Any settling down after returning from Portland was not in the cards. Not even remotely. With the move into my new house only days away and the frenzied packing up of the old place still in progress, I found myself in a darkish limbo. While my dear friend Teresa had been on top of overseeing things and keeping me informed of the building progress while I was away, it now fell to me to deal with the tsunami of details that kept surging in unstoppable waves. To stop the To-Do Lists from swirling around in my head I’d get up and walk the streets of my neighbourhood as the sun came up. Sometimes the walking worked … mostly, it didn’t. There were boxes to be packed, old computers to be thrown away, lawyers needing signatures and Property Tax cheques, and the maddening job of being middleman between painters and contractors; and on it went. At one point I was theoretically homeless, having signed the final vacate papers and not having signed the final occupancy papers. With my innate sense of organization and order, this bothered me greatly and it was all I could do to maintain at least some focus on getting out payrolls for the myriad of MSI shows still running. So there would be minimal interruption, I had allotted only two days between the actual move and the setting up of my new home office. Sticking to that schedule was going to be a challenge.

            The move was hell! A few days prior, I’d been out to the new place to discover that the small bobcat that had been leveling the driveway for the concrete pour had become stuck in a sea of mud! After a quick peek inside the house, I fled, fretting about how this was all going to get done? Move-in day was rainy and incredibly humid. The moving guys arrived at 7:45AM and were immediately pissed off (at me) that there were three floors to my house, and they were going to need a second truck to accommodate all my earthly belongings. None of this was my fault and, in no uncertain terms, I let them know that the week before I’d taken the rep from their Company through my house to see the lay of the land. After some more grumbling and the arrival of the second truck, they began the move. It took them six hours to empty the house and finally, by mid-afternoon, I was standing in my living room directing where boxes and furniture were to go. By 8:30 that evening I had set up the essentials – my office, my bed and the coffee maker – and was finally sitting in an air conditioned Great Room. It was DONE! Robbie and wife Heather had been by earlier to offer some moral support, but I was now alone. It was surreal sitting there surrounded by boxes, smelling the newness and quickly becoming aware that the adrenalin on which I been running was wearing off. I had no dreams that night and awoke to the sun shining down on me through the uncurtained bedroom window at 5:20AM. I went down to the kitchen and prepared my first cup of coffee in the house, something I’d looked forward to since signing the initial offer papers almost four months earlier. The feeling was as wonderful as I thought it would be … and then some!

My settling-in would have to be incremental however as there were only a few days before starting rehearsals for “Big – The Musical” at Rainbow. I was happy that my role in the show was not huge. There would be time off to take care of the house … and the unstoppable payrolls! Manilow was still touring. We’d contracted an Anne Murray TV special. There was wasted time doing spec budgets and countless revisions for a Broadway show which never did pan out. “Mamma Mia” was on the road. “The Full Monty” was still up in Toronto and The Irish Tenors were doing Carnegie Hall. Fortunately “Big” rehearsals had an afternoon/evening schedule, so I had some morning hours to deal with my other life … and, always it seemed, unpacking boxes.

I also found myself questioning my involvement with an up-coming new play for Manitoba Theatre Projects called “Prok” by local playwright Brian Drader It was a deeply complex play, and we’d had the second Workshop reading of the draft script. I’d had doubts from the start about my being right for the role of biologist and sexologist Alfred Kinsey (“The Kinsey Report”). However Brian and Margot Charlton, the Director, were adamant that I was the one they wanted and wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was a huge role with a massive number of lines to learn and I rationalized my acceptance by telling myself that I was just tired from everything that had been going on and would probably kick myself if I turned it down. But that project was a few months away and I’d feel better about it as time went on.

Since the early Spring, I’d been under the impression that Rainbow’s “West Side Story”, which I was to direct, was being mounted in their Winter slot in February of ’02. Now Ken (Peter, the Producer) informed me that it was being rescheduled to the Summer. He gave me the choice of sticking with “West Side” or doing another yet-to-be-named Winter show. It took me about three seconds to decide to stay with “WSS”, but this new time frame would affect a lot of my thinking about casting choices and the creative team for a show that was now a year off. Once again I had to lay down some parameters and conditions with Ken. This would be my first directing job on the big Summer stage, and nothing was going to go wrong. There would be a lot more conversations to come. But first it was into “Big”.

“Big–The Musical” is based on the iconic Tom Hanks film of the same name. Encountering a mechanical Fortune Teller named ‘Zoltan’ at a carnival, a 14-year-old boy named ‘Josh’ makes a wish to be a grown-up; overnight the wish is granted. Now a man, ‘Josh’ takes off for adventure in New York where, of course, no one knows he’s actually a teenager in an adult body. Our cast was great, led by Kevin McIntyre as ‘Josh’. Kevin had left Winnipeg a number of years earlier and had made a name for himself back East, initially as ‘Chris’ in the Toronto premiere of “Miss Saigon” and then as ‘Marius’ in a National Tour of “Les Misérables”. We’d worked together back in the old days, and it was a great coup to have him in our midst once again and to be playing opposite him in a number of scenes. He was (and still is) a really sweet guy and massively talented. More favorite performers were also in the cast, in particular, the ladies – Debbie Maslowsky, Jennifer Lyon (right), Jan Skene, Mairi Babb and Martine Friesen. With stalwarts Robbie (Paterson) directing and Scott (Drewitz) doing the choreography, rehearsals were very relaxed and great fun from the get-go. While the adaptation of the film’s script to the stage seemed a little bumpy at points, the Maltby and Shire songs were delicious. Listening to Jan as Josh’s Mom singing “Stop Time” and Jen’s ‘Susan’ singing “Dancin’ All The Time” always touched my heart.

