit juice. Our session was focused and illuminating. There was no worry about him having the lines down; but he was at sea when it came to the arc of the character. He talked about the fact that the cuts tended to throw him from time to time and I could see him computing the jumps in his head as we worked through the play. He’d had a few bad days of depression but was working his way through that. Then he mentioned the challenge he was experiencing working on stage. In film you get a scene “in the can” and move on to something else. Filming is not always done in sequence so you struggle to hold on to the details of the character’s evolution (the arc). A number of different takes are filmed with variations on emotional details; then, making choices from those takes, an Editor in the editing room is relied upon to create the continuity from one scene to the next. Maintaining ‘Hamlet’s’ through-line was very hard for him, a situation not helped by some of Shakespeare’s emotional transitions now being cut.
One other thing that was causing him some difficulty was the space we were in. Robbie and I had talked about this in the car a number of times. The confinement of a camera’s lens was a control he’d come to rely on … hit your mark and don’t go out of frame. Now, with no physical constraints and the not-fully-realized blocking, he found himself wandering arbitrarily. I suggested that perhaps the old “less is more” trope might be something to consider when he found himself at sea trying to “fill the lens” which was now forty feet wide! But in the days that followed, those suggestions might have overwhelmed him. He would do a great scene, physically concise and clear on all levels and it would make you marvel at his awareness of the moment he was playing. The next time, it would be completely different, far away from what one thought he’d set for himself … and for the actors around him. Not committing to a choice resulted in some insecurity. There was no editor picking the best take. This ambivalence would lead to some strange problems for the cast during the run, problems that I would come to be unofficially relied upon to solve.
The tech rehearsals leading up to the student previews were long and very complicated. Our Stage Manager, Janet Remy, was miraculous keeping almost everything in order. She had a million cues to call and was under intense pressure from all productions departments, but was always cheerily accommodating. However, one thing she couldn’t control was the length of the play. Despite valiant attempts of more cutting and scene pacing and set change reconfigurations, the performance time couldn’t be brought down to the promised three hours without compromising the play’s integrity … and our star’s sanity … all of which meant a conflict with the production’s budget and stage crew overtime. Three hours was the call limit for the crew; beyond that, overtime kicked in. Reluctantly, Management bit the bullet and everything was fine. As well it should have been because the Theatre was about to make a MINT on this production!
In announcing the season months earlier, the Company had made a very clever decision. No single tickets would be sold for “Hamlet”! In order to see the play, a Season Subscription would have to be purchased. It was a risk to be sure. Certainly Keanu Reeves in “Hamlet” would be a big draw, but instituting this restriction would either fail miserably or be a bonanza. It was a BONANZA!! Keanu Fans from all over the world bought up season subscriptions like they were going out of style. From all over Canada, from Japan, the US, Europe and Australia, orders poured in. And not just for single subscriptions. They were buying seven, eight, ten subscription packages just to see their idol night after night! The gamble had paid off.
As we ploughed through the final rehearsals, the production tightened up and settled into a focused and accessible telling of the story. There were moments of wonderful brilliance in Keanu’s performance. He had such an incredible magnetism that shone through but not on a consistent basis. He was still exploring and working to set the pathway for the character. Some performances were good, some were, well … bad. I would stand in the wings every run mesmerized by his immediacy. I could see the wheels turning, unnoticeable to most, but, knowing what he was going through, now very obvious to me.
After the show, Robbie and I would drive him back to his apartment building. Usually we would chatter about anything but the play. On this particular night, there was silence. The drive was only about seven or eight minutes long. He got out of the car and I switched from the back seat to the front. He mumbled “good night” and hurried into the building. As we drove away Robbie told me that Keanu had been crying in his seat. It struck my heart. There was something about him that made us want to protect and encourage him. His distant vulnerability was so compelling, or at least that’s how Robbie and I – and a number of others – saw it. I wrote him a note that night letting him know that we were all with him, supporting and honouring his work. He never said anything about the note, but there were small glances when offstage that acknowledged it, as if he was saying “I’m okay” and “thank you”.
Things got more comfortable as we went along, but I became aware of a pivotal moment that occurred every night just before Keanu and I entered together for the “speak the speech” scene. It all depended on how fast he travelled behind the set from one side of the stage to the other after the histrionics of the Nunnery scene. If he made it quickly and had a moment to breathe before going back on, the rest of the play would be in control. If he didn’t have that moment, he would bring the emotional stress and upheaval of the previous scene on stage with him, and it was anyone’s guess where he would take us all for the rest of the performance. It became an adventure that was to play out at every show!
Our first preview audience was a packed house (800 souls) of high school students. There was an air of excitement backstage. Everyone was up for this. It was like opening night, but we had to keep reminding ourselves that we were still in rehearsal for another week, albeit with full houses of kids waiting to see their idol! The very good speech made before that first show (and all subsequent student performances) put everyone on their best behaviour. It was amazing how they sat, leaning forward, rapt, for the entire three and a half hours. All had gone smoothly until close to the end when Keanu went up on a line in an exchange with ‘Horatio’ and the kids laughed. He tried to get back on track but couldn’t remember what he was supposed to say. He stopped, turned to the house and, with a little grin, said “I don’t know what comes next!” The house exploded in a wall of laughter and hoots and applause for a good thirty seconds, all the pent up enthusiasm and love for the guy pouring out from these young people he’d just guided through a difficult piece of classical theatre. Back on track, we ended what was a very good performance.
Early the following morning, I was preparing for a meeting with Sam at the house. It was yet another hand-off of a pile of work to be done while he was travelling in the States for a week. Just before he arrived, I got a call from Stage Management at the Theatre. Gary Reineke, an actor who was playing a number of larger roles, was in the hospital with a chicken bone stuck in his throat and was going into surgery. Could I do the ‘Ghost of Hamlet’s Father’ and the ‘Gravedigger’ for the afternoon student preview? No question! I was shaking as I left a note on the front door for Sam and dashed to the theatre!