But it was one huge production number that kept me on my toes, literally and figuratively. ‘McMillan’ (me) is the owner of a huge Toy Company with a store in mid-town Manhattan (think F.A.O. Schwartz like in the movie). In the dialogue at the start of the number, he explains that over time he has lost the joy he used to have when he started the Company. In a song called “Fun”, ‘Josh’ and a group of children convince him that all he has to do is think like a kid, and the ‘fun’ begins. After a lot of examples of “fun” (which could be translated as “legally out-of-control-on-stage” for our younger cast members), ‘Josh’ and ‘McMillan’ take it to another level by making music on the keys of a 28-foot-long piano keyboard spanning the width of the stage. I’d seen it done in the film but was somewhat apprehensive about how this was actually going to work in real life. In the rehearsal hall, we’d only had an outline of the keyboard taped out on floor. Kevin and I had to learn where our feet had to land to correspond to the sound and (eventually) the lit-up keys controlled by a keyboard in the orchestra pit. Great … in theory. There were two songs we had to play – “Heart and Soul” and “Chopsticks”. Jumping back and forth along the keyboard and landing on the right notes was, along with being physically exhausting, mind boggling! Celoris (Miller, our pianist) was playing the music on her piano and supposedly we were hitting the right notes on the taped-out keyboard. It wasn’t until we got to the Stage that things got very complicated.

The actual keyboard was huge, each key being about a foot high and a foot wide! Keep in mind that when one sits at a piano, the higher notes are on the right and the lower notes are on the left. For some unfathomable reason, our keyboard had been set up as if the audience was playing it. But Kevin and I would have to be facing out toward the audience so, for us, the high notes were on our LEFT and the low notes on our RIGHT! We had to do everything in reverse, translating in our heads as we went along, always having to be totally “in the moment” about where our feet were going next. Keeping our eyes on the lights was essential.

One night during previews, I looked up for an instant to connect with Kevin and lost the sequence. My feet weren’t where the lights were! There was no way Celoris at the pit piano was going to stop playing – Kevin was continuing to hop around “making music”- so I had to jump off the keyboard, watch the lights and then jump back on at just the right moment to get back in sync. It was musical whack-a-mole! Thank heaven it only happened once. Every night after that number the crowd went wild. After the opening, everyone settled in and even the 20 kids calmed down … kinda. I got the distinct impression at every curtain call that, despite my initial misgivings about the script, our audiences had bought into it and loved the show. The run went by in the blink of an eye, and all too soon became another one for the scrapbook.

Then two planes slammed into the Twin Towers in New York City and the world changed. Every mind on earth was psychically branded with the images. The news had come over the Internet while I was working in the office, and I rushed up to the TV in the living room just in time to see the second skyscraper disappearing in a great plume of smoke and debris. It was unbelievable and surreal. It took a long time for life to inch toward any sense of the normal, but it did.  Some of MSI’s U.S. projects had been waylaid as scheduling adjustments and other accommodations, mostly emotional, were made, but our momentarily-shattered resilience returned … as it always does. The mundane came back. My house was finally stucco-ed, the cement driveway had cured to the point that I could drive into the garage and payrolls were once more being sent out from my now neat and settled office.

In the midst of all this, I had gone out for an audition. It was for a TV Series called “2030CE”, “CE” being a date reference to the “Common Era”. Jim Heber, a casting agent for the show, had called to tell me that he thought I would be “perfect” for a character named ‘Victor’. The story takes place, needless to say, in a dystopian class-structured future. ‘Victor’, a man in his late 50’s, has started an underground revolution against an autocratic government which has been contaminating the drinking water with a biological agent that leads to death before 30. He has recruited young insurgents to the cause and is a wanted man. The rest of the details were rather sketchy at that point, but I thought it was worth a shot. After all, a series is a series!

Jim had faxed me a lot of ‘Victor’s’ scenes and I arrived at the Production Office with a couple of them memorized and a good bead on the rest. The folks auditioning me were very effusive about my “look” … “your rather youthful face with the white hair and moustache is just great” they said. The readings went very well, and they would “let me know shortly”. I waited for days with no word. I figured I’d blown it somehow and chalked it up as yet another waste of time. I’d not fared particularly well over the past couple of years when I came to film auditions. I’d always felt us small-part-players were at a great disadvantage at these auditions. Unless you were a major character you had little to go on, rarely knowing the storyline and how you fit into it. You were “just a local”, a bit player, so what did it matter. I didn’t know why that attitude prevailed, but what could I do? They also always seemed to be casting on that “look” thing and though they’d been positive about mine, I could only guess that someone else’s had been better.

One evening about a week later, the phone rang. “Hi Richard, Jim Heber here.” The world seemed to shrink down to nothing but our voices in a great void. “How’s it going, Jim?’ To tell the truth, I’d let go of the thought of getting the part and he was probably calling to confirm the fact. “Good, thanks. Look, there’s no easy way to say this.” Ah, here it comes, I thought. “You’re Victor!!” I took in a gasp. Everything seemed to switch to slow motion. “Congratulations”, he said. I still couldn’t speak. There was nothing about savouring the moment or being happy. I just heard “You’re Victor” over and over again in my head. I managed to croaked out a “Really??” “They loved your reading and look (there it was again) and didn’t want to consider anyone else for the part” he said. I’d only spoken one word since saying hello to him. It gradually started to sink in … that I had a major role AND in a major series. “Fantastic” I yelled a bit too loudly. Then he talked for quite a while. It was being produced by YTV. There were a number of episodes already “in the can” but I was to be introduced in the last two episodes of the first season being filmed over the next month and then, during the following Spring and Summer, we’d get down to business in the second season. I was still having trouble getting my head around it but wrote down everything he said. “Again, congrats! We’ll be in touch” he said and rang off. I started to shake a bit and giddily pranced around the living room needing to release some of this adrenalin. Could anything possibly be better?!!

  A couple of days later, Production folks started calling me about the contract signing, scheduling for Wardrobe fittings and timetables for shooting. Somewhere in the back of my head was the nagging thought that all this was still an audition and that these two episodes would provide the Producers with “out options” – if they didn’t like me they’d find someone else for the next season and just replace me with an explanation that ‘Victor’ had plastic surgery in order to go further undercover or something. A fatalistic scenario was still playing in my head. But Jim had been clear in his words and they quickly became my Truth. The part was mine! Oddly, there had been no mention of money, but I supposed I’d find out what I was going to make at the contract signing. I also began thinking about conflicts with some projects I’d already agreed to do, but put that aside for a bit. I was in a TV SERIES!!!

Since the Series had been in production for a few months, everything was running like a greased wheel. It was incredibly well-organized and extremely efficient on every count. I arrived at my first day of shooting a bit early and was escorted by an affable Production Assistant to my trailer and she showed me where everything was. After settling down and getting into my costume, I was taken to hair and make-up. Then I sat about for six hours! My lines at the end of this introduction-of-‘Victor’ episode were minimal and I had those down pat. But I had read a draft of the final script for the season (called “Plan B”) and was perplexed by my storyline. I would have to get some answers before filming the following week. There being no point in sitting alone in the trailer, I took some time to walk about the compound getting the lay of the land. As was the case with the films I’d done, there were seemingly hundreds of people in constant motion – in and out of the sound stage, on the outdoor setting (where my first appearance was to happen) and attending to all manner of making-a-film work. There were a number of tech folks I knew from other sets I’d been on and a very large contingent of young local actors playing the “kids” in the series, some of whom I knew. There were only a few adults in the show. There was, like there always was, a lot of “hurry up and wait”. I sat at one of the craft services tables with a coffee and donut and Rob King (Director for my two episodes in this block [season]) came over and sat down with me and we started to chat. It started out with some small talk, but I figured that since he was directing he probably knew a lot more about my arc than I did, and I posed some of the questions that were swirling about in my head. He couldn’t answer them.

He called one of the PA’s over and told him to get Yan (Moore, one of the creators) and Stephanie (Kostiuk, one of the writers) “down here to answer some very good questions”. A few minutes later, the four of us were involved in a very deep chat about who this character was, where he came from and where he was going. Most of the answers were helpful, but the one major question I had – “How did ‘Victor’ get to be 52 years old?” – only received a “That’s a secret” response. It struck me that maybe they were making this up as they were going along. It had been a long slog for them already and, with the season winding down, they’d not thought too far ahead in the story line. I got the impression that they weren’t getting this kind of grilling from anyone else. They appeared happy to have an opportunity to talk about the development and evolution of a major character, particularly with the person playing that character. At the end of the conversation they alluded to the possibility that ‘Victor’ might be the father of ‘Hart’, the lead character in the show. That excited me. I wasted a few more hours before shooting walking about in the beautiful Fall afternoon thinking about the great potential for this character. ‘Hart’ has chosen to join the rebellion and has found his way to our headquarters. The episode ends with my saying “Welcome Hart. The journey has begun”. ‘Victor’ was now established and there didn’t seem to be any holding back.

Driving home at the end of each shooting day I kept thinking that I should have done some of my lines in another way, that I hadn’t given Rob exactly what he wanted, hadn’t played all the colours that perhaps I could have played. But he always seemed pleased. I had to work to ignore the cameras and the dozens of crew and production folk constantly in motion, checking various technical elements of a shot, all without a thought to the interpretation I was giving. There was a clinical feeling to it all. It was hard … and going to get harder!